It didn’t take very long to confirm that we are truly in the final stage of a police state.

The euphoria on Monday when Assange’s extradition was denied (a wonderful interlude of laughs, smiles and hugs) was short lived. I confess that I was sceptical of the premature celebrations then, as were many others. Craig Murray was convinced that bail would be granted.

Wishful thinking. Today witnessed the true betrayal. Assange denied bail. This, if you thought about it, was the obvious outcome. They cannot let Assange survive. They are out to destroy him. He is the head of the snake as far as ‘they’ are concerned. He being the most powerful voice railing against government crimes.

Unfortunately I was arrested and dragged away before the official announcement that Assange has been denied bail, was delivered to the presstitute press, so I still do not know the official reasoning behind this verdict.

The “presstitutes” were allowed to clump together whilst the Julian Assange supporters were targeted, intimidated and arrested. This included Eric, at 92yrs still campaigning for freedom and justice. He was surrounded by cops but the cameras and witnesses to his intimidation was too much for the cops. They had to back off. Apparently, he was given a lift home, all charges dropped.

I have been charged with breaking covid rules. But I really don’t care at the moment, what this all means. I just feel disgust at what is going on.

It is horrifying what is happening. But if the people really cannot see what is happening then it is difficult to keep even a shred of optimism that common sense and our collective humanity will win over this tyranny.

The recent voices from Palestine does not lift any optimism that justice will prevail. But what is the alternative? To give up, to bow to this tyranny or to keep fighting?

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Featured image is from riacale/flickr/cc

Note to our readers. This is a satire focussing on the “mysterious monoliths” which according to NASA is “paving the way for a full scale Alien invasion.” 

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A recent CBC article, reported that another one of those mysterious monoliths appeared on New Year’s Eve in Toronto on the shore of Lake Ontario.

It made me ponder whether these twelve-foot-tall, low-budget “crop circles” are the harbingers of a new attempt at tyrannical fear-mongering.

Screenshot CTV News

Indeed, I would not be surprised if Canada’s Prime Minister Justin Trudeau took to the airways with the following  message:

“I know we did our best to scare you with COVID-19. Sadly, the fact almost nobody knows anybody (under the age of 75) who died from this common cold virus really took away the fear-factor.

“So we are now working hard to scare you with stories of a new, more virulent mutation. But, quite frankly, I know we’ve called COVID a few too many times… So let’s forget about pandemics. Let us have a shot at another new normal scenario. I promise, this will really scare you into utter and complete submission.

“NASA has examined these monoliths appearing around the world and has determined they are paving the way for a full-scale alien invasion. Scientists assure us that these are not Steven Spielberg’s E.T. Instead, think Ridley Scott’s Aliens.

“Microscopic eggs from this reptilian race have already infested the world’s food supply. The WHO estimates 3.4% of people already harbour an alien fetus in their stomach, ready to burst forth and devour its host and all those within six feet. For this reason, we strongly urge social distancing more than ever.

“These body hatchers are believed to thrive on oxygen. Henceforth, Canada’s Chief Public Health Officer is now recommending that all masks be made of hermetically sealed solid plastic (that allows minimal air flow through a cluster of microscopic pinholes).

We just can’t risk letting you breathe more than the barest amount of oxygen necessary to enable you to continue watching television.

“Furthermore, scientists have determined that water strengthens these extraterrestrial parasites. It is now your civic duty to avoid all forms of bathing and to only drink dehydrating coffee, soda and alcohol. For this reason, municipal water plants will be going into shutdown for the next twenty-eight days. In order to stay clean you need only rub your entire body with a Health Canada approved sanitizer (they’re not just for you hands!).

“In addition to oxygen and hydration, scientist also believe these gastrointestinal invaders survive off the very food you eat. For this reason, we now declare grocery stores as no longer an ‘essential’ business. They, too, will be closed for the next twenty-eight days —or as long as we deem necessary — to starve out this Martian parasite.

“While hunger may be more uncomfortable than wearing a mask, again we ask you not to be selfish. Think of those around who would be devoured when the alien predator inside you breaks through and begins hunting down the sick and elderly who are too slow to outrun it.

“You also probably have no money left anyway, after all those  lockdowns. So by not eating for the next twenty-eight days, you’ll be doing your part to stop food banks from becoming overrun.

“As a last resort, we are already pumping trillions of dollars into building underground bunkers. At a preplanned time, which we won’t reveal until the very last moment, we will herd all of you into these subterranean chambers and seal the airtight doors. Our top eugenicists believe that complete oxygen starvation may be the only way to eliminate this invisible enemy.”

Of course, they would never do that, would they? And, even if they did, nobody would fall for that one. Or would they?

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John C. A. Manley has spent over a decade ghostwriting for medical doctors, as well as naturopaths, chiropractors and Ayurvedic physicians. He publishes the COVID-19(84) Red Pill Briefs – an email-based newsletter dedicated to preventing the governments of the world from using an exaggerated pandemic as an excuse to violate our freedom, health, privacy, livelihood and humanity. He is also writing a novel, Brave New Normal: A Dystopian Love Story. Visit his website at: MuchAdoAboutCorona.ca. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

I fully expect that Julian will be released on bail this week, pending a possible US appeal against the blocking of his extradition.

There was discussion of when and how to make the bail application on Monday, after magistrate Vanessa Baraitser announced her decision not to grant extradition as it would be oppressive on health and welfare grounds. Lead Defence QC Edward Fitzgerald was prepared to make an immediate application for release on bail, but was strongly steered by Baraitser towards waiting a couple of days until he could have the full bail application ready in good order with all the supporting documentation.

I had the strong impression that Baraitser was minded to grant bail and wanted the decision to be fireproof. I have spoken to two others who were in court who formed the same impression. Indeed, in the past, she has more than once indicated that she will reject a bail application before one has been made. I can think of no reason why she would steer Fitzgerald so strongly to delay the application if there were not a very strong chance she would grant it. She gave him the advice and then adjourned the court for 45 minutes so Fitzgerald and Gareth Peirce could discuss it with Julian, and on return they took her advice. If she were simply going to refuse the bail application, there was no reason for her not to get it over with quickly there and then.

Fitzgerald briefly made the point that Assange now had very little incentive to abscond, as there had never been a successful appeal against a refusal to extradite on medical grounds. Indeed it is very difficult to see how an appeal can be successful. The magistrate is the sole determinant of fact in the case. She has heard the evidence, and her view of the facts of Assange’s medical condition and the facts of conditions in American supermax prisons cannot be overturned. Nor can any new evidence be introduced. The appeal has rather to find that, given the facts, Baraitser made an error in law, and it is difficult to see the argument.

I am not sure that at this stage the High Court would accept a new guarantee from the USA that Assange would not be kept in isolation or in a Supermax prison; that would be contrary to the affidavit from Assistant Secretary of State Kromberg and thus would probably be ruled to amount to new evidence. Not to mention that Baraitser heard other evidence that such assurances had been received in the case of Abu Hamza, but had been broken. Hamza is not only kept in total isolation, but as a man with no hands he is deprived of prosthetics that would enable him to brush his teeth, and he has no means of cutting his nails nor assistance to do so, and cannot effectively wipe himself in the toilet.

Not only is it hard to see the point of law on which the USA could launch an appeal, it is far from plain that they have a motive to do so. Baraitser agreed with all the substantive points of argument put forward by the US government. She stated that there was no bar on extradition from the UK for political offences; she agreed that publication of national security material did constitute an offence in the USA under the Espionage Act and would do so in the UK under the Official Secrets Act, with no public interest defence in either jurisdiction; she agreed that encouraging a source to leak classified information is a crime; she agreed Wikileaks’ publications had put lives at risk.

On all of these points she dismissed virtually without comment all the defence arguments and evidence. As a US Justice Department spokesman said yesterday:

“While we are extremely disappointed in the court’s ultimate decision, we are gratified that the United States prevailed on every point of law raised. In particular, the court rejected all of Mr Assange’s arguments regarding political motivation, political offence, fair trial, and freedom of speech. We will continue to seek Mr Assange’s extradition to the United States.” That is a fair categorisation of what happened.

Appealing a verdict that is such a good result for the United States does not necessarily make sense for the Justice Department. Edward Fitzgerald explained to me yesterday that, if the USA appeals the decision on the health and prison condition grounds, it becomes open to the defence to counter-appeal on all the other grounds, which would be very desirable indeed given the stark implications of Baraitser’s ruling for media freedom. I have always believed that Baraitser would rule as she did on the substantial points, but I have always also believed that those extreme security state arguments would never survive the scrutiny of better judges in a higher court. Unlike the health ruling, the dispute over Baraitser’s judgement on all the other points does come down to classic errors in law which can successfully be argued on appeal.

If the USA does appeal the judgement, it is far more likely that not only will the health grounds be upheld, but also that Baraitser’s positions on extradition for political offences and freedom of the media will be overturned, than it is likely that the US will achieve extradition. They have fourteen days in which to lodge the appeal – now thirteen.

An appeal result is in short likely to be humiliating for the USA. It would be much wiser for the US to let sleeping dogs lie. But pride and the wound to the US sense of omnipotence and exceptionalism may drive them to an appeal which, for the reasons given above, I would actually welcome provided Julian is out on bail. Which I expect he shall be shortly.

More analysis of Baraitser’s judgment will follow.

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The government of France has decided to recognize the contributions of essential workers from other countries working within its borders during the pandemic by offering them French citizenship. On 22 December 2020, the day of the announcement, 74 immigrants were naturalized and 693 were in line to receive their papers. So far, 2890 requests have been received.

“Health professionals, cleaning women, childcare workers, cashiers, etc., have proven their commitment to the nation. It is now up to the Republic to take a step in their direction,” reads the government’s press release.

The new move comes at a time of increasing popular criticism of the government. Beginning two years ago with the Gilets Jaunes (Yellow Jackets) fight against new consumer fuel taxes, the movement has grown to embrace protest of two impending laws seen to curtail civil rights: an anti-Islamist “Separatism” bill and the “Global Security” bill.

The two bills introduced this month do not name their targets outright but governmental explanations make their objectives abundantly clear. The “separatism” bill was suddenly retitled as the “law affirming the values of the Republic”, with Prime Minister Jean Castex clarifying that the bill “is aimed at the pernicious ideology known as radical Islamism.” The law stipulates mandatory schooling from the age of 3 to hinder private Islamic academies, and reinforces measures against Islamic face covering, absurdly at a time when failing to wear a Covid mask, even outside, results in hefty fines.

The “global security” bill has provoked the ire of the United Nation’s High Commissioner for Human Rights, former Chilean president Michelle Bachelet. Bachelet objects particularly to the bill’s Article 24, which criminalizes recording and sharing images of the police.

Photographing the use of force has been crucial in exposing police abuses of people of colour. Just last month, a brutal pre-dawn raid tore down an impromptu tent city at the Stade de France stadium northeast of Paris where Afghan, Somali and Sudanese refugees, including children, had been sleeping rough. Days later, a smaller encampment on Paris’ Place de la République, frequent site of progressive protests, was more easily videotaped, revealing officers hurling tents with people still inside.

On November 27, video shot from above recorded the violent, racially-fueled beating by four police officers of Michel Zecler, a Black Frenchman who was entering his own music studio at the time. Zecler was charged with assaulting an officer but video showing him to have not resisted vindicated the music producer. Zecler says he has sustained permanent injuries.

Right-wing leader Marine Le Pen opposes removing Article 24 from the new security law. “The State has lost control,” she asserted before adding ominously, “and when a state loses control, it puts its compatriots in danger.” Her use of the term “compatriots” is significant.

When France conquered and colonized Algeria between 1830 and 1962, Algerians were not considered citizens in their own homeland, and French colonists, called “pieds noirs” or “black feet”, were never required to adopt North African customs, even after successive generations were born in Algeria. A French, and Catholic, educational system was instituted, and close relationships were forged as native Algerians fought in France’s army and emigrated to provide manpower for French industry in the post-war years.

“Citizenship” comports legal rights whereas “compatriotism” implies a shared identity. When Le Pen refers to “compatriots”, she is signalling a “fraternité” that transcends citizenship, and excludes citizens, residents and immigrants on a racial basis. Whereas France sought a French Algeria and a “Françafrique” (France-Africa) in the last century, its institutions continue to reject the plurinational state that results.

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The unexpected detente between Qatar and its GCC partners saw the full restoration of political ties between them following the end of the over three-year-long blockade against the peninsular nation, but speculation remain about the future of their reconciliation considering the unresolved issue of Qatar’s support for the Muslim Brotherhood and the UAE’s reported umbrage with Saudi Arabia’s decision to go through with all of this despite the uncertainties, though the arrangement will likely survive even if only because its optics serve every involved parties’ interests for the time being at least.

“Whenever the government of the United States shall break up, it will probably be in consequence of a false direction having been given to public opinion. This is the weak point of our defences, and the part to which the enemies of the system will direct all their attacks. Opinion can be so perverted as to cause the false to seem true; the enemy, a friend, and the friend, an enemy; the best interests of the nation to appear insignificant, and trifles of moment; in a word, the right the wrong, and the wrong, the right. In a country where opinion has sway, to seize upon it, is to seize upon power. As it is a rule of humanity that the upright and well-intentioned are comparatively passive, while the designing, dishonest and selfish are the most untiring in their efforts, the danger of public opinion’s getting a false direction is four-fold, since few men think for themselves.” – James Fenimore Cooper (The American Democrat 1838)

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I think it is evident to most by now that the United States is presently undergoing a crisis that could become a full-blown second civil war.

Some might be wondering, is it really so bad that the U.S. could possibly collapse in the not-so-distant future? After all, isn’t it acting like the worst of empires? Isn’t it wreaking havoc on the world today? Is it not a good thing that it collapse internally and spare the world from further wars?

It is true that the U.S. is presently acting more like a terrible empire than a republic based on liberty and freedom. It may even be the case that the world is spared for a time from further war and tyranny, if the U.S. were to collapse. However, this is unlikely and it most certainly would be only temporary, since the U.S. is not the source of such monstrosities but rather is merely its instrument.

This paper will go not only through why this is the case and but will also analyze Russia’s historical relationship to the U.S. in context to its recognition of this very fact.

The Great Liberators

In 1861, the Emancipation Edict was passed and successfully carried out by Czar Alexander II that would result in the freeing of over 23 million serfs. This was by no means a simple task and met much resistance, requiring an amazing degree of statesmanship to see it through. In a speech made by Czar Alexander II to the Marshalls of Nobility in 1856 he stated:

“You can yourself understand that the present order of owning souls cannot remain unchanged. It is better to abolish serfdom from above, than to wait for that time when it starts to abolish itself from below. I ask you to think about the best way to carry this out.”

The success of this edict would go down in history as one of the greatest accomplishments for human freedom and Czar Alexander II became known as the ‘Great Liberator’, for which he was beloved around the world.

Shortly after, in 1863, President Lincoln would pass the Emancipation Proclamation which declared “that all persons held as slaves” within the rebellious states “are, and henceforward shall be free.” There is astonishingly a great deal of cynicism surrounding this today. It is thought that because Lincoln did not announce this at the beginning of the war it somehow was never genuine. However, Lincoln was always for the abolishment of slavery and the reason for his delay was due to the country being so at odds with itself that it was willing to break into pieces over the subject, an intent that Lincoln rightfully opposed and had to navigate through.

Former slave and Lincoln ally, Frederick Douglass, though himself frustrated with the delay to equal rights, understood after meeting and discussing his concerns with Lincoln that the preservation of the country came first, stating:

“It was a great thing to achieve American independence when we numbered three millions [slaves], but it was a greater thing to save this country from dismemberment and ruin when it numbered thirty millions. He alone of all our presidents was to have the opportunity to destroy slavery, and to lift into manhood millions of his countrymen hitherto held as chattels and numbered with the beasts of the field.”

For more on the Lincoln-Douglass story refer to my paper.

In addition, there are many speeches Lincoln gave while he was a lawyer, where he most clearly and transparently spoke out against slavery. In a speech at Peoria, Illinois (Oct 16, 1854), 7 years before he would become president, Lincoln stated:

“This declared indifference, but as I must think, covert real zeal for the spread of slavery, I cannot but hate. I hate it because of the monstrous injustice of slavery itself. I hate it because it deprives our republican example of its just influence in the world—enables the enemies of free institutions, with plausibility, to taunt us as hypocrites—causes the real friends of freedom to doubt our sincerity, and especially because it forces so many really good men among ourselves into an open war with the very fundamental principle of civil liberty—criticizing the Declaration of Independence and insisting that there is no right principle of action but self-interest.”

During the civil war lord Robert Cecil (later called the Marquess of Salisbury and three-time Prime Minister of Britain) expressed his viewpoint on the matter in the British Parliament:

“The Northern States of America never can be our sure friends because we are rivals, rivals politically, rivals commercially…With the Southern States, the case is entirely reversed. The population are an agricultural people. They furnish the raw material of our industry, and they consume the products which we manufacture from it. With them, every interest must lead us to cultivate friendly relations, and when the war began they at once recurred to England as their natural ally.” [emphasis added]

By 1840, cotton made up more than half of American exports. More than 75% of slave cotton was exported to Britain. American slave cotton was the centerpiece of the British Empire’s world cheap-labor system.

The autumn of 1862 would mark the first critical phase of the Civil War. Lincoln sent an urgent letter to the Russian Foreign Minister Gorchakov, informing him that France was ready to intervene militarily and was awaiting England. The salvation of the Union thus rested solely on Russia’s decision to act.

The Foreign Minister Gorchakov wrote in response to Lincoln’s plea:

“You know that the government of United States has few friends among the Powers. England rejoices over what is happening to you; she longs and prays for your overthrow. France is less actively hostile; her interests would be less affected by the result; but she is not unwilling to see it. She is not your friend. Your situation is getting worse and worse. The chances of preserving the Union are growing more desperate. Can nothing be done to stop this dreadful war? The hope of reunion is growing less and less, and I wish to impress upon your government that the separation, which I fear must come, will be considered by Russia as one of the greatest misfortunes. Russia alone, has stood by you from the first, and will continue to stand by you. We are very, very anxious that some means should be adopted–that any course should be pursued–which will prevent the division which now seems inevitable. One separation will be followed by another; you will break into fragments.”

Russia’s proclaimed support in its letters to Lincoln would be put to the test during the summer of 1863. By then, the South’s invasion of the North had failed at Gettysburg and the violent anti-war New York draft riots also failed and Britain, as a result, was thinking of a direct military intervention with the backing of France. What would follow marks one of the greatest displays of support for another country’s sovereignty to ever occur in modern history.

The Russian Navy arrived on both the east and west coastlines of the United States late September and early October 1863.

The timing was highly coordinated due to intelligence reports of when Britain and France were intending their military action. The Russian navy would stay along the US coastline in support of the Union for 7 months! They never intervened in the American civil war but rather remained in its waters at the behest of Lincoln in the case of a foreign power’s interference.

If Russia had not done this, Britain and France would most certainly have intervened on behalf of the Confederate states as they made clear they would, and the United States would have most certainly broken in two at that point. It was Russia’s direct naval support that allowed the United States to remain whole.

Czar Alexander II, who held sole power to declare war for Russia, stated in an interview to the American banker Wharton Barker on Aug. 17, 1879 (Published in The Independent March 24, 1904):

“In the Autumn of 1862, the governments of France and Great Britain proposed to Russia, in a formal but not in an official way, the joint recognition by European powers of the independence of the Confederate States of America. My immediate answer was: `I will not cooperate in such action; and I will not acquiesce. On the contrary, I shall accept the recognition of the independence of the Confederate States by France and Great Britain as a casus belli for Russia. And in order that the governments of France and Great Britain may understand that this is no idle threat; I will send a Pacific fleet to San Francisco and an Atlantic fleet to New York.

…All this I did because of love for my own dear Russia, rather than for love of the American Republic. I acted thus because I understood that Russia would have a more serious task to perform if the American Republic, with advanced industrial development were broken up and Great Britain should be left in control of most branches of modern industrial development.” [emphasis added]

What was Czar Alexander II referring to exactly when mentioning the advanced industrial development of the American Republic? Well, in short he was referring to the Hamiltonian system of economics. Notably, Alexander Hamilton’s 1791 Report on the Usefulness of the Manufactories in Relation to Trade and Agriculture which was published in St. Petersburg in 1807, sponsored by Russian Minister of Finance D.A. Guryev.

It was Hamilton who pioneered a new system of political economy coming out of the war of Independence which saw America bankrupt, undeveloped, and agrarian. Hamilton solved this problem by federalizing the state debts and converting it into productive credit, channelled by national banks into large scale internal improvements with a focus on the growth of manufacturing. Anyone wishing to learn more about this should read Anton Chaitkin’s recent publication Who We Are: America’s Fight for Universal Progress.

In the introduction to the translated Hamilton pamphlet, Russian educator V. Malinovsky wrote:

“The similarity of American United Provinces with Russia appears both in the expanse of the land, climate and natural conditions, in the size of population disproportionate to the space, and in the general youthfulness of various generally useful institutions; therefore all the rules, remarks and means proposed here are suitable for our country.”

This “American system” was what Tsar Alexander II recognised as the only economic system to have successfully challenged the system of empire, which he recognized as the root of all slavery. The ineffective and ultimately costly labour of slaves was no match for competing against a machine tool industry to which Frederick Douglass attested. The construction of rail that was made possible through the development of this machine tool industry is what freed countries from Britain’s maritime supremacy.

The “American System”

In 1842, Czar Nicholas I hired American engineer George Washington Whistler to oversee the building of the Saint Petersburg-Moscow Railway, Russia’s first large-scale railroad. In the 1860s, Henry C. Carey’s economics would be promoted in St. Petersburg’s university education, organised by US Ambassador to Russia Cassius Clay. Carey was a leading economic advisor to Lincoln and leading Hamiltonian of his age.

Sergei Witte, who worked as Russian Minister of Finance from 1889-1891 and later became Prime Minister in 1905, would publish in 1889 the incredibly influential paper titled “National Savings and Friedrich List” which resulted in a new customs law for Russia in 1891 and resulted in an exponential growth increase in Russia’s economy. Friedrich List publicly attributed his influence in economics to Alexander Hamilton.

Lincoln’s Pacific Railroad superintendent, General Grenville Dodge, advised Russia on its Trans-Siberia railroad, built with Pennsylvania steel and locomotives from 1890-1905.

In his 1890 budget report, Sergei Witte- echoing the Belt and Road Initiative unfolding today, wrote:

“The railroad is like a leaven, which creates a cultural fermentation among the population. Even if it passed through an absolutely wild people along its way, it would raise them in a short time to the level requisite for its operation.”

Sergei Witte was explicit of his following of the American model of political economy when he described his re-organization of the Russian railways saying:

“Faced by a serious shortage of locomotives, I invented and applied the traffic system which had long been in practice in the United States and which is now known as the “American system.”

By 1906, Czar Nicholas II of Russia supported the plan for the American-Russian Bering Strait tunnel, officially approving a team of American engineers to conduct a feasibility study.

Russia would complete the trans-Siberian railway in 1905 under the leadership of “American System” follower Count Sergei Witte. On its maiden voyage the Trans-Siberian rail saw Philadelphia-made train cars run across the Russian heartland, and it is no accident that all of the key players involved in the Alaska purchase were also involved in the Russian continental rail program on both sides of the ocean.

Bismarck’s Zollverein

In 1876 Henry C. Carey organized the centennial exhibition where 10 million people from 37 countries came to Philadelphia to see the achievements of the United States in its advancements in machine tool industry, which propelled their economy to the first in the world.

Only three years later, Otto von Bismarck broke Germany’s free trade system implementing an American style tariff policy for his nation. The kinship between Germany and the United States became so strong at this time that Otto von Bismarck’s speech in the parliament (1879) was quoted by McKinley on the floor in US Congress:

“A success of the United States in material development is the most illustrious of modern time. The American nation has not only successfully born and suppressed the most gigantic and expensive war of all history, but immediately afterward disbanded its army, found employment for all its soldiers and marines, paid off most of its debt, given labour and homes to all the unemployed in Europe as fast as they could arrive within its territory and still by a system of taxation so indirect as not to be perceived, much less felt… Because it is my deliberate judgement that the prosperity of America is mainly due to its protective laws, I urge that Germany has now reached that point, where it is necessary to imitate the tariff system of the United States.”

Otto von Bismarck was heavily organising for the building of the Berlin to Baghdad railway, which after much resistance and delay would only be completed in 1940. If this has been accomplished during Otto von Bismarck’s life, the Middle East could have avoided the Sykes Picot carving up.

In 1869, Japanese modernizers working directly with the Lincoln-Carey strategists ran the Meiji Restoration which industrialized Japan.

In the 1880s and 90s, Lincoln-Carey Philadelphia industrialists were contracted for huge infrastructure and nation-building projects in China. Hawaiian Christian missionary Frank Damon, having participated in the Carey group’s strategies at a very high level, helped instigate, shape, and build the Sun Yat-sen organization that gave birth to modern China.

Sun Yat-sen referred to his admiration of Lincoln’s USA as the basis for a new multipolar system saying:

“The world has been greatly benefited by the development of America as an industrial and a commercial Nation. So a developed China with her four hundred millions of population, will be another New World in the economic sense. The nations which will take part in this development will reap immense advantages. Furthermore, international cooperation of this kind cannot but help to strengthen the Brotherhood of Man.”

How Did We End Up Where We Are Today?

With such a glorious outlay of cooperation and common interests across the globe united against an economic system of empire, it begs the obvious question “What went wrong? How did we end up where we are today?”

To give one a quick glimpse into the reason why, let us look at some of the major assassinations and soft-coups from the late 19^th century and early 20^th century of American system proponents (refer to the image below).

Henry C. Carey stated it best when he described the situation as such, in his “Harmony of Interests” (1851):

“Two systems are before the world; the one looks to increasing the proportion of persons and of capital engaged in trade and transportation, and therefore to diminishing the proportion engaged in producing commodities with which to trade, with necessarily diminished return to the labor of all; while the other looks to increasing the proportion engaged in the work of production, and diminishing that engaged in trade and transportation, with increased return to all, giving to the laborer good wages, and to the owner of capital good profits… One looks to pauperism, ignorance, depopulation, and barbarism; the other in increasing wealth, comfort, intelligence, combination of action, and civilization. One looks towards universal war; the other towards universal peace. One is the English system; the other we may be proud to call the American system, for it is the only one ever devised the tendency of which was that of elevating while equalizing the condition of man throughout the world.”

We have yet to conclude the victor between these two opposing systems, the fight is not over and we would be foolish to give up at the finishing line. What we do today will decide the course of things in the future, and whether we live under a true recognition of freedom and prosperity, or whether we are ruled-over and our liberties treated as “privilege,” that can be given or taken based on the judgement of a ruling class, remains to be seen.

Thus, let us hearken to the words of Lincoln, who in a debate with the slave power’s champion Stephen Douglas, said:

“That is the issue that will continue in this country when these poor tongues of Judge Douglas and myself shall be silent. It is the eternal struggle between these two principles – right and wrong – throughout the world. They are the two principles that have stood face to face from the beginning of time, and will ever continue to struggle. The one is the common right of humanity and the other the divine right of kings.”

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Cynthia Chung is a lecturer, writer and co-founder and editor of the Rising Tide Foundation (Montreal, Canada).

All images in this article are from SCF

History, while not always a telling guide, can be useful.  But in moments of flushed confidence, it is not consulted and Cleo is forgotten.  A crisp new dawn can negate a glance to the past.  Having received the unexpected news that Julian Assange’s extradition to the United States for charges of breaching the Espionage Act of 1917 and computer intrusion had been blocked by Justice Vanessa Baraitser, his legal team and supporters were confident. All that was left was to apply for bail, see Assange safely to the arms of his family, and await the next move by wounded US authorities.

Former UK ambassador Craig Murray, human rights activist and veteran reporter on the Assange case, was initially buoyant in his column.  “I fully expect Julian will be released on bail this week, pending a possible US appeal against the blocking of his extradition.”  He further got “the strong impression that Baraitser was minded to grant bail and wanted the decision to be fireproof.”

That fireproofing never came.  On Wednesday, January 6, the application for bail by Assange’s legal team was rejected.  Counsel for the US government, Clair Dobbin, built the prosecution’s case around the strong possibility that the publisher might flee the clutches of UK authorities even as the US was gathering its wits for an appeal to the High Court.  “His history shows he will go to any lengths to get away.”

Forums would welcome this disreputable character: Mexico, for instance, had offered to “protect Assange with political asylum.”  The defence might well say that he would not flee due to poor health, but could they be sure?  A “flight risk” had little to do with mental wellbeing.  Remember, she pressed, what he did during the Swedish proceedings, how he “ruthlessly” breached the trust of those who fronted the bail money. Those who had offered surety for him, such as the Duchess of Beaufort, Tracy Worcester, had also failed in ensuring that Assange presented in court in 2012.  Beware, warned Dobbin, of sinister networks of operatives he could call upon to aid him vanish.  WikiLeaks had, after all, facilitated the escape of Edward Snowden.

Dobbin’s tone and manner – gloomy and Presbyterian, as Murray described it – was all judgment.  She insisted to the court that, “any idea that moral or principled reasons would bear on Mr Assange’s conscience turned out to be ill-founded indeed.”  And she had much to go on, as Baraitser’s own judgment had essentially accepted virtually everything the prosecution had submitted bar grounds of mental health and the risk posed to him in US prison facilities.

As for the basis of whether an appeal would succeed, Dobbin was convinced the prosecution were onto something.  The judge, she respectfully submitted, had erred on a point of law in applying the incorrect test on the prison conditions awaiting Assange.  The test was not whether measures taken by US prison authorities would make suicide impossible; the only issue was for authorities to put measures in place to lessen its prospects.  Reprising her role in attacking various defence witnesses who had put together a picture of grotesque danger awaiting Assange, including the ADX supermax prison in Colorado, Dobbin was convinced that the US system stood the test.

Sidestepping the defence evidence on this, more thorough than anything supplied by the likes of US Assistant US Attorney Gordon Kromberg during the trial, Dobbin argued that no thorough assessment of the facilities for treatment and prison conditions had taken place.

Baraitser proved accommodating to Dobbin’s whipping submission.  “Notwithstanding the package offered by the defence, I am satisfied he might abscond.”  Having discharged Assange, she promptly repudiated her own ruling in a fit of Dickensian jurisprudence.  “The history of this case is well known…  Assange skipped bail and remained in the Ecuadorian Embassy to avoid extradition to the US.”  Assange would remain in Belmarsh prison pending the US appeal.

In her Monday judgment, Baraitser had acknowledged the signs of potential suicide shown by Assange during his stay in Belmarsh.  The prison adjudication report confirmed that, on May 5, 2019 “during a routine search of the cell solely occupied by Mr Assange, inside a cupboard and concealed under some underwear, a prison officer found ‘half a razor blade’.”  Baraitser even went so far as to accept, based on the assessment of defence witness Professor Michael Kopelman, that the finding of the razor was not merely a “disciplinary infraction” but one of the “very many factors indicating Mr Assange’s depression and risk of suicide.”

On Wednesday, her tune was indifferent to the consequences of sending Assange back to a maximum security prison stocked with Britain’s most notorious inmates.  Continuing her long spell of denial on the seriousness of COVID-19 in the UK prison system, she swatted the submission by defence counsel Edward Fitzgerald QC that there had been 59 cases specific to Belmarsh before Christmas and that the prison remained locked down.  Dobbin demurred on this point, showing an email sent by prison authorities at 10.49 pm the previous night claiming that only 3 positive tests for COVID for Belmarsh had been returned.

The result is that Assange continues to be punished, facing brutal carceral conditions while he awaits the next move by US prosecutors, despite having already served his sentence of skipping bail.  As a dejected Murray wrote, “Julian is living his life in conditions both torturous and tortuous.”

Amidst the banal cruelties of Wednesday’s proceedings came a smidgen of hope for Assange.  G. Zachary Terwilliger, the US attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia handling the prosecution, had to admit to being uncertain about what a Biden administration would do.  Speaking to NPR, Terwilliger suggested that any decision taken on Assange would “come down to resources and where you’re going to focus your energies.” But he is not waiting to find out: a position at the law firm Vinson & Elkins awaits.

The UK, having adopted a position as Washington’s proxy jailor, is not about to quit its sordid role. Assange’s wellbeing and health continue to be jeopardised by his stay in Britain’s most notorious prison, where determined despair, as Baraitser herself has acknowledged, can take their toll.

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Dr. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge.  He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research. Email: [email protected]

Featured image is from Another Day in the Empire

Russia has commented on the work policies of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons regarding the Syrian file and the pressures that the organization is subjected to by some countries, criticizing the technical secretariat policies in them, saying that it is “biased and politicized against Syria.”

The Russian comment was made by Russia’s permanent representative to the United Nations, Dmitry Poliansky, who emphasized that “the volume of evidence about irregularities in the work of the organization’s secretariat has crossed until early 2021 a critical threshold, and the problem is much broader than the Syrian file and bears a systemic character, as it revolves around Talking about the crisis of confidence in one of the most credible international organizations in the world in the past, which is now turning into a tool for political manipulation and punishment of unwanted parties.

“The assessments made by former Director General of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), Jose Boustany, before the Security Council, reflect the internal situation that threatens serious problems for the organization’s reputation and effectiveness,” he said.

He added, “Moscow has been insisting for a few months to invite the current director general of the organization, Fernando Arias, to discussions on the Syrian file in the Security Council, in order to clarify the outstanding issues, but he used various arguments to avoid attending the discussions.”

The Russian diplomat revealed that “Arias last month submitted a statement to the Security Council, but the Russian deputy delegate criticized it because the Director-General of the organization repeated general ideas known to everyone, after which the public part of the hypothetical conference was cut off for vague reasons, and then converted into a closed format, which allowed Arias would avoid answering the questions of the attendees. ”

Poliansky warned that “the role of the OPCW Technical Secretariat in these endeavors has increased negatively,” blaming it for “abandoning the usual procedures for gathering evidence, manipulating facts, and suppressing and intimidating officials opposed to such activities.”

The Russian diplomat also accused the secretariat of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) of “exaggerating the issues related to the Syrian government’s initial declaration on eliminating chemical weapons,” noting that “such issues are a normal matter that many other countries have faced, such as Canada, Belgium, France, Germany, the United States, Libya and Iraq.”

This article originally appeared on RT (Arabic)

The Turkish Army has been increasing its military presence in Greater Idlib despite the recent withdrawal of observation posts, which had been encircled by the Syrian Army.

Recently, the Turkish military deployed major reinforcements to Mount al-Zawiya. Turkish military convoys deployed to the area included battle tanks and BMC Kirpi armoured vehicles. Mount al-Zawiya is controlled by al-Qaeda-affiliated Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham together with its supposedly ‘moderate counterparts’ from the Turkish-created National Front for Liberation. Turkey has been reinforcing its troops in the Mount al-Zawiya region for the last two months. It has also established several permanent positions in the area.

At the same time, the Turkish military has been undertaking active steps to reinforce its positions along the M4 highway in southern Idlib. Recently, Turkish forces have even started creating watch towers additionally to the permanent observation posts that they already have there.

The situation in northern Syria also remains tense. As recently as January 3, intense clashes had broken out between Turkish proxies and the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces near the town of Ain Issa. Turkish-backed militants tried to capture the villages of Hwshan and al-Khalidiyah in another attempt to block the part of the M4 highway that runs by there.

These developments came amid cries from pro-Turkish propaganda that the ‘cowardly’ Assad regime and the Russians are planning to violate the de-escalation agreement and to capture the Turkish-occupied town of al-Bab in northern Aleppo.

The SDF keeps apace with Sultan Erdogan and also shows no sign of dropping its attempts to bite off a piece of Syria. On December 30, Sinam Mohamad, a representative of the SDF political wing in Washington, called on US President-elect Joe Biden to recognize the SDF-controlled territory in northern Syria as a de-facto state. This, he claimed, will help to improve the security and humanitarian situation there. The SDF has also repeatedly declared its support for the illegal US presence in Syria and for the US occupation of Syrian energy resources on the eastern bank of the Euphrates.

Under such conditions, there is no surprise that the group’s Kurdish leadership prefers to turn a blind eye to the negative consequences of these ‘democratic actions’. For example, the state of lawlessness created by US-backed forces on territories controlled by them and the Kurdish ethnic nationalism in fact employed by the SDF as an instruction manual for relations with the Arab majority in the SDF-held areas both contribute to the growth of militancy and create conditions for the resurgence of ISIS cells.

Government-controlled territories and units of the Syrian Army on the western bank of the Euphrates regularly experience the resulting consequences of this situation in the drastic increase of ISIS attacks. On January 3, the Syrian Army and local pro-government militias once again launched a combing operation in the vast desert located between the towns of al-Mayadin and al-Bukamal. The goal of the operation is to track and neutralize ISIS cells there. Nonetheless, it is unlikely that this threat can be fully removed without the establishment of full control of the border by the Damascus government and the elimination of US-occupied ‘No-Go Zones’, which are being extensively used by terrorists.

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A British district judge denied bail for WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange after a hearing in which the prosecution argued he had helped NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden “flee justice” and would abscond if released from the Belmarsh high-security prison.

“As far as Mr. Assange is concerned, this case has not been won,” Judge Vanessa Baraitser declared. She said the United States government “must be allowed to challenge [her] decision.”

Baraitser referred to the lengthy history of the case and how he “jumped bail” and entered the Ecuador Embassy to obtain asylum in 2012.

She went on to highlight the “huge support networks” he still has “should he again choose to go to ground,” and Baraitser agreed with the prosecution that WikiLeaks’ assistance of Snowden made Assange a flight risk.

Assange has been confined at Belmarsh since he was arrested and expelled from the Ecuador embassy in April 2019. All along, Judge Vanessa Baraitser agreed with prosecutors that he was a flight risk.

“Mr. Assange’s past conduct shows the lengths he is prepared to go to avoid extradition proceedings. If I released him today, he would not return to face these extradition proceedings,” Baraitser declared during a hearing in March 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic was initially intensifying worldwide.

In her ruling on bail, despite evidence of a recent outbreak at Belmarsh, the judge maintained that the facility was properly caring for prisoners and Assange would be safe.

Edward Fitzgerald, an attorney for Assange, argued the extradition decision changed any motive Assange would have to flee London before the case was resolved. In fact, the extradition decision came with an order of discharge for Assange.

“The logical outcome of the ruling would be he regains liberty at least conditionally,” Fitzgerald stated.

Fitzgerald questioned whether the Justice Department is even serious about an appeal, given recent reporting on the incoming administration of President-elect Joe Biden.

Although Fitzgerald indicated Assange would be willing to wear a GPS tracking device while under house arrest, the judge gave no reasoning why this would not be enough to prevent him from absconding before the date of his appeal.

Assange has not seen his family in person since March 2020, and Belmarsh has suspended social visits. It is widely recognized that physical contact would alleviate the mental distress that factored into the judge’s decision against extradition.

London is on lockdown as a mutated variant of COVID-19 rips through the city, and the date for the appeal proceedings is unknown.

And here’s my full video report that was broadcast immediately after proceedings concluded:

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Kevin Gosztola is managing editor of Shadowproof. He also produces and co-hosts the weekly podcast, “Unauthorized Disclosure.”

The US remains wholly incapable of tracing Covid-19 contagion, but if it tried, we might wind up with “the worst of both worlds” – a horror of coercion and confusion that still failed to stop the epidemic.

“Low income communities, particularly Black and Brown communities, have reasonable fears that at least some law enforcement agencies might use access to contact tracing data to harass them.”

I spoke to Bay Area privacy activist Tracy Rosenberg about the danger that data contact tracing to track the spread of COVID-19 will become available to the surveillance state.

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Ann Garrison: Many fear that digital contact tracing to stop the spread of COVID-19 will expand surveillance states’ ability to curtail privacy and control their populations. Can you explain what contact tracing is?

Tracy Rosenberg: Contact tracing is the process of creating a map of a person’s movements and associations in order to identify the possible spread of infectious disease. Before the age of digital technology, it was an onerous process of paper surveys, which while they contained very personal information, had some practical limitations on any additional use. In the age of digital technology, the ability to retain, repurpose and search large data chains is greater than it has ever been in human history. Contact tracing data, when performed by government public health agencies, is medical health data and is protected by the same laws that protect other health data.

AG: What dangers does it pose?

TR: Well, there are quite a few. One is emergency protocols. A large tracing program set up under emergency conditions can often lead to incomplete frameworks and poorly trained personnel, including some with relatively little or no familiarity with health data protections. When data protections, storage and access protocols are not well-planned, leaks, hacks and unauthorized access sometimes occur.

AG: Can you describe what a well-planned data protection plan would be? Who would have access to what and who not, and how would we know that the FBI, CIA, NSA, and Mossad hadn’t gotten into it?

TR: It’s not an easy question, but generally data protection requires retention limits (i.e., only keeping things for as long as you actually need them and no longer), disaggregating bulk data from personally identifying information as soon as possible, clear demarcations of access by job title, several layers of anti-hacking security protections, clear consent procedures, and training. An emergency like a pandemic is always the enemy of planned data protections. But there have been efforts.

For example, California privacy groups tried to pass protective legislation in 2020 for contact tracing software (AB 1782 and AB 660) that among other things would have established procedures for providing and revoking consent, required at least some level of encryption for stored data, required public reports and metrics every 90 days, and prevented law enforcement agencies from participating in or having access to contact tracing data. (That’s a broad summary, but it gives you the idea.) Sadly, both bills were vetoed by Gavin Newsom who argued that he did not want regulations that might slow down contact tracing efforts in the state.

It’s a habitual trend in American politics that we don’t want to address privacy issues during emergencies, which has then led to revelations of upsetting practices after the fact. In theory, agencies like FBI, CIA, NSA, and Mossad (to use your examples) should have no access to health data that is already protected by law. But in an emergency, with a bunch of entities that are both public and private rushing in to try to help and set up new processes–that is exactly how the guard rails slip and things happen that aren’t supposed to happen.

AG: Doesn’t any privacy protection plan or policy depend on the good faith of those expected to follow it? This is true with any policy, but the use of Big Data seems particularly difficult to detect.

TR: Good faith only goes so far. Firstly, it probably isn’t that good an idea to depend on the intentions of government agencies, which are filled with a large variety of people. While I believe most public health workers are dedicated and conscientious, one can never say anything concrete about 100% of the people involved in anything, and the nature of a pandemic is to draw in other additional agencies and entities with relatively little experience with handling large amounts of health data and personally identifying information (PII). In general, our approach to privacy regulations is that enforcement is required. A policy without enforcement protocols and consequences for violations is a recommendation. The vetoed California bills I mentioned both included private rights of actions that allow anyone to take a legal action to ensure compliance. Basically crowdsourced enforcement, which provides a step that can be taken if and when good faith is not enough.

There isn’t any doubt that the use and distribution of any set of Big Data can be hard to detect in real time. The only privacy protection that is 100% bulletproof is not to collect the information in the first place. But if that’s not an option (and a reasonable case can be made that it probably isn’t, at least in the early stages of a pandemic), then enforceable regulations are the next best thing.

At this point in the COVID-19 pandemic in the US, case numbers are far exceeding any realistic contact tracing program, so we may have the worst of both worlds, which is half-assed and partial contact tracing with limited effect on actually reining in the pandemic and with no effective or enforceable regulations.

AG: The California Development Department has been announcing jobs for contact tracers every day since the COVID pandemic began, and employment information is readily available on the Web. They usually include the promise that you can “work from home” and don’t require much experience. What kind of training do you think contact tracers should have?

TR: A thorough review of federal and state protections for medical data. A one-way data uplink that removes data access once it is submitted to a public health agency so it cannot be recovered and stored on a personal hard drive or shared.

AG: What about cross-state and cross-border contact tracing? How is that being handled?

TR: Best as I can tell, remarkably ad hoc and randomly. Since the federal government under Trump has largely shifted pandemic response onto the states to deal with, there is a big handicap in dealing with cross-state episodes. We’ve seen that with incidents like the MA conference that allegedly spread a great deal of virus in the early days of the pandemic as conference-goers went home all across the country, but primarily to the large urban cities, and the few attempts at national contact tracing of Florida spring break participants. Probably the most active federal involvement apart from some of the vaccines has been at the airports, but as we’ve seen it’s been pretty marginal, with random travel bans on some foreign countries at some times, and somewhat chaotic testing protocols that I’m not sure people really believe are that effective, given the limitations of PCR testing for infection.

AG: What are some of the other dangers of contact tracing?

TR: Another issue is consent. The right to agree or not agree to participate in contact tracing is an important privacy value. While very few have advocated for mandatory participation in the US, that would potentially be a privacy issue. What is more worrisome is what we call coerced participation, which is pressure from employers or social service agencies which impairs freely given consent by suggesting adverse consequences for those who do not participate. California had proposed bills in 2020 to ban retaliation against individuals who chose not to participate, but Governor Newsom vetoed those contact tracing regulatory protocols.

AG: It’s worth noting here that Governor Newsom is widely considered to be a future presidential candidate.

TR: Yes.

AG: It seems that most contact tracing is done with cell phone apps that people are downloading voluntarily, although Singapore is also deploying a wearable token. Are most people who now choose to participate in contact tracing downloading an app onto their phone?

TR: The Apple/Google Notify app is a fairly widespread mode of contact tracing. There are a lot of downloads of the app, although there is no real way to verify how many of those people have turned on Bluetooth to use the app and how many are carrying their cell phone everywhere they go. As I said, this particular app was developed to minimize privacy risks and does not collect too much PII. However, testing facilities, which are run in a lot of different ways in different states, may also be engaging in contact tracing with positive test results, and how all of that is working across the country is a bit unclear. There are also anecdotal reports of large employers engaging in some ad hoc contact tracing when their employees test positive, which of course happens in a black box.

AG: Singapore has already excluded anyone who refuses to participate in contact tracing access to public space, and openly stated that they will make data available to police to investigate crimes. That’s not surprising because Singapore is one of the most tightly and openly controlled states in the world. Who is pressing for mandatory participation here?

TR: I don’t think anyone has openly pushed for mandatory participation in contact tracing. If they have, I’m not aware of it. But there is concern about coerced participation with employers pressuring employees, or educational bureaucracies pressuring teachers and students that would have people fearing informal retaliation or discrimination if they prefer not to participate. In my view, mandated participation requires extensive safeguards. Laissez-faire should not operate in only one direction. If the government will not take action to safeguard my personal information, then I have a choice whether to trust them with it—or not.

AG: What’s next on your list of concerns?

TR: Another is technology. As with anything else, technology can make large-scale tasks much easier, but it can also introduce more problems. Automated contact tracing programs can potentially introduce greater scale and speed, but also introduce storage and access questions that can impair data safety, sometimes in ways that are not clear until something bad happens. It bears repeating that the California Notify app, one of the first automated contact tracing programs to go forward with public distribution, was carefully designed with privacy rights in mind and, at least on paper, its protocol should prevent many of the problems that could be anticipated.

AG: Can you give us an example of “something bad happening”?

TR: A list on the dark web or even the plain old Internet of people with positive COVID tests in the last month in Philadelphia with the names and addresses of anyone they can remember having contact with, secured by a hacker. A FOIA request that comes back in 2022 with emails from FBI agents referring to “tapping into” the NY COVID database to find someone they are looking for. Vaccine passports required for bus, train, and plane travel that cannot be acquired without a social security number, which turns undocumented Americans into literal fugitives in the country they live in and turns victims of identity theft into one big no-travel list. None of these things are impossible from a badly regulated contact tracing effort.

AG: What about law enforcement access outside Singapore, where it’s already acknowledged?

TR: That’s of course one of the greatest concerns. First responders are sometimes seen as participants in contact tracing administration. While this can make sense on the EMS public health end, it becomes concerning when extended to police and fire. One of the restraints that California’s 2020 legislation sought to establish was a red line keeping police out of contact tracing. But, as mentioned, that was vetoed by California’s governor.

Communities have what I think are reasonable fears based on past experiences that at least some law enforcement agencies might use access to contact tracing data to harass low income communities, especially in Black and Brown neighborhoods or homeless people. It is definitely true that some police agencies have demonstrated ongoing violations of data-sharing limitations of all kinds, which usually come to light after the fact, so the role of law enforcement in contact tracing is an ongoing concern.

AG: Anything else?

TR: Beyond those four specific concerns, there are always broader concerns that lists of “the exposed” or “the infected,” like any government list of people (like lists of “suspected terrorists” or “antifa” or “black identity extremists”), could under certain political conditions be used to strip some level of Constitutional protections from the people on the list. This would be a secretive government activity unsanctioned by law, but it has certainly happened before in American history.

AG: Since the Snowden release about NSA surveillance, many people assume that the horse is out of the barn, that we have no privacy left, but I know you continue to work on privacy issues with multiple coalitions and at multiple levels of government. Can you explain why you still have hope and think this is worth doing?

TR: Section 215 of the Patriot Act, which more or less legalized most of the NSA’s snooping, was not renewed by Congress after 20 years. That’s a big deal. In reality, although an agency like the NSA has enormous access, the numbers of people they actually touch is tens of thousands in a year, while there are hundreds of millions in the US. So there is plenty of room to protect literally mountains of collected data, first by trying to reduce the size of the mountain and secondly by installing guardrails to limit abuse and misuse. It is never a question of 100% success because that won’t happen, but I can say after several years that the visibility of the conversation and the acknowledgment of the risks have increased by a quantum amount from say 2013 to 2021. I do not think this pandemic emergency has (at least not yet and not in the United States) set loose the kind of mass privacy violations unleashed by 9-11. That said, it has unleashed an economic crisis and social control limitations that become increasingly debilitating the longer they drag on. And it is not wrong to say that the economic disenfranchisement of millions over the course of a year certainly can work in the interests of oppression and authoritarianism. A state of ongoing emergency is a state in which things that would never fly in a non-emergency can become institutionalized.

AG: There’s a lot of concern about contact tracing expressed in mainstream outlets. What could you say about how widespread and effective the resistance to abuse of the data has been so far?

TR: With regard to the pandemic, objections to masks and social distancing as well as business closures and fears about the vaccines have been all tangled up with contact tracing worries in kind of a soup of general anxiety. It has been difficult to separate out all of the pieces into coherent public policy recommendations. So I’d say we have widespread and ineffective resistance. Probably the folks pursuing eviction moratoriums have been the most successful in getting protections actually put into place, and even those have been only partially effective. We definitely have not provided the economic support people need for a real disease-prevention lockdown, nor have we made it possible to identify everyone exposed and assist them with a real isolation period to stop any spread. Without those things, we end up with a very, very long period of emergency, which has huge risks as outlined above.

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Tracy Rosenberg is the Executive Director of Media Alliance  and a founding member of Oakland Privacy.

Ann Garrison is an independent journalist based in the San Francisco Bay Area. In 2014, she received the Victoire Ingabire Umuhoza Democracy and Peace Prize  for promoting peace through her reporting on conflict in the African Great Lakes Region. Please help support her work on Patreon. She can be reached on Twitter @AnnGarrison  and at ann(at)anngarrison(dot)com.

Featured image is from Shutterstock

“To understand the situation, figure out that now, in Washington, the main obstacle to war is a man called Mad Dog.”

This answer was given to me three years ago by Ray McGovern, when I asked him about the situation in the USA. McGovern is a former senior CIA analyst. One of his main tasks was to brief daily six successive US Presidents on what was happening in the USSR. After his retirement, he became a staunch critic of US foreign policy.

He told me also another thing. There were always two CIA’s inside CIA. One of them informed the President about realities and the other constructed realities as arguments for action. Without such “constructions”, by the way, it would be impossible to invade Iraq and unleash the chain of wars in the Middle East that followed.

As for the “Mad Dog”, he was no other than former US Defense Secretary General Mattis. Analyzing closely the publications on what was happening in the White House during the Trump years, I came to the conclusion that probably Mattis played a crucial role, along with the chief of staff of the US Armed Forces, General Joseph Dunford and leading Republicans, in setting up an “informal”, secret mechanism to prevent Trump if he decided to launch a nuclear attack. But of course there are not, and there cannot be proofs of that.

The US nuclear command system has been designed in such a way that any presidential order to launch nukes will be executed almost automatically in a few minutes. The mechanism does not allow any room for hesitations in executing an order. It is calibrated to the scenario of a world nuclear war, when one must act very quickly, in order not to lose his weapons from an attack of the enemy. And it is providing US President with an almost unlimited power to launch a nuclear attack.

This is the kind of games humanity is busy playing with after 1945. When Soviets and Americans signed the agreements on nuclear control, many people thought that we left all that madness behind us. Unfortunately, we still live in a barbaric and (hopefully!) pre-historic world, so all its problems tend to resurface from time to time.

According to the New York Times and many other sources, Mattis and Tillerson have also opposed successfully the drive to war with Iran, orchestrated by Netanyahu, Bannon, Bolton and others (for a short introduction to the subject, you may read the story – only partially – reconstructed by the New York magazine http://www.defenddemocracy.press/the-secret-history-of-the-push-to-strike-iran-2/).

According to an article in the Wall Street Journal, when President Trump assembled his main advisors to make the final decision about the targets of the Syria US bombings in 2018, Mattis was the only one participant who opposed successfully extended bombings of the country, which could provoke a much larger conflict in the Middle East, if not with Russia, given the presence of Russian troops in Syria. (The US bombing campaigns of 2017 and 2018 to Syria revealed indirectly another interesting thing. Behind the quite open agenda by Netanyahu, Bannon and Bolton, to attack Iran, there was also, and it is always there, the “hidden” agenda of the same forces to expel Russia from the Middle East). Somehow, there is an analogy between Mattis’ role in 2018 and Kennedy’s role in the Cuban Missile Crisis, with the difference Mattis did not pay it with his life, only with his job.

The clash between extremists and … “normal” imperialists, is a permanent feature of the situation in the United States (and the West at large) since the election of Bush and Cheney in 2000. This clash between two opposing lines has demonstrated itself at least five times during the last two years concerning Iran and one concerning the use of Armed Forces to suppress turmoil in US cities, as Trump wanted last June.

Israel, a “hidden superpower”

A similar conflict between “normal” and extremist imperialists is a permanent element of political life in Israel, but there the power of extremists is even higher than in the USA. Benjamin Netanyahu has financed the planning of the Iraqi War by leading Neocons Perle and Wolfowitz back in the 90’s  following the lines already developed by the Israeli strategist Odet Yinon back in the ‘80s (See this). This is by the way quite astonishing given that, if the “radical” ideas were implemented, Israel would risk much more than the United States! This is also a proof of the extremely dangerous fanaticism of a part of world leadership in our era.

Netanyahu exercised a tremendous influence in the US under Trump, to the point of dictating US Foreign Policy, at least in the fields he wanted to.

It is impossible to analyze the international situation portraying Israel as a “satellite”, or a “client – state” of the United States, or a medium power. Especially under Netanyahu it has acquired at least some of the characteristics of a “hidden superpower”. Its ascension was greatly facilitated – there is no other logical way to explain it – by its special links to the world financial capital and the rise of its power of the later during the “globalization” era (after 1990).

Israel has not only a regional, but a truly global agenda, from Ukraine to Brazil and from Britain to Sudan. It is also able to intervene to the internal affairs of major European powers, like it did in Britain against Corbyn, or when it was able to overturn the decision by the French President Sarkozy upon his election in 2008 to appoint Hubert Védrine as Foreign Minister. Vedrine would be a serious obstacle to the French intervention in Syria to support jihadists and to the war which destroyed Libya.

At a time the 2nd Socialist International is a shadow of itself, the 3rd Communist International does not exist and the 4th International has been split in many organizations, if not degenerated, the Israeli extremists dispose of their own Far Right International, in the form of the Evangelicals, able to greatly influence the politics of big countries like the US or Brazil. Israel is so powerful (and many people so opportunistic) that it has been able to deter effectively any serious analysis of its global role. You can also freely criticize Americans, Russians, Germans or Chinese, but it seems much more difficult to do it with Israel. As George Orwell put it, all animals are equal, but some are more equal than others.

Sending bombers and withdrawing air carriers

This controversy between the two lines on Iran has resurfaced in recent days. Trump’s departure will make war with Iran much more difficult. And on the other side, a war could facilitate Trump’s plans to remain in power, in spite of his electoral defeat.

Acting US Secretary of Defense Christopher Miller has ordered the US aircraft carrier Nimitz to return to its base, thus removing a key element for any major military action against Iran. He did so despite the suggestion of General Frank McKenzie, head of the US Central Command, who was pushing for the expansion of the aircraft carrier’s mission. Simultaneously, anonymous Pentagon sources told CNN that there is no trace of information about any planned attacks by Iran, especially in Iraq. That means the Pentagon sources have denied what American and Israeli officials have been claiming for weeks!

Just before this announcement was made the Americans sent to the Gulf strategic B-52 bombers for a third time in recent weeks and the Israelis a submarine equipped with nuclear weapons.

It is also noteworthy that the chief of the US General Staff General visited Israel recently. Maybe it is a pure coincidence, but every time he visits Israel something very big happens afterwards. It was the case with Gen. Soleimani’s assassination or the explosion in Beirut.

The extremists of the Empire have repeatedly used methods of provocation, deception and deep “entryism” into the US state apparatus and political and media system, in order to provoke the invasion of Iraq in 2003. They are most probably trying to use the same methods now, only now their opponents know their methods and they are much more aware of the potential consequences of a major escalation in the Middle East. We cannot exclude also that they use themselves the methods of their opponents, or, as a minimum, the situation has already led various opponents of a war against Iran to communicate somehow between themselves, thus creating an informal, still powerful “anti-provocation” mechanism.

Human history cannot repeat itself in exactly the same forms, as happens with processes of the inorganic world, for a quite simple reason. Humans know it.

Conclusion

Three conclusions can be drawn from what we already presented.

First, the international public awareness was greatly reduced during the last 20 years. Back in 2003 powerful states and millions of demonstrators were mobilized against the Iraq war. Now, we have to count on the US Armed Forces, the CIA and various conspiracies to avert the danger of a global disaster!

Second, it seems very probable that extremists will not be able to provoke the war they are planning, although no one can be certain. It is an ongoing struggle.

Third, even if nothing happens from now till January 20^th, even under Biden, the dangerous oscillation of the Middle Eastern situation (and of the whole world situation) between chaos and stability will continue and the apocalyptic scenarios may come back, if there is not a comprehensive solution to the problems of the whole region of the Middle East (and of the world).

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Ivermectin, a cheap generic drug used for hookworm, heartworm and scabies, with a half life causing it to remain in your system for months, is used as a “worming” medicine in children, dogs, horses.  Due to its tremendous value as a highly safe and effective drug, a Nobel Prize was awarded to its developers in 2015.

Serendipitously, it was found to be extremely effective in Covid-19, for both prevention and treatment.  It is even effective at a late stage of illness, unlike hydroxychloroquine.  The drug seems to work against SARS-CoV-2 even better than antimalarials.  Unlike the chloroquine drugs, its efficacy was only established during the past several months.  Many studies now prove its value in Covid-19.

Ivermectin’s routine use in places like Africa probably contributed to Africa’s extraordinary resistance to Covid-19, where rates of death are a small fraction what they are in the US. Most African countries have reported death rates from Covid-19 between 1% and 10% that of the US.

A US Senate hearing led by Senator Ron Johnson on December 8 called as witnesses doctors who were using the drug, who discussed its extreme benefit in the Covid epidemic.

That appears to have initiated a firestorm of fake news about how the drug is dangerous, unproven, and should not be used for Covid.  The Associated Press led the way, employing journalist Beatrice Dupuy, who specializes in debunking Covid ‘misinformation,’ and who previously wrote for Teen Vogue. The AP also used Facebook’s opaque “fact checking” system.  Then other media outlets followed.

On Christmas Eve, 16 days after the Senate hearing that gave ivermectin its first broad publicity, the government of South Africa banned its use and importation as a treatment for Covid.  No specific safety issue was cited as the reason.  There is no specific safety issue; the drug is extremely safe, although a large burden of dead worms can sometimes sicken a patient.

The chloroquine drugs are also very effective treatments for early Covid, but their use for this purpose has been obfuscated, banned, and interfered with using a huge number of techniques.  I created a list of 53 different strategiesthat have been employed to prevent chloroquine drugs from being used against Covid in many countries. The strategies were enormously effective.  Few doctors and patients have any idea that real “magic bullets” exist to cure Covid.  Fewer still have realized that by preventing access to highly effective drugs, our rulers deliberately prolong the pandemic and maximize the deaths.

Make no mistake:  proper use of chloroquine drugs or ivermectin (all cheap and generic) would be a game changer.  They would end the Covid-19 pandemic, with or without vaccines.

The banning of ivermectin in South Africa is a TRIAL BALLOON–if the powers that be can get away with it there, they will start banning it elsewhere.  Do everything in your power to prevent this from happening. Please spread the word.  Get your doctor to prescribe the drug for you.  Write letters to the newspaper.  Please DO SOMETHING!

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This article was originally published on the author’s blog site, Anthrax Vaccine.

The import into South Africa of ivermectin, a drug that has made international headlines recently as a so-called “miracle cure” for Covid-19, has been declared illegal by the South African Health Products Regulatory Authority (Sahpra).

Ivermectin, which has been used for decades to treat livestock and people infested with parasitic worms, was hailed as a revolutionary drug in the 1980s and works by paralysing and killing parasites.

In a statement, Sahpra chief executive Dr Boitumelo Semete-Makokotlela said:

“Our stance is unambiguous. This drug is not approved by Sahpra and any attempt to import it into the country will be dealt with by Sahpra’s regulatory compliance unit in conjunction with law enforcement agencies such as the SAPS and the SIU.”

Semete-Makokotlela said:

“If any member of the public is aware of such transgressions, please contact Deon Poovan, senior manager of Sahpra’s Inspectorate and Regulatory Compliance on [email protected]”

“At present, there is no confirmatory clinical evidence available for the use of ivermectin in the management of Covd-19 infections,” said Semete-Makokotlela.

“In terms of safety and efficacy, there is no evidence to support the use of ivermectin and we do not have any clinical trial evidence to justify its use.

“Sahpra is focused on quality, safety and efficacy and its ultimate goal is to protect the health and well-being of all those who live in South Africa. The use of such a drug could potentially lead to harmful effects or even death,” said Semete-Makokotlela.

Reached for comment, provincial head of health Dr Keith Cloete said:

“We will be guided by the expert advice of the national Essential Medicine List (EML) committee and the ministerial advisory committee for Covid-19, who will pronounce on this matter.”

Provincial health department spokesperson Mark van der Heever said:

“We only use medication and drugs which are approved by Sahpra.”

During a hearing before the US senate homeland security and governmental affairs committee last week, Dr Pierre Kory, a pulmonary and critical care specialist at Aurora St Luke’s Medical Center in Milwaukee, described ivermectin as a “wonder drug” with immensely powerful antiviral and anti-inflammatory agents.

Kory said:

“Ivermectin is highly safe, widely available, and low cost. Its discovery was awarded the Nobel Prize in medicine, and is already included on the WHO’s World’s List of Essential Medicines. Ivermectin is effectively a miracle drug against Covid-19.”

The hearing went viral on social media with one clip receiving more than one million views on YouTube, and a number of people around the world including in South Africa where the second wave of Covid-19 appears to be worse than the first time around, have since called for governments and regulators allow the drug for use against Covid-19.

The WHO and health authorities worldwide have urged people to be wary of so-called Covid-19 miracle cures.

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One of the most serious attacks on the anti-colonial and national liberation legacy in Africa was the attempts by the United States and the Kingdom of Morocco to liquidate the right to self-determination among the Saharawi people in the Northwest region of the continent.

These maneuvers by Washington took the form of geographic misrepresentation suggesting that the Western Sahara, formally colonized by Spain, was an integral part of Morocco.

The efforts to distort the actual history of the struggle for independence by the Saharawi Arab Democratic Republic (SADR) was linked to the purported “normalization” of relations with the State of Israel by Morocco. The diplomatic recognition of Tel Aviv has been a consistent theme pursued by the U.S. State Department throughout Africa.

Millions of Palestinians, like their counterparts in the Western Sahara, are seeking to relinquish the stranglehold imposed upon them by imperialism. A truce declared nearly three decades ago in lieu of United Nations internationally supervised elections in the territory, has recently been rejected by the SADR and its armed forces known as the Polisario Front.

The SADR has been recognized by the UN and the AU as the legitimate representatives of the people of the Western Sahara. Nonetheless, the outgoing administration of President Donald J. Trump has sought to hamper anti-colonial and anti-imperialist efforts on the continent and indeed throughout the world. The incoming administration of President-elect Joe Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris will inherit a well-established foreign policy orientation which transcends both the Democratic and Republican parties throughout successive administrations.

In addition to the U.S., the SADR has condemned France for its consistent support given to Morocco as it relates to the Western Sahara national question. Moreover, the provisional government has vowed to maintain its disavowal of the truce from 1991 which could threaten stability in the North and West Africa regions.

Sahara Press Service reported on a statement delivered by the Polisario Front representative to France saying:

“Frente POLISARIO’s representative to France, Mohamed Sidati, said the Saharawi people embarked, since November 13, in a second war of liberation, following Morocco’s aggression against Saharawi civilians, stressing UN Security Council’s recent strong message to the United States and the Moroccan occupier which attempt to derail the decolonization process. Speaking Monday (December 28) to the International Radio of Algeria, Sidati said the Saharawi people’s ‘return to the path of armed struggle shows they remain so determined to sacrifice themselves for the recovery of their rights.’”

The path of armed revolutionary struggle has been a tactical and strategic approach within the history of the African Revolution since the era of enslavement and colonialism. Such decisions to resist with weapons by genuine anti-imperialist liberation movements and provisional governments are never taken lightly. The purpose of the violent approach to the oppressive state and social system are in essence actions of self-defense, where the objective is clearly aimed at removing the mechanism of exploitation and political suppression.

Sidati, in the article quoted above also emphasizes:

“The Moroccan occupation has completely ignored the will of the Saharawi people and tried to exploit the patience of Western Sahara people, persisting in its tyranny, before being surprised by the strong response of the Saharawi people, he added. On outgoing U.S. President Donald Trump’s decision to acknowledge Morocco’s alleged ‘sovereignty’ over Western Sahara, the representative of the Frente POLISARIO in France said that ‘to exchange the right of a people for such sovereignty is an injustice and a tyranny.’ ‘This will not succeed,’ Sidati stressed, explaining that it will only tarnish Morocco’s reputation as wanting to sell the Palestinian cause in order to confiscate a territory that is not its own. This recognition, he said, is a ‘kind of international brigandage’ of peoples’ rights, which is, he added, especially harmful to the United States.”

The Southern African Development Community (SADC) has been a source of the strongest support for the SADR as proponents of the right of independence for the Western Sahara. Zimbabwe, which has been subjected to imperialist-driven economic sanctions for more than two decades, understands clearly, the significance of the Western Sahara question. Consequently, SADC and the AU for the last two years have held “Anti-Sanctions Day” during October in solidarity with Harare and the ZANU-PF government.

Britain and the U.S. have led the sanctions and destabilization efforts against Zimbabwe in response to the radical land redistribution program launched in 2000. Since the expropriation of European settler-colonial agricultural business interests in Zimbabwe, the country has been targeted for regime change. However, Zimbabwe, with the assistance of neighboring African states and the People’s Republic of China, has been able to maintain its political independence. Therefore, Zimbabwe and SADC can take positions which coincide with the aspirations of the anti-imperialist forces internationally.

Ethiopia, Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and Ivory Coast: Focal Points for Imperialist Intrigue

In the Horn of Africa state of the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia there has been an internal conflict stemming from the need to take control of the Tigray region in the north where the former ruling party challenged the central government headed by Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed Ali. Under the TPLF which was the dominant party within the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF), the armed organization came to power after being designated by the United States in May 1991 as the official representatives of the people.

The TPLF-EPRDF regime played an important role in facilitating the foreign policy of Washington in East Africa. Ethiopia entered Somalia in December 2006 at the aegis of the Pentagon. The situation in Somalia remains precarious although thousands of African Union Mission to Somalia (AMISOM) troops along with the U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM) occupy the oil-rich nation. Dating back as far as 1992-1994, the former administrations of Presidents George W. H. Bush, Sr. and Bill Clinton, deployed thousands of Marines to Somalia. U.S. soldiers have been killed in Somalia including during 2020.

As the motivating factors behind imperialist intervention remain strategic mineral and energy interests as well as competition with China, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) is a prime illustration of the extent to which western states will go to extract wealth and maintain indirect political control. The first elected Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba sought after taking office in June 1960 to form Pan-African alliances with other governments such as Ghana. Belgium and the U.S. expended considerable intelligence and military resources in order to undermine the Congolese Revolution.

Today, the current President Felix Tshisekedi has become embroiled in a row with former President Joseph Kabila, who ruled the DRC from 2001 until 2018. A coalition administration appears to be breaking up over which party will control the apparatus of the government.

The disagreement between Tshisekedi and Kabila has recently involved Pan-African cultural figure Tshala Muana, a staunch supporter of Kabila. Muana was detained in November ostensibly for releasing a popular song criticizing the political posture of Tshekedi.

According to the Standard news website:

“Relatives of the Lubumbashi- based singer said agents from the National Intelligence Agency arrested her in Kinshasha on November 14 saying she was wanted for questioning.  Their sentiments were echoed by her companion and producer Claude Mashuls, who indicated that the artiste was treated like a criminal. Speaking to Standard Entertainment and Lifestyle through Congolese music promoter Jules Nsana who relocated back to Kinshasha two years ago from Kenya, the musician denied attacking president Tshisekedi, instead saying she was misunderstood.”

Ivory Coast, the largest cocoa producer internationally and an emerging oil exporting country, was the center of an electoral dispute in 2010-2011 that resulted in the military intervention by France designed to topple the Popular Front (FPI) administration of President Laurent Gbagbo. The president and his wife, Simone, the Second Vice President of the FPI and a political leader in her own right, was placed under the incarceration of imperialist-backed interests. The U.S. under former President Barack Obama concurred with the French in overthrowing Gbagbo who was later kidnapped and taken to the Netherlands to stand trial in a contrived International Criminal Court (ICC) tribunal on Ivory Coast.

Due to lack of evidence, the Netherlands-based court could not gain a conviction against Gbagbo. He was released while being required to wait in another European state for the prosecution to develop an appeal to the case. In early December 2020, it was announced that the Ivorian government had issued Gbagbo a passport to return to the country, which the president says he will soon seek reentry.

Simone Gbagbo was charged by the French-installed regime of Alassane Ouattara of crimes against humanity and sentenced to 20 years in prison. After spending several years behind bars, she was released by the neo-colonial dominated Ivorian administration. In an interview granted to DW she said of the current political crisis in Ivory Coast stemming from Ouattara’s insistence on staying in power for a third term that:

“I think that Ivory Coast was targeted by a French conspiracy. First it was [Jacques] Chirac’s France, then Sarkozy’s France, who decided that Laurent Gbagbo had no right to be in Ivory Coast. They organized things so that Gbagbo would be ousted from power. This they needed to show that he was surrounded by demons. Apparently I became the leader of a death squad. But nobody has ever been able to provide any evidence to support this allegation. I just watched and chose not to say anything. At that time, 2002 to 2003, I took French press agencies who repeated the claim to court in Paris. I won all my lawsuits. They went appealed; I won again. I don’t use weapons to act, to expose my ideas, to share my ideas. So I say nothing about the death squads.”

Pan-Africanism and Anti-Imperialism in the 21st Century

There can be no functional and effective unification of Africa absent an anti-imperialist orientation in domestic and foreign policy issues. The examples cited above are reflective of the challenges facing the continent in the coming decades of the present century.

Economic integration in its most logical form presupposes ideological and political uniformity. Judging from the pronouncements of the AU along with the trade union, youth, women’s and farmer organizations, the African masses yearn for social justice and collective progress.

Nonetheless, the anti-imperialist movement is part and parcel of the class struggle for socialist transformation. The solidarity of oppressed peoples and the international proletariat provides the potential for the eradication of the exploitative capitalist modes of production and social relations.

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

Featured image is from the author

Over the last three years, a new type of groupthink has emerged among many Western media and policy think tanks in their geopolitically motivated efforts to malign China. They’ve claimed that China is practicing a new type of colonialism, which is coined “debt-trap diplomacy.” China is charged with deliberately luring developing nations into borrowing-lending arrangements, primarily for infrastructure projects, with the intention of entrapping them into unpayable loans. It is alleged that once the borrowing nation defaults on “excessive debt,” China seizes the project or collateral assets of valuable mineral resources.

There is only one problem with this supposition. None of it is true. There has been no takeover of any project and no seizure of assets of any kind in Africa by China. There is no evidence of an intentional effort to trap African nations into owing debt to China.

To give an example of how manipulation of words is used to disparage the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) in Africa, just look at Heather Zeiger’s article “China and Africa: Debt-Trap Diplomacy?” The article recognizes that Kenya is suffering from COVID-19 related financial stress and cannot fulfill the terms of the loan for the Standard Gauge Railway (SGR). However, she then attempts to make the case for debt-trap diplomacy by slyly using a conditional sentence: “If Kenya defaults on payments, China might be able to receive revenue from the Port of Mombasa as collateral, although the Chinese government has said it does not intend to do this.”

The truth is, neither happened.

Johns Hopkins University’s China-Africa Research Initiative (CARI) has extensive data on Chinese lending in Africa. After reviewing over 1,000 loans, it reports that “we have not seen any examples where we would say the Chinese deliberately entangled another country in debt, and then used that debt to extract unfair or strategic advantages of some kind in Africa, including ‘asset seizures’.”

Aerial photo shows trains at the Nairobi railway station in Nairobi, capital of Kenya. /Xinhua

However, this has not prevented U.S. elected officials and representatives of Democratic and Republican parties from ignorantly reciting this debt-trap mantra. This propaganda is so pervasive that even some Africans have been repeating this disinformation.

African nations require infrastructure

China through the BRI is helping to finance and construct vitally needed infrastructure in Africa. Nothing is more critical or more urgently needed to industrialize Africa and end poverty and hunger than infrastructure. The United States, whose foreign policy is increasingly vectored at countering China’s rising political and economic power in the world, has no strategy or intention of making a similar commitment to the African continent.

W. Gyude Moore, a senior policy fellow at the Center for Global Development and Liberia’s former Minister of Public Works, has said that China’s investment in infrastructure in Africa is unsurpassed. And given the West’s history and operations in Africa, it is “frustrating that in its complicated, enmeshed, centuries-long history in Africa, there has never been a Western proposal for continental-scale infrastructure building … It was the Chinese who sought to build a road, rail and maritime infrastructure network to link Africa’s economies with the rest of the world.”

China helped finance and construct Kenya’s SGR, the only new railroad in 100 years since the British empire occupied Kenya at the beginning of the 20th century. The first phase of this ambitious project, from the port city of Mombasa to the capital Nairobi, is already completed. It is intended to connect to Uganda, Rwanda, South Sudan and Ethiopia. This has the potential to become the eastern leg of the long overdue East-West railroad across the girth of Africa, which would transform the continent.

China has contributed to the welfare of nations through the BRI. And for this, it should be supported, not pilloried.

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Lawrence Freeman is a political-economic analyst on Africa with 30 years of experience in Africa promoting infrastructure development policies. The article reflects the author’s opinions, and not necessarily the views of CGTN.

Featured image is from CGTN

If you are advocating for lockdowns, you are complicit in tearing families apart. You are complicit in inflicting untold suffering on millions of people around the world.

You are complicit in casting the poorest and most vulnerable in our societies into even further grinding poverty. You are complicit in murder.

Read full transcript below.

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This is James Corbett of corbettreport.com.

In 2006, a 15-year-old high school student from Albuquerque, New Mexico won third place in the Intel science and engineering fair for her project on slowing the spread of an infectious pathogen during a pandemic emergency. Using a computer simulation that she developed with the help of her father, she argued that in order to slow the spread of the disease, governments should implement school shutdowns, keep kids at home and enforce social distancing.

Incredibly, that third place high school science fair project can be tied directly to the lockdown policies being implemented by governments around the world today. You see, that father that she developed her computer simulation with was no average doting dad, but a senior researcher at Sandia National Laboratories who at that time was working on pandemic emergency response plans for the US Department of Homeland Security. His proposal to implement school shutdowns and, if need be, workplace shutdowns in the event of a pandemic emergency was developed at least in part in response to his daughter’s high school project.

Now those advocating for lockdowns have seen the destruction and death that those policies have wrought this year and we are living through that right now. Not only are people being deprived of their livelihoods and forced into grinding poverty as a direct result of these shutdowns, but now the undeniable truth is that if you are advocating for lockdowns, you are advocating for some portion of the population to be consigned to death.

This is no longer debatable. It is even openly admitted—although months too late by the World Health Organization.

DAVID NABARRO: I want to say it again: we in the World Health Organization do not advocate lockdowns as a primary means of control of this virus. [. . .] We may well have a doubling of world poverty by early next year. We may well have at least a doubling of child malnutrition because children are not getting meals at school and their parents and poor families are not able to afford it.

This is a terrible, ghastly global catastrophe, actually. And so we really do appeal to all world leaders: stop using lockdown as your primary control method. Develop better systems for doing it. Work together and learn from each other. But remember, lockdowns just have one consequence that you must never, ever belittle, and that is making poor people an awful lot poorer.

SOURCE: The Week in 60 Minutes #6

This is the point at which, no doubt, I’ll be expected to produce the data to back up the non-controversial observation that lockdowns kill, even though that data will do precisely nothing to penetrate the consciousness of those who have already decided that they occupy the moral high ground for advocating locking billions of people around the globe as prisoners inside their own homes. But persevere I will.

I’ll point, for example, to the letter signed by hundreds of doctors calling the lockdowns themselves a “mass casualty incident” and exhorting politicians to end the shutdowns.

I’ll point to the research that shows that thousands of people will die because of delays to cancer surgery treatments as a result of the medical shutdowns.

I’ll point to the research of the Well-Being Trust showing that 75,000 Americans are expected to die deaths of despair—including alcohol and drug misuse and suicide—this year alone as a result of the lockdowns.

I will point to the research of The Lancet showing that 265 million people are expected to be thrown into severe food insecurity as a result of these lockdowns.

I will even point to the research showing 125,000 children are expected to die from malnutrition as a result of these lockdowns.

But, as I say, none of these deaths will matter to those who have already decided that they are right and virtuous for advocating locking vast swathes of the human population inside their own homes to starve to death in the name of slowing the spread of a disease that even the epidemiologists who have been wrong about everything this year tell us will kill less than one percent of the infected.

Yes, slowing the spread, not stopping the spread. This was never about stopping a pandemic. Even the lockdown advocates never advocated that. But somehow that has been forgotten and “15 days to flatten the curve” has turned into a never-ending carte blanche for the biosecurity state to implement any number of draconian policies on its population, any number of policies on the checklist of the would-be dictator. Not only locking people inside their own homes, but constant surveillance of the population through the contact tracing and tracking apps that are increasingly being implemented around the globe, and, inevitably, the proposals for mandating the experimental vaccines which agents of the state will forcibly inject into people against their will.

This is not acceptable.

We cannot allow this to stand.

If we forsake this, our most basic right—the right to step foot outside of our own homes—then we forsake our humanity itself. An important part of what makes us human is being taken away from us in the name of stopping the spread of COVID-19.

But there is good news for those who have managed to retain their sanity in the time of insanity. We do not need a complicated plan in order to subvert this agenda. We do not need special deputization or to ask permission from the government. We do not need to join any particular political party or even any particular protest movement.

All we have to do is disobey these unlawful “orders.”

CASSIE ZERVOS: The persistent anti-lockdown protesters said they will not forget Melbourne’s strict 112 day measures as they took to the steps of Parliament. They carried signs saying “Don’t trust the government” and chanted for police to join them in their rally.

SOURCE: Melbourne anti-COVID lockdown protest turns ugly outside Parliament House

BUSINESS OWNER: I’ve lost friends who’ve killed themselves. I’ve seen clients die because they’ve lost their livelihood.

HEALTH INSPECTOR: I’m sorry to hear that.

BUSINESS OWNER: I know you are and i’m just a—I’m asking for you to guys have some compassion.

SOURCE: Buffalo, New York Business Owners Stand Up to Cuomo Lockdown Orders

ASHLEY DRIEMEYER: Can he arrest us all? Because, from what I am gathering, in this area we are all banding together and going against our governor.

SOURCE: Illinois restaurant owner will defy new state restrictions

[CROWD BANGS POTS AND PANS DURING PROTEST]

SOURCE: Protests in Denmark – Epidemic law and mandatory vaccines – EPIDEMILOV

BUSINESS OWNERS: Get out! Get out! Get out! Get out! Get out!

SOURCE: Buffalo, New York Business Owners Stand Up to Cuomo Lockdown Orders

If you have managed to retain your sanity during this time of widespread insanity, I applaud you and wish to assure you that you are not alone. Many, many people all around the world are defying orders. They are protesting against these lockdowns. They are standing up. They are disobeying.

But of course the corporate controlled press don’t want you to know that disobedience is an option on the table and they will not report on this. But disobedience is an option. Open your business. Leave your home. Do not ask for permission. Disobey.

To those who are still advocating for lockdowns, I encourage you to do so to the face of those parents who have lost their teenage children due to suicide as a direct result of the shutdowns and tell them that their child’s death doesn’t matter because it wasn’t listed as being due to COVID-19. Or do so to the face of the tens of thousands of others who have already lost loved ones as a direct result of these shutdown or the hundreds of thousands more who will die as long as these lockdowns endure.

If you are advocating for lockdowns, you are complicit in tearing families apart. You are complicit in inflicting untold suffering on millions of people around the world. You are complicit in casting the poorest and most vulnerable in our societies into even further grinding poverty. You are complicit in murder.

A line is being crossed right now. Which side of history are you on? Make your decision now and make it wisely, because your actions during these times will not be forgotten.

You have been warned.

This is James Corbett of corbettreport.com.

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Featured image: Public domain image from Wiki’s COVID-Protest page.

Among the many controversies surrounding the events of 9/11 one of the most prominent has been the question of how, many hours after the collapse of the Twin Towers, the 47-storey WTC7 building suffered a total collapse, all in a matter of seconds.

The persistence of this controversy is hardly surprising. WTC7 was not hit by an airplane, it had suffered from only a few isolated office fires whilst multiple sources on the day were foretelling the collapse of the building, even though in history no steel-framed skyscraper had ever been brought down by fire alone.

Questions were hardly mitigated by the remarkable length of time it took NIST (the National Institute for Standards in Technology) to publish their investigation of the collapse nor their eye-brow raising conclusion.

And prior to this the 9/11 Commission Report had entirely ignored WTC7. The belated NIST investigation concluded that isolated office fires had caused thermal expansion leading to the failure of a single column and then, extraordinarily, an immediate cascading collapse of all columns in the building.

This then brought the building down symmetrically, in a manner consistent with controlled demolition, in under 12 seconds.

WTC 7 from SEVEN, AE911 / 1091 Pictures.

To many this did not appear to be a particularly persuasive analysis, and certainly not for the grouping of engineers and architects (AE 9/11) who had been questioning for some time the initiation and behaviour of the building collapses on 9/11.

Indeed, so dissatisfied were the architects and engineers that they funded an independent scientific study in order to rigorously evaluate NIST’s ‘completely new’ theory of thermal expansion and progressive collapse.

Seven tells the story of this scientific study, focusing upon its lead researcher, Professor Leroy Hulsey from the University of Alaska Fairbanks, who spent four years examining the WTC 7 collapse along with two engineering PhD students Feng Xiao and Zhili Quan.

Image on the right: Dr. Leroy Hulsey – SEVEN, AE911 / 1091 Pictures.

The film is beautifully produced and directed by Dylan Avery, narrated by the well-known and much-loved actor Ed Asner, and is underpinned by a powerful music score by Johan Back Monell. It was produced by Richard Gage, Ted Walters and Kelly David from AE9/11.

Interviews with Professor Hulsey are skillfully interwoven with expert testimony from Roland Angle (civil engineer), Kamal Obeid (structural engineer), Scott Grainger (fire protection officer) and Tony Szamboti (mechanical engineer).

The integrity and expertise of these experts is juxtaposed with embarrassing silences from news anchors when members of the US public phone in to ask about Building 7 and the sheepish Shyam Sunder, lead investigator for the NIST study. At one point in the film, having introduced the matter of the corroded steel, retrieved by FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency) and reported by the New York Times as ‘perhaps the deepest mystery uncovered in the investigation’, Sunder is heard awkwardly attempting to explain away its significance:

Er, there is, there is reference often made to a piece of steel from Building 7. There was no evidence that any of the residue in that steel, in that piece of steel, er had any, er, relationship to, er, an an, undue er fire event in the building … or any other kind of incendiary, incendiary device in the building.

The extreme temperatures needed to have corroded or melted the steel were many times higher than those identified by NIST as having occurred due to the isolated office fires. As with so many other aspects of the NIST investigation, evidence that did not fit a preordained conclusion was simply ignored. Scientific method and rigour was thrown to the wind.

Hulsey’s integrity and rigour stands in sharp contrast to NIST’s disgraceful and un-scientific conduct.

University of Alaska Fairbanks – SEVEN, AE911 / 1091 Pictures.

Seven carefully describes how Hulsey’s team systematically unpicked the flawed claims advanced by NIST, including demonstrably inaccurate calculations relating to their explanation that thermal expansion worked to move a girder off its seat, and implausible claims that the resulting failure of a single column (out of a total of 50 odd) could ever lead to a global collapse of the entire building at free fall speed.

Using two separate computer programs, Hulsey’s team explored how the building would have behaved according to NIST’s explanation and found that the NIST account was wrong.

When confronted with issues relating to their study, NIST simply responded with evasions and secrecy: they have refused to release their key data whilst specific errors identified in their study received curt responses signed off, not by an engineer, but by a NIST public relations staffer. Hulsey’s study, conversely, and all of its data and calculations, has been fully open to expert and public scrutiny.

After one year of public consultation (2019-2020), almost no substantive issues were identified and his reported was officially published byAlaska Fairbanks University. The Hulsey study conclusions are delivered with devastating effect. The final report states:

… the collapse of WTC 7 was a global failure involving the near-simultaneous failure of every column in the building.

This conclusion is based primarily upon the finding that the simultaneous failure of all core columns over 8 stories followed 1.3 seconds later by the simultaneous failure of all exterior columns over 8 stories produces almost exactly the behaviour observed in videos of the collapse, whereas no other sequence of failures produced the observed effect

Hulsey is more concise in the film:

All those interior columns came out at once, at once, the exteriors also a few seconds later came out at once, giving you free fall which comes down, straight down.

Image below: SEVEN, AE911 / 1091 Pictures.

To its credit, Seven remains focused on the scientific question of why WTC 7 collapsed and, only at the very end, are the broader implications hinted at.

If the building was not brought down by office fires, something else caused it to come down. The events in New York and Washington D.C. on September 11 2001 led directly to a global ‘war on terror’ and multiple wars, with countless lives being destroyed and ruined, and the crumbling of basic civil rights and democracy in the west.

The film closes with Hulsey’s understated but powerful words:

I’m worried, I’m worried about this country right now. We just seem to be doing a lot of yelling and screaming and no hearing. No listening, maybe some hearing but no listening. So are we in a post 9/11? Yes we are. Does that mean just that is a problem? I think it’s bigger than that, I just don’t know where we are right now. It’s a bit troublesome.

Ultimately, Seven calmly and carefully tells a story of good scientists and professionals with integrity battling to establish an important truth through scientific rigour and objectivity. And that truth relates to one of the most important and consequential events of the 21st century whose ramifications are felt ever more powerfully today.

Hulsey’s study is likely to play an important role in some of the legal processes that are currently underway: The Lawyers’ Committee Grand Jury petition and lawsuit against the FBI, the petition to initiate a congressional investigation of the 2001 Anthrax attacks and theCampbell family petition to the UK courts.

But the struggle they have had is testament to how far Western institutions and public spheres have been corrupted in the service of power and become, to all intent and purpose, mediums of propaganda.

At an early stage two students, although keen, elected not to study with Hulsey’s team because of the controversial nature of the research; one prominent University blocked an attempt to discuss Hulsey’s findings; nefarious so-called ‘debunkers’ contacted members of Hulsey’s team and told them not to continue with their work. Hulsey himself speculates that fear of losing lucrative government funding streams has deterred debate among architectural and engineering firms.

The creation of a spiral of silence, fuelled by a compliant and lazy corporate media all too eager to childishly dismiss any questioning as ‘conspiracism’ or ‘conspiracy theory’, has meant that public discussion and debate has been subdued.

The conduct of NIST, more than anything else, highlights how respected scientific organizations have become corrupted.

Dr. Leroy Hulsey – SEVEN, AE911 / 1091 Pictures.

These issues could not be more relevant today, in 2021, where we see similar processes at work suffocating open scientific debate regarding COVID-19 and obfuscating the very real political and economic agendas now being pushed through. Indeed, the parallels between 9/11 and COVID-19 are striking. And the processes are also seen with the ongoing OPCW scandal regarding alleged chemical weapon attacks in Syria in which rigorous science has been thwarted by political power.

But, as much as Seven serves to highlight how far the West’s Enlightenment tradition has been eclipsed by corruption and propaganda, it also serves as an example that not all hope is lost. ‘Truth is the daughter of time, not of authority’ and is achieved through the determined efforts of people with integrity and courage.

Academia needs more people like Professor Hulsey and so too does the world, never more so than today.

You can rent and buy Seven on multiple platforms, here.

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This article was originally published on OffGuardian.

Dr Piers Robinson is a co-director of the Organisation for Propaganda Studies and convenor of the Working Group on Syria, Propaganda and Media. He is an associated researcher with the Working Group on Propaganda and the 9/11 ‘Global War on Terror’. He writes here in a personal capacity.

Featured image: University of Alaska Fairbanks – SEVEN, AE911 / 1091 Pictures.

Every recent US administration has performed a perverse ritual as it has come into office. All have agreed to undermine US law by signing secret letters stipulating they will not acknowledge something everyone knows: that Israel has a nuclear weapons arsenal.

Part of the reason for this is to stop people focusing on Israel’s capacity to turn dozens of cities to dust. This failure to face up to the threat posed by Israel’s horrific arsenal gives its prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, a sense of power and impunity, allowing Israel to dictate terms to others.

But one other effect of the US administration’s ostrich approach is that it avoids invoking the US’s own laws, which call for an end to taxpayer largesse for nuclear weapons proliferators.

Israel in fact is a multiple nuclear weapons proliferator. There is overwhelming evidence that it offered to sell the apartheid regime in South Africa nuclear weapons in the 1970s and even conducted a joint nuclear test. The US government tried to cover up these facts. Additionally, it has never signed the nuclear non-proliferation treaty.

Yet the US and Israeli governments pushed for the invasion of Iraq based on lies about coming mushroom clouds. As Israeli nuclear whistleblower Mordechai Vanunu said: the nuclear weapons were not in Iraq – they are in Israel.

To read complete article on The Guardian click here

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Desmond Tutu, a Nobel peace laureate, is a former archbishop of Cape Town and, from 1996 to 2003, was chair of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission

Featured image: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu delivers a speech on Iran’s nuclear programme at the defence ministry in Tel Aviv on 30 April 2018 (Source: MEE)

Yemen, a Quagmire for Saudi Coalition and Imperialists

By Azza Rojbi, January 06 2021

The humanitarian crisis in Yemen is the worst in the world. Those who survive the war live in dire situations struggling to provide for their own basic human needs and those of their families. According to the United Nations, nearly 80 percent of the Yemeni population — over 24 million people — rely on humanitarian assistance to live.

Iran Uses Its Grip on Strait of Hormuz to Fight Back US-Imposed Sanctions

By South Front, January 06 2021

Iran has found an original way of dealing with sanctions and limitations imposed on it by the so-called “maximum pressure” campaign launched by the Trump administration.

Assange Extradition Denial Indicts US Prison System But Imperils Journalism

By Prof. Marjorie Cohn, January 06 2021

As press freedom advocates celebrate that Assange has escaped facing charges under the U.S. Espionage Act — charges that carry 175 years in prison — they are also lamenting Baraitser’s acceptance of virtually all of the Trump administration’s attacks on investigative journalism.

COVID-19 and Induced Insanity in the UK, the Global Lab Rat

By Dr. David Halpin, January 06 2021

The strategy has been to scare a large majority out of their remaining wits, and to keep repeating the big lie – that Covid_19 (C19) is very infectious and likely lethal. Every body set up to drive the policies, and there are hundreds, has been corrupt.

We Are at War

By Peter Koenig, January 06 2021

We, the common people, are at war against an ever more authoritarian and tyrannical elitist Globalist system, reigned by a small group of multi-billionaires, that planned already decades ago to take power over the people, to control them.

The GSK – Pfizer Multibillion Dollar Global Vaccine Monopoly

By Prof Michel Chossudovsky, January 05 2021

It’s Big Pharma, It’s Big Money. It’s the multibillion dollar global vaccine market. In August 2019, five months before the onslaught of the Covid-19 crisis, two of the largest Worldwide Pharma conglomerates decided to join hands in a strategic relationship which barely made the headlines.

Greece: From A Covid Coup To A Covid Junta

By Evans Aggelissopoulos, January 06 2021

The Covid Coup of early March has metastasized into a full blown Covid Junta as areas in Western Athens have had a full 24 hour curfew imposed on them. Citizens have been quoted on MSM as stating this has nothing to do with a virus but a full-blown attempt at a Junta.

The Fate of the American Republic: Without the Banana!

By Philip A Farruggio, January 06 2021

“We are a DEMOCRACY.” The Democratic Party leaning stations love to ram this continually down our throats. The right wing outlets seem to be SO far gone that they don’t even attempt to sell this **** to their viewers. Such is the fate of this republic.

In Diversity We Trust: Joe Biden’s Cabinet Choices

By Dr. Binoy Kampmark, January 06 2021

Such a vulgar politicisation of multiculturalism and identity also serves another function.  Not only is it meant to convince the multicultis and identitarians that they are onto a good thing with Biden; they can also scorn those voters who backed the soon-to-be-exiting Donald Trump.

What to Expect in 2021: Madness, Mayhem, Manipulation and More Tyranny

By John W. Whitehead, January 06 2021

Iran has found an original way of dealing with sanctions and limitations imposed on it by the so-called “maximum pressure” campaign launched by the Trump administration.

On January 4, the Navy of the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps detained a South Korea-flagged oil tanker in the Strait of Hormuz over an alleged environmental pollution issue. The chemical tanker HANKUK CHEMI was inbound to Fujairah in the United Arab Emirates. Ahead of the incident, the United Kingdom Maritime Trade Operations naval authority reported that an “interaction” between Iranian authorities and a merchant vessel in the Strait of Hormuz led the ship to alter its course and proceed into Iranian waters.

Following the incident, the South Korean Defense Ministry said that it will send its anti-piracy Cheonghae unit, normally based in the Gulf of Aden, along with helicopters to the Persian Gulf. The 302-strong Cheonghae unit operates a 4,500-ton destroyer, a Lynx anti-submarine helicopter and three speed boats.

The deployment of this unit is a rather a symbolic move than a practical step that should allow to protect South Korea-flagged ships in the region as Iranian forces have an overwhelming dominance there and using its conventional and asymmetric capabilities can even challenge the US military in the event of a limited military confrontation there.

Two days before the seizure of the tanker, Iran said a South Korean diplomat was due to travel to the country to negotiate over billions of dollars in its assets now frozen in Seoul. The total amount of Iranian money blocked in South Korea is up to $8.5 billion and Tehran declared its readiness to barter its money for deliveries of a variety of goods and commodities, including raw materials, medicine, petrochemicals, auto parts, home appliances.

Apparently, Iran thinks that South Korea needs some additional motivation to go contrary to the will of its Big Brother and accept the Iranian proposal.

Another important diplomatic achievement was made by Qatar, which is known as not only a Turkish ally, but also the Gulf monarchy that has constructive relations with Iran. On January 4, Saudi Arabia lifted the 4-year air, sea and land blockade that it together with the UAE, Kuwait, Egypt and Bahrain imposed on Qatar. In June 2017, the blockading countries accused Qatar, among other things, of supporting terrorism and of being too close to Iran. They severed economic and diplomatic ties with Doha and imposed a land, sea and air blockade on it. Qatar rejected all the allegations and refused to comply with a long list of demands announced by the blockading countries. So, now the anti-Qatari coalition is in retreat. The main factors that contributed to this scenario are the following:

• a deep crisis faced by Saudi Arabia due to the failed intervention in Yemen and its oil war adventure;
• the UAE-Saudi tensions that reached a new level due to the declining power of the Saudi Kingdom;
• the growth of the influence of Iran and its popularity among the population of the Middle East due to the public rapprochement of the Gulf monarchies with Israel;
• the stern stance of Qatar itself that used the blockade to develop alternative alliances and strengthen relations with Turkey, Iran and even Russia to contain the pressure it faced.

The Israeli-aligned Gulf monarchies will likely try to use the lifting of the blockade to convince Doha to officially join the US-led pro-Israeli coalition. However, even if Qatar does this under the pressure of the United States and with hopes of restoring economic relations with its neighbors, this does not mean that Doha would change its de-facto regional strategy as the previous years already demonstrated that the national-oriented approach is much more useful in times of crises than empty hopes on large revenues from Israeli love.

Perfumed and tailored for a certain brand of folksy, identity politics, Pete Buttigieg hoped to blast his way to the White House having run a community of 102,000 constituents in South Bend, Indiana.  Mayor Pete was hoping for the best, though his effort did not so much stall as fall over early on before the somnambulist who eventually won both his party’s nomination and the Presidency. 

With President-elect Joe Biden hoping to give the impression of full-blooded diversity in his Cabinet, Buttigieg was a natural choice for transport secretary.  At least New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio and the US Conference of Mayors thought so.  He spoke well, much like a textbook Rotarian who wishes to justify the club fee.  He comes across as tutored, yet to be jaded.  And there was that wonderful bonus thrown in: his sexual politics.

Biden has gone where many a US president has gone before, pushing up the hill of exceptionalism, proudly claiming that he has gotten his appointments the way no other president before has.

“This Cabinet will be the most representative of any Cabinet in American history.”  Meretriciously, he claimed it would be a “Cabinet of barrier breakers, a Cabinet of firsts.”

Buttergieg had been his ninth “precedent-busting” pick.

To keep him company was, of course, the Vice President-elect herself, Kamala Harris; Alejandro Mayorkas (Department of Homeland Security) – the first Latino to occupy that position and defense secretary appointee Army Gen. Lloyd Austin – the first Black American for the role.  Avril Haines is pencilled in as chief of the US intelligence committee – the first woman to take the reins.  The world’s citizenry can rest assured that they will be monitored, bombed and tortured by a most inclusive set of Cabinet appointees.

Biden’s choices are certainly brimming with the rehearsed lines and testimonials.  Haines, to take but one example, claims to “have never shied away from speaking truth to power…. I’ve worked for you for a long time and I accept this nomination knowing that you would never want me to do otherwise.”

Former CIA director John Brennan is also taken by her “willingness to speak up and speak out if she sees something that needs to be said, so she is not somebody who hesitates to be contrarian as necessary.”

This barely squares with her approval of an “accountability board” that exonerated CIA personnel from conducing espionage on investigators charged by the US Senate for investigating claims of torture.  Far from speaking truth to power, she took a shovel and sought to bury it.  Haines also threw in her lot in backing Gina Haspel for the role of CIA director, despite Haspel’s torture speckled resume.

The appointments have certainly propitiated the devotees of diversity across a number of publications and fora.  The New Republic, making specific reference to court appointments, suggested that it “may actually be an essential move […] to make after the Trump era”.  Biden’s “diversity promises” were “identity politics at their best.”

Jodi Enda of the Center for American Progress wrote glowingly of the president-elect’s appointment of an all-female communications team.  It was “a particularly stunning move”; women, for the first time in history, would “have the chance to weigh in on every important White House decision.  Women will be advising the president and speaking for him.”  Making much of this, the network had to justify the soggy praise.  Having such a team was good because women’s priorities were “different” from men.  “In general, women are more often focused on issues such as healthcare, pay equity and education, which directly affect their families, and are more concerned about equality for immigrants and people of color.”

Such a vulgar politicisation of multiculturalism and identity also serves another function.  Not only is it meant to convince the multicultis and identitarians that they are onto a good thing with Biden; they can also scorn those voters who backed the soon-to-be-exiting Donald Trump.  That’s a huge number to scorn, suggesting that change is something bound to be left in cold storage.  As conservative commentator Daniel Henninger has suggested, “diversity in practice is preponderantly political, which is to say, divisive.”

The diversity drive has become a creature of itself, a lobbying tool, pressing Biden into making appointments to satisfy investors.  Asian American and Pacific Islander lawmakers, for instance, wish for their share of the diversity pie and would be deeply disappointed “if several AAPIs are not nominated.”  Texas Rep. Vicente González has demanded no less than five Latinos to occupy Cabinet positions.

Consolation prizes are being doled out to candidates with neither the expertise nor the interest.  Ohio Rep. Marcia Fudge had hoped to head the Department of Agriculture but instead got the call to fill the role of secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development.  Ironically enough, it was Fudge who told Politico in November that, “You know, it’s always ‘we want to put the Black person in labor or HUD”.

The racial-gender-sexual arithmetic has entailed ensuring a plastering and splash of shallowness, a squeezing of rhetoric that, on closer inspection, fractures with the clichés.  In such cases, history suddenly has eyes and is looking at Biden.  “The eyes of history,” he insists, “are gazing at my diversity inclusion.”  This does not necessarily do him any favours.  This is fashion show politics, not substantive thinking about how best to ameliorate a fatigued, broken state.  We await the achievements of the appointees in due course, but a good number of the ills of the US Republic will continue to be ignored by the practices of the establishment.

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

You’ve been diabolically lied to and deceived by a tyranny-supporting troika of Western regimes, Big Pharma, and their media press agents.

Covid is seasonal flu/influenza by another name, worlds apart from how it’s portrayed. [That assessment is broadly confirmed by the CDC and the WHO].

It shows up annually during cold weather months — unaccompanied by fear-mongering mass hysteria, a daily media promoted blitzkrieg of mass deception.

Endless promoting of what’s harmful to human health will surely continue in the new year — selling snake oil vaccines that contain an alphabet soup menu of dangerous toxins, some revealed, others hidden.

Annual flu shots do more harm than good and should be avoided to protect health and well-being.

Vaccines are far worse because of a menu of highly toxic ingredients.

Experimental covid ones may be the most dangerous of all.

All vaccines are hazardous to human health. Instead of shielding from diseases as falsely claimed, they risk outbreaks of what they’re supposed protect against.

They also create customers for more drugs, the greater the number taken, the higher the risk of other illnesses, the more sickness industry profits.

Misnaming it Western healthcare is part of diabolical mass deception.

Wellness isn’t profitable. Big Pharma and large hospital chains need widespread illnesses to prosper.

Vaccines for covid enable Pharma to cash in big on a bonanza of profits — at the expense of human health and well-being.

I’ve covered all of the above before and will again because it’s important to combat mass deception by ruling regimes that are supposed to be serving and protecting public health, wellness, and safety but go the other way for their own self-interest.

They’re public enemies, not allies. Knowledge is self-protection, what’s essential to have and act accordingly to keep from being irreparably harmed by mass-vaxxing that doesn’t protect.

Outbreaks of seasonal flu/influenza — disguised as covid this year — showed up in mutated strains as it does every year.

It’s why annual flu shots in the US are for one or more strains that are different from previous years.

What’s true for flu shots (vaccines by another name) applies to mass-vaxxing for covid.

Emergency authorization use granted Pfizer, Moderna, and AstraZeneca entries in the covid vaccine sweepstakes will likely be granted for vaccines in development for new seasonal flu/covid strains called covid in the weeks and months ahead.

It’s another version of annually promoted flu shots except that they’re a one-time single shot routine each year for believers.

Multiple strains of seasonal flu showed up this year, more emerging, what happens most all years.

Mass-vaxxing for covid requires multiple shots — two initially, then more with newly developed vaccines for new strains as they emerge that may be bioengineered bioweapons that will harm, not protect human health.

The process is designed to be endless — forever mass-vaxxing for unwitting guinea pigs.

The more shots given, the more profitable to Pharma’s bottom line — the more harm to people taken in by the scam it’s vital to avoid to stay well instead of risking potentially serious illnesses from vaccine toxins.

New covid strains in Britain, South Africa, India, and more surely on the way are part of the diabolical scheme — promoting endless mass-vaxxing henceforth with hazardous to human health toxins.

In late December, Pandemic News.com reported that Pharma is developing new vaccines for newly “concoct(ed)” covid strains to be mass-marketed by stepped up fear-mongering.

The scheme may continue ad infinitum unless through knowledge from reliable sources most people reject it.

The WHO is part of the scam. Days earlier, it warned that covid is “not necessarily the big one,” adding:

We must learn to live with covid — without explaining it’s seasonal flu that shows up annually like clockwork, unaccompanied by fear-mongering mass-hysteria.

According to epidemiologist/chair of the WHO’s strategic and technical advisory group for infectious hazards Dr. David Heymann:

“It appears that (covid) is to become endemic (and) will continue to mutate as it reproduces in human cells.”

“Fortunately, we have tools (that) permit us to learn to live with Covid-19.”

WHO emergencies program director Dr. Mike Ryan said it’s likely  that covid will become an “endemic virus” that can be treated by mass-vaxxing each time new strains emerge.

WHO chief scientist Dr Soumya Swaminathan said social distancing may not “be able to be stopped in the future” because of continued emergence of new viral strains.

Lockdowns when ordered, quarantines, face masks and social distancing as a permanent way of like is what dystopian social control is all about — sacrificing freedom to a totalitarian higher power.

It appears that made-in-the USA covid, economic collapse, and medical tyranny are intended to be longterm, not 2020 events to end in the new year.

If things turn out this way that’s likely, it’s a new abnormal to be feared and rebelled against, not accepted.

Was 2020 a test run to learn whether most Americans, others in the West and elsewhere will accept dystopian harshness or resist?

The latter is sparse. Stepping it up is crucial.

The alternative is the worst of Orwell’s 1984 and Huxley’s brave new world — ruler/serf societies in the West and elsewhere controlled by police state harshness.

We have a choice. Resist or capitulate to tyranny that won’t end in our lifetime.

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Award-winning author Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago. He can be reached at [email protected]. He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG)

His new book as editor and contributor is titled “Flashpoint in Ukraine: US Drive for Hegemony Risks WW III.”

http://www.claritypress.com/LendmanIII.html

Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com.

“I was still awake. I was sitting in a chair because I was afraid of the planes flying overhead and making a very loud noise. Then they dropped a bomb near us and afterwards they hit our neighbourhood with three bombs. After that, I lost consciousness.”

These are the words of Yemeni child Ahmad Mansour, ten years old, after he survived the Saudi-led airstrike in his neighbourhood in the Midi District, Hajjah Governorate in north-western Yemen. Ahmed was injured, and his mother and siblings died in the airstrike. A total of 15 people were killed that day (nine children and four women).

The airstrike against Ahmed’s neighbourhood is one of the horrific incidents documented by the Yemeni organization Mwatana for Human Rights in a report titled “DAY OF JUDGMENT”: The US’s Role and Europe in Civilian Death, Destruction, and Trauma in Yemen.” According to the report, a “US-made BLU-63 cluster bomb Submunition” was used by the Saudi-led coalition in this bombing.

World’s Worst Humanitarian Crisis

Ahmed and his family’s tragedy is similar to that of many other Yemeni families as the Saudi-led coalition war and destruction on Yemen continues into its sixth year. In its 2020 Global Humanitarian Overview, the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said that the war on Yemen “had already caused an estimated 233,000 deaths, including 131,000 from indirect causes such as lack of food, health services, and infrastructure”. To put this devastating number of deaths in perspective, this would be the equivalent of over 2.5 million people killed by war in the United States.

Children collecting water in Yemen’s capital Sana’a

The humanitarian crisis in Yemen is the worst in the world. Those who survive the war live in dire situations struggling to provide for their own basic human needs and those of their families. According to the United Nations, nearly 80 percent of the Yemeni population — over 24 million people — rely on humanitarian assistance to live. Children suffer the most, with 100,000 children under five years old at risk of dying from acute malnutrition.

The U.S.-backed Saudi-led coalition has bombed and destroyed vital civilian infrastructure in Yemen. Over half of Yemen’s healthcare facilities have been damaged and closed due to the war. To add to the brutal bombing, the Saudi-led coalition maintains a sea, land, and air blockade on Yemen. The cruel blockade hinders Yemen’s access to food, fuel, medicine, and medical equipment.

Forgotten Yemeni Refugees

The Saudi-led war on Yemen continues to intensify the humanitarian crisis in the country. 3.6 million people in Yemen have been internally displaced and live in makeshift shelters and refugee camps inside Yemen. According to the UN, Yemen is home to almost 300,000 refugees from countries in the horn of Africa, mainly from Somalia. Refugees across Yemen live in harsh conditions under the threat of war and hunger, making them very vulnerable to diseases, especially in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic.

A Yemeni boy in the Markazi refugee camp near Obock, Djibouti

Hundreds of thousands of Yemenis chose to make the perilous journey to leave Yemen to seek safety and asylum in other countries such as Egypt, Djibouti, Somalia, Malaysia, Jordan, and Sudan. These families that were forced out of their beloved homeland by the Saudi-led war find themselves stranded in foreign countries with very little support. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) response to Yemeni refugees’ suffering has been completely inadequate and insufficient.

The same “international community” has been profiting since the start of the war on Yemen from selling weapons and military equipment to Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and their allied coalition. The U.S. and its western imperialist allies are directly responsible for the war and destruction in Yemen. Yet, they purposely turn a blind eye to the suffering of millions of displaced Yemenis internally and internationally.

Imperialists Complicity and Hypocrisy of the War

Since the start of the war, the United States has only accepted over 50 refugees from Yemen! In contrast, the U.S. has provided political, logistical, and military support to Saudi Arabia to carry out the war under the guise of restoring legitimacy and stability to the region. Over five years of Saudi-led war on Yemen only achieved death and destruction with no peace or stability in sight.

Saudi Arabia was the largest importer of weapons globally in 2015–2019 and the United States was its biggest supplier with billions of dollars’ worth of arms sales. In his last days in office, U.S. President Donald Trump is pushing to complete a $500 million arms sale to the Saudi Kingdom and a $23 billion arms sale to the United Arab Emirates.

The U.K. government also continues to profit from weapons sales and to provide military training to Saudi Arabia. An article published on September 23, 2020, in Declassified UK, an investigative journalism website, exposed that Saudi combat aircraft pilots continue to receive training in the U.K. by the British Royal Air Force.

Just like the U.S. and the U.K., Canada also has blood on its hands as it also continues to profit from selling arms to Saudi Arabia and other countries in the military coalition. According to data from the “Canadian International Merchandise Trade Database,” Canada has exported over $600 million worth of “Tanks and other armoured fighting vehicles, motorized, and parts” to Saudi Arabia just in the period between July and October 2020.

In contrast, Canada contributed $220 million in humanitarian assistance for Yemen since the war in 2015. Canada’s amount of money made selling weapons to Saudi Arabia in the last four months is three times higher than the total amount donated by the government in aid for Yemen in over five years! Such hypocrisy!

A Canadian-made LAV sold to Saudi Arabia is seen burning after clashes in the Kitaf district in northern Yemen

In addition to profiting from the war, Canada also joins other Western countries in disregarding the Yemeni refugee situation. While hundreds of thousands of Yemenis are still stranded in transit countries, Canada has only accepted 124 refugees from Yemen between January to June​ 2020. What a shame!

No to the War on Yemen

The hypocrisy of countries like the U.K., the U.S., and Canada is so revolting. As long as they continue their political and military support for the Saudi-led war on Yemen, there will be no solution to the country’s humanitarian or political situation. We must hold our respective governments accountable and demand an immediate end to the war and that they open the borders to Yemeni refugees and grant them asylum. The solution to Yemeni political problems has to come locally from diverse Yemeni voices, without any military and foreign interference. The Yemeni people deserve a future in peace and prosperity.

Let’s add our voices on January 25, 2020 for the global day of action against the war on Yemen organized by the Yemeni Alliance Committee and other anti-war and humanitarian organizations from across the world. Fire This Time Movement for Social Justice endorses and supports this critical international initiative led by the Yemeni community, and we will actively build it. For more information on the campaign, you can read the international joint statement against Yemen’s war on page 9 of this issue. Let’s unite our voices to demand an end to Yemen’s brutal and cruel war and blockade. Saudi Arabia and U.A.E Stop Bombing Yemen! U.S., U.K., and all imperialists Hands Off Yemen!

Azza Rojbi is a Tunisian social justice activist, author and researcher in Vancouver, Canada. She is a member of the Executive Committee of Vancouver’s antiwar coalition Mobilization Against War and Occupation (MAWO) and author of the book “U.S. and Saudi Arabia War on the People of Yemen” (Battle of Ideas Press, April 2019).

Originally published in the Fire This Newspaper

“Twelve voices were shouting in anger, and they were all alike. No question, now, what had happened to the faces of the pigs. The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.”―George Orwell, Animal Farm

What should we expect in 2021?

So far, it looks like this year is going to be plagued by more of the same brand of madness, mayhem, manipulation and tyranny that dominated 2020.

Frankly, I’m sick of it: the hypocrisy, the double standards, the delusional belief by Americans at every point along the political spectrum that politics and politicians are the answer to what ails the country, when for most of our nation’s history, politics and politicians have been the cause of our woes.

Consider: for years now, Americans, with sheeplike placidity, have tolerated all manner of injustices and abuses meted out upon them by the government (police shootings of unarmed individuals, brutality, corruption, graft, outright theft, occupations and invasions of their homes by militarized police, roadside strip searches, profit-driven incarcerations, profit-driven wars, egregious surveillance, taxation without any real representation, a nanny state that dictates every aspect of their lives, lockdowns, overcriminalization, etc.) without ever saying “enough is enough.”

Only now do Americans seem righteously indignant enough to mobilize and get active, and for what purpose? Politics. They’re ready to go to the mat over which corporate puppet will get the honor to serve as the smiling face on the pig for the next four years.

Talk about delusion.

It’s so ludicrous as to be Kafkaesque.

A perfect example of how farcical, topsy-turvy, and downright perverse life has become in the America: while President Trump doles out medals of commendation and presidential pardons to political cronies who have done little to nothing to advance the cause of freedom, Julian Assange rots in prison for daring to blow the whistle on the U.S. government’s war crimes

You’d think that Americans would be outraged over such abject pandering to the very swamp that Trump pledged to drain, but that’s not what has the Right and the Left so worked up. No, they’re still arguing over whether dead men voted in the last presidential election.

Either way, no matter which candidate lost to the other, it was always going to be the Deep State that won.

And so you have it: reduced to technicalities, distracted by magician’s con games, and caught up in the manufactured, highly scripted contest over which beauty contestant wears the crown, we have failed to do anything about the world falling apart around us.

Literally.

Our economy—at least as it impacts the vast majority of Americans as opposed to the economic elite—is in a shambles. Our infrastructure is falling apart. Our government has been overtaken by power-hungry predators and parasites. And our ability—and fundamental right—to govern our own lives is being usurped by greedy government operatives who care nothing for our lives or our freedoms.

Our ship of state is being transformed into a ship of fools.

We stand utterly defenseless in the face of a technological revolution brought about by artificial intelligence and wall-to-wall surveillance that is re-orienting the world as we know it. Despite the mounting high-tech encroachments on our rights, we have been afforded a paltry amount of legislative and judicial protections. Indeed, Corporate America has more rights than we do.

We stand utterly powerless in the face of government bureaucrats and elected officials who dance to the tune of corporate overlords and do what they want, when they want, with whomever they want at taxpayer expense, with no thought or concern for the plight of those they are supposed to represent. To this power elite, “we the people” are good for only two things: our tax dollars and our votes. In other words, they just want our money.

We stand utterly helpless in the face of government violence that is meted out, both at home and abroad. Indeed, the systemic violence being perpetrated by agents of the government—inflicted on unarmed individuals by battlefield-trained SWAT teams, militarized police, and bureaucratic government agents trained to shoot first and ask questions later—has done more collective harm to the American people and their liberties than any single act of terror or mass shooting.

We stand utterly silenced in the face of government and corporate censors and a cancel culture that, in their quest to not offend certain viewpoints, are all too willing to eradicate views that do not conform. In this way, political correctness has given way to a more insidious form of group think and mob rule.

We stand utterly locked down in the face of COVID-19 mandates, restrictions, travel bans and penalties that are acclimating the populace to unquestioningly accede to the government’s dictates, whatever they might be (as long as they are issued in the name of national security), no matter how extreme or unreasonable.

We stand utterly intimidated in the face of red flag laws, terrorism watch lists, contact tracing programs, zero tolerance policies, and all other manner of police state tactics that aim to keep us fearful and compliant.

We stand utterly indoctrinated in the collective belief that the government—despite its longstanding pattern and practice of corruption, collusion, dysfunction, immorality and incompetence—somehow represents “we the people.”

Despite all of this, despite how evident it is that we are mere tools to be used and abused and manipulated for the power elite’s own diabolical purposes, we somehow fail to see their machinations for what they truly are: thinly veiled attempts to overthrow our republic and enslave the citizenry in order to expand their power and wealth.

It is a grim outlook for a new year, but it is not completely hopeless.

If hope is to be found, it will be found with those of us who do not rely on politicians that promise to fix what is wrong but instead do their part, at their local levels, to right the wrongs and fix what is broken. I am referring to the builders, the thinkers, the helpers, the healers, the educators, the creators, the artists, the activists, the technicians, the food gatherers and distributors, and every other person who does their part to build up rather than destroy.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, “we the people” are the hope for a better year. Not Trump. Not Biden. And not the architects and enablers of the American Police State.

Until we can own that truth, until we can forge our own path back to a world in which freedom means something again, we’re going to be stuck in this wormhole of populist anger, petty politics and destruction that is pitting us one against the other.

In that scenario, no one wins.

There’s a meme circulating on social media that goes like this:

If you catch 100 red fire ants as well as 100 large black ants, and put them in a jar, at first, nothing will happen. However, if you violently shake the jar and dump them back on the ground the ants will fight until they eventually kill each other. The thing is, the red ants think the black ants are the enemy and vice versa, when in reality, the real enemy is the person who shook the jar. This is exactly what’s happening in society today. Liberal vs. Conservative. Black vs. White. Pro Mask vs. Anti Mask. The real question we need to be asking ourselves is who’s shaking the jar … and why?

Whether red ants will really fight black ants to the death is a question for the biologists, but it’s an apt analogy of what’s playing out before us on the political scene and a chilling lesson in social engineering. So before you get too caught up in the circus politics and conveniently timed spectacles that keep us distracted from focusing too closely on the government’s power grabs, first ask yourself: who’s really shaking the jar?

Constitutional attorney and author John W. Whitehead is founder and president of The Rutherford Institute. His new book Battlefield America: The War on the American People  is available at www.amazon.com. Whitehead can be contacted at [email protected].

Originally published by The Rutherford Institute

In the end, only a Grand Coalition of all Covidian parties will become inevitable, either as a consequence of a rebellion or prior to one…

The Greek government is trying to excel in its imposition of totalitarian rules for a non-existent Covid crisis. Magnifying alleged PCR positives and blowing infections out of all proportion, they shut down Greece in early November by imposing draconian measures. The Covid Coup of early March has metastasized into a full blown Covid Junta as areas in Western Athens have had a full 24 hour curfew imposed on them. Citizens have been quoted on MSM as stating this has nothing to do with a virus but a full-blown attempt at a Junta.

PM Mitsotakis in a video conference call with Klaus Schwab’s Great Reset book on his desk

September 2020

Whilst hotels were partially opened in the summer but a whole series of roadblocks were created on tourists from PCR tests for entrance into Greece, the banning of certain islands from tourists, night curfews, etc., the actual numbers were miniscule to support the tens of thousands that work in the industry or supply it. The collapse in the tourist trade was catastrophic, and as most businesses were closed down during the draconian years of the IMF-EU imposed austerity, the economy entered the new Great Depression already on its knees and it will now be blown up completely. That is why even more draconian measures are sought and imposed.

Mitsotakis’ New Democracy is fully embedded to Merkel’s EU and she dictates the agenda. The covidclowns in Athens are only too eager to please and the reason is simple. Since Syriza came to power, they have shown that they are more pro-EU than the EU itself and they know the opposition wants even more measures than are being proposed or implemented.

Old habits die hard: Afghanis and Pakistanis celebrate in central Athens despite lockdown measures

After making masks compulsory for shopping and public transport, the government then made mask wearing compulsory everywhere the moment you leave the house with €300 fines, SMS messages in order to leave, and not allowing people to leave the region/area they live in. Fines became like confetti when the changes were first implemented, but to what extent any are paid is another issue. Coupled with compulsory mask wearing in schools and the defeat of the student protests due to the Lockdown Left, the government implemented a second lockdown in early November which continues till this article was written, and they want to extend it to Easter and possibly indefinitely.

Economic Meltdown Anew

Having been the guinea pigs for the Eurocrisis that was magnified beyond all proportion for lilliputian Greece, they have now chosen for themselves to be the Covidclowns for Davos’ Great Reset. Without any serious functioning industries left anymore and relying mostly on imports and the tourist trade, they are being imploded one lockdown after another on dubious excuses regarding infections and Covid deaths. The ever evolving Covid-1984 goalpost serves an agenda, that which destroys the independence of all and turns them into dependent appendages of a higher authority whose aim is to instil fear via virus terrorism and to ensure people no longer meet or act independently of governments. The closest description are prisoners of an open prison who are free to act within certain limits and their life is regulated.

The collapse of GDP year-on-year but beginning from the first lockdown early March 2020 until March 2021 will probably be in the region of around 25%, equivalent in one year to what took four to occur between 2010 and 2014, but you won’t hear that being said anywhere as a boom is always literally round the corner. The only problem for most people is that they can never find that corner, and it isn’t due to a lack of working google maps.

The two reasons Greece and its people survived (not everyone of course, that is) in the last decade was the fact that hundreds of thousands of citizens went abroad for work, and North African coupled with Turkish tourism collapsed due to the wars/upheavals in those regions. But the 2020 collapse in tourism which registered probably a 80% downturn in both numbers and takings will eventually take its toll as it will complete a full cycle (Easter 2020-Easter 2021).

For Whom the Bell Tolls

Police roadblocks in the Western Greater Athens region of Aspropirgos

The Greek riot police have spent over a decade cracking heads open and targeting the most vulnerable in society, usually pensioners, women, and children. They actually get a buzz out of it that breaks the boredom of hanging around doing nothing. Twice in the past they have been defeated: intheriots over a dump site which was withdrawn in Keratea, Greece and in the islands of the Aegean over illegal immigration. A third event is developing, this time round the Covid dictatorship in Western Athens, the old rustbelt of Aspropirgos (which in the last three decades has been populated by ex-Russian Pontiac Greeks who arrived in the mid-1980s and settled in the region) and a northern town called Kozani which has also been in extreme lockdown.

The curfew has been imposed from 6pm till 5am and helicopters and drones have been circling the areas daily with police roadblocks in and out of the roads that connect the region. All shops and markets apart from supermarkets are to be closed. Hundredsgotinvolved in battles with the riot police for a series of nights. These areas have become a testing site to roll this out nationally, and it’s no coincidence that locals interviewed in the media mentioned that this is all about going national (i.e. a new Junta). Just as this is being written, a new lockdown has been announced, nationally restricting movements from 9pm to 5pm and re-closing everything apart from supermarkets. The aim of course is to lock Greece down from 6pm and block all movements. This appears to be an EU agenda as France announced similar types of measures as well.

Theriotpolice’s role has now been elevated in imposing around-the-clock curfews, the problem being that there aren’t enough of them and going into local areas in such a brutal manner only shows their limitations. This role can only realistically be imposed by an army with shoot to kill orders.

The Covidian Junta is trying to impose a Woke Dictatorship whereby people volunteer to stay imprisoned indefinitely, and if they come out, then we send riot police out to crack a few skulls. This would work if there was an active segment of the population on the streets pushing for people to stay in, but they are all shielding from life in general, hence the arrival of the riot police only inflames passions and inevitably leads to their defeat as they can’t take on locals in their own areas. Apart from the riots in Aspropirgos, a motorcade rally now occurred in Kozani, with emphasis that no political parties are allowed to be present.

Lockdown Left Propping Up New Democracy

Never in the history of Greece has there been such a total and complete unison in politics by all the representatives in Parliament. The previous decade of course showed that they were in unison in particular when fake left Syriza took over and New Democracy voted alongside them for the 3^rd Memorandum. Now,though, they are in lockstep behind endless rounds of lockdowns, which according to the World Bank are to go on for a full five years (funding has been secured for that aim).

The leaders of the official left parties Syriza and KKE rushed to get the Pfeizer vaccine and no other. Not the Russian, but Pfeizer’s, the one that the government was allegedly going to roll out for millions within weeks but which now has been derailed as only a few thousand arrived and are now on hold. Having told everyone that lockdowns are the only way for stopping the virus but then they don’t stop it, they now tell everyone that the vaccine will but then they stop its rollout, which begs the question that if lockdowns were successful, then why were they continued? And if they weren’t successful, then why weren’t they discontinued?

World Bank documentation stating that funding for Covid goes on till 2025

The Greek government has voted through a (Great Reset) Bankruptcy Law and now individuals will be treated as corporations. Without your knowledge, creditors can apply for default. So for any loan you have taken out or for any money you owe, if they push for bankruptcy and you own any assets, then they will go for them….real asset stripping will occur, not the fake ones that occurred before when they fake Left allegedly got involved in stopping them. This time around, there won’t even be any fake protests as the Lockdown Left will be at home wearing a mask and keeping ‘safe’. This is the number one priority of all political discourse nowadays: how to save oneself from death by dying one lockdown at a time.

In the end, only a Grand Coalition of all Covidian parties will become inevitable, either as a consequence of a rebellion or prior to one…

Julian Assange’s legal victory this week was bittersweet. In a stunning decision, British judge Vanessa Baraitser denied Donald Trump’s request for extradition of Assange to the United States, ruling that he was at high risk of suicide if he were extradited because the U.S. prison system could not protect him.

But at the same time, Baraitser spent most of her 132-page decision supporting the Trump administration’s case against Assange, which amounts to the criminalization of national security journalism.

So even as press freedom advocates celebrate that Assange has escaped facing charges under the U.S. Espionage Act — charges that carry 175 years in prison — they are also lamenting Baraitser’s acceptance of virtually all of the Trump administration’s attacks on investigative journalism.

Extradition Would Be “Oppressive” Due to Assange’s Mental Condition

The U.K. 2003 Extradition Act forbids extradition if “the physical or mental condition of the person is such that it would be unjust or oppressive to extradite him.”

If Assange is extradited to the United States, he would be incarcerated in a U.S. supermax prison and held in solitary confinement for 23 hours a day under onerous conditions, the judge found.

Baraitser relied heavily on the written testimony of Professor Michael Kopelman, emeritus professor of neuropsychiatry at Kings College London, who diagnosed Assange with recurrent depression and post-traumatic stress disorder. Baraitser cited Kopelman’s assertion, “I am as confident as a psychiatrist ever can be that, if extradition to the United States were to become imminent, Mr. Assange will find a way of suiciding.” She noted that other experts corroborated Kopelman’s predictions of suicide.

The judge wrote, “The detention conditions in which Mr. Assange is likely to be held are relevant to Mr. Assange’s risk of suicide.” She cited testimony by prison experts as well as mental health experts. If he were sent to the U.S., Assange would face incarceration under onerous special administrative measures leaving him in virtual isolation from all other human beings.

Thus, Baraitser found, “Faced with conditions of near total isolation and without the protective factors which moderate his risk at HMP Belmarsh [where Assange is currently imprisoned], I am satisfied that the procedures described by Dr. Leukefled will not prevent Mr. Assange from finding a way to commit suicide.”

“I am satisfied that the risk that Mr. Assange will commit suicide is a substantial one,” Baraitser concluded. “I find that the mental condition of Mr. Assange is such that it would be oppressive to extradite him to the United States of America.”

Baraitser’s decision is ultimately an indictment of the brutal U.S. prison system that wouldn’t be able to protect Assange if he were sent there.

National Security Journalism Under Threat From Judge’s Ruling

But Baraitser had no problem with the U.S. government prosecuting Assange for practicing journalism.

This is the first time a journalist has been indicted under the Espionage Act for publishing truthful information. Journalists are allowed to publish material illegally obtained by a third person if it is a matter of public concern. The U.S. government has never prosecuted a journalist or newspaper for publishing classified information.

The indictment charges that Assange and WikiLeaks obtained and published classified material that Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning had provided to the organization. Many of the charges allege that Assange had “reason to believe that the information would be used to damage the interests of the U.S. or used to the advantage of a foreign nation.” The material that Assange and WikiLeaks published contained evidence of war crimes committed by the United States.

They published 400,000 field reports about the Iraq War, 15,000 unreported deaths of Iraqi civilians and evidence of the systematic murder, torture and rape by the Iraqi army and authorities that was ignored by U.S. forces.

They published 90,000 reports about the war in Afghanistan, including the Afghan War Logs, which recorded more civilian casualties by coalition forces than the U.S. military had reported.

And they published the Guantánamo Files — 779 secret reports about the U.S. government’s torture and abuse of 800 men and boys in violation of the Geneva Conventions and the Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment.

The most notorious release by WikiLeaks was the 2007 “Collateral Murder” video, in which a U.S. Army Apache helicopter gunship targeted and fired on unarmed civilians in Baghdad. At least 18 civilians were killed — including two Reuters reporters and a man who came to rescue the wounded — and two children were injured. An Army tank drove over one of the bodies, severing it in half. That video portrays the commission of three separate war crimes prohibited by the Geneva Conventions and the U.S. Army Field Manual.

Jameel Jaffer, executive director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, told Amy Goodman on Democracy Now! that, “the point of the prosecution [of Assange] is to criminalize national security journalism.” It goes to the heart of what journalists do, he said, “protecting confidential sources, communicating with them confidentially, cultivating sources, publishing classified secrets. These are the pillars of investigative journalism, of national security journalism in particular.”

Jaffer provided written testimony at Assange’s hearing. He noted that in 1973, Harold Edgar and Benno Schmidt Jr. called the Espionage Act a “loaded gun pointed at newspapers and reporters who publish foreign policy and defense secrets.”

If publication of national security secrets violated the Espionage Act, we wouldn’t know about U.S. government misconduct in the “war on terror.” In his interview with Goodman, Jaffer cited The Washington Post’s exposé of the CIA black sites, the torture and abuse of prisoners in Afghanistan and Iraq that The New Yorker and “60 Minutes II” disclosed, and the warrantless surveillance program revealed by The New York Times.

Noam Chomsky said at a January 4 webinar (in which I participated) that the Biden administration will now be spared the embarrassment of putting Assange on trial, but at the same time, the threat to press freedom has been strengthened by Baraitser’s ruling.

Chomsky noted that the government always invokes national security when it doesn’t want the people “to know what they’re doing in their name.” National security really means “the security of the state against its own citizens,” he said.

Four Blackwater mercenaries committed war crimes when they used machine guns and grenade launchers to kill or wound at least 31 Iraqi civilians in Baghdad in 2007. They were convicted and were serving long prison terms. In a move that fueled outrage throughout Iraq, Trump pardoned all four men. Contrast that with the 2007 Collateral Murder video, which contains evidence of U.S. war crimes, also in Baghdad. The helicopter crew was never prosecuted. Trump pardoned individuals who committed war crimes but indicted Assange who revealed them.

The U.S. government is appealing to the High Court to reverse Baraitser’s denial of extradition. If the U.S. loses there, it can appeal to Britain’s Supreme Court. The appellate process will take several months.

It is unlikely that Baraitser’s ruling will be reversed on appeal. She limited her decision to a narrow ground — Assange’s mental health — and accepted most of the U.S. government’s allegations.

On January 6, the defense will request that Assange be released on bond pending appeal.

Originally published on Truthout. Reprinted with permission.

Marjorie Cohn is professor emerita at Thomas Jefferson School of Law, former president of the National Lawyers Guild, deputy secretary general of the International Association of Democratic Lawyers and a member of the advisory board of Veterans for Peace. Her most recent book is Drones and Targeted Killing: Legal, Moral, and Geopolitical Issues.

There were several events typical of predictive programming. 

The World Economic Forum October 21^st 2020 meeting and the Great Reset was one (1). 

Here in Britain the orchestration of central, NHS and local responses to a respiratory disease suggested that plans were laid before the Wuhan outbreak was announced on the 12^th of December 2019. 

For instance, the title of a most complex and lengthy bill nodded through in 48 hours in the Mother of Parliaments, was ‘The 2019/2020 Coronavirus Bill’.  This would have required drafting lawyers and committees of MPs to crawl over this miscarriage for at least a month or so pre-Wuhan.

Click the screen below to view to WEF Great Reset Propaganda Video.

The Virus

In my earlier article (2)  I focus on the apocalyptic atmosphere being engendered by the ‘hype’ attached to this recent addition to the ubiqitous corona virus family, first characterised in the 1960s.  That it was probably ‘engineered’ –i.e. not of natural origin by mutation, might have been an excuse for more fear than logic determined.

There was a feeling of ‘End Times’ under a blackening sky; an inevitable spiral into the failure of systems with increased suffering and loss, especially for that large majority world wide who live hand to mouth.

The Pandemic and Geopolitics

Under the vast and masked distraction, and without the possibility of publics gathering in protest, a long planned attack on Iran was in those many psychopathic minds. (2)  The latter are the zealots for destruction of other humans calling a nuclear weapon ‘tactical’.

The Propaganda Campaign

The strategy has been to scare a large majority out of their remaining wits, and to keep repeating the big lie – that Covid_19 (C19) is very infectious and likely lethal.

Every body set up to drive the policies, and there are hundreds, has been corrupt.

The corruption and mendacity of politicians is vast in scale, but ‘they’ press on without any accountability and ‘laugh in the faces’ of those who know.

Sustaining Obedience. The Mask, Social Distancing 

The gullibility is extraordinary in most, and obedience almost complete.

Nine months from the start at least half the shoppers in the local country towns are masked as they move about or queue observing anti-social distancing.

Some ride cycles in brisk winter weather with faces muzzled.

Attempts to tell the wearers that they will have varieties of bacteria and viruses in the culture medium within the gauze are met with blank eyes.

That some species in the masks which are fingered constantly, tucked into pockets and removed for every encounter, are probably pathogenic, evinces no reaction.

“I’m seeing patients that have facial rashes, fungal infections, bacterial infections.  … In February and March we were told not to wear masks. What changed? The science didn’t change. The politics did. This is about compliance. It’s not about science… (Dr. James Meehan) 

The Behavioural Insights Team (now Independent of the Uk government)(3) will be measuring compliance via the masks as seen in CCTV footage at supermarkets, petrol stations etc.

With the same title exactly in the US, these psychologists of the mass mind will know how the mask has many benefits for control of the polity.  De-personalization, submission, stifling of speech, and anonymity are some of the gains as perceived in the fascist mind.

Fascism – the author’s definition:

the subjugation of the individual’s will and freedom by an overweening state.  Humanity withers, freedom of speech is stifled and the soul dies. Self preservation becomes a dominant drive.

The suffering is largely silent, and the complacent middle classes spend time ordering their food on line for home delivery.

The print and broadcast media is in lock step, the main message being that there are many thousands of ‘cases’ or ‘infections’ each day – conflating the many positive RT-PCR ‘tests’ (4) with disease.

Many are oblivious to this obvious lie.  Their ductility is ensured by their lack of logic, inquiry and a desert of information.

The Bailouts, Handouts and Social Safety Nets

‘Funny’ money dished out, pacifies the many and memories are in milliseconds.

That ‘austerity’ was enforced after the exchequer baled out the banks with an amount equal to five years worth of NHS spending – £540 billion, in 2008 is not remembered, and the consequences of a record National Debt now does not hit home.

Surveillance and Social Control

The current situation in this ‘demi-paradise’ is of accelarating fear and ever closer surveillance and control.

This is the BBC ‘news’ today (5).

  “Covid-19: Concern at ‘unprecedented’ infection level in England”.

‘The mutant strain of C19 is very ‘infectious’ and the ambulance service and the receiving hospitals are being overwhelmed.’

There is no let up in the lying; the evil of it tends to overwhelm the conscientious.

Locally, in Devon (Southern England), are these things true?

1. Is there a bounty to some health authority if Covid-19 is on the death certificate – as was the case in the US?
2. Did the relative dying of a ruptured aneurysm in hospital have Covid-19 put on his death certificate?
3. There was an accident on the coastal road in Torbay. A car rolled over and the road was closed, It was said the driver had just driven away from the English Riviera Centre where a Covid-19 ‘vaccine’ had been injected.  What are the facts?

But all is not lost.  At present it can be said that if the British were in 1939, what the morasse is like now, Hitler would have walked straight in.

But there are many who see through the propagandare nero, and as poverty bites, the trampled will resist more and a revolution of the mind will restore the freedoms and the common sense.

This was Trafalgar Square in late September 2020  (6).

*

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Notes

1. https://www.weforum.org/videos/welcome-to-the-jobs-reset-summit?collection=jobs-reset-summit-2020
2. https://www.globalresearch.ca/israel-america-and-britain-building-a-pretext-to-wage-war-on-iran-setting-the-scene-for-a-broader-war/5680621
3. https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations/behavioural-insights-team
4. https://www.globalresearch.ca/coronavirus-scandal-breaking-merkel-germany/5731891
5. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-55462701
6. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_hBxleGUxig

You tune into the great BOOB and channel surf the ( so called ) News and News Talk shows, and you hear this over and over: We are a DEMOCRACY.

The Democratic Party leaning stations love to ram this continually down our throats. The right wing outlets seem to be SO far gone that they don’t even attempt to sell this **** to their viewers.

Such is the fate of this republic.

Take a look at this current Senatorial run-off election in Georgia, the one that has gotten so much attention. One surmises that for lovers of this Two Party/One Party con this election could decide the balance of power in the Senate.

As many of us should realize by now the Senate is AKA The Super Rich Man’s Club replete with super rich or water carriers for the super rich. One of the current Georgia Senators is a super rich cousin of the powerful Sonny Perdue, former Governor of the state.

David Perdue made his fortune as a management consultant for major corporations. HIs real ‘ claim to fame’ was just this past year when he made money from the Covid 19 influenced stock market crash from information he gathered at closed door Senate meetings. This should be enough to have him either censored from the Senate or indicted.

His opponent, Jon Ossoff, has an equally ‘ checkered past’ in Democratic Party politics.

Ossoff was a student at Georgetown U. when he volunteered to write speeches for Hank Johnson in 2006. Johnson was selected ( the term I will use) by the big machers in the Democratic Party to run against Rep. Cynthia McKinney. Ms. McKinney ( who I later voted for as President when she ran on the 2008 Green Party ticket ) was one of the most outspoken critics of the Iraq invasion, along with her doubts as to the official 9/11 Commission’s findings

In a nutshell, McKinney was a ‘ breath of progressive fresh air’ during those days. Her party could NOT tolerate her for her stances on many issues. Bernie Sanders could only wish e had the same views on things that she had. Ossoff made damn sure that this woman would lose her seat… and she did!

Now we come to Georgia Senator Kelly Loeffler, appointed to that seat just 13 months ago. Loeffler, married to NY Stock Exchange Chairman Jeffery Sprecher, is said to be worth $500 million.

Her husband is also “filthy rich”. As with Perdue, Loeffler had information from being on important Senate Committees that it is reported her husband may have used to make a fortune during this pandemic.

Duh, they call this ‘ Insider trading’ and it is ILLEGAL.

To hear her speak publically, as with Perdue, one can easily ascertain that she is not a ‘ bright candle’. As we all know, ‘ Money talks’. Her opponent, Pastor Raphael Warnock, fits in with the moderate wing of the Democratic Party. He will always make sure that he stays as close to the other ( so called ) moderate Democrats.

The good pastor, who has stood for many noble causes during his tenure as head of the late MLK Jr’s church, is aware of just how far his party will allow him to go. As with this previous presidential election, we the voters really have a scant choice. To vote for Trump and his Republican minions would be almost sacrilegious. Thus, to get rid of these parasites we had to vote for more kinder and gentler parasites. Sad.

This Two Party/One Party con job has been only getting more lethal through the decades. The super rich have succeeded in capturing any remnants of what we were schooled in as pure Democracy. As with the Jim Morrison lyrics:

” When I was back there in seminary school someone put forth the proposition that you can

‘ Petition the Lord with Prayer’ , ‘ Petition the Lord with prayer’ , Petition the Lord with prayer’…..

YOU CANNOT PETITION THE LORD WITH PRAYER!!!

Ditto for thinking that we are living in a Democracy.

Worse than that, we are even worse than a Banana Republic. Why? Well, in most of these Banana Republics the populace knows that their electoral system is a ruse, a scam.

They know just how easy it is for the super rich to run things through fixed elections. Amerika operates on a much more sophisticated con. They make sure there are only two parties to choose from. The rest of any third party movements are either co-opted or forced through the use of money in elections to become mostly invisible to the public. We see in each and every recent presidential election the higher amounts of money spent on campaigns. This obscenity, like the battery commercial, just ‘ Keeps on Keepin on’.

As this new Biden administration will reveal, just like with Obama before him, little will be done to counteract the super rich who run this empire.

We will see the same ‘ Food Fight’ by the two parties that will give Zero to working stiffs. Zero!

When the day comes that a  mass of people finally show up at the halls of Congress, at the statehouses and the city councils, as well as the local offices of their elected officials , and look them in the eyes and demand change concerning vital issues….

PA Farruggio

January 5th, 2021

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].

It’s Big Pharma, It’s Big Money. It’s the multibillion dollar global vaccine market.

In August 2019, five months before the onslaught of the Covid-19 crisis, two of the largest Worldwide Pharma conglomerates decided to join hands in a strategic relationship which barely made the headlines. 

In an August 2019 Press release GSK confirmed the formation of a major partnership with Pfizer entitled the Consumer Health Joint Venture:

While the two companies had envisaged a “separation” clause following a process of restructuring, GSK and Pfizer have nonetheless integrated their decision making, specifically with regards to the vaccine market:

“With our future intention to separate, the transaction also presents a clear pathway forward for GSK to create a new global Pharmaceuticals/Vaccines company, with an R&D approach focused on science related to the immune system, use of genetics and advanced technologies,  …  Ultimately, our goal is to create two exceptional, UK-based global companies, with appropriate capital structures” (GSK)

What is at stake is the de facto formation of a Big Pharma Worldwide monopoly with a global network of “partners”.

Most of the so-called 125 (“small pharma”) candidates are involved in subcontracting (out-sourcing) manufacturing and marketing activities on behalf of the Big Pharma conglomerates.

The COVAX Initiative and Big Pharma

The COVAX initiative launched in April 2020 was intended to facilitate the Worldwide  distribution of the Covid vaccine. It is coordinated by the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI), GAVI, the Vaccine Alliance, and the World Health Organization (WHO) (all of which are partially funded by the Gates foundation).

In turn, the Gates foundation is a major shareholder of the Big Pharma vaccine conglomerates including GSK and Pfizer:

Sanofi and Glaxosmithkline were awarded about $2.1 billion in July from the U.S. Operation Warp Speed to support development and large-scale manufacturing of their adjuvanted recombinant protein subunit vaccine, providing the federal government with 100 million doses. The companies also have supply deals with the U.K., Canada and Gavi, an international vaccine alliance. (BioWorld, December 202o, emphasis added)

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The November 2020 Launching of the Covid Vaccine

Were the standard animal lab tests using mice or ferrets conducted?

Or did Pfizer, Moderna  “go straight to human “guinea pigs.”? Human tests began in late July and early August. “Three months is unheard of for testing a new vaccine. Several years is the norm.”  

Our thanks to Large and JIPÉM

This caricature by Large + JIPÉM  explains our predicament:

Mouse No 1: “Are You Going to get Vaccinated”,

Mouse No. 2: Are You Crazy, They Haven’t finished the Tests on Humans”

And why do we need a vaccine for Covid-19 when both the WHO and the US Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) have confirmed unequivocally that Covid-19 is  “similar to seasonal influenza”. 

The unspoken answer is “Big Money”.

Biggest Vaccine Operation in World History

The plan to develop the Covid-19 vaccine is profit driven. It is supported by corrupt governments serving the interests of Big Pharma.

The US government had already ordered 100 million doses back in July 2020 and the EU is to purchase 300 million doses. It’s Big Money for Big Pharma, generous payoffs to corrupt politicians, at the expense of tax payers.

The objective is ultimately to make money, by vaccinating the entire planet of 7.8 billion people for SARS-CoV-2.

The Covid vaccine in some cases envisages more than one shot. If this plan were to go ahead as planned, it would be the largest vaccine initiative in World history and the biggest money making operation for Big Pharma.

Moreover, under the Pfizer Moderna initiative, the mRNA vaccine will have an impact on the human genome.

The ID2020 Digital Vaccine Identity Platform

And there is also the project promoted by GAVI to insert a “digital passport”.

It’s called the ID2020 Agenda, which, according to Peter Koenig constitutes “an electronic ID program that uses generalized vaccination as a platform for digital identity”.

“The program harnesses existing birth registration and vaccination operations to provide newborns with a portable and persistent biometrically-linked digital identity”. (Peter Koenig, March 2020)

The Founding Partners of ID2020 are Microsoft, the Rockefeller Foundation and the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization (GAVI) among others.

It is worth noting the timeline: The ID2020 Alliance held their Summit in New York, entitled “Rising to the Good ID Challenge”, on September 19, 2019, exactly one month prior to nCov-2019 simulation exercise entitled Event 201 at John Hopkins in New York:

Is it just a coincidence that ID2020 is being rolled out at the onset of what the WHO calls a Pandemic? – Or is a pandemic needed to ‘roll out’ the multiple devastating programs of ID2020? (Peter Koenig, March 2020)

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ID2020 is part of a “World Governance” project which, if applied, would roll out the contours of what some analysts have described as a Global Police State embedding through vaccination the personal details of several billion people Worldwide.

The creation of false opposites has been a long-standing obstacle to human progress.

From the ancient pleasure-seeking Epicureans who argued against the logic-heavy Stoics of ancient Rome to the war of “salvation through faith vs works” that schismed western Christianity, to the chaotic emotional energy driving the Jacobin mobs of France whose passions were only matched by the radical Cartesian logic of their Girondin enemies; humanity has long been manipulated by oligarchs who knew how to set the species to war against itself. Although these operations have taken many forms, the desired effect has always been the same: divide-to-conquer bloodbaths which drowned out the saner voices of Cicero (executed in 44 BCE), Thomas More (executed in 1535 CE), or Jean Sylvain Bailly (executed in 1793 CE).

Today’s polarization across the Trans-Atlantic world has reached a fevered pitch with the “right wing conservatives” shouting for liberty and less government while left wing liberals call for more government and top-down reforms of the system (with Great Reset technocrats laughing in the background).

Everyone with half a brain should be able to sense that the danger of civil war and economic meltdown hang over our destinies like a sword of Damocles, but instead of hearing calls for restoring the SCIENTIFICALLY PROVEN traditions of American System banking that author Ellen Brown recently documented in her powerful new essay, we find only feuding sects that assert we must EITHER have top-down centralized planning OR bottom-up free markets laissez faire policies devoid of any government intervention.

To the degree that this false debate continues the overtones of France’s 1789-94 bloodbath will be heard growing louder with every passing day.

Keynes vs Hayek: A False Dualism

In this first of a three-part series, I will argue that the source of this confusion among Americans was first concocted in London during the height of the depression, centering on the figures of two London-based Malthusian hedonists. One was top-down economist John Maynard Keynes (1883-1946) and the other played the role of his supposed opponent in the form of “bottom up” advocate Friedrich von Hayek (1899-1992).

To put it another way, these two fundamentally anti-republican ideologues whose lives were each devoted to the hereditary systems of empire constructed a widely publicized debate that asserted two opposing economic theories, either 1) government must spend arbitrarily to create jobs OR 2) government must cut budgets, end social safety nets and public services and let the strong survive leaving each unit of society to its own (supposedly) self-regulating passions.

The constants among both apparent opponents (who remained friends throughout their lives) were that 1) neither believed that INTENTION or MIND should govern economic policy (Keynes believed in arbitrary “make work” which could not differentiate between the qualitative difference of a $100 paycheck to a digger of random holes vs $100 paycheck to an engineer building a dam), and 2) both believed equally in the universal validity of Malthus’s population theories, and of Bernard Mandeville’s satanic belief that personal vice creates public virtue. Both theories have underpinned British imperial grand strategy for over two centuries.

It is also important to hold in mind that this 1932 debate emerged at a time that the world government agenda driven by the Bank of England and League of Nations were on the ascendency. This operation, in which both Keynes and von Hayek were thoroughly enmeshed, demanded fascist regimes control the world under a “scientifically managed” bankers’ dictatorship.

One month after the London Times October 17, 1932 publication began to print arguments from proponents of both schools on how to best end the depression, Franklin Roosevelt was elected to the U.S. presidency.

With his presidential victory, a specific form of economic planning was restored to the republic that had nothing to do with either school of Keynes or Hayek and everything to do with something uniquely embedded in the U.S. Constitutional traditions that petrified the hereditary empires of Europe’s old nobility.

In the years leading up to his victory, FDR had worked closely with a grouping of bipartisan American congressmen and senators to revive a form of political economy which involved the paradoxical coexistence of increased government involvement together with massive increase in entrepreneurism, and private sector growth. The fact that FDR is attacked by communists for being a capitalist shill while being simultaneously attacked by capitalists for being a communist shill to this very day is a sign of this ongoing confusion and a testament to the effectiveness of British intelligence propaganda.

The systemic inability for modern Americans to resolve the ‘FDR paradox’ today is due entirely to a sleight of hand pulled by the very same imperial power that has never forgiven the USA for declaring its independence in 1776.

What Ben Franklin Created

When Benjamin Franklin (1705-1790) had orchestrated his life-long project of establishing a new nation on this earth founded upon the principle of the sanctity of the individual (enunciated in the 1776 Declaration of Independence) and the sanctity of the General Welfare (as outlined in the Constitution’s 1787 pre-amble), he and his leading co-thinkers demonstrated a profoundly philosophical understanding of the political economy and also nature of true freedom which citizens must re-learn – quickly.

In order to give practical meaning to the ideals of individual (bottom up) freedom and national (top down) collective well-being enshrined in America’s founding documents, a new system of political economy was created by Franklin and his closest followers among the founding fathers.

This new system did not arise ex nihilo but was itself based upon the greatest traditions of French dirigisme of Jean-Baptiste Colbert (1619-1683), and earlier Cameralist schools of economic planning which grew out of the creation of the first modern nation states of France’s Louis XI and England’s Henry VII. For the first time in history (at least since the short-lived effort by Charlemagne in the 8^th century), the idea of “money”, “value”, “profit” were tied not to the passive capital off which feudal landlords fed parasitically, or bounty to be looted, but rather the improvement of the lives of people from whom the legitimacy of government was recognized to originate.

Throughout the 18^th century, Benjamin Franklin became a leading American force for this school of thought which was outlined in his 1729 On the Necessity for a Paper Currency. In this influential essay, the young scientist argued for a system of finance, colonial scrip, and value governed by the growth of manufacturing and full spectrum economics. In his essay Franklin battled the British establishment who argued that the colonies should forever remain agrarian, backward and cash cropping, saying:

“As Providence has so ordered it, that not only different Countries, but even different Parts of the same Country, have their peculiar most suitable Productions; and like wise that different Men have Genius’s adapted to Variety of different Arts and Manufactures, Therefore Commerce, or the Exchange of one Commodity or Manufacture for another, is highly convenient and beneficial to Mankind.”

Some of Franklin’s leading protégé’s who carried this tradition into the 19^th century included the first U.S. Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton (1755-1804), John Jay (1745-1829), Gouverneur Morris (1752-1816), Robert Morris (1734-1806), Isaac Roosevelt (1726-1794) (great-great grandfather to Franklin Roosevelt) and later Henry Clay (1777-1852), John Quincy Adams (1767-1848), Matthew Carey (1760-1839). Matthew Carey’s son Henry C. Carey (1793-1879) became a leading economic advisor to Abraham Lincoln.

All of these figures defended the right of the young republic to develop “full spectrum economics” in order to gain true independence from the City of London.

Henry C. Carey’s Seminal works that rallied the nation’s patriots to the cause of the American System included The Principles of Political Economy (1840), How to Outdo England Without Fighting Her (1865), Unity of Law (1872) and more. It was in The Harmony of Interests (1856) that Carey famously foretold of the emerging global fight between open vs closed systems that would define the post Civil War decades:

“Two systems are before the world; the one looks to increasing the proportion of persons and of capital engaged in trade and transportation, and therefore to diminishing the proportion engaged in producing commodities with which to trade, with necessarily diminished return to the labor of all; while the other looks to increasing the proportion engaged in the work of production, and diminishing that engaged in trade and transportation, with increased return to all, giving to the laborer good wages, and to the owner of capital good profits… One looks to pauperism, ignorance, depopulation, and barbarism; the other in increasing wealth, comfort, intelligence, combination of action, and civilization. One looks towards universal war; the other towards universal peace. One is the English system; the other we may be proud to call the American system, for it is the only one ever devised the tendency of which was that of elevating while equalizing the condition of man throughout the world.”

What did the “American System” Do?

While the British System of laissez fair free trade demanded that governments do nothing, regulate nothing and plan nothing in order for the magical creative animal spirits of the self-regulating markets to “do their thing”, the American System took a very different approach.

By applying protectionism, national banking, internal improvements and public credit, the American System was driven by the idea that “value” was located not in money or any material thing existent in the ephemeral “now” but rather in the development of the creative powers of mental activity of the people. Lincoln outlined this concept beautifully in his powerful “On Discoveries and Inventions” (1858) and this principle governed the creation of the Greenbacks when private bankers made every effort to cripple the Union’s access to credit needed to win the war.

Using protection, all nations have the right and even duty to prevent the cheap dumping of foreign goods by imposing a tariff upon imports, thus ensuring that local production be favored. Dumping was an old practice of economic warfare which the British had honed since the 17th century crushing its colonies’ efforts to build up local manufacturing on countless occasions (and continues to be a key element of economic warfare masquerading behind the veneer of globalization in our current age).

As demonstrated in the LPAC documentary 1932, whenever American System-followers in Russia, Germany, Italy, Japan, China, Spain and France applied protection, rail, and dirigiste credit, prosperity, independence and abundance flourished. Whenever these policies were abandoned, those nations were crippled and manipulated into wars by foreign interests.

Between 1880-1930, this system was led by nationalist forces affiliated with President Garfield (1831-1881), President Ulysses Grant (1822-1885), Governor William Gilpin (1813-1894), President McKinley (1843-1901), Secretary of State James Blaine (1830-1893), and President Warren Harding (1865-1923). Each time it began to take hold the system was derailed by timely assassinations and it was only able to emerge once more in 1932.

How Franklin Roosevelt Revived the American System

With Roosevelt’s entry into office, the British Empire (using its Wall Street lackies) that had intentionally orchestrated the Great Depression in 1929 had realized that the American System was coming back to life for the first time in decades.

While Warren Harding’s short-lived presidency saw a few noble attempts to resurrect the McKinley-Lincoln traditions of the republican party, his convenient “death by oyster poisoning” in 1923 ensured that the revival of the American System would not succeed. Over Harding’s dead body, free trade, bank deregulation, and speculation ran rampant throughout the “roaring twenties” led by Andrew Mellon, the Morgan dynasty and their puppet Calvin Coolidge. This decay turned the once-productive industrial economy of America into a casino of bubbles built on unpayable debts and over-extended broker call loans that went up in smoke in 1929.

The “solution” that the financial oligarchy provided to the world in anticipation of the fear and starvation unleashed by the planned meltdown of the banking system was a novel economic miracle solution called “fascism”. This system soon swept the world from Italy, Germany, Austria and Spain. Within Britain, Canada and the USA, Wall Street/London sponsored fascist movements arose with lightning speed offering to solve all financial woes “and put food on the table” for millions of traumatized citizens. In a world of fear and instability, the masses were proving all too willing to ignore Ben Franklin’s sage advice by giving up their liberties to achieve a bit of security.

It was within this context that Franklin Roosevelt’s call to kick the money changers out of the temple and declare war on the abuses of Wall Street was an unexpected breath of fresh air for millions of suffocating citizens. With FDR’s sabotage of the 1933 London Conference, the empire gasped as their carefully laid plans for world government run by local fascist enforcers were going up in smoke. Wall Street’s assassination plot in February 1933 and a military coup plot in 1934 failed, as the Pecora Commission shone the light of truth upon the abuses of those bankers that created the great depression.

After putting dozens of leading bankers in prison, prosecutor Ferdinand Pecora described the operation years later: “Under the surface of the governmental regulation of the securities market, the same forces that produced the riotous speculative excesses of the ‘wild bull market’ of 1929 still give evidence of their existence and influence. Though repressed for the present, it cannot be doubted that, given a suitable opportunity, they would spring back to their pernicious activity.”

In Washington, a bi-partisan network of patriotic statesmen representing the Lincoln-McKinley-Harding traditions rose to prominence and shaped in large measure the policies which came to be known as the New Deal together with associated bank reforms of the Glass-Steagall, national credit, protectionism, and large-scale megaprojects known as the “four corners” vision (Tennessee Valley authority/Rural Electrification, Hoover Dam, Grand Coulee dam/Colorado River development, and St Lawrence Seaway).

Much like the Belt and Road Initiative today, these large-scale macro projects governed the tens of thousands of smaller state, county and municipal “micro” projects within a top-down dynamic.

The Keynesian Myth

Even though today’s popular narrative has asserted that FDR’s New Deal was a Keynesian innovation managed by the nebulous “Brain Trust”, the reality is that Keynes believed that FDR was a buffoon and FDR believed the Fabian eugenicist could only be considered a detached ivory tower mathematician but not a competent economist.

In her autobiography, FDR’s Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins recorded the 1934 interaction between the two men when Roosevelt told her: “I saw your friend Keynes. He left a whole rigmarole of figures. He must be a mathematician rather than a political economist.” In response Keynes, who was then trying to coopt the intellectual narrative of the New Deal stated he had “supposed the President was more literate, economically speaking.”

The ‘American System’ Caucus

Those forgotten forces who have been nearly written out of history were American statesmen who had battled against the Federal Reserve Act in 1913, stood up to the police state apparatus begun by Teddy Roosevelt’s FBI in 1908, and against America’s turn towards imperialism with the death of McKinley. They were the men who risked much to stand up against the League of Nations World government schemes launched in 1919, and against the Wall Street/CFR takeover of U.S. foreign and internal policy.

Senator George Norris showcasing the web of controls managed by the Wall Street oligarchs

These names which should be celebrated today, interfaced closely with FDR and his allies Harry Hopkins and Henry Wallace. Some of their names include Senator Robert Lafollette Jr (R-Iowa) (1895-1953), Sen. Robert Wagner (D-NY) (1877-1953), Sen. Peter Norbeck (R-SD) (1870-1936), Sen. Edward Costigan (D-Colo.) (1874-1939), Senator George Norris (R-Neb) (1861-1944) and Rep. William Lemke (R-N.D.)(1878-1950). These were a few of the leading men that some historians have dubbed “the American System Caucus”, and while this article doesn’t leave room for their story, rest assured that more will be said about them in a future installment.

While it would be a lie to say that there was no such thing as a “Brain Trust” or that Keynesian economists and Rhodes Scholars were not to be found among this group, the idea that this was the “cause” of the New Deal is a pure fiction.

Taking Back Control of Credit Policy

While surgery was begun on the cancerous financial system and unpayable debts depriving the nation of the credit needed to commence a reconstruction policy of the physical economy (over 50% of U.S. industrial potential was destroyed and unemployment hit 25%), Franklin Roosevelt’s long time ally Harry Hopkins worked with Harold Ickes to provide emergency work for over 3 million people in the first months under the Public Works Administration and Works Progress Administration.

Although FDR could not destroy the private Federal Reserve that had taken control of U.S. monetary policy 30 years earlier, he was able to impose his own man (Marinner Eccles) onto it in 1934, forcing the beast to start obeying national law for the first time ever. Despite this maneuver, Wall Street oligarchs continued to sabotage FDR’s recovery by constricting credit, refusing to purchase treasury notes at strategic moments, or even speculating against the U.S. dollar itself. To get around these manipulations, the Reconstruction Finance Corporation (RFC) was brought online to function as a surrogate national bank channeling billions of dollars into small and medium businesses, industrial growth, and infrastructure projects.

Psy Ops vs the New Deal: The Rise of the Austrian School

Throughout the 1930s and 1940s, Mellon-Morgan-Rockefeller interests ran a multifaceted psychological war against the population. After their coup plans failed due to Gen. Butler’s brave whistleblowing in 1934, these groups created a think tank calling itself the “American Liberty League”. The irony of the word “Liberty” used by an organization whose controllers sponsored fascism before and even during WWII should not be lost on anyone.

Through powerful oligarchs like William Randolph Hearst, Henry Luce, the Morgans, the Warburgs, the Duponts, and the Rockefellers, the Liberty League controlled the majority of mainstream media outlets, radio stations, and publishing houses in the USA, at the same time they co-ordinated with the newly re-organized FBI under J. Edgar Hoover. These groups worked hard to paint FDR as a Keynesian who only created inflationary “make work jobs” without any concrete intention for the future productive powers of labor. Through this sleight of hand, FDR’s enemies were able to invent a straw man that they could then refute by promoting the anti-Keynesian model known as the “Austrian School” that had formerly grown out of the British System inspired theories of Carl Menger (retainer for the Habsburg empire) and his aristocratic disciples Ludwig von Mises, Friedrick von Hayek, Frank Knight, and Sir John Claphan.

By 1940, the American Liberty League formerly disbanded. However with FDR’s death its cabal of controllers spawned dozens of new think tanks that were enmeshed with the Council on Foreign Relations and Mont Pelerin Society mothership founded in 1947 by von Hayek and a group of eugenics-loving oligarchs whom we will encounter in a following report..

Over the coming decades, the Liberty League morphed into hundreds of new think tanks which began with the American Enterprise Association (AEA) [later American Enterprise Institute] founded by Liberty League leader Raymond Moley and sponsored by General Mills, Chemical Bank and Bristol Meyers.

Other think tanks built up by this network over the years included the Heritage Foundation, Cato Institute, Hudson Institute, Mises Institute, Manhattan Institute etc… which would set the groundwork for the later “conservative revolution” of the 1970s. This “Austrian School” revolution would spring to life once the 1945-1971 Keynesian perversion of Bretton Woods ended with the 1971 floating of the dollar off of the fixed exchange rate gold reserve system.

Under this post-1971 era, a new god of the “markets” would replace the old god of “the state” and a new ethic of post-industrial consumerism would replace the former system of Keynesian controls that defined the post-WWII era. Those anti-Keynesian leaders of the American System tradition such as Henry Dexter White, Franklin Roosevelt, Wendell Wilkie, Sumner Welles, and Harry Hopkins were taken out of power through various means between 1945-1946 as the Anglo-American establishment regained control over U.S. foreign and internal policies. This Keynesian takeover destroyed the positive potential of the Bretton Woods Institutions which were designed originally to internationalize the New Deal via the creation of cheap credit for global development and win-win cooperation.

In our next installments, we will look more deeply into the sordid minds and political operations controlling the figures of John Maynard Keynes and Friedrich von Hayek.

The author can be reached at [email protected]

Originally published on Strategic Culture Foundation

Xi Jinping’s frequent references to Mao Zedong, along with Xi’s own claims to ideological originality, have fueled debate over the significance of Maoism in the PRC today.

The discussion recalls an earlier debate, at the height of the Cold War, over the meaning of Maoism itself. This paper revisits that earlier controversy, reflected in arguments between Benjamin Schwartz and Karl Wittfogel, with an eye toward their contemporary relevance.

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Nearly a century after its founding in 1921, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) again trumpeted the ideological contributions of its paramount leader.  The insertion into the Party Constitution of a reference to “Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era” in 2018 was the first time since Mao Zedong (in 1945) that a sitting CCP leader received such recognition. Unlike Mao’s successor Deng Xiaoping, who famously pronounced that the (political) color of a cat did not matter so long as it caught mice, Xi Jinping donned the mantle of ideological authority once worn by Chairman Mao. Not surprisingly, contemporary observers ponder the continuing relevance of Maoism in post-Mao China.¹

The discussion of Xi Jinping’s Maoist tendencies evokes a previous debate, conducted during the Cold War, over the authenticity and import of Maoism itself. Benjamin I. Schwartz introduced the term “Maoism” into the English lexicon in his 1951 book Chinese Communism and the Rise of Mao.² Tracing the development of Chinese Communism in its early years, Schwartz argued that the essence of Maoist ideology reflected practical lessons drawn from the experience of concrete political struggle rather than derived from pure theory. Maoism, Schwartz proposed, was a pragmatic strategy of revolution that (in its initial iteration) grafted useful elements of Marxism-Leninism, most notably a disciplined and hierarchical Communist Party, onto a mobilized peasant mass base.³

While Schwartz described the CCP as “an elite of professional revolutionaries which has risen to power by basing itself on the dynamic of peasant discontent,” he focused not on the social and economic problems that had created the “objective conditions” for discontent, but on “the ideas, intentions and ambitions of those who finally assume the responsibility for meeting them.”⁴ In other words, Schwartz undertook a kind of intellectual/political/psychological history that situated his subjects in the world of strategic struggle rather than in some disembodied dialogue with the Marxist canon. His primary sources were the writings and speeches of the principal CCP leaders, the official resolutions and other documents issued by the Party, and the unofficial letters and memoirs of a wide range of participants and engaged observers – in Chinese, Japanese, Russian, German and English. Beginning with the co-founders of the CCP, Chen Duxiu and Li Dazhao, and continuing with subsequent Communist leaders Qu Qiubai, Li Lisan and Wang Ming, Schwartz shows how the Party line shifted repeatedly in tandem with the changing political circumstances of the day and the predilections of paramount leaders. Only in the final two chapters (Chapters 12 and 13) does he address the ascendency of Mao Zedong and his revolutionary strategy.

Benjamin I. Schwartz

The discussion of Mao occupies less than 15% of the book, but it was Schwartz’s treatment of Maoism as a distinctive strategic ideology that sparked debate. Schwartz observes that Mao’s rural revolution was forced to deviate from the dictates of Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy after the Nationalists’ crackdown in 1927 cut the Communist Party off from its previous foothold among factory workers in Shanghai and other industrial cities.⁵ The CCP’s turn from urban proletariat to rural peasantry marked “the beginning of a heresy in act never made explicit in theory.”⁶ According to Schwartz, then, Maoism originated as an unacknowledged yet highly consequential departure in practice from the strictures of Soviet doctrine. A decade later, however, when war with Japan allowed the CCP to “harness nationalist sentiment to its own cause” there occurred a “profound change in the psychology of the Communist leadership which may itself spring from nationalist sentiment.” The result was that in wartime Yan’an “Mao was now sufficiently self-confident to take the initiative in the field of theoretical formulation . . . intent on proving that developments in China represented a unique and original development in the course of human history.”⁷

With our twenty-twenty hindsight, Schwartz’s argument about the origins and evolution of Maoism seems commonsensical and incontrovertible. But that was not the situation when his book first appeared. Schwartz’s thesis that Mao’s revolutionary recipe “was not planned in advance in Moscow, and even ran counter to tenets of orthodoxy which were still considered sacrosanct and inviolate in Moscow at the time” directly challenged the reigning “totalitarian model” that depicted the People’s Republic of China as a replica of the USSR.⁸ His stress on the significance of Maoism as a distinctive ideology not only contradicted the proclamations of Soviet propagandists; it also disputed the firmly held beliefs of many vehemently anti-Soviet scholars. As Schwartz noted, “An immense effort is currently being made by orthodox Stalinist historiography to present the Chinese Communist success as the result of Stalin’s own prescience and masterly planning. It is strange to note that this myth has been accepted and even insisted upon by many who regard themselves as the Kremlin’s bitterest foes.”⁹

Schwartz’s challenge to a generic “totalitarian model,” applicable to Communist and fascist regimes alike, elicited dissent from its defenders.¹⁰ The most acerbic was a series of diatribes penned by Karl August Wittfogel, a former German Communist who had fled Hitler’s Third Reich to become a vocal critic of Communism in both the Soviet Union and China. A professor of Chinese history at the University of Washington, Wittfogel had gained notoriety in the field by accusing fellow Sinologist Owen Lattimore of Communist sympathies at the McCarran hearings on the “loss” of China.¹¹ In Wittfogel’s view, Chinese Communism was a carbon copy of Russian Communism. He rejected the notion that Mao Zedong had been an innovator in any sense of the word; every strategic move and ideological justification that marked the Chinese revolutionary experience, he insisted, could already be found full-blown in Leninism. For Wittfogel, Chinese Communist doctrine did “not exhibit any originality, ‘Maoist’ or otherwise.”¹² 

Karl August Wittfogel

Mao’s revolutionary road, according to Wittfogel, was Russian designed and Russian engineered. To be sure, Schwartz also credited Lenin with substantial influence on the course of Chinese Communism, but he did not believe that the Chinese revolution was merely the duplication of a familiar Bolshevik blueprint. As Schwartz replied, “Now it is, of course, true that Lenin opened the doors to all subsequent developments of world Communism. This does not mean, however, that he marched through all doors which he opened and that all the developments of Stalinism in the Soviet Union and of Maoism in China are simply untroubled applications of Lenin’s teachings.”¹³

This early Cold War controversy over the meaning of Maoism, rather than an arcane academic exercise, was actually a debate over the future of the Communist bloc. Schwartz’s contention that Maoism in China (like Titoism in Yugoslavia) reflected a departure from orthodox Russian doctrine anticipated the advent of fissures within the Communist world stemming from disparate national experiences and attendant “isms”: “the fate of doctrine may in the course of time have a profound effect on the relationship among Communist states such as China, Jugoslavia [sic] and the Soviet Union which are not directly subject to each other.”¹⁴ Here was a prescient insight that Chalmers Johnson would later elaborate in Peasant Nationalism and Communist Power when he argued that the Chinese and Yugoslavian states’ defiance of Soviet domination was a product of their both having risen to power on the backs of peasant nationalist revolutions.¹⁵ By the time that Johnson’s book was published in 1962, the Sino-Soviet split was already a visible fait accompli.

Occurring on the heels of the toxic Congressional hearings on the “loss” of China, the debate over Maoism reflected a deep divide in academic and policy circles.¹⁶ Advocates of the totalitarian model such as Wittfogel and some of his colleagues at the University of Washington asserted that Schwartz and his Harvard colleagues, in identifying the existence of an alternative Maoist path, constituted a dangerous cabal that – if not guilty of Maoist sympathies themselves – were at the very least naive about the Communist monolith. In the inaugural issue of The China Quarterly in 1960, Wittfogel’s “The Legend of Maoism” referred to the Harvard scholars as a “‘Maoist’ group” and detailed their inter-connections in a quasi-conspiratorial tone: “Suffice it to say that in substance the ‘Maoist’ thesis was first outlined in 1947 by John K. Fairbank; that Prof. Fairbank was the ‘teacher and guide’ of Benjamin Schwartz who in 1951 coined the term ‘Maoism’ and elaborated on its meaning; that Prof. Fairbank fulfilled editorial functions in the preparation of the Documentary History of Chinese Communism, a collection of documents with explanatory introductions mainly written by Prof. Schwartz and Conrad Brandt and published in 1952; and that in 1958 Prof. Fairbank reasserted the ‘Maoist’ thesis . . . ”¹⁷

Even after Soviet advisers had abruptly withdrawn from China following Mao Zedong’s announcement of his radical Great Leap Forward in 1958, Wittfogel continued to dismiss as “fictitious” the suggestion that the CCP might act contrary to the desires of Moscow. To Wittfogel’s mind, the claim that China’s alternative revolutionary tradition had facilitated a tendency toward nationalistic independence, although ostensibly academic, betrayed a nefarious political motive: “This argument, known as the ‘Maoist’ thesis, is historical in form, but political in content.”¹⁸ Chiding Schwartz and company for an “inadequate understanding of the doctrinal and political Marxist-Leninist background,” Wittfogel accused them of having concocted a “legend of ‘Maoism’.”¹⁹ Former Communist and member of the Frankfurt School of critical theory that he was, Wittfogel assumed the role of doctrinal arbiter: “The authors of the Documentary History, who created the ‘Maoist’ myth in 1951-52, had ample opportunity in subsequent studies of Chinese thought to correct their errors. But instead of doing so, they kept repeating their key conclusions . . . based on an inadequate reproduction of Lenin’s ideas … and on the misrepresentation of Mao’s behavior.”²⁰

The “faulty views” of Schwartz and his colleagues were politically dangerous, Wittfogel contended, because they undermined American resolve to win the Cold War: “Their damaging consequences are not restricted to their impact on purely academic understanding. For the political confusion they have engendered has strongly affected opinion-molders and policy-makers in this country, and has thus hampered the development of a clear, consistent and far-sighted policy for coping with the Chinese Communist threat. In this important respect, these views have done a distinct disservice to the free world . . . . The survival of the free world hangs in the balance.”²¹

In Wittfogel’s account, the dangers posed by “Maoism” had spread far beyond the ivory tower, yet he looked to the academy for rectification: 

It has been said that the battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton. Today, the ideas which the scholars and opinion-molders hold are no less crucial for the decisions the policy-makers will make. Where, then, we may ask, are the schools, the universities, the foundations and research centers that will determine victory – or defeat – in the present cold war?²²

Public intellectuals imbued with the proper political outlook, he suggested, were needed to fill the breach.

With Harvard having allegedly concocted a dangerous “’Maoist’ thesis,” another academic institution would have to produce the antidote. Thankfully, such a remedy was close at hand due to the scholarly efforts of Wittfogel and his cold-warrior colleagues (George Taylor, Franz Michael, Donald Treadgold, and others) who had assembled at the University of Washington’s newly founded Far Eastern and Russian Institute. Wittfogel claimed to speak for the group: “It is vital to our survival that the record be set straight, and a small but growing number of Far Eastern specialists are doing just that. A realistic comparative study of the historical roots of Chinese and Soviet Communism is possible. And such a study enables us to remove the widespread misconceptions regarding the character and intent of the present Chinese and Soviet regimes.”²³ Among the many publications by scholars at the Far Eastern and Russian Institute expounding on the totalitarian model, no doubt Wittfogel had in mind above all his own forthcoming Oriental Despotism: A Comparative Study of Total Power.²⁴ Wittfogel’s study attributed the origins of Chinese and Russian totalitarianism to age-old traditions of state domination in both societies.

Irritated by the barrage of criticism directed at him and his colleagues, the usually unflappable Benjamin Schwartz returned fire with a sharp rejoinder entitled “The Legend of the ‘Legend of Maoism’.” “For some years now,” he wrote, “Prof. Wittfogel has been obsessed with the view that Fairbank, Schwartz and Brandt (an indivisible entity) have committed an ‘error’ (not an accidental error!) which has led to incalculably evil results in our struggle with world Communism.”²⁵ Schwartz rejected “Wittfogel’s conception of Marxism-Leninism as a ‘doctrine and strategy of total revolution,’ as a ready-made science of power with established recipes for dealing with all situations – a science which is never surprised by new contingencies.”²⁶  Instead of this formulaic totalism, Schwartz reminded readers that his primary goal in Chinese Communism and the Rise of Mao had been to trace the actual process by which Mao gained control of the Chinese Communist movement, creating the conditions for Maoism to become the dominant strategic and policy line within the CCP. The implications of Maoist departures (in practice if not always in acknowledged ideological doctrine) were, moreover, continuing to unfold: “the end of the story is not yet in sight.”²⁷

Schwartz readily acknowledged that in seeking to explain the opaque development of Chinese Communism, “we have all committed errors,” but he emphasized that his own conception of Maoism derived from an effort to understand the lived experience of Mao and his comrades as they groped in fits and starts toward a workable strategy of revolution. As such, his empirical method differed fundamentally from Wittfogel’s theoretically-predetermined mode of scholarship, whose claim for correctness resided in a supposedly authoritative grasp of Marxist-Leninist doctrine. Schwartz called on Wittfogel to discard his superiority complex in favor of a less rigid approach: “It is in fact high time that Prof. Wittfogel overcame the illusion that his particular experiences and his particular ‘theories’ vouchsafe for him some peculiar access to an understanding of Communism not available to the rest of us.”²⁸ 

Published some seven decades ago, Benjamin Schwartz’s study of Maoism has remarkable resonance today for our understanding of ideology in contemporary China as well as for our methods of scholarship. His grounded yet dynamic conception of ideology –as an articulation of practical strategy on the part of individual leaders with important implications for subsequent political developments – is a useful corrective to arguments that Xi Jinping Thought can be ignored simply because it does not make major theoretical advances beyond Mao Zedong Thought, to say nothing of classical Marxism-Leninism. Xi himself presents his ideas as building on three central principles of Mao Zedong Thought: “seeking truth from facts” (pragmatism), the “mass line” (populism), and “independent sovereignty” (patriotism).²⁹ The core concepts are repurposed to address contemporary challenges. Manifestly motivated by a desire to avoid what he regards as fatal missteps of Soviet leaders from Khrushchev to Gorbachev that led to the eventual collapse of the USSR, Xi – much like Mao at Yan’an – strives to sum up key lessons extracted from the CCP’s own experience as it has departed from the Russian prototype. Benjamin Schwartz was ahead of his day in realizing that Communist leaders were not necessarily more restrained by doctrinal orthodoxy than other politicians. But, he insisted, this did not mean that their ideology or utterances were insignificant; on the contrary, their speeches and writings provide critical insight into the origins and long-term implications of their political strategies.

For Schwartz, in the end the crucial point was less Mao’s doctrinal deviation than the claim to ideological originality on the part of a leader whose concrete political accomplishments had made him confident enough to seek to project his and his country’s influence on the world stage. As Schwartz observed in 1965, this process of asserting the CCP’s ideological independence, first evident in Yan’an, accelerated after 1956 following Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin and Mao’s launch of the Hundred Flowers Campaign, as the PRC gradually distanced itself from the Soviet orbit in favor of declaring an alternative “Maoist vision.”³⁰ Roderick MacFarquhar would describe the events of 1956-57 as “a major turning point in the history of the People’s Republic,” marked by Mao’s advocacy of a “new militancy at home and abroad” that would ultimately result in the Cultural Revolution.³¹

Schwartz’s characterization of the Maoist vision of 1956 could easily have been written of the work report delivered by Xi Jinping at the 19th Party Congress some sixty years later: 

The vision involves not only a conception of the good society of the future but also a sanctified image of the methods by which this vision is to be achieved. Certainly Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist ideology is one of the main sources of this vision, but this does not preclude the possibility that in some of its aspects it coincides with certain traditional Chinese habits of thought and behavior.³² 

Xi’s three hour and twenty minute work report touted the value of “Chinese wisdom” and the “Chinese approach” in crafting political solutions for global challenges. As he stated boldly, “We have every confidence that we can give full play to the strengths and distinctive features of China’s socialist democracy, and make China’s contribution to the political advancement of mankind.” Xi took a page right out of Mao’s Hundred Flowers playbook by zeroing in on what he identified as the “principal contradiction” (主要矛盾) currently facing Chinese society; namely, “the people’s ever-growing need for a better life” versus the country’s “unbalanced and inadequate development.”³³ Setting a date of 2035, two decades in the future, for the full attainment of “socialist modernization,” the CCP’s paramount leader offered a familiar formula for reaching this future vision: the Communist Party must continue to “lead in everything.”

History does not repeat itself, but contemporary CCP theoreticians and propagandists do comb the historical record for ideological inspiration and legitimation. Studies of the Maoist past are therefore of more than academic interest in understanding current and future political developments. While it would be facile to equate the disquiet generated in the Communist world at the time of Mao’s Hundred Flowers Campaign, in the wake of destalinization and the Hungarian Revolt, with the current disarray in the capitalist world, brought about by Brexit and the Trump presidency, catalytic moments of international disorder do seem to create opportunities for the assertion of an alternative Chinese ideological authority.³⁴ Such openings merit systematic comparative attention.

In trying to plumb the enduring importance of CCP ideology, however, the post-Mao China field until very recently has offered few signposts. For nearly four decades after Mao’s death, political scientists largely acceded to Deng Xiaoping’s famous maxim that the “black cat, white cat” distinction did not matter; under the pragmatic imperatives of market reforms, the ideological correctness of the Mao era had seemingly been relegated to the dustbin of PRC history. In reality, of course, Deng’s formulation of “Socialism with Chinese Characteristics” carried its own ideological and political implications, as would Jiang Zemin’s “Three Represents” and Hu Jintao’s “Scientific Development Outlook.” But under Xi Jinping, ideology in the PRC has reclaimed an explicit primacy and global ambition that scholars can no longer ignore; from Xi’s articulation of a “China Dream” to his latest “Thought for a New Era,” the project of publicizing and popularizing the “visionary” ideas of the top leader again occupies a commanding place on the CCP’s agenda.³⁵ The astonishing amount of Propaganda Department support earmarked for the study of Xi Jinping’s “theoretical innovations” attests to the priority that the Party puts on this all-out ideological effort.³⁶

Like Mao Zedong, Xi Jinping portrays his vision as a continuation of China’s revolutionary tradition. In his 2020 New Year’s greeting, Xi recalled retracing the route of the Red Army so as to tap into an “inexhaustible source of motivation during our Long March of the New Era.” Xi, like Mao, also stresses his close connection to the peasantry: “As usual, no matter how busy I was, I spent time visiting people in the countryside.”³⁷ Despite this apparent endorsement of revolutionary populism, Xi’s own tightly disciplined governance is actually a far cry from Mao’s tumultuous rule. Xi Jinping’s obsession with Party control is more reminiscent of the leadership style of Mao’s nemesis, former head of state Liu Shaoqi, than of the mercurial Great Helmsman himself.³⁸ Yet Xi shares with Mao a penchant to herald the Chinese experience as a development model with wide reaching application. Even after the stain of the Covid-19 crisis, in his speech before the UN General Assembly in September 2020 Xi Jinping unabashedly hailed China’s “new development paradigm” as a post-pandemic panacea for global recovery.³⁹

Communist parties are prone to portray their ideology as a blueprint for future action, but classic studies of ideology reveal that it is more usefully regarded as a summation of past and present experience: “The pedigree of every political ideology shows it to be the creature, not of premeditation in advance of political activity, but of meditation upon a manner of politics. In short, political activity comes first and a political ideology follows after.”⁴⁰ As Benjamin Schwartz recognized, when the CCP spotlights the “visionary” thought of its paramount leader, it is presenting an authoritative outline of what it deems to be proven practical political theory. 

Benjamin Schwartz’s work has much to teach us not only about the legacy of Maoism and its contemporary relevance, but about research methods more generally. His admonitions against a doctrinaire mindset that makes truth claims based on adherence to theoretical orthodoxy are well worth remembering. If these days few scholars attempt to force their analyses into the old procrustean bed of Marxist-Leninist Theory, other theoretical straightjackets can nonetheless be found in abundance. From Rational Choice Theory at one pole to Post-Modern Theory at the other, social scientists and humanists alike advance arguments on grounds of stale theoretical authority rather than fresh research discovery. While Schwartz’s scholarship was certainly not atheoretical, his theories – like Maoism itself – derived from empirical investigation. Citing a Hunan proverb, Mao Zedong once likened the Chinese revolution to straw sandals; with no preset pattern, they “shaped themselves in the making.”⁴¹ Benjamin Schwartz’s Chinese Communism and the Rise of Mao adopts a similarly open-ended and responsive approach.

The 19th Congress of the Chinese Communist Party in October 2017 offered poignant reminders that even in heralding a “New Era” guided by Xi Jinping Thought, the CCP self-consciously recalls previous chapters in its eventful past. A banner festooned across the back wall of the auditorium in the Great Hall of the People proclaimed, “不忘初心” (Don’t forget our original intention). To be sure, the Party’s claims to historical continuity are often highly contrived, but its assertions of revolutionary and cultural lineage are nonetheless central to its identity. Xi Jinping himself often invokes the adage “吃水不忘挖井人” (When drinking the water, don’t forget those who dug the well) – a phrase associated with Mao’s legacy. At the opening ceremony of the 19th Party Congress, he called upon delegates to bow their heads in silence to remember the contributions of Chairman Mao and other early leaders of the CCP. Taking a cue from those whose history and politics we study, we too might be advised at this advent of a “new era” to recall the achievements of our own intellectual ancestors.

Notes

¹ Roderick MacFarquhar, “Does Mao Still Matter?” in Jennifer Rudolph and Michael Szonyi, eds., The China Questions: Critical Insights into a Rising Power (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2018): Chapter 3; Sebastian Heilmann and Elizabeth J. Perry, eds., Mao’s Invisible Hand: The Political Foundations of Adaptive Governance in China (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011).

² Benjamin I. Schwartz, Chinese Communism and the Rise of Mao (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1951). The Chinese Communist Party itself has always referred to Mao’s ideological contributions simply as “Mao Zedong Thought” (毛泽东思想), in contrast to the “isms” （主义）of Marxism, Leninism, and Stalinism. In coining the term “Maoism,” Schwartz was thus implying a degree of originality and importance that elevated Mao into the pantheon of leading Communist theorists.

³ Schwartz, 1951: 189.

⁴ Schwartz, 1951: 199, 2.

⁵ Elizabeth J. Perry, Shanghai on Strike: The Politics of Chinese Labor (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993).

⁶ Schwartz, 1951: 191.

⁷ Schwartz, 1951: 201.

⁸ Schwartz, 1951: 5. For classic statements of the totalitarian model, which presented the framework as equally applicable to Communist and fascist regimes, see Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Schocken Books, 1951); and Carl Joachim Friedrich, Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1956).

⁹ Schwartz, 1951: 5.

¹⁰ Peter S.H. Tang, Communist China Today (New York: Praeger, 1957); Richard L. Walker, China Under Communism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1955); Richard L. Walker, The Continuing Struggle: Communist China and the Free World (New York: Athene Press, 1958); Franz H. Michael and George E. Taylor, The Far East in the Modern World (New York: Henry Holt, 1956).

¹¹ Robert P. Newman, Owen Lattimore and the “Loss” of China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992): 334-335.

¹² Karl A. Wittfogel, “The Historical Position of Communist China: Doctrine and Reality,” The Review of Politics, Vol. 16, No. 4 (October 1954): 464.

¹³ Benjamin Schwartz, “On the ‘Originality’ of Mao Tse-tung,” Foreign Affairs, Vol. 3, No. 1 (October 1955): 74-75.

¹⁴ Schwartz, 1955: 76.

¹⁵ Chalmers A. Johnson, Peasant Nationalism and Communist Power: The Emergence of Revolutionary China, 1937-1945 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1962).

¹⁶ On Wittfogel’s role in the hearings, see Stanley I. Kutler, The American Inquisition: Justice and Injustice in the Cold War (New York: Hill and Wang, 1982): 201; and Ellen Schrecker, No Ivory Tower: McCarthyism and the Universities (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986): 165.

¹⁷ Karl A. Wittfogel, “The Legend of ‘Maoism,’” The China Quarterly, No. 1 (January – March 1960): 76, 73. On the occasion of his sixtieth birthday in 1967, John Fairbank would “confess” to this “conspiracy” by composing some humorous doggerel that concluded with the lines: 

The files, when examined, will demonstrate
That this “Fairbank” so-called was a syndicate
Who were busy writing memos and in other ways
During Benjamin Schwartz’s earlier phase.

John King Fairbank, Chinabound: A Fifty-Year Memoir (New York: Harper and Row, 1982): 448.

¹⁸ Karl A. Wittfogel, “Peking’s ‘Independence’,” The New Leader (July 20-27, 1959): 13.

¹⁹ Wittfogel, (Jan-March) 1960: 75.

²⁰ Wittfogel, (April-June) 1960: 28-29.

²¹ Wittfogel, 1959: 17.

²² Wittfogel, 1959: 17.

²³ Wittfogel, 1959: 17.

²⁴ Karl A. Wittfogel, Oriental Despotism: A Comparative Study of Total Power (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1957).

²⁵ Benjamin Schwartz, “The Legend of the ‘Legend of Maoism’,” The China Quarterly, No. 2 (April – June 1960): 35.

²⁶ Schwartz, 1960: 36.

²⁷ Schwartz, 1960: 36.

²⁸ Schwartz, 1960: 42.

²⁹ Xi Jinpiing, “Uphold and Properly Apply the Spirit of Mao Zedong Thought” (坚持与运用好毛泽东思想活的灵魂) in Talks on Governing the Country (谈治国理政) (Beijing: 2014): 25-31.

³⁰ Benjamin I. Schwartz, Communism and China: Ideology in Flux (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968): 171ff.

³¹ Roderick MacFarquhar, The Origins of the Cultural Revolution: Contradictions Among the People, 1956-1957 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1974): 317.

³² Schwartz, Communism and China: 171-172; Chris Buckley, “China Enshrines ‘Xi Jinping Thought,’ Elevating Leader to Mao-like Status,” New York Times (October 24, 2017).

³³ On the central role of “contradictions” in CCP ideology, see Franz Schurmann, Ideology and Organization in Communist China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970): Chapter I.

³⁴ The historical parallel is far from exact, however: at the 8th Party Congress in 1956, Mao’s Thought was dropped from the Party Constitution.

³⁵ Elizabeth J. Perry, “The Populist Dream of Chinese Democracy,” Journal of Asian Studies, vol. 74, no. 4 (December 2015); Chen Cheng, The Return of Ideology: The Search for Regime Identities in Postcommunist Russia and China (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2016); Zeng Jinghan, The Chinese Communist Party’s Capacity to Rule: Ideology, Legitimacy and Party Cohesion (New York: Palgrave, 2016).

³⁶ That more than twenty major Chinese universities within a week of the 19th Party Congress had already established new departments for the teaching of Xi’s Thought is further evidence of its political significance.

³⁷ Full text: Chinese President Xi Jinping’s 2020 New Year speech – CGTN

³⁸ On Liu Shaoqi’s leadership style, see Lowell Dittmer, Liu Shaoqi and the Chinese Cultural Revolution (New York: Taylor and Francis, 1998).

³⁹ Full text: Xi Jinping’s speech at General Debate of UNGA – CGTN

⁴⁰ Michael Oakeshott, Rationalism in Politics (New York, Basic Books: 1962): 118-119.

⁴¹ Mao Zedong, “Speech at a Supreme State Conference” (January 28, 1958). Quoted in John Bryan Starr, Continuing the Revolution: The Political Thought of Mao (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979): ix.

Da un processo ingiusto – quello di Londra a Julian Assange, fondatore di WikiLeaks – è scaturita una sentenza che a prima vista appare giusta: la non-estradizione del giornalista negli Stati uniti, dove lo attende una condanna a 175 anni di reclusione in base alla Legge sullo spionaggio del 1917. Resta da vedere, al momento in cui scriviamo, se e in che modo Assange verrà scarcerato dopo sette anni di confino all’ambasciata ecuadoregna e quasi due anni di carcere duro a Londra.

Si parla di rilascio su cauzione, ma, se Washington fa appello contro la sentenza (come appare certo), il procedimento di estradizione può essere riaperto e Assange deve restare a disposizione della magistratura in Gran Bretagna. C’è poi il fatto che nel verdetto la giudice Vanessa Baraister si è detta convinta della «buona fede» delle autorità Usa e della regolarità di un possibile processo negli Stati uniti, motivando il verdetto solo con «ragioni di salute mentale» che potrebbero portare Assange al suicidio.

Che cosa in realtà ha determinato, in questo momento, la non-estradizione di Julian Assange negli Usa? Da un lato la campagna internazionale per la sua liberazione, che ha portato il caso Assange all’attenzione dell’opinione pubblica. Dall’altro il fatto che un processo pubblico a Julian Assange negli Usa sarebbe estremamente imbarazzante per l’establishment politico-militare. Quale prova dei «crimini» di Assange l’accusa dovrebbe mostrare i crimini di guerra Usa, portati alla luce da WikiLeaks. Ad esempio, quando nel 2010 essa ha pubblicato oltre 250.000 documenti statunitensi, molti dei quali etichettati come «confidenziali» o «segreti», sulle guerre in Iraq e Afghanistan. Oppure quando nel 2016, al momento in cui Assange era già confinato nell’ambasciata ecuadoregna a Londra, WikiLeaks ha pubblicato oltre 30.000 email e documenti inviati e ricevuti tra il 2010 e il 2014 da Hillary Clinton, Segretaria di Stato dell’Amministrazione Obama.

Tra questi una email del 2011, la quale rivela il vero scopo della guerra Nato alla Libia perseguito in particolare da Usa e Francia: impedire che Gheddafi usasse le riserve auree della Libia per creare una moneta pan-africana alternativa al dollaro e al franco Cfa, la moneta imposta dalla Francia a 14 ex colonie. Insieme alle decine di migliaia di documenti, che hanno portato alla luce i veri scopi di questa e altre operazioni belliche, WikiLeaks ha pubblicato le immagini video delle stragi di civili in Iraq e altrove, mostrando il vero volto della guerra.

Quello che oggi viene nascosto dai grandi media. Mentre nella guerra del Vietnam degli anni Sessanta i resoconti giornalistici e le immagini delle stragi suscitarono un vasto movimento contro la «sporca guerra», contribuendo alla sconfitta Usa, il giornalismo di guerra è oggi sempre più irreggimentato: ai corrispondenti embedded, al seguito delle truppe, viene mostrato solo ciò che vogliono i comandi, gli unici autorizzati a fornire «informazioni» nei loro briefing. I pochi veri giornalisti operano in condizioni sempre più difficili e rischiose, e spesso i loro resoconti vengono censurati dai grandi media, nei quali domina la narrazione ufficiale degli eventi.

Il giornalismo d’inchiesta di WikiLeaks ha aperto crepe nel muro di omertà mediatica che copre i reali interessi di potenti élite le quali, operando nello «Stato profondo», continuano a giocare la carta della guerra, con la differenza che oggi, con le armi nucleari, essa può portare il mondo alla catastrofe finale. Violare le stanze segrete di questi gruppi di potere, portando alla luce le loro strategie e le loro trame, è un’azione assai rischiosa per i giornalisti e per coloro che, ribellandosi all’omertà, li aiutano a scoprire la verità. Emblematico è il caso di Chelsea Manning, l’attivista statunitense accusata di aver fornito a WikiLeaks documenti di cui era venuta a conoscenza lavorando quale analista di intelligence dell’Esercito Usa durante la guerra in Iraq. È stata per questo condannata a 37 anni di detenzione in un carcere di massima sicurezza e, rilasciata dopo 7 anni di carcere duro, è stata di nuovo incarcerata per essersi rifiutata di testimoniare contro Assange e, dopo un tentativo di suicidio, rimessa in temporanea libertà.

Manlio Dinucci

In early December I travelled to Venezuela to be an election observer at their national assembly election. I was part of a group of eight persons from Canada and US organized by CodePink. There were about two hundred international observers in total, including the Latin American Council of Electoral Experts.  I have previously been an official election observer in Honduras and was an unofficial observer at the 2015 Venezuela national assembly election.

Meeting Opposition Leaders

Before the election, our small group met eight leaders of the Democratic Alliance. This is the major opposition coalition. Pedro Jose Rojas of Accion Democratica said the US sanctions are not doing what is claimed; they are hurting average citizens. Bruno Gallo of Avanca Progressista said Venezuela needs negotiation not confrontation. Juan Carlos Alvarado of the Christian Democratic Party said Venezuelans have been “victims of politics” and that dialogue and flexibility are needed. Several leaders spoke about the importance of the national assembly and the road to change is through voting not violence. Several leaders expressed the wish for better relations with the US; another one said Venezuelan sovereignty needs to be respected.  The common request was to end US sanctions and interference in Venezuelan politics.

We visited the factory where voting machines were assembled, tested and certified. The staff was openly proud of their work. In March this year, nearly all the pre-existing voting computers were destroyed in a massive fire at the main election warehouse. There were calls to delay the December election. But in six months, forty thousand new computers were ordered, built, assembled, tested and certified for the December election. 

The Election Process

On election day, Sunday December 6, we visited many different elections sites. Typically, the election voting takes place at a school, with five or ten classrooms designated as “mesas”.  Each voter goes to his or her designated classroom / “mesa”.

The voting process was quick and efficient, with bio-safety sanitation at each step. The first step is to show your identity card and prove your identity with fingerprint recognition. Step 2 was to make your voting choices at the touchscreen computer and receive a paper receipt. Step 3 is to verify the receipt matches your voting choice and deposit the receipt in a ballot box. The fourth and final step is to sign and put your fingerprint on the voting registry.  The entire voting process took about 3 minutes.

At the end of the voting day, we observed the process of tabulating the votes. At each “mesa”, with observers from other parties present,  the paper receipts were recorded one by one. At the end, the results were compared to the digital count.  Voting results were then transmitted to the headquarters for overall tabulation.

Election results were announced by the Council for National Election (CNE) which manages the entire process.  CNE leaders are not permitted to be members of any party and the CNE leadership was recently changed at the request of the opposition.  In our discussion with leading opposition members, they complained about incumbent party advantages but acknowledged the election process is free, fair and honest.

PBS Newshour Special

With this firsthand experience, on December 29 I watched a PBS Newshour segment about the Venezuela election and overall situation.   PBS reporter Marcia Biggs said, “Maduro’s party essentially ran unopposed in this month’s election.”   As noted above, this is untrue. 

In fact, there were 107 parties and over 14,000 individuals competing in the December 6 election for 277 national assembly seats. While 8 parties were in alliance with the governing United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV), there were over 90 opposition parties. The strongest opposition coalition was the Democratic Alliance comprising 7 opposition parties.  The Democratic Alliance won 1.1 million votes or 18% of the vote. The LEFT opposition to the PSUV, under the banner of the Communist Party of Venezuela, received 168 thousand votes. 

Reporter Marcia Biggs claimed that “politics permeates everything in Venezuela and can determine whether you support Maduro and eat or go hungry.” This claim is based on a campaign statement by PSUV Vice President Diosdado Cabello encouraging people to vote. He jokingly said that women are in the forefront and can say to their family, “No vote, no food.” Video of him making the statement is here.  This statement has been distorted out of all meaning and context.

The PBS story showed a fistfight in the national assembly, implying that it was the Venezuelan government.  But, as reported in the “Juan Guaido surreal regime change reality show”,  the fight was between competing factions of the Venezuelan opposition. 

When they showed Juan Guaido climbing over a fence, that was a publicity stunt to distract from the important news that Luis Parra was elected Speaker of the national assembly one year ago.  That was embarrassing because Guaido’s claim to be “interim president” was based on his being Speaker.

Election turnout was lower than usual at 31% but one needs to account for the election taking place despite covid19 with no mail-in voting. Also, millions of registered voters have had to leave the country due to economic hardship. Also, transportation is difficult due to gasoline scarcity. This was a national assembly election, equivalent to a US mid-term election, which gets lower turnout. Note that 95% of voting eligible Venezuelans are registered voters compared to just 67% in the USA.  Thus a turnout of 50% registered voters in the US equates to 33% of eligible voters.

US Meddling in Venezuela

The star of the 7-minute PBS story is Roberto Patino, the Venezuelan director of a food distribution charity. The report neglects to mention that Patino is associated with a major US foreign policy institution. He is a Millennium Leadership fellow and “expert” at the neoliberal Atlantic Council where the “regime change” goals against Venezuela are  clear.  His food charity “Alimenta la Solidaridad” is allied with the “Rescue Venezuela” funded by the US with the apparent goal of undermining the Venezuelan government and promoting “interim president Juan Guaido”.

Roberto Patino says the Venezuelan government is “very paranoid and they see conspiracies all over.” Paranoia is a mental condition where there is fear of imaginary threats.  But US threats and aggression against Venezuela are not imaginary; they are very real:

In 2002 the US supported the kidnapping and coup against the popular and elected President Hugo Chavez. The years have gone by but US hostility persists. 

* In August 2018 there was a drone assassination attempt on the Venezuelan President. 

* In January 2019 the US declared that it would not recognize the elected President Maduro and instead recognized Juan Guaido as “interim president”.  His background is described in the article “The Making of Juan Guaido: How the US regime change laboratory created Venezuela’s coup leader”

* In February 2019 President Trump threatened military intervention against Venezuela.

* In March 2019, there was massive power blackout caused by sabotage of the electrical grid, with probable US involvement.

*In May 2020, two former US Special Forces soldiers and other mercenaries were arrested  in a failed attempt to overthrow President Maduro.

* In June 2020, the US Navy warship Nitze began provocative “freedom of navigation” patrols along the Venezuelan coast.

* In August 2020, the US seized four ships carrying much needed gasoline to Venezuela.

* In September 2020, in a attempt to undermine the Venezuelan election, the US imposed sanctions on political leaders who planned to participate.

* The US 2021 stimulus bill includes $33Million for “democracy programs for Venezuela”. 

Based on the past twenty years, Venezuela’s government has good reason to be on guard against US threats, meddling and intervention. The PBS program ignores this history. 

Another hero of the show is the exiled politician Leopoldo Lopez. He was imprisoned in 2014 for instigating street violence known as “guarimbas” which led to the deaths of 43 people. 

Like Patino, Lopez  is from the Venezuelan elite, studied in the US and has major public relations support in the US. Like Guaido, Leopoldo Lopez is more popular in Washington than his home country. 

Will the US respect Venezuelan sovereignty?

If the PBS Newshour reporters had not been so biased, they would have interviewed members of the moderate opposition in Venezuela. Viewers could have heard Democratic Alliance leaders explain why they participated in the election, why they are critical of US economic sanctions and US interference in their domestic affairs. That would have been educational for viewers. 

On January 5, the newly elected national assembly will commence in Venezuela.  The fig leaf pretense of Juan Guaido as “interim president” of Venezuela will be removed because he is no longer in the national assembly.  In fact, he was removed as speaker of the national assembly one year ago.

But viewers of the PBS special did not learn this. Instead, they received a biased report ignoring the moderate opposition and promoting a few US supported elites.  The report ignores or denigrates the efforts of millions of Venezuelans who carried out and participated in an election which compares favorably with the election process in the US.  You would never know it from PBS, and you might not believe it, unless you saw it with your own eyes.

Rick Sterling is an investigate journalist based in the SF Bay Area of California. He can be contacted at [email protected]

Images provided by the author

This text was originally published on October 28, 2020 shortly before the US November elections.

This message is for anyone who has concerns about the upcoming U.S. elections, the potential for chaos and civil unrest, or those who fear what a “second wave” of Covid-19 could mean for the future of humanity. 

We are in the last few months of a tumultuous year and it appears there might be more unprecedented events on the way. As we near election 2020, it’s important to step back and analyze the potential plans of the “Predator Class”.

Specifically, it’s important to understand a number of recent government simulations and exercises.

First, let’s look at the exercise known as Event 201.

Event 201

One year ago, on October 18, 2019, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation partnered with the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security and the World Economic Forum on a high-level pandemic exercise known as Event 201. Event 201 simulated how the world would respond to a fictional coronavirus pandemic known as CAPS which swept around the planet. The simulation imagined 65 million people dying, mass lock downs, quarantines, censorship of alternative viewpoints under the guise of fighting “disinformation,” and even floated the idea of arresting people who question the pandemic narrative.

Coincidentally, one of the players involved with Event 201 was Dr. Michael Ryan, the head of the World Health Organization’s team responsible for the international containment and treatment of COVID-19. Ryan has called for looking into families to find potentially sick individuals and isolate them from their families.

Due to the vast web of connections between Bill Gates and nearly every organization connected to the COVID-19 fight, a growing number of researchers are questioning the motivations of Gates and the other officials involved in the Event 201 exercise.

Simulations and Scenarios:

Crimson Contagion (August 2019), 

Another exercise known as Crimson Contagion simulated an outbreak of a respiratory virus originating from China. From August 13 to August 16, 2019, Trump’s Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), headed by Alex Azar, partnered with numerous national, state, and local organization for the exercise. According to the results of the October 2019 draft report, the spread of the novel avian influenza (H7N9) resulted in 110 million infected Americans, 7.7 million hospitalizations, and 586,000 deaths.

Clade X (May 2018)

Another simulation known as Clade X took place on May 2018. This event examined the response to a pandemic resulting from the release of a fictional virus known as Clade X. In the simulation, the virus was released by a terror group called A Brighter Dawn. As the outbreak spread through the United States, the participants asked what would be needed if the President issued a federal quarantine, noting that authorities would need to “Determine (the) level of force authorized to maintain quarantine.” The Clade X exercise also resulted in the federal government nationalizing the healthcare system.

The leaders of these controversial pandemic simulations that took place before the Coronavirus crisis have longstanding connections to the U.S. Intelligence and the U.S. Department of Defense. Even more troubling is that key players in the exercises – specifically, Event 201 and Clade X – share a common history in another biowarfare simulation known as Dark Winter.

Darkest Winter Exercise (June 2001)

The Dark Winter exercise took place in June 2001, only months before the 9/11 attacks. This exercise took place at Andrews Air Force Base in Camp Springs, Maryland, and involved several Congressmen, a former CIA director, a former FBI director, government insiders and privileged members of the press. The exercise simulated the use of smallpox as a biological weapon against the American public.

During the Dark Winter exercise authorities attempt to stop the spread of “dangerous misinformation” and “unverified” cures, just like with the Event 201 simulation.

Dark Winter further discusses the suppression and removal of civil liberties, such as the possibility of the President to invoke “The Insurrection Act”, which would allow the military to act as law enforcement upon request by a State governor, as well as the possibility of “martial rule.” The script says martial rule may “include, but are not limited to, prohibition of free assembly, national travel ban, quarantine of certain areas, suspension of the writ of habeas corpus [i.e. arrest without due process], and/or military trials in the event that the court system becomes dysfunctional.”

What is important to know is Dark Winter was largely written and designed by Tara O’Toole and Thomas Inglesby of the Johns Hopkins Center along with Randy Larsen and Mark DeMier of the Analytic Services (ANSER) Institute for Homeland Security.

O’Toole, Inglesby, and Larsen were directly involved in the response to the alleged anthrax attacks which took place in the days after September 11, 2001. These scientists personally briefed Vice President Cheney on Dark Winter.

Simulation Event 201

Coincidentally, Event 201 was co-hosted by the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, which is currently led by Dark Winter co-author Thomas Inglesby. Tara O’Toole was also a key player in the Clade X simulation.

The name for the exercise comes from a statement made by Robert Kadlec, a veteran of the George W. Bush administration and a former lobbyist for military intelligence/intelligence contractors. In the script, Kadlec states that the lack of smallpox vaccines for the U.S. populace means that “it could be a very dark winter for America.” Kadlec is now leading HHS’ Covid-19 response and was also involved in the Trump administration’s 2019 “Crimson Contagion” exercises.

Eerily, Kadlec’s statements in 201 exercise were recently repeated nearly word for word by Richard Bright, former director of Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority. Bright was recently celebrated as a whistleblower who attempted to hold the Trump administration accountable during the COVID-19 battle. However, while speaking in front of Congress, Bright stated, “without clear planning and implementation of the steps that I and other experts have outlined, 2020 will be darkest winter in modern history.” Now, maybe Bright is simply a concerned scientist warning about the potential for more sick people, but his use of the phrase “darkest winter” is hard to ignore.

When hearing the statements from Kadlec and Bright we ought to consider the corporate media’s promotion of a potential “second wave” of COVID-19. Bill Gates and other influential pundits and health authorities have consistently warned about a second wave which was slated to arrive in the fall of 2020. As of mid-October 2020, reports are beginning to come in that “cases are on the rise”. This is what makes the statement from Richard Bright all the more concerning.

Election 2020 Chaos Incoming?

This leads us to a number of recent simulations of the 2020 U.S. election which have resulted in chaos and potential civil war. It would be easy to dismiss these exercises as politically driven fantasy if the people involved had not already publicly advised their candidate not to concede the election under any circumstances.

Most recently, media reports indicated the Transition Integrity Project (TIP) held a number of exercises simulating what might happen in the event Donald Trump loses the 2020 election, but refuses to leave office. The TIP itself is a secretive group made up of “Never Trump” neocon Republicans and Democrats associated with the Obama administration and Hillary Clinton.

The Boston Globe reported that the TIP met in June to simulate the 11-week period between Election Day on November 3rd and Inauguration Day on January 20, 2021. The exercises state that “Trump and his Republican allies used every apparatus of government — the Postal Service, state lawmakers, the Justice Department, federal agents, and the military — to hold onto power, and Democrats took to the courts and the streets to try to stop it.”

The TIP envisioned one scenario where Trump wins and Biden refuses to concede and instead asks for a recount and makes several demands, including to give statehood to Washington, DC and Puerto Rico, and divide California into 5 states. In the exercises Joe Biden is played by John Podesta, Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign manager and chief of staff to former President Bill Clinton. The simulations essentially end in a constitutional crisis where there is no clear President and the Supreme Court or possibly the military play a deciding role.

This unprecedented event could be disastrous for American life as it is likely activists from both sides of the vote would take to the streets to protest what they believe is a theft by their opponents. If you think protests and fights between “extreme leftists” and “extreme right” wingers are contentious, just wait until they both feel shafted during the presidential election.

Those opposed to Trump will claim Biden won and Trump is attempting to steal the election and create a fascist dictatorship. The Trump supporters will say the Radical Leftist Democrats are attempting a coup to establish a “Communist Police State”. The result will be neighbor turning against neighbor, family members disowning one another, and some political activists may escalate their tactics from protests to violence.

Other groups were similarly engaged in “war games” that predicted complete chaos in the U.S. on election day as well as the imposition of martial law. This includes the “Operation Blackout” simulations conducted by the U.S.-Israeli company, Cybereason. That company has considerable ties to the U.S. and Israeli intelligence.

Operation Blackout involved hackers taking control of city buses around the U.S., crashing into voters waiting in line at polling stations, hacked traffic lights causing accidents, and the release of “deepfakes” to manipulate the public. The simulation resulted in the cancellation of the 2020 election and the imposition of martial law.

While Donald Trump continues to stoke the flames of division and uncertainty surrounding election 2020, the Establishment is also preparing for the possibility of martial law in response to this chaos. Meanwhile, the public is being prepped for a second wave of COVID-19 infections which could lead to the foreshadowed Darkest Winter. While we don’t care to instill fear we do encourage everyone to heed these warnings and be prepared for potential unrest in the days and weeks following the election.

Are You Prepared?

In conclusion, I believe we may have a narrow window of time to inform our friends and family, and motivate them to prepare for what may be on the horizon.

We can spend our time attempting to convince them of the lies of COVID-19.

We can also try to educate them about the numerous exercises predicting chaos and civil unrest across the United States.

As important as education is in the Information War; now might be the time to focus our energy on helping our families be prepared for what may come. Rather than attempting to convince them to see what you see or believe what you believe, perhaps we can simply help keep them safe until they can clearly see the writing on the wall.

Again, if you are hearing of these exercises and topics for the first time, please listen with an open mind.

I want to emphasize that I do not write these words in hopes of inspiring fear or stress. In fact, I hope that this analysis can paint a clear enough picture of the grim reality we are facing so we may act! It is only by honestly facing our circumstances that we can hope to influence and change the path of humanity.

This is a historic time to be alive and we have the opportunity to play a powerful role. It’s time to shake off the shackles and expose those who seek to hold us back for their own sick purposes.

The barrister-brewed humour of Edward Fitzgerald QC, one of the solid and stout figures defending a certain Julian Assange of WikiLeaks at the Old Bailey in London, was understandable.  Time had worn and wearied the parties, none more so than his client.  Fitzgerald had asked for water, but then mused that its absence could hardly have been as bad as the horrors of war in the Battle of Iwo Jima.  What mattered was the decision on extradition. 

Kevin Gosztola of Shadowproof also gave us a sense of the scene.

“I see a bench of a glass container, where Assange will be isolated during the announcement of his extradition decision.  This has been standard practice during this case, even after he complained about how it infringed upon his ability to participate in his defense.”

As it transpired, District Justice Vanessa Baraitser went against her near perfect streak of granting extraditions by blocking the request by the US government for 17 charges based on the Espionage Act of 1917 and one of conspiracy to commit computer intrusion.  Crudely put, she accepted the grounds of poor mental health, evidence that Assange was a suicide risk, and that his conditions of detention in a US supermax prison facility might well accentuate it.  She also noted a “real risk that … Assange will be subject to restrictive special administrative measures [SAMs].”

Should the publisher be “subjected to the extreme conditions of SAMs, [his] mental health will deteriorate to the point where he will commit suicide with the ‘single minded determination’ described by Dr [Quinton] Deeley.”  She was further “satisfied that Mr Assange’s suicidal impulses will come from his psychiatric diagnoses rather than his own voluntary act.”  Accordingly, “it would be oppressive to extradite [Assange] to the United States of America.”

But for those unwilling to digest the headline act and specious highlights, the decision of Justice Baraitser was also an expansive effort to salvage the credibility of state-sanctioned persecution while dishing it out to the defendant.  Central to her judgment was reasoning crafted to deny the exceptional, political nature of the Assange case and its threat to journalism.

She did not accept, for instance, that Assange would be treated differently – in other words, “be subject to harsh detention conditions on the basis of his political opinions or nationality.”  She further failed to accept that the case against Assange might be “manipulated for political purposes at the behest of the executive or the CIA.”

The mountain of evidence submitted by defence witnesses demonstrating the markedly politicised nature of the Department of Justice’s actions, left little impression.  As Reprieve’s board president Eric Lewis statedduring the trial, individual prosecutors might well be acting in good faith but “the [DOJ] is highly politicised and many Americans would agree with that sentiment.”  Baraitser’s response: “there is no credible evidence” to reach a conclusion “that federal prosecutors have improper motives for bringing these charges or to find they have acted contrary to their obligations and responsibilities of impartiality and fairness.”  Things remain perennially micro with some judicial minds.

Baraitser pays homage to state power and dirties the role played by WikiLeaks and whistleblowers.  The defence had argued Assange engaged in activities as an investigative journalist, and that such conduct would be protected by Article 10 of the European Charter of Human Rights providing the right to freedom of expression and information.

But the judge evidently had different ideas uncritically focusing on the alleged conspiracy to commit computer intrusion between Chelsea Manning and Assange.  In doing so, there was little engagement with the defence’s demonstration that the hacking allegation is deeply flawed and speculative, both in terms of attributable identity and on the matter of execution.   The testimony from Patrick Eller, formerly of the US Army Criminal Investigation Command headquarters at Quantico, was particularly damning.  Manning, Eller revealed on September 25, 2020, “already had legitimate access to all the databases from which she downloaded the data.”  To have logged “into another user account would not have provided her with more access than she already possessed.”

Baraitser merely accepted the prosecution submission that Assange had “agreed to use the rainbow tools, which he had for the purpose of cracking Microsoft password hashes, to decipher an alphanumeric code [Manning] had given him.”  The code was tailored for “an encrypted password hash stored on a Department of Defence computer connected to the SIPRNet [Secret Internet Protocol Router Network].”  But Eller’s testimony, referring to Manning’s court martial records, makes the point that she never supplied the two files essential in generating the decryption key for the password hash.  “At the time, it would not have been possible to crack an encrypted password hash, such as the one Manning obtained.”  In any case, Manning already had access, making any conspiracy needless.

None of this mattered a jot.   “This is the conduct which most obviously demonstrates Mr Assange’s complicity in Ms Manning’s theft of the information, and separates his activity from that of the ordinary investigative journalist.”  Assange had also allegedly engaged in conduct that would amount to offences in English law, not only with Manning, but with “computer hackers Teenager, Laurelai, Kayla, Jeremy Hammond, Sabu and Topiary to gain unauthorised access to a computer”.

The judge also took a withering view to the publisher’s “wider scheme, to work with computer hackers and whistle blowers to obtain information for WikiLeaks.”  She latched onto the US prosecution’s keenness to target Assange’s philosophy, citing the “Hacking at Random” conference held in August 2009 and the “Hack in the Box Security Conference” in October that year.  “Notwithstanding the vital role played by the press in a democratic society, journalists have the same duty as everyone else to obey the ordinary criminal law.”  The right to freedom of expression was mediated by imposed responsibilities and the “technical means” used in gathering information.

Clearly keeping in mind the deterrent function of such stifling instruments as The Official Secrets Act of 1989, Baraitser remained staunchly establishment in relegating journalism to the lowest pegs of significance.  Motivation is irrelevant, the public interest merely a construction best left to the paternally learned.  Those with secrets had to be prevented from disclosing them; the role of whether information should be made available for public consumption had to be left to “trusted people in a position to make an objective assessment of the public interest”.

The credulous acceptance of most of the evidence by Assistant US attorney in the Eastern District of Virginia, Gordon Kromberg, boggles.  Kromberg made a good go of convincing Baraitser that the case against Assange was far from “unprecedented” and would not attract the free speech protections of the US First Amendment.  Criminalising the intentional disclosure of names of intelligence agents and sources, by way of example, was still consistent with First Amendment rights.  Weakly, the judge claimed that, “Cases which raise novel issues of law are not so uncommon.”

Untroubled by any potential desecration of press freedoms, Baraitser resorted to vague hypotheticals.  Whether the prosecution would raise the issue of excluding Assange from the protections of the First Amendment for publishing national defence information or otherwise did not raise “a real risk that a court would find that Mr Assange will not be protected by the US Constitution in general or by the due process clause of the Fifth Amendment in particular.”  Convoluted understatement chokes the dangerous implication.

The “harm” thesis – that Assange’s publishing activities supposedly put people at risk – was seen as credible.  Little stock is put in his redaction efforts, many of which were extensively documented at the trial.  Instead, an opportunistic, careless figure emerges, one who endangered “well over one hundred people” and caused “quantifiable” harm – loss of employment, the freezing of assets.  Even if Assange had been “acting within the parameters of responsible journalism” he had no vested “right to make the decision to sacrifice the safety of these few individuals, knowing of their circumstances or the dangers they faced, in the name of free speech.”

The reasoning of the judge on the US-UK Treaty would have also caused shudders across the fourth estate.  Extradition treaties, she affirmed, confirmed no enforceable rights.  And Parliament, in its wisdom, had taken “the decision to remove the political offences bar which had previously been available to those facing extradition.”  She accepted, in whole, the US submission that the regime upon which extradition would be dealt with obligated the court to follow a set of “imperative steps” which did not “include a consideration of the political character of the offence”.

For human rights organisations and those defending press freedom, the judgment remains rewarding in terms of outcome, unsatisfactory in terms of reasoning.  It leaves the appalling treatment of Assange, at the hands of UK authorities guided by US instruction, unaccounted for.  As Amnesty International described it, the verdict “does not absolve the UK from having engaged in this politically-motivated process at the behest of the USA and putting media freedom and freedom of expression on trial.”  WikiLeaks editor-in-chief Kristinn Hrafnsson was characteristically blunt in his assessment.  “It is a win for Julian Assange – but it is not a win for journalism.”

The US Department of Justice, keen to prolong Assange’s suffering, promises to appeal, though the grounds on mental health will prove hard to impeach.  A bail application is due to be submitted by the defence in a few days.

Dr. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge.  He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne.  Email: [email protected]

Planet Lockdown and US Dollar Hegemony: Catherine Austin Fitts

By Catherine Austin Fitts, January 04 2021

This sit down interview with Catherine Austin Fitts covers the spectrum of the current situation we find ourselves in. It was conducted as a part of the full length documentary.

Master Biden Speaks

By Margaret Kimberley, January 04 2021

The civil rights groups’ rather basic requests for voting rights protections and the need for federal intervention to address police brutality were minimized and dismissed by the president-elect.

Generation Betrayed. The Corona Regime in Schools. The Future of Our Children

By Michael Hüter, January 04 2021

As a historian, I have been deeply appalled for months at how a whole society, whole nations, can be led collectively into division and, above all, irrationality solely on the basis of mass PCR tests.

The Raging 2020s. Soleimani Geopolitics, One Year On 

By Pepe Escobar, January 04 2021

One year ago, the Raging Twenties started with a murder. The assassination of Maj Gen Qassem Soleimani, commander of the Quds Force of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), was an act of war. 

US Imperialism Defeated: UK Court Blocks Extradition of Julian Assange

By Dr. Leon Tressell, January 04 2021

The judge sided with all of the American claims against Assange. However, she justified her decision on the grounds that Assange would be a suicide risk if he were extradited to the US due to the horrendous conditions in their supermax prisons.

Assange Wins. The Cost: The Crushing of Press Freedom, The Labelling of Dissent as Mental Illness

By Jonathan Cook, January 04 2021

The unexpected decision by Judge Vanessa Baraitser to deny a US demand to extradite Julian Assange, foiling efforts to send him to a US super-max jail for the rest of his life, is a welcome legal victory, but one swamped by larger lessons that should disturb us deeply.

Living in Dark Times: I Revolt, Therefore I Am!

By Dr. Rudolf Hänsel, January 04 2021

Most citizens instinctively feel that “Something is Rotten in the State of Denmark” and “Time is Out of Joint” (Shakespeare). However, a sense of authority and a mental obedience reflex prevent them from distrusting the brazen lies of politicians, scientists and the mass media and from saying no. With this behaviour they stabilise the totalitarian system.

2020: Annus Horribilis, The Worst Is Yet to Come? Poverty, Unemployment, Despair

By Stephen Lendman, January 04 2021

Well over 100,000 small businesses went bankrupt or otherwise shut down permanently because of draconian lockdowns, quarantines and related policies. According to Gallup survey data, “Americans’ mental health ratings s(ank) to a new low” in 2020 — with no end to mass-misery in prospect.

COVID-19: The Emergence of the Pandemic Industrial Complex

By Brian Berletic, January 04 2021

There is one industry who stands out above all others to benefit, an industry notorious for its deeply rooted corruption, and an industry that has already been caught using its ties with international organizations like the WHO to declare pandemics, stoke hysteria, and profit handsomely from the resulting chaos. It’s the West’s pharmaceutical industry.

Sure, I could have written my last article for Health Impact News for the year 2020 with a look back on how terrible the year was, but looking forward to better times in 2021. Undoubtedly, that would have been a more popular article.

But then I would have had to lie to you. Because if one truly understands what has happened in 2020, then you should also understand that this Plandemic was just the prelude, and things are now about to get a lot worse.

2019 is history, and we will NEVER go back to the kind of life we had back then. The Globalists know this, and for those who reject being spoon-fed the propaganda that is called “news” in the pharma-owned corporate media, we know it too.

Since there has been a threat hanging over us in the Alternative Health media of being censored once the new COVID vaccines started being distributed, I have already written what needs to be understood at the close of 2020, since I had no idea how much longer we would be allowed to continue publishing and have worked hard to get this information to our readers as quickly as possible.

So here is the review.

Pretty much everything concerning COVID19 was predicted and planned for before the first cases were even reported in Wuhan, China at the beginning of the year. See our page on the “Plandemic” in our COVID Information Center.

The Globalists have also announced what is in the pipeline and coming next.

That includes a Dark Winter, and a “Digital Pandemic” which will strike our infrastructure through Cyber attacks and make COVID19 look like “a small disturbance” in comparison, according to Klaus Schwab, the founder and executive chairman of the World Economic Forum. See:

Why is the Corporate Media Predicting a “Dark Winter”?

WARNING! “Dark Winter” Begins! Next Phase is “Digital Pandemic” as Cyber Wars Start

Things will not get better until a significant portion of our population understands that Government is our ENEMY, no matter who is in office, because politicians at the top are puppets being controlled by their handlers, the Shadow Government that is run by the corporate Wall Street Billionaires and the Central Bankers.

Those who still believe that Trump is not one of them and expect him to save our nation, you will be sorely disappointed soon, even if he does come through and start arresting people in the “Deep State” and retains the presidency.

I have previously written who is the top person running the show, and explained many times now how we are uselessly fighting each other if we prefer one political party over the other.

Unmasking Who is Behind the Plandemic and Rioting to Usher in the New World Order

The Myth of Right vs. Left, Liberal vs. Conservative – Top 9 Myths Believed by BOTH Sides to Usher in a New World Order

For my real end of the year message to you, please read:

Is God’s Judgment About to Fall on America? What is the “Mark of the Beast”?

As we end this year on a very somber note, I share with you this video published by ReallyGraceful about what this year has done to our children.

Leaving a lucrative career as a nephrologist (kidney doctor), Dr. Suzanne Humphries is now free to actually help cure people.

In this autobiography she explains why good doctors are constrained within the current corrupt medical system from practicing real, ethical medicine.

One of the sane voices when it comes to examining the science behind modern-day vaccines, no pro-vaccine extremist doctors have ever dared to debate her in public.

Brian Shilhavy is Editor, Health Impact News

For 2021, we encourage our readers to make research a priority and to spread word of their findings to others; to ask questions and not to settle for unsatisfactory answers; to make decisions based on what’s proven rather than what’s convenient.

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One year ago, the Raging Twenties started with a murder.   

The assassination of Maj Gen Qassem Soleimani, commander of the Quds Force of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), alongside Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, the deputy commander of Iraq’s Hashd al-Sha’abi militia, by laser-guided Hellfire missiles launched from two MQ-9 Reaper drones, was an act of war. 

Not only the drone strike at Baghdad airport, directly ordered by President Trump, was unilateral, unprovoked and illegal: it was engineered as a stark provocation, to detonate an Iranian reaction that would then be countered by American “self-defense”, packaged as “deterrence”. Call it a perverse form of double down, reversed false flag.   

The imperial Mighty Wurlitzer spun it as a “targeted killing”, a pre-emptive op squashing Soleimani’s alleged planning of “imminent attacks” against US diplomats and troops. 

False. No evidence whatsoever. And then, Iraqi Prime Minister Adil Abdul-Mahdi, in front of his Parliament, offered the ultimate context: Soleimani was on a diplomatic mission, on a regular flight between Damascus and Baghdad, involved in complex negotiations between Tehran and Riyadh, with the Iraqi Prime Minister as mediator, at the request of President Trump. 

So the imperial machine – in complete mockery of international law – assassinated a de facto diplomatic envoy.  

The three top factions who pushed for Soleimani’s assassination were US neo-cons – supremely ignorant of Southwest Asia’s history, culture and politics – and the Israeli and Saudi lobbies, who ardently believe their interests are advanced every time Iran is attacked. Trump could not possibly see The Big Picture and its dire ramifications: only what his major Israeli-firster donor Sheldon Adelson dictates, and what Jared of Arabia Kushner whispered in his ear, remote-controlled by his close pal Muhammad bin Salman (MbS).

The armor of American “prestige”

The measured Iranian response to Soleimani’s assassination was carefully calibrated to not detonate vengeful imperial “deterrence”:  

precision missile strikes on the American-controlled Ain al-Assad air base in Iraq. The Pentagon received advance warning. 

Predictably, the run-up towards the first anniversary of Soleimani’s assassination had to degenerate into intimations of US-Iran once again on the brink of war.  

So it’s enlightening to examine what the Commander of the IRGC Aerospace Division, Brigadier General Amir-Ali Hajizadeh, https://www.tasnimnews.com/fa/news/1399/10/13/2423366/

told Lebanon’s Al Manar network:

“The US and the Zionist regime [Israel] have not brought security to any place and if something happens here (in the region) and a war breaks out, we will make no distinction between the US bases and the countries hosting them.”

Hajizadeh, expanding on the precision missile strikes a year ago, added, “We were prepared for the Americans’ response and all our missile power was fully on alert. If they had given a response, we would have hit all of their bases from Jordan to Iraq and the Persian Gulf and even their warships in the Indian Ocean.”

The precision missile strikes on Ain al-Assad, a year ago, represented a middle-rank power, enfeebled by sanctions, and facing a huge economic/financial crisis, responding to an attack by targeting imperial assets that are part of the Empire of Bases. That was a global first – unheard of since the end of WWII. It was clearly interpreted across vast swathes of the Global South as fatally piercing the decades-old hegemonic armor of American” prestige”.      

So Tehran was not exactly impressed by two nuclear-capable B-52s recently flying over the Persian Gulf; or the US Navy announcing the arrival of the nuclear-powered, missile loaded USS Georgia in the Persian Gulf last week. 

These deployments were spun as a response to an evidence-free claim that Tehran was behind a 21-rocket attack against the sprawling American embassy in Baghdad’s Green Zone. 

The (unexploded) 107mm caliber rockets – by the way marked in English, not Farsi – can be easily bought in some underground Baghdad souk by virtually anybody, as I have seen for myself in Iraq since the mid-2000s.  

That certainly does not qualify as a casus belli – or “self-defense” merging with “deterrence”. The Centcom justification  actually sounds like a Monty Python sketch: an attack “…almost certainly conducted by an Iranian-backed rogue militia group.” Note that “almost certainly” is code for “we have no idea who did it”.  

How to fight the – real – war on terror 

Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif did take the trouble (see attached tweet) to warn Trump he was being set up for a fake casus belli – and blowback would be inevitable. That’s a case of Iranian diplomacy being perfectly aligned with the IRGC: after all, the whole post-Soleimani strategy comes straight from Ayatollah Khamenei.  

And that leads to the IRGC’s Hajizadeh once again establishing the Iranian red line in terms of the Islamic Republic’s defense: “We will not negotiate about the missile power with anyone” – pre-empting any move to incorporate missile reduction into a possible Washington return to the JCPOA. Hajizadeh has also emphasized that Tehran   has restricted the range of its missiles to 2,000 km. 

My friend Elijah Magnier, arguably the top war correspondent across Southwest Asia in the past four decades, has neatly detailed the importance of Soleimani. 

Everyone not only along the Axis of Resistance – Tehran, Baghdad, Damascus, Hezbollah – but across vast swathes of the Global South is firmly aware of how Soleimani led the fight against ISIS/Daesh in Iraq from 2014 to 2015, and how he was instrumental in retaking Tikrit in 2015.  

Zeinab Soleimani, the impressive General’s daughter, has

profiled the man, and the sentiments he inspired. And Hezbollah’s secretary-general Sayed Nasrallah, in an extraordinary interview,  stressed Soleimani’s “great humility”, even “with the common people, the simple people.”  

Nasrallah tells a story that is essential to place Soleimani’s modus operandi in the real – not fictional – war on terror, and deserves to be quoted in full:  

 “At that time, Hajj Qassem traveled from Baghdad airport to Damascus airport, from where he came (directly) to Beirut, in the southern suburbs. He arrived to me at midnight. I remember very well what he said to me: “At dawn you must have provided me with 120 (Hezbollah) operation commanders.”

I replied

“But Hajj, it’s midnight, how can I provide you with 120 commanders?”

He told me that there was no other solution if we wanted to fight (effectively) against ISIS, to defend the Iraqi people, our holy places [5 of the 12 Imams of Twelver Shi’ism have their mausoleums in Iraq], our Hawzas [Islamic seminars], and everything that existed in Iraq. There was no choice. “I don’t need fighters. I need operational commanders [to supervise the Iraqi Popular Mobilization Units, PMU].”

This is why in my speech [about Soleimani’s assassination], I said that during the 22 years or so of our relationship with Hajj Qassem Soleimani, he never asked us for anything. He never asked us for anything, not even for Iran. Yes, he only asked us once, and that was for Iraq, when he asked us for these (120) operations commanders. So he stayed with me, and we started contacting our (Hezbollah) brothers one by one. We were able to bring in nearly 60 operational commanders, including some brothers who were on the front lines in Syria, and whom we sent to Damascus airport [to wait for Soleimani], and others who were in Lebanon, and that we woke up from their sleep and brought in [immediately] from their house as the Hajj said he wanted to take them with him on the plane that would bring him back to Damascus after the dawn prayer. And indeed, after praying the dawn prayer together, they flew to Damascus with him, and Hajj Qassem traveled from Damascus to Baghdad with 50 to 60 Lebanese Hezbollah commanders, with whom he went to the front lines in Iraq. He said he didn’t need fighters, because thank God there were plenty of volunteers in Iraq. But he needed [battle-hardened] commanders to lead these fighters, train them, pass on experience and expertise to them, etc. And he didn’t leave until he took my pledge that within two or three days I would have sent him the remaining 60 commanders.”

Orientalism, all over again 

A former commander under Soleimani that I met in Iran in 2018 had promised me and my colleague Sebastiano Caputo that he would try to arrange an interview with the Maj Gen – who never spoke to foreign media. We had no reason to doubt our interlocutor – so until the last Baghdad minute we were in this selective waiting list. 

As for Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, killed side by side with Soleimani in the Baghdad drone strike, I was part of a small group who spent an afternoon with him in a safe house inside – not outside – Baghdad’s Green Zone in November 2017. My full report is here.  

Prof. Mohammad Marandi of the University of Tehran, reflecting on the assassination, told me, “the most important thing is that the Western view on the situation is very Orientalist. They assume that Iran has no real structures and that everything is dependent on individuals. In the West an assassination doesn’t destroy an administration, company, or organization. Ayatollah Khomeini passed away and they said the revolution was finished. But the constitutional process produced a new leader within hours. The rest is history.” 

This may go a long way to explain Soleimani geopolitics. He may have been a revolutionary superstar – many across the Global South see him as the Che Guevara of Southwest Asia – but he was most of all a quite articulated cog of a very articulated machine.  

The adjunct President of the Iranian Parliament, Hossein Amirabdollahian, told Iranian network Shabake Khabar that Soleimani, two years before the assassination, had already envisaged an inevitable “normalization” between Israel and Persian Gulf monarchies.

At the same time he was also very much aware of the Arab League 2002 position – shared, among others, by Iraq, Syria and Lebanon: a “normalization” cannot even begin to be discussed without an independent – and viable – Palestinian state under 1967 borders with East Jerusalem as capital.  

Now everyone knows this dream is dead, if not completely buried. What remains is the usual, dreary slog: the American assassination of Soleimani, the Israeli assassination of top Iranian scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, the relentless, relatively low-intensity Israeli warfare against Iran fully supported by the Beltway, Washington’s illegal occupation of parts of northeast Syria to grab some oil, the perpetual drive for regime change in Damascus, the non-stop demonization of Hezbollah.    

Beyond the Hellfire 

Tehran has made it very clear that a return to at least a measure of mutual respect between US-Iran involves Washington rejoining the JCPOA with no preconditions, and the end of illegal, unilateral Trump administration sanctions. These parameters are non-negotiable.

Nasrallah, for his part, in a speech in Beirut on Sunday, stressed, 

“one of the main outcomes of the assassination of General Soleimani and al-Muhandis is the calls made for the expulsion of US forces from the region. Such calls had not been made prior to the assassination. The martyrdom of the resistance leaders set US troops on the track of leaving Iraq.” 

This may be wishful thinking, because the military-industrial-security complex will never willingly abandon a key hub of the Empire of Bases.  

More important is the fact that the post-Soleimani environment transcends Soleimani.  

The Axis of Resistance – Tehran-Baghdad-Damascus-Hezbollah – instead of collapsing, will keep getting reinforced. 

Internally, and still under “maximum pressure” sanctions, Iran and Russia will be cooperating to produce Covid-19 vaccines, and the Pasteur Institute of Iran will co-produce a vaccine with a Cuban company. 

Iran is increasingly solidified as the key node of the New Silk Roads in Southwest Asia: the Iran-China strategic partnership is constantly revitalized by FMs Zarif and Wang Yi, and that includes Beijing turbo-charging its geoeconomic investment in South Pars – the largest gas field on the planet. 

Iran, Russia and China will be involved in the reconstruction of Syria – which will also include, eventually, a New Silk Road branch: the Iran-Iraq-Syria-Eastern Mediterranean railway. 

All that is an interlinked, ongoing process no Hellfires are able to burn. 

The unexpected decision by Judge Vanessa Baraitser to deny a US demand to extradite Julian Assange, foiling efforts to send him to a US super-max jail for the rest of his life, is a welcome legal victory, but one swamped by larger lessons that should disturb us deeply.

Those who campaigned so vigorously to keep Assange’s case in the spotlight, even as the US and UK corporate media worked so strenuously to keep it in darkness, are the heroes of the day. They made the price too steep for Baraitser or the British establishment to agree to lock Assange away indefinitely in the US for exposing its war crimes and its crimes against humanity in Iraq and Afghanistan. 

But we must not downplay the price being demanded of us for this victory. 

https://twitter.com/Jonathan_K_Cook/status/1346059260539637760

A moment of celebration

We have contributed collectively in our various small ways to win back for Assange some degree of freedom, and hopefully a reprieve from what could be a death sentence as his health continues to deteriorate in an overcrowded Belmarsh high-security prison in London that has become a breeding ground for Covid-19.  

For this we should allow ourselves a moment of celebration. But Assange is not out of the woods yet. The US has said it will appeal the decision. And it is not yet clear whether Assange will remain jailed in the UK – possibly in Belmarsh – while many months of further legal argument about his future take place. 

The US and British establishments do not care where Assange is imprisoned – be it Sweden, the UK or the US. What has been most important to them is that he continues to be locked out of sight in a cell somewhere, where his physical and mental fortitude can be destroyed and where he is effectively silenced, encouraging others to draw the lesson that there is too high a price to pay for dissent. 

The personal battle for Assange won’t be over till he is properly free. And even then he will be lucky if the last decade of various forms of incarceration and torture he has been subjected to do not leave him permanently traumatised, emotionally and mentally damaged, a pale shadow of the unapologetic, vigorous transparency champion he was before his ordeal began.

That alone will be a victory for the British and US establishments who were so embarrassed by, and fearful of, Wikileaks’ revelations of their crimes. 

Rejected on a technicality 

But aside from what is a potential personal victory for Assange, assuming he doesn’t lose on appeal, we should be deeply worried by the legal arguments Baraitser advanced in denying extradition. 

The US demand for extradition was rejected on what was effectively a technicality. The US mass incarceration system is so obviously barbaric and depraved that, it was shown conclusively by experts at the hearings back in September, Assange would be at grave risk of committing suicide should he become another victim of its super-max jails.à 

One should not also discard another of the British establishment’s likely considerations: that in a few days Donald Trump will be gone from the White House and a new US administration will take his place. 

There is no reason to be sentimental about president-elect Joe Biden. He is a big fan of mass incarceration too, and he will be no more of a friend to dissident media, whistleblowers and journalism that challenges the national security state than was his Democratic predecessor, Barack Obama. Which is no friend at all. 

But Biden probably doesn’t need the Assange case hanging over his head, becoming a rallying cry against him, an uncomfortable residue of the Trump administration’s authoritarian instincts that his own officials would be forced to defend. 

It would be nice to imagine that the British legal, judicial and political establishments grew a backbone in ruling against extradition. The far more likely truth is that they sounded out the incoming Biden team and received permission to forgo an immediate ruling in favour of extradition – on a technicality. 

Keep an eye on whether the new Biden administration decides to drop the appeal case. More likely his officials will let it rumble on, largely below the media’s radar, for many months more. 

Journalism as espionage 

Significantly, Judge Baraitser backed all the Trump administration’s main legal arguments for extradition, even though they were comprehensively demolished by Assange’s lawyers. 

Baraitser accepted the US government’s dangerous new definition of investigative journalism as “espionage”, and implied that Assange had also broken Britain’s draconian Official Secrets Act in exposing government war crimes.

She agreed that the 2007 Extradition Treaty applies in Assange’s case, ignoring the treaty’s actual words that exempt political cases like his. She thereby opened the door for other journalists to be seized in their home countries and renditioned to the US.

Baraitser accepted that protecting sources in the digital age – as Assange did for whistleblower Chelsea Manning, an essential obligation on journalists in a free society – now amounts to criminal “hacking”. She trashed free speech and press freedom rights, saying they did not provide “unfettered discretion by Mr Assange to decide what he’s going to publish”.

She appeared to approve of the ample evidence showing that the US spied on Assange inside the Ecuadorian embassy, both in violation of international law and his client-lawyer privilege – a breach of his most fundamental legal rights that alone should have halted proceedings. 

https://twitter.com/kgosztola/status/1346043748078260226 

Baraitser argued that Assange would receive a fair trial in the US, even though it was almost certain to take place in the eastern district of Virginia, where the major US security and intelligence services are headquartered. Any jury there would be dominated by US security personnel and their families, who would have no sympathy for Assange. 

So as we celebrate this ruling for Assange, we must also loudly denounce it as an attack on press freedom, as an attack on our hard-won collective freedoms, and as an attack on our efforts to hold the US and UK establishments accountable for riding roughshod over the values, principles and laws they themselves profess to uphold. 

Even as we are offered with one hand a small prize in Assange’s current legal victory, the establishment’s other hand seizes much more from us.

Vilification continues

There is a final lesson from the Assange ruling. The last decade has been about discrediting, disgracing and demonising Assange. This ruling should very much be seen as a continuation of that process.

Baraitser has denied extradition only on the grounds of Assange’s mental health and his autism, and the fact that he is a suicide risk. In other words, the principled arguments for freeing Assange have been decisively rejected.

If he regains his freedom, it will be solely because he has been characterised as mentally unsound. That will be used to discredit not just Assange, but the cause for which he fought, the Wikileaks organisation he helped to found, and all wider dissidence from establishment narratives. This idea will settle into popular public discourse unless we challenge such a presentation at every turn.  

 Assange’s battle to defend our freedoms, to defend those in far-off lands whom we bomb at will in the promotion of the selfish interests of a western elite, was not autistic or evidence of mental illness. His struggle to make our societies fairer, to hold the powerful to account for their actions, was not evidence of dysfunction. It is a duty we all share to make our politics less corrupt, our legal systems more transparent, our media less dishonest.

Unless far more of us fight for these values – for real sanity, not the perverse, unsustainable, suicidal interests of our leaders – we are doomed. Assange showed us how we can free ourselves and our societies. It is incumbent on the rest of us to continue his fight.

 This essay first appeared on Jonathan Cook’s blog: https://www.jonathan-cook.net/blog/

Jonathan Cook won the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. His books include “Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East” (Pluto Press) and “Disappearing Palestine: Israel’s Experiments in Human Despair” (Zed Books). His website is www.jonathan-cook.net.

“We have to reserve the right to bomb N…” (British Prime Minister David Lloyd George, 1932(1))

Historical human rights abuses are not explained well in most school textbooks or by the mainstream media. They celebrate Columbus as an explorer, failing to note that the purpose of his voyage was plunder, and that he should be remembered for helping to start the trans-Atlantic slave trade and the genocide of the people of Haiti. Britain’s human rights record is appalling. Some of Britain’s most famous seafarers, such as Sir Francis Drake, were actually pirates (notice the Sir – being a criminal does not affect your chances of receiving an honour if your crimes are committed on behalf of the government). The explorer Henry Stanley (famous for the line “Dr. Livingstone, I presume?”) assisted King Leopold II of Belgium in controlling the people of the Congo, so that he could steal their rubber. King Leopold is most famous for cutting off the hands of the native population. One of Stanley’s key roles was in persuading local chiefs to sign treaties they did not understand.(2) Commerce was (and still is) more important than human rights.  

Gradually, there has been a steady improvement in how governments from many nations treat their citizens. In most countries slavery has been abolished. Women and minorities are supposed to have equal rights, and we have agreements on how prisoners are treated. Each year, a couple of countries removed the death penalty.(3) Many of us recognised that our earlier exploitation of some groups of people was no longer acceptable. 

In 1947 the United Nations came up with the Universal Declaration on Human Rights.(4) This is a surprisingly long list of rights that every person is entitled to. The right to life perhaps being the most important, but also freedom from slavery and torture. However, the Declaration was flawed from the beginning because the five most powerful nations at the time (US, Britain, Russia, China and France) violated the rights of their citizens or their colonies on a regular basis, even whilst the declaration was being created.(5) British negotiators were aware that the authorities in some British colonies carried out murder, torture and rape. Authorities in other British colonies regularly detained people, hindered freedom of movement and controlled the holding of meetings. British colonies were therefore being governed in ways that contradicted the declaration.(6) 

Whatever progress we had made came to an abrupt halt following the terrorist attacks in New York on September 11^th, 2001. We have gone backwards significantly for the last 20 years.(7)Steadily increasing standards of human rights and personal freedoms have been set aside as we fly people abroad for torture, and destroy multiple countries in the Middle East.

Mass Murder Is Not A Crime If You Call It War – And You’re British or American

“The American army’s use of its massive fire-power is so unrestrained that all US military operations are in reality the collective punishment of whole districts, towns and cities.” (Patrick Cockburn, 2005(8))

An important part of the propaganda system in Britain and the US is that we have been conditioned over many years to assess a country’s human rights record based on the treatment of its own people. However, it is more accurate to also include human rights violations committed by our governments and their armies in other countries. When we do this, it becomes clear that many of the worst human rights atrocities are committed by the US and British governments when they go to war, or when they supply weapons or provide assistance to murderous dictators. The version of war that we see in the US and British media bears little relationship to what actually goes on when the US and Britain invade another country. The media shows us videos of precision bombs hitting their targets. What they rarely show is the mass slaughter and maiming of human beings, and the destruction of entire cities using the most devastating weapons available.

We have also been conditioned to think of human rights as what are known as political rights, such as the right to vote, freedom of speech (which means the right to criticise your government), and the right to a free press. These rights are regularly violated in many countries. However, there are even more important rights within the 1948 declaration, such as the right to life. In other words, the right not to be shot by an invading army. It is these more important rights that are violated by the US and British governments when they invade other countries.

If we examine the activities of US soldiers in wartime, we find that they commit mass murder on a regular basis. A good example was the ‘Highway of Death’. In 1991, the Iraqi army had just invaded Kuwait, but they agreed to a ceasefire and were withdrawing their troops. The US White House Press Secretary, Marlin Fitzwater, stated that “The United States…will not attack retreating Iraqi forces.”(9) Two thousand Iraqi vehicles were returning on the main highways between Kuwait and Iraq. US planes destroyed vehicles at the front and rear of the column, so vehicles in-between could not move. They then methodically destroyed everything, killing thousands of people, not discriminating between civilians and the military. The people on the ground were defenceless. The pilots described this as a ‘Turkey Shoot’.(10) Eyewitnesses report US soldiers burying the bodies quickly to hide them before journalists arrived.

Also in 1991, when the US military invaded Iraq, they were equipped with armoured bulldozers, and they fitted bulldozer blades to the front of some tanks. These were used to push sand into the Iraqi trenches. Iraqi soldiers, most of whom were conscripts, were buried alive in their trenches, including many who were trying to surrender. The conscripts were poorly equipped and had no weapons that were effective against the US armour. Others were just burned alive by dropping napalm bombs on the trenches. The staff of the US commander, General Schwarzkopf, privately estimated that 50-70,000 Iraqis were killed in approximately 70 miles of trenches.(11) These massacres went almost unreported by the mainstream media.

 It is interesting to compare media reporting of slaughter committed by US troops with other atrocities committed elsewhere. The Serbian leader, Slobodan Milosevic, was accused of genocide in Srebrenica in 1995, where 8,000 people died. The media made him out to be a monster. In contrast, when US forces slaughtered large numbers of people in the Iraqi city of Fallujah in 2004, the mainstream Western media offered virtually no criticism. Fallujah had been cut off so that none of the men could leave, and then bombed from the air. One observer compared Fallujah to Dresden, the German city that had been destroyed by firebombing during World War Two.(12) According to eyewitnesses, the use of incendiary weapons that could not be put out with water had melted some of the victims.

One Set of Rules For Everyone Else – No Rules For The Powerful 

From 1945-1949 the German leaders from World War Two were tried for their crimes at the Nuremberg Trials. They were found guilty of three sets of crimes. Crimes against peace, which means going to war in the first place; crimes against humanity, such as mass murder; and breaking the rules of war (see below). This whole procedure was hypocritical, because the US and Britain had regularly committed all three sets of crimes before the trials began, and they have committed all three sets of crimes on numerous occasions since.(13) 

The conclusion at the end of the trials was that invading another country is one of the worst crimes any group of people can commit, because it encompasses every violent act that follows. However, many of the military actions carried out by the US since 1945 and listed in earlier posts are crimes of this type. If we judged US crimes by the standards of Nuremberg, every US President since WW2 would have been found guilty of serious crimes.(14) Despite the US and Britain being responsible for, or actively supporting, many of the world’s worst war crimes and human rights violations throughout the last seventy years, the notion of holding these governments to account is rarely discussed by politicians or the mainstream media. In practice we have ‘victor’s justice’, where the losers can be prosecuted for war crimes, but the victorious side is not. The US is now so powerful that it is not prosecuted for any of its crimes. Neither is Britain. 

Over the years, legal experts have created ‘rules of war’, which most people think of as the rules that apply after the war has started. These are discussed regularly by the media when other countries violate them, but are mostly ignored by decision-makers in the US and British governments. In the real world, once war begins, there are no rules. There is an expression, ’in time of war, law is silent’ and former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill once said “In the struggle for life and death there is in the end no legality”.(15) The former US representative at the UN, John Bolton, has made it clear that International Law does not apply to the US.(16) The historical evidence clearly shows that in any war, both sides ignore the rules as and when they choose. Discussions about the rules, after a war has started, are analogous to debating whether a violent rapist wore a condom.(17) Going to war in the first place is the real crime. Once war begins, debating the rules within that war is a propaganda technique to shift responsibility for wrongdoing onto individual soldiers, rather than the politicians who created the war.  

The Iraq and Afghanistan war logs that were released by Wikileaks show clearly that once war begins, soldiers commit human rights abuses on a daily basis. They murder, torture and injure civilians, then cover up those crimes.(18) War is death, destruction, mutilation, violence and rape on an enormous scale. When our politicians vote for war, they are voting for the industrial-scale slaughter of human beings.  

Human Rights Are Currently Just Public Relations 

Politicians and the mainstream media present the world in a simplistic way, which has been described as the ‘3 V’s division of humanity – villains, victims and victorious saviours’, where the US are always presented as the victorious saviours.(19) The evidence shows this is just propaganda. We have already seen in earlier posts that the US has come close to genocide in Korea, Vietnam and Iraq; has killed large numbers of people in Afghanistan, Libya and many other countries; has supported dictators committing genocide in Indonesia; and it has also supported regimes in central Africa that have fought wars where upwards of 4 million people have died. The US and British governments have ignored human rights whenever it has suited them. They have never taken human rights seriously. When they criticise another governments’ human rights record, it is not because of a genuine concern for human rights. 

Useful Websites

Wikileaks Iraq war logs https://wikileaks.org/irq/

Wikileaks Afghan War Diary https://wikileaks.org/afg/

Further Reading

Kirsten Sellars – The Rise and Rise of Human Rights

Jean Bricmont – Humanitarian Imperialism

Notes

1) David Lloyd George, cited in Mark Curtis, The Great Deception, 1998, p.135.

2) Francis Drake is discussed in Krzysztof Wilczynski, ‘The Gentleman Pirate’, at www.piratesinfo.com/biography/biography.php?article_id=32

Henry Stanley is discussed in Adam Hochschild, King Leopold’s Ghost, 2012

Christopher Columbus is discussed at Dylan Matthews, ‘9 Reasons Christopher Columbus was a murderer, tyrant and scoundrel’, Vox, 12 Oct 2015, at

https://www.vox.com/2014/10/13/6957875/christopher-columbus-murderer-tyrant-scoundrel

3) Amnesty International, ‘Death Penalty Facts and Figures’, April 2019, at https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2019/04/death-penalty-facts-and-figures-2018/

4) Universal Declaration of Human Rights, at

https://www.un.org/en/universal-declaration-human-rights/

5) Kirsten Sellars, The Rise and Rise of Human Rights, 2002, p.7

6) Kirsten Sellars, The Rise and Rise of Human Rights, 2002, p.95

7) https://www.hrw.org/world-report/2019/country-chapters/united-states

8) Patrick Cockburn, ‘We must avoid the terrorist trap’, The Independent, July 11, 2005, at

https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/commentators/patrick-cockburn-we-must-avoid-the-terrorist-trap-5346486.html

9) Michael K. Duffy, Peacemaking Christians: The future of just wars, pacifism, and nonviolent resistance, 1995, p.65

10) Joyce Chediac, ‘The Massacre of Withdrawing Soldiers On The Highway of Death’, in Ramsey Clark et al, War Crimes: A Report on United States War Crimes against Iraq, 1992, at http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/International_War_Crimes/Massacre_JChediac_WC.html

See also Geoff Simons, The Scourging of Iraq: Sanctions, Law and Natural Justice, 1996

There were actually multiple massacres carried out by the US military on different highways. Most mainstream news sources have tried to play down the severity of these events, but there were some mainstream eyewitnesses:

Journalist Robert Fisk arrived very quickly and said he saw bodies everywhere

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highway_of_Death

Journalist Peter Turnley said he saw US soldiers burying many bodies in large graves before other journalists arrived.

Peter Turnley, ‘The unseen gulf war’, Dec 2002, at http://digitaljournalist.org/issue0212/pt_intro.html

see also Seymour Hersh, ‘Overwhelming Force: What happened in the final days of the gulf war?’, The New Yorker, 22 May 2000, pp.49-82, at

https://cryptome.org/mccaffrey-sh.htm

11) Maggie O’Kane, ‘How To Tell Lies And Win Wars’, Muslim and Arab Perspectives 2:11-12, 1995, pp.31-43, at

www.missionislam.com/nwo/gulfwar.htm

See also, Noam Chomsky, Understanding Power: The Indispensable Chomsky, 2003, footnotes at

http://www.understandingpower.com/ 

12) Rory McCarthy and Peter Beaumont, ‘Civilian cost of Battle for Fallujah Emerges’, 14 Nov 2004, at

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2004/nov/14/iraq.iraq3

For more on Fallujah, see also Dahr Jamail, ‘What I Saw In Fallujah’, 5 Nov 2007, The New Statesman, at

http://www.dahrjamail.net/2007/11/05/what-i-saw-in-fallujah/ 

David Cromwell and David Edwards, ‘Some Matter More – When 47 Victims Are Worth 43 Words’, Medialens, 22 July, 2008, at

https://www.medialens.org/2008/some-matter-more-when-47-victims-are-worth-43-words/

13) Kirsten Sellars, The Rise and Rise of Human Rights, 2002, p.34

 14) Noam Chomsky, ‘If the Nuremberg laws were applied…’, 1990, at

https://chomsky.info/1990____-2/

 15) Kirsten Sellars, The Rise and Rise of Human Rights, 2002, p.36

 16) Fred Kaplan, ‘Send Bolton Wandering: Why The Senate Should Reject Bush’s UN Nominee’, Slate, 5 April 2005, at

www.slate.com/id/2116264/

 17) Jean Bricmont, Humanitarian Imperialism, 2005, p.147

 18) Wikileaks, ‘Iraq war logs’, at https://wikileaks.org/irq/

 Wikileaks, ‘Afghan war diary’, at https://wikileaks.org/afg/

 19) Diana Johnstone, ‘Why the French hate Chomsky’, Counterpunch, June 12, 2010

https://www.counterpunch.org/2010/06/14/why-the-french-hate-chomsky/

Rod Driver is a part-time academic who is particularly interested in de-bunking modern-day US and British propaganda. This is the ninth in a series entitled Elephants In The Room, which attempts to provide a beginners guide to understanding what’s really going on in relation to war, terrorism, economics and poverty, without the nonsense in the mainstream media.

This article was first posted at medium.com/elephantsintheroom

Today at the Old Bailey in London Judge Vanessa Baraitser ruled that WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange should not be extradited to the United States. The judge sided with all of the American claims against Assange. However, she justified her decision on the grounds that Assange would be a suicide risk if he were extradited to the US due to the horrendous conditions in their supermax prisons.

Journalist John Pilger has pointed out that this decision does not reflect how fair the British justice system is. Rather, the judge, faced with evidence that Assange has been spied upon in the Ecuadorian embassy and therefore not received a fair trial, used a legal technicality to save face. Pilger notes:

“This is wonderful! It’s a face saving cover for the British to justify their disgraceful political trial of Assange on America’s behalf.’’

On Wednesday the judge will rule on whether Assange can be released on bail while he awaits the US appeal. Of course, the US Department of Justice will argue that Assange should remain in Belmarsh maximum security prison until the appeal hearing takes place.

We should celebrate this defeat of the American Empire but remember that this was not a victory for press freedom. Pulitzer prize winning journalist Glenn Greenwald has observed:

“This wasn’t a victory for press freedom. Quite the contrary: the judge made clear she believed there are grounds to prosecute Assange in connection with the 2010 publication.’’

The Defend Assange campaign has summarised the 118 page opinion of the judge in which she sided with the US prosecution on every key issue:

“The judge ruled:

• The U.K. Extradition Act should take precedence over the U.S.-U.K. Extradition Treaty, and the former removed the clause barring extradition for political offences
• The charges against Assange in the U.S. would be considered offences in the U.S.
• Assange’s conduct “went beyond that of a journalist” in agreeing to help Chelsea Manning crack a password and in telling her that “curious eyes never run dry,” encouraging her to leak more files
• The release of unredacted cables was “indiscriminate”
• Defence arguments about Assange’s political opinions were “extraneous”
• There was insufficient evidence that the charges were “pressurized” by the Trump Administration and instead showed healthy internal debate
• Though the intelligence community has harshly criticized WikiLeaks, it doesn’t speak for the administration
• It isn’t the UK court’s place to comment on the case of UC Global spying on Assange in the Ecuadorian Embassy, as it doesn’t have access to court documents in the case against UC Global in Spain
• Assange’s prospective jury pool in the Eastern District of Virginia would come from a large county, can’t prove it would only be ex-national security and ex-military officials
• Challenges of the U.S. prosecution’s “over broadness” and “vagueness” should be made in a U.S. court, not adjudicated here, no reason to think Assange wouldn’t have constitutional rights when tried in the U.S. — “This court trusts that a US court will properly consider Mr Assange’s constitutional right to free speech”
• On whether it would be oppressive to extradite: I accepted Prof Kopelman opinion that Mr Assange suffers from a recurrent depressive disorder, that Assange has suicidal ideation, and would be ‘single-minded’ in attempt to end his life
• Potential conditions in a US prison: CIA views Assange as hostile, still a security risk; Assange likely to be sent to ADX Florence, would be held in serious isolation
• The purpose of Special Administrative Measures is to minimize communications, and prisoners have extreme limitations. These conditions were considered by all experts to have deleterious impact on Assange’s mental health
• Mr Assange has the intellect and determination to follow through with suicidal ideation
• Therefore I rule it would be unjust to extradite Mr Assange. The US has the right to appeal.’’

During the extradition trial the defence lawyers for Assange presented compelling evidence against all of the key points of the US prosecution mentioned above.

We should celebrate this victory for journalist Julian Assange who has shown great courage in standing up to the psychological torture imposed on him by a collection of governments led by the US and UK.

“Protecting children from all dangers is my damned father’s duty,” sang Reinhard Mey. Our offspring currently need protection from the rigid corona regime in schools.

Serious damage is done to our sons and daughters through masking and social distance rules, through constant ventilation in freezing cold and the suppression of their vital needs for contact and impartiality – both physically and mentally.

In addition, their self-confidence is broken by the constant suggestion that they are a changing risk of infection. In addition, they are trained into conformism and submission to constraints.

Which generation is growing up there? Do we think our children are not systemically relevant and are we therefore only too willing to sacrifice them on the altar of the prevailing corona narrative? We must finally defend ourselves against the organized lovelessness to which our children are exposed.

As a historian, I have been deeply appalled for months at how a whole society, whole nations, can be led collectively into division and, above all, irrationality solely on the basis of mass PCR tests.

For weeks I have been wondering: Where is the so-called academic elite of Europe in the areas of history, political science, sociology and psychology which stands up and says: Enough! With a total “war against the virus”, according to Emmanuel Macron, – as in any war – thousands or millions of “civilians” – in this case healthy people – lose their livelihoods, make sick, and ultimately killed (1).

Where are the many celebrities in Europe from science, the arts, literature, music and film who come together in public and shout: Enough! We demand an end to Covid-19 totalitarianism, not just in the media!

Three years ago the renowned German historian Philipp Blom, who lives in Vienna, wrote the admonishing book: “What is at stake!” Meanwhile everything is at stake: human rights, social peace, freedom, democracy, prosperity, work, tolerance, public health – not because of the virus, but the highly disproportionate nature of measures such as “lockdown” – and simply human dignity.

For all these humane achievements people fought for centuries and many lost their lives. These achievements are not a law of nature, not divisible, not negotiable, not interpretable and also not measurable.

It was not without reason that the greatest peacemaker of all time, Mahatma Gandhi, gave us a warning: Whoever accepts injustice in silence is complicit!

As a reminder: the legacy of totalitarianism and fascism: Between 1914 and 1970, around 100 million people lost their lives in all world wars and civil wars, in all totalitarian societies in Europe, both right-wing and left-wing ideologies.

All of Europe’s totalitarian systems – National Socialism, Stalinism, Italian fascism, Franco’s dictatorship in Spain, etc. – they were all made possible not by those in power, not by the leaders and commanders, but without exception and again and again by the tolerant or silent majority. By the informers, but also by those who were discouraged and fearful. By those concerned about their belongings. In the end, almost everyone lost everything: their belongings, honor and human dignity.

I am writing here not only as a historian and researcher on the rights of children, but primarily as a father of three.

Most of the public play facilities for children were closed on World Playday for Children on May 29th and World Children’s Day on June 1st, while beer gardens and hardware stores had been open for weeks.

A society that implicitly says that children and young people are not “systemically relevant” does not want a future!

Since the end of March at the latest and until today, all international studies on SARS-CoV-2 have shown the following:

Children and adolescents play no role in the infection process, they rarely become infected and, if at all, they usually do not get sick at all (2).

A positive PCR test result does not automatically mean: infected! By now every journalist – also in Germany and Austria – should be familiar, understandable and comprehensible. And infected with SARS-CoV-2 does not automatically mean that you get Covid-19.

It is not without reason that every PCR test manufacturer points out: The test is not suitable for diagnostic purposes.

Therefore, mask compulsory and quarantine for children and adolescents, based solely on a positive PCR test, are child abuse and simply a crime of humanity.

Because to this day there is not a single evidence-based medical and therefore no legal justification for this!

The “Parents Stand Up” initiative carried out a nationwide survey among schoolchildren about the requirement to mask in schools. A first interim report of 2,300 questionnaires shows the following devastating picture:

For example, 44.1 percent of the students surveyed suffer from breathing difficulties. 73 percent of headaches, 86.4 percent of fatigue, 65.7 percent of concentration disorders, 38 percent of dizziness and around 36 percent of anxiety states.

As a reminder, for centuries the schools of Europe were primarily a place of religious, political or ideological indoctrination and also a place of violence. For months I have been oppressed by the feeling that, since March, Europe has literally released all the negative spirits of the last centuries from the bottle in one fell swoop.

Now a small excerpt from the interim evaluation of 2,300 questionnaires at mainly German kindergartens and schools in 2020:

In some crèches and kindergartens, parents have to leave their children at the door, even during the so-called acclimatization phase, because adults are not allowed to accompany them!

School classes with masks and wet jackets sit all day in classrooms with the windows open!

Again and again, students collapse because of wearing masks and are also punished with denunciation and exclusion!

Again and again it is suggested to young people that if you don’t wear a mask you are a murderer! In the meantime, however, dozens of studies have shown that wearing everyday masks to curb the spread of the virus does absolutely nothing.

Schoolchildren are only allowed to drink and go to the toilet according to the schedule, not when needed!

In some schools it is no longer allowed to shower and blow-dry your hair after swimming lessons!

Again and again children are terrified, with the argument: If you don’t wear a mask, it’s your fault when grandpa and grandma die!

This list is madness, it is pathology. Here healthy people are made sick.

A human rights disaster.

With what right – in the double sense of the word – do we simply steal everything from an entire generation of children and young people? Relationship and friendship, education and training, sport and health, freedom and self-efficacy, the acquisition of vital skills, simply and completely the future!

The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Michelle Bachelet, recently spoke of a “human rights disaster” at the 41st session of the Human Rights Council. “But if the rule of law is not respected, the health emergency threatens to turn into a human rights catastrophe, the negative effects of which will long surpass those of the pandemic itself,” warned the UN High Commissioner.

To all the highest and constitutional judges in Germany and Austria: Immediately end all Covid-19 measures for young people, for children and adolescents, end the mask requirement and school closings, end the exaggerated hygiene and distance rules, come to your senses and look to Sweden!

The young Astrid Lindgren, author of Pipi Longstocking, wrote in her diary in the 1940s: “Mankind has lost its mind.”

Sweden in 2020. To date, this country has not carried out a lockdown, nor has it introduced a general mask requirement. No school closings and, above all, no masking requirements for children and young people. In Sweden, the hundred thousand people prophesied by Angela Merkel, Sebastian Kurz, Christian Drosten and Co have not died to this day. Sweden does not make the healthy sick and does not abuse its children and adolescents with mask force.

Could it be that Covid-19 has mutated into a political virus in many parts of Europe? A small but possibly clarifying detail: Sweden is still neither in the euro zone nor a member of NATO. While Germany and Austria, for example, are in the second “lockdown”, schools, restaurants, fitness studios, cinemas, etc. are open in neighboring Switzerland.

First judgment on the general obligation to quarantine

A Portuguese court of appeal (Tribunal da Relação de Lisboa) is the first court in Europe to lift the general quarantine requirement for those who have tested positive with a judgment of November 11, 2020. His reasoning: The principle “in dubio pro reo” applies to courts. The PCR tests are unreliable and tested positive means neither necessarily contagious nor infected. According to the court, a medical diagnosis can only be made by a doctor (3).

Can it be that we are merely witnessing a gigantic and historically unprecedented medical-political abuse of power?

That a virus is being used as a scapegoat for something else?

Children and adolescents are not a virus risk for society, not even for the old, the sick and the elderly. Children are and will remain our only future!

Anyone who cannot stand a child’s laughter, who cannot bear the mental health of a child, who forces children to use masks and distance rules, is sick themselves. Not suffering from Covid-19, but from lovelessness, ignorance, hatred and dehumanization.

The history of mankind shows one thing impressively: no epidemic, no single virus can cause as much hardship, suffering, illness, misery and even death as a mentally ill society, human presumption and, above all, overconfidence.

We should protect our children from that!

*

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Notes

(1) On March 16, 2020, French President Emmanuel Macron spoke of war seven times in his State of the Union address (1st lockdown) regarding the corona crisis: “We are at war, a health war, for sure. We are not fighting against an army or any other nation, but the enemy is there, insecure, fleeting and on the advance. (…) We are at war. “

(2) There are now numerous international online platforms that publish uncommented international research reports, studies, evaluations, court rulings, etc. on Covid-19. For example the Swiss platform Swiss Policy Research.

(3) The original court ruling is available at: infosperber.ch

A selection of international research results on SARS-CoV-2 and children and adolescents:

The Icelandic tracing pioneer Kari Stephanson, CEO of deCODEgenetics, did not find a single case in which a child under ten had infected their parents.

The director of the US CDC (Center for Disease Control and Prevention), Robert Redfield, said that the number of additional suicides and drug deaths among adolescents in recent months has been far greater than the number of Covid-19 deaths.

According to the US state health authority CDC, three times more children up to 14 years of age have died of influenza than of Covid-19 (101 versus 31) since the beginning of 2020. To put that in perspective: The USA has around 328 million inhabitants and the general mental and physical health of children and adolescents in the USA has been consistently poor for over 20 years than in any other western country. Even before Covid-19 and for years, around 2.5 million children in the United States have been homeless.

A joint report from Sweden (without closing primary schools) and Finland (with closing primary schools) found that there was no difference in infection rates among children in the two countries. This joint state report was published by Sweden and Finland via the international press agency Reuters, which reported on it on July 15, 2020. So weeks before the state corona terror was introduced in schools in some German federal states such as North Rhine-Westphalia or Bavaria.

A British study found that up to 60 percent of children and adolescents and around 6 percent of adults already have cross-reactive antibodies against the new coronavirus that have arisen through contact with previous coronaviruses.

After the first lockdown, Saxony was the first federal state to start regular school operations, which were scientifically supported by Dresden University. Study leader Reinhard Berner explained to the Frankfurter Allgemeine on July 13th that in terms of Covid-19, in summary, children act more as a brake on the infection than as a carrier. See also “Corona consequences for children”

As well as at michael-hueter.org

Featured image is from Yakov Hanzelmann/Shutterstock.com