Teenagers Dying Suddenly in Australia, UK, Ireland

August 16th, 2023 by Dr. William Makis

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July 31, 2023 – Pyle, Wales – 15 year old Rugby captain Joseph Gardiner died suddenly of a cardiac arrest on July 31, 2023. He died a day after reportedly visiting his GP when he began experiencing shortness of breath.

July 19, 2023 – Irish football star 18 year old Pauric Brady died suddenly “after a short battle with cancer” he was diagnosed with in Dec. 2022. Diagnosis to death in 6 months.

July 6, 2023 – Australia – 11 year old Emma Schwab died suddenly on July 6, 2023 from “influenza B” after another 15 yo girl also died from it (click here). 

July 5, 2023 – Ireland – 17 year old football player Kayla Rooney died suddenly on July 5, 2023 “It is with great sadness our club announces the sudden passing of our U17 Football & Camogie player, Kayla Rooney,” St. Brigid’s Ladies Gaelic Football & Camogie Club.

June 28, 2023 – Liverpool, UK – 19 year old University student Harvey Edwards died suddenly. The media is very misleading with this story. He didn’t die from a sinus infection. He died from a brain bleed and stroke.

June 27, 2023 – Nambour, Australia – 18 year old Keira Dascoli-Guymer, a rising teen roller derby star, collapsed died suddenly on June 27, 2023 after collapsing & going into cardiac arrest on June 17, 2023, then spending 10 days in a coma, “her heart just stopped and they don’t know why.”

June 24/25, 2023 – Sheffield, UK – 20 yo Alex Graham, top British hockey prospect playing for the Sheffield Steelers, died suddenly over the weekend, June 24/25, 2023.

June 23, 2023 – Gold Coast, Australia – 20 year old apprentice electrician Caleb Pace collapsed during a game of Touch Football (Oztag) and died suddenly. While playing a match, his heart went into fibrillation, causing him to stop breathing & was in an induced coma for 3 days.

June 18, 2023 – Wales – 19 year old Daniel Smyth collapsed while on family holiday in Bulgaria. He woke in early morning hours feeling ill, collapsed in the bathroom and died. (Click here)

June 17, 2023 – Southampton, UK – 13 year old Sydney Daarol died suddenly in her sleep from cardiac arrest on June 17 2023. “She was perfectly healthy and had come home from a fun day of bowling with friends.”

June 16, 2023 – Telford, UK – 12 year old Joshua Lloyd, schoolboy at Telford Langley School, collapsed on a playing field at school and died on June 16, 2023, as onlookers desperately tried to revive him. “Ambulance crews responded to a “medical emergency.”

May 27, 2023 – Victoria, Australia – 17 year old Dallas Keogh collapsed during a football game and died suddenly on May 27, 2023. “He collapsed in the visitors rooms after the game & later died in hospital before he could be transferred.”

May 24, 2023 – Wolverhampton, UK – 15 yo soccer player Myles Christie died suddenly from a cardiac arrest on May 24, 2023.

May 2023 – Glasgow, Scotland – A young cafe worker at Singl-end Merchant City died suddenly in May 2023 Kayahad apparently been diagnosed with a stage 4 cancer only 6 weeks before her sudden death.

March 14, 2023 – Edinburgh, Scotland – 15 year old Andrew MacKinnon collapsed on the pitch at Forrester High School at 3:15pm and died suddenly on March 14, 2023.

My Take…

I started reporting on sudden deaths of Canadian teenagers in November 2022, when I started seeing them on a frighteningly regular basis.

Now we are seeing teenagers die suddenly in all the highly COVID-19 vaccinated countries.

From my observations, this is how COVID-19 vaccines are killing teenagers, from more frequent causes to less:

  1. Cardiac arrest during intense exercise (most deaths, vaccine myocarditis)
  2. Cardiac arrest doing a regular activity
  3. Cardiac arrest while sleeping (early morning hours, vaccine myocarditis)
  4. Blood clots – strokes (brain clots), pulmonary emboli (lung clots)
  5. Brain Bleed (usually a ruptured aneurysm, due to damaged blood vessels)
  6. Infections (sepsis, strep, influenza, meningitis – due to damaged immune system)
  7. Turbo cancer (most commonly leukemia, lymphoma, brain – glioblastoma)

In this group of 16 teenagers who died recently in UK, Ireland or Australia, you see all of these causes of death represented (except pulmonary emboli).

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Dr. William Makis is a Canadian physician with expertise in Radiology, Oncology and Immunology. Governor General’s Medal, University of Toronto Scholar. Author of 100+ peer-reviewed medical publications.


The Worldwide Corona Crisis, Global Coup d’Etat Against Humanity

by Michel Chossudovsky

Michel Chossudovsky reviews in detail how this insidious project “destroys people’s lives”. He provides a comprehensive analysis of everything you need to know about the “pandemic” — from the medical dimensions to the economic and social repercussions, political underpinnings, and mental and psychological impacts.

“My objective as an author is to inform people worldwide and refute the official narrative which has been used as a justification to destabilize the economic and social fabric of entire countries, followed by the imposition of the “deadly” COVID-19 “vaccine”. This crisis affects humanity in its entirety: almost 8 billion people. We stand in solidarity with our fellow human beings and our children worldwide. Truth is a powerful instrument.”

ISBN: 978-0-9879389-3-0,  Year: 2022,  PDF Ebook,  Pages: 164, 15 Chapters

Price: $11.50 FREE COPY! Click here (docsend) and download.

We encourage you to support the eBook project by making a donation through Global Research’s DonorBox “Worldwide Corona Crisis” Campaign Page

Saudi-UAE loophole in AI Computing?

August 16th, 2023 by Karsten Riise

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Will Saudi Arabia and UAE be creating a loop-hole for China and Russia to get access to high-performance cloud computing for AI?

They are both buying up enormous numbers of chips to build their own gargantuan data centers.

“Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates are buying up thousands of the high-performance Nvidia chips crucial for building artificial intelligence software, joining a global AI arms race that is squeezing the supply of Silicon Valley’s hottest commodity.

The Gulf powerhouses have publicly stated their goal of becoming leaders in AI as they pursue ambitious plans to turbocharge their economies. But the push has also raised concerns about potential misuse of the technology by the oil-rich states’ autocratic leaders.” (Financial Times, August 14, 2023)

If China and/or Russia get access to use these data centers, then they can run large AI models there.

I expect the US to intervene – otherwise the US chip restrictions on China will become a joke.

The question is only how the US will intervene against Saudi Arabia and UAE in this delicate matter.

Both Saudi Arabia and UAE are no longer push-overs for the USA – and we speak about an enormous amount of profit they can earn by super-charging China and Russia with exaggerated prices for access. On top of earning a lot of money, Saudi Arabia and UAE will also earn a lot of political “bonus points” in goodwill from China for doing so.

The US will have to use real strong coercion to stop Saudi Arabia and UAE from exploiting this great opportunity.

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Karsten Riise is a Master of Science (Econ) from Copenhagen Business School and has a university degree in Spanish Culture and Languages from Copenhagen University. He is the former Senior Vice President Chief Financial Officer (CFO) of Mercedes-Benz in Denmark and Sweden.

He is a regular contributor to Global Research.  

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As war drums beat across Africa, as China cleans up after devastating floods, as Maui searches remains, a tsunami is scheduled to hit Japan Tuesday with predictions of 20 inches of rain in 24 hours. Climate is changing patterns both naturally and thru geoengineering with bomb like consequences. And Niger’s military coup has sparked a western reaction – WAR!

It is playing out like a 4th of July fireworks display with the finale being a ratcheted torrent of bombs bursting in air! Ordinary people are on edge, their tongues quick to lash out with anger and even rage.

Are we in the midst of a geoengineered tit-for-tat war?  

The media overwhelmingly claim the Maui fire was caused by climate change. Why? Because the topsy-turvydom world claims everything nefarious is now caused by climate change. Vax deaths are because of – climate change. Plane crashes are – climate change. Citywide chaos is caused by – climate change. All because The Media says so.

The concept that a hurricane south of Hawaii caused the ‘climate change’ fires in Maui is preposterous! According to a past weather graph, the temperatures in Maui were normal, peaking at 88’, the wind speed was NE peaking at 25 mph at noon. This is normal. Hurricane Dora never made landfall and was tracked 500 miles ‘south’ of Hawaii amidst Northeasterly winds blowing southwest. Maui is north of Hawaii.

A normal ‘fast fire’ can travel up to 14 mph. The Maui fire was stated to be traveling at 60 mph.

According to government officials, the vast majority of the recent fires in Greece and Italy were arson. These coordinated blazes also spread across Croatia, Portugal, Spain, and Algeria. In each scenario, the respective governments blamed ‘arson terrorists’. NOT Climate Change!

Therefore, what if Hawaii was a tit-for-tat weaponized reaction to the China flooding? Or, what if it was a US military exercise using Directed Energy Lasers – gone awry…?

Directed Energy Weapons (DEW) use electromagnetic energy via energy lasers and high power microwave rays. Sonar is used to hone in on a target. They are being developed and/or are already in use by: US, China, Russia, India, Pakistan, Japan, Korea, UK, Germany, France, Iran and Turkey. Their impact is somewhat akin to an atomic bomb.

Lockheed Martin

“At sea, in the air and on the ground, Lockheed Martin is developing laser weapon systems ready to defend U.S. and allied forces. Combined with our platform integration expertise, these systems are designed to defeat a growing range of threats to military forces and infrastructure across all domains.”

Lockheed, Northrop, Raytheon are in various stages of testing Directed Energy Laser Weapons. It is NOT a conspiracy. Their websites are rife with bravado regarding their ability to target our ‘enemies’. Certainly, it would not be the first time the US military ‘accidentally’ destroyed a city/town.

The 2010 earthquake in Haiti was considered by ‘conspiracy theorists’ to have been caused by a HAARP experiment causing tectonic plate shifts. The recent earthquake in Turkey was a ‘threat’ to Erdogan to obey and abide by Western Cartels. OUR Government is a Conspiracy – incapable of providing anything remotely parallel to Truth.

The power and control these DEW weapons can yield is considered much more efficient than nuclear. Yet governments continue to parlay the effects of climate change as though the military industrial complex is nonexistent.

The Jet Stream: Jet streams are narrow bands of strong wind currents that occur in the upper atmosphere around 30,000 feet. The jet streams roughly follow the earth’s rotation. The speed of rotation is fastest at the equator, and slows to zero at the north & south poles. Typically these air currents flow west to east and when cold air collides with warm air, the jet stream moves north or south creating curvature blips.

Jet streams cause changes in weather, affecting high and low pressure systems – and shaping the weather. Climate enthusiasts assert the opposite – that climate changes cause jet streams – a scientifically proven false assertion.

According to Science Alert, today jet streams are chaotic and undefinable. The current fragmentation of the jet streams are fueling catastrophic weather patterns. Scientists are baffled. As a result, they are calling for more geoengineered manipulation – which will likely cause more chaos.

The flooding in China is damaging crops. The western media is fueling claims that China’s flooding could result in Xi Jinping’s government being blamed causing a collapse of faith in his power. And once again, the point of the accusation is to undermine Xi Jinping in order to insert a western proxy. The secondary point is the creation of a global food shortage.

The reality is that earth’s weather is comprised of complex atmospheric and subsurface ecosystems that interact in a completed cycles.

Like a rain forest, if any singular interruption of the eco-balance occurs, the entire system begins a slow death. When we pound particles at CERN, seed clouds, manipulate climate, and block the sun, we are forever destroying the natural balance. And no amount of $$$$$$$$$$$$ will reverse the course SCIENCE has crippled.

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Featured image is from Helena

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House Appropriations Republicans have loaded up their draft annual spending bills with at least two dozen poison pill policy riders that attack wildlife, endangered species, and at-risk habitats. The Clean Budget Coalition, which is tracking the poison pills added to federal spending bills, has repeatedly called on Congress to remove all of these harmful measures.

“The American people expect that wildlife conservation will be based on science, not politics,” said Leda Huta, executive director of the Endangered Species Coalition. “Decisions on how wildlife are protected should be made by biologists rather than politicians in Congress.”

“MAGA Republican leadership in the House has reached a new low in their Interior appropriations bill, which slashes protections for our clean air, water, and critically endangered species,” said Kaila Hood, government affairs advocate for the League of Conservation Voters. “The House Interior spending bill contains dozens of provisions that attack at-risk wildlife and habitats, including iconic species like bison, grizzly bears, and gray wolves. These harmful provisions are part of a larger wish-list from extractive industries and developers, which come at the expense of wildlife, our environment, and our collective health. We must ensure that these poison pill riders are not included in any final spending bills— now or in the future.”

“We need policies that meaningfully address the joint biodiversity and climate crises and the grave threats they present to wildlife and people,” said Mary Beth Beetham, legislative director for Defenders of Wildlife. “Politicians who attack the Endangered Species Act and override science-based conservation policies are ignoring catastrophes that grow worse by the day and will be poorly remembered by future generations paying for these harmful riders.”

The riders attacking wildlife include:

Commerce, Justice, Science, and Related Agencies

  • The Climate Fisheries Rider would block funds for climate change fisheries research, which would harm fisheries management, ecosystems, and fishermen.
  • The Vessel Strike Reduction Rule Rider would prevent the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration from finalizing its proposed North Atlantic right whale vessel strike reduction rule until a “near real-time monitoring and mitigation program” to track threatened or endangered whales has been deployed. This would slow down an urgently needed rule to protect the survival of this species.
  • The Forest Protection Rider would block funds for implementation of Executive Order 14072, which protects forests in federal regulatory decision making.

Energy and Water Development, and Related Agencies

  • The Waters of the U.S. Rider would block the January 2023 revised definition of “Waters of the United States.”

Interior, Environment, and Related Agencies

  • The Waters of the U.S. Rider would prevent the Waters of the United States rule from taking effect.
  • The Boundary Waters Mining Rider would overturn the Biden administration’s recently finalized withdrawal of around 225,000 acres of National Forest System lands in northeastern Minnesota, opening the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness to toxic mine pollution.
  • The Boundary Waters Hardrock Lease Rider would require the Secretary of the Interior to reinstate two canceled hardrock mineral leases in the headwaters of the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness.
  • The Ancillary Use Mining Rider would give mining claimants the right to permanently occupy federal public lands, construct massive toxic waste dumps, and build roads and pipelines across those lands – an unprecedented giveaway of America’s cherished public lands to mining corporations, reversing over one hundred years of legal precedent.
  • The Caldwell Canyon Mining Rider would require the Secretary of the Interior to issue a new Record of Decision for Caldwell Canyon Mine project, imposing arbitrary timelines to shortcut compliance with applicable environmental laws and regulations. The Caldwell Canyon phosphorus-phosphate mine would be built on irreplaceable habitat, leading to decades of additional water pollution.
  • The Expanded Sage Grouse Rider would expand the ban on protecting the sage grouse under the Endangered Species Act – a legacy rider – to include the separate population of bi-state sage grouse.
  • The Bison Rider would prohibit funds to allow the introduction of bison into the Charles M. Russell National Wildlife Refuge in Montana.
  • The Endangered Species Consultation Rider would codify climate denialism into law by exempting the U.S. Forest Service and U.S. Bureau of Land Management from updating their land management plans when new information – often new knowledge about the increasingly severe impacts of climate change – shows that endangered species are being harmed or killed on public lands.
  • The Lesser Prairie Chicken Rider would prohibit the Interior Department from implementing or enforcing a rule that protects the Lesser Prairie Chicken under the Endangered Species Act.
  • The Grizzly Bear Habitat Rider would block funds for the North Cascades Grizzly Bear Ecosystem Restoration Plan.
  • The Northern Long-Eared Bat Rider would prohibit the Interior Department from implementing or enforcing a final rule that protects the northern long-eared bat under the Endangered Species Act.
  • The Gray Wolf Rider would direct the Secretary of the Interior to reissue a rule prematurely removing endangered species protections for the Gray Wolf.
  • The Grand Staircase-Escalante Rider would prohibit funds for management of the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument in Utah except in compliance with the Record of Decision and the February 2020 Resource Management Plan.
  • The Glacier National Park Reservation Rider would prohibit the park from implementing a reservation system to address overcrowding.
  • The Bison Rider would prohibit the U.S. Department of the Interior from establishing a working group to help restore bison populations.
  • The Lead Ammunition and Tackle Rider would prevent agencies charged with wildlife protection from banning toxic lead in ammunition and fishing tackle on federal lands unless an impossible set of criteria are met.
  • The Dunes Sagebrush Lizard Rider would prohibit listing the animal under the Endangered Species Act.
  • The Rat Poison Rider would block the EPA from restricting rodenticides that pose health risks to humans and other mammals and birds.
  • The Conservation Land Use Rider would prohibit the U.S. Bureau of Land Management from implementing the Conservation and Landscape Health rule, which allows the agency to better prioritize conservation of public lands.
  • The Grizzly Bear Rider would delist the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem population of Grizzly Bears under the Endangered Species Act.

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This article originally published in January 2022 is of relevance to the evolving role of the US military in Francophone West Africa as well to Niger’s military coup d’Etat.

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Earlier this week [January  2022], the military seized power in Burkina Faso, ousting the country’s democratically elected president, Roch Marc Christian Kaboré.

The coup was announced on state television Monday by a young officer who said the military had suspended the constitution and dissolved the government. Beside him sat a camouflage-clad man whom he introduced as Burkina Faso’s new leader: Lt. Col. Paul-Henri Sandaogo Damiba, the commander of one of the country’s three military regions.

Damiba is a highly trained soldier, thanks in no small part to the U.S. military, which has a long record of training soldiers in Africa who go on to stage coups. Damiba, it turns out, participated in at least a half-dozen U.S. training exercises, according to U.S. Africa Command, or AFRICOM.

In 2010 and 2020, he participated in an annual special operations training program known as the Flintlock exercise. In 2013, Damiba was accepted into an Africa Contingency Operations Training and Assistance course, which is a State Department-funded peacekeeping training program. In 2013 and 2014, Damiba attended the U.S.-sponsored Military Intelligence Basic Officer Course-Africa. And in 2018 and 2019, he participated in engagements with a U.S. Defense Department Civil Military Support Element in Burkina Faso.

Damiba is just the latest in a carousel of coup leaders in West Africa trained by the U.S. military as the U.S. has pumped in more than $1 billion in security assistance to promote “stability” in the region. Since 2008, U.S.-trained officers have attempted at least nine coups (and succeeded in at least eight) across five West African countries, including Burkina Faso (three times), Guinea, Mali (three times), Mauritania, and the Gambia.

Since the 2000s, the United States has regularly deployed small teams of commandos to advise, assist, and accompany local forces, even into battle; provided weapons, equipment, and aircraft; offered many forms of training, including Flintlock, which is conducted by Special Operations Command Africa and focused on enhancing the counterterrorism capabilities of nations in West Africa, including Burkina Faso, Guinea, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Nigeria, and Senegal.

“When the U.S. prioritizes tactical training, we overlook longer-term goals that could create more stable governments,” said Lauren Woods, director of the Security Assistance Monitor, which is a program of the nonprofit Center for International Policy. “We need more transparency and public debate on the foreign military training that we provide. And we need to do a much better job thinking about the long-term risks — including coups and abuses by forces we train.”

AFRICOM emphasizes that its security cooperation and “capacity-building activities” foster the “development of professional militaries,” which are disciplined and committed to the well-being of their citizens. “U.S. military training regularly includes modules on the law of armed conflict, subjugation to civilian control, and respect for human rights,” AFRICOM spokesperson Kelly Cahalan told The Intercept. “Military seizures of power are inconsistent with U.S. military training and education.”

But coups d’état by U.S.-trained officers have become an increasingly common occurrence in Burkina Faso and elsewhere in the region.

Last summer, for example, American Green Berets arrived in Guinea to train a special forces unit led by Col. Mamady Doumbouya, a charismatic young officer who had also served in the French Foreign Legion. In September, members of Doumbouya’s unit took time out from their ongoing instruction — in small unit tactics, tactical combat casualty care, and the law of armed conflict — to storm the presidential palace and depose the country’s 83-year-old president, Alpha Condé. Doumbouya soon declared himself Guinea’s new leader and the U.S. ended the training.

In 2020, Col. Assimi Goïta, who worked with U.S. Special Operations forces for years, participating in Flintlock training exercises and attending a Joint Special Operations University seminar at MacDill Air Force Base in Florida, headed the junta that overthrew Mali’s government.

“The act of mutiny in Mali is strongly condemned and inconsistent with U.S. military training and education,” Marine Corps Lt. Col. Anton T. Semelroth, a Pentagon spokesperson, said at the time.

After staging the coup, Goïta stepped down and took the job of vice president in a transitional government tasked with returning Mali to civilian rule. But nine months later, he seized power again in his second coup.

Goïta wasn’t even the first U.S.-trained Malian officer to overthrow the country’s government. In 2011, when a U.S.-backed uprising in Libya toppled autocrat Muammar Gaddafi, Tuareg fighters in his service looted the regime’s weapons caches, traveled to their native Mali and began to take over the northern part of that country. Angered by the ineffective response of his government, Amadou Sanogo — an officer who learned English in Texas, received intelligence training in Arizona, and underwent Army infantry-officer basic training in Georgia — took matters into his own hands and overthrew his country’s democratically elected government.

“America is a great country with a fantastic army,” he said after the 2012 coup. “I tried to put all the things I learned there into practice here.”

In 2014, another U.S.-trained officer, Lt. Col. Isaac Zida, seized power in Burkina Faso amid popular protests. Two years earlier, when he was a major, Zida attended a counterterrorism training course at MacDill Air Force Base that was sponsored by Joint Special Operations University and attended a military intelligence course in Botswana that was financed by the U.S. government.

The next year, another coup in Burkina Faso installed Gen. Gilbert Diendéré. Diendéré had not only taken part in a U.S.-led Flintlock counterterrorism exercise, but he also served as a literal advertisement for it, appearing in an AFRICOM photo addressing Burkinabe soldiers before their deployment to Mali in support of the 2010 Flintlock exercise.

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Then-Col. Maj. Gilbert Diendéré addresses Burkinabe soldiers prior to their deployment to Mali in support of AFRICOM’s Flintlock 10 exercise in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, on May 1, 2010. Photo: U.S. Air Force Master Sgt. Jeremiah Erickson, Flintlock 10 Public Affairs

In 2014, two generations of U.S.-educated officers faced off in the Gambia as a group of American-trained would-be coup-makers attempted (but failed) to overthrow another U.S.-trained coup-maker, Yahya Jammeh who had seized power back in 1994. The unsuccessful rebellion claimed the life of Lamin Sanneh, the purported ringleader, who had earned a master’s degree at National Defense University in Washington, D.C.

“I can’t shake the feeling that his education in the United States somehow influenced his actions,” wrote Sanneh’s former NDU mentor Jeffrey Meiser. “I can’t help but wonder if simply imprinting our foreign students with the ‘American program’ is counterproductive and unethical.”

In 2008, Stars and Stripes reported that Gen. Mohamed Ould Abdel Aziz, the leader of a coup against Mauritania’s elected president, “has worked with U.S. forces that train in the African country.” Arrested and charged with corruption after a decadelong rule, Aziz was recently released on bail due to ill health.

U.S.-trained coup-plotters aren’t strictly confined to West Africa. Before Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi deposed Egypt’s first democratically elected president, Mohammed Morsi, he underwent basic training at Fort Benning, Georgia, (in 1981) and advanced instruction at the U.S. Army War College (in 2006).

A 2018 study by the military’s go-to think tank, the Rand Corporation, cast doubt on the notion that U.S. military training breeds coup-makers.

“[T]here is little evidence that overall [security sector assistance] (measured in dollar terms) associates with coup propensity in Africa,” according to the study, which was written for the Office of the Secretary of Defense and did note that there was a “marginally significant” association in the post-Cold War period.

A year before, however, a study by Jonathan Caverley of the U.S. Naval War College and Jesse Savage of Trinity College Dublin in the Journal of Peace Research, analyzing data from 1970 to 2009, found “a robust relationship between U.S. training of foreign militaries and military-backed coup attempts” despite the authors limiting their analysis to the International Military Education and Training program — “which explicitly focuses on promoting norms of civilian control.”

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Featured image: A soldier patrols the streets of Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, October 2018. Photo by Issouf Sanogo.

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Stories revolving around prison breaks, such as The Shawshank RedemptionThe Great Escape and Escape From Alcatraz, have long intrigued audiences with their adrenaline-fuelled narratives and raw human emotions.

But few films have been able to capture Palestinian prisoners’ sheer audacity, spotlighting their ongoing yearning for freedoms that have been taken away.

Palestinian Prison Break, a new documentary by the visionary filmmaker Mohammad Sawwaf, follows six attempts to escape from maximum-security Israeli prisons between 1987 and 2004, taking us on a journey that delves deep into the meaning of freedom for Palestinian prisoners. It explores the psyches of the imprisoned and imprisoner alike.

The prisoner’s mind is like a whirlpool, turning and turning, trying to deal with one key dilemma: how to reclaim one’s stolen freedom. As freed Palestinian prisoner Imad al-Din al-Saftawi, who was held in Israeli occupation jails for 18 years, said in the film: “To be imprisoned is the worst thing that could happen in your life.”

The Israeli prison system has been using ever-more punitive measures to make its jails – which are located at remote, isolated sites – even more secure.

These include dogs trained to detect suspicious activity, surveillance equipment and watchtowers. Given such tough measures, one might think escape sounds far-fetched. But do such strict conditions deter or break prisoners’ wills? Unlikely. 

Human Spirit

At its heart, Palestinian Prison Break is a testament to the resilience of humans in their fight for freedom. The human spirit does not accept imprisonment. Likewise, Palestinian prisoners do not accept all the structural injustices that they endure. 

The director weaves together personal stories, interviews, testimonials and reenactments to create an authentic portrayal of their escape attempts.

Watching this film, I was immediately reminded of the brave Gilboa prison break, where six Palestinian political prisoners escaped in 2021, tunnelling their way out of the prison with a spoon. It served as a stark reminder of the determination of those seeking freedom, even from seemingly impregnable confines. 

The film explores the deprivation that the featured prisoners endured, which drove them on in their desire to escape. And these were not only material deprivations and restricted access to personal belongings and resources. Mohammad Abu Jamous, one of the ex-prisoners interviewed, perfectly summed it up: “I was deprived of my dad and mum, my family, my youth. My life was wasted in prison.”

The film reminded me of these lines from a poem by Mahmoud Darwish, widely considered the national poet of Palestine: 

My home has changed,
And when I eat
And the amount of tobacco has changed
And the colour of my clothes, and my face, and my figure
And even the moon

This profound poem and the film both vividly capture the changes that suddenly occur in the lives of political prisoners, and the deprivation that they endure. 

Remarkable Luck

The six meticulously devised escape plans were diverse, creative and used simple tools, the only ones accessible to the prisoners. One involved sawing through the steel bars of a window in the toilets with a smuggled hacksaw. Another saw prisoners cutting the metal bars of a prison gate during break time, taking advantage of temporary chaos in the facility due to ongoing construction work.

Other cases involved prisoners tunnelling under a bed to the visiting room’s toilet, while dressing as women so they could leave along with visiting families; or digging a tunnel with rudimentary tools, such as steel nails.

I was struck by how remarkable luck combined with the forces of nature helped prisoners navigate their way to freedom. Saftawi tells of how a dense fog suddenly descended on their escape day, blanketing the prison and momentarily distracting the guards.

“The moment I started climbing down [from a prison window to the ground], the guard dogs left at the same time,” he said.

The escapees recognised all too well the risks they were taking; that they might be captured and their sentences lengthened, or that they could suffer additional punishments, such as restrictions on family visits. But the taste of freedom was worth it, and they would rather fight than surrender. They sacrificed much for their freedom.

In one case, Saftawi’s hand was injured on a barbed-wire fence surrounding a prison facility in Gaza while he was escaping in 1987. He recalls: “That was the most painful moment. To be free, I would have dismembered my hand in the barbed wire.”

Watch the trailer below.

Wasted Lives

While incarcerated, the prisoners often found solace and support in one another during their relentless pursuit of freedom. If one prisoner hatched a plan, everyone would support it.

Those forced from their homes and families, locked up in hostile places, said they felt compelled to tell their stories.

“It is our duty to share these narratives in all media, not to entertain but to educate,” Sawwaf told Middle East Eye.

At the film’s end, the director highlights how the prisoners’ wishes were reduced to only meeting their mothers, as both suffered the weight of longing and absence.

Tears fell down my cheeks as I watched a prisoner ask his mother not to die. His mother replied: “I am putting a sword by my hand, and if the angel of death comes, I will tell him not to take my soul before my son comes home.”

I loved this film, and it’s vital that more documentaries and films about Palestinian prisoners’ experiences are made. This is the least we can do to honour their lives and struggles.

These wasted lives should be written about, read about and made into films. We need to ensure that their stories and their voices are not silenced.

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Ghada Abed is a freelance journalist based in the Gaza Strip.

Featured image: A reenactment from the film Palestinian Prison Break shows a prisoner trying to dig a tunnel out of a facility (Alef Multimedia Company/Mohammad Sawwaf for MEE)

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***

The new blockbuster film on Robert Oppenheimer has brought back memories of the first nuclear bomb dropped on Hiroshima. It raises complex questions on the nature of the society that allowed such bombs to be developed and used and which stockpiles a nuclear arsenal that can destroy the world many times over.

Was the infamous McCarthy-era hunt for reds everywhere have any relationship with the pathology of a society that suppressed its guilt over the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and substituted it with a belief in its exceptionalism?

And what explains Oppenheimer’s transformation from “hero” of the Manhattan Project that built the atomic bomb to villain and then forgotten?

I remember my first encounter with American guilt over the two atom bombs dropped on Japan. It was during a 1985 conference on distributed computer controls in Monterey, California. The hosts were the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory, which developed the hydrogen bomb. At dinner, a nuclear scientist’s wife asked a Japanese professor if his fellow citizens understood why the Americans had to drop the bomb on Japan—for it had saved a million American soldiers’ lives and many more Japanese. Was she seeking absolution for the guilt all Americans carried? Or did she want to confirm what she had been told and believed about the bomb? And did she believe that even the victims of the bomb shared those beliefs?

This is not about Oppenheimer the movie—it is about the atomic bomb Oppenheimer made, which created multiple ruptures in society. This new weapon completely changed the parameters of war. But not just that—it brought the recognition in society that science was no longer a concern of just scientists but of us all. For scientists, it also became a question that what they did in the laboratories had real-world consequences, including the possible destruction of humanity itself. It also brought home that this was a new era of big science that needed mega bucks!

Strangely enough, two of the foremost names of scientists at the core of the anti-nuclear bomb movement after the war also had a major role in initiating the Manhattan Project. Leo Szilard, a Hungarian scientist who had become a refugee in England first and then in the United States, sought Einstein’s help in petitioning President Franklin Roosevelt for the United States to build the bomb. He feared that if Nazi Germany built it first, it would conquer the world.

Szilard joined the Manhattan Project, though he was located not in Los Alamos but in the University of Chicago’s Metallurgical Laboratories. He also campaigned within the Manhattan Project to demonstrate the bomb before its use on Japan. Einstein also tried to reach Roosevelt with his appeal against using the bomb. But Roosevelt died and Einstein’s letter remained unopened on his desk. He was replaced by vice-president Harry Truman, who thought the bomb would give the United States a nuclear monopoly and, therefore, help subjugate the Soviet Union in the post-War scenario.

Turning to the Manhattan Project, it had a staggering scale, even by today’s standards. At its peak, it employed 1,25,000 people directly, and if we include the many other industries that directly or indirectly produced parts or equipment for the bomb, that number would be close to half a million. The costs, again, were massive: $2 billion in 1945 (around $30-50 billion today). Its scientists were an elite group that included Hans Bethe, Enrico Fermi, Nils Bohr, James Franck, Oppenheimer, Edward Teller (later the villain of the story), Richard Feynman, Harold Urey, Klaus Fuchs (who shared atomic secrets with the Soviets) and many more glittering names. More than two dozen Nobel prize winners got associated with the Manhattan Project.

But science was only a small part of the Manhattan Project. It wanted to build two kinds of bombs, one using a uranium 235 isotope and the other, plutonium. How to separate fissile material, U-235, from U-238? How to concentrate fissile plutonium? How to do both at an industrial scale? How to set up the chain reaction to create fission, bringing sub-critical fissile material together to create a critical mass? All these required metallurgists, chemists, engineers, explosive experts, and completely new plants and equipment spread over hundreds of sites. All of it was to be done at record speeds. This was a science “experiment” done not at a laboratory but industrial scale. That is why the huge budget and the size of the human power involved.

The United States government convinced its citizens that the Hiroshima and, three days later, Nagasaki bombings led Japan to surrender. Based on archival and other evidence, it is clear that more than the nuclear bombs, the Soviet Union declaring war against Japan led to its surrender. It has been proved that the claim of “one million American lives saved” by bombing Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which avoided an invasion of Japan, has no basis. It was a number conjured up for propaganda purposes.

While the American people presented these figures as serious calculations, what was completely censored were actual pictures of the victims of the two bombings. The only available photo of the Hiroshima bombing—the mushroom cloud—was taken by the gunner of Enola Gay, the plane that dropped the bomb. Even months after the nuclear bombings, when a few photographs of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were released, they were only of shattered buildings, none of the human beings.

The United States wanted to bask in its victory over Japan. It did not want that victory marred by visuals of the horror of the nuclear bombs. It dismissed people dying of a mysterious disease, which it knew was radiation sickness, as Japanese propaganda. To quote General Leslie Groves, who led the Manhattan Project, these were “Tokyo Tales”.

It took seven years for the human toll to become visible, only after the United States ceased its occupation of Japan. Even then, only a few pictures emerged, as Japan was still cooperating with the United States in hushing up the horrors of the nuclear bomb.

A full visual account of what happened in Hiroshima had to wait until the sixties. Then we saw the pictures of Hiroshima Shadows—the people who had vaporised, leaving only their traces on the stone on which they had been sitting; the survivors whose skin hung from their bodies, and of people dying of radiation sickness.

After the nuclear bombing, the scientists behind the bomb became heroes who had shortened the war and saved a million American lives. This myth-making converted the nuclear bomb from an industrial-scale effort to a secret formula discovered by a few physicists, giving the United States enormous power in the post-War era. This was what made Oppenheimer a hero for the American people. He symbolised the scientific community and its godlike powers. And it also made him the target for people like Teller, who later combined with others to bring Oppenheimer down.

But if Oppenheimer was a hero, how was he pulled down just a few years later?

It is difficult to imagine today, but the United States had a strong left movement before the Second World War. Apart from communists in workers’ movements, the intelligentsia—literature, cinema and physicists—had a strong communist presence. Scientists had embraced the idea, which JD Bernal had then argued in the United Kingdom, that science and technology could be planned and used for the public good. That is why contemporary physicists—then on the cutting edge of the sciences of relativity and quantum mechanics—also led social and political debates in and on science.

It is this world of science, a critical worldview, which collided with the new world where the belief was that the United States should be the exceptional nation and sole global hegemon. This hegemony could only be weakened if some people—“traitors to the nation”—gave away “our” national secrets. Any development anywhere else could be only a result of theft and nothing else. This campaign was helped by the belief that the atomic bomb resulted from a few equations scientists had discovered, which could, therefore, easily be leaked to enemies.

This was the genesis of the McCarthy era in the United States, its war on the artistic, academic and scientific communities and its search for spies under the bed. The military-industrial complex was taking birth in the country, and it soon took over the scientific establishment. In the United States, the military and energy—nuclear energy—budget would henceforth determine the fate of scientists and their grants. Oppenheimer needed to be punished as an example to other scientists—do not set yourself up against the gods of the military-industrial complex and our vision of world domination.

Oppenheimer’s fall from grace served another purpose. It was a lesson to the scientific community that no one was big enough to cross the security state. The Rosenbergs—Julius and Ethel—were executed though they were relatively minor figures. Julius had not leaked atomic secrets, only kept the Soviet Union abreast of the developments. Ethel, a communist, had nothing to do with spying. The only person who did leak atomic “secrets” was Klaus Fuchs, a German communist party member who escaped to the United Kingdom and worked on the bomb project there, followed by the Manhattan Project, which he joined as a part of a British team.

Fuchs made important contributions to the nuclear bomb-triggering mechanism and shared these with the Soviet Union. His contribution would have shortened the Soviet bomb, at best, by a year. As a host of nations have shown, once they knew a fissile bomb was possible, it was easy for scientists and technologists to duplicate it, as countries as small as North Korea have demonstrated.

Oppenheimer’s tragedy was not that he was victimised in the McCarthy era and lost his security clearance. Einstein never had a security clearance, so that need not have been a major calamity. It was his public humiliation during the hearings in which he challenged the withdrawal of his security clearance that broke him. Physicists, the golden boys of the atomic era, had finally been shown their true place in the emerging world of the military-industrial complex.

Einstein, Szilard, Joseph Rotblat and others had foreseen this world. Unlike Oppenheimer, they took the path of building a movement against the nuclear bomb. Having made the bomb, the scientists now had to act as conscience-keepers of the world against a bomb that could destroy all humanity—that bomb which still hangs as a Damocles Sword over our heads.

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***

The British playwright and Nobel Prize winner Harold Pinter was an early critic of the Bush administration’s decision, endorsed by British Prime Minister Tony Blair, to declare a worldwide war on Islamist terrorism in the aftermath of 9/11. In the fall of 2002, Pinter was invited to make his case against the war before the House of Commons. He began his talk with a bit of embellished British history about an earlier wave of terror in Ireland:

There’s an old story about Oliver Cromwell. After he had taken the town of Drogheda the citizens were brought to the main square. Cromwell announced to his Lieutenants: ‘Right! Kill all the women and rape all the men.’ One of his aides said: ‘Excuse me General. Isn’t it the other way around?’ A voice from the crowd called out: ‘Mr. Cromwell knows what he’s doing!’

The voice in the crowd in Pinter’s telling was Blair’s, but today it could be German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, who has kept his silence about when and what he knew about President Biden’s decision to mangle Germany’s economy by destroying the Nord Stream pipelines last September.

There were two sets of pipelines, both partially financed by Russian oligarchs who were beholden to President Vladimir Putin. Nord Stream 1 went into operation in 2011, and within ten years Russia was providing Germany more than half of its overall energy needs, with most of the inexpensive gas targeted for industrial use. Nord Stream 2 was completed by the summer of 2021, but never brought into use. By February 2022, at the start of the war, Scholz halted the pipeline’s certification process. Nord Stream 2 was loaded with gas meant for delivery to Germany, but its huge payload was blocked on arrival by Scholz, obviously at the request of the Biden administration.

Last September 26, the two pipelines were destroyed by underwater bombs. It was not known at the time who was responsible for the sabotage, amid the usual Western accusations against Russia and Russian denials. In February, I published a detailed account of the White House’s role in the attack, including an assertion that a major goal of Biden’s was to prevent Scholz from reversing his decision to stop the flow of Russian gas to Germany. My account was denied by the White House and as of today no government has accepted responsibility.

Germany muddled through last year’s preternaturally warm winter, as the government provided generous energy subsidies for homes and businesses. But since then, the lack of Russian gas has been the major factor in rising energy costs that have led to a slowdown in the German economy, the fourth largest in the world. The economic crunch resulted in a rise of political opposition to the political coalition Scholz leads. Another divisive issue is the steady rise in immigration applications from the Middle East and Africa and the more than one million Ukrainians who have fled to Germany since the war in Ukraine began.

Polling in Germany has consistently shown enormous discontent with the economic crisis it faces. One survey analyzed by Bloomberg last month found that only 39 percent of German voters believe the country will be a leading industrial nation in the next decade. The dispatch specifically cited internal political infighting over the nation’s home and business heating subsidy policies but did not mention a major cause of the crisis—Biden’s decision to destroy the Nord Stream pipelines.

A review of recent reporting on the German economic crisis in German, American, and international business publications—much of it excellent—yielded not a single citation of the pipeline’s destruction as a major reason for national pessimism. I couldn’t help wondering what Pinter would have said about the self-censorship.

In July Politico reported that Robert Habeck, the German vice chancellor and economic minister, a member of the Green Party, warned that the country was certain to face a shrinking economy and a transition to green energy that “will put a burden” on the population. In May, the German government announced that the country had entered a recession. Some of the nation’s companies, according to Politico,

have begun to ditch the Fatherland, triggering fears of deindustrialization.

Habeck said the economic downturn could be explained by high energy prices, which Germany felt more intensely than other countries “because it relied on cheap Russian gas.” The article did not state why there is no longer Russian gas flowing to Germany.

The refusal of the White House or any of the Scandinavian nations—Norway, Sweden, and Denmark—who provided support for the covert American sabotage of the pipelines to accept responsibility for their actions turned out be an important asset for Scholz, who met with Biden at the White House in February of 2022 when Biden directly threatened to destroy Nord Stream 2. Asked how he would respond if Russia invaded, Biden said,

If Russia invades . . . there will no longer be a Nord Stream 2. We will bring an end to it.

Scholz said nothing in public and returned to the White House last winter for a private two-day visit—his plane carried no members of the German media with him—that included a long one-on-one session with Biden. There was no state dinner nor a press conference, other than a brief exchange of platitudes with the president in front of the White House press corps, who were not permitted to not to ask questions.

It is impossible not to ask once again whether Biden had briefed the chancellor about the pending operation last February and also warned him in advance of the pipeline destruction last September. Scholz’s continued silence about an act of violence against his state can only be described as mystifying, especially as the energy crisis intensified in recent months to the point where the German people were suffering. The end of the pipelines also removed a potential disastrous political dilemma for the chancellor: if the pipelines were still intact but shut down at his command, pressure would have been high for him to open the valves and let the gas flow from those who believed keeping the German people warm and prosperous was more important than supporting the White House, NATO, and Volodymyr Zelensky, the Ukrainian president, in a war that need not have been fought.

It just may be that the White House, by keeping him in the loop, saved him from a career-ending conundrum: to support NATO and America in war or protect his people and German industry.

Last October, Lisa Hänel, reporting for Deutche Welle, a state-owned television network, pointed to one immediate social cost of the lack of Russian gas for the German middle class: regional German welfare workers told her that “more people are worried that they can no longer cope with rising prices and energy costs.” Discussing the impact of the lack of cheap Russian gas on those in the lower and middle income scales, which includes 18 million people in Germany who are struggling to stay warm and well fed, she wrote that they “could be hit hard by inflation and the energy crisis.”

Adam Button, a Canadian economic analyst who writes for ForexLive.com, published an essay last month under the title “The pillars of Germany’s economy are crumbling. Three reasons for worry.” His three reasons: industrial production is declining; deficits are increasing; and energy costs are rising.

Auto production and exports “are at the heart of the German economy,” Button writes. “Their machines,” he writes,

have powered Europe and been a worthy competitor to the U.S. and Japan. But there is a new rival: China. The burgeoning automotive manufacturing sector in China is coming for everyone but Germany’s export-sensitive model may be most at risk from China’s EVs. At best, it’s a formidable wave of competition that hurts margins and weakens Germany. At worst, it hollows Germany’s key high-wage industry.

The supply of cheap energy, which Nord Stream I produced, comes into play in Button’s analysis:

Germany’s economic model is exporting manufactured goods, with China as a target market. Competition from China is already a major obstacle but it’s compounded by rising energy costs. Germany survived the winter of 2023 better than I expected but that was with heavy subsidies and good weather. That’s not a formula for the long term and aside from pie-in-the-sky hydrogen talk, I don’t see a way for Germany to get away from expensive imported LNG [liquefied natural gas].

Last week German economy minister Robert Habeck offered up a harsh truth. He said Germany faces five difficult years of deindustrialization from high energy prices. He called for more subsidies for energy as a bridge to around 2030 when he estimates that green energy will take over.

The problem for that is budgetary. Eurozone countries are bound to deficits of less than 3%. Germany is currently running at 4.25%, up from 2.6% a year ago. Finance ministry estimates see the deficit falling to 0.75% in 2026 but that assumes that all energy subsidies are ended. Therein lies the rub: Either they cut the subsidies and lose industry or subsidize and break deficit rules.

For years, Germany was the policeman of the deficit system and periphery countries may wish to give it back some of its own medicine and the German public is also famously austere. The problem is that even if high subsidies stay in place, German industry is under heavy pressure. If anything, the subsidies need to be stepped up. . . .

There is a window for large subsidies but the government must decide if that fiscal ammunition should be spent on subsidizing industry, the green transition or some combination of both. Ideally, the taps would be fully opened but I fear that old instincts around spending will win out, dooming Germany’s economy.

The loss of inexpensive Russian gas has also affected the German multinational chemical producer BASF, which employs more than 50,000 people in its home country. The company has announced a series of cutbacks since the pipelines were demolished. Thousands of workers have been laid off, and the firm shut down one of its major facilities. An industry news account of its cutbacks explain that the war in Ukraine “has sharply reduced natural gas supplies in Europe and boosted BASF’s energy bill on the continent by $2.9 billion in 2022.”

Button’s article, like of all those reviewed for this report, did not mention the main cause of the reduced supply of natural gas. Nor did it say that it was the destruction of the pipelines that forced BASF to make a change in its plans for a $11 billion investment in a state-of-the-art complex that it hailed as the gold standard for sustainable production. The project will be built in China.

“We are increasingly worried about our home market,” chief executive Martin Brudermüller explained to shareholders last April. “Profitability is no longer anywhere near where it should be.” He added that the firm lost close to $143 million in Germany last year, after many decades of constant profit.Pinter, who died in 2008, would have relished the irony of the Biden administration, in its attempt to protect its political and economic investment in the Ukrainian war effort against Russia, may have given China, another nemesis of the White House, a helping hand.

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The author wishes to thank Mohamed Elmaazi of London for his superb research.

Featured image: “Harold Pinter (photograph)” by Beaton, Cecil is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.

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***

Two years ago, the Afghan government constructed and armed at Washington’s great expense dissolved one provincial capital at a time. The Taliban occupied Kabul on August 15. America’s role in Afghanistan’s tragedy came to an inglorious and shocking end.

Today the Afghan people are impoverished and isolated; the Taliban leadership is fanatical and tyrannical. The so-called Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, as yet recognized by no nation, is in the global cellar on almost every measure.

If anything, failure has only made the extremist leadership more obdurate: “Over the past year, the Taliban’s rule progressively hardened and became more authoritarian and dogmatically 1990s-like. The Taliban’s exclusionary Pashtun-centered rule has turned highly repressive toward all forms of opposition.” Western criticism of Taliban policy, particularly toward women, is seen as validating the regime’s radical interpretation of Islam.

Washington, haunted by its ignominious exit, continues to struggle over policy toward Afghanistan. The refusal to recognize Kabul is needlessly counterproductive, preventing even basic communication. The Taliban rules and is the de facto if not de jure government. Its policies are odious, but brutal repression has never prevented the U.S. from engaging hostile governments.

Moreover, Taliban rule has delivered one essential benefit lacking during America’s two decade-long attempt to install a liberal, centralized democracy in Central Asia: peace.

As The Economist last year summarized the status of a watermelon farmer: “since the Taliban returned to power, the guns have mostly fallen silent. True, poor rains have ruined Mahmood’s harvest, his relatives have lost their jobs and his family is broke. But at least he no longer has to worry about his children being shot.” Ponder the latter observation. Only after America’s departure did this poor farmer no longer “worry about his children being shot.” For him, the U.S. was a malign, even deadly force. And his feelings were widely shared.

Journalist Anand Gopal visited Afghanistan shortly before its collapse, reporting that “the biggest thing I noticed on the ground is just how tired people were of fighting.” It is difficult to overstate the benefits of even a bad peace to those who suffer through such a war. Afghanistan still is not free of violence. The Islamic State (Khorasan Province) is most responsible for bombing attacks that have killed hundreds of people. Nevertheless, overall casualties are way down. Reported the Crisis Group last year:

The Taliban’s military takeover of Afghanistan in August 2021 put an end to 43 years of almost continuous war, an overlapping series of conflicts that reached a new ferocity as U.S. forces prepared for their departure.… Afghans certainly noticed the change. They had grown accustomed to a drumbeat of death and destruction: an estimated 20,000 to 40,000 battle fatalities per year, a toll that for several years had surpassed those of Syria, Yemen and Iraq, and more U.S. airstrikes than in any other part of the world. All of a sudden, after the Taliban seized power, the emergency wards were not full of Afghans suffering shrapnel cuts and blast injuries. In the early months of 2022, by UN estimates, fighting diminished to only 18 per cent of previous levels.

Two decades of conflict involving the U.S. resulted in an estimated quarter million deaths, some 70,000 who were believed to be civilians. Before the Trump administration reached its agreement with the Taliban, Washington loosened its aerial rules of engagement, increasing civilian casualties. Gopal reported on an extended family in Helmand province that lost several members in a single bombing raid. One of the men “travelled to Kandahar to report the massacres to the United Nations and to the Afghan government. When no justice was forthcoming, he joined the Taliban.”

The war’s impact was especially harsh in rural Afghanistan. Wrote Baktash Ahadi, who served as an interpreter for U.S. forces:

“Virtually the only contact most Afghans had with the West came via heavily armed and armored combat troops. Americans thus mistook the Afghan countryside for a mere theater of war, rather than as a place where people actually lived. U.S. forces turned villages into battlegrounds, pulverizing mud homes and destroying livelihoods.”

The humanitarian consequences were predictable. In the New Yorker Gopal discussed the experience of a 40-something Afghan woman named Shakira:

Entire branches of Shakira’s family, from the uncles who used to tell her stories to the cousins who played with her in the caves, vanished. In all, she lost sixteen family members. … [Other families, he found] lost ten to twelve civilians in what locals call the American War. This scale of suffering was unknown in a bustling metropolis like Kabul, where citizens enjoyed relative security. But in countryside enclaves like Sangin the ceaseless killings of civilians led many Afghans to gravitate toward the Taliban. By 2010, many households in Ishaqzai villages had sons in the Taliban, most of whom had joined simply to protect themselves or to take revenge.

In relative luxury, denizens of Washington could, and still do, debate the finer points of counter-insurgency strategy while bearing none of the costs. Few Americans can even imagine the price that “real” Afghans paid for the privilege of a dubious democracy powered by venal warlords, festooned with officials both corrupt and incompetent, and capped by a central government notable for its dysfunction.

When Shakira and other women in her community were asked about the Taliban, they judged the movement compared to Afghan alternatives rather than American fantasies: “The women described their lives under the Taliban as identical to their lives under [local warlord] Dado and the mujahideen—minus the strangers barging through the doors at night, the deadly checkpoints.” Dado was thankfully displaced by the Taliban, but he returned with the Americans more arbitrary, corrupt, and brutal than ever. Whatever Washington’s intentions, Ahadi noted that “When comparing the Taliban with the United States and its Western allies, the vast majority of Afghans have always viewed the Taliban as the lesser of two evils.”

Different were the lives of those living in Kabul and other major cities, which contained only about 30 percent of the Afghan people but who were almost 100 percent of those who shared Western values, experiences, and outlooks. Urban dwellers prospered economically and rarely suffered the full human costs of the conflict. American visitors, like me, typically spent most of their time with these Afghans. Yet U.S. policymakers had strikingly little contact even with them, other than those serving in government or other official roles. And the latter did not really represent Afghanistan. Observed Shadi Hamid of the Brookings Institution, “In the end, few Afghans believed in a government they never felt was theirs.”

Today the slaughter is over. Indeed, two years ago when Americans were transfixed by desperate people rushing the airport, most Afghans were marveling at the experience of peace. The Wall Street Journal’s Yaroslav Trofimov wrote that “in Afghanistan’s rural districts like Baraki Barak, where Taliban rules don’t differ that much from existing conservative customs… the collapse of the Afghan republic and the U.S. withdrawal mean, above all, that the guns have fallen silent for the first time in two decades.” Life might be a bit harder economically, but rural men aren’t being killed and neither cruel local warlords nor corrupt distant politicians are interfering with people’s lives. A village elder who lost sixteen members of his extended family during the war told Trofimov: “Now, there is peace. And when someone doesn’t feel danger, doesn’t fear war, and can walk with a peace of mind, he is happy even if he is hungry.”

Of course, Afghans shouldn’t have to choose among barbarities. They should be able to live in a system that mixes liberal rules with federal rule, while entering the 21st century at a measured pace. However, that was never on offer as they suffered through multiple domestic insurgencies and outside interventions. Writing before the Kabul government’s collapse, the Brookings Institution’s Vanda Felbab-Brown and John Allen observed that “peace is an absolute priority for some rural women, even a peace deal very much on the Taliban terms.”

Perhaps the most striking aspect of U.S. foreign policy today is how little policymakers weigh the costs of their decisions on others. In recent decades Washington has contributed to hundreds of thousands, probably millions, of civilian deaths. The lethality of combat was evident in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Yemen, and other countries in which the U.S. intervened. Sanctions, a fan-favorite in the nation’s capital, can be even deadlier than war.

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A nation’s leader just wanting his nation to stay neutral regarding a war undertaken against another nation by the United States government can set in motion a US government effort to boot that leader from office. A previously secret Pakistan government document disclosed in a Wednesday in-depth The Intercept article suggests that such a removal effort is just what the US government successfully accomplished in Pakistan in the early days of the Ukraine War.

Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan had been steadfast in supporting keeping his country out of the Ukraine War in which the United States and other nations have been using the Ukraine government and military as a proxy to fight against Russia. An indication of Khan’s approach to the matter is provided in this relating in The Intercept article of comments he made on March 6, 2022 — the day before the meeting between US and Pakistan officials detailed in the newly revealed Pakistan cable:

The day before the meeting, Khan addressed a rally and responded directly to European calls that Pakistan rally behind Ukraine. “Are we your slaves?” Khan thundered to the crowd. “What do you think of us? That we are your slaves and that we will do whatever you ask of us?” he asked. “We are friends of Russia, and we are also friends of the United States. We are friends of China and Europe. We are not part of any alliance.”

That type of foreign policy approach is as American as apple pie or George Washington. But, its expression by a foreign government leader to justify opting out of supporting US empire is sure to bring contemporary American uber-interventionists to rage.

The US interventionists got their way. The Intercept article relates:

One month after the meeting with U.S. officials documented in the leaked Pakistani government document, a no-confidence vote was held in Parliament, leading to Khan’s removal from power. The vote is believed to have been organized with the backing of Pakistan’s powerful military. Since that time, Khan and his supporters have been engaged in a struggle with the military and its civilian allies, whom Khan claims engineered his removal from power at the request of the U.S.

And Khan’s expressed policy of keeping his country free of Ukraine War involvement and international alliances has gone by the wayside in Pakistan foreign policy:

Pakistan’s foreign policy has changed significantly since Khan’s removal, with Pakistan tilting more clearly toward the U.S. and European side in the Ukraine conflict. Abandoning its posture of neutrality, Pakistan has now emerged as a supplier of arms to the Ukrainian military; images of Pakistan-produced shells and ammunition regularly turn up on battlefield footage. In an interview earlier this year, a European Union official confirmed Pakistani military backing to Ukraine. Meanwhile, Ukraine’s foreign minister traveled to Pakistan this July in a visit widely presumed to be about military cooperation, but publicly described as focusing on trade, education, and environmental issues.

This realignment toward the U.S. has appeared to provide dividends to the Pakistani military. On August 3, a Pakistani newspaper reported that Parliament had approved the signing of a defense pact with the U.S. covering “joint exercises, operations, training, basing and equipment.” The agreement was intended to replace a previous 15-year deal between the two countries that expired in 2020.

But that’s not all. This month, Khan was imprisoned in Pakistan and barred from holding office for the next five years.

Another win for USA.

*

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***

Einführung in Thematik

Auf der Suche nach einer aufbauenden Lektüre, die in diesen finsteren Zeiten Orientierung bieten kann, stieß ich – wie bereits in den sechziger und siebziger Jahren des letzten Jahrhunderts – auf die Werke und Gedanken von Albert Camus.

Camus Wirkungsgeschichte geht weit über die Literatur hinaus. Als Repräsentant des französischen Existentialismus atheistischer Prägung beeinflusste er nicht nur im vergangenen Jahrhundert das Denken über die Grundfragen der menschlichen Existenz, die Rolle der Intellektuellen und das Engagement des Individuums für Freiheit und Gerechtigkeit (1), er bietet noch heute eine grundlegende Orientierung. Die Forschungsergebnisse der naturwissenschaftlichen Tiefenpsychologie hat er dabei mitberücksichtigt.

Zwar erlangte das umfangreiche literarische Werk des Literatur-Nobelpreisträgers (1957) weltweite Anerkennung, sein journalistisches Schaffen, seine Artikel in libertär-sozialistischen Zeitschriften sowie sein Buch „Der Mensch in der Revolte“ (1961) sind jedoch weniger bekannt. Sie inspirierten anarchistische Bewegungen weltweit, führten zu einer Neuorientierung in der Nachkriegszeit und waren 1952 Anlass für die Auseinandersetzung und den Bruch mit Jean-Paul Sartre (2).

Einen guten Überblick über das Denken und Wirken Camus‘ und das umfassende Verständnis des Menschen in der Revolte ermöglicht das Buch „Albert Camus – Libertäre Schriften (1948-1960)“, das der französische Journalist und Übersetzer Lou Marin 2013 herausgegeben hat (3).

Am besten lässt sich die tapfere Diesseitsbejahung im Werk Camus‘ mit den Satz Pindars beschreiben, der der Abhandlung von Camus‘ „Der Mythos von Sisyphos“ vorangestellt ist:

„Liebe Seele, trachte nicht nach dem ewigen Leben, sondern schöpfe das Mögliche aus.“ (4)

Camus‘ letzte Botschaft: „Geben, wenn man kann. Und nicht hassen, wenn das möglich ist.“

Camus‘ letzte Nachricht, die die nachkommende Generation inspirieren sollte (5), wurde in der libertären Zeitschrift „Reconstruir“ (Wiederaufbau) auf der Titelseite ihrer Ausgabe vom Januar/Februar 1960 veröffentlicht. Es war Camus‘ Antwort auf einen Fragebogen über das Problem der internationalen Beziehungen.

So fragte die Zeitschrift:

„Geben Ihnen die Gipfeltreffen zwischen den Vertretern der Vereinigten Staaten und der Sowjetunion irgendeine Hoffnung, was die Möglichkeiten der Überwindung des Kalten Krieges und der Teilung der Welt in zwei antagonistisch sich gegenüberstehende Blöcke betrifft?“

Camus‘ Antwort: „Nein. Die Macht macht denjenigen verrückt, der sie innehat.“ (6)

Die letzte Frage von „Reconstruir“ lautete:

„Wie sehen Sie die Zukunft der Menschheit? Was müsste man tun, um zu einer Welt zu kommen, die weniger von der Notwendigkeit unterdrückt und freier wäre?“

Darauf antwortete Camus mit der bekannten „Botschaft“ an die nachfolgende Generation:

„Geben, wenn man kann. Und nicht hassen, wenn das möglich ist.“ (7)

Auf den Frieden hoffen und für ihn kämpfen 

Albert Camus

Albert Camus

Für Camus war nichts unentschuldbarer als der Krieg und der Aufruf zum Völkerhass. Seiner Meinung nach hätte der Westen Besseres zu tun, als sich in Kriegen und Streitereien selbst zu zerfleischen Aber wenn der Krieg einmal ausgebrochen ist, meinte er, sei es zwecklos und feige, sich unter dem Vorwand, man sei nicht für ihn verantwortlich, abseits zu stellen (8).

In der französischen Zeitschrift „Défence de l’homme“ vom 10. Juni 1949 ergänzte er auf deren Feststellung hin, dass die Zukunft düster aussehe:

„Warum? Es gibt nichts mehr zu fürchten, denn wir haben das Allerschlimmste kennengelernt. Es gibt daher von nun an nur noch Gründe dafür, zu hoffen und zu kämpfen.“

Auf die Frage: „Mit welchem Ziel?“ antwortete er: „Für den Frieden.“

„Ich setze auf den Frieden. Darin liegt mein ganz eigener Optimismus. Aber man muss für ihn etwas tun und das wird schwer. Darin liegt mein Pessimismus. Jedenfalls bekenne ich mich heute einzig und allein zu den Friedensbewegungen, die versuchen, sich auf internationaler Ebene zu verbreiten. Auf ihrer Seite finden sich die wahren Realisten. Und ich bin mit ihnen.“ (9).

In seinen Tagebucheintragungen von 1939 meinte Camus, dass nichts festgelegt sei und man alles ändern könne; auch Kriege könne man verhindern:

„Es gibt ein einziges Verhängnis, nämlich den Tod, und darüber hinaus gibt es keines mehr. In dem Zeitraum, der von der Geburt bis zum Tod reicht, ist nichts festgelegt: man kann alles ändern und sogar dem Krieg Einhalt gebieten und sogar den Frieden erhalten, wenn man inständig, stark und lange genug will. Grundsatz: Zuerst nach dem suchen, was jeder Mensch an Wertvollem in sich trägt.“ (10).

In den „Seiten aus dem Tagebuch (1939)“ in Lou Marins Buch gibt es auch einen Brief, in dem sich Camus an einen „Verzweifelten“ wendet:

„Sie schreiben, dass dieser Krieg Sie bedrückt, dass Sie bereit wären zu sterben, dass sie aber diese weltweite Dummheit nicht ertragen können, diese blutrünstige Feigheit und diese verbrecherische Naivität, die immer noch glaubt, menschliche Probleme könnten mit Blut gelöst werden. Ich lese Ihre Zeilen, und ich verstehe Sie. (…)

Ich verstehe Sie, aber ich kann Ihnen nicht mehr folgen, wenn sie aus dieser Verzweiflung eine Lebensregel machen und sich hinter Ihrem Ekel zurückziehen wollen, weil ja doch alles unnütz sei. Denn die Verzweiflung ist ein Gefühl und kein Zustand. Sie können nicht darin verharren. Und das Gefühl muss einer klaren Erkenntnis der Dinge weichen. (…).

Heute sind Sie überzeugt, dass Sie nichts mehr verhindern können. Dies ist der springende Punkt. Aber zunächst müssen Sie sich fragen, ob Sie wirklich alles getan haben, um diesen Krieg zu verhindern. Wenn ja, könnte dieser Krieg Ihnen als ein Verhängnis vorkommen und Sie könnten die Meinung vertreten, dass nichts mehr zu machen sei. Aber ich bin sicher, dass Sie nicht alles getan haben, was nötig war, genau so wenig wie wir alle. Sie haben es nicht verhindern können? Nein, das stimmt nicht. Dieser Krieg war nicht unabwendbar, das wissen Sie. (…).

Sie haben eine Aufgabe, zweifeln Sie nicht daran. Jeder Mensch besitzt einen mehr oder weniger großen Einflussbereich. Er verdankt ihn seinen Mängeln ebenso sehr wie seinen Vorzügen. Aber wie dem auch sei, er ist vorhanden und er kann unmittelbar genutzt werden. Treiben sie niemanden zum Aufruhr. Man muss mit dem Blut und der Freiheit der anderen schonend umgehen. Aber Sie können zehn, zwanzig, dreißig Menschen davon überzeugen, dass dieser Krieg weder unabwendbar war noch ist, dass noch nicht alle Mittel versucht worden sind, ihm Einhalt zu gebieten, dass man es sagen, es wenn möglich schreiben, es wenn nötig hinausschreien muss! Diese zehn oder dreißig Menschen werden es zehn anderen weitersagen, die es ihrerseits wieder verbreiten. Wenn die Trägheit Sie zurückhält, nun gut, so fangen sie mit anderen wieder von vorne an. (…).

Individuen sind es, die uns heute in den Tod schicken. Warum sollte es nicht anderen Individuen gelingen, der Welt den Frieden zu schenken? Nur muss man beginnen, ohne an so große Ziele zu denken. Vergessen Sie nicht, dass der Krieg ebenso sehr mit der Begeisterung derer geführt wird, die ihn wollen, wie mit der Verzweiflung derer, die ihn mit der ganzen Kraft ihrer Seele ablehnen (11). 

Camus‘ Werke sind eine Schulung im Geiste der Revolte

Camus‘ Denken kulminiert in der Aufforderung zur Revolte im Sinne eines unablässigen Kampfes um ein höheres Maß an Freiheit. Der zum Bewusstsein seiner selbst gelangte Mensch kann nichts anderes tun, als sich gegen die Bedingungen der Sozialordnung aufzulehnen. Die ihm entsprechende Lebensform ist die permanente Empörung.

Wenn der Mensch in seiner Verlassenheit zu sich kommt, kann er gemäß Camus‘ entweder den Selbstmord wählen oder sich entschlossen diesem Dasein zuwenden, das nur durch diese Zuwendung Sinn bekommt. Gleichgültigkeit ist ausgeschlossen. Das Ich hat die Welt absurd genannt und bekennt sich somit zum Willen, diese Welt zu verändern. Die Absurdität der Welt zur Kenntnis zu nehmen heißt: sich gegen sie auflehnen. In diesem Akt der Empörung findet der Mensch zu sich selbst – in Abwandlung der Formel von Descartes: „Ich empöre mich – deshalb bin ich!“ Der hellsichtig gewordene Mensch, der sich als Herr seines Schicksals weiß, verschreibt sich dem Geist der Revolte.

Einmal auf dem Standpunkt der Revolte stehend, erblickt der Mensch in seinen Mitmenschen Bedrückte seiner Art und sieht sich in der Gemeinschaft der Leidenden, zu der er sich selbst als zugehörig betrachtet. Die Auflehnung im Namen von Menschenrecht und Menschenwürde kann aber nie für den einzelnen alleine geschehen – sie geschieht für alle Menschen: „Ich empöre mich – also sind wir!“

Für den freien Menschen gibt es kein höheres Ziel, als die Verwirklichung der Freiheit aller. Gerade das ist die eigentliche Hingabe an die Menschen der Zukunft. Die wahre Großzügigkeit gegenüber der Zukunft bestehet darin, alles der Gegenwart zu geben.

*

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Dr. Rudolf Lothar Hänsel ist Schul-Rektor, Erziehungswissenschaftler und Diplom-Psychologe. Nach seinen Universitätsstudien wurde er wissenschaftlicher Lehrer in der Erwachsenenbildung. Als Pensionär arbeitete er als Psychotherapeut in eigener Praxis. In seinen Büchern und Fachartikeln fordert er eine bewusste ethisch-moralische Werteerziehung sowie eine Erziehung zu Gemeinsinn und Frieden. Für seine Verdienste um Serbien bekam er 2021 von den Universitäten Belgrad und Novi Sad den Republik-Preis „Kapitän Misa Anastasijevic“ verliehen.

Er schreibt regelmäßig für Global Research.     

Noten

(1) Bouchentouf-Siagh, Zohra und Kampits, Peter (2001). Zur Aktualität von Albert Camus. Wiener Vorlesungen. Wien

(2) Marin, Lou (Hrsg.). (2013). Albert Camus-Libertäre Schriften (1948-1960). Hamburg. Buchumschlag Innenklappe

(3) A. a. O.

(4) Camus, Albert (1959). Der Mythos von Sisyphos. Hamburg, S. 7

(5) Marin, Lou (Hrsg.). (2013). Albert Camus-Libertäre Schriften (1948-1960). Hamburg, S.363

(6) A. a. O., S. 363f.

(7) A. a. O., S. 364

(8) A. a. O., S. 197

(9) A. a. O., S. 81

(10) A. a. O., S. 267

(11) A. a. O., S. 271ff

 

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***

Introduction to the Theme

In my search for uplifting reading that can offer orientation in these dark times, I came across the works and thoughts of Albert Camus – as I did in the sixties and seventies of the last century.

Camus’s history of influence goes far beyond literature. As a representative of French atheistic existentialism, he not only influenced thinking in the last century about the basic questions of human existence, the role of intellectuals and the individual’s commitment to freedom and justice (1), he still offers fundamental orientation today. He has taken into account the research results of scientific depth psychology.

Although the extensive literary work of the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature (1957) achieved worldwide recognition, his journalistic work, his articles in libertarian-socialist magazines and his book “Man in Revolt” (1961) are less well-known. They inspired anarchist movements worldwide, led to a reorientation in the post-war period and were the occasion for the confrontation and break with Jean-Paul Sartre in 1952 (2).

A good overview of Camus’ thought and work and comprehensive understanding of man in revolt is provided by the book “Albert Camus – Libertarian Writings (1948-1960)”, edited by the French journalist and translator Lou Marin in 2013 (3).

The best way to describe the brave affirmation of this world in Camus’s work is the sentence of Pindar that precedes the treatise of Camus’s “The Myth of Sisyphus”:

“Dear soul, do not aspire to eternal life, but exhaust what is possible.” (4)

Camus’s final message: “Give when you can. And not hate, if that is possible.”

Camus’s last message, which was to inspire the coming generation (5), was published in the libertarian journal Reconstruir (Reconstruction) on the front page of its January/February 1960 issue. It was Camus’s answer to a questionnaire on the problem of international relations.

Thus the journal asked:

“Do the summit meetings between the representatives of the United States and the Soviet Union give you any hope as to the possibilities of overcoming the Cold War and the division of the world into two antagonistically opposed blocs?”

Camus’ answer: “No. Power makes the one who holds it crazy.” (6)

The final question of “Reconstruir” was: “How do you see the future of humanity? What would it take to arrive at a world less oppressed by necessity and more free?”

To this Camus replied with the well-known “message” to the following generation: “Give when you can. And not hate, if that is possible.” (7)

Hoping for Peace and Fighting for It

For Camus, nothing was more inexcusable than war and the call to hatred of nations. In his opinion, the West had better things to do than to tear itself apart in wars and quarrels. But once war had broken out, he thought, it was futile and cowardly to stand aside under the pretext that one was not responsible for it (8).

In the French magazine “Défence de l’homme” of 10 June 1949, in response to its observation that the future looked bleak, he added:

“Why? There is nothing more to fear, because we have known the very worst. Therefore, from now on, there are only reasons to hope and fight.”

To the question, “To what end?” he replied, “For peace.”

“I am betting on peace. Therein lies my very own optimism. But you have to do something for it and that will be difficult. Therein lies my pessimism. In any case, today I am solely committed to the peace movements that are trying to spread internationally. On their side are found the true realists. And I am with them.” (9).

In his diary entries of 1939, Camus said that nothing is fixed and everything can be changed; even wars can be prevented:

“There is one fatality, death, and beyond that there is none. In the period that extends from birth to death, nothing is fixed: one can change everything and even put a stop to war and even preserve peace if one wants fervently, strongly and long enough. Principle: seek first what each person has within him of value.” (10).

In the “Pages from the Diary (1939)” in Lou Marin’s book, there is also a letter in which Camus addresses a “despairing man”:

“You write that this war depresses you, that you would be ready to die, but that you cannot bear this worldwide stupidity, this bloodthirsty cowardice and this criminal naivety that still believes human problems can be solved with blood. I read your lines and I understand you. (…)

I understand you, but I can no longer follow you when you make a rule of life out of this despair and want to retreat behind your disgust because everything is useless. For despair is a feeling and not a state. You cannot remain in it. And the feeling must give way to a clear realisation of things. (…).

Today you are convinced that you can no longer prevent anything. This is the crux of the matter. But first you must ask yourself whether you have really done everything to prevent this war. If so, this war might seem like a doom to you and you might take the view that nothing more can be done. But I am sure that you did not do everything that was necessary, any more than any of us. You couldn’t have prevented it? No, that’s not true. This war was not inevitable, you know that. (…).

You have a task, do not doubt it. Every person has a more or less large sphere of influence. He owes it as much to his shortcomings as to his advantages. But be that as it may, it is there and it can be used immediately. Do not drive anyone to riot. One must be sparing with the blood and freedom of others. But you can convince ten, twenty, thirty people that this war was neither inevitable nor is it, that all means have not yet been tried to stop it, that it must be said, written if possible, shouted out if necessary! These ten or thirty people will spread the word to ten others, who in turn will spread it again. If inertia holds you back, well, they start all over again with others. (…).

Individuals are the ones who send us to our deaths today. Why shouldn’t other individuals succeed in giving peace to the world? Only one must begin without thinking of such great goals. Do not forget that war is waged as much with the enthusiasm of those who want it as with the despair of those who reject it with all the strength of their souls (11).

Camus’s Works Are a Training in the Spirit of Revolt

Camus’s thinking culminates in the call to revolt in the sense of an incessant struggle for a higher degree of freedom. Man who has achieved self-awareness can do nothing but rebel against the conditions of the social order. The form of life that corresponds to him is permanent indignation.

When man comes to himself in his abandonment, he can, according to Camus, either choose suicide or resolutely turn to this existence, which only gains meaning through this turning. Indifference is out of the question. The I has called the world absurd and thus professes the will to change this world. To take note of the absurdity of the world means: to rebel against it. In this act of indignation, man finds himself – in a variation of Descartes’ formula: “I indignate – therefore I am!” The clairvoyant human being, who knows himself to be the master of his destiny, subscribes to the spirit of revolt.

Once standing on the standpoint of revolt, the human being sees in his fellow human beings oppressed people of his own kind and sees himself in the community of the suffering, to which he considers himself to belong. However, revolt in the name of human rights and human dignity can never happen for the individual alone – it happens for all human beings: “I revolt – therefore we are!”

For the free human being, there is no higher goal than the realisation of freedom for all. This is precisely the real dedication to the people of the future. True generosity towards the future consists in giving everything to the present.

*

Note to readers: Please click the share button above. Follow us on Instagram and Twitter and subscribe to our Telegram Channel. Feel free to repost and share widely Global Research articles.

Dr Rudolf Lothar Hänsel is a school rector, educational scientist and qualified psychologist. After his university studies he became an academic teacher in adult education. As a retiree he worked as a psychotherapist in his own practice. In his books and professional articles, he calls for a conscious ethical-moral education in values as well as an education for public spirit and peace. For his services to Serbia, he was awarded the Republic Prize “Captain Misa Anastasijevic” by the Universities of Belgrade and Novi Sad in 2021. 

He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

Notes

(1) Bouchentouf-Siagh, Zohra and Kampits, Peter (2001). On the topicality of Albert Camus. Vienna Lectures. Vienna

(2) Marin, Lou (ed.). (2013). Albert Camus-Libertarian Writings (1948-1960). Hamburg. Book jacket inside flap

(3) Op. cit.

(4) Camus, Albert (1959). The myth of Sisyphus. Hamburg, p. 7

(5) Marin, Lou (ed.). (2013). Albert Camus-Libertarian Writings (1948-1960). Hamburg, p.363

(6) op. cit., p. 363f.

(7) op. cit., p. 364

(8) op. cit., p. 197

(9) op. cit., p. 81

(10) op. cit., p. 267

(11) op. cit., p. 271ff.

All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the Translate Website button below the author’s name.

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***

Michael Hudson [Intro/Music]: America cannot re-industrialize without reversing this whole philosophy of post-industrial society as a class war against labor. You can’t have both. You can’t have a class war against labor and reindustrialization with the labor unionization that goes with it.

Countries who let an oligarchy develop end up pushing their own economies into obsolescence and a kind of dark age. It’s policy, and most of all, it’s the policy of the Democratic Party’s administration here.

[00:01:35] Geoff Ginter [Intro/Music]: Now, let’s see if we can avoid the apocalypse altogether. Here’s another episode of Macro N Cheese with your host, Steve Grumbine.

[00:01:43] Steven Grumbine: All right. This is Steve with Macro N Cheese. Today’s guest is none other than Michael Hudson. Michael Hudson’s the president of the Institute for Study of Long-Term Economic Trends (ISLET), a Wall Street financial analyst, Distinguished Research Professor of Economics at the University of Missouri, Kansas City, and he is the author of many books you’ve probably read, including Superimperialism: The Economic Strategy of American Empire, Forgive Them Their Debts, J is for Junk Economics, Killing The Host, The Bubble And Beyond: Trade, Development and Foreign Debt, amongst others. Without further ado, I want to bring on my guest, Michael Hudson. Michael, thank you so much for joining me today, sir.

[00:02:26] Michael Hudson: Good to be back.

[00:02:27] Grumbine: Absolutely. So one of the things that’s stressing me out, as far as being an economic podcast and reviewing the dialogue that is going on in the ecosphere and lefties trying to make heads or tails of the world around them, is watching the fallout of decisions that the United States have made in regards to Ukraine, China, Russia, and this divergence into a multipolar world. The steps that the United States have taken appear to be shooting themselves in the foot.

An empire that has lost its grip on much of what it once had, and it’s doing things that I think most people would say are really horrible, from war, to austerity, to using the IMF and NATO as tools of aggression. There’s so many aspects to the United States approach to geopolitical relationships, that I think most people are trying to get a grip on.

What does this mean to them? In discussing this, before we started this podcast, you gave us some notes, and it was quite clear that the United States is a failed state. I don’t fully understand what that means, but I’m hoping that maybe you can help us understand why is the US a failed state and what is it about its recent behavior?

What does it indicate to us about where it’s headed, and what we can expect in the future?

[00:03:58] Hudson: Well, I think it’s a failed state because its economy is paralyzed and we’re in a debt deflation, an economic polarization, that is just transferring all wealth and income away from labor, away from industry, into really the financial sector and what I call the finance, insurance, and real estate sector.

And what’s failed is, right now, President Biden says that he wants the future to re-industrialize. He realizes that ever since the Clinton administration, the Democratic Party has been solidly behind de-industrializing the United States, and that’s actually going back to the 1960s and early 70s when economists were celebrating what they called, a post-industrial society.

Well, what does a post-industrial society mean? It meant a society without blue collar labor, really, service labor, which happened to be a society without labor unions. And the promise was that a post-industrial society was going to make everybody richer, and you’d have easier working conditions, and shorter working days, and productivity would rise, and everybody would have an easier, more prosperous life.

Well, that hasn’t happened, so the question is: Why did the United States decide to de-industrialize? And I think it was done as a combination between two parties.

You had the Democrats with a pro-financial anti-labor policy, and the Republicans with a pro-financial, pro-landlord, pro-1% policy, wanting tax cuts; and the real objective of de-industrialization from Clinton on, was an anti-labor policy, because de-industrialization meant essentially lowering employment, and thereby lowering the demand for labor, and lowering the wages.

And the question that everyone was asking from 1980 on was, why were wages having to be reduced, and why are wages lower right now? Well, for years, American dominance, as an industrial power in the late 19th century, was a result of low wages, as a result of low housing costs, low debt, free education, public services, and this had created a very prosperous US economy, from right after the Civil War, down through Roosevelt’s New Deal.

But all of this began to come under attack. Really beginning with the Carter administration, when he was promoting immigration as a means of cutting wages in the southwest. It was Carter that began to realize that, well, there’s a lot of labor that’s making too much money in the southwest, we’ll spur immigration.

Well, when Clinton came in later, he wanted to deregulate the economy and he wanted free trade, for basically, corporations to de-invest from the United States, and invest abroad, and hire low wage labor.

He pressed to accept China into the World Trade Organization in 2001, and that’s basically the Democratic Party program today, to fight against labor, and reduce its wages, and favor Wall Street. Obama typified this. He promised a card-check to support unionization, and then just refused to do it.

And instead of introducing card check, he devoted his time to hoping to work with the Republicans, to cut back Social Security, on the grounds that you had to balance the budget. And by balancing the budget, that would force the economy to rely on private banks lending money at interest, instead of the government creating money to spend into the economy by running budget deficits. Well, Biden has topped it all off by not supporting labor unions, as you saw during the railroad strike, and by the Democrats having a trick that they pull. They have some postgraduate lady – maybe she does have a degree, as the Parliamentarian, who, just in case the Democrats and Congress would pass a law that people want, the parliamentarian said, you can’t pass that because that’s pro-labor. And being pro-labor is against the Constitution. Because that’s against what the original leaders of the Constitution meant. And you can’t pass a law favoring blacks or hispanics, as you saw with the Harvard case, because after all, the original authors of the Constitution were mostly slave owners, and they wouldn’t have wanted any such favoritism to the blacks.

So if you’re an originalist, of course you’re going to have the Parliamentarian lady say, well, that’s not really what the Supreme Court will agree with. And of course, when it finally did get to the Supreme Court, they said: you can’t do this, this is not what the original founders of the Constitution wanted and believed.

They wanted to enslave Afro-Americans, not get them into Harvard for heaven’s sakes. Well, I don’t want to leave the Republicans out of this, because they’ve had a kind of complementary pro-rentier policy, favoring real estate under Reagan, with his accelerated depreciation. He basically made absentee ownership and commercial real estate tax exempt, and he slashed the taxes on wealth, and moved away from progressive taxation to regressive taxation.

As did Donald Trump, and of course the Democrats have accepted all of this. There was no attempt by the Democrats to fight back against the Republicans regressive taxation, and the difference is that the Republicans have a kind of libertarian, anti-government policy, which is their euphemism for a government strong enough to control the economy, and the interests of the 1%, who are their campaign donors.

And the Democrats are pro-government. Namely, they want a pro-government strong enough to defend the 1% against the rest of the economy, but they use a different rhetoric for all of this. So the problem is that both US political parties are committed to de-industrialization for the reasons that the head of the Federal reserve has explained over the last few months: if you have more industrialization, you’ll have more employment, and if you have more employment, you’ll raise wages.

And our philosophy, Democrats and Republicans alike, is to keep wages down so that corporate profits can be higher. And it’s worth it to the employing class, it’s worth it to the corporate monopolies to impose a depression on the United States, as long as that will reduce wages and strengthen the power of the 1% over the 99%. So the 1% is willing to lose sales, to lose profits, as the economy falls into what they call a recession, as long as their power over the 99% increases.

That’s the basic key to understanding where American politics is going. And this is why the Davos gang says the world is overpopulated. Who needs labor, when it really can’t afford to pay interest.

For the financial sector and the FIRE sector, the 1% or the 10%, the role of labor is to make enough earnings so that it can pay interest to the banks, pay rents or interest to the mortgage lenders, and can basically pay money to the FIRE sector. And if labor’s wages really are forced down to break-even subsistence levels, then who needs labor? Time for population control. And basically the US problem is not only low wages, but it’s tax favoritism for the FIRE sector. And this cannot be reversed without causing a bank crisis. Because if you were to tax real estate and home ownership, for instance, and commercial real estate with a land tax, which is what the whole 19th century’s classical economics is all about, then the banks couldn’t get paid. So we’re stuck. America cannot re-industrialize without reversing this whole philosophy of post-industrial society as a class war against labor.

You can’t have both. You can’t have a class war against labor and reindustrialization, with the labor unionization that goes with it. That’s the conundrum. So when Biden talks about, we at the Democratic party want to re-industrialize, there’s no way that his policies can possibly permit any real re-industrialization to occur.

And that’s why America’s stuck. That’s why it’s become a failed state, because it can’t compete with other countries in today’s world with this right wing libertarian, anti-labor, neoliberal philosophy.

[00:13:29] Grumbine: Every time I think about this, I get enraged. We’ve been speaking with some abolitionists for police abolition. When we talk to them, they explain, you’ve got it all backwards. The police aren’t there after the fact. They’re not there as a result of crime. They’re there to keep order for capital, to make sure that capital runs smoothly.

And to extend this out to NATO, and it does the same thing around the world, it’s there to create chaos, and it’s there to institute order to facilitate these things. The US is losing its grip on its empire, yet has the largest military ever amassed in the history of the world. What about that military maintains hegemony?

And what about that military is costing it it’s hegemony. Cuz right now something’s outta whack. I’m all about ripping the empire down, but that has a whole lot of downstream dominoes that come with it. I’m interested in your thoughts on the role of the military industrial complex on this failed state.

[00:14:32] Hudson: Well, you’re using a trick word: ‘military.’ Military, for the United States, is different from what the word ‘military’ meant in every other society from the beginning of time. When you say military, you think of an army fighting. You cannot conquer a country without invading it, and to invade it, you obviously need an army, you need troops. But the Americans can’t mount an army, of enough size, to occupy anybody except Grenada, or Panama, because the Vietnam War stopped the military draft. What America does have, what it calls military, is what you quite rightly linked it to: the military industrial complex. It makes arms. And weapons.

But again, these are a funny kind of weapons. Suppose you had a winery that made wine that was so good, that really wasn’t for drinking. It was for wealthy people to buy, and to trade. And as the years go by, the wine would turn to vinegar. It’s not wine for drinking. It’s wine for making a profit, a capital gain.

Well, you can say the same thing about America’s military arms, as we’re seeing in Ukraine right now — or as President Biden calls it, Iraq. The arms, basically, are there to create a huge profit for Raytheon, and the other companies in the military industrial complex. They’re for buying, and they’re for giving to the Ukrainians, to let Russia blow them up.

But they’re not for fighting. They’re not for winning a war. They’re for being used up, so you have to replace them now, with yet new buying. And so the United States State Department has asked Germany and other European countries, well, you’d promised to pay 2% of your GDP on military arms to enrich our military industrial complex.

But now that we’ve given all these tanks and missiles away – Russia just blew up 12% of all the tanks in just one week – so we only have a few weeks left to go before they’re all wiped out. Because they really don’t work on the battlefield. They’re not for fighting, they’re for being blown up. Now we want you to actually increase your spending to 4%, to replenish all of the stocks, you’ve just depleted, 10 years, maybe 20 years, of your arms stocks. And you have to now replenish them very rapidly, in order to meet the NATO targets, that we and the State Department, have set. So military today isn’t really how you control other countries. America’s found it much easier to do this by financial mechanisms.

You conquer a country financially, you conquer a country by getting it to submit to austerity programs by the International Monetary Fund, again, to impose austerity, to keep its local wages down. So you use finance as a means of imposing post-industrialization and depression, in order to prevent democracy from developing.

So any country that is seeking to promote a democracy by public spending on basic infrastructure, or banking, like China is doing, is called an autocracy. And every autocracy that has imposed a client oligarchy, to fight against labor, and to prevent these policies that would help enrich and industrialize the economy, is called a democracy, not an autocracy.

So we’re back in the Orwellian logic to describe a situation, that probably even the cynical George Orwell, would not have thought could go quite this far.

[00:18:29] Grumbine: I think about austerity all the time. I read Clara Mattei’s book The Capital Order: How Economists Invented Austerity and Paved the Way to Fascism [Clara Mattei]. And I guess my question to you is this, given all the work that you’ve put into the historical nature of debt and debt jubilees and austerity, how is it when we look at the domestic policy of the United States, we don’t have money for healthcare, for getting rid of student debt?

We don’t have money to invest in universal basic services, to provide any kind of relief. Housing as a right, any of the basic needs, we have no money for this, but we know as MMT, or economically literate people, from an understanding of state theory of money, that the state itself creates its currency.

How in the world is the United States able to convince people that it doesn’t have money? And it can’t do any of these things, while it uses every bit of its fiscal power, that it’s willing to admit it has, to defeat the rest of the world, but stamps down on its own citizens? I feel like, Michael, this is maybe the most important cog in between, not only the geopolitical world, the larger picture, but as well as the domestic picture, and even down to the local homeless guy living under a bridge.

The things that we’re dealing with here are the same thing, it’s just different in scale, maybe. Can you explain that to me?

I.

[00:20:04] Hudson: Well, what this is, is reflecting the power of junk economics and ideology. The right wing economists claim that if government were to provide more public healthcare, and more public services, taxes would go up. And because both Republicans and the Democrats have shifted taxes off real estate, off finance, off the 1% onto the 99%, that means that the wage earners taxes would go up.

But of course, it doesn’t have to be that way at all, because, as you point out, the state theory of money says that governments can create their own money. That’s been the case for the last few hundred years. And China has shown, governments don’t have to borrow money from the wealthy people to pay interest.

They can simply print the money, and the junk economics people say, well, if you print your money, that’s inflationary. But it’s no more inflationary than bank credit. Suppose that a government does indeed borrow a billion dollars from wealthy bond holders, and the wealthy bond holders are going to take the money out of the bank and turn it over to the government for spending.

Why does the government need the bond holders to create this money? Or, why do they need banks to suddenly go to their computer and create a billion dollars, to lend to the government, which the government will then redeposit in these very banks? The government is going to create the money in any case, whether it’s lent by the bond holders, or the banks, or just simply printed.

So the pretense is that the government has to borrow from bond holders. Because the bond holders decide what is economically worthwhile. Well, what does this ignore? That the bond holders are the 1%, and what they find economically worthwhile, isn’t using the government to benefit living standards, benefit labor, and to provide social services.

The government’s role is to provide more money for the 1%, via the military industrial complex, and the other government projects.

[00:22:22] Intermission: You are listening to Macro N Cheese, a podcast brought to you by Real Progressives, a nonprofit organization dedicated to teaching the masses about MMT or Modern Monetary Theory. Please help our efforts and become a monthly donor at PayPal or Patreon, like and follow our pages on Facebook and YouTube, and follow us on TikTok, Twitter, Twitch, Rokfin, and Instagram.

[00:23:13] Grumbine: So as far as austerity in this country, and making people feel like there is no alternative, you talked about the sale of bonds, and the myth that the rich are financing all of our lives. I listened to your friend Stephanie Kelton, who talks about the deficit myth, and talks about how bonds are after the fact, that they’re not really a funding operation.

And her paper she wrote in 1998, broke down that taxes and bonds cannot finance government. Yet people still acting like we are in debt to the rich, that we need the rich to survive. How does that myth hold water? Why does that still exist? Why are we not in the streets, locking arms, fighting back, taking this leviathan down?

I’ll just interject one thing also. I had the weird opportunity to spend a night with Jerome Powell, even though I didn’t know it, at the Dead and Company show in Virginia. And before I got there, I was driving through Loudoun County, Virginia, the tech corridor where you got Raytheon, and Boeing, and Halliburton. Every big defense contractor, and it just felt like huge trophies for the gods.

It was ridiculous. It was so over the top. That’s what we’re up against. We are up against something so massive, so unbelievably powerful. How does a person that has a leftist perspective, not only of labor and capital, but an understanding of trying to make people’s lives better, how do you do away with empire, when you’re staring at these massive monuments to the gods of industry, of the military industrial complex?

How do we take that leviathan on? It seems too big.

[00:25:08] Hudson: Well, in contrast to your trip through Virginia, here in New York, in Chicago, in Toronto, and in almost all the big cities throughout the world, the biggest buildings are the banks. They’re not Raytheon, they’re not the military industrial complex, they’re always the banks. They used to be shaped just like ancient Greek and Roman temples, not pyramids, as earlier, but a temple, as temples of finance, often they were called. And they’re the largest buildings because the wealthiest sector of society is the banking sector, the financial sector, not the industrial sector, not the military sector, and not even the real estate sector. Because most real estate rents are paid as interest to the banks. Now, the banks do not really help industrialize the economy.

They actually help de-industrialize the economy, because their philosophy is anti-labor and post-industrial. So how do you explain to people that it’s not necessary, for instance, for the governments to abandon public planning, and leave planning to the financial sectors? If the governments don’t do economic forward planning, Wall Street and the financial sectors will do it, because that is where credit is created.

Well, you mentioned Stephanie Kelton, and she was my department chairman at the University of Missouri at Kansas City, which was put together with a grant over 20 years ago, by Warren Mosler, and they put all of the Modern Monetary Theorists together there. Randy Wray, myself, Bill Black, explaining bank corruption in his book The Best Way To Rob A Bank Is To Own One. So we had developed a whole curriculum to explain what we called reality economics, how the economy and the world really works. Well, needless to say, a lot of students wanted to come to learn this. They were very sympathetic. Intuitively, they felt that, yes, this is how the economy works.

But there’s one problem, when they graduated with their PhD, there’s really only two jobs for economists in the economy: one is to drive a cab and the other is to teach. But in order to teach, you have to be hired according to how many journal articles you write for the most prestigious journals. And almost all the journal articles are controlled by the economics departments of colleges like the University of Chicago, or Berkeley, that are funded by the banks, and the large foundations. And so if you don’t publish in these journals, by saying what the neoliberals, the monetarists, the junk economists say, then you’re not going to get hired. So of course our students did get hired, but not by Harvard, or the University of Chicago, or Princeton, or Columbia. They could get hired by the New School here in New York, and by others, but there is a almost total censorship. And some students came from Asia, and they’ve gone back to Asia. Some were my colleagues in China, and Hong Kong, folks studied at UMKC. But you have the control imposing junk economics in the United States, by the media, such as The New York Times, is almost as strong as their control over reporting about the Ukraine war, as if Ukraine’s winning, and not losing.

They’re saying as if deindustrialization is helping us move into the post-industrial society of mass unemployment and homelessness, as if that’s a good thing. Well, it is a good thing for the 1%, because they get to feel, we’re really it. We’re really the new lords, the financial lords, not landlords, who are also in debt to us, to borrow. So that’s really the situation. Ultimately, if people don’t have a mental model in their mind of how the world works, and how it should work, to promote prosperity, they believe with Margaret Thatcher, as you said, that “there is no alternative.” And the function of economic education is to try to brainwash students into thinking there is no alternative.

Things have to be the way they are. That’s Darwinian evolution. That’s survival of the fittest, the survival of the bankers. To beat society. The bankers have won, labor’s lost. And if you look at what American polls show, the Americans don’t want war in Ukraine.

They want money to be spent domestically — we don’t get it. They want public healthcare — we don’t get it. They want student loans to be forgiven, rather than preventing graduates, debtors, from ever having enough money to actually buy a home of their own and start a family — we don’t get it. And we don’t get it, because neither the Republicans, nor the Democrats support it.

But if they pretend to support it, by passing a law, the Supreme Court is there to make sure that it’s not what the original Constitutional people wanted. Because the Constitution was drafted by authors who feared democracy. Who said that we have to make sure that we have enough checks and blocks, so that the mob cannot rule and take away the power of we, the bond holders, and landlords, and slave owners.

[00:30:45] Grumbine: Well stated. This is really important stuff you’re bringing up here, Michael, I appreciate it. Let’s roll into the next phase. We’re going to double back, cuz we talked about the BRICS in the very beginning. We talked about China investing in its own financial sector. One of the concerns that many have is the loss of the world reserve currency.

And I’ve spoken with quite a few economists who have stated, point blank, that one of the reasons why the US is still able to maintain that level of hegemony, and still be able to hold onto reserve status, is because of the amount of deficit spending it was allowed to do previously, and that allowed the money to matriculate throughout the world.

It has a central hub in Wall Street, where people can invest, and so this is one of the primary reasons they say, that and, of course, the military, that allows us to retain that level. What, if anything, do you see has changed in such a way, to make that threatened by the BRICS, and I guess remedially, what exactly are the BRICS, and what does it represent that they’re trying to do?

[00:31:57] Hudson: Well, the BRICS was an acronym formed over a decade ago, for Brazil, Russia, India, and China. But now that the United States, in February of last year, 2022, confiscated Russia’s dollar reserves in the west, and told the Bank of England to confiscate Venezuela’s gold reserves. The United States says that any country that we declare to be an enemy, any country that we call an autocracy, namely democracies, is our enemy, and we can just grab all of your reserves.

Well, needless to say, this makes other countries afraid to use it, and they realize that the United States deficit, that has been pumping all these dollars into foreign economies, and their central banks, they end up being re-lent to the US government in treasury bills, and these treasury bills are used to finance the deficit, that’s largely military in nature. The budget deficit is primarily military, and the entire balance of payments deficit, after the Korean War, was entirely overseas military spending. That is what forced the United States to abandon convertibility of the dollar into gold in 1971. Not only General DeGaulle, but Germany, was cashing in every month, the extra dollars that were ending up in their central banks.

The United States was fighting in Vietnam and Southeast Asia, which were French colonies, and the only banks there at the time were French banks. They’d received this local spending in dollars, sent it to France and DeGaulle would cash it in for gold. And so it was America’s military spending that forced the United States off gold.

Well, when it went off gold, what were foreign countries going to spend their dollar inflows on? They don’t really buy real estate, and they don’t really buy stocks and bonds, at that time. They buy government bonds, and so it was the military spending for the balance of payments deficit, that financed the government domestic deficit.

The government didn’t have to borrow from abroad. Of course, it could have created its own money, but it had to provide some vehicle to absorb all of these dollars, that were being thrown off to other countries. So creating government bonds, by a deficit, was the means of giving foreign central banks an opportunity to dump, and recycle, and save, all of their dollars that America spent on 800 military bases, to encircle them, and have organized color revolutions, for any country that didn’t follow what American wanted, but responded to their own democratic wishes. So the BRICS are onto this, finally. They’ve been expanded to many other countries that want to join them, including Saudi Arabia, Iran. Basically, the BRICS are becoming an expanded Shanghai cooperation organization.

They’re the BRICS alternative to NATO, and we’re seeing a whole bunch of shadow international institutions, to counter those of the United States. An alternative to the IMF with a BRICS Bank, an alternative to the World Bank. Not to lend just for dependency on US exports, but to actually help other countries grow, instead of to become dependent.

So they realize that the American economic philosophy is junk economics, and the objective of American economic policy is to make other countries dependent, and to make sure that they can install client oligarchies to prevent democracy from occurring, right? So that if Chile would elect a socialist president like Allende, America will promote Pinochet to overthrow the whole group.

Other countries, they’ve been protesting this ever since the Bandon conference, in the mid 1950s. But there wasn’t a critical mass, and for the first time, the success of China, and other Asian countries, and having a mixed economy, and really doing exactly what industrial capitalism was supposed to do, namely evolving into socialism.

By creating a mixed economy with a government infrastructure, lowering the cost of living, and the cost of doing business, they’re finally succeeding, and leaving America way behind, in a paralyzed form. So it’s as like, America would like to grow as rapidly as China, but it can’t grow as rapidly as Asia, and still have a class war against industrialization.

How on earth are you going to maintain American prosperity without industry? How can you rule the world without having something to export, like industrial goods, or agriculture, or raw materials, or something other people need? The Americans only have one thing to offer. And it’s an offer really, that China and Russia can’t match.

The American can offer not to bomb other countries, not to overthrow their governments, not to have a color revolution. They’ll say what we can offer: your life. We’ll agree not to kill you, not to overthrow you, not to bomb you, not to do to you what we did to Libya, to Iraq, to Syria. If you don’t want that, then why don’t you be ‘our friend’, and join the free world?

That is what America has to offer, and other countries, I guess now that you’ve seen the year and a half war in Ukraine, you see that American weaponry, as we discussed, is what Mao called, a paper tiger. It’s not weaponry to fight. All that America has is one weapon, the hydrogen bomb. There is no other weapon that works.

There’s nothing in between, launching the Marines on shore, and dropping an atom bomb. There’s nothing in between that works, as we’re seeing. So that’s the problem. And the question is, now that you have a lot of American officials that say, well, you know, it’s really not necessarily so bad a thing if we use atom bombs, and the world comes to an end, because as Secretary of State and CIA head, Pompeo said, if the world blows up, Jesus will come, and he’ll send all of my people to heaven, and everyone else to hell. And there’s this end time mentality, with Blinken, Biden, the State Department, after us the deluge. We might as well have it come now, and we’ll have done a really big thing that’s changed history. Kaboom.

[00:38:44] Grumbine: Wow. Biden’s First State of the Union address, I was appalled to hear him already calling out China. His first intent was to demonize China, and you focus in on why? All I could see was, the United States government had allowed itself to be hollowed out, it allowed all its infrastructure to fall apart, it allowed its entire industrial base to collapse, and the pandemic showed the frailty of supply chains.

They go after Russia, they go after China, and they create enemies to buy time, to try to reinvent what the US is, to allow it to survive without its hegemony. What are your thoughts on why China and Russia became the targets?

[00:39:35] Hudson: It’s not what you say, it’s not that America ‘allowed’ other countries to go ahead, that was the deliberate policy, from Clinton on. They wanted to get rid of manufacturing labor here, in order to create what Marx called, a reserve army of the unemployed. They wanted to create unemployment here, by hiring foreign labor instead of American labor, and in the process, to make huge profits for companies, multinational firms, that produced abroad, with lower priced labor, from the United States.

So, it’s not that they allowed China to do something to pull ahead, America pushed these other countries to develop. That was part of the American’s anti-labor policy. And if you don’t realize that the aim is to cut living standards and reduce wages, except to the extent that wages can be spent on interest, to the financial sector, insurance, to the health providing sector, and housing sector, and rents for the real estate sector.

If they can’t provide this, the function of labor is not to produce commodities, as occurs under industrial capitalism. It’s not to be employed by manufacturers, to use equipment, to produce goods or services, it’s to serve as a market for the fire sector. That really is the guiding line, and it was the guiding line in Rome, which is why Rome fell apart.

It’s been the reason why countries, who let an oligarchy develop, end up pushing their own economies into obsolescence, and a kind of dark age. It’s policy, and most of all, it’s the policy of the Democratic Party’s administration here. Yeah. So look at what the laws do, and how the Supreme Court is there to prevent any kind of re-industrialization in the United States.

You cannot re-industrialize in a way that the original slaveholding authors of the Constitution would have approved of, if they were there today. They would be like the billionaires of Microsoft, and Facebook, and the others. That would be their philosophy.

[00:41:49] Grumbine: With the United States, this was by design. And we keep going through this dance, and if you’ve ever been to marriage counseling or anything like that, they always tell you, in order to get different results, you gotta change the dance. We’re still continuing to do the same dance, and the American people really haven’t got a clue, Michael.

How do we get the word out? It doesn’t seem to be making nearly enough of a dent. How do you get this word out to people, given the fact that the state itself, controls the media. How do we get out of that hell, or is it done, and we just have to stare the tsunami in the eye, and just let it take us out to sea.

[00:42:33] Hudson: Not at all like marriage counseling. My wife is a psychotherapist, and she’s counseled couples, and there’s one basic rule in counseling couples, she tells me. That if there’s a chance of violence, then you can’t do couples therapy, because they really can’t talk freely. You have to have each member of the couple go to a separate therapist and work them out individually.

It doesn’t work having them together. Well, there really isn’t a harmony of interest in the United States enough, so you can put labor and capital together, and come to a happy medium. There isn’t a medium. The economy’s polarizing. The interests of the financial, and the FIRE sector, are so antithetical to the interest of labor, and industry, that there’s no way you can meet in the middle, because the dynamic is polarizing, not converging.

The dream of most Americans is, we can somehow make a happy medium and bipartisanship. The bipartisanship is, what part of the FIRE sector do you want to rule: the Republicans cutting taxes for the rich, or the Democrats cutting employment for labor? Well, they’re two peas in the same pod, as they say. So you have to realize that the interests of labor are not those of capital. And yet, since I guess, the 1840 revolutions in Europe, there’s been this ideal that somehow the wage earning class can evolve into the middle class, first by owning its own home.

Although today, if you own your own home, you have to go into a lifetime of mortgage debt, or you can maybe buy an apartment somewhere and rent it out, and get that. Or you can use your retirement account to try to make money in the stock market. Good luck betting against the big guys. And there’s a myth that somehow the wage earners can become capitalists in miniature, as if they’re winning a lottery.

And as long as they don’t realize that the interests of labor and capital, and labor and capital they’re against finance, are antithetical, they’re not going to be the motivation for developing an economic ideology, to replace the pro 1% ideology, that we have today. Well, you could say the same problem is occurring in the BRICS countries.

The other day I was asked, how are you going to get China, and Saudi Arabia, and African, and South American countries all to work together? They all have such different religions, and ethnicities, and social status. Well, the common denominator is, they’re all wage earners. And they all have a common objective in making enough money, by working for a living, so that they can increase their living standards, have a home of their own, and have a shorter working day, and a less intensive, less exploitative, working conditions.

That’s all the common denominator that you need for these countries to work together, and it should be all the common denominator that you need in the United States, but as long as people think there are only two alternatives, the Republicans or the Democrats, well, that’s the same thing as saying there’s no alternative to the 1%, the FIRE sector, ruling society.

[00:45:57] Grumbine: Michael, if you were to have one parting word, to let our listeners know where we are, what would you describe the world as today? How would you describe the existence of the US, in this failed state that it’s in?

[00:46:15] Hudson: That America is in the same position as the Roman Republic, when it finally turned into the Roman Empire. The polarization has gone so far that there cannot be any recovery of living standards, any rise in wages, any improvement in living conditions, without radically changing the tax policy, the economic policy, without having a policy that benefits labor and productive industry, not the financial sector, and the real estate sector. That the financial sector and the property owning sector is outside of the economy. It’s external, it’s imposed on the economy. The economic core is workers for wages, producing goods and services. That core doesn’t need a financial wrapping.

You don’t need a wealthy 1% to finance the government’s budget deficit. Governments can do it by itself. The governments should have the role that the banks have today. That means there are not going to be any more big bank buildings overshadowing urban skylines. It means that there will be, basically, a return to what the whole world thought was an ideal of industrial capitalism, before World War I. And that was that capitalism would evolve steadily into socialism, to be a more productive economy, to free itself from the financial class, from the landlord class, and from the monopolists, and that a free market is a market free from land rent, free from bank rent, and free from unearned income, and wealth, that doesn’t play any productive role at all.

[00:48:01] Grumbine: Well stated, sir, well stated. Michael, do you have any other projects coming up? What are you working on? You’re always doing something, what’s happening over there?

[00:48:10] Hudson: Well, I’ve just published the second volume of my history of debt, The Collapse of Antiquity, and I’m now working on the third and final volume, which picks up the story of debt in the Crusades, in the 11th century to the 13th century. And I find that the whole financial system was transformed by the crusades.

Christianity had been denouncing interest payments and usury, ever since it became the Roman State religion. But Rome wanted to fund the Crusades, which were mainly against other Christian countries, mainly against France, and Germany, and Southern Italy, and Sicily, and Constantinople, is a kind of power grab.

And these wars required financing. So it was the papacy that introduced interest bearing debt and bankers, back into Christian civilization. And the modern financial system was introduced by the papacy itself, reversing all of the early Christian denunciation of usury. As Islam had denounced that, and freed its society from usury. All of this was a result of the Crusades, and the associated Inquisition, that was used to essentially wipe out all opposition from the real Christians, in Southern France, the Cathars, and the Christianity of the German states, the Holy Roman Empire.

And the strongest survival of Christianity in Constantinople, and its allied churches.

[00:49:56] Grumbine: I look forward to reading this, I’m excited about it. We have a bookstore at Real Progressives, on our website, and we will definitely fill it up with all the books. We have a bunch of them already there, but we’re going to keep adding to it. Michael, thank you so much for joining me today. This was an absolute pleasure.

I hope that we can have you back on. Your friend, and my friend, Virginia Cotts, would like to have you join us also, for what we call an RP Live. Really fun opportunity to do give and take, with our volunteers, and our donors, and other people that come to Real Progressives for this kind of information, and you sir, are a rockstar.

I really appreciate you taking the time, and look forward to having you back on soon.

[00:50:39] Hudson: Well, thanks for having me. I always enjoy our discussions, cuz I think of new things as we’re talking.

[00:50:44] Grumbine: Awesome. My name’s Steve Grumbine with my guest, Michael Hudson. This is the podcast, Macro N Cheese, and we are outta here.

*

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Michael Hudson is President of The Institute for the Study of Long-Term Economic Trends (ISLET), a Wall Street Financial Analyst, Distinguished Research Professor of Economics at the University of Missouri, Kansas City. He is the author of Killing the Host (published in e-format by CounterPunch Books and in print by Islet). His new book is J is For Junk Economics.

What Is Happening in Syria?

August 15th, 2023 by Philip Giraldi

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Which are the governments generally regarded as “rogue” by an overwhelming majority of the world’s nations? If you answered either Russia or China you would be wrong, even though many countries have condemned Russia’s attack on Ukraine on grounds that no government has an intrinsic right to invade another unless there is an imminent serious threat that would excuse such an intervention.

I would however expect that most readers of this review would have made the right choice, which is that the United States is probably number one based on its ability to destabilize whole regions with a military reach that spans the globe. And indeed, it is important to note that the Russian “special military operation” directed against Ukraine would not have happened at all if the Joe Biden Administration had simply indicated clearly and non-ambiguously to the Russian government that there was no intention of allowing Ukraine to join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) alliance. Ironically, the White House knew very well that inviting Kiev to enter into the alliance was a legitimate red-line, existential issue for the Kremlin, but opted to push hard on the issue instead. Instead of opting for a negotiated peaceful settlement, Biden and his clown show foreign and national security policy team opted to kill possibly hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians and Russians to somehow “weaken” Russia, an intention that has borne no fruit even after more than a year and a half of fighting.

So yes, by the world’s reckoning the United States of American is both “exceptional” and “number one,” which a series of White House inhabitants have aspired to, though perhaps not in the same way as buffoons like Senators Tom Cotton and Ted Cruz refer to it. Most non-Americans see the US as the greatest threat to world peace. And then there is America’s “closest ally and best friend in the whole world” Israel in second place, a government which commits crimes against humanity and even war crimes on a nearly daily basis with absolute impunity as it is protected and defended by the very same United States, where the Jewish state runs the foremost and most powerful foreign policy lobby. It is a lobby that has inserted itself in all levels of government and which has corrupted huge majorities of politicians and both major political parties while also controlling the “message” on the Middle East promoted by the media.

Even as I write this, 41 Democratic Party politicians are spending their recess on a Lobby sponsored trip to Israel. Their leaders include the inimitable traitor 80 year old Congressman Steny Hoyer of Maryland, who is on his twenty-third trip to the country that he loves and admires beyond all others, and House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries. Jeffries is on his second trip to Israel this year. He should be ashamed but, of course, isn’t. It is the largest-ever delegation of Democratic lawmakers on a tour of Israel, sponsored in this case by the American Israel Education Foundation, an affiliate of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). Not to be outdone House Speaker Kevin McCarthy is leading 31 Republican Congressmen on the same mission though the groups will not mingle and the speaker will be careful to render his own obeisance separately to the Israeli leadership.

The Democrats and Republicans, will as always be unable to enunciate any good reasons for American bondage to Israel beyond bromides like “Israel has a right to defend itself,” which will be repeated over and over before the Solons head back to Washington to send billions more of US taxpayer dollars to the Jewish state. While in Israel they will be fed a special diet of “all Arabs are terrorists” and good old Steny will be nodding his head in time with the song. That is before he and his colleagues engage in crawling on their bellies before Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as a sign of their total submission to his will.

If one is seeking a single example of the failure of the United States and its ally Israel to abide by the clearly mythical “rules based international order” one might well examine what is going on in Syria, where both the US and the Jewish state have been punishing the country through lethal sanctions and direct military intervention for many years with no sign that the interaction will be ending any time soon. The activity is rarely reported in the US and European media, which somehow has decided that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad is some kind of tyrant who deserves whatever he gets, even if it is dished out by “apartheid” Israel and the clueless US, which has been illegally militarily occupying roughly one third of Syria since 2015, including the areas that have producing oil facilities and good agricultural land, both of which are being exploited or stolen. Israel meanwhile has annexed the Syrian Golan Heights, which it occupied in 1967. Donald Trump gave his blessing to the illegal annexation and also gave his consent to whatever the Jewish state decides to do both with the Syrians and the Palestinians while also conniving at the nearly daily air attacks carried out by Israel against targets in both Palestine-Gaza and Syria, killing scores of local soldiers and civilians.

The US military occupation has been supplemented by an increasingly harsh series of sanctions that have effectively cut off food, medicines and other basic commodities to the Syrian people while also denying access to international banking services. Russia, which is assisting Syria at the invitation of the country’s government, has made up for some of the shortages but there is considerable suffering among the ordinary people, not the country’s leaders. The claim by Washington is that Syria has to be protected from its own “totalitarian” government and the US is there to fight terrorists, most particularly ISIS. Ironically perhaps, but Tel Aviv and Washington actually support some of the groups that many would consider to be themselves terrorists, including providing direct US aid to al-Qaeda clone Hayat Tahrir al Sham and Israeli support for ISIS to include treating wounded terrorists in Israel’s hospitals. The US air base at Al-Tanf, near the border with Iraq and Jordan, has, in fact, become a support hub for terrorist groups opposing the al-Assad government.

Sanctions on energy imports were temporarily lifted by the US and EU after the disastrous earthquakes the shook the region in February, but in June, US lawmakers introduced the Assad Regime Anti-Normalization Act of 2023 which would use secondary sanctions to penalize those countries that might be tempted to help restore services to the areas of Syria affected by both war and the impact of the quakes. Israel reportedly has exploited the opportunity provided by the natural disaster to increase its air attacks on Syrian infrastructure.

Indeed, recent history tells us that both Israel and the United States are particularly fond of occupying someone else’s land and are capable of coming up with excuses for doing so at the drop of a hat. The reasons generally sound like saying “Hey! We are the good guys who support democracy!” Repeat as necessary until the audience either goes to sleep or wanders off. The western media reporting on what is taking place in Syria can be regarded as being in the “wanders off” category.

I certainly am not the only one who has noted that the United States tends to do everything ass-backwards in its conduct of foreign policy since the time of the Clintons. That has certainly been the case in dealing with nations like Syria and Russia, where ambassadors Robert Ford and Michael McFaul were openly hostile to the respective local governments and openly sought to empower declared opponents of the countries’ leaders. Syria presumably was demonized to please Israel, beginning with the seeking to destabilize Syria through the passage of the Syria Accountability Act in 2003, even though Damascus posed no threat whatsoever to American interests. The current sanctions come at a time when Syria is continuing to struggle to rebuild after a still active twelve year civil war that destroyed much of the country’s infrastructure. US sanctions are making more difficult ongoing reconstruction efforts and are de facto largely punishing the Syrian people, with only minor impact on its government.

And sanctioning to punish Syria is bipartisan, perhaps reflecting a desire to satisfy Israeli demands. Donald Trump, who ran for president pledging to end America’s pointless wars overseas, on June 17th 2020 nevertheless initiated new sanctions against Syria and its government. US Ambassador to the United Nations Kelly Craft informed the Security Council that the Trump Administration would implement the measures to “prevent the Assad regime from securing a military victory. Our aim is to deprive the Assad regime of the revenue and the support it has used to commit the large-scale atrocities and human rights violations that prevent a political resolution and severely diminish the prospects for peace.”

Subsequently, the most recent block of sanctions was imposed through the Caesar Syria Civilian Protection Act, signed by President Trump in December 2020 after he was due to leave office, with the objective of stopping “bad actors who continue to aid and finance the Assad regime’s atrocities against the Syrian people while simply enriching themselves.” At that time, the existing US sanctions on Syria had already frozen all government assets and had also targeted companies and even individuals. The new sanctions gave the White House and Treasury the power to apply so-called “secondary sanctions” to freeze the assets of any entity or even individual, regardless of nationality, for doing any business in Syria. The threat of secondary sanctions have in fact had a major negative impact on Damascus’s remaining trading partners, to include Lebanon and Iran. Russia might also be impacted as it is involved in Syrian reconstruction.

The United States and Israel clearly hope that punitive sanctions will eventually force the starving Syrian people to rise up against the government, as some sought to do during the so-called Arab Spring in 2011. That means that a sanctions routine, much favored by both the Trump and Biden Administrations, never succeeds in compelling rogue governments to behave better because the way it works it is always really about regime change no matter how it is packaged. In the case of Syria, and contrary to the claims made by Ambassador Craft at the United Nations, the Bashar al-Assad government has already won the war in spite of US and Turkish intervention on behalf of the largely terrorist group supported insurgency. And the evidence for Syria’s having carried out “large scale atrocities and human rights violations” has mostly been manufactured by enemies of the government, to include the Hollywood and Washington think tank favorite, the White Helmets, a terrorist front group funded at least in part by western intelligence agencies, which was featured in a self-generated documentary that won a Hollywood Motion Pictures Academy Award in 2017. The film was effusively praised by the usual celebrity brain-deads including Hillary Clinton and George Clooney. It is indeed overall a very impressive piece of propaganda. The National Holocaust Museum even gave the coveted 2019 Elie Wiesel Award to the group. The White Helmets are still active in Syria in areas that are still held by the so-called rebels and they featured in a film clip just last week. They are still being funded by western governments and Israel to destabilize the government of Bashar al-Assad.

One might well ask what the US objective in continuing to promote the carnage and suffering in a Syria that poses no threat to Americans or to any vital security interests. It is similar to a question that might well be raised regarding Ukraine, which is confronting an unneeded escalation of 3,000 US military reservists to reinforce the 20,000 American soldiers that have arrived in theater since February 2022. And then there is Iran, which responded to its oil tankers being hijacked in international waters under the unilaterally imposed authority granted by US sanctions. Iran has sought to respond in kind and now the US will dispatch Marines to the Persian Gulf to ride shotgun on foreign tankers and other commercial vessels traversing the Straits of Hormuz. If Iranian vessels come too close, they will shoot to kill. It is another escalation that is asking for trouble. Why can’t the United States leave the rest of the world alone? That is perhaps the fundamental question for our times.

*

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This article was originally published on The Unz Review.

Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation (Federal ID Number #52-1739023) that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is councilforthenationalinterest.org, address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is [email protected].

He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

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Historical Analysis: Zionism and Israel

August 15th, 2023 by Dr. Vladislav B. Sotirović

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Zionism 

The term Zionism is derived from the word Zion that in the Hebrew language and cultural-historical tradition of the Jews refers to the citadel (acropolis) of the city of Jerusalem as well as to the Kingdom of Heaven. From the matter of politics, Zionism refers to the political-national movement of the European Jews in the very late 19th century for the very purpose to re-create a Jewish homeland in the form of a nation-state in the Middle East – Israel.[i]

This Zionist movement was to a great extent expressed as a consequence of the European (mostly West European) anti-Semitic (better to say anti-Judaic) sentiments and politics that the (West) European Jews were experiencing for centuries.[ii] Zionism as a political-national movement was formally initiated by Theodor Herzl (1860−1904) at the World’s Zionist Conference in Basle (Switzerland) or the First World’s Zionist Congress held from August 29 to 31st, 1897 attended by 208 delegates and 26 representatives of the press.[iii]

Th. Herzl was born in Budapest. He was an assimilated Jew who became a journalist in Vienna and was the Paris correspondent of the newspaper Neu Freie Presse in 1891−1895. The Dreyfus Affair which started in December 1894 found his interest in anti-Semitism and how to solve the Jewish Question. He published the book in German Der Judenstaat in 1896 in which he claimed that the creation of the Jewish nation-state in Palestine can be the only effective response to centuries of European anti-Semitism. He devoted the rest of his life to the propagation and realization of this idea and for that purpose, he established the World’s Zionist Organization (the WZO), which was convened at the First World’s Zionist Congress in Switzerland in 1897.

From the end of the 19th century onward, (basically after 1897) there have been organized attempts to persuade the European Jews to emigrate to the Land of Israel or known as Palestine. However, it was not at first unquestioned that the Jewish nation-state had to be in Palestine exactly. For example, Chaim Weizmann (1874−1952) who became the first Israeli President, was quite influential in the process of creating this political task. He became very much encouraged by the declaration of the British Foreign Secretary, Arthur James Balfour (the Balfour Declaration) in the form of the letter sent on November 2nd, 1917 to Lord Rothschild as the UK favored the establishment of a Jewish nation-state exactly in Palestine/Israel. After WWI, the European Jews continued to emigrate to Palestine in rather small numbers and, therefore, the Jewish state of Israel might have been for a very long time away to be established if not happened the holocaust of the Jews by the Nazis and their collaborators from 1933 to 1945, which, in fact, morally gave the legitimization to the idea of Israel to Jews and non-Jews (the Palestinians) alike as the only solution where the Jews might feel safe from the persecutions and exterminations.[iv] 

The 1917 Balfour Declaration

The 1917 Balfour Declaration is the name given to the UK’s pledge to support the creation of the Jewish nation-state in Palestine. It was contained in a letter of November 2nd, 1917 from Arthur James, 1st Earl Balfour and Viscount Traprain (1848−1930) to the chief British Zionist, Lord Rothschild. The declaration is considered to be one of the most significant and influential Zionist documents ever written. In fact, the letter-declaration urged that the Jewish nation-state had to be established in Palestine without any prejudice to the civil and religious rights of the non-Jewish people, i.e. the Muslim Arabs or the Palestinians as known today. Nevertheless, this statement from the letter represented a crucial contradiction in the UK’s policy for the very reason at the same time London had pledged to recognize the leaders of the Arab uprising as the rulers of Palestine which at that time was part of the Ottoman Sultanate.

The Balfour Declaration was, however, confirmed by the Allies, and became the foundation of the British Mandate for Palestine that was given by the League of Nations in 1920. The roots of the future political problems of the UK in the Middle East were subsequent attempts by London to reconcile the Balfour Declaration with promises to the Arab Palestinians. Lord Balfour was at the time of issuing declaration the UK’s Foreign Secretary in Lloyd George’s wartime cabinet. Later, he was a prominent British representative at the Paris Peace Conference after WWI and a participant in the 1921−1922 Washington Conference. As Lord President of the Council from 1925 to 1929, he was a very strong supporter of the concept of dominion status, and the Statute of Westminster of 1931 owed much to him.

Establishment of the Zionist Israel  

The very idea of returning the Jews to Palestine, wherefrom they became dispersed throughout Europe and Asia since 70 A.D., had been alive in some form for many centuries of their almost 2.000 years of the diaspora (from 70 to 1948). The idea became seriously revived at the very end of the 19th century as modern Zionism, in response to a revived wave of pogroms in East Europe followed by anti-Semitism in West Europe, especially in France after the Dreyfus Affair[v] but in Germany and Austria-Hungary too. The founder of modern Zionism, Th. Herzl claimed that peaceful and harmonious coexistence between the Jews and non-Jews already was proven impossible and therefore, the Jews could only be free from discrimination, persecution, and pogroms in their national state – Israel in Palestine.

Zionism as the movement and political program achieved finally its fundamental task in May 1948 when Israel as the Jewish nation-state was established which recognized in its Law of Return the right of all Jews to live in Israel. From that time onward, Zionism is understood as a reference for support for the continued existence of the state of Israel.[vi]

Undoubtedly, Zionism was an ideological-political form of Jewish nationalism and was recognized as such by the OUN. However, like many different forms and expressions of nationalism across the globe, Zionism historically was tolerating very deep ideological diversity as, for instance, it is possible to be a religious or secular Zionist and to believe either in capitalism or socialism in Zionist Israel.[vii]

After the First World’s Zionist Congress in 1897, many Jews began to emigrate to Palestine. At the same time, the WZO was working to convince the world’s opinion and influential politicians of the very necessity of the creation of the Jewish state in Palestine. However, Palestine was already occupied when the Jewish emigration and settlement began but populated by Arab people, the Palestinians for centuries. They have been, for the most part, forced into exile by a form of settlement that became, in fact, a military conquest.

In essence, it is a very problematic question of the Zionist-Jewish legitimacy of a national claim to the land which dates back to a dispersion of the Jews in 70 A.D. under the Roman Empire. However, there are historians who have even claimed that the European Jews are not, or at least for the most part of them, descended from the Jews of Palestine, who btw have not been the original inhabitants of the land. They claim that most European Jews were originating from Caucasus tribes who converted to Judaism under the Late Roman Empire.[viii]   

In 1917 the WZO urged the Government of the UK to set up a Jewish Legion which helped rid Palestine of the Ottoman administration. The Jewish Legion was, in fact, a number of military units formed in 1917 to assist the British to expel the Ottoman authorities from the “Promised Land”.

One battalion was recruited in the UK, another in the USA, and others in Egypt and Palestine, joining Allenby in his advance into the Ottoman Sultanate.[ix] After WWI, many of the members of the Jewish Legion, like Ben-Gurion and Eshkol, proceeded to form the Haganah (Defense) – A Jewish defense force in Palestine established in 1920 as a secret organization for the very purpose to defend Jewish settlements from the Arabs. Nevertheless, the Haganah was very soon accepted and used by the British authorities in Palestine as an auxiliary police force which was under the control of the General Federation of Jewish Labor (Histadrut). During the Arab-Jewish clashes in 1936−1939, it acquired a General Staff and developed close cooperation with the Jewish Agency.[x] In WWII, the Haganah contributed to the British 8th Army, but, however, was as well as involved in organizing illegal Jewish immigration from Europe. The organization condemned the terrorist activities against the Brits and Arabs by Stern Gang and Irgun, and when the Brits have been preparing to leave Palestine in 1947, the Haganah took on the defense of Jewish Palestine against the Arab troops committing at the same time and war crimes but, in essence, it formed the foundations of the army of the new state of Israel.[xi]

When the Balfour Declaration to establish an independent Jewish state of Israel failed after WWI, the Zionist WZO was working further on the Jewish emigration into Palestine and succeeded to win from the local British authorities extremely important concessions related to the self-administration via the Jewish Agency. In the beginning, the newly arrived Jewish settlers lived peacefully with the genuine Arab population but soon, as the Jewish influx continued, the Arabs started with sporadic attacks against the Jewish immigrants. Tensions between the Arabs, the Jewish immigrants, and the British administration in Palestine arose in the 1940s when around 100.000 new Jewish settlers illegally arrived in Palestine.

Finally, in 1947 it was clear that the UK cannot solve the Palestinian problem in the form of its promise to create independent states for both Jews and Arabs and, therefore, returned its mandate to the UN, which recommended the partition of Palestine between the Jews and genuine Arabs. Formally, on the foundation of such a UN plan, a Zionist Ben-Gurion[xii] issued a declaration of Israel’s independence on May 14th, 1948 (the Nakba Day for the Arabs) on the day of British withdrawal.

The greater portion of Palestine became the Jewish state of Zionist Israel, most of the rest was amalgamated with Transjordan to become Jordan, and the Gaza Strip was occupied by Egypt.

During and after the fighting in 1948, around 70% of the Arab Palestinians left their homes and became refugees in Jordan, Gaza, Syria, and Lebanon.[xiii] Nevertheless, today, the overwhelming number of Israeli Jews are descendants of the Jewish immigrants to Palestine after the First Zionist Congress in 1897 differently to all Arab-Palestinians who are native of Palestine.[xiv]           

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Dr. Vladislav B. Sotirović is a former university professor in Vilnius, Lithuania. He is a Research Fellow at the Center for Geostrategic Studies. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

Notes

[i] See more in [Shlomo Avineri, The Making of Modern Zionism: The Intellectual Origins of the Jewish State, New York: Perseus Books, 2017].

[ii] About European anti-Semitism, see in [Albert S. Lindemann, Richard S. Levy (eds.), Antisemitism: A History, Oxford: New York: Oxford University Press, 2010].

[iii] About Theodor Herzl’s visions about Israel, see in [Shlomo Avineri, Herzl’s Vision: Theodor Herzl and the Foundation of the Jewish State, New York: Blue Bridge, 2013; Theodor Herzl, The Jewish State: An Attempt at a Modern Solution of the Jewish Question, Whithorn, UK: Anodos Books, 2018].

[iv] Holocaust as the term originally denotes a victim who has been burnt completely. After 1945, the term is used to describe the Nazi genocide of the Jews in concentration and death camps (the most notorious was Auschwitz) during WWII [Jan Palmowski, A Dictionary of Contemporary World History From 1900 To the Present Day, Oxford−New York: Oxford University Press, 2004, 277]. For example, today, September 23rd, is a National Memorial Day for the Genocide of the Lithuanian Jews (in 1943). During WWII, the Jewish Ghetto was formed in Vilnius’ Old Town (Jerusalem of the North) on September 6th, 1941. It is estimated that approximately 50.000 Vilnius’ Jews found themselves in the ghetto out of the pre-war 60.000 Jews. The ghetto was divided into the Small and the Large Jewish Ghettos. The Small Ghetto was liquidated in October 1941 while the Larger Ghetto on September 23rd and 24th, 1943 [Karolina Mickevičiūtė, Vilnius: A Guide Through The City, Vilnius: Briedis, 2016, 94]. As a matter of fact, a herald of the future Jewish state and founder of the Zionist political movement and the World Zionist Organization, Theodor Herzl visited Vilnius in 1903 where he met the local Jewish society at the venue of the Great Charity, the General Prayer Board of the Great Synagogue [Irina Guzenberg, Vilnius, Sites of Jewish Memory: A Concise Guide, Second Edition, Vilnius: Pavilniai Publishers, 2019, 29]. Almost all Vilnius’ Jews from the ghetto have been executed in the High Ponary Forest nearby Vilnius. See more in [Piotr Niwiński, Ponary: The Place of “Human Slaughter”, Warszawa: Legra, 2015]. About the Vilnius’ Ghetto, see in [Arūnas Bubnys, Vilnius Ghetto 1941−1943, Vilnius: Genocide and Resistance Research Centre of Lithuania, 2018].    

[v] The Dreyfus Affair was a crisis that shook French politics and society to their foundations in 1894−1899. The affair started in December 1894 when Captain Alfred Dreyfus (1859−1935), a Jewish officer from Alsace on the General Staff of the French Army, was officially convicted of treason by a military court for passing on military secrets to the Germans. Nevertheless, the Dreyfus Affair revealed the deep anti-Semitism in French society. About the case, see in [Ruth Harris, Man on Devil’s Island: Alfred Dreyfus and the Affair that Divided France, London: Penguin Books, 2011].

[vi] About the connection between Zionism and Israel, see in [Yotav Eliach, Judaism, Zionism and the Land of Israel: The 4,000 Year Religious, Ideological, and Historical Story of the Jewish Nation, Published in the USA: Dialog Press, 2018].

[vii] See more in [Walter Laqueur, A History of Zionism: From the French Revolution to the Establishment of the State of Israel, New York: Random House, 2003].

[viii] About the general history of Jews, their culture and religion, see in [Дејвид Џ. Голдберг, Џон Д. Рејнер, Јевреји: Историја и религија, Београд: CLIO, 2003].

[ix] About the legion, see in [Martin Watts, The Jewish Legion during the First World War, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004].

[x] The Jewish Agency was an organization that was created by the UK for the sake to deal with its Mandate given by the League of Nations and to represent the Jews from Palestine. The agency was established in 1929 but, in fact, it was operating from 1920. Half of its membership was composed of the Palestinian Jews and another half of the Jews coming from outside Palestine, nominated by the Zionist WZO. It means that the Zionists had an extremely influential political role in Palestine immediately after WWI. The Jewish Agency was responsible for: 1) establishing kibbutzim settlements; 2) the Jewish immigration, investment, and economic and cultural development of the Jewish Palestine, and 3) representation of the Jews in the international sphere. In practice, the Jewish Agency provided its leaders like Ben-Gurion or Eshkol with administrative and diplomatic experience which they used when they took over the Government of Israel in 1948. After the proclamation of the independence of Israel in May 1948, the Jewish Agency lost its administrative and domestic political functions but continued to exist as an international body keeping links with the global Jewish community which would assist Israel in matters of finance or immigration, for instance. About the Jewish Agency, see in [Jewish Agency, The Story of the Jewish Agency for Israel, Jewish Agency American Section, 1964].   

[xi] About this organization, see more in [Munya Mardor, Haganah: A Firsthand Account of the Jewish Underground Army in Palestine, New American Library, 1966].

[xii] David Ben-Gurion (1886−1973) was Israeli PM in 1948−1953 and 1955−1963. He was born in Russian Poland and as a Zionist emigrated to Palestine in 1906. In 1935, Ben-Gurion became a Chairman of the Jewish Agency and, therefore, effectively became a leader of the Jewish community in Palestine. He organized the influx of Jewish large refugee movements, which, in fact, made a Jewish state of Zionist Israel to be more viable and more inevitable. He was part of the Israeli Government till 1963. Under his administration, Israel succeeded to survive (with crucial US’ support) the initial threat to its existence, when it was attacked by its Arab neighbors. About Ben-Gurion, see in [Tom Segev, A State at any Cost: The Life of David Ben-Gurion, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019].

[xiii] Geoffrey Barraclough (ed.), The Times Atlas of World History, Revised Edition, Maplewood, New Jersey: Hammond, 1986, 285.

[xiv] About the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, see in [Dov Waxman, The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict: What Everyone Needs to Know, New York: Oxford University Press, 2019].

Johannesburg Summit: A Critical Look at BRICS and Africa

August 15th, 2023 by Prof. Maurice Okoli

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Undoubtedly the forthcoming 15th BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) summit August 22 – 24 in Johannesburg, South Africa, opens the door for critical multiple issues mostly relating to the irreversible processes of the emerging new world. While it seriously presents an opportunity to take meticulous stock of its wins and losses, strength and weaknesses, the summit has the imperative to examine the new paradigms, evaluate innovative directions and assess strategies for moving the organization farther in this re-configurating world.

The BRIC concept was created by the Goldman Sachs economist Jim O’Neill, and the “S” was added after South Africa joined the group in 2010. But the first meeting of the group began in St Petersburg in 2005. It was simply referred to as RIC, which stood for Russia, India and China. Then, Brazil and subsequently South Africa joined later, which is why now it is popularly called BRICS. As rotating chair, South Africa first held the summit in 2013 in Durban, the second in July 2018 and now the third in August 2023.

Durban hosted African leaders, heads of the G20, representatives of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation and the Caribbean Community. Since then, BRICS Five and African States have greatly strengthened and expanded their cooperation in the economy, politics and the humanitarian sphere. BRICS considers Africa is one of the world’s most rapidly developing regions.

During the summit in South Africa, Russian President Vladimir Putin attended a meeting of BRICS leaders with delegation heads from invited African states and chairs of international associations. Those invited included the leaders from Africa, namely Angola, Botswana, Ethiopia, Gabon, Lesotho, Madagascar, Mauritius, Malawi, Mozambique, Namibia, Rwanda, Senegal, the Seychelles, Tanzania, Togo, Uganda, Zambia and Zimbabwe.

I would like to remind and further emphasize that BRICS and the African States have similar development goals in many respects. In 2015, the BRICS summit in Russia adopted the large-scale BRICS Strategy for Economic Partnership. In fact, during that gathering Putin’s position was about involving African partners in the areas identified then: the economy, finance, and food security.

It was also based on the fact that Russia has always given priority to the development of relations with African countries, based on long-standing traditions of friendship and mutual assistance. Notwithstanding the long-list of pledges at the meeting in July 2018, a considerable part of the Russian initiatives was for localizing industrial businesses in Africa. Russia has consistently advocated for deepening organization’s interaction with the African continent. It was that meeting Putin, for the first, mentioned the idea of holding a Russia-Africa summit with the participation of heads of African States.

Expanding BRICS Membership

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With the forthcoming August 2023 summit, heated discussions and debates have been on the organization’s expansion, adoption of alternative currency and various proposals to redesign its architecture with new comprehensive objectives and tasks within the context of the current geopolitical changes. This growing enthusiasm and interest for the BRICS has various underlying motivations, which have to be accommodated within the broader framework. There is the strong common motive for forming an alliance in a multipolar world.

As several media reports show, in my own monitoring and research assessment, a large number of Asian, African and Latin American States are interested in forging a full-fledged structural membership and possible cooperation with the BRICS. More than 20 States have formally applied to join BRICS. The authentic criteria and mechanism for the expansion of the organization is being been developed.

South Africa’s term as the rotating Chair of BRICS ends this August, as stipulated by the guidelines and rules, and will pass on the baton to Brazil. This implies that South African President Cyril Ramaphosa has a lot more at hand this last-minute crucial moment. Tracking the developments of the organization especially this 2023 presidency of South Africa, there have been so many controversial questions which are still currently receiving enormous attention, including the South Africa’s relationship with Russia, BRICS common currency as well as other global issues.

According to reports, BRICS is steadily or rather rapidly becoming an alternative organization for the Global South against the backdrop of the accusations of the United States and Europe together with their allies political dominance, hegemony and unipolar or unitary approach towards global problems, and especially those adversely affecting the developing or the least developed nations. The emphasis is on geopolitical and development cooperation with non-Western States appears to be sliding, BRICS now attracting friends. Those lined up states are consolidating their growing desire to join BRICS.

Johannesburg summit, therefore, has the primary tasks now, developing along two aspects: by admitting new members and by strengthening cooperation of BRICS with potential new members. The possibility of expanding membership (for purposes of determining the principles, standards, criteria and procedures of this process) in the organization is still under discussions within the BRICS framework.

China and Russia have seemingly been pushing for the expansion of BRICS, soliciting support for the multipolar system of global governance instead of the existing rules-based unipolar directed by the United States. Often explained that a bigger BRICS primarily offers huge opportunities among the group members and for developing countries.

On the other side, BRICS researchers and analysts argue and believe that additional States will not be admitted to BRICS, but each organization’s partner has the chance and will be able to choose a convenient mode of cooperation within the BRICS+ new structure. The argument holds the fact regarding re-titling BRICS. Therefore, it is highly likely to be the case, but this requires a consensus of all the members of BRICS.

More countries have become interested in joining the group: Afghanistan, Algeria, Argentina, Bahrain, Bangladesh, Belarus, Egypt, Indonesia, Iran, Kazakhstan, Mexico, Nicaragua, Nigeria, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Senegal, Sudan, Syria, United Arab Emirates, Thailand, Tunisia, Turkey, Uruguay, Venezuela, Zimbabwe. This growing interest for the BRICS project has various underlying motivations, which have to be accommodated within the broader framework.

In advancing the discussion here, interesting to remind here that during the 14th BRICS summit successfully held in June 2022, President Xi Jinping emphasized at the meeting that BRICS countries gather not in a closed club or an exclusive circle, but a big family of mutual support and a partnership for win-win cooperation. At the same summit, BRICS leaders reached important common understanding about BRICS expansion and expressed support for discussion on the standards and procedures of the expansion.

Africa’s Alliance with BRICS

South Africa, the first African State, joined the group on the initiative of China and Russia. Its membership has reflected and altered the organization’s name, now known as BRICS. It has, since then, played significant roles hosting summits, influencing the organization’s activities, and creating historic milestone in this 21st century world. South Africa can warmly be credited, first for its membership presence, and second for laying the pathways for strategic expansion plans to include African States. At least, South Africa has brought a tectonic shift in landscape, a transformative aspect when African States participated in BRICS plus Outreach in July 2018.

Russian President Vladimir Putin attended a meeting of BRICS leaders with delegations from invited African states and chairs of international associations that July 2018. And BRICS documents show the participating leaders of African States as Angola, Botswana, Ethiopia, Gabon, Lesotho, Madagascar, Mauritius, Malawi, Mozambique, Namibia, Rwanda, Senegal, the Seychelles, Tanzania, Togo, Uganda, Zambia and Zimbabwe.

In practical terms, BRICS has recognized and welcomed Africans into its fold long ago.

“I am grateful to the President of the Republic of South Africa for organizing this representative meeting. In 2013 in Durban, BRICS leaders held a meeting with the heads of African states for the first time. We know that Africa is one of the world’s most rapidly developing regions, so its representation is important for BRICS,” Putin said in his introductory speech.

In awakening reality, African States are still seeking greater representation and louder instrumental voices on international platforms including the Group of Twenty (G20) and the United Nations.

BRICS together with majority of African States, the African Union and all the Regional Economic Communities (RECs) are getting involved to halt the system of unipolarity. Without doubts, Africa has a common vision and unflinching interest that BRICS plays an essential role on the global multilateral stage. This Global South political movement consistently presents a fundamental coherent challenge to the West.

Dilma Rousseff at Russia-Africa Summit

At the Russia-Africa summit held late July 2023, during the high-profile line-up of speakers during the plenary session, former President of Brazil from 2011 to 2016, and now the new President of the BRICS New Development Bank (NDB), Dilma Rousseff, reaffirmed BRICS position towards building a more multilateral and multipolar world.

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Dilma Rousseff meeting with President Putin on 26 July (Licensed under CC BY 4.0)

The BRICS New Development Bank now also includes Egypt, Bangladesh and the UAE, supports the development initiatives of developing nations on all continents just as other regional development banks do. These nations can count on agreements on using national currencies in trade transactions, according to Rousseff, the first female to hold the position.

The New Development Bank was established just eight years ago, in 2014, at the BRICS summit in Fortaleza. This bank is often called the BRICS bank because it was established by the will of the five BRICS members but it has already outgrown this framework and is not limited to just these members. It works towards ensuring sustainable development and eliminating the threat of poverty and famine, and in the spirit of true multilateralism. The bank is working to share experiences and best practices of sustainable development.

Rousseff, however, stressed the fact that in loaning its funds, the bank is not dependent on external factors. The bank provides a platform for the development of the Global South. In this sense, the developing nations of all continents, especially Africa, Latin America and Asia are its strategic partners. 

She believes participants should not be affected by problems that may arise in Western markets, and for this reason, it is developing its own transaction systems. The NDB receives money in different markets and in the currencies of all developing nations, not only in dollars or in euros. The NDB has already approved 98 projects in member states amounting in total to about US$35 billion. It cooperates with the African Export-Import Bank and other banks engaged in economic and social development. It implements infrastructure and logistics projects aimed at improving living standards in the BRICS members.

We pefectly understand that the proposed expansion has admirable and beneficial geopolitical importance. Worth noting here that African States are readjusting their place in the multipolar world, moving to new emerging multinational centres such as BRICS. For many from Africa, it is an opportunity for something much newer within the spectrum of their internal development paradigm. Therefore, it has become increasingly attractive as a new stage for diplomacy and development financing.

In fact, reviewing and analysing the current emerging developments especially for the Global South, Africans are now describing it as an organization that can challenge the dominant United States and European-led global governance structures. And of course, there are also several arguments that China and India are equally emerging powers. There are visible signs that both consider Africa as their new playground, will probably compete with each other to ‘impress’ Africa with goodies like aid, soft loans or trade.

The NDB and BRICS Common Currency

Records indicate that BRICS are under-represented in the global financial architecture. Europe and the United States dominate institutions like the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank. Fully aware of this shortfall, BRICS established in 2015 its own National Development Bank. The idea for setting up the bank was first proposed by India at the 4th BRICS summit in 2012 held in Delhi, but was finally created three years later. It is a multilateral development bank established with an initial capital of US$100 billion. According to its stipulated primary functions, NDB has to cooperate with international organizations and other financial entities, and provide technical assistance for projects to be supported by the Bank.

With the current global unstable and volatile situation creating skyrocketing uncertainties in global economic recovery, China have unreservedly shown its contribution for strengthening BRICS. Despite its large population of 1.5 billion which many have considered as an impediment, China pursues an admirable collaborative strategic diplomacy with external countries and among the BRICS.

For 16 years since its inception, China offers the largest financial support for the BRICS National Development Bank, contributed tremendously to other directions including health, education and economic collaboration among the group. That is one reason why BRICS has gained extensive recognition.

More and more countries are willing and interested to become members of the organization, make joint efforts to overcome difficulties and challenges, and realize common development and prosperity. BRICS activities have expanded during the past few years. Now many States participated in the Outreach and BRICS plus segments of the organization. But now with the emerging new global order, BRICS seeks to expand its membership, consolidate its platform as an instrument for pushing against the existing rules-based order unipolar system.

A careful study and analysis monitored show that BRICS activities have expanded during the past few years. States participated in the Outreach and BRICS plus segments of the organization. There are also a number of African countries including Algeria, Ethiopia, Nigeria, Senegal and Zimbabwe have also shown interest. Uruguay is part way through the process of joining, while Argentina, Cuba, Honduras and Saudi Arabia and a number of Asian States have expressed desire. Bangladesh, the United Arab Emirates and Egypt have joined since 2021, bringing its membership to eight. Egypt has already been involved for a fairly long time. Last December 2022, Egypt, the decision on its accession to the New Development Bank was made by BRICS.

According to media reports, Ennahar TV quoted Algerian President Abdelmadjid Tebboune as saying that Algeria has applied to join the BRICS group and submitted a request to become a shareholder member of BRICS Bank with an amount of US$1.5 billion.

In July, Tebboune visited China and had sought to join the BRICS to open new economic opportunities. Algeria is rich in oil and gas resources and seeking to diversify its economy and strengthen its partnership with members such as China. Already China plans to invest US$36 billion in Algeria across sectors including manufacturing, new technology, the knowledge economy, transport and agriculture.

Charles Robertson, Chief Economist at Renaissance Capital, argues that “Russia and others in the BRICS would like to see larger power centres emerge to offer an alternative to that Western dominated construct. That is reasonable enough – providing there are countries with the money to backstop the new institutions, such as China supporting the BRICS bank, and if the countries offer an alternative vision that provides benefits to new members.”

In today’s changing conditions, BRICS has been very concerned about de-dollarization and strongly advocating for its own currency. Thus in the discussion, 26 July 2023 in St. Petersburg, Putin stressed doubtlessly that Rousseff uses her rich experience in public work and knowledge in this area to develop the institution. In today’s conditions, this is not easy to do, given what is happening in world finance and the use of the dollar as an instrument of political struggle. But the members of BRICS, are not ‘friends’ against someone, they work in each other’s interests. This applies to the financial sector.

“In general, we are good participants in this organization, we fulfill everything on time, all our obligations to it. We know that there is a question about the liquidity of the bank, there are some ideas that come from you, from your staff, and we will support this,” Putin said at the meeting with her. “Relations between BRICS members are developing in national currencies, and settlements are increasing. In this regard, the bank can also play a significant role in the development of joint activities.”

Putin’s Perceptions on BRICS and Africa

Late July 2023, when the second Russia-Africa summit was held, Russian President Vladimir Putin underlined on Africa’s new role and remnants of colonialism in the continent. Putin explicitly explained that Africa is turning into “a new center of power,” and everybody will have to reckon with it. “The era of hegemony of one or several countries is receding into the past” – “however, not without resistance on the part of those who got used to their own uniqueness and monopoly in global affairs.”

Without missing words, Putin unreservedly shared his objective thoughts, and Africans know these trends across the continent down the years. The situation in many regions of Africa still remains unstable particularly due to the West’s ‘divide and rule’ policy. Which is why Russia, with consistency, favors or advocates for expanding the role of African representation, for instance, in the UN, including the Security Council: “It is high time to remedy historical injustice.”

Taking a clear position on issues that affect the entire continent will be more productive. Moreso, with the process of geopolitics rapidly shifting, Africa leaders have to assess their external relationships in the context of their national and cultural sovereignty, to play a more active role in resolving regional and global challenges.

At this point of the analysis, it is also very necessary to take a glancy look at BRICS members’ performance with Africa. Over the last two decades, partnerships with Africa have become central to China’s geostrategic objectives. It has made significant investments to secure favorable media coverage to promote a positive view of China, to counter the influence of the United States. 

As a strong member of BRICS, it has used the media to improve African perceptions. India and Brazil are doing something similar but on a comparatively lower scale. Smart African States, in an attempt to reset relations with global powers, are equally capitalizing on these new opportunities to improve aspects of development for the impoverished population. Whatever be the case, the potentials exist for African leaders to explore. BRICS in this emerging world has diverse opportunities for industrial, economic, agricultural, commercial and financial development. 

Johannesburg as Summit Venue

The 15th summit will also discuss the expansion of the bank, which has admitted the United Arab Emirates, Bangladesh and Egypt as members. Nevertheless, most of NDB related questions are on the agenda during the 15th BRICS summit scheduled for August 22 – 24 at the Sandton Convention Centre in Johannesburg, South Africa.

That BRICS has the potential of becoming a global player is a fact, since more intend to join the group, and if we look carefully, each of them has significant assets to contribute: some have huge financial potential, others have huge demographic potential, others have expertise in particular industries. BRICS is simply consolidating its position to control economic development on a global scale and to vehemently oppose Western values and U.S. hegemony.

For China, this summit is a new opportunity to present its current projects, as well as its new initiatives, such as GDI (Global Development Initiative), GSI (Global Security Initiative), GCI (Global Civilisation Initiative). The already ten-year old Belt-and-Road Initiative (BRI) currently covers 147 countries with more than 3,000 projects worth trillions of dollars.

Ahead of the summit, South Africa’s Anil Sooklal said in a lecture at the University of KwaZulu-Natal that so far, representatives from more than 70 nations have been invited to attend, necessary security arrangements have been made and other pre-visit formalities have been completed. And that Russia’s Vladimir Putin will participate via video (virtual) format. “This will be the largest gathering with foreign nations from the Global South coming together to discuss the current global challenges,” Sooklal said.

South Africa’s Foreign Ministry confirmed that Russia would be represented at this month’s BRICS summit by Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov after President Vladimir Putin decided not to attend in person due to a warrant for his arrest issued by the International Criminal Court (ICC) for alleged war crimes in Ukraine. Kremlin also said an official decision reached “by mutual agreement” allows Putin to skip in-person participation.

South African President Cyril Ramaphosa has repeatedly said that BRICS as a dynamic group would usher in a new global development era that promises a system of more inclusive, sustainable and fair principles. BRICS group, in an expanded form, can support a sustainable and equitable global economic recovery.

Ramaphosa further believes that the BRICS is simply a highly-valuable platform fixed to strengthen ties with partner States in support of economic growth, development process and for discussing global economic problems and challenges, and above all for strengthening the role of developing States in the emerging multipolar world.

Formed officially in 2009-2010, the organization has struggled to have the kind of geopolitical influence that matches its collective economic reach. It also embodies a synergy of cultures and explores a model of genuine multilateral diplomacy. Its structure is formed in compliance with the 21st century realities. Efforts within its framework are based on the principles of equality, mutual respect and justice. BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) collectively represent about 26% of the world’s geographical area and about 42% of the world’s population.

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Professor Maurice Okoli is a fellow at the Institute for African Studies and the Institute of World Economy and International Relations, Russian Academy of Sciences. He is also a fellow at the North-Eastern Federal University of Russia. He is an expert at the Roscongress Foundation and the Valdai Discussion Club.

As an academic researcher and economist with keen interest in current geopolitical changes and the emerging world order, Maurice Okoli frequently contributes articles for publication in reputable media portals on different aspects of the interconnection between developing and developed countries, particularly in Asia, Africa and Europe. With comments and suggestions, he can be reached via email: markolconsult (at) gmail (dot) com

He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from Andrew Korybko

Climate Maps Manipulated to Mislead the Public

August 15th, 2023 by Free West Media

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Cold and snow records have been set worldwide both this winter season and during the spring. All continents have experienced cold and precipitation that significantly deviate from the so-called climate normal, which is the average of the same measurement data over three decades. New Times has reported on this repeatedly. We also recently examined in detail temperature, snow, and ice data for the months of April and May from around the world and found several very interesting deviations. Among other things, this winter season’s snow mass and its bound water quantity in the northern hemisphere were far above normal.

Cold April i Luxemburg. The small country had one of the coldest and most rainy Aprils for ages. The average temperature was chilling 8 degrees Celsius through out the month. This is 1.6 degrees lowest than the average for the period 1991-2020. NOAA’s “creative” global temperature map for April, which system media presents to the public, states that the Benelux countries are “warmer than average”. Photo: RTL Luxembourg

Cold April i Luxemburg. The small country had one of the coldest and most rainy Aprils for ages. The average temperature was chilling 8 degrees Celsius through out the month. This is 1.6 degrees lowest than the average for the period 1991-2020. NOAA’s “creative” global temperature map for April, which system media presents to the public, states that the Benelux countries are “warmer than average”. Photo: RTL Luxembourg

According to Canadian climate authority Environment and Climate Change Canada (ECCC), their own statistics showed that the amount of water tied up in the northern hemisphere’s snow mass at the end of April this year amounted to about 2,600 cubic kilometers of water, compared with the norm of about 1,600 cubic kilometers. This means that this winter was over 60 percent more snow-rich than the norm for the years 1998–2011 (see “Record Cold and Snowy Spring Worldwide – Cold-hardened Mongolians Seek Help” in Nya Tider). This was very evident, among other things, in the snow cover rate in the USA. In at least 13 American states, several of which are located in the southern USA, the snow covered twice to 4.5 times as large areas as normal. This has led to state budgets for snow clearing being inadequate. Weather stations several meters high had to be dug out by shocked meteorologists in the state of Utah (see “Spring has begun with record cold – USA buried under gigantic snow masses” in Nya Tider). In California, the situation was so extreme that houses were completely buried under snow after a total of more than 20 meters of snowfall during the winter. The houses only began to emerge from the snow masses in May, with milder temperatures and melting. The California authorities have not even managed to clear all highways, as those at higher altitudes continue to be under about three meters of hard-packed snow, even though we are now entering the summer. For example, Route 120 is not expected to be cleared of snow and passable until July (see “Snow chaos in the USA: California’s roads remain impassable” in Nya Tider).

Unusually Cold April

New Times found when examining temperature data from authorities and research organizations from a number of different countries that April was unusually cold in many parts of the world. Numerous cold records were set in April. In North America and the continental USA, several cold records were also set since measurements began. Alaska saw one of the coldest April months since measurements began nearly a hundred years ago.

Europe looked similar with unusual cold and precipitation primarily in Central and Eastern Europe. Cold and spring snow caused the Alps’ glaciers to grow, and ski resorts that had closed for the season could reopen and continue skiing into the summer. We reported that the ice cover in the Arctic during the second half of April was about 20,000 square kilometers larger than the average for the years 2011 to 2020.

Central Asia and India set a multitude of cold records week after week in April, which continued even into May. In India’s case, the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology (IITM) confirmed that this was a trend over time and not an anomaly this spring.

The southern hemisphere also experienced a cold April, which is an autumn month there. In Australia and many other countries, temperatures were below the 30-year so-called climate normal.

Deceptive Maps

In May, the American governmental science organization National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) released a world map showing temperatures for April… or rather, two global temperature maps – one for researchers and one for the general public. The first map shows land and sea temperature deviations from the average in April, where the average is calculated based on the 30-year climate norm, which in this case are the years 1991–2020. It is color-graded on a scale with 0.5-degree accuracy, showing colder deviations in blue shades, neutral in white, and warmer deviations in red shades. This is the map that climate researchers themselves use.

TEMPERATURE DEVIATIONS FOR LAND AND SEA, APRIL 2023 relative to the temperature normal, the average for the years 1991–2020. In this map, which uses a clearly indicated and color-coded temperature scale that the scientists themselves use, the temperature deviations we reported about over the last few months from North and South America, Central and Eastern Europe, and Central Asia, with hard-hit Mongolia, India, and Australia, are confirmed. This is despite the fact that critics argue it consistently shows higher temperatures due to non-representative and then tampered with measurement data. Source and map: NOAA

TEMPERATURE DEVIATIONS FOR LAND AND SEA, APRIL 2023 relative to the temperature normal, the average for the years 1991–2020. In this map, which uses a clearly indicated and color-coded temperature scale that the scientists themselves use, the temperature deviations we reported about over the last few months from North and South America, Central and Eastern Europe, and Central Asia, with hard-hit Mongolia, India, and Australia, are confirmed. This is despite the fact that critics argue it consistently shows higher temperatures due to non-representative and then tampered with measurement data. Source and map: NOAA

TEMPERATURE PERCENTILES FOR LAND AND SEA, APRIL 2023 based on an unspecified average. Here we can see that the Benelux countries, where Belgium and the Netherlands in April were 1.4 and 1.1 °C cooler than the climate normal 1991–2020, are falsely presented as having had an April average temperature "Above average" or "Much above average". Central and Eastern Europe, which were much cooler than normal in April—for example, Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Serbia were 2.1 to 2.8 °C below the climate normal in April, which is significant in a climate context—are marked as "Near average" with misleading neutral white color. Source and map: NOAA

TEMPERATURE PERCENTILES FOR LAND AND SEA, APRIL 2023 based on an unspecified average. Here we can see that the Benelux countries, where Belgium and the Netherlands in April were 1.4 and 1.1 °C cooler than the climate normal 1991–2020, are falsely presented as having had an April average temperature “Above average” or “Much above average”. Central and Eastern Europe, which were much cooler than normal in April—for example, Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Serbia were 2.1 to 2.8 °C below the climate normal in April, which is significant in a climate context—are marked as “Near average” with misleading neutral white color. Source and map: NOAA

At the same time, NOAA published on its website National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI) another map, and it’s this one that mainstream media reproduce for the public. It shows what’s called “Temperature percentiles for land and sea, April 2023.” So it’s not about deviations in degrees Celsius or percent, as the uninitiated might believe. We ask the politically correct tech giant Google what percentile means. We choose Google, as they are known for strictly controlling search results and ensuring compliance with the climate narrative as prescribed by the establishment and their media. The answer we get is as follows:

“In statistics, a percentile is a term that describes how a unit of value compares to other units of value from the same [data] set. Although there is no universal definition of percentile, it is usually expressed as the percentage of values in a set of data results that fall below a given value.”

We can conclude that such a vague description opens up for the creation of “creative statistics.” Percentiles are normally used in statistics to show distributions such as different age groups within a population, where it clearly shows how many percent each group constitutes. The problem with NOAA’s “media-adapted” map is that it does not state temperatures, percentages, or any real value. Instead, unspecified temperatures are compared to an average, which is also not clearly defined, unlike the “researcher version” of the map.

Unlike the temperature map provided to researchers, the temperature map that mainstream media presents to the public is almost entirely red. Moreover, the weaker blue shades are very grayish, creating the illusion that everything seems warmer and nothing cooler. All together, it creates a deceptive impression that April was warmer than normal even in parts of the world where we have official data that not only show the opposite, but in several cases, these are the lowest recorded temperatures ever. If you look at it without knowing that it is grossly misleading, it creates the false illusion that it confirms a purported global warming.

Garbage In, Garbage Out

What makes it even worse is that already the “researcher version” of the temperature map is misleading, as it too reports warmer temperatures than the real ones. This is achieved, among other things, by using measurement stations placed in aberrantly warm conditions and not least in cities, which create so-called heat islands. Cities are warmer than the countryside due to the so-called urban heat island effect. This is because the city’s often unnatural materials replace natural surfaces, and shading vegetation is replaced with dense concentrations of asphalt, buildings, and other surfaces that absorb and retain heat. If a large majority of all temperature measurement sites are located in cities, which can be several degrees warmer than surrounding less densely populated areas, the measured temperatures will also be several degrees higher than the actual ones.

New Times was the first Swedish newspaper to report in August 2022 that no less than 96 percent of NOAA’s American measurement stations in an old network have indicated too high temperatures. We could also show that NOAA and other American authorities were aware of this, but still used this misleading measurement data – despite a new network that delivers accurate measurement data being available (see “Misleading high temperatures from over 19 out of 20 weather stations in the USA – Measurement stations with correct data are deliberately ignored” in Nya Tider).

NOAA’s temperature map with percentiles – which mainstream media like to reproduce – is therefore grossly deceptive in a double sense. It shows countries and areas that were actually cooler or much cooler than normal in April, with temperatures “Near average” in white color, “Above average” in light red, or even “Much above average” in red.

What makes this temperature fraud so serious is that it is used to prove an alleged man-made global warming, a narrative that globalists then use to impose on the world’s governments and populations a total restructuring of society and our lives. These mandates have already seriously damaged energy and food security, eroding Western treasuries and private economies, and taking away a large part of our freedom and quality of life.

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Dr. Peter McCullough, Dr. Harvey Risch, and colleagues were censored by the formerly respected scientific journal The Lancet: their paper, removed within 24 hours, found that 74% of the deaths following mRNA vaccine injection were likely caused by the injection.

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The Lancet Study: How It Started

Dr. McCullough, one of the most highly esteemed and credentialed cardiologists in the world, was contacted by a graduate student from the University of Michigan School of Public Health. Dr. McCullough, being a University Michigan Alum himself, was quickly accepted by the university as a mentor. The graduate student and Dr. McCullough then began working together on a project aimed at identifying all the published deaths that occurred after the mRNA vaccine.

They sifted through hundreds of papers, eventually narrowing their search to 44 papers containing 325 autopsies. Each case was reviewed by three experts, including the former president of Royal College of Pathology Dr. Roger Hodkinson. Two out of three of the experts needed to agree that the vaccine was either the direct cause of death or significantly contributed to death in order for the study to continue.

The paper was finalized and then moved forward into the submission process for publication. Dr. McCullough describes how the New England Journal of Medicine rejected the paper after a few days, while the Journal of American Medical Association rejected it within an hour. The only reasoning that was provided by the journals was that the study was not a priority for them.

The team also submitted to The Lancet. Dr. McCullough had previously published in The Lancet, so it would not be new territory. After about three days, The Lancet agreed to publish the study on their preprint server.

Overnight, the downloads of the full manuscript were by the hundreds per minute. Dr. McCullough attributes the enormous amount of interest to the amount of detail provided in the study’s evidence tables on the autopsies. The standard search methodology used in the study is a method in which Dr. McCullough has much experience.

Medical Censorship by The Lancet – But Who Called The Lancet?

Within 24 hours, the paper was swiftly and mysteriously removed. Only a note from The Lancet remained, reading:

“This preprint has been removed by Preprints with The Lancet because the study’s conclusions are not supported by the study methodology…”

Unfortunately but unsurprisingly, for Dr. McCullough, Dr. Risch, and the other authors of the study, there were no courtesy editorial communications from The Lancet regarding the censorship of their study.

Dr. McCullough believes that the paper’s terrifying conclusion was the main reason for The Lancet’s removal of the paper. The conclusion? 73.9% of cases were directly caused by, or were significantly contributed to, by the mRNA-injection. In other words, of the autopsies consistent with mRNA injection injury, 74% of deaths were indeed mRNA injection-related. The mean timeline for the study was deaths that occurred within two weeks of injection.

What Caught Dr. McCullough’s Attention

The largest category of conditions post-vaccine is cardiac damage. The first category of cardiac-related injuries is myocarditis, heart inflammation of the muscle. Inflammation causes the electrical current not to conduct smoothly, causing a heart rhythm, and eventually causing sudden cardiac death.

Dr. McCullough explains that these attacks occur most often during exercise, when there is a surge of adrenaline, and between 3 a.m. and 6 a.m. when there is also a surge of adrenaline during the normal waking process.

Dr. McCullough mentions up-and-coming basketball player Oscar Cabrera Adames, who was taken out of competition due to being diagnosed with myocarditis.

Before returning to competition, Adames went to take a treadmill test to make sure he was ready to return to the sport. He died on the treadmill.

Dr. McCullough explains that, in his decades of experience as a cardiologist, he has never had a patient die on a treadmill test, as defibrillator paddles are always available on-site in the unlikely event of a heart attack.

The second category of cardiac-related injury post-mRNA injection is the progression of atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease. An abstract published in 2021 by the American Heart Association measured a variety of blood factors known to be related to triggering an atherosclerotic plaque rupture in the arteries before and after the vaccine. The paper found “astronomical” elevations of these blood factors post-mRNA injection.

Before Covid — cardiac arrest cases of those under 35 totalled about 29 cases per year.

Since the mRNA-injections were released, and mandated on sports players, there are now 283 cases per year.

The Lancet Censored Science, Education, and Our Right to Informed Consent

How can we have informed consent if the opportunity to educate ourselves on a previously mandated, experimental drug is constantly being taken away by publications like The Lancet? How can we educate ourselves by doing our own research when that research is being censored by journals and media outlets? And finally, how can we have real, unbiased science when expert-reviewed studies with pages of detailed evidence are being tossed in the trash because the “conclusions are not supported” by the media? We cannot have science, truth, or informed consent without information.

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The Worldwide Corona Crisis, Global Coup d’Etat Against Humanity

by Michel Chossudovsky

Michel Chossudovsky reviews in detail how this insidious project “destroys people’s lives”. He provides a comprehensive analysis of everything you need to know about the “pandemic” — from the medical dimensions to the economic and social repercussions, political underpinnings, and mental and psychological impacts.

“My objective as an author is to inform people worldwide and refute the official narrative which has been used as a justification to destabilize the economic and social fabric of entire countries, followed by the imposition of the “deadly” COVID-19 “vaccine”. This crisis affects humanity in its entirety: almost 8 billion people. We stand in solidarity with our fellow human beings and our children worldwide. Truth is a powerful instrument.”

ISBN: 978-0-9879389-3-0,  Year: 2022,  PDF Ebook,  Pages: 164, 15 Chapters

Price: $11.50 FREE COPY! Click here (docsend) and download.

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German Politicians Criticize Anti-Russian Sanctions

August 15th, 2023 by Lucas Leiroz de Almeida

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A leading German parliamentarian stated that his country should not impose sanctions on Moscow, as Russian-German energy cooperation is important for national stability. According to him, without Russian gas, the German economy is threatened and becomes heavily dependent on “green” technologies that are not yet fully developed.

The criticisms were made by the leader of the “Alternative for Germany” (AfD) party, Anton Baron, during an interview for the Stuttgarter Zeitung on August 11. Baron asserted that Germany should not put the West’s anti-Russian agenda ahead of the country’s economy and energy security. The politician believes that by buying Russian gas, Germany is not contributing to the continuation of the conflict, thus contradicting the Western narrative that Moscow must be boycotted to “stop the invasion”.

“Russian gas was a blessing for the [German] economy and our prosperity (…) [Also,] to say that by using [Russian gas] we are financing Putin’s war is nonsense (…) We cannot make it [the German economy] dependent on war conditions – it’s a pure necessity”, Baron told journalists during the interview.

Baron also strongly criticized the German decision not to invest in nuclear energy and to focus on the development of “green” technologies. This decision, according to him, is anti-strategic and strongly harms the country, making it dependent on technologies that have not yet been entirely developed, failing to meet German demands for energy security.

“We switch off nuclear power plants and coal-fired power plants, relying more and more on renewable energies, even though there are no storage facilities,” he added.

Baron is a well-known critic of the Western “green” agenda and its negative impacts on German national interests. In another recent statement on this topic, he “pointed out that hydrogen technology might still need decades to mature, criticizing the simultaneous decommissioning of reliable nuclear power plants”. Indeed, this has been another sensitive topic in the country, since, given the absence of Russian gas, nuclear energy could be used to at least alleviate the effects of the energy crisis. But any possibility of nuclear development is blocked in the country by the “ultra-green” agenda that controls German politics.

In fact, these criticisms have become increasingly frequent. The boycott of Russia and the irresponsible advancement of the “green” agenda are causing serious problems in Germany, threatening the EU’s leading economic role that the country plays. By 2022, 40% of German gas needs were met by Russia, which made Moscow an indispensable partner for the German economy, especially in the industrial sector. However, Berlin irresponsibly approved all EU sanctions packages imposed on Russia and fully joined the Western attempt to “cancel” Moscow.

As a result, Germany has become the country most affected by the effects of sanctions – much more so than Russia itself, whose economy has recently overtaken Germany’s. Also, in early August, the German group of gas storage operators INES released a report predicting gas shortages by the winter of 2026-2027, which is raising serious concerns among experts.

This has prompted criticism from several German politicians. Baron is not alone in his stance, with many other lawmakers also echoing popular dissatisfaction with the sanctions. For example, recently, Member of Parliament (MP) Uwe Schulz stated:

“Sanctions against Russia… are leading Germany and its economic activity straight to de-industrialization (…) [Germany] lift economic sanctions against Russia [in order to] prevent [further] economic damage.”

Also, in June, another AfD politician, MP Markus Frohnmaier, classified the current German economic policy as “carefree”, stating that the people are “fed up” with the anti-Russian measures, as the Germans do not want to “pay for Kiev forever”.

However, nothing seems to change the German desire to continue an absolutely “suicidal” economic and foreign policy. Unlimited support for Ukraine, considered a “priority” by the German government, is leading the country to a catastrophe. Berlin is already in a technical recession, with inflation rates worsening every month and without any expectation of a reversal in the economic scenario for the coming years. But even so the main discussions of the German government are about new ways to punish Russia and help Kiev, with no concern for German citizens.

Indeed, increased criticism of the German government is inevitable. The popular demand for changes tends to raise more and more. Despite being serious, the German crisis has not yet reached its most critical point, as there are expectations of a significant worsening in the short term. And if the German government does not act in time to avoid the most catastrophic effects of this crisis by reviewing its economic and international guidelines, the country risks to collapse.

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Lucas Leiroz is a journalist, researcher at the Center for Geostrategic Studies, geopolitical consultant. You can follow Lucas on Twitter and Telegram.

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Imran Khan: US Leaked Cable on Pakistan Fits a Pattern

August 15th, 2023 by Uriel Araujo

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Pakistan’s former Prime Minister, Imran Khan, has been found guilty of corruption, sentenced to three years in prison, and arrested. In 2022, amid a constitutional crisis, he was removed from office after the April 10 no-confidence motion. In August the same year, after accusing the judiciary and the police of detaining and torturing his close aide, Imran Khan was charged with anti-terror laws for allegedly making threats against state officials in Islamabad. This year, on May 9 he was arrested by paramilitary forces – and this sparked nation-wide protests.

Khan has always accused the Pakistani military of having played a role in his 2022 removal from office, and his followers, once again enraged, claim his recent sentencing is far from unbiased. To add fuel to the fire, it has come to light that a month before the no-confidence motion, the US State Department encouraged Islamabad on March 7, 2022, to remove Khan as Prime Minister over his neutral stance on the Russian-Ukrainian conflict. This stance was indeed reversed after his removal.

A secret Pakistani diplomatic cable (a “cipher”, as it is called) which was obtained by the Intercept discusses the meeting between Asad Majeed Khan, the Pakistani ambassador to the US at the time, and American State Department authorities, including Donald Lu, Assistant Secretary of State for the Bureau of South and Central Asian Affairs. The meeting between the US officials and the Pakistani ambassador had long been the subject of speculation and controversy, in the context of Pakistan’s power struggle between the former Prime Minister supporters and the country’s military.

According to the leaked cable, during the meeting Lu said:

“people here and in Europe are quite concerned about why Pakistan is taking such an aggressively neutral position (on Ukraine).” He added: “I think if the no-confidence vote against the Prime Minister succeeds, all will be forgiven in Washington because the Russia visit is being looked at as a decision by the Prime Minister.” “Otherwise,” he went on: “I think it will be tough going ahead”, adding that Pakistan could face “isolation” by the US and by European powers.

The day before the meeting, Khan basically called for a non-aligned stance and sovereign pragmatism. He said: “we are friends of Russia, and we are also friends of the United States. We are friends of China and Europe. We are not part of any alliance.” On the same occasion, rhetorically addressing Western powers, he asked: “What do you think of us? That we are your slaves and that we will do whatever you ask of us?”

The document basically shows that, amid a heated Pakistani crisis, Washington pressured Islamabad to go ahead specifically with a no-confidence motion (which it did), threatening the country with isolation. So far one can only speculate on how much weight such pressure carried in the eyes of Pakistani political elites. It is not too far-fetched to assume it carried some.

Donald Lu’s incredibly arrogant tone (“all will be forgiven in Washington”) is reminiscent of US diplomat Victoria Nuland’s infamous 2014 leaked phone conversation with US Ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt. During the exchange she uses the F-word to disdainfully refer to the European Union. If that 2014 leak exposed a certain Washington attitude towards its transatlantic European allies (and such an  attitude does not seem to have changed much at all), one can only imagine how the US sees Pakistan – and the rest of the world, for that matter. Washington has of course a well-known record of betraying its most devoted allies.

Even if one condemns the Russian military campaign in Ukraine, which started in February 2022, one should at least acknowledge the fact that far from being an “unprovoked” aggression, it was the result of an escalation of frictions, involving border tensions – a tale in which the US played a major role. Ukraine itself had been in a civil war since 2014, and Kiev has, for nine years now, been bombing the Donbass region and committing a series of human rights infringements largely related to far-right Ukrainian nationalism.

When the US crossed the sea to invade far-away Iraq in 2003, there was no immediate danger or a near border. No Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, the American main claim to legitimize the occupation, were ever found. For 8 years, Washington carried on a neocolonial policy, including a so-called Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) which, from the very start, was created and funded as a US Department of Defense division, in a failed American attempt to “democratize” and to “reconstruct” the Middle-Eastern nation.

Under the tremendously corrupt CPA rule, over $8 billion destined for the country’s reconstruction disappeared and remain unaccounted for to this very day. Up to 1 million deaths, according to ORB International, an independent polling agency located in London, are estimated as a result of the war and American invasion. And yet no international movement arose to sanction or isolate Washington – nor American companies, for that matter (which greatly profited from the war). To this day, former US President George W. Bush is a popular speaker in the US. All of this, once again, whether one condemns the Russian military campaign in neighboring Ukraine or not, goes to show an immense degree of Western hypocrisy, to say the least. And many non-Western leaders see it this way.

To sum it up, the recently leaked document is yet another blatant instance of American “alignmentism” and its cold war mentality – an approach that can only further alienate potential partners and allies, especially in the Global South.

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

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The Destruction of American Health Care

August 15th, 2023 by Dr. Paul Craig Roberts

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In the US medical boards are in many respects agents of Big Pharma. They serve to punish doctors who don’t abide by Big Pharma’s money-grubbing protocols.

The Ohio Medical Board is a good example. Dr. Sherri Tenpenny testified in June 2021 to the Ohio House of Representatives Health Committee about the dangers of the so-called “Covid vaccines.” Her testimony was based on published studies in medical journals. Her testimony was at a time when the full press was on to have the entire population injected with an experimental dose of no one knew what. Big Pharma and American medicine that it controls didn’t want anyone  getting in the way of huge profits and whatever other agendas were at work. Big Pharma orchestrated a number of complaints to be made about Dr. Tenpenny. The Ohio Medical Board responded to its master’s call.

The vaccinators were unhappy when 2 years and 2 months ago Dr. Tenpenny said that the so-called “vaccine” was causing heart inflammation. Her statement, controversial at the time, is now accepted as true.  But the Ohio Medical Board is nevertheless punishing her for being correct. By telling the truth, the Ohio Medical Board thinks Dr. Tenpenny violated the State’s Medical Practices Act. Big Pharma’s Ohio Medical Board has suspended Dr. Tenpenny’s medical license.

This is how corrupt medicine is today in the United States. Over the course of my life I have watched the collapse of medical practice in the US. Doctors were in private practice. You had a personal relationship with them. They knew how to diagnose. Poor people weren’t charged. The doctors added a little to rich people’s bills. The doctor was focused on your health, not his pocketbook.

Today medical schools teach doctors, who are increasingly corporate employees thanks to Obamacare and other legislation designed to destroy private practice, to type the patients reported symptoms into his laptop and prescribe the drugs that Big Pharma recommends. This kind of medicine can be automated.

In the US doctors have become employees. They cannot use their judgment but must follow protocols. Doctors who rejected the death-dealing Covid protocols and saved patients’ lives with Ivermectin and HCQ were fired. If they were in private practice, they were hauled before corrupt medical boards whose pockets were lined by Big Pharma.

Cat scans, MRIs, and blood analysis are wonderful tests for diagnostics, but technology aside medical practice in the US is failing fast.  With the rapid expansion of corporate medicine doctors are being turned into profit centers. Their job is to hand the patient a Big Pharma prescription and rush to the next patient. 

One way that Big Pharma, using its political campaign contributions, is closing down private medical practice is by getting Congress to pass legislation that results in corporate billings to insurance companies and Medicare being paid a larger percentage of the billed amount than private practices. The consequence has been the sale of private practices and their incorporation into corporate medicine.

What this means is that “our representatives” in Congress are not our representatives. They are Big Pharma’s representatives and representatives for others who finance their election campaigns. Big Pharma’s representatives have centralized our health care and turned it against us by turning health care into just another monetized commodity.

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Paul Craig Roberts is a renowned author and academic, chairman of The Institute for Political Economy where this article was originally published. Dr. Roberts was previously associate editor and columnist for The Wall Street Journal. He was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy during the Reagan Administration. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

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***

 

 

The United States has trained at least five members of the new ruling junta in Niger, The Intercept has learned. America has now “paused” security assistance to that military-led government even as it looks to ramp up such aid to Burkina Faso, which is ruled by a military officer who took power in a 2022 coup.

The Nigerien junta, which calls itself the National Council for the Safeguarding of the Fatherland, seized power on July 26 and detained the democratically elected President Mohamed Bazoum. The commander of the country’s presidential guard, Gen. Abdourahmane Tchiani, also spelled Tiani, has proclaimed himself the country’s new leader, while Bazoum and his family remain “under virtual house arrest,” U.S. Under Secretary for Political Affairs and Acting Deputy Secretary of State Victoria Nuland said this week. Nuland and other U.S. officials asked to see Bazoum in person when they visited Niger on Monday, but his captors refused.

Diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks show that a Lt. Cl. Abdourahmane Tiani was selected to attend a yearlong International Counterterrorism Fellows Program at the National Defense University in Washington, D.C., from 2009 to 2010. Over the weekend, another Nigerien mutineer, Gen. Mohamed Toumba, spoke before a cheering crowd at a 30,000-seat stadium named after Seyni Kountche, who led Niger’s first coup d’état in 1974. “We are aware of their Machiavellian plan,” he said of those “plotting subversion” against “the forward march of Niger.” Five years ago, Toumba addressed U.S. military officers and African dignitaries at the opening ceremony for Flintlock, U.S. Africa Command’s largest annual special operations counterterrorism exercise.

The Intercept previously reported that Brig. Gen. Moussa Salaou Barmou, who headed Niger’s Special Forces and now serves as chief of defense, also attended the National Defense University and trained at Fort Benning (now Fort Moore), Georgia. On Monday, Barmou told Nuland that the junta would execute Bazoum if neighboring countries attempted a military intervention to restore his rule, a U.S. official told The Intercept.

“It’s a disturbing trend, and a sign of how badly misallocated our national security spending is on the continent,” wrote Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., on X, formerly known as Twitter, drawing attention to The Intercept’s coverage of the latest in a long parade of U.S.-trained military mutineers.

Two weeks after Niger’s coup, the State Department has still not provided a list of the U.S.-connected mutineers, but a different U.S. official confirmed that there are “five people we’ve identified as having received [U.S. military] training.” The official spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the press.

“The U.S. is using security assistance and military training too broadly in sub-Saharan Africa. Doing so means you’re putting the United States in a position where it’s implicated in human rights abuses and the malign behavior of local security partners,” said Elias Yousif, a research analyst with the Stimson Center’s Conventional Defense Program. “Our experience in the Sahel should be especially cautionary. Over many years, we’ve seen a remarkable series of coups as well as deteriorating security with a rise in militancy, Islamist insurgencies, and criminal networks. I would be hard-pressed to point to a success that could justify continuing on the same path.”

“A Model of Democracy”

In March, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken called Niger “a model of democracy,” even though the latest State Department human rights report on the country refers to “significant human rights issues,” including “extrajudicial killings by or on behalf of [the] government.”

The State Department has offered similarly confused responses to The Intercept’s questions about the coup in Niger. When asked about the training provided to members of the Nigerien junta, a nameless spokesperson replied by email: “This is an evolving situation and it is too soon to characterize the nature of ongoing developments.”

That spokesperson also insisted that the “U.S. Government does not provide training to the Presidential Guard.” A 2017 and 2018 joint State and Defense Department “Foreign Military Training Report,” however, mentions “In Country Training” for members of Niger’s presidential guard.

“We are pausing certain foreign assistance programs, and will continue to review our assistance as the situation evolves,” Blinken posted on X last week, but also said in a press statement that the U.S. was continuing some “security operations” in Niger.

Following military coups, U.S. law generally restricts countries from receiving military aid. But The Intercept recently found security assistance still trickling into Mali, even though that country is ruled by a U.S.-trained officer who overthrew the previous government and its military has been implicated in the killing of civilians. Military officers twice overthrew the government of Burkina Faso in 2022, but the U.S. continues to provide training to Burkinabe forces according to Gen. Michael Langley, the chief of Africa Command, or AFRICOM. In April, less than a month after Langley informed members of the House Armed Services Committee about the continued support, the Burkinabe military reportedly massacred at least 156 civilians, including 45 children, in the village of Karma. Langley has also argued against constraints on U.S. military aid following coups.

On Monday, Nuland met with Barmou, warning the new defense chief of “the economic and other kinds of support that we will legally have to cut off if democracy is not restored.” Barmou — who U.S. commandos previously helped set up specialized mobile units designed to target terrorist groups and criminal gangs — was apparently unmoved. “They are quite firm in their view on how they want to proceed,” said Nuland, noting “it was difficult today, and I will be straight up about that.”

Last year, The Intercept asked Nuland what the U.S. was doing to slow the parade of African officers overthrowing governments the U.S. trains them to protect.

“Nick, that was a pretty loaded comment that you made,” she replied. “Some folks involved in these coups have received some U.S. training, but far from all of them.”

Since then, five more U.S.-trained officers have been involved in coups. Reporting by The Intercept indicates that at least 14 U.S.-trained officers have taken part in coups in West Africa since 2008.

Ineffective and Counterproductive

Senior officials at the State Department and Pentagon, meanwhile, are reportedly lobbying to increase security assistance to Burkina Faso, which neighbors Niger, at a time when human rights defenders and journalists say the government is cracking down on critical voices and forced disappearances are on the rise.

“It’s getting much worse. The government is suppressing free speech,” a journalist working in Burkina Faso told The Intercept on the condition of anonymity, due to fears for his safety. “People who speak out are being abducted. The situation is scary.”

The Biden administration’s push for increased security aid to Burkina Faso comes despite a coup last year by U.S.-trained Lt. Col. Paul-Henri Damiba, who was swiftly overthrown by another military officer, Capt. Ibrahim Traoré. Last September, The Intercept asked AFRICOM if Traoré was also trained by the U.S. “We are looking into this,” said AFRICOM spokesperson Kelly Cahalan, noting that the command was “still digging” into possible “engagements” with him. “I will let you know when I have an answer,” Cahalan wrote. A request this week for updates yielded no response.

Experts say that the U.S. track record of pouring money into foreign militaries instead of making long-term investments in humanitarian aid, strengthening civil society, and bolstering democratic institutions has been short-sighted and detrimental to wider American aims. They also question the ability of the United States to build foreign military capacity, a task the Pentagon sees as a core competency.

“When you look at the big picture, from Afghanistan to Somalia to Burkina Faso, the U.S. government’s funding and training of other nations’ military and police forces in counterterrorism has largely been ineffective and counterproductive in regards to the pursuit of meaningful safety, for either Americans or anyone else around the world,” Stephanie Savell, the co-director of the Costs of War project at Brown University, told The Intercept.

Ukrainian troops trained by the U.S. and its allies have floundered during a long-awaited counteroffensive against Russian forces, raising questions about the quality of the instruction and the efficacy of tens of billions of dollars in U.S. assistance. In 2021, an Afghan army built, trained, advised, and armed by the United States over 20 years evaporated in the face of Taliban forces. In 2015, a $500 million Pentagon effort to train and equip Syrian rebels, slated to produce 15,000 fighters over three years, yielded just a few dozen before being scrapped by the United States. A year earlier, an Iraqi army created, trained, and funded — to the tune of at least $25 billion — by the U.S. was routed by the far smaller forces of the Islamic State.

In West Africa in particular, Yousif noted, security aid has not been tethered to a more diversified whole-of-government approach. “It really illustrates the lack of tools in the toolkit that the United States has in this part of the world. It’s the one mechanism that the U.S. thinks it has for garnering influence and delivering foreign policy benefits, but it seems like a very poor tool, especially in a place like the Sahel, where militaries are also increasingly a threat to the civilian government.”

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***

Events in Pakistan these past few days have been quite astonishing and yet the treatment of its former Prime Minister Imran Khan, jailed on spurious corruption charges, has raised barely a headline beyond the foreign pages of Western newspapers. Possibly because most reporting is one-dimensional, the complexities of Pakistan’s politics seem incomprehensible to most Western commentators and the British politicians who dismiss the importance of this country because it is indeed mired in corruption.

Cricket legend Khan is the least corrupt politician in Pakistan these days. I was told by a senior political figure some years ago during a briefing on Pakistani politics, that the former superstar would never make it as a politician because “he is not corrupt”. The people in Pakistan, I was told, expect their politicians to be corrupt. “But how can you trust a man who can’t be bought?” This has probably been quite a stumbling block for those in Washington for whom the solution to every problem is a steady stream of dollars.

As Prime Minister, Khan posed a problem to America the moment that he said “absolutely not” to a question about moving US forces from neighbouring Afghanistan to bases in Pakistan. When he uttered those words in June 2021 I knew that the US would move heaven and earth to get rid of him, and was not in the least surprised when he faced a “no confidence” vote in March 2022 and then went on to claim that the US “threatened” him and was seeking his removal from office.

During an interview four months later, former US ambassador to the UN and ex-White House national security adviser John Bolton boasted that he had helped plan coups in foreign countries. It is very easy, therefore, to believe Imran Khan’s allegation, but this deliberate attempt to meddle in Pakistani affairs seems to have been ignored by a contemptuous media that simply does not understand what is unfolding in the nuclear-armed state, the world’s fifth-most populous country — more than 249.5 million people — and home to the world’s largest Muslim population.

However, most of us have to rely on the vain ramblings of foreign correspondents who simply sneer at Khan’s dream of building an Islamic welfare state in a Third World country which is divided politically and forever staggering from one public debt crisis to another.

This has not been lost on the underappreciated Craig Murray. The former UK ambassador to Uzbekistan is amazed that “there have been no protests from the UK or US governments.”

Sadly, Murray’s analysis and knowledge of the region are largely ignored by journalists who simply regurgitate briefings against him. The demonised yet invaluable observer has to publish his own blogbecause the corporate media don’t want to upset the Establishment by offering him his own column. Murray is also convinced that Khan’s removal from his position as prime minister was a CIA-engineered coup, and that the vicious campaign of violence and imprisonment against Khan and his supporters is a demonstration of dark forces at work.

Nevertheless, there’s something much larger at play now in Pakistan: the people. They have finally woken up to the fact that their country has been in the grip of a military dictatorship since its creation in 1947.

“Pakistan’s politics are, to an extent not sufficiently understood in the West, [it is] literally feudal,” Murray pointed out. “Two dynasties, the Sharifs and the Bhuttos, have alternated in power, in a sometimes deadly rivalry, punctuated by periods of more open military rule.”

Moreover,

“There is no genuine ideological or policy gap between the Sharifs and Bhuttos, though the latter have more intellectual pretension. It is purely about control of state resources. The arbiter of power has in reality been the military, not the electorate. They have now put the Sharifs back in power.”

I remember documenting Khan’s arrival and determination to change the political landscape in his beloved country. His achievements in under three decades have been staggering coming from point zero and launching the Pakistan Tehreek e Insaf (PTI) party in 1996. In one interview, I put it to him that the life expectancy of a successful political leader in Pakistan was not good, but he brushed away any fears, and declared his faith in Allah.

That was back in 2003 when the tide was beginning to turn against the US presence in Pakistan. The arrival of US drones wiped out hundreds of innocents over the following decade. This rough US justice and extra-judicial assassinations by Predator drones probably inspired the PTI’s astonishing victories in the 2018 National Assembly elections.

Khan had shattered the two-party system and stunned the political dynasties in Pakistan. He was already much loved for his legendary heroics in cricket, but ordinary Pakistanis also loved the way that he was prepared to stand up to Uncle Sam. With the exception of Malala Yousafzai, not a single Pakistani has ever walked into the Oval Office and told the US president to stop US drone attacks. But Khan did.

As Murray writes in his blog,

“The Pakistani military went along with him. The reason is not hard to find. Given the level of hatred the USA had engendered through its drone killings, the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, and the hideous torture excesses of the ‘War on terror’, it was temporarily not in the interests of the Pakistan military to foreground their deep relationship with the CIA and US military.

“The Pakistan security service, ISI, had betrayed Osama Bin Laden to the USA, which hardly improved the popularity of the military and security services. Imran Khan was seen by them as a useful safety valve. It was believed he could channel the insurgent anti-Americanism and Islamic enthusiasm which was sweeping Pakistan, into a government acceptable to the West.”

While he was in power Khan achieved a great deal, which resonated with the people in the street. He brought an end to the US drone attacks and stopped Pakistani soldiers from being sent as cannon fodder for Saudi Arabia in the Yemen war. His sincerity and ability to endear himself to the common man knew no bounds, just as his unfortunate capacity to make powerful enemies left him terribly exposed.

I suppose, given Pakistan’s awful record for political assassinations, it came as no surprise when a gunman fired five shots at Khan after he very publicly condemned military corruption. Up until that point, no one had ever spoken out from a political platform against the military. Khan basically challenged the generals who thought themselves untouchable.

And when he moved last year towards a closer trading relationship with sanction-hit Russia it was inevitable that Washington would attempt to pull the rug from under Khan’s feet by reaching out to corrupt senior army officers. When it comes to power grabs America is not fussy about who it jumps into bed with, and the generals were obviously more than happy to reap the rewards on offer.

The state of Pakistan today is depressing. Thousands of PTI members are behind bars for nothing more than daring to dream of an end to years of corrupt military and dynastic rule.

The media has been defanged and told not to broadcast any interviews with Khan or even show his image. Such censorship of a political leader is almost unprecedented, apart from Nelson Mandela perhaps during the racist Apartheid era in South Africa.

Where are the voices in the British government condemning the injustice of it all? At the time of writing, not one political voice has been heard in Westminster about the treatment of Khan or his followers. Britain’s ties to the US are evidently strong enough to ignore the influential presence of hundreds of thousands of Pakistanis within the British Asian community. Around 80 per cent of them are believed to support Khan.

Murray is more to the point on this:

“…I feel confident it also reflects in part the racism and contempt shown by the British political class towards the Pakistani immigrant community, which contrasts starkly with British ministerial enthusiasm for Modi’s India. We should not forget New Labour has also never been a friend to democracy in Pakistan, and the Blair government was extremely comfortable with Pakistan’s last open military dictatorship under General Musharraf.”

Someone else who clearly understands Pakistani politics more than most is Yusuf Islam, aka singer-songwriter Cat Stevens, who has spoken out on social media about Khan’s imprisonment. Yusuf tweeted that,

“The majority of balance-minded Muslims know that the politics of Pakistan has for years been allowing corruption to flourish…”

He described Khan’s imprisonment as a “charade” and reminded “those who have orchestrated this premeditated coup… that God, the Seer of all things, is not unaware” before urging them to set Khan free “immediately.”

At the time of writing this column, Imran Khan was in the first week of three years in prison — and a five-year ban from politics — for the alleged embezzlement of official gifts. According to Shah Mehmood Qureshi, the vice chairman of Tehreek-e-Insaf, the former prime minister is not being allowed to meet his lawyers. He also admitted to being “extremely concerned” about Khan’s wellbeing following the assassination attempt last November.

Khan believes that he and his party are still capable of returning to power in Pakistan’s next elections despite his latest incarceration. Early last month he compared himself to embattled leaders from history like Mandela and Gandhi, and almost foreshadowed his own arrest and imprisonment.

For those journalists still trying to figure out if Imran Khan will compromise or throw in the towel, consider this: the cricket legend may be down, but he is “absolutely not” out.

*

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Africa and Latin America – Revolutionary Ties

August 15th, 2023 by Stephen Sefton

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Historically, the United States and its allies only retreat from their aggressive policies and the imposition of their dominance when they suffer a strategic defeat. They never repair their essence, all they do is modify their policies looking for how to recover the lost ground. For them, the 1950s were a decade of bitter setbacks. China defeated them in Korea in 1953, Vietnam expelled the French in 1954, Egypt took control of the Suez Canal in 1956, the Cuban Revolution took power in 1959 and shortly afterwards in 1962, the National Liberation Front did so in Algeria. The West responded, among other ways, with its campaign in the Congo and the assassination of Patrice Lumumba in 1961, support for the massacre of more than a million communists to seal the coup in Indonesia in 1965, the overthrow of the Kwame Nkrumah in Ghana in 1966, the genocidal US war in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia and determined Western support for the Zionist occupation in Palestine and for the racist regime in South Africa.

The drive at that time towards decolonization and the ruthless Western reaction to it occurred in the context of the Cold War. In parallel with their aggressive policies, the United States and its allies were deepening their control of international finance and global trade. They perfected the neocolonial interventions of the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the manipulation of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) as tools of financial and commercial control around the world. In a systematic way, Western governments developed the mechanisms of indebtedness and development cooperation as a means of increasing the economic dependence of the countries of Latin America, Asia and Africa.

To this neocolonial model of economic development promoted by the imperial powers, majority world leaders began proposing, as an alternative, models of trade and South-South cooperation without conditions and based on solidarity. In 1955, the first Africa-Asia conference was organized in Bandung, Indonesia, which reaffirmed from the perspective of the majority world the founding principles of the United Nations, self-determination, non-aggression and respect for international law. Afterwards, the Non-Aligned Movement gave greater impetus to a vision of international relations based on respect among equals, the recognition of the legitimate interests of countries, the promotion of solidarity based cooperation, trade for mutual benefit and the peaceful resolution of differences.

In the last twenty years, this vision has been developed very successfully, for example, by the countries of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization and by the BRICS group. It explicitly opposes the practice of the United States and its allies to impose their imperatives in international relations through economic and military domination. In Latin America, Comandante Fidel Castro and Comandante Hugo Chávez Frias promoted the same vision of international relations based on solidarity through the Bolivarian Alliance of Our America (ALBA). Later, enough consensus was reached in support of this vision to form the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States. To the extent that the ability of these countries to defend their interests increases, all these independent schemes of cooperation threaten Western power in international relations.

In the history of the development of the libertarian anti-imperialist vision, it is worth highlighting the role of revolutionary solidarity between Latin America and Africa, of which the example of Cuban solidarity has been decisive. The campaign of the Cuban contingent with Che Guevara and Jorge Risquet in the Congo in 1965 was the precursor of Operation Carlota in defense of Angola in the 1970s that finally managed to defeat the forces of the racist regime of South Africa and its Western patrons. Even before the Cuban collaboration in the Congo, Cuba had supported the newly liberated Algeria against an aggression in 1963 by the Kingdom of Morocco backed by France. In 1965, Che met at one time or another with key revolutionary African leaders such as Modibo Keita from Mali, Amilcar Cabral from what is now Guinea Bissau, with Agostinho Neto from Angola and Kwame Nkrumah from Ghana. Che insisted on the importance of solidarity based and complementary international cooperation to achieve emancipation from the domination of the world economy by the imperialist powers.

Gabriel García Marquez wrote “That fleeting and anonymous sojourn of Che Guevara through Africa sowed a seed that no one can uproot.” Some twenty years later, in 1987, shortly before his own assassination, Thomas Sankara said, “Che Guevara was struck by imperialist bullets under the Bolivian sun but we declare that for us Che Guevara is not dead… In almost all of Africa he made known his beret with its star… Africa, from north to south, remembers Che Guevara.”

A year after Thomas Sankara’s words, the Cuban and Angolan forces defeated the armed forces of the racist regime of South Africa in the battle of Cuito Cuanavale. Of that battle Nelson Mandela commented in Cuba in 1991“ “That impressive defeat of the racist army gave Angola the possibility of enjoying peace and consolidating its sovereignty. It gave the people of Namibia their independence, demoralized the white racist regime in Pretoria and inspired the anti-apartheid struggle within South Africa…”

In Nicaragua, the Sandinista Popular Revolution has always maintained fraternal relations with Africa’s revolutions, especially with the Libyan Jamahiriya, with Algeria, Burkina Faso and Zimbabwe. In his words of tribute to our Chancellor of Dignity, Father Miguel d’Escoto, in 2017, President Comandante Daniel recalled how they traveled together to celebrate Zimbabwe’s independence in April 1980, “We were there with Miguel living that unforgettable experience, and we have constantly recalled that experience, whereby a People in Africa, just like the People of Nicaragua who had fought against imperialist policy, there against colonialist, imperialist policy, also achieved their Liberation.”

On Algeria, Vice President Compañera Rosario has commented on how the national liberation struggle of the Algerian people against French colonialism has been “important and significant, not only for Algeria but for all Peoples who love Peace and Freedom. Algeria continues to be an Example, a Reference Point, an Inspiration for the Peoples who struggle in the World, out of Respect for our Sovereignty, for Justice, and Peace.” In relation to the Libyan Jamahiriya of Brother Muammar al-Gaddafi, Commander Daniel recalled in this year’s celebration of July 19th, “We cannot forget Gaddafi. As soon as he saw the aggression that Nicaragua was suffering, he joined in and gave us unconditional solidarity.”

For the 44/19 Anniversary this year, the Prime Minister of Burkina Faso was present. He commented “Nicaragua is a great country, and the determination of its People is a Hope and an example for others, they have a great Spirit… That is why I am here, and I am here to be the living witness of the Unity between the People of Nicaragua and Burkina Faso.” That afternoon too, Compañera Rosario recalled the words of Thomas Sankara during a visit he made to Nicaragua in the 1980s, “Burkina will stand together with Nicaragua! Because the Revolution is invincible and the People will rule!”

These solidarity ties between revolutionary African countries and the revolutionary countries in Latin America were further consolidated with the new foreign policy implemented by the Bolivarian Revolution in Venezuela. President Hugo Chávez Frías promoted the development of new relations between Venezuela and the Southern African Development Community, with the Economic Community of West African States and with the African Union. He also gave greater impetus to the initiative of Brazil during the first government of President Lula da Silva along with his African counterparts of the Africa-South America Summits.

A few weeks before his transit to immortality in 2013, our Eternal Comandante wrote in a letter to the Africa-South America Summit that year: “South America and Africa are the same people. We only manage to understand the depth of the social and political reality of our continent in the depths of the immense African territory where, I am sure, humanity was born. From there come the codes and the elements that make up the cultural, musical and religious syncretism of our America, creating not only racial unity among our peoples but also spiritual unity.

… Latin America and the Caribbean share with Africa a past of oppression and slavery. Today more than ever, we are the inheritors of our liberators and of their conquests. We can say, we must say with strength and conviction, that we are also united by a present of struggle essential for the freedom and definitive independence of our nations.

I will not tire of repeating it, we are the same people, we have the obligation to come together, beyond formal speeches, in the same desire for unity and thus united, to give life to the equation that will need to be applied to the construction of the conditions that will allow us to get our peoples out of the labyrinth into which colonialism and, later, the neoliberal capitalism of the twentieth century threw them.”

These words of our Eternal Comandante remind us that from one century to the next, the threads of the revolutionary history of Latin America and Africa are inseparably intertwined. It seems that the current historical moments will be decisive for the defense of the principles of the new world enunciated more than sixty years ago by visionary African leaders such as Kwame Nkrumah and Gamal Abdel Nasser. Now a new generation of revolutionary leaders in Africa are determined to confront the influence and power of the empire in their countries. At the Russia-Africa Summit at the end of July this year, President Ibrahim Traoré of Burkina Faso commented:

“We have met today because we need to talk about the future of our countries. What will happen tomorrow in this new free world we are fighting for, a world without interference in our internal affairs?… We have the opportunity to build a new kind of relationships. I hope that these relations will serve us better and allow us to create a better future for our peoples… The problem is that the leaders of African countries do not contribute anything to the people who are fighting imperialism, calling us armed groups or criminals. We do not agree with this approach. We, the heads of African states, must stop behaving like puppets ready to act every time the imperialists pull the strings.”

*

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This article was originally published on Tortilla con Sal, translated from Spanish.

Stephen Sefton, renowned author and political analyst based in northern Nicaragua, is actively involved in community development work focussing on education and health care. He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG).

Featured image: Che Guevara con el Presidente Kwame Nkrumah en 1965 (Source: TCS)

Why China Can’t Pull the World Out of a New Great Depression

August 15th, 2023 by F. William Engdahl

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Over the past two decades since China was admitted into the WTO, its national industrial base has made unprecedented strides to emerge as the world’s leading economic producer in many major areas. The academic debates over whether China’s GDP is larger than that of the USA are misplaced. GDP is largely worthless as a measure of a real economy. When measured in real physical economic production, China has left the USA and everyone else in the dust. Therefore, the future course of industrial production in China is vital to the future of the world economy. Globalization of the world economy made it so.

Steel production is still the single best indicator of a growing real economy. In 2021, China produced more that twelve times the tonnage steel as the USA, over one billion tons. The USA, once world leader, managed a piddly 86 million tons. In tons of coal, China produces some 50% of world total coal. She controls 70% of world rare earth mining and over 90% of its processing, thanks to bizarre US policy actions going back several decades. China today is far the world’s largest motor vehicle producer, almost three times the size of the US at 27 million units annually, one third of world total in 2022. China is by far the largest producer of the essential cement for construction, and is the world’s leading aluminum  producer.  At 40 million tons in 2022, this compares to not even one million tons in the USA. It is also the world’s largest copper consumer. The list goes on.

This is merely to suggest  how essential the economy of China has been to world economic growth over the past two decades. A mere four decades ago China was insignificant in world real economic terms. So, if China goes into deep economic contraction, the effect this time will be global. And this is just what is now underway. Important to note, the contraction began well before the severe three-years of China’s zero covid lockdown. Simply put, China since the so-called Great Financial Crisis of 2008 managed to create a financial bubble the size of which the world has never before experienced. That bubble began to deflate, beginning in real estate, around 2019. The scale is systemic and is only beginning.

Colossal Deleveraging and Hidden Debt

A huge problem with China’s economic model over the past two decades has been the fact that it has been a debt-based finance model massively concentrated on real estate speculation beyond what the economy can digest.

Fully 25 to 30% of the total Chinese GDP is from real estate investment in homes, apartments, offices. That’s significant. The problem is that real estate, especially apartments in China, for more than two decades, appeared to be a guaranteed money maker for owners as well as builders and banks and above all, local government officials. Prices rose annually in the double digits, sometimes by 20%. Millions of middle-class Chinese bought not just one, but two or more apartments, using the second as investment for future retirement. China’s land is owned by the Communist Party, at the local level. It is leased long-term to construction firms who then borrow to build.

Here it gets murky. For CP local government officials, revenue from local real estate land leasing and their infrastructure projects is their major revenue source. Until now municipal property taxes are forbidden despite a huge pressure from local officials.

In the months of 2018 and 2019 China real estate prices peaked. Since then they have been in a prolonged decline. China has a unique and very abuse-prone real estate model. Typically a buyer must pre-pay the full purchase price when a developer has merely begun the construction. “Buy today as the price will be even more tomorrow” was the mantra. He takes a mortgage, usually from local banks, to do that. If the builder does not complete on time, the buyer must still pay their mortgage. Even if the developer goes bankrupt as is now happening, leaving abandoned unfinished housing behind. No other country uses that model. Typically in Western countries a small deposit on a home to reserve until completion is enough. The mortgage comes when the property is finished. Not in China.

So long as China home prices were constantly rising, it seemingly worked and the home market expanded. When that price inflation stopped, for a variety of reasons, and exacerbated by the ultra-severe covid lockdowns, what was then a colossal real estate bubble began to implode. According to economist Robert Pettis at Beijing University, “Since the beginning of the property crisis in September and October 2021, property prices have declined in more than two-thirds of China’s seventy largest cities (and probably all of the smaller ones), while, more importantly, sales of new apartments this year (2022) have collapsed.” [i]

The major turn took place in 2021 with the default of China Evergrande Group on its dollar bonds. It was then the world’s most indebted real estate conglomerate with debts of well over $300 billion. In 2018 Evergrande was deemed, “the most valuable real estate group in the world,” according to Wikipedia. That was on paper. By time of default it also owned theme parks, an EV auto company, resorts and enough land to house 10 million people. Until Beijing refused to bailout Evergrande, in a belated bid to cool the bubble,  Chinese lenders had made loans based on the assumption that large borrowers would be bailed out—Too Big To Fail. Beijing learned all the wrong lessons from US banks after Lehman Bros.

It came out that Evergrande had created a colossal Ponzi fraud over the years. They were not unique. Following a speculative property boom after 2010, poorly-regulated local governments across China turned increasingly to real estate to boost income and fulfill the Beijing GDP growth targets, a de facto monetary version of Soviet central planning. Inflating local real estate values was a way of meeting local GDP targets. Local officials were given their share of annual GDP contribution to be met. Real estate became the ideal vehicle to meet GDP targets and generate local revenues. As long as prices were rising, banks and increasingly unregulated local “shadow banks” joined in the “win-win” bonanza.  According to the South China Morning Post, by 2020 and the start of covid severe lockdowns, land sales and real estate taxes’ contribution to local government fiscal revenue reached a peak of 37.6 per cent. [ii]

The Evergrande partial default set off a panic in China real estate that officials desperately, and unsuccessfully, have tried to control. It was merely the first major casualty in what is a systemic meltdown. Beijing authorities imposed sharp limits on real estate lending in a vain attempt to contain the implosion, the so-called Three Red Lines. That made the implosion of the property bubble worse. In 2022 China new home sales plunged 22% over 2021. As of February 2023, China home prices had fallen for 16 straight months. Sales by the country’s top 100 developers last year were only 60% of 2021 levels. Land sales, which typically account for more than 40% of local government revenue, have collapsed. [iii]

Empty Houses and unemployment rising

Until the bubble began to burst in 2022 with the Evergrande default, Chinese real estate prices had risen several times higher, relative to household income, than in the USA. More alarming, two decades of rampant price inflation had created literal ghost cities and millions of empty apartments. As of 2021 an estimated 65 million apartments in China were empty, enough to house the French nation. [iv] This was a result of two decades or more of municipalities and developers building beyond actual demand, as citizens bought for investment, not living. One estimate is that between one-fifth and one-quarter of the total China housing stock, especially in more desirable cities, was owned by speculative buyers who had no intention of living in them or renting them out. In Chinese culture, a used apartment is considered unattractive.[v] With falling prices, these homes become unpayable.

The unprecedented 3-year covid lockdowns that ended abruptly last December did not help matters. Thousands of foreign manufacturers including Apple, Foxconn, Samsung and Sony, have begun to leave China for other locations in Asia or even Mexico, fueling a growing unemployment crisis which feeds the housing crisis in a self-feeding cycle.

As a result of this slow-motion implosion across China, for the first time since the great expansion unemployment is becoming very serious. This March, youth unemployment officially was over 20%. Millions of recent university graduates are unable to find work and Beijing has begun to send them to work in the rural countryside, reminiscent of the Mao era. This bodes ill for future home sales. A contracting bubble has a vicious dynamic.

Until about the time of the 2008 Beijing Olympics, real estate investment was largely productive. It filled a huge deficit in quality housing as a new middle class grew more affluent. After about 2010 that began to shift to bubble status as millions of middle-class and rich Chinese began to buy second and even third homes for pure speculation as prices were rising in double digits. The degree of central supervision of local government finances was loose.

Over recent years, to avoid central clampdown by Beijing authorities fearful of a new debt bubble imploding, local governments, often with hidden collusion from the giant state banks, created a non-bank economy, “shadow banks,” all off-balance sheet. As one result, despite actions by Beijing regulators to control the property meltdown and prevent contagion, total debt, public and private, in China by February 2023 according to Bloomberg reached an alarming 280% of GDP. [vi]

Commodity.com reports total state debt of China in 2023 is more than $9.4 trillion. But that excluded local government financing vehicles (LGFVs). Chinese local governments rely on off-balance sheet LGFVs to raise funds for local public construction—housing, high-speed rails, ports, airports. The debts of all these LGFVs are estimated to be roughly $27 trillion more. The official figure for total state debt also excluded debt of state banks and state companies, which is also clearly considerable, but unpublished. That total debt is also without the unknown size of local shadow banks which China’s National Institute of Finance and Development in 2018 estimated at some $6 trillion more. The result of all these omissions is a headline figure meant to reassure Western financial markets that China has manageable public and private debt. It doesn’t. All told, very roughly we can calculate a mammoth debt accumulation of well more than $42 trillion, a staggering sum for an economy which only three decades ago was at a level of an underdeveloped economy.  [vii]

A major vehicle used to finance local budgets is unguaranteed and largely unregulated municipal investment bonds. Unlike traditional municipal debt in western countries, the Chinese local LGFVs are not able to use tax revenues to fund their bond interest or principal payments. So, local governments would tap into a growing housing market by leasing their long-term land to developers to fund their bond payments.  This created a system where a sustained fall in housing construction, sales and prices now creates a systemic threat. This is now underway across China. In just two decades China has created the world’s second largest corporate debt market behind the USA, and far the most of that is in unregulated municipal bond debt.

As a result of this unique mixing of local governmental fiscal policies with local housing markets, a substantial drop in housing or land prices has greatly increased the risk level of local government  default on its debts. In July 2022 Zunyi City in Guizhou defaulted on a major bond, leading to a collapse of the entire unregulated local bond market, as local bond issuance collapsed by 85% after that. The bonds were a way to refinance local debt and that channel now is all but closed, despite   Beijing liquidity injections early 2023. Investors were mostly local ordinary Chinese seeking to earn on savings. This past April officials of Guiyang, also in Guizhou, told Beijing it was unable to finance its debts accumulated over a decade in construction projects including housing. [viii] This opens the next phase of debt implosion. Several China municipalities reportedly have been slashing wages, cutting transportation services and reducing fuel subsidies in a desperate bid to avoid default.

National Security redefined

Transparency of financial data has always been a problem in China. Thirty years ago the country had no developed financial markets. So long as the economy was expanding however, it was not a priority. Now it is, but too late.

A signal of how severe the situation is becoming, the Beijing authorities have begun to limit release of local and corporate financial data to foreign firms, calling it a “national security” issue.

On May 9 Bloomberg reported, “China’s crackdown on data access to overseas firms is adding to concerns about how Beijing controls the flow of information in the country, making it difficult for investors to assess the state of the economy.” Information such as academic papers, court judgments, official biographies of politicians, and bond market transactions are affected, they report. US consultancy Bain &Co. had their China offices raided recently as part of the national data security campaign. Such measures may keep reality from the pages of the Wall Street Journal or CNBC for a while, but the underlying reality of the collapse of the world’s largest financial edifice will be more difficult to hide.

This May, Dalian Wanda Group, another major Chinese real estate conglomerate with investments in US cinema chains, Australian real estate and beyond, revealed talks with its major bankers to restructure huge debts amid a liquidity crisis. The UK Financial Times on May 9 reported that hopes of a post-covid China recovery are vanishing: “Chinese iron ore prices dropped to their lowest levels in five months, as weak demand adds to evidence that the country’s economic rebound from tough coronavirus lockdowns may be faltering… the optimism and activity that followed the end of lockdown have waned, leading to a ‘collapse’ in the steel market.”

This all means the prospect of the Chinese economy being a growth locomotive to lift the rest of the world from looming depression is virtually nil at this point. The massive Belt and Road Initiative is mired in hundreds of billions of dollars in loans to countries unable to service the debt, as world interest rates rise and growth stalls. Attempts to boost domestic China growth by relying on a consumer boom are doomed presently for obvious reasons noted, as is the call by Xi Jinping to make 5G, AI and such technologies the basis of a new boom, as US sanctions greatly hamper China IT advances.

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F. William Engdahl is strategic risk consultant and lecturer, he holds a degree in politics from Princeton University and is a best-selling author on oil and geopolitics.

He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization.

Notes

[i] Michael Pettis, What’s in Store for China’s Mortgage Market?, August 12, 2022,

https://carnegieendowment.org/chinafinancialmarkets/87664

[ii] Luna Sun, China cracks down on ‘characteristic towns’ that misused land, real estate while racking up massive debt, 6 November, 2021, https://www.scmp.com/economy/china-economy/article/3155055/china-cracks-down-characteristic-towns-misused-land-real

[iii] Laura He, China s property crash is prompting banks to offer mortgages to 70 year olds, February 20, 2023     https://edition.cnn.com/2023/02/17/economy/china-mortgage-age-95-property-market-intl-hnk/index.html

[iv] Lina Batarags, China has at least 65 million empty homes — enough to house the population of France. It offers a glimpse into the country’s massive housing-market problem, Business Insider, October 14, 2021, https://www.businessinsider.com/china-empty-homes-real-estate-evergrande-housing-market-problem-2021-10 .

[v] Michael Pettis, What Does Evergrande Meltdown Mean for China?,  September, 20, 2021, https://carnegieendowment.org/chinafinancialmarkets/85391

[vi] Bloomberg, China’s Debt-to-GDP Ratio Rises to Record 279.7% on Credit Boom, 8 May, 2023, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-05-08/china-s-debt-to-gdp-ratio-rises-to-record-279-7-on-credit-boom#xj4y7vzkg

[vii] Commodity.com, China’s National Debt Clock: What’s the Current Figure (and What’s Included), May 12, 2023,

https://commodity.com/data/china/debt-clock/

[viii] The Economist, China’s local-debt crisis is about to get nasty, May 4, 2023, https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2023/05/04/chinas-local-debt-crisis-is-about-to-get-nasty

Featured image is from InfoBrics


Seeds of Destruction: Hidden Agenda of Genetic Manipulation

Author Name: F. William Engdahl
ISBN Number: 978-0-9879389-2-3
Year: 2007
Product Type: PDF File

Price: $9.50

This skilfully researched book focuses on how a small socio-political American elite seeks to establish control over the very basis of human survival: the provision of our daily bread. “Control the food and you control the people.”

This is no ordinary book about the perils of GMO. Engdahl takes the reader inside the corridors of power, into the backrooms of the science labs, behind closed doors in the corporate boardrooms.

The author cogently reveals a diabolical world of profit-driven political intrigue, government corruption and coercion, where genetic manipulation and the patenting of life forms are used to gain worldwide control over food production. If the book often reads as a crime story, that should come as no surprise. For that is what it is.

Click here to purchase.

The Public Health Red Meat Allergy Bioengineering Plot Thickens…

By Ben Bartee, August 14, 2023

In a recently unearthed video of the College of Global Public Health Center for Bioethics at New York University Director, Dr. Matthew Liao,speaking at the 2016 World Science Festival, he openly advocates artificially inducing a red meat allergy in the entire human population,using an analog of the algha-gal molecule found in the Lone Star Tick that I have documented previously at Armageddon Prose, so as to fight “climate change.”

Assange be Wary: The Dangers of a US Plea Deal

By Dr. Binoy Kampmark, August 15, 2023

At every stage of its proceedings against Julian Assange, the US Imperium has shown little by way of tempering its vengeful impulses. The WikiLeaks publisher, in uncovering the sordid, operational details of a global military power, would always have to pay. 

Former Israeli General Compares Treatment of Palestinians to ‘Nazi Germany’ and ‘Apartheid’

By Middle East Eye, August 15, 2023

A former top general in the Israeli military has said that Israel‘s treatment of Palestinians in the occupied West Bank resembles Nazi Germany and is “total apartheid”. Amiram Levin, former head of the army’s northern command, made the comments on Sunday on Israeli public broadcaster Kan. 

COVID-19 mRNA Vaccine Injury Treatment: Curcumin (Turmeric) Blocks Spike Protein (Combine It with Bromelain), Treats Myocarditis, Has Anti-inflammatory, Anti-aging and Anti-Cancer Properties!

By Dr. William Makis, August 15, 2023

Curcumin (diferuloylmethane), is a main bioactive polyphenolic compound that is extracted from the Curcuma longa (Tumeric) rhizomes, which belongs to Ginger family and is broadly cultivated in Southeast Asia and India.

Moral Culpability Among the Oppressed and a New Look at the Tragedy of Orwell’s 1984

By Dr. Emanuel Garcia, August 14, 2023

I have no idea whether or not it is fashionable in literary circles to criticize the two protagonists of George Orwell’s 1984, Winston and Julia. After all, they inhabit a world governed by a perverse and despicable elite who have achieved virtually complete control over the thoughts and actions of their subjects — a world not far removed from the one that is being thrust upon us as I write.

“Struggling with the Old Enemies of Peace”

By Emanuel Pastreich, August 14, 2023

We have to struggle with the old enemies of peace: business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, race antagonism whipped by hidden operatives, the exploitation of tensions between cities and rural communities, and of course, the old favorite, war profiteering.

Five for Five: US-Iran Prisoner Swap and the Nuclear Deal

By Steven Sahiounie, August 14, 2023

The deal has not been finalized, and the prisoners may not arrive home soon, but the deal has been placed into motion as Iran has transferred the five prisoners to house arrest, some having been transferred out of the infamous Evin prison in Tehran.

The Illusion of Scandal: How Washington Is Attempting to Dismiss $20 Million as an Illusion

By Jonathan Turley, August 14, 2023

I previously wrote a column marveling at the success of the Bidens in pulling off one of the neatest tricks in political history. I analogized it to how Houdini used to make his 10,000-pound elephant Jennie disappear on a stage in front of a live audience. The media and political establishment is now striving to top that performance by declaring $20 million in payments to Biden family members as an “illusion” of influence. At the heart of this scandal is the BFF, the Biden Family Fund.

As Maui Burns, Biden Demands Another $24 Billion…For Ukraine!

By Rep. Ron Paul, August 14, 2023

It’s hard to look at recent footage of the devastation in Maui and then hear President Biden tell Congress that he needs another $24 billion for Ukraine. How can this Administration continue to justify tens of billions of dollars for this losing war that is not in our interest while the rest of the United States disintegrates?

Kyrgyzstan Is the US’ Next Regime Change Target

By Andrew Korybko, August 14, 2023

What Senator Menendez demands is nothing short of a soft coup brought about by voluntarily reversing Kyrgyzstan’s recent “Democratic Security” successes under the Damocles’ sword of “security and economic” consequences if it dares to refuse.

Assange be Wary: The Dangers of a US Plea Deal

August 15th, 2023 by Dr. Binoy Kampmark

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***

At every stage of its proceedings against Julian Assange, the US Imperium has shown little by way of tempering its vengeful impulses.  The WikiLeaks publisher, in uncovering the sordid, operational details of a global military power, would always have to pay.  Given the 18 charges he faces, 17 fashioned from that most repressive of instruments, the US Espionage Act of 1917, any sentence is bound to be hefty.  Were he to be extradited from the United Kingdom to the US, Assange will disappear into a carceral, life-ending dystopia.

In this saga of relentless mugging and persecution, the country that has featured regularly in commentary, yet done the least, is Australia.  Assange may well be an Australian national, but this has generally counted for naught.  Successive governments have tended to cower before the bullying disposition of Washington’s power. With the signing of the AUKUS pact and the inexorable surrender of Canberra’s military and diplomatic functions to Washington, any exertion of independent counsel and fair advice will be treated with sneering qualification.

The Albanese government has claimed, at various stages, to be pursuing the matter with its US counterparts with firm insistence.  Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has even publicly expressed his frustration at the lack of progress in finding a “diplomatic solution” to Assange’s plight.  But such frustrations have been tempered by an acceptance that legal processes must first run their course.

The substance of any such diplomatic solution remains vague. But on August 14, the Sydney Morning Herald, citing US Ambassador to Australia Caroline Kennedy as its chief source, reported that a “resolution” to Assange’s plight might be in the offing. “There is a way to resolve it,” the ambassador told the paper. This could involve a reduction of any charges in favour of a guilty plea, with the details sketched out by the US Department of Justice. In making her remarks, Kennedy clarified that this was more a matter for the DOJ than the State Department or any other department. “So it’s not really a diplomatic issue, but I think there absolutely could be a resolution.”

In May, Kennedy met members of the Parliamentary Friends of Julian Assange Group to hear their concerns.  The previous month, 48 Australian MPs and Senators, including 13 from the governing Labor Party, wrote an open letter to the US Attorney General, Merrick Garland, warning that the prosecution “would set a dangerous precedent for all global citizens, journalists, publishers, media organizations and the freedom of the press.  It would also be needlessly damaging for the US as a world leader on freedom of expression and the rule of law.”

In a discussion with The Intercept, Gabriel Shipton, Assange’s brother, had his own analysis of the latest developments. “The [Biden] administration appears to be searching for an off-ramp ahead of [Albanese’s] first state visit to DC in October.”  In the event one wasn’t found, “we could see a repeat of a very public rebuff delivered by [US Secretary of State] Tony Blinken to the Australian Foreign Minister two weeks ago in Brisbane.”

That rebuff was particularly brutal, taking place on the occasion of the AUSMIN talks between the foreign and defence ministers of both Australia and the United States.  On that occasion, Foreign Minister Penny Wong remarked that Australia had made its position clear to their US counterparts “that Mr Assange’s case has dragged for too long, and our desire it be brought to a conclusion, and we’ve said that publicly and you would anticipate that that reflects also the positive we articulate in private.”

In his response, Secretary of State Blinken claimed to “understand” such views and admitted that the matter had been raised with himself and various offices of the US.  With such polite formalities acknowledged, Blinken proceeded to tell “our friends” what, exactly, Washington wished to do. Assange had been “charged with very serious criminal conduct in the United States in connection with his alleged role in one of the largest compromises of classified information in the history of our country. The actions that he has alleged to have committed risked very serious harm to our national security, to the benefit of our adversaries, and put named sources at grave risk – grave risk – of physical harm, and grave risk of detention.”

Such an assessment, lazily assumed, repeatedly rebutted, and persistently disproved, went unchallenged by all the parties present, including the Australian ministers. Nor did any members of the press deem it appropriate to challenge the account. The unstated assumption here is that Assange is already guilty for absurd charges, a man condemned.

At this stage, such deals are the stuff of manipulation and fantasy. The espionage charges have been drafted to inflate, rather than diminish any sentence. Suggestions that the DOJ will somehow go soft must be treated with abundant scepticism. The pursuit of Assange is laced by sentiments of revenge, intended to both inflict harm upon the publisher while deterring those wishing to publish US national security information.  As the Australian international law academic Don Rothwell observes, the plea deal may well take into account the four years spent in UK captivity, but is unlikely to either feature a complete scrapping of the charges, or exempt Assange from travelling to the US to admit his guilt. “It’s not possible to strike a plea deal outside the relevant jurisdiction except in the most exceptional circumstances.”

Should any plea deal be successfully reached and implemented, thereby making Assange admit guilt, the terms of his return to Australia, assuming he survives any stint on US soil, will be onerous. In effect, the US would merely be changing the prison warden while adjusting the terms of observation. In place of British prison wardens will be Australian overseers unlikely to ever take kindly to the publication of national security information.

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

Featured image: STOP THIS – by Mr. Fish

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***

New Jersey is in the process of approving two major offshore wind projects: the Ocean Wind I and II initiatives owned by the Danish “green” energy company Ørsted. Radical leftist Governor Phil Murphy ordered a massive restructuring of the state’s power grid in September to become reliant on “100 percent clean energy by 2035” that has enjoyed enthusiastic support from the White House, which approved Ocean Wind I in July.

To install the wind turbines necessary for the projects, engineers must survey and map the ground floor to find the ground best able to sustain the massive structures. The survey work being done in anticipation of the installation of these turbines has coincided with a massive increase in the number of dead whales and other marine mammals off the coasts of New York and New Jersey.

POINT PLEASANT NEW JERSEY - FEBRUARY 19: Environmentalists gather during a 'Save the Whales' rally calling for a halt to offshore wind energy development along the Jersey Shore on February 19, 2023 in Point Pleasant New Jersey. The rally, hosted by the environmental organization Clean Ocean Action, followed the deaths of numerous whales, Since Dec. 1, 2022 according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA 12 whales have died in NY and NJ (Photo by Kena Betancur/VIEWpress)

Environmentalists gather during a ‘Save the Whales’ rally calling for a halt to offshore wind energy development along the Jersey Shore on February 19, 2023 in Point Pleasant New Jersey. (Kena Betancur/VIEWpress)

As of June, scientists have documented at least 14 humpback and minke whales washing ashore dead in the two states compared to nine in all of 2022. Between December and May, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) documented 25 dead whales washing ashore along the entirety of the East Coast, nine in New Jersey. The whales washing ashore are dramatic affairs, as they have on several occasions appeared on boardwalk beaches frequented by families, alarming locals.

Most whales who have undergone autopsies after washing ashore showed signs of blunt trauma, suggesting they died by hitting ships.

Veteran fishermen in New Jersey, who have spent decades studying the sea, say the whale deaths and those of other marine mammals are unprecedented and insist a relationship must exist between the surveying and the deaths. As marine mammals use sonar, the theory suggests that the surveying is disrupting the animals’ ability to know where ships are and thus avoid hitting them. NOAA insists that it has no scientific evidence linking the surveying – which, like whales, dolphins, and porpoises, uses sonar for echolocation – to the whale deaths.

“At this point, there is no evidence that noise resulting from wind development-related site characterization surveys could potentially cause mortality of whales, and no specific links between recent large whale mortalities and currently ongoing surveys,” NOAA’s website reads.

Robert Bogan, the captain of the Gambler recreational fishing vessel in Point Pleasant Beach, New Jersey, said in a letter to his Congressman, Rep. Chris Smith (R-NJ), shared with Breitbart News this week that the whale deaths present an entirely new phenomenon to him – something unless in the over half a century Capt. Bogan has spent regularly taking his customers out to fish.

The Gambler fishing boat, Point Pleasant Beach, New Jersey.

The Gambler fishing boat, Point Pleasant Beach, New Jersey. (Courtesy Capt. Robert Bogan)

The Gambler is what is commonly known in the Jersey Shore region as a party boat – it offers tickets for individual trips to sea for fishermen and provides the service of finding the fish, aiding new fishermen with basic training, providing bait, and fileting the catches. It has been in operation since 1949 as a local family business. It offers trips closer to shore – for species such as summer flounder (fluke) in the summer – and trips further out for tuna and other large catches in the colder months, meaning its crew are familiar with the conditions of the sea year-round.

“My business runs 10 months out of the year and we employ up to 10 people. Many other businesses in our shore community depend on our business –as we do those businesses,” Bogan explained. “I find it very disturbing that the powers backing the offshore windmill development would claim that there is no correlation between wind research development and the dead whales that continue to wash up on our beaches.”

“In my 50+ years of working on the ocean, I have never seen anything remotely like this,” he emphasized. “Dead whales on our beach absolutely and logically have everything to do with the oceanic geo-surveys.”

“NOAA was so concerned about slowing our boats down to less than 10 knots (basically a crawl), so as not to strike a whale and yet they signed-off on these invasive surveys, and admitted there would be an ‘acceptable’ whale mortality involved,” Bogan wrote. “Now, they don’t want to admit there was any mortality coinciding with wind research.”

Contrary to assurances on NOAA’s website, a Bloomberg News report in November unearthed a report from NOAA protected species expert Sean Hayes who warned the wind projects “will likely cause added stress that could result in additional population consequences to a species that is already experiencing rapid decline,” referring to whales.

“If these whales are dying from boat strikes, then how do we explain the deaths of many porpoises that have playfully swam the bow-wakes of ships for centuries?” he asked. “In all my years working the ocean: winter, spring, summer and fall — we have never hit, have seen or know of any boater who has hit a whale.”

Bogan described himself as initially “open-minded” about offshore wind, but feels “lied to” about the environmental damage.

We only know of the whales that were hurt by seismic and sonar research because they float when dead. What of all the other effected sea life that did not come to the surface?” he asked.

Asked about the letter, Rep. Smith told Breitbart News that Bogan’s experiences and concerns were representative of a growing chorus of voices of maritime professionals at the Shore.

“Captain Robert Bogan and numerous recreational and commercial fisherman — who know our sea better than anyone else — have reached out to me with serious, first-hand observations regarding the aggressive offshore wind industrialization of our Jersey Shore,” Rep. Smith said.  “Tragically, their alarming insights about these unprecedented offshore wind projects and the resulting permanent transformation of our marine seascape continue to be ignored by Governor Phil Murphy and the Biden Administration.”

“The hardworking members of our community who depend on the sea for their livelihoods, and who contribute enormously to our economy, deserve to have their concerns thoroughly addressed—not trivialized, mocked or dismissed,” the Congressman added.

Bogan’s observations in recreational fishing are consistent with those of New Jersey’s commercial anglers.

“The commercial fishing is extremely upset with the visual observations of dead whales floating at sea,” Brick Wenzel, Point Pleasant Beach, New Jersey’s, fishing liaison and a longtime commercial fisherman, told Breitbart News in March. “One vessel said they had seen 3 different whales in one trip. Another had parts of a whale come up in their net. Most of the captains are generational fishers and are in their 60s — No one has heard of or [has] seen anything like the carnage being witnessed.”

POINT PLEASANT NEW JERSEY - FEBRUARY 19: Environmentalists gather during a 'Save the Whales' rally calling for a halt to offshore wind energy development along the Jersey Shore on February 19, 2023 in Point Pleasant New Jersey. The rally, hosted by the environmental organization Clean Ocean Action, followed the deaths of numerous whales, Since Dec. 1, 2022 according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA 12 whales have died in NY and NJ (Photo by Kena Betancur/VIEWpress)

Environmentalists gather during a ‘Save the Whales’ rally calling for a halt to offshore wind energy development along the Jersey Shore on February 19, 2023 in Point Pleasant Beach, New Jersey. (Kena Betancur/VIEWpress)

Rep. Jeff Van Drew (R-NJ), whose district borders Rep. Smith’s to the south, similarly told Breitbart News in March that fishermen in his district have been alarmed by the situation for some time out of both fear for the environmental damage and concerns that the wind turbines will harm their fishing grounds.

“The fishermen have always been concerned, but it wasn’t just enough when it was just the fishermen,” Rep. Van Drew (R-NJ) asserted. “And now what’s happened is, over time, because of the whales, because of people realizing what these things are going to look like — we’re going to industrialize the Jersey Shore.”

Reps. Van Drew and Smith led a hearing in Wildwood, New Jersey, (Van Drew’s district) in March in which experts testified that, in addition to concerns about the potential mass killing of marine life, the offshore wind turbine projects appeared to interfere with military missions.

“NASA has said that these areas interfere with all their missions out of Wallops Island; the Navy has said there is not an area in that whole lease block that does not interfere with DOD [Department of Defense] missions, but BOEM [the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management] is continuing ahead,” Meghan Lapp, the fisheries liaison for the Rhode Island commercial fishing company Seafreeze, said at the event. “When I’ve asked them on webinars, like – the Navy said that this is a problem how can you still be leasing it? ‘Well, we’re just going to be continuing the discussions.’”

Other concerns regarding the offshore wind facilities are the unclear science regarding disposal of used wind turbines, potential threats to migrating birds, and few answers regarding whether or not the turbines could survive major hurricane damage, which New Jersey occasionally experiences.

In response to the lack of clarity regarding the Ocean Wind projects, Rep. Smith spearheaded an effort to begin an investigation into the plan by the Government Accountability Office (GAO), which confirmed a probe in June. The GAO will reportedly investigate potential effects on “the environment, the fishing industry, military operations, navigational safety, and more.”

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***

A former top general in the Israeli military has said that Israel‘s treatment of Palestinians in the occupied West Bank resembles Nazi Germany and is “total apartheid”.

Amiram Levin, former head of the army’s northern command, made the comments on Sunday on Israeli public broadcaster Kan. 

“There hasn’t been a democracy there in 57 years. There is total apartheid,” Levin said, referring to the situation in the West Bank.

He said the Israeli army was “forced to exert sovereignty there” and is “rotting from the inside”. 

“It’s standing by, looking at the settler rioters and is beginning to be a partner to war crimes. These are deep processes.”

Levin went further, comparing those processes to Nazi Germany. 

“It’s hard for us to say it, but it’s the truth. Walk around Hebron, look at the streets; streets where Arabs are no longer allowed to go on, only Jews,” he said. “That’s exactly what happened there, in that dark country.”

Criticism of Comments

The comments were condemned by lawmaker Danny Danon, who belongs to the ruling Likud party. 

“Those who compare us to Germany or the Nazi regime should be examined,” Danon said. 

Levin, who was also a former deputy chief of the Mossad, had a military career which spanned from 1965 to 1998. 

Earlier this weekend, he made a speech at an anti-government demonstration in Tel Aviv in which he called on military leaders to stand up to Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir, both of whom he said were “trying to drag you into war crimes”.

Levin’s views on Israeli abuses appear to have taken a marked turn: in a 2017 interview with Israeli daily Maariv, he claimed that Palestinians “deserved the occupation”. 

Several human rights groups, including B’tselem, Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International have in recent years determined that the term “apartheid” applies to the situation in Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories.

Last year, Michael Lynk, the UN’s special rapporteur for human rights in the occupied Palestinian territories, said in a report that the treatment of Palestinians “satisfies the prevailing evidentiary standard for the existence of apartheid”.

Israel has occupied the West Bank since the war in 1967.

The territory is home to around 2.9 million Palestinians. Around 475,000 Jewish settlers also live there in Israeli state-approved settlements, which are illegal under international law.

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Featured image: Amiram Levin (Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0)

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***

I have written about mRNA vaccine treatments: NATTOKINASE, QUERCETIN, N-Acetyl CYSTINE (NAC), OLIVE LEAF, BLACK SEED/NIGELLA, BROMELAIN and 3-DAY FASTING.

Curcumin (Turmeric)

Curcumin (diferuloylmethane), is a main bioactive polyphenolic compound that is extracted from the Curcuma longa (Tumeric) rhizomes, which belongs to Ginger family and is broadly cultivated in Southeast Asia and India.

Curcumin is a yellowish compound, which has been used as a food additive, dietary spice, and herbal remedy.

Several investigations have revealed that curcumin possesses potent biochemical and biological activities, including anti-inflammatory, anti-viral, anti-bacterial antioxidant, and anti-cancer activities.

In traditional herbal medicine, curcumin is used to improve the immune system and as a treatment for various respiratory disorders like allergy and asthma.

Curcumin has also been traditionally used for the treatment of numerous diseases including ulcers, dysentery, jaundice, upset stomach, arthritis, acne, wounds, and eye and skin infections.

Curcumin and COVID-19 Infection and spike protein 

May 2020 – Zahediour et al reviewed curcumin in COVID-19 infection:

  • curcumin has antiviral properties against other viruses like RSV, Herpes
  • curcumin altered surface protein structure of viruses to block their entry into cells
  • curcumin binds spike protein (!)
  • curcumin inhibits viral replication inside infected cells
  • curcumin inhibits inflammatory cytokines in COVID infection and decreases cytokine storm
  • curcumin inhibits oxidative stress that causes severe lung injuries
  • curcumin inhibits fibrotic response in COVID-19 infection, reduces lung fibrosis, reduces cardiac damage and fibrosis, reduces kidney fibrosis

July 2022 – Nag et al. found that curcumin had strong, stable binding with Omicron spike protein, that was superior to hydroxychloroquine. It could also disrupt a spike protein already bound to ACE-2.

Sep.2022 – Zipin et al found that curcumin can disrupt Omicron viral particles but their curcumin formulation which had poor bioavailability, was unable to disrupt Omicron virus in infected cells – authors suggest using nanocurcumin to improve bioavailability

Oct.2022 – Venugopa et al. found that in addition to curcumin binding spike protein, curcumin could also interfere with COVID-19 viral replication, and was an immunomodulator that could prevent cytokine storm.

April 2023 – Wei Wu et al. found that curcumin could ameliorate spike protein mediated oxidative stress through scavenging ROS (reactive oxygen species) and enhancing function of the antioxidation system. This is enhanced further when taken in combination with resveratrol.

CURCUMIN + BROMELAIN 

Greek researchers Kritis et al showed in Dec.2020 that Bromelain combined with Curcumin has a major impact on stopping severe COVID-19! 

  • Severe COVID-19 involves 3 pathways: inflammatory (cytokine storm), coagulation (thrombosis) and bradykinin cascades
  • Both Bromelain and Curcumin inhibit two of these (inflammation and coagulation) and Bromelain inhibits bradykinin as well.
  • Both Bromelain and Curcumin block binding of spike protein to ACE-2 and TMPRSS-2
  • Bromelain also increases absorption of curcumin after oral intake which is very important because curcumin on its own has very poor bioavailability
  • Conclusion: “Bromelain is absorbed directly when administered orally, while it substantially promotes the absorption of curcumin enhancing its bioavailability,and making this a perfect combination of immune-boosting nutraceuticals with synergistic anti-inflammatory and anticoagulant actions

CURCUMIN and Anti-Aging

Aging is one of the most complex and intricate phenomenon in the biological context. Aging is described as a physiological decrease of several biological activities in the organ with a gradual reduction of cellular adjustment to external and internal injuries.

The senescence that is known also as cellular aging is the hallmark of aging, and includes the reduction of the regenerative capacity of cells. In this regard, cellular senescence seems to be harmful because it consists of a defect of tissue renewal and functionality. Cellular senescence is an irreversible growth arrest by which cells cease to replicate; it occurs in somatic cells and limits their proliferative life span.

Anti-aging benefits of Curcumin:

  • 10 times higher anti-oxidant activity compared to Vitamin E
  • Stimulates production of anti-oxidative enzymes (like superoxide dismutase) that decrease oxidative stress and increase life span
  • Inhibits lipid peroxidation
  • free radical scavenging activities slow telomere shortening
  • activates various cell signaling pathways that increase lifespan
  • decreases inflammation in neural cells, decreases neurodegenerative processes
  • decreases skin aging, promotes wound healing
  • inhibits aging processes in skeletal muscle, improves muscle mass and function
  • powerful anti-cancer effects by inducing apoptosis of cancer cells

CURCUMIN and Anti-Cancer 

  • Aug. 2021 – Zoi et al – summarized curcumin’s effects on cancer 
  • Lung cancer: curcumin suppressed invasion and metastatic potential of lung cancer cells. Also activates key tumor suppressor genes in smoking induced lung cancer
  • breast cancer: curcumin stopped the growth of breast cancer cells, also suppressed invasion and metastasis of breast cancer cells
  • prostate cancer: curcumin induced apoptosis and autophagy of cancer cells and is effective in castration-resistant prostate cancer as well
  • brain cancer: nanocurcumin can get past BBB into brain and can decrease proliferation of glioblastoma (GBM) cells, also suppresses formation of GBM stem cells which are responsible for tumor progression, recurrence and resistance to chemo – curcumin also decreases malignant characteristics of GBM stem cells to prevent GBM cancer recurrence.
  • pancreatic cancer: curcumin suppresses formation of cancer stem cells which are responsible for high proliferation rate and rapid tumor growth of pancreatic cancer – suppresses tumor growth.
  • leukemia – curcumin affects numerous anti-cancer pathways, also enhances the effectiveness of chemo in treatment of leukemias.
  • Feb.2021 – Zia et al – most cancers have a non-functional or mutated p53 tumor suppressor gene
  • curcumin activates p53 pathway that induces senescence in cancerous cells and also induces death of cancer cells via apoptosis
  • Aug.2020 – Mansouri et al reviews use of curcumin in cancer patients:
    • curcumin increases effectiveness of chemo and radiation therapy
    • curcumin improves patient survival and increases expression of anti-metastatic proteins
    • curcumin reduces side effects of chemotherapy and radiotherapy

CURCUMIN and Lifestyle-related conditions

  • curcumin reduces myocardial infarct size
  • curcumin treats myocarditis(!) reduces inflammation and progression
  • curcumin inhibits development of left ventricular systolic dysfunction and heart failure
  • curcumin reduces lung inflammation in COPD
  • obesity – curcumin reduces inflammation due to obesity, also improves serum lipid profile and lipid metabolism.
  • dementia – nanocurcumin reduced amyloid and tau accumulation in the brain

CURCUMIN Supplement Formulations 

  • Oct.2021 – Tabanelli et al reported that the major problem with curcumin is low bioavailability
  • curcumin is almost insoluble in pure water
  • curcumin has poor absorption, fast metabolism and rapid systemic clearance resulting in very low curcumin levels in plasma and tissues
  • some formulations have curcumin + black pepper (piperine) which blocks the breakdown of curcumin.
  • there are “nanocurcumin” formulations that enhance absorption and bioavailability

Pharmaceutics 13 01715 g001

CURCUMIN Safety

Curcumin has been characterized as “generally safe” by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Indeed, no significant side effects related to curcumin can be found in the literature. Some of the documented cases are of reversible side effects, including allergic dermatitis.

Dose-escalating studies have demonstrated that consumption of up to 12 g of curcumin daily presents no damaging effects. In studies on patients with solid tumors, no adverse effects were reported when curcumin was given for 8 weeks at a dosage of 900 mg/day orally, except for mild gastrointestinal upset.

Oral intake of 6 g/day of curcumin for 7 weeks was also reported to be safe in patients with breast cancer, and 3 g/day of curcumin given for 9 weeks to patients with prostate cancer showed no adverse effects.

Curcumin also exhibits a strong iron-chelating activity. Long-term supplementation with curcumin induced iron depletion in young mice.

Apart from that, curcumin possesses anticoagulant properties and may increase bleeding time in patients receiving anticoagulants.

It has been reported that this compound can inhibit several cytochrome P450 subtypes, including CYP2C9 and CYP3A4. For this reason, curcumin has been known to interact with certain other medications, including anticoagulants, antibiotics and antidepressants.

My Take… 

How can the COVID-19 Vaccine Injured or Long COVID patients benefit from Curcumin?

First, get a highly absorbable formulation: nanocurcumin, Curcumin + Bromelain or Curcumin + Black Pepper (piperine – which blocks the breakdown of curcumin and increases bioavailability).

There is no point taking a regular curcumin supplement with poor absorption

Summary of benefits: 

  • binds spike protein (stronger binding than hydroxychloroquine)
  • reduces tissue damage done by spike protein (decreases oxidative stress)
  • protects against COVID infection and re-infection (disrupts viruses, blocks their replication, reduces cytokine storm, reduces lung edema & inflammation)
  • reduces fibrosis in the lungs, heart, kidneys caused by spike protein
  • treats myocarditis (!) (has many anti-inflammatory effects which are very useful in anyone suffering from “lifestyle conditions” including obesity, diabetes and cardiovascular disease)
  • anti-aging benefits – 10x higher antioxidant than Vitamin E, slows telomere shortening, decreases neurodegenerative processes, decreases skin aging, decreases skeletal muscle aging, anti-tumor effects
  • powerful anti-cancer effects
    • stops growth of breast cancer, lung cancer, prostate cancer cells
    • stimulates autophagy and apoptosis of cancer cells
    • suppresses malignant cell invasion & metastasis
  • POTENTIAL TURBO CANCER EFFECTS:

    • stimulates p53 tumor suppressor pathways which may have been damaged by the spike protein
    • for aggressive cancers like glioblastomas and pancreatic cancers – it suppresses formation of cancer stem cells that are responsible for aggressive growth, spread, recurrence and resistance to chemo.
    • leukemias – has many pathways to treat leukemias.
    • enhances effectiveness of chemotherapy and radiation therapy and decreases their side effects (may be helpful for COVID-19 vaccine induced turbo cancer patients whose cancers are resistant to conventional chemo and radiation)

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Dr. William Makis is a Canadian physician with expertise in Radiology, Oncology and Immunology. Governor General’s Medal, University of Toronto Scholar. Author of 100+ peer-reviewed medical publications.


The Worldwide Corona Crisis, Global Coup d’Etat Against Humanity

by Michel Chossudovsky

Michel Chossudovsky reviews in detail how this insidious project “destroys people’s lives”. He provides a comprehensive analysis of everything you need to know about the “pandemic” — from the medical dimensions to the economic and social repercussions, political underpinnings, and mental and psychological impacts.

“My objective as an author is to inform people worldwide and refute the official narrative which has been used as a justification to destabilize the economic and social fabric of entire countries, followed by the imposition of the “deadly” COVID-19 “vaccine”. This crisis affects humanity in its entirety: almost 8 billion people. We stand in solidarity with our fellow human beings and our children worldwide. Truth is a powerful instrument.”

ISBN: 978-0-9879389-3-0,  Year: 2022,  PDF Ebook,  Pages: 164, 15 Chapters

Price: $11.50 FREE COPY! Click here (docsend) and download.

We encourage you to support the eBook project by making a donation through Global Research’s DonorBox “Worldwide Corona Crisis” Campaign Page

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***

I have no idea whether or not it is fashionable in literary circles to criticize the two protagonists of George Orwell’s 1984, Winston and Julia. After all, they inhabit a world governed by a perverse and despicable elite who have achieved virtually complete control over the thoughts and actions of their subjects — a world not far removed from the one that is being thrust upon us as I write.

When I recently reread the novel I was surprised by the tender sensitivity with which Orwell rendered the lovers’ relationship. The Orwell of social and political commentary, the prescient Orwell, the didactic Orwell — this was the author I remembered most, and I regarded his portrayal of the poignantly tragic couple, the couple whose love for each other was annihilated by the State in the end, to be the highlight of the book.

We sympathize with these rebellious creatures playing a dangerous game against the Enemy we all abhor, we cherish their secret meetings and their attempts to breathe within the suffocating mantle of surveillance, and we hope against hope that their love will triumph, knowing of course that only a dismal termination would be possible.

The tortures perpetrated upon them and their ultimate betrayals of self and other lend an even greater weight to the overall gloom of Orwell’s dystopian political world. They had been beaten, bludgeoned, threatened and, finally, broken, into forsaking each other for the sake of their own skins — understandably enough, I suppose — and with this the embers of their love were extinguished, transmogrified into some facsimile of affection for Big Brother.

I asked myself, however, if Winston and Julia did not in some irrevocable way, perhaps reminiscent of Greek tragedy, deserve their fates.

In a clandestine meeting with O’Brien, the man they believe to be leading the Resistance, they are asked a series of questions to determine their dedication to the good cause against the ruling Party:

‘You are prepared to commit murder?’

‘Yes.’

‘To commit acts of sabotage which may cause the death of hundreds of innocent people?’

‘Yes.’

‘To betray your country to foreign powers?’

‘Yes.’

‘You are prepared to cheat, to forge, to blackmail, to corrupt the minds of children, to distribute habit-forming drugs, to encourage prostitution, to disseminate venereal diseases—to do anything which is likely to cause demoralization and weaken the power of the Party?’

‘Yes.’

‘If, for example, it would somehow serve our interests to throw sulphuric acid in a child’s face—are you prepared to do that?’

‘Yes.’

Heinous and evil as undoubtedly the Party is, with its reign of ceaseless war and terror, its abolition of privacy, its revision of history and language, its debasement of its citizens and its promotion of suffering, the two who have met in love and pledged to fight for some semblance of human freedom commit themselves to unconscionable acts in the service of their quest for a greater good. They are apparently willing to do anything except promise never to see one another, a promise they will, pathetically and ironically enough, not be able to keep.

What if they had answered O’Brien, the treacherous Party representative masquerading as the opposition, with a ‘no’ to these queries? Would their fates have been different?

I wonder.

Yes, they would have been imprisoned and tortured and flattened and perhaps even executed, but they would have died with their souls and their love somehow intact. It is this failing, this weakness, this fallibility, consumed as they were by the desperate fight for the cause of humanity, that signaled their destruction more certainly than the machinations of Big Brother could ever accomplish.

When people ask me nowadays if we can ever hope to win out against the immense forces arrayed against our own humanity, our wishes for love and intimacy and cooperation and support and freedom to think and feel as we wish, I tell them that, unlike Orwell, I’m not a terribly good prognosticator.

But I also add that staying true to what is good makes us winners no matter what.

It is tempting in any war to resort to lawlessness, it is tempting to justify destructive means by the ends they purport to reach, it is tempting to put our consciences in abeyance in the thick of the fight. But by doing so we therefore become the instruments of our own destruction.

Those doctors who conveniently forgot about informed consent and individualized treatment and ‘first do no harm’ when it came to the Jab, and those lawyers and judges who conveniently overlooked the trampling by the government of our unalienable rights to freedom of expression and protest, did themselves in, whether they acknowledge it or not.

To become, by renouncing our fundamental principles, like the destructive and despicable enemy that persecutes us, is sure defeat. They may invade our bank accounts and attempt to invade our bodies and appropriate our earthly possessions, but only we can ensure that our souls are intact. Death, in the end, looms for us all. Preserving dignity is a choice we can make every step along the inevitable path.

In a way this is nothing new. I’m sure that life under Genghis Khan for an ordinary peasant was no picnic, nor was life as a Helot in Sparta. The now massively global reach of the Oppressing Elite, however, lends a uniqueness to our collective plight.

We have been given, however, just as uniquely, a glimpse into the rotten hearts and the depths of the Overlords’ hypocrisies and their many perverse means of wielding Power. It is breathtaking, this revelation of institutionalized genocide, chicanery, deception and clever manipulation, and we may indeed be in for a new Dark Age of feudal submission.

Or not.

I believe that even in a vicious conflict there are ways to fight tough, smart and effectively, sparing the innocents, through peaceful means. Whatever the material outcome. so long as we oppose oppression without betraying ourselves, we will be victorious.

*

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Dr. Garcia is a Philadelphia-born psychoanalyst and psychiatrist who emigrated to New Zealand in 2006. He has authored articles ranging from explorations of psychoanalytic technique, the psychology of creativity in music (Mahler, Rachmaninoff, Scriabin, Delius), and politics. He is also a poet, novelist and theatrical director. He retired from psychiatric practice in 2021 after working in the public sector in New Zealand. Visit his substack at https://newzealanddoc.substack.com/

He is a regular contributor to Global Research.


The Worldwide Corona Crisis, Global Coup d’Etat Against Humanity

by Michel Chossudovsky

Michel Chossudovsky reviews in detail how this insidious project “destroys people’s lives”. He provides a comprehensive analysis of everything you need to know about the “pandemic” — from the medical dimensions to the economic and social repercussions, political underpinnings, and mental and psychological impacts.

“My objective as an author is to inform people worldwide and refute the official narrative which has been used as a justification to destabilize the economic and social fabric of entire countries, followed by the imposition of the “deadly” COVID-19 “vaccine”. This crisis affects humanity in its entirety: almost 8 billion people. We stand in solidarity with our fellow human beings and our children worldwide. Truth is a powerful instrument.”

ISBN: 978-0-9879389-3-0,  Year: 2022,  PDF Ebook,  Pages: 164, 15 Chapters

Price: $11.50 FREE COPY! Click here (docsend) and download.

We encourage you to support the eBook project by making a donation through Global Research’s DonorBox “Worldwide Corona Crisis” Campaign Page

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***

What Is Elderberry?

Sambucus nigra Linnaeus is a tree that grows in Western and Central Asia, Europe, and North Africa. Sambucus is a generic Greek name that comes from an ancient musical instrument built with the wood of this tree.

Elderberry is a blue-black colored fruit of the Sambucus tree, the European version of the 30 kinds of elder plants globally.

Therapeutic uses of Elderberry can be traced back to ancient times:

  • 3000 B.C – 30 B.C: Ancient Egypt: Researchers have uncovered evidence that black elderberry may have been cultivated by prehistoric man, and there are recipes for elderberry-based preparations in the records of Ancient Egypt. The Ancient Egyptians used elderberry as an essential ingredient in their skincare regimen to enhance their skin complexion and glow.

  • 2000 BC: Stone Age: Neolithic people cultivated the elderplant / elderberries. Seeds from elderberry found in Neolithic pole-dwellings in Switzerland suggest that the plant was in cultivation by about 2000 BC.
  • 400 BC: Hippocrates – Greece: The ancient knowledge of Elderberry runs so deep that the “father of medicine”, Hippocrates (460 BC – 375 BC), adoringly referred to the herb as the “medicine chest” of all herbs because of its endless benefits and the usability of all aspects of the plant.
  • 370 BC – 285 BC: Greco-Roman Period: The name if the plant dates back to the Greco-Roman period. The word Sambucus came from the Greek word Sambuca. Theophrastus (300’s BC) described elder in Historia Plantarum.
  • 77 AD: Italy: By the time of Pliny the Elder, the medicinal qualities of elder were widely known and his writings notes this as well.
  • 1600’s AD: Britain: Over the centuries, elderberry has been used to treat colds, flu, fever, burns, cuts, and more than 70 other maladies, from toothache to the plague. In the 17th century, John Evelyn, a British researcher, declared, If the medicinal properties of its leaves, bark, and berries were fully known, I cannot tell what our country man could ail for which he might not fetch a remedy [from the elderberry], either for sickness or wounds.”
  • North American First Nations: are said to have used elderberry going back thousands of years.
  • Traditional Chinese Medicine: It is said that elderberry has been part of traditional Chinese medicine going back hundreds of years.

Elderberries have twice the Vitamin C of oranges and 3 times the anti-oxidants of blueberries. They are high in polyphenols and bioflavonoids.

The use of the elderberry and elderflower is common and widespread in Europe and modern science is now beginning a serious study of the plant’s properties and uses.

The elderflower extract standardized on flavonoids, is recorded in the European and British Pharmacopoeias. An elderflower monograph has been prepared by the World Health Organization. The European Medicines Agency has published a detailed assessment report on Sambuci fructus.

The flowers of the elderberry tree contain sugar, cyanogenic glycosides, phenolic acids, flavonoids, and pectin. Flowers have antiviral properties, diuretic, and mild anti-inflammatory effects and are used to treat colds.

The elderberry fruits have a high level of essential oils, flavonoids, and anthocyanin glycosides. They possess immuno-stimulatory, antiviral, and significant antioxidant activity to boost the immune system and act as a potent viral inhibitor to treat flu.

S. nigra also enhances the immune system in a nonspecific way and stimulates the generation of cytokines.

Elderberry and Influenza 

Elderberry contains a high concentration of bioactive compounds, especially polyphenols such as flavonols, phenolic acids, proanthocyanidins, and anthocyanins, which give the fruit its dark-purple hue.

Elderberry has anthocyanins, a subset of flavonoids which have immuno-modulating and anti-inflammatory effects.

Anthocyanins can attach to and render ineffective viral glycoproteins that enable viruses to enter host cells, thereby having an inhibitory effect on viral infection.

Extracts of elderberry have demonstrated in vitro to have inhibitory effects on influenza A and influenza B viruses, influenza H5N1, as well as H1N1 swine flu virus.

Human clinical trials have shown that black elderberry extracts reduce symptom severity as well as the duration of influenza viral infections.

Elderberry and COVID-19

In the United States, elderberry supplements sales increased by 415% in the single-week period ending March 8, 2020.

In addition to its direct viral inhibitory effect (studied with Influenza), elderberry also affects the immune system through regulation of cytokines.

Elderberry appears to increase cytokine production at the first stage of viral attachment and early viral replication. This helps kill the virus and stop replication.

However, cytokine storm is a problem with severe COVID-19 infections and this was used by big pharma to cast doubts and concerns on the use of Elderberry to treat COVID-19.

A review by Wieland et al. concluded that there was no evidence that Elderberry overstimulated the immune system

Broduske et al. showed in March 2021 that Elderberry extract can bind the spike protein and inhibit SARS-CoV2 and ACE-2 binding.

Elderberry inhibits viral replication of SARS-CoV2 and increases production of pro-inflammatory cytokines IL-1, TNF-alpha, IL-6 and IL-8. TNF-alpha in particular improves macrophage activity against viral infection.

Elderberry anthocyanins also protect the endothelium which is attacked during COVID-19 infection:

Elderberry in Kids

Dr.Gregory Weaver MD, a pediatrician at Cleveland Clinic Children’s in Cleveland gave an interview:

“In general, we have very few medications that treat viral illnesses,” says Gregory Weaver, M.D., a pediatrician at Cleveland Clinic Children’s in Cleveland. “There is some data that the actual components of elderberry have been looked at as either an anti-inflammatory drug and/or an antiviral drug. Specifically, there is a fair amount of data for influenza.”

Several studies have compared Tamiflu and elderberry for the purpose of lessening flu symptoms or reducing the risk of getting the flu after exposure. “There is a fair amount of evidence to say that elderberry is at least as effective at Tamiflu,” says Dr. Weaver.

It seems no one is doing research on Elderberry in kids. 

A 2020 study by Macknin et al of Elderberry in kids ages 5 and above found no benefit, which they admit is contrary to previous published literature:

  • kids ages 5 to 12 received 15 mL Elderberry syrup twice a day for 5 days
  • kids ages > 12 received 15 mL Elderberry syrup four times a day for 5 days

Previous Elderberry literature that was contrary to their findings:

  • 1995 Kakay-Rones study – 27 patients, found that elderberry shortened duration of proven influenza by about 4 days compared to placebo. 93% of Elderberry treated saw significant improvement in symptoms including fever within 2 days.
  • 2004 Kakay-Rones study – 60 patients, found that elderberry shortened duration of proven influenza by about 4 days compared to placebo
  • 2009 Fan-Kun et al. – 64 patients with flu-like symptoms, 88% of Elderberry treated showed significant improvement after 48 hours, only 16% of placebo did.
  • In 2016, an Australian study looked at 312 air travelers who were given Elderberry before traveling, to see how they would do 4 days after travel. Those who took Elderberry had fewer cold episodes, significantly reduced severity of symptoms and a significantly shorter duration of symptoms (by 2-3 days).

Anti-microbial effect of Elderberry:

Krawitz et al in 2011 tested Elderberry on Strep:

My Take… 

The following is a personal anecdote.

Elderberry is the only supplement that I don’t allow to “run out” in the household. Our family has been using Elderberry since the fall of 2020, and this arose in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic and the need to protect our kids.

I approached Elderberry with skepticism, having never heard of it before. We initially bought Elderberry gummies on the recommendation of several Edmonton parents and found that our kids, ages 8 and 10, responded positively to them almost immediately. Over time, we shifted to Elderberry syrup, which remains, to this day, their favorite medication or supplement by far.

Over the last 3 years, we’ve gone through several viral respiratory infections at home. Both kids tend to respond partially to Elderberry within 24 hours (occasionally their mild symptoms are gone the next day). By 48-72 hours, they’re typically well enough to return to school. One or two stubborn viral infections have lingered a bit longer, usually a few more days. That would have been the “COVID-19 Delta era”.

3 years. No flu vaccines. No COVID-19 vaccines. No COVID-19 testing. Healthy kids.

I have been taking Elderberry supplements in capsule form, along with Quercetin, Zinc, NAC, Olive Leaf, Vitamin D/C throughout the pandemic but I must admit that even I sneak in some Elderberry syrup now and then, usually to address some cough that persists a bit longer than I’d like.

This stuff simply works. Of course, as a physician, I would love to see more studies done on kids and Elderberry extract but they’re not happening. In light of the Universal push to get toxic, experimental mRNA vaccines into kids, this is not surprising.

There are thousands of testimonials from parents on Elderberry gummies or syrup on Amazon. Here is one from a random Elderberry product:

The line that struck me: “I have NO tylenol/advil etc in my house anymore”.

Here in Canada, last year, we had such a shortage of children’s Tylenol and Advil that in Edmonton, the shelves were bare for months and it was not possible to find them anywhere (click here).

Nevertheless, we were quite comfortable with Elderberry, and didn’t feel the impact of the shortage of children’s Tylenol or Advil. And that’s a great place to be in, as a parent.

Going forward, I’m particularly pleased with the fact that Elderberry not only acts against various Influenza virus types but specifically against H5N1, which concerns me as one of the viruses that may “emerge” as a future pandemic.

It’s good to know that the kids have something to protect them, no matter the “scariant” or pandemic that we get hit with in the future.

*

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Dr. William Makis is a Canadian physician with expertise in Radiology, Oncology and Immunology. Governor General’s Medal, University of Toronto Scholar. Author of 100+ peer-reviewed medical publications.

Featured image is from Children’s Health Defense


The Worldwide Corona Crisis, Global Coup d’Etat Against Humanity

by Michel Chossudovsky

Michel Chossudovsky reviews in detail how this insidious project “destroys people’s lives”. He provides a comprehensive analysis of everything you need to know about the “pandemic” — from the medical dimensions to the economic and social repercussions, political underpinnings, and mental and psychological impacts.

“My objective as an author is to inform people worldwide and refute the official narrative which has been used as a justification to destabilize the economic and social fabric of entire countries, followed by the imposition of the “deadly” COVID-19 “vaccine”. This crisis affects humanity in its entirety: almost 8 billion people. We stand in solidarity with our fellow human beings and our children worldwide. Truth is a powerful instrument.”

ISBN: 978-0-9879389-3-0,  Year: 2022,  PDF Ebook,  Pages: 164, 15 Chapters

Price: $11.50 FREE COPY! Click here (docsend) and download.

We encourage you to support the eBook project by making a donation through Global Research’s DonorBox “Worldwide Corona Crisis” Campaign Page

“Struggling with the Old Enemies of Peace”

August 14th, 2023 by Emanuel Pastreich

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***

We have to struggle with the old enemies of peace: business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, race antagonism whipped by hidden operatives, the exploitation of tensions between cities and rural communities, and of course, the old favorite, war profiteering.

Now we have IT monsters inside of Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft Word and Oracle that track us day and night, processing every bit of information in banks of supercomputers so as to anticipate our next move and to checkmate us.  The parasite class does so while also exposing us to advertisements and movies, YouTube and Instagram images, that are designed to reduce us to simplistic beasts seeking momentary satisfaction in the pleasures of the flesh, to form us into abject slaves who worship the decadent and indulgent rich.

When I see how young girls are assaulted by commercials and movies that glorify sexual indulgence and that suggest that women must be objects for consumption, I am reduced to tears.

These multinational corporations have begun to consider the government of the United States as a mere appendage to their own affairs. They hide behind “progressive” or “conservative” puppets in Congress, just out of sight, protected by their public relations firms and private security details.

And so, we now know that government run by organized money is just as dangerous as government run by organized mobs.

Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they are today. They cannot stand the idea that I might somehow manage to crawl over all the obstacles that they have thrown in my path; they cannot bear that fact that somehow we have managed to get the word out about their heinous crimes even though I am blocked from all the newspapers and television broadcasts that they control so jealously, even though I am anathema for all the so-called alternative media sources that they manipulate covertly.

For yes, we know now that no matter how discouraged by 24-7 propaganda the American citizen may be, no matter how worn down he or she may feel working day and night to pay bills to the parasites which pray on common people (posing as “government” here, posing as “schools” or “utilities” there), that the truth is still attractive, that the truth is still a beacon that offers hope in the midst of the most dark fraud.

The truth will set you free.

Those multinational corporations, private equity firms, and the billionaire families lurking behind them, they are unanimous in their hate for me—and I welcome their hatred.

And, oh yes, they have extended their long fingers, their greedy probiscis, deep into the Green Party as well.

If the leaders of the Green Party say that there are no infiltrators in the Green Party, that the party is not riddled with operatives paid as consultants by Booze Allen Hamilton or CASI, Black Cube or CRG, private intelligence and PR firms that have their snouts in the trough of Homeland Security’s anti disinformation budgets, if they claim such people are not burrowed deep in the Green Party, then I proclaim, “Halleluiah!” For truly this is a miracle!

All the other political parties are crawling with these parasites, retired police officers and treasury bureaucrats, the dregs of public relations firms who team up with management consulting zombies to make a bit of money to supplement their retirements by blocking the rights of citizens to express their opinions and trampling on the freedom of our children.

For the kingpins who make their fortunes oppressing the American people, who are waiting for their moment to put down our movement to unify all Americans against their predations, we say,

“Go ahead. Make my day!”

And for those of you who must watch this as contract workers for private intelligence firms, trying to make ends meet, trying to feed your families—we feel your pain and we are sorrowed by such contradictions. Join with us today for verily, you have nothing to lose but thy chains.

Oh, they were so smart. No one would ever have known what they did. Nor would anyone have ever guessed how the billionaires funneled millions to the kingpins through various shell companies.

But this is about to change, and to change utterly.

I should like to say that in my administration these forces of selfishness and of lust for power will meet their match. And in our nation-wide movement to restore a constitutional republic, to end debt slavery, work slavery and prison slavery, and to rid ourselves forever of the machinations of the parasites, that they will most certainly meet their master.

*

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This article was originally published on Fear No Evil.

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

He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from Children’s Health Defense

Five for Five: US-Iran Prisoner Swap and the Nuclear Deal

August 14th, 2023 by Steven Sahiounie

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***

The US and Iran are in a negotiation to swap five prisoners held in Iran for five prisoners held in the US.

The deal has not been finalized, and the prisoners may not arrive home soon, but the deal has been placed into motion as Iran has transferred the five prisoners to house arrest, some having been transferred out of the infamous Evin prison in Tehran.

Qatar, Oman and Switzerland played a role in the deal, and when it finalizes, $6 billion dollars will be converted to Euros in a South Korean bank account which holds frozen Iranian funds. After the US dollars are converted to Euros, they will then be transferred to a bank in Qatar which will allow Iranian access, but the account will be restricted for food and humanitarian needs. 

Tensions between the US and Iran have escalated since President Trump pulled the US out of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) to ensure that Iran’s nuclear program will be exclusively peaceful which was signed July 14, 2015. Trump’s move was an appeasement to Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu, who has long threatened a military attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities.  With Israel now facing civil war over domestic issues, Netanyahu still threatens an attack to diffuse opposition to his government.

After taking office, President Biden’s administration has sought to come to a new agreement with Iran to curb the enrichment of uranium. However, the negotiations have failed to produce results. Experts have said this latest prisoner swap may be one small step in re-igniting the waning diplomacy between the US and Iran. 

Trump’s decision to leave the JCPOA in 2018 has allowed Iran to escalate its enrichment of uranium to 60% purity, which is short of the 90% needed to produce a nuclear weapon.

Biden has asked Iran to decrease its enrichment of uranium, hand over several American prisoners, pull back its support for Russia, and avoid targeting US forces stationed in the Middle East. Iran has agreed in principle to stop stockpiling uranium enriched to 60%, and is now in the process of a prisoner swap.

Previously, Iran has cooperated with UN nuclear inspectors and provided some information to them concerning past nuclear activities in question. A report by the UN inspectors is expected by the end of this month, perhaps coinciding with the prisoner swap.

Siamak Namazi, 51,  Emad Shargi, 58, and  Morad Tahbaz, 67, are three of the five in the proposed prisoner swap. The name of the fourth and fifth US citizen has not been made public.

Iran’s mission to the UN said,

“As part of a humanitarian cooperation agreement mediated by a third-party government, Iran and the US have agreed to reciprocally release and pardon five prisoners. The transfer of these prisoners to out of prison marks a significant initial step in the implementation of this agreement.”

Tehran scaled back its nuclear program in 2015 in exchange for lifting of international sanctions, but after Trump’s disastrous break with the deal in 2018, he piled on sanctions under his ‘maximum pressure’ policy, and Biden has also continued to impose new sanctions on Iran.

The Chinese brokered agreement between Iran and Saudi Arabia has given hope to the Middle East for a peaceful and prosperous future.

Netanyahu set two main goals for his administration. He wants to sign Saudi Arabia onto the Abraham Accords with Israel, and to vastly expand Jewish settlements on the Occupied West Bank of Palestine. Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia has said no agreement with Israel can be reached until the rights of the Palestinian people have been first met with Israel.

In my personal view, all of the military tension which the US has created in the Middle East lately, by sending the US aircraft carrier with 3,000 Marines onboard to the Arab Gulf, and the military reinforcements to the east of Syria, is designed to promote negotiations on many issues concerning the region and the US role played. 

*

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This article was originally published on Mideast Discourse.

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

All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the Translate Website button below the author’s name.

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***

 

 

I previously wrote a column marveling at the success of the Bidens in pulling off one of the neatest tricks in political history. I analogized it to how Houdini used to make his 10,000-pound elephant Jennie disappear on a stage in front of a live audience. The media and political establishment is now striving to top that performance by declaring $20 million in payments to Biden family members as an “illusion” of influence. At the heart of this scandal is the BFF, the Biden Family Fund.

Here is the column:

This week, President Joe Biden responded to calls for greater access to the media with a blockbuster interview with . . . the Weather Channel.

The interview immediately prompted critics to speculate that the president wanted to continue to talk about the weather — the same claim made after the disclosure of his participation in various dinners with his son’s foreign associates.

As the number of these dinners, meetings and outings increase, Joe Biden appears to have covered more meteorological subjects than Al Roker.

The problem is that conditions are worsening in Washington.

This week, House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer released a third report on the ongoing investigations into the Biden corruption scandal.

The latest bank records indicate the Biden family has received more than $20 million, including from corrupt Kazakh figures.

Some of this money provided Hunter Biden with extravagant toys. On April 22, 2014, Kazakh oligarch Kenes Rakishev wired $142,300 to the Rosemont Seneca Bohai bank account.

That account then shows the exact same amount being wired to a New Jersey car dealership for a Fisker sports car for Hunter. Finding the Fisker unsuitable, Hunter traded it in for a Porsche.

Notably, these payments often coincided with dinners and meetings with Joe Biden.

Russian oligarch Yelena Baturina, the widow of Moscow ex-Mayor Yury Luzhkov, wired $3.5 million to Rosemont Seneca Thornton Feb. 14, 2014.

She later attended a dinner with Joe and Hunter Biden at Washington, DC, hotspot Café Milano.

For weeks, Joe Biden’s prior claims have been collapsing as his allies in the media and Congress struggle for an alternative spin on these new disclosures.

The president’s denials of any knowledge of his son’s foreign dealings finally have been exposed as a lie.

Even the Washington Post has acknowledged Biden lied when he insisted that Hunter never made any money in China.

It was always a boldfaced falsehood (and a confusing claim from a man who insisted that he had no knowledge of his son’s foreign dealings).

But the testimony of associate Devon Archer and new bank records forced the paper and others to recognize the falsehood.

There is also the confirmation that Biden’s long denials that he attended key dinners with Hunter’s business associates were false.

Most notably, the media are grudgingly admitting that Hunter was openly selling influence peddling and access to his father as part of what Archer called “selling the brand.”

The final line of defense is now that Hunter Biden was selling access to Joe Biden but it was an “illusion.” The reason, they claim, is there is no evidence of direct payments to Joe and Jill Biden.

There is, of course, nothing “illusionary” about tens of millions moving to Hunter and other family members.

But political spins are often built on illusions. The latest is that Joe Biden only benefits from these payments if they were directly deposited in his accounts.

For a family that Hunter explained was “the best” at this type of dealing, it is absurd to expect a deposit slip from a corrupt Ukrainian official to the account of Joe and Jill Biden, one of the most vulnerable accounts in the world to review and monitoring.

These claims, moreover, ignore emails discussing Hunter’s and his father’s use of joint accounts to pay for expenses, including how one account was used to pay Joe’s taxes. There is also Hunter’s complaint that he was using half of his earnings to support his father. Indeed, one trusted FBI informant said that, in planning a bribe, one foreign figure was told to avoid direct payments to Joe Biden. Today, that is as amateurish as an envelope of cash and the Bidens have been in the business of influence peddling for decades.

Responding to the new evidence, Washington Post columnist Phillip Bump led the charge in asking: Where’s the bribe?

In other words, as long as Hunter got the luxury car, Joe didn’t benefit or receive a bribe.

(Notably, Bump did not have the same high standards when he pushed the false claim over a photo op in Lafayette Park and later refused to concede with the rest of the media on the lack of Russian collusion with Donald Trump.)

Not even millions to Biden children and grandchildren would seem to satisfy Bump as an inducement for the then-vice president.

Yet the greatest illusion is the claim Joe Biden would only be motivated by a direct payment to one of his accounts.

Biden clearly benefited from millions going to the Biden Family Fund (BFF). Even grandchildren received some of the transfers funneled through a labyrinth of accounts.

Joe Biden is 80 years old. Despite holding only government jobs in his career, he is worth an estimated $8 million.

Forbes reported he earned $17.3 million over the four years he was out of office. He will never spend his fortune. Any additional money would have to pass to his descendants.

For most wealthy people in their final years, the challenge is not raising more money but getting that money to your children without heavy taxes or delays.

This money was going to his BFF. That is a benefit and probably of greater value to a man of Joe Biden’s age and wealth.

None of this has stopped politicians, press and pundits from insisting that absent a direct payment to the president’s account, there is no corruption or crime.

After all, $20 million going to a president’s family is like complaining about the weather in Washington.

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Jonathan Turley is an attorney and professor at George Washington University Law School.

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I am not a big fan of Federal Government disaster relief. Too much of the time the money never gets to those who need it most, and too often Washington’s armies of disaster “experts” are more interested in pushing people around than helping them.

Nevertheless, it’s hard to look at recent footage of the devastation in Maui and then hear President Biden tell Congress that he needs another $24 billion for Ukraine. How can this Administration continue to justify tens of billions of dollars for this losing war that is not in our interest while the rest of the United States disintegrates?

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Burned cars, Front Street, Lāhainā (Licensed under the Public Domain)

Biden’s new $24 billion request comes on top of well over $120 billion already spent to fight the US proxy war on Russia in Ukraine. Heritage Foundation budget expert Richard Stern has done the math and determined that Biden’s spending on the Ukraine war thus far will cost each and every American household $900. How many Americans would rather have those $900 dollars back in their pocket rather than in the pockets of Lockheed-Martin, Raytheon, and Ukraine’s oligarchs?

Recent surveys have shown that a majority of Americans could not afford to cover a sudden $1,000 emergency. Will Americans connect the dots and realize that the reason they can’t find that $1,000 for an emergency is because the neocons have already sent it to Ukraine?

Ukraine has long been known as among the most corrupt countries on earth and not long ago investigative journalist Seymour Hersh wrote that Ukrainian president Vladimir Zelensky has embezzled at least $400 million in aid from the American people. Corruption scandals continue to break in Ukraine. Just last week Zelensky fired the heads of all local draft boards for corruption. Some press reports suggest that sales of luxury cars in Ukraine have broken all previous records. I wonder why.

No wonder the tide of US public opinion is turning against further involvement in the war. Recently CNN found that among all Americans, more than 55 percent are opposed to continued aid to Ukraine. Among Republicans the number opposing more aid to Ukraine rises to three-out-of-four. That is why we are finally starting to see more Republican Members raising concerns. I’d like to think they have seen the light that an aggressive and interventionist foreign policy is not in America’s interest, but most likely they are worried about losing elections. Whatever their motivation, this turning tide should be welcomed.

Yet the Biden Administration persists in backing Ukraine even as the US mainstream media is increasingly pointing out the obvious: Ukraine is not winning and cannot win, and continuing to pour money into a losing cause will just result in bankruptcy at home and more dead Ukrainians overseas.

Last week Newsweek published an article asking, “Does Ukraine Have Kompromat on Joe Biden?” In the article, Northeastern University Professor Max Abrahms wonders out loud whether Biden’s continued support for Ukraine might be related to compromising information held in Kiev about the many Biden family shady business ventures in Ukraine and the region. It is certainly worth considering.

Meanwhile, the residents of Maui that survived the recent horrific fire will take little comfort knowing that the Biden Administration is more interested in sending their money to Ukraine than in helping them recover.

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Featured image: Lāhainā Lighthouse surrounded by August 2023 wildfire ruins (Licensed under the Public Domain)

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Scott Ritter has been a go-to source for information about what has really been happening in the Ukraine War, instead of the spin from the big money media and United States government officials. He has also been a very vocal critic of US government support for the Ukraine government throughout the war.

Thus, it is sadly not a surprise that on Friday Google-owned YouTube deplatformed two shows through which Ritter has been sharing his views. YouTube is no friend of people who challenge US foreign intervention.

Ritter commented on YouTube’s deplatforming of the shows in a Friday Twitter post, stating:

When it rains, it pours. The same day that YouTube deplatformed “The Scott Ritter Show”, they deplatformed “Ask The Inspector.” This is a targeted effort by YouTube to remove/minimize my voice, and those of my guests and the people who took the time to ask probing questions about the pressing issues of the day. Those who are behind this should know—you won’t succeed. There is a vast social media world out there beyond YouTube. And for those voices who still use YouTube as the primary vector to your audience, understand this—conform or perish. If you’re doing a geopolitical show, and you’re still platformed by YouTube, ask yourself why. And be willing to live with the answer. More on this later.

Just short of a year has passed since the first of Ritter’s shows began airing at YouTube.

Concerns about censorship have helped lead some popular communicators to move their primary means of distributing their video messages away from YouTube. For example, Russell Brand and the Ron Paul Institute’s own Ron Paul have moved their shows’ primary distribution from YouTube to Rumble.

Episodes of Ask the Inspector featuring Ritter can be found at Rumble here.

Hopefully, YouTube’s censorship is just a bump in the road and soon Ritter can be sharing his ideas as well as or even better than before.

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Dr. William Makis joins Shannon to discuss the tragic body count of vaccine injured that is turning into a massive constituency & voting block.

Also a discussion about shedding & vaccine induced psychosis.

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Dr. William Makis is a Canadian physician with expertise in Radiology, Oncology and Immunology. Governor General’s Medal, University of Toronto Scholar. Author of 100+ peer-reviewed medical publications.


The Worldwide Corona Crisis, Global Coup d’Etat Against Humanity

by Michel Chossudovsky

Michel Chossudovsky reviews in detail how this insidious project “destroys people’s lives”. He provides a comprehensive analysis of everything you need to know about the “pandemic” — from the medical dimensions to the economic and social repercussions, political underpinnings, and mental and psychological impacts.

“My objective as an author is to inform people worldwide and refute the official narrative which has been used as a justification to destabilize the economic and social fabric of entire countries, followed by the imposition of the “deadly” COVID-19 “vaccine”. This crisis affects humanity in its entirety: almost 8 billion people. We stand in solidarity with our fellow human beings and our children worldwide. Truth is a powerful instrument.”

ISBN: 978-0-9879389-3-0,  Year: 2022,  PDF Ebook,  Pages: 164, 15 Chapters

Price: $11.50 FREE COPY! Click here (docsend) and download.

We encourage you to support the eBook project by making a donation through Global Research’s DonorBox “Worldwide Corona Crisis” Campaign Page

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***

In the tense relations between Warsaw and Kiev, mistakes can be made that lead to a break, said the former Ukrainian Minister of Economic Development, Trade and Agriculture, Tymofiy Mylovanov, in an article published in the Washington Post.

“I am worried about this because, you know, the history is not given, it’s not predetermined. Actions of individuals, especially political leaders, matter — matter a lot. And I think mistakes could be made, and if mistakes are made, there would be a rift between Poland and Ukraine,” said Mylovanov, head of the Kyiv School of Economics.

In the article, Mylovanov also states that the tense bilateral relations between Warsaw and Kiev show exhaustion, conflict fatigue and “frayed nerves.”

Warsaw previously said that relations with Kiev had deteriorated recently following statements by Ukrainian politicians. One of the contentious issues is Poland’s refusal to open its border to Ukrainian grain. Kiev considers this decision to be populist. Warsaw claims it already helps Ukraine and has the right to protect its agriculture without listening to criticism.

It is recalled that Polish Deputy Foreign Minister Pawel Jablonski told Polish radio on August 2 that “relations with Ukraine at the moment has not been the best lately.”

“I have the impression that there are some emotions. We understand, of course, because the state is under attack, but it should not attack its allies either,” he added.

In response to the grain dispute, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky wrote on X (formerly Twitter) that “political moments” should not dampen relations and “emotions should definitely cool down,” before stressing that Ukraine greatly appreciated “the historical support of Poland, which together with us has become a real shield of Europe.”

“And there cannot be a single crack in this shield,” he added.

Farmers constitute a significant voting bloc in Poland’s ruling Law and Justice party. For this reason, the grain issue is vital for the Polish government, which faces elections on October 15. The ruling party risks losing farmers’ support as the Confederation party has campaigned against the “Ukrainization of Poland,” which includes the influx of Ukrainian grain into the country. According to the latest poll numbers cited by the Washington Post, the Confederation party could decide the upcoming elections, raising concerns that its influence in policymaking will lead to Poland reducing support for Ukraine.

Ukraine had 38 million inhabitants in the last census, and according to the latest data, over eight million Ukrainians left the country, with 1.3-1.4 million refugees currently in Poland. This also means that Ukraine has experienced a significant population drop, making the lack of labour power available impossible to maintain a long war.

In addition, the US, and therefore by extension, Poland, will only support Ukraine if it can financially do so. There are suggestions that Washington could begin scaling back support as next year’s elections approach and support for Ukraine appears to become a central debate point.

It is unlikely the Democratic party want the presidential election campaign marred with war images, mainly because the war would not have been prolonged if the Ukrainian military was not continually supplied by its Western allies with weapons that have not brought any advantage in its attempt to recapture territory from Russian forces. Policymakers in Washington are yet to realise that this is not a classic war, and instead, it is a de facto war of attrition, in which Russia is far more prepared and with far more capacity than Ukraine.

Although the collective West attempted to exhaust Moscow economically, it turned out that the sanctions and the war itself did not harm Russia to the extent that they wanted. Rather Europe, including Poland, felt the impact far worse. Due to this, the war is becoming more expensive for the US and Poland. Considering the approach of the US elections, a ceasefire will likely be called, and the beginning of broader negotiations will follow.

At the same time, Moscow’s recent decision to abandon a United Nations-brokered grain deal to allow shipments from Black Sea ports was opportunely timed by the European Union’s decision to restrict Ukrainian exports to neighbouring countries, especially on Warsaw’s behest. This further pressured the already shattered Ukrainian economy, making Warsaw’s frustrations a priority for Kiev to alleviate. Grain is just one issue, though, as the dispute now also focuses on poultry and soft fruit, such as raspberries and currants.

The EU’s Agriculture Commissioner Janusz Wojciechowski said on July 25 that extending the safeguard measures to these products could be an option. However, Polish agricultural minister Robert Telus clarified that there would be no need to include new commodities in the EU restrictions at least “until the end of the year.”

“I hope that this will be extended, but if it is not, Poland will still have to tackle the issue, and we have demonstrated we can do that,” Telus added. 

All this points to Poland becoming frustrated with Ukraine and perhaps even wanting to seek a way to slowly reduce its support for the country, given the inevitability of the US scaling back support and Russia’s ultimate victory.

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Ahmed Adel is a Cairo-based geopolitics and political economy researcher.

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Kyrgyzstan Is the US’ Next Regime Change Target

August 14th, 2023 by Andrew Korybko

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***

What Senator Menendez demands is nothing short of a soft coup brought about by voluntarily reversing Kyrgyzstan’s recent “Democratic Security” successes under the Damocles’ sword of “security and economic” consequences if it dares to refuse. If he has his way, then suspected Color Revolutionaries will be released from prison, Western “NGO” intel fronts will be allowed to meddle with impunity, and their allied propaganda outlets will once again incessantly spew anti-state disinformation for provoking riots.

Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee Bob Menendez conveyed his country’s intentions to overthrow the Kyrgyz government in the letter that he sent to President Sadyr Japarov last week. It’s even more damning than the newly leaked Pakistani cable from March 2022 regarding US pressure over Russia that implicated a leading diplomat in that country’s post-modern coup one month later. The present piece will point out the threats in Menendez’s letter and place them in the geostrategic context.

Right off the bat, he declared that “I write to you with deep concern regarding allegations of the Government of the Kyrgyz Republic’s assistance to the Russian Federation, or its proxies, in evading international sanctions, imposed with respect to Russia’s unlawful invasion of Ukraine.” This follows Kyrgyzstan’s foiled coup attempt in early June that was analyzed here and the Washington Post’s (WaPo) report last month on its role in facilitating Russia’s purchase of Western-sanctioned tech from China.

That way that events have thus far unfolded strongly suggests that the failed effort to overthrow the Kyrgyz government just two months ago was intended to punish it for allegedly violating the West’s anti-Russian sanctions regime. Afterwards, WaPo published their report to precondition the public to think that Kyrgyzstan is turning into a “rogue state”, which was meant to make the target audience more likely to accept Menendez’s threatening letter and the US-orchestrated destabilization campaign that’ll follow.

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President Japarov (right) with Vladimir Putin and other post-Soviet leaders at the 2023 Moscow Victory Day Parade (Licensed under CC BY 4.0)

The Senator continued by writing that

“I urge the Kyrgyz government to swiftly investigate these allegations and to establish more reliable processes to prevent the illicit flow of goods through your territory bound for Russia. I am also concerned that the Kyrgyz Republic’s failure to uphold international sanctions reflects the alarming erosion in democratic governance and extensive human rights violations occurring in the country.”

Kyrgyzstan doesn’t have to initiate any investigation on any country’s demand, but even if it was driven to do so by the desire to de-escalate rapidly worsening political tensions with the US, this would be futile unless it went along with the narrative that it allegedly violated the West’s anti-Russian sanctions. Anything less would be dismissed as a “sham” and exploited as the pretext to impose even more pressure upon it, which brings the analysis around to the next part of Menendez’s statement.

His unsolicited commentary on Kyrgyzstan’s domestic affairs takes WaPo’s preconditioning even further by making explicit what was previously only implied about that country becoming a “rogue state”. After once again lambasting it for allegedly violating the West’s unilateral restrictions, he then defends them on the grounds that they’re “a vital tool in holding Vladimir Putin to account and reducing threats to the sovereignty, independence, and territorial integrity of other nations, including those in Central Asia.

All of this built up to the threat that he then conveyed in his letter when writing that

“In the face of potential threats from Russia, the United States remains steadfast in our support of upholding the sovereignty and independence of nations like the Kyrgyz Republic. However, assisting or permitting systemic sanctions evasion by Russia weakens their effectiveness, which could put at risk the security and economic interests of the Kyrgyz people.”

Menendez’s twisted logic is that the US imposed its anti-Russian sanctions on the partial pretext of supposedly defending Kyrgyzstan’s “sovereignty and independence” from Moscow without ever having asked Bishkek ahead of time and now it claims that the latter’s alleged violation of them will endanger it. Objectively speaking, “the security and economic interests of the Kyrgyz people” are “put at risk” by capitulating to American pressure dump their Russian ally, not strengthening ties with it.

The only realistic way in which Kyrgyzstan’s aforesaid interests “could be put at risk” by defying the US’ demands is if Washington ramps up its support for Color Revolution agents and rebels/militants/terrorists in parallel with imposing crushing secondary sanctions in response. These scenarios would have remained speculative and the Mainstream Media could have gaslit that they’re “conspiracy theories” had Menendez not threatened that these same interests might soon be harmed.

He then went for the kill shot:

“Furthermore, I fear that Kyrgyzstan’s failure to uphold international sanctions on Russia is simply a symptom of its continued democratic backsliding and widespread human rights violations. Your government has weakened institutions, repeatedly violated the rights of journalists and independent media, harassed human rights defenders, and placed restrictions on civil society actors.

A once shining beacon of democracy in Central Asia, the Kyrgyz Republic is headed down a dangerous path toward autocracy. I urge you to lift all restrictions on independent media and journalists, release imprisoned human rights defenders, and repeal measures restricting fundamental freedoms such as the freedom of association.”

This is a de facto declaration of Hybrid War.

What Menendez demands is nothing short of a soft coup brought about by voluntarily reversing Kyrgyzstan’s recent “Democratic Security” successes under the Damocles’ sword of “security and economic” consequences if it dares to refuse. The preceding concept refers to the wide range of counter-Hybrid Warfare tactics and strategies that President Japarov employed to safeguard his country’s national model of democracy from associated threats.

If Menendez has his way, however, then suspected Color Revolutionaries will be released from prison, Western “NGO” intel fronts will be allowed to meddle with impunity, and their allied propaganda outlets will once again incessantly spew anti-state disinformation for provoking riots. He then ended his letter on an ominous note by writing that “Your government’s commitment to these matters is critical for the security and prosperity of the Kyrgyz people. We look forward to receiving your prompt response.”

Neighboring Kazakhstan has already capitulated to American pressure to informally take its side over Russia’s in the New Cold War as proven by its partial compliance with the West’s sanctions regime. It also refuses to close its over $100 million biosecurity laboratory that’s funded by the US. Furthermore, the latest news that it’ll host Microsoft’s regional hub was met with harsh criticism from Moscow after Deputy Foreign Minister Mikhail Galuzin described these plans as serving the US’ intelligence interests.

By contrast, Kyrgyzstan refuses to follow in Kazakhstan’s footsteps and remains committed to maximizing the mutual benefits from its strategic partnership with Russia, which is all the more impressive when remembering that it’s smaller, less developed, and historically more unstable than its northern neighbor. Moscow appreciates this display of sovereignty and is actively implementing workarounds to retain trade with Bishkek in the event that Astana’s compliance with Western sanctions ends up impeding this.

The Governor of Astrakhan Region announced the creation last month of the “Southern Transport Corridor” across the Caspian Sea, which is more expensive and time-consuming than trading with the Central Asian Republics across Kazakhstan but makes up for these costs by being outside of US influence. As this analysis already explained, Kyrgyzstan is a stalwart Russian ally, just like the rest of the region remains apart from newly wayward and increasingly treacherous Kazakhstan.

For these reasons, Russia is expected to help those four countries withstand the “security and economic” punishments that the US might soon inflict on them for their brave defiance of its sanctions pressure, beginning with Kyrgyzstan. Its potential descent into Hybrid War havoc could have far-reaching consequences for all of Central Asia due to the very high risk of overspill, which is why it’s imperative for Russia to thwart the US’ impending destabilization plans lest a “second containment front” emerge.

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This article was originally published on Andrew Korybko’s Newsletter.

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

He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

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***

So, my friends and comrades in virtually the entire Pakistani Left spent more than a year mocking at least 80 percent of the country’s population for believing former Prime Minister Imran Khan about American ‘interference’ (to put it mildly) in Pakistan’s internal politics, and more specifically about removing him from office.

My comrades’ contributions to political life since Khan was ousted from power in April of 2022 have been a fanatical obsession with the man, an understandable deeply emotional envy of the tens of millions of people he was mobilizing, and a crazed fixation to convince the ‘Western Left’ that Khan isn’t really that popular (Democracy Now) and is no ‘anti-imperialist hero’ (Jacobin) – who cares about engaging other outsiders like suffering Kashmiris or Palestinians under occupation for whom Khan took a strong stand (apparently the ‘Western Left’ is just much more important). I guess my comrades thought that these were the most productive strategies to ‘liberate’ the Pakistani ‘working class.’

Ultimately, the Left with which I’ve always identified has facilitated not merely the return of the ‘ancien regime’ of kleptocratic politicians and an all-powerful military establishment, but the most fascist face of these two forces that the country has ever witnessed. We are now in a ruthless military dictatorship which is wholeheartedly supported by the two dynastic political parties akin to more like personal feudal fiefdoms which have taken turns in plundering and impoverishing the country since the late 1980s/early 1990s.

The new fascist regime has decimated the, by far and away, largest and most popular political party in the country, disappeared, arrested, illegally detained, tortured, sexually abused, and killed tens of thousands of not primarily men, but women, children, and the elderly – anyone that even remotely had any association with Khan’s political party, which included mothers, grand-mothers, children, neighbors, friends, etc. All of this was done in a deliberate and calculated way, and even though Democracy Now informed us that Khan’s views on women are identical to the Taliban, the majority of supporters of Khan are women, not men.

Pakistani journalists have been hunted down and killed as far away as in Kenya, forget about their mass disappearances, torture, and killing within Pakistan itself. And the final act being, since they failed in their assassination attempts, to throw Khan in a remote, wretched jail cell in which he can barely fit – to thoroughly and barbarically humiliate him.

The point was to strike so much terror in the population, and to show us that if this can be done to Imran Khan, then anyone and everyone is fair game to be disappeared, tortured, or killed.

Where has our Left been during all of this? Why were my comrades not confronting the ‘establishment’ we’ve always railed against? You had the most direct and persistent people’s confrontation with the sadistic military elite in the nation’s history (joined by many soldiers and junior and mid-rank officers, many former students of mine), and there was an astonishing absence of any of our Left in this struggle of many months.

This has and has not been about Khan. This is about Khan because he helped to politicize a society, the level of mass politicization not seen since the late 1960s/early 1970s. The popular reaction to his ouster from power, unlike any previous ouster of the country’s prime ministers (all of which elicited absolute indifference from the population precisely because civilian rule was not different for them from military rule – both were equally corrupt and repressive), literally shocked everyone (including Khan himself): tens of millions of people mobilizing and demonstrating in every corner of the country of 240 million.

And it is not about Khan because, since April 2022, each month you could see a population (the vast majority demonstrating were not card-carrying members of Khan’s party and had myriad criticisms of his term in power) becoming even more radically opposed to the cruelties and injustices of the social and political order – a situation which the Left could have completely taken advantage of to sharpen popular analysis and help organize and mobilize more effectively. There has been no moment more opportune for the country’s Left to help radically undermine the political status quo that has been the norm virtually since the nation’s birth in 1947, and have popular engagement – to make the case for more progressive values – as they struggle in solidarity with the bulk of the country’s population.

But that was not to be since, from the beginning, the Left dismissed Khan as the ‘military’s puppet’ simply because he and the military high command, at ONE particular moment in 2018, agreed on ONE single issue: ending the US occupation of Afghanistan. It was an absurd analysis of the most popular political and public personality – by far – in the country. And it was a convenient way to not only do nothing, but ridicule and mock (especially the youth and students) who were involved in these mobilizations.

Finally, the silence of Western governments and Western media on this barbaric period of military brutality in the fifth largest country in the world, nuclear-armed, contrasted with the obsession with a bloodless coup in Niger which seems either welcomed or just shown indifference by the majority of that country’s population, tells you everything how the Deepest State made sure its vassal Deep State resolve the ‘Khan problem’ once and for all.

Friends, imperialism and its domestic enforcers/torturers have taken my country to a period of darkness that I have never witnessed.

(The government in Pakistan has now blocked access to The Intercept for this exposé. This 20 minute video (see below) by the Intercept’s co-author Ryan Grim is an attempt at a workaround.)

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Prof. Junaid S. Ahmad teaches Religion and Global Politics, and is the Director of the Center for the Study of Islam and Decoloniality, Islamabad, Pakistan. He is a regular contributor to Global Research. 

Featured image is from Andrew Korybko

COVID-19 mRNA Vaccination Campaign Is Mass Homicide

August 14th, 2023 by Mark Taliano

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***

The following videos are compiled by Mark Taliano. 

Watch and understand the real agenda behind the COVID-19 plandemic and the mass vaccination campaign.

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Featured image is from NaturalNews.com


The Worldwide Corona Crisis, Global Coup d’Etat Against Humanity

by Michel Chossudovsky

Michel Chossudovsky reviews in detail how this insidious project “destroys people’s lives”. He provides a comprehensive analysis of everything you need to know about the “pandemic” — from the medical dimensions to the economic and social repercussions, political underpinnings, and mental and psychological impacts.

“My objective as an author is to inform people worldwide and refute the official narrative which has been used as a justification to destabilize the economic and social fabric of entire countries, followed by the imposition of the “deadly” COVID-19 “vaccine”. This crisis affects humanity in its entirety: almost 8 billion people. We stand in solidarity with our fellow human beings and our children worldwide. Truth is a powerful instrument.”

ISBN: 978-0-9879389-3-0,  Year: 2022,  PDF Ebook,  Pages: 164, 15 Chapters

Price: $11.50 FREE COPY! Click here (docsend) and download.

We encourage you to support the eBook project by making a donation through Global Research’s DonorBox “Worldwide Corona Crisis” Campaign Page

Climate Change: Why Action on the Crisis Is All Hot Air

August 14th, 2023 by Jonathan Cook

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***

The debate about the climate crisis should have been settled in the early 1990s. And yet, three decades later, the extent, imminence and even existence of a looming catastrophe are still hotly disputed. That is not by accident.

David Attenborough is on social media pleading, once more, for mankind to do something before tipping points are surpassed that cannot be reversed and temperatures begin to rise inexorably, whatever we do.

In the same vein, Antonio Guterres, the United Nations’ secretary general, warned late last month that humanity has shifted from the era of global warming to “global boiling”. Record temperatures keep being broken, while wildfires and floods have become a news staple.

Scientists’ updated models now predict the first breach of the limit of 1.5C mean temperature rise for the globe, set by the 2015 Paris Agreement, in a matter of a few years, rather than decades. This week it was announced that July had been the hottest month globally on record, a jump of 0.33C above the previous record.

The Middle East is likely to feel the worst effects early, with large parts of the region least able to cope with the heavy costs of adapting.

Water scarcity, extreme heat, food insecurity and desertification will make life increasingly tough, triggering migration and conflict.

And yet inaction on curbing fossil fuel use continues.

‘Max Out’ Oil Reserves

Recent figures show that the United States and China – responsible for the bulk of global emissions – are burning more fossil fuel than ever.

Oil industry executives fearmonger the public by claiming oil production cuts will intensify the cost of living crisis. Driven by the same apparent logic, western governments are rapidly walking back their green pledges.

In Britain, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak vows to “max out” the UK’s oil and gas reserves through new North Sea drilling, presumably believing it’s a vote winner. Fearing job losses, his business secretary, Kemi Badenoch, indicates that the Tories may water down commitments to mandate the switchover to electric vehicles.

Keir Starmer, the Labour opposition leader, has nothing but vitriol for climate protesters, the only people publicly demanding something urgently be done. This week he called Just Stop Oil protesters “contemptible” as they demanded a future Labour government revoke Sunak’s new oil drilling licences.

The European Union’s proposed €620bn/$680bn annual Green Deal budget is so far largely unfunded. Member states have other financial priorities, it seems, not least arming Ukraine. Similarly, the UK is preparing to ditch its £11.6bn/$14.7bn climate pledge, made in 2019, to help developing countries.

And the Cop climate summit of world leaders later in the year – the 28th – is set to be captured, once more, in broad daylight by the oil lobby. The summit is to be hosted, and its agenda most likely controlled, by the United Arab Emirates, whose economy is completely dependent on oil production.

Reality Slap in the Face

So how did we reach this point of abject failure: where the greater the scientific consensus, and real-world evidence, the smaller the impact that consensus has on decision making?

The astonishing disjunct between threat and response is possible only because the oil lobby has historically shaped, and continues to shape, popular understanding of the gravity of what lies ahead. Cognitive dissonance reigns.

It is true that the establishment media has, very belatedly, started to diagnose more unpredictable and extreme weather patterns as symptoms of a wider climate crisis. It is hard to deny reality when reality keeps slapping you in the face.

But otherwise, the media has been, and continues to be, the core of the problem. It still plays cover both for the oil lobby and for the global corporations whose bottom line depends on a continuing addiction to over-consumption and “economic growth”.

That should be no surprise, because media corporations, whose job it is to frame our understanding of the world, are themselves deeply embedded in corporate profiteering at the planet’s expense.

They have done sterling work obfuscating both our collective fate and their own role in perpetuating the deception.

The truth is that scientists knew at least 70 years ago that a warming world would be a major concern down the road if the human economy continued to grow through the burning of carbon.

That understanding only deepened through the late 1960s into the 1980s, as modellers developed more sophisticated ways of measuring and predicting the effects of greenhouse gas emissions.

Forecasts Kept Secret

Sadly for humanity, most of the early research on this subject was financed by the oil corporations.

In 1968, a research institute at Stanford concluded: “There seems to be no doubt that the potential damage to our environment could be severe.” Its findings, however, were delivered in private to the American Petroleum Institute.

According to recent revelations, in 1978 researchers working for the Italian oil major Eni predicted accurately global emission trends and their likely impact. Eni’s in-house magazine made repeated references to climate change even as the company publicly championed its fuels as “clean”.

By 1982, the best minds on climate science had plotted the future course of global warming for ExxonMobil.

They predicted the critical moment would arrive 37 years hence – in 2019 – when carbon dioxide levels would reach 415 parts per million (ppm) in the atmosphere. That would result in a dangerous rise in mean global temperatures of 0.9C.

Within a year, by 2020, they warned, it would no longer be possible for the oil corporations to dissimulate by dismissing climate change as simply normal weather fluctuations.

As we now know, their predictions were bang on target. The threshold of 415ppm was breached in May 2019. And in the past few years it has become ever harder to ignore the unprecedented nature of weather events.

The scientists’ only error was to be slightly conservative about when the resulting temperature rise would cross the dangerous threshold of 0.9C: it occurred two years earlier than they had forecast.

Responding to a draft of the report in 1981, Roger Cohen, head of strategic planning at ExxonMobil until his retirement in 2003, proposed that it might be more accurate to describe the likely effects of fossil fuel burning as “catastrophic” by 2030 rather than the intended text of “well short of catastrophic”.

Once again, ExxonMobil’s scientists were contractually obliged to keep their terrifying forecasts from the public.

Return to Dark Ages?

The accuracy of these predictions is hard to explain for those arguing that the man-made climate emergency is a hoax, a conspiracy either to return us to the dark ages or to advance a globalist agenda of “authoritarian eco-socialism”, supposedly led by Amazon and Elon Musk.

Why did western corporations work so hard to hide this critically important information about climate change from the public for so long, if they were always intending to use it to take away our liberties and deprive us of our mobile phones?

The real answer is to be found in what happened over the past 30 years.

Scientists who weren’t in the pocket of the oil industry eventually caught up with their captured colleagues. That culminated in a scientific report to the United Nations in 1990, which warned in stark language of the dangers posed by man-made climate change. The climate threat finally went mainstream.

For a brief while, Big Oil seemed to fear that the game was up. It assumed that there would be a popular and political backlash as the data leaked out.

In 1989, Shell plotted two future scenarios. In one, which it termed “Sustainable World”, carbon burning would peak in 2000 and then drop off, leading to a manageable 1C rise in temperatures. The other, what it called continued “Global Mercantilism” – or business as usual – would lead to disastrous outcomes.

“There would be more violent weather – more storms, more droughts, more deluges. The mean sea level would rise at least 30cm. Agricultural patterns would be most dramatically changed,” Shell’s 1989 report concluded.

A worldwide refugee problem would be unleashed too, as people fled hotspots where famine and drought hit first. “Conflicts would abound. Civilisation could prove a fragile thing.”

In response, public relations campaigns were organised to show how seriously the oil industry was taking the problem. In 1991, for example, Shell funded a half-hour video on the dangers of climate change for screening in schools and colleges.

Irrational faith in eternal growth

Averting a crisis for all mankind that the industry knew was coming may have been a moral duty, but it was not a legal one.

In fact, as explained before by Middle East Eye, the exact reverse happened. Throughout the 1990s, Big Oil successfully sabotaged meaningful climate action by pressuring western states to sign an energy treaty tying their hands on cuts to fossil-fuel use.

That was for a good reason. Under the capitalist system, the primary duty of oil corporations – like other corporations – is to maintain profitability and guarantee value for investors and stockholders. Ethics never got a look-in.

So the fossil fuel industry spent part of its vast profits pursuing a twin-track: first, muddying the waters about the climate science, then channelling attention towards largely meaningless, small-scale fixes that fell to the public to implement.

For the critical years when urgent, state-backed action was needed on a massive scale, climate denial, funded by dark money from Big Business, was given regular airtime on influential media channels like the BBC. Ordinary people were left, as they were supposed to be, confused and unsure.

Meanwhile, the burden of doing something was intentionally shifted away from governments to western publics. Small, private actions, we were told, would have big impacts.

Ordinary people were encouraged, for example, to convert, very gradually, from using wasteful, short-life lightbulbs to more efficient, long-lasting versions – lightbulbs that had been around for decades but kept out of production because they were far less profitable.

Now the cost-benefit analysis had changed for Big Business: the humble lightbulb was a weapon in the fight to placate a public and policymakers keen to do something about climate change.

Similarly, responsible citizens were advised to commute to work on a bike, even as governments exclusively prioritised road infrastructure improvements for motorists, not cyclists, and a wider culture was fostered vilifying bike riders, one that persists to this day.

It did not end there. The fossil-fuel lobby intensified its capture of the public space.

Corporate money in politics meant the political class was in no mood to take on the oil industry, whatever the scientists were saying. In any case, politicians, desperate for re-election, were not about to start questioning the precepts of capitalism in a two-party system in which both parties were expected to worship the model of endless economic growth.

The establishment media was embedded in the same network of interconnected corporations that profited from an oil-based economy. Their own short-termist goals depended on shoring up an irrational faith among the public in eternal economic growth on a finite planet.

Giant Psyop

The bottom line was that no one with a public platform had any interest in warning the public that advanced societies were structured in a way that was hurtling us towards extinction. The profit-driven, over-consumption model of capitalism was never in question.

Instead, the fossil-fuel companies set themselves a deadline of the 2010s – the point at which, as their scientists had warned, climate disruptions would be hard to conceal from the public. By that time, the oil industry would need to have ready a new script that the oil industry was integral to saving the planet.

Which is exactly what it did. Recent reports show that ethical and green investment funds have poured money into fossil-fuel companies after those firms rebranded themselves. The oil giants’ profits have again hit record levels.

Under the so-called Green New Deals, nothing fundamentally changes. We still drive our own cars in pretty, individualised colours. We still holiday abroad. We still shop in large supermarkets with everything – including year-round exotic fruit flown in from abroad – wrapped and protected in oil-based plastics.

We are still encouraged through advertising to consume as much as possible and throw away items of new technology – from personal computers to phones – every few years through planned obsolescence.

But this individualised, competitive, wasteful way of life is being given a makeover. Cars are now hybrids or electric. Holidays are “carbon offset” somehow. Plastic on our food is described as recyclable. Advertising now explains to us how all the stuff we buy is saving the planet.

Living ever more of our lives online supposedly helps too, because it reduces our carbon footprint. It is a green revolution in which everything stays pretty much the same – including the ability of giant corporations to make massive profits.

Armed with warnings – decades in advance – from their own scientists, the oil industry had enough of a head-start to invent a self-serving narrative. It’s one in which ordinary people are encouraged to consume as much as before, while being persuaded either that they are making a difference or that the damage they are causing will be reversed by imminent technologies.

The new watchword is “net zero”. But in truth, it is a giant psychological operation (psyop), as climate scientists have gradually started to appreciate.

In 2021 a group of three leading academics admitted that for years they had been duped into championing the promises of the Green New Deal.

Technological fixes, such as carbon capture, offsetting and geoengineering, were “no more than fairy tales”, they warned. Net zero policies “were and still are driven by a need to protect business as usual, not the climate”.

One, James Dyke, an expert in global systems at Exeter University, observed: “It’s astonishing how the continual absence of any credible carbon removal technology seems to never affect net zero policies. Whatever is thrown at it, net zero carries on without a dent in the fender… I’ve now realised that we have all been subject to a form of gaslighting.”

Unhealthy Cynicism

This has turned out – whether intentionally or not – as a win-win-win for Big Business.

Much of the public is wrongly persuaded that the climate crisis is still some way off, and that the action necessary to avert it is in hand through technological advances like carbon capture. As a consequence, they have little truck with an increasingly noisy climate protest movement.

Significant sections of the protest movement itself have been hoodwinked into believing the Green New Deal offers good-faith solutions – despite the fact that it has been hijacked to disguise business as normal.

As a result, the elephant in the room – the inherent, self-destructive tendencies of capitalism – is pushed by protesters to the sidelines or out of sight completely. Protests are invariably restricted to policy failures or government U-turns.

Even the protest movement’s figurehead, Greta Thunberg, who last year finally came out against capitalism with the publication of The Climate Book, has found it hard not to drift back into supporting business as normal.

In recent months she has become an increasingly high-profile partisan in the Ukraine war, effectively greenwashing the West’s cynical proxy fight against Russia on behalf of its war and energy industries.

The Ukraine war, provoked all too predictably by Nato expansion to Russia’s borders, has offered enormous profiteering opportunities for the West’s military, weapons and oil industries.

That has served not just as a welcome distraction from the urgent need to tackle the climate crisis. The war’s collateral damage – from the Nord Stream pipeline explosions to the Kakhovka dam rupture – is wreaking an enormous ecological toll. The war itself, and the refusal to consider peace talks, is fuelling the very forces most responsible for environmental destruction.

Trapped in the middle is a third camp. It has grown terminally cynical. Some deny any kind of climate emergency. Others write off the green agenda, arguing that the deadline to save the planet has been missed and any action is now futile.

Western publics are confused, embittered and divided – the ideal conditions in which inertia reigns and Big Oil can carry on as normal.

Growth Paradigm

With no one in the mainstream grappling with the reality of what lies ahead, leading financial institutions have been free to pretend that capitalism’s relentless growth paradigm can be squared with sustainability.

A 2017 report, for example, by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, a world trade body comprising the world’s 38 most developed states, is titled simply: “Investing in Climate, Investing in Growth”.

The World Bank champions continuing growth – for western corporations – under the deceptive rubric of “development” for the Global South.

The market cheerleaders of the British government trumpet their green credentials. “Our transition to a green and sustainable future will provide new opportunities to grow and level up the UK economy,” a 2023 policy paper says. Such claims are being made, as noted earlier, even as the government and opposition scramble to reverse policies that are the prerequisite for a sustainable future.

The European Commission, meanwhile, calls its Green Deal “Europe’s new growth strategy”, even as it fails to fund it.

The exclusive focus on climate change has served too as a kind of sinkhole, into which much wider problems of ecological degradation through human activity can be disappeared. While Big Business is busy promising fairytale tech fixes like carbon capture, attention is diverted from the things for which no fixes are being offered. They include a massive, global loss of biodiversity, shortages of fresh water, soil degradation, deforestation, air and water pollution, microplastics, ocean acidification, the over mining of rare minerals. The list goes on.

Ecologist William Rees, professor emeritus at the University of British Columbia, has referred to modern techno-industrial culture as “fundamentally dysfunctional”. It “is systematically – even enthusiastically – consuming the biophysical basis of its own existence.” He describes humanity’s relationship to the planet as analogous to a “malignant parasite”.

Heads in the Sand

Behind the scenes, politicians and officials appear less sanguine than their public, simple-minded declarations.

Though they refuse to face up to the inherent contradictions between ecological and economic demands, they are recognising the heavy costs certain to be inflicted on each nation’s finances by more extreme weather events and rising oceans.

In late 2021, a US Treasury panel concluded that the climate crisis was an “emerging threat” to the country’s financial stability, with the potential to wipe out trillions of dollars of assets. 

Nonetheless, when faced with a choice between addressing the climate emergency or pursuing growth, the economic imperative triumphs every time.

In January, at a meeting of central bank chiefs in Stockholm, the head of the US Federal Reserve, Jerome Powell, urged his western colleagues to prioritise short-term goals like fighting inflation rather than address the long-term need to fight climate change. “We are not, and will not be, a climate policymaker,” he said.

The climate emergency, and the wider ecological crisis, will put this kind of neoliberal orthodoxy under ever greater strain. Without a meaningful response, something will have to give. Already, the twin pillars of the West’s liberal democratic order are starting to crumble: the commitment to free speech and the right to protest.

Ahead lie ever more unaffordable energy bills, empty supermarket shelves, floods and heatwaves, wasted expenditure on resource wars, and the more general symptoms of ecological collapse.

Burying our heads in the sand a little longer won’t make the coming battle go away. It will just make survival even less likely.

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Jonathan Cook is the author of three books on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and a winner of the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. His website and blog can be found at www.jonathan-cook.net

Featured image is from The Last American Vagabond

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Evidence of Directed Energy weapons in the Lāhainā fire.

Watch for the pulse flashes.

 

Click here to view the video

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All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the Translate Website button below the author’s name.

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A retired CIA expert on Russia and rare voice of reason coming from the bowels of the American deep state, Ray McGovern joins host Robert Scheer on another edition of the Scheer Intelligence podcast. With world peace, nuclear weapon prudence and film critique on the agenda, McGovern and Scheer delve into a host of relevant issues stemming from the war in Ukraine and the history behind it. From Christopher Nolan’s “Oppenheimer,” to CNN’s strange truthful broadcast on Ukraine’s counteroffensive, the old boys from the Bronx prod each other’s encyclopedic minds to try and make sense of the state of the world.

While mixed opinions over the atomic bomb film fill the first segment of the episode, the conversation seems to always make its way back to the importance of potential nuclear war on the horizon. As McGovern said, “I spent six decades, count them, six decades following Soviet and now Russian policy. Most of that time professionally and now… really just as intently and I have never, never had so much fear that we are on the cusp of a nuclear catastrophe.”

McGovern, an adviser to seven presidents, also dives into the motivations and ramifications of such reckless foreign policy decisions, made by people who supposedly check all the qualification boxes:

“Sullivan, Blinken, Nuland… They have the reins of power and they’re telling Biden what to do. They have a sense of unreality that they can prevail. That was very clear at their first major foreign policy adventure, where the Chinese were kind enough to come to Anchorage, Alaska and they were treated like the British imperialists treated the Chinese on the Yangtze River two centuries ago!”

In the end, it is the citizens back home as well as the soldiers on the front lines who get dealt a bad hand from these decisions. McGovern points out the bleak realities of what these aid packages to countries like Ukraine really mean to all parties involved. The most sinister part being how it happens in front of people without them even knowing and that is by design, courtesy of McGovern’s famously coined military, industrial, congressional, intelligence, media, academia, think tank (MICIMATT) complex.

“We don’t have a well-informed citizenry. If we did, our well-informed citizenry would be talking about opportunity costs. What does one F-35 that doesn’t really fly real well in the dark or in bad weather, what does it cost? $200 million? What can we do with that $200 million in our school district? In our reaching out to people who are poor in one of those state.”

Transcript

This transcript was produced by an automated transcription service. Please refer to the audio interview to ensure accuracy.

Robert Scheer Hi, this is Robert Scheer with another edition of Scheer Intelligence, and it’s a title once given to me by an NPR producer, but I’ll live with it, sounds a little egotistical. And then I always say the intelligence comes from my guests, and that’s almost always the case in this case. My guest is Ray McGovern. And, you know, I don’t often go back to people, I should, I’ve gone back to you a few times now because of Russia and controversy, the invasion, the Russian invasion of Ukraine, all of these issues. But I want to explain and I want to get in a little bit, this is actually, today is the 78th anniversary of our dropping the bomb on Nagasaki. And then Hiroshima, of course, was two days previous and I do want to talk about a lot of serious things, but I want to really start with objectivity. Objectivity. And Ray McGovern has now joined me. I’ve known him a long time in the as being controversial. And in fact, he’s actually attacked for being more of a Putin apologist or I don’t know if that makes you left or right, since Putin is the guy the U.S. backed against Gorbachev and he was Yeltsin’s protege and he was supposed to be a good conservative. But I guess a conservative in Russia ends up being a nationalist. And you don’t like that.

But nonetheless, somehow Ray McGovern, who I first encountered his work and everything when he was working for the CIA, our trajectories actually been very different. And one of my arguments is, you know, yes, objectivity is important, certainly for journalists, certainly for people who want to represent the public interest is not easy to attain. And nowadays we use these slogans of disinformation and fake news as a way of disparaging anybody that disagrees with the government or the current government was the Trump government. You are allowed to disagree. And, you know, so there’s it’s very difficult, but I want to stress the people bring their own perspective. Lawrence Ferlinghetti once said, “Keep an open mind, but not so open that your brains fall out.” And what he meant is we all have a core of experience, belief, philosophy, religion, whatever. And I like talking to you, Ray, because we actually come from, in the context of the Bronx, where we both grew up, and you’re a much younger guy. I’m 87, you’re I’m an old coot. You’re a young guy of 84. But when I look at our lives, there on, you went to Fordham University. Guess that was about, I don’t know, I guess a mile from where I grew up in the Bronx. I went to city College, very different. And in fact, some of your listeners on your website, what is your website called? Ray McGovern? 

Ray McGovern RayMcGovern.com

Scheer Ray McGovern dot com. I really took umbrage because they said I was anti Catholic because I made some remarks about Fordham. And it is true, I am my mother was Jewish, I was very sensitive. And there were, at that time, some people Catholic who thought we had something to do with the Jews being responsible for killing their Lord or something. And there was tension, ethnic tension and religious tension. And then my father was a German Protestant. So I said, only a half of me was responsible and, you know, you get this insane hostility, which you grew up with also. Religious, ethnic and everything else, and we all are affected by it. And my only point was actually when you were going to Fordham and you graduated, I believe that the time in a missile crisis, right? You were Phi Beta Kappa, one of them really smart guys and graduated ’61, was it? Kennedy was president. Yeah. And then you got a master’s degree in Russian studies in ’62. And I want to point this out to you. And then you went into the military and you were there, and then they let you out early so you could go work for the CIA,. 

McGovern Correct. 

Scheer Okay. And so you were really went into the national security establishment, the very thing that Eisenhower had just warned us about. Right. Eisenhower, in his farewell address while you were still in college, warned us about the military industrial complex. But you joined it, right? You joined it. And it’s funny because these days here now, people are questioning your patriotism and so forth. I, on the other hand, was this kind of antiwar character over at City College and had lots of doubts about this. I thought, you know, Eisenhower was great when he called out the military industrial complex and that it should be looked at critically and examined. You were the other way. So why don’t we begin with that? Because you there are people who try to dismiss you now, try to marginalize you. Oh, Ray’s old or Ray, you know, what does he know? Well, you know a great deal. You advised how many presidents on personally. 

McGovern You know, worked under seven. And I wrote the president’s daily brief, three of them. 

Scheer Which three? 

McGovern Nixon, Ford and Reagan. 

Scheer So these are three presidents that you actually were responsible for the daily briefing of those three presidents on, you know, on the most serious matters, right? 

McGovern That’s correct. I was one of about five. 

Scheer Yeah. And you were there at the center of power. Right. And they trusted you. You had all the clearances. You were, right? 

McGovern Yeah. They trusted me enough to allow me to do that in person. One on one. So the first Reagan term, ’81 to ’85, I was sort of a special gift because my superiors, Bobby Gates in the first instance and then Bill Casey. Well, put it simply, they saw a Soviet under every rock. 

Scheer This was at the CIA. 

McGovern Yeah. Yeah. They were my bosses, nominally at least. And, you know, they go down to Nicaragua. And Casey would say, Bobby, you see that Soviet under that rock? Mr. Casey, there are three of them. Can you see three of them? Casey said you will run my analysis. And he did. Okay. So that’s the kind of people that were advising Reagan at the very top. My approach was to Reagan’s chief advisors: H.W. Bush, Secretary Shultz, Secretary Weinberger, the chairman of Joint Chiefs of Staff, Jack Vessey, and then a slew of national security advisers, some of whom ended up in prison. But I briefed them with a team mate every other day, early in the morning. Generally speaking, Reagan himself preferred to sleep in. And so he was briefed by the same characters that we briefed at about 11:30 when he was fully awake. 

Scheer So I just want to remind people, because right now America is establishment military influence. If you watch CNN, I just watched, on your recommendation, a program today where they’re very gloomy about what was happening with the counter offensive in the Ukraine and then people from the military industrial complex who now are retired and so they act like journalists and telling Anderson [Cooper] that, well, yes, but it might get better or it should get better and so forth. But there’s a feeling we have the good war. You know, here are the heroic Ukrainians fighting against the evil Russians. And I just want to remind people that during the Cold War, we always thought we had the good war. And Vietnam is a very good example. Jack Kennedy, President Kennedy actually is the person most responsible for getting it going. And that’s where I got in trouble with your readers who thought I was being anti-Catholic. The American Catholic Church, not the pope. Pope John actually was raising some fundamental questions with his Pacem in terris about the waging a war and the need for peace. But there was no question about the virtue of our Vietnamese, even though Diem, who was in charge of South Vietnam, had come out of a Marino seminary and the United States and had been picked by the American military establishment. But with the whole narrative was obviously we weren’t even fighting Vietnam, we were fighting the communists, and they were mostly led by Mao and the Chinese and everything. And everybody forgets that that war, which we were supposed to be on the side of virtue. And you had Tom Dooley, Navy lieutenant doctor who wrote a book about the necessity of fighting for these people. Very popular, that the mood was really very supportive of the Diem administration until the US basically killed Diem, they hunted him down and he died in a sewer in Saigon trying to hide or what happened it’s all quite mysterious. And so why don’t you take us back? Because at that time you were on the war making side, right? 

McGovern Well, Robert, I wouldn’t put it that way, actually. Let me go back to where you started, our common heritage in the Bronx. I, too, was from an immigrant family, and mine was Irish. We were pretty secluded, parochial, if you will, provincial, if you will. I had a first rate education, but it was not the kind of broad exposure to the world that you had at City College. Among other things, I remember there in 1948, the Jews finally got their own country. And there was there was great rejoicing throughout the production everywhere else of New York. But nobody told me that there are already people there, called the Palestinians. And I had to learn later what that was all about. Okay. So it was a little provincial. When you come to serving your country. You mention John Kennedy. Well, he made that inaugural speech when I was a senior at Fordham. And you know what he said, Ask not what your country can do for you, what you might be able to do for your country. Now, believe it or not, Robert, you could believe this. Maybe others can’t. But that didn’t sound corny at that time, that sounded real. And there was a real threat from Russia. I mean, they did have missiles. They were challenging us and Germany and Berlin and finally in Cuba. So when I took a political science course at Fordham in my senior year, it was a graduate course. And I talked about this new national security apparatus that had been put together after the war by the National Security Act 1947, and it included the CIA. What was the CIA all about? It was about telling the president the truth, what was going on in the world with what Truman called untainted, not biased information that he would get from the State Department or for the Defense Department. Tell me like it is. Now, I was a Russian specialist. That’s why they let me out of the army earlier. This year I paid off the army and I was able to do my last one and a half years of active duty at the CIA. And that was okay. The same government. There was a real Russian threat there. And I had the privilege of being able to tell our policymakers that, for example, the rift, the conflict between Russia and China was extremely real. Okay. Don’t listen to all this troglodyte. Ah they’re both commies, for God’s sake, don’t trust them. It was real. What does that mean? That meant when I became chief of the Soviet foreign policy branch. We will tell Nixon and Kissinger. Look, they hate each other. You can exploit that. There are 40 divisions, Soviet divisions on the Chinese border, for God’s sake. Chinese really can have a nicer relationship with you guys. What do you think? Well, they went off to Beijing. You know the rest of this story. Now, I had a particularly interesting… 

Scheer Well for people listening to this who don’t know the rest of the story, because after all, you know, we don’t teach much of this. We should remember the whole justification for the Cold War and certainly for Vietnam was that there was a monolithic communism that was supra nationalist because they read Marx or Lenin and they would never care about being Chinese or Russian or Vietnamese, and therefore they would act in sync and betray the interests of their own people for some kind of pseudo religion called communism. And it turned out to be utter nonsense. And there were some smart people who knew it at the time, but the policy still was constructed by people who pretended that was real. And then, much to the amazement of the American people, even though we were fighting because nobody could defend going to war in Vietnam with all of, you know, dropping more bombs that had been dropped on Germany during World War Two on this tiny area of Vietnam. And this people didn’t even have an air force. They all argument was no was stopping the Chinese communist from stopping the Russian communists. And then, amazingly enough, this cold warrior, Richard Nixon, who made a career out of, oh, it is a communist and underwriting good. By the way, one of the people who went after Oppenheimer and there’s this popular movie now, Oppenheimer and the making of the bomb. You know, suddenly Nixon is over there with Mao Zedong, now everybody says, now you can’t talk to Putin. Putin’s a monster. Putin’s another Hitler. My God, Putin is enlightened compared to Mao in the and the view of America. First of all, he’s not a communist, but he’s actually broken very severely with communism. But here was Nixon went with Mao Zedong, the guy who was described as the bloodiest dictator maybe in the history of the world by some people in the CIA, and the Defense Department. Certainly that was the conventional wisdom. Suddenly, Nixon and Kissinger are over there, just as Kissinger was quite recently. And they say, hey, you know, maybe they were basing it in part on McGovern. But I want to say, to be fair. Richard Nixon wrote an article in Foreign Affairs magazine before he was president saying there was room to negotiate with China and there was actually a movement in that direction. But nonetheless, this incredible thing. Now, if an American president, Donald Trump, said you might want to talk to Putin and cut a deal, everybody say, no, that’s it, you’re a traitor. Right. And there was Nixon when… and you were in the middle of that. You knew about that? 

McGovern I was. And when Kissinger came to us, my Soviet foreign policy branch, and said, we’re going to have these negotiations for limiting strategic arms. You think the Russians are really interested in doing that? Well, I named three people from my branch to go with the delegation in Helsinki or Vienna, and then one down in the bowels of the CIA to report on what the military developments were. And we reported back. We said, yeah, the Russians are really interested. And they said, Why? Well, number one, they don’t want to spend their selves into oblivion. But number two, they’re afraid of the Chinese. There is this triangular relationship now, and they don’t want the Chinese to steal a march on them and develop good relations with you. Well. Kissinger went to Beijing in 1971. Nixon goes in early in 1972, and all of a sudden we see a lot of leeway, a lot of flexibility in the Soviet negotiation position on limiting offensive and defensive missile and nuclear arms. So long story short, I got to go to Moscow in May of 1972 for the signing of this incredible treaty that was the Anti Ballistic Missile Treaty. Just just to spell out very briefly, it was really simple. We were we were building scads of offensive missiles and defensive missiles. There was no end to the competition. Finally, as people said, well, hey, look, let’s create a kind of a balance of terror. If there are no anti ballistic missiles, neither side can think that they could make a first strike on the other without suffering an immediate and devastating response. That’s what they did. That was the ABM Treaty was all about limiting the number of ABM sites you could have first to two and then to one. And so they went ahead and now Kissinger says to me, “Are the Russians gonna cheat?” I said, “I don’t know.” “Well, how soon could you tell me?” So I went back to the people that run all the satellites and all that other stuff. You know, you can do that when you’re in a position with some some important. So you say, How long is it? Seven, ten days. Go back 7 to 10 days, sir. All right. I think we should go ahead on that basis doveryay, no proveryay, trust but verify. Did the Russians cheat? Yes, they cheated. Did we find out? Yes, within seven days. Yes. Where was it? In Siberia. God awful place. But they built this incredible radar that could only be for ABM usage. And Reagan called them on it. That’s the way we used to do things in those days. Right. We’d say show them the pictures we showed on the pictures, they said no, no, it’s not an ABM site. So finally, Gorbachev comes in. Reagan is gone. G.W. Bush is in place and it’s all right it’s an ABM, site we’ll tear it down. And he does. I’m just saying here that it’s possible to talk to people. It’s possible to trust and verify. And when you get around a table, it’s often possible to work out deals that never would have seemed possible, been seen as possible before you sat down at the table. That’s what’s missing today, of course. There’s no trust. There’s no trust. You can verify anything. There’s just no trust. That’s really dangerous situation. You mentioned Oppenheimer. We can talk about that later. 

Scheer  Talk about it now, go ahead. 

McGovern I saw it yesterday. You know, I’m not a real big moviegoer, but I was terribly disappointed. For God’s sake, you know. Here’s this really bright, youngish, white male, just tortured. All right. I sympathize with that. 

Scheer You’re talking about Oppenheimer now. 

McGovern Yeah, Oppenheimer. You know, here’s the victim of… Well, what that what about those tens of thousands of Japanese? There was only one key moment in that film that was not brought out in any real detail. 

Scheer Well, well, let me just point out, those tens of thousands of Japanese I mean, the figures, I think they go much higher. You know. 

McGovern They do, hundreds of thousands. Yeah. 

Scheer But the interesting thing is and I’m quite positive about the movie, so we can have a lively discussion. I think it was, it’s a classic, I do. But we could disagree about that. But the fact of the matter is we’re having this discussion on the, you know, the United States government, which is supposed to be the center of civilization, we’re the only ones who have ever used these weapons. We not only created them, but we didn’t just set it off in the ocean and kill some fish or a lot of fish. You know, there were a lot of things. Eisenhower didn’t feel the need to to drop the bomb. He’s expressed that. The movie does go into some of the tension, but there were plenty of people who said you should not use it. And the war was, in effect, although the movie’s pretty light on that, really, all the Japanese wanted was some language saying they can have an emperor, that there really wasn’t much of a sticking point. And other reason was they didn’t want the Russians to come in and the Russians supposed to come in, I believe it was 90 days after that or whatever it was some period of time after the defeat of the Germans, and they would have been, you know, part of the occupying force. So there was a need for that. But I think the point of the movie is the power of these weapons. And of course, they’re far more dangerous now. And I want to get into that because this, we’re almost giddy or oblivious to the fact that we’re on the cusp of nuclear war now. I want to get to that. And that’s why I think the movie is very powerful. But I want to ask you a question. There’s a character in the movie, Edward Teller. And it’s not the way I remember Edward Teller. I interviewed Edward Teller that quite a bit of contact with him. Edward Teller, the father of the H-bomb. He’s the guy there. He looks sinister. And then at during the test, he’s got some kind of grease to protect him on his face and his glasses and so forth. But everybody forgets and here I’m actually resting my computer on a book to make it go higher that I wrote called With Enough Shovels. You probably remember this. You know, Reagan, Bush, a nuclear war, dig a hole, cover it with a couple of doors, and then throw three feet of dirt on top. It’s the dirt that does it. If there are enough shovels to go around, everybody’s going to make it. That was from T.K. Jones, deputy undersecretary of defense for Strategic and Theater nuclear forces. Well, we are even in a worse place now, because at that time there was active discussion and other people mentioned the book. Remember, I interviewed Hans Bethe, who was in charge of theoretical research at Los Alamos, the Making the Bomb. A lot of those people spoke out and said, this is madness. Star wars is madness you can’t find. You’re not hearing that now. And in fact, you wrote a column recently talking about, you know, the possibility of both the Russians using it, if they’re into a corner, are using it. So something that we had come during the worst days of the Cold War, see, is absolute madness. We now think now maybe you can do it right. Where are we on this issue now? And I think Reagan should be remembered positively as the person who accepted Gorbachev despite Reagan’s rhetoric about those monsters. I know I interviewed him at some length, but the fact of the matter is he and Gorbachev both agreed these weapons could not be used and we should get rid of them, at least make big advances in getting rid of them. That’s now, if you said that now, that would be heresy. So let’s talk a little bit about the nuclear dimension, Nagasaki and so forth. 

McGovern Well, Reagan, of course, did conclude the INF Treaty, the Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty, which destroy, I emphasize, destroyed a whole class of medium range and intermediate range nuclear missiles and warheads stationed already already deployed in Europe. On both sides, Russian side it was SS 20’s. The US side it was Pershing twos, destroyed. Scott Ritter, my good friend, as one of those people who went up and inspected one of those places, made sure that doveryay, no proveryay, that we could monitor, that we could prove that these things were being destroyed, so you’re right about Reagan. Just getting back to Oppenheimer for a second, Bob, I tend to think in two terms here. I think, I mentioned this little vignette where President Truman and Jimmy Byrnes were together there, and they invited Oppenheimer. 

Scheer Byrnes, the secretary of state. 

McGovern Yeah. Now where was he from? He is from the great state of Georgia. And what did you share with Harry Truman? Bias prejudice to the core. Truman himself very seldom referred to African-Americans with anything other than the N-word. Okay. People don’t look like us are much easier to kill. Japanese Yellow Peril. What the Japanese had done to us at Pearl Harbor and all that kind of stuff. It made it easy for Truman and Byrnes all alone, against the advice of Eisenhower, against the advice of MacArthur, against the advice of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs at the time. Although there was no Joint Chiefs policy, all these top, top military groups, look, it’s not needed. But as you Bob very pointed out, the Japanese, we knew from intercepting their messages, their coded messages and translating them that they would give up as soon as we said, all right, you could keep your damn emperor. We won’t string them up. You won’t have any power, but you can keep. They would quit on the spot. Now, why the hell do we do that? Well, number one, we had this bomb, right? Number two, we could use it against people that don’t look like us. All right. And number three, there’s this anti-communism that had really, really been very firmly implanted. Instead of saying to the Russians, Hey, we’re about to jointly conquer Japan, let’s do a deal here. Let’s talk about this. We think that you’re entitled to something from what you’ve done. Now, let’s let’s deal with this instead of that. There’s this urge, there’s this compulsion to make sure we got in there before the before the Russians, and that we demonstrated to these commies that we had this weapon that they’ll never get that we could use again if we so please. 

Scheer You know, it’s so difficult, you know, for people to grasp all this. You know what I mean? We’ve forgotten, first of all, I mean, the very idea that we’re kind of giddy, you have people say, oh, the the Russians stuff wouldn’t work, or we they might use tactical and Medvedev, the guy who had run Russia, I guess, with Putin’s tutelage and now he’s the head of their national security talked about actually they put weapons in Belarus. He’s talked about maybe using them. And the fact of the matter is, you know, if they get desperate, we’ve called them all war criminals. So if they think they’re going to go to some Nuremberg and they’re going to face the death penalty, you know, that’s that’s not how you begin negotiations. You know, we had a very dark view of Mao, but Nixon went there and made nice, you know, and so did Kissinger to negotiate. Aren’t you afraid? I mean, I don’t want to just get into rhetoric here. I have never been this frightened and I’ve covered this issue not from the inside viewpoint that you have, but I spent a lot of time. I actually spent hours talking to people in the Defense Department everywhere. There were quite a bit of time when I worked for the L.A. Times wrote that book. I have never been as scared as now because back then, you know, Ronald Reagan knew, he said he said, yes, we wouldn’t do that. But those monsters have a different feeling about life and so forth. But no one defended even Edward Teller would not say it’s, you know, hey, yeah, let’s have a nuclear war. It was you know, everybody understood that was the end of anything like civilization. Now we’ve lost that, haven’t we? And we’re talking on a day remember Nagasaki? And you’re absolutely correct that the movie in that respect, the movie, a conscious decision was made not to show the devastation of Nagasaki and Hiroshima. No question about it. And, you know, I think I don’t think it was done out of racism. I think it was done that a recognition that movie audiences are impervious to that. They’ve seen it. So, okay, it’s a picture. And I think one theatrical device when he showed a white scientist suddenly having what the bomb does to their faces and imploding, you know, the and so forth, I thought that was a device. But nonetheless, where are we now on this nuclear question? It’s very much in play with Russia right now. We haven’t talked about that CNN report. It seems as if the new technology and the training of the Ukrainians is not working. And I don’t know what’s going to happen. You have the idea that I’ve seen reference that maybe the Biden administration to hold on to power might do a wag the dog scenarios. I mean, so let’s talk about that. What is the danger of nuclear war now? What might be the point? How do you see the Biden administration? I was accused the last time of interrupting too much and talking too much, which I am always accused of. So please, Ray, just take it from there. 

McGovern Well, Irish and Jewish from the Bronx do tend to talk a lot. Let me just have another sentence on Oppenheimer. The audience is left with the erroneous impression that thousands or hundreds of thousands of U.S. lives would have been lost in invading Japan had we not detonated these bombs. That is criminally wrong. Okay. There is only one little thing in there that suggests that Oppenheimer himself. Now, I know that was necessary. Well. Oh, yeah, it wasn’t necessary. So why did they do it? Now, I don’t pierce the moviemakers of racism. I accuse Truman. I accuse Jimmy Byrnes just like I accuse William Westmoreland, who pretty much said the Oriental doesn’t put the same value on life. I mean, hello. That’s pure and simple racism. Whatever comes out of the state of South Carolina, where Westmoreland was, as well as came as well as Jimmy Byrnes. Now, getting to the question of now. Robert, you’re a lot older than I am. 

Scheer I got the point. 

McGovern 3 years. 

Scheer I’m in pretty good shape, though, right? Don’t push me. If we were to meet there somewhere on the Grand Concourse or somewhere, you know, I wouldn’t get out of your way. I think I could handle you. 

McGovern You probably could. I’m three years younger than you. But what I would say is that I spent six decades, count them, six decades following Soviet and now Russian policy. Most of that time professionally now since, well, the last few decades really just as intently. And I have never, never had so much fears that we are on the cusp of a nuclear catastrophe. Why? Because the people advising Joe Biden. And Joe Biden is compos mentis or not, I don’t know. But the people advising him are calling the shots. They have a lot to lose if Ukraine goes shoop! Now, I hate to tell you this, but Ukraine is going to shoop! Russia is winning. And whoever advised, well actually probably the CIA director advise the president to say Russia has already lost. Okay. Hello. So what happens to the CIA director? He gets promoted to be a cabinet officer. A really, a stupid thing in and of itself. Anyhow. There’s a degree of unreality here. Biden up up in, he was in Maine campaigning a lot of rhetoric. And then he met at a small home. Someone was there and reported. What does he say? Who can shape the whole world at this stage in life? Not the president. And not me, not me. But the President of United States can. Who else but the President of the United States? I’m going to do it. Madeleine Albright was right. She talked about us being essential, exceptional, indispensable, even. We’re going to do it now. That’s unreal. Did these guys tell him that? They must tell them that because they get promoted to the cabinet. Bill Burns himself just a couple of weeks later, said Russia has already lost. And the the defeat, the weakness of the Russian army has been laid bare for all to see. Well, that’s 180 degrees away from the real situation. So just last night, CNN had an honest report. Ukrainians are losing. They’re taking a real bashing. They’re not going to win anytime soon. Maybe they can last until next year, but that even is doubtful. Woah, the same CNN that was saying two weeks ago this could be a great counteroffensive? Just watch this. General emerging. What do you think we’re going to win? General so-and-so? Oh, yeah. We’ll take back Crimea. It’s all B.S. And the problem is they’re going to have to try to figure out some way to to rejigger the narrative here so that Americans won’t say, well, wait a sec, I thought we were winning. I thought the Ukrainians were winning. They’re not? And we have to decide, well, how do we handle this? Now, the media is so malleable that they probably won’t have any trouble persuading Americans. Oh, this was all good. We tried. We said that we gave Ukraine 98% of what they needed and I guess they just couldn’t handle it. That’s the way it’s going to come down. Meanwhile, meanwhile, hundreds, hundreds of Ukrainian young men and some old men like me are perishing every day that the U.S. and the Ukrainians and NATO don’t say, well, look, let’s stop this. Let’s stop this carnage. Let’s talk. 

Scheer So I want to cut to the chase here on the moral question, because there will be people listening to this right now and they will take the high moral ground. They will say that McGovern and that really dangerous guy Scheer, they don’t care about the freedom of Ukrainians. They don’t care about their rights. They don’t care about the moral question. And they just want to give up. And we have a poll now that shows most Americans or not by a big majority, but a majority, don’t want to give more aid. We’re now starting to see Ukraine is another one of those forever wars and so forth. But at the core of it is that the Biden administration, the Democrats, were able to establish in the mass media there the soft power world that they represent virtue. This is, again, the old American exceptionalism and that anyone else’s nationalism is illegitimate, dangerous to the world if it conflicts with us. I think if we look back at our lives in this country. Ray McGovern that’s been the issue. It was the issue even in getting a peace agreement or getting out of the war with Japan and not dropping the bomb because, okay, let them have their emperor. No, they’re war criminals, they have to be… It’s happening now with Russia. There’s no Russian side to this. The fact is, the area that they’re now fortified and I’m projecting might have probably has the evidence would have, show that those people probably voted against the current government in Ukraine, did not want this short break and so forth speak mostly Russian have a connection with Russia. Certainly people in Crimea, there’s no complexity. We’re now pushing Russia because we want to get to China and we’re very angry with China. We don’t have any respect for Chinese nationalism. We don’t know that, you know, maybe they’ve had experience with us, know we can provoke them with Taiwan. We can exacerbate that. So I want to ask you, as a person who lived deep within this military industrial establishment, you have an insight that I certainly don’t have because these are more, I’ve interviewed a lot of these people they’re smart. They probably got higher test scores than I did. You know, they probably know how to, you know, can justify their expertise in terms of the languages they speak. So what how do they consistently get it so wrong? Why do they not know, for example? Well, let’s just take China. Why are they not know that Chinese nationalism is it now, what these communists in China are really talking about? This is nationalism. Why isn’t this multi-polar world acceptable to them? Why do they insist? And here we are in the day when we killed so many Japanese, we’re the only ones. This is the greatest act, I think, of terrorism, if by that you mean using civilians to make a point and their deaths. Certainly what we did at Hiroshima and Nagasaki is the greatest act of terrorism. Why do they still have this arrogance that they got it right and that they represent human values for everybody in the world? You lived with these people. You broke bread with them. You talked to them. Why are we these oddballs now having this discussion? Why don’t your colleagues that are on CNN, you know, turned into journalists, why don’t they see it? I mean, actually, that discussion today that I watched, you sent the tape and the reporter forget his name, but he was very good in his 7 minutes who’s been covering the war. But, you know, the attitude was, first of all, the we, they talked about, well, we may have splits now where maybe, you know, you’re not a journalist, they just assume, Anderson, you might want to talk about him a little bit. Just assumes he represents the U.S. government and that represents virtue. How do they maintain this? 

McGovern Well, let’s see. I call Anderson Cooper. I call him Hans Christian Anderson Cooper, because he tells all the fairy tales that he’s told to tell on CNN. 

Scheer He’s a bright guy. But you lived with these people. I’m trying to get a different you know, I could say things like that, too, but I didn’t go to the cafeteria with these people, the journalists, as well as the people inside the CIA. But you did you.

McGovern No, no. Bob, the big difference here is you didn’t go to cafeteria with these people at City College, and there was no one at Fordham to go to the cafeteria with the high shoes, with the claim to exceptionalism that these guys and now you know about Vietnam, You know a lot about Vietnam. You’ve interviewed these guys. It’s the same best and brightest that knew what was best for our country. No way could prevail over those. 

Scheer David Halberstam, the great New York Times reporter, wrote that book, The Best and the Brightest. 

McGovern So they go to City College. They go to a Fordham, where’d they go? You know, where they went with the ivy mental walls, with all that kind of stuff to say, brood saint, brood of cats that’s running our policy. Sullivan, Blinken, Nuland. I mean, hello. It’s just really, really they have the reins of power and they’re telling bleak. They’re telling Biden what to do. You know, they have a sense of unreality that they can prevail. That was that was very clear at their first major foreign policy adventure, where the Chinese were kind enough to come to Anchorage and Alaska. They were treated like the British imperialists treated the Chinese on the Yangtze River two centuries ago. Okay. So what I’m saying here is that these guys are delusional. Okay, that’s dangerous. Okay. But the other thing is they have a personal stake in this. Personal stake. Okay. Look at Joe Biden and Hunter Biden now. Look at Blinken, who was demonstrably responsible for rallying up 51 intelligence managers to say the Biden laptop bore all the earmarks of a Russian disinformation operation lie completely. Okay. So that and you got who’s the other guy? Well, Sullivan was responsible for Russian hacking. A lie from day one. Now, curiously enough, Russian hacking was divulged to be a lie under testimony by the head of CrowdStrike, the cyber firm that was supposed to investigate this. He testified before Adam Schiff’s committee, House Intelligence Committee, on the 5th of December 2017, and said there is no technical evidence that anyone hacked the Democratic National Committee. No one, not the Russians, not anyone else. No technical evidence. What happened to that transcript? Adam Schiff kept it secret for two and a half years. Finally somebody told Trump, Hey, you’re the president. You can get that release. And it was released. When was it released? May 10th, 2020. Okay. What is it? It’s May 9th, 2023. That I think makes three years. Okay. Why is it the Americans still believe there was Russian hacking that that helped Trump with the election? Because their New York Times, The Washington Post has kept that secret even since it was released to the public on May 10th, 2020. So shifted it for two and a half years. The New York Times, everybody else for three more years. And so you get people like Amanpour interviewing the Russian ambassador to London just a day or two ago, and she says, ah, why did you why did you interfere? Mess up in our in our election 2016. I know you were going to say that, you know, let’s go on to the whole. So the media is the problem here. Now, the good news is today or last night, actually, Anderson Cooper decided to tell the truth because no longer… Well, because he was allowed to. My experience with Anderson Cooper. Okay. Here it is, May 4th, I think, 2006. I’m at a big think tank where Donald Rumsfeld is speaking in Atlanta. Okay. I get up and ask the first question. Okay. I embarrass him by quoting back to himself about where he knew, he knew weapons of mass destruction were and how he knew that there were ties between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda. And by inference, Saddam Hussein was in part responsible for 9/11. I nail on those two things now, as I’m walking and it’s on, look at look at old woman’s version of that when he was when he was going straight. Okay, now what? My point is, I’m going out into the auditorium. Nobody’s looking at me. It was a very wealthy male, Southern defense oriented think tank. And I get a call. Hello, Mr. McGovern, this is Anderson Cooper. Oh, hey, Anderson. How are you? Now I find out you’re causing quite a stir down here. We have your live on CNN and also on C-SPAN. Tell me and I just have to look at my program tonight, but I have a question for you first. Sure. Anderson, weren’t you afraid? Now, I was pretty much, you know, I was in a state, so I said, Well, that’s a normal question. I said, no, Anderson, you know, I had I had prepared for this. I knew that if I ever had a shot, then I thought,. 

Scheer Wait a second.

McGovern Anderson, it was the heir to a fortune. Anderson is that pretty boy on CNN. And I said, Anderson, look, it was a real high. Let me tell you, prepare real questions. Ask them for real people. You’ll find it’s a real high. And he said, yeah, Mr. McGovern I’ll have my people get in touch with your people for tonight. I said, No, no, don’t do that, Anderson. Why not? I don’t have any people. No people. Just give me a call. I get on this program that night, 3 hours later. What is it? Off with Mr. McGovern, weren’t you afraid? As though everyone should be afraid, as Anderson Cooper has been afraid. So now he’s not afraid to tell the truth. That’s a good sign. Maybe Americans will come out. 

Scheer For people who didn’t watch that CNN, why don’t you summarize what happened? Because it was… 

McGovern It was Jim Sciutto, one of their big reporters, and Anderson interviewing him. And he and then later comes on General Hertling, who has been saying that Ukraine is, of course, going to win. And then who else? Well, that was Hertling and Sciutto. 

Scheer August 8th, last night, right? 

McGovern Yeah, just just last night. And people are kind enough to call my attention to these things. I don’t watch CNN, okay? Well, it’s really quite amazing. I had this some of the transcript here. Yeah, here it is. Sciutto. Jim Sciutto, you know, he’s the big CNN military reporter. It says, look, the losses have been tremendous in Ukraine and Western military sources and Western political sources just told us that this is really, really serious. They’re not going to be able to do much. Then Lieutenant General Mark Pershing doesn’t disagree. And he says now this is why the defensive is failing. Bah, bah, bah bah. The Russians, you know what the Russians did? They had it from October to build these three, three, three rings of defense, two anti-tank rings and big holes in the Russian lines. My God, mines, eight months they had to do that. And so it’s really a formal one saying, well, did somebody tell the Ukrainian army that this was what they would have to do? It’s just really great to watch to watch the U.S. urging the Ukrainians to spend their last Ukrainian on this completely unacceptable carnage and just die, die, die. It’s just really a very disappointing…. 

Scheer I tried it before, but I do want to do it now because, yes, you explain this, that these are careerists and they go to Ivy League schools and so forth. And I’m not going to disagree with some of that. However, a former General Eisenhower, President Eisenhower, maybe with the urging of his was he the head of the University of Pennsylvania, his brother… Huh? 

McGovern Johns Hopkins, I think.

Scheer Anyway, he gave that incredible speech very similar to the farewell address of another general term, President George Washington. And no one ever refers to his farewell speech, but warned us about the pretense the imposters of pretended patriotism. It actually was George Washington who warned us about that emerging military industrial complex. But Eisenhower was really clear. And I wonder whether that’s not more responsible than the careerism of Ivy League successful people, that a lot of money is being made for this. And this is NATO expansion. Also, all of these narrow governments now buy stuff from the Pentagon. You know, India was getting military stuff from Russia that’s going to go even if they’re not in Natal or don’t ever be brought in. But Naito is now replace the U.N. as the major thing. And it’s a military alliance and it’s aimed at now China and Russia and this military industrial complex that you work for. Maybe that’s a good way to wrap this all up, because the more things change, the more they’re the same, it seems to me. And the real winners of this whole thing are the people who benefit from an incredible increase in the military budget at a time when we thought, we’re going to have an earpiece. You work for president. The first President Bush, somebody I interviewed before he was president, he had been head of the CIA, but our ambassador to China. And he thought you could cut the military by 30, 40% right away. Donald Rumsfeld believed that when he went in to be editor of the Defense Department under the second Bush. Now, there’s no such talk, this talk. And here is a time when we’re seeing the effect of global warming, climate change. Instead of talking about cutting back on wasteful destruction and building a military, we are demanding that once, you know, neutral countries, Scandinavian or even Germany that said they wouldn’t go down the road, we’re demanding that they rearm and they rearm with ordnance that is consistent with the US Defense Department. Right. And this is Eisenhower’s nightmare become reality and no one seems to even talk about it. This is the real winner here, is the military industrial complex. 

McGovern Well, we need to talk about it, Robert. And we do. When Eisenhower warned about the accretion of power of the what he called the military industrial complex. He said there was only one antidote for that, and that was a well-informed citizenry. We ain’t got that, okay? We don’t have a well-informed citizenry. If we did, our well-informed citizenry would be talking about opportunity costs. You know, what does one F-35? That doesn’t really fly real well in the dark or in bad weather. What does it cost? $200 million? What can we do with that $200 million in our school district in our reaching out to people who are poor in one of those states? Okay. What can we do? That’s a that’s a that’s an opportunity cost now. The mother of all opportunity costs is Ukraine. Ukraine has diverted all attention from. Global warming. It’s actually stoked global warming. The US military is the biggest offender in some respects. And, you know, it’s deprived any any real chance, deprived all of us from doing what is absolutely essential, absolutely necessary that is working together. U.S., China, Russia to combat this long term problem. Now, you and I probably don’t have to worry about something like, you know, we all have children, we have grandchildren, for God’s sake, don’t these well-heeled people have grandchildren? Maybe they think they can stay inside their well gated communities. They can’t. Okay, so there’s lots to this. What’s going to happen now is that the military industrial complex, which I call the MICIMATT, let me spell that out for you. All right. Military, industrial, congressional, intelligence, media, academia, think tank complex. They all play an essential role. But the reason I say media, as if in all caps is because media is the linchpin. If you can’t have the media cooperating on this, you’re not able to do it. And who does? The media? Who is it owned by? The rest of the MICIMATT. Okay. So that’s one thing now. What’s going to happen when Ukraine loses? Okay. What’s going to happen? Let’s say we avoid nuclear war. Let’s pray for that. Okay. The previous president of Russia said, you guys in the West, you ought to pray that it doesn’t come to a nuclear war, because if you steal parts of Russian territory, it’s inevitable. That’s going to happen. He said that. Did Putin say it. No, Medvedev is the bad cop. Putin is the more reserved cop. Okay. What would they do it? Yes, they would do it for God’s sake. Do the people advising Biden know this? I don’t know. That’s what makes it so volatile. Last thing on this. How does Putin look at the people running on foreign policy and our military? He has said so. He was asked in October at this discussion club, Mr. President, the United States is taking on China now as well as taking on Russia and Ukraine. What do you make of that? And Putin said, well, you know, initially I thought there was some subtle plan or subtle logic to this, but I no longer think so. I think that crazy, crazy was the word he used. It can only be explained, said Putin, by arrogance and a feeling of impunity. Period. End quote. Now, I happen to agree with that. But it doesn’t matter what I think. It does matter what Putin thinks. 

Scheer What is the Russian word for crazy? 

McGovern Crazy, sumasshedshiy. Sum, is your mind, shed in which you’re walking out. So you’re walking out of your mind. Oh, no, you’re walking out. You’re walking out of your mind. Sumasshedshiy. Okay. And you know, they don’t use those words blithely. As I say. You could agree with that as I do. But one of the implications, for God sake, and that’s why after 60 decades, not 60 decades plus three, that you’ve been watching this situation, Robert, it’s after 60 years. I’m more afraid that it will come to a nuclear exchange than ever before. And it won’t be it won’t be unless the Russians think they’re losing. We told President Biden this on the 26th of January 2023. We said, look, Mr. Biden, you can’t have it both ways. You can’t avoid World War III and inflict a significant defeat on Russia. You have to have one. But if you have if you’re going to have them both, if Russia loses, I don’t think Russia is going to lose. But even if there’s only a 5% chance that their backs would be put up against the world to that degree. You know, I like to think that my grandchildren can live in a in a country that finally will address climate change and be able to survive. So this nice earth that we live on can be still livable. 

Scheer But, you know, we again, I’ve been promising myself to try to keep this under an hour, but we’re a minute, 2 seconds away from violating that. But. At this point, and I looked at the comments, when I’ve done things with you before and people will say so you, basically Ray McGovern just made an argument that we must always give in to the Russians because they have nuclear weapons. And yet and when we think about what kind of peace could come here, we’re in an impasse because you have the U.S. and Ukrainian position not an inch, right then used to say that about NATO expansion would not expand. But now no. Now they were even saying Crimea must be returned and no part of Ukraine. And then they put that down and you have, you know, much of what used to be called the Western world supporting that. And Russia saying they would not accept that. What is the path of peace here? 

McGovern Well, a good parallel, Robert, is the Cuban Missile crisis. I think I’ve shared with you earlier on that I was a second lieutenant Army infantry at Fort Benning in November, early November 1962, and there were no weapons in the Army Infantry Training Center at Fort Benning in October, early October 1962. Where were they? They were at Key West. They were ready to go into Cuba. That was the Cuban Missile Crisis. Okay. It was real. Do I think that Kennedy should have said, oh, okay, okay, Nikita Khrushchev, this is pretty good gamble you made. I’m not going to disturb these medium and intermediate range ballistic missiles that could reach Washington in 7 minutes and Omaha in 10 minutes, you can keep them, just please don’t use them. No, I don’t think that. I think Kennedy did the right thing. Now, did Kennedy break the law? Yes. Kennedy broke the law. What was it? Well, he instituted a blockade and you prevented the greater range ballistic missiles from getting to Cuba. Now, blockade, that’s illegal. He calls it a quarantine, but that doesn’t make it legal. What else did he do that? He assembled that force in Key West. Now, they might have been part of that if I entered active duty a little earlier and he threatened nuclear war. Now you’re not supposed to do that, U.N. Charter says you’re not supposed to do that. Did he do it? Yes, was he right in doing it? I believe he was right. So what am I saying, That he violated the law and that’s okay? Yeah, Because when you feel an existential threat to you, which is what I believe Kennedy felt with these missiles within, you know, seven, 10 minutes of key points in the United States, then if you can, you act forcefully. Now, what’s the parallel? We have missile sites in Romania and Poland that Russia cannot be sure what’s in those missile capsules. Okay. They could be cruise missiles. That means 10 minutes to Moscow. They could be eventually hypersonic missiles. And that means five minutes to Moscow. Okay. Do Americans know that? They don’t know it, but it’s it’s the truth. Okay. So here’s Putin looking at these things and well, we don’t know how to find out what’s in those things. We can’t we can’t find out what’s in those things. But we know they come in capsules that accommodate cruise missiles and other kinds of missiles. So it’s a danger, a danger to Moscow, a danger to our ICBM fleet in the western part of Russia. So what what does Putin do? Now, this is almost certainly something your audience doesn’t know. He calls up that is the Kremlin calls up the White House on the 30th of December 2021. Mr. Putin would like to talk to Mr. [Biden]. Now, wait a second. Our negotiators as agree. I mean. 

Scheer I missed a scene here. 

Click here to read the full transcript.

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Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, a publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in inner-city Washington. During his 27-year C.I.A. career he supervised intelligence analysis as Chief of Soviet Foreign Policy Branch, as editor/briefer of the President’s Daily Brief, as a member of the Production Review Staff, and as chair of National Intelligence Estimates. In retirement he co-founded Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS).

Featured image is from ScheerPost


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

by Michel Chossudovsky

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

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

Reviews

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

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

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

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In his message to the troops prior to the July 4th weekend, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin offered high praise indeed.

“We have the greatest fighting force in human history,” he tweeted, connecting that claim to the U.S. having patriots of all colors, creeds, and backgrounds “who bravely volunteer to defend our country and our values.”

As a retired Air Force lieutenant colonel from a working-class background who volunteered to serve more than four decades ago, who am I to argue with Austin? Shouldn’t I just bask in the glow of his praise for today’s troops, reflecting on my own honorable service near the end of what now must be thought of as the First Cold War?

Yet I confess to having doubts. I’ve heard it all before. The hype. The hyperbole. I still remember how, soon after the 9/11 attacks, President George W. Bush boasted that this country had “the greatest force for human liberation the world has ever known.” I also remember how, in a pep talk given to U.S. troops in Afghanistan in 2010, President Barack Obama declared them “the finest fighting force that the world has ever known.” And yet, 15 years ago at TomDispatch, I was already wondering when Americans had first become so proud of, and insistent upon, declaring our military the world’s absolute best, a force beyond compare, and what that meant for a republic that once had viewed large standing armies and constant warfare as anathemas to freedom.

In retrospect, the answer is all too straightforward: we need something to boast about, don’t we? In the once-upon-a-time “exceptional nation,” what else is there to praise to the skies or consider our pride and joy these days except our heroes? After all, this country can no longer boast of having anything like the world’s best educational outcomes, or healthcare system, or the most advanced and safest infrastructure, or the best democratic politics, so we better damn well be able to boast about having “the greatest fighting force” ever.

Leaving that boast aside, Americans could certainly brag about one thing this country has beyond compare: the most expensive military around and possibly ever. No country even comes close to our commitment of funds to wars, weapons (including nuclear ones at the Department of Energy), and global dominance. Indeed, the Pentagon’s budget for “defense” in 2023 exceeds that of the next 10 countries (mostly allies!) combined.

The United States spends more on defense than the next 10 countries combined

And from all of this, it seems to me, two questions arise: Are we truly getting what we pay so dearly for — the bestest, finest, most exceptional military ever? And even if we are, should a self-proclaimed democracy really want such a thing?

The answer to both those questions is, of course, no. After all, America hasn’t won a war in a convincing fashion since 1945. If this country keeps losing wars routinely and often enough catastrophically, as it has in places like Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq, how can we honestly say that we possess the world’s greatest fighting force? And if we nevertheless persist in such a boast, doesn’t that echo the rhetoric of militaristic empires of the past? (Remember when we used to think that only unhinged dictators like Adolf Hitler boasted of having peerless warriors in a megalomaniacal pursuit of global domination?)

Actually, I do believe the United States has the most exceptional military, just not in the way its boosters and cheerleaders like Austin, Bush, and Obama claimed. How is the U.S. military truly “exceptional”? Let me count the ways.

The Pentagon as a Budgetary Black Hole

In so many ways, the U.S. military is indeed exceptional. Let’s begin with its budget. At this very moment, Congress is debating a colossal “defense” budget of $886 billion for FY2024 (and all the debate is about issues that have little to do with the military). That defense spending bill, you may recall, was “only” $740 billion when President Joe Biden took office three years ago. In 2021, Biden withdrew U.S. forces from the disastrous war in Afghanistan, theoretically saving the taxpayer nearly $50 billion a year. Yet, in place of any sort of peace dividend, American taxpayers simply got an even higher bill as the Pentagon budget continued to soar.

Recall that, in his four years in office, Donald Trump increased military spending by 20%. Biden is now poised to achieve a similar 20% increase in just three years in office. And that increase largely doesn’t even include the cost of supporting Ukraine in its war with Russia — so far, somewhere between $120 billion and $200 billion and still rising.

Colossal budgets for weapons and war enjoy broad bipartisan support in Washington. It’s almost as if there were a military-industrial-congressional complex at work here! Where, in fact, did I ever hear a president warning us about that? Oh, perhaps I’m thinking of a certain farewell address by Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1961.

In all seriousness, there’s now a huge pentagonal-shaped black hole on the Potomac that’s devouring more than half of the federal discretionary budget annually. Even when Congress and the Pentagon allegedly try to enforce fiscal discipline, if not austerity elsewhere, the crushing gravitational pull of that hole just continues to suck in more money. Bet on that continuing as the Pentagon issues ever more warnings about a new cold war with China and Russia.

Given its money-sucking nature, perhaps you won’t be surprised to learn that the Pentagon is remarkably exceptional when it comes to failing fiscal audits — five of them in a row (the fifth failure being a “teachable moment,” according to its chief financial officer) — as its budget only continued to soar. Whether you’re talking about lost wars or failed audits, the Pentagon is eternally rewarded for its failures. Try running a “Mom and Pop” store on that basis and see how long you last.

Speaking of all those failed wars, perhaps you won’t be surprised to learn that they haven’t come cheaply. According to the Costs of War Project at Brown University, roughly 937,000 people have died since 9/11/2001 thanks to direct violence in this country’s “Global War on Terror” in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and elsewhere. (And the deaths of another 3.6 to 3.7 million people may be indirectly attributable to those same post-9/11 conflicts.) The financial cost to the American taxpayer has been roughly $8 trillion and rising even as the U.S. military continues its counterterror preparations and activities in 85 countries.

HUMAN COSTS The number of people killed directly in the violence of the post-9/11 wars in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, and elsewhere are estimated here. Several times as many more have been killed as a reverberating effect of the wars — because, for example, of water loss, sewage and other infrastructural issues, and war-related disease. Posted March 2023. Updated August 2023.

No other nation in the world sees its military as (to borrow from a short-lived Navy slogan) “a global force for good.” No other nation divides the whole world into military commands like AFRICOM for Africa and CENTCOM for the Middle East and parts of Central and South Asia, headed up by four-star generals and admirals. No other nation has a network of 750 foreign bases scattered across the globe. No other nation strives for full-spectrum dominance through “all-domain operations,” meaning not only the control of traditional “domains” of combat — the land, sea, and air — but also of space and cyberspace. While other countries are focused mainly on national defense (or regional aggressions of one sort or another), the U.S. military strives for total global and spatial dominance. Truly exceptional!

Strangely, in this never-ending, unbounded pursuit of dominance, results simply don’t matter. The Afghan War? Bungled, botched, and lost. The Iraq War? Built on lies and lost. Libya? We came, we saw, Libya’s leader (and so many innocents) died. Yet no one at the Pentagon was punished for any of those failures. In fact, to this day, it remains an accountability-free zone, exempt from meaningful oversight. If you’re a “modern major general,” why not pursue wars when you know you’ll never be punished for losing them?

Indeed, the few “exceptions” within the military-industrial-congressional complex who stood up for accountability, people of principle like Daniel Hale, Chelsea Manning, and Edward Snowden, were imprisoned or exiled. In fact, the U.S. government has even conspired to imprison a foreign publisher and transparency activist, Julian Assange, who published the truth about the American war on terror, by using a World War I-era espionage clause that only applies to American citizens.

And the record is even grimmer than that. In our post-9/11 years at war, as President Barack Obama admitted, “We tortured some folks” — and the only person punished for that was another whistleblower, John Kiriakou, who did his best to bring those war crimes to our attention.

And speaking of war crimes, isn’t it “exceptional” that the U.S. military plans to spend upwards of $2 trillion in the coming decades on a new generation of genocidal nuclear weapons? Those include new stealth bombers and new intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) for the Air Force, as well as new nuclear-missile-firing submarines for the Navy. Worse yet, the U.S. continues to reserve the right to use nuclear weapons first, presumably in the name of protecting life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. And of course, despite the countries — nine! — that now possess nukes, the U.S. remains the only one to have used them in wartime, in the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Finally, it turns out that the military is even immune from Supreme Court decisions! When SCOTUS recently overturned affirmative action for college admission, it carved out an exception for the military academies. Schools like West Point and Annapolis can still consider the race of their applicants, presumably to promote unit cohesion through proportional representation of minorities within the officer ranks, but our society at large apparently does not require racial equity for its cohesion.

A Most Exceptional Military Makes Its Wars and Their Ugliness Disappear

Here’s one of my favorite lines from the movie The Usual Suspects: “The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he did not exist.” The greatest trick the U.S. military ever pulled was essentially convincing us that its wars never existed. As Norman Solomon notes in his revealing book, War Made Invisible, the military-industrial-congressional complex has excelled at camouflaging the atrocious realities of war, rendering them almost entirely invisible to the American people. Call it the new American isolationism, only this time we’re isolated from the harrowing and horrific costs of war itself.

America is a nation perpetually at war, yet most of us live our lives with little or no perception of this. There is no longer a military draft. There are no war bond drives. You aren’t asked to make direct and personal sacrifices. You aren’t even asked to pay attention, let alone pay (except for those nearly trillion-dollar-a-year budgets and interest payments on a ballooning national debt, of course). You certainly aren’t asked for your permission for this country to fight its wars, as the Constitution demands. As President George W. Bush suggested after the 9/11 attacks, go visit Disneyworld! Enjoy life! Let America’s “best and brightest” handle the brutality, the degradation, and the ugliness of war, bright minds like former Vice President Dick (“So?”) Cheney and former Secretary of Defense Donald (“I don’t do quagmires”) Rumsfeld.

Did you hear something about the U.S. military being in Syria? In Somalia? Did you hear about the U.S. military supporting the Saudis in a brutal war of repression in Yemen? Did you notice how this country’s military interventions around the world kill, wound, and displace so many people of color, so much so that observers speak of the systemic racism of America’s wars? Is it truly progress that a more diverse military in terms of “color, creed, and background,” to use Secretary of Defense Austin’s words, has killed and is killing so many non-white peoples around the globe?

Praising the all-female-crewed flyover at the last Super Bowl or painting rainbow flags of inclusivity (or even blue and yellow flags for Ukraine) on cluster munitions won’t soften the blows or quiet the screams. As one reader of my blog Bracing Viewsso aptly put it: “The diversity the war parties [Democrats and Republicans] will not tolerate is diversity of thought.”

Of course, the U.S. military isn’t solely to blame here. Senior officers will claim their duty is not to make policy at all but to salute smartly as the president and Congress order them about. The reality, however, is different. The military is, in fact, at the core of America’s shadow government with enormous influence over policymaking. It’s not merely an instrument of power; it is power — and exceptionally powerful at that. And that form of power simply isn’t conducive to liberty and freedom, whether inside America’s borders or beyond them.

Wait! What am I saying? Stop thinking about all that! America is, after all, the exceptional nation and its military, a band of freedom fighters. In Iraq, where war and sanctions killed untold numbers of Iraqi children in the 1990s, the sacrifice was “worth it,” as former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright once reassured Americans on 60 Minutes.

Even when government actions kill children, lots of children, it’s for the greater good. If this troubles you, go to Disney and take your kids with you. You don’t like Disney? Then, hark back to that old marching song of World War I and “pack up your troubles in your old kit-bag, and smile, smile, smile.” Remember, America’s troops are freedom-delivering heroes and your job is to smile and support them without question.

Have I made my point? I hope so. And yes, the U.S. military is indeed exceptional and being so, being #1 (or claiming you are anyway) means never having to say you’re sorry, no matter how many innocents you kill or maim, how many lives you disrupt and destroy, how many lies you tell.

I must admit, though, that, despite the endless celebration of our military’s exceptionalism and “greatness,” a fragment of scripture from my Catholic upbringing haunts me still: Pride goeth before destruction and a haughty spirit before a fall.

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William J. Astore, a retired lieutenant colonel (USAF) and professor of history, is a TomDispatch regular and a senior fellow at the Eisenhower Media Network (EMN), an organization of critical veteran military and national security professionals. His personal substack is Bracing Views.

Featured image: Pentagon by Thomas Hawk is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0 / Flickr

Calf Days and Rationed Broadcasting: FIFA Women’s World Cup

August 14th, 2023 by Dr. Binoy Kampmark

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FIFA is a funny organisation. Mafia-run, obscenely corrupt, it governs the most popular game on the planet with a shameless, muscular vigour that must make other criminal enterprises green with envy. But even its members must find the curious limitations to viewing matches of the 2023 Women’s World Cup being held in Australia and New Zealand odd, especially given the organisation’s efforts to promote the appeal of the game.

Billed as the most popular women’s tournament ever, Australians have been rationed in their share of viewable matches. A mere 15 matches are available from the free-to-air service on Channel Seven. If you do fork out for a subscription to the extortionists at Optus Sport, then you can view all 64 matches for a monthly fee of A$24.99. Existing Optus customers have the pleasure of viewing the matches at the cost $A6.99.

Those attending in person have not disappointed the organisers, and figures have been supremely healthy in both countries, with Australia doing particularly well. But the broadcasting pay wall has baffled the supporters of various national sides.

When a very entertaining Nigeria advanced to the knockout stages of the tournament, supporters in Australia found their options for viewing the match against England spare. “Many people have been looking forward to watching the game with England, but not everybody can afford to pay for Optus Sports,” the complained the frustrated chairperson of the Nigerian Association of Western Australia, Dr Pedrus Eweama. “But there’s a limit to what we can do, it’s just part of policy … it’s very disappointing.”

Expatriates from other countries living in Australia were also bemused. A UK citizen living in Melbourne, Alex Read, found it odd that his friends and family back in the old country could enjoy all the games on free to air platforms, live television or the BBC iPlayer. “I get that football is a bigger sport in the UK than it may be in Australia, but that should be irrelevant. You’re not going to show the Olympics and not show the whole thing for live view.” Well, not unless you are in Australia, where broadcasting is stunningly tribal.

True to form, supporters of the Australian side, the Matildas, have little reason to be concerned about any impending paywall. Channel Seven has rights to broadcast all their matches without charge. But their broadcasting has been, for the most part, ordinary, platitudinous and stifled by cliché. During the Australia-France quarterfinal held in Brisbane, a remark from one of the mathematically challenged commentators stood out: “There have been 50,000 eyes looking on tonight.” Given the presence of 50,000 attendees, it can only be presumed that 25,000 one-eyed, Cyclopean wonders had stumbled their way into the Suncorp Stadium to witness the Australian victory after a brutally draining penalty shootout.

The viewing arrangements meant that only subscribers could watch the England-Colombia quarterfinal being held in Sydney later in the evening, which furnished those in attendance a thrilling 2-1 spectacle with the England Lionesses prevailing. The next day, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation made footnote references to the match, focusing with almost exclusive adulation on the achievements of the home side’s efforts against France. That England remains a firm favourite to win the tournament has been all but scratched from the narrative.

For sports journalist and presenter Lucy Zelić, this seemed to conform to a disturbing pattern in the field of football broadcasting down under. “From the technological disaster with SBS and Optus in 2018, to the limited offering of free-to-air matches for the 2019 Women’s World Cup, history has had an unfunny way of repeating itself.” The limited offerings on Australian soil were all the more galling given that each of the 32 countries being represented at the tournament “has a proud community living in Australia.”

None of this was helped by the fact that the Women’s World Cup, despite being held on home soil, was not placed on a protected list of salient sporting tournaments that prevent them from falling into the cosmos of pay television. Such Australian anti-siphoning laws, passed in 1992, were not used to cover the tournament as it was deemed, according to Zelić, not “to be ‘nationally important’ or ‘culturally significant’ for the Australian public”. Those occupying the portfolio of Communications Minister have been far from sharp in that regard.

The problem was a microcosm of the broader challenges of broadcasting that seemed to have plagued this tournament. Even before a ball was kicked, a spat arose between the head of FIFA, Gianni Infantino, and public service providers in five European countries over the cost of broadcasting rights. Infantino was particularly miffed by offerings of US$1 million and US$10 million for the rights, compared with US$100 million to US$200 million for the men’s tournament.

The other tournament story that seemed to suck up the oxygen of discussion has been the cultish obsession with Sam Kerr’s injured calf muscle, which has come to resemble the miracle bone of a medieval saint. Was the injury mild, severe, or even crippling? The delicate wonder has featured in press conferences, cod psychology and the circles of endless punditry. Seen as one of the most potent strikers in women’s football, the Australian has been confined to meandering on the sidelines and releasing words of undisclosed wisdom to her teammates like a sagacious witchdoctor.

In the match against France, Kerr finally made a lengthier show, though the weight of the team in the tournament has been borne with exuberant audacity largely by the likes of Caitlin Foord and Mary Fowler. Because of their efforts, and those of goalkeeper Mackenzie Arnold, the team has reached their first World Cup semi-final. At least Channel Seven will broadcast it, if poorly.

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

Featured image: View of Stadium Australia before the kickoff to the 2022 NRL Grand Final (Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0)

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180 fully COVID-19 vaccinated Canadian doctors have died suddenly or unexpectedly since the rollout of COVID-19 mRNA vaccines – let’s look at ALL DEATHS of all ages during 2019-2022:

Deaths

  • 2019: 463 (doctor deaths all ages)
  • 2020: 542 (+17% vs 2019)
  • 2021: 618 (+33% vs 2019)
  • 2022: 714 (+54% vs 2019)
  • Conclusion: Doctor excess mortality was +54% in 2022 vs 2019 and still rising!

All Deaths Under 30 Years Old 

  • 2022: 6 deaths
  • 2019-2020 average: 0.5/year
  • Conclusion: Excess mortality age < 30 was +1100% higher in 2022 vs 2019-2020 average

All Deaths Under 40 Years Old 

  • 2022: 11 deaths
  • 2019-2020 average: 2.5/year
  • Conclusion: Excess mortality age < 40 was +340% higher in 2022 vs 2019-2020

Causes of Death

  • Proper autopsies done: 0/180
  • For the following, we are dealing with incomplete or limited information:
  • Turbo Cancer: 42/180 (23%)
  • Suicide: 11/180 (probably more)
  • Exercise: 11/180 (3 swim, 2 hike, 2 mountaineer, 2 running, 1 cycle, 1 ski)
  • Died in Sleep: 6/180
  • Accident: 5/180 (2 car accident, 2 fall)
  • Stroke: 2/180
  • Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (Prions): 1/180
  • Died Suddenly NOS (not otherwise specified): 102/180 (most will be cardiac arrests or heart attacks, a few will be due to blood clots in lungs/pulmonary emboli, aneurysms, neurological injuries or other unusual causes)

Conclusion

Canadian doctors complied with COVID-19 vaccine mandates, and now face an excess mortality of 54% in 2022 which is heavily skewed towards younger physicians, with the youngest doctors under age 30 dying at +1100% excess mortality.

There were 11 deaths while exercising and 6 deaths while sleeping – I believe most of these were due to COVID-19 vaccine induced myocarditis and cardiac arrest, or heart attack.

Of the 180 sudden or unexpected deaths of practicing doctors 42/180 or 23% were cancers, most appear to be turbo cancers, but not all. This is much higher than I expected.

From the limited information, at least 11 doctors died due to suicide and I suspect most (or all) of these are due to neurological injury caused by COVID-19 vaccine spike protein expression and accumulation in the brain.

Canadian Medical Association, which runs full page Pfizer ads in its monthly CMA Journal, has been actively covering up the deaths of their own doctor members since September 3, 2022, when I first alerted them to these sudden deaths. After three letters I sent to CMA Presidents and their legal and media teams, to date I have not received any response in return.

We need proper autopsies of every unexplained sudden death of a doctor (or any healthcare worker), and we will never get them. 

Meanwhile, Canadian doctors are not waking up to what’s been done to them and many will be lining up for their 6th COVID-19 vaccine in the fall.

No one can say I didn’t try.

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Dr. William Makis is a Canadian physician with expertise in Radiology, Oncology and Immunology. Governor General’s Medal, University of Toronto Scholar. Author of 100+ peer-reviewed medical publications.

Featured image is from Children’s Health Defense


The Worldwide Corona Crisis, Global Coup d’Etat Against Humanity

by Michel Chossudovsky

Michel Chossudovsky reviews in detail how this insidious project “destroys people’s lives”. He provides a comprehensive analysis of everything you need to know about the “pandemic” — from the medical dimensions to the economic and social repercussions, political underpinnings, and mental and psychological impacts.

“My objective as an author is to inform people worldwide and refute the official narrative which has been used as a justification to destabilize the economic and social fabric of entire countries, followed by the imposition of the “deadly” COVID-19 “vaccine”. This crisis affects humanity in its entirety: almost 8 billion people. We stand in solidarity with our fellow human beings and our children worldwide. Truth is a powerful instrument.”

ISBN: 978-0-9879389-3-0,  Year: 2022,  PDF Ebook,  Pages: 164, 15 Chapters

Price: $11.50 FREE COPY! Click here (docsend) and download.

We encourage you to support the eBook project by making a donation through Global Research’s DonorBox “Worldwide Corona Crisis” Campaign Page

Turning Point in the Ukraine War

August 14th, 2023 by Karsten Riise

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***

US Media now confirm that Russia is advancing on the city of Kupyansk in Kharkov region – and is poised to take it. See this.

We talk about a Ukrainian evacuation not only of Kupyansk, a major railway hub, but of Ukraine evacuating in total 53 settlements in the region. With 100,000 Russian troops in the region, and ever-thinner Ukrainian reserves, this is going to be a big Russian offensive – and defeat for Ukraine. As usual, Ukraine will fight their losing position to the last Ukrainian, after which the subsequent Russian victory and advance in Ukraine will only be even larger.

I wrote 10 August 2023 to a number of my recipients, that this is a turning point in the Ukraine war. Ukraine is exhausting its offensive capabilities without having achieved anything, and Russia is now moving to take a strategic city. After that, everything will only get worse and worse for Ukraine.

As for the linked New York Times article’s talk of Russian “torture”, that is unsubstantiated, unlike Ukraine use of torture. Ukraine’s SBU uses thugs to torture and scrape the white out of the eyes of their victims with a toothpick, threatening to put the toothpick into his eye to blind him. Just have a listen to Gonzalo Lira, who is a US citizen right now in the torture-custody of the Ukrainian SBU.

No, Gonzalo didn’t make it to the Hungarian border. Gonzalo, who has a heart condition, is now facing 5-10 years imprisonment and near-certain death in Ukrainian prison for using his free speech. This is how prisons work in US “friendly countries” like the “democratic” Ukraine. The US embassy of course does nothing for their own citizen Gonzalo Lira detained for a free-speech “crime”. US media is silent too about the fate of their fellow countryman Gonzalo Lira. After all, US media are affiliated with the US deep state which for decades and decades runs a whole school in Fort Benning where they instruct fascist paramilitaries like the SBU how to do torture and commit these things.

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Karsten Riise is a Master of Science (Econ) from Copenhagen Business School and has a university degree in Spanish Culture and Languages from Copenhagen University. He is the former Senior Vice President Chief Financial Officer (CFO) of Mercedes-Benz in Denmark and Sweden.

He is a regular contributor to Global Research.  

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***

 

 

 

This is what is happening now in Maui… This may be part of the fear apparatus, but also of Agenda 2030 and the Great Reset: targeted destruction of property, causing poverty, misery and in many cases death. 

The underlying environmental modification technologies (ENMOD) are amply documented. Are they being applied?

Maui, a paradise island, might be bought for pennies on the dollar… privatized paradise for the powerful financial interests.  

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Featured image is from The Dossier

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In a recently unearthed video of the College of Global Public Health Center for Bioethics at New York University Director, Dr. Matthew Liao, speaking at the 2016 World Science Festival, he openly advocates artificially inducing a red meat allergy in the entire human population, using an analog of the algha-gal molecule found in the Lone Star Tick that I have documented previously at Armageddon Prose, so as to fight “climate change.”

“People eat too much meat. And if they were to cut down on their consumption on meat, then it would actually really help the planet.

But people are not willing to give up meat. Some people will be willing to, but other people – they may be willing to but they have a weakness of will. They say ‘this steak is just too juicy, I can’t do that.’ I’m one of those by the way.

So here’s a thought. So it turns out that we know a lot about — we have these intolerances… For example, I have a milk intolerance. And some people are intolerant to crayfish. So possibly we can use human engineering to make the case that we’re intolerant to certain kinds of meat, to certain kinds of bovine proteins

There’s this thing called the Lone Star tick where if it bites you, you will become allergic to meat… So that’s something we can do through human engineering. We can possibly address really big world problems through human engineering.”

This level of evil – openly plotting to trigger autoimmune disease in humans without their consent at the population level – is nearly unspeakable.

At the same forum, Liao advocated “editing” humans to become “so small that we get eaten by cats,” again for the sake of “climate change.”

Were these psychopaths to succeed with this and any of their many other bioengineering projects under the guises of Public Health™, fighting “climate change,” etc., then nothing the Third Reich did, or even fantasized doing in Dr. Mengele’s wildest dreams, to the undesirables would remotely compare.

This is a war – of a different kind than we have seen historically – “unrestricted warfare,” as the CCP calls it — but a war nonetheless. As such, we need Nuremberg II now. People like Matthew Liao are not civilians; they must be reclassified as enemy combatants and given military tribunal trials.

I don’t know how this is going to be politically feasible, given the highly controlled and totally compromised political machine in the US and across the West, “penetrated” by the WEF, in the words of Klaus Schwab, as they are.

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This article was originally published on Armageddon Prose.

Ben Bartee, author of Broken English Teacher: Notes From Exile, is an independent Bangkok-based American journalist with opposable thumbs. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from The Daily Sceptic

China vs. Taiwan – A Constant US Provocation

August 14th, 2023 by Peter Koenig

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***

Background

China has strongly condemned the US for arranging a visit by Taiwanese Vice President William Lai. Beijing says it will take resolute and forceful measures to safeguard its national sovereignty and territorial integrity.

The Chinese Foreign Ministry says Beijing is firmly opposed to any form of official exchanges between the US and Taiwan. It also labeled Lai a “downright troublemaker”. Lai is a vocal separatist and the frontrunner in Taiwan’s presidential elections next year. He is officially making transit stops in the US en route to and from Paraguay.

China claims Taiwan as its own territory. Washington does not have formal diplomatic relations with the island, but maintains close ties with the territory and is its most important international source of weapons.

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PressTV: How do you see this non-stop provocation by the US? Will there be a point when China says enough is enough?

Peter Koenig (PK): Of course, China is opposed to official political exchanges between the US and Taiwan because Taiwan is an integral part of Mainland China. The US is well aware of this but uses this bone of contention for constant provocation with official visits to Taiwan – case in point, Pelosi and other US Congress People; or inviting Taiwanese “political officials” to the US – but foremost, the US delivering weaponry to Taiwan, is just intolerable.

If Taiwanese Vice President Lai wants to make a private stop-over in New York or Washington, on his way from or to Paraguay, that is his affair. But an official stop, meaning meetings with US political leaders, is a no-go.

It is an absolute infraction against diplomacy 101. It just heightens the conflict even more. This is even against international law, if we only still had international law. International Law has been overruled by the self-styled Masters of the Universe – principally the US and Europe – and replaced by what they call a “Rules-based Order”.

In other words, whatever suits this elitist cabal is Law.

But back to delivering weapons to a self-ceded section of a country, in this case Taiwan from mainland China, is a crime.

In this case it might as well be considered a crime against humanity. Because this endless tension and war provocation has prompted already numerous dangerous military maneuvers and exercises in the South China Sea, and the Taiwanese people are heavily under stress. I know that personally from conversations with many Taiwanese.

What the Biden Administration does apparently not realize is that this non-stop provocation of Beijing will and is already backfiring. Because already today a large proportion of Taiwanese citizens, some say more than half the Taiwanese population, wants to integrate as soon as possible into Mainland China to stop the provocations – the fear from war, from aggression which is due only to US provocations and hassles.

What is inevitable – and every US Administration knows it – is that Taiwan sooner or later will be integrated peacefully into Mainland China. Hopefully sooner.

Already today, there are many direct relations, irreversible relations between Taiwan and China – business relations, joint scientific research, as well as investments from mainland China in Taiwan and vice-versa.

The recent – again US incited – “chips fiasco” is a case in point.

Taiwan chip manufacturers have built plants in mainland China and Chinese investments in chip manufacturing are going to Taiwan. The cooperation is irrevocable.

Also, in terms of labor exchange, daily thousands of people from Taiwan work in mainland China and to some extent vice-versa.

The link between the two parts of the same China is irreversible.

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Peter Koenig is a geopolitical analyst and a former Senior Economist at the World Bank and the World Health Organization (WHO), where he worked for over 30 years around the world. He lectures at universities in the US, Europe and South America. He writes regularly for online journals and is the author of Implosion – An Economic Thriller about War, Environmental Destruction and Corporate Greed; and co-author of Cynthia McKinney’s book “When China Sneezes: From the Coronavirus Lockdown to the Global Politico-Economic Crisis” (Clarity Press – November 1, 2020).

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

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***

Hawaii fire survivor & witness offers testimony to what she saw: 

“This was not a natural disaster!”

Click here to view the video

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The Jab or Not the Jab: Tactics and Strategy in an Irregular War

By Dr. Emanuel Garcia, August 13, 2023

Those of us in the ‘resistance’ or ‘opposition’ — we skeptics who question and have questioned the covidian debacle and all of its accoutrements — seem inevitably to fall into discussions about the Jab.

Ukrainian Soldiers Underestimated Russia – Western Media

By Lucas Leiroz de Almeida, August 13, 2023

Apparently, the Ukrainian armed forces were not aware of the defense capabilities of the Russian Federation, having underestimated the enemy during the counteroffensive. According to an article recently published by CNN, Ukrainian soldiers did not expect their opponents to be so efficient on the battlefield, which is supposed to explain why Kiev’s counteroffensive was so overrated – and is now being so criticized for its irrelevant results.

Ukraine “Aid” in Perspective. A Huge Addition to “Defense Spending”

By Karsten Riise, August 13, 2023

It’s interesting to see the Ukraine aid in percent of GDP. Even for the US, it amounts to one-third of a percentage of total GDP. But it’s not only a big burden on the total economies of the West. It’s also a huge addition to total defense spending on top of NATO’s goal of 2% of GDP.

World Sliding Toward WW3 as More Warhawks Grab Power in Washington DC

By Drago Bosnic, August 13, 2023

It’s hardly breaking news that there are numerous warhawks among the political elites in Washington DC. These people have been behind every instance of (geo)political instability initiated by the United States, be it illegal coups, civil wars, invasions, etc, all of which resulted in an exponential exacerbation of the supposed “problem” they were seemingly designed to “resolve”.

COVID mRNA Vaccines: Two Pilot Incapacitations

By Dr. William Makis, August 13, 2023

Aug. 9, 2023 – United Airlines UAL1309 SRQ-EWR pilot had a heart attack, lost consciousness in flight; Aug. 7, 2023 TigerAir IT237 (CTS-TPE) Japan to Taiwan co-pilot collapsed

Niger: Italian PM Giorgia Meloni Goes Viral After Niger Coup

By Peter Koenig, August 13, 2023

In a literal assault on France for their usurpation of Niger’s and the 13 other former French West and Central African colonies’ wealth, Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni blasted France especially President Macron about the shameless and continuous imposition of the French backed franc CFA in these countries.

“The US will strengthen its occupation of Syria, while plundering oil resources”, Interview with Glenn Diesen

By Prof. Glenn Diesen and Steven Sahiounie, August 13, 2023

The Obama administration began the US military occupation of Syria in November 2015. Obama sold the public on the idea of fighting ISIS, but in reality military personnel of Syria, Russia, Iraq and Iran were already on the group and ultimately defeated ISIS in Syria.

Inglorious Politics: The Hunter Biden Problem

By Dr. Binoy Kampmark, August 13, 2023

In May last year, the Washington Post ran a fairly typical piece about what the paper perceives as an unjustified conservative mania regarding President Joe Biden’s son. While those in the US worried “about such things as inflation and the war in Ukraine, the top concerns of congressional Republicans can be ranked roughly as follows: 1) Hunter Biden; 2) Hunter Biden; 3) Hunter Biden; 4) Hunter Biden.”

Agent Zelensky: Ukraine on Sale

By Manlio Dinucci, August 12, 2023

“Zelensky relaunches the war on corruption. “Zero tolerance against corrupts and against those who get rich with war”: this is the title of the daily newspaper L’Avvenire giving the image of a simple and honest President who renounces any privilege and fights corruption.

Smallpox War Against British Columbia’s Indigenous Peoples: Gussying Up Colonialism?

By Tom Swanky and Kim Petersen, August 11, 2023

Colonialism has as its aim gaining ownership/control of the land and its resources regardless of whether or not the land was already populated by an Indigenous people. Morality aside, colonialism has been very successful in the context of Turtle Island. This is also true in northwestern Turtle Island, where the colonies designated “Vancouver Island” and “British Columbia” (merged in 1866 to become a province of Canada) were created through the dispossession of First Nations.

Ukrainian Soldiers Underestimated Russia – Western Media

August 13th, 2023 by Lucas Leiroz de Almeida

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***

Apparently, the Ukrainian armed forces were not aware of the defense capabilities of the Russian Federation, having underestimated the enemy during the counteroffensive. According to an article recently published by CNN, Ukrainian soldiers did not expect their opponents to be so efficient on the battlefield, which is supposed to explain why Kiev’s counteroffensive was so overrated – and is now being so criticized for its irrelevant results.

The article was written by on the ground reporters, war correspondents who interviewed Ukrainian troops to find out their opinion on what is happening in the frontlines. In the text, the interviewees unexpectedly “admitted” to have underestimated the Russian opponents, virtually assuming responsibility for the failure of the counterattack.

“It won’t be as easy as in [Russia’s tactical retreat from] Kharkiv. Here the enemy was ready, unfortunately. Everybody chatted for months that we would move here (…) We expected less resistance. They are holding. They have leadership. It is not often you say that about the enemy”, a tank unit commander named “Lotos” told CNN’s journalists. Also, “Vlad”, “a medic with the 15th National Guard”, stated: “You shouldn’t honor the enemy (…) But don’t underestimate him”.

The article, however, also shows some optimism about the future of the counteroffensive. It is said that the Ukrainians already learned “not to underestimate their enemy” and now they can do something really efficient, despite the difficulties. Interviewees claim that there is a kind of “thirst for revenge” that motivates them to keep fighting, which is why “CNN saw a palpable improvement in morale”.

Julia, another military medic interviewed by CNN, states that her colleagues are optimistic about the future of the offensive, since “revenge” and “hatred” would be motivating them. According to her, now there is a different optimism, possibly more realistic, knowing the enemy’s capacity, but still very strong, since the Ukrainians are enthusiastic about the possibility of attacking, as they spent more than 18 months just defending themselves. She says, for example, that the wounded soldiers she takes care of are eager to return to the front and resume their duties as their “thirst for revenge is very strong”.

“We are still optimistic but not as we used to be. Assaulting is emotionally easier. It was very hard standing in defense for 18 months (…) They (wounded Ukrainian troops) know it’s not going to be the same – they won’t be in the assault squad. But they want to come back. Because thirst for revenge is very strong. Hatred is very strong”, she said.

It is curious to read this type of information in the Western media when, on the other side, prisoners of war captured by the Russians claim that they learned about the existence of a “counteroffensive” through TikTok, since their officers had not told them anything on the battlefield. There is clearly an inconsistency between the data. Soldiers who were not aware of the counteroffensive cannot have overestimated the attack or underestimated the enemy. They did not even know what they were doing to have any critical assessment of the topic.

CNN’s interviewees speak as if they were to blame for military failure, when in fact those responsible for calculating the chances of victory are not military personnel on the frontlines, but intelligence officers who have access to sensitive data about the enemy. What seems most likely is that the media is manipulating the reports made by the sources saying that there were errors in calculating the possible results of the counteroffensive, blaming the Ukrainians and trying to clean up their own image.

Along with Ukrainian state officials, the Western media were primarily responsible for spreading the narrative that a large-scale attack was being planned by Kiev. Western journalists overestimated this alleged attack more than any Ukrainian military and now they seem to be trying to save their own credibility by bringing new “explanations” about what supposedly prevented the move from succeeding.

Furthermore, it is hard to believe that there really is so much motivation and high morale among the Ukrainian troops after so many recent defeats. What has been seen in recent months is a series of pessimistic statements by the Ukrainian military, with fewer and fewer people believing in any possibility of victory. In fact, the tendency is that territorial losses and battlefield defeats generate deterioration of credibility, moral discouragement and capitulation, not “thirst for revenge”.

In this sense, it seems more likely that the Western media itself is initiating a new propaganda campaign, focused on asserting that there will be a new wave of counterattacks in the near future, which is supposed not to repeat the errors of the previous one. An indication of this is the fact that in the article CNN journalists also made some criticisms of the NATO’s weapons sent to Ukraine, stating that they are “donated” ones, “not always kept at NATO service standards”. This appears to be a psychological move to convince public opinion that what has been sent to Kiev so far is still “not enough” for the counteroffensive to succeed, and there needs to be more efficient, lethal weapons in the military aid packages.

In the end, the Western media outlets seem to be doing once again what they have been doing throughout the entire conflict: encouraging war, demanding more weapons and trying to disguise their own analytical errors.

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Lucas Leiroz is a journalist, researcher at the Center for Geostrategic Studies, geopolitical consultant. You can follow Lucas on Twitter and Telegram.

Featured image is from InfoBrics

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***

It’s interesting to see the Ukraine aid in percent of GDP. Even for the US, it amounts to one-third of a percentage of total GDP. But it’s not only a big burden on the total economies of the West. It’s also a huge addition to total defense spending on top of NATO’s goal of 2% of GDP.

Source: The Washington Post

And it’s not surprising to see Denmark with more than half a percentage of GDP on top of the Ukraine spending list, right after the Baltic states and Poland.

Denmark is always the reliable camp-follower of the US. Invade Iraq – Yes, sir! Make a nuclear missile base in Greenland? Of course.

No matter what the US says and does, Denmark jumps.

But it’s also interesting to see how Ukraine has taken the lead in US military concerns above everything else – including even Israel and Taiwan.

Source: The Washington Post

With a US population of 340 million, the $ 66.2 billion in US aid for US is nearly $ 200 for every American, from newborn to pensioner. A US family of 5 have spent $ 1,000 dollars for Ukraine – for nothing. That is a lot, considering that 34 million Americans, incl. 9 million children, are “food insecure” – that is, often go to bed hungry due to lack of money for food.

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Karsten Riise is a Master of Science (Econ) from Copenhagen Business School and has a university degree in Spanish Culture and Languages from Copenhagen University. He is the former Senior Vice President Chief Financial Officer (CFO) of Mercedes-Benz in Denmark and Sweden.

He is a regular contributor to Global Research.  

Featured image is from InfoBrics

All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the Translate Website button below the author’s name.

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***

Because there is so much personal anguish, unhappiness, and human mental and physical suffering in the world, many people often wonder how they might personally change to find happiness, contentment, or some elusive something. Or even how to change other people, as if that arrogant illusion could ever work.

This question of significant personal change is usually couched within the context of narrow psychological analyses. This is very common and is a habit of mind that grows stronger over the years. People are reduced to their family upbringings and their personal relationships, while the social history they have lived through is dismissed as irrelevant.

The United States is very much a psychological society. Sociological and historical analyses are considered insignificant to people’s identities. It’s as if economics, politics, culture, and propaganda are beside the point.

Yes, it is often admitted that circumstances, such as illness, death, divorce, unemployment, etc. affect people, but such circumstances are not considered central to who people are and whom they become. These matters are rarely seen contextually, nor are connections made. They are considered inessentials despite the fact that they are always connected to larger social issues – that biography and history are intertwined.

In writing about what he termed the sociological imagination, C. Wright Mills put it clearly when he described it as

“the idea that the individual can understand his own experience and gauge his own fate only by locating himself within his period, that he can know his own chances in life only by becoming aware of those of all individuals in his circumstances. In many ways it is a terrible lesson; in many ways a magnificent one.”

Without learning it, one cannot know who one is or whom one might become if one chose to change and were not just blown by the winds of fate.

We now live in a digital world where the uncanny nature of information pick up sticks is the big game. Uncanny because most people cannot grasp its mysterious power over their minds.

What was true in 1953 when Ray Bradbury penned the following words in Fahrenheit 451, is exponentially truer today:

Cram them full of non-combustible data, chock them so damn full of ‘facts’ that they feel stuffed, but absolutely ‘brilliant’ with information. Then they’ll feel they’re thinking, they’ll get a sense of motion without moving. . . . Don’t give them any slippery stuff like philosophy or sociology to tie things up with. That way lies melancholy.

That it is all noise, all signal – no silence. That it prevents deep reflection but creates the habit of mental befuddlement that is consonant with the mental derangement of the mainstream media’s 24/7 news reports.

When almost everything you hear is a lie of one sort or another, it becomes barely possible to keep your wits about you.

These bits of bait are scattered all over the mind’s floor, tossed by an unknown player, the unnameable one who comes in the night to play with us. Their colors flood the mind, dazzle and razzle the eye. It is screen time in fantasy-land.

This summer’s two hit movies – “Oppenheimer” and “Barbie” – while seemingly opposites, are two sides of this same counterfeit coin. Spectacles in The Society of the Spectacle as Guy Debord put it:

The spectacle is a social relation between people that is mediated by an accumulation of images that serve to alienate us from a genuinely lived life. The image is thus an historical mutation of the form of commodity fetishism.

“Oppenheimer,” while concentrating on the man J. Robert Oppenheimer who is called “the father of the atomic bomb,” omits the diabolic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as if there were no innocent victims, while “Barbie” plays the coy game of satirizing the doll that celebrates women as sex objects while advertising its same sex doll status. It’s just great “fun.” Colorful salt water taffy for a summer hoot. “Little Boy” meets sexy sister in the land of dreams where existential crises lead to expanded consciousness. Yes, Hollywood is the Dream Factory.

There is so much to attend to, multi-colored tidbits begging to be touched carefully, to grab our full consideration as we delicately lift them into the air of our minds. So many flavors. Call it mass attention disorder order or paranoia (beside the mind) or digital dementia. The names don’t matter, for it is a real condition and it is widespread and spreading madly. Everyone knows it but represses the truth that the country has become a comic book travesty sliding into quicksand while bringing the world down with it.

“Oppenheimer” plays while a mumbling and bumbling U.S. President Biden pushes the world toward nuclear annihilation with Russia over Ukraine.

“Barbie” struts on her stilettos while men receive guidance from the CDC on “chest feeding” and millions of young people are not sure what sex they are.

What’s up?

It’s all noise, all signal – no silence.

The instinct of self-defense has disappeared. “Not to see many things, not to hear many things, not to permit many things to come close,” this, Nietzsche told us, is the instinct of self-defense. But we have let all our defenses down because of the Internet, cell phones, and the digital revolution. We have turned on, tuned in, and dropped into computerized cells whose flickering bars note signal strength but not mental bondage. Not the long loneliness of distant signals barely heard, but “Cause” what Rodriquez sings for us:

Cause my heart’s become a crooked hotel full of rumours
But it’s I who pays the rent for these fingered-face out-of-tuners
and I make 16 solid half hour friendships every evening

It’s all noise, all signal – no silence.

I recently had the arduous task of reviewing nearly fifty years of a writer’s personal journals. The thing that stood out to me was the repetitive nature of his comments and analyses of people he knew and the relationships he had. His political, literary, and historical comments were insightful, and his keen observations into the decades long diminution of the belief in existential freedom captured well the growing domination of today’s deterministic ethos with its biological emphasis and its underlying hopeless nihilism. But it was also very clear that the people he wrote about were little different after forty to fifty years. Their situations changed but they did not – fundamentally. They were encased in long-standing carapaces that protected them from change and choices that would force them to metamorphosize or undergo profound metanoias. Most of them saw no connection between their personal lives and world events, nor did they seem to grasp what William James, in writing about habits, said,

“if we suffer the wandering of our attention, presently it will wander all the time. Attention and effort are … but two names for the same psychic fact.”

The notebooks, of course, were one man’s observations.  But they seemed to me to capture something about people generally.  In the notes I took, I summarized this by the words “social addiction,” a habit of living and thinking that has resulted in vast numbers of people locked in their cells, confused, totally bamboozled, and in despair.  This condition is now widely recognized, even by the most unreflective people, for it is felt in the gut as a dazed death-in-life, a treading of water waiting for the next disaster, the next bad joke passing for serious attention.  It is impossible to fail to recognize, if not admit, that the United States has become a crazy country, mad and deluded in the worst ways and leading the world to perdition on a fool’s dream of dominance and delusions.

How People Change by Allen Wheelis | Goodreads

The psychoanalyst Allen Wheelis, an intriguing writer who questioned his own profession, put it well in his 1973 book How People Change:

Often we do not choose, but drift into those modes which eventually define us. Circumstances push and we yield. We did not choose to be what we have become, but gradually, imperceptibly, became what we are by drifting into the doing of those things we now characteristically do. Freedom is not an objective attribute of life; alternatives without awareness yield no leeway… Nothing guarantees freedom. It may never be achieved, or having been achieved, may be lost. Alternatives go unnoticed; foreseeable consequences are not foreseen; we may not know what we have been, what we are, or what we are becoming. We are the bearers of consciousness but of not very much, may proceed through a whole life without awareness of that which would have meant the most, the freedom which has to be noticed to be real. Freedom is the awareness of alternatives and of the ability to choose. It is contingent upon consciousness, and so may be gained or lost, extended or diminished.

He correctly warned that insight does not necessarily lead to change. It may help initiate it, but in the end the belief in freedom and the power of the will is necessary. This has become harder in a society that has embraced biological determinism as a result of decades of propaganda. Freedom has become a slogan only.  We have generally become determined to be determined.

To realize that one has choices is necessary and that not to decide is to decide. Decisions (from Latin de = off and caedere = to cut) are hard, for they involve deaths, the elimination of alternatives, the facing of one own’s death(s) with courage and hope. The loss of illusions. This too has become more difficult in a country that has jettisoned so much of the deep human spirituality that still animates many people around the world whom the U.S. government considers enemies.

Such decisions also involve the intellectual honesty to seek out alternative voices to one’s fixed opinions on a host of public issues that affect everyone’s lives.

To recognize that who we are and who we become intersect with world events, war, politics, the foreign policies of one’s country, economics, culture, etc.; that they cannot be divorced from the people we say we are. That none of us are islands but part of the main, but when that main becomes corporate dominated mainstream news pumped into our eyes and ears day and night from little machines, we are in big trouble.

To not turn away from what the former CIA analyst Ray McGovern calls this propaganda machine – the Military-Industrial-Congressional-Intelligence-Media-Academic-Think Tank Complex (MICIMATT) – is a choice by default and one of bad faith in which one hides the truth from oneself while knowing one is doing so.

To not seek truth outside this complex is to deny one’s freedom and to determine not to change even when it is apodictic that things are falling apart and all innocence is being drowned in a sea of lies.

It’s all noise, all signal – no silence.

Change begins with desire, at the personal and public level. It takes courage to face the ways we have all been wrong, missed opportunities, shrunk back, lied, refused to consider alternatives. Everyone senses that the U.S. is proceeding down a perilous road now. Everything is out of joint, the country heading for hell.

I recently read an article by Timothy Denevi about the late writer Joan Didion who, together with her husband John Gregory Dunne, was at the Royal Hawaiian Hotel in Honolulu in June 1968 when Senator Robert F. Kennedy, who was assassinated in Los Angeles a few days previously, had died. The thing that struck me in the article was what Didion described as the sickening indifference of so many vacationers to the news about RFK’s death and funeral. Because television reception was sketchy in Hawaii, Didion and Dunne, not Kennedy supporters, were only able to watch a three-hour ABC taped special on June 8 that covered the assassination, funeral, and train ride of the body to Arlington Cemetery as millions of regular people kept vigil along the tracks. A television had been set up on a large veranda where guests could watch this taped show. But few vacationers were interested; the opposite, actually. It angered them that this terrible national tragedy was intruding into their vacations. They walked away. It seemed to Didion and Dunne that something deep and dark was symbolized by their selfish indifference. As a result, Didion suffered an attack of vertigo and nausea and was prescribed antidepressants after psychiatric evaluation. She felt the 1960s “snapping” as she too snapped.

I think those feelings of vertigo and nausea are felt by many people today. Rightly so.

The U.S.A. is snapping. It is no longer possible to remain a normal person in dark times like these, no matter how powerfully that urge tempts us. Things have gone too far on so many fronts from the Covid scam with all its attendant deaths and injuries to the U.S. war against Russia with its increasing nuclear risks, to name only two of scores of disasters. One could say Didion was a bit late, that the snapping began in Dallas, Texas on November 22, 1963 when President Kennedy was assassinated by the CIA. As Billie Joel sings, “J.F.K. blown away, what more do I have to say?” And why was he assassinated? Because he changed dramatically in the last year of his life to embrace the role of peacemaker despite knowing that by doing so he was accepting the real risk that he would be killed. He was courage and will personified, an exceptional example of radical change for the sake of the world.

So I come back to my ostensible subject: Do people change?

The short answer is: Rarely. Many play at it while playing dumb.

Yet is does happen, but only by some mixture of miracle and freedom, in an instant or with the passing of time where meaning and mystery can only exist. Where we exist. “If there is a plurality of times, or if time is cyclic,” the English writer John Berger muses, “then prophecy and destiny can coexist with freedom of choice.” Time always tells.

The last entry in the writer’s notebooks that I reviewed was this:

I read that Kris Kristofferson, whose music I love, has said that he would like the first three lines of Leonard Cohen’s “Bird on a Wire” on his tombstone:

Like a bird on the wire
Like a drunk in a midnight choir
I have tried in my way to be free

It seemed apposite.

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

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

On November 25, 2021, Fidel Castro Ruz passed away. His legacy will live forever.  

Fidel was born on August 13, 1926

Today August 13, 2023, we commemorate Fidel’s Birthday

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“There are men who struggle for a day and they are good. There are men who struggle for a year and they are better. There are men who struggle many years, and they are better still. But there are those who struggle all their lives: These are the indispensable ones.” — Bertolt Brecht

“Fidel! Fidel! Que tiene Fidel que los americanos no pueden con él!” (Fidel! Fidel! What is it that he has that the U.S. imperialists can’t defeat him!) — Cuban Revolutionary chant

August 13 marks the birthday of Fidel Castro Ruz, the historic leader of the Cuban Revolution.

Progressive, anti-war and social justice forces across the world will join in the celebration of the life of one of the world’s most influential and significant leaders. It is especially worthwhile and necessary to mark and valorize the life and times of a man whose heart, without missing a beat, has withstood more than 600 assassination attempts by U.S imperialism.

Fidel’s life and legacy loom large in world history and development. Fidel is part and parcel of the wave of the anti-colonial, national liberation and social emancipation struggles that swept Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean in the second half of the 20th century. Fidel is integral to the Cuban-born and international revolutionary and anti-imperialist tradition, theory and practice, stretching through the Taino cacique, Hatuey, Toussaint L’Overture, Simon Bolivar, José Martí, Karl Marx, Vladimir Lenin, Mao Zedong and Ho Chi Minh, among others.

Fidel does not transcend Cuba and history, as some have opined, but, instead, is ineluctably and organically bound to the deepest aspirations of the Cuban people and the demands of the times. Fidel belongs to the world. He does not stand above or outside life. Flesh and blood, brain and bone, he exemplifies the finest traditions of humanity.

His life encapsulates the struggle of the exploited and oppressed, epitomizing, as articulated by U.S. political prisoner Mumia Abu Jamal, “their historic power to transform our dull realities.”

The significance of Fidel extends beyond the geographical boundaries of Cuba. Since its inception, the Cuban Revolution has made an invaluable contribution to the global struggle for justice, social development and human dignity. Under Fidel’s leadership Cuba has established an unparalleled legacy of internationalism and humanitarianism, embodying the immortal words of José Martí: “Homeland is Humanity. Humanity is Homeland.” In southern Africa, for example, more than 2,000 Cubans gave their lives to defeat the racist apartheid regime in South Africa. Mandela never forgot. After he was released from prison, one of the first countries outside of Africa and the first country in Latin America that he chose to visit was Cuba.

Today this commitment to humanity is mirrored in the tens of thousands of Cuban medical personnel and educators who have served and continue to serve around the world. This service sees them battling in the trenches against disease and illiteracy, running the gamut from combating the Ebola outbreaks in west Africa to beating back other challenges to public health in southern Africa. No less important is the training inside Cuba of medical cadres from Asia, Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean as well as North America (including African-American communities from the largest U.S. cities).

Fidel was only 26 when on July 26, 1953 he led a group of courageous young men and women in the attack on the Moncada Barracks in the city of Santiago de Cuba, and the Carlos Manuel de Cespedes Barracks in Bayamo, an unsuccessful but valiant effort to overthrow the U.S.-supported puppet dictator Fulgencio Batista. Moncada was a catalyst for the revolutionary struggle to free Cuba from U.S. tutelage and establish authentic independence. Fidel has epitomized the unbending commitment to justice, dignity and independence that has characterized Cuba since the triumph of the Cuban Revolution on January 1, 1959, leading Cuban resistance against the unjust and genocidal economic, commercial and financial blockade imposed on the island by Washington.

No words can adequately convey the singular meaning of Fidel. By holding aloft the banners of Socialism, Justice, Peace, Internationalism and Human Dignity, the Cuban Revolution, led by Fidel, demonstrates that a better world is possible. On October 16, 1953 at his trial following the Moncada attack, Fidel laid out his vision of national independence and social justice, declaring, “Condemn me, it does not matter, history will absolve me.” Since those historic words and the subsequent unfolding of events, in a world fraught with intense challenges and dangers, history has not only absolved Fidel but also vindicated the meaning and legacy of his life.

This article was first written on Fidel’s 90th birthday

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It’s hardly breaking news that there are numerous warhawks among the political elites in Washington DC. These people have been behind every instance of (geo)political instability initiated by the United States, be it illegal coups, civil wars, invasions, etc, all of which resulted in an exponential exacerbation of the supposed “problem” they were seemingly designed to “resolve”. Such warhawks are oftentimes so shamelessly belligerent that they don’t even bother concealing their openly planned war crimes under the guise of the mythical “moral high ground” used by other more subtle Washington DC warmongers.

It’s important to note that their style has always been preying on the weak, as these warmongers mostly focus on bringing the wanton “freedom and democracy” to those unable to retaliate or at least defend themselves. Direct attacks are unmistakably preceded by economic warfare (primarily sanctions) and “isolation” by the so-called “international community”, that is, the political West and its vassals and satellite states. After all, those are the countries “that matter”, the much-touted “garden”, while the rest of the world (or better said, the actual world) is “simply a jungle”, as EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell (in)famously stated.

And yet, in recent years, the warhawks have become so overconfident that they don’t even consider the possibility of engaging in actual diplomacy (unless arm-twisting is considered “diplomatic”), not even with countries that have the means of bringing all the “freedom and democracy” the US “exports” back to it. This includes not only “pocket superpowers” such as North Korea, but also geopolitical giants wielding unprecedented military and/or economic might, such as Russia and China, the two only near-peer adversaries to the United States. Such dangerous trends in American politics are only getting worse.

Namely, as if there weren’t enough war criminals in Washington DC, the US government is becoming a virtual hive of such power circles. Infamous neoconservatives such as John Bolton, Michael McCaul and Lindsey Graham, whose political influence has become dangerously powerful, are now getting significant backup that includes rabid Russophobes and Sinophobes such as Victoria Nuland and USAF General Charles Brown. Such warhawks are now gaining even more influence, meaning that America’s foreign policy is set to become more belligerent than ever before (if that’s even imaginable to most people).

In early October last year, John Bolton, former US National Security Advisor, infamous for his insistence on invading Venezuela, Iran and North Korea or escalating the ongoing war of aggression against Syria, Libya, Yemen, etc, openly stated that Russian President Vladimir Putin is on the US target list and threatened he might be assassinated. And while his directly visible political influence may seem to be dwindling, Bolton’s close associates are grabbing more power than ever. Namely, he was one of the most prominent members of the infamous Washington DC-based think tank known as the Project for the New American Century (PNAC).

PNAC’s main focus was making the already extremely belligerent US foreign policy even more aggressive. One of the original founders of the now-defunct think tank was Robert Kagan, notorious for being one of the strongest proponents of America’s aggression against the world. There’s not a single war Kagan hasn’t supported. Worse yet, he regularly and deliberately spreads disinformation in order to speed up wars, as evidenced by his unadulterated lies in years before the illegal US invasion of Iraq. Kagan is the husband of Victoria Nuland, who was directly involved in the illegal Maidan coup that resulted in the war in Donbass that killed upwards of 15,000 people by early 2022.

She was recently promoted to acting Deputy Secretary of State by President Biden, placing her in one of the most influential positions in the State Department, second only to Secretary of State Antony Blinken. It should be noted that while Nuland was serving in the Obama administration, one of her phone calls with the then US ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt was leaked. In February 2014, she told Pyatt that Arseniy Yatsenyuk will become the new prime minister of Ukraine, which he did that same month. During the call, she also clearly expressed her stance on the significance of the European Union in decision-making when it comes to the political West’s foreign policy.

Nuland was one of the architects of the Neo-Nazi junta’s seizure of power in Ukraine, making her directly responsible for the ongoing hostilities. She also supported both US terrorist attacks on the Nord Stream pipelines and the setting up of military biolabs in Ukraine. Her no less aggressive ally Lindsey Graham also actively took part in pushing Ukraine into a bloodbath, while also calling it the “best money we’ve ever spent” because “Russians are dying”. He is also notorious for actively calling for US aggression in Mexico. The strong influence of such warhawks exponentially raises the possibility of a world-ending thermonuclear confrontation.

Unfortunately, this isn’t only limited to the political establishment.

Namely, the Senate Arms Services Committee recently voted to confirm General Charles Brown as the next Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, replacing Mark Milley.

He is adamant that the US confrontation with China in the Asia-Pacific is inevitable and that Washington DC should further militarize the area. Coupled with resurgent Neo-McCarthyism that also includes congressman McCaul’s insistence on direct confrontation for semiconductors, as well as calls for placing Taiwan under the US nuclear umbrella, this is bound to put America on a collision course with China.

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Drago Bosnic is an independent geopolitical and military analyst.

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