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First published on May 21, 2023
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‘Net Zero’, what does it mean? Does anyone know? Who dreamt-up this slogan?
Put together, these two words don’t actually have any meaning. ‘Net’ is usually used as a shortened form of ‘netto’ (netto/brutto) a term used in accountancy describing a sum of money remaining after tax or expenses have been deducted.
So what could ‘Net Zero’ possibly mean? That nothing will be left once zero carbon has been achieved?
The term seems to ape, no doubt for good reason, the one chosen to describe the blackened hole in the ground left after the devastation of 9/11: Ground Zero.
Look at it this way, by reducing carbon dioxide to nil (zero carbon) all plant life dependent for its growth on this natural gas, will die. By extension, all humans and animals dependent upon the oxygen that plants produce, via the conversion of carbon dioxide into oxygen, will also die. Basic biology reveals that is indeed the case.
So what the inventors of ‘Net Zero’ seem to be suggesting is that the objective is to end all plant, animal and human life by 2050. Or have I got something wrong? Have ‘they’ quietly dropped CO2 as the arch baddie of the past three decades – and are now trying to make simple ‘carbon’ the source of all our woes?
This is, after all, what they did by surreptitiously shifting ‘global warming’ into ‘climate change’ a couple of decades ago. A classic slight of hand by the cabal spin doctors.
Let’s scrutinise the history a little more thoroughly. The World Economic Foundation (WEF) is acting as lead player of the project known as ‘Stop Global Warming’. A project which states that a deadly form of anthropogenic ‘warming’ is being caused by the burning of fossil fuels, and that the stated need is therefore to completely dispense with all fossil fuels by 2050.
But doing a little elementary research reveals that what one sees coming out of factory chimneys, in ubiquitous media photographs, is not CO2. It is mostly water vapour, plus nitrous oxides, carbon monoxide, methane, water vapour and various forms of particulates, with noxious CO2 forming less than 5% of these emissions.
This corroborates with scientific tests done on the composition of the upper atmosphere, which find that man made CO2 makes a contribution of just 0.04% above natural atmospheric CO2.
So what the perpetrators of ‘net zero’ are doing is to take an essential component of nature, without which neither we nor plant life could survive, and make it into a demon, responsible for causing catastrophic changes to the world’s climate.
This is, of course, an outrageous conclusion to come to; but should its outrageousness cancel out its logic? Could it be that all two thousand ‘scientists’ employed by the International Commission on Climate Change’ (IPCC) failed to get a pass in biology at secondary school – and then went on to become Emeritus experts on climate change?
The fact is that ‘Net Zero’ is telling us that ‘we the people’ are to be wiped-out, along with the flora and fauna of the planet; while the elite cabal running this deception racket have created their own unique CO2 subterranean storage ecosphere, of thriving plants, pure water and all the nutrients needed to carry on pretty much as before. Maybe better?
If psychopaths form a majority of the cabal that runs this planet – and that looks probable – then announcing that The Great Reset/Green New Deal has adopted ‘Net Zero’ by 2050, has a certain logic. Because to a psychopath, sentient people are strange unreal beings, their emotions and feelings being incomprehensible and alien.
Therefore, looked at from the perspective of the psychopath, among the first thing to be done to ‘save the planet’ would be to find a good reason to get rid of the anthropogenic (human) causal agent behind the ‘destruction of the planet’ wouldn’t it?
But in the meantime, Mr Schwab and his aspiring team of henchmen want us ‘to be happy’, and have therefore found it helpful to remove all our private property and wealth and keep it for themselves – once the depopulation process is well enough advanced and provided there is little or no resistance to their ploy forthcoming.
Our ‘happiness’ will of course, be due to the fact that Herr Schwab and his main advisor Noah Yuval Harari, have studied the bible, and taken note of the words of Jesus Christ “It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of Heaven.”
So they will kindly do the removal of the riches job for us, liberating us from our private wealth and therefore releasing us from the material ties that prevent us attaining a higher state of consciousness.
One can see by uncle Klause’s patronising attitude to his hand picked dictators that he is proud of having found such a convenient way of opening heaven’s gates for humanity and thereby simultaneously ‘saving the world from global warming’.
Killing two birds with one stone is a sought after achievement for the soulless psychopath.
Achieving ‘Net Zero’ must be done with a smile. After all, making people believe that ‘to save the world’ they must first of all abandon their accustomed diets and instead chew on greatly superior laboratory raised and processed chicken thighs, garnished with a sprinkling of ground insect bodies and a special side dish of genetically modified hydroponically raised tomatoes – may not be easy. So a big American style smile should do the trick.
However a frown may be necessary to convey the seriousness of the fact that if cows are allowed to remain part of the farm animal kingdom, their survival will depend upon wearing Covid style ‘methane blocking’ masks recently awarded a special environmental prize by King Charles 111 for their contribution to slowing global warming.
But ‘a smile’ may once again be necessary to convey the fact that farmers who tend the fields are to be replaced by armies of robots, leaving the human element to be ‘cared for’ by 5/6G powered Smart Cities. Places in which every need will be catered for, by an all seeing all doing digitalised electro magnetic grid known as the ‘internet of things’. An electro magnetically charged version of Big Brother which will monitor human activities 24’7 and no doubt administer a sharp shock on anyone who steps out of line.
All this, you understand, is just the precursor for we ‘non psychopaths’ to be upgraded into chipped and cloned cyborgs, known as Transhumans.
Selling this one may not be so difficult, as the sales slogan will be “Let us do your thinking for you.” And since a rather significant proportion of mankind seems largely incapable of meaningful thought, it may be quite easy to sell them the added convenience of letting a piece of tech take over what’s left of the onerous task of having to activate one’s brain cells.
By 2050 these Transhumans will be needed as servants in the psychopaths’ underground palaces. The psychos having drained the planet of oxygen and having already killed-off a large percentage of humans via weaponised vaccines and a plethora of special laboratory designed diseases.
Not a pretty tale to tell, I’m afraid. But can anyone categorically tell me I’ve got it all wrong? That it is not the elite cabal dream goal to have a clinically sterilized and ‘purified planet’ by 2050 – in what amounts to a kind of ‘eugenics of man and nature’?
Is this the image that Net Zero is supposed to conjure-up? To sufficiently incite us to give-up our lives for whatever it is supposed to stand for? Ground Zero mark 2?
There are demons on the loose. They thrive on chaos and fear. They muddle-up greenhouse gases, methane, carbon and whatever other elements of nature they can sell as speeding-up the arrival of Armageddon. It’s a sort of game – in which, at any time, any one factor can be pointed-up as the evil agent of planetary destruction.
They get their greatest kicks form subverting the trajectory of human life into becoming the reverse of what evolution intends. They like to distort language and the meaning of words so as to create a twisted version of reality.
Thus, ‘Net Zero’ is a diabolical agenda sold as a saviour formula.
But once we know this, we are more than half way towards defeating it. Awareness is the crucial first step of our collective liberation.
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Julian Rose is an early pioneer of UK organic farming, writer, international activist, entrepreneur and holistic teacher. He is Co-founder of the Hardwick Alliance for Real Ecology HARE https://hardwickalliance.org/ Julian’s latest book ‘Overcoming the Robotic Mind – Why Humanity Must Come Through’ is strongly recommended reading for this time: see www.julianrose.info
Worldwide, people have been misled both by their governments and the media as to the causes and devastating consequences of the Covid-19 “pandemic”.
The unspoken truth is that the novel coronavirus provides a pretext and a justification to powerful financial interests and corrupt politicians to precipitate the entire World into a spiral of mass unemployment, bankruptcy, extreme poverty and despair.
The evidence confirms that there is an insidious and carefully designed project formulated by the upper echelons of the financial establishment.
According to Prof. Michel Chossudovsky’s analysis of the history, estimates and underling scientific concepts, the so-called pandemic is “A Pack of Lies”.
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This video was initially published by Vimeo more than a year ago, prior to launching of the vaccine.
It was taken down on March 5, 2022 as an act of censorship directed against Global Research.
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Followup Reading
For an in-depth analysis of the Corona Crisis crisis see Michel Chossudovsky’s E-Book (Ten Chapters) entitled:
Michel Chossudovsky is an award-winning author, Professor of Economics (emeritus) at the University of Ottawa, Founder and Director of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG), Montreal, Editor of Global Research.
He has undertaken field research in Latin America, Asia, the Middle East, sub-Saharan Africa and the Pacific and has written extensively on the economies of developing countries with a focus on poverty and social inequality. He has also undertaken research in Health Economics (UN Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC), UNFPA, CIDA, WHO, Government of Venezuela, John Hopkins International Journal of Health Services (1979, 1983)
He is the author of 13 books including The Globalization of Poverty and The New World Order (2003), America’s “War on Terrorism” (2005), The Globalization of War, America’s Long War against Humanity (2015).
He is a contributor to the Encyclopaedia Britannica. His writings have been published in more than twenty languages. In 2014, he was awarded the Gold Medal for Merit of the Republic of Serbia for his writings on NATO’s war of aggression against Yugoslavia. He can be reached at [email protected]
The alleged killing of Osama bin Laden, which fittingly occurred in his “mansion” within 1,000 yards of a Pakistani military training academy, could signal the winding down of the biggest psychological warfare operation ever prosecuted by the global oligarchy.
What follows is a three-part investigation of 911 excerpted from my book, Big Oil & Their Bankers in the Persian Gulf: Four Horsemen, Eight Families & Their Global Intelligence, Narcotics & Terror Network.
The Patsies
In the wake of the 911 terror attacks, Americans everywhere recited the collective mantra, “Things will never be the same”. Actually things had changed very little.
Fifteen of the nineteen alleged hijackers were born in Saudi Arabia, where the House of Saud dictatorship has financed Muslim Brotherhood modern-day Assassins and CIA covert operations since its inception for the benefit of the Eight Families banking cartel and their Four Horsemen – whose ARAMCO oilfields are protected via US military occupation of the Kingdom.
The Assassins this time were members of al Qaeda, the cadre of former Afghan mujahadeen fighters that the CIA trained, then used to carry out proxy wars in Bosnia, Kosovo, Albania, Macedonia, Chechnya, Dagestan, Indian Kashmir, East Turkistan Province in China, Russia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Kyrgyzstan, Somalia, Algeria and Uzbekistan. The CIA brought al Qaeda spiritual leader and Anwar Sadat assassin Sheik Abdul Rahman to the US to recruit Islamic fundamentalists willing to fight in these CIA wars. [1]
Al Qaeda was headed by Osama bin Laden, who built the CIA’s mujahadeen training camps in Afghanistan. Bin Laden was House of Saud point man in recruiting Arab fighters for CIA shenanigans in Central Asia and the Balkans. Bin Laden’s brother Salem was a business partner and good friend of James Bath. His father Mohammed provided seed money for Bath’s good friend George W. Bush’s Arbusto Energy. The bin Laden family fortune was managed by Carlyle Group principal George Bush Sr.
According to a PBS spokeswomen, within three days of 911 both Vice-President Dick Cheney and Queen Elizabeth II called PBS to request copies of two video documentaries the station had done – one on bin Laden and the other on Islam.
Since US intelligence knew all it needed to know of their foot soldier bin Laden, Cheney and Her Majesty were more concerned with what the US public had already been told of the Saudi paymaster so they could factor this into their forthcoming public relations blitz.
Bin Laden’s second in command Ayman al-Zawahiri heads Egyptian Islamic Jihad – a Muslim Brotherhood front whose assassins had help from the CIA in escaping justice in Egypt so they could go to Albania to fight with the Kosovo Liberation Army. Al-Zawahiri’s sidekick Ali Mohammed came to the US in 1984. He trained terrorists in Brooklyn and Jersey City on weekends and instructed US Special Forces at Fort Bragg. [2] He was later involved in the US Embassy bombings in Africa.
According to the FBI, five of the nineteen alleged 911 hijackers were trained by the US military – three at Pensacola Naval Air Station and two at other facilities. [3]
Alleged 911 ring leader Mohammed Atta received the $100,000 he needed to plan and carry out the terror attacks from Standard Chartered accounts in gold bullion haven Dubai – where US Naval vessels often berth. Standard Chartered was founded by the Illuminated Cecil Rhodes. The bank is one of five London “gold-fixers” and prints Hong Kong’s currency. These accounts were controlled by 911 paymaster and UAE citizen Mustafa Ahmed al-Hawsawi.
According to British MP Michael Meacher in an article for The Guardian, M16 recruited up to 200 British Muslims to fight in Afghanistan and Yugoslavia. Meacher says a Dehli-based foundation describes Omar Saeed Sheikh – the man who beheaded US journalist Daniel Pearl in 2002 – as a British agent.
Meacher says it was Sheikh who – at the behest of Pakistani ISI General Mahmood Ahmed – had al-Hawsawi wire $100,000 to Mohammed Atta before 911, a fact confirmed by Dennis Lomel, director of the FBI’s financial crimes unit. [4] An October 11, 2001 article in The Times of India also corroborates this.
At a June 25, 2002 conference in Calgary, University of Ottawa Economics Professor Michel Chossudovsky and former Los Angeles police officer Michael Ruppert further corroborated this information based on ABC News reports.
They added that ISI Chief Ahmad was in Washington on September 4, 2001 meeting with CIA Director George Tenet, Assistant Secretary of State Richard Armitage, Senator Joe Biden (D-DE) and the heads of two Congressional intelligence committees. [5]
The New York Times reported on February 17, 2002 that the two congressmen Ahmed met with were Joint Senate Intelligence Committee Co-Chairs, Florida Senators Bob Graham and Porter Goss. Goss is a former CIA operative and was appointed Bush Jr. CIA Director in 2004.
When President Clinton and Defense Secretary Cohen had earlier pressed UAE officials to crack down on the al Qaeda money shuffle, a senior UAE sheik told them it was difficult to discern between criminal money and that going to fight CIA proxy wars in Bosnia and Chechnya. [6]
Ruppert cited a BBC report by Gregg Palast that details how the Bush Administration ordered curtailment of an FBI investigation of the bin Laden family. Minneapolis FBI whistle-blower Colleen Rowley and Robert Wright – who worked for the bureau in Chicago – described the same unnamed superior who “obstructed”, “deliberately thwarted” and “intimidated” their attempts to track down US-based al Qaeda operatives.
Wright was investigating an al Qaeda money laundering ring based in Chicago that may have been plugged into the Nugan Hand/Bank of Cicero/CIA/P-2 black network based in Chicago – often disguising its dirty transactions via the freewheeling Chicago Mercantile Exchange.
Chossudovsky stated his belief that 911 served the US in its quest to control both Central Asian oil supplies and the Afghan opium trade. He told the Calgary crowd,
“Osama bin Laden is and remains to this day a CIA asset. Even now his al Qaeda operatives are working with the Kosovo Liberation Army who are US allies and with the US-backed forces in Macedonia. Members of al Qaeda have been protected as they moved into Kashmir where they are now fomenting conflict between India and Pakistan.”[7]
Many of the alleged hijackers were in the country on legitimate US visas. Most were issued at the US consulate in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. According to Mike Springmann, Chief of the Visa Section at Jeddah during the late 1980’s, CIA officials ran roughshod over the visa operation, often overruling Springmann’s decisions not to issue visas to people he considered dangerous. Often CIA officials would stamp the questionable applicants’ visas themselves in clear violation of US law. [8]
Bush blocked Secret Service investigations into US-based al-Qaeda terrorist “sleeper” cells while he continued to negotiate secretly with Afghan Taliban officials. The last meeting, headed by Bush NSA and former Unocal official Zalmay Khalilzad, was in August 2001, just five weeks before the terror attacks. [9] The Unocal-led consortium offered the Taliban, through current Afghan President Hamid Kharzai, $100 million to run its natural gas pipeline from Turkmenistan to the Indian Ocean. The Bush team offered additional aid to the Taliban, whom they’d already given over $132 million in 2001, and told them, “You either accept our offer of a carpet of gold, or we bury you under a carpet of bombs.”[10]
Considering the history of CIA/Four Horsemen/Eight Families treachery in the Middle East and the toll these schemes have taken on the Arab world, one could easily interpret 911 as an Arab response to US imperialism. The trouble is that explanation defies the facts.
Mohammed Atta’s father, a prominent Cairo physician, said his son was afraid of flying and insists that he was not a trained pilot. Atta believes his son was kidnapped and made a patsy by the Israeli Mossad. He believes Israelis used his son and the other 18 Arabs’ identities as cover to carry out the 911 plot because this would turn Americans against the Arab world, enhance the Israeli bargaining position vis-à-vis the Palestinians and draw the US further into the Middle Eastern cauldron. Atta’s father stated, “This was done by Mossad using American pilots.”
Lending credence to the doctor’s charges is the assertion that the official passenger flight logs for all four American and United flights that became fuel-air bombs on 911 listed no Arab passengers. [11] The Dallas Morning News reported that in July 2001 a federal task force pulled the plug on over 500 Arab websites in the US when they raided InfoCom Corporation in Texas. Did the Feds want to silence cyber-chat concerning the actual whereabouts of the “hijackers”? Reports emerged from the Arab world that many of them had been sighted after 911.
According to Daniel Hopsicker who wrote, Welcome to Terrorland…, Mohamed Atta began working for the US government in Hamburg in 1992. He was later enrolled in an elite officer training course at Maxwell Air Force Base in Montgomery, AL. Hopsicker says Atta had pilot licenses from six countries and wonders why, except to establish a paper trail, he would even have needed to attend flight school. [12]
Atta spoke Hebrew, snorted coke and lived with a stripper. He met with various German and Swiss nationals just prior to 911 and was part of an email discussion on the Middle East that included numerous employees of US defense contractors. Atta and up to seven other 911 hijackers had received flight training at US military facilities.
Most interestingly, Atta was part of an elite international exchange program run by the American/German Congress-Bundestag Program – an organization with close ties to both David Rockefeller and Henry Kissinger. The group funded Atta trips to Istanbul, Cairo and Damascus; where he played the role of Islamic fundamentalist. [13]
Rep. Curt Weldon (R-PA) wrote in his 2005 book that two weeks after 911 he presented a chart to the Bush Administration showing that Atta and other hijackers were being monitored as part of the Pentagon’s Able Danger program. In September 2006 the Pentagon Inspector General put out a statement denying Atta’s existence on this chart. An infuriated Weldon stated, “I am appalled that the DOD IG would expect the American people to actually consider this a full and thorough investigation”. [14]
The Florida flight school where the 911 hijackers trained was Huffman Aviation – co-owned by Bill Clinton chum Wally Hilliard and Rudy Dekkers, who met with Atta less than one month prior to 911. One Huffman employee told Hopsicker, “Early on I gleaned that these guys had government protection…They were let into the country for a specific purpose. It was a business deal.”
Huffman’s hangar at Venice Airport is used to maintain the planes of Caribe Air, a known CIA-front airline which had twenty of its planes seized by federal authorities at Mena, AR after they were found to have curried billions of dollars worth of contra cocaine. Hopsicker says Caribe could also be tied to Enron, since many of that now-defunct company’s Caribbean tax shelters had the word “Caribe” in their name. 15]
The Beneficiaries
While much of the Arab world’s mainstream media echoed Atta’s father’s viewpoint, all US media – corporate and progressive alike – dismissed these claims as “outrageous conspiracy theories”. Yet no one could deny that Israel gained a great deal from the 911 attacks. Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon – wanted in Belgium for war crimes – began targeting Palestinian leaders for assassination as soon as Bush took office, causing US public support for Israel to wane.
Sharon used 911 to turn the tide, labeling all Palestinians, “bin Laden terrorists”, and occupying yet more Palestinian territory. Bush sent General Anthony Zinni to Tel Aviv as Middle East envoy to lend legitimacy to Sharon’s aggression, while refusing to deal with Palestinian President Yasser Arafat. The Samuel Huntington CFR Clash of Civilizations crowd had their pretext for a global war against Arabs and Muslims.
US defense giants reaped the 911 harvest. In October 2001 Lockheed Martin led a consortium of corporations awarded the largest single defense contract ever – a $200 billion deal to build an F-35 joint strike fighter. The Lockheed-led group included Northrup Grumman and several British companies including British Aerospace and Rolls Royce. [16] Amidst the post-911 flag-waving frenzy, the all-American bidder McDonnell Douglas would have seemed a more discretionary choice.
Defense stocks surged. Raytheon stock was up 36% in the month following 911 while the rest of the stock market crashed. The hawks and their generals pushed for huge Pentagon budget increases, some advocating a $500 billion defense budget by 2005. In January 2002, President Bush approved a defense budget of $317 billion. Three weeks later he increased it to $379 billion, while setting a marker for a $471 billion defense budget by 2007.
The money will line the pockets of the Eight Families banking cartel which owns the defense companies, pockets already deepened by Bush tax cut and the subsequent increase in US debt – which the international bankers make a healthy living financing. Their point man Bush – cousin to the House of Windsor – saw his dismal approval ratings skyrocket to over 80% as a fear-driven US public rallied around the Four Horsemen President.
The Rockefeller-controlled airlines, near bankruptcy before 911, glad-handed their way to a $15 billion taxpayer bailout. The insurance industry, railroads and travel industry soon got in line at the government trough; their phony far-right anti-government venom temporarily muted.
The CIA was a major 911 beneficiary, marching out an array of “old hands” like Richard Armitage, General Barry McCafferty and United Brands grant recipient Major Andy Messing to extol the virtues of dealing with unsavory underworld characters when gathering intelligence. The Clinton Administration had clamped down on this common CIA practice after revelations of CIA involvement in the Guatemalan death squad murders of American citizens. CIA torture chambers were once again open for business.
Global civil liberties were a major casualty of 911. Within a week of the attacks Bush Attorney General John Ashcroft announced plans to unleash the CIA and FBI, expanding and combining their already sweeping powers. With no public debate and near unanimous Congressional approval – despite the fact that not one Congress member read it – Bush gleefully signed the ironically-titled USA Patriot Act into law, suspending big chunks of the US Constitution and bringing the nation a step closer to outright martial law. Similar legislation was passed in numerous other countries.
Section 802 of the Patriot Act designated a federal crime broadly defined as “domestic terrorism”, which cast a broad net over political dissidents and seemed especially targeted at the growing ranks of WTO/IMF protestors who have taken a frontal assault on the Eight Families. Section 411 posed an ideological litmus test for foreigners wishing to come to the US in a direct affront to the First Amendment. Section 215 obliterated the Fourth Amendment, allowing the FBI to obtain a court order to seize a person’s “tangible things”, including books, documents and computer disks; without suspecting that person of wrongdoing and without informing that person of the seizure until well after the fact. Section 218 gave the FBI a green light to spy on domestic “enemies” and threatened to return the US to the dark days of J. Edgar Hoover. [17]
Later Ashcroft marched out his new TIPS program, which encouraged mailmen, utility workers and neighbors to spy on their fellow citizens. In November 2002 the Bush Administration pushed through the new Homeland Security Act, whose name conjures memories of Hitler’s Office of Fatherland Security, which he established within one month of the staged Reichstag fire and later became the SS. [18]
One provision of the act created an Information Awareness Office, which would compile a computer database on every American. The office emerged from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency – a JASON Society affiliate – that earlier spawned both the Internet and stealth technology. Heading the office was Admiral John Poindexter, the five-count convicted felon of Iran/Contra fame.
The Center for Public Integrity revealed an even more draconian version of the Patriot Act being drafted at Georgetown University. Dubbed the Domestic Security Enhancement Act, the draft called for secret arrests – never before allowed in US history – and carte blanche deportation of legal immigrants. Another provision allowed chemical companies to quit disclosing toxic emissions to the communities in which they operated.
As of February 2003 there had been over 300 rollbacks of the Freedom of Information Act. [19] In 2004 Patriot Act II passed. Provisions included a National ID. In 2003 the General Accounting Office dropped its lawsuit against Vice President Cheney, which would have forced him to reveal which energy executives he met with secretly to craft the Bush Energy policy. The right of US citizens to acquire information by which they could hold their government accountable was seriously eroded by the events of 911 and the culture of secrecy that emerged in its aftermath.
But it was the Eight Families banking cartel that had the most to gain from dialing 911. The day of the terror attacks there was an unusually heavy volume of financial transactions being handled at the WTC. The bulk of investment bankers killed in the WTC worked for competitors of the Big Six old money investment banks. Cantor Fitzgerald was particularly hard hit.
Merrill Lynch had its own building nearby, as did Deutsche Bank. Lehman Brothers moved from the WTC to a newly built headquarters just prior 911. Only seven weeks before 911 a group of wealthy oligarch investors terminated their lease on the WTC. Investor Larry Silverstein bought a 99-year lease on the property in July 2001, while the old money slid out from under it. Silverstein filed a $7.2 billion insurance claim after the tragedy. The Eight Families insurance companies involved offered only $3.6 billion.
The President’s brother, Marvin Bush, was on the board of directors at Securacom – now Stratesec – from 1993-2000. The company provided security for the WTC, Dulles International Airport and United Airlines. It had the security contract at Los Alamos Laboratories, when there had been a number of security breaches at that facility. The firm is backed by a Kuwaiti-American investment firm known as KuwAm. Current clients include the US Army, US Navy, US Air Force and Department of Justice. They carry a Blanket Purchase Agreement with the GSA – meaning that no other company can compete for these security contracts.
According to David Icke’s bombshell book Children of the Matrix, Securacom is a subsidiary of Crown Agency- a British Crown entity which Icke says also owns the Agha Khan Foundation. Khan is based in Pakistan and is spiritual torch-bearer for Islamism, from which groups like al Qaeda and the Taliban take their cues. This important fact points to Buckingham Palace involvement in the prosecution of 911.
Marvin Bush also sat on the board at HCC Insurance Holdings until November 2002. That company carried some of the insurance on the WTC. Brother Jeb – Governor of Florida – declared a state of emergency in his state one week prior to 911. He personally escorted the alleged hijackers’ flight school documents to Washington, DC shortly after the attacks. [20]
New York Mayor Rudolf Guliani was portrayed as the hero of 911. Yet on November 2, 2001 Guliani ordered New York firefighters to thin their ranks at ground zero. The day before, 200 tons of gold buried in vaults beneath the WTC belonging to Silver Triangle gold kingpin/drug money laundry Bank of Nova Scotia was recovered. Gold prices soon began their meteoric rise. The Bank of Nova Scotia has extensive ties to both Israel and the House of Windsor.
No one in the fawning corporate media bothered to ask Guliani where that gold went. Nor did they ask him why. According to Internet reports, he had ordered 6,000 gallons of fuel stored beneath WTC #7 to supply his personal bomb shelter. [21]
The explosion of this fuel may have caused WTC #7 – which was clearly not hit by an airplane – to collapse, destroying sensitive Enron-related CIA and FBI documents stored there. The CIA ran an undercover station on the 47th floor of #7. The 23rd and 24th floors of the WTC North Tower housed FBI covert operations and boatloads of agency documents.
Louie Cacchioli, a firefighter with Engine 47 in Harlem said he was in an elevator to the spook-occupied 24th floor of the North Tower, when he heard explosions. His crew – the first in that building – believes bombs were set off inside the towers.
In a statement to the Albuquerque Journal shortly after the disaster, Van Romero, Vice-President for Research at the world-renowned New Mexico Institute for Mining and Technology, agreed. Romero, one of the world’s foremost demolitions experts, stated, “My opinion is, based on the videotapes, that after the airplanes hit the World Trade Center there were some explosive devices inside the buildings that caused the towers to collapse.”[22]
Numerous experts agreed that jet fuel alone burns too fast to have melted the massive steel structure of the WTC on its own. The orderly nature of the collapse of both towers also begged inquiry. The contractor awarded the $7 billion job of cleaning up the WTC rubble was eerily named Controlled Demolition – the same outfit that quickly disposed of the evidence of the Alfred T. Murrah Federal Building after the Oklahoma City bombing.
WTC scrap metal was expeditiously shipped to China. Brigham Young physics Professor Steven Jones, who studied the WTC rubble, says he found traces of thermite explosives all over the stuff. In September 2006, Brigham Young placed Jones on paid leave for his efforts at seeking the truth.
Was Time’s 2001 Man of the Year Rudy Guliani part of a covert operation to consolidate Crown/Eight Families control over Persian Gulf and Central Asian oil? In February 2002 Guliani was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II.
Next Week: Part II: Deutsche Bank & the Carlyle Group
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Dean Henderson is the author of Big Oil & Their Bankers in the Persian Gulf: Four Horsemen, Eight Families & Their Global Intelligence, Narcotics & Terror Network and The Grateful Unrich: Revolution in 50 Countries. His Left Hook blog is at www.deanhenderson.wordpress.com
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Many of us are convinced that the twin towers of the World Trade Center were brought down on September 11, 2001 through controlled demolition. But the question at once arises: if this is what happened, would somebody not have noticed?
The answer is that many people did notice. There is a good deal of eyewitness evidence for the demolition of buildings 1 and 2. This paper will give a brief overview of this evidence.
Before we look at the evidence, we must first confront one of the most common objections in response to it. Eyewitness evidence, say the objectors, is “soft,” untrustworthy, and unreliable. According to such critics, it does not matter how many eyewitnesses there are to an event or who these eyewitnesses are or how their accounts relate to each other; the best plan is just to dismiss everything they say. This is an odd view. There is no support for it either in social scientific studies of eyewitness testimony or in the scholarly literature on criminal investigation (255).
Eyewitness evidence certainly has its vulnerabilities: we know that eyewitnesses can misperceive, misremember and deceive. However, as with other kinds of evidence, we have developed ways of checking to see if what the witnesses report is accurate. For example, we look for corroborating evidence – further eyewitness evidence as well as evidence of entirely different kinds.
Moreover, eyewitness evidence is highly relevant to the investigation of explosions. The National Fire Protection Association’s manual on fire and explosion investigations states clearly that in an explosion investigation, “the investigator should take into consideration all the available information, including witness statements” (256).
The present paper offers not only an overview of eyewitness evidence of explosions but also a critique of the handling of this evidence by the 9/11 Commission and the National Institute of Standards and Technology. But both of these organizations make extensive use of eyewitness evidence and obviously consider it valid and important. Therefore, disagreements with NIST and the 9/11 Commission on the legitimacy of eyewitness testimony are not at the level of principle but at the level of application.
One especially important source of eyewitness testimony is the oral histories of the Fire Department of New York (technically, World Trade Center Task Force Interviews), released in 2005 by the City of New York (257). The New York Times had taken the city to court to obtain the release of the documents, and when the material was released the newspaper hosted the oral histories in the form of a series of separate PDF files on its website.
The oral histories were collected by the World Trade Center Task Force of the FDNY after New York City fire commissioner Thomas Von Essen decided it would be important to have a record of what the members of the department experienced on that day. The Task Force interviews comprise 10-12,000 pages of statements by approximately 500 “FDNY firefighters, emergency medical technicians and paramedics collected from early October, 2001 to late January, 2002” (258).
Professor David Ray Griffin, with the help of able researchers, was the first scholar to ferret out fascinating descriptions of explosions from this material (259). The author of the present paper published a subsequent article after reading the oral histories, “118 Witnesses: the Firefighters’ Testimony to Explosions in the Twin Towers” (260).
The presentation and analysis below build on this earlier work. As the evidence is presented, three important points will emerge. First, the conviction that the Towers came down because of explosions was common on 9/11. Second, there is substantial eyewitness evidence supporting this conviction. Third, this evidence has been ignored or suppressed by both the 9/11 Commission and NIST.
The Explosion Hypothesis Was Common on 9/11
In discussions of the events of 9/11, it is often implied that the original, obvious, and natural hypothesis concerning the destruction of the Twin Towers is some variety of gravity-driven collapse. It was obvious to everyone on 9/11, we are led to believe, that the Towers came down because the buildings simply could not withstand the plane strikes and subsequent fires and therefore gave way. Those who say the buildings came down because of explosions – who hold to an “explosion hypothesis” in the broad sense – are, according to this view, late arrivals. They are folks, it is argued, who came along after 9/11 and over-thought an initially simple situation due to a conspiratorial mind-set.
In fact, it is easy to prove that this is a falsification of history. Proponents of the explosion hypothesis were extremely common on 9/11, especially at the scene of the crime. Many people made their judgment on the basis of what they directly perceived while close to the buildings, while others accepted as a matter of course that complete and energetic pulverization of these enormous buildings must have entailed explosions. Below are five of many examples supporting these views.
In a video clip preserved from 9/11, ABC television reporter N. J. Burkett is seen standing close to the Twin Towers. He draws our attention to the firefighters at the scene and to the burning buildings themselves. Suddenly, the South Tower begins to come apart behind him. As the pulverized debris shoots into the air, Burkett says: “A huge explosion now, raining debris on all of us. We better get out of the way!” Mr. Burkett’s statement shows no evidence of over-thinking the situation or of a conspiratorial mindset. He certainly did not come along after 9/11: he expressed his judgment before the debris of the building had even reached the ground. Then he ran for his life. Half an hour later he would run for his life again as the North Tower came down (261).
In CNN’s same-day coverage of the events of 9/11, Mayor Giuliani was asked questions about explosions in the Twin Towers on two separate occasions. The second occasion is a press conference at about 2:39 p.m. A female reporter (off screen) asks the Mayor: “Do you know anything about the cause of the explosions that brought the two buildings down? Was it caused by the planes or by something else?” (262). Notice that she does not ask if there were explosions: she assumes there were. She does not ask if these explosions brought down the Towers: she assumes they did. She merely wants to know what caused the explosions – the planes or “something else.”
In footage known as the “Matthew Shapoff video,” acquired from NIST through a Freedom of Information Act request, there are several people (off screen) chatting while they watch the events at the World Trade Center unfold at a distance and film them with their video camera. Suddenly, through their camera we see the North Tower begin to throw pulverized debris in all directions in huge plumes as it disintegrates. After a horrified, “oh, my God!” we hear a male voice, presumably that of Shapoff, exclaim as follows: “That was a bomb that did that! That was a fuckin’ bomb that did that! There’s no goddamn way that could have happened!” (263). Again, this is a spontaneous reaction to what Shapoff was observing.
New York firefighter Christopher Fenyo, in a passage from the World Trade Center Task Force interviews, speaks of a debate that began among firefighters who were on the scene. The debate started after the destruction of the South Tower but before the destruction of the North Tower – in other words, between about 10:00 and 10:30 a.m. “…At that point a debate began to rage because the perception was that the building looked like it had been taken out with charges.” As with Shapoff, the statement concerns not just explosions generally but the intentional destruction of the building with explosives. That is, people were already debating a subcategory of the explosion hypothesis, the controlled demolition hypothesis, before 10:30 on the morning of 9/11.
The FBI’s name for its investigation of the 9/11 incidents is PENTTBOM, which stands for “Pentagon/Twin Towers Bombing Investigation.” Is it possible that when this name was assigned someone in the FBI thought a bombing had taken place? (Recall that according to the current official narrative there was no bombing at any of the affected locations.) On the day of 9/11, USA Today’s foreign correspondent Jack Kelley was seen telling his TV audience that the FBI’s “working theory” at that time was that “at the same time two planes hit the building…there was a car or truck packed with explosives underneath the building, which exploded at the same time and brought both of them down” (264). Given that Kelley was later shown to have routinely fabricated stories for USA Today, his allegations about the FBI would have to be corroborated. However, the general hypothesis ascribed here to the FBI – the buildings were brought down through the use of explosives – was common on 9/11. For example, Albert Turi, FDNY Chief of Safety, told NBC’s Pat Dawson not long after the destruction of the Towers that, in Dawson’s words, “according to his [Turi’s] theory he thinks that there were actually devices that were planted in the building” (265).
These five examples have been offered in support of the contention that the explosion theory, even in its most robust form (deliberate destruction through explosives), was familiar to eyewitnesses on the day of 9/11. It was widely accepted as a reasonable theory. That many people held this theory does not mean it is correct, but it suggests that if this theory is to be rejected it must be rejected on the basis of evidence, not because it is regarded as late, unnatural, exotic or conspiratorial.
There is strong eyewitness evidence supporting the explosion hypothesis.
The eyewitness evidence is strong in terms of both quality and quantity. The quality of the evidence is found in the richly detailed, mutually corroborating accounts of what was witnessed. At the same time, the quantity of evidence is impressive in both the number and variety of eyewitnesses who discuss explosions in their statements.
Quality
A conversation between Dennis Tardio and Pat Zoda about the destruction of the North Tower was captured on film by the Naudet brothers on the day of 9/11 (266).
Tardio and Zoda repeatedly affirm each other’s accounts, both with words and with hand gestures. The hand gestures are like a series of karate chops starting high and going quickly downward. The witnesses evidently want to suggest that there were many discrete, energetic events that they observed, and that these started high up and then moved rapidly down the building at regular intervals.
Zoda says, as he moves his hand: “Floor by floor, it started poppin’ out.” Tardio concurs and uses the same hand gesture: “It was as if they had detonated, detonated (Zoda: “Yeah, detonated, yeah”), you know, as if they were planted to take down a building: boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom.” Zoda adds: “All the way down. I was watching and running.”
These are firefighters and they are used to encountering the standard sorts of explosions that occur in building fires. But they do not talk about smoke explosions, or “boiling-liquid-expanding-vapor” (BLEVE) explosions, or any of the other expected forms of explosion. Instead, they are talking about, and acting out with dramatic gestures, something altogether different. They say that what they saw resembled a controlled demolition.
The next example is Paul Lemos, who, on 9/11, was in the vicinity of the World Trade Center to participate in the filming of a commercial. Lemos was interviewed on videotape on 9/11 near the World Trade Center, with WTC-7 still standing in the distance (267). He was filmed by a different film maker at a different location than the firefighters just described. This footage appears to be entirely independent of the Tardio/Zoda footage just discussed. However, when Lemos begins describing the demise of the North Tower, he uses the same hand gestures as Tardio and Zoda: rapid chops that start high and move at regular intervals down the building.
Here is what he says as he performs his gestures:
“All of a sudden I looked up and about twenty stories below…the fire…I saw, from the corner, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom…just like twenty straight hits, just went down and then I just saw the whole building just went ‘pshew’…and as the bombs were goin’ people just started running and I sat there and watched a few of ‘em explode and then I just turned around and I just started running for my life because at that point the World Trade Center was coming right down…”
Lemos is even bolder than Tardio and Zoda, in that he does not qualify his statement by saying “as if they had detonated.” He refers openly to “bombs” and he says he watched them “explode.” In any case, the Tardio/Zoda footage and the Lemos footage are both rich in detail and mutually corroborating. The rich detail is apparent from the transcript, and the corroboration comes not just from the language used but also the hand gestures. These men clearly perceived the same event and came away with the same idea – that explosive devices in the buildings were used to bring them down.
Lemos also tells an interesting anecdote about a conversation with a person who was introduced to him as an architect, which is relevant to the tampering with and suppression of eyewitness evidence. Lemos states, “…now, they told me afterwards it wasn’t explosions. I was talking to one of the architects that they pulled in.” It is unclear who “they” is referring to in this statement, but a reasonable supposition can be made that “they” refers to the authorities on the scene. Therefore, it appears that the authorities had an architect there on 9/11 telling people like Paul Lemos what they had and had not perceived.
Regardless of whether or not this “architect” had a sinister purpose, we can be sure of the following facts about the architect: (1) unlike Lemos, he was not himself an eyewitness (he had been “pulled in” to the scene); (2) he would not have had time to carry out a thorough canvassing of eyewitnesses; (3) he certainly did not have time to do a comprehensive review of photographs and videos of the collapse; and (4) there is little possibility he could have studied the remains of the building in any detail – either the steel or the dust. Despite all of this, he feels he can tell an eyewitness what that eyewitness did not perceive. Not only is the architect making an unwarranted judgment, his behavior is extremely irregular insofar as it makes conducting an unbiased investigation much more difficult. Homicide investigations, fire investigations, and explosion investigations have strict principles, and in each case it would be unheard of to walk onto a crime scene and taint the evidence by interfering with an eyewitness.
This discussion of the architect is also important because of its wider significance. In the months following 9/11, many eyewitnesses muted, qualified and even rejected their own initial judgments after hearing that authorities had adopted a structural failure hypothesis that had no room for explosions. The structural failure hypothesis that was most common during that period, and that was widely advanced as correct, was the “pancake” hypothesis of sequentially failing floors. The pancake hypothesis has since that time been discredited and abandoned (it was specifically rejected by NIST) but in the early days it did a fine job of weakening the confidence of eyewitnesses who thought they had perceived explosions.
Examples of firefighters revising their judgment of what they had perceived on the basis of what authorities were saying at the time are common in the World Trade Center Task Force interviews.
Dominick DeRubbio says in his description of the destruction of the South Tower: “It was weird how it started to come down. It looked like it was a timed explosion, but I guess it was just the floors starting to pancake one on top of the other.”
James Drury says in his statement about the North Tower:
“…we started to hear the second roar. That was the north tower now coming down. I should say that people in the street and myself included thought that the roar was so loud that…bombs were going off inside the building. Obviously we were later proved wrong…”
John Coyle starts his important statement about the South Tower in a very tentative way:
“The tower was—it looked to me—I thought it was exploding, actually. That’s what I thought for hours afterwards… Everybody I think at that point still thought these things were blown up.”
All of these witnesses recall their initial impressions of what they saw and thought (and in the case of Drury and Coyle the initial impressions of their friends and colleagues who were also on the scene), and then try to back away from these impressions. Thus, we have clear evidence of both how common the explosive demolition theory was on 9/11, and how it was later marginalized – not by sound science but by speculative theories given a stamp of approval by authority figures.
Returning now to the issue of corroboration, there are additional evidentiary sources that corroborate the descriptions given by Zoda, Tardio and Lemos of regular, descending energetic events. First, here are three examples of corroborating eyewitness testimony.
Ross Milanytch, an employee at nearby Chase Manhattan Bank, says of the South Tower: “It started exploding…It was about the 70th floor. And each second another floor exploded out for about eight floors, before the cloud obscured it all.”
John Bussey, a reporter for the Wall Street Journal, said this of the South Tower:
“Off the phone, and collecting my thoughts for the next report, I heard metallic crashes and looked up out of the office window to see what seemed like perfectly synchronized explosions coming from each floor, spewing glass and metal outward. One after the other, from top to bottom, with a fraction of a second between, the floors blew to pieces.” (268)
Kenneth Rogers of the New York Fire Department said this about his experience with the South Tower:
“…we were standing there with about five companies and we were just waiting for our assignment and then there was an explosion in the south tower… A lot of guys left at that point. I kept watching. Floor after floor after floor. One floor under another after another and when it hit about the fifth floor, I figured it was a bomb, because it looked like a synchronized deliberate kind of thing.”
Corroboration can be even more impressive when it involves an entirely different form of evidence. Paul Lemos explicitly says that he was watching the North Tower, and, more specifically, a corner of the North Tower, when he saw the explosions. Evidence that corroborates his judgment that there were explosions occurring at a corner of the North Tower is found in high quality footage filmed during its destruction (269). This footage clearly shows a rapid sequence of forceful and focused ejections, apparently explosive, moving down the building. The size and velocity of these ejections can be measured, which means their existence and basic characteristics are not open to question.
Thus, there is a high degree of corroboration among the different eyewitness accounts, and between eyewitness evidence and other evidence.
Some who object to this compilation of eyewitness testimony say that what these witnesses experienced may not have been explosions at all. Falling bodies, crashing elevators, snapping columns and even sonic booms have all been proposed as alternative explanations. These assertions can be addressed by analyzing, quite closely, the statements of another eyewitness.
The witness is Sue Keane. She was, on 9/11, an officer in the Port Authority Police Department (PAPD) where she had been for eight years. Before this she had spent 13 years in the U.S. Army, where she received training on how to respond to explosions.
Listed below are six common characteristics of explosions as described by former FBI explosives expert James Thurman in his book, Practical Bomb Scene Investigation (270). These characteristics are matched to selections from statements Sue Keane gave to the authors of the book, Women at Ground Zero (271). These statements, given within a few months of the 9/11 events, are supported by her separate handwritten submission to the Port Authority Police Department.
1. Sound
Keane: “A couple of minutes later, it sounded like bombs going off. That’s when the explosions happened.”
2. Positive blast pressure phase
“The windows blew in…we all got thrown.” “Each one of those explosions picked me up and threw me.”
3. Partial vacuum during positive blast pressure phase
“There was this incredible rush of air, and it literally sucked the breath out of my lungs.”
4. Negative blast pressure phase
“Everything went out of me with this massive wind… Stuff was just flying past. Then it stopped and got really quiet, and then everything came back at us. I could breathe at this point, but now I was sucking all that stuff in, too. It was almost like a back draft. It sounded like a tornado.”
5. Incendiary or thermal effect
“…he threw me under the hose, which in a way felt great, because I didn’t realize until then that my skin was actually burning. I had burn marks, not like you’d have from a fire, but my face was all red, my chest was red.”
6. Fragmentation and shrapnel
“…there was stuff coming out of my body like you wouldn’t believe. It was like shrapnel. It’s still coming out.”
The handwritten PAPD report of this brave and obviously traumatized individual, which corroborates the above account in several crucial respects, is directly available in the PAPD documents released in 2003 (272). One page of that report is reproduced as follows.
On what reasonable grounds can we exclude Sue Keane’s statements as we attempt to determine the causes of the destruction of the Twin Towers?
In summary, the eyewitness testimony of Tardio/Zoda, Lemos and Keane are examples of “quality,” meaning evidence that is rich in detail. Below, the issue of “quantity” of eyewitness evidence is considered.
Quantity
It is difficult to formulate a complete account of eyewitnesses who describe, expressly or implicitly, explosions near the time of the destruction of the Twin Towers. Neither the FBI, nor the 9/11 Commission, nor the National Institute of Standards and Technology have published a count. I have compiled the most complete known list of witnesses to explosions at the Twin Towers. There are 156 such witness statements. The two graphs presented below summarize certain aspects of the list.
Figure 8-1: Witnesses by Profession/Agency
Of the 156 eyewitnesses, 121 are from the Fire Department of New York. Another 14 witnesses are from the Port Authority Police Department. Thirteen are reporters, most working for major television networks. Eight are listed as “other,” usually people who worked in the vicinity of the Towers.
Members of the FDNY and PAPD are typically referred to as “first responders.” So 135 out of 156 witnesses, or 87% of the total, are first responders. This is significant because these people have much more experience with explosions than most people. Moreover, their statements were given to superior officers as part of their professional duties, and the circumstances in which the statements were collected make this eyewitness evidence very strong.
The reporters also occupy an important position in the list because their accounts in most cases are directly captured on videotape. Their voice inflections and often their body language can be examined in detail. The reporters’ accounts are also important because they are in most cases given spontaneously, with little reflection, very soon— minutes or even seconds—after the event they witnessed. Spontaneous witness statements are widely viewed as credible because there is little time for internal or external filtering of what is stated. In fact, the U.S. Federal Rules of Evidence typically do not admit into court statements made by witnesses outside of court, which are referred to as hearsay. However, one exception to the rule against hearsay is the “excited utterance” exception. The excited utterance exception allows hearsay to be admitted when it is “a statement relating to a startling event or condition made while the declarant was under the stress of excitement caused by the event or condition.” (Fed. Rules Evid. 803(2)). As expected, with respect to 9/11, the distorting tendencies in recollection have worked against the explosion hypothesis, for the simple reason that people progressively adjusted their stories as time went on to better accord with what they were being told by authority figures (273).
Before discussing the next graph, it is appropriate to describe how the list of explosion witnesses was compiled. Eyewitnesses are included in the list if they use, in their statement, at least one of the following terms: “explosion” (or the corresponding permutations of “to explode”), “blast,” “blow up” (or “blow out”) “bomb” (or “secondary device”), or “implosion.” There is also a category called “other CD,” which includes cases that do not use one of these terms, but that are in some respects strongly suggestive of controlled demolition. The point of this method is not merely to be able to quantify explosion reports, but to reduce the list compiler’s role in the interpretive process. Eyewitnesses are included in the list not because an outside observer interprets what they witnessed as explosions, but because the eyewitnesses themselves interpret what they witnessed as explosions.
Additionally, there are processes available to investigators that can help check the quality of the evidence. The witnesses can be closely scrutinized (names, occupations, reliability, experience); motives for deception can be looked at; quality of sources can be examined; chain of custody for all witness accounts can be verified; and, of course, corroboration through other evidence of both similar and dissimilar kinds can be confirmed. Corroboration is so massive in the present case that the other processes have received less attention.
The “explosion” category is by far the largest, with 112 eyewitnesses. However, the “bomb” category, with 32 eyewitnesses, is extremely important as well. Most of the people on this list speaking of bombs are firefighters, and it is clear from their use of the word “bomb” that they are not talking about the sort of explosion they expect to encounter in a high-rise fire.
Now, there are three common objections to the demolition argument as based on eyewitness evidence. Two have been addressed already: eyewitness evidence is “soft” and can be disregarded; and eyewitnesses may have mistakenly reported explosions when, in fact, non-explosive events (such as falling elevators) were at issue. The third objection is the only one that can be taken seriously. It is this: there are many natural forms of explosion that occur in large fires, and the mere fact that there were explosions does not mean that explosives were used. It is an unjustified leap, claim these objectors, to go from eyewitness statements about explosions to the controlled demolition hypothesis.
Figure 8-2: Witnesses by Term Used
The types of explosions that typically accompany a fire are described in detail in various publications, probably most authoritatively in the National Fire Protection Association’s Guide for Fire and Explosion Investigations. There the NFPA describes four types of explosion that would have been expected to accompany the fires in the Twin Towers.
BLEVE (“boiling-liquid-expanding-vapor-explosion,” as with an exploding boiler)
There are three characteristics of the eyewitness statements that rule out all four types of explosion. That is, these four sorts of explosions may well have occurred, but they do not account for the main explosions witnesses say they perceived. Here are the three characteristics that must be explained.
Identification
If the explosions encountered were the type typically encountered in fires, the firefighters would be expected to recognize them as such and name them. There are very few instances where they do so. On the contrary, they clearly feel these were different types of explosion than those they were used to encountering, as evidenced by, for example, the number of references to bombs.
Power
Many eyewitnesses clearly thought they were watching explosions destroy the Twin Towers (“I looked up, and the building exploded…The whole top came off like a volcano”). But none of the common four types of fire-related explosions could accomplish this. Recall that according to NIST, the Twin Towers were essentially intact beneath the point where they were hit by the planes. While BLEVEs and combustion explosions sometimes destroy structures such as wood frame houses, there are no examples of these explosions causing the destruction of such robust steel structures as are at issue here. Also, there is no evidence that the right conditions for such explosions (for example, the necessary quantities of natural gas or jet fuel) existed in the Twin Towers at the time their dramatic destruction began.
Pattern
As described above, many eyewitnesses reported regular, rapid energetic events in sequence down the building, which cannot be explained by any of the four common types of explosion. If these patterned ejections are the result of explosions, they can only be explosions resulting from explosives.
Eyewitness Evidence Was Ignored/Suppressed by the 9/11 Commission and NIST
The discussion above gives a brief overview of the eyewitness testimony available to investigators. The last main point here is that this evidence has been ignored or suppressed by both the 9/11 Commission and NIST.
In its 585 pages, the 9/11 Commission Report contains one partial sentence referring to eyewitness reports of explosions at the time of collapse. The context is a discussion of firefighters who were on upper floors of the North Tower when the South Tower came down. The sentence fragment is as follows: “…those firefighters not standing near windows facing south had no way of knowing that the South Tower had collapsed; many surmised that a bomb had exploded…” (274). In other words, according to the 9/11 Commission, a subcategory of firefighters – those in upper floors of the North Tower with an impeded view—mistook the collapse of the South Tower for a bomb. The implication here is that the explosion witnesses, presumably few in number, made a mistake.
Of course, a careful examination of the available eyewitness testimony, as set forth above, would show that it is categorically false that all or most of the explosion witnesses were in the upper floors of the North Tower, and that only those with an impeded view thought a bomb had exploded. The truth is that witnesses were in a great variety of locations and many of them had an exceptionally clear view of the Towers.
The National Institute of Standards and Technology gave even worse treatment to the eyewitness testimony. One of NIST’s stated objectives is to “determine why and how WTC 1 and WTC 2 collapsed following the initial impacts of the aircraft” (275). But in the 295 pages of this report, there is not a single reference to eyewitnesses who perceived explosions in the Twin Towers.
Some may argue that this is not surprising because NIST deals with hard evidence, not soft evidence. NIST is concerned with things like column size, temperatures reached, and the yield strength of steel; NIST does not deal with eyewitnesses. This is a misconception. The truth is that NIST openly discussed its attention to eyewitnesses.
Very early in its investigation of the Twin Towers, NIST adopted a sophisticated method of collecting eyewitness evidence, and the results can be seen in Chapter 7 (“Reconstruction of Human Activity”) of the NIST final report. Telephone interviews, face-to-face interviews, and focus groups were all used (276). Note, for example, the following statement: “225 face-to-face interviews, averaging 2 hours each, gathered detailed, first-hand accounts and observations of the activities and events inside the buildings on the morning of September 11” (277). Although Chapter 7 is not about the destruction of the Towers, elsewhere NIST explicitly recognizes the relevance of eyewitness evidence to the understanding of how the buildings came down (278). Yet NIST somehow fails to note even one eyewitness reference to explosions or bombs, not only among its interviewees but also in the literature. It misses, for example, all of the 156 eyewitnesses used as the basis of this paper, even though it had access to all of the sources used to compile the list.
The 9/11 Commission and the National Institute of Standards and Technology, apparently following the lead of the FBI, have violated standard principles of investigation. Whether this is evidence of incompetence or of deliberate cover-up is irrelevant to my present argument. Either way, it is obvious that the official investigations carried out to this point have been grossly inadequate and that a new and thorough investigation is essential.
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Prof. Graeme MacQueen, was an author and distinguished professor of religious studies, Hamilton, Ont. Canada. He was a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG).
Graeme MacQueen received his Ph.D. in Buddhist Studies from Harvard University and taught in the Religious Studies Department of McMaster University for 30 years. While at McMaster he became founding Director of the Centre for Peace Studies at McMaster, after which he helped developed the B.A. program in Peace Studies and oversaw the development of peace-building projects in Sri Lanka, Gaza, Croatia and Afghanistan. He was a member of the organizing committee of the Toronto Hearings held on the 10th anniversary of 9/11, was a member of the international 9/11 Consensus Panel, and was co-editor of The Journal of 9/11 Studies.
Reviews:
We have been told that the truth will set us free. Less emphasized is how the truth will stalk, haunt and disquiet us along the way. Few of us really have the tenacity to dwell for any length of time with those sorts of truths. Doing so is like dwelling in deep waters where it’s dark, cold, and the temptation to surface too quickly threatens us with a kind of spiritual bends. Fewer of us still try to give elusive truths their full account under the scrutiny of peers and public. Among these fewest of few, Graeme MacQueen stands out, making this remarkable collection of essays, spanning 15 years of epochal shifts in world affairs, one for the bookshelf of the ages. – Matthew Witt has a Ph.D. in urban studies from Portland State University and since 2001 has been Professor of Public Administration, University of La Verne, California.
As I reflect on how I managed to penetrate the multi-layered shield of propaganda concealing the crimes of 9/11, I realize that two things were most important for me. On the one hand, there was the physical evidence, such as the free fall of Building 7, and, on the other hand, there were the writings and lectures of Graeme MacQueen. Graeme MacQueen clothed the skeleton of physical evidence with a living body. His rigorous approach to evaluating available evidence is an outstanding example of the overwhelming power of science. – Ansgar Schneider, physicist and mathematician, Dr. rer. nat. Universität Göttingen, author of Stigmatisierung statt Aufklärung (Eng) and Generation 9/11(Eng).
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The first meeting between Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky and his American counterpart Joe Biden turned out to be a real scandal, reports The Guardian, citing information published in the book ‘The Last Politician’ by the American journalist Franklin Foer.
During the first meeting of politicians in the summer of 2021, Zelensky behaved unprofessionally and “crammed his conversations” with Biden by giving “a long list of demands.”
In particular, the Ukrainian leader called for Ukraine’s entry into NATO but simultaneously expressed his opinion that France and Germany would leave the alliance, calling the bloc “a relic”.
“Zelensky’s frustration occluded his capacity for logic. After begging to join NATO, he began to lecture that the organisation is, in fact, a historic relic, with waning significance. He told Biden that France and Germany were going to exit NATO,” Foer wrote. “It was an absurd analysis – and a blatant contradiction. And it pissed Biden off.”
Foer also claimed that Zelensky considered Biden weak over his decision in early 2021 to waive sanctions against a Russian company building a gas pipeline to Germany, Nord Stream 2, with even the Ukrainian president’s most ardent supporters in the Biden Administration agreeing that he had crossed the line.
According to the author, Biden himself also “didn’t think much” of his Ukrainian counterpart, especially because of his friendly relations with Republican Senator Ted Cruz over the Nord Stream decision. In protest, Cruz blocked the confirmation of State Department nominees.
“Whether he understood this or not. Zelensky was complicit with this stunt. It reeked of what the administration considered amateurism. To be fair, Biden didn’t think much of his Ukrainian counterpart, either,” Foer writes.
Foer also revealed that Zelensky had long sought a meeting with former US President Donald Trump. However, he failed because he refused to help the then-US president “to dig up dirt on rivals including Biden.”
In the journalist’s words, Zelensky felt a “lingering resentments from the episode” and “at least subconsciously … seemed to blame” Biden, Trump’s successor in the Oval Office, “for the humiliation he suffered, for the political awkwardness he endured.”
Yet, two years after the failed meeting between the two presidents, Biden has proved in action that the US will support Ukraine and promised to continue doing so for “as long as it takes.” If taken literally, it would mean that the Biden Administration is prepared to arm and finance Ukraine’s war effort against Russia until the total and complete military victory of Kiev, which will obviously not happen, especially as lofty aspirations are often blunted by cold, hard reality.
Following the start of Russia’s special military operation in Ukraine, the White House took advantage of the situation to send billions of dollars in military assistance to Kiev. However, a growing group of US legislators, mostly Republican, questions whether Washington can maintain the current level of support in perpetuity. While the Republican congressional leadership remains in line with the Biden administration to oppose Russia, the broader membership wants to end funding or want stricter accountability for additional aid.
According to data from a July poll by CNN, 55% of Americans believe that Congress should not authorise more funding for the conflict.
At the same time, 51% said the US has already done enough for Ukraine. In addition, even though 2022 was a year in which the Ukrainian Army far exceeded expectations thanks to the constant supply of US weapons, 2023 is proving to be much tougher and more complex for Kiev’s forces, as evidenced by the counteroffensive, which after ten weeks can best be described as a failure.
It is recalled that in the first three weeks after the Russian special military operation started, Congress approved $13 billion in emergency aid for Kiev. To date, Congress has appropriated $113 billion in aid to Ukraine in four tranches — about 60%, or $67 billion, is specifically for military assistance. This is an incredible amount of money being wasted on a war that Ukraine has no hope of winning, which is why the spending issue is coming to the fore and challenging Biden’s promise to support Kiev for “as long as it takes.”
Yet, despite the incredible amount of resources spent to prop up Ukraine, Zelensky, just like in 2021, as revealed by Foer, is ungrateful for the support and behaves in a juvenile entitled manner.
In July 2023, a high-level Pentagon official told former Pentagon official, Douglas MacKinnon, “Zelensky is acting like a spoiled, petulant child who gets everything he wants and it’s still not enough. Many in the US government and many of our citizens are growing tired of his act. I can assure you he is burning bridges in Europe as well.”
For all the consistent lambasting and abuse from Zelensky, there is still little indication that Biden will withdraw his support for Ukraine. However, it is doubtful that Biden can maintain a policy of “as long as it takes,” especially when the US election campaign will likely kick off in the winter.
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Ahmed Adel is a Cairo-based geopolitics and political economy researcher.
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As I’ve noted in previous posts–and in my recent books Atomic Cover-up and The Beginning or the End–the U.S. after dropping the bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki was confronted with a unique publicity (not to mention, moral) problem.
Reports from Japan warned of a mysterious new disease afflicting survivors of the twin blasts. Some in Japan were already dubbing it “radiation disease,” which was what Robert Oppenheimer some of our other bomb-makers privately expected (though unmentioned in the Christopher Nolan movie)–but still, officials and most in media in U.S. mocked the idea. No one from the West had yet reached either city.
Seventy-eight years ago this week, however, one of the most horrific, if revealing, conversations of the nuclear era took place.
Gen. Leslie Groves, head of the Manhattan Project, had received a telex the day before from Los Alamos, as scientists asked for information on those shocking reports from Japan. Groves responded that they were nothing but “a hoax” or “propaganda.” The top radiation expert at Los Alamos also used the word “hoax.”
Knowing that the press would be seeking his official response, Groves called Lt. Col. Charles Rea, a doctor at Oak Ridge hospital (part of the bomb project). According to the official transcript, Rea called the reports of death-by-radiation “propaganda,” “hookum,” and “kind of crazy” and Groves joked, “Of course, it’s crazy–a doctor like me can tell that!”
But Groves knew it wasn’t crazy and he grew agitated as he read passages from the Japanese reports. He even asked, seriously, if there was “any difference between Japanese blood and others.” Both men ultimately seized on the idea that everything was attributable to burns–or “good thermal burns,” as Rea put it. “They are getting the delayed action of the burn,” he advised. Groves replied, “Of course we are getting a good dose of propaganda”–and blamed some of our scientists and our media for giving the reports any credence.
Groves even bragged, “We are not bothered a bit, excepting for—what they are trying to do is create sympathy.” Adding: “This is the kind of thing that hurts us.” (See PDF of transcript. click the Memorandum to access complete document)
But Rea hinted that he knew Groves was merely denying reality, admitting finally, “Of course, those Jap scientists over there aren’t so dumb either.” Still, in a second conversation that day with Groves, Rea advised: “I think you had better get the anti-propagandists out.” One of the great quotes of that time. He also advised, “You will have to get some big-wig to put a countet-statement in the paper.” (That big-wig would end up being….Oppenheimer, again not mentioned in the Nolan movie.)
Five days later, on a visit to Oak Ridge, Groves publicly labelled the reports from Japan propaganda and added, “The atomic bomb is not an inhuman weapon.”
Groves’ top aide, Kenneth D. Nichols (featured as a key Oppenheimer antagonist in the Nolan movie), would admit in his 1987 memoirs that “we knew that there would be many deaths and injuries caused by the radiation.…”
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Two fifty-year old documents related to the coup in Chile were released by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the State Department last week. The democratically elected, left wing government of President Salvador Allende was overthrown in 1973 by the Chilean military, with covert CIA backing. A US-supported dictatorship led by General Augusto Pinochet was subsequently installed.
President Richard Nixon’s daily briefs related to the coup on September 8th as well as the 11th – the day the Chilean military seized control of the government – were released. This declassification followed repeated calls for increased transparency by progressive members of Congress, human rights groups, and Santiago.
Nixon and then National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger strongly opposed the leftist Allende government and attempted to prevent its rule. George Washington University’s National Security Archive issued a statement which says
“[the documents] contained information that went to President Nixon as a military takeover that he and [Kissinger] had encouraged for three years came to fruition.”
Nixon’s daily brief for September 8, 1973 reads
“a number of reports have been received… indicating the possibility of an early military coup… Navy men plotting to overthrow the government now claim army and air force support.”
The document – written three days before the coup – continues with a discussion of how a fascist paramilitary group “has been blocking roads and provoking clashes with the national police, adding to the tension caused by continuing strikes and opposition political moves. President Allende earlier this week said he believed the armed forces will ask for his resignation if he does not change his economic and political policies.”
On September 11th, Nixon’s daily brief said
“Plans by navy officers to trigger military action against the Allende government are supported by some key army units… The navy is also counting on help from the air force and national police.”
After Allende’s initial refusal to resign, tanks opened fire, Air Force aircraft launched rocket attacks and bombed the presidential palace. Troops stormed in and Allende shot himself. [He was assassinated, M.C.]
“What followed [the coup] was a vicious, decades-long reign of terror and repression during which tens of thousands of Chileans were killed, tortured, or disappeared by the Pinochet regime, which continued to receive support from the CIA,” as Common Dreams’ Jake Johnson has written.
“many of Pinochet’s officers were involved in systematic and widespread human rights abuses… Some of these were contacts or agents of the CIA or [US] military.”
Peter Kornbluh, a Chile specialist for National Security Archive, said
“I’m happy that the Freedom of Information Act, together with some positive diplomacy by the Chilean government, broke a secrecy barrier that has kept us from knowing this history for 50 years.” He added that he hopes the White House will soon be “releasing all the [US records on Chile relating to the coup and its aftermath] that, inexplicably, remain secret after all this time.”
As the Los Angeles Times noted, the US government “favored Pinochet, who for most of his 17 years of rule had good economic and military ties with Washington as he repressed many of his own people.”
Throughout Latin America, during the Cold War, the CIA was involved in overthrowing governments, while fueling a series of proxy wars and civil wars, as well as waging terror campaigns against others. To this day, the US maintains a more than 60-year old embargo on Cuba as well as a notorious torture prison at Guantanamo Bay.
During recent years, the US has supported coups against governments in Venezuela and Bolivia. The US currently imposes sanctions on Venezuela, Nicaragua, and Cuba. In Venezuela, Washington’s economic war led to tens of thousands of unnecessary deaths between 2017 and 2018 as a result of vital medicines being deprived.
Additionally, among GOP presidential candidates, there is substantial support for a potential military invasion of Mexico to ostensibly counter drug trafficking.
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Connor Freeman is the assistant editor and a writer at the Libertarian Institute, primarily covering foreign policy. He is a co-host on Conflicts of Interest. His writing has been featured in media outlets such as Antiwar.com and Counterpunch, as well as the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity. He has also appeared on Liberty Weekly, Around the Empire, and Parallax Views. You can follow him on Twitter @FreemansMind96
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Matt Roeske from CultivateElevate.com, who has been prolific in putting out Instagram posts regarding information on Nikola Tesla technology, EMF dangers, electroculture, Tartaria, and more, has now been nailing it around the horrific Lahaina attack —because that is what it was — an attack. It becomes more apparent day by day.
In addition to Roeske’s citizen journalism, another internet super-sleuth on TikTok recently uncovered satellite images of the Lahaina devastation that demonstrate “fingerprints” that can only be attributed to DEW.
How else could Lahaina be covered in these large, nearly identical in size, chard pinpoints on the ground?
Undoubtedly, the smoke and chaos were a cover for the advanced weaponry.
Satellite images of Lahaina attack. Note red arrows pointing to the large, nearly identical in size, chard pinpoints across surfaces.
A Tiktoker points out in a satellite image of Lahaina post-event nearly identical chard pinpoints throughout Lahaina.
Was arson involved in the Lahaina fires? Yes.
Is the power company culpable? Yes. Maui officials?
Yes….. the long list goes on.
But now we have clear, definitive evidence that DEWs played a massive role in obliterating the sacred land of Lahaina and its people.
Miles of “dust fence” below surround the crime scene of Lahaina. I saw this in other attempts to keep the public out of the area of “natural disaster” areas.
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Featured image: Lāhainā Lighthouse surrounded by August 2023 wildfire ruins
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In Episode 2 of this docuseries about his presidential campaign, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. travels to the U.S.-Mexico border in Yuma, Arizona to investigate the immigration issue firsthand.
What he discovers is mind-boggling: a dire humanitarian crisis, a border security system crippled by politics and corruption, and people on both sides struggling to end the suffering. On his journey, Mr. Kennedy gathers ideas to help him decide how, as President, he will heal the southern divide.
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.:
“I witnessed this dystopian nightmare of this uncontrolled flow of desperate humanity crossing the border and converging here because of misbegotten policies by high leadership of the United States.”
“I’ve come to understand that the open border policy is just a way of funding a multi-billion dollar drug and human trafficking operation for the Mexican drug cartels. When I’m president, I will secure the border, which will end the cartels’ drug-trafficking economy, and I will build wide doors for those who wish to enter legally so that the United States can continue to be a beacon to the world.”
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As a child, I watched the men I loved in my family lift their high-powered rifles and shoot one prairie dog after another and another for fun, and then walk away. They called them “pop-guts.” On the way back to our camp, I stepped over their small blood-soaked, blown-apart bodies left in the matted grasses of their prairie dog town. And then, a single prairie dog raised her head out of a burrow and stood up and faced me. I froze in place, unable to avoid her gaze. She disappeared underground.
On that day, I made a vow, short of standing in front of my father’s rifle, that I would be their ally. I have tried to keep that vow.
I graduated from high school in 1973, the same year the Endangered Species Act was signed into law. At that time only 3,300 Utah prairie dogs remained in 37 isolated colonies. Due to political pressure from ranchers and developers, they were not listed on the original endangered species list. Prairie dogs were seen as vermin.
In 1977, I lobbied the Utah legislature as a graduate student in education from the University of Utah. I had created a Utah Prairie Dog curriculum for the Salt Lake City school district. At the State Capitol, I was met with incredulity and disdain by representatives who insisted on calling prairie dogs “varmints,” the Speaker of the House handed me a recipe for “Prairie Dog Stew.”
Finally in 1984, the Utah prairie dog was added to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife’s Endangered Species List and remains on the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species.
But in 2000, in a special millennial issue of The New York Times Magazine, the Utah prairie dog was featured as one of 10 species most likely to become extinct by the next millennium. Their fate was to become a ghost species. I wrote a book on prairie dogs. Every month I sent a picture of prairie dogs in different poses (one with a helmet and bazooka) to friends at The Utah Nature Conservancy, a playful nudge for protection. Did any of these gestures make a difference? It made a difference to me. This was my wild promise that became a vow I made to the lone Utah prairie dog who survived my family’s massacre.
What is the difference between a promise and a vow? A promise is “a specific declaration or assurance that one will do a particular thing or that a particular thing will happen.” A vow is “a solemn promise” — a deepening gesture that one makes with one’s whole being. Both are nouns. But what if we see them as verbs, as actions that grows out of a commitment?
A promise becomes giving one’s word — “assuring someone that one will definitely do, give, or arrange something; undertake or declare that something will happen.” A vow is an open-ended commitment over time that moves into the realm of a sacred obligation — “dedicated to someone or something, especially a deity.” If one believes, as I do that the Divine resides in all living things, then there are many gods among us, in a myriad of shapes and sizes and forms.
What Wild Promise Will We Make?
Artist Allen Crawford has created A Wild Promise, an illustrated celebration of the Endangered Species Act, vibrant and instructive by featuring 80 vulnerable species. He is a visionary artist who not only cares about the survival and sustaining grace of the “more than human world” but has chosen to put his gifts to use with the intention of inspiring us to care more deeply and act more consciously on behalf of these vulnerable creatures.
Perhaps as you come to know their stories, and others like them, you will be moved to seek out an endangered or threatened species that lives close to you, learn their natural history and give them not only your attention, but your devotion. Or maybe you know of a species in your state or a particular ecosystem that needs federal protection. You can support a specific species campaign addressed to the Fish and Wildlife Service to nominate newly threatened plants and animals to be concerned for protection under the endangered species list.
The Endangered Species Act is an act of love that asks for our engagement, each in our own way with the gifts that are ours in the places we call home. Learn their names. Speak their names. Remember their names. Act.
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Terry Tempest Williamsis an American author, naturalist, and conservationist. Her work ranges from issues of ecology and wilderness preservation, to women’s health, to exploring our relationship to culture and nature.
Featured image is by James Marvin Phelps (CC BY-NC 2.0)
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I will briefly review these 4 recent studies on toxic compounds in masks:
Mar. 2022 – Bussan et al – Quantification of trace elements in surgical and KN95 face masks widely used during the SARS-COVID-19 pandemic
heavy metals – observed detectable concentration levels for Cu, Sb and Pb
copper (Cu) was detected in most of the surgical masks
a children’s mask had the 2nd highest amount of Sb (antimony) detected, largest concentrations of Sb (antimony) were in KN95 masks
inhalation of Sb (antimony) can cause pneumoconiosis, chronic bronchitis, chronic emphysema, pleural adhesions and respiratory irritation.
a bestselling children’s mask also had lead (Pb) – inhaled and ingested lead can cause severe brain damage, reproductive system damage and death
Zinc (Zn) was also detected – excess can cause lethargy , respiratory tract problems and neuronal death
different masks of the same brand, in the same box, were found to contain different concentrations of metals – lack of quality control by manufacturer
In a saline solution mimicking saliva, half of the lead (Pb) leached out – exposure could occur in people who may use contaminated masks for extensive periods of time or for children who may chew the mask material.
human saliva contains enzymes that could also enhance metal leaching from masks = additional exposure
May 2022 – Ze Liu et al – Generation of environmental persistent free radicals (EPFRs) enhances ecotoxicological effects of the disposable face mask waste with the COVID-19 pandemic
10 heavy metals identified in disposable face masks: Zn, Sr, Ti, Co, Cu, Mn, Ni, Cd, Pb, Cr
EPFRs environmentally persistent free radicals – in vitro assay confirmed these cause cytotoxicity and oxidative stress
Surgical masks release more heavy metals, organic chemicals, microplastics and free radicals than N95 masks after exposure to water.
bisphenol-A exhibits toxic, endocrine, mutagenic and carcinogenic effects in living organisms (source)
benzothiazoles are “probably carcinogenic to humans” (Health Canada)
DTBP (2,4-di-tert-butylphenol) “exhibits potent toxicity against almost all testing organisms” (source)
April 2023 – Ana Oliveira et al – Current knowledge on the presence, biodegradation, and toxicity of discarded face masks in the environment
face masks are a source of organic and inorganic contaminants including micro(nano)plastics and fibers.
surgical masks are disposable and mostly made of different plastic nanofibers, most common polypropylene (PP). They usually have 3-5 layers.
disposable masks possess a nose wire frame made of metallic compounds (iron constituting 4.58 wt% of the total mass of the face mask, and the trace amount of zinc, calcium, titanium, and manganese)
disposable masks also release hazardous chemical compounds often added during their manufacturing
polar organic species related to polyamide-66 monomer and oligomers (nylon-66 synthesis), polyethylene glycol, and phthalate esters plasticizers also detected
face masks contain metals (such as titanium dioxide – TiO2 in quantities ranging from 100 to 2000 mg/kg) that can induce carcinogenic and mutagenic effects
Bussan et al. reported detectable levels of copper, antimony and lead which implicated a potential for their leaching. Surgical masks had higher heavy metals than N95 masks.
Face masks have a three-dimensional porous structure in which the additives are dispersed but not bounded, which contributes to their release into the environment
inorganic and organic contaminants released from face masks can lead to oxidative stress – for example, phthalates were detected in several disposable face masks which exhibited potential carcinogenic effects on humans
A considerable amount of volatile organic compounds (VOCs), PAHs, and alkanes were also detected on face masks
In addition to the adverse effects of face masks’ chemicals, inhaled microplastics and microfibres can induce lung inflammation – fibers may cause localized responses such as its additives and sorbed contaminants may result in genotoxicity, reproductive toxicity, carcinogenicity and mutagenicity
May 2023 – Hajoo Ryu et al – Measuring the quantity of harmful volatile organic compounds inhaled through masks
volatile organic compounds (VOC) are emitted from many commonly used masks
in KF94 masks, the total VOC (TVOC) released was about 14 times more than that released by the cotton masks
15 types of VOCs were detected released from masks – among these 15 chemicals, DMAc and DMF are known to potentially cause liver and reproductive toxicity, and aromatic compounds such as toluene and xylene are toxic to the nervous system
Acetonitrile is also a harmful substance that can cause inflammation to the skin and eyes, and can cause neurological disorders
n-Hexane is a skin irritant that can cause headaches and pulmonary edema when inhaled.
Simultaneous exposure to n-hexane and 2-butanone can cause severe neurotoxicity
My Take…
There are many toxic compounds hiding in disposable face masks that can be categorized as:
Heavy metals (mainly lead, antimony, copper), one study found 10 heavy metals
All of these leach out of the masks, with surgical masks leaching more heavy metals and chemicals when exposed to moisture and saliva, than N95 masks.
“Face masks have a three-dimensional porous structure in which the additives are dispersed but not bounded, which contributes to their release into the environment”
Some best selling children’s masks have high levels of heavy metals like lead.
Also, if children chew on their masks, they can have additional exposure to these heavy metals and various carcinogenic chemicals.
Several of the organic chemicals released by masks cause reproductive toxicity, neurological toxicity and are carcinogenic.
Microplastics and microfibers released by masks are also toxic to humans.
Quality control of disposable masks is lacking, with different masks from the same box containing different amounts of heavy metals, for example.
Personal comment: The level of contamination of surgical masks and N95 masks is much worse than I had suspected. It might be useful for people to print out these studies and send them to anyone thinking about implementing mask mandates again, advising them that they’re engaging in criminal conduct if they proceed.
That best selling children’s masks have high contamination with heavy metals like lead, actually does not surprise me at all. Our political and healthcare leaders have repeatedly shown a strong intent to harm children throughout the COVID-19 pandemic.
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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 COVID Intel
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
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Incumbent Gabon’s presidentAli Bongo Ondimba, who has been in power for 14 years, has won a third term with 64,27%, according to official results announced on Wednesday (Aug. 30) by the electoral commission. Ali Bongo defeated his main rival Albert Ondo Ossa in a single round of voting. Elections took place last Saturday, 26 August 2023 – curiously the day of the Niger military coup.
Ali Bongo is the son of Omar Bongo, who was president of Gabon from 1967 until his death in 2009. Ali took over at the time of his father’s death. During his father’s presidency, Ali was Minister of Foreign Affairs.
Today, 31 August, General Brice Oligui Nguema, was named Gabon’s new leader. He served the Central African country’s long-time former president Omar Bongo before finally turning on his son, ousting leader Ali Bongo.
The announcement of the voting results on 30 August 2023, they say, prompted the military coup of Gabon, a resources-rich Central African country at the African West Coast. The military claimed electoral fraud – what else is new, just look at elections in the west and around the world.
Gabon is a former French colony – and new economic and monetary colony – for the last 50-plus years. See this and this.
The new Gabonese military junta rejected the election results, dissolved all state institutions, and placed Ali Bongo under house arrest. It looks like this may be the end of a 55-year Bongo-family dynasty. See this from BBC:
Unlike other West- and Central African countries, Gabon has no US military base, but easy access to military advice and training from the US largest African military base in Djibouti.
These are the recent Francophone African military uprisings:
Niger (July 2023);
Burkina Faso (January 2022),
Guinea (September 2021);
Chad (April 2021);
Mali (August 2020);
and now Gabon (30 August 2023).
At the outset, it looks like the former French colonies and present French neo-colonies have had enough of French enslavement and shameless monetary exploitation.
That may be true, though, at the same time, there is a growing US influence visible in West- and Central Africa. Maybe Madame Victoria Nuland’s – Deputy US Secretary of State – recent three visits to the region are indicative. The latest visit to Niger took place on 7 August 2023, under the pretext of the US interest to restore stability in the Region.
It looks quite convincingly like Washington would like to get rid of France in Africa and replace the French with their own style of neo-colonialism.
The 14 West (8) and Central (6) African former French colonial territories may finally get rid of the cursed, French Central Bank controlled CFA Franc which was their French-imposed currency since “independence”, analogous to a highly coercive price for independence.
But, will it be replaced by the US-dollar?
God forgive! May they – all 14 West-and Central African countries – apply for BRICS membership at the next round in 2024. One of the BRICS top-priorities is de-dollarization.
Interests in Gabon?
Other than enhancing the strategic stronghold in Africa – against the potential interests of Russia and China – Gabon has sizable natural resources. It is one of the resources-richest Sub-Sahelian countries.
According to World Bank data, Gabon’s surface is 267,670 sq. km (2020), about half the size of France (547,557 sq. km). Of Gabon’s total surface, some 88% is covered by forest, mostly rain forest. This level of forestation can be maintained thanks to Gabon’s relatively low population of only 2.4 million (World Bank 2023 estimate).
Gabon is situated in a region known for its mineral wealth. Gabon’s minerals include, timber, manganese, diamonds, gold, and uranium. Minerals are so important to the country’s economy that the entire economy revolves around the country’s mining industry, to the detriment of agricultural development.
Mining Industry
Gabon has the second largest deposit of manganese in the world and is currently the world’s third largest producer. From high-grade manganese to minerals, there are over 250 million tons of manganese reserves, and their metal content is between 48% to 52%.
Manganese is Gabon’s second largest export product, accounting for roughly 11% of Gabon’s total exports. La Compagnie Minière de l’Ogooue (COMILOG), a subsidiary of the French company ERAMET, is the largest company currently producing manganese in Gabon.
Mining prospects also exist for iron, copper, diamonds, and other minerals.
Gabon has the sixth largest proven oil deposits in Africa, with an estimated 3.68 billion barrels of oil reserves. The daily production is estimated at 0.244 million barrels, with a minimal local consumption of 0.013 million barrels. The balance is exported. More than 90% of it to the United States.
Gabon, the fourth largest oil producer in Sub-Saharan Africa, posted strong economic growth over the past decade, driven mainly by oil and manganese production. In 2020, the oil sector accounted for 38.5% of GDP and 70.5% of exports despite efforts to diversify the economy.
Gabon also has large deposits of natural gas which are estimated to be over 28.3 billion cubic meters. The production of the natural gas in the country is estimated to be about 0.1 billion cubic meters per year. Unlike the country’s crude oil which is primarily destined for foreign markets, Gabon consumes all the natural gas it produces. See this.
Gabon’s almost exclusive reliance on oil exports is a real danger for her economy and social development, especially given the volatility of hydrocarbon prices. Due to this reliance on petrol income, the agricultural sector has been neglected to the point where, according to government estimates, more than 80% of food is imported – and this given the high degree of fertility of Gabon’s soil. See this.
Food imports make for food price volatility an instability.
Given her resources, Gabon may be one of the most obvious Sahel countries attracting foreign interests. In this case, the US wants to strengthen their foothold in Gabon. Washington controls now almost 100% of the country’s crude oil exports, not to be challenged by other contenders.
The hydrocarbon energy market which is hypocritically being suppressed by the west for the climate change hoax while every western country knows that without hydrocarbon the world economy as it presents itself today would collapse. Today, still about 85% of all energy used in the world stems from hydrocarbons.
Gabon’s hydrocarbon resources might be sought after also by other blocs, like China and Russia. The US will make sure they will not lose out on what they already control. Not to forget all the other natural resources riches Gabon possesses.
Therefore, it is not to be excluded that Washington may have played a role in timing the military coup just coinciding with the Gabonese elections – fake elections, naturally.
Let’s see, if and when Washington’s Madame Nuland will show up and look for order and calming unrest in Gabon – with US assistance, of course.
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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.
Featured image: Satellite image of Gabon (Licensed under the Public Domain)
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***
Addressing a meeting of government ministers and the press in Havana on Aug. 11, Cuba’s Vice Prime Minister Jorge Luis Tapia Fonseca exploded when discussing the food crisis gripping the nation.
“It takes work to produce food. Everyone wants food deliveries, but we do nothing to produce it. We lack a culture of production … We don’t need all these papers, or words. When do we begin to plant? Who will do it?”
He was reporting on implementation of Cuba’s 2022 law on Food Sovereignty and Food and Nutritional Security. He noted that food self-sufficiency in local areas is disastrously lagging. Crop yields are low; plant diseases and the lack of inputs has hampered grain production.
The food situation in Cuba is growing more desperate by the day. Residents of the island individually consumed only 438 grams of animal protein per month in 2022, and in May 2023, only 347 grams; recommendations call for ingestion of 5 kg monthly. Not enough chickens were raised last year; poultry meat and eggs remain scarce.
Yields of corn, soy, sorghum and other crops have dropped, and animal feed is mostly unavailable. Therefore, pork production is also down, milk is unavailable to adults, and fewer cattle are being raised. Pasturage is poor, due to drought and no fertilizer.
Failures Mount
Tapia pointed to the many failures exacerbating the situation. The output of state-controlled food producers is low. Producers, distributers, and institutional consumers don’t regularly contract with one another to facilitate food distribution. Producers aren’t being paid, because credit isn’t available. Cattle-stealing has reached new heights, 44,318 head so far this year.
The Ministry of Finances and Prices issued a report prior to the National Assembly session that recognized high inflation, widespread popular dissatisfaction, and the need for “concrete solutions.” Minister Vladimir Regueiro Ale indicated prices skyrocketed by 39% during 2022 and 18% more so far in 2023.
Inflation, he explained, varies from province to province and may manifest as abusive price-fixing, especially when agricultural supplies and products are in short supply.
Commenting on the report, National Assembly President Esteban Lazo, reminded delegates that diminished production and inflation were connected:
“If there is no production and supply, we will not achieve effective control of prices.” He complained that “practically 100% of the food basket is being imported.”
The Assembly’s Food and Agricultural Commission analyzed organizational and management problems and reported that only 68% of expected diesel fuel has arrived so far in 2023, 14,700 tons less than in the similar period a year before; 28,900 tons of imported fertilizer were ordered, but only 168 tons arrived. Cuba’s fertilizer production has been nil this year in contrast to 9,600 tons produced in the same months in 2022.
Lazo communicated a message to Cuba’s Minister of Agriculture from the Assembly, whose recent session ended on July 22. The ministry, he said, would be “transforming and strengthening the country’s agricultural production,” to initiate “a political and participatory movement that would unleash a productive revolution in the agricultural sector.”
Nothing Less Than a Revolution Will Do
A revolution appears to be exactly what’s needed. The recent National Assembly session dealt almost entirely with Cuba’s present food disaster. The lives of many Cubans are becoming more precarious due to unending food shortages, high prices, and low incomes.
Information emerging from the Assembly’s deliberations attests to the reality of crisis in Cuba, and it means that urgency is building for Cuba’s friends in the United States to resist U.S. policies in new ways, strongly and assertively. Their own government accounts for new suffering and destitution in Cuba.
President Miguel Díaz-Canel emphasized resistance when addressing the National Assembly. He dedicated his remarks to two revolutionary heroes who were present. Admiring how they kept “their foot in the stirrup of difficulties” and their “rifle pointed at mistakes,” he may have been thinking of hard work ahead.
He mentioned “problems of our difficult daily life, such as food production, electricity generation, water availability, crime, rising inflation, abusive prices.”
The president criticized behaviors “that reinforce the omnipresent blockade through inaction, apathy, insensitivity, incapacity, or simple tiredness and lack of faith.”
Díaz-Canel noted approvingly that delegates discussed “closer ties between deputies and the population,” “better management and allocation of the currency,” “greater direct participation of the non-state sector in national production,” “municipal autonomy,” and “downward pressure on prices.”
But it’s not enough. “Above all,” he said, “we must devote ourselves to creating wealth, first of all, by producing food.”
Trouble in the Countryside
Cuba’s rural communities are troubled—and shrinking. Soon, “we won’t have any people left in the countryside,” one delegate said. Another called for improved “roadways, housing, and connectivity.”
Regarding the low level of agricultural skills among the rural population, someone called for teaching in “agroecological techniques” and “good practices for the producing, processing, and commercialization of food.”
The idea has been circulating for a while now that greater local autonomy might help spur food production, but efforts at prompting that devolution of initiative have seen a slow uptake. As of April 2023, aspiring farmers had not yet taken possession of 258,388 hectares of idle land made available to them without cost under land-tenure reforms in 2008.
Frei Betto, Brazilian friend of revolutionary Cuba and adviser to Cuba’s Food Sovereignty and Nutritional Education Plan, visited Cuba in June. In his assessment, the “current shortages are more severe than in the Special Period (1990-95),” when Cuba’s economy nearly collapsed following the withdrawal of Soviet aid and the contraction of trade with the socialist bloc of nations.
He indicated that Cuba now imports 80% of the food it consumes, up from 70% five or so years ago, and that it costs $4 billion annually, up from $2 billion. For corn, soy, and rice alone, the outlay now is $1.5 billion annually.
He indicated, too, that a ton of imported chicken meat now costs $1.3 million, up from $900,000 a year ago, that “the wheat supply has worsened,” that milk production is down 38 million liters in one year, and that less oil from Venezuela, thanks to U.S. sanctions there, means further reduced food production in Cuba.
Blame the Blockade, But Not Only
The origins of food shortages in Cuba and the mode of U.S. intervention are highly relevant in understanding the current situation, as every Cuban knows.
To be sure, the shortages plaguing the people are not solely due to U.S. policies. Drought, hurricane damage, marabou shrub infestation, soil erosion, high soil acidity, poor drainage, and lack of organic material soil have all contributed.
The still-prevailing bureaucratic and centralizing tendencies of the Cuban government’s economic management also play a role.
The U.S. economic blockade, however, remains central to understanding what’s happening. The creation of a food crisis was among the original proposals put forward by State Department official Lestor Mallory in 1960 for how to overthrow Cuba’s revolutionary government. The program: Use “hunger and desperation” to spark the “overthrow of government.”
Aid from and trade with the socialist world frustrated U.S. efforts and kept disaster at bay for decades, but eventually the Soviet Union and socialist Eastern Europe fell. The U.S. government seized the moment and passed legislation tightening the economic blockade in 1992 and 1996 and, later, designated Cuba a terrorist-sponsoring nation.
Beyond bans on products manufactured or sold by U.S. companies, proscribed categories soon included products manufactured by foreign companies associated with U.S. ones and products containing 10% or more components of U.S. origin. Now, foreign enterprises active in Cuba faced possible U.S. court action.
International loans and international transactions in dollars are usually off-limits. Payments abroad don’t reach destinations. Income from exports doesn’t arrive.
Think imports of seeds, fertilizers, herbicides, pesticides, breeding stock, veterinary supplies and drugs, new equipment, spare parts, exports of coffee, rum, and nickel. Think loans for purchasing food and more, loans for agricultural development. Think impediments to restoring rural infrastructure.
The blockade, the U.S. tool of choice, has hit food production in Cuba hard. It is far along in achieving its ultimate purpose. Cuba needs a new order of support from friends in the United States─Marti’s “belly of the beast.”
Cuba Needs Friends More Than Ever
Many have so admired Cuba’s brand of socialism as to assume that Cuba’s social gains and exuberant international solidarity would fire up such enthusiasm that, along with considerations of fairness, legality, neighborliness, and revulsion against U.S. cruelty, would make U.S. policymakers think anew about Cuba. It never happened.
Now at a watershed moment in Cuba, a new direction is necessary, one all about persuading, organizing, and unifying left-leaning political groups and anti-war, anti-empire activists of all stripes. Leadership is needed.
Frei Betto says that, “It is time for all of us, in solidarity with the Cuban Revolution, to intensify the struggle against the U.S. blockade and mobilize international cooperation with the island that dared to conquer its independence and sovereignty against the most powerful and genocidal empire in the history of mankind.”
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W.T. Whitney Jr. is a political journalist whose focus is on Latin America, health care, and anti-racism. A Cuba solidarity activist, he formerly worked as a pediatrician, lives in rural Maine. W.T. Whitney Jr. es un periodista político cuyo enfoque está en América Latina, la atención médica y el antirracismo. Activista solidario con Cuba, anteriormente trabajó como pediatra, vive en la zona rural de Maine.
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***
The Internet just changed forever, but most people living in the United States don’t even realize what just happened. A draconian new law known as the “Digital Services Act” went into effect in the European Union on Friday, and it establishes an extremely strict regime of Internet censorship that is far more authoritarian than anything we have ever seen before. From this point forward, hordes of European bureaucrats will be the arbiters of what is acceptable to say on the Internet. If they discover something that you have said on a large online platform that they do not like, they can force that platform to take it down, because someone in Europe might see it. So even though this is a European law, the truth is that it is going to have a tremendous impact on all of us.
The European Union’s Digital Services Act (DSA) has officially gone into effect. Starting on August 25th, 2023, tech giants like Google, Facebook, Amazon, and more must comply with sweeping legislation that holds online platforms legally accountable for the content posted to them.
Even though this new law was passed in the EU, we’ll likely see far-reaching global effects as companies adjust their policies to comply.
Ranging from social media platforms to online marketplaces and search engines, the list so far includes: Facebook, TikTok, X (formerly Twitter), YouTube, Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Snapchat, Amazon, Booking, AliExpress, Zalando, Google Shopping, Wikipedia, Google Maps, Google and Apple’s mobile app stores, Google’s Search, and Microsoft’s Bing.
But starting on February 24th, 2024, the Digital Services Act will start applying to a much broader spectrum of online platforms that have fewer than 45 million monthly users.
We are being told that this new law will establish clear rules that online platforms must follow.
That will include censoring anything that is deemed “false or misleading” under the Strengthened Code of Practice on Disinformation…
So what kind of speech is the DSA expected to police? Last year’s Strengthened Code of Practice on Disinformation defines disinformation as “false or misleading content that is spread with an intention to deceive or secure economic or political gain and which may cause public harm.” The code has already been put to work during elections and to “respond to crises,” such as COVID and the war in Ukraine.
And it really doesn’t matter if material that European bureaucrats consider to be “false or misleading” is actually “false of misleading” at all.
What matters is that if online platforms do not comply with what they are being told to do, they will pay dearly…
Online platforms that don’t comply with the DSA’s rules could see fines of up to 6 percent of their global turnover. According to the EU Commission, the Digital Services Coordinator and the Commission will have the power to “require immediate actions where necessary to address very serious harms.” A platform continually refusing to comply could result in a temporary suspension in the EU.
Big tech companies will be desperate to avoid such penalties, and so they will obey.
Under this Orwellian regime, a team of hundreds of unelected EU bureaucrats will decide what constitutes disinformation and instruct Big Tech firms to censor it. The firms themselves, faced with reputational risk and financial penalties, will have little choice other than to comply. This can be done in all manner of ways: simply by human moderators removing content, by shadow-banning problematic creators to reduce their reach, by demonetising certain content, and by tweaking algorithms to favour or disfavour certain topics. And though, legally speaking, the DSA only applies in the EU, once installed inside Big Tech firms, this vast content-regulation apparatus will surely affect users in the rest of the world, too.
We are being told that these EU bureaucrats will also be working with “trusted flaggers” to help identify content that needs to be censored…
The DSA’s “trusted flaggers” are entities with proven expertise in flagging harmful or illegal content to platforms. The new regulation provides that their content flagging shall be prioritised by platforms when moderating content.
You might be tempted to think that you will be able to avoid all of this censorship because you do not live in Europe.
Unfortunately, that is simply not true.
If you post something that someone in Europe might see, your content comes under the jurisdiction of this horrifying new law.
So you need to brace yourself for a level of Internet censorship that none of us have ever seen before.
In addition, most of the large tech companies that must comply with this new law are based in the United States.
U.S. Senate Commerce Committee Ranking Member Ted Cruz (R-Texas) today sent letters to Federal Trade Commission (FTC) Chairwoman Lina Khan and the head of the European Union’s San Francisco office, demanding answers regarding the degree of coordination between the FTC and the EU to enforce the EU’s Digital Services Act (“DSA”) and Digital Markets Act (“DMA”) on U.S. soil. Both foreign laws were written to weaken American tech companies, particularly in Europe. There are no corollary federal laws to the DSA and DMA, making the FTC’s efforts to conspire with foreign regulators against U.S. businesses unprecedented.
The FTC announced in March that it was sending agency officials to Brussels to assist the EU in implementing these laws, while the EU opened a San Francisco office to pressure U.S tech companies to comply with them.
From this point forward, it is going to become much more difficult to share alternative views on the Internet.
Personally, there will be certain things that I will only be able to share in my books or with the paid subscribers of my Substack newsletter.
I am going to need to be more careful about what I share from now on, because if I say something publicly on the Internet that offends the bureaucrats in Europe, I could get into really big trouble.
And that is going to apply to every other independent journalist as well.
For a long time, the Internet allowed ordinary people like you and ordinary people like me to share truth with a world that was desperate for it.
But now the gatekeepers are exerting a draconian level of control, and the Internet will never, ever be the same again.
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Michael’s new book entitled “End Times” is now available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com, and you can check out his new Substack newsletter right here.
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***
The US and Israel will simulate striking Iranian nuclear facilities as part of a series of joint military exercises that will be held in the coming months, The Times of Israel reported Wednesday, citing Israeli TV.
Back in January, the US and Israel conducted the Juniper Oak exercises, which were the largest-ever joint drills between the two nations. The Israeli military said Juniper Oak was just the first of a series of drills that the US and Israel will hold this year.
Israel’s Channel 12 reported one of the upcoming drills would simulate Israel facing a multi-front missile attack that will involve the US deployment of Patriot missile systems. Another drill will rehearse a joint US-Israeli attack on Iranian nuclear facilities.
The plan to simulate attacks on Iran has not been publicly confirmed by the US or Israel, but the two nations have previously rehearsed bombing Iran, including during drills that were held over the Mediterranean Sea in November 2022.
While nuclear facilities would be the target in the simulated drills, there’s no sign Iran is looking to build a nuclear weapon, which was affirmed by a recent US intelligence report. Often missing from the conversation about Iran’s civilian nuclear program is the fact that Israel has a secret nuclear weapons program and an arsenal of nukes that the US does not acknowledge exists.
The report comes amid heightened tensions between the US and Iran in the Persian Gulf. The US seizure of a tanker carrying Iranian oil in April provoked two Iranian tanker seizures, and the US responded by beefing up its military presence in the region.
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Dave DeCamp is the news editor of Antiwar.com, follow him on Twitter @decampdave.
Featured image: US and Israeli fighter jets fly alongside a US B-52 bomber over the Mediterranean Sea during the Juniper Oak 2023 drill, January 25, 2023. (CENTCOM)
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***
There are parallels between these Suwayda protests and the 2011 ones that morphed into a countrywide military conflict – namely, the foreign exploitation of sincere grievances strategically aimed at dividing Syria along sectarian and ethnic lines.
Thirteen years after the onset of the war on Syria, a domestic political eruption backed by foreign states has resurfaced, threatening to once again ignite conflict in the country despite years of relative calm.
Economic woes today underpin the public grievances expressed on the street. The much-heralded May 2023 reinstatement of Syria in the Arab League has thus far failed to deliver any significant political or economic relief for the beleaguered Levantine state.
Instead, Syria’s economy continues to deteriorate with the devaluation of the national currency against the dollar. Concurrently, a renewed US initiative to partition and weaken Syria is gaining traction, as Washington strives relentlessly to undermine Damascus’ centrality as a pivotal regional state and geopolitical player.
Underpinning all this is stifling western unilateral economic sanctions imposed on Syria, as well as the territorial encroachments of US, Turkish, and Israeli military forces.
The illegal occupation of Syrian lands, coupled with the loss and theft of vital oil, water resources, and agricultural bounty by foreign occupation troops and their local proxy militias, further compounds the crisis, as does the recurrent Israeli aggression and missile strikes targeting Syrian infrastructure.
Within the context of all this devastation, some tough-love decisions made by the central government in Damascus have unsurprisingly ignited a fresh wave of protests that have now assumed a distinctly “separatist” character.
SDF Backs Suwayda Secession
The initial protests emerged in Syria’s Suwayda governorate following the removal of fuel subsidies, which caused a hike in public transportation costs and raw material prices. These grievances rapidly evolved into political demands, centering on the implementation of UN Security Council Resolution 2254 and policies of decentralization.
The latter concept implies a form of “self-administration” akin to the separatist Kurdish Autonomous Administration that receives support from the US in the northeastern region of the country.
The Syrian Democratic Council (SDC), representing the political arm of the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) – bolstered by the US military occupation and the cover it provides – has overtly endorsed the Suwayda protests and their transformation from socio-economic aspirations into calls for secession.
The SDF openly seeks to attract western assistance to replicate its Kurdish self-governance model – but in Suwayda. Importantly, this isn’t the first time the SDF has attempted to exert political influence in Suwayda. In 2019, amidst ISIS assaults on the southern governorate, the SDF pursued relations with Druze leaders, engaging in both public and secret talks to garner support for the self-governance initiative in Suwayda.
The initial protests in Suwayda were modest in scale, and attempts by Syrian government opponents to portray these as a massive uprising fell short. The numbers involved continue to be small in comparison to Suwayda’s total population, and have thus far failed to incite a broader nationwide wave.
Comparisons with the 2011 Uprisings
Others tried to ride the Suwayda momentum. In the north of the country, at the very same time, Al-Qaeda affiliate Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) began to organize large-scale demonstrations in various cities and villages under its control in Idlib province – again, drawing parallels to the 2011 events that led to the Syrian war.
In the southern governorate of Daraa, which borders Jordan, armed individuals took to the streets and launched attacks on a number of army positions, but these were rapidly quelled. In Suwayda, security forces monitored the movements without immediate reaction.
Today, the momentum of the protests has dwindled, and the situation across other governorates remains largely unchanged despite a rush of rumors about a potential reenactment of the 2011 events.
A Syrian security source informs The Cradle that Druze spiritual leader Sheikh Hikmat al-Hijriplayed a pivotal role in Suwayda’s narrative shift from local demands to separatist aspirations. His discord with the Syrian government has led him to establish ties with parties in the Persian Gulf, while internally fostering support for Suwayda’s separation. However, Hijri has since backed off, reiterating the need to preserve the unity of Syria and supporting the legitimacy of the government in Damascus.
According to the source, some local factions in Suwayda support “the process of transforming the protest movement into demands for secession, such as the traditional opposition close to the coalition, the so-called Ahrar al-Jabal movement, the Karama faction led by Sheikh Laith al-Balous and some smuggling gangs.”
After the protests spread in Suwayda and Daraa, participants demanded decentralization and the implementation of UN Resolution 2254 to end the 12-year war in Syria.
Not a Populist Movement
Some clerics and “local factions” in Suwayda have expressed solidarity with the protesters’ demands, and local news outlets have described the protests as “civil disobedience.” But the clerics do not speak with one voice, as some refuse to turn the demands into political ones, a development which reportedly prompted Sheikh Hijri to tone down his separatist rhetoric.
One website quoted an unnamed source as saying that “the slogans raised in all villages and towns of Suwayda carry political ideas far from economic demands, most notably the overthrow of the regime.”
Samira Moubayed, a member of the Syrian Constitutional Committee representing the civil society bloc, told North Press that “the movement will continue until security is achieved in southern Syria. This is part of the process of political change needed and necessary across Syria.”
This narrative introduced a regional aspect, positioning “the security of southern Syria” as distinct from that of Damascus and its surroundings. Riad Drar, co-chair of the SDF, countered this view more explicitly, asserting that Kurdish separatists endorse the popular movement and maintain direct communication with its leadership in the south.
Drar urged protest leaders to safeguard the movement, liaise with Syrian territories outside Damascus’ control, and establish collaborative initiatives with northeastern Syria. He also offered up the US-backed Kurdish administration as a conduit to galvanize international support for a southern secessionist movement.
The HTS-SDF Crossover
The US role in Syria’s southern governorates is still unclear, unlike its overt military and financial roles in the country’s north.
In June, Syrian opposition media outlets aligned with Turkiye disclosed a US-supported plan to integrate areas controlled by HTS in northwestern Syria with territories directly governed by the Turkish occupation army in the north (northern Aleppo countryside and parts of Raqqa and Hasakah countryside), as well as the Kurdish separatist domains in northeastern Syria, all under a single civilian administration.
HTS has shown that it is willing to establish channels of communication with the SDF when common economic interests emerge. Confidential sources told Syria TV at the time that HTS had hosted several delegations from al-Hasakah in recent months, including security leaders from the SDF.
The talks touched on the possibility of forming a joint civilian administration between the two parties, if HTS gains control over areas held by the Turkiye-backed Syrian National Army (SNA) – previously known as the Free Syrian Army. The SDF, for its part, indicated that the US supports the unification of the northeastern and northwestern regions of Syria.
In a revealing investigation for The Grayzone, journalist Hekmat Aboukhater detailed discussions within the Syrian opposition “lobby” in the US, where a former US official discussed the scenario of Syria’s division. This envisaged creating a “canton” in the northwest of the country under the administration of HTS, albeit with a different name to disassociate the group from its Al Qaeda origins.
Earlier this month, HTS accused its second-in-command Abu Maria al-Qahtani, of unauthorized communication with the US-led “International coalition.” Qahtani was purportedly attempting to expand into areas controlled by the so-called SNA and the “eastern sector” within the organization.
Rebranding Al Qaeda, Yet Again
A Syrian security source tells The Cradle that this raised concerns within a faction of Turkish intelligence linked directly to HTS, which seeks to oversee the group’s activities and avoid involvement in US-led projects.
The actual intention, says the Syrian security source, is to rebrand the organization and reshape its structure, potentially for eventual integration into the Turkish-backed “SNA” confab, followed by discussions with the international coalition or other entities. It is worth noting that HTS has undergone several re-inventions, having previously been known as Jahbat al-Nusra, and, before that, Al Qaeda.
Meanwhile, on Syria’s eastern border, the SDF has denied participating in military campaigns targeting the bordering (with Iraq) city of Albu Kamal in cooperation with US forces, but the recent visit of former US Secretary of Defense Christopher Miller to its areas suggests otherwise.
Despite himself being illegally in Syria, Miller called for supporting stability in the region, and discussed with the Autonomous Administration the limitations it faces, the threats against it, and the necessity of supporting it economically and politically, according to a statement by the Department of Foreign Relations.
Dogged Pursuit of De Facto Division
On 27 August, a high-level delegation from the US Congress visited the Turkish-occupied areas in northwestern Syria, particularly the northern countryside of Aleppo. This visit seems to confirm Washington’s intentions to establish a de facto presence in Syrian territory.
Concurrently, the Saudi newspaper Asharq Al-Awsat published a report detailing a Turkish project aimed at the Turkification of northern Syria, which involves teaching the Turkish language to approximately 300,000 Syrian children.
These developments collectively raise the possibility of the US administration supporting efforts to “impose a reality” that could lead to the division of Syria. This prospect could gain traction amid the economic challenges faced by Syria, the waning authority of the central state, and Ankara’s determination to remain in Syrian territory while engineering local demographics.
Turkiye has been constructing cities for refugees with Qatari funding, a move that lays the groundwork for scenarios similar to what’s transpiring in Suwayda – and mirroring the model of the US-funded Kurdish Autonomous Administration.
Given the existing security, military, and political landscape in Syria, it becomes evident that returning to the 2011 model of popular protests, which eventually transformed into an armed rebellion, remains an uphill task for the US and its allies.
Despite their inability to overthrow the government through military means, these actors – comprising the US, its European partners, Turkiye, Qatar, and Israel – remain undeterred in pursuing a de facto division of Syria.
Their strategy entails surrounding and economically strangling key areas under the control of the central government in Damascus. Although this may not immediately threaten the government’s stability, it poses an existential threat to the integrity of the Syrian state itself.
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***
Declassified British files highlight a little known aspect of the joint MI6/CIA coup against Iran’s democratically elected government in August 1953 – UK covert action in support of leading radical Shia Islamists, the predecessors of Ayatollah Khomeini.
In many accounts the CIA is regarded as the prime mover behind the 1953 coup in Iran, yet Britain was in fact the initial instigator and provided considerable resources to the plot, which UK planners named ‘Operation Boot’.
In the early 1950s, the Anglo–Iranian Oil Company (AIOC), or BP as it is now known, was run from London and owned jointly by the British government and private citizens. It controlled Iran’s main source of income, oil, and by 1951 had become, according to one British official, “in effect an imperium in imperio [an empire within an empire] in Persia”.
Iranian nationalists objected to the fact that the AIOC’s revenues from oil were greater than the Iranian government’s.
Britain’s ambassador in Tehran, Sir Francis Shepherd, had a typically colonialist take on the situation. The declassified files show his writing:
“It is so important to prevent the Persians from destroying their main source of revenue…by trying to run it themselves”
He added:
“The need for Persia is not to run the oil industry for herself (which she cannot do) but to profit from the technical ability of the West.”
Of course Iran was perfectly capable of running its own oil industry. In March 1951 the Iranian parliament voted to nationalise oil operations, take control of the AIOC and expropriate its assets.
In May, Mohammed Mossadeq, the leader of Iran’s social-democratic National Front Party, was elected as prime minister and immediately implemented the bill.
Britain responded by withdrawing the AIOC’s technicians and announcing a blockade on Iranian oil exports. Moreover, it also began planning to overthrow Mossadeq.
“Our policy”, a British official later recalled, “was to get rid of Mossadeq as soon as possible”.
‘An Authoritarian Regime’
Following the well-worn pattern of installing and backing compliant Middle Eastern monarchs, British officials were keen on “a non-communist coup d’etat, preferably in the name of the shah”, which “would mean an authoritarian regime”.
The ambassador in Tehran wanted “a dictator” who “would carry out the necessary administrative and economic reforms and settle the oil question on reasonable terms” – meaning reversing the nationalisation.
Image is licensed under the Public Domain
The military strongman chosen to preside over the coup was General Fazlollah Zahedi, a figure who had been arrested by the British for pro-Nazi activities during the second world war, and was by the early 1950s Iran’s interior minister.
Despite British propaganda, Mossadeq’s government was privately recognised by UK officials as generally being democratic, popular, nationalist and anti-communist.
One difference between the National Front and other political groupings in Iran was that its members were, as Britain’s ambassador privately admitted, “comparatively free from the taint of having amassed wealth and influence through the improper use of official positions”.
Mossadeq had considerable popular support, and as prime minister managed to break the grip over Iranian affairs exercised by the large landowners, wealthy merchants, the army and the civil service.
Danger of Independence
The popular nationalist threat posed by Mossadeq was compounded by his alliance of convenience with the pro-Soviet Iranian communist party – Tudeh.
As British and US covert planners met throughout 1952, the former tried to enlist the latter in attempting a joint overthrow of the government by deliberately playing up the scenario of a communist threat to Iran.
One British official noted in August 1952 that
“the Americans would be more likely to work with us if they saw the problem as one of containing communism rather than restoring the position of the AIOC”.
However, neither the British nor US planning files show that they took seriously the prospect of a communist take-over of the country. Rather, both primarily feared the dangerous example Mossadeq’s independent policies presented to Western interests in Iran and elsewhere in the region.
By November 1952, an MI6–Foreign Office team was jointly proposing with the CIA the overthrow of Iran’s democratic government. British agents in Iran were provided with radio transmitters to maintain contact with MI6, while the head of the MI6 operation, Christopher Woodhouse, put the CIA in touch with other British contacts in the country.
MI6 also began to provide arms to tribal leaders in the north of Iran.
Ayatollah Kashani
Image is licensed under the Public Domain
The most important religious figure in Iran was the 65-year-old Shia cleric, Ayatollah Seyyed Kashani. He had helped German agents in Persia in 1944, and a year later helped found the unofficial Iranian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, the Fadayan-e-Islam (‘Devotees of Islam’), a militant fundamentalist organisation.
The Fadayan was involved in a number of terrorist attacks against Iran’s then ruler, the Shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, in the late 1940s, including an assassination attempt in 1949, and killed the Shah’s prime minister, Ali Razmara, in 1951. Around this time, it appears Kashani broke with the organisation.
By the early 1950s, the Ayatollah had become the speaker in the Iranian parliament, the Majlis, and a key ally of Mossadeq.
A US intelligence report noted that, like Mossadeq, Kashani had a large popular appeal and strongly supported the National Front’s policies of oil nationalisation and the elimination of British influence in Iran.
However, by early 1953 relations between Kashani and Mossadeq became strained, notably over the latter’s proposals to extend his powers, and in July of that year Mossadeq dismissed Kashani from the post of speaker.
Tensions between Mossadeq and Kashani and other religious supporters of the ruling National Front were further stirred up by two of the principal British agents in the country: the Rashidian brothers, who came from a wealthy family with connections to the Iranian royals.
Instrumental in securing the Shah’s endorsement for the coup, the Rashidians also later acted as go-betweens among army officers distributing weapons to rebellious tribes and other ayatollahs, as well as Kashani.
Rioting
In February 1953 rioting broke out in Tehran, and pro-Zahedi supporters attacked Mossadeq’s residence, calling for the prime minister’s blood. Stephen Dorril notes in his book, MI6: Fifty Years of Special Operations, that this mob had been financed by Ayatollah Kashani and was acting in collaboration with British agents.
Kashani’s potential for attracting the Iranian street had been noted by the British Foreign Office, which remarked on his “considerable following in the bazaar [markets] among the older type of shop-keeper, merchant and the like. This is the chief source of his political power and his ability to stage demonstrations”.
British pay-offs had also secured the cooperation of senior army and police officers, deputies and senators, mullahs, merchants, newspaper editors and elder statesmen, as well as mob leaders.
“These forces”, explained MI6 officer Christopher Woodhouse, “were to seize control of Tehran, preferably with the support of the shah but if necessary without it, and to arrest Mossadeq and his ministers”.
The British also operated agents inside the Tudeh Party and were involved in organising “false flag” attacks on mosques and public figures in the party’s name.
CIA officer Richard Cottam later observed that the British “saw the opportunity and sent the people we had under our control into the streets to act as if they were Tudeh. They were more than just provocateurs, they were shock troops, who acted as if they were Tudeh people throwing rocks at mosques and priests.”
Black Propaganda
All this was intended to frighten Iranians into believing that a victory for Mossadeq would be a victory for communism and would mean an increase in Tudeh’s political influence.
A secret US history of the coup plan, drawn up by CIA officer Donald Wilber in 1954, and published by the New York Times in 2000, relates how CIA agents gave serious attention to alarming the religious leaders in Tehran by issuing black propaganda in the name of the Tudeh Party, threatening these leaders with savage punishment if they opposed Mossadeq.
Threatening phone calls were made to some of them, in the name of the Tudeh, and one of several planned sham bombings of the houses of these leaders was carried out.
British declassified files show that both the British and US governments considered installing Ayatollah Kashani as a client political leader in Iran following the coup.
In March 1953 Foreign Office official Alan Rothnie wrote how foreign secretary Anthony Eden had discussed with the head of the CIA, General Walter Bedell Smith, the possibility of dealing with Kashani as an alternative to Mossadeq.
Rothnie noted that
“they would be glad to learn whether we have any information which would suggest that the United States and United Kingdom could find a modus vivendi [way of working] with Kashani once he was in power. They feel that Kashani might be bought, but are doubtful, once he was in power, whether he could be held to a reasonable line.”
The British and US consideration of Kashani as a future leader is itself instructive yet the answer that came back both from the US State Department and the British Foreign Office was that Kashani would be a liability: he was seen as far too independent.
‘Complete Political Reactionary’
The Foreign Office stated that Kashani “would be of no use to us, and almost certainly a hindrance, as a successor to Dr Mossadeq, both generally and in an oil settlement”.
It regarded him as even more anti-Western than Mossadeq, describing him as “anti-British” and as nursing a “bitter enmity towards us” after being arrested for helping the Nazis during the war.
The Foreign Office termed him “a complete political reactionary…totally opposed to political reforms”. “He would conceivably…accept Western money”, it noted, but he would not follow “a reasonable line about an oil settlement”.
“If he came to power it would be impossible to reach a modus vivendi with him…We could not count on Kashani giving Persia that minimum of order and stability which is our basic need,” the Foreign Office concluded.
However, written comments appended to this report show other Foreign Office officials pondering the “the idea of Kashani as a stop gap, or a bridge to some more amenable regime”.
One official questioned whether Britain should work to replace Mossadeq with Kashani “before we can expect something better in order to produce the necessary public revulsion”.
The British view was that if Kashani could not be entrusted with power, his forces could still be used as shock troops to change the regime.
The evidence points to British and US support being provided to this “complete political reactionary” both before and after the report noted above was written, in March 1953.
Go-ahead
In late June 1953, the US gave the final go-ahead for the coup, setting the date for mid-August.
The initial coup plan was thwarted when Mossadeq – having been warned of the plot, possibly by the Tudeh Party – arrested some officials plotting with Zahedi and set up roadblocks in Tehran. This caused the Shah to panic and flee abroad where he would stay until the coup restored him as absolute monarch.
In order to trigger a wider uprising, the CIA turned to the clergy and made contact with Kashani via the Rashidian brothers. Footing the bill for this joint Anglo–American operation, the US gave Kashani $10,000 to organise massive demonstrations in central Tehran, together with other ayatollahs who also brought their supporters out onto the streets.
Amidst these demonstrations, the Shah appointed General Zahidi as prime minister and appealed to the military to come out in support of him.
Wider protests developed in which anti-Shah activists were beaten up and pro-Shah forces, including elements in the military, seized the radio station, army headquarters and Mossadeq’s home, forcing the latter to surrender to Zahidi.
The CIA also helped to mobilise militants of the Fadayan-e-Islam in these demonstrations; it is not known if Britain also did.
The Fadayan’s founder and leader, Navab Safavi, is believed to have had associations at the time with Ruhollah Khomeini, a Shia cleric and scholar based at the shrine city of Qom in Iran. According to Iranian officials, Khomeini, then a follower of Kashani, was among the MI6/CIA-sponsored crowd protesting against Mossadeq in 1953.
Fadayan-e-Islam’s members would act as the foot soldiers of the Islamic revolution of 1979, helping to implement the wholesale introduction of Islamic law in Iran.
Thanking Kashani
Image: Mohammad Mosaddegh in court, 8 November 1953. (Licensed under the Public Domain)
After Mossadeq’s overthrow, the British received a report from the new Iraqi ambassador in Tehran, telling how the Shah and Zahedi had together visited Kashani, “kissed his hands, and thanked him for his help in restoring the monarchy”.
The Shah soon assumed all powers and became the “dictator” preferred by the British ambassador. The following year a new consortium was established, controlling the production and export of Iranian oil, in which the US and Britain each secured a 40 per cent interest – a sign of the new order, the US having muscled in on a formerly British preserve.
Kashani, meanwhile, faded from political view after 1953, but he acted as Khomeini’s mentor and the latter was a frequent visitor to Kashani’s home. Kashani’s death in 1961 would mark the start of Khomeini’s long rise to power.
Despite eventual US management of the coup, the British had been the prime movers, and their motives were evident.
As a former Iranian ambassador to the UN until the 1979 Islamic revolution, Fereydoun Hoveyda, claimed years later:
“The British wanted to keep up their empire and the best way to do that was to divide and rule.”
He added:
“The British were playing all sides. They were dealing with the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and the mullahs in Iran, but at the same time they were dealing with the army and the royal families.”
Hoveyda continued:
“They had financial deals with the mullahs. They would find the most important ones and would help them…The British would bring suitcases of cash and give it to these people. For example, people in the bazaar, the wealthy merchants, would each have their own ayatollah that they would finance. And that’s what the British were doing”.
‘Made in Britain’
In her memoirs, written in exile in 1980, the Shah’s twin sister, Ashraf Pahlavi, who pressed her brother to assume power in 1953, observed that
“many influential clergymen formed alliances with representatives of foreign powers, most often the British, and there was in fact a standing joke in Persia that if you picked up a clergyman’s beard, you would see the words ‘Made in England’ stamped on the other side.”
Although exaggerating with her ‘Made in England’ claim, Ashraf neatly summed up the British view of the Islamists – that they could be used to counter threats to UK interests.
During the 1951–3 coup planning period, Kashani was seen by the British as too much of an anti-Western liability to be a strategic ally. But his forces could be used to prepare the way for the installation of pro-Western figures, and be dropped as soon as their tasks for the imperial powers had been performed.
Kashani’s successor, Ayatollah Khomeini, took over the country following the 1979 revolution, presiding over an Islamic theocracy until his death a decade later.
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This is an edited extract from Mark Curtis’ book, Secret Affairs: Britain’s Collusion with Radical Islam.
Mark Curtis is the editor of Declassified UK, and the author of five books and many articles on UK foreign policy.
Featured image: Ayatollah Kashani with Iranian police and military officials. (Photo: IICHS)
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The Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) and Muslim Advocates sued multiple United States government agencies that have refused to produce key information on thousands of Afghan refugees still living in limbo at secretive detention sites.
In August 2021, over 124,000 Afghan civilians were evacuated. Yet as described in a filed complaint [PDF], the “evacuees” were sent to “processing” sites for medical screening and security vetting. They were supposed to receive visas or parole that would allow them to enter the U.S., but numerous Afghans “remain stranded” at sites that are reportedly overseen or controlled by the U.S. government.
CCR filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request on March 31 for records from the Defense Department, State Department, and Homeland Security Department (DHS). The information would include “policies and data about the detained Afghan refugees” as well as the “health and safety conditions” of the camps where they are being held.
All three U.S. agencies failed to respond to CCR’s request, as required by FOIA. DHS and the State Department did not even acknowledge that they received the request for records.
Sadaf Doost, an attorney and Bertha Justice fellow at CCR, told The Dissenter that human rights organizations have spent the past two years “trying to ask for accountability but also at the same time transparency around the process of what Afghan civilians are facing.” Specifically, groups have been concerned with refugees at Emirates Humanitarian City in the United Arab Emirates, Camp Liya in Kosovo, and Camp As Sayliyah in Qatar.
The U.S. government has not provided any “clarity around how long they have to continue waiting,” Doost added. News reporting suggests that “some may be coerced to return back to Afghanistan” if they do not want to continue their lives in limbo.
“The documents that the Center for Constitutional Rights and Muslim Advocates are seeking production of would provide insight as to how many Afghan refugees remain at these sites, the U.S.’s role in maintaining, operating, and facilitating these sites; if people have been denied entry into the U.S. or are under security vetting, what that process entails, and also just the location of these sites so that again those impacted and those working on the rights of Afghan refugees can know what they’re up against,” Doost stated.
As the complaint argues, the public has a “time-sensitive need” for this information about the U.S. government’s “practices, policies, knowledge of, or role in these matters, not only to inform their involvement in advocacy around executive policies on immigration and refugee processing but to meaningfully participate in ongoing discussions regarding the treatment of Afghan civilians.”
Camp Liya, which is located at U.S. Base Camp Bondsteel, has been dubbed “Little Guantanamo” by several residents.
Deutsche Welle reported in 2022 that refugees at Camp Liya are not allowed to leave if they wish to return to the site. They are not allowed to work so they may send money back home to their families.
“A prisoner can have access to his case, and he can ask about his case, why he is here, for how long he will be in detention,” one refugee told DW. “If we ask that, they don’t give us any reason why we are in this camp and for how long.”
The U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants reported [PDF] in June 2022 that the majority of Afghan evacuees were brought to Camp As Sayliyah in Doha, which once was a U.S. army base. They were “warehoused in giant rooms without air-conditioning with few restroom and shower facilities, and without access to sufficient nourishment or water.”
About a year ago, Reveal News reported that the U.S. government had “approved less than 2 percent of Afghan applications it processed for a humanitarian parole program.”
Rape, medical neglect, and human trafficking have been confirmed at several detention sites.
“The U.S. government cannot continue to ignore questions about the legal status and well-being of the Afghan civilians it is detaining around the world while they await immigration determinations,” declared Chris Godshall-Bennett, a staff attorney for Muslim Advocates. “Tired appeals to ‘security concerns’ that seem to only apply to Muslim communities can no longer justify arbitrary detentions and disparate treatment.”
A March 2023 letter from the Office of the Coordinator for Afghan Relocation Efforts (CARE) apparently claimed that the U.S. government does not maintain the Emirates Humanitarian City camp. “Emirati officials solely manage, control, and operate the EHC,” CARE wrote to Human Rights Watch.
“This, however, is contrary to reports that U.S. officials visit sites, on average, twice a week,” the lawsuit notes. The State Department also acknowledged in February 2023 that the U.S. government works “closely with UAE partners to address concerns with EHC.”
Doost believes the “documents that we’re requesting would make clear what the U.S.’s role in the facilitation, control, or operation of these sites are,” especially as officials insist on giving opaque or vague answers about Afghan refugees at these camps.
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Featured image: Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who once claimed when United States troops withdrew from Afghanistan that there was “no deadline” for helping Afghans at risk. (Source: The Dissenter)
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This week’s military coup in the Central African country of Gabon against long-serving President Ali Bongo Ondimba, who’s been in office since 2009 after succeeding his father who ruled for 42 years from 1967-2009, is being hailed by many non-Western observers as the continent’s latest anti-imperialist victory. They drew comparisons to the spate of West African coups in Guinea, Mali, Burkina Faso, and most recently Niger to reach their conclusion that this former French colony is rising up against Paris too.
While it’s true that the optics extend credence this claim, and France does indeed have a wide range of economic interests in Gabon alongside basing several hundred troops there, it’s arguably premature to connect that country’s latest regime change to this trend. There are three reasons to be skeptical:
2) economic factors are more significant than geopolitical ones in Gabon; and
3) the country has close ties with China.
Beginning with the first, reliable Russian telegram channel Rybar cited their French sources to report that the US had been cultivating Oligui to replace Bongo. The timeline was unexpectedly pushed up to seize the political initiative before latent socio-economic processes threatened to spiral into another bonafide anti-imperialist revolution. This aligns with the “Amerafrique” model described here in mid-August and the Associated Press’ report about the flawed elections being a “smokescreen” for the coup.
The aforementioned announcement leads to the last reason since it was prompted by Bongo’s trip to China in April. He and President Xi, who described his Gabonese counterpart as “an old friend”, agreed to elevate bilateral ties to a comprehensive strategic partnership. The Chinese Foreign Ministry published a detailed report about their talks that can be read here and is worth reviewing for those who are surprised at just how close Gabon had grown to the People’s Republic under Bongo’s rule.
These three points cast doubt on the conclusion that Gabon’s latest regime change was driven by anti-imperialist sentiment unless the interim military authorities condemn France and/or take tangible action to disengage from it such as by demanding the expulsion of its armed forces. Until then, it’s plausible that this was either a purely domesticaffair driven by economic factors or an American attempt to preempt a bonafide anti-imperialist revolution, but hopefully average people will benefit in any case.
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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.
September 1st, 2023 by UN Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People
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The Legality of the Israeli Occupation
of the Occupied Palestinian Territory, Including East Jerusalem
UN Committee on the Exercise of
The Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People
Foreword
It is with a deep sense of responsibility that on behalf of the United Nations Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People, I present this groundbreaking Study on the Legality of the Israeli occupation of the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem. As the Chair of the Committee, it is my honour to endorse this comprehensive examination, which has been meticulously researched and drafted by the Irish Human Rights Centre of the National University of Ireland in Galway.
The relevance and urgency of this study cannot be overstated. The Israeli occupation which started in 1967 is the only reality generations of Palestinians have grown up with. It continues to have far-reaching implications on the lives and rights of the Palestinian people. It is incumbent upon us, the international community, to deepen our understanding of the legal issues raised by this prolonged occupation and its profound impact on human rights, peace and stability in the region.
Against this backdrop, the study on the legality of the Israeli occupation fills a critical knowledge gap. This thorough legal analysis aspires to contribute to an informed discourse, empowering individuals and institutions with the knowledge and tools to advocate for justice, accountability and the realization of the inalienable rights of the Palestinian people. By examining the relevant international legal instruments, conventions and resolutions, the study also provides a comprehensive appraisal of the legal obligations and responsibilities incumbent on the occupying Power and the parties involved.
This study also underscores the pressing need for a just and lasting resolution based on international law of the Question of Palestine in all its aspects. It highlights the imperative of upholding the principles of international law, including respect for human rights, self-determination and the prohibition of the acquisition of territory by force. Such an understanding is crucial for fostering a conducive environment that paves the way for the end of the Israeli occupation and the realization of the inalienable rights of the Palestinian people.
Moreover, the timely nature of this study cannot be overlooked at a time when Israel is deepening its colonization and creeping annexation of the Occupied Palestinian Territory. In a rapidly evolving global landscape, where geopolitical dynamics continue to shape the debate on the Question of Palestine, the study offers a frame of reference to anchor policymakers, diplomats, international organizations and civil society actors on a comprehensive and authoritative legal analysis enabling informed decision-making, advocacy and the pursuit of justice.
I extend my heartfelt gratitude to the Irish Human Rights Centre of the National University of Ireland Galway for their unwavering commitment and for the rigorous research that underpins this study.
Finally, I recommend this study to all those dedicated to the realization of a just and lasting peace in the Middle East. It is my hope that the findings and insights presented herein will serve as a catalyst for informed dialogue, effective advocacy and meaningful actions towards a future where the rights and aspirations of both Palestinians and Israelis are realized with full respect for the rule of law.
Ambassador Cheikh Niang
Chair, United Nations Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People and Permanent Representative of Senegal to the United Nations
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Executive Summary
Part I
This study examines two central questions. First, it asks whether Israel’s de facto and de jure annexation measures, continued settlement and protracted occupation of the Palestinian territory – the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip – render the occupation illegal under international law. Second, the study examines the question raised by the implications arising from a finding of illegal occupation. If an occupation can become illegal, what would be the legal consequences that arise for all States and the United Nations, considering, inter alia, the rules and principles of international law, including, but not limited to, the Charter of the United Nations; the Fourth Geneva Convention; international human rights law; relevant Security Council, General Assembly and Human Rights Council resolutions; and the advisory opinion of the International Court of Justice of 9 July 2004?
The study establishes that there are two clear grounds in international law establishing when a belligerent occupation may be categorized as illegal. First, where a belligerent occupation follows from a prohibited use of force amounting to an act of aggression, such occupation is illegal ab initio. Second, where a belligerent occupation follows from a permitted use of force in self-defence under Article 51 of the Charter of the United Nations but is subsequently carried out ultra vires the principles and rules of international humanitarian law and in breach of peremptory norms of international law, the conduct of the occupation may amount to an unnecessary and disproportionate use of force in self-defence. The study examines Israel’s breaches of peremptory norms of international law, the prohibition of the acquisition of territory through force, the right to self-determination, and the prohibition on racial discrimination and apartheid, as indicative of an occupation being administered in breach of the principles of necessity and proportionality for a use of force in self-defence.
Part II – The nature of belligerent occupation
Part II of the study provides a thematic introduction to the legal nature of belligerent occupation and the divergent approach of Israel to the occupation of Palestine. In doing so, it broadly examines the principles underpinning the laws governing belligerent occupation, presents the theory of belligerent occupation as illegal under the jus bello, and highlights international practice and jurisprudence classifying belligerent occupations as illegal under the jus ad bellum. Further, the study introduces the central tenets of Israel’s official policies and positions on the nature of the belligerent occupation of Palestine, its settlement enterprise and its annexation of Palestinian territory.
The laws governing belligerent occupation establish a number of important principles, including the temporary or de facto nature of occupation enshrined in Article 42 of the Hague Regulations (1907), which finds that “[t]erritory is considered occupied when it is actually placed under the authority of the hostile army”. As such, although governmental authority may be “temporarily disrupted or territorially restricted” during a belligerent occupation, the “State remains the same international person”.1 The occupying Power therefore does not acquire sovereignty over the occupied territory,2 but rather, is obliged to administer the territoryweighing the best interests of the occupied population with those of military necessity, under the limitative conservationist principle.3 Significantly, the present study highlights the positions of leading authorities on international law which consider that the practice of “prolonged occupation” has related to occupations of no more than four or five years in length, such as Germany’s four-year occupation of Belgium during World War I,4 or Germany’s five-year occupation of Norway in World War II.5 Former United Nations Special Rapporteur Michael Lynk observes that modern occupations compliant with the principles of occupation law “have not exceeded 10 years, including the American occupation of Japan, the Allied occupation of western Germany and the American-led occupation of Iraq”.6
That belligerent occupations may be considered illegal is not unique to Israel. For example, in Case Concerning Armed Activities on the Territory of the Congo (2005), the International Court of Justice held that Uganda’s occupation of Ituri “violated the principle of non-use of force in international relations and the principle of non-intervention”.7 Concomitantly, the United Nations Security Council condemned Iraq’s “illegal occupation” of Kuwait,8 and South Africa’s “illegal administration” in Namibia.9 The United Nations General Assembly, meanwhile, called on Third States to not “recognize as lawful the situation resulting from the occupation of the territories of the Republic of Azerbaijan”10 and condemned Portugal for “perpetuating its illegal occupation” of Guinea-Bissau.11 Similarly, the United Nations Commission on Human Rights denounced Vietnam’s “continuing illegal occupation of Kampuchea”.12 In 1977, the General Assembly expressed its deep concern “that the Arab territories occupied since 1967 have continued, for more than ten years, to be under illegal Israeli occupation and that the Palestinian people, after three decades, are still deprived of the exercise of their inalienable national rights”.13 Likewise, the preambles to successive United Nations Economic and Social Council resolutions refer to the “severe impact of the ongoing illegal Israeli occupation and all of its manifestations”.14
Finally, section II concludes with a presentation of Israel’s policies and positions on the nature of its administration of the Palestinian territory, the legality of settlements and its annexation of Jerusalem. For instance, Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs considers there to be “competing claims” over the West Bank which “should be resolved in peace processnegotiations”, including the settlements.15 However, Israel’s High Court of Justice, in Gaza Coast Regional Council v Knesset of Israel, held that “the legal outlook of all Israel’s governments” is that the “areas are held by Israel by way of belligerent occupation”.16 Nevertheless, Israel does not apply the Fourth Geneva Convention (1949) to the occupied territory as it has not been transposed into its domestic law; also, politically, Israel disputes the application of the Convention premised on its theory of the “missing sovereign”. Meanwhile, Israel considers occupied Jerusalem “the eternal undivided capital of Israel”17 and explains that Jerusalem was “reunified” in 1967 “as a result of the six-day war launched against Israel by the Arab world”.18
Part III – Legality of the occupation
Part III presents two separate grounds under the jus ad bellum where a belligerent occupation may be considered illegal, whether from the outset or beginning at some subsequent point in the occupation. First, an occupation arising from an act of aggression is illegal ab initio. Article 2(4) of the United Nations Charter requires that “[a]ll Members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any State, or in any other manner inconsistent with the purposes of the United Nations”. Criminal liability may arise for aggressive acts of occupation; for example, the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg considered Austria to be “occupied pursuant to a common plan of aggression”.19
Second, a belligerent occupation may be conducted in a manner that amounts to an unnecessary and disproportionate use of force in self-defence.20 Here the caselaw of the International Court of Justice provides useful guidance on proportionality. For example, in Nicaragua, the International Court of Justice considered, “the reaction of the United States in the context of what it regarded as self-defence was continued long after the period in which any presumed armed attack by Nicaragua could reasonably be contemplated”.21 Further, in Nuclear Weapons the International Court of Justice suggested that a use of force should meet “in particular the principles and rules of humanitarian law” to be a lawful use of force in self-defence.22 This study suggests that the occupying Power’s breach of the principles and rules of international humanitarian law and peremptory norms of international law provide a strong indicator that a use of force is disproportionate. Such breaches include de facto and de jure annexations of territory, illegal acquisition of territory through use of force, the denial of the right of self-determination, and the administration of the occupied territory in breach of the prohibition of racial discrimination and apartheid.
Having established the two grounds for illegal occupation under the jus ad bellum, the study proceeds to examine, as a separate and subsequent ground of illegality, the occupying Power’s breach of the external right of self-determination of Palestine as Mandate territory. Article 1(2) of the United Nations Charter provides for the right of self-determination of peoples, a jus cogens norm of international law23 which has obligations on States erga omnes.24 The right of self-determination has special resonance for Mandate territories, whose right of self-determination is held internationally as a “sacred trust” until full independence. As such, the colonial process can only be considered to be fully brought to a complete end once the right of self-determination has been exercised by the inhabitants of the colony.25 The South West Africa advisory opinion provides the leading example of an illegal occupation of Mandate territory, considered by the International Court of Justice to be illegal ab initio. However, whereas South West Africa was mandated territory, held under occupation after the termination of the Mandate, it can be distinguished from Palestine, which is mandated territory held under belligerent occupation in the context of an international armed conflict. Nevertheless, if the occupation is administered in a way that denies the exercise of the right of the people to external self-determination and sovereignty, this may similarly be considered in breach of the “sacred trust”. Depending on the circumstances giving rise to the breach of self-determination, the occupation could be illegal either ab initio or at some point thereafter.
This study examines two central questions. The first is whether Israel’s de facto and de jure annexation measures, continued settlement and protracted occupation of the Palestinian territory – the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip – render the occupation illegal under international law. Second, the study examines the question raised by a finding of illegal occupation. If an occupation can become illegal, what would be the legal consequences that arise for all States and the United Nations, considering, inter alia, the rules and principles of international law, including, but not limited to, the United Nations Charter; the Fourth Geneva Convention; international human rights law; relevant Security Council, General Assembly and Human Rights Council resolutions; and the advisory opinion of the International Court of Justice of 9 July 2004?
Although the establishment of a belligerent occupation operates as a question of fact, the rationale behind the de facto nature of belligerent occupation was to prevent the disinterested or malevolent occupying Power from reneging on their obligations towards the occupied population.58 For these purposes, international humanitarian law norms continue to bind the occupying Power regardless of the legality of the occupation. However, Giladi observes that “regulating situations of occupation is as much a jus ad bellum exercise as it is one of jus in bello”.59 Jus ad bellum refers to “conditions under which States may resort to war or to the use of armed force in general” while jus in bello refers to the law regulating the conduct of parties engaged in an armed conflict, primarily international humanitarian law.60 Accordingly, this study establishes that there are two clear grounds in international law establishing when a belligerent occupation may be categorized as illegal. First, where a belligerent occupation follows from a prohibited use of force amounting to an act of aggression, such occupation is illegal from the outset. Second, where a belligerent occupation follows from a permitted use of force in self-defence under Article 51 of the United Nations Charter, but subsequently breaches the principles of necessity and proportionality, the resulting occupation may become illegal.
This study foregrounds its analysis on the illegality of the belligerent occupation primarily on Israel’s breach of the law governing the use of force as an act of aggression. There is persuasive documentary evidence to indicate that Israel’s initial invasion of Egypt in 1967 constituted a pre-emptive armed attack against the Egyptian blockade and therefore an unlawful use of force.61 Even assuming arguendo that Israel’s use of force was a legitimate act of self-defence in response to an armed attack, Israel’s continued belligerent occupation of the Palestinian territory for almost 56 years – decades after it concluded peace agreements with Egypt and Jordan, key parties to the conflict, and after multiple Security Council calls for it to end – makes it clear that the belligerent occupation has exceeded the parameters of military necessity and proportionality for a legitimate act of self-defence. The study demonstrates that Israel iscarrying out an indefinite belligerent occupation, with annexationist intent, in violation of the exercise of the Palestinian people’s right to self-determination and permanent sovereignty over national resources. In doing so, this research broadly examines Israel’s breach of the principles and rules of international humanitarian law, and in particular, the breach of three peremptory norms: (1) the right to self-determination; (2) the prohibition on the acquisition of territory by use of force; and (3) the prohibition of racial discrimination and apartheid, as particularly compelling indicators that Israel is occupying the Palestinian territory in breach of the principles of immediacy, necessity and proportionality, rendering the belligerent occupation an unlawful use of force in self-defence.
Having established that Israel’s pre-emptive use of force against Egypt amounted to an act of aggression, and dispelling Israel’s arguments of self-defence, the study examines the particular consequences of the occupation and its breach of the external right of self-determination of the Palestinian people. It is clearly articulated in the South West Africa advisory opinion that the continued occupation of Mandate territory after the termination of the Mandate is illegal ab initio.62 Nevertheless, the study draws a distinction between the administration of Namibia by South Africa – which had previously been the Mandatory Power and was acting ultra vires international resolutions terminating the Mandate – and the case of Palestine, a Mandate territory which is the subject of an international armed conflict and subsequent belligerent occupation.63 As a “sacred trust” with particular international consequences, Israel’s continued administration of occupied Palestine, as a mala fide illegal occupant, breaches the exercise of the right of the Palestinian people to external self-determination.
The study demonstrates that there are international consequences for Israel’s illegal occupation and its breaches of peremptory norms of international law,64 and that Third States and the international community are obliged to bring the unlawful administration of occupied territory to an end. In doing so, this study underscores the requirements for the full de-occupation and decolonization of the Palestinian territory, starting with the immediate, unconditional and total withdrawal of Israeli occupying forces and the dismantling of the military administration. Critically, withdrawal, as the termination of an internationally wrongful act, cannot be made the subject of negotiation. Full sanctions and countermeasures, including economic restrictions, arms embargoes and the cutting of diplomatic and consular relations, should be implemented immediately, as an erga omnes (towards all) response of Third States and the international community to Israel’s serious violations of peremptory norms of international law. The international community must take immediate steps towards the realization of the collective rights of the Palestinian people, including refugees and exiles in the diaspora, starting with a plebiscite convened under United Nations supervision, to undertake the completion of decolonization.
B. Methodology
The study takes it as a starting point that the Palestinian territory – i.e., the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip – was occupied by Israel in 1967, in the course of an international armed conflict. That the territory is under belligerent occupation is recognized by the International Court of Justice in the Wall advisory opinion:
The territories situated between the Green Line… and the former eastern boundary of Palestine under the Mandate were occupied by Israel in 1967 during the armed conflict between Israel and Jordan. Under customary international law, these were therefore occupied territories in which Israel had the status of occupying Power. Subsequent events in these territories… have done nothing to alter this situation. All these territories (including East Jerusalem) remain occupied territories and Israel has continued to have the status of occupying Power.65
The study also takes it as a starting point that Israel continues to occupy the Gaza Strip.66 While recognizing that Israel is administering the territory occupied in 1967 as an occupying Power under the laws of armed conflict, the study also makes reference to territory held under Israeli control beyond the occupied territory acquired in the 1948–49 conflict. This territory includes both the effectively annexed West Jerusalem67 and the territory demarcated for a Palestinian State under General Assembly resolution 181,68 territory which at a minimum continues to be held as a “sacred trust” for the Palestinian people.69
The study undertakes a comparative analysis of the legal consequences of a number of occupations where the Security Council, the General Assembly and the International Court of Justice have pronounced on the illegality of the occupation. This includes South Africa’s occupation of Angola, Iraq’s occupation of Kuwait, Armenia’s occupation of Azerbaijan, Uganda’s occupation of Ituri in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Vietnam’s occupation of Democratic Kampuchea, South Africa’s occupation of Namibia, and Portugal’s occupation of Guinea-Bissau. Drawing from these case studies, the study concludes with an outline of the requirements for the de-occupation and decolonization of occupied Palestine.
The research draws from the leading international law scholars on the subject of belligerent occupation, broadly analysing the discourse on illegality under three central legal arguments. The first argument provides that belligerent occupations may become illegal premised onbreaches of peremptory norms of international law.70 A second school of thought suggests that the ooccupying Power’s breach of the principles of occupation law in bello taint the occupation with illegality.71 And a third line of arguments posits that an occupation following from an unlawful use of force, in breach of the jus ad bellum, is illegal, or may become illegal should the occupation follow from an act of self-defence that later violates the principles of necessity and proportionality.72 The study provides a substantive overview of the principles governing belligerent occupation. It provides a rationale for proceeding with use-of-force arguments,73 while taking Israel’s violation of the principles underpinning occupation, along with its breach of peremptory norms of international law in administering the occupied territory, as evidence that the continuing unnecessary use of force is disproportionate to its original aim.74
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Featured image: Palestinian residents of Huwara walk among their burned homes, cars, and businesses the morning after Israeli settlers rampaged through their town in the West Bank, Feb. 27, 2023. (Oren Ziv)
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In this insightful interview, Samir Bhattacharya, a research associate at Vivekananda International Foundation, discusses the changing geopolitical situation, how India and Africa are working closely together to support the emerging multipolar world.Kester Kenn Klomegah, the interviewer, further attempted to find out from the academic expert how India and Russia can broad-based collaborate for the betterment of Africa.
Here are the interview excerpts.
Kester Kenn Klomegah (KKK): Do you think there is an increasing need for India and African countries to work more closely, especially in this changing global situation?
Samir Bhattacharya (SB): The world is going through a turbulent time. For about two years, countries across the world suffered from covid and covid-related shutdowns. When the world just started its recovery journey, the war in Ukraine started derailing all the recovery plans. Today, the disastrous impacts of this metastasising conflict have extended beyond the borders of the European continent and are felt throughout the world, even in Africa. Rising food and energy prices, disruptions in the trade of commodities and services, and a sharp humanitarian crisis were brought on by a sharp decline in development funding for Africa.
Furthermore, the continent suffers the most from the detrimental effects of climate change. This crisis also severely impacts the already too-slow, however steady, energy transition program. Given this background, India’s contribution to Africa’s reconstruction effort would be crucial. Over the years, India’s interactions with Africa have grown organically. The key tenets of India’s development partnership with Africa have included capacity-building initiatives, lines of credit, grant financing, small-scale development projects, technical advice, disaster relief and humanitarian support, and military cooperation. There is a strong need for India and Africa to work together in this changing global situation.
KKK: What are some of the areas of collaboration that you think India and Africa should strengthen?
SB: To achieve inclusive growth, Africa requires financial resources. Most small businesses and industries in Africa require urgent access to infrastructure financing, especially in the backdrop of the COVID-19 outbreak and the Russia-Ukraine war. In the absence of adequate local financing sources, the policymakers of the continent are grappling to arrange the finance from different traditional external partners.
Currently, LOCs provided by the Export-Import Bank of India (Indian Exim Bank) is the primary source for India to finance an increasing number of development projects on the African continent. Exim Bank now operates three representative offices in Africa, one each in Cote d’Ivoire, Ethiopia, and South Africa. Over 44 African countries have already been granted an extension of 200 Letters of Credit, totalling about $12 billion up to May 2021. There are $2.2 billion in approved Pipelines and $9.75 billion in active Lines of Credit. Moreover, the Indian Exim Bank recently offered a US$100 million (Rs 730 crore) credit line to the Africa Finance Corporation (AFC). This funding will aid African governments in building the critical infrastructure required to revive their economies after the COVID-19 outbreak.
India has financed several significant infrastructure projects in Africa. Important African infrastructure projects supported by IFC include the construction of a railway line in Ghana, the provision of blast hole drill and mining equipment to Zimbabwe, the city decongestion project in Zambia, integrated LPG facilities at bitumen storage facilities in Mozambique, and the supply of vehicles and spare parts to Cote d’Ivoire, Senegal, Tanzania, and Zimbabwe.
Concerning security, India has always been at the forefront in preparing African countries’ military forces for the twenty-first century’s security problems. These training programs must include counterinsurgency operations, peacekeeping, marine security, and specialised instruction in emerging fields like drone operations and cyber warfare. Mandates for training citizens in fields like disaster management, humanitarian relief, and medical help must also be included. Although some of these are already included in India’s skill development initiatives, they should be pursued more thoroughly and comprehensively.
Furthermore, the continent is lagging in human resource development. As the fourth industrial revolution approaches, skill development in Africa is more important than ever if that continent does not want to fall behind in the new global economy. In fact, if early preparation and a more substantial commitment to its implementation are not made, African countries risk falling behind in the fourth industrial revolution. India’s primary method of interaction with Africa has always been capacity building and skill development. India needs to step up its information diplomacy with Africa.
KKK: Do you think of any new and emerging areas of cooperation?
SB: According to the African Union’s 2050 Africa’s Maritime Strategy, the Africa Blue Economy Strategy (2019), and other continental and regional frameworks, African nations are realising that the blue economy presents an opportunity for Africa to develop new revenue streams that could aid in development and lessen reliance on foreign aid. The SAGAR project and India’s draft policy statement on the blue economy align with the African Union’s (AU) 2050 Africa’s Maritime Strategy and Africa Blue Economy Strategy (2019). India and African nations working together to establish the “Blue Economy” will have both economic and maritime security benefits.
As digitalisation advances and more news and social media outlets, including mobile phones and the Internet, become accessible, Africa is poised for exponential media expansion. There are several print media outlets, radio stations, and roughly 1000 TV channels in Africa. Media connections between Africa and India are essentially nonexistent. There is a significant communication gap here that has to be filled. In order to support the meagre efforts made by a few private TV networks, India could attempt to create a dedicated TV channel that broadcasts content to Africa.
In terms of geoclimatic conditions, biodiversity, physiognomy, people, culture, and family values, India and Africa exhibit significant similarities. Traditional medicinal systems are commonly used to treat patients in India and Africa. India has extensive knowledge, a robust pharmaceutical industry, and a solid industrial foundation. India has one of the most affordable, easily accessible, and high-quality healthcare systems in the world. By 2025, the market for complementary and alternative medicine is anticipated to grow to $70 billion, according to the Ministry of Ayush. Therefore, collaboration between India and Africa on traditional medicine offers an outstanding prospect.
Every year, Africa loses billions of dollars due to illicit trading of natural resources such as minerals, forestry (and its by-products), oil, fisheries and wildlife sectors. A Reuters research found that every year, gold worth billions of dollars is smuggled out of Africa via the United Arab Emirates in the Middle East, which serves as a gateway to markets in Europe, the United States, and other countries. India can help Africa curb this illegal practice by sharing its experiences to improve data quality and infrastructure, skills and resources, as well as provide training to the national statistics office. Thus, some of the above-mentioned requisite finances can be raised by plugging the hole.
KKK: By the way what has been achieved since the last India-Africa summit? Do you also think there have been a number of challenges and setbacks since then?
SB: The aim, methodology, and development cooperation strategies with Africa have drastically changed since the last India Africa summit in 2015. The main modifications are as follows: increased attention paid to Africa’s development agenda; modifications made to the mechanics and procedures for carrying out LoC projects; development of new financing mechanisms; active participation of the private sector; new approaches taken to capacity building programs; increased participation of civil society organisations in capacity building; digital capacity building initiatives; priority given to partnering with multilateral organisations; and trilateral cooperation.
Unfortunately, many ongoing development activities were affected by the COVID-19 epidemic. On the positive side, due to COVID-19, digital initiatives with a particular emphasis on healthcare and education have accelerated. In light of this, India’s Pan African e-Network Project has added a new dimension to make tele-medicine and tele-education accessible in most African nations. In October 2019, it was re-launched as e-Aarogya Bharati to utilise the 15,000 scholarships offered to African students between 2019 and 2024. In order to train African healthcare practitioners, India has uniquely offered COVID-19 management practices and training webinars. Through these projects, India has helped strengthen Africa’s capability in the health and education sectors.
KKK: In your opinion, what can be done to increase trade and economic relations between the two continents?
SB: Trade and investment are the principal tenets of the economic partnership between India and Africa, and over the previous two decades, significant progress has been made in this regard. Indian trade with Africa is valued at USD 98 billion in 2022–2023 compared to USD 89.6 billion the year before. For Indian manufacturers of items like textiles, pharmaceuticals, cars, and light machinery, Africa is a sizable unexplored market. Additionally, it provides potential in the resource and energy industries, which have historically been India’s weak points. Together, India and Africa must develop short- and long-term goals that are in line with the actual needs of the African states.
Under the AfCFTA, local supply chains and regional production networks will emerge as significant markets for Indian investments and exports. By developing a legal system that forges a unique connection between the AfCFTA and India, India should actively investigate how it might benefit from the agreement. A similar structure will benefit Africa and give Indian businesses easy access to a single continental market, broadening India’s economic relationship with Africa.
KKK: Where do you see India-Africa relations, at least, in the next five years? Do India and Africa share common grounds for the emerging multipolar world?
SB: Regarding geopolitics, the world is at a turning point where multipolarity is quickly replacing US unipolarity. Both India and Africa are devoted to their cooperation to establish a multipolar world order in this rapidly changing globe. In truth, both India and Africa are working to create a multipolar world that rejects great power politics, represents contemporary diversity, and depends on broad-based collaboration. India sees Africa’s rise as essential to balance the world’s power structure. Going forward, both bilaterally and in multilateral platforms like the BRICS, the G20, and others, India will collaborate with African nations to promote inclusive and decentralised economic practices to secure global political democratisation.
India is committed to establishing a development alliance with Africa based on the participating nations’ needs and goals. Some of the shared interests include fighting terrorism, protecting the environment, combating climate change, protecting cyberspace, protecting human health and food, protecting energy supplies, and creating resilient supply chains. These are a few areas where cooperation has a lot of potential. In line with the urgent concerns of Africa, India’s development partnership with Africa is anticipated to place a strong emphasis on digital, green, healthcare, food security, and water during the next five to ten years.
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Kester Kenn Klomegah, who worked previously with Inter Press Service (IPS), Weekly Blitz and InDepthNews, is now a regular contributor to Global Research. He researches Eurasia, Russia, Africa and BRICS. His focused interest areas include geopolitical changes, foreign relations and economic development questions relating to Africa. As a versatile researcher, he believes that everyone deserves equal access to quality and trustworthy media reports.
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***
Because of the organized suppression of facts and because of the campaigns against truth-tellers, it is increasingly difficult and risky to provide truthful accounts.Only writers who support the official narratives are tolerated.
Retribution is becoming commonplace.The level of retribution depends upon the level of threat the writer is perceived to present.
Julian Assange is the top level threat because of his worldwide reach via Wikileaks and his courage to publish leaks revealing war crimes and other criminal actions of the United States government.
Assange has been incarcerated without trial in one form or another for a decade.In recent years Assange has been held in solitary confinement in a British maximum security prison while the corrupt British legal system goes through the motions pretending to comply with British law, but always delivering the result its Washington master demands.This process could not make it more clear that subservience to Washington trumps the integrity of the British judicial system.
Washington’s insensitivity to war crimes, crimes against humanity, and blatant frame-ups of innocents has brutalized the entire world’s respect for moral and ethical behavior.
Independent scientists, experts and journalists who are seen as lesser threats than Assange find themselves cancelled, de-platformed, marginalized, fired, and their medical licenses stolen for refusing to follow the deadly Covid protocols.Just the other day Germany convicted one of the country’s own judges for listening to the expert evidence and ruling against the government’s mask mandate.In other words, evidence that contradicts the narrative has been criminalized by the German judicial system. See this.
We see the same thing in the false indictments of President Trump.What Trump is actually indicted for is questioning on the basis of real evidence the extraordinary overnight reversal in the 2020 election vote count.Trump’s “felony” is that he raised the question of electoral fraud, a question usually raised in every election.Remember, George W. Bush’s election was so questioned by Democrats that it had to be decided by the US Supreme Court.
Glenn Greenwald, Matt Taibbi, and James O’Keefe were fired from the organizations they created or in Taibbi’s case served as the most followed writer.Not content with O’Keefe’s removal from his own forum, a corrupt NY prosecutor is now “investigating” O’Keefe for “mistreating employees and misspending the organization’s funds.” Again, as in Trump’s and Assange’s cases, we see the creation of crimes out of thin air in order to silence a truth-teller dangerous to a corrupt establishment that will not let go of its illegitimate hold on power.
Matt Taibbi reported one year ago that YouTube censored Matt Orfalea’s factually accurate video presentation, “‘Rigged’ Election Claims, Trump 2020 vs. Clinton 2016,” demonized it as “elections misinformation,” and set itself up as legislator, prosecutor, judge, and jury by declaring Orfalea in violation of YouTube’s “criminal organizations policy.”How does social media have integrity when social media declares careful examination of a public issue to be a criminal offense that carries a de-platforming sentence? See this.
Blue pill people might think they are safe as long as they keep their heads in the sand and their mouths shut.But Taibbi says that is not the case and that the noose is tightening on every one:
“Independent media content is increasingly hard to find via platform searches, even when exact terminology, bylines, or dates are entered by users. Social media platforms that once provided effective marketing and distribution at little to no cost are now difficult to navigate even with the aid of paid boosting tools. In other words, even if your business does well enough to pay full retail rates for marketing, a widening lattice of algorithmic restriction across platforms is making distribution for non-corporate media a nightmare anyway.”
And remember Tucker Carlson, the most important and profitable media voice, was fired by Fox News for his relentless exposing of the ruling elite’s false narratives. Fox News took a huge financial hit for itself and its shareholders in its attempt to shut down an effective truth-teller. Obviously, controlling the narrative is more important than profit.
Just as the message has been made clear to Germany’s judges that judges who dispense actual justice will be imprisoned, the message has been made clear to scientists, experts, medical doctors, and independent journalists that if they tell the truth their careers and lives will be ruined.
My level of threat is being dealt with by exclusion and by libel, slander, and ad hominem attacks.Over the weekend I was cleaning out a garage.I came upon boxes of tapes of my television appearances on Good Morning America, the Today Show, the Brinkley show, C-Span, and all the rest.Today I am not allowed on any American TV.
I also discovered boxes of files of my articles published in The New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Wall Street Journal, Business Week, the London Times, the Telegraph, TLS, the leading French and Italian newspapers, where it is impossible for me to publish a word today.
Another way they deal with you is on website comment sections where trolls hiding behind false names and serving a variety of interests ridicule, slander, misrepresent, and demonize you in efforts to damage your credibility and scare readers away. It works on weak-minded people who have never thought independently in their life and are fearful of differing from their blue pill peers.
As unfortunate as it is, many Americans are blue pill people.They prefer the reassurances of a false narrative to the stresses of reality.
Reality is too much for them.It requires more intellectual and emotional strength than they have.They are easily led into the camp that disparages truth as misinformation. As truth is upsetting, they are delighted to have it dispensed with.
Search the Western world for integrity.You cannot find it in any governing party.You cannot find it in any institution, whether educational, justice, corporate, media, medical, legal.
How does the FBI have integrity when the organization frames the President of the United States and his supporters?
How does the CIA have integrity when the organization overthrows foreign governments that do not turn their countries over to Washington and the New York Banks?
How do Tony Fauci, NIH, CDC, FDA, WHO have integrity when they use the inaccurate PCR test to overstate the Covid threat in order to make the people fearful, prohibit the use of known Covid cures such as Ivermectin and HCQ, arrange incentives for hospitals to lie and report every death as a Covid death, lie about the safety and effectiveness of the deadly “vaccine,” deny that there are any adverse reactions to the Covid jab to the extent that the CDC ceases to compile VAERS data (see this), count flu cases as Covid cases (remember the year there was zero flu cases?), and, as there was no accountability, are now in the process of orchestrating another “Covid threat,” a new round of “vaccination,” and the return of masks and lockdowns?
How does Justice Department prosecutor Jack Smith have integrity when a federal judge has to stop him from trying Trump on Florida charges in a D.C. court with an all-Democrat Trump-hating jury?
How does NY prosecutor Alvin Bragg have integrity when he cannot identify the federal charge he has brought against Trump or justify the trial of Trump on a federal charge in a state court?
How does Atlanta prosecutor Fani Willis have integrity when she brings racketeering charges against President Trump for questioning an election outcome?
Prosecutors devoid of integrity are tyrannical.
How does the judiciary have integrity when judges permit such blatantly false prosecutions?
How do law schools, bar associations, and media have integrity when they egg on wrongful prosecutions because they dislike the defendant?
How do school boards have integrity when parents opposed to the brainwashing of their children are arrested or thrown out of the school board meetings?
How do Democrats have integrity when they are removing Trump from the ballot in blue states on the grounds that he is a criminal by their accusation alone prior to his rigged trials?
How do RINO Republicans, who are in open conspiracy with Democrats to prevent Trump’s election as President, have integrity?
Ask yourself, why not allow the American people in place of a tiny biased jury, to decide Trump’s innocence or guilt in a fair democratic election?
Why should a carefully Democrat-selected biased jury be permitted to decide for the American people?
How can a Democrat Party, media, and Justice (sic) Department that tries to pull a fast one like this have any integrity?
Ask the same question about every institution, including your local property owners’ association.
What becomes of a country devoid of integrity?
What does the world think of country that poses as “exceptional and indispensable” while it violates every known moral principle and exploits the rest of the world?
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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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***
“We’ve got this group of unelected bureaucrats that are running the healthcare system. They control $23B that gets siphoned off the Albert provincial budget every year and the politicians let them do it; they don’t get themselves involved in anyway.”
Watch the interview of Dr. William Makis with Bob Blayone.
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***
While the troubled Biden administration keeps parroting the same narrative about the CO2 emissions, even insisting that a ban on gas stoves would “help fight global warming”, it’s also actively working on the return of the ever so “climate-friendly” live nuclear weapons testing.
The Russian Foreign Ministry has been warning about this for months, although this is usually decried as “Russian disinformation” by the mainstream propaganda machine. It’s important to note that thanks to the efforts of the United States, the CTBT (Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty) never entered into force and its implementation is largely dependent on the goodwill of the signatories.
“The situation involving the CTBT is causing increasing concern. The responsibility for the situation in which the treaty has not entered into force over more than a quarter of a century of its existence lies squarely with the United States, which defiantly refused to ratify it and is now demonstrating its clear intention to resume testing,” Russia’s Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov warned back in early March, adding: “We cannot afford to remain idle spectators to what is happening. If the United States nevertheless decides to take such a step and be the first to conduct nuclear tests, we will be forced to respond proportionately. No one should have dangerous illusions that global strategic parity can be upset.”
However, it seems that’s exactly what the US is trying to accomplish. Its intention to restart nuclear weapons testing isn’t subsiding in the slightest. Quite the contrary it would seem, as the belligerent thalassocracy is now actively working on restoring and improving its nuclear test sites. Andrey Belousov, Deputy Permanent Representative of Russia to the UN and International Organizations in Geneva, stated that the US is still engaged in covert activities in Nevada, which shows that it doesn’t intend to stop testing new nuclear warheads. Belousov warned that Washington DC is working to improve and maintain the nuclear test site in a state of full operational readiness.
“The United States does not hide the development of new types of nuclear warheads, the effectiveness of which will sooner or later have to be tested in practice,” Belousov stated.
What the high-ranking Russian diplomat is most likely referring to is the so-called “nuclear super-fuse” technology that the US has been testing for decades, particularly under the Obama administration (and ever since). Investigative historian Eric Zuesse wrote extensively on the topic, warning that the sole purpose of this controversial technology is to exponentially amplify the effectiveness of America’s first-strike capabilities, meaning that the belligerent thalassocracy is contemplating a direct attack on Russia. Zuesse’s warnings are not to be discarded or ignored, as he argues that Finland’s NATO accession is a crucial part of this sinister plan.
The Pentagon believes this would be a “checkmate move” as it would allow a decapitation strike on Russia’s central command so that it doesn’t have enough time to launch retaliatory missiles. The goal is to demand Russia’s surrender on the assumption there would be no way for Moscow to assess the situation within only 7 minutes and respond accordingly. The plan was set in motion no later than 2006 when the relations between Russia and the US were cordial and years before there were major tensions between them.
Namely, at the time, America’s two most prestigious national security academic journals, Foreign Affairs and National Security, both recommended replacing the idea of mutually assured destruction (MAD) with the new strategy of so-called “nuclear Primacy” that involves America’s dominance in first-strike capabilities, all in order to win a nuclear war against Russia. Zuesse argues that positioning missiles in Ukraine was supposed to be the way to achieve “nuclear primacy”, but since that’s no longer a possibility, Finland is to take the central role in this plan. It should be noted that Moscow will certainly know if the deployment of American nuclear weapons in Finland ever takes place.
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Drago Bosnic is an independent geopolitical and military analyst.
ISBN Number: 978-0-9737147-5-3 Year: 2012 Pages: 102
PDF Edition: $6.50 (sent directly to your email account!)
Michel Chossudovsky is Professor of Economics at the University of Ottawa and Director of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG), which hosts the critically acclaimed website www.globalresearch.ca . He is a contributor to the Encyclopedia Britannica. His writings have been translated into more than 20 languages.
Reviews
“This book is a ‘must’ resource – a richly documented and systematic diagnosis of the supremely pathological geo-strategic planning of US wars since ‘9-11’ against non-nuclear countries to seize their oil fields and resources under cover of ‘freedom and democracy’.” –John McMurtry, Professor of Philosophy, Guelph University
“In a world where engineered, pre-emptive, or more fashionably “humanitarian” wars of aggression have become the norm, this challenging book may be our final wake-up call.” -Denis Halliday, Former Assistant Secretary General of the United Nations
Michel Chossudovsky exposes the insanity of our privatized war machine. Iran is being targeted with nuclear weapons as part of a war agenda built on distortions and lies for the purpose of private profit. The real aims are oil, financial hegemony and global control. The price could be nuclear holocaust. When weapons become the hottest export of the world’s only superpower, and diplomats work as salesmen for the defense industry, the whole world is recklessly endangered. If we must have a military, it belongs entirely in the public sector. No one should profit from mass death and destruction. –Ellen Brown, author of ‘Web of Debt’ and president of the Public Banking Institute
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In the article Godless Fake Science and in the book Godless Fake Science I described that much of the scientific narrative we have been taught from our school days onwards, is based on falsehood, and that the institution of ‘science’ itself has in many ways been hijacked by financial interests seeking to advance their own narrative and agenda. Modern science, like economics, banking, and corporate-owned mass media, has become part of a paradigm borne by deceit, and corporate greed; and which paints God out of the picture. The article described fake science in areas including climate science; the fake Covid-19 pandemic; the biopharmaceutical sector; and neo-Darwinian evolution.
In this article, I summarise an investigation of the ‘big bang theory’, with reference to selected books and articles that refer to this contentious subject.
The creation of the universe is explained today in mainstream modern science by the big bang theory, DNA research, and other models. The big bang theory was initially conceived by Georges Lemaitre, a Belgian priest in 1927. The theory proposes that the entire universe exploded from a state of infinite density, temperatures and pressure at extremely high-energy levels and then, expanded (inflated) and cooled.
We are meant to believe that this big bang took place about 13.7 billion years ago, came from nowhere and was caused by nothing, and yet created everything.
This is not only unscientific, it is stupidity, yet, because these ideas are endorsed and promoted by the modern-day institutional orthodoxy of science (the church of godless scientism), and by governments, we are expected to accept them.
The big bang theory has been adopted by mainstream science and has been promoted and taught as fact, as the scientific creation story, in virtually all the schools and universities of the world, and to almost the entire world population via TV programmes and ‘science’ documentaries. The financial and governmental forces behind the promotion of the atheistic ideologies of neo-Darwinian evolution and the ‘big bang’ have tried to convince the masses that these ideologies are scientific facts, but in reality, there is no scientific basis for these atheistic positions.
The ‘big bang theory’ contains untestable assumptions and excludes the existence of God, yet we are asked to accept it on ‘faith’
“Never run after a bus or woman or cosmological theory, because there’ll always be another one along in a few minutes.” – John Wheeler, Theoretical Physicist at Princeton University
Despite all this, many physicists and astrophysicists do not accept the theory and maintain that the big bang simply did not happen.
For example, physicist Eric Lerner published his work on the origin of the universe in his book The Big Bang Never Happened in 1991.
Over 30 significant problems with the big bang hypothesis are analyzed in the book Cult of the Big Bang by William Mitchell. Normally any model with so many problems would be discarded. The Princeton University biologist, Dr Edwin Godwin, has compared the chances of a planet like ours originating from a big bang to the likelihood of a dictionary resulting from an explosion in a printing shop.
Timeline of the expansion of the universe, where space, including hypothetical non-observable portions of the universe, is represented at each time by the circular sections. On the left, the dramatic expansion occurs in the inflationary epoch; and at the center, the expansion accelerates (artist’s concept; neither time or size are to scale). (Licensed under the Public Domain)
For many people the big-bang ‘singularity’ is highly contentious. Could it simply be a another ‘big lie’?
A big lie being defined as a repeated distortion of the truth on a grand scale, especially for propaganda purposes. The renowned American scientist, mathematician, and author Richard L. Thompson (1947 – 2008), succinctly exposed the ridiculousness of the proposition that the big bang arose from a singularity. He stated:
“The big bang theory does not describe the origin of the universe at all, because the initial singularity is by definition indescribable…. And there is a further difficult. Where did the singularity come from? Here the scientist faces the same difficulty as the religionists they taunt with the question, “Where did God come from?” And just as the religionist responds with the answer that God is the causeless cause of all causes, the scientists are now faced with the prospect of declaring a mathematically indescribable point of infinite density and infinitesimal size, existing before all conceptions of time and space, as the causeless cause of all causes… To say that something happens once by chance is in essence no different from simply saying “it happened” or “there it is”. And these statements do not qualify as scientific explanations. In the end you wind up knowing no more than you did before. In other words, by invoking chance or the anthropic principle the scientists have not actually explained anything about the origin of the universe”” – Richard L. Thompson, Scientist and Mathematician, PhD from Cornell University
The author, Pierre St. Clair, author of the book Cosmology on Trial Cracking the Cosmic Code noted that an increasing number of cosmologists and physicists no longer accept the big bang theory, as evidenced by the following quotations:
“Big Bang cosmology is probably as widely believed as been any theory of the universe in the history of Western civilization. It rests, however, on many untested, and [in] many cases, untestable assumptions. Indeed, the Big Bang cosmology has become a bandwagon of thought that reflects faith a much as objective truth.” – Geoffrey Burbridge, Professor of Physics, University of California.
“For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story [of the big bang] ends like a bad dream. For the past three hundred years, scientists have scaled the mountain of ignorance and as they pull themselves over the final rock, they are greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries.” – Robert Jastrow, Astrophysicist and Author of the book God and the Astronomers
“The theories we have so far (in physics) are both inconsistent and incomplete.” — Stephen Hawking, Astro-physicist
Despite this, the theory is still taught worldwide to billions of children, students and adults as the scientific creation story. The big bang has evolved into a worldwide belief system – much like a religion! Author, Pierre St. Clair describes the modern big bang creation story that science teaches today as a ‘leap of faith’:
“In the beginning scientists can’t say whether time, space, matter or energy existed. They have various hypotheses… Suddenly, ‘something’ materialized… scientists call that ‘something’ a singularity. It was smaller than atom but it contained all the matter and energy that was to become our universe. Of course, accepting that everything in the cosmos was crushed into a single point smaller than an atom, we admit, requires a huge leap of faith… the singularity didn’t like being crushed. Apparently, it resisted the crunch with a fierce explosion for no reason… We call that massive explosion the Big Bang… The hypothesis of instant expansion, cosmic inflation, defies all known laws of physics… ” – Pierre St. Clair, Author, see Endnote [i].
“Astrophysicists portray their cosmological ideas as scientific (supported by evidence) when they are mostly a cloud of probabilities and caveats. The media presents these explanations as factual science, and the unsuspecting public interprets them as ‘true accounts’” – Pierre St. Clair, Author
Chaitanya Charandas, author of Science and Spirituality makes the following observation:
“Stephen Hawking has stated, “Any theory that predicts a singularity can be said to have broken down.” So, if science necessitates postulating something beyond the realm of science, then an intelligent being is a much more logical candidate for creating the complex world we see around us than a singularity. Both are non-scientific, in the conventional sense of the word ‘scientific’, but we at least have experience of an intelligent being designing something, but we have no experience of a singularity and its explosion leading to design” – Chaitanya Charan das, author
I also note the words of John Horgan, who has written for Scientific American since 1986.
“…I derided inflation as “ironic science,” which can never be proven true or false and hence isn’t really science at all… physicists Anna Ijjas, Paul Steinhardt and Abraham Loeb presented a stinging critique of inflation in Scientific American… The authors assert that inflationary cosmology, as we currently understand it, cannot be evaluated using the scientific method… the expected outcome of inflation can easily change if we vary the initial conditions… these features make inflation so flexible that no experiment can ever disprove it… The persistence of these unfalsifiable and hence unscientific theories is an embarrassment that risks damaging science’s reputation… Isn’t it time to pull the plug?” – John Horgan, writer, see Endnote [ii].
There is also the dubious concept, or conjuring trick. of ‘dark matter’ upon which the theory rests. John Watson describes the problem with dark matter in an article Top Ten Scientific Flaws In The Big Bang Theory, see Endnote [iii], as follows.
“Dark Matter and Dark Energy have never been proven, or observed in any way whatsoever, yet the Big Bang theory depends on the existence of such potentially mythological substances… The “dark” in “dark matter” and “dark energy” doesn’t mean color. It means, “unknown”. In other words, the proponents of the Big Bang theory couldn’t figure out how it could possibly happen so they said, let’s make up some fictional matter and energy that “made it happen”. It’s kind of like me saying I am the most powerful person in the universe. My power is everywhere and can do everything! You just can’t see my power but it’s there!” – John Watson, writer.
Despite all the problems with the theory, Wikipedia makes the bold assertion that
“The Big Bang is a well-tested scientific theory which is widely accepted within the scientific community… abundant evidence has arisen to further validate the model.”
Pierre St. Clair notes that “from an outsider’s point of view the science creation myth sounds bizarre. But for insiders – cosmologists and physicists – this story is a normal as going to a party.” The reality is that pleading the case for the big bang theory is as much in the realm of faith as the traditional creation stories of ancient scriptures – nothing can be validated by ‘material science’ in either case. The rigorous discipline of scientific observation, experimentation and verification do not apply to the big bang theory – one simply has to accept it on ‘faith’. The big bang theory is, therefore, not science, it is religion without God – it seems to be ‘godless’ fake science.
Modern-day Science Excludes the Divine Consciousness of an Intelligent Designer — God
From this perspective, we can see that a fundamental difference between the science creation story and the stories of creation as told by ancient spiritual traditions is whether a cosmic divine consciousness was involved. Modern-day science excludes that divine consciousness.
Atheistic scientists will tell you that God is not accepted as a cause because God cannot be detected by our technology.
Hypocritically, modern astrophysicists tell us that the universe consists mostly of substances called ‘dark matter’ and ‘dark energy’, yet, I note, these substances cannot be detected by their instruments, so why have these unobservable, unknowable, and hypothetical substances been accepted ‘on faith’ by modern ‘science’?
According to St. Clair, the astrophysicists are using these concepts of dark matter and dark energy in an attempt to save the big bang theory. Yet, as they become more invested in the entanglements of the theory, it is likely they will become unable to extricate themselves from the conclusion they are trying to avoid, i.e., that the science story of creation will resemble the traditional spiritual story of creation – that something had to have been created for the universe to exist, which implies a creator. Note also that the scientific creation story also does not explain how the laws of science and the universe came into existence in the first place. Who originally wrote those laws? Did these laws suddenly appear with a big bang also?
The Christian Bible informs us that the Earth was created by God, and it appears that many Christians are skeptical of the theories of evolution and the big bang.
Yet, it also appears that, today, the Judeo-Christian universities are teaching these theories. The ancient spiritual texts of Vedic Vaishnavism inform us that universe was created by God. The following excerpts from the book Life comes from Life by HDG Srila Prabhupada, renowned spiritual leader in the tradition of Vedic Vaishnavism, highlight the problem with the atheistic creation story of a big bang; and of life originating from random chemical interactions rather than a divine source:
“Modern proponents of Darwinism say that the first living organism was created chemically… If life originated from chemicals, and if your science is so advanced, then why can’t you create life biochemically in your laboratories?… Their claim that they will soon prove a chemical origin is something like paying someone with a postdated check… They cannot even produce a single blade of grass in their laboratories, yet they are claiming, that life is produced from chemical. What is this nonsense?” – Quote from Life come from life’ by HDG Srila Prabhupada
“Dr. Singh: The scientists say that at one point the earth was composed of dust particles floating in some gaseous material. Then, in due course, this colloidal suspension condensed and formed the earth.
Srila Prabhupada: … where did the gas come from?
Dr Singh: They say it just existed!…
Srila Prabhupada: “They say, “This existed, and then all of a sudden, by chance, that occurred.” This not science. Science means to explain the original cause.”” – Extract from the book Life comes from Life by HDG Srila Prabhupada
The reality is that despite so-called advancements, modern-day scientists cannot even do what a cow does, i.e., change grass into milk. Scientists cannot produce grass from chemicals either. Yet they still tell us that they can produce life in a laboratory. Note that what is taking place with In vitro fertilization (IVF) is merely manipulation of the matter that God created.
Another, scientist disseminating godless science was Stephen Hawking. Hawking has written “Because there is a law like gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing…”. In the book Krishna, authors Gauranga Premananda dasa and Avadhuta Raya das, counter Hawking’s assertion as follows: “Hawking has said absolutely nothing that proves that “the universe can and will create itself from nothing”. To say that something comes out of nothing, that there is no material cause is simply a statement of faith and doesn’t meet the needs of science and philosophy.”
Furthermore, in contrast, to the science creation story, which tells us there is no meaning whatsoever to the creation of the universe, the traditional spiritual stories are infused with deep meanings and purport for human life; and the reasons why we are here. Could it be that by excluding the possibility that the Earth has a creator, telling us that the Earth and humans were created by random blind chance, that the Earth is just another unimportant part of a random universe, that there is no intelligent designer or God, the atheistic forces have tried to keep us unaware of our individual uniqueness and spiritual potency as children of God?
The Fine-tuning of the Universe Cannot be Explained Away as Mere Chance
So, modern atheistic science asserts that the universe was ‘created’ by blind random chance – if this is the case should not our universe be completely random, unpredictable and chaotic?
In reality, we see that the universe is precisely ordered and conditions are uncannily fine-tuned for life, not at all as if they were at random. Is it not foolishness to believe such precise structure was created by blind random chance?
The book Rethinking Darwin by Lief A. Jensen details multiple parameters about the universe that are so fine-tuned it shows that the universe would not exist if these parameters were even minutely different.
The astounding level of precision indicates to me that the universe is intelligently designed – it appears to be the arrangement of an incredible intelligence. The fine-tuning of the universe cannot be explained away as mere chance. As British astronomer Sir Fred Hoyle remarked:
“I do not believe that any scientist who examines the evidence would fail to draw the inference that the laws of physics have been deliberately designed with regard to the consequences they produce inside the stars.“ – Sir Fred Hoyle, British astronomer
To account for the creation of the universe by random chance, atheists’ resort to ludicrous postulates, such as the ‘infinite number of monkeys’ theory.
The theory has been detailed as followed: if an infinite number of monkeys that were shown how to type were allowed to type for billions of years, they would at some point type the complete works of Shakespeare by random chance. Renowned scientist and mathematician, Richard L Thompson, with a PhD from Cornell University, has stated that the ‘infinite number of monkeys’ theory defies probability theory and is mathematically impossible because randomness does not produce order on any appreciable scale, no matter how long you give it. Despite this mathematical impossibility, biological text books worldwide, refer to randomness as the cause for the existence of the complex universe we live in – thereby completely negating the design within it. The experiment referred to below indicates the reality that randomness as an explanation for the creation of the universe leads to nothing special and is just ‘monkey business’.
“In 2003, lecturers and students from the University of Plymouth MediaLab Arts course used a £2,000 grant from the Arts Council to study the literary output of real monkeys. They left a computer keyboard in the enclosure of six Celebes Crested Macaques in Paignton Zoo in Devon I England for month, with a radio link to broadcast the results on a website… Not only did the monkeys produce nothing but 5 pages consisting largely of the letter S, the lead male began by bashing the keyboard with a stone, and the monkeys continued by urinating and defecating on it.” – Chaitanya Charon Das, Author
State-funded “Atheistic Indoctrination”
Many millions, if not billions, of people believe that God, the Creator, exists, yet schools, universities and TV stations worldwide are teaching nonsensical atheistic theories, such as theory of evolution and the big bang theory as proven facts. If there was indeed a type of big bang from which the ordered universe originated, the atheistic scientists should at least acknowledge that there had to be an original cause, an intelligent designer.
Students worldwide are in essence being force fed dubious unproven atheistic doctrine as the only acceptable worldview. Presenting these theories as indisputable truths amounts to indoctrination plain and simple. Note that this is ‘government-funded’ indoctrination. The governments of the world are teaching our children that they have originated from monkeys. Do you really believe your most ancient grandparents were monkeys? If you think your ancestors were monkeys – will you tend to behave like a monkey or like a God-conscious human?
The Spiritual Origins of the Universe
Modern mechanistic science assumes that we can describe the world independently of the existence of God, and negates the concept of the individual soul. The direction of mechanistic science over the past two centuries has been to see how far this approach can take us – to what extent can we explain nature, the world, the universe and everything whilst completely ignoring any reference to God, the soul and spiritual origins of everything. In 1931 Austrian mathematician Kurt Gödel actually proved that humankind will never be able to describe the universe by a final mechanistic theory.
“the stream of knowledge is heading toward a non-mechanical reality; the Universe begins to look more like a great thought than like a great machine. Mind no longer appears to be an accidental intruder into the realm of matter… we ought rather hail it as the creator and governor of the realm of matter.” – Richard Conn Henry, Professor of Physics, John Hopkins University
“I maintain that the human mystery is incredibly demeaned by scientific reductionism, with its claim in promissory materialism to account eventually for all of the spiritual world in terms of patterns of neuronal activity. This belief must be classed as superstition… we have to recognize that we are spiritual beings with souls existing in a spiritual world as well as material beings with bodies and brains”- John Eccles, Nobel Laureate in Medicine and Physiology
To quote a lyric from the song Colonised Mind by the famous American musician Prince (1958 – 2016):
“Without God its just the blind leading the blind”.
In a book by Stephen Rosen, see Endnote [iv], there is a relevant story about the scientist Sir Isaac Newton. Newton had a mechanical model of the universe in his study. A friend of his who did not believe in God came to visit him and admiring the model asked: ‘Who made it?’. Newton answered: ‘Nobody!’ and assured his friend that it had just happened to assure the form it was in. His astonished friend replied ‘You must think I am a fool! Of course, somebody made it, and he is a genius, and I’d like to know who he is.’ Newton laid his hand on his hand on his friend’s shoulder. ‘This thing is but a puny imitation of a much grander system… I am not able to convince you that this mere toy is without a designer and maker; yet you profess to believe that the original form which the design is taken has come into being without either designer or maker! Now tell me by what sort of reasoning do you reach such an incongruous conclusion?”
One of the fundamental laws of the universe is cause and effect. If the big bang theory has any basis in reality, it is simply a pointer to a moment of creation where the cause exists outside of the matter, space and time of the universe. The universe displays a working complexity infinitely greater than a manmade watch or computer. The incredible arrangement of everything in the universe is based on the one truth of God’s spiritual existence in all things.
The original meaning of the English word ‘universe’ is actually “one truth”. Uni meaning ‘one’ and verse meaning “verified truth”. From this perspective we can see that our universities and science institutions have become muddled with multiple dubious truths/ideologies and are no longer uni-versities of the one truth. With the proliferation of mechanistic science, in particular, over the past 200 years, these centers of education have become de-harmonised from the one truth. We now need a synthesis of mechanistic science with spiritual science to realise and re-establish the one truth. That one truth is God – our father and the Creator of the universe.
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Mark Keenan is a former scientist at the UK Government Dept. of Energy and Climate Change, and at the United Nations Environment Division. He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG).
He is author of the following books available on Amazon:
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Notes
[i] Source: Cosmology on Trial Cracking the Cosmic Code by Pierre St. Clair, pg 17. The book also details that the acceptance of scientific theories such as Stephen Hawkings’ general theory of relativity, and The Grand Design theory, also require a huge leap of faith, see pg 125, which describes “the frailties of Stephen Hawking’s grand design hypothesis.
[iv] This story is described in the book Vedic Archaeology and Assorted Essays by Stephen Rosen, on pg 127.
Featured image is from the author
Godless Fake Science
By Mark Keenan
ASIN: B0C9SC6XWQ
Publisher: Independently published (July 2, 2023)
ISBN-13: 979-8850715342
Paperback: 304 pages
The author, a former science advisor at the UK government and at the United Nations, evidences the matrix of fake science that has polluted modern society for decades. Including in the areas of manmade climate change, Covid-19, virology, psychiatry, pharmaceuticals, evolution, the big bang, paleontology, particle physics, and cosmology. By excluding the existence of God in the scientific world, the atheistic manipulators have left themselves in a cul-de-sac unable to explain the scientific puzzle of creation, consciousness, and existence. Civilisation has been misdirected by large-scale lies that advance corporate greed and a godless agenda. The author is also a student of the Christian and Vedic scriptures, and calls for a re-establishment of truth and God-consciousness.
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Africa has witnessed eight coups in the last three years, with the latest military take-over announced in Gabon, Wednesday, only a month after a military intervention in Niger ousted the president.
Senior military officers in Gabon staged a coup in the Central African country on Wednesday, saying they seized power after President Ali Bongo was declared winner in Saturday’s election for a third term in office.
Appearing on national television, the military cancelled the election results that declared Bongo, who has been in power for over a decade, the winner with 64.27 per cent of the votes.
They also announced that the 64-year-old leader was put under house arrest and one of his sons was arrested for “treason.”
Niger
On 26 July, military officers in Niger, led by Gen. Abdourahamane Tchiani, a former Commander of the presidential guard, carried out a military intervention, ousting President Mohamed Bazoum. The military has since held Bazoum hostage, despite international calls for his release.
Sudan
The military in Sudan ousted President Omar Al-Bashir on 11 April, 2019, after months of protests following increased prices of goods – including fuel and bread. Al-Bashir had ruled Sudan for nearly 30 years.
A power-sharing agreement was reached between the Army and civilians, but they later refused to hand over power.
On 25 October, 2021, Sudan experienced another military takeover when Gen. Abdel Fattah Al-Burhan, who headed the power-sharing deal, seized power, citing infighting between military and civilians.
Burkina Faso, Mali, Guinea, Chad
In Burkina Faso, the army ousted and detained President Roch Kabore on 23 January, 2022, leading to two other coups.
In neighbouring Mali, the military overthrew President Ibrahim Boubacar Keita, 75, before the country witnessed a second coup on 24 May, 2021, when Col. Assimi Goita dismissed the transitional civilian president and prime minister.
There was also a military coup in Guinea on 5 September, 2021, when the army overthrew President Alpha Conde. In April 2021, the Chadian Army installed Gen. Mahamat Idriss Deby Itno as interim president, after the death of his father, Idriss Deby. The opposition said the move was tantamount to a coup.
Sultan Kakuba, a Political Science professor at Kyambogo University in Uganda, told Anadolu in a recent interview that military coups had been common in Africa for many years after independence, but they became increasingly rare in the past two decades.
He said poor leadership and economic hardships in some countries have influenced military leaders to seize power.
Kakuba opined that Africa has been consolidating democracy, but the coups are pushing it behind.
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Featured image: Officers from Department of Public Security (DSP) patrol as supporters of the military administration gather on a street after Gabonese army officers enter the national television building following the announcement of the presidential election results and announce that they take over, in Libreville, Gabon on August 30, 2023 [Stringer/Anadolu Agency]
Perhaps the leading two veteran critics of US policy in Ukraine, Colonel Douglas MacGregor USA and Major Scott Ritter USMC, have said loud and clear that at least from a military standpoint the Ukrainian armed forces have lost the war against Russia.
The European Union is expected to import a record volume of liquefied natural gas from Russia this year, despite the bloc’s intention to wean itself off Russian fossil fuels by 2027. This revelation by the Financial Times comes as Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán said that he warned Ukraine that any attacks on Hungary’s energy supplies from Russia would lead to war.
Following reports about Wagner chief Yevgeny Prigozhin being killed in a plane crash, a Russian political analyst has alleged that the warlord is still “alive, well and free”, claiming that it was his doppelganger who was actually killed in the accident.
In April, Israeli security forces brutally assaulted Palestinian worshippers inside Al-Aqsa Mosque in occupied East Jerusalem. In the aftermath of the attack, James Cleverly, Britain’s foreign secretary, called on “all parties to respect the historic status quo arrangements at Jerusalem’s holy sites and cease all provocative action”.
From all indications, China has emerged as the greatest beneficiary at the 15th BRICS summit – a platform hosted by South Africa last August with participation of African leaders. The summit turned out be successful with most of the significant questions put under serious discussions and finally ended with a joint declaration which outlines the necessary strategic pathways into the future.
Some viewers had the impression that DeSantis was a Seal, but he was actually a Harvard Law School graduate who was a Judge Advocate General Corps (JAG) alongside the Seals. DeSantis was deployed to Iraq in 2007 and 2008, during President George W. Bush’s “surge” (intended to postpone the obvious failure of the war until after Bush’s second term ended).
Amid a controversial visit from Vice President William Lai (the front-runner to be his country’s next leader), official documents reviewed by “MintPress News” show that the Taiwanese government is attempting to drum up anti-China hostility, influence and intimidate American politicians and is even working with the FBI and other agencies to spy on and prosecute Chinese American citizens.
Recently articles have appeared on the front page of the New York Times that try to smear Code Pink, The People’s Forum and TriContinental as Chinese agents. The Times article was followed by a statement from Senator Marco Rubio calling for investigation of the people mentioned in the article.
Being a psychiatrist certainly makes me no specialist in areas of immunology, cardiology, surgery or infectious disease. But having earned a doctorate in medicine I was provided an education in reasoning within this extraordinarily complex discipline from first principles. Therefore as an inquisitive physician throughout the covid operation, I could not help but be baffled by the response of institutional authorities.
South Asian media recently reported that India has pushed back against US meddling in Bangladesh through diplomatic channels after Washington imposed a new visa policy ahead of next January’s elections that many regard as aimed at pressuring the ruling Awami League (AL) party.
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The European Union is expected to import a record volume of liquefied natural gas from Russia this year, despite the bloc’s intention to wean itself off Russian fossil fuels by 2027. This revelation by the Financial Times comes as Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán said that he warned Ukraine that any attacks on Hungary’s energy supplies from Russia would lead to war.
According to an analysis of energy industry data by Global Witness, in the first seven months of this year, Belgium and Spain were the second and third most significant buyers of Russian LNG, behind only China, an increase much higher than the global average of 6% from January to July this year. LNG imports by the EU increased by 40% from January to June compared to the same period in 2021, mainly because the European bloc relied on Russian pipeline supplies before the special military operation in Ukraine started.
“It’s shocking that countries in the EU have worked so hard to wean themselves off piped Russian fossil gas only to replace it with the shipped equivalent,” Global Witness senior fossil fuel campaigner Jonathan Noronha-Gant told the FT. “It doesn’t matter if it comes from a pipeline or a boat — it still means European companies are sending billions to [Vladimir] Putin’s war chest.”
According to the outlet, most Russian volumes come from the Yamal LNG joint venture, mainly owned by the Russian company Novatek. Other stakes are held by TotalEnergies of France, CNPC of China and a Chinese state fund. The development is exempt from export taxes but is subject to income tax.
Senior LNG analyst at consultancy ICIS, Alex Froley, told the FT that “long-term buyers in Europe say they will continue to accept contracted volumes unless banned by politicians,” which he said would cause disruptions to shipping as global trade patterns would need to be rearranged.
EU officials have pointed to a global effort to phase out Russian fossil fuels by 2027 but warned that a complete ban on LNG imports risks triggering an energy crisis like 2022 when gas prices hit record highs of more than €300 per megawatt/hour.
A source heard by the FT said that, although European gas storage containers were more than 90% complete before winter, there was still “a lot of nervousness” in case of further supply cuts.
Russian LNG accounted for 21.6 million (16%) of the EU’s total 133.5 million cubic metres of LNG imports between January and July, according to Kepler data, making it the bloc’s second-biggest supplier behind the US, which rose to the position after the start of Western sanctions against Moscow.
Given how the EU is still heavily reliant on Russian energy, it cannot be discounted that Kiev might try to sabotage supplies, just as it did to Germany when it attacked the NordStream 2 pipeline. It is for this reason that in an interview with US journalist Tucker Carlson, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán recalled that he had immediately qualified the damage to the Russian-German Nord Stream gas pipeline as a terrorist act, calling the absence of a strong reaction on the part of Germany a lack of sovereignty. He then recounted how he and Serbian leaders warned Ukraine, without directly naming the country, of war if energy flows were sabotaged.
“On the TurkStream pipeline, bringing gas from Russia via Turkey, Bulgaria and Serbia, he said that together with the Serbian Prime Minister and the Serbian President, they have made it clear that if anyone did to the southern corridor what they did to the northern, it would be considered a cause for war or a terrorist attack and they would react immediately,” Orbán said.
Given that Ukraine already has a history of sabotaging flows of Russian energy to Europe, and following the report by FT that the EU is expected to import a record volume of LNG from Russia this year, it cannot be discounted that Kiev will plan for more terrorist attacks to disrupt flows. Ukrainian soldiers are already conducting terrorist attacks in the Black Sea and Crimea with speedboats, and tankers could very well be the next target.
In addition, the FT report highlights the impossibility of the EU being able to divorce itself from Russian energy. Attempted decoupling has only led to the further decline of the European economy, and as seen, the difference is now being made up with LNG.
*
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Ahmed Adel is a Cairo-based geopolitics and political economy researcher.
The New York Times casually acknowledged that it sends major scoops to the US government before publication, to make sure “national security officials” have “no concerns.”
***
First published on June 26, 2019
The New York Times has publicly acknowledged that it sends some of its stories to the US government for approval from “national security officials” before publication.
This confirms what veteran New York Times correspondents like James Risen have said: The American newspaper of record regularly collaborates with the US government, suppressing reporting that top officials don’t want made public.
On June 15, the Times reported that the US government is escalating its cyber attacks on Russia’s power grid. According to the article, “the Trump administration is using new authorities to deploy cybertools more aggressively,” as part of a larger “digital Cold War between Washington and Moscow.”
In response to the report, Donald Trump attacked the Times on Twitter, calling the article “a virtual act of Treason.”
The New York Times PR office replied to Trump from its official Twitter account, defending the story and noting that it had, in fact, been cleared with the US government before being printed.
“Accusing the press of treason is dangerous,” the Times communications team said. “We described the article to the government before publication.”
“As our story notes, President Trump’s own national security officials said there were no concerns,” the Times added.
Accusing the press of treason is dangerous. We described the article to the government before publication. As our story notes, President Trump’s own national security officials said there were no concerns. https://t.co/MU020hxwdcpic.twitter.com/4CIfcqKoEl
Indeed, the Times report on the escalating American cyber attacks against Russia is attributed to “current and former [US] government officials.” The scoop in fact came from these apparatchiks, not from a leak or the dogged investigation of an intrepid reporter.
‘Real’ journalists get approval from ‘national security’ officials
The neoliberal self-declared “Resistance” jumped on Trump’s reckless accusation of treason (the Democratic Coalition, which boasts, “We help run #TheResistance,” responded by calling Trump “Putin’s puppet”). The rest of the corporatemedia went wild.
But what was entirely overlooked was the most revealing thing in the New York Times’ statement: The newspaper of record was essentially admitting that it has a symbiotic relationship with the US government.
In fact, some prominent American pundits have gone so far as to insist that this symbiotic relationship is precisely what makes someone a journalist.
In May, neoconservative Washington Post columnist Marc Thiessen — a former speechwriter for President George W. Bush — declared that WikiLeaks publisher and political prisoner Julian Assange is “not a journalist”; rather, he is a “spy” who “deserves prison.” (Thiessen also once called Assange “the devil.”)
What was the Post columnist’s rationale for revoking Assange’s journalistic credentials?
Unlike “reputable news organizations, Assange did not give the U.S. government an opportunity to review the classified information WikiLeaks was planning to release so they could raise national security objections,” Thiessen wrote. “So responsible journalists have nothing to fear.”
In other words, this former US government speechwriter turned corporate media pundit insists that collaborating with the government, and censoring your reporting to protect so-called “national security,” is definitionally what makes you a journalist.
This is the express ideology of the American commentariat.
NY Times editors ‘quite willing to cooperate with the government’
The symbiotic relationship between the US corporate media and the government has been known for some time. American intelligence agencies play the press like a musical instrument, using it it to selectively leak information at opportune moments to push US soft power and advance Washington’s interests.
But rarely is this symbiotic relationship so casually and publicly acknowledged.
In 2018, former New York Times reporter James Risen published a 15,000-word article in The Intercept providing further insight into how this unspoken alliance operates.
1. #JamesRisen: "A top CIA official once told me that his rule of thumb for whether a covert operation should be approved was, “How will this look on the front page of the New York Times?” https://t.co/YIUtpTthe8
Risen detailed how his editors had been “quite willing to cooperate with the government.” In fact, a top CIA official even told Risen that his rule of thumb for approving a covert operation was, “How will this look on the front page of the New York Times?”
There is an “informal arrangement” between the state and the press, Risen explained, where US government officials “regularly engaged in quiet negotiations with the press to try to stop the publication of sensitive national security stories.”
“At the time, I usually went along with these negotiations,” the former New York Times reported said. He recalled an example of a story he was writing on Afghanistan just prior to the September 11, 2001 attacks. Then-CIA Director George Tenet called Risen personally and asked him to kill the story.
“He told me the disclosure would threaten the safety of the CIA officers in Afghanistan,” Risen said. “I agreed.”
Risen said he later questioned whether or not this was the right decision. “If I had reported the story before 9/11, the CIA would have been angry, but it might have led to a public debate about whether the United States was doing enough to capture or kill bin Laden,” he wrote. “That public debate might have forced the CIA to take the effort to get bin Laden more seriously.”
This dilemma led Risen to reconsider responding to US government requests to censor stories. “And that ultimately set me on a collision course with the editors at the New York Times,” he said.
“After the 9/11 attacks, the Bush administration began asking the press to kill stories more frequently,” Risen continued. “They did it so often that I became convinced the administration was invoking national security to quash stories that were merely politically embarrassing.”
One year ago: Former New York Times national security reporter James Risen reveals how the paper repeatedly suppressed stories at the request of the Obama and Bush administrations https://t.co/pJ2BAPluqH
In the lead-up to the Iraq War, Risen frequently “clashed” with Times editors because he raised questions about the US government’s lies. But his stories “stories raising questions about the intelligence, particularly the administration’s claims of a link between Iraq and Al Qaeda, were being cut, buried, or held out of the paper altogether.”
The Times’ executive editor Howell Raines “was believed by many at the paper to prefer stories that supported the case for war,” Risen said.
In another anecdote, the former Times journalist recalled a scoop he had uncovered on a botched CIA plot. The Bush administration got wind of it and called him to the White House, where then-National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice ordered the Times to bury the story.
Risen said Rice told him “to forget about the story, destroy my notes, and never make another phone call to discuss the matter with anyone.”
“The Bush administration was successfully convincing the press to hold or kill national security stories,” Risen wrote. And the Barack Obama administration subsequently accelerated the “war on the press.”
CIA media infiltration and manufacturing consent
In their renowned study of US media, “Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media,” Edward S. Herman and Chomsky articulated a “propaganda model,” showing how “the media serve, and propagandize on behalf of, the powerful societal interests that control and finance them,” through “the selection of right-thinking personnel and by the editors’ and working journalists’ internalization of priorities and definitions of newsworthiness that conform to the institution’s policy.”
But in some cases, the relationship between US intelligence agencies and the corporate media is not just one of mere ideological policing, indirect pressure, or friendship, but rather one of employment.
In the 1950s, the CIA launched a covert operation called Project Mockingbird, in which it surveilled, influenced, and manipulated American journalists and media coverage, explicitly in order to direct public opinion against the Soviet Union, China, and the growing international communist movement.
Legendary journalist Carl Bernstein, a former Washington Post reporter who helped uncover the Watergate scandal, published a major cover story for Rolling Stone in 1977 titled “The CIA and the Media: How America’s Most Powerful News Media Worked Hand in Glove with the Central Intelligence Agency and Why the Church Committee Covered It Up.”
Bernstein obtained CIA documents that revealed that more than 400 American journalists in the previous 25 years had “secretly carried out assignments for the Central Intelligence Agency.”
Bernstein wrote:
“Some of these journalists’ relationships with the Agency were tacit; some were explicit. There was cooperation, accommodation and overlap. Journalists provided a full range of clandestine services—from simple intelligence gathering to serving as go‑betweens with spies in Communist countries. Reporters shared their notebooks with the CIA. Editors shared their staffs. Some of the journalists were Pulitzer Prize winners, distinguished reporters who considered themselves ambassadors without‑portfolio for their country. Most were less exalted: foreign correspondents who found that their association with the Agency helped their work; stringers and freelancers who were as interested in the derring‑do of the spy business as in filing articles; and, the smallest category, full‑time CIA employees masquerading as journalists abroad. In many instances, CIA documents show, journalists were engaged to perform tasks for the CIA with the consent of the managements of America’s leading news organizations.”
Virtually all major US media outlets cooperated with the CIA, Bernstein revealed, including ABC, NBC, the AP, UPI, Reuters, Newsweek, Hearst newspapers, the Miami Herald, the Saturday Evening Post, and the New York Herald‑Tribune.
However, he added, “By far the most valuable of these associations, according to CIA officials, have been with the New York Times, CBS and Time Inc.”
These layers of state manipulation, censorship, and even direct crafting of the news media show that, as much as they claim to be independent, The New York Times and other outlets effectively serve as de facto spokespeople for the government — or at least for the US national security state.
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Ben Norton is a journalist and writer. He is a reporter for The Grayzone, and the producer of the Moderate Rebels podcast, which he co-hosts with Max Blumenthal. His website is BenNorton.com, and he tweets at @BenjaminNorton.
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Introduction
Perhaps the leading two veteran critics of US policy in Ukraine, Colonel Douglas MacGregor USA and Major Scott Ritter USMC, have said loud and clear that at least from a military standpoint the Ukrainian armed forces have lost the war against Russia.
There have been numerous voices calling for an end to the conflict, not least because the more than USD 46 billion and counting in military aid alone, has yet to produce any of the results announced as aims of what has finally been admitted is a war against Russia.[i]
If Mr Zelenskyy, the president of the Ukraine’s government in Kiev, is to be taken at face value, then the hostilities can only end when Crimea and the Donbass regions are fully under Kiev’s control and Vladimir Putin has been removed from office as president of the Russian Federation. To date no commentator has adequately explained how those war aims are to be attained. This applies especially after the conservatively estimated 400,000 deaths and uncounted casualties in the ranks of Kiev’s forces since the beginning of the Special Military Operation in February 2022.
Before considering the political and economic issues it is important to reiterate a few military facts, especially for those armchair soldiers who derive their military acumen from TV and Hollywood films.
As MacGregor and Ritter, both of whom have intimate practical knowledge of warfare, have said. Armies on the ground need supplies, i.e. food, weapons, ammunition, medical care for wounded, etc.
These supplies have to be delivered from somewhere.
In ancient times, armies could live off the land. Essentially this was through looting and plunder—stealing their food from the local population as they marched. To prevent the local population from becoming the enemy in the rear and avoid early exhaustion of local supply, generals started paying for what was requisitioned.
To prevent this defending forces would often withdraw the civilian population and destroy what could not be taken. In fact this kind of rough warfare against civilians still occurs although it has been forbidden under the Law of Land Warfare.[ii]
Naturally the soldier in the field can no longer make weaponry and even less plundered from the local inhabitants—unless one comes across some tribe the US has armed with Stingers perhaps.
All the weapons the Ukrainian armed forces deploy have to be imported from countries with factory capacity.
As the two officers among others have said, the capacity is unavailable for the Ukraine.
Obviously it would also be unavailable to NATO forces were they able to deploy in Ukraine in any numbers.
It is illusory to believe that a NATO army can do what the Wehrmacht could not some eighty years ago with three million men under arms and the most modern army of its day.
This was so obvious from the beginning that one has to wonder why this war ever started.
Is it possible that wars are started without any intention of winning them?
If winning the war is not the objective, then what is?
Forgery and Force: Explicit and Implicit
or Latent and Expressed Foreign Policy
Historical documents are essential elements in any attempt to understand the past and the present. However this is not because they are necessarily true or accurate. Forgeries and outright lies are also important parts of the historical record. Perhaps the most notorious forgery in Western history is the so-called Donation of Constantine. This document was used to legitimate papal supremacy and the primacy of the Latin over the Greek Church. Although it did not take long for the forgery to be discovered, the objective was accomplished. Even today most people in the West have learned that the part of the Christian Church called Orthodoxy is schismatic when the reverse is true, namely the Latin Church arose from a coup d’état against Constantinople.
There is now no shortage of evidence that the British Empire forced the German Empire into the Great War and with US help justified the slaughter of some four million men to expel German forces from Belgium.
There is systematically suppressed testimony by commanders in the field and others in a position to know that the Japanese attack on the US colonial base at Pearl Harbor was not only no surprise but a carefully crafted event exploited to justify US designs on Japan and China.
Yet to this day the myth of surprise attack against a neutral country prevails over the historical facts. Even though there is almost popular acceptance that the US invasion of Iraq was based on entirely fabricated evidence and innuendo, the destruction of the country was not stopped and continues as of this writing.
What does that tell us about historical record and official statements of policy?
Former US POTUS and former CIA director, George H.W. Bush expressed the principle that government lies did not matter because the lie appears on page one and the retraction or correction on page 28.
In short, it is the front page that matters.
That is what catches and keeps the public’s attention. Truth and accuracy are immaterial.
***
Let us consider for a moment one of the most durable wonders of published state policy—the Balfour Declaration. This brief letter signed by one Arthur Balfour in 2 November 1917 was addressed to the Lord Rothschild, addressed in his capacity as some kind of conduit for the Zionist Federation.
On the other hand, Carroll Quigley in his The Anglo-American Establishment strongly suggests that Lord Rothschild, also in his capacity as a sponsor of the Milner/ Round Table group, presented the letter for Mr Balfour to sign. As Quigley also convincingly argues the academic and media network created by the Round Table has successfully dominated the writing of British imperial history making it as suspicious as the Vatican’s history of the Latin Church.
This “private” letter to the representative of the West’s leading banking dynasty is then adopted as the working principle for the League of Nations Mandate for Palestine awarded to the British Empire. From this private letter an international law mandate was created under the League of Nations regime to convert a part the conquered Ottoman Empire into a state entity for people organized in Europe who imagined that some thousand(s) of years ago some ancestors once inhabited the area.[iii]
The incongruence of this act ought to have been obvious—and in fact it was. The explicit policy with which the British Empire had sought to undermine Germany and Austria-Hungary was that of ethnic/ linguistic self-determination of peoples. So by right—even if the fiction of a population in diaspora were accepted—this could not pre-empt the right of ethnic/ linguistic self-determination in Palestine where Arabic was the dominant language and even those who adhered to the Jewish religion were not Europeans.
As argued elsewhere there has been a century of propaganda and brute force applied to render the dubious origins and integrity of the legitimation for the settler conquest that was declared the State of Israel in 1948 acceptable no matter how implausible. Like the Donation of Constantine, the Balfour Declaration served its purpose. No amount of rebuttal can reverse the events that followed.
Motors and Motives
However the question remains what is then the policy driving such acts?
What is the motive for such seemingly senseless aggression against ordinary people?
Why does an institution supposedly based on national self-determination deny it so effectively to majorities everywhere whose only fault appears to be living on land others covet?
By the time the Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples was finally adopted in 1960, there was no question of reversing the de facto colonisation practiced by the mandatory powers under the League. The Declaration was only an act of the UN General Assembly any way, a body wholly dominated by the three permanent imperial members of the Security Council, each with their veto powers.
To understand that and perhaps to better illuminate the principal subject—Ukraine—it is helpful to recall that of the five permanent members of the Security Council, the two most powerful are not nation-states at all. The United Kingdom is a colonial confederation as is the United States.
Russia, France, and China are all states derived from historical ethnic-linguistic determination. They were formed into such unitary states through wars and revolutions.
As de Gaulle famously said “France was made with the sword”.
However there is no question that these three countries are based explicitly on ethnic-linguistic and cultural congruity within continental boundaries, in the sense articulated by the explicit text of the Covenant and the Charter.
On the contrary, Great Britain and the United States are commercial enterprises organised on the basis of piracy and colonial conquest. There is not a square centimetre of the United States that was not seized by the most brutal force of arms from its indigenous inhabitants. “Ethnic-linguistic” among the English-speaking peoples is a commodity characteristic. It is a way to define a market segment.
Great Britain gave the world “free trade” and liberalism and the US added to that the “open door”.
Nothing could be more inimical to the self-determination of peoples than either policy.[iv] How can a people be independent and self-determined when they are denied the right to say “no”?
The Great War and its sequel the war against the Soviet Union and Communism, aka World War 2, were first and foremost wars to establish markets dominated by the Anglo-American free trade – open door doctrine. One will not find this explicitly stated in any of the history books or the celebratory speeches on Remembrance Day (Memorial Day in the US) or the anniversary of D-Day to which properly the Soviet Union and Russia ought not to be invited.
After all D-Day was the beginning of the official war by Anglo-America against the Soviet Union after Hitler failed.
More of Italian, French and German industrial and domestic infrastructure was destroyed by aerial bombardment from the West than by anything the Wehrmacht did—since its job was to destroy Soviet industry.
This will not be reported in schoolbooks and very few official papers will verify this open secret. That is because like the Donation much of what counts as history was simply “written to the file”.
The facts however speak for themselves. When the German High Command signed the terms of unconditional surrender in Berlin-Karlshorst, the domestic industry of the West, except the US, had been virtually destroyed leaving it a practical monopoly not only in finance but manufacturing that would last well into the late 1960s.
Only the excess demand of the war against Korea accelerated German industrial recovery. No one can say for sure how much of German, French, Italian, Belgian, or Netherlands capital was absorbed by Anglo-American holding companies.
Hence those that wonder today about the self-destruction of the German economy have to ask who owns Germany in fact. To do that one will have to hunt through the minefield of secrecy jurisdictions behind which beneficial ownership of much of the West is concealed.
It is necessary to return to the conditions at the beginning of the Great War to understand what is happening now in Ukraine. One has to scratch the paint off the house called “interests” and recall some geography. F. William Engdahl performed this task well in his ACentury of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order (2011). It would do well to summarise this here before going further.
Geography and Aggrandizement
Continental nation-states need secure land routes. Pirate states need secure sea-lanes. Britain succeeded in seizing control ruling the waves after defeating the Spanish and Portuguese fleets. It reached a commercial entente with the Netherlands, which helped until the Royal Navy was paramount. The control of the seas meant that Britain could dominate shipping as well as maritime insurance needed to cover the risk of sea transport. So it was no accident that Lloyds of London came to control the financing of maritime traffic.
Geography dictated that the alternative for continental nation-states was the railroad. Germany was building a railroad from Berlin to Baghdad which would not only have delivered oil to its industry but allowed it to bypass the Anglo-French Suez Canal and the British controlled Cape route. Centuries before the predecessors to the City of London financed crusades to control the trade routes through the Middle East, propagandistically labelled the Holy Land, whereby this was wholly for commercial reasons.
The Anglo-American led NATO captured Kosovo not out of any special loyalty to Albanians but because of geography.
Camp Bondsteel lies at the end of the easiest route to build pipelines between Central Asia and the Mediterranean.
In short there is not a single war for “self-determination” waged by the Anglo-American special relationship that was not driven by piratical motives, for which ethnic-linguistic commodities are expendable.
In 1917, the “interests”, for whom Lord Rothschild spoke and no doubt provided financial support, coincided with the pre-emptive control over real estate that had been desired by the banking-commercial cult at least since the establishment of the Latin Church. It is no accident that serious investigations have established that the state created from the British Mandate in Palestine was a commercial venture like all other British undertakings.
Moreover it has been able to use its most insidious cover story to veil itself in victimhood and thus immunity for those criminal enterprises, both private and state, that use it as a conduit: money laundering, drug and arms trafficking, training of repressive forces for other countries on contract, etc. all documented and protected by atomic weapons. Moreover this enterprise has been the greatest per capita recipient of US foreign aid for decades.
Its citizens are able to use dual citizenship to hold high office in the sovereign state that funds it, too. Any attempt to criticize or oppose this relationship or its moral justification by a public official or personality with anything to lose can lead to the gravest of consequences. Its official lobby in the US, the AIPAC, is only one instrument by which any act that could interfere with the smooth flow of cash or influence between Washington and Tel Aviv. It draws on an international organisation that does not even have to be organised. The status of ultimate victimhood combined with mass media at all levels committed to protecting “victims” can summon crowds just as Gene Sharp predicted in his works.[v]
A Business Too Innocent to Fail
Now we come to the issues with which this essay began. What is the aim of the war in Ukraine? Will it end when the military operations have failed?
In April 2022, i.e. just over a month after the Russian intervention, Volodymyr Zelenskyy described “the future for his country”.
He used the terms “a big Israel”. In Haaretz it was reported that Zelenskyy wanted Ukraine to become “a big Israel, with its own face”.
Writing for the NATO lobby, the Atlantic Council, Daniel Shapiro elaborated what Zelenskyy might mean: the main points are security first, the whole population plays a role, self-defence is the only way, but maintain active defence partnerships, intelligence dominance, technology as key, build an innovation ecosystem, maintain democratic institutions.[vi] The stories depict this stance for better or worse as the creation of a state under permanent military control, always giving priority to existential threats—presumably from the East.
But is that really what Zelenskyy means?
Or perhaps that is what he may mean.
What about all those who have directed nearly all of NATO armament and so many billions through the hands of the Kiev regime—one notorious even before 2022 as one of the most corrupt in Europe if not anywhere?
Maybe there is another construction to be applied here.
Perhaps Zelenskyy is talking, like some latter day Balfour, on behalf of his sponsors whose Holocaust piety never prevented them from subjecting nearly the entire population to forced medical experiments starting in 2020.
Perhaps he is talking about the extensive participation in all sorts of international trafficking, either as agent or protection for the principals. Perhaps he is talking about the permanent and undebatable foreign aid contributions from the US and the extortion from other countries, e.g. as Norman Finkelstein documented.[vii]
There is no doubt that Ukraine has become a major hub for human trafficking, arms smuggling, and biological-chemical testing. They have atomic reactors and have asked for warheads.[viii]
Add to this the potential of a large and potentially self-righteous diaspora spread throughout the West, heavily subsidised and already equipped with influence in high places.
A “Ukraine Lobby” was already in preparation in 1944 when the British shipped some thousand POWs from the SS Galicia Division (a Ukrainian force) from Italy to Britain without a single war crimes investigation.[ix] From there they were able to spread throughout the Empire as Canada amply indicates.
If Lord Rothschild’s model for Israel has been so successful to this day, one can scarcely blame a patriot like Volodymyr Zelenskyy for seizing the opportunity of a proven model.
It has been so successful that no one in public dare oppose it.
Why not establish another such parasitic machine? Russians or Arabs provide the permanent enemies with which to sell the permanent victim status at the expense of millions of displaced Ukrainians.
Plunder and Pillage
In other words there is a very successful business model to be implemented wholly consistent with free trade and the open door and all those other slogans, which have anointed plunder and pillage by the occasionally alpine commercial cults in their campaign to assure that:
All of us:
“You’ll own nothing and you’ll be happy”.
***
.
“Own Everything”: “Plunder and Pillage” Implemented by BlackRock, JP Morgan, Et. Al.
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[i] Jonathan Masters and Will Merrow, “How Much as the US Sent to Ukraine Here are Six Charts”, Council on Foreign Relations (10 July 2023). Among those declaring this was Foreign Minister of the German Federal Republic, Annalena Baerbock. Angela Merkel, the former chancellor of the Federal Republic is on record having said that the so-called Minsk Accords were intended to stall the Russian reaction in Donbass until Ukraine could be sufficiently armed to fight against the Russian Federation.
[ii] Principally the Hague (1907) Conventions
[iii] More likely the Eastern Europeans in question were descendent from the Khazar kingdom located far closer to what today is Ukraine. The ruling elite was to have converted to Rabbinic Judaism in the 8th century. The Khazar Khaganate was disbursed by the end of the first millennium CE. This would better explain the hostility toward Russia and myth of a national homeland, displaced in 1917 to Palestine based on contemporary political realities.
[iv] Historian Gerald Horne ascribes “free trade” to the so-called Glorious Revolution, which also abolished the Royal Africa Company, opening “free trade in slaves”, see The Counter-Revolution of 1776 (2014).
[v] Gene Sharp, From Dictatorship to Democracy (1994)
[vi] Daniel B. Shapiro, “Zelenskyy wants Ukraine to be ‘a big Israel’. Here’s a road map”, New Atlanticist (6 April 2022) “By adapting their country’s mindset to mirror aspects of Israel’s approach to security challenges, Ukrainian officials can tackle national security challenges with confidence and build a similarly resilient state”.
[vii] Norman Finkelstein, The Holocaust Industry (2000)
[viii] This notorious request by Zelenskyy at the Munich Security Conference in 2022 for atomic weapons was another reason President Vladimir Putin gave for a military response to Kiev’s attacks on the Russian-speaking eastern Ukraine that Russia had been forced to recognise as two independent republics and grant protection.
[ix] A documentary produced by Julian Hendy (The SS in Britain) contains interviews, e.g. with civil servants who were told by US authorities that no pre-immigration investigations were to be conducted. This film about the 14thWaffenSS Division Galizia division has been effectively scrubbed from the Web. The film, originally to be broadcast by Yorkshire Television (UK) was never shown. Geoffrey Goodman described details after a private viewing in a Guardian article (12 June 2000).
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***
Following reports about Wagner chief Yevgeny Prigozhin being killed in a plane crash, a Russian political analyst has alleged that the warlord is still “alive, well and free”, claiming that it was his doppelganger who was actually killed in the accident.
Alleging that Prigozhin foiled an assassination attempt sanctioned by Russian President Vladimir Putin, Dr Valery Solovey claimed that the Wagner boss is now plotting his revenge. Solovey is a former professor at Moscow’s Institute of International Relations, which trains spies and diplomats.
“First, the plane in which Yevgeny Prigozhin was supposed to fly was downed by a Russian air defence system,” Daily Mail quoted Solovey as saying. “There was no explosion on board. It was downed from the outside.”
“How did he end up alive while his close people died? This is the choice he [Prigozhin] was faced with. I’m not talking about the moral side of this choice. God forbid any of us face such a choice. He intends to take revenge for having been faced with such a choice. He intends to take revenge on people who were intending to destroy him, and destroyed people close to him,” he added.
Wagner military commander Dmitry Utkin, 53, and flight attendant Kristina Raspopova, 39, were among other who were killed in the crash.
Solovey said Prigozhin who has access to £1.6 billion in bitcoin will use it to strike back.
“That is more than enough for revenge. As for ambition, energy, and courage, he has plenty of that,” he added.
Reports also claimed that the supposed wife of Prigozhin seen at his funeral on Tuesday was actually the spouse of his doppelganger. The woman who was earlier claimed to be Prigozhin’s wife Lyubov Prigozhina, 52, was later identified by Russian media as Irina Krasavina, the spouse of his main body double Leonid Krasavin.
Another video released by the Telegram channel linked to the Wagner Group showed Prigozhin in Africa days before his death. In the clip, Prigozhin is heard talking about his threats to his life. Dressed in camouflage, he says,
“”For those who are discussing whether I’m alive or not, how I’m doing – right now it’s the weekend, second half of August 2023, I’m in Africa.”
THE WEEK cannot independently verify claims made by the analyst or the location and date of the video.
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***
From all indications, China has emerged as the greatest beneficiary at the 15th BRICS summit – a platform hosted by South Africa last August with participation of African leaders. The summit turned out be successful with most of the significant questions put under serious discussions and finally ended with a joint declaration which outlines the necessary strategic pathways into the future. In practical context, BRICS is increasingly becoming the beacon of hope for the new multipolar world.
At the most obvious level, there were some genuine adverse criticisms, but one main advantage was and still exists now is the emphasis on preparing for a new multipolar world order. It is a distinctive impetus to the divergence between the world represented by the West and the world represented by the BRICS. This is the fundamental driving interest, the reason twisting potential members mostly developing nations in the south towards joining BRICS.
Results emerging from Johannesburg indicate that BRICS will expand to have a total of three African states – South African Egypt and Ethiopia. For China, who has swiftly moved into the continent in 90s after Russia abandoned and exited after the collapse of the Soviet era, has designed a comprehensive plan to strengthen its economic foothold. China keep its distance, far away from empty geopolitical rhetoric. China, the key driver of BRICS, interprets active participation by African leaders at the summit which further gives the continent an opportunity to take a more active position in world politics and economics.
President of the People’s Republic of China, Xi Jinping, during the China-Africa Leaders’ Dialogue held on August 24, rained praises that Africa has made big strides on the path of independence, seeking strength through unity and integration. With steady progress under Agenda 2063 of the African Union (AU), the official launch of the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA), and growing coordination among the sub-regional groups, Africa is becoming an important pole with global influence.
Xi Jinping also said that
“China will continue to support Africa in speaking with one voice on international affairs and continuously elevating its international standing. China will work actively at the G20 summit to support the AU’s full membership in the group. China supports making special arrangements on the U.N. Security Council reform to meet Africa’s aspiration as a priority.”
Over the past 20 years, China has stayed committed to this basic principle of together with Africa and drawing strength from the spirit of China-Africa friendship and cooperation. Aiming to China-Africa relations to new heights and build a shared common future, China shows absolute readiness to work with Africa to implement new vision of common connectivity with new strategic action plan to be implemented right away, starting September 2023.
To chart the course for practical cooperation in the next stage and partner with Africa to bring its integration and modernization into a fast track, on the sideline meeting with African leaders, Xi Jinping made three concrete proposals which are as follows:
(i) China will launch the Initiative on Supporting Africa’s Industrialization. China will better harness its resources for cooperation with Africa and the initiative of businesses to support Africa in growing its manufacturing sector and realizing industrialization and economic diversification. In implementing the nine programs under the FOCAC framework, China will channel more resources of assistance, investment and financing toward programs for industrialization.
(ii) China will launch the Plan for China Supporting Africa’s Agricultural Modernization. China will partner with Africa to expand grain plantation, encourage Chinese companies to increase agricultural investment in Africa, and enhance cooperation with Africa on seed and other areas of agro-technology, to support Africa in transforming and upgrading its agricultural sector. China will host the second Forum on China-Africa Cooperation in Agriculture in Hainan this November.
It also plans to partner with Africa in tackling the current food crisis, China will provide additional emergency food assistance to African countries in need. More importantly, China has confidence that Africa will attain food self-sufficiency through its own efforts.
(iii) China will launch the Plan for China-Africa Cooperation on Talent Development. China plans to train 500 principals and high-caliber teachers of vocational colleges every year, and 10,000 technical personnel with both Chinese language and vocational skills for Africa. China will invite 20,000 government officials and technicians of African countries to participate in workshops and seminars. To support Africa in strengthening education and innovation, it will launch the China-Africa Universities 100 Cooperation Plan and 10 pilot exchange programs of China-Africa partner institutes.
China sees the world undergoing rapid transformation and unpredictable turmoil, and the changes unseen in a century are unfolding at a faster pace. At this point of history, it becomes to address the deficit in development, overcome security challenges and enhance mutual learning between civilizations.
In view of this, Chinese leader Xi Jinping has put forward the Global Development Initiative, the Global Security Initiative and the Global Civilization Initiative, called for peace, development, cooperation and mutual benefit, and advocated building a community with a shared future for mankind. These proposals have received the extensive support of African countries. China and Africa, through the creative explorations for modernization, are giving answers to the questions of the times, and making joint efforts to advance the great endeavors of win-win cooperation, harmonious coexistence and shared prosperity of civilizations.
The BRICS leaders and Sergei Lavrov (representing Vladimir Putin). (Licensed under Creative Commons Public Domain Mark 1.0)
At the BRICS-Africa Outreach and BRICS Plus Dialogue, Xi Jinping reported a number of notable achievements the previous years as following:
The Global Development Initiative (GDI), precisely for the purpose of calling on the world to stay focused on development and lending impetus to the implementation of the 2030 Agenda. Last year, China held the first High-Level Dialogue on Global Development where a host of measures for development cooperation were unveiled. Encouraging progress has been made since then.
China has put development first and allocated more resources. China has set up a Global Development and South-South Cooperation Fund with a total funding of US$4 billion, and Chinese financial institutions will soon set up a special fund of US$10 billion dedicated to the implementation of the GDI.
China has taken results-oriented actions and deepened practical cooperation. From Asia to Africa, from Pacific island countries to the Caribbean, over 200 cooperation projects have come to fruition, and cooperation mechanisms are growing in areas such as poverty reduction, education and health.
China has unleashed the power of innovation and built up momentum for development. Under the GDI, it has prioritized green development, new-type industrialization, the digital economy and some other key areas, and pursued a Partnership on New Industrial Revolution to boost high-quality development.
China has tided over difficulties together and made development more resilient. Food and energy security bear on the economy of a country and the well-being of its people. It has launched a China-FAO South-South Cooperation Trust Fund, implemented the Food Production Enhancement Action, and provided food assistance to and shared agricultural technology with many countries. It has also initiated a Global Clean Energy Cooperation Partnership with a view to achieving energy security.
China is a friend that Africa can count on. Over the past decade, China has provided a large amount of development assistance to Africa and partnered in building more than 6,000 kilometers of railway, over 6,000 kilometers of highway, and 80-plus large power facilities on the continent. Going forward, China will carry out more cooperation with African countries to support Africa in enhancing its own capacity for development. Specific measures will be taken, such as providing satellite mapping data products, implementing a Smart Customs cooperation partnership, and launching with UNESCO a “GDI for Africa’s Future” action plan, to support sustainable development in Africa.
It’s often-stated that like-minded friends inseparable move and work together. China and Africa demonstrate and/or testify to this popular rhetoric. As Africa faces formidable challenges during this time of complex geopolitical processes, China upholds true friendship and solidarity, displays optimum readiness to ensure high-quality comprehensive strategic partnership. The vigorous nature of the China-Africa cooperation meets the development needs of Africa and has been implemented efficiently, which has supported the economic and social development of African countries.
We can, at this juncture, say that the 15th BRICS meeting is a turn-key that brings along its fold substantial, if not additional changes for economic landscape across Africa. We have already witnessed, to an appreciable level, how China has partnered with Africa in building a large amount of connectivity infrastructure, carried out extensive cooperation with the AU and sub-regional organizations, and assisted the construction of several signature Pan-African projects, including the new AU Conference Center and the Africa Center for Disease Control and Prevention.
Judging from above, we can conveniently conclude that advancing the African agenda is a strategic priority for China as it used the opportunity to portray its assertiveness during the BRICS summit. Understandably Africans hold high perceptions over China’s consistent engagement, dynamism in its collaborative partnership and strong attachment to achieve their development goals per the United Nations SGDs.
According the official documents, China will next year (2024) host the FOCAC meeting, where it will again draw up new plans for development in Africa. It is quite clear that China and Africa have eternal hope to carry forward the traditional friendship, enhance solidarity and coordination, and bolster cooperation across the board, both further desire to deliver a better future for the Chinese and African people, and set a fine example in the building of a community with a shared future for mankind.
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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
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***
In the first 2024 Republican presidential debate last week, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis touted his time in Iraq.
“I learned in the military, I was assigned with U.S. Navy SEALs in Iraq, that you focus on the mission above all else, you can’t get distracted,” he declared.
Later in the debate he stated,
“I’m somebody that volunteered to serve, inspired by September 11 and I deployed to Iraq alongside U.S. Navy SEALs in places like Fallujah, Ramadi…”
Some viewers had the impression that DeSantis was a Seal, but he was actually a Harvard Law School graduate who was a Judge Advocate General Corps (JAG) alongside the Seals. DeSantis was deployed to Iraq in 2007 and 2008, during President George W. Bush’s “surge” (intended to postpone the obvious failure of the war until after Bush’s second term ended).
The American troops that Bush sent to Iraq were injected into a conflict where it was often nearly impossible to distinguish friend from foe—what author Robert Jay Lifton labeled “atrocity-producing situations.” Invoking his time in Fallujah, DeSantis may be confident that few Americans recall the carnage that preceded his time there.
Fallujah was hammered by two U.S. assaults in 2004. The first attack was launched in April 2004 in retaliation for the killings of four contractors for Blackwater, a company that became renowned for killing innocent Iraqis.After their corpses were dragged through the street, the Bush administration demanded vengeance.
President Bush reportedly gave the order: “I want heads to roll.” He raved at Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez during a video conference,
“If somebody tries to stop the march to democracy, we will seek them out and kill them! We must be tougher than hell!…Stay strong! Stay the course! Kill them! Be confident! Prevail! We are going to wipe them out!”
U.S. forces quickly placed the entire city under siege. The British Guardian reported:
“The U.S. soldiers were going around telling people to leave by dusk or they would be killed, but then when people fled with whatever they could carry, they were stopped at the U.S. military checkpoint on the edge of town and not let out, trapped, watching the sun go down.”
The city was blasted by artillery barrages, F–16 jets, and AC–130 Spectre planes which pumped 4,000 rounds a minute into selected targets. Adam Kokesh, who was present in Fallujah as a Marine Corps sergeant, later commented:
“During the siege of Fallujah, we changed rules of engagement more often than we changed our underwear. At one point, we imposed a curfew on the city, and were told to fire at anything that moved in the dark.”
The Bush administration decided to crush the city—but not until after Bush was safely reelected. In the weeks after Election Day, U.S. Army soldiers and Marines smashed the city of Fallujah, Iraq, killing an unknown number of civilians and leaving the city a burnt-out ruin. Marine Col. Gary Brandl explained the U.S. holy mission: “The enemy has got a face. He’s called Satan. He’s in Fallujah and we’re going to destroy him.”
Up to 50,000 civilians remained in Fallujah at the time of the second U.S. assault. At a November 8, 2004 press conference, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld declared that “Innocent civilians in that city have all the guidance they need as to how they can avoid getting into trouble.” Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Richard B. Myers said three days later that Fallujah “looks like a ghost town [because] the Iraqi government gave instructions to the citizens of Fallujah to stay indoors.”
Supposedly, Iraqi civilians would be safe even if when American troops went house to house “clearing” insurgents out. However, three years later, during the trials for killings elsewhere in Iraq, Marines continually invoked the Fallujah Rules of Engagement to justify their actions. Marine Corporal Justin Sharratt, who was indicted for murdering three civilians in Haditha (the charges were later dropped), explained in a 2007 interview with PBS:
“For the push of Fallujah, there [were no civilians]. We were told before we went in that if it moved, it dies…About a month before we went into the city of Fallujah, we sent out flyers…We let the population know that we were coming in on this date, and if you were left in the city, you were going to die.”
The interviewer asked, “Was the procedure for clearing a house in Fallujah different from other house clearing in Iraq?” Sharratt replied,
“Yes. The difference between clearing houses in Fallujah was that the entire city was deemed hostile. So every house we went into, we prepped with frags and we went in shooting.”
Thus, the Marines were preemptively justified in killing everyone inside—no questions asked. Former Congressman Duncan Hunter admitted in 2019,
“I was an artillery officer, and we fired hundreds of rounds into Fallujah, killed probably hundreds of civilians…probably killed women and children.”
The U.S. attack left much of Fallujah looking like a lunar landscape, with near-total destruction as far as the eye could see. Yet, regardless of how many rows of houses the United States flattened in the city, accusations that the United States killed noncombatants were false by definition. Because the U.S. government refused to count civilian casualties, they did not exist. And anyone who claimed to count them was slandering the United States and aiding the terrorists.
The carnage the U.S. forces inflicting on Fallujah was supposedly not massive retaliation but the well-disguised triumph of hope and freedom. Bush announced on December 1, “In Fallujah and elsewhere, our coalition and Iraqi forces are on the offensive, and we are delivering a message: Freedom, not oppression, is the future of Iraq…A long night of terror and tyranny in that region is ending, and a new day of freedom and hope and self-government is on the way.” But it is tricky for corpses to be hopeful.
During DeSantis’ first campaign to become Florida’s governor in 2018, his first words in his first televised advertisement were, “Ron DeSantis, Iraq War veteran.” TheSt. Augustine Record noted in 2018, “DeSantis was responsible for helping ensure that the missions of Navy SEALs and Army Green Berets in that wide swath of the Western Euphrates River Valley were planned according to the rule of law and that captured detainees were humanely treated.”
Most of the details of DeSantis’ time in Iraq have not been disclosed. But he was deployed into an area where stunning detainee abuses by the U.S. Army had previously been reported. In September 2005, Americans learned that three 82nd Airborne Division soldiers complained about Army cooks and other off-duty troops, for amusement and sport, routinely physically beating Iraqi detainees being held near Fallujah. One sergeant explained, “We would give [detainees] blows to the head, chest, legs and stomach, and pull them down, kick dirt on them. This happened every day.” The sergeant said that there were no problems as long as no detainees “came up dead…We kept it to broken arms and legs.” Captain Ian Fishback of the 82nd Airborne repeatedly sought to get guidance from superiors on the standards for lawful and humane treatment of detainees. He, like other officers, never received clear guidelines. Fishback publicly complained, “I am certain that this confusion contributed to a wide range of abuses including death threats, beatings, broken bones, murder, exposure to elements, extreme forced physical exertion, hostage-taking, stripping, sleep deprivation and degrading treatment.”
It would be most helpful to American voters to learn more about what exactly Ron DeSantis did during his time in Iraq. Prior to his time in Iraq, he volunteered to be a legal advisor at Guantanamo Bay detention camp. In a 2018 interview for CBS Miami, he stated that one of his tasks was to clarify “the rules for force feeding detainees.” He also stated, “What I learned from [Gitmo] and I took to Iraq—they are using things like [false charges of] detainee abuse offensively against us—it was a tactic, technique, and procedure.”A Vice documentary that covered DeSantis’ role at Gitmo was scheduled for broadcast on Showtime but the May 28 air date was canceled on the day after DeSantis announced his presidential campaign.
The Pentagon’s records on DeSantis’ years as a JAG could help voters judge his candidacy for the presidency. But Americans would be damn fools to expect transparency from the feds or from most political candidates.
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Jim Bovard is the Senior Fellow for The Libertarian Institute. He is the author of Public Policy Hooligan (2012), Attention Deficit Democracy (2006), Lost Rights: The Destruction of American Liberty (1994), and 7 other books. He is a member of the USA Today Board of Contributors and has also written for the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Playboy, Washington Post, and other publications. His articles have been publicly denounced by the chief of the FBI, the Postmaster General, the Secretary of HUD, and the heads of the DEA, FEMA, and EEOC and numerous federal agencies.
Featured image: Des Moines, Iowa, USA – August 12, 2023: Florida Republican Governor and presidential candidate Ron DeSantis greets supporters at the Iowa State Fair fair side chats in Des Moines, Iowa. (Source: TLI)
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***
Amid a controversial visit from Vice President William Lai (the front-runner to be his country’s next leader), official documents reviewed by “MintPress News” show that the Taiwanese government is attempting to drum up anti-China hostility, influence and intimidate American politicians and is even working with the FBI and other agencies to spy on and prosecute Chinese American citizens.
Key points of this investigation
Taiwanese officials are monitoring Chinese Americans and passing intelligence to the FBI in attempts to have them prosecuted.
Taiwan is working with “friends” in media and politics to create a culture of fear towards China and Chinese people in the US
Taiwanese officials claim they are “directing” and “guiding” certain US politicians.
Taiwan is monitoring and helping to intimidate U.S. politicians they deem to be too pro-China.
The island is spending millions funding US think tanks that inject pro-Taiwan and anti-China talking points into American politics.
Working with the Feds to Prosecute Chinese Americans
Vice President Lai’s journey to the United States is, officially, only a stopover on his way to Paraguay (the U.S. does not formally recognize Taiwan as an independent state). He is scheduled to make appearances in both New York and San Francisco.
Lai himself is an outspoken leader of the growing movement for Taiwanese independence. Many nationalists see Taiwan as culturally different from the mainland and argue it would be better off as a fully independent state. To achieve this goal, they are attempting to gain American backing and influence American public opinion. China, however, sees the matter as purely internal, and American attempts to wrest Taiwan out of its orbit as a potential trigger for World War Three.
Part of the effort to influence American politics, the cables reveal, is waging a silent war against pro-Chinese groups and directly working and sharing intelligence with the FBI and other agencies.
“We should grasp the opportunity to counteract and further weaken China’s grassroots influence activities in the U.S. through adopting more offensive and lethal measures,” a cable from Taiwan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) reads.
The same document instructs all offices of the Taipei Economic and Cultural Representative Office (TECRO or TECO) – Taiwan’s de facto U.S. embassy and consulates – to cooperate with local law enforcement.
“We are happy to witness that some local offices have already started exchanging intelligence related to China with U.S. federal staff. All offices are mandated to keep track of China’s activities and enhance the frequency of sharing information with U.S. officials,” the Ministry of Foreign Affairs notes.
The exchanges between the different Taiwanese agencies make clear that Taiwan sees Chinese Americans as suspect and all pro-China or anti-Taiwanese sentiment expressed by Chinese Americans as possibly directed by Beijing itself.
“Chinese Americans have already adapted to the mainstream society, serving as the major channel for Chinese consulates to influence local politics, economics, culture, education and community groups. Their presence and activities pose great threats for Taiwan,” the New York TECO office wrote, which also noted that it had infiltrated some of these groups.
Earlier this year, Chinese American groups protested Taiwanese President Tsai-Ing Wen’s visit to the United States, upstaging the event. The demonstrations, TECO New York alleged, were led by the United Chinese Association of Brooklyn and the Chinese American Community Affairs Council.
Angered by this, it appears that Taiwan attempted to have these groups arrested and prosecuted as foreign agents, despite lamenting that they could find no evidence they broke any U.S. laws. As one cable noted:
The U.S. government is acutely aware that protesting and freedom of speech are guaranteed by the Constitution. Although it knows that Chinese Americans keep in constant contact with the Chinese Consulate in New York, it is quite difficult to charge them in ways that the FBI sued Chinese Americans.”
The plan, it seemed, was to continue to monitor pro-China groups in the hopes that they could find something actionable. As TECO New York wrote:
If we can collect clear and concrete evidence that Chinese Americans and community groups are directed by Chinese government, they will likely be prosecuted by the U.S. We are supposed to maintain the communication with U.S. law enforcement continuously, and share updated intelligence about Chinese Americans and community groups in our jurisdiction, in order to assist the U.S. to get hold of potential illegal actions by pro-China individuals and community groups.”
“MintPress” approached both TECO New York and the United Chinese Association of Brooklyn for comment but did not receive a response.
The FBI has already helped create a culture of fear among Chinese Americans. For example, the agency falsely accused Professor Xiaoxing Xi of Temple University of spying for Beijing. During their investigation, the FBI unlawfully searched his house and held his family at gunpoint. Xi is currently suing the government. A survey taken earlier this year found that 72% of Chinese researchers in the U.S. felt unsafe, and most were looking into pursuing job opportunities elsewhere.
Monitoring, Intimidating, “Directing,” and “Guiding” US Politicians
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs also directs TECO staff to investigate and pressure American politicians who they deem too friendly with China, attempting to create a climate of fear and suspicion in the process.
Two prominent U.S. politicians the cables highlight are Governor of New York Kathy Hochul and Mayor of New York City Eric Adams. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs wrote that they should help “our allies in politics, academia and the media” to investigate their relations to China. As MOFA stated:
We should encourage our allies to probe and expose the relations between Chinese American community groups and local politicians, and employ the current backdrop skeptical of China in U.S. society, which will make U.S. citizens stay alert with pro-China politicians, and warn them to show restraint and spontaneously distance themselves from China under the backdrop.”
While it is not explicitly stated how much – if any – influence Taiwan had in its publication, the documents also reference a series of hit pieces in “The National Review,” painting Hochul and Adams as suspiciously close to Communist China. One noted that Hochul enjoyed a “long-standing collaboration” with a genocide-denying Communist official who supports China’s “baseless claims to sovereignty over Taiwan.” Another article, which featured considerable FBI input, reported that both Hochul and Adams had received donations from Chinese Americans alleged to be secret police officers for Beijing.
The state of Utah has also turned into an unlikely battleground between China and Taiwan. In March, an “Associated Press” report headlined, “Amid strained U.S. ties, China finds unlikely friend in Utah” smeared a number of local politicians from the Beehive State, dubiously presenting them as in Beijing’s pocket. One legislator was questioned by the FBI after he introduced a resolution expressing solidarity with China in the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic, while a professor advocating for closer U.S./China relations was questioned twice.
This letter from Chinese President Xi Jinping to a Utah Elementary School in early 2020 was presented as evidence of China’s malign influence in the state. Jon Elswick | AP
Again, it is not clear whether Taiwan had any role in the story’s publication, although we do see the FBI/media/Taiwan nexus once again appearing. What is certain, however, is that they took full advantage of it. Another legislator highlighted in the AP report quickly rushed out a statement strongly supporting Taiwan and made a number of promises to the island. Fearing being smeared as pro-China, many Utah state representatives have since joined the Utah-Taiwan Friendship Caucus. Utah has also passed a number of pieces of pro-Taiwan or anti-China legislation.
Many of these bills have been promulgated by Candice Pierucci, a Republican legislator that the San Francisco TECO office describes as a “pro-Taiwan and promising political figure.” The wording of the TECO cables suggests Taiwan might consider Pierucci as under their control or direction. “Our office has directed Pierruci to follow the trend and lobby more lawmakers to join the Utah-Taiwan friendship caucus,” TECO San Francisco wrote. “We also guided Candice to take advantage of the AP reports to enhance her media exposure on ‘AP’ and ‘Fox News’ in order to shape her as a pro-Taiwan advocate,” it added (emphasis added).
MintPress approached TECO San Francisco and Pierucci for comment but has not received a response.
Information War
Anti-China hostility, both among elites and in the general population, has been rapidly rising in America. A recent Gallup poll found that only 15% of respondents viewed China in a positive light – an all-time low. As recently as 2018, a majority of Americans (53%) viewed the country favorably. However, increased hostility from Washington and a barrage of negative sentiment from politicians and media outlets has seen this figure fall. Hate crimes against Asian Americans have skyrocketed.
Conversely, support for Taiwan has been rising for decades, with the same Gallup poll finding a record-high 77% of Americans view Taiwan positively. Nearly nine in ten consider the conflict between China and Taiwan – a struggle between a state and an island the U.S. officially recognizes as part of China – as an “important” or “critical” threat to U.S. vital interests. Only 10% of Americans think it is relatively unimportant to U.S. national interests.
Part of this dramatic shift in outlook is down to Taiwanese efforts to bankroll a plethora of top U.S. think tanks. A 2021 “MintPress News” study found that TECRO had given millions of dollars to many of the most influential think tanks in the United States, including the Carnegie Endowment for Peace, The German Marshall Fund, the Center for a New American Security, the Center for Strategic and International Studies, the Hudson Institute, the Atlantic Council and the Center for American Progress.
These think tanks, in turn, pumped out papers, reports and other content supportive of Taiwan, highly critical of Beijing, and arguing that the U.S. needs to defend the former from the latter. For example, in 2019, TECRO donated between $250,000 and $500,000 to the Brookings Institute. Brookings, in turn, championed the island and routinely condemn Beijing’s attempts to bring it closer into its orbit.
However, while Taiwanese efforts might have played some role in it, most of the U.S. hostility towards China is entirely homegrown. China’s rapid economic rise has many in Washington worried that the U.S. is no longer the global hegemon. The country has turned itself into a manufacturing powerhouse and the top trading partner of more than 120 nations. China’s economy is expected to overtake the United States relatively soon. Worse still, in Washington’s eyes, is Beijing’s appetite for gigantic infrastructure projects all over the world, bringing countries closer to China and further from the United States.
China has become a world leader in a myriad of cutting-edge technologies, including 5G communications, high-speed rail, semiconductors, electric vehicles and solar energy. Unable to compete, the U.S. has pressured other nations to ban Chinese tech (and rely on America). Yet, its sanctions regime on Beijing appears to have done little to stymie China’s continued rise.
Instead, Washington’s goal appears to be to shift the conflict from the economic field towards a military one. Since President Obama’s “Pivot to Asia,” successive administrations have pulled military resources away from the Middle East and towards the Pacific. Today, the U.S. has an estimated 400 military bases surrounding China, and it has attempted to foster an “Asian NATO” of states willing to counter China’s rise.
Information warfare is also a critical component of the new struggle to halt Chinese growth. The U.S. banned sales of Huawei and ZTE electronic products and considered blocking the popular video app TikTok due to its connections with China. Other war planners have suggested “kicking China under the table” through psychological warfare, including commissioning “Taiwanese Tom Clancy” novels intended to demonize China and demoralize its citizens.
History Lesson
The triangular relationship between the U.S., China and Taiwan goes back to the Second World War when Chinese resistance to the Japanese invasion centered around two poles. One was nationalist in character and led by Chiang Kai-shek of the Kuomintang Party. The other was the Communist resistance led by Mao Zedong.
Despite a lack of resources, the Communists proved more capable of repelling the Japanese invaders and fought the U.S.-backed Kuomintang off the mainland. The U.S. actually invaded and occupied parts of China with a force of 50,000 troops for four years between 1945 and 1949. But it soon became clear that the Communists were too powerful. The U.S. retreated, and Chiang Kai-shek and the Kuomintang fled to Taiwan, an island around 130 km (80 miles) off the mainland. There, they established a one-party state that ruled the country under martial law between 1949 and 1987. After decades of political terror and repression, the country had its first democratic presidential elections in 1996.
Chiang Kai-shek, left, and U.S. Navy officials salute the U.S. carrier Bonhomme Richard off Northern Taiwan on Nov. 11, 1957. Photo | US Navy
For decades, the United States refused to recognize Mao’s Communist government, instead viewing the government in Taiwan as the rightful ruler of all of China. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, there were many recriminations in Washington about the “loss” of China. Nevertheless, by the 1970s, it became clear that the Communists were going nowhere, and President Nixon began to pursue better relations. In 1979, the U.S. formally recognized Beijing as the sole legitimate government (thereby abandoning their Taiwanese allies). To this day, the official U.S. position is that Taiwan is not an independent state. Indeed, only a handful of countries recognize Taiwan as independent, the largest of which is Paraguay.
In the late 20th and early 21st century, China became a manufacturing hub for U.S. industry, its cheap and pliant workforce generating gigantic profits for corporate America. However, as China has become strong enough to pose a threat to U.S. dominance, attitudes to it in Washington have begun to sour. Today, in an attempt to weaken their rival, the U.S. is supporting a number of separatist movements, including in Tibet, Hong Kong, Xinjiang and Taiwan.
Taiwan’s Future
Regardless of what the major powers want, support for independence in Taiwan itself has been growing. A recent poll found that 21% of Taiwanese people want the country to gradually move towards independence, while 4.5% favored an immediate break with China. The large majority, however, favored keeping the status quo situation continuing. Few advocated for unification with China.
China, however, sees Taiwanese independence as a red line, meaning increased Western attempts as pulling the island away from Beijing could result in it becoming the Ukraine of Asia. A recent poll found that most mainland Chinese would back a full-scale invasion of Taiwan. Given China’s position, then, Taiwanese politicians will have to tread carefully and deploy masterful diplomacy.
Lai, who has previously referred to himself as a “practical worker for Taiwan independence,” has attempted to encourage the U.S. to get more involved in the debate. “If Taiwan is safe, the world is safe, if the Taiwan Strait is peaceful, then the world is peaceful…We are already on the right track. Don’t be afraid and turn back because of the increased threat from authoritarianism. We must be brave and strong,” he said on Sunday.
Clearly, then, Lai sees the United States as key to the future prospects of a more independent Taiwan. The documents seen by “MintPress” clearly underscore this, though few would guess the extent to which Taiwan is meddling in U.S. affairs in its attempt to drum up support for this goal.
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Featured image: Taiwan’s Vice President William Lai, left, chats with Ingrid D. Larson, managing director of the American Institute in Taiwan/Washington Office upon arrival in New York, Aug. 13, 2023. Photo | Taiwan Presidential Office | Editing by MintPress News
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In the aftermath of the attack, James Cleverly, Britain’s foreign secretary, called on “all parties to respect the historic status quo arrangements at Jerusalem’s holy sites and cease all provocative action”.
Cleverly would have known that there had been only one aggressor at Al-Aqsa – Israel. He would also have known that the status quo agreement places responsibility for internal security at Al-Aqsa with Jordan’sKing Abdullah II.
And that the status quo agreement gives no role to Israeli forces inside the Al-Aqsa compound. Yet Cleverly went ahead and cheerfully made his false statement.
A magnificent new book by Middle East historian Peter Shambrook places Cleverly’s casual deceit in its tragic historical context.
In Policy of Deceit, Britain and Palestine, 1914-1939, Shambrook shows that Cleverly’s cynically misleading account of events inside Al-Aqsa – as well as countless other false and unbalanced statements by British officials – are part of a pattern of British dishonesty over Palestine that dates back more than a century.
In an admirable display of clear thinking and meticulous scholarship, Shambrook shows that Britain has lied about its intentions concerning Palestine from the start.
Britain and the Ottomans
At the heart of his forensic investigation is the deal struck between the British empire and the sharif of Mecca after the outbreak of the First World War.
Britain was then the greatest power in the world but became fearful that she would lose overseas “possessions” after the Ottomans sided with Germany.
Matters turned desperate when, against most expectations, the Ottoman empire repulsed the British invasion of Turkey in 1915.
In the wake of this disaster, the British concluded that they had no choice but to strike a deal with Hussein Ibn Ali, sharif of Mecca, a member of the Hashemite family who could trace his lineage back 41 generations to the Prophet Mohammed – and was chief religious authority for Islam’s holy shrines.
The deal was simple: the sharif would lead an Arab revolt against the Ottomans. In return, Britain promised to grant an extensive Arab state after the Ottomans were defeated.
Sir Henry McMahon, high commissioner in Egypt, was given the task of entering into correspondence with the sharif.
In this eye-opening book, Shambrook tells the story of the sharif/McMahon correspondence. This means entering a minefield, because the British state has never accepted that Palestine was included in the area promised to the sharif.
The British position has been supported by serious scholars. Professor Isaiah Friedman, in Palestine: A Twice Promised Land? (published 23 years ago) buttressed the British government’s position. So does Elie Kedourie’s In the Anglo-Arab Labyrinth (1976).
Shambrook, through research in private papers and public records, refutes both Kedourie and Friedman’s findings, in the process dismantling the official account of events, concluding that the British government did indeed promise Palestine to the sharif.
What’s more, he shows that the British lied about this from the start. Among the long list of British decision-makers who made misleading comments are David Lloyd George, Arthur Balfour, George Curzon, Winston Churchill – and numerous Foreign Office officials.
Cynically Exploited
At the heart of the British deception was a wilful misinterpretation of the word “districts”, which was rendered by the Arab word wilayat in the letters sent by McMahon to the sharif.
A very similar word – vilayet – was used by Turkish administrators. It had a subtly different meaning. This difference was cynically exploited by the Foreign Office to exclude all of Palestine from the area assigned to the sharif.
How this happened is a case study in British perfidy. In 1920 the Foreign Office invented an Ottoman “Vilayet of Damascus”, the boundary of which stretched 300 miles south to the Gulf of Aqaba. No such province had ever existed.
Ottoman administrative districts were very precise geographically. The province included in the fictitious Vilayet invented by Britain was actually called – as any cursory look at an Ottoman map would have established – the Vilayet of Syria.
This essential fact was well-known, not just to the Ottomans but among all the great powers, and was clear as day on the detailed map used by British generals in the War Office back in London during their strategic planning to defeat the Ottomans.
Furthermore, Shambrook establishes that McMahon was not making an innocent mistake when he used the term wilayat in his correspondence. The Egyptian high commissioner knew perfectly what the word meant in Arabic, and what vilayet meant in Turkish. We can be certain of this because alongside wilayat he also used the term vilayet in the correct sense in other parts of the correspondence.
Had McMahon specified in his letter that he reserved the whole region to the west of the Vilayet of Syria, then indeed all of Palestine would have been excluded from the deal he struck with the sharif.
But he did not.
Broken Promise
Significantly, McMahon set out these facts in an explanatory letter despatched two days later to the Foreign Office. He told his masters back in London that he had excluded the northern coasts of Syria (modern-day Lebanon) from his offer to the sharif, which by no stretch of the imagination could include the Palestine region.
Shambrook goes on to prove that this was the accepted view of British military and diplomatic decision-makers right up to 1920. It was only then that the Foreign Office invented the Vilayet of Damascus. Even at this stage, the Foreign Office was clear there had been no ambiguity in the McMahon correspondence as far as Palestine was concerned.
But it needed to adjust to the new political reality of a Lloyd George government that was determined to implement a new pro-Zionist political machinery for Palestine.
Over the next 20 years the British government – on 24 separate occasions! – refused to publish the sharif/McMahon correspondence in the face of Arab and other demands.
The reason, as revealed in the records, is simple. Officials knew that it would be impossible to defend the broken promise to the sharif over Palestine in parliament.
This refusal, as Shambrook shows, soured Anglo-Arab relations throughout the inter-war period. Shambrook also shows that the only reason the British eventually published the correspondence in 1939 was to keep the Arab world close as another world war loomed.
No wonder that the great historian Arnold Toynbee, who was a Foreign Office official during the First World War, later wrote that
“Palestine was not excepted from the area in which the British government promised in 1915 to recognise and uphold Arab independence, and that the Balfour Declaration of 1917 was, therefore, incompatible with a previous commitment”.
Toynbee added that this deceit “is almost the worst crime of which a professional diplomatist is capable, for it compromises that country’s reputation for straight-dealing”.
Festering Wounds
Shambrook’s book is a major historical achievement. He has solved the mystery of the sharif/McMahon agreement. He has overturned the century-long British narrative that Palestine was excluded from the agreement with the sharif. He has also disposed of the notion, promoted by scholars from Albert Hourani to Martin Gilbert, that the truth about the agreement was mysterious or elusive.
More than that, he has shown that the sharif/McMahon correspondence may have contained greater legal weight than the famous promise to the global Jewish community two years later in the shape of the Balfour Declaration, which was a statement of intent and not (officially at any rate) an agreement between two parties.
We should remember today that the sharif fulfilled his part of the agreement, leading a revolt against Ottoman rule in the Hijaz.
The British did not.
The Palestinian people have been obliged to live with the consequences ever since.
Shambrook concludes his book with a call for Britain to acknowledge her broken promise.
“To heal the wounds of history anywhere requires acknowledgment of error and the willingness of all parties to be held to account for the policies they pursued,” he wrote.
“In the Middle East, where such wounds have festered for so long, a British government’s acknowledgment, however late in the day, of the truth concerning the pledge given by a predecessor to the sharif of Mecca in 1915 would surely be welcomed.”
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Peter Oborne won best commentary/blogging in both 2022 and 2017, and was also named freelancer of the year in 2016 at the Drum Online Media Awards for articles he wrote for Middle East Eye. He was also named as British Press Awards Columnist of the Year in 2013. He resigned as chief political columnist of the Daily Telegraph in 2015. His latest book is The Fate of Abraham: Why the West is Wrong about Islam, published in May by Simon & Schuster. His previous books include The Triumph of the Political Class, The Rise of Political Lying, Why the West is Wrong about Nuclear Iran and The Assault on Truth: Boris Johnson, Donald Trump and the Emergence of a New Moral Barbarism.
Featured image: Israel’s National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir visits Al-Aqsa, 3 January (Social Media)
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Recently articles have appeared on the front page of the New York Times that try to smear Code Pink, The People’s Forum and TriContinental as Chinese agents. The Times article was followed by a statement from Senator Marco Rubio calling for investigation of the people mentioned in the article.
Another article using similar McCarthyite tactics, by Lawrence S. Wittner, appeared in CounterPunch, Foreign Policy in Focus and The Daily Kos. Each are considered “progressive” publications. This attack uses the exact terminology of HUAC – the House on Un-American Activities Committee. Wittner’s attack is titled: “Spinning Illusions: The Anti-American Left and the Ukraine War”
The article targeted the United Antiwar Coalition – UNAC, International Action Center, Code Pink, The Peace in Ukraine Coalition. UNAC and IAC are called “campists” and “anti-American.”
These attacks are designed to silence critics of the U.S. at a time that we are seeing an escalating U.S. / NATO war in Ukraine and as the U.S. continues its aggression towards another nuclear power, China.
We must stop this new Cold War and this move back to McCarthyism. We must not be silent.
These attacks are designed to silence critics of the U.S. at a time that we are seeing an escalating U.S. / NATO war in Ukraine and as the U.S. continues its aggression towards another nuclear power, China.
We must stop this new Cold War and this move back to McCarthyism. We must not be silent.
Lawrence S. Wittner’s article, “Spinning Illusions: The Anti-American Left and the Ukraine War” is a throwback to McCarthyism, replacing analysis with name-calling. It attacks the United National Antiwar Coalition (UNAC), naming Sara Flounders, an organizer of UNAC and the International Action Center. Also attacked was Code Pink, accusing all of us as being “Campists.” This is an old term, a slur, against those who dare to take sides in the international class struggle.
The article’s title accuses those named as being “The Anti-American Left.” Sounds like Wittner is resurrecting HUAC – the House Un-American Activities Committee, that destroyed peoples’ lives in the 1950s and early 1960s simply for what they thought and said.
Other evidence that the U.S. government is headed toward McCarthyism are the indictments of leaders of the Black is Back Coalition for their opposition to NATO’s role in Ukraine −− charging them with “distributing Russian propaganda.”
The New York Times, a media conglomerate that gives propaganda support to each U.S. war −− remember Judith Miller’s hack job on Iraq building up to the 2003 invasion −− published a front-page article insinuating that Code Pink, The People’s Forum and Tricontinental are agents of China. Why? Because these groups campaign to say: “No to a New Cold War.” This article’s signers support this campaign – 100%. Senator Marco Rubio has called for the Department of Justice to investigate these antiwar activists. Wittner’s article comes across as another desperate effort to silence opposition as the U.S. and NATO march closer to war with Russia and China.
Wittner wrote, “Sara Flounders, a leader of the International Action Center and the United National Antiwar Coalition, two of the largest campist organizations in the United States, lovingly depicted a recent BRICS summit as devoted to ‘building an open world economy that . . . promotes cooperation.’ She contrasted this with a summit of the Group of Seven (Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Britain, and the United States)― ‘the countries responsible for the looting and colonization of Asia, Africa, and the Americas. They owe reparations for the genocide of Indigenous peoples, the enslavement of African people, and the devastating world wars of the 20th century.’ Naturally, ‘this summit of the most powerful and wealthiest imperialist powers was focused on how to intensify sanctions on Russia and how to continue the war in Ukraine.’ Behind them stood NATO, ‘the U.S. commanded military alliance that serves as a global enforcer of U.S. corporate power.’”
Flounders stands behind what she wrote. Completely.
Wittner uses polls, Congressional votes and U.N. votes −− all promoted by U.S. power −− to claim support for the current U.S./NATO war in Ukraine. Similar “evidence” was utilized to justify U.S. wars in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, Yugoslavia and Libya. Support evaporated as the wars dragged on. Already a CNN poll (Aug. 4) confirms the majority of the U.S. population is opposed to additional funding to Ukraine. But Biden is demanding another $24 billion for the Kiev government.
Wittner writes that we “focused criticism on the U.S. government, NATO and Ukraine.” Yes! We in UNAC do focus our work on stopping U.S. wars. For example, we explain that NATO is a U.S.-commanded, U.S.-equipped military alliance. NATO trainers, advisors and equipment have been deployed in Ukraine since a U.S.-supported coup in Kiev in 2014 overthrew the elected Ukrainian government.
Through NATO, Washington built up the small Ukrainian military to be bigger than nearly any of the NATO member countries. It is Washington that pushed NATO expansion to the borders of Russia, after the fall of the Soviet Union. For what purpose? According to numerous official U.S. statements and articles, it was to destroy Russia. But if we say this, we are falsely accused of being controlled by Russia or China.
What we are. What we need.
UNAC is an antiwar coalition based in the U.S, and it is the U.S. that has been responsible for most of the military aggressions since WWII. This is still the only country to use nuclear weapons and still threatens to use them.
Millions of lives were lost in past U.S. wars. Trillions of dollars, with bipartisan support, goes directly to U.S. military contractors, a steady stream of guaranteed profits. When those who want social services observe that the United States is the only industrialized country without free medical care, free university education, crumbling infrastructure and with millions of people who are unhoused and desperate, they should consider this waste of wealth. Shouldn’t we address these burning issues?
The world needs an antiwar movement willing to consistently speak out and mobilize opposition among poor and working people when it is most difficult and unpopular to resist the endless U.S. wars. In the U.S., we need to oppose the devastating impact of 800 U.S. military bases around the world and a military budget 40% of the world’s total. We need to address the illegal and inhuman U.S. sanctions on 40 countries, comprising a third of the world population.
But most important is that we need an antiwar movement that always links these endless U.S. wars to the war here at home. The racist repression, the world’s largest prison population and three police killings a day, every day, widening attacks on migrants, LGBTQ+ and others, are the outgrowth of U.S. wars.
We are determined to continue to oppose U.S. wars and demand that the hundreds of billions of dollars of the military budget that benefits corporate power in the U.S. be spent on people’s needs.
We are actively building, with many others, for nationally coordinated days of opposition to the U.S./NATO war in Ukraine – Sept 30 to Oct. 7 in more than 100 U.S. cities.
Contact UNACpeace.org for information on past and upcoming antiwar actions.
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Joe Lombardo – Coordinator of United National Antiwar Coalition – UNACpeace.org, Bethlehem Neighbors for Peace, [email protected]
Sara Flounders – Administrative Committee of UNAC, Co-Director of International Action Center, Contributing Editor of Workers World [email protected].
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***
Mere days before Yevgeny Prigozhin supposedly died, he posted a video announcing that the “Wagner” PMC (private military company) will be returning to “its roots” by refocusing on Africa. And while the address was supposed to mark this shift, in reality, the Russian PMC never stopped operating in Africa. What’s more, it never even stopped expanding the scope of its activities, as many African nations and their militaries are looking to intensify cooperation with “Wagner”. And although it may seem unclear who will replace Prigozhin (provided he’s really out of the picture), the actual leadership behind the PMC doesn’t even need to reveal itself.
It’s important to note that the video Prigozhin posted was just one of the few since the so-called “mutiny” in late June, serving as a farewell of sorts. It’s clear that even in the case Prigozhin actually died, the idea that “Wagner” will cease operations is pure nonsense. Its members are personally invested to serve their country and they’ve proven it time and again, regardless if they need to protect Russia’s interest in Ukraine, Africa, Latin America or elsewhere. All this is coordinated with Moscow’s extensive global intelligence network, in “Wagner’s” case, the GRU (Russian military intelligence) in particular, but also the SVR (dealing with external operations).
Apart from the long-running presence in the Central African Republic (CAR), “Wagner” is also operating in Libya, both Congo and DR Congo, Mozambique, Zimbabwe and likely Somalia. Western sources are claiming that the PMC is also present (at least covertly) in Burkina Faso, Mali, Guinea, Niger, Chad and Sudan, all of which have seen the military take power from corrupt civilian officials and governments. It’s important to note that “Wagner” is working specifically with security forces, so it’s safe to assume they’ve exerted at least some influence on the decision-making. The mainstream propaganda machine is going out of its way to present this as supposedly “bad”.
However, the peoples of these long-exploited African countries would beg to differ. The popularity of the Russian PMC is growing exponentially and by the day, as hundreds of millions of Africans are desperate to finally get rid of the (neo)colonial yoke that has been ravaging their continent for centuries. Finding common ground with Russia on this matter is only logical. The political West is trying to present the events unfolding in much (if not most) of Africa as some sort of Moscow’s “evil design”. And yet, Russia is simply providing tools for what African nations themselves want – actual freedom. The example of Niger illustrates this perfectly.
What’s more, Niger is not alone. Its neighbors, specifically Mali and Burkina Faso, have offered direct support, both military and humanitarian. Other African powers, such as Algeria, are also taking part in this effort. Even if they didn’t have much in common, the threat posed by the political West is more than enough to have these countries unite their efforts. Interestingly, wherever “Wagner” appeared, the suppression of various terrorist insurgencies and organizations was almost instantaneous. This is in stark contrast to NATO-backed “humanitarian interventions” that usually result in scores of dead civilians, destruction of infrastructure and overall instability.
This usually involves constant American drone strikes with unclear objectives that further cause nothing but the exacerbation of terrorism in African countries hosting Western military presence. With “Wagner’s” successful operations, these issues cease, leading to the restoration of normal economic activities, which further contributes to stability. The framework of the Russian PMC’s operations is also rather self-sustainable. Namely, in exchange for their services, many African governments simply lease their own enterprises to “Wagner”, which the PMC then uses to finance its activities. The mainstream propaganda machine is trying to present this as supposed “exploitation”.
However, the logic of many African countries is rather sound – it’s better to give “Wagner” a single mine (or even several) than have the political West perpetually exploit them while maintaining a semblance of “independence”. Corrupt officials are the lifeline of neocolonialism in Africa (and not just Africa, obviously), which perfectly explains why the militaries are bearers of this long overdue change. Transitioning to an actual democratic civilian government is a process that will take time, but these countries have to start from somewhere. Precisely their militaries provide the springboard for the process, while “Wagner” provides the necessary tools, training and direct combat support when needed.
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Drago Bosnic is an independent geopolitical and military analyst.
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***
Being a psychiatrist certainly makes me no specialist in areas of immunology, cardiology, surgery or infectious disease. But having earned a doctorate in medicine I was provided an education in reasoning within this extraordinarily complex discipline from first principles. Therefore as an inquisitive physician throughout the covid operation, I could not help but be baffled by the response of institutional authorities.
Forgive me for repeating myself, but a ‘first principles’ approach would never have led to lockdowns, distancing, masks or the nefarious Jab. It would never have led to mandates or apartheid. And it would never have led to the promulgation of mRNA agents and the relentless push not only to inject all of humanity but, alas, all of the animal kingdom upon which humanity relies for food.
I repeat myself because with the whiff of yet another novel ‘variant’ restrictive measures are again in the news in America, whose so-called president has promised a yet more effective jab.
Effective at what, one may ask? At creating even more disastrous adverse effects and excess death? At degrading one’s natural immune system so as to render one more susceptible to infections and cancers?
Leaving aside the fact that I never believed a vaccine of any kind was necessary to manage the covid threat, for reasons I have laid out in many essays already, the description of the emergency-use instrument was proof enough for me that it would be a disaster. Flooding a body with millions upon millions of coronavirus spike protein antigens manufactured by the body itself, thanks to the integration of messenger RNA into cell machinery, did not seem like a very good idea — unless one wished to wreak havoc.
Even a psychiatrist like me could see that the potential for spike protein/antibody complexes in tremendous numbers could create autoimmune catastrophe via myriad mechanisms, and even a psychiatrist would suspect that somehow those pesky things would cross the blood-brain barrier despite assurances to the contrary. In short, I figured that they would go everywhere.
And so they have.
The greater looming question, a question that continues to vex me to this day, is why or how so many medical specialists — some of whom have now come to have changed their tune — initially insisted that the Jab would be advisable for the elderly and medically compromised, if not for all. And indeed I wonder how some of these specialists, prominent in the current opposition to the Jab, came themselves to have received it.
You see, to argue from another set of first principles — principles of psychological rationality — it simply made no sense then, nor does it make sense now. Nor does it make any conceivable sense that the astonishingly predominant majority of physicians could have touted the Jab, forgotten about informed consent and early treatment, and cheered the imprisonment of healthy people against all hitherto formulated pandemic guidelines.
That we have been betrayed by our institutional medical authorities, trans-nationally and intra-nationally — and here I am thinking not only of the infamously corrupt World Health Organisation and Federation of State Medical Boards but of entities such as the Medical Council of New Zealand and the American Board of Internal Medicine and many others — is no longer a surprise. We can see them for what they are, for the despicable agenda they have imposed, and for the scientific and ethical foundation they, by their actions, have destroyed.
That we have been betrayed by our governments also is no surprise, given their dismissal and oppression of the very citizenry from whom these governments are supposed to derive their power.
The fight against these powers is not easy, as we know; and as we also know these powers delight in confusing and dividing any concerted opposition, which they accomplish in many ways, so as to weaken us.
During ‘conventional’ wartime it is commonplace for adversaries to send out spies, to infiltrate each other, to play the game of double and even triple agents, and to mislead each other in every possible way. In this war — in this war of the Globalist Few against the Populist Many — the massive communications agency masquerading as ‘news’ and ‘trusted media sources’ has hammered away without pause. It’s an irregular and really unfair war, and a thoroughly unique one given its scale, even though the techniques themselves of artful deception and purposeful division and the combination of soft and hard force have been around forever.
That our enemy — the enemy of real science and human autonomy, the proponent of censorship and the persecution of dissent — will seek to control us is obvious. However, the notion of ‘controlled opposition’ is in vogue and proceeds too trippingly from the tongue. Strictly speaking it is only one of the various means and devices used to disrupt our clamoring.
I’ve never liked this designation because it can become another of those irrefutable assertions whenever a disagreement arises and can be made to cover so many scenarios that it loses usefulness. Surely there can be spies and traitors and infiltrators and the like, and there always will. That’s life.
I worry more about ‘self-controlled opposition’ — about people who need no higher official to pull their strings but who have an uncanny knack for knowing how to curry favor and when to keep from going ‘too far’.
A realist is compelled to acknowledge that within any group of people, on whatever side, personalities will arise whose fealty is more to themselves than to the common mission. These are the folks with the kind of pull that can bend a movement astray.
Vaccines have become a kind of black hole, sucking so much of our discursive energy into endless debate. I have learned over these past three and a half years that no vaccine can be trusted — just as no medication can be. It is sound and rational to demand to know about the ingredients and adjuvants of every vaccine, just as it is sound and rational to what to know how fluoxetine is supposed to work and how it might go wrong. But we are left with the choice to partake and receive, or not. A choice that is non-negotiable, no matter what our governments may say while brandishing their scepter of fear.
Which brings me back to first principles. When the rebellious crew of fifty-six Americans signed the Declaration of Independence, they made preeminently clear the principles of human autonomy, rights that were inborn rather then conferred. They were, naturally, creatures of their time, molded by its social and cultural and racial constraints. The first principles, however, that they espoused and enshrined, held with them the key to overcoming these constraints. It took a while for their reasoning to be extended to its logical end to include all men and women, regardless of color — but it got there thanks to the enunciation of these foundational principles.
Same for psychoanalysis. Whatever one thinks or knows or thinks he or she knows about Freud and analysis and the mores of fin de siècle Vienna, the principle of free association as a portal to the unconscious mind transcends the societal and cultural milieu of the age in which it was discovered.
As we fight this fight of our lives the surest sign of corruption within our midst is whether our leaders adhere to or stray from principle.
So, going forward, if I start hearing about a better mRNA vaccine or an improved method of masking or a friendlier way to limit our freedom to assemble; if I start to read about how the harsh measures imposed and the rationale for a lightning-quick jab had some merit, all in the name of the greater good of course, I’ll know whom I’m up against.
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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
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Since Bangladesh’s upcoming elections are poised to become the US’ next “trigger event” for geostrategically reshaping South Asia, it’s imperative that India offsets these cascading scenarios or preemptively mitigates the damage to its interests if that isn’t possible. India has no problem with the US per se and wants to strengthen their strategic ties, but it isn’t going to stand aside as the liberal-globalists provoke a regional security crisis. If the situation worsens, then so too might US-Indian ties.
South Asian media recently reported that India has pushed back against US meddling in Bangladesh through diplomatic channels after Washington imposed a new visa policy ahead of next January’s elections that many regard as aimed at pressuring the ruling Awami League (AL) party. AL General Secretary Obaidul Quadersaid that India could have done this because it’s in its own interests, not due to any malicious or partisan intent like his Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) rivals had earlier implied.
The Hindu published a detailed analysis about the geostrategic stakes at play in Bangladesh’s upcoming elections that can be read here, which draws attention to the consequences for Indian security if the BNP replaces the AL. In brief, the US might advance its stalled military agenda there that could see its armed forces playing a greater role in the Bay of Bengal. Pakistani influence might also return and risk leading to Bangladesh once again hosting anti-Indian forces. Here are some additional analyses:
1) exacerbate preexisting ethno-political fault lines to show India that they can create serious difficulties for it in the neighborhood;
2) signal that these problems could be alleviated if India complies with their policy demands;
3) further pressure the ruling BJP and embolden the opposition ahead of next spring’s elections by worsening regional tensions if India doesn’t relent;
4) spark a post-election Bangladeshi crisis that spills over the border; and 5) wage a full-blown HybridWar.
Manipur’s unrest is unlikely to ever spiral completely out of control since that state is part of India so its troubles can therefore always be dealt with by Delhi however its policymakers deem fit, but Bangladesh is an independent country where Indian influence is naturally much more limited. The US’ visa policy suggests that Washington wants to embolden the BNP to protest more ahead of the polls so as to improve the odds that it ousts the AL, which is being targeted for ideological reasons just like the BJP:
Both ruling parties prioritize relations with Russia, correspondingly defied US pressure upon them to dump their shared decades-long strategic partner, and are expanding the use of national currencies. These three policies are unacceptable to America’s liberal-globalists, thus explaining why they decided to target those two on superficial “democratic” bases to disguise their ideological motives. India is concerned that this faction might soon destabilize Bangladesh, hence why it’s reportedly pushing back.
If the BNP feels emboldened by the US’ new visa policy to riot with the expectation that the AL might either be reluctant to respond or have its leading officials heavily sanctioned if they do, then it could set into motion a self-sustaining cycle of political violence that quickly spirals out of control. It goes without saying that unrest in this country of nearly 170 million could easily spill across the border into Northeast India and catalyze a chain reaction of crises due to this region’s complex preexisting fault lines.
As was earlier mentioned, India’s options for averting a regional security crisis or adequately addressing one if it proves impossible to prevent are much more limited in Bangladesh than in Manipur or elsewhere in its Northeast, but therein lies the reason why it’s reportedly pushing back against the US. This is the fullest extent to which India can realistically go right now in trying to get America’s pragmatic policymaking faction to rein in their subversive liberal-globalist rivals before it’s too late.
Under no circumstances will India capitulate to the pressure put upon it through this incipient Hybrid War campaign to ditch Russia and then go to war against China at the US’ behest, nor is Bangladesh likely to ditch Russia either before abandoning its de-dollarization plans with India and Russia. Accordingly, it’s therefore expected that the liberal-globalists will continue with their destabilization campaign aimed at punishing both, including through a full-blown Hybrid War in the region if need be.
Even in the unlikely event that the AL buckles under pressure, the US would probably still push for it to be replaced by the BNP since their return to power could be a quid pro quo for the Pakistani Establishment removing former Prime Minister Imran Khan in April 2022’s post-moderncoup. Islamabad is also suspected of arming Kiev despite denying it and officially abstaining from anti-Russian UNGA Resolutions, and it might have been promised a geopolitical reward for this by the US in Bangladesh.
After all, the US’ support of the semi-Islamist BNP and by association its indisputably Islamist allies from the Jamaat-e-Islami is a conspicuous change from its policy in recent years of no longer backing political Islamic parties, which de facto entered into effect after the US’ earlier falling out with Qatar and Turkiye. Though ties with those two have since been patched up, there hadn’t been any prior indications before its tacit support of the BNP a few months back that it was considering supporting such groups again.
Since there’s no evidence to suggest that this represents a larger change in policy, or rather a reversion to the previous one, it thus compellingly appears to be the case that this exception is part of a quid pro quo with Pakistan to return the BNP to power in exchange for all that its regime has done since last year. This also serves US interests too since it: 1) keeps Pakistan from flirting with another “Pivot to China”; 2) intensifies retributive pressure on India; and 3) thus optimizes the US’ regional divide-and-rule policy.
Since Bangladesh’s upcoming elections are poised to become the US’ next “trigger event” for geostrategically reshaping South Asia, it’s imperative that India offsets these cascading scenarios or preemptively mitigates the damage to its interests if that isn’t possible. India has no problem with the US per se and wants to strengthen their strategic ties, but it isn’t going to stand aside as the liberal-globalists provoke a regional security crisis. If the situation worsens, then so too might US-Indian ties.
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Andrew Korybko is an American Moscow-based political analyst specializing in the relationship between the US strategy in Afro-Eurasia, China’s One Belt One Road global vision of New Silk Road connectivity, and Hybrid Warfare. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.
He is a regular contributor to Global Research.
Featured image: President Joe Biden and Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India walk along the Colonnade of the White House, Thursday, June 22, 2023, to the Oval Office following the State Arrival Ceremony on the South Lawn. (Official White House Photo by Cameron Smith)
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“But yet mathematical certainty is after all, something insufferable. Twice two makes four seems to me simply a piece of insolence. Twice two makes four is a pert coxcomb who stands with arms akimbo barring your path and spitting. I admit that twice two makes four is an excellent thing, but if we are to give everything its due, twice two makes five is sometimes a very charming thing too.” – Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from the Underground
Everybody knows that 2 + 2 = 4 since 4 = 2 + 2. They know that excellent thing with certainty but generally fail to appreciate the charming nature of 2 + 2 = 5. Tautologies are usually preferred to choices that seem to contradict the “laws of nature.” Mind-forged manacles are popular because freedom from the laws of nature, while desired, is feared. It suggests that liberty is a fundamental existential truth.
Don’t get me wrong, I can count. I am drinking my second cup of coffee. Number one has disappeared down my throat, but the second coffee tastes fine. It is real and still exists. The first is just an abstraction now – number 1 – a simple vertical line on the page.
We are pissing our lives away on abstractions, forgetting that notation is a system of symbols that direct us to what they intend. The key is to grasp what is intended. The cognitive construction of the number system is a useful tool, but when it is pushed as the essential tool to grasp the meaning of life it has become a tool of control. That is the case today.
The Internet and digital media are the greatest propaganda tools ever invented. They have come to us on the wings of numbers. They are insidious in the extreme, as the etymology of “insidious” tells us – Latin, insidere, to sit on, occupy – for over the last few decades they have acted as an invading army occupying our minds with numbers in a cunning attempt to mathematize our lives for techno-scientific, financialized neo-liberal capitalist purposes. To prepare us for the Great Reset when people and machines will be indistinguishable, Artificial Intelligence (AI), 5-G ultra microwaves, and Agenda 2030 will be fully established, and when human life has become part of The Internet of Things.
That, at least, is what the builders of the new Crystal Palace intend. At the moment, their Digital Palace seems like a stone wall that is here to stay, but as Fyodor has said, people are strange creatures and will sometimes refuse to be reconciled to the impossibility of “stone walls if it disgusts you to be reconciled to it.” I am disgusted.
The construction of the Digital Palace is the long goal that has been underway for decades. To erase lived time and space, flesh and blood humans, and by transfixing people with numbers, to create an abstract and ephemeral reality through a constantly evoked sense of emergency. Living the machine/Internet life would never be acceptable if people had not been subjected to an onslaught of numbers/statistics/data that has accustomed them to think like computers. The great Jacques Ellul made it clear in his classic work, Propaganda, that propaganda is much more than the waving of a magic wand and lying, although it is that. It is a long process. He writes:
It is based on slow, constant impregnation. It creates convictions and compliance through imperceptible influences that are effective only by continuous repetition. It must create a complete environment for the individual, one from which he never emerges. And to prevent him from finding external points of reference, it protects him by censoring everything that might come in from the outside. The slow building up of reflexes and myths, of psychological environment and prejudices, is not a stimulus that disappears quickly. . . [my emphasis]
The mathematization of our thinking has been the essential first step in addicting people to the internet complex where mind-control is so effective. I say first step, yet it has been concomitantly accompanied by daily litanies of lies about world events through what Ray McGovern aptly terms the Military-Industrial-Congressional-Media-Academia-Think-Tank complex (MICIMATT). In his usually masterful way, the great journalist John Pilger has recently pointed out so many of those grotesque lies about U.S. wars of aggression around the world. Their numbers are legion, but not the kind of numbers you will find in the mainstream media. We are drowning in lies and numbers produced by a nihilistic elite in love with power, money, mayhem, and murder.
Twenty or so years ago a massive push was organized to give prime emphasis throughout the educational system to what is termed STEM subjects – science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. This has been implemented at the expense of subjects that have traditionally been associated with the liberal arts – philosophy, history, literature, art, music, etc., subjects that introduce students to thinking in the widest and deepest ways. It is no accident that instrumental logic has replaced deep thought for so many people and the poets have been replaced by intellectual pimps. The emphasis on STEM subjects has paralleled the rise of the Internet with its drumbeat of numbers, statistics, and data. Let me offer just a few examples, which may seem innocuous unless seen in their larger context.
The switch from analog to digital clocks and watches and their omnipresence.
Referring to the week as 24/7 and the writing of dates as numbers such as 08/30/2023.
The use-by-date numbers on all products, soon to be applied to commoditized people.
The use of the term 9/11 to refer to the events of September 11, 2001.
The listing by numbers of the best colleges, mascara, underwear, corkscrews, etc.
The hilarious dating of the earth’s age to the current 4.4 billion as if that meant anything to anyone.
The computer generated weather forecasts with their 10 and 30 day forecasts with precise numerical percentages for rain, snow, etc.
The analytics that dominate the world of sports, the posting of numbers for everything from the speed a ball leaves a baseball bat, a tennis ball a racket, and in golf the speed, height, curve, apex, carry, and launch angle when a ball is driven – all these numbers changing as a computer measures the ball in flight.
The “helpful” messages on restaurant receipts where the tips are recorded in descending order and exactitude from 18% to 20% to 25%.
Manipulated statistics for everything under the sun, such as Covid cases and deaths, Ukrainian military casualties, unemployment numbers, etc.
6 feet social distancing and 15 days to flatten the curve – real science
It is easy for one to add to this small list of the use of numbers. They are everywhere and are intended to be – in people’s heads, as the saying goes. They are intended to induce mass production of thought and behavior that is numb and that tranquilizes real thought and oppositional action. The more this is so, the more the schooling institutions will loudly announce how well they are teaching “critical thinking” skills. All our institutions have become complicit in 24/7 capitalism and the mind-control of deep-state forces.
“One of the foremost achievements of the so-called knowledge economy is the mass production of ignorance, stupidity, and hatefulness. . . . programmed unintelligibility and duplicity.”
The reality of everyday life used to revolve around our bodies in place and time. Now that time and place have been jumbled, it revolves for so many around the cell phones in which people live a weird disembodied existence. Sensory life is being annihilated. This is the era of virtual people, shadows of shadows, abstractions upon screens. Our connections to nature, to the seasons, to the sacred ways of our ancestors are being discarded for the machine life in the Digital Palace.
Dostoevsky’s underground man wasn’t playing a silly game when he suggested that 2 + 2 = 5.He was saying that free will is more important than reason which just satisfies the rational side of our nature.
Without it we are sub-human, machines in a vast prison of our own making.
His words are more important today than when he wrote them in 1864, the time of The Crystal Palace with its promotion of the Industrial Revolution’s technological marvels. Today’s Digital Palace marks a far greater threat to our humanity, and so his words are worth attending to:
. . . man everywhere and at all times, whoever he may be, has preferred to act as he chose and not in the least as his reason and advantage dictated. And one may choose what is contrary to one’s interests, and sometimes one positively ought (that is my idea). One’s own free unfettered choice, one’s own caprice, however wild it may be, one’s own fancy worked up at times to frenzy – that is that ‘most advantageous advantage” which we have overlooked, which comes under no classification and against which all systems and theories are continually being shattered to atoms. And how do these wiseacres know that man wants a normal, virtuous choice? What man wants is simply independentchoice, whatever that independence may cost and wherever it may lead. And choice, of course, the devil only knows what choice.
And if you are apt to raise a finger in warning about such wild advice about existential freedom, let Dostoevsky ask you this rhetorical question about the reasonable and logical ones:
“Have you noticed that it is the most civilized gentlemen who have been the subtlest slaughterers, to whom the Attilas and Stenka Razins could not hold a candle, and if they are not so conspicuous as the Attilas and Stenka Razins it is because they are so often met with, are so ordinary and have become so familiar to us.”
As familiar as numbers.
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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).
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The enlargement of the five member BRICS bloc amounts to a challenge to US hegemony, especially in this region. The grouping of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa last week accepted the applications of Iran, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the Emirates as well as of Ethiopia from Africa and Argentina from South America. The entry on January 1, 2004, of the new members, more than doubling the bloc, should change the character of BRICS and provide impetus for BRICS Plus efforts to provide multi-polarity in international affairs.
Sanusha Naidu, of the South African Institute for Global Dialogue told Al Jazeera, “This [development] has geo-economic, geostrategic and geopolitical implications. These additions will compel some BRICS governments to pay more attention to their Middle East policies, and for China and India to strengthen the existing policies.
BRICS was formed in 2009 by Brazil, Russia, India and China and admitted South Africa in 2010. On its own, BRICS has been seen as the main rival of the G-7 bloc of advanced industrial nations. Pre-enlargement, BRICS covered 26.7 per cent of the world’s surface while its members were home to 41.5 per cent of the planet’s population. BRICS launched a development bank with $50 billion in a bid to provide an alternative to the US-dominated World Bank and proposed a payment system to reduce the financial transaction monopoly of the Western powers. When in place, BRICS Pay could promote trade between sanctioned (Russia and China and now Iran) and unsanctioned members. BRICS has consistently opposed the dominance of the US dollar in world trade and encouraged payment in local currencies. BRICS has also rejected the use of unilateral sanctions which isolate targeted countries, shrink their economies and discourage potential trading partners.
From this region, Bahrain, Palestine, Kuwait and Algeria had also applied to join in this enlargement round while Sudan, Syria, Tunisia and Turkey have expressed interest in membership.
Why are countries in region so eager to associate with BRICS? The bloc can grant them some freedom from US and Western meddling. West Asia’s strategic geographic importance has made the region an area of East-West conflict for millennia while its location and energy resources have intensified Western interference and intervention since the early 20th century.
Having only one oil and gas exporter, Russia, BRICS Plus has added three: Iran, Saudi Arabia and the Emirates which will give the bloc greater leverage on the volume and pricing of energy exports. Some commentators have quipped that the new name for the grouping should be “BRICS Plus OPEC” as the bloc has recruited heavy weights in Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries.
China’s mediation of the March reconciliation agreement between Saudi Arabia and Iran has reduced regional tensions and regional rivalries and made it possible for them to cooperate within BRICS Plus. Both longstanding US allies, Saudi Arabia and the Emirates have recently sought to balance their options and adopt policies which are in their national interests rather than follow the US diktat.
Egypt, another erstwhile US ally, Saudi Arabia and the Emirates have seen the US pivot East to challenge China while repositioning and reducing its commitments in the region. Meanwhile, Riyadh and Abu Dhabi are assured by China and Russia that they do not demand fealty as the price of cooperation and collaboration while the US says, “My way or the highway.”
New recruits Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the Emirates have demonstrated independence by refusing to take sides and sanction Russia over the Russo-Ukraine war, which they agree was precipitated by NATO’s post-Soviet eastward expansion which prompted Russia to warn repeatedly over 20 years that Ukraine was a “red line”.
Iran sees membership in BRICS Plus as a means to ease the iron grip of US sanctions which have contributed considerably, along with mismanagement and corruption, to that country’s economic meltdown. Having reestablished relations with the Arabs after reconciling with Riyadh, Tehran also regards BRICS Plus as an opportunity to boost ties with India, Russia, China, Africa via Ethiopia (which hosts the African Union) and South America via Argentina.
Naidu said that “having Iran in the BRICS sends a massive powerful message to the G-7, to the Global North, to Washington” which have ostracised and sanctioned Iran for four decades. By granting Iran membership, BRICS has sent a message to the Global North: The message says, “Your problems are not our problems.” This also goes for the North’s problems with Russia and China, BRICS’s prime movers.
BRICS Plus cannot replace non-alignment which emerged after World War II during the Cold War when Soviet Russia and China opposed the West and Western colonised countries were striving for independence. Highly respected independence leaders were the founding fathers of non-alignment: Jawaharlal Nehru, Gamal Abdel Nasser, Kwame Nkrumah and Tito. This was an era of great men and great expectations. Expectations which have not been realised. This region has been beset by war while Africa has been laid low by poor governance and conflict. Non-alignment waned and failed.
BRICS and BRICS Plus have to cope with an era of toil and trouble caused by post-colonial meddling and bullying, double standards, multiple conflicts, mismanagement, corruption, collapsed economies, millions of refugees and migrants, and climate change. BRICS Plus has to confront low expectations in order to make progress for the half of the world’s people dwelling in BRICS Plus lands.
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This August 30, the United States should reflect on its own violence, so there can finally be some semblance of accountability—including acknowledging wrongdoing, repairing the harm to the victims, and putting mechanisms in place that prevent this violence from recurring.
Despite the fact that the United States has routinely and openly violated the human rights of its own citizens as well as communities across the globe, the government rarely has any qualms about condemning the violations of other countries. These condemnations, almost always hypocritical, however, often do more to shine light on its own abuses and the lack of accountability.
Like clockwork each year, the United States issues statements commemorating various human rights days highlighting particular abuses. Last year, for example, Secretary of State Antony Blinkenreleased a statement through the State Department on the occasion of the International Day of the Victims of Enforced Disappearances. The statement reads in part that “the United States renews its commitment to addressing enforced disappearance and calls on governments around the world to put an end to this practice, hold those responsible to account, reveal the whereabouts or fate of loved ones who have been disappeared, and respect the human rights and fundamental freedoms of all persons.”
This year, the U.S. government will almost certainly release yet another statement to commemorate the International Day of the Victims of Enforced Disappearances on August 30, once again erasing its own crimes. Although disappearances have less typically been associated with the United States, the U.S. has long deployed this abuse in the War on Terror—often disguising the practice through euphemisms and denials. After two decades plus of the War on Terror, however, it is imperative to shed light on the unresolved issue of Guantánamo prisoners’ disappearances and the CIA’s disturbing rendition, detention, and interrogation program that operated in the earlier days of the war.
Obscured Realities: Rendition and Disappearances
In the early days of the War on Terror, the CIA was given the licence to render and detain people in countries across the globe who were willing to host black sites. The program operated from 2002-2009, with at least 119 individuals enduring the violence of the CIA. Some never returned home; others were sent to Guantánamo Bay. Although the U.S. government has continued to use the term “render” as in render to justice, in practice, many of those subjected to this violence have effectively disappeared—leaving their families in an abyss of uncertainty, all while the U.S. government refuses to reckon with this legacy.
On the International Day of the Victims of Enforced Disappearances, the United States should reflect on its own violence, so there can finally be some semblance of accountability—including acknowledging wrongdoing, repairing the harm to the victims, and putting mechanisms in place that prevent this violence from recurring.
Activists holding signs with the names of 35 men still imprisoned at the U.S. military prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, protest outside the White House in Washington, D.C. on January 11, 2023, the 21st anniversary of the notorious facility. (Photo: Alex Wong/Getty Images)
Enforced disappearances are a particularly brutal form of state violence. Not only do the victims fear never being found, the families of the victims live in perpetual uncertainty with constant denials of information from the government about their loved ones’ fates. The pain of not knowing whether a family member is alive or deceased, free or imprisoned, makes closure impossible.
Disappearing War on Terror Prisoners
The post-9/11 and the War on Terror waged by the United States transformed many parts of the world into war zones, cemeteries, and prisons. Lives were forever lost or shrouded in obscurity, while entire families were erased. Gul Rahman, an Afghan citizen, is just one name among the countless individuals whose fate became tragically entwined with the secret operations of the Central Intelligence Agency, vanishing into CIA black sites, never to emerge alive. Among the torture Rahman endured was being handcuffed to the ground, put in a diaper, and placed in a cell with freezing temperatures—which lead to his untimely death by hypothermia. Rahman’s family was never formally informed of his death, and, despite their fighting to have his body returned for a proper burial, the United States has denied their request.
Detention by the CIA was not the only way War on Terror prisoners have been effectively disappeared. When the first Muslim men were taken to Guantánamo in January 2002, only the nationalities of prisoners were disclosed. Not only because the U.S. didn’t actually know the identities of many of the men, but because they were so dehumanized, that the U.S. government didn’t prioritize sharing the names with the International Committee of the Red Cross or any other agency or institution—especially any that would hold them accountable. It wasn’t until 2004 that the names of the men detained were finally revealed—although many with incomplete names documented, leaving their families in prolonged darkness about their whereabouts. Names were only disclosed by monitoring websites like Alasra and the Britain-based CagePrisoners.
Guantánamo became synonymous with secrecy, human rights abuses, and the plight of countless detainees. Many were held there for years, unaccounted for, like ghosts in the system. Families were left in a perpetual state of uncertainty, not knowing whether their loved ones were dead or alive. In addition, nine prisoners died while at Guantánamo—a harrowing and violent conclusion to their detention—especially since the deaths occurred years after many of the men last saw their families.
As a Guantánamo survivor myself, I spent around six agonizing years at Guantánamo before my family knew anything about my whereabouts. Another family came to know about their son in 2016; a lawyer contacted the family and let them know.
Continuing Injustice: Recent Cases
The injustices extended beyond the walls of Guantánamo. In many cases, after being transferred, detainees vanished for months, disappearing into solitary confinement in their home countries in Saudi Arabia or in third-party nations like the United Arab Emirates. Constituting a violent ebb and flow of being lost and found, War on Terror prisoners have been forced to endure the possibility of being disappeared again and again.
Ghassan al-Sharbi’s case represents a more recent chapter in this ongoing tragedy. Forcibly repatriated to Saudi Arabia, he vanished into obscurity. Despite attempts to locate him, his whereabouts remain unknown. The lack of response from both the Saudi government and the State Department exemplifies the prevailing indifference to the plight of former detainees.
Another former prisoner, Asim al-khalaqi, was released to Kazakhstan in 2015, but died tragically four months later due to mistreatment and medical negligence. The Kazakh government failed to inform Asim’s family of his death, denying them the chance to retrieve his body or hold a proper burial—thus constituting a symbolic disappearance. He was buried in an unknown cemetery and an unknown grave.
In solidarity with victims and their families, we must reaffirm our collective determination to create a world where no one vanishes, justice prevails, and human dignity is inviolable.
The stories of Gul Rahman, Asim al-khalaqi, Ghassan al-Sharbi, and countless others stand as painful reminders of the enduring impact of CIA rendition, Guantánamo Bay, and the “War on Terror.” While the black sites and detention camps have garnered international criticism, their legacy continues to cast a long shadow over the lives of those affected. Families have been denied closure, and the cycle of suffering perpetuates even after release. The world must remember these names, demand accountability, and work toward a future where such gross violations of human rights are truly left in the past. Until then, the War on Terror will endure as a haunting testament to the cost of sacrificing justice for security.
On this international day, let us demand an end to enforced disappearances and the practices that perpetuate them. Let us hold nations accountable for their actions and demand transparency. In solidarity with victims and their families, we must reaffirm our collective determination to create a world where no one vanishes, justice prevails, and human dignity is inviolable. By doing so, we honor the disappeared, restore justice, and ensure that no one is condemned to obscurity or denied their humanity.
[From Common Dreams: Our work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.]
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Mansoor Adayfi, a Yemen national formerly imprisoned–without charge or trial–at the U.S. offshore prison in Guantanamo Bay, currently lives in Serbia.
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Apparently, the Ukrainian government wants to disguise the dictatorial aspect of the regime by pretending to be a democracy. According to information reported by Western media, Kiev plans to organize elections next year. The news is surprising, as the country has been under martial law since February 2022, which would legitimize the postponement of the elections. However, the aim is believed to be to increase Zelensky’s popularity and improve his public image.
The information was published by the Spanish newspaper El Pais on August 28th. Anonymous sources familiar with the matter were consulted by journalists and said that elections will strengthen Zelensky, thus motivating a circumvention of the norms imposed by martial law.
Until recently, Zelensky ruled out elections, but now there are signs that he and his team are changing the strategy. In an interview with local TV a few days ago, Zelensky said: “The logic is that if you are protecting democracy, you must also protect it during the war. And one way to protect it is elections”. In the same vein, Ruslan Stefanchuk, the head of the Ukrainian parliament, stated in July that updates to Ukrainian martial law “would take place soon” as “democracy cannot stop”. Some analysts believe he was commenting on the possibility of calling elections even in times of war.
There are some additional reasons why Kiev is planning these measures. First, it is necessary to remember that the Ukrainian neo-Nazi regime is not sovereign, and all its decisions are taken under the direct influence of foreign agents. And recently there has been pressure from some Americans for Ukraine to implement “more democratic” policies to justify Western support. American politicians have already expressed, including in a personal meeting with Zelensky, their desire to see elections in Ukraine next year, which explains Ukraine’s readiness to revise its martial law.
“After a meeting with Zelenskiy in Kyiv on Wednesday, two senators from the Democratic Party, Elizabeth Warren and Richard Blumenthal, as well as Republican Lindsey Graham, stressed that they considered it necessary for Ukrainian democracy to hold elections despite the country being at war. The Democratic position has a lot to do with the upcoming presidential election in the United States, which will be held in November 2024. The Republican Party has numerous prominent members (including former President Donald Trump) who have criticized military support for Kyiv, and who, since last spring, have used the argument that Ukraine is not so different from Russia, since the country has suspended democracy under the pretext of war”, El Pais’ article reads.
However, some sources also believe that the main reason for Kiev to take this action is a matter of domestic politics. Zelensky’s popularity has fallen recently, not just because of the conflict, but also because the Ukrainian president has failed to fulfill his main promise during the previous election campaign: to fight corruption. So, instead of thinking about concrete solutions to the corruption problem, Zelensky apparently plans to regain his popularity through new elections. The Ukrainian political scenario does not allow for the existence of a solid opposition coalition, given that many parties were banned and opposing politicians arrested, so it could be “easy” for Zelensky to achieve victory.
In this regard, Mark Savchuk, a political commentator and adviser to the Ukrainian National Anti-Corruption Office, told journalists:
“Zelenskiy is a great public relations man, especially with the international community, and we are lucky for that, but if there is now talk of going to the polls it is because of Ukrainian internal issues that he does not want to be aired abroad (…) Only in the judiciary have there been improvements, but neither Zelenskiy nor his team are prepared [to fight corruption]. Ordinary Ukrainians see that this is still a corrupt country, they experience it on a daily basis and there are always new stories about it in the news (…) Their team is inept and corrupt. We have a serious corruption problem and they believe that their popularity will slip, so they want to take advantage of their charisma now electorally.”
However, it will not be so easy to organize elections in the midst of the conflict. There are many difficulties to be faced by Ukrainian citizens in an election scenario. In all regions affected by the hostilities it will be virtually impossible for citizens to vote, as the possibility of moving around is severely limited due to the intensity of the fighting. This will restrict the voting area to only some western regions of Ukraine, where the population is more influenced by pro-NATO media and tends to support the regime – despite growing criticism of Zelensky’s administrative ability.
In practice, there are two risks for Zelensky with the plan to hold a new election. One of them is Zelensky losing the dispute. Although the Ukrainian opposition has been practically neutralized by the regime’s dictatorial policies, it has become increasingly clear that Western sponsors plan to replace Zelensky, which makes it possible for Washington to create the necessary conditions for another candidate to win. The other risk is that, even if he wins, Zelensky remains unpopular, with his victory looking like a mere bureaucratic procedure, given the absence of relevant opponents. In this scenario, the plan to make Ukraine look “more democratic” would fail.
However, in either case, Ukraine’s real problem will not be solved: the country will continue to work as a proxy for the US and fight an unwinnable war against a much stronger enemy, causing unnecessary suffering for the Ukrainian population.
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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: Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky delivers an address in Kiev, Ukraine, April 15, 2022. (Credit: Ukrainian Presidency)
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Einleitung
Während ich an einem neuen Artikel arbeitete, wurde ich durch eine serbische Fernsehsendung auf das EU-Gesetz über digitale Dienste (GdD) aufmerksam. Da diese Verordnung eine Gefahr für die Meinungsfreiheit der Bürger und die Rechtsstaatlichkeit sein könnte, möchte ich die Information gerne weitergeben, die genaue Auswertung und Beurteilung jedoch juristischen Experten überlassen.
Um den Zusammenhang zwischen meinem begonnenen Artikel und der Verordnung der EU zu verstehen, will ich das Thema und die Einleitung des Artikels kurz wiedergeben:
Wir wissen, dass wir am Rande des Vulkans leben, wiegen uns aber in der Hoffnung, dass es zu keinem Ausbruch kommen werde.
Immer wieder wird beklagt, dass nur wenige Menschen sich unabhängige Gedanken machen über die Zukunft der Welt. Die beruhigende Selbsttäuschung scheint angenehmer zu sein als der Gedanke an die Gefahr. Die Mehrheit der Menschen würde nicht aufwachen, weiterhin den Staatsmedien vertrauen und vor den anstehenden Problemen ausweichen. Doch die Realität will erkannt und verstanden sein: wer zu ihr in Widerspruch gerät, wird entweder geschädigt oder vernichtet.
Tatsache ist, dass wir auch im Zeitalter der Aufklärung und Vernunft noch im alten konservativen Denken des Mittelalters befangen sind, wo man geglaubt hat, dass sich alles oben im Himmel abspielt. Deshalb meinten die Menschen, sich nicht selbst erforschen zu können, nicht ihre seelische Natur, ihre unbewussten Gefühlsregungen und ihre Reaktionsweisen. Aus diesem Grund haben sie die Psychologie nicht erfasst. Sie wollen weiterhin brave Staatsbürger bleiben, die die Anordnungen der Obrigkeit nicht in Frage stellen, sondern bedingungslos gehorchen und nicht „aus der Reihe tanzen“. Einiges, was man als älterer Bürger seit dem Zweiten Weltkrieg erlebt hat, scheint sich zu wiederholen.
Da es sich beim althergebrachten konservativen Denken um einen unbewussten Prozess handelt, können wir diese Menschen beziehungsweise uns alle nicht verurteilen. Wir sollten mutig an unser Gefühlsleben herantreten und uns wie auch unsere Mitmenschen kennen lernen, um aufzuwachen, aktiv zu werden und gegen die bestehenden unmenschlichen Bedingungen der Gesellschaft zu revoltieren (Albert Camus).
Gesetz über digitale Dienste (GdD)
Das Gesetz über digitale Dienste heißt auf Englisch „Digitale Services Act (DSA)“ und auf Französisch „Règlement sur les Services Numériques (RSN). Es soll unter anderem die Haftungs- und Sicherheitsvorschriften für digitale Plattformen, Dienste und Produkte schaffen und den digitalen Binnenmarkt vollenden.
Da ich die Beurteilung des europäischen Regelwerks juristischen Experten überlassen möchte, hier nur einige Anmerkungen gemäß Wikipedia (1):
„Die Verordnung aktualisiert den 2000 beschlossenen rechtlichen Rahmen für Online-Plattformen der Europäischen Union und passt ihn an die Gegebenheiten des Plattformkapitalismus an. Dabei sollen die Grundsätze des freien Internets jedoch berücksichtigt werden. Die Verordnung wurde am 27. Oktober 2022 im Amtsblatt der Europäischen Union bekannt gemacht. Kernvorschiften werden bereits ab dem 16. November 2022 anwendbar sein, der überwiegende Teil wird am 17. Februar 2024 anwendbar sein. (…).
Die EU-Kommission verfolgt mit dem Vorschlag nach eigenen Angaben primär drei Ziele:
Besserer Schutz der Verbraucher und ihrer Grundrechte im Internet.
Schaffung eines leistungsfähigen bzw. klaren Transparenz- und Rechenschaftsrahmens für Online-Plattformen.
Förderung von Innovation, Wachstum und Wettbewerbsfähigkeit im Binnenmarkt. (…).
Sehr große Online-Plattformen werden strengere Verpflichtungen erfüllen müssen, die in einem angemessenen Verhältnis zu den erheblichen gesellschaftlichen Risiken stehen, die von ihnen ausgehen, wenn sie illegale und „schädliche“ (‚harmful content‘) Inhalte, einschließlich Desinformationen, verbreiten. (…).
Die Bürgerrechtsbewegung European Digital Rights meldete in einer Pressemitteilung substanzielle Bedenken an und beurteilte den Vorschlag als Gefahr für die Meinungsfreiheit und Rechtsstaatlichkeit.“
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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.
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Introduction
While I was working on a new article, I became aware of the EU Digital Services Act (DSA) through a Serbian television programme. Since this regulation could be a threat to citizens’ freedom of expression and the rule of law, I would like to pass on the information, but leave the exact evaluation and assessment to legal experts.
In order to understand the connection between the article I have started and the EU regulation, I will briefly recapitulate the topic and the introduction of the article:
We know that we live on the edge of the volcano, but we lull ourselves into the hope that it will not erupt.
Time and again, people complain that few people give independent thought to the future of the world. The comforting self-delusion seems more pleasant than the thought of danger. The majority of people would not wake up, continue to trust the state media and evade the problems at hand. But reality wants to be recognised and understood: anyone who contradicts it will either be harmed or destroyed.
The fact is that even in the age of enlightenment and reason, we are still caught up in the old conservative thinking of the Middle Ages, where people believed that everything happened up in heaven. That is why people thought they could not explore themselves, not their psychic nature, their unconscious emotions and their ways of reacting. For this reason they have not grasped psychology. They want to remain good citizens who do not question the orders of the authorities, but obey unconditionally and do not “step out of line”. Some of the things that older citizens have experienced since the Second World War seem to be repeating themselves.
Since traditional conservative thinking is an unconscious process, we cannot condemn these people or any of us. We should courageously approach our emotional life and get to know ourselves as well as our fellow human beings in order to wake up, become active and revolt against the existing inhuman conditions of society (Albert Camus).
Digital Services Act (DSA)
The Digital Services Act (DSA) is called in French “Règlement sur les Services Numériques (RSN)”. Among other things, it aims to create liability and security rules for digital platforms, services and products and to complete the digital single market.
Since I would like to leave the assessment of the European regulatory framework to legal experts, here are just a few comments according to Wikipedia (1):
“The regulation updates the legal framework for online platforms of the European Union adopted in 2000 and adapts it to the realities of platform capitalism. However, the principles of the free internet are to be taken into account. The regulation was published in the Official Journal of the European Union on 27 October 2022. Core provisions will already be applicable from 16 November 2022, the majority will be applicable on 17 February 2024. (…).
According to the EU Commission, the proposal primarily pursues three goals:
Better protection of consumers and their fundamental rights on the internet
Creation of an efficient and clear transparency and accountability framework for online platforms.
Promoting innovation, growth and competitiveness in the internal market. (…).
Very large online platforms will have to comply with stricter obligations proportionate to the significant societal risks they pose when disseminating illegal and ‘harmful content’, including disinformation. (…).
The civil rights movement European Digital Rights raised substantial concerns in a press release, judging the proposal a threat to freedom of expression and the rule of law.”
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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.
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Healthy COVID-19 mRNA vaccinated children are dying of infections they should not be dying from: influenza, strep A, meningitis, sepsis. Not just in Australia either.
All highly COVID-19 vaccinated countries. Here are some examples:
July 6, 2023 – Noosa, Australia – 11 year old Emma Schwab died suddenly from “influenza B” one day after being released from the hospital. “Cases surge in Australia.”
Feb. 23, 2023 – IL – 7 year old Rose Tylor Kunkes died suddenly from Strep Throat.
Feb. 17, 2023 – UK – 6 year old Milly-Rose Stirrup suddenly fell ill on Feb. 14 with pain in her stomach and her heart. Within a few days she was dead. Doctors suspect sepsis.
Dec. 20, 2022 – Utah – 17 year old student in a boarding school for troubled teens, Taylor Goodridge, died of peritonitis and sepsis which caused her organs to fail. She started having symptoms on Dec. 9, back pain, difficulty breathing, vomiting.
Dec. 13, 2022 – 18 year old Maria Alexandra Gaynor was a healthy student at Dalhousie University, which mandated COVID-19 mRNA vaccines on all students. She died suddenly of Meningitis.
Nov. 29, 2022 – 9 year old West Kelowna, British Columbia girl Ayla Loseth, died from sepsis from Strep A. “At least 3 kids die from Strep A as infections on the rise among children in Canada”.
Ayla Grace Loseth was taken to hospital by her parents Chrissy and Brad on Nov. 26, 2022 with dehydration, nausea and fever. They were told it was the flu but, three days later, she died from sepsis from Strep A. (Click here)
Sep. 10, 2022 – Italy – 18 year old Lorenzo Squillace, who was a lifeguard from San Benedetto del Tronto, died suddenly on Sep. 10, 2022 after feeling ill at home. He died of sepsis.
Aug. 23, 2022 – Naples, Italy – 19 year old Greek female navy cadet Talia who was on board Prometheus ship died 48hr after feeling unwell on Aug. 23, 2022. She had hemorrhagic rash, then sepsis.
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Australian researchers publish study proving COVID-19 mRNA vaccines damage the immune systems of children!
Published on Aug. 25, 2023, the paper is called: “BNT162b2 COVID-19 vaccination in children alters cytokine responses to heterologous pathogens and Toll-like receptor agonists”
Study looked at 29 kids ages 5-11 and found that:
“BNT162b2 vaccination is associated with a decrease in bacterial and viral stimulant-induced cytokine responses one month after vaccination”
“BNT162b2 vaccination is associated with a sustained decrease in cytokine responses to viral, but not bacterial, stimulants six months after vaccination”
“These data show that a SARS-CoV-2 mRNA-based vaccine alters heterologous immunity in children and that these effects can persist up to six months after vaccination”
Translated, this means that Pfizer COVID-19 mRNA vaccine suppresses the immune systems of children ages 5-11 for at least 6 months, leaving them susceptible to viral and bacterial infections
It only took researchers 1.5 years to catch up to my warnings against mRNA vaccinating children ages 5-11.
On March 5, 2022 at 12:51pm, I posted a Tweet: “Pfizer Covid vaccine was just 12% effective against Omicron in kids 5 to 11, study finds – CNBC. The results are actually far, far worse. By week 6, there is negative efficacy of -41%. This mRNA product should be pulled off the market. Now.”
By 5:11pm my Twitter account was locked, suspended and stayed suspended for 11 months.
Twitter would go on to suspend and terminate every doctor and scientist who raised concerns about safety of mRNA vaccines in children.
COVID-19 mRNA vaccines were rolled out in Canadian and US children 5-11 years old from Dec. 2021 to May 2022.
What happened 6 months later? Nov-Dec 2022: USA had worst flu season in 2 decades!
Canada also had worst flu season in years: “10 kids dead amid pediatric flu surge”. “Pediatric hospitalizations were 20x higher than usual for the time of year.”
My Take…
An Australian team has just proven that the Pfizer COVID-19 mRNA vaccine suppresses or damages the immune systems of children ages 5-11 for at least 6 months, leaving them susceptible to viral and bacterial infections.
Millions of children took the Pfizer mRNA jab because their parents trusted the corrupt officials who approved those jabs without any safety studies!
Once the jabs were rolled out in children ages 5-11 in the first quarter of 2022, the following happened approximately 6 months later:
US had worst flu season in 2 decades in late 2022 (source)
Canada was in a “flu epidemic” in late 2022, with pediatric hospitalizations up 2000%
Australia had 360% increase in strep A infections in 2022 (source)
Australia is having an “intense flu season” in June-Oct 2023 where children are “being hit the hardest” (source1) (source2)
UK had “worst flu season in a decade” in late 2022 (source)
New Zealand is in for another large and early flu season (source)
I believe hundreds of children have died from immune system suppression caused by taking the Pfizer COVID-19 mRNA vaccine, and the record flu seasons seen in US, Canada, Australia and UK in 2022 and 2023 are the direct result of immune damage caused by Pfizer’s COVID-19 mRNA vaccine.
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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
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“Why don’t you just report it to the town council, with a photo of that cluttered yard,” I suggested to a neighbor complaining of piles of junk abandoned on an incomplete construction site beside her house.
“Oh, I wouldn’t do that”, she swiftly counters; “They might become angry.”
I’ve encountered this kind of fear repeatedly – fear of any personal confrontation.
Neighbors prefer to put up with excessive noise, disrespect and other aggravations rather than approach a neighbor, or report their concern to the municipality. It speaks to lack of confidence between neighbors and to misgivings about elected officials.
I wonder if, like me, you detect a wariness and unease – fear, actually– not known here 15, 25, 50 years ago.
We all know our region is undergoing a huge amount of change. Transformation, really. Yet, The Catskills has never been a static, forgotten part of New York. Here’s not unlike many semi-rural areas experiencing surges and slumps.
People are more apprehensive than in the past, it seems. Our schools, hospitals and clinics need more guards, as if businesses and public places are not already engulfed by cameras. If you’re nervous about your home the answer comes back: “Install cameras; activate it while away and you can get alerts anywhere, through your phone.” Is this really a solution? We end up anxiously checking our phones for warnings.
Certainly, in my village, the number of surveillance cameras through the woods and along country roads is unprecedented. Earlier we had only tree-mounted cameras in nearby woods to view baby bears in season, or check the clattering in our refuse bins for bothersome raccoons and porcupines. Now, innocent walkers, perhaps, new homeowners, are caught unaware, like a one couple on a stroll in the woods above their property. They were filmed! And the property owner, far away in another state, filed a trespassing suit that cost the couple several hundred dollars, another villager reports. That can certainly curb one’s enthusiasm for hiking on our abundant green hills.
One homeowner, who visits her riverside house once a year, if that often, has cameras all around her place—to ensure that her teenage grandchildren don’t use the house without her supervision. Her own grandchildren! At a hardly-used residence! When I pass the place during my evening walk, a spotlight flashes on me, alerting her on her phone, somewhere. I wave cynically at the light, mumbling something unrepeatable.
‘No Trespassing’ signs now mark the landscape in all directions. I wonder, should we leave behind our bird-watching binoculars for fear of being suspected of peeping?
Notwithstanding surveillance technology available to homeowners, something else– something discomforting– is going on.
There’s rising fear and unease about our surroundings, our neighborhoods.
Yes, a lot of changes. New people moving in do not feel like real neighbors. Appearing on weekends only, they rush out of their $500,000+ homes to socialize at one of the new upscale restaurants. Regulars can’t even accidentally meet them at our local eateries. Then there’s the Airbnb crowd. They may walk past our house – with their indispensable dog – pausing to peer at our flowerbed. Anyway, they’re soon gone. Can’t make a neighborhood from that.
I’m thankful my house is not near the town’s craft-beer circus, or the extended vodka bar that’s usurped an entire village street. That raises another issue—more drinking holes. Most new businesses are high-end eateries and bars. Frankly, I’d rather have our recently shuttered pharmacy or a handy late-night Chinese takeout.
It’s not change; it’s not newcomers. For more than two centuries, people arrived here from elsewhere and became part of today’s solid social fabric. This change underway today is aggravated by something beyond the Catskills; bad news and threats are descending from all sides. Frightening news used to be confined abroad. Now it’s homemade –within our borders. If it’s not fires, its fentanyl; if it’s not floods, it’s scamming seniors’ savings; if it’s not fights about books, it’s new laws over gender identity; if it’s not the roar of trucks up Highway 17, it’s the price of bread. Shootings and economizing on food had belonged in distant places; now, they are around the corner and up the road.
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A century ago Yogmaya and Durga Devi, two women champions of justice, emerged from a remote corner of rural Nepal to offer solutions to their nation’s social and political ills. Then they were forgotten.
Years after their demise, in 1980 veteran anthropologist Barbara Nimri Aziz first uncovered their suppressed histories in her comprehensive and accessible biographies. Revelations from her decade of research led to the resurrection of these women and their entry into contemporary Nepali consciousness.
This book captures the daring political campaigns of these rebel women; at the same time it asks us to acknowledge their impact on contemporary feminist thinking. Like many revolutionaries who were vilified in their lifetimes, we learn about the true nature of these leaders’ intelligence, sacrifices, and vision during an era of social and economic oppression in this part of Asia.
After Nepal moved from absolute monarchy to a fledgling democracy and history re-evaluated these pioneers, Dr. Aziz explores their legacies in this book.
Psychologically provocative and astonishingly moving, “Yogmaya and Durga Devi” is a seminal contribution to women’s history.
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The US history of creating coups and dictatorships is not over. US President Obama presided over the coup in Honduras in 2009.
The US backed the Turkish military in trying to topple the democratically elected Erdogan in 2016.
In 2014, US president Obama and now-president Biden used Nazi groups to topple the democratically elected president Yanukovych of Ukraine.
The US has also tried to topple the democratically elected president Maduro in Venezuela.
The atrocities which the US inflicted on Chile with the coup in 1973 are still a deep pain for Chile.
It clearly illustrates the size and depth of the pain inflicted by the USA, that even today, 50 years after the US-coup in Chile, enormous efforts are made by Chile’s society to bring justice to the results of US atrocities. This includes looking for the thousands of “disappeared”.
Reporting from Chile’s capital Santiago, Al Jazeera’s Lucia Newman said successive Chilean governments have failed to seriously search for the disappeared people since Pinochet left power in 1990.
Newman noted that mass graves have been previously discovered in Chile near former interrogation centres, but not all the human remains found have been properly examined or identified.
“The forensic science has advanced quite a lot, so there is hope that at least some of the disappeared will be identified, even if it’s just a bone,” she said.
“A lot of people here told me, even if it’s just a little piece of the person that went missing that [they] can bury, that will help a lot to put their pain to rest.”
The ”disappeared” were executed – sometimes cast from helicopters into the ocean.
The US inflicted similar atrocities on Argentina, Nicaragua, Panamá, El Salvador, and many other Latin American, African, Asian, Middle East, and European countries.
The pain of US atrocities lives – and is not forgotten all over the World.
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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.
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In 2022, the US Army selected Bell Textron’s tiltrotor V280 as its Black Hawk replacement. This caused more than a few eyebrows to rise in consternation. The V-22 Osprey tiltrotor, flown by the Marine Corps and Special Operations Command, has had what can only be euphemistically regarded as a patchy record. It has been singularly odd in terms of the procurement and acquisition process, topped off by a tendency for killing its users while continuing to maintain a keen following. To date, no one has been held to account for what would, in any other policy context, be deemed criminally negligent.
The V-22 platform was the first tiltrotor deployed by the military, a strange creature combining the characteristics of fixed-wing planes, helicopters and vertical take-off and landing craft. It was originally inspired by a Pentagon request to Bell and Boeing after the failure of the hostage rescue effort dubbed Operation Eagle Claw. The April 1980 attempt by the Carter administration, intended to rescue US citizens being held by Iranian authorities, resulted in the deaths of five air force personnel and three marines.
The platform is slated for flying till 2055 yet sports a very blood-spattered resume. Prior to 2007, it had had four crashes, resulting in 30 deaths. Two of the first five prototypes suffered a number of fatal crashes in the early 1990s resulting in 30 deaths, though it formally came into the service of the Marines in 2007. After 2007, a further 24 deaths were caused in a further 10 crashes.
The Marine Corps has persisted indulging its use, seeing it as central in fighting the new lighter version of conflict the US imperium envisages, one characterised by manoeuvrability and speed as marked out by the “Force Design 2030” strategy. “Proponents of Force Design 2030 argue,” writes ground forces specialist Andrew Feickert, “that current Marine Corps design is outdated and that new forces and operational concepts are required to prevail against China.”
One such appealing operational concept is EABO, otherwise known as Expeditionary Advanced Base Operations. It is a concept that has been embraced by the de-facto colonial Marine force located at the top end in Australia, cutely called by publicists worried about that fact the Marine Rotational Force – Darwin.Occupying forces, the belief goes, do not rotate.The unit, comprising 2,500 soldiers, has been based in the Northern Territory from April to October every year since 2012.
On the morning of August 27, a V-22B Osprey with 23 US marines crashed on Melville Island just north of Darwin. Three marines were killed. Several others were left injured with varying degrees of severity. The episode brought back memories of another Osprey crash on Australian soil, which saw a failed effort on the part of the Marine Medium Tiltrotor Squadron 265 to land on the flight deck of USS Green Bay on August 5, 2017. On that occasion, there were also three fatalities, along with 23 injuries.
Those with claimed military or aviation expertise flock to the defence of this beast of moron and myth, admiring its “revolutionary design”, “a kind of plane-helicopter hybrid,” writes Peter Layton, involving wings tilting upwards “for take-off and landing and back down again for level flight.” It is appealing to its users, most notably the Marine Corps, for having greater range than helicopters, with higher speed and formidable carrying capacity.
Layton goes on to sing the praises of this lethal hybrid. “The Osprey is at the leading edge of aviation technology, with nothing else in operational service like it.” There are marvellous, evident reasons for that, but he prefers to note its essential role in the US strategy of prosecuting EABO operations against China from Australian bases rather than its hazards.
The literature about the V-22 Osprey notes the thorny history of this supposed “dream machine” and the problems of the Major Defense Acquisition Program that brought it into existence. To follow its development and deployment was an act akin to faith and its accompanying delusions. Richard Whittle, writing on the problem-plagued machine, found that, no matter what he penned, he “could usually count on being chastised by someone, for the Osprey was as close as a defense issue gets to being a religious question. There were believers and nonbelievers, and neither had much use for those who gave credence to the other side.”
Certainly, believers can come up with the sort of waffle asserting that each “Osprey flight is a learning event for the pilots, the maintenance personnel and the aircraft’s manufacturer.” This begs the question as to whether such equipment should ever see the light of day, especially given how often it snuffs out the lives of its users.
Other reasons for such an unfathomably dangerous record are also offered to distract from this deeply flawed craft. The National Commission on Military Aviation Safety, for instance, noted the baleful safety record of the US military in toto in a 2020 study conducted at the behest of Congress. The audit found that between 2013 and 2018, US forces suffered a remarkable 6,000 aviation safety “mishaps” during training and routine operations, resulting in 198 deaths and 157 lost aircraft. The bill for this dubious achievement had been $9.41 billion. The Osprey, it would seem, found itself in good, perishable company.
As with other religious questions, usually touching on doctrine and belief in some invisible, all-powerful tormentor, those saddled with it have paid the highest price. As US military policy continues its inexorable march to the next war, this time shamelessly using Australian strategic real estate for the purpose, it will also happily place its own personnel in machines as deadly to them as to any intended adversary.
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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: Bell V-280 Valor demonstrating high speed cruise configuration at the 2019 Alliance Air Show, Fort Worth, TX. (Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0)
August 31st, 2023 by International Coalition to Ban Uranium Weapons
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In the recent months there have been multiple reports containing different information about the use of depleted uranium weapons in Ukraine. Due to the rapidly changing events and partly contradictory statements by different officials and media, it is hard to tell with certainty, what party of the conflict has already used weapons containing depleted uranium. Further problems arise from the fact, that DU issue is being further instrumentalized by different actors with e.g., Russian officials claiming that DU projectiles are nuclear weapons.
All of this led to uncertainty and to the necessity of updating our initial assessment.
ICBUW position on the issue is unchanged:
Regardless of which belligerent uses DU weapons, that use will result in widespread environmental and public health damage and is extremely problematic under international (humanitarian) law.
DU Use by Ukrainian Forces
According to our research, Ukraine does not have its own depleted uranium rounds. The United Kingdom has confirmed that Ukraine will receive depleted uranium shells, also the United States are planning to supply this type of weapons. Even more alarming are the news regarding the new contract awarded recently to Rocketdyne, which concerns the production of of DU rounds for M1 Abrams tanks. In light of this information, it seems that the US is not planning on phasing out DU ammunition after all.
Our position regarding this news has not changed either:
ICBUW regrets and condemns the decision of the British government to supply depleted uranium ammunition and urges the United States to refrain from supplying this type of ammunition to Ukraine and to rely on less toxic alternatives instead.
The topic of the supply of UK-made depleted uranium ammunition seems to be surrounded by fake news as well. One example is the report, that a warehouse storing British-supplied depleted uranium ammunition was destroyed in Khmelnitsky, claiming that radiation levels were rising in the aftermath of the strike. There is zero evidence, that the warehouse was a “depleted uranium storage facility”, the reports on radiation levels have also been dismissed as false by the IAEA.
DU Use by Russian Forces
Russia has a significant number of different DU rounds in its arsenals. There were multiple reports regarding the use of DU round by the Russian forces, however, we were unable to independently verify that this type of ammunition was already used in Ukraine. The initial reports by GICHD suggested that Russian-made depleted uranium ammunition was already found in Ukraine, but after further clarification, we received information, that the 3BM-32 round was included in the Explosive Ordnance Guide as a precautionary measure.
Due to secrecy, there is also some degree of uncertainty regarding the types of ammunitions in service with the Russian army, which have depleted uranium sabots. According to our research, 3BM-60 (“Svinets-2”) contains a depleted uranium-tungsten alloy penetrator. This information finds it’s confirmation in various sources, including Kommersant newspaper (see their recent article), TASS (see this report from 2018) and Zvezda (see this article). Based on this information, articles speaking of the “tungsten” core of the Svinets-2 appear to be misleading, i.e., telling half-truths regarding this type of ammunition.
Even though there is still no independent confirmation of the use of DU weapons by the Russian army, threats of DU use coming from Moscow are alarming. In June, Russian president Vladimir Putinstated that depleted uranium ammunition was not used so far in the conflict by Russia, but Russia reserves the right to use it if the Armed Forces of Ukraine use the US-/UK-supplied DU rounds. In this regard, ICBUW reminds, that the use of a weapon illegal under international law by one party of conflict does not justify the use of the same weapon by other belligerents. Such use only amplifies the adverse effects on the local population, contributing heavily to the environmental catastrophe.
We continue to follow reports of shipments or use of military equipment with depleted uranium components or DU ammunition and invite everyone with relevant information to share it with us.
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Featured image: Russian T-80 Tank in Ukraine (Source: mil.ru)
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In the footage, Prigozhin, 62, is seen wearing military fatigues in a car, and says:
‘For those discussing whether or not I am alive.
‘How am I doing? It’s the weekend, the second half of August [20]23. I am in Africa,’ he says, speaking to camera. ‘So fans of discussing my elimination, intimate life, earnings or whatever, as a matter of fact, everything is fine.’
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Twenty-two years ago:9/11 was a criminal undertaking based on countless lies and fabrications. On September 11, 2023, we commemorate 9/11. In the following weeks, Global Research will be publishing several important articles pertaining to 9/11 and its immediate aftermath, leading to the illegal US-NATO bombing and occupation of Afghanistan.
This carefully documented article by Larry Chin was first published almost ten year after 9/11 documents how President Obama in May 2011 officially announced that Osama bin Laden, the alleged mastermind of the September 11, 2001 attacks had been killed.
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On the evening of May 1, 2011, President Barack Obama declared that the CIA, on his personal order, successfully killed Al-Qaeda “mastermind” Osama bin Laden. In a conveniently scheduled Sunday evening telecast, Obama shamelessly wielded tired lies and 9/11 propaganda, while congratulating himself and the CIA. In classic lying George W. Bush fashion, Obama announced “mission accomplished”.
Obama has pronounced Osama bin Laden to be dead. But according to historical facts and extensive documented evidence, he may never have been alive in the way that the official propaganda has portrayed him. Or alive at all.
Osama bin Laden has been a CIA asset in reality, and a propaganda boogeyman in official fiction.
The “Militant Islamic Network”, including bin Laden himself, has been, since the Cold War a intelligence network that has been “run” on behalf of Anglo-American interests.
The attack of 9/11 was a false flag operation, planned and carried out by Anglo-American intelligence assets, blamed on “Al-Qaeda”, despite no credible supporting evidence.
On the other hand, evidence abounds concerning the manipulation of terror assets, including bin Laden, by the CIA. This milieu was thoroughly examined by Mike Ruppert in Crossing the Rubicon, in which he concluded:
“Given the degree of documented intelligence penetration of al Qaeda; the fact that Osama bin Laden had been a CIA asset during the first Afghan conflict against the Soviets; the fact that a number of the so-called hijackers and/or al Qaeda members had been trained in CIA training camps in Chechnya; had fought in CIA/US-sponsored guerrilla conflicts (e.g. in Kosovo with the KLA in 2000), or had received military training at US installations; given all that, it is reasonable to assume that one or more top al Qaeda officials were in fact double or triple agents…”
“Based upon what is known about successful intelligence penetrations for years prior to the attacks of 9/11, Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda could not have sneezed without the CIA or the NSA knowing about it.”
The assertion that bin Laden’s whereabouts have been unknown, that he could have eluded detection for a decade (including the “he’s hiding in caves along the Afghanistan/Pakistan border” and other such fables) was debunked years ago. According to a November 2003 Reuters report, bin Laden had received kidney dialysis in a US military hospital in Dubai two months before the 9/11 attacks, and again on September 10, 2001, according to Pakistani intelligence. These and other reports support the conclusion that Osama bin Laden was not only a CIA asset (one whose whereabouts were more than known), but one who was deathly ill. Other reports over the years suggest that the “mastermind” may have certainly died at some point, even while his image continued to be used incessantly to keep the “war on terrorism” alive.
President Obama’s lying before the cameras was as shameless as the clumsiness of the mainstream corporate media dance surrounding it. At the same time Obama stated in his speech that the killing of bin Laden had taken place “tonight” in a mountain hideout in Pakistan, various reporters on competing networks, citing multiple sources, contradicted Obama, stating that bin Laden was killed a week ago in a firefight near Islamabad, and that bin Laden’s body had been tested for DNA ever since. This conflict alone raises enough doubt to throw this new official story into the question. In the coming days, there will undoubtedly be more holes revealed.
Seasoned observers have said for years that Osama bin Laden—the mythic figure— would elude capture as long as the Anglo-American elites needed to continue the current course of war in the Middle East and Central Asia. He would never be captured, absolutely never be put on trial, and would not be “killed” unless political expediency demanded it. The elites, for various reasons, have chosen this hour to end this tired and overused trump card.
The “successful kill” of bin Laden comes at a convenient time. Obama’s popularity has plummeted. His political opponents are threatening to unseat him in 2012. The continued US presence in the Middle East and support for the “war on terrorism” is fragile, weakened by popular protests, and ambivalence among Americans.
The “war on terrorism” narrative, the continuing world war done in its name, will never end. It is clear, however, that some change in course is in the works; at the very least, a tactical shift.
In the meantime, Barack Obama can now claim to have “finished the job” in Afghanistan, just as he promised to do when elected, and declare himself to be a champion anti-terrorist, a “take-charge” military leader and bastion of justice who has avenged 9/11. Obama will ride this hard for his re-election campaign.
In response to Obama’s victory speech, crowds (of unknown origin) gathered outside the White House chanting “U.S.A.”. Whether this spectacle was staged or genuine is not known. What is known is that the vast majority of the American public remains oblivious to the fact that their own government, Bush/Cheney and Obama administrations alike, have never stopped lying to them about 9/11, the “war on terrorism”, or Osama bin Laden.
On this night, Obama repeated The Big Lie, the biggest one of all.
We will all need plenty of time and introspection to analyze the full range of game-changing vectors unleashed by the unveiling of BRICS 11 last week in South Africa. Yet time waits for no one. The Empire will (italics mine) strike back in full force; in fact its multi-hydra Hybrid War tentacles are already on display.
Former State Security Head of Ukraine Oleksandr Yakimenko blames Ukraine’s current government for hiring snipers on Feb. 20, 2014 when dozens of people were killed and hundreds more wounded. The victims were mainly EuroMaidan Revolution demonstrations, but some police officers were also killed. This was the deadliest day during the EuroMaidan Revolution, a three-month uprising that claimed 100 lives.
President Emmanuel Macron of France has publicly stated that the National Council for the Safeguarding of Our Homeland (CNSP) government in Niger has no right to withdraw the diplomatic credentials from Paris’ ambassador to the West African state.
Many of us shared anecdotes of loved ones vaccinated with COVID-19 vaccines – and suffering from all sorts of unrelated illnesses afterward. I know a young individual who, after mandated COVID vaccination, had all sorts of bacterial illnesses that he never had before. (This story was a major impetus to my opening and growing this substack).
Danny Norman and Stacey Singles lost their baby boy Cooper at 2 weeks old on May 23, 2023. Just 2 months later, on August 13, 2023, while on vacation in Bali, Stacey Singles collapsed and died suddenly. This is a truly heartbreaking family tragedy.
We know what the regime is like. Starving a country, bombing its hospitals and strafing its schools has been minor fare for the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. The population of Yemen has found this out to their colossal cost.
Nation-states under EU jurisdiction can no longer be rationally said to be “free,” to the extent that they ever truly were to begin with. They are now part of a wholly integrated slave colony of the multinational technocracy, headed by the World Economic Forum and similar organizations outside of the reach of any democratic control.
The BRICS association-formed by Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa-expands to include 6 more countries, which will become full members as of January 1, 2024: the Argentine Republic, the Arab Republic of Egypt, the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia, the Islamic Republic of Iran, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates.
The Deep State is simply a metaphor for what happens when the enormously destructive, evil powers of obscenely-massive amounts of money, wealth and power, are amassed in the hands of the few or many immoral, conscienceless individuals or groups of individuals, who care little to nothing about what happens to any one person, nation or state other than themselves.
If you actually “follow the science,” Wikipedia’s description of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s “anti-vaccine advocacy” might elicit indifference or unequivocal support for Wikipedia’s position.
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Introduction
There were several military coups in West Africa lately. Mostly in former French colonies, and in many ways “neo-colonies” of France, that do arguably more harm to the Sahel countries than the more than 300 years of French “on-the-ground” colonies, or enslavement. Though, this latter crime is not to be discarded at all. It has been an across-Africa genocide of unimaginable proportions, that, so far went unpunished.
But the new crime, the financial and military strategic econo-political colonization, needs to be brought to the fore now.
Among the coup countries are Mali, Guinea, Burkina Faso, Niger, but also Nigeria – a former British colony.
Of all these “coups”, Niger gets by far the most attention, and seems to be at the center of the controversy.
At the outset it looked like the military staged a coup to get the France-friendly President Mohamed Bazoum (image right with President Macron), out of the way and to move away from French monetary hegemony, the Franc CFA (Communauté Financière Africaine, or African Financial Community). See also this and this.
On second thought, however, another image emerged, especially after Madame Victoria Nuland’s, US Deputy Secretary of State (August 7, 2023) personal visit to Niamey, Niger, where she was purportedly denied access to the deposed President, and was apparently snubbed by the new military leader, General Abdourahmane Tchiani.
The latter is not very plausible, but is once more a “media coup” against the truth. Ever more evidence emerges that Niger’s coup was supported by the US. Washington has two military bases in Niger and at least between 3,000 and 4,000 military personnel stationed in Niger.
One of the US bases is a strategically important drone base, in the Agadez region, known as Niger Air Base 201. Following its permanent base in Djibouti, Niger Air Base 201 (image left ) stands as the second-largest US base in Africa. See this.
The 201 Air Base is owned by the Nigerien military, built and financed for by the United States. It is operated by the U.S. military as a drone base.
France still has at least 1,500 military stationed in Niger. This, even though French President Macron had promised to withdraw them, as soon as General Tchiani “requested” him to do so. Everything must be questioned now. Did Tchiani really request a withdrawal of French troops?
What appears (almost) sure is that the US were supporting the military coup, if not helping General Tchiani – who served as the chiefof the Nigerienpresidential guard (2011-2023) – to the military take-over. See also this important analysis by Professor Chossudovsky.
What’s at Stake?
The deposed President Mohamed Bazoum had Macron’s support, not only because he allowed France’s shameless exploitation of Niger through the CFA Franc (for more details see this), but also because France exploits Niger’s rich uranium and high-purity petrol – and has access to Niger’s other mineral riches. See this and this).
Besides, and maybe most importantly, Niger is a landlocked Sahel country, strategically located in the center of North Africa, between Algeria, Mali, Burkina Faso, Benin, Nigeria, Chad and Libya (see map).
Being in control of Niger, (population 25 million), is in a way like being in control of Kosovo, the US-NATO engineered cut-out piece of land from Serbia (with the largest U.S. military base in Europe), in the middle of former Yugoslavia, bombed to rubble in 1999 by President Clinton, to divide and conquer – conquer the area.
That is what Niger may become, if the US has its say. Washington does not want France involved anymore. Being in control of Niger, is like being in control of at least northern West Africa, a resources-rich, but an extreme poverty-stricken territory – which Washington suspects may also interest Russia and possibly China.
The Role of the Wagner Private Army
It is not a well-kept secret that the private Russian Wagner army has had a foothold in this part of Africa with several thousand mercenaries for at least a couple of years, maybe longer – in Chad, Central African Republic, Mali, Burkina Faso, and maybe even Nigeria.
Hypothetically, purely speculatively, let us assume the leader of the Wagner private army, Yevgeny Prigozhin, who was supposedly killed in a plane crash on 23 August 2023, between Moscow and St. Petersburg, is still alive, never was on that plane. Therefore, he may have escaped the crash.
This according to all official news, including by the Kremlin (2 days ago) was denied. Apparently Russian examinations by genetic tests, indicated that Yevgeny Prigozhin was killed in the crash.
President Putin himself has confirmed that the remains of Yevgeny Prigozhin had been DNA-examined, and confirmed that he is dead.
OK, Prigozhin is no longer among the living.
For example, Dr. Joanna Szostek, Sr. Lecturer in Political Communication, University of Glasgow, expressed some doubts. She said, “It is very likely we will never exactly know what happened … “, as quoted here.
Rumors say, Prigozhin had been seen after the plane “accident”, in the Central African Republic, where he has his African headquarters, and where he is a hero.
It is worth noting that Prigozhin allegedly posted a video on August 21, 2023 from Africa. Was this two days before the plane crash or was it a video corresponding to an earlier date:
Still some doubts remain, one being Prigozhin’s firm habit not to get on the same plane with his top brass, for precisely the reason of a wanton or accidental crash.
Prigozhin had been “killed” before in the past couple of years, and reappeared.
Just for argument’s sake, though very unlikely, a Russian mercenary army in Northern Central Africa that may still be fighting for Russia, would be most uncomfortable for Madame Nuland and her hegemonic ilk in Washington.
Or, is it possible Wagner could be bought by Washington? After all, mercenaries are killers for money.
What to Do About It?
The US attempt is to make sure that Niger, the country of strategy, a member of the US / NATO France supported ECOWAS, will not slip out into liberty from “independence” some 60 years ago.
Shortly after the Niger military coup, Mr. Putin has cautioned not to interfere in Niger’s internal affairs. He was referring precisely to ECOWAS which has “warned” of an ECOWAS military intervention, if the French aligned deposed President Bazoum, would not be returned immediately to the Presidency. In hindsight, and knowing what we know now, the ECOWAS warning too, was a media manufactured untruth by “design”.
ECOWAS is The Economic Community of West African States. It is one of 8 African regional political andeconomic unions. ECOWAS has 15 member countries located in Central and West Africa. But ECOWAS is divided within. Without the support of the US / NATO and France, it may fall apart. Therefore, a warning from ECOWAS has only meaning when an “arrangement” has been reached before.
Le Conseil National pour la Sauvegarde de la Patrie (CNSP), roughly translated as “National Movement for the Defense of the Homeland”, headed by the Military Junta’s General Tchiani, is supported by the Pentagon. At least five members of the military coup (July 26, 2023) received their military training in the U.S.
This means the US is well-established within Niger, and by association within central and West Africa – and they do not want to lose out on this highly strategic – and resources-rich – African position; not to the French, not to the Russians – and not to China.
But, then there is still the unconfirmed suspicion of a mercenary army roaming in Western Africa – and who knows – just in case – what their plans might be, and for whom they might fight.
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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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This important Kiev Post article by Katya Gorchinskaya (originally published on March 13, 2014) in the immediate wake of the EuroMaidan, quotes Ukraine’s Head of State Security of Ukraine Oleksandr Yakimenko (under the Yanukovych government) pointing to the hiring of snipers on February 20, 2014.
Yakimenko also reviews how the U.S. provided financial support to the Protest Movement.
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Former State Security Head of Ukraine Oleksandr Yakimenko blames Ukraine’s current government for hiring snipers on Feb. 20, 2014 when dozens of people were killed and hundreds more wounded.
The victims were mainly EuroMaidan Revolution demonstrations, but some police officers were also killed. This was the deadliest day during the EuroMaidan Revolution, a three-month uprising that claimed 100 lives.
Yakimenko also blamed the United States for organizing and financing the revolution by bringing illegal cash in using diplomatic mail.
The U.S. Embassy in Ukraine dismissed the charges as ludicrous, while another official with the current government called the accusations “cynical” propaganda with no factual basis.
The former SBU chief is now wanted in Ukraine for his alleged role in organizing mass murders in Ukraine, along with numerous other former top officials of deposed President Viktor Yanukovych’s administration, including the ex-president himself, former Prosecutor General Viktor Pshonka, former Interior Minister Vitaliy Zahkharchenko and former presidential chief of staff Andriy Klyuyev.
Yakimenko made these and other accusations in a 10-minute exclusive interview to Russia’s Vesti channel in an undisclosed location.
“The shots sounded from the building of Philharmonics,” Yakimenko told Vesti. “This was the building supervised by (now National Security Council Chief Andriy) Parubiy.”
He said the snipers were shooting in the back of the running police, as well as at protesters. He said there were two groups of “well-dressed” snipers, each composed of 10 people, operating in the building. Yakimenko said their exit was witnessed by both SBU operatives and protesters themselves.
He said one of the groups of snipers disappeared, but the other one relocated to Hotel Ukraina and continued to kill the protesters at a slower pace. Yakimenko said at that point representatives of Svoboda and Right Sector appealed to him to deploy SBU’s special unit Alfa to destroy the snipers.
Yakimenko claims that he was ready to do it, but did not get the permission of Parubiy, who supervised the self-defense forces.
“To get inside EuroMaidan I needed Parubiy’s permission because the forces of self-defense would hit me in the back,” Yakimenko said. “But Parubiy did not give me such a permission.”
“Not a single weapon could get onto Maidan without Parubiy’s permission,” he said, adding that EuroMaidan protesters used mercenaries from former defense ministry’s special units, as well as foreign mercenaries, including those from former Yugoslavia.
“This is typical Russian-style propaganda,” says Viktoria Siumar, deputy head of the National Security and Defense Council and Parubiy’s deputy. She said these “cynical” lies that are circulating in the Russian media, have not and cannot be backed by a single fact.
Yankimenko says that Parubiy, as well as a number of other organizers of EuroMaidan, received direct orders from the U.S. government. Among those people he named former and current intelligence chiefs Mykola Malomuzh and Viktor Gvozd, former Defense Minister Anatoliy Hrytsenko and leader of the opposition Petro Poroshenko.
“These are the forces that were doing everything they were told by the leaders and representatives of the United States,” he says. “They, in essence lived in the U.S. embassy. There wasn’t a day when they did not visit the embassy.”
SBU chief Valentyn Nalyvaichenko is also accused of playing to the tune of the Americans. The U.S. Embassy in Ukraine commented on these accusations in just one word: “ludicrous.”
All orders were given either by the U.S. or EU ambassador Jan Tombinski, “who in essence is a Polish citizen.”
“The role of Poland cannot be evaluated,” Yakimenko said. “It dreams about restoring its old wish, Rzeczpospolita.”
The EU Delegation had no comment about the accusations.
The former SBU chief also talked at length about the financing of EuroMaidan protests, saying much of it came directly from the U.S., and that some Ukrainian oligarchs, including Poroshenko, Dmytro Firtash and Viktor Pinchuk.
“From the beginning of Maidan we as a special service noticed a significant increase of diplomatic cargo to various embassies, western embassies located in Ukraine,” says Yakimenko. “It was tens of times greater than usual diplomatic cargo supplies.” He says that right after such shipments crisp, new U.S. dollar bills were spotted on Maidan.
He said Ukraine’s oligarchs were also financing Maidan because they were “hostages of the situation and had no choice” because most of their assets are located in the west.
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Kyiv Post deputy chief editor Katya Gorchinskaya can be reached at [email protected].
Featured image: Oleksandr Yakimenko blames Ukraine’s current government for hiring snipers on Feb. 20. Photo by UKRAINIAN NEWS
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President Emmanuel Macron of France has publicly stated that the National Council for the Safeguarding of Our Homeland (CNSP) government in Niger has no right to withdraw the diplomatic credentials from Paris’ ambassador to the West African state.
Since the order to leave within 48 hours was issued, the stakes have grown higher in the month-long struggle between the new government in Niamey and several western imperialist countries and their allies in the region.
After the July 26 seizure of power by the presidential guard and the conventional forces, there were immediate calls from France and the United States for a military intervention by the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) aimed at the reinstallation of ousted President Mohamed Bazoum. The former leader was said to have been elected democratically by the people of Niger and therefore the CNSP ruling council should not be recognized as the legitimate government.
However, since the change in government in Niger, neighboring Burkina Faso and Mali have pledged their support to the CNSP. Both governments which also came to power through military coups [supported by the Pentagon], have stated that any attack on Niger would be viewed as a declaration of war against Burkina Faso and Mali.
At the same time several African states such as Algeria, which shares a long border with Niger, are opposing military intervention by ECOWAS. Even within the ECOWAS states such as the Federal Republic of Nigeria, there is broad opposition to sending troops into Niger. The Nigerian Senate controlled by President Bola Tinubu’s own political party, the All-Progressive Congress (APC), refused to authorize the deployment of troops to neighboring Niger.
In fact, throughout the entire region diverse voices have spoken loudly against the French scheme to reimpose Bazoum. A recent session of the African Union (AU) Peace and Security Council (PSC) failed to reach an agreement on endorsing an invasion into Niger.
Therefore, the rationale being used by Macron to stage a diplomatic incident has no basis in the reality now permeating the West and North Africa regions in particular and the continent as a whole. Since the CNSP administration does not have the blessing of France, Macron claims that their diplomatic personnel, military units along with strategic economic interests must continue to operate in Niger despite the widespread sentiment against the neo-colonial status-quo.
In a speech to French ambassadors on August 25, Macron reiterated that he would support an ECOWAS military invasion into Niger. Ambassador Sylvain Itte of France has refused to meet with the new leadership in Niamey. Consequently, the CNSP believes that the ongoing presence of Itte would be a threat to the security and well-being of the country.
“France and its diplomats have faced particularly difficult situations in some countries in recent months, from Sudan, where France has been exemplary, to Niger at this very moment and I applaud your colleague and your colleagues who are listening from their posts. I think our policy is the right one. It’s based on the courage of President Bazoum, and on the commitments of our ambassador on the ground who is remaining despite all the pressure, despite all the declarations made by the illegitimate authorities.”
This response to the existing crisis of legitimacy for France in West Africa illustrates the imperialist posture of Macron. In his discourse, he asserts that Paris has acted in an exemplary manner in the region. Judging from the recent political events many are disputing this perceived notion of benevolence from a former colonial power.
Tens of thousands of Nigeriens have taken to the streets since July 26 to demonstrate their support for the CNSP and its policies. This atmosphere is a direct result of the interference by Paris and Washington in the internal affairs of the uranium-rich state.
The U.S. has at least 1,100 Africa Command (AFRICOM) troops on the ground along with a military base and drone stations. France reportedly maintains a troops contingent of 1,800 aimed at guarding its dominant economic interests in the uranium industry.
People in Niger and throughout the region are incensed over the ongoing exploitation of natural resources. These resources belong to the citizens of these states, and they have a right to determine the political and economic direction of their countries.
Diplomatic Hostility and Military Threats Based on Distortions
The western propaganda saying that the former Bazoum government in Niger was the “last hope for democracy in West Africa” is a pure farce. Bazoum represented the interests of international finance capital and the NATO states.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken visited Niger earlier in the year to praise Bazoum for his willingness to extend the military and intelligence presence of the U.S. In actuality, the circumstances surrounding the ascendancy and administrative tenure of Bazoum are far from the glowing rhetoric about the purported virtues of the political leader.
An article published by Foreign Affairs on August 29 reflects a simmering debate inside the ruling circles in the U.S. over what approach to take towards the CNSP government [which is in liaison with the Pentagon]. Judging from the tone of the report, some analysts are urging that the administration of President Joe Biden distance itself from the policy orientation of France.
“The United States, however, has broken from France to advocate for a more pacifist response. Washington’s stance has come as a surprise. The United States has generally been content to follow France’s lead in the Sahel in exchange for support for U.S. endeavors in the Middle East….
Washington’s current course is correct, and U.S. policymakers must resist calls to back an intervention. It is by no means inevitable that a proxy war between Russia and the West will break out in the Sahel. In fact, a military intervention would only increase the likelihood of more extensive meddling in the region by Russia. The junta appears interested in partnering with Moscow, but to date, Moscow has remained equivocal. In the event of a challenge to the junta by foreign militaries, however, Russia could be obliged to make good on promises to protect its African partners.”
Whether or not the Biden administration will maintain this position is largely dependent upon the direction of the CNSP government along with the burgeoning anti-imperialist movement in Niger and throughout West Africa. Although there is competition between the interests of France and the U.S., overall, the two imperialist powers have the same objectives.
Both Washington and Paris want to utilize their military and economic presence in Niger to serve as a bulwark against the growing influence of the Russian Federation and the People’s Republic of China. If France is given no sanctuary in the Sahel region to pursue its neo-colonial ambitions, it appears inevitable that AFRICOM, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and State Department will seek to fill this vacuum.
By taking on even greater responsibility for ensuring the ability of imperialism to thrive unhindered in West Africa, a clash between AFRICOM, NATO and their client regimes against the popular forces and progressive governments will occur. The emergence of a clearly demarcated military conflict in West Africa involving the interests of the imperialists and those of the people would require a major expansion in defense spending and deployment of Pentagon personnel.
Washington and its NATO cohorts are already committed to military conflicts and antagonisms in Ukraine (Eastern Europe), West Asia and the Asia-Pacific. A significant expansion of this military involvement in West Africa will be paid for by the working people of the U.S. and Western Europe who are already suffering from rising prices and deteriorating living conditions.
Although it is not stated openly in the capitalist countries by the dominant political parties, the escalating imperialist war budgets are responsible to a significant degree for the impoverishment and consequent discontent of the working class and oppressed. This righteous discontent can be transformed into a political outlook which challenges ideologically the entire concept of western hegemony in favor of domestic and foreign policies which serve the majority of people within society.
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Abayomi Azikiwe is the editor of the Pan-African News Wire. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.
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***
Many of us shared anecdotes of loved ones vaccinated with COVID-19 vaccines – and suffering from all sorts of unrelated illnesses afterward. I know a young individual who, after mandated COVID vaccination, had all sorts of bacterial illnesses that he never had before. (This story was a major impetus to my opening and growing this substack).
Finally, we have scientific confirmation that vaccination against COVID-19 causes a marked decrease in immunity to heterologous pathogens such as viruses,bacteria, and fungi. This decreased immunity to other pathogens (acquired immune deficit) is what people colloquially refer to as “VAIDS.” (VAIDS stands for Vaccine-Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome)
Blood samples from 29 children, aged 5-11 years old, were taken before the FIRST dose of COVID vaccination and subsequently retaken on the 28th day after the second dose.
Methods: A whole blood stimulation assay was used to investigate in vitrocytokine responses to heterologous stimulants (killed pathogens, Toll-like receptor ligands) and SARS-CoV-2 antigens. Samples from 29 children, aged 5-11 years, before and 28 days after a second BNT162b2 vaccination were analysed (V2 + 28). Samples from eight children were analysed six months after BNT162b2 vaccination.
In the introduction, scientists coyly said that vaccination “altered cytokine responses”. As we will discover, the jabs altered immune responses for the worse, not better!
Conclusions: BNT162b2 vaccination in children alters cytokine responses to heterologous stimulants, particularly one month after vaccination. This study is the first to report the immunological heterologous effects of COVID-19 vaccination in children.
What the Scientists Did
Sample collection
Participants were requested to provide blood samples at two core visits, and one optional visit. The first blood sample was taken immediately before, and on the same day as, the first BNT162b2 vaccination (V1), the second blood sample was taken 28 days after the second BNT162b2 vaccination (V2 + 28) and the optional third blood sample was taken 6 months after the second BNT162b2 vaccination (V2 + 182) (Supplementary Figure S1). Up to 23 mL venous blood was collected into sodium heparin-containing and serum separator tubes (Becton Dickinson, NJ, USA).
Then, collected blood was tested for the immune response to various pathogens, including various commonly encountered bacteria, staphylococcus aureus, and pathogenic yeast Candida Albicans:
In vitro whole blood stimulation
In vitro whole blood stimulation assays were done as previously described (16, 23). [lab work details omitted – I.C.] … Other stimulants have previously been described (16) and included: bacterial stimulants (heat-killed Haemophilus influenzae type B, HK Listeria monocytogenes, BCG-Denmark , HK Staphylococcus aureus and HK Escherichia coli, and viral/other stimulants (hepatitis B virus surface antigen, …, HK Candida albicans
Many of the above are pathogens that we encounter often, and they are the reason why we have God-given immune systems to keep them away, which healthy children typically do.
Unfortunately, the 29 COVID-vaccinated children aged 5-11, had markedly decreased immune responses 28 days after the second dose of Pfizer. Many specific immune reactions declined by a factor of over ten times:
(the charts in the figure above are using logarithmic scale)
The authors state:
Following heterologous bacterial, fungal and viral/TLR agonists stimulation, there was a general decrease in cytokine and chemokine responses in children between V1 and V2 + 28. The largest decreases were seen for IFN-γ and MCP-1 (Figures 2, 3A-C). IL-6, IL-15, IL-17 also decreased between V1 and V2 + 28 following stimulation with BCG, H. influenzae, S. aureus, hepatitis B antigen, poly(I:C), and R848 (Figure 3B). L. monocytogenes stimulation induced IL-15, TNF-α and IP-10 decreases between V1 and V2 + 28 (Figure 3C). IL-8 responses also decreased between V1 and V2 + 28 following H. influenzae and S. aureus stimulation.
Reduced responses to Staphylococcus aureus are very serious: this illness is difficult to treat and causes untold harm. I will skip the worst pictures to not upset my readers too much.
In any case, a decrease in immune responses happens across the board.
In the ideal world, careful scientists, cautious public health authorities, and principled medical doctors would investigate COVID vaccines’ effects before vaccinating tens of millions of children and billions of adults. Had they investigated and done the basic science (such as the study above) before mandating and injecting COVID vaccines, such dangerous injections would never have been given to children and young adults!
Instead, in the mad rush to “vaccinate the world” with vaccines that do not even work, we ruined the immune responses of millions of children and likely all other vaccinated people.
Headlines about the “unexplained rise in children infected” with the above-mentioned bacteria abound:
Instead of careful consideration, science and health authorities denied everything and refused to debate. Now that the truth is coming out, the ill effects of Covid vaccines can no longer be reversed. Very unfortunate!
Do you know any affected people? Please share your stories, while BEING MINDFUL ABOUT PRIVACY!
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Featured image is from the author
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
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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***
Aug. 14, 2023 – Melbourne, Australia – Danny Norman and Stacey Singles lost their baby boy Cooper at 2 weeks old on May 23, 2023. Just 2 months later, on August 13, 2023, while on vacation in Bali, Stacey Singles collapsed and died suddenly. This is a truly heartbreaking family tragedy.
Aug. 19, 2023 – Halifax, MA – William Roche and his wife Tracy Roche have both come down with cancer. Tracy was diagnosed with breast cancer last year and this spring William was diagnosed with tonsil/neck/throat cancer.
Aug. 12, 2023 – Darlington, UK – 41 year old Mike Clinton died unexpectedly in his sleep just 3 months after his wife Shelly Clinton also died unexpectedly, leaving behind two orphan boys ages 12 & 14.
Aug. 9, 2023 – Dartmouth, NS – 55 yo Brian Scott Sutherland died unexpectedly on Aug. 9, 2023 at home. His partner, 59 yo Robert Bobby Barkhouse died unexpectedly in his sleep on Mar. 22, 2022.
Aug. 4, 2023 – Albertson, NY – Jill Silverstein “suffered a medical event” and died unexpectedly on Aug. 4, 2023. Her 45 year old husband, Craig Silverstein, had died suddenly on April 29, 2021 from a cardiac arrest. Their kids are now orphans.
Aug. 4, 2023 – Whitman, MA – Michelle/Lexi Kowalski suffered a hemorrhagic stroke on Aug. 1, 2023 which left her unable to speak or swallow. Two days later, her husband Joe Kowalski suffered a heart attack.
July 29, 2023 – Deer Lake, NL, Husband and wife dead within a week of each other. 58 year old Sandra May Pearce died suddenly on July 29, 2023, a week after her husband Selby Arthur Pearce died suddenly on July 21, 2023.
July 18, 2023 – New Milford, CT – 24 year old Hope Smith died unexpectedly at home on July 18, 2023. Her father, 59 year old Timothy J. Smith died unexpectedly at home on Nov. 2, 2022.
July 6, 2023 – Fort Hamer, FL – 11 year old Andrew Amber had breathing problems, ended up intubated, coded and died briefly before being revived by Hospital staff. He was diagnosed with myocarditis. His father, Barnabas Amber had a massive heart attack just 5 months ago and needed 6 AED shocks to be revived.
May 5, 2023 – Magnolia, TX – Physician Darrick Wells had a brain bleed from a micro aneurysm in 2021 after his COVID-19 vaccine. Recently, he had another stroke. His wife has been diagnosed with Transverse Myelitis, also COVID-19 vaccine induced.
July 2021 – Bremerton, WA – Robert Phinney and her husband both developed skin problems after taking COVID-19 vaccines. Her husband’s injury appears to be an autoimmune vasculitis caused by COVID-19 vaccine.
June 1, 2021 – Husband and wife have major heart surgeries 3 weeks apart. Erin Gallagher had chest pain on June 1 and needed open heart surgery. 3 weeks later her husband Chris Gallagher, who had chest pains after COVID-19 vaccine, had to have open heart surgery as well!
My Take…
This is why I started my substack.
I wanted to report information that would not be reported anywhere else.
These stories are almost impossible to find.
Special thanks to two Twitter users: Nashville Angela and Janiesaysyay for locating a few of these cases and alerting people to them.
Big pharma and the Vaccine Cartel don’t want people to know about these stories.
Multiple family members coming down with injuries has only a few possible explanations (beyond coincidence):
Genetic predisposition shared by family members (doesn’t explain couples) – no one is studying this anywhere in the world;
Took a COVID-19 vaccine from the same bad batch or bad vial that has high incidence of severe adverse events and sudden deaths – possible cause in some of these cases;
The overall incidence of COVID-19 vaccine injuries is now so high, that it is statistically inevitable that some families will have more than one person coming down with vaccine injuries.
I believe the last scenario is now in play. There are simply so many people being injured by COVID-19 vaccines that it is inevitable now that there will be families where two or three members are injured or die suddenly.
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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
All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the Translate Website button below the author’s name.
To receive Global Research’s Daily Newsletter (selected articles), click here.
Click the share button above to email/forward this article to your friends and colleagues. Follow us on Instagram and Twitter and subscribe to our Telegram Channel. Feel free to repost and share widely Global Research articles.
***
More than twenty years ago I published a study in which I argued that South Africa’s apartheid system was created by mission and land appropriation.[i] This obviously implicated the Christian churches, including those that had claimed to be opposed to the British policy enshrined in the National Party programme when it came to power in 1947. This study received one review which confirmed the experience I had defending it as a dissertation—namely that my thesis was not understood. The problem was not the clarity or evidence. That was clear from the review and the committee’s reactions. Rather it was a fundamental and paradigmatic issue. Neither the Church nor the land question was taken seriously as central to the policy of apartheid.
In the years following the demise of South Africa’s National Party regime, I watched and waited to see what would happen to the social and economic order that the Anglo-Afrikaner elite had created since the end of the 19th century. As I predicted none of the grand land reform measures, not even those stated in the new constitution or the ANC’s Reconstruction and Development Plan were implemented in more than token ways. One of the reasons for this was the victory of neo-liberalism in 1989 over every other form of economic programme. Another was and remains the absence of any social-political-economic praxis aimed at social transformation to counter the neo-liberal paradigm. Finally the nature of the NP’s withdrawal was to surrender form without surrendering power.
Actually my interest in these problems goes back to 1986, when by accident I was on a study trip to Brazil. It was the year after the formal end of the military dictatorship instigated by the US in 1962 and executed in 1964. During that trip I was able to interview numerous people involved in the drafting of a new civilian constitution to replace the Atos Institucionais that had formed the basis of military rule for two decades. It was by coincidence that I found myself in a similar position in 1991 when I arrived in Johannesburg.
All that said: I have been studying social engineering for more than thirty years. In the West—to apply a thoroughly worn and yet useful cliché—the DNA of social engineering is the Latin Church, also known as the Roman Catholic Church. (The Vatican)
Since the 18th century but even more in the 20th century there has been a largely successful effort to conceal the extent to which the Latin Church remains the model for effective conquest. Wishful thinking, mendacity, and propaganda have obscured the mechanisms by which the West’s oldest transnational corporation shaped what is today often called the “globalized world”—a euphemism for the planet’s susceptibility to the central ecclesiastical technology—missionary conquest.
In The Art of War (5 BCE), Chinese general, Sun Tzu, explained, “to fight and conquer in all your battles is not supreme excellence; supreme excellence consists in breaking the enemy’s resistance without fighting.” The method of mission is to break the enemy’s resistance.
Colonialism and imperialism over the past four centuries were not merely the extension of high lethality belligerence and larceny by Western barbarians. Numerically the population of the Western peninsula, aka Europe, was always far too small to fight and conquer the world that came to embody the British and now Anglo-American Empire.
In fact this inability of Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, English, French and later Belgian forces to conquer and fully occupy all the territories they claimed is often used to explain the failures of imperialism and the ultimate victory ascribed to independence movements after 1945.
In today’s comparison between empires supposed to have waned or atrophied, like the British or French, and the imperial quality ascribed to the Russian Federation and the People’s Republic of China, invidious and fallacious distinctions are made. The persistence of the multi-ethnic quality of both great continental states is treated as evidence that they are imperial in nature—for which they are regularly condemned in popular and scholarly venues.
These states whose alleged empires comprise immediately contiguous territory in which culture and populations have integrated over centuries are compared with the occupation of India, Africa, Indonesia and the Americas by small tribal kingdoms, like Spain, Portugal, France or the Netherlands, Belgium or Great Britain. These kingdoms and republics have supposedly withdrawn to their core principalities and liberated once subjugated peoples. Thus these states, which now constitute the EU, the Commonwealth and the USA, have attained the moral status entitling them to condemn other states for sins they committed and meanwhile allege to have confessed.
This is the general political context in which the empire of the West constitutes itself as the “international community” and the promulgator of “rules” those who are not part of this “community” are obliged to follow. Certainly there is a tiny, barely audible voice in that community that tries to assert the primacy of international law or the Law of Nations, as it was once known. Both the Russian Federation and the People’s Republic of China make every effort to remind the world that the Law of Nations, as opposed to the “rules-based” order is the genuine foundation of human civilization and commerce between states.
There are several clear reasons why these efforts have failed to date. First, the historic balance of political-economic forces, including military, had remained for the better part of the 20th century and into the 21st century in the hands of the barbarian West. (For readers who may wonder why I consistently use the term “barbarian”, let me say that it has been these countries, the collective West, that have constituted the most warlike and destructive forces on the planet for the past five hundred years, including the only state to have deployed atomic weapons.) Second, the control of nearly two thirds of the world’s land mass and the inhabitants of those areas has magnified the impact of the barbarian tribes reinforced by naval and air power developed to dominate those territories. This has had the effect of isolating the two huge Asian nations of Russia and China. Third, and probably most importantly, the West developed the most powerful psychic technology for conquest of hearts and minds throughout the planet. This technology is cultural, proprietary and above all religious.
Image: In this handout picture released by the U.S. Army, a mushroom cloud billows about one hour after a nuclear bomb was detonated above Hiroshima, Japan on Aug. 6, 1945. Japanese officials say a 93-year-old Japanese man has become the first person certified as a survivor of both U.S. atomic bombings at the end of World War II. City officials said Tsutomu Yamaguchi had already been a certified “hibakusha,” or radiation survivor, of the Aug. 9, 1945, atomic bombing in Nagasaki, but has now been confirmed as surviving the attack on Hiroshima three days earlier as well. (AP Photo/U.S. Army via Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, HO)
It is on this last aspect of Western barbarism that I will focus.
The Latin Church bequeathed to its semi-secular partners in conquest the technology of mission. Previously religion was based either on geography or ethnicity. There were no universal gods and monotheism was a rarity at best. Sigmund Freud offered an explanation for the latter in a late and brief essay called Moses and Monotheism (1939). However it is not his thesis that concerns me here. In the course of recorded history, to the extent we can rely on it, deities were confined to places and peoples. Travellers, even armies, brought their religions with them while paying due respect even homage to the deities they met on their travels and campaigns. Of course what this meant was that the sacred places of others were generally treated respectfully even if they did not coincide with one’s own religious worship. When people moved they either brought their own deities or adopted the ones they found in their new homes.
The establishment of cults based on a universal deity was the product of global imperial expansion. However it first only supported the imperial conquerors by granting that the local god now was free to accompany the soldiers of a marauding army far from its own cultural and ethnic community. The next stage of development was for the universal deity to be adopted by soldiers recruited from territories that had been invaded and conquered. This left the peoples dominated by military conquest possessed of their local and ethnic deities while integrating the foreign troops into an ideologically (religiously) uniform command structure.
When the Latin Church was founded by what was essentially a coup against Hellenistic Christianity based in the Balkans, Black Sea basin and Asia Minor, monotheism acquired a virulence inconsistent with what we know about original Christian praxis and aggressiveness which arguably triggered the militancy of Islam, too. That virulence and aggressiveness was disproportionate to the numbers actually following the Latin deviation. Yet within less than a thousand years this Christian deviation led to the global dominance of the business corporation and the missionary propaganda technology as means of psychological conquest independent of territorial occupation.
How Does Mission Really Work?
If one reads any of the standard histories describing the expansion of Christianity in the Western peninsula of Eurasia, the Americas or Africa, great attention is given to the preachers of the Gospel. In some narratives they travelled alone preaching—i.e. orally transmitting—from Scripture and working miracles—i.e. performing acts deemed supernatural or divinely supported. Then there were the preachers accompanying invading armies who not only preached to the soldiers but also construed the results of battle either as divine victories or punishing defeats. Hagiography, the stories of saints, is replete with accounts of wonders that led to conversion of princes and nations to the Holy Church. The precise mechanics of these conversions is generally omitted because it is expected that the readers already accept the divine attributes of the Church and the will of god to increase his flock.
However the core of the technology of conversion is already recognisable in the myth of Christ itself. In fact the true intent of this myth has been marvellously characterised by Jose Saramago in his scandalous novel The Gospel according to Jesus Christ (1991). In a dialogue between the god in question and Jesus of Nazareth, Saramago recounts how this god, aware of all the other competing gods and determined to be the top god, needs people to fight for him against the other gods. He explains to Jesus that people would not fight just for a god—but they would fight for him. Jesus is furious at this revelation and refuses to participate in the god’s plan for domination. The god replies that Jesus is powerless to resist. He can refuse to perform miracles but he will be unable to prove that he did not perform the miracles god stages.
Saramago uses this fable or interpretation of the Gospel to explain the dynamics of “victimhood”. The god sets up Jesus as an ordinary man who suddenly can perform miracles, which draw a following. Then he creates the conditions by which Jesus is persecuted and killed by the State. This galvanizes the cult around Jesus the miracle-worker. The cult angered by the murder of its divine leader seeks revenge. This it can only do by the threat of or use of armed force. To exact revenge it must align with those who have the necessary force and win them over to the cult. As members of the vengeful cult they are now in a position to exact revenge or alternatively conversion to the cult. It is this basic materialistic contradiction that fuels the cult’s expansion.
As a rule, and this can be found throughout the missionary activity of Western churches (the Latin Church and its reformed derivatives), local cults and their deities are not easily abandoned. First of all, under the conditions of ethnic or geographic religion there is no reason for an established ethnic group or the traditional inhabitants of a region to “change gods”. Sedentary peoples who remain together as tribes or occupy agricultural and pastoral regions for centuries do not “evolve” their religious beliefs into monotheism. This notion of monotheism as an evolutionary product is part of the 19thcentury myth of progress many associate with Charles Darwin and sociological followers of his historical interpretations.
As said before military expansion or nomadic barbarism are the social formations from which monotheism emerges as soon as territorial and population conquest require.
The expanding Latin Church overcame this inertia by the refinement of the “victimhood” and its transformation into a method of psychological warfare. The invading Church, let us call it the Church militant, sought and isolated minorities in the targets of conquest. These minorities had little or no power in the communities to which they were attached. Thus they were amenable to preaching—if for no other reason than the allied power to which they were then joined. The adoption of the cult by these minorities endowed them with “purity” compared to the complex majority communities with their geographic and ethnic deities, now viewed as corrupted and sullied by mundane practices. The pure status insinuated virtues proclaimed to be absent among the majority. Naturally in any established community there are various sources of discontent. No system functions perfectly. The longer any system has been in place the more incoherence is certain to have appeared. Hence the first tactic of the new “pure” is to find and recruit the discontented among the majority. It is not necessary that these discontents join the cult of the pure. In fact it may be detrimental to the overall strategy if they do.
What is important is the capacity of the discontents to be sacrificed for purity. They must be sufficiently dissatisfied that they will act in concert with the pure, wittingly or unwittingly. Here a number of options are possible but to keep it simple we will stick to the “Jesus model”. The potential “Jesus” has to be perceived as a member of the community as a whole. Then he has to articulate grievances that all but the most hard-core defenders of the status quo will admit—even if this admission has no immediate consequences. Then this “Jesus” has to be sacrificed. That means the “Jesus” has to conspicuously suffer and perhaps even die at the hands of the supporters of the status quo. This does not by itself trigger a revolt or overthrow of the prevailing system. In fact that is not the aim of this strategy. Instead it creates a breach in the perceived legitimation of the extant religion. That breach arises from the fear that the insignificant “Jesus” becomes more than exemplary of the threat to everyone else who harbours the doubts or critiques for which this “Jesus” was persecuted. A latent choice is introduced into an inertial system: align with the pure or risk punishment.
It is important to say that this only works when the pure already enjoy a preponderance of force, even if that force has not yet been applied. Therein lies the difference between missionary conversion and revolutionary mobilisation. For example it is also the fundamental difference between Maoism and “Sharpism”.
The Christianisation of the western hemisphere and Africa relied on this model. Sometimes this was simplified by the mass extermination of Western barbarian conquest, like in the Americas. Another argument used to explain the effect of missionary conquest is that the defeat of the besieged population on the battlefield discredited the extant religion and deities, leaving the survivors to convert to the “winning god”. However this argument is insufficient to explain conversion where no such massive battlefield annihilation occurred. Nor does it explain the continued success of the “Jesus” model without explicit armed force.
In this brief essay I would like to apply the “victimhood” or “Jesus” model and by implication its 20th century adaptation in the wake of the “second thirty years war” that was interrupted in 1945.[ii] For more than 30 years—to keep it simple starting in 1989—the world has been subject to an accelerated conversion or social engineering process, euphemistically called “globalisation”. The acceleration or metastasis was made possible by the defeat of the Soviet Union. Every history book one can find today will recount that the Soviet Union failed due to what might be called the errors of its underlying religion, i.e. Marxism-Leninism. Those with less antagonism toward that body of theory will argue that the Soviet Union was bankrupted into collapse. Then ridiculously sentimental will say that “communism failed because even communists realised it was wrong”.
An objective examination of the economic conditions of the two superpowers in 1989 would demonstrate that the Soviet Union did not collapse because it was bankrupt and its economy no longer able to function. The Soviet Union and its antagonist the United States were both in demonstrably ruinous economic condition. In fact the economic condition of the US never improved after 1989—only the FIRE sector did[iii]. Moreover there was no military defeat of the Soviet Union. The war started under President Jimmy Carter in Afghanistan was far shorter (for the Russians) than the thirty some years that the US waged war throughout Indochina. The Soviet Union had none of the debt the US accumulated carpet-bombing and murdering millions in Korea between 1950-53.
Three factors led to the collapse of the Soviet Union. The first was the accumulated damage done by a century of economic and armed war against the country.
US “experts” like George Kennan wrote accurately that it would take the Soviet Union at least twenty years to recover the lost population and economic capacity destroyed by the West’s German-led war against it. [iv] That was with all things being equal—which they were not. Despite the non-stop war against the Soviet Union the country was able to reach nearly its full pre-war capacity by the mid-1960s.
Scarcely a common source in the West explains that the occupation of Europe east of the rivers Elbe and Danube was conceded by the West to the Soviet Union in Yalta as an alternative to reparations from Germany. To the extent this is mentioned at all the excuse given was to prevent a situation arising like the one when the West drained Germany like a vampire after the 1918 armistice. The conditions at the end of World War 2 were quite different. Namely the Western “allies”, mainly the Americans, had encouraged the destruction or theft of every useful capital asset in what became the Soviet zone of occupation and the transfer of anything of future economic value to the West.
The subsequent, at first secret, re-arming of Germany under command of American and Nazi general officers and continued brain drain led to the erection of the fortified border between the Soviet zone and the rest of the Western peninsula. Thus the Soviet Union had to fortify and subsidize the countries ruined by the Wehrmacht campaigns while trying to reconstruct its own economy and restore the 20 million plus killed during World War 2. While the Soviet Union was working to recover a relatively weak status quo ante, the United States was able to expand its markets and power over the rest of the globe. Thus from 1945 until 1989 the United States economy was fuelled by the elimination of every other meaningful competitor whether it was for sales or purchases. It is worth noting—given the recent release of an atomic bomb hagiography called Oppenheim—that this weapon was devised under the leadership of rabid anti-communists/ anti-Soviets for use in wiping the Soviet Union off the face of the Earth after it was clear that the Wehrmacht had failed. At no time during World War 2 was Anglo-American aerial bombardment directed to support the Soviet Union’s self-defence. It was explicitly waged to destroy economic competitors to the British and American Empires.
The third factor was the missionary strategy. I have always found it bitterly amusing when Americans or the natives of the Western peninsula complain about Soviet (or Chinese) propaganda. The first thing I ask them is how much Russian or Chinese they have learned? Then I ask if they can name a Russian or Chinese pop musician or film star or what Chinese or Russian clothing items they most prefer? The only food and drink they can associate with Russia are vodka and caviar. How effective could their propaganda be?
Coca Cola and Pepsi (thanks to negotiations by Richard Nixon on behalf of his friends) are known throughout the world and were imported or bottled in the Soviet Union. Denim trousers (Levis) were coveted goods from Magdeburg to Vladivostok. Despite technical countermeasures there was little that could be done to suppress the vast global propaganda machine combining films, music, and consumer goods of every kind. This all served to amplify the ideology of consumerism as a pure form of economic and social well being. This pure form—available only to the “middle class” countries on any scale—was presented and seen everywhere as the virtue which a struggling economy and political system was expected to produce for young people. There was no question of converting the heroes of the Soviet Union, the survivors of the civil war and non-stop foreign invasions since 1918.
However the young, the desperately needed replacements to rebuild the Soviet Union, could not simply be inculcated in the moral sacrifices of their parents and grandparents. There had to be space and a future for these people. The capacity to compete for the hearts and minds of the generations that by 1989 had no immediate recollection of the Great Patriotic War was not only challenged within the Soviet Union but throughout the countries it had occupied since 1945. These countries, especially the GDR, Hungary and Poland, were able to benefit from overt and covert support from the West. Moreover there had been an intensive and to date still largely unacknowledged level of penetration and sabotage under the guise of technology transfer agreements that in the final years weakened the system considerably. Defective control technology for industrial infrastructure led to serious destruction of pipelines.[v] It takes no fantasy to imagine that intentionally defective control components—merely improperly calibrated meters would have done the trick—led to the Chernobyl meltdown.
The Helsinki Accords (1975), still considered naively as an important step toward peace, were a major propaganda victory for the West. Despite the creation of NGOs in the West, the only governments consistently subjected to its conditions were those in the “Soviet bloc”. By treating the conflict between the US and the USSR as competition when in fact it was covert aggression by the United States, every international treaty presented the US as the generous human rights and peace defender and the Soviet Union as conceding its power both domestically and abroad. To this day there is no general admission in the West that no later than 1945, it was the US that waged non-stop war against the Soviet Union, making all these treaties essentially acts of extortion against the country and its people all of whom were aware of the US first strike and second strike atomic warfare strategy and what it would mean for any reconstruction and development.
By the time a wholly compromised Mikhail Gorbachev gave his country to the US raiders under Yeltsin, the moral legitimacy of the Soviet Union had been so seriously undermined that no party or military effort could rescue it from the locust swarms that devastated the country after 1990. With the borders open, the government in disgrace, and the youth able to join what they thought would be the saving purity of the cult held back for seventy years, the potential for converts was enormous. The cost was immeasurable. Only with the election of Vladimir Putin did the bleeding stop.
The conversion of the Soviet Union into the neo-liberal Russian Federation was made possible not by some catastrophic failure of Marxism – Leninism or even the inadequacy of the CPSU government. It was accomplished by 44 continuous years of covert war against a country struggling to recover from the previous decades of war waged against it. It may be added that Russia has always had a conflict between its Russian (Slavic Orthodox) and its Francophile/ Anglophile partisans.[vi] The October Revolution did not overcome this contradiction. Before 1917 there were also factions that believed that the Russian economy should rely on Germany, France and Britain for its industrial products and export its raw materials (like any third world country). Lenin’s vision for the October Revolution was to transform Russia into a self-sufficient industrialised nation capable of using its own resources for development. As a result the conflicts in revolutionary Russia were very much like those that persisted in the so-called Third World where leaders like Nkrumah wanted national electrification to make the country capable of producing and exporting aluminium for hard cash instead of just cheap bauxite for peanuts. The Generalplan Ost was not just an expression of Hitler’s attitude toward the Soviet Union but also the West’s plans that had been frustrated by Stalin’s “socialism in one country”, so poorly understood by ultraorthodox Marxists in the West. Altogether then the constant war, covert, diplomatic and economic waged against the Soviet Union, directly and through the Comecon states, combined with the global propaganda campaign directed at the vulnerable youth to undermine the last pillars of an independent Soviet Union. And for the Russian Federation the war is far from over.
The Woke and the Dead
Just as the war against Russia did not end with the destruction of the Soviet Union, the war against humanism, whether liberal or Marxist, has continued. No one doubts that the end of the Soviet Union also meant that the independence struggles that began in earnest and seemed promising until 1975 were going to be reversed wherever possible. Absent the military or diplomatic challenge from Moscow or Beijing, every liberation movement that was not subdued was forced to reach a neo-liberal compromise to avoid being neutralised. While the US economy was just as much in tatters as that of the Soviet Union, the US could use the IMF, World Bank, and UN (also NATO) to transfer the costs to Rest of World. That was an option always unavailable to Moscow.
However the unimaginable concentration of wealth that has continued since 1989 would have to consume what was left of the US economy too. The Chinese strategy for accelerated industrialisation using what was essentially a modified treaty port system permitted the Anglo-American financial oligarchy to relocate all its meaningful industrial capacity—whatever had not already been moved to Indonesia or some other client state—to China.[vii] This deindustrialisation—following the British model—left the US with only one industry of any size: weapons systems.[viii] The steady impoverishment of the US since the 1970s has always been concealed behind a wall of credit cards and second mortgages. Thus the illusory American standard of living is maintained by charging the difference between 1973 salaries and 2023 prices. Already by the time the Bush-Clinton dynasty obtained control over the presidency and the electoral machinery to deliver congressional majorities, popular resistance was growing. Initially deceived by the Reagan-Thatcher shell games, the inability to continue debt payments and the rising cost of everything, aggravated by massive privatization in a system already dominated by business corporations, were pushing increasing numbers of conservative, church-going, Americans into opposition to what they identified as the status quo.
This presented a serious problem for the country’s ruling oligarchy. It was the Christian, moral majority that had put Ronald Reagan in the White House. Despite wars initiated by both Bush presidents and Clinton to stir that majority’s patriotic fervour, both the wars’ failures and the fallout in terms of major wealth transfers and obvious corruption were threatening to alienate that core upon which the nation’s owners depend for consent. A revolt in the Republican rank and file, also known as the Tea Party, not only articulated some of this resentment but also led to upsets in the previously comfortable GOP election machinery. Attempts were made to stigmatise the Tea Party as a fanatical right-wing minority. In fact it looked for a while like some self-appointed Tea Party leaders in the Establishment would perform some rhetorical moves and vent the steam that threatened to dislodge the mainline Republican Party.
This appeared to work until out of the “red”, the New York City real estate mogul, Donald Trump won the Republican nomination for the 2016 general elections.[ix] Worst of all, Donald Trump won the election, soundly defeating the anointed successor from the Bush-Clinton gang. It should be remembered this implosion was delayed by the CIA’s invention of Barack Obama as a candidate to defuse all the opposition to George W Bush. Obama had dutifully served/ saved the financial oligarchy when its massive financial derivatives scam collapsed in 2008. Together with Hillary Clinton, Obama kept the US at war for eight years so that the patriotic majority had to swallow its antipathy to the polyester POTUS.
The panic that ensued among the Establishment was clearly not really aimed at Trump, since his personality and ignorance of the bureaucratic system he was entering posed no immediate threat. Rather it was the conservative, populist core that his election empowered which the Establishment had to check. For the better part of a century this majority of the population could be relied upon to support the Establishment in the cause of anti-communism. However after 1989 this cry was inconsistent with the proclamation that the West had won and communism along with the evil Soviet Union had been destroyed. A new strategy was needed.
Until the Six Day War (1967) not much attention had been paid to Israel and certainly nothing significant to the forced labour, slave labour and mass murder perpetuated in Germany and those territories it had occupied during the Second World War.[x]Obvious reasons included the need to avoid shining the light on perpetrators the US had installed in West Germany or in cushy jobs stateside; the need to focus attention on the evils of the Soviet Union, and more subtly because the massive death toll of the Soviet Union alone would have tarnished the on-going campaigns to destroy it. With the Israel attack of Egypt, a relatively benign public opinion was at risk of turning into outright hostility toward the Euro-Zionist colony under British administration in Palestine that had declared itself the State of Israel in 1948. Israel not only launched surprise attacks but also occupied territory in every direction more than doubling the area under its control.
In the wake of this public relations disaster, a campaign, which became massive in scope and continues to this day, resurrected the stories and history of the Second World War and retold it as the war by Germany to exterminate world Jewry and the centre of this war, “the holocaust” was the mass murder of an estimated six million Jews in concentration camps run by the German Nazi regime. Since the Second World War had been fought to defend Jews from extermination, Israel could not be blamed even for pre-emptive measures since these all served to prevent another “holocaust”. The fact that even were one certain of the numbers of deaths and could be convinced by data, the figure of six million pales in comparison to the twenty plus million killed in the Soviet Union alone and another twenty million that died in China during the war. So without diminishing any deaths whether due to slave labour or mass murder, the re-writing of the history of World War 2 as the prologue to the foundation of Israel required heavy-duty propaganda and convincing political force. All of this was brought to bear. The scope of distortion and outright mendacity needed to establish the state of Israel as the “Victim” par excellence and its Jewish citizens, living and dead, as the ultimate victims, have been treated extensively elsewhere. The point here is that this is probably the greatest example of the “victim” strategy for social engineering since the “Jesus” strategy as deployed by the Latin Church.
The structural analogy I propose is as follows: It is not sufficient that there is a victim, this victim must be chosen; must be the ultimate victim. This victimhood also means that the victim is the embodiment of purity in comparison to which all other victims are imperfect or not victims at all. A veritable hierarchy of victims follows with the chosen victim at the top. This victim is entitled to reverence, even adoration, and the victims purity must be defended absolutely. The cult of this victim endows the true believers with the charisma of purity—even if they are not in fact pure in any meaningful sense. The cult then reaches into the majority of the impure from which it recruits or implicates those either aspirant to purity or touched by the guilt of the “impure”. Together these two elements when combined with material force, whether political, economic, military or combinations thereof, create a minority of the pure positioned to defend purity and the victimhood even from imputed threats by the majority who are by definition impure or victims of lower status. The aim of this strategy is to subjugate an indigenous majority by creation of a morally pure and hence powerful minority. This minority cannot show the physical force upon which its attack relies without creating a majority reaction that could repel it. The moral-psychological power is expressed through the implication of guilt or sympathy among unorganised members of the majority who in dispersion seek confirmation of their moral position. Thus latent outliers may work to strengthen the minority assault or undermine any emerging consensus to defend the indigenous culture.
This is essentially pre-emptive counter-insurgency. That is why Gene Sharp was so interested in dissecting national liberation movements. He wanted to know how to re-engineer them to oppose mass movements. Before he published his infamous From Dictatorship to Democracy he published a study for the US Department of Defense on how to create popular forces that would effectively combat national liberation struggles by imitating them.[xi]
By 1975 the national liberation movements in all of the countries in the Western Empire had been either subdued or compromised. Their radical leaders, including those in the US, were murdered or driven underground. In their place came the civilian defence organisations Sharp had conceived now in the form of NGOs.[xii] These became the seeds for so-called astro-turf grassroots movements, collectively called “civil society”. Civil society replaced the mass movements with qualified experts able to promote agendas in the system. What that meant in fact was that mass politics and struggle were replaced by political management conducted by cadres modelled on Sharp’s understanding of the political commissar. Key positions were filled with the members of movements who could be rewarded after their unfortunate leaders had been eliminated. With time civil society became a career path for academically trained managers in social engineering. The financial support of the oligarchy either directly or through various conduits compounded with access to all the Establishment media outlets, not least of which are the educational institutions, would raise civil society to the supreme force for articulating purity and victimhood. Civil society became the cover for the merger of missionary technology and brute economic, political and military force in a world where the ecclesiastical model had become a vehicle for the popular movements, e,g, in the 80s liberation theology and in the 90s Christian revivalism. The papacy had succeeded in crushing the mass movements’ efforts to use the Church for the liberation struggle.[xiii] However there was no such central force capable of subduing the Protestant denominations. Although Pentecostalism had been very effective in Latin America for neutralising the popular church, the US was a far more complicated terrain than the Catholic countries.[xiv] Scandals had decimated the most reliable agents in the Fundamentalist movement already in the late 1980s.[xv]
This was the challenge that gave rise to the Fourth Awakening—or Woke, a tasteless appropriation of an expression from Black American dialect meaning “aware”.
The term awakening is more appropriate because Woke is really another crusade.
Awakenings were the Protestant equivalents of the Catholic Crusades, usually in someway also just as fanatical and bloody as well as profitable for the promoters.[xvi] Following the model applied after the Six Day War and working from the basis of Gene Sharp’s NGO-based counter-insurgency strategy, the Establishment through its extensive control over all mass media and educational institutions accelerated the moral campaign to create a movement of purity and victimhood to be directed against the core working class population of the United States and other middle class countries in the empire. By appropriating the academically modified liberation jargon developed in the university and NGO labs, armed propaganda units like BLM and Antifa could be deployed in ways that thirty years ago would have been prosecuted as communist terrorism. This use of reconstituted liberation jargon was calculated to antagonise the majority as well as trigger reactions which moderately critical or liberal members of the majority would find difficult to defend.
This counter-insurgency campaign is being waged by the civil society cadre organisations and the kind of armed propaganda units conceived in the CIA’s Phoenix Program for Southeast Asia during the wars against Vietnam and subsequent wars in Central America.[xvii] The difference is that since the target is the conservative, patriotic majority, the language has to be that of the movements they had been indoctrinated to oppose since 1945. Combined with the very real corporate power behind this “moral minority” or pure (vicarious) victims and the effective use of legislation and police power (or its absence), the Woke Crusade aims to divide the majority of the American population, not only whites since conservative Christianity is foundational among Blacks and Latinos too. The Woke crusade is a carefully synthesised missionary project to completely re-engineer the conditions under which the vast majority of American citizens live in the mistaken (and insincere) belief that this serves social justice. This war against popular majorities is not limited to the United States. It is being waged throughout what was once called Christendom. In fact that is why it is so effective thus far—it is derived from the modus operandi of the institution upon which all Christendom was based.
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Notes
[i] Church Clothes: Land, Mission and the End of Apartheid in South Africa (2004)
[ii] The comparison of the wars between 1914 and 1945 with the Thirty Years War (ended with the Peace of Westphalia in 1648) was made by Sigmund Neumann, The Future in Perspective (1946)
[iii] FIRE = Finance, Insurance and Real Estate
[iv] George Kennan’s assessments also formed the basis of the NSC 68, adopted as the framework for the massive post-war rearmament prior to the US invasion of Korea. For a detailed discussion see Bruce Cumings The Origins of the Korean War, especially Vol. II.
[v] In the documentary Deception – Reagan’s Method (2014) Dirk Pohlman interviewed at least one retired US official who stated defective technology was deliberately delivered to the Soviet Union resulting in major industrial sabotage. This was only one aspect of the covert war leading to the collapse of the GDR and the Soviet Union.
[vi] This conflict is an important theme in the works of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky.
[vii] For discussions of these policies under Deng Xiaoping, see among others, William Hinton, The Great Reversal: The Privatization of China 1978-1989 (1989), Michel Chossudovsky, China: Towards Capitalist Restoration? (1986).
[viii] Adam Curtis graphically describes the British post-war deindustrialisation and privatisation of foreign policy (weapons sales) in his BBC documentary The Mayfair Set (1999)
[ix] The US states that supported Republicans, especially Trump have been called „red states“ as opposed to the „blue states“ that vote Democratic.
[x] This and related aspects of the „holocaust industry“ are the subjects of research by Normal Finkelstein, The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering (2000). No claim is made here that he would share my assessment.
[xi] National Security through Civilian-Based Defense (1970)
[xii] The term „non-governmental organisations“, NGOs, is deceptively ambiguous. Literally these are organisations that are not „governmental“. That suggests that such an organisation is private and independent of government. However what constitutes „governmental“ is in fact ambiguous. If such an organisation was created by a government; its key officers are appointed by a government and the core funding comes from such government, then the mere fact that the entity is created under private law is spurious ground for calling it non-governmental. In fact the term is intended to distract from the substance of these organisations and create the impression of independence needed to maintain the fiction of „civil society“. Here it is more appropriate to call this a special case of the “corporate veil”, a concept to conceal liability.
[xiii] Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, later Pope Benedict VI, led these attacks against Catholic clerics and theologians, like the Boffs in Brazil and anyone identified with the Sandinistas in Nicaragua or with other popular church movements, in his capacity as head of the Holy Office (the successor to the Inquisition). During his war against heresy Salvadoran bishop Oscar Romero was murdered while saying mass. The assassins were not even threatened with excommunication.
[xiv] Gerard Colby and Charlotte Dennett, Thy Will Be Done: The Conquest of the Amazon: Nelson Rockefeller and Evangelism in the Age of Oil (1996).
[xv] The names Falwell, Baker and Robertson were among the most prominent among the so-called televangalists.
[xvi] The first Great Awakening began in the 1730s. The second is dated from the end of the 18th century into the early 19th. The third led into the American Civil War. Depending on whether one counts the religious movement that roughly coincided with the Second Vatican Council (late 1960s) as the fourth, the Woke crusade can also be counted as the Fifth Awakening.
[xvii] Douglas Valentine, The Phoenix Program (1990), the definitive elaboration of the program based on Valentine’s in-depth interviews with the key players and independent research.
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