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The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), famed for its hidden agendas and its preference to operate in the shadows, has featured in a couple of recent breaking stories. On July 22^nd the White House announced that CIA Director William Burns would be stepping up to cabinet level in the Joe Biden Administration. That means that beyond being in theory a principal government source for reliable information that can be used to make policy, he would himself become a policy maker, co-equal with Secretary of State Antony Blinken, National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin. Though the gesture is largely symbolic and creates some bureaucratic scrambling of roles and functions, it is not unprecedented. President Ronald Reagan included his CIA Director and close friend William Casey in the cabinet and the inevitable Bill Clinton elevated no less than two Directors, John Deutch and George Tenet.

Interestingly, of the four cabinet level CIA Directors, only Casey was an experienced intelligence officer, having served in the OSS during the Second World War and he became a controversial director who was inclined to support unnecessarily risky operations, particularly in Latin America. Deutch was something like a professional bureaucrat, having worked at the Pentagon before moving on to the Agency. He left CIA after little more than a year in office in December 1996 and it was subsequently learned that he had been keeping classified material on his own laptop computer, which appears to be a Democratic Party trait. Bill Clinton pardoned him before he could be prosecuted for failing to protect classified information. Tenet was a congressional staffer before becoming Director and he, of course, gifted the American people with the massive intelligence failure known as the Iraq War.

Burns likewise is a career diplomat, not a spy, and the two roles are very different, though perhaps not to Joe Biden and whoever is pulling his strings. At the beginning of his administration, Biden engaged Burns as his global trouble shooter—a man with a title and credentials that enabled him to communicate confidentially with foreign leaders outside of normal diplomatic channels. His role was to bridge the important space between overt and covert and to deal with national security from a civilian perspective. This has resulted in travel back and forth from Washington to foreign capitals, most recently involving Ukraine and Russia, where Burns once served as the US Ambassador.

Burns and the president reportedly have met frequently and Burns has been particularly influential on Biden decision-making as it relates to Ukraine. The CIA and National Security Agency (NSA) had been using satellites and communications intercepts to monitor Russia’s military buildup near the border with Ukraine and in November 2021, three months before the actual invasion, Biden sent Burns on a low-keyed trip to Moscow to warn the Kremlin of the possible consequences of any attack. Russia responded that the bid for Ukraine to join NATO plus the aggression against the ethnically Russian Donbas region of Ukraine were red lines, but no one in Washington was listening.

The elevation of Burns has a considerable potential downside as it muddles responsibilities and roles in the government. The CIA exists to provide information that is hopefully reliable to enable policy makers to understand and respond sensibly to complex situations involving foreign governments. To make sure that intelligence and policy are not self-validating, the Agency traditionally limits collaborative contact between the case officers who collect the information in the field and the analysts who produce the finished reports that go to policy makers. That the Director of CIA is now both providing intelligence while also participating in discussions of the appropriate responses runs the risk of the intelligence itself being tainted by policy considerations. The dual role will also subtly impact on the Agency’s perspectives and priorities. In other words, there will be a tendency to shape the intelligence based on White House, State Department and Pentagon expectations, which might themselves be distorted due to purely partisan political considerations. What this means is that if the Administration wants a war with Russia, someone like Burns will possibly cull and shape the information to deliver just that.

The move regarding Burns should come as a surprise to no one as Joe Biden has a clear tendency to surround himself with “yes” men and women rather than knowledgeable managers and leaders. Burns has, in fact, been an enthusiastic cheerleader for the war, often contradicting reports that it is going very badly for Ukraine. And hold on, there is yet another story circulating about the CIA and it also involves William Burns, who has commented how he sees a great opportunity to recruit Russian spies given the turmoil that he thinks prevails in Moscow in the wake of the alleged Yevgeny Prigozhin “mutiny.”

At a lecture at the Ditchley Foundation in London on July 1^st, Burns stated that

“Disaffection with the war will continue to gnaw away at the Russian leadership, beneath the steady diet of state propaganda and practiced repression. That disaffection creates a once-in-a-generation opportunity for us at CIA, at our core a human intelligence service. We’re not letting it go to waste. We recently used social media — our first video post to Telegram, in fact — to let brave Russians know how to contact us safely on the dark web. We had 2.5 million views in the first week, and we’re very much open for business.”

Burns was referring to a slickly produced, cinematic recruitment video that appeared online in the middle of May entitled, “Why I contacted the CIA: My decision,” which shows individual Russians making the choice to contact the Agency. CIA’s material was posted initially on a channel on Telegram, the social media network that is believed to be a highly popular source of unfiltered news in Russia. The video, in Russian, incorporates instructions on how to get in touch with the CIA anonymously and securely. The video has also been picked up by other social media platforms, including YouTube, Twitter, Instagram and Facebook.

The project comes after a previous recruitment drive following the launch of the invasion of Ukraine that CIA officials have claimed to be successful, with “contact coming in.” Which, of course, might be a lie. There are also reportedly several Russian-produced comical versions lampooning the video. The video itself may or may not be having an impact on Russians who are concerned about Ukraine, but Burns’s revelation of what the Agency is doing to recruit Russians demonstrates that he is no intelligence officer. And the video itself is more Hollywood than Langley as revealing one’s intentions and activities to a targeted adversary is bad tradecraft, to put it mildly, as it reveals “sources and methods,” a capital offense in the spy business. Also, the conditions that bred pre-1991 Soviet era defectors no longer exist as Putin is undeniably popular and the disparities between life in Russia and life in the west, both in terms of materialism and personal liberties, are currently barely noticeable.

Russia Today (RT), the state-owned media outlet, also reports that the CIA is stepping up its on-the-ground efforts to recruit the presumably unhappy Russians. Relying on coverage of a recent “CIA at 75” event held at George Mason University in Virginia, RT quotes the Agency’s Deputy Director for Operations David Marlowe, who told a “select audience” that CIA officers abroad have recently been engaged in a major effort to exploit “fertile ground” to recruit Russian agents from “among disgruntled military officers, oligarchs who have seen their fortunes thinned by sanctions, and businesspeople and others who have fled the country.”

Marlowe elaborated how it works, saying “We’re looking around the world for Russians who are as disgusted with [the conflict in Ukraine] as we are.” Marlowe then used the slogan that Burns used in England “…Because we’re open for business.” The Russian government has in fact denounced what appear to be several overt attempts to recruit its remaining diplomats and military attaches in Europe and the US using what are referred to as “cold pitches,” where someone approaches a target on the street or in a social setting and offers money or other inducements in return for information. Russian reports indicate that American officers have been hanging around Russian Embassies passing out to those leaving or entering the building cards with phone numbers to contact the FBI and CIA.

Inevitably, cold pitches very rarely work because even if the target were so inclined, he or she would have to consider the possibility that his or her own loyalty was being tested by the agency that he or she works for. In fact, the comments by Burns and the CIA video will likely reduce the possibility that some Russian official thinking of defecting will do so. The Russian government, angered by the crude overt attempts to have its citizens commit treason, will be watching more closely its employees who have access to highly sensitive information and they will also be increasing the surveillance of the movements of foreign diplomat-spies in Moscow and elsewhere. That makes a Director of Central Intelligence speaking out about what he is up to combined with videos making crude proposals a losing proposition if one is seriously interested in penetrating the security surrounding an adversary.

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This article was originally published on The Unz Review.

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

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Acting Deputy Secretary of State Victoria Nuland of “EuroMaidan” infamy traveled to Niger to hold discussions with its interim military-led government after the expiry of ECOWAS’ one-week deadline for reinstalling ousted President Mohamed Bazoum. A regional war is looming over West Africa in the event that this NATO-backed bloc invades like it earlier threatened and/or that country’s former French colonizer acts unilaterally, which is why it’s important to analyze what she revealed about her trip there.

Her special briefing to the press began with platitudes about restoring Niger’s constitutional order following the patriotic military coup last month and then referenced the aid that the US would be legally obliged to cut off if this doesn’t happen. Nuland then mentioned that she also met with “a broad cross-section of Nigerien civil society.  These are long-time friends of the United States. They are journalists.  They are democratic activists. They are human rights activists.”

Considering her role in Ukraine’s Color Revolution that ultimately led to the ongoing NATO-Russian proxy war in that country, it’s reasonable to suspect that she might have signaled to these civil society forces that the US supports them initiating large-scale and riotous protests against the military authorities. This scenario could unfold either in lieu of a NATO-backed and possibly French-supported Nigerian-led ECOWAS invasion of Niger, as a pretext for publicly justifying the aforesaid, or during such an invasion.

Nevertheless, that doesn’t appear to have been the main reason for her trip since such signals could more conveniently and securely be sent to those forces remotely without a top US diplomatic official having to do so directly in-person, but this still can’t be ruled out. Moving along, Nuland then disclosed that her discussions

“with the self-proclaimed chief of defense of this operation, General Barmou, and three of the colonels supporting him…were extremely frank and at times quite difficult”.

She explained that this was because “we were pushing for a negotiated solution”, which could either be an insincere effort designed to get the Nigerien military’s guard down ahead of the potentially imminent destabilization scenarios that were just described or might actually be the US’ preferred way forward. The first possibility is plausible owing to the Ukrainian precedent, while the second might be due to fears that a wider regional war could go awry and eventually create space for Russia to expand its influence.  

The next part of her briefing was very interesting. She said that she wasn’t allowed to see Bazoum despite talking to him on the phone and also wasn’t permitted to meet interim President General Abdourahamane Tiani. Keeping her away from Bazoum could have been meant to retain some ambiguity about his status so as to deter the earlier mentioned destabilization scenarios while also reaffirming President Tiani’s legitimacy, whereas the latter’s refusal to meet Nuland was a deliberate snub.  

She then said that

“I hope they will keep the door open to diplomacy. We made that proposal. We’ll see. As I said, they have their own ideas about how this goes forward. They do not – their ideas do not comport with the constitution, and that will be difficult in terms of our relationship if that’s the path they take. But we gave them a number of options to keep talking and we hope they take us up on it.”

Simply put, the interim military-led government isn’t backing down despite this jeopardizing ties with the US.

Another intriguing detail that was revealed during her briefing is that

“General Barmou, former Colonel Barmou, is somebody who has worked very closely with U.S. Special Forces over many, many years. So we were able to go through in considerable detail the risks to aspects of our cooperation that he has historically cared about a lot.”

It’s remarkable that a close US military ally ended up participating in the overthrow of his US-backed leader, became the new defense chief, and then didn’t back down.

This shows that even those high-ranking foreign military officials who closely cooperate with some of the US’ best-trained forces “over many, many years” don’t always become its puppets, which suggests that other similarly positioned officials elsewhere across Africa might follow in General Barmou’s footsteps. It can therefore no longer be taken for granted that the US’ foreign military programs successfully lead to the cultivation of elite proxies. They sometimes backfire as proven by this particular case.  

Near the end of her briefing, Nuland answered two questions about Wagner and Russia in the following way:

“Of course I raised the – Wagner and its threat to those countries where it is present, reminding them that security gets worse, that human rights get worse when Wagner enters. I would not say that we learned much more about their thinking on that front.

…

With regard to Wagner, you will have seen some boasting by Prigozhin in St. Petersburg. I will say that I got the sense in my meetings today that the people who have taken this action here understand very well the risks to their sovereignty when Wagner is invited in.”

These statements are obviously contradictory, so she either got confused or is lying in one of her answers.

Regardless of the signals that the interim military-led government might have sent to Nuland pertaining to speculation that it might request Wagner’s “DemocraticSecurity” services, it would have likely been meant for deterrence purposes. Entertaining this scenario could hint that the US risks losing even more of its influence if it doesn’t stop a regional war from breaking out, while downplaying it could be intended to convince the US that it shouldn’t overreact to the consequences of the coup.

Altogether, the top takeaways from Nuland’s trip are that: the US is making a public effort of dubious sincerity to show the world that it doesn’t want a regional war; her meeting with Nigerien civil society means that a Color Revolution can’t be ruled out; the interim military-led government isn’t backing down despite its new defense chief being a close years-long partner of the Pentagon; and its envisaged post-coup relations with Russia and Wagner remain unclear.

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This article was originally published on Andrew Korybko’s Newsletter.

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

He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from the author

Since the publication of this article pertaining to the ICC Arrest Warrant directed against President Putin, NATO’s Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg has confirmed (on behalf of NATO) that the “war didn’t start in 2022”. 

In an interview with the Washington Post, Stoltenberg  stated that “the war started in 2014″. In so doing he tacitly admits that it was not Russia which took the decision to declare war on Ukraine on February 24, 2022.

 

.

.

Lee Hockstader, Washington Post Editorial Board: How has the war led NATO to recalibrate its defense posture and doctrine? 

What this admission by Jens Stoltenberg confirms is that the Ukraine war commenced in the immediate wake of the US sponsored illegal February 2014 EuroMaidan Coup d’Etat which was conducive to the installation of a Neo-Nazi regime in Kiev. The legal implications of Stoltenberg’s admission are far-reaching.

First it implies that NATO entered the war following a “regime change” (Victoria Nuland and US Ambassador Pyatt) in which the U.S. was directly involved in consultation with NATO.

Since February 2014, Ukraine artillery and missile bombardments of Donbass have resulted in more than 14,000 deaths of civilians, including children.

Stoltenberg’s admission that the war started in 2014 would have required that from the very outset in February  2014 the warring parties abide by the Four Basic Principles of  The Law of Armed Conflict (LOAC) which consists in:

“….respect for and protection of the civilian population and civilian objects, the Parties to the conflict shall at all times distinguish between the civilian population and combatants and between civilian objects and military objectives and accordingly shall direct their operations only against military objectives.” [Additional Protocol 1, Article 48]

Civilian population (children) and civilian objects (schools, hospitals, residential areas) were the deliberate object of UAF and Azov Battalion attacks in blatant violation of the Law of Armed Conflict (LOAC). 

In accordance with the LOAC, Moscow took the decision starting in February 2014 to come to the rescue of Donbass civilians including children.

Visibly the president of the I.C.C. Piotr Hofmanski in accusing President Putin of “unlawful kidnapping of Ukrainian children” hasn’t the foggiest understanding of Article 48. of the Law of Armed Conflict (LOAC). Is this an issue of incompetence? Or has Piotr Hofmanski been co-opted into endorsing crimes against humanity? 

Michel Chossudovsky, Global Research, August 8, 2023

 

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The International Criminal Court (ICC) has issued arrest warrants for President Vladimir Putin and his Children’s Rights commissioner, Maria Lvova-Belova, over the alleged “unlawful kidnapping of Ukrainian children’.  According to the I.C.C: 

“there are reasonable grounds to believe that each suspect bears responsibility for the war crime of unlawful deportation of population and that of unlawful transfer of population from occupied areas of Ukraine to the Russian Federation, in prejudice of Ukrainian children.”  (emphasis added)

The I.C.C. accusation directed against Vladimir Putin of “kidnapping” or “deportation” of Ukrainian children borders on ridicule.

The president of the I.C.C. Piotr Hofmanski (see below) refers to the Geneva Convention, without the foggiest  understanding of the rights of civilians in a war zone.

The Azov Battalion as well as Ukrainian forces have routinely bombed civilians in Donbass since 2014. The I.C.C. fails to acknowledge that killing children in a war zone is a crime against humanity. 

Swastika, Azov Battalion’s SS Wolfsangel symbol, NATO Flag (Right to Left)

These are the Nazi terrorists who are killing children in Donbass. Their legitimacy is tacitly upheld by the I.C.C. They are generously funded by the “International Community”. 

The Nazi SS Wolfsangel symbol 

The war did not start in February 2022. Since 2014, Donbass residential neighbourhoods, schools, hospitals, ambulances, etc. have been routinely targeted. From the 2014 Euromaidan and the US sponsored Coup d’Etat to February 2022, up to 14,000 Donbass residents have been killed. 

Bombing of schools: It’s terrorism instigated by Kiev against Ukrainian Children.

What is the truth? What is the lie?

Thousands of children were killed by the Neo-Nazi Azov Battalion (which is supported by US-NATO). 

Fleeing the war zone to save your children is tagged by the I.C.C. as “deportation”.

The people of Donbass have been under constant shelling for nearly a decade now and they don’t even duck when hearing incoming shells and rockets.

Children born in the besieged region don’t know what peace is. For them, shells hitting their homes is a “normal”, regular occurrence.

They never got the chance to see anything else. (Drago Bosnic, June 1, 2022, emphasis added)

Starting in 2014, thousands of Donbass families including children were provided safe haven in Russia, as part of a humanitarian initiative under the auspices of  Moscow’s Ministry of Emergency Situations.

Russian families have welcomed them and provided assistance.

Many of the children who were provided safe haven in Russia are orphans whose parents were killed by the Azov Battalion.

And this is categorized by the I.C.C. and the mainstream media as the “kidnapping of children” by the President of the Russian Federation. What absolute nonsense. It’s not only “nonsense”, it’s the  “criminalization of mainstream media”.

Video: A Russian Youth Camp categorized as War Crimes against Children

Who are The War Criminals

The I.C.C. has carefully turned a blind eye to the endless war crimes committed by US-NATO. Millions of civilians killed, not to mention Tony Blair and GWB’s illegal invasion of Iraq in March 2003, Twenty Years Ago. 

Donbass. Humanitarian Endeavor or “War Crimes”?

Russia’s initiative in support of Donbass civilians has been ongoing since the outset in 2014. Thousands of lives have been saved. 

It started in Rostov on the Don ( about 100 km from the border with Ukraine, see map below) which had established facilities starting in 2014 to assist the people of Donesk and Luhansk.

 

The following June 12, 2014 report provides details on what is depicted by the I.C.C and the media as the “kidnapping of children”:

One can see how the Rostov region [June 2014] is gradually turning into an area neighboring the combat zone. Thousands of refugees cross the border fleeing the territory of Donetsk People’s Republic. It becomes clear we face a serious disaster with grave consequences to follow. On June 4 [2014], Vassily Golubev, the Rostov region governor, declared emergency in 15 border areas.

According to regional authorities, 995 Ukrainians including 489 children, found refuge in the region as of June 6. 2014.

The flow increased the following days. The recent report [June 2014] says 7335 Ukrainian citizens entered the Rostov region while 4272 left. A local source informed that there were 2102 people, 930 children, given refuge in 15 municipal districts.  About half of the refugees were given accommodation by local people while  many of  them are living in tents.

It was my job to take care of refugees – or potential refugees – from Donbass. The people from Ukrainian Lugansk region also go to the office of unrecognized Donetsk People’s Republic to ask for help. We do our best, but it’s not that easy.  We help the refugees from the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics to cross the border and we temporarily accommodate them but the resources are scarce.

We should admit that the local branches of Russia’s Ministry of Emergency Situations are doing a perfect job. Still the problems are plentiful. The refugee’s legal status is to be defined. Are they foreigners? Immigrants compelled to change the place of residence?  They never know what is in store for them and how long they are going to stay in Russia.  The tragedy is immense. Summer will fly away soon. It’ll become colder. What next?

They tell a lot of things media outlets never report, especially war stories. A former special operations officer saving the children from shells, 17 year old boys on barricades defending the Donbass populated areas from Ukrainian tanks.

The people in Rostov and other Russian cities call and send letters and e-mails offering help.

Time will pass and many things will be obliterated.

But these unobtrusive people ready to act like heroes will always stay in memory.

What is happening on the territory of Donbass declared a combat zone by Kiev where it conducts its “anti-terrorist operation”?  There is a large concentration of Ukrainian troops there.  …

The Azov Battalion’s Nazi Indoctrination Camp for Children and Adolescents 

The Azov battalion is not only involved in killing children in Eastern Ukraine, it has also been running a Summer Camp military training project (starting in 2014-2015) for young children as part of its broader Nazi indoctrination program.

The Nazi Summer Camps constitute a crime against Ukrainian children, which the I.C.C., Western governments and the media have casually ignored.

Compare the Nazi children’s training camp to the Russian Youth Camp for Alleged Kidnapped Donbass orphans, which is tagged by the I.C.C. as a crime against humanity.

And the media applaud. And this article is the object censorship.

For details See:

Ukraine’s “Neo-Nazi Summer Camp”. Military Training for Young Children, Para-military Recruits

By Prof Michel Chossudovsky, March 02, 2023

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Read Part II:

History of World War II: Axis Powers Position Weakens in North Africa

By Shane Quinn, July 18, 2023

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On 21 June 1942 the Axis divisions in North Africa, consisting of German and Italian forces, finally completed the capture of Tobruk in the far north-east of Libya, inflicting a decisive defeat there on the Allies made up of British, South African and Indian soldiers. Tobruk was a strategically important fortress city, and the Axis troops found a very large amount of supplies inside Tobruk, which included more than 1,000 intact armoured cars and thousands of tons of petrol and food.

Tobruk was taken at the end of the 4 week long Battle of Galaza, and the city succumbed for various reasons. Axis morale was high and the same could not be said of the Allies at this time. The German and Italian troops learned from previous mistakes in 1941, and they had amassed a good knowledge of the Tobruk region. In 1942 the Axis soldiers attacked Tobruk at its most weakly defended point, the south-eastern sector, whereas in 1941 they had attacked blind in the city’s strong south-western sector.

The Allies allowed the defences beside Tobruk to deteriorate in the first half of 1942. The mines around the city had been removed, and the anti-tank ditches and trenches were partially covered back in. The British had only 70 anti-tank guns to defend the 33 miles of perimetre around Tobruk.

A serious blow was already struck against the Allied forces when, just over a week before the defeat at Tobruk, a major tank battle took place in Knightsbridge close to Tobruk. Colonel-General Erwin Rommel, the de facto overall commander of Axis forces in North Africa, was helped by the fact that, on the night of 11 June 1942, the Germans and Italians fortuitously gained access to British plans by intercepting orders the latter had made over the open radio.

Erwin Rommel with Italian governor of Libya, General Italo Gariboldi (on Rommel’s right), in Tripoli, February 1941 (Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 de)

Rommel therefore set a trap for the Allied armour, in which they unwittingly went straight into a pincers movement implemented by the Axis troops and that resulted in severe losses for the Allies. Their armoured brigades suffered a mauling by the Axis tanks on either side of them. Among these vehicles was Italy’s M13/40 medium tank, the most widely produced Italian tank of World War II and which had a fine record in destroying British tanks.

Furthermore, historian Samuel W. Mitcham wrote,     bn

“On June 12 the British lost their command of the battlefield right from the start… It was an excellent day for the German antitank gunners. The weather conditions were very hazy. Under this perfect cover, the gunners could easily get within killing distance of the British armored vehicles without being seen. Tank after tank was knocked out”. (Mitcham, Desert War, p. 70)

In the hours after the taking of Tobruk, Rommel dispatched a telegram to the German military attaché in Rome, Lieutenant-General Enno von Rintelen. Rommel outlined,

“The first objective of the Panzerarmee – to defeat the enemy’s army in the field and capture Tobruk – has been attained. Request you ask the Duce [Benito Mussolini] to lift the present restriction on freedom of movement, and put all the troops now under my command at my disposal, so I can continue the battle”.

As Mussolini knew, what Rommel meant by “continue the battle” was the imminent Axis attack on Egypt, which borders Libya to the east.

With Libya secure and Tobruk at their back, the Axis forces could proceed unmolested with their invasion of Egypt, and on 23 June 1942 the Axis troops were amassing on the country’s western borders. The Germans and Italians thereupon entered Egypt and, on June 29th, they took the port of Mersa Matruh in north-western Egypt on the Mediterranean Sea.

In spite of having insufficient armour, Rommel’s plan was to advance further east of Mersa Matruh and take Alexandria, Egypt’s second largest city, followed by the capital, Cairo. In a British war cabinet directive of 28 April 1941, prime minister Winston Churchill had said “the loss of Egypt and the Middle East would be a disaster of the first magnitude to Great Britain” (Goodspeed, p. 381). The only worse scenario than this, according to Churchill, was the Axis conquest of the British Isles.

General Claude Auchinleck, commander of the main Allied force in North Africa, the British 8th Army, was considering giving up Egypt completely and sending his army to Sudan, Palestine and Iraq. Auchinleck quickly dropped the idea. Elsewhere panic was spreading, unreasonably. In Alexandria, Allied military officials and diplomats were losing faith in the British 8th Army’s prospects of stopping the German and Italian troops.

With Rommel’s armoured spearhead advancing in late June 1942, the British Mediterranean Fleet stationed at Alexandria set sail for the Red Sea, and demolition crews were ready to blow up the harbour installations. Most of the soldiers left Alexandria and large numbers of pro-Allied civilians fled 120 miles south-east to Cairo, where long traffic jams built up. Smoke was seen coming from the chimneys of the British embassy in Cairo, where valuable documents were being burnt. The same sight was on show at different military headquarters in the Egyptian capital.

A German Signals reception unit in the desert (Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 de)

Columns of trucks, laden down with equipment belonging to the British General Staff and the General Headquarters, were seen leaving Cairo and driving in the direction of Palestine. The American Liaison Staff disappeared. Units of the British 10th Corps which were still operational dug in on the Nile Delta.

Of Rommel’s attempt to subdue Egypt, Mitcham wrote that “he was halted at El Alamein” which was “60 miles from Alexandria”. The Axis troops were unable to defeat the Allied forces in the First Battle of El Alamein, which finished in stalemate on 27 July 1942, and final victory was to elude the Axis powers in North Africa.

One reason for this was that American material resources were beginning to pour into the continent. America’s economy had been placed on a war footing, and half a million tons of military supplies reached the Allied soldiers in North Africa in the last 2 weeks of August 1942, which was so much more than the Axis divisions received in the same period (13,000 tons). The Axis forces needed 60,000 tons of provisions a month to sustain them in North Africa. Instead they were receiving well below that number, and the Germans and Italians had to rely mostly on captured equipment.

It must be mentioned that the Soviet military’s ongoing resistance was destroying the vast majority of Nazi Germany’s war resources. The great ability of the Russian soldiers, to thwart a Nazi victory in the western USSR, resulted in very significant effects in other war theatres like North Africa. The Nazi regime’s focus, which was largely on Russia since June 1941, ensured they could furnish only limited supplies to German forces in North Africa. It can be said, as a result, the Russians had considerable influence over the ultimate Axis defeat in North Africa also.

At the start of the First Battle of El Alamein on 1 July 1942, Rommel had a modest 55 panzers remaining, along with 77 field guns of different calibres and 65 anti-tank guns (Mitcham, p. 100). On July 26th, the Axis troops fired their last shell for heavy artillery, and their medium artillery was rapidly running out, while Allied warplanes had gained supremacy of the North African skies from the Luftwaffe.

With the German and Italian failure to advance past El Alamein during the high summer, in retrospect it is clear the Axis lost the war in North Africa during July 1942. Mussolini himself might have realised this. In late June and early July 1942, Mussolini had anticipated the expansion of Axis rule into Egypt, but by July 20th his mood seems to have changed (Goodspeed, p. 426). Canadian author Donald J. Goodspeed wrote “the outcome of the war in North Africa was never really in doubt after First Alamein”.

Through August 1942 the British built up their tank force in North Africa to more than 700, while the Germans now had 259 panzers. Many of these panzers came hastily from the repair shops and were in need of total refitting. Due to lack of time this was not possible in the summer of 1942. Rommel unwisely chose to launch another offensive.

In northern Egypt, Rommel struck on the moonlit night of August 30th about 15 miles south-east of El Alamein, during what is called the Battle of Alam el Halfa (30 August–5 September 1942). Goodspeed noted, “Like the First Battle of El Alamein, the Battle of Alam el Halfa proved to be a mistake on Rommel’s part” (Goodspeed, p. 427). The new commander of the British 8th Army, Lieutenant-General Bernard Montgomery, was expecting such an attack and he fought a well-organised defensive battle laid out for him by his predecessor Auchinleck, who Churchill had harshly sacked on 8 August 1942.

Attacking from the south, the Axis armour was assailed by British warplanes and stopped by the strong Allied defences at Alam el Halfa Ridge. Rommel was almost killed on 1 September 1942 during a British air attack, but he managed to jump into a trench at the last moment; 7 of his fellow soldiers nearby were not so fortunate and had been hit by shrapnel. In the Battle of Alam el Halfa, the Allies lost 68 tanks in comparison to 49 Axis tanks destroyed; but Montgomery could replenish his tank fleet more easily than Rommel.

British SAS patrol in armed jeeps (Licensed under the Public Domain)

The Axis tanks were dangerously short of fuel, with almost all of the petrol captured at Tobruk two months before having been consumed. On September 1st with his attack failing, Rommel ordered a withdrawal to a position just in front of their original starting line. British aircraft, including Hawker Hurricanes and Spitfires, continued to harry the retreating Axis divisions over the next few days and inflict losses. British casualties came to 1,750 in the Battle of Alam el Halfa, as opposed to 2,910 Axis casualties, 1,859 of them German, 1,051 Italian. (Goodspeed, p. 427)

After a lull in the fighting, the British began their long-awaited offensive on 23 October (Second Battle of El Alamein, 23 October–11 November 1942). Montgomery’s superiority for this offensive is plain to see: at the outset the Allied divisions had 4 times more troops than the Germans, 5 times more tanks and artillery, 4 times more aircraft and 3 times more anti-tank guns. (Mitcham, Field Marshals, p. 184)

Montgomery’s plan of battle at El Alamein designated his main thrust to take place in the north, between the Ruweisat Ridge and the Mediterranean coast, while diversionary attacks were to fall further south. There was to be an extensive artillery bombardment, and the British infantry would subsequently proceed to clear pathways through the Axis minefields. After these actions were completed the Allied armour would then advance.

The main attack opened at 9:40 pm on 23 October 1942. It went very slowly at first and British casualties were high. Deep penetrations were made in the enemy’s minefields, but no clear hole was punctured through them. At Rommel’s urging, the Axis troops fought back viciously and they launched counterattacks on October 25th. By the end of the first week of fighting, October 30th, the British 8th Army was yet to break through the Axis defences.

At the end of October the Axis divisions were in a real predicament, however. Rommel had about 90 tanks left in the field whereas Montgomery had 800 tanks. Rommel reported that their position was critical and his front might crack apart at any moment.

Rommel attempted another counterattack, which failed, and by November 2nd there were just 30 panzers remaining (Goodspeed, p. 428). Early on November 3rd Montgomery’s armour at last blew a hole through the Axis’ rearguard. The previous night Rommel had decided to retire 60 miles west to the locality of Fouka in north-western Egypt, but a telegram came through to Rommel from Hitler. He ordered Rommel’s forces “to stand fast, yield not a yard of ground, and throw every gun and every man into the battle”.

With some reluctance, Rommel obeyed Hitler’s command to hold El Alamein and he halted the retreat. This decision simply resulted in further losses, including the destruction of more than half of the remaining panzers and heavy damage inflicted on Italian armoured and infantry forces.

On the night of 3 November 1942 another attack broke through the Axis lines as the Allied troops, which included a New Zealand division, wheeled north in an attempt to cut off the enemy soldiers at the Mediterranean coast. South African troops advanced too, including black South African soldiers who often proved to be both courageous and skilful fighters.

Rommel did not wait for more orders from Hitler and he duly retreated. The attempted encirclement by the Allies did not fully succeed, in part because it failed to strike far enough to the west to reach the sea in time, and partly because Montgomery was again indecisive.

Due to this the opportunity of taking Rommel prisoner, which had been a genuine possibility, was also disappearing. On 4 November 1942 the British did manage to capture a prominent German officer, General Wilhelm Ritter von Thoma, who was caught adrift in a minefield and forced to surrender.

Regardless of that, the Axis troops held up the Allied advance long enough, allowing them to pull some of their forces out along the coastal road. When the Second Battle of El Alamein concluded in a decisive Allied victory on 11 November 1942, they had taken prisoner around 10,000 German soldiers and the Axis armour was seriously depleted. Goodspeed noted these events “meant that the end of the Axis’ power in Africa was only a matter of time”.

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This article was originally published on Geopolitica.RU.

Shane Quinn obtained an honors journalism degree and he writes primarily on foreign affairs and historical subjects. He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG).

Sources

“Hawker Hurricane XII”, Canada Aviation and Space Museum

Samuel W. Mitcham Jr., Rommel’s Desert War: The life and death of the Afrika Korps (Jove books, August 1990)

Michael G. DeSensi, “Italian artillery guns”, 14 February 2019

“Fiat M13/40 Details and Specifications”, Comando Supremo, 8 March 2010

Donald J. Goodspeed, The German Wars (Random House Value Publishing, 2nd edition, 3 April 1985)

“Claude Auchinleck: The auk”, National Army Museum

Samuel W. Mitcham Jr., Hitler’s field marshals and their Battles (Leo Cooper Ltd. edition, 1 February 1988)

Featured image: British Crusader tank passes a burning German Panzer IV tank during Operation Crusader (Licensed under the Public Domain)

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The latest political situation unfolded in Niger, the unexpected removal of democratically-elected President Mohamed Bazoum late July and the deepening differences in perception across Africa explicitly shows Africa’s level of political illusions and, practical reality towards attaining unity dimension in Africa.

In a nutshell, Africa remains sharply divided. Tracking down the Africa’s unity propagated by the Big Six politicians including Kwame Nkrumah and Julius Nyerere etcetera, during the time of their struggle for political independence and the creation of an organization for Africa. More than 60 years, the important question of continental unity has been pursued with with great fanfare.

The Telegraph notes that

“the removal of Mohamed Bazoum has completed a coast to coast corridor of African nations under military rule running across the continent’s Sahel region. Niger’s turmoil follows coups in Sudan, Mali, Chad and Burkina Faso in the past few years, sweeping away governments that were often already struggling against jihadist violence and some of the world’s worst poverty.”

The rapid overthrows have alarmed African democracies, but also Western countries who had been attempting to help subdue the jihadists, and boost economies to stem northward migration, according the newspaper’s article published early August.

We can also look at the situation in another perspective: The French-speaking military leaders have raised multiple complaints over the dominance of neo-colonial tendencies, particularly against France for exploitation of natural resources, for their gross under-development and the abject economic poverty these several years after political independence.

A billboard in Niamey criticizing Niger’s pro-western, pro-French attitude (2019) (Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0)

The English-speaking and Portuguese-speaking are similarly also talking about the United States and Europe. Most of them have increasingly acknowledged widespread terrorism and insurgency jihadist attacks as key reasons for the removal of their civilian governments.

Ultimately the situation is also developing in the Horn of Africa, it is rapidly deteriorating due to frequent militant attacks and terrorists’ pressures in the region. Across Kenya, Ethiopia, Somalia and Uganda, the crisis poses a huge critical challenge for governments and regional organisations as well as the African Union.

Seemingly it’s largely the battle for influence, the scramble for resources too. Africa is now the focus; it becomes the focal point for the emerging world order as players are bolstering campaign to edge out Western influence in the region.

The African Union, the organization which primarily coordinates the continental political and economic as well as the socio-cultural activities, observes the new trends as military rule spread in the West African region. There must be an extensive political awareness among the people in the Sahel region to focus on democracy, development, security and stability.

That however, on July 26, 2023, the African Union officially informed of an attempt by certain members of the military to undermine the stability of democratic and republican institutions in Niger, which is tantamount to an attempted coup d’état, the Chairperson of the African Union Commission, Moussa Faki Mahamat, strongly condemns such actions by members of the military acting in total betrayal of their republican duty.

Further urging them to immediately cease these unacceptable actions, the Chairperson calls on the people of Niger, all their brothers in Africa, particularly in ECOWAS, and around the world, to join their voices in unanimous condemnation of this coup attempt, and for the immediate and unconditional return of the felon soldiers to their barracks.

Writing in the media, Khalid Cherkaoui Semmouni, Specialist in Political and Security questions in the Sahel, explains that popular support for the military in Niger which followed that of Mali, Burkina Faso and Guinea endangers spreading to more countries in West Africa, such as Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana, and others countries in the region. The evolving situation has the possibility of changing the regional order in the Sahel.

Gathering of Islamic State fighters on the Mali-Niger border in July 2021 (Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0)

Burkina Faso, Chad, Guinea, Mali and Niger, these landlocked West African states with an impoverished population, face increasing isolation from the international community over their political power grab. Even as the African Union (AU), the continental organization, and the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), the regional bloc, both suspended their memberships.

ECOWAS Sanctions Against Niger

Reports indicated that Niger’s self-declared new leader would not bow to pressure to reinstate ousted President Mohamed Bazoum, intensifying a standoff with the West African bloc, the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS). The bloc has struggled to contain a democratic backslide in West Africa and had vowed that coups will no longer be tolerated after military takeovers in member states Mali, Burkina Faso and Guinea and an attempted coup in Guinea-Bissau in the last two years.

As already known, the United States, France and the European Union have suspended financial assistance to Niger. According to the executive order, ECOWAS imposes eight (8) stringent sanctions. The decision was taken at an extraordinary session of the Authority presided over by President of Nigeria Bola Ahmed Tinubu in Abuja. Below is a list of Economic Sanctions placed on Niger Republic:

1. Closure of Land and air borders between ECOWAS and Niger.

2. Institution of ECOWAS no flight zone to all commercial flights to and fro Niger.

3. Suspension of all commercial and financial transactions between ECOWAS member states and Niger.

4. Freeze all service transactions including energy transactions.

5. Freeze assets of Niger Republic in all ECOWAS Central banks.

6. Freeze all Niger State and the state enterprises and Parastatals in commercial banks.

7. Suspension of Niger from all financial assistance and transactions with all financial institutions.

8. Impose travel bans on the military officials and their families involved in the coup attempt including anyone who accepts to take a position in the military government.

Previous AU and ECOWAS Positions

The African Union has made some attempts in resolving the crisis.

Moreover, in the immediate term, the increasing proliferation of military coups and the attempts to take power through force of arms, has to be addressed swiftly and firmly in order to halt the further erosion of the authority of the AU Executive Council along with the Peace and Security Council. The AU founding documents and protocols categorically prohibit military coups. It is up to the leadership of the AU to develop means to implement these regulations.

Besides these measures to maintain relative control on members in the West African region, African Union and ECOWAS have to jointly ensure its previous decisions. For instance, in March 2021, the ECOWAS Commission held a one-day workshop on the modalities for implementing the Silencing the Guns agenda in West Africa, a flagship programme of the Africa Union’s Agenda 2063.

That workshop was organized through the ECOWAS Directorate of Political Affairs in collaboration with the African Union Commission’s Silencing the Guns Unit. The objective of the workshop was to further discussions on an ECOWAS strategy and approach to the regionalization of the ‘Silencing the Guns Agenda’ in West Africa and in coordination and alignment with the African Union.

As we understand, the meeting was considered highly relevant to the determination of ECOWAS to increase cooperation and enhance synergy in addressing conflict at its roots and to develop robust response approaches and mechanisms across the region. In our assessment, next to nothing has happened to these series of fanfare meetings.

Long before that, an Extraordinary Humanitarian Summit and Pledging Conference held on May 27 and 28 in Malabo, Equatorial Guinea, by African leaders to address the current humanitarian challenges and problems facing Africa. It categorically stated to find root causes, and besides natural disasters and climate change, the frequency of military is creating additional problems on the continent.

At the conference, Chairperson of the African Union Commission, Moussa Faki Mahamat, stressed the significance of the gathering and highlighted details of some of the causes, and increased demands for humanitarian support.

Moussa Faki Mahamat, in his speech, illustrated figures and statistical data drawn up and compiled by the United Nations specialised agencies, based on the general trends that emerge in the five regions of the continent, there are 15 most affected member States, 113 million people urgently waiting for emergency assistance in 2022. These are refugees, returnees, internally displaced persons in Africa.

In his speech, Macky Sall, Chairman of the African Union and President of Senegal, pointed to emergencies linked to climate change, natural disasters and terrorist attacks which have become endemic in certain countries but also emergencies linked to armed conflicts.

Macky Sall passionately called for laying down military arms, to engage in dialogue to settle our differences peacefully, the culture of rejection to embrace care that repairs social fragilities by relieving those who suffer from hunger, disease and poverty, emphasized access to power by peaceful means and to agree on spaces for dialogue and consultation for a peaceful exercise of power, and an inclusive development, following the principles of social justice, so that each citizen feels heir to a part of the national resources.

“We cannot dream of a better future when the poverty of some leaves others indifferent. The state must constantly serve as a lever to give confidence to those who think they are right to doubt and lose hope. In return, the State and the institutions that embody it deserve respect and protection from all”, the Senegalese leader Sall stressed.

When the state is in danger, when it is destabilized in any way, the foundations of living together falter to make way for chaos. The scourge of terrorism calls for a more substantial mobilization of member states, according to new methods of intervention, transcending traditional peacekeeping operations which have shown their limits.

Almost in all speeches at the conference, emphasis was laid on frequency and the new waves of military takeovers, particularly in West Africa. It, therefore, seriously reviewed the Malabo Declaration on Terrorism and Unconstitutional Changes of Government in Africa.

Several experts have been discussing the situation, both inside Africa and foreign media are dominated by the latest development in the continent. Concerns are actually skyrocketing while much is partly blamed on African leaders.

Some Expert Analysis

Dr Mohamed Chtatou, a senior professor of Middle Eastern politics at the International University of Rabat (IUR) and Mohammed V University in Rabat, Morocco, has explained on several occasions that some components and elements of the emerging new world order, and positions taken by a number of African states threaten Africa’s unity.

According to this well-experienced academic professor, regional integration of the continent has been a dream of many African leaders and led to the creation of the Organization of African Unity (OAU) in 1963. This organization later transformed into African Union.

Over the years, many other institutions have been created in different parts of Africa. But on the whole they have noticeably done little to improve the basic development needs of the estimated 1.4 billion population in the continent. In many cases, many of them still continue to have the most extensive relationships with their former colonial powers. Despite that the main focus has to be on utilizing resources for necessary development across Africa.

The record of regional integration in Africa is so far poor, and many regional alliances are characterized by uncoordinated initiatives, political conflicts, and little intra-regional trade. However, analysts note that some of the external and internal factors that have hindered Africa’s integration in the past have abated somewhat in recent years, and there is therefore reason for cautious optimism, Professor Chtatou maintained in his academic paper at a scientific conference.

Today, both the Western world: The United States and Europe, and its Eastern counterpart: China, India and Russia have eager eyes on Africa under the excuse of helping develop the economy of this part of the world, but, in reality, it is just another manifestation of the Scramble for Africa. These powers are interested in minerals and rare earth’s metals that are in Africa.

Still discussing and assessing the developing situation today, Africa is rich in rare earths and minerals that are highly desirable for many industries, including electronics, renewable energy, and defence. As a result, many great powers, including China, India, Europe, the United States and Russia, are highly interested in securing access to these resources.

However, it is important to note that while the presence of valuable resources can be a source of economic opportunity, it can also lead to exploitation, corruption, and political instability. It is essential that African nations have the ability to manage their resources in a sustainable and equitable way, to ensure that the benefits of these resources are shared by all citizens and that their extraction does not come at the expense of the environment or human rights.

Solution Pathways

It beholds, therefore, on our leaders to find effective concrete solutions to the present crises that are also essential in fostering political stability, continental unity, sustainable development and genuine sovereignty in the years ahead.

How can Africa develop itself away from the greed of some developed nations? There is no easy answer to this question, as it is a complex issue that involves many different factors. However, there are some steps that Africa can take to promote sustainable development and reduce the influence of developed nations:

Promote good governance: African nations should work to establish transparent and accountable systems of governance that promote the rule of law, protect human rights, and combat corruption.

Invest in education and human capital: Developing the skills and knowledge of the African people is crucial to building a sustainable and prosperous future for the continent. Investing in education, health care, and other social services can help to build a strong and healthy workforce.

Support local industries: African nations can promote economic development by investing in local industries, rather than relying solely on exports of raw materials. This can create jobs, generate income, and promote sustainable growth.

Foster regional integration: African nations can work together to promote regional integration and reduce dependency on external actors. This can involve developing common trade policies, investing in regional infrastructure, and promoting cooperation on issues of mutual interest.

Encourage foreign investment on African terms: African nations should strive to attract foreign investment on their own terms, by negotiating fair and equitable deals that benefit both the investor and the host country. This can help to promote economic development and reduce dependency on aid.

In view of its abundant resources, its ambitious youth, its vibrant society, and its geo-strategic potential, Africa needs to achieve unity and full integration, at once, to face the immense greed of the developed world and to defend its interest in the best possible ways.

Within the context of geopolitical changes and complexities, African leaders have to absolutely rethink and take strategies to save their straddling economy. Several years have elapsed after the United Nations declared Africa’s political independence. It was precisely on May 25, 1963, more than 60 years ago but Africa is still far away from attaining its economic freedom despite the huge natural and human resources there. The resources are still untapped, development remains shabby while about 60% of the population impoverished.

In addition, rhetorics are not only ineffective in terms of conflict resolution but also may, in fact, be aggravating tensions and violence. Instead, African leaders require comprehensive development-oriented policies combined with good governance, these are the best solutions, at least, to minimizing social conflicts and economic disparities, ultimately ensure long-term peace and harmony in the continent.

Nevertheless, African leaders have to adopt progressive policies and, at the same time, deal with the dangers of neocolonial tendencies perpetrated, and the scramble for resources in the continent. The crucial challenges and priority tasks obviously require working towards the provision of sustainable development and that is line with the African Union’s Agenda 2063 and the United Nations’ 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.

At this stage of Africa’s development, it is necessary to examine thoroughly how the geopolitical changes are influencing Africa’s unity and development, how it is impacting on African countries across the continent. The time has really arrived to look at the development processes and review obstacles, determine the level and extent of participation of foreign players and specific roles in emerging new world order, as well as taking cautious steps in understanding the implications for Africa. The rising neo-colonial tendencies should be considered as the highest challenging task for all African leaders, the regional organizations and the African Union.

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

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

He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from Black Agenda Report

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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Abas La France! Vive le Niger!

Down with France, Down with ECOWAS, Down with the European Union!

Thousands of people demonstrate in the streets of Niamey, the capital of Niger. They do not want an ECOWAS intervention. ECOWAS stands for Economic Community of West African States. And ECOWAS stands for western influence.

Image: Mohamed Bazoum, who was President of Niger from 2021 until the 2023 coup (Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0)

On 26 July 2023, Niger’s official French-supported President, Mohamed Bazoum, was over-thrown by a military junta, led by General Abdourahamane Tiani.

ECOWAS, France, the European Union (EU) and other western governments may be thinking they are domineering over the sovereignty of other nations. They slammed down sanctions on Niger. Among the “sanctioning” countries was also the United States.

Reuters reported that one participant was seen carrying a sign that read

“Long live Niger, Russia, Mali, and Burkina Faso. Down with France, ECOWAS, and the EU.” “We are demonstrating [against] all the countries of ECOWAS and all who are taking inhumane and unpopular measures toward Niger.”

The creation of ECOWAS in 1975 via the Treaty of Lagos was prompted by Europe and the US, to keep a closer grip on the 15 resources-rich member countries. The official reason was free trade and economic integration. ECOWAS members include, Benin, Burkina Faso, Cabo Verde, Côte d’Ivoire, The Gambia, Ghana, Guinea, Guinea Bissau, Liberia, Mali, Niger, Nigeria, Senegal, Sierra Leone, and Togo.

A little anecdote. When US President Biden threatened to withhold US aid to Niger due to the military coup, the Niger military leader said,

“they should keep their aid money and give it to their millions of homeless people in the US. Charity begins at home.”

This clear vision can only be congratulated.

The country will not submit to threats no matter where they come from, the junta’s president General Tiani has said.

General Tiani insists that the military takeover “remains the safeguard of [the] homeland, Niger.”

An ECOWAS military intervention would never work, unless it was fully driven by the west – God forbid, by NATO. All is possible, since dearly sought-after resources of Niger’s are at stake.

Mr. Putin has already said that non-regional powers interfering in Niger will not help the situation would undoubtedly enlarge the conflict far beyond Niger’s frontiers.

So far, nothing has happened. Most likely nothing will happen. ECOWAS is not united and has no common front. The ECOWAS members of Mali, Nigeria, Burkina Faso, have recently had a military coup, for basically the same reason, the military stood up against western-implanted and western-favoring leaders, to finally free themselves from the chains of western new-colonial slavery.

The only reaction so far, as of 7 August, Niger has closed her airspace and Air France, possibly other airlines, have stopped flying to nearby countries.

General Tiani, the former head of Niger’s presidential guard, the coup’s mastermind, has since created a coalition of different civil society groups. He also has the support of the neighboring military juntas of Mali, Burkina Faso, and Nigeria. They all had recently similar military coups of liberation.

For more details, see this.

When the west talks of “democratically” elected West African leaders, they are lying, the same way they are lying when talking about free and democratic elections in Europe or even the United States for that matter.

These ex-French colonies’ heads of states were all groomed by the west, especially by France, and very likely by the World Economic Forum (WEF). Many of them emanate from the WEF’s academy for Young Global Leaders (YGLs), so that they are in line with western thinking and most notably with the western agendas, i.e., The Great Reset, alias UN Agenda 2030 which are basically identical and in pursuit of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDG).

The real meaning of the 17 SDGs can be found by the proper interpretation behind the colorful SDG insignias. See this.

No wonder that Africans are waking up. In a first go, it appears West Africa has had enough of French usurpation and decided to exit the bond. Others may follow.

Niger preceded her 63^rd anniversary of independence on 3 August 2023 by about a week – with a coup to liberate themselves from “Independence” which they never really had, since like most other “former French colonies”, they were never free, economically free, politically free to ally with whom they chose, and free to trade with whomever they desired.

As of this day, France has more than 1,000 military personnel stationed in Niger. General Tiani has said they must go, and France responded that they will be withdrawn. But why were they there in the first place – 63 years after “independence”? And there were many more in earlier years, the same as in other former French colonies.

USAFRICOM operates the Niger Air Base 201 close to Agadez. “It is owned by the Nigerien military but built and paid for by the United States”. Air Base 201 is allegedly designed to fight Islamic insurgents in coordination the the Niger military. 

According to USAFRICOM, the US has some 1,100 U.S. special forces in Niger “to carry out military missions and the training of Niger troops”. See this.

The official version is to protect the countries from Islamic terrorists – “terrorists” which ever so often are conveniently engaged to cause upheavals, when anti-French “instability” could be sensed in Niger or other former French colonies. And, foremost, to protect French and European enterprises interests, while exploiting the riches of these former colonies.

Western Interest in Niger

Niger is the world’s seventh biggest producer of uranium, according to the World Nuclear Association (WNA).

The radioactive metal is the most widely used fuel for nuclear energy. It is also used in treating cancer, for naval propulsion, and in nuclear weapons.

Niger, which has Africa’s highest-grade uranium ores, produced 2,020 metric tons of uranium in 2022, about 5% of world mining output according to the WNA.

The world’s three biggest producers are Kazakhstan, Canada and Namibia.

Niger has one major mining operation in the north operated by France’s state-owned Orano, another major mine is under development. For more details, see this.

Niger has also other western-coveted economically valuable raw materials, such as crude oil, natural gas, coal, tin, and columbite (an iron-bearing mineral that accompanies tin). Petroleum, first discovered in 1956, is the most important source of government revenue and foreign exchange.

Demonstrators hold a Russian flag and banners during the gathering in support of the putschist soldiers in the capital Niamey, Niger July 30, 2023. The signs read Down with France and its allies, Down with imperialism. (Reuters)

The CFA Franc Zones

The key to Niger’s true independence – as well as that of the other 13 Central and West African nations — is breaking loose from their dependence on French imperialism, by cutting the chain of their CFA currency to the French Treasury.

Niger and all 14 of the West (8 nations) and Central African (6 countries) sub-Saharan former French colonies remained tied and monetarily enslaved to France through the Franc CFA (CFA = Communauté Financière Africaine or African Financial Community) – which remains guaranteed by the Bank of France without any justification. To get this guarantee they must deposit 50% of their reserves in a special account of the Bank of France. Thereby the CFA-countries are not free of moving CFA currencies as they wish and find advantageous to themselves and their people. They need the Bank of France’s approval to use their own money!

For more flexibility and monetary stability (France’s stability), France created two CFA zones. Each of the 14 countries is affiliated with one of two monetary unions. Benin, Burkina Faso, Côte D’Ivoire, Guinea-Bissau, Mali, Niger, Senegal, and Togo comprise the West African Economic and Monetary Union, or WAEMU, founded in 1994 to build on the foundation of the West African Monetary Union, founded in 1973. The remaining six countries — Cameroon, Central African Republic, Chad, Republic of Congo, Equatorial Guinea, and Gabon — comprise the Central African Economic and Monetary Union, or CAEMU.

These two unions maintain the same currency, the CFA franc. West African CFA countries belong to the West African Monetary Unions (WAMU); and Coopération Financière en Afrique Centrale (Financial Cooperation in Central Africa), or the Central African Economic and Monetary Community (CEMAC). WAMU and CAMAC account for 14 percent of Africa’s population and 12 percent of the Continent’s GDP.

While both CFA francs have the same exchange value against the Euro (CFA 655.74 = 1 Euro – [6 August 2023]). Yet, the two CFA francs are not inter-changeable and the two monetary units have two separate Central Banks, the Central Bank for West African States (BCEAO – French acronym – 8 countries) and the Bank for Central African States (BEAC – French acronym – 6 countries).

If all of this sounds confusing, it is because it is confusing.

CFA Franc – History and Future

The CFA franc was created in December 1945 when the French government ratified the Bretton Woods Agreement; it became the currency of the “French Colonies of Africa”. Today, the French Treasury guarantees the currency under a fixed exchange rate but requires a deposit of 50% of CFA franc reserves into the French central bank. Immediately following independence, this figure stood at 100 per cent (and from 1973 to 2005, at 65 per cent).

Imagine, all their reserves were blocked at the French Central Bank until 1973. They could not use any of their reserves, without the approval of the French Treasury or Central Bank. Today it is down to 50% without any justification. Today, there is absolutely no need for a French guarantee of the West and Central African currencies.

The Frech argue, this arrangement is a quid pro quo for the French ‘guarantee’ of convertibility. The accords stipulate that foreign exchange reserves must exceed money in circulation by a margin of 20 per cent. Before the fall in oil prices, the money supply coverage rate (the ratio of foreign exchange reserves to money in circulation) consistently approached 100 per cent, implying that Africans could dispense with the French ‘guarantee’.

So far, the French do whatever they can to avoid “letting go” of their former colony. It warrants their continued grip on the colonies in terms of controlling trade as well as natural resources. And the former French colonies, through this usurping monetary arrangement, contribute significantly, directly and indirectly, to the French economy. Rough unproven estimates range from 15% to 25% of France’s GDP stems from the former French colonies. Maybe more.

In 2015, Chad’s President Idriss Debby said, he considers the CFA as “pulling African economies down,” and that “time has come to cut the cordon that prevents Africa to develop.” He called for a restructuring of the currency in order to “enable African countries which are still using it to develop.”

French President Macron ignored the statement. Nothing has happened to change, or abandon altogether the CFA arrangement between France and their former West- and Central African colonies.

Earlier this year, Luigi Di Maio, Italy’s former deputy prime minister and current minister of foreign affairs, raised the controversy about the role of the CFA franc on Africa’s development with an even more provocative statement, than the one of Chad’s President in 2015: “France is one of those countries that by printing money for 14 African states prevents their economic development and contributes to the fact that the refugees leave and then die in the [Mediterranean] Sea or arrive on our coasts.”

It is time that the former French colonies take their lives and economic development and prosperity under their own control. Perhaps the recent military coups against French-imposed leaders are the first steps – and may be replicated in other former French colonies. Not that military governments are ideal, they are not. But it is hoped and expected that eventually these military juntas will call for public elections, as democratic as possible, without foreign interference.

Africa, as part of the Global South has a major role to play in the structure of our future world order. To do so, they need economic and political independence.

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Peter Koenig is a geopolitical analyst and a former Senior Economist at the World Bank (30 years). He has worked for eight years in West Africa, Frances former colonies, including in Niger, Mali, and Burkina Faso. He knows about the “CFA-arrangements” which continue making the 14 West and Central African CFA-zones  dependent on France.

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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Die Rolle der Macht im Leben der Menschen

Die folgenden Zeilen sollen – ungeachtet des Problems der Gewalt – Mut machen und anknüpfen an Albert Camus und seine Leidenschaft,gegen das Unrecht zu revoltieren. Camus‘ Gerechtigkeit wagte es, sich mit der ungerechten Welt in den notwendigen Kampf einzulassen – und zwar hier auf Erden und nicht erst im Himmel. Seine große Liebe zur Welt und zum Menschen überstrahlten die düsteren Schilderungen in seinen Dramen, Romanen und philosophischen Essays.

Die gegenwärtigen Ereignisse wie der Stellvertreterkrieg in der Ukraine oder auch Massenterror und Diktaturen vermitteln uns einen gründlichen Anschauungsunterricht über die geschichtliche Bedeutung der Gewalttätigkeit im Leben des Einzelnen und der Gemeinschaft. Die Flut von legalisierten Verbrechen berauben uns so mancher Illusionen; in der Frage der Bändigung der Gewalt scheint sich die Menschheit noch ganz am Anfang der Humanisierung zu befinden.

Das Machtstreben in Wirtschaft und Politik führt immer wieder zu Katastrophen, in denen der Reichtum unserer Kultur verschleudert und die Ernten unserer Zivilisation zerstört werden. Doch unsere Lethargie führt dazu, dass wir uns dadurch nicht aufrütteln lassen, sondern dass wir uns weiterhin in Sicherheit wiegen. Die beruhigende Selbsttäuschung ist uns lieber als der Gedanke an die Gefahr. Die Gewalttätigkeit bringt alle unsere kulturellen Bemühungen zum Scheitern. Indem wir nicht gegen sie ankämpfen, billigen wir sie in der Hoffnung, sie werde uns verschonen. Keiner kann sich der Verantwortung entziehen, immer sind wir mitschuldig, selbst dann, wenn wir Opfer sind.

Der Weg des Einzelnen in einer gewalttätigen Kultur gerät unweigerlich in den Einflussbereich des Macht- und Herrschaftsbestrebens. Alle Vorbilder und Ideale dieses Kulturkreises sind vom Machtwillen gefärbt. Groß sein, mächtig sein wird zum Ziel, das sich die Schwäche setzt, um stark zu werden.

Bereits zu Beginn des letzten Jahrhunderts schreibt der Individualpsychologe Alfred Adler :

„In die Elternliebe schleicht sich das Gift der Herrschsucht (…). Da wird es zur Aufgabe der Kinder, über ihre Erzieher hinauszuwachsen, mit ihnen fertig zu werden. Nicht anders beim Lehrer. (….). Die moderne Seelenkunde hat uns aber gezeigt, dass die Züge von Herrschsucht, Ehrgeiz und Machtstreben über den anderen samt ihrer Fülle von hässlichen Begleiterscheinungen nicht angeboren und unabänderlich sind. Sie werden vielmehr dem Kinde frühzeitig eingeimpft, das Kind empfängt sie willenlos aus einer Atmosphäre, die vom Machtkitzel getränkt ist. (…). 

Die Herrschaftsgelüste von Eltern, Dienstverhältnisse im Hause, die Privilegien des kleinen Kindes lenken unwiderstehlich den Sinn des Kindes auf die Erringung von Macht und Vorherrschaft, lassen ihm nur diese Position als lockend erscheinen. Um einiges später erst fließen Gemeinschaftsgefühle in seine Seele, geraten aber meist unter die Herrschaft des bereits ausgebildeten Machtbegehrens. (…). (1)

Krieg und Gesellschaftsordnung

Die Entwicklung einer Kultur besteht jedoch darin, dass sich die Stimme des Menschheitsgewissens mehr und mehr Gehör verschafft und dass der Geist der Verantwortlichkeit an die Stelle der Gewalttätigkeit tritt. Das Anwachsen des menschlichen Gemeinschaftsgefühls, das Wissen um die Zusammengehörigkeit aller, die Menschenantlitz tragen, wird die ethische Errungenschaft der Zukunft sein. Noch leiden wir an der Fiktion der Macht und der Selbstherrlichkeit des Individuums.

Überall kommt es auf den Gemeinsinn an, auf das Gefühl der Zusammengehörigkeit, des Miteinanderseins. Das heißt, wir müssen zusammenhalten und uns die Hände reichen. Der Abbau der Machtgier und des Gewaltstrebens ist für das gemeinschaftliche Leben eine dringende Notwendigkeit.

Wegen der Friedfertigkeit der menschlichen Natur ist es ein Irrtum, den Krieg auf die Natur der Menschen zurückzuführen. Nur die Machtgier derer, die innerhalb der Völker als Obrigkeit fungieren und durch ihre soziale Stellung vom Geist der Gewalt durchdrungen sind, treibt immer wieder zu kriegerischen Auseinandersetzungen, in denen die Völker zugunsten ihrer Herren und Ausbeuter verbluten. Zwar kann man die Mahnrufe des menschlichen Gemeinschaftsgefühls unterdrücken, gänzlich ausmerzen kann man sie nie. Denn das Geschenk der Evolution besteht im sittlichen Bewusstsein des Einzelnen, in der Einsicht in die Verantwortung aller gegenüber allen.

Deshalb verwundert es, wenn man die abendlichen Fernsehbilder betrachtet und feststellen muss, dass große Unterschiede gemacht werden bezüglich der Nationalität der getöteten Soldaten. Ist nicht jeder tote Soldat in der Ukraine oder einem anderen Teil der Welt ein toter Mann zu viel? Egal, ob er westeuropäischer, russischer, ukrainischer, afrikanischer oder US-amerikanischer Nationalität ist? Ist es nicht immer ein Mitmensch, der umgebracht wird? Wie können wir das vergessen und trotzdem gut leben und schlafen?

Kriege sind ein gutes Geschäft 

Die anderen Völker zu bezwingen, die anderen zu beherrschen, das ist ein gutes Geschäft. Die horrenden Gewinne der deutschen Rüstungsgüter-Firma „Rheinmetall“ oder der international tätigen US-amerikanischen Investmentgesellschaft „BlackRock“ mit über 10 Billionen US-Dollar an verwaltetem Vermögen, sind nur zwei Beispiele unter vielen.

Wo wir uns umsehen ist Profit. Es gibt nichts, wo das nicht spielt in unserer Gesellschaftsordnung. Ein weiteres Beispiel ist das Drogenproblem, an dem ungeheuer viele Jugendliche zugrunde gehen. Wenn damit nicht viel Geld zu verdienen wäre, müssten sich Eltern keine Sorgen machen. Jugendliche würden nicht an die Rauschmittel herankommen, der Markt wäre leer. Aber darauf wird keine Rücksicht genommen. Ganz im Gegenteil: die Freigabe bestimmter Mengen von Rauschgiften wird inzwischen in vielen Ländern nicht nur diskutiert, sondern bereits praktiziert.

Noch ist es in unseren kapitalistischen Ländern so, dass eine verschwindend kleine Minderheit von Menschen auf Kosten der Mehrheit lebt. Und diese Schere zwischen Arm und Reich klafft immer weiter auseinander. Während das Volksvermögen in die Produktion von Rüstungsgütern investiert werden, sind Hunger und Armut für Millionen oder gar Milliarden von Menschen auf der Welt Realität. Während Kapitalisten durch rücksichtsloses Handeln immer reicher werden, werden auf der anderen Seite zahlreiche Menschen immer ärmer.

Ein Zitat des deutschen Dramatikers Bertolt Brecht bringt das gefühlvoll zum Ausdruck:

„Reicher Mann und armer Mann standen da und sahn sich an. Und der Arme sagte bleich: ‚Wär ich nicht arm, wärst du nicht reich‘.“

Wird neuer Staatenbund (BRICS) ohne Gewalt auskommen?

Die BRICS-Staaten (Brasilien, Russland, Indien, China, Südafrika) sind eine Vereinigung aufstrebender Volkswirtschaften. Wegen der wirtschaftlichen Stagnation in den Industrienationen wenden sich die Investoren nun diesen fünf Ländern zu. Vor dem Hintergrund des Ukrainekrieges und des Konflikts um Taiwan strebt er neue Staatenbund nach mehr politischem Gewicht und versucht, sich als Alternative zu den G7-Ländern zu positionieren.

Für kritische Beobachter stellt sich die Frage, ob dieser neue Staatenbund ohne Gewalt auskommen will und auch kann. Wieso sollte man die mächtigen Führer dieser fünf Staaten in einem anderen Lichte sehen sollte als die Führer aller anderen Staaten. Warum einen Unterschied machen?

Der neue Staatenbund wird mit denselben Methoden Gewalt anwenden, Menschen zu zwingen, in den Krieg zu ziehen und Krieg zu führen wie ehemals Adolf Hitler oder heute die Führer der US-NATO-Staaten oder Russlands und Chinas. Und zwar deshalb, weil unsere ganze Gesellschaft, alle unsere Institutionen, unser ganzes Um und Auf ohne Ausnahme vom Gedanken der Gewalt durchsetzt sind.

Auch wenn der Westen offensichtlich mit allen erlaubten und unerlaubten Mitteln gegen den Osten kämpft, sollte man – wenn man gegen jede Diktatur und gewalttätige Gesellschaft ist – nicht Partei ergreifen. Bereits während der Russischen Revolution konnte man sehen, dass dort etwas geschah, was mit Befreiung, Freiheit oder Sozialismus nichts zu tun hatte.

Das Experiment in Russland ist misslungen. Diejenigen, die das sagen hatten, haben die Menschen nicht erfasst, nicht richtig eingeschätzt. Sie haben sich mit den Arbeitern nicht assoziiert, sondern sich über sie gestellt. Das Prinzip der Gewalt, der Unterdrückung, der Bezwingung der Menschen hat schließlich zur Katastrophe geführt. Wenn das richtig geführt worden wäre, wäre eventuell kein Zweiter Weltkrieg ausgebrochen. Der sozialistische, antimilitärische Gedanke des Friedens und der Freiheit, die Hoffnung der Proletarier der ganzen Welt sind zunichte gemacht worden.

Die Idee des Sozialismus kann eben nur in Frieden und Freiheit gedeihen, ob in Russland, in China oder in einem anderen BRICS-Staat. Bis heute fehlt die Psychologie – und die Menschen sind nicht zufrieden.

Ohne Psychologie wir die Menschheit nicht vorankommen

Die Menschheit muss sich die Ergebnisse der psychologischen Forschung zu eigen machen, um ein menschenwürdiges Leben zu schaffen. Wenn wir uns selbst und die Mitmenschen erkennen, ändert sich auch die Sichtweise auf die staatlichen Gegebenheiten, die gesamte Gesellschaftsordnung.

Da die Geschichte ein Werk der Menschen ist, muss die Veränderung der Welt aus ihnen selbst kommen, aus der Gemeinschaft mündiger Bürger. Die Menschen müssen ihre eigene Natur, ihre seelische Verfassung, ihre bewussten und halbbewussten Vorurteile sowie die eigenen Reaktionsweisen und auch die ihrer Mitmenschen kennenlernen. So sollten sie einschätzen können, wie sie selbst und wie ihre Mitmenschen auf konfliktträchtige Krisen und heraufziehende Kriege reagieren werden.

Noch scheint die Menschheit nicht in der Lage zu sein, ohne Gewalt und Kriege zusammenzuleben, sich zu assoziieren. Doch das kann sich jederzeit ändern. Dabei ist die Aufklärung, die Reinigung des menschlichen Bewusstseins von individuellen und kollektiven Vorurteilen von großer Bedeutung.

Wichtiger noch als die Aufklärung ist das Problem der Erziehung. Die tiefenpsychologische Forschung hat ihre ungeheure Tragweite deutlich gemacht. Somit wissen wir heute, dass die Menschen in einem derartigen Maße das Produkt ihrer frühkindlichen Erziehung sind, dass man hoffen darf, dass durch psychologische Erziehungsmethoden, die auf das autoritäre Prinzip verzichten, Menschen herangebildet werden, die gegen die Verstrickungen des Machtwahns gefeit sein werden.

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

Er schreibt regelmäßig für Global Research.

Note

1 Adler, Alfred (1928). Psychologie der Macht. In: Grasenack, Moritz (HG.). (2005). Die libertäre Psychotherapie von Friedrich Liebling. Lich / Hessen, S. 139f.

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“X” marks the spot. For the modern advertiser, this is problematic. It breathes pornographic escape, self-denial, elusive treasure, irresistible capture, compelling lasciviousness. And now Elon Musk has decided to impose himself upon a brand he loved as a plaything of juvenile ecstasy. Farewell the bird of Twitter; welcome the X of Musk.

The company rebrand is certainly all Muskian in manner, part of his monomaniac obsession with the letter. In 1999, he created the online bank X.com, which eventually merged with PayPal the following year. Just shy of two decades later, Musk reacquired the X.com site from PayPal. Over time, it seems to have become an ideology and practice, a purpose and an end. X is seen as an “everything app” that will function as a platform to transfer money, order meals, and share posts.

Linda Yaccarino, the company’s chief executive, described it as follows: “X is the future of unlimited interactivity – centered in audio, video, messaging, payments/banking – creating a global marketplace for ideas, goods, services, and opportunities”. As if this did not sound sinister, Yaccarino also declared that there was “absolutely no limit to this transformation. X will be the platform that can deliver, well….everything.”

Like a spreading cult, it has rushed through the Musk empire, afflicting all manner of products and themes. Twitter even has conference rooms with X-oriented names, be they the cringeworthy “eXposure”, or the less revolting “s3Xy”.

For even the most junior of advertising minions, the whole matter has been an example of counter-intuitive madness. “It’s a rookie mistake to throw away decades of equity in those assets [the name Twitter and the blue bird logo],” remarked marketing consultant Gareth Turner. Negative assessments of the rebrand exercise have suggested that billions of dollars have been wiped from the value of the company.

The company is being tanked with a fanatic’s relish, submerged in a sea of depraved indulgence. Its mutilating, despoiling owner hardly seems to care. In the meantime, there is a lot of management rot that’s crept in, just to replace the initial management rot that seeped through prior to Musk’s acquisition.

The substance of the rebrand, for all the lamentations about extinguishing the bird logo, is hard to discern. There is the lexical dimension, which seems to have bothered a goodly number of social media users. What, for instance, are posts on the renamed platform meant to be? Has the verb of tweeting been abandoned altogether? According to the Associated Press stylebook, the platform is to be referred to “as X, formerly known as Twitter.” Usage of the term “tweet” is still considered acceptable.

Beyond the labels, the Musk experiment remains infantile. Far better to simply reflect on the boy-child nature of the entire enterprise, a Peter Pan mad venture that rejects adulthood in favour of an arrested, preserved adolescence. The video game designer Ian Bogost is certainly on to something in noting that “Twitter, like other social platforms and the very internet itself, is already redolent of a seventh grader’s mindset that Musk’s behaviour betrays.”

The seventh grader mindset is one based on noise, shouting, and deafening declarations. It repudiates the notion of trusted small communities, where limits and protocols of good conduct matter. “The shift from social networks to social media,” writes Bogost, “was culturally destructive. It set the expectation that everyone deserves – is owed, even – an audience for every notion, quip, photo, or activity.” The consequences that follow have been manifold: the surfeit of public data, the stratospheric rise of the outrage culture, the prevalence of misinformation, the normalising of shame.

As if to serve up a perfect illustration of the problem, Musk decided last month to fire off a number of social media posts challenging his technology rival and Meta CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, to a penis “measuring contest” and cage fight. Much of this came about because of Zuckerberg’s own efforts to create Threads, a shameless rival platform to Twitter that apes many microblogging features of the latter. Aiming low, Zuckerberg agreed, requesting that Musk send him the location. “Vegas, Octagon,” Musk shot back. To date, the man child bullies have yet to go through with their arrangements, which was hardly surprising.

In a sense, Musk and Zuck resemble the generation of another era, one so beautifully and plangently captured by Cyril Connolly in his memoir, Enemies of Promise. Published in 1938, a year before the catastrophe of the Second World War, it captures a distinct, spoilt view of human development, one where privilege and luxury blight, and where growth is to be feared. On leaving Eton, Connolly distilled his “Theory of Permanent Adolescence”, where the “boys at the great public schools” undergo experiences “so intense as to dominate their lives and to arrest their development.” For Musk and his fellow tech nerds, the future is a necessarily stunted one.

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

Featured image is from Twitter via Creative Bloq

Covidian Madness Infects Alberta’s Criminal Justice System. The Truckers Movement and the Case of the “Coutts Four”

By Prof. Anthony J. Hall, August 07, 2023

The Coutts fiasco is emblematic of the political capture of Canada’s now mostly-dysfunctional criminal justice system. The latest “pre-trial” phase of this major scandal-in-the-making, unfolded in late July in a Lethbridge Alberta courthouse. In that courthouse a process is sporadically underway based on the government’s accusation that four men at the Coutts protest conspired to murder members of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.

“Unidentified Aerial Phenomena”(UAP): What’s Up with All the Elites’ Alien Talk? Let’s Talk Motive

By Ben Bartee, August 07, 2023

I recently wrote a report for PJ Media speculating on the true motivations behind the elite media and Swamp creatures’ recent preoccupation with so-called “unidentified aerial phenomena” or UAP (a government/media rebrand for whatever stupid reason away from UFO)– as if unidentified objects in the sky and secretive military installations with zero transparency are some new development.

How to Solve the Boundless Problem of Violence?

By Dr. Rudolf Hänsel, August 07, 2023

The following lines – regardless of the problem of violence – are meant to encourage and tie in with Albert Camus and his passion to revolt against injustice. Camus’ justice dared to engage in the necessary struggle with the unjust world – here on earth and not only in heaven. His great love for the world and for humanity outshone the bleak depictions in his dramas, novels and philosophical essays.

Indicting a President Is a New Development in America’s Decline: How It Happened

By Dr. Paul Craig Roberts, August 07, 2023

As I wrote in 2016, Trump had no knowledge of Washington. He threw down the gauntlet to the ruling powers, but had no idea who to appoint, who would support his challenge and was quickly staffed up with his establishment enemies.

Latin America and West Africa – Patterns of Neocolonialism

By Stephen Sefton, August 07, 2023

The patterns of neocolonial intervention in the majority world by the United States and its allies since their victories over Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan in 1945 are very clear. Almost immediately the Western countries started a cycle of bloody aggression against peoples resisting colonialism, followed later by the dependence of most African and Asian countries on the ruthless Western economic system.

History: The Making of Modern Russia from Ivan the Great (1462) to Alexander I (1815)

By Dr. Vladislav B. Sotirović, August 07, 2023

In 1462 the crucial aspect of Russian participation in international relations was, in fact, zero as the state was almost in absolute isolation from the rest of the world. In other words, Moscovy Russia was in the mid-15^th century isolated from almost all contact with the outside communities simply by the hostility of its direct neighbors.

American Public Rejects Continuous US Funding of Ukraine

By Peter Koenig and Press TV, August 07, 2023

Most Americans oppose Congress authorizing additional funding to support Ukraine in its war with Russia, according to a new CNN poll conducted by SSRS, as the public splits over whether the US has already done enough to assist Ukraine.

Fire! Fire! Fire! … But Wait a Moment…

By Julian Rose, August 07, 2023

The would be masters of totalitarian control have turned-up the heat in a calculated push to make sure responsibility for the bush and forest fires that have broken-out in the Mediterranean during the recent heatwave, are squarely blamed on ‘global warming’.  

Died Suddenly on Vacation: Collapsing on the Beach. COVID Vaccinated While on Holidays

By Dr. William Makis, August 07, 2023

29 year old Elisabetta Caon, who just completed her PhD at University College London in biotechnology, was on holiday in Greece with her partner, when she collapsed on the beach, could not be revived and died of sudden cardiac arrest (click here).

U.S. Government on “Wrong Side” of Ukraine War. Who Started the War?

By Eric Zuesse, August 07, 2023

Ukraine’s war started in February 2014, not in 2022. As NATO’s Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said on 9 May 2023, “The war started in 2014.” He even was explicit that “You have to remember that the war didn’t start in 2022” (which was when Russia responded on 24 February 2022 by invading Ukraine).

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I recently wrote a report for PJ Media speculating on the true motivations behind the elite media and Swamp creatures’ recent preoccupation with so-called “unidentified aerial phenomena” or UAP (a government/media rebrand for whatever stupid reason away from UFO)– as if unidentified objects in the sky and secretive military installations with zero transparency are some new development.

There is still much secrecy and thus uncertainty — thanks in no small parts to the millions and millions of needlessly classified documents that protect the government from public scrutiny under the guise of “national security” – regarding the true nature of what the government knows and what technology it may or may not have pilfered through reverse-engineering of recovered alien spacecraft, etc.

But what’s for sure is that there’s some agenda afoot beyond merely disclosing to the public what the government’s been up to for decades. We can know this because the government and media despise the public and would never voluntarily expose it to the deeds done in their dark using public money.

I believe, that at least part of the reason is increased defense industry spending, as evidenced by Space Force’s recent budget increase request.

Via Space News:

President Biden’s $842 billion budget request for the Defense Department for fiscal year 2024 includes $30 billion for the U.S. Space Force, the largest funding request to date for the military space branch.

The $30 billion request is $3.7 billion more than what Congress enacted for the Space Force in 2023.

“The largest space budget ever,” DoD said in budget documents released March 13 on the Biden administration’s funding request for the coming fiscal year that begins Oct 1. The proposed budget ‘procures and modernizes capabilities to secure the use of space in the face of increasing threats to U.S. national security space systems,’ the Pentagon said in budget documents…

The heftiest increase is in the [research, development, testing and engineering] account. Funding for low and medium orbit missile-tracking satellites nearly doubles from $1.2 billion in 2023 to $2.3 billion in 2024.”

Hrvoje Moric graciously brought me onto his TNT Radio show to discuss the matter and others of import.

See this.

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This article was originally published on Armageddon Prose.

Ben Bartee, author of Broken English Teacher: Notes From Exile, is an independent Bangkok-based American journalist with opposable thumbs. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from InfoBrics

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The Role of Power in People’s Lives

The following lines – regardless of the problem of violence – are meant to encourage and tie in with Albert Camus and his passion to revolt against injustice. Camus’ justice dared to engage in the necessary struggle with the unjust world – here on earth and not only in heaven. His great love for the world and for humanity outshone the bleak depictions in his dramas, novels and philosophical essays.

Current events such as the proxy war in Ukraine or mass terror and dictatorships give us a thorough visual lesson on the historical significance of violence in the lives of individuals and communities. The flood of legalised crimes deprives us of many illusions; in the question of taming violence, humanity still seems to be at the very beginning of humanisation.

The striving for power in business and politics leads again and again to catastrophes in which the wealth of our culture is squandered and the harvests of our civilisation are destroyed.

But our lethargy means that we do not allow ourselves to be shaken up by this, but continue to lull ourselves into security. We prefer the comforting self-delusion to the thought of danger. Violence brings down all our cultural efforts.

By not fighting it, we condone it in the hope that it will spare us. No one can escape responsibility, we are always complicit, even when we are victims.

The path of the individual in a violent culture inevitably comes under the influence of the desire for power and domination.

All the role models and ideals of this culture are coloured by the will to power. To be great, to be powerful becomes the goal that weakness sets for itself in order to become strong.

Already at the beginning of the last century, the individual psychologist Alfred Adler wrote:

“The poison of imperiousness (…) creeps into parental love. It becomes the children’s task to outgrow their educators, to come to terms with them. It is no different with the teacher. (….). Modern psychology has shown us, however, that the traits of imperiousness, ambition and striving for power over others, together with their abundance of ugly concomitants, are not innate and unchangeable. Rather, they are inculcated into the child at an early age; the child receives them willy-nilly from an atmosphere drenched in the thrill of power. (…).

The parents’ lust for domination, service relationships in the home, the privileges of the small child irresistibly direct the child’s mind towards the attainment of power and dominance, making only this position seem enticing to it. It is only some time later that feelings of community flow into his soul, but they are usually subordinated to the already developed desire for power. (…). (1)

War and Social Order

The development of a culture, however, consists in the voice of the human conscience making itself heard more and more and in the spirit of responsibility taking the place of violence. The ethical achievement of the future will be the growth of the human sense of community, the knowledge of the togetherness of all those who bear humanity’s face. We still suffer from the fiction of power and the self-importance of the individual.

What matters everywhere is a sense of community, a feeling of belonging together, of being with one another. That means we have to stick together and join hands. The reduction of the lust for power and the desire for violence is an urgent necessity for communal life.

Because of the peacefulness of human nature, it is a mistake to attribute war to human nature. Only the lust for power of those who function as authorities within the peoples and are imbued by their social position with the spirit of violence, drives time and again to warlike conflicts in which the peoples bleed to death for the benefit of their masters and exploiters. While it is possible to suppress the admonishing cries of the human sense of community, they can never be completely eradicated. For the gift of evolution consists in the moral consciousness of the individual, in the insight into the responsibility of all towards all.

That is why it is surprising when one looks at the evening television pictures and sees that great differences are made with regard to the nationality of the soldiers killed. Isn’t every dead soldier in Ukraine or any other part of the world one dead man too many? No matter whether he is of Western European, Russian, Ukrainian, African or US nationality? Is it not always a fellow human being who is killed? How can we forget this and still live and sleep well?

Wars Are Good Business

To conquer the other nations, to dominate the others, that is good business. The horrendous profits of the German armaments company “Rheinmetall” or the internationally active US investment company “BlackRock” with over 10 trillion US dollars in assets under management are just two examples among many.

Where we look is profit. There is nothing where that does not play in our social order. Another example is the drug problem, which is killing an enormous number of young people. If there wasn’t a lot of money to be made from it, parents wouldn’t have to worry. Young people would not be able to get hold of the drugs, the market would be empty. But this is not taken into consideration. On the contrary: the release of certain quantities of narcotics is now not only discussed but already practised in many countries.

It is still the case in our capitalist countries that a tiny minority of people live at the expense of the majority. And this gap between rich and poor is widening.

While national wealth is invested in the production of armaments, hunger and poverty are a reality for millions or even billions of people in the world. While capitalists are getting richer and richer through ruthless actions, numerous people are getting poorer and poorer on the other side.

A quote from the German playwright Bertolt Brecht expresses this sentimentally:

“Rich man and poor man stood there and looked at each other. And the poor man said pale: ‘If I were not poor, you would not be rich’.”

Will New Confederation of States (BRICS) Manage Without Violence?

The BRICS countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa) are an association of emerging economies. Because of the economic stagnation in the industrialised nations, investors are now turning to these five countries. Against the backdrop of the Ukraine war and the conflict over Taiwan, the new confederation is striving for more political weight and trying to position itself as an alternative to the G7 countries.

For critical observers, the question arises whether this new confederation of states wants to and can manage without violence.

Why should the powerful leaders of these five states [as well as new members ++] be seen in a different light than the leaders of all other states? Why make a difference?

Will the new confederation use the same methods to force people to go to war and wage war? And this is because our whole society, all our institutions, all our ins and outs, without exception, are permeated by the idea of violence.

Even if the West is obviously fighting the East with all permissible and impermissible means, one should – if one is against every dictatorship and violent society – not take sides. Already during the Russian Revolution one could see that something was happening there that had nothing to do with liberation, freedom or socialism.

The experiment in Russia failed. Those who had the say did not grasp the people, did not assess them correctly.

They did not associate with the workers, but placed themselves above them.

The principle of violence, of oppression, of conquering the people has finally led to disaster. If this had been conducted properly, there might not have been a Second World War. The socialist, anti-military idea of peace and freedom, the hope of the proletarians of the whole world have been destroyed.

The idea of socialism can only flourish in peace and freedom, whether in Russia, in China or in another BRICS state. Psychology is still missing today – and people are not satisfied.

Without Psychology, Humanity Will Not Progress

Humanity must embrace the results of psychological research in order to create a life worthy of human beings. When we recognise ourselves and our fellow human beings, our view of state conditions, the entire social order, also changes.

Since history is a work of human beings, the change of the world must come from within them, from the community of mature citizens. People must get to know their own nature, their mental make-up, their conscious and semi-conscious prejudices, as well as their own ways of reacting and also those of their fellow human beings. In this way, they should be able to assess how they themselves and how their fellow human beings will react to conflict-laden crises and emerging wars.

Humanity does not yet seem to be able to live together, to associate, without violence and wars. But this can change at any time. In this context, enlightenment, the purification of human consciousness from individual and collective prejudices is of great importance.

Even more important than enlightenment is the problem of education. Depth psychological research has made its immense implications clear. Thus we know today that people are to such an extent the product of their early childhood education that we may hope that psychological methods of education, which dispense with the authoritarian principle, will produce people who will be immune to the entanglements of power madness.

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

He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

Note 

(1) Adler, Alfred (1928). Psychology of Power. In: Grasenack, Moritz (ed.). (2005). The libertarian psychotherapy of Friedrich Liebling. Lich / Hesse, p. 139f.

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The wave of Russophobia in NATO and the EU is nothing new. Western states have been fomenting anti-Russian animosity for years and this situation is already starting to reach truly intolerable levels of persecution. In a recent announcement in Riga, it was revealed that the government will soon be issuing orders to thousands of Russian citizens to leave the country. As a post-Soviet state, Latvia has a significant number of ethnic Russians among its population, but apparently this is no reason for the pro-Western government to avoid persecuting its own residents.

This statement was made by Ingmars Lindaka, head of the parliamentary committee on citizenship and migration, during an interview with state media. He said that after receiving the orders, Russians will have 90 days to leave Latvia, otherwise they will be considered illegal migrants. According to him, these thousands of Russians are those who have not expressed interest in participating in the exams to obtain permanent residency certificates. These exams include tests of Latvian language, which has discouraged many Russians from taking part. Lindaka says those who have not been tested are illegally in the country and should be treated according to [recently imposed] Office of Citizenship and Migration Affairs’ (PMLP) rules.

“Roughly 5,000 to 6,000, according to my estimates. These are people who have shown no desire – neither to take the exam nor obtain a temporary residence permit. These are the silent ones. If we look at the law as it currently stands, PMLP must send a notice to leave the country within three months”, Lindaka told journalists.

Other officials later confirmed the statement. Spokespersons for the Ministry of the Interior of Latvia informed the news agency “Elta” that “around 6,000” Russians are to receive official notification from the State in September.

“If a person does not have the right to stay in the country, they must leave for a country where they have the right to stay. The time for departure is three months. So the person can leave without haste. If a person continues to stay in Latvia illegally, there may come a moment when state structures find out about it and, accordingly, remind them of the need to leave. Criminal liability is not provided, but administrative liability is. The person may be fined,” Vilnis Vitolins, the Deputy Secretary of State of the Ministry of Interior Affairs, said.

As well as the other Baltic states, Poland and Ukraine, Latvia has a serious problem of racism against Russian citizens. Since Latvia’s independence from the USSR, there has been a strong growth in anti-Russian sentiments in the country. The resentful mentality towards the Soviet past and the revanchist ideology against the Russian Federation have been encouraged by Riga’s western partners as a way to mobilize the country’s population against NATO’s geopolitical enemies. For this reason, since 1991, ethnic Russians have been denied Latvian citizenship, increasing social polarization.

All this has worsened significantly since last year, when, in response to Russia’s special military operation, the Latvian government launched a series of racist de-Russification policies. Monuments honoring Soviet WWII heroes have been demolished, with the state classifying the memory of the war as a symbol of “occupation”. In August last year, then Latvian President Egils Levits also stated that all Russians in the country should be “isolated” for reasons of “national security”, given the conflict in Ukraine.

To avoid getting into legal problems, 1.8 million Russian ethnic citizens (around 25% of the country’s population) have been forced since 2022 to take Latvian language exams. If they prove fluency in the language, these citizens gain the right to stay in the country, but if they do not pass, they are forced to leave. This is an uncomfortable situation as Russian has been commonly spoken in Latvian territory for many decades, as this language was already official in that territory during the Soviet era. For this reason, many of the Russians who live there cannot pass the exam, since they have no skills in Latvian, being now considered criminals for simply speaking only Russian.

Recently, the case of a 74-year-old Russian woman went viral on the internet. Even though she has lived her entire life in Latvia speaking Russian, the pensioner is now required to prove skills in the Latvian language to avoid expulsion and loss of government social benefits. Thousands of other Soviet-era seniors are in a similar situation. This has already generated protests and has been considered by Russia as a case of cultural genocide, but Riga still seems willing to advance the agenda of de-Russification.

In fact, what is happening in Latvia is absolutely intolerable from a humanitarian point of view. A quarter of the country is being coerced into speaking a new language to avoid being expelled from the territory where they have lived their entire lives. These cultural genocide policies often precede the implementation of physical persecution against the “isolated”, “undesirable” citizens. So, it is possible that Latvia will soon take more serious Nazi-like measures, just as Ukraine did in 2014.

This tends only to further aggravate tensions in Europe, as the “right to protect” citizens abroad is an important and recognized principle in contemporary international law. Certainly, Moscow will do everything in its power to prevent its citizens from being mistreated in other countries.

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

Featured image is from InfoBrics

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***

July 29, 2023 – 29 year old Elisabetta Caon, who just completed her PhD at University College London in biotechnology, was on holiday in Greece with her partner, when she collapsed on the beach, could not be revived and died of sudden cardiac arrest (click here).

July 27, 2023 – 41 year old German doctor and anesthesiologist Dr.Klaus Ott, was on vacation in Croatia when he developed sepsis and died suddenly within 12 hours of getting to the hospital (click here).

July 24, 2023 – Graham, WA – 51 year old firefighter Todd Jensen, Graham Fire & Rescue Battalion Chief, died suddenly from a “medical event” while on vacation.

July 7, 2023 – Charlotte, NC – 60 year old Ritchie Starnes, Managing Editor of the Daily Courier, died unexpectedly while on vacation in Folly Beach, South Carolina.

July 4, 2023 – Wexford, Ireland – A woman in her 60s collapsed while walking with a friend on the beach. (click here)

July 3, 2023 – Melbourne, Australia – 43 year old businessman Rajiv “Raj” Jayarajah was snorkelling with friends in Bali (Jun.27). On June 30, 2023, he suffered a seizure in his hotel room, causing him to collapse, hit his head and suffer a brain haemorrhage. He died a few days later. (click here)

June 28, 2023 – Menorca, Spain – A 37 year old British Tourist died in a hotel room in Menorca, Spain after falling ill in his hotel bed next to his girlfriend. He began having “respiratory difficulties” in the early hours of June 28 which led to a cardiac arrest and sudden death (click here).

June 28, 2023 – 50 year old Nevada State Police Lieutenant Lorin Correll died suddenly, drowned while snorkeling in the Galapagos Islands, Ecuador, with his family and friends on vacation.

June 25, 2023 – Marcianise, Italy – 39 year old Giuseppe Amato died suddenly in his sleep while on vacation in Maratea, Italy. He was found dead in his room.

June 18, 2023 – Italy – 42 year old Italian doctor & surgeon Dr. Paolo Cappare had a medical emergency while swimming off a beach and died suddenly.

April 28, 2023 – Athens, GA – 21 year old University of Georgia student Liza Burke had brain bleed on Mar.10, 2023 while on vacation in Mexico, was diagnosed with glioblastoma on brainstem & died 4 weeks later.

April 26, 2023 – Southport, UK – 31 year old nursing student Ashleigh De Andrade returned from holiday, felt unwell, had several seizures & died suddenly on April 26, 2023 due to a “bleed on the brain”.

April 16, 2023 – 44 year old Canadian doctor Shannon Corbett (ObGyn & fertility specialist in Ontario) died suddenly of a heart attack while on vacation in Nassau, Bahamas.

April 16, 2023 – Australian amateur boxer, 28 year old Charlie James Bradley, died suddenly in Bali on April 16, 2023, he was found dead outside of a medical clinic in the middle of the road (click here).

April 10, 2023 – Morton, IL – 42 year old news anchor Lesley Swick Van Ness died suddenly on April 10, 2023. She was on vacation with her family in Florida when she “fell ill” on April 6, was hospitalized, died a few days later.

My Take…

Why are COVID-19 vaccinated people dying suddenly on vacations? Theories:

1. Getting a “recent COVID-19 vaccine booster shot” to travel
2. Travel stress can trigger arrhythmia in those with post jab myocarditis
3. Flying increases risk of forming blood clots in vessels damaged by spike protein
4. Higher risk of developing infections, sepsis
5. Higher risk of seizures
6. Heat may affect contents of “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.

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***

Last week, Nobel physicist John Clauser came out of the Clausit to speak his own inconvenient truth about global warming and CO₂ . No good deed goes unpunished. Another physicist who was a personal hero of mine has expressed similar views. This is a big subject, and I don’t feel engaged enough with the issue to write a book, But I will say a few things about which I feel pretty certain, but to which Right Thinking People may take exception. 

1. Global ecosystems are indeed in crisis, and this is the result of human activity.
2. But greenhouse gasses, CO₂ and climate change are peripheral to this story. The net effect of CO₂ emission is likely to be beneficial, if at all relevant.
3. Environmental activism may be the most important movement on the planet today, and its diversion into a narrow focus on carbon is dangerous.
4. Weather manipulation is a well-developed, sophisticated science being practiced on a global scale, without open scientific backing and without democratic consent. This, too, is a crime and a major danger. 

1.  Ecosystem Collapse 

Elizabeth Kolbert’s book, The Sixth Extinction, is the best single guide to what is at stake.

Species are disappearing at a rate that has only been rivaled five previous times in the 4-billion-year history of life on earth.

These are seminal events, changing the face of the earth and the nature of life.

The most recent extinction (#5) was the disappearance of the dinosaurs, 65 million years ago. 

We know just enough to realize that ecosystems are complex and interdependent in more ways than we can understand. Ecosystems are robust, and the loss or replacement of a few species triggers adaptations so that the ecosystem continues in a new equilibrium. But ecosystems can also collapse if a keystone species is lost, or if it is sufficiently disrupted. 

Some large fraction of the species on earth is either extinct or rapidly disappearing. It is impossible to offer a more quantitative estimate because most of the macroscopic species have not yet even been catalogued, and of the microscopic species, including bacteria and fungi, our understanding has barely scratched the surface. 

At some point, ecosystems collapse and species disappear because other species on which they depend are disappearing.

This is happening in large stretches of the world.

Ocean life is seeking a new equilibrium after the pollution, overfishing, and the killing spree of the last 50 years in particular.

Forests and wetlands the world over no longer support the diversity of life that they once harbored, and the collapse of biodiversity has a momentum that continues over decades.

The Center for Biological Diversity is a go-to source for information and my favorite environmental group.

Major reasons for this collapse include 

• habitat loss 
• deforestation 
• every war is an environmental disaster
• widespread poisoning of insects, which are at the base of the animal food chain
• insects are also pollinators, and plant life becomes fragile when insects disappear  
• draining of wetlands, mining of fossil water, and damming of rivers
• deliberate targeting of apex predators, including lions, wolves, and whales
• washing of topsoil into the rivers and oceans
• wasteful practices in mining, agriculture, and industry
• global travel, bringing invasive species that tend to homogenize ecosystems worldwide 

Many people, consciously or otherwise, imagine a transhuman future in which the earth is paved over and food is grown hydroponically.

We’ll eat lab-grown meat and live in a virtual paradise, even after we kill the ecosphere.

This is a dangerous delusion! All life is interdependent.

No species can survive outside an ecosystem. Bacteria manufacture chemicals crucial for life. Insects pollinate. Fungi recycle waste, make atmospheric nitrogen biologically useful, and connect trees underground. No species can exist without a rich ecosystem, and we don’t begin to understand all the connections that create a functional ecosystem. Mankind’s one attempt to create an artificial ecosystem, dubbed Biosphere 2, fell flat on its face within weeks.

In murdering nature, we are destroying the foundation for human life as well.

2.  Carbon Dioxide Has Little to Do with This

Anthropogenic global warming is a tiny fraction of the natural variations in earth’s temperature.

There are great natural cycles in the earth’s temperature. One of the best-documented is a cycle of about 100,000 years. The reasons are not well understood, but the present warm period in which human civilization has developed is not typical. Ice ages are typical.

As recently as 12,000 years ago, the part of Pennsylvania where I live was under a glacier two miles thick. When these conditions inevitably return, it will create a far greater disruption to animal life and to human activity than anthropogenic warming. “We’re overdue for the next ice age,” and it may be that “global warming” is helping to stave off that destiny, at least temporarily.

So, it’s true that we are at the warmest point in the last 100,000 years, but that has little to do with human activity. The 100,000 year cycle has a range of about 10^o C, and human activity in the last 200 years is responsible for only about one 1^o C.

Compared to local effects in America and Europe during the Little Ice Age of the 18th century, the effect of all our burning of fossil fuels is lost in the noise. Global warming is a worldwide average, while the Little Ice Age was regional; but the point is that even in the last few hundred years, ecosystems have had to adapt to much larger changes than those that global warming has imposed.

All the hype about a climate catastrophe based on carbon emissions is based on computer models that are woefully inadequate. These models have been wrong about the changes in the last 40 years since modeling began. They are no reliable guide to future climate response, though they are are continually being cited as authority.

In the last 7 years in particular, CO₂ emissions have continued and accelerated, atmospheric concentration has increased steadily, but temperatures have gone up and down. 

Freeman Dyson makes the point that plants grow faster when there is more CO₂ in the air, and when temperatures are warmer. Plants are the productive basis for all ecosystems, so ecosystems are enriched by higher CO₂ levels. John Clauser makes the point that there is no evidence that a pattern of extreme weather events can be related to more CO₂ in the air.

3.  The Environmental Movement Has Been Derailed by the Carbon Narrative

Many people of good will are passionate about reducing their CO₂ footprint. Many companies and organizations are profiting from scaring the public about climate change and selling solutions to enrich themselves such as carbon credits, or pushing nuclear power as a friendlier form of energy than burning wood, coal or petroleum products. (It is not.)

Government policies regarding energy could certainly be improved. The most effective thing we can do is to adopt technologies that use energy much more efficiently than we now do.

Cars that get 200 miles per gallon of gasoline already exist, and public transit can be much more efficient.  Buildings can be designed so that they remain comfortable with much less energy input. Rocky Mountain Institute has been creatively documenting the necessarily policy changes for decades. 

There is an urgent need for all of us to get back to advocating the diverse policy changes that are required to preserve and restore ecosystems, to slow and mitigate the Sixth Extinction.

Reducing carbon emissions is dauntingly difficult, both technically and politically. Technically, because so much of what we do depends on fossil fuel energy, politically because the economic benefits of burning fossil fuels accrue locally, while the costs, if any, are spread across the globe.

Burning oil is associated with spills that devastate ocean life for decades; burning coal is associated with mountaintop removal; fracking causes earthquakes and pollutes groundwater. Cars cause smog and coal-burning power plants put mercury in the air. I’m not saying that fossil fuels are environmentally benign or that our dependence on carbon-based fuels is sustainable; only that atmospheric carbon dioxide is not the locus of the principal harms. 

When vast machines capture carbon dioxide from smokestacks and pipe it thousands of miles to be pumped into the ground, I suspect something is seriously amiss. When companies get environmental brownie points for cutting down forests for woodchips and replanting seedlings, environmentalism has gone mad.

Focus on carbon emissions is the least effective kind of environmental advocacy, and it is probably counter-productive. 

4.  Weather Manipulation Is Everywhere, and It’s Unacknowledged

Chemtrails are real, though the motivation for this vast, multi-billion dollar project is unclear.

My best guess is that HAARP and similar large antennas are being used to push air masses around the globe with electrostatics and stratospheric heating, and that seeding the stratosphere with aluminum is part of a coordinated effort to send that radio energy to desired locations.  

Dane Wigington has done more than anyone to document this. He has an encyclopedic knowledge of the phenomena, but I don’t believe he understands the motivation for weather manipulation. This is his introductory video.

Droughts and cold snaps are being weaponized to reduce agriculture output. Hurricanes are being steered toward inhabited areas.

It may be that weather manipulation could be applied in a productive and broadly beneficial program, but evidence is that the opposite is being pursued. 

I believe that the long drought in California, floods in Texas, and the recent transport of smoke from Quebec to blanket the densely populated Eastern US are all examples of weather manipulation. I believe that these engineered weather anomalies are being put forward as evidence that CO₂ is deranging the weather. I realize that it is difficult to prove that any particular weather anomaly is engineered, but Wigington’s evidence convinces me. 

There is no doubt that the technology of weather manipulation has been maturing for many decades, and present capabilities are unacknowledged. Who is manipulating the weather and what is motivating them? I think these are important, open questions.

The Bottom Line 

Please redouble your advocacy for environmental protection in all its forms. Please educate yourself about chemtrails and geoengineering. And don’t worry about CO₂.

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In a previous article (August 3, 2023) I explained why the indictments of President Trump are entirely fabrications for political and propagandistic reasons. Today I will answer the question how it is possible for a President of the United States to be indicted multiple times for behavior while in office.

A US president is surrounded by legal counsel. It is not possible for a president to go around breaking scores of laws. Normally such phony indictments as Trump faces would not be possible. Not only has no president in US history been previously indicted, the political party he represents would be up in arms pointing out the absurdity and political nature of the indictments. The indicting party would be overwhelmed with criticism and exposure.

But not in Trump’s case. Why? 

As I wrote in 2016, Trump had no knowledge of Washington. He threw down the gauntlet to the ruling powers, but had no idea who to appoint, who would support his challenge and was quickly staffed up with his establishment enemies.

Consider Trump’s chosen vice president, Mike Pence. On August 1, Pence said that Trump put Trump above the Constitution and therefore should never be permitted to become president. See this. 

What does Pence mean when he says Trump put himself above the Constitution? He means that Trump challenged the obvious electoral fraud that stole Trump’s reelection.  

Let’s assume that the election was not stolen, but that Trump was convinced or influenced, as I am, by the claims made by many experts and the evidence that they presented that the election was stolen and did not want to be ushered out of office before the claims could be investigated. 

But Pence refused to prevent the vote certification before it could be verified. Pence served the ruling establishment and got Trump out of office prior to knowing if the vote was honest. Remember, despite the hard evidence presented in many forums by many unrelated experts, nothing was done about the information they provided. The very minute Biden was declared the winner, the MSM “presstitutes” began the endless refrain: “there was no vote fraud.”  

The coverup propaganda prevailed. And certainly Pence was not going to let anyone establish the truth by delaying the certification of an election that was clearly stolen. There is really no doubt about it.

Consider Trump’s attorney general, the establishment figure William Barr. One function, probably the most important, of a US attorney general is to keep an administration on the right side of all the many laws, treaties, agreements, of all the things that can result in embarrassments. In recent years, and perhaps always, attorney generals have protected presidents from consequences of illegal actions, such as George W. Bush’s and Obama’s illegal wars in the Middle East and North Africa based on orchestrated deceit and lies to the public, the allies, and the United Nations.

Today we are witnessing the attorney general protecting both President Biden and his son from known crimes that are well established. But not a word from the Justice (sic) Department, the media “presstitutes”, or the legal profession.

Here is how the turncoat Barr served the president who appointed him AG. On August 3 establishment member Barr said that the indictments against Trump are “legitimate,” but Trump’s claim that he has a free speech right to say his reelection was stolen is “not valid.” See this.

In other words, Trump broke some unknown law that if it existed would be unconstitutional for challenging the unexamined vote count on the basis of many experts’ evidence that his reelection was stolen. What is this alleged law? How can indictments be made on the basis of a non-existent law?

Try to imagine the extent of the gag being shoved in the mouth of a President of the United States.

Now consider President Trump’s chosen national security advisor, John Bolton. When Trump appointed Bolton national security advisor, I knew for certain that Trump was a defenseless babe in the woods. 

Trump has no worst enemy than the neoconservatives of whom Bolton is the worst. 

When Trump said one of his main goals was to “normalize relations with Russia,” the neoconservatives and the entirety of the military/security complex turned against him and regarded him as a deadly enemy. Here was Trump declaring the end to the neoconservatives dream of world hegemony and the termination of Russia’s enemy status that would diminish the budget and power of the US military/security complex. The CIA, NSA, FBI, US military, and the neoconservatives and their think tanks and publications instantly set about destroying Donald Trump.

John Bolton says Trump is in love with authoritarian rulers and rule, that Trump will cut defense spending, thus weakening the neoconservatives ability to start wars all over the world. See this.

I agree with Bolton that Trump does not know how to serve the agendas of the ruling elite and would fail to serve well the elite’s agendas. But from my standpoint, which differs fundamentally from Bolton’s, it is not the elite’s agendas that are important. What is important, if America is to be restored and continue as a free country, is that the massive attacks on US civil liberties be stopped and punished. To defend America means to defend the US Constitution. It does not mean to serve the profits of the powerful economic interests, the Woke ideologies of the universities, Democrat Party, and intellectuals, or the war-mongering of the neoconservatives. It is all to the good if Trump makes a mess of these agendas that are destroying the United States and the American people. 

When people say Trump is unfit to be president, they don’t understand the reason why. The reason that Trump is unfit is that Trump does not have the background that permits him to differentiate enemy from friend. The two friends he had were quickly evicted from his administration, which ended up consisting entirely of the Washington Establishment.

And now in his dangerous difficulty, his own appointees are viciously damning him. Trump’s term was like a western frontier marshal setting out to arrest an outlaw by appointing the outlaw’s gang as deputy marshals.

Trump appointed to his government the enemies that he intended to destroy.

It seems that the American people, a majority of actual voters, are going to stick with Trump, but as time passes perhaps they will succumb to the propaganda against him.

The Rinos (Republicans in name only) are working hard with their theme that “we have to move on.” But if he is again elected, I doubt he will be permitted to assume the presidency. 

He has seen and experienced too much. The corruption of everything that was America is vastly worse than Trump ever imagined or the American people know.  If Trump gets power again and has the wits to appoint only the people who understand the erosion of America and have the will to fight to restore our rights and our country, it is the ruling Establishment that will rebel.  

Biden and Obama have turned the US military into a corrupt Woke organization. The US military is the last organization that will come to America’s defense, or, to put it differently, they will come to Woke America’s defense, but not to the defense of traditional American values  and the US Constitution.

The next election will determine whether America has a future. 

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

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The patterns of neocolonial intervention in the majority world by the United States and its allies since their victories over Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan in 1945 are very clear. Almost immediately the Western countries started a cycle of bloody aggression against peoples resisting colonialism, followed later by the dependence of most African and Asian countries on the ruthless Western economic system. In all this time, the United States and Europe demonstrated the most crude and brutal determination to guarantee at all costs control of the natural resources required by their capitalist system. Until the developments of recent years, they were able to achieve their goal through commercial and financial domination at the global level and, at the regional level, political co-optation of local elites. Whenever they have found it necessary, they have never hesitated to use military aggression either directly or indirectly. 

However, in the last twenty-five years, the old imperialist regime imposed by the American and European powers has entered into crisis. It is instructive to make the comparison between the contemporary history of West Africa and Latin America and the Caribbean. This is a period that began approximately with the election of our Eternal Comandante Hugo Chávez Frías in 1998 as president of Venezuela and our comrade Laurent Gbagbo as president of the Ivory Coast in 2000. Both leaders promoted socialist ideas that threatened the customary imperial control of their respective regions. 

In both cases, the Western powers mounted campaigns to destabilize the new governments with repeated attacks and interventions of one kind or another. The intensification of the imperial aggression reached its peak in 2011 with the destruction of the Libyan Jamahiriya and the assassination of Brother Guide Muammar al Gaddafi; with the French attack in Ivory Coast to overthrow Laurent Gbagbo, with the treacherous complicity of the United Nations, and also the beginning of unilateral coercive measures by the United States against Venezuela and its oil company PDVSA. The institutional context of both regions of the world contains very similar components.

In Latin America and the Caribbean, the Organization of American States has served as the United States Ministry of Colonies since 1948. But in West Africa, it was not until the 1970s that the countries of the region completed their independence from the colonial powers, France, the United Kingdom and Portugal. So, it was not until 1975 that the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) was founded. The ostensible objective of both institutions – the OAS and ECOWAS – is to promote regional cooperation, socio-economic development and political stability. In both cases, the dominant influence of the respective Western powers has distorted the practice of the institutions so that they serve in effect as tools of imperial regional control.

Throughout its history, the OAS has given its institutional support to imperial rule in the region, from supporting the 1954 coup in Guatemala and the exclusion of revolutionary Cuba to the illegal recognition of Juan Guaidó to represent Venezuela. After Cuba, only Venezuela and Nicaragua have had the courage to refuse to be members of this neocolonial institution. In the case of ECOWAS, while it is true that none of the former colonial powers is an actual member, France, and therefore the European Union, wields great influence because it dominates one of the main economic components of ECOWAS, the West African Economic and Monetary Union (WAEMU) and also because most of the countries of the region use the CFA Franc currency, a direct inheritance from the colonial era. 

The scope of ECOWAS has expanded beyond its original goal of “collective self-sufficiency” in a way similar to the development of the OAS, to now include the organization of peacekeeping missions in its member countries and the promotion of Western-style electoral democracy. ECOWAS now has a total population of over 440 million with a Gross Domestic Product of almost two trillion dollars (PPP). (It should be noted that if Nigeria’s oil wealth is subtracted that GDP drops dramatically to only US$600 billion indicating the relative poverty of the region). Almost all of the ECOWAS governments have faithfully fulfilled their neocolonial role in relation to the recent military insurrection in Niger, which has broad support among that country’s population, as is also the case with the other recent similar military insurrections in Guinea in 2021, Burkina Faso in 2022 and Mali in 2020.

The reasons for these coups include the presence of French and American military personnel on national territory, systemic corruption for the benefit of a small national elite and their foreign owners, and the lack of social and economic development for the population in general. However, perhaps even more urgently than these other factors has been the development of pseudo-Islamist terrorist forces such as Boko Haram and Al Qaeda of the Islamic Maghreb (AQMI) as a destabilizing factor in the entire region. In fact, the immediate origin of this component of regional instability was the destruction of Libya in 2011 and the consequent destabilization of the huge northern territory of Mali after the massacre in January 2012 of more than 100 Malian soldiers in the village of Aguelhok by terrorist movements.

In response to the lack of support from its government to defend its territory, the Malian army took power in a very similar way to what has just happened in Niger. A Committee for the Return of Democracy and the Restoration of the State was appointed. As now in the case of Niger, ECOWAS implemented economic coercive measures and threatened possible military intervention. Then came an agreement mediated by the United Nations, among others, and the intervention of a French military force. As in Niger this year (where the military has formed a National Council for Defense of the Nation), the 2020 military insurrection in Mali was largely a reaction against the presence of the French military. The fundamental difference between the events of 2012 and 2013 in Mali and the situation now ten years later is the united front agreed between Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger and Guinea, all ECOWAS member countries. 

In this context, Guinea’s action could be crucial because its support for its three land-locked neighbors gives them access to commercial transit through the important port of Conakry, the capital of Guinea. Whereas in previous years, ECOWAS was always able to put more intense pressure and with greater ease on military insurrections in Burkina Faso or Mali, and now in Niger, because these countries lack access to the sea. The militaries of all four countries have concluded that the US and French military presence promotes neither stability nor security and, moreover, they suspect that the imperialist powers themselves covertly and indirectly support the terrorist forces they are supposedly fighting. Certainly, in 2012 a close Western ally at the time, Qatar, sent planes with armaments for the pseudo-Islamist groups via the city of Gao in northern Mali.

In West Africa, the recent military uprisings have been in support of nationalist and popular demands in the context of this counterproductive foreign military occupation and the cynicism of the predatory Western powers. In Latin America only Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela, the only countries to have rejected the OAS, have anti-imperialist armed forces defending their governments. The United States and its NATO allies have more than 70 military bases throughout the region, with most concentrated in Central America and the Caribbean, thus encircling Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua. As in Africa, this regional military occupation is camouflaged under the spurious motif of security cooperation. 

As in Africa too, this imperialist military harassment of the region goes hand in hand with endless pressure from giant Western energy and mining multinationals to ensure they get priority in controlling the region’s natural resources. It is also about ensuring the imposition of inappropriate economic priorities through international and regional financial institutions. Both the United States and the European Union are now intensifying their focus on Latin America and West Africa because they are afraid of losing their customary control over the natural resources of these regions to governments which, first, prioritize the needs and aspirations of their own peoples and, secondly, for the same reason want to seal more favorable agreements with China and Russia. This is the fundamental dynamic that will define the successful development of a genuine new world order. 

It is a dynamic in which the corporate elites of the United States and the European Union will not be able to prevail because they still think they can to impose their interests over the needs and aspirations of the peoples of the majority world whom they want to continue marginalizing. They think they can forever keep entire populations in political impotence and economic distress by means of endless psychological warfare and its corollary, spreading malicious calumny to promote division and disunity. Many examples show how demented this assumption has become, whether the rejection in a country like Argentina of its subjugation to Western financial structures or the determined popular resistance in Haiti to systematic institutional destruction and grotesque exploitation by local private sector and foreign corporate predators. 

Also relevant is Cuba’s heroic resistance to the genocidal US blockade and too, Venezuela’s and Nicaragua’s resistance to coup attempts and to constant US and EU provocation and intimidation or, elsewhere, the resistance to the coups in Bolivia and Peru. The advance of the political right in the region between 2015 and 2022 was brief and fragile. The Latin American and Caribbean nations continue the unstoppable development of their relations with the People’s Republic of China. All this is also reflected in the development of various similar events in West Africa. Resistance to the empire is inevitable among the peoples of the majority world who live the reality of all these processes. As our President Comandante Daniel noted in 2021,”Those countries that still dream of imposing their colonialist, neocolonialist policies on the world are simply out of touch with reality. That’s not possible anymore.”

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

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

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On the night of August 4, the Kiev regime launched a sea drone attack against a Russian tanker. Luckily, the resulting damage was insufficient to sink the ship or cause any casualties among the 11 crew members, but it did hinder its operation. The attack happened at about 23:20 just south of the Kerch Strait, according to a statement by Russia’s Federal Agency for Sea and Inland Water Transport. The vessel was later identified as the chemical tanker SIG. The Russian maritime agency detailed that there is a hole “near the waterline on the starboard side, presumably as a result of a sea drone attack” and confirmed there were no casualties.

It’s important to note that the SIG is sanctioned by the United States for transporting jet fuel to the Russian military in Syria, making American involvement in the attack almost a certainty, particularly at a time when Washington DC’s aggression against Damascus is escalating. The targeting information was most likely provided by US ISR (intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance) platforms which then relayed this to the SBU or the Neo-Nazi junta forces. The move aims to hamper vital Russian logistics in Syria, particularly operations by the VKS (Russian Aerospace Forces) which is regularly intercepting US/NATO aircraft illegally entering Syrian airspace.

To further conceal direct US involvement, the Kiev regime openly boasted about the attack, which is highly unusual given the fact that it normally maintains plausible deniability in the aftermath of such actions. According to NBC, “the tanker was transporting fuel for the Russian troops,” citing sources and adding that “it was well loaded” and that “the ‘fireworks’ could be seen from afar”. They said that a surface drone and TNT had been used to carry out the attack. A video was also released and shared by several Neo-Nazi junta officials, showing a sea drone moving towards the tanker, although it cuts just before reaching the ship, suggesting the explosion followed immediately after.

“Any explosions that happen with the ships of the Russian Federation or the Crimean Bridge is an absolutely logical and effective step in relation to the enemy,” the head of the SBU Vasyl Malyuk posted on Telegram, adding: “If the Russians want the explosions to stop, they should use the only option for this — to leave the territorial waters of Ukraine.”

Several hours before the attack on SIG, another sea drone damaged the “Olenogorsky Gornyak” landing ship, just off the port of Novorossiysk, one of Russia’s major export hubs. Coupled with attacks on tankers, such actions are obviously designed to hinder Moscow’s oil sales as the so-called “price cap” turned out to be a miserable failure, with even US vassals such as Japan ignoring it. By targeting Russian tankers and major ports, the US is hoping to stop or at least hamper oil sales. This is also connected to the issue of insurance for Russian vessels, meaning there would be no compensation in case of such attacks, possibly prompting other tankers to halt transporting Russian oil.

On the other hand, drone strikes on Russian cities aim to disrupt normal economic activity and discredit Russian authorities, probably in hopes of causing unrest of some kind. On August 6, Moscow’s Vnukovo airport was forced to temporarily halt all flights due to a failed drone attack. The Russian military’s electronic warfare (EW) assets downed the drone in the Podolsk region of the Moscow suburbs. The attack could have caused untold damage had it reached the airport, jeopardizing the lives of thousands of civilians. Since major drone attacks on buildings in Moscow (including the Kremlin itself), the Russian military strengthened its air defenses in and around Moscow, including by placing “Pantsir” SAM (surface-to-air missile) systems on rooftops.

Moscow Mayor Sergey Sobyanin wrote on Telegram:

“Today at around 11:00 AM, a drone attempted to break through to Moscow. It was destroyed on the approach by air defenses. Well done, military.”

Drone attacks on civilian infrastructure are absolutely irrelevant to Russian military operations in Ukraine, meaning they are either an act of desperation (as the Kiev regime’s much-touted counteroffensive has been an absolute debacle) or the United States is simply trying to launch a total war against Russia, as its economy has proved to be virtually impervious to political West’s unrelenting sanctions warfare. Another proof that the economic siege of Russia has failed spectacularly is the fact that the Eurasian giant’s economy will grow 1.5% this year, according to an assessment by the IMF. This “unpleasant surprise” most likely prompted the political West to take “concrete action” in order to prevent such a scenario, as its own economic prospects are not looking so good.

Namely, although President Joe Biden vowed to “turn the ruble into rubble” just last year, this has proven to be nothing more than a fantasy, as the Russian economy is now outperforming those of its adversaries, the same ones enforcing the sanctions. Unable to face Moscow in a fair fight, be it militarily, economically or otherwise, the political West is left with underhanded tactics such as biological warfare, evident terrorist attacks and even covert nuclear proliferation. As previously mentioned, all this can only be described by two words – total war. And while it inevitably results in damage for Moscow on a tactical level, strategically and historically, Russia has never lost such confrontations, as evidenced by the last attempt by a certain failed painter with a peculiar mustache.

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Drago Bosnic is an independent geopolitical and military analyst.

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The period from 1462 to 1815 is of special importance for the history of Russia and the Russian people as well as for the history of Eurasia for at least five good reasons:

1) Russia became modernized according to the European pattern;

2) Russia became liberated from the foreign occupants;

3) The Russian people became territorially united into a single national state;

4) Eurasia experienced Russian territorial expansion in all directions from its original administrative center in Moscow and later St Petersburg; and finally

5) Russia as the mighty empire became a member of the European concert of Great Powers and even the most powerful state in Eurasia after the Napoleonic Wars.

The period started with the realm of Ivan the Great (Ivan III Vasilievich, 1462−1505) to be ended with the final decisions of the Congress of Vienna in 1815. That was the Grand Duchy of Moscow, known as Moscovy, as the state created by the Grand Dukes of Moscow in north-east Russia to be destined to commit two great historical tasks:

1) To recover the territories lost to the Swedish, Polish, Lithuanian, German, Ottoman, and Mongol/Tartar occupants (in the west and south), and

2) To expand Russian authority across North Asia (Siberia) up to the Pacific Ocean.

However, it has to be noticed that in 1462 the crucial aspect of Russian participation in international relations was, in fact, zero as the state was almost in absolute isolation from the rest of the world. In other words, Moscovy Russia was in the mid-15^th century isolated from almost all contact with the outside communities simply by the hostility of its direct neighbors.

In particular, Moscovy Russia was not in a position to share in both scientific and cultural issues of Europe, and from this perspective became relatively backward compared with especially West Europe. However, lesser than four centuries later, in 1815 Russian Empire became the most powerful participant in European politics and international relations.

The territories of the Russian people ruled from Kiev (the Kieven Rus’) have been split due to the Mongol occupation in the mid-13^th century followed by the occupation by the Grand Duchy of Lithuania into two parts: eastern and western. The eastern lands were under the authority of Mongols while the western territories became crucial parts of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania (including Kiev) to be after the Lublin Union of 1569 (signed between Poland and Lithuania) incorporated into the Kingdom of Poland. Nevertheless, under the shadow of Mongol overlordship, the Grand Duchy of Moscow succeeded to dominate its Russian neighbors and finally threw off the Mongol/Tartar yoke.

Image: Ivan the Great (Licensed under the Public Domain)

The growing power of the Grand Duchy of Moscow was gradual and finally obtained political independence from the Mongols/Tartars under the rule of Ivan the Great in 1480.

The political-military power of Moscovy was first exerted eastward and later southeastward. The northern territories of Novgorod have been the next (in 1478) followed by Pskov (1510). Nevertheless, one of the most successful and important conquests by Moscovyte Russia (from 1547 the Empire) was in 1552 when the Khanate of Kazan became subjugated to Russian rule. Consequently, this conquest opened the way for Russia to advance across the Urals and into Siberia.

Subsequently, the Tartar Khanate of Astrakhan became conquered in 1556 which gave Russia control of the Volga and all ways to the Caspian Sea.

However, in the second half of the 16^th century, Russia experienced certain setbacks during the Livonian War (1558−1583) under Ivan IV the Terrible (1533−1584) as this debilitating war for a quarter of a century on the Polish-Lithuanian and Swedish frontiers was, in principle, not successful for Russia. Moscow was in the year 1571 even sacked by the invading army of the Tartars from Crimea.

Nevertheless, Siberia became the biggest challenge of the Russian territorial expansion at the turn of the 17^th century. Originally, it was the fur trade that involved Russian merchants in the unknown and rarely settled territory of Siberia (that was, in fact, terra incognita).

Russians finally reached the coast of the Pacific Ocean in 1639 followed by the establishment of the holds (like the Americans did in the Wild West).

In essence, the plenty of Siberian rivers very much facilitated fast exploration that became soon inforced by strategic forts and trading posts. In fact, all of Siberia except the Amur region became acquired from native primitive peoples (Tungusy, Ostyaks, Lamuts, Koryaks, Chukchi, Yakuts, Evenki…) – the Amur was annexed from China in the 1650s but was given up in 1689 according to the Treaty of Nerchinsk with China. Parallelly, the opening of the Volga trade route led to the fast growth of the silk trade with Persia/Iran via the Caspian Sea.

After the Time of Troubles in Russian history, which followed the deaths of Ivan the Terrible (1584) and Boris Godunov (1605) in 1613 Michael Romanov became elected Russian Tsar/Emperor – the founder of the Romanov ruling dynasty (1613−1917).

The Romanovs in the 17^th century turned their attention to the recovery of West Russia which was for centuries under the Lithuanian-Polish occupation. At the beginning of this campaign, there were certain losses which have been caused mainly by the internal political chaos and disunity of the earlier period known as the Time of Troubles. However, important gains have been done from 1640 to 1686. For instance, in 1667, Kiev and the mid-Dneper territories were gained. The Cossacs of the lower Dniepr led by Bogdan Khmelnitski voluntarily accepted the Russian rule instead of the Polish Catholic yoke in 1654, and their land of Zaporozh’ye, therefore, became since that time claimed by Russia.

Image: Alexander I (Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0)

In the second half of the 16^th century and throughout the 17^th century, Russian colonization spread across the Oka River in the south while some Eastern Slavs migrated from Poland into the forest-steppe zone.

At the time, several towns in this zone started their existence as borderland outposts like, for instance, Orel (1564), Voronezh (1586), or Kursk (1586). Nevertheless, at the time, isolation from Europe was the focal problem for Russia until the time of Tsar Peter the Great (1682−1725).

On one hand, there was a huge demand for different products from the Russian forest and land by West Europeans but, on the other hand, Russia was unable to profit from such demand for the very physical reason that Poland-Lithuania, Sweden, and the Ottoman Empire simply blocked both oversea and overland links with Europe.

It is true that the Brits for commercial purposes succeeded to open up a very dangerous northern route to the White Sea via the Barents Sea and that Russian Tsar Ivan the Terrible established the seaport of Archangel in 1584.

However, Archangel as the outlet for the export of Russian products to Europe was workable only during the summertime for a few months. For several reasons, therefore, Russian Tsar Peter the Great accepted as his focal national aim in foreign policy to break through to the shores of the Baltic Sea and consequently, took from Sweden Estonia and Livonia after the Great Northern War (1700−1725) which, in fact, Swedish King Charles XII started against Russia. The seaport of Riga became acquainted and a new Russia’s capital on the Baltic Sea was established in 1703 – St Petersburg. Consequently, Russia became a Baltic power with open access via the sea to Europe and its market.

What was done by Peter the Great for Russia in the north (the Baltic Sea) was done later in the same century by Russian Empress (of German origin) Catherine the Great (1762−1796) in the south (the Black Sea). She was waging several successful wars from 1768 to 1792 against the Tartar Khanate in Crimea which finally led to the destruction of the Tartar state in the peninsula.

It was followed by the substitution of Russian for Ottoman control along the northern littoral of the Black Sea, in the Crimean Peninsula, around the Azov Sea, and across the adjoining steppes. The seaport of Odessa was founded in 1794 and became for the region of the Black Sea of the same importance as the seaport of Archangel (est. 1584) was for the White Sea or St Petersburg for the Baltics – the focal outlet for Russian exports to Europe.

From the time of the First Partition of Poland-Lithuania (the Republic of Two Nations) in 1772 to the Vienna Congress of 1814−1815 Russia moved her state territory westward for 600 miles at the expense of Poland-Lithuania.

By the three partitions of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in 1772, 1793, and 1795 Russian Empire gained much of the former Polish Kingdom and all Grand Duchy of Lithuania. After the collapse of Napoleon’s Grand Duchy of Warsaw, the Vienna Congress authorized Russian Emperor Alexander I (1801−1825) to become King of a reconstituted Kingdom of Poland. Russia became a leader of the Holy Alliance (Russia, Austria, and Prussia) up to the mid-19^th century and, in fact, the strongest power in continental Europe with borders from Warsaw to Vladivostok. At the time of the Napoleonic Wars, Russia included the region of the South Caucasus (1806−1813).

Russia during the period from Peter the Great to the Vienna Congress experienced fast economic development, especially in the military industry.

During that historical period, the Russian Empire was engaged in several wars for the purpose to obtain direct geophysical access to both the Baltic Sea in the north and the Black Sea in the south followed by pushing Russian borders westward into the territory of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth which main part of it was previously annexed from Russia and populated by Russians and other Eastern Slavs.

On these East Slavonic territories incorporated into Poland-Lithuania, the Eastern Orthodox Slavs have been experiencing systematic Catholization, forced acceptance of the church union with the Vatican, and denationalization (i.e., political Russophobia). Nevertheless, these wars required a huge investment in the armaments industry and, therefore, productive metallurgical foundations. These conditions were founded by Emperor Peter the Great according to the West European pattern, fundamentally in the Urals as this region was extremely rich in iron and copper ores as well as in huge forests which have been suitable for the production of charcoal.

The same Emperor founded factories, gave investment incentives, encouraged new management, and established the foundation for the further industrialization of Russia. In Central Russia, the textile and animal fat industries continued to be developed while by 1815, a new (third) industrial center arose in the north at a new capital St Petersburg.

Finally, Russia’s population in 1815 due to both territorial enlargement and prolific natural increase was significantly increased. For the year 1600, it is estimated that Russia (Moscovy) had circa 10 million inhabitants but when Peter the Great died, around 15,5 million.

According to the census data in the year of the Napoleonic invasion of Russia in 1812, the Empire had already 42,75 million people (including from Europe and Asia). The population of Siberia, for instance, had grown from around 500.000 during the time of Peter the Great to some 1.400.000 when Napoleon attacked Russia. However, at that time, only 4% of the total of Russia’s population was living in the urban areas, of which 30% lived in the two biggest cities – Moscow and St Petersburg.

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

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Background

Most Americans oppose Congress authorizing additional funding to support Ukraine in its war with Russia, according to a new CNN poll conducted by SSRS, as the public splits over whether the US has already done enough to assist Ukraine.

Overall, 55% say the US Congress should not authorize additional funding to support Ukraine vs. 45% who say Congress should authorize such funding. And 51% say that the US has already done enough to help Ukraine while 48% say it should do more. A poll conducted in the early days of the Russian invasion in late February 2022 found 62% who felt the US should have been doing more.

Partisan divisions have widened since that poll, too, with most Democrats and Republicans now on opposing sides of questions on the US role in Ukraine.

And, all these come as American people are unhappy with a worsening economic situation. Earlier this week, the American rating agency Fitch downgraded the US government’s triple-A credit rating by one notch, putting it at double-A plus. The agency cited expected fiscal deterioration over the next three years as well as high and growing general government debt burden.

PressTV: Any comments?

Peter Koenig (PK): It is about time the American public wakes up to this scam of biblical proportions. Unfortunately, in Europe the awakening appears slower, because opposition is not made as public as in the US. Censorship in Europe has reached record proportions. We are way beyond George Orwell’s 1984.

However, similar inquiries made in secret with people in Europe would yield similar results – or even stronger against putting more tax-payers’ money into a bottomless, corrupt rathole, called Ukraine.

In the US, Republicans see apparently much clearer through the scam than so-called Democrats – Dems — do. By scam is meant a last-ditch US attempt to weaken Russia to the point of a “regime change”, to a regime à la Yeltsin, so that Russia’s wealth of natural resources would become open for privatization and foreign / US exploitation; last ditch – means, before this wannabe empire disappears from the horizon of importance.

In the US, Dems are indoctrinated by Globalism. Though, adherents to the Democratic Party in States like California and New York, would hardly admit that their originally noble socially-inclined points of view, as in helping those in need, have been gradually highjacked in the last at least 2 to 3 decades by an incessant well-funded globalist propaganda.

This is a worldwide western trend. In Europe – same happens with left leaning people and political parties. What was left, is now globalist; what was right is now anti-globalist, defending national sovereignty and personal freedom. They apparently have seen through the scams of the elite.

The traditional western world party system – left vs.  right – has disappeared. It is now simply globalists vs. anti-globalists.

And the western NATO provoked and incited Ukraine war is, next to the covid crime and the fake narrative on “climate change”, the worst crime the west is getting away with, because westerners are gullible to false media reports. And why is that so?

Because they love their comfort.

Going against the official narrative may risk their comfortable life, as they fear being exposed to ever more dictatorial regimes, if they do not obey.

But, quietly in their closed quarters and in their minds, in the US and in Europe, they have long discovered that money and ship-loads full of arms to Ukraine does not resolve the “problem” – that the war was not winnable, never was – against a mighty Russia.

Americans also recognize that there is an enormous poverty growing in the US. Countless homeless people are dotting the streets of Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York, Chicago, and other major US cities. US unemployment is rampant, despite official “statistics” to the contrary.

Plus, US infrastructure is breaking down in warp speed. In many cases roads, bridges and railroads have become extremely dangerous to human life.

All these are good reasons, why and how US tax money could be spent to much better use at home.

Up to now we are talking about an estimated US-dollars 150-plus billion sent in the form of weaponry and “budgetary” transfers to Ukraine. And this within about 18 months, since February 2022.

Compare this with about US$ 38.4 billion unemployment benefits paid in the same 18 months, from February 2022, when the NATO war against Russia began, to June 2023. The US$ 150-plus billion, represent almost four times more than paid US unemployment benefits in the same period. See this.

If you add to the US$ 150 billion another, say US$ 60 – 70 billion-equivalent from Europe’s spending in weaponry and “gifts”, or officially “budgetary transfers”, you get a total of about 215 billion dollars equivalent put down the bottomless black Ukrainian abyss.

This is not only a ridiculous but an economy-killing amount.

In addition, literally 70% of all the weaponry that the west sends to Ukraine ends up on the black market, instead of at the front. This was already reported a while ago by BBC, CNN, and other mainstream media.

So, US and European governments know it, but continue doing it – why?

Because they may want to supply the black market with sophisticated NATO weaponry.

Most of these arms end up in what the west calls “terrorist groups” – precisely what the west wants, because terrorist activities, violent protests and the like, as we have witnessed in France and other countries in the past few months, they are not random. They are planned. They are justification for increasing militarization and dictatorship in the west.

In recent vicious protests in France, NATO weapons have been spotted and reported, but to no avail, not picked up by the mainstream.

PressTV: The US Fitch Rating Agency recently down-graded the US credit rating from AAA to AA-plus. Yet, the useless spending on Ukraine continues, against all common senses, and against US economic interests.

PK: Fitch Rating Inc. is a US-UK credit rating agency. Agency Fitch, or any rating agency, would only make a US rating decision in complete accord with, or even by mandate from the US government, in tune with Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen.

Even though in this case Treasury Secretary Yellen complained officially, she might as well have been the initiator of the down-rating.

A lower rating gives the US more leeway or flexibility with potentially controversial policy decisions, i.e., increasing base interest rates again later this year … and more. Yet, most economists know that the FED’s raising the base-rate does more harm to the economy, brings more enterprises to their knees, and transfers their assets to Big Capital, i.e., BlackRock style financial behemoths, than lowering interests, so that business and production enterprises could pick up steam and catch up with what they lost during the covid times.

Of course, the same applies to Europe, and to most countries of capitalist economies. The convenient excuse of fighting inflation, does not stand its ground. Never did.

And that is known to the politicians and their economic advisers.

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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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***

The would be masters of totalitarian control have turned-up the heat in a calculated push to make sure responsibility for the bush and forest fires that have broken-out in the Mediterranean during the recent heatwave, are squarely blamed on ‘global warming’.  

There has barely been a day during July when the ‘horror’ of these events hasn’t occupied the headlines of the UK mainstream press and other such top-down compliant media outlets.

The horror is no doubt very real where fires have got out of control, putting lives and property under direct threat – and we should spare a thought for those afflicted in this way.

But the continuous repetition of headlines shouting “Record breaking heat!” “Devastating fires!” “Hell on Earth!” have become suspiciously familiar to those who saw through the Covid fear mongering scams of 2020/2021.  An increasingly wary public are no longer so easily seduced by the mind controlling media manipulations employed to enforce public acceptance of the ‘great global warming hoax’.

Things haven’t being going so well for the ‘Net Zero’ lobby recently. Public sentiment is shifting away from the sort of ‘in-your-face’ simplistic headlines specifically designed to provoke fear and panic; especially when the fully insulated mainstream media agenda completely suppresses any attempt to express another opinion.

The Grecian islands of Rhodes and Corfu follow the pattern of much of mainland Greece. They have hot dry Summers. It is not uncommon for temperatures to reach the upper 30’s and low 40’s centigrade.

We have Vanessa Beeley, reporting for the UK Column News, to thank for pointing-out that the fires which were reported as breaking-out on Rhodes, actually caused significant damage in just three villages and surrounding farmland, some of which was badly scorched by wind driven fires, causing serious loss of income to the affected farmers, no doubt for years to come.

The World Economic Forum leadership has stated that it does not like small farms producing ‘real’ food. It’s ‘Green Deal’ wants such farms out of the way, to be replaced by synthetic laboratory look a’ likes. Such a view is now being taken up by all governments that subscribe to ‘The Great Reset’.

Greece has the highest number of small farms of any country in Western Europe. It’s farmers have frequently come out in support of ‘the people’ during political crises; selling staple foods direct from their farm trailers at give-away prices. However they rely heavily on the tourist trade in the Summer months, as sales during this season keep them solvent during the winter.

Scare mongering by the BBC and mainstream media in general, has kept visitors away this Summer, with fabricated reports of temperatures regularly exceeding the norm.

Southern Greece appears to have been targetted for special treatment by whoever sets the ‘hit agenda’ meted-out to various countries unwilling to conform to the strictures of the insidious WEF ‘net zero’ climate change agenda.

Adding to the dilemma of a country already dry by most European standards, is the recent rush to erect banks of ‘green’ wind turbines in countryside locations.

As has been the experience in North Germany and North Poland in recent years, the blades of these turbines generate a unique air flow the effect of which is to reduce rainfall and subtly alter local weather patterns, thus making areas in which they are situated drier than normal. Fires, some of which the Greek press are reporting as likely cases of arson, have spread faster and been more damaging due to this drying out.

It is my contention that the anti-life forces behind the creed of anthropogenic global warming are upping their programme via a globally coordinated agenda of deliberate weather disruption and the simultaneous spreading of critically biased information.

To keep the ‘Stop CO2’ Net Zero scam on course, the powers that be within the World Economic Forum, United Nations and affiliated corporate and banking institutions, must come up with a regular menu of disasters ostensibly caused by excess CO2. They must promulgate stories of rising temperatures threatening the future of life on earth.

This is a policy the elite cabal has been running for more than three decades. It is set in stone – and all other activities/issues are subordinate to it. ‘Stopping global warming’ is quite simply the concocted alibi with which to impose every conceivable form of restriction on the basic rights of all humanity.

Consider the fact that recent CO2 spewing volcanic eruptions in a number of countries are being kept out of the news. Why is this? Are volcanoes somehow now categorised as ‘conspiracy theories’ to be fact-checked out of the public eye?

Might this be because the amount of CO2 being released into the atmosphere by these eruptions dwarfs that contributed by man made activities? What if the public should wake-up to the fact that volcanic activity is not being factored-in as a serious threat to achieving the great Net Zero by 2045 agenda? In just the same way as ‘war’ has quietly been airbrushed out of the carbon contribution picture.

We should be on the lookout for a sudden ‘new scientific discovery’; something along the lines of “It has recently been established that previous analysis of matter released during volcanic eruptions was incorrect. Scientists have reanalysed recent data and discovered that CO2 only forms a minimal part of the elements released during eruptions.”

Strange isn’t it, that the composition of the upper atmosphere contains such a tiny proportion of CO2 – just 0.04% according to scientific research. But maybe not so odd, when one takes into account that CO2 is 1.5 times heavier than air (oxygen). How much is going to make it to the upper atmosphere?

I frequently repeat such observations in my articles, because we need every mortal still capable of rational thought and the ability to experience an emotional response, to grasp the significance of this vast climate deception.

A deception whose successful perpetuation forms the critical mass upon which the entire deep state globalist take-over of the planet currently depends.

Puncture this deceitful global fabrication – this hyper inflated lie – and the false agenda upon which the entire New World Order ‘Great Reset’ is based – will come crashing down.  

Fires in Canada, fires in the USA; fires in China and fires in Europe. Now there will have to be such fires in the headlines every year. They will have to become more extreme, won’t they? If not, the story of disasters caused by continuous anthropogenic ‘global warming’ will cease to hold-up, and humanity will cease being spellbound by its horror.

Given such exceptionally high stakes, might not the perpetrators turn increasingly to the advanced EMF technology of scalar weapons and similar instruments of violence to start fires and keep them burning?

How long have such weapons – like HAARP – already been in use to provoke earthquakes and to change weather patterns?

What lengths will the psychopathic elite cabal go to achieve their ‘Net Zero’ Transhuman planet?

You know the answer.

But, as I also always stress in my writings, we who are awakening have it in our powers to put a stop to this demonic riot of destruction. We just have to get it into our heads that ‘they’ will stop at nothing, to achieve their Luciferian nightmare.

They will obliterate God’s work and replace it with their version, as professor Yuval Noah Harari has recently declared. Well, isn’t this the best possible incentive to prove him wrong?

Could there ever be a more powerful reason to channel our life energies into the unflinching defence of God’s creation?

Is there be a more powerful cause to commit to than that of freeing this jewel of a world, gifted to us as our physical home, from the deadly clutches of a small bunch of obsessed psychopaths?

Not in my book there isn’t.

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Julian is an early pioneer of UK organic farming, a writer, broadcaster and international activist. He is co-director of The International Coalition to Protect the Polish Countryside and a long time campaigner for the survival of small farms throughout the world. See his website www.julianrose.info. 

He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

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***

This article was originally published in March 2014.

In this video we’re going to provide you with compelling evidence that the crimes against humanity committed in Kiev earlier this year [2014] were in fact committed by the new coalition government and that officials in the E.U. and the United States knew full well who committed these crimes and that they are protecting and financially supporting the real criminals.

On February 20th of 2014 the world was shocked by video footage of snipers firing on protesters in Kiev Ukraine. Twenty one people were murdered, and it was widely assumed that President Victor Yanukovich and his supporters were behind the attacks. However a phone conversation between EU foreign policy chief Cathy Ashton and Estonia’s foreign minister Urmas Paet leaked to the public on March 5th reveals that the snipers in were actually from the new coalition government, and that Western diplomats knew this and covered it up.

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***

Ukraine’s war started in February 2014, not in 2022. As NATO’s Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said on 9 May 2023, “The war started in 2014.” He even was explicit that “You have to remember that the war didn’t start in 2022” (which was when Russia responded on 24 February 2022 by invading Ukraine). Here is the best short video (only ten minutes long) accurately showing in the original historic video clips how it started, and it is very clear there that the U.S. Government, U.S. President Obama, started it in February 2014, by means of a coup, which the Obama Administration had had in the planning stages for quite some time.

Screenshot from The Washington Post

The founder and head of the ‘private CIA’ firm Stratfor even called it “the most blatant coup in history”.

The smoking-gun piece of evidence proving that it had been a coup by the U.S. Government is this recording of Obama’s mastermind of the coup, Victoria Nuland, telling Obama’s Ambassador in Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt, a month before the coup became climaxed, whom to get appointed to lead the post-coup Ukraine.

And, then, the smoking-gun piece of evidence proving that even the top officials of the EU didn’t know that it had been a coup instead of the ‘democratic revolution’ that the U.S. regime claimed, is this recording of the EU’s minister of foreign affairs being told in a phone call from Kiev, by her investigator there, immediately after the coup was over, that it had been a coup. On 4 November 2019, after enough verified evidence had become known about it and about how the war in Ukraine had actually been started by the U.S. Government, I headlined “The Obama Regime’s Plan to Seize the Russian Naval Base in Crimea”, which was the only part of Obama’s plan that failed; and that article documented also how the war had been started by that coup.

Screenshot from The Washington Post

So, as a matter of history now, there can be no question that

Jens Stoltenberg was telling the truth when he said that “You have to remember that the war didn’t start in 2022. The war started in 2014.”

But if that is all true, then you also need to ask yourself “Who started the war?”

And, without any doubt at all, the answer to that question is the United States Government. In fact, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton started immediately after Viktor Yanukovych became democratically elected in 2010 as Ukraine’s President, to pressure him to bring Ukraine into EU and then NATO and he refused, and this is the reason why the planning for the coup started by no later than June 2011.

In my article “The Obama Regime’s Plan to Seize the Russian Naval Base in Crimea”, I linked to all of the key items of evidence so that any reader can, on one’s own, verify all of these things. They are, by now, clear history, nothing that is rationally disputable.

On 2 August 2023, the U.S. propaganda agency Newsweek headlined “U.S. Troops Should be Sent to Ukraine, Third of Americans Say”, and reported an alleged poll — though without linking to it or otherwise verifying that it existed or anything about its methodology if it did — that

“A total of 31 percent of eligible voters in the U.S. support or strongly support American military forces heading to the battlefields of Ukraine, polling conducted exclusively for Newsweek by Redfield & Wilton Strategies has revealed.”

Even if the poll existed, and if it was scientifically done, and it found that 31% did support sending U.S. troops into the battlefield of Ukraine to wage war against Russia there in that country which borders Russia, then what national-security interest of the American people would be served by the U.S. Government’s doing that?

Would it not instead enormously endanger us? If America’s troops there would win a conventional war there against Russia, then would not Russia escalate the conflict there on Russia’s very borders, raise it by going nuclear against the U.S., in order to prevent the U.S. Government from placing its nuclear missiles only a five-minute flying time away from blitz-nuking The Kremlin?

On 5 August 2023, I headlined and documented that the “IMF Has ‘Loaned’ $115B to Ukraine Without Requiring Any Proof Where It Went”, but the U.S. Government and its taxpayers have lent and donated far more than that to Ukraine, and if even the IMF (of which America’s Government is the top financial backer) is constantly postponing any audit of its ‘investments’ there, then how could things be any better for the ‘investments’ and donations by America’s taxpayers in Ukraine?

According to the U.S. Government and its agents and allies, the war in Ukraine started by “Russia’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine in 2022” and by “Russia’s illegal and unprovoked war against Ukraine” — and anything which would contradict that is mere ‘fake news’ which the social media and the traditional ‘news’ media ought to filter out so that the public won’t get to see or hear any such ‘Russian disinformation’. But even they cannot filter out (far less outright deny) the NATO Secretary General’s having said on 9 May 2023 that “the war didn’t start in 2022. The war started in 2014.”

America’s Government is on the wrong side of the war in Ukraine — the side of the aggressor. Where Stoltenberg lied there was when he continued by saying,

“And since then, NATO has implemented the biggest reinforcement of our collective defense since the end of the Cold War.” Obviously, the U.S. Government’s being the aggressor means that its military alliance against Russia is not “collective defense” in this war but is instead collective offense in it — the aggressors. That is what makes all of them be on the side of the aggressor, on the side of the nation that started the war.

To the extent that this information is not publishable in those nations, it’s proof of the given nation’s being a dictatorship — controlled behind-the-scenes by the very same ultimate rulers who also control its news media and censor-out this information, and call this information by such phrases as ‘Russian disinformation’.

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This article was originally published on The Duran.

Investigative historian Eric Zuesse’s new book, AMERICA’S EMPIRE OF EVIL: Hitler’s Posthumous Victory, and Why the Social Sciences Need to Change, is about how America took over the world after World War II in order to enslave it to U.S.-and-allied billionaires. Their cartels extract the world’s wealth by control of not only their ‘news’ media but the social ‘sciences’ — duping the public.

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***

On August 6, 1945, the United States US Army Air Forces dropped the atomic bomb “Little Boy” on Hiroshima, killing over 70,000 citizens and leaving at least as many ill from radiation sickness. It was the beginning of a horrible madness that seized the American soul.

The United States government dismissed all reports from Japan of radiation sickness, and other conditions, in the months that followed that bombing, claiming that such reports were just conspiracy theories. It would take enormous battles within the US, and around the world, to finally get the US to admit that this atomic weapon was different from a conventional weapon.

But everyone in the War Department knew exactly what sort of a bomb had been dropped and what it did to people. The Manhattan Project that developed the atomic bomb had undertaken horrible human experiments to determine the influence of radiation on the body, after all.

Moreover, the US government has never formally recognized the pointlessness and the brutality of this massive bombing at a moment that the surrender of Japan was a matter of days.

I want to take this opportunity, as an American running for president of the United States, to do what every previous president of the United States has lacked the decency to do. I want to take responsibility for this atrocity.

My deep apologies to the people of Japan, and to the people of the world, for what the United States did on August 6, 1945. I pledge that the United States will declassify all materials related to the Manhattan Project that developed the atomic bomb and to the Army Air Force that planned the bombings and that the entire story will be made public for the world.

I believe that there were corporations and other distinct actors at the time who can be singled out as legally liable and that I think such a process of pursuing legal liability is meaningful.

I also pledge that the United States will eliminate all nuclear weapons from its arsenal in the next ten years, and that the United States will lead the effort to eliminate these weapons around the world. Only when we make such a commitment, and act upon that commitment, can we hope that other countries will stop their dreams of nuclear arsenals.

We are on the edge of an even more horrible nuclear war at this very moment. The time for action in the United States cannot be put off.

It is also worth mentioning that the journalist John Hershey broke the story of the radiation poisoning in Hiroshima in his article “Hiroshima” that was published in the New Yorker August 23, 1946.

I seriously doubt the increasingly fluffy and trite New Yorker today, aimed more at wealthy upper West Side homes than at thoughtful citizens, would be capable of publishing such an article today.

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This article was originally published on Fear No Evil.

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

He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

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***

Islamophobia in France: Stop the Fires of Hatred!

The summer period is notoriously prone to forest fires, a formidable threat to our natural resources and the surrounding biodiversity. However, there is an even more insidious danger spreading through our societies, undermining our values and cohesion: irresponsible hate speech. A reminder of some recent occurrences is in order.

Occitan Hearth

At the end of April, in elementary schools, middle schools, and high schools in the Academies of Toulouse and Montpellier [French southern cities of the Occitania region], a survey on “absenteeism” during the month of Ramadan and the Eid al-Fitr holiday, particularly affecting priority education zones [underprivileged areas with a significant Muslim community], targeted exclusively Muslim pupils. Commissioned by the Interior Ministry, this survey was required from schools by the police and the Ministry of Education. This situation provoked a legitimate outcry.

Following the denunciation of these stigmatizing practices—which turn a basic practice of Islam into a security issue—fraught with illegality, since religious statistics (even non-nominative ones) are strictly regulated in France, the authorities, as usual, talked a lot of hot air: “clumsiness”, “badly formulated message”, “autonomous research by an intelligence officer”, “study of the impact of certain religious holidays on the operation of public services”… As if cops were known for carrying out sociological investigations in schools; as if a religion other than Islam had ever been in the line of fire; as if occasional absences, provided for in the Education Code and legally unassailable (for the time being), could harm the functioning of Europe’s most overcrowded classrooms—after Romania.

A wet-finger estimate in [the right-wing newspaper] Le Figaro, announcing a “record absenteeism rate” on the day of Eid al-Fitr 2023 due to an alleged “TikTok trend,” is said to have prompted this investigation, which is perhaps intended to provide more quantified data for future witch-hunts. The data, moreover, is hardly usable, for while some school heads and inspectors have encouraged staff to respond to these tendentious surveys, which we can only deplore and denounce, others have fortunately dissuaded them from doing so—not to mention the fact that it is difficult to presume the reason for an absence on a Friday just before the national school holidays.

The question immediately arose as to the motives behind such a survey. Was it “only” a question of stirring up yet another unfounded controversy at the expense of the Muslim community? Or is the government planning to call into question an acquired right that is in no way contentious, in the name of an ever more narrow and misguided interpretation of secularism (which could tomorrow attack pork-free or meat-free menus in school canteens, ban any refunding of half-boarding fees for Muslim pupils during the month of Ramadan, etc.)? Will staff be the next targets of these investigations? Already, some non-teaching staff have been refused a “religious holiday” leave, which is illegal and unacceptable. Any attempt to generalize these measures on the pretext of “combating separatism” and “ensuring the smooth running of the public education service” must be fiercely opposed.

PACA Hearth and Ministerial Fuel to the Fire

On June 15, the Mayor of Nice and President of the Provence-Alpes-Côte-d’Azur (PACA) Regional Council, Christian Estrosi, issued an alarmist press release denouncing “several extremely serious incidents” which had occurred the previous day in three Nice elementary schools, and which were reported to the School Inspection Office, then to the Prefect of the Alpes-Maritimes Department, and the Prime Minister, Elisabeth Borne. The following day, the French Minister of Education, Pap Ndiaye, went even further, speaking of “intolerable facts,” the “mobilization of the Values of the Republic teams in all the schools concerned to ensure full respect for the principle of secularism on a permanent basis,” and the implementation of “the necessary government measures” to ensure respect for secularism—or “laïcité”—in schools.

Image: Pap Ndiaye and Christian Estrosi (Source: Norman G. Finkelstein)

The alleged “facts”? Some children in 4th and 5th grades were said to have “performed the Muslim prayer in their school playground” or organized “a minute’s silence in memory of the Prophet Mahomet[1].” These were nothing more than rumors, as the expressions of doubt (“it is reported to me,” “or”) and the conditional tense (“These unacceptable situations would also have taken place in secondary schools”) clearly underlines. Worse still, before even the slightest verification of these absolutely insignificant alleged facts (it’s just a handful of 9-10 year-olds having fun in the playground), Christian Estrosi likened these “attempts at religious intrusion into the sanctuaries of the Republic that are our schools” to “religious obscurantism attempting to destabilize us” and to “families who left to wage jihad in Syria,” who are reportedly beginning to return to France and sending their children “to our schools.”

And without even waiting for the results of “the General Inspectorate’s investigation to establish the facts precisely and draw the appropriate conclusions” (no kidding), the full force of the law was brought to bear against this allegedly dangerous “slide” (which at this stage has not even gone beyond the stage of gossip): “meeting with all the departments concerned to set up an action plan,” “reinforcement of State action to ensure that these attacks on secularism are firmly combated,” “campaign to prevent and combat radicalization,” “firm, collective, and resolute response,” setting up “secularism and values of the Republic training courses” which “will be the subject of a common module bringing together all personnel…” The joint press release from Christian Estrosi and Pap Ndiaye concluded with a fanfare worthy of this outpouring of catastrophist press releases, disproportionate means, and withering epithets: “the principle of secularism is non-negotiable in our Republic.” Such a display of paranoia and hysteria is not surprising from the reactionary clown Estrosi, whose secular fervor is otherwise well known, but considering what Pap Ndiaye was before he plunged body and soul into the political cesspool [Pap Ndiaye was a Professor at the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences, focusing his research on the compared history of racially discriminatory practices in France and in America, and the Director of the French national museum of immigration], one can only feel a bitter mixture of disgust and pity[2].

Christian Estrosi’s uncompromising crusade for secularism: “Defending our Christian traditions also means defending the heritage of our elders, who also built our Nice countryside”.

An Eternal Flame

The deep-seated motivations behind such Islamophobic outbursts are well known and have unfortunately become a constant in the discourse of Emmanuel Macron and his minions. Having faced massive popular opposition with the pension reform, they now resort to a despicable strategy of scapegoating, reminiscent of the darkest hours of France’s history. In a notorious debate with Marine Le Pen, President of the Far-Right Party “Rassemblement National” (National Rally), Macron’s Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin accused her of being “too soft” on Islam and refusing to “name the enemy”: “You say that Islam isn’t even a problem… You need to take vitamins, you’re not harsh enough!”

During a special evening dedicated to Samuel Paty [French teacher who was beheaded by a radicalized Islamist for showing his pupils derogatory Charlie Hebdo cartoons depicting the Prophet of Islam], Darmanin also denounced “communitarianism” and the “baser instincts” of “separatism” related to clothing or food (again, no kidding). He criticized clothing stores offering “community outfits” and the “halal sections” of supermarkets, portraying these as shocking practices. His aim was to link these cultural practices, which are perfectly harmless and consensual, to terrorism—a despicable process of amalgamation, stigmatization, and the appropriation of far-right discourse that is increasingly overt in the discourse and practices of Macron and his ministers.

Far from deterring the Rassemblement National’s electorate, this trivialization has only served to consolidate and grow it, providing a vigorous “vitamin” treatment regularly administered to hate speech by those in power and their media echo chambers.

The infamous Charlie Hebdo contributed on this ominous issue with a cartoon (“School reinvents itself” – “We bring our homework to school”) and a comment: “The question is how to deal with these cases, which involve particularly young children. The ten-year-old boy who incited his classmates to observe a minute’s silence for the Prophet was the subject of ‘worrying information’ sent to the Alpes-Maritimes departmental council, as the Nice education authority told Charlie Hebdo. An alert was also issued to the prefecture for ‘suspicion of radicalization’. ‘The child doesn’t become flagged as a serious threat to national security,’ we’re told. The idea is for the intelligence services to rule out any threat and check that the parents are not dangerous.’ In the meantime, the schoolboy has been excluded from the school canteen and has taken an early vacation. ‘We can’t afford another Samuel Paty,’ says a member of the Rector’s entourage.”

In any case, it wouldn’t be the first time that alleged TikTok “cyber-attacks on secularism” or other unverified gossip causes an uproar in the services of the Ministry of the Interior and the Ministry of National Education. Let us mention the controversies surrounding the wearing of the abaya and the deployment of the Orwellian concept of “improvised religious clothing,” promoted during the dubious “laïcité” training courses imposed on all teaching staff throughout France. These courses provide instructions and even rhetorical and legal tools to track down alleged intentions behind the “suspicious” dresses of presumably Muslim girls. A dress bought at H&M could thus fall under the “law banning ostentatious religious signs” (which really only targeted the Islamic veil) and earn the targeted schoolgirls summons, reprimands, or even threats and exclusion if they refuse to dress in a “republican” manner: a “morality police” doubled with a “thought police” in short. And it seems that the French authorities have just introduced a “children’s games police.” Are we soon to see SWAT teams in primary school playgrounds? The degree of insanity is such that a sneeze from a swarthy pupil that sounds vaguely like “Allahu Akbar” would be enough to trigger such an intervention.

Extinguishing the Fires or Fanning Them?

At a time when violence, including far-right terrorism targeting our fellow Muslim citizens, is reaching worrying proportions, the government persists in fanning the flames of hatred with its pyromaniac actions, exacerbating the real dangers threatening civil peace. The government’s approach involves all-out repression, police and security abuses with total impunity [the French police are lately becoming seditious and openly rebellious, literally demanding a license to beat up and even kill without being bothered by any kind of justice procedure], and over-instrumentalizing trivial facts to raise the specter of fantasized threats. These tactics only serve to pit citizens against each other and divide the French society.

The republican school urgently needs resources, not diversionary strategies, artificial tensions, or a perpetual call into question of the status and fundamental rights of users and staff. The “non-negotiable” secularism promoted and ardently defended by the CGT Educ’action aims to ensure the serenity and cohesion of the educational community, not to transform staff into zealous police auxiliaries or confine an entire population to the status of suspect or “enemy within,” to be constantly monitored and held at bay.

The Republic guarantees freedom of worship and equal treatment for all its citizens. Anyone committed to republican ideals must protest against this frenzied desire to ignite bonfires from the most microscopic twigs, and against stigmatizing and discriminatory practices that tarnish France’s image abroad and regularly elicit condemnations from human rights associations like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch. National Education staff, in particular, must oppose these practices and report them to local union sections, which must vigorously defend all members of the educational community (staff, pupils, parents…) who fall victim to them.

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Notes

[1] The minute’s silence isn’t precisely a well-known practice in Muslim liturgy. As for the spelling “Mahomet,” we can only deplore the fact that despite the presence of the first name Mohammed in the top 10 of most given names in the current French population, and its position in the top 50 of names on French war memorials from the First World War, this backward-looking and contemptuous name dating from an era of antagonism between Christianity and Islam, and felt as an insult by millions of Muslims, remains in use.

[2] Like a downsized version of Voltaire fighting fanaticism in the days of the Inquisition, Pap Ndiaye has also taken to TV to denounce these “manifestations of religious proselytism in schools,” gargling in big words, notably BFM WC (“These facts are not acceptable in the School of the Republic… It is only natural that the Nice Academy, the Nice Rector, and the Nice Mayor should react firmly to ensure respect for the principles of secularism, which is why I have signed this joint declaration with the Nice Mayor… The parents have been summoned… The pupils have been reminded of their obligations with regard to religious neutrality, and they have been given training, because we’re talking about children after all… In secondary schools, [for similar acts] there can be sanctions [or even] temporary or permanent exclusions…”). Pap Ndiaye did not hesitate to spread false Islamophobic information, namely that these children all belonged to the Muslim faith, which was denied by Eliane’s testimony to BFM Côte d’Azur, whose non-Muslim grandson took part in these children’s games: “He should check his sources because my grandson was part of the group playing and imitating prayer. There was no intention, no religion in the middle, it was really just a game… The stigmatization of children is really lamentable… That’s why we no longer have confidence in politicians, because everything is blown out of proportion to unbelievable proportions, and this harms solidarity and life together.”

[3] Let us remind that to be valid, Muslim prayer (especially in congregations) requires the age of puberty, a precise timetable, ablutions, specific clothing, orientation towards Mecca, etc.; so many conditions that it is simply impossible to meet in an elementary school playground during the lunch break.

Featured image is from Muslim Mirror

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Some time ago, I wrote a blog post about a hypothesis I had regarding President Truman and the decision to use the atomic bomb. My basic thesis then (and continues to be) is that there is good reason to think that Truman did not understand that Hiroshima was a city with a military base in it, and not merely some kind of military installation. Truman’s confusion on this issue, I argue, came out of his discussions with Secretary of War Henry Stimson about the relative merits of Kyoto versus Hiroshima as a target: Stimson emphasized the civilian nature of Kyoto and paired it against the military-status of Hiroshima, and Truman read more into the contrast than was actually true.

I have kept poking around this issue for some time now, and written an article-length version of it (more on that in due time). I feel even more confident in it than before, having gone over the relevant documents very closely and talked about with many scholars (including at a conference in Hiroshima last summer), though there are some aspects of the original blog post that I would refine or revise.

But I thought I’d share one set of documents that I found extremely illuminating and interesting, and useful for thinking about how the “narrative” of Hiroshima changed over a very short period of time in August 1945. I have not seen any reference to these in the work of any other historians, not because they are slouches (they are not), but because you have to be asking very specific questions to think they are a possible source of the answers.1

The press release sent out under Truman’s name after the bombing of Hiroshima was not written by him. It was largely written by Arthur Page, a Vice President at AT&T and the “father of modern corporate public relations,” at the request of the Interim Committee of the Manhattan Project. Page was an old friend of Henry Stimson, the Secretary of War, and Stimson wanted the first statement to be a very carefully-written document, as it was meant to credibly describe a new weapon and outline possible paths forward for the Japanese. Truman was shown the final version of it, but he didn’t add or remove anything from it. It is interesting (for my purposes) to note that if you did not know whether Hiroshima was a city or an isolated military base, the initial announcement would not clarify that for you, even if you were (like Truman) the one reading it aloud.

A far more interesting case is the second speech that Truman gave which mentioned the atomic bomb. This was a radio address given on the evening of August 9, 1945, not long after the atomic bombing of Nagasaki. The atomic bomb only occupies a small part of the overall speech — it is really a speech about what had happened at the Potsdam Conference the weeks previous. But the parts on the atomic bomb are fascinating to read. Here are the parts I’d like to draw your attention to in particular:

The world will note that the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, a military base. That was because we wished in this first attack to avoid, insofar as possible, the killing of civilians. But that attack is only a warning of things to come. If Japan does not surrender, bombs will have to be dropped on her war industries and, unfortunately, thousands of civilian lives will be lost. I urge Japanese civilians to leave industrial cities immediately, and save themselves from destruction. […]

Having found the bomb we have used it. We have used it against those who attacked us without warning at Pearl Harbor, against those who have starved and beaten and executed American prisoners of war, against those who have abandoned all pretense of obeying international laws of warfare. We have used it in order to shorten the agony of war, in order to save the lives of thousands and thousands of young Americans.2

Two things interest me about the above. One is that the first paragraph emphasizes that Hiroshima was a “military base,” and that they wanted to avoid, “insofar as possible, the killing of civilians.” Now, Hiroshima was not, strictly speaking, a military base — it was a major city that contained a military base. There is a difference there, and fewer than 10% of the casualties were military.3 The paragraph further warns that bombing cities might occur — it doesn’t ‘fess up to having already done it, but puts it as a thing for the future.

The second paragraph quoted does something a bit different: it justifies the bombing, first by saying that the Japanese were awful and deserved it, then by saying that the use of the bomb was really a humane act, and using it would “shorten the agony of war,” and would save American lives.

We will come back to both of these in a minute. Let’s instead ask: who wrote this speech? Given the background of the first press release, one might be surprised to find that the answer is… Harry Truman. Well, he wrote the first draft. As he wrote in a note on August 10th:

“While all this has been going on, I’ve been trying to get ready a radio address to the nation on the Berlin conference. Made the first draft on the ship coming back. Discussed it with [James] Byrnes, [Samuel] Rosenman, Ben Cohen, [William] Leahy and Charlie Ross. Rewrote it four times and then the Japs offered to surrender and it had to be done again.”4

When Truman says he “made the first draft on the ship coming back,” he’s referring to his travel back from Europe aboard the USS Augusta. In fact, there is a photograph in the Truman Library that claims to be showing him writing this very draft:

“President Harry S. Truman at his desk aboard the U. S. S. Augusta, returning from the Potsdam Conference. He is preparing his “report to the nation.” August 6, 1945.” Source: Truman Library, 63-1453-47; scan from Wikimedia Commons

So, while many hands were no doubt involved, we can say with some reliability that Truman was very involved in the drafting process. How involved is a hard thing to say — but it gives us something to think about when looking at the specific language used, to question how much of it reflects the President’s own thoughts (something we cannot do with the original Hiroshima press release, which was written without Truman’s input).

I wrote the Truman Library awhile back and asked if they had any information about this statement, and they helpfully sent me a whole sheaf of papers taken from the papers of Samuel Rosenman, who was a Truman speechwriter and staffer. They included not only five different drafts of the radio address, but also many pieces of correspondence that helped contextualize it. For example, I was interested to find that the radio address as a means of communication was decided upon around July 20, 1945, as an alternative to giving Congress a full address, because Congress was going to be out of session when he got back.5

The drafts are of course themselves the most interesting part. There are, as noted, five in the folder. They are all typed, and numbered but not dated. The fifth draft is not exactly the same as the version that Truman delivered, so we can deduce that there was at least one last round of changes, perhaps by Truman himself, perhaps not. There are, as we will see, some ways to date some of the drafts, based on the relationship between their content and some of the other letters in the folder.

The first draft, presumably related to the version first developed by Truman while on the USS Augusta (August 2–7). The atomic bomb was only mentioned very briefly, and in no detail:

What we are doing to Japan now — even with the new atomic bomb — is only a small fraction of what would happen to the world in a third World War. […] We have laid down the general terms on which they can surrender. Since then they have seen what our atomic bomb can do. They can foresee what it will do. They would be wise if they would accept the inevitable before it is too late; otherwise their fate will be even worse than Germany’s.6

That’s it. I suspect this was written before Hiroshima, when Truman knew the bombing was scheduled to occur. What’s really interesting, though, is that underneath the final paragraph quoted above, someone has written in (by hand), the following: “Why we dropped bomb on Hiroshima.” So we can put some kind of boundary on when this draft was written: potentially before Hiroshima (as early as August 6th), but sometime soon after the bombing someone decided that there needed to be more on the atomic bomb in it.

“The scrawl,” as I think of it.

How does this scrawl date it? Hiroshima was the preferred target for the first atomic bomb but it wasn’t until the mission was successful that anyone would have known it was the actual target. There were two backup targets as well (Kokura and Nagasaki); it is only on August 6th that it would have been talked about definitively as the bombing of Hiroshima. (Whose scrawl is it? I don’t know. Could it be Truman’s? Maybe. I am not a handwriting expert and it is not much to go by on itself.)

The second draft of the statement is much the same on the passages already quoted, but true to the penciled suggestion on the first draft, a new statement about the bombing of Hiroshima was added:

The world will note that the first atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima which is purely a military base. This was because we did not want to destroy the lives of women and children and innocent civilians in this first attack. But it is only a warning of things to come. If Japan does not surrender, bombs will have to be dropped on war industries and thousands of civilian lives will be lost. I urge the Japanese civilians to leave industrial cities and save themselves from destruction.7

This is not so dissimilar to the language in the final statement but the differences are important. Let’s put them side by side:

• Draft #2: The world will note that the first atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima which is purely a military base.
• Final: The world will note that the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, a military base.

First, we have a confusion about how many bombs (singular or plural) were dropped. I don’t read much into that other than as an indicator of how quickly this was probably written.

Second, the original language is even more emphatic about the military status of Hiroshima: here it was purely a military base. “Purely” is a very strong modifier. Ask yourself under what conditions you would describe a city as being “purely a military base” — it’s hard to come up with any that are honest, if you understood the target to be a city. It is interesting, as well, that in the final version, Hiroshima is still listed as a military base — but the “purely” has vanished. Still a misleading statement (again, it was a city with a base in it), but it’s not as egregious as the original draft.

• Draft #2: This was because we did not want to destroy the lives of women and children and innocent civilians in this first attack.
•  Final: That was because we wished in this first attack to avoid, insofar as possible, the killing of civilians.

This is another interesting and, I think, important juxtaposition. In the first one, it is claimed that “women and children and innocent civilians” were spared in the first attack. In the final version, this has been watered down quite a lot — only “civilians” (not even innocent!) are mentioned, the killing of which was only avoided “insofar as possible.”

Am I reading too much into language? I don’t think so. Because, strikingly, this language mirrors very closely another Truman passage, his Potsdam journal entry of July 25th, 1945, which he wrote just after making final decisions about the question of the bombing of Kyoto:

I have told the Sec. of War, Mr. Stimson, to use it so that military objectives and soldiers and sailors are the target and not women and children. Even if the Japs are savages, ruthless, merciless and fanatic, we as the leader of the world for the common welfare cannot drop that terrible bomb on the old capital or the new. He and I are in accord. The target will be a purely military one and we will issue a warning statement asking the Japs to surrender and save lives. I’m sure they will not do that, but we will have given them the chance.8

These two phrases are pretty distinct. Truman wants to avoid the killing of “women and children.” This is a phrase he uses again and again when talkig about the atomic bombs — first in talking about how his choices would avoid it, later to emphasize that this is what atomic bombs do. For example, in a speech he wrote in December 1945, Truman noted that the bomb would involve, “blotting out women and children and non-combatants.”9 In 1948, he told a group of advisors and generals that the atomic bomb was not a regular weapon of war, because, “it is used to wipe out women and children and unarmed people, and not for military uses.”10 I just point this out because Truman (like many people, including myself) has distinct turns of phrase that he deploys and redeploys repetitively, what at least one historian has called “Trumanisms.”

From the third draft (emphasis added).

Even more striking is the repetition of the “purely military” phrase, which is much more extreme and particular to Truman. No one today would describe Hiroshima as “purely military,” and the scientists and military men who chose it as a target explicitly noted that it was not one. At the Target Committee Meeting at Los Alamos in May 1945, it was recommended that “pure military” targets not be considered: “It was agreed that for the initial use of the weapon any small and strictly military objective should be located in a much larger area subject to blast damage” — that is, a city, an urban area — “in order to avoid undue risks of the weapon being lost due to bad placing of the bomb.”11

In my interpretation, the timeline so far looks something like this:

• Prior to the Hiroshima bombing (sometime between August 2 and sometime August 6), Truman drafts the radio address (little to no mention of atomic bomb)
• After the Hiroshima bombing (August 6), but before Truman knows the full extent of civilian casualties, Truman and others revise it to talk about Hiroshima
• Sometime before the final version is released (August 9), it is revised to indicate an awareness that Hiroshima was not “purely military” and that civilians were in fact killed in great numbers

On the second point — do we know that Truman himself modified the statement? We know he was (by his own account) involved in the revisions over the days. And the language is strikingly similar to his Potsdam journal. I suspect he was to some degree (even just in discussions) involved in forming that language, but the other possibility is that the Potsdam journal was used as “raw material” for writing that section (and it may have been why he kept the journal; Truman was not a diarist, and the Potsdam journal is unusual).12

Do the rest of the drafts help us refine this timeline and the shifts in language? A bit. By the third draft, the singular/plural nature of the bombing of Hiroshima was resolved (“the first atomic bomb was dropped”), but it is still “purely a military base.” Most importantly, though, is that someone has added a line to it (on page 5) indicating that the Soviet Union had declared war on Japan the day before, putting it at around August 8th or 9th in Washington (midnight in Tokyo is 10am the previousday in Washington, DC).13

The fourth draft moves the paragraphs about the atomic bomb towards the end (from page 6-7 to page 17), which is an interesting change by itself. But it otherwise does not change them.14

In the fifth draft, however, a change occurs. The language about Hiroshima as “purely” a military target still remains. But a new bit of text has been added:

Its production and use were not lightly undertaken by this Government. But we knew our enemies were on the search for it. We now know they were close to finding it. And we knew the disaster that would come to this nation, to all peaceful nations, to all civilization, if they found it first. […]

We won the race of discovery against the Germans.

Having found it we have used it. […] We have used it in order to shorten the agony of war, in order to save the lives of thousands and thousands of Americans.15

This is an interesting addition: it is the justification for having made it (the Nazis were going to make one) and having used it (we wanted to save lives). That it takes until the fifth draft — the last one in the archival file — for this to appear is fascinating. It is almost as if the speech drafters realized, all of the sudden, that they were going to have to account for its use, to make a case for the manufacture and use of the bomb that went further beyond their original one.

So when and where did this language enter into this text? Fortunately, there is another piece of documentation in the file that helps us. The Assistant Secretary of State (and former Librarian of Congress) Archibald MacLeish sent a letter to Rosenman dated August 8th, with “a paragraph which has some ideas you might wish to use about the atomic bomb.” It is not an exact match for the fifth draft’s language but it is so close on many points as to be the obvious source: “Its production and its use were not lightly undertaken by this Government. … Only the certainty that the terrible destructiveness of this weapon will shorten the agony of the war and will save American lives has persuaded us to use it against our enemies.”16

So that indicates clearly that the fifth draft was finished sometime after MacLeish sent his memo on August 8th. What happened on August 8th that would provoke MacLeish and others to think they needed to justify the creation and use of the atomic bomb? On the morning of August 8th, the first damage reports came back from Japan. These included the famous aerial photograph of Hiroshima, which was shown to Truman by Stimson that morning:17

Damage map of Hiroshima, 8/8/1945. Source: National Archives and Records Administration / Fold3

The Japanese also began to talk about the bomb damage for the first time in their newspapers, as the survey team sent to Hiroshima by the Japanese high command had finally sent its report back. (Someday I will write something here on this — it is its own interesting topic.) American newspapers on August 8 and 9th were reporting huge casualties: “Atom Bomb Destroyed 60% of Hiroshima; Pictures Show 4 Square Miles of City Gone” (New York Herald Tribune, 8 August); “200,000 Believed Dead in Inferno That Vaporized City of Hiroshima” (Boston Globe, 9 August). This latter estimate of the dead too high — it was created by just assuming 60% of the Hiroshima population were killed, as opposed to 60% of the area destroyed. But this is the sort of estimate that would persist until full surveys, by the Japanese and Americans, were done in the postwar.

If Truman believed that Hiroshima was “purely” military, there is no way he could have continued to believe that after August 8th. So sometime between that final draft in the Rosenman files (the fifth draft) and the final version delivered, the language about Hiroshima’s military status, and the sparing of civilians, got significantly watered down.

Is this conclusive? Not at all! This is highly interpretive, based on a smattering of sources. But history is the work of interpretation, and if one wants to understand the interior mental states of the long dead, one has to engage in this kind of triangulation of sources. I think it is plausible that Truman did not understand the nature of Hiroshima, and was rudely surprised by it on August 8th. That another atomic bomb would be used on another city on August 9th, I suspect, came as a surprise to him (he was not given any immediate prior warning).

Boston Globe (9 August 1945), page 2. Notice the typo in the first sentence: “Horoshima.” Just a typo, to be sure, but perhaps reflective as to how quickly this news was coming out, how unfamiliar these cities were to the American populace…

In my full paper, I discuss a bit what I think my conditions are for choosing one plausible interpretation over another. In this case, I think my interpretation solves some of these tricky questions about why Truman would persist in many ways to label Hiroshima as a “purely military” target. But more usefully, it also explains Truman’s sudden change in language after August 8th and 9th, in which he bluntly acknowledges that the atomic bomb was a killer of civilians. At his December 1945 speech mentioned earlier, he — in his own handwriting — refers to the atomic bomb as “the most terrible of all destructive forces for the wholesale slaughter of human beings.”18

This is not the language of a man who is under a misapprehension about what the bombings did. On August 10th, he told his cabinet that “he had given orders to stop atomic bombing” because, as Henry Wallace recorded in his diary, “the thought of wiping out another 100,000 people was too horrible. He didn’t like the idea of killing, as he said, ‘all those kids.’”19 This is a far cry from his initial reaction to hearing that the Hiroshima mission was successful: “This is the greatest thing in history!” I think something changed in him, and I think it was a horrible realization of his own misunderstanding of what this weapon would do.

Account of the cabinet meeting of 10 August 1945 in the diary of Henry A. Wallace.

We remember Truman primarily as the person who was president when the atomic bombs were first used. We should also remember him, as I have argued before, as the person who ordered that the atomic bombs stop being used. And the person who, over the course of his presidency, did the most to establish that atomic bombs were not weapons to be deployed lightly ever again. One might see this as irony, but in my interpretation, it is not: it the reaction of someone who realized he had been badly out of the loop once, and wore that on his conscience, and determined it would not happen again.

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Notes

1. It is a general point that sometimes comes up when talking about the work of history: a lot of people think new work is driven exclusively or even primarily by access to new sources. New sources can play a role but usually it is new questions that drive historical innovation. The new questions can provoke re-reading of old sources, and can point towards overlooked sources as well. The hardest thing in any field of knowledge is coming up with a new, interesting question to ask — answers are much easier to find and deal with than new questions.
2. Harry S. Truman, “Radio Report to the American People on the Potsdam Conference” (9 August 1945), Harry S. Truman Library, Independence, MO. 
3. Barton Bernstein, “Reconsidering the ‘Atomic General’: Leslie R. Groves,” Journal of Military History 67, no. 3 (July 2003), 889-920, esp. 904-905.
4. Longhand note of Harry S. Truman (9/10 August 1945), transcript and copy available in Harry Truman Library.
5. Samuel Rosenman to Charles Ross (20 July 1945), Samuel Rosenman Papers, Harry Truman Library, “Report to the Nation (Potsdam).” 
6. “Draft of a Speech by President Truman on Berlin Conference,” (n.d., first draft), Papers of Samuel I. Rosenman, Harry Truman Library,  “Report to the Nation (Potsdam),” pages 2 and 6.
7. “Draft of a Speech by President Truman on Berlin Conference,” (n.d., second draft), Papers of Samuel I. Rosenman, Harry Truman Library,  “Report to the Nation (Potsdam),”, page 5.
8. Harry Truman, Potsdam Journal entry for 25 July 1945, Harry Truman Library.
9. Harry S. Truman, “Draft of the Gridiron Dinner Speech,” (15 December 1945), Harry Truman Library.
10. Diary entry of 21 July 1948, in David E. Lilienthal, Journals of David E. Lilienthal, Volume II: The atomic energy years, 1945-1950 (New York: Harper & Row, 1964), 390-391. 
11. J.A. Derry and N.F. Ramsey to L.R. Groves, “Summary of Target Committee Meetings on 10 and 11 May 1945,” in Correspondence (“Top Secret”) of the Manhattan Engineer District, 1942-1946, microfilm publication M1109 (Washington, D.C.: National Archives and Records Administration, 1980), Roll 1, Target 6, Folder 5D, “Selection of Targets.”
12. See Barton J. Bernstein, “Truman at Potsdam: His Secret Diary,” Foreign Service Journal (July/August 1980), 29-34. 
13. “Draft of a Speech by President Truman on Berlin Conference,” (n.d., third draft), Papers of Samuel I. Rosenman, Harry Truman Library,  “Report to the Nation (Potsdam).”
14. “Draft of a Speech by President Truman on Berlin Conference,” (n.d., fourth draft), Papers of Samuel I. Rosenman, Harry Truman Library,  “Report to the Nation (Potsdam).”
15. “Draft of a Speech by President Truman on Berlin Conference,” (n.d., fifth draft), Papers of Samuel I. Rosenman, Harry Truman Library,  “Report to the Nation (Potsdam).” 
16. Archibald MacLeish to Samuel I. Rosenman (8 August 1945),Papers of Samuel I. Rosenman, Harry Truman Library,  “Report to the Nation (Potsdam).”
17. “I showed the President the teletype report from Guam showing the extent of the damage; also, the Wire Service bulletin showing the damage as reported by Tokyo at nine A.M. August 8th. I showed him the photograph showing the total destruction and also the radius of damage which Dr. Lovett had brought me from the Air Corps just before I went. He mentioned the terrible responsibility that such destruction placed upon us here and himself.^” “Memorandum of Conference with the President” (8 August 1945), attached to Henry L. Stimson diary entry of 8 August 1945, in The Henry Lewis Stimson Diaries, microfilm edition retrieved from the Center for Research Libraries, original from Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University Library, New Haven, Connecticut. 
18. See the “Gridiron Dinner” speech, previously cited. 
19. Henry A. Wallace diary entry of 10 August 1945, in Henry A. Wallace, The diary of Henry Agard Wallace, January 18, 1935-September 19, 1946 (Glen Rock, N.J.: Microfilming Corp. of America, 1977). 

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Seventy-eight years ago, an act of international criminality and infamy took place, the consequences of which have posed an existential threat to humanity ever since. For the first time, a species had created the capacity to not only bring about its own extinction, but also to threaten virtually all life on our planet.

On August 6 and 9, 1945, the U.S. military bombed the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki with nuclear weapons. Over 200,000 people, mostly civilians, died instantly or later succumbed from burns, malnutrition, and radiation-related illnesses, and their cities levelled to the ground. Those notorious acts will forever be remembered as the first time the devastating impact of nuclear warfare was unleashed.

There was absolutely no justification for this wanton attack. Unclassified documents have confirmed the lie of the constructed ‘myth’ that the atomic attack was necessary to spare the lives of U.S. servicemen and end the war. In fact, Imperial Japan was already on the verge of collapse and surrender by early August 1945. The U.S. Truman Administration proceeded anyway to showcase its awesome new weaponry, thus guaranteeing U.S. military dominance in the post-war period. Hiroshima was the opening salvo in the “cold war” which was to dominate international politics and spur a nuclear arms race for the next half-century.

The experience of Hiroshima and Nagasaki is an object lesson and dire warning for all humanity. All wars spell calamity for its victims, but nuclear weapons – weapons of mass destruction – are in a horrific category of their own, and their use must never, ever again be contemplated or tolerated.

Albert Einstein placed it best when he wrote:

“Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius – and a lot of courage – to move in the opposite direction. The splitting of the atom has changed everything except the way we think. Thus we drift toward unparalleled catastrophe. We shall require a substantially new manner of thinking if humanity is to survive.”

And yet today, more than three-quarters of a century later, the world again stands dangerously close to the edge of self-destruction. NATO, the aggressive military alliance which includes Canada, clings stubbornly to its ‘right’ to the first use of nuclear weapons in a conflict, and the U.S. and its allies are pouring billions into scientific research to make their nuclear arsenals even more lethal and ‘effective’ (sic). And much of nuclear R&D is directed to developing delivery systems and war game strategies which will make nuclear wars “winnable” and “survivable”. This is pure insanity! The only way to prevent a nuclear exchange is by banning the research and production of new thermonuclear weapons and eliminating existing stockpiles, as called for in the UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW).

Britain and the U.S. are providing the Ukrainian government with depleted uranium shells for battlefield use in the conflict in Ukraine. Meanwhile, Russian government officials are now speaking openly of their preparedness to use nuclear arms as well, if they sense an ‘existential threat’ from NATO and its proxies in the region.

At the same time, tensions are also growing in the Asia-Pacific with the formation of AUKUS (including 12 new nuclear-powered subs), and the construction of four new U.S. bases in the Philippines, completing a pearl-like string of bases surrounding and hemming in the People’s Republic of China, and provoking a dangerous conflict with China over Taiwan.

These are only a few indicators that the world is drifting to the very precipice of the nuclear abyss. In January 2023, the Board of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists moved the hands of the Doomsday Clock to 90 seconds before midnight, reflecting the growing risk of nuclear war.

In early August, the journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) stated the following:

“Any use of nuclear weapons would be catastrophic for humanity. A large-scale nuclear war between the US and Russia could kill 200 million people or more in the near term, and potentially cause a global ‘nuclear winter’ that could kill 5 to 6 billion people, threatening the survival of humanity.” [emphasis added]

“We now call on health associations to inform about the threat to human survival and … to support efforts to reduce the near-term risks of nuclear war, including immediate steps on the part of nuclear-armed states and their allies: first, adopt a no first use policy; second, take nuclear weapons off hair-trigger alert; and third, urge all states to pledge publicly and unequivocally that they will not use nuclear weapons in conflicts. We further ask them to work for a definitive end to the nuclear threat by supporting the urgent negotiations among the nuclear-armed states for a verifiable, time-bound agreement to eliminate their nuclear weapons, opening the way for all nations to join the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.”

And What of Canada’s Role?

One would expect that in the face of this apocalyptic danger, the Canadian government would be in the forefront of international efforts to eliminate this threat and avert catastrophe. But no such good fortune. Instead, the Trudeau government has repeatedly refused to consider – much less ratify – the TPNW treaty, claiming that there is no real danger, and prohibiting nuclear weapons is both a ‘pie in the sky’ and ‘motherhood’ issue.

In July, it was reported that the federal agency Internal Public Safety Canada is updating nuclear preparedness measures, including a highly secret plan to ensure the federal government can continue to function in a severe [nuclear] crisis, and ‘finalizing a protocol to advise the Canadian public of an incoming ballistic missile attack.’ This sounds very much like the Cold War BS of the 1950s that the way to ‘survive’ a nuclear war is by building more bomb shelters, and stocking up on anti-radiation medicines and canned beans!

And Canada is doubling down on its NATO commitments, further increasing defence spending, purchasing a new fleet of F-35 fighter jets and naval frigates, and sending more troops and weaponry to Ukraine and elsewhere in Eastern Europe.

Instead of more war preparations, the Canadian government should adopt a foreign policy of peace and disarmament, sign the TPNW treaty, get out of NATO and NORAD, and cut the arms budget, redirecting those massive expenditures to job creation, funding healthcare and education, building affordable housing, and addressing the scourge of climate change, to the benefit of working people in Canada and around the world.

The clock is ticking. The time to speak out and mobilize against the growing war danger is NOW! Support the work of the Canadian Peace Congress and its affiliates across the country; join the Canada-wide Peace & Justice Network; and build a local peace organization or coalition in your own communities.

No More Hiroshimas!

Take Peace Action Now!

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

by Michel Chossudovsky

Available to order from Global Research! 

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

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

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

Reviews

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

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

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

Hiroshima: A “Military Base” According to President Harry Truman

By Prof Michel Chossudovsky, August 06, 2023

Did you know that tactical nuclear weapons or so-called mini-nukes with an explosive capacity between one-third and six times a Hiroshima bomb are considered, according to scientific opinion, on contract to the Pentagon as “harmless to the surrounding civilian population because the explosion is underground”? It’s a lie.

Counting the Dead at Hiroshima and Nagasaki

By Prof. Alex Wellerstein, August 06, 2023

How many people died as a result of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki? There is one thing that everyone who has tackled this question has agreed upon: The answer is probably fundamentally unknowable. The indiscriminate damage inflicted upon the cities, coupled with the existing disruptions of the wartime Japanese home front, means that any precise reckoning is never going to be achieved.

Hiroshima-Nagasaki: Remembering One of Humanity’s Worst Catastrophes, 78 Years On

By John Steinbach, August 06, 2023

President Harry S. Truman’s decision to drop atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki set the groundwork for an era of U.S. global hegemony and enriched corporations like General Electric, DuPont, Union Carbide, Bechtel and Westinghouse which made hundreds of billions of dollars developing generation after generation of “first-strike” nuclear weapons.

The Moral Legacy of Hiroshima and Nagasaki

By Prof Rodrigue Tremblay, August 06, 2023

When U.S. President Harry S. Truman decided on his own to use the atom bomb, a barbarous weapon of mass destruction, against the Japanese civilian populations of the cities of Hiroshima and of Nagasaki on August 6 and on August 9, 1945, the United States sided officially on the wrong side of history.

Nuclear War or Invasion: The False Dichotomy of Hiroshima and Nagasaki

By Brett Wilkins, August 06, 2023

President Harry S. Truman, who only learned about the Manhattan Project after being sworn in following Franklin D. Roosevelt’s death on April 12, approved a plan to drop two atomic bombs on Japan. Planners sought undamaged cities where military facilities were located near civilians, and the decision was made to detonate the bombs hundreds of meters in the air for maximum destructive effect.

“In a Nuclear War the Collateral Damage Would be the Life of All Humanity”. Fidel Castro

By Fidel Castro Ruz and Prof Michel Chossudovsky, August 06, 2023

The leader of the Cuban Revolution believes that only a far-reaching “Battle of Ideas” could  change the course of World history. The  objective is to prevent the unthinkable, a nuclear war which threatens to destroy life on planet earth.

How So Many Americans Learned to “Stop Worrying” and “Love the Nukes”

By Edward Curtin, August 06, 2023

I recently wrote an article about the dangers of the fourteen U.S. Trident submarines. These subs constantly cruise under the oceans carrying 3,360 nuclear warheads equivalent to 134,400 Hiroshima bombs. All are on first strike triggers. And of course these are supplemented by all the land and air based nukes. My point was not very complicated: now that the United States government has abrogated all nuclear weapons treaties and continues to escalate its war against Russia in Ukraine, we are closer to nuclear annihilation than ever before.

Hiroshima Day: The Movie and the Moment: An Oppenheimer Review Through the Lens of an Anti-War Activist

By Marcy Winograd, August 06, 2023

Only those with a global death wish or on the payroll of Northrop Grumman, the military contractor with the nuclear “modernization” contract, could watch this film and still root for US nuclear rearmament, a horror show now underway with the blessings of DC politicians. Unless people rise up in fury, unless this Hollywood movie sparks a second nuclear-freeze movement, a repeat on steroids of the 80’s nuclear weapons freeze, Congress and the White House will raid the treasury to expand our nuclear arsenal.

The Real Reason America Used Nuclear Weapons Against Japan. It Was Not to End the War or Save Lives.

By Washington’s Blog, August 06, 2023

Like all Americans, I was taught that the U.S. dropped nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in order to end WWII and save both American and Japanese lives. But most of the top American military officials at the time said otherwise.

750 U.S. Military Bases Globally, $7.2 Trillion US Nuclear Weapons Expenditure Since Hiroshima, Nagasaki

By Shane Quinn, April 01, 2023

From 1940 to 1996, Washington spent about $5.5 trillion on its nuclear program. This figure does not include the $320 billion, pertaining to the annual storage and removal costs of more than 50 years worth of accumulated radioactive waste, and the $20 billion needed for the dismantling of nuclear weapons systems and removal of surplus nuclear material.

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First published in September 2016.

18 years later, the US and its NATO allies still have troops in Afghanistan with no plans on leaving.

We were told this was about 9/11 and Osama Bin Laden, but these were lies.

So why are the troops still there?

What was the war in Afghanistan really about?

The decision to invade Afghanistan was taken by the Bush-Cheney war cabinet in the evening of September 11, 2001. It was based on the presumption, “confirmed” by the head of the CIA that Al Qaeda was behind the attacks and that Al Qaeda was supported by the Afghan government.

On the following morning, September 12, 2001, NATO’s Atlantic Council meeting in Brussels, endorsed the Bush administration’s declaration of war on Afghanistan, invoking Article 5 of the Washington Treaty.

Michel Chossudovsky of the Centre for Research on Globalization joins us to explain.

James Corbett and Michel Chossudovsky (Interview conducted in 2016)

October 7, 2001: Waging America’s 9/11 War of Retribution Against Afghanistan

The immediate response of the US and its allies to the 9/11 attacks was to the declare a war of retribution against Afghanistan on the grounds that the Taliban government was protecting “terror mastermind” Osama bin Laden. By allegedly harboring bin Laden, the Taliban were complicit, according to both the US administration and NATO, for having waged an act of war against the United States.

Parroting official statements, the Western media mantra on September 12, 2001 had already approved the launching of “punitive actions” directed against civilian targets in Afghanistan. In the words of William Saffire writing in the New York Times: “When we reasonably determine our attackers’ bases and camps, we must pulverize them — minimizing but accepting the risk of collateral damage” — and act overtly or covertly to destabilize terror’s national hosts”.

This decision was taken by the Bush-Cheney war cabinet in the evening of September 11, 2001. It was based on the presumption, “confirmed” by the head of the CIA that Al Qaeda was behind the attacks.

On the following morning, September 12, 2001, NATO’s Atlantic Council meeting in Brussels, endorsed the Bush administration’s declaration of war on Afghanistan, invoking Article 5 of the Washington Treaty.

An act of war by a foreign nation (Afghanistan) against a member of the Atlantic Alliance (the USA) is an act of war against all members under NATO’s doctrine of collective security. Under any stretch of the imagination, the attack on the World Trade Center and Pentagon cannot be categorized as an act of war by a foreign country. But nobody seemed to have raised this issue.

Meanwhile, on two occasions in the course of September 2001 and early October, the Afghan government –through diplomatic channels– offered to hand over Osama Bin laden to US Justice. These overtures were turned down by president Bush, on the grounds that America “does not negotiate with terrorists”.

The war on Afghanistan was launched 26 days later on the morning of October 7, 2001. The timing of this war begs the question: how long does it take to plan and implement a major theater war several thousand miles away.

Military analysts will confirm that a major theater war takes months and months, up to a year or more of advanced preparations. The war on Afghanistan was already in advanced planning stages prior to September 11, 2001, which begs the question of foreknowledge of the 9/11 attacks.

The repeal of civil liberties in America was launched in parallel with the bombing and invasion of Afghanistan, almost immediately following 9/11 with the adoption of the PATRIOT legislation and the setting up of a Homeland Security apparatus, under the pretext of protecting Americans. This post-911 legal and institutional framework had been carefully crafted prior to the 9/11 attacks.

-Michel Chossudovsky, September 12, 2019

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by Michel Chossudovsky

ISBN Number: 0-9737147-1-9

List Price: $9.50

Product Type: PDF File

click here to order

Price: $9.50

In this new and expanded edition of Michel Chossudovsky’s 2002 best seller, the author blows away the smokescreen put up by the mainstream media, that 9/11 was an attack on America by “Islamic terrorists”.  Through meticulous research, the author uncovers a military-intelligence ploy behind the September 11 attacks, and the cover-up and complicity of key members of the Bush Administration.

The expanded edition, which includes twelve new chapters focuses on the use of 9/11 as a pretext for the invasion and illegal occupation of Iraq, the militarisation of justice and law enforcement and the repeal of democracy.

According to Chossudovsky, the  “war on terrorism” is a complete fabrication based on the illusion that one man, Osama bin Laden, outwitted the $40 billion-a-year American intelligence apparatus. The “war on terrorism” is a war of conquest. Globalisation is the final march to the “New World Order”, dominated by Wall Street and the U.S. military-industrial complex.

September 11, 2001 provides a justification for waging a war without borders. Washington’s agenda consists in extending the frontiers of the American Empire to facilitate complete U.S. corporate control, while installing within America the institutions of the Homeland Security State.

Click here to purchase.

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The AUSMIN 2023 talks held between the US Secretaries of State and Defense and their Australian counterparts, confirmed the increasing, unaccountable militarisation of the Australian north and its preparation for a future conflict with Beijing. Details were skimpy, the rhetoric aspirational. But the Australian performance from Defence Minister Richard Marles, and Foreign Minister Penny Wong, was crawling, lamentable, even outrageous. State Secretary Antony Blinken and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin III could only look on with sheer wonder at their prostrate hosts.

Money, much of it from the US military budget, is being poured into upgrading, expanding and redeveloping Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF) bases in the Northern Territory city of Darwin, and Tindal, situated 320km south-east of Darwin, the intended to “address functional deficiencies and capacity constraints in existing facilities and infrastructure.” Two new locations are also being proposed at RAAF Bases Scherger and RAAF Curtin, aided by site surveys.

The AUSMIN joint statement, while revealing nothing in terms of operational details or costs, proved heavy with talk about “the ambitious trajectory of Enhanced Force Posture Cooperation across land, maritime, and air domains, as well as Combined Logistics, Sustainment and Maintenance Enterprise (CoLSME).” Additionally, there would be “Enhanced Air Cooperation” with a rotating “US Navy Maritime Patrol and Reconnaissance Aircraft in Australia to enhance regional maritime domain awareness, with an ambition of inviting likeminded partners to participate in the future.”

Further details have come to light about the money being spent by the Pentagon on facilities in Darwin. The unromantically titled FY22 MCAF Project PAF160700 Squadron Operations Facility at the RAAF Darwin base “includes the construction (design-bid-build) of a United States Air Force squadron facility at the … (RAAF) in Darwin, Australia.” The project is deemed necessary to add space “for aircrew flight equipment, maintenance and care, mission planning, intelligence, crew briefings, crew readiness, and incidental related work.” Some of the systems are mundane but deemed important for an expanded facility, including ventilating and air conditioning, water heating, plumbing, utility energy meters and sub-meters and a building automation system (HVAC Control system).

Correspondents from the Australian Broadcasting have gone further into the squadron operations facility, consulting US budget filings and tender documents to reveal cost assessments of $26 million (A$40 million). A further parking apron at RAAF Darwin is also featured in the planning, estimated to cost somewhere in the order of $258 billion. This will further supplement plans to establish the East Arm fuel storage facility for the US Air Force located 15 kilometres from Darwin that should be able to, on completion by September this year, store 300 million litres of military jet fuel intended to support US military activity in the Northern Territory and Indo-Pacific region.

According to the tender documents, the squadron operations facility also had a broader, more strategic significance: “to support strategic operations and to run multiple 15-day training exercises during the NT dry season for deployed B-52 squadrons.” The RAAF Tindal facility’s redevelopment, slated to conclude in 2026, is also intended to accommodate six B-52 bombers. Given their nuclear capability, residents in the NT should feel a suitable degree of terror.

Michael Shoebridge, founder and director of Strategic Analysis Australia, is none too pleased by this state of affairs. He is unhappy by Canberra’s reticence on US-Australian military arrangements, and none too keen on a debate that is only being informed by US-based sources. “A public debate needs to be enabled by information and you can’t have a complete picture without knowing where the money is being spent.”

While it is hard to disagree with that tack, Shoebridge’s outfit, in line with such think tanks as the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, is not against turning Australia into a frontline fortress state ready for war. What he, and his colleagues take issue with, is the overwhelmingly dominant role the US is playing in the venture. Those in Washington, Shoebridge argues, seem to “understand the urgency we don’t seem to.” Rather than questioning Australia’s need for a larger, more threatening military capability to fight phantoms and confected foreign adversaries, he accepts the premise, wholeheartedly. Canberra, in short, should muck in more, pull its weight, and drum up Australian personnel for the killing.

Anthony Bergin, a senior fellow of Strategic Analysis Australia, teases out the idea of such mucking in, suggesting a familiar formula. He insists that, in order to improve “our national security, we should be looking at options short of conscription which wouldn’t be as hard to sell to the Australian people.” He thought the timing perfect for such a move. “There’s now a latent appetite for our political leaders to introduce measures to bolster national resilience.”

This silly reading only makes sense on the assumption that the Australian public has been softened sufficiently by such hysterical affronts to sensibility as the Red Alert campaign waged in the Fairfax Press.

Options to add padding to Australia’s military preparedness include doubling or tripling school cadets and cadet programs of the “outdoor bound” type based in the regions. But more important would be the creation of a “national militia training scheme”. Bergin is, however, displeased by the difficulty of finding “volunteers of any kind”, a strange comment given the huge, unpaid volunteer army that governs the delivery of numerous services in Australia, from charities to firefighting.

Alison Broinowski, herself formerly of the Australian diplomatic corps, safely concludes that the current moves constitute “another step in the same direction – a step that the government has been taking a series of for years; accepting whatever the United States government wants to place on Australian soil.” More’s the pity that most details are to come from Washington sources, indicating, with irrefutable finality, Canberra’s abject subordination to the US imperium and its refusal to admit that fact.

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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: ‘B-52 Stratofortress bombers arrive at RAAF Base Darwin‘, 29 November 2018. (Source: Nautilus Institute for Security and Sustainability)

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Fierce and deadly clashes between rival factions in Ein el-Hilweh Palestinian refugee camp in southern Lebanon have killed two children and 10 others, while at least 56 have been wounded according to sources at Al Hamshari Hospital. 

The extremist groups Jund al Sham and Shabab al Muslim have been facing off against Fatah fighters in the largest Palestinian refugee camp in Lebanon, near the city of Sidon, close to the Israeli border.

The UN agency for Palestinian refugees, UNRWA, has reported that more than 2,000 people were forced to flee in search of safety since the beginning of the clashes.

The camp was formed in 1948 to shelter Palestinian refugees fleeing the formation of Israel, where they had been forced from their homes, lands and businesses in a program of ethnic cleansing, which is ongoing in the Jewish State of Israel.

The fighting broke out Saturday night, and into Sunday morning, while a cease-fire was reached late Monday, but broke down as new clashes erupted on Tuesday.

The violence began when an unknown gunman attempted to assassinate Mahmoud Khalil, but killed his companion instead.  In retaliation, militants assassinated Abu Ashraf al Armoushi, a Palestinian military general from the Fatah group and three escorts.

Israeli Defense Forces Chief of staff Herzi Halevi and President Isaac Herzog made separate trips Wednesday to Israel’s northern border with Lebanon amid heightened tensions. 

Ousama Saad, Member of the Lebanese Parliament, blamed Israel for the violence. Saad said,

“The Zionist enemy is escalating against Lebanon and Palestine, and we must not help it by fomenting sedition inside Palestinian camps, which is in the Israeli interest.” 

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is facing a huge domestic political crisis which threatens civil war after a judicial reform bill passed in the most religious extremist government in Israeli history. Netanyahu often has resorted in the past to creating violence among Palestinian groups in an effort to unite his domestic Jewish citizens. However, this time it might backfire on him, as many Israeli military personnel have pledged to not report for duty as a personal form of protest to the law which many say has taken away democracy from Israel. 

Palestinian resistance groups in the Occupied West Bank have been carrying out operations to resist the occupation of their land, and the lack of human rights and dignity at the hands of the brutal Israeli military.

On Sunday, factions blazed away with assault rifles and rocket-propelled grenade launchers and lobbed hand grenades in the refugee camp as ambulances zoomed through its narrow streets to take the wounded to the hospital.

Lebanese reaction

Palestinian Ambassador to Lebanon Ashraf Dabbour met with the commander of the Lebanese army, Gen. Joseph Aoun, on Wednesday to discuss developments in the camps and attempts to secure a new cease-fire.

Some sniper bullets and shells crossed the outskirts of the camp into the nearby neighborhoods in Sidon city, and a “B7” shell exploded near a point where several photographers and media staff were stationed, but no injuries were recorded.

Many Lebanese soldiers were deployed in the area, and Interior Minister Bassam Mawlawi stressed that “the army is carrying out all its duties in this region, as in others, despite all the difficult circumstances.”

The Lebanese army said in a statement that a mortar shell hit a military barracks outside the camp and wounded one soldier, whose condition is stable.

Some residents in Sidon neighborhoods near the camp fled their homes as stray bullets hit buildings and shattered windows and storefronts.

UNRWA said two of its schools that serve some 2,000 students were damaged in the fighting, and it had suspended all its operations in the camp.

Lebanon’s caretaker prime minister, Najib Mikati, condemned the clashes.

“We call on the Palestinian leadership to cooperate with the army to control the security situation and hand over those meddling with security to the Lebanese authorities,” Mikati said in his statement.

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This article was originally published on Mideast Discourse.

Steven Sahiounie is a two-time award-winning journalist. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from MD

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July 31, 2023 – NFL Broncos waive 24 year old KJ Hamler after he was recently diagnosed with “mild pericarditis” (click here).

KJ Hamler announced on his Instagram account he has been diagnosed with a “mild heart irritation, called pericarditis.” He said he would miss some time but intended to be back on the field this season after treatment with medication.

The Broncos waived Hamler with a non-football illness designation on Monday. Sources told ESPN the move was made to let him undergo treatment and potentially bring him back later if he is cleared.

Hamler said in his Instagram post he had experienced chest pains during workouts before training camp began.

July 21, 2023 – NFL Cleveland Browns wide receiver, 32 year old Marquise Goodwin has blood clots in his legs and lungs, the team announced (click here).

Goodwin, 32, was placed on the non-football illness list last Friday after feeling discomfort in his legs and shortness of breath during team workouts this spring.

The blood clots will force the receiver, who is entering his 10th season in the NFL, to miss the start of training camp, the Browns said. “It was really alarming at first because I’ve experienced injury throughout my career, but it’s never been anything like this that could turn into something detrimental if it’s not taken care of,” he told the team website.

“It was frightening at first, but now I’m at ease with it. I’ve prayed and just given it over to God.

Goodwin doesn’t know when he will be able to get on the field again.

July 29/30, 2023 – Four bizarre retirements from NFL announced within 24 hours: ages 23, 25, 27 and 28. No explanations given for any of them!

International Soccer Players “Retired Suddenly”

July 28, 2023 – 28 year old Ex-Premier League player Nabil Bentaleb has his $4 million transfer to Lille held up due to “medical concerns” – he failed his recent medical exam. (click here).

July 26, 2023 – 22 year old Ex-Premier League (Brighton Club) soccer player Lars Dendoncker forced to RETIRE after being diagnosed with a “heart condition” (click here).

July 10, 2023 – 23 year old Noah Fadiga, a Senegal player in French Ligue 1 Club Brest, had his contract terminated over “irregular heartbeat”. He also had his license to play soccer in France revoked and must look outside of France to continue his career (click here).

French soccer authorities apparently have a “zero tolerance policy on cardiac issues” which is wildly ironic.

July 4, 2023 – 22 year old Luca Beckenbauer, grandson of professional German soccer player Franz Beckenbauer, was forced into retirement due to “heart condition” allegedly caused by COVID-19 (much more likely caused by COVID-19 vaccination).

Jan. 15, 2023 – 25 year old soccer player Enock Mwepu was forced to retire from Premier League Brighton Club after suffering a suspected heart attack while driving!

Jan. 12, 2023 – German professional soccer player Marcel Scheifl has been disabled since COVID-19 vaccination and has been fighting for a normal life for 1.5 years (click here).

My Take… 

Mainstream media is not covering these stories, which is not surprising.

These are serious injuries that are ending the careers of athletes in their 20s – once again we see injuries typical of COVID-19 vaccination such as myocarditis, pericarditis, unspecified “heart conditions”, arrhythmias and of course blood clots.

I believe there is a logical reason why the COVID-19 vaccine injured, including professional athletes, are treated so horribly.

The COVID-19 vaccine “died suddenly” individuals offer a crime scene that can be easily scrubbed and then forgotten. If an autopsy is done, an “indeterminate” result is acceptable or the cause of death is blamed on something else and everyone moves on. The “vaccine crime” can be wiped clean.

The COVID-19 vaccine injured, however, present a crime scene that cannot be scrubbed. Their untreatable injury is a constant reminder of the crimes committed by their doctors, employers, in this case sports officials, and more broadly speaking politicians, judges and health leaders.

The COVID-19 vaccine injured ARE evidence of crimes that cannot be scrubbed and won’t go away quietly. They are the open crime scene that constantly points at the perpetrators of the crimes who are trying to avoid consequences.

This may explain, in part, the behavior of French soccer authorities and their “zero tolerance policy” regarding heart injuries they themselves caused and are legally liable for.

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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.

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This article was originally published on the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists in August 2020.

How many people died as a result of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki? There is one thing that everyone who has tackled this question has agreed upon: The answer is probably fundamentally unknowable. The indiscriminate damage inflicted upon the cities, coupled with the existing disruptions of the wartime Japanese home front, means that any precise reckoning is never going to be achieved.

But beginning in 1945, people have tried to estimate the number of the dead and injured. The casualties from the first atomic bombings are not of mere historical interest. They are part of how we understand the effects of nuclear weapons today — for Hiroshima and Nagasaki, thankfully, remain the only instances of these weapons being used in warfare, and thus provide an invaluable “data set” upon which to base other understandings and simulations. The estimated casualties also play a nuanced role in the various narratives and arguments about the end of World War II.

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***

First published on August 5, 2017

***

.

78 years ago. The first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima “A Military Base” according to Harry Truman.

The collateral damage concept had yet to be defined. 100,000 civilians were killed in the first seven seconds of the explosion. 

Michel Chossudovsky, Hiroshima Day, August 6, 2023

***

The dangers of nuclear war are not an object of debate and analysis by the mainstream media.

Public opinion is carefully misled. ” All options on the table”.  Nuclear weapons are portrayed as peace-making bombs.

Did you know that tactical nuclear weapons or so-called mininukes with an explosive capacity between one third and six times a Hiroshima bomb are considered, according to scientific opinion, on contract to the Pentagon as “harmless to the surrounding civilian population because the explosion is underground”.

It’s a lie.

The US has a vast nuclear arsenal capable of blowing up the planet several times.

The World commemorates the 78th anniversary of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (August 6, 9, 1945)

Did you know that  Hiroshima was a “military base”, and that when the first atomic bomb was dropped on two of Japan’s heavily populated areas in August 1945, the objective was, according to president Truman to save the lives of innocent civilians.

“The World will note that the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima a military base. That was because we wished in this first attack to avoid, insofar as possible, the killing of civilians..”(President Harry S. Truman in a radio address to the Nation, August 9, 1945, starts at 05.15).

The first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945; the Second on Nagasaki, on August 9, on the same day as Truman’s radio speech to the Nation, starts at 05.15.

Unpunished crimes against humanity, “collateral damage”.

In the words of President Harry Truman in his Diary (emphasis added):

“We have discovered the most terrible bomb in the history of the world. It may be the fire destruction prophesied in the Euphrates Valley Era, after Noah and his fabulous Ark…. This weapon is to be used against Japan … [We] will use it so that military objectives and soldiers and sailors are the target and not women and children.

Even if the Japs are savages, ruthless, merciless and fanatic, we as the leader of the world for the common welfare cannot drop that terrible bomb on the old capital or the new. …  The target will be a purely military one… It seems to be the most terrible thing ever discovered, but it can be made the most useful.”

(President Harry S. Truman, Diary, July 25, 1945)

To this date, the US government has not apologized to the people of Japan, nor has the mainstream media acknowledged that Harry Truman was a liar and a criminal.

Truman’s July 25 diary entry (see above), suggests that he was not aware that Hiroshima was a city.

Had he been misled by his advisers that Hiroshima was a military base and that it was ok to bomb, or was he lying to himself?

Was he stupid and uneducated?

Everybody in the high ranks of the U.S military knew that Hiroshima was a populated urban area with approximately 350,000 inhabitants (1945).

The complete text of the radio address entitled Radio Report to the American People on the Potsdam Conference is contained in the  Harry Truman Library and Museum, Public Papers of Harry S. Truman, University of Missouri. 

The reference to Hiroshima and the atomic bomb was mentioned by Truman at the very end of a long radio address largely focussing on Germany and the Potsdam Conference.

It is worth noting that the US chose to drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima at the height of peace negotiations in Berlin.

The second atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki upon Truman’s return to Washington.

(Listen to the Audio of Truman’s Radio Report from Potsdam August 9, 1945, speech, Hiroshima audio video)

Excerpt regarding The Hiroshima bomb, starts at 05.15

Here is the transcript of Truman’s radio address pertaining to the atomic bomb (emphasis added):

The world will note that the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, a military base. That was because we wished in this first attack to avoid, insofar as possible, the killing of civilians. But that attack is only a warning of things to come. If Japan does not surrender, bombs will have to be dropped on her war industries and, unfortunately, thousands of civilian lives will be lost. I urge Japanese civilians to leave industrial cities immediately, and save themselves from destruction.

I realize the tragic significance of the atomic bomb.

Its production and its use were not lightly undertaken by this Government. But we knew that our enemies were on the search for it. We know now how close they were to finding it. And we knew the disaster which would come to this Nation, and to all peace-loving nations, to all civilization, if they had found it first.

That is why we felt compelled to undertake the long and uncertain and costly labor of discovery and production.

We won the race of discovery against the Germans. [Amply confirmed Nazi Germany never contemplated the development of nuclear bombs]

Having found the bomb we have used it. We have used it against those who attacked us without warning at Pearl Harbor, against those who have starved and beaten and executed American prisoners of war, against those who have abandoned all pretense of obeying international laws of warfare. We have used it in order to shorten the agony of war, in order to save the lives of thousands and thousands of young Americans.

We shall continue to use it until we completely destroy Japan’s power to make war. Only a Japanese surrender will stop us.

The atomic bomb is too dangerous to be loose in a lawless world. That is why Great Britain, Canada, and the United States, who have the secret of its production, do not intend to reveal that secret until means have been found to control the bomb so as to protect ourselves and the rest of the world from the danger of total destruction.

As far back as last May, Secretary of War Stimson, at my suggestion, appointed a committee upon which Secretary of State Byrnes served as my personal representative, to prepare plans for the future control of this bomb. I shall ask the Congress to cooperate to the end that its production and use be controlled, and that its power be made an overwhelming influence towards world peace.

We must constitute ourselves trustees of this new force–to prevent its misuse, and to turn it into the channels of service to mankind.

It is an awful responsibility which has come to us.

We thank God that it has come to us, instead of to our enemies; and we pray that He may guide us to use it in His ways and for His purposes.  

…

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This article was first published on March 9, 2022, revised and expanded on October 5, 2022, minor revisions on May 25, 2023.

 

***

 

At no point since the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima on August 6th, 1945, has humanity been closer to the unthinkable. 

All the safeguards of the Cold War era, which categorized the nuclear bomb as “a weapon of last resort”, have been scrapped.

It should be understood, that there are powerful financial interests behind the Nuclear Posture Review (NPR) which are tied into America’s $1.3  trillion nuclear weapons program initiated under President Obama. 

Although the Ukraine conflict has so-far been limited to conventional weapons coupled with “economic warfare”, the use of a large array of sophisticated WMDs including nuclear weapons is on the drawing board of the Pentagon.

Dangerous narrative: The NPR proposes “increased integration of conventional and nuclear planning”, which consists in categorizing tactical nuclear weapons (e.g. B61-11 and 12) as conventional weapons, to be used on a preemptive basis in the conventional war theater (as a means of “self defense”)

According to the Federation of American Scientists, the total number of nuclear warheads Worldwide is of the order of 13,000.  Russia and the United States “each have around 4,000 warheads in their military stockpiles”.

Under Joe Biden, public funds allocated to nuclear weapons are slated to increase to 2 trillion by 2030 allegedly as a means to safeguarding peace and national security at taxpayers expense. 

Biden does not have the foggiest idea regarding the potential impacts of nuclear weapons. 

Michel Chossudovsky, July 10, 2023

***

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First published on July 7, 2023

***

Social psychosis is widespread. In the words of the British psychiatrist, R. D. Laing, “The condition of alienation, of being asleep, of being unconscious, of being out of one’s mind, is the condition of the normal man.”

He was not referring to raving, drooling, hitting-your-head-against-the-wall lunacy but a taken-for-granted acceptance of a world long teetering on the edge of nuclear extinction, to take the most extreme example, but surely only one of many. The insouciant acceptance and support of psychotic rulers who promote first-strike nuclear war is very common. First strike nuclear policy is United States policy.

I recently wrote an article about the dangers of the fourteen U.S. Trident submarines. These subs constantly cruise under the oceans carrying 3,360 nuclear warheads equivalent to 134,400 Hiroshima bombs. All are on first strike triggers. And of course these are supplemented by all the land and air based nukes. My point was not very complicated: now that the United States government has abrogated all nuclear weapons treaties and continues to escalate its war against Russia in Ukraine, we are closer to nuclear annihilation than ever before.

This conclusion is shared by many esteemed thinkers such as the late Daniel Ellsberg who died  on June 16, 2023 and whose 2017 book The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner, makes clear that nuclear war, waged intentionally or by mistake or accident, is very possible. In the months before he died, he warned that this is now especially true with the situation in Ukraine and the U.S. provocations against China.

The Grayzone’s Max Blumenthal recently addressed the UN Security Council on the danger of U.S. actions in Ukraine and asked:

Will we see another Douma deception, but this time in Zaporizhzhia?

Why are we doing this? Why are we tempting nuclear annihilation by flooding Ukraine with advanced weapons and sabotaging negotiations at every turn?

Finian Cunningham has just raised the specter of a thermonuclear catastrophe initiated by a U.S./Ukrainian false flag attack on the Zaporozhye Nuclear Power Plant.

So my article was in no way unusual, except for my concentration on the Trident submarines.

When, against my better judgment, I read some commentators’ responses to my piece at a few websites where my article was posted, I was taken aback when I read the following [all emphases are mine]:

“Like many other boomers, Edward J Curtin Jr is caught up in ‘nuclear terror’ … whereas on 4chan you see that a large portion of the young generation has come to accept the massive evidence that Hiroshima & Nagasaki were chemically firebombed like Tokyo, and ‘nuclear weapons’ most likely do not exist at all. The 10 alleged ‘nuclear powers’ have had reasons to hoax together, just like the global collusion on ‘covid’ & ‘vaccines’.

So, the point is? Subs with nukes have been cruising around the world’s oceans for over 60 years, back to the time when they tried to scare us with the Cuban missile crisis. I was on a fast attack sub during the Vietnam war, friend of mine got boomer duty, which is what they call the ones that carry the missiles. They’re there for show, they aren’t going to use them. Yes, they should be banned internationally, just in case. But as with the Nuremberg trials and principles, that’s not nearly enough. We’re going to need to create our own New World Order

This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper

        I vote for the bang!

The nuke is exaggerated. Reality is that too many will survive a nuclear WWIII.

There will still be too many useless eaters and psychos left in the underground bunkers no matter how many nukes we drop. Like Chernobyl it will only develop to paradises for animals, natives and homeless on food stamps, while we the exceptionals will suffer from an underground life for 50 years without seeing natural light .

A global virus and for double insurance a coupled vaxx, will be a much more effective tool to clean the filth and double shareholders profit..

Dear Ed the sea monsters about as real as nukes.

Another one of the “elites” hoaxes.”

To hear that there are no nuclear weapons and never were; to learn that some in their embrace of nihilism hope for a nuclear holocaust; to read that nuclear weapons are never going to be used because they only exist for show – well, this at least confirmed my suspicion that many who comment on articles are either bonkers or trolls or both.  

Some probably have nothing better to do than inform writers how wrong they are.  It frightened me.  It made me wonder how many of the millions of silent ones think similarly or have come to embrace hopelessness as a way of life – the feeling that they have no power because that has been drilled into them from birth.  I have long thought that cultural normality can be understood as the use of one’s freedom to create a prison, a cell in which one can convince oneself that one is safe because the authorities have established a sacred umbrella to protect one from an apocalyptic hard rain that they never think is going to fall.

The Pew Research Center recently surveyed the American public on their sixteen greatest fears.  Nuclear war was not one them. 

It was as if nuclear weapons did not exist, as if they have been buried in the cellar of public awareness.  As if Mad Magazine’s  Alfred E. Newman’s motto was the national motto: “What? Me worry?”  No doubt more Americans are aware of the gross public spectacle of Joey Chestnut stuffing his mouth with sixty-five hot dogs in ten minutes than they are of the Biden administration’s insane escalation toward nuclear war in Ukraine.  We live in Guy Debord’s “Society of the Spectacle.”

Although he was writing years ago, Ronald Laing’s words sound ironically prescient today after so many years of endless propaganda, the destruction of human experience resulting in destructive behavior, and the relentless diminishment of human beings to the status of machines:

At this moment in history, we are all caught in the hell of frenetic passivity. We find ourselves threatened by extermination that will be reciprocal, that no one wishes, that everyone fears, that may just happen to us ‘because’ no one knows how to stop it. There is one possibility of doing so if we can understand the structure of this alienation of ourselves from our experience, our experience from our deeds, our deeds from human authorship. Everyone will be carrying out orders. Where do they come from? Always from elsewhere. Is it still possible to reconstitute our destiny out of the hellish and inhuman fatality?

That is the key question now that more than fifty years have elapsed since Laing penned those words in his now classic book, The Politics of Experience(isbn.nu).  He said then, which is exponentially truer today, that “machines are already becoming better at communicating with each other than human beings with each other.”  Talking about deep things has become passé for so many.

If we don’t start worrying and unlove the machines, we are doomed sooner or later.  Sooner is probable.  Nuclear weapons are very real.  They are poised and ready to fly. 

If we continue to live in denial of the madness of those who provoke their use while calmly promoting first-strike policies as the U.S. government does, we are worse than fools.  We are suicidal.

As Daniel Ellsberg told us, “Don’t wait ‘till the bombs are actually falling.”  That will be too late.  There is no doubt that before a nuclear war can happen, we must go insane, normally so.

Let’s make the few protest voices in the wilderness the cries of hundreds of millions:

End nuclear weapons now before they end us.

Stop escalating the war in Ukraine now.

Make peace with Russia and China now.

“There is such a thing as being too late,” Martin Luther King, Jr. told us on April 4, 1967, one year to the day before he was assassinated in a U.S. government plot.

“We still have a choice today: nonviolent coexistence or violent coannihilation.”

*

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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). 

Featured image is from The Unz Review

---

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

by Michel Chossudovsky

Available to order from Global Research! 

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

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

Reviews

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

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

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

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***

First published on August 11, 2022

 

President Harry S. Truman’s decision to drop atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki set the groundwork for an era of U.S. global hegemony and enriched corporations like General Electric, DuPont, Union Carbide, Bechtel and Westinghouse which made hundreds of billions of dollars developing generation after generation of “first-strike” nuclear weapons.

U.S. leaders, intent on provoking wars with China and/or Russia, appear willing to use these weapons again—if we don’t stop them.

The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, 78 years ago, marked the crucial turning point in the history of the 20^th century. By the end of World War II, Europe, the Soviet Union and the Japanese Empire lay in ruins, and the United States was in a position of unprecedented power with sole possession of the Bomb.

Unfortunately, the U.S. used this power to launch the Cold War against the Soviet Union, and initiated a nuclear build-up that has impoverished the entire world and brought us to the brink of nuclear oblivion. The question remains: Why did the U.S. government decide to initiate the Cold War with the atomic bombings instead of pursuing a course of diplomacy and negotiated settlement?

There is broad consensus among serious historians that the atomic bombings were not necessary to end the war with Japan. By 1945 Japan was a destroyed and starving nation desperately seeking a negotiated surrender and the Soviet Union was preparing to enter the Pacific war in early August, eliminating the need for an invasion of the Japanese mainland. For the Truman administration, the use of the Bomb served two purposes: a demonstration of the terrible power of the split atom to be held against the entire world, and a means to deny the Soviet Union a major role in the post-war settlement.

On August 6 at 8:15 a.m. (August 5, 7:15 p.m. EDT), Hiroshima was annihilated in a flash by a single uranium bomb.

Three days later, on August 9, and one day after the Soviets entered the Pacific war, Nagasaki was likewise eradicated by a plutonium bomb.

More than 200,000 Japanese civilians and Korean laborers were slaughtered unnecessarily to expedite the promotion of U.S. foreign policy throughout the world.

But to truly understand the decision to use the Bomb and initiate the Cold War, it is crucial to understand who benefited the most.

The big winners were the claque of corporations which stood to “make a killing” if the U.S. were to initiate a massive nuclear build-up and launch a Cold War. Corporations led by General Electric, DuPont, Union Carbide, Bechtel and Westinghouse made hundreds of billions of dollars developing generation after generation of “first-strike” nuclear weapons and “conventional” weapons.

The entire spectrum of Corporate America applauded the government policy of using military force and nuclear threats to compel a dependable supply of cheap labor, cheap natural resources and markets, primarily from impoverished Southern Hemisphere nations.

Pantex production technicians prepare B61s for surveillance tests. The B61 nuclear bomb is the primary thermonuclear weapon in the U.S. Enduring Stockpile. Pantex is one of six production facilities in the National Nuclear Security Administration’s “Nuclear Security Enterprise.” Corporations like Pantex have made a killing from the nuclear arms race triggered by the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. [Source: nukewatch.org]

In 1945, the U.S. launched a first strike with atomic weapons against Hiroshima and Nagasaki to consolidate and advance its unprecedented position of economic, political and military power.

Today, the U.S. remains resolutely prepared to do precisely the same!

Its strategy has been and continues to be to threaten use of nuclear weapons to advance U.S. interests and, if deemed necessary, to launch a first strike. In the words of the Joint Chiefs of Staff rebuttal to Jimmy Carter’s 1977 proposal to reduce the U.S. nuclear arsenal to 200 warheads,

“U.S. nuclear strategy maintains military strength sufficient… to provide a war-fighting capability to respond to a wide range of conflict in order to control escalation and terminate the war on terms acceptable to the United States.” ^[1]

And, in the 1977 Nuclear Posture Review, submitted on Jaunary 14, 1977, outgoing Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld wrote:

“The most ambitious (damage limiting) strategy dictates a first strike capability against an enemy’s strategic offensive forces which seeks to destroy as much of his megatonnage as possible before it can be brought into play. An enemy’s residual retaliation, assumed to be directed against urban-industrial targets, would be blunted still further by a combination of active & passive defenses, including ASW (anti-sub), ABMs, anti-bomber defenses, civil defense, stockpiles of food & other essentials, and even the dispersal & hardening of essential industry.”^[2]

Following Hiroshima and Nagasaki, U.S. nuclear policy continued to be first strike, at least up to the signing of the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) and the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Force (INF) treaties which, for the first time, actually raised the threshold for the use of nuclear weapons. The ABM and INF treaties were, arguably, the most important arms control treaties because they both raised the threshold to nuclear war and, at that time, marked the beginning of a tentative retreat from a first-strike strategy. It is no coincidence that both of these nuclear risk-reducing treaties have been abrogated by the U.S. in its pursuit of global hegemony in the face of a rapidly emerging multi-polar world.

Source: rferl.org

Analysts like Arjun Makhijani, Daniel Ellsberg, and Michio Kaku have pointed out that the U.S. government has threatened to use nuclear weapons dozens of times since Nagasaki, usually against Third World nations exercising their rights to self-determination. They argue that, from the beginning, the central function of U.S. nuclear weapons has been as a primary foreign policy instrument, and not for deterrence.

Ellsberg explains:

“Again and again, generally in secret from the American public, nuclear weapons have been used: …in the precise way that a gun is used when you point it at someone’s head in a direct confrontation, whether or not the trigger is pulled.”^[3]

Source: berkeleyside.org

Why Hiroshima and Nagasaki Matter Today

Although the number of nuclear weapons has been reduced to about 13,000, today’s weapons are vastly more accurate, sophisticated and usable. Scientists estimate that even a tiny fraction of these weapons, as few as a hundred, if detonated against cities would result in a global nuclear winter and countless deaths.^[4]

Currently, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists’ Doomsday Clock is set to 100 seconds to midnight, the closest ever. This is in part due to the existential threat posed by climate change, but also to the current radically lowered threshold to nuclear war posed by a range of factors including the U.S.-Russia proxy war in Ukraine, rapidly deteriorating U.S.-China relations, the emergence of a multi-polar global economy rapidly replacing U.S. hegemony, the end of the era of plentiful and cheap fossil fuels and other critical resources, and the absence of the ABM and INF treaties. In the words of U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres, speaking during opening ceremonies of the 2022 NPT Review Conference, “Today, humanity is just one misunderstanding, one miscalculation away from nuclear annihilation.”^[5]

Nuclear war is more likely because of military interventions caused by increased regional resource wars and conflicts such as the current conflict in Ukraine. As resources dwindle, we can expect to see more and more regional conflicts, any one of which can quickly devolve into nuclear war. With the two most important nuclear weapons treaties gone, and the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT), currently under review, there is little to prevent a regional conflict from “going nuclear.”

Absence of the ABM or INF treaties, and NATO expansion up to Russia’s borders leaves U.S./NATO and Russia face to face, each side with nuclear weapons poised to launch on warning. If either side felt threatened enough to launch a nuclear missile, the warning time would be about five minutes. Russia considers this situation to be existential to its survival and has made this “Red Line” clear for the past 30 years, including under Yeltsin.

The sanctions imposed on Russia by the U.S. and NATO since February 24, 2022, were intended to quickly collapse the Russian economy and isolate Russia from the rest of the world. The results have had a spectacular opposite effect. While the value of the ruble has dramatically strengthened, Russia has reached out to nations like China, India, Iran and others to establish new trade agreements and alternative payment arrangements.

Meanwhile, the European Union is suffering economic blowback from the sanctions, with rising inflation and the prospect of a freezing winter without affordable fuel. The inexorable emergence of a multi-polar world to replace U.S. hegemony has been accelerated by the sanctions. It is exceedingly unlikely that the U.S. will willingly accept this change in the global status quo, a likelihood that portends future clashes.

Global climate change adds to the political instability and, itself, lowers the threshold to nuclear war. Scientists warn that, unless radical reductions in greenhouse gas emissions occur within the next decade, the consequences are catastrophic. We already see millions of climate refugees crossing political borders to escape the changing climate.

It seems like every day there is a new flood, drought, hurricane or other “thousand-year” event. With adversarial nations like India and Pakistan each possessing hundreds of nukes, and Israel possessing hundreds of nuclear weapons and a sophisticated delivery system with which to threaten its neighbors and even Moscow, the slightest incident could trigger a nuclear attack. (Jonathan Pollard was convicted of espionage and imprisoned for providing Israel with top-secret targeting information about the Soviet Union.)

Finally, political and economic relations between the U.S. and the People’s Republic of China are rapidly deteriorating. After years of hostility toward China from Obama’s “pivot to Asia” to the March 18, 2021 summit that ended in a tense confrontation, to the recent visit to Taiwan by Nancy Pelosi, the U.S. has steadily ratcheted up its hostility toward China.

An August 3 editorial in the Global Times underlines the gravity of the situation: “China’s countermeasures will not be one-off but a combination of long-term, resolute and steadily advancing actions.”^[6] 

Immediately following Pelosi’s controversial visit, China responded by announcing the establishment of six large exclusion zones around Taiwan starting on Thursday, and lasting for four days. In an unprecedented move, three of the six zones penetrate Taiwan’s 12-mile limit. As the Global Times editorial notes, this will be the first of undoubtedly many responses to Pelosi’s visit by China. This escalating clash of economic titans could easily lead to another nuclear flashpoint.

Source: tippinsights.com

Challenges for the Movement

The challenge for the peace, justice and environmental movements is to quickly organize a broad political base capable of challenging the presently prevailing corporate power structure. Their nearly absolute corporate control over the media, including public broadcasting, complicates our already difficult task, a task made even more difficult by the unprecedented corporate capture of both political parties.

To educate and mobilize the public we must adopt strategies that reflect the current political and technical realities, increasingly emphasizing the inter-connectedness of issues and the importance of networking.

Protests such as this one in New York City, on August 2, need to continue. The man in the center holding the sign, with blue shirt and blue hat, is a Hibakusha, a survivor of the U.S. atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He was nine months old at that time. [Source: Michaela Czerkies/Brooklyn For Peace]

The key to preventing the use of nuclear weapons—an act which will inevitably have calamitous consequences for the entire world—lies in the ability of the anti-nuclear, anti-war, social justice and environmental movements to understand that their issues are inextricably linked. The best strategy for abolishing nuclear weapons is to broaden and strengthen the people’s movement to challenge all aspects of the corporate imperial state.

In Dialectics of War, Martin Shaw writes,

“By the time nuclear war is even likely, war-resistance may be largely beside the point. The resistance to nuclear war has to be successful in the period of general war-preparation. The key question is the relationship between militarism and antimilitarism, and the wider social struggles of the society in which nuclear war is prepared.”^[7]

Each anniversary of the atomic bombings provides us a unique opportunity to study and reflect on the horrors of possible nuclear war and the massive destruction already wrought by pursuing nuclear madness.

The Hibakusha (living survivors of Hiroshima/Nagasaki) remind us that any use of nuclear weapons cannot be limited and will not be survivable. Their message is especially urgent as the world faces the “unparalleled catastrophe” prophesized by Albert Einstein at the dawn of the Nuclear Age.

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John Steinbach, activist and author, has written extensively on environmental, economics, energy, social justice and nuclear energy issues. His works include the map and database Radiation Hazards USAco-authored with his late wife Louise Franklin-Ramirez. Steinbach’s 2002 article in CovertAction Quarterly (CAQ), “Palestine in the Crosshairs: U.S. Policy and the Struggle for Nationhood,” received a 2004 Project Censored award. John lives and works in Prince William County, Virginia. He is active in several peace and justice organizations and was the recipient of the 2007 Prince William Human Rights Award. John can be reached at [email protected].

Notes

1. Michio Kaku and Daniel Axelrod, To Win A Nuclear War: the Pentagon’s Secret War Plans(Boston: South End Press, 1987), p. 184. 

2. Robert Aldridge, The Counterforce Syndrome: A Guide to U.S. Nuclear Weapons and Strategic Doctrine (Washington, D.C.: Transnational Institute, 1978), p. 9. 
3. Daniel Ellsberg, “A Call to Mutiny,” Protest and Survive, E.P. Thompson and Dan Smith, Eds. (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1981), p. 1. 
4. https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/2013EF000205. 
5. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/aug/02/world-one-miscalculation-away-from-nuclear-annihilation-un-chief-says 
6. https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202208/1272069.shtml 

7. Martin Shaw, Dialectics of War: An Essay in the Social Theory of Total War and Peace(London: Pluto Press, 1988), p. 102. 

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This article was first published on August 7, 2011.

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Author’s Note and Update

Of relevance to the ongoing crisis in Ukraine.

Is the Biden Administration committed to the use of nuclear weapons as an instrument of peace? The cost of America’s “peace-making” nuclear weapons program is of the order of 1.3 trillion dollars. 

The focus of US military doctrine since the Bush administration has been on the development of so-called “more usable nuclear weapons”.

George W. Bush’s 2001 Nuclear Posture Review, which was adopted by the US Senate in late 2002. envisaged the development of “a generation of more useable nuclear weapons.” namely tactical nuclear weapons (B61-11 mini-nukes) with an explosive capacity between one third and 6 times times a Hiroshima bomb.

The term “more usable” emanates from the debate surrounding the 2001 NPR, which justified the use of tactical nuclear weapons in the conventional war theater on the grounds that tactical nuclear weapons, namely bunker buster bombs with a nuclear warhead are, according to scientific opinion on contract to the Pentagon “harmless to the surrounding population because the explosion is underground.”

Michel Chossudovsky,  Hiroshima Day, August 6, 2023

***

Video Produced by James Corbett. The Privatization of Nuclear War, June 2015

***

The text below is an excerpt from Michel Chossudovsky’s Towards a World War Three Scenario, The Dangers of Nuclear War. first published in 2011. 

Towards a World War III Scenario: The Privatization of Nuclear War

Michel Chossudovsky

August 7, 2011.

At no point since the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima on August 6th, 1945, has humanity been closer to the unthinkable – a nuclear holocaust which could potentially spread in terms of radioactive fallout over a large part of the Middle East.

All the safeguards of the Cold War era, which categorized the nuclear bomb as “a weapon of last resort”, have been scrapped. “Offensive” military actions using nuclear warheads are now described as acts of “self-defense”.

The casualties from the direct effects of blast, radioactivity, and fires resulting from the massive use of nuclear weapons by the superpowers [of the Cold War era] would be so catastrophic that we avoided such a tragedy for the first four decades after the invention of nuclear weapons.1

During the Cold War, the doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) prevailed, namely that the use of nuclear weapons against the Soviet Union would result in “the destruction of both the attacker and the defender”. In the post Cold war era, US nuclear doctrine was redefined.

The dangers of nuclear weapons have been obfuscated. Tactical weapons have been upheld as distinct, in terms of their impact, from the strategic thermonuclear bombs of the Cold War era. Tactical nuclear weapons are identical to the strategic nuclear bombs. The only thing that differentiates these two categories of nuclear bombs are:

1) their delivery system;
2) their explosive yield (measured in mass of trinitrotoluene (TNT), in kilotons or megatons.

The tactical nuclear weapon or low yield mini-nuke is described as a small nuclear bomb, delivered in the same way as the earth penetrating bunker buster bombs.

While the technology is fundamentally different, tactical nuclear weapons, in terms of in-theater delivery systems are comparable to the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945.

The Pentagon’s 2001 Nuclear Posture Review envisaged so-called “contingency plans” for an offensive “first strike use” of nuclear weapons, not only against “axis of evil” countries (including Iran and North Korea) but also against Russia and China.2

The adoption of the NPR by the US Congress in late 2002 provided a green light for carrying out the Pentagon’s pre-emptive nuclear war doctrine, both in terms of military planning as well as defense procurement and production. Congress not only rolled back its prohibition on low yield nuclear weapons, it also provided funding “to pursue work on so-called mini-nukes”. The financing was allocated to bunker buster (earth penetrator) tactical nuclear weapons as well as to the development of new nuclear weapons.3

Hiroshima Day 2003: Secret Meeting at Strategic Command Headquarters

On August 6, 2003, on Hiroshima Day, [twenty years ago] commemorating when the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima (August 6 1945), a secret meeting was held behind closed doors at Strategic Command Headquarters at the Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska.

Senior executives from the nuclear industry and the military industrial complex were in attendance. This mingling of defense contractors, scientists and policy-makers was not intended to commemorate Hiroshima. The meeting was intended to set the stage for the development of a new generation of “smaller”, “safer” and “more usable” nuclear weapons, to be used in the “in-theater nuclear wars” of the 21st Century.

In a cruel irony, the participants to this secret meeting, which excluded members of Congress, arrived on the anniversary of the Hiroshima bombing and departed on the anniversary of the attack on Nagasaki.

More than 150 military contractors, scientists from the weapons labs, and other government officials gathered at the headquarters of the US Strategic Command in Omaha, Nebraska to plot and plan for the possibility of “full-scale nuclear war”, calling for the production of a new generation of nuclear weapons – more “usable” so-called “mini-nukes” and earth penetrating “bunker busters” armed with atomic warheads.4

According to a leaked draft of the agenda, the secret meeting included discussions on “mini-nukes” and “bunker-buster” bombs with nuclear war heads “for possible use against rogue states”:

We need to change our nuclear strategy from the Cold War to one that can deal with emerging threats… The meeting will give some thought to how we guarantee the efficacy of the (nuclear) stockpile.5

The Privatization of Nuclear War: US Military Contractors Set the Stage
.

The post 9/11 nuclear weapons doctrine was in the making, with America’s major defense contractors directly involved in the decision-making process.

The Hiroshima Day 2003 meetings had set the stage for the “privatization of nuclear war”. Corporations not only reap multibillion-dollar profits from the production of nuclear bombs, they also have a direct voice in setting the agenda regarding the use and deployment of nuclear weapons.

The nuclear weapons industry, which includes the production of nuclear devices as well as the missile delivery systems, etc., is controlled by a handful of defense contractors with Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics, Northrop Grunman, Raytheon and Boeing in the lead.

It is worth noting that barely a week prior to the historic August 6, 2003 meeting, the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) disbanded its advisory committee which provided an “independent oversight” on the US nuclear arsenal, including the testing and/or use of new nuclear devices.6 

The above text is an excerpt from Michel Chossudovsky’s Towards a World War Three Scenario, The Dangers of Nuclear War.

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DETAILED TABLE OF CONTENTS

PREFACE

A New War Theater in North Africa
Operation Odyssey Dawn
Nuclear Weapons against Libya? How Real is the Threat?
America’s Long War: The Global Military Agenda
How to Reverse the Tide of War
World War III Scenario
Acknowledgments

CHAPTER I: INTRODUCTION

The Cult of Killing and Destruction
America’s Mini-nukes
War and the Economic Crisis
Real versus Fake Crises

CHAPTER II: THE DANGERS OF NUCLEAR WAR

Hiroshima Day 2003: Secret Meeting at Strategic Command Headquarters
The Privatization of Nuclear War: US Military Contractors Set the Stage
9/11 Military Doctrine: Nuclear Weapons and the “Global War on Terrorism”
Al Qaeda: “Upcoming Nuclear Power”
Obama’s Nuclear Doctrine: The 2010 Nuclear Posture Review
Post 9/11 Nuclear Doctrine
“Defensive” and “Offensive” Actions
“Integration” of Nuclear and Conventional Weapons Plans
Theater Nuclear Operations (TNO)
Planned Aerial Attacks on Iran
Global Warfare: The Role of US Strategic Command (USSTRATCOM)
Nuclear Weapons Deployment Authorization
Israel’s Stockpiling of Conventional and Nuclear Weapons
The Role of Western Europe
Germany: De Facto Nuclear Power
Pre-emptive Nuclear War: NATO’s 2010 Strategic Concept
The World is at a Critical Crossroads

CHAPTER III: AMERICA’S HOLY CRUSADE AND THE BATTLE FOR OIL

America’s Crusade in Central Asia and the Middle East
“Homegrown Terrorists”
The American Inquisition
Washington’s Extrajudicial Assassination Program
The Battle for Oil
The Oil Lies in Muslim Lands
Globalization and the Conquest of the World’s Energy Resources

CHAPTER IV: PREPARING FOR WORLD WAR THREE

Media Disinformation
A “Pre-emptive” Aerial Attack Directed Against Iran would Lead to Escalation
Global Warfare
US “Military Aid”
The Timetable of Military Stockpiling and Deployment
World War III Scenario
The United Nations Security Council
The American Inquisition: Building a Political Consensus for War

CHAPTER V: TARGETING IRAN WITH NUCLEAR WEAPONS

Building a Pretext for a Pre-emptive Nuclear Attack
“Theater Iran Near Term”
The Military Road Map: “First Iraq, then Iran”
Simulated Scenarios of a Global War: The Vigilant Shield 07 War Games
The Role of Israel
Cheney: “Israel Might Do it Without Being Asked”
US Israel Military Coordination
Tactical Nuclear Weapons directed against Iran
Radioactive Fallout
“The Mother of All Bombs” (MOAB) Slated to be Used Against Iran
Extensive Destruction of Iran’s Infrastructure
State of the Art Weaponry: “War Made Possible Through New Technologies”
Electromagnetic Weapons
Iran’s Military Capabilities: Medium and Long Range Missiles
Iran’s Ground Forces
US Military and Allied Facilities Surrounding Iran

CHAPTER VI: REVERSING THE TIDE OF WAR

Revealing the Lie
The Existing Anti-War Movement
Manufacturing Dissent
Jus ad Bellum: 9/11 and the Invasions of Yugoslavia and Afghanistan
Fake Antiwar Activism: Heralding Iran as a Nuclear Threat
The Road Ahead
The Antiwar Movement within the State Structure and the Military
Abandon the Battlefield: Refuse to Fight
The Broader Peace Process
What has to be Achieved

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First published by GR on August 8, 2010

“We have discovered the most terrible bomb in the history of the world. It may be the fire destruction prophesied in the Euphrates Valley Era, after Noah and his fabulous Ark…. This weapon is to be used against Japan … [We] will use it so that military objectives and soldiers and sailors are the target and not women and children. Even if the Japs are savages, ruthless, merciless and fanatic, we as the leader of the world for the common welfare cannot drop that terrible bomb on the old capital or the new. …  The target will be a purely military one… It seems to be the most terrible thing ever discovered, but it can be made the most useful.” (Harry S. Truman (1884-1972), 33rd U.S. President, (Diary, July 25, 1945) 

“The World will note that the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima a military base. That was because we wished in this first attack to avoid, insofar  as possible, the killing of civilians.” (Harry S. Truman (1884-1972), 33rd U.S. President, (radio speech to the Nation, August 9, 1945) 

“.. In [July] 1945… Secretary of War [Henry L.] Stimson, visiting my headquarters in Germany, informed me that our government was preparing to drop an atomic bomb on Japan. I was one of those who felt that there were a number of cogent reasons to question the wisdom of such an act. …The Secretary, upon giving me the news of the successful bomb test in New Mexico, and of the plan for using it, asked for my reaction, apparently expecting a vigorous assent. …During his recitation of the relevant facts, I had been conscious of a feeling of depression and so I voiced to him my grave misgivings, first on the basis of my belief that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary, and secondly because I thought that our country should avoid shocking world opinion by the use of a weapon whose employment was, I thought, no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives.

It was my belief that Japan was, at that very moment, seeking some way to surrender with a minimum loss of ‘face’. The Secretary was deeply perturbed by my attitude.” (General Dwight Eisenhower, Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces in Europe and 34th U.S. President from 1952 to 1960, (Mandate For Change, p. 380) 

“Mechanized civilization has just reached the ultimate stage of barbarism. In a near future, we will have to choose between mass suicide and intelligent use of scientific conquests […] This can no longer be simply a prayer; it must become an order which goes upward from the peoples to the governments, an order to make a definitive choice between hell and reason.” (Albert Camus (1913-1960), French philosopher and author, August 8, 1945)

 “As American Christians, we are deeply penitent for the irresponsible use already made of the atomic bomb. We are agreed that, whatever be one’s judgment of the war in principle, the surprise bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are morally indefensible.”(The American Federal Council of Churches‘ Report on Atomic Warfare and the Christian Faith, 1946)

“It is my opinion that the use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. ” – “The lethal possibilities of atomic warfare in the future are frightening. My own feeling was that in being the first to use it, we had adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages.” (William Leahy, Chief of Staff to Presidents Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry S. Truman (“I Was There”, p. 441)

“Completely in charge in their marble homes and granite banks from which they rob the people of the world under the pretence of bringing them culture, Watch out, for … they’ll send you out to protect their gold in wars whose weapons, rapidly developed by servile scientists, will become more and more deadly until they can with a flick of the finger tear a million of you to pieces.”(Jean Paul Marat (1743-1793), Swiss-born scientist and physician and actor in the French Revolution)

***

When U.S. President Harry S. Truman decided on his own to use the atom bomb, a barbarous weapon of mass destruction, against the Japanese civilian populations of the cities of Hiroshima and of Nagasaki on August 6 and on August 9, 1945, the United States sided officially on the wrong side of history. General Dwight Eisenhower, Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces in Europe and 34th U.S. President from 1952 to 1960, said it in so many words: “…the Japanese were ready to surrender and it wasn’t necessary to hit them with that awful thing.”  (Newsweek, November 11, 1963). Between 90,000 and 120,000 people died in Hiroshima and between 60,000 and 80,000 died in Nagasaki, for a grand total of between 150,000 and 200,000 most cruel deaths.

It seems that military man Eisenhower was more ethical than Freemason small-town politician Harry S. Truman regarding the fateful decision.

In being the first country to use nuclear weapons against civilian populations, the United States was then in direct violation of internationally accepted principles of war with respect to the wholesale and indiscriminate destruction of populations. Thus, August 1945 is a most dangerous and ominous precedent that marked a new dismal beginning in the history of humanity, a big moral step backward.

In future generations, it most certainly will be considered that the use of the atom bomb against the Japanese civilian populations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was a historic crime against humanity that will stain the reputation of the United States for centuries to come. It can also be said that President Harry S. Truman, besides lying to the American people about the whole sordid affair (see official quotes above), has left behind him a terrible moral legacy of incalculable consequences to future generations of Americans.

Many self-serving reasons have been advanced for justifying Truman’s decision, such as the objective of saving the lives of American soldiers by shortening the war in the Pacific and avoiding a military invasion of Japan with a quick Japanese surrender. That surrender came on August 15, 1945 and it was made official on September 2 with the signing of the Japanese Instrument of Surrender, nearly one month after the bombing of the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Nazi Germany had capitulated on May 8, 1945 and World War II was already over in Europe. There was also the diplomatic fear that the Soviet Red Army could have invaded Japan, as they had done in Berlin, thus depriving the United States of a hard fought clear-cut victory against Japan.

But by the end of July 1945, according to military experts, the Japanese military apparatus had de facto been defeated. It is also true that the militarist Japanese Supreme Council for the Direction of the War was stalling with the aim of getting better capitulation terms hoping for a negotiated settlement, especially regarding the future role of their Emperor Hirohito as formal head of state.

In Europe, the allies had caused a recalcitrant Nazi Germany to accept an unconditional surrender and there were other military means to force the Japanese government to surrender. The convenient pretext of rushing a surrender carries no weight compared to the enormity of using the nuclear weapon on two civilian targets. And even if President Truman was anxious to demonstrate the power of the atom bomb and impress his Soviet friends—and possibly also assert himself as a political figure vis-à-vis previous President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who had died a few months earlier, on April 12, 1945—this could have been done while targeting remote Japanese military targets, not on targeting entire cities. It seems that there were no moral considerations in this most inhuman decision.

Since that fateful month of August 1945, humanity has embarked upon a disastrous nuclear arms race and is rushing toward oblivion with its eyes open and its mind closed.

Rodrigue Tremblay is professor emeritus of economics at the University of Montreal and can be reached at [email protected]. He is the author of the book “The Code for Global Ethics” at: www.TheCodeForGlobalEthics.com/

The book “The Code for Global Ethics, Ten Humanist Principles”, by Dr. Rodrigue Tremblay, prefaced by Dr. Paul Kurtz, has just been released by Prometheus Books.

Please visit the book site at: www.TheCodeForGlobalEthics.com/

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***

We bring to your attention this article, first published by Common Dreams on August 6, 2020, in commemoration of the 75th anniversary of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombing.

***

Seventy-five years ago, the United States waged the only nuclear war in history. Among the truths held self-evident by millions of Americans is the notion that the atomic destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki saved lives, both American and Japanese. The choice, Americans are told starting as school children and throughout their lives by largely uncritical media, was between nuclear war and an even bloodier protracted invasion of Japan, whose fanatical people would have fought to the death defending their homeland and their divine emperor.

As with so many other dark chapters in US history, the official narrative of the decision to unleash the most destructive weapon humanity has ever known upon an utterly defeated people is deeply flawed.

‘Anxious to Terminate’ 

The Japanese had in fact been trying to find a way to surrender with honor for months before the atomic bombs were dropped, and US leaders knew it. Japan could no longer defend itself from the ruthless, relentless American onslaught; years of ferocious firebombing had reduced most Japanese cities, including the capital Tokyo, to ruins. General Curtis “Bombs Away” LeMay, commander of strategic bombing, even complained that there was nothing left to bomb there but “garbage can targets.”

After years of war and privation, Japan’s people had had enough, and so had many of its leaders. The Allies, through a secret cryptanalysis project codenamed Magic, had intercepted and decoded secret transmissions from Shigenori Togo, the Japanese foreign minister, to Naotaki Sato, the ambassador in Moscow, stating a desire to end the war.

“His Majesty is extremely anxious to terminate the war as soon as possible,” Sato cabled on July 12. However, saving face was imperative to the Japanese, which meant retaining their sacred emperor. Unconditional surrender was, for the time being, out of the question.

In a secret memo dated June 28, Undersecretary of the Navy Ralph A. Bard wrote that “the Japanese government may be searching for some opportunity which they could use as a medium of surrender.” In a 1960 interview, Bard reiterated that “the Japanese were ready for peace and had already approached the Russians” about capitulating.

On July 26, the leaders of the US, Britain and China issued the Potsdam Declaration, demanding unconditional Japanese surrender and vowing “prompt and utter destruction”—the US had successfully tested the first atomic bomb in New Mexico 10 days earlier—if Japan refused. The declaration was originally written so that Emperor Hirohito would not be removed from the Chrysanthemum Throne, with Japan to be ruled as a constitutional monarchy after the war.

However, Secretary of State James Byrnes removed that language from the final declaration. It would be unconditional surrender or total annihilation.

President Harry S. Truman, who only learned about the Manhattan Project after being sworn in following Franklin D. Roosevelt’s death on April 12, approved a plan to drop two atomic bombs on Japan. Planners sought undamaged cities where military facilities were located near civilians, and the decision was made to detonate the bombs hundreds of meters in the air for maximum destructive effect.

Tokyo, which in early March suffered firebombing that killed more people than either of the atomic bombs, was off the table as a target. Kyoto was spared due to its cultural significance. Kyoto’s good fortune would mean the Nagasaki’s destruction. Hiroshima, Japan’s largest untouched target, would die first.

Widespread Opposition 

Seven of the eight five-star US generals and admirals in 1945 opposed using the atomic bomb against Japan. One of them, General Dwight D. Eisenhower, later said that “the Japanese were ready to surrender and it wasn’t necessary to hit them with that awful thing.”

“Japan was already defeated and dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary,” President Eisenhower wrote in 1954. “I thought our country should avoid shocking world opinion by the use of a weapon whose employment was no longer mandatory to save American lives. It was my belief that Japan was, at that very moment, seeking some way to surrender with a minimum loss of face.”

Despite so much high-level misgiving, the US did “hit them with that awful thing.” The idea of giving Japanese officials a live demonstration of an atomic bomb on a remote island, proposed by Strategic Bombing Survey Vice Chairman Paul Nitze and supported by Navy Secretary James Forrestal, was rejected. The US was already destroying multiple Japanese cities every week; it was believed that such a demonstration would likely not have moved the Japanese any more than the ongoing destruction of their actual cities.

Throughout the spring and summer of 1945, Japanese officials increasingly sought an honorable end to the war. Although they had no way of knowing that the US was planning to wage nuclear war against them, they knew that the defeat of Nazi Germany meant that a Soviet invasion, first of Manchuria and Korea and then of Japan itself, was now imminent.

“The Japanese could not fight a two-front war, and were more anti-communist than the Americans were,” Martin Sherwin, an historian awarded the Pulitzer Prize for co-authoring a biography of Manhattan Project leader Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer, said a recent webinar sponsored by over two dozen international peace organizations. “The idea of a Soviet occupation of Japan was their worst nightmare.”

Historian and professor Peter Kuznick, who with Oliver Stone co-authored the bestselling The Untold History of the United States, also spoke at the webinar, adding that “the Joint Chiefs of Staff repeatedly reported that if the USSR should enter the war then Japan would realize that defeat is inevitable.” Kuznick also noted that General George Marshall, the only five-star US officer to approve of using the atomic bomb, said that a Soviet invasion would likely lead to Japan’s swift surrender.

Truman knew this too. On the opening day of the Potsdam Conference, he had lunch with Joseph Stalin. Afterwards he wrote in his diary that the USSR “will be in the Jap war by August 15. Fini Japs when that occurs.”

Regardless, Truman pressed ahead with the plan to destroy Hiroshima and Nagasaki while attempting to convince himself that there was some humanity in the act.

“I have told Secretary of War Stimson to use [the A-bomb] so that military objectives… are the target, not women and children,” the president wrote in his diary on July 25.

“Even if the Japs are savages, ruthless, merciless and fanatic, we as the leader of the world for the common welfare cannot drop that terrible bomb on the old capital [Kyoto] or the new [Tokyo],” he added. “The target will be a purely military one.”

The First Nuclear War 

At 8:15 a.m. on August 6, 1945, a Boeing B-29 Superfortress dropped “Little Boy,” the first nuclear weapon ever used in war. It exploded above Hiroshima with the force of 16 kilotons of TNT, destroying everything and everyone within about a 1-mile (1.62 km) radius. The heat, blast wave and ensuing inferno killed as many as 90,000 people. Tens of thousands more were injured, many of them mortally. Tens of thousands more people perished from radiation over the following weeks, months and years.

Three days later, Nagasaki suffered a similar fate as “Fat Man,” the second and so far the last nuclear weapon used in war, obliterated Nagasaki in a 20-kiloton air burst. As many as 75,000 people died that day, with a similar number of people wounded and tens of thousands more dying later from radiation.

Despite Truman’s attempt at self-delusion, most of the people living in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 were women, children and old people, as most of the men were away fighting the war, or dead from it.

The same morning that Nagasaki was destroyed, Prime Minister Kintaro Suzuki addressed the Japanese cabinet, declaring that “under the present circumstances I have concluded that our only alternative is to accept the Potsdam Proclamation and terminate the war.”

Why Japan Really Surrendered 

Suzuki did not learn about Nagasaki until the afternoon of August 9. But he did know that the Soviet Union had declared war on Japan the previous day. This, Japanese officials and historians on both sides of the Pacific agree, precipitated Japan’s surrender more than the A-bombs, although it also slammed the door shut on attempts to negotiate a surrender via Moscow.

“The destruction of another city was just the destruction of another city,” said Sherwin. “It was the entry of the Soviets into the war that really threw the Japanese into a complete panic.” They knew that if they didn’t surrender soon to the US, they would lose not only their overseas empire, but also Hokkaido.

An exhibit at the National Museum of the US Navy in Washington, DC states that “the vast destruction wreaked by the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the loss of 135,000 people made little impact on the Japanese military. However, the Soviet invasion of Manchuria changed their minds.”

“The atomic bomb had nothing to do with the end of the war at all,” General LeMay stated flatly in September 1945.

“The use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan,” agreed Admiral William Leahy, Truman’s chief of staff. “The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender because of the effective sea blockade and the successful bombing with conventional weapons.”

It is probably too much to say the atomic bombings had nothing to do with ending the war. Hirohito, after all, spoke of “a new and most cruel bomb” that could “lead to the total extinction of human civilization,” in his surrender broadcast. It is also important to note that the decision to capitulate was not unanimous; in fact, a cabal of hard-line military officers attempted to stage a coup the day before the emperor’s announcement.

Target: Moscow 

Not only were Hiroshima and Nagasaki the last battles of World War II, they were also the first battles of the Cold War. American leaders knew very well that the Soviet Union would feature prominently in the postwar world order.

The US wanted to maximize its own position as the dominant world power, and what better way to do this than to show the Russians that the United States had the cold resolve necessary to unilaterally wage nuclear war, even when it enjoyed an atomic monopoly and dropping the bomb wasn’t even necessary?

Stimson acknowledged that some US officials saw nuclear weapons as “a diplomatic weapon,” and that “some of the men in charge of foreign policy were eager to carry the bomb as their ace-in-the-hole” and wanted “to browbeat the Russians with the bomb held rather ostentatiously on our hip.”

“I’ll certainly have a hammer on those boys,” Truman reportedly said, referring to the A-bomb and Soviet leaders.

According to Manhattan Project scientist Leo Szilard, Secretary Byrnes believed that “Russia might be more manageable if impressed by American military might, and that a demonstration of the bomb might impress Russia.”

But instead of “managing” Russia, some US officials admitted that waging nuclear war actually empowered it, encouraging Moscow to rush to develop its own nuclear arsenal, which it did in 1949.

‘A Nice, Round Figure’ 

As for the common claim that a US invasion of Japan would have cost a million lives, Kai Bird, who shared the Pulitzer Prize with Sherwin for their Oppenheimer biography, said it is simply not true.

“This figure was never given to Truman or bandied about by Stimson,” Bird told the webinar audience. “I asked [Stimson protégé] McGeorge Bundy about it, and he sheepishly admitted that he chose 1 million because it was a nice, round figure. He pulled it out of thin air.”

There is no doubt that an invasion of Japan would have been horrific for all involved, as demonstrated by the bloody battle for Okinawa, in which over 12,000 US invaders and six times that number of Japanese defenders died, along with as many as half of the island’s 300,000 civilians, many of whom committed mass suicide rather than fall under enemy occupation. However, the probability of Japan remaining in the war by the time the US was ready to invade was extremely low, especially given the Soviet Union’s declaration of war.

Plus, the claim that the United States cared anything about the lives of Japanese people, who were portrayed in wartime propaganda as sub-human barbarians, beggars belief. US bombs and bullets had killed over a million Japanese people by 1945, and back in the United States, Japanese Americans and Japanese nationals—who had been banned from even immigrating to the US since the 1920s—were still languishing in a network of concentration camps.

Representatives of the Empire of Japan stand aboard USS Missouri prior to signing of the Instrument of Surrender on September 2, 1945. (Photo: US National Archives/Army Signal Corps)

Being mere “dirty Japs” made it easier for the Americans to try out their ultimate weapon, in which so much time and treasure had been invested. The cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki would make perfect laboratories in which to test the atomic bomb, as some US officials later acknowledged.

“When we didn’t need to do it, and we knew we didn’t need to do it, and they knew that we didn’t need to do it, we used [the Japanese] as an experiment for two atomic bombs,” said General Carter Clarke, the intelligence officer in charge of intercepted Japanese cables.

Tough Luck 

Many of the very men who invented the A-bomb also had grave misgivings, even before it was used. These Manhattan Project scientists wrote what came to be known as the Franck Report in May 1945. It recommended a demonstration of the bomb to the Japanese and questioned whether using it would really bring Japan to its knees when massive conventional bombing had failed to do so.

“If no international agreement is concluded immediately after the first detonation, this will mean a flying start of an unlimited armaments race,” the report prophetically stated.

One notable participant in the events of August 6, 1945 had no regrets. Paul Tibbets flew the B-29 bomber, named Enola Gay after his mother, that let loose “Little Boy” over Hiroshima on that fateful morning. Asked at age 87 about doing it again, Tibbets, who died in 2007, said he “wouldn’t hesitate if  I had the choice.”

“I’d wipe ’em out,” he said. “You’re gonna kill innocent people at the same time, but we’ve never fought a damn war anywhere in the world where they didn’t kill innocent people. If the newspapers would just cut out the shit: ‘You’ve killed so many civilians.’ That’s their tough luck for being there.”

A False Choice 

Seventy-five years later, a slim majority of Americans still believe the nuclear war against Japan was justified. Millions of Americans believe the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were acts of “necessary evil,” while ignoring alternatives to the standard narrative that the only choice was between nuclear war and invading Japan.

What if the United States had clarified its unconditional surrender stance to assure that Hirohito would not be hanged? Or announced that he would be allowed to remain in a position of ceremonial leadership? After all, General Douglas MacArthur, the Supreme Allied Commander, would ultimately allow Hirohito to remain emperor, even if only as a figurehead.

“It is possible,” wrote Stimson in his memoir, “that an earlier exposition of American willingness to retain the emperor could have produced an earlier ending to the war.”

It is also possible, adds Sherwin, “that unconditional surrender would have been qualified earlier” if the atomic bomb wasn’t being developed and tested for use.

“Most historians know this, but most Americans regurgitate the official narrative,” Bird told the webinar audience.

The official US narrative blames the Soviet Union for starting the Cold War and the nuclear arms race, which on numerous occasions over the following decades brought the world within reach, and once to the brink, of thermonuclear annihilation. But it was the United States that fired the first fiery salvo, forcing the Soviets to scramble to develop their own deterrent and launching an arms race in which there are now thousands of nuclear warheads in the arsenals of a record number of countries, with the risk of nuclear armageddon as real as it has ever been.

Americans must admit that the nuclear war against Japan was one of the greatest atrocities in human history. For the first time ever, we humans now have the power to bring about our own extinction. There is absolutely nothing “necessary” about this evil.

“If we’d lost the war, we’d all have been tried as war criminals,” General LeMay remarked, according to Robert McNamara, who brought maximum efficiency to B-29 bombing during the war and maximum death and destruction to Vietnam as secretary of defense during the Kennedy and Johnson administrations.

He added: “What makes it immoral if you lose but not immoral if you win?”

From Common Dreams: Our work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License. Feel free to republish and share widely.

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Brett Wilkins is a San Francisco-based freelance author and editor-at-large for US news at Digital Journal. His work, which focuses on issues of war and peace and human rights, is archived at www.brettwilkins.com.

Featured image: In this handout picture released by the U.S. Army, a mushroom cloud billows about one hour after a nuclear bomb was detonated above Hiroshima, Japan on Aug. 6, 1945. (Source: U.S. Army via Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, HO)

Relevant article selected from the GR archive, first published on Washington Blog and Global Research in October 2012.

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Atomic Weapons Were Not Needed to End the War or Save Lives

Global Research Editor’s Note

Of  relevance to recent developments in Israel, we bring to the attention of our readers the following letter by Albert Einstein, et al, to the NYT published on December 4, 1948.

It is of utmost significance to reflect upon a historical process initiated at very outset of the State of Israel.

What is outlined in this letter depicting the atrocities committed against the people of Palestine in 1948 in the Village of Deir Yassin vividly describe what is currently ongoing, more than 75 years later in the State of Israel. 

The signatories of the 1948 letter were:

Isidore Abramowitz, Hannah Arendt, Abraham Brick, Rabbi Jessurun Cardozo, Albert Einstein, Herman Eisen, M.D., Hayim Fineman, M. Gallen, M.D., H.H. Harris, Zelig S. Harris, Sidney Hook, Fred Karush, Bruria Kaufman, Irma L. Lindheim, Nachman Maisel, Symour Melman, Myer D. Mendelson, M.D., Harry M. Orlinsky, Samuel Pitlick, Fritz Rohrlich, Louis P. Rocker, Ruth Sager, Itzhak Sankowsky, I.J. Schoenberg, Samuel Shuman, M. Znger, Irma Wolpe and Stefan Wolpe.

See below.

Michel Chossudovsky, August 5, 2023

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Letters to the Editor
New York Times

December 4, 1948

TO THE EDITORS OF THE NEW YORK TIMES:

Among the most disturbing political phenomena of our times is the emergence in the newly created state of Israel of the “Freedom Party” (Tnuat Haherut), a political party closely akin in its organization, methods, political philosophy and social appeal to the Nazi and Fascist parties.

It was formed out of the membership and following of the former Irgun Zvai Leumi, a terrorist, right-wing, chauvinist organization in Palestine.

The current visit of Menachem Begin, leader of this party, to the United States is obviously calculated to give the impression of American support for his party in the coming Israeli elections, and to cement political ties with conservative Zionist elements in the United States. Several Americans of national repute have lent their names to welcome his visit. It is inconceivable that those who oppose fascism throughout the world, if correctly informed as to Mr. Begin’s political record and perspectives, could add their names and support to the movement he represents.

Before irreparable damage is done by way of financial contributions, public manifestations in Begin’s behalf, and the creation in Palestine of the impression that a large segment of America supports Fascist elements in Israel, the American public must be informed as to the record and objectives of Mr. Begin and his movement.

The public avowals of Begin’s party are no guide whatever to its actual character. Today they speak of freedom, democracy and anti-imperialism, whereas until recently they openly preached the doctrine of the Fascist state. It is in its actions that the terrorist party betrays its real character; from its past actions we can judge what it may be expected to do in the future.

Attack on Arab Village

A shocking example was their behavior in the Arab village of Deir Yassin. This village, off the main roads and surrounded by Jewish lands, had taken no part in the war, and had even fought off Arab bands who wanted to use the village as their base.

On April 9 [supported THE NEW YORK TIMES), terrorist bands attacked this peaceful village, which was not a military objective in the fighting, killed most of its inhabitants,  240 men, women, and children – and kept a few of them alive to parade as captives through the streets of Jerusalem.

Most of the Jewish community was horrified at the deed, and the Jewish Agency sent a telegram of apology to King Abdullah of Trans-Jordan. But the terrorists, far from being ashamed of their act, were proud of this massacre, publicized it widely, and invited all the foreign correspondents present in the country to view the heaped corpses and the general havoc at Deir Yassin. The Deir Yassin incident exemplifies the character and actions of the Freedom Party.

Within the Jewish community they have preached an admixture of ultranationalism, religious mysticism, and racial superiority. Like other Fascist parties they have been used to break strikes, and have themselves pressed for the destruction of free trade unions. In their stead they have proposed corporate unions on the Italian Fascist model. During the last years of sporadic anti-British violence, the IZL and Stern groups inaugurated a reign of terror in the Palestine Jewish community. Teachers were beaten up for speaking against them, adults were shot for not letting their children join them. By gangster methods, beatings, window-smashing, and wide-spread robberies, the terrorists intimidated the population and exacted a heavy tribute.

The people of the Freedom Party have had no part in the constructive achievements in Palestine. They have reclaimed no land, built no settlements, and only detracted from the Jewish defense activity. Their much-publicized immigration endeavors were minute, and devoted mainly to bringing in Fascist compatriots.

Discrepancies Seen

The discrepancies between the bold claims now being made by Begin and his party, and their record of past performance in Palestine bear the imprint of no ordinary political party. This is the unmistakable stamp of a Fascist party for whom terrorism (against Jews, Arabs, and British alike), and misrepresentation are means, and a “Leader State” is the goal.

In the light of the foregoing considerations, it is imperative that the truth about Mr. Begin and his movement be made known in this country. It is all the more tragic that the top leadership of American Zionism has refused to campaign against Begin’s efforts, or even to expose to its own constituents the dangers to Israel from support to Begin.

The undersigned therefore take this means of publicly presenting a few salient facts concerning Begin and his party; and of urging all concerned not to support this latest manifestation of fascism.

ISIDORE ABRAMOWITZ
HANNAH ARENDT
ABRAHAM BRICK
RABBI JESSURUN CARDOZO
ALBERT EINSTEIN
HERMAN EISEN, M.D.
HAYIM FINEMAN
M. GALLEN, M.D.
H.H. HARRIS
ZELIG S. HARRIS
SIDNEY HOOK
FRED KARUSH
BRURIA KAUFMAN
IRMA L. LINDHEIM
NACHMAN MAISEL
SEYMOUR MELMAN
MYER D. MENDELSON
M.D., HARRY M. OSLINSKY
SAMUEL PITLICK
FRITZ ROHRLICH
LOUIS P. ROCKER
RUTH SAGIS
ITZHAK SANKOWSKY
I.J. SHOENBERG
SAMUEL SHUMAN
M. SINGER
IRMA WOLFE
STEFAN WOLF.

New York, Dec. 2, 1948

 

Dear Readers, Please forward this important article by Manlio Dinucci.

The World is at a dangerous crossroads.

US-NATO is preparing to wage nuclear war. 

First published on June 3, 2023

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The United States has begun a training programme for the Ukrainian Air Force in the use of F-16 fighters. Several European NATO countries participate in this programme: Denmark, Holland, Poland, Norway, Belgium, and Portugal. Other countries have offered to help with the training. The same countries will supply Ukraine with F-16 fighters. They are conventional dual-capable and nuclear fighters.

An F-16 aircraft was used in the B61-12 nuclear bomb test firing, which the US is already deploying in Italy, Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands. Probably, the B61-12 bombs are also supplied by the USA to Poland: Polish F-16 fighters have been participating in NATO nuclear attack exercises since 2014.

Vladimir Kozin – chief expert of the Moscow Political-Military Studies Centre – declares, in an interview on Grandangolo TV programme, that there is a deep suspicion based on precise facts, that US nuclear weapons have also been deployed in Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia, or could be rapidly sent to their territories and also to that of Poland.

These countries participate in the “Baltic air patrol“, close to Russian territory, with dual conventional and nuclear capability aircraft. In addition, US strategic bombers, certified to carry nuclear weapons, are engaged in “exercises” over the Baltic Sea and other areas adjacent to Russian territory,

After having unsuccessfully proposed negotiations to the USA and NATO to reduce the risk of a nuclear conflict in Europe, Moscow is deploying tactical nuclear weapons in Belarus in a position close to the US-NATO nuclear bases in Europe in agreement with Minsk.

To Grandangolo’s question:

“Do the tactical nuclear weapons deployed by Russia in Belarus have a range beyond Poland and therefore constitute a deterrent to US nuclear weapons deployed in Italy and other European countries?”,

Vladimir Kozin replies:

“Yes, Russian tactical nuclear weapons that will be deployed in Belarus and possibly in the Kaliningrad region and the Crimean Peninsula can achieve various military objectives in Poland, Italy and many other European NATO member countries.”

The US-NATO escalation against Russia brings Europe ever closer to the threshold of nuclear war. The political-media complex falls a curtain of silence on all this as not to alarm European public opinion and prevent it from reacting.

click screen / link to view Italian

https://www.byoblu.com/2023/06/02/allucraina-gli-f-16-da-attacco-nucleare-grandangolo-pangea/

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August 6 from 1 – 4 pm EDT Humanity for Peace (HumanityforPeace.net) will be holding a demonstration on the 78th anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima — along with the subsequent bombing of Nagasaki probably the most heinous crimes committed in human history.

Location: Dag Hammarskjöld Plaza, E 47th St, New York, NY 10017

Current list of speakers include:

Gerald Celente – Founder/Director of the Trends Research Institute and Publisher of the weekly Trends Journal magazine.

Mike ter Matt – Candidate for the Libertarian Party presidential nomination. 

Scott Ritter – Former U.S. Marine Corps intelligence officer. 

Garland Nixon – Veteran progressive radio and talk show host. 

Diane Sare – Independent candidate for U.S. Senate in New York 2024. 

Muhammad Salim Akhtar – National Director of the American Muslim Alliance and the American Muslim Task Force on Civil Rights and Elections. 

Jose Vega – Sare for Senate staffer and LaRouche activist/interventionist since 2014. 

Ahmadou Diallo – President and founder of the Guinean American League of Friends for Freedom. 

Rev. Dr. Terri L. Strong – Chairwoman of the Action and Global Concerns Committee for the National Church Women United Organization.  

Aaron Day – Former Chairman of the Free State Project; author of the book The Final Countdown: Crypto, Gold, Silver and the People’s Last Stand Against Tyranny by Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs).

Jude Elie – leader of the Haitian diaspora in the United States; President of the Haitian Salesians of Don Bosco Past Pupils Worldwide. 

Malcolm Burn – Grammy Award-winning record producer; host of the weekly “The Long Way Around” radio program heard on Radio Kingston, WKNY in Kingston, NY.

Demands are as follows:

1) The immediate ending of all funding and weapons to Ukraine.

2) Convene immediate unconditional peace talks.

3) The Dissolution of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO)

4) A new international security architecture must be created to end the division of the world into blocs, eliminating geopolitics. This new architecture must take into account the security concerns of every sovereign nation, large or small.

The demonstration will be livestreamed by the Schiller Institute at this link and by Humanity for Peace at this link.

Contact us at [email protected], follow us on X @4peacehumanity.

Below is the Mission Statement of the demonstration:

The danger of nuclear war has escalated to a point that no thoughtful person on the planet can ignore it any longer. Yet, in this atmosphere, there are still some who think there should be more weapons, more sanctions, and who think that a nuclear war can be won against Russia. It is very clear that those who have provoked the war, and continue to escalate it, do not care about the lives of the people of Ukraine or any other nation on the planet for that matter. This is NOT acceptable to those of us who care about the well-being of ALL of humanity — those who do not wish to see the human race wiped off the face of the earth.

We, therefore, call on the citizens of the world to come together and raise our voices against this madness. Humanity For Peace is building a unified coalition, above ideologies, to stop this unfolding escalation towards nuclear war. We refuse to let humanity perish at the hands of insanity.

August 6 will be the 78th anniversary of the unnecessary and genocidal nuclear bombing of Hiroshima by the United States, which was followed days later by the same crime against Nagasaki. Humanity For Peace is proud to announce that on this occasion, August 6, 2023, an international rally will be held to remind the world that nuclear war should never be fought and can never be won. Humanity is better than that, and we must reject the destiny of inevitable war as a morally repugnant and horribly cynical view.

The main rally will be held at the United Nations in New York City, NY, from 1-4pm, which will be live streamed over the internet. In solidarity with this, sister rallies will be held in other cities around the world. Please get in contact with us if you are interested in organizing another sister rally.

There are currently over 20 organizations sponsoring the event. If your organization would also like to sponsor the event, please contact us. More information, including the current speakers list, can be found at HumanityForPeace.net.

As President Kennedy said in his famous address to American University in 1963, war is not inevitable — but only if we work instead to create peace. The leadership in the United States and NATO is currently not working towards this goal, but rather are further escalating and inflaming the situation in Ukraine. For this reason, an international chorus of voices must be raised against this policy, and sound the call for peace!

Join us August 6 — we must make this sentiment the dominant voice in the world!

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When a globalist mafia cartel — or a garden-variety tyranny — wish to silence dissent, they like to make ‘examples’ of those who resist. Here in New Zealand, under the sway of PM Jacinda Ardern’s ‘single source of truth’, a few doctors who three years ago raised their voices against the government’s woefully destructive covid measures — measures that included severe lockdowns, ineffectual masking, anti-social distancing, and the vehement suppression of early treatment, so that the one-size-fits-all Covid 19 vaccine death jab could be introduced as our salvation — found that their practising certificates were suspended by the FSMB-directed Medical Council of New Zealand. I was unfortunately one of these, as I discovered when I went to renew my certificate in November 2021.

If any other doctors dared to uphold the principles of their profession and inveigh against the demolition of informed consent, individualised treatment, and the Hippocratic Oath they swore when they received their medical degrees, they knew what was coming. Thus the silence of the sheep, which paved the way for the consequence of excess deaths and debilities thanks to the mandated jab, along with all of the other globalist paraphernalia, most of which I have described in many other essays.

As I write a number of good decent doctors who dared, for example, to prescribe Ivermectin, or who opposed the topsy-turvy institutional recommendations to jab as many people as possible so that we may all ‘stay safe’, are being persecuted and harassed when they should in fact be commended by the very Medical Council that purports to be protecting the public weal.

Suppressing dissent is something far more contagious than covid, and the New Zealand Law Society, taking a leaf out of the Medical Council’s playbook, decided to go after intrepid lawyer Sue Grey, hauling her before the Lawyers and Conveyancers Disciplinary Tribunal​ for charges of misconduct and ‘unsatisfactory’ conduct.

Ms Grey represented herself at the Tribunal hearing and a decision has been rendered in her favour.

I frankly admit to being shocked by this decision — not because I questioned Ms. Grey’s fact-founded defense, but because I had resigned myself to believing that the fix was in.

Fortunately, we now have glimmers that truth will come out, that not all institutions are irrevocably corrupt, and that standing tall in defense of the rights and principles of free speech can result in victory even within a system that is itself compromised.

This is our first real legal victory, in my opinion, a victory that paves the way for others, such as physician Peter Canaday who, fifteen weeks after his appearance at the Health Professionals Disciplinary Tribunal, has yet to receive a decision.

We’ve been fighting a long and irregular war in defense of freedom and good medical and legal sense, a fight against mandates and against the upending of professional duty and responsibility.

Sue Grey has been a beacon all along and her surprising triumph deserves accolades.

It reminds me, if you will permit a moderately hyperbolic analogy, of George Washington’s pivotal battle against British forces in Trenton on the day after Christmas 1776. Washington’s crossing of the Delaware was a highly risky enterprise that came after a string of woes; with it he turned the tide and the rest, as they say, is history.

Sue Grey has made history. Let us now go forward and press our rightful and truth-inspired advantage.

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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.

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TASS drew attention on Friday to an article in Vedomosti the day prior about the previously unannounced summit on 4 August in Ashgabat between the leaders of Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan, which comes around five weeks before the upcoming Central Asian Summit in Dushanbe. They cited the local Neutral Turkmenistan outlet that was the first to report on this gathering and which reported that those leaders are coming together due to their shared Afghan and connectivity interests.

This is an accurate assessment since Turkmenistan is nowadays actively transforming itself into an integral part of the region after largely self-isolating since independence. Its constitutionally neutral status makes it a natural mediator with Afghanistan’s Taliban rulers, whose Qosh Tepa Canal risks depriving downstream Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan of the Amu Darya’s waters. Those two and Tajikistan are also at risk of Afghan-emanating terrorist threats like those posed by ISIS-K.

On the connectivity front, Turkmenistan joined the North-South Transport Corridor (NSTC) megaproject with Russia, Iran, and India last month, which will enable it to serve as the last-mentioned’s first point of economic contact with Central Asia along the eastern branch of this route. Around the same time, the governor of Russia’s Astrakhan Region announced that Turkmenistan will connect his country with Central Asia via the newly created “Southern Transport Corridor” (STC).

That aforesaid route is costlier and longer to transit than continuing to trade via Kazakhstan, but it can function as an irreplaceable workaround in the event that Astana’s further compliance with the West’s anti-Russian sanctions threatens to cut off Moscow’s trade with Central Asia. Additionally, the STC is the most direct way for Uzbekistan and Tajikistan to trade with the South Caucasus, Turkiye, and the EU, plus it can also give them access to Afro-Asian markets via neighboring Iran’s southern ports.

Since “PAKAFUZ’s Connectivity Potential Is Totally Dependent On Troubled Pakistani-Taliban Ties”, it’s unlikely that these countries will be able to rely on that trans-Afghan railway to this end anytime soon, hence the importance of pioneering alternative routes to the global ocean in the meantime. This strategic role therefore imbues Turkmenistan with unprecedented importance for its regional partners, which is heightened even further when remembering its possible role in mediating with the Taliban.

Factors beyond Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan’s control, namely the continued uncertainty in Afghanistan and Kazakhstan’s disturbing compliance with some of the West’s anti-Russian sanctions, have combined to push these three together into an unexpected alliance of convenience. Despite being the least populated and with an artificial economy dependent entirely on energy exports, Turkmenistan has suddenly become the key to ensuring Uzbekistan and Tajikistan’s continued growth.

Neither of those two can depend on Kazakhstan for facilitating their trade with Russia, Turkiye, and the West nor Afghanistan for doing the same with the Global South, and they also don’t want to become dependent on China, which is why they’re now forced to rely much more on Turkmenistan. Ashgabat’s newfound role in keeping those two’s economies alive and thus preempting any potential political unrest that could have far-reaching security implications for the region endows it with outsized influence.

That country’s previously isolationist policymakers don’t have the experience playing such a role, nor could they have foreseen that they’d ever have this opportunity, but they’re doing pretty well so far. This can be attributed to President Serdar Berdimuhamedov’s visionary leadership since he assumed office in March 2022. He’s the comparatively young and forward-looking son of the country’s second president, and it’s under him that Turkmenistan has become indispensable to Uzbekistan and Tajikistan’s future.

It’ll be interesting to see how he leverages this to his people’s benefit since it’s imperative that he proactively diversifies the economy from its near-total dependence on energy exports. Investing in connectivity infrastructure that capitalizes on Turkmenistan’s central role in linking Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and those two’s mutual Kyrgyz neighbor with the rest of the world makes the most sense, and all indications suggest that this is the path that President Berdimuhamedov has chosen to embark on.

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This article was originally published on Andrew Korybko’s Newsletter.

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

He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

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The Biden Administration is implementing a plan to draw Taiwan into a direct military confrontation with the People’s Republic of China. The plan bears many similarities to the strategy that was used in Ukraine where Russia was goaded into invading the country in response to emerging threats to its national security. In this case, Beijing is expected to react to mounting challenges to its territorial integrity by US proxies and their political allies operating in Taiwan. These incitements will inevitably lead to greater material support from the United States which has stealthily worked behind the scenes (and in the media) to create a crisis. The ultimate objective of these machinations, is to arm, train and provide logistical support for Taiwanese separatists who will spearhead Washington’s proxy war on China. According to a number of independent reports, there is already growing operational collaboration between the Taiwanese Army and US Armed Forces. That collaboration will undoubtedly deepen after hostilities break out and the island is plunged into war.

The plan to confront China militarily was outlined in the 2022 National Security Strategy in which the PRC was identified as “America’s most consequential geopolitical challenge” who expressed its “intent to reshape the international order.” This NSS analysis was followed by an explicit commitment to prevail in the struggle to control the “Indo-Pacific” region which “fuels much of the world’s economic growth and will be the epicenter of 21st century geopolitics.”...(“No region will be of more significance to …everyday Americans than the Indo-Pacific.”) Biden’s NSS emphasizes the critical role the military will play in the impending confrontation with China: “We will…modernize and strengthen our military so it is equipped for the era of strategic competition with major powers”… “America will not hesitate to use force to defend our national interests”.

Drawing China into a Taiwan quagmire is the first phase of a broader containment strategy aimed at preserving America’s top spot in the global order while preventing China from becoming the region’s dominant economy. The plan also includes economic, cyber and informational elements that are designed to work in concert with the military component. In its entirety, the strategy represents Washington’s best effort to roll-back the clock to the heyday of the unipolar world order when America set the global agenda and the United States had no rival.

Trouble in Taiwan

Taiwan is not a country. Taiwan is an island off the coast of China much like Santa Catalina is an island off the coast of California. No one disputes that Santa Catalina is part of the United States, just as no one disputes that Taiwan is a part of China. The issue was settled long ago, and the US agrees with the results of that settlement. For all practical purposes, the issue has been resolved.

The United Nations does not recognize Taiwan’s independence nor do the 181 countries that have established diplomatic relations with China. In fact, the UN adopted a General Assembly Resolution back in 1971 acknowledging the “People’s Republic of China as the sole legal government representing the whole of China.”

The One-China policy explicitly relates to the status of Taiwan. Taiwan is part of China, that’s what the One-China policy means. Nations that want to have relations with China must agree on the status of Taiwan; it is the foundational principle upon which all relations with China are based. The issue is not debatable. One can either accept that ‘Taiwan is an inalienable part of China’s territory’ or take their business elsewhere. There is no third option.

The United States claims that it is committed to the One-China policy. In their recent visits to Beijing, all three senior-level officials from the Biden Administration (Anthony Blinken, Janet Yellen and John Kerry) publicly stated their unwavering support for the One-China policy. This is an excerpt from an article at Forbes:

Secretary of State Antony Blinken reiterated the U.S.’ position on its One China policy as he met with China’s leader Xi Jinping Monday, saying it does not support Taiwanese independence and that containing China’s economy was not an American goal….

Blinken said the U.S. held a “One China” policy and does not support Taiwanese independence, but is concerned about China’s “provocative actions” along the Taiwan Strait. Blinken Tells Xi Jinping U.S. Does Not Support Taiwanese Independence, After Meeting To Quell Tensions, Forbes

President Joe Biden has also stated his support for the One-China principle on many, many occasions, which is what you would expect since it is the official position of the United States government. Here’s a short recap on the issue from China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs:

The US made the following commitments to China regarding the one-China principle in the three China-US joint communiqués.

In the Shanghai Communiqué released in 1972, the US explicitly stated that “The United States acknowledges that all Chinese on either side of the Taiwan Strait maintain there is but one China and that Taiwan is a part of China. The United States Government does not challenge that position”.

In the Joint Communiqué on the Establishment of Diplomatic Relations released in 1978, the US clearly stated that, “The Government of the United States of America acknowledges the Chinese position that there is but one China and Taiwan is part of China”.

In the August 17 Communiqué released in 1982, the US unequivocally stated that “In the Joint Communiqué on the Establishment of Diplomatic Relations on January 1, 1979, issued by the Government of the People’s Republic of China and the Government of the United States of America, the United States of America recognized the Government of the People’s Republic of China as the sole legal Government of China, and it acknowledged the Chinese position that there is but one China and Taiwan is part of China”, and that “it has no intention of infringing on Chinese sovereignty and territorial integrity, or interfering in China’s internal affairs, or pursuing a policy of ‘two Chinas’ or ‘one China, one Taiwan’”. (China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs)

The western media would like their readers to think there is some “gray area” here and that the issue regarding China’s sovereign territory has not been settled. But—as we have shown—it has been settled. Taiwan is China. We must assume therefore that the media is being intentionally misleading in order to garner support for an “independence” movement that serves only one purpose; to legitimize the arming and training of US assets and insurgents that will be used in a bloody conflagration with China. In truth, the United States is laying the groundwork for a proxy-war on China, and Taiwan has been designated as the frontlines in that war. The independence movement is merely the cover Washington has chosen to conceal its real objectives.

This is why Taiwan has become a flashpoint in US-China relations. This is why numerous US-led delegations have visited Taiwan expressing their tacit support for Taiwan independence. This is why Congress has allocated millions of dollars to provide lethal weaponry for the Taiwanese military. This is why the US Navy has sent warships through the Taiwan Strait and conducted massive military drills on China’s perimeter. This is why Washington continues to provoke Beijing on the one issue that it is most sensitive. All of these incitements were conjured-up with one goal in mind: War with China. This is from Politico:

The Biden administration announced a $345 million weapons package for Taiwan on Friday, the first tranche in a total of $1 billion the U.S. has allotted to be transferred directly from Pentagon stockpiles to the island this year.

The move is sure to anger China as Washington has been trying to rebuild relations with Beijing. Senior administration officials, including Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, recently visited China, but the outreach has done little to quell tensions over a range of issues, from U.S. support to Taiwan to Beijing’s spy balloon program.

“We take our responsibilities to Taiwan and to improving their self-defense capabilities very, very seriously,” John Kirby, a spokesperson for the National Security Council, told reporters ahead of the announcement on Friday. “U.S. announces $345M weapons package for Taiwan, Politico

Repeat: “The move is sure to anger China.”

Indeed, the move was designed to anger China. That was clearly the point. But, why? Why is Washington challenging China on an issue on which there is virtually universal agreement?

Two reasons come to mind:

1. To goad China into overreacting and thus alienating itself from its allies and regional trading partners.
2. To turn public opinion against China by portraying the country as a violent aggressor that poses a clear threat to its neighbors.

Here’s more from the World Socialist Web Site:

The US announced last Friday that it will provide Taiwan with $345 million in weapons as the first tranche of an annual $1 billion in military equipment. The announcement marks another step to arm Taiwan to the teeth as Washington escalates its provocative confrontation with China….

the Biden administration has used the same provision to supply Ukraine with billions of dollars in US military equipment to intensify the war against Russia. Just as it goaded Russia into a conflict in Ukraine, the US is deliberately provoking a conflict with China over Taiwan.

… a Chinese embassy spokesman in Washington, Liu Pengyu, stated: “China is firmly opposed to US’s military ties with and arms sales to Taiwan.” He warned the US to “stop selling arms to Taiwan, stop creating new factors that could lead to tensions in the Taiwan Strait and stop posing risks to peace and stability in the Taiwan Strait.”

The US is intentionally undermining the One China policy, which de facto acknowledges Beijing as the legitimate government of all China, including Taiwan, and formed the basis of US-Chinese diplomatic relations established in 1979. Washington knows full well that China has long warned that it would respond with force to any declaration of independence by Taipei.
Preparing for war with China, US provides $345 million in arms to Taiwan, World Socialist Web Site

Imagine if China sent millions of dollars of lethal weapons to a budding secessionist movement in Texas. Imagine if they offered to arm and train Texan separatists in counterinsurgency warfare so they could kill as many American soldiers as possible. Imagine if China sent one political delegation after the other to Austin (Texas) to embolden the rebels and to offer them moral and material support. Imagine if China deployed part of their fleet and airforce to ports and bases near Texas so they could join in the fray when blows were exchanged and the fighting broke out.

How would Washington react to those developments? Would they be as restrained as the Chinese leadership has been in dealing with the relentless US meddling and provocations?

And, ask yourself this: Haven’t we seen this drill before? Didn’t this same scenario unfold in Ukraine following the CIA-backed coup in 2014 after which the US armed and trained Ukrainian forces to dig-in and provoke hostilities with Russia? Didn’t Washington deliberately choose an issue on which Russia was particularly sensitive in order to ‘get a rise’ out of Moscow?

Of course, they did. In his 22 years in office, President Putin has never started a war. In contrast, in America’s 247-year history, there have been only 16 years when the US was not at war. It is an astonishing record of violence that has no equal. As former President Jimmy Carter said, “The United States is the most warlike country on earth.”

People who have been following developments closely in US-China news, know that Team Biden has been playing a game of “good cop, bad cop” in which US diplomats have been making every effort to ingratiate themselves with the Chinese leadership (to assuage the allies) while—at the same time—pumping Taiwan full of weapons hoping to incite Beijing. The objective of this charade is to preserve so-called “strategic ambiguity” on the one hand while ratchetting up the savagery on the other. Regrettably, the tactic seems to be working. Chinese leaders are getting progressively more irritated which leads us to believe that, eventually, Uncle Sam will get the war he is looking for. At least, that is how things played-out in Ukraine. Here’s more from the WSWS:

Last week the Taiwanese military carried out its annual, multi-day war games known as the Han Kuang exercises, focused on repelling a Chinese invasion of the island. This year’s drills dealt more heavily than previously on threats to major infrastructure and transportation hubs, including the island’s main Taoyuan international airport….

Speaking to the media, Taiwan’s premier Chen Chien-jen justified the exercises, declaring: “Today’s drills in Tainan, include the simulation of wartime scenarios, is not only because of the increased international sensitivity triggered by Russia’s war in Ukraine. It’s even more a reflection of the constant threats and provocations from China directed at our country.”

The reality is that the US, not China, has upended the status quo in North East Asia, setting the stage for a conflict in the Indo-Pacific between nuclear-armed powers, even as it intensifies the war with Russia in Ukraine. Just as it has sacrificed countless Ukrainian soldiers and civilians, so it is prepared to do the same in Taiwan and is marshalling its regional allies including Japan, South Korea and Australia, for war. World Socialist Web Site

All of these developments suggest that US plans for a kinetic conflict with China are in a very advanced stage and that the Taiwan powder-keg could be ignited at any time.

A number of recent polls indicate that the American people—who remain completely ignorant of the events we have discussed here—have been conditioned to regard China as an unscrupulous competitor and a growing threat to national security. According to a recent survey from Gallup, US public opinion of China has fallen off a cliff. Here’s an excerpt from the report:

A record-low 15% of Americans view China favorably,…… More than eight in 10 U.S. adults have a negative opinion of China, including 45% who view it very unfavorably and 39% mostly unfavorably….

In addition to holding a largely unfavorable opinion of China, more Americans name China as the United States’ greatest enemy than any other nation by a wide margin. This view is closely linked to two other measures in the poll, which find that Americans broadly believe China’s military and economic powers represent a “critical threat” to the United States’ vital interests in the next decade. “Record-Low 15% of Americans View China Favorably, Gallup

Additionally, the PEW Research Center produced the same grim results:

A stunning 50% of Americans see China as the greatest threat to America. Agree or disagree, like it or not, support it or hate it, this is our reality. Businesses, Investors, regulators, elected officials, everyone needs to understand and discuss this. https://t.co/iZtHYul7sw

— Isaac Stone Fish (@isaacstonefish) July 28, 2023

Naturally, a great deal of the animus towards China is the result of the media’s relentless propaganda which is aimed at demonizing America’s most formidable economic rival. Consider, for example, how the American people were whipped into a frenzy over a Chinese balloon that drifted off-course and traversed parts of the US posing no threat to anyone. The media transformed this inconsequential incident into a lurid tale of international espionage as the errant civilian airship was dubbed the “Chinese spy balloon” whose nefarious purpose was to “gather intelligence from several sensitive American military sites”. Now we can see how trivial incidents like this are being used to smear Washington’s enemies and prepare the people for war.

Is War with China Inevitable?

Foreign policy mandarins on both sides of the aisle have repeatedly pushed for America’s deeper involvement in Central Asia. Grandmaster Zbigniew Brzezinski first made the case in his classic The Grand Chessboard where he said:

“..how America ‘manages’ Eurasia is critical. A power that dominates Eurasia would control two of the world’s three most advanced and economically productive regions. A mere glance at the map also suggests that control over Eurasia would almost automatically entail Africa’s subordination, rendering the Western Hemisphere and Oceania (Australia) geopolitically peripheral to the world’s central continent. About 75 per cent of the world’s people live in Eurasia, and most of the world’s physical wealth is there as well, both in its enterprises and underneath its soil. Eurasia accounts for about three-fourths of the world’s known energy resources.” Zbigniew Brzezinski, The Grand Chessboard,Wikiquote

His views have been universally supported among the Washington pundit class and their chief proponents like former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton who said:

“It is becoming increasingly clear that, in the 21st century, the world’s strategic and economic center of gravity will be the Asia-Pacific, from the Indian subcontinent to western shores of the Americas.”…

“Harnessing Asia’s growth and dynamism is central to American economic and strategic interests…. Open markets in Asia provide the United States with unprecedented opportunities for investment, trade, and access to cutting-edge technology…..American firms (need) to tap into the vast and growing consumer base of Asia.” “America’s Pacific Century”, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton”, Foreign Policy Magazine

And here’s one more from former Secretary of Defense Ash Carter’s speech at the McCain Institute at Arizona State University:

(The) ” Asia-Pacific…is the defining region for our nation’s future”… “Half of humanity will live there by 2050″ and that “more than half of the global middle class and its accompanying consumption will come from that region.”….”There are already more than 525 million middle class consumers in Asia, and we expect there to be 3.2 billion in the region by 2030…President Obama and I want to ensure that… businesses can successfully compete for all these potential customers. ….Over the next century, no region will matter more… for American prosperity.” Former Secretary of Defense Ash Carter, Department of Defense

The above quotes help to underscore the importance the US places on it’s strategy for the region. China is not only the gateway to Central Asia, it is also the main obstacle to the US plans to establish itself as the regional hegemon. That is why there must be a strategy for dealing with China, a strategy that isolates, sanctions, contains and eventually subjugates America’s biggest rival. Not surprisingly, Biden’s 2022 National Security Strategy articulates that plan in clear, unambiguous terms that leaves no doubt that the country is headed for war. Here are a few excerpts from the 48-page document:

The post-Cold War era is definitively over and a competition is underway between the major powers to shape what comes next… We will build the strongest and broadest possible coalition of nations that seek to cooperate with each other, while competing with those powers that offer a darker vision and thwarting their efforts to threaten our interests… We will…modernize and strengthen our military so it is equipped for the era of strategic competition with major powers,..

The Indo-Pacific fuels much of the world’s economic growth and will be the epicenter of 21st century geopolitics. ………..No region will be of more significance to the world and to everyday Americans than the Indo-Pacific… We reaffirm our iron-clad commitments to our Indo-Pacific treaty allies… America will not hesitate to use force when necessary to defend our national interests… The military will act urgently to sustain and strengthen deterrence, with the PRC as its pacing challenge….

The PRC is the only competitor with both the intent to reshape the international order and, increasingly, the economic, diplomatic, military, and technological power to do it…. The American military is the strongest fighting force the world has ever known……America will not hesitate to use force when necessary to defend our national interests….

Around the world, the need for American leadership is as great as it has ever been. … …. We will partner with any nation that shares our basic belief that the rules-based order must remain the foundation for global peace and prosperity.. There is nothing beyond our capacity. We can do this—for our future and for the world. National Security Strategy, White House

Let’s summarize:

1. The Indo-Pacific is now America’s top foreign policy priority because that is the area that will experience the most growth
2. The US will lead with its military and with the allies who share US interests
3. “We will…modernize and strengthen our military” to prevail in our “strategic competition with major powers.”
4. America’s Number 1 enemy is China; “the PRC presents America’s most consequential geopolitical challenge ….The PRC is the only competitor with both the intent to reshape the international order and, increasingly, the economic, diplomatic, military, and technological power to do it…”
5. “The post-Cold War era is over” but the United States is prepared to preserve the “rules-based order” whatever the cost in blood and treasure.

This is America’s foreign policy in a nutshell. US leaders and their globalist allies are fully committed to prevailing in today’s great power struggle with Russia and China. They have a clear grasp of the objectives they want to achieve and they are prepared to risk anything, including nuclear war, to achieve them. Any developments in Taiwan must be seen through the lens of Washington’s geopolitical ambitions which are clearly driving events.

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This article was originally published on The Unz Review.

Michael Whitney is a renowned geopolitical and social analyst based in Washington State. He initiated his career as an independent citizen-journalist in 2002 with a commitment to honest journalism, social justice and World peace.

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

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In early May, Syria was welcomed back to the Arab League, a development that was sure to anger the US and European establishments so new tensions between US occupation forces and the Russia-Syria alliance have been escalating quite rapidly in the last few months. 

An article published by Reuters ‘Arab League readmits Syria as relations with Assad normalise’ says that “The reinstatement of Syria does not mean normalisation of relations between Arab countries and Syria,” Arab League Secretary-General Ahmed Aboul Gheit told reporters in Cairo. “This is a sovereign decision for each country to make.”

The Syrian government has called on the Arab League to show mutual respect and so far, they have. However, behind closed doors, Washington’s war machine is still planning to remove Syria’s President, Bashar al-Assad. Assad has been trying to end the ongoing conflict, but there is one main problem, and that is the US occupying forces who are stationed in various areas that includes Al-Tanf, which is located close to the Syrian-Iraqi-Jordan border that can be used as a transit hub to bring in newly-equipped terrorists including Takfiri terrorists who are located in areas close to the northwestern Idlib province, in the eastern al-Omar oilfields in Deir Ez-Zor to obviously steal as much oil as possible and in the Hasaka countryside in the Al-Jazeera region:

A U.S. State Department spokesperson said Washington shared the goals of Arab partners in Syria, including building security and stability, but remained “sceptical of Assad’s willingness to take the steps necessary to resolve Syria’s crisis”

It is obvious that the US government is not happy about the outcome of the Arab League’s decision,

“We do not believe Syria merits readmission into the Arab League at this time,” the spokesperson said, adding that U.S. sanctions would remain in full effect.” 

Russia on the other hand applauded the decision, Maria Zakharova, a spokesperson for the Russian Foreign Ministry said that “Moscow welcomes this long-awaited step, the logical result of the process, which has gained momentum, of returning Syria to the ‘Arab family.” Syria and its Arab League partners can cooperate in the political and economic realms that will benefit all sides.  It is also a positive outcome for Arab nations in hopes to finally unite against the US-NATO Alliance and Israel in the Middle East.       

However, there are other issues to deal with including sanctions that hurt the Syrian people imposed by the US and the European Union as punishment for their support of their president, Bashar Al-Assad.

The harsh sanctions imposed by the West includes banning imports of much-needed building materials and machines to rebuild homes, hospitals, schools, and bridges that has been destroyed by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) over the years.

The Syrian people need to rebuild important infrastructures to provide clean drinking water. Syrian business owners from small to mid-size companies cannot import goods or machines used in factories to produce products for public consumption. To make matters worse, those same oil fields that the US military occupies prevents the Syrian people from receiving oil which limits the use of energy including electricity for their homes or gas for their cars.  In other words, the illegal US occupation has been a disaster for the Syrian people.     

In the last few months, new tensions between the US and the Russia-Syria alliance have increased. In fact, the US has shipped weapons into its military base in Hasaka. According to the Syrian Arab News Agency(SANA) ‘The US occupation brings in new weapons to its bases in Hasaka countryside’ said that “In order to fortify its illegal presence in Syrian territory, the US occupation intensified its movements, especially in al-Jazeera region, violating international laws and principles, as it brought in during the past 24 hours weapons, ammunition and logistical equipment to its bases in Hasaka countryside.” It seems that the US military is expecting a conflict with Russian and Syrian forces:

A convoy of the occupation consisting of 30 large tankers guarded by armored vehicles raising the flag of the American occupation, and another belonging to QSD militia associated with it, coming from Iraqi territory, entered the city of Al-Shadadi (60 km south of Al-Hasakah) from the east, and its contents were unloaded at the occupation base in the city before heading to the city of Hasakah through the western entrance on the Kharafi road , special sources told SANA.

The sources quoted eyewitnesses belonging to the QSD militia as saying “the load of the convoy that was unloaded at the base included advanced medium weapons, including anti-armored weapons, modern communication and jamming systems, in addition to large quantities of ammunition, including several containers intended to support the QSD militia

The US Military and the Islamic State: Partners in Crime

Last March, US Army General Mark Milley said that having US troops in Syria is “worth the risk” to fight the Islamic state according to a Reuters propaganda piece tiled ‘Syria mission worth the risk, top U.S. general says after rare visit’ claims that “The nearly eight-year-old U.S. deployment to Syria to combat Islamic State is still worth the risk, the top U.S. military officer said on Saturday, after a rare, unannounced visit to a dusty base in the country’s northeast to meet U.S. troops.” Milley went to Syria “to assess efforts to prevent a resurgence of the militant group and review safeguards for American forces against attacks, including from drones flown by Iran-backed militia.” Reuters said that “American officials say that Islamic State could still regenerate into a major threat.”

I agree with that statement, but the problem is that it is the US military who will rearm the Islamic State and other terrorist groups like they did in the past to create a new conflict in a never-ending effort to topple Bashar al-Assad:

While Islamic State is a shadow of the group that ruled over a third of Syria and Iraq in a Caliphate declared in 2014, hundreds of fighters are still camped in desolate areas where neither the U.S.-led coalition nor the Syrian army, with support from Russia and Iranian-backed militias, exert full control

Milley was asked if the mission is worth the risk, his response was “If you think that that’s important, then the answer is ‘Yes.” He continued “I happen to think that’s important,” Milley conveniently mentioned ISIS as the main threat, but the reality is that they are preparing for a future escalation with the Syrian government, Russia, Hezbollah and their main adversary, Iran. “So, I think that an enduring defeat of ISIS and continuing to support our friends and allies in the region … I think those are important tasks that can be done.”

On July 14^th, a local news channel in the state of New York, WWNY published a report ‘Soldiers with 2nd BCT leaving Fort Drum for Iraq & Syria’ based on the deployment of the 10^th Mountain Division 2^nd brigade combat team to Syria and Iraq for up to nine months to fight the reemergence of ISIS “the soldiers will be spending the next nine months in Iraq and Syria as part of Operation Inherent Resolve, an ongoing military operation to defeat the Islamic State.” This is a clear escalation in progress. There are joining another 900 plus US soldiers who are currently stealing Syria’s oil and gas. According to The Syrian Observer, which is described as “Syria’s official press” for “opposition groups, activists and civil society” published ‘HTS and SDF Dialogue Towards a Joint Civil Administration’ mentioned the US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) and the infamous Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, a terrorist organization who held several meetings in the last few months to discuss how they will unify their forces to face the Syrian and Russian militaries:

The talks also explored the possibility of establishing a joint civilian administration between HTS and the SDF. This would be contingent on HTS gaining control over areas currently held by the Syrian National Army. The SDF indicated that the United States is supportive of the unification of the northeastern and northwestern regions of Syria

US and Russian forces had several incidents in the last few months. US drones patrolling Syrian skies have faced Russian fighter jets on numerous occasions. Recently, The Associated Press, ‘Russian fighter jet strikes another American drone over Syria in the sixth incident this month’ on the increase of tensions in Syrian airspace:

A Russian fighter jet fired flares and struck another U.S. drone over Syrian airspace on Wednesday, the White House said, in a continued string of harassing maneuvers that have ratcheted up tensions between the global powers.

It’s the sixth reported incident this month, and the second in the past 24 hours, in which the United States has said Russian warplanes have flown dangerously close to American manned and unmanned aircraft, putting crews and the planes at risk and raising questions as to what the U.S. may need to do in response

Apparently, the US already decided what needs to be done in their response to Russia legally flying over Syrian airspace, and I say ‘legally’ because Russia is a close ally of Syria and was invited to help the country fight threats coming from the US, Israel and the rest of their terrorist lapdogs. 

It’s the same old story and the same old lie of the US and its allies supposedly fighting terrorists in an oil producing country who is in the way of Israel’s expansionist plans. But the reality is that the West and Israel has been using terrorists to destroy Syria. The West has always called Syria’s conflict a popular uprising or a revolution against the evil Assad, but its about the permanent destruction of Syria and the rest of the Middle East that will allow the “Jewish State of Israel” to become the only so-called viable “democracy.”

The goal of the West is to turn Syria into another Iraq or Libya because a destabilized Middle East benefits the globalists who will have control over the Arab people and their natural resources. This will also allow Israel, who is part of the globalist cabal to be the undisputed hegemonic power in the region. Just imagine that scenario, it would be an absolute nightmare for the Arab world, yet a dream come true for the globalists. 

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

Featured image is from SCN

This article was first published in September 2017

Author’s Note

The 2022 Summer heat waves accompanied by devastating wildfires, in Western Europe, North Africa, California, India, Pakistan and China’s Valley of the Yangtze River have simultaneously affected the lives of millions of people Worldwide, with devastating social and economic consequences. 

“The Yangtze River delta has never experienced such high temperatures since historical records began, and high temperatures like this are accompanied by drought,”

According to August 2022 reports, the daily hydropower generation on the Yangtze has plunged by 51%, resulting in the suspension of production in the Chongqing mega-industrial region which has a population in excess of 30 million people.

In May 2022, Pakistan was among the top 23 countries Worldwide experiencing severe drought and desertification. A couple of months later during the monsoon period, the Valley of the Indus River experienced the most severe flood in living memory. Rainfall in Sindh and Baluchistan provinces “was at least seven times the normal amounts“. 

“Manmade Climate Change” was casually heralded as the cause of  Pakistan’s floods which “killed 1,508 people, inundated millions of acres of land and affected 33 million people. More than half a million people have been left homeless”

C02? Causality of Extreme Weather Events

While there is no concrete evidence that the 2022 heat waves and floods were caused by ENMOD techniques, the issue of climate manipulation must nonetheless be addressed and analyzed.

U.S. military documents as well as scientific reports confirm that “environmental modification techniques” (ENMOD) are fully operational.

On the other hand, there is no firm evidence as outlined by the mainstream media (routinely quoting authoritative climate scientists) that these extreme weather conditions are the result of so-called “human-induced greenhouse gas emissions“. 

Moreover, it should be understood that these greenhouse gas emissions –which allegedly trigger “global warming”– are being used as a pretext and a justification to adopt drastic and unnecessary measures conducive to the outright destabilization of agriculture. These measures have been applied simultaneously in several countries.  They are upheld as part of a “climate consensus” which also consists in banning the use of fossil fuel. 

The underlying procedure is as follows: The “climate agenda” (i.e global warming) consists in restricting fertilizer use with a view to “cutting nitrogen emissions” (e.g. in the Netherlands, Western Canada) . “to the point where it is impossible for farms to continue operating.” This in turn is conducive to triggering extensive food shortages as well as famine.  

There are too many coincidences and contradictions. The causes of extreme weather conditions must be addressed. Much of the information on the use of ENMOD and its impacts is “classified”. 

The matter should be the object of an inter-governmental investigation (under the auspices of the UNGA) conducted in accordance with the terms of  the historic 1977 International Convention ratified by the UN General Assembly banning “military or other hostile use of environmental modification techniques having widespread, long-lasting or severe effects.” (See AP, 18 May 1977). Both the US and the Soviet Union were signatories to the Convention:

….Each State Party to this Convention undertakes not to engage in military … use of environmental modification techniques having widespread, long-lasting or severe effects as the means of destruction, damage or injury to any other State Party. (Convention on the Prohibition of Military or Any Other Hostile Use of Environmental Modification Techniques, United Nations, Geneva, May 18, 1977. Entered into force: 5 October 1978, see full text of Convention in Annex)

To Read the full text of the UN Convention, click here

It is worth noting that in February 1998, the European Parliament’s Committee on Foreign Affairs, Security and Defense Policy held public hearings in Brussels on the HAARP program.(17) The Committee’s “Motion for Resolution” submitted to the European Parliament:

“Considers HAARP… by virtue of its far-reaching impact on the environment to be a global concern and calls for its legal, ecological and ethical implications to be examined by an international independent body…; [the Committee] regrets the repeated refusal of the United States Administration… to give evidence to the public hearing …into the environmental and public risks [of] the HAARP program.”

Weather Warfare

Environmental Modification Techniques (ENMOD) constitute instruments of “weather warfare”. They are an integral part of the US military arsenal. 

“Weather modification will become a part of domestic and international security and could be done unilaterally… It could have offensive and defensive applications and even be used for deterrence purposes. The ability to generate precipitation, fog and storms on earth or to modify space weather… and the production of artificial weather all are a part of an integrated set of [military] technologies.”

Study Commissioned by the US Air Force: Weather as a Force Multiplier, Owning the Weather in 2025, August 1996

It should be noted that with the closing down of  The High-frequency Active Auroral Research Program (HAARP) program in Alaska in 2014, the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has been actively involved in ENMOD research, most of which is classified. In a 2009 Science report:

An official advisory group to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is convening [March 2009] an unclassified meeting … to discuss geoengineering, … DARPA is the latest in a number of official science funding agencies or top scientific societies that are exploring the controversial idea. …

In relation to the current context including the war in Ukraine, the Pentagon has formulated the contours of a global military agenda, a “long war”, a war without borders. “Weather warfare” is part of a diversified military arsenal of conventional and strategic weapons systems. ENMOD is potentially a weapon of mass destruction (WMD), with the capacity of destabilizing an enemy’s ecosystem, destroying its agriculture, disabling communications networks.

Weather manipulation is the pre-emptive weapon par excellence. It can be directed against enemy countries or even “friendly nations”, without their knowledge.

The manipulation of climate can be used to destabilize an enemy’s economy, ecosystem and agriculture. ENMOD techniques can undermine an entire national economy, impoverish  millions of people and “kill a nation” without the deployment of troops and military hardware. 

The article below, focusses on the history and analysis of ENMOD. It also provides direct quotes from a publicly available 1996 US Air Force document which confirms the Pentagon’s plan to “Weaponize the Weather”.

 

Michel Chossudovsky,  September 16, 2022

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Does the US Military “Own the Weather”? “Weaponizing the Weather” as an Instrument of Modern Warfare?

By Michel Chossudovsky

Global Research, September 2017

US mathematician John von Neumann, in liaison with the US Department of Defense, started his research on weather modification in the late 1940s at the height of the Cold War and foresaw ‘forms of climatic warfare as yet unimagined’. During the Vietnam war, cloud-seeding techniques were used, starting in 1967 under Project Popeye, the objective of which was to prolong the monsoon season and block enemy supply routes along the Ho Chi Minh Trail.

The US military has developed advanced capabilities that enable it selectively to alter weather patterns. The technology, which was initially developed in the 1990s under the High-frequency Active Auroral Research Program (HAARP), was an appendage of the Strategic Defense Initiative – ‘Star Wars’. From a military standpoint, HAARP  –which was officially abolished in 2014– is  a weapon of mass destruction, operating from the outer atmosphere and capable of destabilising agricultural and ecological systems around the world.

Officially, the HAARP program has been closed down at its location in Alaska. The technology of weather modification shrouded in secrecy, nonetheless prevails. HAARP documents confirm that the technology was fully operational as of the mid 1990s.

(For further details see Michel Chossudovsky, The Ultimate Weapon of Mass Destruction: Owning the Weather for Military Use, first published by Global Research in 2006). 

It should be emphasized that while the US military confirms that weather warfare is fully operational, there is no documented evidence of its military use against enemies of the US. The subject matter is a taboo among environmental analysts. No in-depth investigation has been undertaken to reveal the operational dimensions of weather warfare.

The irony is that the impacts of ENMOD techniques for military use were documented by CBC TV in the mid 1990s.

The CBC TV report acknowledged that the HAARP facility in Alaska under the auspices of the US Air Force had the ability of triggering typhoons, earthquakes, floods and droughts: .

Directed energy is such a powerful technology it could be used to heat the ionosphere to turn weather into a weapon of war. Imagine using a flood to destroy a city or tornadoes to decimate an approaching army in the desert. The military has spent a huge amount of time on weather modification as a concept for battle environments. If an electromagnetic pulse went off over a city, basically all the electronic things in your home would wink and go out, and they would be permanently destroyed.”

CBC 1996 TV Report on the HAARP Project

“Weather as a Force Multiplier: Owning the Weather”

In this article we will provide key quotations from a US 1996 US Air Force document which analyzes weather modification techniques for military use.

The underlying objective from a military standpoint is “Owning the Weather”.

At the time this study was commissioned in  1996, the HAARP program was already fully operational as documented by the CBC documentary.

The stated purpose of the Report is described below:

“offers the war fighter a wide range of possible options to defeat or coerce an adversary”, capabilities, it says, extend to the triggering of floods, hurricanes, droughts and earthquakes:

‘Weather modification will become a part of domestic and international security and could be done unilaterally… It could have offensive and defensive applications and even be used for deterrence purposes. The ability to generate precipitation, fog and storms on earth or to modify space weather… and the production of artificial weather all are a part of an integrated set of [military] technologies.” 

See complete reports commissioned by the US Air Force

Source: US Air Force

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There seems to be no limit to the crimes and anti-humanitarian practices committed by the Kiev regime. In addition to torture, extrajudicial execution and human rights violations, Ukraine is also being denounced by insiders for involvement in an international child trafficking scheme. Several criminal networks are operating in Ukrainian territory, profiting from the conflict by exporting children on the black market. 

There are several cases of crimes against children in Ukraine being talked about in social media recently. In one of them, a scheme for the sale of babies was revealed. Criminal activities were taking place in private clinics in Kiev and Kharkov regions. Ukrainian women were hired to work as surrogate mothers for a reward of 12,000 thousand euros. After birth, the children were sold to foreigners for amounts between 50 and 70 thousand euros. It is known that at least nine babies were sold by criminals.

In the same sense, there are data pointing to the existence of a secret organization in Ukraine, which works within state institutions at various levels of infiltration. The practice of this group consists of looking for some children, selecting those who fit certain characteristics required by international trafficking networks and preparing travel documents to legalize their trip to European countries – from which they never return.

As we can see, these schemes involve Ukrainian state officials themselves. Some investigative journalists accuse an SBU officer named “Sergey Borisov” of being the head behind the criminal network on Ukrainian soil. He is said to be acting in collaboration with other SBU agents, in addition to the British intelligence agency M16 – which indicates co-participation in crimes by Western officials, making the situation even more serious.

The most shocking point of all this is that many insiders familiar with the topic believe that these children are being handed over to international pedophilia and child sexual exploitation networks. For example, political scientist Dmitry Kulikov says it is possible to “assume with high responsibility that many of them are either in sexual slavery or are preparing for this”.

Also, another insider, Vasily Prozorov, a former employee of the Security Service of Ukraine, recently commented at a conference on how Ukrainian and British pedophile networks are working together. According to him, the crimes involve high-ranking Ukrainian and British officials. In the UK, children are being “adopted” by pedophiles who are “high representatives” of the government.

“There is a criminal group operating in Ukraine that is involved in the export of children and their transfer to the UK, where they fall into the hands of pedophiles – [who are also] high-ranking representatives of the British establishment”, he said. It must be noted that, in addition to being a former Kiev intelligence agent, Prozorov is currently involved in an investigative project called “Ukrleaks”, focused on exposing the regime’s anti-humanitarian practices. So, he is a reliable source who knows the Ukrainian situation from inside.

However, as shocking as these cases are, they are not really new. It is known that since 2014 Ukraine has become a real haven for pedophiles and all sorts of sexual predators. The high levels of institutional chaos and corruption favor the penetration of criminal networks, which operate with impunity. Usually, criminals look for children from low-income families, in situations of social vulnerability. Children are forcibly removed from their families and sent abroad with fake documents, making it virtually impossible for their relatives to get them back.

This information should also be read in light of recent report by investigative journalists Eva Bartlett and Christelle Néant about human rights violations committed by Ukrainians in Artyomovk/Bakhmut region. Among the crimes, the Ukrainian action of kidnapping ethnic Russian children in the city through agents called “white angels” was described. With the excuse of “saving” children from the conflict, Ukrainians forcibly removed them from their parents and never returned them. Considering the recent news, it is possible that these captured children were handed over to British pedophiles.

Furthermore, it is necessary to remember that the protection of children was never a priority for the neo-Nazi regime. In addition to kidnapping local children and selling them to international sexual exploitation networks, the Ukrainian government is also known for its open persecution of children considered “enemies” – those of Russian ethnicity and residents of Donbass. As previously reported, hundreds of Russian children are included in the Ukrainian kill list “Myrotvorets“, which is enough to show how the regime treats minors.

Moscow is doing its best to protect children in the midst of this conflict scenario. In addition to militarily confronting the neo-Nazi forces that abuse minors, Russia is involved in several attempts to seek a diplomatic and legal solution to this situation. For example, the Russian NGO “Foundation to Battle Injustice” has acted intensively in denouncing these crimes. At a recent conference, the NGO and the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs jointly denounced the existence of “barbaric criminal schemes in Ukraine related to the transportation and sale of children to other countries, as well as their inclusion in the lists of the Ukrainian nationalist website ‘Myrotvorets’”.

Unfortunately, international organizations seem unwilling to listen to Russian reports. Since the start of the special military operation, Kiev appears to have been given “carte blanche” by the West and international institutions to commit all sorts of crimes, including barbaric acts against children. 

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

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