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The New York Times continues to selectively promote news that fits the Establishment narrative. The NYT portrays the nine-year sentence of the Russian “opposition leader” Aleksei Navalny to a high-security prison as a travesty of justice. Was it unjust? If so, justice must be demanded. What I can comment on is a factual inaccuracy by the NYT: Navalny is not the opposition leader.

His party has zero seats in the State Duma. The opposition party is the Communist Party of the Russian Federation with 57 seats. Navalny’s party, Russia of the Future, has zero seats. Russia of the Future remains unregistered as a political party. This is an unassailable point for the NYT given that democracy in the US is such that the Communist Party and Communism has been outlawed since the days of president Dwight Eisenhower.

A clearcut travesty of justice is the case of the political prisoner Julian Assange. He is imprisoned for having carried out his job as a publisher at WikiLeaks: informing the public by publishing facts. WikiLeaks has a publication record which under normal circumstances would make the NYT green with envy: WikiLeaks is “perfect in document authentication and resistance to all censorship attempts.” But the NYT is not about accuracy in publication.

WikiLeak’s perfect publication record includes revealing the war crimes of the United States; for this, the US Establishment placed a target on Assange’s back.

NYT, which once collaborated with WikiLeaks to publish stories, notes that Navalny — who was tried and convicted — has been held in captivity for more than a year.

Assange — who has been tried and convicted of breach of bail stemming from fraudulent Swedish charges; since Sweden refused to guarantee non-extradition to the US, Assange sought asylum in the Ecuadorian embassy, subsequent events have borne out Assange’s fear — has been under one form of incarceration or another since January 2011.

In 2017, Navalny was found guilty at a retrial for embezzlement and given a five-year suspended prison sentence. He was later imprisoned for breaching the terms of his probation. In his latest trial, he was again found guilty of having embezzled people’s money. The NYT, however, paints the verdict as a move to extend Navalny’s time in prison.

Assange has only been found guilty of the relatively minor violation of breaching bail. Nonetheless, the period of his detention began with bogus charges of rape and sexual molestation cooked up by Swedish authorities. It is not difficult to join the dots and arrive at the logical conclusion that were it not for the initial fraudulent allegations against him, Assange would never have been placed into detention in the first place, and he would not be facing extradition to the US where he could sit in prison for as much as 175 years — for doing something for which he should be saluted by humanity: exposing war crimes.

Collateral Murder: U.S. Apache helicopters killing journalists in Iraq from Jesse Taylor on Vimeo.

Assange represents another nail in the coffin of the worthlessness of the Nobel Peace Prize, an award that has previously been conferred upon war criminals and other miscreants.

NYT is not focused on the miscarriage of justice against Assange even though the abuse of justice in Assange’s case puts its own “journalists” at risk of persecution should they reveal grave crimes of state.

Russia, the US-designated ennemi du jour, is an easy target for the NYT. Therefore, even though Navalny is a convicted criminal, he is deemed worthy of support by the NYT. Navalny is an enemy of an enemy, that plus his animus against Russian president Vladimir Putin makes him a friend for the US Establishment. Given this cozy arrangement, the NYT is free to cast aspersions on the Russian judge, Margarita Kotova, insinuating that her recent promotion is linked with the judicial finding against Navalny.

Emma Arbuthnot, who presided over Assange’s extradition case from late 2017 until mid-2019 was accused of a conflict of interest since her husband is “a former Conservative defense minister with extensive links to the British military and intelligence community exposed by WikiLeaks.” She did not recuse herself, and the legal Establishment in Britain did not have her removed from the case. In one ruling, Arbuthnot showed her true colors by dismissing a United Nations working group’s assessment that Assange was being arbitrarily detained.

Arbuthnot’s subordinate, judge Vanessa Baraitser, took over the Assange case and ruled that he should not be extradited for reasons of mental harm. However, she also stated that she believed Assange to be guilty, providing an opening for an American appeal, which the US won.

Assange’s appeal of that appeal was rejected. It seems that the appellate court accepted the Biden administration’s pledge not to confine Assange under the austerest conditions reserved for high-security prisoners and, should he be convicted, to allow him to serve his sentence in his native Australia.

Returning to Navalny, the NYT asserts there is “substantial evidence” that the Russian government was responsible for poisoning him in August 2020. And if one follows the link embedded for the “substantial evidence,” one comes to another NYT article wherein it is stated “Navalny’s revelations about his poisoning — not all of which have been independently verified.” The source of the “substantial evidence” is Navalny. In fact, there appears nothing at all that is compelling or substantial. But an investigation to determine the authenticity of Navalny’s claims would be in order.

On the other hand, there is verifiable evidence that the assassination and kidnapping of Assange was discussed at the highest levels of the CIA.

The NYT does not point out the discrediting of the rape allegations against Assange. The UN Special Rapporteur on Torture, Nils Melzer, destroyed the rape allegations against Assange and accused the authorities of psychological torture against the WikiLeaks publisher.

Expressing sympathy for Navalny, the NYT rued that he might be “moved to a higher-security prison farther from Moscow, making it harder for his lawyers and family to visit him.”

Meanwhile Assange, unaccused of any violent offense, is being held in the maximum security Belmarsh prison in England — about 15,000 km away from his birthplace in Australia.

The NYT mentions concerns for the life of Navalny. This concern is ostensibly missing for Assange’s incarceration in Belmarsh. Given that the British judge found imprisonment a mental health danger for Assange, it is a stark contradiction to keep him in prison where his mental health would remain at risk while awaiting the justice system’s outcome. It speaks clearly to the travesty of justice Assange has endured.

The Ripple Effect

The NYT’s shoddy journalism emerges again and again. Only recently it had to admit it had suppressed the story of what’s on the laptop of president Joe Biden’s son, Hunter. What was initially dismissed as Russian disinformation turned out to be Russiagate disinformation.

It shines a spotlight on who overwhelmingly provoked the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Grotesquely, the mother of all rogue nations, the US, led/cajoled its subservient Canadian, European, Japanese, South Korean, among other accomplices to sanction Russia (unilateral sanctions have been denounced by independent UN human rights experts who declared the right to development “an inalienable human right”) while the instigator goes unsanctioned.

Navalny deserves justice as much as any other person on the planet. If an injustice has been meted out to Navalny, then that must be corrected. The present thesis examines who the NYT deems worthy or unworthy of propping up. NYT’s “opposition leader” in Russia is without any party members in the Russian State Duma. Navalny compares in many respects to the hapless Juan Guaidó, a wannabe president of Venezuela, who the US backs and recognizes as president of Venezuela. To bring about a government amenable to American dictates in Venezuela, president Obama declared Venezuela a national security threat and sanctioned seven Venezuelan officials in 2015. Human rights expert Alfred de Zayas, who is highly critical of NYT coverage of Venezuela, estimated that at least 100,000 Venezuelans having died because of US sanctions. Mark Weisbrot and Jeffrey Sachs contend that the US sanctions “fit the definition of collective punishment of the civilian population as described in both the Geneva and Hague international conventions, to which the US is a signatory.”

One victim who has not been found worthy of mention in the NYT is 16-year-old Palestinian Nader Rayan who was gunned down by Israeli border police troops. Israel’s Haaretz had the gumption to publish a piece describing the corpse of Nader Rayan:

strewn with deep, bleeding bullet wounds, his flesh is bare, his brain is spilling out, his head and face are perforated. Border Police troops shot him with pathological madness, in a rage, savagely, without restraint. His father counted 12 bullet wounds in his son’s body, all of them deep, large, oozing blood. Head, chest, stomach, back, legs and arms: There’s not a part of his son’s body without a large, gaping hole in it.

Nothing can justify this repeated shooting of a teenager who was running for his life, certainly not once he was hit and lay wounded on the road. Not even if the initial Border Police account, which for some reason was magically altered the following week – that the youth or his friend shot at the troops – is correct. Nothing can justify such unhinged shooting at a youth.

One can glean an understanding for NYT’s concern or lack of concern for humanity by comparing how it feted and eulogized genocidaire and former US secretary-of-state Madeleine Albright who blithely agreed with half a million Iraqi kids serving as sacrificial lambs for US policy objectives.

Russians, according to the NYT, have responded with insouciance to Navalny’s predicament.

Conversely, Julian Assange has garnered worldwide attention and support. Despite this, he is being subjected to a slow-motion assassination. As long as Assange draws air, there is still time for a tidal wave of humanity to drown out the injustice. It may seem unfair that one political prisoner, Julian Assange, has so much of progressivists’ attention focused on his release, but Assange is crucial in making known the crimes of state and revealing the plight of other people wrongfully imprisoned or unjustly targeted by the state.

How to stop the extradition of Assange? For instance, shutting down any airport that would seek to fly Assange to the US. Protestors in Hong Kong managed to shut down their airport, so it can be done. If enough people would surround Belmarsh prison preventing entry or exit, such a mass movement signal would be a signal. The trucker convoy with its supporters disrupted Ottawa and borders in Canada for weeks, and it had an effect because soon afterwards many provincial governments relented on the mandates. So it can be done. The protests caused the Canadian government to resort to an extremely draconian Emergencies Act and siphon people’s bank accounts. Forcing the state to turn to repressive measures is contradictorily a victory for protestors. The battle for justice will not and must not be over until Assange and all others falsely imprisoned are released. Conscience demands it.

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Kim Petersen is a scuba diver, independent writer, and former co-editor of the Dissident Voice newsletter. He can be emailed at: [email protected]. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

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***

Earlier this year, the French Prime Minister, Mr. Jean Castex, warned that French elections planned for April 2022 may have to be postponed as there may be an outbreak of Marburg disease.

How does he know?

One dark evening late in February 2022, the Covid narrative left the world arena – mostly in the global west – quietly through the back door. There are some stubborn “hang-ons”, like Canada and Australia, but they may follow suit in time – when the masters tell them so.

In comes through the front door, the devastating Ukraine-Russia war. It takes over the media in storm, from one day to the next – and people’s attention is focused on the atrocities of war. It’s like an overnight switch from health, alias disease, to war. Both are deadly.

That’s almost too much. That’s not what “deep state” wants. They want a moderate switch. The media must dampen their Ukraine war reporting. They want people to enjoy life now, an illusion of “back to normal”; a personal diversion.

A clever socio-psychological game. Pretty much what Edward Bernays, nephew of Sigmund Freud and a pioneer in the field of public relations and propaganda, did to help Woodrow Wilson convince the American people to breaking America’s then “neutrality”, and that entering WWI was necessary for “national security”.

If anybody thinks that Covid is now over and we can go back to normal, or as the Swiss Health Minister recently told an interviewer, “Go and enjoy life”, they are dead wrong.

What is planned makes the Covid plandemic look like a benign training exercise.

But what is planned doesn’t necessarily have to become true. We, the People, when we are aware of the plan and awake, we have the moral, ethical and spiritual capacity to stop it. We don’t just want to enjoy life; we want a spiritual life in a long-lasting Peace. For that we have to know the plan and we have to be awake. We have to connect in binding-solidarity with each other.

Here is the plan.

Earlier this year, the French Prime Minister, Mr. Jean Castex, warned that France’s elections planned for April 2022 may have to be postponed as there may be an outbreak of Marburg disease.

Marburg disease is similar to Ebola, it causes internal bleeding and death. From 2014 to 2016, there was an unusually strong Ebola outbreak, concentrated on the West African countries of Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone. Over two years, 28,616 cases of Ebola and 11,310 deaths were reported. This is a death to case rate of about 40%; as compared to the average covid death rate of less than 0.1%.

Was the 2014-2016 Ebola outbreak a trial for what was to come in the 2020s?

If there is indeed a dark sinister cult behind the UN Agenda 2030, then as part of the cult’s rules, individual steps of their disaster agenda must be revealed to the people in one way or another. This has happened in the past on many occasions with regard to the disastrous events planned for UN Agenda 2030. Mr. Castex’s warning about a “horrible virus” [Marburg], may have been just that. See video below.

We are now in the third year of Agenda 2030, alias The Great Reset. There may be many sinister occurrences to follow covid and the war. But we the People, will not allow implementation of Agenda 2030. We shall overcome!

The goal at the end of 2030, foresees depopulation; a monumental shift of properties and assets worldwide from the lower and middle echelon, private and public assets to the top – and full digitization of everything, including the human brain, making of the surviving humans “transhumans”, who “will own nothing but be happy” (Klaus Schwab, WEF).

Again, this is their plan. We can and must resist it.

Dr. Reiner Fuellmich, German / US international lawyer and leader of the German Corona Committee, interviewed US Attorney Todd Callender, a US international lawyer, specialized in disabled-rights. He has worked in the disability health and life insurance industry for more than 20 years.

Todd is also a leading figure in the movement to defeat the US Federal government’s covid campaign, its medical establishment, and Big Pharma. The interview, part of Reiner Fuellmich’s Grand Jury, a Public Trial, often dubbed “Nuremberg 2.0”, against the criminal perpetrators of the devastating covid plandemic, was first published on 28 March 2022.

In his crucial testimony, Attorney Todd Callender provides evidence on how the wireless 5G technology can kill and produce “Marburg”. He describes in mind-blowing details, how the wireless technology in combination with the graphene oxide spiked mRNA vaxxes causes genocide.

See this full video interview (1:11:51 h); revealing and shocking to the bones – what is planned and what has already taken place in hospitals in terms of organized genocide. People, beware from hospitals. See video below.

Attorney Todd Callender also discloses how “after they modify you, they will own you”, meaning by DNA modifying mRNA-vaxxes. He is referring to a US Supreme Court Decision – No. 12–398. Argued April 15, 2013—Decided June 13, 2013. See this.

This sounds terrifying. But you must not let yourself be plunged into fear, by reading this story. Fear lowers people’s immune response, and fear makes people vulnerable – and obedient.

To resist – and we, who are not only informed but also “spiritually awaken” – we must not be fearful – and

WE SHALL OVERCOME.

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Peter Koenig is a geopolitical analyst and a former Senior Economist at the World Bank and the World Health Organization (WHO), where he has worked for over 30 years on water and environment around the world. He lectures at universities in the US, Europe and South America. He writes regularly for online journals and is the author of Implosion – An Economic Thriller about War, Environmental Destruction and Corporate Greed; and  co-author of Cynthia McKinney’s book “When China Sneezes: From the Coronavirus Lockdown to the Global Politico-Economic Crisis” (Clarity Press – November 1, 2020)

Peter is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG). He is also is a non-resident Senior Fellow of the Chongyang Institute of Renmin University, Beijing.

Featured image is from The Freedom Articles

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The global distribution of Russian gas was hampered after sanctions were imposed on the “belligerent” state. Since then, the global gas supply chain has been in shambles. It should be clear by now that the West is heavily dependent on Russian gas and that the more they attempt to isolate one of the major gas exporters, the more their actions backfire on them.

The Kremlin has recently announced that henceforth it will only accept gas payments in Ruble. Other countries have already commenced trading in local currencies, bypassing the dollar hegemony. Are we witnessing waves of de-dollarization, precipitating into the overthrow of the dollar as a global currency? 

Read our selection below and share our articles far and wide.

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New Global Economic Order Built Around China?

By Steven Sahiounie, April 01, 2022

There are now countries rushing to find ways of transacting and storing money that circumvent the US currencies and financial markets, as well as those of their allies.  Some countries are renegotiating the currency in which they get paid for trade.

Russia Demands Ruble Payments for Gas Instead Western Currencies

By Lucas Leiroz de Almeida, March 31, 2022

According to reports, Putin claimed that Western currencies are “compromised”, which is why it would be necessary to change the payment method to the Russian ruble. “Compromised” would be all currencies active in western countries considered hostile by the Russian government, which includes the US, UK and the entire European Union.

UAE Energy Chief Reaffirms Commitment to Opec+ Alliance with Russia

By Umar A Farooq, March 29, 2022

The United Arab Emirates‘ energy minister on Monday reaffirmed an oil alliance with Russia, as governments across the globe shun Moscow over its invasion of Ukraine. Suhail al-Mazrouei, a former president of the oil alliance, said that Russia, which exports roughly 10 million barrels of oil a day, is an important member of the global Opec+ energy alliance and no producer could substitute its production.

Strategic Miscalculation? Financial Sanctions Directed against Russia Could “Topple the West”?

By Thomas Fazi, March 29, 2022

The Russian central bank reacted to the sanctions by stopping capital flows out of Russia and nationalising the foreign exchange earnings of major exporters, requiring Russian firms to convert 80% of their dollar and euro earnings into rubles. It also raised interest rates to 20% in an effort to attract foreign capital.

Putin’s Rubles for Gas Demand Ensures “Unfriendly Countries” Prop Up Russian Economy

By Paul Antonopoulos, March 25, 2022

Russian President Vladimir Putin announced on March 23 that natural gas payments from so-called unfriendly countries will be made in rubles from now on. He stressed however that Russia will continue to supply gas to other countries according to the volume and price specified in previously signed contracts.

Say Hello to Russian Gold and Chinese Petroyuan

By Pepe Escobar, March 16, 2022

The Eurasian system is bound to become a serious alternative to the US dollar, as the EAEU may attract not only nations that have joined BRI (Kazakhstan, for instance, is a member of both) but also the leading players in the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) as well as ASEAN. West Asian actors – Iran, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon – will be inevitably interested.

The Coming World War for US Dollar Supremacy? US-Backed NATO Expansion to Russia’s Borders

By Timothy Alexander Guzman, February 25, 2022

The US uses its reserve currency status to control the world’s economy and its politics in its favor, for example it uses economic sanctions as a tool against countries who don’t do what Uncle Sam wants them to do.

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The doctors, scientists and journalists featured in THE VIRAL DELUSION examine in detail the scientific papers that were used to justify the pandemic, and what they find is shattering. In this shocking, five-part, seven hour documentary series, they explode every single major claim, from the “isolation” of the virus to its so-called genetic sequencing, from the discovery of how to “test” for SARS-CoV2 to the emergence of “variants” that in reality, they explain, exist only on a computer. Their point: that the so-called SARS-CoV-2 virus exists only as a mental construct whose existence in the real world has been disproven by the science itself.

They then go back through history to reveal how the birth and growth of virology has led to massive misunderstanding and misdiagnosis of disease: from Smallpox to the Spanish Flu, Polio to AIDS, to COVID itself – putting the pandemic in a whole new context better understood not as settled science, but the tragic culmination of misunderstood biology by the growing cult of virology, built on pseudo-science, to which much of the rest of the medical profession defers without understanding or examination, and the tragic consequences that have been wrought in its name.

In 2019, the virologists took center stage, and for the first time on film, their methods, miscues and tragedy they have wrought are put under the spotlight, revealing the extraordinary leaps of fantasy buried in their methodology, the contradictions quietly acknowledged in their papers, their desperate effort to change language to justify their findings, the obvious incongruence of their conclusions and the extraordinary stakes for our entire society in whether we continue to blindly follow their lead into a full-scale war against nature itself.

Featuring:

Andrew Kaufman, MD; Tom Cowan, MD; Stefan Lanka, Virologist; Torsten Engelbrecht, journalist; Claus Kohnlein, MD; Kevin Corbett, PhD RN; David Rasnick, Biochemist PhD; Mark Bailey, MD; Dawn Lester and David Parker, Authors; Stefano Scoglio, Biochemist PhD; Saeed Qureeshi, Chemist PhD; Celia Farber, Journalist; Harold Wallach, PhD; Pam Popper, PhD, ND; Charles Geshekter, PhD; Amandha Vollmer ND, Jim West, Author; Larry Palevsky MD; and more.

The opening episode, which is two hours and twenty minutes, will be available for free from March 21st until May 21st. The full package of episodes is available for only $11.99. CLICK HERE

Watch the trailer below.

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First published on May 21, 2021

***

Twenty-three years ago the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia was subjected to the 55th straight day of bombardment from the then 19-member North Atlantic Treaty Organization, with 23 days more to go. Many families in Belgrade, Novi Sad and Niš daily fled to bomb shelters during the aerial onslaught. The permanent trauma inflicted on millions of civilians, especially children, is perhaps impossible to calculate. And it has been denied or ignored by Europe and the world. As forgotten as the cluster bomb fragments and depleted uranium left behind by NATO’s “humanitarian intervention.”

The air war was justified by U.S. President Bill Clinton, British Prime Minister Tony Blair and NATO Secretary General Javier Solana as a noble crusade to stop, to employ an expression not uncommon at the time, the “worst genocide since Hitler” in the Serbian province of Kosovo. The operation, Operation Allied Force for NATO, Operation Noble Anvil for the U.S., began with a barrage of Tomahawk cruise missiles fired from ships and submarines in the Adriatic Sea. In all over 1,000 NATO military aircraft flew 30,000 combat sorties over a nation of slightly more than 10 million people, two million of those in Kosovo; a military bloc whose combined population at the time was some 850 million and which included three of the world’s nuclear powers.

During the war, arguably the most lopsided since the U.S.’s invasion of Grenada in 1983, American and other Western officials maintained a steady drumbeat of increasingly hyperbolic, and criminally unconscionable, claims of ethnic Albanians in Kosovo killed by Yugoslav forces. On May 16 Defense Secretary William Cohen appeared on Face the Nation and said: “We’ve now seen about 100,000 military-aged men missing….They may have been murdered.” Almost immediately afterward another American official raised that number to 200,000.

The scare tactics worked, as NATO’s top military commander, General Wesley Clark, was able to continue daily bombing missions over the small nation months after all targets of military value had been hit and hit repeatedly. A passenger train, a religious procession, a refugee column, Radio Television of Serbia headquarters. a vacuum cleaner factory, bridges, marketplaces, apartment courtyards, the Swiss embassy in Belgrade and the Chinese embassy as well, with three journalists killed and 27 other Chinese injured. Cluster bombs, graphite bombs and depleted uranium ordnance were used widely. No one, not a single individual, has been held accountable for those war crimes. Nor for what should be a war crime and one of the most grave at that: intentionally fabricating and exaggerating atrocity stories to agitate for and escalate a war. Few Western politicians and journalists would have escaped that charge over their roles in 1999.

When the Yugoslav government of President Slobodan Milosevic was compelled to accede to NATO diktat on June 10, over 200,000 ethnic Serbs, Roma and other minorities left Kosovo with Yugoslav troops, and NATO and its so-called Kosovo Liberation Army cutthroats – for whom and with whom it waged the war – marched into Kosovo. After the latter arrived even more, perhaps a hundred thousand or more, Serbs, Roma, Turks, Jews, Egyptians, Ashkali and members of other ethnic minority communities, along with no few Albanians, fled the province. Numerous Serbs, Roma and Albanian “collaborators” were murdered in what the Western press invariably described as revenge killings. (During the air war Britain’s Daily Telegraph reported 100,000 ethnic Albanians fled Kosovo to other parts of Serbia.)

The permanent displacement of hundreds of thousands of non-ethnic Albanians from Kosovo and the expulsion of over a quarter of a million Serbs from Croatia in the early 1990s are the two largest cases of irreversible ethnic cleansing in Europe since World War II. Decades later no one has been held accountable for those crimes either.

Most all of the above has been forgotten if it was ever known. That’s how it was planned. While NATO was celebrating its fiftieth-anniversary jubilee in Washington, D.C. and inducting the first new members since Spain in 1986, and former members of the Warsaw Pact at that – the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland – a high-profile, low-risk war was just the thing to launch new global NATO on the world.

The victim, Yugoslavia, had been mortally wounded; four years later it no longer existed, even on the map. The corpse was expected to rest silently.

But its ghost refuses to disappear. On May 14 Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic, responding to a comment by his Slovenian counterpart, Borut Pahor, to the effect that there should be no redrawing of borders in Europe, said:

“We have a differing view on Kosovo’s independence. When I hear that, as Pahor says, there are no border changes without conflict, I agree, and that should be clear to all who have been generating conflicts and wanted to change Serbia’s borders.” That is a reference to the West – the U.S., European Union and NATO – successfully wrenching Kosovo from Serbia in 2008, in violation of the 1999 Kumanovo Agreement. Vucic backed up his contention that national borders should not be arbitrarily or unilaterally changed by stating that only borders recognized by the United Nations are legitimate. However, he said that a contrary practice had been at work since 1999, the result of “the brutal hypocrisy of Western powers that have no principles, or have principles as needed.”

President Vucic was in Prague, the Czech Republic on May 18 and met there with President Miloš Zeman. Zeman was prime minister of the Czech Republic in 1999 when his country joined NATO and the war against Yugoslavia was launched.

The Czech leader’s spokesman, Jiri Ovcacec, confirmed that “President Miloš Zeman presented public apologies to President Aleksandar Vucic for the [NATO] bombardments of Yugoslavia in 1999,” and that he “personally asked the Serbian people for forgiveness.”

During the war Prague refused NATO’s warplanes the right to land in Czech territory. Today Zeman himself told the press after his meeting with Serbia’s president:

“We were hopelessly looking for at least one more [NATO] country that would join us and come out against [the bombardments of Yugoslavia]. We remained all alone.” Displaying that rarest of virtues for a politician, penitence, he also said his government should have exercised more resolve in demanding the end of the bombing once it had commenced.

When the Czech Republic joined NATO in 1999 it was accompanied by Hungary and Poland, fellow members of the Visegrad Four group in Central Europe. The fourth member, Slovakia, was not invited because the party of three-time prime minister Vladimír Mečiar was not to the liking of the U.S., NATO and the EU. The following year Mečiar dropped out of politics, with his Movement for a Democratic Slovakia party colleague Augustín Marián Húska disclosing: “The NATO war against Yugoslavia in 1999 was also a signal to us, to not pursue any vision of political independence anymore. We have seen what will happen to forces that want to be independent.”

On May 7 the governments of Serbia and China commemorated the NATO bombing of China’s embassy in Serbia in 1999. Serbian Minister of Labor, Employment, Veteran and Social Affairs Dr. Darija Kisic Tepavcevic, head of the Association of Journalists of Serbia Vladimir Radomirovic, Chinese ambassador to Serbia Chen Bo and others laid wreaths in honor of three Chinese journalists killed in the attack.

The Chinese ambassador thanked the Serbian people for keeping alive the memory of the victims who, she said, “paid the price of truth, justice, and righteousness with their lives.

“We will never forget the crime conducted by the aggressor, who most brutally violated human rights, in the name of the so-called protection of human rights.”

If most of the rest of the world has forgotten NATO’s first war and its bloody emergence on the world stage, China and Serbia have not.

On March 26, to mark the beginning of NATO’s air war against Yugoslavia and Serbia’s Remembrance Day for the Victims of the NATO Aggression, Hua Chunying, spokesperson for the Chinese Foreign Ministry, stated:

“China would like to remind NATO that they still owe a debt of blood to the Chinese people….The dead have passed away, but the living need more vigilance and reflection.”

It’s worth quoting him further as a reminder that the crime of 1999 has indeed haunted not only Europe but the world ever since it was perpetrated; that what is seemingly past is really both prologue and precedent.

“Whether in Yugoslavia, Iraq, Libya or Syria, we should never forget the lives of ordinary people lost to repeated bombardment, the crumbling walls under the shells, the glorious historical sites consumed by the flames.

“The US and some Western countries have kept their mouths open about human rights and kept their mouths shut about their responsibilities….When they blatantly launched a war against a sovereign country without the Security Council’s authorization, causing hundreds of thousands of deaths and the dispersal of millions of people, did they ever care about the human rights of the people in those countries? Is this what they mean by international rules? Shouldn’t they be held accountable for their war actions?”

Those questions, which had they been asked twenty-two years ago might have spared millions of lives in the nations the Chinese diplomat enumerated and others, need to be asked now and with a passion and insistence hitherto absent.

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Rick Rozoff, renowned author and geopolitical analyst, actively involved in opposing war, militarism and interventionism for over fifty years. He manages the Anti-Bellum and For peace, against war website.

He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG)

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The West continues to work against peace in Ukraine. According to recent reports, the British government is “concerned” about the progress of the peace talks, mainly due to Kiev’s alleged initiative to propose significant concessions. The news was published by The Times website, which mentions anonymous British government sources in its text. If the veracity of the information contained in the article is confirmed, this will be further evidence of the destabilizing role played by the UK in the conflict.

According to The Times, Britain is “concerned” that the US, France, and Germany will pressure Ukraine to “settle” quickly and make significant concessions during the recent peace talks with Russia. An anonymous senior British government source reportedly said there were concerns that other Western countries were “eager” to secure a peace deal as soon as possible, encouraging Kiev to accept all Russian-imposed conditions.

This “fear” was allegedly the reason British Prime Minister Boris Johnson called Ukrainian President Volodymir Zelensky the last weekend. During the conversation, Johnson described Vladimir Putin as a “liar and a bully” and “alerted” that the Russian leader would try to wear down the Ukrainian government and force it to make concessions during the Ankara peace talks, which ended without any relevant results.

The source also stated that the hegemonic thought among British government officials is that Ukraine should reinforce its military measures before seeking a diplomatic solution, using full power against Russian troops. For London, what seems to be the worst-case scenario for Western interests is a retreat by Kiev on territorial issues. In this sense, there should be a maximum effort to bring the military resistance to the last consequences, so that, in addition to international sanctions (which he said that must be increased further), Russia will then be forced to leave Ukraine including from Donbass and Crimea, which Kiev continues to claim.

An interesting point to mention is that Liz Truss, the UK Foreign Minister, said in an interview on Sunday 27 March that Western sanctions on Moscow should only be lifted in the event of a complete withdrawal of Russian troops from the Ukrainian territory. In other words, Truss believes it is necessary to maintain a policy of absolute coercion throughout the entire Russian Special Operation, not admitting the possibility of easing sanctions in advance to initiate a diplomatic dialogue. In fact, it is a position somewhat similar to that pointed out by the anonymous interviewee of The Times, which makes the situation really worrying.

Considering that goodwill and mutual trust are elementary diplomatic principles, it is difficult for any peace talks to be fruitful if one of the parties starts the debate by ruling out withdrawing its troops. Russia has so far reduced the intensity of operations during talks on all occasions that there has been a diplomatic meeting between Russian and Ukrainian relations. So, it would also be diplomatic kindness for the West to at least ease some sanctions during the negotiations, showing willingness to really reach a peaceful end.

However, returning to the topic reported by The Times, it is curious to note the destabilizing role that London is adopting. It is known by any experts that the Ukrainian armed forces do not have the material conditions necessary to carry out the resistance for a long time, which is one of the main reasons why a peaceful diplomatic agreement is considered a good option. The Russian military superiority is absolute and, in other words, there is simply no possibility for the Ukrainians to effectively counter Russian troops.

Of course, this fact is well known to British government officials, who apparently still insist on advocating that military resistance be promoted. In practice, what London simply wants is for the West to increase its participation, sending more money, weapons and fighters. Some recent UK actions corroborate this narrative. It is necessary to remember, for example, that many western mercenaries who are fighting on the side of Kiev are actually British veterans and even members of elite divisions. Indeed, for the UK, peace seems to be the least important thing.

It seems wrong, however, to believe that other countries really have any interest in making Ukraine consider concessions. On the contrary, so far Kiev has shown no interest in surrendering on practically any relevant point, making bilateral dialogue virtually impossible. It simply appears that London is adopting such a radical stance that even some more realistic positions on the part of its allies sound like “eager” to achieve peace.

The UK is interested in projecting itself internationally with the ongoing conflict, leading a global pro-sanctions and pro-military aid campaign to Kiev. The US historically occupies this type of position, but there is strong popular pressure on Biden to avoid a new war, which leads Washington to take a more realistic stance. Only in the EU there is a more genuine interest in peace, as the conflict directly affects the European continent and impacts trade and energy supply, leading Europeans to also act realistically when advising Zelensky. The UK, on the other hand, as not a member of the EU and being free from US social pressures, remains able to occupy this position of “global anti-Russian leader”, which is why it has acted in such a destabilizing way.

It is questionable, however, how much force the UK will have to actually encourage Kiev to carry out military resistance. With the undeniable Russian victory and global demand for peace, the most likely scenario for the short-medium future is that Boris Johnson himself will soon be increasingly questioned by the British public opinion, losing legitimacy due to his pro-war positions.

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Lucas Leiroz is a researcher in Social Sciences at the Rural Federal University of Rio de Janeiro; geopolitical consultant.

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On Thursday, President Joe Biden ordered the largest release ever from the US emergency oil reserve in a futile attempt to bring down gasoline prices that have soared to record levels following the Russo-Ukraine War. Starting in May, the United States will release 1 million barrels per day (bpd) of crude oil for six months from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR), amounting to 180 million barrels in total, which is equivalent to only two days of the global demand.

Invoking the fabled trope of American patriotism, Biden urged the consumers not to hesitate from paying twice the amount while filling gas tanks in order for the military-industrial complex to reap billions of dollars windfalls by providing anti-aircraft and anti-armor munitions to NATO’s proxies in Ukraine.

“This is a moment of consequence and peril for the world, and pain at the pump for American families. It’s also a moment of patriotism,” Biden said at an event at the White House.

The US announcement came a day before the International Energy Agency member countries were set to meet on Friday to discuss a further emergency oil release that would follow their March 1 agreement to release about 60 million barrels that would cover only two-third of a single day’s oil demand, as the global net oil consumption per day is over 90 million barrels. With over 10 million barrels daily oil production capacity, Russia, alongside Saudi Arabia, is the world’s largest oil producer accounting for providing over 10% of the world’s crude oil demand.

As far as military power is concerned, Russia with its enormous arsenal of conventional as well as nuclear weapons more or less equals the military power of the United States. But it’s the much more subtle and insidious tactic of economic warfare for which Russia seems to have no answer following the break-up of the Soviet Union in the nineties and consequent dismantling of the once-thriving communist bloc, spanning Eastern Europe, Latin America and many socialist states in Asia and Africa in the sixties.

The current global neocolonial order is being led by the United States and its West European clients since the signing of the Bretton Woods Accord in 1945 following the Second World War. Historically, any state, particularly those inclined to pursue socialist policies, that dared to challenge the Western monopoly over global trade and economic policies was internationally isolated and its national economy went bankrupt over a period of time. But for once, it appears Washington might shoot itself in the foot by going overboard in its relentless efforts to punish Russia for invading Ukraine.

On March 17, Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe and Anoosheh Ashoori, two British-Iranian nationals held in Iran since 2016 and 2017, respectively, were unexpectedly set free and were permitted to travel to the United Kingdom. In return, the British government, in what gave the impression of a ransom payment, triumphantly announced it had settled a £400m debt owed to Iran from the seventies.

The thaw in the frosty relations between the Western powers and Iran signaled that a tentative understanding on reviving the Iran nuclear deal was also reached behind the scenes, particularly in the backdrop of the Ukraine crisis and the Western efforts to internationally isolate Russia. After sanctioning Russia’s 10 million barrels daily crude oil output, the industrialized world is desperately in need of Iran’s 5 million barrels oil production capacity to keep the already inflated oil price from causing further pain to consumers.

Last month, Venezuela similarly released two incarcerated US citizens in an apparent goodwill gesture toward the Biden administration following a visit to Caracas by a high-level US delegation, despite the fact that Washington still officially recognizes Nicolas Maduro’s detractor Juan Guaido as Venezuela’s “legitimate president.” Nonetheless, Venezuela is one of Latin America’s largest oil producers and opening the international market to its heavy crude might provide a welcome relief in the time of global oil crunch.

Niftily forestalling the likelihood of strengthening of mutually beneficial bonds between China and Russia when the latter is badly in need for economic relief, the United States pre-emptively accused China of pledging to sell military hardware to Russia, when the latter, itself one of the world’s leading arms exporters, didn’t even make any such request to China.

US National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan held an intense seven-hour meeting in Rome with his Chinese counterpart Yang Jiechi on March 15, and warned China of “grave consequences” of evading Western sanctions on Russia. Besides wielding the stick of economic sanctions, he must also have dangled the carrot of ending trade war against China initiated by the Trump administration and continued by the Biden administration until Russia invaded Ukraine in late February.

Despite vowing to treat the Saudi kingdom as a “pariah” in the run-up to Nov. 2020 presidential elections, the Wall Street Journal reported last month the White House unsuccessfully tried to arrange calls between President Biden and the de facto leaders of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates as the US was working to build international support for Ukraine and contain a surge in oil prices.

“Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and the U.A.E.’s Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed al Nahyan both declined U.S. requests to speak to Mr. Biden in recent weeks, the officials said, as Saudi and Emirati officials have become more vocal in recent weeks in their criticism of American policy in the Gulf.

“‘There was some expectation of a phone call, but it didn’t happen,’ said a U.S. official of the planned discussion between the Saudi Prince Mohammed and Mr. Biden. ‘It was part of turning on the spigot [of Saudi oil].’

“But the Saudis and Emiratis have declined to pump more oil, saying they are sticking to a production plan approved by OPEC. Both Prince Mohammed and Sheikh Mohammed took phone calls from Russian President Vladimir Putin last week, after declining to speak with Mr. Biden.”

To add insult to the injury, Saudi Arabia has reportedly invited Chinese President Xi Jinping for an official visit to the kingdom that could happen as soon as May, and is also considering pegging its vast oil reserves in yuan, a move that could spell end to the petrodollar hegemony.

The United States and Britain were ramping up pressure on Saudi Arabia to pump more oil and join efforts to isolate Russia, while Riyadh had shown little readiness to respond and had revived a threat to ditch dollars in its oil sales to China, Reuters reported last month.

“If Saudi Arabia does that, it will change the dynamics of the forex market,” said a source with knowledge of the matter, adding that such a move—which the source said Beijing had long requested and which Riyadh threatened as far back as 2018—might prompt other buyers to follow.

Trump aptly observed: “Now Biden is crawling around the globe on his knees begging and pleading for mercy from Saudi Arabia, Iran and Venezuela.” It appears quite plausible that in its relentless efforts to internationally isolate Russia, the Biden administration is likely to unravel the whole neocolonial economic order imposed on the world after the signing of the Bretton Woods Accord following the Second World War in 1945.

In order to bring home the significance of the Persian Gulf’s oil in the energy-starved industrialized world, here are a few stats from the OPEC data: Saudi Arabia has the world’s largest proven crude oil reserves of 266 billion barrels and its daily oil production is 10 million barrels; Iran and Iraq each has 150 billion barrels reserves and has the capacity to produce 5 million barrels per day each; while UAE and Kuwait each has 100 billion barrels reserves and produces 3 million barrels per day each; thus, all the littoral states of the Persian Gulf, together, hold 788 billion barrels, over half of world’s 1477 billion barrels proven oil reserves.

In many ways, the current oil crunch caused by Washington’s unilateral decision to impose economic sanctions on Russia’s vital energy sector is similar to the oil crisis of 1973. The 1973 collective Arab oil embargo against the West following the Arab-Israel War lasted only for a short span of six months during which the price of oil quadrupled, but Washington became so paranoid after the embargo that it put in place a ban on the export of crude oil outside the US borders, and began keeping sixty-day stock of reserve fuel for strategic and military needs dubbed the Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR).

Regarding the reciprocal relationship between Washington and the Gulf’s autocrats, it bears mentioning that in April 2016, the Saudi foreign minister threatened that the Saudi kingdom would sell up to $750 billion in treasury securities and other assets if the US Congress passed a bill that would allow Americans to sue the Saudi government in the United States courts for its role in the September 11, 2001 terror attack – though the bill was eventually passed, Saudi authorities have not been held accountable for nurturing terrorism.

It’s noteworthy that $750 billion was only the Saudi investment in the United States, if we add its investment in the Western Europe and the investments of the oil-rich UAE, Kuwait and Qatar in the Western economies, the sum total would amount to trillions of dollars of Gulf’s investments in the economies of North America and Western Europe.

Additionally, regarding the Western defense production industry’s sales of arms to the Gulf Arab States, a report authored by William Hartung of the US-based Center for International Policy found that the Obama administration had offered Saudi Arabia more than $115 billion in weapons, military equipment and training during its eight-year tenure.

Similarly, the top items in Trump’s agenda for his maiden visit to Saudi Arabia in May 2017 were: firstly, he threw his weight behind the idea of the Saudi-led “Arab NATO” to counter Iran’s influence in the region; and secondly, he announced an unprecedented arms package for Saudi Arabia.

The package included between $98 billion and $128 billion in arms sales and, over a period of 10 years, total sales could reach $400 billion, as Donald Trump himself alluded to in his conversations with American journalist Bob Woodward described in the book “Rage.”

President Donald Trump boasted that he protected Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman from congressional scrutiny after the brutal assassination of Saudi dissident Jamal Khashoggi, who was murdered at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul in October 2018.

“I saved his ass,” Trump said in 2018, according to the book. “I was able to get Congress to leave him alone. I was able to get them to stop.” When Woodward pressed Trump if he believed the Saudi crown prince ordered the assassination himself, Trump responded: “He says very strongly that he didn’t do it. Bob, they spent $400 billion over a fairly short period of time,” Trump said.

“And you know, they’re in the Middle East. You know, they’re big. Because of their religious monuments, you know, they have the real power. They have the oil, but they also have the great monuments for religion. You know that, right? For that religion,” Trump noted. “They wouldn’t last a week if we’re not there, and they know it,” he added.

In this reciprocal relationship, the US provides security to the ruling families of the Gulf Arab States by providing weapons and troops; and in return, the Gulf’s petro-sheikhs contribute substantial investments to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars to the Western economies.

All the recent wars and conflicts aside, the unholy alliance between the Western powers and the Gulf’s petro-monarchies is much older. The British Empire stirred uprising in Arabia by instigating the Sharifs of Mecca to rebel against the Ottoman rule during the First World War, as the Ottoman Empire had sided with Germany during the war.

After the Ottoman Empire collapsed following the war, the British Empire backed King Abdul Aziz (Ibn-e-Saud) in his violent insurgency against Sharif of Mecca Hussein bin Ali, because the latter was demanding too much of a price for his loyalty, the unification of the whole of Arabian peninsula, including the Levant, Iraq and the Gulf Emirates, under his suzerainty as a bribe for stabbing the Ottoman Empire in the back during the First World War.

Consequently, the Western powers abandoned the Sharifs of Mecca, though the scions of the family were rewarded with kingdoms in Iraq and Jordan, imposed the Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1916 dividing Arabs into small states at loggerheads with each other, and lent their support to the nomadic Sauds of Najd.

King Abdul Aziz defeated the Sharifs and united his dominions into the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia in 1932 with the financial and military support of the British Empire. However, by then the tide of the British Imperialism was subsiding and the Americans inherited the former territorial possessions of the British Empire.

At the end of the Second World War on 14 February 1945, President Franklin D. Roosevelt held a historic meeting with King Abdul Aziz at Great Bitter Lake in the Suez Canal onboard USS Quincy, and laid the foundations of an enduring alliance which persists to this day. During the course of that momentous meeting, among other things, it was decided to set up the United States Military Training Mission (USMTM) to Saudi Arabia to “train, advise and assist” the Saudi Arabian Armed Forces.

Aside from USMTM, the US-based Vinnell Corporation, which is a private military company based in the US and a subsidiary of the Northrop Grumman, used over a thousand Vietnam War veterans to train and equip 125,000 strong Saudi Arabian National Guards (SANG) which is not under the authority of the Saudi Ministry of Defense and acts as the Praetorian Guards of the House of Saud.

In addition, the Critical Infrastructure Protection Force, whose strength is numbered in tens of thousands, is also being trained and equipped by the US to guard the critical Saudi oil infrastructure along its eastern Persian Gulf coast where 90% of 266 billion barrels Saudi oil reserves are located.

Currently, the US has deployed tens of thousands of American troops in aircraft carriers and numerous military bases in the Persian Gulf that include sprawling al-Dhafra airbase in Abu Dhabi, al-Udeid airbase in Qatar and a naval base in Bahrain where the Fifth Fleet of the US Navy is based.

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Nauman Sadiq is an Islamabad-based geopolitical and national security analyst focused on geo-strategic affairs and hybrid warfare in the Af-Pak and Middle East regions. His domains of expertise include neocolonialism, military-industrial complex and petro-imperialism. He is a regular contributor of diligently researched investigative reports to Global Research.

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Just as everything you were told about Covid by the media and health and government officials was false, so is everything you have been told by the same propagandistic liars about Ukraine. Americans have had nothing but lies since the assassination of US President John F. Kennedy, of his brother, US Senator Robert Kennedy President-in-Waiting, Martin Luther King, the Vietnam war, 9/11, Saddam Hussian’s nonexistent “weapons of mass destruction,” Assad’s “use of chemical weapons,” Iranian nukes, the extraordinary lies about Kaddafi, Covid pandemic, Russian invasions. The entire Western World lives in The Mattrix, a world created by propaganda. The vast majority of people in the West have no idea of the reality in which they live. This makes them impotent and completely unable to protect their freedom. They are sitting ducks for tyranny which is fast enclosing around them.

Take the Ukraine narrative, for example. The story as presented to the public by the Western media has no relationship to reality.  The Ukraine narrative has collapsed as completely as the Covid narrative.  There will be no going back to it.  The narrative will simply be dropped as the next crisis–inflation perhaps or a newly released pathogen–takes the front page.

There was never a “Russian invasion” of Ukraine comparable to Vietnam, Iraq or Afghanistan.  Russian military focus was on the Donbass region in east and south Ukraine.  Inhabited by Russians and part of Russia herself until Soviet leaders transferred it, like Crimea, into Ukraine for their reasons.  When the US overthrew the democratically elected Ukrainian government in 2014 and took control over Ukraine, the Crimean and Donbass Russians voted overwhelmingly to be reunited with Russia.  The Kremlin accepted Crimea but not Donbass.

This was a strategic blunder demonstrating a lack of awareness on the part of the Russian government.  Immediately the neo-Nazi remnants in west Ukraine, whose forebears had fought for Hitler against Russia in WW II, began abusing the Russian population in the Donbass region in the east. The American puppet government in Kiev followed up by banning the use of the Russian language. 

To protect themselves, the Donbass Russians declared their independence in the form of two republics, the Donetsk and Luhansk Republics.  Ukrainian troops and neo-Nazi militias began attacking these “breakaway republics.”  They have been shelling with artillery Donbass villages, towns, and cities for 8 years, killing thousands of civilians, and the Ukrainian forces, although twice defeated  by hastily assembled forces in the Donbass, managed to gain control over large areas of the breakaway republics.

It was the deployment of a 100,000 or more Ukrainian force on the shrunken borders of Donbass for an invasion to reconquer the territory that provoked the Russian intervention. Washington’s refusal to give the Kremlin a security guarantee was a second reason for the Russian military intervention.  Russia told Washington in completely clear language that Russia would not permit Ukraine to be a member of NATO.  Nevertheless, Washington persisted in its provocation.

Most of Russia’s military intervention in Ukraine is focused on clearing Ukrainian and neo-Nazi forces out of Donbass.  This is the reason for Putin’s go-slow war that rules out heavy weapons use on civilian areas.

The civilians are Russians, and, as Putin said, “we went in to liberate these people, not to kill them.”

The West’s media whores and government officials misrepresent the Russians’ intention of avoiding the death of Russian civilians as a sign of a “stalled Russian invasion,” as CNN and the NPR whores proclaim.  Some of the Western media whores go even further and say it is a “Russian defeat.”

If there is a Russian defeat, it will happen in negotiations, not on the battlefield.  Russians are too trusting to be negotiators and never do well.

The battle field has a higher standard of performance.  Before any Russian troops entered Donbass, the Ukrainian military infrastructure, air force, and navy were completely destroyed.  The Ukrainian army is incapable of action. It has no communication, no air cover, and is cut off from supplies.

Russia’s reason for the peace negotiations is to avoid destroying the Ukrainian troops that the neo-Nazi commissars require to fight to the last man.  Russia doesn’t seem to understand that they are negotiating with a “government” that is not in control of anything.

The Russians have deployed 200,000 troops against Ukraine’s 600,000 soldiers trained and armed by the US and UK.  The Ukrainian army, which outnumbered the Russians 3 to 1, was destroyed as a fighting force even quicker than the Russians destroyed the US and Israeli armed and trained Georgian army that invaded South Ossetia in August, 2008. 

The only reason that any building, any Ukrainian exists in Ukraine is Russian restraint.

The Kremlin is confident that Russia can achieve its objectives without destroying Ukraine.  This is true militarily, but I do believe that the Russian government is too gullible to be successful in negotiation.  Russia still has a moral fiber and mistakenly inputs one to the West. The West does not have any moral fiber.  Russians do not know how to negotiate with “The Devil”.   Remember Hugo Chavez’s speech at the UN.  Remember U.S. Secretary Albright saying on national TV that America’s murder of 500,000 Iraqi children “was worth it.” Yes, worth it for Israel’s dominance of the Middle East.

Americans, British, French, Germans, Japan, all of the US empire do not understand how they have been betrayed, how they have been implicated in monstrous crimes, how they have been brainwashed by lies from a media that they stupidly trusted, how Washington has destroyed the reputation of the United States, or why most of the world hates America.

Neither do they understand that the American Empire is at its end. What the sanctions have done is to destroy the dollar-based world that allowed the Americans to impose the financing of their huge trade deficit, due largely to US corporations offshoring their production for the US market, on the rest of the world.

Russia, China, central and east Asia will now create their own methods of payment separate from the West. This will destroy dollar hegemony and American power.

We come full circle. The American hubris created an arrogance that could not prevail over Russian, Chinese, and  Indian determination to exist as sovereign nations.  American globalism, Washington’s method of exercising hegemony, is collapsing.  The idiots in Washington have themselves collapsed their ruling system by mindless sanctions that are driving the East out of the dollar system.  

Russia has only one problem.  Russia’s problem is internal.  The problem consists of  elements of the intellectual and upper class and financial system who see their interests allied with the West. These traitors, tolerated by the Kremlin, are de facto Western agents created during the Yeltsin regime by the American overlords.

In the Russian government their most powerful person is the head of the Russian central bank whose policies serve the West and not Russia.  Putin, despite the warnings from Russia’s only economist, Sergey Glazyev, trusts the pro-American head of the Russian central bank with Russia’s future. The Russian central bank, which has never served Russia, is Washington’s greatest asset in its hopes to defeat Russia.  It is Putin’s blindness to this threat that is the dagger at Russia’s heart.

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Dr. Paul Craig Roberts writes on his blog site, PCR Institute for Political Economy, where this article was originally published. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

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Pakistan’s opposition is trying to overthrow Prime Minister Imran Khan with a no-confidence motion. Khan says the US sent him a threatening letter and he has proof of foreign funding for a regime-change operation, aimed at reversing his independent foreign policy – like his alliance with China and Russia and support for Palestine.

While the world’s attention is understandably focused on the crisis in Ukraine, equally grave developments are taking place elsewhere. Perhaps the most consequential – and underreported – is a regime-change operation underway in Pakistan.

This March, opposition lawmakers in Pakistan’s parliament launched a “no-confidence” motion aimed at overthrowing Prime Minister Imran Khan.

Khan, who was democratically elected in 2018, has warned that an “effort is being made to topple the government with the help of foreign funds in our country.”

“Our people are being used. Mostly unknowingly, but some knowingly are using this money against us,” Khan said at a rally on March 27. He added that the government had proof of these payments.

Khan argued that these external interests seek to reverse his independent foreign policy. He recalled his predecessor Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, a Pakistani prime minister who was overthrown in a US-backed coup in 1977, then executed following a show trial.

Bhutto was punished “when he tried to bring in a free foreign policy to the country,” Khan declared.

Khan specifically singled out the United States for meddling to try to remove him from power. He said he received a letter from Washington that threatened him for refusing to allow it to establish US military bases in Pakistan.

He cautioned that the opposition is collaborating with the United States and other foreign countries in its no-confidence motion against him.

These warnings came just over a month after Khan publicly criticized the US government for cynically using Pakistan to advance Washington’s interests. He also simultaneously praised China for always acting as a “friend” of Islamabad.

“Whenever the US needed us, they established relations, and Pakistan became a frontline state [against the Soviet Union], and then abandoned it and slapped sanctions on us,” Khan complained.

On the other hand, “China is a friend which has always stood by Pakistan,” he contrasted.

The idea that a regime-change plot could even be conceived of, let alone attempted, in a nuclear-armed country of more than 220 million may seem shocking and preposterous. On the surface, it strikes as incredulous considering that Islamabad is a major power, arguably the most powerful within the Muslim-majority world.

Nevertheless, it is precisely these characteristics that make Pakistan so geopolitically important.

The following is an analysis of the principal reasons for why hostile foreign elites have decided that Prime Minister Imran Khan must go:

1. Imran Khan opposes US foreign policy

Imran Khan was always dubbed a “fanatic” – i.e., overly critical of US foreign policy.

Khan strongly opposed Washington’s so-called “war on terror,” and especially the war in Afghanistan, arguing that military solutions were both immoral and counterproductive. For this he was long disparagingly referred to as “Taliban Khan.”

What bruised Washington’s ego even more was that Khan turned out to be right. The American debacle in Afghanistan that ended with Kabul falling to the Taliban was perceived by the US as a victory for Pakistan, and for Khan in particular.

The US is unwilling to forgive Khan for its own humiliation in Afghanistan, even though he had little to do with it.

2. Khan’s anti-colonial voice on the international stage

Imran Khan’s speech at the United Nations General Assembly in September 2019 was condemned as overly audacious. A Pakistani leader speaking so strongly on issues of global injustice made Western elites feel that he had become way too big for his shoes.

At least three of the points that he emphasized in his remarks rubbed Western supremacists in the wrong way.

First, Khan condemned powerful Western countries for enabling elites of the Global South to plunder their own societies.

Second, he highlighted Islamophobia as not a marginal affair, but as a dangerous phenomenon structuring our global order – and one that the world must take seriously.

Relatedly, Khan scathingly criticized the insidious characterization of some Muslims as “moderate” and others as “radical.” These maliciously constructed distinctions have been essential to the political lexicon of the “war on terror.”

Third, Khan spoke passionately about the Kashmiri struggle against Indian occupation in a way that few Pakistani (or any other) leaders have.

His rhetorical performance seemed to be a page out of the anti-colonial playbook of the 1960s.

3. Khan deepened Pakistan’s friendship with China

Xi Jinping Meets with Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan (Source: Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the PRC)

Perhaps most concerning to Western elites is how Imran Khan has strengthened Pakistan’s decades-old relationship with China.

Islamabad and Beijing are key partners in infrastructure projects aimed at connecting the region. They work together in the China Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) and the Belt and Road Initiative.

Pakistan is also a member of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO)

 

 

Khan received a very warm reception at the Beijing Olympics this February. It was a clear affirmation that Islamabad remains Beijing’s close ally.

In addition, President Xi Jinping and the Chinese leadership deem Khan to be a Pakistani leader genuinely interested in cooperation for Pakistan’s development, free from the enormous corruption and incompetence that characterize other political forces in the country.

Whether this is true or not, Beijing believes it. And Xi has built a very close relationship with Khan personally.

Furthermore, the fact that China’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi attended the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) Summit in Islamabad this March spoke volumes to China’s embrace of Pakistan’s leadership within the Muslim world.

4. Khan improved Pakistan’s ties with Russia

The recent breakthrough in the relationship between Pakistan and Russia seems to have been the straw that ultimately broke the camel’s back.

Islamabad never had a close relationship with Moscow. On the contrary, Pakistan and the Soviet Union had been adversaries during the first cold war, and retained a level of bitterness and distance. Moscow was always considered a strong ally of New Delhi.

But on the sidelines of the Beijing Olympics, Russian President Putin extended an invitation to Prime Minister Khan. Seeing an opportunity to at least neutralize a regional powerhouse that has historically been Islamabad’s foe, he agreed to the visit.

However, as soon as Khan landed in Moscow, Putin launched his military assault against Ukraine. Khan was lambasted by Western capitals for not condemning Russia then, and this continued when he returned home.

Khan received a strongly worded letter from European ambassadors demanding he denounce Moscow. The prime minister’s response, “we are not your slaves,” became quite popular not only in Pakistan, but in many parts of the Muslim world and the Global South.

Khan noted that his requests that these same Western countries condemn India’s behavior in Kashmir or Israel’s crimes in Palestine routinely fell on deaf ears.

Since then, Khan has consistently called for an end to the war in Ukraine and a diplomatic solution.

At the OIC summit he hosted, Khan specifically called on China to help mediate between Russia and Ukraine.

But the rapprochement with Russia appears to be where Khan crossed the rubicon.

As the global geopolitical battle lines are being rigidly drawn, Khan’s Pakistan seems to increasingly be on the “wrong side,” according to Washington.

5. Khan’s leadership in the Muslim world

The decision to host the 48th Session of the Organization of Islamic Conference (OIC) in Islamabad this March crystallized Imran Khan’s role as one of the most popular Muslim political leaders today.

Khan seemed to be trying to mimic the performance and standing of Pakistan’s prime minister in the 1970s, Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, who similarly hosted an OIC meeting in Lahore, with great fanfare and purpose.

Whatever one’s feelings about Islam and politics, there is no question that powerful external forces detest those Muslim actors that they cannot control.

Washington has continued to work closely with brutal exclusivist forces such as al-Qaeda in Syria and the House of Saud. It has also cultivated a class of “moderate” Muslims since 9/11 that have faithfully delivered an empire-friendly Islam.

There is one factor that unites all of these disparate Muslim actors: their servility to Washington.

Unfortunately, Khan does not fit these imperial categories – as much as both Western and Pakistani liberal elites would want to portray him as a “fundamentalist.”

Khan’s invocation of an Islamicate civilizational ethos that centers social justice, however incoherently articulated and scarcely implemented, also advanced a politics of countering Western supremacy.

6. Pakistan’s gradual challenge to Saudi-led hegemony in the Muslim world

Imran Khan has demonstrated a gradual tilt toward countries that, on the whole, represent a counterweight to Saudi-led hegemony throughout the Muslim world.

The 2019 Kuala Lumpur Summit called by Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad marked a milestone in this project. Nations such as Turkey, Iran, and Qatar participated.

Everyone knew that this was a significant attempt to challenge traditional Saudi dominance and influence.

Mahathir, who is very fond of Khan, invited Pakistan, and the participants understood how important the Pakistani prime minister’s presence would be.

Yet in the last minute, Islamabad pulled out.

Days before the Kuala Lumpur Summit, Khan was summoned to Riyadh, where he was warned in no uncertain terms: You are not to go to Malaysia, and if you do, the House of Saud will begin the deportation of Pakistani laborers, halt all oil subsidies and supplies, rescind any and all loans, and so on.

Khan was humiliated, but had to comply. He did not go to Kuala Lumpur.

7. Khan can’t be simply controlled by the military

Imran Khan came to power with the blessing of the Pakistani army. The commonsense understanding was that he and the military have a snug relationship and are on the same page – to the point that Khan was for a time portrayed as a puppet of the military establishment. That has turned out not to be true.

The military has always been in control of Pakistan’s national security and foreign policy. To the extent both Khan and the generals viewed things the same, all was fine.

However, Khan turned out to be no pushover. He has firmly asserted his right to be a part of any crucial national security issue – a right most previous civilian governments readily relinquished.

When the Pakistani media now incessantly reiterates “Khan has fallen out of favor with the military,” it simply means that the cat is finally out of the bag: Khan is no lackey of the men in khaki.

For Washington, this is a huge problem. Having militaries to “set things straight” when leaders of the Global South become disobedient has been standard American operating procedure.

8. Khan’s unequivocal support for Palestinian liberation

One of the most important reasons why imperialist forces demand Imran Khan’s ouster is the obvious: his consistent and unequivocal support for the Palestinian struggle.

His position became all too well-known and “controversial” when an intense campaign of pressure and threats came Islamabad’s way in 2020 and 2021.

After several Gulf monarchies normalized relations with apartheid Israel, and the extent of their coziness was finally paraded publicly, what followed was painful arm-twisting of other Muslim countries to follow suit.

For Tel Aviv, Riyadh, Abu Dhabi, and of course Washington, Islamabad was the real prize.

For months, Pakistanis experienced an onslaught of information warfare geared to make the public more amenable to the idea of recognizing and accepting Israeli apartheid.

Very quickly, it became obvious that not only the major national political parties, but also significant sections of the military high command all conveyed a willingness to entertain the idea of normalization.

The motive of Pakistan’s ruling elite was obvious: such a step, they believed, would get them into the good graces of Washington, and enable their private coffers to exponentially grow.

But Prime Minister Khan did not give in.

Prior to the hoopla around normalization, in May 2020, Khan vocally condemned Israel’s war on Gaza. He did not mince his words: “We are with Palestine. We are with Gaza.”

At the OIC summit this March, even at the risk of embarrassing some of his guests (especially from the Gulf), Khan consistently spoke about the failure of Muslim countries to stop Israeli brutality against the Palestinians.

There is no doubt that if Khan had avoided touching the Palestinian question, he would not be in so much trouble.

Criticisms of Imran Khan

While the reasons enunciated above explain why antagonistic global elites desire regime change in Islamabad, for the sake of clarity – especially for sincere liberal-progressive critics of Imran Khan – it is also worth acknowledging criticisms. Suffice to say, these are decidedly not reasons motivating this hybrid war on Pakistan:

1) Khan’s patriarchal views

2) Khan’s poor governance

3) Khan’s mismanagement of the economy

Whether any of the above is true or not – (and they certainly may be – it ought to be self-evident that these issues have never been the real motivations of global elites in their imperial interventions.

From the time that Khan first took power, we have been subject to an eerily familiar narrative. In the dirty war aimed at regime change in Syria, for years we heard the same refrain: the Assad regime is falling any day now.

We have been fed the same slogan for the past three-and-a-half years in Pakistan as well: the Imran Khan “regime” is just about to fall.

And since Khan has not “moderated” his views to be more palatable to the interests of Western capitals, the latter’s low-intensity hybrid war has been increased to full throttle.

The standard falsehoods recycled against all targets of regime change, including Latin American countries like Venezuela, now prevail in the narrative on Pakistan.

Claims that Khan is guilty of “increasingly authoritarian” rule, characterized by harsh repression of dissent and the media, fit an all too well-trodden script.

Yet it just so happens that the overwhelming majority of both the print and electronic media in Pakistan have been incessantly anti-Khan.

The hybrid warfare being waged against Pakistan – including information warfare, psyops, and the engineering of something like a “color revolution” – in no way means that there is not genuine opposition to the current government.

But in Pakistan we saw a coordinated campaign emerge this March, leading up to the opposition’s “no-confidence” motion in the parliament.

Virtually all of Pakistan’s media, dominant sections of elite civil society, and the opposition leaders and their moles in Khan’s political party, Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI), all of a sudden united in a full-scale blitzkrieg against Khan.

That this came right at the moment when Western condemnations of the prime minister had reached their peak does not seem like a mere coincidence.

As we witness geopolitical transformations of a world-historical importance, the international fault lines in this interregnum are becoming more visible.

Pakistan’s growing proximity to China and Russia and the country’s commitment to the Eurasian integration project has activated the wrath of American ruling elites.

At this particularly precarious conjuncture, Washington views Islamabad as a, if not the, major Muslim capital that needs to be controlled and severely disciplined if an independent Khan-type leader arises.

The turmoil afflicting Pakistan is the outcome of a well-coordinated strategy to discipline and punish Khan.

The opposition demand for a no-confidence vote in the National Assembly reflects the amalgamation of domestic and foreign machinations.

This vote will be a reflection of the balance of forces, resulting either in a victory for Washington and its political quislings, or the retention of at least quasi-sovereign Pakistan with Khan still in power.

The shenanigans of politicians and their maneuvering to be on the “right side” of the political winds are the games of corrupt, power-hungry elites.

None of this has anything to do with genuine grievances of Pakistanis, and is largely a diversion from the real global power play inside the country.

Hostile global elites are trying desperately to find a new, Pakistani version of Juan Guaidó (the Western minion chosen unilaterally by Washington to replace Nicolás Maduro as supposed “interim president” of Venezuela).

Whether or not Khan survives, anyone even vaguely familiar with global regime-change operations will see exactly what is going on.

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Junaid S. Ahmad teaches Religion, Law, and Politics and is the Director of the Center for the Study of Islam and Decoloniality. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

Feature image the bombing of Yugoslavia

First published on July 1, 2018

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In order to justify aggression on Yugoslavia, NATO, Western allies, public medias, international humanitarian organizations and even Western intellectuals, were fabricating the story that Serbian forces ethnically cleansed more than 800 000 Albanians from Kosovo (they said 90 % of the total Albanian population were forced to leave Kosovo).

What really happened is that Albanians were leaving Kosovo via trains towards Macedonia and Albania fleeing from the armed conflict between Yugoslavian military/police against the [US-NATO supported] Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) [UCK] a terrorist entity with links to Al Qaeda and organized crime.

Screenshots, sources CNN and NATO

Most of the fights were done in villages with Albanian majority, because terrorists used their homes as military camps and strongholds. Thousands of Serbs and Albanians were used by terrorists as a live shield.

Image left: Insignia of the KLA 

None of the Yugoslav authorities ordered the removal of the Albanians nor did the Serbs living in Kosovo. The individual crimes committed by Yugoslav forces were registered and legally processed by military and civilian authorities.

In order to frame a process of ethnic cleansing many of the Albanian refugees were leaving their homes during the day, after they have been recorded by CNN/BBC, they would then return to their homes at night. Operation “Horseshoe” coordinated by the CIA was proven to be at The Hague Tribunal as an attempt to blame Serbs for ethnic cleansing.

The Yugoslav Army and Police organized public kitchens for all citizens throughout Kosovo and Metohija, and provided regular humanitarian aid to all citizens. The first massive refugee columns of Albanians started leaving Kosovo after NATO’s aerial attacks, which caused the humanitarian catastrophe.

NATO Atrocities

NATO was intentionally targeting Albanian villages, humanitarian aid deliveries and even refugee columns in order to trigger a humanitarian disaster, incriminating Serbs for it. [Similar procedure to what is now being applied in Syria]

In the city of Đakovica on 14th April 1999, NATO targeted Albanian refugee columns and killed 75 civilians;

14 May 1999, village Koriši near Prizren, NATO hit again Albanian refugee column with cluster bombs (thermovisual bombs which reach temperature up to 2000 °C) and killed more than 100 people (NATO and world’s fake news medias accused Serbian forces for these crimes).

On 1 May 1999, near the town of Lužane, NATO hit the passenger bus killing 60 people.

In the city of Surdulica (my hometown), on 21 April 1999, NATO hit a civilian refugee shelter, where Serbian refugees from Croatia (Republic of Serbian Krajina) were settled, killing 10 people, of which 6 were children and mutilating 16.

On 27 April in the same city, NATO hit residential houses in the city center with 10 projectiles, killing 20 people, of which 12 were children, and mutilating more than 100 people.

Again in the same city, on 31 May 1999, NATO hit the hospital for respiratory diseases, hospital-gerontological center and refugee shelter, killing over-again 20 Serbian civilian refugees from Krajina and mutilating 88.

NATO also targeted Serbian refugees from Krajina in different parts of Serbia. In the city of Surdulica more than 500 residential civilian houses were destroyed during these 3 attacks, including the city waterworks, elementary school and kindergarten.

During the aggression and for several months after, the whole city didn’t have drinking water, me and my family were traveling on foot uphill for at least 8 km every days to get a potable water. After every explosion the roofs and the windows on houses were destroyed out of detonation, and the house walls were full of the missile fragments, we lived in a basement in constant fear for life throughout 78 days. 1/4 of all civilian objects in my hometown were destroyed by NATO bombing. On the 2 April 1999, NATO destroyed more than 500 civilian and religious objects in the city of Kuršumlija, including the monastery of the Holy Mother of God and St. Nicholas from 12 century…

On 30 May 1999 NATO hit the civilian Radio-television tower in the city of Vranje, using depleted uranium ammunition, the amount of measured radiation after the strike was 8 000 times higher than before the strike.

World’s average rate of malignant diseases is 2000 per 1 million people, in Serbia (without data from Kosovo) the average is 5500 per 1 million people, which is 2.7 times higher than the world’s average. In Serbia, cancer incidence rate grows 2 % per year, while in the rest of the world the incidence rate grows 0.6% per year. Death rate from leukemia has increased by  139% since 1999.

Environmental and biodiversity damage is irreversible.


1999-Statistics:

  • Concluding with the 10th of June 1999, the total number of killed civilians is between 2700- 3500 (including civilians of all nationalities)
  • Yugoslavian military and police personnel, killed: 1031
  • 12 500 people injured or wounded
  • 25 000 residential buildings destroyed
  • Destroyed: 14 airports (5 civilian), 20 hospitals, 30 health centres and medical facilities, 18 kindergartens, 190 schools, 176 cultural monuments, 50 bridges
  • 470km of the roads damaged
  • 595km of the railway damaged
  • 30% of energy infrastructure destroyed
  • 100 billion US dollars material damage (first assessment made by the Government of the FR Yugoslavia)
  • 36 250 sorties above Yugoslav airspace, done by NATO
  • Carried out more than 2 300 arial strikes by NATO airplanes on the territory of Yugoslavia.
  • NATO used 1150 aircraft
  • More than 420 000 projectiles were thrown to Yugoslavia (total mass of 22 000 tons)
  • 1300 cruise missiles fired at Yugoslavia
  • More than 31 000 projectiles with depleted uranium used (according to NATO sources), the presence of the plutonium is found at targeted locations, which proves that NATO used nuclear waste products for depleted uranium ammunition. 60% of the projectiles with depleted uranium were used against civilian objects.
  • Around 15 tons of depleted uranium was thrown to Yugoslavia in 112 identified locations: 4 locations in the South East of Serbia, 1 location in Montenegro, the rest of 107 is used in Kosovo (NATO sources). Kosovo was targeted with depleted uranium projectiles on a daily basis.
  • More than 37 000 cluster bombs thrown.
  • 20 tons of Chlorine was released in the atmosphere due to bombardment of the petroleum factory in the city of Pančevo on the 15th of April 1999.
  • 16 500 tons of kerosene was burnt on the territory of Yugoslavia due to bombardment of the petroleum factories.
  • Just in two cities: Pančevo and Novi Sad, 3 tons of mercury released into Danube due to bombardment of the chemical and petroleum factories.
  • In the city of Barič, 165 tons of hydrochloric acid released into Sava river.
  • Huge amount of the methylated mercury and heavy metals released in Sava and Danube rivers due to bombardment of the chemical and petroleum factories.
  • 3.5 billion kilograms of soil relocated due to pollution of the soil. 

Joint Land Based Aggression

NATO aggression on Yugoslavia in 1999, is known in the West only as aerial campaign, but this war was conducted along with joint land-based invasion against Yugoslavia from Albania and FYR Macedonia (operation Arrow). During the war, Yugoslavian Army was successfully defending its territory against joint land and air invasion on state border between Yugoslavia and Albania and Macedonia.

NATO forces (consisted of 12 000 soldiers in northern Albania and 17 000 forces in northern Macedonia), included: CIA and US military personnel; British SAS; Norwegian commandos (Hærens Jegerkommando) and Norwegian special units (Forsvarets Spesialkommando); Kosovo Liberation Army (which included the Atlantic Brigade of mercenaries, consisting of US born Albanians), Al Qaeda fighters and other mercenaries, total strength of 25 000 soldiers); Army of the Republic of Albania (2nd Infantry Division of the Army of the Republic of Albania, strengths of about 5,000 people, as well as independent artillery regiments with command in the city of Kukes,). Army of the Republic of Albania used armored units.

NATO used all available land and air artillery capacities, including strategic bombers B-1, B-52, airplanes F-16, A-10, and Apache helicopters, launching more than 40 000 projectiles and over 1000 cruise missiles. Despite enormous efforts and devastation, NATO and its allies couldn’t penetrate into Yugoslavian territory as planned, therefore Nobel Prize winner Martti Ahtisaari, threatened to flatten Belgrade and major Serbian cities and infrastructure objects by using strategic bombers all across Serbia. This threat made Serbian political leadership to sign Military Technical Agreement in Kumanovo on the 10th of June, 1999.

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Radovan Spasic is a political scientist from Serbia.

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David Orchard led the anti-war campaign across Canada relentlessly mobilizing support against NATO’s war on Yugoslavia.

March 24, 2018 commemorates the 19th anniversary of  NATO’s war on Yugoslavia.

This article was originally published by Toronto’s National Post on June 23, 1999.

David Orchard (image left)

In March [1999], the most powerful military force in history attacked tiny Yugoslavia (one fifth the size of Saskatchewan) and after seventy-nine days of flagrantly illegal bombing forced an occupation of Kosovo. Admitting its intention was to break Yugoslavia’s spirit, NATO targeted civilian structures, dropping over 23,000 bombs (500 Canadian) and cruise missiles in a campaign of terror bombing, described recently by Alexander Solzhenitsyn as follows: “I don’t see any difference in the behaviour of NATO and of Hitler. NATO wants to erect its own order in the world and it needs Yugoslavia simply as an example: We’ll punish Yugoslavia and the whole rest of the planet will tremble.”

The idea that NATO attacked Yugoslavia to solve a humanitarian crisis is about as credible as Germany’s claim in 1939 that it was invading Poland to prevent “Polish atrocities.” The United Nations Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) reported the first registered refugees out of Kosovo on March 27th — three days after the bombing began. Civilian casualties after twenty-one days of bombing exceeded all casualties on both sides in Kosovo in the three months before the war.

In an all out effort to convince public opinion that Yugoslavia deserved the onslaught, Western politicians and media are churning out endless accusations of Serb atrocities, while the proven and infinitely greater atrocities of NATO — launching an aggressive war, using internationally outlawed cluster bombs and firing depleted uranium ammunition into Yugoslavia — are buried.

Why did NATO attack Yugoslavia and why are Serbs — Canada’s staunch allies in both World Wars, with 1.5 million dead resisting Hitler’s Nazis and Italian Fascism — being demonized?

Most 19th century wars were over trade. When the U.S. invaded Canada in 1812, Andrew Jackson declared, “We are going to… vindicate our right to a free trade, and open markets… and to carry the Republican standard to the Heights of Abraham.” In 1839, Britain demanded China accept its opium and attacked when China said no. When Thailand refused British trading demands in 1849, Britain “found its presumption unbounded” and decided “a better disposed King [be] placed on the throne… and through him, we might, beyond doubt, gain all we desire.”

In 1999, NATO said it was attacking Yugoslavia to force it to sign the Rambouillet “peace agreement” (even though the Vienna Convention states that any treaty obtained by force or the threat of force is void).

Significantly, Rambouillet stipulated:

“The economy of Kosovo shall function in accordance with free market principles” and “There shall be no impediments to the free movement of persons, goods, services and capital to and from Kosovo.”

During the war, Bill Clinton elaborated:

“If we’re going to have a strong economic relationship that includes our ability to sell around the world Europe has got to be the key; that’s what this Kosovo thing is all about… It’s globalism versus tribalism.”

“Tribalism” was the word used by 19th century free trade liberals to describe nationalism. And this war was all about threatening any nation which might have ideas of independence.

Yugoslavia had a domestically controlled economy, a strong publicly owned sector, a good (and free) health care system and its own defence industry. It had many employee owned factories — its population was resisting wholesale privatization. It produced its own pharmaceuticals, aircraft and Yugo automobile. It refused to allow U.S. military bases on its soil. According to the speaker of the Russian Duma:

“Yugoslavia annoys NATO because it conducts an independent policy, does not want to join NATO and has an attractive geographic position.”

Ottawa, cutting medicare, agricultural research, social housing and shelters for battered women, spent tens of millions to bomb Yugoslavia and is spending millions more occupying Kosovo, while abandoning its own sovereignty to U.S. demands, from magazines to fish, wheat and lumber. It is expropriating part of British Columbia for the U.S. military and considering the U.S. dollar as North America’s currency. Now, the Liberals have thrown our reputation as a peace keeper into the trash can, along with the rule of international law, by smashing a small country to pieces at the behest of Washington.

In a March 28 New York Times article, Thomas Friedman wrote:

“For globalization to work, America can’t be afraid to act like the almighty superpower that it is… The hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist. McDonald’s cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas, the designer of the F-15. And the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley’s technologies is called the United States Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps.”

As NATO troops entered Kosovo, the same newspaper announced Kosovo’s new currency will be the U.S. dollar or German mark, currencies of the two countries most responsible for Yugoslavia’s break-up. And after months of being told that Slobodan Milosevic was the problem, we heard Washington Balkans expert, Daniel Serwer, explain:

“It’s not a single person that’s at issue, there’s a regime in place in Belgrade that is incompatible with the kind of economy that the World Bank… has to insist on…”

The Canadian government professes great interest in human rights. Globalization undermines both democracy and national sovereignty, the only guarantors of human rights. Unfortunately for Messrs. Clinton, Chretien et al, that message was not lost on millions around the world watching NATO bombs pulverize Yugoslavia.

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This article was originally published on National Post on June 23, 1999.

David Orchard is the author of The Fight for Canada – Four Centuries of Resistance to American Expansionism. He  ran twice for the leadership of the Progressive Conservative Party of Canada. He was convenor in 1999 of the Ad Hoc Committee to Stop Canada’s Participation in the War on Yugoslavia.  He farms in Borden, SK and can be reached  at [email protected].

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***

Ukraine forces pulled off a rare attack on Russian soil Friday when two military helicopters destroyed a fuel depot in the city of Belgorod, situated roughly 40 miles north of the border with Ukraine.

The attack was purportedly carried out by two Ukrainian helicopters that crossed into Ukrainian territory. Videos circulating online purported to show Ukrainian Air Force Mi-24 helicopters flying low over Belgorod just before the strike.

The strike will certainly create an interesting backdrop to talks between the Russian and Ukrainian negotiators, which are set to resume via video-conference on Friday.

Meanwhile, the UN said Friday that its relief convoys had failed to reach Mariupol, the southern port city devastated by weeks of shelling, after Russia said it had opened up a “humanitarian corridor” to allow the evacuation of civilians.

Video images of the purported attack posted online showed what looked like several missiles being fired from low altitude, followed by an explosion. Reuters has not yet been able to verify the images.

While Russian authorities have confirmed the attack, some Ukrainian defense analysts insisted that the strike  may have been a “false flag” planned by Moscow to further turn the tide of public opinion in favor of the war (although at least one recently released independent poll showed that the majority of Russians have rallied around the flag in support of the war, per the NYT).

The Ukrainian Foreign Minister said early Friday morning that he “could not confirm nor deny” Ukrainian involvement in the strike.

He’s not the first Ukrainian official to neither “confirm nor deny” the attack.

Still, video of the strike has circulated on Western social media.

Given the number of videos of the attack circulating online, many believe some sort of attack did occur.

A WSJ reporter described it as “the most daring known Ukrainian cross-border attack” since the start of the conflict.

A fire at the facility was raging uncontrolled up until a few hours ago.

Here’s video of the fire from another angle.

Video taken later in the morning showed the fire had been almost extinguished.

Dmitry Peskov, the spokesman for President Vladimir Putin, said the strike wouldn’t help the cause of peace talks.

According to one media report, 8 tanks with fuel volume of 2,000 cubic meters each are burning. The Russian Defense Ministry hasn’t officially commented on the incident.

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Featured image is from ZH

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The European Union (EU) and China are planning to hold a virtual summit on 1 April 2022, in an attempt to diffuse growing tensions between the two. This was the assessment given to the media by European Commission Vice-President and EU trade chief Valdis Dombrovskis.

The meeting will be attended by both, Chinese President Xi Jinping and Premier Li Keqiang and European Union representatives Charles Michel and Ursula von der Leyen, presidents of the European Council and European Commission, respectively, as reported by Politico.

The summit comes at the height of the Ukraine-Russian war, that was largely provoked – though not justified – by the west, led by the United States and NATO. The Russian invasion of Ukraine was immediately followed with a barrage of western sanctions against Russia – sanctions which, when properly analyzed, hurt the west, mainly Europe, much more than they hurt Russia.

On 3 March 2022, in a historic Emergency UN General Assembly vote, 141 nations of the 193 UN member countries, reprimanded Russia over its invasion of Ukraine, demanding withdrawal of forces.

China, India and South Africa were among the 35 countries that abstained, while just five – Eritrea, North Korea, Syria, Belarus and of course Russia – voted against it.

China’s abstention, a close ally of Russia, is not only an anti-war vote, but it was also a for-peace signal to the world. Likewise, China has excellent relations with Ukraine. Since 2008, the two countries have built strong trade ties. China has become Ukraine’s largest trading partner, with a trade turnover in 2020 of 15.4 billion US dollar equivalent.

China would be well-poised to play a mediating role in the conflict, precisely what China’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, Mr. Wang Yi, had suggested to Ukraine and Russia, presuming that the EU has an intrinsic interest in Peace in Europe.

Given the halting peace negotiations between Russia and Ukraine, currently ongoing in Istanbul, Turkey, the upcoming EU-China summit would be an excellent opportunity for Europe to bring fresh wind into the negotiations, by inviting China as mediator. Considering Russia’s and Ukraine’s friendly relations with China, such a move may bring positive results.

In addition to renewing and easing their currently tense relations with China, the EU might, for example, entering into trade talks with China, that may lead to new trade agreements.

Such treaties might be particularly welcome for Europe, as the current war and the preceding covid pandemic have caused interrupted supply chains, food shortages – potential famine even in Europe. China could be an excellent partner to repair supply chains and fulfill food and other essential requirements – technological goods – while western countries suffer themselves under the weight of their sanctions imposed on Russia and to some extent also on China.

The summit might be an opportunity to rethinking “sanctions” as sanctions have never resolved any political differences. To the contrary. They increase the level of hostilities. Not only are they unethical, but they are also in the purest sense of the word, illegal. Under international law, economic “sanctions”, punishment by forestalling economic progress of a sovereign nation by external financial, trading and economic pressure, is illegal.

Lifting of “sanctions” would be by themselves a move towards peace and peaceful relations between Europe and China.

The upcoming summit is also an opportunity for Europe to look eastwards – to renew a history-old geopolitical and trade relation with Eurasia, and especially with China and beyond. The Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), created in 2001 and headed by China, is a strategic block of some nine countries, including China, Russia, India, Pakistan and Iran, as well as another nine observer and dialogue partners.

The SCO comprises close to 50% of the world population and more than 30% of the globe’s GDP – a potentially highly attractive partnership for the EU. It would allow Europe to regain her hundreds of year-old autonomy.

Europe may become free again to trade with east and west, according to comparative advantages. Since economic relationships forge political relations – comparative-advantage trading means win-win trading – leading to peaceful cohabitation.

In general, Eurasia is a logical market for Europe, a contiguous landmass of 55 million km2, comprising some 70% of the world’s population and accounting for about two thirds of the world’s GDP. Historically, Europe has been an integral part of Eurasia. A vivid example is the 2,100-year-old original Silk Road, a trading route, of which Europe was an essential link.

Finally, Europe may be interested in joining the New Silk Road, President Xi Jinping’s Belt and Road Initiative which was launched in 2013.

BRI is a transcontinental long-term policy and investment program which aims at infrastructure development and accelerating the economic integration of countries, while preserving each country’s sovereignty. The Belt and Road is patterned along the principles of the historic Silk Road.

More generally, the BRI aims at promoting the connectivity of Asian, European and African continents and their adjacent seas, and eventually reaching to the Americas. It strives to establish and strengthen partnerships among the countries along the Belt and Road, set up all-dimensional, multi-tiered and composite connectivity networks, and realize diversified, independent, balanced and sustainable development in these countries.

A few EU countries, like Greece, Italy, France and Germany, have already links to BRI. A large-scale connection with BRI would offer Europe another series of unique opportunities for trade, as well as cooperation in the fields of technology and research – a true potential economic relief in times of shortages due to supply chain interruptions.

The April 1, 2022 summit will offer Europe and China a myriad of opportunities to reconnecting in a friendly and mutually fruitful, new win-win relation.

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This paper was first published by the “Chongyang Institute” in China’s Global Times in Chinese on 31 March 2022.

Peter Koenig is a geopolitical analyst and a former Senior Economist at the World Bank and the World Health Organization (WHO), where he has worked for over 30 years on water and environment around the world. He lectures at universities in the US, Europe and South America. He writes regularly for online journals and is the author of Implosion – An Economic Thriller about War, Environmental Destruction and Corporate Greed; and co-author of Cynthia McKinney’s book “When China Sneezes: From the Coronavirus Lockdown to the Global Politico-Economic Crisis” (Clarity Press – November 1, 2020).

Peter Koenig is a non-resident Senior Fellow of the Chongyang Institute of Renmin University  Beijing and a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG)

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***

European countries were stunned by Russia’s demand that gas be paid in rubles as they seemingly expected the Eurasian country to be sanctioned and locked out of Western financial mechanisms without retaliation. Russian President Vladimir Putin said on March 31 that he had signed a decree forcing buyers from “unfriendly countries” to pay for Russian gas in rubles from April 1, warning that contracts would be halted if these payments were not made.

Although the companies and governments of “unfriendly countries” have rejected the move as a breach of existing contracts, which are set in euros or dollars, French economy minister Bruno Le Maire said his country and Germany were preparing for a possible scenario that Russian gas flows are halted – something that would plunge Europe into a full-blown energy and economic crisis.

Although the halt of gas supplies to Europe could see Gazprom lose about half of its profits and reduce investment, it will have an even greater negative consequence on the European energy sector. Europe will not be able to quickly replace Russian gas with LNG supplies from the United States and Qatar, and as a result, European gas prices could rise to $5,000 per 1,000 cubic meters or even higher, which will force a consumption reduction and hit the economy.

Charles Michel, head of the Council of Europe, presented the EU Programme on ensuring energy security. He stressed that eliminating dependence on Russian energy sources is at the heart of the program as, according to him, it is necessary to quickly get rid of Russian carbon hydrogen and then fossil fuels in general.

However, it is clear that even without the current global energy crisis caused by the lack of gas supplies, it would still be impossible to find a short to medium term solution to replace Russian sources. In this way, EU states, the UK, the US and other listed unfriendly countries will have no choice but to engage in rubles trade if they want to continue receiving Russian energy and not let their economic situations worsen.

Speaking about changes in the global economic system following sanctions and Russia’s responses to the financial hostilities, Serbian geopolitical analyst Borislav Korkodelovic said:

“IMF and World Bank data also show that it is becoming increasingly easy for the rest of the world to reject the demands of the West because it is no longer as economically omnipotent as it once was.”

“Even when it comes to nominal GDP, the difference between the BRICS countries on the one hand, and the EU and the US on the other, is narrower (24% to 30% before the pandemic and now it is even smaller). When the GDP is calculated relative to the parity of purchasing power, the stakes have already been replaced: 45% to 44.1% in favor of BRICS.”

For his part, Serbian lawyer Branko Pavlović said that Russia, China and India had a key part in building a new global economic system that is more equitable, as it should have been after the Second World War.

“This is a fight for a whole new international relationship and a return to multilateralism with respect to the sovereignty and equality of states, as envisioned after World War II, but now with incredible economic momentum to the general benefit. Everyone around the world understands that America and the West have been exploitative so far. We are now witnessing a new internationalism of liberation,” said Pavlović.

This sentiment was shared by Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov who said that BRICS nations (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) will be at the center of a new world order and stressed that the demand for rubles “is not a change in the terms of [energy] contracts,” but rather “a protection of Russian interests.”

It is this very drive to protect Russian interests that has forced Putin’s hand to demand rubles for energy. In fact, sanctions against Russia have only forced an accelerated change to the global economic system as de-Dollarization is being explored by nearly every major non-Western country.

Alfredo Jalife-Rahme, a Mexican political scientist, said that London, Washington and Beijing agree that there is a weakening of globalization. He stressed that “Moscow’s demand that your gas is paid in rubles” is an example of “the dismantling of the globalized model in the energy framework.”

Jalife-Rahme also explained that “the financial globalization with the predominance of the dollar generated annual profits of 1 trillion dollars for the United States, about 10% of the global GDP. The change of this paradigm may be one of the most serious blows of the Ukrainian situation to American interests.”

The West thought that it could economically collapse Russia, ignoring that sanctions failed to topple Saddam Hussein, Bashar al-Assad, Iran’s Ayatollah’s, Kim Jong-Un and Nicolás Maduro. Rather, sanctions have only forced an acceleration of the de-Dollarization of the global economy. In effect, the demand for rubles for gas is pushing forward a multipolar and more equitable global economic system.

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Paul Antonopoulos is an independent geopolitical analyst.

Featured image is from news.cgtn.com

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It’s amazing how NATO and the EU can watch the crisis in Ukraine and not reflect on issues like these: 1) Prioritising weapons over all other security tools creates neither security nor sustainable peace; it creates hubris, anti-intellectualism and militarism. 2) Alliances can only thrive if they appoint enemies. 3) Military deterrence doesn’t work but stimulates escalation. With confrontational policies and offensive weapons, there can never be common security, stability or peace. 4) Applying one set of rules for “us” – e.g. the international rules-based order in contravention of UN-based international law – and another for “them” is moral fraud. 5) Creating hard borders with polarisation is unwise. Lacking empathy and a sense of history makes for counterproductive, self-destructive decisions. 6) Peace is about analysing the conflicts – or problems – that always stand between the parties. War happens when conflicts are neglected.

Since 1949, NATO has promised its taxpayers that they would live in peace. But today’s Europe is closer to catastrophe than ever before.

The world-domineering Western paradigm of security politics has come to its end. But more dollars and weapons are pumped into it.

By and large, the EU sides with and submits to US policies because, as a Union, it has failed to develop an independent comprehensive one-voice foreign and security policy.

Immediately after the Russian military intervention in Ukraine, it resorted to tit-for-tat devoid of analyses of the longer-term consequences to basically cut off – cancel – everything Russian. This is blind punishment and hate mood as if Russia would not exist in the future.

Next, it argued that China should put pressure on Russia and “help” the West to stop that war and that China should face negative consequences if it doesn’t.

Whether this is a genuine plea for help or another way of promoting the Western Cold War agenda vis-a-vis China remains to be seen. This attitude will prevent progress at the upcoming China-EU summit.

The West’s sanctions on Russia are extraordinarily ill-considered and will have self-destructive consequences. For a while, they will surely hurt the Russian innocent people, but they will, beyond a doubt,  boomerang back on the West, with a deep socio-economic crisis following.

Russia will see no reason to work with the West in the future – and will orient itself toward countries including Iran, India, and China. Contrary to the increasingly unreal and autistic perceptions of the West, the whole world does not support its reactions to Russia’s military operation in Ukraine.

The European Union has displayed a politically and rhetorically anti-China stand – on issues related to China’s Xinjiang, Hongkong, Taiwan, as well as provacation of Lithuania – but is now asking China to “help” solve a problem which several Union members have contributed vitally to as NATO members.

NATO’s confrontational expansion was always unwise. NATO should have been closed down when the Warsaw Pact and the Soviet Union dissolved.

History is catching up. The EU has failed miserably in living up to its own Lisbon Treaty and failed to work for peace inside the Union and the world.

If the EU/NATO members had distanced themselves from the US-promoted coup in Kiev in 2014 and insisted on other security arrangements for Ukraine’s future instead of full NATO membership, the world would not be in this dangerous situation.

The US and NATO want to tie up Russia’s militarily for as long as possible and undermine its economy and society, then turn to what it foolishly believes is its No.1 adversary: China.

Russia, of course, has other options and should negotiate a ceasefire and a new future relationship with Ukraine. The EU will have to become more independent to contribute constructively to the emerging multi-polar world order.

Europe desperately needs an entirely new all-European security and peace system, a kind of European UN, based on common security with Russia, trans-armament toward defensive military structures, non-threatening postures, early warning and – above all – civilian, civilised negotiations, instead of defunct and militarist escalatory deterrence.

In this sense, the NATO-Russia conflict in Ukraine could be used as a constructive turning point. It should mark the end of the outdated NATO paradigm and its peaceless policies.

It would be good for humanity if the East and West Europeans could creatively recognise their common interests and thereby do good for the future of humanity and practise cooperation instead of confrontation with China.

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Jan Oberg is director at the Transnational Foundation for Peace and Future Research in Lund, Sweden. [email protected]

Featured image: China-EU relationship Photo: VCG

United States to Ban Real Meat

April 1st, 2022 by Dr. Joseph Mercola

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Evidence that The Great Reset is rapidly approaching can be seen in the recent decision by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to ban real meat, and if history is any indication, the same decision may be taken by other countries as well. The U.S. ban is slated to take effect April 1, 2024

The decision comes on the heels of repeated public appeals to the Western world by Bill Gates to stop eating real meat as a climate control effort

According to the FDA, natural beef production is a primary culprit of climate change. University of California researchers have measured the amount of methane emitted by the average cow, concluding cattle “are the No. 1 agricultural source of greenhouse gases worldwide”

Each year, a single cow produces about 220 pounds of methane, and methane from cattle is 28 times more potent in warming the atmosphere than carbon dioxide

Livestock raised in massive industrial farming arrangements, aptly called “confined animal feeding operations” (CAFOs), have also been identified as a source of foodborne illness, and is yet another reason why the FDA has decided to ban real meat in favor of synthetic beef

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Evidence that The Great Reset is rapidly approaching can be seen in the recent decision by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to ban real meat, and if history is any indication, the same decision may be taken by other countries as well. The U.S. ban is slated to take effect April 1, 2024.

The decision comes on the heels of repeated public appeals to the Western world by Bill Gates to stop eating real meat and transition to lab-grown synthetic “beef” instead.

Gates Spearheads Fake Beef Climate Solution

Click here to watch the video.

As explained in the Navdanya International report, “Bill Gates & His Fake Solutions to Climate Change,” an excerpt of which was published by The Defender in April 2021:1

“One of Bill Gates’ most recent promotions is his prescriptions of synthetic foods for developed countries as a means to combat climate change. In a recent interview with MIT Technology Review, Gates says he thinks ‘all rich countries should move to 100% synthetic beef.’

Fake food replaces animal products with highly processed food grown in labs, like fake meat, fake dairy products or fake eggs. It is made possible by technical innovations such as synthetic biology, which involves reconfiguring the DNA of an organism to create something entirely new.

For instance, plant-based meat companies like Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods use a DNA coding sequence from soybeans or peas to create a product that looks and tastes like real meat. Some companies are also investing in cell-based meat, grown from real animal cells, but it has yet to reach the market.

More and more firms are getting involved in this fast-growing market, like Motif Foodworks (plant-based meat and dairy alternatives), Ginkgo Bioworks (custom-built microbes), BioMilq (lab-grown breast milk), Nature’s Fynd (fungi-grown meat and dairy alternatives), Eat Just (egg substitutes made from plant proteins), Perfect Day Food (lab-grown dairy products) or NotCo (plant-based animal products made through AI), to name but a few.”

Beef Production Pegged as ‘Prime Culprit’ of Climate Change

According to Gates and other synthetic beef proponents — and now the FDA — natural beef production is a primary culprit of climate change.

A number of institutions have evaluated the environmental impact of cows and other livestock over the years, including University of California, Davis, where researchers like Frank Mitloehner have been busy measuring the amount of methane emitted by the average cow.2 According to UC Davis:3

“Cattle are the No. 1 agricultural source of greenhouse gases worldwide. Each year, a single cow will belch about 220 pounds of methane. Methane from cattle is shorter lived than carbon dioxide but 28 times more potent in warming the atmosphere, said Mitloehner, a professor and air quality specialist in the Department of Animal Science.”

Meat Is Also Implicated in Foodborne Disease

Livestock raised in massive industrial farming arrangements, aptly called “confined animal feeding operations” (CAFOs), have also been identified as a source of foodborne illness. Covered in feces and urine, dehydrated and often sickly, these animals are slaughtered using mechanized tools and procedures that convey these infection-loaded excreta into the final meat product.

The food and food-contaminant combination that causes the most harm to human health is campylobacter, which sickens more than 1.5 million people4 and costs the U.S. an estimated $1.3 billion a year. In second place is toxoplasma, costing society another $8 billion5 annually.

Despite the obvious reality of foodborne illness, very little was actually known about which foods were the riskiest until a report6 from the University of Florida’s Emerging Pathogens Institute revealed the pathogen-food combinations most likely to make you sick. The report, issued in 2011, showed that the data overwhelmingly pointed to tainted meats as the prime culprits.

Realizing that pasteurization of animal products such as milk falls way short of protecting human health, the U.S. Department of Agriculture in 2014 proposed tackling the No. 1 source of costly foodborne illness — raw meat — by placing restrictions on the sale of raw meat.

The proposal didn’t go anywhere, but the FDA is now pointing to it as yet another reason to ban natural meat sales altogether. Lab-grown synthetic “beef” does not have any of these issues, they claim, due to the fact that all of the ingredients in each batch can be carefully controlled.

Beef Consumption Is ‘Unsustainable’

As reported by UC Davis:7

“With the escalating effects of climate change, that fact has advocates urging the public to eat less beef. They contend it’s an unsustainable diet in a world with a population expected to reach nearly 10 billion by 2050.”

As mentioned, Gates is one such anti-beef advocate. In mid-February 2021, he gave an interview with MIT Technology Review, in which he suggested that that synthetic beef, such as Impossible Foods (which he cofounded with Google and Jeff Bezos), “is a key part of climate action,” as it would eliminate a key source of global greenhouse gas emissions.8

Gates has also suggested that synthetic beef could eliminate the “protein problem,” i.e., the fact that we’re facing a global shortage of protein-rich foods in the wake of the COVID pandemic.9

The strong recommendation to replace beef with fake meat is made in Gates’ book “How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need,” which was released in February 2021. As for the issue of taste, Gates assured MIT Technology Review10 that:

“You can get used to the taste difference, and … they’re going to make it taste even better over time.”

The irony of Bill Gates — who lives in a 66,000-square-foot mansion and travels in a private jet that uses up 486 gallons of fuel every hour11 — talking about how to save the environment isn’t lost on everyone. Two days after his MIT Technology Review interview, The Nation criticized Gates’ contradictions, including the fact that his jet-setting lifestyle also makes him a carbon “super emitter”:12

“According to a 2019 academic study13 looking at extreme carbon emissions from the jet-setting elite, Bill Gates’s extensive travel by private jet likely makes him one of the world’s top carbon contributors — a veritable super emitter. In the list of 10 celebrities investigated — including Jennifer Lopez, Paris Hilton, and Oprah Winfrey — Gates was the source of the most emissions.”

Impossible Foods Holds 14 Patents, Has 100+ Pending

Impossible Foods’ products resemble nothing found in nature. That’s why the company holds 14 patents, with at least 100 more pending. “It’s not food; it’s software, intellectual property” — 14 patents, in fact, in each bite of Impossible Burger with over 100 additional patents pending for animal proxies from chicken to fish.

Natural foods cannot be patented, but Impossible Foods’ products certainly can be. Impossible Foods’ products are heavily processed and created in production rooms — not grown in or found in nature. Their science project creations are also heavily protected.

And the creator holds all the cards. They own the “food” and are the only ones allowed to make the “food.” All fake meat consumers lacking options for real food will be dependent on the patented ultraprocessed goo.

Circumventing Problematic Labeling Challenge

The idea is that by making the transition from real beef to synthetic “meats” in wealthier nations first, we would have the best chance of positively impacting the environment while simultaneously reducing world hunger.

In the interview, Gates admitted that use of regulation might be required “to totally shift the demand.” With that statement, he’s basically proven his “prophetic powers” yet again. At the time, he confessed that “the politics are challenging,” especially with regard to labeling. He told MIT Technology Review:

“There are all these bills that say it’s got to be called, basically, lab garbage to be sold. They don’t want us to use the beef label.”

The controversy became clear during a July 2018 public meeting convened by the FDA to discuss the naming of lab-grown meat. As reported by The Atlantic,14 various speakers referred to the lab concoctions as “clean meat,” “artificial meat,” “in vitro meat,” “cell culture products,” “cultured meat” or “culture tissue.”

Each term had its advocates and critics and consensus seemed impossible to reach. Now, with the ban on real meat sales in the U.S., the FDA basically resolves this challenge, as no special labels will be required. ALL beef products will be adulterated.

Some will be plant-based, while others will be based on tissue cells grown on a lattice. Mosa Meat, for example, grows their meat after harvesting a small number of cells from livestock “who are then returned, almost unscathed, to their fields.”15 A single tissue sample is said to be able to yield 80,000 quarter-pound hamburgers.

Yesterday’s Science Fiction May Become Tomorrow’s Reality

Food inventors are even working on cultured meat from human cells, bringing to mind the 1973 dystopian science fiction film “Soylent Green.” The movie takes place in New York in 2022. The Earth is severely overpopulated, and for sustenance, people are given rations of water and Soylent Green, which supposedly is a high-protein food made from plankton.

In the end, you discover in this futuristic nightmare fantasy of controlling big corporations, that the high-protein drink is actually made from people. Now, in the year 2022, scientists are working on lab-grown “meat” made from human cells that are harvested from the inside of human cheeks.16 As reported by Tech Times in November 2020:17

“A new ‘DIY meal kit’ that can be used to grow steaks that are made mostly from human cells … Called ‘Ouroboros Steak,’ this is named right after the circular symbol of a snake known for eating itself tail-first. This hypothetical kit would later on come with everything that one person would need in order to use their own cells to grow miniature human meat steaks …”

These kits are not yet commercially available, but it begs the question of what possesses someone to think that eating a lump of meat made from your own body could be a viable idea? The question must also be raised about whether this is cannibalism.

Those defending the concept claim that since you’re eating your own body, it’s not cannibalism. However, if it ever becomes commercially available, what’s to prevent someone from growing meat from other people’s cells — and selling it? And the ick factor aside, how could this impact the spread of disease? For example, tribal cannibalism in Papua, New Guinea,18 led to a prion disease, which nearly wiped out a tribe of people.

In many villages, after an individual died, the villagers would cook and consume the body in an act of grief. Scientists who studied the tribe believe that one person developed a sporadic incident of Crutchfield-Jakob disease, also known as mad cow disease. Eating the neurological tissue then spread the disease throughout the tribe.

How Will FDA’s Decision Impact Public Health?

While much attention is placed on taste — making products that, taste-wise, mimic real beef — few if any are talking about the proverbial elephant in the room, which is the health impacts of fake beef.

Tissue growth inside an animal occurs when the blood supply delivers appropriate nutrients to produce healthy muscle growth. This requires that the animal is fed a whole and balanced diet, from which the body extracts the necessary nutrients in an appropriate amount to feed the cells.

The human body then extracts the nutrients found in regeneratively and biodynamically pastured meat. However, as science has demonstrated in the last two decades, growing cells on sugar causes growth, but will not yield health. The sheer ability to grow lab-cultured meat does not indicate that the end product will have any health benefit to the end consumer.

One primary problem I foresee is the fact that plant-based fake meat contains excess amounts of omega-6 fat in the form of linoleic acid (LA). This, I believe, is one of the most significant contributors to ill health and chronic disease, as excessive LA leads to severe mitochondrial dysfunction, decreased NAD+ levels, obesity, insulin resistance and a radical decrease in the ability to generate energy.

The genetic engineering used to produce the flavor and texture of real meat does not reproduce healthy fatty acid composition because the substrate is canola and sunflower oils as the primary sources of fat. The sunflower oil used in both Impossible Burgers and Beyond Meats is 68% LA,19which is an extraordinarily high amount.

It is dangerous because LA is susceptible to oxidation and causes oxidation byproducts called OXLAMs (oxidative linoleic acid metabolites). These byproducts devastate your DNA, protein, mitochondria and cellular membranes. This means that fake meat is failing all measures of sustainability and health.

Facing an Uncertain Future

I’ve often stated that if every American decided to purchase humanely raised organic beef, the CAFO system and the ultra-processed and patented fake meat industry would collapse overnight. With the nationwide ban on real meat racing toward us — 2024 is only two short years away — the window of opportunity for change is rapidly closing.

For now, however, sourcing your foods from a local farmer is still one of your best bets to ensure you’re getting wholesome food, and I would encourage you to do so while you still can. The following organizations can help you locate farm-fresh foods in your local area:

1. Local Harvest This website will help you find farmers markets, family farms, and other sources of sustainably grown food in your area where you can buy produce, grass-fed meats, and many other goodies.

2. Farmers Markets A national listing of farmers markets.

3. Eat Well Guide: Wholesome Food from Healthy Animals The Eat Well Guide is a free online directory of sustainably raised meat, poultry, dairy and eggs from farms, stores, restaurants, inns and hotels, and online outlets in the United States and Canada.

4. Community Involved in Sustaining Agriculture (CISA) — CISA is dedicated to sustaining agriculture and promoting the products of small farms.

NOTICE

This is an April Fool’s article and the FDA ban on real meat is a fictional scenario. A primary reason why we post April Fool’s articles is to act as warnings. We want to wake people up to see what could happen if actions aren’t taken to protect and preserve freedom.

Over the years, many of our April Fool’s “jokes” have come true, including our fictional prediction of adult vaccine mandates and internment camps. This isn’t a coincidence. This is planned, and you can see it happening around you. The future of your personal and medical freedoms has not yet been decided. The ending will depend on you.

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With oil prices rising to near-record levels due to Russia’s ongoing war in Ukraine, companies producing oil and gas in the United States are in line to make tens of billions in additional profits. Using Rystad Energy’s UCube database — a database that tracks the industry’s production economics at the well level — we can get an insight into how much money the industry is set to earn simply as a result of this massive price spike. Under conservative estimates, we find the U.S. upstream oil and gas industry will collect a windfall of $37 to $126 billion in 2022 alone.[1]

Before the most recent phase of Russia’s war against Ukraine began, the forecast oil price for 2022 used in Rystad Energy’s upstream database was $70 per barrel, in line with the U.S. Energy Information Administration’s December 2021 assessment.[2] On March 9th, Rystad updated its 2022 oil price to $88 per barrel. But oil prices could remain elevated if Russia’s supply is severely curtailed, represented by the $120 case. Some analysts believe that prices could even hit $200 per barrel this summer.[3] We ran two scenarios comparing the pre-war price of $70 per barrel with the updated base case of $88 per barrel and a high case of $120 per barrel. These scenarios also include similarly higher gas prices in their analysis of companies’ cash flow.

We found that the U.S. upstream industry is in line to earn an additional $37 billion if the current base case ($88) holds. If prices spike this summer and the 2022 average is closer to $120, earnings could soar by $126 billion compared to the pre-war case. Total projected free cash flow for 2022 would nearly double from $128 billion in the $70 scenario, to a potential $253 billion in the $120 scenario.

We also looked at the top ten earners. ConocoPhillips, Chevron and Occidental lead the pack with the potential to earn an additional $6.5 billion to $7.5 billion each if prices average $120. Together the top ten could earn additional profits just shy of $50 billion.

Oil executives have recently signaled that high oil prices may not lead to a rapid increase in domestic production.[4] U.S. production is still quite high historically but is recovering from the Covid-19 downturn in oil demand,[5] and U.S. drillers do not have the ability to immediately spin up new production. What’s more, pressure from Wall Street to impose “capital discipline” could lead these companies to pocket the gains from these high prices and return them to investors via dividends and buybacks.[6]

Much of this excess free cash flow that is boosting oil corporation balance sheets is flowing from the pocketbooks of U.S. consumers. It is only right for Congress to pass a windfall profits tax and return some of these profits to consumers, as Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse and Rep. Ro Khanna recently proposed.[7] Despite misleading talk of “energy independence” from some politicians, the U.S. can’t drill its way to lower gasoline prices. Thanks to the lifting of the crude oil export ban in 2015, U.S. drillers are fully integrated with the global market; when crude prices increase globally, they also increase in the U.S. Booming U.S. exports of liquefied natural gas (LNG) also tend to drive up domestic gas prices.[8]

If Congress had taken decisive action on climate change at any time in the last three decades the U.S. economy would be more insulated against oil shocks, and would be enjoying the benefits of a renewable-powered economy that is healthier, more affordable, and more just. The answer to high gasoline prices is not to triple-down on a failed system.

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Notes

1 See Methodology below for methods and definitions.

2 U.S. Energy Information Administration. December 2022. Short-Term Energy Outlook. https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/steo/archives/Dec21.pdf

3 Reuters, Goldman hikes crude price forecast, Barclays and Rystad warn of $200 oil. March 8, 2022. https://www.reuters.com/markets/europe/ goldman-raises-oil-price-forecasts-russia-supply-shock-2022-03-08/

4 Paraskova, T. 2022. High Oil Prices Aren’t Enough To Tempt Shale Producers. Oil Price, March 1. https://oilprice.com/Energy/Oil-Prices/High-Oil-Prices- Arent-Enough-To-Tempt-Shale-Producers.html

5 U.S. Energy Information Administration. Crude Oil Production. https://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/pet_crd_crpdn_adc_mbblpd_m.htm

6 Stevens, P. 2022. Oil producers in a ‘dire situation’ and unable to ramp up output, says Oxy CEO. CNBC, March 8. https://www.cnbc.com/ 2022/03/08/oil-producers-in-a-dire-situation-and-unable-to-ramp-output-says-oxy-ceo.html

7 Sheldon Whitehouse Press Release, March 10, 2022. https://www.whitehouse.senate.gov/news/release/with-gasoline-prices-sky-high-whitehouse- leads-democrats-in-introducing-curb-on-big-oil-companies-engaged-in-profiteering-to-provide-relief-at-the-pump

8 Nalley, Stephen, Acting Administrator of U.S. Energy Information Administration, Statement before the U.S. Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, November 16, 2021. https://www.energy.senate.gov/services/files/9E0CF3E9-FD05-4010-BDF5-30E2D04D3ECC

 

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“The truth is like a lion. You don’t have to defend it. Let it loose. It will defend itself.” ―Saint Augustine

I met Senator Ron Johnson in person for the first time in his Senate office conference room on Tuesday November 16, 2021.  I was with a group of doctors including Ryan Cole, Richard Urso, Kirk A. Milhoan, Mollie James, Katarina Lindley, Heather Gessling, and Brian Tyson.

I didn’t quite know what to expect.  I knew how the media was portraying him – as a polarizing figure ready to embrace just about any conspiracy theory. But his advocacy for early COVID treatment and the vaccine injured had prompted us to request a meeting to see if the doctors might have an ally in the US Senate.

He walked in and said, “Wow, I didn’t realize this was a meeting with all the COVID heroes!”

I took that as a sign he was well aware of what we all were fighting for.  Since the early stages of the pandemic, he had been part of our e-mail chains comprised of renowned doctors, scientists, and medical researchers from around the globe.  As a result, he had extensive knowledge and awareness of the issues related to the pandemic that we had all been dealing with.

This really shouldn’t have surprised me. After all, as Chairman of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, he was the only member of Congress who had given members of our group the platform to share our truth during Senate hearings (as early as May, 2020!).  Dr. Pierre Kory testified about his group of Critical Care specialists’ use of Corticosteroids at that May hearing.

Drs. McCullogh, Risch, and Fareed testified at his first hearing on early treatment in November, 2020.   For their efforts, they were labeled the “Snake-oil Salesmen of the Senate” in a column written by Biden’s new COVID Czar, Dr. Ashish Jha, published by the New York Times.   That slander did not deter him as he invited Dr. Kory back to testify in December, 2020 to speak regarding the use of ivermectin to treat COVID-19 disease.   Dr. Kory’s passionate opening statement at that hearing was eventually censored by YouTube after receiving more than 8 million views.

In June, 2021 Senator Johnson held an event in Milwaukee where 4 vaccine-injured women and a 12-year-old vaccine-injured girl and her mom were able to tell their stories.   Instead of showing compassion and reporting their stories, most of the media in attendance used the opportunity to attack Senator Johnson.  Multiple newspapers in Wisconsin published his picture on the front page above the fold with the headline: “So Fundamentally Dangerous.”

Once again, the media attacks did not deter Senator Johnson from searching for and exposing the truth.  In November, 2021, he held another event in Washington, D.C. where medical experts offered their opinions and those suffering from vaccine injuries described what they were dealing with.

His most recent public event, held in Washington, D.C. on January 24, 2022, was titled COVID-19, A Second Opinion.”  The five-hour long panel discussion included myself and many of the other doctors and medical experts that have been providing the public with information that federal health agencies and the mainstream media vilify and censor.   The full five-hour version can be viewed on Rumble, and a 38-minute highlight video (below) is still available on YouTube.  Collectively, they have been viewed over 3.7 million times.

I have detailed these public events to give you a sense of Senator Johnson’s contribution to the public’s growing awareness of the failed response to the pandemic.  Senator Johnson’s intention was to serve out his second term and then leave office.  Many of us, including myself, strongly and personally encouraged him to run again so he could continue his important work.  I was really grateful that he decided to do so.

Those who have been following my efforts are fully aware of the media attacks, lies, and distortions directed against me and my colleagues.  Senator Johnson gets even worse treatment by the media and those who have so miserably mismanaged the pandemic response because they fear he will expose them. But that’s exactly why it is so important to help him win re-election.   The power of the media is extraordinary, so he will need an extraordinary amount of financial support to counter their falsehoods.

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“Big Bad China”: US Senator Marco Rubio

April 1st, 2022 by Daniel Larison

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Sen. Marco Rubio delivered a predictably hawkish speech at the Heritage Foundation on Tuesday in which he railed against the Chinese government and called for a “whole of society effort” to confront them. 

Rubio’s analysis of Chinese ambitions was crude and reductionist, and the specific policy changes he called for were few and far between. He told a simple story of a power-hungry rival that seeks domination for its own sake, and made sure to blame many of our country’s social and economic ills on China as well. While he praised the emergence of a “new consensus” on China in Washington that has replaced the earlier preference for economic engagement, he failed to acknowledge that this new consensus would set the U.S. on a potentially ruinous course towards great power conflict.

His assessment of China’s goals was blunt and not all that insightful:

“They believe in raw power. They believe that because they are a big country that their smaller neighbors have to be their tributaries. And they believe that the only way for them to become more powerful is to make others weaker, particularly America.”

This description could be applied with some accuracy to every great power, including the United States, but it also accepts a zero-sum approach to international relations that frequently misleads governments into pursuing self-destructive courses of action. The more that the U.S. sees its relationship with China in purely adversarial terms, the more tempted its leaders will be to try weakening China simply for the sake of harming them, and that will likely result in fighting unnecessary wars and supporting reckless clients in the name of thwarting Chinese influence.

The speech was long on denunciation of unpatriotic corporations and “woke” activists and short on policy substance. One of the few specifics in the speech concerned his interest in the Department of Justice’s China Initiative that began under the Trump administration. Of course Rubio complained about the Biden administration’s decision to shutter it early this year. He dismissed accusations of discrimination that were leveled against it as nothing more than a smear, but there is good reason to believe that the criticisms of the Initiative were accurate. As The Quincy Institute’s Jessica Lee explained in February, “While the China Initiative’s aim may have been to combat Chinese economic espionage and threats to U.S. national security, it evolved into institutionalized racial profiling of people of Chinese heritage.”

Rubio’s dismissive attitude towards such abuses is typical of China hawks that would like to stoke anti-Chinese sentiment while pretending that it will not lead to an increase in discriminatory treatment of Asian-Americans.

He claimed the decision to end the initiative was an example of how “progressive identity politics” is supposedly undermining national security and he called for the reinstatement of the program. His comments are further proof of how unserious China hawks are when it comes to recognizing the dangers of ratcheting up tensions with Beijing. Treating China not only as a potential threat but also as the source of many of America’s internal problems will fan anti-Chinese and anti-hatred, and that will put millions of our own citizens at greater risk of discrimination, abuse and violence.

Rubio may think he has found a convenient way to link his hawkish agenda to current culture war rhetoric, but that just underscores how increasing hostility towards the Chinese government can contribute to worsening internal divisions here in the United States.

According to Rubio, U.S. China policy is “held hostage” by “leftist radicalism.” That is such a bizarre and fantastical assertion that it is difficult to take anything else that Rubio says seriously. Elsewhere in the speech, he repeats the familiar “debt trap” canard, which has been debunked many times in recent years. Rubio also grossly exaggerates the Chinese threat to its neighbors by calling them an “imminent aggressor,” though this may be a case of the senator not understanding what the word imminent means. One can acknowledge that the Chinese government poses a real threat to other states in the region without indulging in such alarmism.

Belittling the threats posed by climate change and the pandemic, Rubio insisted, “The threat that will define this century is China.” If the U.S. goes down the road of embracing great power rivalry at the expense of cooperation on something as important as climate change, it condemns itself and the rest of the world to an increasingly bleak future. In that future, the U.S. and China would vie with each other for dominance over a world marred by intensifying hunger, political instability, and conflict, and whoever emerged on top at the end would be king of the ash heap.

It would not be surprising if our political leaders once again chose to go down the road of militarism and confrontation while neglecting the collective interests of humanity, but the consequences of doing so will very likely be awful even if we manage to avoid the great power war that could follow from Rubio’s more confrontational approach.

Rubio went on to say that there are no “buffer states” in the region, and he claimed that all regional states are on the “front lines,” but this ignores that almost all states in East and Southeast Asia have no desire to play the role that our China hawks would assign to them. These states do not wish to take sides in a U.S.-Chinese contest for supremacy, and any strategy that relies on pulling these states into an anti-China coalition seems certain to fail. The nations that have to live and work with China as their neighbor don’t want to be caught in the middle of the conflict that hawks in Washington want to stoke.

The Florida senator presents the choice as one between allowing the world to fall into a new “dark age of exploitation” dominated by China or one in which the U.S. prevails and ushers in a “new century of liberty, and justice, and prosperity.” The simplistic Manichean framing of the question ignores the reality of relative American decline and the limits of American power, both of which make Rubio’s warmed-over “American century” rhetoric hopelessly outdated. It also rules out the possibility of attempting to find a workable modus vivendi with China in a multipolar world where no one state is in a position to dictate terms to the rest.

Rubio continues to make an aggressive foreign policy the focus of his career in the Senate, and in recent years he has added China to the list of targets that have already included Iran, Cuba, and Venezuela. The speech confirmed that Rubio is still among the most hardline senators.

The last big foreign policy initiative in which he had a leading role was the use of broad sanctions in the destructive pursuit of regime change in Venezuela, which has further exacerbated the humanitarian crisis there. If his track record is any indication of what his preferred China policy would achieve, it is safe to say that it would lead to more misery for ordinary people and greater risks for the United States and its allies.

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The young men and women who have volunteered to serve to protect their communities as members of the United States military have been under attack by their own government for over a century, experimented on like laboratory animals, with mustard gas, plutonium, Agent Orange and depleted uranium.

But what we’re experiencing now is the final destruction of the entire US military from within.

Those with enough sense to refuse the gene therapy shots are being forced out of military service.

Navy SEALs who have refused the jab have been denied deployment and even denied permission to travel for medical treatment.

But more than two-thirds of the US military have chosen to receive this life-altering vaxxine, which has now proven to be catastrophic.

Attorney-at-Law Todd Callender, who is representing the US Navy SEALs vs President Joe Biden has recently reported an 1100% increase in US military deaths as a result of these mRNA injections and based on their latest data, they expect this number to soon rise above 5000%.

A leaked military database from the Department of Defense shows us that while the public was being told that it’s a “crisis of the unvaccinated”, the Defense Secretary and Upper Command knew 71% of all new cases were among the fully-vaxxinated.

The Department of Defense knew what they were doing and the proper charges are genocide.

[TruNews clip] Todd Callender:

“If you look at all of the documentation; Pfizer’s documentation, we did mass spectrometry on their vials. We know what’s in these things.

“And in fact, they even admitted that they added an HIV protein into the shots for the purpose of disabling peoples’ autoimmune (sic).

“They couldn’t slip these lipid nanoparticles, which are, in fact little bombers that carry pathogenic proteins to effectuate gene modification in an individual – ‘gene therapy’, as they call it.

“In order to get those lipid nanoparticles past your cellular defense, your body’s defense, they had to disarm your immune system – and they did that. It’s in all the scientific papers.

“What they didn’t do is undo that and right now, they’re coming to understand this. People are showing up HIV positive. People that have had three shots have no immune system left over, whatsoever.

“There is no way to characterize this other than intentional homicide, the intentional taking of a human life – except that it’s in large numbers, which makes it a genocide.

Rick Wiles: A vaccine-delivered AIDS epidemic.

Todd Callender: That’s right. That’s correct.

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First crossposted on March 23, 2022

On 20 March 2022, while we were conducting a humanitarian mission near Sartana, on the north-eastern outskirts of Mariupol, we came across many civilians who had recently fled Mariupol thanks to the advance of Russian and DPR (Donetsk People’s Republic) troops. One of them, Nikolay, agreed to talk on camera about the crimes committed by the neo-Nazi Azov regiment against the inhabitants. A testimony confirmed by other civilians who managed to evacuate the city.

As we deliver the last of our food supplies and baby nappies to the fifth village in our humanitarian mission near Sartana, a man comes out of the house where he is staying and starts talking to us. We discover that he has recently managed to flee Mariupol, after three weeks of horror.

I ask him if he knows by any chance what really happened in the Mariupol maternity hospital and theatre, about which the Western media have recently made their headlines. And there surprise, Nikolay knows what happened there, he saw with his own eyes, how the maternity hospital was transformed into a military position and a firing position by the fighters of the Azov regiment (which he still calls Azov battalion by the way). He confirms that the hospital had been evacuated to another area and was therefore no longer in working order.

He also explains that the dramatic theatre in Mariupol was not destroyed at all by a bombing by the Russian army, but that the fighters of the Azov regiment blew it up!

See Nikolay’s interview with English subtitles:

Nikolay goes on to explain that Ukrainian soldiers (whether from the regular army or the neo-Nazi Azov regiment) would not let civilians out of Mariupol, he says that they shot at a column of cars trying to evacuate the town, and that bodies still lie along the highway they drove on.

This is confirmed by the testimony of other civilians who were interviewed by Anna News colleagues as they left Mariupol (English subtitles):

Nikolay ends with some chilling facts about how his 17-year-old niece was almost dragged into the basement where the Azov fighters are holed up. He says that other girls, including minors, have been taken there by Ukrainian neo-Nazis. He does not talk openly about rape, as there are children nearby when we discuss it, but he simply says that “everyone knows what they do to them”.

This testimony reminds me of others. Former prisoners recovered by the DPR during exchanges had told me in private discussions that young girls were disappearing in Mariupol, that they were raped by neo-Nazi fighters and then executed.

A former prisoner who had been tortured in a neo-Nazi battalion prison, and who was interviewed by my colleague Laurent Brayard at the beginning of 2016, recounted how several other prisoners had been raped by Ukrainian fighters, before some of them suddenly disappeared.

A technique also used by the SBU in the famous secret prison called “the library”, located in the basement of Mariupol airport, as revealed by a former prisoner, Yulia Prosolova.

The airport has just fallen under the control of the DPR’s popular militia (which invalidates Western media reports that the Russian army is no longer advancing, or even retreating, in Mariupol), which will make it possible to investigate and try to find evidence of the crimes denounced by numerous testimonies of former prisoners, but also by the former SBU agent, Vasily Prozorov.

Currently 50% of the city of Mariupol is now under the control of the Russian army and the DPR people’s militia, including the Azovstal factory, which shows that the advance is continuing, contrary to what the Ukrainian propaganda and the Western “media” say.

Further north, the DPR People’s Militia has taken Maryinka, Verkhnetoretskoye and Slavnoye. The battle for the capture of Kamenka, Novosselovka II, and Avdeyevka continues.

In the newly liberated territories, municipal services are working hard to restore electricity, gas and water supplies. Electricity has been restored to 16 new settlements in the DPR, including Staromarievka, Granitnoye, Novosselovka and Andreyevka, and gas to 11 villages including Pavlopol, Bougas, Novognatovka, Nikolayevka and Donskoye.

In Volnovakha, the DPR also started work on repairing the hospital, which had been used as a firing position by Ukrainian soldiers and destroyed, so that it would be operational again as soon as possible.

The LPR People’s Militia has taken control of Kalinovo Popasnoye, Novoalexandrovka, Stepnoye and Boguslavskoye.

The use of civilian infrastructure by Ukrainian soldiers has been documented in places other than Donbass. For example, the Russian army published a video filmed by one of its drones, showing how a Ukrainian multiple rocket launcher firing from Kiev went to refuel in a shopping centre transformed into an ammunition stockpile! A shopping centre that was then destroyed by a Russian missile strike.

 

Other videos, filmed by civilians, confirm this use of the shopping centre by Ukrainian soldiers (videos that some people reproach civilians for filming, as can be seen below with this screenshot of a post on Telegram where one can read “This is partly why you should not broadcast the movements of our military equipment on social networks”)

 

Meanwhile, in the Ukrainian media, it seems that journalists and guests of the programmes are having an ignominy contest. So after the journalist Fakhroudine Charafmal, who quoted Adolf Eichmann and said that he was ready to kill Russian children in order to destroy Russia (for which he was not even fired from the TV channel, and merely apologised saying that he had gone too far), we had a Ukrainian “Mengele doctor”, Guennady Drouzenko, who said (on the same TV channel) that he had ordered his doctors in the field hospitals to castrate captured Russian soldiers, because the Russians would not be humans, but cockroaches that must be destroyed (video with English subtitles below)…

After the Russian Investigative Committee launched proceedings against him, the Ukrainian “Dr Mengele” also put his statement down to emotion, and denied that he had given the order to castrate the captured Russian soldiers.

And against a backdrop of Nazi-like statements on Ukrainian TV, the Western media are competing in terms of shameless lies, from Associated Press claiming that there are no more journalists in Marioupol, whereas TF1, Éric Tegnér and I went there with Russian and Italian journalists, and Christopher Miller of RFI, who distorts a statement by the Russian defense ministry to make it appear that the ministry is threatening military tribunals against anyone who does not evacuate Marioupol, whereas the threat is directed at the local authorities who are doing nothing to help the population.

The information war around the Russian military operation in Ukraine is becoming increasingly insane, with the continued publication of false information (including via the hacking of Russian media sites) that must be debunked. It is to be hoped that the battle of Mariupol will end as soon as possible, to put an end to the ordeal of the civilians still held in the city by the fighters of the neo-Nazi Azov regiment.

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A recent report in National Geographic describes how international research groups are attempting to design ‘self-spreading’ genetically engineered vaccines that can jump from vaccinated to unvaccinated populations. Receiving only scant attention in the mainstream media, the approach carries long-term risks that are essentially both unpredictable and irreversible. As is similarly the case with the so-called ‘gain-of-function’ research that has been implicated in causing COVID-19, the existence and use of this technology should be openly addressed by governments as a matter of urgency.  

Carried out with the supposed aim of stopping wildlife from spreading Ebola, rabies, and other dangerous viruses, the experiments are claimed to be seeking to prevent future global pandemics by blocking the jumping of pathogens from animals to humans. Because animals living in the wild are difficult to vaccinate in large numbers, the idea behind the technology is to design vaccines that, after administration to small groups, would spread quickly and easily to other animals.

Independent scientists are far from being universally convinced the idea is a good one. Jonas Sandbrink, a biosecurity researcher at the University of Oxford in the UK, has expressed particular concern. “Once you set something engineered and self-transmissible out into nature, you don’t know what happens to it and where it will go,” he says. “Even if you just start by setting it out into animal populations, part of the genetic elements might find their way back into humans.”

While it is being claimed for now that such vaccines would never deliberately be administered to people, the experience of the past two years has taught us how policies that might once have been thought unthinkable, such as imposing draconian lockdowns and the mandatory use of experimental gene-based vaccinations, have quickly become employed by governments as standard public health responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. With authoritarian forms of governance seemingly on the rise in this way, to trust that self-spreading vaccines would never be applied to humans would clearly be naïve.

Moreover, given that the ’official’ explanation for the emergence of COVID-19 posits that the SARS-CoV-2 virus supposedly crossed over to humans from an (unknown) animal, logic dictates that regulatory authorities could therefore not rule out the possibility that a virus-based self-spreading vaccine administered to animals might similarly cross over to humans. Nor either can anyone be certain that the release of such a vaccine in the wild would not set off an unexpected chain of events producing catastrophic effects across multiple ecosystems.

There are also some fundamental legal questions to be considered as, once used, virus-based self-spreading vaccines would be impossible to contain within a country’s own borders. As a result, countries opposed to their use may still end up suffering their effects. A vaccine utilized in one country could easily affect entire continents.

Nevertheless, despite the incalculable risks involved, National Geographic reports that field experiments involving inoculating animals with a Lassa virus self-spreading vaccine are already expected to commence within the year. Politicians and policy makers need to recognize the potential risks of this disturbing technology before it’s too late.

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This article was originally published on Dr. Rath Health Foundation.

Paul Anthony Taylor is the Executive Director of the Dr. Rath Health Foundation and one of the coauthors of our explosive book, “The Nazi Roots of the ‘Brussels EU’”, Paul is also our expert on the Codex Alimentarius Commission and has had eye-witness experience, as an official observer delegate, at its meetings.

Featured image is from Chemical Violence

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On the same day that the FDA authorized a fifth mRNA COVID injection for immunocompromised individuals (and a fourth for the general population over 50), one of the FDA’s top bureaucrats is already projecting more mRNA doses to come.

“I don’t want to shock anyone, but there may be a need for people to get an additional booster in the fall,” Peter Marks, the director of the FDA’s Center for Biologic Evaluation and Research, told reporters.

For mRNA compliant citizens, that round of shots would mark a fifth or sixth injection of a non FDA-approved experimental mRNA vaccine — which can cause significant side effects with each additional dose for some — within a two year window.

Marks explained that an FDA advisory committee will discuss the probability of another mRNA dose next week. That committee was supposed to meet before the latest booster authorization to evaluate the safety and efficacy of a fourth and fifth round of shots. The FDA decided to bypass that process entirely.

“It’s not actually clear yet what the optimal booster should be,” Marks said. “We’re hoping by taking this action, we will help allow people to take steps to protect themselves should we have another wave to come through this country.”

He added that the next dose might be one that is reformulated for a more current variant, but did not commit one way or another.

The current mRNA shot was designed by both Pfizer and Moderna to target the ostensibly original Wuhan strain of 2019. This strain no longer exists in circulation, and according to gene sequencing, it has not been the dominant strain for about two years. The 2019 shot has never been updated, despite claims of an update being as easy as a computer-generated “copy and paste” procedure. Pfizer and Moderna both claimed that they were working on an Omicron vaccine — projecting that it would be ready in March of 2022 — but seem to have scrapped the plan, for reasons unknown to the public.

The U.S. government has already spent tens of billions of dollars in taxpayer funds to enrich Pfizer and Moderna, which seem to have assumed full regulatory capture of Government Health agencies. These agencies now deliver timely rubber stamp approvals for their latest experimental products, and they routinely dismiss the overwhelming evidence of a negative efficacy, failed vaccine program.

On Wednesday, President Biden got his claimed “second booster” (fourth injection) on live television, marking the president’s fourth shot in the last 15 months.

He then demanded more money from taxpayers to finance future doses for “new variants.”

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The Russian invasion of Ukraine has been seized as an opportunity by fossil fuel investors. While consumers get hammered by high gas prices and spiking energy costs, top fracking executives’ wealth soars. Since January, the value of shares currently held by CEOs of eight leading fossil fuel companies has increased by nearly $100 million.

An analysis of leading fossil fuel interests shows executives are profiting from the crisis. While carnage happens in Ukraine, these predators are taking advantage of global price increases that have sent company stocks soaring. They include:

  • Fracking and LNG companies Cheniere, EQT, EOG Resources
  • Pipeline giants Kinder Morgan and Enbridge
  • And industry powerhouses Chevron, ConocoPhillips, and Exxon Mobil

Fossil Fuel Titans Are In A Mad Dash To Profit From Soaring Gas Prices

The value of Cheniere CEO Jack Fusco’s company stock is up $25 million from January to March 10th. ExxonMobil CEO Darren Woods’ stock holdings have increased by $25 million over the same period. The value of Kinder Morgan CEO Steven Kean’s stock has jumped nearly $15 million. Some of these corporate leaders have sold shares to cash in on the crisis. ConocoPhillips’ Ryan Lance sold shares for $23 million in mid-February, while Chevron’s Michael Wirth sold $14 million in stock by late February.

The companies are finding other ways to consolidate wealth in response to this crisis, too.

Eight big fracked gas and export companies announced stock buybacks and repurchase authorizations in the last year totaling over $25 billion. That amassed wealth is equivalent to filling up 500,000,000 gas tanks with 10 gallons of gas at $5 a gallon. It’s also enough to heat the homes of over 33 million people for the winter (assuming a $750 gas bill).

Fossil Fuel Interests Use PR Spin To Peddle LNG As a  ‘Solution’

The invasion of Ukraine helps fossil fuel interests promote an even greater expansion of liquefied natural gas (LNG) exports. Theoretically, this is to replace Russian gas in Europe. EQT, the largest US gas company, launched a brazen PR campaign. Its plan is titled “Unleashing U.S. LNG: The Largest Green Initiative on the Planet.” They’ve cooked up talking points to sell LNG as a security measure against the climate crisis they’ve helped cause:

[LNG is] ”one of the world’s largest weapons to combat climate change…. it would allow us to provide energy security to our allies while weakening the energy dominance of our adversaries.” — EQT CEO Toby Rice

The truth is LNG transportation and export has significant environmental, public health, and safety impacts. Further taking into account the life cycle including leaks, fracked gas can be as bad or worse for the climate than coal, especially in the short term.

The Push For LNG Expansion Is A Bid To Lock In Decades Of Fossil Fuel Dependence

The United States is already the top exporter of fracked gas in the world, and companies are planning to expand their U.S. fracking operations. As Chevron CEO Colin Parfit said recently about the company’s Permian drilling projects:

“Essentially the U.S. isn’t big enough to absorb it all, so essentially you need to create export alternatives for all of it.”

While the industry and White House officials push to increase drilling, that will have no impact on current prices. It also overlooks the fact that Wall Street investors have been pushing drillers to slow production to increase profits. This campaign to promote LNG in response to Ukraine is a cynical calculation by the dominant players in the industry. They intend it to lock in long-term contracts that would create decades of additional fossil fuel dependence.

They say so themselves, often most clearly when speaking to investors.

As Jack Fusco, CEO of LNG company Cheniere, put it:

“If anything, these high prices, the volatility drive even more energy security and long-term contracting. So I would say that the fact that there’s a scarcity of LNG these days is driving more and more conversation on how to increase our infrastructure and secure monthly contracts for our European customers.” He added that “the market continues to get healthier, but it’s extremely volatile. And you should expect us to be opportunistic out there.”

Ezra Yacob, CEO of EOG remarked,

“the U.S. has discovered a very vast supply of natural gas and it’s important that we get that gas offshore and into the global market for some of the reasons that you talked about now, not only geopolitical, but just developing nations.”

It’s An Aggressive Move From Fossil Fuel Companies As Climate Change Jeopardizes Their Prospects

Oil and gas companies are positioning themselves for decades of continued fossil fuel growth because they perceive a threat. The science clearly shows we need to rapidly move off fossil fuels and towards a renewable energy future.

Enbridge president and CEO Al Monaco told investors that increasing exports ”is what’s behind our crude and LNG export strategy. So before the crisis, our view was that conventional energy will grow at least through 2035 and what’s happening today just reinforces that view.“

Chevron CEO Michael Wirth said similar, based on fossil fuel execs’ favorite lie about renewable energy: “Particularly as you see more wind and solar, you need some sort of reliable generation capacity to deal with the intermittency that we’re going to see increasingly….I think there’s a good future for natural gas.”

The long-term damage of expanding fossil fuel extraction, however, is something they think can wait for another day. Charif Souki, the chair of LNG company Tellurian put it, “Since the consequences of climate are going to be 30 or 40 years down the road, people are going to focus a lot more on what is happening now….We can come back to climate.”

They couldn’t be more wrong. The consequences of climate change — which they’ve helped drive — are all around us now. Letting them capitalize on international conflict to secure their profits will only perpetuate their damage.

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***

As debate over ‘The Science’ has increased, people are questioning whether there was more to COVID-19 in terms of underlying agendas, in particular with respect to global-level actors. Was it incompetence or coordination?

It’s been two years since COVID-19 became a dominant and all-consuming issue. Now there are signs we are witnessing the unravelling of some of the key policy responses – blanket lockdowns and population-wide injections – that have been so aggressively promoted by many, although not all, governments around the world. Of course, the unravelling is patchy: many countries are maintaining high levels of restrictions and the infrastructure for reinstating measures persists. There is also reluctance by many to concede there have been problems with the COVID-19 responses to date. However, doubts about the efficacy of lockdowns are now widely aired whilst there is increasing awareness that the mRNA shot is not safe. And it is at least clear that very significant numbers of people, including scientists and academics, are expressing views that are at odds with authority or mainstream claims that lockdowns reduce mortality and that mass injections are a rational and efficacious solution.

As debate over ‘The Science’ has increased, more and more people have started to question whether or not there is more to COVID-19 in terms of underlying agendas, in particular with respect to global-level actors such as the World Economic Forum (WEF), the World Health Organisation (WHO) and so-called ‘Big Pharma’. In the early days of COVID-19 any such talk was immediately dismissed as ‘conspiratorial’ nonsense and, broadly speaking, people raising non-mainstream doubts about any aspect of the COVID-19 issue were subjected to vilification by ‘authoritative’ voices and corporate media. Such dynamics were very much in evidence with respect to speculation about the origins of COVID-19. And yet, today, the so-called ‘lab leak theory’ has moved from a ‘sphere of deviance’ to a ‘sphere of legitimate controversy’ with many people, from mainstream science and corporate media to popular podcasts, discussing it. At the same time, public awareness of the WEF and its political agendas, perhaps more accurately described as visions, is growing. Indeed, a constant refrain from some quarters is that what was yesterday’s conspiracy theory is today’s fact. So, if all this is not about a virus, what might actually be going on?

COVID-19 and the ‘Structural Deep Event’ concept

First and foremost, it is necessary to dispel the idea that any attempt to understand intersections between political-economic agendas and COVID-19 is necessarily absurd or smacks of batshit-crazy conspiracism. It is a fact that powerful political and economic actors do not blindly and irrationally stumble through history but rather strategise, plan and take actions that are expected to achieve results. They may make mistakes and plans are not always successful, but that does not mean they do not try and sometimes succeed in their aims and objectives. For example the tobacco industry worked long and hard, and with some success, to shape scientific and political discourse regarding their product and delay public awareness of its dangers.

Second, it is also true that powerful actors can have clear perceptions of their interests and are guided by the desire to realise, protect and further them. Where those interests come from might be reducible to any number of material or ideological influences. But origins do not matter, powerful actors still have conceptions of their interests and what they want to do.

Third, it is also true that powerful political and economic actors are, well, powerful. They have resources and skills at their disposal that other less powerful actors do not. One potent  tool available is that of propaganda, which grants significant leverage and influence to those with the skills and resources to disseminate it. For those liberals who remain at peace with their world – believing that powerful actors simply relay their political, economic and social goals to knowledgeable publics who then consent, or refuse to consent, to those goals – the fact that propaganda is exercised extensively across liberal democratic states comes as a shock. Indeed, it is the experience of this author that many ‘liberal’ scholars struggle to recognise the role of propaganda even in well documented examples such as that of the tobacco industry shaping the science on the harms of smoking or the bogus claims regarding weapons of mass destruction (WMD) used to justify the invasion of Iraq. Recognising that propaganda is a major component of exercising power within so-called liberal democratic states logically removes any justification for the assumptions that a) powerful actors cannot or do not manipulate publics and b) citizenry are sufficiently autonomous and knowledgeable to be able to grant or withhold consent.

History is replete with examples of powerful actors successfully pursuing goals and manipulating populations in the process. In the days after 9/11, we now know that British and American officials were planning a wide-ranging series of actions – so called ‘regime-change’ wars – that went well outside the scope of the official narrative regarding combating alleged ‘Islamic fundamentalist terrorism’. One British embassy cable stated, four days after 9/11, that ‘[t]he “regime-change hawks” in Washington are arguing that a coalition put together for one purpose [against international terrorism] could be used to clear up other problems in the region’. Within weeks British Prime Minister Tony Blair communicated with US president George W. Bush saying, amongst many other things, ‘If toppling Saddam is a prime objective, it is far easier to do it with Syria and Iran in favour or acquiescing rather than hitting all three at once’. As these two western leaders conspired at the geo-strategic level, a low-level ‘spin doctor’, Jo Moore, commented on the utility of 9/11 in terms of day-to-day ‘media management’, noting that it was ‘a good day to bury bad news’. Jo Moore was forced to resign, Bush and Blair laid the tracks for 20-plus years of conflict in the international system, including the 2003 invasion of Iraq and the recently ended 20-year occupation of Afghanistan.

Professor Peter Dale Scott (University of California, Berkley) developed the idea of the  ‘structural deep event’ and this is useful in capturing the idea that powerful actors frequently work to instigate, exploit or exacerbate events in ways that enable substantive and long-lasting societal transformations.

These frequently involve, according to Scott, a combination of legal and illegal activity implicating both legitimate and public-facing political structures as well as covert or hidden parts of government – the so-called deep state which is understood as the interface ‘between the public, the constitutionally established state, and the deep forces behind it of wealth, power, and violence outside the government’. So, for example, Scott argues that the JFK assassination became an event that enabled the maintenance of the Cold War whilst 9/11 likewise enabled the global ‘war on terror’, and that both involved a variety of actors not usually recognized in mainstream or official accounts of these events. It is important to note that Scott claims his approach does not necessarily imply a simplistic grand conspiracy, but is rather based on the idea of opaque networks of powerful and influential groups whose interests converge, at points, and who use and exploit events to pursue their objectives.

Applied to COVID-19, a ‘structural deep event’ reading would point toward a constellation of actors, with overlapping interests, working to advance agendas, and being enabled to do so because of COVID-19. Such a reading does not necessarily include or exclude the possibility of COVID-19 being an instigated event. What are the grounds for seriously considering a ‘structural deep event’ reading?

The failed COVID-19 response, injection inefficacy and propaganda

There is a strong, perhaps overwhelming, case to be made that the key responses to COVID-19 – lockdowns, cloth masking and mass injection – were flawed. A large swathe of scientists and medical professionals are now clearly and repeatedly warning governments and populations that lockdowns are harmful and ineffective, whilst mass injection of populations may also be doing more harm than good. Put in lay terms, the idea of quarantining entire (healthy) populations for extended periods of time in response to a respiratory virus, and then attempting to submit entire populations to an experimental mRNA injection on a repeated basis, does not appear to be scientifically robust.

It has also become apparent that a remarkable and wide-ranging propaganda effort was used to mobilize support for lockdowns and, later on, injections. For example, it is understood that many Western governments have behavioural psychology units attached to the highest levels of government, designed to shape thoughts and behaviour. According to Iain Davis, in February 2020 the WHO had established  the Technical Advisory Group on Behavioural Insights and Sciences for Health (TAG); ‘The group is chaired by Prof. Cass Sunstein and its members include behavioural change experts from the World Bank, the World Economic Forum and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Prof. Susan Michie, from the UK, is also a TAG participant’. In the UK, behavioural scientists from SPI-B (Scientific Pandemic Influenza Group on Behaviour) reconvened on 13 February 2020 and subsequently advised the UK government on how to secure compliance with non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs). Broadly, these propaganda techniques appear to have involved maximising perceived threat in order to coerce populations to comply with lockdown and, eventually, to accept a series of injections.

We also now know that propaganda activities have included smear campaigns against dissenting scientists and, in at least one major case, were initiated by high-level officials: in Autumn 2020, Anthony Fauci and National Institute of Health director Francis Collins discussed the need to swiftly shut down the Great Barrington Declaration, whose authors were advocating an alternative (and historically orthodox) COVID-19 response focused on protecting high-risk individuals and thus avoiding destructive lockdown measures. Collins wrote in an email that this ‘proposal from the three fringe epidemiologists … seems to be getting a lot of attention … There needs to be a quick and devastating published takedown of its premises’. Rather than a civilised and robust scientific debate, a smear campaign followed.

The legacy corporate media, social media platforms and large swathes of academia appear to have played an important role in disseminating this propaganda and promoting the official narrative on COVID-19. The proximity of legacy corporate media to political and economic power has been well understood for many decades: concentration of ownership, reliance upon advertising revenue, deference to elite sources, vulnerability to smear campaigns and ideological positioning are all understood to sharply limit the autonomy of legacy media (these factors also arguably shape academia). With COVID-19 these dynamics are exacerbated by, for example, direct regulatory influence, such as Ofcom direction to UK broadcasters, and censorship by ‘Big Tech’ of views deviating from those of the authorities and the WHO. The Trusted News Initiative (TNI) and Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA) have coordinated major legacy media in order to counter what they claim to be ‘misinformation’, and this appears to have played a role in suppressing legitimate scientific criticism whilst elevating ‘official’ narratives. Currently moves are afoot to further strengthen elite control over media discourse via legislation aimed at preventing so-called ‘misinformation’ and ‘disinformation’.

Extreme and arguably flawed policy responses – societal lockdown and mandated mass injection – combined with widespread propaganda activities aimed at securing the compliance of the population might be explicable in a number of ways. For example:

  1. The cock-up thesis might be invoked to explain all of this as an irrational panic response by well-intentioned or ideologically driven actors who got things badly wrong and imitated each other while doing so;
  2. It might be that these policy responses are the result of narrow vested interests and corruption;
  3. Powerful actors might have sought to take advantage of COVID-19 to advance substantial political and economic agendas and, as part of this, helped to promote key aspects of the COVID-19 event.

Following two years of massive societal disruption aimed at containing a seasonal respiratory virus and the persistence of some aspects of the COVID-19 narrative despite substantive scientific challenges, it is tempting to speculate that there are corruption and concerted political and economic drivers behind policy, rather than blunders and incompetence. Moving beyond speculation, are there well-established grounds to take explanations 2 and 3 seriously?

Manipulation and exploitation of Health Agencies: Regulatory Capture at the NIH and CDC plus the World Health Organisation (WHO) and Pandemic Preparedness Agenda

Evidence for vested interests and corruption has come, in particular, from analyses of US regulatory bodies and the actions of the WHO. In particular, evidence has emergedshowing that key authorities in the US – the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) – under the influence of Fauci, the Chief Medical Officer to the US President, have suffered from severe conflicts of interest. The term ‘regulatory capture’ is frequently used to describe this situation.

For example, Robert F. Kennedy Jr’s detailed analysis of the US-led COVID-19 response in The Real Anthony Fauci, documents the corrupt relationship between so-called ‘Big Pharma’ and Anthony Fauci arguing that, to all intents and purposes, there has been ‘regulatory capture’ whereby pharmaceutical companies and public officials enjoy mutually beneficial arrangements. This mutual infiltration is understood by Kennedy to underpin the COVID-19 response, especially the commitment to a ‘vaccine-only’ solution and suppression of preventative treatments such as Ivermectin and Hydroxychloroquine (HCQ).  By way of  example, Kennedy relays the case of Dr Tess Lawrie and WHO researcher Andrew Hill in which Hill appeared to confirm there was pressure to delay publication of results supporting the efficacy of Ivermectin. Regarding HCQ, Kennedy writes:

By 2020, we shall see, Bill Gates exercised firm control over WHO and deployed the agency in his effort to discredit HCQ’ …

On June 17, the WHO – for which Mr. Gates is the largest funder after the US, and over which Mr. Gates and Dr Fauci exercise tight control – called for the halt of HCQ trials in hundreds of hospitals across the world. WHO Chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus ordered nations to stop using HCQ and CQ. Portugal, France, Italy, and Belgium banned HCQ for COVID-19 treatment.

More broadly, the WHO has been important in terms of co-ordinating some COVID-19 policy responses.  Although notionally an independent entity, the WHO has increasingly come under corporate influence via both the growth of corporate-influenced organisations such as Gavi (Global Vaccine Alliance), CEPI (Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations) and private financing via the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The WHO is also currently negotiating a treaty with the governments of member states to provide unprecedented powers to this organization to enable rapid responses, transcending national governments, when the WHO declares pandemics in the future, thus centralizing control and potentially overriding national sovereignty.

This line of analysis might lead to a conclusion that what we have experienced to date – harmful lockdowns and injection strategies underpinned by massive propaganda – is primarily the result of corruption, conflicts of interest and vested interests, rather than what could reasonably be described as good faith errors by politicians and bureaucrats.

The World Economic Forum and the ‘Great Reset’

The World Economic Forum (WEF) has been associated by some analysts with the COVID-19 event and in 2020 Klaus Schwab, its founder, published a co-authored book titled COVID-19: The Great Reset. Schwab declared: ‘The Pandemic represents a rare but narrow window of opportunity to reflect, reimagine, and reset our world’. One key component of the political-economic vision promoted by the WEF is ‘stakeholder capitalism’ (Global Public-Private Partnerships, GPPP) involving the integration of government, business and civil society actors with respect to the provision of services. Another key component involves harnessing ‘the innovations of the Fourth Industrial Revolution’, especially the exploitation of developments in artificial intelligence, computing and robotics, in order to radically transform society toward a digitised model. Slogans now frequently associated with these visions include ‘you will own nothing and be happy’, ‘smart cities’ and ‘build back better’.

It is also apparent that the WEF, as an organising force, has considerable reach. It has been involved with training and educating individuals – through its Young Global Leaders Programme and its predecessor, Global Leaders for Tomorrow – who have subsequently moved into positions of considerable power. It has also been noted that many national leaders (e.g. Merkel, Macron, Trudeau, Ardern, Putin, and Kurz) are WEF Forum of Young Global Leaders graduates or members and have ‘played prominent roles, typically promoting zero-covid strategies, lockdowns, mask mandates, and ‘vaccine passports’. In 2017 Schwab boasted:

When I mention our names like Mrs Merkel, even Vladimir Putin and so on, they all have been Young Global Leaders of the World Economic forum. But what we are very proud of now is the young generation like prime minister Trudeau, president of Argentina and so on. So we penetrate the cabinets. So yesterday I was at a reception for prime minister Trudeau and I will know that half of this cabinet or even more half of this cabinet are actually young global leaders of the World Economic Forum …. that’s true in Argentina, and it’s true in France now with the president a Young Global Leader.

Corporate members of the WEF’s Forum of Young Global Leaders includes Mark Zuckerberg whilst ‘Global Leaders for Tomorrow’ included Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos.

Financial Crisis, the Central Banks and Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC)

It is now established that a major crisis in the repo markets during the Autumn of 2019 was followed by high-level planning aimed at resolving an impending financial crisis of greater proportions than the 2008 banking crisis.  According to some analysts, one response appears to have been a strengthened drive to control currencies via the Central Banks: Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC). The General Manager of the Bank of International Settlements (BIS), Agustin Carstens, stated in October 2020 that:

We intend to establish the equivalence with cash and there is a huge difference there. For example, in cash we don’t know who is using a $100 bill today … the key difference with the CBDC is that the central bank will have absolute control on the rules and regulations that will determine the use of that expression of central bank liability and also we will have the technology to enforce that.

A programmable CBDC potentially provides complete control over how and when an individual spends money, in addition to allowing authorities to automatically deduct taxes through a person’s ‘digital wallet’. According to some analysts, this development would also effectively remove any significant control over financial policy at the national level.

Technologies associated with programmable CBDCs overlap with those associated with 4IR and concepts regarding digitised society. Specifically, digital identity, a potential component of the intended CBDC, provides a basis for the creation of a digital grid upon which information relating to all aspects of an individual’s life will be available to governments, corporations and other powerful entities such as the security services. Also notable is the relationship between digital ID and the drive to create ‘vaccine passports’ as part of the COVID-19 response: Microsoft and the Rockefeller Foundation are central players in ID2020, alongside Gavi. The objective appears to be a global-level digital ID framework that integrates with health/vaccination status.

Both of these political-economic phenomena point toward a conclusion more closely aligned with the ‘structural deep event’ (Scott) thesis, in that they highlight the possibility that COVID-19 has been an event exploited to advance major political and economic agendas. This hypothesis is at least in part distinct from the idea that corruption and narrow vested interests explain most of what we have seen.

Threats to democracy and understanding what this all means

The political and economic processes identified regarding the WEF, digital ID and the central banks are not speculative or theoretical, they are directly observable and ongoing. It is also worth spelling out the potential interaction between these agendas and threats to democracy. It is now clear and empirically demonstrable that populations are being subjected to increasingly coercive and aggressive attempts to limit their autonomy, including restrictions on movement, the right to protest, freedom to work and freedom to participate in society. Most notably, significant numbers of people have been pushed, sometimes required, to take an injection at regular intervals in order to continue their participation in society. These developments have been accompanied by, at times, aggressive and discriminatory statements from major political leaders with respect to people resisting injection. The threat to civil liberties and ‘democracy as usual’ is, arguably, unprecedented. The economic impact has been dire and COVID-19 has seen a dramatic and continued  transfer of wealth from the poorest to the very richest (e.g. Oxfam, 2021).

Furthermore, the combination of a programmable CBDC, a ‘vaccine passport’ that determines access to services and real-world spaces and the availability of all online behaviours to corporations and governments can enable a system of near total control over an individual’s life, activities and opportunities. This system of control can be seen in China with the social credit system currently being implemented in certain provinces. Integration of personal data and money though a digital ID would also allow individuals to be readily stripped of their assets.

Of course, it is still possible that the sustained adherence to lockdown and mass injection (in spite of growing evidence against their efficacy) are explicable through reference to government blunders, whilst the parallel political and economic projects and rapid reduction in civil liberties are coincidences.

However, it would be remiss to set aside the fact that organisations such as the WHO and the WEF exist within a wider network, or constellation, of extremely powerful, non-elected political and economic entities made up of major multinational corporations, intergovernmental organisations (IGOs), large private foundations and other non-governmental organisations (NGOs). These include, in no particular order, the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) and other central banks; asset managers Blackrock and Vanguard; global-level entities such as the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), the Club of Rome, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Kellogg Foundation, Chatham House, the Trilateral Commission, the Atlantic Council, the Open Society Foundations and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation; and major corporations including so-called ‘Big Pharma’ and ‘Big Tech’ such as Apple, Google (part of Alphabet Inc), Amazon and Microsoft. And, of course, governments themselves are part of this constellation, with the most powerful – the US, China and India – having considerable influence. In addition, the European Union (EU) supranational body, via its President Ursula von der Leyen, has promoted the EU Digital COVID Certificate and demanded that all EU citizens be injected.

As such, it is entirely plausible that a convergence of interests, shared by multiple political and economic actors, has occurred, which has enabled the advancement of political and economic agendas. COVID-19, in this scenario, might well have been a mobilizing event instrumentalized by powerful players. It may also be the case that the current war in the Ukraine is an event that will be propagandized and used in a similar fashion.

Indeed, precisely this broad thesis is advanced in recent publications. In States of Emergency Kees van der Pijl argues there has been a ‘biopolitical seizure of power’ in which an intelligence-IT-media complex has crystallized as a new class block seeking to quell growing unrest and the strengthening of progressive social movements throughout the world. Under cover of Covid-19, and via ruthless exploitation of people’s fear of a virus, van der Pijl traces how this new class block is attempting to impose control via high-tech, digitised societies necessitating  mandatory injections and digital ID, as well as censorship and manipulation of public spheres. In short, van der Pijl describes a total surveillance society involving massive concentration of power and the end of democracy. Iain Davis’ Pseudopandemic similarly presents the COVID-19 event as primarily a propagandized phenomena that has functioned to enable the continued emergence of a technocratic order built around the Global Public-Private Partnership (GPPP) and ‘stake-holder capitalism’ that has appeared primarily to serve the interests of what he describes as an elite ‘parasite class’. Robert F. Kennedy’s The Real Anthony Fauci, although focused on documenting the corruption with respect to public health institutions and ‘Big Pharma’, is clear about its consequences for our democracies. Early in the book he notes that Fauci ‘has played a central role in undermining public health and subverting democracy and constitutional governance around the globe and in transitioning our civil governance toward medical totalitarianism’. Later in the book, Kennedy discusses the interplay between military, medical and intelligence planners and raises questions about an ‘underlying agenda to coordinate dismantlement of democratic governance’:

After 9/11, the rising biosecurity cartel adopted simulations as signaling mechanisms for choreographing lockstep responses among corporate, political, and military technocrats charged with managing global exigencies. Scenario planning became an indispensable device for multiple power centers to coordinate complex strategies for simultaneously imposing coercive controls upon democratic societies across the globe.

Other important analyses, all of which run along similar lines, have been provided by Cory Morningstar, Paul Shreyer and Whitney Webb, amongst others. And, not to be forgotten, James Corbett was one of the first to warn of the impending dangers of a biosecurity state all the way back in March 2020. Others such as Patrick Wood alerted us to these developments long before the arrival of COVID-19.  Along with all this, transhumanism, life extension or ‘enhancement’ through technology and digitalised society, observable in some of the output from the WEF and public musings of key individuals, appears to reflect a set of beliefs in technology and progress that can be traced back to Enlightenment thinking of the last 300 years. Philosophical debates over technology and what it means to be human have remained at the heart of the Enlightenment ‘project’, although perhaps deeply buried. Associated with this might be scientism as a religious cult of the West.

Attempts to attach a label to the complex political and economic processes we are witnessing include descriptors such as ‘global fascism,’ ‘global communism,’ ‘neo-feudalism,’ ‘neo-serfdom’, ‘totalitarianism,’ ‘technocracy,’ ‘centralization vs. subsidiarity,’ ‘stakeholder capitalism’, ‘global public-private partnerships,’ ‘corporate authoritarianism’, ‘authoritarianism,’ ‘tyranny’ and ‘global capitalism.’ Dr Robert Malone, inventor of part of the mRNA technology used in the COVID-19 injections, openly refers to the threat of global totalitarianism.

The task confronting humanity

For those occupying corporate or mainstream positions in politics, media or academia, the fear of being tarred with the ‘conspiracy theorist’ label is usually enough to dampen any enthusiasm for serious evaluation of the ways in which powerful and influential political and economic actors might be shaping responses to COVID-19 to further political and economic agendas. But the stakes are now simply too high for such shyness and, indeed cowardice, to be allowed to persist. There are strong and well-established grounds to take  analyses along the lines of the ‘structural deep event’ thesis seriously, as set out in this article, and there are clear and present dangers to our civil liberties, freedom and democracy.

Building on the work already started, researchers must explore more fully the networks and power structures that have shaped the COVID-19 responses and which have sought to move forward various political and economic agendas. Analysing more fully the techniques used, including propaganda and exploitation of COVID-19 as an enabling event, is now an essential task for researchers to undertake. Equally important is for scholars of democracy and ethics to further unpack the implications of these developments with respect to liberty and civil rights. Such work, ultimately, can not only deepen our understanding of what is going on; it can also provide a guide for those who seek to oppose what is being described by some as ‘global totalitarianism’ or ‘fascism’.

It could of course be the case that such a research agenda ultimately leads to a refutation of the ‘structural deep event’ thesis and confirmation that everything witnessed over the last two years has been one almighty cock-up. But if that is not the case, and we have all buried our heads in the sand by assuming there is nothing deeper going on, we will have failed ourselves and future generations. The stakes could not be higher and it has never been more essential to seriously engage with uncomfortable possibilities – even if that means interrogating explanations that move beyond reducing what we are all experiencing to blunder and incompetence.

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Dr Piers Robinson is a co-director of the Organisation for Propaganda Studies and was Chair/Professor in Politics, Society and Political Journalism, University of Sheffield, 2016-2019, Senior Lecturer in International Politics (University of Manchester 2010-2016) and Lecturer in Political Communication (University of Liverpool, 1999-2005). He researches and writes on propaganda, media, international politics and conflict.

Notes

1. Thanks to David Bell, Isa Blumi, Heike Bruner, Jonathan Engler and Nick Hudson for comments and input.

2. Sheldon Watts offers historic background illustrating how the establishment regularly rewrites the science to serve other purposes. In the case of Cholera, the main editors of The Lancet in the late 19th century actually contradicted their own findings of a previous decade in order to accommodate trade interests concerning the quarantining of British ships from India that would have harmed the British Empire’s economic model. From being a human communicable disease, it transformed into a dark-skinned disease of the orient. Watts, Sheldon. “From rapid change to stasis: Official responses to cholera in British-ruled India and Egypt: 1860 to c. 1921.” Journal of World History (2001): 321-374. Thanks to Isa Blumi for this reference.

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Is Russia the Real Target of Western Sanctions?

April 1st, 2022 by Kit Knightly

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The first tweet I saw when I checked my timeline this morning was from foreign policy analyst Clint Ehlirch, pointing out that the Russian ruble has already started recovering from the dip created by Western sanctions, and is almost at pre-war levels:

Ehrlich states, “sanctions were designed to collapse the value of the Ruble, they have failed”.

…to which I can only respond, well “were they?”

…and perhaps more importantly, “have they?”

Because it doesn’t really look like it, does it?

If anything, the sanctions seem to be at best rather impotent, and at worst amazingly counterproductive.

It’s not like the US/EU/NATO don’t know how to cripple economies. They have had years of practice starving the people of Cuba, Iraq, Venezuela and too many others to list.

Now, you could argue that Russia is a larger, more developed economy than those countries, and that’s true, but the US and its allies have previously managed to hurt the Russian economy quite drastically.

As recently as 2014, following the “annexation” of Crimea, Western sanctions were tame compared to the recent unprecedented measures, but crucially the US massively increased its own oil production, then later that year (following a visit by US Secretary of State John Kerry) Saudi Arabia did the same.

Despite objections from other members of OPEC – Venezuela and Iran chiefly – the Saudis flooded the market with oil.

The result of these moves was the biggest fall in oil prices for decades – collapsing from $109 a barrel, in June 2014, to $44 by January 2015.

This kicked Russia into a full recession and saw Russia’s GDP shrink for the first time under Putin’s leadership.

Again, just two years ago, allegedly as part of competing with Russia for a share of the oil market, Saudi Arabia once more flooded the market with cheap oil.

So, the West does know how to hurt Russia if it really wants to – by increasing oil production, flooding the market and tanking the price.

But has the US increased its oil production this time round? Have they leant on their Gulf allies to do the same?

Not at all.

In fact, in a point of beautiful narrative synchronicity, the US claims it’s “unable” to increase its oil production due to “staff shortages” caused by that gift that keeps on giving – Covid.

Similarly, Saudi Arabia is not tanking the oil market, but deliberately increasing prices.

Yes, right now, with the Western allies locked in an alleged economic war with Russia the price of oil is soaring, and may continue to do so.

This is good news for the Russian economy, to the point it may even make up for the damage done by the brutal sanctions.

The high price of oil and need “not to rely on Putin’s gas” or “de-Russify”our energy supply will doubtless result in millions being poured into “green” technology.

Those Western sanctions are targeting other Russian exports too, including grains and food in general.

Russia is a net exporter of food, meaning they export more food than they import. Conversely, many countries in Western Europe rely on imported food, including the UK which imports over 48% of its food supply.

If Europe refuses to buy Russian food, the net effect is that Russia hasfood…and the West doesn’t.

And, just as with oil, increasing food prices will help rather than hinder the Russian economy.

Take wheat for example, of which Russia is the biggest exporter in the world. The vast majority of this wheat is not even sold to Western countries – but instead to China, Kazakhstan, Egypt, Nigeria and Pakistan – and so is not even subject to sanctions.

Nevertheless, the sanctions, and the war, have actually driven the price of wheat up almost 30%.

This is good for the Russian economy.

Meanwhile, according to CNN, the US is likely to enter a full-blown recession by 2023, France is considering food vouchers and countries all over the world are expected to begin rationing fuel.

So, the sweeping sanctions imposed against Russia by the West, allegedly in response to the invasion of Ukraine, are not having their stated aim – tanking the Russian economy – but they are driving up the price of oil, creating potential energy and food shortages in the West and exacerbating the “cost of living” crisis created by the “pandemic”.

You should always be wary of anybody – individual or institution – whose actions accidentally achieve the exact opposite of their stated aim. That’s a simple rule to live by.

Remember how Orwell described the evolution of the concept of war in 1984:

War, it will be seen, is now a purely internal affair. In the past, the ruling groups of all countries, although they might recognize their common interest and therefore limit the destructiveness of war, did fight against one another, and the victor always plundered the vanquished. In our own day they are not fighting against one another at all. The war is waged by each ruling group against its own subjects, and the object of the war is not to make or prevent conquests of territory, but to keep the structure of society intact.

Recall that “the worst food shortages for fifty years” were predicted as a result of Covid. But they never materialised.

Likewise, we were due to experience Covid-related energy disruptions and power cuts. Short of the UK’s damp squib of a “petrol crisis”, they never really arrived.

But now they are heading our way after all – because war and sanctions

Increased food prices, decreased use of fossil fuels, lowering standards of living, public money poured into “renewables”. This is all part of a very familiar agenda, isn’t it?

Regardless of what you feel about Putin, Zelensky, the war in general or Ukrainian Nazis, it’s time to confront the elephant in room.

We need to be asking: What exactly is the real aim of these sanctions? And how come they align so perfectly with the great reset?

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Security, Empire and Life in the USA

April 1st, 2022 by James Patrick Jordan

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The word “security” conjures a couple of distinctly different and conflicting images. One is of human beings living in safe, viable, and sustainable communities, where individuals can freely develop their full potential, not hindered by threat and assault and exclusion from the daily necessities of life.

This notion of security prioritizes such socially beneficial institutions as housing, health care and education. It encourages the arts, maintains infrastructure and sustains ecosystems.

This kind of security also provides for the people’s defense. That defense is not, however, prioritized over social needs, and it is not formed for committing acts of aggression against others.  Such a society may take a variety of forms but, in the broadest sense, all of them could be called socialist in that they put people before profits.

More often than not, however, when we talk about security, we are talking about something completely different. This notion of security is rooted in the kind of fear bred in the heart of the thief and the murderer, ever on guard that those to whom they have caused pain might rise against them and take back what has been stolen.

This type of security also results from a desire to manage broken communities and societies through coercion and punishment, rather than addressing root causes. It is the security of those who prefer to fight “wars on crime” instead of “wars on poverty.”

This security is prioritized over every social need. Its primary directive is protection of the powerful few, and the preservation and expansion of their markets and profits. This is the “security” of capitalism and Empire, that is, the U.S./NATO Empire.

According to the World Inequality Report, one percent of the world’s population owns 38% of its wealth, while the poorest 50% own just 2%. My former colleague at the Alliance for Global Justice (AFGJ), Jon Hunt, used to say, “The Pentagon is the insurance company of transnational corporations and global capitalism.”

Pentagon | History & Features | Britannica

The insurance company of transnational corporations and global capitalism. [Source: Britannica.com]  

The United States was founded as an empire, and that is what it is today. While its architects once clamored about the “manifest destiny” of U.S. occupation of the continent “from sea to shining sea,” the objective today is U.S. hegemony around the world.

The U.S. Empire wants to dominate other nations, but it is not against the idea that they should be more developed. The U.S. wants to replicate its model in many other places while also bringing home lessons learned abroad.

As the wealth gap grows each day in our own country, the U.S. ruling class must also find new ways to exercise its control over the nation. Global capitalism depends on the growth of power-elites around the world to facilitate privatization of resources, as well as expansion of markets and access to cheap labor.

Meanwhile, as resources dwindle every day—especially water resources—and the twin crises of economic collapse and climate change proliferate, the export of the U.S. security model becomes a priority for the control, displacement and dispossession of peoples, and, of course, for the repression of the inevitable resistance.

The United States is unique in this way. The export of our security model across the world is unparalleled. That model represents the very infrastructure of the Empire. It is Empire’s skeleton. This is why the United States maintains more than 800 foreign military bases, the spine of the imperial beast.

But not only that. We are exporting our police model; our legal model; our border militarization model; our prison model. In fact, as if to underscore the reality that, in the U.S., the nation and Empire are one, our Department of Homeland Security is itself an international agency, with more than 2,000 agents stationed outside our borders.

Colombia is a case in point in terms of a country whose security model has been restructured based on a U.S. model. And it is more than that. Colombia is a most willing proving ground for the development of new programs, new aspects of security, new partners, subsequently taken to a much wider international stage. In terms of the diffusion of the U.S. security model, Colombia is not just a doorway to Latin America, but to the world.

Colombia functions as a military colony of the U.S. Empire (and NATO, given its status as Latin America’s sole NATO partner). As such, the nation has at least seven U.S. military bases and, truly, the U.S. military has access wherever it wants to go.

Colombia Action Network: Statement on U.S. bases in Colombia | The Marxist-Leninist

Source: marxistleninist.wordpress.com

Colombian military officials regularly report to the Pentagon’s Southern Command (SOUTHCOM). Colombia’s troops have served in Afghanistan and Yemen, and they have patrolled air and sea space with U.S. troops along the coasts of Central America and Western Africa.

I have personally seen Colombian troops in the village of Herrera, Municipality of Rioblanco, Department of Tolima, who were carrying canteens on their belts stamped “USA.” You can be sure that no U.S. soldier has ever been approved to wear any clothing or accessory bearing the insignia of another country’s military, no matter how close an ally.

Today, Colombia’s two largest troop concentrations are in the southwest of Colombia and along its border with Venezuela.  Both are frequently visited by advisers from SOUTHCOM. Colombia is a launching pad for any potential military action in the region on behalf of or involving the United States and against progressive governments and movements across Latin America.

Colombia has also become a major trainer of military, police and prison personnel internationally, especially in Central America and Mexico. General John Kelly, former commander of SOUTHCOM and former Secretary of Homeland Security, told a House hearing on April 29, 2014, that

“The beauty of having a Colombia – they’re such good partners, particularly in the military realm, they’re such good partners with us. When we ask them to go somewhere else and train the Mexicans, the Hondurans, the Guatemalans, the Panamanians, they will do it almost without asking. And they’ll do it on their own…. But that’s why it’s important for them to go, because I’m–at least on the military side–restricted from working with some of these countries because of limitations that are, that are really based on past sins. And I’ll let it go at that.”

Plan Colombia is the military and security aid project that was implemented by the U.S. and Colombian governments in the late 1990s, at a price tag of some $12 billion. One result was the establishment of the U.S.-funded and advised ESMAD (Escuadron Móvil Antidisturbios, the highly militarized Colombian riot police).

ESMAD and the Colombian National Police are reviled across Colombia for their attacks against people’s movements, something I myself have witnessed. As if to underscore the internationality of both the people’s resistance and the repression of the people, it is significant that the first protester killed by ESMAD was Carlos Giovanni Blanco in Bogotá in 2001 while protesting the U.S. war against Afghanistan.

Escuadrón Móvil Antidisturbios | Policía Nacional de los colombianos | Flickr

Escuadron Móvil Antidisturbios. [Source: flickr.com]

In an article titled Colombia’s ESMAD and the History of U.S. Policing, my colleague, Maya Hernandez, explains:

“The exportation of the U.S. policing model started during the Cold War, when American officials traveled to over fifty countries, offering assistance for stemming the spread of communism to local police forces. By embarking on a global campaign to encourage the use of policing to fight communism, the U.S. successfully created a transnational repressive police force. These counterinsurgency tactics are ongoing. Today, the U.S. trains police in 91 different countries, mostly in the Global South, thus internationalizing the targeting of people of color by focusing their efforts in non-White majority countries. According to a recent article published in the Washington Post, “U.S. funding for foreign police training expanded from $4.3 million in 2001 to $146 million in 2018.” This is a continuation of the domestic root of policing to protect the interests of the wealthy and, especially, the profits secured from the global plunder of transnational corporations and their regional collaborators. In other words, overseas police training is essential to the prosperity of the U.S. Empire.

As a close ally to the United States, Colombia is one of the first countries to use the U.S.’ policing model. In 1999, the Colombian government, backed by President Bill Clinton, created ESMAD or Mobile Anti-Disturbance Squadron…. Since its inception, ESMAD has flagrantly violated the rights of thousands of Colombians, consistently escalating violence against social leaders and activists and silencing peaceful protest. In rural areas, ESMAD has been used against protests led by peasant farmers communities, including attacks against mass indigenous consultations known as mingas, and against communities protesting to be included in voluntary programs of rural development to create alternatives to coca production. Disproportionately, the targets have been indigenous and Afro-Colombian communities….

Between 1999 and June 2019, ESMAD was involved in the extrajudicial killings of 34 persons. Since then, the number has grown. Many of us watched in horror the news reports depicting the repression by ESMAD and the Colombian National Police against participants in the national strike that began April 28, 2021, in Cali, Bogotá, and elsewhere.

Although it received less international news coverage, before that was the massacre perpetrated by the police in Bogotá on September 9, 2020. On that day, in the pre-dawn hours of the morning, Javier Ordóñez was beaten to death by local police before a crowd of witnesses while he pleaded for his life. He was murdered for violating a curfew. Across Bogotá, thousands of people took to the streets in protest of police brutality and, before the day was done, ESMAD and other police units had killed 13 more people.

Protests After the Killing of Javier Ordóñez — The Caravel

Javier Ordóñez [Source: thecaraveglu.com]

For us in the United States, what took place in Bogotá on that day looked all too familiar. As Javier Ordóñez spoke his last words pleading, “Please, I’m choking!” we were painfully reminded of the murder of George Floyd by the police in Minneapolis on May 27, 2020. His last words: “I can’t breathe.”

Likewise, as we looked on at the repression unleashed against Colombian protesters on September 9 and during the national strike, the similarities were clear. The riot gear worn by ESMAD was just like the riot gear worn by U.S. police who attacked protesters in Portland, Seattle, and other cities across the U.S.

The rubber bullets, the tear gas canisters, the helicopters used to track, threaten and assault protesters that we saw deployed in Colombia? We recognized those, too. After all, they were “Made in the USA.”

Of course, the U.S. also brings home new ways to repress. Colombians seeing the repression of U.S. protesters would have recognized the presence of paramilitaries working with police (Kyle Rittenhouse), arbitrary arrests, forced disappearances.

Rittenhouse acquittal is latest chapter in long and sinister history of racism

Protesters rally on the steps of the Kenosha County Courthouse while the jury deliberates in the Kyle Rittenhouse case inside in Kenosha, Wisconsin on November 16, 2021. [Source: peoplesworld.org]

In an excellent document about the 2020 uprising titled A Year in Review: Racism, Repression and Fightback in the USA, coordinated by my colleague, Natalia Schuurman, she writes,

 “On June 29, 2020, about a month after George Floyd’s murder, USA Today reported protests in at least 1,700 cities and towns, large and small, across all 50 states. In early June of 2020, a poll from the Pew Research Center estimated that at least 15 million people nationwide had participated in protests, with the number growing by the millions into late June. By then, the National Guard had mobilized in at least 25 states, deploying at least 62,000 federal troops on the ground working in cooperation with local and statewide police to ‘dominate the streets,’ as former President Trump described.”

While watching footage of the repression of the National Strike in Cali, I was angered by videos of Colombian National Police helicopters harassing and firing on protesters with live ammunition. I wanted to know more about Colombian police air capabilities and ties to U.S. funding. I learned about one company that is emblematic not only of how the U.S. exports its security model to Colombia and the rest of the world, but also of the multi-faceted aspects of that model.

Between 2012 and 2017, the Falls Church, Virginia-based contractor Pacific Architects and Engineers (PAE) received at least $616.7 million from the U.S. State Department to support the air capabilities of the Colombian National Police. This included support for and development of the Tuluá National Police Air Base, located near Cali, and used as a base of operations against the 2021 national strike. According to PAE officials, “The company… will provide administrative, technical, maintenance, training, safety, logistics and procurement services for 59 aircraft units that include Bell-206 helicopters, C-208 caravans, UH-1HII, UH-60L and UH-60A.”

On January 6, 2021 (the same day as the Capitol Hill riot in Washington, D.C.), PAE announced that it was one of three companies that had been awarded a $3.3 billion contract to process 98% of visas to immigrants and non-immigrants, with operations in 120 countries.

As we can see, the U.S. security model is diverse… and profitable. PAE is also one of the top ten contractors for privately run immigrant detention centers in the U.S., for which it received more than $801 million between 2013 and the first six months of 2019. From processing visas to jailing immigrants to repressing popular movements in Colombia, PAE is well-paid to administer key components of the Empire’s concept of security.

Militarized policing leads directly to militarized prisons and mass incarceration. It is not enough that here in the U.S., we have the largest population of incarcerated persons in the world.

Prison Culture » 7 Things You Should Know About the Prison Industrial Complex by Prison Culturefeed…

Source: usprisonculture.com

Among the characteristics of the U.S. prison model are overcrowding; torture, especially in the form of solitary confinement; long periods being held incognito while in transfer; neglect of healthcare; a prevalence of rape and physical abuse that is largely ignored by prison officials; persons of color and the poor jailed at rates far above their representation in both crime statistics and the general population; and the detention of political prisoners which, in the U.S., is mostly directed against those who resist racism.

The U.S. model of mass incarceration is something we should be ashamed of. Instead, we export it around the world. We call this Prison Imperialism. It started in 2000 with an agreement between the U.S. and Colombian governments to restructure Colombia’s prison system, spread from there to Guantánamo in occupied Cuba, Bagram in Afghanistan, and Abu Ghraib in Iraq. Today the U.S. is building an Empire of Prisons across the Global South.

Woeful overcrowding at Tramacúa prison. [Source: afgj.org]

But what of the other concept of security—the security, safety and well-being of our own people, those who live and work and play and go to school within the borders of the United States?

Many people internationally have a flawed perception of life in the United States, including on the Left. I was recently at an event in Colombia, in Popayan, Cauca. I am sure everyone there would have described themselves as socialist and anti-imperialist.

At one point, an Indigenous leader came up to me and asked me if it was true that in the United States, there is no poverty. I also spent five weeks in Cuba in 2015, the most humane country I have visited in my life. Even there, I spoke with people who had a distorted view of the U.S. as a land of opportunity.

The reality is that every time a person rises in this system, others must fall. The United States has the largest inequality gap in the developed world. And while workers and the poor and, indeed, everyone but the richest and most powerful have suffered economically and in every other way during the pandemic, according to the Institute for Policy Studies,the wealth of U.S. billionaires increased by 71%, more than $2 trillion!

Life in the U.S. is indelibly marked by pervasive racism, rising inequality, repression of popular movements, rampant climate chaos and the rise in hate crimes and paramilitary groups.  The belligerent aspect of the nation’s political bosses, police, and military parallels the loss of U.S. prestige and influence in the world economically, as the world becomes more multi-polar, and China challenges the U.S. as the world’s largest economy.

The U.S. is on a downward slide, an Empire in decline. But that Empire retains the most massive monopoly on destructive power in the world, and it will use it at home and abroad to protect the interests of its wealthiest citizens and benefactors.

The starting point of any discussion about reality in the United States has to be around the topic of racism. One Black man of every 1,000 Black men can expect to be killed by a police officer. Likewise, class oppression and racism are deeply intertwined in the U.S. Homelessness is part of our national fabric and identity.

Venice Beach homelessness crisis prompts pleas for action

Homeless row at Venice Beach. [Source: ktla.com]

Driving Indigenous nations from their homes, kidnapping Africans for enslavement in another land, the dispossession and poverty that are the lot of our nation’s poor: It is upon this more than anything else that the so-called American Dream is built.

Homeless people are far more likely to be victims of hate crimes than the general population. The problem is greatly compounded if one is a person of color.

According to the Population Reference Bureau, “Estimates of homelessness in the United States range from fewer than 600,000 to more than 1.5 million people, and the estimates vary by source.”

I would like to mention some of my own experiences. When I was a young man, I worked with homeless persons for about five years in the cities of Chicago and Tucson and have continued to support the movement for the rights of the homeless. My comrades in this struggle and I were equally involved in the movement against war and nuclear weapons. We saw them as the same: The State had abandoned its duties to the poor and workers in order to increase an already ridiculously bloated military budget.

When I was engaged in this work, I could not begin to count the times we heard about police beatings of homeless persons, how often we treated their wounds. Where I lived in Chicago, it was common knowledge that the police would beat, torture and even kill victims, especially Black, Latino, and homeless Chicagoans.

One police detective and commander, Jon Burge, a veteran of the U.S.’s Phoenix Program in South Vietnam, was found to have tortured at least 118 people between 1972 and 1991. Homeless people are not only the victims of police violence, but that of para-police and paramilitaries. Between 1999 and 2019, there were 1,852 reported incidents of violence against the homeless, 515 of which resulted in fatalities.

Nationwide, homelessness has increased each of the past four years. Meanwhile, funding for the military has increased. Instead of homes for those with no home, we house soldiers in our 800+ international military bases. We build prisons that hold 2.7 million of our people behind bars, 60% of whom are people of color, and we build squalid immigrant detention centers that incarcerate some 400,000 persons per year, including children tragically separated from their families.

What the U.S. wants for the world is inequality, for the elite to rise to the top, and for the rest of us to serve them. This is obvious. Let me repeat again: Among the so-called “developed nations,” we have the largest wealth gap. Our top allies in South America, Brazil and Colombia, are the first and second most unequal countries in the Western Hemisphere.

The moment any person or people cease to be useful, or resist, the Empire wants to bomb us, starve us, jail us, displace us, or disappear us. What the Empire hates most is the threat of a good example. The U.S. Empire will use any tactic or trick possible to destroy that threat. The sanctions and blockades against Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela are designed to cripple these nations and destroy the alternative examples they offer to the U.S. models.

While the U.S. seeks to be a destroyer of some nations, it seeks to reinforce others. The U.S. approach to nation-building is fundamentally a military strategy. First destroy, then occupy, then rebuild it as a vassal state and perhaps, eventually replicate the U.S. reality in the name of development.

The U.S. spends more on its military than the next 11 countries combined. But that is only part of the story. All aspects of U.S. government are in some manner subservient to the Pentagon and the overarching militarism that pervades this society.

Likewise, U.S.-style democracy promotion and nation-building is included explicitly as part of a total spectrum Pentagon strategy known as DIMEFIL. DIMEFIL refers to the components of Diplomacy, Information, Military, Economic, Finance, Intelligence, and Law Enforcement as applied to the concept of nation-building.

Marc Plattner is the Editor of the Journal of Democracy, published by the government-created and funded National Endowment for Democracy. The NED is a leading supporter and instigator of U.S.-sponsored regime change. Plattner states, quite openly that

“Liberal democracy clearly favors the economic arrangements that foster globalization—namely, the market economy and an open international trading system…. Liberalism is based on the natural rights and the desire for property…. Globalization has fostered democratization, and democratization has fostered globalization.  Moreover, both trends generally have furthered American interests and contributed to the strengthening of American power…. It is worth emphasizing that the international order that sustains globalization is underpinned by American military predominance.”

What, then, is the nature and tactical objective of U.S. military predominance? It cannot be fit into such simplistic and traditional concepts as victory or peaceful resolution—especially not resolution.

Resolution requires concessions of land rights, security for the political opposition, healthy and independent labor institutions, and other such troublesome ideas. Perpetual war has become the new reality. Manageable conflict may be ongoing for long and perhaps endless periods of time. But it allows for continued privatization without respect for the demands and sovereignty of others.

Victory certainly has not been the unitary objective in either Afghanistan or Colombia. It is too easy to talk about the recent events of Afghanistan and the return of the Taliban as a defeat for U.S. imperialism, which it was.

But if that is all we focus on, we forget that the reason the U.S. began its involvement in Afghanistan in the first place was precisely to overthrow a socialist government, and to set in motion the events that would help lead to the eventual fall of the Soviet Union. Former National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski explained in a 1998 interview that,

“According to the official version of history, CIA aid to the Mujahideen began during 1980, that is to say, after the Soviet army invaded Afghanistan on December 24, 1979. But the reality, closely guarded until now, is completely otherwise: Indeed, it was July 3, 1979, that President Carter signed the first directive for secret aid to the opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul. And that very day, I wrote a note to the president in which I explained to him that in my opinion this aid was going to induce a Soviet military intervention.

That secret operation was an excellent idea. It had the effect of drawing the Russians into the Afghan trap and you want me to regret it? The day that the Soviets officially crossed the border, I wrote to President Carter, essentially: ‘We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam war.’ Indeed, for almost 10 years, Moscow had to carry on a war that was unsustainable for the regime , a conflict that brought about the demoralization and finally the breakup of the Soviet empire.

What is more important in world history? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire?”

Thomas A. Drohan, a retired U.S. Air Force brigadier general and professor emeritus of military and strategic studies at the USAF Academy, writes that,

“Effectively, we are at war and peace all the time…. When peace fails—that is, war is not deterred—the DoD’s job is to prevail in the resulting conflict. For the grey zone in between, military strength is to reinforce ‘traditional tools of diplomacy, ensuring that the President and our diplomats negotiate from a position of strength.’ The problem with this viewpoint is that we also tend to assume, ‘war is an act of violence.’

Misapplied to warfare, this assumption overlooks effective methods of waging war in our densely interactive security environment…. Confusion about what constitutes legitimate competition thickens the fog of war in a boundless battlespace of weaponized information. What’s clear is that warfare is hybrid conflict marked by cooperation and confrontation….

We are in arenas of warfare that are all-domain, all-instruments-of-power, and all-effects. Conflict involves cooperation and confrontation. How will we fight?”

Karl Marlantes is a Vietnam war veteran who commanded a Marine rifle platoon. He has written three books that were best sellers, two of which are taught at West Point, Annapolis, the Naval War College, the Air Force Academy, and various other military schools.

Reflecting on U.S. endless and unwinnable wars in light of the defeat in Afghanistan, he writes in an editorial for Time magazine, that

“…the question no one is discussing is why for decades successive administrations of both parties continue to involve us in wars that not only we don’t win, but that for years we keep on fighting even when we know we can’t win and our objectives in those wars are confusing and malleable. If you look back over the history of our war in Afghanistan, it was clear as early as 2002 that we didn’t fully understand what we were doing there anymore or how to go about doing it. Yet we remained for nearly 20 more bloody years.

Why do we keep doing this? How can we stop?….

Most Americans don’t seem to care about any of this until, after a series of escalations, the national pain crosses some hard to define threshold and the American people want out. The policy makers usually do not want out. Their reasons range from genuine belief in the war’s objectives to self-serving fear of being blamed for failure and the ensuing damage to their political or bureaucratic careers….

Unleashing the awesome and massive power of the American military should only be done to defend against threats to our democracy and the values and hard-won rights of its citizens. Since World War Two, we have repeatedly used this power unwisely, resulting in a humiliating cycle of wasted lives and money….

In Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq we sacrificed our young and spent massive amounts of money fighting to build nations that look and think like we do, a goal that most Americans don’t really care about, especially when they don’t face getting drafted. In those wars there was no direct threat to Americans that our fundamental values would be taken from us. The reason we lose these wars is that our opponents are fighting for something they care about very much indeed.”

Who among our own people truly cares about the objectives of the Empire and U.S. militarism? I think again about those two kinds of security. Where I live in Tucson, Arizona, I am only three blocks from the Casa Maria soup kitchen I used to be part of back in the 1980s. It is still operating, every day passing out hundreds of free lunches, providing a few showers, a place for the poor and the homeless to just sit and relax and not be harassed.

The neighborhood I live in is a poor and mostly Latino neighborhood. When I walk down the alley next to my house, I see the trash, the human excrement, the discarded blankets and clothes, the discarded syringes of those who can only imagine relief in this cruel world at the end of a needle. If it is early enough in the morning or late enough in the evening,

I will see the homeless huddled in storefront doorways, under trees, on benches, sleeping on the hard concrete and ground, even in the coldest or the hottest parts of our desert weather.

Meanwhile, military aircraft from the nearby Davis-Monthan Air Force Base fly overhead, perhaps on test runs to drop Tomahawk missiles made by our city’s top employer, defense contractor Raytheon. These planes, these missiles, cost U.S. taxpayers hundreds of millions, billions of dollars.

What is the U.S. security model? The U.S. security model is inequality—inequality at the point of a sword. At the end of the day, the homeless man sleeping in the winter cold a few blocks from the White House in Washington, D.C., and the homeless youth sifting through garbage a few blocks from the Plaza Bolívar in Bogotá, both represent the putrid fruits of the same Empire. Wherever we live, within the U.S. or outside it, our struggle must be one as we reach across borders and boundaries to dismantle the Empire and achieve liberation. Therein lies our security.

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This is the English version of an article solicited by the magazine Revistat from Catalunya.

James Patrick Jordan is National Co-Coordinator for the Alliance for Global Justice and is responsible for its Colombia, labor, and ecological solidarity programs. He lives in Tucson, Arizona and is a student and occasional presenter at Salt of the Earth Labor College. He can be reached at [email protected].

Featured image is from playboy.com

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Youth Died Before They Could Begin to Live

By Dr. Rudolf Hänsel, March 31, 2022

World War I, World War II, dozens of other wars – murder and manslaughter again and again. Mothers sent their sons to the “field of honour” and wore a black armband afterwards – “in proud mourning”. Youth died before they could begin to live. Conquering and dominating other peoples is a good business. But the soldiers on both sides slay each other for nothing.

Russia Demands Ruble Payments for Gas Instead Western Currencies

By Lucas Leiroz de Almeida, March 31, 2022

Recently, the Russian government has demanded that European countries pay for their natural gas imports from Russia in rubles, rather than in dollars or euros. The action aims to prioritize Russian monetary interests at a time of conflict and polarization between Russia and the West, as can be deduced from the words of the Russian president himself, who made it clear that the target states of the measure were “unfriendly” countries.

Ukraine’s Nuclear Weapons Program Can No Longer be Denied

By Paul Antonopoulos, March 31, 2022

Ukraine has engaged in nuclear and missile programs for nearly three decades as part of their quest to have their own nuclear weapons. The revelation by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky at the Munich Security Conference on February 19 about the possibility of achieving a nuclear status, just five days before Moscow launched its “special military operation”, was certainly not accidental.

UK Home Secretary Priti Patel Was Part of CIA-linked Lobby Group with Husband of Assange Judge

By Matt Kennard, March 31, 2022

Home Secretary Priti Patel, who will soon decide whether to extradite Julian Assange to the US, has been a political adviser to – and been funded by – a right-wing lobby group which has attacked Assange in the British media for a decade.

Bruce Willis Developed Aphasia After Being Vaccinated: “Aphasia is a Language Disorder caused by Damage in a Specific Area of the Brain.”

By Steve Kirsch, March 31, 2022

I wanted to make sure everyone knows aphasia is one of the thousands of symptoms whose reporting rates were elevated after the COVID vaccines rolled out. It’s #1574 on that sorted list of symptoms elevated by the COVID vaccine that we calculated back in November 2021.

Who are the War Criminals? Ukrainian Soldiers Torturing Russian Prisoners of War

By Peter Koenig, March 31, 2022

American-initiated wars and conflicts have in the last 60 years killed between 20 and 30 million people. One wonders, who are the war criminals? Where do most war criminals abound as Presidents? The short answer is: In the freedom-loving United States of America. And they are literally all getting away with murder.

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New Global Economic Order Built Around China?

April 1st, 2022 by Steven Sahiounie

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The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has warned that the US dollar dominance as the global trading currency could be threatened by the sweeping sanctions taken against Russia from the late February ‘military operations’ undertaken in Ukraine.  The IMF is worried that using currencies as a weapon will fragment the world economy while making it less efficient.

There are now countries rushing to find ways of transacting and storing money that circumvent the US currencies and financial markets, as well as those of their allies.  Some countries are renegotiating the currency in which they get paid for trade.

Western countries, in unison with the US, EU and NATO, have imposed huge sanctions on Russia, including restrictions on its central bank, which could trigger the emergence of small currency blocs based on trade between separate groups of countries.

Russia has sought to reduce its dependence on the dollar after the US imposed sanctions in retaliation to its annexation of Crimea in 2014.

As of the end of January 2022, Russia held foreign currency reserves worth $469bn, which represented roughly a fifth of its foreign reserves in dollar-denominated assets just prior to the ‘military operations’ in Ukraine, with a notable chunk held overseas in Germany, France, the UK and Japan, who have now banded together to isolate Moscow from the global financial system, and have frozen more than half of Russia’s reserves.

Gita Gopinath, the IMF’s first deputy managing director, said the sanctions against Russia do not foreshadow the demise of the dollar as the reserve currency and that the conflict in Ukraine will slow global economic growth but will not cause a global recession.

Financial sanctions imposed on Russia threaten to weaken the dominance of the US dollar and could result in a more fragmented international monetary system, said Gopinath to The Financial Times. The conflict will also spur the adoption of digital finance, from cryptocurrencies to stablecoins and central bank digital currencies, she added.

Gopinath said the greater use of other currencies in global trade would lead to further diversification of the reserve assets held by national central banks and added,

“Countries tend to accumulate reserves in the currencies with which they trade with the rest of the world, and in which they borrow from the rest of the world, so you might see some slow-moving trends towards other currencies playing a bigger role [in reserve assets].”

Two monetary systems might emerge, with one western and the other Chinese, and may operate in divergent ways which overlap.

The Great Economic Rivalry, by Graham Allison and associates at Harvard, have concluded that China is strong peer competitor of the US, and its currency could become global money, given the size and sophistication of its economy.

China hopes its currency, the yuan, also known as renminbi, will replace the US dollar as the global currency.  The majority of international investors believe this will be inevitable, but none can say when.

When this happens Chinese exporters would have lower borrowing costs, more economic clout in relation to the United States, and would support President Jinping’s economic reforms.

On December 1, 2015, the IMF announced that it awarded the yuan status as a reserve currency, and added the yuan to its Special Drawing Rights basket on October 1, 2016. This basket currently includes the Euro, Japanese yen, British pound, and US dollar. By August 2015, the yuan became the fourth most-used currency in the world, as it surpassed the Japanese yen, Canadian loonie, and the Australian dollar.

Chinese exports are relatively more competitive against dollar prices around the world. Thanks to low-cost exports to the US, China’s economic growth soared.

Global reserves account for about 2% and the use of the yuan around the world is rising, while the decline in the dollar’s share can be accounted for by greater use of the Chinese renminbi.

Beijing was in the process of internationalizing the yuan before the Ukraine crisis and is already ahead of other nations in adopting a central bank digital currency.

The level of trade is not the only reason the US dollar is the world’s reserve currency. The strength of the American economy instills trust, but most importantly is the transparency of US financial markets and the stability of its monetary policy.

Former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg is Chair of the Working Group on US RMB Trading and Clearing group, with a goal to create a yuan trading center in the United States. The group includes former US Treasury Secretaries Hank Paulson and Timothy Geithner.  The center would lower costs for American companies trading with China.

The dominance of the US dollar is a product of the US economic size and open financial markets. However, high inflation is a greater threat to the stability in the dollar. The US dollar became the official reserve currency of the world in 1944 in the Bretton Woods Agreement.

The US dollar is not backed by gold or any other precious metal, and is a fiat (government-made) currency, since 1971.

59 per cent of global foreign currency reserves were denominated in dollars, another 20 per cent in euros, 6 per cent in yen and 5 per cent in sterling, as of the third quarter of 2021.

Gopinath noted that the dollar’s share of international reserves had fallen from 70 per cent to 60 per cent over the past two decades, with the emergence of other trading currencies, led by the Australian dollar.

If the US currency were to collapse, hyperinflation would lock the economy into a “wage-price spiral,” in which higher prices would force employers to pay higher wages, which they would pass on to customers as higher price, while Washington would print out currency to meet demand, making inflation even worse.

The dollar slid to more than a one-week low in late January 2022 as data showed a drop in US private sector employment due to the increase in COVID-19 infections.

US President Biden refuses to acknowledge Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) as the de-facto leader of Saudi Arabia.  Biden only deals with King Salman, and has said he will not recognize MBS as the next King after Salman, and has labeled MBS a killer.

Biden wanted MBS to pump more oil to bring the price down after the Russia sanctions on gas and oil.  MBS would not take the White House calls, neither did the United Arab Emirates.  MBS will sell oil to China in yuan, as Saudi Arabia makes a historic pivot towards China, and away from the US, who has disappointed Saudi Arabia for not defending the oil facilities after repeated attacks by Yemeni rebels. Former President Trump insulted Saudi Arabia and the King personally. Saudi Arabia had previously depended on the US as a security defender, but now realizes that the oil rich kingdom can no longer depend on the US for respect, or security.

The US and China may one day sit in negotiations concerning the new world trade currency.

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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.

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Bush and His Torturers. Guantanamo “Plea Negotiations”

March 31st, 2022 by Judge Andrew P. Napolitano

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Last week, prosecutors and defense counsel at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, completed three weeks of plea negotiations. At the end of the three weeks, the military judge presiding over the trials of the five plotters of the attacks on 9/11 signed an order reflecting that progress had been made and anticipating a continuation of the negotiations in May.

Among the defendants is Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the admitted and acknowledged mastermind of the attacks.

All five have been defendants in the same capital murder prosecution for 10 years. None has had a jury trial. What were the lawyers negotiating?

Here is the backstory.

Shortly after the 9/11 attacks, President George W. Bush opened a military prison at the U.S. Naval Base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to house persons arrested for 9/11-related attacks and other acts in what he called the war on terror.

Bush believed that since Cuba is outside the United States, the Constitution would not restrain the government there, federal laws would not apply there and federal judges could not interfere with the government’s behavior there.

Bush’s CIA began a program of systematic torture of detainees by CIA and foreign intelligence personnel at so-called black sites in foreign countries. Much of the torture was inflicted on people who knew nothing of value to the CIA. The victims of CIA torture, whether they had information of value or not and whether they revealed what they had or not, were transferred to Gitmo.

Bush’s extraconstitutional behavior embraced the false belief — soon corrected by the U.S. Supreme Court — that it could confine detainees without charges for the remainder of their lives.

While the foreign torture was being conducted by the CIA on some detainees and others were being housed at Gitmo, the U.S. military tried its hand at torturing some of the prisoners it was supposed to be protecting.

When FBI agents arrived at Gitmo to interrogate detainees and informed them of their right to counsel, the torture stopped; it is a federal crime. The prisoners secured lawyers who filed complaints with the U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., which was assigned to hear these cases.

The complaints revealed horrific torture, and they were met with the government’s horrific and tortured interpretations of the Constitution. In six cases that eventually found their way to the Supreme Court, the detainees argued that their constitutionally protected rights to due process had been violated.

The Bush administration argued that the judicial branch had no jurisdiction over the government’s behavior at Gitmo, because Gitmo is outside the U.S. It also argued that, even if federal courts did have jurisdiction over the government at Gitmo, the detainees had no valid claims to present to the courts because the Constitution only protects Americans.

Congress jumped into this fray by suspending the right to habeas corpus for those at Gitmo. The right to habeas corpus is an ancient personal right in which the prisoner may compel his jailer to bring the prisoner to a neutral judge and legally justify the prisoner’s confinement. The Constitution permits Congress to suspend habeas corpus only when, in cases of rebellion or invasion, the public safety may require it.

The Bush administration lost five of six Gitmo cases in the Supreme Court. The case it won involved the location at which a detainee who is an American citizen was to be tried.

The jurisprudence of the remaining five cases held that wherever the government goes and confines people against their will, the Constitution goes with it, since all who exercise government power have taken an oath to do so consistent with the Constitution. Moreover, since there was no invasion or rebellion at Gitmo, the suspension of habeas corpus was nullified.

The court held that since the two operative amendments to the Constitution — the Fourth and the Fifth — protect all “people” and every “person” from the government, their protections are not limited to Americans only.

All this litigation eventually forced the government to commence the process for military jury trials with the full panoply of constitutional protections. Gitmo was established by Bush’s executive order on Jan. 11, 2002. In 20 years, there have been no jury trials of any 9/11 defendants.

Now, back to the current negotiations. They were initiated by the government because the Departments of Defense and Justice — after continual changes of judicial and prosecutorial personnel — now no longer want to try anyone, particularly those defendants who have been tortured.

That’s so because numerous military judges at Gitmo have consistently ruled that defendants may subpoena records of their torture and inform juries of it.

Those of us who believe that the Constitution means what it says argued that 9/11 was a series of federal crimes and the defendants should have been accorded constitutional protection from Bush’s torturers and tried in federal courts where their alleged crimes occurred — in New York City, Washington, D.C., and Shanksville, Pennsylvania.

Had the feds done that, these cases would have been completed, and the defendants either convicted or acquitted, and the government would not be spending $100 million a year on Gitmo. But Bush’s disdain for constitutional norms has wrecked the rule of law in these cases and made it nearly impossible to try any of them — thus, the plea negotiations that are now under way.

The lawyers are negotiating dropping the death penalty and protecting the defendants’ religious liberties, medical treatment and creature comforts in prison, in return for guilty pleas.

The fanaticism of George W. Bush — under whose incompetent watch the attacks of 9/11 occurred and who killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis to produce regime change because Saddam Hussein “tried to kill my daddy” — continues to haunt and demean the American judicial system.

Because Bush irreparably assaulted the Constitution he swore to uphold, the government is afraid to try the men who killed 3,000 Americans.

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Much is talked today about the fuel and energy crises that the current conflict in Ukraine can worsen. Not so much is talked, though, about how food insecurity can become a major crisis – especially in the Middle East and Africa, but actually everywhere. Global food chains are expected to be affected, thus further exacerbating already-rising food prices, as Lama Fakih (an executive Middle East and North Africa director at Human Rights Watch) warns.

Both Ukraine and Russia happen to be leading exporters of agricultural products to North African and Middle Eastern nations. These countries are heavily dependent on grains from Kiev, for example, and the price of bread and other basic food items has been escalating. Most of these countries already face internal conflicts and have populations struggling with food insecurity.

For example, approximately 80% of the wheat Lebanon imported in 2020 came from Ukraine. Egypt, in its turn, remains the world’s largest wheat importer, which places this North African country in a very delicate position: about 50 percent of its imports come from the Russian Federation, while another 30 percent come from Ukraine. Libya imports 40% of its wheat from Kiev, and Yemen imports around one third of its wheat from Ukraine, while 8% comes from Russia.

In fact, the potential damage is global. 45% of Ukrainian exports are agricultural-related. It is a leading exporter of poultry, wheat, barley, and corn, and much of its wheat comes precisely from the Eastern Ukrainian areas where most of the heavy conflict is going on.

In fact, the Black Sea area – affected by the current military operations – exports over 12 percent of the food traded globally. Moreover, Ukraine possesses about one-third of the planet’s most fertile soil, according to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). However, on March 9, Kiev banned exports of grains and many other food items in order to prevent a domestic crisis in times of war, thus disrupting supply chains. This is quite alarming because the planting season is to start this April.

The Russian Federation itself is the largest wheat supplier worldwide and one of the main producers of fertilizers. The problem is that it could halt fertilizer exports as a response to the heavy economic sanctions imposed on the country.

In Latin America, for example, Brazil imports 95% of its nitrogen fertilizers, Moscow being its leading supplier (21% of the amount imported by Brazil comes from there). Brazilian harvests have been much damaged by droughts since 2020. In any case, the increase in fuel prices in itself affects food transport costs, thereby affecting agricultural productivity worldwide.

There is a global energy shortage crisis today, which was caused by the supply-demand imbalance after the pandemic and was made worse by the global supply chain crisis, among other factors. Due to a number of climatic and natural reasons, Brazil, India and China have been facing energy problems. The crisis is severe in the Middle East and beyond. Lebanon too has been struggling with fuel shortages, and so has Syria, and Turkey.

There are fuel wars going on in the Levant, a situation that has been made worse by US sanctions – the  US Caesar Act, in this case. Iran has been shipping fuel to countries such as Lebanon, Syria, and Venezuela, as part of its oil diplomacy, and there have been attacks on vessels (Damascus accuses Israel of being behind them). Western Europe, in its turn, had already been facing its own energy crisis which was aggravated by the pandemic, and by the delays in the completion of the now-halted Nord Stream 2 pipeline.

With on-going migration and energy crises, adding food insecurity to this scenario can lead to a catastrophic situation. One could say that by fueling the Ukrainian-Russian conflict and by sanctioning Moscow, the West is in fact punishing itself, but the truth goes beyond that: it is punishing the entire world.

Solving the current impasse depends on leaders opening channels of communication and dialogue with Moscow.

Unfortunately, the Western Establishment today does not seem to have political leaders up to this task. Rather than seeking dialogue with the Kremlin, they have been trying to turn Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky into a kind of a Western showman and mouthpiece of North Atlantic Alliance interests.

He was in talks with the the American Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to make an Oscar appearance – which did not happen – and has been addressing the parliament of a number of NATO countries to make his points (by videoconference). Joe Biden’s visit to Poland also only added fuel to the fire. To sum it up, the West is irresponsible in further fomenting tensions by sending more troops to Eastern Europe and failing to pursue good diplomacy. A cease-fire must be negotiated. But then Ukraine and the West must make concessions. Or else there will be hunger worldwide.

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

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Joe Biden Wants to “Tax Income that You Don’t Have”

March 31st, 2022 by Dr. Paul Craig Roberts

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Joe Biden wants to tax unrealized capital gains, and some neoliberal economists think it is a good idea.

Let’s take a look and see what we think.

A capital gain is an increase in the price of something since you purchased it.  It could be a stock, a bond, a house, artwork, gold, silver, anything for which there is a market.  An unrealized capital gain is a paper gain based on the day’s price. It is not income and it is not wealth until it is realized.  You realize it by selling the item, thereby having the money in your possession.  An unrealized capital gain is a potential possession.

So what does it mean to tax income you have not received? 

Suppose you purchase stock at the beginning of the year and it rises in value by year end. That rise is an unrealized capital gain.  You pay the tax on the unrealized gain, and then in the new year the stock market falls, wiping out the taxed gain. 

The tax you paid eats into your original investment.  You have experienced a wealth confiscation.

Most economists understand that there is no such thing as a capital gain on stocks or homes.

If you sell your stock or home, the replacement cost is the sale proceeds.  If the stock or home has increased in price since you purchased it, you have to pay a tax on the sale proceeds. (You get an exemption on your home gain up to a certain amount.)  Consequently, you cannot replace the stock or home with your sales proceeds net of tax.  So what did you gain?  You lost.

What would happen, for example, to the stock market if unrealized gains are taxed? There would be increased volatility.  People would tend to realize their gains as they occurred so as to avoid taxed gains being wiped out by a market correction.

It is also likely that net new investment would decline.  Capital gains are a measure of rising profitability. The capital gain satisfies the investor in the company, leaving him content with a low dividend, thus freeing most of the earnings for debt-free investment. 

If unrealized capital gains are taxed, the person has to find the money elsewhere to pay the tax, as he hasn’t realized the taxed gain. He has to sell some other asset, cut back his living standard, or borrow the money to pay the tax.  The cost and inconvenience of this would lead to pressure on companies to pay out more or all of their earnings in dividends in order for investors to avoid paying taxes on gains that might turn out not to be there.  This would reduce the funds the company has in retained earnings for investment, and force the company to borrow, that is, to indebt itself to maintain the same level of investment.

Consider also the effect of taxing unrealized capital gains on quarterly estimated tax payments. The taxpayer doesn’t know if a stock market boom is going to push up equity prices and leave him with a large unrealized gain at the end of the year or experience a correction, so how does he estimate the required quarterly payments for non-W-2 income?

Suppose the taxation of unrealized capital gains applies to your home.  In a rising housing market, where do you get the money to pay the tax on the rise in your home value?  Do you borrow it, sell your car, cut back your living standard?  Do you do this year after year in rising housing markets?  

The same question arises for an art dealer or collector.  

As you can see, taxing unrealized capital gains is a nonsensical idea.

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Dr. Paul Craig Roberts writes on his blog site, PCR Institute for Political Economy, where this article was originally published. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

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Joe Biden is well known for gaffes. He admits that he is a “gaffe machine”. He has a 47-year history of making confusing, embarrassing and misleading public statements, bigoted comments and angry outbursts. His gaffes have generally been shrugged off by his entourage, colleages and world leaders but revealed by journalists. Since he became US president Biden’s gaffes have, however, become risky and downright dangerous.

World leaders who came to distrust the US under a capricious and disruptive Donald Trump are feeling dubious about Biden’s gaffes which have sustained mistrust of Washington although he had pledged to stabilise the US political scene and foreign policy. Concerns over his behaviour have increased after he appointed himself commander of the NATO campaign against Russia.

In 2011, as Barack Obama’s vice president, Biden forged an awkward relationship with the Russian leader. During a charged meeting in the Kremlin while standing next to Vladimir Putin, Biden told journalists he said, “I’m looking into your eyes, and I don’t think you have a soul.” According to Biden, “He looked back at me, and he smiled, and he said, “‘We understand one another.'”

Despite Putin’s chilling response, the remark, coming from a man claiming to be a devout but tolerant Catholic, amounted to a major insult. Russians are steeped in their country’s millennial history and Orthodox Christianity. “Soul” is deeply embedded in the Russian psyche and persona.

This cold assessment of Putin more than a decade ago could very well have driven Biden’s strident advocacy of Ukraine after Russia deployed troops around that country in January and invaded on February 24. Biden took the lead and dragged a reluctant Europe into an all-out campaign against Putin and Russia without pausing to think about how the war could be brought to an end. When Biden has called Putin a “thug”, “a butcher” and a “murderous dictator”, the Kremlin responded by saying the US president was suffering from irritability and fatigue and should not be uttering personal insults.

During last week’s trip to Europe, Biden committed four serious gaffs. When asked what the US would do if Russia used chemical weapons in Ukraine, he said this “would depend on the nature of the use” but then added the US would respond “in kind”.  While visiting the US 22nd airborne, he told troops that they would witness Ukrainians resisting Russia “when you’re there”, suggesting that they would be deployed in Ukraine. He had previously vowed not to intervene and start World War III.

Biden went beyond insults when he breached US protocols by saying war crimes were being committed by Russia in Ukraine and called Putin a “war criminal” as this has legal implications. In addition to applying this term to the Russian president, the Biden administration has established its own mechanism for gathering evidence of Russian war crimes in Ukraine. Until Biden’s statement, the administration had avoided accusing Russia of war crimes.

Last Saturday, Biden escalated his rhetoric by saying Putin “cannot remain in power”, effectively calling for regime change in Russia. Although the White House promptly att empted to get round this existential gaff, no one has been convinced by its efforts. The Kremlin responded by saying, “That’s not for Biden to decide. The president of Russia is elected by Russians.”

French President Emmanuel Macron reacted by saying,

“We want to stop the war that Russia has launched in Ukraine without escalation, that is the objective… If this is what we want to do, we should not escalate things, neither with words nor actions.”

Forty-eight hours after his dangerous gaffe, Biden said the US does not have a policy of regime change in Russia but refused to a apologise and said he was expressing personal “moral outrage” at Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. As US president he must keep personal opinions out of the public sphere and stick to describing policy.

Since Biden’s gaffes generally spring from his lips when he is offscript, his handlers need to ensure that he does not have a chance to go off-script by turning off the microphone as soon as he stops reading the approved text on a teleprompter and limiting appearances where he can speak independently. Biden’s gaffes could, indeed, cause World War III.

By insulting Putin and calling for his removal from power, Biden has made it all the more difficult for the US and Europe to find a way to end the Ukraine war.

Biden’s verbal stumbles have prompted Greek legislator Yanis Varoufakis to warn,

“The West Is ‘Playing with Fire’ If It Pushes Regime Change In Nuclear-Armed Russia”,

“Whenever the United States tried regime change, it didn’t turn out very well and has never been tried with a nuclear power”. (quoted in Democracy Now)

He said while the West is unified and has the backing of many countries, India, China and and many other countries, with half of the world’s population, do not agree with the campaign against Russia.

Varoufakis referred to the Chinese philosopher Sun Tzu who

“once said that if you are faced with a formidable enemy… what you should do… is to build a golden bridge behind your enemy from which your enemy can escape, to give him an opportunity to withdraw while claiming that he has achieved something”.

But, by calling Putin a war criminal, Biden

“is not leaving any room for a compromise, then he is effectively jeopardising the interests of Ukrainians.. a quagmire in the Ukraine is not exactly in the interests of any Ukrainian I know of”.

Instead of arming Ukraine and imposing sanctions on Russia, Varoufakis said the world should discuss

“Biden’s proposals for a resolution [of the conflict] that would mean an immediate ceasefire and an immediate withdrawal from the Ukraine in an exchange for some kind of deal that Putin can sell to his own henchmen as something of a victory. Instead of that, Biden is doubling down, and he’s speaking in a language which is consistent with regime change, which will be catastrophic for the people of Ukraine.”

In Varoufakis’ view, a deal would render Ukraine neutral, provide arrangements for the Russian-controlled Donbas area, and postpone discussion of the status of Russian-annexed Crimea. Such a deal would dissatisfy all partners but end the threat of nuclear war.

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Die Jugend starb, bevor sie zu leben beginnen konnte

March 31st, 2022 by Dr. Rudolf Hänsel

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Erster Weltkrieg, Zweiter Weltkrieg, Dutzende weitere Kriege – immer wieder Mord und Totschlag. Mütter schickten ihre Söhne auf das „Feld der Ehre“ und trugen anschließend eine schwarze Armbinde – „in stolzer Trauer“. Die Jugend starb, bevor sie zu leben beginnen konnte. Andere Völker zu bezwingen und zu beherrschen ist ein gutes Geschäft. Doch die Soldaten auf beiden Seiten erschlagen sich für nichts und wieder nichts.

Erich Maria Remarque schrieb im Vorwort seines 1957 in West-Berlin erschienenen Klassiker „Im Westen nichts Neues“:

„Dieses Buch soll weder eine Anklage noch ein Bekenntnis sein. Es soll nur den Versuch machen, über eine Generation zu berichten, die vom Kriege zerstört wurde – auch wenn sie seinen Granaten entkam.“

Nie zuvor hat man in allen Staaten so viel Geld für die Rüstung ausgegeben, so viele tödliche Waffen geschmiedet wie heute. Aber für andere Zwecke – für Schulen, für den Unterricht, für kulturelle Dinge – haben wir kein Geld.

Wir führen Krieg – und sind nicht gegen ihn!

Viele Universitätslehrer, Professoren, haben in der Vergangenheit Stellung bezogen gegen den Krieg – und tun das auch heute. Doch wer von den großen Persönlichkeiten, den Philosophen oder Psychologen tritt auf und sagt der Jugend, sie soll einen Krieg nie mitmachen und keinem Staatsführer folgen, der einen Krieg beginnt.

Keine Mutter, kein Vater, kein Professor empfiehlt der Jugend, dass sie nicht in den Krieg ziehen soll, ruft sie dazu auf: „Geht nicht!“

Aus diesem Grund zog die Jugend in den Krieg – und zieht weiter in den Krieg:

Und wieder stirbt die Jugend, bevor sie zu leben beginnen kann.

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Dr. Rudolf Lothar Hänsel ist Lehrer (Rektor a. D.), Doktor der Pädagogik (Dr. paed.) und Diplom-Psychologe (Schwerpunkte: Klinische-, Pädagogische- und Medien-Psychologie). Als Pensionär arbeitete er viele Jahre als Psychotherapeut in eigener Praxis. In seinen Büchern und pädagogisch-psychologischen Fachartikeln fordert er eine bewusste ethisch-moralische Werteerziehung und eine Erziehung zum Gemeinsinn und Frieden.

He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

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Youth Died Before They Could Begin to Live

March 31st, 2022 by Dr. Rudolf Hänsel

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World War I, World War II, dozens of other wars – murder and manslaughter again and again. Mothers sent their sons to the “field of honour” and wore a black armband afterwards – “in proud mourning”. Youth died before they could begin to live. Conquering and dominating other peoples is a good business. But the soldiers on both sides slay each other for nothing.

Erich Maria Remarque wrote in the preface of his classic novel “Nothing New in the West”, published in West Berlin in 1957:

“This book is not meant to be an indictment or a confession. It is only to attempt to report on a generation destroyed by war – even if it escaped its shells.”

Never before has so much money been spent on armaments, so many deadly weapons forged, in all the states as today. But for other purposes – for schools, for teaching, for cultural things – we have no money.

We are at war – and we are not against it!

Many university teachers and professors have taken a stand against war in the past – and continue to do so today. But who among the great personalities, the philosophers or psychologists stands up and tells the youth never to take part in a war and never to follow a state leader who starts a war?

No mother, no father, no professor recommends to the youth that they should not go to war, calls them to “Don’t go!”

For this reason, the youth went to war – and continues to go to war:

And again the youth dies before it can begin to live.

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Dr. Rudolf Lothar Hänsel is a teacher (retired headmaster), a doctor of education (Dr. paed.) and a graduate psychologist (specialising in clinical, educational and media psychology). As a retiree, he worked for many years as a psychotherapist in his own practice. In his books and educational-psychological articles, he calls for a conscious ethical-moral values education and an education for public spirit and peace.

He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

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Russia Demands Ruble Payments for Gas Instead Western Currencies

March 31st, 2022 by Lucas Leiroz de Almeida

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Recently, the Russian government has demanded that European countries pay for their natural gas imports from Russia in rubles, rather than in dollars or euros. The action aims to prioritize Russian monetary interests at a time of conflict and polarization between Russia and the West, as can be deduced from the words of the Russian president himself, who made it clear that the target states of the measure were “unfriendly” countries.

According to reports, Putin claimed that Western currencies are “compromised”, which is why it would be necessary to change the payment method to the Russian ruble. “Compromised” would be all currencies active in western countries considered hostile by the Russian government, which includes the US, UK and the entire European Union. In this sense, by preventing the use of Western currencies in transactions, Moscow would be guaranteeing its national interests, encouraging the growth of the search for ruble in the financial market.

As known, the Russian currency has been suffering a major drop since the beginning of the Special Operation in Ukraine, mainly due to the sanctions that have been imposed on Moscow. After the military operation’s beginning, the dollar grew by more than 104% compared to the ruble. Now, however, due to the Russian new payment policy, the trend is for there to be a significant increase in international demand for rubles, which favors Russian monetary and financial security.

Undoubtedly, there is no reason to be scandalized by this Russian measure. The Russian sanction against Western currencies is a moderate and peaceful one in the face of the attitudes that the West has been taking against Moscow in recent weeks, which include heavy sanctions such as banning the export of various consumer goods, exclusion flights in the airspace of NATO countries and various coercive maneuvers in the financial and monetary spheres (among which the most impacting one was the banning of the SWIFT system in Russia). So, considering all this, it is possible to conclude that, despite the apparent “shock” shown by Western media channels, the Russian attitude seems reasonable and prudent, seeking only to guarantee some Russian interests in the financial market.

Moscow has shown itself to be flexible on several points, tolerating that some transactions are not immediately transferred to the ruble system, giving a necessary time limit for the consolidation of the changes. However, the clear fact is that at some point European countries will need to present complete trade proposals in Russian currency if they want to continue to import gas.

In fact, adhering to the American measures, all the members of the European Union accepted to adopt the sanctions against Russia, which, despite pro-NATO propaganda, was really a big strategic mistake. If European nations had remained neutral about Ukraine, the Euro would not have been described as a “compromised currency” and countries using it would not be considered hostile. The sanctions, indeed, built the current polarized scenario in Europe and now the consequences are being seen clearly.

Many Union’s officials keep talking about a “contingency plan” to “reduce European dependence on Russian gas”, but this is a project with little chance of success. Russian gas is the fastest, cheapest, safest, and most ecologically correct option to supply the European market and no “contingency plan” will be drawn up suddenly to put an end to it without leaving serious consequences for the European supply. Now, the European public opinion is close to realizing that the EU’s governments have put the entire continent in a situation of not serving the interests of any European country, only the plans of NATO.

Still, in addition to the reaction to Western sanctions, it is also necessary to mention the geostrategic value of Putin’s maneuver. In the end, for its part, Russia just wants to ensure its insertion in the growing process of monetary multipolarization, where more and more countries accept to trade internationally using their local currencies. As an energy power, Moscow has the potential to strengthen the ruble and will not miss this opportunity.

Even if a contingency plan is devised to make Europe “less dependent on Russian gas”, this is not a matter for the current moment and Europe still needs gas for now while strategists think about such plans. So, accelerating the formation of a ruble payment plan for Euro-Russian transactions is a project of immediate urgency and could represent a major step towards normalization of Russia-EU relations.

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Lucas Leiroz is a researcher in Social Sciences at the Rural Federal University of Rio de Janeiro; geopolitical consultant.

Ukraine’s Nuclear Weapons Program Can No Longer be Denied

March 31st, 2022 by Paul Antonopoulos

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Ukraine has engaged in nuclear and missile programs for nearly three decades as part of their quest to have their own nuclear weapons. The revelation by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky at the Munich Security Conference on February 19 about the possibility of achieving a nuclear status, just five days before Moscow launched its “special military operation”, was certainly not accidental.

Despite joining the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons as a non-nuclear state in 1994, Ukraine immediately began Research and Development (R&D) to form the technological basis for the possible creation of its own nuclear weapons. However, the biggest push for nuclear weapons was following the 2014 Maidan coup and the accession of Petro Poroshenko to the presidency.

According to the Russian Foreign Intelligence Agency, Ukraine’s R&D on the creation of a nuclear explosive device (NED), which could later be used in the design of nuclear warheads, was carried out in both uranium and plutonium directions. Given Ukraine’s important role in R&D during the Soviet era, the country’s scientific community has the capabilities and industry potential to achieve this goal. In addition, in order to accelerate R&D, plutonium of the required quality was obtained by Ukraine from abroad.

The key role in the creation of NEDs was assigned to the National Scientific Center “Kharkov Institute of Physics and Technology”. The experimental base available there makes it possible to research nuclear materials, including spent reactor fuel assemblies, which can be used to produce weapon-grade plutonium. The Institute for Nuclear Research and the Institute of Organic Chemistry in Kiev provided assistance to the Center in the development of methods for the separation of isotopes of nuclear materials.

The Institute for Nuclear Safety Problems in Chernobyl, as well as the State Scientific and Technical Center for Nuclear and Radiation Safety in Kiev, also participated in this work. It is worth noting the use of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant as a site for the development of nuclear weapons. It was there, judging by the available information, that work was underway on the separation of plutonium and to manufacture a “dirty” bomb. The increased radiation in Chernobyl following the infamous 1986 disaster concealed Ukraine’s research and work.

The employees of the Odessa National Polytechnic University have significant experience in mathematically modeling the kinetics of thermonuclear reactions, as do the specialized departments of the Kiev National University, named after I.I. Taras Shevchenko. In addition, the Institute of Physics and Technology of Materials and Alloys of the National Academy of Sciences specializes in hydrodynamics computer modeling. Particular attention was paid to the creation of special alloys, which was carried out at the Institute of Electric Welding. E. O. Paton and the Institute of Metal Physics. G. V. Kurdyumova.

In recent years, Ukraine has stepped up exploration of existing uranium mines, as well as the development of promising uranium deposits in the Mykolaiv, Dnepropetrovsk and Kirovograd regions. At the same time, foreign companies were contracted to assist Ukraine in setting up its own uranium enrichment. In this regard, it is noteworthy that the hydrometallurgical plant in Zhovti Vody is already processing uranium oxide concentrate from ore mined in Ukraine, which can be used in the process of uranium enrichment in gas centrifuges without additional processing and purification.

At the same time, work was underway in Ukraine to modernize existing weapons and create new missile that can be used for nuclear weapons. It is recalled that in December 2013, a cooperation agreement was reached with Turkey in the rocket sphere, specifically with Ukrainian rocket and space companies Yuzhmashzavod and Yuzhnoye Design Bureau, which were previously involved in the manufacture of the Soviet Union’s nuclear missile arsenal. The main goal of this cooperation is to establish a mobile complex equipped with a solid-propellant ballistic missile with a range of up to 1,500 km.

Yuzhmashzavod is also developing the Grom-2 (Thunder-2) mobile ground-based missile system. The export version of it can fire up to 500 km. Since 2017, the Alibey missile range has been operated in the Odessa region to conduct rocket technology flight tests.

Having implemented nuclear and missile programs for decades, Ukraine has been establishing the necessary conditions to manufacture its own nuclear weapons. In particular, significant achievements have been made in modeling nuclear chain reactions and isotope separation of fissile materials. Kiev was close to creating a nuclear explosive device based on plutonium by obtaining it from stored spent nuclear fuel. Effectively, Ukrainian specialists could produce such a device within a relatively short time, perhaps only months.

It also appears that when Russian Special Military Operation began, the Ukrainian leadership destroyed or relocated all valuable documentation stored in scientific centers in Kiev and Kharkiv to the National University “Lviv Polytechnic”. This was done, among other things, to deny accusations about the presence of a weaponized component of Ukraine’s so-called peaceful nuclear program.

In this way, although the West scoffs at the idea of Russia’s mission to de-militarize Ukraine, evidence of the country’s nuclear weapons program will be further exposed as more details, documents and facilities come under Russian control. With Kiev seemingly willing to negotiate on its neutrality status, along with Russia’s dismantling of the country’s nuclear weapons program, it will ensure that Ukraine in the post-war period will not be a NATO spearhead aimed against Moscow, thus stabilizing a situation that has been extremely volatile and violent since 2014.

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Paul Antonopoulos is an independent geopolitical analyst.

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The German government has triggered the first stage of an emergency plan for natural gas supplies and urged consumers to save energy in the face of growing concerns that sanctions-hit Russia could stop deliveries unless it is paid in roubles.

Russian President Vladimir Putin announced last week his country would only accept payments in roubles for natural gas deliveries to “unfriendly countries” – those that have imposed sanctions over Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, including all European Union members.

The announcement was seen as an effort to shore up the rouble, which has collapsed against other currencies since Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24 and Western countries responded with debilitating sanctions against Moscow.

Russia is the world’s largest exporter of gas in terms of volume, accounting for nearly half of the EU’s imports in 2021. For Germany, Europe’s largest economy, that figure stood at 55 percent last year. And although Germany’s gas imports from Russia dropped to 40 percent in the first quarter of 2022, economy minister Robert Habeck has said his country will not achieve full independence from Russian supplies before mid-2024.

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On March 29, the Government of Canada released its new emissions reduction plan. The document is filled with spending promises and ambitious targets, but it’s important to step back and ask whether anything about the plan is achievable.

The report outlines how Canada will, “reduce emissions across the entire economy to reach our emissions reduction target of 40 to 45 percent below 2005 levels by 2030 and put us on a path to achieve net-zero emissions by 2050.” While this aspirational goal is commendable, it is divorced from the reality that, according to Environment and Climate Change Canada, we have not yet even begun to lower our total national emissions. As stated in a report published in 2021, “Canada’s total GHG emissions in 2019 were 730 megatonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent (Mt CO2 eq), a slight increase from 728 Mt CO2 eq in 2018.”

Our emissions may even be higher than estimated, as new research shows that fugitive emissions from sources like natural gas may be orders of magnitude larger than currently accounted for. Similarly, the Climate Action Tracker (an independent scientific collaboration between Climate Analytics and the NewClimate Institute) states that, “We rate Canada’s policies and action as ‘Highly Insufficient’ when compared to modelled domestic pathways.”

So, where does the government believe these massive emissions cuts can be made?

The 2030 plan begins with a focus on homes and buildings, which together represent approximately 13 percent of Canada’s total emissions. However, updating model codes for buildings and supporting large-scale and expensive home retrofits in an already problematic era of skyrocketing property values will require vast amounts of resources in a world already strained by supply chain disruptions and intensifying geo-political instability.

A key cornerstone of the plan is related to the oil and gas sector and the spectrum of technologies known as carbon capture, utilization, and storage (CCUS), with a complementary investment tax credit to incentivize their development and adoption. While CCUS has the potential to decrease or mitigate the carbon emissions from a variety of industrial processes from concrete production to oil extraction, experts are dubious about its potential to significantly lower Canada’s overall carbon footprint.

Prior to the release of the Trudeau government’s 2030 plan, over 400 Canadian climate scientists and other academics (myself included) signed a letter calling on the federal government to reject the introduction of tax credits for CCUS technologies on the grounds that, “Despite decades of research, CCUS is neither economically sound nor proven at scale, with a terrible track record and limited potential to deliver significant, cost-effective emissions reductions.”

Why are experts so skeptical about a purported overreliance on these technologies to purify Canada’s carbon stream? Several independent reports have found that existing CCUS innovations have failed to meet their targets according to numerous metrics, and none are on track to be met. In fact, one report found that carbon capture projects can even increase total emissions. For some, this may conjure memories of the failed American drive for ‘clean coal,’ which proved to be a billion dollar boondoggle, or other missteps in Australia and here in Canada—all backed by huge amounts of public investment.

The fact is that despite oil prices returning to strong levels and possible future reductions in costs, CCUS is not economically viable. Even if it were financially practicable, it would take precious resources away from other, proven technologies such as renewable energy. In other words, by the time we develop new CCUS to a scale where it would have any significant impact, it will likely be too late.

Regrettably, the Trudeau government has chosen to implement new subsidies to attempt to force the technology into wider adoption under the guise that “climate action must go hand in hand with keeping life affordable for Canadians and creating good jobs.” However, the question must be asked: who is paying for these subsidies? No new taxes on the oil and gas sector are identified as part of Canada’s new climate action plan. Instead the report implores the fossil fuel sector to do its part: “Canada’s oil and gas industry is currently generating record cash flow. If deployed strategically, these funds could enhance carbon competitiveness and enable the sector to do its fair share in contributing to the country’s climate goals.”

This is a toothless statement directed at an industry that, with few exceptions, has shown virtually no willingness to engage in real climate action.

Despite decades of boldfaced lies by oil and gas companies about their contributions to tackling global warming, the ‘polluter pays’ principle has yet to be forced upon the extractive sector—the same firms that have for decades reaped record profits despite abandoning their messes both in the form of orphaned wells and climate harms. It is clear, to cite the Parkland Institute’s Kevin Taft’s historic warning, that the conventional energy sector has fully captured and harnessed the institutions of democracy for its own use.

Nor is there any explanation of where funding for the billions of dollars for other programs will come from. At a time when the Liberal government is emerging from under a burden of historic stimulus spending in the wake of the COVID crisis, announcing negotiations to buy a fleet of F-35 fighter jets, and entering into a cooperation agreement with the NDP that will see the introduction of dental and pharmacare, one might question the scope of the government’s fiscal flexibility. This isn’t to say that more spending is unjustified—indeed, the cost of doing nothing will far outweigh the costs of climate action.

Of course, CCUS has real-world applications and is far from a useless technology (I have been too critical of its uses in the past), and it will likely have a sustained future in certain industries where emissions are more or less unavoidable, or as a stepping stone to carbon dioxide removal or direct air capture which can be used to gradually undo industrial emissions. The problem is that every moment we take from engaging in real action pushes us toward greater extremes, like increasingly severe natural disasters such as last year’s fire and flood cycle in British Columbia, or the possibility of deploying solar geoengineering.

And while the Trudeau government should be applauded for other initiatives such as supporting farmers and agri-producers and funding clean energy and energy efficiency projects led by Indigenous peoples, it is clear this larger climate plan is mostly one of not rocking the boat—and hoping things work out. Rather than investing wholeheartedly in a just and equitable transition (there is some funding earmarked for renewable energy), we are stuck placating the oil and gas sector with solutions that go nowhere near the material dismantling of fossil capital that is required to avert climate catastrophe.

Perhaps now is the time to take a step back and reassess. If the government is going to commit over $9 billion towards climate action, it needs to be targeted at programs that will quickly and effectively reduce emissions. Unfortunately, this means that our grandiose strategy of planting billions of trees is probably all for naught, as is hoping the oil and gas sector will do its part voluntarily. Ultimately, relying too heavily upon silver bullet technologies like CCUS to make a sizable difference is a fantasy that relies on other future, unproven innovations like nuclear fusion or even small modular reactors.

The steps we must take will be painful. They will cost jobs, and they will involve sacrificing some of the comforts we’ve become accustomed to. First and foremost, real climate action must start with the rapid phase out of oil and gas production in Canada. And despite the protestations of former Alberta Premier Rachel Notley, such a transition is indeed possible.

As one of the world’s worst climate offenders, we have a responsibility to act, and earn a reputation for leadership which others may follow. Until real action is taken, any plan will be nothing more than thoughts and prayers.

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Burgess Langshaw Power is a former policy analyst currently completing his PhD in Global Governance at the Balsillie School, University of Waterloo. His policy expertise includes climate interventions and energy technologies. Views expressed here are his own and not necessarily those of his school or employer.

Featured image: Carbon capture, utilization and storage features heavily in the Trudeau government’s new climate plan, but critics question whether it represents another gift to to the oil and gas industry. Photo by Claudia Otte/Fotolia.

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An international aid group warned Wednesday that Afghanistan is on the brink of complete collapse as the Biden administration and European governments refuse to release the war-torn nation’s central bank reserves, depriving the economy of critical funds as millions face poverty and starvation.

In a statement ahead of an international donor conference for Afghanistan, the International Rescue Committee (IRC) said the country “is now the world’s largest-ever humanitarian appeal, requiring a staggering US$4.47 billion in humanitarian aid—quadruple the needs at the start of 2021 and more than is required for either Syria or Yemen.”

Since the Taliban retook power last August following two decades of U.S.-led warfare, IRC noted, “the speed of Afghanistan’s economic collapse has been unprecedented.” Following the withdrawal of American troops, the Biden administration froze billions of dollars in Afghan central bank assets held in the U.S. despite warnings that the move would push the country closer to full-scale economic ruin.

Last month, U.S. President Joe Biden issued an executive order aiming to permanently seize Afghanistan’s assets and split them between the families of 9/11 victims and an ill-defined “trust fund” for Afghans. Blocked from accessing its own reserves, Kabul has struggled to afford even the import taxes on containers of badly needed food.

Moreover, the Biden administration has left in place crippling economic sanctions that could kill more civilians than 20 years of war, according to one analyst.

European governments and international institutions also took punitive steps following the Taliban’s return to power, suspending financing for projects in Afghanistan and leaving humanitarian groups on the ground without the resources needed to help the growing number of sick and malnourished Afghans.

“Afghans that could support themselves and their families six months ago are now entirely dependent on aid,” IRC said Wednesday. “With each week that goes by, more Afghans are forced to resort to the unimaginable to survive: since August, the number of Afghans resorting to negative coping capacities has risen sixfold, such as selling young daughters into marriage, pulling children out of school to work, selling organs, skipping meals, or taking on high levels of debt.”

The New York Times reported Tuesday that Afghans desperate for cash to feed their families are turning to “backbreaking work” in the notoriously dangerous mines of northern Afghanistan. Some toiling in the mines are as young as 10 years old, according to the newspaper.

UNICEF recently warned that more than a million Afghan children will need treatment for severe acute malnutrition this year and 13 million kids in total will need humanitarian assistance.

David Miliband, IRC’s president and CEO, said Wednesday that the actions of the international community have pushed Afghanistan toward “total collapse.”

“If the Afghan economy is not resuscitated, the severity of the current humanitarian crisis will only deepen, with dire consequences for life and limb of ordinary Afghans,” said Miliband. “Further economic distress will only mean greater displacement, greater insecurity, and greater misery.”

Miliband urged countries and humanitarian groups participating in Thursday’s donor conference to ramp up aid to Afghanistan, but stressed that such charity work “only addresses the symptoms rather than the drivers of a failing economy.”

“Afghanistan urgently requires a roadmap for international engagement to address the economic crisis, including benchmarks for the release of frozen Afghan assets to the central bank,” Miliband argued. “In the immediate term, this will require donors and financial institutions to help rebuild the capacity of the central bank to operate independently, adhere to international banking standards, and manage the Afghan economy.”

“The urgent work to stave off famine and preventable deaths in the coming weeks and months should not crowd out the important work to halt the trajectory of this crisis and stabilize the economy,” he continued. “Until these measures are taken, Afghan civilians will continue to pay for the transgressions of others with their own lives and suffering.”

Welthungerhilfe, a Germany-based humanitarian nonprofit, voiced similar fears on Tuesday, pointing out that 95% of the Afghan population “no longer has adequate nutrition”—a crisis exacerbated by Russia’s war on Ukraine, which has pushed up commodity prices and intensified supply chain disruptions.

“Afghanistan is in free fall,” said Thomas ten Boer, Welthungerhilfe’s director in Kabul. “The sanctions are crushing the economy and preventing money from entering the country. Agricultural production will continue to plummet because farmers cannot purchase seeds or fertilizer due to drastic price hikes.”

“We are risking the future of an entire generation that now lacks both adequate nutrition and a proper education,” he added.

From Common Dreams: Our work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.

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China’s Diplomacy on a Roll in Kabul

March 31st, 2022 by M. K. Bhadrakumar

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Last Thursday, the Acting Foreign Minister of the Taliban interim government Amir Khan Muttaqi made a stunning remark to greet the visiting Chinese Councilor and Foreign Minister Wang Yi in Kabul when he said, “This is the most important high-level delegation received by Afghanistan.” It spoke volumes about the quiet success of Beijing’s diplomacy to turn the tables in the Hindu Kush. 

The body language of the red carpet welcome extended to Wang Yi showed that China has emerged as the most influential external player in Afghanistan by a long shot in the period since the Taliban took power last August. Without doubt, the US’ preoccupations in the European theatre, which seem open-ended, can only work to China’s advantage.  

Therefore, there are expectations regarding the Third Meeting of the Foreign Ministers of the Neighbouring Countries of Afghanistan that China is hosting in Tunxi in the eastern Chinese province of Anhui on March 30-31. 

The Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman, while announcing the two-day meeting beginning on Wednesday, put the event in its context saying that the Afghan situation “is now in a critical transition from chaos to order.” Indeed, he qualified this by adding that the country faces “multiple challenges from within and outside that need to be addressed with more support and help.” 

The Chinese spokesperson said the meeting hopes to “pool more consensus” from Afghanistan’s neighbouring countries and to discuss “ways to jointly stabilise the situation.” Thus, the neighbouring countries’ forum will engage the Afghan Acting Foreign Minister Amir Khan Muttaqi in a formal “Dialogue” format where he will interact with the participants of the event in Tunxi — foreign ministers of China, Pakistan, Iran, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and Russia — as regards the country’s “difficulties and needs.” 

Interestingly, the Chinese spokesman specifically confirmed that Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov will attend the meeting in Tunxi “upon invitation.” This is important against the backdrop of the US-Russia confrontation and the West’s concerted attempts in the recent months to entice the Taliban regime into the western orbit through a mix of alluring offers and bullying. 

Neither Russia nor China wants Afghanistan to become a turf of the great game, but that said, they also cannot be passive towards the reinstallation of the NATO intelligence apparatus so close to their borders at the emergent regional security scenario.

It is improbable that tomorrow’s meeting will lead to the recognition of the Taliban government. However, beneath that threshold, an intensification of the regional states’ engagement with the Taliban regime can be expected. 

Wang Yi’s visit to Kabul coincided with the arrival of a high-level Russian delegation in the Afghan capital led by the presidential envoy on Afghanistan Zamir Kabulov, which included representatives of various agencies of the government, especially the economic ministries. Conceivably, Russia is drawing up a roadmap for stepping up security-cum-economic cooperation with the Taliban’s interim government. The internal situation in Afghanistan is stabilising and the prospects of any organised resistance to the Taliban have receded significantly. 

Both Russia and China are gearing up for the deepening of their economic cooperation with Kabul. It is entirely conceivable that they may take recourse to innovative payment mechanisms to sidestep the tyranny of the US dollar (“world currency”), thereby undercutting Washington’s capacity to keep the Taliban regime on a tight leash financially through bullying and blackmail until it proved pliable to the Western diktat. 

During Wang Yi’s visit to Kabul, both the Acting Deputy Prime Minister Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar and Muttaqi himself emphatically stated their interest in expanding the cooperation with China within the ambit of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). Wang Yi has proposed that China is “ready to make efforts to extend” the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor to Afghanistan and help the country develop as “a bridge for regional connectivity.” 

Basically, both Beijing and Moscow have reason to be satisfied with the Afghan interim government’s performance so far, which suggests that the Taliban leadership’s commitment to the peaceful reconstruction of the country is not to be doubted. Wang Yi, in fact, went to the extent of complimenting the Taliban regime for its “series of positive measures to respond to the concerns of the international community.” Wang Yi told Muttaqi, “We oppose the political pressure and economic sanctions on Afghanistan imposed by non-regional forces at every turn.” 

Of course, the clincher will be the Taliban regime’s performance on the security front. Baradar pledged that Kabul will not allow any forces to engage in activities that undermine China.” He just stopped short of mentioning the shenanigans by the western intelligence. Specifically, Baradar underscored the importance that the Taliban leadership attaches to China’s security concerns. 

He said Kabul “will take concrete and strong measures to achieve security across Afghanistan and contribute to maintaining regional security.” Importantly, Baradar sought China’s help in enhancing Afghanistan’s “security capacity.” Wang Yi took the opportunity to convey Beijing’s expectation that Kabul will “earnestly fulfil its commitment to resolutely crack down on all terrorist forces, including the East Turkestan Islamic Movement.” 

With the US and the European Union hopelessly bogged down in their confrontation with Russia, the situation surrounding Afghanistan is radically transforming. The Taliban leadership is savvy enough to sense this. To be sure, there is no stopping the BRI projects in Afghanistan in this changed situation. 

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Featured image: China’s State Councilor and Foreign Minister Wang Yi (R) with Acting Prime Minister of Interim Government Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, Acting Foreign Minister Amir Khan Muttaqi, Kabul, March 24, 2022 (Source: Indian Punchline)

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Our thoughts are with Bruce Willis. 

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Bruce Willis is 67 and developed aphasia after being vaccinated. Could it just be a coincidence? Maybe, but how did Willis’ doctors rule out the vaccine being causal?

We aren’t told this. Why not?

Why aren’t they explaining to us why this couldn’t have been caused by the vaccine?

The medical authorities always tell us they want to reduce vaccine hesitancy so why not tell us how the doctors ruled out the vaccine as causal in Willis’ case?

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I wanted to make sure everyone knows aphasia is one of the thousands of symptoms whose reporting rates were elevated after the COVID vaccines rolled out. It’s #1574 on that sorted list of symptoms elevated by the COVID vaccine that we calculated back in November 2021.

But I also very distinctly remember, very early on after the vaccines rolled out, a story from Dr. Byram Bridle of a teenage girl, perfectly healthy before getting the vaccine, who couldn’t speak shortly after getting vaccinated.

Of course, we now know this wasn’t just a coincidence.

The numbers of reports to the VAERS system bear this out.

Here’s a “baseline” year 2019 for all vaccines put together:

Here’s what the numbers are just for the COVID vaccine alone:

Bruce Willis is 67 and developed aphasia after being vaccinated. Could it just be a coincidence? Maybe, but how did Willis’ doctors rule out the vaccine being causal?

We aren’t told this. Why not?

340 vs. 12 for his age group… a factor of 28 higher reporting rate for the COVID vaccines.

Bad luck? I don’t think so.

Why aren’t they explaining to us why this couldn’t have been caused by the vaccine?

The medical authorities always tell us they want to reduce vaccine hesitancy so why not tell us how the doctors ruled out the vaccine as causal in Willis’ case?

The actual case reports show people are normal before getting vaccinated and unable to talk shortly after.

If this isn’t causal, then how do you explain all these amazing coincidences? And why are the reports so much higher after the COVID vaccines vs. all other vaccines?

More troubling are the actual case reports.

Here are just the first three that came up in the search report:

VAERS ID: 906282 (history) Given the vaccine at 712 pm on 12/20/20. At approximately 715 pm, she began to clear her throat and then became unable to speak, followed by audible wheezes and short, shallow breaths. At 1923, Epinephrine was administered. At 1928, she was able to speak again and was transported to the ED. The patient reports after arrival to the ER, the symptoms returned. She was given PO Benadryl, followed by IV Benadryl, and then a 2nd dose of Epinephrine. She was admitted to the ICU for observation

VAERS ID: 907710 (history) About 30 minutes after injection felt brain fog and had a hard time finding words; About 30 minutes after injection felt brain fog and had a hard time finding words; It”s like we were having to concentrate more than usual to do routine stuff; This is a spontaneous report from a contactable consumer (patient himself). A 44-year-old male received BNT162B2 (PFIZER-BIONTECH COVID-19 VACCINE, Lot number Ej1685), intramuscular on the left arm, as first single dose on 20Dec2020 (at 06:30) for COVID-19 immunisation. The patient did not have a relevant medical history. No relevant concomitant medications were provided. About 30 minutes after injection felt brain fog and had a hard time finding words. Another nurse that got vaccinated at the same time felt the same way. It”s like we were having to concentrate more than usual to do routine stuff. The patient was not treated for the events. The patient did not perform COVID test before vaccination but after vaccination Nasal Swab, Rapid PCR, was Negative. He was recovering from the events.; Sender”s Comments: Linked Report(s) : US-PFIZER INC-2020504556 same drug, same event and different patient

VAERS ID: 911587 (history): 5 to 10 minutes after receiving vaccine started feeling “drunk”, anxious, paranoid. Muscles became mildly tense and teeth clenched. The physical aspects only lasted a short time (10-15 minutes)the anxiousness paranoia and “drunk” feeling lasted approximately another hour. An hour after receiving vaccine started experiencing nausea and vomiting with extreme muscle soreness that was generalized and fatigue. After napping the nausea and vomiting resolved. Woke up shivering in cold sweats and shivering. Began experiencing forgetfulness and having problems thinking correctly. Issues with finding words, conversing and conveying information to other people. Shortly after waking up began experiencing severe back pain in lower to mid left back. Pain was shooting and it did not seem to matter on positioning. Back pain has resolved. Day 2 still experiencing severe fatigue, extreme muscle soreness, forgetfulness and not thinking correctly. Having issues finding words to use and communicate. Thinking process seems slow. Occasional cold sweats and shivering. Day 3 still feeling of forgetfulness, unable to find words and communicate correctly, slow thinking process, occasional cold sweats and shivering, occasional bouts of anxiety (lasts only 2-3 minutes at a time), short bouts of shortness of breath with exertion resolved quickly. Some muscle soreness seems to be resolving.

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***

While President Biden is accusing President Putin of being a war criminal, he seems to conveniently forget how his predecessors in the White House all the way back to the 1960s, to and including Lyndon Johnson have committed directly or by proxy war crimes around the world in Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Lebanon, Somalia, Egypt, Korea, Vietnam, Yemen — and the list is almost endless.

American-initiated wars and conflicts have in the last 60 years killed between 20 and 30 million people.

One wonders, who are the war criminals?

Where do most war criminals abound as Presidents? The short answer is: In the freedom-loving United States of America. And they are literally all getting away with murder.

Western media fully ignore this fact when they repeat Biden’s accusation calling Mr. Putin a war criminal and worse.

The West, perhaps out of desperation since the end is near, has become a dystopian, lie-infested world, beset by untruths, censoring free-speech, deleting the truth for lies and more. Unknown in recent history.

Since western war criminals literally are getting away with murder, Ukraine soldiers have taken a lesson and become some of the most atrocious war criminals in recent history.

As reported by RT (German), 27 March 2022, they are torturing Russian military prisoners of war in the most brutal ways, in total disregard of the Geneva Conventions on Prisoners of War; see this 3-min video by RT (German) or click the image below.

The Geneva Convention on Prisoners of war dates back to 29 July 1929. It became effective in June 1931. The Convention has since been renewed, updated and adjusted on 12 August 1949 as a UN Human Rights Instrument the Geneva Convention relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War. It entered into force on 21 October 1950.

Article 3 of the Convention specifies that Prisoners of war must at all times be humanely treated. Any unlawful act or omission by the Detaining Power causing death or seriously endangering the health of a prisoner of war in its custody is prohibited, and will be regarded as a serious breach of the present Convention. See this.

Soldiers of the Ukrainian army are certainly not abiding by this law and must be held accountable by an International Court of Law judging war crimes.

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Peter Koenig is a geopolitical analyst and a former Senior Economist at the World Bank and the World Health Organization (WHO), where he has worked for over 30 years on water and environment around the world. He lectures at universities in the US, Europe and South America. He writes regularly for online journals and is the author of Implosion – An Economic Thriller about War, Environmental Destruction and Corporate Greed; and co-author of Cynthia McKinney’s book “When China Sneezes: From the Coronavirus Lockdown to the Global Politico-Economic Crisis” (Clarity Press – November 1, 2020)

He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG). He is also is a non-resident Senior Fellow of the Chongyang Institute of Renmin University, Beijing.

Featured image is from South Front

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***

If Secretary of State Antony Blinken wanted to highlight the hypocrisy that so many non-Western nations perceive in President Biden’s efforts to depict the Russian invasion of Ukraine as a global “battle between democracy and autocracy,” he couldn’t have chosen better than to attend the Middle East foreign ministers’ meeting in Israel today.

All five of his interlocutors from Israel, Egypt, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, and Morocco represent governments that are either monarchical, outright tyrannical, or have invaded and occupy their neighbors’ territory by the force of arms.

Blinken’s enthusiastic endorsement of this burgeoning axis of Mideast states regardless of their human rights records marks a return to the familiar Cold War politics where generous U.S. support for all kinds of repressive states, especially in the Global South, was justified by the overriding necessity of containing and defeating the Soviet Union.

Blinken of course is trying to get these same governments to back sweeping U.S. and EU sanctions against Russia in order to demonstrate their opposition to Moscow’s aggression — even as a growing number of Putin-enabled oligarchs seek safe haven in Israel and the UAE, in particular.

Blinken also hopes to at least soften or mute their opposition to the still-to-be-concluded revived nuclear deal, no doubt by reassuring them that Washington will sell them ever more sophisticated and expensive U.S.-made weapons systems and participate in more joint military exercises with them.

Thus far, Washington has commended Israel’s efforts to mediate between Moscow and Kiev and its dispatch of humanitarian aid, but has otherwise been disappointed by Tel Aviv’s failure to provide Ukraine with specific weapons that could materially help Kiev repel the invasion.

As for the five Arab states at the meeting, despite voting to condemn Russia’s aggression in the UN General Assembly, they have tried to steer a more neutral course on the war. The Biden administration has been particularly frustrated by the UAE’s rejection of urgent Western appeals to increase the country’s badly needed oil and gas exports to help make up for the shortfall in global markets caused by Western sanctions against Russia. It also didn’t help that its de facto leader, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed al-Nahyan, extolled his March 1 telephone conversation with Putin while reportedly refusing to take a call from Biden.

Whether Blinken succeeds in persuading his interlocutors to take stronger measures to isolate Russia or reconcile them to Washington’s revival of the nuclear deal remains to be seen. But the warm embrace of his Israeli and Arab counterparts in Monday’s meeting would seem to undermine — at least in the Middle East — Biden’s sweeping message Saturday that Washington is a defender of an international rules-based liberal order that is leading the “perennial struggle for democracy and freedom.”

Egypt under President Abdel al-Sisi is widely considered, along with Syria, to be perhaps the most repressive dictatorship in the region with thousands of peaceful dissidents languishing for years in overcrowded prisons and most non-governmental organizations operating under unprecedented constraints when they are permitted to operate at all.

“Egyptians under Sisi are living through the worst repression in the country’s modern history, according to the latest edition of Human Rights Watch’s “World Report.”

Bahrain, whose Sunni royal family rules over a restive Shia majority, according to the same report, pursues a policy of “zero tolerance for dissent,” continues to conduct mass trials against dissidents, and has imprisoned key leaders of the Shia community since the 2011 “Arab Spring.”

Particularly ironic given the Biden administration’s support for Ukraine’s defense of its territorial integrity in the face of Russia’s invasion and possible occupation, three of the five participating governments in Monday’s meeting have invaded and occupied their neighbors’ territory in defiance of international law. Morocco invaded and eventually annexed the Western Sahara in the wake of Spain’s 1975 withdrawal, prompting a mass exodus of most of the former colony’s Sahrawi inhabitants, many of whom remain in refugee camps in Algeria.

Of course, Israel gained control of and occupied the Gaza Strip, Syrian’s Golan Heights, East Jerusalem, and the West Bank in the 1967 war and subsequently unilaterally annexed East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights also in defiance of international law. It has also established 130 government-approved settlements housing more than 400,000 of its Jewish citizens on the West Bank in violation of the Geneva Convention, leaving some 2.7 million Palestinians on the West Bank under military occupation, a situation which a growing number of international human rights organizations have denounced as a form of “apartheid.”

As for the UAE, which, along with Saudi Arabia, led the counterrevolution across the Middle East against the “Arab Spring” imprisoned scores of activists, academics, lawyers, and other dissidents under “dismal and unhygienic conditions” at home, its participation in the Yemen war has resulted in its effective occupation of Yemen’s Mayun Island in the Bab al-Mandab Strait, and control of Socotra Island. It has also promoted and armed secessionist groups elsewhere in southern Yemen.

If Blinken wants to focus on Russia’s aggression and defiance of the international “rules-based order,” this meeting is not a good look.

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***

To initiate a war of aggression is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulative evil of the whole.” – Judges of the International Military Tribunal at the Nuremberg Trials.

When it comes to the legal use of force between states, it is considered unimpeachable fact that in accordance with the intent of the United Nations Charter to ban all conflict, there are only two acceptable exceptions. One is an enforcement action to maintain international peace and security authorized by a Security Council resolution passed under Chapter VII of the Charter, which permits the use of force.

The other is the inherent right of individual and collective self-defense, as enshrined in Article 51 of the Charter, which reads as follows:

“Nothing in the present Charter shall impair the inherent right of individual or collective self-defense if an armed attack occurs against a Member of the United Nations, until the Security Council has taken measures necessary to maintain international peace and security. Measures taken by Members in the exercise of this right of self-defense shall be immediately reported to the Security Council and shall not in any way affect the authority and responsibility of the Security Council under the present Charter to take at any time such action as it deems necessary in order to maintain or restore international peace and security.”

A plain-language reading of Article 51 makes it clear that the trigger necessary for invocation of the right of self-defense is the occurrence of an actual armed attack — the notion of an open-ended threat to security does not, by itself, suffice.

Prior to the adoption of the U.N. Charter, the customary international law interpretation of the role of pre-emption as applied to the principle of self-defense was Hugo Grotius, the 17th century Dutch legal scholar who, in his book De Jure Belli Ac Pacis (“On the Law of War and Peace”) declared that “war in defense of life is permissible only when the danger is immediate and certain, not when it is merely assumed,” adding that “the danger must be immediate and imminent in point in time.”

Grotius formed the core of the so-called “Caroline Standard” of 1842, (named after a U.S. ship of that name which had been attacked by the British navy after aiding Canadian rebels back in 1837) drafted by then U.S. Secretary of State Daniel Webster. It supported the right of pre-emption or anticipatory self-defense only under extreme circumstances and within clearly defined boundaries.

“Undoubtedly,” Webster wrote, “it is just, that while it is admitted that exceptions growing out of the great law of self-defense do exist, those exceptions should be confined to eases in which the ‘necessity of that self-defense is instant, overwhelming, and leaving no choice of means, and no moment for deliberation.’”

Until the adoption of the U.N. Charter in 1945, Webster’s criteria, borrowing heavily from Grotius, had become Black Letter Law regarding anticipatory action in international law. However, once the United Nations was established and the U.N. Charter sanctified as international law, the concept of pre-emption or anticipatory self defense lost favor in customary international law.

George Ball, deputy under-secretary of state for President John F. Kennedy, made the following famous remark about the possibility of a U.S. attack on Cuba in response to the deployment of Soviet nuclear-armed missiles on Cuban territory in 1962. As it was being discussed in the White House Situation Room, Ball said: “A course of action where we strike without warning is like Pearl Harbor…It’s…it’s the kind of conduct that’s such that one might expect of the Soviet Union. It is not conduct that one expects of the United States.”

Oct. 29, 1962 Executive Committee of the National Security Council meeting during the Cuban Missile Crisis. (Cecil Stoughton, White House, in the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum)

The Ball standard guided the administration of President Ronald Reagan when, in 1983, Israel bombed the Osirak nuclear reactor in Iraq. Israel claimed that “in removing this terrible nuclear threat to its existence, Israel was only exercising its legitimate right of self-defense within the meaning of this term in international law and as preserved under the U.N. Charter.”

The Reagan administration ultimately disagreed, with U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Jeane Kirkparick saying, “our judgement that Israeli actions violated the Charter of the United Nations is based on the conviction that Israel failed to exhaust peaceful means for the resolution of this dispute.” Kirkpatrick, however, noted that President Reagan had opined that “Israel might have sincerely believed it was a defensive move.”

The American argument dealt with the process of the Israeli action, namely the fact that Israel had not brought the problem before the Security Council as required by Article 51. In this, the U.S. drew upon the judgement of Sir Humphrey Waldock, the head of the International Court of Justice, who in his 1952 book, The Regulation of the Use of Force by Individual States in International Law, noted:

“The Charter obliges Members to submit to the Council or Assembly any dispute dangerous to peace which they cannot settle. Members have therefore an imperative duty to invoke the jurisdiction of the United Nations whenever a grave menace to their security develops carrying the probability of armed attack.”

After Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in August 1990, the United States was able to assemble a diverse international coalition by citing not only Article 51, which provided a somewhat weak case for intervention based upon self-defense and collective security, but also Security Council resolution 678 passed under Chapter VII of the U.N. Charter. That authorized the use of force to evict Iraq from Kuwait. Regardless of where one stood on the merits of that conflict, the fact is, from the standpoint of international law, the legality underpinning the U.S. and coalition use of force was rock solid.

The aftermath of Operation Desert Storm, the U.S.-led military campaign to liberate Kuwait, however, lacked such clarity. While Kuwait was liberated, the Iraqi government was still in place. Since Resolution 678 did not authorize regime change, the continued existence of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein’s government posed a political problem for the United States, whose president, George H. W. Bush, had likened Saddam Hussein in an October 1990 speech to the Middle East equivalent of Adolf Hitler, requiring Nuremburg-like retribution.

US Misuse of Ceasefire Resolution

The Security Council, under pressure from the United States, passed a ceasefire resolution, 687, under Chapter VII, which linked the lifting of economic sanctions imposed on Iraq for invading Kuwait to the verified disarmament of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction (WMD) under the auspices of U.N. weapons inspectors.

The U.N. disarmament process was troubled by two disparate undercurrents. The first was the fact the Iraqi government was an unwilling participant in the disarmament process, actively hiding material, weapons, and documentation pertaining to banned missile, chemical, biological, and nuclear programs from the inspectors.

This active program of concealment constituted a de facto material breach of the ceasefire resolution, creating a prima facia case for the resumption of military action for the purpose of compelling Iraq into compliance.

The second was the reality that the United States, rather than using the disarmament process authorized by the Security Council to rid Iraq of WMD, was instead using the sanctions triggered by continued Iraqi noncompliance to create the conditions inside Iraq to remove Saddam from power.

The weapons inspection process was only useful to the United States if it furthered that singular objective. By the fall of 1998, inspections had become inconvenient to U.S. Iraq policy.

In a move carefully coordinated between the U.N. inspection team and the U.S. government, an inspection-based confrontation was orchestrated between U.N. inspectors and the Iraqi government, which was then used as an excuse to withdraw the U.N. inspectors from Iraq. The U.S. government,  citing the threat posed by Iraqi WMD in an inspection-free environment, launched a three-day aerial bombardment of Iraq known as Operation Desert Fox.

Neither the U.S. nor the U.K. (the two nations involved in Operation Desert Fox) had received authority from the U.N. Security Council prior to taking military action. There is no specific legal authority that would allow either the U.S. or Britain to act in a unilateral fashion regarding the enforcement of a Chapter VII resolution such as 687. While the Security Council would obviously be able to authorize compelled compliance (i.e., the use of force), no single nation nor collective possesses unilateral enforcement authority, making Operation Desert Fox an illegal act of aggression under international law.

The U.S. has sought to get around this legality by crafting a case for military action under the rubric of the “right of reprisal”, with the act of Iraq being in material breach of its obligations under resolution 687 serving as the justification for reprisal. To argue what by most accounts is a tenuous case, however, the strike in question would have to be limited to targets that could be exclusively defined as being related to weapons of mass destruction (WMD).

The fact that the U.S. and U.K. struck a plethora of sites, none of which were related to the manufacture or storage of WMD, undermines the legitimacy of any justification under a claim of reprisal, making Operation Desert Fox an unauthorized (i.e., illegal) use of military force.

Deterrence

U.N. weapons inspectors in central Iraq, June 1, 1991. (UN Photo)

One of the purposes alleged to justify an action under the “right of reprisal” was the notion of deterrence, namely that by carrying out a limited reprisal in response to a documented material breach of a Chapter VII resolution, the U.S. and UK would be deterring Iraq from any future acts of non-compliance.

One of the key aspects of deterrence in defense of the law, however, is the need for the act upon which deterrence is derived being itself legitimate. Given that Operation Desert Fox was, prima facia, an illegal act, the deterrence value generated by the action was nil.

The inability to craft a valid deterrence policy produced the opposite of what had been intended — it emboldened Iraq to defy the will of the Security Council under the misguided conclusion that its constituent members were impotent to act against it.

In 2003 the administration of President George W. Bush proved the Iraqis wrong.

Having failed to implement a viable doctrine of military deterrence when dealing with Iraq’s unfulfilled obligations under Security Council resolutions, the U.S. crafted a new approach for resolving the Iraqi problem once and for all—the doctrine of pre-emption.

This doctrine was first articulated by President Bush in his June 2002 address to West Point, where he declared that while “in some cases deterrence still applied, new threats required new thinking … if we wait for threats to fully materialize, we will have waited too long.”

On Aug. 26, 2002 Vice President Dick Cheney specifically linked Bush’s embryonic doctrine of pre-emption to Iraq, declaring at a convention for the Veterans of Foreign Wars that:

“What we must not do in the face of a mortal threat is to give in to wishful thinking or willful blindness…deliverable weapons of mass destruction in the hands of a terror network or murderous dictator or the two working together constitutes as grave a threat as can be imagined. The risks of inaction are far greater than the risks of action.”

Certified Pre-Emption

In early September 2002 the Bush administration published its National Security Strategy (NSS), which certified as official U.S. policy the principle of pre-emption. It noted that the Cold War-era doctrines of containment and deterrence no longer worked when dealing with a post-9/11 threat matrix which included rogue states and non-state terrorists.

“It has taken almost a decade for us to comprehend the true nature of this new threat,” the NSS stated.

“Given the goals of the rogue states and terrorists, the U.S. can no longer solely rely on a reactive posture as we have in the past. The inability to deter a potential attacker…and the magnitude of potential harm that could be caused by our adversaries’ choice of weapons do not permit that option. We cannot let our enemies strike first.”

The NSS went on to offer a legal argument for this new doctrine. “For centuries international law recognized that nations need not suffer an attack before they can lawfully take action to defend themselves against forces that present an imminent danger of attack. Legal scholars and international jurists often conditioned the legitimacy of pre-emption on the existence of an imminent threat — most often a visible mobilization of armies, navies and air forces preparing to attack.”

According to the NSS, the concept of immediacy as a pre-condition for the legitimate employment of anticipatory self-defense had to be adapted to the new kinds of threats that had emerged. “The greater the threat,” the NSS declared, “the greater is the risk of inaction — and the more compelling the case for taking anticipatory action to defend ourselves, even if uncertainty remains as to the time and place of the enemy’s attack. To forestall or prevent such hostile acts, the United States will, if necessary, act pre-emptively.”

The new Bush Doctrine of pre-emption was not well received by legal scholars and international relations specialists. As William Galston, at the time a professor of public policy for the University of Maryland, observed in an article published on Sept. 3, 2002,

“A global strategy based on the new Bush doctrine of preemption means the end of the system of international institutions, laws, and norms that we have worked to build for more than half a century. What is at stake is nothing less than a fundamental shift in America’s place in the world. Rather than continuing to serve as first among equals in the postwar international system, the United States would act as a law unto itself, creating new rules of international engagement without the consent of other nations.”

Galston’s words were echoed by then U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan, who shortly after the NSS was published declared that the notion of pre-emptive self-defense would lead to a breakdown in international order. For any military action against Iraq to have legitimacy under the U.N. Charter, Annan believed, there needed to be a new Security Council resolution which specifically authorized a military response.

The U.S. and U.K. did, in fact, seek to secure such a resolution in early 2003, but failed. As such, the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, launched in March 2003 under the sole authority of the U.S. doctrine of pre-emption, “was not in conformity with the U.N. charter,” according to Annan, who added “From our point of view and from the charter point of view it was illegal.”

As the de facto first test case of the new American doctrine of preemption, the U.S. would have benefitted from having been proven right in the major threat assumptions which underpinned the need for urgency. History has shown that the major threat issue — that of Iraqi WMD, was fundamentally flawed, derived as it were from a manufactured case for war based on fabricated intelligence.

Likewise, the so-called nexus between Iraq’s WMD and the al Qaeda terrorists who perpetrated the terrorist attacks of 9/11 turned out to be equally as illusory. The doctrine of pre-emption carries with it a high standard of proof; about Iraq, this standard was not remotely met, making the 2003 invasion of Iraq illegal under even the most liberal application of the doctrine.

Ukraine

Putin announcing military operation against Ukraine on Feb. 24. (AP screenshot)

Concerns that any attempt to carve a doctrine of pre-emption out of the four corners of international law defined by Article 51 of the U.N. Charter would result in the creation of new rules of international engagement, and that that would result in the breakdown of international order were realized on Feb. 24.

That is when Russian President Vladimir Putin, citing Article 51 as his authority, ordered what he called a “special military operation” against Ukraine for the ostensible purpose of eliminating neo-Nazi affiliated military formations accused of carrying out acts of genocide against the Russian-speaking population of the Donbass, and for dismantling a Ukrainian military Russia believed served as a de facto proxy of the NATO military alliance.

Putin laid out a detailed case for pre-emption, detailing the threat that NATO’s eastward expansion posed to Russia, as well as Ukraine’s ongoing military operations against the Russian-speaking people of the Donbass.

“[T]he showdown between Russia and these forces,” Putin said, “cannot be avoided. It is only a matter of time. They are getting ready and waiting for the right moment. Moreover, they went as far as aspire to acquire nuclear weapons. We will not let this happen.” NATO and Ukraine, Putin declared,

“did not leave us [Russia] any other option for defending Russia and our people, other than the one we are forced to use today. In these circumstances, we have to take bold and immediate action. The people’s republics of Donbass have asked Russia for help. In this context, in accordance with Article 51 of the U.N. Charter, with permission of Russia’s Federation Council, and in execution of the treaties of friendship and mutual assistance with the Donetsk People’s Republic and the Lugansk People’s Republic, ratified by the Federal Assembly on February 22, I made a decision to carry out a special military operation.”

Putin’s case for invading Ukraine has, not surprisingly, been widely rejected in the West. “Russia’s invasion of Ukraine,” Amnesty International declared, “is a manifest violation of the United Nations Charter and an act of aggression that is a crime under international law. Russia is in clear breach of its international obligations. Its actions are blatantly against the rules and principles on which the United Nations was founded.”

John B. Bellinger III, an American lawyer who served as legal adviser for the U.S. Department of State and the National Security Council during the George W. Bush administration, has argued that Putin’s Article 51 claim “has no support in fact or law.”

While Bellinger notes that Article 51 does not “impair the inherent right of individual or collective self-defense if an armed attack occurs against a member of the United Nations,” he hastens to note that Ukraine had not committed an armed attack against Russia or threatened to do so.

Bellinger is dismissive of Russia’s claims to the contrary, noting that “Even if Russia could show that Ukraine had committed or planned to commit attacks on Russians in the Ukrainian regions of Donetsk and Luhansk, Article 51 would not permit an action in collective self-defense, because Donetsk and Luhansk are not U.N. member states.”

While the notion that a lawyer who served in an American presidential administration which crafted the original doctrine of pre-emption used to justify the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq would now be arguing against the application of that very same doctrine by another state would seem hypocritical, hypocrisy alone does not invalidate Bellinger’s underlying arguments against Russia, or the claims put forward by its president.

Unfortunately for Bellinger and those who share his legal opinion, a previous U.S. presidential administration, that of William Jefferson Clinton, had previously crafted a novel legal theory based upon the right to anticipatory collective self-defense under Article 51 of the U.N. Charter.

The Clinton administration argued that this right was properly exercised under “normative expectation that permits anticipatory collective self-defense actions by regional security or self-defense organizations where the organization is not entirely dominated by a single member.” NATO, ignoring the obvious reality that it was, in fact, dominated by the United States, claimed such a status.

While the credibility of the NATO claim of “anticipatory collective self-defense” collapsed when it transpired that its characterization of the Kosovo crisis as a humanitarian disaster infused with elements of genocide that created, not only a moral justification for intervention, but a moral necessity, turned out to be little more than a covert provocation carried out by the C.I.A. for the sole purpose of creating the conditions for NATO military intervention.

While one may be able to mount a legal challenge to Russia’s contention that its joint operation with Russia’s newly recognized independent nations of Lugansk and Donetsk constitutes a “regional security or self-defense organization” as regards “anticipatory collective self-defense actions” under Article 51, there can be no doubt as to the legitimacy of Russia’s contention that the Russian-speaking population of the Donbass had been subjected to a brutal eight-year-long bombardment that had killed thousands of people.

Moreover, Russia claims to have documentary proof that the Ukrainian Army was preparing for a massive military incursion into the Donbass which was pre-empted by the Russian-led “special military operation.” [OSCE figures show an increase of government shelling of the area in the days before Russia moved in.]

Finally, Russia has articulated claims about Ukraine’s intent regarding nuclear weapons, and in particular efforts to manufacture a so-called “dirty bomb”, which have yet to be proven or disproven. [Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky made a reference to seeking a nuclear weapon in February at the Munich Security Conference.]

The bottom line is that Russia has set forth a cognizable claim under the doctrine of anticipatory collective self defense, devised originally by the U.S. and NATO, as it applies to Article 51 which is predicated on fact, not fiction.

While it might be in vogue for people, organizations, and governments in the West to embrace the knee-jerk conclusion that Russia’s military intervention constitutes a wanton violation of the United Nations Charter and, as such, constitutes an illegal war of aggression, the uncomfortable truth is that, of all the claims made regarding the legality of pre-emption under Article 51 of the United Nations Charter, Russia’s justification for invading Ukraine is on solid legal ground.

Coming in Part 2: Russia, Ukraine, and the Law of War: War And War Crimes.

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Scott Ritter is a former U.S. Marine Corps intelligence officer who served in the former Soviet Union implementing arms control treaties, in the Persian Gulf during Operation Desert Storm and in Iraq overseeing the disarmament of WMD.

Featured image: Nuremberg Trials. 1st row: Hermann Göring, Rudolf Heß, Joachim von Ribbentrop, Wilhelm Keitel. 2nd row: Karl Dönitz, Erich Raeder, Baldur von Schirach, Fritz Sauckel. (Office of the U.S. Chief of Counsel for the Prosecution of Axis Criminality/Still Picture Records LICON, Special Media Archives Services Division (NWCS-S)

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***

Mariupol, the strategic Sea of Azov port, remains in the eye of the storm in Ukraine.

The NATO narrative is that Azovstal – one of Europe’s biggest iron and steel works – was nearly destroyed by the Russian Army and its allied Donetsk forces who “lay siege” to Mariupol.

The true story is that the neo-Nazi Azov batallion [stationed in Mariupol] took scores of Mariupol civilians as human shields since the start of the Russian military operation in Ukraine, and retreated to Azovstal as a last stand. After an ultimatum delivered last week, they are now being completely exterminated by the Russian and Donetsk forces and Chechen Spetsnaz.

Azovstal, part of the Metinvest group controlled by Ukraine’s wealthiest oligarch, Rinat Akhmetov, is indeed one of the biggest metallurgic plants in Europe, self-described as a “high-performance integrated metallurgical enterprise that produces coke and sinter, steel as well as high-quality rolled products, bars and shapes.”

Amidst a flurry of testimonials detailing the horrors inflicted by the Azov neo-Nazis on Mariupol’s civilian population, a way more auspicious, invisible story bodes well for the immediate future.

Russia is the world’s fifth largest steel producer, apart from holding huge iron and coal deposits. Mariupol – a steel Mecca – used to source coal from Donbass, but under de facto neo-Nazi rule since the 2014 Maidan events, was turned into an importer. Iron, for instance, started to be supplied from Krivbas in Ukraine, over 200 kilometers away.

After Donetsk solidifies itself as an independent republic or, via referendum, chooses to become part of the Russian Federation, this situation is bound to change.

Azovstal is invested in a broad product line of very useful stuff: structural steel, rail for railroads, hardened steel for chains, mining equipment, rolled steel used in factory apparatus, trucks and railroad cars. Parts of the factory complex are quite modern while some, decades old, are badly in need of upgrading, which Russian industry can certainly provide.

Strategically, this is a huge complex, right at the Sea of Azov, which is now, for all practical purposes, incorporated into the Donetsk People’s Republic, and close to the Black Sea. That implies a short trip to the Eastern Mediterranean, including many potential customers in West Asia. And crossing Suez and reaching the Indian Ocean, are customers all across South and Southeast Asia.

So the Donetsk People’s Republic, possibly part of the future Novorossiya, and even part of Russia, will be in control of a lot of steel-making capacity for southern Europe, West Asia, and beyond.

One of the inevitable consequences is that it will be able to supply a real freight railroad construction boom in Russia, China and the Central Asian ‘stans.’ Railroad construction happens to be the privileged connectivity mode for Beijing’s ambitious Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). And, crucially, of the increasingly turbo-charged International North South Transportation Corridor (INSTC).

So, mid-term, Mariupol should expect to become one of the key hubs of a boom in north-south routes – INSTC across Russia and linking with the ‘stans’ – as well as major BRI upgrades east-west and sub-BRI corridors.

Interlocked Eurasia

The INSTC’s main players are Russia, Iran and India – which are now, post-NATO sanctions, in advanced interconnection mode, complete with devising mechanisms to bypass the US dollar in their trade. Azerbaijan is another important INSTC player, yet more volatile because it privileges Turkey’s connectivity designs in the Caucasus.

The INSTC network will also be progressively interconnecting with Pakistan – and that means the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), a key BRI hub, which is slowly but surely expanding to Afghanistan. Foreign Minister Wang Yi’s impromptu visit to Kabul late last week was to advance the incorporation of Afghanistan to the New Silk Roads.

All that is happening as Moscow – extremely close to New Delhi – is simultaneously expanding trade relations with Islamabad. All three, crucially, are Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) members.

So the grand North-South design spells out fluent connectivity from the Russian mainland to the Caucasus (Azerbaijan), to West Asia (Iran) all the way to South Asia (India and Pakistan). None of these key players have demonized or sanctioned Russia despite ongoing US pressures to do so.

Strategically, that represents the Russian multipolar concept of Greater Eurasian Partnership in action in terms of trade and connectivity – in parallel and complimentary with BRI because India, eager to install a rupee-ruble mechanism to buy energy, in this case is an absolutely crucial Russia partner, matching China’s reported $400 billion strategic deal with Iran. In practice, the Greater Eurasia Partnership will facilitate smoother connectivity between Russia, Iran, Pakistan and India.

The NATO universe, meanwhile, is congenitally incapable of even recognizing the complexity of the alignment, not to mention analyze its implications. What we have is the interlocking of BRI, INTSC and the Greater Eurasia Partnership on the ground – all notions that are regarded as anathema in the Washington Beltway.

All that of course is being designed amidst a game-changing geoeconomic moment, as Russia, starting this Thursday, will only accept payment for its gas in rubles from “unfriendly” nations.

Parallel to the Greater Eurasia Partnership, BRI, since it was launched in 2013, is also progressively weaving a complex, integrated Eurasian network of partnerships: financial/economic, connectivity, physical infrastructure building, economic/trade corridors. BRI’s role as a co-shaper of institutions of global governance, including normative foundations, has also been crucial, much to the despair of the NATO alliance.

Time to de-westernize

Yet only now the Global South, especially, will start to observe the full spectrum of the China-Russia play across the Eurasian sphere. Moscow and Beijing are deeply involved in a joint drive to de-westernize globalist governance, if not shatter it altogether.

Russia from now on will be even more meticulous in its institution-building, coalescing the Eurasia Economic Union (EAEU), the SCO and the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) – a Eurasian military alliance of select post-Soviet states – in a geopolitical context of irreversible institutional and normative divide between Russia and the West.

At the same time, the Greater Eurasia Partnership will be solidifying Russia as the ultimate Eurasian bridge, creating a common space across Eurasia which could even ignore vassalized Europe.

Meanwhile in real life, BRI, as much as the INSTC, will be increasingly plugged into the Black Sea (hello, Mariupol). And BRI itself may even be prone to re-evaluation in its emphasis of linking western China to western Europe’s shrinking industrial base.

There will be no point in privileging the northern BRI corridors – China-Mongolia-Russia via the Trans-Siberian, and the Eurasian land bridge via Kazakhstan – when you have Europe descending into medieval dementia.

BRI’s renewed focus will be on gaining access to irreplaceable commodities – and that means Russia – as well as securing essential supplies for Chinese production. Commodity-rich nations, such as Kazakhstan and many players in Africa, shall become the top future markets for China.

In a pre-Covid loop across Central Asia, one constantly heard that China builds plants and high-speed railways while Europe at best writes white papers. It can always get worse.

The EU as occupied American territory is now descending, fast, from center of global power to the status of inconsequential peripheral player, a mere struggling market in the far periphery of China’s “community of shared destiny.”

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This article was originally published on The Cradle.

Pepe Escobar, born in Brazil, is a correspondent and editor-at-large at Asia Times and columnist for Consortium News and Strategic Culture in Moscow. Since the mid-1980s he’s lived and worked as a foreign correspondent in London, Paris, Milan, Los Angeles, Singapore, Bangkok. He has extensively covered Pakistan, Afghanistan and Central Asia to China, Iran, Iraq and the wider Middle East. Pepe is the author of Globalistan – How the Globalized World is Dissolving into Liquid War; Red Zone Blues: A Snapshot of Baghdad during the Surge. He was contributing editor to The Empire and The Crescent and Tutto in Vendita in Italy. His last two books are Empire of Chaos and 2030. Pepe is also associated with the Paris-based European Academy of Geopolitics. When not on the road he lives between Paris and Bangkok.

He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from The Cradle

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***

In a bizarre turn of events Tuesday, Russian and Ukrainian delegations taking part in peace negotiations in Istanbul appeared to have reached a breakthrough. But following a tepid response by Secretary of State Antony Blinken, contemptuously dismissing Russian peace overtures as nothing more than “delaying tactics” meant to “deceive people and deflect attention,” head of the Russian delegation Vladimir Medinsky walked back the earlier optimistic remarks, saying “a gradual military de-escalation does not necessarily mean an immediate ceasefire.”

Hours later on Tuesday evening, in what appeared to be either a coincidence or a sabotage attempt, an ammunition depot across the Ukraine border in Russia “mysteriously exploded,” sending thick plumes of smoke into air, visible in videos posted on social media, injuring four Russian soldiers, and effectively pouring cold water over the optimism generated by the likelihood of the success of the peace process between Ukraine and Russia.

A Ukrainian missile appeared to have hit a temporary Russian military encampment outside Belgorod, in Russia’s village of Krasny Oktyabr, about 40 miles from the Ukrainian city of Kharkiv, said the Russian state-run news agency Tass. The strike would only be the second that struck a military target inside Russia and wounded soldiers. Last week, Tass reported two men were hurt when a shell from Ukraine exploded in the same area.

The Russian offer scaling back its blitz north of the capital and focusing instead on liberating Russian-majority Donbas region in east Ukraine, a task that has already been accomplished in large measure, isn’t the first time the Kremlin extended the hand of friendship to Kyiv. Last week, Russia made a similar peace gesture that wasn’t even dignified with a response by Western policymakers and went almost unheeded in the establishment-controlled media.

Russian Deputy Defense Minister Alexander Fomin said the offer to scale back military operations was a confidence building step for the ongoing negotiations with Ukrainian officials in Istanbul.

“In order to increase mutual trust and create the necessary conditions for further negotiations and achieving the ultimate goal of agreeing and signing an agreement, a decision was made to radically, by a large margin, reduce military activity in the Kyiv and Chernihiv directions,” Russian Deputy Defense Minister leading the Russian peace delegation told reporters.

Ukrainian negotiators said that under their proposals, Kyiv would agree not to join alliances or host bases of foreign troops, but would have security guarantees in terms similar to Article 5, the collective defense clause of the transatlantic NATO military alliance.

The proposals, which would require a referendum in Ukraine, mentioned a 15-year consultation period on the status of Crimea, annexed by Russia in 2014. The fate of the southeastern Donbas region, which Russia demands Ukraine cede to separatists, would be discussed by the Ukrainian and Russian leaders.

Kyiv’s proposals also included one that Moscow would not oppose Ukraine joining the European Union, Russia’s lead negotiator Vladimir Medinsky said. Russia has previously opposed Ukrainian membership of the EU and especially of the NATO military alliance. Medinsky said Russia’s delegation would study and present the proposals to President Vladimir Putin.

Welcoming the Russian peace initiative, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said Tuesday the signals from peace talks with Russia “could be called positive” but added that Ukraine would not slacken its defensive efforts until it noticed “concrete actions.”

It would be prudent, however, of the Ukrainian leader to get rid of the duplicitous NATO interlocutors and try reaching a political settlement to the conflict with Russia bilaterally if he wishes peace and stability to prevail in the embattled country, because opportunistic NATO leaders have their own axe to grind by taking advantage of the humanitarian crisis unfolding in Ukraine.

The Biden administration doesn’t seem particularly enamored of the Russian peace proposal that could bring much-needed relief to the war-ravaged country because, as the seasoned American politician and peace activist Ron Paul aptly observed, Washington’s policy appeared to be “fighting Russia down to the last Ukrainian.”

While on a whirlwind Middle East trip in Morocco, Antony Blinken, the charismatic secretary of state idolized by diplomatic community for wavy salt-and-pepper hair and suave Parisian etiquette who has childishly refused to diplomatically engage with his counterpart Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov since the start of the conflict on Feb. 24, derisively mocked the diplomatic breakthrough achieved in Istanbul as nothing more than “delaying tactics” meant to “deceive people and deflect attention.”

Paranoidly echoing the secretary of state’s imagined apprehensions, the Pentagon said Russia had started moving very small numbers of troops away from positions around Kyiv, describing the move as more of a “repositioning” than a withdrawal. “We all should be prepared to watch for a major offensive against other areas of Ukraine,” Pentagon spokesman John Kirby told a news briefing. “It does not mean that the threat to Kyiv is over.”

Not to be left behind in the collective Russophobic hysteria inflicting Western policymaking circles and the mainstream media alike, Britain’s defense ministry said Moscow was being “forced to pull out troops” from the vicinity of Kyiv to Russia and Belarus, to resupply and reorganize after “taking heavy losses,” adding that Russia was likely to compensate for its reduced ground maneuver capability through “mass artillery and missile strikes.”

“The combat potential of the Ukrainian Armed Forces has been significantly reduced, which allows us to focus our main attention and efforts on achieving the main goal—the liberation of Donbas,” Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu proudly boasted Tuesday. He added that 123 of Ukraine’s 152 fighter jets had been destroyed, as well as 77 of its 149 helicopters and 152 of its 180 long- and medium-range air defense systems, while its naval forces had been totally eliminated.

It’s worth recalling that the Russian special military operation, dubbed “Operation Z” by Vladimir Putin, wasn’t a full-scale war. It was a calculated military incursion having well-defined security objectives: the liberation of Donbas and denazification and demilitarization of Ukraine.

Those military objectives have already been achieved in large measure, as not only the Russian-majority Donbas including Kherson and Mariupol have been liberated but the battles are ongoing in the adjacent areas in the northeast, Kharkiv and Sumy, that will hopefully fall soon.

Sergey Shoigu has already proved through facts and figures how the country has been demilitarized with the combat potential of Ukraine’s armed forces significantly reduced. As for denazification, Donbas was the hub of neo-Nazi Azov, Right Sector, Dnipro 1 and 2, Aidar and myriad of other ultra-nationalist militias funded, armed and trained by the CIA since the 2014 Maidan coup toppling Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych and consequent annexation of the Crimean Peninsula by Russia. With the liberation of Donbas and deployment of Russian peacekeeping forces, neo-Nazi militias wouldn’t find a foothold, at least, in east Ukraine bordering Russia’s vulnerable western flank.

As for the “40-mile-long” convoy of battle tanks, armored vehicles and heavy artillery that descended from Belorussia in the north and reached the outskirts of Kyiv in the early days of the war without encountering much resistance en route the capital, that was simply a power projection gambit astutely designed as a diversionary tactic by Russia’s cunning military strategists to deter Ukraine from sending reinforcements to Donbas in east Ukraine, where real battles for territory were actually fought, and scramble to defend the embattled country’s capital instead.

Except in the early days of the war when Russian airstrikes and long-range artillery shelling targeted military infrastructure in the outskirts of Kyiv to reduce the combat potential of Ukraine’s armed forces, the capital did not witness much action during the month-long offensive. Otherwise, with the tremendous firepower at its disposal, the world’s second most powerful military had the demonstrable capability to reduce the whole city down to the ashes.

What further lends credence to the indisputable fact that the Russian assault on Kyiv was meant simply as a show of force rather than actual military objective to occupy the capital is the factor that Belarusian troops didn’t take part in the battle despite staging military exercises alongside Russian forces before the invasion and despite the fact that Belarusian President Aleksander Lukashenko is a dependable ally of the Russian strongman, Vladimir Putin.

Although Russia lost the lives of 1,351 soldiers during the war, as candidly admitted by the Russian defense ministry, the myth of countless charred Russian tanks, armored vehicles and artillery pieces littering the streets of Ukraine’s towns and cities is a downright fabrication peddled by the corporate media as a psychological warfare tactic to insidiously portray the losing side in the conflict as a winning side.

Besides the handful neo-Nazi militias and foreign mercenaries fighting pitched battles against Russian forces in Donbas, the much-touted “resistance” was nowhere to be found in the rest of Ukraine. As soon as the war began last month, the “valiant resistance” fled across the border to the safety of Poland, Romania and neighboring countries.

The opportunistic militant leaders of the virtually nonexistent “resistance” are reaping windfalls by reportedly selling caches of anti-aircraft and anti-armor munitions provided by NATO countries in the thriving arms markets of Eastern Europe and buying opulent mansions in southern France and Italy.

In the 2001 census, nearly a third of Ukraine’s over 40 million population registered Russian as their first language. In fact, Russian speakers constitute a majority in urban areas of industrialized eastern Ukraine and socio-culturally identify with Russia. Ukrainian speakers are mainly found in sparsely populated western Ukraine and in rural areas of east Ukraine.

Russian, Belarusian and Ukrainian together belong to the East Slavic family of languages and share a degree of mutual intelligibility. Thus, Russians, Byelorussians and Ukrainians are one nation and one country whose shared history and culture goes all the way back to the golden period of the 10th century Kyivan Rus’.

In addition, Russians and Ukrainians share Byzantine heritage and together belong to the Greek Orthodox Church, one of the oldest Christian denominations whose history can be traced back to the Christ and his apostles. Protestantism and Catholicism are products of the second millennium after a Roman bishop of the Byzantine Empire declared himself Pope following the 1054 schism between the Orthodox and Catholic Churches.

In comparison, what do Ukrainians have in common with NATO powers, their newfound patrons, besides the fact that humanitarian imperialists are attempting to douse fire by pouring gasoline on Ukraine’s proxy war by providing caches of lethal weapons to militant forces holding disenfranchised Ukrainian masses hostage.

While addressing a meeting on socioeconomic support for the constituent entities of the Russian Federation on March 16, Russian President Vladimir Putin succinctly elucidated the salient reasons for pre-emptively mounting a military intervention in Ukraine in order to forestall NATO’s encroachment upon Russia’s security interests. Here are a few trenchant excerpts from the lucid and eloquent speech:

“We are meeting in a complicated period as our Armed Forces are conducting a special military operation in Ukraine and Donbass. I would like to remind you that at the beginning, on the morning of February 24, I publicly announced the reasons for and the main goal of Russia’s actions.

“It is to help our people in Donbass, who have been subjected to real genocide for nearly eight years in the most barbarous ways, that is, through blockade, large-scale punitive operations, terrorist attacks and constant artillery raids. Their only guilt was that they demanded basic human rights: to live according to their forefathers’ laws and traditions, to speak their native Russian language, and to bring up their children as they want.

“Kiev was not just preparing for war, for aggression against Russia – it was conducting it … Hostilities in Donbass and the shelling of peaceful residential areas have continued all these years. Almost 14,000 civilians, including children have been killed over this time … Clearly, Kiev’s Western patrons are just pushing them to continue the bloodshed. They incessantly supply Kiev with weapons and intelligence, as well as other types of assistance, including military advisers and mercenaries.

“Just like in the 1990s and the early 2000s, they want to try again to finish us off, to reduce us to nothing by turning us into a weak and dependent country, destroying our territorial integrity and dismembering Russia as they see fit. The failed then and they will fail this time … Yes, of course, they will back the so-called fifth column, national traitors – those who make money here in our country but live over there, and live not in the geographical sense of the word but in their minds, in their servile mentality.”

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Nauman Sadiq is an Islamabad-based geopolitical and national security analyst focused on geo-strategic affairs and hybrid warfare in the Af-Pak and Middle East regions. His domains of expertise include neocolonialism, military-industrial complex and petro-imperialism. He is a regular contributor of diligently researched investigative reports to Global Research.

“Wiki-Gate”: Julian Assange Was Framed by the People Who Supported Him

By Prof Michel Chossudovsky, March 31, 2022

Julian Assange was initially lauded and supported by the mainstream media. In 2008  The Economist, which is partly owned by the Rothschild family granted Assange The New Media Award. Was this a genuine endorsement of  Assange’s commitment to “freedom of the press”? Or was it a public relations ploy?

“Exclusive: Documents Reveal Erik Prince’s $10 Billion Plan to Make Weapons and Create a Private Army in Ukraine”

By Simon Shuster, March 31, 2022

On the second night of his visit to Kyiv, Erik Prince had a dinner date on his agenda. A few of his Ukrainian associates had arranged to meet the American billionaire at the Vodka Grill that evening, Feb. 23, 2020. The choice of venue seemed unusual. The Vodka Grill, a since-defunct nightclub next to a KFC franchise in a rough part of town, rarely saw patrons as powerful as Prince.

India: Massive Strike of 200 Million Workers Draws Attention to Increasing Problems and Apprehensions of Workers

By Bharat Dogra, March 31, 2022

The call for a 2 day national level strike by workers given by 10 central trade unions and other supporting organizations in India drew a strong response by  over 200 million (20 crore) workers on March 28 and 29, according to organizers.

The Presidential Election in South Korea: Dark Threatening Fog Is Covering Up the Future of the Korean Peninsula

By Prof. Joseph H. Chung, March 30, 2022

In South Korea, something which should not happen has happened. Yoon Suk-yeol has won the presidential election with a margin of little more than 240,000 votes. If there is any person who should not become the head of Korea, he is Yoon who has revealed himself as the most corrupted, dishonest and violent person and who relies on shaman (MooDang) for decisions.

Oliver Stone Documents the Past to Illuminate the Present. “JFK: Destiny Betrayed”

By Edward Curtin, March 30, 2022

While Kennedy was the last U.S. president to genuinely seek peace at the cost of his life, his successors have all been lackeys in love with war and in full awareness  that the promotion of war and the military industrial complex were at the top of their job description.

Italian Airport Workers Refuse to Load Arms for Ukraine

By Alessio Arena, March 30, 2022

Workers at the Galileo Galilei Airport in Pisa — a civilian airport — reported March 12 that they had been involved in the loading of a cargo plane with what was alleged to be humanitarian aid destined for Ukraine. The aid turned out to be arms and ammunition destined for the troops of the Zelensky regime.

French Lawyer Arrested for Treason After Helping Reiner Fuellmich Prove World Leaders Have Committed Crimes Against Humanity in the Name of COVID-19

By The Daily Expose, March 30, 2022

Virginie de Araujo Recchia, a French attorney living in France who is participating in the work of the Citizen Jury with Reiner Fuellmich, was arrested in her home at dawn on March 22nd in front of her children. The arrest comes three weeks before ahead of the French presidential elections.

Senators Urge US to Halt UN Probe into Alleged War Crimes During Gaza Bombing

By Middle East Eye, March 30, 2022

A bipartisan group of 68 US senators sent a letter to Secretary of State Antony Blinken, calling on the Biden administration to lead an effort to end a United Nations commission that is probing alleged Israeli war crimes against Palestinians.

The Current Ukrainian Government’s Nazism

By Eric Zuesse, March 30, 2022

Sadism is a marked feature of racist fascism, or “nazism,” and it’s proudly displayed in today’s Ukraine, such as in this string of cellphone videos. It was posted as a string of tweets during March 20-22 by a “Juan Sinmiedo”, whose account then became “suspended” by Twitter, because it was publicly exposing truths about Ukraine that mega-corporate America assiduously suppresses U.S.-and-allied publics from knowing.

What Are FDA’s Criteria for Issuing a COVID Vaccine EUA? What Happens When Pfizer and Moderna Vaccines Fall Short? Next Up, Babies and Toddlers

By Dr. Meryl Nass, March 30, 2022

FDA made it very clear what its standards were for COVID vaccines. FDA repeatedly told its advisory committee, the public and vaccine manufacturers what it required in order to issue an EUA for a COVID vaccine.  I have copied 4 of the FDA’s power-points below so we can all agree on what, precisely, those standards are.

Putin’s Bombers Could Devastate Ukraine But He’s Holding Back. Here’s Why

By William M Arkin, March 30, 2022

Russia’s conduct in the brutal war tells a different story than the widely accepted view that Vladimir Putin is intent on demolishing Ukraine and inflicting maximum civilian damage—and it reveals the Russian leader’s strategic balancing act.

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A Nine-Year Obscenity: The Australia-NZ Resettlement Deal

March 31st, 2022 by Dr. Binoy Kampmark

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Below are excerpts of an important article by Time Magazine pertaining to the creation of a multibillion dollar military project in Ukraine including a the recruitment of a private mercenary army.

Our thanks to Time Magazine for having brought this article by Simon Shuster to our attention.

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On the second night of his visit to Kyiv, Erik Prince had a dinner date on his agenda. A few of his Ukrainian associates had arranged to meet the American billionaire at the Vodka Grill that evening, Feb. 23, 2020. The choice of venue seemed unusual. The Vodka Grill, a since-defunct nightclub next to a KFC franchise in a rough part of town, rarely saw patrons as powerful as Prince.

As the party got seated inside a private karaoke room on the second floor, Igor Novikov, who was then a top adviser to Ukraine’s President, remembers feeling a little nervous. He had done some reading about Blackwater, the private military company Prince had founded in 1997, and he knew about the massacre its troops had perpetrated during the U.S. war in Iraq. Coming face to face that night with the world’s most prominent soldier of fortune, Novikov remembers thinking: “What does this guy want from us?”

It soon became clear that Prince wanted a lot from Ukraine. According to interviews with close associates and confidential documents detailing his ambitions, Prince hoped to hire Ukraine’s combat veterans into a private military company. Prince also wanted a big piece of Ukraine’s military-industrial complex, including factories that make engines for fighter jets and helicopters. His full plan, dated June 2020 and obtained exclusively by TIME this spring, includes a “roadmap” for the creation of a “vertically integrated aviation defense consortium” that could bring $10 billion in revenues and investment.

… 

This account of Prince’s ambitions in Ukraine is based on interviews with seven sources, including current and former U.S. and Ukrainian officials as well as people who worked directly with Prince to try to realize his aspirations in Ukraine. Those business plans, which have not been previously reported, were confirmed by four of the sources on both sides of the negotiations, all of whom recalled meeting in person with Prince last year to discuss them. The documents describe a series of ventures that would give Prince a pivotal role in Ukraine’s military industry and its ongoing conflict with Russia, which has taken more than 14,000 lives since it began seven years ago.

The documents detail several previously unreported ventures that Prince and his partners wanted the Ukrainian government to approve. One proposal would create a new private military company that would draw personnel from among the veterans of the ongoing war in eastern Ukraine. Another deal would build a new munitions factory in Ukraine, while a third would consolidate Ukraine’s leading aviation and aerospace firms into a consortium that could compete with “the likes of Boeing and Airbus.”  (emphasis added)

Click here to read the full article on Time Magazine.

 

 

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With reporting by Barbara Maddux and Madeline Roache

Featured image is by Neil Jamieson for TIME

Russia-Ukraine Istanbul Talks End Without Peace Accords

March 30th, 2022 by Lucas Leiroz de Almeida

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***

Members of the Russian and Ukrainian diplomatic delegations met on March 29 to negotiate peace terms in Istanbul, Turkey, after more than a month of “Special Military Operation”. The conversations did not have much practical effect.

The Ukrainians made a series of proposals, some of which met Russian demands for pacification and others did not. There was no scheduling of a personal meeting between two presidents Putin and Zelensky, which practically rules out the possibility of an official agreement in the short term. Quite unexpectedly, however, the Western media has been describing the Istanbul talks’ results as a peace deal, which is obviously not true.

The meeting did not start in a very friendly way. Both delegations, amidst the hostility of the conflict, refused to greet each other, opening the conversations in an impolite manner. There were not many expectations of good results in the negotiations, but the promises of reducing violence were positive. Kiev presented some proposals that matched Russian demands but harmed its package of conditions by insisting on a review of some issues that are out of negotiation for the Kremlin.

Moscow’s core demands can be summed up in neutral Kiev, outside of NATO and the EU, recognizing Crimea as part of Russia and the Donbas republics as independent countries. In the midst of the current scenario, the Ukrainian government already seems resigned to the fact that it is impossible to join NATO and is also gradually accepting that the EU will not give space to Kiev.

However, Zelensky remains adamant about the regions that have ceased to be part of Ukrainian territory since 2014. Moscow has already made it clear that there is no possibility of reviewing Crimea’s legal status under any circumstances and that the Donbas republics must have their sovereignty recognized without reservations. So, either Zelensky fully accepts such conditions or the peace talks will always be fruitless.

However, despite all the obstructions, the talks ended better than expected as at least the Ukrainian government was willing to compromise on some points, which was enough for the Russian delegation to consider the possibility of reducing the intensity of operations in some regions. Spokespersons for the Kiev delegation said that the next rounds would focus on discussing humanitarian issues and ceasefire possibilities, ruling out any chance of dialogue on territorial issues.

In some western media channels, the talks were treated, however, as a great advance for peace and there are even some fake news circulating on the internet about a possible end to the conflict. Clearly, data is being manipulated in order to promote an information war in which the dominant narrative is that Russia has accepted conditions of peace. The result of this is to justify the need for new coercive measures against Russia in the coming days, as the conflict will obviously continue and then the same channels that pointed out that Russia had committed to the end of the Operation will then claim that Moscow has failed to fulfill its vows of peace.

It is important to emphasize that there has been no significant progress towards peace. Russia will continue the operation and there is no expectation of an end to the conflict in the short term. There was a positive balance in terms of negotiating mutual promises and reducing violence, but not in ending military activities. Over the course of eight years, the Russian government maintained the most peaceful stance possible on the Ukrainian crisis, remaining inert in the midst of the civil war and trying to prevent the genocide in Donbass through legal and diplomatic means.

This stance is officially over. Now, it is no longer in Russia’s interest to sign any premature peace agreement that will generate new clashes in the future. Moscow is unyielding in its plan to keep Kiev neutral and demilitarized, outside the Western military and economic blocs and passive in the face of territorial issues in Crimea and Donbass.

The fact that a meeting between Putin and Zelensky has been ruled out shows that there is, for the time being, no disposition towards an end to the conflict, considering that an agreement of such nature could only be signed by the two leaders or their respective foreign ministers. So, the biggest positive balance so far is the fact that Russia is still willing to partially reduce the intensity of operations in some regions, as it has done since the beginning of the conflict. It was the Russian side that has promoted all the de-escalations so far, opening up humanitarian corridors and allowing the flow of aid to the victims. On the other hand, violations of such measures have become commonplace for Ukrainian troops, without any denouncement by the pro-NATO western media.

In the end, despite mainstream media’s propaganda, there is no asymmetry of conditions in the current situation. The basic package of measures demanded by Moscow needs to be met by Zelensky for peace to happen. Russia does not seem to be in a hurry to sign an agreement and is willing to maintain the military mission for as long as necessary to achieve its objectives.

*

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Lucas Leiroz is a researcher in Social Sciences at the Rural Federal University of Rio de Janeiro; geopolitical consultant.

Featured image is from PravdaReport

All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the “Translate Website” drop down menu on the top banner of our home page (Desktop version).

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***

 

Introduction

In South Korea, something which should not happen has happened. Yoon Suk-yeol has won the presidential election with a margin of little more than 240,000 votes.

If there is any person who should not become the head of Korea, he is Yoon who has revealed himself as the most corrupted, dishonest and violent person and who relies on shaman (MooDang) for decisions.

Nonetheless, Yoon will become the head of South Korea. Who have voted for him? Those who have voted for Yoon may be grouped into the following groups.

First there are those who were not allowed to know who Yoon was because of the lie campaigns led by corrupted media.

Second, there are those who are parts of the corruption community led by the oligarchy composed of academics, business, bureaucrats, media, politics (ABBMP).

Third, there are those who were most likely paid for voting for Yoon.

  • It was a victory of the past over the future;
  • it was a victory of war over peace;
  • it was a victory of economic stagnation over sustained growth of the economy.

Victory of the Past over the Future

The presidential candidate of the Democratic party (DP), Lee Jae-myung has promised the continuation of a President Moon Jae-in‘s work of building a society where everybody lives in harmony, where 50% of the elders do not kill themselves because they are hungry and lonesome, where the youth can have dating, love, marry and have children, where one can have decent job without college degree, where the rich do not despise the poor. This is the future of Korea he was going to build, but he lost the election.

Under the future president, Yoon Suk-yeol representing the People Power Party (PPP), South Korea will go back to what it was under the pro-Japan conservative government which ruled Korea for 60 Years since 1948.

The corruption culture will be restored. The bribe money will be the express way to wealth, fame and power; the income gap will be widened; the rich will oppress the poor; the media will hide the corruption of the conservative establishment; the police, the prosecutor and the court judge will allow the illegal and immoral activities of the member of the corrupted communities on the one hand and, on the other, punish the good deeds of the opposition forces; the “Hell Korea” will continue; the young will not marry; the elders will continue to kill themselves; the minimum wage will decrease; the work hours will become longer.

Victory of War Over Peace

Lee Jae-myung, the defeated presidential candidate representing DP had a very constructive and bold plan for the peace on the Korean peninsula. His idea was the implementation of the North-South agreement of 2018 which made two commitments, namely, the declaration of the end of the Korean War and North-South economic cooperation.

But, these agreements could not be respected because of the objection on the part of Japan and the South Korean conservative party and the U.S.

Lee was ready to go ahead despite the objection by Japan, conservative South Korea and the U.S. Lee’s plan included the following.

First, he would continue to negotiate for the repatriation of the OPCON so that a Korean general would command the Korean armed forces in war. This would allow South Korea not to participate in the pre-emptive attack against North Korea or Taiwan war or Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands conflict.

Second, Lee would negotiate with Washington to allow the realization of his plan for peace in the Korean peninsula and North-South economic cooperation. Lee was optimistic for the negotiation results. He counted on the fact that Korea is 6th global military power and 9th global economic power; Lee thought that this would give him some advantage in the negotiation with Washington.

Third, even if Washington continue objecting the North-South peace-dialogue and economic cooperation, Lee would go ahead with his plan, because  the U.S. badly needs South Korea as the forefront military base needed for the containment of China.

On his part, Yoon Suk-yeol has declared that South Korea will join the QUAD, that he will think of undertaking pre-emptive attack against North Korea, that the Japanese Self Defence Force (SDF) may join the pre-emptive attack against North Korea and that South Korea will not ask Washington to transfer the OPCON back to Korea.

These declarations mean the 70-year old desire of the pro-Japan conservative forces to unify the two Koreas not by dialogue of peace but by force. This was planned in 2017 involving the combined armed forces of the U.S., Japan and South Korea. But the idea was abandoned because of costs and the fear of third World War which might result from such attack.

There is no doubt that the combined armed forces of the three countries can easily topple the North Korea regime. But, there is no doubt that North Korea will fight back and, in the end, nobody wins.

What these three countries are aiming at is the absorption-reunification of Korea by force for different reasons.

For the pro-Japan conservative South Koreans, the peaceful unification means two risks.

First, North Koreans are likely to punish them for their collaboration with Japan during the Japanese occupation in Korea.

Second, in a unified Korea, they will become a marginal minority and lose their privilege.

As for Japan, it also has two reasons for favouring absorption-unification of Korea by force.

First, it would provide a chance to invade and re-conquer Korea in complicity with pro-Japan South Koreans who identify themselves more with Japanese than with Koreans. In other words, Korea would be annexed to Japan in some forms.

Second, this is important, unified Korea would mean a major military power threatening Japan.

As far as the U.S. is concerned, the absorption- unification means that the whole of the Korean peninsula become the American military base and provide important strategic advantage for Washington in the war against China and even Russia.

The victory of Yoon would provoke the following results.

First, it will most likely force Pyongyang to accelerate the production of nuclear bombs and launch long-range ICBM and hit exact spots which will be announced in advance; it will be somewhere near Guam.

Second, if North Korea finds that the peace-dialogue is impossible, it may join the Russia-China camp and the possibility of the reunification of Korea will become more difficult and the dark challenging clouds of war will cover the peninsula.

There will be another security challenge which Yoon may provoke. It is the possibility of war involving Taiwan or the Senkaku-Miaoyu Islands. It is likely that Japan would initiate a shooting war forcing the U.S. and South Korea under Yoon to join the war.

We must understand why Japan would provoke a war with China. The ambition of Japan to rule against Asia is still there. Nationalist Shintoism restored; the dream of Kakko-Ichi-U (Japan rules over the world) is still alive and the 1927 Tanaka Memorial (roadmap of Japan’s world conquest) is still relevant for neo-imperialists led by Shinzo Abe and the his party, Liberal Democratic Party (LDP).

However, to rule the world, at least Asia, Japan must do something to kill China. The Taiwan President, Tsai In-wen is ardent promoter of Taiwan independence and close friend of Tokyo and Washington. It is possible that Japan wished for China’s invasion of Taiwan. Indeed, it can happen.

For Washington, Taiwan is a fixed aircraft carrier at the front door of China and the best weapon which has been used for decades for the containment of China. Therefore, Washington will continue to arm Taiwan. This will increase the possibility of the intervention of the China’s PLA.

It is true that Washington recognizes the principles of ONE CHINA by virtue of three joint declarations (1972, 1979 and 1982) and the Taiwan Relations Act (1982) and China’s right to govern Taiwan.

But, Washington adopted an ambiguous Taiwan policy by installing the American Institute in Taiwan (IAT) and by imposing the flexible condition of American weapon sales to Taiwan by virtue of the Six Assurances imposed by Ronald Reagan in 1982.

There are five conditions which Taiwan must respect to avoid a possible invasion by Beijing:

  • declaration of Taiwan independence,
  • internal turmoil in Taiwan,
  • military alliance with other countries,
  • acquisition of weapons of mass destruction(WMD) and
  • the violation of the 1992 Taiwan-China Consensus for One-China system.

Among these five conditions for China invasion into Taiwan, the most important condition is the Taiwan’s Independence Declaration.

In Taiwan, there are two major parties: the Kwomintang (KMT) and the Democratic and Progressive Party (DPP). The KMT has been in power except for two governments of DPP.

Washington has been supplying weapons for decades. But, the two Republican governments have been the most active in selling weapons to Taiwan, namely the Bush government and Trump government.

For instance the government of G.W. Bush shipped each year weapons amounting to USD 3.74 billion when Chen Shui-bian of DPP (2000-2008) was in power. The Trump government provided each year weapons amounting to as much as USD 4.45 billion, when Tsai Ing-wen of DDP (2016-2022)was in power.

The DDP is the party claiming more autonomy vis-à-vis China. For the time being, it refrains from the declaration of independence to avoid the invasion of China’s PLA. But, there is heavy pressure from Taiwan population for independence. Nevertheless, Tsai has been avoiding the declaration of independence saying that Taiwan is a de facto independent.

However, the sustained shipping of weapons to Taiwan can be seen by China as Washington’s pressure on Taiwan to choose independence.

Even if Taiwan does not declare independence, China may attack Taiwan, if it imports WMD such as strategic nuclear weapons. The acquisition of WMD is one of the conditions of China’s Taiwan invasion.

Another possibility is to create a situation in which Taiwanese plane or warship is attacked by the PLA.

Once the shooting war starts, the Japanese SDF will play the major part of the shooting, while the U.S. will minimize its direct fighting.

The most dreadful perspective is the role of the Korean armed forces. Since the Korean government has no authority of mobilizing its own armed forces because of the OPCON agreement, the ROK forces will have to join Japan. And the outcome is clear enough.

Taiwan will be destroyed and it will be governed directly by China. But, Japanese economy and the Korean economy will be devastated.

Nevertheless, Japan wants this war, because it has not abandoned its dangerous dream of ruling Asia after having destroyed China. Besides, the armament is the best way of reviving the Japanese economy, just like it was during the 1930s before the Pearl Harbour attack.

As for the U.S. it wants this war, because this war destroys both China and Japan which are or will be enemies of America.

In short, the electoral victory of Yoon may bring a doomsday for Korea.

Victory of Economic Stagnation over Sustained Growth

Lee’s vision of economic policy was the liberation from the trap of neo-liberal regime and corruption.

Under the neo-liberal regime, the ultimate objective was to maximize GDP growth. To do so, corporate profit should be maximized through the use of technology which reduced the labour cost on the one hand, on the other, the use of the imported low cost raw materials and intermediate goods which also cut down production cost.

Lee was planning to avoid the neo-liberal regime and continue the policies of Moon Jae-in.These policies include the following policy measures.

First, Lee would continue to break the bribery culture which has ruled the government-business relations. Under the previous pro-Japan conservative government, the government used to offer all sorts of privileges to Chaebols including tax allowances, grants and subsidies, easy access to privileged information and above all overlooking of illegal and immoral activities of large corporations for bribes paid to politicians and bureaucrats. The bribe culture affects the productivity of corporations and slows down GDP growth.

Second, Lee was going to improve the Chaebol-SME relations. Under the pro-Japan conservative government, Chaebols abused SMEs. For example, Chaebols did not respect contracts with SMEs, even stole new technology developed by SMEs. Lee was going to better integrate SMEs into the value chains led by the Chaebols. In fact, this policy has had some success under President Moon Jae-in.

Third, Lee was planning to assure GDP growth which is beneficial to all citizens in such a way that income be more equally distributed and the rate of jobless will decrease.

Fourth, the labour rights were to be better protected and promoted. The planned measures included these: more unionization, labour participation in national economic policy designs, shorter work hours, overtime payment, more nursing homes for working mothers.

Fifth, under the leadership of President Moon Jae-in, more resources have been allocated for the benefits of to low income people, senior citizens, single mother, disabled and other marginal groups. This policy would continue.

The increasing purchasing power of the ordinary Korean will enhance domestic demand, create more jobs and promote sustained economic growth.

By contrast, Yoon is planning to restore the radical version of the neo-liberal economic regime through the following measures.

First, the role of the government will be minimized so that the contents of national economic policy will be determined by large corporations.

Second, the public corporations will be privatized. Even the public health insurance will be privatized.

Third, the regulations, in particular, those related to housing will be deregulated allowing real estate speculation.

Fourth, the corporate tax will be reduced so that corporate profit can increase.

Fifth, the minimum wage will be cut and labour unionization will be prevented.

Sixth, the government will cut welfare spending including old age pension, housing allowance, grants to public health services. This will make the survival of the low-income people.

Concentration of Income and Wealth

The combination of these planned measures implies the concentration of income and wealth in the hands of the corrupted community led by the oligarchy composed of academics, business, bureaucrats, media and politicians (ABBMP).

The income distribution is still skewed in favour of the rich despite the efforts of the government of Moon Jae-in. But, Yoon’s policy will worsen the inequality of income distribution leading to shrinking domestic demand, increasing jobless and eventually long-run economic stagnation.

Importing Japan’s Stagnation Model

What is frightening is the possibility of importing the Japanese model of decades-long economic stagnation. The fundamental reason for the Japanese decades-long economic stagnation was Japan’s failure to overcome the shock of the 1989 asset bubble busting.

But, it is important to find out who were responsible for the asset bubble. In 1985, the value of stocks was 60% of GDP but in 1989, it represented 250% of GDP. In 1989, the real estate value of the Japanese territory was four time that of the U.S. territory, although the area of the Japanese territory was 3.7% of that of the U.S.

Then, in 1989, the Bank of Japan raised the interest rate from 2% to 6%; it was too much. The bubble exploded. The value of stocks fell by 60%; the value of real estate had a free fall of 80%.

Japan tried all the known policies to overcome the shock of the bubble explosion but failed. The GDP which had a growth rate varying between 4.5% and 20% before 1990 fell to 1.72% in the period 1990-1995 and to 1.1% in the period 1996-2018.

This is the horror story of the saga of the falling Japanese economy. There were many years of minus GDP growth. The per capita GDP fell from USD 44,674 in 2010 to USD 39,295, a fall of 12%.

The important question is this: “Who were responsible for this crime of destroying the Japanese economy?” It was the greed of the Golden Triangle referring to the oligarchy composed of bureaucrats, politician and large corporations.

True, the oligarchy has made major contribution to the Japanese economic miracle, but over the years, it transformed itself into closely knit corruption community and appropriated the bulk of the national wealth through bribe money and real estate speculation money.

The real estate speculation has produced three harmful results:

First, it has enforced illegal or immoral activities of the oligarchs thus expanding the community of corruption.

Second, it is so easier to make money that the large corporations have invested more funds in real estate than in technological innovation. As a result, leading Japanese corporations have lost their global share. For example, in the period 2005-2011, Toyota’s global share dropped from 51% to 41%; Honda’s global share fell from 39% to 29%, the Share of DRAM decreased from42% to 9%.

Third, the Japanese model has worsened the inequality income distribution, caused under-development of SMEs and decreased regular jobs. Despite the injection of astronomic amount money in the economy it did not revive. The amount of fiscal money injected was 250% of GDP; the money created in the name of Quantity Easing (QE) as almost 90%of GDP.

But, there was no demand for goods and services, because the ordinary Japanese had empty pockets; there was no job creation, because the SMEs had no demand for their goods. Moreover, they could not get bank money, because they had little collateral. At the end of the road, decades-long economic stagnation was waiting.

In a word, the saga of the falling Japanese economy was due to the greed of the corrupted elite.

This can happen in Korea under the pro-Japan corrupted conservative government of Yoon Suk-yeol.

In fact, the Korean GDP maintained annual grow rate of about 9.00% for three decades 1960s, 1970s and 1980s dropped to 7.22% in the 1990s and 4.60% in 2000s. It fell to 2.92% in the 2010s. The sudden drop of the GDP growth rate was due to the poor performing of Korean exports of goods and services.

In the latter half or the 1970s, the average annual rate of Korean exports was 22.3% to decrease to 14.74% in the 1980s, then to drop to 11.0% in the 1990s; it rose to 12.47% in the 2000s and finally it had a free fall of 5.26% in the 2010s.

However in the 2010s, if we except 2011 (24%), 2013(14%) and 2017 (10.0%), for 7 years, the rate of exports growth was below 1.0%. In other words, the downward trend of Korean exports became accelerated since the second half of the 2000s.

The sustained trend of declining GDP growth and the drastic slowdown of exports is largely due to the increase access to financial resources of the 1980s allowing wide spread real estate speculation by the Korean oligarchy.

In the 1980, the housing price increases by 17% per year. The large corporations being able to make money easily through real estate speculation did not invest funds for the development of technology and the improvement of global competitiveness. In fact, since 1980, the favoured pass time was “Jae-taek” (technique of making easy money); this is the “Zaitech” imported from Japan.

The real estate speculation has continued despite the efforts of the government of Moon Jae-in. In Seoul, the ratio of housing price to income is 33 which was 15 in the 1990. In Seoul, an apartment of 100 m2 is sold for more than 2.5 million USD.

Remember this. The Asian financial crisis of 1997-98 in Korea was due to the abundance of money around and the access to easy and quick money which could be made by real estate speculation. The large corporation borrowed so much money to make speculation money that the average of corporate debt ratio was 600%.

This is just incredible. The corporate debt ratio exceeding 100% is a sign of alarm. The crisis of 1997-98 was due to the impossibility for the Chaebols to pay debt in a situation where foreign funds were fleeing.

This was the first financial national crisis for Korea. To overcome the crisis, millions of ordinary Koreans gave their golden wedding rings and other golden items to pay the national debt.

Fortunately, the crucial measure taken by the Kim Dae-jung government was the structural adjustment designed to discipline the Chaebols, make their accounting system more transparent and induce them to be more specialized so that their global competitiveness be improved.

However the most powerful measure was the non-bailing-out of insolvent Chaebols, banks and businesses. This was the major difference between Japanese model which bailed out insolvent companies who were friends of the oligarchs and the Korean model in which insolvents companies were not bailed out.

These Korean measures were possible because Korea had the leadership of Kim Dae-jung of the Democratic Party as president. If Korea had a conservative president, Korea might have had the long-run economic stagnation like in Japan.

The failure of Abe Shinzo’s Abenmics was due to the absence of the Kim Dae-jung’s model of corporate structural adjustment.

There is the danger that Yoon repeat the failed model of Shinzo Abe of Japan.

To conclude, the election of Yoon Suk-yeol casts dark menacing fog on the future of the Korean peninsula. It is our duty to watch out so that one of the rare democracies in the world would not disappear with the fog.

*

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Dr. Joseph H. Chung is professor of economics and member of the Research Center on Integration and Globalization (CEIM) of Quebec University in Montreal (UQAM.

He is Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG).

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***

The timing of the early March 2022 release of this digital streaming documentary could not be more auspicious.  For anyone wanting to understand how we arrived at a new Cold War with the second Irish-Catholic Democratic president in U.S. history, Joseph Biden, spewing belligerent absurdities about Ukraine, Russia, and Vladimir Putin, and leading a charge toward a World War III that could easily turn nuclear, the aggregated factual details in this series of why President John F. Kennedy was assassinated by the CIA and its minions is essential history that illuminates current events.

While Kennedy was the last U.S. president to genuinely seek peace at the cost of his life, his successors have all been lackeys in love with war and in full awareness  that the promotion of war and the military industrial complex were at the top of their job description.  They have gladly served the god of war and ravaged countries around the world with the glee of sadists and madmen.  Pusillanimous in the extreme, they have sought the presidency knowing they would never oppose the gunmen in the shadows who demanded their obedience.  They heard the message from the streets of Dallas loud and clear and followed orders as required.

Their long history of provocations against Russia in Eastern Europe and Ukraine that has resulted in the current Russian attack on Ukraine is a most frightening case in point.  While Kennedy embraced dialogue and negotiations that recognized the humanity and validity of other countries leaders’ viewpoints – e.g. Nikita Khrushchev, Fidel Castro, et al. – and was cognizant, as he said, that genuine peace had to exclude a Pax Americana, his replacements have demanded U.S. dominance and the growth of empire.

It is therefore essential to understand why JFK was assassinated by the U.S. national security state; it is a fundamental requisite for piercing the miasma of lies that have been used over the decades to conceal the true nature of U.S. foreign policy and the intense anti-Russia hatred.

JFK: Destiny Betrayed, a four-hour, four-part follow-up to Oliver Stone’s two hour feature film JFK Revisited: Through the Looking Glass (11/22/21), does precisely that. While JFK Revisited is by the nature of its shorter and undivided length a better film as film, JFK: Destiny Betrayed is the deeper history lesson because of its more extensive documentation.

click to access Episode Guide

It is largely based on the scriptwriter, James DiEugenio’s masterful book, Destiny Betrayed: JFK, Cuba, and the Garrison Case, which draws on hundreds of thousands of documents released by the Assassination Records Review Board, which was formed as a result of Oliver Stone’s 1991 film, JFK.  As such, the book, and the new film, hoist the U.S. government by its own petard, and thus the film’s powerful indictment can only be dismissed by ignoramuses, propagandists, or sensibilities too tender to accept factual truth.  At an Orwellian time when “fictionalized documentaries” are being promoted, and the difference between fact and fiction is being scrambled to scramble brains, that, regrettably, may be many people.  But for anyone who takes history and facts seriously, this is a dazzling and deeply disturbing film whose implications are enormous.

It is divided into four parts, each approximately an hour.  This allows the viewer to space out their viewing to allow each section to sink in.  I think this is a good idea, for there is much to comprehend, especially for one not well-versed in this history.

Chapter One opens with an emphatic point: Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. tells how his father immediately suspected that the CIA was involved in the murder of President Kennedy and that when the Warren Commission Report (WC) was released he didn’t believe it.  The WC had been pushed by people such as Eugene Rostow, Joseph Alsop, et al., no friends to Kennedy; was controlled by Allen Dulles, the CIA Director whom Kennedy had fired following the Bay of Pigs treachery; and was promoted by The New York Times upon its release with the claim that the commission’s conclusion that Lee Harvey Oswald killed the president was supported by all its documents when in fact those documents were not released for many months following.  Thus the N.Y. Times lied to serve the coverup as it has done ever since. This was typical of mainstream media then and now.

The first part of the documentary informs the viewer of many such lies of commission and omission:

  • That the CIA lied to Kennedy about the Bay of Pigs.
  • That Allen Dulles never told the Warren Commission that the CIA had tried repeatedly to kill Fidel Castro.
  • That the CIA lied to JFK about its attempts to assassinate French President Charles De Gaulle.
  • That the CIA lied to him about the assassination of the Congolese Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba, another Kennedy ally.
  • That the CIA lied to Robert Kennedy when he learned of its attempts to assassinate Castro by telling him they had stopped when they had not.

Lies piled upon lies on every side.

Sandwiched between, in a deft placement that says “try to lie about this,” is the Zapruder film that graphically refutes the lie that the president was not shot from the front; it confirms witness testimony that the kill shot came from the right front and a large back portion of the back of his head was blown out by a gunman who wasn’t Oswald.  Presto: a conspiracy.

And then the viewer learns how years later the Church Committee Hearings uncovered many more lies.  How Jack Ruby, who killed Oswald, was a confidential FBI informer; how, contrary to press lies, JFK never authorized the plots to assassinate Castro, etc.

And when the lies became more known, The House Select Committee on Assassinations (1979) sealed half-a-million records until 2029, many of which were only released due to Oliver Stone’s 1991 film.  Still, in 2022 records are still being held back against the law.

Chapter Two opens with the absurd deceptions involving Kennedy’s autopsy.  Brief but powerful and a preliminary introduction to an extensive analysis in Chapter 3, this section presents evidence that doctors were pressured to lie about the frontal wounds, that Captain James Humes, the doctor in charge of the autopsy, had never done a gunshot autopsy and was part of the coverup – literally with JFK’s head, that the president’s personal doctor, George Burkley, disappeared crucial evidence, etc.

Then, in a creative switch used throughout the four parts, we learn some more of why Kennedy was killed.  How as a young U.S. Representatives in 1951 he went to Vietnam with his brother Robert and became convinced that the French war there was wrong and also unwinnable, and that Vietnam should be free of colonial domination.  How years later as a Senator he spoke out against Secretary of State John Foster Dulles’ advice to use nuclear weapons at Diên Bên Phù to help the beleaguered French (one of many times he opposed the use of nuclear weapons).  How he gave a famous Senate speech in 1957 opposing colonialism and was attacked by both parties for it.  How he supported the non-aligned nations movement, including Sukarno in Indonesia and many leaders throughout Africa.

Then we are returned to Dallas and the assassination where we learn about the conflicting number of shots, the “magic bullet that allegedly and comically was claimed to have created seven wounds in Kennedy and Gov. John Connally, the failure of the chain of custody for the bullets, and the various anomalies associated with Oswald’s alleged rifle that are revealed with multiple photos.  A viewer’s ears would no doubt particularly perk up when learning that the rifle the government says Oswald used that he ordered through mail order under the alias A. Hidell and was sent to his post office box registered under the name Lee Oswald, could not be picked up by Oswald since it was sent to the name Hidell.  And so… ?

Before moving on to the third section, I would like to note the book-like quality of this streaming film documentary.  The sections are called chapters and its title and much of its contents are taken from DiEugenio’s book.  So you could say it is similar to a novel that is converted into a screenplay, but in this case it is a carefully sourced and researched non-fiction (I prefer the word “fact”) book with fifty-four pages of notes.  Watching it is like reading a book in that the viewer needs to slowly evaluate not only the narrative drive of the presentation but also the quality of the filmed notes that buttress the telling from beginning to end.  As one who has read the book very carefully two times, always noting sources, and as one who has researched, written about, and taught university courses on the JFK and other political assassinations, I can attest to the solidity of the film’s sources.  I can think of none that are not accurate.  Like the earlier JFK Revisited: Through the Looking Glass, the collaboration between Stone, a filmmaker of genius, and DiEugenio, a supremely talented researcher, has produced two remarkable films, slightly different in style and substance, but achieving the same clarification of purpose: Factual truth about who killed President Kennedy and why, and why it matters today.

Chapter Three is perhaps the most devastating of the four.  Much of it is spent on showing the evil treachery involved in the autopsy of the president at Bethesda Naval Hospital that is central to the coverup of the truth. This coverup was carried out within the higher reaches of the government, and its only purpose could be to protect the killers within that government.  It is very hard to stomach such truth, but it is necessary.

Only one person was present both at Parkland Hospital in Dallas and at the autopsy: Dr. George Burkley, JFK’s White House physician.  Deeply involved in the coverup, Burkley changed his statements from inadvertent truth to falsehoods like a jumping bean, finally firmly supporting the lies of Dr. Humes, who performed the autopsy under the direction of military/intelligence higher-ups and then incredibly destroyed his notes.  Burkley also backed the lies of those others involved in replacing Kennedy’s brain with another, and then patching up the back of his head to conceal his large wound in order to deny the fatal head shot came from the front.  He supported Robert Knudsen, the White House photographer who took photos of JFK’s fraudulently repaired head. All these men conspired to cover up the truth by literally covering up of the hole in the back of the president’s head. This was betrayal of the highest order.  Treachery close to home.

Yet to learn in detail that Kennedy’s brain was replaced and that his badly damaged brain is missing is matched in depravity with learning that JFK’s arch-enemy, General Curtis LeMay, made sure to quickly return from Canada to attend the autopsy where he sat with others in bleachers, puffing a cigar as Kennedy was cut up and patched like a show piece.  As Kennedy’s most belligerent foe and the real life Dr. Strangelove, one who hated the president and who advocated dropping nuclear weapons on Cuba, Vietnam, the Soviet Union, and using terrorism against the American people to blame on Cuba (Operation Northwoods) – all emphatically repudiated by JFK who thought such suggestions insane and evil – the image of the sadistic LeMay in the autopsy room is haunting.

This chapter also tells us of a National Security Meeting on July 20, 1961 when Allen Dulles and the military urged Kennedy to do a first-strike nuclear attack on the Soviet Union, one of many such attempts that the president rebuffed without hesitation.  Watching this, one cannot help thinking of what is taking place with President Biden, unlike Kennedy, a lifetime war hawk and clearly not in his right mind.  We have been warned.

The concluding chapter is “Fingerprints of Intelligence” and confirms what the first three parts make obvious: that the CIA and its minions killed their own president to prevent him from seeking peace and reconciliation in a world on the edge of nuclear destruction.  We learn all about the CIA’s running of Oswald as a false defector to the Soviet Union and a patsy in JFK’s murder.  We learn how the agency lied repeatedly about its connections to him.  We learn about parallel plots to assassinate Kennedy in Chicago and Tampa with fall guys similar to Oswald waiting in the wings.  We learn how Lyndon Johnson changed Kennedy’s policies in Vietnam, Indonesia, the Congo, etc. immediately after his death and how the military industrial complex won the day.

Oliver Stone tells us this.  And he tells us JFK’s ghost won’t rest.

This documentary makes that clear, but ghosts only have a way of sometimes disturbing consciences when they also know the facts.  JFK: Destiny Betrayedhas all the facts one needs to rile one’s conscience, if one watches it, and if one can see through today’s repetition of history as the old Cold War has become the new old Cold War and betrayal rules the day as the CIA has been rehabilitated through insidious propaganda, as if nothing happened in 1963, or it doesn’t matter.

Yet nothing could be more untrue.

Ukraine is no anomaly; it fits the propaganda neatly. President Biden’s 813 billion dollar military budget request does likewise.  As the film makes clear, President John F. Kennedy was killed by the national security state for seeking peace, while our leaders are seeking war.  It’s still the same old story.  The warfare state rules.  That has not changed from the day John Kennedy died.

The only thing that can possibly change is people’s knowledge of the truth and how that can change their consciences to oppose the war promoters.  This film can do the former.  As for the latter, only time will tell.

JFK: Destiny Betrayed is a powerful corrective to the historical amnesia that has settled over the United States.  It is an incandescent example of how the marriage of film and scholarship can produce popular history at its best.  For anyone who wants to understand the new Cold War that is verging on going nuclear, this film is essential viewing.

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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 Behind the Curtain


He is the author of Seeking the Truth in a Country of Lies

To order his book click the cover page.

“Seeking Truth in a Country of Lies is a dazzling journey into the heart of many issues — political, philosophical, and personal — that should concern us all.  Ed Curtin has the touch of the poet and the eye of an eagle.” Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

“Edward Curtin puts our propaganda-stuffed heads in a guillotine, then in a flash takes us on a redemptive walk in the woods — from inferno to paradiso.  Walk with Ed and his friends — Daniel Berrigan, Albert Camus, George Orwell, and many others — through the darkest, most-firefly-filled woods on this earth.” James W. Douglass, author, JFK and the Unspeakable

“A powerful exposé of the CIA and our secret state… Curtin is a passionate long-time reform advocate; his stories will rouse your heart.” Oliver Stone, filmmaker, writer, and director

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Earlier this month on pro-government IndiaTV, celebrity astrologer Acharya Indu Prakash presented an hour-long Ukraine special in which he predicted good fortune was 99% in favor of Putin. He said that Russia’s military operation in Ukraine “was the last resort for Mr. Putin, he was left with no options. Even now, attempts are being made to create this narrative that Putin is engaging in a bad war.”

Such an outlook would shock most Western audiences as this rhetoric is seldom heard. However, such an outlook is mostly shared across the political spectrum in India, as highlighted by an article published in The Washington Post on March 29, titled: “In India, a U.S. partner, Modi’s base is inundated with anti-U.S. commentary on Ukraine.” The opening sentence of the article wrote:

“Turn on a television in India this past month, and the arguments espoused by some of the country’s most popular media personalities follow a pattern: The United States provoked Russia into attacking Ukraine. The Americans were possibly developing biological weapons in Ukraine. Joe Biden, the US president who fumbled the American withdrawal from Afghanistan, has no business criticizing India over the war he sparked in Ukraine.”

Due to this position, New Delhi has been continuously lambasted by Western officials, media and academics for protecting the interests of the country and its citizens.

Among some of the many examples, White House press secretary Jen Psaki said for India to: “Think about where you want to stand when the history books are written in this moment in time, and support for the Russian leadership is support for an invasion that obviously is having a devastating impact”; Award-winning and renowned conservative American host of the Trish Regan Show tweeted: “If INDIA buys Russian crude oil, INDIA should expect to be sanctioned by the United States. And, believe me, that won’t work out so well for India’s economy. Right now: you’re with US or you’re against us. Simple”; and, The Telegraph newspaper complained that “India is the only Quad member not to have condemned the invasion.”

India, despite traditionally being a non-aligned country, joined the QUAD formation with the US, Japan and Australia to oppose China at sea in the so-called Indo-Pacific region. New Delhi believes that such a formation will be beneficial in its confrontation with China over its support for Pakistan and control of Aksai Chin, which New Delhi says is occupied by the East Asian country.

A Pew Research poll in 2017 found 49% of Indians viewed the US favorably while 47% viewed Russia favourably. A 2020 Pew Research poll found that 49% of Indians saw Russia positively, a significantly higher amount when compared to a quarter of Japanese and Australians and 19% of Americans who viewed the country favorably. Some domestic polls have shown that most Indians approve of their government abstaining from criticizing Russia, just as India did for the seventh time at the United Nations on March 25.

None-the-less, India’s cooperation with the US through the QUAD formation and its increasing confrontation with China appears to have created misunderstandings in Western capitals about New Delhi’s independent foreign policy. With the advent of the Special Military Operation in Ukraine, India maintained a balance by refusing to condemn and sanction Russia, something that has created great irritation in the West, thus demonstrating that they do not care for India’s interests but only in India serving their interests.

With Russia locked out of using Dollars and the SWIFT system, discussions of India-Russia trade in local currencies accelerated so much that purchases for agriculture, pharmaceuticals and energy without dollars will seemingly become a reality. The Reserve Bank of India reportedly met with officials from Russian banks VTB, Sberbank and Gazprombank so that a rupee-ruble trade mechanism could be established.

M. K. Bhadrakumar, an Indian columnist and former diplomat, highlighted that 60-70% of weaponry for India’s armed forces is of Russian origin, and that New Delhi’s capitulation to Western demands will “render a crippling blow to India’s defence preparedness.”

“By the colour of our skin, our religion, our culture, our geography, our political economy, we will never be accepted by the West as ‘one of us’. Do not be mesmerised by promises of equal partnerships […] Fundamentally, what the Western powers are planning is a form of neo-colonialism borne out of the desperate need to arrest the decline of their economies through a massive transfer of wealth from the rest of the world inhabited by 88% of mankind — Asia,” he added.

As Western condemnation against India intensifies, discussions of neo-colonialism is re-entering Indian discourse. Because India suffered from centuries of colonial rule, which saw an astronomical $45 trillion plundered by the British alone between 1765 to 1938 (almost 9 times the current combined GDP of Britain and India), the country never wants to be colonized again, including in the form of 21st century neo-colonialism.

Although the US has found India as an ally to oppose China, pushing the South Asian country to abandon all its interests and carefully crafted foreign policy to serve exclusively the interests of the West, whilst lambasting India for not adopting Western positions in issues that New Delhi has no business being involved in, will only strengthen the discourse of Western attempts of neo-colonialism against India.

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Paul Antonopoulos is an independent geopolitical analyst.

Featured image is from thewire.in

Biden’s Latest Verbal Gaffe Is Truly Dangerous

March 30th, 2022 by Ted Galen Carpenter

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Throughout his extraordinarily long political career, Joe Biden has had a well-deserved reputation for making verbal gaffes. In 2018, he even admitted that he was “a gaffe machine.” That problem has worsened since he became president, especially with respect to foreign affairs. Biden has made several statements that suggested important shifts in U.S. policy – apparently without meaning to do so. His subordinates then scramble to assure other countries and the news media that Washington’s policy on that particular issue remains unchanged.

Such incidents have created needless confusion and raised serious questions about the president’s competence. His latest comments while visiting US troops stationed in Poland are the most inept to date. Biden told troops from the 82nd Airborne Division that regular citizens in Ukraine were “stepping up” in the face of the Russian assault. “And you’re going to see when you’re there. And you – some – some of you have been there. You’re going to see – you’re going to see women, young people standing – standing the middle of – in front of a damn tank, just saying, ‘I’m not leaving. I’m holding my ground.’”

Those remarks seemed to contradict the president’s previous, unequivocal statements that US forces would not be used to defend Ukraine. When reporters asked about Biden’s latest comments, the White House assured them that Washington’s stance remained the same. “The president has been clear we are not sending US troops to Ukraine and there is no change in that position,” a White House spokesperson stated.

This episode continues a frequent pattern in which Biden makes a highly controversial statement that his aides then desperately try to walk back. For example, he seemed to commit major gaffes not once, but twice, with respect to US policy toward Taiwan.

During a CNN town hall session in October 2021, the president was asked whether the United States would defend Taiwan from an attack by the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Biden responded unhesitatingly: “Yes, we have a commitment.” He flatly misstated what US policy has been since Washington established formal diplomatic relations with the PRC in 1979 and adopted the Taiwan Relations Act (TRA) to govern economic and cultural ties with Taiwan.

The TRA commits the United States only to sell Taiwan “defensive” weapons and to regard any PRC attack on the island as a serious “breach of the peace” in East Asia. It emphatically did not obligate the United States to defend Taiwan with its own military forces.

Members of the administration spent the next several days scrambling to “clarify” Biden’s comment. “He wasn’t announcing a change in policy nor have we changed our policy,” White House press secretary Jen Psaki told reporters. “We are guided by the Taiwan Relations Act.” Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin also insisted that the United States remained committed to a “one-China” policy and the provisions of the TRA.

However, it was not the first time that Biden made comments misstating long-standing, official US policy on the Taiwan issue. During an August 2021 interview with ABC News, host George Stephanopoulos asked the president if Washington’s allies could still rely on US protection in light of the disorderly withdrawal from Afghanistan. Biden responded: “We made a sacred commitment to Article Five that if in fact, anyone were to invade or take action against our NATO allies, we would respond.” The same alliance obligation existed with respect to Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan, he added.

Insisting that Washington’s vague security relationship with Taiwan is the same as the explicit US defense obligations specified in the North Atlantic Treaty and the bilateral treaties with Japan and South Korea was wildly inaccurate. On that occasion, as with the October episode, Biden’s advisers worked to repair the damage the president’s indiscreet statement had caused. The next day, US officials rushed to assure Beijing that US policy regarding Taiwan had not changed, despite Biden’s comment suggesting the contrary.

The gaffes about Taiwan policy were bad enough, but Biden’s verbal incontinence in Poland could lead to a catastrophe. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was a response to the prospect that Ukraine might someday be invited to join NATO. Vladimir Putin had warned on several occasions that such a move by the United States and its allies would cross a red line threatening Russia’s security. Moreover, the Kremlin had been increasingly concerned not only by the possibility of Kyiv’s formal inclusion in NATO, but by evidence of a mounting military partnership between the United States and Ukraine.

Moscow already is fuming about the shipments of NATO weaponry flowing into Ukraine in the midst of the ongoing war. Russian officials have warned that convoys of such weapons are legitimate targets. The Kremlin also is watching nervously as hawks in the West lobby recklessly for NATO to impose a no-fly zone over Ukraine, and Putin already put Russia’s nuclear forces on high alert. One hopes that Russian leaders understand that Biden is a gaffe-prone individual, and his casual comment about US troops going to Ukraine should not be taken seriously. If they did conclude that Washington’s policy was about to become even more confrontational than it is now, the consequences could be horrific.

Under less grave circumstances, Biden’s frequent verbal blunders might induce head shaking or even laughter. Given the alarming situation in Europe and the growing tensions between the United States and Russia, though, his loose tongue is no laughing matter.

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Ted Galen Carpenter, a senior fellow in defense and foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute, is the author of 12 books and more than 950 articles on international affairs.

Featured image is from OneWorld

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***

Workers at the Galileo Galilei Airport in Pisa — a civilian airport — reported March 12 that they had been involved in the loading of a cargo plane with what was alleged to be humanitarian aid destined for Ukraine. The aid turned out to be arms and ammunition destined for the troops of the Zelensky regime.

Having learned the real content of the shipment, the workers refused to complete the loading operations and informed their rank and file union, Unione Sindacale di Base (USB), which publicly denounced the incident.

“From the Cargo Village located at the civilian airport, ‘humanitarian’ flights take off. These are supposed to be filled with food, provisions, medicines and anything else useful for the Ukrainian people tormented by weeks of bombing and fighting. But it’s not like that: When they showed up under the plane, the workers in charge of loading were faced with boxes full of various types of weapons, ammunition, explosives,” says the USB statement. And further: “We strongly denounce this real fraud, which cynically uses the ‘humanitarian’ cover to continue to fuel the war in Ukraine.”

Role of Italian regime

The Italian government is on the front line in the proxy war fought on Ukrainian territory by the Russian army against the troops of the Zelensky government, which had been armed, trained and financed for almost a decade by the U.S. and NATO.

Image on the right: People protest in Pisa, Italy, March 19 against the Italian government’s decision to send weapons to Ukraine’s government under the guise of humanitarian cargo. Banner reads ‘From Tuscany, bridges of peace, not flights of war!’

Italy’s role has reached the point where the country is being increasingly excluded from the initiatives of the French-German axis that leads the European Union. These initiatives have aimed at trying to stem the crisis, recently materialized in a high-level discussion among French President Emmanuel Macron (current president of the EU Council), German Chancellor [Olaf] Scholz and Chinese President Xi Jinping.

Media propaganda has pounded away, pushing an increasingly active Italian commitment in support of the Ukraine regime in Kiev. Leaders of Italy’s executive, headed by Prime Minister Mario Draghi, have ranted against Moscow.

The country is being led by the hand to a paroxysm of Russophobia completely alien to its traditions and to the common sense of the population.

An impressive barrage of distorted information, hypocritical rhetoric on human rights and anathema to unified networks against the execrable demon of “pacifism” is lavished to legitimize sending weapons to the war theater. Doing this is a dangerous step towards generalizing and worsening a crisis that threatens to drag the continent and the whole world into the abyss.

The episode at Pisa airport shows that the attempt to impose pro-war sentiments on the Italian people is meeting resistance, despite the concerted effort almost all parties represented in Parliament have been making. In recent weeks, the media has conducted a hostile campaign against the main Italian trade union, the Italian General Confederation of Labor (CGIL) and against the National Association of Partisans of Italy (ANPI).

The ANPI is “guilty,” along with many other popular organizations, of refusing to conform to the single voice of war propaganda. While they oppose the “special military operation” ordered by Putin, they also oppose sending weapons to the Ukrainian army and, in the case of ANPI, against the expansion of NATO to the east.

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All images in this article are from Unione Sindacale di Base

The Pandemic Treaty Is a Spreading Plague

March 30th, 2022 by Dr. Joseph Mercola

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***

The globalist cabal wants to monopolize health systems worldwide, and a stealth attack is already underway in the form of an international pandemic treaty, proposed by the World Health Organization

The treaty is a direct threat to a nation’s sovereignty to make decisions for itself and its citizens, and would erode democracy everywhere. Not only would the treaty empower the WHO to mandate COVID jabs and vaccine passports globally, it could potentially also expand the WHO’s power to dictate all health care policy worldwide

The treaty would also give the WHO the power to censor health information worldwide. This would be disastrous, as the WHO has a long history of corruption and health policy failures that are intrinsically linked to conflicts of interest

When people are harmed by the WHO’s health policies, there’s no accountability because the WHO has diplomatic immunity

Bill Gates, the second largest funder of the WHO, has also been funding pandemic exercises, including Event 201 and the Nuclear Threat Initiative’s exercise on international response to deliberate biological events. This scenario involved a deliberate release of a genetically engineered bioweapon — a pneumonic plague — for which there is no available treatment. Both exercises were held in 2019

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The globalist cabal wants to monopolize health systems worldwide, and a stealth attack is already underway in the form of an international pandemic treaty.1 The negotiations for this treaty began March 3, 2022.2 As reported by The Pulse (video above):

“Coming off the back of the COVID-19 pandemic, the World Health Organization is proposing a new pandemic treaty they’re hoping will be accepted by enough member countries to become a reality by 2024.”

According to Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, “me-first” approaches “stymie the global solidarity needed” to address global threats. His solution? Give the WHO all the power.

Over the past two years, in the name of keeping everyone “safe” from infection, the globalists have justified unprecedented attacks on democracy, civil liberties and personal freedoms, including the right to choose your own medical treatment. Now, the WHO wants to make its pandemic leadership permanent, and to extend it into the health care systems of every nation.

Treaty Threatens National Sovereignty

As noted by The Pulse, “there are a number of things in the treaty that the people of the world need to consider before going down this path.” In the featured video, The Pulse’s Joe Martino interviews Shabnam Palesa Mohamed, a member of the steering committee of the World Council for Health, who points out that the treaty gives the WHO:

“… an inordinate amount of power to make decisions in sovereign countries as to how people live and how they deal with pandemics, from lockdowns to mandates over treatment.”

In short, it would create a one-size-fits-all approach to disease, without regard for all the varying situations found in individual countries, and this is something we already know doesn’t work. The treaty is a direct threat to a nation’s sovereignty to make decisions for itself and its citizens, and would erode democracy everywhere.

At the same time, it would cost each member country millions of dollars to participate in this process. As explained by Mohamed, the treaty will need to go through a voting process at the World Health Assembly in 2023. They need a majority for it to pass and, if passed, all member countries will be bound by it.

The Treaty Is ‘Invalid and Unlawful’

Another concern raised by Mohamed is that many countries don’t even know about this treaty as of yet, and it’s possible that the WHO might try to push for earlier implementation than 2024 — all without public participation or input. “It is undemocratic, it is unconstitutional and therefore it makes the treaty invalid and unlawful,” she says.

She also highlights the WHO’s history of corruption and many health policy failures, which are “intrinsically linked to conflicts of interest.” In an open letter on the WHO’s pandemic treaty, the World Council for Health writes, in part:3

“The proposed WHO agreement is unnecessary, and is a threat to sovereignty and inalienable rights. It increases the WHO’s suffocating power to declare unjustified pandemics, impose dehumanizing lockdowns, and enforce expensive, unsafe, and ineffective treatments against the will of the people.

The WCH [World Council for Health] believes that the people have a right to participate in any agreement that affects their lives, livelihoods, and well-being.

However, the WHO has not engaged in a process of public participation, which is evidence that its priority is capturing more power for itself and its corporate accomplices, than serving the interests of the people. Without an unbiased democratic process, any agreement by the WHO, acting via the United Nations, will be unlawful, illegitimate, and invalid.

Historically, the WHO leadership has failed the people. Among many examples, it approved the injurious H1N1 (swine flu) vaccine for a controversially declared pandemic.

Equally, the WHO failed during the COVID-19 chapter as it encouraged lockdowns, suppressed early preventive treatments, and recommended product interventions that have proven to be neither safe nor effective.

The WHO cannot be allowed to control the world’s health agenda, nor enforce biosurveillance. While it receives funding from public sources belonging to the people, it is caught in a perpetual conflict of interest because it also receives substantial funding from private interests that use their contributions to influence and profit from WHO decisions and mandates.

For example, the Gates Foundation and the Gates-funded GAVI vaccine promotion alliance, contribute over $1 billion a year.”

Another concern is the fact that when people are harmed by the WHO’s health policies, there’s no accountability because the WHO has diplomatic immunity. According to Mohamed, “the WHO should not be making ANY decisions about world health in the future.”

The Ultimate Power Grab

As noted by Martino, while the treaty claims to be focused on pandemic planning and responses, there’s serious concern that it could be expanded to cover other areas of health as well. Mohamed agrees, saying that it could potentially be expanded, using the WHO’s constitution as the basis for that expansion. Article 2 of the WHO’s constitution states:

“In order to achieve its objective, the functions of the Organization shall be: a) to act as the directing and coordinating authority on international health work … k) to propose conventions, agreements and regulations, and make recommendations with respect to international health matters …

s) to establish and revise as necessary international nomenclatures of diseases, of causes of death and of public health practices … v) generally to take all necessary action to attain the objective of the Organization.”

Its power is already very significant, and the goal to turn the WHO into a global health dictatorship is virtually written into its constitution. Also, remember that the WHO removed the specificity of mass casualties from the definition of a pandemic, so now a pandemic can be just about any disease that occurs in multiple countries. Even obesity could theoretically qualify. So, the WHO could claim power over health care systems in any number of ways, given the chance.

Treaty Would Grant WHO Power to Mandate Vaccine Passports

While most of the world is more than ready to move on, the WHO seems unwilling to let go. A WHO official recently told the Ottawa Citizen that the COVID pandemic is still “far from over.”4

The reason for this reluctance to declare the pandemic over is likely because the WHO hopes to gain the power to mandate vaccine passports and COVID jabs worldwide. It’s already working on the creation of a global vaccine passport/digital identity program. As reported by WEBLYF:5

“Under the guise of a ‘trust network,’ another initiative called Vaccination Credential Initiative (VCI) is also gaining momentum.

Partnering with big tech companies, big corporations, and big universities, VCI describes itself as ‘a voluntary coalition of public and private organizations committed to empowering individuals with access to verifiable clinical information including a trustworthy and verifiable copy of their vaccination records in digital or paper form using open, interoperable standards.’

VCI’s SMART Health Cards, as reported by Off-Guardian, are already implemented by ‘25 states in America, plus Puerto Rico and DC, and have become the US’s de-facto national passport.’ As explained in the article:

‘The US government, unlike many European countries, has not issued their own official vaccine passport, knowing such a move would rankle with the more Libertarian-leaning US public, not to mention get tangled in the question of state vs federal law.

The SMART cards allow them to sidestep this issue. They are technically only implemented by each state individually via agreements with VCI, which is technically a private entity. However, since the SMART cards are indirectly funded by the US government, their implementation across every state makes them a national standard in all but name.’”

United Tribes of New Zealand Denounce the WHO Treaty

As noted by NZDSOS,6 “Is this the way we want to live our lives? Constantly at the behest of shadowy individuals and corporations who monitor our every move and determine what we can and can’t do, down to buying food?”

In a formal letter of notification to the WHO and the Executive Board of the World Health Assembly, the government of Aotearoa Nu Tireni in New Zealand strongly denounced this and any other treaty that challenges national sovereignty:7

“… you are thereby formally notified that the Wakaminenga Māorigovernment of Aotearoa Nu Tireni/New Zealand does not consent in any shape of form to any type of international pandemic treaty under the WHO or its assembly. Any such construct shall be void ab initio.

We, as United Tribes and Hereditary Chiefs, represent the only current legitimate government in New Zealand. The current NZ government represented by Jacinda Ardern is an illegitimate government because it is a corporation (SEC CIK #0000216105) listed on the US Security & Exchange Commission as Her Majesty the Queen in Right of New Zealand.8,9

In accordance with the Clearfield Trust Doctrine, a corporation does not have any implied right to govern a sovereign people. We hereby register our vote of no confidence in the actions or authority of the corporation unlawfully posing as a government in our territory.

This unlawful Ardern government and its ministers stand charged by the Nga Tikanga Māori Law Society and the Wakaminenga Maori Government of Nu Tireni with genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity related to their wilful disregard for the suffering and loss of life resulting from their unlawful response to the engineered bioweapon known as COVID-19 and the unlawful forced administration of a poison to our people and forced medical experimentation.

Also charged with serious crimes related to a pandemic response, the WHO and Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus have no standing or authority to form any binding agreement related to a pandemic response, in any jurisdiction and we command that these attempts shall cease and desist immediately pending the outcome of these charges under Rome statutes 6, 7 and 8, filed in the international Criminal Court 6 December 2021 …

You are hereby directed to cease and desist discussions or negotiations with the unlawful Arden Government, a NZ Corporation, known as Her Majesty Queen in Right of New Zealand. The Wakaminenga Maori Government of Aotearoa Nu Tireni reserves the right to discuss/negotiate with any international partner(s) of its choice, including the World Council for Health (WCH).”

Treaty Would Create Global Censorship of Health Information

The treaty would also give the WHO the power to censor health information worldwide. On the European Council’s web page discussing the pandemic treaty, under the headline “Restoring Trust in the International Health System,” it states:10

The agreement … will set the foundation for better communication and information to citizens. Misinformation threatens public trust and risks undermining public health responses. To redeem citizen trust, concrete measures should be foreseen to improve the flow of reliable and accurate information as well as to tackle misinformation globally.”

In other words, under this treaty, we can expect even greater censorship than what we’ve experienced so far. Tech companies have already proven where their allegiance lies, and it’s not with the public.

Google, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and others have deplatformed just about everyone who posts health information that runs counter to what the WHO is saying, real-world data and verifiable facts be damned. Financial platforms have also banned people for the same reason. Now imagine there being a binding international law that makes all that censorship mandatory.

Their Playbook Was Revealed in 2019

Officially, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is the second largest funder of the WHO, second only to the U.S. government,11 but the combined contributions from the Gates Foundation and GAVI made Gates the unofficial top sponsor of the WHO as of 2018.12

Gates has also been funding pandemic exercises, including Event 201,13 held October 18, 2019, which gained notoriety for its extraordinary accurate “predictions” of the COVID pandemic mere months before it was declared. Other co-sponsors included the World Economic Forum and Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

However, earlier that year, February 14, 2019, Gates also funded the Nuclear Threat Initiative’s (NTI) pandemic exercise for senior global leaders on international response to deliberate biological events, which took place in Munich, Germany.14,15

NTI was founded to assess and reduce threats associated with the proliferation of nuclear weapons,16 but they’ve since expanded to include biological threats.17 Gates has also given grants to the NTI for vaccine development in relation to biological threats.18

While Event 201 featured a fictional coronavirus outbreak, the NTI exercise involved response to “deliberate, high consequence biological events.” In other words, a deliberate release of a genetically engineered bioweapon — in this case a pneumonic plague — for which there is no available treatment. This exercise scenario was the first of its kind. The video above features a summary of the four-phase exercise.

Curiously, in mid-November 2019, The Guardian, The New York Times,19 The Washington Post20 and others reported that two people in China had in fact been diagnosed with pneumonic plague.21

In addition to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the NTI event was sponsored by the Wellcome Trust, the “philanthropic arm” of GlaxoSmithKline and an investor in Vaccitech, which owns the patents to AstraZeneca’s COVID jab.22 Both Gates and Wellcome are part of the technocratic globalist network that is pushing The Great Reset forward.

Another sponsor was Georgetown University,23 which also curated the World Economic Forum’s library of COVID-19 treatments (primarily focused on antivirals and COVID gene transfer injections).24

Curation was done by three Georgetown University professors and Rebecca Katz, director of the Georgetown Center for Global Health Science and Security.25 Katz is also listed as an author on the NTI paper,26 “A Spreading Plague: Lessons and Recommendations for Responding to a Deliberate Biological Event,” published June 2019, in which they review the conclusions reached from that February 2019 exercise.

‘A Spreading Plague’

Together, these two pandemic exercises — both of which were sponsored by Gates — form a playbook for how to set up a biological attack and then hide the truth from the world so that you can not only profit from it in the short term but also centralize power, permanently transfer wealth and change the social and financial order to your own liking in the process.

Not surprisingly, a number of Event 201 participants also partook in the NTI’s exercise,27 and hold positions within technocratic institutions like Wellcome, the WHO and the World Economic Forum.

Event 201, in particular, focused not on finding remedies and saving lives, but how to control “misinformation.” A vast majority of that exercise centered around the creation of effective propaganda and censorship. Similarly, “A Spreading Plague” also includes the recommendation to enlist private companies as “assets” to carry out the globalists bidding:28

“In 2019 and 2020, international organizations, including the WHO, UNODA [United Nations Office for Disarmament Affairs], and the World Economic Forum, should convene private sector companies to identify gaps and concrete next steps to strengthen the capability of companies to provide assets to assist with international response for deliberate biological attacks and other high-consequence biological events.”

In the NTI scenario — in which a fictional country called Carta is found to have engineered and released a biological weapon into the neighboring country of Vestia — we also see curious parallels to current-day accusations by Russia, which claims biological weapons research was being conducted in the Ukraine, necessitating defensive action.

All in all, the NTI tabletop exercise only adds to the evidence pile that suggests the COVID pandemic was premeditated and preplanned for financial and geopolitical purposes. It was a power grab.

The pandemic treaty with the WHO is precisely what the World Economic Forum and its allies now need, as it will put the technocratic cabal firmly in charge of the biosecurity of the whole world, and empower them to implement the rest of The Great Reset agenda.

You can learn more about The Great Reset on the World Economic Forum’s website29,30 and in Klaus Schwab’s book, “COVID-19: The Great Reset”31 (but you might want to review the overwhelmingly negative comments on Amazon first).

As noted in a July 21, 2020, World Economic Forum article,32 the economic devastation caused by COVID-19 pandemic shutdowns “has the potential to hobble global prosperity for generations to come.” The answer, according to the World Economic Forum, is for countries to make sure the economic system is “built back better.”

Make no mistake, this catchy slogan is part and parcel of the Great Reset plan and cannot be separated from it, no matter how altruistic it may sound. Part of the “building back better” is to shift the financial system over to an all-digital centrally controlled currency system that is tied to a vaccine passport and/or digital identity system.

Together, they will form a pervasive system of social control, as desired behaviors can be incentivized and undesired ones discouraged through loss of various “privileges,” including access to your own finances. Digital currency can even be programmed by the issuer so that it can only be used for certain types of purchases or expenses.

While it’s going to be very difficult to stop this runaway train that is The Great Reset, part of our defense is to oppose and prevent the WHO’s pandemic treaty from becoming reality, as we’ll lose our national sovereignty if it does.

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Notes

1 Reuters November 26, 2021

2, 10 European Council, Treaty on Pandemic Prevention and Preparedness

3 World Council for Health Open Letter March 2022

4 Ottawa Citizen March 18, 2022

5 Weblyf March 2022

6, 7 NZDSOS March 18, 2022

8 US Security & Exchange Commission as Her Majesty the Queen in Right of New Zealand

9 SEC CIK #0000216105

11 Swiss Info May 10, 2021

12 The Defender September 7, 2021

13 Center for Health Security Event 201

14 NTI February 14, 2019

15 NTI June 13, 2019

16 NTI Nuclear Threats

17 NTI Biological Threats

18 Gates Foundation National Threat Initiative

19 New York Times November 13, 2019

20 Washington Post November 13, 2019

21 The Guardian November 13, 2019

22 The Corbett Report February 24, 2021

23 Georgetown University Tabletop Exercise on Int’l Response to Deliberate Biological Events

24, 25 WEF COVID-19 Treatments Curated by Georgetown University

26 A Spreading Plague: Lessons and Recommendations for Responding to a Deliberate Biological Event June 2019

27 A Spreading Plague: Lessons and Recommendations for Responding to a Deliberate Biological Event June 2019, List of Participants Page 8

28 A Spreading Plague: Lessons and Recommendations for Responding to a Deliberate Biological Event June 2019, Page 17

29 WEF The Great Reset

30 WEF The Great Reset Highlights

31 COVID-19: The Great Reset (PDF)

32 World Economic Forum July 21, 2020

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One of the attorneys assisting Reiner Fuelmich in proving world leaders have committed crimes against humanity in the name of Covid-19, has been arrested in France on suspicion of terrorism and treason.

Virginie de Araujo Recchia, a French attorney living in France who is participating in the work of the Citizen Jury with Reiner Fuellmich, was arrested in her home at dawn on March 22nd in front of her children. The arrest comes three weeks before ahead of the French presidential elections.

Fuellmich’s team have allegedly been informed the charges involve counterterrorism and possibly treason, and relate to the passionate work she does for the French people as well as the world, in fighting to restore our God-given rights.

At the beginning of the year, Virginie de Araujo Recchia, in partnership with her colleague Jean-Pierre Joseph, and two other jurists, filed a complaint before the head of the investigating judges on behalf of the associations BonSens.org, AIMSIB and the Collectif des Maires Résistants (Collective of Resistant Mayors) against the parliamentarians who validated a law on mandatory Covid-19 vaccination in August 2021.

This law forced millions of professionals to undergo experimental gene therapy or risk losing their jobs.

According to sources close to the case, she was working on a complaint against political parties and the actions of some of their members.

She had just made public her report entitled “Dictatorship 2020” accusing the government of state terrorism, attacking the fundamental interests of the nation and crimes against humanity.

This document was intended to form the basis for a criminal prosecution against members of the government…

Download the report here.

This flagrant violation of rights demonstrates there is no more freedom of speech- and proves that if we speak out, as Virginie Araujo-Recchia has done, that we will be persecuted.

Even those who disagree with Virginie de Araujo Recchia’s message should know that their rights to free speech are threatened by such action. Just because you may go along with the “official” narrative now does not mean at some point you won’t disagree with it.

What happens then, if you have not moved to help another faced with this? You know this is fundamentally wrong, and against natural law.

This is a time for unification and standing up. We cannot continue to allow this tyranny to escalate. When Shakespeare said in King Henry VI “First, kill all the lawyers”… he was referring to the first step in destabilizing a society. For a society cannot be a peaceful society if it does not follow the Rule of Law or its Constitutions of God-given liberties. None of us is safe when tyranny rules.

The first casualty of war, as they say, is the truth. The next may be the lawyers and advocates, and then anyone else. Don’t stand by and let an arrest of a freedom loving patriot go unpunished or unheard. Please pray for her speedy release, her safety, and then flood the officials involved in this with calls and emails to protest this travesty.

If you don’t, this could just be the first in a wave of purges in the post-democracies of continental Western Europe.

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Featured image is from The Expose