La receta de los futuros disturbios a la parisina
July 1st, 2023 by Marc Vandepitte
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Nuestro sitio en español: GlobalizacionJuly 1st, 2023 by Marc Vandepitte
June 30th, 2023 by Michael Welch
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In little more than two weeks, we mark the 20th anniversary of the Welsh scientist and authority on biowarfare, Dr David Kelly. [1]
Listeners to this station will remember a discussion about the man in March 2023, the anniversary of the start of the Iraq War. Our past guest, Dr David Halpin outlined some of the reasons he, Dr Stephen Frost, and a list of determined skeptics doubted the official story of his passage due to suicide and were mobilizing in support of not just public hearings, but a public inquest to get to the bottom of his death, which they suspected was a murder which benefited the government of the UK, and Prime Minister Tony Blair in particular. [2]
The oft repeated assertion among many such skeptics, including Liberal-Democrat MP Norman Baker, was the claim that weapons of mass destruction was a key to a motive behind his elimination. Iraq supposedly still had WMDs. They could be launched at the insistence of Big Bad Saddam to cause tens of thousands, possibly hundreds of thousands of people in some innocent country – maybe even America! But David Kelly, acclaimed and high profile weapons instructor that he was, publicly challenged this claim. Hence, ripping away the fundamental reason for going to war with Iraq.
However, there may be another motive that could potentially lead to an even darker agenda. Dr. Kelly was the head of biological defence at the Government’s secretive military research establishment in Wiltshire, England. He was the brain behind much of the West’s germ warfare programmes. . [3]
If Dr. Kelly was knowledgeable of anything untoward, and was willing to blab to the public, might that also be a reason for doing him in? After all, soon after the suspicious releases of anthrax letters post 9/11, followed an astonishing level of deaths of top scientists in the field of microbiology. Was Kelly a target? Or unfinished business? [4]
Joining us for the bulk of the show this week is Canadian born podcaster and investigative journalist James Corbett. A former member of the Global Research team bringing enlightening views on a variety of topics, James Corbett was entirely enrapt in the David Kelly affair, even before he was producing his video-work. He has also interviewed Dr David Halpin and put out a couple of informative documentaries on the mysterious incident. While he is convinced Kelly’s murder is a “no-brainer” he tends to look at the murder as a little larger than eliminating a convenient Iraq’s WMD truth-teller.
In this exquisite edition of the Global Research News Hour, James elaborates again on the fraudulent claim underlying the death by suicide fiasco, conjures evidence of biowarfare on the murderer’s radar screen, and postulates some of the contemporary realities Dr. Kelly’s death continues to shine a light on two decades later, particularly on the subject of the recent “pandemic.”
James Corbett started The Corbett Report website in 2007 as an outlet for independent critical analysis of politics, society, history, and economics. An award-winning investigative journalist, he has lectured on geopolitics at the University of Groningen’s Studium Generale, and delivered presentations on open source journalism at The French Institute for Research in Computer Science and Automation’s fOSSa conference, at TedXGroningen and at Ritsumeikan University in Kyoto.
(Global Research News Hour Episode 397)
LISTEN TO THE SHOW
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Transcript of James Corbett, June 27, 2023
Part One
Global Research: This happened before you set up the Corbett Report. Could you talk about how you became acquainted with it enough to spark an interest in investigating it yourself?
James Corbett: Absolutely, yes. So, as you indicate, I started the Corbett Report in 2007, but Dr. Kelly died in July of 2003. So, this did predate my work or even my research into what became the Corbett Report by a few years. And it was a – obviously, it was a big story at the time. I certainly recall hearing about it or reading about it at the time that it was happening and unfolding. It was a mainstream news story in Canada and elsewhere around the world.
But why? ‘What was really going on with this story?’ I think is the real question. And I think it’s important just to refresh ourselves of what the official story is so that we can then debunk it.
On the note of, yes, the lone gunmen or the lone assassin idea being, in this case, well I guess it was David Kelly himself who was the lone assassin, apparently, in terms of suicide. I employ the term “suicided” for this type of case where, someone is murdered in a way that is meant to look like suicide in order to, essentially, stop any further investigation into what this person was saying or what they believed. And I have an entire series of podcast episodes that I’ve done in the past on the Corbett Report called “Requiem for the Suicided” in which I’ve explored the deaths of several people like Danny Casolaro and Gary Webb and Dr. David Kelly. So, if people are interested in more of the meat and details of the official story and why it is obviously incorrect, they can go to my Requiem for the Suicided episode about this.
But yes, let’s set the table for people who don’t remember some of the specifics or why it was being covered at the time.
And you introduced David Kelly by saying he was a microbiologist and a weapons inspector, and I think most people at the time understood and thought of him as a weapons inspector. And of course, that was one of his roles. He was appointed to the United Nations Special Commission, the UNSCOM, in 1991 as one of its chief weapons inspectors going into Iraq. And he led ten missions to Iraq between May 1991 and December 1998. Obviously, at that time seeking to verify compliance with Saddam Hussein’s government’s disposal of their weapons of mass destruction, right? Which, of course, factored heavily into what came with the invasion in 2003.
He also worked with UNSCOM’s successor organization, the United Nations Monitoring, Verification and Inspections Commission. And so, he was specifically looking at anthrax reduction programs in Saddam’s Iraq, as well as the bioweapons program that was being run at Al-Hakum. I think that’s the way that the public understands David Kelly: he was a weapons inspector. And so, it was in that context that in 2002, the UK government released this dossier on the Iraqi weapons of mass destruction which stated that Saddam had chemical and biological weapons that were deployable within 45 minutes.
And the 45-minute claim with the big sensational headline-generating claim at that time as – essentially it was being sold to the public as “Oh my God, Saddam Hussein is crazy. He has weapons of mass destruction. They could be used against us within 45 minutes.” And that was a big part of the UK version of the push towards the Iraq War in 2003.
Now, the BBC came out with a story from reporter Andrew Gilligan that claimed that the Downing Street Press officer had been pressured to include the 45-minute claim against the advisement of the weapons inspectors, who were saying this isn’t true. That you’re just ‘sexing up’ the dossier. So, the sexed-up dossier became a big question. The BBC’s report became a big scandal: “Is this true? If it is true, who was the source for this story?” And in the UK, at any rate, when there is parliamentary privilege about libel, and you can’t sue someone for libel against the Parliament. But they do have the right to demand the source of the accusation or something along those lines. At any rate, there was a judicial process to try – a parliamentary inquiry process, I believe – to try to get Andrew Gilligan to reveal his source. The BBC wouldn’t reveal the source. But it eventually came out that, apparently – although this was – I don’t know if this was ever definitely concluded, but at any rate, it became apparent that David Kelly was likely the source for Andrew Gilligan’s reporting.
And so, David Kelly was brought before this parliamentary inquiry process. And that we’ve all seen the footage of him at this inquiry being grilled by the various ministers on this panel, and they were talking about him and, ‘Oh, you’ve been set up to take the – you’re fall guy for this.’ He looks very harried in the two-second clips that are generally played in the mainstream media when they talk about David Kelly. ‘Look, he was under attack, he was so stressed, he ended up taking his own life.’
So, the story is that somewhere on or around the 17th of July 2003, Dr. Kelly took a pocket knife that he had had since childhood; took copious amounts of Co-proxamol tablets; and went out to the woods around his house in Oxfordshire, England and ended up slitting his own wrists and dying from, I believe – I will have to double-check this – but dying from exsanguination. Bleeding out, essentially. Well, a combination of factors, actually, related to the Co-proxamol tablets and, apparently, an undiagnosed coronary artery condition that he had. That is the official story. I won’t do disservice to this by saying it is trivially true that this is not the case. But at any rate, we can summarize, as you already have, but we can just summarize the various threads through which we know that the official story is not true.
So, for example, David Kelly had a known aversion to swallowing pills at all, let alone the 26 tablets or whatever it is he was said to have swallowed. Which, by the way, this Co-proxamol, the amount that he had swallowed was not a lethal amount. And that was never even suggested that this was some sort of lethal amount of pills that he had taken.
As Dr. Halpin, who you have talked to, has talked about at length, the Hutton report that was issued from the inquiry – the public inquiry that eventually resulted as a result of this scandal around David Kelly’s death – was looking at blood samples. And there is all sorts of questions about the blood samples that they were looking at. One of the doctors involved in that inquiry said that there were five blood samples that he had seen and had access to, but only one of which was actually labelled. Which is fairly important for an actual forensic examination. And of those five samples, only four ended up getting mentioned in the Hutton inquiry report which means one of them just kind of disappeared somewhere. And of those four samples, only one was directly connected: MCH47 was the blood sample that was apparently found to contain the elements that are the breakdown elements of this Co-proxamol. But of that, even in that one sample that apparently contained these elements, the elements that were found were 400 percent smaller than the amounts that were found in cases that actually resulted in death.
So, it wasn’t the tablets. Kelly could not have killed himself in the manner suggested, because he had – according to his close confidant who is on record with this – he had difficulty using his right hand at all for strenuous activities, because of an injury that he had received to his elbow a number of years past. So, he had difficulty using his hand at all. Apparently, he had to use the pocket knife with his right hand to inflict the wound on the left arm, and apparently used the pocket knife the wrong way around because of the way the blade was designed.
So again, seems unlikely. The body changed position between the time that it was discovered and the time the police report was filed. The person who discovered the body claimed that the body was resting against a tree, propped up against the tree, head and shoulders propped up. The police report describes the body was found lying completely flat. We do know that there was a helicopter that landed at the scene of the discovery of the body, just 90 minutes after the discovery of the body. We only know about this because of Freedom of Information Act requests for the helicopter flight logs which eventually were released. And although they were released heavily redacted, we do know that the helicopter came within 90 minutes of the discovery of the body, landed at the scene for five minutes, and then took off again. It has never been explained what that helicopter was; who was piloting it; what was on board; what they did; or why they were there. None of that information is available.
We do know that David Kelly – the last e-mail that he wrote before he was found dead was an e-mail to Judy Miller, who factors heavily into the whole Iraq story for her reporting on – for the New York Times, but is probably not very well remembered for the fact that, I believe, just one month before 9/11 she had a front-page New York Times story on the secret bio-weapons program that was illegally being run by the US Defense Department. Which had been going on for decades, but was now being reported on the front page of the New York Times involving anthrax. And this was one month before 9/11. At any rate, his last e-mail was to Judy Miller in which he said there were “Dark actors playing games.”
He had also mentioned that he was likely to be found dead in the woods at some point. And lo and behold, apparently, we are asked to believe that this weapons inspector, this seasoned veteran of the weapons inspections and all of this, who’d been obviously in a very stressful position for a very long time, couldn’t take the stress of being questioned before parliamentary members and decided to take his own life. Again, top to bottom, front to back, complete nonsense.
There is a lot more to say about that, but it has been said: you’ve talked about it, I’ve talked about it. People can look up more information about that or look at sources like Dr. David Halpin for more information about that. That’s ostensibly why this was such a big story at the time. It was a scandal. It was related to the Iraq invasion and the war and what was going on there, and that’s why it was covered at all, I think, by the mainstream media. And because it also involved the BBC. The Hutton inquiry that was then launched as a result of this scandal came to the conclusion that, actually, you know, the BBC was at fault for their story and it was just a suicide. And Gilligan, Andrew Gilligan, the BBC reporter and others, lost their positions at the BBC as a result of this. And the official story became “It was a suicide.” It has been ruled by the Hutton inquiry.
The Hutton inquiry, however, was a public inquiry, which is very different from a coroner’s inquest. And a public inquiry is a special type of – essentially a review of government actions that is set up by the UK government that doesn’t have any legal force or legal teeth to it whatsoever. All it can do is issue a report of recommendations which is what ultimately got released.
So, for several years there was a concerted attempt by Dr. David Halpin and others, who were involved in a process to try to bring an actual coroner’s inquest to the question of David Kelly’s death where there would be real forensic evidence examined. There would be real legal ramifications to the coroner’s findings. However, 2010 or was it 2011, the UK government considered for about 15 minutes the idea that they would hold an inquiry, and decided they would not. There will be no – sorry, an inquest. There will be no inquest into David Kelly’s death.
And that is essentially – essentially – where that story has remained for the past decade. And I guess the question might be, ‘Okay, well so why was I interested i this story in the first place?’ And now, ‘Why do I think it is relevant to what we are living through today?’ I will —
GR: Mm-hmm.
JC: — stop for a moment in case you have any further questions you want to ask before we get into those subjects.
Part Two
GR: The Iraq weapons of mass destruction are non-existent. That was all made up. That it was phony. And you know, this is the reason why he was killed, because he knew too much. But I don’t know, I’m kind of the impression that that’s kind of like a – like a limited hangout, kind of idea. Because, I mean, this man who worked at Porton Down which was kind of like the UK equivalent of Fort Dietrich in the United States. He was engaged with really, really high-level things like DNA sequencing, or at least the people he was coming into contact with did. It seems like there’s a little bit more to it than that. I mean, very important, perhaps, but I mean I think a lot of people already knew the – maybe I’ll ask you the question that Donald Sutherland’s character in the movie – the Oliver Stone movie JFK put to Kevin Costner’s character, you know, the three questions that you really have to ask to get to the bottom of it: why was David Kelly killed? Who benefited? And who had the ability to cover it up?
JC: Excellent, yes. Very, very, very good. Very important questions. Equally as important to the JFK assassination as to David Kelly’s death, as to many other events that are going on. So, I’m glad you put it that way.
And I think you hit the nail on the head: yes, the official story, that this was a fundamentally, at base, about anthrax or weapons of mass destruction, biological weapons, and Iraq is a limited hangout. That is part, certainly, part of the story and part of what David Kelly was involved with. But David Kelly was involved in much more. And you hit the nail on the head, because as I say, the way that I understood David Kelly at the time that it was happening when I was just watching the mainstream news coverage of this back in 2003, was as a weapons inspector. And that was the context in which this was framed and that was who he was, that was what he did.
But actually, what David Kelly was, was the chief microbiologist at Porton Down. Now, for people who – in the audience who do not know about Porton Down, I really suggest they start taking a look at this. As you say, this is essentially the top bio-weapons lab in the UK government complex, a military installation, that has its fingers in a lot of different pies. For example, the Novichok discovery, the poisoning that took place a few years ago in the UK, apparently Russian agents or so we are asked to believe, spreading Novichok in a ham-handed, weirdly cookie crumb trail way in order to lead all signs of these assassination attempts back to Vladimir Putin. Interestingly enough, that was taking place literally there on the doorstep of Porton Down just miles away from that facility, where, oh yeah, they did have samples of Novichok and they were working on it. There’s many such examples that we could dig up from Porton Down’s illustrious past about their involvement with biological weapons research, et cetera.
Again, research that is technically, supposedly banned and illegal under the Biological Weapons Treaty that supposedly bans this type of research. Except, of course, for defensive purposes and, ‘Oh, well, we don’t know what the Russians are doing, so we have to develop these weapons in order to counteract them and come up with antidotes and vaccines’ and blah blah blah. That is an incredibly important part of this David Kelly story and what David Kelly was doing with regards to that. Now, I won’t claim to know all of that, because a lot of it, of course, is classified and secret. But there are certain things that we do know, on the record, that David Kelly was involved with that do seem extremely interesting and relevant.
And I have a surprising source for at least some of this information. As a Canadian, you’ll be able to appreciate the CBC’s The Passionate Eye documentary series that they’ve been doing for decades. I believe it is still going on but I don’t watch the CBC, so I wouldn’t be able to know. But at any rate, back in 2000 – I don’t know the exact date, but in the early-2000s, they had an investigation about – well, broadly speaking, about David Kelly and anthrax and biological weapons. It was called The Anthrax War and it is available, actually, up on YouTube even for free viewing if people are interested in it. And I would suggest they do so, because it’s interesting to me, this exact documentary, the exact documentary – and I mean word-for-word – the exact documentary could be made by myself or yourself or any person out there today and would be immediately dismissed by all of the fact-checkers in the fact-checker universe as ‘misinformation, disinformation,’ likely ‘Russian misinformation,’ despite the fact that this was mainstream, this was broadcast on the CBC two decades ago. Hm, interesting.
But at any rate, there is some interesting information in that documentary including, for example, there is the story of Vladimir Pasechnik who was a defector from the Russian biological weapons program who had been working with, specifically with weaponizing anthrax and other biological agents for the Soviets in the Cold War. And in 1989, he defected to the West. And he, interestingly, was debriefed at Porton Down and was then offered a job. He was offered a weird position in which he could start a company that would be housed at Porton Down, conducting research into anthrax antidotes. Very interesting setup, especially for someone who was literally just working with the enemy in the Cold War.
At any rate, that arrangement is interesting in and of itself, but guess who was one of the debriefers of Vladimir Pasechnik when he came over? Of course, it was David Kelly. David Kelly was involved with that, and apparently he was the one who specifically gave that offer of allowing Pasechnik to work at Porton Down on his anthrax antidote research. Which again, as I intimated earlier, the defensive biological research is always also offensive research by its very nature. In order to understand how to counteract weaponized anthrax, you have to weaponize anthrax. So, there is of course the implication that Porton Down was working with weaponizing anthrax. And oh, by the way, Porton Down also had the Ames strain of anthrax which was the exact strain that was used in the 2001 attacks. So, there’s that interesting connection, as well.
Here’s another interesting connection: just days after the anthrax attacks began in the United States – or at least when they were being reported in October of 2001 – Vladimir Pasechnik died of an apparent stroke. So, the man at Porton Down who was working on the anthrax antidotes and weaponization of anthrax died within days of the anthrax attacks in the United States being announced. And again, David Kelly we know was involved in that story in some manner, in some capacity.
Here’s another interesting connection that David Kelly had: in the – well, in the 1990s during the Truth and Reconciliation proceedings in South Africa after the end of Apartheid – at which amnesty was given to government workers who would confess to the crimes that they had been involved with – the records were released around a very interesting project that the South African government had been engaged in for some time in the 1980s called “Project Coast.” And the man who headed up Project Coast was a cardiologist by the name of Wouter Basson. And he was directing this program and according to the Post – I don’t know which Post, this is Washington Post? — he “Spoke candidly to federal officials of global shopping sprees for pathogens and equipment. Of plans for epidemics to be sewn in black communities. And of cigarettes and letters that were laced with anthrax.” And that he also revealed the development of a novel anthrax strain unknown to US officials. A kind of stealth anthrax that Basson claimed could fool tests used to detect the disease.
So, this was all part of this Project Coast that he was heading up from 1981 to 1993. The South African National Defence Force had created it and, according to multiple testimonies from multiple people, it was directed specifically to develop race-specific bio-weapons that could be directed at the black population in South Africa under Apartheid. For example, one person who was the director of Project Coast’s research, Don Gustin, testified that he was ordered by Basson to develop ways, “To suppress population growth among blacks,” and to, “Search for a black bomb, a biological weapon that would select targets based on skin colour.” And —
GR: So, you’re —
JC: — he also —
GR: — saying that – so, you’re saying that all of these people – like, you have a certain genetic, ethnicity, you look for certain traits in the genes that race will have that others don’t and that’s basically how you separate them, right?
JC: That was, at least according to Gustin and others who were involved in Project Coast, that was the specific aim of Project Coast.
It was also confirmed in certain documents that were unearthed by the Truth and Reconciliation Committee. That was the aim. And they were talking about – and Basson has openly talked about attempts to develop a vaccine that would essentially immunize women against sperm, essentially, taking elements that are found in human semen and making it so that women would reject that by way of some sort of adjuvant or something inserted into a vaccine. Now, according to Basson, according to others, they didn’t – this was never developed to the point where they had some working ability to do this.
However, it is interesting to note that there has been for decades, the accusation, at any rate, made by a number of groups, that the tetanus vaccines that were being developed and delivered by the United Nations in The Philippines, in Kenya, in various other countries, has been specifically claimed to have been weaponized essentially in exactly that way. A fertility vaccine, essentially, that would make women spontaneously reject pregnancy. So, that claim, at any rate, has been out for a long time and there are various – I’ve talked about that before and the various reasons for believing that. At any rate, I’m not sure that was specifically related to Project Coast or what Wouter Basson had to do with that specifically. But at any rate, that idea has been around for many decades.
In fact, it was a Rockefeller Foundation project aim at some point, to develop a fertility vaccine, and vaccine to actually make women infertile. This is a known possibility. And race-specific bio-weapons, of course, was specifically mentioned in the Rebuilding America’s Defenses document released by PNAC, famously, infamously, the year before 9/11, in which they were also calling for the new Pearl Harbor to galvanize the American public behind this transformation of the American military. What transformation? Well, a number of proposals, but one of those proposals was for race-specific bio-weapons to be made a politically useful tool.
So, at any rate, that’s the type of thing that Project Coast and Basson was involved with. And that Anthrax War documentary that was, again, aired on the CBC a couple of decades ago, got Basson on the record to admit he had had multiple meetings with David Kelly. He wouldn’t confirm whether those meetings took place at Porton Down or who arranged them, et cetera. But at any rate, we know David Kelly had multiple meetings with Wouter Basson.
So, at any rate, Kelly knew something with regard to Project Coast and what was being worked on there. We do obviously do not – we are not privy to the details of those. Those are a couple of things that we know Kelly had some connection to. Pasechnik working on weaponization of anthrax, Basson working on these race-specific bio-weapons, fertility vaccines, anthrax letters and other such things. So, we know that Kelly had some sort of connection to that.
Here is the other thing that we know: so, the question then is, “Okay, who was interested in keeping this information suppressed? How do we know it? Who was capable of covering this up?” Well, here’s a couple of things that we do know: we know that David Kelly was exploring, shortly before his death he was exploring with publishers in Oxford the possibility of publishing a book, a tell-all essentially of his work. And we know this from multiple reporting, there’s reports that have been made about this. Also, in that Anthrax War documentary, they have author Gordon Thomas on the record saying that he had been approached by David Kelly to help in the writing of such a book. And when pressed on the fact that, ‘Well, you’re a government employee, you are privy to the Official Secrets Act in the UK, you can’t go public with this information. You know that, right?’ And Kelly, apparently, according to this source, claimed that, “Well, I know that. But if I get someone else to write this book, then it won’t be breaching the Official Secrets Act.” At any rate, that’s what was claimed to be saying – he was saying shortly before his death.
We also know that MI-5, the British internal intelligence service, the FBI equivalent, if you will, in the UK, had sent a letter to David Kelly one week before his death warning him, essentially, to keep his mouth shut. And we know this because that letter was found unopened, it must be admitted, unopened amongst his mail when he died. However, friends and sources that were quoted by the Daily Mail in their report on this claimed that he absolutely did know the contents of that letter. This was not some sort of surprising thing to him. He had obviously, I am sure, received over the table and under the table warnings, as well as the official, formal letter that was actually written to him by MI-5 specifically warning him not to spill the secrets.
So, we know Kelly was very, very much involved in the biological weapons world of the ‘80s and ‘90s. And we know that he was being specifically threatened to keep his mouth shut. And we know that he was exploring the possibility of writing a book about his experiences. I think that has an awful lot to do with why we ended up – why he was discovered dead on Harrowdown Hill in July of 2003.
GR: And I also should point out, it’s not just Vladimir Pasechnik who died mysteriously, but you had other people like Benito Que on November 12th, I think, was found comatose in the street near the laboratory where he worked at the University of Miami Medical School and then died on the 6th. And then on November 16th, Don C. Wiley vanished and his abandoned rental car was found on the, you know, on a bridge outside Memphis, Tennessee. And there were like a whole string of other people, world class microbiologists. These all seem to point to the idea that this was, in effect, protecting the reality of bio-warfare from prying eyes. Which, perhaps, leads to the last three-and-a-half years, right? I mean, would you say something like that is accurate? Or is this just a coincidence?
JC: No, I think this is absolutely accurate. And again, I don’t mean to continue harping on this, but I just think that it’s interesting, this anthrax war documentary that was made nearly two decades ago and broadcast on the CBC, did talk about, at that time, they were talking about the creation of biological weapons that could be used in bio-warfare.
The fact that this – there was an entire industry developing around the idea of bio-security in the wake of the anthrax attacks of 2001 and they were talking about the billions of dollars that were slushing around through the system for various private contractors at that time in order to, essentially, create an entire industry around this. And it is interesting that, as you say, not just David Kelly, but a number of whistle-blowers or potential whistle-blowers, people who knew about the inner workings of this nascent industry, ended up dying shortly – or around the time of or shortly after the creation of this bio-security feeding frenzy that was going on.
So, one example of an interesting connection that deserves further investigation is BioPort as it was originally known, which was a company that developed an anthrax vaccine that was being shoved in the arms of US military personnel in the 1990s and up to the 2000s. In which, their anthrax vaccine was linked by many researchers to, for example, the Gulf War Syndrome that many veterans were suffering from and a whole host of health issues that were taking place. And the question, of course, at the time before the anthrax attacks of 2001 was, “Why is the US government paying for these vaccines? Why are they trying to cover up the demonstrable ill health effects that these vaccines are producing? What is the real threat here? Do we think a vaccine is going to be effective against some sort of weaponized anthrax? What is the point of this?” All of those questions, of course, went away in the event of the anthrax attacks because, suddenly, there is – obviously, we need to have our troops vaccinated. At the very least our troops and maybe the entire US population. And maybe the entire global population vaccinated against anthrax. Look, you saw what happened in 2001.
BioPort went on to become Emergent BioSolutions and was one of the companies involved in Operation Warp Speed. Of course, the US military operation to warp speed the completely untested vaccines, mRNA vaccines, into the veins of the American population and ultimately the people around the globe. So, yes, there is a definite through-line, a connecting through-line and historical continuity between the events that were developing around the death of David Kelly and the emergence of the bio-security grid. And what we have seen over the past few years involving many of the same players and many of the same companies that were involved at the time of Kelly’s death.
Part Three
GR: The World Health Organization said recently, or maybe a month or two ago, that the public health emergency of emergency concern is over according to Tedros. But I’m worried by warnings that put forward, like, almost from the start by Bill Gates that – of all people – that the next virus to come is potentially going to be even worse. And they’re preparing a pandemic treaty set to go into effect, I guess, in May of 2024. I know that you have researched bio-security as much as is possible, at least from an open source perspective. Could you maybe give us a hint as to what is coming? Because I know most of us are kind of distracted by the Russian war in Ukraine, and I mean, it is understandable that it’s a distraction, right? But the thing is, if we keep our eye on that bio-security ball, something else, it seems to me, is coming. I mean…
JC: Yeah.
GR: Or maybe —
JC: Yeah.
GR: — I could ask you: how will this second pandemic be different from the last in —
JC: Yeah.
GR:— terms of effects and protocols?
JC: Excellent question. Well, I think that’s obviously the question for our times, because it has been my – I’ve maintained this since the beginning of this generated crisis that we’ve been living under for the past few years – this was not about a virus, this was about setting up the global infrastructure for responding to any declared public health threat at any time. And that is exactly what is taking place. So, for people who don’t know, please research it.
At this point, they are publicly stating and claiming that they are moving towards the ratification of a potential international pandemic health treaty, which they’re not calling a treaty, and/or the amendments to the International Health Regulations which is an entire governing fabric that the World Health Organization uses to essentially impose its will upon all World Health Organization member states which is basically every nation state on the planet at the next World Health Assembly in May of 2024.
Now, of course, that could be a faint or a dupe. They may extend that deadline, they may spring it early. The International Health Regulations could be – the amendments could be adopted at any time, essentially, that they choose to do so. It may be two separate processes, they may merge these processes. It’s deliberately left very confusing and it’s hidden behind layers of gobbledygook. They’re calling it the Proposed Agreements on International Health Concerns, blah blah blah. There’s an inter-governmental negotiating body that’s running this process. It’s all happening behind closed doors.
I have talked about this quite – in quite deep – a lot of detail recently in my work, because I think it is important. Because they are setting up the infrastructure that will govern the response to whatever declared threat, public health threat comes in the future. Now that public health threat very well could be some sort of biological agent, biological weapon; a release of some sort of biological agent. The likes of which Porton Down and Fort Dietrich and others have been working on for many years. It could be a completely generated health scare that is not an actual public health concern, but they could pretend that it is one. And part of the amendments to the International Health Regulations and others is essentially to expand the powers of the World Health Organization to essentially declare anything, even a potential risk to public health can be declared as this type of public health emergency of international concern that can then basically spring into action the World Health Organization and whatever powers it gives itself under its new proposed treaty and/or amendments.
So, we’re facing some very serious concerns. At the very, very best I think we are facing the possibility, the probability of the hard-wiring into global health – public health infrastructure, this multi-billion, perhaps multi-trillion dollar ultimately boondoggle of bio-security and big pharma manufacturers and others directly benefiting from this. But at very worst, we are facing the possibly of really widespread release of some actual biological agent in order to essentially justify this infrastructure that’s being put in place.
And you raised the spectre, for example, of Bill Gates, who as people may or may not know was writing about, ‘Oh yes, you know, this pandemic, we’re treating it this way. But the next one –’ and he was actually calling it “Pandemic II,” as in Pandemic II like World War II, ‘– we’re going to have to fight like our parents generation fought World War II.’ Some very creepy rhetoric. But beyond the rhetoric, of course, people may or may not know, he wrote a book, which I reviewed on my podcast, about how to fight the next pandemic in which he was talking about the types of things that could be embedded in some sort of pandemic treaty like a global pandemic firefighter response team that could spring into action, be activated by the World Health Organization, and spring into action and go to whatever place that any sort of public health concern was developing, and well, do what they will: inject people, quarantine people. Whatever they need to do to – or whatever they declare they need to do in order to counteract the health crisis.
So, that’s the type of threats that we are facing right now. And I think this does —
GR: Yeah.
JC: — definitely tie – it ties —
GR: We keep having —
JC: — into that —
GR: — NATO troops on the ground.
JC: — story of David Kelly.
GR: Yeah. Wow. Just a couple of minutes left. Do you think that there’s at least a possibility that we can back away from it? I mean, through mass action or something like that, to keep this from falling into place?
JC: Yes, absolutely. There are signs that this – it is not inevitable. And I think sometimes in independent media spaces, the various organizations are portrayed as some sort of world bestriding conquerors that can do anything that they want. But that is not the case. Often it is Toto pulling back the curtain and finding it’s just a withered old man pulling some strings back there.
And examples of that are – for example, from the 2009 conference of the parties that the UNFCCC – the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change – was running in Copenhagen in 2009. At that particular meeting, it was being proposed that this would be the unveiling of some sort of new global agreements that would form the basis for a new global governance infrastructure of some sort. The EU chief at that time was calling this the beginning of global government in Copenhagen, it’s going to happen. That was derailed. It was derailed because of squabbling between developing nations and developed nations over who was going to fund essentially this takeover. But at any rate, it was derailed. In 2009, Copenhagen did not result in the type of agreement that was being planned at that time.
The UN is running something called Our Common Agenda right now, which was unveiled to the public in 2021 by Secretary General Antonio Guterres in which, essentially, it’s the creation, the beefing up of the UN to give it more teeth in various aspects from cyberspace to outer space and everything in between. Literally, this is part of the remit of this common agenda. They had planned for a summit of the future to be held at the sidelines of the UN General Assembly in New York in September of 2023. But that has been now postponed to September of 2024 because they don’t quite have all their ducks in a row yet.
So, I think there is a definite chance that we can derail, forestall, or otherwise throw roadblocks in the ways of these various agendas. These are not people who have the ability to dictate reality. They have to respond to reality. Now, there are political movements and currents that are developing in a number of countries to stop the WHO treaty, proposed treaty, in its tracks. Or even, to exit the WHO altogether. In fact, I note there was a couple of dozen congressmen and other high-ranking political officials in the US that was holding a press conference on the steps of the Capitol just a few weeks ago.
On that very note of we need to exit the WHO. This is building political momentum behind some very radical changes that could happen. And I do believe there is a chance at this. But only if people are aware of the gravity of the threat that we’re facing.
GR: Thank you very much.
JC: Thank you for having me on.
GR: James Corbett is a filmmaker and a producer of the Corbett Report. Check out his productions, including a re-broadcast of the Requiem for the Suicided: David Kelly at corbettreport.com.
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Notes:
June 30th, 2023 by Óscar Manteca
June 30th, 2023 by Peter Koenig
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***
The answer imposes itself: The devil himself. Because there is no international law allowing such human tyranny. This is an elite-made “rules-based order” striking down any dictatorial, military-enforced command on humanity.
That’s what the West has become since the Covid fraud, an empire led by evil itself.
The West has not just become a sea of criminal institutions, if not stopped NOW, it will continue with its drive to complete its eugenics and transhumanism agenda – way before 2030.
We, the People, must stand up NOW against this tyrannical attempt by foremost three key institutions to dominate, enslave and tyrannize to death most of the commons of world populations.
These institutions are:
first, the United Nations (UN) created with the aim to help resolve conflicts among countries and preserve peace in the world;
second, the so-called World Health Organization (WHO) which is everything but a defender of world health – because it is by over 80% funded by big pharma and by the genocidal type-criminal Bill Gates Foundation; and
third, by arguably one of the most corrupt institutions in the world, the European Union, with its unelected head, the European Commission (EC).
The EC calling the shots for 27 member countries, virtually all of whom are led by co-opted, utterly immoral leaders, graduates from the World Economic Forum’s (WEF) academy for Young Global Leaders (YGL).
They have not just by accident been “democratically” elected to lead all of the 27 EU countries. These “elections” were and continue to be “manufactured and manipulated”, if We, the People, do not open our eyes and call STOP. Algorithms and Artificial Intelligence (AI) work wonders.
Democracy has ceased to exist long ago in the West, if, indeed, it ever existed. With its horrendous, exploitative and murderous colonial past, going a half a millennium back, the West, notably Europe, the roots of the West are anchored, has certainly never had an inkling and want for democracy.
To the contrary. But using the term democracy as a propaganda tool is perfect and has worked up to today. It even helps the European key colonizers to continue their dirty colonization in disguise.
These three agencies, UN, WHO, EU / EC, are all in bed with the WEF.
Or better, they are led by individuals compromised by the WEF.
UN Secretary General Guterres, is a close ally of WEF’s CEO Klaus Schwab,
Ursula Von der Leyen is on the Board of Trustees of the WEF,
and WHO’s Director General Mr. Tedros has been chosen and imposed by Bill Gates in the position he currently holds.
Gates is a strong supporter and ally of the WEF. Tedros was before a member of the Board of GAVI, the Vaxx-Alliance closely associated with WHO and which is physically located across the street from WHO in Geneva; and has of course immunity and a tax-free status in protective Switzerland.
The WEF too is but an executing agency – a willing executing agency. So, who is behind the WEF? Big-Big Finance. BlackRock is the largest single donor and supporter of this arguably world’s wealthiest and most criminal NGO, the WEF, located tax-free and legally protected in Geneva, Switzerland.
The power of Finance is the works of sociopaths. BlackRock is apparently negotiating with Volodymyr Zelensky the privatization of much of Ukraine. As it stands, BR owns already about 60% of Ukraine’s most fertile agricultural land.
Greed- and power-driven Big Finance has turned into a diabolical death cult, about to take over the world. First by drastically reducing the globe’s population, so Mother Earth’s generous but nevertheless limited resources will last longer for a small elite; and second, making of the survivors, 5G-driven digitally-manipulated transhuman slaves.
People’s eyes are kept shut by a tremendously corrupted Big Finance-bought Western media.
The purpose of this writing is to open eyes, and hopefully these opened eyes will open more eyes – and then more – and so on, until there is a critical mass that screams in unison “NO, NOT WITH US”, standing up in solidarity, tearing these Western cum UN institutions to shreds before they bring down our civilization.
We are indeed at a crossroads of the worst humanitarian catastrophe, worldwide destruction of the economy, engineered annihilation of agriculture, bringing about poverty, famine and eventually death. See this:
Video: The Engineered Destabilization of the Global Economy. Prof. Michel Chossudovsky
By , June 28, 2023
***
Only, We, the People, in SOLIDARITY, can and must stand up against these institutions, dismantle them and bring their leaders to justice. Because if we do not act now, we are doomed.
Now, listen to this absolute evil plan – once it’s implemented, there is hardly a way back.
In order to justify their digital Vaxx and ID certificate tyranny, they are creating genetically-modified mosquitoes in military-grade laboratories. These mosquitoes will then be let loose to “vaccinate” people with selective diseases. One of the first such diseases is malaria, for which there is no real effective cure nor true vaccination.
What is good for malaria, could be done for much more deadly diseases like Ebola – which suspiciously broke out in a series of West African countries in 2012. The death rate of Ebola may be as high as 50%.
Genetically-modified disease-equipped mosquitoes would be very effective in killing people, hard to trace back, especially with the corrupted media making you believe that these outbreaks are real, as were predicted and warned by WHO, the UN and, of course, the ultra-philanthropist, Bill Gates, already years ago – and that you better get “vaxxed”.
When the ambiance starts smelling of death, the flocking and running to the medical vaxx needle would hardly be avoidable.
Yet, such catastrophes, the crossroads of humanity’s extinction or survival — would be the instruments of the “devil – clad in white collar and tie” – the uniform of financial supremacy.
Read this:
“Since the One World Government’s “vaccine” con is essentially up, with bivalent DEATHVAX™ uptake currently at around 1.5%, the technocommunist sociopaths have realized that the best way to continue their eugenics program is by stealth.
Enter the genetically modified mosquito which has been expressly created to more effectively genetically modify humans; to wit:
A box full of genetically modified mosquitos successfully vaccinated a human against malaria in a trial funded by the National Institute of Health (NIH).
Gates’s partner in crime Dr. Mengele 2.0 aka Dr. Fauci happens to for all intents and purposes control the NIH, which “coincidentally” was illegally funding COVID-19 gain of function (GoF) research at the Wuhan virology institute.”
See full story.
The UN, WHO, EC / EU – and of course, the WEF, diabolical institutions by nature and their leadership cannot be reformed, but must be dismantled for the sake of humanity.
Insight must be sufficiently powerful to open people’s eyes and ears, to mobilize them to action in SOLIDARITY, taking measures in spirit and unison, not in violence, but in deeds that vibrate worldwide at a level where a collapse into a civilization-ending abyss may be avoided.
“There is a crack in everything where the light shines through.”
*
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Peter Koenig is a geopolitical analyst and a former Senior Economist at the World Bank and the World Health Organization (WHO), where he worked for over 30 years around the world. He lectures at universities in the US, Europe and South America. He writes regularly for online journals and is the author of Implosion – An Economic Thriller about War, Environmental Destruction and Corporate Greed; and co-author of Cynthia McKinney’s book “When China Sneezes: From the Coronavirus Lockdown to the Global Politico-Economic Crisis” (Clarity Press – November 1, 2020).
Peter is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG). He is also a non-resident Senior Fellow of the Chongyang Institute of Renmin University, Beijing.
June 30th, 2023 by Ben Bartee
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***
Surveying the economy-shattering “climate change” lies for social control as relayed by our self-appointed technocratic overlords.
JPMorgan & Chase CEO Jamie Dimon’s annual love letter to his shareholders opens with self-congratulation for maintaining profitability even in the current state of inflation – something that most middle-class or working-class Americans can’t necessarily say.
After all, the American middle and working classes don’t have Senators and regulators and presidents on speed dial, so why would they enjoy the economic largesse afforded to the architects of the multinational merger of corporate and state power?
Global neofeudalism is humming along at full speed. Still, the serfs’ estates aren’t shrinking fast enough for the likes of the World Economic Forum.
JPMorgan & Chase, Dimon explains, has just the solution: confiscate what’s left of their property for climate change under eminent domain.
Via JPMorgan Chase & Co. (emphases added):
“The window for action to avert the costliest impacts of global climate change is closing…
Permitting reforms are desperately needed to allow [green energy] investment to be done in any kind of timely way. We may even need to evoke eminent domain – we simply are not getting the adequate investments fast enough for grid, solar, wind and pipeline initiatives. Policies like the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, the Creating Helpful Incentives to Produce Semiconductors (CHIPS) and Science Act, and the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) — that hold the potential to unlock over $1 trillion in clean technology development — need to be implemented effectively.”
As I recently covered elsewhere, the captured government of Ireland is planning to sacrifice many thousands of cows to the climate change gods.
Leaked documents suggest the Irish government is planning to cull 65,000 cows a year for the next three years, at a cost of 200million euros a year, to meet its climate targets. Get ready for more, not less, of this insanity. pic.twitter.com/gQ7QB06tif
— RAW EGG NATIONALIST (@Babygravy9) June 1, 2023
The phenomenon of suicidal governments immolating their own domestic agricultural industries, more or less the same phenomenon, as I covered elsewhere, is underway in Third World nations like Sri Lanka as well as across Europe – all in the name of fighting something called “climate change” that the anointed “experts” don’t even bother getting into the specifics of anymore after their histrionic prior predictions of mass die-offs failed to come to fruiting.
Speaking of which, one little visionary autistic — a brave and stunning warrior of the climate change cause popular with all the right technocrats – recently passed an unceremonious milestone in her climate change prognostication career…
Via Western Journal, June 20th:
“Five years ago, almost to the day, Greta Thunberg made an apocalyptic claim about the fate of the world, and now we know whether or not it has come true.
On June 21, 2018, the then-15-year-old Swedish climate activist sent out an alarming tweet that seemed to imply that due to climate change caused by fossil fuels, we had only five years left to act to prevent the end of the world.
“A top scientist is warning that climate change will wipe out all of humanity unless we stop using fossil fuels over the next five years,” the tweet read.
Now, it is nearly the five-year anniversary of Thunberg’s dire warning, and to the surprise of almost no one, except perhaps Thunberg, the world has survived and appears to be going nowhere for the time being.”
JUST IN: According to Greta Thunberg’s 2018 tweet, all of humanity will be wiped out by today. pic.twitter.com/ZeEZFRcozD
— WhaleWire (@WhaleWire) June 22, 2023
In a sane world, this kind of totally discrediting, overblown proclamation would be just that – discrediting and disqualifying from public life.
Instead, the corporate state media will silently move the goalposts, and their favorite Asperger’s mascot will be permitted to continue her histrionic forecasting of doom and gloom until we’re all locked down in 15-minute cities.
*
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This article was originally published on The Daily Bell.
Ben Bartee is an independent Bangkok-based American journalist with opposable thumbs. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.
Featured image is from TDB
June 30th, 2023 by Ben Norton
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***
37 years after a 1986 International Court of Justice ruling, the United States still refuses to pay Nicaragua the reparations it legally owes. Today, the Nicaraguan government is demanding that the United Nations take action.
The International Court of Justice in the Hague ruled in 1986 that the US government had violated international law in its attacks on Nicaragua and that it owed the Central American nation reparations.
June 27, 2023 was the 37th anniversary of this ruling, and Washington still to this day refuses to pay Nicaragua the money that it legally owes it.
The International Court of Justice (ICJ) is the judicial arm of the United Nations. (It is not to be confused with the International Criminal Court (ICC), which is independent of the UN. The ICJ was founded in 1945, in order to settle disputes between states; whereas the ICC was only formed in 2002, in order to prosecute individuals.)
In 1986, the ICJ determined that the US repeatedly violated international law by:
Nicaragua’s current government has publicly called on the US to meet its obligations under international law.
This June 26, Nicaragua’s President Daniel Ortega sent a letter to UN Secretary General António Guterres demanding that Washington pay reparations.
“There exists a historical debt with the Nicaraguan people that 37 years later has not been settled by the United States”, Ortega said. “It is an obligation clearly established in a final judgment of the highest international judicial authority, the International Court of Justice”.
The Nicaraguan president wrote:
The list of direct damages includes human damages, direct material damages, defense expenses, losses caused by the embargo. Also other damages such as social losses in education, health, work, social security, as well as potential losses for development and production.
From all points of view, the nation’s right to development was irreparably affected.
…
The estimated value of the damages in March 1988, the date on which the Report was presented along with all supporting documentation, was estimated at $12 billion. This amount does not reflect damages after said date, the consequences of which are currently verifiable.
For example, to this day, the country’s social security system continues to pay pensions to those injured in the war and their relatives, including those who were part of the counterrevolutionary forces illegally financed by the United States, which never assumed the social cost of said illegalities.
Adjusted for inflation, $12 billion in 1988 would be more than $31 billion in 2023.
Following the triumph of Nicaragua’s socialist Sandinista Revolution in 1979, the United States created a far-right terror army that sought to violently overthrow the new revolutionary government.
The CIA armed and trained death squads known as the Contras – short for “Counterrevolutionaries”.
With US backing, the Contras systematically used terrorism to destabilize Nicaraguan society.
A former Contra leader from one of the country’s most powerful oligarchic families, Edgar Chamorro, published an open letter in the New York Times in 1986 admitting that “terror is the most effective weapon of the ‘contras’“.
It “was premeditated policy to terrorize civilian noncombatants to prevent them from cooperating with the Government. Hundreds of civilian murders, mutilations, tortures and rapes were committed in pursuit of this policy”, he recalled.
Referring to the Contras as “CIA puppets” and “a proxy army controlled by the U.S. Government”, Chamorro wrote that “the ‘contras’ burn down schools, homes and health centers as fast as the Sandinistas build them”.
Chamorro said that US-backed Contras seized poor villages, then “selected those civilians they suspected of sympathizing with the Government and shot them in cold blood as a lesson”.
US President Ronald Reagan with Contra leader “Doctor Henry” outside the White House
In 1984, the Nicaraguan government filed a case with the United Nation’s judicial organ, the International Court of Justice (ICJ), demanding legal action against the United States for its attacks.
The US government refused to represent itself in court, boycotting the case. In doing so, Washington refused to accept the legitimacy of the UN-backed ICJ, undermining the so-called “rules-based international order” that the US claims it supports.
The ICJ case was officially called “Military and Paramilitary Activities in and against Nicaragua (Nicaragua v. United States of America)”.
The judges wrote in 1986 that the court:
Decides that the United States of America, by training, arming, equipping, financing and supplying the contra forces or otherwise encouraging, supporting and aiding military and paramilitary activities in and against Nicaragua, has acted, against the Republic of Nicaragua, in breach of its obligation under customary international law not to intervene in the affairs of another State;
…
Decides that the United States of America, by certain attacks on Nicaraguan territoryin 1983-1984, namely attacks on Puerto Sandino on 13 September and 14 October 1983 ; an attack on Corinto on 10 October 1983 ; an attack on Potosi Naval Base on 4/5 January 1984 ; an attack on San Juan del Sur on 7 March 1984 ; attacks on patrol boats at Puerto Sandino on 28 and 30 March 1984 ; and an attack on San Juan del Norte on 9 April 1984 ; and further by those acts of intervention referred to in subparagraph (3) hereof which involve the use of force, has acted, against the Republic of Nicaragua, in breach of its obligation under customary international law not to use force against another State;
…
Decides that, by laying mines in the internal or territorial waters of the Republic of Nicaragua during the first months of 1984, the United States of America has acted, against the Republic of Nicaragua, in breach of its obligations under customary international law not to use force against another State, not to intervene in its affairs, not to violate its sovereignty and not to interrupt peaceful maritime commerce;
…
Finds that the United States of America, by producing in 1983 a manual entitled Operaciones sicológicas [sic] en guerra de guerrillas, and disseminating it to contra forces, has encouraged the commission by them of acts contrary to general principles of humanitarian law;
…
Decides that the United States of America, by the attacks on Nicaraguan territory … and by declaring a general embargo on trade with Nicaragua on 1 May 1985, has committed acts calculated to deprive of its object and purpose the Treaty of Friendship, Commerce and Navigation between the Parties signed at Managua on 2 1 January 1956;
…
Decides that the United States of America is under a duty immediately to cease and to refrain from all such acts as may constitute breaches of the foregoing legal obligations;
…
Decides that the United States of America is under an obligation to make reparation to the Republic of Nicaragua for all injury caused to Nicaragua by the breaches of obligations under customary international law enumerated above.
The ICJ ruling only considered the crimes that Washington had committed against Nicaragua in the 1980s.
The United States has a history of invading and militarily occupying the Central American nation, on multiple occasions.
After decades of military occupation, the US Marines were expelled from Nicaragua in 1933, due to an armed rebellion led by revolutionary General Augusto Sandino.
To maintain its political and economic control over the country, Washington left behind a National Guard led by Anastasio Somoza García. Somoza murdered Sandino, before later taking state power for himself, with US support.
The Somoza dynasty ruled Nicaragua as a brutal right-wing dictatorship. Somoza García’s son, Anastasio Somoza Debayle, followed in his father’s footsteps and ran the country with an iron fist, until he was overthrown in the 1979 Sandinista Revolution.
US President Richard Nixon with Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza Debayle in 1971
In the 1980s, Nicaragua’s civilian population suffered the horrors of the US-sponsored terror war, as well as a devastating economic blockade, which caused hyperinflation and led to a shortage of many goods.
Washington’s threat to continue waging this war and imposing the blockade led Nicaraguans to vote in the 1990 election for right-wing presidential candidate Violeta Chamorro, from the wealthy oligarchic dynasty that has long sought to control the country (in alliance with the US).
Chamorro’s electoral victory was the result of massive US meddling and manipulation. The CIA and other US government agencies spent millions of dollars creating, supporting, and advising Chamorro’s campaign.
Violeta Chamorro addresses the US Congress in 1991
In 1991, Chamorro’s US-installed government told the ICJ that it did not plan on continuing with the case against Washington.
However, Chamorro’s decision to discontinue the case was a direct result of the very same US violations of international law and attacks on Nicaraguan sovereignty that the ICJ had ruled on in the first place.
Nicaragua’s sovereign government has the right to return to the ICJ case today and demand that its legally binding ruling be implemented.
In his letter to the United Nations secretary general, President Daniel Ortega pointed out that, in 1991, Chamorro’s government in “Nicaragua discontinued the proceedings before the Court to determine the amount owed, but at no time did it waive the payment of the debt, that is, the right to receive compensation“.
Ortega’s letter made it clear that Chamorro’s decision not to proceed with the case does not change Washington’s legal obligation to pay reparations.
The current Nicaraguan president wrote to the UN:
Nicaragua never received anything to which it was not entitled (such as the right not to be attacked) in exchange for discontinuing the trial before the Court.
Instead of receiving compensation as it morally and legally corresponds, Nicaragua continues to be the object of a new type of aggression. It is in this context, in which Nicaragua has once again been the victim of attacks, now euphemistically called sanctions, and the victim of an attempted coup, that the people of Nicaragua remember the historic sentence of the International Court of Justice.
…
Nicaragua takes this opportunity to recall that the judgments of the International Court of Justice are final and of inescapable compliance, and therefore the United States has the legal obligation to comply with the reparations ordered by the judgment of June 27, 1986.
*
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Featured image: The United Nations’ International Court of Justice (ICJ)
June 30th, 2023 by Mike Whitney
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First published on February 6, 2023
***
We want to emphasize that the officials from the OSCE were operating in their professional capacity gathering first-hand evidence of shelling in the area. What their data shows is that Ukrainian Forces were bombing and killing their own people. This has all been documented and has not been challenged.
So, the question we must all ask ourselves is this: Is the bombardment and slaughter of one’s own people an ‘act of war’?
We think it is.
And if we are right, then we must logically assume that the war began before the Russian invasion (which was launched a full week later).
We must also assume that Russia’s alleged “unprovoked aggression” was not unprovoked at all but was the appropriate humanitarian response to the deliberate killing of civilians. In order to argue that the Russian invasion was ‘not provoked’, we would have to say that firing over 4,000 artillery shells into towns and neighborhoods where women and children live, is not a provocation? Who will defend that point of view?
No one, because it’s absurd. The killing of civilians in the Donbas was a clear provocation, a provocation that was aimed at goading Russia into a war. And –as we said earlier– the OSCE had monitors on the ground who provided full documentation of the shelling as it took place, which is as close to ironclad, eyewitness testimony as you’re going to get.
This, of course, is a major break with the “official narrative” which identifies Russia as the perpetrator of hostilities. But, as we’ve shown, that simply isn’t the case. The official narrative is wrong. Even so, it might not surprise you to know that most of the mainstream media completely omitted any coverage of the OSCE’s fact-finding activities in east Ukraine. The one exception to was Reuters that published a deliberately opaque account published on February 18 titled “Russia voices alarm over sharp increase of Donbass shelling”. Here’s an excerpt:
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov voiced alarm on Friday over a sharp increase in shelling in eastern Ukraine and accused the OSCE special monitoring mission of glossing over what he said were Ukrainian violations of the peace process….
Washington and its allies have raised fears that the upsurge in violence in the Donbass could form part of a Russian pretext to invade Ukraine. Tensions are already high over a Russian military buildup to the north, east and south of Ukraine.
“We are very concerned by the reports of recent days – yesterday and the day before there was a sharp increase in shelling using weapons that are prohibited under the Minsk agreements,” Lavrov said, referring to peace accords aimed at ending the conflict. “So far we are seeing the special monitoring mission is doing its best to smooth over all questions that point to the blame of Ukraine’s armed forces,” he told a news conference.
Ukraine’s military on Friday denied violating the Minsk peace process and accused Moscow of waging an information war to say that Kyiv was shelling civilians, allegations it said were lies and designed to provoke it.” (Russia voices alarm over sharp increase of Donbass shelling, Reuters)
Notice the clever way that Reuters frames its coverage so that the claims of the Ukrainian military are given as much credibility as the claims of the Russian Foreign Minister. What Reuters fails to point out is that the OSCE’s report verifies Lavrov’s version of events while disproving the claims of the Ukrainians. It is the job of a journalist to make the distinction between fact and fiction but, once again, we see how agenda-driven news is not meant to inform but to mislead.
The point we are trying to make is simple: The war in Ukraine was not launched by a tyrannical Russian leader (Putin) bent on rebuilding the Soviet Empire. That narrative is a fraud that was cobbled together by neocon spin-meisters trying to build public support for a war with Russia. The facts I am presenting here can be identified on a map where the actual explosions took place and were then recorded by officials whose job was to fulfill that very task. Can you see the difference between the two? In one case, the storyline rests on speculation, conjecture and psychobabble; while in the other, the storyline is linked to actual events that took place on the ground and were catalogued by trained professionals in the field. In which version of events do you have more confidence?
Bottom line: Russia did not start the war in Ukraine. That is a fake narrative. The responsibility lies with the Ukrainian Army and their leaders in Kiev.
And here’s something else that is typically excluded in the media’s selective coverage.Before Putin sent his tanks across the border into Ukraine, he invoked United Nations Article 51 which provides a legal justification for military intervention. Of course, the United States has done this numerous times to provide a fig leaf of legitimacy to its numerous military interventions. But, in this case, you can see where the so-called Responsibility To Protect (R2P) could actually be justified, after all, by most estimates, the Ukrainian army has killed over 14,000 ethnic Russians since the US-backed coup 8 years ago. If ever there was a situation in which a defensive military operation could be justified, this was it. But that still doesn’t fully explain why Putin invoked UN Article 51. For that, we turn to former weapons inspector Scott Ritter, who explained it like this:
“Russian President Vladimir Putin, citing Article 51 as his authority, ordered what he called a “special military operation”….
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.]..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.” (“Russia, Ukraine & the Law of War: Crime of Aggression”, Consortium News)
Here’s a bit more background from an article by foreign policy analyst Danial Kovalik:
“One must begin this discussion by accepting the fact that there was already a war happening in Ukraine for the eight years preceding the Russian military incursion in February 2022. And, this war by the government in Kiev… claimed the lives of around 14,000 people, many of them children, and displaced around 1.5 million more … The government in Kiev, and especially its neo-Nazi battalions, carried out attacks against these peoples … precisely because of their ethnicity. ..
While the UN Charter prohibits unilateral acts of war, it also provides, in Article 51, that “nothing in the present Charter shall impair the inherent right of individual or collective self-defense… ” And this right of self-defense has been interpreted to permit countries to respond, not only to actual armed attacks, but also to the threat of imminent attack.
In light of the above, it is my assessment.. that Russia had a right to act in its own self-defense by intervening in Ukraine, which had become a proxy of the US and NATO for an assault – not only on Russian ethnics within Ukraine – but also upon Russia itself.” (“Why Russia’s intervention in Ukraine is legal under international law”, RT)
So, has anyone in the western media reported on the fact that Putin invoked UN Article 51 before he launched the Special Military Operation?
No, they haven’t, because to do so, would be an admission that Putin’s military operation complies with international law. Instead, the media continues to spread the fiction that ‘Hitler-Putin is trying to rebuild the Soviet empire’, a claim for which there is not a scintilla of evidence. Keep in mind, Putin’s operation does not involve the toppling of a foreign government to install a Moscow-backed stooge, or the arming and training a foreign military that will be used as proxies to fight a geopolitical rival, or the stuffing a country with state-of-the-art weaponry to achieve his own narrow strategic objectives, or perpetrating terrorist acts of industrial sabotage (Nord-Stream 2) to prevent the economic integration of Asia and Europe. No, Putin hasn’t engaged in any of these things. But Washington certainly has, because Washington isn’t constrained by international law. In Washington’s eyes, international law is merely an inconvenience that is dismissively shrugged off whenever unilateral action is required. But Putin is not nearly as cavalier about such matters, in fact, he has a long history of playing by the rules because he believes the rules help to strengthen everyone’s security. And, he’s right; they do.
And that’s why he invoked Article 51 before he sent the troops to help the people in the Donbas. He felt he had a moral obligation to lend them his assistance but wanted his actions to comply with international law. We think he achieved both.
US imperial planner George Kennan, an architect of the first cold war, wrote in 1948: “we have about 50% of the world’s wealth but only 6.3% of its population” “Our real task” is “to maintain this position of disparity” @BenjaminNorton
Here’s something else you will never see in the western media. You’ll never see the actual text of Putin’s security demands that were made a full 2 months before the war broke out. And, the reason you won’t see them, is because his demands were legitimate, reasonable and necessary. All Putin wanted was basic assurances that NATO was not planning to put its bases, armies and missile sites on Russia’s border. In other words, he was doing the same thing that all responsible leaders do to defend the safety and security of their own people.
Article 1
The Parties shall cooperate on the basis of principles of indivisible, equal and undiminished security and to these ends:
shall not undertake actions nor participate in or support activities that affect the security of the other Party;
shall not implement security measures adopted by each Party individually or in the framework of an international organization, military alliance or coalition that could undermine core security interests of the other Party.Article 3
The Parties shall not use the territories of other States with a view to preparing or carrying out an armed attack against the other Party or other actions affecting core security interests of the other Party.
Article 4
The United States of America shall undertake to prevent further eastward expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and deny accession to the Alliance to the States of the former Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.
The United States of America shall not establish military bases in the territory of the States of the former Union of Soviet Socialist Republics that are not members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, use their infrastructure for any military activities or develop bilateral military cooperation with them.
Article 5
The Parties shall refrain from deploying their armed forces and armaments, including in the framework of international organizations, military alliances or coalitions, in the areas where such deployment could be perceived by the other Party as a threat to its national security, with the exception of such deployment within the national territories of the Parties.
The Parties shall refrain from flying heavy bombers equipped for nuclear or non-nuclear armaments or deploying surface warships of any type, including in the framework of international organizations, military alliances or coalitions, in the areas outside national airspace and national territorial waters respectively, from where they can attack targets in the territory of the other Party.
The Parties shall maintain dialogue and cooperate to improve mechanisms to prevent dangerous military activities on and over the high seas, including agreeing on the maximum approach distance between warships and aircraft.
Article 6
The Parties shall undertake not to deploy ground-launched intermediate-range and shorter-range missiles outside their national territories, as well as in the areas of their national territories, from which such weapons can attack targets in the national territory of the other Party.
Article 7
The Parties shall refrain from deploying nuclear weapons outside their national territories and return such weapons already deployed outside their national territories at the time of the entry into force of the Treaty to their national territories. The Parties shall eliminate all existing infrastructure for deployment of nuclear weapons outside their national territories.
The Parties shall not train military and civilian personnel from non-nuclear countries to use nuclear weapons. The Parties shall not conduct exercises or training for general-purpose forces, that include scenarios involving the use of nuclear weapons.” (“To Make Sense of War”, Israel Shamir, Unz Review)
It doesn’t take a genius to figure out what Putin was worried about. He was worried about NATO expansion and, in particular, the emergence of a hostile military alliance backed by Washington-groomed Nazis occupying territory on his western flank. Was that unreasonable of him? Should he have embraced these US-backed Russophobes and allowed them to place their missiles on his border? Would that have been the prudent thing to do?
So, what can we deduce from Putin’s list of demands?
First, we can deduce that he is not trying to reconstruct the Soviet empire as the MSM relentlessly insists. The list focuses exclusively on security-related demands, nothing else.
Second, it proves that the war could have easily been avoided had Zelensky simply maintained the status quo and formally announced that Ukraine would remain neutral. In fact, Zelensky actually agreed to neutrality in negotiations with Moscow in March, but Washington prevented the Ukrainian president from going through with the deal which means that the Biden administration is largely responsible for the ongoing conflict. (RT published an article today stating clearly that an agreement had been reached between Russia and Ukraine in March but the deal was intentionally scuttled by the US and UK. Washington wanted a war.)
Third, it shows that Putin is a reasonable leader whose demands should have been eagerly accepted. Was it unreasonable of Putin to ask that “The Parties shall refrain from deploying their armed forces and… military alliances.. in the areas where such deployment could be perceived by the other Party as a threat to its national security”? Was it unreasonable for him the ask that “The Parties shall eliminate all existing infrastructure for deployment of nuclear weapons outside their national territories”?
Where exactly are the “unreasonable demands” that Putin supposedly made?
There aren’t any. Putin made no demands that the US wouldn’t have made if ‘the shoe was on the other foot.’
Forth, it proves that the war is not a struggle for Ukrainian liberation or democracy. That’s hogwash. It is a war that is aimed at “weakening” Russia and eventually removing Putin from power. Those are the overriding goals. What that means is that Ukrainian soldiers are not dying for their country, they are dying for an elitist dream to expand NATO, crush Russia, encircle China, and extend US hegemony for another century. Ukraine is merely the battlefield on which the Great Power struggle is being fought.
There are number points we are trying to make in this article:
The aim of the Minsk agreement was to end the fighting between the Ukrainian army and ethnic Russians in the Donbas region of Ukraine. It was the responsibility of the four participants in the treaty– Germany, France, Russia and Ukraine– to ensure that both sides followed the terms of the deal. But in December, former German Chancellor Angela Merkel said in an interview with a German magazine, that there was never any intention of implementing the deal, instead, the plan was to use the time to make Ukraine stronger in order to prepare for a war with Russia. So, clearly, from the very beginning, the United States intended to provoke a war with Russia.
On September 5, 2014, Germany, France, Ukraine and Russia all signed Minsk, but the treaty failed and the fighting resumed.
On February 12, 2015, Minsk 2 was signed, but that failed, as well.
Please, watch this short segment on You Tube by Amit Sengupta who gives a brief rundown of Minsk and its implications: (I transcribed the piece myself and any mistakes are mine.)
(11:40 minute) “In 2015, Germany and France were supposed to play a neutral role.They were supposed to make Ukraine and Russia follow the rules. But they didn’t do that, and the reason they didn’t do that is what Angela Merkel revealed in her interview on December 7. Merkel said, “The 2014 Minsk agreement was an attempt to give time to Ukraine. It also gave time to become stronger as can be seen today. The Ukraine of 2014 and 2015 is not the modern Ukraine.” Basically, all three partners of the Minsk Agreement lied and betrayed Russia. Even Putin said, “One day Russia will have to reach an agreement with Ukraine, but Germany and France betrayed Russia, and now they are helping Ukraine with weapons.”… It is a shame that western political leaders engage in negotiations that they do not intend to honor or enforce…(Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko has admitted the same as Merkel and Hollande)….Now even Putin has acknowledged that it was a mistake to agree to the Minsk Accords. He even said that the Donbas problem should have been resolved by force-of-arms at the time. (2015) Russia waited 8 years to recognize Donbas’s independence, and then launched a full-scale attack this year. But then Putin was under the impression that the Minsk Accords–guaranteed by Germany and France and endorsed unanimously by the UN Security Council including the United States– would resolve the crisis and would give the Donbas autonomy while remaining part of Ukraine. Germany and France were supposed to make sure the Minsk accords were implemented from 2015 to 2022. The collective west always knew that war was the only solution. They never wanted peace, they just played along in the name of Minsk agreement.So, you can see, it is a diplomatic “win” for the west……
France and Germany appeased Russia with the Minsk agreement and gave false hopes of a peaceful settlement. But, in reality, they were buying time for Ukraine to build its military. There was never a diplomatic solution; the collective west –which includes the United States, NATO, the European Union and the G-7– fooled Russia into believing there was a diplomatic solution to the Donbas conflict (but) instead, they were preparing Ukraine for a full-fledged war against Russia. So, either way, this war was meant to happen. There was never a diplomatic solution…. This is what Angela Merkel wanted to convey: “The Cold War never ended”. She was the German Chancellor when the coup took place in Ukraine in 2014 and the Minsk Accords were signed. Therefore her contribution to this duplicitous game along with Germany, France, Ukraine and US– has led to this war. And she very well knows it. But, either way, it is not going to end well for Germany or France whose economies have been badly hurt. Ukraine has been completely destroyed. It has become the Afghanistan of Europe. It is the western political leaders that are guilty of the murder of Ukraine. As it has been since 2014, the Ukrainian government has been launching vicious military attacks against Russian-speaking Ukrainian civilians in the Donbas region. Thousands of Russian speaking civilians have been killed. Russia should have taken back the territory in 2014 along with Crimea. But, then, Russia fell into the trap of the western countries’ Minsk Agreement. … It is not Russia that started this war, it is the United States that started this war. Ukraine is just a pawn that is supported by the US and the other european governments. And, it is a pity that the Ukrainian government serves the interests of the United States and not the Ukrainian people.” (“Angela Merkel’s revelation about Minsk Agreements | Russia Ukraine war“, Amit Sengupta, You Tube)
Starts at 11.40
There’s no way to overstate the importance of the Minsk betrayal or the impact it’s going to have on the final settlement in Ukraine. When trust is lost, nations can only ensure their security through brute force. What that means is that Russia must expand its perimeter as far as is necessary to ensure that it will remain beyond the enemy’s range of fire. (Putin, Lavrov and Medvedev have already indicated that they plan to do just that.) Second, the new perimeter must be permanently fortified with combat troops and lethal weaponry that are kept on hairtrigger alert. When treaties become vehicles for political opportunism, then nations must accept a permanent state of war.
This is the world that Merkel, Hollande, Poroshenko and the US created by opting to use ‘the cornerstone of international relations’ (Treaties) to advance their own narrow warmongering objectives.
We just wonder if anyone in Washington realizes whet the fu** they’ve done?
Originally published by Unz.com
Michael Whitney is a renowned geopolitical and social analyst based in Washington State. He initiated his career as an independent citizen-journalist in 2002 with a commitment to honest journalism, social justice and world peace.
He has been contributing to Global Research for 20 years. He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG)
June 30th, 2023 by Michael Snyder
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What are they thinking? Without enough sunlight, life on this planet would not be able to survive for long. So when global leaders start talking about blocking out the sun or “re-engineering the atmosphere”, we should all get really, really nervous. Plants need sunlight in order go grow. So less sunlight would mean less food for all of us. And considering the fact that we are already in the early stages of a horrifying global food crisis, growing enough food should be a very high priority. Unfortunately, the globalists see things very differently. They are apparently willing to implement extremely risky measures in a desperate attempt to get temperatures back into a range that they consider to be “normal”. The following comes from a Bloomberg article entitled “EU Looks Into Blocking Out the Sun as Climate Efforts Falter”…
The European Union will join an international effort to assess whether large-scale interventions such as deflecting the sun’s rays or changing the Earth’s weather patterns are viable options for fighting climate change.
The bloc will announce a framework Wednesday for assessing the security implications of a rapidly warming planet, such as the potential for scarce water or food to trigger conflict and migration, according to a draft document seen by Bloomberg. Part of that assessment includes studying the potential dangers of re-engineering the atmosphere.
This is madness.
Blocking out the sun isn’t going to solve anything.
In fact, it would have the potential to create far bigger problems than we are facing now.
But the globalists are desperate. Even though they have been imposing unthinkable mandates on their populations, carbon emissions just aren’t going down fast enough to meet their goals. For example, the Dutch government is actually forcing thousands of farmers to turn over their farms…
The Dutch government is planning to purchase and then close down up to 3,000 farms in an effort to comply with a European Union environmental mandate to slash emissions, according to reports.
Farmers in the Netherlands will be offered “well over” the worth of their farm in an effort to take up the offer voluntarily, The Telegraph reported. The country is attempting to reduce its nitrogen pollution and will make the purchases if not enough farmers accept buyouts.
“There is no better offer coming,” Christianne van der Wal, nitrogen minister, told the Dutch parliament on Friday.
Shutting down thousands of farms in the midst of the worst global food crisis in modern history is literally an insane thing to do.
But they are doing it anyway.
And the government of Canada is considering similar measures. Canada is supposed to reduce carbon emissions from fertilizer by 30 percent by 2030, and so the government is looking at ways to impose draconian production reductions on farmers…
Production losses could be significant, according to an analysis commissioned by Fertilizer Canada. Canada could lose over 160 million metric tons of canola, corn and spring wheat between 2023 and 2030 due to the plan, according to the report. That’s nearly double Canada’s expected grain production this season.
Agriculture emissions have soared in recent decades as farmers apply more fertilizer to increase output. Emissions from crop soils rose 87 per cent to about 7.6 metric tons of carbon dioxide over three decades through 2020, according to the latest data from Environment and Climate Change Canada .
I can’t even begin to describe how stupid this is.
We need more food, not less.
Here in the United States, the USDA has made fighting climate change their number one priority. The following comes from Doug Casey…
The US Department of Agriculture has about 100,000 employees. It’s one of the many US government departments that should be abolished. If any of those 100,000 employees actually know anything about agriculture or farming—most of them don’t—they should go out and do it, as opposed to making the lives of farmers miserable.
Interestingly, the #1 mission of the USDA, stated on its website, is to combat climate change. Not to improve food production.
The USDA, the EPA, and many others create regulations on everything and anything that farmers do today. I’d point out that according to USDA rules, a “farm” is any piece of land that produces over or can produce over $1000 worth of product. That’s an unbelievably low amount. A garden in your backyard can be deemed a farm if it suits the authorities.
I feel so sorry for our farmers.
They shouldn’t have to put up with this.
Sadly, the zealotry of the climate change cult seems to get more extreme with each passing year.
In New York City, officials are actually planning to crack down on restaurants that use pizza ovens that are powered by coal and wood…
Historic Big Apple pizza joints could be forced to dish out mounds of dough under a proposed city edict targeting pollutant-spewing coal-and-wood-fired ovens, The Post has learned.
The New York City Department of Environmental Protection has drafted new rules that would order eateries using the decades-old baking method to slice carbon emissions by up to 75%.
If you have had pizzas that are cooked over real flames, you know how incredibly delicious they can be.
But if authorities in New York City have their way, New Yorkers will soon be deprived of such pleasure.
We live in a world that is literally going insane.
We aren’t going to make enough food for everyone in the world this year, and the outlook for future years is even worse.
Our leaders know that global famine is coming, but they seem absolutely determined to make it even worse.
During this upcoming holiday, take some time to enjoy our sun while you still can.
If the globalists have their way, it won’t be too long before the sun is much dimmer and much less sunlight is reaching our planet.
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June 30th, 2023 by Steven Sahiounie
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An immigrant in Sweden, Salwan Momika, burnt the Quran on the first day of the Muslim holiday, Eid al Adha. He first stomped on the book, kicked it, wrapped it in bacon strips which is a forbidden food under Muslim laws, and then burnt the book while standing on a stage in front of onlookers outside a Mosque in Stockholm.
Momika has said previously that he believed the Muslim religion had such a negative impact that the Quran should be banned globally.
The United States, Morocco, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and many Muslim countries expressed condemnation of the act. Jewish groups in Sweden condemned the act and recalled a Torah that was burnt by Nazis in Germany in the 1930s which later followed with the Jewish people being burnt alive.
Momika made an application to burn the Quran as an act of free speech in a democracy. The police have ultimate authority over approving such an act, and apparently without investigating the motives and ideologies driving Momika to commit such an act, they approved his application.
Danish extremist Rasmus Paludan burnt the Quran outside the Turkish embassy in January, which led to Sweden’s talks with Turkey over NATO membership being put on hold, and Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said that his country will not back Sweden’s membership of NATO unless burning the Quran is made illegal.
Russian President Putin was visiting a Mosque in Derbent for Eid al Adha yesterday and was gifted with a Quran (Koran) from Muslim clerics from Dagestan.
Putin took the opportunity to comment on the Quran burning in Sweden and said that is treated as a crime in Russia, both constitutionally and by the civil penal code.
“The Quran is sacred for Muslims and should be sacred for others,” he said as he thanked the clerics for the gift and added, “We will always abide by these rules.”
Turkey holds the key to allowing Sweden to join NATO. In the US statement of condemnation of the Quran burning, the US stressed that Turkey must allow Sweden to join NATO. The urgency is tied to the US-engineered war against Russia for regime change, being currently fought in Ukraine. Turkey is an ally of Russia, while also being a NATO member. This situation has left Turkey split between relationships with nations in conflict with one another.
Turkey is about 99% Muslim and President Erdogan takes the burning of the Quran very seriously, and personally. The burning of the Quran in Sweden appears to be a direct attack on Turkey and against the Swedish national interest in joining NATO.
Erdogan had pointed out that Sweden has harbored and supported Kurds who have links to the PKK, a terrorist group who have killed over 30,000 people over three decades in Turkey. The US-supported SDF and YPG in northeast Syria are also linked to the PKK, and this has been a serious threat to the US-Turkey relationship.
Salwan Momika, 37, is an Iraqi from Qaraqosh but had been living in Ankawa since 2016. His national passport was Iraqi, but his identity is Assyrian. He is a Syriac Christian, part of a historical community of Christians of Iraq who suffered massacres during the 2003 US invasion and occupation of Iraq, and who suffered again during the ISIS attack in the 2014-2016 occupation. He received a Swedish passport in 2022.
Momika tried to conceal his identity by describing himself as an atheist to the media recently, but he wears a cross tattooed on his arm. He is part of a large community in Sweden of 150,000 Syriac Christians, who began migrating there in the 1960s, and after the US war on Iraq and its people, and then the US-NATO attack on Syria for regime change in 2011 more Syriacs arrived in Sweden looking for a safe place to live.
The Facebook page Momika had in 2016 carried photos of banners held in crowds that read SAYFO 1915. This refers to the Turkish Ottoman Empire’s genocide against Syriac Christians, Greek Catholics, and Armenians. The word Sayfo is Momika’s self-identifying term.
Kevork Almassian, a noted Syrian journalist, found on Momika’s website that he claims to be the founder and head of the “Syriac Union Party” between 2014 and 2018, and is allied with the US-backed Kurdish SDF and the page says “decentralization is the best system” for Syria.
Momika is a Syriac filled with hatred of Muslims in general, but particularly of the Turkish. His motivation to burn the Quran is very personal, and it touches his identity and ancestry. He found a haven in Sweden and uses the freedom he is granted there to pursue his agenda of sectarian and ethnic hatred. His support of the Kurds in northeast Syria shows he is against Turkey and its security.
Momika is a member of the Sweden Democrats party, which is a right-wing party, and the second largest in the Riksdag. Some of the founders of the party were white nationalists and neo-Nazis, and the party continues to be anti-Islamic.
The question is, why couldn’t the Swedish authorities investigate him and not allow the burning of the Quran, which has nothing to do with religious freedom, but is just one man’s fantasy being carried out? Or, is Sweden acting out on their own sectarian and ethnic fantasies?
Sweden has a large Muslim community and while there have been criminal elements among them, the majority are law-abiding residents and citizens who are contributing to the economy and the society.
Sweden is taking school-aged children away from their Syrian parents and placing them into a foster home, and the parents are prevented from even knowing where the child is at. The Swedish Social Services are teaching children at schools what is allowed and not allowed at home. This encourages the children to then report on their parents, which results in the child being taken away permanently.
Muslims and Muslim immigrants living in Sweden are feeling they are not welcome, not respected, and not appreciated.
One resident in Malmo, who asked not to be named, but is working as an English teacher from Syria, said, “I am starting to feel like the Swedish are asking me to take my Quran and my kids and go home.”
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This article was originally published on Mideast Discourse.
Steven Sahiounie is a two-time award-winning journalist. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.
Featured image is from MD
June 30th, 2023 by Ben Norton
June 30th, 2023 by Dr. William Makis
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***
These cases continue to happen, and they are still shocking and disturbing, as the medical establishment continues to deny this phenomenon exists:
Lauren Hanechak was a 40 year old bartender in New York with a 10 year old daughter. Her husband died of a heart attack on March 20, 2020.
She was fully COVID-19 vaccinated and posted about it on facebook in Oct.2021.
Her facebook and instagram accounts reveal a regular life of a mother and 10 year old daughter with nothing out of the ordinary.
Then on June 13, 2023, Lauren died suddenly and friends reveal that she had been diagnosed with Acute Myeloid Leukemia (AML) just 4 days prior to her sudden death.
Leukemia diagnosis to death in just 4 days. And now her 10 year old daughter is an orphan.
I have written about turbo leukemias with identical stories. Diagnosis to death in days, sometimes even in hours. Death is usually from internal bleeding.
These leukemias are the most rapid of all post COVID-19 vaccine turbo cancers.
A new Belgian study by Sander Eens et al. was published on May 1, 2023 (click here)
They injected 14 mice with two Pfizer COVID-19 mRNA vaccines.
Two days after the 2nd dose and 16 days after 1st dose, one of the mice died suddenly without any warning.
Authors write: “there was no specific lead-up to this spontaneous death since no abnormalities were observed during daily examination for follow-up of animal welfare….the animal was still routinely weighed in the morning prior to the sudden death without displaying externally evident clinical symptoms”
They were shocked by what they saw on autopsy:
“At necropsy examination, a disproportional enlargement of several major thoracic and abdominal organs was observed, including the liver, kidneys, spleen, lungs, and intestines”
“The above histopathological observations suggested extensive, systemic infiltration of the organs by a malignant lymphoid neoplasm, morphologically most suggestive of a Burkitt lymphoma (BL) or B-cell lymphoblastic lymphoma (B-LBL)”
To summarize, 1 out of 14 mice died suddenly two days after 2nd Pfizer mRNA dose, and had multiple organs completely infiltrated with an aggressive “turbo cancer” – a rare lymphoma.
40 year old Lauren Hanechak was fully COVID-19 vaccinated and did not complain of any vaccine injuries.
Then one day, she was diagnosed with leukemia and 4 days later she was dead.
I have written about similar such incidents and there are many of them, but they are always shocking.
The Belgian mouse study is new and it is the 2nd study to show “turbo cancer” after Pfizer COVID-19 mRNA vaccination (first study was this one).
These are the kinds of studies that Pfizer & Moderna should have done but didn’t.
It’s a small sample but 1 in 14, or 7% of Pfizered mice got “turbo cancer” isn’t reassuring.
Not only that, but the turbo cancer mouse died suddenly with no warning signs of any illness. That’s a little too close to real life.
And its organs were full of cancer.
Putting things into perspective. This “turbo cancer” 14 mouse study was bigger than the study that was used to approve COVID-19 mRNA Omicron bivalent boosters for 100s of millions of people – that study only had 8 mice.
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Dr. William Makis is a Canadian physician with expertise in Radiology, Oncology and Immunology. Governor General’s Medal, University of Toronto Scholar. Author of 100+ peer-reviewed medical publications.
by Michel Chossudovsky
Michel Chossudovsky reviews in detail how this insidious project “destroys people’s lives”. He provides a comprehensive analysis of everything you need to know about the “pandemic” — from the medical dimensions to the economic and social repercussions, political underpinnings, and mental and psychological impacts.
“My objective as an author is to inform people worldwide and refute the official narrative which has been used as a justification to destabilize the economic and social fabric of entire countries, followed by the imposition of the “deadly” COVID-19 “vaccine”. This crisis affects humanity in its entirety: almost 8 billion people. We stand in solidarity with our fellow human beings and our children worldwide. Truth is a powerful instrument.”
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June 30th, 2023 by Karsten Riise
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***
Nap a cup of coffee – or glass of cognac, if you are so inclined.
Because here is a very, very interesting story. Beware – because it develops into a real spy novel, where you never know who is really who, or whom they pretend to work for.
Start with the headline story of CNN today Friday 30 June 2023 – a story smearing Russia’s general Surovikin for being accomplice to Wagner’s failed coup last Saturday 24 June 2023.
After the short-lived insurrection, questions swirl over top Russian commander and Prigozhin
By CNN , , and ,
One is known as “General Armageddon,” the other as “Putin’s chef.” Both have a checkered past and a reputation for brutality. One launched the insurrection, the other reportedly knew about it in advance. And right now, both are nowhere to be found.
The commander of the Russian air force Sergey Surovikin and the Wagner chief Yevgeny Prigozhin have not been seen in public in days as questions swirl about the role Surovikin may have played in Prigozhin’s short-lived mutiny.
Kremlin has remained silent on the topic, embarking instead on an aggressive campaign to reassert the authority of the Russian President Vladimir Putin.
The CNN story is interesting not for its content, but for its reference to a “Russian” source, the so-called “Moscow Times”. Go to “Moscow Times” to find the source of the CNN-story about general Surovikin, and you find this:
Who Was Prigozhin Counting On to Back His Failed Mutiny?
By Mikhail Komin, The Moscow Times
One of the most shocking aspects of the weekend’s mutiny by Yevgeny Prigozhin’s Wagner private military company is that the Russian Armed Forces appear to have done next to nothing to stop the Wagner troops as they moved first from field camps in Ukraine to the southern Russian city of Rostov-on-Don, where they seized key military headquarters, and then on almost to Moscow.
In theory, those headquarters — as the main command center for Russia’s operations in Ukraine — should have been one of the most high-security sites in the country. Yet Prigozhin was able to breeze in with his gang of mercenaries in tow and effectively take two senior generals hostage: First Deputy Head of the General Staff Main Directorate Vladimir Alekseyev and Deputy Defense Minister Yunus-bek Yevkurov.
Even after a criminal case was initiated against Prigozhin on suspicion of inciting armed insurrection and Putin addressed the nation, calling Prigozhin’s actions a “stab in the back,” there was still no resistance. It seems that the maverick Wagner boss may not be mistaken in his belief that there are plenty of people within the Armed Forces and security services who secretly sympathize with his cause.
The ”Moscow Times” story was officially published yesterday, 29 June 2023. It is detailed and indeed interesting. Lots of names, backgrounds, and hypothesis. It may all be true – or not. Read carefully the “Moscow Times” story until the very, very end – and you see the small notation at the bottom: “This story was first published by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace“. Click here to Carnegie, and yes, you find the same story published by Carnegie already last Tuesday, 27 June 2023.
But hey – something’s wrong here. Carnegie in Moscow was closed down as a foreign agent by Russian authorities already on 8 April 2022, more than a year ago. You then scroll down to the bottom of the Carnegie page with the “Russian story” about the “generals”, and you find Carnegie’s address at the bottom of the web-page. It says: “1179 Massachusetts Avenue NW, Washington DC”!!
So the CNN “Surovikin story” was concocted in Washington DC. After being cooked in Washington, the story was then sent to “Russia” or rather, to “Moscow Times”, which may in fact also be writing out of Washington (who knows). And from “Moscow Times” in “Russia”, the story was then sent “back” to the US to be published by CNN as being based on “Russian” sources (residing in Washington, actually).
Nice story.
This reveals a lot about how the US disinformation and PR machine works. The CNN could as well have referenced Carnegie in Washington DC as their “Russian” source – but that would immediately have revealed the US deep-state origins of the CNN story. Instead, the CNN hid the origin of their story and pretended it was based on sources in Moscow – which it is not. All this does not prevent some of that story from being true or partly true. As is well known, disinformation works best when lies are mixed with truths. All we can say is that the CIA and the US deep state work over-time to take down one of Russia’s most effective generals, general Surovikin. The New York Times first “broke” the story about Surovikin based on “US officials”, who could have been nothing else but CIA. In fact, the CIA probably briefed the leaders of Congress (the “inner Congress” or Gang of Eight) about the impending coup-attempt in Russia already last week on Wednesday 21 June 2023, three days before it happened. The New York Times then went on to claim that general Surovikin had “disappeared” or been “detained”. All in spite of the Kremlin spokeperson Peskov saying that this is all “rumors”. And now CNN with secret help from Carnegie “follows up” in attacking the loyalty, honesty, and integrity of general Surovikin.
It takes a lot of effort to destroy an enemy general. Normally, you either need to be lucky to bomb his Headquarters, or send out a highly trained special forces command for a hit operation. But sometimes, you get a rare chance to try and destroy an enemy general in a “peaceful” way. Or rather, you take the war into a “peaceful” domain of war… like the press.
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Karsten Riise is a Master of Science (Econ) from Copenhagen Business School and has a university degree in Spanish Culture and Languages from Copenhagen University. He is the former Senior Vice President Chief Financial Officer (CFO) of Mercedes-Benz in Denmark and Sweden.
He is a regular contributor to Global Research.
Featured image: Secret Press Agents, USA – by Karsten Riise
June 30th, 2023 by Liberation
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***
The Supreme Court today struck a devastating blow against one of the most important tools available to combat the intense segregation felt in nearly every area of society: affirmative action. Today’s ruling in lawsuits brought against Harvard and the University of North Carolina effectively ends this practice in higher education based on the deeply ironic rationale that it violates the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment. The majority opinion’s assurance that “nothing prohibits universities from considering an applicant’s discussion of how race affected the applicant’s life” – meaning that it is not banning an applicant from, for instance, mentioning the fact that they are Black in a personal essay – is meaningless in the face of the historic attack on racial equality that the rest of the ruling constitutes.
In an outrageous distortion of history, the six right-wing justices who voted for this ruling presented it as part of a long legacy of decisions that removed racial discrimination from the law, like Brown v. Board of Education and Loving v. Virginia. The policies adopted by educational institutions, or any other powerful institution, cannot be understood outside of their social and historical context.
Decisions like Brown and Loving helped overturn the explicitly white supremacist political system that had been in place since the foundation of the country. In those cases, of course the demand was to strike down the explicit references to race in the law. But formal legal equality does not on its own translate into social equality. Black, Latino and other oppressed communities remain overrepresented in the lowest-paying jobs, the most neglected neighborhoods and the most underfunded schools. It was to address this reality that affirmative action programs began to be implemented in the 1960s and 70s, aiming to guarantee representation especially at educational institutions.
Opponents of affirmative action pretend to be standing up for poor and middle class white students who these right wingers claim are victims of “reverse racism.” But the six millionaire judges who ruled on this case don’t give a damn about working class students of any race – and neither do the ultra-wealthy donors who bankroll the falsely-named “Students for Fair Admissions” organization that is the plaintiff in the case. What this ruling is really about is retaining the privileges of a tiny elite.
The court did not say anything about Harvard’s practice of “legacy admissions,” for example. Between 2014 and 2019, the overall acceptance rate for Harvard was six percent. But for legacy applicants whose family members also attended Harvard, the acceptance rate was 33 percent. To the tiny handful of overwhelmingly white, ultra-rich families that have ruled this country for centuries, prestigious institutions of higher education are only for them. Their children get every advantage in the world from the moment they’re born. The admission of Black and Latino students as well as the admission of poor white students is an affront to the unequal social order that they view as natural and god-given. They are also horrified at proposals to make higher education free and forgive student debt.
Jim Crow apartheid in the United States came to an end because of the heroic struggle of the Black liberation movement in the 1950s and 60s that shook the ruling class to the core and forced them to adopt a more democratic form of government. Oftentimes, it was the struggle of existing students that forced universities to adopt affirmative action policies. For instance, the Third World Student Strikes at UC Berkeley and San Francisco State University in 1968 and 1969 — led by an organization of revolutionary students called the Third World Liberation Front — led to some of the first affirmative action programs in the country and the creation of the first Ethnic Studies programs.
As legal segregation was uprooted with the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the Black liberation struggle began to focus on demands for even more sweeping social transformation. Latino, Native, Asian and progressive white people came into the struggle in huge numbers as well, and threatened the capitalist system itself. Many institutions felt compelled to accept demands that they institute affirmative action policies.
But what happened next illustrates a fundamental truth about concessions secured under the existing system: Any progressive gain that is won can be taken away. In 1978, the Supreme Court issued the Bakke decision, which weakened affirmative action by banning the use of quotas. The inclusion of race as one factor of many in admissions processes was upheld in subsequent decisions, but on an increasingly narrow basis. The 2003 Grutter decision arbitrarily suggested that in 25 years affirmative action programs will no longer be necessary, and the 2016 Fisher ruling imposed the legal standard of “strict scrutiny” to existing programs.
What is needed in this moment is in fact a massive expansion of affirmative action, not its de-facto prohibition. A comprehensive, national program of affirmative action truly capable of uprooting racial inequality would ensure that Black, Latino and Native students who are subjected to the worst poverty under this system are the principal beneficiaries, as opposed to class strata that are subjected to less extreme material deprivation. And it should be applied not just in education, but in housing, the job market and other key areas of society as well.
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Featured image is from Liberation News
June 30th, 2023 by James G. Rickards
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***
The “coup” in Russia is over but there’s a very worrying development going on in Ukraine right now that should frighten everyone.
That’s the growing risk of a nuclear war. I’m not being hyperbolic.
Let’s break it all down…
President Biden is accusing Russian President Vladimir Putin of preparing to use tactical nuclear weapons in Ukraine.
The theory is that if Russia is in danger of military collapse in Ukraine, Putin will resort to the use of tactical nuclear weapons out of desperation.
But you can basically rule that out because Russia isn’t losing the war in Ukraine. In fact, it’s winning the war and continues to gain momentum.
Russia is crushing the much-anticipated Ukrainian offensive and is either advancing or holding the line in other sectors.
Meanwhile, Russian arms factories are churning out massive amounts of weapons and ammunition while the West is scraping the bottom of the barrel to find enough weapons and ammo to send to Ukraine.
It’s a war of attrition and there’s no practical way that Ukraine can win that war.
So why would Putin need to use nuclear weapons?
The answer, of course, is that he wouldn’t. He’s winning the war.
But such warnings about Putin using nuclear weapons are not new. Biden has been accusing Russia of threatening to use nuclear weapons since the start of the war last February.
Some perspective is needed to assess this claim. For the record, the United States is the first and only country to conduct a nuclear war, which it did between Aug. 6 and Aug. 9, 1945, killing about a quarter-million civilians.
Putin has made it clear that Russia will not use nuclear weapons unless the U.S. or NATO allies do so first.
The U.S. has not made a similar pledge.
Biden based his threat assessment on the fact that Putin recently moved tactical nuclear weapons to its ally, Belarus, which is closer to Kyiv.
That’s true, but it conveniently ignores the facts that the U.S. has placed nuclear weapons in Germany, that the U.K. and France are nuclear powers in their own rights and that U.S. Navy submarines and destroyers with nuclear missiles are deployed around Russia.
Belarus also had nuclear weapons when it was part of the Soviet Union prior to 1991. In short, there was nothing particularly provocative about Putin’s move relative to prior positioning and the U.S. deployment of nukes.
What is provocative is a recent article by Michael Rubin, a former Pentagon official and now a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank.
Rubin recommended that the U.S. should provide tactical nuclear weapons to the Ukrainians themselves.
The rationale is a version of the doctrine of mutually assured destruction, MAD, that maintained stability between the U.S. and the former Soviet Union (really Russia) during the Cold War.
The idea is if each side has enough nuclear weapons to survive a first strike by the other and launch a second strike of its own, then neither side will start a nuclear war because it would be destroyed in turn.
There’s merit to the MAD doctrine subject to a long list of conditions including large arsenals, secure command-and-control procedures, good communication between the protagonists (such as the “hot line”) and rational leadership on both sides.
None of those conditions applies to Ukraine. It would have a modest arsenal (not enough to survive a first strike), has weak command-and-control, has almost no communication with Russia and has desperate and insecure leadership.
It’s almost as if Rubin’s proposal is designed to force Putin to attack any Ukrainian nuclear capacity as a way to justify escalation by the U.S. and get U.S. and NATO boots on the ground in Ukraine.
That’s a short path to World War III. Any talk of giving Ukraine nuclear weapons is reckless.
Rubin’s idea could be behind Putin’s plan to move nuclear weapons to Belarus as a way to dissuade the U.S. from going further.
Of course, Putin’s actions in Belarus are an example of escalation, which may be exactly what Rubin and the other warmongers in the U.S. wanted.
Simply put, Rubin’s idea is reckless and moves the world closer to nuclear war.
When you hear Biden talk about Putin’s threat to use nuclear weapons, it’s critical to bear in mind that the U.S. is the real threat and is acting with a view to escalating the war and dragging NATO into a direct war with Russia.
But that’s not all. There’s the possibility that an increasingly desperate Ukraine could try to stage a “false flag” attack on the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant (ZNPP) in the Kherson region and blame it on Russia.
Both Ukrainian President Zelenskyy and the head of Ukrainian intelligence services have warned recently about a possible Russian attack on the plant.
In other words, they could be putting the conditions in place for a false flag attack.
“See, we warned you this would happen!”
Such an attack could potentially spread nuclear radiation throughout the region and possibly beyond.
It wouldn’t be on the level of Chernobyl because the plant is operating at a much smaller capacity than Chernobyl.
But still, it would be seen as an unacceptable war crime by Russia, which would spark international outrage and set the stage for direct NATO intervention.
Incidentally, ZNPP is currently under Russian control, but much of the surrounding territory is still held by the Ukrainians.
How might an attack on the plant go down? Here’s some more detail:
Ukraine (under direction of the U.S. and with U.S. help) could send a commando team to the facility, plant heavy explosives and then detonate them in a way intended to cause a partial meltdown and release of radiation.
Prevailing winds would carry the radiation in the direction of Romania, Poland and Slovakia, all of whom are members of NATO.
Once the radiation reaches those countries it will be regarded as an “attack” on NATO members.
This will trigger Article 5 of the NATO treaty, which says that an attack on one is an attack on all.
Sens. Lindsey Graham and Richard Blumenthal, in fact, just proposed legislation stating that Russian nuclear weapons use in Ukraine would be considered a direct attack on NATO.
Bombing a nuclear power plant isn’t the same as employing tactical nuclear weapons, but do you really think they’d draw that distinction?
The Article 5 trigger would provide legal cover to the U.S., the U.K., France, Germany and the rest of the coalition to send troops to Ukraine to prop up the failing offensive.
The next step would be direct combat between U.S. and Russian troops. And that’s a direct gateway to World War III.
You might dismiss all this talk as conspiratorial nonsense. After all, why would Ukraine want to create a serious nuclear incident on its own soil?
I’d just remind you that there’s credible evidence (according to German intelligence) that Ukrainian security agencies were responsible for the destruction of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, the largest act of eco-terrrorism ever conducted.
In fairness, there’s also credible evidence that the U.S. carried out the attack, so it might not have been Ukraine. But it remains a legitimate possibility.
It’s also probable that Ukraine destroyed the Nova Kakhovka Hydroelectric Dam earlier this month in an effort to undermine Russia’s position in the area.
The result was an environmental disaster.
As with Nord Stream 2, there’s no definitive proof that Ukraine was responsible. Of course, as with the pipeline, Ukraine blamed Russia.
While it’s possible Russia did it, Russia stood to lose much more than Ukraine from the dam’s destruction and the subsequent flooding.
If you were a detective, Ukraine would be your prime suspect.
Assuming Ukraine was responsible for both the pipeline and dam incidents, would it be out of the question for it to stage a nuclear incident if that meant bringing NATO directly into the war?
I don’t think it would be.
Again, I have no proof that Ukraine was actually responsible for the destruction of the pipeline or the dam. But it is a reasonable possibility.
That’s why you shouldn’t rule out the possibility of a false flag attack on the nuclear power plant.
Again, Ukraine is getting desperate and desperate times call for desperate measures.
So if there is an attack on the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant in the days to come, you’ll know who was responsible.
You’ll also know that the world is one step closer to nuclear war.
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James G. Rickards is the editor of Strategic Intelligence, Project Prophesy, Crash Speculator, and Gold Speculator. He is an American lawyer, economist, and investment banker with 40 years of experience working in capital markets on Wall Street. He was the principal negotiator of the rescue of Long-Term Capital Management L.P. (LTCM) by the U.S Federal Reserve in 1998. His clients include institutional investors and government directorates.
Featured image is from TDR
June 30th, 2023 by Kyle Anzalone
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***
The Kremlin’s top diplomat said Moscow can no longer trust Washington and the potential for nuclear war has escalated. The Russian foreign minister suggested talks with American officials were possible, but Washington has not made an effort to engage.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavorv’s remarks were reported in TASS on Wednesday.
“Russian President Vladimir Putin has said it repeatedly that we are open for cooperation,” he said. “But, in regards to our former Western partners, we can no longer rely on agreements with them, including legally binding ones. It is a ‘fight of worlds,’ of sorts.”
He went on to indicate that talks between the two sides are unlikely.
“Each time [US Secretary of State Antony] Blinken requested contact – it happened twice in the last eighteen months, I think – I either answered his phone call or we talked on the sidelines of the G20 summit in Bali for about ten minutes.” He continued, “But there were no more requests.”
Contact between the White House and the Kremlin has been through national security advisor Jake Sullivan rather than Secretary of State Antony Blinken.
Lavrov argued part of the issue is Western leaders have stated they will indefinitely provide military support to Ukraine.
“They never answer the question – ‘it takes’ to do what? It is one thing to end the military campaign, like they ended it in Afghanistan or in Iraq,” he explained, adding, “It is, probably, a slightly different thing If they want to use this campaign to completely annihilate the Ukrainian army. That is, when they smelled trouble in Afghanistan, in Iraq, they simply high-tailed it out of there. They have no interest in Ukraine itself.”
The diplomat said Moscow has no plans to conclude the war before achieving its goals in Ukraine, and the Wagner insurrection had no major battlefield impacts.
“As we overcame the attempted mutiny, we haven’t made the slightest concessions with respect to the goals of the special military operation and haven’t lost any positions on the battlefield… It’s impossible to give them up – the goals that have been set.”
Lavrov warned the deteriorating relationship between Washington and Moscow escalated the risk of nuclear war, blaming the US for withdrawing from Cold War-era agreements.
“It is a medical fact that they have destroyed the entire international legal system of deterrence and strategic stability.” He added, “It’s a good thing they do not want a nuclear war, no one wants it. And the system of agreements, which has been destroyed by the United States, exists specifically to reduce its risk and to make this risk negligible at all.”
Since the end of the Cold War, Washington withdrew from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, the Open Skies Treaty and the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty. While Moscow suspended its participation in the New Start agreement earlier this year.
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Kyle Anzalone is news editor of the Libertarian Institute, opinion editor of Antiwar.com and co-host of Conflicts of Interest with Will Porter and Connor Freeman.
Featured image: Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov is seen during a United Nations meeting in Geneva, Switzerland. (Credit: UN / Emmanuel Hungrecker)
June 30th, 2023 by Bharat Dogra
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***
Rational choices in any part of the world mean choices made by people and governments of the region for pursuing welfare and peace of the region within a framework of welfare and peace of the entire world.
In other words, while it is understood that welfare, peace and safety of the people within the region would of course be of the greatest importance for them, this should also be integrated with the welfare, peace and safety of the entire world as no one sits alone in an increasingly globalized world and any people can best protect their safety and welfare by remaining concerned about the safety of the entire world. This is so obvious in the context of environmental issues like climate change, for example, as also in the context of the arms race.
It is important to emphasize this second aspect of rationality, regarding integration with the welfare of the entire world, keeping in mind how often very narrow self-seeking gets wrongly promoted in the name of rationality.
Few regions of the world appear to be as well-endowed as Europe with the capacity for such rational decision making. This can be stated in the context of the high levels of education and the wider space for diverse points of view as manifested in the vigorous functioning of multi-party democracies. The ability to create a union of many countries, some of which had been much in conflict earlier, has also been regarded on the whole as an assertion of rationality and maturity which could overcome several hurdles.
Despite this, however, Europe appears to be caught today in a peculiar crisis situation when it appears unable to protect its welfare interests and also remain on the right side of protecting world peace and safety. This is a matter of great concern for Europe as well as for the entire world.
While some of these concerns relating to meeting energy needs and to Ukraine policy are quite recent, these also remind people of some previous instances when rational decision making took a back seat.
The highly damaging and irrational support provided by the British Prime Minister Tony Blair to Iraq invasion, leading to the destruction and destabilization of a country and the death and ruin of several hundred thousand people, directly and indirectly, is one such glaring example. At that time Tony Blair had provided such non-rational and unthinking support to the USA led invasion that he was widely referred to as Bush’s poodle within his own country.
Even earlier Europe’s leading countries had colluded in the USA-led destruction and disintegration of the former Yugoslavia, raising serious questions about well-informed decision-making in Europe even to protect its own. Here we could see that even on matters within Europe, there was highly questionable and non-rational conduct by leading European countries and even the supposedly independent media played a big role in spreading lies and half-truths, making it difficult to sort out issues peacefully.
Still earlier, when there were suppressions of left groups within countries like Italy, France and Greece, who had been a part of the brave resistance against the Nazis, several governments had colluded in this.
After the disintegration of the USSR, when violating promises NATO started expanding eastwards and subsequently came very close to encircling Russia, again Europe colluded entirely in this, despite serious threats to world peace and European peace related to this. Senior leaders of leading European countries stated themselves that they merely used Minsk accords to give Ukraine time for arming itself adequately (to face Russia).
When Nord Stream was detonated and the Hersh revelations had already been widely discussed, governments and even the media appeared to be avoiding the most likely truth all the time.
This brings us to the present situation where an increasing number of European people feel that in terms of meeting their energy needs they have been denied the proper choices, and probably a lesser but nevertheless significant number of people also feel (but may not assert) that the path of ceasefire and peace is the best way forward for resolving the Ukraine crisis (and not the path of endlessly sending more and more weapons to Ukraine).
What is common to all these situations which represent important examples of failure of European policy is the fact that all these policies involved the need to go along with the role expected of Europe by the USA. Hence it appears that if Europe is to avoid such policy failures in future and to instead go with rational decision making, then this is one relationship that should be sorted out—Europe should be able to act independent of any pressures or expectations from the USA, regardless of the military bases and even nuclear weapon deployments the USA has in many European countries and despite the fact that most European countries are NATO members.
When Emmanuel Macron, the President of France, said while returning from a recent tour of China that European countries should not be like vassals of the USA, should not be dragged into a war with China and should be able to exercise strategic autonomy, there were voices of protest within Europe but also of support. It is likely that the support for this view is wider than what we see being expressed more openly. While speaking about this wider support, European Council President and former Prime Minister of Belgium Charles Michel stated, “quite a few really think like Macron.”
More provocative although less reported was the comment of Prof. Yanis Varoufakis who as former finance minister of Greece at the time of a serious economic crisis had won a lot of respect for standing up to the unhelpful policies of the big bosses of the European Union. He stated,
“It’s not that the European Union is a vassal of the US. It is worse than a vassal. Vassals had a degree of autonomy under feudalism. We are serfs. We are not even serfs, who had certain rights under feudalism.”
However if words like vassal or serf are to be used for leading European countries or for the European Union, then what really would be the status to which Ukraine is being reduced, at least in relation to some leading European countries, vassal of vassal or serf of serf?
Will Europe like to be a part, a close ally of any future war of the USA against China? Or will it like to be a US ally in any future war which is as unjust and destructive as the invasion of Iraq was? Most people in Europe may not at all be happy with this, but certain sections, for example big capitalists or arms industry or politicians close to these sections, may opt for this for their narrow reasons. So despite the majority of people not being in favor of this, Europe may once again become closely involved in highly destructive wars.
After all the huge destruction of the first two world wars which were centered in Europe, no one in Europe would like the possibility of a third war centered again in Europe. Nevertheless, the fact remains that eminent experts have been warning about the Ukraine conflict escalating to a nuclear war and the third world war.
The most important lesson of history in Europe is that aggressive wars eventually turn out to be self-destructive too. This lesson should not be ignored or neglected.
From the 16th to the 20th century Europe was central to the most destructive invasions and wars of world, wars much more destructive than what the worst invaders of earlier centuries had unleashed, linked also to worst forms of plunder and exploitation extended over very long years. The overwhelming majority of native people of entire continents of Americas and Australia were decimated. One of the most barbaric and largest slave trades was unleashed. The march of progress was rudely shattered across vast nations, including very ancient civilizations, to plunge them in war and famine. The rush and fierce competition for plundering distant lands ultimately (and inevitably) led to internal clashes within Europe, plunging the continent into two world wars, inflicting untold destruction and distress on its most powerful nations, as well as on much of the remaining world.
However even while departing from several colonies Europe inflicted heavy, avoidable destruction on many of them. While post-war years were rightly devoted to reconstruction, increasing internal cooperation and economic progress, several European countries also became willing members of the dominating neo-colonial order which continued to exploit the Global South badly in matters relating to trade, debt and much else. Leading European countries continued to be part of new world boss USA’s invasions and democracy-toppling projects, or at least did nothing to oppose these. Hence some leading European countries had an important role in the destruction of countries like Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya, or in the toppling of democratic governments in several countries.
Isn’t it time now for Europe to try to leave behind this past and seek a different future by integrating an enlightened understanding of its self-interests (safety and well-being of its people) with peace, justice and environment protection concerns of entire world. It is right of Macron and his friends to ask for more strategic autonomy, but more autonomy for pursuing which path? Clearly the answer should be—for pursuing a path which integrates well-being of people of Europe with peace, justice and environment protection in entire world.
In many ways Europe is still a long distance away from such a path, but if at least internal broad consensus can be created within Europe regarding this, this itself will be an important step forward for peace, justice and environment protection at world level. Instead of the USA dragging Europe towards war, the future should be for Europe to push the USA towards peace—a role which only Europe can perform with its special ties with USA, people to people, not just government to government. And this peace should include peace with Russia and China.
A leading politician of Europe recently said that in this world only Europe has been able to create a garden, the rest is a jungle. If he was to honestly dig up a part of his garden, he would find it to be fertilized by the blood and bones of millions of innocent people who became victims of colonial and imperialist wars. The most important aspect of European history very less taught in its schools is that for nearly 500 years Europe’s settlers, invaders, colonialists and imperialists became the most violent killers and plunderers in various parts of the world (in the name of spreading civilization) and this violence ultimately led to the self-destruction (as well as continuing destruction of others) as seen in the two world wars.
The big question now is whether Europe will continue to remain on the path which can, as several security experts have warned, lead to the third world war and nuclear war, or will it choose to be firmly on the side of peace. Clearly Europe should firmly and bravely assert itself to choose the path of rationality which integrates the peace and welfare of its own people with the peace and welfare of the entire world.
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Bharat Dogra is Honorary Convener, Campaign to Save Earth Now. His recent books include Planet in Peril, A Day in 2071, Protecting Earth for Children and Earth without Borders.
Featured image is from Andrew Korybko
June 30th, 2023 by Steve Watson
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***
The University of North Carolina (UNC) has shared an ‘inclusive’ language guide, laying out guidelines for what students and staff are and are not allowed to say.
The guide essentially wipes the word ‘man’ out of existence, and discourages the use of the words ‘mother’ and ‘father’.
A statement from the university claims
“Carolina is committed to creating an inclusive and equitable learning environment for every Tar Heel. To fully represent the diversity of our students, faculty, staff and everyone in our community, it is important to use language that supports these values.”
It continues,
“This inclusive language guide can act as a starting point for communicating in a way that supports a diverse and welcoming community.”
Here’s what’s not allowed:
Any word with ‘man’ in it is consigned to the dustbin.
Furthermore… Don’t say ‘mom’, say ‘guardian’.
And don’t say ‘poor’, say “people whose incomes are below the federal poverty threshold.”
There are a lot of rules here…
Remember that there is also romantic orientation as well, except is you’re ‘aromantic’:
This lunacy is gong on all over the country and it’s spilling out of woke education into the real world.
"Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it."
— George Orwell, 1984 pic.twitter.com/c36H7AJlaA
— Samantha Rose Hill (@Samantharhill) January 21, 2023
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Featured image is from Spiked
June 30th, 2023 by Ahmed Adel
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The United States is open to allowing more countries to participate in the technology arm of the monumental Australia-UK-US alliance, known as the AUKUS, but they would have to show they can contribute in meaningful ways, a US official said on June 26.
“We are in conversation with a variety of countries who are interested. And frankly, it goes far beyond just those countries, and we’re grateful for that. The fact that countries are interested in it is a positive, and we will explore those appropriately,” Kurt Campbell, the deputy assistant to the president and coordinator for the Indo-Pacific, said during the Center for Strategic and International Studies event.
“I think all three countries have made clear that under the appropriate circumstances we would be prepared to work collaboratively with other partners who bring capacity to the challenge,” he added.
According to the official, the perspectives of potential partners in terms of interacting with AUKUS will depend on the benefits they can bring to the association in a specific field. The representative of the US National Security Council did not name the countries with which cooperation negotiations are being carried out but said that there are many interested States.
The Australian broadcaster ABC believes that Canada and New Zealand – which with the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia, form the Five Eyes intelligence sharing network – have previously expressed interest in joining the AUKUS at a new stage of partnership development.
For its part, the US Congressional Research Service released a report on June 20 saying that, in addition to Canada and New Zealand, Congress may consider giving the Department of Defense and the Department of State a mandate to expand the AUKUS to include Japan, as recommended by several analysts.
The US, for its part, hopes to create, based on AUKUS, an analogue of the NATO bloc to deter China in the Asia-Pacific region. In China, the creation of AUKUS was repeatedly criticised. Beijing noted that transferring nuclear submarine technology to Canberra would only fuel the arms race and undermine regional stability.
But Washington defiantly rejected that position. In March 2023, US President Joe Biden said he did not care if China saw aggression in the AUKUS alliance.
At the same time Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov warned that AUKUS was being created as an instrument of NATO influence in the Asia-Pacific region. In addition, Lavrov pointed out that the US is “energy pushing” Japan, New Zealand and Australia towards activities that involve the expansion of NATO military infrastructure in Asia-Pacific with the formation of appropriate logistical chains.
It must be remembered that the subsequent expansion of AUKUS, through the involvement of external partners, was built into the bloc’s format from the beginning. As Ukraine does in Europe, several countries will be offered cooperation and partnership options with AUKUS but will not grant equal rights.
In September 2021, Canberra, London, and Washington formed the AUKUS pact to deliver nuclear-powered submarines to Australia by 2040. The alliance is focused on sharing military capability, including cyberintelligence, artificial intelligence and quantum technologies, but also hypersonic weapons and the nuclear-powered submarines in question. Although AUKUS claims not to focus on any specific adversary, it is clear, by its structure and comments from its member nations, that it is intended to deter China in the Indo-Pacific region and, by extension, Russia.
The deal caused worldwide controversy because Australia is a nuclear-free state, not even having a national nuclear energy program, meaning all technology must be imported and adapted from the US. Virginia-class submarines, which Australia will acquire, use military uranium as fuel, which raises fears of nuclear proliferation.
According to a Congressional Research Service report, the AUKUS agreement comprises two pillars: to provide Australia with nuclear-powered attack submarines and cooperation in key technologies such as hypersonics, underwater drones, and artificial intelligence. The Center for Strategic and International Studies Australia chair Charles Edel said New Zealand, South Korea, and France had expressed interest in the second pillar.
The latest discussion of AUKUS expansion comes after US Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s recently visited China, which was considered a success by American government officials in the context of current tensions. However, on June 20, US President Joe Biden remarked at a fundraiser in California about the spy balloon controversy in February and described Chinese President Xi Jinping as a “dictator.”
China’s Foreign Ministry spokesperson Mao Ning hit back, saying,
“[President Biden’s remarks] go totally against facts, seriously violate diplomatic protocol, and severely infringe on China’s political dignity … It is a blatant political provocation.”
Rather than try and calm tensions, Blinken backed Biden by saying:
“The President always speaks candidly, he speaks directly. He speaks clearly, and he speaks for all of us.”
This demonstrates that Washington has no real actual intentions of de-escalating with China, despite some diplomatic niceties by Blinken. Instead, the US is working towards expanding AUKUS to challenge and contain China in the Asia-Pacific region, as well as Russia.
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Ahmed Adel is a Cairo-based geopolitics and political economy researcher.
Featured image is from InfoBrics
June 30th, 2023 by Dr. William Makis
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***
Two musicians died recently while performing on stage.
On April 24, 2023, I wrote a substack about musicians getting vaccine injured or dying suddenly (click here).
This may be subjective, but it appears to me that the trend of singers and musicians dying suddenly is accelerating. More and more are dying suddenly.
Many musicians and singers were forced into COVID-19 vaccines in three ways:
I can’t think of many musicians who were vocally opposed to COVID-19 vaccines or vaccine mandates, but there were a few memorable ones like Nicki Minaj and others who are listed here (click here).
Today, news broke that 64 year old Madonna was found unresponsive and was rushed to the hospital. She has claimed in the past to be at least double vaccinated with Moderna COVID-19 mRNA vaccine (click here).
She apparently had a “serious bacterial infection” that landed her in the ICU for several days, intubated and septic. I don’t have any information beyond that.
Up to now, Jamie Foxx has probably been the most famous entertainer who has had a very serious COVID-19 vaccine reaction, a stroke that has apparently left him partially blind and paralyzed, and which nearly killed him.
Jamie Foxx is also a musician. The tragic nature of his injuries has opened many people’s eyes to what the COVID-19 vaccines are doing to people.
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Dr. William Makis is a Canadian physician with expertise in Radiology, Oncology and Immunology. Governor General’s Medal, University of Toronto Scholar. Author of 100+ peer-reviewed medical publications.
by Michel Chossudovsky
Michel Chossudovsky reviews in detail how this insidious project “destroys people’s lives”. He provides a comprehensive analysis of everything you need to know about the “pandemic” — from the medical dimensions to the economic and social repercussions, political underpinnings, and mental and psychological impacts.
“My objective as an author is to inform people worldwide and refute the official narrative which has been used as a justification to destabilize the economic and social fabric of entire countries, followed by the imposition of the “deadly” COVID-19 “vaccine”. This crisis affects humanity in its entirety: almost 8 billion people. We stand in solidarity with our fellow human beings and our children worldwide. Truth is a powerful instrument.”
ISBN: 978-0-9879389-3-0, Year: 2022, PDF Ebook, Pages: 164, 15 Chapters
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June 30th, 2023 by Seymour M. Hersh
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***
The Biden administration had a glorious few days last weekend. The ongoing disaster in Ukraine slipped from the headlines to be replaced by the “revolt,” as a New York Times headline put it, of Yevgeny Prigozhin, chief of the mercenary Wagner Group.
The focus slipped from Ukraine’s failing counter-offensive to Prigozhin’s threat to Putin’s control. As one headline in the Times put it, “Revolt Raises Searing Question: Could Putin Lose Power?” Washington Post columnist David Ignatius posed this assessment: “Putin looked into the abyss Saturday—and blinked.”
Secretary of State Antony Blinken—the administration’s go-to wartime flack, who weeks ago spoke proudly of his commitment not to seek a ceasefire in Ukraine—appeared on CBS’s Face the Nation with his own version of reality:
“Sixteen months ago, Russian forces were . . . thinking they would erase Ukraine from the map as an independent country,” Blinken said. “Now, over the weekend they’ve had to defend Moscow, Russia’s capital, against mercenaries of Putin’s own making. . . . It was a direct challenge to Putin’s authority. . . . It shows real cracks.”
Blinken, unchallenged by his interviewer, Margaret Brennan, as he knew he would not be—why else would he appear on the show?—went on to suggest that the defection of the crazed Wagner leader would be a boon for Ukraine’s forces, whose slaughter by Russian troops was ongoing as he spoke.
“To the extent that it presents a real distraction for Putin, and for Russian authorities, that they have to look at—sort of mind their rear as they’re trying to deal with the counter offensive in Ukraine, I think that creates even greater openings for the Ukrainians to do well on the ground.”
At this point was Blinken speaking for Joe Biden? Are we to understand that this is what the man in charge believes?
We now know that the chronically unstable Prigozhin’s revolt fizzled out within a day, as he fled to Belarus, with a no-prosecution guarantee, and his mercenary army was mingled into the Russian army. There was no march on Moscow, nor was there a significant threat to Putin’s rule.
Pity the Washington columnists and national security correspondents who seem to rely heavily on official backgrounders with White House and State Department officials. Given the published results of such briefings, those officials seem unable to look at the reality of the past few weeks, or the total disaster that has befallen the Ukraine military’s counter-offensive.
So, below is a look at what is really going that was provided to me by a knowledgeable source in the American intelligence community:
“I thought I might clear some of the smoke. First and most importantly, Putin is now in a much stronger position. We realized as early as January of 2023 that a showdown between the generals, backed by Putin, and Prigo, backed by ultra-nationalist extremists, was inevitable. The age-old conflict between the ‘special’ war fighters and a large, slow, clumsy, unimaginative regular army. The army always wins because they own the peripheral assets that make victory, either offensive or defensive, possible. Most importantly, they control logistics. special forces see themselves as the premier offensive asset. When the overall strategy is offensive, big army tolerates their hubris and public chest thumping because SF are willing to take high risk and pay a high price. Successful offense requires a large expenditure of men and equipment. Successful defense, on the other hand, requires husbanding these assets.
“Wagner members were the spearhead of the original Russian Ukraine offensive. They were the ‘little green men’. When the offensive grew into an all-out attack by the regular army, Wagner continued to assist but reluctantly had to take a back seat in the period of instability and readjustment that followed. Prigo, no shy violet, took the initiative to grow his forces and stabilize his sector.
“The regular army welcomed the help. Prigo and Wagner, as is the wont of special forces, took the limelight and took the credit for stopping the hated Ukrainians. The press gobbled it up. Meanwhile, the big army and Putin slowly changed their strategy from offensive conquest of greater Ukraine to defense of what they already had. Prigo refused to accept the change and continued on the offensive against Bakhmut. Therein lies the rub. Rather than create a public crisis and court-martial the asshole [Prigozhin], Moscow simply withheld the resources and let Prigo use up his manpower and firepower reserves, dooming him to a stand-down. He is, after all, no matter how cunning financially, an ex-hot dog cart owner with no political or military accomplishments.
“What we never heard is three months ago Wagner was cycled out of the Bakhmut front and sent to an abandoned barracks north of Rostov-on-Don [in southern Russia] for demobilization. The heavy equipment was mostly redistributed, and the force was reduced to about 8,000, 2,000 of which left for Rostov escorted by local police.
“Putin fully backed the army who let Prigo make a fool of himself and now disappear into ignominy. All without raising a sweat militarily or causing Putin to face a political standoff with the fundamentalists, who were ardent Prigo admirers. Pretty shrewd.”
There is an enormous gap between the way the professionals in the American intelligence community assess the situation and what the White House and the supine Washington press project to the public by uncritically reproducing the statements of Blinken and his hawkish cohorts.
The current battlefield statistics that were shared with me suggest that the Biden administration’s overall foreign policy may be at risk in Ukraine. They also raise questions about the involvement of the NATO alliance, which has been providing the Ukrainian forces with training and weapons for the current lagging counter-offensive. I learned that in the first two weeks of the operation, the Ukraine military seized only 44 square miles of territory previously held by the Russian army, much of it open land. In contrast, Russia is now in control of 40,000 square miles of Ukrainian territory. I have been told that in the past ten days Ukrainian forces have not fought their way through the Russian defenses in any significant way. They have recovered only two more square miles of Russian-seized territory. At that pace, one informed official said, waggishly, it would take Zelensky’s military 117 years to rid the country. of Russian occupation.
The Washington press in recent days seems to be slowly coming to grips with the enormity of the disaster, but there is no public evidence that President Biden and his senior aides in the White House and State Department aides understand the situation.
Putin now has within his grasp total control, or close to it, of the four Ukrainian oblasts—Donetsk, Kherson, Lubansk, Zaporizhzhia—that he publicly annexed on September 30, 2022, seven months after he began the war. The next step, assuming there is no miracle on the battlefield, will be up to Putin. He could simply stop where he is, and see if the military reality will be accepted by the White House and whether a ceasefire will be sought, with formal end-of-war talks initiated. There will be a presidential election next April in Ukraine, and the Russian leader may stay put and wait for that—if it takes place. President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine has said there will be no elections while the country is under martial law.
Biden’s political problems, in terms of next year’s presidential election, are acute—and obvious. On June 20 the Washington Post published an article based on a Gallup poll under the headline “Biden Shouldn’t Be as Unpopular as Trump—but He Is.” The article accompanying the poll by Perry Bacon, Jr., said that Biden has “almost universal support within his own party, virtually none from the opposition party and terrible numbers among independents.” Biden, like previous Democratic presidents, Bacon wrote, struggles “to connect with younger and less engaged voters.” Bacon had nothing to say about Biden’s support for the Ukraine war because the poll apparently asked no questions about the administration’s foreign policy.
The looming disaster in Ukraine, and its political implications, should be a wake-up call for those Democratic members of Congress who support the president but disagree with his willingness to throw many billions of good money after bad in Ukraine in the hope of a miracle that will not arrive. Democratic support for the war is another example of the party’s growing disengagement from the working class. It’s their children who have been fighting the wars of the recent past and may be fighting in any future war. These voters have turned away in increasing numbers as the Democrats move closer to the intellectual and moneyed classes.
If there is any doubt about the continuing seismic shift in current politics, I recommend a good dose of Thomas Frank, the acclaimed author of the 2004 best-seller What’s the Matter with Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America, a book that explained why the voters of that state turned away from the Democratic party and voted against their economic interests. Frank did it again in 2016 in his book Listen, Liberal: Or, Whatever Happened to the Party of the People? In an afterword to the paperback edition he depicted how Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party repeated—make that amplified—the mistakes made in Kansas en route to losing a sure-thing election to Donald Trump.
It may be prudent for Joe Biden to talk straight about the war, and its various problems for America—and to explain why the estimated more than $150 billion that his administration has put up thus far turned out to be a very bad investment.
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Featured image: Yevgeny Prigozhin, chief of the mercenary Wagner Group, in a video he released last weekend. (Source: Seymour Hersh)
June 30th, 2023 by Global Research News
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By , June 29, 2023
Surveying the latest transgressions against decency, morality, and humanity itself by artificial intelligence and its biological architects. One theme I’ve tried to work into my conversations with Joe Jarvis and Nicolas Creed regarding artificial intelligence, transhumanism, and related issues is: technology is a tool.
By , June 30, 2023
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France Erupts in Rebellion After Police Killing of North African Youth
By , June 30, 2023
On June 29, thousands marched in Paris demanding an end to police brutality and institutional racism which people believe was the motivating factor in the death of Nahel M, a legal citizen in France of Moroccan and Algerian descent.
By , June 29, 2023
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Pfizer Vaccine Batches in the EU Were Placebos, Say Scientists
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The Real Casualties of Russia’s ‘Civil War’: The Beltway Expert Class
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By , June 29, 2023
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By , June 29, 2023
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June 30th, 2023 by Abayomi Azikiwe
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A young person was brutally shot to death during a traffic stop in the Paris suburb of Nanterre on June 27 prompting mass demonstrations and rebellions in various areas in France.
On June 29, thousands marched in Paris demanding an end to police brutality and institutional racism which people believe was the motivating factor in the death of Nahel M, a legal citizen in France of Moroccan and Algerian descent.
In France, many of the oppressed people communities exist in the suburban areas outside of Paris and other major municipalities. These neighborhoods are subjected to intensive police patrolling and surveillance. The suburbs are often predominantly composed of people of African and Middle Eastern descent who have direct and ancestral lineages among the Black and Arab peoples formerly enslaved and colonized by France.
A video of the actual shooting revealed that Nahel was sitting in a vehicle after being pulled over by the French police. As the video illustrates, the shooting was completely unprovoked.
The French national newspaper Le Monde wrote on the video saying:
“The teenager was killed as he pulled away from police who tried to stop him for traffic infractions. A video, authenticated by Agence France-Presse, showed two policemen standing by the side of the stationary car, with one pointing a weapon at the driver. A voice is heard saying: ‘You are going to get a bullet in the head.’ The police officer then appears to fire as the car abruptly drives off.”
Over a two-day period, French authorities said that 180 people were arrested on June 28-29 as people engaged in peaceful marches along with violent attacks on commercial and government buildings. Dozens of cars were set alight in protests against the racist violence emanating from the police.
French President Emmanuel Macron came out publicly saying the police shooting of Nahel was unacceptable. However, when the oppressed communities engaged in violent protest, the neo-liberal president said that the spontaneous response of the masses was unjustified prompting the deployment of 40,000 law-enforcement personnel to quell the unrest.
Although the French political leadership has attempted to distance itself from the police killing of Nahel, this is not the first time where the brutality and misconduct of law-enforcement has resulted in serious injury and death. Just recently in the early months of 2023, when French trade unions and students went out on a series of general strikes in opposition to the pension reforms which raised the age levels and work requirements for retirement payments, there were several hundreds reports of excessive uses of force by the police to quell demonstrations.
In an article published by the New York Times on June 29, it states that:
“Police stations were vandalized or targeted with fireworks in cities including Trappes, near Paris, and Rouen, in the north. In Clamart, a Paris suburb, a tramway was briefly set ablaze. About 40,000 officers will be deployed across France on Thursday (June 29) evening to contain further unrest, the interior minister said, a significant increase over the 9,000 deployed on Wednesday night.”
There has been very minimal information released by the corporate and government-controlled media outlets in France, Britain and the United States as it relates to the ethnicity and race of the latest victim of police brutality in Paris. This reluctance to report on racially charged incidents involving law-enforcement points to the volatile social situations prevailing in the capitalist states in Europe and North America. The ruling class and state officials are well aware of the ongoing economic exploitation and national oppression which undergird the capitalist and imperialist system.
Obviously, the investigative reporting on these issues of bias within policing would not be in the interest of racist capitalist states since it exposes the inherent contradictions in the political system. The only real alternatives would be to either provide a rationale for the continuance of the same system or demand its dismantling.
In death as in life, the victims of state and racist vigilante violence are denied their humanity while being presumed guilty of offenses which ostensibly brought about their own demise. Police always attempt to justify their murderous behavior under the guise that they felt threatened by people of color. This narrative coincides with how African and Arab peoples are treated within French society. Despite the presence of several million people who have African and West Asian ancestry, they have not been accepted fully into the mainstream of the body politic and are therefore susceptible to discrimination.
According to the same above-mentioned article published by the New York Times and other sources:
“Nahel, 17, was a French citizen of Algerian and Moroccan descent. He was an only child being raised by his mother in Nanterre, a working-class suburb 15 minutes by commuter train from central Paris. His grandmother told a French journalist that he had dreamed of being a mechanic. ‘He was kind,’ she said. ‘He was a nice boy.’ He played on a local rugby team that was part of a French association, Ovale Citoyen. A lawyer representing his family told the French television program “C à Vous” that he had no criminal record. But Pascal Prache, the top prosecutor in Nanterre, said that the teenager had been known to the police for not complying with traffic stops and had been summoned to juvenile court in September for such an incident. Nahel M. was driving a yellow Mercedes AMG on Tuesday morning. Mr. Prache told a news conference on Thursday (29) that a search of the car did not find any ‘dangerous’ material or illegal drugs.”
France has been the scene of widespread demonstrations and rebellions going back to 2005 when various suburbs across the country witnessed unrest sparked by police killings of Black and other people of color. In 2005, the then French Interior Minister Nicholas Sarkozy described the demonstrators as “social scum.”
Sarkozy was later elected president of France becoming a major proponent of the destruction of the North African state of Libya in 2011. The former president was later indicted and convicted in a corruption scandal. Nonetheless, Sarkozy was not sent to prison and given a suspended sentence for his crimes against the French state.
Today, President Macron is desperately seeking to reassert French imperialist influence in various geopolitical regions of the world. In Africa, the anti-French sentiment throughout the Sahel and other areas is palpable. Macron last year announced the liquidation of Operation Barkhane which was a counterpart to the U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM). However, French military and economic interests remain on the continent of Africa.
France has gone along with the defeatist proxy war led by Washington in Ukraine against the Russian Federation. Long term economic relations with the Russian Federation have been jeopardized by the sanctions imposed on Moscow which is partially responsible for the rising rates of inflation and credit tightening by the European Central Bank.
Workers and oppressed people in France are being forced to give up even more social benefits and freedoms. This pattern is spreading rapidly throughout the European continent and the United Kingdom which has also been struck by industrial actions and racial problems.
Although the officer in France who fired the shots that killed Nahel has been placed under investigation for homicide, these actions by the state do not address the fundamental issues of racism, class exploitation and police violence which are embedded in the governmental policies of the country. The thousands who marched in Paris on June 29 are demanding immediate reforms in policing culture. If these measures are not implemented there will more mass demonstrations and rebellions in France and other geopolitical regions throughout the globe.
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Abayomi Azikiwe is the editor of the Pan-African News Wire. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.
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June 30th, 2023 by Dr. Binoy Kampmark
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***
Sports stars are making a heated rush for it, cresting on the money wave, and finding sanctuary in Mammon’s big breasted glory. And that wave is coming, oddly enough, from a desert country, alien to such matters till recent decades, when oil came with blessings and political power.
After colonising international golf with a throat crushing ruthlessness, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is moving to consume another field with voracious interest: football. And to be fair to the recruiters, some of the most morally flabby, flexible and flatulent recruits are to be found among these overly paid bipeds of the European leagues. They may be beautiful to look at, admirable in kicking a spherical object, but they exhibit an ethical awareness less developed than that of a house budgie.
An initial target had to be found. Find the one least aware, most vain, and most likely to succumb to the next frontier of money paved opportunity. As it so happened, there was one that fitted the bill with almost harmonic ease. The Portuguese star, Cristiano Ronaldo, who seemed to have lost some of his shine, was nigh perfect. Following in the footsteps of previous figures keen to make a killing in a league in the twilight of their career, Saudi Arabia stretched out a cash-filled hand. Never the most morally, philosophically mature of types, Ronaldo was bound to grab it. These would be easy pickings for minimum effort.
In January this year, Amnesty International expressed their concern at the signing of the Portuguese national by Al-Nassr. The decision, according to Dana Ahmed, Amnesty International’s Middle East researcher, fitted “into a wider pattern of sportswashing in Saudi Arabia.” It was also “highly likely that the Saudi authorities will promote Ronaldo’s presence in the country as a means of distracting from the country’s appalling human rights record.”
Highly likely are the keywords here. As Simon Chadwick, an expert on the geopolitical economy of sport at SKEMA Business School in Paris puts it, “Saudi Arabia is Qatar on steroids.” The Kingdom “sees itself as being at the centre of a new world order that is kind of a connecting note in this huge network between Europe, Africa, and Asia.”
Sporting measures are not merely seen as efforts at mass distraction on the international stage; they are also seen as an effort to keep the youth of the country busy. Sebastian Castelier, writing in Haaretz, suggests that sports is being placed in the service of the state to prevent any potential rejection of a “monarchy which rules with complete and unchallenged authority”.
Haunting such figures as the Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman is the prospect of another Arab Spring. In Chadwick’s assessment, sport acts as a tool to leverage the “risks of potential political dissent or upheaval by offering the youth the fashion-music-entertainment-tourism lifestyle that comes with sports.”
Instead of dismissing Ronaldo’s sense of principle, which can only be seen as shallow at best, Ahmed sensed an implausible opportunity: he could eschew “offering uncritical praise of Saudi Arabia” and “use his considerable public platform to draw attention to human rights issues in the country.”
No indication of such a position was given in Ronaldo’s January 3 press conference. Journalists duly witnessed an exercise of preening and self-praise. “I had many opportunities … Many clubs tried to sign me but I gave my word to this club to develop not only the football but other parts of this amazing country.” He wished to “give a different vision of this club and country. This is why I took this opportunity.” Human rights can, it would seem, sod it, especially for an annual fee of $200 million, with an additional $200 million for aiding Riyadh promote a joint bid for the 2030 FIFA World Cup.
A slew of stellar performers, hypnotised by the lucre, now find themselves on the blood speckled payroll of the House of Saud. Karim Benzema, N’Golo Kante, Kalidou Koulibaly, Edouard Mendy and Ruben Neves have all added their names to teams in the Saudi Pro League, all owned by Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund.
The notable absentee in the list is the Argentinian master, Lionel Messi. Instead of joining the Al-Hilal club, he preferred a move to Inter Miami in the United States. “If it had been a matter of money, I’d have gone to Arabia or elsewhere.” He suggested, without elaborating on any details, that his final decision was not exclusively motivated by money. Not exactly profound, but hardly surprising.
It is incumbent on anyone looking at Saudi Arabia’s efforts to mention the obvious. But as is so often the case, the obvious tends to be avoided with a combination of ignorance, willful blindness and deceit. The Kingdom arbitrarily detains, tortures and murders dissidents and journalists. It specialises in sham trials and takes delight in mass executions. It wages wars in the name of theocratic reassurance, claiming to have a monopoly interpreting the tenets of Islam. For all that, the genius of the regime is very much in keeping with the methods of all effective propagandists: preach about distractions long enough, be they about performances, trinkets, and hope, and an amnesiac slumber will follow.
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Dr. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He currently lectures at RMIT University. He is a regular contributor to Global Research and Asia-Pacific Research. Email: [email protected]
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June 29th, 2023 by Matthew Ehret-Kump
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***
Amidst this week’s strange attempt to instigate a military coup from the head of Russia’s Wagner Group, President Putin took a loud stand calling out the operation as a foreign directed insurgency with parallels drawn from the chaotic revolution of 1917.
Just as in 1917, the nation was at war with an enemy on the verge of defeat, and just as in 1917, foreign manipulations using fifth columnists resulted in sucking the nation into Civil War. Putin stated:
“Exactly this strike was dealt in 1917 when the country was in WW1, but its victory was stolen. Intrigues and arguments behind the army’s back turned out to be the greatest catastrophe, destruction of the army and the state, loss of huge territories, resulting in a tragedy and a civil war…
Russians were killing Russians, brothers killing brothers. But the beneficiaries were various political chevaliers of fortune and foreign powers who divided the country and tore it into parts. We will not let this happen.”
Now I don’t know if the events catalyzed by Prigozhin’s attempted coup are part of a ‘game within a game’ designed to flush out fifth columnists while providing a head fake to western strategists… OR if this was an authentic coup. But what I do know is that there are historical processes at play which too few recognize and which President Putin understands very well.
Some might think Putin’s comparison to the 1917 revolution to be hyperbole, or a disrespect for the glorious Soviet revolution. They would be mistaken.
The sad fact is that neither the Bolsheviks nor Mensheviks which emerged onto the stage of history at the turn of the 20th century were organically arising “peoples’ movements”.
Upon deeper analysis conducted by historians like Anthony Sutton, Kerry Bolton, and Robert Cowley, both organizations which eventually merged into a singular force, enjoyed vast financial patronage of western imperial powerhouses such as Paul Warburg, Jacob Schiff (head of Kuhn, Loeb & co.) and even Lord Alfred Milner — head of the newly formed Round Table Movement.
These characters bankrolled much of the Bolshevik movement as early as 1905 in order to destroy a truly revolutionary process that was spreading across much of the world in the wake of the Civil War.
One of the leading champions of this revolutionary process was Lincoln’s former bodyguard and the first Governor of Colorado William Gilpin. Governor Gilpin envisioned a world of sovereign nation states united by rail lines stretching through the Bering Strait and bringing all the continents and cultures into harmonious co-existence. In his famous 1890 ‘Cosmopolitan Railway’ Gilpin stated:
“The cosmopolitan railway will make the whole world one community. It will reduce the separate nations to families of our great nation… From extended intercommunication will arise a wider intercourse of human ideas and as the result, logical and philosophical reciprocities, which will become the germs for innumerable new developments; for in the track of intercommunication, enterprise and invention invariably follow and whatever facilitates one stimulates every other agency of progress.”
Describing the obvious brotherhood of Russia and the USA in spearheading this project, Gilpin wrote:
“It is a simple and plain proposition, that Russia and the United States, each having broad, uninhabited areas and limitless undeveloped resources, would by the expenditure of two or three hundred millions apiece for a highway of the nations through their now waste places, add a hundred fold to their wealth and power and influence. Nations which can spend in war their thousands of lives – the lives of the best and bravest of their sons and citizens – can surely afford a little of their surplus wealth and energy for such a work as this.” [p.35]
Gilpin was not alone in this vision.
In fact, he represented a network of statesmen spread all across the globe who recognized that the only way to break out of the endless cycle of wars, usury, and corruption, which the Hobbesian structures of the British Empire maintained globally, was through the adoption of an anti-Free Trade system known as “The American System of Political Economy”. This was a very different concept of “America” than the Pax Americana which has run roughshod over the world since WWII.
In Russia, this process found its champion in the figure of Sergei Witte (Finance Minister and Minister of Transportation from 1892-1903) who led a faction of the Russian intelligentsia in a struggle for progress and cooperation both internally and with allied nations against powerful forces committed to feudalism both within the Russian oligarchy and externally.
The regressive forces which Witte had to contend with included powerful reactionary traditionalist forces who yearned for the good old days before Czar Alexander II freed the serfs and on the other extreme, the emergence of vast clusters of anarchist movements threatening to burn down the state in a replication of the Jacobin frenzy of the French revolution.
As Martin Sieff has demonstrated through his many writings on Prince Kropotkin, many of these anarchist networks enjoyed the patronage of powerful forces that cared little for the plight of the working class.
The international spread of the American System between 1876-1905 took the form of large-scale industrialization and railroads. The funding mechanism was located in a practice that has fallen out of favor in the West (although has made a powerful comeback in China in recent years) called ‘dirigisme’ — the emission of productive credit from state banks.
It was Witte who had spearheaded the Trans Siberian Railway’s construction between 1890-1905 with plans to extend rail lines to China and beyond utilizing state directed capital and a blend of private enterprise. A fuller exposition of Witte’s fight will be unveiled in the next installment.
The British Empire which always relied on keeping nations divided, underdeveloped and dependent on the use of maritime shipping was not amused.
By controlling the international maritime choke points, the tiny island was able to exert its influence across the globe. Through the vigorous enforcement of laissez-faire doctrines of free trade, nations were blocked from protecting themselves from the financial warfare launched by the city of London against victim states (speculative volatility, usury, cheap dumping, cash cropping, and drug running). Anyone wishing to engage in long term planning in the building up of the land-based transport corridors via rail, roads, and industry would be easily sabotaged if the British System were shaping their world.
The international movement to break this system of evil was the only real revolutionary process animating the world during this time.
In 1905, Wall Street financier Jacob Schiff had given $200 million to the Japanese to assist their victory against the Russians during the 1904-05 Russian Japanese war. This generosity ultimately earned the banker the Medal of the Rising Sun in the Meiji Palace in 1907.
After crippling the Russian state and military (it’s navy was wiped out during the war), Schiff turned his attention to financing revolutionary activities within Russia itself. How money was spent by Schiff was difficult to say until 1949, when Schiff’s grandson John Schiff bragged to the New York Journal that his grandfather had given $20 million “for the triumph of communism in Russia.”
American journalist, and Schiff asset George Kennan, played an instrumental role as perception manager of the revolution and bragged that he had converted 52,000 Russian soldiers imprisoned in Japan into Bolshevik revolutionaries. A March 24, 1917 interview recorded in The New York Times celebrating the revolution read:
“Mr. Kennan told of the work of the Friends of Russian Freedom in the revolution. He said that during the Russian-Japanese war he was in Tokyo, and that he was permitted to make visits among the 12,000 Russian prisoners in Japanese hands at the end of the first year of the war. He had conceived the idea of putting revolutionary propaganda into the hands of the Russian army.
The Japanese authorities favoured it and gave him permission. After which he sent to America for all the Russian revolutionary literature to be had…
‘The movement was financed by a New York banker you all know and love,’ he said, referring to Mr Schiff, ‘and soon we received a ton and a half of Russian revolutionary propaganda. At the end of the war 50,000 Russian officers and men went back to their country ardent revolutionists. The Friends of Russian Freedom had sowed 50,000 seeds of liberty in 100 Russian regiments. I do not know how many of these officers and men were in the Petrograd fortress last week, but we do know what part the army took in the revolution.’”
Schiff himself jubilantly stated to the New York Times, March 18, 1917:
“May I through your columns give expression to my joy that the Russian nation, a great and good people, have at last effected their deliverance from centuries of autocratic oppression and through an almost bloodless revolution have now come into their own. Praised be God on high!”
Historian Kerry Bolton wrote of New York Federal Reserve director William Boyce Thompson who had been installed as head of the American Red Cross during the 1917 revolution and was largely recognized as the true U.S. ambassador to the government, saying:
“Thompson set himself up in royal manner in Petrograd reporting directly to Pres. Wilson and bypassing U.S. Ambassador Francis. Thompson provided funds from his own money, first to the Social Revolutionaries, to whom he gave one million rubles, and shortly after $1,000,000 to the Bolsheviks to spread their propaganda to Germany and Austria.”
Writing in 1962, historian Arsene de Goulevitch who experienced the events of 1917 firsthand wrote:
“In private interviews, I have been told that over 21 million rubles were spent by Lord Alfred Milner in financing the Russian Revolution… The financier just mentioned was by no means alone among the British to support the Russian revolution with large financial donations.” (1)
According to his own accounts, during the four months Leon Trotsky spent in New York in 1917, much of it was spent hobnobbing with the upper crust of Wall Street and being driven around in limousines (2).
It is also noteworthy that after Trotsky was arrested by Canadian authorities while en route back to Russia with tens of thousands of dollars of Wall Street money, it was none other than Claude Dansey (Cecil Rhodes disciple, deputy chief of the new MI6 and founder of US military intelligence in 1917!!) that directly intervened to liberate Trotsky and company.
Leon Trotsky, who Lord Milner, Schiff, Paul Warburg etc., always intended to be the leader of the movement that would take control over the dead bodies of the Romanovs, was fortunately ousted by the saner forces around Joseph Stalin in 1927.
As historian Grover Furr masterfully documents using recently declassified material, testimonies, and other evidence from archives in the USA and Russia, Leon Trotsky made several attempts to return to power in Russia after his expulsion. He didn’t do this alone, however, but largely with the help of fascist forces in Britain, Japan, Ukraine, and Germany all the way until the moment he met his untimely end in 1940. This will be the subject of a future review of Grover Furr’s work (3).
For all of Lenin’s many problems, he differed from Trotsky on two interconnected points of 1) a general belief in voluntarism and 2) a rejection of the theory of permanent revolution.
Where Lenin believed that productive labor could be channeled towards the improvement of productive forces of society, Trotsky believed that any such effort at peaceful productive improvement would lead only to decadence. Permanent revolution was thus needed to keep workers from falling into sloth amidst the eternal striving for global class struggle. In 1914, a frustrated Lenin spoke of Trotsky’s fetish saying: “he [Trotsky] deserted the Mensheviks and occupied a vacillating position, now co-operating with Martynov (the economist), now proclaiming his absurdly Left ‘permanent revolution’ theory.”
Another point of conflict between Lenin on the one side and Trotsky on the other centered on whether or not Russia should continue to participate in WWI.
A mind-numbing over-simplification of Russian history has destroyed the ability for countless historians to recognize the reason for the life and death battles that took place between Trotsky and Stalin during the first 20 post revolutionary years [in photo: Stalin, Lenin and Trotsky]
Where Lenin wanted to bring Russia out of the insane conflict in the first moments of their coup in 1917, Trotsky and his close ally Bukharin demanded that Russia stay in the war with the aim of converting it into a total pan European (and ultimately global) revolution. Trotsky’s commitment to global socialist revolution vs Stalin’s commitment to “socialism in one country” was at the heart of an unbridgeable divide between the two revolutionaries throughout the years.
Upon taking charge of the Russian economy, Trotsky and Lenin unleashed a destructive wave of economic reforms titled ‘The New Economic Policy’ (NEP) that saw vast liberalization of the entire state with western corporate powers sweeping in to buy up former national utilities for pennies on the dollar. The most powerful figure of the western magnates to be granted full access to buy up Russia under this new policy was Occidental Petroleum’s Armand Hammer (1898-1990) who was only forced to leave Russia the moment Trotsky was kicked out (and returning to dominance in the weeks after Stalin’s 1953 death).
Later on in life, Hammer described how Lenin told him:
”We do not need doctors, we need businessmen… communism is not working and we must change to a New Economic Policy.”
Working closely with Lenin and especially Trotsky, Hammer became the principal moderator of nearly every business deal made between the Soviet government and western corporations during the 1920s which saw Russia sink into brutal economic enslavement to foreign powers at a pace which would not be seen again for over 60 years.
The vast liberalization of the Russian economy during the dark 1920s paralleled closely the Perestroika program of free trade/privatization of the 1990s and it is no coincidence that George Bush Sr dubbed this program of Balkanized looting of Russia ‘Operation Hammer’.
Trotsky’s close association with Alexander Israel Helphand (aka: Parvus) throughout the revolution of 1905 and beyond is also suspicious and should be considered in the context of a much broader imperial geopolitical strategy.
Parvus’ association with the Pan-European Union founded by Count Richard von Coudenhove-Kalergi in 1923 is another relevant anomaly that takes us into the deeper power structures lurking below the surface waves of history (4).
Other members of Coudenhove-Kalergi’s institution included likes of Benito Mussolini, Walter Lippman, Nazi finance minister Hjalmar Schacht and Nazi geopolitician Karl Haushofer, while financiers Max Warburg and Louis de Rothschild openly bankrolled the organization.
In 1932, Kalergi delivered a speech celebrating the great restoration of order that would emerge in the unified pan-European effort to put down Bolshevik anarchism saying:
“This eternal war can end only with the constitution of a world republic…. The only way left to save the peace seems to be a politic of peaceful strength, on the model of the Roman Empire, that succeeded in having the longest period of peace in the west thanks to the supremacy of his legions.”
This group played a much greater role in history than many realize and set the stage for the European Union. Parvus’ (and Trotsky’s) close association with Vladimir Jabotinsky set the stage for the most fascist elements of Zionism to emerge in the wake of WWII, and Parvus’ work as propagandist and arms dealer for the leadership of the Young Turk movement (deployed to set a weakened Ottoman Empire on fire and provoke what became the Balkan Wars of 1912-13) can still be felt across the Turkish world to this day.
It is also noteworthy that none other than Otto von Habsburg himself had run this organization for over 30 years and also created a sister organization called Dignitae Humanae Institute to “united the right of the world” under a gnostic Catholic veneer with a Clash of Civilizations rebranding for the alt right. As the ultra-liberalized dissolution of society proceeds expectedly apace under the moral mush of LBGTXYZ gobbledygook, pagan Gaia worship, and critical race theory, it is obvious that a knee jerk leap into radical conservativism will accelerate. Hence, a net has been cast to catch conservative fish.
Located in an 800-year-old monastery in Trisulti, Otto Hapsburg’s organization has found a useful frontman in the form of a Jesuitical fascist right-wing priest of the American alt-right by the name of… Steve Bannon. (5)
I say this here and now just to draw a parallel in the reader’s mind to the strange transmogrification which leading Trotskyists took in the USA once their leader’s life was snuffed out in 1940. Trotsky’s body wasn’t even cold before such devotees as James Burnham, Sidney Hook, Max Schachtman, Albert Wohlsetter, and Irving Kristol abandoned Trotskyite socialism and adopted a new rabidly right-wing paradigm, which came to be known as ‘neo-conservativism’.
This poisonous movement grew quickly throughout the Cold War and took over the USA over the dead bodies of JFK and his brother while unleashing a new global dis-order ‘clash of civilizations’ each-against-all logic onto the globe under the watch of the Trilateral Commission of Kissinger, Brzezinski, and David Rockefeller.
I think we can intimate what Trotsky ultimately saw as the final destination for his aims of a global revolution of the masses, and willingness to collaborate with Nazis to achieve his ends by considering the writings of former Trotskyite James Burnham.
As Cynthia Chung pointed out in her recent article on the topic, Burnham, (Trotsky’s former personal assistant and a man known to many as the father of the neocons), saw the resolution to the Manichean problem of class struggle and Cold War in a one world fascist government. Right before Trotsky’s 1940 death, Burnham wrote an essay renouncing Dialectic Materialism in favor of the superior philosophy of Bertrand Russell as outlined in the 1913 Principia Scientifica, and hence his rebirth as a neocon was ensured (6).
Bertrand Russell and Alfred Whitehead’s three volume Principia Mathematica published between 1910-1913 set the stage for the latter development of cybernetics and information theory by Russell’s pupil Norbert Wiener
The question now sits before us: Was Burnham’s conversion to Russell’s worldview inconsistent with the actual goals and mission of Leon Trotsky?
It is too often forgotten that Leon Trotsky, acting as chairman Of the technical and scientific board of industry, quite literally controlled all science policy of Russia from 1924-25. During this time, he wrote a 1924 pamphlet outlining his pro-eugenics vision of the future global order that would be brought into existence through the forces of Darwinian natural selection saying:
“The human species will once more enter into a state of radical transformation, and in his own hands, will become an object of the most complicated methods of artificial selection and mass psycho-physical training. This is entirely in accord with evolution… man will make his purpose to master his own feelings, to raise his instincts to a higher consciousness… to create a higher social biological type, or if you please, a superman.”
Whether we consider Trotsky’s relentless efforts to integrate Darwinism with Marxist Dialectic Materialism or the Neoconservative commitment to a Darwinian survival of the fittest ethic merged with agnostic Christian end times doctrine, the effects are largely identical: Global chaos with a supposed point of rapture/synthesis to resolve the chaos of the material world. Getting to this destination, whereby a new order and new Nietzschean human being were to emerge, simply required a cleansing experience.
In this sense, Trotsky could be compared to a Russian version of his contemporary Jesuit Pierre Teilhard de Chardin.
Where Chardin was tasked with merging Darwin’s theory of natural selection into Christianity, Trotsky was tasked with merging Darwin’s theory into the state religion of Marxist dialectic materialism in Russia. The end result in either case was identical.
Albert Wohlstetter is another devout Trotskyist who became a leading neo-conservative and controlling hand behind RAND Corporation. It was under Wohlstetter’s influence that RAND Corp became the principal conduit for the intellectual takeover of all branches of US policy on military, economic, and cultural levels.
How did this occur? Through a process known as Cybernetics.
Created by Norbert Wiener as the “practical application” of Lord Bertrand Russell’s “theoretical” Principia Mathematica of 1910-1913, Cybernetics was essentially a ‘science of control’ which became the conduit used to re-brand eugenics into new clothes after World War II.
As I outlined in my recent essay ‘The Revenge of the Malthusians and the Science of Limits’ the language of Cybernetics was called ‘systems analysis’ and presumed that all systems could be described as closed units susceptible to pure mathematical description and most importantly… manipulation from a scientific elite.
Author Alex Abella described RAND’s systems analysis repackaging of Dialectic Materialism in the following terms in his Soldiers of Reason:
“RAND’s systems analysis…refused to be constrained by existing reality…Systems analysis was the freedom to dream and to dream big, to turn away from the idea that reality is a limited set of choices, to strive to bend the world to one’s will…the crux of systems analysis lies in a careful examination of the assumptions that gird the so-called right question, for the moment of greatest danger in a project is when unexamined criteria define the answers we want to extract. Sadly, most RAND analysts failed to perceive this inherent flaw in their wondrous construct. Not only that, the methodology of systems analysis required that all the aspects of a particular problem be broken down into quantities…Those things that could not be eased into a mathematical formula…were left out of the analysis… By extension, if a subject could not be measured, ranged, and classified, it was of little consequence in systems analysis, for it was not rational. Numbers were all – the human factor was a mere adjunct to the empirical.”
The key that gives both Dialectic Materialism the same power of evil as the upgraded tool of Bertrand Russell’s Principia Scientifica extolled by Burnham or Norbert Wiener’s cybernetics/systems analysis is found in the following axiom:
“Quantity must always govern quality”.
Under the influence of Wohlsetter’s RAND Corporation, the USA was driven into full scale insanity with a military outlook driven by computer models that presumed nuclear war was a winnable endeavor bringing the world closer to full scale nuclear holocaust. The merging of Darwinism with social science created “eugenics” which presumed that quantitative properties like genetic codes and DNA gave rise to qualitative attributes like “morality”, “wisdom” or “fitness to rule or live”.
In order for society to be brought into acceptance of this new soul-less paradigm of existence, with an invisible master class governing depopulated slaves from above, a vast shock therapy would be called for.
That cleansing experience would take the form of ritualistic climax of purgative violence which would usher in a state of total despair and thus a new scientific priesthood managing the slaves of the other under a renewed form of technocratic feudalism. But how would society be brought to such a state of despair such that the masses would clamor for a new age to be imposed upon them in the form of a one world technocratic government?
When Christianity, nationalism, and respect for family values still governed society, such a state of nihilistic despair requisite to achieve this breaking point was more than a little difficult to achieve.
Here the role of Trotsky’s associates Georg Lukacs, and Willi Munzenberg play an important role.
Both men were not only radical Bolsheviks but also founders of a new organization founded in 1923 known as the Institute for Social Research founded in Frankfurt Germany, otherwise known as “The Frankfurt School”.
The Frankfurt School would lay out a comprehensive intellectual framework for a new global aesthetical and scientific revolution premised on the worship of decay, ugliness, and death within a Weberian-Freudian-Marxist synthesis.
The system developed by these misanthropic leading priests of the new cult of death would justify the CIA’s funding of abstract art, post-modernist literature, a-tonal music, and other most modernist garbage throughout the Cold War.
The launching of this project in full force took the form of a CIA-MI6 funded operation in 1949 dubbed ‘The Congress for Cultural Freedom’. Leading organizers of this congress included Lord Bertrand Russell and two former Trotskyists: Sidney Hook and James Burnham.
This group and their role in steering mass education and culture over the ensuing century will be the topic of a future report.
To this author’s knowledge, the first time Vladimir Putin laid out a full attack on the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution as a foreign directed color revolution was during his 2021 Valdai Club meeting. At his keynote address, the Russian leader called out the social engineers masquerading as revolutionaries and social reformers today driving a parallel to the destructive ideology of the Bolsheviks of 1917:
“The advocates of so-called ‘social progress’ believe they are introducing humanity to some kind of a new and better consciousness. Godspeed, hoist the flags as we say, go right ahead. The only thing that I want to say now is that their prescriptions are not new at all. It may come as a surprise to some people, but Russia has been there already. After the 1917 revolution, the Bolsheviks, relying on the dogmas of Marx and Engels, also said that they would change existing ways and customs and not just political and economic ones, but the very notion of human morality and the foundations of a healthy society. The destruction of age-old values, religion and relations between people, up to and including the total rejection of family (we had that, too), encouragement to inform on loved ones – all this was proclaimed progress and, by the way, was widely supported around the world back then and was quite fashionable, same as today. By the way, the Bolsheviks were absolutely intolerant of opinions other than theirs.”
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This article was originally published on The Last American Vagabond.
Matthew Ehret is the Editor-in-Chief of the Canadian Patriot Review, and Senior Fellow at the American University in Moscow. He is author of the ‘Untold History of Canada’ book series and Clash of the Two Americas trilogy. In 2019 he co-founded the Montreal-based Rising Tide Foundation.
He is a regular contributor to Global Research.
Notes
(1) Czarism and Revolution, published by Omni Publications in Hawthorne, 1962 French edition, pp. 224, 230)
(2) Leon Trotsky: My Life, New York publisher: Scribner’s, 1930, p. 277
(3) One of the best and more recent among Furr’s pioneering writing on this topic can be found in his New Evidence of Trotsky’s Conspiracy, Erythos Press, 2020. Furr’s website is also an invaluable resource.
(4) Parvus’s association with the Pan European Union and broader fascist operations across Turkey and the Middle East is laid out in Jeffrey Steinberg’s 2005 report “Cheney Revives Parvus’ Permanent War Madness”
(5) This fact gives new meaning to Bannon’s self-characterization as a Leninist. In an August 22, 2016 Daily Beast article, journalist Ronald Radosh described a conversation he had with Bannon two years earlier saying “we had a long talk about his approach to politics. He never called himself a “populist” or an “American nationalist,” as so many think of him today. “I’m a Leninist,” Bannon proudly proclaimed. Shocked, I asked him what he meant.
“Lenin,” he answered, “wanted to destroy the state, and that’s my goal too. I want to bring everything crashing down, and destroy all of today’s establishment.”
(6) In his Feb 1940 ‘Science and Style’, Burnham wrote: “Do you wish me to prepare a reading list, Comrade Trotsky? It would be long, ranging from the work of the brilliant mathematicians and logicians of the middle of the last century to one climax in the monumental Principia Mathematica of Russell and Whitehead (the historic turning point in modern logic), and then spreading out in many directions – one of the most fruitful represented by the scientists, mathematicians and logicians now cooperating in the new Encyclopedia of Unified Science.”
June 29th, 2023 by Kevork Almassian
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The Middle East is entering a new era, which is has seen the US side-lined while China and Saudi Arabia take new leadership positions. Gone are the days when a Middle Eastern monarch marched to orders written in the Oval Office. Newly exerted independence and diplomacy tracks have led to paths designed to support peace and prosperity in the region.
Steven Sahiounie of MidEastDiscourse has interviewed Kevork Almassian, Syrian political commentator and founder of Syriana Analysis.
Steven Sahiounie (SS): Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia has taken an abrupt turn eastward. He has normalized his relationship with Iran, which was brokered by China. The US was taken by surprise by the Chinese diplomacy. In your opinion, has the US been sidelined in the Middle East?
Kevork Almassian (KA): The United States policy toward the Middle East is based on three pillars: First, The Carter Doctrine which allows Washington to use military force, if necessary, to defend its national interests in the Persian Gulf. Second, the security of Israel. Third, the divide and conquer strategy among Arab countries. These foreign and security policies have kept the Middle East destabilized for decades for the financial interests of the U.S. and the security interests of Israel. However, the position of U.S. in 2023 is different from the era that followed the Soviet Union when the U.S. emerged as an absolute hegemonic power with excessive force to project on the world.
In 2023, the U.S. must to be careful with its checks and balances due to the emergence of rivals on the international scene who are willing to challenge the American hegemony. Therefore, the U.S. had to withdraw from Afghanistan to focus on the struggle of power with Russia in the Eurasian region and with China in the far east from the gate of Taiwan.
This policy shift opened the opportunity for China to present itself as a peace broker in the Middle East. Hence, Beijing’s role in striking a deal between foes like Iran and Saudi Arabia will have positive reflection on the region where the U.S. intentionally destabilized it because wars are profitable for the military industrial complex.
Consequently, I believe the U.S. has been sidelined from this important deal, but that does not mean Washington lost its grip over the region yet.
SS: Saudi Arabia and Iran have begun a new chapter in peaceful coexistence. In your view, how will this new relationship affect the various crisis areas in the Middle East, such as: Syria, Lebanon, Yemen, and Libya?
KA: Winston Churchill once famously said about the desirability of dialogue over destruction in the conduct of relations between states “Jaw Jaw is better than War War.” This quote perfectly applies on the struggle of power between Saudi Arabia and Iran in the region, where neither Riyadh nor Tehran can eliminate the other side. And since diplomacy is the continuation of war by other means, the China-brokered deal is already reflecting positively on different hot spots in the region. For example, the Yemeni war has been halted and negotiations reactivated, Syria returned to the Arab League and negotiations are going on for a political solution to the war that harvested the lives of over half a million people, and Lebanese parties are talking to finally select a President.
SS: Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman has not bowed to pressure from US President Biden to pump more oil to reduce global prices. In your opinion, what will be the US response to Saudi Arabia’s new foreign policy which is independent of US coercion?
KA: Saudi Arabia’s approach toward the U.S. under the de-facto rule of Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) is different from his predecessors. MBS is more like the Trump of Arabia who told the Americans: my country comes first! And that implies a few things: First, Saudi Arabia is willing to capitalize on its enormous economic strength to project its power on the region and abroad through soft tools. Second, when Saudi interests do not match with the U.S., the kingdom is not willing to sacrifice for the sake of Washington that could not or is not willing to protect its ally against Houthi attacks on Saudi oil fields. Third, MBS has an economic vision and a plan to develop the Kingdom to the ranks of developed countries. Therefore, he is not willing to waste his country’s money or effort on endless wars for the sake of a tiny elite a few thousand miles away.
The U.S. knows Saudi Arabia is too important to lose and eventually, politicians in Washington have decided to refrain from coercion and counter-productive approach toward the Kingdom. The U.S. will continue dealing with Saudi Arabia because antagonizing the Kingdom can lead to losing it as an important partner and allowing Russia and China to fill the power vacuum in the region.
SS: UAE President Mohammed bin Zayed met with Russian President Vladimir Putin in St. Petersburg and said he was under immense western pressure because of his good relationship with both Russia and China. In your view, will the western media seek to demonize the UAE and its leader?
KA: Mohammed bin Zayed’s (MBZ) talk with Putin was intentionally recorded and posted. If MBZ did not want to send a message to the collective West, he would not have allowed this video segment to be published. This is a big deal because historically, the UAE revolves in the American orbit, but Abu Dhabi just like Riyadh have a new approach toward Washington: our countries come first!
However, we should not quickly jump to the conclusion that the UAE and KSA are ditching the West. In my opinion, both Abu Dhabi and Riyadh are perfectly willing to deal with the US and the EU but they want the West to treat them with respect and for the relations to be at the same eye-level. The Gulf monarchies have concluded that the U.S. did not spare anyone, even its allies. See what is happening in Ukraine and how the U.S. policy there is harming European interests. All European economies are suffering nowadays because of the United States. Therefore, the rational policy is to diversify the relationships between the West and East just like the Gulf countries have.
SS: Saudi Arabia and Algeria have both recently expressed interest in joining the organization known as BRICS. In your opinion, what is their potential benefit from joining, and what is the US response?
KA: The BRICS countries consist of 42 per cent of the global population, around 27 per cent of the words growth products and economists predicting that the BRICS might be the leading economy by 2050. This represents a huge economic and investment opportunities for the developing countries.
In my opinion, what the BRICS lack right now is a common currency which can be the last nail in the coffin of the American hegemony. Due to its status as a global reserve currency, the Dollar is the one of the most important guns in the hands of the United States which uses it for economic monopoly, bullying and targeting other countries via unilateral sanctions.
But, once the Dollar loses its status as a global reserve currency, no country will be afraid of the United States because the latter will not be able to harm the economies of its rivals and foes via sanctions, such as the cases of Syria, Iran, Russia, Venezuela, Cuba, and a long list of nations.
Let us remember what happened to Libya when Gaddafi proposed a plan to present a unified golden currency for the African continent and what happened to Gaddafi? NATO mercenaries murdered him.
Consequently, the rise of the BRICS and the candidacy of new countries to the economic block can be seen as a serious challenge to the U.S. hegemony in the decision making corridors in Washington.
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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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June 29th, 2023 by Robert Kogon
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Scientists have uncovered startling evidence that a substantial portion of the batches of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine deployed in the European Union may in fact have consisted of placebos – and that the German regulator knew this and did not subject them to quality-control testing.
The scientists, Dr. Gerald Dyker, Professor of Organic Chemistry at the Ruhr University Bochum, and Dr. Jörg Matysik, Professor of Analytical Chemistry at the University of Leipzig, are part of a group of five German-speaking scientists who have been publicly raising questions about the quality and safety of the BioNTech vaccine (as it is known in Germany) for the last year and a half.
They recently appeared on the Punkt.Preradovic online programme of the German journalist Milena Preradovic to discuss batch variability. Their starting point was the recent Danish study showing enormous variation in the adverse events associated with different batches of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, or BNT162b2 per its scientific codename. The below figure from the Danish study illustrates this variation.
It shows that the batches used in Denmark, which are represented by the points in the graph, essentially break down into three groups.
The ‘green batches’ clustered around the green line have a moderate or moderately-high level of adverse events associated with them. In the discussion with Preradovic, Gerald Dyker takes the example of the green point furthest to the right.
As he explains, it represents the batch that was the used the most in Denmark, with somewhat over 800,000 doses having been administered. These 800,000 doses are associated with around 2,000 suspected adverse events, which gives a reporting rate of one suspected adverse event per approximately 400 doses. As Dyker puts it, “That’s not a small amount if we compare to what we know otherwise from influenza vaccines.” According to Dyker’s calculation, the green batches account for more than 60% of the Danish sample.
There are then the ‘blue batches’ clustered around the blue line, which are obviously associated with an extraordinarily high level of adverse events. As Dyker notes, no more than 80,000 doses of any of the blue batches were administered in Denmark – suggesting that these especially bad batches may perhaps have been quietly pulled from the market by public health authorities.
Nonetheless, these batches had as many as 8,000 suspected adverse events associated with them. Eight thousand out of 80,000 doses would give a reporting rate of one suspected adverse event for every 10 doses – and Dyker notes that some of the blue batches are indeed associated with a reporting rate of as high as one suspected adverse event for every six doses!
On Dyker’s calculation, the blue batches represent less than 5% of the total number of doses included in the Danish study. Nonetheless, they are associated with nearly 50% of the 579 deaths recorded in the sample.
Finally, we have the ‘yellow batches’ clustered around the yellow line, which, as can be seen above, barely gets off the x-axis. On Dyker’s calculation, the yellow batches represent around 30% of the total. Dyker notes that they include batches comprising some 200,000 administered doses which are associated with literally zero suspected adverse events.
As Dyker puts it, “malicious” observers might note that “this is how placebos would look”.
And malicious observers might be right. For Dyker and Matysik compared the batch numbers contained in the Danish study with publicly available information on the batches approved for release, and they made the startling discovery that almost none of the harmless batches, unlike the very-bad and not-so-bad batches, appear to have been subject to any quality-control testing at all.
Unbeknownst to most observers, it is precisely the German regulatory agency, the Paul Ehrlich Institute (PEI), which is, in principle, responsible for quality control of all the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine supply in the EU. (The institute is named after the German immunologist and Nobel Prize winner Paul Ehrlich, not, of course, the Stanford biology professor of the same name.)
This reflects the fact that the actual legal manufacturer of the vaccine, as well as the marketing authorisation holder in the EU, is the German company BioNTech, not its more well-known American partner Pfizer.
Dyker and Matysik found that the PEI had tested and approved for release all the very bad ‘blue’ batches, the overwhelming majority of the not-so-bad ‘green’ batches, but almost none of the harmless ‘yellow’ batches – as if the PEI knew in advance that these batches were unproblematic.
This is shown in the below slide from Dyker’s presentation during the Punkt.Preradovic interview. The title reads: ‘Which batches from the Danish study did the Paul Ehrlich Institute test and approve for release?’
In the PEI column of each of the tables, “ja” means, of course, that the batch was tested, “nein” means that it was not. Note that only the first batch in the ‘yellow’ table was tested.
The caption under that table reads: “The PEI did not generally regard testing of the harmless ‘yellow batches’ as necessary.”
As Dyker put it, with notable restraint, “this would support the initial suspicion that they are maybe in fact something like placebos”.
Or, in short, to paraphrase the German scientists’ findings on the variability of the Pfizer-BioNTech batches, it would appear that the good was bad, the bad was very bad, and the very good was saline solution.
(The full Punkt.Preradovic interview with Gerald Dyker and Jörg Matysik is available here in German. The above translations are by your writer. A full, presumably machine-translated, English version of the interview is also available on the Punkt.Preradovic webpage.)
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June 29th, 2023 by Tom Luongo
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***
After this weekend’s whirlwind events in Russia we’re left with a lot more questions than answers about what happened with Wagner Group’s Yevgeny Prigozhin’s abortive rebellion against Moscow. I’m not here to answer any of those questions definitively because we’ll never really know.
That said, if what I think happened is anything close to the truth then this may be one of the greatest non-battlefield victories in modern history.
Let’s start with what we know. Prigozhin’s been running his mouth for months about lack of support from the Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) while his boys did all the heavy lifting in Bakhmut. His issues with Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu are pretty well known. It’s also likely that there’s zero love loss between Prigozhin and General Valeri Gerasimov either.
Pissing contests between military commanders are not unheard of, after all.
You could easily make the argument that Wagner was brought in to clean up the mess made by Shoigu while Gerasimov undertook the bigger task to reorient the Russian military away from Battalion Tactical Groups (BTGs) towards an infantry-focused army more capable of taking and holding territory.
There is this looming war with NATO after all.
You could also easily make the argument that his successes left Prigozhin in a position to demand changes and for him to begin getting a big head.
Now, let’s bring in the external factor here, the enemy, NATO. But really it is the US/UK neoconservatives who have been the ones spending every waking hour punching Russia in the face with blatant escalatory moves to try and draw Russia and Putin offside.
The list is nearly endless.
We heard reports of the Russian FSB thwarting a smuggling operation of Cesium-137 into Ukraine to simulate a nuclear weapons attack. Salt some of this stuff to taste, but in the world I’ve come to live in there is almost nothing, no dirty trick low enough, that in desperation the Brits and their American co-conspirators would not attempt.
In my worldview MI6 and the British Defense Ministry spend all day, everyday coming up with a new way to justify a wider conflict between NATO and Russia. The destruction and balkanization of Russia has, after all, been their raison d’etre for more than 300 years.
And, so far, that heuristic has been almost perfectly accurate in predicting where things would go next.
So, let’s cut through all the bullshit about this, shall we?
In no way was this an organic affair. It’s been building for months. But what’s been building?
A guy like Prigozhin could easily become massively disheartened with Russia’s leadership. Could it be to the point of him taking up arms against Putin? Well, that’s certainly what a lot of people wanted us to believe this weekend.
And I’m in no way suggesting that it isn’t possible or even probable. It is the most likely story.
Now factor in the stories floating around out there that Prigozhin was bribed with billions for Wagner to stage his insurrection. Would anyone be surprised by this if it were ever found out?
What? the CIA with suitcases of cash for some foreign malcontent with delusions of grandeur?
The deuce you say!!
Remember folks, since we live in a world of dis- if not mal-information we have to concoct stories that fit what few facts we have along with assessing such basic things as motive, means and opportunity.
Moreover, things are accelerating into the July 11-12th NATO Summit, where it is obvious the neocons are pushing for a statement or policy change that will be the ultimate punch in the mouth for Putin.
It will be one he cannot ignore because it will violate a major red line which he has laid out with stunning clarity.
Those are either Ukraine’s accession into the EU or NATO, one begets the other. For anyone thinking they are not one and the same thing, please turn in your geopolitics street cred card with the usher by the door.
But this is exactly what is being pushed by the most openly hostile members of NATO — namely UK Foreign Minister James Cleverly and German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock. At the same time the Brits are nearly as mad at President Joe Biden as they are at Putin himself.
Why? Because Biden is the one that blocked UK Defense Minister (and IQ 60 mouth-breathing moron!) Ben Wallace from taking over for Jens Stoltenberg as NATO’s General Secretary. This was supposed to happen next month. It’s been put on hold and Stoltenberg has been urged by Biden to stay on for another year.
The Brits are pushing the world into war.
Wallace becoming NATO Chief would ensure this.
The only good news here is that France’s military, as much as likely the American’s, would rather be caught dead in a bathroom with an underaged hooker and pile of blow than have a Brit running this war.
It’s clear they have promised everyone a piece of the pie after Russia is defeated in Ukraine. The Poles get back Lvov and parts of Belarus. Ukrainian Right Sector thugs get to wipe out Russians in the Donbass, Hungary gets Transcarphia (to Viktor Orban’s credit he doesn’t want it on these terms), Georgia gets the Caucuses…. etc.
They are being cheered on by serial Death Eaters Lindsey Graham and Richard Blumenthal, who this week penned a bipartisan resolution to widen the scope of NATO’s Article 5 to include not only Russia’s use of a tactical nuke but also any radiation that resulted from a nuclear accident.
Really, Lindsey, like we can’t see the setup here at it pertains to the Zaporizhia Nuclear Power Plant?
The bribes have been flying around everywhere. And Wallace as NATO chief would ensure that the final iteration of Britain’s ‘divide and rule’ strategy would work. But Biden said no.
And that’s the piece to this puzzle that tells me we’ve reached the crescendo of this nonsense.
That maybe, just maybe, the Pentagon and even Davos are getting off this train.
With all of that in your back pocket now let’s look at this weekend’s events.
Here’s your quick and dirty list of hits:
What started out as the ‘Fall of the Evil Russian Empire’ ended with “Suck what?” in a matter of hours.
The Neocons went from drooling in anticipation to crying in their lattes in about 15 minutes.
The final outcome is the real head scratcher if you believe for a moment that Prigozhin wasn’t someone’s puppet — Putin’s or Western Intelligence agencies.
Wagner forces would be moved to Belarus. All charges of insurrection would be dropped for those that marched. Those that stood down and didn’t back Prigozhin would be offered contracts with the Russian military directly.
Prigozhin would not be executed as a traitor.
Now, are you buying any of this? But these are the announced facts. And while the Neocons would like you to believe “this isn’t over.” Putin’s been weakened. The reality here is far, far different.
So, here are three likely scenarios as to what really happened. They are not, however, comprehensive.
With the backing of the West, Prigozhin pushes all in. Sensing that their attempts on Putin’s rule would be successful because of assurances that hardliners in Russia have his back the CIA/MI6 go for the gold. Prigozhin’s still in a hyper-combative state, angry and distraught over Shoigu’s incompetence and Putin’s passivity.
Since backstabbing is not unheard of in the Russian oligarchy, he’s convinced of the plot against him. There may even be some money and promises of him ruling in Rostov-on-Don under the balkanization of Russia carrot dangled in front of him.
He hopes for a wider uprising against Putin’s rule, doesn’t get it, and quickly is put down.
Putin knew all about all of this, as did the West, and, like his swift moves to put down Nasarbaev’s attempt to get back into power in Kakakhstan in January of 2022 (with the obvious backing of the CIA/MI6), he gave Prigozhin all the rope he needed to hang himself.
If Prigozhin disappears in the next few weeks we’ll have a better answer.
Prigozhin begins his ‘anti-MoD’ ranting a day or two after securing Bakhmut and begins playing into the fever dreams of the West that the hardliners are ready to dump Putin for his passivity. This isn’t implausible. There are many in Russia who are angry with Putin for not punching back.
Attacks like Nordstream and Kerch are designed to lose Putin ‘face.’ It’s no different than Nancy Piglosi going to Taiwan for China. Make Xi lose face, get Chinese big mad. Win.
Loss of face is a big deal in domestic politics of these countries. But, at the same time, you have to realize that Putin’s been cleaning out Russia of western assets. The main reason why we know that “Putin jails reporters” is because those reporters who were jailed were foreign intelligence assets, not journalists.
Over the years of doing this, surviving multiple assassination attempts and passing laws banning NGOs, Putin has cleaned up the streets in Moscow. For this reason you have to assume that our ground game there is really weak.
It’s not hard to believe that Prigozhin could help feed them all the bullshit they wanted to hear. We are talking about people increasingly desperate to get this war past the point of no return and Putin refuses to give it to them.
So, with that background it’s easy to believe that Prigozhin sets the hook for a few months, even goes so far to take a few billion in ‘lost money’ to seal the deal.
He stages the walk out, gets on the road and ‘negotiates’ a settlement at the exact moment when his convoy would have had to make a left and go to Belarus anyway.
For the past ten years I’ve watched Putin engage the West’s false flags and provocations and turn them into strategic victories by veering from the whiteboard script at GCHQ and Langley.
He prefers engaging in ‘parallel aggression’ — proportionally making a move to counter some other act of open aggression.
So, with that parallel aggression idea in your head here’s the scenario:
If you know that NATO is getting ready to widen the conflict next month and the British are supplying Ukraine with Storm Shadow missiles to soften up Crimea while the UAF struggles to make headway in the misnamed “counter-offensive,” then wouldn’t you want your best and battle-hardened troops strategically placed to respond if things go sideways?
Look at the outcome of Prigozhin’s Rebellion. Wagner is now in Belarus. The disloyal ones are cannon fodder to soak up anything Poland tries to do.
The rest are positioned to make a move on Kiev if anyone gets silly ideas of going after Crimea.
With the UAF getting ground into paste as the attacker down south, a bad situation for them gets worse now that Putin has an army he can use in Belarus.
Remember, legally, this isn’t a war. Putin doesn’t have a free hand to do certain things under the auspice of an SMO. This is why Wagner has been so important to events thus far.
In fact, I’d go so far as to say a whole lotta folks coming off their Russian military contracts may be ‘reassigned to Wagner’ in the next couple of weeks to bolster their ranks.
Your move, NATO.
Oh, and just to remind everyone, Belarus now has tactical nuclear weapons that Putin just announced he moved into country. Does he trust Wagner enough to give them those nukes? I’m not touching that one with Lindsey Graham’s dick.
And the truth is that none of these scenarios fully cover what’s happening or even what’s happened. The fate of Sergei Shoigu hasn’t been resolved. The hardliners may get their wish with a new Defense Minister of a more Prigozhin-esque character.
You can pick bits and pieces of these scenarios out and reassemble them like Legos and you’ll have something interesting and worth considering.
But it’s hard to argue with the final outcome. A big military unit with real combat experience under the harshest conditions are now stationed within 150 miles of Kiev potentially armed with tac nukes while Putin just sniffed out a another layer of 5th and 6th columnists who outed themselves in their zeal to kill Russians with American money.
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June 29th, 2023 by Max Blumenthal
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Numerous serious casualties were incurred during Wagner chief Yevgeny Prigozhin’s supposed “coup.” The Grayzone offers an in-depth look at the massacre carried out by some of America’s top Russia experts against their own credibility.
When Wagner Group leader Yevgeny Prigozhin launched a supposed revolt against Russian President Vladimir Putin on June 23, sending his forces on a march toward Moscow following a series of tirades against the country’s defense establishment, Washington’s expert class overflowed with an orgy of regime change fantasies.
For just over 12 hours, everyone from former US ambassador to Russia and noted Hitler apologist Michael McFaul to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to neocon pundit Anne Applebaum exploded with seemingly libidinal excitement about a supposed “civil war” that was certain to feature “Russians…killing Russians,” along with “lots of casualties” and Putin “probably hiding somewhere.”
It was as though the Soviet Union was collapsing all over again, and Prigozhin, a character named on the FBI’s most wanted list whom the US government has sanctioned for leading what it described as a “transnational criminal organization,” was suddenly a white knight storming into Moscow to liberate Russia from “the Putin regime” on the back of a tank. Move over, Juan Guaido.
Expecting a bloodbath and seismic political upheaval, corporate networks like CNN had budgeted wall-to-wall coverage of the coup that wasn’t, filling cable news green rooms with rent-a-generals, K Street think tankers, and war-hungry former diplomatic corps hacks.
On the afternoon of June 24, however, news broke across the US that Prigozhin had struck a deal with Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko to end his protest and go into exile. Thus ended a largely bloodless affair that ultimately saw fewer documented deaths than the January 6 Capitol Riot.
Though the supposed revolt in Russia burned out faster than a Leopard tank on the way to Zaporizhzhia, we now know that a number of serious casualties were incurred inside the DC Beltway. The Grayzone obtained an exclusive look at the massacre some of America’s top Russia experts carried out against their own credibility.
Ever since he was unceremoniously ejected from Moscow for apparently attempting to organize a color revolution in 2012, Ambassador Michael McFaul has waged a personal jihad against the country’s government. His hatred of the Russian leadership grew so impassioned that he once declared that Putin was morally inferior to Adolf Hitler, embracing a fringe view associated with Holocaust deniers that asserts the Nazi dictator “didn’t kill German-speaking people.”
When the events of June 23 kicked off, McFaul could hardly contain himself. The disgraced diplomat immediately took to Twitter to insist without a shred of evidence to claim that Putin “has ordered his army and others to destroy Wagner & Prigozhin.”
“So there’s going to be a big fight,” he promised.
As for the Russian President, McFaul confidently declared: “I am sure that he is no longer in Moscow.” Just after noon on June 24, he seemed to believe the Russian president’s demise was imminent. “Rats are jumping” from Putin’s ship, he effused, referring to oligarch Arkady Rotenberg taking a flight to Azerbaijan. “This is now a civil war,” the self-styled expert confidently declared.
The fight is now on. This is now a civil war. https://t.co/FfQ0nakI1Z
— Michael McFaul (@McFaul) June 24, 2023
But around 1:30 PM on June 24, the unwelcome news had made its way to Washington: Putin and Prigozhin had reached an agreement. There was to be no civil war in Russia, after all.
McFaul was suddenly forced to reckon with the reality that his predictions of a coup were premature, and that virtually everything he had said hours before was completely wrong. “Can anyone remember a mutiny or coup attempt that lasted 24 hours and no one really fought or was killed?,” pondered the retired diplomat, seemingly coming to grips with the obvious.
Then, like an alcoholic in denial after yet another blackout, McFaul whimpered, “I was wrong about this. Eager to learn why.”
I was wrong about this. Eager to learn why. There is so much to this story that we don't know yet. https://t.co/zzsysPTF1Z
— Michael McFaul (@McFaul) June 24, 2023
This May, anti-Russian pseudo-scholar and former Iraq war cheerleader Anne Applebaum predicted a decisive Ukrainian counter-offensive that would storm through Russian defenses and not only “liberate” Crimea, but encourage regime change from Moscow to Venezuela.
In an article co-authored by former Israeli prison guard and Atlantic Magazine editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg, and illustrated by the Davos frontman, Bono, (with apparent help from an Etch-a-Sketch), Applebaum openly fantasized about a madman taking control of Russia’s nuclear arsenal. “Even the worst successor imaginable,” she wrote, “even the bloodiest general or most rabid propagandist, will immediately be preferable to Putin, because he will be weaker than Putin. He will quickly become the focus of an intense power struggle.”
By June 24, Applebaum seemed to believe her fever dreams were coming true. And it was then that she breathlessly announced, “Russia is sliding into what can only be described as a civil war. ”
“If you are surprised, maybe you shouldn’t be,” she lectured readers, just hours before the bloodless “coup” came to a conclusion.
“…what can only be described as a civil war,” according to Anne Applebaum, who also declared as a member of WaPo’s editorial board that Saddam Hussein’s possession of WMD was “irrefutable” https://t.co/Vk2lr96MKw
— Max Blumenthal (@MaxBlumenthal) June 24, 2023
Applebaum’s husband is the former foreign minister of Poland, Radek Sikorski, who infamously tweeted his gratitude to the US government for destroying the Nord Stream pipeline. While Sikorski deleted his tweet, Applebaum’s thoroughly discredited “civil war” article remains on the website of the Atlantic.
On June 25, Applebaum and McFaul were rewarded for their badly botched analysis with an appearance on MSNBC’s “Inside with Jen Psaki,” which is hosted by the Biden White House’s former press secretary.
Everything we said about Russia yesterday was an insane lie or completely wrong, now check us out on the White House ex-propaganda minister’s show today #meritocracy https://t.co/uZQcTlkbUi
— Max Blumenthal (@MaxBlumenthal) June 25, 2023
“The man from the Kremlin is obviously very afraid and probably hiding somewhere, not showing himself,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky proclaimed on June 24. According to fact checkers, Zelensky did not issue this bold statement from inside a bunker or in front of a green screen.
On Sunday, CNN reported that US intelligence analysts were taken by surprise by “the swiftness of the deal that was struck on Saturday.”
What’s more, they believed that Prigozhin’s march toward Moscow “would encounter much more resistance” than it did.
“I do know that we assessed it was going to be a great deal more violent and bloody,” an unnamed US official reportedly told the outlet.
But DC’s disappointment with the lack of carnage on Moscow streets did not end there.
Kurt Volker is a former US special representative for Ukraine negotiations who also operated as a de facto Raytheon lobbyist while serving as the executive director of the John McCain Institute. Volker also functioned as a liaison for US and Ukrainian business interests while presiding over the founding of American University Kyiv.
During a June 24 CNN appearance, Volker declared that the brief moment of disorder in Russia marked “the end for Putin” and “the beginning of the end of Russia’s war in Ukraine.”
Christo Grozev is the Russia director of the US and UK government-funded website Bellingcat. This April, Grozev celebrated a terrorist attack that saw a Russian war blogger assassinated and a cafe full of civilians blown up in St. Petersburg, Russia.
With chaos seemingly intensifying inside the Russian Federation again, Grozev suddenly transformed from a glorified OSINT blogger into a geopolitical soothsayer with a unique ability to divine the fate of the Kremlin.
“Prigozhin says he’s got 25k strong army and he’s going to take power and deal with the ‘traitors’ at the top of before returning to the front line,” the Bellingcat commentator claimed on Twitter. “Am old enough to remember how Russia ‘pundits’ said I was talking nonsense predicting a Prigozhin coup attempt this year.”
Having not been born literally yesterday, we at The Grayzone are thankfully old enough to remember when Prigozhin’s “coup attempt” failed to materialize and ended quickly with negotiations.
Our memory is so long, in fact, that we recall when the war prophet Grozev stated that Russia had expended 70 percent of its precision missile stocks back in April 2022. Since then, Russian missile strikes on Ukrainian targets have only increased.
As president of the Eurasia Group risk analysis firm, political scientist Ian Bremmer has leveraged his supposed expertise into a lucrative business.
Bremmer recently weighed in in defense of the absurdly double-talking pediatrician and pundit Peter Hotez, defending his decision not to debate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on Covid-related issues on the grounds that Hotez was a credentialed expert, and RFK Jr. was not. “It would be like me debating elon [Musk] on electric vehicles. Or him debating me on international relations,” Bremmer argued, asserting his own superior credentials. “There’s no value added.”
During the events of June 23, Bremmer joined the rest of the Beltway expert class in predicting imminent doom for Putin. “wagner territorial gains in russia dramatically faster than in ukraine,” Bremmer wrote in a viral post seen by more than 1 million Twitter users. Moments later, he joked that “ukraine has run out of popcorn,” implying that Kiev was eagerly preparing for Russia’s collapse.
wagner territorial gains in russia dramatically faster than in ukraine.
— ian bremmer (@ianbremmer) June 24, 2023
Following the announcement of Wagner’s stand-down on June 24, an apparently disappointed Bremmer insisted “there’s no environment where [Putin and Prigozhin] hug it out.”
Among the most overlooked victims of the brief march on Moscow were high-ranking US officials’ weekend plans.
On Saturday, a spokesman for the Joint Chiefs of Staff announced that a planned visit to Jordan and Israel by Gen. Mark Milley, the top military officer in the US, had been canceled “due to the situation in Russia.”
Biden administration National Security Council director and possible human scarecrow Jake Sullivan was forced to cancel a trip as well. Sullivan had reportedly been slated to attend a conference on Ukraine in Denmark until Prigozhin decided to make a trip of his own toward Rostov-on-Don.
Horror author-turned-liberal Russiagate conspiracist Stephen King, who once praised Ukrainian Nazi collaborator and Holocaust perpetrator Stepan Bandera in a phone call with a prankster he believed to be Volodymyr Zelensky, was clearly titillated by the events of June 23. When Prigozhin’s forces briefly took over the city of Rostov-on-Don, King once again proved unable to contain his overactive imagination. “Putin sowed the wind. Now he must reap the whirlwind. Slava Ukraini!” he exclaimed.
Putin sowed the wind.
Now he must reap the whirlwind.
Slava Ukraini!— Stephen King (@StephenKing) June 24, 2023
Idress Ahmad once existed on the margins of the UK’s antiwar movement, publishing a book attacking the Iraq war-era neocon cabal, suggesting Senators Barbara Boxer and Russ Feingold voted for Iran sanctions because they are Jewish, and openly questioning the West’s narrative of a genocide in Darfur.
After running into financial trouble and escaping deportation to his native Pakistan “against the odds” thanks to a Home Office decision that remains unexplained, Ahmad transformed into the very thing he once condemned.
Having re-emerged as a rabid supporter of the West’s dirty war on Syria, Ahmad busied himself by stalking The Grayzone, even phoning its editor, Max Blumenthal, to threaten him against publishing a factual investigation of the Syrian White Helmets in 2016.
While Ahmad’s recent work at the spook-infested Newlines think tank has failed to generate much interest, even among his fellow regime change cheerleaders, we noticed his June 24 prophecy that Prigozhin’s “coup” would lead to the collapse of The Grayzone, the international committee of the Democratic Socialists of America, and “the death of Aaron Mate’s career.”
In the difficult days that lie ahead, spare a thought for the comrades at Grayzone News, @jacobin, @dsa_intl_comm, and @BTnewsroom. And you can direct your condolences for the death of Aaron Mate’s career to @DrGaborMate.
— Idrees Ahmad (@im_PULSE) June 23, 2023
At the time of publication, we are still triggering Ahmad’s rage-a-holic personality while his own media career has gone about as far as Prigozhin’s march toward Moscow.
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The editor-in-chief of The Grayzone, Max Blumenthal is an award-winning journalist and the author of several books, including best-selling Republican Gomorrah, Goliath, The Fifty One Day War, and The Management of Savagery. He has produced print articles for an array of publications, many video reports, and several documentaries, including Killing Gaza. Blumenthal founded The Grayzone in 2015 to shine a journalistic light on America’s state of perpetual war and its dangerous domestic repercussions.
Wyatt Reed is a correspondent and managing editor of The Grayzone. Follow him on Twitter at @wyattreed13.
Featured image is from The Grayzone
June 29th, 2023 by Charles Kennedy
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NASA has plans to begin mining for rare earths and iron on the moon in the early 2030s, Reuters has reported, citing a rocket scientist from the agency.
According to Gerald Sanders, NASA will initially explore the development of oxygen and water on the Moon and will later consider exploring iron ore and rare earths mining.
“We are trying to invest in the exploration phase, understand the resources… to (lower) risk such that external investment makes sense that could lead to development and production,” Sanders said at a mining industry event in Australia.
The plans are part of the Artemis mission that NASA is organizing, that aims to gather knowledge from the second visit to the Moon that the agency could then use for Mars, Sanders explained.
He added that one of the purposes of the mission is to quantify the resources available on the Moon so NASA can attract investment in its exploration efforts.
“We are literally just scratching the surface,” Sanders said, referring to the Moon’s potential resources.
NASA will send a test drill to the Moon’s surface at the end of this month, Sanders also said, adding that large-scale excavation activities are scheduled for 2032. A processing plant for whatever resources are discovered by that year is also in the plans.
The initial focus of the Moon mission, however, will be oxygen—it would be crucial for making the rest of NASA’s plans realistic.
“This … is a key step towards establishing a sustainable human presence on the moon, as well (as) supporting future missions to Mars,” Sanders told the conference.
NASA sees the Artemis mission as a stepping stone on the way to conquering Mars. The lunar project also aims to establish a long-term human presence on the Moon, to exploit its mineral resources.
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Charles is a writer for Oilprice.com
June 29th, 2023 by Ahmed Adel
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The claim by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky that Russia allegedly wants to blow up the Zaporozhye nuclear power plant is causing mass hysteria in the country. Ukrainians are buying iodine, used to help block one type of radioactive material from being absorbed by the thyroid, and the authorities intend to conduct drills in response to a “possible nuclear threat.” This is part of Ukraine’s global campaign to fearmonger against Russia.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said on June 25 that Zelensky’s statement on a nuclear threat coming from Russia is an “even more turbulent stream of consciousness.”
“I cannot be responsible for the psychological condition of people who repeatedly prove their lack of sanity daily,” Lavrov added.
Behind Zelensky’s words may be the hidden intention of Kiev to carry out a false flag operation around the nuclear complex. Due to the paranoid statements of the Ukrainian president, the Zaporozhye nuclear power plant became a subject of discussion at the United Nations.
The Permanent Representative of Russia to the UN, Vasily Nebenzya, said that the statements by Zelensky that Moscow allegedly wants to blow up the Zaporizhzhye nuclear power plant are extremely disturbing.
“The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), headed by Director General Rafael Grossi, who recently visited the plant, despite all the obstacles from Ukraine, could see the absurdity of these statements,” Nebenzya said.
By making these statements, Zelensky is trying to demonise and isolate Russia from the international community, something Kiev has failed to do except with the Western world.
Either way, Russia will not blow up the Zaporozhye nuclear power plant, especially as it is located on its territory and is a vital piece of infrastructure.
The possibility that Zelensky’s statement has something to do with the intention of the Ukrainian military to blow up the Zaporozhye nuclear power plant or, for example, to detonate a dirty bomb cannot be ruled out. This can be achieved with solid radioactive waste from the Chernobyl nuclear power plant.
Such an action could lead to a radioactive cloud affecting Ukraine’s neighbours. Due to this, such an operation is high-risk for the Kiev regime and with many negative repercussions if they are caught out.
However, there are suggestions that Kiev is willing to take such a risk, evidenced by Zelensky’s latest statements regarding the Zaporizhzhye nuclear plant and the attempt by Ukraine to smuggle material for a dirty bomb.
Adding to the ridiculousness of Zelensky’s claim is the fact that Russian forces took control of the nuclear facility and the nearby town of Energodar in the first few days of the military operation at the end of February 2022. Since then, the Ukrainian army has been periodically shelling the residential areas of Energodar and the nuclear power plant complex. Still, Kiev insists on the ludicrous notion that Russia wants to destroy it.
Zelensky is becoming increasingly desperate, even telling the BBC on June 21 that progress against Russian forces had been “slower than desired.”
“Some people believe this is a Hollywood movie and expect results now. It’s not,” he added.
With the complete failure of the long-awaited “Spring Offensive,” which actually started at the beginning of summer, huge narrative shifts are occurring in the Kiev regime.
The Ukrainian Defence Minister told the Financial Times in an interview published on June 28 that the recent capture of villages in Donetsk and Zaporizhzhye from Russian forces was “not the main event.”
“When it happens, you will all see it,” Oleksii Reznikov added.
This is another delaying tactic by the Kiev regime, one that was used for the entirety of winter and spring, and now that the so-called offensive has started in the summer and failed, Ukraine and Western media are propagating that Ukrainian military operations are in the early testing and reconnaissance stages.
At the same time, they are blowing up the success of capturing some villages when the Ukrainian military has not even reached the first defensive line nearly a month after beginning operations
However, this is quite obviously a ridiculous notion since major counteroffensives rely on the element of surprise and blitzkrieg tactics or something similar. Rather, the failure of the counteroffensive is leading to the Kiev regime becoming so desperate that they resort to making up claims about Russia wanting to bomb a nuclear power plant, place ultimatums on NATO to offer a membership pathway at the July meeting in Lithuania, and even promises of capturing Crimea.
Another hindering factor to Ukraine’s desire to carry out a false flag operation on the nuclear power complex is that there was basically a muted reaction from the global community to the destruction of the Kakhovka hydroelectric dam on June 6, as most of the world was unwilling to call-out Ukraine.
Just as there is a limited response to the destruction of the Kakhovka hydroelectric dam, there is little international concern, besides statements here and there, about the security of the Zaporozhye nuclear power plant since it is safely in Russian hands and the global community, including even the West behind closed doors, understands Russia has no reason or desire to destroy it.
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Ahmed Adel is a Cairo-based geopolitics and political economy researcher.
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June 29th, 2023 by M. K. Bhadrakumar
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The CNN, followed by the New York Times, broke the story on Sunday that the US and western intelligence were indeed aware of the failed coup attempt on Friday night by Yevgeny Prigozhin, head of the Wagner Group of Russian military contractors, “for quite some time and making preparations for such a move, including by massing weapons and ammunition.”
What we do not know is at what point Russian intelligence got wind of it. The Kremlin acted forcefully, decisively and with foresight in real time to scotch the coup attempt within hours. By Saturday evening, the foreign intelligence chief Sergey Narishkin announced that the coup attempt had failed. The Russian authorities were waiting for Prigozhin to make his move.
It is only natural that Russian intelligence kept a strong presence right inside the Wagner tent all through. Damn it, it is a war zone where Russia’s fate is hanging in the balance. The lyrics of the famous Sting song come to mind: ‘Every breath you take / And every move you make / Every bond you break / Every step you take / I’ll be watching you…’
And the Chorus sings, thereupon: ‘Oh, can’t you see / You belong to me? / How my poor heart aches / With every step you take…’
Just as the CIA or most intelligence organisations do, the FSB also psychoanalyses the remarks of their targets for profound meanings. They do that routinely and have trained analysts who do only that.
It wouldn’t have escaped the attention of Russian intelligence analysts that Prigozhin’s ranting and ravings from Donetsk from last autumn and winter began originally on the operational aspects of the Bakhmut war front in Donetsk oblast, but incrementally began acquiring political overtones, culminating finally in his incredible statement that the raison d’être of the special military operation in Ukraine since February 2022, was all baloney.
Even more strangely, this man who physically witnessed the Battle of Bakhmut, came to the bizarre conclusion that Kiev or Nato had no mala fide intentions toward Donbass or Russia.
Therefore, the ‘known known’ here is that the Russian intelligence was under instructions to be in ‘listening mode,’ give the eddies a free flow in the Battle of Bakhmut where Wagner was in the driving seat. (Interestingly, though, at some point, much to Prigozhin’s annoyance, Moscow also began deploying regular troops selectively on the Bakhmut front alongside the Wagner fighters. )
On Saturday, top US intelligence officials sprang into action to brief the media as it emerged that Russian authorities were literally waiting with a road map to squash Prigozhin’s coup attempt. Even the Chechen militia was put on standby.
The crucial element in the deal struck with Prigozhin has been that he will not be prosecuted but must simply get lost. And where else could his exile be arranged better on Planet Earth than in Belarus under the benevolent eyes of President Alexander Lukashenko?
Now, we may get to know at some point from Lukashenko, who struggles to keep secrets for long, as to when exactly would Putin have taken him into confidence on a ‘need-to-know basis.’ It strains credulity that such a complex dealmaking was possible within a clutch of hours via tortuous 3-way negotiations between Moscow, Minsk and Rostov-on-Don even as the renegade Wagner column was approaching Moscow.
An intriguing sub-plot here is that amidst all this heavy traffic, Lukashenko also negotiated with Nurusultan Nazarbayev, the former Kazakh dictator who headed a pro-western regime in Astana and was ousted from power after reigning for nearly three decades, following the failure of a similar US-backed coup attempt like Prigozhin’s in the winter of 2021-2022, which too was crushed with the help of the CSTO forces (Russian troops) led by a Russian general.
On the previous day, in fact, Putin had spoken with two Central Asian leaders — Kazakh President Jomart Tokayev and Uzbek President Shavkat Miromonovich Mirziyoyev. Did he share any crucial intelligence? In fact, both these countries have been facing western plots for regime change lately. By the way, Given Moscow’s preoccupations in Ukraine, Chinese President Xi Jinping has stepped in to take a hands-on role to consolidate the stability and security of the Central Asian region. (Please see my recent articles — China takes leadership role in Central Asia ; An “Axis of Seven” to supplement SCO; and, Russia, China take holistic view of the Pamirs and Hindu Kush.
Clearly, something was seriously afoot in Kazakhstan, which is sandwiched between Russia and China and is the most crucial piece of real estate in geopolitical terms in Central Asia.
In all probability, this was what the US Secretary of State Antony Blinken alluded to when he told ABC on Sunday that the situation with the attempted coup in Russia “is still developing… I don’t want to speculate, and I don’t think we saw the final episode.” That said, however, Blinken has piled up a consistent record for being horribly wrong on his assessments on Russia — starting from the deathly blow the ‘sanctions from hell’ were expected to give to the Russian economy; Putin’s hold on power; Russia’s catastrophic defeat in Ukraine; Russian military’s deficiencies; Kiev’s inexorable military victory, and so on.
In this case, he has reason to feel embittered particularly because of the spectacular unity of the Russian state, political elite, media, regional and federal bureaucracy, and the military and security establishment in rallying behind Putin. Arguably, Putin’s political stature is now unchallengeable and unassailable in Russia and the Americans have to live with that reality long after Joe Biden’s departure from the scene.
The Kremlin has adopted a very thoughtful strategy. From available details so far, it has the following five key elements:
The last element is utterly fascinating. The Kremlin is extremely annoyed with Prigozhin for his seditious behaviour but is also aware — presumably on the basis of intelligence inputs — that he has been manipulated by western powers. Of course, there is going to be a price to pay. Prigozhin will never get back his towering stature as an oligarch with a personal fortune of $1.2 billion or the fabulous lifestyle he led.
But at least, the 62-year old oligarch is spared a possible twenty-year prison term. This is of a piece with Putin’s handling of oligarchs in general. (Read my article The Rise and fall of a Russian oligarch.)
Make no mistake, Lukashenko will eventually make Prigozhin sing — sooner rather later — and the song will be transmitted live to the Kremlin. And that accounts for the great nervousness in Washington, which has raised the spectre of nuclear war, etc. to give the spin to distract attention from the CIA’s plot to destabilise Russia. The irrepressible Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov calls it a “turbulent stream of consciousness.”
To be sure, now that the CIA-MI6- Prigozhin plot has failed, out of its debris, new western narratives will be born like a Phoenix out of the ashes. And the US’ sleeping cells abroad, including in the Indian media, will parrot that narrative.
But, not for long. For, what lies ahead is the manifestation of the steely resolve of the Kremlin — and Putin himself — to seek an all-out military solution to the Ukraine crisis. Putin declared last week — most likely in anticipation of the storm brewing on the horizon — that the war will be over when no Ukrainian army will be left on the battlefield, or NATO weapons.
Read the official transcript of a videoconference that Putin took last Thursday, in the immediate run-up to Prigozhin’s coup attempt, with the full quorum of the Security Council (post-Soviet Russia’s ‘Politburo’), which gives a flavour of the mood in the Kremlin and will provide some clues to what to expect on the battlefields of Ukraine, going forward. It is a huge signal in advance to the “collective West” that nothing will be forgotten.
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June 29th, 2023 by John Helmer
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In brief statements issued late last week in Moscow – their significance missed in the western press — President Vladimir Putin ordered a reality check of Russia’s war strategy. He then answered himself by declaring the war will be over when no Ukrainian army will be left on the battlefield, nor NATO weapons.
The Foreign Ministry answered by pointing out that Russia does not recognize there is a legal Ukrainian state because the reality is that the mutual recognition treaty between Russia and the Ukraine was cancelled by Presidents Petro Poroshenko and Vladimir Zelensky in 2018 and 2019.
“We can conclude,” Putin said at the Security Council meeting on Thursday morning, “that they can certainly send in additional equipment, but the mobilisation reserve is not unlimited. And Ukraine’s Western allies really seem determined to fight with Russia to the last Ukrainian. At the same time, we must proceed from the fact that the enemy’s offensive potential has not been exhausted; they may have strategic reserves yet unused, and I ask you to keep this in mind when making fighting strategies. You need to proceed from reality.”
Putin was following by a few hours the statement by the Foreign Ministry that Russia does not recognize the legal sovereignty of the regime in Kiev, and that following the cancellation of the treaty between the Ukraine and Russia in 2019, there will be no Ukrainian state left to sign an end-of-war agreement.
At her weekly briefing of reporters, the ministry spokesman Maria Zakharova, was asked “when will Russia initiate a legal procedure to terminate the bilateral treaty with Ukraine on its sovereignty?” Zakharova answered:
“The procedure for terminating the bilateral treaty with Ukraine on its sovereignty is hampered by the absence of such a treaty. In Article 1 of the Treaty on the Principles of Relations between the RSFSR and the Ukrainian SSR of November 19, 1990, the two republics recognised each other as ‘sovereign states.’ The 1990 treaty was then replaced by the Treaty on Friendship, Cooperation, and Partnership between the Russian Federation and Ukraine of May 31, 1997 (Article 39), which was denounced by Ukraine and terminated on April 1, 2019.”
No army, no state. But the war will continue because it is the one between the US and the NATO powers and Russia. That too will have an ending, but longer.
“If [NATO Secretary-General] Mr Stoltenberg again says on behalf of NATO that they are against freezing the conflict in Ukraine,” Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said on June 21, “this means that they want to fight. So let them fight. We are ready for that. We realised NATO’s true goals in Ukraine some time ago as their plans took shape over the years that followed the coup. Today, NATO is attempting to implement them…they are directly involved in the hybrid and hot war declared on Russia.”
I am reminded, Lavrov added, “of a Soviet-era joke noting that the Soviet Union is located too close to US military bases.” The Soviet Union was dismantled, but the war continues against Russia. It will end when the US is pushed to a safe distance. How safe, Putin asked Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu to explain in answer to two questions?
Putin’s question:
“we know that the enemy is to receive additional Western equipment. What does the Defence Ministry think about threats in this connection?”
Shoigu’s answer:
“All arsenals, accumulated by the Soviet Union and countries of the former socialist bloc, have now been virtually depleted. We can say the same about former Ukrainian resources… the amount, due to be delivered throughout 2023, as well as those weapons that have already been delivered, will not seriously affect the course of hostilities. Additionally, most of the armoured vehicles and fighting vehicles belong to the previous generation, or even to an earlier generation. On the one hand, their armour is weak and ineffective, compared to modern equipment. Mr President, we do not see any threats here.”
Question:
“Mr Shoigu, what is the percentage of Western equipment out of the equipment that has been destroyed since June 4, which Mr Patrushev has just reported giving generalised data? Approximately.”
Answer:
“Of the 246 tanks destroyed, 13 were Western made. At the same time, it should be noted that, if we consider the equipment that was delivered, tanks in particular: 81 Western-made tanks have been delivered. Of the 81 Western tanks, 13 [16%] have been destroyed. Of the armoured fighting vehicles, 59 Western ones have been destroyed. To date, Western countries have supplied Ukraine with an estimated 109 Bradley armoured fighting vehicles. Of the 109 BFVs, 18 [17%] have been destroyed. Overall, 59 Western-made armoured vehicles have been destroyed. As for field artillery and guns, here, of course, I can estimate right away that out of the 48 pieces destroyed, about 30 percent were Western made.”
The “reality”, Putin concluded publicly, not for Shoigu or the General Staff, is that the percentage of NATO weapons destroyed on the battlefield will rise sharply because “the enemy’s offensive potential has not been exhausted; they may have strategic reserves yet unused.” When those reserves are defeated, there will be neither NATO arms nor Ukrainian men left.
The significance of this re-tuning of Russia’s war aims was diverted for several hours by the Prigozhin affair.
The return of the Wagner columns to their bases in Lugansk, the dissolution of Wagner by the Defense Ministry, and the exit of Prigozhin to house arrest in Belarus remove the distraction from the battlefield and the General Staff’s war strategy. If Prigozhin cannot bear the silence, the lack of access to the fortune he has accumulated, and his loss of freedom of movement, he may attempt a break-out to Africa, to plot his return to Russian politics. He will also be aware of the Lebed precedent – and the danger of taking helicopter rides.
Russian military sources believe the outcome of the one-armed rebellion will be salutary for the key decision-makers including Putin and Shoigu; least of all the General Staff and the chief, General Valery Gerasimov, who have come out of the affair with greater political leverage over the Kremlin. According to one Moscow source, “Now that the General Staff have saved the president, the latter will allow General Patience to continue doing its work, as Generals Iskander and Kinzhal seem to be doing theirs now.”
President Putin in a visit to the headquarters of the Dnieper battlegroup near the Kherson front on April 18. Tass reported:
“While at the headquarters of the Dnepr battlegroup near the Kherson front, Vladimir Putin heard reports delivered by Airborne Troops commander Colonel General Mikhail Teplinsky [left], Dnepr battlegroup commander Colonel General Oleg Makarevich [right] and other field commanders.”
The last comment is a reference to long-range missile strikes against Ukrainian command headquarters, airfields, reserve stocks of ammunition and fuel, and NATO storages. After Shoigu had publicly warned on June 20 of decapitation strikes if the Ukrainians attacked targets in the Crimea and other Russian regions, and there was a Storm Shadow attack on the Chongar bridge in the Crimea on June 22, the Defense Ministry reported that it had launched a June 23 salvo “ in response to a strike on a road bridge across the Chongar Strait [as well as] , a warehouse with Storm Shadow cruise missiles was destroyed at a Ukrainian airbase near the settlement of Starokonstantinov in the Khmelnitsky region.”
Left: Missile explodes on impacting the Chongarsky bridge on June 22; right, impact crater on the bridge road surface. Source: https://www.dailymail.co.uk
As for the impact of the affair on the conduct of the war, the assessment reported in the broadcast several hours before the end of the affair, was between next to nothing and not very much. The no Ukrainian army, no NATO weapons, no Kiev state goals are much more important now.
A NATO veteran comments on what he expects to see next at the front.
“The Ukrainians are going to have a problem disengaging at the front lines and passing on to a conventional defence. I’ve noticed that the Russians, especially on the Lugansk People’s Repubic/Kharkov front, have massed significant forces and are applying pressure. This is causing the Ukrainians to shift and commit forces to the area either to stop the Russians, or to gain the initiative via attack. Unless they are willing to accept losing territory in favour of sparing their reserves — which they don’t seem to be — they will continue to be ground down at the front. While this is going on, their logistics will disintegrate at an increasing scope and rate due to Russian strikes, made up in large part of cheap Iranian-designed drones augmented by missiles.
“Stavka is moving away from the battalion tactical group as the fulcrum of operations and back to division-level formations. The forces built up on the Kharkov front are indicative of that. When your enemy knows how you think on a fundamental level, it’s a trifle for them to figure out what you’ll do next. After that, it’s about how to maneuver the enemy into doing it when and where they choose. I’m going to keep watching Kharkov.”
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June 29th, 2023 by Danica Thiessen
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In 2004, when Foreign Policy asked eminent scholar Francis Fukuyama to write an article answering the question, What is the world’s most dangerous idea?, he responded with a piece titled Transhumanism.
Fukuyama argued that the transhumanist project will use biotechnology to modify life until humans lose something of their ‘essence’, or fundamental nature. Doing so will disrupt the very basis of natural law upon which, he believes, our liberal democracies are founded (Fukuyama, 2004). For Fukuyama, these losses lay unrecognised beneath a mountain of promise for a techno-scientific future of imaginative self-improvement.
Currently, the Fourth Industrial Revolution, in which transhumanism plays a central guiding role, is shaping the policies of global corporations and political governance (Philbeck, 2018: 17).
The converging technologies of this revolution are nanotechnology, biotechnology, information technology, cognitive sciences (NBIC), and artificial intelligence (Roco and Bainbridge, 2002).
The political class and the new technology elite routinely tell us that ‘the age of AI has arrived’ (Kissinger et al., 2021). Simultaneously, modern humans have also become increasingly dependent on advanced technologies and the complex systems they enable.
These changes have presented new challenges to old questions, namely: what does it mean to be human? And what future do we want for ourselves?
From the hype of super-intelligence to self-assembling nanobiology, the world can seem increasingly science-fictional. Contemporary technological society is “harder and harder to grasp”, is full of “disruptions…that move ever faster”, and is confronting us with “situations that seem outrageously beyond the scope of our understanding” (Schmeink, 2016: 18).
This paper aims to further our critical engagement with an ideology that is emerging across influential sectors of society. With this aim in mind, I will make three essential arguments:
Firstly, transhumanism is a movement based on a techno-scientific belief system that is striving towards the technological enhancement of biology and, in this regard, is self-consciously promoting bio-social engineering.
Secondly, the technologies of transhumanism have the potential to bring tremendous financial and political gains to corporations and governments who are not incentivised to seek out nor address their potential dangers.
Thirdly, the discontent towards transhumanism is diverse and comes overridingly from the threat to traditional values, nature-based ways of life, freedom, equality, and the loss of bodily autonomy to the will of those who operate these powerful systems.
Much of the current scholarship on transhumanism focuses on the intellectual contribution of the movement, with minimal work assessing socio-political impacts. This neglect is worrying since, within the reality of global capitalism, transhumanism may be overridingly motivated by economic and political forces as it may be by ideology. Furthermore, perhaps only a minority of humans may be able to access certain NBIC technologies or utilise them for profits (McNamee and Edwards, 2006: 515). Of course, the socio-economic ramifications may be culturally and politically disruptive in unanticipated ways. It is this overwrought relationship—of transhumanism, the global economy, profitable science, human nature, and traditional belief systems—that demand further critical examination.
Schwab and other elites understand the social and political implications of their technological ideology and the rules of the ‘winner-takes-all’ market economy that will continue to consolidate gains from disruptive technologies.
Transhumanism is a predominantly an Anglo-American movement that has flourished since the 1980s in “American circles of science fiction fans” and with “computer experts and techno-geeks” (Manzocco, 2019: 36). Today, California’s Silicon Valley, with its culture of technological optimism and imaginative entrepreneurship, is the hub of transhumanist thought and innovation. Though scholars have noted that there is no single definition of transhumanism, the essence of transhumanist ideology is to use science and technology to re-design and re-shape the human condition away from randomness, imperfectability, and decay, towards order, perfectibility, and control (Bostrom, 2005: 14).
This ideology emerged in early 20th Century Britain. There is a clear continuity of ideas between current proponents of transhumanism and those who were writing before the Second World War of the potential of science to shape the trajectory of nature, while fostering international cooperation and governance.
They included British scientists and thinkers such as Julian Huxley (credited with first using the word Transhumanism in the 1950s), his brother Aldous, and his grandfather Thomas Huxley, as well as their colleagues J.B.S. Haldane, H.G. Wells, J.D. Bernal, and Bertrand Russell.
These influential thinkers and internationalists were writing and working on promoting political and scientific outlooks that would form the basis of a century of scientific transhumanist thought (Bostrom, 2005: 4-6; Bohan, 2019: 74-108). The subjects they explored still attract transhumanists today: behavioural conditioning, genetic control, technological augmentation, artificial foods and wombs, space travel, life extension, and total disease control. These and other themes circle around the assertion that nature, including human nature, operates optimally under scientific adjustment and management (Bohan, 2019: 99-100).
Early transhumanists (or proto-transhumanists) viewed techno-scientific advancement as a cure for ‘primitive’ human nature (anger, violence, excess fertility), physical limitations (disease and possibly death), political ignorance, and international conflict. It was the Enlightenment ideal of mastery over nature, including human populations, that Aldous Huxley so aptly demonstrated in his dystopian novel, Brave New World. Huxley’s novel, written in 1931, illustrates a scientific dystopia where transhumanist aims (genetic engineering, anti-aging interventions, biotechnology and enhancement drugs) are used to manage society implicitly through pleasure rather than explicitly through force.
Huxley’s depictions were based less on his prophetic abilities and more on his intimate knowledge of the possibilities of social engineering as discussed and promoted by the scientific minds with whom he mingled. His later essay, Over-population, surmises that his novel’s projections were “coming true much sooner than” anticipated (Huxley, 1960: 1).
Notably, Aldous’s brother, Julian Huxley, also wrote about the ills of global overpopulation while promoting the genetic control (‘improvement’) of populations through eugenics (Hubback, 1989; Huxley, 1933). His 1957 essay, Transhumanism, claimed that man was the “managing director” of “evolution on this earth” (Huxley, 2015:12-13).
He was very involved with Britain’s Eugenics Society for over three decades, serving as Vice-President and then President, as well as supporting “campaigns for voluntary sterilization…and for negative eugenics measures against persons carrying the scientific stigma of ‘mental defect’” (Weindling, 2012: 3). Julian Huxley was the first Director-General of UNESCO and founder of the World Wildlife Fund (Byk 2021: 141-142). In this role, he promoted the ideology of an international, scientifically-founded welfare state to further his aim of liberating “the concept of God from personality” because “religions as all human activities is always an unfinished work” (Byk, 2021:149), (Huxley, 1957:10). Julian Huxley’s work and writing envisioned an international social engineering project based on rational scientific management that promised to elevate humanity towards global peace (Sluga, 2010; Byke, 2021:146).
Transhumanism has a wide variety of interpretations, similar to how a major religion is expressed with a divergence of commitment, beliefs and motivations. In fact, many scholars consider transhumanism to be a novel, emerging religion with significant parallels to Christian eschatology (deGrey et al., 2022; O’Gieblyn, 2017). The vast majority of transhumanists do not accept a monotheistic ‘God’ or the moral restraints of traditional religions, but instead endow “technology with religious significance,” leading scholars to define it as “a secularist faith” (Tirosh-Samuelson, 2012: 710).
While not all transhumanists partake in techno-spiritual views, transhumanists essentially view technology as the redemption for fallible biology. For some, these perspectives were inspired by the philosophical work of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955). Tielhard de Chardin was a palaeontologist and Jesuit who believed that a “worldwide network would be woven between all men about earth” and that a “God-like entity” would form from a future “conscious, collective, omniscient mind—the Omega Point” (Bohan, 2019:92). The concept of technological ‘transcendence’ has continued to be central to Transhumanism in conversations about the worldwide web, the Internet of Bodies, artificial intelligence, and the ‘Singularity’, which is the belief that human-machine intelligence will grow exponentially and reach a point where humanity will be thrust into a posthuman age (Bohan, 2019:96; Kurzweil, 2005). The belief that humans (or rather posthumans) can become immortal and ‘god-like’ in a future machine-dominated age—complete with astral travel and digital telepathic communication—is why, in its philosophical form, many scholars understand transhumanism as a techno-materialist religious movement.
In an attempt to consolidate such a complex movement, transhumanist philosopher Nick Bostrom—current head of the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University, and transhumanism’s most legitimate academic—co-founded the World Transhumanist Association in 1998 (Bostrom, 2005:12-13). Out of this work, the Transhumanist Declaration was drafted. It consists of bold statements such as: Humanity will be radically changed by technology in the future. We foresee the feasibility of redesigning the human condition. The Declaration concludes with: Transhumanism advocates for the well-being of all sentience whether in artificial intellects, humans, posthumans, or non-human mammals. The Declaration makes it clear that transhumanism is an unprecedented social engineering project promoting the desirability of using “technology to push the boundaries of what it means to be human and to transcend our biological condition”, as described by Mark O’Connell, author of To Be a Machine (Mayor, 2018).
Two American transhumanist philosophers who have worked, since the 1980s, to spread transhumanist ideas, are Max More and Natasha Vita-More. They are entrepreneurs in the cryonics industry, which deep-freezes human corpses (called ‘patients’) with the aim of future revival (McKibbin, 2019:184-185). Vita-More, in a recent interview, emphasised that the essence of transhumanism is, “a transition of being human-animal into becoming more mechanised using different devices and technologies to enhance humans into whatever they feel that they are.” This very Californian-esque promise of becoming ‘whatever you want to be’ could result in a more mechanised, or augmented, version of you. We already see the emergence of this new ‘becoming whoever you want’ phraseology in the popular acceptance of enhancement chemicals, biotechnology, and videogames. A pantheon of new technologies is on the horizon: exoskeletons, virtual reality, robotics, body-changing pharmaceuticals, remote-controlled nanotechnology, artificial foods, brain implants and synthetic organs. Adopting these technologies is a part of what Max More describes as becoming the Overhuman, otherwise known as the Posthuman: if you are Transhuman you are essentially a transitional human.
In The Overman in the Transhuman, More attributes attitudes in transhumanism to Nietzsche’s philosophy, arguing that the overhuman is the “meaning-giving” concept meant to “replace the basically Christian worldview” of Nietzsche’s time (and, to a lesser extent, our times). More holds that the current “relevance of the posthuman” is that it ultimately gives meaning to scientifically-minded people” (More, 2010:2). In this influential paper, More asks the reader to “take seriously Nietzche’s determination to undertake ‘a revaluation of all values’” (More, 2010:3). Since a modern overhuman upgrade will depend on human gene editing and other biotechnology applications (such as Elon Musk’s Neuralink) becoming legally available, More’s call to ‘reevaluate values’ is understandable. Issues raised on both sides of the academic debate concern which values and traits would be genetically chosen, and to what extent human enhancement will be voluntary (Levin, 2018).
While earlier Anglo-American eugenicists argued for the removal of anti-social genes by sterilisation, some modern transhumanist proponents have argued that moral bioenhancement, through selective gene editing, should become compulsory (Persson and Savulescu, 2008). Many notable transhumanists argue for procreative bioenhancement of offspring by the parents (Levin, 2018:38). Transhumanist advocates Ingmar Persson and Julian Savulescu believe moral enhancement should become obligatory like “education and water fluoridation,” since “those who should take them are least likely to be inclined” (Persson and Savulescu, 2008: 22). Transhumanist Niel Levy argues that “cognitive enhancement could be required,” much as vaccines currently are (Levy, 2013:38). Scholar Susan Levin writes that allowing a techno-scientific transhumanist vision to shape the “form that society takes” may lend itself to “socio-political requirements that
would clash with…liberal democracy” (Levin, 2018:50). She also argues that when transhumanists use “public health analogies and reasoning” to “justify vigorous enhancement” they are putting into serious question their commitment to autonomy (Levin, 2018:48). In this way, the coercive vaccine mandates used during the Covid-19 pandemic can be interpreted as an early warning signal for how future bio-enhancements are likely to be accompanied by forceful moralistic and utilitarian arguments.
Ingmar Person, Julian Savulescu, and Niel Levy are prominent ethicists at the University of Oxford; all three advocate for mandatory genetic enhancement despite the trail of 20th century trauma wrought by grandiose social- and eugenic engineering projects. Does this suggest that a moral framework based on utilitarian arguments and flawed metaphysics remains fundamentally unchanged in public health governance since the last century?
In his recent book God and Gaia: Science, Religion and Ethics on a Living Planet, scholar Michael Northcott argues that a growing “post-human agenda” has become central to policies around public health—referred to as “biosecurity”—which has very little to do with authentic “human health or health of the environment” (Northcott, 89). The consequences of this ideology became apparent during the recent mandating of the experimental gene-altering vaccines, and could represent what Northcott refers to as “automatism”. This is when we are culturally obligated to “use new technologies regardless of the possible consequences” because of a utilitarian ethic of the “managerial goal of efficiency” (Northcott, 2022: 114). To underestimate the suffering caused by one-size-fits-all public health measures is inadequate scholarship, yet despite this, only a minority of academics have openly questioned the use of coercive genetic therapy during the Covid-19 pandemic.
A clash between individual rights and a movement that aims to “re-design the human condition” seems inevitable. In the words of transhumanist scholar Nick Bostrom, “human nature is a work-in-progress, a half-baked beginning that we can learn to remould in desirable ways” (Bostrom, 2005: 3). As the co-founder of the World Transhumanist Association, David Pearce said,
“…if we want to live in paradise, we will have to engineer it ourselves. If we want eternal life, then we’ll need to re-write our bug-ridden code and become god-like…only high-tech solutions can ever eradicate suffering from the living world”. DOEDE, 2009: 47
It is human nature that often comes into direct conflict with massive social engineering projects. Understanding transhumanism as a bio-social engineering project of unprecedented scale is a useful perspective in that it focuses the potential conflicts as value-based and ideological rather than as a direct result of specific scientific advances (Broudy and Arakaki, 2020). Furthermore, the term ‘social engineering’ is in itself inadequate, in that a utopia that aims to phase out Homo sapiens, while making way for the new, enhanced posthuman, is historically unprecedented (Bauman, 2010), and is possibly an energetic form of nihilism or an expression of ‘losing oneself’ to an intoxication with machine power, inspired by what scholars identify as “machine fetishism” (Geisen, 2018: 6). Yet, the surprising willingness to martyr one’s physical self to attain paradise has always been particular to our species (Pugh, 2017).
In congruence with the scholarly work available, I have focused on the ideas of philosophical and academic transhumanists, but transhumanism is an ideology reaching far beyond discourse. Though under-discussed in the academic literature, the movement is advanced by corporate and political transhumanists, and transhumanist scientists. Massive corporate and state investment in NBIC technologies rely on specialised scientists working in the military, elite universities, and corporate laboratories to push the frontiers of reality with robotics, artificial intelligence and biotechnology (Mahnkopf, 2019: 11).
These scientists are designing technologies with such potential that the world’s most powerful players, such as the Chinese Communist Party and the US Department of Defense (DOD), are deeply involved. In January 2023, Harvard University’s esteemed chemist Charles Leiber was on trial for lying to the DOD about his involvement with the Wuhan University of Technology over his work on “revolutionary nanomaterials.” In his Harvard laboratories, Leiber and his assistants have created nanoscale wires that can record electrical signals from neurons (Silver, 2022). Nanowire brain implants were designed by Leiber to “spy on and stimulate individual neurons” (Gibney, 2015:1). In an age where neurotechnology and mind-machine interfaces are changing the nature of warfare, the contested power-potential of transhumanist techno-science is quickly apparent (DeFranco, 2019).
The transhumanist vision for the future should not be viewed outside of the ‘technological arms race’ or a competitive, utilitarian mindset that informs business, war-making, and our cultural esteem of scientific research. This suggests that more research understanding corporate and political transhumanists is critical in analysing how this group is actively involved with determining humanity’s future. Political leaders with a sharp sense for power understand that machine intelligence and enhancement may determine the world’s winners and losers (Kissinger et al., 2021).
As Vladimir Putin articulates: “Artificial Intelligence is the future, not only for Russia, but for all of humankind. It comes with colossal opportunities but also threats that are difficult to predict. Whoever becomes the leader in this sphere will become the ruler of the world” (Karpukhin, 2017).
The elite fascination with transhumanist technologies concerns the potential power inherent in the technology itself—and in who creates and controls it. The influential historian and speaker, Yuval Noah Harari, expressed this view in his 2021 Davos Summit presentation where he said that technology “might allow human elites to do something even more radical than just build digital dictatorships. By hacking organisms, elites may gain the power to re-engineer the future of life itself. Because once you hack something, you can usually geo-engineer it.”
Harari is a frequently featured speaker at the World Economic Forum (WEF) and associated events. The WEF is currently acknowledged as one of the “most significant case studies of private authority with global impact” (Vincent and Dias-Trandade, 2021: 711). Criticised as being a “transnational elite club, with high media visibility” and a neoliberal “agenda-setting power,” the WEF can be understood as an “instrument for global geopolitical domination” (Vincent and Dias-Trandade, 2021: 711). At the very least, it is a forum where heads of state, CEOs of multi-billion-dollar companies, and academics who intelligently promote strategic values, are encouraged to collaborate and shape the global future. On WEF and other media collaborative platforms, Harari eloquently argues for humanity to “break out of the organic realms to the inorganic realm” with the creation of a new type of machine human so much more sophisticated than us that our current form will be more drastically different from it than “Neanderthals” or “chimpanzees” are from us today (BBC, 2016). Perhaps this epochal vision is received with welcome at the WEF because it boldly asserts a future dystopia for those who choose to ignore this high-tech revolution. It may act as a motivational warning to “acculturate” or “disappear.”
Scholar Kasper Schiølin (2020) believes WEF agenda setting is accomplished through strategic political and corporate marketing and the discourse of “future essentialism” where the “fabrication of power” and of an inevitable global destiny is reinforced by “sociotechnical imaginaries” and “epochalism.” Future essentialism is the construct of narratives that use “historical analysis…speculative estimates…and hard statistics” to disseminate an idea of a “fixed and scripted…future” that can be “desirable if harnessed” but also “dangerous if humanity fails” to accept the vision. “Epocholism” is an attempt to capture “The Spirit of the Age” and promote a feeling that the current times are of unsurpassed historical significance. These strategies, Schiølin (2020:553) convincingly argues, are how the “WEF produces a moral-political universe around The Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR).” Is it possible that these techniques can create a narrative of urgency, significance, and global opportunity that can persuade us (or our leaders) to participate in a transnational, transhumanist future?
Klaus Schwab is the founder of the WEF and the one responsible for conceptualising and promoting this revolution, which was announced in his 2016 book The Fourth Industrial Revolution. Schwab (2017) describes the 4IR as a social re-setting (named the ‘Great Reset’) enabled by “a range of new technologies that are fusing the physical, digital and biological worlds, impacting all disciplines, economies and industries, and even challenging ideas about what it means to be human.” Analyses of the 4IR conclude that the rate of technological change is supposed to “accelerate” and be “exponential”, covering the Internet of Things (IoT), AI, automation, genetic engineering of humans and natural biology, nanomedicine, smart cities (where sensors are embedded all over the environment), a sci-fi enabled military, and algorithms with political agency (Trauth-Goik, 2021: 3).
Political scientist Klaus-Gerd Giesen convincingly argues that transhumanism is the “dominant ideology” of the 4IR, having become a “grand narrative” for politicians while “advancing the interests of multinational tech giants” (Geisen, 2018: 10). Giesen views this revolution as a “significant rupture in the evolution of capitalism” as well as the tradition of humanism, arguing that “transhumanist machinism” is “fundamentally anti-human—not least because the machine is by definition inhuman” (Geisen, 2018: 6). With global 5G networks, the Internet of Things and of Bodies, and the convergence of the NBIC technologies, the “body as market” (Geisen, 2018: 10), or what Céline Lafontaine defines as the corps-marché (Céline, 2014), is complete. The sheer mass of consumption will exponentially rise with marketable ‘smart’ products: “wearable tech, autonomous vehicles, biochips, bio sensors” and other new materials (Mahnkopf, 2019: 2). This is a materially focused future where consumer upgrades are baked into the system, so it’s no wonder that corporate monopolies such as Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft, the “new industrial kings” are actively promoting this revolution (Mahnkopf, 2019: 14).
Is it possible that human flourishing is encouraged by the ancient struggle with the limitations of our own animal natures, rather than by conforming to the constructs of complex technology? With transhumanism, who is in control and who benefits?
In his book, Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out?, the environmentalist Bill McKibben writes that, “the Silicon Valley tycoons are arguably the most powerful people on earth” (McKibben, 2019: 183). North American West Coast transhumanist visionaries are an avant-garde community of ultra-rich technologists, businesspeople and inventors who are idolised by the media and who collaborate extensively with the US State to advance their aims. Eric Schmidt illustrates the collaboration common between US State defence organs, academia, and giant technology corporations (Conger and Metz, 2020). With a net worth of $23 billion, Schmidt was the Executive Chairman of Google and is now the current Chairman of the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence (NSCAI) for the US Department of Defense, where he advised President Biden to reject a ban on AI-driven autonomous weapons (Shead, 2021). Schmidt believes that artificial intelligence will “govern society” and be “perfectly rational”, outdating and rendering useless human intuition and knowledge. As with most tech billionaires, Schmidt has set up a private charity, Schmidt Futures, and has so far donated a billion dollars towards his AI educational aims (Philanthropy News Digest, 2019). While he admits that he did not design Google to regulate ‘misinformation’ more effectively, censorship is increasing with the accelerated abilities of AI (working with humans) to moderate and remove content on the Internet (Desai, 2021).
Many of our most influential technologies come from programmes at the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).
DARPA funds ‘blue sky’ technology research and is credited with inventing the Internet, GPS, virtual reality, and drones.
The agency is now set on advancing human augmentation both in and off the battlefield, with the goal of mastering brain-computer neural-interfaces (Krishnan, 2016).
Arati Prabhakar is the former head of DARPA, and Chief Science Advisor to President Biden. Prabhakar, like the prior head of DARPA, Regina Dugan, moves between working with technology companies in Silicon Valley and the US Department of Defense. Like most, she is enthusiastic about a transhumanist future of augmentation, and advocates for this as a matter of national security. And yet, she also admits that this “will bring surprises that we may not like.
For generations we have thought about technologies that change our tools – but this is about technology that changes us.” We already have ample evidence that our current technologies, particularly wireless devices and chemicals, are physically changing our human (and planetary) biology, but the aims of DARPA and the DoD are more ambitious and revolve around the complete mastery of evolution (including the human genome) and natural systems (including the human population) using technology (Carr, 2020). This is exemplified in the recent, far-reaching US Executive Order for Advancing Biotechnology, which states that “we need to develop genetic engineering technologies” to “write circuitry for cells and predictably program biology in the same way in which we write software and program computers.” The order states that this is to “help us achieve our societal goals.” These societal goals are central to what the White House identifies as the “bioeconomy” where “computing tools and artificial intelligence” will help us “unlock the power of biological data”, scale up production, and reduce “obstacles for commercialization” (Biden, 2022).
In March 2022 at the World Government Summit, Elon Musk, a self-identified transhumanist, and the world’s wealthiest individual, spoke bluntly from the podium. He announced that he sees the upcoming AI apocalypse as a human-extinction event. What is the solution? “We must all become cyborgs if we are to survive the inevitable robot uprising.”
This may be marketing, since Musk’s Neuralink is poised to start human trials of brain implantable chips” (Neate, 2022). Radically enhanced human cognition should, Musk predicts, counterbalance the dangers posed by super-intelligent machines. If the richest man on earth prophesied a mass AI extermination event and an inevitable posthuman future from the platform of the World Government Summit, should we dismiss it as just another tech business strategy?
In her analysis of the 4IR, Birgit Mahnkopf (2019:2) writes that a “system of physical-to-digital technologies embodied in machines and equipment…would enable sensing, monitoring, and control of the entire economy.” This is occurring against a backdrop of increasing global inequality and centralisation of wealth. It is estimated that eight men own as much as half the monetary wealth of the other eight billion humans (The New York Times, 2017). Schwab and other elites understand the social and political implications of their technological ideology and the rules of the ‘winner-takes-all’ market economy that will continue to consolidate gains from disruptive technologies. Universal basic income and social credit systems (with a resource-based economy and central bank digital currencies, or CBDCs) are presented as solutions to managing popular resistance and social unrest.
The WEF represents the fusion of transhumanist goals within global governance. As Schwab notes, the organisation has been very effective at ‘penetrating the cabinets’ of national governments. As Harvard scholar Kasper Schiølin (2020:549) astutely observes, the “4IR is justified as kings and emperors once justified their authority as divine and natural in uncertain times.” Hence, it may be that the potential problems from transhumanist ideologies come, not so much from the prospect of an AI take-over, but from the elites’ use of the culture and technologies of transhumanism. It may be that these risks overwhelm liberal democracies long before sentient AI does.
Few intellectuals note the opposition to transhumanism better than the transhumanists themselves. Nick Bostrom writes that resistance comes from:
“Ancient notions of taboo; the Greek concept of hubris; the Romanticist view of nature; certain religious interpretations of the concept of human dignity and of a God-given natural order; Karl Marx’s analysis of technology under capitalism; various Continental philosophers’ critique of technology, technocracy, and the rationalistic mindset that accompanies modern technoscience; foes to the military industrial complex and multinational corporation; and objectors to the consumerist rat-race.” BOSTROM, 2005:18
Bostrom’s summary is a panorama of human expression, literature, thousands of years of culture, religion, philosophy and human meaning-making. Modern literature on philosophy, culture and technology, from Jacques Ellul, Jerry Mander, Neil Postman and Wendell Berry to Jürgan Habermas and Martin Heidegger, offer poignant critiques that are relevant to opposing transhumanist visions of the future, and remind us of the value of community, embodied wisdom, and traditions, and the effects of technological systems. The difference in writing styles is noteworthy: while pro-transhumanist writing tends to be utilitarian and have a tone of scientific authority, ‘bioconservatives’ will often use narrative, symbols, and a writing style considered traditionally beautiful in human culture.
What is noticeable is that the opposition to transhumanism is broad, ill-defined and diverse. Nick Bostrom notes that “right-wing conservatives, left wing environmentalists and anti-globalists” are all pushing back against central transhumanist aims (Bostrom, 2005: 18). Firstly, there are the well-published intellectual and academic opponents that engage in a forceful scholarly debate with transhumanism over issues such as biotechnology, threats to liberal democracy, and scientific materialism (Leon Kass, 2000 and Francis Fukyama, 2003), and the environmental and social costs of transhumanism (Bill McKibbin, 2019). Also noteworthy are the bioethicists, George Annas, Lori Andrews and Rosario Isasi, who have advised making “inheritable genetic modification in humans a ‘crime against humanity’” (Annas, et al., 2002: 154-155). These scholars fear the posthuman potential for inequality and war, warning that, “the new species, or ‘posthuman’, will likely view the old ‘normal’ humans as inferior, even savages, and fit for slavery or slaughter…it is the predictable potential for genocide” (Annas, et al., 2002: 162). The common factor amongst these academics is that they believe biological engineering (of humans) would be disruptive to values, rights, and equality, and would threaten liberal democracy itself. These men have been labelled bio-conservatives or, more dismissively, Neo-Luddites, for rejecting the legitimacy of a posthuman future (Agar, 2007:12).
The second group that is emerging as anti-transhumanist are the environmentalists, non-conformists, primitivists, and anarchists committed to Wild Nature with forceful anti-industrial sentiments. In North America, this includes elements of the Deep Green Movement (Bilek, 2021), represented by various writers, artists, activists, ecologists, organic farmers, herbalists and healers, forest-dwellers and hunter/gatherers, spiritualists, and various alternative people, off-grid or nomadic, who refuse to live within a mechanised, industrial system, and may intentionally attempt to sabotage it. As an eclectic group, they have significant influence over specific geographical areas, tend to identify with traditional local indigenous values, and deeply resent Western consumerist culture, war, global corporations, pollution, and industrial infrastructure (Tsolkas, 2015). Notably, some ecofeminists have written that biotechnology is a dangerous “extension of traditional patriarchal exploitation of women” in promoting the reshaping of natural human bodies (Bostrom, 2005: 18).
The third group that has rapidly developed increasing opposition to transhumanism is religious groups. Besides the Mennonite and Amish communities, who maintain ‘old world’ lifestyles across significant sections of the United States, there is a rising anti-transhumanist sentiment and increasing religious fervour amongst some Evangelical Christians across North America. The New York Times reported on the increasing politicisation of evangelical congregations, with defiant unifying songs that repeated, “We will not comply” in the chorus (Dias and Graham, 2022). The language these groups use to describe transhumanism is often symbolic, archetypal and apocalyptic, and understood as an epic battle between light and darkness. For example, speaker and writer, Thomas Horn, has been preaching about the dangers of transhumanism to Christian congregations for over a decade. His books have titles such as Pandemonium’s Engine: How the End of the Church Age, the Rise of Transhumanism, and the Coming of the Ubermensch (Overman) Herald Satan’s Imminent and Final Assault on the Creation of God. Suspicions of ‘Satanic technology’, and anti-transhumanist sentiments may have been a part of the reason why Evangelical Christians were the demographic most unlikely to cooperate with Covid vaccination mandates in the United States (Lovett, 2021; Porter, 2021).
The tragic situation in Ukraine suggests that ideologically-driven wars may increase with the growing animosity between religious and transhumanist world views, or this may be used in war propaganda. The Russian Orthodox Church, with well over one hundred million members, considers the invasion of Ukraine as a battle of light and darkness, with ‘Holy Russia’ fighting against an unholy NATO alliance (Klip and Pankhurst, 2022). The Church Patriarch, Kirill of Moscow, has taken a strong position against biotechnology—including “gene therapy”, “cloning” and “artificial life extension”—and views the Russian Orthodox Church as defending the traditional family against the liberalism of the West (Stepanova, 2022: 8). Addressing the leaders of Russia at the recent 24th World Russian People’s Council, the orthodox believer and philosopher Alexander Dugin proclaimed, “this war is not only a war of armies, of men…it is a war of Heaven against Hell…the Archangel Michael against the devil…the enemy came to us…in the face of LGBT, Transhumanism—that openly Satanic, anti-human civilization with which we are at war with today.” It may be that an influential number of religious Russians believe that they are not fighting against Ukraine at all, but rather rescuing it from the Satanic hold of the Transhumanist West (Siewers, 2020).
The fourth major group that is exhibiting overwhelming anti-establishment sentiments towards what is perceived as the ‘elites’ and their ‘transhumanist agenda’ are the politically and economically disenfranchised working classes and displaced farmers. Known in academic circles as ‘populists’ (Mazarella, 2019: 50), this group has recently displayed significant anger over extended ‘lockdowns’; losing the freedom to travel and to access decent healthcare (in the US); and experiencing unemployment and poverty. Their physically non-compliant behaviour, seen in mass demonstrations, notably across Europe and with the Canadian truckers, has been met with discursive and physical violence from increasingly irritated political leaders and media corporations. These ‘populists’ often reject transhumanism as an elitist ideology that they fear will lead to further loss of bodily autonomy, increased surveillance, political disempowerment, and a reduction of dignified employment to robots and automation (Mazarella, 2019: 130-134). These fears are not altogether unfounded since, according to the WEF, the 4IR is proposed to lead to significant worldwide job losses, perhaps up to 70% (Mahnkopf, 2019: 7). Steven Bannon, the instrumental ‘populist’ of Trump’s 2016 election force, uses religious polemics to rally resistance against what he sees as a rising transhuman globalist agenda. His popular show, the War Room, features broadcasts such as Descent into Hell: Transhumansim and the New Human Race. The outrage this group has towards 4IR transformations and transhumanism cannot be underestimated: within the US many working class families, though not all, also hold values of egalitarian weapons ownership, and their discourse exudes a willingness to engage in violent confrontation over threats to bodily autonomy (Sturm and Albretch, 2021: 130).
The United States’ most infamous anti-transhumanist/anti-technologist came, not from religious circles, but from within the radical environmental movement and academia. Theodore Kazcynski, a mathematical genius and professor at UC Berkeley, conducted an anti-technology terrorist campaign that spanned 17 years, killing three people and injuring 23 (Fleming, 2022). He blackmailed the FBI into publishing his 35,000-word thesis titled Industrial Society and its Future in the Washington Post and New York Times, which led to his capture. Since spending 25 years in solitary confinement, he has published volumes about how to conduct a revolution against the scientific elite. In one volume, The Anti-Tech Revolution: Why and How, he writes,
“The techies themselves insist that machines will soon surpass human intelligence and natural selection will favour systems that eliminate them (humans)—if not abruptly, then in a series of stages so that the risk of rebellion will be eliminated.” KAZCYNSKI, 2016: 79
Kazcynski reacted with terrorism to what he considered an existential threat posed by technology to humans and his greatest love, Wild Nature. His fear was a loss of freedom and masculine human nature, as well as the transformation of society into a controlled Brave New World, something he viewed as inevitable without a revolution (Moen, 2019: 3). In fact, it is arguable that the United States was already too similar to the Brave New World for Kazcynski, since he depicts “fighting industrial society” as “structurally similar to escaping a concentration camp” (Moen, 2019: 3).
Bill Joy, founder of Sun Technologies, authored an influential essay at the dawn of the 21stcentury, Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us, advocating for the relinquishment of developing “AI, nanotechnology and genetics because of the risks” (Joy, 2000). Interestingly, Joy argues for the legitimacy of Kazcynski’s logic about the threats of advanced technologies, despite Kazcynski having “gravely injured” one of his friends, a computer scientist, with a bomb. Parts of Kazcynski’s writing that shifted Joy’s views included the following:
“The human race might easily permit itself to drift into a position of such dependence on machines that it would have no practical choice but to accept all of the machines’ decisions. As society and problems that face it become more and more complex and machines become more and more intelligent, people will let machines make more of their decisions for them…eventually a stage may be reached in which the decisions necessary to keep the system running will be so complex that human beings will be incapable of making them intelligently. At that stage, the machines will effectively be in control. People won’t be able to just turn the machines off, because they will be so dependent on them that turning them off would amount to suicide.” JOY, 2000: 48-49
This scenario is not too hard to imagine since it is quickly becoming our modern predicament. There is an implicit and explicit consensus in much transhumanist and anti-transhumanist thought, by Musk, Kazcynski, Joy and many others, that this phenomenon is leading, and will continue, to this logical end. The other scenario that Bill Joy quoted in his essay, again from Kazcynski, was:
“On the other hand, it is possible that human control over machines may be retained. In that case the average man may have control over certain private machines of his own…but control over large systems of machines will be in the hands of a tiny elite—just as it is today, but with two differences. Due to improved techniques the elite will have greater control over the masses; and because human work will no longer be necessary the masses will be ‘superfluous’, a useless burden on the system. If the elite is ruthless they may simply decide to exterminate the mass of humanity. Or if they are humane they may use propaganda or other psychological or biological techniques to reduce the birth rate until the mass of humanity becomes extinct, leaving the world to the elites.” JOY, 2000: 48-49
Interestingly, the scenarios do not seem mutually exclusive, at least for a time.
Scholar Ole Martin Moen has noted similarities between Kazycinski, Nick Bostrom and Julian Savulescu in their projections of a future crisis (Moen, 2018: 5). Like Kazcinski, Bostrom has argued that transhumanist technologies expose humanity to a significant risk of eradication (Bostrom, 2019). Savulescu, also like Kazcyinski, argues in Unfit for the Future: The need for moral enhancement, that evolved human nature combined with transhumanist technologies will lead to catastrophic consequences (Persson and Savulescu, 2012). Kazcinski, who believed these outcomes were logical, reacted with violence because his highest ethic was one of authentic, uncontrolled freedom (Moen, 2018:5-6). His life is a warning that some human natures may be entirely incompatible with a techno-scientific future. In fact, the transhumanist vision of human extinction and a ‘posthuman’ future may actually promote anxiety and violence in some humans.
Martin Heidegger has warned that those who seek to use technology’s influence without realising the immense power that the technology has over them, are trapped into becoming extensions of machines rather than free actors. They are “framed like men with advanced computational devices into seeing all of reality as computational information” (Doede, 2009:49). For thousands of years, human existence and meaning-making has accumulated from “birth and death, flood and fire, sleep and waking, the motions of the winds, the cycles of the stars, the budding and falling of the leaves, the ebbing and flowing of the tides” (Powys, 1930: 73), and it seems fitting to question if our highly evolved human tissues and ‘natures’ are strengthened or undermined by advanced technology. Is it possible that human flourishing is encouraged by the ancient struggle with the limitations of our own animal natures, rather than by conforming to the constructs of complex technology? With transhumanism, who is in control and who benefits?
It may be fair to say that transhumanism is a bio-social engineering project that ultimately concentrates power in machines, and humans who behave with machine-like characteristics. Large sections of the earth’s population, such as various religious groups, the working class, indigenous peoples, and other nature-based humans, may resent undemocratic announcements from forums like the WEF that, with the 4IR, industrialization is accelerating towards genetic engineering, robotic automation and virtual living. Furthermore, we may risk promoting an existential crisis and extreme reactions in those who dislike being told that the future belongs to the posthuman rather than to themselves and their offspring. It is a contested future and one that is entirely unwritten.
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Source
Agar, N. (2007). Whereto transhumanism?: the literature reaches a critical mass. The Hastings Center Report, 37(3), 12-17.
June 29th, 2023 by Andrew Korybko
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Nothing that the US says about Russia should ever be taken at face value, especially when it concerns the most sensitive affairs of its leadership.
The New York Times (NYT) published a piece on Tuesday citing unnamed US officials who claimed that their country’s intelligence services believe that Army General Sergey Surovikin was aware in advance of Wagner chief Yevgeny Prigozhin’s failed coup attempt and may even have helped planned it. Their sources also alleged that other Russian Generals might have been involved as well since they claim that the exiled mercenary leader wouldn’t have launched his armed rebellion unless he expected support.
To the NYT’s credit, they informed their audience that “much of what the United States and its allies know is preliminary” and that “American officials have an interest in pushing out information that undermines the standing of General Surovikin”. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov rubbished this report on Wednesday, however, saying that “I think that now there will be a lot of gossip, speculation on this issue [the armed mutiny] and so on. I think this is one of such examples.”
Observers should be very skeptical of US intelligence claiming that General Surovikin may have helped plan Prigozhin’s coup since even the NYT candidly admitted that their country has a reason to propagate disinformation about him. The target of their latest information warfare attack actually recorded a video the night that Prigozhin’s coup began calling on him to stop in order to avoid bloodshed. Even if he was speculatively in cahoots with him, that should have signaled to the Wagner chief that his plot was foiled.
There’s no reason right now to believe that General Surovikin was involved, however, since the notion that Prigozhin wouldn’t have acted unless he expected support doesn’t mean that he launched his coup after explicitly receiving such from high-level collaborators in the Defense Ministry (DM). After all, he might have simply misinterpreted grumbling from officials like him about Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu and/or Chief of General Staff Valery Gerasimov as suggesting support for his secret plans.
Nevertheless, it’s important for the security services’ investigation into these events to complete its course without foreign meddling, which is what the NYT’s latest report can be regarded as. It appears aimed at making Russians think that General Surovikin is guilty so that President Putin feels pressured to remove him, which that outlet predicts “would undoubtedly benefit Ukraine, whose Western-backed troops are pushing a new counteroffensive that is meant to try to win back territory seized by Moscow.”
In the event he decides not to do anything, then the Western media and that de facto New Cold War bloc’s officials could then spin this as “proving his weakness” with all that entails for his future. This strategy is similar to the one that was earlier employed in mid-May after the Washington Post (WaPo) claimed to have obtained previously unreported documents from the Pentagon leaks alleging that Prigozhin was in cahoots with Kiev.
As was analyzed in hindsight here about how the Wagner chief ended up being their “useful idiot”, it was arguably the case that this particular information provocation was meant to exacerbate the rivalry between his group and the DM. Both sides were pressured to act first against the other: Prigozhin could have pushed his coup plans ahead if he thought that the DM might exploit that report as the pretext for an impending crackdown; and the DM might have thought they had to root out a dangerous traitor.
Informed by this recent precedent, it might very well be the case that the NYT’s latest report about what’s being presented to the global public as American intelligence’s latest assessment is also motivated by the desire to manipulate Russia’s internal political dynamics at the highest level. The specific intent is to pressure President Putin into removing General Surovikin out of fear that his authority would be discredited in the eyes of his people if he doesn’t.
The premises upon which this influence operation is being waged are false, however, which is why it won’t succeed except in misleading their fellow Westerners (including those among the Alt-Media Community who generally sympathize with Russia but are prone to believe the latest conspiracies). For starters, President Putin isn’t influenced by public opinion when making any decisions, especially those regarding national security such as this one.
Second, the Russian public isn’t all that influenced by the Mainstream Media as it is, let alone claims from their existential enemy’s intelligence officials who they instinctively distrust. The third reason is that unnamed US officials already admitted to their country’s media that they withheld their detailed information about Prigozhin’s plans from their allies and Russia alike in order to let events unfold on their own. Another source then explained why when revealing that the US expected a lot of bloodshed.
That last-mentioned detail is reason enough not to believe that the latest reports are being shared with the public for supposedly altruistic reasons related to helping President Putin protect himself from suspected traitors like they’re framing General Surovikin as being. To the contrary, it suggests that the reason why they’re sharing this information now is to provoke even more bloodshed, albeit this time inflicted by Ukraine upon Russia by possibly giving it an edge on the battlefield if he’s removed.
To be absolutely clear, President Putin will make whatever decision he believes is aligned with his country’s national interests after his security services’ investigation into events is concluded, thus meaning that his speculative removal would be done for those reasons and not because of any pressure. Having clarified that, it’s relevant to reiterate what was written earlier about how there’s no reason right now to believe that General Surovikin was involved in plotting Prigozhin’s coup or is under investigation.
From the looks of it, these claims are being made to provoke the same sort of internal political divisions inside Russia as those that were earlier shared by WaPo last month. Nothing that the US says about Russia should ever be taken at face value, especially when it concerns the most sensitive affairs of its leadership. General Surovikin should be assumed innocent unless President Putin is convinced that he’s guilty since wildly speculating about his patriotism services to advance the US’ divide-and-rule agenda.
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This article was originally published on Andrew Korybko’s Newsletter.
June 29th, 2023 by Scott Ritter
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In this interview with Col. Douglas Macgregor, Scott Ritter answers the question, “would Ukraine’s attack on Moscow lead to nuclear retaliation?”
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June 29th, 2023 by Barry Kissin
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On Oct. 20, 2020, just before the Presidential election, a letter signed by 51 former top intelligence officials claimed that Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop ‘has all the classic earmarks of a Russian intelligence operation.’”
It is important to notice who were the signers of this critical lie – they include John Brennan, Obama’s director of the CIA; James Clapper, Obama’s Director of National Intelligence; Leon Panetta, Obama’s other CIA director; Michael Hayden, George W. Bush’s CIA director (making this a bipartisan effort); and Mike Morell, former Acting CIA Director under Obama, who later testified to Congress that he drafted the Oct. 20 letter at the request of Anthony Blinken, then serving as one of Biden’s campaign advisers.
It is also important to notice the content of the lie — this timely lie that the Russians were to blame for all the business with Hunter’s laptop. Worked like a charm.
Since being elevated to Secretary of State, Blinken has repeatedly told us that the Russians one day in February, 2022 decided to launch an “unprovoked” imperialistic invasion of Ukraine. Russia is said not to have a legitimate security interest in the country with which it shares 1227 miles of land border and 199 miles of sea border.
We are also expected to believe the Russians were:
shelling the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant in Ukraine while they were occupying it;
they blew up their own Nord Stream pipelines;
and earlier in this month of June, they blew up the Nova Kakhovka dam, located in Russian-occupied territory, thus threatening the water supply of Crimea, one more major act of ecological terrorism.
Back in December, 2022, it was reported by the Washington Post that the Ukrainian military had conducted a successful “test strike” of the Nova Kakhovka dam with a HIMARS missile supplied by the U.S.
As we continue this madness of escalating in Ukraine, isn’t it time for blaming Russians to lose its charm?
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Barry Kissin is a retired attorney, dedicated peace activist and columnist who resides in Frederick, Maryland, home of Fort Detrick, headquarters of the American biodefense/bioweapons program. He is regularly published in his local newspaper, The Frederick News-Post, as well as in alternative media, including Global Research, Consortium News, Op-ed News and International Clearing House.
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June 29th, 2023 by The Global Research Team
Dear Readers,
We are approaching the 22nd founding anniversary of Global Research, which was established on September 9, 2001.
Through these years, the quest for truth and government accountability has only grown stronger and clearer. We held our ground in reporting on the US-NATO criminal invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, the bombing of Libya, Syria and Yemen, the dangers of the COVID-19 mRNA vaccines, the media lies pertaining to the Ukraine war, the attack on free speech, the indictment of Julian Assange, and the ongoing phenomenon of democratic backsliding, among others.
21 years’ worth of courageous reporting by outstanding authors, scholars and scientists— all these are not without roadblocks. But we’ve survived them because of you, our readers.
For the months leading up to our 22nd anniversary, can you help us keep going by donating to Global Research? Any amount is highly appreciated.
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Thank you for your support!
The Global Research Team
June 29th, 2023 by Ben Bartee
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Surveying the latest transgressions against decency, morality, and humanity itself by artificial intelligence and its biological architects.
One theme I’ve tried to work into my conversations with Joe Jarvis and Nicolas Creed regarding artificial intelligence, transhumanism, and related issues is: technology is a tool.
It can conceivably be a tool of evil and devastation and impoverishment, or a revolutionary one of empowerment and human flourishing. Which trajectory the AI revolution will take is still up in the air.
But, if the decision is left to the transhumanist technocrats who are currently bankrolling AI and hope to shape its development for their own interests, it will be the former.
Even the technology sector is not immune to automation.
Via City A.M.:
“Artificial intelligence could replace 7,800 jobs at the technology giant, International Business Machines Corporation (IBM), according to its chief executive.
Arvind Krishna told Bloomberg News on Monday that the company expected to pause hiring for non-customer facing roles, such as human resources.
“I could easily see 30 per cent of that getting replaced by AI and automation over a five-year period,” Krishna told the outlet, of the company’s 26,000 non-consumer facing roles.”
And what of the blue-collar workers?
They don’t stand a chance, except in certain niche industries that, for various reasons, cannot be done well now or in the immediate future by AI – psychologists, for instance, as even supercomputers can’t comprehend the intricacies of the human mind.
Are all of the displaced railroad workers or soldiers replaced by AI going to “learn to code?”
Of course not and, anyway, there are a finite number of coding jobs – not nearly enough to compensate for the automation of all or nearly all of the manufacturing, service, transportation sectors, etc.
The synopsis here is that human well-being and AI are incompatible under the modern economic model. Something fundamental and transformation for the economy and society we often take for granted is going to change, one way or another – for better or worse.
Joe Jarvis recently took viewers on a guided tour of his father’s off-grid, modest yet highly impressive housing situation. This is the kind of approach to independence that we could all incorporate more of in our lives, myself included.
Former high-level Google Executive and the man recognized by many as the “godfather of AI,” Geoffrey Hinton, has some choice warnings regarding the technology he helped pioneer.
Via International Business Times:
“A computer scientist often dubbed “the godfather of artificial intelligence” has quit his job at Google to speak out about the dangers of the technology, US media reported Monday.
Geoffrey Hinton, who created a foundation technology for AI systems, told The New York Times that advancements made in the field posed “profound risks to society and humanity”.
“Look at how it was five years ago and how it is now,” he was quoted as saying in the piece, which was published on Monday.”
Since 9/11, American airports have been the testing ground for technological impositions on fundamental privacy rights and civil liberties espoused in the Constitution and federal case law.
In that tradition, the agency has recently rolled out what it describes as “voluntary” face scans allegedly necessary for identity verification purposes.
Via Associated Press:
“A passenger walks up to an airport security checkpoint, slips an ID card into a slot and looks into a camera atop a small screen. The screen flashes “Photo Complete” and the person walks through — all without having to hand over their identification to the TSA officer sitting behind the screen.
It’s all part of a pilot project by the Transportation Security Administration to assess the use of facial recognition technology at a number of airports across the country.
“What we are trying to do with this is aid the officers to actually determine that you are who you say who you are,” said Jason Lim, identity management capabilities manager, during a demonstration of the technology to reporters at Baltimore-Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport.”
I was checking in at PHX and they have a new device that randomly requires people to scan their face into the screen pictured below
The TSA agent required the person before me to scan their face but not me pic.twitter.com/95cIH5fGxa
— Merissa Hamilton 🗳 ⛽ 🗽🔥 (@merissahamilton) March 17, 2022
In national security state parlance, “voluntary” means “do it or you’ll get molested by an obese thug with blue latex gloves until he’s good and satisfied. We’ll also put you on a domestic terror list.”
So lots of the public will bend over and take it good and hard.
The Chinese Communist Party has granted itself even more censorship powers than it already had under the guise of fighting AI-generated “misinformation.”
Via AI News:
“China’s Cyberspace Administration (CAC) has launched a campaign to combat fake news generated by AI.
The crackdown is focused on news providers, including short video platforms and popular search lists.
The CAC specifically highlighted manipulative practices such as the use of AI virtual anchors, forged studio scenes, fake news accounts mimicking legitimate ones, and the manipulation of news to create misleading storylines. These practices are employed to generate what’s often known as clickbait.”
Nina Jankowicz and her failed Disinformation Governance Board look on in envy. But she can rest easy knowing that CCP-style techno-hell will be imported to America in good time.
WEF lieutenant Yuval Noah Harari is titillated by the prospect of replacing ancient, human-derived texts with soulless AI productions.
“It’s the first technology ever that can create new ideas.
You know, the printing press, radio, television, they broadcast, they spread the ideas created by the human brain, by the human mind. They cannot create a new idea. You know, [Johannes] Gutenberg printed the Bible in the middle of the 15th century; the printing press printed as many copies of the Bible as Gutenberg instructed it, but it did not create a single new page. It had no ideas of its own about the Bible: Is it good? Is it bad? How to interpret this? How to interpret that?”
AI can create new ideas. It can even write a new Bible.”
-Yuval Noah Harari
Reverence for anything transcendent aside from technology is unwelcome competition to the likes of Harari.
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This article was originally published on The Daily Bell.
Ben Bartee is an independent Bangkok-based American journalist with opposable thumbs. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.
Featured image is from TDB
June 29th, 2023 by Global Research News
By , June 28, 2023
A survey of the public health records in the UK has turned up the conclusion that many anecdotally adopted years ago based on anecdotal experience and intuition: the lockdowns were total theater that needlessly, badly hurt the society and economy.
The US Had Anticipated “More Violence and Bloodshed” in Wagner’s Mutiny
By , June 28, 2023
The US expected the mutiny attempt by the private military company Wagner to be “a great deal more violent and bloody” than it actually was. Unfortunately for Washington, a Bolshevik-like revolution was not repeated to usurp Russia’s war effort. At the same time, the head of EU Foreign Affairs, Josep Borrell, incorrectly espouses that the Russian military will soon crack.
The Standoff Between Russia’s Defense Ministry and Wagner’s Prigozhin: Implications for Africa
By , June 28, 2023
The internal disagreements and possibly deep-seated dissatisfaction between Russia’s Ministry of Defense (MoD) and Wagner Group leader over the ‘special military operation’ are aspects of the the geopolitical chess game.
Video: The Engineered Destabilization of the Global Economy. Prof. Michel Chossudovsky
By , June 28, 2023
We are currently at the crossroads of the most serious economic and social crisis in world history. Engineered collapse of agriculture. Hikes in the price of energy. Collapse in production and consumption. Poverty and Famine in all major regions of the world. An outright war against all humanity: the planet’s 8 billion people.
Coup Coo: US Intel Had Foreknowledge of Prigozhin “Coup Attempt”
By , June 28, 2023
The New York Times informs us that US Intel was well aware weeks beforehand of the developing coup attempt by Yevgeny Prigozhin and his personal army, the Wagner Group. Congressional leaders were briefed a day prior to its roll-out. Well, golly, can you suppose for a New York minute that Russia’s intel agency didn’t know all about it, too?
Nauru’s Refugee Stain: Australia’s Continued Offshore Processing Regime
By , June 28, 2023
The last refugee, for now, has left the small, guano-producing state of Nauru. For a decade, the Pacific Island state served as one of Australia’s offshore prisons for refugees and asylum seekers, a cruel deterrent to those daring to exercise their right to seek asylum via the sea.
United Nations Taking Over EU COVID Certificate Program. The World’s Digital Health Pass
By , June 28, 2023
July 1, the EU certificate will become the first building block of the UN World Health Organization’s Global Digital Health Certification Network which will include a range of digital health services. And while the WHO declared in May that COVID-19 no longer constitutes a global health emergency, the international certificate program will protect against future pandemics.
Does Russia Have Legitimate Security Concerns? RFK Jr.
By , June 28, 2023
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is running against the Democratic establishment’s position on the Russia-Ukraine War and for the presidential nomination of the party in 2024. He recently gave a peace speech in New Hampshire that echoed the sentiments of the peace speech given by his uncle, President John F. Kennedy, in 1963.
By , June 28, 2023
After having lied about WMDs, Russia Gate, chemical weapons in Syria and so many other things, the U.S. intelligence community is now advancing the lie that Cuba is hosting a Chinese spy base that enables China to spy on the U.S.
Despite Cancelling Attempts, Dimitri Lascaris’s Canada-Wide Tour for Peace Continues
By , June 28, 2023
Despite successful and unsuccessful attempts to cancel and deplatform the Canada-wide Tour For Peace of Dimitri Lascaris, his in-person tour continued successfully last night in Vancouver. 60 people attended at Harbour Centre without incident.
June 29th, 2023 by Karsten Riise
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Once again – the US is strangling China one more time on chips.
NVIDIA made a downgraded “China-version” of their A100 to an A800 chip – now the US government wants to forbid that too. See this.
No reason to talk about the latest and more advanced NVIDIA “China-chip” H800 – it will be banned for China too.
Not even a year has passed since the US introduced the chip sanctions on China – and the US is already unhappy that it “allowed” China “too much”.
This will NEVER end before China is done.
Moore’s law states that chip power doubles every 2 years – but US wants China to NEVER have better chips than as of Autumn, 2022 when chip sanctions started).
Every 2 years, the US will have double the chip power of China – and China will stand still.
2. But the US will not even be satisfied with forcing China to a stand-still in chips as per “Autumn 2022”.
The US is already attacking China’s existing business in computer centers (not even for AI), incl. in Brazil.
We also see US anger that even simple chips for washing machines are being used for military weapons (example: Russia).
The US will want China to regress – go backwards – in chip technology.
You cannot run AI without a lot of computer power.
This is about AI, but more than that. It is about depriving China-Russia of technology as a whole !
No technology and hence no advanced country can run without modern computers. China is a decade behind in its own chip-making technology. Already now, 2023, China is without the most modern computing chips.
China is in an undeclared cold war with the US. A US war for the total destruction of China as a power – even as a regional power.
The salami is cut – slice for slice, technologies are taken away from China, investments are taken away from China (recently, Sequoia Capital was banned from investing in China), US business cooperation is taken away from China, cooperation with the EU is deprived by the US (“de-risking”), relations with India are part of the chess game – everything is done.
It took Russia until Autumn 2022 to really understand that the US wants to destroy Russia as a power.
China has not fully understood, that Russia is only a secondary target of the US – the primary target is the destruction of China.
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Karsten Riise is a Master of Science (Econ) from Copenhagen Business School and has a university degree in Spanish Culture and Languages from Copenhagen University. He is the former Senior Vice President Chief Financial Officer (CFO) of Mercedes-Benz in Denmark and Sweden.
He is a regular contributor to Global Research.
June 28th, 2023 by Hedelberto López Blanch
June 28th, 2023 by Ahmed Adel
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The US expected the mutiny attempt by the private military company Wagner to be “a great deal more violent and bloody” than it actually was. Unfortunately for Washington, a Bolshevik-like revolution was not repeated to usurp Russia’s war effort. At the same time, the head of EU Foreign Affairs, Josep Borrell, incorrectly espouses that the Russian military will soon crack.
According to US media reports, the intelligence community in Washington claims to have had information about Yevgeny Prigozhin’s plans and believed that this would result in further bloodshed.
“I do know that we assessed it was going to be a great deal more violent and bloody,” a Biden administration official told CNN.
On June 24, PMC Wagner took control of the Russian city Rostov-on-Don, including the headquarters of the Southern Military District, because Yevgeny Prigozhin, the leader of Wagner, claimed the Russian military targeted his camps in missile and bomb attacks. The Russian Ministry of Defence and Federal Security Service denies the allegation.
Russian President Vladimir Putin delivered a televised address on June 24, saying that Wagner’s actions were an armed mutiny and treason. He then promised tough measures against the insurgents.
Later in the day, the Belarusian presidential office said that Prigozhin had agreed with Aleksandr Lukashenko’s proposal to stop Wagner’s troop movement in Russia and take further steps to calm the situation. Prigozhin later confirmed his adherence to the proposal, saying that Wagner’s troops were returning to their camps – and just like that, the mutiny was already over.
In the end, there was no destructive battle for Moscow. The West hoped for a fierce battle between the Russian military and Wagner, ultimately destroying Moscow and ending the Russian military operation in Ukraine.
“Now is the moment when blood can be shed. Therefore, realising all the responsibility for the fact that Russian blood will be shed from one of the sides, we turn our columns around and leave in the opposite direction,” Prigozhin said when explaining the reason for ending Wagner’s march to Moscow.
Despite Russian unity prevailing, Josep Borrell saw a threat to nuclear stability in Europe against the background of recent events in Russia and considered it necessary to continue EU military support for Kiev as the Russian military is “cracking.”
“The political system is showing fragilities, and the military power is cracking,” he told reporters in Luxembourg ahead of an EU foreign ministers meeting on June 26.
“It’s not a good thing to see that a nuclear power like Russia can go into a phase of political instability,” Borrell said, adding that this was the moment for the EU to continue supporting Ukraine more than ever.
Thus, the EU foreign ministers approved an increase of €3.5 billion to 12 billion in the fund from which the supply of arms to Kiev is financed. However, even these extra billions will have little impact on Ukraine’s war effort.
Ukraine’s Minister of Defence, Oleksii Reznikov, admitted to Fox News on June 25 that early expectations were “overestimated” for the offensive. It is recalled that there were boisterous claims from the Kiev regime that Crimea would be captured in a matter of weeks once the “Spring” Offensive was launched.
Rather than reaching any location remotely close to Crimea, Ukraine’s offensive utterly failed, resulting in Kiev resorting to a narrative shift of “saving lives” and probing Russian positions instead of launching offensive operations.
Reznikov said the current manoeuvres are “some kind of preparatory operation.” He also acknowledged that the Russians had built “very strong defensive lines.” This is covering rhetoric by him to hide that Ukraine, despite all its Western equipment, never had the manpower and capabilities to push back Russian forces.
With Ukraine’s counteroffensive in its third week, it is beyond any doubt that it has been nothing more than a major failure. Ukraine and the West, out of desperation, thought that a saving grace was provided in the form of Prigozhin’s mutiny. To their disappointment, Russian unity prevailed, and now the West is scrambling to provide Ukraine with even more funds as the counteroffensive stagnates.
The Biden official appeared disappointed that Russian blood did not spill on the streets of Moscow because of Wagner’s mutiny. It also shows how the West still has very little understanding of Russia when considering Josep Borrell who believes Russian power is “cracking” rather than strengthening following the purging of traitorous elements.
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Ahmed Adel is a Cairo-based geopolitics and political economy researcher.
Featured image is from InfoBrics
June 28th, 2023 by Kester Kenn Klomegah
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The internal disagreements and possibly deep-seated dissatisfaction between Russia’s Ministry of Defense (MoD) and Wagner Group leader over the ‘special military operation’ are aspects of the the geopolitical chess game.
The unsuccessful military fight between MoD, the Kremlin and Wagner Group, at least, somehow ended without any direct clashes, bloodshed or civilian casualties. But there were potential conditions to resort into something disastrous which officials have referred to as “armed mutiny”, a resemblance of the current political-military conflict in the Republic of Sudan. A short comparative analysis shows an element of commonality between Russia and Sudan, the fact that Kremlin signed a decree to absorb the private para-military group into the Ministry of Defense.
In the case of Sudan, it also revolves around infighting between two rival groups: Sudan’s Armed Forces (SAF) and a paramilitary group known as the Rapid Support Forces. After the overthrow of Omar al-Bashir, forces loyal to two generals are vying for control of power. Sudan has been run by the army, with coup leader General Abdel-Fattah Burhan who has share power with the paramilitary leader General Mohammed Hamdan Dagalo. He has worked alongside the Sudanese army to help keep the military in power.
Until today, the ceasefires agreed on by SAF and RSF have never worked in Sudan. As a result of this fact, there are growing negative political sentiments, deepening social discontent and the situation is pushing out people as refugees in the neighboring countries. The background to the political-military violence was a disagreement over how RSF paramilitaries should be incorporated into the Sudanese army.
Wagner’s Yevgeny Prigozhin criticized Russian Defense Ministry formalization efforts on June 17. In its update, Prigozhin also claimed he attempted to submit a contract to formalize Wagner under the Defense Ministry. Obviously it implied that the Defense Ministry would confiscate weapons that volunteer units obtained outside of formal weapon deliveries and that Russian commanders with higher military education would replace Wagner’s combat-effective volunteer commanders. It indicated that Wagner forces to subordinate to the Russian Ministry of Defense.
That however, the short-lived military drama, some alternatively described as theatrical military spectacle was primarily due to deep-seated internal conflicts allegedly between Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu, and Wagner founder and CEO Yevgeny Prigozhin over aspects of the ‘special military operation’ started since late February 2022. Perhaps, Prigozhin dreamed he could push Putin into making some changes within the top brass of the MoD which Wagner chief publicly berated for months. Putin’s addresses have eradicated that prospect, he works closely with the top defense management.
Wagner has seemingly achieved a lot in Ukraine. For instance in May 2023, Putin congratulated them for distinguished part in the battle by awarding state decorations. Putin recognized the operation, on the authentic special report given by the Russian Defense Ministry on the completion of the operation to liberate Artyomovsk, (called Bakhmut in Ukraine). “In the Artyomovsk tactical direction, the assault teams of the Wagner private military company with the support of artillery and aviation of the southern battlegroup have completed the liberation of the city of Artyomovsk,” the defense ministry stated.
Source: The Dossier
Artyomovsk is located in the north of the Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR) and it served as a major transportation hub for the Ukrainian army’s supplies in Donbass. Fierce fighting to liberate the city started on August 1, 2022. The battle for this city is one of the largest battles during the liberation of Donbass since 2014. Some 72,000 people lived in Artyomovsk before the battle started.
The developments were quite clear. Reports have, over these few months, indicated sharp disagreements between Ministry of Defense is headed by Sergey Shoigu and Wagner leader Yevgeny Prigozhin over aspect of the troops assigned to Ukraine. But the last straw that broke the carmel’s back was Putin’s decree that instructed incorporating the paramilitary into the regular army. The decree, in strictest terms, requested the ministry to manage, monitor and oversee all aspects of Russian troops, including the paramilitary, at the war frontline in Ukraine.
In an interview in December 2018, Putin said, in regard to Wagner PMC’s operating in Ukraine, Syria and elsewhere, that “everyone should remain within the legal framework” and that if the Wagner group was violating the law, the Russian Prosecutor General’s Office “should provide a legal assessment”. But, according to Putin, if they did not violate Russian law, they had the right to work and promote their business interests abroad. The president also denied allegations that Prigozhin had been directing Wagner’s activities.
In September 2022 Prigozhin officially admitted to founding and managing “Wagner Group” which started as a battalion participating from May 2014 on the Russian side in the war in Donbass. Private military companies are still illegal in Russia, but with their heavy participation in the war in Ukraine they have been legitimized by being referred by the Ministry of Defense and Russian government with the umbrella term of “volunteer detachments”.
On 5 May 2023, Prigozhin blamed Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu and chief of the Russian armed forces Gen. Valery Gerasimov for “tens of thousands” of Wagner casualties, saying “They came here as volunteers and are dying so you can sit like fat cats in your luxury offices.” Thereafter there had been series of unpleasant exchanges between the Kremlin, MoD and Wagner, this time to leading what the Russian officials and the political elite viewed as mutiny against the Russian government.
On 24 June 2023, Prigozhin was accused by the Russian government of organizing an armed uprising after he threatened to attack Russian forces in response to a claimed air strike on his paramilitary soldiers. Russian security forces accused the founder of the Wagner group of launching a coup attempt as he pledged a “march of justice” against the Russian army. Prigozhin posted a voice memo claiming that Wagner had left Ukraine and was advancing on the Russian city of Rostov-on-Don. Senior Russian generals urged Wagner’s fighters to withdraw.
In the final analysis, Russia and Belarus presumably in a ‘deal’ agreed that Prigozhin moved to Belarus in order to ensure both personal safety and national security. As reported by both local and foreign media, decision was a follow-up to high-level negotiations. The terms appeared to include an amnesty for Wagner fighters who had participated in the insurrection, although it was not clear whether Prigozhin would still face punishment for his role in launching what was effectively the country’s first armed coup in decades.
Wagner, also known as PMC Wagner, is a private para-military organization, and has operated since 2014. It operates in support of Russia’s interest, receives necessary equipment from the Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) and has used MoD installations for training. In fact several years ago, Erica Gaston, a senior policy adviser at the UN University Centre for Policy Research, noted that the Wagner Group is not ideologically driven, but rather a network of mercenaries “linked to the Russian security state”. Russia denies the connection and that officially the group does not exist.
But subsequently, the owner was established as Russian businessman Prigozhin – sometimes called ‘Putin’s chef’ because of his catering businesses that hosted dinners which Vladimir Putin attended with foreign dignitaries. As a paramilitary, it has represented Russia’s military operations abroad, including the Middle East. In Africa’s direction, following the deployment of its contractors between 2017 and 2019, to Sudan, Madagascar, Libya, Central African Republic and Mozambique. The Wagner Group has offices in 20 African countries. By March 2021, Wagner PMCs were reportedly also deployed forces in Zimbabwe, Angola, Guinea, Guinea Bissau, and possibly the Democratic Republic of Congo and Burkina Faso.
Prigozhin was sanctioned by the United States in December 2016 for Russia’s involvement in the Ukraine conflict, and by the European Union (EU) and the United Kingdom in October 2020 for links to Wagner activities in Libya. In December 2021, the EU imposed sanctions for committing “serious human rights abuses, including torture and extra-judicial, summary or arbitrary executions and killings, or in destabilising activities in some of the countries they operate in, including Libya, Syria, Ukraine (Donbas) and the Central African Republic.”
On 24 February 2022, Canada, Australia, Japan, Switzerland and New Zealand had sanctioned the group. In addition, in late January 2023, the United States announced it would designate Wagner as a “significant transnational criminal organization”, enabling further tougher sanctions to be implemented against the group.
In early 2023, the United States was reported to be working with Egypt and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) to put pressure on the military leaders of Sudan and Libya to end their relationship with the Wagner Group and expel them from the countries. The Wagner Group had supported the UAE’s and Saudi Arabia’s allies in Sudan and Libya. In addition, the Wagner PMCs in Libya were mainly funded by the UAE.
With the geopolitical developments, global players choice to make Africa their playing field and the exploit resources, Russia belatedly joined the band wagon. Russia’s practical focused interest is to strengthen military-technical cooperation and participate in sharing concession for natural resource exploitation. This aspect of its policy, although it has been denied, Wagner forces were visibly deployed in many African countries. One significant feature is natural resources are bartered for military equipment deliveries. Forces were despatched as training instructors with additional responsibilities of battling growing insurgencies and extremism on the continent.
Research academics especially those from the United States and Europe broadly argued that Wagner forces exhibited blindness to basic human rights, allegedly killed civilians and thousands were compelled to flee their home to seek refuge in nearby settlements. Both local and foreign rights organization and the United Nations Commission for Refuges have documented all these atrocities in Africa.
Sudan:
In an interview with The Insider in December 2017, Wagner PMCs were prepared to be sent from Syria to Sudan or South Sudan after Sudan’s president, Omar al-Bashir, told Russia’s president Putin that his country needed protection from aggressive actions of the United States. Omar al-Bashir visited on the special invitation from Putin.
During the July 2018 meeting, “We have very good opportunities to develop relations in a number of areas including the military-technical sphere, and this cooperation is developing,” Putin told Omar al-Bashir and his delegation. According to al-Bashir, Russia and Sudan relations relations really demonstrated positive dynamics. Russian companies, including those producing mineral resources, actively work in Sudan.
“Of course, there are positive shifts in the military-technical sphere and in military cooperation. We see big exchanges between specialists of Russia and Sudan. A big number of Russian specialists work in the country and this is why we highly praise the role that Russia plays in preparing Sudanese military personnel,” he emphasized during the discussions. He made reference to the UN Security Council regarding the withdrawal of forces of the UNAMID mission in Sudan.
Earlier in Sochi when the two leaders held talk in November 2017, Omar Al-Bashir documents were signed for the exploitation of mineral resources in exchanged for weapons and military equipment. Both noted good prospects in the energy sector, including geological prospecting, production and resource exchanges. The hydrocarbons sector, the power industry and the development of the civilian nuclear power industry.
“Our positions coincide on the majority of issues. We are primarily opposed to US interference in the domestic affairs of Arab countries, in particular US interference in Iraq,” he said and added “the problems the region is now facing have been caused by US interference. We think the situation that developed in country (the same applies to Darfur and South Sudan) has the same roots – US policy. As a result, our country split into two parts, which made a bad situation worse. We need protection from aggressive US actions.”
During the Sudanese delegation’s meeting with the Russian Defence Minister Sergey Shoigu, expressed deep concern about the situation in the Red Sea. “We would like to discuss the use of military bases in the Red Sea. And re-enforcement, the re-equipment of our armed forces. Sudan may become Russian’s key to Africa.”
By mid-December 2017, a video surfaced showing Wagner PMCs training members of the Sudanese military, thus confirming Wagner’s presence in Sudan. It had already increased to 300. In May 2019, Russia signed a new military agreement with Sudan, which, among other things, would facilitate the entry of Russian warships to Sudanese ports. With the two military rivalries ongoing, some Sudanese and regional diplomatic sources claimed that the Wagner Group had provided surface-to-air missiles to the RSF against the SAF. But Sudan’s army chief, Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, stated that “So far, there has been no confirmation about the Wagner Group’s support for the RSF.”
Central African Republic:
The situation is not exclusively different from Sudan. By May 2018, it was reported that the number of Wagner PMCs in the CAR was 1,400. The Ukrainian Security Service reported that the umbrella structure of Wagner in the CAR is a commercial firm affiliated with Prigozhin – M-Finance LLC Security Service from St. Petersburg, whose main areas of activity are mining of precious stones and private security services. At the present time, Prigozhin has been sanctioned by the US government for his alleged involvement in election interference and other malign activities.
By 2021, the situation in the CAR had deteriorated further, with rebels attacking and capturing the fourth-largest city in the country. In response, Russia sent an additional 300 military instructors to train government forces and provide support in CAR. Quite recently, the Wagner Group sustained relatively heavy casualties as a new government military offensive was launched near the CAR border with Cameroon and Chad.
Madagascar, Libya, Mozambique have experienced similar situation with strong involvement with Wagner. As majority of African countries are undergoing different kinds of conflicts, Russia has used descriptions such as ‘the growth of neocolonialism’ to win sympathy and expand its military-technical cooperation through its affiliation with Wagner. Russia has encouraged African countries to view the United States and Europe as the key causes of their under development.
The Sahel Five has drastically reduced French presence in the region. The Republic of Mali and Burkina Faso against the United Nations multilateral force, and replaced it with Wagner forces. In late January 2023, the ruling junta demanded France withdraw its troops, numbering between 200 and 400 special forces members, from Burkina Faso. According to diplomatic and security sources, an agreement was finalized that would allow the Wagner Group to operate in Mali. At least 1,000 PMCs or less deployed to Mali, and another considerable number to Chad and Burkina Faso. The Wagner Group would be paid about 6 billion CFA francs a month for training of the Malian military and providing protection for government officials. The African Union Commission and the United Nations as well as ECOWAS have registered their collective dissatisfaction Mali’s withdrawal from the Sahel-5 Joint Peacekeeping Force. The Sahel-5 are Burkina Faso, Chad, Mali, Mauritania and Niger.
While attending the conference at the United Nations, Sergey Lavrov told reporters that the Malian government was turning towards private Russian companies.
“This is an activity which has been carried out on a legitimate basis,” he said during a press conference at the UN headquarters in New York. “We have nothing to do with that,” he added, saying the Malian government estimated that “its own capacities would be insufficient in the absence of external support” and initiated the discussions.
Then during the joint media conference held with Mali’s Foreign Affairs Minister, Abdoulaye Diop, in November 2021, Sergey Lavrov referred to the historical legacy, including the traditions of combating colonialism and overcoming colonial dependence and the subsequent recurrences of neo-colonialism in Africa. Regrettably, these have not yet become thing of the past.
“The fact that terrorist groups have been increasingly active, especially in the north of the country, does not offer a favourable environment for launching an election campaign. Mr Diop said the Malian government would determine the timeline for the election campaign,” Lavrov told the media conference. “We understand the need to reinforce Mali’s counter-terrorism potential. In this connection, the Russian state supplies the necessary equipment, weapons, and ammunition to prevent any threat to Mali’s statehood and territorial integrity.”
At the African Union summit on the Good Governance and Conflicts held in Equatorial Guinea, Moussa Faki Mahamat, Chairperson of the African Union Commission, highlighted the factors contributing to lack of development including and good governance, the growing tendency of usurping power by the military and the significance of forging a collective solidarity as basis for resolving continental and regional problems.
That time both Macky Sall and Moussa Faki Mahamat, have issued official statements urging the military transitional governments in Mali, Chad, Burkina Faso, CAR, Libya and Sudan to take to a constitutional regime as early as possible, reassuring that the solutions to continental problems and overcoming the existing challenges depends on strong mobilization of African leaders and the effective coordination provided by the African Union.
Mali, a landlocked West African state with an impoverished population, faces increasing isolation from the international community over the political power grab. Even as the African Union (AU), the continental organization, and the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), the regional bloc, both suspended the membership of Mali following military coups in August 2020 and May 2021, the ruling military officials continue to onto political power by delaying the proposed democratic elections.
The Russia-Ukraine crisis, to large extent, is affecting Africa. At the United Nations, early March 2022, more than hald the African states voted for the UN resolution. Eritrea is the only Africa that voted against it, and since has become the ‘darling’ ally of Russia. In mid-June, the Africa Peace Initiative headed by South African Cyril Ramaphosa underscored the the importance of access to both Russia and Ukraine uninterrupted supply of grains and fertilizer. Ukraine is concerned about the huge destruction of its nation, Africans think of food security. Russia’s dream is to deal with NATO and United States at its backyard, Africans called for withdrawal of Russian troops from Ukraine as the well-refined step to end the one-and-half year-old conflict.
The latest developments especially relating to Wagner Group incorporated into the Ministry of Defense, the question many are asking is how this will impact on Wagner forces in Africa. For some of us in the academia, after a bit of brainstorming, many experts have arguments from various perspectives. These experts based their arguments on reports mostly from the leading global media including Associated Press (AP), Cable News Network (CNN), Agence France-Presse (AFP), British Broadcasting (BBC), Voice of America (VOA), Reuters, Al Jazeera and many others, well-noted for their comprehensive and verified coverage of geopolitical changes and developments shaping Africa’s relation to Russia.
According to these several media reports, Russia’s Wagner Group which is a shadowy mercenary outfit helps Africa to deal with conflicts and at the same time support Russia to secure mineral concessions. Russia has, during the past two decades of raising its economic influence and fight French neo-colonial tendencies, bartered military equipment in order to have complete access into mineral resources in Central African Republic, Guinea, Mali and Chad. There are similar cases in Sudan and Libya. We know that Russia has about military-technical cooperation with 15 African countries.
Vedomosti, a Russian daily Financial and Business newspaper, reported that Russia is interested in offering Sahel countries military equipment in exchange for exploiting the untapped minerals resources. Worth noting here that Russia, in its strategy on Africa is reported looking into building military bases in the continent. Further, some Russian official explained that large numbers of Wagners and the military done constitute and should not be considered as military bases in Africa.
According to Russia’s investigative media, Wagner has no legal status to operate in the Russian Federation. The organization was said to be registered in Argentina. In November 2022, Wagner opened a new headquarters in Saint Petersburg, where it coordinated its activities including recruitment of ‘volunteers’ and other categories of young people including ‘prison labor’ for the ‘special military operation’ in Ukraine.
South Africa based Institute for International Affairs’ report titled – Russia’s Private Military Diplomacy in Africa: High Risk, Low Reward, Limited Impact – says that Russia’s renewed interest in Africa is driven by its quest for global power status. Few expect Russia’s security engagement to bring peace and development to countries with which it has security partnerships. Moscow’s opportunistic use of private military diplomacy lacks of transparency in interactions, the limited scope of impact and the high financial costs expose the limitations of the partnership in addressing the peace and development challenges in Africa. But then what would be the status of existing Wagner forces spread across Africa. At this point, it is however necessary to have contextual understanding of the Wagner element, strategic interests and its unfinished business in the current developments between Africa and the Russian Federation.
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Kester Kenn Klomegah, who worked previously with Inter Press Service (IPS) and InDepthNews, is now a regular contributor to Global Research. As a versatile researcher, he believes that everyone deserves equal access to quality and trustworthy media reports.
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June 28th, 2023 by James Howard Kunstler
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“At exactly the point of the AFU’s weakest moment and near-collapse on the battlefield he chose to strike Russia in the back as if obviously driven by a hidden hand.”— Simplicius on Substack
You’d think that the hapless DC neocons, Antony Blinken and his boss, Victoria Nuland, plus the gang at Spook Central, would have learned a lesson about the diminishing returns of color revolutions: namely, that these bold pranks blow back… and not in a good way.
The New York Times informs us that US Intel was well aware weeks beforehand of the developing coup attempt by Yevgeny Prigozhin and his personal army, the Wagner Group. Congressional leaders were briefed a day prior to its roll-out. Well, golly, can you suppose for a New York minute that Russia’s intel agency didn’t know all about it, too?
A vast array of explanations for this bizarre wartime vaudeville can be found in every corner of the Internet.
I’ll go with this one:
Prigozhin came to bethink himself a Napoleonic figure. Just as Bonaparte wowed revolution-weary France with his military exploits against her enemies, and seized leadership of the nation, Prigozhin’s mercenary army carried the brunt of the action in Ukraine this year, culminating in the heroic victory at Bakhmut.
Priggy regarded the Russian Ministry of Defense as oafish, and by extension, his long-time friend and mentor, Vlad Putin, indecisive about it. The moment was ripe to seize power! As a recent US president might have said: he misoverestimated.
It looks like the neocons, the CIA, and Britain’s MI6 did, too, if they helped nudge the event to fruition with assurances and cash — say, some of that $6.2 billion the Pentagon happened to find recently via an “accounting error.” What better time to destabilize Russia than during Ukraine’s vaunted spring offensive (which, let’s face it, was not going too well)? In fact, Ukraine’s whole NATO-assisted project from the get-go looked like a bust. The Bakhmut “meat-grinder” was just the latest fiasco. But then, the irascible, disgruntled, and grandiose field marshal Priggy seemed like the perfect instrument to jazz things up for the demoralized West.
Pretty darn quick, on the road from Rostov-on-Don to Moscow, Priggy learned the hard way that he had no support in the government, the military, or among the Russian public.
The coup fizzled before sundown the very day it started. Some say, any way you cut it, the result is Vlad Putin left looking weak and vulnerable. I don’t think so. His speech to the Russian people that day appeared, if anything, resolute. And the way he seemed to spit out the words “a stab in the back,” you couldn’t think he was play-acting. By evening, with the whole psychodrama concluded, the people of St. Petersburg crowded the quay along the Neva River and busted into patriotic song.
Let’s address one nagging question: why did Mr. Putin allow the Wagner Group private army to play the leading role countering the Ukraine offensive?
Answer: because he was saving and building-up the regular Russian army to strength in the further event that NATO might finally jump into Ukraine with all its multi-national feet when all else fails.
We’re left, of course, with the manifold mysteries of the coup’s hasty resolution. Mr. Prigozhin, we’re told, will be turned over to the custody of the Belarus president Lukashenko, to… to be done what with? To be put on the shelf like a bowling trophy? I’m sure…. If they can even find the bugger now. (I’d look in Africa, where sundry Wagner units have been operating — Priggy must have had a plane standing by in Rostov.)
In any case, we know the rest: Wagner troops who did not participate in the coup get folded into the regular army, and said regular army takes over duty along the front in Ukraine. Mr. Putin, despite all these insults, will continue to seek a diplomatic end to all this nonsense, and he might get it sooner rather than later. Germany and France, among Euro others, must be sick of these shenanigans.
Can Ukraine even carry on much longer? President Zelensky, the comedian, seems to have gone mad-dog now.
He just cancelled next year’s election, which makes him… what? Dictator?
So much for America’s democracy export program.
He’s also issued warnings to the effect that Russia is about to blow up the Zaporozhye nuclear power plant, Europe’s largest.
Such an act would supposedly trigger direct intervention by NATO, according to the policy promoted by war-hawk US Senators Lindsey Graham and Richard Blumenthal.
The nuclear plant is under Russian control. Mr. Zelensky says they have set mines in it. The scenario is pretty absurd. Nobody believes it. Of course, Mr. Zelensky might use some of his NATO missiles to zap it, but Russia has video surveillance and recording equipment at every angle around the joint and the world will know five seconds after how it was blown up.
From his latest photographs, it looks like Mr. Zelensky is in the terminal throes of a cocaine rapture, and his actions are consistent with that state of mind.
He must know that he’s not long for this world. And our country, the USA, must know that this Ukraine gambit is another lost cause on our long march of military misadventures. And if the government of our country doesn’t know, the people surely do. Have you noticed, the yellow-and-blue flags are not flying anymore?
Even the most hardcore anti-Trump Democrats seem to understand what pounding sand down a rat-hole means when it comes to the many billions of dollars squandered on this stupid project while our cities rot and a whole lot more goes south in our own ailing homeland.
Not to mention the parlous position of the American president himself, the spectral “Joe Biden,” skulking in his demon-haunted White House as evidence of his treasonous turpitudes mounts and mounts. Which leaves us to wonder whether our Intel Community may have stirred up the Russia coup as just another distraction from its own Biden-linked crimes against this nation.
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June 28th, 2023 by Bharat Dogra
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***
Ukraine’s people desperately need a future based on welfare and peace, and this is what all of their sincere friends would desire, but in reality Ukraine is being driven towards the kind of huge indebtedness that leads to subservience and dominance by those countries (or institutions controlled by them) which own the loans, a condition that cannot bring peace and welfare.
It is common for war-torn countries to get into debt. However in the case of a proxy war, it may be reasonable to suppose that the country on behalf of which the proxy war is being fought will bear much of the expenses. Therefore it is important that whenever the USA or its allies announce their weapons or other supplies to Ukraine, they should clearly mention whether this is loan or grant, sale or ‘help’, and if this is a loan, what are the terms and interest rates? The present indications are that a lot of this is loan, not grant. So if a country fighting someone else’s proxy war also gets indebted to this country and its allies on a long-term basis, what is in this for the people of that country?
Actually the story of getting indebted for the desires and whims of others does not begin here, nor does it end here. It begins in 2014 with the maidan coup which also set Ukraine on the path of indebtedness. As for the future, this indebtedness is set to get aggravated with the (already being planned) distorted reconstruction process.
After the ouster of a democratically elected government in Ukraine following a coup engineered by the USA and its allies, a number of very important changes took places in its policies. The political aspects of these policy changes include pressures from those who facilitated the coup to have a permanently anti-Russia policy, to be aggressive all the time towards Russian speaking citizens of Ukraine, to strengthen neo-Nazi forces to facilitate their attacks on Russian language speaking citizens of Ukraine. In addition the changes in economic policies were also very important. Ukraine became more indebted (with the third highest debt in the world to the IMF) and had to face structural adjustment policies imposed by the IMF and other international financial institutions. As in the case of most such structural adjustment programs, there was a lot of privatization leading to big gains to the richest, including foreign interests, while at the same time heavy costs were imposed on ordinary people including workers and farmers. There was stagnation and decline of real wages while prices were rising. In particular there was heavy increase in the price of gas which is very important for people for heating and fuel. The elderly people depending on pensions were very badly affected. The poverty rate increased from 28% to 41% in 2019, although it even approached about 55% at one stage in between.
Far-reaching changes were initiated regarding land ownership and land relations so that land ownership pattern started becoming heavily concentrated in the hands of the super-rich. As Ukraine has a lot of fertile land capable of supplying food and feed to Europe, attempts were being made earlier also by big agribusiness interests and super-rich oligarchs to grab some of this land or gain control over it. However before 2014 various governments also took steps to check such trends. After the 2014 coup, however, restrictions on land markets were increasingly removed. The aim was to facilitate the passing over of vast areas of farmland into the hands of the richest oligarchs and even foreign interests. Even though some restrictions on foreign control may still remain formally, in practice this has not prevented effective control passing into the hands of foreign interests based mainly in the USA, Europe and Saudi Arabia. Several of the oligarchs and foreign interests are also linked to tax havens (and may be registered there), making even taxation more difficult, while at the same time several of the oligarchs and agribusiness interests have borrowed from western banks and funds. West-based banks, pension and equity funds, various endowments and foundations have their money invested in such deals, and thus have a stake in the continuation of regressive land changes which take ownership and control from farmers and hand it over to big business.
A recent study titled ‘War and Theft’ by the Oakland Institute (USA), an institute known for its commitment to justice based farm growth and ecologically protective farming, has revealed that nearly 3 million hectares of arable land in Ukraine have passed into the hands of just about a dozen big controlling interests. Altogether about 9 million hectares have passed into the hands of oligarchs, corrupt individuals and big agribusiness. The other side of this grab is that less and less land is available for the ordinary farmers. If a big share of the cultivable land is to be taken by the super-rich then certainly the land available to the ordinary farmers is reduced significantly at a time when they need to earn more to cope with inflation and other adverse factors.
Despite adversities it is the small and medium farmers who contribute most of the food and any adverse impact on them will be bad for food security too. The ongoing changes are bad for environment and climate too, as the industrial agriculture practiced by big business interests is much worse from the point of view of GHG emissions, while small farmers are much more conducive to adopting eco-friendly practices which makes for sustainable livelihoods that can help to check climate change as well.
The current trend in the structural changes program and west-backed policies is to go on promoting big business interests in Ukraine farming. While already the biggest single owner may have in excess of five hundred thousand hectares, the future plans for such big owners are to grab more and more land, helped also by the tendency of government farm development programs to favor them.
In addition the current Ukraine government is also wooing western, particularly USA companies to invest heavily in the exploitation of natural resources of Ukraine. This country has extensive deposits of natural gas, and what may turn out to be even more lucrative eventually, of lithium.
After the war started there have been frequent announcements of assistance, particularly in the form of weapons, by the USA and its allies. In the interests of transparency, and keeping in view the heavy debts Ukraine already has, it would be prudent for the loaner as well as the debtor to acknowledge clearly and openly whether this assistance is conditional to something bigger, whether it is a loan or grant, what are the terms of the loans. Although this is rarely done, there are certainly indications that the indebtedness of Ukraine is worsening all the time.
For the future, it is likely that the program of reconstruction being planned for Ukraine by the collective west will also increase this indebtedness. While the prospects of peace are not bright at all just now, one should at least hope that peace will come sooner rather than later, and in this context the early planning for reconstruction for is welcome. Clearly, keeping in view the devastation already suffered by Ukraine, this reconstruction should be on the basis of generous and unconditional grants by all rich countries, particularly those countries whose proxy war demanded so much sacrifice on the part of the people of Ukraine. In addition these funds should be distributed among people without any bias as to their social identity or political affiliation, with those who have suffered the most getting more help on the basis of certain criteria. The reconstruction should be very transparent with in-built systems for checking any corrupt practices. This reconstruction should be led by communities in decentralized systems, so that community and family needs are met properly. While this is what the reconstruction and rehabilitation effort should aim for, the picture that is emerging from the various reconstruction conferences in London or Lugano or elsewhere is of a highly distorted form of reconstruction.
Here reconstruction appears more like a gigantic earning opportunity for big business interests, mainly of western countries. It appears from present trends that most, if not all, of these funds will also come as a loan, not as a grant. The repayment of loans is likely to be postponed for some years, as in any case the country will not have much of a capacity to pay back for some time. The huge effort is likely to be led by corporate interests and is also likely to involve low levels of transparency, judging from past experience. The role of governments of leading donor countries may be to provide insurance cover for big business interests, and also provide a subsidy on interest, but even this is likely to involve strict conditions relating to Ukrainian policies and government’s overall attitude being within the acceptability limits of the donors.
At the same time, and this can be seen already, there is a big clampdown on any dissenting views and opposition in Ukraine. All groups which are left of centre, or which favor a durable policy of peace with Russia, are being discouraged or silenced in various ways. Rightist, extreme rightist and even neo-Nazi groups are encouraged. Laws relating to welfare and social security of workers, or laws which protect labor rights are being removed. There is a steady and increasing entry of foreign interests in strong roles. While an earlier phase was for local oligarchs to get big control over the assets, now the situation is more likely to favor takeover by foreign big business interests with the Ukrainian government and armed forces authorities also benefiting personally from such deals, somewhat resembling the Yeltsin years in the last decade of the 1990s in Russia when the health and life expectancy of the Russian people had fallen in unprecedented ways even while the USA and allied western interests were making big fortunes and also dictating policies. A very ironical and cruel situation then was that experts from western countries flaunting the names of their prestigious connections were moving around Russia recommending policies which were resulting in the ruin or even death of a very large number of people, but at the same time were getting all the hospitality of being very prestigious guests. Something similar may happen in Ukraine, in fact may already be happening in Ukraine.
In such a situation the ordinary people of Ukraine, farmers and workers and middle class households, may well wonder whether their real interests are being sacrificed. This is a question that must be increasingly raised by the people of Ukraine and by their sincere friends.
While peace is the biggest priority just now, questions and concerns remain about the impact of the heavy indebtedness of Ukraine and continuing impact of structural adjustment policies linked to this. Hence it will be a good idea for the people of Ukraine settled now in various countries to get together and, after also obtaining the helpful collaboration of local friends, to start planning for an alternative development path, a very different development path for the people of Ukraine, based on peace, freedom, democracy, decentralization, justice, equality and environment protection. This will give a different vision to people to which they can aspire, a vision which brings peace and welfare to the people of Ukraine, and at the same time also helps the cause of world peace.
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Bharat Dogra is Honorary Convener, Campaign to Save Earth Now. His recent books include Planet in Peril, A Day in 2071, Protecting Earth for Children and Man over Machine. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.
Featured image is from Kurt Nimmo
June 28th, 2023 by Lucas Leiroz de Almeida
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Germany is interested in further worsening tensions in Europe by boosting NATO’s policy of “encircling” Russia. According to the Ministry of Defense, Berlin would be ready to send thousands of troops to Lithuania with the aim of reinforcing NATO’s eastern flank. In practice, the measure only prolongs the security crisis, as it poses a direct threat to Moscow.
On June 26, German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius said that Germany would be ready to send around 4,000 troops on permanent mission to Lithuania. According to him, the objective would be to maintain a “robust brigade” in Lithuania as a way to increase NATO’s defense capacity on the eastern flank. The declaration was made in Vilnius, where the alliance will soon meet for a summit, at the day German and Lithuanian forces were engaged in joint military exercises, the Griffin Storm drills.
The minister also informed that infrastructure works need to start in Lithuania in order to receive the soldiers and their families, since they will be permanently accommodated in the country. Pistorius believes that, with this condition met, Berlin could actively contribute to the improving of NATO’s position on the eastern flank.
“Germany is prepared to permanently station a robust brigade in Lithuania (…) Precondition [for the deployment] is that the necessary infrastructure is in place – barracks, training grounds and depots”, he said during a meeting with Lithuanian counterpart Arvydas Anušauskas.
There is still no specific deadline for completing the deployment of German troops – not even an official confirmation that Lithuania will accept the German offer. However, the country’s authorities have already stated that they are really interested in the “assistance” and informed that they will work to meet the infrastructure requirements. According to Lithuanian Foreign Minister Gabrelius Landsbergis, “this is a strong message and acknowledgment that Eastern Flank needs to be strengthened”.
In fact, the news was not something unexpected. The German government was required at the last NATO Summit to keep troops and equipment “pre-positioned” in high combat readiness to be deployed on the eastern flank – both on German territory and in the Baltics – in case of a military crisis with Russia. Currently, Berlin already maintains a contingent of 800 troops in Lithuania, which corresponds to half of the 1600 NATO troops in the country. Netherlands, Belgium, Czech Republic, Norway, Croatia and Luxembourg are the other nations that contribute with military personnel to the Baltic state.
With an additional 4000 troops, the number of foreign troops on Lithuanian soil would more than double, which point out the level of escalation planned by the alliance in the neighboring region of Russia. NATO believes that the current moment is serious and urges its members to be prepared to face Russia, if necessary.
It is impossible to deny that the moment is serious. NATO and Russia are in their biggest crisis of all times, never having been so close to a direct military conflict between them. However, this deterioration of diplomacy is the sole fault of NATO, which is the side that insists on the strategy of the liberal think tanks of “encircling” Russia, promoting unnecessary militarization of the countries close to Russian borders and arming the neo-Nazi regime in Kiev and prolonging the conflict in Ukraine.
To reverse the crisis, NATO’s attitude must be the opposite of what is being taken. The alliance should stop the militarization of hostile countries near the Russian border, in addition to signing a non-expansion treaty, creating favorable conditions for peaceful coexistence with Moscow. Otherwise, the problems will continue for a long time, increasing the risks of open conflict.
As far as Germany is concerned, more than an attempt to comply with the alliance’s requirements, the measure also echoes the country’s interest in acting more actively in the current conflict. German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock stated recently that her country and the European Union are at “war with Russia”, which shows the level of aggressiveness with which Berlin deals with Moscow today.
By sending troops to Lithuania, Germany is not “strengthening the eastern flank”, but simply engaging in provocative and irresponsible maneuvers against Russia, serving American interests in the region. Like Ukraine and Poland, the Baltics are countries significantly affected by Russophobia and rehabilitation of Nazism, being the states most likely to recklessly start an open conflict with Russia involving NATO. And by keeping troops in the country, Berlin will be helping to accelerate that.
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Lucas Leiroz is a journalist, researcher at the Center for Geostrategic Studies, geopolitical consultant. You can follow Lucas on Twitter and Telegram.
Featured image is from InfoBrics
June 28th, 2023 by Dr. Binoy Kampmark
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***
The last refugee, for now, has left the small, guano-producing state of Nauru. For a decade, the Pacific Island state served as one of Australia’s offshore prisons for refugees and asylum seekers, a cruel deterrent to those daring to exercise their right to seek asylum via the sea.
Since July 2013, 3,127 people making the naval journey to Australia to seek sanctuary found themselves in carceral facilities in Nauru and Papua New Guinea’s Manus Island, told that they would never resettle on the Australian mainland. Such persons were duly euphemised as “transitory persons” to be hurried on to third country destinations, if not returned to their country of origin, a form of vacant reasoning typical of a callous bureaucracy.
The wisdom here was that other countries would not only be more suitable for such persons, but keener candidates to pull their weight in terms of processing and accepting refugees. For the Australian Commonwealth, outsourcing responsibilities from protecting citizens to shielding vulnerable arrivals from harm, has become a matter of dark habit.
Many of those remaining refugees held on the Australian mainland are the subjects of acute care, and all await transfer to third countries such as Canada under its private sponsorship program, the United States, New Zealand or other destinations.
In the meantime, 80 remain in PNG. The situation there is marred by a fundamental legal peculiarity. In October 2017, the Supreme Court of Papua New Guinea found the Manus Island Centre to be both illegal and unconstitutional. (PNG, unlike Australia, has a constitution prohibiting violations of personal liberty, even for non-PNG nationals.) Its closure led to the removal of the detainees to various transition centres devoid of basic amenities, including water, electricity and medical support.
Both PNG and Australia proceeded to squabble over responsibility, despite the obvious fact that the latter exercises effective control over the facilities and those being held in them. Emilie McDonnell of Human Rights Watch deems it indisputable “that Australia bears primary responsibility for those in offshore detention under its policies and has an ongoing legal duty to find a durable solution.”
The offshore concentration camp system established and prosecuted by respective federal governments has become the envy for autocrats, populists and reactionaries the world over. Fact-finding missions have been made by European Union members states. The model is mesmerising officials in the UK. Its credentials of cruelty and suffering are beyond doubt: 14 deaths since 2012, marked by gross medical neglect, suicide and murder by overly enthusiastic guards. Spokesperson for the Refugee Action Collective, Ian Rintoul, suggested that the legacy on Nauru “will forever stain the record of both sides of Australian politics”.
The absence of any refugee inmates in Nauru’s detention facility does not herald its closure. Far from it: the Albanese government has, according to Federal Budget figures, promised to spend A$486 million this year on the facility.
The Department of Home Affairs continues to tersely state that the position of the government “on maritime smuggling and irregular maritime ventures has not changed. Any person entering Australia by boat without a valid visa will be returned or taken to a regional processing country for protection claims assessment. Unauthorised maritime arrivals will not settle in Australia.”
For anyone concerned about the welfare of such persons held in captivity, the department makes a feeble assurance: “All transitory persons in Nauru reside in community accommodation and have access to health and welfare services. Transitory persons have work rights and can operate businesses.” These people have evidently not been to the prison idyll they so praise. But not to worry, a wounded conscience could also be put to rest by the fact that there were “currently no minors under regional processing arrangements” on the island.
In Senate estimates, it was also revealed that the government would continue forking out A$350 million annually to maintain the Nauru facility as a “contingency” for any future arrivals. According to a spokesperson for the Department of Home Affairs, the processing centre was “ready to receive and process any new unauthorised maritime arrivals, future-proofing Australia’s response to maritime people-smuggling”. And so, old canards are recycled in their staleness and counterfeit quality.
Another unsavoury aspect to this needless cost to the Australian budget is the recipient of such taxpayer largesse. The Albanese government has an ongoing contract with the US prison company, Management and Training Corporation (MTC), which is responsible for running the facilities till September 2025 at the cost of A$422 million.
MTC has a spotty resume, though it trumpets its record as a “leader in social impact”. Impact is certainly not an issue, if maladministration, wrongful death, poor medical care and a failing performance in rehabilitation count in the equation. In 2015, then Arizona governor Dough Ducey cancelled MTC’s contract after a withering state department of corrections report into a riot at Kingman prison identifying “a culture of disorganisation, disengagement and disregard for state policies”. As a 2021 lawsuit filed in the District Court of the Southern District of California pungently alleged, MTC “is a private corporation that traffics in human captivity for profit.”
The very fact that MTC Australia advertises itself as a provider of “evidence-based rehabilitation programs and other services to approximately 1,000 male inmates in Australia” begs that old question as to why they need to oversee refugees and asylum seekers in the first place. But the answer is glaringly evident: anyone daring to make the perilous journey across the seas to the world’s largest island continent are seen as presumptively criminal, trafficked by actual criminals. Such a sickness of attitude and policy continues to keep the Australian political imagination captive and defiant before law and decency.
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Dr. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He currently lectures at RMIT University. He is a regular contributor to Global Research and Asia-Pacific Research. Email: [email protected]
Featured image is from the Refugee Council of Australia
June 28th, 2023 by Masha Borak
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***
The European Union’s Covid certificate is about to become the world’s digital health pass.
July 1, the EU certificate will become the first building block of the UN World Health Organization’s Global Digital Health Certification Network which will include a range of digital health services. And while the WHO declared in May that COVID-19 no longer constitutes a global health emergency, the international certificate program will protect against future pandemics.
Work on the certification network started last November when the European Commission struck a cooperation deal with the WHO on global health issues. The network was officially launched this month with Stella Kyriakides, the European commissioner for health and food safety announcing that the voluntary certificate program has already been taken up by almost 80 countries.
“A central pillar of the EU’s Covid response, the EU digital Covid certificate is being scaled up to global level,” says Kyriakides. It “quickly became a global standard. We worked hard with our international partners to ensure that their national certificates could be recognized under the EU Covid certificate framework.”
Personally identifiable information will continue to be managed by EU member states, which will issue digital health certificates and records according to WHO guidelines. The organization will also certify the credentialing authorities of member states and establish their connection to the digital infrastructure hosted and funded by WHO.
EU officials have boasted about the success of their digital health certificates in the fight against the pandemic. A new report from the independent research group the Ada Lovelace Institute, however, claims that contact tracing apps and digital vaccine certificates were rolled out without clear expectations.
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Featured image is from Biometric Update
by Michel Chossudovsky
Michel Chossudovsky reviews in detail how this insidious project “destroys people’s lives”. He provides a comprehensive analysis of everything you need to know about the “pandemic” — from the medical dimensions to the economic and social repercussions, political underpinnings, and mental and psychological impacts.
“My objective as an author is to inform people worldwide and refute the official narrative which has been used as a justification to destabilize the economic and social fabric of entire countries, followed by the imposition of the “deadly” COVID-19 “vaccine”. This crisis affects humanity in its entirety: almost 8 billion people. We stand in solidarity with our fellow human beings and our children worldwide. Truth is a powerful instrument.”
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June 28th, 2023 by Dr. Joseph Mercola
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***
The World Health Organization and their “One Health” approach are coming for the world’s food systems, aiming to meld them with health and medical fields
The outcome will be food tokens, medically tailored meals and prescription food programs that dictate what you eat
Part of this is a new “food is medicine” agenda, which is being put in place to ultimately screen, track and control people through food, according to investigative journalist Corey Lynn
The Rockefeller Foundation, the American Heart Association and Kroger have already partnered to develop and launch the Food is Medicine Research Initiative, which includes programs like produce prescriptions and medically tailored meals
Expect that as the Food is Medicine initiative ramps up, you’ll hear more about the “necessity” of bioengineered food, lab-grown meat and insects for “good” human health and to protect the planet
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The World Health Organization and their “One Health” approach are coming for the world’s food systems, aiming to meld them with the health insurance and medical fields. The outcome will be food tokens, medically tailored meals and prescription food programs that both dictate what you eat and have the power to impose penalties if you stray too far off course.
“How do you get people to break? Control their food and money,” investigative journalist Corey Lynn explains. “What is the weapon? Controlling your identity through digital means. The smart phone, QR codes, digital identities, biometrics, AI, and chips are all weapons being used against humanity.”1 You can listen to Corey discuss this on Spotify by going to her channel Dig It! Episode #189.2
It was October 2022 when the WHO announced its One Health Joint Plan of Action, launched by the Quadripartite, which, in addition to WHO, consists of the:3
“The Quadripartite will join forces to leverage the needed resources in support of the common approach to address critical health threats and promote the health of people, animals, plants and the environment,” according to a WHO press release.4
Echoing this statement, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus stated that “a transformation of the world’s food systems is needed urgently, based on a One Health approach that protects and promotes the health of humans, animals and the planet.”
Part of this is a new “food is medicine” agenda, including from the White House,5 which isn’t nearly as holistic as it sounds. Instead, “food is medicine” is the phrase “being used to campaign, launch programs, change policies and financing, aggregate data, tie the health care industry in with the food supply, and ultimately screen, track and control people through food,” Lynn says.6
It’s a smokescreen, under which more people will be ushered into the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), the Women, Infants and Children Program (WIC), and similar initiatives so digital food tokens can be implemented. This allows for the tracking and control of people’s food purchases.
A number of big names have recently joined in the push to increase SNAP enrollment, including Google, which intends to make it easier to find out eligibility and apply for the program.
Other partners include Instacart, the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the Food Industry Association. Benefits Data Trust is also working to help facilitate the enrollment of college students into SNAP, Medicaid and the Affordable Connectivity Program, which provides help to obtain internet access.
Again, these seemingly altruistic plans have an ulterior motive — surveillance and control. “Food, health care and internet may seem like a wonderful free benefit, until a college student tries to get their first cheeseburger, doesn’t get the Covid jab, or puts out ‘misinformation’ on the internet,” Lynn says. “Watch how quickly it’s all taken away. It’s like making a deal with the Devil.”7
Once you’re locked into receiving food tokens, you’ve fallen into their trap. Who’s “their”? Lynn has previously described key organizations pulling strings behind the scenes, allowing them to “operate as ghosts without transparency or accountability.”8 These powerful organizations enjoy unrestricted privileges and layers of immunity, allowing them to exert control over the globe.
“These aren’t just ordinary organizations,” Lynn explains. “They happen to be the prime organizations that run the new world order globalists’ agendas against humanity, and they have hundreds of NGOs working with and through them.”9 The roll-out of “healthy eating tokens” isn’t just a possibility.
They’ve already been woven into key propaganda pieces, like this 2018 image below from the Illinois Blockchain and Distributed Ledger Task Force:10,11 “Whereas this example may be reflective of a welfare applicant,” Lynn says, “make no mistake, this is the goal all states are trying to accomplish for all people, not just those on welfare.”12
In line with WHO’s One Health, the White House laid out a Fact Sheet detailing its “transformational vision for ending hunger and reducing diet-related disease by 2030 – all while closing disparities among the communities that are impacted most.”13
The initiative intends to invest in “new businesses and new ways of screening for and integrating nutrition into health care delivery,” along with devoting at least $2.5 billion to startup companies “pioneering solutions to hunger and food insecurity.” Another $4 billion is earmarked for “philanthropy that improves access to nutritious food, promotes healthy choices and increases physical activity.”
Here again we have the smoke-and-mirrors effect, which masks the integration of food and health as a means to enact broad policies of control. As Lynn reports:14
“A helping hand is always nice, until it has ulterior motives. Sure, physical activity for all and the reduction of sugar in food items are both welcome approaches, but the rest of this agenda is not in the best interest of human beings.
The problem is, when reviewing this Fact Sheet it may seem like a good idea, just as while reviewing a single white paper from the WEF [World Economic Forum] could even sound like it has the potential to be a good thing.
However, when one takes the Fact Sheet with countless white papers, websites, funding, and other internal documents and puts it all together — it paints quite a different story. They know full well that most people won’t gather all of the pieces of the puzzle so they won’t be able to see the reality of the situation and discern the true agenda. That’s why it is so critical to do just that.”
The White House intends to work with a long list of private organizations to reach its goals. The American Heart Association, American Academy of Pediatrics, Joint Commission, National Grocers Association, Food Industry Association and the Rockefeller Foundation are among them.
The Rockefeller Foundation, the American Heart Association and Kroger have already partnered to develop and launch the Food is Medicine Research Initiative.15 It includes programs like produce prescriptions and medically tailored meals,16 which sound good in theory. But entities like the Rockefeller Foundation aren’t looking to further the reach of small farmers producing real, healthy food.
Consider the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA), which was launched in 2006 with funding from the Rockefeller Foundation and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. With strategies centered on promoting biotechnology and chemical fertilizers, AGRA’s influence significantly worsened the situation in the 18 African nations targeted by this “philanthropic” endeavor. Hunger under AGRA’s direction increased by 30% and rural poverty rose dramatically.17
The Green Revolution is another Rockefeller Foundation-funded conversion of natural farming to a system dependent on chemicals, fossil fuels and industry. You can expect that under this Food is Medicine initiative, genetic engineering, lab-grown meat and, eventually, insects will take center stage. Plus, it’s another tool for integrating food under health care, so you can ultimately be tracked with one digital health passport. Lynn says:18
“Of course food is medicine, but that’s not the true intention of this initiative. By integrating food under medicine just imagine how this will change the landscape of the control mechanisms being put in place under the guise of health care.
This isn’t the only avenue the Rockefeller’s are using to orchestrate this shift in food control. They are also one of the major funders of the Center for Good Food Purchasing, along with W.K. Kellogg Foundation, Panta Rhea Foundation, Michael & Susan Dell Foundation, and the 11th Hour Project — the grant-making vehicle of the Schmidt Family Foundation — former Google CEO Eric Schmidt.
The stated goal of this “Center” is to manage the Good Food Purchasing Program, which is all about getting institutions to convert over to their “supply chain transparency from farm to fork and shift towards a values-based purchasing model.”
Converting schools, hospitals, and public administrations is a strong goal, for starters. They’ve established standards, certifications, and a point system as the first of its kind and are building local and national partners as quickly as they built the website.”
Meanwhile, they’re rolling out Food is Medicine courses at hospitals and universities in order to indoctrinate health care providers into this plan. Among the training will be “screening for nutrition” and instruction on how to refer patients to their community nutrition resources, likely along with education on the “benefits” of gene-edited foods and fake meat.19
Expect that as the Food is Medicine initiative ramps up, you’ll hear more about the necessity of bioengineered food, lab-grown meat and insects for “good” human health and to protect the planet. It’s important to share knowledge with your circle about the pitfalls of these foods and why traditional whole foods are truly what your body needs.
If the powers-that-be take control of the food supply and dictate what people can and can’t eat, humanity is threatened. Envision a world in which your weekly groceries are only released if you’ve met certain requirements, and even then, those groceries are made up of what they ration for your use.
“Imagine if one refuses to eat bugs — they may not receive proper health care,” Lynn says. “Or what happens if one refuses to go on the food token program and only eat as instructed? Did they just lose their ability to receive health care? … What happens if edible vaccines hit the market and they try to make it mandatory as part of one’s diet?”20
To fight back, continue to source food from small, local sources instead of multinational corporations — and pay for your food with cash. As Lynn reports:21
“Just as with their other agendas that all tie into this one, the narrative control is being piped out by universities, medical associations, the National Association of Chain Drug Stores, and many others to bring a whole new outlook on what a nutritional diet should look like to prevent disease.
It’s as though a complete overhaul is being done on what’s ‘good’ for human beings to ingest, and gene-edited produce, insects, and cultured cells seem to be the top priority.
This may seem like a slow burn, but they are clicking multiple pieces of the structure into place simultaneously, and when that burn finally reaches inside people’s homes, in their cabinets, fridge, and wallets, it will be too late to rollback all of the policies and regulations that have locked into place.”
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Notes
1, 6, 7, 11, 12, 14, 18, 19, 20, 21 Corey’s Digs November 22, 2022
2 Corey’s Digs #189 June 9, 2023
3, 4 WHO October 17, 2022
5, 13 The White House September 28, 2022
10 Illinois Blockchain and Distributed Ledger Task Force January 31, 2018, page 27
15 American Heart Association September 28, 2022
June 28th, 2023 by William J. Astore
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Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is running against the Democratic establishment’s position on the Russia-Ukraine War and for the presidential nomination of the party in 2024. He recently gave a peace speech in New Hampshire that echoed the sentiments of the peace speech given by his uncle, President John F. Kennedy, in 1963.
In his speech, RFK Jr. stated that Russia has legitimate security concerns, that NATO expansion to Russia’s border was a betrayal of promises made to leaders like Mikhail Gorbachev, and that America’s military-industrial-congressional complex (MICC) is enabling forever war rather than actively seeking an end to war. He was also careful to say he abhorred Vladimir Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine.
I’ve already heard RFK Jr. being called a “Putin enabler,” if not a Putin puppet, for suggesting that Russian concerns about Ukraine’s inclusion in NATO are in any sense legitimate. Doesn’t he know, one reader asked, that Putin rejects Ukrainian identity as a country and a people? Doesn’t he know Russia is killing civilians in terror bombings? Why is he acting as an apologist for Putin’s many war crimes?
Obviously I can’t speak for RFK Jr., but I think his message is plain: a state of permanent war is causing deep harm to American democracy, what’s left of it, and any sustainable U.S. recovery must start with a rejection of war and massive military spending, including the more than $100 billion already devoted to what has become a proxy war in Ukraine. That war has greatly contributed to the rhetoric, and increasingly the reality, of a new Cold War with Russia (and China too), strengthening the MICC’s call for even vaster sums for wars and weapons in the cause of maintaining U.S. full-spectrum dominance around the globe.
Like his uncle, President Kennedy, RFK Jr. fears a world-ending nuclear cataclysm, an event that becomes more imaginable as the Russia-Ukraine War continues to escalate. Again, at no time did I hear RFK Jr. express support of the Russian invasion or its brutal methods; what he did express support for is diplomacy as a way of ending the bloodshed while reducing the risk of nuclear Armageddon.
Any reasonable diplomatic effort would have to recognize the legitimate security concerns of Russia, just as that same effort would have to recognize those of Ukraine as well.
Those who advocate for peace often face the charge of being puppets, enablers, or apologists for enemies who are usually presented as monstrous. All credit to RFK Jr. for departing from standard neocon rhetoric and practices and for extending an olive branch to Russia.
Arguing for more war is easy. It even wins salutes (and money) within today’s Democratic establishment. Striving for peace is far harder, and like his uncle, RFK Jr. has decided to take the harder path. More of us should join him.
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Featured image: In New Hampshire, RFK Jr. speaks for the possibility of peace and against the MICC and its forever war (Source: Bracing Views)
June 28th, 2023 by Jacob G. Hornberger
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American interventionists undoubtedly finished the weekend in a deep depression over the fact that Russia did not devolve into a full-scale civil war. With Wagner Group’s leader Yevgeny Prigozhin’s decision to give up his short-lived plan to initiate such a war, the possibility of a deadly Russian civil war evaporated at the same time. Just think how much more Russia would have been degraded with the deaths and injuries of millions of Russian people. “Darn!” U.S. interventionists and the U.S. national-security establishment undoubtedly exclaimed.
And make no mistake about it: Degrading Russia has been one of the principal aims of the U.S. national-security establishment ever since the end of its old Cold War racket.
That is how empires work. They look around the world until they find a foreign nation that appears to be rising in prosperity, power, and influence. That nation is then targeted as a rival, opponent, adversary, competitor, and enemy. To ensure that it doesn’t reach the same stature as the empire, the empire targets that nation with degradation.
That’s what has happened with Russia. While the United States was mired down for decades in its forever wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, Russia was slowly rising in terms of economic prosperity and influence. That infuriated the U.S. national-security establishment.
Thus, the Pentagon and the CIA embarked on their course of action designed to give Russia its “own Afghanistan or Iraq,” just like they did in 1979 when they gave Russia its “own Vietnam” by manipulating Russia into invading Afghanistan. (See my article “Brzezinski’s Confession.”) By expanding NATO eastward toward Russia’s borders, Pentagon and CIA officials knew that they were slowly but inexorably boxing Russia into ultimately invading Ukraine.
Their plan worked brilliantly, just as it did back in 1979. Since Russia invaded Ukraine, Russia has lost an estimated 250,000 soldiers to deaths and injuries. That’s a lot of “degrading.”
To be sure, America has been degraded too. The weaponry furnished Ukraine to defend itself has to be replaced, which means American taxpayers will have to pay for the replacement weaponry. At the same time, American taxpayers have been required to fund the billions of dollars of largess being heaped on the crooked and corrupt Ukrainian regime.
But that doesn’t matter to interventionists and the U.S. national-security establishment because when you have an extremely large and powerful empire and a much smaller rising empire, the degradation operates to place a much bigger relative burden on the smaller empire.
Another aim has been to present Russia as a renewed Cold War threat to Europe and the United States, thereby justifying not only the continued existence of America’s national-security state form of governmental structure but, equally important, its ever-growing receipt of taxpayer-funded largess. That, of course, was what their old Cold War racket was all about.
One big downside of the Russia-Ukrainian war, however — from the standpoint of interventionists and the U.S national-security establishment — has been that it has exposed the fallacy of the other principal aim of the U.S. national-security establishment — its hope of reinvigorating the old Cold War fear that the Russians are coming to get us. At the risk of belaboring the obvious, if Russia’s military forces cannot conquer Ukraine, they can’t conquer Europe and the United States.
But that reality certainly did not stop the Pentagon from recently conducting a massive NATO exercise involving 250 military aircraft, including 100 from the United States, which the media is reporting as “the biggest defense exercise of its kind in the history of the Euro-Atlantic alliance.” Hey, when you’ve got a long-term plan to reinvigorate Russia as a renewed scary Cold War enemy, you go with the plan because you figure that people will fall for whatever you tell them. I just wonder how much that gigantically ridiculous military exercise cost American taxpayers.
In any event, obviously 250,000 dead and injured Russian soldiers are still not sufficient degradation to satisfy the U.S. national-security establishment and American interventionists. I’m not even sure that millions of deaths or injuries in a Russian civil war would satisfy them. My hunch is these people are not going to be satisfied until Russia is fully degraded in an all-out nuclear war with the West, which, of course, would put the Pentagon, the CIA, and the NSA in permanent charge of what is left of the United States.
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Jacob G. Hornberger is founder and president of The Future of Freedom Foundation. He was born and raised in Laredo, Texas, and received his B.A. in economics from Virginia Military Institute and his law degree from the University of Texas. He was a trial attorney for twelve years in Texas. He also was an adjunct professor at the University of Dallas, where he taught law and economics. In 1987, Mr. Hornberger left the practice of law to become director of programs at the Foundation for Economic Education. He has advanced freedom and free markets on talk-radio stations all across the country as well as on Fox News’ Neil Cavuto and Greta van Susteren shows and he appeared as a regular commentator on Judge Andrew Napolitano’s show Freedom Watch. View these interviews at LewRockwell.com and from Full Context. Send him email.
Featured image is licensed under Creative Commons and attributed to government.ru.
June 28th, 2023 by Ben Bartee
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The latest updates on the “new normal” – chronicling the lies, distortions, and abuses by the ruling class.
A survey of the public health records in the UK has turned up the conclusion that many anecdotally adopted years ago based on anecdotal experience and intuition: the lockdowns were total theater that needlessly, badly hurt the society and economy.
Via The Telegraph:
“Lockdown saved as few as 1,700 lives in England and Wales in spring 2020, according to a landmark study which concludes the benefits of the policy were “a drop in the bucket compared to the staggering collateral costs” imposed.
Scientists from Johns Hopkins University and Lund University examined almost 20,000 studies on measures taken to protect populations against Covid across the world.
Their findings suggest that lockdowns in response to the first wave of the pandemic, when compared with less strict policies adopted by the likes of Sweden, prevented as few as 1,700 deaths in England and Wales. In an average week there are around 11,000 deaths in England and Wales.”
1,700 deaths over the span of several months in a principality as large as Great Britain is nothing from a sane public health perspective. For context, 3,700 people globally die every day from car accidents.
The EU, along with Australia, Canada, and the UK, is ground zero for global biomedical totalitarianism.
Via World Health Organization:
“In June 2023, WHO will take up the European Union (EU) system of digital COVID-19 certification to establish a global system that will help facilitate global mobility and protect citizens across the world from on-going and future health threats, including pandemics. This is the first building block of the WHO Global Digital Health Certification Network (GDHCN) that will develop a wide range of digital products to deliver better health for all.”
The corrupt pharmaceutical industry tool nitwit Rochelle Walensky has resigned her post as CDC Director in disgrace, to be replaced by, somehow, an even more despicable technocrat with no apparent regard of any kind for the serfs’ welfare.
Here is Mandy Cohen bragging about her arbitrary edicts, conjured out of thin air, in her prior role as North Carolina HHS Director.
“Make yourself sheep and the wolves will eat you.”
— B. Franklin pic.twitter.com/INKfotBt7q— rooted.wings (@BrittRooted) June 3, 2023
The FDA – which, of course, respects deeply The Science™ with a fanatical reverence reserved exclusively for the domain or religion — recently rejected a petition filed in January 2023 for the agency to update its Pfizer and Moderna mRNA shots’ warning label based on the risks demonstrated by actual science.
Via the Coalition Advocating for Adequately Labeled Medicines (CAALM):
“Incomplete, inaccurate, or misleading labeling of any medical product can negatively impact the health and safety of Americans, with global ramifications considering the international importance of FDA decisions. For these reasons, and due to the compelling need to ensure the safety and efficacy of any COVID-19 vaccine licensed by the FDA and to allow Petitioner the opportunity to seek emergency judicial relief should the instant Petition be denied, it is respectfully requested that FDA act on the instant Petition by April 30, 2023.”
The FDA, three months later in late April, issued its official response. In the document, it rejects all but one of CAALM’s demands, including the request for a myocarditis warning because, according to the agency, the evidence tying the injections to sudden cardiac death “is not sufficient to demonstrate a causal association between sudden cardiac death and vaccination.”
But, Mr. Public Health™ bureaucrat, one might retort, myocarditis is housed categorically under the umbrella of cardiac sudden death and myocarditis is a documented side effect of the shots.
So, it appears, the FDA is spreading medical misinformation here.
What’s good for the goose is good for the gander. I got my social media accounts on multiple platforms suspended for saying true things about COVID-19 that ran counter to Public Health™ orthodoxy. Surely the FDA denying proven risks of the COVID-19 shots would cross some similar red line.
Right?
No double standards for federal government bureaucrats, right?
Elon Musk might want to look into the FDA’s blue-check status.
I’m old enough to remember a time when the Public Health™ authorities assured the public that concerns over nanoparticles in vaccines designed to form unnatural structures were the sole domain of “conspiracy theorists.”
Now they’re openly developing vaccines with “self-assembling nanoparticles” – meaning nanoparticles that form non-human structures in the blood or tissue using a bacterial protein as the foundation.
What could go wrong?
Via National Institutes of Health (NIH):
“Inspiring progress also continues to be made toward a safe and effective vaccine for HIV, which still infects about 1.5 million people around the world each year. A prime example is the recent first-in-human trial of an HIV vaccine made in the lab from a unique protein nanoparticle, a molecular construct measuring just a few billionths of a meter.
This nanoparticle, administered by injection, is designed to mimic a small, highly conserved segment of an HIV protein that allows the virus to bind and infect human cells…
The researchers started with a bacterial protein called lumazine synthase (LumSyn). It forms the scaffold, or structural support, of the self-assembling nanoparticle. Then, they added to the LumSyn scaffold 60 copies of the key HIV protein. This louder HIV signal is tailored to draw out and engage those very specific B cells with the potential to produce bnAbs.“
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This article was originally published on The Daily Bell.
Ben Bartee is an independent Bangkok-based American journalist with opposable thumbs. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.
Featured image is from TDB
by Michel Chossudovsky
Michel Chossudovsky reviews in detail how this insidious project “destroys people’s lives”. He provides a comprehensive analysis of everything you need to know about the “pandemic” — from the medical dimensions to the economic and social repercussions, political underpinnings, and mental and psychological impacts.
“My objective as an author is to inform people worldwide and refute the official narrative which has been used as a justification to destabilize the economic and social fabric of entire countries, followed by the imposition of the “deadly” COVID-19 “vaccine”. This crisis affects humanity in its entirety: almost 8 billion people. We stand in solidarity with our fellow human beings and our children worldwide. Truth is a powerful instrument.”
ISBN: 978-0-9879389-3-0, Year: 2022, PDF Ebook, Pages: 164, 15 Chapters
Price: $11.50 Get yours for FREE! Click here to download.
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June 28th, 2023 by Middle East Eye
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The US on Tuesday unveiled fresh sanctions on the Wagner Group, aimed at disrupting its gold mining activities in Africa, days after the mercenary group’s founder launched a short-lived mutiny in Russia.
The measures against Wagner had been previously planned but were briefly put on hold, as US officials sought to avoid appearing to favour a side in a power struggle between the mercenaries’ chief, Yevgeny Prigozhin, and Russian President Vladimir Putin.
“The Wagner Group funds its brutal operations in part by exploiting natural resources in countries like the Central African Republic and Mali,” undersecretary of the Treasury for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence Brian E Nelson said in a statement.
“The United States will continue to target the Wagner Group’s revenue streams to degrade its expansion and violence in Africa, Ukraine, and anywhere else,” he added.
The sanctions come the same day Prigozhin arrived in Belarus as part of a deal President Alexander Lukashenko negotiated with Putin to diffuse tensions. Lukashenko said that he offered Wagner an abandoned military base to set up camp.
Wagner mercenaries cut their teeth fighting side-by-side with Russian troops in the battlefields of Syria, as a stand-alone outfit in Libya, and are involved in the current conflicts in Sudan, Mali and the Central African Republic (CAR).
The sanctions target Midas Resources, which operates mines in the CAR, and Diamville, a gold and diamond purchasing company in the country – both of which the US said are controlled by Prigozhin.
MEE has previously reported on massacres carried out by Wagner fighters around gold mines in the CAR. The US has also accused the group of pilfering billions of dollars worth of gold from Sudan, with much of it allegedly making its way to the UAE.
Tuesday’s sanctions targeted the Dubai-based, Industrial Resources General Trading – which the US accused of handling finances for Prigozhin’s dealings with Diamville.
The UAE is believed to have helped fund Wagner’s operations in Libya. The North African country has been a launchpad for Wagner’s operations throughout the continent. Wagner mercenaries there operate air defence systems defending territory held by military commander turned warlord, Khalifa Haftar, in Libya.
Wagner helped Moscow advance its foreign policy goals in hotspots like Libya with the cover of deniability. The group would eventually supplant Russia’s traditional military footprint in Libya, which MEE previously revealed was facilitated by Russian military officials based in Saudi Arabia.
Prighozin’s remarkable fallout with Putin has created uncertainty about Wagner’s future. Some analysts have speculated that Putin may ask UAE President Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan to “clamp down” on the groups’ financial networks.
Other Wagner watchers are waiting to see if mercenaries in African and Middle East hotspots break altogether with the group.
“The Wagner branches in Africa may turn into completely uncontrollable mercenary structures that will themselves build ties with local governments without regard to Moscow,” Kirill Semenov, a non-resident expert with the Russian International Affairs Council, told MEE previously.
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Featured image is from Mikhail Svetlov/Ge/Mikhail Svetlov
June 28th, 2023 by Jeremy Kuzmarov
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After having lied about WMDs, Russia Gate, chemical weapons in Syria and so many other things, the U.S. intelligence community is now advancing the lie that Cuba is hosting a Chinese spy base that enables China to spy on the U.S.
The Wall Street Journal reported on June 8 that China and Cuba had reached an agreement in principle to build an electronic eavesdropping station on the island and that China planned to pay cash-strapped Cuba billions of dollars as part of the negotiations.
White House National Security Council spokesman John Kirby, however, said in an MSNBC interview that The Wall Street Journal report was “not accurate” and that the U.S. was watching Chinese influence activities around the world very carefully.
An anonymous source familiar with the intelligence says it suggests that a deal has been struck in principle but there has not been any movement on building the spy facility.
Cuban Deputy Foreign Minister Carlos Fernández de Cossío said that the slanderous speculation about a Chinese spy base was causing “harm and alarm without observing minimum patterns of communication and without providing data or evidence to support what they disseminate.”[1]
The Chinese spy base fabrication is obviously designed to try to mobilize public support for the Biden administration’s regime-change policies.
Biden’s election had raised expectations among many Cubans of a return to the Obama days, when the United States sought to bury the last vestige of the Cold War by restoring diplomatic relations with Havana and calling for an end to the embargo.
However, when protests broke out early in Biden’s presidency, the Biden administration supported the dissidents and doubled down on Donald Trump’s hard-line anti-Cuba policies.
It expanded sanctions and the economic embargo of Cuba, which is opposed by 185 countries and, according to Yuri Gala López, the Ambassador of the Permanent Mission of Cuba to the UN, costs Cubans $455 million per month.
Obama had argued that making it easier for Americans to travel to Cuba and invest in its nascent private sector stood a better chance of promoting economic and political changes on the island than the more directly confrontational regime-change policy Washington has pursued since the 1960s.
Biden went along with Obama’s policy though, in 1996 as a U.S. Senator, he had supported tightening the already devastating U.S. embargo on Cuba through the Helms-Burton Act, which was signed into law by President Bill Clinton.
Fidel Castro called Helms-Burton a “shameful” bill, which paved the way for “economic genocide.” In addition to tightening economic sanctions, it increased support for Cuban exile groups and made it official U.S. policy to support regime change in Cuba.
In 2008, Biden stated that he was against “lifting the embargo until there is a response to political prisoners—all the things that are wrong with this Castro administration.”
Besides his own pro-imperialist sensibilities, Biden’s policy shift from Obama reflects the influence of Senate Foreign Relations Chairman Robert Menendez, the son of Cuban immigrants and an ardent champion of regime-change policies who criticized Obama’s gambit toward Cuba.
The cruelty of Menendez’s approach was underscored at an International People’s Tribunal on U.S. Imperialism focused on Cuba on June 10 and 11. See video here and here.
Organized by an array of peace and social justice organizations, the hearings aimed to spotlight the pernicious impact of U.S. sanctions functioning as a “key tool of U.S. imperialism.”
The first speaker at the hearing, Yuri Gala López, emphasized the Biden administration was continuing to apply a “maximum pressure policy” on Cuba inherited from the Trump administration, whose purpose was to cripple its economy in order to facilitate unrest and the eventual overthrow of Cuba’s communist government.
This strategy has essentially been in place since 1960 following the triumph of the Cuban Revolution led by Fidel Castro, which toppled the U.S.-backed dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista and nationalized Cuba’s economy while advancing land reform and instituting free health care and education.
López cited an April 1960 memorandum by Lester D. Mallory, the Deputy Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs at the time of the Cuban Revolution, which emphasized that, since the majority of Cubans supported Fidel Castro and there was no effective political opposition, the U.S. should try to create economic hardship for the population by denying money and supplies and cutting off trade, which would bring about hunger and desperation and the eventual overthrow of Castro’s government.
Mallory’s memo provided the basis for U.S. foreign policy toward Cuba that remains essentially unchanged after six decades.
According to López, the impact of the U.S. blockade has been devastating in human terms, resulting in material shortages and scarcity designed to sow the seeds of popular dissatisfaction with the Castro and Miguel Díaz-Canel administrations.
The economic damage from the embargo is at least $154 billion, along with thousands killed in terrorist acts directed largely from U.S. soil.
Other speakers at the hearing emphasized that the U.S. goal was to punish Cuba for its defiance and establishment of a humane governing structure that serves as an alternative to the inhuman capitalist system.
In the agricultural sector, because of the blockade, farmers are deprived of needed technologies and have difficulty exporting their products. Transportation is impeded and certain medicines and medical treatments are difficult to obtain. The U.S. even blocked the delivery of respirators following the outbreak of COVID-19.
Because of a remarkable medical system nevertheless, Cuba has obtained lower infant mortality rates than in the U.S. and parallel life expectancy. This is because of the Cuban government’s investment of its resources in the social and human needs of its people, unlike in the U.S. where neo-liberal austerity is the norm and so much money is invested in the military.
Cuba’s function as a zone of peace was evident in its recent role in helping to broker an important peace agreement in Colombia between the Colombian government and the National Liberation Army (ELN) guerrilla group.
Cuba has generally been labeled by U.S. administrations as a terrorist state and accused of providing a platform for spycraft and subversion into the U.S. when, in reality, it is the U.S. which has terrorized Cuba for six decades and tried to deliberately impoverish and starve its people in the vain hope that they could achieve the long-held goal of regime change and turn the clock back to the 1950s.
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Jeremy Kuzmarov is Managing Editor of CovertAction Magazine. He is the author of four books on U.S. foreign policy, including Obama’s Unending Wars (Clarity Press, 2019) and The Russians Are Coming, Again, with John Marciano (Monthly Review Press, 2018). He can be reached at: [email protected].
Note
1. Wang Wenbin, spokesperson for China’s foreign ministry, said the U.S. is the “global champion of hacking and superpower of surveillance,” suggesting U.S. officials spread rumors about the spy base as a “common tactic.”
June 28th, 2023 by Ken Stone
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Opponents are trying to cancel Dimitri Lascaris, but it isn’t working.
Despite successful and unsuccessful attempts to cancel and deplatform the Canada-wide Tour For Peace of Dimitri Lascaris, his in-person tour continued successfully last night in Vancouver. 60 people attended at Harbour Centre without incident.
Last week, Dimitri’s tour was briefly derailed in Toronto after an organized campaign of fear-mongering against the event caused the Ontario Public Services Employees Union to cancel their venue. Dimitri issued a statement following the cancellation, which stated in part:
“A representative of OPSEU has advised us that this is not a political decision by OPSEU leadership. Rather, OPSEU’s leadership took this decision because, within the past day or so, OPSEU leaders and staff received dozens of emails expressing opposition to the holding of the event. Based on those emails, OPSEU leadership became concerned for the safety of participants and the property.
Although we understand the decision taken by OPSEU’s leadership, we find it highly regrettable that those who support the arming of Ukraine are resorting to pressure tactics such as these in order to silence the voices of peace. If supporters of Canadian government policy toward this devastating war truly believe that their position can be defended on the basis of evidence, reason and humanitarian principles, then they should engage in a constructive debate with their opponents. The fact that they resort to silencing us only confirms that they cannot win a debate on the merits.”
Despite the last-minute OPSEU cancellation, peace activists gathered at an outdoor location near OPSEU’s offices to hear Dimitri present his views on resolving the Ukraine war peacefully.
Dimitri’s tour has served as a focal-point for pro-war Ukrainian extremists, and state-funded ‘researchers.’ It is in fact shocking how a censorship campaign is carried out openly in NATO countries.
For example, Marcus Kolga of the Macdonald-Laurier Institute, a Canadian think tank funded by the USA and Latvia, went after the Regina Public Library, among other venues. Seneca College prof, Osap Soroka, in league with the NAFO troll farm operated by British and US intelligence, levelled open threats on Twitter to disrupt Lascaris’ London and Vancouver lectures. (Both lectures came off without incident.)
A University of Calgary professor, JC Boucher, amplified these actions and attacked Dimitri on Twitter. Alexey Kovalyov, a self-exiled Russian journalist, resident in a Baltic country, wrote a long hit piece against Lascaris ending with a call and instructions for Canadians to deplatform him. Finally, a lawyer for the Ukrainian Canadian Congress made it his business to threaten negative consequences for owners of private venues who had accepted room bookings for Dimitri’s speaking events.
In Winnipeg, two venues cancelled their bookings within 24 hours, but determined local organizers secured a third venue at the last minute In Hamilton, Ukrainian nationalists tried, but failed, to barge into the lecture hall where Dimitri was speaking.
The Canada-Wide Peace and Justice Network (CWPJN), which organized Dimitri’s Tour For Peace, decried the attempts to curtail the rights of Canadians to freedom of speech and association. In a media release dated June 26th, 2023, the Network wrote that “Dimitri Lascaris’ speaking tour presents a unique opportunity for people across Canada to hear a different perspective on how to reach peace in Ukraine, one that is not based on the Trudeau government continuing to arm the war, with $8.5 billion worth of arms and funding sent to date. The Network calls upon supporters of Canada and NATO’s current military actions to desist from further efforts to silence alternative perspectives. Canadians should hear from dissenting voices before the conflict in Ukraine spirals out of control into a wider war or even a nuclear confrontation between the superpowers.”
Dimitri will be in Montreal on Thursday, June 29th, Halifax on Friday, June 30th, Fredericton on Sunday, July 2nd, and in Ottawa on Monday, July 3rd. Furthermore, on July 4th, a free, Canada-wide webinar, featuring Dimitri, will be broadcast at 8 pm ET from Kingston, Ontario. Registration for the webinar here.
The Network’s media release continued, “Whether or not they agree with Dimitri’s perspective, we encourage Canadians to come out to Dimitri’s in-person events and hear what his opponents are so intent on censoring. He welcomes robust and respectful debate on these vitally important issues.”
In April 2023, Dimitri Lascaris, Canadian lawyer, activist and journalist, embarked on a self-financed trip to Russia to see for himself because he thought Canadian media and political leaders were failing to inform Canadians accurately or responsibly. While in Russia he spoke to student groups, presented at a Russian policy think tank, gave media interviews, met with public officials and many peace activists. From day one, Lascaris faithfully reported to Canadians through extensive articles and daily tweets about his meetings and impressions at dimitrilascaris.org. Now, he wants to share that experience with Canadians in-person across the country.
The tour is entitled “Making Peace with Russia, One Handshake at a Time.” The Canada-Wide Peace and Justice Network hopes “the tour will move the needle on public opinion in support of a negotiated end to the war in Ukraine and thus accelerate a resolution.” The Network further hopes to convince Canadians that it’s time for Canada to withdraw from NATO.
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Ken Stone is Treasurer of the Hamilton Coalition to Stop The War and Member of the Steering Committee of the Canada-Wide Peace and Justice Network.
June 28th, 2023 by Heather Kaiser
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In the absence of official scrutiny of Washington’s spending spree on Ukraine, The Grayzone conducted an independent audit of US funding for the country. We discovered a series of wasteful, highly unusual expenditures the Biden administration has yet to explain.
During a recent discussion with New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, Administrator of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), Samantha Power, touted her organization’s push to guarantee transparency for US taxpayer funds sent to Ukraine.
“We are involved in funding efforts at ensuring judicial integrity, which is intrinsically important to building Ukraine’s democracy and its integration plans to get into Europe,” Power declared, adding USAID’s work in Ukraine was “also really important in terms of assuring the taxpayer, the American taxpayer, that they’re resources are well spent.”
Even a year into the war, Ukraine continues to build out Diia – an e-government app that gives citizens access to more than 120 gov services.
I spoke with @NickKristof about @USAID’s support of this groundbreaking app that plays such an important role in transparent government. pic.twitter.com/pZTCZYaZHN
— Samantha Power (@PowerUSAID) February 24, 2023
While innocuous on the surface, Power’s comments revealed a great deception the US government is currently waging against the American public. In the roughly 16 months since Russia’s February 2022 escalation of the Ukraine conflict, the US government has approved several multi-billion dollar spending packages to sustain the Kiev military’s fight against Moscow.
Though many Americans likely believe that US dollars allocated for Ukraine are spent directly on supplies for the war effort, the lead author of this report, Heather Kaiser, conducted a thorough review of Washington’s budget for the 2022 and 2023 fiscal year and discovered that is far from the case.
US taxpayers may be shocked to learn that as their families grappled with fears of Social Security’s looming insolvency, the Social Security Administration in Washington sent $4.48 million to the Kiev government in 2022 and 2023 alone. In another example of bizarre spending, USAID paid off $4.5 billion worth of Ukraine’s sovereign debt through payments made to the World Bank — all while Congress went to loggerheads over America’s ballooning national debt. (Western financial interests including BlackRock Inc. are among the largest holders of Ukrainian government bonds.)
Though it is nearly impossible to calculate the total sum of US tax dollars sent to Kiev, Kaiser was able to perform an independent audit of Washington’s proxy war in Ukraine through a careful search of open source data available on the US government’s official spending tracker.
Kaiser reviewed all the funding allocations in which Ukraine was listed as the “Place of Performance” for fiscal years 2022 and 2023. Additionally, she discovered supplementary funds were sent to Kiev by listing Ukraine as the “justification” for spending, rather than the location where the money was physically sent.
Calculating the total dollar amount that the US has given to Ukraine is incredibly challenging for multitude of reasons: there is a lag in reporting expenditures; covert money given by the CIA (Title 50 Covert Action) won’t be publicly disclosed; and direct military assistance in the form of military equipment is not calculated in the same manner as raw cash. The Pentagon recently admitted to an accounting error revised up to 6.2 billion dollars. Despite this, Kaiser submitted a request to the Department of Treasury asking them to disclose the total dollar amount of US taxpayer support for Ukraine. Treasury has not responded at the time of publication.
Though Kaiser was able to search through pages of reported spending, the US government has yet to conduct an official audit of its funding for Ukraine. What’s more, there is currently no limit to how much Washington can send to Kiev.
In the absence of dedicated official scrutiny of Washington’s spending in Ukraine, The Grayzone has produced an independent audit of US tax dollar allocation in the country.
Among the many troubling contracts we discovered was a $4.25 million payment from the Pentagon to a military diving contractor that a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee has described as a “fraudulent company.” The US government asserts the payment covered the company’s delivery of explosives equipment to Ukraine.
So how exactly was that money put to use? And why has Congress so far refused to implement any program to track these shady weapons deals?
Unfortunately, the “justification” for contracts like these often consists of just a brief paragraph — or worse, a single sentence. Little little information is available that documents precisely how the funds were spent down to the dollar and item.
USAID awarded $21.8 billion to Ukraine throughout fiscal years 2022 and 2023, roughly 41 percent of the 53.4 billion it spent during that period. Mysteriously, a portion of USAID funding earmarked for Kiev was sent to Kenya and Ethiopia via other agencies, with the award description stating projects in Africa were “partially funded with response funds and Ukraine supplemental funds.”
USAID sent $4.5 billion to Ukraine via the World Bank to pay off Kiev’s debt and fund various social programs, including government pensions. USAID made a total of $21 billion worth of direct payments to the World Bank in fiscal years 2022 and 2023 (9.1 Billion and 11.9 Billion, respectively), more money than all of the funding Washington sent to the bank between fiscal years 2008 and 2021 combined. The $4.5 billion allocated for Ukraine funded programs directed by the bank’s International Development Association and International Bank for Reconstruction and Development.
USAID supplied a $1 billion grant to the World Bank’s International Bank for Reconstruction and Development to subsidize projects “Ukraine cannot fund at this time.”
USAID has supplied $20 million to “Miscellaneous Foreign Awardees” since February 2020. Recipients include a Polish think tank called the Casimir Pulaski Foundation, a Toronto-based Ukrainian TV channel, a collection of Ukrainian “anti-corruption” organizations, and other groups listed in the screenshot below. These awards were issued on top of $26 million worth of funds USAID sent these groups between 2016 and the February 2022 war escalation.
USAID allocated $500,000 for the Casimir Pulaski Foundation in 2023 to fund a program dedicated to “advanc[ing] U.S. foreign policy objectives by supporting economic growth, agriculture and trade; global health; and democracy, conflict prevention and humanitarian assistance” in Ukraine. The funds were earmarked “to strengthen the International Center for Ukrainian Victory (ICUV) initiative in implementing international advocacy campaigns to keep high levels of international solidarity with Ukraine.”
USAID’s support arrived on top of a $74,788 subaward the State Department granted to the Casimir Pulaski Foundation in June 2022 to “build capacity and policy formulating capabilities of the International Center for Ukrainian Victory (ICUV) and assisting Ukrainian civil society based in Poland.”
According to their own so-called “Peace Manifesto,” the ICUV’s top priority is to admit Ukraine into NATO, a move that former US diplomats from George Kennan to Jack Matlock to Henry Kissinger and even current CIA director William Burns have described as a major provocation against Russia.
USAID sent $3 million to the World Health Organization (WHO) in 2022 “to improve health outcomes in drought affected areas in Ethiopia.” The description stated, “partially funded with response funds and Ukraine Supplemental Funds.”
USAID sent 30.9 million to Chemonics International, Inc. for the “Ukraine confidence building initiative (UCBI) 4. A private, for-profit aid contractor, Chemonics’ founder said he launched the company to “have my own CIA.” The Grayzone has documented Chemonics’ role in delivering US government funding and supplies to the Syrian White Helmets, which served as the propaganda wing of the Al Qaeda-tied armed opposition. Chemonics previously reaped a massive windfall from the US occupation of Afghanistan, raking in as much as $600 million from USAID.
USAID sent $20.7 million to PACT, INC. for “USAID Ukraine’s public health system recovery and resilience activity and will strengthen the Government of Ukraine (GOU) capacity to address COVID-19 and other public health threats, sustain health services during a crisis, and protect the health of all Ukrainians including vulnerable and marginalized populations. According to its 2022 impact statement [PDF], “In Ukraine, Pact’s work empowers citizens to push for transparent and democratic governance, advances gender equality and human rights for women and girls, and accelerates efforts to achieve HIV epidemic control.” The contractor’s work contributed to “172 people increas[ing] their net income,” according to Pact.
USAID sent $25 million to Horizon Capital Growth Fund IV, a “leading private equity firm in emerging Europe, via the US International Development Finance Corporation (DFC), “to back high-growth tech and export-oriented [Small and Medium Sized Enterprises] succeeding globally, based on platforms in Ukraine and Moldova.”
USAID sent 7.6 million to UNICEF IDA for emergency nutrition response in ASALs (Arid and Semi-Arid Lands) in Kenya. The description stated, “partially funded with response funds and Ukraine Supplemental Funds”
USAID sent $1.2 million to University of Georgia Research Foundation, Inc. located in Atlanta, GA to “support humanitarian information management through geographic information systems, data analytics and visualizations”. Ukraine was listed as the place of performance.
The Department of Homeland Security sent 5.48 million to Gravois Aluminum Boats LLCon June 8, 2021 for the following purpose: “PROCUREMENT OF TWO 38-FOOT FULL CABIN RESPONSE BOATS, FOUR 38-FOOT CENTER CONSOLE RESPONSE BOATS, TRAILERS, SPARE PARTS, AND TRAINING AS REQUIRED UNDER FMS LOA DB-P-LCL FOR THE COUNTRY OF UKRAINE.”
The Department of Defense has transferred 4.75 Million to Atlantic Diving Supply, Inc. as of February 3, 2023 for “PRO SAPPER AND EOD EQUIPMENT [CONTRACTING SQUADRON] UKRAINE” and “Marine lifesaving and Diving Equipment.”
Explosive Ordnance Disposal (EOD) and sapper equipment is exclusively used to blow things up or clean up explosives. And Atlantic Diving Supply is a military contractor originally founded to provide tactical gear to Navy SEAL divers.
When a company like this is tasked with a highly specific delivery of explosives gear to any foreign nation, including Ukraine, it should prompt questions about the mission, particularly when US intelligence is blaming Ukraine’s military for attacking the Nord Stream pipelines without the knowledge of President Volodymyr Zelensky. (The payment date does not necessarily correlate with the date of delivery from the vendor; in other words, the equipment could have been delivered at a prior date.)
Luke Hillier, the founder of Atlantic Diving Supply, paid a $20 million settlement in 2019 to resolve charges that he defrauded the Pentagon by falsely claiming his company was a small business. Atlantic Diving is consistently listed as one of the top 25 largest military contractors in the country.
THREAD: A controversial "small business" just won a $33B DoD contact, despite what a senator calls "a known history of fraud." A new @POGOwatchdog investigation into Atlantic Diving Supply, Inc. https://t.co/kinpwb7O9l with @schwellenbach @adamzagorin
— Jason Paladino (@jason_paladino) February 18, 2021
In 2021, Hillier raked in a massive $33 billion contract under the same program, prompting fresh accusations of fraud. This pattern of malfeasance prompted a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee to bluntly denounce Atlantic Diving as a “fraudulent company.”
Hillier currently owns a $13 million mega-yacht in the Cayman Islands, $24 million worth of beachfront property in Hawaii, and two Bahamas-based companies with murky operations, according to the Project on Government Oversight.
The Department of Defense has paid 4.9 Million to BAE Systems GCS International as of September 12, 2022 for “UKRAINE LCS LW 155 SPARES” and “guns over 155mm through 200mm”. In Navy terminology, LCS means “Littoral Combat Ship,” while LW refers to the lightweight gun. And “155 SPARES” refers to the gun mounted on the ship’s main battery off the bow.
So what is the exact purpose of the LCS LW 155mm gun spares, why were they given to Ukraine, and where are they now? Is there a tracking mechanism in place to know where they are and how they’re being used?
US International Development Finance Corporation (DFC) sent $25 million to Horizon Capital Growth Fund IV, a “leading private equity firm in emerging Europe, “to back high-growth tech and export-oriented [Small and Medium Sized Enterprises] succeeding globally, based on platforms in Ukraine and Moldova.”
US International Development Finance Corporation (DFC) sent $1.5 million to the Gazelle Fund LP, another private equity firm, to relocate Ukrainian businesses to Georgia. Georgia does not border Ukraine, nor is it a primary location for Ukrainian refugee resettlement.
The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) sent $882,291 to a single individual described as an “private entrepreneur” in exchange for “overseas technical assistance program support services.” The private entrepreneur listed, Igor Lavreniuk, serves as the Program Coordinator for USAID’s Competitive Markets Program according to his LinkedIn.
The National Science Foundation sent 1.3 million to University of Illinois for faculty and curricular development in remote sensing. The place of performance is listed as Ukraine.
The Department of State has paid 8.3 million to Catholic Relief Services (CRS) to help “refugees from Ukraine meet their essential needs during initial displacement.” According to SpendingUS.gov, Catholic Relief Services is listed as having received a total of 657 million from the State Department in 2021, 5.7 billion since 2008 and 670 million during the last 12 months.
Along with the blowback from their government’s gratuitous sanctions policy against Russia and other official enemies, Americans are feeling the impact of this overseas spending spree at grocery stores, gas stations, and everywhere in between. Meanwhile, rising generations are not only struggling with historic inflation, but concerns that Medicare and Social Security will be insolvent in the near future.
Washington and Europe have insisted that the flood of aid to Ukraine is essential to defending democracy against the existential threat of an authoritarian Russia. This framing is designed to shut down all debate by casting anyone who questions the ballooning price tag as fundamentally anti-American — if you are against funding the West’s proxy war with a nuclear power, you oppose the very ideals that define our nation.
Yet our inspection of US government spending in Ukraine demonstrates that Washington has prioritized its supposed fight for “democracy” abroad over the well-being of the American people.
As the war drags on, lawmakers like Sen. Lindsey Graham have marketed military aid to Ukraine in increasingly grim terms. As the senator boasted during a recent trip to Kiev, “The Russians are dying…it’s the best money we’ve ever spent.” Meanwhile, Congress has rejected any mechanism that would guarantee transparency on the billions sent to Kiev, and shunned a war powers debate over the US military’s presence on the Ukrainian battlefield.
President Joseph Biden, for his part, has pledged that official Washington will support Kiev “as long as it takes.” As the potential for blowback grows from Western pressure to push Ukraine into NATO, and a nuclear-armed Moscow is backed into an existential fight for its survival, while economic powers including China gradually decouple from the Western financial system, Americans can only wonder how much will this war cost them when it is finally over.
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Heather Kaiser is a former military intelligence officer and veteran of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. She is an independent researcher and analyst for defense, intelligence, and political matters. Heather earned a bachelor’s in geopolitics from the United States Military Academy at West Point and earned a degree in sculpture from Indiana University of Pennsylvania. Since the 2020 riots, she has returned to research and analysis of current events for organizations such as American Contingency and Grayzone.
Anya Parampil is a journalist based in Washington, DC. She has produced and reported several documentaries, including on-the-ground reports from the Korean peninsula, Palestine, Venezuela, and Honduras.
The editor-in-chief of The Grayzone, Max Blumenthal is an award-winning journalist and the author of several books, including best-selling Republican Gomorrah, Goliath, The Fifty One Day War, and The Management of Savagery. He has produced print articles for an array of publications, many video reports, and several documentaries, including Killing Gaza. Blumenthal founded The Grayzone in 2015 to shine a journalistic light on America’s state of perpetual war and its dangerous domestic repercussions.
Featured image: President Joe Biden travels to Kyiv, Ukraine Monday, February 20, 2023. (Official White House Photo by Adam Schultz)
June 28th, 2023 by Colin Todhunter
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US neoconservatives like Victoria Nuland, Jake Sullivan and Tony Blinken are using Ukraine as the linchpin of their strategy to undermine and destabilise Russia.
Since the start of the conflict in February 2022, billions of dollars’ worth of military hardware has been sent to Ukraine by the EU. By late February 2023, it had forwarded €3.6 billion worth of military assistance to the Zelensky regime via the European Peace Fund. However, even at that time, the total cost for EU countries could have been closer to €6.9 billion.
In late June 2023, the EU pledged a further €3.5 billion in military aid.
Josep Borrell is the High Representative of the EU for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy and Vice-President of the EU Commission.
Following this latest pledge, he stated on Twitter:
“We will continue to double down on our military support on both equipment [and] training. For as long as it takes.”
Great news for European and UK armaments companies like BAE Systems, Saab and Rheinmetall, which are raking in huge profits from the destruction of Ukraine (see the CNN Business report Europe’s arms spending on Ukraine boosts defense companies).
US arms manufacturers like Raytheon and Lockheed Martin are also acquiring multi-billion-dollar contracts (as outlined in the online articles Raytheon wins $1.2 billion surface-to-air missile order for Ukraine and Pentagon readies new $2 billion Ukraine air defense package including missiles).
And as for BlackRock, JP Morgan and private investors, they aim to profit from the country’s reconstruction along with 400 global companies, including Citi, Sanofi and Philips.
As reported on the CNN Business website (War-torn economy needs private investors to rebuild), JP Morgan’s Stefan Weiler sees a “tremendous opportunity” for private investors.
At the same time, in War and Theft: The Takeover of Ukraine’s Agricultural Land, the Oakland Institute describes how financial institutions are insidiously supporting the consolidation of farmland by oligarchs and Western financial interests.
With Ukrainian forces struggling on the battlefield, it poses the worrying question: with so much money at stake for Western capital, just how far will the US escalate in order to prevent Russia from securing control over areas of the country?
Meanwhile, away from the boardrooms, business conferences and high-level strategizing, hundreds of thousands of ordinary young Ukrainians have died.
Irish MEPs Mick Wallace and Clare Daly have been staunch critics of the EU stance on Ukraine (see Clare Daly talking in the EU parliament about Ukraine burning through a generation of men on YouTube).
Wallace recently addressed the EU Parliament, describing the heist currently taking place in that country by Western corporations.
Wallace said:
“The damage to Ukraine is devastating. Towns and cities that endured for hundreds of years don’t exist anymore. We must recognise that these towns, cities and surrounding lands were long being stolen by local oligarchs colluding with global financial capital. This theft quickened with the onset of the war in 2014.
“The pro-Western government opened the doors wide for massive structural adjustment and privatisation programmes spearheaded by the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, the IMF and the World Bank. Zelensky used the current war to concentrate power and accelerate the corporate fire sale. He banned opposition parties that were resisting deeply unpopular reforms to the laws restricting the sale of land to foreign investors.
“Over three million hectares of agricultural land are now owned by companies based in Western tax havens. Ukraine’s mineral deposits alone are worth over $12 trillion. Western companies are licking their lips.”
“What are the working-class people of Ukraine dying for?”
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Renowned author Colin Todhunter specialises in development, food and agriculture. He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG) in Montreal.
Featured image: MEP Mick Wallace (Licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0)
We are currently seeing an acceleration of the corporate consolidation of the entire global agri-food chain. The high-tech/big data conglomerates, including Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook and Google, have joined traditional agribusiness giants, such as Corteva, Bayer, Cargill and Syngenta, in a quest to impose their model of food and agriculture on the world.
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is also involved (documented in ‘Gates to a Global Empire‘ by Navdanya International), whether through buying up huge tracts of farmland, promoting a much-heralded (but failed) ‘green revolution’ for Africa, pushing biosynthetic food and genetic engineering technologies or more generally facilitating the aims of the mega agri-food corporations.
June 28th, 2023 by Ahmed Adel
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According to a recent survey, 60% of American citizens consulted do not welcome the 80-year-old president of the United States seeking a second term. The numbers are clear: a vast majority of Americans are concerned about the age of Joe Biden and reject the fact that the Democrat has decided to run for re-election.
A poll conducted by NBC News found that 68% of registered voters are concerned that Biden lacks the mental and physical health to continue as president. In this sense, 55% of those consulted said they were “concerned” about the age of Biden, who, if he succeeded in the next elections, would be leaving the White House at 86 years of age.
Worsening the prognosis for the president and Democratic candidate for 2024, 60% of those polled responded that they were concerned that the candidate would be re-elected. 46% specifically said that the scenario caused them “major concerns.”
Confirming the low acceptance of the Democrat, other data from the survey shows that 44% of voters say that they would “definitely” or “probably” consider supporting an independent or third-party candidate for president in 2024. As all the polls indicate, this is in case the candidates are Joe Biden for the Democrats and former president Donald Trump, the current favourite in the internal race over Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, for the Republicans.
The advanced age of Biden, who is the oldest president in US history, has been a focus of concern not only for voters but also for the very leaders and strategists of the Democratic Party, who, since the beginning of his term, have considered other figures as potential replacements for 2024.
However, Biden, who practically every week since he arrived at the White House has been in the news for slipping or suffering a physical accident, which has increased comments about his alleged senility or physical vulnerability, announced on April 25 that he would go for re-election and that he will repeat with his current vice president, Kamala Harris, the electoral formula.
There are stark differences, though, as Biden will be on the campaign trail, unlike in 2020, when most of the campaigning was done online due to the COVID pandemic. He will now be forced to be on public display, all whilst under greater scrutiny and more advanced age.
First Lady Jill Biden has been telling donors that “nothing” can slow down Joe Biden, despite most voters being concerned about his mental and physical health.
“Nothing can slow him down and now he’s ready to finish the job,” Jill Biden said at fundraisers in Minnesota and Tennessee on June 24, where donors gave millions of dollars to Biden’s re-election effort.
Yet, despite what Jill says, the situation has become so desperate that Hollywood movie mogul Jeffrey Katzenberg is counselling the president on how to “own” his age and treat it as an asset rather than a drawback for his re-election campaign. Katzenberg believes Biden ought to “lean into his longevity as a sign of wisdom and experience while offering a sense of humour about it.”
But no amount of Hollywood star power can stop Biden from his constant tumbles, jumbled words, and moments of confusion.
“Don’t underestimate Joe’s ability to f–k things up,” as his onetime boss, President Barack Obama, reportedly said.
One of Biden’s worst gaffes was when he sought out Indiana Rep. Jackie Walorski at a White House conference — eight weeks after her high-profile death, in which he had even released a lengthy statement mourning her.
“Representative Jackie — are you here? Where’s Jackie?” he said from the podium while peering about the room. “I think she was going to be here.”
Who could forget that he challenged US official foreign policy by calling for regime change in Russia?
The White House quickly denied that is what he meant he said of Russian President Vladimir Putin: “For God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power.”
Biden also said the US would defend Taiwan militarily if China attacked it, seemingly ending decades of non-commitment to that kind of intervention and sparking fury from Beijing and challenging the One China policy. The White House had to deny again what the entire world heard him say.
The president has also picked up a habit of constantly falling over, such as when he fell flat on his face at the Air Force Academy graduation ceremony in May or when he stumbled twice in a few weeks earlier this year as he walked up the steps of Air Force One, or in 2022 when he tumbled off his bike crossing a road.
Considering Biden’s mental and physical faculties are not what they should be for the president of a Great Power, it is easily understandable why most Americans show concern for his age in the leadup to the elections. It appears, for now, the Democrats will insist on Biden as their main candidate.
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Ahmed Adel is a Cairo-based geopolitics and political economy researcher.
Featured image is from The Unz Review
June 28th, 2023 by Gunnar Lindemann
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The largest migrant boat disaster recently off the coast of Greece involved 750 persons wanting to get to Germany and elsewhere in Europe. Though this was the largest tragedy, similar voyages are happening almost daily with loss of life.
The US and EU sanctions prevent Syrians from a livelihood at home, and desperate people make deadly choices to feed their families. If sanctions were lifted, Syrians could find a job in the many reconstruction projects and new factories which could open if the sanctions were lifted, which currently prevent any reconstruction projects, or factories refurbishment or construction. The Syrian economy sits idle and the Syrian workers are unemployed because of sanctions. Many feel their only hope is an illegal boat ride to Europe, which has a seemingly open door policy that encourages human trafficking.
Germany has welcomed 560,000 Syrian refugees, and while many have become productive members of society, many others have remained uninterested in German integration, and a few have become criminals. In an effort to understand the problems surrounding the current Syrian economic migrants to Germany, Steven Sahiounie of MidEastDiscourse interviewed Gunnar Lindemann, a Member of the Berlin parliament since 2016. who has been to Syria and has firsthand information, and has proposed a way to end the illegal migrant boats to Europe, and thus save lives.
Gunnar Lindemann is member of Parliament of the Federal state of Berlin from the party “Alternative for Germany”.
Steven Sahiounie (SS): Recently, in Essen there was a massive fight between Lebanese and Syrian refugees. In the German media, the Lebanese were said to be operating as a mafia involved with the illegal drug trade.
From your perspective, how are the German police handling the problem, and what is the German citizens’ reaction to these crimes?
Gunnar Lindemann (GL): The problem is not the German police. The problem is German politics and the German government. This government is acting irresponsibly by allowing hundreds of thousands of people, mostly illegally, to enter Germany for decades. The problem with the Lebanese clans has also been known for a long time. The mistake is that criminal or violent migrants are almost never deported, even though they disobey German laws.
SS: A ship carrying 750 illegal migrants to Europe recently sank with great loss of life, and it is an ongoing tragedy happening almost daily.
In your opinion, what can Germany and the European Union do to prevent this situation?
GL: Here, too, politics in Germany and Europe is to blame. All people rescued from the Mediterranean should not be allowed to go to Europe, but would have to be brought back to their starting point in Africa. If you did it like that for a few weeks, nobody would risk a voyage on an unfit ship anymore. And with that, no one would drown.
SS: Syrian refugees number about 800,000 in Germany, and are the largest refugee community. Syrian Christians and Muslims both reject the LGBTQ lifestyle and do not want their school aged children indoctrinated in an adult subject.
In your view, shouldn’t parents have the right to choose what their child is taught in school about a sensitive topic?
GL: Yes, of course, parents should have more influence over school lessons on sensitive topics. Most German parents also reject this LGTB propaganda in German schools. From my point of view, this early sexualization in children has no place and should be banned.
SS: The armed conflict in Syria is over. The last period of open conflict was in 2017, and today the cities of Aleppo, Damascus, Homs, and Latakia are all safe and calm. There is even a growing tourism industry as visitors return, including Syrians living in Germany who often return each summer for a beach vacation and family visits.
In your opinion, is it time to ask Syrians in Germany to return home, especially those who do not want to integrate into the society?
GL: I was in Damascus myself 2 years ago. The war in Syria is over. The Syrians in Germany should now return to their homeland, whereby the German government should certainly provide financial return assistance here. Diplomatic relations with Syria should also be resumed immediately and sanctions against Syria must be lifted. Relations between Germany and Syria must finally return to normal. Syria has great potential in economic development and of course in the tourism sector. Which is certainly interesting for German investors and business people.
SS: The majority of Syrians never left home, and are still in Syria. They have suffered through years of armed conflict which left them without a home and without an income. However, due to US and EU sanctions, the rebuilding process is prohibited from beginning. Homes, hospitals, schools and businesses are prevented from making repairs and offering new jobs. The sanctions have not hampered the government, but have only hurt the Syrian people.
In your opinion, isn’t it time to lift the sanctions and allow the Syrian citizens to rebuild and attract foreign investors who want to help Syria recover?
GL: As I said, Syria is interesting for foreign investors. That is why relations must be normalized and sanctions must be ended. Cooperation between the official government agencies should also work again, and both the EU and the USA should support Syria’s reconstruction. Joint ventures between Syrian and German companies, which should be funded by the EU, are one possibility. Syria has always been the most liberal Arab country and it is important to support Syria now as a factor of stability in the region.
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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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