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Since 2022, Rwanda has been very much on the mind of British policy makers, a dark option of retreat from the irritating intrusions of international refugee law. The English Channel has become something of a polemical resource, with those seeking to cross it demonised as undermining Britannia’s sacred sovereignty.
Giddy with the dusty advice of Australian advisors – the crude offerings of wisdom from former foreign minister Alexander Downer, and former Prime Minister Tony Abbott stand out – respective Tory governments have been pondering how to stem the arrival of irregular migrants and asylum seekers.
The use of third states as a means of deferring obligations of protection towards refugees has become an attractive, brutal way of snuffing out the right to asylum. The UN Refugee Convention of 1951 is treated as a dead letter, and options such as the “Australian model” in repelling unwanted arrivals thrill populist politicians.
The common choice of destination in all these agreements is Africa, with Rwanda proving most attractive. In equal measures the choice of such a country is both daft and cruel. But this has not stopped Denmark and the United Kingdom from signing memoranda of understanding and agreements making Kigali the favoured destination of unwanted asylum seekers.
On April 14, 2022 the Johnson government announced that it had reached an Asylum Partnership Arrangement with Rwanda “to contribute to the prevention and combating of illegally facilitated and unlawful cross border migration by establishing a bilateral asylum partnership”. According to the agreement, Rwanda would receive asylum seekers whose claims would be otherwise processed in the UK and consider applications through its own domestic asylum system. They would also assume settling and protective responsibilities. The then Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, crowed that the arrangements were “uncapped”, with Rwanda having “the capacity to resettle tens of thousands of people in the years ahead.”
That Rwanda should even feature at all was baffling for human rights advocates. Home Secretary Suella Braverman is barely believable in her claim that “Rwanda has a track record of successfully resettling and integrating people who are refugees or asylum seekers”.
While the UK government continues to praise the country as a model of development and guardian of human rights, Kigali’s record is abysmal. Organisations such as Human Rights Watch have noted the country’s appetite for prosecuting dissidents, using torture, arbitrary detention, and resorting to more than the occasional extrajudicial assassination.
Rwandan police have not been shy in using live ammunition on protesters, especially when they have been refugees. In February 2018, twelve refugees from the Democratic Republic of Congo were gunned down in a protest over diminished food rations at the Kiziba camp. A rash of arrests were hurriedly made, with charges ranging from the implausible accusation of rebellion to the “spreading of false information with intent to create a hostile international opinion against the Rwandan state.”
As to how well the Rwandan state processes claims for asylum, the record is hardly glorious there, either. Instances of “airport refoulement” – where individuals arriving in the country claiming asylum are denied entry and promptly returned back to countries they have flown from, abound. (The testy response from Rwanda border authorities suggested that these were not cases of refoulement given that these arrivals tended to use forged documents, thereby failing to meet immigration entry requirements.)
Victoire Ingabire Umuhoza, a political figure Rwanda’s authorities have often found threatening, offers another, oft neglected angle on her country’s policies. The Rwandan government, she challenges, “creates thousands of refugees every year and its government is yet to guarantee a safe environment for Rwandan refugees settled across the world to return home.” The very fact that 12,838 Rwandans fled their own country to seek asylum should scuttle any claims about refugee safety. The joke is on any power willing to send the vulnerable to the country.
Despite such facts respective UK Home Secretaries have been pushing the plan as viable and, most astonishingly of all, legal. Potential victims of the policy have begged to differ. Last year, a legal appeal by ten asylum seekers from Syria, Iraq, Iran, Vietnam, Sudan and Albania, along with the charity Asylum Aid, was launched. The central claims by the parties were that there were real risks that their claims to asylum would not be properly and fairly determined by the authorities in Kigali, and that there was a serious risk that they would either be sent back to their own country (refoulement) or be “subjected to torture or to inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment” in breach of Article 3 of the European Convention on Human Rights.
The UK government, at least initially, had reason to be cocky. It scored a legal victory in the High Court in December 2022, which had taken the undertakings made by Kigali in the Memorandum of Understanding and Notes Verbales (NV) at face value. The Home Secretary had also conducted, it was astonishingly found, a “thorough examination” of “all relevant generally available information” relevant to human rights.
On June 29, a majority of the Court of Appeal reversed the decision. As Sir Geoffrey Vos, Master of the Rolls opined, “there were substantial grounds for thinking that asylum seekers sent to Rwanda under the MEDP [Migration and Economic Development Partnership]” at the date the decisions were made by the secretary in July 2022 “faced real risks of article 3 mistreatment.” Such a conclusion was inevitable after consulting “the historical record described by the UNHCR, the significant concerns of the UNHCR itself, and the factual realities of the current asylum process itself.”
The Rwandan human rights record, which was danced around in the lower court, comes in for some severe pasting. Lord Justice Underhill noted the lower court’s own acknowledgment that the Rwandan government was “intolerant of dissent; that there are restrictions on the right of peaceful assembly, freedom of the press and freedom of speech; and that political opponents have been detained in unofficial detention centres and have been subjected to torture and Article 3 ill-treatment short of torture.”
As has been starkly demonstrated by Australia’s own offshoring record, outsourcing a state’s obligations to process asylum claims is both costly to the taxpayer and bound to put asylum seekers and refugees in harm’s way. Doing so contravenes the spirit, and the letter, of international refugee law, whatever specious claims are advanced to the contrary. It is a source of some comfort that certain judicial officers in the UK have come to that same conclusion. An appeal to the Supreme Court, however, will test this further.
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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: British home secretary Priti Patel (left) and Rwandan foreign minister Vincent Biruta (right) enacting the policy on 14 April 2022 (Licensed under CC BY 2.0)
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The U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Appropriations has proposed cutting government funding for the World Health Organization (WHO) entirely, as part of its budget proposal for fiscal year 2024.
It’s uncertain if any of the proposed cuts will be adopted, as the bill faces a long path through Congress.
Rep. Ralph Norman (R-S.C.), one of Congress’ most vocally opposed to U.S. involvement in the WHO, told The Defender the proposals by the appropriations committee are a positive sign — but more action is needed.
“I had written a letter to House Speaker Kevin McCarthy to move forward with cutting the WHO’s funding in appropriations and in his role as speaker,” Norman said. “I’m glad to see it did come out of the appropriations committee, but we’ve got to follow it through to make sure it passes.”
In his May 10 letter to McCarthy, Norman said the first step “to avoid the unacceptable consequences of what is afoot with the World Health Organization” is “to terminate further U.S. funding of the WHO, a roughly $700 million annual contribution.”
In a separate letter on May 24 to Rep. Michael McCaul (R-Texas), chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Norman urged the committee “to conduct oversight and consider taking up legislation to address the United States’ involvement” in the WHO.
Several medical and legal experts who spoke with The Defender and who have been outspoken in their opposition to the WHO’s proposed pandemic treaty and amendments to the International Health Regulations (IHR) also described the bill as a positive development.
Dr. Kat Lindley, president of the Global Health Project and director of the Global Covid Summit, said the bill is “a move in the right direction — probably not enough, but I applaud them trying.”
“This is the committee that counts in the House when it comes to funding everything,” Boyle told The Defender. “This is a good first step, but it is not sufficient.”
“Even if we do not pay our dues to the WHO and cut off the funding,” Boyle said, “we will remain a contracting party to the WHO Constitution/treaty and bound by it. So, we have to terminate our participation in the WHO Constitution/treaty.”
Congress has the constitutional authority to do this, Boyle said.
Author and podcast host Frank Gaffney, founder and president of the Center for Security Policy and co-founder of the Sovereignty Coalition, said what the bill means in practice “is unclear at the moment,” but that it nevertheless is a “huge first step.”
“This is now part of the bill that is being considered and it has to be removed, rather than having to be added to it,” he said. “It’s easier to defend a good piece of legislation than to modify a bad one.”
Dr. David Bell, a public health physician, biotech consultant and former director of Global Health Technologies at Intellectual Ventures Global Good Fund, said that while the WHO was “once a force for good,” it now “has become part of a tragedy.”
“It is hard to see a way forward without defunding this hijacked organization and working on more appropriate ways to coordinate international health,” Bell said.
Noting the extent to which the U.S. government — and taxpayers — fund the WHO, independent journalist James Roguski told The Defender, “In 2022 the United States donated nearly three-quarters of a billion dollars to the WHO, which was over and above the assessed payments we were obligated to make.”
The committee’s proposals came just as the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) held a series of “listening sessions” discussing the WHO’s proposed pandemic treaty and IHR amendments, during which numerous experts and activists expressed their opposition to both instruments.
A growing number of lawmakers in Congress also have begun calling for the U.S. to cease funding the WHO and exit the organization. Several bills putting forth such proposals are currently under consideration in Congress.
‘Supports American values’ by banning ‘disinformation’ and ‘misinformation’ programs
The proposed appropriations bill includes what it describes as “cuts to wasteful spending,” including a prohibition on funding for “controversial organizations and programs,” many of which involve United Nations (U.N.) bodies such as the WHO.
Other “cuts to wasteful spending” proposed in the bill include a prohibition of funds to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, the EcoHealth Alliance and “any gain-of-function research,” in addition to an elimination of funding for the U.N.’s regular budget, which the bill’s summary states will result in “savings of $707 million.”
The proposal also “terminates” U.S. government participation in 18 programs. These include organizations such as the U.N. Environment Fund and the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), as well as the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, and the WEF.
During the proceedings, several representatives shared their views on the proposal to defund the WHO, while the motion for the proposed bill to move to the full appropriations committee was passed.
Rep. Mario Díaz-Balart (R-Fla.), said, “The ineffectiveness and the egregious failures of the United Nations and U.N. bodies do not merit support,” while Rep. Kay Granger (R-Texas), chairwoman of the appropriations committee, said the proposed bill “prevents funding for controversial programs.”
Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.) said the bill “abdicates U.S. leadership at the United Nations and other multilateral and international institutions,” including the WHO.
Full committee markup will follow, during which the bill may be amended. It may then be placed on the congressional calendar, leading to its consideration on the House and Senate floors, during which more amendments may be proposed.
House and Senate votes may then follow. Any differences that emerge between the House and Senate versions of the bill would then have to be resolved. The bill may also be added as a rider to other pending legislation.
Eventually, the bill may reach the president’s desk for his signature — or a veto.
The proposed bill may be considered for markup by the appropriations committee as soon as the week of July 10, a source with knowledge of the committee’s procedures told The Defender, although this date is not yet definite.
WHO a ‘real and present danger’
As the appropriations committee is considering defunding the WHO, the HHS Office of Global Affairs on Wednesday organized “stakeholder listening sessions” on the draft pandemic treaty. Previously, on June 20, the committee held a listening session on the proposed IHR amendments.
At Wednesday’s listening session, Pamela Hamamoto, lead U.S. negotiator for the pandemic treaty, said:
“The COVID-19 pandemic reinforced that threats to global health require rapid, effective, and sustained international cooperation. By applying the lessons learned from COVID-19 and other outbreak response efforts, we aim to ensure that we are better equipped when another pandemic threatens.”
Hamamoto added:
“The administration will not support any measure at the World Health Organization, including in these negotiations, that in any way undermines or compromises U.S. sovereignty or security.”
Others took a different view. Lindley told The Defender that many “American citizens opposing the treaty and the power grab by the WHO” testified. “The sentiment was that the WHO is a real and present danger to what we stand for as Americans.”
Lindley was one of the individuals who testified Wednesday. She said the pandemic treaty “would dramatically expand its authority to declare another pandemic” and impose “obligations to be followed by all member nations.”
“My ask is to exit the WHO,” Lindley said.
Roguski, who also testified Wednesday, described the listening sessions as “a thinly veiled charade,” because HHS ignored over 33,000 public comments it received, opposing U.S. involvement in the WHO, the pandemic treaty and the IHR amendments.
He called on the U.S. to “stop these negotiations immediately” and “defund the WHO.”
People who testified during the June 20 listening session on the IHR amendments expressed similar sentiments.
Political opposition to the WHO intensifies
Opposition to the WHO is becoming increasingly vocal in Congress in recent weeks. Several bills have been proposed calling for the U.S. to stop funding or withdraw from the WHO.
These include H.R.79 (WHO Withdrawal Act), H.R.343 (No Taxpayer Funding for the World Health Organization Act), H.R.1425 (No WHO Pandemic Preparedness Treaty Without Senate Approval Act) and S.444 (No WHO Pandemic Preparedness Treaty Without Senate Approval Act).
Referring to this congressional activity, Norman told The Defender: “We’ve got to disassociate ourselves with the WHO … This country is in danger of losing its sovereignty. We cannot let this happen by staying in the WHO.”
The bill that appears to have the most support so far is H.R.79, proposed byRep. Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.), which has 49 co-sponsors.
Norman, Biggs, Smith and other members of Congress spoke in support of defunding and exiting the WHO at a May 17 Sovereignty Coalition press conference.
Roguski said, “Merely defunding the WHO is an inadequate response,” adding that H.R.79 would repeal the 1948 joint resolution through which the U.S. joined the WHO, which he said, “should have been declared unconstitutional 75 years ago.”
“If we can get the Biggs legislation attached as a rider to the budget resolution or [other] resolutions that Biden cannot veto, that should be sufficient to protect ourselves from the WHO totalitarian police state, along with the cutoff of funds,” Boyle said.
Bell called the WHO “a servant of private and corporate interests” which has adopted “a program of centralized, authoritarian management that has everything to do with the profit of its sponsors and very little to do with public health.”
“No democracy should hand power over its people to private and hostile interests, or support organizations that are bent on impoverishing people for the benefit of a few.”
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Michael Nevradakis, Ph.D., based in Athens, Greece, is a senior reporter for The Defender and part of the rotation of hosts for CHD.TV’s “Good Morning CHD.”
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Barring Bolsonaro from running for office until 2030 can be considered a form of election meddling since it’s meant to influence the outcome of the next elections.
Former Brazilian President Bolsonaro was barred from running for office until 2030 after telling foreign ambassadors last summer before fall’s election that he didn’t trust his country’s electronic voting system. This decision by a panel of judges implies that they and President Lula are scared that Brazilians might re-elect Bolsonaro otherwise they’d have never killed his political future. From this, it can be intuited that they’re not confident that the ruling party will win the next elections.
For whatever one may think about Bolsonaro personally or his presidency, and there are certainly many criticisms that can be leveled against them, he represents the antithesis of Lula and has the support of almost half the country according to the official results of the last election. This represents a critical mass of the population that will now no longer be able to vote for him in a few years’ time had he not been barred from running and decided to do so, which thus disenfranchises them in a sense.
The pretext for doing so is highly questionable, especially in a country whose newly re-elected leftist leader claims that he’s reversing the so-called fascist dictatorship that his predecessor allegedly imposed. After all, Bolsonaro didn’t exploit his distrust of Brazil’s electronic voting system to overturn the official results of the last election, instead peacefully transferring power to his opponent who the Financial Times recently reported had the full support of the US government in his quest to return to office.
Likewise, considering Lula’s ideological alliance with the US’ ruling liberal–globalists who helped him win the last election like that outlet reported citing their unnamed official sources, nobody should expect the US to condemn the decision to bar Bolsonaro from running until 2030. They wanted him out of office so it naturally follows that they’ll at the very least tacitly approve of the panel’s anti-democratic ruling. This suggests that they’re also not confident that the ruling party will win the next elections.
While it’s too early to tell whether Bolsonaro could hypothetically return to office if he was allowed to run, the fact that he was barred in the first place reduces the chances that the opposition will oust Lula since they no longer have anyone around whom they can rally. As was written in the title of this analysis, Lula is scared that Brazilians might re-elect Bolsonaro, which in turn hints that he and his team expect to make unpopular or at the very least very polarizing decisions in the coming future.
It can’t be known for sure, but this might have to do with the increasingly dictatorial policies that they’re relying on in the aftermath of the January 8thevents, which includes social media censorship. Far from striking fear in the opposition, this is actually galvanizing them, which could run the risk of Lula or whoever he appoints in his place losing the next elections. With this scenario in mind, it makes sense for them to bar the same man who almost half the country already voted for.
This won’t destroy the opposition, but it’s intended to make it more difficult for them to win the next elections since they’ll now have to choose a new leader to rally around instead of relying on Bolsonaro like they could have otherwise done. For this reason, the panel’s decision can be considered a form of election meddling since it’s meant to influence the outcome of the next elections, which suggests that Lula and his US allies do indeed expect that the ruling party will struggle to retain the presidency.
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Andrew Korybko is an American Moscow-based political analyst specializing in the relationship between the US strategy in Afro-Eurasia, China’s One Belt One Road global vision of New Silk Road connectivity, and Hybrid Warfare. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.
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First published on June 8, 2023
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Supposedly completely innovative and revolutionary projects, announced today as a part of the Even Braver and Newer World, not only already existed, but in previous stages have been fiercely destroyed and eradicated, as unnecessary obstacles in the way of progress.
Who really blew up public transport?
The same people who today forbid us to use private cars, previously effectively limited and eliminated public transport. Bus and train lines subjected to commercialisation and privatisation ceased to function as public services, in practice forcing people to change to their own cars, which was joyfully applauded by the car industry.
Now this is a time for bicycle and moped manufacturers to take their share of the accumulation, but we are to believe that this particular industry is based on voluntary cooperatives of hippie koala bears, and is not the same business as others, with equally large lobbying funds and access to councilors’ and mayors’ wallets. Unfortunately, the drivers hunting will not automatically resurrect bus and railway lines.
Blocking of cities is not accompanied by the reconstruction of public transport, on the contrary, in fact it is often hindered as well, because no bus or tram will fly over these empty, concrete hectares, created in the city centres, with no cars, but with no people either. Forasmuch the real purpose is not to replace one form of transport for another, but to actually immobilise the greater part of humanity.
Herbivores
Now in the Eastern Europe we have lot of critics of the city centres transformation, which has started exactly after 1990 and escalated with joining EU. Well, fine, but who the hell actually turned these town districts into stone and concrete deserts? Who uprooted the trees and bushes for years growing in the communal squares, ‘because bums may hang out there’?
Who wanted them to be modern and European, because for sure not the locals, but the same elite, who now pretend to be so close to nature and green liking? They destroyed greenery that had existed for generations, and now they claim to have invented green squares and lawns! And again, old and natural greenery disturbs, but trees must be planted in pots in the middle of the streets, as it was done for millions of pounds in the UK town during the pandemic. In fact, it is social engineering, not ecology and environmentally friendly urban planning.
We already had green, friendly neighbourhood units.
The recently fashionable vision of the ‘15-Minute Cities’ has a similarly alienating character. Its inhabitants may be able to go for a soy latte on foot, but the barista who will prepare that for them and the cleaner who will take care of the mess in their apartments will have to travel for hours with three electric bus transfers to these oases of modern, green brave happiness. What is more, the idea itself is completely unrelated to European urban planning, being a reaction to the American cities problems, which for nearly a hundred years had been divided into strictly separated zones of residence, business, industry and entertainment, what resulted in the need to move farther and farther within heavy traffic and with restrictive highway code.
Meanwhile, the situation on the Old Continent, including its Eastern part, was completely different. What is more, analogous concepts were already being implemented, and it was just when Americans began to close themselves in their suburbs. European cities are full of model housing estates (‘Neighbourhood Units’), erected since the 1930s, and in Eastern Europe especially in the 1970s. In the middle of such (often centrally built) sectors there were general stores, service outlets, community and activity centres, schools, kindergartens, health centres, pharmacies, churches etc. In a word, there have been everything that is considered necessary so that the local community does not have to move to the city centre. Such districts were often designed as areas closed to cars, with access roads, parking lots and garages on the outskirts.
In the West, however, with the progress of financialisation and deregulation, i.e. from the 1980s, and in Eastern Europe after 1990, care was taken to ensure that these areas were especially degenerated, disgusted and subjected to commercialisation. Libraries and activity centres were closed, local shops could not withstand the competition of hypermarkets and shopping malls, local gastronomy gave way first to fast food chains, and now to delivery.
Even schools have been closed and demolished to create great educational conglomerates, far from places of residence and teaching children to first stand in traffic jams to get to them. Again, no ignorant, medieval, traditionalist fascists did this. It has been a work of progress, associated in the West with the triumph of the Reaganomics and Thatcherism, and in the East with the victory of anti-communism and peripheralisation. Today, ideologically motivated, urban planners are eager to play on the longing for ‘a nice locality and a familiar lady in a neighbourhood store’. Then why they have destroyed that when we already had it?!
These already successfully existing 15-Minute Cities have been smashed either as ‘relics of communism’ or ‘unnecessary elements of overprotectiveness of the state’ and now the same, 100 years old Clarence Perry’s concept is presented as a great discovery of the Zero-Growth-World. Only today’s ones have one more minor improvement: they are CLOSED. Really closed, with entry limits to individual zones and common-sense convenience replaced by a system of bans, as it happened exemplarily in Oxford and Sheffield and what will probably await us all over time.
However, some naive people get trapped again. ‘Oh my, the rat race is over, we’ll be living local again!’ they repeat mindlessly, as if global social engineering has brought anything other than greater repression, increased surveillance, and intensified exploitation in the interests of the Top 1%. Hello, did you just fall off Mars? Where have you been for the last three years, haven’t you noticed that we have already been successfully tested on how to shut us down? Can’t you see the difference between a local neighbourhood you do not need to leave and the one you must not leave? Don’t you have any associations about the world, where your car can be immobilised from the outside, energy in your house can be remotely blocked and the entire sector you are assigned to can be isolated? You are right, the rat race is over, rat labs will suffice for the system’s survival.
The Eloi’s cities of and the Morlocks’ services
The COVID lockdowns rehearsed the reality of cities and whole countries completely closed. Since we did not protest then, let’s not be surprised that the test from 2020-22 is now turning into a system: a permanent state of emergency, for a good start in transport, or rather the lack of it, as well as in housing. That vision comes directly from the stories of the Eloi and Morlocks and it is easy to guess which group most of us belongs to.
Well, on the other hand let’s not worry too much. It may be just a 15-minute flattening the curve…
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Konrad Rękas is a regular contributor to Global Research.
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First published on April 27, 2023
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The World Bank says nearly 80% (560 million) of the 700 million people who were pushed into extreme poverty in 2020 due to COVID policies were from India. Globally, extreme poverty levels increased by 9.3 per cent in 2020.
In the UK, poverty is increasing in two-thirds of communities, as millions go without heat and skip meals. Due to the ‘cost-of-living crisis’, 10.5 million are experiencing financial difficulty. An additional 13.7 million people would be at risk of financial difficulty with further increases in costs.
Living standards in the UK are plummeting. For instance, 28 per cent (up from 9 per cent pre-COVID) of UK adults said that they could not afford to eat balanced meals. Absolute poverty is set to rise from 17.2 per cent in 2021-22 to 18.3 per cent in 2023-24, pushing an additional 800,000 people into poverty.
In the US, around 30 million low-income people are on the edge of a ‘hunger cliff’ as a portion of their federal food assistance is taken away. In 2021, it was estimated that one in eight children were going hungry in the US.
Small businesses are filing for bankruptcy in the US at a record rate. Private bankruptcy filings in 2023 have exceeded the highest point recorded during the early stages of COVID by a considerable amount. The four-week moving average for private filings in late February 2023 was 73 per cent higher than in June 2020.
The Bank of England’s chief economist Huw Pill says that people should ‘accept’ being poorer. This is similar to the response of Rob Kapito, co-founder of the world’s biggest asset management firm BlackRock. In 2022, he said that a “very entitled” generation of people who have never had to sacrifice would soon have to face shortages for the first time in their lives.
Crisis – what crisis?
Of course, Kapito is no doubt referring to ordinary US citizens and not himself. Kapito, as the president of BlackRock, made $26,750,780 in total compensation in 2021.
Nor is he referring to the high-net-worth individuals who benefit from hunger by investing in BlackRock, a firm that continues to profit from a globalised food system which – by design – leaves around a billion people experiencing malnutrition. BlackRock is one of the rich ‘barbarians at the barn’ who continue to make huge financial killings from an exploitative food regime.
Kapito and Pill tell ordinary people to get used to their ‘new normal’ while business as usual prevails elsewhere, not least in one of the world’s most financially lucrative sectors – arms manufacturing. The war in Ukraine has been a ‘gold rush’ for Western arms makers as wealthy US neocons like Victoria Nuland continue to try to bring about ‘regime change’ in Russia by fighting Moscow to the last Ukrainian.
When Huw Pill tells ordinary people to get used to being poorer, he is not referring to the individuals and firms who have made hundreds of millions of pounds (courtesy of the taxpayer) from corrupt COVID equipment contracts thanks to the UK government prioritising politically connected suppliers at the start of COVID.
And this cannot be brushed aside as a ‘one-off’. These revelations are merely the tip of a massive corruption iceberg.
For example, Byline Times reports a cross-party parliamentary watchdog raised concerns that decisions on how to award money from the £3.6 billion towns fund, designed to boost economic growth in struggling towns, were politically motivated. It also notes that 40 potential breaches of the Ministerial Code were not investigated in the past five years.
Consider that the UN estimates that just $51.5 billion would be enough to provide food, shelter and lifesaving support for the world’s 230 million most vulnerable people. Then consider that 20 corporations in the grain, fertiliser, meat and dairy sectors delivered $53.5 billion to shareholders in the financial years 2020 and 2021.
According to Global Witness, ‘excess profits’ are sudden and significant increases in a company’s financial returns that are due not to their own actions but to external events. The EU says profits count as ‘excess’ when they are more than 20% above the average return of the previous four years.
Global Witness finds that the 2022 annual profits of the five largest integrated private sector oil and gas companies – Chevron, ExxonMobil, Shell, BP and TotalEnergies – were $195 billion. Up by almost 120% on 2021 and the highest level in the industry’s history.
This means that these companies made $134 billion in excess profits, which could cover nearly 20% of the money all European governments together have allocated to shielding vulnerable households and businesses from the current energy crisis.
Centrica, the company that owns British Gas, reports record profits for 2022. Operating profits of £3.3bn were recorded, up from £948m in 2021. This surpassed its previous highest ever yearly profit of £2.7bn in 2012.
In May 2021, it was reported that COVID vaccines had created at least nine new billionaires. According to research by the People’s Vaccine Alliance, the new billionaires included Moderna CEO Stéphane Bancel and Ugur Sahin, the CEO of BioNTech, which has produced a vaccine with Pfizer. Both CEOs were then worth around $4 billion. Senior executives from China’s CanSino Biologics and early investors in Moderna have also become billionaires.
Although the nine new billionaires were at that time worth a combined $19.3 billion, the vaccines were largely funded by public money. For instance, according to a May 2021 report by CNN, BioNTech received €325 million from the German government for the development of the vaccine. The company made a net profit of €1.1 billion in the first three months of the year, thanks to its share of sales from the COVID vaccine, compared with a loss of €53.4 million for the same period last year.
Moderna was expected to make $13.2 billion in COVID vaccine revenue in 2021. The company received billions of dollars in funding from the US government for development of its vaccine.
This article has briefly touched on four horses of the economic apocalypse – agribusiness, oil, arms and big pharma. But let’s finish by mentioning the fifth and the most powerful – finance. The sector which sparked the devastation that we now see.
By late 2019, a financial crisis was looming. It was multiple times worse than the 2008 one.
Investigative journalist Michael Byrant says that €1.5 trillion was needed to deal with the crisis in Europe alone. The financial collapse staring European central bankers in the face came to a head in 2019:
“All talk about big finance bankrupting the nation by looting public funds, politicians destroying public services at the behest of large investors and the depredations of the casino economy were washed away with COVID. Predators who saw their financial empires coming apart resolved to shut down society. To solve the problems they created, they needed a cover story. It magically appeared in the form of a ‘novel virus’.”
The European Central Bank agreed to a €1.31 trillion bailout of banks followed by the EU agreeing to a €750 billion recovery fund for European states and corporations. This package of long-term, ultra-cheap credit to hundreds of banks was sold to the public as a necessary programme to cushion the impact of the pandemic on businesses and workers.
What happened in Europe was part of a strategy to avert the wider systemic collapse of the hegemonic financial system. And what we now see is an interrelated global debt, inflation and ‘austerity’ crisis and the biggest transfer of wealth to the rich in history under cover of a ‘cost-of-living crisis’.
As millions of workers take strike action in the UK, Huw Pill implies that they should accept their plight as inevitable. But they have no reason to.
The wealth of the world’s billionaires increased by $3.9tn between 18 March and 31 December 2020. Their total wealth then stood at $11.95tn, a 50 per cent increase in just 9.5 months. Between April and July 2020, during the initial lockdowns, the wealth held by these billionaires grew from $8 trillion to more than $10 trillion.
The only thing inevitable about the current crisis was the collapse of a debt-fuelled, unsustainable neoliberalism set up to facilitate outright plunder by the super-rich who have offshored more than $50 trillion in hidden accounts.
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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.
Read Colin Todhunter’s e-Book entitled
Food, Dispossession and Dependency. Resisting the New World Order
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.
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The march of tyranny is upon us. You see it every day in the Covid lockdowns, vaccine propaganda, government-sponsored censorship and banking / finance restrictions on what you’re allowed to do with your own money.
The shocking truth, however, is that it’s going to get far, far worse if we don’t stop the march of tyranny that’s accelerating all around us.
In today’s analysis, I detail ten unbelievable things that are sure to take place if we don’t stop the march of tyranny and take back our privacy, our dignity and our future.
Humanity now faces a critical choice: We either choose the path of total enslavement under an authoritarian, techno-fascist dictatorship, or we choose to instead embrace decentralized finance, free speech, rationality and the rule of law.
Here’s my list of ten unbelievable things that will occur if we don’t stop the tyranny, with the most mild outcomes at the top of the list and the most nightmarish outcomes near the bottom of this list.
Ten nightmarish outcomes if we don’t turn back tyranny
1) All cryptocurrency, gold and silver will be outlawed. All financial transactions will have to go through centralized control systems run by the regime, including CBDCs. Your will be required to participate in a CBDC to pay taxes, buy food and receive a UBI (Universal Basic Income). All your purchases will be monitored and restricted, if necessary, to shape your behavior.
2) Your ability to purchase food (and meat in particular) will be severely restricted based on your cultural and climate compliance score. You will be restricted to a calorie limit of allowable grocery purchases, and any food items deemed to be in non-compliance with climate propaganda (i.e. cheese, meat and milk) will be restricted.
3) You will be required to conform to the narrative demands of the regime, and if the regime changes its stance on anything, you will be required to retroactively update all your previous articles, videos, social media posts and podcasts to conform to the new narrative, or face penalties and censorship.
4) You will be prohibited from growing food, savings seeds or raising backyard chickens without receiving permission (and licensing) from the government, which will require you to use genetically engineered seeds and repeated vaccination of your farm animals. (And no raw milk allowed.)
5) You will be entirely barred from purchasing firearms, ammunition, knives, ballistic vests or other self-defense items, leaving you at the mercy of the lawless state that’s defunding police and releasing violent criminals onto the streets.
6) The state will medically kidnap your children and mutilate them to achieve “gender transitions,” and if you try to interfere, you will be charged with felony crimes and child abuse. This is about to become law in California.
7) You will be required to install a government-monitored network of video cameras and microphones in your home to make sure you don’t say anything that might go against “facts” being pushed by the regime. AI systems will monitor your speech and activities, then report you to government authorities if you veer from the required degree of obedience.
8) You will be prohibited from purchasing a gasoline or diesel vehicle, yet at the same time, your home electricity usage will be strictly limited based on your climate and culture compliance score. In other words, if you ever wish to charge your car and drive somewhere, you will need to be completely obedient to the regime’s narrative, or you’ll never have enough kilowatt hours available to charge your EV. Only those who parrot the ridiculous lies of the regime — i.e. “a man can become a woman” — will be allowed to use transportation.
9) You will most likely be replaced by AI systems or automation robots who will take over your current job.
As you are displaced from work, you will be placed on a UBI system to receive automatic digital payments, but your ability to access your UBI “benefits” will require you to stay fully up to date on all vaccine requirements, no matter how many are demanded (and regardless of their safety). Effectively, in order to receive a UBI and be able to afford enough food to narrowly avoid starvation, you will need to agree to subject yourself to state-sponsored medical suicide via endless vaccine jabs. To live, in other words, you will have to surrender to be slowly killed by the state.
10) Extra UBI benefits will be awarded to individuals who voluntarily allow “fact checkers” and “public safety enforcers” to have real-time, unlimited access to the microphones and cameras on their mobile devices.
This will turn ordinary citizens into walking spy machines who will sweep up all surrounding audio and video from their immediate environment. 5G communication speeds are necessary to achieve this, and when “smart clothing” becomes a reality, microphones and cameras will be embedded into shirts, jackets, hats and other forms of clothing, streaming real-time audio and video to government controllers who will use AI analysis to generate transcripts that can be keyword-searched for “speech violations” that will result in harsh penalties. This will mean that you can be spied on by anyone, anywhere, at any time, including merely walking down a sidewalk or chatting in a restaurant. The reach of the regime will be unlimited. This technology was already tested during Covid, tracking individual movements and forcing people into lockdowns if their phone geolocation data showed them entering the close proximity of anyone who later tested positive for Covid.
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Comments Off on Dystopian Nightmare: Ten Unbelievable Things that Will Happen Soon if We Don’t Stop the March of Tyranny and the Enslavement of Humanity
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First published on June 10, 2023
***
Briefly, as a medical doctor, it is my opinion that deadly viral pandemics are not possible, and are likely a Big Pharma/globalist construct/fraud.
Additionally, the “gain of function” narrative which is being put about is likely false and is intended to bolster the story that deadly pandemics caused by viruses (given that one accepts that viruses exist), both man-made and naturally occurring, can occur, when that is not possible.
There was no pandemic in 2020, but perhaps more importantly there can be no pandemic of concern in the future.
Furthermore, just like the Covid-19 fraud, the Ukraine war, climate change, and the “trans nonsense” do not make any sense and are all driven by relentless propaganda/psychological torture and unprecedented censorship which foster dangerous cults.
It follows that we do not need any of their “measures” to control us in their endless fake emergencies.
Furthermore, it is possible that the whole world of virology, genomics, epidemiology and the tyranny of evidence-based medicine were deliberately constructed by our enemies so that the Trojan horse of Covid-19 could be used to kick start the process of imposing totalitarianism on us all, worldwide.
Their aim is to break “social bonds”, historical bonds, cultural bonds, by for example destroying the middle class (the defining feature of so-called democracies) and nation states and family hierarchies, so that people do not want to live any more and thereby die as per the mice in the Universe 25 experiment of the 1960s.
Some of our friends are leading people astray. It is difficult to be sure that they are not controlled opposition.
The people, in countries right across the world, urgently need to be educated about totalitarianism, and the many ways a descent into totalitarianism is being undertaken.
It is preferable to teach people that all the dangerous nonsenses on many different fronts which they are being fed now, and which they will be fed in the future, are manifestations of a dangerous descent into totalitarianism, from which there will be no return.
It is imperative that people fully understand the extreme seriousness of the situation which we are in.
We must fight against everything which looks like tyranny or which might lead to tyranny.
We must learn all we can about totalitarianism and inform our fellow human beings in language that everyone understands, and as quickly as possible.
We thought in our “civilised” Western “democracies”, comfortable and brainwashed as we were, that we would never be visited by a descent into totalitarianism, but we were wrong.
Full blown totalitarianism can and will come to us if we do not fight NOW against it in all its manifestations or preludes.
We were warned by George Orwell and Aldous Huxley, but most people took no notice, because they thought that it did not apply to them or their countries. It does.
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Dr. Stephen Frost, prominent medical doctor, human rights activist and anti-war whistleblower. North Wales. Founder of Doctors for Covid Ethics. He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG).
Featured image is from Stop World Control
The Worldwide Corona Crisis, Global Coup d’Etat Against Humanity
by Michel Chossudovsky
Michel Chossudovsky reviews in detail how this insidious project “destroys people’s lives”. He provides a comprehensive analysis of everything you need to know about the “pandemic” — from the medical dimensions to the economic and social repercussions, political underpinnings, and mental and psychological impacts.
“My objective as an author is to inform people worldwide and refute the official narrative which has been used as a justification to destabilize the economic and social fabric of entire countries, followed by the imposition of the “deadly” COVID-19 “vaccine”. This crisis affects humanity in its entirety: almost 8 billion people. We stand in solidarity with our fellow human beings and our children worldwide. Truth is a powerful instrument.”
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First published. on May 1, 2023
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I have covered the great deception of ‘Net Zero’ in more than one article already. But I’m sticking with it because this massive con trick lies right at the heart of the current attempt, by a small group of psychotic control freaks, to gain absolute control over planetary life and to eviscerate the fundamental laws of nature in the process.
We must spell it out as it is. The intention behind the World Economic Forum’s Great Reset, Green Deal ‘Net Zero’ agenda is to completely block off the arteries of sentient life on earth and replace them with an insentient artificial construct.
A construct which, going under the heading ‘Fourth Industrial Revolution’ demands that thinking man/woman is made redundant, to be replaced by computer power directly accessed to the human brain. The Transhuman agenda.
Rapidly developing algorithmic and digital technologies are the dark techno gods of this planned take-over of life on earth. A life that must be stripped bare of access to the higher dimensions of universal awareness, and kept strictly to a material, five sense prison camp, to include passive obeisance to the perpetrators.
We must not be afraid to state that the motivation for bringing about this dystopian holocaust is quite obviously very dark.
There has existed for millennia, a perverted anti-life element within the human race, which is only out for its own narcissistic ends. It’s a ‘me, me, me’ obsessed element which has no truck with the existence of God, or indeed any universal benign source of life. It only knows the essentially demonic cravings for ‘full spectrum dominance’.
The weaker mirrored version of this despotic malfeasance is to be found in those largely unconscious human beings who become hypnotically entangled with this grandiose narcissism. Here the current obsession is the ‘selfie’ and the seeming need to show others ‘how one is looking’ in 101 different poses and locations on an almost daily – if not hourly- basis.
“Oh well” some may say “at last they are having fun”. But, I observe, the love affair with the seductive agility of the EMF powered mobile phone, is actually an obsession. It follows a very similar pattern as the smoking addict.
Young people in their tens of millions have developed a kind of nervous need to repeatedly pull their cell phones out of their back pockets and check if anyone has called them. It is an addiction which has produced a weird kind of spectacle to those who remember a time when people looked where they were going and took-in the atmosphere and specialness of place without needing to ‘snap’ it and without the snapper making sure that he/she is the main feature of each image!
Humanity, until a critical number become conscious, automatically follows the messages and psychological persuasions of those who control the status quo. Who set the agenda.
So when Klaus Schwab and Yuval Noah Harari announce that it’s ‘advanced technology’ that is going to lead humanity to the promised land, and that a reinvented cyborgian world will be ‘an improvement on God’s version’, many EMF addicts fail to register any resistance to this soulless proclamation. They are already half way there.
Nevertheless, some seem to be aroused by the story that the ending of the world will come about via something called ‘global warming’. This suggests that there must be some form of self preservation instinct still working here. Some emotional sense of the undesirability of this outcome.
But we should question whether this emotion is the result of being told, repeatedly “you should be frightened”, or whether it is an actual sense of shock? Followers of Greta Thunberg, Extinction Rebellion and Stop Oil, for example, seem prepared to make quite a show out of their ‘save the world’ ambitions.
It looks real enough until one realises these are governments and WEF/Soros/Gates sponsored shows and that the participants are brainwashed believers in whatever they see or hear on the BBC, CNN or their favourite social media portal. Their brain cells seem to lack the ability to make an independent critical judgement. There has been a deadening of the basic will power ‘to question’.
The relentless process of psychological attrition is something that the proponents of a New World Order do particularly well. Dumbing down is proving an effective weapon in the war against a humanity collectively addicted to the technological take-over of their lives, and to the fake green story about ‘the ending of the world’.
That fake green story centres around the stated WEF, UN, EU imperative for achieving a ‘Net Zero’ world by 2050. An imperative, one way or the other, signed up to by just about every country of the world.
But, as I have explained in previous writings, ‘Net Zero’ is a quasi scientific fiction, completely devoid of reason or rational thought. It utilises two abstracted meaningless words ‘net’ and ‘zero’ to convey something that everybody is supposed to understand as a saviour remedy for an overheating planet, but which is actually a scurrilous plot for the decimation of life on earth.
Please be aware: ‘Net Zero’ exactly fits the description of what we are told run-away global warming would do to our living planet.
The demonic element of mankind likes to perform this sort of black magic on unsuspecting mortals.
It likes to reverse the reality and make the complete suppression of the ‘plant CO2 to oxygen’ photosynthesis cycle – into a global redemption agenda. And the survival of a living breathing green planet, the number one enemy.
If one chooses to interpret ‘Net Zero’ as a jargonistic way of saying ‘zero carbon’, one is led to believe that those standing behind this planned global ecocide have pinned all their alarm-clamouring around a recent verifiable trend of just 0.13 centigrade increase in warming per decade, with no increase observed since 2016 and a slight cooling factor detected since then (NOAH/NASA).
This is the ‘science’ which stands behind the story of the coming ‘catastrophic over heating’ of the planet. Which can can only see ‘excess CO2’ as the key causative agent of our planetary demise.
Such a position fails to take cognisance of the fact that our global survival system is being brutally subjected to a litany of deeply wounding attacks via out of control levels of pesticides, plastics, chemtrails, EMF pollution, gas fracking, nuclear radiation, deforestation, concreting over of fertile land, water poisoning, insect annihilation, GMO mono-cropping, animal factory farming and its toxic wastes, war (greatest finite fossil fuel user), ubiquitous oil spillages, wild life habitat destruction and continuous pharmaceutical disruption of the world’s natural healing systems – and much, much more.
As if this litany of attacks on the integrity of planetary eco-systems and human health was not enough, we must now add:
The ‘Net Zero’ ecocide saviour remedy.
The digitalisation and robotisation of a large segment of the work place.
5G powered ‘Smart City’ concentration camps for disenfranchised farmers and country dwellers. Those still committed to working ‘with’ nature and growing real food. Not the synthetic stuff promised by ‘Green’ Great Reset.
A weaponised ‘vaccination’ programme to coincide with the hitting of the 5G ‘on’ switch.
The confiscation of all private property, so that we ‘will have nothing and will be happy’.
An extended ‘war theatre’ to include space and almost every populated and unpopulated region of the world.
And last but not least, the greatest prize – the complete dehumanisation and de-spiritualisation of homo sapiens via an ‘upgrading’ of the species into computer powered Transhuman cyborgs.
Yes, a state that Yuval Harari claims will produce results better than those achieved by God.
However, the rhetoric and the reality are not in sync. Cracks in the grand plan are appearing with increasing frequency. It’s leading figureheads appear increasingly off balance, almost comically in some cases.
The Covid agenda has given us a much clearer view into the snake pit. We see there, amongst other things, the further weaponisation of health and the almost unfathomable deception perpetrated by Big Pharma and the US Department of Defence.[1]
We are learning fast. We now see that Covid, 5G, Net Zero and the Great Reset/Green New Deal are all part of one plan: a declaration of war against nature and humanity.
We are finding a commonality of resistance to this brutal intervention across an ever widening field of human expression.
The pace of another sort of change is quickening. Antonio Guterres (WHO) announces the desperate need for further ‘Stop Global Warming’ measures, leading to the need to bring forward the ‘Net Zero’ deadline to 2040. He and his henchmen are clearly rattled by the rising tide of awareness and push-back.
‘We the people’ are rising inexorably. Spring is breaking through the waning grip of Winter.
Push-on we will, for the challenge we are confronting has a liberating effect on our souls and on our passion for the manifestation of a life based on Truth.
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Julian Rose is an early pioneer of UK organic farming, a writer and international activist. He is President of the International Coalition to Protect the Polish Countryside and author of ‘Overcoming the Robotic Mind’ See www.julianrose.info
He is a regular contributor to Global Research.
Note
[1] The recently uncovered evidence that the US Department of Defense financed the production of the mRNA GM ‘vaccine’ subsequently rolled out by the corporate pharmaceutical industry.
Important article by Mark Keenan first published on October 30, 2020
For decades there have been false and deceptive narratives disseminated by organisations, including the United Nations (UN) and the World Economic Forum (WEF), by the governments that comply with these narratives and by the corporate-owned media.
These narratives include the deceptive political schemes of sustainable development, Agenda 21/2030, combating climate change, and the WEF ‘reset’ of Society under cover of what has been proven to be a fake pandemic. According to the World Health Organization’s official statistics, up to 650,000 people normally die every year from flu, yet it is never before been called a ‘pandemic’, or regarded as a cause for a world lock-down.
Beyond the attractively designed rhetoric of politically defined sustainable development, deeper analysis shows it is a deceptive narrative that has facilitated ongoing globalisation, a process which has had serious detrimental consequences for the environment and the wellbeing of society. The concept of manmade climate change has been utilised for a political agenda of taxation.
Globalisation, artificially created boom-bust economic cycles, and the debt-money system have been central to the accumulation of immense wealth by the monetocracy, i.e., a small group that owns and controls the privately owned banking system, the money creation process, world finance and associated mega-corporations. These schemes and processes have all been utilised for the purposes of greed, power and authoritarian control to the general detriment of the overwhelming majority of the world population. The United Nation’s Agenda 21/2030, the Paris Climate Agreement, the Fourth Industrial Revolution and the proposed WEF ‘reset’ offer an insight into how a small group of extremely wealthy globalists want to further control and dictate the lives of all people over the course of the next decades as part of a plan for world governance.
An attempt to usher in a reset of society and one world government control under cover of the Coronavirus ‘situation’ and controlled economic demolition
The flawed economic and financial system was already in crash/failure mode prior to the Coronavirus ‘situation’. The flaws of the system were exposed in the banking crisis of 2008, endless quantitative easing occurred from October 2019 onwards and a multi-trillion dollar bailout/wealth transfer to financial asset management corporations was sanctioned in the U.S. in April 2020. This significant bailout event gained little media coverage in comparison to the coverage of the Coronavirus situation.
The truth is a controlled economic demolition is taking place. Over the past decades, a small group have gained and consolidated immense wealth via control of the debt-money creation system, privately owned mega-banks, and mega-corporations. This process was powered by the associated GDP hypergrowth paradigm of globalisation.
Over the decades, the debt-money component of the system has resulted in worldwide debt-slavery with virtually all governments in debt to the international private banking system. This served the immense wealth accumulation plans of those few in control of the system, but the system was ultimately flawed/unsustainable. These people have long planned to dismantle their flawed economic system and collapse society to the detriment of humanity, and clear a path/excuse for the introduction of their nefarious ideal – a technocratic authoritarian ‘reset’ of society and centralized one world government.
The WEF, an organisation with a corporate agenda known as the Fourth Industrial Revolution and with significant links to privately owned mega-banks, mega-corporations, and the U.N., is at the forefront of this attempted ‘reset’ of society. This ‘reset’ attempts to replace the old system of worldwide debt-money slavery with their new fascist system of technocratic authoritarianism under cover of a fake pandemic and is aligned with their deceptive political narrative of sustainable development. The ‘reset’ is an attempt by the WEF, globalist bankers and their political cohorts to push their fourth industrial revolution agenda of control.
The WEF attempt will fail in my opinion and is failing as millions of people are seeing through the agenda. The real divide in society is not the media fostered left versus right ‘punch and judy show’ – it is fascist authoritarianism versus human freedom. The power seekers versus the freedom lovers. There are those that just want to be left alone and there are those that just won’t leave them alone.
The Event 201 pandemic simulation was a simulation of a Coronavirus pandemic held just two months before the actual Coronavirus ‘situation’ in early 2020. It was held by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the WEF. The scenario explained: “the pandemic will continue at some rate until there is an effective vaccine or until 80-90 % of the global population has been exposed. From that point on, it is likely to be an endemic childhood disease” and suggested solutions to a pandemic, such as the institution of a global centralized economic body that could handle the financial response to the Coronavirus.
Enter the ‘real’ coronavirus situation. Less than a month after the conclusion of Event 201 a worldwide Coronavirus ‘situation’ appeared in accordance with the Event 201 simulation and the ‘reset‘ of the WEF was launched, in what the organisation said was in response to the Coronavirus. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, a direct partner of the WEF, has been a major force behind efforts for a Coronavirus vaccination to be disseminated worldwide.
Many commentators and people worldwide can see that the situation is yet another problem-reaction-solution (Hegelian dialectic manipulation) created by these people to attempt to implement their plans for the so-called ‘reset’ and one-world authoritarian government control.
Government and corporate-media deceptions in relation to the Coronavirus
The overall situation has provided ample political leverage and a wave of fear was instilled amongst the general population, largely due to government propaganda and scare-mongering tactics of corporate-controlled media who utilised nothing less than trauma-based mind control to convince the people that they are all likely to die unless they do exactly what the world government orders. A fearful people are more compliant and accepting of authoritarian change. In 2020, drastic control and lockdown measures were quickly imposed on worldwide society in response the coronavirus situation.
The book ‘Covid19 – The Great Reset’ by WEF Founder Klaus Schwab and Thierry Malleret utilises the Coronavirus situation as a major reason for the ‘reset’ and makes scaremongering statements such as:
“the Corona virus is spreading globally and sparing none”
“If no one power can enforce order, our world will suffer from a global order deficit”
“A Great Reset is necessary to build a new social contract… COVID-19 has accelerated our transition into the age of the Fourth Industrial Revolution.”
The book also states social distancing measures are likely to persist after the pandemic subsides and that ‘fear… will thus speed the relentless march of automation’. Yet Schwab admits in the book that the consequences of Covid 19 in terms of health and mortality are mild compared to previous pandemics and that HIV/AIDS was responsible for 100 times more deaths than Covid 19 (1). Millions of people have, therefore, challenged the mainstream/WEF narrative and posed the valid question ‘if the consequences are relatively mild why are drastic changes of mass societal control and surveillance being proposed and implemented?’.
Furthermore, the health dangers of vaccines are now widely known in society, yet a message from António Guterres, Secretary-General, United Nations, New York shows the U.N. is aligned with this vaccination agenda, he states:
“we need a people’s vaccine… None of us are safe until all of us are safe’
A multitude of deceptive aspects of the Coronavirus situation have been exposed worldwide. For example, in Ireland official data shows Ireland’s overall mortality rate is no different from previous years and previous flu seasons and Europe as a whole shows a similar situation. Ireland’s second wave shows no evidence of concerning difference in respiratory ICU or excess mortality over previous years. Furthermore, in relation to the process of registering the number of Coronavirus deaths, a document from the Northern Ireland Government website (2) stated on page 10:
“The Department of Health count the number of deaths reported by health trusts, where the deceased had a positive test for COVID-19 and died within 28 days, whether or not COVID-19 was the cause of death…and whether or not Covid-19 was the primary underlying cause of death. The figures include cases where the doctor noted that there was suspected or probable corona virus infection involved in the death”
When this issue was exposed by concerned citizens on social media the document was deleted from the government website, but the document has been saved here. Furthermore, a report from the U.S. Federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in August 2020 showed that the number of actual deaths that occurred has been significantly misrepresented. The report drops a “bombshell” i.e. that in 94 percent of the cases of those who died from Coronavirus, another disease was also at work on the victim and the overwhelming majority of this 6% are aged over 80. The report states:
“For 6% of the deaths, COVID-19 was the only cause mentioned,” the CDC stated in its report, under the heading “Comoborbities.” – (3)
The ‘reset’ attempts to replace the system of worldwide debt-money slavery with a new fascist system of technocratic authoritarianism
The debt slavery paradigm has been in place for decades. This paradigm has been controlled by the privately owned worldwide banking system, and is evidenced by the fact that in 2020 virtually all governments of the world are in vast debt to the private international banking/finance system on debt-money the bankers created from nothing.
For decades, the international privately owned banking system has created debt-money from nothing and charged all governments and people often extortionist interest on it (usury). By this and other mechanisms it bled a significant percentage of the profits of the world’s nations. This resulted in immense wealth and political power for a tiny minority that own the private system of worldwide banking, but placed a financial debt burden of control on the nations of the world.
The cruel hoax is that governments could have created this money themselves. The last US President to attempt to take the money creation process out of the hands of the private bankers was John F Kennedy.
The flawed GDP hypergrowth/globalisation system was needed by the banking system, so that it could receive endless interest payments on debt-money loans created from nothing, yet for decades GDP growth caused environmental degradation and it has been a myth that the system “floated all boats”. During this time, the real economic welfare of the 99% of society, as estimated by the Genuine Progress Indicator, has decreased since 1978. The pseudo-science of contemporary economics used by all governments facilitated the process. Furthermore, by controlling the availability of credit the private banking cartel created boom-bust-bailout cycles at will that placed nations in further debt.
Over decades the power of the bankers to create money resulted in the power to own, control and manipulate the assets of the material world, as well media and politics. A small group of people and the private mega-banks and mega- corporations they run, gained and consolidated control of the majority of the world’s financial wealth and assets.
This power grab was achieved not by creating more value, but by fully controlling the source of money and the financial world. A pyramid type system of hierarchical control has existed in society – it has operated via debt slavery. The higher up the pyramid you go the closer you get to the source of money creation. At the bottom level we are all going about our everyday lives.
At the next level up are governments. Governments are given a monopoly on force and use it to tax and control the population whether or not we agree. Who controls the governments? The election of new leaders via the illusion of representative democracy does not alter the vast government bureaucracy, which is ultimately subservient not to the people but to international finance. International banking and mega corporations control governments, i.e., at the next level up are the mega corporations and at the next level beyond the corporations is the privately owned worldwide banking cartel. The corporations have relied on cheap financing from the megabanks. We can conclude that those who control the mega-banks ultimately control the mega-corporations.
The old system of debt slavery may have reached its mathematical endpoint, due to peak oil, the consequent inability to grow economies further and the inability of governments to make ongoing interest payments. Recall that systemic problems in the economic system led to endless quantitative easing in 2019 and a multi-trillion-dollar banking bailout in 2020 that took place under cover of a virus. Regardless of the reason for the timing, it is clear that the 2020 “reset” is part of a long-term plan/agenda of control.
Representative democracy as currently implemented in much of the world is an illusion
Representative democracy under capitalism as currently implemented in much of the world, is an illusion – it is money that controls the world. Financial power translated into political power. Those that control the money creation process wield the power to control the corporate media, steer international political policy and own the material world, regardless of which political party is elected, or which system is utilised (capitalism, socialism, communism, etc). The real divide in society is not the media fostered left versus right ‘punch and judy show’ – it is the fascist authoritarianism of the money masters versus human freedom.
We have been under the impression that we each live in individual and autonomous nation states, but actually the mechanisms of a one world corporate and institutional government have already long been in operation.
Over the decades its controllers have facilitated a perpetual war machine causing death to countless of millions of people; mass abortion; genetically modified foods; thousands of chemical compounds, herbicides and pesticides harmful to human health; toxic pharmaceuticals and vaccines; fluoridated water; and widespread environmental destruction. Now in the midst of what has proven to be a mild virus situation, we are expected to believe that the leaders of the unelected WEF and its corporate partners, such as vaccine-promoting billionaire Bill Gates, are suddenly concerned for the lives of people? Does a vulture wish the cow to be alive or dead? Does a vulture government wish for the health of its citizens? (4)
The real sustainability movement was hijacked decades ago by the deceptive political scheme of sustainable development
Decades ago, the real sustainability movement was hijacked by the deceptive political scheme of sustainable development, which actually endorsed the unjust debt-money banking and flawed GDP hypergrowth economic system. Sustainable development is and has been a false narrative operating under cover of continued environmentally destructive globalisation. Sustainable Development is not real sustainability at all. It is a political scheme that has detracted from what real environmentalism is.
The subject of environmental sustainability and how to create a truly successful ‘sustainable’ society that nurtures human creativity, freedom, and wellbeing and that of the natural world have been central to my research for the past 15 years.
However, over the past decades the orthodox political agenda of ‘sustainable development’ that has been promoted by the UN. and the governments of the world has not worked. It has not addressed the unjust flawed systems of banking and economic control that benefitted an elite wealthy few at the expense of everyone else, nor has it solved the “real” environmental problems of the world. Furthermore, the loosely defined Brundtland definition of sustainable development used by the UN and governments for 30 years actually endorses GDP growth and is not a scientifically robust definition of sustainability.
There are detrimental environmental and societal effects associated with the debt-money banking and GDP growth economic paradigm (5). The worldwide private banking system has for decades been bleeding a significant percentage of the profit of nations of the world/the productive element of the economy.
For example, in recent years Ireland has been paying between €6 to 10 billion per annum in interest payments on the national debt and as a trading entity the country has been making a profit of around €40 billion per annum. Yet the political agenda of sustainable development does not reform these areas – in fact it has endorsed them for decades. The ‘real’ environmental and ‘real’ sustainability movement was hijacked decades ago by this political scheme known as sustainable development. By 2020, even the word ‘sustainability’ itself has become a dirty word to many people – with its modern political mechanisms far removed from the insightful writings of original sustainability visionaries of the 1970s.
Part of the political sustainable development strategy has been a delusional attempt to “decouple” environmental impacts from GDP growth. This decoupling strategy has failed, was never going work and I doubt it ever was intended to work. This is evidenced by a BIOS Research Institute study that reviewed 179 scientific studies on decoupling published between 1990 and 2019 — a period of nearly 30 years — and found, in short, that:
“the evidence does not suggest that decoupling towards ecological sustainability is happening at a global (or even regional) scale.” – (6)
BIOS Research Institute is an independent multidisciplinary scientific organisation that has previously advised the UN Global Sustainable Development Report on the risks of emerging biophysical limits to endless economic growth. The de-coupling concept has been utilised as a ploy to placate people concerned with the environmental impacts of rampant GDP growth – yet rampant globalisation and environmental degradation continued unabated for decades.
Politically defined ‘sustainable development’ has been an illusory light ‘greenwashing’ of the current flawed system, thereby temporarily perpetuating a system that will ultimately fail due to its unsustainable, ecocidal, and human welfare diminishing effects. Many seemingly worthwhile corporate and governmental sustainable development initiatives are in operation, but all have operated within the unquestioned paradigm (or status quo) of environmentally destructive GDP growth along with the debt-money private worldwide banking system that has placed much of humanity on a treadmill of debt.
In analysing sustainable development, we must expose these flaws and detrimental effects of the banking, economic and monetary system, as well as the undemocratic deceptive ‘reset’ of society that is being attempted in 2020 to replace the old flawed system.
UN sustainable development programs, such as Agenda 21, Agenda 2030, and the Paris Climate Agreement, as well as the economic ‘reset’ being attempted, all operate under the cover of continued globalisation. All are working together to create a new resource-based economic system. This may sound a worthy goal in light of the flaws of the failing growth-based economic paradigm.
However, closer analysis reveals that sustainable development involves an agenda to take control of all resources and all production, leaving all people to be micro-managed by a type of technocracy. This technocratic type society is outlined in Agenda 21/2030 and proposed by the WEF ‘reset’. The political jargon of ‘sustainable development/Agenda 21’ is not true sustainability. Agenda 21 involves a plan to abolish private property rights and get all people off the land and into so-called smart towns and smart cities, where they will be unable to grow much food.
This is the opposite of what is needed – people should be moving back to the land and developing self-sufficient communities. Furthermore, smart cities utilise EMF technologies and thousands of scientific reports exist describing the harmful health effects of these technologies. An undemocratic dictatorship involving the rise of smart cities, surveillance, crypto currencies, and the drive toward a digital cashless society that people have no control over are all part of this globalist plan.
Creating a truly sustainable society involves developing practical locally empowered self-sufficient rural communities of villages and towns with local and regional systems for food, energy, water, goods and services rather than the unsustainable trans-national systems of the so-called globalised economy or the corporation-serving technocratic futures the WEF have planned for us. It also involves living conscious of the needs of others and of the purity of natural environmental resources we all rely on.
Climate Change – 900 scientists have signed a declaration disputing the IPPC carbon emissions narrative
It is my opinion that the narrative of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is incorrect. I have signed a declaration to this effect at www.clintel.org along with 900 other scientists and professionals. I have zero commercial interest in stating this position.
I kindly urge the many well-intentioned people working in the environmental and sustainable development sector to please re-evaluate the evidence/data in relation to the IPCC narrative that carbon (CO2) emissions are causing climate change and to be open-minded to the analysis of other scientists.
The concept that CO2 emissions cause climate change is a flawed theory and it has involved a political agenda of taxation that has been incessantly promoted for decades. This agenda has detracted and distracted significantly from peoples understanding of what real environmentalism is and involves.
The geological archive reveals that Earth’s climate has varied as long as the planet has existed, with natural cold and warm phases. The world has warmed significantly less than predicted by IPCC on the basis of modelled anthropogenic forcing. The gap between the real world and the modelled world tells us that we are far from understanding climate change. Climate models have many shortcomings and are not remotely plausible as global policy tools. They blow up the effect of greenhouse gases, such as CO2, and ignore the fact that enriching the atmosphere with CO2 is beneficial. Furthermore, relevant data showing temperatures were higher in the early 1900s than today appears to have been omitted (7).
CO2 is plant food, the basis of all life on Earth. Thousands of actual industrial pollutants exist, but CO2 is not a pollutant. It is essential to all life on Earth. Photosynthesis is a blessing. More CO2 is beneficial for nature, greening the Earth: additional CO2 in the air has promoted growth in global plant biomass. It is also good for agriculture, increasing the yields of crops worldwide (8).
The UN Agenda 2030 plan and the Paris Agreement goal to reduce CO2 emissions by 7% per annum until 2030 is in effect a plan that will disable the resource mechanisms of the industrial economy for the food, energy and goods that enable human life and survival. This is being done before humanity has transitioned away from the flawed trans-national industrial economy toward self-sufficient local economies. Whether you believe the ‘plug is being pulled’ intentionally or not, this inevitably amounts to a de-population outcome. The dependency of humanity was created for decades by an international political corporate hierarchy rampantly promoting and implementing flawed trans-national systems for agriculture, energy and goods. I conclude, that the science and data behind the IPPC CO2 narrative is flawed and the Paris Agreement plan to reduce CO2 emissions so quickly would have a de-population effect. These potentially genocidal narratives must be exposed.
Conclusion
The United Nations, European Union, and most governments are not serving the people, for decades they have been prioritising the interests of private bankers who control the money system; and the interests of institutions, such as the WEF, which prioritises the interests of privately-owned mega-corporations. The privately owned banking/money creation system is the head of the snake.
The current worldwide situation has serious implications for the future of worldwide society and human wellbeing. The ‘reset’ agenda is an imposition against human freedoms is being exposed worldwide.
As sovereign free peoples, we urgently need to start planning, connecting with each other and creating much more self-sufficient local communities, towns, and regions free of the mainstream economy. Whilst respecting ‘real’ environmental principles and the natural world we rely on, we should disavow the fake deceptive narratives of the ‘reset’, sustainable development and combating climate change.
The path for success involves personal freedom and local independence – not centralization, authoritarianism and slavery. If people are not dependent on the system they cannot be controlled by the system. How many people will accept the globalist authoritarian system and how many will fight for freedom and create their own local systems? You are part of the answer.
I have no doubt that the short-term effects of this ‘reset’ are likely to be bad for many people, but that the long-term opposition to these unjust changes will eventually bring an end to the present system of nefarious corporate control and manipulation.
God Bless and best wishes in the years ahead.
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Mark Keenan is a former scientist at the UK Government Dept. of Energy and Climate Change, and at the United Nations Environment Division. He is author of the following books available on Amazon:
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First published on Global Research on July 7, 2022
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“The ferocity of the confrontation in Ukraine shows that we’re talking about much more than the fate of the regime in Kiev. The architecture of the entire world order is at stake.” Sergei Naryshkin, Director of Russia’s Foreign Intelligence.
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Here’s your ‘reserve currency’ thought for the day: Every US dollar is a check written on an account that is overdrawn by 30 trillion dollars.
It’s true. The “full faith and credit” of the US Treasury is largely a myth held together by an institutional framework that rests on a foundation of pure sand. In fact, the USD is not worth the paper it is printed on; it is an IOU flailing in an ocean of red ink.
The only thing keeping the USD from vanishing into the ether, is the trust of credulous people who continue to accept it as legal tender.
But why do people remain confident in the dollar when its flaws are known to all? After all, America’s $30 trillion National Debt is hardly a secret, nor is the additional $9 trillion that’s piled up on the Fed’s balance sheet. That is a stealth debt of which the American people are completely unaware, but they are responsible for all the same.
In order to answer that question, we need to look at how the system actually works and how the dollar is propped up by the numerous institutions that were created following WW2. These institutions provide an environment for conducting history’s longest and most flagrant swindle, the exchange of high-ticket manufactured goods, raw materials and hard-labor for slips of green paper with dead presidents on them.
One can only marvel at the genius of the elites who concocted this scam and then imposed it wholesale on the masses without a peep of protest. Of course, the system is accompanied by various enforcement mechanisms that swiftly remove anyone who tries to either break free from the dollar or, God help us, create an alternate system altogether. (Saddam Hussein and Muammar Qaddafi come to mind.) But the fact is– aside from the institutional framework and the ruthless extermination of dollar opponents– there’s no reason why humanity should remain yoked to a currency that is buried beneath a mountain of debt and whose real value is virtually unknowable.
It wasn’t always like this. There was a time when the dollar was the strongest currency in the world and deserved its spot at the top of the heap. Following WW1, the US was “the owner of the majority of the world’s gold” which was why an international delegation “decided that the world’s currencies would no longer be linked to gold but could be pegged to the U.S. dollar, “because the greenback was, itself, linked to gold.” Here’s more from an article at Investopedia:
“The arrangement came to be known as the Bretton Woods Agreement. It established the authority of central banks, which would maintain fixed exchange rates between their currencies and the dollar. In turn, the United States would redeem U.S. dollars for gold on demand….
The U.S dollar was officially crowned the world’s reserve currency and was backed by the world’s largest gold reserves thanks to the Bretton Woods Agreement. Instead of gold reserves, other countries accumulated reserves of U.S. dollars. Needing a place to store their dollars, countries began buying U.S. Treasury securities, which they considered to be a safe store of money.
The demand for Treasury securities, coupled with the deficit spending needed to finance the Vietnam War and the Great Society domestic programs, caused the United States to flood the market with paper money….
The demand for gold was such that President Richard Nixon was forced to intervene and de-link the dollar from gold, which led to the floating exchange rates that exist today. Although there have been periods of stagflation, which is defined as high inflation and high unemployment, the U.S. dollar has remained the world’s reserve currency.” (“How the U.S. Dollar Became the World’s Reserve Currency”, Investopedia)
But now the gold is gone and what’s left is a steaming pile of debt. So, how on earth has the dollar managed to preserve its status as the world’s preeminent currency?
Proponents of the dollar system, will tell you it has something to do with “the size and strength of the U.S. economy and the dominance of the U.S. financial markets.” But that’s nonsense.
The truth is, reserve currency status has nothing to do with “the size and strength” of America’s post-industrial, service-oriented, bubble-driven, third-world-sh**hole economy. Nor does it have anything to do with the alleged safety of US Treasuries” which– next to the dollar– is the biggest Ponzi flim-flam of all time.
The real reason the dollar has remained the world’s premier currency is because of the cartelization of Central Banking.
The Western Central Banks are a de facto monopoly run by a small cabal of inter-breeding bottom-feeders who coordinate and collude on monetary policy in order to preserve their maniacal death-grip on the financial markets and the global economy. It’s a Monetary Mafia and– as George Carlin famously said: “You and I are not in it. You and I are not in the big club.” Bottom line: It is the relentless manipulation of interest rates, forward guidance and Quantitative Easing (QE) that has kept the dollar in its lofty but undeserved spot.
But all that is about to change due entirely to Biden’s reckless foreign policy which is forcing critical players in the global economy to create their own rival system. This is a real tragedy for the West that has enjoyed a century of nonstop wealth extraction from the developing world.
Now– due to the economic sanctions on Russia– an entirely new order is emerging in which the dollar will be substituted for national currencies (processed through an independent financial settlement system) in bilateral trade deals until– later this year– Russia launches an exchange-traded commodities-backed currency that will be used by trading partners in Asia and Africa.
Washington’s theft of Russia’s foreign reserves in April turbo-charged the current process which was further accelerated by banning of Russia from foreign markets. In short, US economic sanctions and boycotts have expanded the non-dollar zone by many orders of magnitude and forced the creation of a new monetary order.
How dumb is that? For decades the US has been running a scam in which it exchanges its fishwrap currency for things of genuine value. (oil, manufactured goods and labor) But now the Biden troupe has scrapped that system altogether and divided the world into warring camps.
But, why?
To punish Russia, is that it?
Yes, that’s it.
But, if that’s the case, then shouldn’t we try to figure out whether the sanctions actually work or not before we recklessly change the system?
Too late for that. The war on Russia has begun and the early results are already pouring in. Just look at the way we’ve destroyed Russia’s currency, the ruble. It’s shocking! Here’s the scoop from an article at CBS:
“The Russian ruble is the best-performing currency in the world this year….
Two months after the ruble’s value fell to less than a U.S. penny amid the swiftest, toughest economic sanctions in modern history, Russia’s currency has mounted a stunning turnaround. The ruble has jumped 40% against the dollar since January.
Normally, a country facing international sanctions and a major military conflict would see investors fleeing and a steady outflow of capital, causing its currency to drop….
Huh? You mean the attack on the ruble didn’t work after all?
Sure looks that way. But that doesn’t mean the sanctions are a failure. Oh, no. Just at look at the effect they’ve had on Russian commodities. Export receipts are way-down, right? Here’s more from CBS:
“Commodity prices are currently sky-high, and even though there is a drop in the volume of Russian exports due to embargoes and sanctioning, the increase in commodity prices more than compensates for these drops,” said Tatiana Orlova, lead emerging markets economist at Oxford Economics.
Russia is pulling in nearly $20 billion a month from energy exports. Since the end of March, many foreign buyers have complied with a demand to pay for energy in rubles, pushing up the currency’s value.” (“Russia’s ruble is the strongest currency in the world this year“, CBS News)
You’re kidding me? You mean the ruble is surging and Putin is raking in more dough on commodities than ever before?
Yep, and it’s the same deal with Russia’s trade surplus. Take a look at this excerpt from an article in The Economist:
“Russia’s exports… have held up surprisingly well, including those directed to the West. Sanctions permit the sale of oil and gas to most of the world to continue uninterrupted. And a spike in energy prices has boosted revenues further.
As a result, analysts expect Russia’s trade surplus to hit record highs in the coming months. The IIF reckons that in 2022 the current-account surplus, which includes trade and some financial flows, could come in at $250bn (15% of last year’s GDP), more than double the $120bn recorded in 2021. That sanctions have boosted Russia’s trade surplus, and thus helped finance the war, is disappointing, says Mr Vistesen. Ms Ribakova reckons that the efficacy of financial sanctions may have reached its limits. A decision to tighten trade sanctions must come next.
But such measures could take time to take effect. Even if the EU enacts its proposal to ban Russian oil, the embargo would be phased in so slowly that the bloc’s oil imports from Russia would fall by just 19% this year, says Liam Peach of Capital Economics, a consultancy. The full impact of these sanctions would be felt only at the start of 2023—by which point Mr Putin will have amassed billions to fund his war.” ( “Russia is on track for a record trade surplus”, The Economist)
Let me get this straight: The sanctions are actually hurting the US and helping Russia, so the experts think we should impose more sanctions? Is that it?
Precisely. Now that we have shot ourselves in the foot, the experts think it would be wise to shoot the other one too.
Am I the only one who is struck by the insanity of this policy? Check out this clip from an article at RT:
“Russia could earn a record $100 billion from gas sales to European countries in 2022 due to the sharp rise in energy prices, French newspaper Les Echos reported this week, citing Citibank analysts.
According to the paper, the projected income from gas sales will be almost twice as much as last year. The analysis does not take into account profits from the sale of other Russian commodities, such as oil, coal, and other minerals.
Les Echos reports that, despite sanctions and warnings of a sweeping embargo on Russian energy, the 27 EU countries continue to send roughly $200 million per day to Gazprom.”(“Russian gas revenues projected to hit new highs”, RT)
So the revenues from gas and oil sales are literally flooding Moscow’s coffers like never before. Meanwhile, energy prices in the EU and America have skyrocketed to 40-year highs.
Can you see how counterproductive this policy is?
The EU is sinking into recession, supply lines have been severely disrupted, food shortages are steadily emerging, and gas and oil prices are through-the-roof. By every objective standard, the sanctions have not only failed, but backfired spectacularly. Can’t the Biden people see the damage they’re doing? Are they completely divorced from reality?
Imagine if the Ukrainians use Biden’s new artillery battery (HIMARS) to shell cities in Russia? Then what?
Then Putin takes off the gloves and shuts off the flow of hydrocarbons to Europe immediately. That’s what’s going to happen if Washington continues to escalate. You can bet on it. If Russia’s “Special Military Operation” suddenly becomes a war, the lights across Europe will go dark, homes will begin to freeze, factories will go silent, and the continent will slide headlong into a protracted and painful depression.
Does anyone in Washington think about these things or are they all so drunk on their own press clippings they’ve completely lost touch with reality?
Here’s more from an article at RT:
“Even as the collective West continues to insist – against all observable reality – that the conflict in Ukraine is going well for Kiev, major media outlets are becoming increasingly uneasy with the situation on the economic front. More and more observers are admitting that the embargoes imposed by the US and its allies aren’t crushing the Russian economy, as originally intended, but rather their own.…
“Russia is winning the economic war,” the Guardian’s economics editor Larry Elliott declared on Thursday. “It is now three months since the west launched its economic war against Russia, and it is not going according to plan. On the contrary, things are going very badly indeed,” he wrote…
In a May 30 essay, Guardian columnist Simon Jenkins also said that the embargo had failed…
Did you catch that part about “Russia winning the economic war”? What do you think that means in practical terms?
Does it mean that Washington’s failed attempt to maintain its global hegemony by “weakening” Russia is actually putting enormous strains on the Transatlantic Alliance and NATO that will trigger a re-calibration of relations leading to a defiant rejection of the “rules-based system.”
Is that what it means? Is Europe going to split with Washington and leave America to sink beneath its $30 trillion ocean of red ink?
Yes, that’s exactly what it means.
Uncle Sam’s 30 Year Bender
Proponents of Washington’s proxy-war have no idea of the magnitude of their mistake or how much damage they are inflicting on their own country. The Ukraine debacle is the culmination of 30 years of bloody interventions that have brought us to a tipping point where the nation’s fortunes are about to take a dramatic turn-for-the-worse. As the dollar-zone shrinks, standards of living will plunge, unemployment will soar, and the economy will go into a downward-death spiral.
Washington has greatly underestimated its vulnerability to catastrophic geopolitical blowback that is about to bring the New American Century to a swift and excruciating end.
A wise leader would do everything in his power to pull us back from the brink.
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This article was originally published on The Unz Review.
Michael Whitney is a renowned geopolitical and social analyst based in Washington State. He initiated his career as an independent citizen-journalist in 2002 with a commitment to honest journalism, social justice and World peace.
He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG).
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Friends Are Urging Credico to Go Underground
Advisers are suggesting Randy Credico to lie low—keep out of sight—because too many journalists, activists, academics and dissidents placed on this hit-list coincidentally wind up dead, sometimes only days after being listed. Once killed, the Ukrainian word ЛИКВИДИРОВАН (“LIQUIDATED”) is plastered across their pictures in big red letters—as in the listing (below) of Russian journalist Darya Dugina, who was blown up by a car bomb.
Randy refuses to hide. He says his first priority is to keep his “Free Julian Assange” billboard trucks rolling up and down the streets of Washington, D.C., to shame Joe Biden, Merrick Garland and the Democratic Party for their continued persecution and imprisonment of Julian Assange.
Photo courtesy of Randy Credico
CAM asked Randy what he thinks and feels about being placed on this precarious list.
“It is what it is. I think it underscores the kind of people the U.S. and NATO are supporting in their proxy war. They remind me of the depraved leadership of the Contras in Nicaragua back in 1980s. The ones that murdered Ben Linder, an American engineer helping people obtain water. I suppose I wouldn’t be doing my job if I weren’t on the list. I will continue to report the truth regardless of the consequences. Living in fear is worse than being dead.”
Randy is no stranger to threats of violence. For decades he has been putting his body on the line to fight racial oppression, war crimes and violations of human rights. He was recently threatened by right-wing supporters of Donald Trump and Roger Stone; before that, he shared a jail cell with Cornel West after being arrested for protesting New York’s stop-and-frisk law. Randy is probably the most jailed political satirist since Lenny Bruce.
That is why his decision to ignore the Ukrainian hit-list is not news. What is news is—Randy may not be able to keep funding his “Free Julian Assange” billboard trucks much longer. His money is running out.
Randy Credico being arrested by police in Times Square. [Source: Photo courtesy of Stephen Brown]
Randy has been digging into his own pockets to keep those billboard trucks rolling. But he cannot continue to pay the bills without a little help from his friends—and from the friends of Julian Assange. Without it, the billboard trucks will stop rolling.
That would be a shame, because they are doing their job. They keep Julian in the public mind and put pressure on the Biden administration during the months leading up to the 2024 election. They also get attention from the millions of tourists who visit the capital city. The media, too, are paying attention to Julian’s plight, and have begun writing editorials asking Biden to set Julian free (although their editorials have been shamefully late and embarrassingly grudging).
Unfortunately, these mobile billboards do not come cheap. They cost a lot to design and fabricate. So does gasoline. And the cost of leasing the trucks and hiring licensed drivers. The cost to keep one billboard truck circulating around Washington, D.C., is $500 a day.
Randy has a message for all those who are sad—and mad—at what the CIA and the U.S. government are doing to Julian. He says, “Don’t just mope and feel powerless to help. Instead, consider donating a few dollars to the Free Assange Mobile Billboard Project. Every dollar will help keep the billboards rolling for another minute—another hour—another day.”
What he does not say, but it is very clear, is that your donations will also show Randy—who may literally be risking his life to keep these billboards rolling—that he is not alone. Donations can be made at AssangeCountdownToFreedom.com.
The Ukrainian terrorist “kill list”
The list is on a website called Myrotvorets (“Peacekeeper” in English). Although mostly written in Ukrainian, it proudly identifies itself—right on its homepage (and in English)—as “a CIA project.” And its headquarters are in Langley, VA, home of the CIA. The website is also reportedly hosted on a NATO server. [See homepage below]
CAM Managing Editor Jeremy Kuzmarov was put on the list after he published an article critical of Myrotvorets, which exposed its links to the CIA.
The list includes many Russian journalists and Americans critical of the Ukraine War, like Scott Ritter, former UN weapons inspector, and Roger Waters, the Pink Floyd singer who criticized the war. Former government officials advocating for moderation, like Henry Kissinger, have also been put on the list.
The fact that so many journalists, activists and political opponents who get listed on its site die violent deaths—sometimes days after being listed—is dismissed by website apologists as coincidence. Myrotvorets claims that its only purpose is to identify “pro-Russian terrorists, separatists, mercenaries, war criminals, and murderers [guilty of]…crimes against the National Security of Ukraine, Peace, Humanity, and International Law…[in order] to assist law enforcement authorities” in bringing them to justice.
But the website’s real purpose appears to be compiling an extra-judicial “kill list” of journalists, activists, political dissidents and their family members who criticize Ukrainian President Zelensky and his government in Kyiv, which is supported by many neo-Nazis.
By posting the names, phone numbers, home addresses and whereabouts of targets (as Myrotvorets has done with Randy), the website is sending a dog-whistle signal to “patriotic Ukrainians” in the U.S., Russia, and throughout the world, letting them know they have a green light to eliminate these “enemies of Ukraine.”
Why has Myrotvorets targeted Randy Credico?
Randy recently returned from a ten-day trip to Russia and the battleground region of Donbas. His stories, photos and video interviews with Russian and Ukrainian residents in the war zones revealed horrendous war crimes, torture, rape and other human rights violations committed by Ukraine’s neo-Nazi military forces—but deliberately under-reported (or not reported at all) by corporate media like TheNew York Times, The Washington Post, The Atlantic magazine and other U.S. government echo chambers.
The majority of citizens in Donbas voted to become part of the Russian Federation after the Obama administration backed a neo-fascist coup in February 2014.
Russia has long wanted cooperative relations with the U.S. and even to become a NATO member but was betrayed when NATO was expanded to multiple countries that surrounded Russia in violation of a pledge made by the George H.W. Bush administration to Mikhail Gorbachev.
Russia offered a peace treaty as recently as December 17, 2021, which Ukraine and the U.S./NATO simply ignored as part of their strategy to encourage a Russian invasion of Ukraine that could bog down Russia in a quagmire like in Afghanistan in the 1980s and provide a pretext for ratcheting up sanctions that could cause disaffection with Putin’s government and then regime change.
Randy’s on-the-ground reports were designed to help better inform the U.S. public about what is really going on in eastern Ukraine and totally contradicted the official propaganda emanating from both Ukraine and the U.S. State Department. They evidently caught the attention of this CIA-backed terrorist website as swiftly as the scent of blood in the water catches the attention of a killer shark.
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Steve Brown contributed to this article.
Ron Ridenour is a U.S.-born author and journalist, anti-war and civil rights activist since 1961. After joining the U.S. Air Force at 17, he saw the inner workings of U.S. imperialism first hand and resigned. In the 1980s and 1990’s he worked with the Nicaraguan government and on Cuban national media.
He now lives in Denmark and, in addition to writing a dozen books, has served as a special correspondent and freelance investigative journalist for many publications in the U.S. and several Latin American and European countries—among them: The Morning Star, New Statesman, The Guardian (U.S. and England), Playboy, Liberation News Service, Pacific News Service, Coast Magazine, Qui, Skeptic, Seven Days, and Pacifica Radio.
CAM co-founder Philip Agee wrote commentaries to two of his dozen books: Yankee Sandinistas: Interviews with North Americans Living and Working in the New Nicaragua, and Backfire: CIA’s Biggest Burn. See also: The Russian Peace Threat: Pentagon on Alert and Winding Brook Stories at Amazon and Lulu. Other work can be found at ronridenour.com. Ron can be reached at [email protected].
Featured image: Randy Credico in Donetsk. [Source: Photo courtesy of Arnaud Develay]
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India and the United States are willing to “deploy” ships in the Pacific and the Indian Oceans, U.S. Ambassador Eric Garcetti said in New Delhi on June 28. Speaking at IIT Delhi, Mr. Garcetti said in the interests of safeguarding peace, prosperity and sovereign borders India and the United States can join hands to resist the “might makes right mentality” in international affairs.
Envoy expounds on policy
“I hope soon we’ll see the United States and India working together across the Pacific and into the Atlantic, from Central Asia to Southern Africa. We can stand together against those who would upend the common good for their own benefit. We can deploy our ships together in the Pacific and Indian oceans, and even beyond, to ensure maritime security,” said Mr. Garcetti.
He was delivering a speech titled ‘Peace, Prosperity, Planet, People: A New Chapter in U.S.-India relations’.
The speech delivered in the seminar hall of IIT-Delhi was the first big foreign policy related exposition by the top American diplomat who took charge in April ahead of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s recent state visit to the United States. Mr. Garcetti started his speech by telling the audience that he returned from the U.S. on June 27 night after completing the official requirements associated with the state visit to the U.S. by PM Modi.
Suitable partner
Mr. Garcetti said that the US is poised to be the suitable partner for India as both sides are tied by bonds of common values, science and technology and people to people contact. In 2022, Mr. Garcetti said one out of every five U.S. student visas issued across the world was received by an Indian student. With $191 billion dollars in bilateral trade, the U.S. is India’s largest trading partner. “Our connection is very personal, based on affinity and friendship. We’re linked by a diaspora community more than four-million strong.”
The U.S. ambassador avoided naming any country but said that there are states who believe in advancing their interest through aggressive means saying, “A key component of peace is protection. As we have unfortunately seen over the past three years, we live in a world in which countries ignore sovereign borders, advancing their claims through violence and destruction. This is not the world we want.”
Bulwark against bullying
“Together, India and the United States of America can build a bulwark against this ‘might makes right’ mentality. Working together, the world’s two largest democracies can bolster the security, stability, and prosperity of the entire world,” said Mr. Garcetti. The ambassador argued that the U.S. and India produce better results for peace, prosperity, planet and the people of India when they work together.
Mr. Garcetti cautioned against authoritarian practices by governments that use technology to suppress civil liberty and said to safeguard citizens both India and the US are investing in supply chains and investing in “trusted partners”. “As democracies, we believe that the design and use of technology should be informed by democratic values and respect for human rights. Unfortunately, not everyone shares that vision. There are those who would prefer to use technology as an authoritarian weapon, to intimidate their neighbours and control their own citizens,” said Mr. Garcetti.
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Featured image: U.S. Ambassador Eric Garcetti delivers his speech on ‘Peace, Prosperity, Planet, Peopl: A New Chapter for U.S.-India Relations’ at IIT Delhi on June 28, 2023. | Photo Credit: PTI
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The Doctrine (1823)
The doctrine was presented by the 5-th U.S. President James Monroe (1817−1825) in 1823 as an official warning to (West) European powers that any European policy of imperialistic expansionism on the ground of the Americas (North, Central, and South or Anglo-Francophone and Latin, i.e., Spanish & Portuguese) was going to be taken into account by Washington as a threat to the U.S. national interests. In fact, the doctrine proclaimed the Americas as the sole business of the U.S. without any involvement or/and interruption from the outside world. In other words, James Monroe proclaimed the exclusive U.S. economic, financial, and geopolitical rights to deal (exploit) with the Americas (including Canada as well). The doctrine was later extended with practical consequences by both 26-th U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt (1901−1909) and 28-th U. S. President Thomas Woodrow Wilson (1913−1921) who used it to formally justify American imperialistic policies in several countries from Latin America from Mexico to Colombia.
James Monroe (1758−1831) was the U.S. Democratic Republican statesman and the U.S. President. He is remembered for two reasons:
1) In 1803 being a minister to France under U.S. President Jefferson he negotiated and finally ratified the so-called “Louisiana Purchase”, by which a large territory formally owned by (Napoléonic) France was sold to the USA (as Napoléon needed extra financial sources for his wars in Europe);
2) However, James Monroe is mainly remembered as the creator of the Monroe Doctrine which, in fact, drafted the U.S. imperialistic policy in the future.
What is the Monroe Doctrine?
It is the U.S. foreign policy formal (diplomatic) declaration that was warning (West) European powers (in fact, the UK, Spain, Portugal, and France) against further colonization of the Americas (the New World) but, as well as, against intervention in the governments within the American hemisphere. As a counteroffer, the doctrine disclaimed any intention of Washington to take part in European political affairs (that was, however, valid till April 1917 when the U.S. took direct participation in WWI on European soil followed by the American military intervention in Russia during the Russian Civil War of 1917−1921).
The background of the doctrine that was uttered by President James Monroe in his annual speech to the U.S. Congress in 1823, was, at first glance, the political threat of military intervention by the post-Napoleonic Holy Alliance to restore the colonies of Spain in Latin America which already declared their independence from Madrid. However, it became soon clear that the U.S. imperialistic policy had to fill the vacuum in Latin America after the withdrawal of the Spanish power and administration.
The Monroe Doctrine was from time to time applied by the U.S. foreign policy in the Americas. Nevertheless, after the development of territorial interests in Central America and the Caribbean, it became a tenet of U.S. foreign policy. The doctrine in the first part of the 20th century became developed into a policy in which Washington concerned the U.S. as responsible for the security of the Americas – an umbrella of U.S. geopolitical colonization of the Americas especially during the Cold War. As a result, such policy consistently complicated U.S. relations with Latin American countries and only local dictatorships sponsored by Washington could control the people’s anti-American sentiments.
It is understood by political scientists that, in fact, it was in the cause of the balance that London influenced Washington to issue the Monroe Doctrine – the doctrine announced by President James Monroe to Congress on December 2nd, 1823. We have to keep in mind that the doctrine originally stated that (West) European states could not re-colonize the Americas or interfere in the affairs of already independent states of North and Soth America. At the moment, such an attitude was reflecting the U.S. and the U.K.’s concern about West European interference within the Western hemisphere, especially any effort by Spain to regain control over former colonial possessions in Latin America. Nonetheless, the focal slogan of the Monroe Doctrine – “America to Americans” in the following years, in fact, inspired U.S. colonial imperialism and since 1867 and especially 1898 became transformed into the policy of “The Americas to the U.S.A.”.
President Monroe promulgated his doctrine for the reason that he saw an opportunity for the special geopolitical role of Washington in the Americas from Alaska to Patagonia. However, originally, beating the Spanish and French colonial influences in the Americas was not imaginable at the time of the declaration without the British Royal Navy. Truly speaking, the aim of the U.K. was not to assist the U.S. but to beat France – a country that at that time dominated Spain. Therefore, the British Foreign Secretary George Canning (1770−1827), actually, encouraged the policy of Washington as a good way to count down Spanish (in fact, French) colonial power. In one word, The U.S. administration issued the Monroe Doctrine formally to prevent any further effort by Spain (and France) to regain its lost possessions in the New World (the Americas). Nevertheless, in practice, according to the doctrine, all European states have been obliged to respect the Western hemisphere as an exclusive sphere of geopolitical, financial, and economic influence by the U.S.A.
The first consequences (1897−1916)
The 1897−1903 Alaska border dispute with neighboring Canada (Dominion since 1867) was the first direct implementation of the Monroe Doctrine concerning the U.S. foreign policy with, in fact, the final geopolitical intention to incorporate Canada into the U.S.A. In other words, the rush to the Klondike gold fields in 1897 (land between Alaska and Canada) brought the dispute near the war between the two states. Canada feared the loss of the territories in the northwest. However, a politically oriented tribunal established to solve the problem with the U.K. judge holding the casting vote simply favored in 1903 the boundary line between Canada and the U.S. proposed by Washington.
The U.S. military intervention in the insurrection in Cuba in 1898 directly provoked the war with Spain. As the war became extremely successful for Washington, the U.S. obtained a protectorate over Cuba in 1903. However, the constant local revolts against U.S. rule brought several American military interventions on the island from 1906 to 1922. Nevertheless, similar U.S. military interventions happened in the Caribbean Dominican Republic twice – in 1905 and 1916−1924 followed in Haiti (1915−1934), and in Nicaragua (1909−1933). The next stage of the U.S. colonial imperialistic policy in Latin America according to the Monroe Doctrine was in 1917 when under Washington’s military pressure Denmark was forced to formally sell the Virgin Islands to the U.S. Nonetheless, the U.S. aggressive policy on Mexico in meanwhile brought two abortive American military interventions in that country in 1914 (invasion on Tampico and Veracruz) and 1916 (invasion across Rio Grande on Mexican provinces of Chihuahua, Coahuila, and Nuevo León).
Probably, the focal geopolitical and economic success of the U.S.A. in Latin America following the Monroe Doctrine was to obtain the Panama Canal zone’s control and protection (in fact, exploitation). Under the treaty with Panama (a former territory of Colombia taken out by the U.S.) in 1903 the U.S. leases the Panama Canal zone in perpetuity. However, at the same time, according to the treaty, Washington had to possess the zone as “if it were sovereign”. In fact, such contradictory diplomatic language caused unsolvable arguments from both sides. To keep in mind, the Panama Canal zone is 10 miles wide being bisected by the Canal which, contrary to the Suez Canal, has locks.
In conclusion, the ideological foundation for such American colonial imperialism in the Americas since the end of the 19th century was the 1823 Monroe Doctrine which implied an intention to treat the Americas (especially Latin America) as the exclusive geopolitical, economic, and financial sphere of influence by the U.S.A.
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Dr. Vladislav B. Sotirović is a former university professor in Vilnius, Lithuania. He is a Research Fellow at the Center for Geostrategic Studies. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.
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US records show Starmer met with Attorney General Eric Holder and a host of American and British national security officials in Washington in 2011, when he was in charge of Julian Assange’s proposed extradition to Sweden.
The Crown Prosecution Service (CPS), England and Wales’ public prosecutor, has deleted all records of its former head Keir Starmer’s trips to the US, it can be revealed.
Starmer served as Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) from 2008-13, a period when the body was overseeing Julian Assange’s proposed extradition to Sweden to face questioning over sexual assault allegations.
Starmer, who became a MP in 2015, is now leader of the Labour Party. Assange, meanwhile, faces imminent extradition to the US to face up to 175 years in prison under charges mostly related to the US Espionage Act.
While DPP, Starmer made trips to Washington in 2009, 2011, 2012 and 2013 at a cost to the British taxpayer of £21,603. It was his most frequent foreign destination while in post. Max Hill, the current DPP, has made just one trip to Washington during his five-year tenure.
During Starmer’s time in post, the CPS was marred by irregularities surrounding the case of the WikiLeaks founder.
The organisation has admitted to destroying key emails related to the Assange case, mostly covering the period when Starmer was in charge, while the CPS lawyer overseeing the case advised the Swedes in 2010 or 2011 not to visit London to interview Assange.
An interview at that time could have prevented the long-running embassy standoff.
Assange and WikiLeaks began publishing classified US diplomatic cables – in alliance with some of the world’s largest newspapers – in November 2010. In the same month, Sweden issued an international arrest warrant for Assange over allegations of sexual misconduct, leading to a protracted legal battle, in which the CPS was heavily involved.
Italian journalist Stefania Maurizi has been waging a years-long legal fight to access documents related to the CPS and Assange case. However, the role of its then head, Keir Starmer, in the episode has always remained unclear.
Starmer in Washington
Using the Freedom of Information Act, Declassified requested the itinerary for each of Starmer’s four trips to Washington with details of his official meetings, including any briefing notes.
“The Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) does not hold any information falling within the scope of your request,” the public body told Declassified. “Information held has been destroyed in line with retention schedules.”
When asked by Declassified what these retention schedules are, the CPS pointed to its retention and disposal schedule policy. But that document contains no references to time-limits on the preservation of CPS documents.
Asked for clarification – and whether the destruction of Starmer’s Washington documents was routine – the CPS did not respond.
But while there is no longer any official record of what Starmer did on these four trips on the British side, some information has come to light on the US side.
US records show that on 9 November 2011, then US Attorney General Eric Holder met with Starmer at his office at the US Department of Justice (DoJ) for 45 minutes.
Starmer’s CPS was then handling Assange’s proposed extradition to Sweden. In December 2010, Holder had been asked about WikiLeaks’ cable releases. “We are doing everything that we can,” he said.
Asked if he might mount a prosecution under the Espionage Act, Holder added: “That is certainly something that might play a role, but there are other statutes, other tools at our disposal.”
He continued that he had given the go-ahead for a number of unspecified actions as part of a criminal investigation into WikiLeaks. “I personally authorised a number of things last week and that’s an indication of the seriousness with which we take this matter and the highest level of involvement at the department of justice.”
US Attorney General Eric Holder’s diary for 9 November 2011. (US Department of Justice)
Meeting at the DoJ
The personnel involved in the Starmer-Holder meeting at the DoJ indicates it had a national security focus. It is possible that some of the unspecified actions against WikiLeaks and Assange referenced by Holder the previous year were discussed.
Starmer was part of a five-person British delegation. This included Gary Balch, then UK liaison prosecutor to the US, who dealt with extradition.
Also present was Patrick Stevens, then head of the international division at the CPS, in which he developed and led CPS activities worldwide “in support of UK national security”. Stevens states that, at the time, he was “at the heart of the UK government’s national security and international justice strategy”.
Alongside them sat Susan Hemming, then head of counterrorism at the CPS, who was in charge of issues related to – among other things – “official secrets”.
On the US side, the point of contact was listed as Amy Jeffress, then the DoJ’s attaché at the US embassy in London, a role which involved coordinating with the CPS. Before that role, she had been national security counsellor to Attorney General Holder which involved “interfacing regularly” with the US intelligence community.
Jeffress moved from the DoJ in Washington to the US embassy in London in September 2010, two months after WikiLeaks began publishing the Afghan War Logs. She would stay in London until 2014.
When Assange was seized at the Ecuadorian embassy in London in April 2019, Jeffress told the Washington Post: “It will be some years before a final decision is reached – at least a year and probably longer.” She added: “These cases can become very political in the UK.”
National security
Another US official present at Starmer’s DoJ meeting was Denise Cheung who would go on to be deputy chief of its National Security Section. Also present was Bruce Schwartz, then the DoJ’s counsellor for international affairs, who would go on to win the department’s award for excellence in furthering the interests of US national security.
Lisa Monaco, another DoJ official at the meeting, had recently been appointedassistant attorney general for national security, leading the DoJ divisionoverseeing its intelligence functions.
Monaco, who is now deputy US Attorney General, was in London in February this year to “reaffirm and build upon the strong partnership between the United States and Great Britain in countering threats to our national security.”
She met with Matthew Rycroft, permanent secretary at the Home Office, “to continue the strong working relationship between the Home Office and the Justice Department.”
Declassified has previously shown that the UK Home Office deployed eight staff on the secret operation to seize Assange from his asylum at the Ecuadorian embassy in London. This was a highly irregular move as Ecuador is a friendly country and asylum is a right enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
The CPS’s lack of disclosure of documents related to Assange may raise suspicions of a cover-up. While Starmer was still in charge, in April 2013, the CPS rejected Assange’s request for the personal data it had on him “because of the live matters still pending”.
Even GCHQ, the UK’s largest spy agency, had granted Assange’s request for the personal information it held on him, which revealed one of its intelligence officers calling the Swedish case a “fit-up”.
Keir Starmer did not respond to a request for comment.
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Matt Kennard is chief investigator at Declassified UK. He was a fellow and then director at the Centre for Investigative Journalism in London. Follow him on Twitter @kennardmatt
Comments Off on Julian Assange Extradition: Britain’s Crown Prosecutor Has Conveniently Destroyed All Records of Keir Starmer’s Four Trips to Washington
L’ ‘ammutinamento’ della compagnia militare privata Wagner non ha provocato lo sfacelo della Russia, annunciato e auspicato dal mainstream politico-mediatico dell’Occidente. Il Presidente Putin ha dichiarato che “la stragrande maggioranza dei combattenti e dei comandanti del gruppo Wagner sono patrioti russi, devoti al loro Paese, e lo hanno dimostrato con il loro coraggio sul campo di battaglia”. Allo stesso tempo Putin ha lodato l’Esercito russo e le forze dell’ordine che hanno impedito, agendo in modo preciso e coeso, il degenerare della situazione. Le autorità russe hanno ritirato l‘accusa penale di “ammutinamento armato” contro lo stesso capo della Wagner, Prigozhin, che si trasferisce in Bielorussia con parte dei combattenti della compagnia. Tale vicenda non va però sottovalutata: essa è espressione di un confronto interno tra diverse posizioni riguardo alla conduzione dell’operazione militare con cui Mosca risponde all’offensiva lanciata, attraverso l’Ucraina, da USA e NATO con il crescente sostegno della UE. Il risultato, probabilmente, sarà la decisione di Mosca di usare capacità militari più avanzate per respingere l’offensiva.
I risultati già si vedono. Scrive il New York Times: “I carrarmati e i veicoli corazzati, forniti dall’Occidente all’Ucraina, vengono danneggiati e distrutti dalle forze russe. Le formazioni di Kiev sono riuscite a conquistare alcuni piccoli villaggi, ma le perdite ucraine aumentano. Le truppe russe hanno dimostrato di saper combattere sulla difensiva e migliorato le loro tattiche rispetto all’inizio della guerra”.
In tale situazione, il cancelliere tedesco Scholz esorta il prossimo vertice NATO di Vilnius a “concentrarsi sul rafforzamento della forza di combattimento dell’Ucraina e della sua forza economica necessaria per difendersi dall’aggressione russa.” Allo stesso tempo viene varato il piano di “ripresa dell’Ucraina”. Per facilitare gli investimenti privati, il presidente Zelensky ha incaricato il fondo di investimento statunitense BlackRock, il maggiore del mondo, di gestire il “Fondo di sviluppo dell’Ucraina”. Il Fondo raccoglie soprattutto dai governi europei miliardi di euro, pagati direttamente e indirettamente dai cittadini europei, che verranno concessi, a tassi di interesse inferiori a quelli di mercato, alle multinazionali che investono in Ucraina. Per di più viene istituita, sempre con i soldi dei cittadini europei, una “assicurazione contro i rischi di guerra” per risarcire le multinazionali per gli eventuali danni che con la guerra possono subire i loro investimenti in Ucraina.
The “mutiny” of the private military company Wagner did not cause the collapse of Russia, as it was announced and hoped for by the Western political media mainstream. President Putin said that “the overwhelming majority of fighters and commanders of the Wagner group are Russian patriots, devoted to their country, and they proved it with their courage on the battlefield.”
At the same time, Putin praised the Russian Army and the security forces who prevented the situation from escalating by acting in a precise and cohesive way. The Russian authorities have withdrawn the criminal charge of “armed mutiny” against the same Wagner chief, Prigozhin, who is moving to Belarus with part of the company’s fighters.
However, this story should not be underestimated: it is the expression of an internal confrontation between different positions regarding the conduct of the military operation with which Moscow responds to the offensive launched, through Ukraine, by the USA and NATO with the growing support of the EU. The result will likely be Moscow’s decision to use more advanced military capabilities to repel the offensive.
Results are already visible. The New York Times writes:
“Tanks and armoured vehicles supplied by the West to Ukraine are being damaged and destroyed by Russian forces. Kyiv formations managed to capture some small villages, but Ukrainian losses are mounting. Russian troops have shown that they are capable of fighting defensively and have improved their tactics since the beginning of the war”.
Against this backdrop, German Chancellor Scholz urges the forthcoming NATO Summit in Vilnius to “focus on strengthening Ukraine’s combat strength, and economic strength needed to defend itself against Russian aggression.”
At the same time, the “recovery of Ukraine” plan was launched. President Zelensky appointed the US investment fund BlackRock, the largest in the world, to manage the “Development Fund of Ukraine” to facilitate private investment.
The Fund collects billions of euros above all from European governments, paid directly and indirectly by European citizens, which will be granted, at interest rates below market rates, to multinationals investing in Ukraine. Furthermore, again with the money of European citizens, an “insurance against war risks” is set up to compensate multinationals for any damage that their investments in Ukraine may suffer through the war.
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In its many variations, the Rainbow Flag is pre-empting the status of Canada’s official flag. Indeed, since the days of the Truckers’ Freedom Convoy in February of 2022, the use of the Red Maple Leaf Flag has become a symbol of patriotic determination. The All-Red Maple Leaf Flag has been widely adopted by many foes of woke extremism as a fitting marker of the sovereignty and inclusiveness integral to Canada’s nationhood. The refusal to subordinate the Canadian Flag to the increasing ubiquitousness of the Pride Flag signifies a rejection of the “post-national” perversities pushed by globalist Trudeau and his billionaire bosses.
This assertion of the principles of a just and inclusive nation stands in stark contrast to the discriminatory prejudices deeply ingrained in the ultra-woke obsessions of Justin Trudeau. There is no place in the symbolism of the Pride Flag to afford a place of dignity for people that adhere to religious traditions and to the pre-eminence of the family over the claims of the state in the raising of children. Moreover, the supposedly inclusive spirit of LBTQ2S+ effectively excludes any safe space for heterosexual people including caucasian men and especially those that are Christians.
The mobilization of Muslims in the West against trans-fixated governments and schools is a major subject in its own right that deserves careful attention.
Source: Anthony J. Hall
Once again Justin Trudeau has run to the front of the class to continue his hectoring lectures.
Last year he was haranguing us about the imagined glories of the Covid Vaccine gene altering injection procedures with all their many thousands of “adverse effects” including death.
This year he is lashing out at those who don’t share his sexual orientations and aggressive prejudices. One of these prejudices favours the stories told by drag queens over the policies proposed by truckers and their expert advisers. Once again those who don’t go along with Trudeau’s divisive and sometimes lethal B.S are dismissed as a hateful fringe minority that shouldn’t be tolerated.
From Trudeau’s bigoted perspective the millions of naysayers he is facing are “far-right” extremists trying to stifle children from being themselves. He makes no allowance for the fact that many of his detractors are not contesting the right of consenting adults to interact sexually and domestically however they might choose to do so. The real problem arises with the massive push currently underway to radically transform schooling as we have known it. How did it happen that those pushing hardest for this change– Trudeau is a good example– want to put Drag Queen Story Hour at the core of the new kind of pedagogical agenda.
The cry of protest against this assault on the safety and security of our children during their most impressionable years is becoming ever more clear: LEAVE OUR KIDS ALONE.
Educators should go back to the basics and protect children so that they can be free to be kids. Give them plenty of space to explore their own inner urges in their own ways under the guardianship and guidance of their parents.
In a society dominated by many rich and powerful figures that really are engaged in trying to normalize pedophilia, we shouldn’t allow ourselves to be pushed into weaponizing our schools to make them instruments for the ruination of child-family relations.
Trudeau speaks with confidence because he knows he has the backing of big businesses whose captains are being blackmailed into compliance with the whole woke agenda. A key figure in the enforcement of this corporatist conformity is the high priest (or high rabbi?) of ESG conformity, BlackRock’s Larry Fink. See this.
One of the key aims of the financier enforcers like Fink, whose shadow looms large in and around the Bank of International Settlements, is to shatter our existing familial means of replicating and socializing ourselves. The globalist war mongers among us are really going for the civilizational jugular right now in all sorts of ways!
As this issue continues to take over front page news even in the Bill Gates-led disinformation networks, a core issue that is being permitted to emerge concerns the role of parents. Do parents have an inherent right to be involved in school-led initiatives to explore with students changes to their names extending even to the possibility of surgical alterations as a means of “gender expression”? The message behind this focus is that during this first ever Pride Month, the emphasis is being strategically shifted to the supposed “human right” of “transgender kids” to “be themselves.”
Trudeau comes down on the side of excluding parents from a required say in the joint decision of a child and his or her teachers to embark on a course of an attempted change to “gender identity.” He does not think that children who are persuaded to go in this direction should be required to have parental “permission.”
The Canadian PM raised the issue in the course of an announcement elevating to government status a LBTQ2S+ organization known as the Rainbow Railway. The name of the organization, which has all the attributes of a George Soros “Open Society” operation, represents an obvious word play on the history of Canada as the anti-slavery destination of the Underground Railroad. See this.
Henceforth selected LBTQ2S+ refugee claimants are to be swept to the front of the line in the process of immigrating into Canada. What are the implications of making the Rainbow Railway an arm of the Canadian government? As worthy as some of its international campaigns seem to have been, I have no cause to trust Trudeau’s rush to make Rainbow Railroad a certified extension of the Canadian government.
I do not want to see the sketchy polemics of the LBTQ2S+ movement provide the pre-eminent criteria for the choosing of new Canadians.
Who is behind the Rainbow Railroad?
What is its true mission?
Given our recent history, why should I believe anything Trudeau has to say right now?
What is to be the fate of those children of the future who somehow manage to make it into the world in the midst of the gender confusion and chaos growing all around us?
How will future generations find stable places to grow up, places manifesting the kind of love and support that over thousands of years have been provided frequently by stable families operating on ethical principles of right and wrong?
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Dr. Anthony Hallis currently Professor of Globalization Studies at University of Lethbridge in Alberta Canada. He has been a teacher in the Canadian university system since 1982. Dr. Hall, has recently finished a big two-volume publishing project at McGill-Queen’s University Press entitled “The Bowl with One Spoon”.
He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG).
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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: 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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***
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:
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.
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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?
“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.”
Irish government announces genocidal intentions against nation’s cows
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
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…
Deadline for Greta Thunberg’s hysterical prediction of climate change apocalypse comes and goes
“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
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.
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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:
training, arming, equipping, financing, and supplying the Contra paramilitaries in Nicaragua;
attacking Nicaraguan infrastructure;
putting mines in Nicaragua’s ports;
imposing an embargo on Nicaragua; and
encouraging the Contras to commit atrocities that violate international humanitarian law.
Nicaragua’s current government has publicly called on the US to meet its obligations under international law.
“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.
The US terror war on Nicaragua’s Sandinista government
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.
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 long history of US invasions, attacks, and economic blockades on Nicaragua
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)
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First published on February 6, 2023
***
On February 16, 2022, a full week before Putin sent combat troops into Ukraine, the Ukrainian Army began the heavy bombardment of the area (in east Ukraine) occupied by mainly ethnic Russians. Officials from the Observer Mission of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) were located in the vicinity at the time and kept a record of the shelling as it took place. What the OSCE discovered was that the bombardment dramatically intensified as the week went on until it reached a peak on February 19, when a total of 2,026 artillery strikes were recorded. Keep in mind, the Ukrainian Army was, in fact, shelling civilian areas along the Line of Contact that were occupied by other Ukrainians.
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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’?
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.
Here are a few critical excerpts from the text of Putin’s proposal to the US and NATO:
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:
Who started the war? Answer– Ukraine started the war
Was the Russian invasion a violation of international law? Answer– No, the Russian invasion should be approved under United Nations Article 51
Could the war have been avoided if Ukraine declared neutrality and met Putin’s reasonable demands? Answer– Yes, the war could have been avoided
The last point deals with the Minsk Treaty and how the dishonesty of western leaders is going to effect the final settlement in Ukraine. I am convinced that neither Washington nor the NATO allies have any idea of how severely international relations have been decimated by the Minsk betrayal. In a world where legally binding agreements can be breezily discarded in the name of political expediency, the only way to settle disputes is through brute force. Did anyone in Germany, France or Washington think about this before they acted? (But, first, some background on Minsk.)
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 Whitneyis 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)
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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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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.
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.
The Swedish Police
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.
President Vladimir Putin’s comments
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 and the vote for Sweden to join NATO
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.
Who burnt the Quran, and why?
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?
The Swedish police taking Syrian children away from their parents
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.
Not welcome
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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I have written several substacks on COVID-19 mRNA vaccine induced turbo leukemias and lymphomas:
May.2, 2023 – turbo leukemias in children ages 11-21 (click here)
Mar.7, 2023 – leukemias skyrocketing in children & young adults (click here)
Feb.20, 2023 – 21 yo Evan Fischel died 4 days after diagnosis (click here)
Apr.2, 2023 – turbo lymphoma – California photographer Mike Lim (click here)
These cases continue to happen, and they are still shocking and disturbing, as the medical establishment continues to deny this phenomenon exists:
Remsenburg, NY – 40 year old Lauren Jill (LJ) Delman Hanechak died suddenly on June 13, 2023 (click here)
A GoFundme has been setup for her 10 year old daughter who has been made an orphan (click here).
The Story
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.
New Study has 14 mice injected with Pfizer COVID-19 mRNA vaccines. One mouse died suddenly of turbo cancer
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.
My Take…
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.
The Worldwide Corona Crisis, Global Coup d’Etat Against Humanity
by Michel Chossudovsky
Michel Chossudovsky reviews in detail how this insidious project “destroys people’s lives”. He provides a comprehensive analysis of everything you need to know about the “pandemic” — from the medical dimensions to the economic and social repercussions, political underpinnings, and mental and psychological impacts.
“My objective as an author is to inform people worldwide and refute the official narrative which has been used as a justification to destabilize the economic and social fabric of entire countries, followed by the imposition of the “deadly” COVID-19 “vaccine”. This crisis affects humanity in its entirety: almost 8 billion people. We stand in solidarity with our fellow human beings and our children worldwide. Truth is a powerful instrument.”
ISBN: 978-0-9879389-3-0, Year: 2022, PDF Ebook, Pages: 164, 15 Chapters
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***
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 Ivana Kottasová, Jo Shelley, Anna Chernova and Sophie Tanno, CNN
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?
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
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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.
How affirmative action was won – and came under attack
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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***
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.
Nuclear Swordsmanship
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.
MADness!
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.
Will Ukraine Conduct a “False Flag” Attack on a Nuclear Power Plant?
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.
Is This Really Just Conspiratorial Nonsense?
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.
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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)
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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.
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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."
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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.
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***
Two musicians died recently while performing on stage.
In this video, 45 year old rapper “Big Pokey”, real name Milton Powell, died during a June 17, 2023 performance in Beaumont, Texas.
On May 26, 2023, 59 year old singer, songwriter and guitarist Juan Carlos Formell died after suffering a heart attack onstage during his NYC show (you can see him collapse in the video below).
On March 11, 2023, 27 year old Greek & South African rapper Costa Titch (Constantinos Tsobanoglou) collapsed at the Ultra Music Festival at Nasrec Expo Centre in Johannesburg. He died later in the hospital.
Other Musician deaths in May and June 2023: June 23, 2023 – 58 year old Lee Rauch, the drummer for the band Megadeth, died suddenly
June 19, 2023 – Australia – 26 yo Ryan Siew, guitarist for metalcore band Polaris died unexpectedly on June 19, 2023 He had been struggling with brain fog and fatigue.
June 12, 2023 – Brazil – Country singer Gilmar Silva Pereira died suddenly from a heart attack. He had performed a show at a friend’s birthday, felt unwell afterwards and was rushed to the hospital where he died
June 11, 2023 – New York – Dan Lardner, the singer and guitarist for New York indie rock band QTY, died suddenly.
June 11, 2023 – Brazil – 41 year old musician Adriano Lima died suddenly after being hospitalized with a stroke
June 8, 2023 – Arlington, MA – Justine Covault, a renowned singer, songwriter, guitarist, and record label owner from Boston, died suddenly and unexpectedly on June 8, 2023
June 5, 2023 – Cairo, Egypt – 39 year old Egyptian pop composer Mohamed Al-Nadi died suddenly on June 5, 2023 after a “sudden health crisis”
June 2, 2023 – Villar Perosa, Italy – 47 year old musician and guitar player Diego Di Chiara died suddenly on June 2, 2023 He was “struck with an illness on his way home while carrying a shopping bag”
May 26, 2023 – Montgomery, IL – 29 yo musician and optometrist Arturo Montano Jr died suddenly on May 26, 2023.
May 8, 2023 – Calgary, AB – 47 year old Stacie Roper, singer & songwriter and lead singer of the group “Hey Romeo”, died suddenly on May 8, 2023. She was COVID-19 vaccinated.
My Take…
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:
record companies had COVID-19 vaccine mandates
concert venues required COVID-19 vaccination to be able to participate
international travel required at least 2 if not 3 COVID-19 vaccines
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.
The Worldwide Corona Crisis, Global Coup d’Etat Against Humanity
by Michel Chossudovsky
Michel Chossudovsky reviews in detail how this insidious project “destroys people’s lives”. He provides a comprehensive analysis of everything you need to know about the “pandemic” — from the medical dimensions to the economic and social repercussions, political underpinnings, and mental and psychological impacts.
“My objective as an author is to inform people worldwide and refute the official narrative which has been used as a justification to destabilize the economic and social fabric of entire countries, followed by the imposition of the “deadly” COVID-19 “vaccine”. This crisis affects humanity in its entirety: almost 8 billion people. We stand in solidarity with our fellow human beings and our children worldwide. Truth is a powerful instrument.”
ISBN: 978-0-9879389-3-0, Year: 2022, PDF Ebook, Pages: 164, 15 Chapters
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***
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.”
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 failedcoupattempt and may even have helped planned it.
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.
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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.
“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.”
Nahel Represents Millions of Oppressed People in France and Around the World
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.”
Not an Isolated Incident
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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***
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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***
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 operationas 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.
Aborting a System of Win-Win Cooperation
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]
The American System Goes Global
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.
The Bolshevik Counter-Revolution: An Anglo-American Fraud
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’s Immortal Treachery
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).
”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’.
Parvus and the Pan-European Union
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)
Trotskyites Mutate into Neocons
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.
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.
Wohlstetter and RAND Corporation
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.
The Frankfurt School Global Revolution
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.
Post-Script: A Final Word from Putin
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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(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.”
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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 (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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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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Featured image is from NaturalNews.com
The Worldwide Corona Crisis, Global Coup d’Etat Against Humanity
by Michel Chossudovsky
Michel Chossudovsky reviews in detail how this insidious project “destroys people’s lives”. He provides a comprehensive analysis of everything you need to know about the “pandemic” — from the medical dimensions to the economic and social repercussions, political underpinnings, and mental and psychological impacts.
“My objective as an author is to inform people worldwide and refute the official narrative which has been used as a justification to destabilize the economic and social fabric of entire countries, followed by the imposition of the “deadly” COVID-19 “vaccine”. This crisis affects humanity in its entirety: almost 8 billion people. We stand in solidarity with our fellow human beings and our children worldwide. Truth is a powerful instrument.”
ISBN: 978-0-9879389-3-0, Year: 2022, PDF Ebook, Pages: 164, 15 Chapters
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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.
Nordstream 2,
the Kerch Strait Bridge bombing,
the staged massacre at Bucha,
the Kakhovka dam explosion,
the attacks at Belgorod,
the arms smuggling into Odessa under the auspice of the ‘Grain deal…”
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.
NATO or Bust
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.
Putin – Lucky, Smart or Both?
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:
Prigozhin may or may not have been bribed by the CIA/MI6 with money and dreams of ruling the Caucuses. Long a dream of the Brits to deny Russia the oil and gas from that region.
Oil, gas and coal Ukraine and Europe desperately need.
He comes out with some ridiculous statement about Putin lying about the reasons for this war.
He also implicates the Russian MoD in dispersing Wagner
He begins the March to Moscow.
There are unconfirmed reports of helicopters being shot down. Fighting, etc.
The Neocons go into absolute overdrive that this is the end for Putin.
Twitter becomes unreadable
Chechen Leader Ramzan Kadyrov comes out in full support of Putin
So too, the Russian Ministry of Defense.
There are no defectors from the Russian military
There are small kerfluffles in St. Pete and Moscow
Putin comes out and makes his speech denouncing Prigozhin as a ‘traitor.’ He is as angry as I’ve ever seen him.
President of Belarus Alexander Lukashenko negotiates with Prigozhin and within an hour the whole thing is over.
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.
#1 Prigozhin Really Rebelled
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.
#2 Prigozhin Set Everyone Up
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.
Scenario #3 – A Strategic Reallocation
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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Tom Luongo is Publisher of the Gold Goats n Guns. Ruminations on Geopolitics, Markets and Goats.
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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.
McFaul McFails, again
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 insistwithout 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.
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
Anne Applebaum: “Russia is sliding into what can only be described as a civil war”
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
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 #meritocracyhttps://t.co/uZQcTlkbUi
“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.
The US intelligence “community” claims “surprise”
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 declares “the end” for Putin
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: Bellingcat’s neocon-stradumus
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.
Ian Bremmer, the Peter Hotez of international relations
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.
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.”
Top Biden officials’ travel plans interrupted
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.
Stephen King, lost in fantasy
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!
Noted online stalker Idrees Ahmad predicts “the death of Aaron Mate’s career”
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.
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.
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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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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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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.
Going forward
The Kremlin has adopted a very thoughtful strategy. From available details so far, it has the following five key elements:
Principally, the top priority is to avoid bloodshed so that life moves on and the focus on the war in Ukraine, which is at a tipping point, doesn’t suffer;
In immediate terms, get the few renegade Wagner fighters and Prigozhin to leave Rostov-on-Don and return to their camps in Lugansk;
Clinically separate Prigozhin from the rest of Wagner Group (In fact, not a single Wagner commander or officer joined his revolt);
Offer immunity to the bulk of the Wagner Group — except the participants in the coup, of course — and facilitate their formal integration into the defence ministry. That is, the logic behind the creation of Wagner Group by the Defence Ministry (and an unnamed top secret internal security agency) holds good still, but it will no longer be a quasi-state force, but will have a habitation and name and led by designated professional military commanders instead of free-wheeling fortune hunters like Prigozhin.)
Get Prigozhin to leave for Belarus, which was not difficult once he realised that he should request mercy from none other than Putin (who agreed to the oligarch’s safe passage to Belarus.)
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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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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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: A brief history
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).
Philosophical and Spiritual Transhumanism: Towards a Technological Utopia
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).
Corporate Transhumanism: The Pursuit of Wealth and Power
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.
The Discontents
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.
Conclusion
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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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 failedcoupattempt 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 existentialenemy’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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Andrew Korybko is an American Moscow-based political analyst specializing in the relationship between the US strategy in Afro-Eurasia, China’s One Belt One Road global vision of New Silk Road connectivity, and Hybrid Warfare. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.
He is a regular contributor to Global Research.
Featured image: Surovikin in December 2022 (Licensed under CC BY 4.0)
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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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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.
Featured image is licensed under Wikimedia Commons
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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.
“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.
‘AI godfather’ warns of technology’s existential threat
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.
“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.”
TSA introduces techno-slaves to ‘voluntary’ facial recognition technology at airports
“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
— 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.
CCP grants itself new powers to fight AI-generated ‘misinformation’
The Chinese Communist Party has granted itself even more censorship powers than it already had under the guise of fighting AI-generated “misinformation.”
“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 Technocrat Yuval Noah Harari: Let’s Use AI to ‘Rewrite’ Bible
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.
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 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 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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
Comments Off on Selected Articles: COVID Propaganda Roundup: ‘Self-Assembling Nanoparticles’ Developed for New Vaccines, EU Activates Vaccine Passport Regime
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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.
First, the US wants to forbid China to ever participate in the improvement in chips.
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.