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Bukhara The Noble, the “Dome of Islam”, with a history stretching back 2,500 years, bears too many marvels to mention: from the two-millennia-old Ark, a fortress around which the city developed, to the 48-meter high Kalon minaret, built in 1127, which so impressed Genghis Khan that he ordered it not to be razed.

The elegant, single turquoise band near the top of the minaret is the earliest example of glazed tilework all across the Heartland.

According to the Shanameh, the Persian epic, the hero Siyavush founded the city after marrying the daughter of neighboring Afrasiab. Even before the Ancient Silk Roads were in business, Bukhara thrived as a caravan crossroads – its city gates pointing to Merv (in today’s Turkmenistan), Herat (in western Afghanistan), Khiva and Samarkand.

Bukhara’s apex was in the 9^th-10^th centuries under the Samanid dynasty, as it turned into a Mecca of Persian culture and science. That was the time of al-Biruni, the poet Rudaki and of course Avicenna: they all had access to the legendary Treasure of Wisdom, a library that in the Islamic world would only be rivalled by the House of Wisdom in Baghdad.

Bukhara was largely razed by Genghis Khan and the Mongols in 1220 (yes: only the minaret was spared). When the great Moroccan traveler Ibn Battuta visited in 1333, most of the city was still in ruins.

But then, in 1318, someone very special had been born in Kasri Orifon, a village outside of Bukhara. At first he was simply known as Muhammad, after his father and grandfather, whose origins reached Hazrat Ali. But History ruled that Muhammad would eventually become famous all over the lands of Islam as the Sufi saint Bahauddin Naqshbandi.

What’s in a name? Everything. Bahauddin means “the light of religion” and Naqshbandi means “chaser”. His upbringing was enriched by several pirs (“saints”) and sheikhs living in and around Bukhara. He spent almost all his life in these oases, very poor and always relying on his own manual labor, with no slaves or servants.

Bahauddin Naqshbandi ended up founding a highly influential tariqa – Islamic school – based on a very simple concept: “Occupy your heart with Allah and your hands with work”. The concept was developed in other 11 rules, or rashas (“drops”).

What’s Coming Out of Those “Five Fingers”

A visit to the Bahauddin Naqshbandi complex outside of Bukhara, centered around the tomb of the 14^th century Sufi saint who is in fact the city’s spiritual protector, is an illuminating experience: such a peaceful atmosphere enveloping an appeasing network of holy stones, “wishing trees” and the odd sacrificial offering.

This is the essence of what could be defined as a parallel Islam infusing so many latitudes across the Heartland, combining an animist past with formal Islamic teachings.

At the complex, we meet scores of lovely, colorfully dressed Uzbek women from all regions and pilgrims from all over Central Asia but also from West and South Asia. Uzbek President Mirzoyoyev, extremely popular, was here late last week, and he came straight from the nearby, brand new, airport.

This oasis of peace and meditation offers not only a sharp contrast to the toxic turbulence of the times but also inspires us to search for sanity among the madness. After all, one of Naqshbandi’s rashas states,

“our way is conversation, good deeds are found only in mutual communication, but not in seclusion.”

So let’s apply Sufi wisdom to the upcoming, possibly ground-breaking moment that should solidify the path of the Global Majority towards a more equitable, less deranged pattern of international relations: the 15^th BRICS summit in South Africa next week.

Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi has coined a concise definition that embodies a fascinating mix of Confucianism and Sufism:

“The BRICS countries are like five fingers: short and long if extended, but a powerful fist if clenched together.”

How to clench these fingers into a powerful fist has been the work of quite a few sherpas in preparation for the summit. But soon this will not be a matter related to a fist, but to fists, arms, legs and in fact, a whole body. That’s where BRICS+ comes in.

Among the network of new multilateral organizations involved in preparing and acting out a new system of international relations, BRICS is now seen as the premier Global South, or Global Majority, or “Global Globe” (copyright Lukashenko) platform.

We are still far away from the transition towards a new “world system” – to quote Wallerstein – but without BRICS even baby steps would be impossible.

South Africa will seal the first coordinates for the BRICS+ expansion – which may go on indefinitely. After all, large swathes of the “Global Globe” already have stated, formally (23 nations) and informally (countless “expressions of interest”, according to the South African Foreign Ministry) they want in.

The official list – subject to change – of those nations who want to be part of BRICS+ as soon as possible is a Global South’s who’s who: Algeria, Argentina, Bahrain, Bangladesh, Belarus, Bolivia, Cuba, Egypt, Ethiopia, Honduras, Indonesia, Iran, Kazakhstan, Kuwait, Morocco, Nigeria, the State of Palestine, Saudi Arabia, Senegal, Thailand, UAE, Venezuela and Vietnam.

Then there’s Africa: the “five fingers”, via South African President Cyril Ramaphosa, invited no less than 67 leaders from Africa and the Global South to follow the BRICS-Africa Outreach and BRICS+ Dialogues.

This all spells out what would be the key BRICS rasha, to evoke Naqshbandi: total Africa and Global South inclusion – all nations engaged in profitable conversations and equally respected in affirming their sovereignty.

The Persians Strike Back

A case can be made that Iran is in a privileged position to become one of the first BRICS+ members. It helps that Tehran already enjoys strategic partnership status with both Russia and China and also is a key partner of India in the International North South Transportation Corridor (INSTC).

Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian has already stated, on the record that,

“the partnership between Iran and BRICS has in fact already started in some areas. In the field of transport, the North-South transport corridor connecting India to Russia via Iran is actually part of BRICS’ transport project.”

In parallel to breakthroughs on BRICS+, the “five fingers” will be relatively cautious on the de-dollarization front. Sherpas have already confirmed, off the record, there will be no official announcement of a new currency, but of more bilateral trade and multilateral trade using the members’ own currencies: for the moment the notorious R5 (renminbi, ruble, real, rupee and rand).

Belarussian leader Lukashenko, who coined “Global Globe” as a motto as strong, if not even more seductive than Global South, was the first to evoke a crucial policy coup that may take place further on down the road, with BRICS+ in effect: the merger of BRICS and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO).

Now Lukashenko is being echoed in public by former South African ambassador Kingsley Makhubela – as well as scores of “Global Globe” diplomats and analysts off the record:

“In the future, BRICS and the SCO would match to form one entity (…) Because having the BRICS and the SCO running in parallel with the same members would not make sense.”

No question about that. The key BRICS drivers are Russia and China, with India slightly less influential for a number of complex reasons. On the SCO, Russia, China, India, Iran and Pakistan sit at the same table. The Eurasia focus of the SCO can easily be transplanted into BRICS+. Both organizations are “Global Globe”-centered; driving towards multipolarity; and most of all, committed to de-dollarization on all fronts.

It is indeed possible to have a Sufi reading of all these geopolitical and geoeconomic tectonic plates in motion. As much as the promoters of Divide and Rule as well as assorted dogs of war would be clueless visiting the Naqshbandi complex outside of Bukhara, the “Global Globe” may find all the answers it seeks as it engages in a process of conversation and mutual respect.

Bless these global souls – and may they find knowledge as if they were revisiting the Treasure of Wisdom of 10^th century Bukhara.

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Pepe Escobar, born in Brazil, is a correspondent and editor-at-large at Asia Times and columnist for Consortium News and Strategic Culture. Since the mid-1980s he’s lived and worked as a foreign correspondent in London, Paris, Milan, Los Angeles, Singapore, Bangkok. He has extensively covered Pakistan, Afghanistan and Central Asia to China, Iran, Iraq and the wider Middle East. Pepe is the author of Globalistan – How the Globalized World is Dissolving into Liquid War; Red Zone Blues: A Snapshot of Baghdad during the Surge. He was contributing editor to The Empire and The Crescent and Tutto in Vendita in Italy. His last two books are Empire of Chaos and 2030. Pepe is also associated with the Paris-based European Academy of Geopolitics. When not on the road he lives between Paris and Bangkok.

He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is licensed under the Public Domain

All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the Translate Website button below the author’s name.

To receive Global Research’s Daily Newsletter (selected articles), click here.

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There was enormous publicity surrounding the box office revenues generated from the newly released movie “Barbie” during the first two weekends of August.

In its second week after release, the corporate and government-controlled media announced that over $US1 billion was taken in from consumers at the theaters.

The character of these news reports marked a not too subtle rebuke to the two unions which have been striking for better pay and working conditions within the film and television industry for several months. On May 2, the Writers Guild of America (WGA) walked off the job when they failed to reach an acceptable agreement with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP), which represents the owners and shareholders within the industry.

Later, on July 14, the Screen Actors Guild and the American Federation Television and Radio Announcers (SAG-AFTRA), joined the WGA members on strike against the same AMPTS owners. The combined membership of the two unions equals 171,000 entertainment industry workers, with 11,000 within the WGA and the other 160,000 as members of SAG-AFTRA.

These striking workers within the entertainment industry did not call for a boycott of the movies being released during the summer months. Nonetheless, they are required as striking workers not to participate in any promotional activities for the films being released.

In addition, the upcoming Emmy and Oscar awards programs will have to be postponed if the strike is not settled. Movie theaters and television studios are hard pressed to create and generate programming for their viewing audiences. A decline in products which are of interest to the general public can result in losses of revenue and profits.

WGA negotiators who have been representing their members in the more than 100 days of striking, have emphasized the critical issues at stake in the labor dispute. There is the lack of adequate pay which provides a living wage for the majority of its members. Benefits such as healthcare are not available to many WGA members since they do not earn enough money to qualify.

In addition, the use of artificial intelligence in a manner which can usurp the work done by screen writers while not providing compensation. Negotiators for the WGA and SAG-AFTRA indicate that the AMPTP has become more obstinate since the previous strike of 2007-2008.

In an article published by Hollywood Reporter on August 9, which featured an interview with WGA East President Michael Winship, among others, it quotes the labor leader as saying:

“It’s a different alliance than it was 15 years ago because it includes so many streaming companies like Amazon, like Netflix, like Apple and others. So, there is that apparent division between those companies and the legacy companies. I have no doubt that we’re gonna win. It’s just gonna take a little while longer. We’re as strong as ever, so I’m not concerned about moving past the 100-day point.” 

The role of streaming companies has been central in the negotiations between the unions and AMPTP. Writers and actors say they are not receiving their owed residuals from the streaming firms.

This situation prevails while the companies and their promoters in the mainstream media are championing the revenue being taken in by owners and the movie houses. At the same time, many more households have access to streaming services which allows the owners to make enormous profits on several platforms simultaneously.

Both the WGA and SAG-AFTRA members have complained about the reduction in the number of episodes in a season which erodes their annual incomes. During the pandemic, auditions were done online without compensation to the SAF-AFTRA members.

Another member of the negotiating team for the WGA, Greg Iwinski, emphasized that the outcome of the strike will determine the futures of their members:

“You are really talking to 11,000 writers about will you ever be able to get a mortgage? Will you be able to pay rent in New York and LA? Will you be able to put your kids in school? Will you be able to pay off your student loans ever working in this? Or will you be a TV writer who has a second job?” See this.

Economic Impact in Other Sectors

There are estimates that the WGA and SAG-AFTRA strike has cost the California economy more than $US3 billion over the last three-and-a-half months. Not only are the earnings of the owners placed in jeopardy, along with the salaries of union members, there are other sectors which have been forced to lay off employees. See this.

The Hollywood Reporter, in a recent analysis of the damage being done to earnings as a result of the strike, pointed out that the loss of revenue is coming starkly into the purview of AMPTP as the work stoppage remains unresolved. If the strikes continue for many more weeks and months to come, the decline in earnings could prove devastating for the industry owners and shareholders. 

With 171,000 workers on strike, their spending power has been greatly reduced. Strike benefits are important during labor actions. However, these remunerations are not nearly enough to maintain the necessary standard of living in the present period.

A business news website and television station, CNBC, wrote in a recent report:

“The strikes don’t impact just writers or actors. Halted productions impact all kinds of businesses, including companies that provide catering for productions, restaurants near studios, prop houses, set builders, dry cleaners, professional drivers, florists and more. ‘A lot of different people are impacted surrounding the industry,” Holmes says, “and it’s causing them a lot of hardship.’ People who hold entertainment jobs and entertainment-adjacent roles account for almost 20% of the LA-area income, says Lee Ohanian, an economics professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. ‘The economic impact is even bigger because average compensation in the industry is considerably higher’ than the average earner, he tells CNBC Make It.’”

Strike Reflects the Increasing Exploitative Character of Capitalism

There have been a wave of strikes and threatened labor actions among unions in the United States over the last few months. In addition to the WGA and SAG-AFTRA workers, the UPS corporation may have avoided a strike by 340,000 Teamsters when the negotiating team reached a tentative agreement with the executives in late July.

Members of the Teamsters union employed by UPS have until the end of August to approve the contract. If this tentative agreement is not approved, it could result in the commencement of a strike in the future, said to be the largest against a single company in U.S. history.

Abayomi Azikiwe among strike UAW workers (Source: Abayomi Azikiwe)

Salary and benefit increases offered to the UPS workers could set a standard for greater militancy on the part of other organized labor groups. The UAW is threatening to strike when their contract expires in mid-September.

UAW President Shawn Fain in an August 15 Facebook live broadcast said that:

“Whether or not there’s a strike next month is entirely up to the Big Three automakers. Our priorities are clear, the companies can afford them, and there’s plenty of time for the Big Three to get serious about these negotiations. This is about economic justice for the auto workers who make this industry run, and who have generated record profits for Ford, General Motors and Stellantis. All of us are at war with corporate greed.” 

These labor actions are important in light of the declining annual household incomes among working families in the U.S. Inflation, although slowing from its nearly 9% annual rate for 2022, remains a serious problem among the majority of working class and oppressed peoples struggling to purchase gasoline, utilities, food, housing and other essentials.

With presidential elections scheduled to begin in early 2024, neither of the leading capitalist parties are presenting a program to relief the distress of the people in the U.S. What is lacking is a firm political response on the part of the workers and nationally oppressed aimed at achieving the large-scale redistribution of wealth and income which would disempower the ruling class and create a just and equal society for all who live within it.

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Abayomi Azikiwe is the editor of the Pan-African News Wire. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from Abayomi Azikiwe

The US Is Caught in a Dilemma with Niger. Scott Ritter

By Scott Ritter, August 16, 2023

This time, Nuland was in the African country to respond to the July 26 military coup, which saw the ouster of the constitutionally-elected President Mohamed Bazoum by a group of military officers, operating under the umbrella of the newly-formed National Council for the Safeguard of the Homeland, led by the commander of the presidential guard, General Abdourahmane Tchiani, who subsequently declared himself to be the new head of state. 

Global WAR-NING! Geoengineering Is Wrecking Our Planet and Humanity

By Prof. Claudia von Werlhof, Dr. Rosalie Bertell, Prof Michel Chossudovsky, Josefina Fraile, Elana Freeland, Maria Heibel, Claire Henrion, Conny Kadia, Linda Leblanc, and Vilma Rocío Almendra Quiguanás, August 17, 2023

The so-called “climate emergency”  has become a timely and convenient instrument of propaganda which is used to distract people from questioning “the real crisis”, namely the Covid-19 “plandemic” (instigated by the financial elites) which is destroying people’s lives Worldwide.

U.S.-Backed Roll of the Dice Leaves Ukraine in Worse Crisis

By Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J. S. Davies, August 16, 2023

Ukraine’s fall 2022 counteroffensive left it in a stronger position, yet Biden and his NATO allies still chose the battlefield over the negotiating table. Now the failure of Ukraine’s long-delayed “Spring Counteroffensive” has left Ukraine in a weaker position, both on the battlefield and at the still empty negotiating table.

Theocracy Is Under Attack in Iran. “Joe Biden has friendly relations with the Islamists”

By Prof. Akbar E. Torbat, August 16, 2023

The invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq by the U.S. and its European allies in the early 2000s alarmed the clerics in Tehran that they may be next to lose power. Consequently, the clerics heavily invested in manufacturing conventional advanced weapons, which strengthened the country’s military.

U.S. Launched Illegal Invasion of Afghanistan 22 Years Ago: Fantasies About the “Global Wars on Terrorism and Drugs”

By Drago Bosnic, August 16, 2023

When the United States launched its illegal invasion of Afghanistan 22 years ago, it tried to convince the world (and even itself) that it was doing “the right thing” by using the September 11 attacks as the pretext.

Pilot Died in Flight: Aug. 14, 2023 LATAM Flight LA505 (MIA-SCL) Miami to Santiago, Chile

By Dr. William Makis, August 16, 2023

56 year old captain pilot went into the washroom in the 2nd hour of the flight, saying he felt unwell. Noticing that the captain had fallen in the sink, the cabin crew intervened with first aid, but the captain could not be revived.

US-NATO Plans to Prepare Ukraine for Another Doomed Counteroffensive in 2024

By Ahmed Adel, August 16, 2023

The Wall Street Journal reported that Western politicians have begun speculating about Kiev’s preparations for a possible new counteroffensive next spring. The media outlet quoted diplomats saying that the US and other Western officials hoped the Ukrainian military’s much-vaunted summer counteroffensive.

Shocking Audio Recording Played at Ottawa Police Detective’s Trial for Investigating “Sudden Infant Deaths”

By Donald Best, August 16, 2023

Detective Grus is charged with Discreditable Conduct under the Police Services Act for the ‘unauthorized’ re-investigation of nine sudden infant deaths (‘SIDS’), where she sought to know if the mothers’ vaccination status might have been connected with the deaths.

Food, Dispossession and Dependency. Resisting the New World Order

By Colin Todhunter, August 16, 2023

We are currently seeing an acceleration of the corporate consolidation of the entire global agri-food chain. The high-tech/big data conglomerates, including Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook and Google, have joined traditional agribusiness giants, such as Corteva, Bayer, Cargill and Syngenta, in a quest to impose their model of food and agriculture on the world.

The Biggest Vietnam War Story that Americans Don’t Talk About

By John Summers, August 16, 2023

In February, a district court in Seoul ordered the government of South Korea to pay compensatory damages to Nguyễn Thi Thanh, a Vietnamese woman, in a lawsuit she brought over an event that had taken place 55 years earlier, nearly to the day. On the morning of Feb. 12, 1968, about 100 combat troops from the Republic of Korea’s 2nd Marine Brigade poured into Phong Nhị in Quảng Nam Province.

All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the Translate Website button below the author’s name.

To receive Global Research’s Daily Newsletter (selected articles), click here.

Click the share button above to email/forward this article to your friends and colleagues. Follow us on Instagram and Twitter and subscribe to our Telegram Channel. Feel free to repost and share widely Global Research articles.

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President Biden wrote in the New York Times in June 2022 that the United States was arming Ukraine to “fight on the battlefield and be in the strongest possible position at the negotiating table.”

Ukraine’s fall 2022 counteroffensive left it in a stronger position, yet Biden and his NATO allies still chose the battlefield over the negotiating table. Now the failure of Ukraine’s long-delayed “Spring Counteroffensive” has left Ukraine in a weaker position, both on the battlefield and at the still empty negotiating table.

So, based on Biden’s own definition of U.S. war aims, his policy is failing, and it is hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian soldiers, not Americans, who are paying the price, with their limbs and their lives.

But this result was not unexpected. It was predicted in leaked Pentagon documents that were widely published in April, and in President Zelenskyy’s postponement of the offensive in May to avoid what he called “unacceptable” losses.

The delay allowed more Ukrainian troops to complete NATO training on Western tanks and armored vehicles, but it also gave Russia more time to reinforce its anti-tank defenses and prepare lethal kill-zones along the 700-mile front line.

Now, after two months, Ukraine’s new armored divisions have advanced only 12 miles or less in two small areas, at the cost of tens of thousands of casualties. Twenty percent of newly deployed Western armored vehicles and equipment were reportedly destroyed in the first few weeks of the new offensive, as British-trained armored divisions tried to advance through Russian minefields and kill-zones without demining operations or air cover.

Meanwhile, Russia has made similar small advances toward Kupyansk in eastern Kharkiv province, where land around the town of Dvorichna has changed hands for the third time since the invasion. These tit-for-tat exchanges of small pieces of territory, with massive use of heavy artillery and appalling losses, typify a brutal war of attrition not unlike the First World War.

Ukraine’s more successful counteroffensives last fall provoked serious debate within NATO over whether that was the moment for Ukraine to return to the negotiating table it had abandoned at British and U.S. urging in April 2022. As Ukrainian forces advanced on Kherson in early November, La Republicca in Italy reported that NATO leaders had agreed that the fall of Kherson would put Ukraine in the position of strength they had been waiting for to relaunch peace talks.

On November 9, 2022, the very day that Russia ordered its withdrawal from Kherson, General Mark Milley, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, spoke at the Economic Club of New York, where the interviewer asked him whether the time was now ripe for negotiations.

General Milley compared the situation to the First World War, explaining that leaders on all sides understood by Christmas 1914 that that war was not winnable, yet they fought on for another four years, multiplying the million lives lost in 1914 into 20 million by 1918, destroying five empires and setting the stage for the rise of fascism and the Second World War.

Milley concluded his cautionary tale by noting that, as in 1914,

“… there has to be a mutual recognition that military victory is probably in the true sense of the word, is maybe not achievable through military means. And therefore, you need to turn to other means… So things can get worse. So when there’s an opportunity to negotiate, when peace can be achieved, seize it, seize the moment.”

But Milley and other voices of experience were ignored. At Biden’s February State of the Union speech in Congress, General Milley’s face was a study in gravity, a rock in a sea of misplaced self-congratulation and ignorance of the real world beyond the circus tent, where the West’s incoherent war strategy was not only sacrificing Ukrainian lives every day but flirting with nuclear war. Milley didn’t crack a smile all night, even when Biden came over to glad-hand after his speech.

No U.S., NATO or Ukrainian leaders have been held accountable for failing to seize that moment last winter, nor the previous missed chance for peace in April 2022, when the U.S. and UK blocked the Turkish and Israeli mediation that came so close to bringing peace, based on the simple principle of a Russian withdrawal in exchange for Ukrainian neutrality.

Nobody has demanded a serious account of why Western leaders let these chances for peace slip through their fingers.

Whatever their reasoning, the result is that Ukraine is caught in a war with no exit. When Ukraine seemed to have the upper hand in the war, NATO leaders were determined to press their advantage and launch another offensive, regardless of the shocking human cost. But now that the new offensive and weapons shipments have only succeeded in laying bare the weakness of Western strategy and returning the initiative to Russia, the architects of failure reject negotiating from a position of weakness.

So the conflict has fallen into an intractable pattern common to many wars, in which all parties to the fighting—Russia, Ukraine and the leading members of the NATO military alliance—have been encouraged, or we might say deluded, by limited successes at different times, into prolonging the war and rejecting diplomacy, despite appalling human costs, the rising danger of a wider war and the existential danger of a nuclear confrontation.

But the reality of war is laying bare the contradictions of Western policy. If Ukraine is not allowed to negotiate with Russia from a position of strength, nor from a position of weakness, what stands in the way of its total destruction?

And how can Ukraine and its allies defeat Russia, a country whose nuclear weapons policy explicitly states that it will use nuclear weapons before it will accept an existential defeat?

If, as Biden has warned, any war between the United States and Russia, or any use of “tactical” nuclear weapons, would most likely escalate into full-scale nuclear war, where else is the current policy of incremental escalation and ever-increasing U.S. and NATO involvement intended to lead?

Are they simply praying that Russia will implode, or give up? Or are they determined to call Russia’s bluff and push it into an inescapable choice between total defeat and nuclear war? Hoping, or pretending, that Ukraine and its allies can defeat Russia without triggering a nuclear war is not a strategy.

In place of a strategy to resolve the conflict, the United States and its allies harnessed the natural impulse to resist Russian aggression onto a U.S. and British plan to prolong the war indefinitely. The results of that decision are hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian casualties and the gradual destruction of Ukraine by millions of artillery shells fired by both sides.

Since the end of the First Cold War, successive U.S. governments, Democratic and Republican, have made catastrophic miscalculations regarding the United States’ ability to impose its will on other countries and peoples. Their wrong assumptions about American power and military superiority have led us to this fateful, historic crisis in U.S. foreign policy.

Now Congress is being asked for another $24 billion to keep fueling this war. They should instead listen to the majority of Americans, who, according to the latest CNN poll, oppose more funding for an unwinnable war. They should heed the words of the declaration by civil society groups in 32 countries calling for an immediate ceasefire and peace negotiations to end the war before it destroys Ukraine and endangers all of humanity.

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Medea Benjamin is the cofounder of CODEPINK for Peace, and the author of several books, including Inside Iran: The Real History and Politics of the Islamic Republic of Iran.

Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J. S. Davies are the authors of War in Ukraine: Making Sense of a Senseless Conflict, published by OR Books in November 2022. They are regular contributors to Global Research.

Featured image: President Biden speaks to General Mark Milley after his 2023 State of the Union speech. Photo credit: Francis Chung/Politico

All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the Translate Website button below the author’s name.

To receive Global Research’s Daily Newsletter (selected articles), click here.

Click the share button above to email/forward this article to your friends and colleagues. Follow us on Instagram and Twitter and subscribe to our Telegram Channel. Feel free to repost and share widely Global Research articles.

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The invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq by the U.S. and its European allies in the early 2000s alarmed the clerics in Tehran that they may be next to lose power. Consequently, the clerics heavily invested in manufacturing conventional advanced weapons, which strengthened the country’s military. With the recent progress in the nuclear field, Iran now has a choice to build atomic weapons. Furthermore, Iran’s admission to the Shanghai Cooperation Organization in September 2022 as a full member further has strengthened Iran’s position versus the West. As is explained further below, behind the scenes, the clerics have made a deal with Biden’s administration to reduce weapon-grade uranium enrichment to reduce tension with the United States. As a result, the clerics feel they have managed a strong deterrent against a possible external threat to their regime. 

Now that Western imperialism has partly vacated the neighboring countries, the internal threat to their regime has not ceased. Specifically, the women-led social revolution over hejab that started last September, after the death of Mahsa Amini and spread to the schools and universities, has seriously threatened the survival of the theocratic rule in Iran. In recent years, the ruling clerics’ political base has drastically shrunk. Many mosques are almost empty, and some are closed. The clerics are under pressure to give up power, but they do not want to lose their grip on theocratic rule. So far, they have continuously attacked protestors by using force and do not mind killing them to preserve their power.

Seeing the shrinking of their power, the clerics are strengthening their political base by spreading their religious beliefs in schools to indoctrinate underage students. Under the so-called “Amin Plan,” the regime has brought thousands of junior mullahs to teach in schools. The plan is a cooperation between the seminary and the Ministry of Education. Junior mullahs act as Islamic evangelists.

The plan is to further de-secularize education in schools. Under the cover of teaching Islamic ethics, the mullahs inject their superstitious beliefs into the students’ brains to prevent anti-clerics movements in the future. Some teachers are forced to retire to be replaced by junior mullahs. Moreover, the magnitude of the brain drain has recently increased, especially since many physicians that the country needs are leaving to seek jobs in the West.

Hejab symbolizes the cleric’s cultural hegemony over half of the population in Iran, which emancipated women have recently challenged. The clerics are under a barrage of criticisms from many Iranians, including some of their own supporters. President Ebrahim Raisi has promised that he will surely re-enforce hejab. Currently, there is legislation under review in the Islamic Consultative Assembly (Majles) for enforcing hejab entitled “Promotion of the Culture of Chastity and Hejab.” The legislation is supposed to fine women who defy the hejab law.  For example, if a passenger takes off her headscarf in a taxi and the police sees it, the taxi driver will immediately be charged 500,000 tomans (about $50).

From a legal viewpoint, a person is responsible for his or her actions, and the driver cannot be punished for another person’s offense. The women who are known celebrities are fined up to 10% of their entire wealth in case of non-compliance with hejab rules. Many have criticized the legislation before becoming law. Also, a group of pro-cleric women has been hired to police enforcement of hejab in Tehran’s metro and other public places. Many think the legislation is unenforceable and will lead to further waves of anti-clerical discontent.

The spread of information technology has created a serious threat to clerical rules. A few weeks ago, several videos were published in the media that showed several officials of the regime engaging in acts of sodomy or adultery, which according to Islamic law, is punishable by the death penalty. In response, the clerics have arrested the persons who took or published the videos.

As is known in the Iranian community, President Joe Biden has friendly relations with the Islamists. Biden has publicly stated that he is interested in Islamic theology. Before the Iranian revolution, Senator Biden was sympathetic to a few Islamist political activists who later became the top officials in the Islamic regime in Iran.

According to the Iranian community, a few decades ago, a wealthy dentist in Los Angeles, an Islamic ideologue, supported Biden’s campaign for the Senate among Iranians in Los Angeles. Now, it seems behind the scenes the clerics have made a deal with Biden’s administration to reduce Uranium enrichment. AS was reported by the Wall Street Journal on August 11, “Iran has significantly slowed the pace at which it is accumulating near-weapons-grade enriched uranium and has diluted some of its stockpiles.”[1]

Furthermore, the Biden Administration has agreed to let South Korea release the Iranian funds that were restricted under the U.S. sanctions. Initially, Iran had about $7 billion there, which now has been reduced to $6 billion due to the depreciation of the South Korean won versus the dollar. The $6 billion which was held in a restricted account in Seoul, will be converted to euro and transferred to a bank in Qatar, where they can be accessed for “humanitarian purposes and other trade permitted under U.S. sanctions.”[2] In return, Iran has agreed to release five Iranian American prisoners in Tehran. According to Politico, the top Republican senators criticized Biden’s deal to give a ransom to the regime for releasing the prisoners.[3]

The theocratic regime that came to power in Iran about 44 years ago seems to have lost legitimacy among the majority of Iranians, especially the youth and women who defy the theocratic rules that are enforced by the regime. It is time for the Western supporters of the regime to realize that the life of theocracy in Iran is effectively and rapidly coming to an end.

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Akbar E. Torbat ([email protected]) is the author of “Politics of Oil and Nuclear Technology in Iran,” Palgrave Macmillan (2020). He received his Ph.D. in political economy from the University of Texas at Dallas.

Notes

[1]Laurence Norman, August. 11, 2023,  Iran Slows Buildup of Uranium Needed for Weapon.

[2] Vivian Salama, August 11,2023 Iran Releases Four Americans from Evin Prison Tehran seeks billions in energy revenue frozen in South Korea.

[3] Eric Bazail-Eimil and Nahal Toosi, August. 10, 2023 Politico, https://www.politico.com/news/2023/08/10/republicans-biden-iran-00110737 

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***

August 14, 2023 – LATAM Flight LA505 (MIA-SCL) Miami to Santiago, Chile (source 1, source 2, source 3, source 4) 

• LATAM Flight LA505 (MIA-SCL) left Miami at 22:11 EDT
• 56 year old captain pilot went into the washroom in the 2nd hour of the flight, saying he felt unwell.
• Noticing that the captain had fallen in the sink, the cabin crew intervened with first aid, but the captain could not be revived.
• There were 3 pilots on the plane, the remaining two diverted the plane and landed safely in Panama City, Panama, 28 minutes after pilot collapse, at 12:36AM EDT.
• The captain was pronounced dead upon arrival.
• The aircraft is still on the ground in Panama City about 12 hours after landing.
• Passengers reported they were dropped off in Panama City with no LATAM staff around and left without information (that the captain had died).

Recent Pilot Incapacitations

Aug. 9, 2023 – United Airlines UAL1309 (SRQ-EWR) Sarasota to Newark, pilot had a heart attack and lost consciousness in flight

Aug. 7, 2023 – TigerAIR Flight IT237 (CTS-TPE) Sapporo to Taipei, copilot had a medical emergency after landing plane in Taipei

July 19, 2023 – Eurowings Discover Flight 4Y-1205 (HER-FRA) Heraklion to Frankfurt, pilot incapacitated, first officer took control, landed safely

July 16, 2023 – 2006 Piper Meridian, flying from Westchester NY, crashed at Martha’s Vineyard Airport after pilot had medical emergency upon final approach and passenger took control of the plane and attempted a landing

Jun. 7, 2023 – Air Canada Flight ACA692 (YYZ-YYT) Toronto to St.John’s, First Officer became incapacitated, deadheading Captain assumed duties

Jun. 4, 2023 – Cessna Citation N611VG flying Tennessee to Long Island, fighter jets spotted pilot slumped over in cockpit unconscious, plane crashed and all onboard died

May 11, 2023 – HiSKy Flight H4474 (DUB-KIV) Dublin to Chisinau (Moldova), 20 min after liftoff pilot became “unable to act”, plane diverted to Manchester

May 4, 2023 – British Charter TUI Airways Flight BY-1424 (NCL-LPA) Newcastle to Las Palmas Spain pilot became ill, plane diverted back to NCL.

April 4, 2023 – United Airlines Flight 2102 (BOI-SFO) – captain was incapacitated, first officer was only one in control of the aircraft.

March 25, 2023 – TAROM Flight RO-7673 TSR-HRG diverted to Bucharest as 30 yo pilot had chest pain, then collapsed

March 22, 2023 – Southwest Flight WN6013 LAS-CMH diverted as pilot collapsed shortly after take-off, replaced by non-Southwest pilot

March 18, 2023 – Air Transat Flight TS739 FDF-YUL first officer was incapacitated about 200NM south of Montreal

March 13, 2023 – Emirates Flight EK205 MXP-JFK diverted due to pilot illness hour and a half after take-off

March 11, 2023 – United Airlines Flight UA2007 GUA-ORD diverted due to “incapacitated pilot” who had chest pains

March 11, 2023? – British Airways (CAI-LHR) pilot collapsed in Cairo hotel and died, was scheduled to fly Airbus A321 from Cairo to London

March 3, 2023 – Virgin Australia Flight VA-717 ADL-PER Adelaide to Perth flight was forced to make an emergency landing after First Officer suffered heart attack 30 min after departure.

Recent Pilot Deaths

Pilot death – May 2023 – 4 Singapore Airlines pilots died suddenly in May 2023

Pilot death – May 9, 2023 – United Airlines and US Air Force Pilot Lt. Col. Michael Fugett, age 46, died unexpectedly at his home

Pilot death – May 3, 2023 – Air Transat and Air Canada Pilot Eddy Vorperian, age 48, died suddenly during layover in Croatia

Pilot death – April 13, 2023 – Phil Thomas, graduate of Flight Training Pilot academy in Cadiz, Spain (FTEJerez) died suddenly.

Pilot death – March 17, 2023 – 39 year old Westjet Pilot Benjamin Paul Vige died suddenly in Calgary

Pilot death – March 11, 2023 – British Airways pilot died of heart attack in crew hotel in Cairo before a Cairo to London flight (name & age not released

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Dr. William Makis is a Canadian physician with expertise in Radiology, Oncology and Immunology. Governor General’s Medal, University of Toronto Scholar. Author of 100+ peer-reviewed medical publications.

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It was a shallow affair. Reputed to have exceptionally poor hairdo, the figure who became one of Europe’s, and indeed one of the globe’s most lasting and influential politicians, inspired memes aplenty for what she sported on her bonce.

The teases, the parodying, the satire, began to bite. Stylists were sought in an attempt to do away with the soup bowl severity of her hair, all part of the rebrand in running against Chancellor Gerhard Schröder in 2005. There was Udo Walz, whose clients included Chancellor Schröder himself, and such celebrity terrorists such as Ulrike Meinhof.

Former world hairdressing champion, Martina Acht also offered her snipping and touch-up services, much to the consternation of an envious Walz, who insisted on being the first one to have “started slowly changing her style”. The change had evidently been so slow as to enable competitors to swoop in. “Just before George Bush visited Germany in February [2005], Mrs Merkel came to me for advice,” stated Acht in September that same year. “I wanted her to look her best for ‘Georgie Boy’, so I did her hair, and gave her a bit of encouragement in the looks department.”

Being out of the job of German Chancellor for two years, Merkel’s appetite for hairstyling and makeup has not abated. The bills for quite literally keeping up appearances continue to amount. A freedom of information request submitted by the Tagesspiegel has found that the Chancellery continues to pay Merkel’s hair and makeup costs regarding public and private engagements. The amount since 2021 has come to 57,000 euros.

Merkel also seems to have parted ways with a makeup artist she had retained for some years, preferring the services of a self-employed hair and makeup artist. And just to add sauce to the mix, not to mention cost, the individual is also a fashion designer.

According to the Chancellery’s response to the paper, “The assumption of costs is linked to the performance of continuing official duties – regardless of whether they are public or non-public.”

That is not an assumption worn lightly in the office. When Merkel billed the government for both her stylist and personal adviser during a visit to the Netherlands last year, some employees in the Chancellery grumbled. Concern was also expressed about accommodation costs for Merkel’s cosmetics assistant for a trip to Geneva.

For members of the current government, the costs for keeping up appearances has been impressive. A parliamentary investigation earlier this year found that 1.5 million euros had been spent on payments to photographers, hairdressers and makeup artists for the first full year of the Scholz administration. This constituted, roughly speaking, an 80% increase from 2021. In all of this, the true star in the roll call of makeup expenses turned out to be Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock. In 2022, 137,000 euros was spent on a makeup artist that keeps the minister company for her appointments in Germany and overseas.

The current chancellor, Olaf Scholz, is also proving stellar in his own right: 21,808 euros was spent on hair and makeup in 2023, and 38,910 euros the previous year. These totals would be questionable at the best of times, but Scholz’s case is even odder. How do you justify generous remunerations to hairstylists for someone with little to no hair to work with? Is the pate particularly delicate, requiring tender care? German taxpayers must be pondering the mysteries.

The issue with generous hairstyling and photography costs seems to be endemic, spreading through the country to other offices and states. The office of Bavaria’s head of state, Markus Söder, parted with 180,000 euros on freelance photographers in 2022, just to add to the 36,000 euros annually paid to a permanent photographer.

The post-career billings of politicians reluctant to leave the treasury unmolested has been a very pungent and contentious issue.  How far should such public service be rewarded, if at all? Should it extend to some perennial monetary defraying of expenses well beyond the life, let alone usefulness, of that service? In Australia, the treasured Life Gold Pass, introduced in 1918, used to give former members of parliament extensive travel benefits within the country without fear of private disbursement for return trips.  Initially, there were no limits. Then the trips were capped. Eventually, the measures were amended in 2017 to only cover former Prime Ministers. Discussion about makeup artists in tow, however, did not occur.

President Reiner Holznagel, President of The Taxpayers’ Association, argues that using the public purse to cover an ex-politician’s expenses such as makeup artists and hairstylists is best avoided or “reduced to the bare minimum”. When in doubt, these should be paid from private sources. It is a sentiment most understandable but, short of any hard policy reform, likely to be rebuffed. The definition of politics by the witty poet and US Civil War veteran Ambrose Bierce comes to mind: “The conduct of public affairs for private advantage.”

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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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***

The Wall Street Journal reported that Western politicians have begun speculating about Kiev’s preparations for a possible new counteroffensive next spring. The media outlet quoted diplomats saying that the US and other Western officials hoped the Ukrainian military’s much-vaunted summer counteroffensive, initially scheduled for the spring, would succeed and help force Russia to negotiate this winter – but this did not occur. Thus, the focus is now moving to next year.

The cited diplomats also assessed that Western military strategists and politicians have already begun to think about a possible Ukrainian offensive in the spring of 2024, suggesting that there are still definitely hardcore elements in Western decision-making centres that want the conflict to continue. It is especially questionable how Ukraine will be able to build a brand-new army while, at the same time, Russia continues to build its defences and offensive capabilities.

The Ukrainian counteroffensive began on June 4 in the southern regions of Donetsk, Artyomovsk (Bakhmut) and Zaporozhye. The attempts by Ukrainian troops to pierce the first Russian line of defence have catastrophically failed, leading to thousands of Ukrainian casualties, shattered morale, and a destroyed army. This enormous cost led to only about 10 miles in two areas being captured by Ukrainian forces, all in a dead zone in territory that Russia was willing to sacrifice when considering the enemy still had not even reached the first line of defence.

Kiev’s failures in the counteroffensive were the indecision of Western allies and, personally, of US President Joe Biden, former US National Security Adviser John Bolton said in an article in The Wall Street Journal.

According to Bolton,

 “inability to achieve major advances is the natural result of a U.S. strategy aimed only at staving off Russian conquest.”

At the same time, Bolton said the constant debate in the West over the desirability of arms supplies to Ukraine and Moscow’s nuclear power has engendered a “paralysing caution” in European capitals. He stressed that the West, especially Washington, needed to “radically” rethink its sanctions policy to put pressure on Russia.

“Theories about price caps on Russian oil have failed, and Western sanctions generally remain piecemeal and seriously underenforced,” he said, adding: “Proclaiming sanctions is great PR, but enforcement is hard, tedious and necessarily done clandestinely where possible.”

Given the catastrophic failure of the 2023 counteroffensive, there is little suggestion that 2024 will be better since Ukraine will need several years to rebuild its military capabilities following its destruction by Russian forces. While some elements of Western leadership discuss a 2023 counteroffensive, reports have emerged that thousands of Ukrainians paid high bribes to corrupt army recruiters to avoid being conscripted amid Russia’s special military operation in Ukraine.

According to reports, 20,000 Ukrainian citizens were prevented from leaving the country following an order by President Volodymyr Zelensky regarding regional recruiting chiefs. The cost of bribes differs across Ukraine, with many draft defectors asked to pay $6,000 for a medical certificate that exempts them from military service.

The FT mentioned Yevgeny Borisov, head of the regional recruiting centre in Odessa, who was arrested in July after being accused of receiving more than $5 million in bribes to approve exemptions, helping hundreds of men, and possibly thousands, who paid between US$2,000 and $10,000 per person. Ukrainian investigators said Borisov used most of the ill-gotten money to buy a €4.2m home in Spain in December 2022 and travel abroad to holiday, including in Seychelles.

According to the British newspaper, after Zelensky ordered the dismissal of all regional army recruitment chiefs suspected of being involved in corruption schemes, 13,600 Ukrainians were caught trying to enter neighbouring countries without going through official checkpoints. Another 6,100 were detained when trying to use false documents at regular border crossings. 

These events, which are being reported during the failed Kiev counteroffensive, not only point to an issue of corruption in the Ukrainian military but also highlight recruitment issues. This again suggests that ideas of another counteroffensive in 2024 are fanciful at best.

In addition, Ukraine does not have air superiority. Modern warfare can only be won with air superiority, but this is especially prioritised in US military doctrine, on which the much-vaunted counteroffensive relied despite not having air superiority. As Russia has air superiority, something it will maintain over the course of this war, it dominates the sky and destroys command control systems, missile emplacements, and troop convoys.

Given that willingness, as well reported in Western media, to support Ukraine financially endlessly is diminishing in the West, in addition to recruitment issues and being unable to achieve air superiority, ideas of a major Ukrainian counteroffensive in 2024 cannot be taken seriously. Ukraine’s army has been devastated and is unlikely to recover during the war.

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Ahmed Adel is a Cairo-based geopolitics and political economy researcher.

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***

The first day of Ottawa Police Detective Helen Grus’s trial began with prayer outside the tribunal, and ended with many spectators saying they were shocked by an audio recording played by the prosecution.

Detective Grus is charged with Discreditable Conduct under the Police Services Act for the ‘unauthorized’ re-investigation of nine sudden infant deaths (‘SIDS’), where she sought to know if the mothers’ vaccination status might have been connected with the deaths.

Monday August 14, 2023 was not the trial, but a pre-trial hearing where defense and prosecution debated the adequacy of disclosure and whether defense would be able to call and cross-exam a lengthy list of witnesses.

The prosecution also played an almost three-hour recording of the May 12, 2022 Professional Standards interview of Detective Grus that caused one retired RCMP observer to declare,

“This is becoming a trial about Ottawa Police officers being in Neglect of Duty for failing to properly investigate Sudden Infant Deaths, and for obstructing Detective Grus’s investigations.”

During the almost three-hour recording Detective Grus related how she had informed her superiors including then Chief of Police Sloly of the growing medical and scientific reports concerning Covid vaccine injuries and deaths – including to babies in the womb and newborns.

Grus can be heard in the recording explaining revelations contained in Pfizer Documents, including that only one newborn baby survived of the 33 reported in the initial trial.

Audible Gasps in Public Gallery

Detective Grus sent an open letter to Chief Sloly in September of 2021 – after which her supervisor in the Sexual Assault and Child Abuse Unit (SACA) sent an email instructing her not to talk about Covid or the Vaccines in the unit.

At this revelation, audible gasps could be heard throughout the gallery – because it meant that the sergeants running the unit responsible for investigating SIDS – arbitrarily eliminated the Covid vaccine as a potential factor in all infant deaths.

This bias meant that no OPS Sudden Infant Death investigations were complete, or adhered to World Heath Organization standards.

At the time she was suspended in February 2022, Detective Grus was pulling together evidence for a report to the Chief and other senior leaders that recommended changes to the SIDS questionnaire and investigation methodology of the SACA unit. Grus also found that each of her nine SIDS investigations in question was substandard in various ways.

The suspension and charges against Detective ended any investigations by Ottawa Police into the potential that the experimental mRNA Covid injections of pregnant and breastfeeding mothers could be a factor in Sudden Infant Deaths.

Famed NYPD Detective Frank Serpico is following the Grus case, and previously declared that Ottawa Police are engaged in a cover-up of the police failure to investigate the potential connections between Covid-vaccinated mothers, and the nine sudden infant deaths.

Detective Serpico stated of the cover-up “Incompetence or criminality will go to any length not to be exposed even at the cost of innocent infant lives.”

Transparency of Trial Doubtful

It became apparent during Monday’s session, that the Ottawa Police have withheld various motions and judge’s decisions from the public and the news media. This, after refusing for six months to provide any documents at all, and then only recently releasing some (but not all) the filed court documents.

The voice recording the prosecution played Monday was clearly heard by all over the room’s speaker system. This was in contrast to the proceedings where the judge, prosecutor and defense attorney are not amplified.

The audience simply cannot hear the lawyers and judge talking. The so-called open court principle is a sham when the public and press cannot hear even when attending the proceedings live.

This comes following the Ottawa Police decision to stop broadcasting the Grus hearings on the Internet – despite the fact that other cases are booked for Internet broadcast in the coming November.

Tuesday Starts at 9am, ends early at 1pm Due to a scheduling conflict with the court reporter, Tuesday’s session will begin at 9am and end at 1pm.

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Our thanks to Prof. Denis Rancourt for bringing this to our attention.

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***

Last week, Acting Deputy Secretary of State for the United States Victoria Nuland made her third visit to Niger in the past two years.

This time, Nuland was in the African country to respond to the July 26 military coup, which saw the ouster of the constitutionally-elected President Mohamed Bazoum by a group of military officers, operating under the umbrella of the newly-formed National Council for the Safeguard of the Homeland, led by the commander of the presidential guard, General Abdourahmane Tchiani, who subsequently declared himself to be the new head of state. 

Nuland had sought a meeting with the ousted president, Bazoum, as well as the leader of the new  military government, General Tchiani. She was denied both, and instead held a very strained dialogue with Tchiani’s military chief, General Moussa Salaou Barmou, who headed a delegation of lesser officers. Nuland called the talks with Barmou “frank” and “difficult.” What she did not do, however, was call a spade a spade, refusing to label the Nigerien coup a coup, but rather treating it as temporary domestic political mishap which, with a little bit of US-applied pressure from the right source, could be overcome.

The reasoning behind the American game of semantics is that, by law, if the US recognizes the Nigerien coup as a coup, then it must cease all military-to-military interactions between a force of some 1,100 US military personnel currently stationed in Niger, and their Nigerien military counterparts, as well as all other forms of US-funded aid. The law in question, known as Section 7008 (of Public Law 117-328, Division K), specifically states that no funds appropriated by Congress in support of State, Foreign Operations and Related Programs (SFOPS) “shall be obligated or expended to finance directly any assistance to the government of any country whose duly elected head of government is deposed by military coup d’état or decree.” 

During her 2-hour discussions with the Tchiani government delegation, Nuland made it clear that while US relations were currently suspended, they were not permanently halted. In a post-meeting video press conference, Nuland emphasized the consequences of the failure to return President Bazoum to power with General Barmou, a Nigerien special forces officer who had been trained at US military schools and had extensive interaction with US military trainers in Niger. Barmou’s personal experience with the US military is in many ways the personification of a relationship that today serves as the foundation of America’s military presence and mission in West Africa.

The US, France, and other European partners have been engaged in a years-long campaign, together with their West African partners, to combat Islamic extremism in the Sahel region of Africa. Niger, which hosts two major US bases, one outside the Nigerien capital of Niamey known as Base 101, and a second, Air Base 201, in Agadez – a city located on the southern edge of the Sahara. Both bases support US intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) operations conducted by MQ-9 Reaper drones and fixed-wing aircraft flown by a Joint Special Operations Aviation Detachment, as well as other US military operations, including military airlift and special forces training detachments (France also maintains a significant military presence in Niger, numbering over 1,000, and there are several hundred other military personnel from a variety of European Union (EU) nations.

With the collapse of the US, French, EU, and United Nations military presence in neighboring Mali, and in the aftermath of a military coup in Chad, Niger has emerged as the last remaining bastion of the US-led anti-terrorism effort in the Sahel. If the US were to cut relations with Niger because of the coup, there would be no Western-oriented anti-terrorism efforts remaining to counter the threat of Al Qaeda and Islamic State terrorism in the region.

From Washington’s perspective, the greatest threat that would emerge from any break in the military-to-military assistance between the US and Niger is not the potential spread of Islamic fundamentalist-inspired terrorism, but rather Russian influence, especially in the form of military security support allegedly provided by Wagner Group, a private military company whose African operations appear to operate in sync with Russian foreign policy objectives (neither the Kremlin nor the Tchiani government has commented on the reports of Wagner activities in Niger).

Prior to last month’s Russian-African Summit, Prigozhin had met with Wagner forces who had relocated to Belarus in the aftermath of the abortive June 23-24 insurrection – which resulted in halting Wagner operations in Donbass – during which he emphasized the importance Africa would play in future Wagner activities. Wagner’s presence has been reported in several African countries, including the Central African Republic, Libya, and Mali. Members of the senior leadership of the Nigerien coup have reportedly met with Wagner officials in Mali, to discuss security cooperation between Wagner and Niger. During her meeting with the Nigerien coup government, Victoria Nuland singled out the potential deployment of Wagner into Niger as a worrisome development and indicated that she pressed upon her Nigerien counterparts her assessment regarding the detrimental role played by Wagner regarding African security. The reported meeting between Wagner and Niger representatives indicates that Nuland’s message did not resonate with her Nigerien hosts.

The US appears to be caught in the horns of a dilemma, trying to balance a desire to maintain relations with a nation whose government cannot legally receive US aid, and the consequences that would accrue if US-Niger relations were severed, as required by Section 7008. There is an option that neither Nuland nor her boss, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, have yet given voice to. In early 2003, the US Congress amended Section 7008 to provide for the Secretary of State to seek a waiver on the grounds of the “national security interests of the United States.”

There are two major obstacles for the US when it comes to any such waiver. First is the amount of political capital that the US has expended in trying to return President Bazoum to power – to reverse now would be the kind of nod to Realpolitik that the Biden administration is loath to do. Second is the fact that Niger, having evaluated its options going forward, may no longer be interested in maintaining the close relations it previously enjoyed with the US. Niger, like Mali, Burkina Faso, and Guinea before it, has thrown off the mantle of its post-colonial relationship with France, a relationship that was closely linked with US national security policy in West Africa and the Sahel. The clock is ticking on the fate of US-Niger relations, and there seems to be little Victoria Nuland or any American official can do to change the outcome.

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Scott Ritter is a former US Marine Corps intelligence officer and author of ‘Disarmament in the Time of Perestroika: Arms Control and the End of the Soviet Union.’ He served in the Soviet Union as an inspector implementing the INF Treaty, in General Schwarzkopf’s staff during the Gulf War, and from 1991-1998 as a UN weapons inspector. 

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***

One day after my mother informed my father of her pregnancy with me, he received orders from the US Marine Corps to report to Vietnam. One month later, he was patrolling Quảng Nam Province with a brigade of South Korean Marines nicknamed the “Blue Dragons.” I’ve long yearned to piece together a story of how the faraway events coinciding with my gestation shattered our family after his return. The war’s brutality has never been anybody’s secret. By now, the 50th anniversary of the Paris Peace Accords, no aspect of any feature of the conflict would seem to remain unexplored. Yet my boyhood quest to mine the details of what my father did in Vietnam has foundered over the first and most general question: What were South Korean Marines doing there?

A clue tapped me on the shoulder earlier this year. In February, a district court in Seoul ordered the government of South Korea to pay compensatory damages to Nguyễn Thi Thanh, a Vietnamese woman, in a lawsuit she brought over an event that had taken place 55 years earlier, nearly to the day. On the morning of Feb. 12, 1968, about 100 combat troops from the Republic of Korea’s 2nd Marine Brigade poured into Phong Nhị in Quảng Nam Province. The Blue Dragons set homes ablaze and then proceeded to shoot, stab, drown, and hack to death 70 women, children, and infants. The butchery left no uninjured survivors. Nguyễn, 8 years old, took a bullet to the stomach. The rest of her family perished.

The South Korean government has appealed the verdict, which marked the first time any court in South Korea had attributed culpability for a massacre of Vietnamese civilians. More such lawsuits are likely to be brought. Since 1999, journalists, scholars, and veterans in Seoul have documented more than 80 similar massacres of a total of (at least) 9,000 civilians in three provinces. “There’s a strong sense among the survivors that the problem has to be resolved before their generation passes on,” Ku Su-jeong of the Korean-Vietnamese Peace Foundation said in 2016.

Only a few US news outlets reported Nguyễn’s victory. The silence bespeaks a curious subtraction of memory.

Image: Nguyễn Thi Thanh at the massacre site in 2021.LINH PHAM/NYT

Between 1965 and 1972, South Korea contributed 325,517 combatants at our behest. (Australia’s 60,000 rated the next highest contribution by an American ally. Some 2.7 million Americans served.) South Korean belligerents formed the largest phalanx of foreign fighters in Vietnam other than ours, and they even outnumbered ours in the final two years. Most Americans today, however, have forgotten the little our predecessors learned about this feature of the conflict at the time. Of tens of thousands of books in English about the Vietnam War, not one is dedicated to South Korea’s participation.

The Vietnam commitment marked the first time in Korea’s 4,000-year history that its fighters left the peninsula to wage war. The American and South Korean governments conspired to make it appear as if these deployments answered a call that came directly from South Vietnam. But in 1970 a US Senate committee detailed a mercenary motive in 2,000 pages of documents appended to its report of hearings into the matter.

Our government footed the entire cost of the South Koreans’ ammunition, aircraft, and weapons, trained and quartered their officers, built barracks for their infantry, and paid bonuses at a rate 23 times as high as their base pay for the duration of the war. A document called the Brown Memorandum — named for Winthrop G. Brown, the US ambassador to the Republic of Korea — codified the terms of a business transaction. In addition to paying for war materiel and troop bonuses and providing security guarantees against North Korea, our government agreed to purchase all goods and services for the South Korean forces exclusively from South Korean businesses. The windfall, totaling more than $1 billion, rapidly modernized the country’s heavy industry. Our money contributed 4 percent of South Korea’s gross domestic product and 20 percent of its foreign exchange earnings. President Park Chung Hee, having seized power in a 1961 coup d’état, fortified authoritarian rule in the bargain.

In March 1973, our aircraft removed the last of the South Korean troops to a home country rejuvenated by war profiteering. With its end, President Park turned to formal dictatorship. Western economists have been calling the transformation of South Korea a “miracle” ever since.

The South Koreans based their detachment in the Central Highlands, a region thick with enemy forces. The Tiger and the White Horse divisions secured the coast and disrupted supply lines. The Blue Dragon Marine brigade conducted search-and-destroy missions in villages and hamlets. American liaisons such as my father escorted the brigade in the countryside, coordinating helicopter and gunship sup Blue Dragon contingent as “a troubleshooting outfit.” Some of the trouble they shot had been herded into refugee camps. Survivors reported members of the brigade baiting children into groups with candy and cake and then turning machine guns and grenade launchers against them. Other survivors alleged the Blue Dragons beheaded five children in 1966 and deposited their skulls on a highway as a warning to insurgents.

A memorial to villagers killed in the 1968 massacre in Quảng Nam Province.LINH PHAM/NYT

American newspapers celebrated the florid cruelty of our mercenaries. “Korean Marines are Legends,” crowed the Copley News Service on Nov. 11, 1966, describing them as “larger-than-life figures with dusky yellow skins, high cheekbones, and almond-shaped eyes.” The dispatch quoted US field commanders praising their exemplary methods of terror: “After every fight they skin a few of the dead and leave them behind or cut off their ears and put up their heads on bamboo poles.” A Scripps-Howard report endorsed the logic of their bloodletting: “Their rough tactics discourage the Viet Cong from attacking them. When Koreans receive fire from a village, they are likely to level it and spread word that the same thing will happen to the next village from which they receive harassment.”

As discipline and morale in our forces wobbled, the South Korean Marines stood firm. The news service UPI extolled them as “one of the toughest fighting units left in Vietnam” in 1971. Their unsentimental ferocity chiseled proof of concept into America’s military strategy. “The ROK Marine pacification program is considered a success,” UPI wrote, “and the corps has gotten over an ugly incident at Barrier Island near Da Nang in which it was reported that many civilians were massacred during a clearing operation.” The next month, as the Blue Dragons began to draw down, their commander, Brigadier General Hur Hong, assured the Los Angeles Times his men’s thirst for blood wasn’t slaked: “Now we would like to go back to Korea and cut off the head of Kim Il Sung.”

This May, as the verdict in Nguyễn Thi Thanh’s lawsuit roiled Seoul, South Korean veterans attended a Vietnam War commemoration ceremony in Washington, D.C. Secretary of the Navy Carlos Del Toro thanked them for their service. To the bare fact of that service, all the most comprehensive and acclaimed histories of the war have given a few grudging sentences, if any. The latest doorstop, Carolyn Woods Eisenberg’s “Fire and Rain,” appeared this year with an “avalanche of material” declassified in recent decades. Eisenberg omits South Korea entirely. Journalists, novelists, and filmmakers have perpetuated the erasure. The Library of America’s 1,600-page anthology “Reporting Vietnam” affords the subject fewer than 10 words. Ken Burns and Lynn Novick’s documentary “The Vietnam War” runs 18 hours and features interviews with nearly 100 veterans “from all sides.” No South Koreans appear.

Our commentators still tend to interpret the “loss” of Vietnam as a “tragedy,” a fateful concatenation of domestic politics, diplomacy, and military strategy. A rote recitation of the My Lai massacre of 1968 often stands in for the unmentionable fact of many more atrocities committed by US troops. (In 1969, the Pentagon’s Vietnam War Crimes Working Group substantiated 320 massacres and documented another 500 or so allegations.) South Korea’s have been shuffled off stage along with the rest, so that they don’t disturb the dignified musings of tragedy.

The silence deprives us of a framework for the necessary question: What responsibility do we bear for atrocities committed by South Koreans in our Vietnam War? The US Army’s Inspector General found “some probability that a war crime was committed” by them in Phong Nhị on Feb. 12, 1968, the subject of the court ruling in Seoul this year. “After a limited investigation,” General Westmoreland averred to Lieutenant General Chae Myung-shin, commander of South Korea’s forces in Vietnam, “it was recognized that this matter is more properly a concern of your country, as a signatory to the Geneva Conventions, and our investigation was terminated.” To my knowledge, nobody in a position to do so has ever undertaken a legal or moral inventory of our use of mercenaries in the war.

What my 21-year-old father saw and did with the Blue Dragons he divulged just once, in a private conversation with my mother over my crib. The marriage didn’t last much longer. To his final breath, however, he declined to discuss with me what turned out to be the most important event for both our lives. Maybe he could never find the words to express the meaning of his complicity in extreme violence. Or maybe he feared I would pity him as a victim of circumstance, denying him moral agency. Either way, the wedge of conscience that separated us never lifted — and cheated us both. In “Un-nameable Objects, Unspeakable Crimes,” James Baldwin wrote that “the great force of history comes from the fact that we carry it within us, are unconsciously controlled by it in many ways, and history is literally present in all that we do.” Some stories never end. Others never begin.

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Our thanks to Dr. Kiyul Chung for bringing this to our attention.

John Summers is the editorial director of Lingua Franca Media. His edited collection of Dwight Macdonald’s writings on art, politics, and atrocity will appear next year from the University of Chicago Press.

Featured image: Nguyen Thi Thanh, a survivor of a massacre carried out by South Korean troops who fought alongside Americans, pointed out the names of relatives at a memorial in the Quang Nam Province of Vietnam in 2021.LINH PHAM/NYT

Harold Pinter Had It Right. Lessons in Western Self-sabotage from the Ukraine War

By Seymour M. Hersh, August 16, 2023

The British playwright and Nobel Prize winner Harold Pinter was an early critic of the Bush administration’s decision, endorsed by British Prime Minister Tony Blair, to declare a worldwide war on Islamist terrorism in the aftermath of 9/11. In the fall of 2002, Pinter was invited to make his case against the war before the House of Commons.

Wheel Has Come Full Circle in Myanmar

By M. K. Bhadrakumar, August 16, 2023

If the past is any guide, the military leadership in Myanmar has either been talking to Suu Kyi behind the scenes or is hoping to re-engage her in a meaningful conversation. The fact that Thailand’s foreign minister Don Pramudwinai paid a secret visit to Nay Pyi Taw three weeks ago and met with Senior General Min Aung Hlaing and Suu Kyi in prison suggests pivotal undercurrents. 

Teenagers Dying Suddenly in Australia, UK, Ireland

By Dr. William Makis, August 16, 2023

I started reporting on sudden deaths of Canadian teenagers in November 2022, when I started seeing them on a frighteningly regular basis. Now we are seeing teenagers die suddenly in all the highly COVID-19 vaccinated countries. From my observations, this is how COVID-19 vaccines are killing teenagers, from more frequent causes to less.

Geo-engineered Fire Bombs = Directed Energy Weapons Not Climate Change

By Helena, August 16, 2023

As war drums beat across Africa, as China cleans up after devastating floods, as Maui searches remains, a tsunami is scheduled to hit Japan Tuesday with predictions of 20 inches of rain in 24 hours. Climate is changing patterns both naturally and thru geoengineering with bomb like consequences. And Niger’s military coup has sparked a western reaction – WAR!

Burkina Faso January 2022: Another US-trained Soldier Staged a Military Coup in West Africa

By Nick Turse, August 16, 2023

The coup was announced on state television by a young officer who said the military had suspended the constitution and dissolved the government. Beside him sat a camouflage-clad man whom he introduced as Burkina Faso’s new leader: Lt. Col. Paul-Henri Sandaogo Damiba, the commander of one of the country’s three military regions.

Peace be with Afghanistan. The Taliban Has Delivered Peace to the War-torn Country, a Terrible Peace Though It May be.

By Doug Bandow, August 15, 2023

Two years ago, the Afghan government constructed and armed at Washington’s great expense dissolved one provincial capital at a time. The Taliban occupied Kabul on August 15. America’s role in Afghanistan’s tragedy came to an inglorious and shocking end.

On the Topicality and Relevance of Albert Camus, Yesterday and Today. “How do you see the future of humanity?”

By Dr. Rudolf Hänsel, August 15, 2023

Camus’s history of influence goes far beyond literature. As a representative of French atheistic existentialism, he not only influenced thinking in the last century about the basic questions of human existence, the role of intellectuals and the individual’s commitment to freedom and justice, he still offers fundamental orientation today. He has taken into account the research results of scientific depth psychology.

Is the U.S. a Failed State? “Why Did the U.S. Decide to Deindustrialize?” Michael Hudson

By Prof Michael Hudson and Steven Grumbine, August 15, 2023

America cannot re-industrialize without reversing this whole philosophy of post-industrial society as a class war against labor. You can’t have both. You can’t have a class war against labor and reindustrialization with the labor unionization that goes with it.

What Is Happening in Syria?

By Philip Giraldi, August 15, 2023

Which are the governments generally regarded as “rogue” by an overwhelming majority of the world’s nations? If you answered either Russia or China you would be wrong, even though many countries have condemned Russia’s attack on Ukraine on grounds that no government has an intrinsic right to invade another unless there is an imminent serious threat that would excuse such an intervention.

Historical Analysis: Zionism and Israel

By Dr. Vladislav B. Sotirović, August 15, 2023

This Zionist movement was to a great extent expressed as a consequence of the European (mostly West European) anti-Semitic (better to say anti-Judaic) sentiments and politics that the (West) European Jews were experiencing for centuries.[ii] Zionism as a political-national movement was formally initiated by Theodor Herzl (1860−1904) at the World’s Zionist Conference in Basle (Switzerland) or the First World’s Zionist Congress held from August 29 to 31^st, 1897 attended by 208 delegates and 26 representatives of the press.

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July 31, 2023 – Pyle, Wales – 15 year old Rugby captain Joseph Gardiner died suddenly of a cardiac arrest on July 31, 2023. He died a day after reportedly visiting his GP when he began experiencing shortness of breath.

July 19, 2023 – Irish football star 18 year old Pauric Brady died suddenly “after a short battle with cancer” he was diagnosed with in Dec. 2022. Diagnosis to death in 6 months.

July 6, 2023 – Australia – 11 year old Emma Schwab died suddenly on July 6, 2023 from “influenza B” after another 15 yo girl also died from it (click here). 

July 5, 2023 – Ireland – 17 year old football player Kayla Rooney died suddenly on July 5, 2023 “It is with great sadness our club announces the sudden passing of our U17 Football & Camogie player, Kayla Rooney,” St. Brigid’s Ladies Gaelic Football & Camogie Club.

June 28, 2023 – Liverpool, UK – 19 year old University student Harvey Edwards died suddenly. The media is very misleading with this story. He didn’t die from a sinus infection. He died from a brain bleed and stroke.

June 27, 2023 – Nambour, Australia – 18 year old Keira Dascoli-Guymer, a rising teen roller derby star, collapsed died suddenly on June 27, 2023 after collapsing & going into cardiac arrest on June 17, 2023, then spending 10 days in a coma, “her heart just stopped and they don’t know why.”

June 24/25, 2023 – Sheffield, UK – 20 yo Alex Graham, top British hockey prospect playing for the Sheffield Steelers, died suddenly over the weekend, June 24/25, 2023.

June 23, 2023 – Gold Coast, Australia – 20 year old apprentice electrician Caleb Pace collapsed during a game of Touch Football (Oztag) and died suddenly. While playing a match, his heart went into fibrillation, causing him to stop breathing & was in an induced coma for 3 days.

June 18, 2023 – Wales – 19 year old Daniel Smyth collapsed while on family holiday in Bulgaria. He woke in early morning hours feeling ill, collapsed in the bathroom and died. (Click here)

June 17, 2023 – Southampton, UK – 13 year old Sydney Daarol died suddenly in her sleep from cardiac arrest on June 17 2023. “She was perfectly healthy and had come home from a fun day of bowling with friends.”

June 16, 2023 – Telford, UK – 12 year old Joshua Lloyd, schoolboy at Telford Langley School, collapsed on a playing field at school and died on June 16, 2023, as onlookers desperately tried to revive him. “Ambulance crews responded to a “medical emergency.”

May 27, 2023 – Victoria, Australia – 17 year old Dallas Keogh collapsed during a football game and died suddenly on May 27, 2023. “He collapsed in the visitors rooms after the game & later died in hospital before he could be transferred.”

May 24, 2023 – Wolverhampton, UK – 15 yo soccer player Myles Christie died suddenly from a cardiac arrest on May 24, 2023.

May 2023 – Glasgow, Scotland – A young cafe worker at Singl-end Merchant City died suddenly in May 2023 Kayahad apparently been diagnosed with a stage 4 cancer only 6 weeks before her sudden death.

March 14, 2023 – Edinburgh, Scotland – 15 year old Andrew MacKinnon collapsed on the pitch at Forrester High School at 3:15pm and died suddenly on March 14, 2023.

My Take…

I started reporting on sudden deaths of Canadian teenagers in November 2022, when I started seeing them on a frighteningly regular basis.

Now we are seeing teenagers die suddenly in all the highly COVID-19 vaccinated countries.

From my observations, this is how COVID-19 vaccines are killing teenagers, from more frequent causes to less:

1. Cardiac arrest during intense exercise (most deaths, vaccine myocarditis)
2. Cardiac arrest doing a regular activity
3. Cardiac arrest while sleeping (early morning hours, vaccine myocarditis)
4. Blood clots – strokes (brain clots), pulmonary emboli (lung clots)
5. Brain Bleed (usually a ruptured aneurysm, due to damaged blood vessels)
6. Infections (sepsis, strep, influenza, meningitis – due to damaged immune system)
7. Turbo cancer (most commonly leukemia, lymphoma, brain – glioblastoma)

In this group of 16 teenagers who died recently in UK, Ireland or Australia, you see all of these causes of death represented (except pulmonary emboli).

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Dr. William Makis is a Canadian physician with expertise in Radiology, Oncology and Immunology. Governor General’s Medal, University of Toronto Scholar. Author of 100+ peer-reviewed medical publications.

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Will Saudi Arabia and UAE be creating a loop-hole for China and Russia to get access to high-performance cloud computing for AI?

They are both buying up enormous numbers of chips to build their own gargantuan data centers.

“Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates are buying up thousands of the high-performance Nvidia chips crucial for building artificial intelligence software, joining a global AI arms race that is squeezing the supply of Silicon Valley’s hottest commodity.

The Gulf powerhouses have publicly stated their goal of becoming leaders in AI as they pursue ambitious plans to turbocharge their economies. But the push has also raised concerns about potential misuse of the technology by the oil-rich states’ autocratic leaders.” (Financial Times, August 14, 2023)

If China and/or Russia get access to use these data centers, then they can run large AI models there.

I expect the US to intervene – otherwise the US chip restrictions on China will become a joke.

The question is only how the US will intervene against Saudi Arabia and UAE in this delicate matter.

Both Saudi Arabia and UAE are no longer push-overs for the USA – and we speak about an enormous amount of profit they can earn by super-charging China and Russia with exaggerated prices for access. On top of earning a lot of money, Saudi Arabia and UAE will also earn a lot of political “bonus points” in goodwill from China for doing so.

The US will have to use real strong coercion to stop Saudi Arabia and UAE from exploiting this great opportunity.

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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.  

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As war drums beat across Africa, as China cleans up after devastating floods, as Maui searches remains, a tsunami is scheduled to hit Japan Tuesday with predictions of 20 inches of rain in 24 hours. Climate is changing patterns both naturally and thru geoengineering with bomb like consequences. And Niger’s military coup has sparked a western reaction – WAR!

It is playing out like a 4^th of July fireworks display with the finale being a ratcheted torrent of bombs bursting in air! Ordinary people are on edge, their tongues quick to lash out with anger and even rage.

Are we in the midst of a geoengineered tit-for-tat war?  

The media overwhelmingly claim the Maui fire was caused by climate change. Why? Because the topsy-turvydom world claims everything nefarious is now caused by climate change. Vax deaths are because of – climate change. Plane crashes are – climate change. Citywide chaos is caused by – climate change. All because The Media says so.

The concept that a hurricane south of Hawaii caused the ‘climate change’ fires in Maui is preposterous! According to a past weather graph, the temperatures in Maui were normal, peaking at 88’, the wind speed was NE peaking at 25 mph at noon. This is normal. Hurricane Dora never made landfall and was tracked 500 miles ‘south’ of Hawaii amidst Northeasterly winds blowing southwest. Maui is north of Hawaii.

A normal ‘fast fire’ can travel up to 14 mph. The Maui fire was stated to be traveling at 60 mph.

According to government officials, the vast majority of the recent fires in Greece and Italy were arson. These coordinated blazes also spread across Croatia, Portugal, Spain, and Algeria. In each scenario, the respective governments blamed ‘arson terrorists’. NOT Climate Change!

Therefore, what if Hawaii was a tit-for-tat weaponized reaction to the China flooding? Or, what if it was a US military exercise using Directed Energy Lasers – gone awry…?

Directed Energy Weapons (DEW) use electromagnetic energy via energy lasers and high power microwave rays. Sonar is used to hone in on a target. They are being developed and/or are already in use by: US, China, Russia, India, Pakistan, Japan, Korea, UK, Germany, France, Iran and Turkey. Their impact is somewhat akin to an atomic bomb.

Lockheed Martin: 

“At sea, in the air and on the ground, Lockheed Martin is developing laser weapon systems ready to defend U.S. and allied forces. Combined with our platform integration expertise, these systems are designed to defeat a growing range of threats to military forces and infrastructure across all domains.”

Lockheed, Northrop, Raytheon are in various stages of testing Directed Energy Laser Weapons. It is NOT a conspiracy. Their websites are rife with bravado regarding their ability to target our ‘enemies’. Certainly, it would not be the first time the US military ‘accidentally’ destroyed a city/town.

The 2010 earthquake in Haiti was considered by ‘conspiracy theorists’ to have been caused by a HAARP experiment causing tectonic plate shifts. The recent earthquake in Turkey was a ‘threat’ to Erdogan to obey and abide by Western Cartels. OUR Government is a Conspiracy – incapable of providing anything remotely parallel to Truth.

The power and control these DEW weapons can yield is considered much more efficient than nuclear. Yet governments continue to parlay the effects of climate change as though the military industrial complex is nonexistent.

The Jet Stream: Jet streams are narrow bands of strong wind currents that occur in the upper atmosphere around 30,000 feet. The jet streams roughly follow the earth’s rotation. The speed of rotation is fastest at the equator, and slows to zero at the north & south poles. Typically these air currents flow west to east and when cold air collides with warm air, the jet stream moves north or south creating curvature blips.

Jet streams cause changes in weather, affecting high and low pressure systems – and shaping the weather. Climate enthusiasts assert the opposite – that climate changes cause jet streams – a scientifically proven false assertion.

According to Science Alert, today jet streams are chaotic and undefinable. The current fragmentation of the jet streams are fueling catastrophic weather patterns. Scientists are baffled. As a result, they are calling for more geoengineered manipulation – which will likely cause more chaos.

The flooding in China is damaging crops. The western media is fueling claims that China’s flooding could result in Xi Jinping’s government being blamed causing a collapse of faith in his power. And once again, the point of the accusation is to undermine Xi Jinping in order to insert a western proxy. The secondary point is the creation of a global food shortage.

The reality is that earth’s weather is comprised of complex atmospheric and subsurface ecosystems that interact in a completed cycles.

Like a rain forest, if any singular interruption of the eco-balance occurs, the entire system begins a slow death. When we pound particles at CERN, seed clouds, manipulate climate, and block the sun, we are forever destroying the natural balance. And no amount of $$$$$$$$$$$$ will reverse the course SCIENCE has crippled.

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Featured image is from Helena

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House Appropriations Republicans have loaded up their draft annual spending bills with at least two dozen poison pill policy riders that attack wildlife, endangered species, and at-risk habitats. The Clean Budget Coalition, which is tracking the poison pills added to federal spending bills, has repeatedly called on Congress to remove all of these harmful measures.

“The American people expect that wildlife conservation will be based on science, not politics,” said Leda Huta, executive director of the Endangered Species Coalition. “Decisions on how wildlife are protected should be made by biologists rather than politicians in Congress.”

“MAGA Republican leadership in the House has reached a new low in their Interior appropriations bill, which slashes protections for our clean air, water, and critically endangered species,” said Kaila Hood, government affairs advocate for the League of Conservation Voters. “The House Interior spending bill contains dozens of provisions that attack at-risk wildlife and habitats, including iconic species like bison, grizzly bears, and gray wolves. These harmful provisions are part of a larger wish-list from extractive industries and developers, which come at the expense of wildlife, our environment, and our collective health. We must ensure that these poison pill riders are not included in any final spending bills— now or in the future.”

“We need policies that meaningfully address the joint biodiversity and climate crises and the grave threats they present to wildlife and people,” said Mary Beth Beetham, legislative director for Defenders of Wildlife. “Politicians who attack the Endangered Species Act and override science-based conservation policies are ignoring catastrophes that grow worse by the day and will be poorly remembered by future generations paying for these harmful riders.”

The riders attacking wildlife include:

Commerce, Justice, Science, and Related Agencies

• The Climate Fisheries Rider would block funds for climate change fisheries research, which would harm fisheries management, ecosystems, and fishermen.
• The Vessel Strike Reduction Rule Rider would prevent the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration from finalizing its proposed North Atlantic right whale vessel strike reduction rule until a “near real-time monitoring and mitigation program” to track threatened or endangered whales has been deployed. This would slow down an urgently needed rule to protect the survival of this species.
• The Forest Protection Rider would block funds for implementation of Executive Order 14072, which protects forests in federal regulatory decision making.

Energy and Water Development, and Related Agencies

• The Waters of the U.S. Rider would block the January 2023 revised definition of “Waters of the United States.”

Interior, Environment, and Related Agencies

• The Waters of the U.S. Rider would prevent the Waters of the United States rule from taking effect.
• The Boundary Waters Mining Rider would overturn the Biden administration’s recently finalized withdrawal of around 225,000 acres of National Forest System lands in northeastern Minnesota, opening the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness to toxic mine pollution.
• The Boundary Waters Hardrock Lease Rider would require the Secretary of the Interior to reinstate two canceled hardrock mineral leases in the headwaters of the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness.
• The Ancillary Use Mining Rider would give mining claimants the right to permanently occupy federal public lands, construct massive toxic waste dumps, and build roads and pipelines across those lands – an unprecedented giveaway of America’s cherished public lands to mining corporations, reversing over one hundred years of legal precedent.
• The Caldwell Canyon Mining Rider would require the Secretary of the Interior to issue a new Record of Decision for Caldwell Canyon Mine project, imposing arbitrary timelines to shortcut compliance with applicable environmental laws and regulations. The Caldwell Canyon phosphorus-phosphate mine would be built on irreplaceable habitat, leading to decades of additional water pollution.
• The Expanded Sage Grouse Rider would expand the ban on protecting the sage grouse under the Endangered Species Act – a legacy rider – to include the separate population of bi-state sage grouse.
• The Bison Rider would prohibit funds to allow the introduction of bison into the Charles M. Russell National Wildlife Refuge in Montana.
• The Endangered Species Consultation Rider would codify climate denialism into law by exempting the U.S. Forest Service and U.S. Bureau of Land Management from updating their land management plans when new information – often new knowledge about the increasingly severe impacts of climate change – shows that endangered species are being harmed or killed on public lands.
• The Lesser Prairie Chicken Rider would prohibit the Interior Department from implementing or enforcing a rule that protects the Lesser Prairie Chicken under the Endangered Species Act.
• The Grizzly Bear Habitat Rider would block funds for the North Cascades Grizzly Bear Ecosystem Restoration Plan.
• The Northern Long-Eared Bat Rider would prohibit the Interior Department from implementing or enforcing a final rule that protects the northern long-eared bat under the Endangered Species Act.
• The Gray Wolf Rider would direct the Secretary of the Interior to reissue a rule prematurely removing endangered species protections for the Gray Wolf.
• The Grand Staircase-Escalante Rider would prohibit funds for management of the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument in Utah except in compliance with the Record of Decision and the February 2020 Resource Management Plan.
• The Glacier National Park Reservation Rider would prohibit the park from implementing a reservation system to address overcrowding.
• The Bison Rider would prohibit the U.S. Department of the Interior from establishing a working group to help restore bison populations.
• The Lead Ammunition and Tackle Rider would prevent agencies charged with wildlife protection from banning toxic lead in ammunition and fishing tackle on federal lands unless an impossible set of criteria are met.
• The Dunes Sagebrush Lizard Rider would prohibit listing the animal under the Endangered Species Act.
• The Rat Poison Rider would block the EPA from restricting rodenticides that pose health risks to humans and other mammals and birds.
• The Conservation Land Use Rider would prohibit the U.S. Bureau of Land Management from implementing the Conservation and Landscape Health rule, which allows the agency to better prioritize conservation of public lands.
• The Grizzly Bear Rider would delist the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem population of Grizzly Bears under the Endangered Species Act.

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This article originally published in January 2022 is of relevance to the evolving role of the US military in Francophone West Africa as well to Niger’s military coup d’Etat.

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Earlier this week [January  2022], the military seized power in Burkina Faso, ousting the country’s democratically elected president, Roch Marc Christian Kaboré.

The coup was announced on state television Monday by a young officer who said the military had suspended the constitution and dissolved the government. Beside him sat a camouflage-clad man whom he introduced as Burkina Faso’s new leader: Lt. Col. Paul-Henri Sandaogo Damiba, the commander of one of the country’s three military regions.

Damiba is a highly trained soldier, thanks in no small part to the U.S. military, which has a long record of training soldiers in Africa who go on to stage coups. Damiba, it turns out, participated in at least a half-dozen U.S. training exercises, according to U.S. Africa Command, or AFRICOM.

In 2010 and 2020, he participated in an annual special operations training program known as the Flintlock exercise. In 2013, Damiba was accepted into an Africa Contingency Operations Training and Assistance course, which is a State Department-funded peacekeeping training program. In 2013 and 2014, Damiba attended the U.S.-sponsored Military Intelligence Basic Officer Course-Africa. And in 2018 and 2019, he participated in engagements with a U.S. Defense Department Civil Military Support Element in Burkina Faso.

Damiba is just the latest in a carousel of coup leaders in West Africa trained by the U.S. military as the U.S. has pumped in more than $1 billion in security assistance to promote “stability” in the region. Since 2008, U.S.-trained officers have attempted at least nine coups (and succeeded in at least eight) across five West African countries, including Burkina Faso (three times), Guinea, Mali (three times), Mauritania, and the Gambia.

Since the 2000s, the United States has regularly deployed small teams of commandos to advise, assist, and accompany local forces, even into battle; provided weapons, equipment, and aircraft; offered many forms of training, including Flintlock, which is conducted by Special Operations Command Africa and focused on enhancing the counterterrorism capabilities of nations in West Africa, including Burkina Faso, Guinea, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Nigeria, and Senegal.

“When the U.S. prioritizes tactical training, we overlook longer-term goals that could create more stable governments,” said Lauren Woods, director of the Security Assistance Monitor, which is a program of the nonprofit Center for International Policy. “We need more transparency and public debate on the foreign military training that we provide. And we need to do a much better job thinking about the long-term risks — including coups and abuses by forces we train.”

AFRICOM emphasizes that its security cooperation and “capacity-building activities” foster the “development of professional militaries,” which are disciplined and committed to the well-being of their citizens. “U.S. military training regularly includes modules on the law of armed conflict, subjugation to civilian control, and respect for human rights,” AFRICOM spokesperson Kelly Cahalan told The Intercept. “Military seizures of power are inconsistent with U.S. military training and education.”

But coups d’état by U.S.-trained officers have become an increasingly common occurrence in Burkina Faso and elsewhere in the region.

Last summer, for example, American Green Berets arrived in Guinea to train a special forces unit led by Col. Mamady Doumbouya, a charismatic young officer who had also served in the French Foreign Legion. In September, members of Doumbouya’s unit took time out from their ongoing instruction — in small unit tactics, tactical combat casualty care, and the law of armed conflict — to storm the presidential palace and depose the country’s 83-year-old president, Alpha Condé. Doumbouya soon declared himself Guinea’s new leader and the U.S. ended the training.

In 2020, Col. Assimi Goïta, who worked with U.S. Special Operations forces for years, participating in Flintlock training exercises and attending a Joint Special Operations University seminar at MacDill Air Force Base in Florida, headed the junta that overthrew Mali’s government.

“The act of mutiny in Mali is strongly condemned and inconsistent with U.S. military training and education,” Marine Corps Lt. Col. Anton T. Semelroth, a Pentagon spokesperson, said at the time.

After staging the coup, Goïta stepped down and took the job of vice president in a transitional government tasked with returning Mali to civilian rule. But nine months later, he seized power again in his second coup.

Goïta wasn’t even the first U.S.-trained Malian officer to overthrow the country’s government. In 2011, when a U.S.-backed uprising in Libya toppled autocrat Muammar Gaddafi, Tuareg fighters in his service looted the regime’s weapons caches, traveled to their native Mali and began to take over the northern part of that country. Angered by the ineffective response of his government, Amadou Sanogo — an officer who learned English in Texas, received intelligence training in Arizona, and underwent Army infantry-officer basic training in Georgia — took matters into his own hands and overthrew his country’s democratically elected government.

“America is a great country with a fantastic army,” he said after the 2012 coup. “I tried to put all the things I learned there into practice here.”

In 2014, another U.S.-trained officer, Lt. Col. Isaac Zida, seized power in Burkina Faso amid popular protests. Two years earlier, when he was a major, Zida attended a counterterrorism training course at MacDill Air Force Base that was sponsored by Joint Special Operations University and attended a military intelligence course in Botswana that was financed by the U.S. government.

The next year, another coup in Burkina Faso installed Gen. Gilbert Diendéré. Diendéré had not only taken part in a U.S.-led Flintlock counterterrorism exercise, but he also served as a literal advertisement for it, appearing in an AFRICOM photo addressing Burkinabe soldiers before their deployment to Mali in support of the 2010 Flintlock exercise.

Then-Col. Maj. Gilbert Diendéré addresses Burkinabe soldiers prior to their deployment to Mali in support of AFRICOM’s Flintlock 10 exercise in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, on May 1, 2010. Photo: U.S. Air Force Master Sgt. Jeremiah Erickson, Flintlock 10 Public Affairs

In 2014, two generations of U.S.-educated officers faced off in the Gambia as a group of American-trained would-be coup-makers attempted (but failed) to overthrow another U.S.-trained coup-maker, Yahya Jammeh who had seized power back in 1994. The unsuccessful rebellion claimed the life of Lamin Sanneh, the purported ringleader, who had earned a master’s degree at National Defense University in Washington, D.C.

“I can’t shake the feeling that his education in the United States somehow influenced his actions,” wrote Sanneh’s former NDU mentor Jeffrey Meiser. “I can’t help but wonder if simply imprinting our foreign students with the ‘American program’ is counterproductive and unethical.”

In 2008, Stars and Stripes reported that Gen. Mohamed Ould Abdel Aziz, the leader of a coup against Mauritania’s elected president, “has worked with U.S. forces that train in the African country.” Arrested and charged with corruption after a decadelong rule, Aziz was recently released on bail due to ill health.

U.S.-trained coup-plotters aren’t strictly confined to West Africa. Before Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi deposed Egypt’s first democratically elected president, Mohammed Morsi, he underwent basic training at Fort Benning, Georgia, (in 1981) and advanced instruction at the U.S. Army War College (in 2006).

A 2018 study by the military’s go-to think tank, the Rand Corporation, cast doubt on the notion that U.S. military training breeds coup-makers.

“[T]here is little evidence that overall [security sector assistance] (measured in dollar terms) associates with coup propensity in Africa,” according to the study, which was written for the Office of the Secretary of Defense and did note that there was a “marginally significant” association in the post-Cold War period.

A year before, however, a study by Jonathan Caverley of the U.S. Naval War College and Jesse Savage of Trinity College Dublin in the Journal of Peace Research, analyzing data from 1970 to 2009, found “a robust relationship between U.S. training of foreign militaries and military-backed coup attempts” despite the authors limiting their analysis to the International Military Education and Training program — “which explicitly focuses on promoting norms of civilian control.”

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Featured image: A soldier patrols the streets of Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, October 2018. Photo by Issouf Sanogo.

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***

Stories revolving around prison breaks, such as The Shawshank Redemption, The Great Escape and Escape From Alcatraz, have long intrigued audiences with their adrenaline-fuelled narratives and raw human emotions.

But few films have been able to capture Palestinian prisoners’ sheer audacity, spotlighting their ongoing yearning for freedoms that have been taken away.

Palestinian Prison Break, a new documentary by the visionary filmmaker Mohammad Sawwaf, follows six attempts to escape from maximum-security Israeli prisons between 1987 and 2004, taking us on a journey that delves deep into the meaning of freedom for Palestinian prisoners. It explores the psyches of the imprisoned and imprisoner alike.

The prisoner’s mind is like a whirlpool, turning and turning, trying to deal with one key dilemma: how to reclaim one’s stolen freedom. As freed Palestinian prisoner Imad al-Din al-Saftawi, who was held in Israeli occupation jails for 18 years, said in the film: “To be imprisoned is the worst thing that could happen in your life.”

The Israeli prison system has been using ever-more punitive measures to make its jails – which are located at remote, isolated sites – even more secure.

These include dogs trained to detect suspicious activity, surveillance equipment and watchtowers. Given such tough measures, one might think escape sounds far-fetched. But do such strict conditions deter or break prisoners’ wills? Unlikely. 

Human Spirit

At its heart, Palestinian Prison Break is a testament to the resilience of humans in their fight for freedom. The human spirit does not accept imprisonment. Likewise, Palestinian prisoners do not accept all the structural injustices that they endure. 

The director weaves together personal stories, interviews, testimonials and reenactments to create an authentic portrayal of their escape attempts.

Watching this film, I was immediately reminded of the brave Gilboa prison break, where six Palestinian political prisoners escaped in 2021, tunnelling their way out of the prison with a spoon. It served as a stark reminder of the determination of those seeking freedom, even from seemingly impregnable confines. 

The film explores the deprivation that the featured prisoners endured, which drove them on in their desire to escape. And these were not only material deprivations and restricted access to personal belongings and resources. Mohammad Abu Jamous, one of the ex-prisoners interviewed, perfectly summed it up: “I was deprived of my dad and mum, my family, my youth. My life was wasted in prison.”

The film reminded me of these lines from a poem by Mahmoud Darwish, widely considered the national poet of Palestine: 

My home has changed,
And when I eat
And the amount of tobacco has changed
And the colour of my clothes, and my face, and my figure
And even the moon

This profound poem and the film both vividly capture the changes that suddenly occur in the lives of political prisoners, and the deprivation that they endure. 

Remarkable Luck

The six meticulously devised escape plans were diverse, creative and used simple tools, the only ones accessible to the prisoners. One involved sawing through the steel bars of a window in the toilets with a smuggled hacksaw. Another saw prisoners cutting the metal bars of a prison gate during break time, taking advantage of temporary chaos in the facility due to ongoing construction work.

Other cases involved prisoners tunnelling under a bed to the visiting room’s toilet, while dressing as women so they could leave along with visiting families; or digging a tunnel with rudimentary tools, such as steel nails.

I was struck by how remarkable luck combined with the forces of nature helped prisoners navigate their way to freedom. Saftawi tells of how a dense fog suddenly descended on their escape day, blanketing the prison and momentarily distracting the guards.

“The moment I started climbing down [from a prison window to the ground], the guard dogs left at the same time,” he said.

The escapees recognised all too well the risks they were taking; that they might be captured and their sentences lengthened, or that they could suffer additional punishments, such as restrictions on family visits. But the taste of freedom was worth it, and they would rather fight than surrender. They sacrificed much for their freedom.

In one case, Saftawi’s hand was injured on a barbed-wire fence surrounding a prison facility in Gaza while he was escaping in 1987. He recalls: “That was the most painful moment. To be free, I would have dismembered my hand in the barbed wire.”

Watch the trailer below.

Wasted Lives

While incarcerated, the prisoners often found solace and support in one another during their relentless pursuit of freedom. If one prisoner hatched a plan, everyone would support it.

Those forced from their homes and families, locked up in hostile places, said they felt compelled to tell their stories.

“It is our duty to share these narratives in all media, not to entertain but to educate,” Sawwaf told Middle East Eye.

At the film’s end, the director highlights how the prisoners’ wishes were reduced to only meeting their mothers, as both suffered the weight of longing and absence.

Tears fell down my cheeks as I watched a prisoner ask his mother not to die. His mother replied: “I am putting a sword by my hand, and if the angel of death comes, I will tell him not to take my soul before my son comes home.”

I loved this film, and it’s vital that more documentaries and films about Palestinian prisoners’ experiences are made. This is the least we can do to honour their lives and struggles.

These wasted lives should be written about, read about and made into films. We need to ensure that their stories and their voices are not silenced.

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Ghada Abed is a freelance journalist based in the Gaza Strip.

Featured image: A reenactment from the film Palestinian Prison Break shows a prisoner trying to dig a tunnel out of a facility (Alef Multimedia Company/Mohammad Sawwaf for MEE)

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***

The new blockbuster film on Robert Oppenheimer has brought back memories of the first nuclear bomb dropped on Hiroshima. It raises complex questions on the nature of the society that allowed such bombs to be developed and used and which stockpiles a nuclear arsenal that can destroy the world many times over.

Was the infamous McCarthy-era hunt for reds everywhere have any relationship with the pathology of a society that suppressed its guilt over the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and substituted it with a belief in its exceptionalism?

And what explains Oppenheimer’s transformation from “hero” of the Manhattan Project that built the atomic bomb to villain and then forgotten?

I remember my first encounter with American guilt over the two atom bombs dropped on Japan. It was during a 1985 conference on distributed computer controls in Monterey, California. The hosts were the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory, which developed the hydrogen bomb. At dinner, a nuclear scientist’s wife asked a Japanese professor if his fellow citizens understood why the Americans had to drop the bomb on Japan—for it had saved a million American soldiers’ lives and many more Japanese. Was she seeking absolution for the guilt all Americans carried? Or did she want to confirm what she had been told and believed about the bomb? And did she believe that even the victims of the bomb shared those beliefs?

This is not about Oppenheimer the movie—it is about the atomic bomb Oppenheimer made, which created multiple ruptures in society. This new weapon completely changed the parameters of war. But not just that—it brought the recognition in society that science was no longer a concern of just scientists but of us all. For scientists, it also became a question that what they did in the laboratories had real-world consequences, including the possible destruction of humanity itself. It also brought home that this was a new era of big science that needed mega bucks!

Strangely enough, two of the foremost names of scientists at the core of the anti-nuclear bomb movement after the war also had a major role in initiating the Manhattan Project. Leo Szilard, a Hungarian scientist who had become a refugee in England first and then in the United States, sought Einstein’s help in petitioning President Franklin Roosevelt for the United States to build the bomb. He feared that if Nazi Germany built it first, it would conquer the world.

Szilard joined the Manhattan Project, though he was located not in Los Alamos but in the University of Chicago’s Metallurgical Laboratories. He also campaigned within the Manhattan Project to demonstrate the bomb before its use on Japan. Einstein also tried to reach Roosevelt with his appeal against using the bomb. But Roosevelt died and Einstein’s letter remained unopened on his desk. He was replaced by vice-president Harry Truman, who thought the bomb would give the United States a nuclear monopoly and, therefore, help subjugate the Soviet Union in the post-War scenario.

Turning to the Manhattan Project, it had a staggering scale, even by today’s standards. At its peak, it employed 1,25,000 people directly, and if we include the many other industries that directly or indirectly produced parts or equipment for the bomb, that number would be close to half a million. The costs, again, were massive: $2 billion in 1945 (around $30-50 billion today). Its scientists were an elite group that included Hans Bethe, Enrico Fermi, Nils Bohr, James Franck, Oppenheimer, Edward Teller (later the villain of the story), Richard Feynman, Harold Urey, Klaus Fuchs (who shared atomic secrets with the Soviets) and many more glittering names. More than two dozen Nobel prize winners got associated with the Manhattan Project.

But science was only a small part of the Manhattan Project. It wanted to build two kinds of bombs, one using a uranium 235 isotope and the other, plutonium. How to separate fissile material, U-235, from U-238? How to concentrate fissile plutonium? How to do both at an industrial scale? How to set up the chain reaction to create fission, bringing sub-critical fissile material together to create a critical mass? All these required metallurgists, chemists, engineers, explosive experts, and completely new plants and equipment spread over hundreds of sites. All of it was to be done at record speeds. This was a science “experiment” done not at a laboratory but industrial scale. That is why the huge budget and the size of the human power involved.

The United States government convinced its citizens that the Hiroshima and, three days later, Nagasaki bombings led Japan to surrender. Based on archival and other evidence, it is clear that more than the nuclear bombs, the Soviet Union declaring war against Japan led to its surrender. It has been proved that the claim of “one million American lives saved” by bombing Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which avoided an invasion of Japan, has no basis. It was a number conjured up for propaganda purposes.

While the American people presented these figures as serious calculations, what was completely censored were actual pictures of the victims of the two bombings. The only available photo of the Hiroshima bombing—the mushroom cloud—was taken by the gunner of Enola Gay, the plane that dropped the bomb. Even months after the nuclear bombings, when a few photographs of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were released, they were only of shattered buildings, none of the human beings.

The United States wanted to bask in its victory over Japan. It did not want that victory marred by visuals of the horror of the nuclear bombs. It dismissed people dying of a mysterious disease, which it knew was radiation sickness, as Japanese propaganda. To quote General Leslie Groves, who led the Manhattan Project, these were “Tokyo Tales”.

It took seven years for the human toll to become visible, only after the United States ceased its occupation of Japan. Even then, only a few pictures emerged, as Japan was still cooperating with the United States in hushing up the horrors of the nuclear bomb.

A full visual account of what happened in Hiroshima had to wait until the sixties. Then we saw the pictures of Hiroshima Shadows—the people who had vaporised, leaving only their traces on the stone on which they had been sitting; the survivors whose skin hung from their bodies, and of people dying of radiation sickness.

After the nuclear bombing, the scientists behind the bomb became heroes who had shortened the war and saved a million American lives. This myth-making converted the nuclear bomb from an industrial-scale effort to a secret formula discovered by a few physicists, giving the United States enormous power in the post-War era. This was what made Oppenheimer a hero for the American people. He symbolised the scientific community and its godlike powers. And it also made him the target for people like Teller, who later combined with others to bring Oppenheimer down.

But if Oppenheimer was a hero, how was he pulled down just a few years later?

It is difficult to imagine today, but the United States had a strong left movement before the Second World War. Apart from communists in workers’ movements, the intelligentsia—literature, cinema and physicists—had a strong communist presence. Scientists had embraced the idea, which JD Bernal had then argued in the United Kingdom, that science and technology could be planned and used for the public good. That is why contemporary physicists—then on the cutting edge of the sciences of relativity and quantum mechanics—also led social and political debates in and on science.

It is this world of science, a critical worldview, which collided with the new world where the belief was that the United States should be the exceptional nation and sole global hegemon. This hegemony could only be weakened if some people—“traitors to the nation”—gave away “our” national secrets. Any development anywhere else could be only a result of theft and nothing else. This campaign was helped by the belief that the atomic bomb resulted from a few equations scientists had discovered, which could, therefore, easily be leaked to enemies.

This was the genesis of the McCarthy era in the United States, its war on the artistic, academic and scientific communities and its search for spies under the bed. The military-industrial complex was taking birth in the country, and it soon took over the scientific establishment. In the United States, the military and energy—nuclear energy—budget would henceforth determine the fate of scientists and their grants. Oppenheimer needed to be punished as an example to other scientists—do not set yourself up against the gods of the military-industrial complex and our vision of world domination.

Oppenheimer’s fall from grace served another purpose. It was a lesson to the scientific community that no one was big enough to cross the security state. The Rosenbergs—Julius and Ethel—were executed though they were relatively minor figures. Julius had not leaked atomic secrets, only kept the Soviet Union abreast of the developments. Ethel, a communist, had nothing to do with spying. The only person who did leak atomic “secrets” was Klaus Fuchs, a German communist party member who escaped to the United Kingdom and worked on the bomb project there, followed by the Manhattan Project, which he joined as a part of a British team.

Fuchs made important contributions to the nuclear bomb-triggering mechanism and shared these with the Soviet Union. His contribution would have shortened the Soviet bomb, at best, by a year. As a host of nations have shown, once they knew a fissile bomb was possible, it was easy for scientists and technologists to duplicate it, as countries as small as North Korea have demonstrated.

Oppenheimer’s tragedy was not that he was victimised in the McCarthy era and lost his security clearance. Einstein never had a security clearance, so that need not have been a major calamity. It was his public humiliation during the hearings in which he challenged the withdrawal of his security clearance that broke him. Physicists, the golden boys of the atomic era, had finally been shown their true place in the emerging world of the military-industrial complex.

Einstein, Szilard, Joseph Rotblat and others had foreseen this world. Unlike Oppenheimer, they took the path of building a movement against the nuclear bomb. Having made the bomb, the scientists now had to act as conscience-keepers of the world against a bomb that could destroy all humanity—that bomb which still hangs as a Damocles Sword over our heads.

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***

The British playwright and Nobel Prize winner Harold Pinter was an early critic of the Bush administration’s decision, endorsed by British Prime Minister Tony Blair, to declare a worldwide war on Islamist terrorism in the aftermath of 9/11. In the fall of 2002, Pinter was invited to make his case against the war before the House of Commons. He began his talk with a bit of embellished British history about an earlier wave of terror in Ireland:

There’s an old story about Oliver Cromwell. After he had taken the town of Drogheda the citizens were brought to the main square. Cromwell announced to his Lieutenants: ‘Right! Kill all the women and rape all the men.’ One of his aides said: ‘Excuse me General. Isn’t it the other way around?’ A voice from the crowd called out: ‘Mr. Cromwell knows what he’s doing!’

The voice in the crowd in Pinter’s telling was Blair’s, but today it could be German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, who has kept his silence about when and what he knew about President Biden’s decision to mangle Germany’s economy by destroying the Nord Stream pipelines last September.

There were two sets of pipelines, both partially financed by Russian oligarchs who were beholden to President Vladimir Putin. Nord Stream 1 went into operation in 2011, and within ten years Russia was providing Germany more than half of its overall energy needs, with most of the inexpensive gas targeted for industrial use. Nord Stream 2 was completed by the summer of 2021, but never brought into use. By February 2022, at the start of the war, Scholz halted the pipeline’s certification process. Nord Stream 2 was loaded with gas meant for delivery to Germany, but its huge payload was blocked on arrival by Scholz, obviously at the request of the Biden administration.

Last September 26, the two pipelines were destroyed by underwater bombs. It was not known at the time who was responsible for the sabotage, amid the usual Western accusations against Russia and Russian denials. In February, I published a detailed account of the White House’s role in the attack, including an assertion that a major goal of Biden’s was to prevent Scholz from reversing his decision to stop the flow of Russian gas to Germany. My account was denied by the White House and as of today no government has accepted responsibility.

Germany muddled through last year’s preternaturally warm winter, as the government provided generous energy subsidies for homes and businesses. But since then, the lack of Russian gas has been the major factor in rising energy costs that have led to a slowdown in the German economy, the fourth largest in the world. The economic crunch resulted in a rise of political opposition to the political coalition Scholz leads. Another divisive issue is the steady rise in immigration applications from the Middle East and Africa and the more than one million Ukrainians who have fled to Germany since the war in Ukraine began.

Polling in Germany has consistently shown enormous discontent with the economic crisis it faces. One survey analyzed by Bloomberg last month found that only 39 percent of German voters believe the country will be a leading industrial nation in the next decade. The dispatch specifically cited internal political infighting over the nation’s home and business heating subsidy policies but did not mention a major cause of the crisis—Biden’s decision to destroy the Nord Stream pipelines.

A review of recent reporting on the German economic crisis in German, American, and international business publications—much of it excellent—yielded not a single citation of the pipeline’s destruction as a major reason for national pessimism. I couldn’t help wondering what Pinter would have said about the self-censorship.

In July Politico reported that Robert Habeck, the German vice chancellor and economic minister, a member of the Green Party, warned that the country was certain to face a shrinking economy and a transition to green energy that “will put a burden” on the population. In May, the German government announced that the country had entered a recession. Some of the nation’s companies, according to Politico,

have begun to ditch the Fatherland, triggering fears of deindustrialization.

Habeck said the economic downturn could be explained by high energy prices, which Germany felt more intensely than other countries “because it relied on cheap Russian gas.” The article did not state why there is no longer Russian gas flowing to Germany.

The refusal of the White House or any of the Scandinavian nations—Norway, Sweden, and Denmark—who provided support for the covert American sabotage of the pipelines to accept responsibility for their actions turned out be an important asset for Scholz, who met with Biden at the White House in February of 2022 when Biden directly threatened to destroy Nord Stream 2. Asked how he would respond if Russia invaded, Biden said,

If Russia invades . . . there will no longer be a Nord Stream 2. We will bring an end to it.

Scholz said nothing in public and returned to the White House last winter for a private two-day visit—his plane carried no members of the German media with him—that included a long one-on-one session with Biden. There was no state dinner nor a press conference, other than a brief exchange of platitudes with the president in front of the White House press corps, who were not permitted to not to ask questions.

It is impossible not to ask once again whether Biden had briefed the chancellor about the pending operation last February and also warned him in advance of the pipeline destruction last September. Scholz’s continued silence about an act of violence against his state can only be described as mystifying, especially as the energy crisis intensified in recent months to the point where the German people were suffering. The end of the pipelines also removed a potential disastrous political dilemma for the chancellor: if the pipelines were still intact but shut down at his command, pressure would have been high for him to open the valves and let the gas flow from those who believed keeping the German people warm and prosperous was more important than supporting the White House, NATO, and Volodymyr Zelensky, the Ukrainian president, in a war that need not have been fought.

It just may be that the White House, by keeping him in the loop, saved him from a career-ending conundrum: to support NATO and America in war or protect his people and German industry.

Last October, Lisa Hänel, reporting for Deutche Welle, a state-owned television network, pointed to one immediate social cost of the lack of Russian gas for the German middle class: regional German welfare workers told her that “more people are worried that they can no longer cope with rising prices and energy costs.” Discussing the impact of the lack of cheap Russian gas on those in the lower and middle income scales, which includes 18 million people in Germany who are struggling to stay warm and well fed, she wrote that they “could be hit hard by inflation and the energy crisis.”

Adam Button, a Canadian economic analyst who writes for ForexLive.com, published an essay last month under the title “The pillars of Germany’s economy are crumbling. Three reasons for worry.” His three reasons: industrial production is declining; deficits are increasing; and energy costs are rising.

Auto production and exports “are at the heart of the German economy,” Button writes. “Their machines,” he writes,

have powered Europe and been a worthy competitor to the U.S. and Japan. But there is a new rival: China. The burgeoning automotive manufacturing sector in China is coming for everyone but Germany’s export-sensitive model may be most at risk from China’s EVs. At best, it’s a formidable wave of competition that hurts margins and weakens Germany. At worst, it hollows Germany’s key high-wage industry.

The supply of cheap energy, which Nord Stream I produced, comes into play in Button’s analysis:

Germany’s economic model is exporting manufactured goods, with China as a target market. Competition from China is already a major obstacle but it’s compounded by rising energy costs. Germany survived the winter of 2023 better than I expected but that was with heavy subsidies and good weather. That’s not a formula for the long term and aside from pie-in-the-sky hydrogen talk, I don’t see a way for Germany to get away from expensive imported LNG [liquefied natural gas].

Last week German economy minister Robert Habeck offered up a harsh truth. He said Germany faces five difficult years of deindustrialization from high energy prices. He called for more subsidies for energy as a bridge to around 2030 when he estimates that green energy will take over.

The problem for that is budgetary. Eurozone countries are bound to deficits of less than 3%. Germany is currently running at 4.25%, up from 2.6% a year ago. Finance ministry estimates see the deficit falling to 0.75% in 2026 but that assumes that all energy subsidies are ended. Therein lies the rub: Either they cut the subsidies and lose industry or subsidize and break deficit rules.

For years, Germany was the policeman of the deficit system and periphery countries may wish to give it back some of its own medicine and the German public is also famously austere. The problem is that even if high subsidies stay in place, German industry is under heavy pressure. If anything, the subsidies need to be stepped up. . . .

There is a window for large subsidies but the government must decide if that fiscal ammunition should be spent on subsidizing industry, the green transition or some combination of both. Ideally, the taps would be fully opened but I fear that old instincts around spending will win out, dooming Germany’s economy.

The loss of inexpensive Russian gas has also affected the German multinational chemical producer BASF, which employs more than 50,000 people in its home country. The company has announced a series of cutbacks since the pipelines were demolished. Thousands of workers have been laid off, and the firm shut down one of its major facilities. An industry news account of its cutbacks explain that the war in Ukraine “has sharply reduced natural gas supplies in Europe and boosted BASF’s energy bill on the continent by $2.9 billion in 2022.”

Button’s article, like of all those reviewed for this report, did not mention the main cause of the reduced supply of natural gas. Nor did it say that it was the destruction of the pipelines that forced BASF to make a change in its plans for a $11 billion investment in a state-of-the-art complex that it hailed as the gold standard for sustainable production. The project will be built in China.

“We are increasingly worried about our home market,” chief executive Martin Brudermüller explained to shareholders last April. “Profitability is no longer anywhere near where it should be.” He added that the firm lost close to $143 million in Germany last year, after many decades of constant profit.Pinter, who died in 2008, would have relished the irony of the Biden administration, in its attempt to protect its political and economic investment in the Ukrainian war effort against Russia, may have given China, another nemesis of the White House, a helping hand.

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The author wishes to thank Mohamed Elmaazi of London for his superb research.

Featured image: “Harold Pinter (photograph)” by Beaton, Cecil is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.

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Two years ago, the Afghan government constructed and armed at Washington’s great expense dissolved one provincial capital at a time. The Taliban occupied Kabul on August 15. America’s role in Afghanistan’s tragedy came to an inglorious and shocking end.

Today the Afghan people are impoverished and isolated; the Taliban leadership is fanatical and tyrannical. The so-called Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, as yet recognized by no nation, is in the global cellar on almost every measure.

If anything, failure has only made the extremist leadership more obdurate: “Over the past year, the Taliban’s rule progressively hardened and became more authoritarian and dogmatically 1990s-like. The Taliban’s exclusionary Pashtun-centered rule has turned highly repressive toward all forms of opposition.” Western criticism of Taliban policy, particularly toward women, is seen as validating the regime’s radical interpretation of Islam.

Washington, haunted by its ignominious exit, continues to struggle over policy toward Afghanistan. The refusal to recognize Kabul is needlessly counterproductive, preventing even basic communication. The Taliban rules and is the de facto if not de jure government. Its policies are odious, but brutal repression has never prevented the U.S. from engaging hostile governments.

Moreover, Taliban rule has delivered one essential benefit lacking during America’s two decade-long attempt to install a liberal, centralized democracy in Central Asia: peace.

As The Economist last year summarized the status of a watermelon farmer: “since the Taliban returned to power, the guns have mostly fallen silent. True, poor rains have ruined Mahmood’s harvest, his relatives have lost their jobs and his family is broke. But at least he no longer has to worry about his children being shot.” Ponder the latter observation. Only after America’s departure did this poor farmer no longer “worry about his children being shot.” For him, the U.S. was a malign, even deadly force. And his feelings were widely shared.

Journalist Anand Gopal visited Afghanistan shortly before its collapse, reporting that “the biggest thing I noticed on the ground is just how tired people were of fighting.” It is difficult to overstate the benefits of even a bad peace to those who suffer through such a war. Afghanistan still is not free of violence. The Islamic State (Khorasan Province) is most responsible for bombing attacks that have killed hundreds of people. Nevertheless, overall casualties are way down. Reported the Crisis Group last year:

The Taliban’s military takeover of Afghanistan in August 2021 put an end to 43 years of almost continuous war, an overlapping series of conflicts that reached a new ferocity as U.S. forces prepared for their departure.… Afghans certainly noticed the change. They had grown accustomed to a drumbeat of death and destruction: an estimated 20,000 to 40,000 battle fatalities per year, a toll that for several years had surpassed those of Syria, Yemen and Iraq, and more U.S. airstrikes than in any other part of the world. All of a sudden, after the Taliban seized power, the emergency wards were not full of Afghans suffering shrapnel cuts and blast injuries. In the early months of 2022, by UN estimates, fighting diminished to only 18 per cent of previous levels.

Two decades of conflict involving the U.S. resulted in an estimated quarter million deaths, some 70,000 who were believed to be civilians. Before the Trump administration reached its agreement with the Taliban, Washington loosened its aerial rules of engagement, increasing civilian casualties. Gopal reported on an extended family in Helmand province that lost several members in a single bombing raid. One of the men “travelled to Kandahar to report the massacres to the United Nations and to the Afghan government. When no justice was forthcoming, he joined the Taliban.”

The war’s impact was especially harsh in rural Afghanistan. Wrote Baktash Ahadi, who served as an interpreter for U.S. forces:

“Virtually the only contact most Afghans had with the West came via heavily armed and armored combat troops. Americans thus mistook the Afghan countryside for a mere theater of war, rather than as a place where people actually lived. U.S. forces turned villages into battlegrounds, pulverizing mud homes and destroying livelihoods.”

The humanitarian consequences were predictable. In the New Yorker Gopal discussed the experience of a 40-something Afghan woman named Shakira:

Entire branches of Shakira’s family, from the uncles who used to tell her stories to the cousins who played with her in the caves, vanished. In all, she lost sixteen family members. … [Other families, he found] lost ten to twelve civilians in what locals call the American War. This scale of suffering was unknown in a bustling metropolis like Kabul, where citizens enjoyed relative security. But in countryside enclaves like Sangin the ceaseless killings of civilians led many Afghans to gravitate toward the Taliban. By 2010, many households in Ishaqzai villages had sons in the Taliban, most of whom had joined simply to protect themselves or to take revenge.

In relative luxury, denizens of Washington could, and still do, debate the finer points of counter-insurgency strategy while bearing none of the costs. Few Americans can even imagine the price that “real” Afghans paid for the privilege of a dubious democracy powered by venal warlords, festooned with officials both corrupt and incompetent, and capped by a central government notable for its dysfunction.

When Shakira and other women in her community were asked about the Taliban, they judged the movement compared to Afghan alternatives rather than American fantasies: “The women described their lives under the Taliban as identical to their lives under [local warlord] Dado and the mujahideen—minus the strangers barging through the doors at night, the deadly checkpoints.” Dado was thankfully displaced by the Taliban, but he returned with the Americans more arbitrary, corrupt, and brutal than ever. Whatever Washington’s intentions, Ahadi noted that “When comparing the Taliban with the United States and its Western allies, the vast majority of Afghans have always viewed the Taliban as the lesser of two evils.”

Different were the lives of those living in Kabul and other major cities, which contained only about 30 percent of the Afghan people but who were almost 100 percent of those who shared Western values, experiences, and outlooks. Urban dwellers prospered economically and rarely suffered the full human costs of the conflict. American visitors, like me, typically spent most of their time with these Afghans. Yet U.S. policymakers had strikingly little contact even with them, other than those serving in government or other official roles. And the latter did not really represent Afghanistan. Observed Shadi Hamid of the Brookings Institution, “In the end, few Afghans believed in a government they never felt was theirs.”

Today the slaughter is over. Indeed, two years ago when Americans were transfixed by desperate people rushing the airport, most Afghans were marveling at the experience of peace. The Wall Street Journal’s Yaroslav Trofimov wrote that “in Afghanistan’s rural districts like Baraki Barak, where Taliban rules don’t differ that much from existing conservative customs… the collapse of the Afghan republic and the U.S. withdrawal mean, above all, that the guns have fallen silent for the first time in two decades.” Life might be a bit harder economically, but rural men aren’t being killed and neither cruel local warlords nor corrupt distant politicians are interfering with people’s lives. A village elder who lost sixteen members of his extended family during the war told Trofimov: “Now, there is peace. And when someone doesn’t feel danger, doesn’t fear war, and can walk with a peace of mind, he is happy even if he is hungry.”

Of course, Afghans shouldn’t have to choose among barbarities. They should be able to live in a system that mixes liberal rules with federal rule, while entering the 21st century at a measured pace. However, that was never on offer as they suffered through multiple domestic insurgencies and outside interventions. Writing before the Kabul government’s collapse, the Brookings Institution’s Vanda Felbab-Brown and John Allen observed that “peace is an absolute priority for some rural women, even a peace deal very much on the Taliban terms.”

Perhaps the most striking aspect of U.S. foreign policy today is how little policymakers weigh the costs of their decisions on others. In recent decades Washington has contributed to hundreds of thousands, probably millions, of civilian deaths. The lethality of combat was evident in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Yemen, and other countries in which the U.S. intervened. Sanctions, a fan-favorite in the nation’s capital, can be even deadlier than war.

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A nation’s leader just wanting his nation to stay neutral regarding a war undertaken against another nation by the United States government can set in motion a US government effort to boot that leader from office. A previously secret Pakistan government document disclosed in a Wednesday in-depth The Intercept article suggests that such a removal effort is just what the US government successfully accomplished in Pakistan in the early days of the Ukraine War.

Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan had been steadfast in supporting keeping his country out of the Ukraine War in which the United States and other nations have been using the Ukraine government and military as a proxy to fight against Russia. An indication of Khan’s approach to the matter is provided in this relating in The Intercept article of comments he made on March 6, 2022 — the day before the meeting between US and Pakistan officials detailed in the newly revealed Pakistan cable:

The day before the meeting, Khan addressed a rally and responded directly to European calls that Pakistan rally behind Ukraine. “Are we your slaves?” Khan thundered to the crowd. “What do you think of us? That we are your slaves and that we will do whatever you ask of us?” he asked. “We are friends of Russia, and we are also friends of the United States. We are friends of China and Europe. We are not part of any alliance.”

That type of foreign policy approach is as American as apple pie or George Washington. But, its expression by a foreign government leader to justify opting out of supporting US empire is sure to bring contemporary American uber-interventionists to rage.

The US interventionists got their way. The Intercept article relates:

One month after the meeting with U.S. officials documented in the leaked Pakistani government document, a no-confidence vote was held in Parliament, leading to Khan’s removal from power. The vote is believed to have been organized with the backing of Pakistan’s powerful military. Since that time, Khan and his supporters have been engaged in a struggle with the military and its civilian allies, whom Khan claims engineered his removal from power at the request of the U.S.

And Khan’s expressed policy of keeping his country free of Ukraine War involvement and international alliances has gone by the wayside in Pakistan foreign policy:

Pakistan’s foreign policy has changed significantly since Khan’s removal, with Pakistan tilting more clearly toward the U.S. and European side in the Ukraine conflict. Abandoning its posture of neutrality, Pakistan has now emerged as a supplier of arms to the Ukrainian military; images of Pakistan-produced shells and ammunition regularly turn up on battlefield footage. In an interview earlier this year, a European Union official confirmed Pakistani military backing to Ukraine. Meanwhile, Ukraine’s foreign minister traveled to Pakistan this July in a visit widely presumed to be about military cooperation, but publicly described as focusing on trade, education, and environmental issues.

This realignment toward the U.S. has appeared to provide dividends to the Pakistani military. On August 3, a Pakistani newspaper reported that Parliament had approved the signing of a defense pact with the U.S. covering “joint exercises, operations, training, basing and equipment.” The agreement was intended to replace a previous 15-year deal between the two countries that expired in 2020.

But that’s not all. This month, Khan was imprisoned in Pakistan and barred from holding office for the next five years.

Another win for USA.

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Einführung in Thematik

Auf der Suche nach einer aufbauenden Lektüre, die in diesen finsteren Zeiten Orientierung bieten kann, stieß ich – wie bereits in den sechziger und siebziger Jahren des letzten Jahrhunderts – auf die Werke und Gedanken von Albert Camus.

Camus Wirkungsgeschichte geht weit über die Literatur hinaus. Als Repräsentant des französischen Existentialismus atheistischer Prägung beeinflusste er nicht nur im vergangenen Jahrhundert das Denken über die Grundfragen der menschlichen Existenz, die Rolle der Intellektuellen und das Engagement des Individuums für Freiheit und Gerechtigkeit (1), er bietet noch heute eine grundlegende Orientierung. Die Forschungsergebnisse der naturwissenschaftlichen Tiefenpsychologie hat er dabei mitberücksichtigt.

Zwar erlangte das umfangreiche literarische Werk des Literatur-Nobelpreisträgers (1957) weltweite Anerkennung, sein journalistisches Schaffen, seine Artikel in libertär-sozialistischen Zeitschriften sowie sein Buch „Der Mensch in der Revolte“ (1961) sind jedoch weniger bekannt. Sie inspirierten anarchistische Bewegungen weltweit, führten zu einer Neuorientierung in der Nachkriegszeit und waren 1952 Anlass für die Auseinandersetzung und den Bruch mit Jean-Paul Sartre (2).

Einen guten Überblick über das Denken und Wirken Camus‘ und das umfassende Verständnis des Menschen in der Revolte ermöglicht das Buch „Albert Camus – Libertäre Schriften (1948-1960)“, das der französische Journalist und Übersetzer Lou Marin 2013 herausgegeben hat (3).

Am besten lässt sich die tapfere Diesseitsbejahung im Werk Camus‘ mit den Satz Pindars beschreiben, der der Abhandlung von Camus‘ „Der Mythos von Sisyphos“ vorangestellt ist:

„Liebe Seele, trachte nicht nach dem ewigen Leben, sondern schöpfe das Mögliche aus.“ (4)

Camus‘ letzte Botschaft: „Geben, wenn man kann. Und nicht hassen, wenn das möglich ist.“

Camus‘ letzte Nachricht, die die nachkommende Generation inspirieren sollte (5), wurde in der libertären Zeitschrift „Reconstruir“ (Wiederaufbau) auf der Titelseite ihrer Ausgabe vom Januar/Februar 1960 veröffentlicht. Es war Camus‘ Antwort auf einen Fragebogen über das Problem der internationalen Beziehungen.

So fragte die Zeitschrift:

„Geben Ihnen die Gipfeltreffen zwischen den Vertretern der Vereinigten Staaten und der Sowjetunion irgendeine Hoffnung, was die Möglichkeiten der Überwindung des Kalten Krieges und der Teilung der Welt in zwei antagonistisch sich gegenüberstehende Blöcke betrifft?“

Camus‘ Antwort: „Nein. Die Macht macht denjenigen verrückt, der sie innehat.“ (6)

Die letzte Frage von „Reconstruir“ lautete:

„Wie sehen Sie die Zukunft der Menschheit? Was müsste man tun, um zu einer Welt zu kommen, die weniger von der Notwendigkeit unterdrückt und freier wäre?“

Darauf antwortete Camus mit der bekannten „Botschaft“ an die nachfolgende Generation:

„Geben, wenn man kann. Und nicht hassen, wenn das möglich ist.“ (7)

Auf den Frieden hoffen und für ihn kämpfen 

Albert Camus

Für Camus war nichts unentschuldbarer als der Krieg und der Aufruf zum Völkerhass. Seiner Meinung nach hätte der Westen Besseres zu tun, als sich in Kriegen und Streitereien selbst zu zerfleischen Aber wenn der Krieg einmal ausgebrochen ist, meinte er, sei es zwecklos und feige, sich unter dem Vorwand, man sei nicht für ihn verantwortlich, abseits zu stellen (8).

In der französischen Zeitschrift „Défence de l’homme“ vom 10. Juni 1949 ergänzte er auf deren Feststellung hin, dass die Zukunft düster aussehe:

„Warum? Es gibt nichts mehr zu fürchten, denn wir haben das Allerschlimmste kennengelernt. Es gibt daher von nun an nur noch Gründe dafür, zu hoffen und zu kämpfen.“

Auf die Frage: „Mit welchem Ziel?“ antwortete er: „Für den Frieden.“

„Ich setze auf den Frieden. Darin liegt mein ganz eigener Optimismus. Aber man muss für ihn etwas tun und das wird schwer. Darin liegt mein Pessimismus. Jedenfalls bekenne ich mich heute einzig und allein zu den Friedensbewegungen, die versuchen, sich auf internationaler Ebene zu verbreiten. Auf ihrer Seite finden sich die wahren Realisten. Und ich bin mit ihnen.“ (9).

In seinen Tagebucheintragungen von 1939 meinte Camus, dass nichts festgelegt sei und man alles ändern könne; auch Kriege könne man verhindern:

„Es gibt ein einziges Verhängnis, nämlich den Tod, und darüber hinaus gibt es keines mehr. In dem Zeitraum, der von der Geburt bis zum Tod reicht, ist nichts festgelegt: man kann alles ändern und sogar dem Krieg Einhalt gebieten und sogar den Frieden erhalten, wenn man inständig, stark und lange genug will. Grundsatz: Zuerst nach dem suchen, was jeder Mensch an Wertvollem in sich trägt.“ (10).

In den „Seiten aus dem Tagebuch (1939)“ in Lou Marins Buch gibt es auch einen Brief, in dem sich Camus an einen „Verzweifelten“ wendet:

„Sie schreiben, dass dieser Krieg Sie bedrückt, dass Sie bereit wären zu sterben, dass sie aber diese weltweite Dummheit nicht ertragen können, diese blutrünstige Feigheit und diese verbrecherische Naivität, die immer noch glaubt, menschliche Probleme könnten mit Blut gelöst werden. Ich lese Ihre Zeilen, und ich verstehe Sie. (…)

Ich verstehe Sie, aber ich kann Ihnen nicht mehr folgen, wenn sie aus dieser Verzweiflung eine Lebensregel machen und sich hinter Ihrem Ekel zurückziehen wollen, weil ja doch alles unnütz sei. Denn die Verzweiflung ist ein Gefühl und kein Zustand. Sie können nicht darin verharren. Und das Gefühl muss einer klaren Erkenntnis der Dinge weichen. (…).

Heute sind Sie überzeugt, dass Sie nichts mehr verhindern können. Dies ist der springende Punkt. Aber zunächst müssen Sie sich fragen, ob Sie wirklich alles getan haben, um diesen Krieg zu verhindern. Wenn ja, könnte dieser Krieg Ihnen als ein Verhängnis vorkommen und Sie könnten die Meinung vertreten, dass nichts mehr zu machen sei. Aber ich bin sicher, dass Sie nicht alles getan haben, was nötig war, genau so wenig wie wir alle. Sie haben es nicht verhindern können? Nein, das stimmt nicht. Dieser Krieg war nicht unabwendbar, das wissen Sie. (…).

Sie haben eine Aufgabe, zweifeln Sie nicht daran. Jeder Mensch besitzt einen mehr oder weniger großen Einflussbereich. Er verdankt ihn seinen Mängeln ebenso sehr wie seinen Vorzügen. Aber wie dem auch sei, er ist vorhanden und er kann unmittelbar genutzt werden. Treiben sie niemanden zum Aufruhr. Man muss mit dem Blut und der Freiheit der anderen schonend umgehen. Aber Sie können zehn, zwanzig, dreißig Menschen davon überzeugen, dass dieser Krieg weder unabwendbar war noch ist, dass noch nicht alle Mittel versucht worden sind, ihm Einhalt zu gebieten, dass man es sagen, es wenn möglich schreiben, es wenn nötig hinausschreien muss! Diese zehn oder dreißig Menschen werden es zehn anderen weitersagen, die es ihrerseits wieder verbreiten. Wenn die Trägheit Sie zurückhält, nun gut, so fangen sie mit anderen wieder von vorne an. (…).

Individuen sind es, die uns heute in den Tod schicken. Warum sollte es nicht anderen Individuen gelingen, der Welt den Frieden zu schenken? Nur muss man beginnen, ohne an so große Ziele zu denken. Vergessen Sie nicht, dass der Krieg ebenso sehr mit der Begeisterung derer geführt wird, die ihn wollen, wie mit der Verzweiflung derer, die ihn mit der ganzen Kraft ihrer Seele ablehnen (11). 

Camus‘ Werke sind eine Schulung im Geiste der Revolte

Camus‘ Denken kulminiert in der Aufforderung zur Revolte im Sinne eines unablässigen Kampfes um ein höheres Maß an Freiheit. Der zum Bewusstsein seiner selbst gelangte Mensch kann nichts anderes tun, als sich gegen die Bedingungen der Sozialordnung aufzulehnen. Die ihm entsprechende Lebensform ist die permanente Empörung.

Wenn der Mensch in seiner Verlassenheit zu sich kommt, kann er gemäß Camus‘ entweder den Selbstmord wählen oder sich entschlossen diesem Dasein zuwenden, das nur durch diese Zuwendung Sinn bekommt. Gleichgültigkeit ist ausgeschlossen. Das Ich hat die Welt absurd genannt und bekennt sich somit zum Willen, diese Welt zu verändern. Die Absurdität der Welt zur Kenntnis zu nehmen heißt: sich gegen sie auflehnen. In diesem Akt der Empörung findet der Mensch zu sich selbst – in Abwandlung der Formel von Descartes: „Ich empöre mich – deshalb bin ich!“ Der hellsichtig gewordene Mensch, der sich als Herr seines Schicksals weiß, verschreibt sich dem Geist der Revolte.

Einmal auf dem Standpunkt der Revolte stehend, erblickt der Mensch in seinen Mitmenschen Bedrückte seiner Art und sieht sich in der Gemeinschaft der Leidenden, zu der er sich selbst als zugehörig betrachtet. Die Auflehnung im Namen von Menschenrecht und Menschenwürde kann aber nie für den einzelnen alleine geschehen – sie geschieht für alle Menschen: „Ich empöre mich – also sind wir!“

Für den freien Menschen gibt es kein höheres Ziel, als die Verwirklichung der Freiheit aller. Gerade das ist die eigentliche Hingabe an die Menschen der Zukunft. Die wahre Großzügigkeit gegenüber der Zukunft bestehet darin, alles der Gegenwart zu geben.

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

Er schreibt regelmäßig für Global Research.     

Noten

(1) Bouchentouf-Siagh, Zohra und Kampits, Peter (2001). Zur Aktualität von Albert Camus. Wiener Vorlesungen. Wien

(2) Marin, Lou (Hrsg.). (2013). Albert Camus-Libertäre Schriften (1948-1960). Hamburg. Buchumschlag Innenklappe

(3) A. a. O.

(4) Camus, Albert (1959). Der Mythos von Sisyphos. Hamburg, S. 7

(5) Marin, Lou (Hrsg.). (2013). Albert Camus-Libertäre Schriften (1948-1960). Hamburg, S.363

(6) A. a. O., S. 363f.

(7) A. a. O., S. 364

(8) A. a. O., S. 197

(9) A. a. O., S. 81

(10) A. a. O., S. 267

(11) A. a. O., S. 271ff

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Introduction to the Theme

In my search for uplifting reading that can offer orientation in these dark times, I came across the works and thoughts of Albert Camus – as I did in the sixties and seventies of the last century.

Camus’s history of influence goes far beyond literature. As a representative of French atheistic existentialism, he not only influenced thinking in the last century about the basic questions of human existence, the role of intellectuals and the individual’s commitment to freedom and justice (1), he still offers fundamental orientation today. He has taken into account the research results of scientific depth psychology.

Although the extensive literary work of the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature (1957) achieved worldwide recognition, his journalistic work, his articles in libertarian-socialist magazines and his book “Man in Revolt” (1961) are less well-known. They inspired anarchist movements worldwide, led to a reorientation in the post-war period and were the occasion for the confrontation and break with Jean-Paul Sartre in 1952 (2).

A good overview of Camus’ thought and work and comprehensive understanding of man in revolt is provided by the book “Albert Camus – Libertarian Writings (1948-1960)”, edited by the French journalist and translator Lou Marin in 2013 (3).

The best way to describe the brave affirmation of this world in Camus’s work is the sentence of Pindar that precedes the treatise of Camus’s “The Myth of Sisyphus”:

“Dear soul, do not aspire to eternal life, but exhaust what is possible.” (4)

Camus’s final message: “Give when you can. And not hate, if that is possible.”

Camus’s last message, which was to inspire the coming generation (5), was published in the libertarian journal Reconstruir (Reconstruction) on the front page of its January/February 1960 issue. It was Camus’s answer to a questionnaire on the problem of international relations.

Thus the journal asked:

“Do the summit meetings between the representatives of the United States and the Soviet Union give you any hope as to the possibilities of overcoming the Cold War and the division of the world into two antagonistically opposed blocs?”

Camus’ answer: “No. Power makes the one who holds it crazy.” (6)

The final question of “Reconstruir” was: “How do you see the future of humanity? What would it take to arrive at a world less oppressed by necessity and more free?”

To this Camus replied with the well-known “message” to the following generation: “Give when you can. And not hate, if that is possible.” (7)

Hoping for Peace and Fighting for It

For Camus, nothing was more inexcusable than war and the call to hatred of nations. In his opinion, the West had better things to do than to tear itself apart in wars and quarrels. But once war had broken out, he thought, it was futile and cowardly to stand aside under the pretext that one was not responsible for it (8).

In the French magazine “Défence de l’homme” of 10 June 1949, in response to its observation that the future looked bleak, he added:

“Why? There is nothing more to fear, because we have known the very worst. Therefore, from now on, there are only reasons to hope and fight.”

To the question, “To what end?” he replied, “For peace.”

“I am betting on peace. Therein lies my very own optimism. But you have to do something for it and that will be difficult. Therein lies my pessimism. In any case, today I am solely committed to the peace movements that are trying to spread internationally. On their side are found the true realists. And I am with them.” (9).

In his diary entries of 1939, Camus said that nothing is fixed and everything can be changed; even wars can be prevented:

“There is one fatality, death, and beyond that there is none. In the period that extends from birth to death, nothing is fixed: one can change everything and even put a stop to war and even preserve peace if one wants fervently, strongly and long enough. Principle: seek first what each person has within him of value.” (10).

In the “Pages from the Diary (1939)” in Lou Marin’s book, there is also a letter in which Camus addresses a “despairing man”:

“You write that this war depresses you, that you would be ready to die, but that you cannot bear this worldwide stupidity, this bloodthirsty cowardice and this criminal naivety that still believes human problems can be solved with blood. I read your lines and I understand you. (…)

I understand you, but I can no longer follow you when you make a rule of life out of this despair and want to retreat behind your disgust because everything is useless. For despair is a feeling and not a state. You cannot remain in it. And the feeling must give way to a clear realisation of things. (…).

Today you are convinced that you can no longer prevent anything. This is the crux of the matter. But first you must ask yourself whether you have really done everything to prevent this war. If so, this war might seem like a doom to you and you might take the view that nothing more can be done. But I am sure that you did not do everything that was necessary, any more than any of us. You couldn’t have prevented it? No, that’s not true. This war was not inevitable, you know that. (…).

You have a task, do not doubt it. Every person has a more or less large sphere of influence. He owes it as much to his shortcomings as to his advantages. But be that as it may, it is there and it can be used immediately. Do not drive anyone to riot. One must be sparing with the blood and freedom of others. But you can convince ten, twenty, thirty people that this war was neither inevitable nor is it, that all means have not yet been tried to stop it, that it must be said, written if possible, shouted out if necessary! These ten or thirty people will spread the word to ten others, who in turn will spread it again. If inertia holds you back, well, they start all over again with others. (…).

Individuals are the ones who send us to our deaths today. Why shouldn’t other individuals succeed in giving peace to the world? Only one must begin without thinking of such great goals. Do not forget that war is waged as much with the enthusiasm of those who want it as with the despair of those who reject it with all the strength of their souls (11).

Camus’s Works Are a Training in the Spirit of Revolt

Camus’s thinking culminates in the call to revolt in the sense of an incessant struggle for a higher degree of freedom. Man who has achieved self-awareness can do nothing but rebel against the conditions of the social order. The form of life that corresponds to him is permanent indignation.

When man comes to himself in his abandonment, he can, according to Camus, either choose suicide or resolutely turn to this existence, which only gains meaning through this turning. Indifference is out of the question. The I has called the world absurd and thus professes the will to change this world. To take note of the absurdity of the world means: to rebel against it. In this act of indignation, man finds himself – in a variation of Descartes’ formula: “I indignate – therefore I am!” The clairvoyant human being, who knows himself to be the master of his destiny, subscribes to the spirit of revolt.

Once standing on the standpoint of revolt, the human being sees in his fellow human beings oppressed people of his own kind and sees himself in the community of the suffering, to which he considers himself to belong. However, revolt in the name of human rights and human dignity can never happen for the individual alone – it happens for all human beings: “I revolt – therefore we are!”

For the free human being, there is no higher goal than the realisation of freedom for all. This is precisely the real dedication to the people of the future. True generosity towards the future consists in giving everything to the present.

*

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

He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

Notes

(1) Bouchentouf-Siagh, Zohra and Kampits, Peter (2001). On the topicality of Albert Camus. Vienna Lectures. Vienna

(2) Marin, Lou (ed.). (2013). Albert Camus-Libertarian Writings (1948-1960). Hamburg. Book jacket inside flap

(3) Op. cit.

(4) Camus, Albert (1959). The myth of Sisyphus. Hamburg, p. 7

(5) Marin, Lou (ed.). (2013). Albert Camus-Libertarian Writings (1948-1960). Hamburg, p.363

(6) op. cit., p. 363f.

(7) op. cit., p. 364

(8) op. cit., p. 197

(9) op. cit., p. 81

(10) op. cit., p. 267

(11) op. cit., p. 271ff.

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Michael Hudson [Intro/Music]: America cannot re-industrialize without reversing this whole philosophy of post-industrial society as a class war against labor. You can’t have both. You can’t have a class war against labor and reindustrialization with the labor unionization that goes with it.

Countries who let an oligarchy develop end up pushing their own economies into obsolescence and a kind of dark age. It’s policy, and most of all, it’s the policy of the Democratic Party’s administration here.

[00:01:35] Geoff Ginter [Intro/Music]: Now, let’s see if we can avoid the apocalypse altogether. Here’s another episode of Macro N Cheese with your host, Steve Grumbine.

[00:01:43] Steven Grumbine: All right. This is Steve with Macro N Cheese. Today’s guest is none other than Michael Hudson. Michael Hudson’s the president of the Institute for Study of Long-Term Economic Trends (ISLET), a Wall Street financial analyst, Distinguished Research Professor of Economics at the University of Missouri, Kansas City, and he is the author of many books you’ve probably read, including Superimperialism: The Economic Strategy of American Empire, Forgive Them Their Debts, J is for Junk Economics, Killing The Host, The Bubble And Beyond: Trade, Development and Foreign Debt, amongst others. Without further ado, I want to bring on my guest, Michael Hudson. Michael, thank you so much for joining me today, sir.

[00:02:26] Michael Hudson: Good to be back.

[00:02:27] Grumbine: Absolutely. So one of the things that’s stressing me out, as far as being an economic podcast and reviewing the dialogue that is going on in the ecosphere and lefties trying to make heads or tails of the world around them, is watching the fallout of decisions that the United States have made in regards to Ukraine, China, Russia, and this divergence into a multipolar world. The steps that the United States have taken appear to be shooting themselves in the foot.

An empire that has lost its grip on much of what it once had, and it’s doing things that I think most people would say are really horrible, from war, to austerity, to using the IMF and NATO as tools of aggression. There’s so many aspects to the United States approach to geopolitical relationships, that I think most people are trying to get a grip on.

What does this mean to them? In discussing this, before we started this podcast, you gave us some notes, and it was quite clear that the United States is a failed state. I don’t fully understand what that means, but I’m hoping that maybe you can help us understand why is the US a failed state and what is it about its recent behavior?

What does it indicate to us about where it’s headed, and what we can expect in the future?

[00:03:58] Hudson: Well, I think it’s a failed state because its economy is paralyzed and we’re in a debt deflation, an economic polarization, that is just transferring all wealth and income away from labor, away from industry, into really the financial sector and what I call the finance, insurance, and real estate sector.

And what’s failed is, right now, President Biden says that he wants the future to re-industrialize. He realizes that ever since the Clinton administration, the Democratic Party has been solidly behind de-industrializing the United States, and that’s actually going back to the 1960s and early 70s when economists were celebrating what they called, a post-industrial society.

Well, what does a post-industrial society mean? It meant a society without blue collar labor, really, service labor, which happened to be a society without labor unions. And the promise was that a post-industrial society was going to make everybody richer, and you’d have easier working conditions, and shorter working days, and productivity would rise, and everybody would have an easier, more prosperous life.

Well, that hasn’t happened, so the question is: Why did the United States decide to de-industrialize? And I think it was done as a combination between two parties.

You had the Democrats with a pro-financial anti-labor policy, and the Republicans with a pro-financial, pro-landlord, pro-1% policy, wanting tax cuts; and the real objective of de-industrialization from Clinton on, was an anti-labor policy, because de-industrialization meant essentially lowering employment, and thereby lowering the demand for labor, and lowering the wages.

And the question that everyone was asking from 1980 on was, why were wages having to be reduced, and why are wages lower right now? Well, for years, American dominance, as an industrial power in the late 19th century, was a result of low wages, as a result of low housing costs, low debt, free education, public services, and this had created a very prosperous US economy, from right after the Civil War, down through Roosevelt’s New Deal.

But all of this began to come under attack. Really beginning with the Carter administration, when he was promoting immigration as a means of cutting wages in the southwest. It was Carter that began to realize that, well, there’s a lot of labor that’s making too much money in the southwest, we’ll spur immigration.

Well, when Clinton came in later, he wanted to deregulate the economy and he wanted free trade, for basically, corporations to de-invest from the United States, and invest abroad, and hire low wage labor.

He pressed to accept China into the World Trade Organization in 2001, and that’s basically the Democratic Party program today, to fight against labor, and reduce its wages, and favor Wall Street. Obama typified this. He promised a card-check to support unionization, and then just refused to do it.

And instead of introducing card check, he devoted his time to hoping to work with the Republicans, to cut back Social Security, on the grounds that you had to balance the budget. And by balancing the budget, that would force the economy to rely on private banks lending money at interest, instead of the government creating money to spend into the economy by running budget deficits. Well, Biden has topped it all off by not supporting labor unions, as you saw during the railroad strike, and by the Democrats having a trick that they pull. They have some postgraduate lady – maybe she does have a degree, as the Parliamentarian, who, just in case the Democrats and Congress would pass a law that people want, the parliamentarian said, you can’t pass that because that’s pro-labor. And being pro-labor is against the Constitution. Because that’s against what the original leaders of the Constitution meant. And you can’t pass a law favoring blacks or hispanics, as you saw with the Harvard case, because after all, the original authors of the Constitution were mostly slave owners, and they wouldn’t have wanted any such favoritism to the blacks.

So if you’re an originalist, of course you’re going to have the Parliamentarian lady say, well, that’s not really what the Supreme Court will agree with. And of course, when it finally did get to the Supreme Court, they said: you can’t do this, this is not what the original founders of the Constitution wanted and believed.

They wanted to enslave Afro-Americans, not get them into Harvard for heaven’s sakes. Well, I don’t want to leave the Republicans out of this, because they’ve had a kind of complementary pro-rentier policy, favoring real estate under Reagan, with his accelerated depreciation. He basically made absentee ownership and commercial real estate tax exempt, and he slashed the taxes on wealth, and moved away from progressive taxation to regressive taxation.

As did Donald Trump, and of course the Democrats have accepted all of this. There was no attempt by the Democrats to fight back against the Republicans regressive taxation, and the difference is that the Republicans have a kind of libertarian, anti-government policy, which is their euphemism for a government strong enough to control the economy, and the interests of the 1%, who are their campaign donors.

And the Democrats are pro-government. Namely, they want a pro-government strong enough to defend the 1% against the rest of the economy, but they use a different rhetoric for all of this. So the problem is that both US political parties are committed to de-industrialization for the reasons that the head of the Federal reserve has explained over the last few months: if you have more industrialization, you’ll have more employment, and if you have more employment, you’ll raise wages.

And our philosophy, Democrats and Republicans alike, is to keep wages down so that corporate profits can be higher. And it’s worth it to the employing class, it’s worth it to the corporate monopolies to impose a depression on the United States, as long as that will reduce wages and strengthen the power of the 1% over the 99%. So the 1% is willing to lose sales, to lose profits, as the economy falls into what they call a recession, as long as their power over the 99% increases.

That’s the basic key to understanding where American politics is going. And this is why the Davos gang says the world is overpopulated. Who needs labor, when it really can’t afford to pay interest.

For the financial sector and the FIRE sector, the 1% or the 10%, the role of labor is to make enough earnings so that it can pay interest to the banks, pay rents or interest to the mortgage lenders, and can basically pay money to the FIRE sector. And if labor’s wages really are forced down to break-even subsistence levels, then who needs labor? Time for population control. And basically the US problem is not only low wages, but it’s tax favoritism for the FIRE sector. And this cannot be reversed without causing a bank crisis. Because if you were to tax real estate and home ownership, for instance, and commercial real estate with a land tax, which is what the whole 19th century’s classical economics is all about, then the banks couldn’t get paid. So we’re stuck. America cannot re-industrialize without reversing this whole philosophy of post-industrial society as a class war against labor.

You can’t have both. You can’t have a class war against labor and reindustrialization, with the labor unionization that goes with it. That’s the conundrum. So when Biden talks about, we at the Democratic party want to re-industrialize, there’s no way that his policies can possibly permit any real re-industrialization to occur.

And that’s why America’s stuck. That’s why it’s become a failed state, because it can’t compete with other countries in today’s world with this right wing libertarian, anti-labor, neoliberal philosophy.

[00:13:29] Grumbine: Every time I think about this, I get enraged. We’ve been speaking with some abolitionists for police abolition. When we talk to them, they explain, you’ve got it all backwards. The police aren’t there after the fact. They’re not there as a result of crime. They’re there to keep order for capital, to make sure that capital runs smoothly.

And to extend this out to NATO, and it does the same thing around the world, it’s there to create chaos, and it’s there to institute order to facilitate these things. The US is losing its grip on its empire, yet has the largest military ever amassed in the history of the world. What about that military maintains hegemony?

And what about that military is costing it it’s hegemony. Cuz right now something’s outta whack. I’m all about ripping the empire down, but that has a whole lot of downstream dominoes that come with it. I’m interested in your thoughts on the role of the military industrial complex on this failed state.

[00:14:32] Hudson: Well, you’re using a trick word: ‘military.’ Military, for the United States, is different from what the word ‘military’ meant in every other society from the beginning of time. When you say military, you think of an army fighting. You cannot conquer a country without invading it, and to invade it, you obviously need an army, you need troops. But the Americans can’t mount an army, of enough size, to occupy anybody except Grenada, or Panama, because the Vietnam War stopped the military draft. What America does have, what it calls military, is what you quite rightly linked it to: the military industrial complex. It makes arms. And weapons.

But again, these are a funny kind of weapons. Suppose you had a winery that made wine that was so good, that really wasn’t for drinking. It was for wealthy people to buy, and to trade. And as the years go by, the wine would turn to vinegar. It’s not wine for drinking. It’s wine for making a profit, a capital gain.

Well, you can say the same thing about America’s military arms, as we’re seeing in Ukraine right now — or as President Biden calls it, Iraq. The arms, basically, are there to create a huge profit for Raytheon, and the other companies in the military industrial complex. They’re for buying, and they’re for giving to the Ukrainians, to let Russia blow them up.

But they’re not for fighting. They’re not for winning a war. They’re for being used up, so you have to replace them now, with yet new buying. And so the United States State Department has asked Germany and other European countries, well, you’d promised to pay 2% of your GDP on military arms to enrich our military industrial complex.

But now that we’ve given all these tanks and missiles away – Russia just blew up 12% of all the tanks in just one week – so we only have a few weeks left to go before they’re all wiped out. Because they really don’t work on the battlefield. They’re not for fighting, they’re for being blown up. Now we want you to actually increase your spending to 4%, to replenish all of the stocks, you’ve just depleted, 10 years, maybe 20 years, of your arms stocks. And you have to now replenish them very rapidly, in order to meet the NATO targets, that we and the State Department, have set. So military today isn’t really how you control other countries. America’s found it much easier to do this by financial mechanisms.

You conquer a country financially, you conquer a country by getting it to submit to austerity programs by the International Monetary Fund, again, to impose austerity, to keep its local wages down. So you use finance as a means of imposing post-industrialization and depression, in order to prevent democracy from developing.

So any country that is seeking to promote a democracy by public spending on basic infrastructure, or banking, like China is doing, is called an autocracy. And every autocracy that has imposed a client oligarchy, to fight against labor, and to prevent these policies that would help enrich and industrialize the economy, is called a democracy, not an autocracy.

So we’re back in the Orwellian logic to describe a situation, that probably even the cynical George Orwell, would not have thought could go quite this far.

[00:18:29] Grumbine: I think about austerity all the time. I read Clara Mattei’s book The Capital Order: How Economists Invented Austerity and Paved the Way to Fascism [Clara Mattei]. And I guess my question to you is this, given all the work that you’ve put into the historical nature of debt and debt jubilees and austerity, how is it when we look at the domestic policy of the United States, we don’t have money for healthcare, for getting rid of student debt?

We don’t have money to invest in universal basic services, to provide any kind of relief. Housing as a right, any of the basic needs, we have no money for this, but we know as MMT, or economically literate people, from an understanding of state theory of money, that the state itself creates its currency.

How in the world is the United States able to convince people that it doesn’t have money? And it can’t do any of these things, while it uses every bit of its fiscal power, that it’s willing to admit it has, to defeat the rest of the world, but stamps down on its own citizens? I feel like, Michael, this is maybe the most important cog in between, not only the geopolitical world, the larger picture, but as well as the domestic picture, and even down to the local homeless guy living under a bridge.

The things that we’re dealing with here are the same thing, it’s just different in scale, maybe. Can you explain that to me?

I.

[00:20:04] Hudson: Well, what this is, is reflecting the power of junk economics and ideology. The right wing economists claim that if government were to provide more public healthcare, and more public services, taxes would go up. And because both Republicans and the Democrats have shifted taxes off real estate, off finance, off the 1% onto the 99%, that means that the wage earners taxes would go up.

But of course, it doesn’t have to be that way at all, because, as you point out, the state theory of money says that governments can create their own money. That’s been the case for the last few hundred years. And China has shown, governments don’t have to borrow money from the wealthy people to pay interest.

They can simply print the money, and the junk economics people say, well, if you print your money, that’s inflationary. But it’s no more inflationary than bank credit. Suppose that a government does indeed borrow a billion dollars from wealthy bond holders, and the wealthy bond holders are going to take the money out of the bank and turn it over to the government for spending.

Why does the government need the bond holders to create this money? Or, why do they need banks to suddenly go to their computer and create a billion dollars, to lend to the government, which the government will then redeposit in these very banks? The government is going to create the money in any case, whether it’s lent by the bond holders, or the banks, or just simply printed.

So the pretense is that the government has to borrow from bond holders. Because the bond holders decide what is economically worthwhile. Well, what does this ignore? That the bond holders are the 1%, and what they find economically worthwhile, isn’t using the government to benefit living standards, benefit labor, and to provide social services.

The government’s role is to provide more money for the 1%, via the military industrial complex, and the other government projects.

[00:22:22] Intermission: You are listening to Macro N Cheese, a podcast brought to you by Real Progressives, a nonprofit organization dedicated to teaching the masses about MMT or Modern Monetary Theory. Please help our efforts and become a monthly donor at PayPal or Patreon, like and follow our pages on Facebook and YouTube, and follow us on TikTok, Twitter, Twitch, Rokfin, and Instagram.

[00:23:13] Grumbine: So as far as austerity in this country, and making people feel like there is no alternative, you talked about the sale of bonds, and the myth that the rich are financing all of our lives. I listened to your friend Stephanie Kelton, who talks about the deficit myth, and talks about how bonds are after the fact, that they’re not really a funding operation.

And her paper she wrote in 1998, broke down that taxes and bonds cannot finance government. Yet people still acting like we are in debt to the rich, that we need the rich to survive. How does that myth hold water? Why does that still exist? Why are we not in the streets, locking arms, fighting back, taking this leviathan down?

I’ll just interject one thing also. I had the weird opportunity to spend a night with Jerome Powell, even though I didn’t know it, at the Dead and Company show in Virginia. And before I got there, I was driving through Loudoun County, Virginia, the tech corridor where you got Raytheon, and Boeing, and Halliburton. Every big defense contractor, and it just felt like huge trophies for the gods.

It was ridiculous. It was so over the top. That’s what we’re up against. We are up against something so massive, so unbelievably powerful. How does a person that has a leftist perspective, not only of labor and capital, but an understanding of trying to make people’s lives better, how do you do away with empire, when you’re staring at these massive monuments to the gods of industry, of the military industrial complex?

How do we take that leviathan on? It seems too big.

[00:25:08] Hudson: Well, in contrast to your trip through Virginia, here in New York, in Chicago, in Toronto, and in almost all the big cities throughout the world, the biggest buildings are the banks. They’re not Raytheon, they’re not the military industrial complex, they’re always the banks. They used to be shaped just like ancient Greek and Roman temples, not pyramids, as earlier, but a temple, as temples of finance, often they were called. And they’re the largest buildings because the wealthiest sector of society is the banking sector, the financial sector, not the industrial sector, not the military sector, and not even the real estate sector. Because most real estate rents are paid as interest to the banks. Now, the banks do not really help industrialize the economy.

They actually help de-industrialize the economy, because their philosophy is anti-labor and post-industrial. So how do you explain to people that it’s not necessary, for instance, for the governments to abandon public planning, and leave planning to the financial sectors? If the governments don’t do economic forward planning, Wall Street and the financial sectors will do it, because that is where credit is created.

Well, you mentioned Stephanie Kelton, and she was my department chairman at the University of Missouri at Kansas City, which was put together with a grant over 20 years ago, by Warren Mosler, and they put all of the Modern Monetary Theorists together there. Randy Wray, myself, Bill Black, explaining bank corruption in his book The Best Way To Rob A Bank Is To Own One. So we had developed a whole curriculum to explain what we called reality economics, how the economy and the world really works. Well, needless to say, a lot of students wanted to come to learn this. They were very sympathetic. Intuitively, they felt that, yes, this is how the economy works.

But there’s one problem, when they graduated with their PhD, there’s really only two jobs for economists in the economy: one is to drive a cab and the other is to teach. But in order to teach, you have to be hired according to how many journal articles you write for the most prestigious journals. And almost all the journal articles are controlled by the economics departments of colleges like the University of Chicago, or Berkeley, that are funded by the banks, and the large foundations. And so if you don’t publish in these journals, by saying what the neoliberals, the monetarists, the junk economists say, then you’re not going to get hired. So of course our students did get hired, but not by Harvard, or the University of Chicago, or Princeton, or Columbia. They could get hired by the New School here in New York, and by others, but there is a almost total censorship. And some students came from Asia, and they’ve gone back to Asia. Some were my colleagues in China, and Hong Kong, folks studied at UMKC. But you have the control imposing junk economics in the United States, by the media, such as The New York Times, is almost as strong as their control over reporting about the Ukraine war, as if Ukraine’s winning, and not losing.

They’re saying as if deindustrialization is helping us move into the post-industrial society of mass unemployment and homelessness, as if that’s a good thing. Well, it is a good thing for the 1%, because they get to feel, we’re really it. We’re really the new lords, the financial lords, not landlords, who are also in debt to us, to borrow. So that’s really the situation. Ultimately, if people don’t have a mental model in their mind of how the world works, and how it should work, to promote prosperity, they believe with Margaret Thatcher, as you said, that “there is no alternative.” And the function of economic education is to try to brainwash students into thinking there is no alternative.

Things have to be the way they are. That’s Darwinian evolution. That’s survival of the fittest, the survival of the bankers. To beat society. The bankers have won, labor’s lost. And if you look at what American polls show, the Americans don’t want war in Ukraine.

They want money to be spent domestically — we don’t get it. They want public healthcare — we don’t get it. They want student loans to be forgiven, rather than preventing graduates, debtors, from ever having enough money to actually buy a home of their own and start a family — we don’t get it. And we don’t get it, because neither the Republicans, nor the Democrats support it.

But if they pretend to support it, by passing a law, the Supreme Court is there to make sure that it’s not what the original Constitutional people wanted. Because the Constitution was drafted by authors who feared democracy. Who said that we have to make sure that we have enough checks and blocks, so that the mob cannot rule and take away the power of we, the bond holders, and landlords, and slave owners.

[00:30:45] Grumbine: Well stated. This is really important stuff you’re bringing up here, Michael, I appreciate it. Let’s roll into the next phase. We’re going to double back, cuz we talked about the BRICS in the very beginning. We talked about China investing in its own financial sector. One of the concerns that many have is the loss of the world reserve currency.

And I’ve spoken with quite a few economists who have stated, point blank, that one of the reasons why the US is still able to maintain that level of hegemony, and still be able to hold onto reserve status, is because of the amount of deficit spending it was allowed to do previously, and that allowed the money to matriculate throughout the world.

It has a central hub in Wall Street, where people can invest, and so this is one of the primary reasons they say, that and, of course, the military, that allows us to retain that level. What, if anything, do you see has changed in such a way, to make that threatened by the BRICS, and I guess remedially, what exactly are the BRICS, and what does it represent that they’re trying to do?

[00:31:57] Hudson: Well, the BRICS was an acronym formed over a decade ago, for Brazil, Russia, India, and China. But now that the United States, in February of last year, 2022, confiscated Russia’s dollar reserves in the west, and told the Bank of England to confiscate Venezuela’s gold reserves. The United States says that any country that we declare to be an enemy, any country that we call an autocracy, namely democracies, is our enemy, and we can just grab all of your reserves.

Well, needless to say, this makes other countries afraid to use it, and they realize that the United States deficit, that has been pumping all these dollars into foreign economies, and their central banks, they end up being re-lent to the US government in treasury bills, and these treasury bills are used to finance the deficit, that’s largely military in nature. The budget deficit is primarily military, and the entire balance of payments deficit, after the Korean War, was entirely overseas military spending. That is what forced the United States to abandon convertibility of the dollar into gold in 1971. Not only General DeGaulle, but Germany, was cashing in every month, the extra dollars that were ending up in their central banks.

The United States was fighting in Vietnam and Southeast Asia, which were French colonies, and the only banks there at the time were French banks. They’d received this local spending in dollars, sent it to France and DeGaulle would cash it in for gold. And so it was America’s military spending that forced the United States off gold.

Well, when it went off gold, what were foreign countries going to spend their dollar inflows on? They don’t really buy real estate, and they don’t really buy stocks and bonds, at that time. They buy government bonds, and so it was the military spending for the balance of payments deficit, that financed the government domestic deficit.

The government didn’t have to borrow from abroad. Of course, it could have created its own money, but it had to provide some vehicle to absorb all of these dollars, that were being thrown off to other countries. So creating government bonds, by a deficit, was the means of giving foreign central banks an opportunity to dump, and recycle, and save, all of their dollars that America spent on 800 military bases, to encircle them, and have organized color revolutions, for any country that didn’t follow what American wanted, but responded to their own democratic wishes. So the BRICS are onto this, finally. They’ve been expanded to many other countries that want to join them, including Saudi Arabia, Iran. Basically, the BRICS are becoming an expanded Shanghai cooperation organization.

They’re the BRICS alternative to NATO, and we’re seeing a whole bunch of shadow international institutions, to counter those of the United States. An alternative to the IMF with a BRICS Bank, an alternative to the World Bank. Not to lend just for dependency on US exports, but to actually help other countries grow, instead of to become dependent.

So they realize that the American economic philosophy is junk economics, and the objective of American economic policy is to make other countries dependent, and to make sure that they can install client oligarchies to prevent democracy from occurring, right? So that if Chile would elect a socialist president like Allende, America will promote Pinochet to overthrow the whole group.

Other countries, they’ve been protesting this ever since the Bandon conference, in the mid 1950s. But there wasn’t a critical mass, and for the first time, the success of China, and other Asian countries, and having a mixed economy, and really doing exactly what industrial capitalism was supposed to do, namely evolving into socialism.

By creating a mixed economy with a government infrastructure, lowering the cost of living, and the cost of doing business, they’re finally succeeding, and leaving America way behind, in a paralyzed form. So it’s as like, America would like to grow as rapidly as China, but it can’t grow as rapidly as Asia, and still have a class war against industrialization.

How on earth are you going to maintain American prosperity without industry? How can you rule the world without having something to export, like industrial goods, or agriculture, or raw materials, or something other people need? The Americans only have one thing to offer. And it’s an offer really, that China and Russia can’t match.

The American can offer not to bomb other countries, not to overthrow their governments, not to have a color revolution. They’ll say what we can offer: your life. We’ll agree not to kill you, not to overthrow you, not to bomb you, not to do to you what we did to Libya, to Iraq, to Syria. If you don’t want that, then why don’t you be ‘our friend’, and join the free world?

That is what America has to offer, and other countries, I guess now that you’ve seen the year and a half war in Ukraine, you see that American weaponry, as we discussed, is what Mao called, a paper tiger. It’s not weaponry to fight. All that America has is one weapon, the hydrogen bomb. There is no other weapon that works.

There’s nothing in between, launching the Marines on shore, and dropping an atom bomb. There’s nothing in between that works, as we’re seeing. So that’s the problem. And the question is, now that you have a lot of American officials that say, well, you know, it’s really not necessarily so bad a thing if we use atom bombs, and the world comes to an end, because as Secretary of State and CIA head, Pompeo said, if the world blows up, Jesus will come, and he’ll send all of my people to heaven, and everyone else to hell. And there’s this end time mentality, with Blinken, Biden, the State Department, after us the deluge. We might as well have it come now, and we’ll have done a really big thing that’s changed history. Kaboom.

[00:38:44] Grumbine: Wow. Biden’s First State of the Union address, I was appalled to hear him already calling out China. His first intent was to demonize China, and you focus in on why? All I could see was, the United States government had allowed itself to be hollowed out, it allowed all its infrastructure to fall apart, it allowed its entire industrial base to collapse, and the pandemic showed the frailty of supply chains.

They go after Russia, they go after China, and they create enemies to buy time, to try to reinvent what the US is, to allow it to survive without its hegemony. What are your thoughts on why China and Russia became the targets?

[00:39:35] Hudson: It’s not what you say, it’s not that America ‘allowed’ other countries to go ahead, that was the deliberate policy, from Clinton on. They wanted to get rid of manufacturing labor here, in order to create what Marx called, a reserve army of the unemployed. They wanted to create unemployment here, by hiring foreign labor instead of American labor, and in the process, to make huge profits for companies, multinational firms, that produced abroad, with lower priced labor, from the United States.

So, it’s not that they allowed China to do something to pull ahead, America pushed these other countries to develop. That was part of the American’s anti-labor policy. And if you don’t realize that the aim is to cut living standards and reduce wages, except to the extent that wages can be spent on interest, to the financial sector, insurance, to the health providing sector, and housing sector, and rents for the real estate sector.

If they can’t provide this, the function of labor is not to produce commodities, as occurs under industrial capitalism. It’s not to be employed by manufacturers, to use equipment, to produce goods or services, it’s to serve as a market for the fire sector. That really is the guiding line, and it was the guiding line in Rome, which is why Rome fell apart.

It’s been the reason why countries, who let an oligarchy develop, end up pushing their own economies into obsolescence, and a kind of dark age. It’s policy, and most of all, it’s the policy of the Democratic Party’s administration here. Yeah. So look at what the laws do, and how the Supreme Court is there to prevent any kind of re-industrialization in the United States.

You cannot re-industrialize in a way that the original slaveholding authors of the Constitution would have approved of, if they were there today. They would be like the billionaires of Microsoft, and Facebook, and the others. That would be their philosophy.

[00:41:49] Grumbine: With the United States, this was by design. And we keep going through this dance, and if you’ve ever been to marriage counseling or anything like that, they always tell you, in order to get different results, you gotta change the dance. We’re still continuing to do the same dance, and the American people really haven’t got a clue, Michael.

How do we get the word out? It doesn’t seem to be making nearly enough of a dent. How do you get this word out to people, given the fact that the state itself, controls the media. How do we get out of that hell, or is it done, and we just have to stare the tsunami in the eye, and just let it take us out to sea.

[00:42:33] Hudson: Not at all like marriage counseling. My wife is a psychotherapist, and she’s counseled couples, and there’s one basic rule in counseling couples, she tells me. That if there’s a chance of violence, then you can’t do couples therapy, because they really can’t talk freely. You have to have each member of the couple go to a separate therapist and work them out individually.

It doesn’t work having them together. Well, there really isn’t a harmony of interest in the United States enough, so you can put labor and capital together, and come to a happy medium. There isn’t a medium. The economy’s polarizing. The interests of the financial, and the FIRE sector, are so antithetical to the interest of labor, and industry, that there’s no way you can meet in the middle, because the dynamic is polarizing, not converging.

The dream of most Americans is, we can somehow make a happy medium and bipartisanship. The bipartisanship is, what part of the FIRE sector do you want to rule: the Republicans cutting taxes for the rich, or the Democrats cutting employment for labor? Well, they’re two peas in the same pod, as they say. So you have to realize that the interests of labor are not those of capital. And yet, since I guess, the 1840 revolutions in Europe, there’s been this ideal that somehow the wage earning class can evolve into the middle class, first by owning its own home.

Although today, if you own your own home, you have to go into a lifetime of mortgage debt, or you can maybe buy an apartment somewhere and rent it out, and get that. Or you can use your retirement account to try to make money in the stock market. Good luck betting against the big guys. And there’s a myth that somehow the wage earners can become capitalists in miniature, as if they’re winning a lottery.

And as long as they don’t realize that the interests of labor and capital, and labor and capital they’re against finance, are antithetical, they’re not going to be the motivation for developing an economic ideology, to replace the pro 1% ideology, that we have today. Well, you could say the same problem is occurring in the BRICS countries.

The other day I was asked, how are you going to get China, and Saudi Arabia, and African, and South American countries all to work together? They all have such different religions, and ethnicities, and social status. Well, the common denominator is, they’re all wage earners. And they all have a common objective in making enough money, by working for a living, so that they can increase their living standards, have a home of their own, and have a shorter working day, and a less intensive, less exploitative, working conditions.

That’s all the common denominator that you need for these countries to work together, and it should be all the common denominator that you need in the United States, but as long as people think there are only two alternatives, the Republicans or the Democrats, well, that’s the same thing as saying there’s no alternative to the 1%, the FIRE sector, ruling society.

[00:45:57] Grumbine: Michael, if you were to have one parting word, to let our listeners know where we are, what would you describe the world as today? How would you describe the existence of the US, in this failed state that it’s in?

[00:46:15] Hudson: That America is in the same position as the Roman Republic, when it finally turned into the Roman Empire. The polarization has gone so far that there cannot be any recovery of living standards, any rise in wages, any improvement in living conditions, without radically changing the tax policy, the economic policy, without having a policy that benefits labor and productive industry, not the financial sector, and the real estate sector. That the financial sector and the property owning sector is outside of the economy. It’s external, it’s imposed on the economy. The economic core is workers for wages, producing goods and services. That core doesn’t need a financial wrapping.

You don’t need a wealthy 1% to finance the government’s budget deficit. Governments can do it by itself. The governments should have the role that the banks have today. That means there are not going to be any more big bank buildings overshadowing urban skylines. It means that there will be, basically, a return to what the whole world thought was an ideal of industrial capitalism, before World War I. And that was that capitalism would evolve steadily into socialism, to be a more productive economy, to free itself from the financial class, from the landlord class, and from the monopolists, and that a free market is a market free from land rent, free from bank rent, and free from unearned income, and wealth, that doesn’t play any productive role at all.

[00:48:01] Grumbine: Well stated, sir, well stated. Michael, do you have any other projects coming up? What are you working on? You’re always doing something, what’s happening over there?

[00:48:10] Hudson: Well, I’ve just published the second volume of my history of debt, The Collapse of Antiquity, and I’m now working on the third and final volume, which picks up the story of debt in the Crusades, in the 11th century to the 13th century. And I find that the whole financial system was transformed by the crusades.

Christianity had been denouncing interest payments and usury, ever since it became the Roman State religion. But Rome wanted to fund the Crusades, which were mainly against other Christian countries, mainly against France, and Germany, and Southern Italy, and Sicily, and Constantinople, is a kind of power grab.

And these wars required financing. So it was the papacy that introduced interest bearing debt and bankers, back into Christian civilization. And the modern financial system was introduced by the papacy itself, reversing all of the early Christian denunciation of usury. As Islam had denounced that, and freed its society from usury. All of this was a result of the Crusades, and the associated Inquisition, that was used to essentially wipe out all opposition from the real Christians, in Southern France, the Cathars, and the Christianity of the German states, the Holy Roman Empire.

And the strongest survival of Christianity in Constantinople, and its allied churches.

[00:49:56] Grumbine: I look forward to reading this, I’m excited about it. We have a bookstore at Real Progressives, on our website, and we will definitely fill it up with all the books. We have a bunch of them already there, but we’re going to keep adding to it. Michael, thank you so much for joining me today. This was an absolute pleasure.

I hope that we can have you back on. Your friend, and my friend, Virginia Cotts, would like to have you join us also, for what we call an RP Live. Really fun opportunity to do give and take, with our volunteers, and our donors, and other people that come to Real Progressives for this kind of information, and you sir, are a rockstar.

I really appreciate you taking the time, and look forward to having you back on soon.

[00:50:39] Hudson: Well, thanks for having me. I always enjoy our discussions, cuz I think of new things as we’re talking.

[00:50:44] Grumbine: Awesome. My name’s Steve Grumbine with my guest, Michael Hudson. This is the podcast, Macro N Cheese, and we are outta here.

*

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Michael Hudson is President of The Institute for the Study of Long-Term Economic Trends (ISLET), a Wall Street Financial Analyst, Distinguished Research Professor of Economics at the University of Missouri, Kansas City. He is the author of Killing the Host (published in e-format by CounterPunch Books and in print by Islet). His new book is J is For Junk Economics.

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***

Which are the governments generally regarded as “rogue” by an overwhelming majority of the world’s nations? If you answered either Russia or China you would be wrong, even though many countries have condemned Russia’s attack on Ukraine on grounds that no government has an intrinsic right to invade another unless there is an imminent serious threat that would excuse such an intervention.

I would however expect that most readers of this review would have made the right choice, which is that the United States is probably number one based on its ability to destabilize whole regions with a military reach that spans the globe. And indeed, it is important to note that the Russian “special military operation” directed against Ukraine would not have happened at all if the Joe Biden Administration had simply indicated clearly and non-ambiguously to the Russian government that there was no intention of allowing Ukraine to join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) alliance. Ironically, the White House knew very well that inviting Kiev to enter into the alliance was a legitimate red-line, existential issue for the Kremlin, but opted to push hard on the issue instead. Instead of opting for a negotiated peaceful settlement, Biden and his clown show foreign and national security policy team opted to kill possibly hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians and Russians to somehow “weaken” Russia, an intention that has borne no fruit even after more than a year and a half of fighting.

So yes, by the world’s reckoning the United States of American is both “exceptional” and “number one,” which a series of White House inhabitants have aspired to, though perhaps not in the same way as buffoons like Senators Tom Cotton and Ted Cruz refer to it. Most non-Americans see the US as the greatest threat to world peace. And then there is America’s “closest ally and best friend in the whole world” Israel in second place, a government which commits crimes against humanity and even war crimes on a nearly daily basis with absolute impunity as it is protected and defended by the very same United States, where the Jewish state runs the foremost and most powerful foreign policy lobby. It is a lobby that has inserted itself in all levels of government and which has corrupted huge majorities of politicians and both major political parties while also controlling the “message” on the Middle East promoted by the media.

Even as I write this, 41 Democratic Party politicians are spending their recess on a Lobby sponsored trip to Israel. Their leaders include the inimitable traitor 80 year old Congressman Steny Hoyer of Maryland, who is on his twenty-third trip to the country that he loves and admires beyond all others, and House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries. Jeffries is on his second trip to Israel this year. He should be ashamed but, of course, isn’t. It is the largest-ever delegation of Democratic lawmakers on a tour of Israel, sponsored in this case by the American Israel Education Foundation, an affiliate of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). Not to be outdone House Speaker Kevin McCarthy is leading 31 Republican Congressmen on the same mission though the groups will not mingle and the speaker will be careful to render his own obeisance separately to the Israeli leadership.

The Democrats and Republicans, will as always be unable to enunciate any good reasons for American bondage to Israel beyond bromides like “Israel has a right to defend itself,” which will be repeated over and over before the Solons head back to Washington to send billions more of US taxpayer dollars to the Jewish state. While in Israel they will be fed a special diet of “all Arabs are terrorists” and good old Steny will be nodding his head in time with the song. That is before he and his colleagues engage in crawling on their bellies before Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as a sign of their total submission to his will.

If one is seeking a single example of the failure of the United States and its ally Israel to abide by the clearly mythical “rules based international order” one might well examine what is going on in Syria, where both the US and the Jewish state have been punishing the country through lethal sanctions and direct military intervention for many years with no sign that the interaction will be ending any time soon. The activity is rarely reported in the US and European media, which somehow has decided that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad is some kind of tyrant who deserves whatever he gets, even if it is dished out by “apartheid” Israel and the clueless US, which has been illegally militarily occupying roughly one third of Syria since 2015, including the areas that have producing oil facilities and good agricultural land, both of which are being exploited or stolen. Israel meanwhile has annexed the Syrian Golan Heights, which it occupied in 1967. Donald Trump gave his blessing to the illegal annexation and also gave his consent to whatever the Jewish state decides to do both with the Syrians and the Palestinians while also conniving at the nearly daily air attacks carried out by Israel against targets in both Palestine-Gaza and Syria, killing scores of local soldiers and civilians.

The US military occupation has been supplemented by an increasingly harsh series of sanctions that have effectively cut off food, medicines and other basic commodities to the Syrian people while also denying access to international banking services. Russia, which is assisting Syria at the invitation of the country’s government, has made up for some of the shortages but there is considerable suffering among the ordinary people, not the country’s leaders. The claim by Washington is that Syria has to be protected from its own “totalitarian” government and the US is there to fight terrorists, most particularly ISIS. Ironically perhaps, but Tel Aviv and Washington actually support some of the groups that many would consider to be themselves terrorists, including providing direct US aid to al-Qaeda clone Hayat Tahrir al Sham and Israeli support for ISIS to include treating wounded terrorists in Israel’s hospitals. The US air base at Al-Tanf, near the border with Iraq and Jordan, has, in fact, become a support hub for terrorist groups opposing the al-Assad government.

Sanctions on energy imports were temporarily lifted by the US and EU after the disastrous earthquakes the shook the region in February, but in June, US lawmakers introduced the Assad Regime Anti-Normalization Act of 2023 which would use secondary sanctions to penalize those countries that might be tempted to help restore services to the areas of Syria affected by both war and the impact of the quakes. Israel reportedly has exploited the opportunity provided by the natural disaster to increase its air attacks on Syrian infrastructure.

Indeed, recent history tells us that both Israel and the United States are particularly fond of occupying someone else’s land and are capable of coming up with excuses for doing so at the drop of a hat. The reasons generally sound like saying “Hey! We are the good guys who support democracy!” Repeat as necessary until the audience either goes to sleep or wanders off. The western media reporting on what is taking place in Syria can be regarded as being in the “wanders off” category.

I certainly am not the only one who has noted that the United States tends to do everything ass-backwards in its conduct of foreign policy since the time of the Clintons. That has certainly been the case in dealing with nations like Syria and Russia, where ambassadors Robert Ford and Michael McFaul were openly hostile to the respective local governments and openly sought to empower declared opponents of the countries’ leaders. Syria presumably was demonized to please Israel, beginning with the seeking to destabilize Syria through the passage of the Syria Accountability Act in 2003, even though Damascus posed no threat whatsoever to American interests. The current sanctions come at a time when Syria is continuing to struggle to rebuild after a still active twelve year civil war that destroyed much of the country’s infrastructure. US sanctions are making more difficult ongoing reconstruction efforts and are de facto largely punishing the Syrian people, with only minor impact on its government.

And sanctioning to punish Syria is bipartisan, perhaps reflecting a desire to satisfy Israeli demands. Donald Trump, who ran for president pledging to end America’s pointless wars overseas, on June 17^th 2020 nevertheless initiated new sanctions against Syria and its government. US Ambassador to the United Nations Kelly Craft informed the Security Council that the Trump Administration would implement the measures to “prevent the Assad regime from securing a military victory. Our aim is to deprive the Assad regime of the revenue and the support it has used to commit the large-scale atrocities and human rights violations that prevent a political resolution and severely diminish the prospects for peace.”

Subsequently, the most recent block of sanctions was imposed through the Caesar Syria Civilian Protection Act, signed by President Trump in December 2020 after he was due to leave office, with the objective of stopping “bad actors who continue to aid and finance the Assad regime’s atrocities against the Syrian people while simply enriching themselves.” At that time, the existing US sanctions on Syria had already frozen all government assets and had also targeted companies and even individuals. The new sanctions gave the White House and Treasury the power to apply so-called “secondary sanctions” to freeze the assets of any entity or even individual, regardless of nationality, for doing any business in Syria. The threat of secondary sanctions have in fact had a major negative impact on Damascus’s remaining trading partners, to include Lebanon and Iran. Russia might also be impacted as it is involved in Syrian reconstruction.

The United States and Israel clearly hope that punitive sanctions will eventually force the starving Syrian people to rise up against the government, as some sought to do during the so-called Arab Spring in 2011. That means that a sanctions routine, much favored by both the Trump and Biden Administrations, never succeeds in compelling rogue governments to behave better because the way it works it is always really about regime change no matter how it is packaged. In the case of Syria, and contrary to the claims made by Ambassador Craft at the United Nations, the Bashar al-Assad government has already won the war in spite of US and Turkish intervention on behalf of the largely terrorist group supported insurgency. And the evidence for Syria’s having carried out “large scale atrocities and human rights violations” has mostly been manufactured by enemies of the government, to include the Hollywood and Washington think tank favorite, the White Helmets, a terrorist front group funded at least in part by western intelligence agencies, which was featured in a self-generated documentary that won a Hollywood Motion Pictures Academy Award in 2017. The film was effusively praised by the usual celebrity brain-deads including Hillary Clinton and George Clooney. It is indeed overall a very impressive piece of propaganda. The National Holocaust Museum even gave the coveted 2019 Elie Wiesel Award to the group. The White Helmets are still active in Syria in areas that are still held by the so-called rebels and they featured in a film clip just last week. They are still being funded by western governments and Israel to destabilize the government of Bashar al-Assad.

One might well ask what the US objective in continuing to promote the carnage and suffering in a Syria that poses no threat to Americans or to any vital security interests. It is similar to a question that might well be raised regarding Ukraine, which is confronting an unneeded escalation of 3,000 US military reservists to reinforce the 20,000 American soldiers that have arrived in theater since February 2022. And then there is Iran, which responded to its oil tankers being hijacked in international waters under the unilaterally imposed authority granted by US sanctions. Iran has sought to respond in kind and now the US will dispatch Marines to the Persian Gulf to ride shotgun on foreign tankers and other commercial vessels traversing the Straits of Hormuz. If Iranian vessels come too close, they will shoot to kill. It is another escalation that is asking for trouble. Why can’t the United States leave the rest of the world alone? That is perhaps the fundamental question for our times.

*

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This article was originally published on The Unz Review.

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

He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

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***

Zionism 

The term Zionism is derived from the word Zion that in the Hebrew language and cultural-historical tradition of the Jews refers to the citadel (acropolis) of the city of Jerusalem as well as to the Kingdom of Heaven. From the matter of politics, Zionism refers to the political-national movement of the European Jews in the very late 19^th century for the very purpose to re-create a Jewish homeland in the form of a nation-state in the Middle East – Israel.[i]

This Zionist movement was to a great extent expressed as a consequence of the European (mostly West European) anti-Semitic (better to say anti-Judaic) sentiments and politics that the (West) European Jews were experiencing for centuries.[ii] Zionism as a political-national movement was formally initiated by Theodor Herzl (1860−1904) at the World’s Zionist Conference in Basle (Switzerland) or the First World’s Zionist Congress held from August 29 to 31^st, 1897 attended by 208 delegates and 26 representatives of the press.[iii]

Th. Herzl was born in Budapest. He was an assimilated Jew who became a journalist in Vienna and was the Paris correspondent of the newspaper Neu Freie Presse in 1891−1895. The Dreyfus Affair which started in December 1894 found his interest in anti-Semitism and how to solve the Jewish Question. He published the book in German Der Judenstaat in 1896 in which he claimed that the creation of the Jewish nation-state in Palestine can be the only effective response to centuries of European anti-Semitism. He devoted the rest of his life to the propagation and realization of this idea and for that purpose, he established the World’s Zionist Organization (the WZO), which was convened at the First World’s Zionist Congress in Switzerland in 1897.

From the end of the 19^th century onward, (basically after 1897) there have been organized attempts to persuade the European Jews to emigrate to the Land of Israel or known as Palestine. However, it was not at first unquestioned that the Jewish nation-state had to be in Palestine exactly. For example, Chaim Weizmann (1874−1952) who became the first Israeli President, was quite influential in the process of creating this political task. He became very much encouraged by the declaration of the British Foreign Secretary, Arthur James Balfour (the Balfour Declaration) in the form of the letter sent on November 2^nd, 1917 to Lord Rothschild as the UK favored the establishment of a Jewish nation-state exactly in Palestine/Israel. After WWI, the European Jews continued to emigrate to Palestine in rather small numbers and, therefore, the Jewish state of Israel might have been for a very long time away to be established if not happened the holocaust of the Jews by the Nazis and their collaborators from 1933 to 1945, which, in fact, morally gave the legitimization to the idea of Israel to Jews and non-Jews (the Palestinians) alike as the only solution where the Jews might feel safe from the persecutions and exterminations.[iv] 

The 1917 Balfour Declaration

The 1917 Balfour Declaration is the name given to the UK’s pledge to support the creation of the Jewish nation-state in Palestine. It was contained in a letter of November 2^nd, 1917 from Arthur James, 1^st Earl Balfour and Viscount Traprain (1848−1930) to the chief British Zionist, Lord Rothschild. The declaration is considered to be one of the most significant and influential Zionist documents ever written. In fact, the letter-declaration urged that the Jewish nation-state had to be established in Palestine without any prejudice to the civil and religious rights of the non-Jewish people, i.e. the Muslim Arabs or the Palestinians as known today. Nevertheless, this statement from the letter represented a crucial contradiction in the UK’s policy for the very reason at the same time London had pledged to recognize the leaders of the Arab uprising as the rulers of Palestine which at that time was part of the Ottoman Sultanate.

The Balfour Declaration was, however, confirmed by the Allies, and became the foundation of the British Mandate for Palestine that was given by the League of Nations in 1920. The roots of the future political problems of the UK in the Middle East were subsequent attempts by London to reconcile the Balfour Declaration with promises to the Arab Palestinians. Lord Balfour was at the time of issuing declaration the UK’s Foreign Secretary in Lloyd George’s wartime cabinet. Later, he was a prominent British representative at the Paris Peace Conference after WWI and a participant in the 1921−1922 Washington Conference. As Lord President of the Council from 1925 to 1929, he was a very strong supporter of the concept of dominion status, and the Statute of Westminster of 1931 owed much to him.

Establishment of the Zionist Israel  

The very idea of returning the Jews to Palestine, wherefrom they became dispersed throughout Europe and Asia since 70 A.D., had been alive in some form for many centuries of their almost 2.000 years of the diaspora (from 70 to 1948). The idea became seriously revived at the very end of the 19^th century as modern Zionism, in response to a revived wave of pogroms in East Europe followed by anti-Semitism in West Europe, especially in France after the Dreyfus Affair[v] but in Germany and Austria-Hungary too. The founder of modern Zionism, Th. Herzl claimed that peaceful and harmonious coexistence between the Jews and non-Jews already was proven impossible and therefore, the Jews could only be free from discrimination, persecution, and pogroms in their national state – Israel in Palestine.

Zionism as the movement and political program achieved finally its fundamental task in May 1948 when Israel as the Jewish nation-state was established which recognized in its Law of Return the right of all Jews to live in Israel. From that time onward, Zionism is understood as a reference for support for the continued existence of the state of Israel.[vi]

Undoubtedly, Zionism was an ideological-political form of Jewish nationalism and was recognized as such by the OUN. However, like many different forms and expressions of nationalism across the globe, Zionism historically was tolerating very deep ideological diversity as, for instance, it is possible to be a religious or secular Zionist and to believe either in capitalism or socialism in Zionist Israel.[vii]

After the First World’s Zionist Congress in 1897, many Jews began to emigrate to Palestine. At the same time, the WZO was working to convince the world’s opinion and influential politicians of the very necessity of the creation of the Jewish state in Palestine. However, Palestine was already occupied when the Jewish emigration and settlement began but populated by Arab people, the Palestinians for centuries. They have been, for the most part, forced into exile by a form of settlement that became, in fact, a military conquest.

In essence, it is a very problematic question of the Zionist-Jewish legitimacy of a national claim to the land which dates back to a dispersion of the Jews in 70 A.D. under the Roman Empire. However, there are historians who have even claimed that the European Jews are not, or at least for the most part of them, descended from the Jews of Palestine, who btw have not been the original inhabitants of the land. They claim that most European Jews were originating from Caucasus tribes who converted to Judaism under the Late Roman Empire.[viii]   

In 1917 the WZO urged the Government of the UK to set up a Jewish Legion which helped rid Palestine of the Ottoman administration. The Jewish Legion was, in fact, a number of military units formed in 1917 to assist the British to expel the Ottoman authorities from the “Promised Land”.

One battalion was recruited in the UK, another in the USA, and others in Egypt and Palestine, joining Allenby in his advance into the Ottoman Sultanate.[ix] After WWI, many of the members of the Jewish Legion, like Ben-Gurion and Eshkol, proceeded to form the Haganah (Defense) – A Jewish defense force in Palestine established in 1920 as a secret organization for the very purpose to defend Jewish settlements from the Arabs. Nevertheless, the Haganah was very soon accepted and used by the British authorities in Palestine as an auxiliary police force which was under the control of the General Federation of Jewish Labor (Histadrut). During the Arab-Jewish clashes in 1936−1939, it acquired a General Staff and developed close cooperation with the Jewish Agency.[x] In WWII, the Haganah contributed to the British 8^th Army, but, however, was as well as involved in organizing illegal Jewish immigration from Europe. The organization condemned the terrorist activities against the Brits and Arabs by Stern Gang and Irgun, and when the Brits have been preparing to leave Palestine in 1947, the Haganah took on the defense of Jewish Palestine against the Arab troops committing at the same time and war crimes but, in essence, it formed the foundations of the army of the new state of Israel.[xi]

When the Balfour Declaration to establish an independent Jewish state of Israel failed after WWI, the Zionist WZO was working further on the Jewish emigration into Palestine and succeeded to win from the local British authorities extremely important concessions related to the self-administration via the Jewish Agency. In the beginning, the newly arrived Jewish settlers lived peacefully with the genuine Arab population but soon, as the Jewish influx continued, the Arabs started with sporadic attacks against the Jewish immigrants. Tensions between the Arabs, the Jewish immigrants, and the British administration in Palestine arose in the 1940s when around 100.000 new Jewish settlers illegally arrived in Palestine.

Finally, in 1947 it was clear that the UK cannot solve the Palestinian problem in the form of its promise to create independent states for both Jews and Arabs and, therefore, returned its mandate to the UN, which recommended the partition of Palestine between the Jews and genuine Arabs. Formally, on the foundation of such a UN plan, a Zionist Ben-Gurion[xii] issued a declaration of Israel’s independence on May 14^th, 1948 (the Nakba Day for the Arabs) on the day of British withdrawal.

The greater portion of Palestine became the Jewish state of Zionist Israel, most of the rest was amalgamated with Transjordan to become Jordan, and the Gaza Strip was occupied by Egypt.

During and after the fighting in 1948, around 70% of the Arab Palestinians left their homes and became refugees in Jordan, Gaza, Syria, and Lebanon.[xiii] Nevertheless, today, the overwhelming number of Israeli Jews are descendants of the Jewish immigrants to Palestine after the First Zionist Congress in 1897 differently to all Arab-Palestinians who are native of Palestine.[xiv]           

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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.

Notes

[i] See more in [Shlomo Avineri, The Making of Modern Zionism: The Intellectual Origins of the Jewish State, New York: Perseus Books, 2017].

[ii] About European anti-Semitism, see in [Albert S. Lindemann, Richard S. Levy (eds.), Antisemitism: A History, Oxford: New York: Oxford University Press, 2010].

[iii] About Theodor Herzl’s visions about Israel, see in [Shlomo Avineri, Herzl’s Vision: Theodor Herzl and the Foundation of the Jewish State, New York: Blue Bridge, 2013; Theodor Herzl, The Jewish State: An Attempt at a Modern Solution of the Jewish Question, Whithorn, UK: Anodos Books, 2018].

[iv] Holocaust as the term originally denotes a victim who has been burnt completely. After 1945, the term is used to describe the Nazi genocide of the Jews in concentration and death camps (the most notorious was Auschwitz) during WWII [Jan Palmowski, A Dictionary of Contemporary World History From 1900 To the Present Day, Oxford−New York: Oxford University Press, 2004, 277]. For example, today, September 23^rd, is a National Memorial Day for the Genocide of the Lithuanian Jews (in 1943). During WWII, the Jewish Ghetto was formed in Vilnius’ Old Town (Jerusalem of the North) on September 6^th, 1941. It is estimated that approximately 50.000 Vilnius’ Jews found themselves in the ghetto out of the pre-war 60.000 Jews. The ghetto was divided into the Small and the Large Jewish Ghettos. The Small Ghetto was liquidated in October 1941 while the Larger Ghetto on September 23^rd and 24^th, 1943 [Karolina Mickevičiūtė, Vilnius: A Guide Through The City, Vilnius: Briedis, 2016, 94]. As a matter of fact, a herald of the future Jewish state and founder of the Zionist political movement and the World Zionist Organization, Theodor Herzl visited Vilnius in 1903 where he met the local Jewish society at the venue of the Great Charity, the General Prayer Board of the Great Synagogue [Irina Guzenberg, Vilnius, Sites of Jewish Memory: A Concise Guide, Second Edition, Vilnius: Pavilniai Publishers, 2019, 29]. Almost all Vilnius’ Jews from the ghetto have been executed in the High Ponary Forest nearby Vilnius. See more in [Piotr Niwiński, Ponary: The Place of “Human Slaughter”, Warszawa: Legra, 2015]. About the Vilnius’ Ghetto, see in [Arūnas Bubnys, Vilnius Ghetto 1941−1943, Vilnius: Genocide and Resistance Research Centre of Lithuania, 2018].    

[v] The Dreyfus Affair was a crisis that shook French politics and society to their foundations in 1894−1899. The affair started in December 1894 when Captain Alfred Dreyfus (1859−1935), a Jewish officer from Alsace on the General Staff of the French Army, was officially convicted of treason by a military court for passing on military secrets to the Germans. Nevertheless, the Dreyfus Affair revealed the deep anti-Semitism in French society. About the case, see in [Ruth Harris, Man on Devil’s Island: Alfred Dreyfus and the Affair that Divided France, London: Penguin Books, 2011].

[vi] About the connection between Zionism and Israel, see in [Yotav Eliach, Judaism, Zionism and the Land of Israel: The 4,000 Year Religious, Ideological, and Historical Story of the Jewish Nation, Published in the USA: Dialog Press, 2018].

[vii] See more in [Walter Laqueur, A History of Zionism: From the French Revolution to the Establishment of the State of Israel, New York: Random House, 2003].

[viii] About the general history of Jews, their culture and religion, see in [Дејвид Џ. Голдберг, Џон Д. Рејнер, Јевреји: Историја и религија, Београд: CLIO, 2003].

[ix] About the legion, see in [Martin Watts, The Jewish Legion during the First World War, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004].

[x] The Jewish Agency was an organization that was created by the UK for the sake to deal with its Mandate given by the League of Nations and to represent the Jews from Palestine. The agency was established in 1929 but, in fact, it was operating from 1920. Half of its membership was composed of the Palestinian Jews and another half of the Jews coming from outside Palestine, nominated by the Zionist WZO. It means that the Zionists had an extremely influential political role in Palestine immediately after WWI. The Jewish Agency was responsible for: 1) establishing kibbutzim settlements; 2) the Jewish immigration, investment, and economic and cultural development of the Jewish Palestine, and 3) representation of the Jews in the international sphere. In practice, the Jewish Agency provided its leaders like Ben-Gurion or Eshkol with administrative and diplomatic experience which they used when they took over the Government of Israel in 1948. After the proclamation of the independence of Israel in May 1948, the Jewish Agency lost its administrative and domestic political functions but continued to exist as an international body keeping links with the global Jewish community which would assist Israel in matters of finance or immigration, for instance. About the Jewish Agency, see in [Jewish Agency, The Story of the Jewish Agency for Israel, Jewish Agency American Section, 1964].   

[xi] About this organization, see more in [Munya Mardor, Haganah: A Firsthand Account of the Jewish Underground Army in Palestine, New American Library, 1966].

[xii] David Ben-Gurion (1886−1973) was Israeli PM in 1948−1953 and 1955−1963. He was born in Russian Poland and as a Zionist emigrated to Palestine in 1906. In 1935, Ben-Gurion became a Chairman of the Jewish Agency and, therefore, effectively became a leader of the Jewish community in Palestine. He organized the influx of Jewish large refugee movements, which, in fact, made a Jewish state of Zionist Israel to be more viable and more inevitable. He was part of the Israeli Government till 1963. Under his administration, Israel succeeded to survive (with crucial US’ support) the initial threat to its existence, when it was attacked by its Arab neighbors. About Ben-Gurion, see in [Tom Segev, A State at any Cost: The Life of David Ben-Gurion, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019].

[xiii] Geoffrey Barraclough (ed.), The Times Atlas of World History, Revised Edition, Maplewood, New Jersey: Hammond, 1986, 285.

[xiv] About the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, see in [Dov Waxman, The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict: What Everyone Needs to Know, New York: Oxford University Press, 2019].

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Undoubtedly the forthcoming 15th BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) summit August 22 – 24 in Johannesburg, South Africa, opens the door for critical multiple issues mostly relating to the irreversible processes of the emerging new world. While it seriously presents an opportunity to take meticulous stock of its wins and losses, strength and weaknesses, the summit has the imperative to examine the new paradigms, evaluate innovative directions and assess strategies for moving the organization farther in this re-configurating world.

The BRIC concept was created by the Goldman Sachs economist Jim O’Neill, and the “S” was added after South Africa joined the group in 2010. But the first meeting of the group began in St Petersburg in 2005. It was simply referred to as RIC, which stood for Russia, India and China. Then, Brazil and subsequently South Africa joined later, which is why now it is popularly called BRICS. As rotating chair, South Africa first held the summit in 2013 in Durban, the second in July 2018 and now the third in August 2023.

Durban hosted African leaders, heads of the G20, representatives of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation and the Caribbean Community. Since then, BRICS Five and African States have greatly strengthened and expanded their cooperation in the economy, politics and the humanitarian sphere. BRICS considers Africa is one of the world’s most rapidly developing regions.

During the summit in South Africa, Russian President Vladimir Putin attended a meeting of BRICS leaders with delegation heads from invited African states and chairs of international associations. Those invited included the leaders from Africa, namely Angola, Botswana, Ethiopia, Gabon, Lesotho, Madagascar, Mauritius, Malawi, Mozambique, Namibia, Rwanda, Senegal, the Seychelles, Tanzania, Togo, Uganda, Zambia and Zimbabwe.

I would like to remind and further emphasize that BRICS and the African States have similar development goals in many respects. In 2015, the BRICS summit in Russia adopted the large-scale BRICS Strategy for Economic Partnership. In fact, during that gathering Putin’s position was about involving African partners in the areas identified then: the economy, finance, and food security.

It was also based on the fact that Russia has always given priority to the development of relations with African countries, based on long-standing traditions of friendship and mutual assistance. Notwithstanding the long-list of pledges at the meeting in July 2018, a considerable part of the Russian initiatives was for localizing industrial businesses in Africa. Russia has consistently advocated for deepening organization’s interaction with the African continent. It was that meeting Putin, for the first, mentioned the idea of holding a Russia-Africa summit with the participation of heads of African States.

Expanding BRICS Membership

With the forthcoming August 2023 summit, heated discussions and debates have been on the organization’s expansion, adoption of alternative currency and various proposals to redesign its architecture with new comprehensive objectives and tasks within the context of the current geopolitical changes. This growing enthusiasm and interest for the BRICS has various underlying motivations, which have to be accommodated within the broader framework. There is the strong common motive for forming an alliance in a multipolar world.

As several media reports show, in my own monitoring and research assessment, a large number of Asian, African and Latin American States are interested in forging a full-fledged structural membership and possible cooperation with the BRICS. More than 20 States have formally applied to join BRICS. The authentic criteria and mechanism for the expansion of the organization is being been developed.

South Africa’s term as the rotating Chair of BRICS ends this August, as stipulated by the guidelines and rules, and will pass on the baton to Brazil. This implies that South African President Cyril Ramaphosa has a lot more at hand this last-minute crucial moment. Tracking the developments of the organization especially this 2023 presidency of South Africa, there have been so many controversial questions which are still currently receiving enormous attention, including the South Africa’s relationship with Russia, BRICS common currency as well as other global issues.

According to reports, BRICS is steadily or rather rapidly becoming an alternative organization for the Global South against the backdrop of the accusations of the United States and Europe together with their allies political dominance, hegemony and unipolar or unitary approach towards global problems, and especially those adversely affecting the developing or the least developed nations. The emphasis is on geopolitical and development cooperation with non-Western States appears to be sliding, BRICS now attracting friends. Those lined up states are consolidating their growing desire to join BRICS.

Johannesburg summit, therefore, has the primary tasks now, developing along two aspects: by admitting new members and by strengthening cooperation of BRICS with potential new members. The possibility of expanding membership (for purposes of determining the principles, standards, criteria and procedures of this process) in the organization is still under discussions within the BRICS framework.

China and Russia have seemingly been pushing for the expansion of BRICS, soliciting support for the multipolar system of global governance instead of the existing rules-based unipolar directed by the United States. Often explained that a bigger BRICS primarily offers huge opportunities among the group members and for developing countries.

On the other side, BRICS researchers and analysts argue and believe that additional States will not be admitted to BRICS, but each organization’s partner has the chance and will be able to choose a convenient mode of cooperation within the BRICS+ new structure. The argument holds the fact regarding re-titling BRICS. Therefore, it is highly likely to be the case, but this requires a consensus of all the members of BRICS.

More countries have become interested in joining the group: Afghanistan, Algeria, Argentina, Bahrain, Bangladesh, Belarus, Egypt, Indonesia, Iran, Kazakhstan, Mexico, Nicaragua, Nigeria, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Senegal, Sudan, Syria, United Arab Emirates, Thailand, Tunisia, Turkey, Uruguay, Venezuela, Zimbabwe. This growing interest for the BRICS project has various underlying motivations, which have to be accommodated within the broader framework.

In advancing the discussion here, interesting to remind here that during the 14th BRICS summit successfully held in June 2022, President Xi Jinping emphasized at the meeting that BRICS countries gather not in a closed club or an exclusive circle, but a big family of mutual support and a partnership for win-win cooperation. At the same summit, BRICS leaders reached important common understanding about BRICS expansion and expressed support for discussion on the standards and procedures of the expansion.

Africa’s Alliance with BRICS

South Africa, the first African State, joined the group on the initiative of China and Russia. Its membership has reflected and altered the organization’s name, now known as BRICS. It has, since then, played significant roles hosting summits, influencing the organization’s activities, and creating historic milestone in this 21st century world. South Africa can warmly be credited, first for its membership presence, and second for laying the pathways for strategic expansion plans to include African States. At least, South Africa has brought a tectonic shift in landscape, a transformative aspect when African States participated in BRICS plus Outreach in July 2018.

Russian President Vladimir Putin attended a meeting of BRICS leaders with delegations from invited African states and chairs of international associations that July 2018. And BRICS documents show the participating leaders of African States as Angola, Botswana, Ethiopia, Gabon, Lesotho, Madagascar, Mauritius, Malawi, Mozambique, Namibia, Rwanda, Senegal, the Seychelles, Tanzania, Togo, Uganda, Zambia and Zimbabwe.

In practical terms, BRICS has recognized and welcomed Africans into its fold long ago.

“I am grateful to the President of the Republic of South Africa for organizing this representative meeting. In 2013 in Durban, BRICS leaders held a meeting with the heads of African states for the first time. We know that Africa is one of the world’s most rapidly developing regions, so its representation is important for BRICS,” Putin said in his introductory speech.

In awakening reality, African States are still seeking greater representation and louder instrumental voices on international platforms including the Group of Twenty (G20) and the United Nations.

BRICS together with majority of African States, the African Union and all the Regional Economic Communities (RECs) are getting involved to halt the system of unipolarity. Without doubts, Africa has a common vision and unflinching interest that BRICS plays an essential role on the global multilateral stage. This Global South political movement consistently presents a fundamental coherent challenge to the West.

Dilma Rousseff at Russia-Africa Summit

At the Russia-Africa summit held late July 2023, during the high-profile line-up of speakers during the plenary session, former President of Brazil from 2011 to 2016, and now the new President of the BRICS New Development Bank (NDB), Dilma Rousseff, reaffirmed BRICS position towards building a more multilateral and multipolar world.

Dilma Rousseff meeting with President Putin on 26 July (Licensed under CC BY 4.0)

The BRICS New Development Bank now also includes Egypt, Bangladesh and the UAE, supports the development initiatives of developing nations on all continents just as other regional development banks do. These nations can count on agreements on using national currencies in trade transactions, according to Rousseff, the first female to hold the position.

The New Development Bank was established just eight years ago, in 2014, at the BRICS summit in Fortaleza. This bank is often called the BRICS bank because it was established by the will of the five BRICS members but it has already outgrown this framework and is not limited to just these members. It works towards ensuring sustainable development and eliminating the threat of poverty and famine, and in the spirit of true multilateralism. The bank is working to share experiences and best practices of sustainable development.

Rousseff, however, stressed the fact that in loaning its funds, the bank is not dependent on external factors. The bank provides a platform for the development of the Global South. In this sense, the developing nations of all continents, especially Africa, Latin America and Asia are its strategic partners. 

She believes participants should not be affected by problems that may arise in Western markets, and for this reason, it is developing its own transaction systems. The NDB receives money in different markets and in the currencies of all developing nations, not only in dollars or in euros. The NDB has already approved 98 projects in member states amounting in total to about US$35 billion. It cooperates with the African Export-Import Bank and other banks engaged in economic and social development. It implements infrastructure and logistics projects aimed at improving living standards in the BRICS members.

We pefectly understand that the proposed expansion has admirable and beneficial geopolitical importance. Worth noting here that African States are readjusting their place in the multipolar world, moving to new emerging multinational centres such as BRICS. For many from Africa, it is an opportunity for something much newer within the spectrum of their internal development paradigm. Therefore, it has become increasingly attractive as a new stage for diplomacy and development financing.

In fact, reviewing and analysing the current emerging developments especially for the Global South, Africans are now describing it as an organization that can challenge the dominant United States and European-led global governance structures. And of course, there are also several arguments that China and India are equally emerging powers. There are visible signs that both consider Africa as their new playground, will probably compete with each other to ‘impress’ Africa with goodies like aid, soft loans or trade.

The NDB and BRICS Common Currency

Records indicate that BRICS are under-represented in the global financial architecture. Europe and the United States dominate institutions like the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank. Fully aware of this shortfall, BRICS established in 2015 its own National Development Bank. The idea for setting up the bank was first proposed by India at the 4th BRICS summit in 2012 held in Delhi, but was finally created three years later. It is a multilateral development bank established with an initial capital of US$100 billion. According to its stipulated primary functions, NDB has to cooperate with international organizations and other financial entities, and provide technical assistance for projects to be supported by the Bank.

With the current global unstable and volatile situation creating skyrocketing uncertainties in global economic recovery, China have unreservedly shown its contribution for strengthening BRICS. Despite its large population of 1.5 billion which many have considered as an impediment, China pursues an admirable collaborative strategic diplomacy with external countries and among the BRICS.

For 16 years since its inception, China offers the largest financial support for the BRICS National Development Bank, contributed tremendously to other directions including health, education and economic collaboration among the group. That is one reason why BRICS has gained extensive recognition.

More and more countries are willing and interested to become members of the organization, make joint efforts to overcome difficulties and challenges, and realize common development and prosperity. BRICS activities have expanded during the past few years. Now many States participated in the Outreach and BRICS plus segments of the organization. But now with the emerging new global order, BRICS seeks to expand its membership, consolidate its platform as an instrument for pushing against the existing rules-based order unipolar system.

A careful study and analysis monitored show that BRICS activities have expanded during the past few years. States participated in the Outreach and BRICS plus segments of the organization. There are also a number of African countries including Algeria, Ethiopia, Nigeria, Senegal and Zimbabwe have also shown interest. Uruguay is part way through the process of joining, while Argentina, Cuba, Honduras and Saudi Arabia and a number of Asian States have expressed desire. Bangladesh, the United Arab Emirates and Egypt have joined since 2021, bringing its membership to eight. Egypt has already been involved for a fairly long time. Last December 2022, Egypt, the decision on its accession to the New Development Bank was made by BRICS.

According to media reports, Ennahar TV quoted Algerian President Abdelmadjid Tebboune as saying that Algeria has applied to join the BRICS group and submitted a request to become a shareholder member of BRICS Bank with an amount of US$1.5 billion.

In July, Tebboune visited China and had sought to join the BRICS to open new economic opportunities. Algeria is rich in oil and gas resources and seeking to diversify its economy and strengthen its partnership with members such as China. Already China plans to invest US$36 billion in Algeria across sectors including manufacturing, new technology, the knowledge economy, transport and agriculture.

Charles Robertson, Chief Economist at Renaissance Capital, argues that “Russia and others in the BRICS would like to see larger power centres emerge to offer an alternative to that Western dominated construct. That is reasonable enough – providing there are countries with the money to backstop the new institutions, such as China supporting the BRICS bank, and if the countries offer an alternative vision that provides benefits to new members.”

In today’s changing conditions, BRICS has been very concerned about de-dollarization and strongly advocating for its own currency. Thus in the discussion, 26 July 2023 in St. Petersburg, Putin stressed doubtlessly that Rousseff uses her rich experience in public work and knowledge in this area to develop the institution. In today’s conditions, this is not easy to do, given what is happening in world finance and the use of the dollar as an instrument of political struggle. But the members of BRICS, are not ‘friends’ against someone, they work in each other’s interests. This applies to the financial sector.

“In general, we are good participants in this organization, we fulfill everything on time, all our obligations to it. We know that there is a question about the liquidity of the bank, there are some ideas that come from you, from your staff, and we will support this,” Putin said at the meeting with her. “Relations between BRICS members are developing in national currencies, and settlements are increasing. In this regard, the bank can also play a significant role in the development of joint activities.”

Putin’s Perceptions on BRICS and Africa

Late July 2023, when the second Russia-Africa summit was held, Russian President Vladimir Putin underlined on Africa’s new role and remnants of colonialism in the continent. Putin explicitly explained that Africa is turning into “a new center of power,” and everybody will have to reckon with it. “The era of hegemony of one or several countries is receding into the past” – “however, not without resistance on the part of those who got used to their own uniqueness and monopoly in global affairs.”

Without missing words, Putin unreservedly shared his objective thoughts, and Africans know these trends across the continent down the years. The situation in many regions of Africa still remains unstable particularly due to the West’s ‘divide and rule’ policy. Which is why Russia, with consistency, favors or advocates for expanding the role of African representation, for instance, in the UN, including the Security Council: “It is high time to remedy historical injustice.”

Taking a clear position on issues that affect the entire continent will be more productive. Moreso, with the process of geopolitics rapidly shifting, Africa leaders have to assess their external relationships in the context of their national and cultural sovereignty, to play a more active role in resolving regional and global challenges.

At this point of the analysis, it is also very necessary to take a glancy look at BRICS members’ performance with Africa. Over the last two decades, partnerships with Africa have become central to China’s geostrategic objectives. It has made significant investments to secure favorable media coverage to promote a positive view of China, to counter the influence of the United States. 

As a strong member of BRICS, it has used the media to improve African perceptions. India and Brazil are doing something similar but on a comparatively lower scale. Smart African States, in an attempt to reset relations with global powers, are equally capitalizing on these new opportunities to improve aspects of development for the impoverished population. Whatever be the case, the potentials exist for African leaders to explore. BRICS in this emerging world has diverse opportunities for industrial, economic, agricultural, commercial and financial development. 

Johannesburg as Summit Venue

The 15th summit will also discuss the expansion of the bank, which has admitted the United Arab Emirates, Bangladesh and Egypt as members. Nevertheless, most of NDB related questions are on the agenda during the 15th BRICS summit scheduled for August 22 – 24 at the Sandton Convention Centre in Johannesburg, South Africa.

That BRICS has the potential of becoming a global player is a fact, since more intend to join the group, and if we look carefully, each of them has significant assets to contribute: some have huge financial potential, others have huge demographic potential, others have expertise in particular industries. BRICS is simply consolidating its position to control economic development on a global scale and to vehemently oppose Western values and U.S. hegemony.

For China, this summit is a new opportunity to present its current projects, as well as its new initiatives, such as GDI (Global Development Initiative), GSI (Global Security Initiative), GCI (Global Civilisation Initiative). The already ten-year old Belt-and-Road Initiative (BRI) currently covers 147 countries with more than 3,000 projects worth trillions of dollars.

Ahead of the summit, South Africa’s Anil Sooklal said in a lecture at the University of KwaZulu-Natal that so far, representatives from more than 70 nations have been invited to attend, necessary security arrangements have been made and other pre-visit formalities have been completed. And that Russia’s Vladimir Putin will participate via video (virtual) format. “This will be the largest gathering with foreign nations from the Global South coming together to discuss the current global challenges,” Sooklal said.

South Africa’s Foreign Ministry confirmed that Russia would be represented at this month’s BRICS summit by Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov after President Vladimir Putin decided not to attend in person due to a warrant for his arrest issued by the International Criminal Court (ICC) for alleged war crimes in Ukraine. Kremlin also said an official decision reached “by mutual agreement” allows Putin to skip in-person participation.

South African President Cyril Ramaphosa has repeatedly said that BRICS as a dynamic group would usher in a new global development era that promises a system of more inclusive, sustainable and fair principles. BRICS group, in an expanded form, can support a sustainable and equitable global economic recovery.

Ramaphosa further believes that the BRICS is simply a highly-valuable platform fixed to strengthen ties with partner States in support of economic growth, development process and for discussing global economic problems and challenges, and above all for strengthening the role of developing States in the emerging multipolar world.

Formed officially in 2009-2010, the organization has struggled to have the kind of geopolitical influence that matches its collective economic reach. It also embodies a synergy of cultures and explores a model of genuine multilateral diplomacy. Its structure is formed in compliance with the 21st century realities. Efforts within its framework are based on the principles of equality, mutual respect and justice. BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) collectively represent about 26% of the world’s geographical area and about 42% of the world’s population.

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

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

He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from Andrew Korybko

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Cold and snow records have been set worldwide both this winter season and during the spring. All continents have experienced cold and precipitation that significantly deviate from the so-called climate normal, which is the average of the same measurement data over three decades. New Times has reported on this repeatedly. We also recently examined in detail temperature, snow, and ice data for the months of April and May from around the world and found several very interesting deviations. Among other things, this winter season’s snow mass and its bound water quantity in the northern hemisphere were far above normal.

Cold April i Luxemburg. The small country had one of the coldest and most rainy Aprils for ages. The average temperature was chilling 8 degrees Celsius through out the month. This is 1.6 degrees lowest than the average for the period 1991-2020. NOAA’s “creative” global temperature map for April, which system media presents to the public, states that the Benelux countries are “warmer than average”. Photo: RTL Luxembourg

According to Canadian climate authority Environment and Climate Change Canada (ECCC), their own statistics showed that the amount of water tied up in the northern hemisphere’s snow mass at the end of April this year amounted to about 2,600 cubic kilometers of water, compared with the norm of about 1,600 cubic kilometers. This means that this winter was over 60 percent more snow-rich than the norm for the years 1998–2011 (see “Record Cold and Snowy Spring Worldwide – Cold-hardened Mongolians Seek Help” in Nya Tider). This was very evident, among other things, in the snow cover rate in the USA. In at least 13 American states, several of which are located in the southern USA, the snow covered twice to 4.5 times as large areas as normal. This has led to state budgets for snow clearing being inadequate. Weather stations several meters high had to be dug out by shocked meteorologists in the state of Utah (see “Spring has begun with record cold – USA buried under gigantic snow masses” in Nya Tider). In California, the situation was so extreme that houses were completely buried under snow after a total of more than 20 meters of snowfall during the winter. The houses only began to emerge from the snow masses in May, with milder temperatures and melting. The California authorities have not even managed to clear all highways, as those at higher altitudes continue to be under about three meters of hard-packed snow, even though we are now entering the summer. For example, Route 120 is not expected to be cleared of snow and passable until July (see “Snow chaos in the USA: California’s roads remain impassable” in Nya Tider).

Unusually Cold April

New Times found when examining temperature data from authorities and research organizations from a number of different countries that April was unusually cold in many parts of the world. Numerous cold records were set in April. In North America and the continental USA, several cold records were also set since measurements began. Alaska saw one of the coldest April months since measurements began nearly a hundred years ago.

Europe looked similar with unusual cold and precipitation primarily in Central and Eastern Europe. Cold and spring snow caused the Alps’ glaciers to grow, and ski resorts that had closed for the season could reopen and continue skiing into the summer. We reported that the ice cover in the Arctic during the second half of April was about 20,000 square kilometers larger than the average for the years 2011 to 2020.

Central Asia and India set a multitude of cold records week after week in April, which continued even into May. In India’s case, the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology (IITM) confirmed that this was a trend over time and not an anomaly this spring.

The southern hemisphere also experienced a cold April, which is an autumn month there. In Australia and many other countries, temperatures were below the 30-year so-called climate normal.

Deceptive Maps

In May, the American governmental science organization National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) released a world map showing temperatures for April… or rather, two global temperature maps – one for researchers and one for the general public. The first map shows land and sea temperature deviations from the average in April, where the average is calculated based on the 30-year climate norm, which in this case are the years 1991–2020. It is color-graded on a scale with 0.5-degree accuracy, showing colder deviations in blue shades, neutral in white, and warmer deviations in red shades. This is the map that climate researchers themselves use.

TEMPERATURE DEVIATIONS FOR LAND AND SEA, APRIL 2023 relative to the temperature normal, the average for the years 1991–2020. In this map, which uses a clearly indicated and color-coded temperature scale that the scientists themselves use, the temperature deviations we reported about over the last few months from North and South America, Central and Eastern Europe, and Central Asia, with hard-hit Mongolia, India, and Australia, are confirmed. This is despite the fact that critics argue it consistently shows higher temperatures due to non-representative and then tampered with measurement data. Source and map: NOAA

TEMPERATURE PERCENTILES FOR LAND AND SEA, APRIL 2023 based on an unspecified average. Here we can see that the Benelux countries, where Belgium and the Netherlands in April were 1.4 and 1.1 °C cooler than the climate normal 1991–2020, are falsely presented as having had an April average temperature “Above average” or “Much above average”. Central and Eastern Europe, which were much cooler than normal in April—for example, Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Serbia were 2.1 to 2.8 °C below the climate normal in April, which is significant in a climate context—are marked as “Near average” with misleading neutral white color. Source and map: NOAA

At the same time, NOAA published on its website National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI) another map, and it’s this one that mainstream media reproduce for the public. It shows what’s called “Temperature percentiles for land and sea, April 2023.” So it’s not about deviations in degrees Celsius or percent, as the uninitiated might believe. We ask the politically correct tech giant Google what percentile means. We choose Google, as they are known for strictly controlling search results and ensuring compliance with the climate narrative as prescribed by the establishment and their media. The answer we get is as follows:

“In statistics, a percentile is a term that describes how a unit of value compares to other units of value from the same [data] set. Although there is no universal definition of percentile, it is usually expressed as the percentage of values in a set of data results that fall below a given value.”

We can conclude that such a vague description opens up for the creation of “creative statistics.” Percentiles are normally used in statistics to show distributions such as different age groups within a population, where it clearly shows how many percent each group constitutes. The problem with NOAA’s “media-adapted” map is that it does not state temperatures, percentages, or any real value. Instead, unspecified temperatures are compared to an average, which is also not clearly defined, unlike the “researcher version” of the map.

Unlike the temperature map provided to researchers, the temperature map that mainstream media presents to the public is almost entirely red. Moreover, the weaker blue shades are very grayish, creating the illusion that everything seems warmer and nothing cooler. All together, it creates a deceptive impression that April was warmer than normal even in parts of the world where we have official data that not only show the opposite, but in several cases, these are the lowest recorded temperatures ever. If you look at it without knowing that it is grossly misleading, it creates the false illusion that it confirms a purported global warming.

Garbage In, Garbage Out

What makes it even worse is that already the “researcher version” of the temperature map is misleading, as it too reports warmer temperatures than the real ones. This is achieved, among other things, by using measurement stations placed in aberrantly warm conditions and not least in cities, which create so-called heat islands. Cities are warmer than the countryside due to the so-called urban heat island effect. This is because the city’s often unnatural materials replace natural surfaces, and shading vegetation is replaced with dense concentrations of asphalt, buildings, and other surfaces that absorb and retain heat. If a large majority of all temperature measurement sites are located in cities, which can be several degrees warmer than surrounding less densely populated areas, the measured temperatures will also be several degrees higher than the actual ones.

New Times was the first Swedish newspaper to report in August 2022 that no less than 96 percent of NOAA’s American measurement stations in an old network have indicated too high temperatures. We could also show that NOAA and other American authorities were aware of this, but still used this misleading measurement data – despite a new network that delivers accurate measurement data being available (see “Misleading high temperatures from over 19 out of 20 weather stations in the USA – Measurement stations with correct data are deliberately ignored” in Nya Tider).

NOAA’s temperature map with percentiles – which mainstream media like to reproduce – is therefore grossly deceptive in a double sense. It shows countries and areas that were actually cooler or much cooler than normal in April, with temperatures “Near average” in white color, “Above average” in light red, or even “Much above average” in red.

What makes this temperature fraud so serious is that it is used to prove an alleged man-made global warming, a narrative that globalists then use to impose on the world’s governments and populations a total restructuring of society and our lives. These mandates have already seriously damaged energy and food security, eroding Western treasuries and private economies, and taking away a large part of our freedom and quality of life.

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Dr. Peter McCullough, Dr. Harvey Risch, and colleagues were censored by the formerly respected scientific journal The Lancet: their paper, removed within 24 hours, found that 74% of the deaths following mRNA vaccine injection were likely caused by the injection.

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The Lancet Study: How It Started

Dr. McCullough, one of the most highly esteemed and credentialed cardiologists in the world, was contacted by a graduate student from the University of Michigan School of Public Health. Dr. McCullough, being a University Michigan Alum himself, was quickly accepted by the university as a mentor. The graduate student and Dr. McCullough then began working together on a project aimed at identifying all the published deaths that occurred after the mRNA vaccine.

They sifted through hundreds of papers, eventually narrowing their search to 44 papers containing 325 autopsies. Each case was reviewed by three experts, including the former president of Royal College of Pathology Dr. Roger Hodkinson. Two out of three of the experts needed to agree that the vaccine was either the direct cause of death or significantly contributed to death in order for the study to continue.

The paper was finalized and then moved forward into the submission process for publication. Dr. McCullough describes how the New England Journal of Medicine rejected the paper after a few days, while the Journal of American Medical Association rejected it within an hour. The only reasoning that was provided by the journals was that the study was not a priority for them.

The team also submitted to The Lancet. Dr. McCullough had previously published in The Lancet, so it would not be new territory. After about three days, The Lancet agreed to publish the study on their preprint server.

Overnight, the downloads of the full manuscript were by the hundreds per minute. Dr. McCullough attributes the enormous amount of interest to the amount of detail provided in the study’s evidence tables on the autopsies. The standard search methodology used in the study is a method in which Dr. McCullough has much experience.

Medical Censorship by The Lancet – But Who Called The Lancet?

Within 24 hours, the paper was swiftly and mysteriously removed. Only a note from The Lancet remained, reading:

“This preprint has been removed by Preprints with The Lancet because the study’s conclusions are not supported by the study methodology…”

Unfortunately but unsurprisingly, for Dr. McCullough, Dr. Risch, and the other authors of the study, there were no courtesy editorial communications from The Lancet regarding the censorship of their study.

Dr. McCullough believes that the paper’s terrifying conclusion was the main reason for The Lancet’s removal of the paper. The conclusion? 73.9% of cases were directly caused by, or were significantly contributed to, by the mRNA-injection. In other words, of the autopsies consistent with mRNA injection injury, 74% of deaths were indeed mRNA injection-related. The mean timeline for the study was deaths that occurred within two weeks of injection.

What Caught Dr. McCullough’s Attention

The largest category of conditions post-vaccine is cardiac damage. The first category of cardiac-related injuries is myocarditis, heart inflammation of the muscle. Inflammation causes the electrical current not to conduct smoothly, causing a heart rhythm, and eventually causing sudden cardiac death.

Dr. McCullough explains that these attacks occur most often during exercise, when there is a surge of adrenaline, and between 3 a.m. and 6 a.m. when there is also a surge of adrenaline during the normal waking process.

Dr. McCullough mentions up-and-coming basketball player Oscar Cabrera Adames, who was taken out of competition due to being diagnosed with myocarditis.

Before returning to competition, Adames went to take a treadmill test to make sure he was ready to return to the sport. He died on the treadmill.

Dr. McCullough explains that, in his decades of experience as a cardiologist, he has never had a patient die on a treadmill test, as defibrillator paddles are always available on-site in the unlikely event of a heart attack.

The second category of cardiac-related injury post-mRNA injection is the progression of atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease. An abstract published in 2021 by the American Heart Association measured a variety of blood factors known to be related to triggering an atherosclerotic plaque rupture in the arteries before and after the vaccine. The paper found “astronomical” elevations of these blood factors post-mRNA injection.

Before Covid — cardiac arrest cases of those under 35 totalled about 29 cases per year.

Since the mRNA-injections were released, and mandated on sports players, there are now 283 cases per year.

The Lancet Censored Science, Education, and Our Right to Informed Consent

How can we have informed consent if the opportunity to educate ourselves on a previously mandated, experimental drug is constantly being taken away by publications like The Lancet? How can we educate ourselves by doing our own research when that research is being censored by journals and media outlets? And finally, how can we have real, unbiased science when expert-reviewed studies with pages of detailed evidence are being tossed in the trash because the “conclusions are not supported” by the media? We cannot have science, truth, or informed consent without information.

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A leading German parliamentarian stated that his country should not impose sanctions on Moscow, as Russian-German energy cooperation is important for national stability. According to him, without Russian gas, the German economy is threatened and becomes heavily dependent on “green” technologies that are not yet fully developed.

The criticisms were made by the leader of the “Alternative for Germany” (AfD) party, Anton Baron, during an interview for the Stuttgarter Zeitung on August 11. Baron asserted that Germany should not put the West’s anti-Russian agenda ahead of the country’s economy and energy security. The politician believes that by buying Russian gas, Germany is not contributing to the continuation of the conflict, thus contradicting the Western narrative that Moscow must be boycotted to “stop the invasion”.

“Russian gas was a blessing for the [German] economy and our prosperity (…) [Also,] to say that by using [Russian gas] we are financing Putin’s war is nonsense (…) We cannot make it [the German economy] dependent on war conditions – it’s a pure necessity”, Baron told journalists during the interview.

Baron also strongly criticized the German decision not to invest in nuclear energy and to focus on the development of “green” technologies. This decision, according to him, is anti-strategic and strongly harms the country, making it dependent on technologies that have not yet been entirely developed, failing to meet German demands for energy security.

“We switch off nuclear power plants and coal-fired power plants, relying more and more on renewable energies, even though there are no storage facilities,” he added.

Baron is a well-known critic of the Western “green” agenda and its negative impacts on German national interests. In another recent statement on this topic, he “pointed out that hydrogen technology might still need decades to mature, criticizing the simultaneous decommissioning of reliable nuclear power plants”. Indeed, this has been another sensitive topic in the country, since, given the absence of Russian gas, nuclear energy could be used to at least alleviate the effects of the energy crisis. But any possibility of nuclear development is blocked in the country by the “ultra-green” agenda that controls German politics.

In fact, these criticisms have become increasingly frequent. The boycott of Russia and the irresponsible advancement of the “green” agenda are causing serious problems in Germany, threatening the EU’s leading economic role that the country plays. By 2022, 40% of German gas needs were met by Russia, which made Moscow an indispensable partner for the German economy, especially in the industrial sector. However, Berlin irresponsibly approved all EU sanctions packages imposed on Russia and fully joined the Western attempt to “cancel” Moscow.

As a result, Germany has become the country most affected by the effects of sanctions – much more so than Russia itself, whose economy has recently overtaken Germany’s. Also, in early August, the German group of gas storage operators INES released a report predicting gas shortages by the winter of 2026-2027, which is raising serious concerns among experts.

This has prompted criticism from several German politicians. Baron is not alone in his stance, with many other lawmakers also echoing popular dissatisfaction with the sanctions. For example, recently, Member of Parliament (MP) Uwe Schulz stated:

“Sanctions against Russia… are leading Germany and its economic activity straight to de-industrialization (…) [Germany] lift economic sanctions against Russia [in order to] prevent [further] economic damage.”

Also, in June, another AfD politician, MP Markus Frohnmaier, classified the current German economic policy as “carefree”, stating that the people are “fed up” with the anti-Russian measures, as the Germans do not want to “pay for Kiev forever”.

However, nothing seems to change the German desire to continue an absolutely “suicidal” economic and foreign policy. Unlimited support for Ukraine, considered a “priority” by the German government, is leading the country to a catastrophe. Berlin is already in a technical recession, with inflation rates worsening every month and without any expectation of a reversal in the economic scenario for the coming years. But even so the main discussions of the German government are about new ways to punish Russia and help Kiev, with no concern for German citizens.

Indeed, increased criticism of the German government is inevitable. The popular demand for changes tends to raise more and more. Despite being serious, the German crisis has not yet reached its most critical point, as there are expectations of a significant worsening in the short term. And if the German government does not act in time to avoid the most catastrophic effects of this crisis by reviewing its economic and international guidelines, the country risks to collapse.

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

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***

Pakistan’s former Prime Minister, Imran Khan, has been found guilty of corruption, sentenced to three years in prison, and arrested. In 2022, amid a constitutional crisis, he was removed from office after the April 10 no-confidence motion. In August the same year, after accusing the judiciary and the police of detaining and torturing his close aide, Imran Khan was charged with anti-terror laws for allegedly making threats against state officials in Islamabad. This year, on May 9 he was arrested by paramilitary forces – and this sparked nation-wide protests.

Khan has always accused the Pakistani military of having played a role in his 2022 removal from office, and his followers, once again enraged, claim his recent sentencing is far from unbiased. To add fuel to the fire, it has come to light that a month before the no-confidence motion, the US State Department encouraged Islamabad on March 7, 2022, to remove Khan as Prime Minister over his neutral stance on the Russian-Ukrainian conflict. This stance was indeed reversed after his removal.

A secret Pakistani diplomatic cable (a “cipher”, as it is called) which was obtained by the Intercept discusses the meeting between Asad Majeed Khan, the Pakistani ambassador to the US at the time, and American State Department authorities, including Donald Lu, Assistant Secretary of State for the Bureau of South and Central Asian Affairs. The meeting between the US officials and the Pakistani ambassador had long been the subject of speculation and controversy, in the context of Pakistan’s power struggle between the former Prime Minister supporters and the country’s military.

According to the leaked cable, during the meeting Lu said:

“people here and in Europe are quite concerned about why Pakistan is taking such an aggressively neutral position (on Ukraine).” He added: “I think if the no-confidence vote against the Prime Minister succeeds, all will be forgiven in Washington because the Russia visit is being looked at as a decision by the Prime Minister.” “Otherwise,” he went on: “I think it will be tough going ahead”, adding that Pakistan could face “isolation” by the US and by European powers.

The day before the meeting, Khan basically called for a non-aligned stance and sovereign pragmatism. He said: “we are friends of Russia, and we are also friends of the United States. We are friends of China and Europe. We are not part of any alliance.” On the same occasion, rhetorically addressing Western powers, he asked: “What do you think of us? That we are your slaves and that we will do whatever you ask of us?”

The document basically shows that, amid a heated Pakistani crisis, Washington pressured Islamabad to go ahead specifically with a no-confidence motion (which it did), threatening the country with isolation. So far one can only speculate on how much weight such pressure carried in the eyes of Pakistani political elites. It is not too far-fetched to assume it carried some.

Donald Lu’s incredibly arrogant tone (“all will be forgiven in Washington”) is reminiscent of US diplomat Victoria Nuland’s infamous 2014 leaked phone conversation with US Ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt. During the exchange she uses the F-word to disdainfully refer to the European Union. If that 2014 leak exposed a certain Washington attitude towards its transatlantic European allies (and such an  attitude does not seem to have changed much at all), one can only imagine how the US sees Pakistan – and the rest of the world, for that matter. Washington has of course a well-known record of betraying its most devoted allies.

Even if one condemns the Russian military campaign in Ukraine, which started in February 2022, one should at least acknowledge the fact that far from being an “unprovoked” aggression, it was the result of an escalation of frictions, involving border tensions – a tale in which the US played a major role. Ukraine itself had been in a civil war since 2014, and Kiev has, for nine years now, been bombing the Donbass region and committing a series of human rights infringements largely related to far-right Ukrainian nationalism.

When the US crossed the sea to invade far-away Iraq in 2003, there was no immediate danger or a near border. No Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, the American main claim to legitimize the occupation, were ever found. For 8 years, Washington carried on a neocolonial policy, including a so-called Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) which, from the very start, was created and funded as a US Department of Defense division, in a failed American attempt to “democratize” and to “reconstruct” the Middle-Eastern nation.

Under the tremendously corrupt CPA rule, over $8 billion destined for the country’s reconstruction disappeared and remain unaccounted for to this very day. Up to 1 million deaths, according to ORB International, an independent polling agency located in London, are estimated as a result of the war and American invasion. And yet no international movement arose to sanction or isolate Washington – nor American companies, for that matter (which greatly profited from the war). To this day, former US President George W. Bush is a popular speaker in the US. All of this, once again, whether one condemns the Russian military campaign in neighboring Ukraine or not, goes to show an immense degree of Western hypocrisy, to say the least. And many non-Western leaders see it this way.

To sum it up, the recently leaked document is yet another blatant instance of American “alignmentism” and its cold war mentality – an approach that can only further alienate potential partners and allies, especially in the Global South.

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Uriel Araujo is a researcher with a focus on international and ethnic conflicts.

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In the US medical boards are in many respects agents of Big Pharma. They serve to punish doctors who don’t abide by Big Pharma’s money-grubbing protocols.

The Ohio Medical Board is a good example. Dr. Sherri Tenpenny testified in June 2021 to the Ohio House of Representatives Health Committee about the dangers of the so-called “Covid vaccines.” Her testimony was based on published studies in medical journals. Her testimony was at a time when the full press was on to have the entire population injected with an experimental dose of no one knew what. Big Pharma and American medicine that it controls didn’t want anyone  getting in the way of huge profits and whatever other agendas were at work. Big Pharma orchestrated a number of complaints to be made about Dr. Tenpenny. The Ohio Medical Board responded to its master’s call.

The vaccinators were unhappy when 2 years and 2 months ago Dr. Tenpenny said that the so-called “vaccine” was causing heart inflammation. Her statement, controversial at the time, is now accepted as true.  But the Ohio Medical Board is nevertheless punishing her for being correct. By telling the truth, the Ohio Medical Board thinks Dr. Tenpenny violated the State’s Medical Practices Act. Big Pharma’s Ohio Medical Board has suspended Dr. Tenpenny’s medical license.

This is how corrupt medicine is today in the United States. Over the course of my life I have watched the collapse of medical practice in the US. Doctors were in private practice. You had a personal relationship with them. They knew how to diagnose. Poor people weren’t charged. The doctors added a little to rich people’s bills. The doctor was focused on your health, not his pocketbook.

Today medical schools teach doctors, who are increasingly corporate employees thanks to Obamacare and other legislation designed to destroy private practice, to type the patients reported symptoms into his laptop and prescribe the drugs that Big Pharma recommends. This kind of medicine can be automated.

In the US doctors have become employees. They cannot use their judgment but must follow protocols. Doctors who rejected the death-dealing Covid protocols and saved patients’ lives with Ivermectin and HCQ were fired. If they were in private practice, they were hauled before corrupt medical boards whose pockets were lined by Big Pharma.

Cat scans, MRIs, and blood analysis are wonderful tests for diagnostics, but technology aside medical practice in the US is failing fast.  With the rapid expansion of corporate medicine doctors are being turned into profit centers. Their job is to hand the patient a Big Pharma prescription and rush to the next patient. 

One way that Big Pharma, using its political campaign contributions, is closing down private medical practice is by getting Congress to pass legislation that results in corporate billings to insurance companies and Medicare being paid a larger percentage of the billed amount than private practices. The consequence has been the sale of private practices and their incorporation into corporate medicine.

What this means is that “our representatives” in Congress are not our representatives. They are Big Pharma’s representatives and representatives for others who finance their election campaigns. Big Pharma’s representatives have centralized our health care and turned it against us by turning health care into just another monetized commodity.

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

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The United States has trained at least five members of the new ruling junta in Niger, The Intercept has learned. America has now “paused” security assistance to that military-led government even as it looks to ramp up such aid to Burkina Faso, which is ruled by a military officer who took power in a 2022 coup.

The Nigerien junta, which calls itself the National Council for the Safeguarding of the Fatherland, seized power on July 26 and detained the democratically elected President Mohamed Bazoum. The commander of the country’s presidential guard, Gen. Abdourahmane Tchiani, also spelled Tiani, has proclaimed himself the country’s new leader, while Bazoum and his family remain “under virtual house arrest,” U.S. Under Secretary for Political Affairs and Acting Deputy Secretary of State Victoria Nuland said this week. Nuland and other U.S. officials asked to see Bazoum in person when they visited Niger on Monday, but his captors refused.

Diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks show that a Lt. Cl. Abdourahmane Tiani was selected to attend a yearlong International Counterterrorism Fellows Program at the National Defense University in Washington, D.C., from 2009 to 2010. Over the weekend, another Nigerien mutineer, Gen. Mohamed Toumba, spoke before a cheering crowd at a 30,000-seat stadium named after Seyni Kountche, who led Niger’s first coup d’état in 1974. “We are aware of their Machiavellian plan,” he said of those “plotting subversion” against “the forward march of Niger.” Five years ago, Toumba addressed U.S. military officers and African dignitaries at the opening ceremony for Flintlock, U.S. Africa Command’s largest annual special operations counterterrorism exercise.

The Intercept previously reported that Brig. Gen. Moussa Salaou Barmou, who headed Niger’s Special Forces and now serves as chief of defense, also attended the National Defense University and trained at Fort Benning (now Fort Moore), Georgia. On Monday, Barmou told Nuland that the junta would execute Bazoum if neighboring countries attempted a military intervention to restore his rule, a U.S. official told The Intercept.

“It’s a disturbing trend, and a sign of how badly misallocated our national security spending is on the continent,” wrote Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., on X, formerly known as Twitter, drawing attention to The Intercept’s coverage of the latest in a long parade of U.S.-trained military mutineers.

It appears that the United States trained yet another coup leader in Africa. It's a disturbing trend, and a sign of how badly misallocated our national security spending is on the continent.

1/ A short thread on some of what's gone wrong.https://t.co/waVCuwJvaE

— Chris Murphy 🟧 (@ChrisMurphyCT) July 29, 2023

Two weeks after Niger’s coup, the State Department has still not provided a list of the U.S.-connected mutineers, but a different U.S. official confirmed that there are “five people we’ve identified as having received [U.S. military] training.” The official spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the press.

“The U.S. is using security assistance and military training too broadly in sub-Saharan Africa. Doing so means you’re putting the United States in a position where it’s implicated in human rights abuses and the malign behavior of local security partners,” said Elias Yousif, a research analyst with the Stimson Center’s Conventional Defense Program. “Our experience in the Sahel should be especially cautionary. Over many years, we’ve seen a remarkable series of coups as well as deteriorating security with a rise in militancy, Islamist insurgencies, and criminal networks. I would be hard-pressed to point to a success that could justify continuing on the same path.”

“A Model of Democracy”

In March, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken called Niger “a model of democracy,” even though the latest State Department human rights report on the country refers to “significant human rights issues,” including “extrajudicial killings by or on behalf of [the] government.”

The State Department has offered similarly confused responses to The Intercept’s questions about the coup in Niger. When asked about the training provided to members of the Nigerien junta, a nameless spokesperson replied by email: “This is an evolving situation and it is too soon to characterize the nature of ongoing developments.”

That spokesperson also insisted that the “U.S. Government does not provide training to the Presidential Guard.” A 2017 and 2018 joint State and Defense Department “Foreign Military Training Report,” however, mentions “In Country Training” for members of Niger’s presidential guard.

“We are pausing certain foreign assistance programs, and will continue to review our assistance as the situation evolves,” Blinken posted on X last week, but also said in a press statement that the U.S. was continuing some “security operations” in Niger.

The provision of United States assistance to the government of Niger depends on democratic governance and respect for constitutional order. We are pausing certain foreign assistance programs, and will continue to review our assistance as the situation evolves.

— Secretary Antony Blinken (@SecBlinken) August 4, 2023

Following military coups, U.S. law generally restricts countries from receiving military aid. But The Intercept recently found security assistance still trickling into Mali, even though that country is ruled by a U.S.-trained officer who overthrew the previous government and its military has been implicated in the killing of civilians. Military officers twice overthrew the government of Burkina Faso in 2022, but the U.S. continues to provide training to Burkinabe forces according to Gen. Michael Langley, the chief of Africa Command, or AFRICOM. In April, less than a month after Langley informed members of the House Armed Services Committee about the continued support, the Burkinabe military reportedly massacred at least 156 civilians, including 45 children, in the village of Karma. Langley has also argued against constraints on U.S. military aid following coups.

On Monday, Nuland met with Barmou, warning the new defense chief of “the economic and other kinds of support that we will legally have to cut off if democracy is not restored.” Barmou — who U.S. commandos previously helped set up specialized mobile units designed to target terrorist groups and criminal gangs — was apparently unmoved. “They are quite firm in their view on how they want to proceed,” said Nuland, noting “it was difficult today, and I will be straight up about that.”

Last year, The Intercept asked Nuland what the U.S. was doing to slow the parade of African officers overthrowing governments the U.S. trains them to protect.

“Nick, that was a pretty loaded comment that you made,” she replied. “Some folks involved in these coups have received some U.S. training, but far from all of them.”

Since then, five more U.S.-trained officers have been involved in coups. Reporting by The Intercept indicates that at least 14 U.S.-trained officers have taken part in coups in West Africa since 2008.

Ineffective and Counterproductive

Senior officials at the State Department and Pentagon, meanwhile, are reportedly lobbying to increase security assistance to Burkina Faso, which neighbors Niger, at a time when human rights defenders and journalists say the government is cracking down on critical voices and forced disappearances are on the rise.

“It’s getting much worse. The government is suppressing free speech,” a journalist working in Burkina Faso told The Intercept on the condition of anonymity, due to fears for his safety. “People who speak out are being abducted. The situation is scary.”

The Biden administration’s push for increased security aid to Burkina Faso comes despite a coup last year by U.S.-trained Lt. Col. Paul-Henri Damiba, who was swiftly overthrown by another military officer, Capt. Ibrahim Traoré. Last September, The Intercept asked AFRICOM if Traoré was also trained by the U.S. “We are looking into this,” said AFRICOM spokesperson Kelly Cahalan, noting that the command was “still digging” into possible “engagements” with him. “I will let you know when I have an answer,” Cahalan wrote. A request this week for updates yielded no response.

Experts say that the U.S. track record of pouring money into foreign militaries instead of making long-term investments in humanitarian aid, strengthening civil society, and bolstering democratic institutions has been short-sighted and detrimental to wider American aims. They also question the ability of the United States to build foreign military capacity, a task the Pentagon sees as a core competency.

“When you look at the big picture, from Afghanistan to Somalia to Burkina Faso, the U.S. government’s funding and training of other nations’ military and police forces in counterterrorism has largely been ineffective and counterproductive in regards to the pursuit of meaningful safety, for either Americans or anyone else around the world,” Stephanie Savell, the co-director of the Costs of War project at Brown University, told The Intercept.

Ukrainian troops trained by the U.S. and its allies have floundered during a long-awaited counteroffensive against Russian forces, raising questions about the quality of the instruction and the efficacy of tens of billions of dollars in U.S. assistance. In 2021, an Afghan army built, trained, advised, and armed by the United States over 20 years evaporated in the face of Taliban forces. In 2015, a $500 million Pentagon effort to train and equip Syrian rebels, slated to produce 15,000 fighters over three years, yielded just a few dozen before being scrapped by the United States. A year earlier, an Iraqi army created, trained, and funded — to the tune of at least $25 billion — by the U.S. was routed by the far smaller forces of the Islamic State.

In West Africa in particular, Yousif noted, security aid has not been tethered to a more diversified whole-of-government approach. “It really illustrates the lack of tools in the toolkit that the United States has in this part of the world. It’s the one mechanism that the U.S. thinks it has for garnering influence and delivering foreign policy benefits, but it seems like a very poor tool, especially in a place like the Sahel, where militaries are also increasingly a threat to the civilian government.”

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***

Events in Pakistan these past few days have been quite astonishing and yet the treatment of its former Prime Minister Imran Khan, jailed on spurious corruption charges, has raised barely a headline beyond the foreign pages of Western newspapers. Possibly because most reporting is one-dimensional, the complexities of Pakistan’s politics seem incomprehensible to most Western commentators and the British politicians who dismiss the importance of this country because it is indeed mired in corruption.

Cricket legend Khan is the least corrupt politician in Pakistan these days. I was told by a senior political figure some years ago during a briefing on Pakistani politics, that the former superstar would never make it as a politician because “he is not corrupt”. The people in Pakistan, I was told, expect their politicians to be corrupt. “But how can you trust a man who can’t be bought?” This has probably been quite a stumbling block for those in Washington for whom the solution to every problem is a steady stream of dollars.

As Prime Minister, Khan posed a problem to America the moment that he said “absolutely not” to a question about moving US forces from neighbouring Afghanistan to bases in Pakistan. When he uttered those words in June 2021 I knew that the US would move heaven and earth to get rid of him, and was not in the least surprised when he faced a “no confidence” vote in March 2022 and then went on to claim that the US “threatened” him and was seeking his removal from office.

During an interview four months later, former US ambassador to the UN and ex-White House national security adviser John Bolton boasted that he had helped plan coups in foreign countries. It is very easy, therefore, to believe Imran Khan’s allegation, but this deliberate attempt to meddle in Pakistani affairs seems to have been ignored by a contemptuous media that simply does not understand what is unfolding in the nuclear-armed state, the world’s fifth-most populous country — more than 249.5 million people — and home to the world’s largest Muslim population.

However, most of us have to rely on the vain ramblings of foreign correspondents who simply sneer at Khan’s dream of building an Islamic welfare state in a Third World country which is divided politically and forever staggering from one public debt crisis to another.

This has not been lost on the underappreciated Craig Murray. The former UK ambassador to Uzbekistan is amazed that “there have been no protests from the UK or US governments.”

Sadly, Murray’s analysis and knowledge of the region are largely ignored by journalists who simply regurgitate briefings against him. The demonised yet invaluable observer has to publish his own blogbecause the corporate media don’t want to upset the Establishment by offering him his own column. Murray is also convinced that Khan’s removal from his position as prime minister was a CIA-engineered coup, and that the vicious campaign of violence and imprisonment against Khan and his supporters is a demonstration of dark forces at work.

Nevertheless, there’s something much larger at play now in Pakistan: the people. They have finally woken up to the fact that their country has been in the grip of a military dictatorship since its creation in 1947.

“Pakistan’s politics are, to an extent not sufficiently understood in the West, [it is] literally feudal,” Murray pointed out. “Two dynasties, the Sharifs and the Bhuttos, have alternated in power, in a sometimes deadly rivalry, punctuated by periods of more open military rule.”

Moreover,

“There is no genuine ideological or policy gap between the Sharifs and Bhuttos, though the latter have more intellectual pretension. It is purely about control of state resources. The arbiter of power has in reality been the military, not the electorate. They have now put the Sharifs back in power.”

I remember documenting Khan’s arrival and determination to change the political landscape in his beloved country. His achievements in under three decades have been staggering coming from point zero and launching the Pakistan Tehreek e Insaf (PTI) party in 1996. In one interview, I put it to him that the life expectancy of a successful political leader in Pakistan was not good, but he brushed away any fears, and declared his faith in Allah.

That was back in 2003 when the tide was beginning to turn against the US presence in Pakistan. The arrival of US drones wiped out hundreds of innocents over the following decade. This rough US justice and extra-judicial assassinations by Predator drones probably inspired the PTI’s astonishing victories in the 2018 National Assembly elections.

Khan had shattered the two-party system and stunned the political dynasties in Pakistan. He was already much loved for his legendary heroics in cricket, but ordinary Pakistanis also loved the way that he was prepared to stand up to Uncle Sam. With the exception of Malala Yousafzai, not a single Pakistani has ever walked into the Oval Office and told the US president to stop US drone attacks. But Khan did.

As Murray writes in his blog,

“The Pakistani military went along with him. The reason is not hard to find. Given the level of hatred the USA had engendered through its drone killings, the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, and the hideous torture excesses of the ‘War on terror’, it was temporarily not in the interests of the Pakistan military to foreground their deep relationship with the CIA and US military.

“The Pakistan security service, ISI, had betrayed Osama Bin Laden to the USA, which hardly improved the popularity of the military and security services. Imran Khan was seen by them as a useful safety valve. It was believed he could channel the insurgent anti-Americanism and Islamic enthusiasm which was sweeping Pakistan, into a government acceptable to the West.”

While he was in power Khan achieved a great deal, which resonated with the people in the street. He brought an end to the US drone attacks and stopped Pakistani soldiers from being sent as cannon fodder for Saudi Arabia in the Yemen war. His sincerity and ability to endear himself to the common man knew no bounds, just as his unfortunate capacity to make powerful enemies left him terribly exposed.

I suppose, given Pakistan’s awful record for political assassinations, it came as no surprise when a gunman fired five shots at Khan after he very publicly condemned military corruption. Up until that point, no one had ever spoken out from a political platform against the military. Khan basically challenged the generals who thought themselves untouchable.

And when he moved last year towards a closer trading relationship with sanction-hit Russia it was inevitable that Washington would attempt to pull the rug from under Khan’s feet by reaching out to corrupt senior army officers. When it comes to power grabs America is not fussy about who it jumps into bed with, and the generals were obviously more than happy to reap the rewards on offer.

The state of Pakistan today is depressing. Thousands of PTI members are behind bars for nothing more than daring to dream of an end to years of corrupt military and dynastic rule.

The media has been defanged and told not to broadcast any interviews with Khan or even show his image. Such censorship of a political leader is almost unprecedented, apart from Nelson Mandela perhaps during the racist Apartheid era in South Africa.

Where are the voices in the British government condemning the injustice of it all? At the time of writing, not one political voice has been heard in Westminster about the treatment of Khan or his followers. Britain’s ties to the US are evidently strong enough to ignore the influential presence of hundreds of thousands of Pakistanis within the British Asian community. Around 80 per cent of them are believed to support Khan.

Murray is more to the point on this:

“…I feel confident it also reflects in part the racism and contempt shown by the British political class towards the Pakistani immigrant community, which contrasts starkly with British ministerial enthusiasm for Modi’s India. We should not forget New Labour has also never been a friend to democracy in Pakistan, and the Blair government was extremely comfortable with Pakistan’s last open military dictatorship under General Musharraf.”

Someone else who clearly understands Pakistani politics more than most is Yusuf Islam, aka singer-songwriter Cat Stevens, who has spoken out on social media about Khan’s imprisonment. Yusuf tweeted that,

“The majority of balance-minded Muslims know that the politics of Pakistan has for years been allowing corruption to flourish…”

He described Khan’s imprisonment as a “charade” and reminded “those who have orchestrated this premeditated coup… that God, the Seer of all things, is not unaware” before urging them to set Khan free “immediately.”

The arrest of Imran Khan on charges of corruption is so clearly unjustified. The majority of balance-minded Muslims know that the politics of Pakistan has for years been allowing corruption to flourish in the shadows, behind party doors. Now someone has risen who speaks out…

— Yusuf / Cat Stevens (@YusufCatStevens) May 9, 2023

At the time of writing this column, Imran Khan was in the first week of three years in prison — and a five-year ban from politics — for the alleged embezzlement of official gifts. According to Shah Mehmood Qureshi, the vice chairman of Tehreek-e-Insaf, the former prime minister is not being allowed to meet his lawyers. He also admitted to being “extremely concerned” about Khan’s wellbeing following the assassination attempt last November.

Khan believes that he and his party are still capable of returning to power in Pakistan’s next elections despite his latest incarceration. Early last month he compared himself to embattled leaders from history like Mandela and Gandhi, and almost foreshadowed his own arrest and imprisonment.

For those journalists still trying to figure out if Imran Khan will compromise or throw in the towel, consider this: the cricket legend may be down, but he is “absolutely not” out.

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***

Historically, the United States and its allies only retreat from their aggressive policies and the imposition of their dominance when they suffer a strategic defeat. They never repair their essence, all they do is modify their policies looking for how to recover the lost ground. For them, the 1950s were a decade of bitter setbacks. China defeated them in Korea in 1953, Vietnam expelled the French in 1954, Egypt took control of the Suez Canal in 1956, the Cuban Revolution took power in 1959 and shortly afterwards in 1962, the National Liberation Front did so in Algeria. The West responded, among other ways, with its campaign in the Congo and the assassination of Patrice Lumumba in 1961, support for the massacre of more than a million communists to seal the coup in Indonesia in 1965, the overthrow of the Kwame Nkrumah in Ghana in 1966, the genocidal US war in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia and determined Western support for the Zionist occupation in Palestine and for the racist regime in South Africa.

The drive at that time towards decolonization and the ruthless Western reaction to it occurred in the context of the Cold War. In parallel with their aggressive policies, the United States and its allies were deepening their control of international finance and global trade. They perfected the neocolonial interventions of the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the manipulation of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) as tools of financial and commercial control around the world. In a systematic way, Western governments developed the mechanisms of indebtedness and development cooperation as a means of increasing the economic dependence of the countries of Latin America, Asia and Africa.

To this neocolonial model of economic development promoted by the imperial powers, majority world leaders began proposing, as an alternative, models of trade and South-South cooperation without conditions and based on solidarity. In 1955, the first Africa-Asia conference was organized in Bandung, Indonesia, which reaffirmed from the perspective of the majority world the founding principles of the United Nations, self-determination, non-aggression and respect for international law. Afterwards, the Non-Aligned Movement gave greater impetus to a vision of international relations based on respect among equals, the recognition of the legitimate interests of countries, the promotion of solidarity based cooperation, trade for mutual benefit and the peaceful resolution of differences.

In the last twenty years, this vision has been developed very successfully, for example, by the countries of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization and by the BRICS group. It explicitly opposes the practice of the United States and its allies to impose their imperatives in international relations through economic and military domination. In Latin America, Comandante Fidel Castro and Comandante Hugo Chávez Frias promoted the same vision of international relations based on solidarity through the Bolivarian Alliance of Our America (ALBA). Later, enough consensus was reached in support of this vision to form the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States. To the extent that the ability of these countries to defend their interests increases, all these independent schemes of cooperation threaten Western power in international relations.

In the history of the development of the libertarian anti-imperialist vision, it is worth highlighting the role of revolutionary solidarity between Latin America and Africa, of which the example of Cuban solidarity has been decisive. The campaign of the Cuban contingent with Che Guevara and Jorge Risquet in the Congo in 1965 was the precursor of Operation Carlota in defense of Angola in the 1970s that finally managed to defeat the forces of the racist regime of South Africa and its Western patrons. Even before the Cuban collaboration in the Congo, Cuba had supported the newly liberated Algeria against an aggression in 1963 by the Kingdom of Morocco backed by France. In 1965, Che met at one time or another with key revolutionary African leaders such as Modibo Keita from Mali, Amilcar Cabral from what is now Guinea Bissau, with Agostinho Neto from Angola and Kwame Nkrumah from Ghana. Che insisted on the importance of solidarity based and complementary international cooperation to achieve emancipation from the domination of the world economy by the imperialist powers.

Gabriel García Marquez wrote “That fleeting and anonymous sojourn of Che Guevara through Africa sowed a seed that no one can uproot.” Some twenty years later, in 1987, shortly before his own assassination, Thomas Sankara said, “Che Guevara was struck by imperialist bullets under the Bolivian sun but we declare that for us Che Guevara is not dead… In almost all of Africa he made known his beret with its star… Africa, from north to south, remembers Che Guevara.”

A year after Thomas Sankara’s words, the Cuban and Angolan forces defeated the armed forces of the racist regime of South Africa in the battle of Cuito Cuanavale. Of that battle Nelson Mandela commented in Cuba in 1991“ “That impressive defeat of the racist army gave Angola the possibility of enjoying peace and consolidating its sovereignty. It gave the people of Namibia their independence, demoralized the white racist regime in Pretoria and inspired the anti-apartheid struggle within South Africa…”

In Nicaragua, the Sandinista Popular Revolution has always maintained fraternal relations with Africa’s revolutions, especially with the Libyan Jamahiriya, with Algeria, Burkina Faso and Zimbabwe. In his words of tribute to our Chancellor of Dignity, Father Miguel d’Escoto, in 2017, President Comandante Daniel recalled how they traveled together to celebrate Zimbabwe’s independence in April 1980, “We were there with Miguel living that unforgettable experience, and we have constantly recalled that experience, whereby a People in Africa, just like the People of Nicaragua who had fought against imperialist policy, there against colonialist, imperialist policy, also achieved their Liberation.”

On Algeria, Vice President Compañera Rosario has commented on how the national liberation struggle of the Algerian people against French colonialism has been “important and significant, not only for Algeria but for all Peoples who love Peace and Freedom. Algeria continues to be an Example, a Reference Point, an Inspiration for the Peoples who struggle in the World, out of Respect for our Sovereignty, for Justice, and Peace.” In relation to the Libyan Jamahiriya of Brother Muammar al-Gaddafi, Commander Daniel recalled in this year’s celebration of July 19th, “We cannot forget Gaddafi. As soon as he saw the aggression that Nicaragua was suffering, he joined in and gave us unconditional solidarity.”

For the 44/19 Anniversary this year, the Prime Minister of Burkina Faso was present. He commented “Nicaragua is a great country, and the determination of its People is a Hope and an example for others, they have a great Spirit… That is why I am here, and I am here to be the living witness of the Unity between the People of Nicaragua and Burkina Faso.” That afternoon too, Compañera Rosario recalled the words of Thomas Sankara during a visit he made to Nicaragua in the 1980s, “Burkina will stand together with Nicaragua! Because the Revolution is invincible and the People will rule!”

These solidarity ties between revolutionary African countries and the revolutionary countries in Latin America were further consolidated with the new foreign policy implemented by the Bolivarian Revolution in Venezuela. President Hugo Chávez Frías promoted the development of new relations between Venezuela and the Southern African Development Community, with the Economic Community of West African States and with the African Union. He also gave greater impetus to the initiative of Brazil during the first government of President Lula da Silva along with his African counterparts of the Africa-South America Summits.

A few weeks before his transit to immortality in 2013, our Eternal Comandante wrote in a letter to the Africa-South America Summit that year: “South America and Africa are the same people. We only manage to understand the depth of the social and political reality of our continent in the depths of the immense African territory where, I am sure, humanity was born. From there come the codes and the elements that make up the cultural, musical and religious syncretism of our America, creating not only racial unity among our peoples but also spiritual unity.

… Latin America and the Caribbean share with Africa a past of oppression and slavery. Today more than ever, we are the inheritors of our liberators and of their conquests. We can say, we must say with strength and conviction, that we are also united by a present of struggle essential for the freedom and definitive independence of our nations.

I will not tire of repeating it, we are the same people, we have the obligation to come together, beyond formal speeches, in the same desire for unity and thus united, to give life to the equation that will need to be applied to the construction of the conditions that will allow us to get our peoples out of the labyrinth into which colonialism and, later, the neoliberal capitalism of the twentieth century threw them.”

These words of our Eternal Comandante remind us that from one century to the next, the threads of the revolutionary history of Latin America and Africa are inseparably intertwined. It seems that the current historical moments will be decisive for the defense of the principles of the new world enunciated more than sixty years ago by visionary African leaders such as Kwame Nkrumah and Gamal Abdel Nasser. Now a new generation of revolutionary leaders in Africa are determined to confront the influence and power of the empire in their countries. At the Russia-Africa Summit at the end of July this year, President Ibrahim Traoré of Burkina Faso commented:

“We have met today because we need to talk about the future of our countries. What will happen tomorrow in this new free world we are fighting for, a world without interference in our internal affairs?… We have the opportunity to build a new kind of relationships. I hope that these relations will serve us better and allow us to create a better future for our peoples… The problem is that the leaders of African countries do not contribute anything to the people who are fighting imperialism, calling us armed groups or criminals. We do not agree with this approach. We, the heads of African states, must stop behaving like puppets ready to act every time the imperialists pull the strings.”

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

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

Featured image: Che Guevara con el Presidente Kwame Nkrumah en 1965 (Source: TCS)

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*** 

Over the past two decades since China was admitted into the WTO, its national industrial base has made unprecedented strides to emerge as the world’s leading economic producer in many major areas. The academic debates over whether China’s GDP is larger than that of the USA are misplaced. GDP is largely worthless as a measure of a real economy. When measured in real physical economic production, China has left the USA and everyone else in the dust. Therefore, the future course of industrial production in China is vital to the future of the world economy. Globalization of the world economy made it so.

Steel production is still the single best indicator of a growing real economy. In 2021, China produced more that twelve times the tonnage steel as the USA, over one billion tons. The USA, once world leader, managed a piddly 86 million tons. In tons of coal, China produces some 50% of world total coal. She controls 70% of world rare earth mining and over 90% of its processing, thanks to bizarre US policy actions going back several decades. China today is far the world’s largest motor vehicle producer, almost three times the size of the US at 27 million units annually, one third of world total in 2022. China is by far the largest producer of the essential cement for construction, and is the world’s leading aluminum  producer.  At 40 million tons in 2022, this compares to not even one million tons in the USA. It is also the world’s largest copper consumer. The list goes on.

This is merely to suggest  how essential the economy of China has been to world economic growth over the past two decades. A mere four decades ago China was insignificant in world real economic terms. So, if China goes into deep economic contraction, the effect this time will be global. And this is just what is now underway. Important to note, the contraction began well before the severe three-years of China’s zero covid lockdown. Simply put, China since the so-called Great Financial Crisis of 2008 managed to create a financial bubble the size of which the world has never before experienced. That bubble began to deflate, beginning in real estate, around 2019. The scale is systemic and is only beginning.

Colossal Deleveraging and Hidden Debt

A huge problem with China’s economic model over the past two decades has been the fact that it has been a debt-based finance model massively concentrated on real estate speculation beyond what the economy can digest.

Fully 25 to 30% of the total Chinese GDP is from real estate investment in homes, apartments, offices. That’s significant. The problem is that real estate, especially apartments in China, for more than two decades, appeared to be a guaranteed money maker for owners as well as builders and banks and above all, local government officials. Prices rose annually in the double digits, sometimes by 20%. Millions of middle-class Chinese bought not just one, but two or more apartments, using the second as investment for future retirement. China’s land is owned by the Communist Party, at the local level. It is leased long-term to construction firms who then borrow to build.

Here it gets murky. For CP local government officials, revenue from local real estate land leasing and their infrastructure projects is their major revenue source. Until now municipal property taxes are forbidden despite a huge pressure from local officials.

In the months of 2018 and 2019 China real estate prices peaked. Since then they have been in a prolonged decline. China has a unique and very abuse-prone real estate model. Typically a buyer must pre-pay the full purchase price when a developer has merely begun the construction. “Buy today as the price will be even more tomorrow” was the mantra. He takes a mortgage, usually from local banks, to do that. If the builder does not complete on time, the buyer must still pay their mortgage. Even if the developer goes bankrupt as is now happening, leaving abandoned unfinished housing behind. No other country uses that model. Typically in Western countries a small deposit on a home to reserve until completion is enough. The mortgage comes when the property is finished. Not in China.

So long as China home prices were constantly rising, it seemingly worked and the home market expanded. When that price inflation stopped, for a variety of reasons, and exacerbated by the ultra-severe covid lockdowns, what was then a colossal real estate bubble began to implode. According to economist Robert Pettis at Beijing University, “Since the beginning of the property crisis in September and October 2021, property prices have declined in more than two-thirds of China’s seventy largest cities (and probably all of the smaller ones), while, more importantly, sales of new apartments this year (2022) have collapsed.” [i]

The major turn took place in 2021 with the default of China Evergrande Group on its dollar bonds. It was then the world’s most indebted real estate conglomerate with debts of well over $300 billion. In 2018 Evergrande was deemed, “the most valuable real estate group in the world,” according to Wikipedia. That was on paper. By time of default it also owned theme parks, an EV auto company, resorts and enough land to house 10 million people. Until Beijing refused to bailout Evergrande, in a belated bid to cool the bubble,  Chinese lenders had made loans based on the assumption that large borrowers would be bailed out—Too Big To Fail. Beijing learned all the wrong lessons from US banks after Lehman Bros.

It came out that Evergrande had created a colossal Ponzi fraud over the years. They were not unique. Following a speculative property boom after 2010, poorly-regulated local governments across China turned increasingly to real estate to boost income and fulfill the Beijing GDP growth targets, a de facto monetary version of Soviet central planning. Inflating local real estate values was a way of meeting local GDP targets. Local officials were given their share of annual GDP contribution to be met. Real estate became the ideal vehicle to meet GDP targets and generate local revenues. As long as prices were rising, banks and increasingly unregulated local “shadow banks” joined in the “win-win” bonanza.  According to the South China Morning Post, by 2020 and the start of covid severe lockdowns, land sales and real estate taxes’ contribution to local government fiscal revenue reached a peak of 37.6 per cent. [ii]

The Evergrande partial default set off a panic in China real estate that officials desperately, and unsuccessfully, have tried to control. It was merely the first major casualty in what is a systemic meltdown. Beijing authorities imposed sharp limits on real estate lending in a vain attempt to contain the implosion, the so-called Three Red Lines. That made the implosion of the property bubble worse. In 2022 China new home sales plunged 22% over 2021. As of February 2023, China home prices had fallen for 16 straight months. Sales by the country’s top 100 developers last year were only 60% of 2021 levels. Land sales, which typically account for more than 40% of local government revenue, have collapsed. [iii]

Empty Houses and unemployment rising

Until the bubble began to burst in 2022 with the Evergrande default, Chinese real estate prices had risen several times higher, relative to household income, than in the USA. More alarming, two decades of rampant price inflation had created literal ghost cities and millions of empty apartments. As of 2021 an estimated 65 million apartments in China were empty, enough to house the French nation. [iv] This was a result of two decades or more of municipalities and developers building beyond actual demand, as citizens bought for investment, not living. One estimate is that between one-fifth and one-quarter of the total China housing stock, especially in more desirable cities, was owned by speculative buyers who had no intention of living in them or renting them out. In Chinese culture, a used apartment is considered unattractive.[v] With falling prices, these homes become unpayable.

The unprecedented 3-year covid lockdowns that ended abruptly last December did not help matters. Thousands of foreign manufacturers including Apple, Foxconn, Samsung and Sony, have begun to leave China for other locations in Asia or even Mexico, fueling a growing unemployment crisis which feeds the housing crisis in a self-feeding cycle.

As a result of this slow-motion implosion across China, for the first time since the great expansion unemployment is becoming very serious. This March, youth unemployment officially was over 20%. Millions of recent university graduates are unable to find work and Beijing has begun to send them to work in the rural countryside, reminiscent of the Mao era. This bodes ill for future home sales. A contracting bubble has a vicious dynamic.

Until about the time of the 2008 Beijing Olympics, real estate investment was largely productive. It filled a huge deficit in quality housing as a new middle class grew more affluent. After about 2010 that began to shift to bubble status as millions of middle-class and rich Chinese began to buy second and even third homes for pure speculation as prices were rising in double digits. The degree of central supervision of local government finances was loose.

Over recent years, to avoid central clampdown by Beijing authorities fearful of a new debt bubble imploding, local governments, often with hidden collusion from the giant state banks, created a non-bank economy, “shadow banks,” all off-balance sheet. As one result, despite actions by Beijing regulators to control the property meltdown and prevent contagion, total debt, public and private, in China by February 2023 according to Bloomberg reached an alarming 280% of GDP. [vi]

Commodity.com reports total state debt of China in 2023 is more than $9.4 trillion. But that excluded local government financing vehicles (LGFVs). Chinese local governments rely on off-balance sheet LGFVs to raise funds for local public construction—housing, high-speed rails, ports, airports. The debts of all these LGFVs are estimated to be roughly $27 trillion more. The official figure for total state debt also excluded debt of state banks and state companies, which is also clearly considerable, but unpublished. That total debt is also without the unknown size of local shadow banks which China’s National Institute of Finance and Development in 2018 estimated at some $6 trillion more. The result of all these omissions is a headline figure meant to reassure Western financial markets that China has manageable public and private debt. It doesn’t. All told, very roughly we can calculate a mammoth debt accumulation of well more than $42 trillion, a staggering sum for an economy which only three decades ago was at a level of an underdeveloped economy.  [vii]

A major vehicle used to finance local budgets is unguaranteed and largely unregulated municipal investment bonds. Unlike traditional municipal debt in western countries, the Chinese local LGFVs are not able to use tax revenues to fund their bond interest or principal payments. So, local governments would tap into a growing housing market by leasing their long-term land to developers to fund their bond payments.  This created a system where a sustained fall in housing construction, sales and prices now creates a systemic threat. This is now underway across China. In just two decades China has created the world’s second largest corporate debt market behind the USA, and far the most of that is in unregulated municipal bond debt.

As a result of this unique mixing of local governmental fiscal policies with local housing markets, a substantial drop in housing or land prices has greatly increased the risk level of local government  default on its debts. In July 2022 Zunyi City in Guizhou defaulted on a major bond, leading to a collapse of the entire unregulated local bond market, as local bond issuance collapsed by 85% after that. The bonds were a way to refinance local debt and that channel now is all but closed, despite   Beijing liquidity injections early 2023. Investors were mostly local ordinary Chinese seeking to earn on savings. This past April officials of Guiyang, also in Guizhou, told Beijing it was unable to finance its debts accumulated over a decade in construction projects including housing. [viii] This opens the next phase of debt implosion. Several China municipalities reportedly have been slashing wages, cutting transportation services and reducing fuel subsidies in a desperate bid to avoid default.

National Security redefined

Transparency of financial data has always been a problem in China. Thirty years ago the country had no developed financial markets. So long as the economy was expanding however, it was not a priority. Now it is, but too late.

A signal of how severe the situation is becoming, the Beijing authorities have begun to limit release of local and corporate financial data to foreign firms, calling it a “national security” issue.

On May 9 Bloomberg reported, “China’s crackdown on data access to overseas firms is adding to concerns about how Beijing controls the flow of information in the country, making it difficult for investors to assess the state of the economy.” Information such as academic papers, court judgments, official biographies of politicians, and bond market transactions are affected, they report. US consultancy Bain &Co. had their China offices raided recently as part of the national data security campaign. Such measures may keep reality from the pages of the Wall Street Journal or CNBC for a while, but the underlying reality of the collapse of the world’s largest financial edifice will be more difficult to hide.

This May, Dalian Wanda Group, another major Chinese real estate conglomerate with investments in US cinema chains, Australian real estate and beyond, revealed talks with its major bankers to restructure huge debts amid a liquidity crisis. The UK Financial Times on May 9 reported that hopes of a post-covid China recovery are vanishing: “Chinese iron ore prices dropped to their lowest levels in five months, as weak demand adds to evidence that the country’s economic rebound from tough coronavirus lockdowns may be faltering… the optimism and activity that followed the end of lockdown have waned, leading to a ‘collapse’ in the steel market.”

This all means the prospect of the Chinese economy being a growth locomotive to lift the rest of the world from looming depression is virtually nil at this point. The massive Belt and Road Initiative is mired in hundreds of billions of dollars in loans to countries unable to service the debt, as world interest rates rise and growth stalls. Attempts to boost domestic China growth by relying on a consumer boom are doomed presently for obvious reasons noted, as is the call by Xi Jinping to make 5G, AI and such technologies the basis of a new boom, as US sanctions greatly hamper China IT advances.

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F. William Engdahl is strategic risk consultant and lecturer, he holds a degree in politics from Princeton University and is a best-selling author on oil and geopolitics.

He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization.

Notes

[i] Michael Pettis, What’s in Store for China’s Mortgage Market?, August 12, 2022,

https://carnegieendowment.org/chinafinancialmarkets/87664

[ii] Luna Sun, China cracks down on ‘characteristic towns’ that misused land, real estate while racking up massive debt, 6 November, 2021, https://www.scmp.com/economy/china-economy/article/3155055/china-cracks-down-characteristic-towns-misused-land-real

[iii] Laura He, China s property crash is prompting banks to offer mortgages to 70 year olds, February 20, 2023     https://edition.cnn.com/2023/02/17/economy/china-mortgage-age-95-property-market-intl-hnk/index.html

[iv] Lina Batarags, China has at least 65 million empty homes — enough to house the population of France. It offers a glimpse into the country’s massive housing-market problem, Business Insider, October 14, 2021, https://www.businessinsider.com/china-empty-homes-real-estate-evergrande-housing-market-problem-2021-10 .

[v] Michael Pettis, What Does Evergrande Meltdown Mean for China?,  September, 20, 2021, https://carnegieendowment.org/chinafinancialmarkets/85391

[vi] Bloomberg, China’s Debt-to-GDP Ratio Rises to Record 279.7% on Credit Boom, 8 May, 2023, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-05-08/china-s-debt-to-gdp-ratio-rises-to-record-279-7-on-credit-boom#xj4y7vzkg

[vii] Commodity.com, China’s National Debt Clock: What’s the Current Figure (and What’s Included), May 12, 2023,

https://commodity.com/data/china/debt-clock/

[viii] The Economist, China’s local-debt crisis is about to get nasty, May 4, 2023, https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2023/05/04/chinas-local-debt-crisis-is-about-to-get-nasty

Featured image is from InfoBrics

Seeds of Destruction: Hidden Agenda of Genetic Manipulation

Author Name: F. William Engdahl

ISBN Number: 978-0-9879389-2-3

Year: 2007

Product Type: PDF File

Price: $9.50

This skilfully researched book focuses on how a small socio-political American elite seeks to establish control over the very basis of human survival: the provision of our daily bread. “Control the food and you control the people.”

This is no ordinary book about the perils of GMO. Engdahl takes the reader inside the corridors of power, into the backrooms of the science labs, behind closed doors in the corporate boardrooms.

The author cogently reveals a diabolical world of profit-driven political intrigue, government corruption and coercion, where genetic manipulation and the patenting of life forms are used to gain worldwide control over food production. If the book often reads as a crime story, that should come as no surprise. For that is what it is.

Click here to purchase.

The Public Health Red Meat Allergy Bioengineering Plot Thickens…

By Ben Bartee, August 14, 2023

In a recently unearthed video of the College of Global Public Health Center for Bioethics at New York University Director, Dr. Matthew Liao,speaking at the 2016 World Science Festival, he openly advocates artificially inducing a red meat allergy in the entire human population,using an analog of the algha-gal molecule found in the Lone Star Tick that I have documented previously at Armageddon Prose, so as to fight “climate change.”

Assange be Wary: The Dangers of a US Plea Deal

By Dr. Binoy Kampmark, August 15, 2023

At every stage of its proceedings against Julian Assange, the US Imperium has shown little by way of tempering its vengeful impulses. The WikiLeaks publisher, in uncovering the sordid, operational details of a global military power, would always have to pay. 

Former Israeli General Compares Treatment of Palestinians to ‘Nazi Germany’ and ‘Apartheid’

By Middle East Eye, August 15, 2023

A former top general in the Israeli military has said that Israel‘s treatment of Palestinians in the occupied West Bank resembles Nazi Germany and is “total apartheid”. Amiram Levin, former head of the army’s northern command, made the comments on Sunday on Israeli public broadcaster Kan. 

COVID-19 mRNA Vaccine Injury Treatment: Curcumin (Turmeric) Blocks Spike Protein (Combine It with Bromelain), Treats Myocarditis, Has Anti-inflammatory, Anti-aging and Anti-Cancer Properties!

By Dr. William Makis, August 15, 2023

Curcumin (diferuloylmethane), is a main bioactive polyphenolic compound that is extracted from the Curcuma longa (Tumeric) rhizomes, which belongs to Ginger family and is broadly cultivated in Southeast Asia and India.

Moral Culpability Among the Oppressed and a New Look at the Tragedy of Orwell’s 1984

By Dr. Emanuel Garcia, August 14, 2023

I have no idea whether or not it is fashionable in literary circles to criticize the two protagonists of George Orwell’s 1984, Winston and Julia. After all, they inhabit a world governed by a perverse and despicable elite who have achieved virtually complete control over the thoughts and actions of their subjects — a world not far removed from the one that is being thrust upon us as I write.

“Struggling with the Old Enemies of Peace”

By Emanuel Pastreich, August 14, 2023

We have to struggle with the old enemies of peace: business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, race antagonism whipped by hidden operatives, the exploitation of tensions between cities and rural communities, and of course, the old favorite, war profiteering.

Five for Five: US-Iran Prisoner Swap and the Nuclear Deal

By Steven Sahiounie, August 14, 2023

The deal has not been finalized, and the prisoners may not arrive home soon, but the deal has been placed into motion as Iran has transferred the five prisoners to house arrest, some having been transferred out of the infamous Evin prison in Tehran.

The Illusion of Scandal: How Washington Is Attempting to Dismiss $20 Million as an Illusion

By Jonathan Turley, August 14, 2023

I previously wrote a column marveling at the success of the Bidens in pulling off one of the neatest tricks in political history. I analogized it to how Houdini used to make his 10,000-pound elephant Jennie disappear on a stage in front of a live audience. The media and political establishment is now striving to top that performance by declaring $20 million in payments to Biden family members as an “illusion” of influence. At the heart of this scandal is the BFF, the Biden Family Fund.

As Maui Burns, Biden Demands Another $24 Billion…For Ukraine!

By Rep. Ron Paul, August 14, 2023

It’s hard to look at recent footage of the devastation in Maui and then hear President Biden tell Congress that he needs another $24 billion for Ukraine. How can this Administration continue to justify tens of billions of dollars for this losing war that is not in our interest while the rest of the United States disintegrates?

Kyrgyzstan Is the US’ Next Regime Change Target

By Andrew Korybko, August 14, 2023

What Senator Menendez demands is nothing short of a soft coup brought about by voluntarily reversing Kyrgyzstan’s recent “Democratic Security” successes under the Damocles’ sword of “security and economic” consequences if it dares to refuse.

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At every stage of its proceedings against Julian Assange, the US Imperium has shown little by way of tempering its vengeful impulses.  The WikiLeaks publisher, in uncovering the sordid, operational details of a global military power, would always have to pay.  Given the 18 charges he faces, 17 fashioned from that most repressive of instruments, the US Espionage Act of 1917, any sentence is bound to be hefty.  Were he to be extradited from the United Kingdom to the US, Assange will disappear into a carceral, life-ending dystopia.

In this saga of relentless mugging and persecution, the country that has featured regularly in commentary, yet done the least, is Australia.  Assange may well be an Australian national, but this has generally counted for naught.  Successive governments have tended to cower before the bullying disposition of Washington’s power. With the signing of the AUKUS pact and the inexorable surrender of Canberra’s military and diplomatic functions to Washington, any exertion of independent counsel and fair advice will be treated with sneering qualification.

The Albanese government has claimed, at various stages, to be pursuing the matter with its US counterparts with firm insistence.  Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has even publicly expressed his frustration at the lack of progress in finding a “diplomatic solution” to Assange’s plight.  But such frustrations have been tempered by an acceptance that legal processes must first run their course.

The substance of any such diplomatic solution remains vague. But on August 14, the Sydney Morning Herald, citing US Ambassador to Australia Caroline Kennedy as its chief source, reported that a “resolution” to Assange’s plight might be in the offing. “There is a way to resolve it,” the ambassador told the paper. This could involve a reduction of any charges in favour of a guilty plea, with the details sketched out by the US Department of Justice. In making her remarks, Kennedy clarified that this was more a matter for the DOJ than the State Department or any other department. “So it’s not really a diplomatic issue, but I think there absolutely could be a resolution.”

In May, Kennedy met members of the Parliamentary Friends of Julian Assange Group to hear their concerns.  The previous month, 48 Australian MPs and Senators, including 13 from the governing Labor Party, wrote an open letter to the US Attorney General, Merrick Garland, warning that the prosecution “would set a dangerous precedent for all global citizens, journalists, publishers, media organizations and the freedom of the press.  It would also be needlessly damaging for the US as a world leader on freedom of expression and the rule of law.”

In a discussion with The Intercept, Gabriel Shipton, Assange’s brother, had his own analysis of the latest developments. “The [Biden] administration appears to be searching for an off-ramp ahead of [Albanese’s] first state visit to DC in October.”  In the event one wasn’t found, “we could see a repeat of a very public rebuff delivered by [US Secretary of State] Tony Blinken to the Australian Foreign Minister two weeks ago in Brisbane.”

That rebuff was particularly brutal, taking place on the occasion of the AUSMIN talks between the foreign and defence ministers of both Australia and the United States.  On that occasion, Foreign Minister Penny Wong remarked that Australia had made its position clear to their US counterparts “that Mr Assange’s case has dragged for too long, and our desire it be brought to a conclusion, and we’ve said that publicly and you would anticipate that that reflects also the positive we articulate in private.”

In his response, Secretary of State Blinken claimed to “understand” such views and admitted that the matter had been raised with himself and various offices of the US.  With such polite formalities acknowledged, Blinken proceeded to tell “our friends” what, exactly, Washington wished to do. Assange had been “charged with very serious criminal conduct in the United States in connection with his alleged role in one of the largest compromises of classified information in the history of our country. The actions that he has alleged to have committed risked very serious harm to our national security, to the benefit of our adversaries, and put named sources at grave risk – grave risk – of physical harm, and grave risk of detention.”

Such an assessment, lazily assumed, repeatedly rebutted, and persistently disproved, went unchallenged by all the parties present, including the Australian ministers. Nor did any members of the press deem it appropriate to challenge the account. The unstated assumption here is that Assange is already guilty for absurd charges, a man condemned.

At this stage, such deals are the stuff of manipulation and fantasy. The espionage charges have been drafted to inflate, rather than diminish any sentence. Suggestions that the DOJ will somehow go soft must be treated with abundant scepticism. The pursuit of Assange is laced by sentiments of revenge, intended to both inflict harm upon the publisher while deterring those wishing to publish US national security information.  As the Australian international law academic Don Rothwell observes, the plea deal may well take into account the four years spent in UK captivity, but is unlikely to either feature a complete scrapping of the charges, or exempt Assange from travelling to the US to admit his guilt. “It’s not possible to strike a plea deal outside the relevant jurisdiction except in the most exceptional circumstances.”

Should any plea deal be successfully reached and implemented, thereby making Assange admit guilt, the terms of his return to Australia, assuming he survives any stint on US soil, will be onerous. In effect, the US would merely be changing the prison warden while adjusting the terms of observation. In place of British prison wardens will be Australian overseers unlikely to ever take kindly to the publication of national security information.

*

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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: STOP THIS – by Mr. Fish

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***

New Jersey is in the process of approving two major offshore wind projects: the Ocean Wind I and II initiatives owned by the Danish “green” energy company Ørsted. Radical leftist Governor Phil Murphy ordered a massive restructuring of the state’s power grid in September to become reliant on “100 percent clean energy by 2035” that has enjoyed enthusiastic support from the White House, which approved Ocean Wind I in July.

To install the wind turbines necessary for the projects, engineers must survey and map the ground floor to find the ground best able to sustain the massive structures. The survey work being done in anticipation of the installation of these turbines has coincided with a massive increase in the number of dead whales and other marine mammals off the coasts of New York and New Jersey.

Environmentalists gather during a ‘Save the Whales’ rally calling for a halt to offshore wind energy development along the Jersey Shore on February 19, 2023 in Point Pleasant New Jersey. (Kena Betancur/VIEWpress)

As of June, scientists have documented at least 14 humpback and minke whales washing ashore dead in the two states compared to nine in all of 2022. Between December and May, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) documented 25 dead whales washing ashore along the entirety of the East Coast, nine in New Jersey. The whales washing ashore are dramatic affairs, as they have on several occasions appeared on boardwalk beaches frequented by families, alarming locals.

Most whales who have undergone autopsies after washing ashore showed signs of blunt trauma, suggesting they died by hitting ships.

Veteran fishermen in New Jersey, who have spent decades studying the sea, say the whale deaths and those of other marine mammals are unprecedented and insist a relationship must exist between the surveying and the deaths. As marine mammals use sonar, the theory suggests that the surveying is disrupting the animals’ ability to know where ships are and thus avoid hitting them. NOAA insists that it has no scientific evidence linking the surveying – which, like whales, dolphins, and porpoises, uses sonar for echolocation – to the whale deaths.

“At this point, there is no evidence that noise resulting from wind development-related site characterization surveys could potentially cause mortality of whales, and no specific links between recent large whale mortalities and currently ongoing surveys,” NOAA’s website reads.

Robert Bogan, the captain of the Gambler recreational fishing vessel in Point Pleasant Beach, New Jersey, said in a letter to his Congressman, Rep. Chris Smith (R-NJ), shared with Breitbart News this week that the whale deaths present an entirely new phenomenon to him – something unless in the over half a century Capt. Bogan has spent regularly taking his customers out to fish.

The Gambler fishing boat, Point Pleasant Beach, New Jersey. (Courtesy Capt. Robert Bogan)

The Gambler is what is commonly known in the Jersey Shore region as a party boat – it offers tickets for individual trips to sea for fishermen and provides the service of finding the fish, aiding new fishermen with basic training, providing bait, and fileting the catches. It has been in operation since 1949 as a local family business. It offers trips closer to shore – for species such as summer flounder (fluke) in the summer – and trips further out for tuna and other large catches in the colder months, meaning its crew are familiar with the conditions of the sea year-round.

“My business runs 10 months out of the year and we employ up to 10 people. Many other businesses in our shore community depend on our business –as we do those businesses,” Bogan explained. “I find it very disturbing that the powers backing the offshore windmill development would claim that there is no correlation between wind research development and the dead whales that continue to wash up on our beaches.”

“In my 50+ years of working on the ocean, I have never seen anything remotely like this,” he emphasized. “Dead whales on our beach absolutely and logically have everything to do with the oceanic geo-surveys.”

“NOAA was so concerned about slowing our boats down to less than 10 knots (basically a crawl), so as not to strike a whale and yet they signed-off on these invasive surveys, and admitted there would be an ‘acceptable’ whale mortality involved,” Bogan wrote. “Now, they don’t want to admit there was any mortality coinciding with wind research.”

Contrary to assurances on NOAA’s website, a Bloomberg News report in November unearthed a report from NOAA protected species expert Sean Hayes who warned the wind projects “will likely cause added stress that could result in additional population consequences to a species that is already experiencing rapid decline,” referring to whales.

“If these whales are dying from boat strikes, then how do we explain the deaths of many porpoises that have playfully swam the bow-wakes of ships for centuries?” he asked. “In all my years working the ocean: winter, spring, summer and fall — we have never hit, have seen or know of any boater who has hit a whale.”

Bogan described himself as initially “open-minded” about offshore wind, but feels “lied to” about the environmental damage.

“We only know of the whales that were hurt by seismic and sonar research because they float when dead. What of all the other effected sea life that did not come to the surface?” he asked.

Asked about the letter, Rep. Smith told Breitbart News that Bogan’s experiences and concerns were representative of a growing chorus of voices of maritime professionals at the Shore.

“Captain Robert Bogan and numerous recreational and commercial fisherman — who know our sea better than anyone else — have reached out to me with serious, first-hand observations regarding the aggressive offshore wind industrialization of our Jersey Shore,” Rep. Smith said.  “Tragically, their alarming insights about these unprecedented offshore wind projects and the resulting permanent transformation of our marine seascape continue to be ignored by Governor Phil Murphy and the Biden Administration.”

“The hardworking members of our community who depend on the sea for their livelihoods, and who contribute enormously to our economy, deserve to have their concerns thoroughly addressed—not trivialized, mocked or dismissed,” the Congressman added.

Bogan’s observations in recreational fishing are consistent with those of New Jersey’s commercial anglers.

“The commercial fishing is extremely upset with the visual observations of dead whales floating at sea,” Brick Wenzel, Point Pleasant Beach, New Jersey’s, fishing liaison and a longtime commercial fisherman, told Breitbart News in March. “One vessel said they had seen 3 different whales in one trip. Another had parts of a whale come up in their net. Most of the captains are generational fishers and are in their 60s — No one has heard of or [has] seen anything like the carnage being witnessed.”

Environmentalists gather during a ‘Save the Whales’ rally calling for a halt to offshore wind energy development along the Jersey Shore on February 19, 2023 in Point Pleasant Beach, New Jersey. (Kena Betancur/VIEWpress)

Rep. Jeff Van Drew (R-NJ), whose district borders Rep. Smith’s to the south, similarly told Breitbart News in March that fishermen in his district have been alarmed by the situation for some time out of both fear for the environmental damage and concerns that the wind turbines will harm their fishing grounds.

“The fishermen have always been concerned, but it wasn’t just enough when it was just the fishermen,” Rep. Van Drew (R-NJ) asserted. “And now what’s happened is, over time, because of the whales, because of people realizing what these things are going to look like — we’re going to industrialize the Jersey Shore.”

Reps. Van Drew and Smith led a hearing in Wildwood, New Jersey, (Van Drew’s district) in March in which experts testified that, in addition to concerns about the potential mass killing of marine life, the offshore wind turbine projects appeared to interfere with military missions.

“NASA has said that these areas interfere with all their missions out of Wallops Island; the Navy has said there is not an area in that whole lease block that does not interfere with DOD [Department of Defense] missions, but BOEM [the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management] is continuing ahead,” Meghan Lapp, the fisheries liaison for the Rhode Island commercial fishing company Seafreeze, said at the event. “When I’ve asked them on webinars, like – the Navy said that this is a problem how can you still be leasing it? ‘Well, we’re just going to be continuing the discussions.’”

Other concerns regarding the offshore wind facilities are the unclear science regarding disposal of used wind turbines, potential threats to migrating birds, and few answers regarding whether or not the turbines could survive major hurricane damage, which New Jersey occasionally experiences.

In response to the lack of clarity regarding the Ocean Wind projects, Rep. Smith spearheaded an effort to begin an investigation into the plan by the Government Accountability Office (GAO), which confirmed a probe in June. The GAO will reportedly investigate potential effects on “the environment, the fishing industry, military operations, navigational safety, and more.”

*

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***

A former top general in the Israeli military has said that Israel‘s treatment of Palestinians in the occupied West Bank resembles Nazi Germany and is “total apartheid”.

Amiram Levin, former head of the army’s northern command, made the comments on Sunday on Israeli public broadcaster Kan. 

“There hasn’t been a democracy there in 57 years. There is total apartheid,” Levin said, referring to the situation in the West Bank.

He said the Israeli army was “forced to exert sovereignty there” and is “rotting from the inside”. 

“It’s standing by, looking at the settler rioters and is beginning to be a partner to war crimes. These are deep processes.”

Levin went further, comparing those processes to Nazi Germany. 

“It’s hard for us to say it, but it’s the truth. Walk around Hebron, look at the streets; streets where Arabs are no longer allowed to go on, only Jews,” he said. “That’s exactly what happened there, in that dark country.”

Criticism of Comments

The comments were condemned by lawmaker Danny Danon, who belongs to the ruling Likud party. 

“Those who compare us to Germany or the Nazi regime should be examined,” Danon said. 

Levin, who was also a former deputy chief of the Mossad, had a military career which spanned from 1965 to 1998. 

Earlier this weekend, he made a speech at an anti-government demonstration in Tel Aviv in which he called on military leaders to stand up to Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir, both of whom he said were “trying to drag you into war crimes”.

Levin’s views on Israeli abuses appear to have taken a marked turn: in a 2017 interview with Israeli daily Maariv, he claimed that Palestinians “deserved the occupation”. 

Several human rights groups, including B’tselem, Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International have in recent years determined that the term “apartheid” applies to the situation in Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories.

Last year, Michael Lynk, the UN’s special rapporteur for human rights in the occupied Palestinian territories, said in a report that the treatment of Palestinians “satisfies the prevailing evidentiary standard for the existence of apartheid”.

Israel has occupied the West Bank since the war in 1967.

The territory is home to around 2.9 million Palestinians. Around 475,000 Jewish settlers also live there in Israeli state-approved settlements, which are illegal under international law.

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Featured image: Amiram Levin (Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0)

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***

I have written about mRNA vaccine treatments: NATTOKINASE, QUERCETIN, N-Acetyl CYSTINE (NAC), OLIVE LEAF, BLACK SEED/NIGELLA, BROMELAIN and 3-DAY FASTING.

Curcumin (Turmeric)

Curcumin (diferuloylmethane), is a main bioactive polyphenolic compound that is extracted from the Curcuma longa (Tumeric) rhizomes, which belongs to Ginger family and is broadly cultivated in Southeast Asia and India.

Curcumin is a yellowish compound, which has been used as a food additive, dietary spice, and herbal remedy.

Several investigations have revealed that curcumin possesses potent biochemical and biological activities, including anti-inflammatory, anti-viral, anti-bacterial antioxidant, and anti-cancer activities.

In traditional herbal medicine, curcumin is used to improve the immune system and as a treatment for various respiratory disorders like allergy and asthma.

Curcumin has also been traditionally used for the treatment of numerous diseases including ulcers, dysentery, jaundice, upset stomach, arthritis, acne, wounds, and eye and skin infections.

Curcumin and COVID-19 Infection and spike protein 

May 2020 – Zahediour et al reviewed curcumin in COVID-19 infection:

• curcumin has antiviral properties against other viruses like RSV, Herpes
• curcumin altered surface protein structure of viruses to block their entry into cells
• curcumin binds spike protein (!)
• curcumin inhibits viral replication inside infected cells
• curcumin inhibits inflammatory cytokines in COVID infection and decreases cytokine storm
• curcumin inhibits oxidative stress that causes severe lung injuries
• curcumin inhibits fibrotic response in COVID-19 infection, reduces lung fibrosis, reduces cardiac damage and fibrosis, reduces kidney fibrosis

July 2022 – Nag et al. found that curcumin had strong, stable binding with Omicron spike protein, that was superior to hydroxychloroquine. It could also disrupt a spike protein already bound to ACE-2.

Sep.2022 – Zipin et al found that curcumin can disrupt Omicron viral particles but their curcumin formulation which had poor bioavailability, was unable to disrupt Omicron virus in infected cells – authors suggest using nanocurcumin to improve bioavailability

Oct.2022 – Venugopa et al. found that in addition to curcumin binding spike protein, curcumin could also interfere with COVID-19 viral replication, and was an immunomodulator that could prevent cytokine storm.

April 2023 – Wei Wu et al. found that curcumin could ameliorate spike protein mediated oxidative stress through scavenging ROS (reactive oxygen species) and enhancing function of the antioxidation system. This is enhanced further when taken in combination with resveratrol.

CURCUMIN + BROMELAIN 

Greek researchers Kritis et al showed in Dec.2020 that Bromelain combined with Curcumin has a major impact on stopping severe COVID-19! 

• Severe COVID-19 involves 3 pathways: inflammatory (cytokine storm), coagulation (thrombosis) and bradykinin cascades
• Both Bromelain and Curcumin inhibit two of these (inflammation and coagulation) and Bromelain inhibits bradykinin as well.
• Both Bromelain and Curcumin block binding of spike protein to ACE-2 and TMPRSS-2
• Bromelain also increases absorption of curcumin after oral intake which is very important because curcumin on its own has very poor bioavailability
• Conclusion: “Bromelain is absorbed directly when administered orally, while it substantially promotes the absorption of curcumin enhancing its bioavailability,and making this a perfect combination of immune-boosting nutraceuticals with synergistic anti-inflammatory and anticoagulant actions”

CURCUMIN and Anti-Aging

Aging is one of the most complex and intricate phenomenon in the biological context. Aging is described as a physiological decrease of several biological activities in the organ with a gradual reduction of cellular adjustment to external and internal injuries.

The senescence that is known also as cellular aging is the hallmark of aging, and includes the reduction of the regenerative capacity of cells. In this regard, cellular senescence seems to be harmful because it consists of a defect of tissue renewal and functionality. Cellular senescence is an irreversible growth arrest by which cells cease to replicate; it occurs in somatic cells and limits their proliferative life span.

Anti-aging benefits of Curcumin:

• 10 times higher anti-oxidant activity compared to Vitamin E
• Stimulates production of anti-oxidative enzymes (like superoxide dismutase) that decrease oxidative stress and increase life span
• Inhibits lipid peroxidation
• free radical scavenging activities slow telomere shortening
• activates various cell signaling pathways that increase lifespan
• decreases inflammation in neural cells, decreases neurodegenerative processes
• decreases skin aging, promotes wound healing
• inhibits aging processes in skeletal muscle, improves muscle mass and function
• powerful anti-cancer effects by inducing apoptosis of cancer cells

CURCUMIN and Anti-Cancer 

• Aug. 2021 – Zoi et al – summarized curcumin’s effects on cancer 
• Lung cancer: curcumin suppressed invasion and metastatic potential of lung cancer cells. Also activates key tumor suppressor genes in smoking induced lung cancer
• breast cancer: curcumin stopped the growth of breast cancer cells, also suppressed invasion and metastasis of breast cancer cells
• prostate cancer: curcumin induced apoptosis and autophagy of cancer cells and is effective in castration-resistant prostate cancer as well
• brain cancer: nanocurcumin can get past BBB into brain and can decrease proliferation of glioblastoma (GBM) cells, also suppresses formation of GBM stem cells which are responsible for tumor progression, recurrence and resistance to chemo – curcumin also decreases malignant characteristics of GBM stem cells to prevent GBM cancer recurrence.
• pancreatic cancer: curcumin suppresses formation of cancer stem cells which are responsible for high proliferation rate and rapid tumor growth of pancreatic cancer – suppresses tumor growth.
• leukemia – curcumin affects numerous anti-cancer pathways, also enhances the effectiveness of chemo in treatment of leukemias.

• Feb.2021 – Zia et al – most cancers have a non-functional or mutated p53 tumor suppressor gene
• curcumin activates p53 pathway that induces senescence in cancerous cells and also induces death of cancer cells via apoptosis
• Aug.2020 – Mansouri et al reviews use of curcumin in cancer patients:
  • curcumin increases effectiveness of chemo and radiation therapy
  • curcumin improves patient survival and increases expression of anti-metastatic proteins
  • curcumin reduces side effects of chemotherapy and radiotherapy

CURCUMIN and Lifestyle-related conditions

• curcumin reduces myocardial infarct size
• curcumin treats myocarditis(!) reduces inflammation and progression
• curcumin inhibits development of left ventricular systolic dysfunction and heart failure
• curcumin reduces lung inflammation in COPD
• obesity – curcumin reduces inflammation due to obesity, also improves serum lipid profile and lipid metabolism.
• dementia – nanocurcumin reduced amyloid and tau accumulation in the brain

CURCUMIN Supplement Formulations 

• Oct.2021 – Tabanelli et al reported that the major problem with curcumin is low bioavailability
• curcumin is almost insoluble in pure water
• curcumin has poor absorption, fast metabolism and rapid systemic clearance resulting in very low curcumin levels in plasma and tissues
• some formulations have curcumin + black pepper (piperine) which blocks the breakdown of curcumin.
• there are “nanocurcumin” formulations that enhance absorption and bioavailability

CURCUMIN Safety

Curcumin has been characterized as “generally safe” by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Indeed, no significant side effects related to curcumin can be found in the literature. Some of the documented cases are of reversible side effects, including allergic dermatitis.

Dose-escalating studies have demonstrated that consumption of up to 12 g of curcumin daily presents no damaging effects. In studies on patients with solid tumors, no adverse effects were reported when curcumin was given for 8 weeks at a dosage of 900 mg/day orally, except for mild gastrointestinal upset.

Oral intake of 6 g/day of curcumin for 7 weeks was also reported to be safe in patients with breast cancer, and 3 g/day of curcumin given for 9 weeks to patients with prostate cancer showed no adverse effects.

Curcumin also exhibits a strong iron-chelating activity. Long-term supplementation with curcumin induced iron depletion in young mice.

Apart from that, curcumin possesses anticoagulant properties and may increase bleeding time in patients receiving anticoagulants.

It has been reported that this compound can inhibit several cytochrome P450 subtypes, including CYP2C9 and CYP3A4. For this reason, curcumin has been known to interact with certain other medications, including anticoagulants, antibiotics and antidepressants.

My Take… 

How can the COVID-19 Vaccine Injured or Long COVID patients benefit from Curcumin?

First, get a highly absorbable formulation: nanocurcumin, Curcumin + Bromelain or Curcumin + Black Pepper (piperine – which blocks the breakdown of curcumin and increases bioavailability).

There is no point taking a regular curcumin supplement with poor absorption

Summary of benefits: 

• binds spike protein (stronger binding than hydroxychloroquine)
• reduces tissue damage done by spike protein (decreases oxidative stress)
• protects against COVID infection and re-infection (disrupts viruses, blocks their replication, reduces cytokine storm, reduces lung edema & inflammation)
• reduces fibrosis in the lungs, heart, kidneys caused by spike protein
• treats myocarditis (!) (has many anti-inflammatory effects which are very useful in anyone suffering from “lifestyle conditions” including obesity, diabetes and cardiovascular disease)
• anti-aging benefits – 10x higher antioxidant than Vitamin E, slows telomere shortening, decreases neurodegenerative processes, decreases skin aging, decreases skeletal muscle aging, anti-tumor effects
• powerful anti-cancer effects
  • stops growth of breast cancer, lung cancer, prostate cancer cells
  • stimulates autophagy and apoptosis of cancer cells
  • suppresses malignant cell invasion & metastasis

• POTENTIAL TURBO CANCER EFFECTS:

  • stimulates p53 tumor suppressor pathways which may have been damaged by the spike protein
  • for aggressive cancers like glioblastomas and pancreatic cancers – it suppresses formation of cancer stem cells that are responsible for aggressive growth, spread, recurrence and resistance to chemo.
  • leukemias – has many pathways to treat leukemias.

  • enhances effectiveness of chemotherapy and radiation therapy and decreases their side effects (may be helpful for COVID-19 vaccine induced turbo cancer patients whose cancers are resistant to conventional chemo and radiation)

*

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Dr. William Makis is a Canadian physician with expertise in Radiology, Oncology and Immunology. Governor General’s Medal, University of Toronto Scholar. Author of 100+ peer-reviewed medical publications.

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***

I have no idea whether or not it is fashionable in literary circles to criticize the two protagonists of George Orwell’s 1984, Winston and Julia. After all, they inhabit a world governed by a perverse and despicable elite who have achieved virtually complete control over the thoughts and actions of their subjects — a world not far removed from the one that is being thrust upon us as I write.

When I recently reread the novel I was surprised by the tender sensitivity with which Orwell rendered the lovers’ relationship. The Orwell of social and political commentary, the prescient Orwell, the didactic Orwell — this was the author I remembered most, and I regarded his portrayal of the poignantly tragic couple, the couple whose love for each other was annihilated by the State in the end, to be the highlight of the book.

We sympathize with these rebellious creatures playing a dangerous game against the Enemy we all abhor, we cherish their secret meetings and their attempts to breathe within the suffocating mantle of surveillance, and we hope against hope that their love will triumph, knowing of course that only a dismal termination would be possible.

The tortures perpetrated upon them and their ultimate betrayals of self and other lend an even greater weight to the overall gloom of Orwell’s dystopian political world. They had been beaten, bludgeoned, threatened and, finally, broken, into forsaking each other for the sake of their own skins — understandably enough, I suppose — and with this the embers of their love were extinguished, transmogrified into some facsimile of affection for Big Brother.

I asked myself, however, if Winston and Julia did not in some irrevocable way, perhaps reminiscent of Greek tragedy, deserve their fates.

In a clandestine meeting with O’Brien, the man they believe to be leading the Resistance, they are asked a series of questions to determine their dedication to the good cause against the ruling Party:

‘You are prepared to commit murder?’

‘Yes.’

‘To commit acts of sabotage which may cause the death of hundreds of innocent people?’

‘Yes.’

‘To betray your country to foreign powers?’

‘Yes.’

‘You are prepared to cheat, to forge, to blackmail, to corrupt the minds of children, to distribute habit-forming drugs, to encourage prostitution, to disseminate venereal diseases—to do anything which is likely to cause demoralization and weaken the power of the Party?’

‘Yes.’

‘If, for example, it would somehow serve our interests to throw sulphuric acid in a child’s face—are you prepared to do that?’

‘Yes.’

Heinous and evil as undoubtedly the Party is, with its reign of ceaseless war and terror, its abolition of privacy, its revision of history and language, its debasement of its citizens and its promotion of suffering, the two who have met in love and pledged to fight for some semblance of human freedom commit themselves to unconscionable acts in the service of their quest for a greater good. They are apparently willing to do anything except promise never to see one another, a promise they will, pathetically and ironically enough, not be able to keep.

What if they had answered O’Brien, the treacherous Party representative masquerading as the opposition, with a ‘no’ to these queries? Would their fates have been different?

I wonder.

Yes, they would have been imprisoned and tortured and flattened and perhaps even executed, but they would have died with their souls and their love somehow intact. It is this failing, this weakness, this fallibility, consumed as they were by the desperate fight for the cause of humanity, that signaled their destruction more certainly than the machinations of Big Brother could ever accomplish.

When people ask me nowadays if we can ever hope to win out against the immense forces arrayed against our own humanity, our wishes for love and intimacy and cooperation and support and freedom to think and feel as we wish, I tell them that, unlike Orwell, I’m not a terribly good prognosticator.

But I also add that staying true to what is good makes us winners no matter what.

It is tempting in any war to resort to lawlessness, it is tempting to justify destructive means by the ends they purport to reach, it is tempting to put our consciences in abeyance in the thick of the fight. But by doing so we therefore become the instruments of our own destruction.

Those doctors who conveniently forgot about informed consent and individualized treatment and ‘first do no harm’ when it came to the Jab, and those lawyers and judges who conveniently overlooked the trampling by the government of our unalienable rights to freedom of expression and protest, did themselves in, whether they acknowledge it or not.

To become, by renouncing our fundamental principles, like the destructive and despicable enemy that persecutes us, is sure defeat. They may invade our bank accounts and attempt to invade our bodies and appropriate our earthly possessions, but only we can ensure that our souls are intact. Death, in the end, looms for us all. Preserving dignity is a choice we can make every step along the inevitable path.

In a way this is nothing new. I’m sure that life under Genghis Khan for an ordinary peasant was no picnic, nor was life as a Helot in Sparta. The now massively global reach of the Oppressing Elite, however, lends a uniqueness to our collective plight.

We have been given, however, just as uniquely, a glimpse into the rotten hearts and the depths of the Overlords’ hypocrisies and their many perverse means of wielding Power. It is breathtaking, this revelation of institutionalized genocide, chicanery, deception and clever manipulation, and we may indeed be in for a new Dark Age of feudal submission.

Or not.

I believe that even in a vicious conflict there are ways to fight tough, smart and effectively, sparing the innocents, through peaceful means. Whatever the material outcome. so long as we oppose oppression without betraying ourselves, we will be victorious.

*

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Dr. Garcia is a Philadelphia-born psychoanalyst and psychiatrist who emigrated to New Zealand in 2006. He has authored articles ranging from explorations of psychoanalytic technique, the psychology of creativity in music (Mahler, Rachmaninoff, Scriabin, Delius), and politics. He is also a poet, novelist and theatrical director. He retired from psychiatric practice in 2021 after working in the public sector in New Zealand. Visit his substack at https://newzealanddoc.substack.com/

He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

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***

What Is Elderberry?

Sambucus nigra Linnaeus is a tree that grows in Western and Central Asia, Europe, and North Africa. Sambucus is a generic Greek name that comes from an ancient musical instrument built with the wood of this tree.

Elderberry is a blue-black colored fruit of the Sambucus tree, the European version of the 30 kinds of elder plants globally.

Therapeutic uses of Elderberry can be traced back to ancient times:

• 3000 B.C – 30 B.C: Ancient Egypt: Researchers have uncovered evidence that black elderberry may have been cultivated by prehistoric man, and there are recipes for elderberry-based preparations in the records of Ancient Egypt. The Ancient Egyptians used elderberry as an essential ingredient in their skincare regimen to enhance their skin complexion and glow.

• 2000 BC: Stone Age: Neolithic people cultivated the elderplant / elderberries. Seeds from elderberry found in Neolithic pole-dwellings in Switzerland suggest that the plant was in cultivation by about 2000 BC.
• 400 BC: Hippocrates – Greece: The ancient knowledge of Elderberry runs so deep that the “father of medicine”, Hippocrates (460 BC – 375 BC), adoringly referred to the herb as the “medicine chest” of all herbs because of its endless benefits and the usability of all aspects of the plant.
• 370 BC – 285 BC: Greco-Roman Period: The name if the plant dates back to the Greco-Roman period. The word Sambucus came from the Greek word Sambuca. Theophrastus (300’s BC) described elder in Historia Plantarum.
• 77 AD: Italy: By the time of Pliny the Elder, the medicinal qualities of elder were widely known and his writings notes this as well.
• 1600’s AD: Britain: Over the centuries, elderberry has been used to treat colds, flu, fever, burns, cuts, and more than 70 other maladies, from toothache to the plague. In the 17th century, John Evelyn, a British researcher, declared, “If the medicinal properties of its leaves, bark, and berries were fully known, I cannot tell what our country man could ail for which he might not fetch a remedy [from the elderberry], either for sickness or wounds.”
• North American First Nations: are said to have used elderberry going back thousands of years.
• Traditional Chinese Medicine: It is said that elderberry has been part of traditional Chinese medicine going back hundreds of years.

Elderberries have twice the Vitamin C of oranges and 3 times the anti-oxidants of blueberries. They are high in polyphenols and bioflavonoids.

The use of the elderberry and elderflower is common and widespread in Europe and modern science is now beginning a serious study of the plant’s properties and uses.

The elderflower extract standardized on flavonoids, is recorded in the European and British Pharmacopoeias. An elderflower monograph has been prepared by the World Health Organization. The European Medicines Agency has published a detailed assessment report on Sambuci fructus.

The flowers of the elderberry tree contain sugar, cyanogenic glycosides, phenolic acids, flavonoids, and pectin. Flowers have antiviral properties, diuretic, and mild anti-inflammatory effects and are used to treat colds.

The elderberry fruits have a high level of essential oils, flavonoids, and anthocyanin glycosides. They possess immuno-stimulatory, antiviral, and significant antioxidant activity to boost the immune system and act as a potent viral inhibitor to treat flu.

S. nigra also enhances the immune system in a nonspecific way and stimulates the generation of cytokines.

Elderberry and Influenza 

Elderberry contains a high concentration of bioactive compounds, especially polyphenols such as flavonols, phenolic acids, proanthocyanidins, and anthocyanins, which give the fruit its dark-purple hue.

Elderberry has anthocyanins, a subset of flavonoids which have immuno-modulating and anti-inflammatory effects.

Anthocyanins can attach to and render ineffective viral glycoproteins that enable viruses to enter host cells, thereby having an inhibitory effect on viral infection.

Extracts of elderberry have demonstrated in vitro to have inhibitory effects on influenza A and influenza B viruses, influenza H5N1, as well as H1N1 swine flu virus.

Human clinical trials have shown that black elderberry extracts reduce symptom severity as well as the duration of influenza viral infections.

Elderberry and COVID-19

In the United States, elderberry supplements sales increased by 415% in the single-week period ending March 8, 2020.

In addition to its direct viral inhibitory effect (studied with Influenza), elderberry also affects the immune system through regulation of cytokines.

Elderberry appears to increase cytokine production at the first stage of viral attachment and early viral replication. This helps kill the virus and stop replication.

However, cytokine storm is a problem with severe COVID-19 infections and this was used by big pharma to cast doubts and concerns on the use of Elderberry to treat COVID-19.

A review by Wieland et al. concluded that there was no evidence that Elderberry overstimulated the immune system

Broduske et al. showed in March 2021 that Elderberry extract can bind the spike protein and inhibit SARS-CoV2 and ACE-2 binding.

Elderberry inhibits viral replication of SARS-CoV2 and increases production of pro-inflammatory cytokines IL-1, TNF-alpha, IL-6 and IL-8. TNF-alpha in particular improves macrophage activity against viral infection.

Elderberry anthocyanins also protect the endothelium which is attacked during COVID-19 infection:

Elderberry in Kids

Dr.Gregory Weaver MD, a pediatrician at Cleveland Clinic Children’s in Cleveland gave an interview:

“In general, we have very few medications that treat viral illnesses,” says Gregory Weaver, M.D., a pediatrician at Cleveland Clinic Children’s in Cleveland. “There is some data that the actual components of elderberry have been looked at as either an anti-inflammatory drug and/or an antiviral drug. Specifically, there is a fair amount of data for influenza.”

Several studies have compared Tamiflu and elderberry for the purpose of lessening flu symptoms or reducing the risk of getting the flu after exposure. “There is a fair amount of evidence to say that elderberry is at least as effective at Tamiflu,” says Dr. Weaver.

It seems no one is doing research on Elderberry in kids. 

A 2020 study by Macknin et al of Elderberry in kids ages 5 and above found no benefit, which they admit is contrary to previous published literature:

• kids ages 5 to 12 received 15 mL Elderberry syrup twice a day for 5 days
• kids ages > 12 received 15 mL Elderberry syrup four times a day for 5 days

Previous Elderberry literature that was contrary to their findings:

• 1995 Kakay-Rones study – 27 patients, found that elderberry shortened duration of proven influenza by about 4 days compared to placebo. 93% of Elderberry treated saw significant improvement in symptoms including fever within 2 days.
• 2004 Kakay-Rones study – 60 patients, found that elderberry shortened duration of proven influenza by about 4 days compared to placebo
• 2009 Fan-Kun et al. – 64 patients with flu-like symptoms, 88% of Elderberry treated showed significant improvement after 48 hours, only 16% of placebo did.
• In 2016, an Australian study looked at 312 air travelers who were given Elderberry before traveling, to see how they would do 4 days after travel. Those who took Elderberry had fewer cold episodes, significantly reduced severity of symptoms and a significantly shorter duration of symptoms (by 2-3 days).

Anti-microbial effect of Elderberry:

Krawitz et al in 2011 tested Elderberry on Strep:

My Take… 

The following is a personal anecdote.

Elderberry is the only supplement that I don’t allow to “run out” in the household. Our family has been using Elderberry since the fall of 2020, and this arose in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic and the need to protect our kids.

I approached Elderberry with skepticism, having never heard of it before. We initially bought Elderberry gummies on the recommendation of several Edmonton parents and found that our kids, ages 8 and 10, responded positively to them almost immediately. Over time, we shifted to Elderberry syrup, which remains, to this day, their favorite medication or supplement by far.

Over the last 3 years, we’ve gone through several viral respiratory infections at home. Both kids tend to respond partially to Elderberry within 24 hours (occasionally their mild symptoms are gone the next day). By 48-72 hours, they’re typically well enough to return to school. One or two stubborn viral infections have lingered a bit longer, usually a few more days. That would have been the “COVID-19 Delta era”.

3 years. No flu vaccines. No COVID-19 vaccines. No COVID-19 testing. Healthy kids.

I have been taking Elderberry supplements in capsule form, along with Quercetin, Zinc, NAC, Olive Leaf, Vitamin D/C throughout the pandemic but I must admit that even I sneak in some Elderberry syrup now and then, usually to address some cough that persists a bit longer than I’d like.

This stuff simply works. Of course, as a physician, I would love to see more studies done on kids and Elderberry extract but they’re not happening. In light of the Universal push to get toxic, experimental mRNA vaccines into kids, this is not surprising.

There are thousands of testimonials from parents on Elderberry gummies or syrup on Amazon. Here is one from a random Elderberry product:

The line that struck me: “I have NO tylenol/advil etc in my house anymore”.

Here in Canada, last year, we had such a shortage of children’s Tylenol and Advil that in Edmonton, the shelves were bare for months and it was not possible to find them anywhere (click here).

Nevertheless, we were quite comfortable with Elderberry, and didn’t feel the impact of the shortage of children’s Tylenol or Advil. And that’s a great place to be in, as a parent.

Going forward, I’m particularly pleased with the fact that Elderberry not only acts against various Influenza virus types but specifically against H5N1, which concerns me as one of the viruses that may “emerge” as a future pandemic.

It’s good to know that the kids have something to protect them, no matter the “scariant” or pandemic that we get hit with in the future.

*

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Dr. William Makis is a Canadian physician with expertise in Radiology, Oncology and Immunology. Governor General’s Medal, University of Toronto Scholar. Author of 100+ peer-reviewed medical publications.

Featured image is from Children’s Health Defense

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***

We have to struggle with the old enemies of peace: business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, race antagonism whipped by hidden operatives, the exploitation of tensions between cities and rural communities, and of course, the old favorite, war profiteering.

Now we have IT monsters inside of Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft Word and Oracle that track us day and night, processing every bit of information in banks of supercomputers so as to anticipate our next move and to checkmate us.  The parasite class does so while also exposing us to advertisements and movies, YouTube and Instagram images, that are designed to reduce us to simplistic beasts seeking momentary satisfaction in the pleasures of the flesh, to form us into abject slaves who worship the decadent and indulgent rich.

When I see how young girls are assaulted by commercials and movies that glorify sexual indulgence and that suggest that women must be objects for consumption, I am reduced to tears.

These multinational corporations have begun to consider the government of the United States as a mere appendage to their own affairs. They hide behind “progressive” or “conservative” puppets in Congress, just out of sight, protected by their public relations firms and private security details.

And so, we now know that government run by organized money is just as dangerous as government run by organized mobs.

Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they are today. They cannot stand the idea that I might somehow manage to crawl over all the obstacles that they have thrown in my path; they cannot bear that fact that somehow we have managed to get the word out about their heinous crimes even though I am blocked from all the newspapers and television broadcasts that they control so jealously, even though I am anathema for all the so-called alternative media sources that they manipulate covertly.

For yes, we know now that no matter how discouraged by 24-7 propaganda the American citizen may be, no matter how worn down he or she may feel working day and night to pay bills to the parasites which pray on common people (posing as “government” here, posing as “schools” or “utilities” there), that the truth is still attractive, that the truth is still a beacon that offers hope in the midst of the most dark fraud.

The truth will set you free.

Those multinational corporations, private equity firms, and the billionaire families lurking behind them, they are unanimous in their hate for me—and I welcome their hatred.

And, oh yes, they have extended their long fingers, their greedy probiscis, deep into the Green Party as well.

If the leaders of the Green Party say that there are no infiltrators in the Green Party, that the party is not riddled with operatives paid as consultants by Booze Allen Hamilton or CASI, Black Cube or CRG, private intelligence and PR firms that have their snouts in the trough of Homeland Security’s anti disinformation budgets, if they claim such people are not burrowed deep in the Green Party, then I proclaim, “Halleluiah!” For truly this is a miracle!

All the other political parties are crawling with these parasites, retired police officers and treasury bureaucrats, the dregs of public relations firms who team up with management consulting zombies to make a bit of money to supplement their retirements by blocking the rights of citizens to express their opinions and trampling on the freedom of our children.

For the kingpins who make their fortunes oppressing the American people, who are waiting for their moment to put down our movement to unify all Americans against their predations, we say,

“Go ahead. Make my day!”

And for those of you who must watch this as contract workers for private intelligence firms, trying to make ends meet, trying to feed your families—we feel your pain and we are sorrowed by such contradictions. Join with us today for verily, you have nothing to lose but thy chains.

Oh, they were so smart. No one would ever have known what they did. Nor would anyone have ever guessed how the billionaires funneled millions to the kingpins through various shell companies.

But this is about to change, and to change utterly.

I should like to say that in my administration these forces of selfishness and of lust for power will meet their match. And in our nation-wide movement to restore a constitutional republic, to end debt slavery, work slavery and prison slavery, and to rid ourselves forever of the machinations of the parasites, that they will most certainly meet their master.

*

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This article was originally published on Fear No Evil.

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

He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from Children’s Health Defense

All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the Translate Website button below the author’s name.

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***

The US and Iran are in a negotiation to swap five prisoners held in Iran for five prisoners held in the US.

The deal has not been finalized, and the prisoners may not arrive home soon, but the deal has been placed into motion as Iran has transferred the five prisoners to house arrest, some having been transferred out of the infamous Evin prison in Tehran.

Qatar, Oman and Switzerland played a role in the deal, and when it finalizes, $6 billion dollars will be converted to Euros in a South Korean bank account which holds frozen Iranian funds. After the US dollars are converted to Euros, they will then be transferred to a bank in Qatar which will allow Iranian access, but the account will be restricted for food and humanitarian needs. 

Tensions between the US and Iran have escalated since President Trump pulled the US out of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) to ensure that Iran’s nuclear program will be exclusively peaceful which was signed July 14, 2015. Trump’s move was an appeasement to Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu, who has long threatened a military attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities.  With Israel now facing civil war over domestic issues, Netanyahu still threatens an attack to diffuse opposition to his government.

After taking office, President Biden’s administration has sought to come to a new agreement with Iran to curb the enrichment of uranium. However, the negotiations have failed to produce results. Experts have said this latest prisoner swap may be one small step in re-igniting the waning diplomacy between the US and Iran. 

Trump’s decision to leave the JCPOA in 2018 has allowed Iran to escalate its enrichment of uranium to 60% purity, which is short of the 90% needed to produce a nuclear weapon.

Biden has asked Iran to decrease its enrichment of uranium, hand over several American prisoners, pull back its support for Russia, and avoid targeting US forces stationed in the Middle East. Iran has agreed in principle to stop stockpiling uranium enriched to 60%, and is now in the process of a prisoner swap.

Previously, Iran has cooperated with UN nuclear inspectors and provided some information to them concerning past nuclear activities in question. A report by the UN inspectors is expected by the end of this month, perhaps coinciding with the prisoner swap.

Siamak Namazi, 51,  Emad Shargi, 58, and  Morad Tahbaz, 67, are three of the five in the proposed prisoner swap. The name of the fourth and fifth US citizen has not been made public.

Iran’s mission to the UN said,

“As part of a humanitarian cooperation agreement mediated by a third-party government, Iran and the US have agreed to reciprocally release and pardon five prisoners. The transfer of these prisoners to out of prison marks a significant initial step in the implementation of this agreement.”

Tehran scaled back its nuclear program in 2015 in exchange for lifting of international sanctions, but after Trump’s disastrous break with the deal in 2018, he piled on sanctions under his ‘maximum pressure’ policy, and Biden has also continued to impose new sanctions on Iran.

The Chinese brokered agreement between Iran and Saudi Arabia has given hope to the Middle East for a peaceful and prosperous future.

Netanyahu set two main goals for his administration. He wants to sign Saudi Arabia onto the Abraham Accords with Israel, and to vastly expand Jewish settlements on the Occupied West Bank of Palestine. Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia has said no agreement with Israel can be reached until the rights of the Palestinian people have been first met with Israel.

In my personal view, all of the military tension which the US has created in the Middle East lately, by sending the US aircraft carrier with 3,000 Marines onboard to the Arab Gulf, and the military reinforcements to the east of Syria, is designed to promote negotiations on many issues concerning the region and the US role played. 

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This article was originally published on Mideast Discourse.

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

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***

I previously wrote a column marveling at the success of the Bidens in pulling off one of the neatest tricks in political history. I analogized it to how Houdini used to make his 10,000-pound elephant Jennie disappear on a stage in front of a live audience. The media and political establishment is now striving to top that performance by declaring $20 million in payments to Biden family members as an “illusion” of influence. At the heart of this scandal is the BFF, the Biden Family Fund.

Here is the column:

This week, President Joe Biden responded to calls for greater access to the media with a blockbuster interview with . . . the Weather Channel.

The interview immediately prompted critics to speculate that the president wanted to continue to talk about the weather — the same claim made after the disclosure of his participation in various dinners with his son’s foreign associates.

As the number of these dinners, meetings and outings increase, Joe Biden appears to have covered more meteorological subjects than Al Roker.

The problem is that conditions are worsening in Washington.

This week, House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer released a third report on the ongoing investigations into the Biden corruption scandal.

The latest bank records indicate the Biden family has received more than $20 million, including from corrupt Kazakh figures.

Some of this money provided Hunter Biden with extravagant toys. On April 22, 2014, Kazakh oligarch Kenes Rakishev wired $142,300 to the Rosemont Seneca Bohai bank account.

That account then shows the exact same amount being wired to a New Jersey car dealership for a Fisker sports car for Hunter. Finding the Fisker unsuitable, Hunter traded it in for a Porsche.

Notably, these payments often coincided with dinners and meetings with Joe Biden.

Russian oligarch Yelena Baturina, the widow of Moscow ex-Mayor Yury Luzhkov, wired $3.5 million to Rosemont Seneca Thornton Feb. 14, 2014.

She later attended a dinner with Joe and Hunter Biden at Washington, DC, hotspot Café Milano.

For weeks, Joe Biden’s prior claims have been collapsing as his allies in the media and Congress struggle for an alternative spin on these new disclosures.

The president’s denials of any knowledge of his son’s foreign dealings finally have been exposed as a lie.

Even the Washington Post has acknowledged Biden lied when he insisted that Hunter never made any money in China.

It was always a boldfaced falsehood (and a confusing claim from a man who insisted that he had no knowledge of his son’s foreign dealings).

But the testimony of associate Devon Archer and new bank records forced the paper and others to recognize the falsehood.

There is also the confirmation that Biden’s long denials that he attended key dinners with Hunter’s business associates were false.

Most notably, the media are grudgingly admitting that Hunter was openly selling influence peddling and access to his father as part of what Archer called “selling the brand.”

The final line of defense is now that Hunter Biden was selling access to Joe Biden but it was an “illusion.” The reason, they claim, is there is no evidence of direct payments to Joe and Jill Biden.

There is, of course, nothing “illusionary” about tens of millions moving to Hunter and other family members.

But political spins are often built on illusions. The latest is that Joe Biden only benefits from these payments if they were directly deposited in his accounts.

For a family that Hunter explained was “the best” at this type of dealing, it is absurd to expect a deposit slip from a corrupt Ukrainian official to the account of Joe and Jill Biden, one of the most vulnerable accounts in the world to review and monitoring.

These claims, moreover, ignore emails discussing Hunter’s and his father’s use of joint accounts to pay for expenses, including how one account was used to pay Joe’s taxes. There is also Hunter’s complaint that he was using half of his earnings to support his father. Indeed, one trusted FBI informant said that, in planning a bribe, one foreign figure was told to avoid direct payments to Joe Biden. Today, that is as amateurish as an envelope of cash and the Bidens have been in the business of influence peddling for decades.

Responding to the new evidence, Washington Post columnist Phillip Bump led the charge in asking: Where’s the bribe?

In other words, as long as Hunter got the luxury car, Joe didn’t benefit or receive a bribe.

(Notably, Bump did not have the same high standards when he pushed the false claim over a photo op in Lafayette Park and later refused to concede with the rest of the media on the lack of Russian collusion with Donald Trump.)

Not even millions to Biden children and grandchildren would seem to satisfy Bump as an inducement for the then-vice president.

Yet the greatest illusion is the claim Joe Biden would only be motivated by a direct payment to one of his accounts.

Biden clearly benefited from millions going to the Biden Family Fund (BFF). Even grandchildren received some of the transfers funneled through a labyrinth of accounts.

Joe Biden is 80 years old. Despite holding only government jobs in his career, he is worth an estimated $8 million.

Forbes reported he earned $17.3 million over the four years he was out of office. He will never spend his fortune. Any additional money would have to pass to his descendants.

For most wealthy people in their final years, the challenge is not raising more money but getting that money to your children without heavy taxes or delays.

This money was going to his BFF. That is a benefit and probably of greater value to a man of Joe Biden’s age and wealth.

None of this has stopped politicians, press and pundits from insisting that absent a direct payment to the president’s account, there is no corruption or crime.

After all, $20 million going to a president’s family is like complaining about the weather in Washington.

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Jonathan Turley is an attorney and professor at George Washington University Law School.

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***

I am not a big fan of Federal Government disaster relief. Too much of the time the money never gets to those who need it most, and too often Washington’s armies of disaster “experts” are more interested in pushing people around than helping them.

Nevertheless, it’s hard to look at recent footage of the devastation in Maui and then hear President Biden tell Congress that he needs another $24 billion for Ukraine. How can this Administration continue to justify tens of billions of dollars for this losing war that is not in our interest while the rest of the United States disintegrates?

Burned cars, Front Street, Lāhainā (Licensed under the Public Domain)

Biden’s new $24 billion request comes on top of well over $120 billion already spent to fight the US proxy war on Russia in Ukraine. Heritage Foundation budget expert Richard Stern has done the math and determined that Biden’s spending on the Ukraine war thus far will cost each and every American household $900. How many Americans would rather have those $900 dollars back in their pocket rather than in the pockets of Lockheed-Martin, Raytheon, and Ukraine’s oligarchs?

Recent surveys have shown that a majority of Americans could not afford to cover a sudden $1,000 emergency. Will Americans connect the dots and realize that the reason they can’t find that $1,000 for an emergency is because the neocons have already sent it to Ukraine?

Ukraine has long been known as among the most corrupt countries on earth and not long ago investigative journalist Seymour Hersh wrote that Ukrainian president Vladimir Zelensky has embezzled at least $400 million in aid from the American people. Corruption scandals continue to break in Ukraine. Just last week Zelensky fired the heads of all local draft boards for corruption. Some press reports suggest that sales of luxury cars in Ukraine have broken all previous records. I wonder why.

No wonder the tide of US public opinion is turning against further involvement in the war. Recently CNN found that among all Americans, more than 55 percent are opposed to continued aid to Ukraine. Among Republicans the number opposing more aid to Ukraine rises to three-out-of-four. That is why we are finally starting to see more Republican Members raising concerns. I’d like to think they have seen the light that an aggressive and interventionist foreign policy is not in America’s interest, but most likely they are worried about losing elections. Whatever their motivation, this turning tide should be welcomed.

Yet the Biden Administration persists in backing Ukraine even as the US mainstream media is increasingly pointing out the obvious: Ukraine is not winning and cannot win, and continuing to pour money into a losing cause will just result in bankruptcy at home and more dead Ukrainians overseas.

Last week Newsweek published an article asking, “Does Ukraine Have Kompromat on Joe Biden?” In the article, Northeastern University Professor Max Abrahms wonders out loud whether Biden’s continued support for Ukraine might be related to compromising information held in Kiev about the many Biden family shady business ventures in Ukraine and the region. It is certainly worth considering.

Meanwhile, the residents of Maui that survived the recent horrific fire will take little comfort knowing that the Biden Administration is more interested in sending their money to Ukraine than in helping them recover.

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***

Scott Ritter has been a go-to source for information about what has really been happening in the Ukraine War, instead of the spin from the big money media and United States government officials. He has also been a very vocal critic of US government support for the Ukraine government throughout the war.

Thus, it is sadly not a surprise that on Friday Google-owned YouTube deplatformed two shows through which Ritter has been sharing his views. YouTube is no friend of people who challenge US foreign intervention.

Ritter commented on YouTube’s deplatforming of the shows in a Friday Twitter post, stating:

When it rains, it pours. The same day that YouTube deplatformed “The Scott Ritter Show”, they deplatformed “Ask The Inspector.” This is a targeted effort by YouTube to remove/minimize my voice, and those of my guests and the people who took the time to ask probing questions about the pressing issues of the day. Those who are behind this should know—you won’t succeed. There is a vast social media world out there beyond YouTube. And for those voices who still use YouTube as the primary vector to your audience, understand this—conform or perish. If you’re doing a geopolitical show, and you’re still platformed by YouTube, ask yourself why. And be willing to live with the answer. More on this later.

Just short of a year has passed since the first of Ritter’s shows began airing at YouTube.

Concerns about censorship have helped lead some popular communicators to move their primary means of distributing their video messages away from YouTube. For example, Russell Brand and the Ron Paul Institute’s own Ron Paul have moved their shows’ primary distribution from YouTube to Rumble.

Episodes of Ask the Inspector featuring Ritter can be found at Rumble here.

Hopefully, YouTube’s censorship is just a bump in the road and soon Ritter can be sharing his ideas as well as or even better than before.

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***

Dr. William Makis joins Shannon to discuss the tragic body count of vaccine injured that is turning into a massive constituency & voting block.

Also a discussion about shedding & vaccine induced psychosis.

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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.

Price: $11.50 FREE COPY! Click here (docsend) and download.

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***

In the tense relations between Warsaw and Kiev, mistakes can be made that lead to a break, said the former Ukrainian Minister of Economic Development, Trade and Agriculture, Tymofiy Mylovanov, in an article published in the Washington Post.

“I am worried about this because, you know, the history is not given, it’s not predetermined. Actions of individuals, especially political leaders, matter — matter a lot. And I think mistakes could be made, and if mistakes are made, there would be a rift between Poland and Ukraine,” said Mylovanov, head of the Kyiv School of Economics.

In the article, Mylovanov also states that the tense bilateral relations between Warsaw and Kiev show exhaustion, conflict fatigue and “frayed nerves.”

Warsaw previously said that relations with Kiev had deteriorated recently following statements by Ukrainian politicians. One of the contentious issues is Poland’s refusal to open its border to Ukrainian grain. Kiev considers this decision to be populist. Warsaw claims it already helps Ukraine and has the right to protect its agriculture without listening to criticism.

It is recalled that Polish Deputy Foreign Minister Pawel Jablonski told Polish radio on August 2 that “relations with Ukraine at the moment has not been the best lately.”

“I have the impression that there are some emotions. We understand, of course, because the state is under attack, but it should not attack its allies either,” he added.

In response to the grain dispute, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky wrote on X (formerly Twitter) that “political moments” should not dampen relations and “emotions should definitely cool down,” before stressing that Ukraine greatly appreciated “the historical support of Poland, which together with us has become a real shield of Europe.”

“And there cannot be a single crack in this shield,” he added.

Farmers constitute a significant voting bloc in Poland’s ruling Law and Justice party. For this reason, the grain issue is vital for the Polish government, which faces elections on October 15. The ruling party risks losing farmers’ support as the Confederation party has campaigned against the “Ukrainization of Poland,” which includes the influx of Ukrainian grain into the country. According to the latest poll numbers cited by the Washington Post, the Confederation party could decide the upcoming elections, raising concerns that its influence in policymaking will lead to Poland reducing support for Ukraine.

Ukraine had 38 million inhabitants in the last census, and according to the latest data, over eight million Ukrainians left the country, with 1.3-1.4 million refugees currently in Poland. This also means that Ukraine has experienced a significant population drop, making the lack of labour power available impossible to maintain a long war.

In addition, the US, and therefore by extension, Poland, will only support Ukraine if it can financially do so. There are suggestions that Washington could begin scaling back support as next year’s elections approach and support for Ukraine appears to become a central debate point.

It is unlikely the Democratic party want the presidential election campaign marred with war images, mainly because the war would not have been prolonged if the Ukrainian military was not continually supplied by its Western allies with weapons that have not brought any advantage in its attempt to recapture territory from Russian forces. Policymakers in Washington are yet to realise that this is not a classic war, and instead, it is a de facto war of attrition, in which Russia is far more prepared and with far more capacity than Ukraine.

Although the collective West attempted to exhaust Moscow economically, it turned out that the sanctions and the war itself did not harm Russia to the extent that they wanted. Rather Europe, including Poland, felt the impact far worse. Due to this, the war is becoming more expensive for the US and Poland. Considering the approach of the US elections, a ceasefire will likely be called, and the beginning of broader negotiations will follow.

At the same time, Moscow’s recent decision to abandon a United Nations-brokered grain deal to allow shipments from Black Sea ports was opportunely timed by the European Union’s decision to restrict Ukrainian exports to neighbouring countries, especially on Warsaw’s behest. This further pressured the already shattered Ukrainian economy, making Warsaw’s frustrations a priority for Kiev to alleviate. Grain is just one issue, though, as the dispute now also focuses on poultry and soft fruit, such as raspberries and currants.

The EU’s Agriculture Commissioner Janusz Wojciechowski said on July 25 that extending the safeguard measures to these products could be an option. However, Polish agricultural minister Robert Telus clarified that there would be no need to include new commodities in the EU restrictions at least “until the end of the year.”

“I hope that this will be extended, but if it is not, Poland will still have to tackle the issue, and we have demonstrated we can do that,” Telus added. 

All this points to Poland becoming frustrated with Ukraine and perhaps even wanting to seek a way to slowly reduce its support for the country, given the inevitability of the US scaling back support and Russia’s ultimate victory.

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Ahmed Adel is a Cairo-based geopolitics and political economy researcher.

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***

What Senator Menendez demands is nothing short of a soft coup brought about by voluntarily reversing Kyrgyzstan’s recent “Democratic Security” successes under the Damocles’ sword of “security and economic” consequences if it dares to refuse. If he has his way, then suspected Color Revolutionaries will be released from prison, Western “NGO” intel fronts will be allowed to meddle with impunity, and their allied propaganda outlets will once again incessantly spew anti-state disinformation for provoking riots.

Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee Bob Menendez conveyed his country’s intentions to overthrow the Kyrgyz government in the letter that he sent to President Sadyr Japarov last week. It’s even more damning than the newly leaked Pakistani cable from March 2022 regarding US pressure over Russia that implicated a leading diplomat in that country’s post-modern coup one month later. The present piece will point out the threats in Menendez’s letter and place them in the geostrategic context.

Right off the bat, he declared that “I write to you with deep concern regarding allegations of the Government of the Kyrgyz Republic’s assistance to the Russian Federation, or its proxies, in evading international sanctions, imposed with respect to Russia’s unlawful invasion of Ukraine.” This follows Kyrgyzstan’s foiled coup attempt in early June that was analyzed here and the Washington Post’s (WaPo) report last month on its role in facilitating Russia’s purchase of Western-sanctioned tech from China.

That way that events have thus far unfolded strongly suggests that the failed effort to overthrow the Kyrgyz government just two months ago was intended to punish it for allegedly violating the West’s anti-Russian sanctions regime. Afterwards, WaPo published their report to precondition the public to think that Kyrgyzstan is turning into a “rogue state”, which was meant to make the target audience more likely to accept Menendez’s threatening letter and the US-orchestrated destabilization campaign that’ll follow.

President Japarov (right) with Vladimir Putin and other post-Soviet leaders at the 2023 Moscow Victory Day Parade (Licensed under CC BY 4.0)

The Senator continued by writing that

“I urge the Kyrgyz government to swiftly investigate these allegations and to establish more reliable processes to prevent the illicit flow of goods through your territory bound for Russia. I am also concerned that the Kyrgyz Republic’s failure to uphold international sanctions reflects the alarming erosion in democratic governance and extensive human rights violations occurring in the country.”

Kyrgyzstan doesn’t have to initiate any investigation on any country’s demand, but even if it was driven to do so by the desire to de-escalate rapidly worsening political tensions with the US, this would be futile unless it went along with the narrative that it allegedly violated the West’s anti-Russian sanctions. Anything less would be dismissed as a “sham” and exploited as the pretext to impose even more pressure upon it, which brings the analysis around to the next part of Menendez’s statement.

His unsolicited commentary on Kyrgyzstan’s domestic affairs takes WaPo’s preconditioning even further by making explicit what was previously only implied about that country becoming a “rogue state”. After once again lambasting it for allegedly violating the West’s unilateral restrictions, he then defends them on the grounds that they’re “a vital tool in holding Vladimir Putin to account and reducing threats to the sovereignty, independence, and territorial integrity of other nations, including those in Central Asia.

All of this built up to the threat that he then conveyed in his letter when writing that

“In the face of potential threats from Russia, the United States remains steadfast in our support of upholding the sovereignty and independence of nations like the Kyrgyz Republic. However, assisting or permitting systemic sanctions evasion by Russia weakens their effectiveness, which could put at risk the security and economic interests of the Kyrgyz people.”

Menendez’s twisted logic is that the US imposed its anti-Russian sanctions on the partial pretext of supposedly defending Kyrgyzstan’s “sovereignty and independence” from Moscow without ever having asked Bishkek ahead of time and now it claims that the latter’s alleged violation of them will endanger it. Objectively speaking, “the security and economic interests of the Kyrgyz people” are “put at risk” by capitulating to American pressure dump their Russian ally, not strengthening ties with it.

The only realistic way in which Kyrgyzstan’s aforesaid interests “could be put at risk” by defying the US’ demands is if Washington ramps up its support for Color Revolution agents and rebels/militants/terrorists in parallel with imposing crushing secondary sanctions in response. These scenarios would have remained speculative and the Mainstream Media could have gaslit that they’re “conspiracy theories” had Menendez not threatened that these same interests might soon be harmed.

He then went for the kill shot:

“Furthermore, I fear that Kyrgyzstan’s failure to uphold international sanctions on Russia is simply a symptom of its continued democratic backsliding and widespread human rights violations. Your government has weakened institutions, repeatedly violated the rights of journalists and independent media, harassed human rights defenders, and placed restrictions on civil society actors.

A once shining beacon of democracy in Central Asia, the Kyrgyz Republic is headed down a dangerous path toward autocracy. I urge you to lift all restrictions on independent media and journalists, release imprisoned human rights defenders, and repeal measures restricting fundamental freedoms such as the freedom of association.”

This is a de facto declaration of Hybrid War.

What Menendez demands is nothing short of a soft coup brought about by voluntarily reversing Kyrgyzstan’s recent “Democratic Security” successes under the Damocles’ sword of “security and economic” consequences if it dares to refuse. The preceding concept refers to the wide range of counter-Hybrid Warfare tactics and strategies that President Japarov employed to safeguard his country’s national model of democracy from associated threats.

If Menendez has his way, however, then suspected Color Revolutionaries will be released from prison, Western “NGO” intel fronts will be allowed to meddle with impunity, and their allied propaganda outlets will once again incessantly spew anti-state disinformation for provoking riots. He then ended his letter on an ominous note by writing that “Your government’s commitment to these matters is critical for the security and prosperity of the Kyrgyz people. We look forward to receiving your prompt response.”

Neighboring Kazakhstan has already capitulated to American pressure to informally take its side over Russia’s in the New Cold War as proven by its partial compliance with the West’s sanctions regime. It also refuses to close its over $100 million biosecurity laboratory that’s funded by the US. Furthermore, the latest news that it’ll host Microsoft’s regional hub was met with harsh criticism from Moscow after Deputy Foreign Minister Mikhail Galuzin described these plans as serving the US’ intelligence interests.

By contrast, Kyrgyzstan refuses to follow in Kazakhstan’s footsteps and remains committed to maximizing the mutual benefits from its strategic partnership with Russia, which is all the more impressive when remembering that it’s smaller, less developed, and historically more unstable than its northern neighbor. Moscow appreciates this display of sovereignty and is actively implementing workarounds to retain trade with Bishkek in the event that Astana’s compliance with Western sanctions ends up impeding this.

The Governor of Astrakhan Region announced the creation last month of the “Southern Transport Corridor” across the Caspian Sea, which is more expensive and time-consuming than trading with the Central Asian Republics across Kazakhstan but makes up for these costs by being outside of US influence. As this analysis already explained, Kyrgyzstan is a stalwart Russian ally, just like the rest of the region remains apart from newly wayward and increasingly treacherous Kazakhstan.

For these reasons, Russia is expected to help those four countries withstand the “security and economic” punishments that the US might soon inflict on them for their brave defiance of its sanctions pressure, beginning with Kyrgyzstan. Its potential descent into Hybrid War havoc could have far-reaching consequences for all of Central Asia due to the very high risk of overspill, which is why it’s imperative for Russia to thwart the US’ impending destabilization plans lest a “second containment front” emerge.

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

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

He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

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***

So, my friends and comrades in virtually the entire Pakistani Left spent more than a year mocking at least 80 percent of the country’s population for believing former Prime Minister Imran Khan about American ‘interference’ (to put it mildly) in Pakistan’s internal politics, and more specifically about removing him from office.

My comrades’ contributions to political life since Khan was ousted from power in April of 2022 have been a fanatical obsession with the man, an understandable deeply emotional envy of the tens of millions of people he was mobilizing, and a crazed fixation to convince the ‘Western Left’ that Khan isn’t really that popular (Democracy Now) and is no ‘anti-imperialist hero’ (Jacobin) – who cares about engaging other outsiders like suffering Kashmiris or Palestinians under occupation for whom Khan took a strong stand (apparently the ‘Western Left’ is just much more important). I guess my comrades thought that these were the most productive strategies to ‘liberate’ the Pakistani ‘working class.’

Ultimately, the Left with which I’ve always identified has facilitated not merely the return of the ‘ancien regime’ of kleptocratic politicians and an all-powerful military establishment, but the most fascist face of these two forces that the country has ever witnessed. We are now in a ruthless military dictatorship which is wholeheartedly supported by the two dynastic political parties akin to more like personal feudal fiefdoms which have taken turns in plundering and impoverishing the country since the late 1980s/early 1990s.

The new fascist regime has decimated the, by far and away, largest and most popular political party in the country, disappeared, arrested, illegally detained, tortured, sexually abused, and killed tens of thousands of not primarily men, but women, children, and the elderly – anyone that even remotely had any association with Khan’s political party, which included mothers, grand-mothers, children, neighbors, friends, etc. All of this was done in a deliberate and calculated way, and even though Democracy Now informed us that Khan’s views on women are identical to the Taliban, the majority of supporters of Khan are women, not men.

Pakistani journalists have been hunted down and killed as far away as in Kenya, forget about their mass disappearances, torture, and killing within Pakistan itself. And the final act being, since they failed in their assassination attempts, to throw Khan in a remote, wretched jail cell in which he can barely fit – to thoroughly and barbarically humiliate him.

The point was to strike so much terror in the population, and to show us that if this can be done to Imran Khan, then anyone and everyone is fair game to be disappeared, tortured, or killed.

Where has our Left been during all of this? Why were my comrades not confronting the ‘establishment’ we’ve always railed against? You had the most direct and persistent people’s confrontation with the sadistic military elite in the nation’s history (joined by many soldiers and junior and mid-rank officers, many former students of mine), and there was an astonishing absence of any of our Left in this struggle of many months.

This has and has not been about Khan. This is about Khan because he helped to politicize a society, the level of mass politicization not seen since the late 1960s/early 1970s. The popular reaction to his ouster from power, unlike any previous ouster of the country’s prime ministers (all of which elicited absolute indifference from the population precisely because civilian rule was not different for them from military rule – both were equally corrupt and repressive), literally shocked everyone (including Khan himself): tens of millions of people mobilizing and demonstrating in every corner of the country of 240 million.

And it is not about Khan because, since April 2022, each month you could see a population (the vast majority demonstrating were not card-carrying members of Khan’s party and had myriad criticisms of his term in power) becoming even more radically opposed to the cruelties and injustices of the social and political order – a situation which the Left could have completely taken advantage of to sharpen popular analysis and help organize and mobilize more effectively. There has been no moment more opportune for the country’s Left to help radically undermine the political status quo that has been the norm virtually since the nation’s birth in 1947, and have popular engagement – to make the case for more progressive values – as they struggle in solidarity with the bulk of the country’s population.

But that was not to be since, from the beginning, the Left dismissed Khan as the ‘military’s puppet’ simply because he and the military high command, at ONE particular moment in 2018, agreed on ONE single issue: ending the US occupation of Afghanistan. It was an absurd analysis of the most popular political and public personality – by far – in the country. And it was a convenient way to not only do nothing, but ridicule and mock (especially the youth and students) who were involved in these mobilizations.

Finally, the silence of Western governments and Western media on this barbaric period of military brutality in the fifth largest country in the world, nuclear-armed, contrasted with the obsession with a bloodless coup in Niger which seems either welcomed or just shown indifference by the majority of that country’s population, tells you everything how the Deepest State made sure its vassal Deep State resolve the ‘Khan problem’ once and for all.

Friends, imperialism and its domestic enforcers/torturers have taken my country to a period of darkness that I have never witnessed.

(The government in Pakistan has now blocked access to The Intercept for this exposé. This 20 minute video (see below) by the Intercept’s co-author Ryan Grim is an attempt at a workaround.)

سائفر کے مطالق مکمل کہانی منظر عام پے آگئی، شکر ہے کہ سلیم صافی صاحب سے جان چھوٹ گیئ، وعدے کے مطابق وہ صحافت سے دستبرداری کا اعلام کرنگے کہ نہیں؟
زیادہ سے زیادہ شئر کرے pic.twitter.com/MyHKJ6IdFX

— Aqssss (@AqssssFajr) August 9, 2023

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

Featured image is from Andrew Korybko

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