Monday was the twenty-fourth consecutive day of the Israeli occupation forces’ aerial, ground, and naval bombardment of northern Gaza. The siege has included blocking supplies of food, water, medicine, and fuel, destroying homes, demolishing entire residential blocks, attacking hospitals, and assassinating individuals trying to escape.

Over 1,000 Palestinians have been killed since Israel began its siege of northern Gaza.

In Gaza, at least 41 Palestinians were killed and 113 wounded in the latest 24-hour reporting period, the health ministry reported.

In Lebanon, at least 20 people were killed in Israeli airstrikes on Monday, according to Lebanese media. Three of the dead were paramedics.

Medical Teams Needed in North Gaza Hospital After Israeli Raid, Health Ministry Says

The Ministry of Health in Gaza Monday appealed to international organizations to quickly send surgical teams to Kamal Adwan Hospital in the northern Gaza Strip, after the occupation arrested and deported all the medical staff present in the hospital, leaving only one pediatrician.

The ministry urged anyone with surgical skills to join the hospital to save whoever they can.

Israeli occupation forces besieged the hospital last week and forced displaced families who had taken shelter there, and wounded Palestinians seeking treatment out of it. Men and young boys were stripped and detained, while women and young children were forced to walk towards southern Gaza.

Medical teams were detained and taken away by the occupation leaving the wounded with no one to care for them.

Occupation forces withdrew from the hospital on Saturday after causing severe damage to the building and bombing its oxygen supply.

UNRWA Outlawed – US “Concerned”

Israeli lawmakers vote to ban UN agency for Palestinian refugees

The Israeli Knesset on 28 October passed two laws banning the UN Agency for Palestinian Refugees (UNRWA) from operating inside Israel, Gaza, the occupied West Bank, and occupied East Jerusalem.

In a 92-10 vote, the Knesset approved the first law, which says that the UN agency cannot “operate any institution, provide any service, or conduct any activity, whether directly or indirectly.” Moments later, lawmakers voted 87-9 for the second law, which states that no Israeli government official or agency may contact UNRWA, effectively prohibiting Israeli officials from providing services or dealing with UN employees.

Ahead of the Knesset vote, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres called the bills a “catastrophe.”

UNRWA was created over 70 years ago to provide essential services — education, healthcare, and emergency aid — to Palestinian refugees across Gaza, the West Bank, and neighboring countries following the Nakba and colonization of Palestinian land by Jewish settlers.

U.S. “Deeply Concerned” New Israeli Laws Will Worsen Gaza Crisis

The Biden administration is “deeply concerned” that two bills passed by the Israeli Knesset on Monday will exacerbate the already dire humanitarian crisis in Gaza and harm Palestinians in East Jerusalem and the West Bank, a State Department spokesman told reporters – at a time when than 1.8 million people across Gaza are experiencing high levels of acute food insecurity.

The U.S. and other Western countries pressed Israel not to move forward with the bills against the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA). Their passage will likely increase pressure on the Biden administration to suspend military assistance to Israel.

Israel has long opposed UNRWA, and has claimed some of the agency’s staff took part in the Oct. 7 attack. UNRWA has repeatedly denied allegations of the agency having widespread links to Hamas, and a UN-appointed independent commission in April said Israel “had yet to provide supporting evidence” of its claims.

Two weeks ago Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin sent a letter to Israeli leaders demanding Israel take steps within 30 days to improve humanitarian conditions in Gaza or risk the supply of U.S. weapons to Israel being affected. The letter also expressed their concern about the UNRWA bills, as well as a warning of policy implications should those bills pass.

The two bills will take effect in 90 days, during which time Netanyahu said Israel will “work with our international partners to ensure Israel continues to facilitate humanitarian aid to civilians in Gaza in a way that does not threaten Israel’s security.”

US president Joe Biden said on Monday, “We need a cease-fire. This war should end.”

Israel’s Netanyahu Rejects Egyptian Cease-fire Initiative in Gaza

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu rejected an initiative proposed by Egypt on Sunday for a short-term cease-fire with Hamas in the Gaza Strip.

Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi announced the proposal, according to Israeli media.

“We proposed a cease-fire in the Gaza Strip for two days to exchange four (Israeli) hostages for some (Palestinian) prisoners, and then negotiations would take place over 10 days to turn the cease-fire into a permanent truce,” al-Sisi said during a joint press conference with Algerian President Abdelmadjid Tebboune in the capital Cairo.

Despite the support of most Israeli ministers for the Egyptian proposal, Tel Aviv decided to reject the deal due to opposition from Netanyahu, who emphasized that “negotiations will take place only under fire,” according to Israel’s Channel 12.

Jailed Palestinian Leader Marwan Barghouti Brutally Assaulted at Israeli Prison

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Featured image: Philippe Lazzarini, Commissioner-General of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) holds press conference in Jerusalem on October 27, 2023 [Mostafa Alkharouf/Anadolu Agency]

An October 27th Times of Israel reports that Israel’s IDF airstrike against Iran late Friday-early Saturday was a complete and rousing success:

Israel’s widespread airstrikes in Iran on Saturday crippled Iran’s ability to produce long-range ballistic missiles in a blow that will be hard and time-consuming to recover from, and rendered crucial energy facilities vulnerable to future attacks by destroying air defense batteries protecting them, according to multiple reports citing Israeli, American and Iranian officials, as well as satellite images analyzed by experts.

On Saturday night October 26th the Jerusalem Post headline boasted:

‘Backbone of Iran’s missile industry’ destroyed by IAF strikes on Islamic Republic

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Screenshot from Jerusalem Post

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Afraid of losing their precious USA-made warplanes if they dared venture flying directly over Iran, Israeli pilots chose to use safely guarded Iraqi airspace, compliments of the illegal US military occupiers still entrenched on Iraqi soil years after losing the Iraq War over a decade ago, falsely justifying the US military presence in Iraq to remove the final vestiges of ISIS terrorists. Total bullshit.

People with half a brain at this stage of the US long war know that US and Israel created, financed, armed and supported ISIS terrorists just like al Qaeda terrorists before them as their proxy war Middle East ally. That’s why the US continues to violate Iraq’s sovereignty, totally disregarding its demand to remove US military from Iraq, in addition to US providing logistical support for America’s chief terrorist ally in the Middle East – Israel.  So, over a hundred US-made F-35 stealth fighter jets piloted by Israeli Air Force last weekend, assisted by US refuel tankers over Iraq, were able to provide safe enough distance and cover away from Iran’s solid, still intact air defense system to launch Israel’s air-to-air ballistic missiles at targets deep inside Iran.

Even prior to the IDF attack on Iran, Israel made sure that Axios relayed that “fair-minded” Israel warned Iran of the attack before its launch, warning not to retaliate. During the 4-hour period early Saturday morning, three waves of IDF fighter aircraft attempted to strike 20 strategic military targets in and around the capital Tehran, along with military targets in southwestern and western Iran, ostensibly to weaken the Islamic Republic’s air defense system safeguarding its nuclear sites and oilfields. Without directly attacking Iran’s nuclear and energy infrastructure, allegedly in compliance with US pressure, not that higher paygrade Israel ever pays attention to feeble US paper tiger’s wish list, Western press maintains that Israel focused on successfully crippling Iran’s air defense and missile production. Again, complete face-saving fabrication.

Israel’s public broadcaster Kan claimed that Israel’s advancing progress over the last two decades enabled its “much greater freedom of operation for Israeli warplanes in striking Iran.” Yeah, due solely to the Jewish State hiding behind the illegal cover of the US military embedded permanently inside Iraq. Israeli press are such bxllshxxters, just like joined at the Zionist Jew hip USA press. Hitting drone and missile producing targets in Iran, the US/Israel side is boasting how this decisive IDF precision attack sparing Iran civilians and killing only four Iranian soldiers has effectively neutralized Iran’s air defense capabilities, now rendered far weaker in anticipation of the direct war escalating against Tehran. Again, Israel insists that virtually all its missiles penetrated Iran’s nearly depleted air defenses. Via the Saturday October 26th New York Times:

Israel’s attacks on Iran early Saturday destroyed air-defense systems set up to protect several critical oil and petrochemical refineries, as well as systems guarding a large gas field and a major port in southern Iran, according to three Iranian officials and three senior Israeli defense officials.

All this hyperbole marveling Israel’s strategic triumph over Iran is the incessant, nonstop Zionist-controlled,  media lies to cover up actual on the ground reality that the frontlines in both the Middle East and Ukraine are growing abysmally bleak for the US and its diehard genocidal nation allies Israel and Ukraine.

What actually is far more likely to have occurred during those early morning hours last Saturday is Israel’s failed suppression of Iran’s air defense system that effectively intercepted a vast majority of incoming IDF missiles, so much so that a far more concentrated, protracted Jewish State swarm attack plan had to be aborted. Despite MSM’s hyped falsehoods surrounding Israel’s mission success in Iran, any actual damage inflicted was minimal. Despite the hundred IDF warplanes, only about 20 missiles were fired, causing negligible damage limited to a few radar installations in western Iran near the Iraqi border.

Despite all the government/media lies, the US-backed wars in Ukraine and Israel are both fast sinking into irreversible defeat, mired in unwinnable wars against Russia and Iran. Netanyahu’s vow to obliterate Hamas has totally backfired, and every time IDF airstrikes savagely pulverize more schools, refugee tent camps and hospitals, Hamas resistance fighters continue defending their homeland, inflicting more Israeli casualties.

Image: Slaughterhouse – by Mr. Fish

Regarding Hezbollah and the US/Israel desperation to ignite another illegal color revolution in Lebanon, or for that matter elsewhere in the former-Soviet state of Georgia, they fail. Bibi the Butcher will never be able to bring back those 60,000 displaced Israeli citizens to their northern Israel homes. His campaign on both fronts are doomed and like a cornered rat, his only move is to desperately widen the war knowing that vassal USA will join his Zionist vs. Islam Third World War.

Thus, the government of Israel, like the United States, lie through their teeth 100% of the time because no nations getting their ass kicked, fast going down in deliberate ruin, can honestly, publicly admit it. Face-saving deception is all they’re left dishing out. Everything coming out of the West’s Mockingbird media today, be it Israel, US or EU, particularly when it comes to wars, must be taken with a grain of salt, deemed not credible or trustworthy whatsoever. The annual Gallup poll results released last Friday found that only 31% of US respondents trust mainstream media at all, the lowest on historical record.

The Zionist owned and controlled fascist Western governments married to their Zionist owned fascist propagandist news media outlets, all five of them monopolizing the MSM airwaves, are forbidden to ever admit the truth. By deliberate, diabolical design, every conflict and war the City of London moneychangers finance and create since World War II is intentionally lost on purpose. To this point, it’s now nearly a full decade since I wrote a Global Research article entitled “Why the United States Always Loses Its Wars,” asserting in the opening paragraph:

In violation of all ethical precepts and all international laws, the sole global superpower citing its impunity through exceptionalism hypocritically insists it can maintain its moral high ground in its relentless pursuit of regime changes anywhere it so chooses on earth. We are the global village bully that’s hated by much of the world. And it’s pure self-aggrandizing bullshit to perpetrate the myth that America is hated because of our ‘freedom,’ another rhetorical brainwashing lie. We now live in a fascist totalitarian police state run by a globalized crime syndicate of the central banking cabal. As of last April [2014] per a Princeton-Northwestern study, the US has officially been designated an oligarchy.

The writing on the wall was more than clear ten years ago. Likewise, today’s two Western backed wars in Ukraine and Middle East are two more in the latest losing propositions going down in flames, joining this ever-long list of disastrous US foreign war defeats committed in our name by malific intended design, central to centuries ago, long-plotted moneychangers’ agenda to throw the West under the bus.

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This article was originally published on The Government Rag.

Joachim Hagopian is a West Point graduate, former Army officer and author of “Don’t Let the Bastards Getcha Down” exposing a faulty US military leadership system based on ticket punching up the seniority ladder, invariably weeding out the best and brightest, leaving mediocrity and order followers rising to the top as politician-bureaucrat generals designated to lose every modern US war by elite design. After the military, Joachim earned a master’s degree in Clinical Psychology and worked as a licensed therapist in the mental health field with abused youth and adolescents for more than a quarter century.

Joachim has written hundreds of articles for many news sites, including Global Researchlewrockwell.com and currently https//jameshfetzer.orgInteldrop.org and https://thegovernmentrag.com. As a published author of a 5-book volume series entitled Pedophilia & Empire: Satan, Sodomy & the Deep State, Joachim’s books and chapters are Amazon bestsellers in child advocacy and human rights categories. His A-Z sourcebook series fully document and expose the global pedophilia scourge and remain available free at https://pedoempire.org/content s/. Joachim also hosts the weekly Revolution Radio broadcast “Cabal Empire Exposed” on Friday morning at 7AM EST (ID: revradio, password: rocks!)

Featured image is from TGR

Ukraine is struggling to recruit troops to reinforce its front lines amid thousands of casualties in nearly three years of conflict. Under these conditions, the Kiev regime is hunting for recruits in places that were once off-limit, such as “upscale venues,” whilst also becoming increasingly reliant on foreign mercenaries to perform special operations.

According to the Wall Street Journal, the Kiev regime has expanded its search network for military recruits to include “upscale venues” and “nightlife spots,” which is creating more social tension.

Even as Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky tries to secure more weapons and security guarantees from the US government, the “biggest immediate problem” in Ukraine is recruiting more soldiers, the US outlet said. To deal with this issue, the Kiev regime recently lowered the age of compulsory military service to 25 and imposed additional penalties for draft dodgers, seeking to bring more soldiers to the front lines in the face of advancing Russian forces.

However, the newspaper said that most of the men who wanted to join the Ukrainian armed forces had already done so, while others had fled the country or were in hiding to avoid being drafted. Some prominent figures, including state prosecutors, are also avoiding joining the military by claiming medical exemptions.

The Wall Street Journal reported that the military is stepping up its recruitment campaigns in public places in the capital and other major cities. Military agents check concert halls, grocery stores, and even luxury restaurants in the port city of Odessa.

Mathieu Boulègue, a researcher at the Transatlantic Defence and Security Programme at the Centre for European Political Analysis, believes “there is no easy solution” to Ukraine’s troop shortage.

“That is unfortunately a critical issue that you cannot solve by sending stuff over, short of sending Western troops,” the researcher told the American outlet.

Some Ukrainian officials, cited by the outlet, said they were building up reserves of conscripts to replace those who had lost their jobs. However, they warned that mobilising new troops would not be effective without “more Western supplies to arm new recruits properly.”

The deployment of new Ukrainian troops is not just a military problem for Kiev, the Wall Street Journal noted, but also a growing social and political issue for Zelensky.

“Among soldiers who have been serving on the front line for nearly three years, resentment is building against men avoiding military service,” while scandals continue to emerge involving officials who allegedly accept bribes to grant exemptions.

For this reason, the Kiev regime is increasingly reliant on foreign mercenaries to perform military operations since the citizenry does not provide enough soldiers. In effect, the presence of foreign mercenaries demonstrates the extreme shortage of experienced troops in Ukraine.

In the latest example, foreign mercenaries from the US, Canada and Poland, likely on a sabotage mission or raid, attempted to breach Russia’s Bryansk Oblast on October 27. The special operations mission the mercenaries were assigned required highly skilled operators capable of sabotage or reconnaissance, so given the lack of such people in the Ukrainian military, it is reasonable that they would turn to foreigners.

Emphasising this point is the fact a tattoo was discovered on the body of one of the eliminated foreigners, indicating that he was a member of the elite 75th Ranger Regiment of the US Army.

The discovery of the mercenary group makes a mockery of the West’s claim that soldiers from North Korea are fighting in Ukraine since it is Ukraine suffering from a shortage of troops and relying on foreigners. In fact, it is clear that the West planned the operation rather than Ukraine.

While South Korea and the Kiev regime spread fake news that North Korean troops are fighting in Ukraine, about 15,000 mercenaries from more than 100 countries have arrived in the country since February 2022 to join Ukrainian forces.

According to a Russian Defence Ministry report, Western secret services recruit mercenaries through the US private military companies Academi (formerly Blackwater), Cubic, Dark Horse Benefits, Dean Corporation, Forward Observations Group, Hyperion Services, and Sons of Liberty International, as well as the Polish ASBS Othago and the European Security Academy. At the same time, mercenaries are recruited by neo-Nazi and right-wing organisations from Germany, Italy, Portugal and other countries.

With Ukraine’s best troops dead, wounded or exhausted, the Kiev regime is now hunting for recruits all over the country, including in places that were once considered off-limits. This only deepens Kiev’s reliance on foreign mercenaries and, more importantly, demonstrates the hopeless position that the regime is in.

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This article was originally published on InfoBrics.

Ahmed Adel is a Cairo-based geopolitics and political economy researcher. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from Bumble Dee/Shutterstock

Hezbollah and Lebanon After Nasrallah

October 30th, 2024 by Steven Sahiounie

Many expected Hezbollah to dissolve into disarray after its leader, Hassan Nasrallah, was assassinated on September 27 by Israeli airstrikes, but Hezbollah fights on in Lebanon and has increased its attacks on Israel since Nasrallah’s death. Nasrallah’s death motivated the armed fighters to avenge the death of their charismatic leader who began his leadership in 1992.

Israel announced on October 27, that five of the IDF were killed in Lebanon fighting Hezbollah, bringing to 37 the death toll for soldiers fighting there since the start of ground operations in Southern Lebanon on September 30.

According to the BBC, eight IDF were killed fighting Hezbollah inside Lebanon on October 3, marking Israel’s first losses in Lebanon.

According to Hezbollah sources, the number of IDF killed is 90, with 750 injured. The equipment losses are 38 Merkava tanks, 4 wheel loaders, 1 hummer, 1 armored vehicle, 1 troop transport, 3 drones, 3 Hermes 450, and 1 Hermes 900.These equipment losses are the result of hand-to-hand combat and do not include Hezbollah attacks on Israeli military bases.

According to the Lebanese Health Ministry, at least 2,672 people have been killed and 12,468 injured in Lebanon. Political analysts have thought there will be no ceasefire in either Gaza or Lebanon until after the US election next week. With the Oval Office flying on auto-pilot, Netanyahu has a fully charged green light to pursue his military goals at the expense of the US taxpayer.

Image source

US Special Envoy, Amos Hochstein, has been on a shuttle diplomacy mission to secure a ceasefire in Lebanon. He is trying to sell a US-Israeli deal that will strip Hezbollah of weapons, and put the Lebanese Army in southern Lebanon, while Hezbollah withdraws its forces north of the Litani River.

Hochstein is in Tel Aviv today, and officials in Beirut are awaiting his next visit.

The current and ongoing conflict is referred to as the Third Lebanon War, following Israeli invasions in 1982 and 2006 that proved to be failures for Israel militarily. The 1982 Israeli invasion, the Hezbollah resistance group, as a response to the brutal Israeli occupation of the south of Lebanon lasted from 1982 to 2000. It was the resistance that was successful in driving out the Israeli occupation army, but a small area on the border, Shebaa Farms, remains occupied by Israel.

Hezbollah has vowed to stop all attacks on Israel if a ceasefire is agreed on in Gaza, where 40,000 Palestinians have been killed, with at least half identified as women and children. The suffering in Lebanon is connected to the suffering in Gaza.

From the outset of violence beginning on October 7, 2023, the US and the international community have been urging a ceasefire in Gaza to release the hostages, and to end the genocide in Gaza. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu opposed a ceasefire because he had not yet realized a military goal. He intends to complete the ethnic cleansing of Gaza by removing all Palestinians remaining from Gaza, and to eliminate all Hamas leaders, fighters, and weapons. Israeli families of the hostages have demanded their government make a deal to release the hostages, but Netanyahu will not bend. He is willing to have his citizens pay the price in blood for his plan to annex Gaza. To Netanyahu, and his co-conspirators, Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben Gvir, the end justifies the means. Netanyahu and his supporters, like the US government, will argue the death and destruction in Gaza and Lebanon is justified to bring security to the Israeli people. But, security experts will say there can be no security in Israel without the security of the Palestinian people.

Without a home and human rights, the Palestinian people, and their supporters, will continue to fight for freedom and self-determination regardless of how high the walls are. Experts in Lebanon point out that Israel and the US have miscalculated the effect of the pagers and walkie-talkie explosions on September 17 and 18. The enemies of Hezbollah were sure this would be the Lebanese resistance group’s downfall.

The collective ‘West’ has not understood the ideology of resistance to the Israeli occupation of Palestine. The ideology of resistance doesn’t belong to a certain group, religion, or country. It is across the Middle East, spanning Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Gaza, and the Occupied West Bank.

Iran and Turkey are also pro-Palestinian and support the resistance, though they are not part of the Arab world. Lebanon is about 43% Christian and 57% Muslim. The support for the resistance is found across religious groups. The detractors of Hezbollah feel Lebanon should not link itself to the cause of resistance, and should decouple its political agenda from supporting the people in Gaza and the Occupied West Bank. Those who oppose Hezbollah may support the cause of resistance but oppose the costs brought to bear by the Lebanese people.

The members of the UN who have voted against Israel and the US represent the majority of countries, and peoples of the globe. Israel and the US are an isolated partnership on the global diplomatic stage. Hezbollah is a Lebanese Shia Islamist political party and resistance group. Its military wing is the Jihad Council, and its political wing is the Loyalty to the Resistance Bloc party in the Lebanese Parliament.

Before October 7, 2023, its armed strength was assessed to be equivalent to that of a medium-sized army. There is only one solution to dismantling Hezbollah, Hamas, or any other Pro-Palestinian resistance group.

The UN resolution, which is decades old and gathering dust, is the two-state solution with Israel respecting the 1967 borders with Palestine, and handing back the Golan Heights to Syria, and the Shebaa Farms to Lebanon. The call for resistance will be over globally if the two-state solution is realized.

When the occupation of Palestine is ended, and Israelis and Palestinians can live side by side with equal rights, then both communities will be secure, peaceful, and prosperous. Until that day, the Israeli people will never be secure, because their neighbors are not secure.

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This article was originally published on Mideast Discourse.

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

Featured image source

There exists a significant amount of literature and debate regarding modernity, urbanisation and social change in India. Critical inquiries persist, not least on the impact of change on the daily lives of individuals and the ways in which they navigate their identities amid the tensions between modernity and tradition in an increasingly dynamic urban environment.

At the heart of this urban landscape are the working poor, who play a crucial role in India’s economy. Engaged in diverse occupations, such as construction, goods transport, waste recycling, domestic service and street vending, their contributions are vital for the functioning of the economy.    

Informal workers constitute more than 90 per cent of the labour force (80 per cent in urban settings). However, the informal sector is characterised by challenging working conditions that include strenuous manual labour, low remuneration, extended hours and a lack of workplace benefits.

This stark reality of the informal sector stands in direct contrast to the expansive cyber parks and modern shopping malls that epitomise India’s uneven ‘development’ — a concept that suggests modernisation often occurs in isolated sectors, leaving substantial portions of the population relatively untouched. This is particularly evident in the retail landscape, where traditional and modern forms of commerce coexist, often in uneasy tension.

On one hand, there is a concerning proliferation of organised retail and (monopolistic) online commerce platforms, representing one aspect of Indian consumerism. On the other hand, local street markets and vendors — integral components of the informal sector — remain a longstanding and vital feature of Indian urban life.

Despite the encroachment of modern retail, these traditional markets continue to thrive, facilitating a direct connection between rural producers and urban consumers, particularly concerning fresh produce. This farm-to-table model not only sustains millions of livelihoods within the informal sector, but it is also deeply embedded in Indian culinary culture, highlighting the ongoing relevance of these markets within urban neighbourhoods. The persistence of such traditional forms of commerce alongside modern retail outlets highlights the interplay between tradition and modernity in India’s urban economic landscape.

Culturally, India presents a distinctive scenario. Unlike many Western contexts where religion is often compartmentalised, spiritual practices and symbols are intricately interwoven into public life. The integration of sacred and secular elements persists despite the influences of modernity, urbanisation and global consumerism.

While societal structures may evolve externally, fundamental cultural and spiritual values remain deeply entrenched. Indian urbanism allows for the coexistence of age-old practices with contemporary realities; tradition and modernity, spirituality and materialism exist together.

For instance, religious symbols serve as markers of cultural identity. The portrayal of Hindu deities on everyday items reinforces cultural connections even within modern contexts. Such representations often feature vibrant artistic styles that blend functionality with cultural significance.

Moreover, religious paraphernalia — such as leaves, limes or conch shells — are commonly used to adorn small businesses. Each leaf possesses distinct symbolic meanings; conch shells are associated with Vishnu and are frequently displayed outside stores. Limes, often paired with green chilies to ward off negative energies, symbolise prosperity and abundance, making them prevalent, hanging in front of shops. This practice illustrates how spiritual beliefs permeate daily life and underscores the enduring influence of tradition on contemporary commerce in India. 

Deeply rooted beliefs associated with concepts like dharma persist despite social transformations. Many dharmic traditions emphasise the significance of seva (selfless service), with charitable giving — known as dana in Sanskrit — considered an essential aspect of one’s dharma or religious duty. This practice is perceived not merely as a moral obligation but as a spiritual endeavour that fosters personal growth and good karma. This may, in part, help us to understand why ‘duty’ or ‘service’ is often invoked when people talk about their jobs.

Historical photographs depicting Britain in the 1950s and 1960s evoke memories of cohesive communities and industrial landscapes that were rapidly swept away under the guise of ‘progress’. These images connect us to a past where individual identities were closely linked to their local and immediate social, economic and cultural environments.

The consequences of this ‘progress’ have been critically examined by writer Paul Kingsnorth in his book Real England: The Battle Against the Bland. He laments the loss of authentic pubs, rural hedgerows, affordable housing, individuality and character in towns due to corporate greed and an insatiable quest for profit — a phenomenon described by one insightful reviewer as a “Starbucked, Wetherspooned avalanche”.

In India, custom, tradition and personal identity are intricately interwoven. The persistence of ancient beliefs amid modern pressures underscores the enduring power of cultural identity. However, even within this context, forces such as modernity or globalisation — more accurately framed as neocolonialism — are gradually reshaping urban landscapes and influencing the lives, fashions and preferences of its inhabitants.

In 2003, British journalist David Charters (1948-2020) remarked:

“Sadly, the world is being shrunk to a ‘global village’ by the forces of celebrity, mass media, instant communications, swift travel and the constant desire for standardisation. So, we should record the qualities that made us different while there is still time”.

Take a journey through Chennai’s streets to prompt reflection on the issues highlighted above by visiting the author’s open-access, image-based ebook here.

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Renowned author Colin Todhunter specialises in development, food and agriculture. He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG).  

Featured image: Elante Mall is the largest mall of Chandigarh (Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0)

“The crime of all crimes.” That is how the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda declared genocide in the final judgment of Prosecutor v. Akayesu, the case against the mayor of Taba, Rwanda for crimes against humanity. Today, that crime repeats itself as UN Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories Francesca Albanese painfully details in her latest report.

Albanese joins host Chris Hedges on this episode of The Chris Hedges Report to break down her report and present the indisputable evidence that Israel is actively committing a genocide of the Palestinian people.

“The acts of killing, the mass killing, the infliction of psychological and physical torture, the devastation, the creation of conditions of life that would not allow the people in Gaza to live, from the destruction of hospitals, the mass force displacement and the mass homelessness while people were being bombed daily, and the starvation—how can we read these acts in isolation?” Albanese asks.

The UN Special Rapporteur clearly outlines the steps and conditions required to meet the classification of genocide, and in the case of Gaza, it’s undeniable. Albanese tells Hedges,

“What is relevant in order to establish that there is genocide is not just the intent behind these crimes, enunciated in Article II of the Genocide Convention; it’s the overall intent, specific intent, to destroy the people—the group as a whole, or in part, as such. And what is the group here? It’s the Palestinians.”

Throughout the rest of her report, Albanese details the harrowing death and destruction Palestinians endure on a daily basis in countless forms, alongside the horror suffered by non-Palestinians in Gaza. Albanese documents record-breaking numbers: The highest number of journalists killed, the highest number of UN officials killed, the highest number of hospitals targeted, the destruction of all universities, the fastest rate of population starvation. It’s clear, according to Albanese, the scale of devastation the Israelis are inflicting is one of scorched-earth catastrophe.

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The Pfizer Papers: Pfizer’s Crimes Against Humanity. Dr. Naomi Wolf

By Dr. Naomi Wolf, October 29, 2024

Our book, The Pfizer Papers: Pfizer’s Crimes Against Humanity, was published October 15 and became an immediate bestseller. This is a book that three governments—the US, the UK and Australia—all sought to suppress. 

Bill Gates Calls for ‘Vaccine Misinformation’ to be Censored in Real-Time by AI

By Frank Bergman and Prof Michel Chossudovsky, October 30, 2024

Billionaire Bill Gates is calling for all questions and concerns about vaccines to be censored in real time by artificial intelligence (AI) as part of an effort to allegedly tackle so-called “misinformation.”

Total Censorship Becoming the Norm in the Political West. “Protection of Free Speech” to Suppress It

By Drago Bosnic, October 29, 2024

Censorship is now so vital to the ruling oligarchy in Washington DC that it’s become the “new normal” in universities, government offices and virtually all other public institutions. In addition, censorship has become particularly strong during recent election campaigns, when the mainstream propaganda machine is tasked to ensure that only “approved” narratives are in the spotlight.

The Politics of Fear: Laying the Groundwork for Fascism, American-Style

By John W. Whitehead and Nisha Whitehead, October 29, 2024

We’re being fed a constant diet of fear: fear of terrorists, fear of illegal immigrants, fear of people who are too religious, fear of people who are not religious enough, fear of extremists, fear of conformists, fear of the government, fear of those who fear the government, fear of those on the Right, fear of those on the Left… The list goes on and on.

When Evil Is Allowed In, Evil Stays. Paul C. Roberts

By Dr. Paul Craig Roberts, October 29, 2024

It is a paradox that Washington, Putin, and Iran are equally indifferent to Israel’s slaughter from the air of civilians in Gaza and civilians in Lebanon. Any one of the three countries could stop the murder of civilians, but not one of them will do anything.

Globalists Plot Worldwide Genocide Via WHO Pandemic Treaty

By Richard C. Cook, October 29, 2024

With all the trouble in today’s world, including the completely pointless American-instigated war in Ukraine, Israel’s loathsome genocidal onslaught against the Palestinians in Gaza, and militant U.S. threats to China over Taiwan, perhaps we should be asking whether the escalation in tensions threatening massive global conflict is really a carefully-crafted Globalist “false-flag” concealing something even more sinister.

Why Did Trump, Rogan Refuse to Touch COVID Vaxx in Three-Hour Interview?

By Ben Bartee, October 29, 2024

Not only did the vaxx elephant in the room remain ignored, but they didn’t touch the recent DoD directive explicitly allowing the U.S. military to kill American citizens under so-called emergency conditions, nor the transhumanist, exterminationist ideology of the psychopathic multinational elites.

India-China Cooperation and the End of QUAD’s Imperialist Agenda

October 30th, 2024 by Bhabani Shankar Nayak

United States President Joe Biden has sought to participate in the presidential campaign of his vice president, Kamala Harris. However, the Democrat’s team has kept him on the sidelines, believing his presence will harm her chances of overcoming Republican candidate Donald Trump.

According to Axios, Biden wants to get involved in the final days of Harris’ campaign to be elected president. According to three people familiar with the matter, her team responded to Biden’s request, “We’ll get back to you.”

Harris’ rise to the Democratic nomination resulted from the crisis within the party caused by Biden’s advanced age and cognitive decline, which raised doubts both internally and externally about his ability to retain the White House. Doubts turned into certainties on June 27, when the Democrat faced the Republican candidate in a debate in which he displayed irresolute behaviour.

Axios reported that the vice president’s team believes Biden is a political liability at a crucial moment in the campaign but has been reluctant to back down from him.

“It’s the latest example of Democrats, and even some of Biden’s staff, tiptoeing around the 81-year-old president’s ego and feelings,” the outlet wrote, adding: “Harris’ team and allies respect Biden’s service but are wary of further tying Harris to the unpopular president on the campaign trail.”

According to CNN, the current US president has an average approval rating of 38% and a disapproval rating of 57%, while FiveThirtyEight found that Biden’s approval rating is 39%.

“He’s a reminder of the last four years, not the new way forward,” said another person familiar with the situation and referencing Harris’ campaign slogan.

Although Harris’ campaign team is trying hard to present her as a different candidate from what Biden represents, a little more than half of Americans believe that the Democrat will continue with the current government’s policies.

According to a poll by the Wall Street Journal, 54% of American voters say Harris will mostly continue Biden’s approach, while 41% believe she will have her own ideas and new leadership in the White House. The perception that the Democrats will continue with the same direction of government is more prevalent among undecided Americans.

Asked which of the two candidates could implement necessary change, the poll showed 49% of voters favour Trump versus 40% for Harris. Asked who has a vision for the future, 45% of respondents voted for the Republican candidate and 43% for the Democratic presidential hopeful.

The American newspaper pointed out that Harris and Trump are competing for a small portion of undecided voters a few days before the November 5 elections. According to a poll last August, the Republican led with 47% of electoral preferences over the Democrat, who had 45% of voting intention.

David Wasserman, an analyst at the Cook Political Report, told the newspaper that Harris has to generate enthusiasm among the 37% to 40% of voters who believe Biden’s presidency was successful while seeking support from Americans who want a big change.

The Wall Street Journal also claimed that Harris’ campaign members acknowledged that the candidate needed to do more to show her separation from Biden’s image. The Democrat’s efforts have been hesitant, which has been exploited by Trump and his electoral team during the race.

The Ukraine conflict will likely leave a host of issues for the next US president, including the cost of US aid, potential peace negotiations, and the extent of NATO’s involvement. Yet Harris is proposing more of the same as Biden has done with this conflict – unwavering support for the Kiev regime and no change in its stance on negotiations with Moscow.

If Harris wins the election, she will find it much more difficult to provide the level of financial support to Kiev that has been possible under the Biden administration, which has resulted in more than $100 billion in support being provided, something that would make her job more difficult. Although she will continue to support whatever Zelensky says he wants to do, she may be unable to provide him with the money and weapons he seeks.

Trump has repeatedly emphasised that the war should end and that it is much better to achieve a peace deal with Russia to start the long-term peace process. This is significantly different from what Harris offers. Trump says he would not want to provide endless financial resources to prop up the Kiev regime, which is gradually losing the war.

In effect, Biden is hidden away from Harris to increase her chances of winning the US presidential election. However, Americans are not naïve and see that she is effectively a continuation of what the current president offers, as seen in their policies towards Ukraine.

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This article was originally published on InfoBrics.

Ahmed Adel is a Cairo-based geopolitics and political economy researcher. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from Adam Schultz / Flickr

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Bill Gates Accused of  “Medical Malpractice”

and “Crimes against Humanity”

by

Michel Chossudovsky 

September 17, 2024

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Kenya: A 500,000 Petition Called for an Investigation 

“An online petition is calling on the White House to investigate Bill Gates and Melinda Gates for “crimes against humanity” and “medical malpractice”.

The petition received more than 500,000 signatures as of 11th May 2020.

 

By Muslim Mirror Web Desk

The petition accuses the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation of “medical malpractice” for citing an accusation of “intentionally sterilizing Kenyan children through the use of a hidden HCG antigen in tetanus vaccines.” The petition also quoted Bill Gates’ when talking about his interest in “reducing population growth” by means of vaccinations.

In Y 2014, the Catholic Bishops Conference of Kenya conducted a study on the 5-injection, 2 yr vaccination project performed on female Kenyans aged 14-49, in a South African laboratory and concluded that “all 6 samples tested positive for the HCG antigen.”

“This proved right our worst fears; that this WHO campaign is not about eradicating neonatal tetanus, but a well-coordinated forceful population control mass sterilization exercise using a proven fertility regulating vaccine,”

Dr. Ngare, spokesman for the Kenya Catholic Doctors Association, said.

“This evidence was presented to the Ministry of Health before the third round of immunization, but was ignored.”

The vaccine, which was administered to 2.3-M girls and women by the World Health Organization (WHO) and UNICEF for free, was said to be funded by Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization (GAVI), an organization started and funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. “(Muslim Mirror, emphasis added)

Bill Gates: the Covid-19 Scam and the mRNA Vaccine

Amply documented Bill Gates has instructed the WHO Director General Tedros to engage in several waves of Misinformation since the outset of the Covid Crisis.

The Lies and Fabrications pertaining to the alleged Covid Pandemic, the Lockdown, the mRNA Vaccine are beyond description.

The fraud emanates from Bill Gates.

And now Bill Gates wants to censor people from revealing the criminality behind the pandemic and the “Covid-19 Vaccine”.

The official “corona narrative” is predicated on a “Big Lie” endorsed by corrupt politicians. Bill Gates wants to censor the truth. See article by Frank Bergman below. 

“They are Killing our Loved Ones”

“‘You Were Right, Vaccines Are Killing Millions of Our Loved Ones”, Kazuhiro Haraguchi, Japan’s former Minister of Internal Affairs’s

Law Suit against Bill Gates in the Netherlands

“A Netherlands judge last week ruled that Bill Gates must face seven people injured by COVID-19 vaccines in court in the Netherlands.

According to Dutch newspaper De Telegraaf, the seven “corona skeptics” sued Gates last year, along with former Dutch prime minister and newly appointed NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte, and “several members” of the Dutch government’s COVID-19 “Outbreak Management Team.”

Other defendants include Albert Bourla, Ph.D., CEO of Pfizer, and the Dutch state.

“Because Bill Gates’ foundation was involved in combating the corona pandemic, he has also been summoned,” De Telegraaf reported. (M. Nevradakis)

The court ruled Gates must pay attorneys’ fees and additional legal costs totaling 1,406 euros (approximately $1,520). A hearing is scheduled for Nov. 27. 2024 A Modest sum of money for Bill Gates. 

“Even if … your name is Bill Gates, you still have to go to court”

Father of Vaccine-injured Plaintiff Made ‘Emotional Plea’ to the Court

“At the Sept. 18 hearing, plaintiffs also delivered statements. According to Zebra Inspiratie, “One of the victims, who is very ill, was also given the opportunity to make a plea. She was no longer able to speak and was represented by her father. It was an emotional plea.”

Krikke said the plaintiff’s father told the court that his daughter, who was previously healthy, fell ill after getting the COVID-19 vaccine and could no longer speak, telling the judge that he “would really like to speak to Bill Gates directly” to ask him what happened to his daughter.

“After that, the judge was really quiet,” Krikke said.

The Oct. 18 ruling also addressed the plaintiffs’ claims about Gates’ role in the WEF’s “Great Reset” project.”

See: also

 

Judge Rules Bill Gates Must Face Vaccine-Injured in Netherlands Court

By Michael Nevradakis, October 25, 2024

Who is Responsible for “Misinformation”

“Hell is Empty and the Devils are All Here”. William Shakespeare, “The Tempest”, 1623

My response to Shakespeare: “Send the Devils Back to Where They Belong”

“When the Lie Becomes the Truth, There Is No Moving Backwards”

 

 

Michel Chossudovsky, Global Research, September 17, 2024, October 30, 2024

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Bill Gates Calls for ‘Vaccine Misinformation’

to be Censored in Real-Time by AI

Frank Bergman

September 12, 2024

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Billionaire Bill Gates is calling for all questions and concerns about vaccines to be censored in real time by artificial intelligence (AI) as part of an effort to allegedly tackle so-called “misinformation.”

According to the Microsoft co-founder, one of the key missions of his Gates Foundation is stopping the spread of “vaccine misinformation” online.

Gates argues that critics of official narratives regarding vaccines must be silenced in order to convince skeptical or unwilling members of the public that experimental injections are “safe and effective.”

In order to stamp out “vaccine misinformation,” Gates is calling for opinions that counter the official narratives to be shut down with the help of AI.

Gates laid out his vision during an interview with CNBC.

According to Gates, the public’s free speech rights are a major obstacle to his plan.

He lamented that America’s Constitution and its speech protections are standing in the way of AI setting new “boundaries” for the flow of information online.

Gates claims to support free speech but insists that the First Amendment should have “rules” in case a person expresses a view that is “causing people not to take vaccines.”

“We should have free speech, but if you’re inciting violence, if you’re causing people not to take vaccines, where are those boundaries that even the US should have rules?” Gates said.

“And then if you have rules, what is it?”

Gates was less forthcoming about who he believes should have the authority to decide what those rules are, however.

Nevertheless, he insists censorship is necessary and must be ushered in without delay.

Gates argues that allowing people to express views without immediate censorship is causing “harm.”

In order to tackle this alleged issue, Gates is calling for every comment made online to be “fact-checked” and censored in real-time with the help of AI-powered machines.

“Is there some AI that encodes those rules because you have billions of activity and if you catch it a day later, the harm is done,” he said.

It comes as Gates has launched a crusade against free speech in recent weeks.

As Slay News recently reported, Gates demanded just last week that digital IDs be made mandatory in order to supposedly tackle so-called “misinformation.”

In a new interview, the Microsoft co-founder also blasted the First Amendment for protecting the free speech rights of the American people.

Gates argues that the First Amendment is standing in the way of censoring “misinformation” online.

He called for digital IDs as a way to skirt the First Amendment and curb “misinformation during an interview with CNET, where he also discussed artificial intelligence (AI) and “climate change.”

Gates claims he is grappling with what he believes to be the threats of “misinformation” and the technological phenomena of deepfakes.

While warning of this alleged threat, Gates argues that digital IDs will help curb this “misinformation” by forcing people to verify their identities online.

Gates told CNET that there must be limitations on free speech or order to crack down on “misinformation.”

He laments that Americans’ First Amendment protections are making it “tough” to censor online content.

“The U.S. is a tough one because we have the notion of the First Amendment and what are the exceptions like yelling ‘fire’ in a theater,” Gates explained.

“I do think over time, with things like deepfakes, most of the time you’re online you’re going to want to be in an environment where the people are truly identified, that is they’re connected to a real-world identity that you trust, instead of just people saying whatever they want,” Gates added.

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Whenever top-ranking Western officials give a speech of almost any kind, it’s virtually mandatory to mention the political West’s so-called “values”, including numerous “freedoms” supposedly “enjoyed” by most people in their part of the world. And yet, despite constant blabbering about “freedom and democracy”, there’s (un)surprisingly little actual freedom in the belligerent power pole. Worse yet, if new laws in the United States and European Union are anything to go by, there’s going to be less of it than ever before. In fact, the Deep State is now (ab)using the alleged “protection of free speech” to suppress it, or as they say, in order to “save free speech, we must censor free speech”. In other words, we have reached a point where paradoxes and absurdity are the norm.

And indeed, censorship is now so vital to the ruling oligarchy in Washington DC that it’s become the “new normal” in universities, government offices and virtually all other public institutions. In addition, censorship has become particularly strong during recent election campaigns, when the mainstream propaganda machine is tasked to ensure that only “approved” narratives are in the spotlight. Back in 2020, the near-universal crackdown on actual free media resulted in numerous shutdowns of numerous outlets, mostly through cyberattacks. For instance, the Belgrade-based Fort Russ News, where I was a senior editor, went offline just weeks before the 2020 presidential election after numerous “mysterious” cyberattacks.

While it managed to return a few times, FRN was permanently shut down after years of persecution at the hands of corrupt federal institutions, including by Pentagon-linked think tanks such as the infamous RAND Corporation that directly targeted all FRN personnel (PDF) as supposed “Russian agents” (myself included). It is only thanks to the Internet Archive that most of FRN’s content is still available. However, this sort of censorship is certainly not a thing of the past. On the contrary, it’s returning in full force, as other reputable media are also being targeted. Namely, Consortium News, an independent investigative news source, went offline following a major cyberattack. The Consortium News website is still unavailable.

“Our web host has confirmed seven recent data breaches and now it appears that our site has been totally replaced. We have been hacked,” the news outlet announced on X.

They are working to restore the website, but the fact that the security breach happened only a week before the election is very telling. Having such a major independent media outlet, famous for its highly critical view of America’s endless wars, go offline is very “convenient” to the Deep State and the warmongering oligarchy in Washington DC. WikiLeaks, another independent source fiercely targeted by the US government, also confirmed that the Consortium News website has been completely removed and its contents are no longer accessible. Once again, this is hardly surprising given that top-ranking American officials are openly talking about the “dangers of disinformation”, the latest Neo-McCarthyist buzzword.

Uncomfortable truths, otherwise known as “evil Russian disinformation”, need to be suppressed at all costs. However, while the corrupt US federal institutions (particularly its numerous intelligence services) are leading the charge in the crackdown on independent media, there’s still a lot of pushback, as millions of Americans (nearly 40%, to be specific) simply don’t trust the mainstream propaganda machine. On the other hand, the EU seems to be even worse. For years, the troubled bloc has been trying to censor press freedom not just in Europe, but also around the world, including the US. This is going so far that Ursula von der Leyen, EU Commission president, advocates “pre-bunking in the public forum to vaccinate people against disinformation”.

However, nobody comes close to the United Kingdom in “preserving freedom and democracy”. Thousands of British citizens are arrested every year for social media posts. However, this is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the sheer scale of censorship in the UK. Namely, you can get arrested for “thought crimes”, as several cases showed. Precisely this happened to a man who quietly prayed on the street across from an abortion clinic in the town of Bournemouth. Expectedly, the mainstream propaganda machine tried “fact-checking” the story, but similar cases show that you can indeed get arrested for having “wrong thoughts”. Namely, back in November 2022, a woman was arrested for an identical “thought crime”, also in front of an abortion clinic.

In the meantime, “evil” Russia allows actual free speech to journalists from countries that banned virtually all Russian media. Western outlets are allowed to freely interview whomever they want, including President Vladimir Putin. In stark contrast, not even Russian mics are tolerated by the political West’s most prominent “beacon of freedom and democracy” that’s now getting dozens of billions for its “commitment”. The case of Tucker Carlson serves as a perfect example of how any form of independent thought is treated in the US and NATO, while the fates of the likes of Julian Assange are definite proof of just how “free” the political West is. On the other hand, the promotion of the so-called Western “values” is as strong as ever.

Namely, any attempt to deal with repulsive crimes such as pedophilia is met with a fiery crackdown of the mainstream propaganda machine. Movies such as the “Sound of Freedom” are continuously targeted by the censors. Any remotely sane person would be dumbfounded to find out that topics such as child trafficking and pedophilia are being suppressed. But that’s exactly the case, even though raising awareness about it should be a matter of basic common sense. However, given the state of so-called Western “values”, it’s hardly surprising this is not the case anymore. Namely, while the political West is after Putin for evacuating kids from a warzone, it’s also involved in the massive child trafficking “business” in Ukraine and elsewhere.

What we can clearly conclude from all this is that the warmongers, war criminals and plutocrats in Washington DC and Brussels are determined to prevent the spread of any sort of “Russian disinformation” (i.e. the truth), as this is extremely “inconvenient” for them. If hundreds of millions of Americans and Europeans knew what was actually going on, they’d certainly be against the policies their unelected bureaucratic oligarchies are imposing, both at home and abroad. Precisely this is why knowing the truth is all the more important. Unfortunately, it can indeed be dangerous to think and speak freely at this time, and we can only expect more censorship and more “thought criminals”, as any deviation from the official narrative is “dangerous for our democracy”.

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Birds Not Bombs: Let’s Fight for a World of Peace, Not War 

This article was originally published on InfoBrics.

Drago Bosnic is an independent geopolitical and military analyst. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from Children’s Health Defense

The entire population of North Gaza is at risk of dying according to Joyce Msuya,  Acting Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator;

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Birds Not Bombs: Let’s Fight for a World of Peace, Not War  

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No one can terrorize a whole nation, unless we are all his accomplices.”—Edward R. Murrow, broadcast journalist

America is in the midst of an epidemic of historic proportions.

The contagion being spread like wildfire is turning communities into battlegrounds and setting Americans one against the other.

Normally mild-mannered individuals caught up in the throes of this disease have been transformed into belligerent zealots, while others inclined to pacifism have taken to stockpiling weapons and practicing defensive drills.

This plague on our nation—one that has been spreading like wildfire—is a potent mix of fear coupled with unhealthy doses of paranoia and intolerance, tragic hallmarks of the post-9/11 America in which we live.

Everywhere you turn, those on both the left- and right-wing are fomenting distrust and division. You can’t escape it.

We’re being fed a constant diet of fear: fear of terrorists, fear of illegal immigrants, fear of people who are too religious, fear of people who are not religious enough, fear of extremists, fear of conformists, fear of the government, fear of those who fear the government, fear of those on the Right, fear of those on the Left… The list goes on and on.

The strategy is simple yet effective: the best way to control a populace is through fear and discord.

Fear makes people stupid.

Confound them, distract them with mindless news chatter and entertainment, pit them against one another by turning minor disagreements into major skirmishes, and tie them up in knots over matters lacking in national significance.

Most importantly, divide the people into factions, persuade them to see each other as the enemy and keep them screaming at each other so that they drown out all other sounds. In this way, they will never reach consensus about anything and will be too distracted to notice the police state closing in on them until the final crushing curtain falls.

This is how free people enslave themselves and allow tyrants to prevail. 

This Machiavellian scheme has so ensnared the nation that few Americans even realize they are being manipulated into adopting an “us” against “them” mindset. Instead, fueled with fear and loathing for phantom opponents, they agree to pour millions of dollars and resources into political elections, militarized police, spy technology and endless wars, hoping for a guarantee of safety that never comes.

All the while, those in power—bought and paid for by lobbyists and corporations—move their costly agendas forward, and “we the suckers” get saddled with the tax bills and subjected to pat downs, police raids and round-the-clock surveillance.

Turn on the TV or flip open the newspaper on any given day, and you will find yourself accosted by reports of government corruption, corporate malfeasance, militarized police and marauding SWAT teams.

America has already entered a new phase, one in which children are arrested in schools, military veterans are forcibly detained by government agents because of their so-called “anti-government” views, and law-abiding Americans are having their movements tracked, their financial transactions documented, and their communications monitored.

These threats are not to be underestimated.

Yet even more dangerous than these violations of our basic rights is the language in which they are couched: the language of fear. It is a language spoken effectively by politicians on both sides of the aisle, shouted by media pundits from their cable TV pulpits, marketed by corporations, and codified into bureaucratic laws that do little to make our lives safer or more secure.

This language of fear has given rise to a politics of fear whose only aim is to distract and divide us. In this way, we have been discouraged from thinking analytically and believing that we have any part to play in solving the problems before us. Instead, we have been conditioned to point the finger at the other Person or vote for this Politician or support this Group, because they are the ones who will fix it. Except that they can’t and won’t fix the problems plaguing our communities.

Nevertheless, fear remains the method most often used by politicians to increase the power of government.

The government’s overblown, extended wars on terrorism, drugs, violence, disease, illegal immigration, and so-called domestic extremism have been convenient ruses used to terrorize the populace into relinquishing more of their freedoms in exchange for elusive promises of security.

An atmosphere of fear permeates modern America. However, with crime at an all-time low, is such fear rational?

Statistics show that you are 17,600 times more likely to die from heart disease than from a terrorist attack. You are 11,000 times more likely to die from an airplane accident than from a terrorist plot involving an airplane. You are 1,048 times more likely to die from a car accident than a terrorist attack. You are 404 times more likely to die in a fall than from a terrorist attack. You are 12 times more likely to die from accidental suffocating in bed than from a terrorist attack. And you are 9 more times likely to choke to death in your own vomit than die in a terrorist attack.

Indeed, those living in the American police state are 8 times more likely to be killed by a police officer than by a terrorist. Thus, the government’s endless jabbering about terrorism amounts to little more than propaganda—the propaganda of fear—a tactic used to terrorize, cower and control the population.

In turn, the government’s stranglehold on power and extreme paranoia about the citizenry as potential threats has resulted in a populace that is increasingly viewed as the government’s enemies.

Why else would the government feel the need to monitor our communications, track our movements, criminalize our every action, treat us like suspects, and strip us of any means of defense while equipping its own personnel with an amazing arsenal of weapons?

So far, these tactics—terrorizing the citizenry over the government’s paranoia and overblown fears while treating them like criminals—are working to transform the way “we the people” view ourselves and our role in this nation.

Indeed, fear and paranoia have become hallmarks of the modern American experience, impacting how we as a nation view the world around us, how we as citizens view each other, and most of all how our government views us.

The American people have been reduced to what commentator Dan Sanchez refers to as “herd-minded hundreds of millions [who] will stampede to the State for security, bleating to please, please be shorn of their remaining liberties.”

Sanchez continues:

I am not terrified of the terrorists; i.e., I am not, myself, terrorized. Rather, I am terrified of the terrorized; terrified of the bovine masses who are so easily manipulated by terrorists, governments, and the terror-amplifying media into allowing our country to slip toward totalitarianism and total war…

I do not irrationally and disproportionately fear Muslim bomb-wielding jihadists or white, gun-toting nutcases. But I rationally and proportionately fear those who do, and the regimes such terror empowers. History demonstrates that governments are capable of mass murder and enslavement far beyond what rogue militants can muster. Industrial-scale terrorists are the ones who wear ties, chevrons, and badges. But such terrorists are a powerless few without the supine acquiescence of the terrorized many. There is nothing to fear but the fearful themselves…

Stop swallowing the overblown scaremongering of the government and its corporate media cronies. Stop letting them use hysteria over small menaces to drive you into the arms of tyranny, which is the greatest menace of all.

As history makes clear, fear and government paranoia lead to fascist, totalitarian regimes.

It’s a simple enough formula. National crises, reported terrorist attacks, and sporadic shootings leave us in a constant state of fear. Fear prevents us from thinking. The emotional panic that accompanies fear actually shuts down the prefrontal cortex or the rational thinking part of our brains. In other words, when we are consumed by fear, we stop thinking.

A populace that stops thinking for themselves is a populace that is easily led, easily manipulated and easily controlled.

The following, derived by from John T. Flynn’s 1944 treatise on fascism As We Go Marching are a few of the necessary ingredients for a fascist state:

  • The government is managed by a powerful leader (even if he or she assumes office by way of the electoral process). This is the fascistic leadership principle (or father figure).
  • The government assumes it is not restrained in its power. This is authoritarianism, which eventually evolves into totalitarianism.
  • The government ostensibly operates under a capitalist system while being undergirded by an immense bureaucracy.
  • The government through its politicians emits powerful and continuing expressions of nationalism.
  • The government has an obsession with national security while constantly invoking terrifying internal and external enemies.
  • The government establishes a domestic and invasive surveillance system and develops a paramilitary force that is not answerable to the citizenry.
  • The government and its various agencies (federal, state, and local) develop an obsession with crime and punishment. This is overcriminalization.
  • The government becomes increasingly centralized while aligning closely with corporate powers to control all aspects of the country’s social, economic, military, and governmental structures.
  • The government uses militarism as a center point of its economic and taxing structure.
  • The government is increasingly imperialistic in order to maintain the military-industrial corporate forces.

The parallels to modern America are impossible to ignore.

“Every industry is regulated. Every profession is classified and organized. Every good or service is taxed. Endless debt accumulation is preserved. Immense doesn’t begin to describe the bureaucracy. Military preparedness never stops, and war with some evil foreign foe, remains a daily prospect,” writes economist Jeffrey Tucker. “It’s incorrect to call fascism either right wing or left wing. It is both and neither… fascism does not seek to overthrow institutions like commercial establishments, family, religious centers, and civic traditions. It seeks to control them… it preserves most of what people hold dear but promises to improve economic, social, and cultural life through unifying their operations under government control.”

For the final hammer of fascism to fall, it will require the most crucial ingredient: the majority of the people will have to agree that it’s not only expedient but necessary. In times of “crisis,” expediency is upheld as the central principle—that is, in order to keep us safe and secure, the government must militarize the police, strip us of basic constitutional rights and criminalize virtually every form of behavior.

We are at a critical crossroads in American history.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, fear has been a critical tool in past fascistic regimes, and it has become the driving force behind the American police state.

All of which begs the question what we will give up in order to perpetuate the illusions of safety and security.

As we once again find ourselves faced with the prospect of voting for the lesser of two evils, “we the people” have a decision to make: do we simply participate in the collapse of the American republic as it degenerates toward a totalitarian regime, or do we take a stand and reject the pathetic excuse for government that is being fobbed off on us?

There is no easy answer, but one thing is true: the lesser of two evils is still evil.

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Birds Not Bombs: Let’s Fight for a World of Peace, Not War 

This article was originally published on The Rutherford Institute.

Constitutional attorney and author John W. Whitehead is founder and president of The Rutherford Institute. His most recent books are the best-selling Battlefield America: The War on the American People, the award-winning A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State, and a debut dystopian fiction novel, The Erik Blair Diaries. Whitehead can be contacted at [email protected].

Nisha Whitehead is the Executive Director of The Rutherford Institute. Information about The Rutherford Institute is available at www.rutherford.org.

They are regular contributors to Global Research.

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Earlier this month Brazil’s Supreme Court lifted its ban on X (formerly Twitter) after Elon Musk finally complied with the court orders. It was the end of a months-long standoff between Justice Alexandre de Moraes and Musk (X was suspended on August 31). The matter has often been addressed as an issue of “free speech”, but with the recent BRICS Summit Declaration on digital sovereignty, one can clearly see that the discussion here should not be just about “censorship”. The BRICS Summit in Kazan, held from October 22 to 24 (2024), for the first time held a meeting with its expanded format, now including new member states such as Iran, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Ethiopia.

As I wrote before, it is true, as many critics and analysts have highlighted, that Moraes has weaponized the war against the so-called Brazilian far-right and the alleged defense of democracy as a way to expand the power of the court and arguably his own powers. Already in 2023 a New York Times piece pointed out that Moraes “jailed people without trial for posting threats on social media; helped sentence a sitting congressman to nearly nine years in prison for threatening the court; ordered raids on businessmen with little evidence of wrongdoing; suspended an elected governor from his job; and unilaterally blocked dozens of accounts and thousands of posts on social media, with virtually no transparency or room for appeal.”

However, if Moraes controversial measures may be used to cast doubts on, say, Brazil’s “sécurité juridique”, Musk’s failure to comply with court orders local laws could indeed also cast doubts on the billionaire and his companies, not to mention on the political role they may play. It goes beyond Musk, of course. In countries such as the US there is an ongoing conversation about how social media such as Facebook and Instagram – not to mention their algorithms – influence people’s politics and elections. Controversy aside, Brazil has shown that it is possible to force Big Tech into compliance. Moreover, the topic has prompted a larger conversation in Brazil on having a national social media platform – or, for that matter, a national engine search. To this day Brazil in fact has to rely on US products such as Google. It doesn’t have to be this way. Now that economic nationalism is back, it is only natural that one questions this state of affairs.

This is a strategic matter, and it extends even way beyond social media – ultimately it is about digital sovereignty, a concept which surpasses the traditional geoeconomic and geopolitical realms. Digital services today encompass sectors such as transportation, energy, public administration, digital IDs, healthcare, payment systems and much more.

In Europe there is an ongoing debate about developing what some call a #EuroStack, a digital public infrastructure relying on European technology and investments. As Cristina Caffarra puts it (she is the co-founder and Vice Chair of the Competition Research Policy Network, Centre for Economic Policy Research – CEPR): 

“Europe has done digital regulation and is in the process of implementing it. But this is ultimately only reliant on beating Big Tech into a compliance game which is hard and will take a long time.”

On September 24, a multi-party group of Members of the European Parliament took part in the “Towards European Digital Independence” conference in Brussels. According to Francesca Bria (a fellow at Stiftung Mercator), it is about investing in “public goods and infrastructures that protect citizens’ rights, ensure European autonomy and security, support the growth of European businesses, and serve the public interest.” Bria highlights the fact that Big Tech companies “dominate the entire technology stack—from chips and cloud infrastructure to operating systems… —solidifying their market position through network effects and economies of scale… This stifles innovation, limits opportunities for European businesses, and undermines Europe’s economic security and industrial competitiveness.”

Nowadays, so much is talked about de-dollarization and about the topic of a currency for BRICS. On Tuesday, former Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff (currently the President of the BRICS bank), met with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Kazan and discussed BRICS expansion and the use of local currencies, replacing the dollar. There has been however yet another new development that has thus far been quite underreported: the BRICS group has for the first time, in its Kazan Declaration, committed itself to “the design of a fair and equitable global framework for data governance, including cross-border data flows, to… ensure the interoperability of data regulatory frameworks at all levels.”

Reliance on external AI capabilities and external cloud services makes strategic assets and all kinds of sensitive data vulnerable to foreign frameworks, such as the US CLOUD Act (this is true even for Europe as well). As mentioned Europeans, albeit a bit slowly, are now more and more concerning themselves with the issue

One may recall that, in 2013, then Brazilian President Dilma Roussef proposed to route internet traffic away from Washington, as part of a strategy to counter American National Security Agency (NSA) espionage: the daring plan involved developing an undersea fiber-optic cable system that would funnel all internet traffic between the South American continent and Europe, thereby bypassing entirely the US, but it did not follow through. It has been brought to light that, at that same time, both Roussef and then German Chancellor Angela Merkel were the targets of NSA espionage.

It is about time emerging powers such as Brazil boldly address the issue of social networks and the larger matter of digital sovereignty, AI, digital currencies and cybersecurity. And this is a conversation that now has finally started to take place within the scope of the BRICS group as well – together with energy and industry (which are of course all connected topics), this could very well be one of the most pressing issues for the 21st century.

Next year, Brazil will be hosting the BRICS Summit – it will also be hosting the 2025 Climate Summit (COP30). Being at the center stage in G20, Brazil now has the opportunity to use the coming months to champion digital sovereignty for the Global South in the emerging polycentric global order. It should use the opportunity to call for the development of not just legal frameworks but also of a digital industry and a digital infrastructure which fosters sovereignty. BRICS needs a #BricsStack too – and Brazil could point the way to that.

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Birds Not Bombs: Let’s Fight for a World of Peace, Not War 

This article was originally published on InfoBrics.

Uriel Araujo, PhD, anthropology researcher with a focus on international and ethnic conflicts. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

Ghana’s Living Nightmarish Experience with Chinese Soft Power

October 29th, 2024 by Shmuel Ja'Mba Abm

From official sources, an estimated population ranging from 10,000 to 30,000 Chinese nationals live in Ghana today. Unofficial sources put it higher. Although on the high side, an unbelievable report says about 700,000 Chinese live in Ghana.

It took the trial of En Huang aka Aisha Huang, arrested in Kumasi on September 2, 2022, to officially confirm that Chinese nationals could enter and exit Ghana illegally too. Kumasi is Ghana’s second largest city after Accra, the capital of Ghana. Kumasi is in the Ashanti Region. En Huang, a Chinese national described by the media in Ghana as kingpin of illegal mining in Ghana, was convicted on December 4, 2023 for mining offences. Also called Galamsey Queen, En Huang was sentenced to four and a half years with hard labour in prison. In addition, she was to pay a fine of GH 48,000 with consequences of custodial sentences in default. Galamsey is the local name for illegal mining.

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Uncategorized Archives – Page 3 of 8 – Nature & Development Foundation

En Huang was earlier arrested for illegal mining offences committed from 2015 to 2017 in Ghana. However, on December 19, 2018, the Attorney General of Ghana entered a nolle prosequi and terminated the trial. Her permit to remain in Ghana indefinitely, was revoked by the Comptroller General of Ghana Immigration Service, leading to her immediate repatriation to China aboard Ethiopian Airlines.

Contrary to the order of the Comptroller General, En Huang re-entered Ghana. On September 2, 2022, she was arrested again, but in Kumasi. The Attorney General directed her prosecution of past and present committed offences.

Officially, migration of Chinese to Africa started in the 1960s, although the record on the Gold Coast, now Ghana, puts its first visitors in the 1940s. Originally, these migrants came from Hong Kong, a British colony just as was the Gold Coast, the former name of Ghana. Mainland Chinese started coming to Ghana in the 1980s. The Gold Coast became independent on March 6, 1957, taking the new name Ghana.

To appreciate the figures, let’s look at the size of others from the region to compare. For instance, 272 Japanese have been recorded in Ghana, whilst a total of 614 Koreans are known to reside in Ghana. As of 2021, 11,313 from the rest of Asia were recorded as residents in Ghana.

The earliest ethnic Chinese migrants to the Gold Coast, in what is now called Ghana, who came from Hong Kong, began arriving in the late 1940s and early 1950s, when both territories [Ghana and Hong Kong] were still part of the British Empire. These migrants stayed in the Gold Coast for periods ranging from a few years to several decades. They never came to consider the Gold Coast as their home.

These migrants consisted largely of men who came to the Gold Coast alone and worked as employees in Chinese-owned factories, while their families remained back at home in Hong Kong. They were concentrated in the western part of the Gold Coast. But after the Gold Coast became independent, the Kwame Nkrumah government began implementing plans to promote development in the eastern part of the country.

As a result, these Chinese migrants began moving towards Accra and Tema. Aside these mentioned individual migrants, an official contingent also came from the People’s Republic of China [PRC] for a brief period in the 1960s. At the time, the PRC provided a variety of military assistance to Ghana in the 1960s, including a loan meant for an arms factory in 1962, which in any way was never constructed. It included a dispatch of military advisors in 1964. After the February 24, 1966 putsch, which overthrew Nkrumah’s government, the National Liberation Council military government expelled the 430 PRC nationals, including three intelligence officers and thirteen guerrilla warfare specialists.

However, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, some of the migrants from Hong Kong returned accompanied by their families to Ghana. Migrants from Shanghai also joined, around the time. Following further political instability in the 1970s and 1980s, including two coups d’ètat by Flt Lt Jerry Rawlings, many Chinese migrants returned home.

Backed by the sudden leap of economic reforms and opening up the country, migrants from mainland China began arriving just at the time Hong Kong migrants, in the reverse, were flowing out of Ghana. Thus, migration from mainland China intensified in the 1990s – some came as employees. Most came as traders, who started and ran import-export businesses or restaurants.

Origins of migration also diversified. Whereas earlier migrants came mostly from Hong Kong or Shanghai, latter Chinese migrants came from Guangdong, Henan as well as the Republic of China in Taiwan. The early wave on migrants from Hong Kong worked as employees in a variety of industries in both the Gold Coast and in Ghana, including a failed tobacco-growing venture, a factory in Takoradi producing cooking implements, and an imitation wax print clothing company.

The true owners of these businesses hardly visited Ghana themselves. In the 1990s and 2000s, large Chinese companies trooped in to actively participate in Ghana’s construction industry as large contractors. Individual Chinese traders engaged in the retail of textiles, electrical appliances, and in daily consumables.

As stipulated and required in the Ghana Investment Promotion Act of 1994, a foreigner needed an investment of not less than US $300,000 in retail business, provided 10 locals would be engaged as employees.

More recently, late arrival Chinese nationals introduced engagement in small-scale mining, particularly in gold. Some are also engaged in providing funds for mining operation purposes, in the lease of heavy duty equipment and machinery to miners, and in the strategic setting up of shops that deal in the supply and distribution of mining-related chemical substances, equipment and machinery, and spares.

Chinese nationals in Ghana live together in close units but within local communities. They haven’t built larger single Chinese communities in the strict sense of it as in Chinatown yet. But names like China Mall, Chinese Restaurant, etc. have emerged.

Most migrants visited with the aim of exploring better opportunities to make money, as against an intention to acquire citizenship and settle down in Ghana as a national. To obtain Ghanaian citizenship, an applicant could do so by marriage to a citizen of Ghana; or show proficiency in a spoken indigenous language or understand it.

Some early Chinese nationals, who have proven record to have lived in Ghana for most of their lives, have acquired Ghanaian citizenship, often granted without difficulties.

In recent times, a section of local environmentalists and traders have risen in protests against chiefs and the government for the influx of Chinese nationals engaged in illegal mining and petty trading as retailers selling imported goods. The chiefs and the government are accused for the relaxation of investment laws.

In late 2007, local traders organised protests in Accra which accused Chinese nationals of unfair competition and trading in specified areas of engagement preserved for natives, which Chinese nationals were disqualified. In reaction, these Chinese migrants reported of arbitrary treatment by the police.

For example, one day in February 2009, officers of the Ghana Immigration Service arrested over 100 Chinese nationals, the highest in a single day. They were arrested for their engagement in illegal gold mining. Forty-one of these Chinese nationals signed an open letter of protest to the Ghana Immigration Service, requesting for a review of their cases.

The sudden crackdown was explained as necessitated by the government’s desire to protect local businesses arising from worsening economic disparities, despite the fact that this is not allowed under Ghanaian law.

Chinese investments, of course, play a critical role in spurring and stimulating diversity of portfolios in the economy of Ghana, resulting in increases in trade volumes as it shapes an emerging pattern of migration of Ghanaian traders to the Guangzhou and Yiwu regions of China, addressing older forms of challenges which impaired relationship.

Virtually, every home in Ghana today is inundated with imported Chinese consumables – from basic needs such as toothbrushes and toothpaste to toilet rolls and toiletries. In the area of building and construction, supplies of imported inexpensive building materials have improved conditions in meeting previous high cost challenges in housing deficit.

Significantly, in the areas of rural development for example, imported Chinese motorcycles and tricycles have contributed immensely in reducing the deficit in haulage and transport services delivery, and reducing the cost and time of doing business drastically, although this came with heavy losses in human lives with high figures in rates of maimed cases such as amputees.

Also, thanks to Chinese low cost mobile phones and accessories and computers, Ghanaians have seamlessly joined the ICT revolution by default. Even mobile telephony service providers and tech companies import Chinese equipment and complementary accessories to keep the industry alive.

In all, weak institutions and regulatory bodies and regimes have contributed in several ways to allow excesses of Chinese business operations in Ghana to overwhelm law enforcement and made mockery of the government through a compromised criminal justice system.

As it stands today in Ghana, illegal mining and its attendant threats of environmental disaster has created a tense political climate with civil society organisations and organised labour confrontations with the government, leading to a bitter standoff.

Reported cases of unregulated use of chemical substances and heavy metals such as cyanide, lead and mercury in illegal mining activities, are found in water bodies, the food chain and wildlife. Manifestations of the effects of these on humans, such as deformities in childbirth and in the reproductive system, have been recorded by scientists in laboratories.

Mining in Ghana has been known for several millennia before the most recent clash of cultures with Europeans. At no time has it been this devastating as it did with the recent influx of Chinese into the country, especially with the sophistication of imported Chinese equipment and machinery, which have quickened the pace of environmental degradation and destruction.

Whereas the onus lies on the Government of Ghana to assert its authority as a sovereign in the exercise of law enforcement in respect of strict adherence to a regulatory regime that comes with the issuance of mining licences, it behoves on the integrity and good relationships with the Chinese government through its embassy and diplomatic staff in Ghana to make collaborative interventions to curb the looming menace already taking a heavy toll on the host country as adequately enumerated above.

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Birds Not Bombs: Let’s Fight for a World of Peace, Not War 

Shmuel Ja’Mba Abm has extensive scholarly publications that establish him as a leading academic expert in regional geopolitical dynamics and diplomatic relations in Africa. Author of e-monographs on geopolitics, ethnic conflicts, and political philosophy.

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With Volkswagen management planning a radical cost-cutting program, Central Works Council Chairwoman Daniela Cavallo, of the IG Metall trade union, announced yesterday that at least three German plants are to be closed and tens of thousands of jobs cut.

On Monday morning, the works council invited workers to information meetings at all German plants. Some 25,000 employees gathered at the main plant in Wolfsburg alone. A works council leaflet, which was distributed en masse on Monday, begins with the words: “It is a declaration of war of historic proportions on its own workforce and entire home regions at the heart of the Group.” It continued: 

In connection with job losses for tens of thousands of us, the Board of Management intends to enforce the following: close at least three VW factories in Germany, shrink virtually all plants still existing in Germany, also separate from previous core areas and, on top of that, enforce massive pay losses for the remaining employees.

All this is “not sabre rattling” as a tactic in the current round of collective bargaining, the VW works council explained, as the board really wants all this and considers that the cost-cutting plan has “no alternative and no room for concessions.” The Central Works Council was informed in advance, but the Board of Directors refused to come clean to its own employees. “That is why your works councils are now forced to inform you about this.”

The financial daily Handelsblatt quoted from an internal strategy paper, which is referred to as a “poison list” in management circles. According to the paper, further massive social attacks are planned. They include, among other things, major wage cuts, the outsourcing of individual administrative areas and pay freezes for the years 2025 and 2026. 

Chief Human Resources Officer Gunnar Kilian said in a media release that the Board of Management had decided not to disclose any further details about the planned measures in the cost-cutting programme: “We adhere to the principle agreed in codetermination to first conduct the discussion about the future of Volkswagen AG internally with our negotiating partners.”

On Wednesday, negotiations between management and IG Metall on a new company collective bargaining agreement will enter the second round. During the first round in September VW rejected IG Metall’s demands for a 7 percent wage increase and instead pushed for savings. According to Cavallo, VW is now demanding a 10 percent wage cut and pay freezes in the next two years. 

Many VW workers are shocked. The largest European carmaker already announced a “cost-cutting policy” in the summer and terminated the employment guarantee that had been in place for decades. But Monday’s announcements exceeded all fears. The VW Group has long been known in Germany for relatively high wages and social benefits with jobs considered crisis-proof, from apprenticeship to retirement.

The works council chief’s apparent indignation on Monday was, however, all for show. In truth, the works council is involved in all management discussions and is directly involved in the preparation of the plans to shut plants. The works council and IG Metall are responsible within management for designing the social attacks in such a way that resistance to them can be suppressed. The confidentiality up to now was also agreed upon and the announcement now made by the works council two days before the next round of negotiations was deliberately calculated. 

Cavallo and her IG Metall colleagues speak of an attack “on us” and try to present themselves as representatives of workers’ interests. The reality is the opposite. The fact that the works council speaks of “historic” attacks, but has so far not initiated any combat measures against them, shows this. In no other German company is the cooperation between the owners, management and trade unions as close and sophisticated as at Volkswagen.

Head of Human Resources Gunnar Kilian, who is responsible for the plan to shutter plants and for layoffs, was General Secretary of the works council before moving to the Board of Directors. He was considered the “closest confidant” of Cavallo’s predecessor Bernd Osterloh and his “mastermind.” 

The VW Group has in the past been described as the epitome of social partnership and as a “German codetermination model.” IG Metall and the works council, together with an army of full-time officials, ensure that the decisions of the Executive Board and Supervisory Board are implemented smoothly. 

The head of IG Metall traditionally serves as Deputy Chairman of the Supervisory Board of the Group, assisted by the works council, which, due to statutory codetermination, together with IGM, occupies half of the Supervisory Board. The other half is accounted for by Porsche Holding, which is controlled by the Porsche and Piech families and owns 53 percent of the ordinary shares, the Emirate of Qatar (17 percent) and the Social Democratic Party-governed state of Lower Saxony (20 percent). 

The VW Group is thus practically dominated by a triumvirate of trade unions, works councils and the SPD. Ex-IGM head Jörg Hofmann, General Works Council Chairman Daniela Cavallo and Lower Saxony Minister President Stephan Weil (SPD) sit on the eight-member Supervisory Board, where all important decisions are discussed. 

In order to repel the planned attacks and to defend all plants and jobs, it is necessary to break the conspiracy of the trade union apparatus, works council and SPD and to initiate a genuine struggle. This requires the establishment of independent rank-and-file committees in which all VW workers who seriously want to fight join forces. The first initiative has already been taken last month with the founding of the VW Rank-and-File Committee.

Rank-and-file committees already exist in several car plants and have joined forces to form a network. It is part of the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees (IWA-RFC), which coordinates the growing struggles of the working class worldwide. The development of rank-and-file committees at VW must be geared towards making the fight against the savage cost-cutting at VW part of a systematic, international counter-offensive by workers throughout the automotive and parts industries.

The cost-cutting at VW is part of a global offensive by the car companies, which—supported by national governments and trade union bureaucracies—are fighting a bitter battle for market share and higher returns, and are using the switch to electric mobility to lay off hundreds of thousands.

Ford is shutting down its plant in Saarlouis and is now attacking the workers in Cologne and Valencia. With Stellantis, “hardly a stone remains on top of another,” as the daily FAZ writes. The CEO Carlos Tavares, who is notorious as a “cost killer,” is destroying thousands of jobs in the US and Italy. The Opel plant in Eisenach is not spared either, and of the 15,000 jobs that once existed at the Opel main plant in Rüsselsheim, only 8,300 remain.

A veritable massacre is taking place in the supplier industry. ZF Friedrichshafen is destroying 14,000 jobs and Continental 7,000. Almost daily, smaller companies with several hundred employees close. The software group SAP is also cutting 10,000 jobs, ThyssenKrupp is cutting its steel division, the chemical group Bayer is destroying 5,000 jobs and BASF is closing two sites in Cologne and Frankfurt-Höchst.

The crisis of the capitalist system is intensifying and massive social attacks are being enforced in order to increase profits not only in Germany and Europe, but worldwide. In the US, striking Boeing workers are facing very similar attacks and have already twice rejected a miserable collective bargaining agreement backed by the union bureaucracy.

The unrestrained pursuit of profit by billionaires and speculators not only exacerbates exploitation, but also leads to war. The hunt for raw materials, markets and cheap labour develops into an economic war with trade restrictions, punitive tariffs and subsidies, and finally into a military conflict.

For example, the US is now imposing import tariffs of 100 percent on electric cars from China. At the same time, they are surrounding the economically rising country militarily and systematically preparing for war. The EU has imposed similar import duties—albeit at a lower level.

Germany has used EU enlargement to increase its economic dominance in Eastern Europe. It supports the NATO proxy war against Russia in Ukraine in order to force regime change in Moscow and bring the huge country with its raw materials and energy sources under the direct control of the German economy. The economic and energy crisis exacerbated by this is now being passed on to the workers using increasingly brutal methods. 

The fight to defend jobs, wages and social standards is therefore inextricably linked to the fight against war and military rearmament as well as the defence of democratic rights. It must be conducted on the basis of a socialist perspective. Without breaking the power of the billionaires, banks and large corporations, not a single social problem can be solved. The banks and major corporations must be expropriated and placed under the democratic control of the workers.

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Birds Not Bombs: Let’s Fight for a World of Peace, Not War 

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Cattle Dog Gusto: How Bluey Conquered the United States

October 29th, 2024 by Dr. Binoy Kampmark

For decades, the cultural phenomenon known as Americanisation has taken place with diffusing ease.  Momentum was gained with the retreat of communism from Europe’s eastern states with the end of the Cold War and the eventual termination of the Soviet Union in 1991.  Global brands of Americana from fizzy drinks to Dallas became pervasive cultural presences.  Not even children’s programming was exempt.

Converts and devotees would mimic accents, adopt terms of reference, and emulate patterns of behaviour.  In terms of children’s programming, Sesame Street, the work of the non-profit organisation Sesame Workshop, has been the global standard bearer.  Jenny Perlman Robinson and Daniela Petrova, writing for Brookings in 2015, delved into its significance as an informal educating tool, reaching millions of children across 150 countries.  “What had started as an educational television program more than 40 years ago is now a multimedia platform that uses everything from radio, video, and books to the latest in interactive media and technology.”

In 2018, Australia made its own contribution in the field.  The Australian Broadcasting Corporation released an animated series that has since become a giddying global phenomenon.  The US has not been spared, suggesting that Americanisation, at least in some areas, can also be given hearty doses of its own medicine.  The series in question, Bluey, features an Australian dog of the Blue Heeler variety: one Bluey, a six-year-old cattle dog who lives in the Queensland city of Brisbane with sister Bingo, and parents Bandit and Chilli.

By the end of March 2020, the series had won an International Emmy in the children’s preschool category, something no doubt helped by the enforced isolation brought on by the coronavirus pandemic.  In 2023, Bluey became the second most popular streaming show in the US, logging 731 million hours.  In 2024, the series became the most viewed show in the United States.

Such success was due, in no small part, to a distribution deal struck between the BBC and Disney in 2019. 

“The warmth and authenticity of Bluey’s family dynamic is what first captured our interest in the show,” explained Jane Gould, senior vice president of Disney Channels Worldwide.  “Bluey reminds us all of our own families, and it plays out in the small but emotionally epic dramas of day-to-day life in surprising, heartfelt and very funny ways that will engage children and parents alike.”

The fascinating aspect about Bluey is its central premise: neither the viewing parents nor their engaged children are treated like passive imbeciles.  Both groups can partake in the themes of the series without feeling infantilised. 

“It trusts,” wrote David Sim in The Atlantic in August last year, “that its young audience will be able to understand stories that are about the foibles and insecurities of parents too.” 

The web traffic site, Similarweb.com, yields an interesting statistic: the largest demographic of visitors to the official Bluey website (Bluey.tv) are those between 25-34, coming in at 28.86%.

Fantasy and imagination mingle with testing, even potentially contentious issues. There are questions about premature birth (“Early Baby”); the appearance of friends who proceed to vanish (“Camping”); even questions about the fine line between full blooded banter and unacceptable teasing.  In a Father’s Day episode, Bluey’s dad, Bandit, openly wonders about the merits of getting a vasectomy.

Given such a format, it was bound to interest academics keen to tell us the obvious after generating the usual quantitative quarry of data.  In a survey of 700 adults – part of a research project called Australian Children’s Television Cultures – we are told that Bluey was most keenly enjoyed by parents wishing to view a series with their children.  Those behind the research project were keen to note the words of one of the respondents in describing the series.  Bluey was “representative of an idealised Australian ethos – relaxed, curious, and hard-working.”

The influence of Bluey has also been noted in another respect.  In 2022, a father in Massachusetts revealed that his child had begun using the term “dunny” instead of “toilet”.  This brought much pleasure to ABC Sydney radio presenter, Richard Glover.  “Finally,” he chortled in The Washington Post, “we have our revenge.”

According to Glover, US popular culture had ensured that Australians of his generation had “enrolled in a PhD program” on the subject. “We paid the price for our enthusiasm, regularly scolded by our parents for ‘using those terrible American words.’ These included ‘sidewalk’ instead of ‘footpath’ and ‘trash’ instead of ‘rubbish’.”  Now, it was time for those in the US, notably children, to learn that breakfast could be called “brekkie”, a chicken a “chook”, and “tradie” a skilled tradesperson.

Little wonder that we can find a Master of Arts thesis dedicated to the adult fandom phenomenon around Bluey, including its appeal to those millennials who show “higher rates of anxiety, a greater distrust in the American government, and disbelief in American excellence than those of previous generations.”  Anthropomorphised cattle dogs had become saviours of a sort.

Something else is at play here. If Bluey is naturalistic, touching on the raw end of life in parenting and children’s lives, it functions in a digital world that is less adult, increasingly infantile and increasingly disabling.  Children and adults are becoming increasingly estranged from relations through technological parting and an addiction to the screen.  Funny that it should fall to a family of animated Australian cattle dogs to tie parents and children in a gentle knot of play and accommodation.

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Birds Not Bombs: Let’s Fight for a World of Peace, Not War 

Dr. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge.  He currently lectures at RMIT University.  He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG). Email: [email protected]

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France and Germany are expressing concerns about a proposal by the European Union’s diplomatic arm that aims to bypass Hungary’s veto as Budapest blocks more than €6 billion in aid to Ukraine. At the same time, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban has blasted the European Union’s support for the Kiev regime’s so-called Victory Plan.

The European External Action Service (EEAS) has floated the possibility of allowing member states to make voluntary contributions to the European Peace Facility (EPF), which helps finance military equipment. This would enable future funds to flow based on taxpayer consent rather than unanimous support.

However, sources told Bloomberg that some member states, including France and Germany, fear a precedent could be set that would jeopardise the EPF’s future as a foreign policy tool. In some countries, voluntary contributions may require approval from national parliaments, which would add a different layer of complication.

“Some member states, including France and Germany, have voiced concerns over setting a precedent that could imperil the future of the European Peace Facility as a foreign policy tool, according to people familiar with the matter,” Bloomberg reported. “Currently, the EPF relies on mandatory contributions based on each member state’s economic weight and requires unanimity for disbursement.”

The French and German governments declined to provide formal comment.

Earlier, the EU’s top diplomat, Josep Borrell, said that Hungary continues to block the allocation of €6 billion as compensation to EU states for the supply of arms and ammunition to Ukraine. A European source told reporters that the EU’s foreign policy service had presented member states with a proposal for the EU to contribute to the EPF on a voluntary basis, thus bypassing Hungary’s veto.

Orban is the most Kremlin-friendly leader in the European bloc and has repeatedly stalled EU aid for Ukraine and obstructed sanctions against Russia. Even though the EU approved an additional €5 billion for Ukraine earlier this year, Orban has been blocking its disbursement, creating tensions between Budapest and Brussels that have only escalated during Hungary’s rotating presidency of the Council of the European Union, as seen with EU member states and institutions boycotting Hungarian-held events.

On October 23, the anniversary of the 1956 Hungarian uprising, Orban said in the Millenaris Park in Budapest that Kiev and Brussels seek to drag the entirety of Europe into a war with Russia by inviting Ukraine to NATO.

“Over the past 70 years, we have never been so close to a new world war as we are now,” he said, adding, “European leaders and Brussels bureaucrats dragged Europe” into the Ukrainian conflict, and now “they want to drag the entire European Union into the Russia-Ukraine war.”

Orban stressed that Kiev’s intentions are backed by Europe continuing to deliver weapons to Ukraine and supporting Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s so-called Victory Plan, which aims to “expand the scope of the war by inviting Ukraine to join NATO and moving the frontline to Russian territory.”

Earlier this month, Orban described Zelensky’s plan as scary. In his view, the Victory Plan will only pave the way for defeat and not victory. Budapest stated that it would neither support Kiev’s initiative nor participate in its implementation.

It is for reasons like this that the EU is instigating its provocations against Orban, including trying to topple his leadership and have him replaced with a puppet who will serve the interests of Brussels instead of Hungary.

“We know they want to force us into the war (in Ukraine), that they want to impose their migrants upon us… and hand over our children to gender activists,” Orban said in Millenaris Park before referring to the new pro-EU Tisza party of Peter Magyar. “We know that they’ve got a puppet government (in mind), the party they want to impose on us.”

In July, the first month of Hungary’s Council of the EU presidency, Orban outraged the European elite by travelling to Moscow and Beijing as part of his “peace mission.” The very fact that his efforts to find peace caused controversy demonstrates that Europe wants the war in Ukraine to be prolonged for as long as possible.

However, what was not expected is that the EU’s two most influential countries, Germany and France, would be concerned that “a precedent” could be made where democratic mechanisms are bypassed. In this way, it is seen just how divided Europe is and the ludicrousy of accusing Orban of authoritarianism when authoritarian practices are considered and employed to limit his power and influence.

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Birds Not Bombs: Let’s Fight for a World of Peace, Not War 

This article was originally published on InfoBrics.

Ahmed Adel is a Cairo-based geopolitics and political economy researcher. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

Oppose the Pro-genocide Purge on US College Campuses!

October 29th, 2024 by Jacob Crosse

In response to student and faculty outrage over the ongoing genocide in Gaza, a veritable purge is taking place on college campuses in the United States. Administrations are suspending, evicting, firing and otherwise trampling on the democratic rights of faculty and students protesting the ongoing slaughter.

This repression is taking place at some of the most prestigious universities in the country, with deep ties to the Democratic Party. This past Friday, some 25 faculty members from Harvard University were suspended from entering the Widener Library for two weeks after conducting a silent “study-in” protest in solidarity with students who were suspended for conducting a similar protest the month prior.

The banning of faculty from the library for simply displaying pieces of paper that had innocuous phrases such as “Embrace diverse perspectives,” is an unprecedented act of disciplinary action. Harvard cited “library policy” to justify barring faculty members from the institution’s main library, which will severely impact their ability to conduct their own work.

In addition to over two dozen faculty members, according to The Harvard Crimson, more than 60 students who previously conducted a silent “study-in” at Widener Library against the genocide have also been banned from the main library on campus for two weeks.

Similar anti-democratic measures are underway at many other campuses:

  • At the University of Pittsburgh, at least 17 students and community members face prosecution for their participation in Gaza Solidarity encampments. After police assaulted the encampments, arrested protesters face inflated charges, including felonies. They have also been issued “persona non grata” notices, essentially banning them from the University of Pittsburgh campus.
  • At the University of Chicago last week, university officials sent the police to evict and suspend an Arab student who participated in an anti-genocide protest earlier this month. Megan Porter, the student’s attorney, told a local news outlet that even though her client has not been convicted of a crime, he was nevertheless removed from campus. Porter added that he does not have family in the state and has nowhere else to live.
  • At Muhlenberg College in Allentown, Pennsylvania, Dr. Maura Finkelstein, who herself is Jewish, was fired for posting comments on social media in opposition to Zionism and the ongoing genocide. Interviewed earlier this month by the World Socialist Web Site, Finkelstein observed, “Our campuses are being militarized.”
  • At Cornell University, administrators suspended four students for three years for their involvement in a pro-Palestinian protest on September 18, directed at military contractors arming the genocide. Cornell University Ph.D. student Momodou Taal, a graduate instructor, was nearly deported earlier this month for participating in the September 18 demonstration.
  • At the University of California, Santa Cruz, over 100 students and faculty members were temporarily banished from campus after they were arrested for protesting the Gaza genocide last semester. The ACLU Foundation of Northern California and the Center for Protest Law and Litigation have filed a lawsuit against the university, arguing that the mass suspension is unconstitutional.
  • The University of Michigan is pursuing criminal charges against 11 students for participating in anti-war demonstrations against the war in Gaza last spring. The charges include trespassing and obstructing a police officer, a felony offense with potential sentences of up to two years in prison.

Many of these universities have close ties to the Democratic Party and American imperialism. The Harvard Corporation, the top governing board of Harvard University, includes former Obama administration officials, billionaires and heads of private investment firms.

Notable Democrats who are currently members of the Harvard Corporation include: Penny Sue Pritzker, billionaire heiress and US Secretary of Commerce in the Obama administration; Kenneth Chenault, one of several corporate executives who spoke at this year’s Democratic National Convention; and Mariano-Florentino Cuéllara, former justice on the Supreme Court of California who served in the Clinton and Obama administrations.

Earlier this year, Harvard University appointed as its vice president and general counsel Jennifer O’Connor, a former executive at Northrop Grumman, the sixth largest weapons manufacturer in the world, which supplies the Israeli Air Force with missile and laser systems for attack helicopters and fighter jets.

The repression on campuses is not limited to the United States. Earlier this month riot police violently arrested students at Western Sydney University for participating in a peaceful sit-in protest against the genocide. After the thuggish arrests, hundreds of academics and faculty signed an open letter condemning the police brutality. The signatories noted the violent actions of the police “are part of a broader pattern of police repression across Australian universities against those who protest against Israel’s atrocities.”

The International Youth and Students for Social Equality (IYSSE) calls on students to mobilize against this escalating attack on democratic rights. Students must demand that all charges against those protesting the genocide—one of the greatest war crimes of the 21st century—be dropped. All sanctions and restrictions on students and faculty must be overturned.

Students should seek the support of workers in the factories and workplaces where colleges and universities are located to mobilize broader support, connecting the defense of basic democratic rights with opposition to war abroad and the war on the working class at home.

The escalating assault on protests on campuses takes place only one week before the US election, which is plumbing the depths of political reaction. Trump and the Republicans are seeking to build up a fascist movement and have pledged to mobilize police and the military against opponents of the genocide and all opposition to the politics of the corporate and financial oligarchy.

The central involvement of the Democratic Party in the persecution of opposition to genocide demonstrates that its claim to be protecting “democracy” is a cynical fraud. No matter who prevails in the election, if there is, indeed, a clear outcome, the drive toward dictatorship will continue in lockstep with the escalation of war and the extreme growth of social inequality.

The McCarthyite witch-hunt against Gaza solidarity demonstrators, the harassment of anti-war activists, and the punitive measures against protesting students and faculty are preparations for even more extensive attacks on the democratic rights of the population as a whole.

The anti-democratic methods deployed by the US ruling class during the McCarthyite anti-communist witch-hunts of the 1950s are being revived on a global scale by all the imperialist powers. The defense of fundamental democratic rights, including the right to protest genocide and ethnic cleansing, is inseparable from the development of an independent socialist movement in the working class and among young people against all imperialist war and its source, the capitalist system.

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In any other context, Joe Rogan — and I appreciate this about him — won’t shut up about the COVID-19 scam.

Nary a show passes by that it doesn’t come up at some point, even with guests who don’t appear very interested in the topic or have nothing to do with it apart from having been a human on planet Earth in 2020.

Yet, strangely enough — or not strangely at all, perhaps — the topic never came up at any point during his three-hour sit-down with the former president.

In fact, when Big Pharma came up, Rogan very carefully danced around the topic of the so-called “vaccines” that Trump so graciously rushed to market in record time.

Not only did the vaxx elephant in the room remain ignored, but they didn’t touch the recent DoD directive explicitly allowing the U.S. military to kill American citizens under so-called emergency conditions, nor the transhumanist, exterminationist ideology of the psychopathic multinational elites;

Nor the CIA trafficking opium out of Afghanistan (at the time of the invasion, the Taliban had virtually eradicated the opium trade in the country;

by the time the U.S. military had taken over, a few years later, the global share of the opium trade soared to 90+%; production collapsed once again after the withdrawal) — just to name a small handful of issues they could have broached which Rogan, who is well-versed in them, had a golden opportunity to pose to one of the only men on Earth who might be willing and able to offer uncommon insight, given that he occupied the top executive position for four years.

Instead, we got a lot of fluff like “tell me what it felt like to be president,” etc.

These omissions were, in my view, pre-ordained. What I wouldn’t give to have been a fly on the wall in the negotiations between Rogan and the Trump team leading up to the appearance.

So, no points to Rogan for this massively disappointing performance.

Regarding the former president and his inability or unwillingness to tackle real issues head-on, the reality is that Trump is a notorious germophobe who bought in long ago to the biomedical industry propaganda that men in white coats and Fortune 500 pharmaceutical corporations love humanity and want us all to live our best lives.

The proper takeaway from the Rogan interview, in my view, is that he’s not bringing the kind of hard-nosed, confrontational, insurgent energy we desperately need in a leader to combat the industry and the deathgrip it has on every relevant institution.

And if he’s not willing do to execute the much-needed war on these institutions, his feckless, corrupt counterparts in Congress certainly aren’t.

Via Biospace (emphasis added):

“The nonprofit transparency group Open Secrets tracks spending by pharmaceutical and health product political action committees (PACs), which have spent $12,009,986 on campaign contributions in 2023 and 2024. The 111 pharmaceutical PACs have given over $5.2 million to Democrats, while around $6.6 million has gone to Republicans thus far in 2023 and 2024.

The top lobbying client in the pharma manufacturing sector is the Pharmaceutical Research & Manufacturers of America (PhRMA), which has a lobbying budget of over $16.9 million. Pfizer is second with $6 million available, followed by Merck, Novartis and Eli Lilly with $5.2 million, $4.6 million, and $4.4 million in 2023 and 2024, respectively.”

Whither do we turn for our champion but to ourselves?

Salvation doesn’t lie with any politician, and surely not with any of the current crop in permanent Washington.

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Birds Not Bombs: Let’s Fight for a World of Peace, Not War 

Ben Bartee is an independent Bangkok-based American journalist with opposable thumbs. Follow his stuff via Substack where this article was originally published. Also, keep tabs via Twitter. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is a screenshot from the interview video

When Evil Is Allowed In, Evil Stays. Paul C. Roberts

October 29th, 2024 by Dr. Paul Craig Roberts

On two previous occasions Israel sent its vaunted army into southern Lebanon only to be driven out by the Arab militia, Hezbollah, operating without tanks, without an air force, without air defense.   It appears that it has now happened again.  Israel has been stopped cold on the ground, causing the Israeli defense minister to announce an end to the ground operations.  The Israeli Army is only good at killing women and children from the air, as in Gaza.

Israel’s war against Hezbollah has been replaced with Israeli air strikes against civilian residential areas in Beirut, which provides more evidence that the only function of the Israeli military is to murder women and children from the air.  The obvious conclusion is that the Israeli military doesn’t fight; it commits war crimes against civilians.

The reason civilian neighborhoods in Beirut, the capital of Lebanon and not Hezbollah territory, are being destroyed from the air is that Iran and Russia permit it by not providing air defense systems to Lebanon.  

Iran and Russia are “maintaining peace” by permitting Israel to slaughter Lebanese women and children and destroy schools and hospitals from the air.  

It is a paradox that Washington, Putin, and Iran are equally indifferent to Israel’s slaughter from the air of civilians in Gaza and civilians in Lebanon. Any one of the three countries could stop the murder of civilians, but not one of them will do anything.

Putin has placed his bets on BRICS, but that is an economic organization that might or might not succeed.  Its success is handicapped by the fact that the Russian and Chinese economists are indoctrinated by the American neoliberals, and, therefore, are not merely worthless to their countries but positively harmful. 

If Washington wanted the Israelis’ murder of Palestinian and Lebanese civilians to stop, Washington would stop providing Israel with the weapons.  Clearly, Israel is doing what Washington wants.  But why do Russia and Iran want Palestinian and Lebanese civilians to be massacred when either country can stop it?  It is beginning to look as if it is not merely Washington and Israel that Satan has in his grasp, but Russia and Iran as well.

Every time Putin gets off-focused from Russia’s only threat–Washington–he finds himself with a mess on this hands.  With Putin focused on the Olympics in China, Washington sent the Georgian army into South Ossetia. With Putin focused on the Sochi Olympics, Washington overthrew the Ukrainian government and brought war to Russia.  Now Putin is focused on BRICS and Washington is stirring up a color revolution in Georgia to regain the former Russian province as another beached against Russia. The opposition parties and the President of Georgia do not accept the election results, which are favorable to Russia. See this. 

I think that Putin by refusing to use power is losing credibility. I don’t think Putin understands the ideological character of the Democrat Party and the ideological woke liberal-left that controls it. If the Democrats manage to retain control over the government, I don’t think Putin is prepared for the consequences.  

Humankind, said T.S. Eliot, “cannot bear very much reality.”  That is as true of Russians as of Americans. Reality conflicts with hopes, aspirations, and plans, and when ignored upsets all of them.  Putin’s Ukraine conflict which has greatly widened, the brewing color revolution in Georgia supported by Washington, and Iran’s demonization and isolation are all self-inflicted  disasters caused by ignoring reality.

When powerful countries such as Russia, China, and Iran stand aside from genocide, they destroy their own reputations. The world is crying out for someone with the means to stand up for humanity, for justice, for truth, and there are no takers.

In Gaza children undergo amputations without anesthesia. The little water available is polluted. Everyone is sick. Washington keeps sending the weapons used from the air against purely civilian populations. Disease and starvation will finish the job for the Americans and the Israelis.  It is America that has enabled this genocide.

And Americans, in their insouciant existence, think they are the salt of the earth.

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Birds Not Bombs: Let’s Fight for a World of Peace, Not War 

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.

Featured image is by L’Orient Le Jour/Muntasser Abdallah

Film: The New American Century

October 29th, 2024 by Alternative Truth

[This film was produced in 2009.]

This film goes in detail through the untold history of The Project for the New American Century with tons of archival footage and connects it right into the present.

This film exposes how every major war in US history was based on a complete fraud with video of insiders themselves admitting it.

This film shows how the first film theaters in the US were used over a hundred years ago to broadcast propaganda to rile the American people into the Spanish-American War.

This film shows the white papers of the oil company Unocal which called for the creation of a pipeline through Afghanistan and how their exact needs were fulfilled through the US invasion of Afghanistan.

This film shows how Halliburton under their “cost plus” exclusive contract with the US Government went on a mad dash spending spree akin to something out of the movie Brewster’s Millions, yet instead of blowing $30 million they blew through BILLIONS by literally burning millions of dollars worth of hundred thousand dollar cars and trucks if they had so much as a flat tire.

“A stunning film. It should be seen as widely as possible, in cinemas, bars, clubs, at meetings and, of course, through the internet. I’m sure the film will continue to be a source of debate and political education for many years. Maybe until the war criminals have been brought to trial.” – Ken Loach

While Massimo Mazzucco’s first political documentary, GLOBAL DECEIT (2006), focused on the long list of inconsistencies in the official version of the 9/11 attacks, THE NEW AMERICAN CENTURY explores the historical, philosophical and economic background that suggests a matrix for such events that is much closer to home than the so-called “Islamic terrorism”.

The film provides solid evidence for the true reasons behind the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, whose unfolding is described in chilling detail in a document called “Project for the New American Century”, published in the year 2000, that seems to have served as the actual blueprint for such dramatic events.

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Globalists Plot Worldwide Genocide Via WHO Pandemic Treaty

October 29th, 2024 by Richard C. Cook

[This article was first published by GR in May 2024.]

Introduction

With all the trouble in today’s world, including the completely pointless American-instigated war in Ukraine, Israel’s loathsome genocidal onslaught against the Palestinians in Gaza, and militant U.S. threats to China over Taiwan, perhaps we should be asking whether the escalation in tensions threatening massive global conflict is really a carefully-crafted Globalist “false-flag” concealing something even more sinister.

Particularly dominating the news cycle are the battles now raging in the U.S. and elsewhere between activists and authorities via pro-Palestinian demonstrations.

But again, is it more contrived distraction? 

I believe it is. 

What then is the real agenda behind these headline-dominating events? What are the Globalists, who are the real string-pullers, actually trying to achieve? Will more conventional wars and street-level conflict really do the job?

Actual Human Deaths from War

To narrow our focus, the world has not seen a major war since World War II took place in 1939-1945, with over 16 million military fatalities and an estimated 70-85 million overall casualties, including civilians. Given a world population of 2.3 billion in 1940, war casualties were thus about 3.7 percent of that total. 

Granted the horrific nature of wartime deaths, 3.7 percent remains a relatively low figure, with the concentration of deaths obviously affecting some nations much more than others. In World War II the hardest hit were the Soviet Union and Germany. But the total loss was scarcely a bump in the road of long-term growth of the world’s human population, today reaching 8.1 billion and counting. 

Looking at more contemporary data, deaths attributed to all wars since 9/11, a period often referred to as one of “endless war,” are about 4.5-4.7 million. This figure, however, yields vastly smaller proportions than those of World War II. Thus the net demographic effect of war over the past two-plus decades is scarcely noticeable, though again, any casualties are horrific to those affected. 

Additionally, war casualties, including civilians, are nowadays produced by highly focused conflicts within limited areas. These conflicts often involve countries where the West covets their resources. Thus West Asia, with its vast hydrocarbon and mineral reserves, has posed a tempting target, leading to U.S./U.K. assaults against Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya. Similar, though less visible assaults, have taken place in Africa. 

More recently, the U.S. proxy war against Russia in Ukraine has led to depopulation of that country through emigration and battlefield losses, even as U.S. corporations like BlackRock have made investments in land and minerals. The U.S.-supported genocide by Israel against Palestinians in Gaza has also been suspected of having as a motivation a takeover of offshore oil and gas reserves. 

Still, we might say that weighed in the balance against the incredible potential for casualties resulting from the enormous firepower of the world’s conventional and nuclear arsenals, total wartime deaths today remain relatively limited. And even if these arsenals were put to far greater use than they have been in recent conflicts, would the totality of the world’s population be seriously reduced by such an outbreak before the impulse to all-out war had spent itself? 

Are we certain, for instance, that the much-feared World War III, would really result in obliteration of life on earth, as many speculate, or would that too be just another speed bump? We really don’t know. Plus there are many more safeguards and restraints within the international community than existed in 1941 which could be activated, including procedures in place through the much-maligned United Nations. 

We are also seeing that the West’s military arsenals are useless except on hapless opponents, as shown by the failure of Western arms in Ukraine, where they have proven to be overly-complex, expensive, and vulnerable. Their main purposes today seem to be, increasingly, “job creation,” enrichment of the stockholders in the arms manufacturing sector, providing some kind of phantom “deterrence” against “aggression,” or just entertainment for politicians, the mainstream media, and voters.  

As horrible as war is, the Globalists are certainly looking beyond overt warfare to accomplish their ends, which many believe center on, or at least include, bioweapons in order to accomplish wholesale human population reduction. In fact, the U.S. military and the CIA have been covertly creating and utilizing bioweapons for decades, as documented on Tucker Carlson Uncensored in a recent episode entitled “Was Lyme Disease Created as a Bioweapon?”

Though not covered in this article, space weaponry is another area where war fantasists have been hoping for decades to make breakthroughs in doomsday weapons that would cause enemies to surrender without a fight or that would wipe an adversary off the map in an unanswerable first-strike. 

But let’s move on. 

The Depopulation Lobby

While it seeks to conceal itself, the existence of a powerful lobby in favor of wholesale planetary population reduction can be discerned.

For a couple of centuries, doomsayers like English minister Thomas Malthus (1766-1834)  have been shouting that sooner rather than later population growth would outstrip the capacity of earth’s resources to support such expanding human numbers. 

Of course, Malthus was wrong, largely due to the ability of the Industrial Revolution to provide sustenance for a growing population and engender large improvements in sanitation, nutrition, agricultural productivity, and medical treatments to keep more people alive for longer lifespans. Particularly impactful have been the reduction in infant mortality and improvements in family and childhood welfare. 

But for a certain class of people closely identified with the Globalists these changes have not been a cause for rejoicing, but rather a premonition of impending doom. These sentiments have merged with the “eugenics” movement which sees population growth as largely an increase in the numbers of people they do not like and do not want to be alive. 

For this particular class, the potential of war to reduce the population has not seemed to have panned out for the reasons disclosed by the considerations presented above. Other, more effective, methods have therefore been sought. Bioweapons, viewed as relatively easy to inflict by covert means and difficult to trace to their sources, have moved to the forefront. Who, then, may be behind it all?

In his article from July 30, 2023, “Billionaires Try to Shrink World’s Population: Secret Gathering Sponsored by Bill Gates, 2009 Meeting of ‘The Good Club,’” Global Research head Dr. Michel Chossudovsky asked, “Is Worldwide Depopulation Part of the Billionaires’ Great Reset?” 

Dr. Chossudovsky writes:

For more than ten years, meetings have been held by billionaires described as philanthropists to reduce the size of the world’s population culminating with the 2020-2022 COVID crisis.

Recent developments suggest that “Depopulation” is an integral part of the so-called COVID mandates, including the lockdown policies and the mRNA vaccine.

According to the Wall Street Journal: “In May 2009, the billionaire philanthropists met behind closed doors at the home of the president of the Rockefeller University in Manhattan. This secret gathering was sponsored by Bill Gates. They called themselves ‘The Good Club.’ Among the participants were the late David Rockefeller, Warren Buffett, George Soros, Michael Bloomberg, Ted Turner, Oprah Winfrey, and many more.”

In May 2009, the WSJ as well as the Sunday Times reported (John Harlow, Los Angeles) that “Some of America’s leading billionaires have met secretly to consider how their wealth could be used to slow the growth of the world’s population and speed up improvements in health and education.” The emphasis was not on population growth (i.e. Planned Parenthood) but on “Depopulation” i.e., the reduction in the absolute size of the world’s population. 

To read complete WSJ article click here.

According to the Sunday Times report :

The philanthropists who attended a summit convened on the initiative of Bill Gates, the Microsoft co-founder, discussed joining forces to overcome political and religious obstacles to change.

Dr. Chossudovsky’s article may be accessed here and is cited in my own book, Our Country, Then and Now. 

It’s no secret that eugenics and population control have long been a goal of the Globalists in general and the Rockefeller family and Bill Gates in particular. With the “Good Club,” we have Gates and David Rockefeller in the same series of meetings, along with several other famous billionaires. Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s recent book, The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health, cites multiple examples where the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has promoted large-scale vaccine utilization in Africa with the likely underlying motive of population reduction. In Europe, the Club of Rome and its offshoots, including the World Economic Forum, have lobbied for similar objectives. 

As far as raw numbers are concerned, “Good Club” member and founder of CNN Ted Turner famously said,

“A total population of 250-300 million people, a 95 percent decline from present levels, would be ideal.” —as quoted in the McAlvany Intelligence Advisor, June 1996.

It’s appropriate here to mention Aurelio Peccei, co-founder of Club of Rome, originator of the idea for the World Economic Forum, and his justification for the need for supra-national institutions to address global crises. This involves the implicit necessity to weaken the sovereignty of nation states in order for Globalism to succeed. It’s from this angle that the destruction of the U.S. producing economy has been undertaken through industrial outsourcing and was achieved in the decades following publication of Peccei’s seminal volume, The Chasm Ahead.   

The relationship between the Rockefellers and Peccei dates to April 11, 1964, when Peccei attended a meeting of the Bilderberger Group in Williamsburg, Virginia, where he met with David Rockefeller, by then president and chairman of Chase Manhattan Bank. Rockefeller was also the overseer for the Council on Foreign Relations, the principal U.S. Globalist think-tank.  

I read about this meeting between Rockefeller and Peccei decades after the fact. It had a particular interest for me, because I was there! Not in their meeting, of course, but at the Williamsburg Lodge where the conference was being held. I was with the local high school current events club at the time, and we had been invited to listen to a couple of speeches. During my lifetime and career as a government analyst, I have been witness to many events of historical significance. Just think, I was also hanging around near what may have been the laying of plans to destroy much of the human race!

By the mid-1970s, promotion of population reduction was official U.S. government policy. As documented by the Human Life International website (January 3, 2024):

The United States National Security Council is the highest decision-making body regarding foreign policy in the United States. On December 10, 1974, it completed a top-secret document entitled National Security Study Memorandum or NSSM-200, also called The Kissinger Report, since Henry Kissinger was Secretary of State at the time it was written.

The subject of NSSM-200 is “Implications of Worldwide Population Growth for U.S. Security and Overseas Interests.” This document, published shortly after the first major international population conference in Bucharest, was the result of collaboration among the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), and the Departments of State, Defense and Agriculture.

NSSM-200 was made public when it was declassified and was transferred to the U.S. National Archives in 1990.

The report stated:

The U.S. economy will require large and increasing amounts of minerals from abroad, especially from less developed countries. That fact gives the U.S. enhanced interest in the political, economic, and social stability of the supplying countries. Wherever a lessening of population pressures through reduced birth rates can increase the prospects for such stability, population policy becomes relevant to resource supplies and to the economic interests of the United States.

Note that Henry Kissinger was a lifetime associate of the Rockefeller financial empire and was even considered at one point as being named overall coordinator of all Rockefeller investments. 

It can also be argued that the U.S. has been trying for decades to engineer limitations on nation-state sovereignty and population growth in less developed countries through the International Monetary Fund, with its host of “conditionalities” accompanying its predatory lending policies. These have included privatizing public utilities, cutting pay for public employees, reduction of welfare benefits, conversion of agricultural production away from self-sufficiency to export commodities, voting the “correct” way at the UN, opening their economies to Western capital investment at high interest rates, etc. 

U.S. sanctions have also played a part, one example being sanctions against Iraq during the mid-1990s that Secretary of State Madeleine Albright admitted were the cause of death of 500,000 Iraqi children. “It was worth it,” she told a TV interviewer. Sanctions against Russia over the war in Ukraine doubtless have the same intent as part of a similar resource grab against Russia the U.S. carried out after the fall of the Soviet Union in the 1990s.

Now, however, it can be argued that the tactics of Globalist population reduction rendered against less-developed/adversarial but often resource-rich parts of the world are being intentionally turned against Western nations’ own populations and are not simply the consequences of multiple policy decisions made without an underlying agenda. Within the U.S. we have seen the rapid and radical increase in wealth disparity between rich and poor and the weakening of the social safety net by such actions as cutting food stamps and Medicaid benefits. Only a blind man could not have known these measures would cause poverty and mortality to increase among the lower income sector.

Due to inflation, caused at least in part by corporate profiteering, the availability of housing, food, education, and transportation are increasingly out of reach, with the high cost of living promoting smaller families. Abortions-on-demand as a birth control measure have long been part of the liberal program with medically-assisted suicide becoming common with the distribution of morphine by hospices. Promotion of the LBGT agenda also results in the begetting of fewer children. 

But a major milestone in the assault by the developed world against humanity may have been reached with the COVID pandemic. Again, it was Robert F. Kennedy Jr. who has amassed the details about the manner in which the societal lockdowns, business closures, shuttering of schools, and censorship of dissent had been anticipated by two decades of below-the-radar training and planning exercises, with heavy military participation. One of these, “Event 201,” took place immediately before the start of the COVID pandemic at Johns Hopkins University, sponsored by Bill Gates and the World Economic Forum. 

In his latest book, The Wuhan Cover-Up and the Terrifying Bioweapons Arm Race, RFK Jr. discusses the massive proliferation of U.S.-sponsored bioweapons labs worldwide that are conducting research on the weaponization of viruses under the heading of “gain-of-function.”  It has only been in the last couple of years that “gain-of-function” has become a phrase of common parlance. 

It almost seems as though the elite controllers of Western society have decided that open warfare is insufficient to reach their depopulation goals, so that a different solution must be sought. What they appear to have lighted upon is the deliberate inculcation of pandemics. COVID, including the deadly mRNA “vax,” was possibly their dry-run. 

Of course, COVID was not the first medical atrocity committed by Big Pharma, the U.S. government, and the medical profession. Another is the epidemic of autism likely caused by the proliferation of vaccinations inflicted on children. According to Dr. Lewis Coleman of the American Geopolitical Institute: 

We never saw this when we were in elementary school, but now it’s an epidemic, not to mention all the myriad damage caused by Long COVID and other “vaccination” effects. One shudders to consider what society will look like 20 years from now. Children with these maladies can destroy families and divert attention from the needs of healthy children. And this doesn’t count all the miscarriages and Long COVID victims and sudden death victims of the mRNA injections, or the countless patients crippled by chronic illnesses such as Parkinson’s Disease that are caused by pollution of our food, water, and air. 

File:Bill Gates MSC 2017 Quote.png

By Hildenbrand / MSC, Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0

 

The Globalists’ Worldwide Depopulation Agenda Outgrows Its Training Wheels

In the meantime, the Globalists have been taking action in the spheres of economics and technology to prepare the ground for a massive crash in the world’s population. One of these actions has been the out-of-proportion “Climate Change” scare and supposed conversion to renewable energy sources that would leave advanced industrial nations dependent on solar panels and windmills. The best example is the destruction being wrought on the German economy by the Green Party which has already succeeded in shuttering all Germany’s nuclear plants. Another point of attack has been centralization and digitization of currencies. Another has been promotion of artificial intelligence in industrial processes, though the Globalists have not disclosed who will purchase all the goods produced by unending automation if the consuming public has been “disappeared.” 

Yet another ruse has been centralization of food production with an ever-shrinking number of companies responsible for the food supply. This has included conjuring up threats to the food supply through what might be called “biological terrorism,” like the growing hysteria over “bird flu” with actions like Michigan Governor Gretchen Witmer’s threats of a military-style crackdown that could result in more of the already-alarming mass culling of poultry and cattle. In fact, “bird flu” may be the mysterious “Disease X” that some are now warning about. 

A May 6, 2024, article by Julian Rose in the Activist Post entitled “Madkind-v-Mankind — A Race Against Time” gives a graphic description of the future the controllers have envisioned:

“The Great Reset” is the appropriately named most recent clock setting event initiated by Madkind.

It has placed some key dates in its agenda for the transference of organic life into a digitally controlled robotic look-alike, with the purpose of rendering Mankind obsolete.

It finds 2025/26, 2030 and 2045/50 useful markers by which to achieve particular phases of this ambition.

We know Madkind’s game plan because it is explicitly laid out in UN Agenda 2030 and the World Economic Forum’s Fourth Industrial Revolution/Green New Deal.

On the financial side, for a start, a central bank digital currency with a social credit compliance program to control individual’s access to their bank accounts, is clocked in for circa 2026.

Global economic stagnation and swathes of human starvation are timed to follow.

By 2030, Madkind’s agenda states that the process of digitalisation and artificial intelligence (AI) will have usurped much of Mankind’s emotional and rational thinking capacity; with natural powers of reproduction also sterilized into submission by ever increasing atmospheric geoengineering, water and food denaturing, electromagnetic frequencies (EMF) and weaponised vaccination programmes.

By the same date around fifty percent of food is planned to be created in factory laboratories. Synthetic, genetically modified and with no connection with soil.

Insects are high on the list for protein replacement, once milk, meat and eggs have been rendered “off the menu” due to their being identified as complicit in Madkind’s mad global warming invention.

Energy production is slated to be largely divorced from fossil fuel burning practices by this same date, replaced by what it sees as “Green’ solutions taking over the powering of what is left of productive industry.

By 2045/50 Madkind sees itself in the driving seat with its so called “Net Zero” (no carbon dioxide) policy having further reduced natural biodiversity and world populations to a fraction of current levels, replacing Mankind with the AI Transhuman cyborg version and a slave race of Humankind preserved for menial duties unsuited to robots.

This is a purely cursory, indicative list – as there is far more insanity in the pipeline than mentioned here. And Madkind has a plan B, C and D if A fails to materialise (on time).

To further remind one’s self, just check Mad Schwab’s description of the Fourth Industrial Revolution and Mad Harari’s declaration “We will do better than God.”

Censorship

We are most emphatically not supposed to communicate among ourselves about any of this. Since President Joe Biden took office in 2021, the U.S. government has engaged in a major assault on free speech. As reported by the Brownstone Institute in an article entitled “Book Burning Goes Digital”:

In March 2021, the Biden White House initiated a brazenly unconstitutional censorship campaign to prevent Americans from buying politically unfavorable books from Amazon. 

The effort, spearheaded by White House censors including Andy Slavitt and Rob Flaherty, began on March 2, 2021, when Slavitt emailed Amazon demanding to speak to an executive about the site’s “high levels of propaganda and misinformation and disinformation.” 

Their subsequent discussions remain unknown, but recently released emails from the House Judiciary Committee reveal that the censors achieved their intended result. Within a week, Amazon adopted a shadow ban policy. 

Company officials wrote in internal emails, “The impetus for this request is criticism from the Biden administration about sensitive books we’re giving prominent placement to, and should be handled urgently.” They further clarified that the policy was “due to criticism from the Biden people,” presumably meaning Slavitt and Flaherty. 

We may generalize by saying that the government’s focal point for their attack on free speech has been mainly topics related to COVID, the “pandemic,” vaccines, etc. Brownstone continues: 

At the time, “vaccine misinformation” was parlance for inconvenient truths. Five months after the Amazon censorship crusade, Twitter banned Alex Berenson at the Government’s behest for noting that the shots do not prevent infection or transmission. Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) favorably cited his Twitter ban in a September 2021 letter to Amazon calling for increased censorship of books. 

A similar process occurred at Facebook. Mark Zuckerberg wrote in internal emails that the platform decided to ban claims related to the lab-leak theory in February 2021 after “tense conversations with the new Administration.” Facebook executive Nick Clegg similarly wrote that the censorship was due to “pressure from the [Biden] administration and others to do more.” Another internal Facebook email from August 2021 wrote that the company had implemented new “misinformation” policies “stemming from the continued criticism of our approach from the [Biden] administration.” 

Not only does the Biden regime’s call for de facto book bans lead to the suppression of true information regarding lockdowns, vaccine injuries, and the lab-leak theory; it was also a clear violation of the First Amendment.

View original article at Brownstone.org.

For a further detailed review of government and media suppression of information on the COVID pandemic, see the May 8, 2024, Substack of the heavily censored Dr. Robert Malone entitled, “Update on COVID mRNA Vaccine Harms.” Dr. Malone states: 

I have been waiting for this moment for years now. The U.S. federal government is finally starting to acknowledge that they have forced the citizens (including military personnel) of this country to accept toxic injectable products presented as “vaccines,” products which either contain or cause patients’ bodies to produce a known toxin: the engineered SARS-CoV-2 spike protein. We are now seeing an incremental rollout of limited hangouts, in which current and former senior federal officials are starting to acknowledge deaths and harms attributable to the various emergency use of authorized COVID-19 “vaccine” products.

Of course, this comes after years of official federal denialism, cover ups, withholding data, overt marketing of unlicensed medical products (to adults AND children), and a massive censorship/defamation/propaganda campaign which has spanned virtually all of both mainstream media as well as alternative media outlets. Virtually all peer reviewed medical journals have been coopted and compromised, particularly those owned by the WEF partner publishing houses Elsevier and Springer/Nature….Relevant to this point was the recent reveal during the Dr. Peter Daszak public testimony in the US. Congress that both the Lancet (published by Elsevier) and Nature (Springer) have refused to testify in response to specific congressional requests. 

It’s a fact that the avalanche of censorship is concerned almost exclusively with the publication of true information about the COVID “pandemic”; nothing has been attacked by the government with such vehemence on any other topic. 

It follows that promotion of the false COVID narrative may be the overriding objective of the Biden administration, even above issues of war and peace, illegal immigration, human rights, or anything else. One may even conjecture that the main purpose of the Biden presidency is to prepare the U.S. and humanity for massive worldwide depopulation. The vehicle now appears to be the World Health Organization’s Pandemic Treaty set for a vote at the WHO’s upcoming World Health Assembly meeting on May 27-June 1, 2024.  

WHO Pandemic Treaty

File:Examination of world's health - journal.pmed.0010003.g001.png

Public health in governmental and non-governmental perception. (By Giovanni Maki, Public Library of Science/Licensed under CC BY-SA 2.5)

 

The WHO, an agency of the United Nations, is largely through its own assumed authority now proposing a Pandemic Treaty that has the potential to shut down the world in lockdowns vastly more severe than occurred during COVID, solely on its own say-so that a “pandemic” may be taking place. The WHO—or whoever their “bosses” are—will be able to mandate compulsory vaccination and “vaccine passports” for every human being on the planet while suppressing all debate or dissent. 

Critics are pointing out—when they are allowed to speak—that there is absolutely no evidence that natural outbreaks of infectious diseases are anywhere close to the level implied by the totalitarian program of societal suppression the treaty would implement. This raises the suspicion that such outbreaks could only be engineered by deliberate release of microbes generated by “gain-of-function” R&D similar to what was likely done with COVID. 

The Biden administration has declared its intent to be a party to the WHO agreement, but that it will not be providing the U.S. Senate the opportunity to ratify such a treaty as specified in the U.S. Constitution. They claim that the treaty can be implemented by executive fiat. 

The treaty is an obvious assault on the sovereignty of any nation that chooses to take part and a threat to the sanctity of personhood of every individual. In the U.S., the Bill of Rights would virtually be suspended.

To implement the WHO’s mandates, the Biden administration has created its own executive-level agency, the Office of Pandemic Preparedness and Response Policy (OPPRP). Approved by Congress in 2023, the agency “leads, coordinates, and implements actions related to preparedness for, and response to, known and unknown biological threats and pathogens that could lead to a pandemic or to significant public health-related disruptions in the United States.” A bureaucratic system referred to as “One Health” is under construction as an organizing mechanism. 

Basically, One Health intends to control all facets of life: Economics, water, public policy, occupational health risks, agriculture, global trade, commerce, environmental health, ecosystems, communications, climate change and incidentally, pandemics and human health. (“Patrick Wood explains how One Health includes everything, and that it is already embedded in our domestic agencies,” Meryl’s COVID Newsletter, May 8, 2024)

“Known and unknown”; “that could lead to a pandemic…” says OPPRP’s charter. An actual pandemic is not even required. And no one says how the mandates approved by the OPPRP, possibly applying to hundreds of millions of people, will be enforced at the level of communities and individuals. But as with COVID, such activities as family gatherings, shopping, or church services would undoubtedly be criminalized, while schools revert to the ruinous-to-learning process of cyber-instruction. 

Returning to the WHO, who are its bosses that will stand as the international arbiter of every real or possible microbial crisis? The most powerful figure behind WHO funding is U.S. multi-billionaire Bill Gates, who, as indicated above, is today the most visible member of the Globalist hierarchy determined to reduce the earth’s human population. Will Gates and his WEF associates be the ultimate decision-makers?

As indicated earlier, COVID can likely be seen as a dry-run for the much more severe sanctions promised by the WHO’s Pandemic Treaty. How then did the WHO perform during COVID? We may perhaps get a glimpse by examining a lawsuit recently filed in Geneva, Switzerland, location of WHO headquarters, by a group of international lawyers through an organization called the World Council for Health Steering Committee. 

The lawsuit is directed against Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, Director General of the WHO. Among the lengthy and detailed allegations against Ghebreyesus are those of “falsely informing world governments of a so-called pandemic, thereby causing governments to declare non-existent medical emergencies” that “have been and are still an integral part of a chain events that is resulting in mass loss of life, immense physical harm, and untold psychological distress and trauma to the people on this planet.”

Dr. Ghebreyesus is not a medical doctor, by the way. Rather he holds a Doctorate of Philosophy (PhD) in Community Health from the University of Nottingham, UK. In fact, the UK has been heavily involved in development of the WHO treaty, with then-British Prime Minister Boris Johnson a signatory to the article proposing the treaty originally.

The text of the World Council for Health Steering Committee lawsuit continues: 

Said actions appear to have led to Governments deploying insufficiently tested SARS-CoV-2 genetically modified organisms (GMOs) falsely termed “vaccines,” being also gene therapies, mandating unscientific masking protocols, implementing inhumane and anti-scientific “social distancing” measures, purchasing and deploying ineffective and fraudulent PCR tests subsequently used to create false “casedemics” in order to justify unlawful “lockdowns,” business closures and house arrest.

The plaintiffs ask for this remedy on the part of Dr. Ghebreyesus:

We demand that, with immediate effect, you cease and desist from taking further actions that would involve false and fraudulent communication to governments thereby causing or resulting in further instances of the kind of catastrophic outcomes outlined above.

The lawsuit also demands personal accountability from Dr. Ghebreyesus:

We also put you on notice that failure to cease or desist from continued or repeated involvement or implication in the above harms shall render you liable both in your personal and corporate capacity. As a man, you shall be investigated for criminal conspiracy. As a corporate officer, you shall be investigated for gross negligence, serious misconduct in public office, corporate fraud, and potentially even aiding and abetting corporate manslaughter.

For complete information on the opposition of the World Council for Health to the WHO and its plans and programs, see their website at https://worldcouncilforhealth.org/.

Then ask yourself if the WHO should be entrusted with the future of the human race or whether the WHO treaty is a prescription for mass extinction. Then ask whether humanity is so lacking in self-respect as to countenance this travesty? 

Opposition to the WHO 

There is growing opposition to the WHO Pandemic Treaty, particularly among organizations and individuals who are leading the general societal awakening to the horrors inflicted by the world’s governing authorities with respect to the COVID pandemic. At the same time, the world is only beginning to realize the harm that has already been inflicted by the mRNA “vaccines” administered to hundreds of millions of people worldwide.

Communication on these vital topics continue to be repressed by the Biden administration and other governments globally. The urgency of the need to fight against the imposition of the WHO Pandemic Treaty has scarcely penetrated the political sphere. 

At the same time, awareness is growing. Within the U.S., the state of Louisiana may soon declare that it will not be subject to UN or WHO mandates. Similar legislation has been introduced in Oklahoma. 22 state attorneys-general have said the same. 

Opposition was also recently expressed by a letter to President Biden from the 49 U.S. senators in the Republican Senate Conference. As reported by Fox News (May 2, 2024):

Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., led the entire Republican Senate conference in calling on President Biden to reject agreements that would expand the authority of the World Health Organization (WHO) in the case of a global pandemic.

“We strongly urge you not to join any pandemic related treaty, convention, or agreement being considered” at the 77th World Health Assembly, reads a letter sent to Biden by Johnson and all 48 other Republican senators. 

The Republican senators stressed that any such agreement would be considered a treaty, which they noted requires “the concurrence of two-thirds of the Senate under Article I Section 2 of the Constitution.”

Sen. Ron Johnson led all GOP senators in a letter to Biden, calling on him not to support agreements to expand WHO authority. 

The World Health Assembly (WHA) will take place from May 27 to June 1, and international agreements are expected to be considered. 

The WHA is the WHO’s decision-making body, which meets yearly, so it can lay out its goals and craft policies between the 194 member states. 

Due to the growing uproar, however, Great Britain, one of the original drivers, is now considering a vote against the treaty. According to Reuters (May 9, 2024), “We will only support the adoption of the accord and accept it on behalf of the UK, if it is firmly in the UK national interest and respects national sovereignty,” a spokesperson for Britain’s Department of Health and Social Care confirmed. Also reportedly opposing the treaty is the government of The Netherlands. 

Grassroots Opposition

Among those individuals leading the opposition within the U.S. and worldwide is Dr. Meryl Nass, a physician from Maine whose license to practice medicine was suspended when she prescribed medications for COVID treatment which, while legal, were frowned upon by medical authorities as not conforming to the often-deadly government-preferred treatment protocols. The medications in question were, of course, ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine. Dr. Nass’s Substack may be found here.

Dr. Nass has recommended a series of steps for sovereign governments to take in fighting the WHO Pandemic Treaty. See her Substack here entitled “What can lawmakers do to stop the Pandemic Agreement (Treaty) and amendments to the International Health Regulations (2005) (IHR) from going forward at the 77th World Health Assembly (WHA) meeting, taking place from May 27 to June 1, 2024?”

Conclusion

For many, the Globalist attitude is on full display in the comment famously attributed to Britain’s Prince Philip by The Guardian in 2009 where he is quoted as having said, “In the event that I am reincarnated, I would like to return as a deadly virus, to contribute something to solving overpopulation.”

We have no idea what the net effect of the COVID pandemic has been, or will be, once the downstream nefarious side-effects of the “jab” play out in deaths, illnesses, and long-term infertility. Without question, the mortality and morbidity, including health effects from depression, loss of livelihood, etc., are already in the hundreds of millions. 

For instance, as reported in Jeff Childers’ Substack, May 8, 2024: “In a recent World Economic Forum clip making the rounds this week, veterinarian and Moderna CEO Stéphan Bancel freely admitted that sixteen million Americans now have disabling Long Covid, which most of us interpret in proper English as ‘Long Vaxx:’”

 I believe it is accurate to say that the harm to mankind from the COVID travesty already exceeds any single war since World War II and possibly all wars on the planet since 9/11. And this may be just the beginning. 

Returning to the considerations that began this article, I personally believe that the Globalists have taken a significant step forward on their project for massive planetary population reduction. But it may also be that the coming effects from the WHO Pandemic Treaty will be much, much greater than anything seen thus far. 

The proposed WHO Pandemic Treaty may therefore be the greatest assault on human rights, constitutional government, and the sanctity of human life in all history. And yes, I am including in this the Holocaust. 

And in our concern about the actions of the WHO, we should not forget about the major role being played by the U.S. military establishment in funding and promoting further bioweapons development. It was the U.S. military, after all, that funded the COVID vax. 

Further, Karen Kingston wrote in her Substack for May 7, 2024: 

Crime Pays: DARPA’s $4.1 Billion Synthetic Biology Budget for 2024. These monies are being used to invest in synthetic biology technologies that no reputable private venture capital firm will fund because the human applications of these biotechnologies are criminal.

DARPA is the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, a major funder of vaccine development. See its website for its article on “Taking Guess Work out of Vaccine Development: AIM Program aims to leverage host immune mechanisms to determine if vaccine candidates will provide long-lasting immune protection.”

And the U.S. military to which DARPA belongs is 100 percent under Globalist control. This was confirmed long ago by Henry Kissinger, who famously said, “Military Men Are dumb, stupid animals to be used as pawns for foreign policy.” 

But it’s not just military men. The Globalists see all of us in a similar way; essentially as just a herd of cattle. 

As I indicated at the beginning of this article, the rush of events in the news today due to the countless conflicts and crises, including the turmoil associated with the 2024 U.S. presidential election, have prevented the seriousness of the WHO’s actions from being fully exposed and appreciated, not just among the political classes of the world’s nations, but from the public in general. 

At the same time, with what there is of growing public and political awareness, there are increasing reports that the current version of the WHO Pandemic Treaty has no chance of being approved at the upcoming May 27-June 1, 2024 meeting. This doesn’t mean, of course, that they won’t try again, and again, and again…or that some new Disease X, Y, or Z using gain-of-function enhancement won’t be released to bring about the longed-for emergency. The final nail in humanity’s coffin would be next. 

The Spiritual Battle

I can only add my conviction that, above all, the current battle is a spiritual one. 

In John 16:5-11, Jesus said to his disciples:

Now I am going to the one who sent me,
and not one of you asks me, “Where are you going?”
But because I told you this, grief has filled your hearts.
But I tell you the truth, it is better for you that I go.
For if I do not go, the Advocate will not come to you.
But if I go, I will send him to you.
And when he comes he will convict the world
in regard to sin and righteousness and condemnation:
sin, because they do not believe in me;
righteousness, because I am going to the Father
and you will no longer see me;
condemnation, because the ruler of this world has been condemned.

We must all decide where we stand: With spiritual truth and the real lifegiving strivings of humanity, or with “the ruler of this world” and the Globalist death cult that serves him. 

For Jesus says further in John 16:20-23:

Amen, amen, I say to you, you will weep and mourn,
while the world rejoices;
you will grieve, but your grief will become joy.
When a woman is in labor, she is in anguish because her hour has arrived;
but when she has given birth to a child,
she no longer remembers the pain because of her joy
that a child has been born into the world.
So you also are now in anguish.
But I will see you again, and your hearts will rejoice,
and no one will take your joy away from you.
On that day you will not question me about anything.
Amen, amen, I say to you,
whatever you ask the Father in my name he will give you.

*

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Birds Not Bombs: Let’s Fight for a World of Peace, Not War 

Richard C. Cook is a co-founder and lead investigator for the American Geopolitical Institute.  Mr. Cook is a retired U.S. federal analyst with extensive experience across various government agencies, including the U.S. Civil Service Commission, FDA, the Carter White House, NASA, and the U.S. Treasury. As a whistleblower at the time of the Challenger disaster, he exposed the flawed O-ring joints that destroyed the Shuttle, documenting his story in his book “Challenger Revealed.” After serving at Treasury, he became a vocal critic of the private finance-controlled monetary system, detailing his concerns in “We Hold These Truths: The Hope of Monetary Reform.” He served as an advisor to the American Monetary Institute and worked with Congressman Dennis Kucinich to advocate for replacing the Federal Reserve with a genuine national currency. See his new book, Our Country, Then and Now, Clarity Press, 2023.

“Every human enterprise must serve life, must seek to enrich existence on earth, lest man become enslaved where he seeks to establish his dominion!” Bô Yin Râ (Joseph Anton Schneiderfranken, 1876-1943), Translation by Posthumus Projects Amsterdam, 2014. Also see the Kober Press edition of The Book on the Living God here.

Featured image is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0

[This article was first published by GR in May 2024.]

Brand-new heart syndrome reportedly affects 90% of U.S. population, American Medical Association claims, no explanation offered 

Via American Heart Association, October 2023 (emphasis added):

Health experts are redefining cardiovascular disease (CVD) risk, prevention and management, according to a new American Heart Association presidential advisory published today in the Association’s flagship journal Circulation.

Various aspects of cardiovascular disease that overlap with kidney disease, Type 2 diabetes and obesity support the new approach. For the first time, the American Heart Association defines the overlap in these conditions as cardiovascular-kidney-metabolic (CKM) syndrome. People who have or are at risk for cardiovascular disease may have CKM syndrome…

According to the American Heart Association’s 2023 Statistical Update, 1 in 3 U.S. adults have three or more risk factors that contribute to cardiovascular disease, metabolic disorders and/or kidney disease. CKM affects nearly every major organ in the body, including the heart, brain, kidney and liver. However, the biggest impact is on the cardiovascular system, affecting blood vessels and heart muscle function, the rate of fatty buildup in arteries, electrical impulses in the heart and more.”

Although the diagnostic designation CKM only materialized last fall, according to recently released data from the Journal of the American Medical Association, a full 90% of Americans might be afflicted.

Via Healthline (emphasis added):

“A new study has revealed that roughly 90% of Americans may have cardiovascular-kidney-metabolic (CKM) syndrome.

The risks are greatest among older adults, men, and Black individuals, the report, which was published in JAMA Wednesday, found.

The American Heart Association (AHA) introduced a new staging system in 2023 — called CKM syndrome — to better treat and manage cardiovascular, kidney, and metabolic diseases, since they are deeply connected and often require a multidisciplinary approach.

CKM syndrome is a systemic disorder that has links between heart disease, kidney disease, diabetes, and obesity.”

Via Journal of the American Medical Association (emphasis added):

Almost 90% of US adults met criteria for CKM syndrome (stage 1 or higher) and 15% met criteria for advanced stages, neither of which improved between 2011 and 2020. The lack of progress, in part, may reflect concomitant improvement and worsening of different risk factors over time. Substantial between-subgroup differences in advanced stages were observed, with older age, men, and Black adults at increased risk.”

A 90% diagnosis rate for a newborn medical condition impacting multiple organs simultaneously would seem to beg for deep, deliberate, comprehensive reflection within the medical community — the kind of sweeping mobilization of resources seen during Operation Warp Speed — to ferret out root causes, which in other contexts, like mass migration, the likes of the Karamel-uh entity are exceptionally curious about.

…Unless, of course, true healthcare isn’t the overriding objective of the brand of institutionalized, corporatized “healthcare” championed by the governing authorities and industry.

One doesn’t require an epidemiology degree to get the sense that whatever is triggering functional meltdowns in multiple organs at once in 90% of a population is probably something coming from a source ubiquitous in the environment, like the food supply, or the water, or the tip of a syringe filled with a certain experimental gene therapy — or all three at once.

Yet — and you’ll be shocked to learn this — perusing all of the literature on CMK pushed out by mainstream outlets and medical organizations like the AMA, there is a palpable lack of interest in asking fundamental questions. 

What they are interested in, and what we can expect coming down the pipeline, is new patented drugs for CMK to the great ecstasy of Pfizer and Merck shareholders.

“An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure” is anathema to the industry’s business model, so what we get is the inverse paradigm.

*

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Birds Not Bombs: Let’s Fight for a World of Peace, Not War 

This article was originally published on the author’s Substack, Armageddon Prose.

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

Featured image source

BRICS 16th Summit – First Step Towards a Common Future of Sovereign Multipolarity?

By Peter Koenig, October 28, 2024

Perhaps one of the most important conflict resolutions at the margins of the meeting happened during a face-to-face dialogue between PM Narendra Modi of India and China’s President Xi Jinping, the first in five years.

Bombshell: ‘You Were Right, Vaccines Are Killing Millions of Our Loved Ones’. Japan’s Former Minister of Internal Affairs Apologizes to the Unvaccinated

By Sean Adl-Tabatabai and Prof Michel Chossudovsky, October 29, 2024

In Japan, the mRNA vaccine was launched in February 2021 allegedly as a means to protect the Japanese people against a non-existent “killer virus”. More than 206 million doses had already been administered. The Japanese population was not informed regarding the dangers of the mRNA vaccine.

Seoul Attempts to Distract from Domestic Issues by Alleging North Korea Will Fight in Ukraine

By Ahmed Adel, October 28, 2024

Attempts by South Korean authorities to spread information that North Korea wants to send troops to Ukraine to help Russia may be aimed at distracting attention from Seoul’s internal problems, but the time is too dangerous to be “playing with fire” now, experts quoted by the South China Morning Post said.

Election 2024: Trump vs. Harris: From the Abyss

By Richard C. Cook, October 28, 2024

The most important economic issue that divides the candidates is that Trump favors the imposition of a high level of tariffs on imports. The purpose would be to restore manufacturing enterprise on American soil, with corresponding growth of factory jobs.

Crippling UNRWA: The Knesset’s Collective Punishment of Palestinians

By Dr. Binoy Kampmark, October 28, 2024

The campaign against UNRWA by the Israeli state has been relentless and pathological.  Even before last year’s October 7 attacks by Hamas, much was made of the fact that the body seemed intent on keeping the horrors of the 1948 displacements current. 

Video: The Mysterious Death of Dr. Kary Mullis, Dr. Fauci’s Most Notable Critic

By Greg Reese, October 28, 2024

The late Dr. Kary Mullis, the inventor of the PCR test, has been blowing the whistle on Fauci and big pharma for 30 years.

The Crimes of Israel, and Their Puppet Master the U.S.

By Michael Welch, Prof Michel Chossudovsky, and Michael Lynk, October 28, 2024

This week, on the Global Research News Hour, we thoroughly analyze Israel-Palestine and attempt to arrive at a solution to the humanitarian mess that holds hope for the people who say with determination, “Free, free Palestine!”

 

[This is an AI translation into Japanese.]

***

爆弾:日本の元内務大臣が予防接種を受けていない人に謝罪:「あなたは正しかった、ワクチンは私たちの愛する人の何百万人もの人を殺している」

ミシェル・チョスドフスキーによる入門ノート

Introductory Note by Michel Chossudovsky

In Japan, the mRNA vaccine was launched in February 2021 allegedly as a means to protect the Japanese people against a non-existent “killer virus”.

More than 206 million doses had already been administered. The Japanese population was not informed regarding the dangers of the mRNA vaccine.

In December 2021, Japan’s Ministry of Health authorized booster shots of  Moderna and Pfizer vaccines, pointing to the “low rate of side effects such as myocarditis”. 

According to Japan’s Ministry of Heath’s early advisory (which was similar to that applied in numerous countries):

“The Government recommends that people get vaccinated because the benefits of vaccination are greater than the risk of side reactions.” (emphasis added)

The foregoing is misleading as pointed out in the Former Minister of Internal Affairs Kazuhiro Haraguchi’s courageous statement:

“‘You Were Right, Vaccines Are Killing Millions of Our Loved Ones”

「あなたは正しかった、ワクチンは私たちの愛する人の何百万人もの人を殺している」

“They are trying to block our freedom, our resistance, our power. But we will never lose.”

Haraguchi issued a rallying call for action.

He urged the people to stand united in challenging the government and its questionable decisions.

“Let’s overthrow this government,”

he proclaimed, emphasizing the need for change and accountability.

He called on legislators to continue fighting for the people’s lives and freedoms, “Let’s make it happen,” he concluded.


Excess Mortality (Japan) (2020-2022)

In Japan, the vaccine was launched in early 2021.

Suicides in Japan Resulting from Lockdown (2020)

Notice the surge in suicide rates immediately following the March 2020 lockdown (Source: Ministry of Health, Welfare and Labor/Graphic: Jason Kwok and Natalie Croker, CNN)
 .

“Far more Japanese people are dying of suicide, likely exacerbated by the economic and social repercussions of the pandemic, than of the COVID-19 disease itself. …  Provisional statistics from the National Police Agency show suicides surged to 2,153 in October [2020] alone, marking the fourth straight month of increase.” CBS November 2020 report (emphasis added)

Suicides Among Japan’s Schoolchildren

A 2021 report by Japan’s Ministry of Education confirms that suicide among Japanese schoolchildren had hit a record high during the 2020 school year.  The report from the Ministry of Education suggests that

“the pandemic has caused changes in the school and family environment and had an impact on children’s behavior”. (For details see chapter 6 of  Michel Chossudovsky’s book)


A  note on my book entitled: 

The Worldwide Corona Crisis, Global Coup d’Etat Against Humanity 

first published in Japanese in April 2022.

In English it is available in E-book form. (See below).

I remain indebted to the Japanese publisher which brought out and promoted my book despite political pressures  and an atmosphere of censorship.  My thanks to both the Publisher and to the Translator.

The fraudulent narrative concerning the Covid “Vaccine” is collapsing in different parts of the World.

In California, 9th Circuit Court Rules that COVID-19 mRNA Injections Are Not “Vaccines”.  

In Germany, the Health authorities  have acknowledged the devastating nature and impacts of the Covid lockdowns, the mandatory wearing of the face mask, and the experimental mRNA “vaccines”.

Global Research has from the outset provided an extensive daily coverage of the devastating impacts of the “vaccine”. Our objective is to SAVE LIVES. 

In solidarity with the people of Japan.

In solidarity with people all over the World. 

Michel Chossudovsky, Global Research, June 11, June 24, 2024

 


Kazuhiro Haraguchi, the former Japanese Minister for Internal Affairs, has become the first major politician to apologize to the unvaccinated for the tsunami of deaths occuring among the vaccinated population.

His presentation  starts 7’o”

Earlier this week, huge numbers of Japanese citizens took to the streets to protest against the crimes against humanity perpetrated by globalist organizations such by World Health Organization (WHO) and World Economic Forum (WEF) during the pandemic.

During an opening speech at the protests, Haraguchi delivered a powerful and emotional apology for the huge numbers of deaths now occurring as a result of the deadly mRNA roll-out.

Haraguchi began by addressing the grief and loss felt by families who have lost loved ones who were coerced into taking the COVID jab. With a deep sense of sincerity, he extended his condolences and took responsibility for the failings of those in power. I apologize to all of you. So many have died, and they shouldn’t have,” he said.

Thelibertybeacon.com reports: One of the key points in Haraguchi’s speech was his criticism of the ban on Ivermectin, a drug developed by Dr. Satoshi Omura, which he believed could have played a significant role in combating the pandemic. Haraguchi questioned the motives behind the ban, suggesting that economic interests were prioritized over public health. “Why? Because they are cheap. They don’t want it because it will interfere with the sales of the vaccines,” he argued. This statement drew loud applause from the crowd, many of whom felt that corporate profits had taken precedence over human lives.

Haraguchi then shared a deeply personal story about his own health struggles. After receiving vaccines, he developed a severe illness, specifically a rapidly progressing form of cancer. “This time last year, I had neither eyebrows nor hair. Two out of the three supposed vaccines I received were lethal batches,” he revealed. This candid account of his battle with cancer, which included significant physical changes like hair loss, struck a chord with the audience. He recounted an incident where his appearance became a point of distraction in the Diet, with an opponent focusing more on his wig than the issues at hand.

Adding to the conversation, Haraguchi disclosed that he was not the only member of Japan’s National Diet (legislature) to suffer adverse effects from vaccines. He mentioned that three of his colleagues had been severely affected, with some even hospitalized. “They are falling to pieces, some hospitalized. But they don’t speak up,” he explained. This revelation underscored a broader issue: the reluctance or inability of public figures to discuss their personal health challenges openly.

Haraguchi was particularly passionate about the attempts to silence those who question current policies and government actions. He recounted a recent incident where he was banned from speaking on Channel 3 after an interview with its president. 

The other day, I spoke with the President of Channel 3, and I was banned. They are trying to silence our voices,” he stated. This attempt to censor dissenting voices highlighted a critical concern about freedom of speech and expression. Haraguchi urged the audience to remain steadfast in their resolve, saying,

“They are trying to block our freedom, our resistance, our power. But we will never lose.”

In the conclusion of his speech,

Haraguchi issued a rallying call for action. He urged the people to stand united in challenging the government and its questionable decisions. “Let’s overthrow this government,” he proclaimed, emphasizing the need for change and accountability. He called on legislators to continue fighting for the people’s lives and freedoms, “Let’s make it happen,” he concluded.

The protest that is happening right now (31st May 2024), which aims to draw tens of thousands of participants, marked a significant moment in the global discourse about pandemic management and health policies. Haraguchi’s speech, filled with personal anecdotes and strong criticisms, resonated deeply with the attendees.

Read this


爆弾:日本の元内務大臣が予防接種を受けていない人に謝罪:「あなたは正しかった、ワクチンは私たちの愛する人の何百万人もの人を殺している」

ミシェル・チョスドフスキーによる入門ノート

Introductory Note by Michel Chossudovsky

私の著書『 世界的なコロナ危機、人類に対するグローバルクーデター』  は、2022年4月に日本語で初めて出版されました。英語版は電子書籍の形で入手できます。

政治的圧力と検閲にもかかわらず私の本を出版してくれた日本の出版社には今でも感謝しています。

出版社と翻訳者に感謝します。

日本では、存在しない「殺人ウイルス」から日本人を守る手段として、mRNAワクチンが2021年2月に発売されたとされている。

すでに2億600万回以上が投与された。日本 国民はmRNAワクチンの危険性について知らされていなかった。

2021年12月、 日本の厚生労働省は 「心筋炎などの副作用の発生率が低い」ことを指摘し、モデルナ社とファイザー社のワクチンの追加接種を承認した。

日本の保健省の初期勧告によると(これは多くの国で適用されているものと同様でした。

「ワクチン接種のメリットは副反応のリスクよりも大きいため、 政府は人々にワクチン接種を推奨しています。」 (強調追加)

原口一博氏の勇気ある発言が指摘しているように、上記は誤解を招くものである。

「『あなたは正しかった。ワクチンは何百万人もの私たちの愛する人を殺している』」

新型コロナウイルスの「ワクチン」に関する欺瞞的な物語は、世界のさまざまな地域で崩壊しつつある。

カリフォルニア州の 第9巡回裁判所は、COVID-19 mRNA注射は「ワクチン」ではないとの判決を下した。

ドイツ では 、保健当局が、新型コロナウイルス対策のロックダウン、マスク着用義務、実験的なmRNA「ワクチン」の壊滅的な性質と影響を認めている。

日本の人々と連帯して。

世界中の人々と連帯します。

ミシェル・チョスドフスキー、グローバル・リサーチ、2024 年 6 月 11 日

 

日本の元総務大臣である原口一博氏は、ワクチン接種者の間で津波による死亡者が発生したことについて、ワクチン未接種者に謝罪した最初の主要政治家となった。

 

今週初め、大勢の日本国民が、パンデミックの最中に世界保健機関(WHO)や世界経済フォーラム(WEF)などのグローバリスト組織が犯した人道に対する罪に抗議するため街頭に出た。

原口氏は抗議活動の冒頭演説で、致命的なmRNAの流出の結果として現在発生している膨大な数の死者について力強く、感情的に謝罪した。

原口氏はまず、新型コロナウイルスのワクチン接種を強制され愛する人を失った遺族が感じている悲しみと喪失感について語った。 氏は心から哀悼の意を表し、権力者の失策の責任を認めた。  「皆さんにお詫びします。多くの人が亡くなりましたが、亡くなるべきではなかったのです」と氏は述べた。

Thelibertybeacon.com の報道によると、原口氏の演説の要点の一つは、 大村智博士が開発した イベルメクチンの禁止に対する批判だった。同氏は、この薬がパンデミック対策に大きな役割を果たせたと考えていた。原口氏は禁止の背後にある動機に疑問を呈し、公衆衛生よりも経済的利益が優先されたと示唆した。「なぜかって? 安いからだ。ワクチンの売り上げに支障が出るから嫌がるんだ」と同氏は主張した。この発言は、企業の利益が人命よりも優先されたと感じていた聴衆から大きな拍手を浴びた。

原口氏はその後、自身の健康問題に関する非常に個人的な話をした。 ワクチン接種後、深刻な病気、具体的には急速に進行する癌を発症した。 「去年の今頃は、眉毛も髪の毛もありませんでした。私が受けた3つのワクチンのうち2つは致死的なワクチンでした」と彼は明かした。脱毛などの著しい身体的変化を含む癌との闘いについてのこの率直な話は、聴衆の共感を呼んだ。彼は、国会で彼の外見が気を散らす原因となり、対立候補が目の前の問題よりも彼のかつらに注目したという出来事を語った。

会話に加えて、原口氏は、 ワクチンによる副作用に苦しんだ日本の国会議員は自分だけではないことを明らかにした。同氏は、同僚3人が重篤な影響を受け、中には入院した人もいると述べた。 「彼らはバラバラになっていて、中には入院している人もいる。しかし、彼らは声を上げません」と彼は説明した。この暴露は、公人が個人の健康問題について公然と話し合うことに消極的である、あるいはそれができないという、より広範な問題を浮き彫りにした。

原口氏は、現在の政策や政府の行動に疑問を抱く人々を黙らせる試みに特に情熱を注いだ。同氏は、チャンネル3の社長とのインタビュー後にチャンネル3での発言を禁止された最近の出来事について語った 。  「先日、私はチャンネル 3 の社長と話をしましたが、私は禁止されました。彼らは私たちの声を黙らせようとしている」と彼は述べた。反対意見を検閲するこの試みは、言論と表現の自由に対する重大な懸念を浮き彫りにした。原口氏は聴衆に対し、「彼らは私たちの自由、私たちの抵抗、私たちの力を阻止しようとしている。しかし、私たちは決して負けません。」

原口氏は演説の最後に、行動を起こすよう呼びかけた。 政府とその疑わしい決定に異議を唱えるために国民が団結するよう促した。  「この政府を打倒しよう」と宣言し、変革と説明責任の必要性を強調した。議員らに国民の命と自由のために戦い続けるよう呼びかけ、「実現させよう」と締めくくった。

現在(2024年5月31日)行われている抗議活動は、数万人の参加を目指しており、パンデミック管理と健康政策に関する世界的な議論において重要な瞬間を刻んだ。個人的な逸話と強い批判に満ちた原口氏の演説は、参加者の心に深く響いた。

これを読む。

 

 

*

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Birds Not Bombs: Let’s Fight for a World of Peace, Not War

Having cut his teeth in the mainstream media, including stints at the BBC, Sean witnessed the corruption within the system and developed a burning desire to expose the secrets that protect the elite and allow them to continue waging war on humanity. Disturbed by the agenda of the elites and dissatisfied with the alternative media, Sean decided it was time to shake things up. Knight of Joseon (https://joseon.com)

Featured image is from TPV


The Worldwide Corona Crisis, Global Coup d’Etat Against Humanity

by Michel Chossudovsky

Michel Chossudovsky reviews in detail how this insidious project “destroys people’s lives”. He provides a comprehensive analysis of everything you need to know about the “pandemic” — from the medical dimensions to the economic and social repercussions, political underpinnings, and mental and psychological impacts.

“My objective as an author is to inform people worldwide and refute the official narrative which has been used as a justification to destabilize the economic and social fabric of entire countries, followed by the imposition of the “deadly” COVID-19 “vaccine”. This crisis affects humanity in its entirety: almost 8 billion people. We stand in solidarity with our fellow human beings and our children worldwide. Truth is a powerful instrument.”

Reviews

This is an in-depth resource of great interest if it is the wider perspective you are motivated to understand a little better, the author is very knowledgeable about geopolitics and this comes out in the way Covid is contextualized. —Dr. Mike Yeadon

In this war against humanity in which we find ourselves, in this singular, irregular and massive assault against liberty and the goodness of people, Chossudovsky’s book is a rock upon which to sustain our fight. –Dr. Emanuel Garcia

In fifteen concise science-based chapters, Michel traces the false covid pandemic, explaining how a PCR test, producing up to 97% proven false positives, combined with a relentless 24/7 fear campaign, was able to create a worldwide panic-laden “plandemic”; that this plandemic would never have been possible without the infamous DNA-modifying Polymerase Chain Reaction test – which to this day is being pushed on a majority of innocent people who have no clue. His conclusions are evidenced by renown scientists. —Peter Koenig 

Professor Chossudovsky exposes the truth that “there is no causal relationship between the virus and economic variables.” In other words, it was not COVID-19 but, rather, the deliberate implementation of the illogical, scientifically baseless lockdowns that caused the shutdown of the global economy. –David Skripac

A reading of  Chossudovsky’s book provides a comprehensive lesson in how there is a global coup d’état under way called “The Great Reset” that if not resisted and defeated by freedom loving people everywhere will result in a dystopian future not yet imagined. Pass on this free gift from Professor Chossudovsky before it’s too late.  You will not find so much valuable information and analysis in one place. –Edward Curtin

ISBN: 978-0-9879389-3-0,  Year: 2022,  PDF Ebook,  Pages: 164, 15 Chapters

Price: $11.50 FREE COPY! Click here (docsend) and download.

You may also access the online version of the e-Book by clicking here.

We encourage you to support the eBook project by making a donation through Global Research’s DonorBox “Worldwide Corona Crisis” Campaign Page


My thanks to the Publisher and to the translator Tatsuo Iwana.

 

 
 
地球規模で仕組まれた〈危機〉の真相

コロナは、入念に準備された世界の初期化=グレート・リセットのための計画である――

●恐怖をあおる政策と、市民社会の破壊
●感染の根拠となったPCR検査の不確実性
●仕組まれた経済不況と億万長者による富の収奪
●パンデミック以前に開発が始まっていたmRNAワクチン
●コロナワクチン市場を寡占する巨大製薬企業の闇
●世界が抱える債務と「新自由主義的ショック療法」

反グローバリゼーションの世界的論客が明かす〈コロナ騒動〉の正体

●目次●
序文・日本語版への序文
第1章 市民社会の破壊と恐怖をあおる政策
第2章 コロナ危機の時系列による経緯
第3章 Covid-19とは何か――どうやって検査・測定されるのか?
第4章 仕組まれた経済不況
第5章 大富豪をさらに富裕化する富の収奪と再配分
第6章 心の健康を破壊する
第7章 大手製薬会社のコロナ「ワクチン」
第8章 豚インフルエンザの世界的流行は本番前の舞台稽古だった?
第9章 「社会を乱すもの」と攻撃される抗議運動
第10章 世界規模のワクチン接種作戦は集団殺戮だ
第11章 世界規模のクーデターと「世界全体の初期化」
第12章 これからの道――「コロナを利用した専制政治」に反対する世界的な運動の構築

Lula vai aguentar dois anos mais em cima da corda bamba?

October 29th, 2024 by Eduardo Vasco

O Brasil não precisava ter vetado a entrada da Venezuela como parceiro do BRICS. É sabido que essa decisão foi tomada para não ficar mal com os Estados Unidos. Mas poderia muito bem ter se abstido e justificado que seria errado ir contra a vontade de todos os outros membros. Não era difícil ter deixado passar a decisão da maioria. Lula demonstrou fraqueza e isso é o pior que um chefe de Estado pode fazer. O inimigo viu que Lula fraquejou e isso vai animá-lo a aumentar as pressões. Essa é uma síndrome da esquerda nacionalista e reformista. Só que a fraqueza que Lula demonstrou foi muita – foi uma capitulação totalmente desnecessária.

Fonte : https://brazilian.report/cartoons/2024/10/24/lula-shuns-maduro-brics/

Ao lado da Fazenda e Defesa, o Itamaraty é um dos três principais ministérios do governo brasileiro. Como tratam o Brasil como uma colônia, os EUA precisam ter o controle sobre esses três ministérios-chave. É inadmissível que algum deles seja independente do controle imperialista. A composição social do Itamaraty é perfeita para a penetração da influência imperialista: uma casta burocrática e familiar formada pela burguesia e os extratos superiores da pequena burguesia. Sempre foi assim. Como uma entidade extremamente tradicional e de elite, ela é inerentemente conservadora, mesmo reacionária, que visa manter o status quo e seus privilégios absolutamente inalterados. O imperialismo americano se aproveita disso e já há mais de cem anos, quando começou a dominar a política brasileira, cooptou e colocou em sua folha de pagamentos senão toda a estrutura desse ministério, ao menos uma parte importante dos seus integrantes.

Como em tudo, o PT não conseguiu (se é que tentou) mudar o quadro da instituição. Os embaixadores e diplomatas de primeiro escalão colocados por Lula e Dilma foram rifados logo quando Bolsonaro assumiu o governo. Trocou muitos “petistas” por olavistas ou semi-olavistas. Dividiram o controle com os burocratas tradicionais da corporação, deixando os poucos “esquerdistas” de canto. Agora que Lula voltou, ao invés de fazer a mesma limpeza que Bolsonaro fez e retirar os bolsonaristas e direitistas de cena, praticamente não mexeu no Itamaraty. O Itamaraty não está sob o controle do presidente da República – como deveria estar, sendo um dos principais ministérios e, portanto, devendo obedecer fielmente o presidente.

O esgotamento da política de conciliação

A vida política institucional de Lula já está indo para o seu desfecho e ele tem a chance de deixar um legado positivo histórico, conduzindo o Brasil para um caminho soberano em relação ao jugo imperialista. Não há sucessor na esquerda e, se Lula falhar na tarefa (que ele talvez almeje e a qual seus apoiadores acreditam que ele é capaz de realizar) de abrir as portas do Brasil para a nossa soberania, a esquerda pagará um preço enorme. Haverá uma crise histórica de lideranças absolutamente adaptadas à submissão imperial, que só não se abateu com toda a força porque Lula ainda existe.

O veto do Brasil à Venezuela no BRICS é consequência da insistência da esquerda em manter a política não apenas de conciliação, mas de colaboração com a direita tradicional, vendida como a “menos pior” – que se expressa, novamente, no apoio aos candidatos dessa direita contra os “mais piores” bolsonaristas no segundo turno das eleições municipais.

As eleições municipais consolidaram a ressurreição dessa direita (o centrão). Depois da débâcle histórica de 2018, a direita conseguiu se recuperar aos poucos, graças ao resgate proporcionado pela esquerda. As eleições de 2022, com a formação de uma frente ampla desnecessária para eleger Lula levaram este à presidência, mas ao custo de que essa direita tradicional se apoderasse do governo.

Na verdade, o centrão nunca saiu do poder. É a grande chaga que mantém o Brasil como uma semicolônia do imperialismo desde a proclamação da república. Nenhuma revolução ou contrarrevolução o tirou do poder – no máximo reduziu ou fortaleceu o seu domínio, mas nunca o erradicou. A maior parte do tempo do governo Bolsonaro já havia sido, de fato, de um governo do centrão. A direita tradicional conseguiu neutralizar a força avassaladora da extrema-direita ao longo da primeira metade do governo Bolsonaro, e foi ainda mais rápida em neutralizar o governo Lula. Há mais de um ano o presidente não passa de um refém do centrão, da direita oligárquica e dependente do imperialismo americano.

O último bastião da resistência de Lula dentro do governo – a política externa – já está sendo conquistado pela direita. O imperialismo não pode tolerar uma política brasileira na cena mundial que apoie a resistência palestina e tampouco o fortalecimento de Rússia, China e do enfrentamento ao seu domínio, representado pelo BRICS. As engrenagens pró-imperialistas do Itamaraty já foram ativadas a fim de completar o cerco do próprio aparelho do Estado brasileiro ao presidente Lula e àquilo que ele representa.

Há, ainda, um problema crucial: a extrema-direita, apesar de suas contradições internas, está com sua força e popularidade praticamente intactas já há uma década. E, como sempre, é favorecida pela sabotagem e propaganda da direita tradicional (centrão, imprensa, bancos e grandes capitalistas) contra Lula. Além do mais, a forte presença da extrema-direita influenciou a política da própria direita tradicional, agora ainda mais reacionária.

A política de não-alinhamento é inviável para o Brasil

O presidente, assim, vive uma situação muito delicada. Há quem acredite que ele está certo em buscar uma suposta equidistância tanto dos Estados Unidos quanto da China. Mas um país como o Brasil, uma semicolônia do imperialismo americano submetida atualmente a uma crescente pressão de Washington, não pode se dar ao luxo de buscar uma pretensa neutralidade, ao contrário de outros, como Índia ou Turquia, que são geograficamente distantes dos EUA e vizinhas de China e Rússia e cuja dependência política e econômica do imperialismo americano (embora ainda seja grande) não é tanta quanto a nossa.

Mesmo países fronteiriços com a Rússia não suportaram as pressões contra a aplicação de uma política não-alinhada e tiveram seus governos derrubados por golpes de Estado promovidos pelo imperialismo. Foi o caso da Ucrânia, em 2014, e é o que tende a ocorrer na Geórgia novamente. Essa também é a tendência do Brasil, se Lula continuar cedendo e não tomar um rumo verdadeiramente soberano, o que significa se aliar com China e Rússia e deixar de depender dos Estados Unidos.

O imperialismo americano tem o controle do Brasil. Tanto o centrão quanto a extrema-direita são seus aliados contra Lula. Ainda que tenham desavenças (às vezes encarniçadas), na hora H eles deixarão essas discordâncias de lado e lutarão juntos contra o inimigo comum, como a história já demonstrou em incontáveis ocasiões. E os aparelhos burocráticos do Estado, como o Judiciário – principal ferramenta do imperialismo no Brasil, junto com a grande imprensa burguesa –, marcharão ao seu lado.

Aparece com crescente saliência, novamente, a falência histórica da política de colaboração de classes. Sua estabilização já não é mais viável desde que foi rompida com o golpe de 2016 e a ascensão da extrema-direita por obra da burguesia e do imperialismo. O que temos hoje é um monstrengo: a ala pretensamente nacionalista da burguesia, a quem Lula e o PT insistem em se apegar, sente-se ainda mais pressionada pelo imperialismo do que Lula – e cede muito mais facilmente e com muito menos hesitação do que o presidente. Quaisquer coincidências de interesses com a classe operária e as demais classes populares que ainda possam existir se esvaem em uma situação de polarização política continuada e que volta a crescer, elevando particularmente as contradições das camadas populares com o imperialismo americano.

A burguesia “nacional”, os aliados civilizados, democráticos e progressistas de Lula vão pular fora do barco (mesmo que não o façam abertamente) porque sabem que não há futuro nenhum dentro dessa aliança anti-histórica, na expressão usada por Mário Pedrosa ao analisar um cenário parecido, a crise do PTB de Jango com o PSD poucos anos antes do golpe de 1964.

Lula também vai ter de abandonar essa ambivalência na política externa e escolher um lado. Se não fizer, não vai durar. E se capitular definitivamente para o imperialismo, tampouco terá algum sucesso. O problema é que não dá para adotar uma política externa e uma política interna antagônicas. Para adotar uma política externa independente e, portanto, oposta ao controle do imperialismo, ele vai ter de se voltar contra os agentes do imperialismo dentro do próprio país, começando por aqueles que infestam o governo mesmo.

Mas, se na política externa Lula sofre a pressão positiva do BRICS ampliado em contraposição à pressão negativa dos Estados Unidos, no cenário interno a pressão popular – a única que poderia contrapor a pressão da direita – quase não existe, ao menos de forma organizada. Daí também a parcela de culpa da esquerda, dos partidos (a começar pelo próprio PT), dos sindicatos e da imprensa progressista na política capituladora de Lula com relação ao BRICS e à América Latina. Na realidade, as posições de Lula, em geral, ainda são mais acertadas do que as da maioria da esquerda.

Não é Lula, somente, quem está na corda bamba. É toda a direção da esquerda brasileira. Sua política medíocre e rebaixada é a grande responsável pelos erros cometidos por Lula e pelo governo. Os movimentos populares precisam dar um giro de 180 graus em sua política e começar a combater de fato os inimigos de Lula, ou seja, os agentes do imperialismo no Brasil, pressionando o presidente e as suas próprias direções. Porque as pressões do outro lado da corda são cada vez mais fortes e Lula não vai conseguir se equilibrar por muito tempo.

Eduardo Vasco

 

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Eduardo Vasco é jornalista especializado em política internacional, correspondente de guerra e autor dos livros-reportagem “O povo esquecido: uma história de genocídio e resistência no Donbass” e “Bloqueio: a guerra silenciosa contra Cuba”.

In this wide-ranging interview, Associate Professor Elisée Byelongo Isheloke, Rector/Vice Chancellor of Université Espoir du Congo (UEC), narrates his experiences of managing an educational institution from scratch, its embryo stage in many ways and with zero-capital, little support and a myriad of challenges. Despite the existing difficulties and challenges, the UEC is steadily becoming a regional powerhouse of knowledge, research and development. The UEC administration will also appreciate any form of assistance and support from external sources. Here are the interview excerpts:

Kester Kenn Klomegah (KKK): What are the peculiarities of managing an educational institution of higher learning, Hope University of Congo which is located in a small town of Baraka, in central Africa?

Byelongo Elisee Isheloke (BEI): First of all, I would like to greet you and your viewers/readers on this day and thank you for having me on this platform. Now, to answer your question, there are a number of challenges in managing any University, let alone a young one like the “Université Espoir du Congo” (UEC) also known as the “Hope University of Congo” with very limited infrastructure and a myriad of challenges.

To name but a few, the peculiarities stem from a variety of factors such as the lack of operational funding, inappropriate infrastructure and the (endemic) insufficient registered students. Most people in the small town of Baraka still send their children to bigger cities for their education. Although I do not entirely condemn this act, I would like to urge the community members to support this tailor-made community University in its mission to address some of the challenges of the very community as so far as education is concerned. 

The UEC is the only University of Fizi which is entirely based in that territory – with only one branch in Kamituga (Fizi is a territory of an area of 41 745 km2 which is bigger than that of the neighbouring country of Burundi or Ruanda). Although there are a few other Higher Learning Institutions, the UEC had been conceived to cater for the academic needs of Fizi-Itombwe with its five faculties, namely Economics, Law, Social, Political and Administrative Sciences (SSPA in French acronym) or six if one dares to add the Faculty of Languages, Interlinguistics and Esperanto which is still on its embryo stage in many ways.

In cities like Bukavu and Lubumbashi, Universities started small and developed into greatness and maturity over the years. I understand that most of those used resources from the state to develop but there are instances in the Great Lakes region where community Universities outperformed public ones in many regards. In my view, the UEC is not following a strange path per se, what is strange though, is the attitude towards it taken by not only “the elites” who live in or have roots within but even by the people who were supposed to hold it dearly. It is time this attitude changes in favour of one which is going to mobilize resources, provide capabilities and get more involvement with research and development; one which is going to allocate funds to build, manage and strengthen this University, the “UEC”.

KKK: For now, what would you count as the marked achievements during the past few years, despite the fact that the university has a short history?

BEI: The university had its years of glory when a lot of funding were allocated to its administration by the Free Methodist Church and when the Faculty of Theology had some bursaries for registered students supported from the United States of America (USA). At that time, many professors came from abroad and the region to lecture and do a number of initiatives with the aim of giving the population of this territory a better chance to education. It will be remembered that Fizi is a war-torn territory owing to more than two decades of war, conflicts in the eastern DRC where the UEC is based, and an aftermath characterized by relative security or the lack thereof.

The population of Fizi deserves better and needs access to better education in their own territory and this should allow interactions to take place between the people of Fizi-Itombwe and other indwellers who have come to Fizi for socio-economic reasons and are now part and parcel of our destiny.

Univ Espoir du Congo (@UniEspoirCongo) / X

To answer your question more directly, the UEC has formed many cadres now deployed in many state institutions. Alumni include the sector chief, education prefects, bankers, magistrates, lawyers, teachers, religious superintendents, pastors, agriculturalists, economists, political analysts, esperantists, businessmen and businesswomen, entrepreneurs, Engineers and many other cadres who play a vital role in the socio-economic, development and political spheres, not only of the territory, but also that of the entire country, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC).

KKK: Do students, in other words, your clients recognized the educational curriculum (quality education) useful in the current competitive labor market in central Africa?

BEI: There is no doubt about it because a year or two ago the government published a list of viable institutions in the entire DRC. The UEC came out as one of those viable institutions recognized on a national scale. This goes without saying that the diplomas, degrees and certificates issued by UEC are equal to those issued by the University of Kinshasa, Lubumbashi or Bukavu, to name but a few. Some of our graduates have been employed as magistrates by the state. There is therefore no reason to turn away this important institution of education.

When I took office as the Rector of UEC, I led my team in conducting a number of reforms which have also visibly make UEC impactful in the society. The human capital is one of those cornerstone achievements under my leadership. I have also managed to bring a few professors to volunteer as academics, deans, professors, assistant lecturers, fund-raisers, technical advisers and prayer-warriors in favour of the UEC. We have academics who joined in different initiatives from Africa, Italy, India, Spain, France, the USA  and so forth.

We managed to introduce reforms, under my stewardship, such as enhancing the quality of education through improved training by suitably qualified professors, assistant lecturers, the provision of technology, solar panels, Wifi, and the reception of new books from France, in the past and recently, mainly from the USA. The last donation of almost four hundred books from the Emeritus Professor Denis Aliko Songolo made history, making the UEC library an institution with very important written books – a treasure to be cherished for many more years. I managed to reschedule that all major transactions be done through a local bank and organized many conferences and events to enhance the culture of reading, researching and engaging in meaningful as well as robust debates about all aspects of life. Briefly, I managed to give to the university more international exposure in America, Europe, Australia, Africa and Asia; all this with the support of my team.

Last but not least, my aim is also to promote the culture, social cohesion and collaboration among the people, within and beyond the community. To do this, we started to organize the Faculty of Language, InterLinguistics and Esperanto which apart from teaching other African languages next to imported ones, namely Mandarin, English, French, Esperanto,  it will particularly promote and defend the use of Ebembe, Kiswahili and the likes – previously disadvantaged African languages. This will not only restore our dignity as the people of that territory but will also affirm our determination to a more equal society where linguistic human rights and indigenous knowledge of culture and science will be preserved and shared.

KKK: What competitive advantages has Hope University of Congo over other similar educational institutions in the region?

BEI: To go straight to the point, I would say the UEC has now the biggest library in the entire Fizi territory. The library which is yet to be built to the desired standard already has more books than any other in Fizi-Itombwe. If we manage to make my dream of building new facilities for the library, and later on for the UEC, it will become a milestone achievement of all the time.

The community University namely UEC places at the centre of its policy the preservation of this community core values, traditions and culture, its languages Ebembe, Kiswahili as well as others and the sharing of science and technology through the use of other means of communication. It was initially meant to be a bilingual University (French and English) but evolved to accommodate other medium of communication including Esperanto, although it is in this regard that capacity need to be reinforced with infrastructure, volunteers, funding, bursaries and win-win partnerships.

Science and technology remain two weaknesses of UEC owing to the lack of investors and regardless of entrepreneurial activities we have undertaken in the past. I appeal to the world to join us in this vision. A university like the UEC is destined to be a catalyst of peace in that slowly recovering region. If we get funding for entrepreneurship incubators, we could make UEC an economic hub of that semi-rural territory of Fizi.

Beyond competition, I believe we could extend access to our library to sister Higher Learning institutions such as the Institut Supérieur Pédagogique (ISP Baraka), Institut Supérieur de Développement Rural (ISDR Baraka), Institut Supérieur de Technique Médical (ISTM Baraka) to name but a few. Where we could help we will not hesitate to do so in order to serve others with our library, sharing of knowledge, know-how through research products and beyond. Please help us build and further develop the library.

We have managed to bring professors and other academics to join us in shaping the future of this University project. The likes of Emeritus Prof Denis Aliko Songolo, Prof Majaliwa Mwanjalolo, Prof Nehemie Mwilanya, Prof Extraordinary Badar Iqbal, P.O Hon. Obedi Nyamangyoku, Prof Renato Corsetti, Prof Vicente Manzano-Arrondo, Ir. Ahmed Mamdoohi, Dr. Jean Sikatenda, Rev. Nana Yenga, Mrs. Francoise Noireau, Mr. Yamungu Yamalong Boniface, Mr. Jérémie Mahungo, Mr. Kester Kenn Klomegah and many more, team up in support to our vision to make the UEC a regional powerhouse of knowledge, research and development.

While some of them lecture physically or virtually, others either support/ed with donations, books, vehicle, Ruforum bursaries procedure, visits, lobbying, conferences, advocacy, fundraising and most importantly with technical advise to the office of the Vice-Chancellor that I hold.

KKK: What has been the most difficult challenge running this university? And what management styles do you disagree with especially as head of this institution?

BEI: The lack of funding is number one problem of this young University. We need funding to pay (decent) salaries to employed staff and visiting professors/Assistants, run the University, support research, equip with infrastructure, promote discoveries, use the 45 hectares of land that we have for agriculture and/or tree planting, nature conservation, and manage developmental projects. As a community University, we could use financial resources to intervene where necessary in the suburbs, villages where the Lake Tanganyika water rise effect impacted so negatively to the housing facilities, standard of living and life in general in Fizi territory and beyond. A proper operational budget coupled with reforms that I am conducting would take this university to another level of service to the community. If for example industrial fishing, research and development are promoted via the UEC which is (relatively) at the shore of the Lake Tanganyika, it can become a hub of economic development and job creation in the region.

I adopted an open door policy in managing the UEC and I therefore do not agree with the autocratic leadership style. I treasure excellence in doing work and want to steer my colleagues to follow my example. I don’t agree with insubordination in any way.

KKK: Some say entrepreneurship is very challenging, but what keeps you motivated as a rector? Who are some of the most notable people that have experienced during the work of Hope University of Congo?

BEI: I taught entrepreneurship and business economics to the university community and around Fizi and I am prepared to do so hoping to get people and organizations to extend some form of support. Fizi should not depend on handouts from NGOs instead I suggest an economic model similar to that of China where community development is catered for, supported, and developed through a bottom up approach at times with top down support most of the time; so that we teach the people to fish more efficiently, to cultivate the land, to work with their hands and brain, hard and smartly, to preserve the environment, recycle, reuse, reoriente our inputs/outputs, promote own literature, fight corruption and mismanagement of funds, embrace the culture of saving and maintenance, promote peace and stability, build on faith, educate on good governance and so forth.

I have been inspired by our leaders. The former Bishop Welongo Wehusha who saw the need to start off the UEC and the current Bishop Dr Lubunga Wehusha whom I believe to hold dear the idea of taking this University to another level and provide it with the necessary support as I lead it to a phase of ambitious project of greatness. 

As I said before, I also met many professors both in the country and abroad willing to do more to help. I should say the team efforts of those who sacrifice their time to work with me in Baraka or from wherever they are, I say thank you so much. I think of people who work/ed as security guards, librarian, cleaner, assistants, professors, office bearers, and appreciate their contribution which makes it possible to hope for a better future. I pray and work that we will one day have funding to rewards and recognize their efforts.

Serving and working in the DRC and at the UEC for me it is in a way giving back to the country of origin and my people. It keeps me going. Having survived the atrocities of the war in that region, I think the people deserve better. It will all start with a better education to change the course of their life. After 26 years in South Africa, I am equipped to do something to change the world around me. With benefactors’ support, I believe that I will make it happen.

KKK: How do you value education and training for staff, as well as regular educational exchanges, as a means of forging relations with external universities (international cooperation) here?

BEI: I think the UEC must be a learning organisation. We need to provide continuous training and cater for career development. We are not doing enough although during my term I am trying it. I have conducted not less than five conferences/workshops and invited other academics to do so but over the years we need more capacity, volunteers, missionaries, investors, authors, engineers, economists, business analysts, educationalists, scientists, researchers, esperantists, philosophers to join me in doing capacity building, training and more.

The major partnerships we forged so far is that with Université Catholique de Bukavu (UCB), with Civencia (Spain) although in both instances we ought to materialize the agreement with practical initiatives. I am willing to steer my team in this regard going forward. I invite people with resources and the will to support me and get involved. We need well established universities to kindly provide bursaries and training opportunities to both our staff and students, invite us for joint venture initiatives, and we are willing to have twin relations with other universities abroad. Please let us know if you are reading me and could help with this.

KKK: Where would you like to see this business of education, at least, in the next five years? In other words, what’s your future vision for Hope University of Congo?

BEI: I would like to see a modern library built and then after the rest of the infrastructure for the UEC. I will reveal later the name of it when the project starts. The UEC must grow into becoming a modern University with all the facilities; it can be a unifying force that call for peace and stability in the Great Lakes region. If developed into a full-fledged University, it will have the muscles to fully call for social cohesion, security, people to people relations, peace and cater for community development, culture preservation, environment conservation, research and development, publications, natural medicine, medicinal plants, multilingualism, food security, breeding of cows and other animals, controlled hunting, that put the spirit of Ubuntu, this African philosophy of humanity and generosity, at the centre of our core values. I thank you for the opportunity and the readers for their time, especially, those who will extend a hand of support to the University project that I have. God bless you! 

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Birds Not Bombs: Let’s Fight for a World of Peace, Not War 

Kester Kenn Klomegah, who worked previously with Inter Press Service (IPS), Weekly Blitz and InDepthNews, is now a regular contributor to Global Research. He researches Eurasia, Russia, Africa and BRICS. His focused interest areas include geopolitical changes, foreign relations and economic development questions relating to Africa. As a versatile researcher, he believes that everyone deserves equal access to quality and trustworthy media reports.

All images in this article are from the author

Attempts by South Korean authorities to spread information that North Korea wants to send troops to Ukraine to help Russia may be aimed at distracting attention from Seoul’s internal problems, but the time is too dangerous to be “playing with fire” now, experts quoted by the South China Morning Post said.

Earlier, South Korean media outlet Yonhap said Seoul is considering sending a team of experts to Ukraine to monitor North Korean military personnel that Pyongyang reportedly intends to send to participate in the special military operation in Ukraine. South Korean government officials have also reportedly said that Seoul is considering providing Ukraine with lethal weapons as part of its response.

The South China Morning Post indicates that the weapons South Korea could send to Kiev are the Cheongung-II anti-aircraft missile system, K9 self-propelled howitzers, K2 tanks and Chunmoo multiple rocket launchers. However, even the South Korean opposition warns the current government not to make decisions based on unconfirmed intelligence data.

Opposition lawmakers Kim Joon-hyung and Lee Jae-gang made a joint statement, cited by the newspaper, in which they warned that Seoul is “playing with fire” by relying on unverified information. They also believe that any retaliatory action by South Korea against its northern neighbour would be a grave mistake.

According to them, South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol is using this issue to “distract the public from a growing political scandal involving his wife.”

Lee Jun-han, a political scientist at Incheon National University, points out that South Korea’s conservative government has a “history of exaggerating threats from the North to boost public support.”

“But the risks are too high for the country to play such a game now,” he added.

Another expert, Yang Moo-jin, the director of the University of North Korean Studies, also opines that Seoul’s abrupt reaction to information not confirmed by the United States and NATO is linked to “the need to address domestic concerns.”

Earlier, the Russian embassy in Seoul stated that cooperation between Russia and North Korea is carried out within the framework of international law and is not directed against South Korea’s security interests. Russian presidential spokesman Dmitry Peskov, commenting on the alleged deployment of North Korean troops to the combat zone in Ukraine, drew attention to the contradiction in information on this issue when “South Korea says one thing, then the Pentagon says they have no confirmation of such statements.”

The White House and NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte said they had no evidence to support allegations of Pyongyang’s involvement in the Ukraine conflict. Nonetheless, US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin told reporters in Rome on September 23 that “There is evidence of DPRK troops in Russia,” using the abbreviation for North Korea’s formal name, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.

“What exactly they’re doing is left to be seen,” Austin said, adding, “We’re trying to gain better fidelity on it.” It’s a “serious issue,” he said, if North Korea’s “intention is to participate in this war on Russia’s behalf.”

On September 22, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said that two units of North Korean troops, with as many as 6,000 people each, were being trained for deployment.

“This is a challenge, but we know how to respond to this challenge. It is important that partners do not hide from this challenge as well,” he said.

Lt. Gen. Kyrylo Budanov, the head of Ukraine’s Main Directorate of Intelligence, told The War Zone that North Korean troops could arrive in Russia’s Kursk region, where Ukrainian forces launched an invasion in August.

In effect, if the reports of the North Korean troops in Russia are true and they are utilised in Kursk, there can be no international condemnation since Moscow has every right by international law to cooperate with allies so Ukrainian invaders can be expelled from Russian sovereign territory that is internationally recognised as such.

There is little indication that North Korean troops will be deployed in Ukraine, rendering South Korea and Ukraine’s allegations as nothing more than fear-mongering in the vain attempt to bring more foreign troops to Ukraine, distract from domestic issues in South Korea, and strengthen Western sanctions imposed on North Korea.

For this reason, there is even scepticism in Ukraine about the authenticity of Seoul’s and the Kiev regime’s claims, with Andriy Kovalenko, the head of Ukraine’s Center for Countering Disinformation, stating:

“There are no North Korean soldiers, yet.”

It is, therefore, more than obvious that the fake claims by Seoul and the Kiev regime are for alternative reasons, the most prominent being that the South Korean president’s approval rating has dropped to 24.1%, the lowest level since he took office in 2022. Creating fake fear over Pyongyang is his longtime tactic to distract citizens from internal issues, and it appears that his propaganda that North Korean soldiers will fight in Ukraine is a part of this same agenda.

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Birds Not Bombs: Let’s Fight for a World of Peace, Not War 

This article was originally published on InfoBrics.

Ahmed Adel is a Cairo-based geopolitics and political economy researcher. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

Featured image: South Korean Ambassador to Ukraine and President of Ukraine in Kyiv, Ukraine on 2021 (From the Public Domain)

COVID Vaccine Injury: Pilots Die In-Flight

October 28th, 2024 by John O'Looney

Pilots dropping like flies.

Can’t fly without a jab.

Can’t fly at all now.

They even moved the goalposts for them to be able to pass the medical as regards heart function because so many of them are now fucked but want to work.

And flying me and you around, it doesn’t matter to them if we get there safely or not.

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Birds Not Bombs: Let’s Fight for a World of Peace, Not War   

Featured image source


The Worldwide Corona Crisis, Global Coup d’Etat Against Humanity

by Michel Chossudovsky

Michel Chossudovsky reviews in detail how this insidious project “destroys people’s lives”. He provides a comprehensive analysis of everything you need to know about the “pandemic” — from the medical dimensions to the economic and social repercussions, political underpinnings, and mental and psychological impacts.

“My objective as an author is to inform people worldwide and refute the official narrative which has been used as a justification to destabilize the economic and social fabric of entire countries, followed by the imposition of the “deadly” COVID-19 “vaccine”. This crisis affects humanity in its entirety: almost 8 billion people. We stand in solidarity with our fellow human beings and our children worldwide. Truth is a powerful instrument.”

Reviews

This is an in-depth resource of great interest if it is the wider perspective you are motivated to understand a little better, the author is very knowledgeable about geopolitics and this comes out in the way Covid is contextualized. —Dr. Mike Yeadon

In this war against humanity in which we find ourselves, in this singular, irregular and massive assault against liberty and the goodness of people, Chossudovsky’s book is a rock upon which to sustain our fight. –Dr. Emanuel Garcia

In fifteen concise science-based chapters, Michel traces the false covid pandemic, explaining how a PCR test, producing up to 97% proven false positives, combined with a relentless 24/7 fear campaign, was able to create a worldwide panic-laden “plandemic”; that this plandemic would never have been possible without the infamous DNA-modifying Polymerase Chain Reaction test – which to this day is being pushed on a majority of innocent people who have no clue. His conclusions are evidenced by renown scientists. —Peter Koenig 

Professor Chossudovsky exposes the truth that “there is no causal relationship between the virus and economic variables.” In other words, it was not COVID-19 but, rather, the deliberate implementation of the illogical, scientifically baseless lockdowns that caused the shutdown of the global economy. –David Skripac

A reading of  Chossudovsky’s book provides a comprehensive lesson in how there is a global coup d’état under way called “The Great Reset” that if not resisted and defeated by freedom loving people everywhere will result in a dystopian future not yet imagined. Pass on this free gift from Professor Chossudovsky before it’s too late.  You will not find so much valuable information and analysis in one place. –Edward Curtin

ISBN: 978-0-9879389-3-0,  Year: 2022,  PDF Ebook,  Pages: 164, 15 Chapters

Price: $11.50 FREE COPY! Click here (docsend) and download.

You may also access the online version of the e-Book by clicking here.

We encourage you to support the eBook project by making a donation through Global Research’s DonorBox “Worldwide Corona Crisis” Campaign Page

The BRICS 16th Annual Meeting in Kazan, Russia – 22-24 October 2024, is history.

Was the summit successful?

Depending on what one looks at and what is considered a success.

At the outset, it was a success, if only because it put issues and differences openly on the table to be disputed and eventually resolved.

The meeting itself did not produce much novelties. For example, many remarkable happenings, dispute resolutions and agreements happened at the margin of the summit or before. Most notably, what did not happen was another expansion of the BRICS alliance.

Since the 2023 BRICS summit in Johannesburg, when Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) joined the five original members, Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa, no new members have joined. However, two more nations that were invited in Johannesburg in 2023 to become members – Argentina and Saudi Arabia – have either declined (Argentina), or, so far, not acted on becoming a member (Saudi Arabia). In fact, Saudi’s acting ruler, crown prince Mohammad bin Salman, was among the notable absentees in Kazan.

Could it be western pressure – by Saudi’s western hydrocarbon clients and military supporters?

BRICS internal rifts or disagreements concern accession conditions for new members. Missing is also a common set of internal rules that would lend the alliance stability and credibility vis-à-vis the outside world.

The BRICS also lack a common Secretariat and common guiding principles on policies of trade, economic and military cooperation.

For a new member to be accepted, it needs the unanimous support of the existing members – currently nine. 

For example, Venezuela is an eager candidate to join the Club, but was vetoed by Brazil, for reasons that have more to do with the two countries’ bilateral relationship than with the enlargement of BRICS.

Such bilateral conflicts do not help the group’s coherence and credibility, the so far most important Global South organization.

Already in September 2024, Turkey had expressed her interest in joining the BRICS and did, indeed, apply for membership. Turkey would be the first NATO member to join the BRICS; yet, so far, her accession has been stalled. 

Although, Mark Rutte, the new NATO chief, when recently questioned, did not object at all, saying that Turkey was a sovereign country and could join the BRICS alliance on her own free will. He added that Turkey would nevertheless remain one of the most important NATO members.

Perhaps Turkey’s NATO membership was a thorn in the eyes of some Global South states. However, India, not a de jure NATO member, has close relations with NATO and the US. Yet, India is a founding member of the BRICS. Perhaps the perceptions have changed since the 2006 formation of the alliance.

Image: President of Russia Vladimir Putin, right, and President of the People’s Republic of China Xi Jinping, left, during the official reception of the 16th BRICS Summit. (Alexey Nikolskiy / Photohost agency brics-russia2024.ru)

16th BRICS Summit official reception

Mr. Putin said that there are some 30 countries that wanted to join the BRICS, among them most notably Azerbaijan, Algeria, Vietnam, Indonesia, Pakistan, Malaysia, Nigeria, Thailand, Venezuela, Palestine, DR Congo, Gabon, Bangladesh, Bahrain, Kuwait, Senegal, and Bolivia.

On the other hand, Kazakhstan, Russia’s largest neighbor in Central Asia, was invited by Russia to join the BRICS, but in a last-minute decision opted not to join. Russia was not only surprised, but not pleased at all for this abrupt decision, and promptly banned imports of a range of agricultural products from Kazakhstan in retaliation. 

According to the Oil & Gas Journal (OGJ), Kazakhstan has proven crude oil reserves of 30 billion barrels, 2nd largest endowment in Eurasia after Russia, and the 12th largest in the world, just behind the United States. With 172 oil fields, Kazakhstan possesses 3% of global oil reserves, putting it among the world’s top dozen countries in terms of oil deposits. 

Could it be that Kazakhstan reacted to some pressure, possibly blackmail, from western oil customers?

Perhaps one of the most important conflict resolutions at the margins of the meeting happened during a face-to-face dialogue between PM Narendra Modi of India and China’s President Xi Jinping, the first in five years.

Just a few months ago, tensions between New Delhi and Beijing were intense enough for Mr. Modi to decline participation in the summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) in Astana, Kazakhstan. Yet, the two countries have now reached a deal over their longstanding border dispute. 

The two most populous and, in terms of GDP, economically most powerful members of the BRICS coalition have not only an opportunity to rebuild their relations, but also to create a building block to help overcome BRICS disagreements. 

If one mentions BRICS internal disagreements, it may be important to notice that external, meaning western interference in terms of threats and coercions to say the least, may have played an important role in the organization’s disarray that prevented – for now – a further expansion.

Improved relations between China and India could generate a momentum for BRICS to deliver on its ambitious agenda to develop, and ultimately implement, a vision for a new multi-polar global order. 

It would lead into the direction of what Mr. Putin said in his opening address during the BRICS summit, that the BRICS alliance was not anti-west but merely a movement for independence, or potentially a shift from an anti-western to a non-western agenda.

Strangely but also remarkably, one of the west’s most feared “threats” of the BRICS summit was the summit’s talk and potentially resolution on the alliance’s dedollarization. It appears that none of that has happened.

Many of the BRICS countries are not interested in dedollarizing their economies, such as Brazil, India, the Emirates, and others. Let alone potential candidates like Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Venezuela.

Instead, Mr. Putin put forward the idea of a new BRICS lending platform for a collective, coercion-free economic advancement and investment agenda, for infrastructure, industrial as well as social services development. Mr. Putin noted that the IMF and the World Bank, the Bretton Woods Institutions created at the end of WWII, were heavily influenced by the west, especially the United States.

He did mention the BRICS bank, but not necessarily as a lending platform, as it is also fully dollarized, hence, not free from western coercive interferences.

However, China’s creation, the Asian Infrastructure and Investment Bank (AIIB), already involved with some of the BRICS, could become a more important development investment instrument in the future. 

Image: President of Russia Vladimir Putin, right, and UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres during their meeting on the sidelines of the 16th BRICS Summit in Kazan, Russia. (By Ekaterina Chesnokova / Photohost agency brics-russia2024.ru)

16th BRICS Summit. President of Russia Vladimir Putin meets with UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres

In an open conversation with Mr. Antonio Guterres, UN Secretary General who also attended the Kazan summit, Mr. Putin mentioned that it was time for the UN to “adapt to the realities of the 21st century” to be effective. This meant foremost reconfiguring the Security Council to give the emerging Global South, for which BRICS might be representative, a more prominent role. 

Citing the UN Chief, saying

“You’ve mentioned we all should represent one big family,” 

the Russian president responded, 

“and that is how we live. Families, unfortunately, have disagreements, scandals, division of property. They even fight at times.” 

Mr. Putin is right. Implicit in this statement is often outside, speak western, meddling to foster disagreements and rifts within groups of countries, who want to go their own way, like the BRICS. 

The Kazan summit may have been a precursor for things to come. But western interference will not be able to stop the BRICS alliance and cooperation towards a new multi-polar world order.

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Birds Not Bombs: Let’s Fight for a World of Peace, Not War   

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

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

Featured image: President of Russia Vladimir Putin addresses the official reception of the 16th BRICS Summit. (By Alexey Nikolskiy / Photohost agency brics-russia2024.ru)

Ainda é muito cedo para avaliar os resultados da reunião dos BRICS em Kazan. No entanto, já parece claro que este evento terá impactos significativos na geopolítica global – possivelmente alterando de alguma forma as estruturas de poder globais. Tal como a Declaração de Kazan deixou claro, a realidade multipolar não pode continuar a ser ignorada, à medida que novos centros de poder se formam gradualmente.

Em Kazan, os principais líderes dos países emergentes reuniram-se para discutir questões geopolíticas de grande importância. O evento reuniu não apenas delegações de países membros do BRICS, mas também de países candidatos e até de países que não se candidataram para ingressar no grupo, mas estão abertos a cooperar de alguma forma com os países membros. Um aspecto importante do BRICS é que é um grupo agregador, onde todos os países são bem-vindos a cooperar até certo ponto.

O respeito mútuo e a cooperação são aspectos vitais do projecto BRICS – e isto ficou ainda mais claro na Declaração de Kazan, onde os países membros concordaram em apelar ao reconhecimento de novos atores internacionais, tentando assim estabelecer uma ordem justa, equilibrada e integrada.

“Notamos a emergência de novos centros de poder, de tomada de decisões políticas e de crescimento econômico, que podem abrir caminho para uma ordem mundial multipolar mais equitativa, justa, democrática e equilibrada (…) Reafirmamos o nosso compromisso com o espírito de respeito e compreensão mútuos dos BRICS, igualdade soberana, solidariedade, democracia, abertura, inclusão, colaboração e consenso”, diz o documento.

A Declaração também expressou uma forte visão crítica, condenando firmemente a atitude de certos países de impor medidas unilaterais a Estados considerados “inimigos”, o que, como se sabe, afetou negativamente o comércio internacional. Medidas como as sanções anti-russas e as restrições impostas pelos EUA aos produtos chineses perturbam significativamente o mercado mundial, gerando consequências negativas para os países emergentes – razão pela qual os BRICS, como organização que representa as nações emergentes, expressam uma condenação conjunta de tais práticas ilegais .

“Estamos profundamente preocupados com os efeitos perturbadores de medidas coercivas unilaterais ilegais, incluindo sanções ilegais, na economia mundial, no comércio internacional e na consecução dos objectivos de desenvolvimento sustentável (…) [Os países BRICS condenam] medidas unilaterais introduzidas sob o pretexto de preocupações climáticas e ambientais” e opõe-se a “medidas protecionistas unilaterais que perturbam deliberadamente as cadeias globais de abastecimento e produção e distorcem a concorrência (…) Reconhecendo o papel dos membros do BRICS como os maiores produtores mundiais de recursos naturais, sublinhamos a importância de fortalecer cooperação entre os membros do BRICS em toda a cadeia de valor e concordam em tomar ações conjuntas para se oporem às medidas protecionistas unilaterais”, acrescenta a Declaração.

Além disso, a Declaração também contém parágrafos que explicam a necessidade de avançar no processo de desdolarização – que parece ser uma prioridade para todos os países do grupo. Tanto a iniciativa de criar um mecanismo de pagamentos intra-BRICS – com uma moeda do bloco e um sistema interbancário comum – quanto a proposta de expandir o uso de moedas locais foram bem recebidas pela Declaração. Parece claro que o maior objetivo dos BRICS é tornar possível a desdolarização, independentemente do que venha a substituí-la.

A Declaração também incluiu palavras que expressam a compreensão do bloco BRICS sobre os atuais conflitos armados que ocorrem na Ucrânia e no Oriente Médio. A posição dos BRICS é de neutralidade na questão russo-ucraniana, respeitando as razões de Moscou para lançar a operação militar especial. No que diz respeito à Palestina, os BRICS condenaram conjuntamente as ações israelitas, cujos resultados levaram à morte de milhares de civis. Além disso, houve um apelo público à diplomacia entre ambos os lados, priorizando a busca por um cessar-fogo e o respeito às resoluções internacionais sobre a disputa territorial local.

Na prática, pode-se dizer que esta Declaração foi a mais significativa e, de certa forma, ousada na história das reuniões do BRICS. O grupo expressou-se conjuntamente como um bloco unido com uma agenda política comum, que é a criação de uma ordem multipolar. As principais questões globais, como os conflitos, a transição monetária e as mudanças geopolíticas, foram discutidas de forma conjunta e pacífica, respeitando os interesses individuais de cada membro e superando quaisquer diferenças específicas em favor de uma agenda comum.

Ainda não está claro como os BRICS irão atuar nesta nova ordem multipolar. Alguns autores acreditam que a organização será uma espécie de plataforma global para as nações emergentes dentro das estruturas convencionais da ONU. Outros autores acreditam que, de certa forma, os BRICS substituirão a própria ONU, mudando completamente o processo de tomada de decisão global. Em qualquer caso, uma avaliação é clara e irrefutável: os BRICS estão a contribuir significativamente para expandir a participação dos países emergentes nas questões globais.

Lucas Leiroz de Almeida

 

Artigo em inglês : BRICS Summit in Kazan significantly advances geopolitical transition towards multipolarity, 25 de Outubro de 2024.

Imagem :  InfoBrics

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Lucas Leiroz, membro da Associação de Jornalistas do BRICS, pesquisador do Centro de Estudos Geoestratégicos, especialista militar.

Você pode seguir Lucas Leiroz em: https://t.me/lucasleiroz e https://x.com/leiroz_lucas

From prosecution (although persecution is a more fitting term) by the Department of “Justice” (DoJ) and bans on running for presidency to several assassination attempts, Donald Trump has seen it all.

The Deep State and the corrupt federal institutions are determined to prevent him from winning.

Does this mean that Trump descended from Heaven to save us all? Certainly not.

Many have argued, myself included, that it’s highly unlikely that he’ll change America’s disastrous foreign policy. Despite promises to do so, it will be exceedingly difficult (if possible at all) for Trump to significantly alter the way the United States works. However, what’s quite obvious is that he thinks thermonuclear war is an extremely bad idea (to put it mildly). And while this should be common sense, very little of it is left in Washington DC, so Trump indeed seems like the light at the end of the tunnel in comparison to the war criminals currently running the show.

That being said, it’s not his only redeeming quality, but it’s by far the most important one. However, the lunatics in power aren’t going to give up that easily. Namely, after all else failed, they’re now desperately launching defamation attacks on Trump in hopes of turning the tables at the polls. In the two latest cases of the Trump derangement syndrome (TDS), we have yet another alleged “sexual assault”, as well as an attempt to destroy the growing support Trump enjoys among Latinos and African Americans.

The Guardian just published a story about Stacey Williams, a former model who claims that (for now) former president “touched her in an unwanted sexual way in 1993, after Epstein introduced them”. Williams didn’t say why she “suddenly” decided to publicly speak about the supposed “incident” only now after over 30 years of silence, although it’s quite clear who would benefit from such a story.

However, as the “sexual scandal” strategy was already tried several times, with little success, the mainstream propaganda machine wanted to make sure to simultaneously run several narratives aimed against Trump. This one isn’t new either, but it comes in a “new package”. Namely, the Atlantic, infamous neoliberal mouthpiece, is claiming that he supposedly tried to “walk back on a promise” to support the family of US soldier Vanessa Guillén who was killed in 2020. According to the report, Trump was allegedly “outraged when he learned that Guillén’s funeral, which included heightened security and closed streets, cost $60,000”. Quoting “anonymous sources”, the Atlantic reports that Trump said that “it doesn’t cost 60,000 bucks to bury a fucking Mexican” and then “ordered then-White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows to deny payment”. There’s just one “tiny” problem with these claims – none of it is true.

“I don’t appreciate how you are exploiting my sister’s death for politics – hurtful & disrespectful to the important changes she made for service members,” Guillén’s sister Mayra posted on X, condemning the Atlantic’s highly politicized reporting and adding: “President Donald Trump did nothing but show respect to my family & Vanessa. In fact, I voted for President Trump today.”

Meadows himself also denied the claims made by the infamous warmongering mouthpiece, insisting that “any suggestion that President Trump disparaged Ms. Guillén or refused to pay for her funeral expenses is absolutely false” and that “he was nothing but kind, gracious and wanted to make sure that the military and the US government did right by Vanessa Guillén and her family”. Meadows instructed his spokesperson Ben Williamson to demand the Atlantic remove the deliberate disinformation. However, the magazine only added that Meadows “didn’t hear Trump say it”. This was the second time that the Atlantic published misleading and/or outright false information on Trump. Back in September 2020, it claimed that he “refused to visit a veteran cemetery” because he allegedly “called fallen soldiers ‘suckers’ and ‘losers'”. This blatantly fake story was never retracted.

It should be noted that this is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the mainstream propaganda machine and its anti-Trump witch-hunt. Namely, it’s long been a routine to compare him to the likes of Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini, even in American academia. CNN has been doing it for years, while war criminals such as the Clinton family never miss out on calling Trump a “threat to democracy”. Funnily enough, the mainstream propaganda machine now even claims that he will “use lawfare” against political opponents, “conveniently forgetting” that’s exactly what the corrupt federal institutions have been doing to him all these years.

Hillary Clinton even called for more censorship to prevent people from accessing any objective information on what’s actually going on. There are other examples of TDS-induced panic, including claims that Trump will “use Navy SEALs to round up political opponents”.

Kamala Harris and her running mate Tim Walz made similar allegations, claiming that he would “use the US military against those who didn’t vote for him”, while CNN facilitated even more disturbing acts of defamation, such as that Trump is planning to “exterminate people through eugenics”. This deeply irrational hatred was also extended to the electorate, with cases of teachers organizing mock voting, where those who voted for Harris were rewarded with pizza parties, unlike those who voted for Trump. Meanwhile, some of the DNC supporters are attacking Trump voters even in their homes, coming to their front doors and insulting them. The McDonald’s restaurant where Trump recently made a campaign ad is being review-bombed, but that’s the lesser issue, as it’s now forced to up security due to threats. And yet, this is only the tip of the iceberg of intimidation attempts both he and his supporters are subjected to.

African Americans who want to vote for Trump are now suddenly “fascists”, while whites are told they’ll be “held accountable” if they don’t vote for Kamala Harris. In previous months, Amazon allowed the sale of merchandise with the slogan “The Only Good Trump Is A Dead One”, while the mainstream propaganda machine tried suppressing information on several people who directly threatened to kill Trump. It should be noted that blatant death threats to him, his family and supporters never stopped even after several assassination attempts. Despite all this, prominent Democrats, including university professors, were openly saying things like “we hope the shooting will inspire others” or “Trump supporters should be lined up and shot”. In the meantime, corrupt federal institutions ignored repeated warnings about more plans to kill Trump, even after new “security incidents”, as they called the attempts on his life.

On the whole, it’s clear that the warmongering oligarchy in Washington DC is determined to either eliminate Trump (physically, politically, judicially or in any other way) or to sabotage his coming presidency by setting up a war with a global or at least a major regional power. Short of war, defamation is the Deep State’s last-ditch effort to (ab)use TDS, although it seems extremely unlikely this will work. Regardless of the outcome of the upcoming election, next week will surely be the most faithful in recent memory, as the warmongers, war criminals and plutocrats are desperately trying to claw their way back into the halls of power in the US. This is why Trump and his team will have to be wary of warhawks who tried to sabotage his first presidency by starting new perpetual wars. It seems some measures are already being taken against these warmongers, but it’s yet to be seen to what extent will Trump remain resilient to their malignant influence.

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Birds Not Bombs: Let’s Fight for a World of Peace, Not War 

This article was originally published on InfoBrics.

Drago Bosnic is an independent geopolitical and military analyst. He is a regular contributor to Global Research. 

Featured image is from Gage Skidmore via Flickr

Election 2024: Trump vs. Harris: From the Abyss

October 28th, 2024 by Richard C. Cook

Two Elites? 

In September 1862, the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia under General Robert E. Lee, fresh from routing the Federals at Second Manassas, crossed the Potomac River into Maryland and set up camp just outside the town of Frederick. The U.S. had entered the second year of the Civil War.

A few weeks earlier, Lee had repulsed General George B. McClellan’s Army of the Potomac outside the Confederate capital of Richmond, Virginia. While McClellan was occupied with retreating back up the Chesapeake Bay to Washington, D.C., Lee and his generals moved overland to crush the Union force under Major General John Pope at the Manassas railway hub.

Then, with a forced march departing from Leesburg, Virginia, 35,000 Confederate troops forded the Potomac as their band played, “Maryland, My Maryland.” Lee and Confederate President Jefferson Davis, communicating by courier back-and-forth from Richmond, figured that a knockout blow ending with an attack on Washington might bring recognition from Britain and France and so force the Lincoln government to bow to Southern independence.

But McClellan was able to regroup and give chase and, in a series of battles culminating on the farm fields bursting with corn along Antietam Creek outside the village of Sharpsburg, Maryland, the two armies fought to a stalemate. The Battle of Antietam took place on September 17, 1862, where the 23,000 combined casualties—killed, wounded, and missing—made it “the bloodiest day in American history.” After waiting a day to see if McClellan would renew the fight, and finding, much to President Lincoln’s subsequent ire, that he would not, Lee then retreated back into Virginia.

The war would drag on for 2-1/2 more years before Lee surrendered to General Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Courthouse in April 1865. But the people of Frederick and Washington Counties in Maryland had been noticeably indifferent to the excitement that raged around their villages and farms those days in the fall of 1862.

They saw the battle as a contest between two elites, neither of which cared particularly for the interests of the local people or their desire to be left alone to focus on bringing in the fall harvest.

In fact, after the war, the Mumma family petitioned the federal government for compensation due to the Confederates burning down their house during the battle. The family lost the case, with the government telling them it was the rebels who did it, not us. Fortunately, friends and family helped them rebuild.

Is what we are looking at today, with many commentators saying we are as close as we’ve ever been to another Civil War, just a contest between two elites, or even a single elite masquerading as two? Or, as sometimes seems to be the case, between two mobs (commandeered by those elites) that are egged on in not being able to tolerate each other, mobs that even portray each other as agents of the devil?

Is there anything real at stake? Or is it the case, as Alabama’s Governor George Wallace said, when running for president against Democrat Hubert Humphrey and Republican Richard Nixon in 1968, “There’s not a dime’s worth of difference between ‘em”?

So let’s examine areas of both similarity and difference between the contenders.

Note that this analysis is based on substantive policy issues, not the trivialities of “identity politics” that people get so excited about. Honestly, Kamala Harris’s pedigree does not impress me as translating into national salvation nor does Donald Trump’s three hours with Joe Rogan.

Social Differences?

There is obviously a difference between the two candidates in terms of the social profile they have attracted among the electorate. If the contest for U.S. Senate in Maryland between Democrat Angela Alsobrooks and Republican Larry Hogan is any indication, some of the distinction, at least, boils down to abortion. Alsobrooks appears to want to give women complete latitude in aborting their unborn children, whereas Hogan appears to favor moderate restrictions. That appears to be the foremost social issue between the two candidates, and it also appears to be a major difference in social policy between the two parties at the national level.

The likelihood that the number of abortions will probably be the same no matter who wins argues in favor of Governor Wallace’s formulation—“not a dime’s worth of difference.”

Economic Differences?

The most important economic issue that divides the candidates is that Trump favors the imposition of a high level of tariffs on imports. The purpose would be to restore manufacturing enterprise on American soil, with corresponding growth of factory jobs.

This would in fact be an epochal change that would affirm a Republican Party stance on protectionism that goes back to the origins of the Republican Party in the mid-19th century. This was the time of the “American System” of economist Henry C. Carey which favored protective tariffs, a strong national currency, and government-sponsored infrastructure improvements. Restoration of the American System would strike a blow at neoliberal globalist policies by which the leaders of both parties have been shipping U.S. jobs abroad for at least three generations while investment in our own manufacturing and infrastructure has collapsed.

The trouble that Trump is not addressing is that higher tariffs would reduce or eliminate the negative trade balance by which the U.S. sends dollars abroad to be used as a world trading currency. Such a dynamic is a necessary element in providing the funding for the 800 military bases the U.S. has established in order to maintain its imperial hegemony worldwide.

With Trump’s tariffs, the U.S. would be moving in the direction of a retreat to “fortress America.” Kamala Harris has attacked Trump’s positions as “isolationism,” just as the Democratic Party globalists attacked “America First” Republicans prior to U.S. engagement in World War II.

Trump has been ingenuous on this issue in declaring that divestment of dollars by foreign nations, as BRICS may do, would be an act of hostility against the U.S., when such divestment would occur much more rapidly with high tariffs.

We would award points to Trump were it not for this elementary contradiction in policy. Also, Trump’s recent claims that he would eliminate the income tax is absurd, since tariff revenue could not possibly come close to being a replacement in funding the government.

Added to this is the fact that U.S. continuation of globalist economics spells endless war and national suicide without either side offering a real way out, so that again, Governor Wallace wins—“not a dime’s worth of difference.”

Foreign Policy Differences?

Trump claims that had he still been president the conflicts in Ukraine and Israel would never have broken out. While president, however, Trump oversaw the arming and training of Ukrainian forces by NATO that eventually provoked Russia into invading when Ukraine began to bomb Russian speakers in the Donbas region. Now the U.S. and NATO are suffering a calamitous defeat in their proxy war against Russia in Ukraine for which Trump helped lay the groundwork.

Image is from OneWorld

In the Middle East, Trump’s actions while president in moving the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem and in ordering the assassination of Iranian General Qasem Soleimani likely emboldened Israel in its genocidal war in Gaza that instigated the widening conflict between Israel and the Axis of Resistance. Israel now may be on the verge of annihilation by the people it has been terrorizing for the past 75 years.

Behind the Axis of Resistance is the regional power of Iran, and behind Iran are Russia and China. The U.S. cannot defeat this coalition without bringing on a nuclear holocaust. Neither Trump/Vance nor their pro-Israel backers Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., and Tulsi Gabbard have any more of an answer than do Harris/Walz.

The only workable answer is to embrace the concept of a multipolar world which the U.S. thought it would never have to face when the Soviet Union dissolved in 1989-91. Could Trump pull this off? Not if the U.S. foreign policy establishment has anything to say about it. And it’s not just the Neocons. It’s everyone whose livelihood depends on U.S. imperial hegemony that is about to go down the drain. And it’s also the massive power of the Israel lobby.

It was this drive for global military conquest that the Rockefeller dynasty’s Council on Foreign Relations foisted on us at the start of World War II, embodied in the post-war National Security State, and that is still being enforced today by the U.S. military and Deep State Neocons. Breaking their power over the erstwhile American republic is a big job.

We’ll award Trump points for good intentions, but we’ll take them away as we remember how easily war mongers like Nicki Haley, John Bolton, Mike Pompeo, etc. wormed their way into power during Trump’s previous administration.

Plus there’s no sign at all that Trump can escape the Zionist zombie influence or even wants to. We vote for Governor Wallace—again.

What Are They Ignoring? Banking and Finance

The U.S. banking and finance system has become increasingly unregulated over past decades to the point where the financialization of our economy has led to catastrophic inflation, major shortages of affordable housing, destruction of the middle class, and the increasing concentration of wealth in the hands of hedge funds like BlackRock and  the billionaires of the financial elite.

No society in history has survived the kind of explosive discrepancy of wealth under which the U.S. is suffering today. Empires have died as a result.

Behind this superstructure of wealth disparity is the omnipresent usury-based banking system overseen by the Federal Reserve. Meanwhile, the only thing that keeps the bankrupt federal government afloat is direct purchase by the Fed of Treasury bonds. This “money printing,” aka “QE,” was the Obama administration’s chosen tactic of “kicking the can down the road.”

It involves the utilization of these Treasury bond purchases and their addition to the Fed’s balance sheet to pay the government’s bills, primarily for the weapons industry and such necessary spending as social security. The Fed also adds to its balance sheet mortgage-backed securities, a practice aimed to conceal the still-high levels of home foreclosures left over from the Great Recession. The same method was used to finance the Trump/Biden COVID relief payments.

Image source

Trump Officially Nominated, Picks Ohio Senator Vance as Running Mate | InDepthNH.org

Neither Trump/Vance nor Harris/Walz has anything to say about reform of the failed financial system except for a few handouts that Harris would provide to a small number of first-time buyers. Trump’s proposals to reduce taxes are typical Republican election-year fare that if done would increase the federal deficit, bring on more QE, and be offset by the resulting inflation. The ideological justification for these shenanigans goes by the cutesy moniker of “Modern Monetary Theory.”

For more information, see my book Our Country, Then and Now which explains Dennis Kucinich’s 2011 NEED Act that would provide a sound indigenous currency for the U.S., pay down the national debt, and bring jobs and investment home.

Neither party gains points for this further tumble, leading to another vote for the wise Governor Wallace.

What Are They Ignoring? “Vaccination” Genocide

The COVID “plandemic,” marked by release of a virus weaponized through gain-of-function research followed by administration of a dysfunctional “vaccine” that is causing millions of excess injuries and deaths worldwide, took place under President Trump’s “Operation Warp Speed.” Trump supposedly knew nothing of what was being done behind the scenes by Dr. Anthony Fauci, the Department of Defense, Big Pharma, and the captured government regulatory apparatus, but that is cold comfort for a world population under assault.

What is shaping up to be the worst public health catastrophe, and possibly the largest known genocide, in history, took place on Trump’s watch. These policies were then adopted in every respect by the Biden/Harris administration, which shares responsibility with Trump for the still unfolding disaster.

Despite the fact that Trump appears to be giving lip service at least to Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s “Make America Healthy Again” proposals, there is no indication that Trump has even thought about pulling the plug on the use of mRNA “vaccines” or coming up with a program of treatment for the millions who have been harmed.

Suffice it to say that Biden/Harris/Walz have totally ignored public health in any of its multitudinous aspects, including the chronic illness epidemic and the explosion of vaccine-caused autism, much less addressing the COVID genocide. They are completely the creatures of the Deep State and Big Pharma, plus the seepage from the WEF’s “Great Reset” and the grab of national sovereignty by the WHO.

Thus both parties sink deeper into negative point territory on the public health front, though Trump has a chance to redeem himself to some extent through RFK, Jr.’s possible role in his administration, but only if he smashes the Big Pharma/DoD mRNA “vaccine” cult into oblivion. I’ll believe that when I see it and maybe not even then. You called it, Governor Wallace.

What Are They Ignoring? Societal Collapse

The symptoms of societal collapse within the U.S. are everywhere: the border crisis and the millions of illegal immigrants, nonstop inflation, likely vote stealing, decline in human fertility, chronic illness, iatrogenic disease, growth in violent crime, government grift, explosion of “lawfare,” overregulation of the food supply, censorship in violation of the First Amendment, illegal drugs and addiction, sexual immorality and human trafficking, etc. The list goes on, pointing without question to the existence of a FAILED STATE that is increasingly a danger to itself and the rest of the world.

An analogy that presents itself is the Austro-Hungarian Empire on the eve of World War I: a conglomeration of diverse regions without a unifying ideology or cultural identity, held together only by the person of an aging Emperor whose uncertain role in guiding public affairs resembles that of today’s fraudulently dysfunctional U.S. presidency.

In Austria-Hungary, once the force of that centralizing institution broke down under the pressure of war and corruption, the entire imperial edifice came crashing down, leaving the chaos of a multitude of different states that became the Central Europe of today.

Image: Tim Walz and Kamala Harris together in March 2024, prior to the start of the Harris 2024 campaign. Walz would go on to become the campaign’s vice presidential candidate. (From the Public Domain)

The U.S. may experience a similar type of crash, with neither Trump/Vance nor Harris/Walz having a comprehensive program that can prevent or resolve it.

Again, both sides lose points, because in fact we are now in an abyss of national decline. Trump/Vance at least bring a glimmer of recognition of what must change though without a program of how to do it. Thus the wise Governor Wallace again rules.

Conclusion

At the same time, my personal inclination is to go with Trump, because I identify with the America-first demographic and my own “hillbilly” roots.

But he is going to have a lot to prove, very quickly, and he’s off to a bad start with his overtly pro-Zionist stance.

So I’ll have a few people mad at me either way. But such is life.

There is now every indication that it will be Russia that draws the line through Europe that renders NATO obsolete by establishing a new security architecture balancing East and West. It is also Russia, backed by China, that is offering to mediate a peaceful settlement in the Middle East which recognizes the legitimate interests and aspirations of all participants, while an impotent American dinosaur fumes on the sidelines side-by-side with a smoldering Israel.

This change in the configuration of world power may have been sparked by the Biden administration’s economic, military, and moral collapse on multiple fronts, but it is also the result of a sea change whereby the empty financialization of Western enterprise has given way to the concrete harnessing of energy and productivity by the growing BRICS+ community that Russia is spearheading.

Ultimately, post-World War II U.S. hegemony is collapsing in full view of the entire world. The U.S. has tried to keep the lid on with its 800 military bases and multiple fleets on the high seas. But this has devolved into a high-stakes game of “Wac-a-Mole” whereby the U.S. runs around from crisis to crisis against opponents with interior battle lines who enjoy an ever-increasing advantage from every type of high-tech and asymmetrical warfare.

All things considered, Governor George Wallace’s summation that “there’s not a dime’s worth of difference between ‘em” might actually capture the realities of the 2024 presidential election. This is because in the crisis we are now in, given the evil war mongering and lawfare of the Deep State and the greed and profiteering of Big Pharma, BlackRock, the Zionists, the Neocons and the globalist bankers, we can rightfully ask whether either candidate could, if elected, make a single unhampered move in a positive direction.

As an aside, exactly the same collapse is taking place in Europe, due to EU regulations that force member states to be constantly bailing out their own failed banking system, resulting in stagflation, hyperinflation, the war against Russia in Ukraine which threatens to spread, and growing civil strife between pro-EU neoliberal governments and “right-wing” nationalist movements.

The pressure is building both in the U.S. and in Europe. In fact, the respective tea kettles are letting out large whistling sounds. Whatever the outcome, intelligent people may wisely choose to hunker down, hope for the best, but prepare for the worst. Take care; just don’t let them talk you into taking the “vax.”

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Birds Not Bombs: Let’s Fight for a World of Peace, Not War   

Richard C. Cook is co-founder and lead investigator for the American Geopolitical Institute.  Mr. Cook is a retired U.S. federal analyst with extensive experience across various government agencies, including the U.S. Civil Service Commission, FDA, the Carter White House, NASA, and the U.S. Treasury. He is a graduate of the College of William and Mary. As a whistleblower at the time of the Challenger disaster, he exposed the flawed O-ring joints that destroyed the Space Shuttle, documenting his story in the book “Challenger Revealed.” After serving at Treasury, he became a vocal critic of the private finance-controlled monetary system, detailing his concerns in “We Hold These Truths: The Hope of Monetary Reform.” He served as an adviser to the American Monetary Institute and worked with Congressman Dennis Kucinich to advocate for replacing the Federal Reserve with a genuine national currency. See his new book, Our Country, Then and Now, Clarity Press, 2023. Also see his Three Sages Substack where this article was originally published.

Featured image source

Less than a year after OpenAI quietly signaled it wanted to do business with the Pentagon, a procurement document obtained by The Intercept shows U.S. Africa Command, or AFRICOM, believes access to OpenAI’s technology is “essential” for its mission.

The September 30 document lays out AFRICOM’s rationale for buying cloud computing services directly from Microsoft as part of its $9 billion Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability contract, rather than seeking another provider on the open market.

“The USAFRICOM operates in a dynamic and evolving environment where IT plays a critical role in achieving mission objectives,” the document reads, including “its vital mission in support of our African Mission Partners [and] USAFRICOM joint exercises.”

The document, labeled Controlled Unclassified Information, is marked as FEDCON, indicating it is not meant to be distributed beyond government or contractors. It shows AFRICOM’s request was approved by the Defense Information Systems Agency. While the price of the purchase is redacted, the approval document notes its value is less than $15 million.

Like the rest of the Department of Defense, AFRICOM — which oversees the Pentagon’s operations across Africa, including local military cooperation with U.S. allies there — has an increasing appetite for cloud computing. The Defense Department already purchases cloud computing access from Microsoft via the Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability project. This new document reflects AFRICOM’s desire to bypass contracting red tape and buy immediately Microsoft Azure cloud services, including OpenAI software, without considering other vendors. AFRICOM states that the “ability to support advanced AI/ML workloads is crucial. This includes services for search, natural language processing, [machine learning], and unified analytics for data processing.” And according to AFRICOM, Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform, which includes a suite of tools provided by OpenAI, is the only cloud provider capable of meeting its needs.

Image: OpenAI headquarters, Pioneer Building, San Francisco (Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0)

Microsoft began selling OpenAI’s GPT-4 large language model to defense customers in June 2023. Earlier this year, following the revelation that OpenAI had changed its mind on military work, the company announced a cybersecurity collaboration with DARPA in January and said its tools would be used for an unspecified veteran suicide prevention initiative. In April, Microsoft pitched the Pentagon on using DALL-E, OpenAI’s image generation tool, for command and control software. But the AFRICOM document marks the first confirmed purchase of OpenAI’s products by a U.S. combatant command whose mission is one of killing.

OpenAI’s stated corporate mission remains “to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity.”

The document states that “OpenAI tools” are among the “unique features” offered by Microsoft “essential to ensure the cloud services provided align with USAFRICOM’s mission and operational needs. … Without access to Microsoft’s integrated suite of AI tools and services, USAFRICOM would face significant challenges in analyzing and extracting actionable insights from vast amounts of data. … This could lead to delays in decision-making, compromised situational awareness, and decreased agility in responding to dynamic and evolving threats across the African continent.” Defense and intelligence agencies around the world have expressed a keen interest in using large language models to sift through troves of intelligence, or rapidly transcribe and analyze interrogation audio data.

Microsoft invested $10 billion in OpenAI last year and now exercises a great deal of influence over the company, in addition to reselling its technology. In February, The Intercept and other digital news outlets sued Microsoft and OpenAI for using their journalism without permission or credit.

An OpenAI spokesperson told The Intercept, “OpenAI does not have a partnership with US Africa Command” and referred questions to Microsoft. Microsoft did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Nor did a spokesperson for AFRICOM.

“It is extremely alarming that they’re explicit in OpenAI tool use for ‘unified analytics for data processing’ to align with USAFRICOM’s mission objectives,” said Heidy Khlaaf, chief AI scientist at the AI Now Institute, who has previously conducted safety evaluations for OpenAI. “Especially in stating that they believe these tools enhance efficiency, accuracy, and scalability, when in fact it has been demonstrated that these tools are highly inaccurate and consistently fabricate outputs. These claims show a concerning lack of awareness by those procuring for these technologies of the high risks these tools pose in mission-critical environments.”

Since OpenAI quietly deleted the portion of its terms of service that prohibited military work in January, the company has steadily ingratiated itself with the U.S. national security establishment, which is eager to integrate impressive but frequently inaccurate tools like ChatGPT. In June, OpenAI added to its board the Trump-appointed former head of the National Security Agency, Paul Nakasone; the company’s current head of national security partnerships is Katrina Mulligan, a Pentagon alum who previously worked in “Special Operations and Irregular Warfare,” according to her LinkedIn profile.

On Thursday, following a White House directive ordering the Pentagon to accelerate adoption of tools like those made by OpenAI, the company published an article outlining its “approach to AI and national security.” According to the post,

“The values that guide our work on national security” include “democratic values,” “human rights,” and “accountability,” explaining, “We believe that all AI applications, especially those involving government and national security, should be subject to oversight, clear usage guidelines, and ethical standards.” OpenAI’s language is a clear reflection of the White House order, which forbade security and intelligence entities from using artificial intelligence in ways that “do not align with democratic values,” the Washington Post reported.

While the AFRICOM document contains little detail about how exactly it might use OpenAI tools, the command’s regular implications in African coup d’états, civilian killings, torture, and covert warfare would seem incompatible with OpenAI’s professed national security framework. Last year, AFRICOM chief Gen. Michael Langley told the House Armed Services Committee that his command shares “core values” with Col. Mamady Doumbouya, an AFRICOM trainee who overthrew the government of Guinea and declared himself its leader in 2021.

Although U.S. military activity in Africa receives relatively little attention in comparison to U.S. Central Command, which oversees American forces in the Middle East, AFRICOM’s presence is both significant and the subject of frequent controversy. Despite claims of a “light footprint” on the continent, The Intercept reported in 2020 a formerly secret AFRICOM map showing “a network of 29 U.S. military bases that stretch from one side of Africa to another.” Much of AFRICOM’s purpose since its establishment in 2007 entails training and advising African troops, low-profile missions by Special Operations forces, and operating drone bases to counter militant groups in the Sahel, Lake Chad Basin, and the Horn of Africa in efforts to bring security and stability to the continent. The results have been dismal. Throughout all of Africa, the State Department counted a total of just nine terrorist attacks in 2002 and 2003, the first years of U.S. counterterrorism assistance on the continent. According to the Africa Center for Strategic Studies, a Pentagon research institution, the annual number of attacks by militant Islamist groups in Africa now tops 6,700 — a 74,344 percent increase.

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enduring-1582752829

non-1-1582752831

Maps of U.S. “Enduring” and “Non-Enduring” bases in Africa. The Pentagon defines “enduring” bases as providing “strategic access and use to support United States security interests for the foreseeable future.” “Non-Enduring” outposts — also known as “contingency locations” — are defined as supporting and sustaining “operations during contingencies or other operations.” Contingency locations can be categorized as initial, temporary, or semipermanent. Images: U.S. Africa Command

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As violence has spiraled, at least 15 officers who benefited from U.S. security assistance have been involved in 12 coups in West Africa and the greater Sahel during the war on terror, including in Niger last year. (At least five leaders of that July 2023 coup received American assistance, according to a U.S. official.) U.S. allies have also been implicated in a raft of alleged human rights abuses. In 2017, The Intercept reported a Cameroonian military base used by AFRICOM to stage surveillance drone flights had been used to torture military prisoners.

Dealing with data has long been a challenge for AFRICOM. After The Intercept put together a count of U.S.-trained coup leaders on the continent, for example, the command admitted it did not know how many coups its charges have conducted, nor did the command even keep a list of how many times such takeovers have happened. “AFRICOM does not maintain a database with this information,” spokesperson Kelly Cahalan told The Intercept last year.

AFRICOM’s mismanagement of information has also been lethal. Following a 2018 drone strike in Somalia, AFRICOM announced it had killed “five terrorists and destroyed one vehicle, and that “no civilians were killed in this airstrike.” A secret U.S. military investigation, obtained by The Intercept via the Freedom of Information Act, showed that despite months of “target development,” the attack on a pickup truck killed at least three, and possibly five, civilians, including Luul Dahir Mohamed and her 4-year-old daughter, Mariam Shilow Muse.

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Birds Not Bombs: Let’s Fight for a World of Peace, Not War  

Featured image: U.S. Army Africa 1st Lt. Salvatore Buzzurro, Africa Contingency Operations Training & Assistance program military mentor, gives a Sierra Leone Armed Forces Soldiers advice on movement techniques. The SL Army has been training with the ACOTA program for two years, and this is the fifth company prepping for their peacekeeping mission in another country. Photo by U.S. Army Africa.

The man has a cheek.  Having lectured Iranians and Lebanese about what (and who) is good for them in terms of rulers and rule (we already know what he thinks of the Palestinians), Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been keeping busy on further depriving access and assistance to those in Gaza and the West Bank.  This comes in draft legislation that would prevent the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) from pursuing its valuable functions in the Occupied Palestinian Territory.

The campaign against UNRWA by the Israeli state has been relentless and pathological.  Even before last year’s October 7 attacks by Hamas, much was made of the fact that the body seemed intent on keeping the horrors of the 1948 displacements current.  Victimhood, complained the amnesiac enforcers of the Israeli state, was being encouraged by treating the descendants of displaced Palestinians as refugees.  Nasty memories were being kept alive.

Since then, Israel has been further libelling and blackening the organisation as a terrorist front best abolished. (Labels are effortlessly swapped – “Hamas supporter”; “activist”; “terrorist”.)  Initially came that infamous dossier pointing the finger at 12 individuals said to be Hamas participants in the October 7 attacks.  With swiftness, the UN commenced internal investigations.  Some individuals were sacked on suspicion of being linked to the attacks. Unfortunately, some US$450 million worth of donor funding from sixteen countries was suspended.

UNRWA Commissioner-General Philippe Lazzarini was always at pains to explain that he had “never been informed” nor received evidence substantiating Israel’s accusations.  It was also all the more curious given that staff lists for the agency were provided to both Israeli and Palestinian authorities in advance.  At no point had he ever “received the slightest concern about the staff that we have been employing.”

In April, Lazzarini told the UN Security Council that “an insidious campaign to end UNRWA’s operations is under way, with serious implications for peace and security”.  Repeatedly, requests by the agency to deliver aid to northern Gaza had been refused, staff barred from coordinating meetings between humanitarian actors and Israel, and UNRWA premises and staff targeted.

Israel’s campaign to dissuade donor states from restoring funding proved a mixed one.  Even the United Kingdom, long sympathetic to Israel’s accusations, announced in July that funding would be restored.  In the view of UK Foreign Secretary David Lammy, UNRWA had taken steps to ensure that it was meeting “the highest standards of neutrality.”

In August, the findings of a review of the allegations by former French foreign minister Catherine Colonna, instigated at the request of the UN Secretary-General António Guterres, were released. It confirmed UNRWA’s role as “irreplaceable and indispensable” in the absence of a political solution between Israel and the Palestinians, a “pivotal” body that provided “life-saving humanitarian aid and essential social services, particularly in health and education, to Palestinian refugees in Gaza, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria and the West Bank.”

In identifying eight areas for immediate improvement on the subject of neutrality (for instance, engaging donors, neutrality of staff, installations, education and staff unions), it was noted that “Israel has yet to provide supporting evidence” that the agency’s employees had been “members of terrorist organizations.”

On October 24, UNRWA confirmed that one of its staffers killed by an Israeli strike in Gaza, Muhammad Abu Attawi, had been in the agency’s employ since July 2022 while serving as a Nukhba commander in Hamas’s Bureij Battalion.  Attawi is alleged to have participated in the killing and kidnapping of Israelis from a roadside bomb shelter near Kibbutz Re’im in October last year.  His name had featured in a July letter from Israel to the agency listing 100 names allegedly connected with terrorist groups.  But no action was taken against Attawi as the Israelis failed to supply UNRWA with evidence.  Lazzarini’s letter urging, in the words of Juliette Touma, the agency’s director of communications, “to cooperate … by providing more information so he could take action” did not receive “any response”.

Having been foiled on various fronts in its quest to terminate UNRWA’s viable existence, Israeli lawmakers are now taking the legislative route to entrench the collective punishment of the Palestinian people.  Two bills are in train in the Knesset. The first, sponsored by such figures as Yisrael Beytenu, MK Yulia Malinovsky and Likud lawmaker Dan Illouz, would bar state authorities from having contact with UNRWA.  The second, sponsored by Likud MK Boaz Bismuth, would critically prevent the agency from operating in Israeli territory through revoking a 1967 exchange of notes justifying such activities.

Even proclaimed moderates – the term is relative – such as former defence minister Benny Gantz support the measures, accusing the UN body of making “itself an inseparable component of Hamas’s mechanism – and now is the time to detach ourselves entirely from it”.  It did not improve the lot of refugees, but merely perpetuated “their victimisation.”  Evidently for Gantz, Israel had no central role in creating Palestinian victims in the first place.

By barring cooperation between any Israeli authorities and UNRWA, work in Gaza and the West Bank would become effectively impossible, largely because Jerusalem would no longer issue entrance permits to the territories or permit any coordination with the Israeli Defense Forces.

UN Secretary-General Guterres was aghast at the two bills.  “It would effectively end coordination to protect UN convoys, offices and shelters serving hundreds of thousands of people.”  Ambassadors from 123 UN member states have echoed the same views, while the Biden administration has, impotently, warned that the proposed “restrictions would devastate the humanitarian response in Gaza at this critical moment” while also denying educational and social services to Palestinians in the West Bank and Jerusalem.

In their October 23 statement, the Nordic countries also expressed concern that UNRWA’s mandate “to carry out […] direct relief and works programmes” for millions of Palestinian refugees as determined by UN General Assembly Resolution 302 (IV) would be jettisoned.  “In the midst of an ongoing catastrophic humanitarian situation in Gaza, a halt to any of the organisation’s activities would have devastating consequences for the hundreds of thousands of civilians served by UNRWA.”

The statement goes on to make a warning.  To impair the refugee agency would create a vacuum that “may well destabilise the situation in [Gaza, and the West Bank, including east Jerusalem], in Israel and in the region as a whole, and may fundamentally jeopardize the prospects of a two-state solution.”

These are concerns that hardly matter before the rationale of murderous collective punishment, one used against a people seen more as mute serfs and submissive animals than sovereign beings entitled to rights and protections.  Israel’s efforts to malign and cripple UNRWA remains a vital part of that agenda.  In that organisation exists a repository of deep and troubling memories the forces of oppression long to erase.

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Birds Not Bombs: Let’s Fight for a World of Peace, Not War 

Dr. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge.  He currently lectures at RMIT University.  He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG). Email: [email protected] 

Featured image: Families have been forced to moved repeatedly in Gaza. UN United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA).

US and Israel — Two Governments Linked by Lies and Bloodshed. Philip Giraldi

By Philip Giraldi, October 28, 2024

On Thursday I participated in a fascinating talk sponsored by Washington’s Committee for the Republic, which is “a citizen-based, non-partisan, nonprofit organization founded in 2003 [that] sponsors speakers monthly on challenges to the American Republic, including the military-industrial complex, too-big-to-fail banks, campaign finance, and US competitiveness.”

BRICS 2024: Building a New World. Manlio Dinucci

By Manlio Dinucci, October 28, 2024

The New Development Bank is becoming a major investor in the largest technology and infrastructure projects in the BRICS region. In this region, where the dollar and the euro used to dominate international transactions, the share of national currencies has risen to 65%. The share of the dollar and the euro has fallen below 30%.

U.S. and Western Allies Support the Genocide. Israel’s Role in U.S.-NATO War Against Iran

By Prof Michel Chossudovsky, October 28, 2024

While the IDF is responsible for the conduct of the atrocities, the U.S. War Machine is a partner in crime. The conduct of the genocide has been planned for several years in consultation with the Pentagon and NATO.

The Gaza Catastrophe: Checking Israeli and Western Elites

By Dr. Chandra Muzaffar, October 28, 2024

Israel is determined to take over North Gaza. This explains its destruction of residential areas in the region. Schools and hospitals have also been targeted. People have been forced to flee their homes. Many who have chosen to stay behind have been killed.

Kid-Killing Kamala (KKK) Harris Complicit in Gaza Genocide

By Gideon Polya, October 28, 2024

The US presidential election is only a dozen days away and the Biden/Harris complicity in the mass murder of Gazans by Jewish Israelis should be the key issue for decent Americans.

Is BRICS Summit the Beginning of a New World Order?

By Marc Vandepitte, October 28, 2024

From 22 to 24 October, 36 countries, mainly from the Global South, attended the 16th summit of the BRICS countries. UN Secretary-General António Guterres also joined this meeting. As Chinese President Xi stated, the summit aimed “to create new opportunities for the Global South.”

Syria and Gaza: Continuity of Barbarism. Empire and Its Proxies Destroy Healthcare and Humanity as Policy

By Mark Taliano, October 28, 2024

In Syria and Gaza, the mechanics of Western-perpetrated terror are eerily similar. Empire’s proxies, al Qaeda, ISIS and affiliates in Syira, and Zionists in occupied Palestine, destroy healthcare as policy.

In Syria and Gaza, the mechanics of Western-perpetrated terror are eerily similar.

Empire’s proxies, al Qaeda, ISIS and affiliates in Syira, and Zionists in occupied Palestine, destroy healthcare as policy.

In February, 2023, journalist Sara Salloum explained that,

“the years of war on Syria have seen the complete destruction of 38 hospitals at the hands of terrorists, as well as the that of 450 vehicles and the killing of more than 700 Syrian doctors.” (1)

Dr. Rouba Mirza, in an interview with Syrian journalist and author Basma Qaddour,  explained that

“the West-backed terrorist groups had not only targeted doctors, pharmacists, nurses, but also attacked with rockets hospitals and pharmaceutical factories, especially in Aleppo governorate, and looted medicines and hoarded them  during the first years of the war on the country because they know that the war will last for a long time…. In May 2014, terrorist groups destroyed Al-Kindi Hospital in Aleppo after looting its contents worth millions of Syrian Pounds.”

The damage and destruction of health infrastructure has been further exacerbated by Western-imposed unilateral coercive measures.

Dr. Mirza explains that,

”this maintenance of damaged factories and equipment was hampered by the western unilateral sanctions as their designation of the Central Bank and all public financial institutions has completely blocked transactions for imports and exports, including  medicine, spare parts, raw materials, and has restrained foreign currency inflows …” (2)

Western-supported Zionists are deploying similar mechanisms of collective punishment and terror on civilian populations in occupied Palestine.

Satellite images captured between October 22, 2023 and March 27, 2024 by Al Jazeera’s Sanad verification agency reveal that 24 hospitals were damaged, including:

  • 6 hospitals in northern Gaza
  • 10 hospitals in Gaza City
  • 1 hospital in Deir el-Balah
  • 7 hospitals in Khan Younis (3)

On-the-ground reporter Hind Khoudary correctly notes that Palestinians “are not dying only from the shelling and airstrikes, they are dying from the lack of access to medical care, lack of food, hunger and starvation …” (4)

Empire’s permanent warfare and its declared “New Middle East” is a criminal war of terror on innocent civilians.  In Palestine, it is a holocaust, where multitudes are displaced and killed, where homes and livelihoods destroyed, where escape is impossible, and the land is uninhabitable.  All by design and with intent.

October 7 was a fabricated pretext for settler colonialism and holocaust.  Lebanon is now also under attack.

Each of Empire’s targets, all of the prey countries, suffer similar mechanisms of terror, in varying degrees.

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Birds Not Bombs: Let’s Fight for a World of Peace, Not War 

Research Assistance by Basma Qaddour

Mark Taliano is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG) and the author of Voices from Syria, Global Research Publishers, 2017. He writes on his website where this article was originally published.

Notes

(1) Sara Salloum, ” How are sanctions, blockade affecting humanitarian effort in Syria?” Al Mayadeem.Net, 7 February, 2023. (How are sanctions, blockade affecting humanitarian effort in Syria? | Al Mayadeen English) Accessed 25 October, 2024.

(2) Basma Qaddour, “Interview with the former Member of Parliament,  the pharmacist Dr. Rouba Mirza/ By Basma Qaddour” marktanliano.net, 24 October, 2024. (Interview with the former Member of Parliament,  the pharmacist Dr. Rouba Mirza/ By Basma Qaddour – Mark Taliano) Accessed 25 October, 2024.

See also: Journey To Aleppo Part II: The Syria Civil Defense & Aleppo Medical Association Are Real Syrians Helping Real Syrians

(3) “Satellite images reveal the destruction of hospitals in Gaza.” AJLabs and Sanad Verification Agency, 18 April, 2024. (Satellite images reveal Israeli destruction of hospitals in Gaza | Interactive News | Al Jazeera) Accessed 25 October, 2024.

(4) Mark Taliano, “Parallel Fascism and Western-Supported Zionist Genocide of Palestine and Palestinians (Revised)” marktanliano.net, 2 June, 2024. (Parallel Fascism and Western-Supported Zionist Genocide of Palestine and Palestinians (Revised) – Mark Taliano) Accessed 25 October, 2024.

Featured image is from Washington Report on ME Affairs

This might be the biggest story of corruption and cover-up in recent years. 

And I’m going to show you why everything he said in his speech is accurate. 

As you just heard the man, Bill Gates has been indicted in a vaccine-related case in the Netherlands and now faces trial.

Now just like most of you guys, I was surprised by this because I haven’t heard anything about this case.

According to this news story a Dutch court has ordered that Bill Gates will face trial in the Netherlands over his involvement in misleading the public about the safety of vaccines.

The plaintiffs filed the lawsuit last year, naming Gates, along with former Dutch Prime Minister and current NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte, members of the Dutch government’s Outbreak Management Team, Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla, and the Dutch state itself.

The plaintiffs argue that Gates, through his involvement with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the World Economic Forum (WEF), was involved in a far-reaching agenda—referred to as “The Great Reset Project”—. And it sought to exploit the global crisis in order to implement sweeping societal changes, all under the guise of combating the pandemic.

Now sadly according to these articles one of the seven individuals, whose identities have been redacted in public documents, has since died after receiving the vaccine.

And in their last hearing, one of the plaintiffs was represented by her father because she could no longer speak. The father explained that his daughter had been healthy prior to receiving the vaccine but became sick afterward and lost her ability to speak. He expressed his desire to “speak to Bill Gates directly” about his daughter’s condition.

Now of course Bill Gates isn’t going to talk to some poor man whose daughter is extremely sick. So he just hired the largest litigation firm in the Netherlands and argued that the Dutch court had no jurisdiction over him because he lives in the United States.

However, the court refuted this claim and ruled that it does have jurisdiction over Gates. The court made this ruling because it found “sufficient evidence” that the claims against Gates and the other defendants are “connected” and based on the same “complex of facts.”

Now the reason why this indictment is a huge problem for Bill Gates is because it set a precedence. It tells other people living in Europe that they can also sue him if they were hurt by the vaccine. So I won’t be shocked if he has to face legal proceedings in other parts of the world as well. And while all of this is happening, for some reason a man who has been bipartisan for 2 decades suddenly decides to throw 50 million dollars behind Kamala Harris only days after his indictment.

Now even though Reps for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation charity declined to comment. Citing anonymous sources, the Times reported that the charitable foundation “is significantly concerned about potential cuts to family planning and global health programs if Mr. Trump is elected.” Well, they should be concerned because Trump and many of his supporters like RFK Jr, have been waging a war against the billionaire’s alleged tactics for years.

So by giving so much money to Kamala, Bill Gates is basically trying to make sure that he will have a president who’ll support him even if things get rough.

And while this indictment might be the last straw, I think Bill Gates has another reason to stop Trump from winning the election. We all know about his history with Epstein and how the two of them were pretty close. Of course later on he said that he feels bad about ever hanging out with that monster.

However, feeling bad about your actions doesn’t mean he isn’t guilty. Of course, thanks to some mind-boggling legal reasons the names of Epstein’s partners haven’t been released to the public but according to Elon Musk that might change pretty soon.

If the Tesla founder is telling the truth, this is bad news for so many people including multiple billionaires who were doing all those vile and disgusting things on Epstein Island. So of course it makes sense for them to support Kamala and it looks like Bill Gates has now bought a seat in that life raft by paying 50 million dollars.

Video: 


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Featured image is from AIER


The Worldwide Corona Crisis, Global Coup d’Etat Against Humanity

by Michel Chossudovsky

Michel Chossudovsky reviews in detail how this insidious project “destroys people’s lives”. He provides a comprehensive analysis of everything you need to know about the “pandemic” — from the medical dimensions to the economic and social repercussions, political underpinnings, and mental and psychological impacts.

“My objective as an author is to inform people worldwide and refute the official narrative which has been used as a justification to destabilize the economic and social fabric of entire countries, followed by the imposition of the “deadly” COVID-19 “vaccine”. This crisis affects humanity in its entirety: almost 8 billion people. We stand in solidarity with our fellow human beings and our children worldwide. Truth is a powerful instrument.”

Reviews

This is an in-depth resource of great interest if it is the wider perspective you are motivated to understand a little better, the author is very knowledgeable about geopolitics and this comes out in the way Covid is contextualized. —Dr. Mike Yeadon

In this war against humanity in which we find ourselves, in this singular, irregular and massive assault against liberty and the goodness of people, Chossudovsky’s book is a rock upon which to sustain our fight. –Dr. Emanuel Garcia

In fifteen concise science-based chapters, Michel traces the false covid pandemic, explaining how a PCR test, producing up to 97% proven false positives, combined with a relentless 24/7 fear campaign, was able to create a worldwide panic-laden “plandemic”; that this plandemic would never have been possible without the infamous DNA-modifying Polymerase Chain Reaction test – which to this day is being pushed on a majority of innocent people who have no clue. His conclusions are evidenced by renown scientists. —Peter Koenig 

Professor Chossudovsky exposes the truth that “there is no causal relationship between the virus and economic variables.” In other words, it was not COVID-19 but, rather, the deliberate implementation of the illogical, scientifically baseless lockdowns that caused the shutdown of the global economy. –David Skripac

A reading of  Chossudovsky’s book provides a comprehensive lesson in how there is a global coup d’état under way called “The Great Reset” that if not resisted and defeated by freedom loving people everywhere will result in a dystopian future not yet imagined. Pass on this free gift from Professor Chossudovsky before it’s too late.  You will not find so much valuable information and analysis in one place. –Edward Curtin

ISBN: 978-0-9879389-3-0,  Year: 2022,  PDF Ebook,  Pages: 164, 15 Chapters

Price: $11.50 FREE COPY! Click here (docsend) and download.

You may also access the online version of the e-Book by clicking here.

We encourage you to support the eBook project by making a donation through Global Research’s DonorBox “Worldwide Corona Crisis” Campaign Page

The Crimes of Israel, and their Puppet Master the U.S.

October 28th, 2024 by Michael Welch

On October 7, two (Israeli) babies are killed. It was dreadful! It was appalling! At the end of August when the Gazan Health Ministry published detailed figures, the first fourteen pages, 701 names were taken up with children under the age of one… It’s very, very likely that in the end, the total number of dead and injured in the Gaza Strip will be more than a quarter of a million people. There is just no comparison between the two!”

Richard Sanders [1]

a

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It is too difficult to look at the ongoing carnage besieging Gaza in 2024.

Here are the latest statistics, courtesy of Gaza’s Ministry of Health:

  • Killed in Gaza: at least 42,847 people, including nearly 16,765 children

  • Injured in Gaza: more than 100,544 people

  • Missing: more than 10,000

Israel’s military attacks have destroyed:

  • More than half of Gaza’s homes (damaged or destroyed)

  • 80 percent of commercial facilities

  • 87 percent of school buildings

  • Healthcare facilities so 17 of 36 hospitals are partially functional

  • 68 percent of road networks

  • 68 percent of cropland

And according to the Committee to Protect Journalists and the International Federation of Journalists, more than 125 Palestinians have been killed since October 7, 2023. [2]

The good news is that people in America and the Western world are waking up to the horrors and continue to plague the political class who continue to apologize for the slaughter as “defence against terrorism.” The bad news, however, is that there is far too much attention paid to the small bully in the Middle east, and not enough on the “Big Boss” that is the U.S.

This week, on the Global Research News Hour, we thoroughly analyze Israel-Palestine and attempt to arrive at a solution to the humanitarian mess that holds hope for the people who say with determination, “Free, free Palestine!”

In our first half hour, our guest, Canadian Professor of Law Michael Lynk, the former Special Rapporteur on human rights in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, expands his own assessment and of the likely route that will have to be taken to secure a just peace in the land formerly known as Palestine. And in our second half hour, Professor Michel Chossudovsky talks about how the United States uses Israel, like many other countries, to do their “dirty work” for them.

Michael Lynk is emeritus Professor at the Faculty of Law, Western University, in London, Ontario. In January 2015, Professor Lynk was named to the Mayor of London’s Honours List for his work on humanitarian issues. In March 2016, the United Nations Human Rights Council appointed Professor Lynk as the 7th Special Rapporteur for the human rights situation in the Palestinian Territories occupied since 1967.

Professor Michel Chossudovsky is the founder and director of the Centre for Research on Globalization and its website globalresearch.ca. He is Professor (Emeritus) of Economics at the University of Ottawa and the award-winning author of 13 books including America’s War on Terrorism (2005), Towards a World War III Scenario: The Dangers of Nuclear War (2011) and The Globalization of War, America’s Long War against Humanity (2015.)

(Global Research News Hour episode 446)

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Transcript of conversation with Professor Michel Chossudovsky, October 17, 2024

Global Research: We have arrived at a major crossroads in world history. So saith Michel Chossudovsky. One of the points he raises, however, is that the U.S. is not only refusing to stand up to Israel, the genocidal war is fully supported by the U.S.

The U.S. is not following Israel. It’s the other way around. We will delve into this subject and the consequences down the pipe for Lebanon and Iran and more.

Of course, Michel Chossudovsky is an award-winning author, professor of economics emeritus at the University of Ottawa, founder and director of the Centre for Research on Globalization in Montreal. He’s also the editor of Global Research. Welcome back to the Global Research News Hour, Professor Chossudovsky.

Michel Chossudovsky: Thank you very much, Michael. It’s good to be with you. I must say that what is lacking in the understanding of the peace movement, of the solidarity movement with Palestine, is the fact that Israel is a de facto member of NATO.

And every single action that it takes goes through the command structures of the United States. The Pentagon, it goes to Central Command headquarters for the Middle East, and it also goes up to Nebraska to U.S. Strategic Command. So there may be flexibilities there, but when they go and kill the head of Hezbollah or when they bomb Lebanon, it is all orchestrated and it is on the drawing board of the Pentagon.

That is absolutely clear. Any government or any group which supports the Israeli government in waging genocide is complicit, under Articles III and IV of the Genocide Protocol, Geneva Convention. They are complicit.

It’s Article III and Article IV. And I suggest that people read these articles. They’re very easy. It’s very straightforward.

You said, if you are supporting the genocide in any particular way, whether it’s through weapons or even promotion or media coverage, you are complicit. And the media is complicit.

GR: So it’s not just the United States that’s complicit.

You’ve got France, Germany, Canada, and even the Canadian media that are providing cover for this operation of genocide.

MC: Well, absolutely. But they’re mostly members of NATO.

They’re member states of NATO, most of which are member states of the European Union. These are “allies” of the United States, even though they’re also victims of U.S.-led economic warfare. But that’s  another matter.

It is important that our peace movement, first of all, understand that this is not simply an action against Palestine. It’s an action against the entire region. And all the actions against Lebanon and Iran and Syria and so on, indicate that the United States and NATO members are complicit in genocide.

GR: Professor Chossudovsky, so you basically say that the United States is essentially using Israel to carry out, I guess, geopolitical maneuvers in their favour. It’s kind of like the way the Ukraine government is kind of a proxy in the war, NATO-orchestrated war in Russia, or for that matter, the ISIS and al-Qaeda, as you’ve argued, that they are being used to orchestrate efforts, again, in U.S. interests. Are the interests around the world different, or are there, I mean, depending on the different orientation?

MC: Well, first of all, I should mention the war against Iran has been on the drawing board of the Pentagon since 1979.

And that coincides with the return of Ayatollah Khomeini. It was a CIA operation, he comes back to his homeland, to Iran, and he’s welcomed. And his function was there, it was a CIA op, was to destabilize the civilian and secular government, which had displaced the Shah, Shah Pahlavi. But I don’t want to get into the complexities, but what happened, if I give a chronology, and that’s very important, as of 1983, the United States launched something which was diabolical.

It had official relations with Iraq, saying, if you fight against Iran, we will fund your weapons.

They were giving weapons to Iraq in the same way as they’re giving weapons to Israel today, to go and fight against Iran.

Now, in turn, you had another component, in that they were also covertly, and that was a CIA op, they were also covertly supporting the Islamic Republic of Iran in weaponry against Iraq.

So, they take these two countries, and they trigger warfare, and that is where some people will remember Oliver North, and the CONTRAS, okay? Oliver North and the CONTRAS, well, what it was, was there was a money laundering process there, but it was essentially an operation which consisted in selling weapons to Iran undercover, and Iran would be paying for these weapons, and with the money, then they would support the CONTRA rebels in Nicaragua, which were there fighting against the government, namely an elected government of the Sandinista movement. It was a coalition government, and they were fighting against that government with a view to toppling it,  in other words, destroying it.

I was actually in Nicaragua in 1984 at the height of the CONTRA attacks, and then you had John Negroponte  he was behind this, and he was at the embassy in Honduras, with the role to support the CONTRAS,

The U.S., never wanted to have a leftist government in Nicaragua, so that was it.

And so that Oliver North was there coordinating a project which was consisted in funding the CONTRA, with the proceeds of the weapons sold to Iran so that they could fight Iraq.

Iraq was receiving weapons also from the United States, and they were fighting one another, and the objective was there to destroy both countries.

Now, that’s really very important because it just shows how diabolical U.S. military doctrine is, one country was an ally and the other country an enemy, and then they fund the enemy, and they fund the ally, and the objective was to destroy both countries.

The Iran-Iraq war was from about 1982 to 86, and then after that, one date which is very important, which I mentioned in my writings, is 1995.

Central Command Headquarters, in consultation with Strategic Command Headquarters in Nebraska, they put together a statement. I’ll read it you:  This is U.S. Central Command (USCENTCOM)

“the NSS directs implementation of a strategy of dual containment of the rogue states of Iraq and Iran, as long as those states pose a threat to U.S. interests, … ”

Now, they don’t pose any threat to the United States. The United States is thousands of miles away, and then they say that this is a process of dual containment, which is designed to maintain the balance of power in the region, but what is very important there is that, and I quote,

“the purpose of U.S. engagement, as espoused by the NSS, is to protect the United States’ vital interests in the region, uninterrupted, secure U.S. allied access to Gulf oil.”

This has always been a war for oil and gas, always, and it is still today.

GR: The gas there seems to be at least one major aspect to this genocidal campaign.

MC: Well, absolutely. I’ve itemized in my article the following, but pretty much under the heading, United States’ vital interests in the region, uninterrupted, secure allied access to Gulf oil.

Today would be Gulf oil and gas.

That is, in fact, America’s promised land. It’s not Israel’s promised land.

What do we have? Iran, third largest reserves of oil worldwide, after Saudi Arabia and Venezuela.

After Russia, Iran is the second country in terms of natural gas reserves, together with Qatar, and it has a partnership with Qatar, so that, in fact, you look at Russia, Iran, and Qatar, all together they have something of the order of 54% of the world’s reserves of natural gas, which is approximately 10 times the gas reserves of the United States.

Well, let’s assume that there is a phoney climate CO2 narrative which prevails. I would say: what we should be doing is to close those oil and gas countries down because they are triggering global warming.

Why on earth would they be going after Iran and Russia? What we have to do is to close them down so that they don’t produce oil anymore. You can see that all the wars for oil and gas are ongoing despite the alleged threat of CO2)

GR: When you’re looking at the situation now, it seems as if the United States dominates NATO and people who are members of NATO, they’re actually serving the United States.

They’re under, essentially, the exploitation of the United States.

MC: Well, absolutely. Let me just answer the question that you put forth about Gaza.

There is another unspoken objective, and that is the Eastern Mediterranean coastline of Gaza, starting in Egypt and going right up to northern Syria, which is a corridor of maritime natural gas reserves, Wirth billions and billions of dollars. 

What they want is to take control of the maritime corridor of Palestine, Lebanon, Syria.

Now, with regard to what you said, NATO does not have any kind of decision-making procedures, even in terms of command structures.

It all goes through the very complex decision-making of U.S. military and intelligence, and of course the propaganda apparatus.

I’d like to quote  Vice President Dick Cheney, who pointed out, and that was in 2005, it was in the second term of the Bush administration, and of course, they were still at war.

It was in the wake of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, and Vice President Dick Cheney said, I’m paraphrasing, “Israel will do the dirty work for us.”

Now, he wasn’t joking there. Now, I’ll quote exactly what he said.

“The Israelis might decide to act first and let the rest of the world worry about cleaning up the diplomatic mess.”

Then you had the media headlines. This was, I think, the Washington Post that said, “Bush should not push Israel to do dirty work in Iran.”

Now, what this “dirty work” concept signifies, is that all or most of America’s allies are potentially involved in dirty work.

You have Germany who’s sending weapons to Ukraine,

You’ve got France sending soldiers to Romania,

And then you’ve a Western countries, member states of the EU which are sending weapons to Israel.

While it’s obvious that in Israel’s war against Palestine, most of these imported weapons are dysfunctional because then they’re not meant to fight against a resistance movement, which is essentially working with Kalashnikovs and small arms and so on.

The fourth military power in the world, is categorized as being Israel.

But in fact, it’s an extension of the US military apparatus, which is sitting in the Middle East.

Dick Cheney mentioned the “dirty work” referring to Israel, but in fact, I would say that all the NATO member states with some exceptions are doing the dirty work and on behalf of America’s hegemonic agenda.

Of course, it’s the powerful interest groups which are behind this war. It’s also the fact that it’s ultimately the financial establishment and so on, which are calling the shots. At the same time, these allies are also the target and the victims of US-sponsored warfare or economic warfare.

GR: What would you say is basically the end game with all of these shady dealings? You mentioned Oliver North, all of the tactics of using Israel and other people doing their dirty work.

What exactly is their end game? Is it basically to take over the entire earth, kind of like Hitler, only with more of a nice kind of public relations or something like that?

MC: Well, I think there is certainly a hegemonic agenda, which is a uni-polar world.

It’s not totally independent from other components, such as the COVID-19 crisis, as well as the vaccine.

The COVID-19 crisis was, let’s say, the lock-down was imposed on 190 countries from one day to the next, with instructions to close down the economy.

We know that if you confine the labour force and you freeze the workplace, which was part of the instructions to 190 countries, that’s economic warfare.

Then we have the whole debate on the vaccine, that people are taking the vaccine.

We have ample evidence to that effect that the vaccine is deadly and is resulting in an upward trend in mortality.

But the tendency here is to create some form of a dichotomy in one’s understanding of the new world order.

Theatre wars are not considered comparable to economic warfare.

But economic warfare is what is being applied now in most countries in Western Europe.

The hikes in fuel prices, they’re not allowing us, they’re not allowing the Europeans to buy oil and gas from Russia or from Iran.

So inevitably, this leads to hikes in market prices, collapse in purchasing power.

And then there’s the usual,  neoliberal agenda, which is applied now extensively in Western Europe. It’s a thirdworldization process.

And I would say that all  these allies are, in a sense, they are also targets, they’re enemies.

Because if you’re in a uni-polar world, there’s only one power. Well, it’s complex.

But let’s say now, just to give people an example, Canadians in particular,

is the United Kingdom an ally of the United States? The answer is no.

No, it’s not. And the reason is the following.

Very few people in Canada know this, that starting in 1921, the US government put together a plan to invade Canada.

 It’s all documented. And who was leading this military agenda? To invade Canada, to occupy Canada. It was also considered a territory of the British Empire.

They even had biological weapons, which were envisaged.

Several cities in Canada were envisaged for bombing, including Vancouver, Halifax, and Quebec City, and mainly port areas.

At that time, it was very important. And General MacArthur was there coordinating it.

General MacArthur  was actively involved, it was a bit like a dress rehearsal. They didn’t invade, but they threatened Canada. It’s all on record.

GR: Given the stakes, especially this critical juncture in history, what do you expect our listeners do to stop the course, especially with the election underway?

MC: I’m going to add one extra sentence to what I’ve just mentioned about war against Canada and the British Empire. In 1939, the war against the British Empire and against Canada was shelved. And then the United Kingdom and Canada were invited to participate in the Manhattan Project to develop the atomic bomb. 

So it went from an enemy to a friend.

And that has been the strategy of the United States. You threaten your allies, and then you also incorporate your allies.

That decision by the U.S to invite the U.K and Canada to join the Manhattan project was, of course, related to the development of the atomic bomb. 

Now, your question is, of course, very important, we should conclude on that. I think, first of all, we have to understand that we’re at a very dangerous crossroads in our history.

I haven’t tackled the issue of nuclear war. It certainly is an issue. And if it happens, it will not be in Eastern Europe, it will be in the Middle East.

And it would be targeting Iran. But I think at this stage, I think this is very unlikely, first of all, because the Russians have an alliance with Iran. And I assume that they also have very high tech air defence systems.

I don’t think that this is going to take place, but it’s still there.

And if it does take place, it would be with the B61-12. It’s a tactical nuclear weapon.

And what is very dangerous is that in the nuclear manuals, they say that the B61 tactical nuclear weapon, which is a mini-nuke, which has an explosive capacity between one third and 12 times the Hiroshima bomb, is safe for civilians.

Now, they say it’s safe for civilians, and it is actually permitted to be used in the conventional war theater. So, it’s not the commander-in-chief that decides, it’s the military itself that decides.

And I think that politicians don’t really understand that any kind of nuclear war, even a fraction (1/3) of a Hiroshima bomb, would potentially lead to escalation, which in turn could lead us to the the end of humanity as we know it.

I mean, this is something which is complex, on we should spend, of course, much more time discussing and debating 

I’ve written two books on nuclear war, and I’m very familiar with the jargon, but with regard to the decision-making process, it’s very complex.

But the potential for making mistakes and also using artificial intelligence is there.

So, I think that what is, let’s say, to confirm, we should refrain from accusing the Netanyahu government of attacking Iran, because the Pentagon is calling the shots. And Netanyahu is a proxy. 

There is no doubt that the Pentagon and the CIA are responsible for the genocide (under Art III and IV) of the Genocide Convention, they and are complicit under international law. 

GR: I thank you for this exchange and dialogue. 

So, thanks a lot.

MC: Thank you very much.


The Global Research News Hour airs every Friday at 1pm CT on CKUW 95.9FM out of the University of Winnipeg.

The programme is also broadcast weekly (Monday, 1-2pm ET) by the Progressive Radio Network in the US.

The programme is also podcast at globalresearch.ca .

Notes:

  1. https://x.com/21WIRE/status/1849709066999730477
  2. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/longform/2023/10/9/israel-hamas-war-in-maps-and-charts-live-tracker

Israeli forces have stormed the last operational hospital in the besieged north Gaza after bombing it and killing children inside, according to doctors and media reports.

Medical sources announced that at least 63 Palestinians were killed in the early morning Israeli attacks on the Gaza Strip.

“A large number of the martyrs are women and children,” they said.

The attack on the Kamal Adwan hospital, located in Beit Lahia northwest of Jabalia, was launched around 2 a.m. local time Friday, shortly after a WHO delegation left the hospital.

It began with airstrikes targeting the hospital and its courtyards, including the medical oxygen generator, said Dr. Munir al-Bursh, the director general of the Palestinian health ministry in Gaza.

The bombing led to the death of children inside the hospital and wounded medical staff.

Israeli troops then raided the hospital around two hours later, calling on all patients, including people in intensive care, to gather in the courtyard.

They detained the young men sheltering in the hospital and interrogated them. According to Al Jazeera, the troops abducted famed teenage Palestinian activist and journalist Aboud Battah from the hospital. 

Kamal Adwan is one of three hospitals in the northern Gaza Strip that have been under a suffocating Israeli siege for three weeks. They have received little to no aid, medicine, food and fuel since the blockade on the north began.

The other two, the Indonesian hospital and al-Awda hospital, have ceased operations in recent days due to the ongoing Israeli attacks. 

Kamal Adwan remained operational at minimal capacity, offering life-saving services to newborn infants in neonatal intensive care units and other patients in ICUs. 

Hussam Abu Safiya, the director of the Kamal Adwan hospital, decried the situation.

“Instead of receiving aid, we receive tanks… which are shelling the [hospital] building,” he said, speaking from the Intensive Care Unit where the injured and medical staff are huddled after Israel started its bombing.

“Where is the law? Which law in the world allows for a hospital to be directly targeted?”

The Israeli military launched a new onslaught on north Gaza on 5 October, described by rights groups and experts as part of a plan to ethnically cleanse the area of Palestinians. 

It began after a controversial proposal named the “Generals’ Plan” was presented to the Israeli regime, which would see areas north of the Netzarim Corridor, which cuts Gaza in two, emptied of its residents so Israel could establish a “closed military zone”. 

According to the plan, anyone who chooses to stay would be considered a Hamas operative and could be killed.

The UN agency for Palestinian refugees, UNRWA, estimates that about 400,000 people remain in Gaza’s north, including Gaza City.

Residential Houses Bombed in Khan Yunis

In southern Gaza, Israeli airstrikes targeted residential homes in the al-Manara neighborhood of Khan Yunis, leading to the deaths of at least 38 Palestinians on Friday. 

The airstrikes were coupled with a ground incursion by Israeli forces, supported by heavy air and artillery cover.

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Click here to watch the video

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Eyewitnesses described scenes of extensive destruction, with entire homes reduced to rubble in residential zones where families had taken shelter.

In the Qizan al-Najjar area of Khan Yunis, two Palestinians were killed and several others were injured when their homes were hit by artillery shells.

Three Palestinians were killed, and others wounded as Israeli artillery targeted the Maan neighborhood east of Khan Yunis.

The deaths reported by health officials were the latest in Khan Yunis, where people have in recent days lined up for bread outside the city’s only bakery in operation.

The strikes come a day after the US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said that Israel had accomplished its objective of “effectively dismantling” Hamas.

Homes Blown Up in Jabalia 

More than 150 Palestinian people were killed or injured in a “major massacre” in Jabalia refugee camp in northern Gaza after Israeli forces blew up 11 residential houses in al-Hawaja area on Thursday evening.  

“There is talk of more than 150 martyrs and wounded,” the Palestinian Civil Defense agency said.

It said the final death toll could rise as rescue efforts were disrupted due to the Israeli bombings and restrictions imposed by Israeli forces who laid siege to northern Gaza for three weeks.

“Citizens are sending distress calls to head to the place to help transport the wounded,” a statement by the agendy read.

According to the statement, the targeted homes belonged to the following families: Najjar, Abu al-Ouf, Salman, Hijazi, Abu al-Qumsan, Aqel Abu Rashid, Abu al-Tarabish, Zaqoul, and Shaalan.

On Thursday, at least 18 people were killed in an attack on the Nuseirat Martyrs School in the Nuseirat refugee camp in central Gaza.

Gaza’s Government Media Office noted that the school housed thousands of displaced people. The attack brings the number of displacement centers targeted by Israeli forces to 196.

Eleven children were also killed in the Israeli bombing of al-Maghazi Services Club in the neighboring Maghazi refugee camp, said the director of Gaza’s Government Media Office, Ismail Al-Thawabta.

Israel launched the war on Gaza on October 7, 2023, after the Palestinian resistance movement Hamas waged the surprise Operation Al-Aqsa Storm against the occupying entity in response to the Israeli regime’s decades-long campaign of bloodletting and devastation against Palestinians.

The regime’s bloody onslaught on Gaza has so far killed nearly 43,000 Palestinians, mostly women and children, and injured about 100,600 others.

Thousands more are also missing and presumed dead under rubble.

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Featured image is from @issam1900haltam

Is BRICS Summit the Beginning of a New World Order?

October 28th, 2024 by Marc Vandepitte

Thirty-six countries, representing over half of the global population, gathered in Russia to discuss a new financial and economic infrastructure for the world. The potential impact could be immense in the long run.

From 22 to 24 October, 36 countries, mainly from the Global South, attended the 16th summit of the BRICS countries. UN Secretary-General António Guterres also joined this meeting. As Chinese President Xi stated, the summit aimed “to create new opportunities for the Global South.”

Changed Balance of Power

Since World War II, former colonized nations have made various attempts to establish a more equitable world order. In the 1970s, there was an attempt to create a New International Economic Order. However, these and other efforts failed due to internal divisions and, more importantly, because the geopolitical balance of power was very unfavourable. The North held various economic and diplomatic levers to keep nations in check, and when those were insufficient, the US relied on military force.

This situation has changed significantly. Over the last few decades, the economic power of the West has substantially declined. In 1990, the US and its allies accounted for 62.4% of global output. That share has currently fallen to 39.6 per cent, and this decline continues. Meanwhile, countries like China and India, and other emerging economies, are on the rise.  

Militarily, too, the West’s influence has waned. In the past 25 years, all US and allied military interventions have failed. They were forced to withdraw from Iraq and Afghanistan, could neither subdue Syria nor Yemen, and Libya has ended in complete chaos and failure.

At the onset of the war in Ukraine, they hoped that by providing massive military support to Kyiv and imposing severe economic sanctions on Russia, they could bring Moscow to its knees. But this also failed. CIA Director William J. Burns acknowledged,

“The United States no longer possesses undisputed supremacy”.

Much has changed. In March of this year, Chinese President Xi Jinping expressed it this way during a visit with Vladimir Putin:

“Right now there are changes, the likes of which we haven’t seen for 100 years, and we should drive those changes together.” This was the context for the summit in Kazan.

Not a Small Club

BRICS was founded in 2006 with four original members: Brazil, Russia, India, and China. South Africa joined in 2010. The BRICS aims “to reshape the global political, economic, and financial architecture in a fair, just, and representative manner based on multilateralism and international law.” In other words, these five countries seek to establish a global governance system that is inclusive and egalitarian.

On 1 January 2024, four new states joined as full members: Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran and the United Arab Emirates (UAE). At the past summit in Kazan, 13 ‘partner countries’ joined BRICS+. With at least 20 other countries expressing interest in joining, the BRICS+ group is no longer a small club. 

Currently, it represents 46 per cent of the global population and 37% of global output.[1] BRICS+ also accounts for a quarter of all goods exports and 40% of oil production. The BRICS+ GDP now surpasses that of the G7, and its industrial production is even double that of the G7.

A Multipolar World

BRICS was founded to create more cooperation between emerging economies and to counterbalance the US and its allies. The BRICS countries want to break away from the West’s dominant practices, and are striving for a multipolar world— one with a more even balance of power and greater opportunities for countries in the South.

The 2007–2011 financial crisis exposed the fragility and unreliability of the Western economic system. Vaccine nationalism during the pandemic showed the Northern countries’ unreliability in times of crisis. The same applies to the refusal of wealthy countries to take historical responsibility for climate change.

This division widened recently with the war in Ukraine. Most Southern countries have remained largely neutral, refusing to join economic sanctions against Russia. 

In addition, many countries frowned on the Russian Central Bank’s monetary reserves in the West being frozen and they were displeased when Russian banks were excluded from international payment transactions (SWIFT). If that is possible with Russia today, it may be done to any other country tomorrow. The financial trust in Western systems took a heavy hit.

The divide widened further with the West’s unconditional support of the genocide in Gaza. Western countries immediately imposed heavy sanctions on Russia following the Ukraine invasion but allowed Israel to act freely, even supplying arms or allowing their ports to ship them. For Southern countries, this application of a double standard is incomprehensible and unacceptable.

Financial Independence

One key aspect of BRICS is the pursuit of greater financial independence from Western financial systems and the dominance of the dollar.

“Every night, I ask myself why all countries must base their trade on the dollar,” said Lula in a speech for the New Development Bank, formerly the BRICS Bank.

Founded in 2015, the bank aims to promote financial independence within the BRICS countries. 

To reduce dependence on the dollar, the BRICS countries are exploring creating a reserve currency, backed for 40 per cent by gold and other natural resources and 60 per cent by a basket of member currencies. 

They are also promoting a payment and settlement platform that would link the financial markets of BRICS countries, independent of the Switzerland-based Bank for International Settlements (BIS).

Other projects include creating an independent insurance system, a rating agency separate from Western powers, and an independent interbank transaction system to compete with the US-controlled SWIFT. 

Although the dollar has not yet been dethroned and may remain the world’s reserve currency for some time, a ‘multipolar’ currency world might emerge in the coming years. This shift would reduce the South’s dependence on the dollar and limit the US’s ability to use economic sanctions as a weapon.

The measures taken at this meeting may appear small at first glance, but in the long term, they could mark the beginning of a new economic infrastructure where the West no longer holds sole dominance, allowing Southern countries to play a fully integrated role. 

In any case, the balance of power having changed, the chances that this may happen are  much more favourable now than they were fifty years ago. History will reveal whether this summit will prove to be historic.

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Birds Not Bombs: Let’s Fight for a World of Peace, Not War   

Marc Vandepitte is a member of the Network of Intellectuals and Artists in Defense of Humanity and was an observer during the presidential elections in Venezuela. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

Sources

16th BRICS summit opens in Kazan, Russia

Expanding list shows BRICS’ unique appeal in ‘openness, inclusiveness, fairness and justice’

Internacional. Los BRICS, en Kazan, marcan el futuro del mundo

Elite US economist warns: dollar system is weakening as gold BRICS rise

BRICS grows, adding 13 new ‘partner countries’ at historic summit in Russia

Note

[1] World product expressed in dollar PPP (purchasing power parity). That figure takes into account price differences between countries for the same goods or services and expresses real purchasing power.

Featured image: A projection mapping show at the Kazan Kremlin. (By Ramil Sitdikov / Source: Photohost agency brics-russia2024.ru)

At least thirty US school children whose parents were told the COVID mRNA shots were “safe and effective” died suddenly and unexpectedly in the US this week as the death toll continues surging among the vaccinated and boosted.

Many of the children died of medical emergencies including cardiac arrest and strokes as doctors warn they are now regularly witnessing “once-in-a-lifetime” disorders in children.

“This is the new normal… turbo cancers, died suddenly. My friend lost three friends in one week! Turbo cancers like this were virtually non-existent before the COVID shots,” explained MIT scientist and vaccine researcher, Steve Kirsch.

How long before we as a society can have an open and honest discussion about what is happening to the Covid-vaccinated before our eyes?

Lillian Costello

13-year-old Lillian Costello of Norton, died suddenly and unexpectedly on Tuesday at the Sturdy Memorial Hospital in Attleboro.

According to a GoFundMe fundraiser, Lilly was a seventh-grade student at the Norton Middle School and a proud member of the Student Council. She also enjoyed being a member of the Photography Club and participated in cheerleading.

Finley Kruchten

Finley Kruchten suffered a “massive pulmonary embolism” while in class at Denmark High School in early October, according to his family’s GoFundMe page.

Finley was taken to Northside Forsyth Hospital and then to Northside Gwinnett Hospital where he was pronounced dead.

Lucy Nash

Kentucky fourth grader Lucy Nash died suddenly and unexpectedly after suffering a cardiac arrest.

“On the first day of school Lucy collapsed and had a cardiac event,” a GoFundMe page for the family reads. “Her little brain went many minutes without oxygen while they were trying to save her life.”

Ovet Gomez-Regalado

Ovet Gomez-Regalado, a 15-year-old Kansas high school student, died two days after suffering a medical emergency. The football player collapsed suddenly on the field at practice.

The 15-year-old collapsed and died after performing 40 minutes of light drills, according to the school district in Hopewell, Virginia.

Leslie Noble

Meanwhile, staff at Franklin High School, Baltimore are mourning the sudden loss of 16-year-old Leslie Noble, a member of the school’s football team.

The teen died while participating in light drills during the first practice of the season on Wednesday in Reisterstown and experiencing a medical emergency.

“I saw a bunch of firetrucks, ambulances, and all I knew was they said that a child had collapsed on the field,” said Sharon Johnson, a staff member at Franklin High School.

Unfortunately, the long list of deaths continues, including unnamed victims whose families have requested their identities remain anonymous due to their age.

For example, a 14-year-old girl whose family requested anonymity suffered a medical emergency during a PE class in Houston. According to Marshall Middle School:

“Today was a very difficult day for the Marshall MS community. A student at Marshall Middle School suffered a medical emergency on campus today. EMS responded to the school quickly and the student was transported to the hospital. The student’s parents were quickly notified and responded to the school.”

However, in an email to parents, provided to us by a Marshall Middle School parent, the principal said,

“One of our eighth-grade students died. This loss is sure to raise many emotions, concerns, and questions for our entire school, especially our students.”

Many questions, indeed.

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Birds Not Bombs: Let’s Fight for a World of Peace, Not War   

Baxter Dmitry is a writer at The People’s Voice. He covers politics, business and entertainment. Speaking truth to power since he learned to talk, Baxter has travelled in over 80 countries and won arguments in every single one. Live without fear.

Featured image is from TPV


The Worldwide Corona Crisis, Global Coup d’Etat Against Humanity

by Michel Chossudovsky

Michel Chossudovsky reviews in detail how this insidious project “destroys people’s lives”. He provides a comprehensive analysis of everything you need to know about the “pandemic” — from the medical dimensions to the economic and social repercussions, political underpinnings, and mental and psychological impacts.

“My objective as an author is to inform people worldwide and refute the official narrative which has been used as a justification to destabilize the economic and social fabric of entire countries, followed by the imposition of the “deadly” COVID-19 “vaccine”. This crisis affects humanity in its entirety: almost 8 billion people. We stand in solidarity with our fellow human beings and our children worldwide. Truth is a powerful instrument.”

Reviews

This is an in-depth resource of great interest if it is the wider perspective you are motivated to understand a little better, the author is very knowledgeable about geopolitics and this comes out in the way Covid is contextualized. —Dr. Mike Yeadon

In this war against humanity in which we find ourselves, in this singular, irregular and massive assault against liberty and the goodness of people, Chossudovsky’s book is a rock upon which to sustain our fight. –Dr. Emanuel Garcia

In fifteen concise science-based chapters, Michel traces the false covid pandemic, explaining how a PCR test, producing up to 97% proven false positives, combined with a relentless 24/7 fear campaign, was able to create a worldwide panic-laden “plandemic”; that this plandemic would never have been possible without the infamous DNA-modifying Polymerase Chain Reaction test – which to this day is being pushed on a majority of innocent people who have no clue. His conclusions are evidenced by renown scientists. —Peter Koenig 

Professor Chossudovsky exposes the truth that “there is no causal relationship between the virus and economic variables.” In other words, it was not COVID-19 but, rather, the deliberate implementation of the illogical, scientifically baseless lockdowns that caused the shutdown of the global economy. –David Skripac

A reading of  Chossudovsky’s book provides a comprehensive lesson in how there is a global coup d’état under way called “The Great Reset” that if not resisted and defeated by freedom loving people everywhere will result in a dystopian future not yet imagined. Pass on this free gift from Professor Chossudovsky before it’s too late.  You will not find so much valuable information and analysis in one place. –Edward Curtin

ISBN: 978-0-9879389-3-0,  Year: 2022,  PDF Ebook,  Pages: 164, 15 Chapters

Price: $11.50 FREE COPY! Click here (docsend) and download.

You may also access the online version of the e-Book by clicking here.

We encourage you to support the eBook project by making a donation through Global Research’s DonorBox “Worldwide Corona Crisis” Campaign Page.  

The Gaza Catastrophe: Checking Israeli and Western Elites

October 28th, 2024 by Dr. Chandra Muzaffar

Israel is determined to take over North Gaza. This explains its destruction of residential areas in the region. Schools and hospitals have also been targeted. People have been forced to flee their homes. Many who have chosen to stay behind have been killed.

Although some food and other essentials are now available, they are far from adequate. This is why the threat of starvation is still real.

As with the rest of Gaza and Palestine, scores of medical workers have lost their lives. Media workers would be another category of people who have been victims of Israeli aggression. It has been noted that a lot of children have also succumbed to Israeli bombs and bullets. This is a pattern that has expressed itself in almost every Israeli assault upon Gaza in the last so many years.

While Israeli atrocities in North Gaza fit in with its larger agenda of ethnic cleansing of Palestine, the intensity of its current aggression in that area appears  to suggest that the Tel Aviv regime has other specific goals. It has been suggested that it is in a hurry to occupy the north to ensure that it will be able to control the oil and gas reserves off the Gaza coast as soon as feasible. There are analysts who have also argued that Tel Aviv wants to convert North Gaza into a buffer zone of sorts to enhance Israel’s security.

Whatever its ulterior motive, it is unconscionable that a country whose occupation of Gaza the International Court of Justice (ICJ) regards as “illegal” should be allowed to get away with its blatant ethnic cleansing of a people and their land. True, people have protested. Citizens groups have condemned what Tel Aviv is doing in Gaza and Palestine as a whole. Segments of the alternative media have been overtly critical of what has been happening in Gaza and the West Bank in the last one year since October 7, 2023. Both these media channels and some citizens groups have also taken Israel to task for its current aggression in Lebanon which has also resulted in the death of hundreds of civilians. And yet Israel continues with its barbaric behaviour. It has chosen arrogantly to ignore the voices of the rest of the human family. It is utterly contemptuous of even balanced views of individuals and groups who are part of its own support base.

Part of the reason why Israel persists with its injustice is because there are some powerful states behind it. The US elite continues to shower Israel with money and weapons. It is also ever ready to protect Israeli wrongdoings by using its veto in the United Nations Security Council. The British elite is likewise a faithful supplier of arms to Israel. The rogue state also benefits from German weapons and support.

If American and British elites are colluding with Israeli elites in the ongoing massacre of Palestinians and Lebanese it is largely because Zionist Israel, as many of us have pointed out on numerous occasions, is a product of British and American colonial interests in the early part of the 20th century. The German elite’s eagerness to provide blind support to Israel has a lot to do with the nation’s collective guilt over the Nazi holocaust of the 1930’s-1940’s. It is an elite that fails to see how its endorsement of Israel has encouraged the latter to perpetrate death and destruction upon an innocent people who had lost their hearth and home to usurpers pursuing a bigoted, racist ideology.

This is why citizens groups and the alternative media in Germany, Britain and the US have a special responsibility to spread awareness of the plight of the Palestinians and why they and other inhabitants of West Asia are totally opposed to Israel and the politics of Zionism. If such awareness grows and reaches a crescendo, it is not inconceivable that the governments in these Western societies will also change their stance and adopt a more critical attitude towards Israel on the question of the legitimate rights of the Palestinians and other victims of hegemonic Israeli and Western policies in West Asia.

Such a change will remain a dream for a long while to come because the vested interests that keep Israeli and Western elites in power are formidable. Perhaps those who are determined to see a modicum of justice in Gaza, Palestine and West Asia have to go beyond pleas addressed to Western elites and the international institutions they control such as the UN Security Council.  Perhaps those who are struggling for justice should begin to harness some of the resources that they and others linked to them possess such as oil and gas and utilize certain assets within their ambit such as strategic sea routes to compel Israeli and Western elites to see reason and do what is morally right.  

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Birds Not Bombs: Let’s Fight for a World of Peace, Not War   

Dr Chandra Muzaffar is the president of the International Movement for a Just World (JUST). He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG).  

Featured image source

As the United States national election draws ever nearer the fringe stories that just might influence the outcome are increasing both in magnitude and in number.

On Thursday I participated in a fascinating talk sponsored by Washington’s Committee for the Republic, which is “a citizen-based, non-partisan, nonprofit organization founded in 2003 [that] sponsors speakers monthly on challenges to the American Republic, including the military-industrial complex, too-big-to-fail banks, campaign finance, and US competitiveness.” The featured speaker for the evening was Josh Paul who “resigned from the State Department on October 18, 2023, over disagreement with the Biden administration’s unconditional surge of military equipment to Israel. The surge greenlighted Israel to equal or better the instruction of Thucydides: ‘The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.’

Image source

Josh Paul - DAWN

Josh is an insider’s insider. He toiled in the State Department for more than 11 years working as a Director in the Bureau of Political-Military Affairs, which is responsible for US security assistance and arms transfers. He also served in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, US Army Staff… Josh holds master’s degrees from the Universities of Georgetown and St Andrews, Scotland. He is currently a Non-Resident Fellow at the organization Democracy Now for the Arab World (DAWN) and a recipient of the 2023 Callaway Award for Civic Courage.”

Josh has cited the wisdom of George Washington’s Farewell Address warning against excessive fondness for any one nation because

“[A] passionate attachment of one nation for another produces a variety of evils. Sympathy for the favorite nation, facilitating the illusion of an imaginary common interest in cases where no real common interest exists, and infusing into one the enmities of the other, betrays the former into a participation in the quarrels and wars of the latter without adequate inducement or justification. It leads also to concessions to the favorite nation of privileges denied to others which is apt doubly to injure the nation making the concessions; by unnecessarily parting with what ought to have been retained, and by exciting jealousy, ill-will, and a disposition to retaliate, in the parties from whom equal privileges are withheld. And it gives to ambitious, corrupted, or deluded citizens.”

One might immediately perceive that George Washington very well described the possible consequences derived from the junior partnership which the United States finds itself locked into in its “wag the dog” relationship with the State of Israel. The “passionate attachment” has been amply demonstrated over the past year of warfare in Gaza in which the US has shamefully showered weapons and money on an Israel that is openly carrying out highly visible war crimes against the Palestinians in an attempt to achieve something like complete removal or extermination of the Gazans.

To my delight, Paul explained how policy making with Israel as the most favored nation works in practice. The United States federal government ignores its own laws to include two amendments of the 1961 Foreign Aid Act, known as the Symington and Glenn amendments, which ban aid to clandestine nuclear powers. Israel has a secret nuclear weapons arsenal that is cleverly ignored through a policy of “nuclear ambiguity” by the US federal government to allow the tribute money payment and other unilateral support to continue. An Energy Department directive actually demands imprisonment for any federal official or contractor who even mentions that Israel might have a nuclear weapons arsenal. To sustain the “nuclear ambiguity” policy on Israel’s weapons program, the government also uses deliberately improper classification to conceal what it is up to.

In addition, there is the Leahy law, which is also completely ignored in its establishment of a process which on paper requires a careful examination of how and when transferred US provided weapons are used, to include examination of possible “gross violations of human rights.” When that is the case, the sale or transfer of weapons is supposed to be denied. Israel, which is committing war crimes right out in the open that amount to a genocide and which has senior government officials calling for extermination of Arabs, is uniquely exempt in practice from such examination while Secretary of State Tony Blinken and his cast of spokesperson-buffoons lie persistently to both the government itself and to the public. They lie every time when they claim that it has not been demonstrated that Israel is guilty of such crimes against humanity, nor even when Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu openly mandates a near complete blockade of food and medicines, resulting in starvation and unneeded deaths.

Paul cited an example of how the system works in practice, with Jewish state demanding weapons often followed up with the Israeli Embassy in Washington calling the White House a few hours later asking “What is the hold up?” The White House then sends word down to the Pentagon and State Department to “Get moving on it!” All other countries seeking to purchase American weapons have to go through the vetting process and stand in line to wait their turn.

Image is from the Public Domain

It seems that Israel always gets what it wants. There has been a great deal of speculation about the surprise decision by President Joe Biden to deploy in Israel a $1.15 billion Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) missile defense system which will be manned by roughly 100 American soldiers on the ground. An advanced team of the soldiers and the battery itself were reported as having arrived in Israel shortly after the announcement of the deployment, and it turns out that a second battery was already in place in Israel.

The commitment ultimately derives from the Biden regime’s frequently repeated unconditional “ironclad” pledge to defend Israel, but it interestingly creates a potential tripwire situation leading to an escalation and a much larger war if American soldiers should die in an Iranian or Hezbollah attack. And there is little to look for on the upside as the soldiers and equipment will be inside a nation which is neither an actual ally nor a friend, as its leader Prime Minister Netanyahu has demonstrated repeatedly over the past year in rebuffing the many proposals regarding mitigating the horror on display in Gaza put forward by Biden. There is also a political price to pay in terms of the US relationship with nations in the Middle East and beyond as the Jewish state is indubitably carrying out a genocide while apparently simultaneously seeking to go to war with all its neighbors to expand its territory to become “Eretz” or “Greater” Israel and establish itself as the preeminent military power in the Middle East. But, at the same time, Netanyahu knows that he needs an active role by the United States as his partner against major powers like Iran to accomplish that goal, which is perhaps why an insistent Israeli leadership somehow was able to pressure the White House into making a commitment of THAAD in spite of the potentially disastrous possible consequences.

So, the United States has absolutely nothing to gain by sending its batteries and soldiers to serve as potential targets in Israel and much to lose. And there has been serious consideration of what the THAAD would be able to accomplish if it did wind up in the middle of a shooting war. Former CIA and State Department officer Larry Johnson describes the THAAD projectile as “a large bullet that is supposed to strike an in-bound missile and break it up. It is a kinetic weapon, i.e., it does not explode.” It is not clear why Israel, which claims to have the best air-defense system in the world, would want or need the THAAD. Beyond that, there is a logistical problem related to the system which Johnson declares to be that “As a tactical and strategic weapon, THAAD is a bust.” There are only nine THAAD launchers in the entire world. Each launcher has mounted on it eight missiles, which means if Iran fires 100 missiles 84% of them will be safe from THAAD even assuming that 100% of the THAAD projectiles from the two batteries score a direct hit. Reloading the system is also complicated and there is a supply problem. Lockheed Martin apparently built only 1,000 missiles for this system which would mean that there will not be a lot of spare parts sitting around in a warehouse in Israel waiting to be sent to the front. Another point not to be ignored is that each missile costs $12.6 million, not exactly cheap ammunition.

There are a number of other factors that might be in play leading to the deployment. Johnson observes that the White House has been negotiating with Netanyahu over possible plans to attack Iran. He believes that it might be “A tangible gesture of support for Israel by the Biden Administration, [which] may be playing a desperation card in order to persuade Israel not to attack Iran.” Some observers note, however, that such a reckless plan relying on good decisions being made by a nuclear armed Israel might go wrong in a number of ways and become a formula for initiating World War 3, which would certainly kill millions of people. At the same time, it is useful to consider what might be achieved by the introduction of the battery and soldiers into an extremely volatile situation as they alone could not deter or even significantly blunt a major Iranian attack. So what is the motive? And what other elements are playing into the decision? And how does the leak of a Top Secret codeword protected US government document exposing the Israeli secret nuclear arsenal and describing possible Israel preparations for a pending Israeli attack on Iran mean?

Even though time is running out, The Washington Post is reporting that Israel has already decided to attack military sites in Iran before the US election. There is some discussion apparently still going on over whether targeting by Israel (possibly joined by the US) will include oil fields and refineries as well as underground nuclear research sites. Having Washington as a partner in the enterprise is just what Netanyahu wants as initiating a new conflict with Iran will invite Tehran’s retaliation, possibly killing the US military personnel inside Israel, and bingo the US will be at war fighting for Israel, which is something that Biden might actually be trying to avoid at least until the US election is over. That is why he, completely out of character, also warned Israel by way of a letter on October 13th that he would give Israel 30 days to undo the blockade of food and medicine going into Gaza, which is causing mass starvation, on humanitarian grounds or he would consider an embargo on some arms being illegally provided to the Jewish state. It did not take much profound analysis of the statement to realize that 30 days will be after the US election and, no matter who wins, it will not be necessary to do anything to punish Israel. The statement is essentially phony and is all about the election. In fact, as a majority of Democratic Party voters oppose Biden/Kamala’s support of what Israel is doing to the Gazans and Lebanese, it might be intended influence the outcome of a close election.

Which leaves us with the TS document that allegedly exposes elements in the Israeli plan of attack. Who leaked it and why? U.S. officials are scrambling to determine how two leaked, highly US classified documents conveying potential Israeli plans to attack Iran got on the Telegram app. According to the New York Times, the documents were prepared “in recent days” by the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, which analyzes information and images collected by America’s fleet of spy satellites.

There are several theories regarding these leaked reports. Trita Parsi, the Executive Vice President of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, opines that there are five plausible theories for what is behind the leak. The first theory posits an Iranian hacking of the servers of the US intelligence services and leaking the document as part of their psychological warfare against Israel, suggesting that they have learned Tel Aviv’s top secret war plans, possibly delaying what is intended. The second theory is that a dissident within the US government seeking to prevent or delay the war may have leaked it, but an initial internal investigation has reportedly already moved on to looking for possible outside government perpetrators, though that speculation might itself be a lie.

Third, the Biden administration may have carried out the leak itself in order to delay the Israeli attack until after the election. Biden cannot say “no” to Israel, but he might well illegally expose even top secret intelligence with the aim of confusing preparations and delaying Israel’s planned attack.

Fourth, the Israelis may have obtained or even fabricated the report and leaked it themselves with the objective of confusing Iran and inducing it to look for attackers in all the wrong places. And Five, possibly a close American ally — a Five Eyes state (FVEY) or a NATO ally with access to FVEY intelligence — might have leaked it, suggesting that a friendly country’s government might be so frustrated with Biden’s unwillingness to “stop Netanyahu from starting the largest war in the Middle East since World War II that they are taking matters into their own hands to sabotage Netanyahu’s escalation plan.”

When it comes to THAADs or no THAADs or leaks of top-secret intelligence, the Democrats would like to do whatever it takes to establish a narrative that will help them stay in power. That would include creeping dangerously close to getting involved in what might develop into a major war by blindly adhering to the blandishments of one notably rogue nation to help destroy another nation that in no way threatens the United States. Then the White House and State Department will lie about it all, as will Israel, to cover up what the true intentions and motives of the various players were. That will be the sleight of hands that will be playing out in the next few days. Where is the truth? The truth might itself turn out to be a lie!

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Birds Not Bombs: Let’s Fight for a World of Peace, Not War 

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.

Featured image: President Joe Biden participates in a restricted bilateral meeting with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the Hotel Kempinski in Tel Aviv, Israel, Wednesday, October 18, 2023. (Official White House Photo by Cameron Smith)

BRICS 2024: Building a New World. Manlio Dinucci

October 28th, 2024 by Manlio Dinucci

The 16th BRICS Summit, chaired by Russia and held in Kazan, capital of the Republic of Tatarstan, was attended by 35 countries and 6 international organisations. The acronym BRICS comes from the initials of the group’s five founding members: Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa.

In 2024, Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates joined BRICS, which became BRICS+’BRICS PLUS’. By the time of the 16th Forum, some 30 countries – including Algeria, Bangladesh, Bahrain, Venezuela, Pakistan, Malaysia, Azerbaijan and Turkey – had applied for membership.

The 10 BRICS + countries account for more than 46% of the world’s population, in fact about half considering their high population growth rate. By comparison, the G7 (US, Canada, UK, Germany, France, Italy, Japan) represent less than 10% of the world’s population. In 1992, the combined GDP of the G7 countries accounted for more than 45% of world GDP, while the combined GDP of the five countries that would later join the BRICS (in 2009-2011) accounted for 16%. By 2023, BRICS’ share exceeds 35%, while G7’s falls to 29%. The gap will continue to widen. By the end of 2024, the BRICS are expected to grow by 4% on average, higher than the G7’s 1.7%. The BRICS account for about a quarter of global merchandise exports and some dominate key markets such as energy resources, metals and food.

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16th BRICS Summit. Joint photo opportunities for BRICS heads of delegation

President of China Xi Jinping, center left, and President of Russia Vladimir Putin during a group photo ceremony for the BRICS leaders during the 16th BRICS Summit. (By Sergey Bobylev / Source: Photohost agency brics-russia2024.ru)

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The New Development Bank is becoming a major investor in the largest technology and infrastructure projects in the BRICS region. In this region, where the dollar and the euro used to dominate international transactions, the share of national currencies has risen to 65%. The share of the dollar and the euro has fallen below 30%.

At the same time, the BRICS are building a vast infrastructure network: the Northern Sea Route and North-South Transport Corridor, which Russia opened after NATO and the EU blocked transit routes to the West; the Russia-Mongolia-China Road and Rail Economic Corridor; the New Silk Road from China to Europe; and many others in Asia, Africa and Latin America.

“In Kazan,” President Putin said at the press conference at the end of the summit, “we reaffirmed that BRICS is not a closed format. It is open to all those who share its values. The members of the group are ready to work on common solutions without external impositions or attempts to impose narrow approaches on anyone. BRICS must respond to the growing demand for cooperation in the world. Accordingly, we have paid special attention to the issue of possible expanding BRICS by creating a new category called “Partner States”.

The Western view is diametrically opposed. Emblematic is the alarm expressed by the Foreign Policy Research Institute, an influential US think-tank:

“If the US does not act, the BRICS are likely to grow in strength, align their foreign policies against US interests, and have the potential to disrupt the global order that has so far averted major conflicts.”

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Birds Not Bombs: Let’s Fight for a World of Peace, Not War 

This article was originally published in Italian on Grandangolo, Byoblu TV.

Manlio Dinucci, award winning author, geopolitical analyst and geographer, Pisa, Italy. He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG). 

Featured image: The plenary session of the Outreach/BRICS Plus meeting. (By Alexei Danichev / Photohost agency brics-russia2024.ru)

A paranóia anti-russa nos países ocidentais está a atingir níveis alarmantes. O simples fato de criticar a ideologia política do regime ucraniano já é suficiente para legitimar a perseguição contra cidadãos comuns nos países ocidentais. É provável que isto se torne um problema verdadeiramente sério, com consequências geopolíticas chocantes.

Recentemente, o Ministério dos Negócios Estrangeiros da Estônia despediu uma funcionária da sua embaixada em Istambul por publicar um artigo acadêmico questionando a validade do nacionalismo ucraniano. Maria Sarantseva era funcionária do departamento de vistos da embaixada da Estônia na Turquia, bem como investigadora acadêmica. Ela publicou um artigo científico de 18 páginas criticando a ideia de nacionalismo na Ucrânia, usando como principal fonte o psicólogo americano nascido na Alemanha, Erich Fromm.

Fromm é um crítico do fenômeno do nacionalismo, considerando-o um mecanismo social típico das sociedades modernas que, em casos extremos, conduz a perigosos sentimentos de superioridade nacional. Sarantseva utilizou o mesmo argumento para defender a tese de que a Ucrânia moderna é uma sociedade extremamente “paranóica e agressiva”, precisamente por causa dos seus sentimentos nacionalistas exacerbados. Segundo ela, a Ucrânia é um país “traumatizado” pelo colapso social pós-soviético e o nacionalismo é uma espécie de “mecanismo psicológico” para superar esta condição social.

Na verdade, o artigo de Sarantseva não parece de forma alguma “pró-Rússia”, mas simplesmente o resultado de pesquisas baseadas em renomados autores da psicologia social. Sua intenção com o trabalho não era apoiar Moscou no atual conflito, mas simplesmente expor problemas psicológicos e sociais que afetam claramente a Ucrânia moderna – o que deveria ser visto como um gesto de boa vontade, uma vez que o conhecimento científico ajuda a estabelecer estratégias para superar tais aspectos negativos.

No entanto, as autoridades estonianas reagiram agressivamente ao seu trabalho – apesar de o artigo ter sido publicado numa revista acadêmica turca sem ligações à Estônia. Sarantseva foi demitida, acusada de usar a “narrativa do Kremlin” e basear sua pesquisa em “fontes russas” – embora sua principal referência fosse justamente um autor americano.

Na verdade, o que aconteceu com Sarantseva não é surpreendente, tendo em conta os recentes casos de extremismo pró-ucraniano e de russofobia na Estônia e nos países bálticos. Na verdade, as nações bálticas parecem ter aderido à mesma onda nacionalista pró-Ocidente que a Ucrânia fez em 2014 – o que resultou no início da perseguição aos russos étnicos no Donbass. Em todos os países bálticos, foram implementadas medidas de segregação étnica e de apartheid para perseguir a população russa, o que significa que num futuro próximo níveis mais extremos de perseguição poderão tornar-se uma realidade.

As consequências deste processo poderão ser catastróficas, tendo em conta que o Estado russo é obviamente obrigado a proteger os seus cidadãos no estrangeiro, especialmente nas áreas pós-soviéticas. Moscou não tolerará que os russos étnicos sejam perseguidos nos países bálticos e tomará medidas adequadas para responder a tais ameaças. Isto significa que a atitude irresponsável de tais países poderá alimentar um cenário de conflito na Europa no futuro.

Quanto à tese científica de Sarantseva, deve-se sublinhar que o seu trabalho tem uma forte base na realidade ucraniana. O fenômeno nacionalista no país indica, de fato, que existem graves problemas psicológicos entre o povo ucraniano, especialmente entre os jovens, que foram os mais afetados pela crise pós-soviética. Estes casos de doença psicológica em massa tiveram consequências catastróficas para toda uma geração de ucranianos, especialmente depois de a ala neonazista ter chegado ao poder através do golpe de Maidan, que permitiu que ideólogos extremistas começassem a ensinar oficialmente as suas doutrinas russofóbicas em escolas e universidades. O resultado é que a Ucrânia é agora um “país doente”, governado por uma elite extremista que está disposta a destruir a nação apenas para travar uma guerra contra a Rússia.

Não só isso, mas, tendo em conta a reação histérica das autoridades estonianas ao trabalho de Sarantseva, é possível dizer que a própria Estônia, tal como os outros países bálticos, também sofre de problemas psicológicos em massa. O fenómeno nacionalista – intimamente ligado ao neonazismo no espaço pós-soviético pode ser visto como uma espécie de reação social à situação gerada pelo colapso da URSS. Os problemas causados ​​pela crise da década de 1990 não foram devidamente abordados pelos Estados liberais, aprofundando uma condição psicológica coletiva que culminou na atual Russofobia.

No final, Sarantseva foi vítima do mesmo problema que descreveu – que é uma realidade não só na Ucrânia, mas de todos os antigos países comunistas que se alinharam com o Ocidente.

Lucas Leiroz de Almeida

 

Artigo em inglês : Estonian embassy’s employee fired for exposing Ukrainian social problems, InfoBrics, 27 de Outubro de 2024.

Imagem :  InfoBrics

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Lucas Leiroz, membro da Associação de Jornalistas do BRICS, pesquisador do Centro de Estudos Geoestratégicos, especialista militar.

Você pode seguir Lucas Leiroz em: https://t.me/lucasleiroz e https://x.com/leiroz_lucas

Our thoughts today are with the people of Iraq, whose country was invaded twenty-one years ago on March 20, 2003. 

The National Security narrative as outlined by Central Command Headquarters in 1995 was “First Iraq, Then Iran”

This article first published in June 2005 focusses on the fake intelligence used to justify the invasion. 

Colin Powell’s “intelligence report” presented to the UN Security Council on February 5, 2003 was fabricated. 

IT WAS FAKE INTELLIGENCE. 

The intimate details pertaining to Colin Powell’s fake report were revealed by Cambridge lecturer Dr. Glen Rangwala.

It was copied and pasted from the internet by members of Tony Blair’s staff.

The Iraq war was based on a Big Lie, which was known and documented MORE THAN A MONTH before the invasion of Iraq on March 20, 2003. Both the US and UK media remained mum. The US Congress and the House of Commons failed to act. 

How convenient: Rangwala’s findings were acknowledged and published by the House of Commons three months AFTER the onset of the war. 

The evidence as well as the statement of Glen Rangwala confirms the criminal and fraudulent nature of the 2003 War on Iraq

See below the full text of Dr. Rangwala’s submission to the House of Commons in June 2003. 

 

Michel Chossudovsky, Global Research, March 18, 2023, October 27, 2024

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Colin Powell and the “The Sloppy Dossier”:

Plagiarism and “Fake Intelligence”

Used to Justify the 2003 War on Iraq:

Copied and Pasted from the Internet into an “Official” British Intel Report

by Michel Chossudovsky

June 2005

 

Colin Powell’s “intelligence report” presented to the UN Security Council in early February 2003 was FABRICATED. It was copied and pasted from the internet by members of Tony Blair’s staff.

While the Chilcot Inquiry report was released in 2016, it is worth noting that most of the dodgy dossier evidence pertaining to Tony Blair and George W, Bush was available before the onset of the Iraq war in March 2003.

“Fake intelligence”  was presented to the UN Security Council by Secretary of State Colin Powell on February 5, 2003.  

Damning evidence refuting Colin Powell’s official intelligence report was revealed by Dr. Glen Rangwala, Newham College, Cambridge  (image right) on  Britain’s Channel 4 TV on February 6, 2003, on the day following Secretary of State Colin Powell’s historic Iraq WMD presentation to the UN Security Council:

“I would call my colleagues’ attention to the fine paper that the United Kingdom distributed . . . which describes in exquisite detail Iraqi deception activities.” (Colin Powell, UN Security Council, February 5, 2003)

Powell was referring to “Iraq Its Infrastructure Of Concealment, Deception And Intimidation”, published on January 30, 2003.

According to Rangwala, the  British intelligence document was fake. It had not been prepared by British intelligence. It was copied and pasted from the internet by members of Tony Blair’s staff:   

The Downing Street authors state they drew “upon a number of sources, including intelligence material” (p.1, first sentence). In fact, they copied material from at least three different authors and gave no credit to them. Indeed, they plagiarized, directly cutting and pasting or near quoting.

A close textual analysis suggests that the UK authors had little access to first-hand intelligence sources and instead based their work on academic papers, which they selectively distorted. Some of the papers used were considerably out of date. This leads the reader to wonder about the reliability and veracity of the Downing Street document.

It was a fake document prepared on the instructions of prime minister Blair with a view to building a “credible” justification to wage war on Iraq.

Rangwala’s analysis was more than a smoking gun. It revealed the Big Lie. It invalidated Colin’s Powell’s presentation to the UN Security Council. It had to be suppressed.

In many regards, the Rangwala revelation was far more important than the leak of the Secret July 2002 Downing Street Memo:

“C  reported on his recent talks in Washington. There was a perceptible shift in attitude. Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy. The NSC had no patience with the UN route, and no enthusiasm for publishing material on the Iraqi regime’s record. There was little discussion in Washington of the aftermath after military action.”

The “WMD facts” had to be “documented”. Did British intelligence refuse to comply with Tony Blair’s demands to produce a fast track report which would “fix the facts”?  Rangwala’s analysis confirms that British intelligence was not involved in what we might describe as the “Sloppy Dossier”.

The “facts” were put together in a hurry (not by MI6) but by Tony Blair’s public relations’ staff, who casually committed acts of plagiarism and political fraud in support of a criminal military agenda.

The report was finalized one week before Colin Powell’s presentation to the UN Security Council; the “facts” and supporting quotations were copied and pasted by members of Tony Blair’s cabinet from the internet and inserted into an official and authoritative document.  

Plagiarism had become a means to justifying the war on Iraq.

The Rangwala revelation was the “unspoken truth”. With the exception of Channel 4 and The Guardian, it was not the object of mainstream media coverage both before as well as after the March invasion of Iraq.

It had to be suppressed. The invasion of Iraq had already been scheduled for March 2003.

 

The Role of Colin Powell in Planning the War on Iraq

In retrospect, the Rangwala findings also bring to the forefront the insidious and complicit role of Colin Powell, who organized the Crawford Texas meetings in early April 2002 between Bush and Blair, as confirmed by the recently leaked emails (see below).

What these emails suggest is that Colin Powell had been entrusted in setting the stage for the war on Iraq, initially at the Bush-Blair Crawford meetings on April 5-7, 2002, leading up to his presentation of the British intelligence dossier on Iraq’s alleged WMD at the UN Security Council on February 5,  2003.

Lest we forget Colin Powell played a behind the scenes role in the Iran Contra Affair.

The Crawford meetings were intended to plan the war on Iraq.

Colin Powell was a central political instrument. The issue is who was Behind Colin Powell?

Who was present at the Crawford meetings? Reports confirm that Colin Powell, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Condoleeza Rice  were among those present.

 

 

In the wake of the Iraq invasion, the plagiarized “British intelligence Iraq Dossier” which had been presented to the UN Security Council by (former) Secretary of State Colin Powell was so to speak “forgotten”.

The plagiarism issue nonetheless confirms beyond doubt the war crimes’ allegations against George W. Bush and Tony Blair.

Glen Rangwala’s report was known to Britain’s parliament.

It was brought to the attention of Global Research.

An earlier version under the Title:

“Intelligence Based on Plagiarism: The British “Intelligence” Iraq Dossier”

was published in my book entitled: America’s War on Terrorism (2005).  

In June 2003, Rangwala submitted his findings to the House of Commons Select Committee on Foreign Affairs. (see below for full text).

There was no follow-up. Glen Rangwala‘s report confirmed the criminal nature of the US led war on Iraq, which resulted in more than 2 million civilian deaths.

 

Plagiarism and Iraq’s WMDs:

British Intelligence Iraq Dossier

Relied on Recycled Academic Articles

by Glen Rangwala

 

Below is the text presented by Dr. Rangwala to the House of Commons Select Committee on Foreign Affairs 

It was presented in June 2003, in the wake of the invasion and occupation of Iraq

THE PRESENTATION OF THE 30 JUNE 2003 DOSSIER

 

1.  The 19-page dossier, entitled “Iraq—Its Infrastructure of Concealment, Deception and Intimidation”, was released on 30 January 2003. The document begins with the statement that:

    “This report draws upon a number of sources, including intelligence material (. . .”

2.  The assertion that the intelligence agencies were involved in the production of the dossier was made more explicitly by Prime Minister Blair when he announced the release of the dossier to the House of Commons on 3 February 2003:

    “We issued further intelligence over the weekend about the infrastructure of concealment. It is obviously difficult when we publish intelligence reports, but I hope that people have some sense of the integrity of our security services. They are not publishing this, or giving us this information, and making it up. It is the intelligence that they are receiving, and we are passing it on to people.”

www.parliament.the-stationery-office.co.uk

A REVIEW OF THE CONTENTS OF THE 30 JANUARY 2003 DOSSIER

Sources

3.  The bulk of the 19-page document (pp 6-16) is directly copied without acknowledgement from three different sources that are on the internet. The most extensively used source is an article in the on-line Israeli journal, Middle East Review of International Affairs (September 2002), entitled “Iraq’s Security and Intelligence Network: A Guide and Analysis”.

http://meria.idc.ac.il/journal/2002/issue3/jv6n3a1.html

4.  The author of the piece is Mr Ibrahim al-Marashi, a postgraduate student then based at the Monterey Institute of International Studies, California, who is completing a doctorate at Oxford University. He has confirmed to me that his permission was not sought; in fact, he didn’t even know about the British document until I contacted him on 4 February to enquire whether his permission was given.

5.  In addition to Mr Marashi’s work, there is also the use of two articles from the specialist security magazine,Jane’s Intelligence Review. On-line summaries of articles by Mr Sean Boyne in 1997 and Mr Ken Gause in 2002 are on the GlobalSecurity.org website, at:

http://globalsecurity.org/intell/world/iraq/

These texts were also amalgamated in part into the UK dossier.

6.  The fact that these sources were copied is most clear from the typographical errors and anomalous uses of grammar in the original pieces that are incorporated into the Downing Street document. For example, Mr Marashi had written:

    “Saddam appointed, Sabir `Abd al-‘Aziz al-Duri as head (. . .)”

There is a misplaced comma after the second word. On p 13, the British dossier incorporates the same misplaced comma:

    “Saddam appointed, Sabir `Abd al-‘Aziz al-Duri as head (. . .)”

7.  Because the texts of these three authors are copied directly also results in a proliferation of different transliterations (for example, different spellings of the Ba’th party, depending on which author is being copied).

Modifications to the original articles

8.  The only exceptions to these acts of copying were the tweaking of specific phrases. For example, most of p 9 on the functions of the Mukhabarat (General Intelligence) is copied directly from Mr Marashi’s article. However, Marashi writes of the Mukhabarat’s role in:

    “monitoring foreign embassies in Iraq”.

This becomes in the British dossier:

    “spying on foreign embassies in Iraq”.

Similarly, on the same page, Marashi writes that the Mukhabarat had a role in:

    “aiding opposition groups in hostile regimes”

The British dossier renders this as:

    “supporting terrorist organisations in hostile regimes”.

9.  A further example is from the section on “Fedayeen Saddam” (Saddam’s Self-Sacrificers). Most of this text is copied from the 1997 article by Sean Boyne. However, Boyne writes that the personnel of this organisation are:

    “recruited from regions loyal to Saddam”, and refers to their original grouping as “some 10,000-15,000 `bullies and country bumpkins.'”

10.  This becomes in the British government’s text, at pp 15-16, a reference to how its personnel are:

    “press ganged from regions known to be loyal to Saddam” . . . “some 10,000-15,000 bullies.”

11.  The reference in Mr Boyne’s article to how the organisation was made up of “bullies and country bumpkins” was shorn of its last three words in the UK dossier, perhaps to render a more threatening picture of the organisation than that contained in the original article.

12.  Numbers are also increased or are rounded up. So, for example, the section on “Fedayeen Saddam” (pp 15-16) is directly copied from Boyne’s article, almost word for word. The only substantive difference is that Mr Boyne estimates the personnel of the organisation to be 18,000-40,000 (Ken Gause, in another article that was substantially copied, estimates personnel in the region of 10,000-40,000). The British dossier instead writes “30,000 to 40,000”. A similar bumping up of figures occurs with the description of the Directorate of Military Intelligence.

Errors

13.  There is at least one serious substantive mistake in the British text, on p 14, about the Iraqi organisation the Military Security Service (al-Amn al-Askari). After an initial two paragraphs copied from Marashi’s 2002 article, the remainder of the text is taken from the description by Sean Boyne in his 1997 article of a wholly different organisation called the General Security Service (al-Amn al-Amm). That is, it mixes up the descriptions of two different organisations.

14.  The result is a confusion that renders the description incoherent. The description of the Military Security Service (al-Amn al-Askari) begins by relating how this organisation was created in 1992 (in a section copied from Marashi). It then describes how the Military Security Service moved headquarters in 1990 (in a piece copied from Boyne on the activities of the General Security Service), two years before the organisation was even created.

15.  Later in the same section, the UK dossier claims that the head of the Military Security Service is Taha al-Ahbabi. This is from Boyne’s description of the General Security Service. In fact, the Military Security Service was headed by Thabet Khalil when the dossier was released.

FURTHER COMMENTS

16.  The information in the UK dossier is presented as being an accurate statement of the current state of Iraq’s security organisations. However, it may not be anything of the sort. Mr Marashi—the real and unwitting author of much of the document—refers in his article to his primary source as being the documents captured by Coalition forces in 1991, and which are now retained by the Massachusetts-based organisation, the Iraq Research and Documentation Project. His own focus is the activities of Iraq’s intelligence agencies in Kuwait in the period from August 1990 to January 1991, as this is the subject of his thesis. As a result, much of the information presented as relevant to how Iraqi agencies are currently engaged with UNMOVIC is 12 years old.

17.  When the document was first released as a Microsoft Word document, I checked the properties of the text in the File menu. It revealed the authors of the text as P. Hamill, J. Pratt, A. Blackshaw, and M. Khan. Those names were removed within hours from the downloadable file. However, in collaboration with journalists, I have since checked who these individuals are. The identity of the authors is as follows:

    Paul Hamill, a Foreign Office official;
    John Pratt, a junior official from the Prime Minister’s Strategic Communications Unit;
    Alison Blackshaw, Alastair Campbell’s personal assistant;
    Mustaza Khan, news editor of the 10 Downing Street website.

THE ORDERING OF THE DOSSIER

18.  The dossier is ordered as follows:

p 1 is the summary.

pp 2-5 consists of, firstly, a repetition of the comments of Hans Blix, Executive Chairman of UNMOVIC, to the Security Council in January on the difficulties they were encountering. Further claims about the activities of al-Mukhabarat follow. These claims are not backed up, and have in some cases been specifically denied by Hans Blix. For example, the UK dossier claims on p 3 that:

    “Journeys are monitored by security officers stationed on the route if they have prior intelligence. Any changes of destination are notified ahead by telephone or radio so that arrival is anticipated. The welcoming party is a give away.”

This can be contrasted with the assessment of Hans Blix on 14 February 2003 that:

    “Since we arrived in Iraq, we have conducted more than 400 inspections covering more than 300 sites. All inspections were performed without notice, and access was almost always provided promptly. In no case have we seen convincing evidence that the Iraqi side knew in advance that the inspectors were coming.”

http://www.un.org/Depts/unmovic/blix14Febasdel.htm

Similarly, the UK dossier claims on p 3 that:

    “Escorts are trained, for example, to start long arguments with other Iraqi officials `on behalf of UNMOVIC’ while any incriminating evidence is hastily being hidden behind the scenes.”

By contrast, Dr Blix relates in the same presentation of 14 February that:

    “we note that access to sites has so far been without problems, including those that had never been declared or inspected, as well as to Presidential sites and private residences.”

p 6 is a simplified version of Mr Marashi’s diagram at: http://cns.miis.edu/research/iraq/pdfs/iraqint.pdf

p 7 is copied (top) from Mr Gause (on the Presidential Secretariat), and (middle and bottom) from Mr Boyne (on the National Security Council).

p 8 is entirely copied from Mr Boyne (on the National Security Council).

p 9 is copied from Mr Marashi (on al-Mukhabarat), except for the final section, which is insubstantial.

p 10 is entirely copied from Mr Marashi (on the General Security Service), except for the final section, which is insubstantial.

p 11 is entirely copied from Mr Marashi (on Special Security), except for the top section (on General Security), which is insubstantial.

p 12 is entirely copied from Mr Marashi (on Special Security).

p 13 is copied from Mr Gause (on Special Protection) and Mr Marashi (Military Intelligence).

p 14 is copied from Mr Marashi (first two paragraphs) and then wrongly copied from Mr Boyne (on Military Security). The last section, on the Special Republican Guard, is copied from Mr Marashi.

p 15 is copied from Messrs Gause and Boyne (on al-Hadi project / project 858).

pp 15-16 is copied from Boyne (on Fedayeen Saddam).

p 16: The final section, on the Tribal Chiefs’ Bureau, seems to be copied from Anthony H. Cordesman, “Key Targets in Iraq”, February 1998, http://www.csis.org/stratassessment/reports/iraq_argets.pdf, pg. 8

pp 17-19 make general claims about human rights in Iraq.

Dr Glen Rangwala

Newnham College

Cambridge

16 June 2003

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Visit and follow us on Instagram at @crg_globalresearch.

First posted on September 29, 2021

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For more than ten years, meetings have been held by billionaires described as philanthropists to Reduce the Size of the World’s Population culminating with the 2020-2024 Covid crisis.

Recent developments suggest that “Depopulation” is an integral part of the so-called Covid mandates including the lockdown policies and the mRNA “vaccine”. 

Flash back to 2009. According to the Wall Street Journal: “Billionaires Try to Shrink World’s Population”.

In May 2009, the Billionaire philanthropists met behind closed doors at the home of the president of The Rockefeller University in Manhattan.

This Secret Gathering was sponsored by Bill Gates. They called themselves “The Good Club”. 

Among the participants were the late David Rockefeller, Warren Buffett, George Soros, Michael Bloomberg  Ted Turner, Oprah Winfrey and many more. 

In May 2009, the WSJ as well as the Sunday Times reported: (John Harlow, Los Angeles) that

“Some of America’s leading billionaires have met secretly to consider how their wealth could be used to slow the growth of the world’s population and speed up improvements in health and education.”

The emphasis was not on population growth (i.e Planned Parenthood) but on “Depopulation”, i.e,. the reduction in the absolute size of the World’s population.

To read complete WSJ article click here.

According to the Sunday Times report :

The philanthropists who attended a summit convened on the initiative of Bill Gates, the Microsoft co-founder, discussed joining forces to overcome political and religious obstacles to change.

Stacy Palmer, editor of the Chronicle of Philanthropy, said the summit was unprecedented. “We only learnt about it afterwards, by accident. Normally these people are happy to talk good causes, but this is different – maybe because they don’t want to be seen as a global cabal,” he said.

Another guest said there was “nothing as crude as a vote” but a consensus emerged that they would back a strategy in which population growth would be tackled as a potentially disastrous environmental, social and industrial threat.

“This is something so nightmarish that everyone in this group agreed it needs big-brain answers,” said the guest.  …

Why all the secrecy? “They wanted to speak rich to rich without worrying anything they said would end up in the newspapers, painting them as an alternative world government,” he said.(Sunday Times)

Shrinking The World’s Population

The media reports on the May 5, 2009 secret gathering focussed on the commitment of “The Good Club” to “slowing down” the growth of the World’s population.

“Shrink the World Population” (the WSJ Title) goes far beyond Planned Parenthood which consists in “Reducing the Growth of World Population”. It consists in “Depopulation”, namely reducing the absolute size of the World’s  Population, which ultimately requires reducing the rate of birth (which would include reduced fertility) coupled with a significant increase in the death rate.

Secret Meeting: At the Height of the H1N1 Pandemic

On April 25, 2009, the World Health Organization (WHO) headed by Margaret Chan declared a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC). And a couple of weeks later, the “Good Club” met in NYC at the height of the H1N1 swine flu pandemic which turned out to be a scam.

It is also worth noting that at very outset of the H1N1 crisis in April 2009, Professor Neil Ferguson of Imperial College, London was advising Bill Gates and the WHO:  “40 per cent of people in the UK could be infected [with H1N1] within the next six months if the country was hit by a pandemic.”

Sounds familiar? That was the same Neil Ferguson (generously supported by the Gates Foundation) who designed the coronavirus Lockdown Model (launched on March 11, 2020). As we recall, that March 2020 mathematical model was based on “predictions” of 600,000 deaths in the UK.  

And now (Summer- Autumn 2021) a third authoritative “mathematical model” by the same “scientist” (Ferguson) was formulated to justify a “Fourth Wave Lockdown”. 

Saving Lives to Achieve “Depopulation”

Was an absolute “reduction” in World population contemplated at that May 2009 secret meeting? 

A few months later,  Bill Gates in his TED presentation (February 2010) pertaining to vaccination, confirmed the following;

“And if we do a really great job on new vaccines, health care, reproductive health services, we could lower that [the world population] by 10 or 15 percent”.

According to Gates’ statement, this would represent  an absolute reduction of the World’s population (2010) of the order of 680 million to 1.02 billion.

(See quotation on Video starting at 04.21. See also screenshot of Transcript of quotation)

TED Talk at 04:21:

 

“The Good Club” Then and Now

The same group of billionaires who met at the May 2009 secret venue at the Rockefeller University in Manhattan, have been actively involved from the outset of the Covid crisis in designing the lockdown policies applied Worldwide including the mRNA vaccine and the WEF’s “Great Reset”.

The mRNA vaccine is not a project of a UN intergovernmental body (WHO) on behalf the member states of the UN: It’s a private initiative. The billionaire elites who fund and enforce the Covid Vaccine Project Worldwide are Eugenists committed to Depopulation.

 

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There are no longer patient rights or confidentiality in Ontario’s medical system. The College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario demands that doctors process patients according to agendas that they endorse. This includes coerced genetic experiments and other initiatives from Bill Gates and the WHO, with virtually no exceptions.

It is disheartening to witness the hardships suffered by myself and other noble doctors at the hands of the current administration of medical colleges across the country. They are abusing their power and neglecting their duties; restoration will require their arrests and prosecutions. Good doctors are harshly persecuted for maintaining our ethical and scientific integrity throughout the COVID operation.

Ultimately, though, it is even worse for the majority of physicians who succumbed to the COVID operation. It was unlawfully forced upon them by Canada’s colleges of physicians and surgeons. The majority of doctors in our country have been coerced into injecting themselves, their families, their staff, and their patients with a toxic genetic fraud. This constitutes illegal medical experimentation and medical assault, in contravention of international, federal, and provincial laws, as well as the rules of the colleges and medical ethics. To maintain their positions and income in the short term, most doctors have been muzzled and hand-tied. They are victims of the colleges.

Individualized medical care, honest advice, and patient confidentiality are now dead in Ontario and across Canada. Dr. Kustka’s story makes that crystal clear. Here is the story of Dr. Kustka, a veteran family physician from Toronto. We are joined by Leslie Peel, who has headed efforts to protect patients’ rights and the privacy of their medical records.

Within this story, you will be shocked by what happened when a child’s Girl Guide leader disagreed with her doctor.

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Click here to watch the video

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Birds Not Bombs: Let’s Fight for a World of Peace, Not War 

COVID Propaganda Roundup: Bill Gates on Trial!

October 26th, 2024 by Ben Bartee

Bill Gates and Albert Bourla (Finally) Face Trial for COVID Scam 

The only regrettable caveats here are that

a.) this is a civil proceeding rather than criminal and that

b.) even if it were the latter, the Netherlands, being a sacred liberal Democracy™, doesn’t enact the death penalty. 

Via Children’s Health Defense (emphasis added):

A Netherlands court last week ruled that Bill Gates can stand trial in the Netherlands, in a case involving seven people injured by COVID-19 vaccines.

According to Dutch newspaper De Telegraaf, the seven “corona skeptics” sued Gates last year, along with former Dutch prime minister and newly appointed NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte, and “several members” of the Dutch government’s COVID-19 “Outbreak Management Team.”

Other defendants include Albert Bourla, Ph.D., CEO of Pfizer, and the Dutch state.

“Because Bill Gates’ foundation was involved in combating the corona pandemic, he has also been summoned,” De Telegraaf reported.

According to Dutch independent news outlet Zebra Inspiratie, the plaintiffs allege that Gates, through his representatives, deliberately misled them about the safety of the COVID-19 shots, despite knowing “that these injections were not safe and effective.”

Dutch independent journalist Erica Krikke told The Defender that the seven plaintiffs — whose names are redacted in the lawsuit’s publicly available documents — “are ordinary Dutch people, and they have been jabbed and after the jabs they got sick.””

FDA Petitions Court to Toss Out Lawsuit Requiring Vaxx Document Disclosure

Via Reuters (emphasis added):

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has asked a federal judge in Texas to throw out a public records lawsuit related to COVID-19 vaccines, arguing that it has already spent more than $3.5 million to produce more than 1 million documents in the case.

The FDA in a filing on Thursday defended the adequacy of the records it provided in the lawsuit, which was filed by scientists who wanted to see licensing information that the agency relied on to approve the Pfizer-BioNTech coronavirus vaccine.

The lawsuit, filed in late 2021, attracted widespread attention after the FDA said early on that it could take decades to process and disclose records* to Public Health and Medical Professionals for Transparency, the group that brought the case.

The public records lawsuit said that “the medical and scientific community and the public have a substantial interest in reviewing the data and information underlying the FDA’s approval of the Pfizer Vaccine.”

It said the requested data would help resolve questions about the FDA’s review process.

U.S. District Judge Mark Pittman in an order in early 2022 set an accelerated time frame for the FDA, calling the group’s Freedom of Information Act request an issue “of paramount public importance.”

The FDA declined to comment.

Aaron Siri, a lawyer for Public Health and Medical Professionals for Transparency, in a statement on Friday said the fight for records was not over.

“Despite years of litigation, and the Court’s order to produce all clinical trial documents, FDA continues to improperly withhold over a million pages of trial documents,” Siri said.

The agency at one point was producing 55,000 pages of records every 30 days in response to court orders in the lawsuit. It said in Thursday’s filing seeking to close the case that it set up “unprecedented and extraordinary operations” to comply with Pittman’s directives.”

*Isn’t it remarkable that, when it comes to rolling out an experimental and unprecedentedly lucrative drug and then figuring out the logistics to get it injected into the peasants’ arms by the hundreds of millions, the FDA, in fascistic collusion with the pharmaceutical industry, is capable of achieving the near-impossible feat — yet, when it’s instructed to simply release documents in the public interest, that’s somehow too much of a burden for a multi-billion-dollar agency.

But maybe federal agencies stonewalling and defying court orders is just Democracy™ in action, and we ought to celebrate and laud secrecy surrounding drugs that kill and maim people for profit, achieving both biomedical depopulation and more chronically ill, lifelong patients for the industry to feed off of until they, too, are disposed of.

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Birds Not Bombs: Let’s Fight for a World of Peace, Not War 

Ben Bartee is an independent Bangkok-based American journalist with opposable thumbs. Follow his stuff via Substack. Also, keep tabs via Twitter. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

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The Worldwide Corona Crisis, Global Coup d’Etat Against Humanity

by Michel Chossudovsky

Michel Chossudovsky reviews in detail how this insidious project “destroys people’s lives”. He provides a comprehensive analysis of everything you need to know about the “pandemic” — from the medical dimensions to the economic and social repercussions, political underpinnings, and mental and psychological impacts.

“My objective as an author is to inform people worldwide and refute the official narrative which has been used as a justification to destabilize the economic and social fabric of entire countries, followed by the imposition of the “deadly” COVID-19 “vaccine”. This crisis affects humanity in its entirety: almost 8 billion people. We stand in solidarity with our fellow human beings and our children worldwide. Truth is a powerful instrument.”

Reviews

This is an in-depth resource of great interest if it is the wider perspective you are motivated to understand a little better, the author is very knowledgeable about geopolitics and this comes out in the way Covid is contextualized. —Dr. Mike Yeadon

In this war against humanity in which we find ourselves, in this singular, irregular and massive assault against liberty and the goodness of people, Chossudovsky’s book is a rock upon which to sustain our fight. –Dr. Emanuel Garcia

In fifteen concise science-based chapters, Michel traces the false covid pandemic, explaining how a PCR test, producing up to 97% proven false positives, combined with a relentless 24/7 fear campaign, was able to create a worldwide panic-laden “plandemic”; that this plandemic would never have been possible without the infamous DNA-modifying Polymerase Chain Reaction test – which to this day is being pushed on a majority of innocent people who have no clue. His conclusions are evidenced by renown scientists. —Peter Koenig 

Professor Chossudovsky exposes the truth that “there is no causal relationship between the virus and economic variables.” In other words, it was not COVID-19 but, rather, the deliberate implementation of the illogical, scientifically baseless lockdowns that caused the shutdown of the global economy. –David Skripac

A reading of  Chossudovsky’s book provides a comprehensive lesson in how there is a global coup d’état under way called “The Great Reset” that if not resisted and defeated by freedom loving people everywhere will result in a dystopian future not yet imagined. Pass on this free gift from Professor Chossudovsky before it’s too late.  You will not find so much valuable information and analysis in one place. –Edward Curtin

ISBN: 978-0-9879389-3-0,  Year: 2022,  PDF Ebook,  Pages: 164, 15 Chapters

Price: $11.50 FREE COPY! Click here (docsend) and download.

You may also access the online version of the e-Book by clicking here.

We encourage you to support the eBook project by making a donation through Global Research’s DonorBox “Worldwide Corona Crisis” Campaign Page

First published by GR on April 18, 2020

**

For over twenty years Bill Gates and his Foundation, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF) have been vaccinating foremost children by the millions in remote areas of poor countries, mostly Africa and Asia. Most of their vaccination program had disastrous results, causing the very illness (polio, for example in India) and sterilizing young women (Kenya, with modified tetanus vaccines). Many of the children died. Many of the programs were carried out with the backing of the WHO and – yes – the UN Agency responsible for the Protection of Children, UNICEF. 

Most of these vaccination campaigns were implemented without the informed-consent of the children, parents, guardians or teachers, nor with the informed-consent, or with forged consent, of the respective government authorities. In the aftermath, The Gates Foundation was sued by governments around the world, Kenya, India, the Philippines – and more.

Bill Gates has a strange image of himself. He sees himself as The Messiah who saves the world through vaccination – and through population reduction.

Around the time, when the 2010 Rockefeller Report was issued, with its even more infamous “Lock Step” Scenario, precisely the scenario of which we are living the beginning right now, Bill Gates talked on a TED show in California, “Innovating to Zero” about the use of energy.

He used this TED presentation to promote his vaccination programs, literally saying, “If we are doing a real good job vaccinating childen, we can reduce the world population by 10% to 15%”. Watch this video from TED Talk at 04:21 or watch directly below.

 

Screenshot from the transcript on TED Talk

This sounds very much like eugenics.

The video, the first 6’45”, “The Truth about Bill Gates and his Disastrous Vaccination Program”, will tell you all about it.

Read also Gates’ Globalist Vaccine Agenda: a Win-Win for Pharma and Mandatory Vaccination by Robert F Kennedy Jr

Robert F Kennedy Jr, an avid Defender of Children’s Rights and anti-vaccination activist, has launched a petition sent to the White House, calling for “Investigations into the ‘Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation’ for Medical Malpractice & Crimes Against Humanity

Screenshot 

“At the forefront of this is Bill Gates, who has publicly stated his interest in “reducing population growth” by 10-15%, by means of vaccination. Gates, UNICEF & WHO have already been credibly accused of intentionally sterilizing Kenyan children through the use of a hidden HCG antigen in tetanus vaccines”. (Excerpt from text of Petition)

Link to the Petition.

If you wish to Sign the Petition click Here  

(At the time of writing, the petition had over 265,000. It requires 100,000 for an answer from the White House)

Video: Robert F. Kennedy Junior. (Video removed. Censorship)

See also brief video featuring Author Bill Still ( 6 min) entitled The Truth about Bill Gates and his disastrous Vaccination Programs around the World

Robert. F. Kennedy Exposes Bill Gates’ Vaccination Agenda

Now Mr. Gates and his allies, including Big-Pharma, WHO, UNICEF, Dr. Anthony Fauci, Director of NIAID / NIH, a close ally of Mr. Gates  – and of course, Agenda ID2020, are proposing to (force) vaccinate 7 billion people around the globe, with their concoction of a (so far) untested coronavirus vaccine. This is a multi-billion dollar bonanza for  Big Pharma and for all those who support the vaccine. Nobody will really know what the vaccine cocktail will contain. They intend to start with the Global South (Developing Countries) and then gradually move North (Developed Countries).

Mind you, there is no need for a vaccine to cure the corona virus. There are many cures:

French Professor Didier Raoult, who is one of the world’s top 5 scientists on communicable diseases, suggested the use of hydroxychloroquine (Chloroquine or Plaquenil), a well-known, simple, and inexpensive drug, also used to fight Malaria, and that has shown efficacy with previous coronaviruses such as SARS.  By mid-February 2020, clinical trials at his institute and in China already confirmed that the drug could reduce the viral load and bring spectacular improvement. Chinese scientists published their first trials on more than 100 patients and announced that the Chinese National Health Commission would recommend Chloroquine in their new guidelines to treat Covid-19. (Peter Koenig, April 1, 2020)

Be aware, awake, alert and warned.

Peter Koenig is an economist and geopolitical analyst. He is also a water resources and environmental specialist. He worked for over 30 years with the World Bank and the World Health Organization around the world in the fields of environment and water. He lectures at universities in the US, Europe and South America. He writes regularly for Global Research; ICH; RT; Sputnik; PressTV; The 21st Century; Greanville Post; Defend Democracy Press, TeleSUR; The Saker Blog, the New Eastern Outlook (NEO); and other internet sites. He is the author of Implosion – An Economic Thriller about War, Environmental Destruction and Corporate Greed – fiction based on facts and on 30 years of World Bank experience around the globe. He is also a co-author of The World Order and Revolution! – Essays from the Resistance.
Peter Koenig is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization.

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David Skripac’s Book, first published on January 22, 2022

 

 

 


 

 

 

 

 

 

Our Species is Being Genetically Modified

Are We Witnessing

Humanity’s March toward Extinction?

Viruses Are Our Friends, Not Our Foes  

 

by David Skripac

 

Global Research E-Book, December 2021


 

About the Author

 

David Skripac has a Bachelor of Technology degree in aerospace engineering. During his two tours of duty as a captain in the Canadian Air Force, he flew extensively in the former Yugoslavia, Somalia, Rwanda, Ethiopia, and Djibouti.

Using an inquisitive mind, a keen eye for detail, and problem-solving skills honed during his university years and throughout his career, David devoted close to 200 hours researching the latest scientific findings in the fields of virology and microbiology to bring this book to fruition.

Since the spring of 2020, he has also written several essays on the subject of COVID-19 for Global Research.

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


 

Table of Contents

 

Preface

Acknowledgements

Introduction

Chapter I

The Microbiome and The Virome

Chapter II

Our War against Nature

Chapter III

What Happened in 2020

Chapter IV

Ignoring the Wreckage


 

Preface

 

When the alleged “pandemic” was declared in March of 2020, I, like millions of other people around the world, was paying close attention to politicians and public health officials as well as to bureaucrats from the Rockefeller Foundation-created World Health Organization (WHO), all of whom announced, in almost perfect synchronicity, “This is the new normal until a vaccine can be developed.”

How odd, I thought. Why is it that the immediate default position is a vaccine? And why is it that a single coronavirus is being blamed for causing people to fall ill in every corner of the earth? Could something else—perhaps one or more toxins in the environment—be the real culprit?

It was impossible to stop myself from asking question after question and pondering possible answers. For, if public health authorities in nearly every jurisdiction (from international healthy organizations to national health agencies to state and local health departments) on the planet were truly concerned about citizens’ well-being, then:

  • Why was it that natural immunity, which has been a key component to human health and survival for over 200,000 years, was suddenly being treated as if it didn’t exist anymore?
  • Why was no one in charge urging us to eat a healthy, nutritionally balanced, organic diet, low in sugar content?
  • Why did no one mention the importance of getting enough sleep?
  • Why were we not being encouraged to go outdoors and exercise?
  • Why was no one suggesting we increase our zinc and vitamin D intake? After all, scientists have known for over fifty years that vitamin D, either absorbed naturally from the sun or taken orally in tablet form, is extremely beneficial to the human body in many ways, especially in building a strong innate immune system.

All of the preceding points, if taken seriously, could have helped us improve our immune system and given us an opportunity to combat the negative effects of the syndrome known as COVID-19.

Even more bizarre was the fact that, from the very start of the “pandemic,” the corporate-controlled media had been continually seeking the opinion of Bill Gates, who is neither a doctor nor a scientist, on what course of action governments around the world should be taking to combat the spread of the so-called SARS-CoV-2 virus.

As two weeks of global lockdowns—allegedly “to flatten the curve”—dragged on and turned into several months of lockdowns, it became painfully obvious that none of the “public health measures”—ranging from physical distancing to masking to self-isolation—being implemented by governments around the world had anything to do with their stated purpose of keeping everyone COVID-free.

These measures did, however, perform two key roles completely unrelated to public health:

First, they were calculated from the beginning to create a polarized population. Indeed, we have been made the subjects of a social engineering experiment intended to divide humanity—thus preventing us from communicating, converging, cooperating, and rising up together against a diabolical plan designed to eradicate representative democracy, sovereign nation-states, and individual liberties.

Second, they had the intended consequence of shutting down the global economy, sending millions of people into bankruptcy, extreme poverty, and despair. The vultures devouring the dead and decaying pieces of the shattered economy are powerful financial interests—big banks and businesses and billionaires whose goal is to control every sector of the economy, including all natural resources and all public and private assets. These predators, though few in number, have wreaked the havoc requisite for them to buy—for pennies on the dollar—every possible possession in the entire world. But they are neither content to be wealthy beyond belief nor satisfied with owning everything. Rather, it seems they will not rest until they have achieved complete world domination by exploiting and enslaving all of us.

In the two years of a “pandemic”-driven panic that most of the world seems to have succumbed to, many nations have been ruled by illegal executive orders and health department guidelines, all promulgated in the name of “following the science.” What this hijacked term really means is that scared-out-of-their-wits citizens are following the worldwide mandate to believe a false narrative that lays all the blame for all the destruction on an alleged virus—a non-isolated, unpurified, computer-generated, allegedly “novel” virus. Meanwhile, the enshrined constitutional and civil rights of billions of human beings are being shredded.

Of all the thoughts that ran through my mind, the one that struck the deepest chord was the realization that a naturally occurring, helpful element in the environment was being blamed as the source of the pseudo pandemic. I understood that, just as there are “global warming” swindlers who falsify climate data and write inaccurate academic reports so they can pretend to vilify carbon dioxide (an element that generateslife on earth—the opposite of killing life!) and thus make scads of money from their scam, so are there “pandemic” gangsters who pretend to vilify another marvel of the natural world—the virus—for the same venal purpose.

I knew I must do something with my realization. That is, I had to research to prove my theory was fact, not fancy. For four solid months, I spent all my free hours reading countless articles and watching umpteen interviews. (See my acknowledgements below to find out who my main sources were.) Next, I amassed everything I had learned and wrote a four-part article. When it was published on the Global Research website, it received so many views and positive comments that the Global Research editor encouraged me to turn it into a short book.  This is that book.

My hope is that I have succeeded in deconstructing the official narrative: first, by explaining how viruses have been blanketing the earth with their genetic codes for eons, creating biodiversity and allowing for adaptation throughout the ecosystem, and, second, by pointing out the myriad ways reckless human behaviour is creating a real environmental catastrophe—not the carbon-is-the-culprit con, but actual pollution and deforestation and species extinction, to name a few such scourges. These real problems are being ignored by the fake “climate change” crowd, who hide their mercenary motives behind euphemisms like “sustainable development goals” (SDGs) and “environmental, social, and governance” benchmarks (ESGs) and florid phrases such as the “Great Reset” and “Build Back Better.”


 

Acknowledgements

 

I would like to give special thanks to Dr. David Martin, Dr. Sucharit Bhakdi, Dr. Andrew Kaufman, and Dr. Byram Bridle. From the very outset of the “pandemic,” they have distinguished themselves with a high degree of intelligence and courage—calling upon these qualities to challenge the official narrative. Their scientific expertise, sound reasoning, and logical questions enabled me to grasp the bigger picture—not just the facts that were being hidden, but also the underlying agenda of the “pandemic” players.

In addition, I humbly credit Dr. Zach Bush for helping me learn about the complex and minute intricacies of the natural world. Had I not had access to the vast body of work he has produced and the important insights he has gained over the years, it would have taken me a lifetime to pull together the material you are about to read.

Furthermore, I truly appreciate Global Research editor Michel Chossudovsky for suggesting the idea of turning my original four-part article into a short book. If it were not for Professor Chossudovsky’s decision to create his news aggregator website and his incredible efforts to sustain it for more than two decades, this book would probably not exist.

Finally, I would like to express my sincerest gratitude to my editor, who, for personal reasons, prefers to remain anonymous.


 

Introduction

 

The war is not meant to be won, it is meant to be continuous. —George Orwell

This year marks a seminal turning point in human history.

For the first time since human civilization began, our species is being genetically modified.

Vaccine manufacturers have now made it possible for the human genome to be permanently altered—and humanity’s relationship with nature forever changed—by means of an experimental pharmaceutical injection that is being falsely referred to as a “vaccine.”

In light of this defining event, I believe we must take a sober look at the motives and acts that are revamping humanity as we know it. Simultaneously, we must examine our increasingly destructive treatment of the natural world.

In order to investigate the many variables that are hastening the demise of humanity and sabotaging our unique role as stewards of the earth and its billions of plant and animal species, I have divided this short book into four main chapters.


 

Chapter I

The Microbiome and The Virome

 

In this chapter, we will discover that, contrary to what Western allopathic medicine has been teaching us for over a century, viruses are not here to attack our cells or harm us in any way. In fact, rather than being our mortal enemies, viruses are actually our friends.

Does this assertion sound too outlandish to be true? If your answer is “yes,” I wouldn’t be surprised. But I believe if you were to study the intricate ecosystem of microorganisms that make up the microbiome and delve into the fascinating world of the virome, you would come to the same realization I finally did: We are literally swimming in a vast sea of viruses, which, from the beginning of time, have been essential for life to form and flourish on this precious earth. The information communicated by these viruses helps all species of life survive—even thrive.

The Microbiome

The microbiome (derived from the Greek words micro, meaning “small,” and biotikos, meaning “pertaining to life”) is a massive ecosystem consisting of trillions of microorganisms. Incredibly, some 40,000 species of bacteria, 300,000 species of parasites, 65,000 species of protozoa, and between 3.5 million and 5 million species of fungi inhabit the environment around us and live in or on the human body. This complex world of microorganisms continually secretes a sea of viruses, which serve as a communication network for the bacteria, parasites, protozoa, and fungi. And, as we will discover shortly, these viruses have always been here to help us, not hinder us. In other words, they are life-affirming, not death-inducing.

Here’s a hint of the microbiome’s intricacy, incredible diversity, and infinitesimal size: The number of genes within the fungal kingdom is at least 125 trillion! The human genome, by comparison, consists of a mere 20,000 genes. A fruit fly has 13,000 genes, a flea 31,000. Thus, in terms of genetic complexity, the human genome has just a tiny fragment of genetic information compared to the vast world of genomic information contained within the microbiome.

One intriguing aspect of the microbiome is its symbiotic communication network, which allows the transmission of protein information from one microorganism to one another. For example, the mycelial network (a matrix of fine white filaments) in fungi allows the fungi to communicate with each other over distances that can stretch to several kilometers. These mycelial structures are capable of transferring mineral and protein resources more than a kilometer. How? They use light energy and electrons that flow through the pathways within the soil system. In this way, the microbiome helps plants and other multicellular life forms flourish. It is no exaggeration to call the mycelial network in the fungal kingdom the literal “brain” of the planet. Incidentally, all of the tiny, intelligent organisms that make up the microbiome are powered by the biophotonic energy of the sun.

Hard as it is to fathom, at least 1.4 quadrillion bacteria and 10 quadrillion fungi live inside the human body. Within the human colon alone are 3.8 x 1013bacteria cells. Every single organ in the body, including the brain, has its own microbiome. The purpose of the bacteria and fungi in our bodies is to nourish and nurture our cells, keeping us healthy and in equilibrium with the larger microbiome surrounding us.

The Virome

The virome is the immense world in which Mother Nature’s messengers exist. It is composed of trillions upon trillions of viruses produced by the aforementioned microbiome’s bacteria, parasites, protozoa, and fungi. The average adult human body contains 1 x 1015 viruses. By contrast, in the air enveloping the earth there are 1 x 1031viruses; in the earth’s soil there are 2.5 x 1031 viruses; and in the earth’s oceans there are 1.2 x 1030 viruses. To provide some perspective on these awe-inspiring numbers, 1 x 1031is 10 million times greater than the number of known stars in the entire universe.

Simply put, a virus is genomic information, either DNA or RNA, wrapped in a protein envelope. The small strands of protein protruding outward from the outer surface of a virus’s protein envelope are called spike proteins. Viruses are not living organisms. They do not produce their own fuel. They have no metabolism for producing energy. And they cannot reproduce.

Viruses have been traveling globally, above the atmospheric boundary layer, for millions of years, long before machines for air travel were invented. Their genetic codes have been blanketing the earth for eons, creating biodiversity and allowing for adaptation throughout the ecosystem. By adaptation, I mean that viruses are always seeking to adapt their genetic codes for the purpose of creating resilient health in all of the planet’s life forms. It is ridiculous to suggest that, in order to travel from one region of the globe to another, a virus must hop on an aircraft, as RAND’s National Security Research Division would have us believe.

Furthermore, viruses—including coronaviruses—do not come in waves and then disappear without a trace, only to miraculously reappear later in the same spot or a different one. Instead, viruses never leave, never expire. They inhabit every element in the environment around us. In short, they are omnipresent and ever-present.

Our relationship with particular viruses can change as a consequence of our harmful actions toward nature. Whenever humans poison and pollute the air, soil, and water, they create an imbalance between humanity and the virome—an imbalance that can cause us to come into disequilibrium with a particular virus.

Unfortunately, the allopathic medicine regime, which plutocrats John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie forced on most of the world with their 1910 Flexner Report, still has a large segment of the scientific community believing that bacteria, fungi, and viruses are our enemies.

The foundation of Rockefeller’s allopathic medicine scheme is Louis Pasteur’s flawed “germ theory,” which claims that outside microorganisms such as bacteria and viruses attack, invade, and infect the body, thereby causing disease. Though he had no formal education in science, most of the Western world credits Pasteur (1822–1895) with playing a fundamental part in establishing what we call “modern medicine”—a paradigm that traces the origin of each disease to a single germ. Without Pasteur’s theory, most modern drugs would never be produced, promoted, or prescribed—a fact that explains why today’s medical establishment and its codependent pharmaceutical industry refuse to recognise their flaws or own up to their ineffectiveness.

By contrast, “terrain theory,” which was initiated by Claude Bernard (1813–1878) and later built upon by Antoine Béchamp (1816–1908), alleges that the terrain—that is, the internal environment of the body—and not an external germ determines our health or lack thereof. What Béchamp referred to as “terrain” is very close to what modern medicine has now termed the innate immune system. As we will see in the following paragraphs, Béchamp was definitely on the right track in discovering how the human body really interacts with the outside environment.

Unlike Pasteur, Béchamp did have an academic background in science. He believed disease to be a biological result of the changes that take place in the body when its metabolic processes become imbalanced. When the body is in a state of imbalance, Béchamp alleged, germs become symptoms that in turn stimulate more symptoms, which eventually lead to disease.

Although Béchamp was moving in the right direction with his terrain theory, Rockefeller’s germ-dependent pharmaceutical tyranny has prevailed, due largely to substantial infusions of money, which Rockefeller and Carnegie gladly supplied in the form of grants to universities, hospitals, and medical research facilities. Their “philanthropic” largess, which easily exceeded $100 million ($2.9 billion in current dollars), enabled them to influence the policy of the entire US medical establishment and eventually most of the Western nations, steering them toward an exclusively chemical-based allopathic regime.

I contend in this book that, contrary to what Rockefeller medicine has been teaching us for over one hundred years, viruses are not here to attack our cells or to harm us in any other manner. On the contrary, the DNA and RNA genetic molecular information contained within the viruses are literally the building blocks of life on earth. To use a modern analogy, we can think of a virus’s information stream as a software update carrying important molecular intelligence that can be uploaded, when required, to any cell of a living multicellular organism—including any one of the 70 trillion cells contained in the human body. Our cells regulate which new genomic information is received and which information is not received. The viruses are simply seeking to adapt to the cells for the purpose of creating resilient human health.

Innate and Adaptive Immunity

A word here about the immune system. There are two kinds of immunity: innate and adaptive.

The innate immune system is the initial and primary means by which our bodies interact with a virus. The innate system helps the body find a genetic balance with each new viral update that is being presented to it. The body does not need to replicate or reproduce the new viral information after more than four or five days of updates. The innate immune system functions on healthy boundaries in the human body, such as the physical barriers between the gut and the bloodstream, or on the blood vessels that tightly regulate the movement of ions, molecules, and cells between the bloodstream and the brain (termed the blood-brain barrier), or at the genetic level in our cells (like the mutagen proteins in our cells). Also, the innate immune system operates through a variety of enzymes—like the APOBec3A/3G and CAS9. These enzymes are now considered central to innate immunity.

The adaptive immune system is the secondary means by which our bodies interact with viruses. The adaptive system mounts a highly specific response to a virus by utilizing the body’s white blood cells, known as lymphocytes (B cells and T cells). The B cells are responsible for releasing antibodies into the bloodstream.

Antibodies are the body’s second—not first—method of interaction with a virus after it receives a new viral update or after it develops an imbalance with a particular virus. Antibodies are specific, targeted defences. They usually show up on the scene 3 to 6 weeks after the body’s initial exposure to a virus. Simply put, antibodies act like a cleanup crew, assisting the body in cleaning out viruses and bacteria that are no longer needed. Meanwhile, the T cells are responsible for stimulating the B cells into making antibodies.

To understand how quickly the human body adapts when exposed to the virome, consider a seven-day-old infant. He has 1 x 108 virus particles in just one gram of feces. Even though that child does not have the capacity to develop any antibodies at such an early stage in life, he nonetheless instantly adapts to these virus particles and stays perfectly healthy. Instead of developing a fever, he remains in stable equilibrium—homeostasis—with the virome, both microbially and genetically. That fact alone proves that we do not interact with the virome through our adaptive immune system but, rather, interact with it through our innate immune system.

What is the key takeaway from these facts? To me, it is that the body’s decision to take in genetic information is a highly intricate and controlled biological process. There are numerous ways our bodies stay in equilibrium with the huge sea of genetic information that we breathe in and come into contact with every moment of our lives.

Since a virus is not a living organism, our innate immune system cannot kill viruses—nor would it want to. Instead, as mentioned above, the innate immune system simply comes into genetic balance with a new virus. It does this by replicating or receiving updates from that virus—and by immediately responding to that new viral upload. Once genetic balance has been achieved, typically four to five days after initial exposure to the virus, our innate immune system refuses to receive further updates.

From these facts, we may conclude that humans cannot stop an “epidemic” or a “pandemic” from occurring, nor can they change the trajectory of either one. In other words, it is useless—actually, worse than useless: it is harmful—to try to check an always-helpful virus by deploying an unapproved experimental gene-editing device that is designed to produce an antibody response (otherwise known as an adaptive immune system response induced by the injection). That antiquated scientific model is biologically illogical and can never work. We now know that it interferes with our beautifully designed innate immune system, which is perfectly capable of handling any virus with which we may develop a temporary imbalance. (Exactly how we develop an imbalance with a particular virus, like the HIV virus or any coronavirus, will be explained later in the book.)

Furthermore, contrary to the official narrative propagated by vaccine makers and governmental health agencies around the world, our immune systems do retain a memory of the viruses that our bodies have interacted with and of the genes that were inserted naturally—upon receiving a new viral update—into our cells. In the innate immune system, for instance, the Cas9 enzyme, which is responsible for cleaving excess DNA when too much of a viral upload is presented to a cell, is the natural memory data bank that will remember which DNA pattern it encountered.

In addition, the permanent records kept by an innate immune system are passed down to succeeding generations of humans, who therefore will never have an inflammatory-inducing reaction to a particular virus. Even in the adaptive immune system, the B cells (the source of antibodies) and T cells (the B cells’ stimulus) provide lasting immunity.

A multipronged NIH study presented by the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy (CIDRAP) in 2008 proved conclusively that antibody immunity can last for a lifetime. In that study, a group of scientists, led by Dr. Eric Altschuler, collected blood samples from thirty-two survivors—between the ages of 91 and 101—of the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic. (Actually, the correct name for that pandemic is the Kansas Flu—its place of origin.) To their amazement, the scientists discovered that, almost a century later, all of the study’s participants still carried the antibodies to the same strain of influenza.

Based on the findings of that twenty-one-year-old study, we can dismiss the propaganda foisted upon us by the mainstream media and medical organizations. It is not true that natural immunity to the SARS-CoV-2 virus may wear off six months to a year after initial exposure. And it is not true that an experimental injection is the only way one can reach immunity. Such unfounded claims are simply ruses invented to further the avaricious agenda of the pharmaceutical industry and the other technocrats operating behind the scenes.

Bottom line: The power of natural immunity will always outperform any perceived immunity to a virus said to result from an injection, whether experimental or government-approved.

The HIV-leads-to-AIDS Hypothesis

Biologically speaking, all life on earth is built from the RNA and DNA molecular genetic sequences contained in viruses. These viruses are exquisitely designed genetic delivery systems essential to initiating and sustaining life on earth. In fact, more than 50% of the 20,000 genes inherited by today’s humans were inserted millions of years ago into the mammalian genome by these tiny marvels of nature. At least 8% of those genes were inserted by RNA retroviruses similar to the HIV retrovirus. (A retrovirus is an RNA virus which inserts a DNA copy of its genome into the host cell in order to replicate itself.) Equally intriguing is the fact that millions of years ago retroviral updates played a key role in the emergence of placental mammals.

Interestingly, a 2017 study published by the National Institute of Health (NIH) demonstrates that many of us are carrying the HIV retrovirus without even knowing it. In this study, the researchers “explored non-human sequence data from whole-genome sequencing” the blood of 8,240 adults living in the US and Europe—none of whom were ascertained to have any infectious disease. They found that a full 42% of the participants tested positive for the presence of ninety-four known viruses. These viruses included the HIV virus, the hepatitis B virus, the hepatitis C virus, and the influenza virus.

We have been trained by the medical community and the corporate-controlled media to believe that the HIV virus should predominate in people living in Sub-Saharan Africa. After all, we are told, 95% of all “HIV positive” cases come from that region of the globe. If that were the case, we would expect to see in other regions very little HIV and a far higher prevalence of, say, hepatitis C or influenza. Not so: It is just the reverse! In fact, the 2017 study found a fivefold higher prevalence of the HIV virus than of hepatitis C and influenza in those 8,240 asymptomatic Americans and Europeans. Remarkably, each one was completely in balance with the HIV virus, even though none of them had ever travelled to Africa. We must conclude from this study that not only has the world completely misunderstood the prevalence of the HIV virus in all corners of the globe but that our fear of it—and of the virome in general—is entirely unjustified.

Given that many powerful organizations, both public and private, profit from the huge grants and donations that perpetuate the endless AIDS movement, it is unsurprising that no scientific peer-reviewed study has been done to provide conclusive evidence that a virus called HIV causes a disease named AIDS. Were any such study to be undertaken, it would prove that the HIV-leads-to-AIDS hypothesis is baseless and, more to the point, fraudulent.

The question scientists should be focusing on is: What is taking place in Sub-Saharan Africa that is creating such an abnormal relationship between people living in that area and the HIV retrovirus, causing 95% of them to test HIV-positive?

For an answer to that question, we need to look at the terrain where viruses reside and stay in balance with the human body. (By “terrain” I mean a geographic area with its associated ecosystem. I am not referring here to the aforementioned Bernard/Béchamp terrain theory.) When a terrain is disrupted by anything unnatural to it—for example, poisoning of the environment by irresponsible human behaviour—the viruses become overexpressed and the body’s balance with the virome is lost.

Taking account of the terrain, we find that the number one factor common to all so-called infectious disease epidemics or pandemics is the destruction of the ecosystem. In other words, the natural terrain has been altered by irresponsible human behaviour to such an extent that our innate adaptation to all the genetic information surrounding us is undermined.

It is not that the viruses are causing a disease. Rather, it is that they are simply presenting the body with a new genetic adaptation option. The body’s innate immune system then determines how much of that new information it will absorb. If the cells are in dire need of repair—perhaps as a result of poor dietary choices, a sedentary lifestyle, or toxicity in the environment—the virus will create an inflammation event as the body goes through its regenerative process. This is usually accompanied by a fever, loss of appetite, and an elevated white blood cell count. Such an inflammatory event is what we commonly refer to as “the flu.”

What we derogatively call a viral infection or an inflammatory event—implying it is bad for the body—is actually a part of the body’s healing process. The inflammation is needed to create regeneration within the body. It is acting on behalf of the body, not against it. But if the body’s microbiome is replete instead of wanting, it will not need an update, and therefore no inflammation will take place.

In the case of Sub-Saharan Africa, the ecosystem is dying. The collapse of nutrient-rich soil systems, poor water hygiene, a lack of basic sanitation, a chronically undernourished population, and the complete elimination of traditional organic farming—overtaken by the oxymoronic Green Revolution, foisted on developing countries by industrial agriculture—have caused a large portion of that population to develop an imbalance between their innate immune system and the environment. The syndrome known as “AIDS” is an expression of that imbalance. The HIV virus, which was first discovered by French virologist Luc Montagnier, has been falsely accused of being the primary culprit responsible for AIDS—a form of guilt by association. In actual fact, the HIV virus is benign and is not trying to take over the mechanics of any cell.

The real root of the problem is that the innate immune system of the Sub-Saharan African people has been degraded by a lack of nutrition to such an extent that they are falling prey to a myriad of illnesses (tuberculosis, pneumonia, Hodgkin’s lymphoma, endocarditis, etc.), which have been collectively grouped under the single title “AIDS.” However, instead of coming to terms with the reality of what the dire ecological disaster is causing, “scientists” are blaming the HIV virus as a cover to hide decades of government and corporate environmental and economic crimes.

From the information covered thus far, we can rightly conclude that it is impossible for viruses or pathogens to create infectious disease pandemics and epidemics—for there is no such thing as an infectious disease in the traditional sense of the term—examples being “AIDS,” “Ebola,” and other unfounded “viral” pandemics. Yes, pharmaceutical propaganda has been pushing the infectious disease paradigm on world thought for centuries. But the belief that such diseases exist is no more than an outgrowth of Pasteur’s debunked germ theory. What we commonly refer to as an epidemic or a pandemic is simply the result of a degraded innate immune system showing up in a segment of the planet’s population. The reasons for this degradation can include chemical poisoning from herbicides, pesticides, or genetically modified foods, which we will look at in more detail below.

As we can see by the above description of the virome, it is no exaggeration to say that the virome is the language of all life on earth. We are literally swimming in a vast sea of genomic information that was essential for life to begin and flourish on this precious earth and that is still trying to help all species survive. The matrix of organisms that make up the microbiome have built a viromic information stream that has allowed for adaptation and biodiversity to occur on the planet. And that very same viromic information stream is responsible for building the human species.

Thus, humans are not separate from the virome and the microbiome but are, rather, integral to the virome and microbiome’s vast, complex ecosystem. Yet we have increasingly placed ourselves in direct opposition to the very living system of which we are an intrinsic part: nature.


 

Chapter II

Our War against Nature

 

In this chapter we will explore how our own reckless behaviour is destroying the environment, thereby moving us toward the sixth mass extinction. By that I mean, I will be covering the real environmental catastrophe, not the billionaire-funded “global warming/climate change” hoax initiated by the Club of Rome and further promulgated by the World Economic Forum (WEF).

The species known as Homo sapiens is the only one on this planet that is actively seeking to eradicate itself and its habitat. All of the earth’s life support systems—soil, water, and air—are in decline as a direct result of our current economic activity, which is geared to extract as much from the sacred earth as possible without any regard for the consequences that ensue.

By embracing such an intolerable economic paradigm, we fail to respect ecological and ethical limits. Our consumption-driven economic model, which we have designed and are now enslaved by, causes perpetual deficiencies—resource depletion, biodiversity loss, and contamination by toxic substances, all of which wreak perpetual havoc on the entire ecosystem and its surrounding environment. Megacorporations continue to propagate the ideology of endless economic growth, which they intend to squeeze out of a planet with finite resources and from which they alone will benefit financially. Their self-centered aims clash with the generous motives of the masses, who favor the concept of equal opportunity, including the equal right of all humans to live in a healthy environment. The billionaire set’s relentless quest for profits at the expense of everyone’s social well-being is fueling worldwide competition for resources and causing an eco-holocaust. In short, what we are witnessing is a new form of colonialism that is being imposed by the predator class on all of humanity as we enter what is commonly referred to as the sixth mass extinction.

Consider what we are doing to our fresh water. A full 80% of our planet’s surface is composed of water, of which 97% is salt water. The remaining 3% of our available supplies of drinking water have been treated so recklessly that they are highly polluted and rapidly depleting. Of that 3% fresh water, at least 29% is siphoned off by the water-intensive meat and dairy industries. The United Nations estimates that over the next decade two billion people will suffer extreme water scarcity and that by the end of this century half of the world’s population will experience some kind of water scarcity.

The mining and oil industries are no friends of the environment either. In the US, mining companies have removed over 500 mountains in the Appalachians, causing immense ground pollution and surface water pollution. In other parts of the country, drilling for shale oil and gas, called hydraulic fracturing but better known as fracking, pumps carcinogens and toxins into the air, water, and soil, further exacerbating the pollution problem. Though touted as a solution to America’s dependency on foreign oil, fracking is in fact the final act of stupidity by a petrostate.

The aforementioned meat and dairy industries do more harm than just hogging water.  Animal agriculture—encompassing huge factory farms and small family farms—is also the leading cause of greenhouse gases, deforestation, species extinction, and ocean “dead zones.” The industrial intensive farming of animals and their feed crops is largely to blame for the highest rate of species mass extinction in 65 million years. Moreover, no other industry on the planet needs as much acreage as animal agriculture: It hoards 45% of all ice-free land on the planet. According to the World Animal Foundation, 70% of the Amazon rainforest is being destroyed for the sole purpose of growing GMO soybean or corn crops that feed livestock in South America and Europe. Between 1970 and 2019, a total of 718,927 square kilometers of the Brazilian portion of the Amazon rainforest was deforested.

A few more facts to consider:

  • Fully half of the world’s grain supply is destined for food animals at the same time that one billion people face starvation.
  • In the US, 54% of all fresh water is diverted by animal agriculture at a time when 99.8% of the geographic area of California is in a critical drought.
  • Worldwide, the animal agriculture industry, which kills at least 72 billion land animals every year (200 million every day), contributes 51% of all “greenhouse gas emissions”, far exceeding the 13% contributed by all modes of transportation combined.

The most surprising “fact” about the devastation wrought by animal agriculture, though, is that almost all of the purported environmental nonprofits are silent on this issue.

The environmental calamity is even direr in the world’s oceans. The commercial fishing industry is destroying ocean life, including ocean floors, at a pace never seen in recorded history. No other industry kills more animals than this trade. A report by Matthew Zampa for Sentient Media observes that between 37 billion and 120 billion fish are killed in manmade commercial fish farms each year and at least another trillion aquatic animals living in natural water bodies are killed for food each year. Research presented on the Oceana website contends that this staggering total does not include the 100 million sharks and 650,000 whales, dolphins, and seals that are killed every year as bycatch. (Bycatch is the total number of sea animals who fishermen unintentionally catch in their nets and kill, either by discarding at sea or bringing back to port.)

As a result of all this extraction and extermination, global populations of numerous species of aquatic life are plummeting to near-extinction levels. A scientific study presented in The New York Times predicts that if commercial fishing around the world continues at its present pace, by 2048 the oceans will be practically empty.

Equally worrisome, the oceans are used as a dumping ground for manufacturing and mining enterprises around the world. It should come as no surprise that researchers at UC San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography have found that fish populations in the oceans are contaminated with heavy metals like mercury, polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), organochlorine pesticides (DDTs and CHLs), polybrominated diphenyl ethers (PBDEs), plastic compounds, and hexachlorobenzene.

Chemical Farming and GMOs

The makers of synthetic chemicals, pesticides, insecticides, herbicides, and fertilizers are among Earth’s worst enemies. The newest threat to our environment comes from genetically modified industrial crops, known as genetically modified organisms, or GMOs. With the introduction of these new crops we have accelerated our ability to manipulate nature at a rate unimaginable in any earlier era. Unfortunately, as a consequence of our meddling, we are seeing an explosion of chronic disease.

How does our aforementioned discussion of the microbiome, the virome, and immunity fit into this picture of environmental desolation?

For one thing, ever since the introduction of chemical farming and the use of GMOs on a global scale in 1996, we have altered our natural surroundings to such an extent that we are decimating our innate immune system. (Remember that date: 1996.) As a result, autoimmune and other chronic diseases that at one time affected only a minute percentage of the general population are now exploding in prevalence. The timing of this surge is not lost on us: These diseases began afflicting humans in a big way beginning in, yes, 1996. It is not farfetched, then, to conclude that the profligate use of GMOs is related to the marked decline in human health over the past two-and-a-half decades.

I’ll cite a few examples: one in four people worldwide now suffer from allergies; one in three in North America are obese; one in two women and one in three men in the US will develop cancer in their lifetime. In addition, the developmental disability termed autism spectrum disorder has risen from one in 5,000 children in 1975 to one in thirty-six in 2016. If the current trend continues, we can expect to see one in three children plagued by autism by 2035. Meanwhile, in the same time period, we have seen a dramatic rise in other immune system disorders, such as Crohn’s, celiac disease, Parkinson’s (in men), Alzheimer’s (in women), dementia, and type 1 diabetes.

GMO crops are sprayed with herbicides, such as Bayer’s Roundup, which contains the active ingredient glyphosate and which is the most ubiquitous cancer-causing herbicide/antibiotic on the planet. In 2014, over 747 million kg of glyphosate was used worldwide. Now, a mere seven years later, that figure has more than doubled, to two billion kg. Being a water-soluble compound, glyphosate contaminates ground water everywhere, from China to North America. As if that weren’t bad enough, glyphosate is also contaminating the air we breathe. A study from the US Geological Survey conducted in 2007 reveals that Roundup (aka glyphosate) and its toxic by-product aminomethylphosphonic acid (AMPA) were found in over 75% of the air samples and rain samples tested in Mississippi in 2007.

Meanwhile, the longest river in the United States, the mighty Mississippi, and its hundreds of tributaries collect more than 80% of the Roundup sprayed on crops in the entire USA. The Mississippi River is also the recipient of thousands of other chemical pollutants that are dumped into it by petrochemical companies. It’s no surprise that the people residing along the last 140 km stretch of the river, which runs through Louisiana—specifically in the Baton Rouge and New Orleans area—have some of the highest rates of cancer in the entire world.

With the Roundup patent once owned by Monsanto (now Bayer) having expired in 2000, China has become the leading user and exporter of glyphosate in the world. In 2017, China exported over 300,000 tons of glyphosate globally. It turns out that Hubei Province, where the infamous Wuhan sits, is one of the leading users of glyphosate in China. The combined toxic effects of pork production, heavy manufacturing, and chemical farming in Hubei have made this region one of the most polluted places on earth. The once-diverse and clean ecosystem in Wuhan has been utterly ravaged by manmade pollutants and the massive use of glyphosate in industrial farming.

There is an indisputable link between the current high rate of cancer and the extensive use of glyphosates. Within a single generation, the rate of cancer diagnosed in men has doubled. Paralleling that rise, in the 25 years (roughly a generation) between 1990 and 2015, the toxicity of the environment also doubled.

Statistical data compiled by Nancy L. Swanson et al. in the Journal of Organic Systems provides overwhelming evidence of a precise correlation, from 1975 to 2010, between glyphosate usage and the incidence of many different types of cancer, including urinary/bladder cancer, liver cancer, thyroid cancer, and myeloid leukemia. The graphs presented in the Swanson study show that the increased prevalence of cancer perfectly overlaps the increased use of glyphosate.

Another link that cannot be ignored is the decline in male sperm counts in Western countries. Shanna Swan, an epidemiologist at Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York and a leading scholar of reproductive health, projects that sperm counts of the median man are set to hit zero by 2045. With the introduction of endocrine-disrupting chemicals (EDCs), male sperm counts have dropped 50% to 60%—an average of 1% to 2% per year—between 1973 and 2011. Granted, endocrine-disruptor microplastics in our drinking water pose a problem, but that problem pales in comparison with the damaging effects of chemical farming and the use of glyphosate, contends internal medicine, endocrinology, and metabolism specialist Zach Bush, MD, on his Global Health Education website.

Moreover, writes Dr. Bush, “glyphosate functions as a potent chelation agent, locking up the nutrients within soil, plant, and water systems such that we can now find ourselves in the equivalent biologic state of starvation in the midst of the most extreme caloric excess that humanity has ever produced.”

Worldwide warnings from other scientists, doctors, and environmentalists abound. For instance, Dr. Vandana Shiva, an environmental and food sovereignty activist and ecofeminist based in Delhi, India, has been continually cautioning, in books and articles she pens and in speeches and interviews she gives around the world, that GMOs have ruined soil and plant life by inhibiting their ability to maintain microorganisms and minerals, such as zinc, iron, and magnesium, which are vital for immune response in animals and humans. In her 2012 opinion piece titled “Myths About Industrial Agriculture,” Dr. Shiva cited a 1995 study that found industrial agriculture (which began in 1965) to be responsible for 75% of the earth’s biodiversity erosion, 75% of its water destruction, and 40% of its greenhouse gases, while producing only 30% of humans’ food supply.

Ever since the mid-1990s, industrial/chemical farming has decimated the microbiome in the soil on a global scale. Consider: In 2014, a senior United Nations official, Maria-Helena Semendo of the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), explained to a forum that unless new approaches to farming were developed, the global amount of arable and productive land per person in 2050 will be only one-quarter of the 1960 level. Also consider: In a study conducted by Lancaster University in September 2020, researchers found that 90% of the earth’s conventionally farmed soils were thinning, and 16% of them had a lifespan of less than a century.

In short, the aforementioned reduction in male sperm counts, combined with soil degradation around the globe, are the two key factors that are driving humanity toward extinction.

Every time we spray Roundup or any of the other even-more-toxic herbicides that are now being widely used—such as 2,4-D (2,4-dichlorophenoxyacetic is a primary ingredient in the chemical warfare herbicide widely known as Agent Orange) or dicamba (an herbicide 200 times more toxic than the glyphosate in Roundup)—we are destroying the microbiome in the soil, in weeds and plants, in animals, and in our own microbiome. And, to hammer home a previously made point, Roundup disperses not only in the soil but also in the air. So do its rival products.

Lamentably, herbicides are not the only toxic substance found in the air we breathe. Many other pollutants—mercury, arsenic, sulfur, and cyanide, to name but four—likewise circulate in the atmosphere. These toxins, which are produced by the transportation and energy sectors, are adept at binding with carbon particulate matter. Fine carbon particulate, referred to as PM2.5 (that is, particulate matter that is less than 2.5 micrograms per cubic meter, or 100 times thinner than a human hair), is a by-product of burning fuel and chemical reactions. It is of particular concern to human health when levels of PM2.5 in the air are high, as these two 2017 studies from the NIH National Library of Medicine and The New England Journal of Medicine demonstrate.

It turns out that not only toxins bind to PM2.5; so do viruses. Before the Industrial Revolution, viruses dispersed themselves equally throughout the atmosphere. However, now that carbon particulate matter is ubiquitous in the air, viruses are abnormally concentrating themselves around this substance. The greater the concentration of PM2.5, the greater the concentration of viral material.

Every single year, beginning in the last week of September and ending by late June, nature goes into its sleep cycle in the Northern Hemisphere. During this period, concentrations of carbon particulate and CO2 emissions and other pollutants that would normally be absorbed by trees, plants, oceans, and soil are unable to be absorbed. The result is very high concentrations of pollutants traveling in an easterly direction with the wind currents. (Along for the ride: clumps of spiked viruses that have hooked themselves onto the carbon particulates.) Compounding the problem—and reminiscent of the damaging effects of chemical farming—are increased concentrations of PM2.5 in areas where the soil has been degraded to the point that its living, breathing microbiome has lost the ability to absorb carbon at any time of year, regardless of the season.

Through NASA satellite imagery, we can see, starting in mid-October every year, a huge plume of carbon material floating from the heavy-industry hubs in China and other industrial regions of the world and dispersing in an easterly flow pattern across the Northern Hemisphere. By the month of May, this toxic haze blankets the Northern Hemisphere. You can check out IQAir for real-time data analysis of PM2.5 toxicity around the world.

Strangely, what we call “the seasonal flu” perfectly coincides with the time period when nature goes into its sleep cycle in the Northern Hemisphere. During the months we refer to as “flu season,” our bodies are more apt to experience an inflammatory event—fever, congestion, coughs, and a loss of appetite. This phenomenon takes place as our bodies adapt and come into balance with the industrial toxins in the environment. When summer arrives in late June, nature resumes its regenerative cycle: The plumes of PM2.5 slowly dissipate and finally disappear, reducing our risk of respiratory illness. That is why we seldom, if ever, experience influenza during the summer months in the Northern Hemisphere. Hence, by following the carbon particulate flows, we can actually map out and predict exactly where the hot spots of respiratory infections, of “pandemics,” and of seasonal influenza will occur.


 

Chapter III

What Happened in 2020

 

We will now examine how this real environmental devastation has contributed to the “pandemic” that was rolled out in 2020—a “pandemic” that led to the mass experimental injection of unknown substances into human “subjects” in 2021 and that has no foreseeable end. (Throughout this book, I have been putting quote marks around “pandemic” because of its fraudulent character. Indeed, it is more accurately and aptly described as a plandemic, a scamdemic, a pseudo pandemic or any other term indicating fakery.)

In the months leading up to 2020, the earth experienced a series of unprecedented wildfires from Australia to the Amazon and from Indonesia to California. In California alone, the wildfire season of 2019 destroyed more than 250,000 acres of land, along with 732 structures. All told, global wildfires in 2019 sent 7.8 billion metric tons of CO2 and carbon particulate into the stratosphere—the highest level of PM2.5 since 2002. Once in the stratosphere, the carbon particulate was able to travel thousands of kilometers from its source. Many cities around the globe, such as Canberra, Wuhan, New York, and Milan, experienced extremely low air quality as a result of the extremely high levels of PM2.5.

It turns out that one of the most toxic substances generated by the combustion of synthetics such as plastics, nylon, wool, and silk—combustion caused either by wildfires or by industrial chemical reactions—is cyanide. Specifically, hydrogen cyanide gas. Cyanide is a highly toxic agent that causes vascular hypoxia and even death if not treated properly.

Thus, as we entered “flu season” in the latter half of 2019 and the start of 2020, we had the perfect storm of toxicity circulating the globe. The abnormally high levels of PM2.5, in conjunction with high levels of industrial by-products like sulfur, mercury, arsenic, carbon, glyphosate, and cyanide, created ideal conditions for suppressing the innate immune system, especially in the frail and elderly, who are in many instances already dealing with serious underlying medical conditions.

To make matters worse, most of the patients afflicted with these underlying conditions—hypertension, diabetes, obesity, coronary artery disease, and renal disease—are placed on commonly prescribed drugs, which include angiotensin-converting enzyme inhibitors (ACE-I) to control blood pressure and statins to lower cholesterol. However, we now know, thanks to a study first published on March 31, 2020, in the American Journal of Physiology Heart and Circulatory Physiology (Volume 318, Issue 5), that ACE-I and statin drugs upregulate the angiotensin-converting enzyme 2 (ACE2) receptor by which the coronavirus enters the body. ACE2 is a protein that sits on the surface of many types of cells in the human body, including the intestine, kidney, uterus, testes, brain, heart, and, most importantly for our coverage of this topic, the lungs and nasal and oral mucosa.

The ACE2 enzyme plays an important role in helping the body to regulate blood pressure and in the healing of wounds and inflammation. In addition, the ACE2’s amino acids help capture and chop up a harmful protein called angiotensin II, which drives up blood pressure and damages tissues. That is why physicians in the Western world will normally prescribe ACE-I in an effort to boost ACE2 expression, thereby reducing the risk of high blood pressure. What’s more, when the ACE2 enzyme is upregulated, it can very easily capture—or snag—any one of the numerous spike proteins emanating from the surface of a coronavirus.

Gain-of-Function Research

While we are on the topic of spike proteins, I would like to make a few comments, in the form of a Q&A, on gain-of-function (GoF) research in this field. Gain-of-function research, which in October 2021 was intentionally and misleadingly redefined by the National Institute of Health (NIH) to enhanced potential pandemic pathogens (EPPPs), is research that seeks to alter the functional characteristics of a virus with the aim of enhancing a viruses’ ability to infect a species and to potentially increase its impact as an airborne pathogen.

By making a virus more “deadly,” it is believed that it could then be used as a biological warfare weapon (bioweapon) against a potential foe. We know there are GoF labs in Wuhan, China, and at the US Army installation at Fort Detrick, Maryland. (As of 2018, at least fifteen other countries beside the US and China, including Canada, the UK, France, Israel, Germany, and Russia, had documented biological weapons programs and bioweapon research laboratories.)

(1) Is it possible that either both or one of the Wuhan and Ft. Detrick labs may have manipulated one of the spike proteins on a coronavirus that would make it even more apt to connect to the ACE2 receptor, as this document from the Human Microbiology Institute in New York suggests? Absolutely.

(2) Does Dr. Anthony Fauci have deep financial ties to the Wuhan lab through his position as director, since 1984, of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious diseases (NIAID)? Absolutely.

(3) By extension, is the US government either indirectly or directly involved in funding the Institute of Virology in Wuhan? Absolutely.

(4) Have both Dr. Fauci and University of North Carolina GoF specialist Ralph Baric received millions of dollars in research grants from several federal agencies—NIH, DARPA, and NIAID—to study GoF in coronaviruses, as this dossier by Dr. David Martin clearly outlines? Absolutely.

Nevertheless, we mustn’t lose sight of the fact that all of this coverage of GoF may actually be a cleverly disguised psychological operation meant to conveniently distract us from the fact that we have zeropeer-reviewed scientific proof that a coronavirus causes the respiratory syndrome known as COVID-19.

In addition, the sudden, intense media focus on Dr. Fauci and the Wuhan connection may be a tactic designed to deflect the blame to China for creating the “crisis,” all the while cleverly obscuring the fact that numerous players from many nations and organizations, like the WEF, the World Health Organisation (WHO), and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, are working in concert with China to enslave all of humanity in a technocratic dystopian nightmare.

Or, is it possible that the real gain-of-function bioweapons are the unapproved experimental injections (called COVID-19 vaccines) now being rolled out around the world? Time will tell.

Toxins or Viral Infections?

Returning to the events of 2020, we can see that by upregulating the ACE2 receptor that is sitting on the surfaces of the lungs and nasal mucosa, we made it very easy for a coronavirus, in conjunction with the PM2.5 particles that were carrying with them cyanide and other possible pollutants, to get snagged and pulled into the respiratory track. Once in the respiratory track, the toxins eventually go into the bloodstream and enter the body’s red blood cells. When a toxin enters the red blood cell, it changes the shape of the hemoglobin protein that carries the oxygen in the red blood cell and causes the red blood cell to become unable to carry oxygen. This process literally starves the body of oxygen. Therefore, with that combination of variables, the stage was set in the latter half of 2019 for the perfect delivery system enabling cyanide poisoning to take place.

Cyanide poisoning causes a condition known as histotoxic hypoxia. The condition includes these symptoms:

  • Changes in the colour of the skin (ranging from blue to red)
  • Confusion
  • Cough
  • Elevated heart rate
  • Rapid breathing
  • Shortness of breath (loss of red blood cells’ capacity to carry oxygen)
  • Sweating

Consequently, in late 2019 and the early part of 2020, health professionals in Hubei Province, in northern Italy, in the New York metropolitan area, and elsewhere were dealing with patients who were presenting symptoms of cyanide poisoning. As outlined by an April 2020 JAMA article, these symptoms have all the hallmarks of histotoxic hypoxia but none of the symptoms of either pneumonia or respiratory failure. In other words, they had no fever (afebrile), no fluid buildup in the lungs, and no white blood cell elevation (which one would expect to see if there were an infection present).

We must conclude, then, that these patients in acute distress, many of whom were in their senior years, had to have been initially suffering from hypoxia, not from pneumonia and not from respiratory failure. The pneumonia and micro blood clots, which eventually killed them, occurred several days or weeks after the initial poisoning event—and that was only because their innate immune system had been so weakened that their bodies succumbed to the cascading effects of secondary infections.

Incidentally, all of the people who were acutely affected by SARS in 2002 and by MERS in 2012 showed the same symptoms of histotoxic hypoxia—not of viral infection. That is to say, their symptoms were identical to the acute cases in 2020 of what was erroneously labeled COVID-19.

Ultimately, most of the patients hospitalized in 2020 died from a toxicology event—which was misleadingly named “COVID-19” after what was called a new strain of coronavirus—not from the so-named infectious disease. Even at the height of the “pandemic,” the purported COVID-19 accounted for a very small percentage of the total deaths in Italy and elsewhere.

Fortunately, the reported overall infection mortality rate of the COVID-19 syndrome is only slightly higher than the alleged seasonal flu. Equally fortunately (though not for its victims), the syndrome posed a danger to only one major population group—elderly people who had two or more major chronic diseases. The presence of comorbidities—heart disease, stroke, and lung cancer—made up the vast majority of their deaths. But for people under age 70 without these comorbidities, the risk of dying in a car accident is higher than the risk of dying from what is being billed as the disease COVID-19. Indeed, severe illness and death from COVID-19 occurred only in younger people who had immune deficiency disorders—obesity, diabetes, autoimmune diseases, and hereditary immunodeficiencies.

Nevertheless, these deaths, though tragic, in no way justify any government violating citizens’ natural rights. These rights include the freedom to:

  • move about (including leaving one’s home at any time of day or night)
  • travel (including between states, provinces, countries, and continents)
  • associate (that is, gather with friends and family in person)
  • assemble (in peaceful protests against unjust edicts, corrupt practices, and censorship)
  • worship (including meeting together with fellow believers)
  • express one’s individuality (including choosing whether or not to wear a mask)
  • enjoy bodily autonomy (including not being psychologically coerced or physically forced into receiving experimental injections of any kind)
  • stay in business (instead of being deemed by tyrannical politicians and public health bureaucrats to be “nonessential”—a label that forced millions of small companies to shut their doors, often permanently).

Dr. Bush summarizes the cases of severe acute respiratory illnesses he saw in 2020 this way:

“Unfortunately, we didn’t look at this as a poisoning; we looked at this as an infection. We kept believing that these people who were dying were dying of infection. I believe they were very clearly being overloaded with PM2.5 bound to cyanide that was being trafficked into the lung environment and ultimately into the bloodstream by the virus. The virus is naturally designed to actually enter the body through lung and vascular tissue and neural tissue like our nasal sinuses. We see all of this loss of taste and scent in people exposed to this virus because it’s trafficking through the ACE2 receptor on the surfaces of all these tissues. The ACE2 receptor binds to the coronavirus and pulls cyanide straight into the [red blood] cell to poison the human body with high amounts of air pollution that were not being breathed in but were literally being smart-targeted into the bloodstream by the innocent bystander of a virus that was in our environment for a very long time.”

From his detailed description, we can clearly see that people were dying from environmental toxicity, not from a viral infection. That is precisely why there is no scientific, peer-reviewed study providing conclusive evidence that a virus called SARS-CoV-2 causes a fatal disease named COVID-19. Such evidence doesn’t exist, because the coronavirus, so-called, is not out to harm anyone but is merely presenting a viral update to those who need it.

Not surprisingly, as of November 30, 2021, 127 health/science institutions in over twenty-five countries have failed to provide or cite even one record describing the purification of the alleged SARS-CoV-2 virus from any patient sample. Though some scientists—notably, in Australia, China, Canada, United Kingdom, Germany, and New Zealand—claim to have purified a coronavirus from a patient sample, upon closer examination, their allegations appear to be baseless in light of the meticulous research conducted by biostatistician Christine Massey, M.Sc.

Calling upon that research, Massey has sent, over the span of a year, numerous Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests to more than one hundred health institutions around the world. The results of her requests are alarming, yet not surprising. All of the responses confirm that there is, as she puts it, no record of “isolation/purification of SARS-CoV-2 having been performed by anyone, ever, anywhere on the planet.”

(For those of you who are unfamiliar with the isolation/purification procedure, I refer you to Dr. Andrew Kaufman’s analysis of the process. He uses six criteria (developed by Dr. Thomas Rivers, who modified Koch’s postulates) for detecting viral disease in the following manner: first, isolate the virus from the diseased host; second, cultivate the virus in host cells; third, provide proof of filterability; fourth, produce the same disease in a new host; fifth, re-isolate the virus; sixth, detect a specific immune response to the virus.)

Also, according to Massey’s research, not only has the original SARS-CoV-2 never been isolated/purified, but it is no surprise that, as of this book’s publication, no lab had isolated/purified samples of the alleged “Delta variant” either.

Most importantly, the World Health Organisation—the main fear-mongering machine driving people into a state of panic by its unsubstantiated claims—does not have in its possession an isolate of the original 2019 novel coronavirus, nor does it have in its possession an isolate from any other variant—including the latest “Omicron variant.”

What the WHO does have in its possession, though, is a computer-generated genomic sequence of the purported 2003 SARS-CoV virus, transmitted in early 2020 by Dr. Christian Drosten and his colleagues from the Berlin Virology Institute at Charité Hospital (an institution that, not incidentally, is generously financed by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation). Eurosurveillance, a weekly peer-reviewed medical journal based in Europe, confirmed this point at the onset of the pseudo pandemic on January 23, 2020, when it made the following assertion:

“We report on the establishment and validation of a diagnostic workflow for 2019-nCoV screening and specific confirmation [using the RT-PCR test], designed in absence of available virus isolates or original patient specimens. Design and validation were enabled by the close genetic relatedness to the 2003 SARS-CoV, and aided by the use of synthetic nucleic acid technology.”

Therefore, given the preceding facts, we can conclude that, not only has no one isolated/purified the virus, but there is no scientific evidence to support the fraudulent claim that we are dealing with a “novel” variant of the 2002/03 SARS coronavirus.

Summary of 2020 Scenarios

We had two different scenarios taking place in 2020. I will summarize each below.

In one scenario, we saw people with an inflammatory event marked by fever, congestion, loss of appetite, elevated white blood cell count, and malaise. All of these symptoms are what would be expected when a possible new variant of a coronavirus or any other virus triggers the innate immune system—and eventually the adaptive immune system—to do what it always does in order to bring us back into balance with a new genomic update from a virus. Let’s remember, coronaviruses provide genetic information that regenerates our bodies; they work on our behalf and are not infecting us with diseases.

In the other scenario, we saw people with serious, sometimes multiple comorbidities eventually succumbing to a toxicology event, as described by Dr. Bush in the long quotation above.

Granted, in both scenarios the coronavirus is present, but only benignly. As I clarified earlier, a virus does not try to take over the mechanics of any cell in the body. It does not cause or force anything. It is simply present—another example of guilt by association, just like the false link between the HIV virus and AIDS that I related in Chapter One.

However, instead of differentiating between the two scenarios, public health officials everywhere, instructed by the utterly corrupt WHO leadership, conveniently grouped them under a single category: COVID-19. They did this by using the monstrously inappropriate and inaccurate RT-PCR test, which its inventor Kary Mullis insisted (before his untimely death in August 2019) was not meant to diagnose disease but was designed simply to ascertain the presence of a viral load.

Despite its easy-to-falsify-and-thus-frequently-falsified results, the PCR test is still being used around the world as a replacement for clinical analysis. Why? The only logical answer is that testing for the coronavirus is a form of control meant to create public hysteria. Not understanding that most positive readings are fraudulent, that the scary words “positive case” do not signify the presence of an infection, and that asymptomatic people can neither have nor spread disease, the public has been deceived into believing that a dangerous pathogen is killing a large percentage of the population. Therefore, what we are witnessing, in reality, is nothing more than a pandemic of “PCR test positive cases,” not of “COVID-19 positive cases.”

By fanning fear, governments around the world have been able to justify harmful, totally ineffective lockdown measures and mask mandates as well as nonsensical physical distancing measures.

But why intentionally induce panic and why clamp down like dictators?

Politicians and public health officials must be either obeying threatening orders or taking irresistible bribes or just following instructions from their superiors, naïvely believing that they are doing the “right thing” in the interest of public safety. In most cases, they have to be induced, by hook or by crook, to persuade citizens to take part in the largest medical experiment in history—a worldwide mass “vaccination” campaign devised for the purpose of injecting every compliant human with an untested, unapproved, experimental gene-therapy called COVID-19 mRNA. (In many places, like parts of Europe, parts of North America, Saudi Arabia, China, and Tajikistan, even the unwilling are compelled to submit to the COVID-19 needle.)

The parallels between the “AIDS epidemic” and the “COVID-19 pandemic” are too striking to ignore. Both feature, as the central actor, a benign virus that can conveniently be blamed as the root cause of a professed disease, despite the absence of any peer-reviewed, truly scientific evidence to support that assertion. Also, in both cases the virus can be used as a cover to obscure decades of environmental degradation spawned by government and corporate entities, whose ringleaders never pay for their crimes in fines or jail time. Finally, in both cases, the virus story provides immense profits to the global pharmaceutical industry, which is never held financially liable for the injuries and deaths caused by its vaccines or its drugs—the latter as long as they are not discovered to be the real cause of death (think AZT).


 

Chapter IV

Ignoring the Wreckage

 

Instead of coming to terms with how we are destroying our habitat, instead of learning the lessons nature has been trying to teach us over the past twenty months, most of us have ignored the wreckage and have refused to be taught. If anything, humanity has only intensified its war against nature during the past year’s pseudo pandemic.

For example, since January of 2020, 129 billion face masks (most of them made from polypropylene) and 65 billion latex gloves have been disposed of every month, according to a study published in Environmental Science & Technology. A significant portion of this waste will eventually end up in the world’s oceans, where it will take the form of polluting microplastics. Then there are the billions upon billions of plastic and paper food containers that have been used—and discarded—as a result of the pandemic-created surge in takeout food orders when restaurants were closed to dine-in customers.

And that’s only part of the environmental damage being wrought by this scam of all scams. Governments around the world—notably, in China and Italy—are spraying cancer-causing biocides into the atmosphere. That act of madness, an effort to contain or destroy the unjustifiably feared virus, subjects pedestrians to still more harmful chemicals. These disinfectants will eventually end up in the tap water of millions of households. In short, we have no idea of the consequences that biocides may be having on the microbiome and on our long-term health.

Medical Professionals Silenced

Meanwhile, hundreds if not thousands of medical professionals and scientists around the world have dared to stand on their oath to do no harm and to follow their conscience by telling the truth about the devastating consequences of adhering to the fake pandemic’s mandates.

These brave men and women—all of whom are either physicians or PhDs and thus have the title “Dr.”—include Robert Malone, inventor of the mRNA and DNA vaccine technology; pediatrician Lawrence Palevsky; primary care physician Vladimir Zelenko; former NIAID scientist Judy Mikovits; attorney, physician, and America’s Frontline Doctors founder Simone Gold; family physician Stephen Malthouse; microbiologist Sucharit Bhakdi; associate professor of viral immunology Byram Bridle; pediatrician Paul Thomas; cardiologist Richard Fleming; emergency room and family physician Patrick Philips; pathologist Roger Hodkinson; and former Pfizer Chief Science Officer Mike Yeadon, to name but a few.

Each has raised serious concerns about the potential side effects these never-tested-or-approved-or-used “vaccines” may have on human health. And, for speaking out, each is being threatened and censored and worse. Collectively, their apprehensions range from (1) the possible effects that Lipid Nano Particles (LNPs) may be having on the human brain to (2) how the use of polyethylene glycol (PEG) may be causing anaphylactoid immune reactions to (3) how the artificially induced spike proteins that travel throughout the human body may be producing blood clotting disorders in different parts of the body to (4) how these excess spike proteins, which are a neurovascular toxin to the body, may be causing myocarditis (inflammation of the heart muscle) in children and young adults.

One way medical practitioners are being bullied is through the strong-arm tactics of the agencies that licence them to practice. For instance, Canada’s College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario (CPSO) issued an ominous statement in late April 2020 threatening to remove the licence to practice medicine of any doctor who publicly spoke out against—or even raised questions about—the harmful side effects of lockdowns and/or the COVID vaccines that they witnessed while working on the frontlines in their local hospitals and communities. In the US, the process of removing a doctor’s license is slightly different, but the end result is the same. Each state has its own Medical Board that can temporarily suspend a medical license without a hearing if “the Board finds that Licensee’s conduct has breached the standard of care and has placed the health and safety of many of his patients at risk of harm.”

Other attempts to prevent vital scientific information from reaching the public include the discrediting and stifling of medical practitioners, doctors, and scientists by Big Tech mainstream social media platforms like Google’s YouTube. This should come as no surprise, since Google, which was created by the CIA, also has major ties to pharmaceutical companies like GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), registered in England. These individuals are also being deplatformed from Facebook—another DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency)/CIA-created private company—as well as by Instagram, Amazon Web Services (AWS), LinkedIn, and Twitter.

Alternative Treatments Available?

Worse yet, doctors have faced extreme censorship for providing evidence that there are indeed viable, effective, and inexpensive treatments for COVID-19—treatments that obviate the need for a “vaccine.” For instance, all of the physicians mentioned above, plus hundreds more from many countries, have not only praised but have repeatedly demonstrated the effectiveness of anti-malarial drugs chloroquine (CQ) and hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) and other remedies like Ivermectin, azithromycin, doxycycline, and zinc, in treating their COVID-19 patients. They have proven, for example, that CQ and HCQ, when administered in small prescribed doses, exert relatively few to no adverse effects. Numerous studies out of South Korea, China, and France bear further witness to that fact.

Nevertheless, government health agencies—the FDA, the NIH, and the CDC in the US, the MHRA in the UK, and Health Canada—as well as the WHO continually ban these inexpensive treatments, try to discourage people from using them, and, with the mainstream media’s complicity, make provably false claims about them.

To find out why this suppression of effective treatments is occurring, we need look no further than the FDA’s Emergency Use Authorization for Vaccines (EUA) to Prevent COVID-19 that was issued in October 2020. On page six of this document, under Section lll, Criteria and Consideration for the Issuance of an EUA for a COVID-19 Vaccine, the last bullet point clearly states that the FDA may issue an EUA only if the FDA has determined that “there is no adequate, approved, and available alternative to the product for diagnosing, preventing, or treating the disease or condition.” This statement means that the entire premise of the EUA is based on a presupposition that there is no alternative intervention available.

In reality, there are several inexpensive off-patent products to choose from, as we cited above—and as the FDA well knows. However, if it were to allow a cheap and readily available product like HCQ to dominate the market, the pharmaceutical industry—which appears to dictate policy to the FDA—would stand to lose billions in sales of COVID-19 vaccines.

So, is greed behind Big Pharma’s concealment of life-saving information on these efficacious alternative products? Most assuredly. And will Big Pharma’s cozy relationships with government agencies (think “revolving door,” “regulatory capture,” and “big payoffs”) and with the news media (heavily dependent upon pharmaceutical advertising) continue to prevent word of the alternatives from reaching the public? It would seem so. In other words, the EUA for the COVID-19 vaccines would surely have run into a major roadblock had the truth about other cures and treatments been allowed to be widely shared instead of censored, ignored, and hidden.

Inconvenient Data

But because that truth has been suppressed, “COVID-19 vaccine” deaths are mounting. As of September 2021, at least 24,000 people in the twenty-seven countries comprising the European Union (EU) have died from being injected with these gene-altering devices, according to data collected by EudraVigilance. In the US, meanwhile, more than 19,000 people have succumbed to the shots, according to the data supplied to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS).

The US figure is shocking: It means that these experimental injections have caused more deaths in a six-month period than has the combination of seventy different approved vaccines in circulation over the last thirty years. As if that weren’t bad enough, a Harvard Pilgrim Health Care study concluded that only 1% of injuries and deaths from all vaccines in the US are ever reported to VAERS. Even if the reporting is as high as 10%, that’s still low compared to the actual statistics.

Equally dire, VAERS data reveals there has been a fiftyfold increase in ectopic pregnancies following the introduction of the gene-therapy COVID-19 injections. That is, fifty times more pregnant women have suffered from this condition after taking the COVID-19 shot than they did from all vaccines given to them over the previous thirty years. (Ectopic pregnancy, also referred to as extrauterine pregnancy, is when a fertilized egg grows outside a woman’s uterus, somewhere else in her belly. It is life-threatening to the mother and needs medical attention immediately.)

Yet the COVID-19 gene-modification injections are still being aggressively pushed by the propagandists and their unscientific, unproven theories—and this despite overwhelming evidence that asymptomatic spread is not possible; that to remain healthy we do not need these injections, which have been proven to be neither safe nor effective; that COVID-19 is nowhere near as life-threatening as it was predicted to be; and that children need no protection from this virus. Besides, notwithstanding their insistence to the contrary, there is no proof that SARS-CoV-2 exists, much less causes COVID-19.

Governments around the world continue to bribe, threaten, and coerce citizens—in direct violation of the Nuremburg Code and only ostensibly “in the interest of public health”—into submitting to these injections. For instance, on December 1, 2021, the president of the European Commission (EC), Ursula von der Leyen, urged European Union member states to consider implementing mandatory COVID jabs within the EU. Since one-third of Europe’s population is not “vaccinated,” this draconian measure, if put into effect, would strip approximately 150 million people of their right to bodily autonomy.

Those of us who have been researching and reading about this subject since its inception know that it has never been about preserving public health. It has always been about the goal of implementing a global biosecurity plan and a transhumanist control grid that, if allowed to come to fruition, would signify the end of the human species.

This manufactured crisis has provided the perfect launching pad for biodigital convergence to take place. For those of you who think the notion of combining the human body with digital systems is hyperbole or fantasy, may I draw your attention to the “Exploring Biodigital Convergence” paper issued February 11, 2020, by Policy Horizons Canada. The document indicates that the Canadian policy steering committee has discussed the frightening concept of altering the evolution of the human body through the integration of biological and digital nano-technologies. Indeed, it turns out that the broad genetic modification of the human species being engineered by the experimental COVID-19 injections is just the first phase of this transhumanist convergence.

As if the Canadian paper were not alarming enough, elsewhere an even greater menace to humanity is being rolled out. In May of 2021, the UK Ministry of Defence issued a “Human Augmentation—The Dawn of a New Paradigm” document. It was worked on by the UK’s Development, Concept and Doctrine Centre (DCDC) in partnership with the German Bundeswehr Office for Defence Planning. Their purpose is “to understand the future implications of human augmentation (HA), setting the stage for more detailed defence research and development.” By incorporating research from German, Swedish, Finnish, and UK defence specialists, the DCDC project attempts to better apprehend how emerging technologies, such as genetic engineering, brain-computer interfaces, and bioinformatics, can further enhance security and defence capabilities. Although it is being touted as a strategic tool for military use, HA will undoubtedly, like the development of so many military programs throughout history, be eventually deployed for use in the civilian sector.

The vaccine passports (vaxxports) being rolled out by a large number of national governments are just the tip of the dystopian iceberg. Granted, for the moment they are being used only as a tool to punish individuals who refuse to surrender their bodily autonomy to the biomedical gene editing injection. But vaxxports will soon extend beyond that purpose: They are the transition from our would-be controllers not being able to completely dominate us (by not complying, we manage to retain some of our individual autonomy and sovereignty) to our total subservience to the IoT (Internet of Things) and IoB (Internet of Bodies) and the CBDC (Central Bank Digital Currency). In the latter stage, unelected technocrat rulers become our supreme masters and we their “own nothing and be happy” slaves.

I must say in no uncertain terms: The transhumanist projects in Canada, in the UK/Europe, and likely surreptitiously in other countries, combined with our willful destruction of the ecosystem, are the two greatest existential threats facing humanity today. Perhaps ever.

Concluding Remarks

We are being relentlessly bombarded by a belief that lays blame squarely on one ancient virus (including its variants) as the sole culprit causing a global health crisis. Yet there exists not a shred of evidence proving that the virus called SARS-CoV-2 causes a disease named COVID-19. This myopic view is preventing us from understanding the true, helpful nature of viruses, as we have detailed above. For, viruses are our friends.

Moreover, this view is blinding us to the real ecological disaster unfolding around us, which viruses are trying to help us uncover and recover from. Not only is humanity marching towards its own extinction but it is also moving rapidly away from science and is instead suffocating in technocratic anti-science dogma—a dogma that has turned into a rigid religion whose adherents worship many deities, two of whom are named “Vaccines” and “Technology.”

As I observed at the beginning of this book, we are living in unprecedented times, in which humans can be genetically altered beyond recognition and the natural world is being ravaged almost beyond repair.

Yet, though these threats are lethal, there are also signs of hope. It is not too late to envision another possible path—one that does not point to our doom but, rather, invites us to accept that humanity has been made, from the beginning, to be an intrinsic part of nature. If we learn from the errors of our ways, we have a window of opportunity to step back from the abyss of transhumanism and species extinction. We can instead embrace our beautiful planet with all of its glorious biodiversity—an earth teeming with abundant life that offers a glimpse of the perfect universe made by God, Spirit, and bestowed on divinity’s spiritual creation.

Let us allow our good earth and our innate goodness to be made apparent instead of obscured and eventually annihilated. Earth and every man, woman, child, and creature inhabiting it are actually infinite, eternal, divine ideas created by an infinite, eternal, divine Mind. It is time for us to acknowledge this truth—and demonstrate it in our lives.


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[Links to Parts I to XI are provided at the bottom of this article.]

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” —(George Santayana)[1]

Bad Students of History

General Vo Nguyen Giap, the great military strategist[2] and political leader who led Vietnamese communist forces to victories in successive wars against Japan, France[3], South Vietnam and the United States, once famously said:

“the imperialists are bad students. Yes. We taught them the right lessons, didn’t we? But they learn the lessons badly, although they are lessons of historical significance: the debacle in Algeria, in Cuba – the stinging debacle in Vietnam. Well, these are events that herald and have contributed to the collapse of colonialism and also to the inevitable collapse of neocolonialism. However, these students, bad students, want to repeat grades”.[4]

Later on, in the same vein, Gideon Rose argued in a penetrating look at American wars over the last century[5] that time and again American Presidents and their advisers have focused more on beating up the enemy than on the need for careful postwar planning. Such a phenomenon, which challenges the Clausewitzian dictum that war is simply a continuation of political intercourse with the addition of other means[6], led them to blindly stumble into turmoil during the final stages of almost each and every major conflict from World War I to Iraq and Afghanistan.

The latter experiences were the most prominent examples of this phenomenon, not an exception to the rule. As U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) commander Tommy Franks put it to the deputy Secretary of defense on the eve of the second Iraq war, “you pay attention to the day after, I’ll pay attention to the day of”[7]. In reality, though, history will recall that nothing of the sort has come about.

Likewise, after its year-long genocidal war on Gaza – which now threatens to become a full-scale regional conflict, or worse, after Netanyahu’s decision to assassinate Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah[8] and wreak havoc on Lebanon, a country Israel hopes to colonize as well, as part of its messianic or irredentist Zionist folly of an “Eretz Yisrael Hoshlema” (Greater Israel)[9] – Israel finds itself in the exact same above-mentioned predicament of its American closest ally, supplier of deadly arms, and unconditional diplomatic shielder. As Gideon Rose rightly pointed out, “lessons from previous wars can serve as cognitive blinders, narrowing the way officials think about the situations they face, and power can be a trap, underwriting hubris and folly”. In 2001, Benjamin Netanyahu said:

“We must beat them up, not once but repeatedly, beat them up so it hurts so badly, until it’s unbearable.”[10]

Precisely because the notion of “war-as-combat” is deeply ingrained in the thinking of both American and Israeli militaries and peoples at large, and the essential political aspects of the war are often neglected, if not lost in the fog of war, it is more than doubtful that current American and Israeli policymakers think clearly about what they are doing today and how to ward off a looming doom; and notwithstanding the fact that their two countries are the strongest powers in the world and in the Middle East region respectively, they will likely stumble miserably once again, and will therefore have nobody to blame but themselves for failing to understand that there’s no military solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Only a political settlement – one characteristically off the beaten track, or once discarded as illusory or too radical – can achieve this desired goal.

Israel/Palestine: One State, or Two States?

So, if the two-state solution proposed by the Oslo Accords has failed and seems more remote than ever, if not definitely dead 30 years on, isn’t it about time to consider alternatives to the prevailing untenable status quo, or even worse, to endless war? All the more so since the illusion that the conflict can be ignored or “managed” has been shattered in a resounding manner in October 2023. The current bout of fighting is forcing the U.S., the EU and regional powers to reassess their old approaches and reappraise the wrong and costly assumption that they can safely ignore the conflict.

Nowadays, it appears that the old/new idea of a “one-state” between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River – a democratic state, with full and equal rights for the populations residing in Israel, East Jerusalem, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip, as citizens – is the best workable option and, most importantly, the only durable solution to an intractable conflict that has lasted too long and cost too much blood and treasure.

After all, if we properly take stock of past experiences, can’t we justifiably ask what if self-determination for both Palestinians and Israelis is not necessarily based on territory but on citizen’s rights?

This idea of a single state is not new. Back in 1930 already, rabbi, scholar and political activist Judah Leon Magnes wrote an essay[11] in which, in contradistinction to the then Zionist leadership, he expressed his strong preference for the establishment of a bi-national, Jewish and Arab state through an agreement with Palestine’s Arab population[12]. And when the Peel Commission made its 1937 recommendations about partition and population transfer for Palestine, Magnes sounded the alarm by saying:

“With the permission of the Arabs we will be able to receive hundreds of thousands of persecuted Jews in Arab lands […] Without the permission of the Arabs even the four hundred thousand [Jews] that now are in Palestine will remain in danger, in spite of the temporary protection of British bayonets. With partition a new Balkan is made”[13].

And in an article in Foreign Affairs magazine in January 1942, he suggested a joint British-American initiative to prevent the division of mandatory Palestine. This move was followed, pursuant to the Biltmore Conference[14], by the foundation – with Henrietta Szold[15] – of a small bi-nationalist party called “Ihud” (Unity). In 1946, Magnes again opposed the partition plan before the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry in Jerusalem and submitted 11 objections to partition to the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine[16]. Finally, by mid-1948, when the conflict between the Jews and Arabs of Palestine was in full swing, Magnes expressed the hope that if a Jewish state were declared, the United States would impose economic sanctions; and also supported a 1948 U.S. trusteeship proposal, in which the UN would freeze the partition decision and force both sides into a trusteeship with a temporary government ruling Palestine, until conditions suited another arrangement. During the 1948 War, he lobbied for an armistice, and proposed a plan for a federation between Israel and a Palestinian state which he called the “United States of Palestine”, under which the two states would be which he called the “United States of Palestine”, under which the two states would be independent, but operate joint foreign and defense policies, with Jerusalem as the shared capital. Magnes predicted that even if a Jewish state was established and defeated the Arabs, it would experience a never-ending series of wars with the Arabs[17].

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February 1956 Map of UN Partition Plan for Palestine, adopted 29 Nov 1947, with boundary of previous UNSCOP partition plan added in green. (From the Public Domain)

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The notion of a one state in all of historic Palestine was espoused by Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) in its original charter[18] in 1964, which called for the establishment of a single, democratic, and secular state for Jews, Muslims and Christians. The PLO only abandoned the idea in the context of the diplomatic negotiations within the framework of the Oslo Accords; hence fundamentally swinging its ideological compass and reorienting its political struggle and efforts toward the realization of the two-state path to peace. 

With the benefit of hindsight, one can say that the PLO’s historic choice was a huge sacrifice, incommensurate with the petty initial “rewards” of a peace process which eventually led nowhere but to an equally historic, and furthermore tragic, impasse.

As the peace process started to show signs of fraying at the edges in the late 1990s, an increasing number of analysts started to suggest acknowledging a “one-state reality”[19] – an ambiguous reference to the continued entanglement of Israelis and Palestinians on the ground – as the starting point for negotiating a workable solution. 

Thus, the Palestinian-American academic Edward Said wrote:

“It is time to question whether the entire process begun in Oslo in 1993 is the right instrument for bringing peace between Palestinians and Israelis. It is my view that…real peace can come only with a binational Israeli-Palestinian state.”[20]

In 2003, as we referred to earlier[21], Tony Judt stated that:

“The time has come to think the unthinkable. The two-state solution – the core of the Oslo process and the present “road map” – is probably already doomed. With every passing year we are postponing an inevitable, harder choice that only the far right and the far left have so far acknowledged, each for its own reasons. The true alternative facing the Middle East in coming years will be between an ethnically cleansed Greater Israel and a single, integrated, binational state of Jews and Arabs, Israelis and Palestinians.”

In the same year, Ari Shavit wrote an insightful article[22] in which he quoted two popular Israeli figures. Meron Benvenisti was one of them. Deputy mayor of Jerusalem from 1971 to 1978, a columnist and author, Benvenisti said:

“We are living in a binational reality, and it is a permanent given. What we have to do is adapt our thinking and our concepts to this reality”. “The conclusion is that the seemingly rational solution of two states for two nations can’t work here. The model of a division into two nation-states is inapplicable. It doesn’t reflect the depth of the conflict and doesn’t sit with the scale of the entanglement that exists in large parts of the country. You can erect all the walls in the world here but you won’t be able to overcome the fact that there is only one aquifer here and the same air and that all the streams run into the same sea. You won’t be able to overcome the fact that this country will not tolerate a border in its midst.”

The other figure was Haim Hanegbi, a journalist for the Israeli daily Maariv. He argued that if Israel remains a colonialist state in its character, it will not survive. Maybe, he added, “in the end we have to create a new, binational Israel, just as a new, multiracial South Africa was created.”

Prof. Joel Kovel[23], who approaches the subject from an Israeli perspective, argued that “Israel is an incorrigible human rights offender because, by discriminating against Arabs, it is guilty of state-sponsored racism”. Considering that Zionism and democracy are essentially incompatible, Kovel concludes that a two-state solution is fundamentally hopeless as it concedes too much to the regressive forces of nationalism, wherein lie the roots of continued conflict, and believes therefore that the best hope for peace in Israel is to return to the idea of a one-state solution, where Jews and Palestinians can co-exist in a secular democracy.

Speaking presciently about the future of Palestine[24] back in 2010, John Mearsheimer said:

“The story I will tell is straightforward. Contrary to the wishes of the Obama administration and most Americans – to include many American Jews – Israel is not going to allow the Palestinians to have a viable state of their own in Gaza and the West Bank. Regrettably, the two-state solution is now a fantasy. Instead, those territories will be incorporated into a “Greater Israel,” which will be an apartheid state bearing a marked resemblance to white-ruled South Africa.  Nevertheless, a Jewish apartheid state is not politically viable over the long term. In the end, it will become a democratic bi-national state, whose politics will be dominated by its Palestinian citizens. In other words, it will cease being a Jewish state, which will mean the end of the Zionist dream”. In sum, “there are great dangers ahead for the Palestinians, who will continue to suffer terribly at the hands of the Israelis for some years to come. But it does look like the Palestinians will eventually get their own state, mainly because Israel seems bent on self-destruction.”

Even the Israeli strategic analyst Yossi Alpher, who does not agree with the one-state option, noted that:

“By 2017, Israel and Palestine were slowly sliding down a slippery slope towards a single political entity.”[25]

Making or Breaking Hope for Peace in the City of Peace

It is against this bleak backdrop that, on 1 March 2018, a new initiative based on the old idea emerged when the “One-State Foundation” was launched.[26] The initiative holds:

“first, that the current situation in Palestine and Israel is untenable; second, that the negotiating process that emanated from the Madrid Peace Conference and Oslo Accords on the basis of a two-state solution has reached a dead end as the final status issues degraded to become effectively non-negotiable; third, that this obstructs the realization of the hopes and aspirations of the Palestinian and Israeli peoples; fourth, that the time has come to rethink the question in its entirety; and, fifth, that any new thinking has to reflect realities on the ground and, above all, the reality that more than fifty years after the Israeli occupation of the whole of Palestine, a form of unity over political, economic, and security matters already exists.”[27]

In recent years, and particularly since the resurgence of the polemical issue of annexation, beginning in the fall of 2019, a substantial debate over the One-State reality has raged between proponents of the two-state “international consensus” and those of the one-state “alternative”, both among and between Palestinians and Israelis, and on the global stage. In the West, the one-state alternative has been boosted over the years by quite knowledgeable academics and militants such as Edward Said, Tony Judt, John Mearsheimer, Ian Lustick, Virginia Tilley, Ilan Pappé, Avi Shlaim, Shlomo Sand, and Ali Abunimah, the Palestinian-American co-founder of Electronic Intifada. 

A significant milestone in this regard was registered when four well-known professors published an article in Foreign Affairs magazine entitled “Israel’s One-State Reality.”[28] In this essay, the authors argue that the two-state solution is dead because there is already a one-state reality, no matter what anyone thinks. In other words, between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River, only one state, namely Israel, controls the entry and exit of people and goods, oversees security, and has the capacity to impose its decisions, laws, and policies on millions of people without their consent. A one-state reality, the academics go on to say, could, in principle, be based on democratic rule and equal citizenship, but such an arrangement is not on offer at the moment. Forced to choose between Israel’s Jewish identity and liberal democracy, Israel has chosen the former; it has locked in a system of Jewish supremacy, wherein non-Jews are structurally discriminated against or excluded in a tiered scheme: some non-Jews have most of, but not all, the rights that Jews have, while most non-Jews live under severe segregation, separation, and domination. They, therefore, see no real prospect of negotiating a Palestinian state, and are of the opinion that the United States should acknowledge this reality, denounce it, impose sanctions on Israel, while putting an end to its efforts against BDS movement and refraining from leading those aiming at normalization of relations between Israel and its Arab neighbors.

Reacting furiously to this essay, well-known pro-Zionist Elliot Abrams published an article[29], which he concluded by saying that by publishing this article, Foreign Affairs has “served only one useful purpose: to show us the state of academia. There, the view that one Jewish state is one too many is widely and indeed increasingly popular”, and that those who believe otherwise are “well-advised” to learn from this article that “the goal of many of today’s academic critics is not to reform the state of Israel. The goal is to eliminate it.”

Asked by his Aljazeera interviewer[30] to give his opinion about this debate, and on his own preferred solution, six months before the outburst of the ongoing war on Gaza, Noam Chomsky indicated that there was something wrong with that debate, because it’s omitting a third alternative, namely the one that is being systematically implemented by Israel, ever since 1969 or so: the creation of a ‘Greater Israel’, which will take over. If you want to talk about long-term outcomes, he added,

“you can’t just talk about one state and two states. You have to talk about what’s happening, ‘Greater Israel’. I understand the reasoning of the one-state advocates, but I think … it’s almost inconceivable that Israel will ever agree to destroy itself and become a Jewish minority population in a Palestinian-dominated state, which is what the demography indicates. And there’s no international support for it. Nothing.”

So, his own personal feeling is that the real options are ‘Greater Israel’, or move towards some kind of two-state arrangement. It’s often claimed, he concluded, that that’s now impossible because of the enormous settlement project. Maybe, maybe not. I think if the United States insists, decides to join the rest of the world in supporting some kind of two-state settlement, not just rhetorically, but in practice, Israel will be faced with a very serious decision.”

As for Israeli historian Ilan Pappé, he sees signs that the ideological hold of Zionism is weakening, and a freer, more democratic Palestine may be possible, telling DemocracyNow!:

“I think we are seeing processes, important processes, that are leading to the collapse of the Zionist project. Hopefully, the Palestinian national movement and anyone else involved in Israel and Palestine would be able to replace this apartheid state, this oppressive regime, with a democratic one for everyone who lives between the river and the sea and for all the Palestinians who were expelled from there since 1948 until today.” He added: “I am really hopeful that there will be a different kind of life for both Jews and Arabs between the river and the sea under a democratic, free Palestine.”[31]

Although polls differ greatly on how Palestinians view the one-state solution, it seems that a half century of crushing Israeli occupation is convincing more and more people in Palestine that the one-state reality is an unbearable fact of everyday life that is not likely to change in the foreseeable future, hence pushing them to support bi-nationalism.

Abdel Monem Said Aly has probably summed up correctly what Palestinians and Israelis alike think about the idea when he said that Palestinians who oppose the idea of a one-state solution argue that a state based on full and equal citizenship between Arabs and Jews could never really exist and that a single state for both would merely be an extension of the current one in which, after seven decades, Israeli Arabs remain second-class citizens. Indeed, the Palestinians have long resisted the Israeli concept of the single state, which in the current de facto version translates into occupation with apartheid on top of it. The Palestinians are also well aware that no Israeli government – let alone the current most far-right and racist one in the whole history of the “Jewish state” – would consider a binational alternative in which they were in the majority. 

On the other hand, Israeli opponents, who are more numerous, hold that the Zionist project was and remains the establishment of a state with a Jewish majority – something that could not be sustained given current Palestinian population growth rates, which would reduce Jewish Israelis in the future to a minority status.

As a matter of fact, the feeling that another day of conflict will ultimately bring victory continues to prevail on both sides. Still, the many objections do not diminish the fact that the status quo and ongoing occupation create a volatile situation with all the conditions for uprisings, resistance, and at times full-scale war. 

On account of the above, if the two-state alternative to the status quo is unreachable, then the one-state alternative could be laid out with solutions for the different objectors on both sides. This would involve a broad restructuring of the existing political system, whether beginning with the Israeli government’s conferral of citizenship on Palestinian Arabs in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip or beginning with the creation of a new state altogether. Moreover, mechanisms such as subjecting legislation on vital or constitutional issues to a two-thirds majority vote, or to a minority veto, or some combinations thereof, have been floated to prevent a majoritarian state in which the demographic majority, whether Jewish or Arab, would govern unilaterally.

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Demonstration against Israeli annexation of the West Bank, Rabin Square, Tel Aviv-Yafo, June 6, 2020 (Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0)

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Some other proponents advocate a binational or consociational arrangement where a federation or confederation would jointly manage economic matters, security, and Jerusalem as a common capital, but maintain separate political structures for Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs on some matters of civil law.

While confederation reflects the existing realities of a multifaceted interdependence between the two sides, it also resolves the citizenship crux of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: the Israelis would always have majority status in their own state and its security, and the Palestinians would have their state with a legitimate place in the Council of Jerusalem, which would be the capital of the confederation. Both the Israeli and Palestinian states would be in a position to interact with their Arab neighbors without animosity for Israel or dependency for the Palestinians. Both would have all symbols of the state from the flag to the seat in the UN, and above all their chosen identities along with the privileges of peace and space throughout historic Palestine.[32]

In the conclusion of her powerfully argued recent book[33], Palestinian-born Academic Ghada Karmi says that the tremendous obstacles facing the “one democratic state solution” may be daunting to some of those who support it in theory, but the fact that something is difficult to realize does not make it any less the right thing to do; nor does the attainment of this solution hinge solely on the wishes of Israel and its supporters. Other factors, she believes, “though now unforeseen or thought improbable”, could intervene and alter the situation dramatically. If and when they do, such events “will merely dictate the pace and timing of the one democratic state solution. But the concept itself must have been established long before, not as an immediately attainable goal perhaps, but as a vision, an aspiration and a belief in the ultimate humanity of Palestinians and Jews and all who wish them to prosper”.

This “humanity” was precisely the subject of a groundbreaking book[34] in which Richard Forer said:

“The real enemy is not someone or something outside us. The real enemy is the unexamined mind that unconsciously projects its suffering onto the other and then blames or scapegoats the other for its suffering (…) If defenders of Israel want to distinguish the source of conflict and find peace as much as they want to be right, they must inquire within. If they do, they will find that just as the real enemy is not someone or something outside us, the real conflict is not Israel versus the Palestinian people or Israel versus a hostile world. The real conflict is the fear of integrating the hard-to-believe but unmistakable reality of Israel’s treatment of Palestinians with unquestioned loyalty to the Jewish state. One consideration recognizes Israel’s dark side. The other denies it exists.”

All in all, if History is any guide – and it is indeed – we must retain its most overarching principle, which is highlighted in the epigraph: “Those who forget history are condemned to repeat it.” And if we do remember history – and we must indeed – then the following key considerations should always be duly taken into account in any reflection or negotiation about peace in the Middle East. They all stand in opposition to partition and division of the Holy Land, and point in the direction of the one democratic state from the river to the sea as the only genuinely durable solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict.

Primo: There is no military solution to the conflict. Wars, uprisings and permanent political instability have been the distinctive features of the whole Middle East since WWI. And today, for the first time ever, we’re witnessing the coming into the picture of a new and mighty regional power in a conflict which has so far involved only Arabs and Jews. Interestingly enough, Iran, a Muslim but non-Arab country, is where the oldest Jewish diaspora has been dwelling since king Nebuchadnezzar took the inhabitants of Jerusalem into captivity in 587/6 BCE. 

Secundo: In the aftermath of WWII, the world has seen an irresistible wave of decolonization that led to the emancipation of almost all former Western colonies. Israel was thus established against a historical trend of mass decolonization, thence constituting an equally historical anomaly.

Tertio: The only white settler colonies that have not been dismantled are those where the native populations have been effectively eliminated, or demographically overwhelmed by foreign settlers (chiefly in the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand). Israel, which is also a settler colony, clearly doesn’t belong to this category of settlements. It is more like South Africa, Algeria, Rhodesia, Kenya, Angola, Mozambique, or Namibia, whose native population outnumbered the white settler population, and ended up gaining their independence. As Ari Shavit observed in his article, “The Zionist dream was maimed from the outset. It didn’t take into account the presence of another national group. Therefore, from the moment the Zionist movement decided that it was not going to exterminate the Arabs, its dream became unattainable.”

Quarto: The Israel/Palestine problem has been created by Western powers – be it because of the dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire in the wake of WWI, the secret Sykes-Picot Accords of 1916, the failed British mandate for Palestine, the refusal to accept Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi Germany before, during, and after the Holocaust[35], or the Western-sponsored and ill-advised 1947 UN partition resolution. It’s then only fair and imperative that they should resolutely shoulder their moral and political responsibilities in the search and implementation of a fair solution, in the spirit of restorative justice. As for the rest of the “international community”, it has consistently supported such a solution, as evidenced by the deliberations and positive votes in the United Nations General Assembly and other international fora.  

Quinto: Throughout the ages, Arabs – who, like the Jews, are Semites and descendants of Prophet Abraham, hence equally legitimate heirs to the “Holy Land”[36] – have almost always provided protection and refuge to the Jews in Arab/Muslim lands. They have lived peacefully with one another as epitomized by the “Pact of Umar” of 638 AD, the “Golden age of Jewish culture” in Muslim-ruled Al-Andalus, Saladin’s “Announcement” of 1187, the settlement of Jews in Arab/Muslim territories after the Reconquista in the 15th century, and their physical protection by Muslim rulers and individuals during WWII. But Zionism ruined everything, as recounted by Orit Bashkin[37], Michael Warchawski[38], and Avi Shlaim[39]. It is therefore in Israelis vital and vested interest to understand that if they are to be accepted, once again, in the Arab world, they have to belong to it by integrating in it at all levels. Michael Warchawski was spot on when he said that “I believe that Israel will only be able to be at peace with the Arab world, to create relations of coexistence and neighborliness when it accepts the geopolitical reality that it is situated at the heart of the Arab world…We have made the choice to settle in the Arab world and we must assume this choice and learn to be part of it, even if it takes time.”[40]

Sexto: Jerusalem is considered a “holy city” by all three monotheistic religions, and frightening eschatological narratives and announcements about it are also present in all three of them. Fortunately, there is a growing number of religious groups[41] and organizations promoting peace through integration in Israel/Palestine. One of them is “Christians for a Free Palestine”.[42]

Perhaps the best and most candid contribution to the debate on the One-State solution is the one made by Shlomo Sand.[43] The Austrian-born to Polish Jewish survivors of the Holocaust Israeli Emeritus Professor of History at Tel Aviv University published a book in French in January 2024, translated as “Two Peoples for One State? Rereading the History of Zionism”. Although the book was written before 7 October, the professor told Middle East Eye[44] he would not have “changed a theoretical line” if he had published it after the Hamas-led attack on Israel and the subsequent war on Gaza. “Perhaps I would have specified that 7 October is a confirmation of my fears”, he clarified. Sand had this to say about the One-State solution: “We can only move towards a political organization of the two peoples in a federation or confederation. Otherwise, there will always be more disasters like 7 October and its consequences in Gaza”, and further cautioning: “Before reaching this historic compromise between the two peoples, we will experience other disasters that will make this political solution indispensable.”

In a previous interview[45] Sand answered the question “You are no longer in favor of the two-state solution?” by saying: “Eight hundred and fifty thousand Israelis, including six ministers, live in the West Bank, and these people will not be torn from the place where they live. Two million Arabs are integrated into Israel. I do not see how we can be separated. I am in favor of a kind of federation such as that advocated by Menachem Begin. People on the left bristle at the name of Begin, who is less of an extremist than Netanyahu! In his speech to the Knesset in 1977, he declared that Israel, in order not to become Rhodesia (which practiced radical apartheid), had to integrate the Arabs of Judea, Samaria and Gaza, offering them the possibility of acquiring Israeli nationality, and even land in Israel. He did not aim for a binational state, but a democratic one, which would lead to an ‘original cultural mix’”. The proposal has sparked fear among the Israeli right and rejection from the left. He concluded the interview by declaring: “I am not ‘for’ a binational state, I say that we have no other solution. There is no future here for my grandchildren without the Palestinians. So I am for a federation, a confederation, whatever (…) We must recognize the tragedy of 1948, and partially correct the injustice suffered. It is a painful process but we have no choice.”

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Birds Not Bombs: Let’s Fight for a World of Peace, Not War 

Amir Nour is an Algerian researcher in international relations, author of the books “L’Orient et l’Occident à l’heure d’un nouveau Sykes-Picot” (The Orient and the Occident in Time of a New Sykes-Picot) Editions Alem El Afkar, Algiers, 2014 and “L’Islam et l’ordre du monde” (Islam and the Order of the World),  Editions Alem El Afkar, Algiers, 2021. 

Notes

[1] Said by George Santayana (b. Jorge Agustín Nicolás Ruiz de Santayana y Borrás) in his book “Reason in Common Sense”. He was a Spanish-American philosopheressayistpoet, and novelist born in Spain and raised and educated in the United States from the age of eight. At the age of 48, he left his academic position at Harvard University and permanently returned to Europe. “The Life of Reason”, subtitled “The Phases of Human Progress”, is a book published in five volumes from 1905 to 1906. (Source: Wikipedia). This oft-quoted aphorism has been incorrectly attributed to Edmund Burke and Winston Churchill, among others.

[2] Giap was also the author of “People’s War, People’s Army: the Viet Cong Insurrection Manual for Underdeveloped Countries”, a manual of guerrilla warfare based on his own experience, published in 1961. To download the book as reproduced by the U.S. Armed Services Technical Information Agency: https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/tr/pdf/AD0292744.pdf

[3] Especially the decisive battle of Dien Bien Phu on 7 May 1945, which – together with the Algerian War of Liberation of 1954-1962 – brought the French colonialist regime to an end.

[4] Watch related video: https://x.com/nxt888/status/1691124304300363777

[5] Gideon Rose, “How Wars End: Why We Always Fight the Last Battle, A History of American Intervention from World War I to Afghanistan”, Simon & Schuster, New York, 2010.

[6] See Amir Nour, “Towards Palestine’s Independence Despite the Doom and Gloom”: https://www.globalresearch.ca/war-gaza-towards-palestine-independence-despite-doom-gloom/5848373

[7] Tommy Frank with Malcolm McConnell, “American Soldier”, HarperCollins, 2004.

[8] Ben Norton, “Hezbollah leader Nasralllah defeated ISIS, protected Lebanon’s Christians, fought Israeli colonialism”, Geopolitical Economy Report, 29 September 2024: https://youtu.be/sxYAn-Ci4jE?si=5EXXhLMfwB58egTa&sfnsn=wa

[9] The concept of “Greater Israel” has been a cornerstone in the ideological and strategic development of the Zionist movement. This idea envisions a Jewish state extending far beyond its modern borders, rooted in biblical descriptions and historical claims (“On that day the LORD made a covenant with Abram and said ‘To your descendants I give this land, from the Wadi [or river] of Egypt to the great river, the Euphrates” and “Every place on which the sole of your foot treads shall be yours. Your territory shall be from the wilderness to the Lebanon and from the River, the river Euphrates, to the western sea”. Source: Bible Gateway, Genesis 15:18 and Deuteronomy 11:24). It stretches from the “River of Egypt [the Nile] to the Perat River [the Euphrates]”, thus including parts of Egypt, modern-day Israel, the West Bank, East Jerusalem, Gaza Strip, Lebanon, Jordan, Syria, and Iraq. Central to this vision are three influential figures: Theodor Herzl, Rabbi Fischmann, and Oded Yinon. Herzl, the father of modern political Zionism, laid the groundwork with his pragmatic and diplomatic efforts. Rabbi Fischmann expanded on Herzl’s vision, emphasizing the religious and historical significance of the Promised Land. Oded Yinon introduced a strategic dimension, proposing a plan to secure Israel’s dominance through the fragmentation of neighboring states. Together, their visions and strategies have profoundly shaped Israeli policy and regional dynamics. For further information on this subject, read:

[10] In a video filmed in 2001, in which he makes a series of unguarded admissions about his first period as prime minister, from 1996 to 1999. It follows him during a visit to the West Bank settlement of Ofra to meet with the family of a man killed in a Palestinian shooting, as described in 2010 by the London-based, Middle East-focused outlet The National: “The film was shot, apparently without Mr. Netanyahu’s knowledge, nine years ago, when the government of Ariel Sharon had started reinvading the main cities of the West Bank to crush Palestinian resistance in the early stages of the second intifada. At the time Mr. Netanyahu had taken a short break from politics but was soon to join Mr. Sharon’s government as finance minister”. To watch the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mvqCWvi-nFo&t=63s

[11] Judah Leon Magnes, “Like All the Nations?”, Weiss Press, 1930.

[12] Ben Reiff, “Mandate 100, ‘Neither a Jewish State nor an Arab State’: How Zionist Bi-Nationalism Tried and Failed to Change the Face of the Middle East”, Fathom Journal, April 2020.

[13] Quoted in The New York Times edition of 18 July 1937.

[14] The Biltmore Conference was called by the Extraordinary Zionist Conference, and was held from May 6 to May 11, 1942 in New York. Due to the war, no Zionist Congress could be held that year. The Extraordinary Zionist Conference was thus called to serve a similar purpose of forming Zionist policy. The joint statement issued at the end of the session was known as the Biltmore Program. It reiterated Zionist demands for unrestricted Jewish immigration to Palestine and that Palestine should serve as a Jewish Commonwealth. (Source: The Jewish Virtual Library)

[15] Henrietta Szold was an essayist, editor, social and communal worker, and Zionist organizer. In 1912, she created “Hadassah”, the Women’s Zionist Organization of America, which later became the largest and most powerful Zionist group of the United States.

[16] Henrietta Szold was an essayist, editor, social and communal worker, and Zionist organizer. In 1912, she created “Hadassah”, the Women’s Zionist Organization of America, which later became the largest and most powerful Zionist group of the United States.

[17] Ofri Ilany, “1948 Diaries: Saving the Jews from Themselves”, Haaretz, 5 May 2008.

[18] The first version of the “Palestinian National Charter” was adopted on 28 May 1964. It was then extensively amended, with the addition of seven articles in 1968. And in April 1996, many of its articles which were deemed inconsistent with the Oslo accords were wholly or partially nullified, as is stated in the following letter from the Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat to the Israeli Prime minister Shimon Peres: http://www.pna.gov.ps/Government/gov/The_Amendment_of_the_Palestinian_National_Charter.asp

[19] David Remnik, “The One-State Reality”, The New Yorker, 10 November 2014.

[20] Edward Said, “The One-State Solution”, The New York Times magazine, 10 January 1999.

[21] See Amir Nour, “The Twilight of the Settler Colonialist Project in Palestine”, Globalresearch.ca, 17 August 2024.

[22] Ari Shavit, “Cry, the beloved two-state solution”, Haaretz, 6 August 2003.

[23] Joel Kovel, “Overcoming Zionism: Creating a Single Democratic State in Israel/Palestine”, Pluto Press, New York, 2007.

[24] John J. Mearsheimer, “The Future of Palestine: Righteous Jews vs. New Afrikaners”, at Palestine Center, Washington, D.C., 29 April 2010.

[25] Yossi Alpher, “Two States or One? Reappraising the Israeli-Palestinian Impasse”, The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 18 September 2018.

[26] To read the Democratic State Manifesto: https://onestatecampaign.org/all/en-manifesto/

[27] Abdel Monem Said Aly, “The Case for the One-State Solution”, The Cairo Review of Global Affairs, Winter 2019.

[28] Michael Barnett, Nathan Brown, Marc Lynch, and Shibley Telhami, “Israel’s One-State Reality: It’s Time to Give Up on the Two-State Solution”, Foreign Affairs magazine, May/June 2023.

[29] Elliot Abrams, “As Israel Turns 75, ‘Foreign Affairs’ Publishes a Call to Eliminate It”, Council on Foreign Relations, 9 May 2023.

[30] Eliyahu Freedman, “Q&A: Noam Chomsky on Palestine, Israel and the state of the world”, Al Jazeera Media Network, 9 April 2023.

[31] Edward Carver, “Israeli Scholar Sees Hope for Democratic Palestine ‘To Replace This Apartheid State’”, Common Dreams, 21 May 2024.

[32] Abdel Monem Said Aly, “The Case for the One-State Solution”, op. cit.

[33] Ghada Karmi, “One State: The Only Democratic Future for Palestine-Israel”, Pluto Press, London and Las Vegas, 2023.

[34] Richard Forer, “Wake Up and Reclaim Your Humanity: Essays on the Tragedy of Israel-Palestine”, MindStir Media, 2020. Boulder County, CO – The NYC Big Book Award recognized Forer as the winner in the Cultural and Social Issues category. His book tells the true story of a lifelong supporter of Israel who underwent a remarkable spiritual awakening in which he realized he was as much Muslim or Christian as Jew, and as much Palestinian as Israeli or American. Recognizing that endless conflict only leads to alienation from our true selves, Forer encourages readers to look at the documented history of the Israel-Palestine tragedy and get in touch with how they view and interpret that history. He also offers readers a path that leads to freedom from false beliefs, enemy images, and the illusion of identity to equal rights for all people and a just peace between Palestinians and Israelis.

[35] Read, among others, David S. Wyman, “The Abandonment of the Jews: America and the Holocaust, 1941-1945”, Pantheon Books, New York, 1984; and Erin Blakemore, “A Ship of Jewish Refugees Was Refused US Landing in 1939. This Was Their Fate”, History.com, 4 June 2019. For the period during and after the Holocaust, read:

Washington Report on Middle East Affairs’ article “The Origin of the Palestine-Israel Conflict Zionism and the Holocaust”, posted on 15 March 2015, and

About the “Évian Conference”, which was convened 6–15 July 1938 at Évian-les-Bains, France, to address the problem of German and Austrian Jewish refugees wishing to flee persecution by Nazi Germany. It was the initiative of US President Franklin D. Roosevelt, and agreed upon by Western European countries. The Roosevelt Plan suggested to take in 100% of Jewish Holocaust survivors. However, the World Zionist Organization refused to participate in the Conference, and other Zionist organizations, including in the US, as well as David Ben-Gurion himself, vehemently opposed it, fearing that resettlement of Jews in other states would reduce the number available for Palestine.

[36] Read in this regard, Naomi Wolf, “On the meaning of ‘God has given us the land’”, Facebook, 25 July 2014. 

[37] Orit Bashkin, “New Babylonians: A History of Jews in Modern Iraq”, Stanford University Press, 2012. In this elegantly written chronicle of the last years of the Jewish presence in Iraq, viewed mostly through the writings of Jewish intellectuals in Iraq at the time and later in Israel, and through interviews with them, Bashkin says that the relatively numerous Iraqi Jewish community was, for the most part, well integrated into Iraqi society, and many of its members consciously identified with Arabic culture, language, and literature as well as with aspects of Arab nationalism and anti-imperialism.

[38] Michael Warchawski, “Ils ont oublié ce que c’est qu’être Juif…” (They have forgotten what it is to be Jewish…), Le Peuple Breton, 21 December 2017. In this article Warchawski argues that “The Crusades, the Inquisition, the Dreyfus Affair and the Nazi Judeocide were not the work of Muslim culture, and in Arab countries the Jewish minority experienced nothing similar…The genocide of the Jews of Europe is 100% ‘made in Europe’, the product of nearly two millennia of Christian civilization. The so-called ‘Judeo-Christian civilization’ is a racist mystification, and as Jeannette Mandouze, my extraordinary classics teacher and courageous anti-Nazi resistance fighter, used to say, a hyphen often excludes a third party: Judeo-Christian excludes Muslims from the so-called ‘civilization’. Now, the link between Judeo and Christian, what has it been made of for nearly two thousand years? Of blood. If we want to talk about a civilization in which the Jews were an essential and legitimate component, let’s talk about the four centuries of Andalusia, the summit of medieval Western civilization, or the Iraqi civilization until Zionism came to rot Jewish-Muslim relations in this country… This has nothing to do with Jewish existence in Europe, where moments of calm and relative harmony are the exception and not the rule, and this continued until the twentieth century”.

[39] Avi shlaim, “Three Worlds: Memoirs of an Arab-Jew”, Oneworld Publications, 2023. In this book, Avi Shlaim tells the story of his family’s idyllic existence in 1940s Iraq, and also claims to possess “undeniable proof of Zionist involvement in terrorist attacks” targeting Jewish sites in Baghdad. He argues that these attacks were orchestrated by the Zionist underground within the country, with the aim of pressuring the hesitant Jewish community to participate in the “Aliyah” (Jewish emigration) to the newly established state of Israel.

[40] Dimitri Nicolaidis, Anne Le Strat, and Hugues Jallon, « Dépasser le sionisme ? Débat avec Ilan Greilsammer et Michel Warschawski” (Going Beyond Zionism? Debate with Ilan Greilsammer and Michel Warschawski), Mouvements 2004/3-4, 2004. To read the document: file:///C:/Users/USER/Downloads/depasser-le-sionisme.pdf

[41] See Roger Copple, “Christians, Muslims, and Jews for a Secular One-State Solution in Palestine-Israel”, The International Movement for a Just World (JUST), 28 May 2024.

[42] They present themselves as “Christians mobilizing against the weaponization of our theology and our tax dollars by Christian Zionists to perpetrate the genocide of the Palestinian people”. Christians, they say, “have a responsibility to use our voices as powerfully as possible for the cause of peace and justice”.

[43] Shlomo Sand is also the author of the best-seller book in English “The Invention of the Jewish People” (Verso, 2009), originally published in Hebrew (Resling, 2008) as “Matai ve’eich humtsa ha‘am hayehudi?” (When and How Was the Jewish People Invented?). This book has generated a heated controversy, not least because, according to Sand’s critics, it presents “dubious theories” regarding Jewish identity as historical facts. One such provocative theory espoused by Sand is the hypothesis that Ashkenazi Jews are descended from Khazars, who purportedly converted to Judaism in the early Middle Ages. Khazars are a multi-ethnic conglomerate of mostly Turkic peoples who formed a semi-nomadic khanate in and around the northern and central Caucasus and the Pontic–Caspian steppe. The hypothesis also postulated that after the collapse of their empire, the Khazars fled to Eastern Europe and made up a large part of the Jews there. (Source: Wikipedia)

[44] Hassina Mechaï, “Israeli academic Shlomo Sand: ‘Jews and Palestinians will have to live together’”, Middle East Eye, 22 August 2024.

[45] Vincent Remy, “Shlomo Sand, historien israélien: “Je ne suis pas ‘pour’ un état binational mais on n’a pas d’autre solution” (“Shlomo Sand, Israeli historian: “I am not ‘for’ a binational state but we have no other solution”), Télérama, 5 January 2024.

Featured image is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0


Links to Parts I to XI:

By Amir Nour, December 01, 2023

The War on Gaza: How the West Is Losing. Accelerating the Transition to a Multipolar Global Order?

By Amir Nour, December 04, 2023

The War on Gaza: Debunking the Pro-Zionist Propaganda Machine

By Amir Nour, December 11, 2023

The War on Gaza: Why Does the “Free World” Condone Israel’s Occupation, Apartheid, and Genocide?

By Amir Nour, December 22, 2023

The War on Gaza: How We Got to the “Monstrosity of Our Century”

By Amir Nour, January 25, 2024

The War on Gaza: Towards Palestine’s Independence Despite the Doom and Gloom

By Amir Nour, February 02, 2024

The War on Gaza: Whither the “Jewish State”?

By Amir Nour, April 17, 2024

The Twilight of the Western Settler Colonialist Project in Palestine

By Amir Nour, August 17, 2024

The War on Gaza: Perpetual Falsehoods and Betrayals in the Service of Endless Deception. Amir Nour

By Amir Nour, August 25, 2024

The War on Gaza: Why the Sustainability of the Western-Zionist Colony Is Nigh on Impossible. Amir Nour

By Amir Nour, September 07, 2024

The War on Gaza: Requiem for the Deeply Held Two-State Delusion. Amir Nour

By Amir Nour, September 21, 2024

[This article was first published by Global Research in June 2024.]

The United States has joined 12 other nations in signing a World Economic Forum (WEF) agreement that seeks to engineer global famine by destroying the agriculture industry.

According to the agreement, which was drawn up by the WEF and the United Nations (UN), food production is causing “global warming” and must be eliminated.

To “save the planet” from “climate change,” globalists insist, farms must be shut down across the world.

The WEF agreement sets targets for how much farmland each nation must eliminate in order to comply.

Under the guise of reducing “methane emissions,” thirteen nations have signed the pledge to engineer global famine by gutting agricultural production and shutting down farms.

Announced earlier this year by the WEF’s Global Methane Hub — a cabal of crisis engineers who exploit public panic to destroy the world food supply — those thirteen nations are:

  • Argentina
  • Australia
  • Brazil
  • Burkina Faso
  • Chile
  • Czech Republic
  • Ecuador
  • Germany
  • Panama
  • Peru
  • Spain
  • The United States
  • Uruguay.

Imagine no meat production from Australia, Brazil, and the USA.

This is the goal of the globalists.

And they admit it’s all part of the climate fraud which has been thoroughly exposed as a quack science hoax, by the way.

As Luis Planas, Spain’s Minister of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food says:

“I am glad to see the shared commitment by the international community to mitigate methane emissions from agriculture as a means to achieve the goals we signed for in the Paris Agreement on climate.”

“Food systems are responsible for 60% of methane emissions,” warns Marcelo Mena, CEO of the Global Methane Hub.

She is saying that farming is destroying the planet.

Hence, their demand to shut down farms.

Without farms, you have no food.

And without food, you get exactly what Kamala Harris called for over the weekend: “Reduced population.”

The depopulation agenda is no longer even a secret.

They are bragging about it.

And here’s their logic: FOOD = GLOBAL WARMING.

So they are attacking food and shutting it down.

John Kerry said in a statement:

“Mitigating methane is the fastest way to reduce warming in the short term.

“Food and agriculture can contribute to a low-methane future by improving farmer productivity and resilience.

“We welcome agriculture ministers participating in the implementation of the Global Methane Pledge.”

Cows and chickens to be replaced by crickets and insect larvae

Enjoy the crunchy fake meat patties and Cricket McNuggets.

Soon, you’ll be eating bugs because meat will be wildly unaffordable – and only available to wealthy elites – due to the governments shutting down farms and ranches.

As journalist Leo Hohmann explains:

“We can presume from this language that among the practices being considered are replacing a major portion of the beef and dairy cattle, pork, and chicken stocks that populations rely on for protein with insect larvae, mealworms, crickets, etc.

“The U.N., World Economic Forum, and other NGOs have been promoting meatless diets and the consumption of insect protein for years, and billionaires have invested in massive insect factories being built in the state of Illinois, in Canada, and in the Netherlands, where mealworms, crickets, and other bugs will be processed as additives to be inserted into the food supply, often without clear labels that will inform people of exactly what they are eating.”

Hohmann also refers to the Deagel forecast which projects an almost 70 percent reduction of the U.S. population by 2025, saying:

“There is no more efficient way to depopulate than through war, famine, and plagues.

“Isn’t it interesting that all three of these time-tested methods of murder are in play right now?

In a related story, Michael Snyder from The Economic Collapse Blog writes:

“Global food supplies just keep getting even tighter, and global hunger has risen to extremely alarming levels…

“According to the United Nations, nearly 30 percent of the global population does not have constant access to food right now, and there are approximately 900 million people that are facing ‘severe food insecurity’…”

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Introduction

Lula first came to power as Brazil’s president in January 2003. That was more than 20 years ago. 

What are the likely consequences of a renewed January 2023 Lula PT government?  

Throughout the western hemisphere as well as in Western Europe, the Left has endorsed the Lula presidency without examining the underlying implications. The 2023 Lula government has been casually categorized as a victory against US imperialism.  

In recent developments at the Kazan BRICS+ Summit, no doubt on the instructions of Washington, Lula has vetoed the accession of Venezuela’s membership to BRICS. 

 

 

Leftist Etiquette

While the “progressive” and “Leftist” labels prevail, key political appointments had already been approved by the Washington Consensus. De facto, it is a centre-rightist government “with leftist characteristics”. 

In this regard, it is important to reflect on how Brazil’s Workers Party (PT) leadership was coopted by Washington and Wall Street from the very outset prior to the 2002 elections.

In January 2003, “Leftists” meeting at the World Social Forum (WSF) in Porto Alegre applauded the inauguration of Luis Inacio da Silva as a victory against neoliberalism, without acknowledging that Lula’s PT had embraced the demands of Wall Street and the IMF. (FYI, the “progressive” World Social Forum (WSF) established in 2001 was funded by the Ford Foundation, which has historical links to the CIA.)

In the words of IMF Managing Director (April 2003)

“the IMF listens to President Lula and the economic team”.  

But that team was appointed to serve the interests of US corporate capital including Brazil’s external creditors.  In August 2002, the composition of Lula’s cabinet had already been endorsed by the Washington consensus. 

Lula had chosen a prominent Wall Street banker to head Brazil’s Central Bank, i.e. to act as a dollarized Trojan Horse on behalf of the U.S. banking cartel. Henrique de Campos Meirelles, former president and CEO of FleetBoston (Brazil’s Second largest external creditor after Citigroup) was duly chosen to head Brazil’s Central Bank. In turn, the State investment bank Banco do Brazil had been handed over to CitiGroup.

The conduct of the nation’s finances and monetary policy were in the hands of Wall Street, the IMF-World Bank and the US Federal Reserve.  In August 2002 at the height of Brazil’s election campaign:  

The International Monetary Fund agreed to provide a $30 billion rescue package aimed at restoring investor confidence in Brazil, … The unusually large loan is intended to forestall a possible default on Brazil’s $264 billion public debt. It is also intended to insulate Brazil’s vulnerable finances from the uncertainty of an October presidential election [2002], in which left-wing candidates are both leading the polls and shaking the markets.  … 

U.S. bank claims on Brazilian borrowers were $26.75 billion at the end of March [2002], with Citigroup Inc. and FleetBoston Financial Corp. having the greatest exposures, according to the Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council, a government agency. (WSJ, August 2002, emphasis added)

What does this mean?

The two key major banking institutions of the Brazilian State apparatus, namely the Banco Central do Brazil  and the giant Banco do Brazil were respectively handed over to Brazil’s two largest external creditors (quoted above), namely FleetBoston Finance Corp and Citigroup Inc.

Lula’s 2023 Cabinet

Lula’s running mate,  Vice President Geraldo José Rodrigues Alckmin Jr. (former governor of Sao Paulois an avowed neoliberal committed to privatizing State property on behalf of Brazil’s external creditors. He also has links to Opus Dei.

Fernando Haddad, former mayor of Sao Paulo, is Lula’s Finance Minister.

Victoria Nuland Goes to Brazil

The globalists’ endorsement of Lula’s candidacy was confirmed last April 2022 when neocon State Department envoy Victoria Nuland (who played a key role in the 2014 Maidan Ukraine coup d’état) on an “unofficial visit” to Brazil, categorically refused to meet president Bolsonaro.

“After promising the EU a participation in the “governance” of the Amazon and condemning the Russian Special Military Operation in Ukraine, Lula became the preferred candidate of globalist elites for this year’s electoral dispute [2022], making the cover of Time Magazine. The Brazilian hegemonic media, which was enthusiastic about the American support for the electoral system and has been campaigning strongly for electronic voting, also supports Lula, who now seems to bring together all the attributes of the globalist agenda, being aligned with green capitalism and sanctions against Russia.”  

Lula’s position with regard to the war in Ukraine was outlined in his May 2022 interview with Time Magazine:

“Putin shouldn’t have invaded Ukraine. But it’s not just Putin who is guilty. The U.S. and the E.U. are also guilty. What was the reason for the Ukraine invasion? NATO? Then the U.S. and Europe should have said: “Ukraine won’t join NATO.” That would have solved the problem.

What is the nature of his cabinet?”

A pseudo-Leftist PT Brazilian government integrated by powerful right wing elements will be serving the interests of  Wall Street and the US State Department.

The driving force is external debt, extensive privatization and the acquisition of real economic assets by the globalist financial establishment.

The geopolitics are crucial:

Washington’s intent is also to ensure that a Lula government will not in any tangible way undermine America’s hegemonic agenda.

From Washington’s Standpoint, Lula’s Track Record is “Impeccable” 

1. “He is the most popular politician on Earth. I love this guy” said Barack Obama (2007). 

2. He is a friend of George W. Bush.

3. He helped us in America’s “Peacekeeping Initiatives”. Lula not only failed to condemn the US sponsored February 28, 2004 Coup d’état in Haiti, against a duly elected and progressive president Jean Bertrand Aristide, his Workers Party (P.T.)  government ordered the dispatch of Brazilian troops to Haiti under the auspices of the UN MINUSTAH “Peace Keeping” “Stabilization” operation (unofficially on behalf of Washington).

George W. Bush conveyed his thanks to Lula whose military participated in the MINUSTAH “Peace Mission” Initiative:

“I  appreciate very much your [Lula] leadership on Haiti.  I appreciate the fact that you’ve led the U.N. Stabilization Force.” 

Brazil’s Military was present in Haiti for 13 years under MINUSTAH with a total deployment of 37,000 troops (p. 1).

This was not a peace initiative. President Aristide was kidnapped and deported. The MINUSTAH (police-military operation) was involved in acts of repression directed against Aristide’s progressive political party Famni Lavalas. 

4. Will Lula remain  a trustful friend of the IMF? In the words of  former IMF’s Managing Director Heinrich Koeller: 

I am deeply impressed by President Lula, indeed, and in particular because I do think he has the credibility which often other leaders lack”. (2003)

5. And to top it off: Lula is a firm supporter of  Joe Biden and now a firm supporter of Kamala Harris. 

“Biden is a breath for democracy in the world.” said Lula (CNN Interview with C. Amanpour, March 2021)

Neoliberalism with a Human Face is a convenient disguise. 

The grassroots of the Workers Party (PT) have once again been misled.

What will be the future of Brazil as a sovereign Nation State?

 

Michel Chossudovsky, October 31, 2022, January 14, 2023, October 26, 2024

***

The article below on Neoliberalism with a Human Face was first published by Global Research more than 20 years ago, on April 25, 2003, shortly following Lula’s inauguration in January 2003.

 

The author interviewed Luis Ignacio da Silva in the mid-1990s. 

*         *         *

Brazil: Neoliberalism with a “Human Face”

by Michel Chossudovsky

April 25, 2003

 

The inauguration of Luis Inacio da Silva (Lula) [2003] to the presidency of Brazil is historically significant, because millions of Brazilians saw in the Workers Party  (Partido dos Trabalhadores), a genuine political and economic alternative to the dominant (neoliberal) “free market” agenda.

Lula’s election embodies the hope of an entire nation. It constitutes an overwhelming vote against globalization and the neo-liberal model, which has resulted in mass poverty and unemployment throughout Latin America.

Meeting in Porto Alegre in late January [2003] at the World Social Forum, Lula’s anti-globalization stance was applauded by tens of thousands of delegates from around the World. The debate at the 2003 WSF, held barely two months  before the invasion of Iraq, was held  under the banner: “Another World is Possible”.

Ironically, while applauding Lula`s victory, nobody  — among the prominent critics of “free trade” and corporate driven globalization– who spoke at the 2003 WSF, seemed to have noticed that President Luis Inacio da Silva’s PT government had already handed over the reigns of macro-economic reform to Wall Street and the IMF.

While embraced in chorus by progressive movements around the World, Lula’s administration was also being applauded by the main protagonists of the neoliberal model.  In the words of the IMF’s Managing Director Heinrich Koeller:

I am enthusiastic [with Lula’s administration]; but it is better to say I am deeply impressed by President Lula, indeed, and in particular because I do think he has the credibility which often other leaders lack a bit, and the credibility is that he is serious to work hard to combine growth-oriented policy with social equity.

This is the right agenda, the right direction, the right objective for Brazil and, beyond Brazil, in Latin America. So, he has defined the right direction. Second, I think what the government, under the leadership of President Lula, has demonstrated in its first 100 days of government is also impressive and not just airing intention how they work through the process on this huge agenda of reforms. I understand that pension reform, tax reform is high on the agenda, and this is right.

The third element is that the IMF listens to President Lula and the economic team, and that is our philosophy, of course, beyond Brazil. (IMF Managing Director Heinrich Koeller, Press conference, 10 April 2003, emphasis added

http://www.imf.org/external/np/tr/2003/tr030410.htm )

Lula appoints a Wall Street Financier to lead Brazil’s Central Bank

At the very outset of his mandate, Lula reassured foreign investors that “Brazil will not follow neighboring Argentina into default” ( Davos World Economic Forum, January 2003). Now if such is his intent, then why did he appoint to the Central Bank, a man who played a role (as president of Boston Fleet) in the Argentinean debacle and whose bank was allegedly involved in shady money transactions, which contributed to the dramatic collapse of the Argentinean Peso.

By appointing Henrique de Campos Meirelles, the president and CEO of FleetBoston, to head the country’s Central Bank, President Luis Inacio da Silva had essentially handed over the conduct of the nation’s finances and monetary policy to Wall Street.

Boston Fleet is the 7th largest bank in the US. After Citigroup, Boston Fleet is Brazil’s second largest creditor institution.

The country is in a financial straightjacket. The key finance/banking positions in Lula’s administration are held by Wall Street appointees:

  • The Central Bank is under the control of FleetBoston,
  • A former senior executive of Citigroup Mr. Casio Casseb Lima  has been put in charge of the State banking giant Banco do Brazil (BB). Cassio Casseb Lima, who worked for Citigroup’s operations in Brazil, was initially recruited to BankBoston in 1976 by Henrique Meirelles. In other words, the head of BB has personal and professional links to Brazil’s two largest commercial creditors: Citigroup and Fleet Boston.

Continuity will be maintained. The new PT team in the Central Bank is a carbon copy of that appointed by  (outgoing) President Fernando Henrique Cardoso. The outgoing Central Bank president Arminio Fraga was a former employee of  Quantum Fund (New York), which is owned by Wall Street financier (and speculator) George Soros.

In close liaison with Wall Street and the IMF, Lula’s appointee to the Central Bank of Brazil, Henrique de Campos Meirelles,  has maintained the policy framework of his predecessor (who was also a Wall Street appointee) : tight monetary policy, generalized austerity measures, high interest rates and a deregulated foreign exchange regime. The latter encourages speculative attacks against the Brazilian Real and capital flight, resulting in a spiraling foreign debt.

Needless to say, the IMF program in Brazil will be geared towards the eventual dismantling of the State banking system in which the new head of Banco do Brazil, a former Citibank official, will no doubt play a crucial role.

No wonder the IMF is “enthusiastic”. The main institutions of economic and financial management are in the hands the country’s creditors. Under these conditions, neoliberalism is “live and kicking”: an “alternative” macro-economic agenda, modeled on the spirit of Porto Alegre is simply not possible.

“Putting the Fox in charge of the Chicken Coop”

Boston Fleet was one among several banks and financial institutions which speculated against the Brazilian Real in 1998-99, leading to the spectacular meltdown of the Sao Paulo stock exchange on “Black Wednesday” 13 January 1999. BankBoston, which later merged with Fleet is estimated to have made a 4.5 billion dollars windfall in Brazil in the course of the Real Plan, starting with an initial investment of $100 million.(Latin Finance, 6 August 1998).

In other words, Boston Fleet is the “cause” rather than “the solution” to the country’s financial woes. Appointing the  former CEO of Boston Fleet to head the nation’s Central Bank is tantamount to “putting the fox to in charge of the chicken coop”.

The new economic team has stated that it is committed to resolving the country’s debt crisis and steering Brazil towards financial stability. Yet the policies they have adopted are likely to have exactly the opposite effects.

Replicating Argentina

It so happens that Lula’s Central Bank president, Henrique Meirelles was a staunch supporter of Argentina’s controversial Finance Minister Domingo Cavallo, who played a key role under the Menem government, in spearheading the country into a deep-seated economic and social crisis. .

According to Meirelles in a 1998 interview, who at the time was President and CEO of Bank Boston:

The most fundamental event [in Latin America] was when the stabilization plan was launched in Argentina [under Domingo Cavallo] . It was a different approach, in the sense that it wasn’t a control of prices or a control of the flow of money, but it was a control of the money supply and government finances.(Latin Finance, 6 August 1998).

It is worth noting that the so-called “control of the money supply” referred to by Meirelles, essentially means freezing the supply of credit  to local businesses, leading to the collapse of productive activity.

The results, as evidenced by the Argentina debacle, was a string of bankruptcies, leading to mass poverty and unemployment. Under the brunt of Finance Minister Cavallo’s policies, in the course of the 1990s, most State owned national and provincial banks in Argentina, which provided credit to industry and agriculture, were sold off to foreign banks. Citibank and Fleet Bank of Boston were on the receiving end of these ill-fated IMF sponsored reforms.

“Once upon a time, government-owned national and provincial banks supported the nation’s debts. But in the mid- Nineties, the government of Carlos Menem sold these off to Citibank of New York, Fleet Bank of Boston and other foreign operators. Charles Calomiris, a former World Bank adviser, describes these bank privatisations as a ‘really wonderful story’. Wonderful for whom? Argentina has bled out as much as three-quarters of a billion dollars a day in hard currency holdings.” (The Guardian, 12 August 2001)

Domingo Cavallo was the architect of “dollarization”. Acting on behalf of Wall Street, he was responsible for pegging the Peso to the US dollar in a colonial style currency board arrangement, which resulted in a spiraling external debt and the eventual breakdown of the entire monetary system.

The currency board arrangement implemented by Cavallo had been actively promoted by Wall Street, with Citigroup and Fleet Bank in the lead.

Under a currency board, money creation is controlled by external creditors. The Central Bank virtually ceases to exist. The government cannot undertake any form of domestic investment without the approval of its external creditors. The US Federal Reserve takes over the process of money creation. Credit can only be granted to domestic producers by driving up the external (dollar denominated) debt.

Financial Scam

When the Argentina crisis reached its climax in 2001, major creditor banks transferred billions of dollars out of the country. An investigation launched in early 2003 pointed not only to the alleged criminal involvement of former Argentinean finance minister Domingo Cavallo, but also to that of several foreign banks including Citibank and Boston Fleet of which Henrique Mereilles was president and CEO:

“Battling to surmount a deep economic crisis, Argentina [January 2002] targeted capital flight and tax evasion, with police searching US, British and Spanish bank offices and authorities seeking explanations from an ex-president about the origins of his Swiss fortune. Claims that as much as 26 billion dollars left the country illegally late last year prompted the police actions. Later in the day, police went to Citibank, Bank Boston [Fleet] and a subsidiary of Spain’s Santander. (…) The various lawsuits in connection with illegal capital transfers name, among others, former president Fernando de la Rua, who stepped down December 20 [2001]; his economy minister Domingo Cavallo; and Roque Maccarone, who quit as central bank chief…” (AFP, 18 January 2003).

The same banks involved in the Argentinean financial scam, including Boston Fleet under the helm of Henrique Meirelles, were also involved in similar shady money transfers operations in other countries including the Russia Federation:

“[A]s many as 10 U.S. banks might have been used to divert as much as $15 billion from Russia, sources said, citing federal investigators. Fleet Financial Group Inc. and other banks are being investigated because they have accounts that belong to or are linked to Benex International Co.which is at the center of an alleged Russian money-laundering scheme.” (Boston Business Journal, 23 September 1999)

The Brazilian Financial Reforms

Everything indicates that Wall Street’s hidden agenda is to eventually replicate the Argentinean scenario and impose “dollarization” on Brazil.  The ground work of this design was established under the Plan Real, at the outset of the presidency of Fernando Henrique Cardoso (1994-2002).

Henrique Meirelles, who had integrated FHC’s party the PSDB, played a key behind the scenes role in setting the stage for the adoption of more fundamental financial reforms:

“In the early 1990s, I  [Meirelles] was a member of the board of the American Chamber of Commerce and in charge of an effort to begin lobbying for a change in the Brazilian Constitution. At the same time I was also chairman of the Brazilian Association of International Banks and was in charge of the effort to open up the country to foreign banks and to open the flow of money. I started a broad campaign of approaching key people, including journalists, politicians, professors and advertising professionals. When I started, everyone told me it was hopeless, that the country would never open its markets, that the country should protect its industries. Over a couple of years, I spoke to about 120 representatives. The private sector was fiercely against the opening of the markets, particularly the bankers.(Latin Finance, op cit)

Amending the Constitution

The issue of Constitutional reform was central to Wall Street’s design of economic and financial deregulation.

At the outset of Fernando Collor de Melo’s presidency in 1990, the IMF had demanded an amendment to the 1988 Constitution. There was uproar in the National Congress, with the IMF accused of “gross interference in the internal affairs of the state”.

Several clauses of the 1988 Constitution stood in the way of achieving the IMF’s proposed budget targets, which were under negotiation with the Collor administration.  IMF expenditure targets could could not be met without a massive firing of public- sector employees, requiring an amendment to a clause of the 1988 Constitution guaranteeing security of employment to federal civil servants. Also at issue was the financing formula (entrenched in the Constitution) of state and municipal-level programs from federal government sources. This formula limited the ability of the federal government to slash social expenditures and shift revenue towards debt servicing.

Blocked during the short-lived Collor administration,  the issue of constitutional reform was reintroduced shortly after the impeachment of President Collor de Melo. In June 1993, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, who at the time was Finance Minister in the interim government of President Itamar Franco, announced budget cuts of 50 per cent in education, health and regional development while pointing to the need for revisions to the 1988 Constitution.

The IMF’s demands regarding Constitutional reform were later embodied in Fernando Henrique Cardoso’s (FHC) presidential platform. The deregulation of the banking sector was a key component of the Constitutional reform process, which at the time had been opposed by the Workers Party in both the House and the Senate.

Meanwhile Henrique Meirelles, who at the time was in charge of BankBoston’s operations in Latin America (with one foot in FHC’s party the PSDB  and the other in Wall Street), was lobbying behind the scenes in favour of constitutional reform:

“Eventually we reached an agreement that became part of the Constitutional reform. When the Constitution was first supposed to be reformed, in 1993, it didn’t happen. It didn’t get enough votes. However, after Fernando Henrique Cardoso took office, it was reformed. That particular agreement I had worked on was one of the first points in the Constitution that was actually changed. I  [Meirelles] personally was involved in a change which I think at the end of the day meant the beginning of the opening of the Brazilian capital markets. In Brazil, there were restrictions on the flow of capital, on foreign capital acquiring Brazilian banks and on international banks opening branches in Brazil as mandated by the 1988 Constitution, all of which prohibited the development of the capital markets. ” (Latin Finance, 6 August 1998).

The Plan Real

The Plan Real was launched barely a few months before the November 1993 elections while FHC was Finance Minister. The fixed peg of the Real to the US dollar, in many regards, emulated the Argentinean framework, without however instating a currency board arrangement.

Under the Plan Real, price stability was achieved. The stability of the currency was in many regards fictitious. It was sustained by driving up the external debt.

The reforms were conducive to the demise of a large number of domestic banking institutions, which were acquired by a handful of foreign banks under the privatization program launched under the FHC presidency (1994-2002).

A spiraling foreign debt ultimately precipitated a financial crash in January 1999, leading to the collapse of the Real.

Cruel Logic of IMF Rescue Loans

IMF loans are largely intended to finance capital flight. In fact this was the logic of the multibillion dollar loan package granted to Brazil, immediately following the October 1998 elections which led to the reelection of FHC for a second presidential term. The loan was granted barely a few months prior to the January 1999 financial meltdown:

Brazil’s foreign currency reserves have fallen from $78 billion in July 1998 to $48 billion in September. And now the IMF has offered to “lend the money back” to Brazil in the context of a “Korean style” rescue operation which will eventually require the issuing of large amounts of public debt in G-7 countries. The Brazilian authorities have insisted that the country “is not at risk” and what they are seeking is “precautionary funding” (rather than a “bail-out”) to stave of the “contagious effects”of the Asian crisis. Ironically, the amount considered by the IMF (30 billion dollars) is exactly equal to the money “taken out” of the country (during a 3 month period) in the form of capital flight . But the central bank will not be able to use the IMF loan to replenish its hard currency reserves. The bail-out money (including a large part of the $18 billion US contribution to the IMF approved by Congress in October) is intended to enable Brazil to meet current debt servicing obligations, –ie. to reimburse the speculators. The bailout money will never enter Brazil. (See Michel Chossudovsky, The Brazilian Financial Scam, op cit.)

The same logic underlies the $31.4 billion precautionary loan granted by the IMF in September 2002, barely a couple of months prior to the presidential elections.

(See IMF Approves US$30.4 Billion Stand-By Credit for Brazil at

http://www.imf.org/external/np/sec/pr/2002/pr0240.htm )

This IMF loan constitutes “a social safety net” for institutional speculators and hot money investors.

The IMF pumps billions of dollars into the Central Bank, Forex reserves are replenished on borrowed money. The IMF loan is granted on condition the Central Bank retains a deregulated foreign exchange market coupled with domestic interest rates at very high levels.

So-called “foreign investors” are able to transfer (in dollars) the proceeds of their “investments” in short term domestic debts (at very high interest rates) out of the country. In other words, the borrowed forex reserves from the IMF are re-appropriated by Brazil’s external creditors.

We must understand the history of successive financial crises in Brazil. With Wall Street creditors in charge, the levels of external debt have continued to climb.  The IMF has “come to the rescue” with new multibillion dollar loans, which are always conditional upon the adoption of sweeping austerity measures and the privatization of State assets. The main difference is that this process is now being undertaken under a  president, who claims to be opposed to neoliberalism.

It should be noted, however, that the new multibillion dollar IMF “precautionary loan” granted in September 2002, was negotiated by FHC, a few months before the elections. The IMF loan and the conditionalities attached to it set  the stage for a spiraling external debt during Lula’s presidential mandate.

(See Brazil—Letter of Intent, Memorandum of Economic Policies, and Technical Memorandum of Understanding, at

http://www.imf.org/external/np/loi/2002/bra/04/index.htm#mep , Brasília, August 29, 2002.)

Dollarization

With the Central Bank and the Ministry of Finance under the control of the Wall Street establishment, this process will eventually lead Brazil into another financial and foreign exchange crisis. While the underlying logic is similar, based on the same financial manipulations as in 1998-99, in all likelihood it will be far more serious than that of  January 1999.

In other words, the macro-economic policies adopted by President Luiz Inacio da Silva could well result, in the foreseeable future, in debt default and the demise of the nation’s currency, leading Brazil down the path of “dollarization”. A currency board arrangement,  similar to that of Argentina could be imposed. What this means is that the US dollar would become Brazil’s proxy currency. What this means is that the country looses its economic sovereignty. Its Central Bank is defunct. As in the case of Argentina, monetary policy would be decided by the US Federal Reserve system.

While not officially part of the Free Trade Area of the America’s (FTAA) negotiations,  the adoption of the US dollar as the common currency for the Western Hemisphere is being discussed behind closed doors  Wall Street intends to extend its control throughout the hemisphere, eventually displacing or taking over remaining domestic banking institutions (including that of Brazil).

The greenback has already been imposed on five Latin American countries including Ecuador, Argentina, Panama, El Salvador and Guatemala. The economic and social consequences of “dollarization” have been devastating. In these countries, Wall Street and the US Federal Reserve system directly control monetary policy.

Brazil’s PT government should draw  the lessons of Argentina where the IMF’s economic medicine played a key role in precipitating the country into a deep-seated economic and social crisis.

Unless the present course of monetary policy is reversed, the tendency in Brazil is towards the “Argentina scenario”, with devastating economic and social consequences.

What Prospects under the Lula Presidency?

While the new  PT government presents itself as “an alternative” to neoliberalism, committed to poverty alleviation and the redistribution of wealth, its monetary and fiscal policy is in the hands of its Wall Street creditors.

Fome Zero (“zero hunger”), described as a program “to fight misery”, largely conforms to World Bank guidelines on “cost-effective poverty reduction”.  The latter require the implementation of so-called “targeted” programs, while drastically slashing social sector budgets. World Bank directives in health and education require curtailing social expenditures with a view to meeting debt servicing obligations.

The IMF and the World Bank have commended President Luiz Ignacio da Silva for his commitment to “strong macroeconomic fundamentals.” As far as the IMF is concerned, Brazil “is on track” in conformity with IMF benchmarks. The World Bank has also praised the Lula government:  “Brazil is pursuing a bold social program with fiscal responsibility.”

 “Another World is Possible”?

What kind of “Alternative” is possible, when a government committed to “fighting neoliberalism”, becomes an unbending  supporter of “free trade” and “strong economic medicine.”

Beneath the surface and behind the Workers Party’s populist rhetoric, the neoliberal agenda under Lula remains functionally intact.

The grassroots movement which brought Lula to power has been betrayed. And the “progressive” Brazilian intellectuals within Lula’s inner circle bear a heavy burden of responsibility in this process. And what this “Left accommodation” does is to ultimately reinforce the clutch of the Wall Street financial establishment on the Brazilian State.

“Another World” cannot be based on empty political slogans. Nor will it result from a shift in “paradigms”, which is not accompanied by real changes in power relations within Brazilian society, within the State system and within the national economy.

Meaningful change cannot result from a debate on “an alternative to neoliberalism”, which on the surface appears to be “progressive”, but which tacitly accepts the “globalizers” legitimate right to rule and plunder the developing World.