“The fight in the U.S. is to fight for a real authentic democracy! It is a struggle to shift power from this repressive minority government – this ruling class that is committed to war and rep repression. To shift power away from them to the people – to the masses of the people! Because if not, we allow for these forces to continue. They will represent and are representing an existential threat to global humanity. And I don’t think that is an exaggeration.”

Ajamu Baraka. From this week’s interview.

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“Unprecedented” was the term used by one Presidential historian in reference to the 2024 election campaign.

Some developments arising during the past few months:

  • The President facing calls from his own party not to run for re-election due to his awkward aging moments.
  • A candidate shot during a campaign stop.
  • The President stepping down and nominating his vice-president to run for President. [1]
  • The first African-American, Asian-American female to run for office.
  • A prominent third party candidate, originally running for one dominant party steps down and endorses the candidate for the other dominant party! [2]

Let us also reflect on the fact that this election running at close to $15.9 billion is bound to be the most costly in history! [3]

Another factor is the current state of foreign policy. There are two major wars on the world stage, one instigated by NATO against Russia and one fought by Israel, with the support of the United States. One war is too costly for the Republicans to continue to finance in Ukraine, the other too immoral for a significant number of Democrats to support at all.

And then there is Iran striking Israel in retaliation for an Israeli air strike on Beirut killing the Hezbollah leader and the operations commander for the Israeli [Islamic?] Revolutionary Guards Force (IRGC) overseas arm, the Quds Force. Israel seems to expect that the U.S. will side with them in a war with Iran [????] [that statement is misleading, look at the history, Israel does not decide] which would according to some military analysis be very, very costly for the U.S. Does anyone remember Jim Carville’s famous 1992 expression “It’s the economy stupid!” ? [4][5][6]

But in the corridors of power, where there are decisions being made to advance power and prospects for some, we can pretty much ignore the many soundbites cluttering up the consciousness of the age. Major changes are about to happen, regardless of who wins the gold ring, that may mean less privacy rights, less freedoms, less income benefits, and a whole lot more surveillance setting us on the path to Orwell’s 1984. [7]

With less than a month to go before the ballot boxes are counted, the Global Research News Hour is taking a look at how the election is affecting affairs on a global stage, the prospect of seeking salvation in either wing of the “Republicrat” Uniparty, and the promise of using third party candidates as an option.

In the first half hour, we hear from Dimitri Lascaris, a prominent lawyer, journalist and activist. He comments on the foreign affairs question, and the hopes for ordinary people on November 5. In our second half hour, we are joined by Ajamu Baraka of the Black Alliance for Peace, who explains that what both parties have to offer are not of interest to the common working man and woman. Finally, we get a visit from journalist and author Matthew Ehret who brings up the bankers coup which almost took place in the early 1930s and explains that the climate is ripe for a similar development today.

Dimitri Lascaris is a lawyer, a journalist and an activist. From 2004 to 2016 he was a member of Canada’s leading class action law firm Siskinds LLP. He now works pro-bono legal cases. In 2020, he ran for the leadership of the Green Party of Canada and placed second with  45.5% of the membership.

Ajamu Baraka is Chairman of the Coordinating Committee of the Black Alliance for Peace and an editor and contributing columnist for the Black Agenda Report. Baraka serves on the Executive Committee of the U.S. Peace Council and leadership body of the U.S. based United National Anti-War Coalition (UNAC) and the Steering Committee of the Black is Back Coalition. In 2016, he ran for Vice President on the Green Party ticket.

Matthew Ehret is the Editor-in-Chief of the Canadian Patriot Review , and Senior Fellow at the American University in Moscow. He is author of theUntold History of Canada’ book series and Clash of the Two Americas. In 2019 he co-founded the Montreal-based Rising Tide Foundation . Consider helping this process by making a donation to the RTF or becoming a Patreon supporter to the Canadian Patriot Review.

(Global Research News Hour episode 444)

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Transcript of Dimitri Lascaris, October 9, 2024:

Global Research: Well, just before addressing the election question, you have, as I mentioned, they’ve been to Lebanon four times since the October 7th attack.

And as you predicted, the war has expanded. And after being mostly done with Gaza, they’re assaulting Lebanon with now more firepower than at any time since 1982. Israel managed to explode walkie-talkies and pagers, a move that surprised many people, and Israel has killed a few leaders, key leaders.

Benjamin Netanyahu then said that the Lebanese people can liberate their country by turning on Hezbollah. Now, is Israel more fierce than we contemplated a year ago? What are Lebanese people on the ground telling you about their situation?

Dimitri Lacaris: Well, it certainly depends on which Lebanese person you’re talking to. Lebanon is, I think it’s fair to say, historically has been a fairly sectarian society.

There are strong divisions in the society, even now, many years after the horrible civil war came to an end. And, you know, you’re likely to get fairly different answers and sometimes radically different answers, depending upon whether you’re speaking to somebody who is Shia, a Shia Muslim, or a Sunni Muslim, or a Christian, an Orthodox Christian, or a Falange Christian, or somebody who’s secular, who’s atheist. But I think, basically, there is, amongst the large majority of the population, I think this much I can say with confidence, a lot of anger towards Israel, probably less sympathy for Israel than there has ever been after a year of, you know, countless unspeakable atrocities being visited upon the Palestinian people.

And now, you know, the Israeli military evidently trying to turn the southern part of Beirut, Dahiya, into Gaza. Secondly, I think there’s probably a higher degree of unity amongst the various factions in Lebanese society vis-a-vis this war than there has been in the past. They’re trying to divide them, but I think the Israelis and the Americans are actually achieving the opposite outcome.

They are creating a higher sense of unity in terms of opposing the United States and Israel in the region. So, for example, the leader of the Druze, who typically has not been a supporter of Nasrallah and Hezbollah before Nasrallah’s assassination, expressed support for Hezbollah’s resistance to Israel and its attacks on its military bases. And when I’ve been there, I’ve spoken to people who come from the Christian community, people who are secular nationalists, supporters of the SSNP, the Syrian Social National Party or Nationalist Party, who are very supportive of Hezbollah, even though they’re not Shia Muslims.

But there are people, especially if you go further north in the country, away from the southern border, who feel that the country is being dragged into a war that it desperately doesn’t need because of the economic crisis and the ferocity of Israel’s attacks by Hezbollah’s resistance on the southern border. And they’d rather, they’re not unsympathetic necessarily to the Palestinian people, but they just rather keep out of it and let the Palestinians and the Israelis work it out for themselves. I would say at this stage, my sense is that that sentiment is felt by a minority of the Lebanese population.

And most of them are very angry with Israel and want Israel once and for all to be defeated.

GR: The election is influencing foreign policy-making and that they are concerned about the reaction of swing voters. I mean, why are both candidates for the Democrats and the Republicans holding up this war on the part of Israel when a sizable chunk of the electorate, I mean, you could see it in the streets, is concerned about Palestinians, international law and genocide?

DL: Well, you know, there’s a school of thought, Michael, that the Israel lobby controls the United States government.

I really am not a big fan of this theory. I understand there is evidence to support it. It’s not like there isn’t any evidence that the Israel lobby is extremely powerful and influential, but does it actually have so much power that it can force the US government to engage in a regional war that will do immense damage to the global economy and to interests in the region, and potentially, depending upon how that war is handled, result in the deaths of many US soldiers? I don’t think so.

I don’t think the Israel lobby has that much power. What we’re witnessing today, in my opinion, is just another example of a broader phenomenon in US politics, and that is that the US government does not, generally speaking, not just with respect to the wars escalating in West Asia, it generally does not do what the people of the United States want it to do. The US government is run by a very wealthy elite, which Bernie Sanders describes as the billionaire class.

Others refer to them as the oligarchs. You could also refer to them collectively, along with the corporations they control, as the military-industrial complex, as President Eisenhower did in January of 1961, three days from the end of his second term, warning of the power of the military-industrial complex. This is who controls the US government, and those people believe, I think wrongly, that their interests will be served and their power will be enhanced.

They don’t give a damn what the American people think, that their interests and their power will be enhanced if they can destroy the axis of resistance in West Asia, and I think they believe they can do it. That’s what’s going on here. The Israel lobby doesn’t have to force these people to do anything because their agenda is the same as that of Benjamin Netanyahu and the entire Israeli political elite.

It’s the destruction of any resistance to US-Israeli hegemony in West Asia. That’s what’s going on here. It’s not that the Israel lobby is forcing the US into a war that the Biden administration is doing everything desperately to avoid, which is the message we’ve been hearing, both from anonymous sources in the administration and from their spokespersons like Matthew Miller and Blinken and this character Amos Hochstein that’s supposed to be their envoy to Lebanon who formerly served in the Israeli military.

We really are trying to de-escalate the situation, and boy, that guy Netanyahu is a tough hombre, and Israel’s a sovereign nation, and we can’t tell Israel what to do. It’s a sovereign country. This is all nonsense.

It’s complete and utter nonsense.

GR: Of course, we don’t discount the propaganda as well, but Iran is being drawn into the war with Israel, and Israel thinks that the US will join in at some point. If the attack on Iran comes soon and then Iran fires back, then we see that whole trigger, that kind of a domino effect that essentially could result in what could be the October surprise of this election, essentially starting World War III in this sense.

Is that one of the things that’s holding back Israel from taking any stand? Would they be so compelled to support Israel that they will engage in the attack on Iran?

I don’t know. Should that happen? The pushback against Iran, it can affect Americans in the region, and it could have a devastating effect even on the economy. What do you think?

DL: Well, let me just say, first of all, that the Americans are fully engaged in this war.

Who provided the bunker buster bombs that annihilated an entire block in southern Beirut and killed Hassan Nasrallah? The Americans did. Of course, Israel couldn’t have done that without the United States. There were credible reports that at the time of the bombing that led to the killing of Nasrallah, there were two US Air Force AWACS operating off the coast of Lebanon, and that they temporarily turned off their transponders, and that this was very unusual behavior on their part.

Afterwards, the Biden administration made the preposterous claim that they didn’t know that the little country in West Asia that depends on the United States government for its very existence, its survival right now, was going to do something that was insanely provocative and kill Nasrallah. This is nonsense. They knew, and they not only knew, they helped them do it.

The Americans helped Israel do it. So, let’s just be clear. We need to dispense with this, as I said, what I call nonsense that we’re hearing in this Kabuki theater, that the US is standing back and Israel is acting on its own.

They’re partners in this crime and this series of crimes. The question is whether… Still, your question is a very important question, which is, will they step it up and actually help Israel to attack Iran? It’s very difficult to say right now. I think there’s a lot of things going on.

One of them is that this Iranian missile attack on October 1st, despite all the hoopla and the triumphalism we’re hearing from the West, Biden stood in front of the press and said with a straight face that the missile attack had been effectively defeated. That is bullocks, folks. That’s bullocks.

There are videos, which have been authenticated by the corporate media in the United States, showing that dozens of ballistic missiles struck Israel’s most heavily defended military bases, air bases, in particular, the Nevatim Air Base. The Western media calculated that the Nevatim Air Base suffered 32 strikes, 32 strikes. There was layer after layer of air defense.

The very best air defense capabilities that the West has were deployed in a layered system to protect that air base, and they nonetheless struck it 32 times. They didn’t fire anything close to their maximum capacity. They could have fired a much larger number of salvos, each consisting of a much larger number of missiles.

Right now, I don’t think that everybody in the Israeli government and the Pentagon is crazy. I think there are actually some people in there who at least have the good sense to say, the Iranians have just demonstrated to us that they can strike anything in Israel, because that’s what they did. They can strike anything and they can destroy anything in Israel, including the Dimona nuclear reactor.

There’s no reason to think if they can strike Nevatim 32 times in one attack, they can almost certainly strike Israel’s Dimona nuclear reactor. There have to be people who are reflecting upon this. That’s number one.

Number two, we’re only less than a month away from the election, and I think a full-blown war, especially if there is an attack in the next couple of weeks before the voting by the Biden administration, I think we can expect that Iran is going to deliver a much more devastating blow on Israel than it had up until now. If it’s clear to the Iranians that the Americans participated in it, in the attacks on Iran, they will strike American military bases in the Middle East. How is that going to play with the American public? Is that going to actually enhance Kamala Harris’s chance of re-election? I don’t know.

I think that’s highly doubtful. I think that they are reflecting upon this right now, and there’s a lot of vigorous debate going on between the administration and the Netanyahu regime as to the timing of any response, the nature of any response, whether the US will directly and overtly participate in that response. And my sense is, could be wrong, they have not come to a decision.

And I think they’re in a real quandary, Michael. They’re in an extremely difficult quandary. What do they do now? In the background, we should mention also, they have not, despite the fact they’re saying, we’re turning our attention away from Gaza, they have not defeated Hamas.

Hamas is still a deadly fighting force. The Israelis in the last couple of weeks have announced casualties in combat in Gaza. They have a lot of troops committed there.

They’re slaughtering people en masse. They’re continuing to do that, particularly in the north of the Gaza Strip. And they’re taking a beating in South Lebanon.

Almost immediately upon announcing a ground, they didn’t announce a full-blown invasion. They were ambiguous about what the nature of the ground offensive was going to be. But it appears to have been quite limited.

And almost immediately, the Israelis were forced to reveal that eight of its soldiers were killed on the border. And there was a video circulating, which I saw, it’s a grisly video showing the dead Israeli soldiers lying on the ground and the Hamas fighters celebrating their victory. So they have to be worried about that.

What if Israel takes another kick in the teeth in South Lebanon over the next several weeks, just as it did in the course of five weeks of brutal fighting in 2006? And how is that going to affect the whole mix? They’re in a world of pain right now, the Americans and Israelis. And frankly, despite all of their triumphalism, I don’t know what they’re going to do to get themselves out of this mess.

GR: Dimitri, I guess I got to spend at least a couple of minutes talking about the Ukraine war, that other war front.

Biden seems more prepared to launch new weapons against Russia than Trump. And I believe it was in September that I think Scott Ritter had been commented that became a needle’s breath approach to going into nuclear war, because launching those weapons deep into Russia would be considered an attack by NATO. And then you have that kind of a collapsation into a nuclear threat.

So Trump, whatever else you have to say about him, it might improve matters because he’s not willing to spend more money on this war. And therefore, Ukraine, that would collapse a lot faster. I mean, what do you think? Is it possible that electing Trump might actually lessen the threat of a nuclear war?

DL: Well, maybe he will actually carry out his promise to bring that war to an end.

He certainly could do it. It’s very simple. He has to say, I mean, the two most important things is that Russia gets to retain the territories it’s annexed, not just those it occupies, but the additional territory that it has annexed the whole of Kherson, Zaporozhia, and the Donbass, and Luhansk, and it gets to keep Crimea, and Ukraine stays out of NATO.

If he agrees to that, this war is over. Essentially, those are the principal demands of the Russian Federation, and he might do it. He might force, and he could easily force the Zelensky regime to make those concessions, because it, like Israel, depends upon the United States for its very survival.

So, of course, that would decrease dramatically the risk of a nuclear war in Ukraine. But the problem is that Trump is probably going to increase the risk of a nuclear war in West Asia. He’s incentivizing.

This is the man who destroyed the Obama-era nuclear deal with Iran, which the IAEA, the International Atomic Energy Agency, said Iran was respecting. This is the man who murdered Qasem Soleimani, the top general of Iran in Iraq, in a flagrant act of war. This is the man who pulled the United States out of the Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty, which was a cornerstone of nuclear management and nuclear nonproliferation.

Russia is not going to allow Iran to be destroyed. It’s not. They have a very close defense relationship, and they’re on the verge of signing a mutual defense pact.

I don’t think China’s going to allow it either. At the end of the day, will the world be safer overall, assuming that Trump actually carries out his promises in foreign policy? I don’t know, Michael. It’s a hard call.

Either way, whether Trump wins or Kamala Harris wins, and I want to point out, it really is telling that Dick Cheney endorsed Kamala Harris. Tells you all you need to know. That psychopathic warmonger who dragged the United States into a criminal war of aggression against Iraq with all of its disastrous consequences and oversaw a torture regime and talked openly about attacking Iran, he endorsed Kamala Harris.

Whoever wins that election, we are in a very, very dangerous place.


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://www.ctpublic.org/news/2024-08-30/unprecedented-2024-presidential-race-could-get-hit-with-an-october-surprise-ct-historian-says
  2. https://www.globalresearch.ca/rfk-jr-full-speech-a-brilliant-speech-by-a-true-patriot/5866264
  3. https://www.opensecrets.org/news/2024/10/total-2024-election-spending-projected-to-exceed-previous-record?emci=827d327a-1285-ef11-8474-6045bda8aae9&emdi=9ca4072a-7f85-ef11-8474-6045bda8aae9&ceid=18010566
  4. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c70w1j0l488o
  5. https://tass.com/world/1852303
  6. https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20241011-it-s-still-the-economy-stupid-says-us-political-guru-carville
  7. https://www.globalresearch.ca/dont-trust-government-not-privacy-property-freedoms/5868165

 

 

The Shanghai Covid Lockdown. Who Was Behind It?

October 20th, 2024 by Emanuel Pastreich

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First published on April 19, 2022

GR Editor’s Note

It is worth noting that the Director of China’s Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC),  Dr. George Fu Gao was among the participants of Scenario 201 in October 2019. (Table Top Simulation of a Corona Virus Pandemic)

China’s CDC under Dr. George Fu Gao played a central and key role in overseeing the Covid-19 outbreak in Wuhan in December 2019, acting in close liaison with the US CDC, the Gates Foundation, the WHO, John Hopkins et al.

George Fu Gao is an Oxford graduate with links to Big Pharma. He was also for several years a fellow of the Wellcome Trust.

China’s CDC is a lead agency of the Chinese government in disease control and prevention.

The Public Health Emergency Center (PHEC) of the China CDC takes charge of national public health emergency preparedness and response activities.”

Under its mandate, one would expect that China’s CDC Director George Gao Fu played a key role in the Shanghai March-April Lockdown emergency.

China’s Health authorities have confirmed that “Nucleic acid [namely PCR] tests are central to its strategy”. That test is totally unreliable. The figures quoted below do not under any circumstances justify the drastic measures put forth by the CDC and China’s National Health Commission.

Incisive analysis by Emmanuel Pastreich below

 

Michel Chossudovsky, Global Research,  April 19, 2022

 

***

Corporate newspapers and social media have been flooded with horrific images of the Shanghai lockdown for the last week, a massive enterprise that has confined millions of Chinese to their homes for weeks and has resulted in the implementation of severe restrictions on access to basic supplies.

Images of citizens yelling from their apartments in frustration, or screaming heartfelt protests in moving soliloquies, videos of drones and robots patrolling the empty streets of Shanghai, present us with a terrifying vision of the totalitarian rule by technology that so many have predicted.

The underlying message is that China is the source of this nightmare.

 

 


The official story put out by the city of Shanghai, and not denied by the Chinese Communist Party, is so extreme as to invite ridicule.

A new “zero tolerance” policy for COVID-19, which is a bogus non-existent disease in the first place, was imposed on all Shanghai citizens, first on the East side of the Huangpu River from March 28, and then for the entire city from April 1st.

Supposedly all citizens will be tested for COVID-19. According to media reports, only 26,087 new cases of COVID-19 have been found, and of those, only 914 were symptomatic (and there were no pictures of bodies on the ground, as was in the case in Wuhan at the end of 2019).

That is to say that the justifications for the lockdown are so absurd as to make the entire process farcical, perhaps an action intended to show citizens that they must do exactly what they are told to do, no matter how ridiculous and groundless the premises are.

The Western corporate media had a ready answer for what was going on: The Chinese Communist Party, following its “undemocratic socialist ideas”, is violating the fundamental rights of citizens that we Westerners respect.

The American Jack Posobiec, who refers to himself as a “veteran Navy intel officer,” posted extensively on Twitter about the lockdown, blaming Communism and making statements like “This is what the CCP is doing to the 26 million people of Shanghai.”

Human Rights Watch was quick to condemn China for its human rights violations in Shanghai, stating on April 6 that “The Chinese government should respect the right to health and other basic rights in its response to the Covid-19 surge in the country,” but did so without any reference to similar, or worse, policies being carried out around the world.

The problem is that although this lockdown is blamed on Communism, there is no precedent for the shutdown of a major city to be found in the Chinese communist tradition; no part of the imposition of technofascism can be traced back to the calls of Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai for class struggle and for resistance to imperialism.

The model for the Shanghai lockdown, it turns out, is the lockdown of Boston after the Boston Marathon bombing of April 15, 2013, exactly nine years ago. On that occasion, the United States Federal government, specifically the FBI, used a murky charge of a terrorist attack (about which serious doubts remain) as an excuse to lock down vast sections of the city of Boston and to confine citizens to their homes while armed police patrolled the streets.

The question we should ask is whether what is taking place in Shanghai is being organized by the same people who organized the Boston lockdown, and similar lockdowns around the world over the last two year, and not by the Chinese Communist Party—or not primarily by the Chinese Communist Party.

Horrific videos of Chinese committing suicide by jumping from their windows were also widely circulated, and they may have been real, but there is no reason to assume anything is true just because it was broadly circulated.

Another popular video featured a dog-shaped robot (that resembles a Boston Dynamics SpotMini) patrolling the streets with a microphone on its back telling the people of Shanghai to stay inside. Anyone who looked at the video with critical eyes had to be doubtful. The speaker was carelessly strapped to the back of the robot with barricade tape in what appears to be a careless stunt, and it was most certainly not representative of government policy.

But the giveaway that this lockdown has silent partners who had nothing to do with the CCP bureaucracy was the constant harping in the Western media on the suffering of animals in Shanghai. Images of live cats rounded up and put in bags for disposal were pasted all over the internet, along with a video of a Chinese man cruelly holding a dog in pain with a device and then dropping it into a container with other injured dogs. Although the video certainly was disturbing, I dare horrified Americans to watch a video of a factory-scale slaughterhouse in the United States for even few minutes.

The focus on cruelty to animals is a standard in the operation to demonize Russia in the Ukraine. For example, a call by “Soi Dog co-founder John Dalley” for help to rescue the dogs and cats of Ukraine has been broadly circulated in the United States.

There are numerous indications that the Shanghai lockdown is being marketed for the Western audience as the equivalent of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The narrative presented is of a cruel totalitarian Communist government in China that oppresses the poor citizens of Shanghai who yearn to be free from these unreasonable “zero covid” restrictions (but no suggestion is offered that covid restrictions themselves are wrong).

MSN reported,

“There are videos of locked-up residents chanting ‘we want food’ and ‘we want freedom.’ In a video, citizens are seen going to their balconies and protesting against the lack of supplies.”

But the videos, the reports, are just too perfect, too carefully staged.

Shanghai Shutdown as war by other means

The details of the actions by American operatives in collaboration with corrupt Chinese officials to plan, and to carry out, this Shanghai lockdown are not available to me. Granted the completely speculative, and often blatantly wrong, reporting that passes for journalism these days, however, I hope that I can be forgiven if I infer, based on the ample evidence I have read in English and Chinese, as to what may be going on behind the scenes.

The Shanghai lockdown must be seen first in proper geopolitical perspective.

China has been subject to high level pressure from Washington D.C. over the last two months in an effort to thwart any possible cooperation with the Russian Federation since Russian troops entered the Ukraine.

Let us consider the critical events leading up to the lockdown.

US President Joe Biden warned the People’s Republic of China on March 18, in a conversation with President Xi Jinping, that there would serious consequences for China if it offered any support for Russia, economic, or, especially, military. White House press secretary Jen Psaki explained,

“He made clear what the implications and consequences would be if China provides material support to Russia as it conducts brutal attacks against Ukrainian cities and civilians.”

We do not know what Biden said, but just three days later, on March 21, China Eastern Airlines Flight 5735 was heading for a smooth landing at the Guangzhou International Airport when it suddenly plunged inexplicably into a nosedive. The cause of the crash has yet to be explained—even three weeks later.

Many Chinese believe the arguments made in videos posted on Weibo (and elsewhere) soon after that incident that the crash was the result of a remote hijacking (similar to the 9/11 crashes) probably conducted by United States. The story was confirmed by the American intelligence investigative blog State of the Nation. Moreover, the egregious decision to include a seven-member team from the United States in the formal investigation of this domestic crash suggests something a bit unusual.

Then, on March 28, the Shanghai Municipal People’s Government, not the central government in Beijing that had been easing restrictions, suddenly launched a radical COVID-19 “zero tolerance” policy.

If intelligence operatives for the United States were looking to give China its own “Ukraine,” and to find a new field for the trouble making that they funded in Hong Kong previously, Shanghai was the logical choice.

Shanghai is riddled with global financial interests, with the head offices (or certainly the major branch) for all major multinational investment banks and multinational corporations located there. Their impact on the Chinese economy remains immense.

Shanghai has a history of over a hundred years as a center for global capital with a parasitic relationship to the rest of the nation. It was Shanghai, after all, that offered extraterritoriality to citizens from imperial powers until the 1940s.

Following that tradition, Shanghai today has the most extreme special economic zone policies of any city in China, policies that allow foreign corporations to engage in a broad range of activities without the authorization of the government.

As part of its drive to meet the demands of multinational corporations, the Shanghai government has privatized services and promoted technological solutions to just about everything. Shanghai has been so enthusiastic in adopting smart grids, 5G, online governance, and automation that it won the top rank globally as smart city from Juniper Research this year.

Shanghai has rolled out the red carpet for global finance, giving special privileges to select institutional investors, opening up to just about any investment from offshore, expanding the derivatives markets, and permitting investment banks to create their own “wealth management joint ventures.”

Who might be involved on the Chinese side in this Shanghai shutdown?

There are plenty of billionaires active in Shanghai with close ties to global finance who might be tempted to play the role of an Igor Kolomoisky, the billionaire who created current president of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelensky in response to American encouragement.

For example, we know that the billionaire Ma Yun (Jack Ma), who took enormous amounts of funding from Goldman Sachs and other American investment banks when he created Alibaba as a global marketing and distribution giant that rivaled Amazon, was very unhappy with Chinese policies.

Ma is popular figure among the globalists, and he is a member of the board of trustees of the World Economic Forum.

Although the details are obscure, Ma’s push for the globalist agenda in China ran afoul of state planners in Beijing, Xi Jinping included, two years ago.

Ma established the Ant Group, a financial institution intended to revolutionize finance by creating an unregulated banking system.

The story is that he delivered a speech on October 24, 2020 in which he called for sweeping changes in the banking system. As a result, the central government cracked down on his activities and he has rarely been seen in public since.

Alibaba is headquartered in Hangzhou, near Shanghai, and has its largest presence in Shanghai.

There are also American billionaires interested in using Shanghai as a way to muscle in and open up China to foreign capital. For example, Stephen Schwarzman, CEO of the private equity firm Blackstone, has bought off many intellectuals and government officials in the Chinese Communist Party with his money, especially the more than 100 million USD he gave to establish, among other things, the prestigious “Schwarzman Scholars” Program at Tsinghua University.

Another American billionaire heavily invested in China is John Thornton, founder of the John L. Thornton China Center at Brookings Institution. Thornton is a member of the International Advisory Council of the China Investment Corporation (China’s sovereign wealth fund) and he is constantly pushing to increase foreign influence over China’s financial policy.

Shanghai Lockdown and Global Economic Disruption

The economic disruption caused by the Shanghai lockdown is already being promoted in the corporate media as the reason for delays in the production and delivery of electronics, automobiles, and other household goods that are produced in, shipped through, or dependent on parts manufactured in Shanghai. Although this disruption is true, there is every reason to believe that this situation will be exploited and exaggerated to justify efforts by the super-rich to destroy the global economy further and to impoverish the Earth’s citizens.

Combining a Ukraine crisis that justifies a sudden scarcity of agricultural goods, raw materials, natural gas, and manufactured goods with a Shanghai crisis that shuts down global trade offers globalists an opportunity to explain just about any disruption.

Already plans are in place to adopt a similar zero tolerance policies in the city of Guangzhou, another major manufacturing and finance center. The resulting economic slowdowns, disruptions in supply chains, increasing inflation and shortages will be just what the doctor ordered.

The economic crisis of the Shanghai lockdown has also been employed as an argument for increasing vaccinations in China, predictably, and for introducing the first Chinese-made mRNA COVID-19 vaccines, according to China’s National Center for Disease Control and Prevention.

Differences between Russia and China

There are clear differences in the nature of the attack on Russia through Ukraine and on China through Shanghai. The United States and China, although talk of war has become a constant theme over the last decade, are also highly integrated economies that involve deep cooperation even in the midst of radical political theatre. Moreover, China has refused to respond to the efforts to goad it into military action in Taiwan, Hong Kong or the South China Sea. The attack, therefore, had to be launched in a covert and obscure manner so as to make it appear as if the Chinese Communist Party that the source of the problem because it is abusing the people of Shanghai. As of this moment, there is not a trace of the American hand anywhere in the public discourse.

Russia, by contrast never had the rapprochement with the United States that China had after President Richard Nixon’s meeting with Chairman Mao Zedong in 1972, nor are the economies of the United States and Russia that integrated. There were Russians who studied in the United States, but study in America did not have the same appeal for Russians that it had for Chinese over the last thirty years.

Thus, although there is American investment in Russia, and American interference in Russia, Russia is not so deeply integrated into the American logistics and supply chain, and American investment banks have fewer ties and fewer financial interests.

What needs to be done

The Chinese have been subject to their part of the Great Reset, serving as guinea pigs for social credit systems that allow for constant surveillance and for the evaluation of citizens via AI, and for the required use of digital payment systems. The globalists most likely targeted China for these experiments, before broader application in the world, because the emphasis on technological development in Chinese society, and Chinese naivety about the negative impact of technological innovation on human society, made the Chinese ready victims.

These technofascist policies are promoted by many bureaucrats in the Chinese Communist Party, but they did not originate in China. They are but a part of a global strategy for control of the world’s economy by the financial elites, cunning men who flatter the Chinese about the effectiveness of their response to COVID-19, and their potential to be innovation leaders through AI.

What is desperately needed in response to the current effort of globalists to induce needless conflicts between nation states, and within nations, through operations like the Shanghai lockdown, is an alliance of citizens in China, Russia, the United States, and other countries against the predations of multinational investment banks and corporations, an alliance that resembles the internationalist anti-fascist movements of the 1930s.

The Shanghai lockdown was designed to increase the isolation of the individual in a technological prison while also creating greater distance between Americans (Westerners) and Chinese who ought to be cooperating to respond to the threat of techno-fascism. It is time for us all to come together in response.

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This article was originally published on Circles and Squares.

Emanuel Pastreich served as the president of the Asia Institute, a think tank with offices in Washington DC, Seoul, Tokyo and Hanoi. Pastreich also serves as director general of the Institute for Future Urban Environments. Pastreich declared his candidacy for president of the United States as an independent in February, 2020.

He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

Featured image: Boston Lockdown of 2013 (Source: C and S)

Bombas Nucleares sob nossos Pés

October 19th, 2024 by Manlio Dinucci

A OTAN anuncia que seu exercício nuclear anual Steadfast Noon de duas semanas começou em 14 de outubro de 2024, com mais de 60 aeronaves de 13 países realizando voos de treinamento sobre a Europa Ocidental. Caças capazes de transportar ogivas nucleares dos EUA participam do exercício, incluindo os primeiros caças F-35A da OTAN declarados prontos para o uso nuclear. Participam bombardeiros pesados, caças de escolta, aeronaves de reabastecimento em voo e aeronaves de guerra eletrônica, com uma equipe de 2.000 militares de oito bases aéreas.

O exercício de guerra nuclear, claramente dirigido contra a Rússia, também conta com a participação da Itália, que – juntamente com a Alemanha, a Bélgica e a Holanda – adere ao “Compartilhamento Nuclear” da OTAN. Qual é o grau de “compartilhamento”, a própria OTAN explica em um texto oficial:

1) “O planejamento nuclear da OTAN é realizado pelo Grupo de Alto Nível, presidido pelos Estados Unidos”.

2) “Os Estados Unidos mantêm o controle absoluto e a custódia de suas armas nucleares instaladas na Europa, enquanto os Aliados fornecem apoio militar.”

Em suma, são os EUA que fornecem aos aliados europeus as armas nucleares sobre as quais mantêm controle absoluto, enquanto os aliados europeus fornecem aeronaves prontas para uso nuclear e pessoal militar sob comando absoluto dos EUA.

O “compartilhamento” nuclear está se estendendo para além dos países que oficialmente fazem parte dela: isso é demonstrado pelo fato de que a Polônia, a Romênia e a Finlândia estão participando do exercício de guerra nuclear. Como as aeronaves da OTAN com dupla capacidade convencional e nuclear também estão posicionadas nos países bálticos, isso significa que os EUA estabeleceram uma frente avançada na Europa a partir da qual um ataque nuclear contra a Rússia pode ser lançado.

Ao mesmo tempo, os Estados Unidos “modernizaram” suas bases nucleares na Europa para equipá-las com os caças F-35A e as novas bombas nucleares B61-12. Na Itália, a base de Ghedi, onde está estacionada a 6ª Ala da Força Aérea Italiana, e a base de Aviano, onde está estacionada a 31ª Ala de Caças dos EUA, foram “modernizadas”. As outras bases nucleares “modernizadas” são as de Kleine Brogel, na Bélgica, Volkel, na Holanda, e Büchel, na Alemanha, às quais deve ser acrescentada a base de Lakenheasth, na Grã-Bretanha, que foi secretamente “modernizada”.

Os Estados Unidos estão “modernizando” seu arsenal nuclear com um gasto projetado de US$ 1,7 trilhão, promovendo uma corrida armamentista que está se tornando mais perigosa do que a da Guerra Fria. Basta dizer que as armas nucleares dos EUA instaladas na Europa, perto da Rússia, podem atingir São Petersburgo ou Moscou em questão de minutos.

Manlio Dinucci

Breve resumo da análise da imprensa internacional do Grandangolo na sexta-feira, 18 de Outubro de 2024, no canal de TV italiano Byoblu:

https://www.byoblu.com/2024/10/18/le-bombe-nucleari-sotto-i-nostri-piedi-grandangolo-pangea-la-rassegna-stampa-internazionale-di-byoblu/

Tradução : Mondialisation.ca 

 

 

VIDEO (em italiano) :

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Manlio Dinucci é geógrafo e jornalista, e ex-diretor executivo italiano da International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, que recebeu o Prêmio Nobel da Paz em 1985. Porta-voz do Comitato no Guerra no Nato (Itália) e pesquisador associado do Centre de recherche sur la Mondialisation (Canadá). Vencedor do Prêmio Internacional de Jornalismo 2019 para Análise Geoestratégica do Club de Periodistas de México.

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In his newly published book, Nuclear High-Altitude Electromagnetic Pulse, Steven Starr shows that all it takes is one nuclear explosion to shut down  the United States and throw the population back into the Dark Ages. The electric power grid would be destroyed along with the communications system, the cooling systems at nuclear power plants and all electronic devices. The reason is that civilian infrastructure is not protected from Electro-Magnetic Pulse (EMP). The military has taken steps to shield its weapon and communication systems, but nothing has been done to protect civilian infrastructure. Bills mandating EMP protection have been defeated in Congress.  

Starr reports that only 4% of the US military budget is required to shield the power grid and civilian infrastructure. Instead, the Washington idiots waste trillions of dollars in pointless wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Serbia, Syria, Yemen, Palestine, and Ukraine.  

American cities would suffer no effects from blast and fire, such as would be produced by ground level detonation, but the consequences would be just as dire. Starr describes them in a summary on his website.

Effects of a Single High-altitude Nuclear Detonation Over the Eastern U.S.

“105 miles above Ohio, a single nuclear warhead explodes. Because it is far above the atmosphere, there will be no blast or fire effects felt on Earth, however, this high-altitude nuclear detonation will create a gigantic electromagnetic pulse or EMP.

“In one billionth of a second, the initial EMP E1 wave will cause massive voltages and currents to form within power lines, telecommunication lines, cables, wires, antennas, and any other electrically conductive material found beneath the nuclear detonation in a circular area covering hundreds of thousands of square miles.

“Within this region, under ideal conditions, the E1 wave will produce 2 million volts and a current of 5,000 to 10,000 amps within medium distribution power lines. Any unshielded modern electronic devices that contain solid-state circuitry, which are plugged into the grid, will be disabled, damaged, or destroyed. This includes the electronic devices required to operate all critical national infrastructure.

“Unshielded electronic devices within ground, air, and sea transportation systems, water and sanitation systems, fuel and food distribution systems, water and sanitation systems, telecommunication systems, and banking systems would all be simultaneously knocked out of service – and all these systems would be disabled until the solid-state electronics required to operate them could be repaired or replaced.

“The E1 wave will also instantly destroy millions of glass insulators found on 15 kilovolt-class electric power distribution lines. 78% of all electricity in the US is delivered to end users (residential, agricultural, commercial) through these 15 kV power lines. The loss of a single insulator on a line can knock out power distribution on the entire line.

“At the same instant, the massive voltage and current induced by the E1 wave will damage and destroy the relays, sensors, and control panels at 1783 High Voltage Substations, knocking out the entire electric power grid in the eastern half of the United States.

“One to ten seconds after the nuclear detonation, the following EMP E3 wave would induce powerful current flows in power lines including lines that are both above and below ground. E3 would damage or destroy many – if not most – of the Large Power Transformers and Extra High Voltage Circuit Breakers required for the long-distance transmission of about 90% of electrical power in the United States.

“The loss of Large Power Transformers and Extra High Voltage Circuit Breakers would mean that entire regions within the United States would be left without electric power for up to a year or longer. This is because Large Power Transformers are not stockpiled and the current wait time for their manufacture is 18 to 24 months; they must be custom designed and manufactured and about 80% are made overseas. They each weigh between 200 and 400 tons and must be shipped by sea and moving them to their final destination is quite difficult even under normal circumstances.

“Because nuclear power plants are not designed to withstand the effects of EMP, the solid-state electronics within their backup electrical and cooling systems would also be damaged and disabled. The failure of their Emergency Power Systems and active Emergency Core Cooling Systems will make it impossible to cool their reactor cores after emergency shutdown; this will quickly lead to reactor core meltdowns at dozens of nuclear power plants.

“To summarize, a single nuclear high-altitude electromagnetic pulse can instantly take out most or all of the US power grid while simultaneously destroying the solid-state electronic devices required to operate US critical national infrastructure – including the safety systems at nuclear power plants. Following a nuclear EMP, the people of the US would suddenly find themselves living in the conditions of the Middle Ages for a period possibly as long as a year – most Americans would not be able to survive such circumstances.

“For less than 4% of the US national defense budget, the US power grid and critical infrastructure can be shielded from EMP. However, the political will to implement this protection has not yet been found, so Americans remain very much at risk.”

The book is available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Kindle. If you read it, you will be amazed and disgusted at the negligence and stupidity of the US government.  Thanks to the fools who govern us, we have zero national security despite the massive expenditures year after year, decade after decade.

People do not realize that the convenience and entertainment provided by their cell phones comes at great cost when measured by risk.  Nothing is secure in the digital age, not your identity, your privacy, your bank account, or your independence. The expansion of the digital revolution into money will mean that you can be denied access to your money for any reason including the exercise of free speech.  All accumulated knowledge in digital form can be erased by one EMP. Try to imagine the consequences of such a loss.  These are new risks never before experienced on Earth.

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Paul Craig Roberts is a renowned author and academic, chairman of The Institute for Political Economy where this article was originally published. Dr. Roberts was previously associate editor and columnist for The Wall Street Journal. He was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy during the Reagan Administration. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

For the last several weeks, the Kiev regime frontman Volodymyr Zelensky has been pitching the much-touted “victory plan” to his overlords in the political West. It didn’t impress them, to put it mildly. Despite this, on October 16, he finally decided to go public with it, revealing the main points in an address to the Verkhovna Rada (Parliament). The document contains five publicly available points and three additional “secret” ones, allegedly “shared only with certain partners”, as CNN reports. Zelensky stated this “would be a bridge toward future peace talks with Russia”. However, among the main points of the “victory plan” is more of the same – NATO membership. CNN claims it also outlines “provisions to strengthen Ukraine’s defense and implement a non-nuclear strategic deterrence package”.

However, already the next day, CNN’s claim was denied by none other than Zelensky himself. Namely, he stated, in no uncertain terms, that if the Neo-Nazi junta isn’t allowed to join NATO, its “only option” will be to acquire nuclear weapons. So much for a “non-nuclear strategic deterrence package”. To make matters worse, he said this during a press conference following his speech in Brussels. He also made a false claim that “Ukraine was the only one who gave up its nuclear weapons” and that “this is why it’s fighting today”. However, this is patently false. Only one country dismantled its own nuclear arsenal completely and that was South Africa (officially in 1994). At around that time, Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan signed an agreement on the transfer of Soviet thermonuclear weapons back to Russia, the sole successor state of the USSR.

Known as the Budapest Memorandum on Security Assurances, the document promised security guarantees to all three former Soviet republics. However, the political West broke these agreements after launching numerous color revolutions across Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, with the goal of taking control over the former republics and strategically encircling Russia. After the CIA-orchestrated “Orange Revolution”, Ukraine stopped being a neutral state and the new foreign-backed regime announced its intention to join the EU and NATO. This was completely unacceptable to the Kremlin, but its reaction was calm, as the putschists were defeated at the 2010 election, normalizing relations between Moscow and Kiev. Unfortunately, this was short-lived, as the US set off the 2014 Maidan coup which brought the Neo-Nazis to power.

The illegal junta then launched the war in the Donbass, killing thousands in the process and here we are today. It should be noted that the Kiev regime already flirted with the idea of acquiring nuclear weapons in the years prior to the special military operation (SMO). Namely, back in early 2021, the Neo-Nazi junta’s former ambassador to Germany, Andriy Melnyk, infamous for his defense of Nazi collaborator Stepan Bandera, threatened that they’ll acquire nuclear weapons. Zelensky himself reiterated this right before and after the SMO began, only to “suddenly change his opinion” days later, due to peace negotiations with Russia. At the time, he stated that “Ukraine must accept it will never join NATO” and that it will “do so if it brings peace”. And that would’ve certainly worked, but there was “just one tiny” problem – Zelensky lied.

The already signed peace deal was thrown into the dustbin and now hundreds of thousands (not too far from a million) are dead, with even more maimed for life and millions of refugees (around half of whom fled to Russia). However, that’s clearly not enough for the political West and its Neo-Nazi puppets.

According to the Associated Press, Zelensky supposedly “gave his allies three months to approve the key points of his ‘victory plan'”, but didn’t specify what the Kiev regime would do if its demands weren’t met. It seems the Neo-Nazi junta frontman decided to spell it out this time. While he was presenting the plan, Zelensky claimed that “Ukraine could win no later than next year”. If you’re laughing at this, you’re not the only one. Namely, prior to publicly revealing it, Zelensky presented this “victory plan” to the US, UK, France, Italy, Germany, etc.

The lack of any official reaction to the document is very telling. The plan includes points that were already publicly rejected by many NATO members, including the demand to allow long-range strikes deeper within Russia. It should be noted that this is not because of any sanity or altruism in those countries’ leaders, but because Moscow made it very clear that they would suffer direct consequences if this ever came to pass. Another point of the plan boils down to NATO effectively establishing no-fly zones over parts of Ukraine, but this too was rejected in previous months, so there’s no reason to think anything changed about it, especially because Moscow demonstrated what would happen to those trying to enforce it. And to top it off, Zelensky even suggested that Kiev regime forces could replace some US troops in Europe.

He insisted that “the strength and experience of Ukraine’s military could be used to strengthen European defense after the war and eventually replace certain US forces in Europe”. While Ukrainian soldiers might be better than NATO troops (according to their own admission), this very idea is absolutely ridiculous. However, what’s not is the possibility that Zelensky’s comments are not just “crazy talk”. Namely, the political West already showed signs that it’s ready to help the Neo-Nazi junta with developing nuclear weapons in hopes of inciting a localized nuclear conflict that would destroy both Russia and Ukraine. The Kremlin is perfectly aware of this, with its top diplomat Sergei Lavrov warning that such plans would fail, as Moscow would respond with its own strikes on the Kiev regime’s sponsors in this eventuality.

However, it seems NATO hasn’t given up on this plan. And this is seen not only in the fact that Zelensky was allowed to make the aforementioned statement in Brussels, but also because certain members of the world’s most vile racketeering cartel already support some points of the “victory plan”. Namely, the Netherlands backed the Neo-Nazi junta’s attacks on Russia using its nuclear-capable F-16s and reiterated this after it delivered the fighters earlier this month. Such belligerence will surely not go unnoticed in Moscow. However, even if the political West doesn’t provide the means for the Kiev regime to acquire nuclear weapons, it may help them make the so-called “dirty bomb”. This issue was raised many times by Moscow, including by Andrei Kartapolov, the head of the State Duma Defense Committee, in comments to RIA Novosti.

Either way, it’s perfectly clear that the political West cannot defeat Russia directly, so it keeps trying to make these Pilatian moves where its participation will be concealed under the shroud of public “rejection” of the Neo-Nazi junta’s requests, when, in reality, it keeps pushing for greater escalation that would be limited to Russia and Ukraine only. NATO is perfectly aware that Moscow’s advance cannot be stopped by any conventional means and that the Kremlin will take back Ukraine one way or another. Thus, if that’s inevitable, it wants to ensure that the unfortunate country becomes a ruin*

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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 SERGEI SUPINSKY

The Weight-Loss Injection Scam: Feeding Pharma Greed

October 19th, 2024 by Paul Anthony Taylor

The UK government is betting big on injectable weight-loss drugs. Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer and Health Secretary Wes Streeting are even promoting them as the solution to getting the unemployed back to work, claiming the shots will not only tackle obesity but also boost the UK economy. In reality, however, their enthusiasm for these drugs has little to do with health. Far from being ‘miracle drugs,’ weight-loss injections like Ozempic, Mounjaro, and Wegovy are simply the latest cynical attempt to feed the insatiable greed of the pharmaceutical investment business.

Reflecting their roles as political stakeholders for the pharma industry, Starmer and Streeting are pinning their hopes on a clinical trial to be run in partnership with American drug giant Eli Lilly, which will inject obese unemployed people with Mounjaro. But in their zeal to worship at the trillion-dollar altar of the pharma industry, they are ignoring the fact that obesity is just one part of a multi-faceted health problem. Treating it without addressing its root causes is not the answer.

Wishful Thinking

This is hardly the first time that the UK government has attempted to tackle obesity. From half-heartedly promoting healthy eating to slapping a tax on sugary drinks, countless initiatives have been thrown at the problem. But they’ve all failed. Today, one in three UK adults is still obese. The notion that drugs are going to achieve what decades of public health policy couldn’t is wishful thinking.

Weight-loss drugs might make people feel full faster, but they aren’t a cure for calorie-dense nutrient-deficient diets. Moreover, there’s already serious concern that relying on them will create a ‘dependency culture’ where people skip the hard work of improving their diet and exercise routines and just rely on injectable pharmaceuticals instead. This might be good for drug industry profits, but it ignores the root causes of the problem.

Celebrity Endorsement

The UK government’s plan raises other questions as well. The country’s National Health Service (NHS) has strict rules about who can get these drugs, for example. Currently, only people with severe obesity and other health complications qualify for Wegovy, and even then, access is restricted to specialist programs that are already stretched to breaking point. Meanwhile, Mounjaro isn’t even approved in the UK yet, and when it is, it could take years to roll out.

But let’s imagine that Starmer and Streeting force the NHS to open up the floodgates. Would drug manufacturers be able to keep up with demand, or would they respond by raising prices? There are already shortages of Wegovy and Ozempi due to private clinics hoarding the supply for wealthy clients. Celebrities have been speaking openly about their use of the injections, and social media is full of endorsements. All this has left the NHS scrambling for supply.

The idea that weight-loss injections will magically reduce long-term unemployment is ultimately delusional. Shedding excess weight could undoubtedly improve some people’s health, but obesity isn’t the primary driver of unemployment. According to data from the UK’s Office for National Statistics, mental health conditions and musculoskeletal problems are the main reasons people can’t work. As such, these drugs are clearly not going to spark the economic revival that Starmer and Streeting are seeking.

Unpleasant Side Effects

While weight-loss injections are being pushed as the ultimate fix for obesity and unemployment, they come with a slew of unpleasant side effects that no one’s talking about loudly enough. Nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, constipation, and abdominal pain are particularly common. And if patients stop having the injections, most or all of the weight they have lost will likely come back. At a cost of around $1,000 per month per patient, the pharma industry has a vested interest in people becoming dependent on these treatments.

Far from being the game-changer that they are being promoted as, weight-loss drugs are just the latest overhyped pharma fad. It would be naïve to expect them to solve a nation’s health or economic problems anytime soon. Instead, they’re simply another distraction that puts more money in pharma pockets and avoids addressing real, long-term solutions to the myriad of problems now facing our world.

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

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

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

He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from Adobe Stock / Dr. Rath Health Foundation

The greatly respected geneticist Kevin McKernan and his team have presented their most recent research, now available in preprint.

Using five different laboratory methods, McKernan and his team studied two vials each of Moderna’s and Pfizer’s bivalent “vaccines.” Both brands contained levels of DNA contamination that exceeded the limits set by both the European Medicines Agency (EMA) and the U.S. FDA.

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Pfizer’s bivalent “vaccine” contains several components when assembling the RNA sequence library. These include the spike protein insert (marked in red), a bacterial origin of replication (yellow), a Neo/Kan resistance gene (green), and two origins of replication (yellow) along with an SV40 promoter (marked in yellow and white).

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When testing for RNA and DNA in the vaccine, the ratio of RNA to DNA was found to be between 43:1 and 161:1. However, the European Medicines Agency (EMA) requires a much higher ratio of 3030:1 for safety. This means the amount of DNA in the vaccine is 18 to 70 times higher than what is allowed by the EMA.

This raises multiple concerns, adding to the growing body of evidence calling for an immediate halt to these injections. One particularly troubling issue is the danger of DNA contamination in breast milk. Current testing methods would miss this problem, as exosomes containing DNA in breast milk could easily pass into suckling infants through their highly receptive neonatal upper digestive tract. The risk of genetic invasion via breast milk is alarming and could constitute a serious violation of medical safety.

The research team consists of Kevin McKernan, Yvonne Helbert, Liam T. Kane, and Stephen McLaughlin from Medicinal Genomics. Their preprint report is titled “Sequencing of Bivalent Moderna and Pfizer mRNA Vaccines Reveals Nanogram to Microgram Quantities of Expression Vector dsDNA per Dose” and can be found here.

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

Featured image is from Mercola


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

“ It is clear that such a major campaign against Germany’s peace and security cannot go unanswered. World propaganda against us will be answered with world propaganda for us. Joseph Goebbels [1]

“I just think that what I’d like people to understand is that so many of the things that as Canadians we’d like to think are sacrosanct, you know, whether it’s we live in a democratic society, we have a free and open media, we have academic institutions, like you said, Michael, that are these open spaces of knowledge exchange, all of these things are being severely eroded, seriously eroded. And I think that really what, you know, if Canadians don’t wake up pretty soon, you know, that democracy is going to slip through our hands, like grains of sand, you know, because it really is getting that intense.”Kevin MacKay, from this week’s interview.

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In her 2007 book The End of America: Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot,  Naomi Wolf wrote about how the “blueprint” for crushing a democracy always took the form of ten steps:

  1. Invoking an external and internal threat
  2. Establish secret prisons
  3. Develop a paramilitary force
  4. Surveil ordinary citizens
  5. Infiltrate citizen groups
  6. Arbitrarily detain and release citizens
  7. Target key individuals
  8. Restrict the press
  9. Cast criticism as ‘espionage’ and dissent as ‘treason’
  10. Subvert the rule of law [2]

It is shocking to reflect on how many of these steps have been taken in many countries. And not just in places like Ukraine and Israel, as spelled out throughout this website. Canada, too, is not the crusader for democracy it bills itself to be. Several past guests of the Global Research News Hour have experiences with the majority of these repressive measures. And this is a situation that should concern all of us.[3]

We have rocket high inflation, largely due to the war in Ukraine (NATO vs Russia). We have enemies (Russia and Palestine supporters). And increasingly, the “pawns” they set up in academia and in journalism are contributing “dis-information” to stir up harmful dissent in our conversations about war torn regions on the globe.[4]

We are now witnessing innocent people, from independent journalists to intellectuals of high esteem facing open challenges in the public sphere. In Canada, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) have put their women and men on notice to set their sites on any “person of interest” that could pose a threat. And far too many are being detained. [5]

Germany was a democratic society just a few years before suspicion and despair drove it toward a constitutional abyss. If Canada has begun to follow the same path then the subject deserves a fair hearing on the Global Research News Hour. [6]

Our show starts with two women, Eva Bartlett and Tamara Lorincz, who got detained in Canadian airports and asked unusual questions for daring to – gulp – speak with Russians! Later in the program, we hear from three more people: Professor Radhika Desai, Professor Kevin MacKay, and independent journalist Vanessa Beeley about similar encounters in airports and in academia more generally. These individuals through what they experienced tell us more about what happened, how much worse this could get, and what can be done about it.

Eva Bartlett is a Canadian independent journalist and activist. She has spent years on the ground covering conflict zones in the Middle East, especially in Syria and occupied Palestine. She is a recipient of the 2017 International Journalism Award for International Reporting, granted by the Mexican Journalists’ Press Club, was the first recipient of the Serena Shim Award for Uncompromised Integrity in Journalism, and was short-listed in 2017 for the Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism.

Tamara Lorincz is a member of Canadian Voice of Women for Peace. Tamara is also a member of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom-Canada, and a fellow with the Canadian Foreign Policy Institute. As well, she is on the advisory committee of the Global Network Against Weapons and Nuclear Power in Space, World Beyond War and the No to War, No to NATO Network. She is a PhD candidate, Balsillie School of International Affairs, Wilfrid Laurier University.

Radhika Desai is  Professor in the Department of Political Studies at the University of Manitoba in Canada; and she is the Convener of the International Manifesto Group. She is the author of Geopolitical Economy: After US Hegemony, Globalization and Empire (2013) among other books, as well as numerous articles in Economic and Political Weekly, International Critical Thought, New Left Review, Third World Quarterly, World Review of Political Economy and other journals.

Kevin MacKay is Anthropology professor at Mohawk College of Applied Arts and Technology, and also the  Co-op Executive Director of Skydragon cooperative,  a non-profit community development organization in Hamilton, Ontario. He also coordinates a new group: Canadian Academics for a Just Foreign Policy (justforeignpolicy.ca)

Vanessa Beeley is an independent journalist and photographer who has worked extensively in the Middle East – on the ground in Syria, Egypt, Iraq and Palestine, while also covering the conflict in Yemen since 2015. In 2017 Vanessa was a finalist for the prestigious Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism which was won by the much-acclaimed Robert Parry that year. In 2019, Vanessa was among recipients of the Serena Shim Award for uncompromised integrity in journalism. 

(Global Research News Hour episode 445)

LISTEN TO THE SHOW


Click to download the audio (MP3 format) 

Transcript of interview with Kevin MacKay, Radhika Desai and Vanessa Beeley, October 15, 2024

Global Research: I will start with Professor MacKay. Could you comment a little on the experiences that you have endured and witnessed in the last year or so?

Kevin MacKay: Thank you.

Yeah, I think like a lot of other folks in academia who are studying critical foreign policy, so they’re looking at world events from a lens that is critical of Western interests, you know, Western colonialism, imperialism. We’ve all been, I think, experiencing a chill and pushback in various ways. At my institution, it has, there’s been a couple of campaigns to get me fired.

I seem to have very, very poor luck using space on campus to hold any kind of critical event. And I’m trying to use legal means to push against that. So definitely been experiencing a lot of suppression, and then also encountering other folks who have been as well.

And so I really think this is a national phenomenon that we’re witnessing.

GR: Yeah, yeah. I mean, I guess, especially with the, what’s happening on campuses with students who are trying to embargo the against, you know, starting the embargoes against the Palestine, the genocide of Palestinians.

KM: Yeah, very much so. So we’ve seen it among students and faculty, you’re right, there’s really a concerted effort to crack down on any alternative narratives.

And I think it speaks a lot to you, as I’m sure other guests will speak to the importance of establishment narratives in enabling things like the Palestinian genocide, enabling the proxy war in Ukraine. I think that, you know, obviously, our governments, the military industrial complex, the other power centers, the only way they can do what they do is if there is, you know, profound misinformation and really skewed narratives out there in the public. And I think folks who are trying to push against that, you know, such as Vanessa, Radhika, you know, myself, other academics are becoming targets simply because they can’t let the truth come out.

GR: Okay. Radhika Desai, I know that you travel pretty frequently as part of your job. You know, you’ve been to China many times, Russia, you’ve been, you know, all over the place.

And you actually asked some of the guests to come here, convene them in conferences, have them speak to your students and so on. Yet, something happened to you recently that’s, as I understand, it’s never happened before. And, you know, maybe you could enlighten us on what exactly happened.

It was at an airport, correct?

Radhika Desai: Yeah. So, I just want to say that actually, the history of trying to suppress the alternative, you know, suppress the truthful narratives that, at least the diverse views that we must put forward in order to have any proper debate, the suppression of that, for me, in my personal experience goes back a long way. I remember in 2014, when essentially Russia incorporated Crimea into its own territory.

And Boris Kagarlitsky, who you will know, is at the moment under arrest in Russia. At that time, he had held a conference. He’s a good friend of mine and my husband, Alan Freeman.

And he had invited us to a conference in Yalta, in the Crimea. We had gone there. It was a conference of activists.

As you know, when the original civil war started, there was a, you know, these people called them, they saw themselves as establishing these people’s republics and so on. And so, we had gone there and there was another Canadian there, Roger Annis. And when we all came back, we decided to hold an event just to report on what we had done, because we had been talking to all the activists, the Odessa massacre had just taken place.

So, there were activists from all over essentially reporting on what had happened. And we, after coming back, we held a public meeting at the Ukrainian Labour Temple, which is a very well-known and beautiful venue here in Winnipeg. And we had essentially people who were also academics at the same university, but also their community allies tried to disrupt our meeting.

A year or two later, we had an event on NATO. There were attempts to disrupt it. Every so often, there are people writing to my head of department or my dean saying this woman should not be working here, et cetera.

But so far, thanks to the University of Manitoba, they have taken the position that Radhika has, as like all faculty members, has academic freedom. And I have written about Ukraine. I have edited a book about it.

So, it’s not like I’m, you know, mouthing off about things I know nothing about. Then, yes, you were mentioning, so this was already in the background. And then last year, we were going to Valdai.

It’s essentially Russia’s equivalent of the Council on Foreign Relations. If the Council on Foreign Relations of a big and important country invites you, you want to go because there are really interesting people there. And by the way, I should mention that the guests at Valdai don’t just include, you know, sort of people from countries that are not Western.

They include a lot of Western countries. There are people from France, from Germany, from the UK, from Italy, from all over Western Europe, et cetera. But anyway, so we were there.

And before we got there, we actually were in China for a few days for a conference. And then we were going from China to Sochi and back and then back from China to Winnipeg. And so, while we were in China, we heard that Valdai had been sanctioned by the Canadian government.

This immediately raised the question, should we go or not? Alan and I sat and we read the sanctions, like the law of the sanctions. We consulted informally, of course, a lot of friends, knowledgeable friends, including friends who were lawyers. And we decided on balance that the sanctions did not apply to us.

We went. We returned. We spent a couple more days in China before returning via Vancouver to Canada and to Winnipeg.

And at Vancouver Airport, we were subject, Alan and I were subject to a three hours long interrogation in which the customs officers were essentially on a fishing expedition saying things like, you know, Valdai has been sanctioned. Why did you go to Valdai? Who did you meet? Blah, blah, and so on. And initially, we thought, you know, we should cooperate.

We can tell them everything that we do, et cetera. So, we cooperated. But they kept pushing and being really aggressive and often insulting and all that.

So, then finally, we decided, OK, we’re not going to, you know, this is it. So, I said, you know, you keep saying that Valdai has been sanctioned, but I have read the sanctions law. It does not apply to attending conference.

Have you read the sanctions law? This guy says, oh, there are two people there. O h, we don’t know anything about sanctions. We’re just customs officers.

I said, right. So, I’m answering every last question you got about what is on my person, what’s in my bags. And I let you do your job as a customs officer, but I’m not answering a single other question about Valdai or anything that that’s none of your business.

So, then they tried to, they goaded me for another 15 minutes because they finished with Alan by this time. They goaded me for another 15 minutes and then they gave up because I refused. I literally just stood there like this and I did not answer any question.

They would do stupid things like don’t put your hands in your pockets. Like, where have you heard that? You know, they just do anything to try to intimidate you, to discombobulate you, to make you feel like you are very insecure and you really have to fight back. But they were just on a fishing expedition.

They got nothing. And I am going to Valdai again this year and I will see what they do when I come back.

GR: Vanessa Beeley, you were confronted at Heathrow Airport almost three years ago, I believe. And I mean, you live in Damascus now, but you travelled to different centres from time to time.

I noticed that you’ve really undercut Western state narratives, particularly with regard to the White Helmets in Syria, right? And maybe you may have run into difficulties, just for that, with getting into the United States and Canada. But as I understand it, it’s nothing like what you went through at Heathrow Airport. And does it sound, what Radhika went through, does that sound similar to what you went through?

Vanessa Beeley: Yeah, very similar.

But I mean, if you remember when I did the speaking tour in Canada, I think that was 20, no, it was 2018 or 2019. I’m losing track. But if you remember, every single talk was boycotted and shut down.

And we had to, in every city, find a last minute venue to do the talk. I mean, it was just extraordinary. And even in Winnipeg, by the way, I can’t remember the university that stopped it, but crazy.

But anyway, so I came to live in Syria in 2019. And then of course, COVID hit and everyone was kind of pretty much isolated, couldn’t go anywhere. And then I think it was at the end of 2022, I decided I would go back.

My brother had had his first baby, so I wanted to go back for Christmas. And I’ll never forget, so it was a flight coming in from Beirut. I’m probably the only British person on this flight.

And I get off the plane and there’s two plainclothes policemen standing there, one woman, one guy. And they basically presented themselves as the anti-terrorist squad. They demanded my passport, my mobile phone.

And I remember that my first statement to them was, why are you arresting me? Why aren’t you arresting the British government? They’re responsible for the terrorism in Syria. I was so angry. I was so incensed, you know, that-

GR: You were like Radhika, you stood your ground.

VB: Yeah, absolutely. And I refused to give the mobile phone. So they said, okay, if you don’t, we’ll arrest you.

So I had to hand it over.

GR: You’re a journalist too.

VB: Yeah! So it was Section 7 of the Anti-Terrorist act which is effectively, as Radhika mentioned, it’s a fishing expedition, right? And I was held for six hours, which is the maximum amount of time that they can hold you under this particular section.

There is now another section that they’re bringing into use where they can effectively arrest people without charging them and hold them like Richard Medhurst and Sarah Wilkinson in the UK for their anti-genocide views. I’m not even going to say pro-Palestinian because, you know, any human being should be against what Israel is doing to the Palestinians and now to the Lebanese. And of course, for many years against Syria also.

And so I was interrogated for this six hours. I had my DNA taken. I had my fingerprints taken.

I was photographed like a criminal, you know, with your face against the wall and you have to turn sideways. So it was a total criminalization process. It was a total intimidation harassment process.

And the thing is, at the end of it, because I had also undergone very much like  Eva Bartlett, two years of solid media pressure and attacks, not only media, but also from academic institutions where I was, you know, going to speak and so on. But I found out at the end of the interview, so at the end of the six hours, that effectively the BBC had given the information to the terrorist squad. Why did I know this? Because of the questions that were being asked were related to a sting operation that was carried out against an academic that was part of the working group investigating the OPCW corruption and misreporting of the alleged chemical weapon attacks in Syria, particularly in 2018 in Douma in the eastern suburbs of Damascus.

So it became very clear to me then that media outlets like the BBC and The Guardian and Channel 4 and all of these outlets that had been attacking me for two years were working in lockstep with the security agencies in the UK who were then triggering the anti-terrorist police. And I wasn’t investigated, by the way, about my Syria work so much, although that was a major part of the conversation, I was stopped on the basis that I was giving secret information to foreign intelligence agencies, primarily Russia. So, you know, it was ridiculous.

And to a degree, you know, I was pretty relaxed. I didn’t have anything to hide. Everything I say is in the public domain anyway.

And at the end of six hours, they did give me back my phone, which many people didn’t have that advantage.

GR: So, I mean, it’s not as if they actually believe necessarily that you are this terrible person, that they’re, as you say, a fishing expedition and they’re trying to, you know, get whatever they can and to intimidate you and to avoid covering these things.

VB: Well, and to download everything from my phone, everything.

So, all my emails, it took them six hours to take all that information and I still don’t know where it is. I don’t know who’s received this information, what it’s being used for, what my DNA is going to be used for. Is it going to be stored? Is it going to be, you know, used as some kind of data mining service in the future? I have no idea.

There’s been no responses from them since the interrogation.

GR: Yeah. Well, Radhika and Vanessa, I mean, did you take any action, like in protest, like go to a political individual or anyone who could say, hey, you got to do something about this?

RD: Well, I mean, I’ve just been so darn busy this past year, partly, of course, because of these things, because Vanessa mentioned something which I should also mention, which is that, of course, when I came back, literally, like, as some of you know, part of the reason why I was interrogated, apart from going to the Valdai conference, is that I embarrassed the Canadian government because we were asked, you know, in the past, we used to be able to just ask questions from the floor to President Putin.

Valdai always closes with a big address by President Putin. That’s like one of the big events on the foreign policy calendar in Russia. And so in the past, we used to just get up on the floor from the floor and ask questions.

But lately, they have said, please submit questions. So I had submitted a question about the fact that and this is an appropriate question to ask the president of the country that played such a big role in defeating Nazism, because the Canadian parliament has stood up and applauded a Nazi on the grounds that he had been fighting the communists. And I just find it to this day astonishing that hundreds, how many MPs do we have 400 and something?

GR: 338, I think.

RD: Yeah, three or whatever. I think the senators were there too. But whatever.

The point is that the entire parliament, hundreds of parliamentarians can stand up and applaud this guy without asking a very simple question. If he was fighting the Russians in World War Two, who was he fighting with?

GR: Yeah.

RD: They never asked that question. How? And I saw, you know, of course, that I got so the moment I saw, I asked this question.

And incidentally, I also asked a question about Boris Kagarlitsky. So I asked these two questions, because Boris is a friend, although, you know, on the war, he has taken a position that I do not agree with. But I still think he’s a great scholar and important intellectual.

Anyway, I asked President Putin about this. And in fact, Boris was, as a result, released for a while. Anyway, the point is that I asked this question.

And of course, Putin began, you know, took his time elaborating an answer, because, of course, as is his right as the leader of this country. And so, you know, he, so he did this, and the meeting hadn’t even ended.




And my phone was bleeping with, you know, CBC wants to interview, blah, blah, etc.

And I took the interview. And that told me taught me one lesson, never do an interview unless they let you record it, because they so misrepresent what you’ve said. And they just take little clips, you know, and they remove and I would have loved to put a recording of that interview on my own website and said, please listen to this here.

But anyway, so I just wanted to and then I got a bad out, you know, the local CBC people came and interviewed me and did the same hash job, and so on. So, all of that has happened. And I should mention just one quick other thing.

And now I’m, you know, so I’ve just been so busy. And I have so much writing to do that I haven’t bothered to do anything, although I have made notes. And I had for a while thought I would write a thing on sanctions, because there is something really, really problematic about sanctions too, because these sanctions are written in such a way that they will allow most businessmen to continue their operations with Russia and with Russian businesses.

They are actually written in a way that they can be used to harass people like me not to actually obstruct business between Canada and Russia, which is what their proclaimed goal is. So, I was going to write an article about that. That didn’t get done because of too many other things.

But lately, there has been an article in The Hill Times about people who appear on RT and attend Valdai Club conferences. There is actually a handful of us in this country who fit that definition. And Dimitri Lascaris, who you know, and Alan and I, we certainly have written a joint letter to The Hill Times.

We are told it’s going to be published soon. So, I hope they will publish it either this week or next. And I should also add that Vanessa’s experience with what is the venue being cancelled and finding a new secret venue each time.

This happened when Dimitri was doing a tour, touring all over the country and reporting on his trip to Ukraine and to Crimea. Sorry, to Russia and to Crimea. So, anyway, I mean, these things are happening.

And I would say, of course, now, at Kevin’s instigation, Kevin has taken the initiative, an excellent initiative to start this Canadian Academics for Just Foreign Policy. So, I’ll let him talk about that. But this is the rubric under which we should fight.

GR: Kevin McKay, you know, the university has been such a, I don’t know, a sanctuary, in a sense, you know, I mean, you know, certain perspectives like communism or LGBTQ in the past, they could be spoken here before anywhere else, really. This is where it started as a sanctionary.

And what’s more, you have Tenure. And so, it protects you, you know, to explore new frontiers of thought, you know, kind of unmolested, but now we seem to see we’re seeing where things are no longer safe. Talk about, you know, going forward, where were the these things that are they’re affecting a faculty and in students, is there a noticeable change in the way they’re studying and or behaving or working that that you’re noticing?

KM: Yeah, thank you.

I mean, you know, I wasn’t around as an academic in the 60s. But from what I understand from folks who were, we’ve had, we’ve had waves of this kind of suppression, right? We’ve had, you know, obviously, sort of the McCarthy era in the States, we had, you know, our equivalent in Canada, as well, where at different times, academics have been suppressed, it always seems to be when the empire is waging major wars. I mean, when Canada was occupying Afghanistan, it was incredibly difficult to have any kind of discourse about Afghanistan within academia.

So, I think that’s the suppression has always been there. But I think we see, I mean, recently, it seems to me, anyway, that it’s been given this new sort of unholy energy, right, by, you know, the conflict in Palestine, the genocide there, by the Ukraine proxy war, there’s a real, it’s more blatant, I would say, it’s more out in the open, in the sense that you have faculty members whose employment is being threatened, you have a lot of internal chilling, you know, that I know, Radhika, when we did our launch last week, spoke really, really eloquently about just all the subtle ways in which, whether it’s getting grants, whether it’s getting publications, whether it’s participating on committees, you know, doing acts of service within the institution as professors are supposed to do. There’s so many ways in which people can be marginalized, and they’re doing it to students as well.

So, we had an amazing graduate student speaking at our launch last week, and it was a really heartbreaking story. She was talking about just all the ways in which she is being systematically marginalized, whether it’s her thesis committee, whether it’s constant investigations that the institution is conducting into her behaviour. And the thing is, too, there’s the weaponization of codes of conduct that we’re seeing now across academia.

And so, we all have these kind of codes of conduct or civility policies or anti-harassment policies, and it sounds great on a certain level, you know, if you’re going to storm into someone’s office and tell them off, well, we don’t want that, right? But what they’re being used to do is to suppress speech, to threaten, to intimidate and harass faculty who are speaking out against genocide, speaking out against proxy war, and even just speaking for peace. And this is what, to me, what is really interesting is just advocating for a peaceful foreign policy, advocating for things like international law and global cooperation. These things are making people a target now.

And it’s just, you know, to sort of leave off my talk here, I just think that what I’d like people to understand is that so many of the things that as Canadians we’d like to think are sacrosanct, you know, whether it’s we live in a democratic society, we have a free and open media, we have academic institutions, like you said, Michael, that are these open spaces of knowledge exchange, all of these things are being severely eroded, seriously eroded. And I think that really what, you know, if Canadians don’t wake up pretty soon, you know, that democracy is going to slip through our hands, like grains of sand, you know, because it really is getting that intense. And so what we’re trying to do is we’re trying to try to organize, I mean, everyone’s already doing, I mean, the two other women on this conversation have been doing this for a lot longer than I have, but trying to organize whether we’re journalists or academics, I mean, we need to reassert these foundational values of a democratic society, you know, that we have academic freedom, we have free speech, we have the freedom of dissent and association and whatnot.

So I think that’s the way forward is we need to just keep organizing around these, these issues.

GR: Yeah. Vanessa, I’m like listening to Kevin, I’m reminded of the saying is back in World War Two, you know, Martin Niemöller, first, they came for the socialists, then they came for the trade unionists, then they came for this, the Jews, then they came for me.

And I mean, I don’t know, I’m, I mean, I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say we’re kind of on the same trapping, you’re witnessing this, you know, creeping levels of, you know, you know, fascism or something. I mean, but I mean, given your engagement, and you’re right, like in the thick of things with your journalism, and then speaking out unreservedly, what do you think the kind of engagement? Like, where is this leading? Do you think? I mean, what’s happening around us? And what could we possibly do to reverse the trend?

VB: Um, that’s a really interesting question. And, and, you know, I don’t have all the answers.

But I guess, if I look at what frightens them most, are these public talks, are these public conferences where people can come and hear you and ask questions and interact and meet you face to face? I mean, it’s fantastic, we will have YouTube, we will, well, some of us don’t, of course, because of censorship. But you know, the internet is a great tool. But I don’t think it’s as big a threat as meeting people in person and talking to them about your experiences, because the internet creates a kind of gladiatorial environment in which people can just put forward their arguments and challenge your arguments in a very aggressive, non constructive, counterintuitive way.

But when you actually go to these public forums, and interestingly, as a group, which was called media on trial, where we’re restarting this, particularly in the UK, but then spreading outwards. And I think the very fact that these kind of events are being cancelled and being attacked, I mean, mine were actually under attack from the extremist elements that had come to Canada from Syria, and who objected to my speaking about my experience inside Syria, which was very different, of course, to the portrayal of events in Syria by the legacy media, the colonial media across the West. But I think when you can actually sit down face to face, and have a panel of people who can present ideas and concepts and opinions in a very intelligent, constructive way that destroys their narratives.

And so for me, it’s not allowing ourselves to be isolated, to make sure that we’re creating groups of like minded people all the time. Because for example, I’m in Syria, you’re in Canada, other people are in Russia, we’re scattered. We don’t have that enormous resource pool, and complex, entire industrial complex of information manipulation that the ruling elite and the oligarchs and the military industrial complex, and the globalists have, we don’t have that.

But I think, and Russia is actually quite good at this, you mentioned Valdai, but there are many NGOs in Russia, for example, who are constantly establishing these kind of meeting places. And I think we need to start doing more of this, you know, breaking out of that academic paradigm where you’re in a minority, create the majority in another space. Including academics or including journalists.

And what I’d love to see – just one last thing – is this collaboration between like-minded academics and journalists, because that also has been eroded. And I think that’s what I found incredibly invaluable, because my experience for example on the ground combined with an academic investigation into a certain event is an invaluable combination.

So I think that sort of collaboration between independent journalists and independent thinking academics is incredibly important also for the future.


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://research.calvin.edu/german-propaganda-archive/goeb41.htm
  2. https://www.globalresearch.ca/the-end-of-canada-in-ten-steps-a-conversation-with-naomi-wolf/5438017
  3. https://www.globalresearch.ca/al-mayadeen-israel-hit-list-information-terrorists/5865225
  4. https://www.jta.org/2024/09/06/united-states/justice-department-says-russian-disinformation-campaign-targeted-israel-and-us-jews
  5. https://justforeignpolicy.ca/
  6. https://www.annefrank.org/en/anne-frank/go-in-depth/germany-1933-democracy-dictatorship/

 

 

First published on October 12, 2024

The Covid 19 “Vaccine” narrative is being question n several countries, confirming what we have outlined and document since the vaccine rollout in mid-December 2020.

We recall the recent courageous statement of Japan’s Former Minister of Internal Affairs Kazuhiro Haraguchi:

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

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

And now Florida’s Surgeon General Dr. Joseph A. Ladapo questions the legitimacy of the mRNA Vaccine, prior to the November 5, Presidential Elections: 

The decision of the Surgeon General is carefully documented. The Florida Department of Health issued the following advisory

Based on the high rate of global immunity and currently available data, the State Surgeon General advises against the use of mRNA COVID-19 vaccines. Any provider concerned about the health risks associated with COVID-19 for patients over the age of 65 or with underlying health conditions should prioritize patient access to non-mRNA COVID-19 vaccines and treatment. 

Safety and Efficacy Concerns

Providers and patients should be aware of outstanding mRNA COVID-19 vaccine safety and efficacy concerns: 

  • The mRNA COVID-19 vaccines present a risk of subclinical and clinical myocarditis and other cardiovascular conditions among otherwise healthy individuals. 
  • The mRNA COVID-19 vaccine may be associated with an increased risk of autoimmune diseases including systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE), rheumatoid arthritis, and psoriasis. 
  • Throughout the pandemic, studies across geographic regions found that the mRNA COVID-19 vaccines are associated with negative effectiveness after four to six months. As efficacy waned, studies showed that COVID-19 vaccinated individuals developed an increased risk for infection.  
  • Potential DNA integration from the mRNA COVID-19 vaccines pose unique and elevated risk to human health and to the integrity of the human genome, including the risk that DNA integrated into sperm or egg gametes could be passed onto offspring of mRNA COVID-19 vaccine recipients. 
  • There is unknown risk of potential adverse impacts with each additional dose of the mRNA COVID-19 vaccine; currently individuals may have received five to seven doses (and counting) of this vaccine over a 3-year period. 

Improving habits and overall health help manage and reduce the risk of heart disease, type 2 diabetes, and obesity, risk factors for serious illness from COVID-19.  

The State Surgeon General and the Department continue to encourage Floridians to prioritize their overall health by: 

Staying physically active, 

  • Minimizing processed foods, 
  • Prioritizing vegetables and healthy fats, and 
  • Spending time outdoors to support necessary vitamin D levels. 
On September 13, 2023, State Surgeon General Dr. Joseph A. Ladapo provided guidance against COVID-19 boosters for individuals under 65 and younger.
 
In addition to aforementioned concerns, providers and patients should be aware of outstanding safety and efficacy concerns outlined in the State Surgeon General’s previous booster guidance released in September 2023.

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Bombshell: Fox New Reports the following: “Severely Pissed Off”

“MSM now admits the shots are toxic “Discovery billions fragments of DNA in every dose” – Florida Surgeon General

The masses are going to be severely pi$$ed off when they finally find out what they’ve injected themselves with numerous times”

VIDEO Click Here or Screen to access Fox News Report

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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People across America

The State of Florida has called for a halt of the use of mRNA Covid-19 Vaccines, setting a precedent for the implementation of similar decisions not only across the United States, but Worldwide. 

The evidence is overwhelming. 

Read the powerful message of Florida State Surgeon General Joseph A. Ladapo who has come to the rescue of 22 million people in Florida. 

 

 

We call upon people across the United States to pressure State officials to cancel the mRNA Covid-19 once and for all.

The evidence of mortality and morbidity resulting from vaccine inoculation both present (official data) and future (e.g. undetected microscopic blood clots) is overwhelming. 

The official data (mortality and morbidity) as well as numerous scientific studies confirm the nature of the Covid-19 mRNA vaccine which is being imposed on all humanity. 

Contact your representative at the US Congress. The decision of the State of Florida must be the object of debate and analysis across the land. AND THIS SHOULD TAKE PLACE BEFORE THE NOVEMBER 5 ELECTIONS. 

The media has remained mum on the dangers of the vaccine in the course of the last three years.

We invite the media to emulate Fox News, to provide coverage pertaining to the “failures” of the Covid-19 Vaccine and its implications, nationally and internationally. 

In less than four weeks from now it’s Election 2024. Let us actively debate the issue of the vaccine which has affected millions of Americans. 

It is essential that the candidates for the Presidency of the United States take a stance regarding the Covid 19 mRNA vaccine which has been carefully documented by Florida’s Surgeon General Dr. Joseph A. Ladopo. 

 

Michel Chossudovsky, Global Research, October 12, 2024

 

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Below is a short review of the impacts of the Covid-19 Vaccine on Excess Mortality

There are numerous studies on vaccine related excess mortality. Below is a summary of an incisive study pertaining to Cancer Related Excess Mortality in England and Wales resulting from the mRNA Vaccine conducted by the team of Edward Dowd

The data for excess mortality in 2020 (the year prior to the vaccine) are negative with the exception of “malignant neoplasm without specification of site”.

The COVID-19 vaccine was rolled-out in several phases in England and Wales starting on December 8, 2020  and extending into March-April 2021.

The upward movement in excess mortality (%) commences in 2021. The increase in excess mortality related to malignant neoplasm is tabulated for the two first years of the vaccine. 

 

England and Wales: Excess Mortality

 

Below is a similar table pertaining to Excess Mortality in Germany, which points to the Deviation of Observed Mortality from Expected Mortality (by age group) in 2020, 2021, and 2022.

Notice the upward shift in excess mortality in 2021 and 2022 following the rollout of the Covid Vaccine in December 2020

Germany: Excess Mortality 

Germany: Excess Mortality by Age Group (%)

Excess Mortality in Red by age group, Total Excess Mortality in Gray 

Japan:  Excess Mortality

Japan. Excess Mortality (2020-2022): Jump in Excess mortality in 2021 and 2022 (January-October 2022)

United States:

 .
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Official Figures for Vaccine Deaths. Official Data (click image below to access the VAERS website)
 
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The graph below: “All Deaths reported to Vaers by Year” starting in 1990. (e.g. reported by the Victim’s family to VAERS). These are official figures, deaths attributable to the Vaccine. Only a very small percentage of vaccine deaths is reported. Nonetheless the graph below indicates more than 19,000 Vaccine related deaths in 2021 in the U.S. Neither the media nor the U.S government have informed the public. The 19,000 vaccine related deaths cannot be refuted.
 
What can be observed is that the number of reported vaccine deaths has increased dramatically in the course of 2021 corresponding to the first year of the Covid vaccine which was launched in the U.S. in mid December 2020.
 
 

 

The above are excerpts from my Article on the Corona Virus Pandemic 

 

Starts At 6’47”: The Worldwide Corona Crisis

Our thanks to Vaccine Choice Canada 

 

 

Michel  Chossudovsky, Global Research, October 12, 2024

 

 

Le Bombe Nucleari Sotto I Nostri Piedi 

October 18th, 2024 by Manlio Dinucci

La NATO comunica che, il 14 ottobre 2024, ha iniziato la sua esercitazione nucleare annuale Steadfast Noon della durata di due settimane, con oltre 60 aerei di 13 Paesi che effettuano voli di addestramento sull’Europa Occidentale. Vi prendono parte jet da combattimento in grado di trasportare testate nucleari statunitensi, tra cui i primi caccia NATO F-35A dichiarati pronti a svolgere ruoli nucleari. Vi prendono parte bombardieri pesanti, caccia di scorta, aerei da rifornimento in volo e aerei da guerra elettronica, con un personale di 2.000 militari di otto basi aeree.

All’esercitazione di guerra nucleare, chiaramente diretta contro la Russia, partecipa anche l’Italia che – insieme a Germania, Belgio e Olanda – aderisce ala “Nuclear Sharing”, la “Condivisione Nucleare” della NATO.

Quale sia il grado di “condivisione” lo spiega la NATO stessa in un testo ufficiale:

1) “La pianificazione nucleare della NATO è effettuata dal Gruppo di Alto Livello, presieduto dagli Stati Uniti.”

2) “Gli Stati Uniti mantengono il controllo assoluto e la custodia delle loro armi nucleari dispiegate in Europa, mentre gli Alleati forniscono supporto militare”.

In poche parole, sono gli Stati Uniti che forniscono agli Alleati europei le armi nucleari su cui mantengono l’assoluto controllo, mentre gli Alleati europei forniscono aerei e personale militare pronti all’attacco nucleare sotto l’assoluto comando statunitense. La “condivisione nucleare” si sta estendendo al di là dei paesi che ufficialmente ne fanno parte: lo dimostra il fatto che, all’esercitazione di guerra nucleare, partecipano Polonia, Romania e Finlandia. Poiché anche nei Paesi baltici sono schierati aerei NATO a duplice capacità convenzionale e nucleare, ciò significa che gli Stati Uniti hanno costituito in Europa un fronte avanzato da cui può essere lanciato un attacco nucleare contro la Russia.

Contemporaneamente gli Stati Uniti hanno “ammodernato” le basi nucleari in Europa per dotarle dei caccia F-35A e delle nuove bombe nucleari B61-12. In Italia sono state “ammodernate” la base di Ghedi, dove è di stanza il 6° Stormo dell’Aeronautica italiana, e quella di Aviano dove è di stanza il 31° Stoormo di Caccia USA. Le altre basi nucleari “ammodernate” sono quelle di Kleine Brogel in Belgio, di Volkel in Olanda, di Büchel in Germania, cui si aggiiunge la base di Lakenheasth in Gran Bretagna che è stata “ammodernata” segretamente.

Gli Stati Uniti stanno “ammodernando” il proprio arsenale nucleare con una spesa prevista in 1.700 miliardi di dollari., facendo da volano a una corsa agli armamenti che sta divenendo più pericolosa di quella della Guerra Fredda. Basti pensare che le armi nucleari statunitensi schierate in Europa, a ridosso della Russia, possono colpire in pochi minuti San Pietroburgo o Mosca.

Manlio Dinucci

 

VIDEO :

Scholz fala sobre diplomacia e paz enquanto continua armando a Ucrânia.

October 18th, 2024 by Lucas Leiroz de Almeida

A hipocrisia aparentemente tornou-se um aspecto vital dos discursos dos líderes ocidentais. Recentemente, o primeiro-ministro alemão falou sobre “paz” e “diplomacia” com a Federação Russa, alegando que o seu objectivo mais importante é acabar com o conflito na Ucrânia. No entanto, não demonstrou interesse em acabar com o atual programa de apoio de Berlim a Kiev, que é um dos maiores de todo o Ocidente.

Olaf Scholz disse que está pronto para negociar com o presidente russo, Vladimir Putin, termos de paz que poriam fim às hostilidades na Ucrânia de uma vez por todas. Disse que apoia incondicionalmente as iniciativas de Kiev e as propostas de cessar-fogo apresentadas por Vladimir Zelensky, que, entre outras questões, exigem o fim da presença da Rússia nos territórios reintegrados. No entanto, ele deixou claro que está pronto para negociar diretamente com os russos se for necessário para pôr fim ao conflito.

“Portanto, também é verdade que quando nos perguntam se também falaremos com o presidente russo, respondemos – sim, iremos (…) (As negociações, no entanto, não aconteceriam) ignorando a Ucrânia e nunca sem conversas com nossos parceiros mais próximos”, disse Scholz.

Obviamente, Scholz comentou o assunto como se o Ocidente e a Ucrânia fossem o lado disposto a alcançar a paz, ignorando que foi Moscou, e não Kiev, quem tomou todas as iniciativas diplomáticas desde 2022. Scholz exige que a Ucrânia faça parte do processo de diálogo, mas ignora hipocritamente que os seus parceiros ocidentais, principalmente os EUA e o Reino Unido, boicotaram deliberadamente as conversações anteriores, não tendo sido criticados em nenhum momento pelos líderes europeus por tais ações.

Além disso, é curioso que Scholz comente sobre a paz e as negociações quando a Alemanha é um dos maiores fornecedores de armas, dinheiro e equipamento militar para a Ucrânia em todo o Ocidente. Mesmo passando por uma grave crise energética e desindustrialização, a Alemanha continua a fazer esforços profundos para produzir todos os equipamentos necessários para abastecer o programa de ajuda da Ucrânia, priorizando Kiev em detrimento do próprio povo alemão.

É totalmente hipócrita que um político fale de “paz” e “diplomacia” enquanto o seu governo coopera diretamente no prolongamento da guerra. Se a Alemanha tivesse um interesse real em acabar com as hostilidades, o primeiro passo seria acabar com a ajuda militar à Ucrânia. Sem armas ocidentais, o regime neonazista não teria qualquer hipótese de continuar a lutar e seria forçado a capitular – o que obviamente poria fim ao conflito. Em vez disso, Scholz, tal como outros líderes ocidentais, procura deliberadamente a guerra, ao mesmo tempo que afirma hipocritamente defender a paz.

Toda a retórica a favor da “paz” e da “diplomacia” revela-se absolutamente inútil no contexto atual, uma vez que a realidade mostra que as negociações diretas entre a Rússia e a Ucrânia são impossíveis. Em vez de tentar acalmar o conflito, Kiev tomou todas as medidas possíveis no sentido de aumentar a violência, sobretudo atacando a região desmilitarizada do Oblast de Kursk, matando civis num território que nem sequer é reivindicado pela Ucrânia.

Após a invasão de Kursk, o presidente russo, Vladimir Putin, deixou claro que não haveria mais conversações de paz, cancelando esforços diplomáticos anteriores. Esta ação foi necessária porque Kiev se revelou indigna de qualquer confiança, sendo um regime capaz de cometer os mais terríveis crimes de guerra e violações de direitos básicos. Não é possível negociar com um governo que demonstra interesse em matar civis inocentes numa zona indiscutível e desmilitarizada. A Rússia compreendeu simplesmente que não são possíveis negociações com a Ucrânia e que uma solução militar é a única alternativa para acabar com a guerra.

É também importante sublinhar que a Ucrânia é apenas um representante nesta guerra. O regime não está a lutar contra a Rússia porque quer, mas porque a OTAN o obriga a fazê-lo e envia recursos para que isso aconteça. Neste sentido, não é lógico exigir que a Ucrânia participe nas negociações de paz. O mais eficiente seria Scholz apelar aos seus próprios parceiros ocidentais para pressionarem o proxy ucraniano a pôr fim aos ataques a civis russos, o que restabeleceria o diálogo de paz. No entanto, Scholz não tem interesse em realmente alcançar a paz, mas sim em melhorar a sua própria imagem política através de uma retórica pseudo-pacifista e fútil.

Há um impasse no conflito ucraniano: para resolvê-lo, o Ocidente precisa de abandonar a sua obsessão hegemonista e reconhecer a realidade multipolar, negociando termos mutuamente favoráveis ​​com a Rússia. Obviamente, os EUA não estão dispostos a fazer isto, e é por isso que a guerra provavelmente continuará.

Neste impasse, líderes como Scholz tentam “sobreviver” politicamente, permanecendo alinhados com o Ocidente mas ao mesmo tempo falando de “paz” para evitar serem vistos como colaboradores no derramamento de sangue.

Lucas Leiroz de Almeida

 

Artigo em inglês : Scholz talks about diplomacy and peace while keeps arming Ukraine, InfoBrics, 17 de Outubro de 2024.

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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

Selected Articles: The Monster Behind Weather Engineering?

October 18th, 2024 by Global Research News

The Monster Behind Weather Engineering?

By Peter Koenig, October 18, 2024

“Climate instability” is a soft term, for climate geoengineering, weather modification, extended into weather weaponizing. In other words, a crime on humanity.

Is Political West Bailing Out Due to ‘Real and Increasing Ukraine Fatigue’?

By Drago Bosnic, October 18, 2024

The term “Ukraine fatigue” is certainly not new. We’re accustomed to the political West using it, particularly during the fall and winter, when Europe’s dependence on Russian energy is most apparent. However, it seems the latest usage of the term breaks off from the usual pattern and may indicate that the world’s most aggressive power pole is looking for ways to leave the Neo-Nazi junta to fend for itself.

Zelensky’s 5/8ths Victory Plan

By Dr. Jack Rasmus, October 18, 2024

So what are the details of the Zelensky Victory Plan? Is it a roadmap to eventually winning the war militarily? How different—or not—is it from his and Ukraine’s previous plan and strategy for conducting the war?

Slovakia Moves to Ban ‘Dangerous’ COVID ‘Vaccines,’ Declares Pandemic a ‘Fabricated Operation’

By Frank Bergman, October 18, 2024

Top government officials in Slovakia are moving to ban “dangerous” Covid mRNA shots from the country after an explosive investigation determined that the pandemic was a “fabricated operation” and the “vaccines” were a resulting “act of bioterrorism.”

Historical View of France’s Internal Problems and Unrest in Its Army

By Shane Quinn, October 18, 2024

France’s defeat against Germany in the Franco-Prussian War, or Franco-German War, of the early 1870s provided stark evidence of the country’s regression. The French birth rate by this point was largely stagnating and the population of France was scarcely higher in 1870 compared to half a century before, at little more than 30 million.

Video: Tokyo International Summit Crisis: Naming Names and Connecting Dots in the Globalist Agenda. Dr. Meryl Nass and James Corbett

By Dr. Meryl Nass and James Corbett, October 18, 2024

Join James for this week’s edition of The Corbett Report where he breaks down Dr. Meryl Nass’ presentation to the International Crisis Summit in Tokyo and provides context and further reading about the cadre of elitists who are attempting to take control of the planet and its resources.

Bosnia-Herzegovina: Political Intrusion, Attempts to Eliminate Republika Srpska. Attacks Against RS President. Call to Respect the 1995 Dayton Peace Agreement

By Belgrade Forum, October 17, 2024

The Belgrade Forum for a World of Equals expresses deep concern over the growing threat to the Republika Srpska (RS) and the Serbian people in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) by open attacks on the institutions and competences of the RS guaranteed by the Dayton-Paris Agreement (1995).

The Monster Behind Weather Engineering?

October 18th, 2024 by Peter Koenig

“Climate instability” is a soft term, for climate geoengineering, weather modification, extended into weather weaponizing. In other words, a crime on humanity.

Professor Michel Chossudovsky provides the historic and technical details concerning weather warfare that has been emerging slowly since WW II, and probably before.

For certain, whenever you hear “fake news” to comments and reports about geoengineering and weather weaponizing, you can be sure the so-called fake news are actually the truth. And this is the case for most everything else called “fake news”.

However, what tops it all, is the recent discovery through a former employee at the South Pole Station in Antarctica. He says, what he saw at the South Pole Station is “HAARP on steroids”. He became a whistleblower, who testified before the United States Senate.

HAARP stands for High-frequency Active Auroral Research Program. Since 2015, it is officially a University of Alaska Fairbanks project which researches the ionosphere – the highest, ionized part of Earth’s atmosphere. In reality, it has a long history of weather modification and climate geoengineering.

The researcher and whistleblower, Eric Hecker, used to work for Raytheon Technologies Corporation, an American multinational aerospace and defense conglomerate, at the South Pole Station. In a 15-minute interview by Redacted, he reveals the existence of a MASSIVE weather machine at the South Pole Station. The interview, which details what Mr. Hecker experienced at the South Pole Station, is mind-blowing. It “makes the HAARP project look like a baby project.”

The weather machines at the South Poles Station can control earthquakes and the weather, alias climate. They can fabricate and direct earthquakes, hurricanes, typhoons, cyclones just about anywhere in the world. In addition, there is a giant UFO control tower, also called a neutrino control tower.

Neutrinos are tiny subatomic particles, often called ‘ghost particles’ because they barely interact with anything else. Neutrinos can be used as high-frequency energy transmitters. Earthquake or storm forming energy can be beamed literally anywhere in the world.

Mr. Hecker talks about precisely targeted earthquakes and storms. 

See and listen to this earth-shaking interview by Redacted of 11 October 2024.

With this prelude, the recent category 3 to 5 devastating hurricanes hitting North Carolina and Florida, as well as the typhoons Bebinca and Yagi, hitting China and other Asian countries, are easily explained. 

In late September, Hurricane Helene, a category 5 Hurricane, hit five US States, Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Virginia, killing way over 300 people.

Hurricane Helene was a near-record-breaking storm. Winds and rainfall together turned the tornado into an almost unimaginable disaster that stretched more than 800 kilometers inland from the Florida coast.

“Helene” devastated and flooded Asheville, North Caroline. Strangely, Asheville sits on billions worth of lithium.

Asheville counts about 100,000 inhabitants and is on about 700m elevation – it is unusual that such elevations are flooded to the extent Asheville was inundated (see picture by Asheville Free Press).

Two companies, Piedmont Lithium and Albemarle Corp., plan to open lithium mines in the State of North Carolina in the coming years. Lithium is a metal used to power batteries for electric vehicles, smartphones, and laptop computers – and, of course, “war electronics”.

Guess who controls both of these companies? Right – BlackRock and Vanguard.

See the incisive analysis and video of Greg Reese

Click here to watch Greg Reese’s video

Click here to watch Greese’s video

Last Wednesday night, 9 October, another weird, record Hurricane “Milton” hit the Florida coast, close to Siesta Key near Tampa, moving inwards towards Mexico, devastating Tampa, Florida, killing at least 23 people. The hurricane was downgraded from an original maximum strength category 5 to a level 3 when it made landfall, and later further down to a category 1 storm.

According to the utility tracker “Find Energy”, some 1.3 million customers were still without electricity on Saturday throughout Florida. See the report by CBS

No surprise, Bill Gates owns much of Tampa’s inner city’s renaissance landmark $3.5 billion Water Street Tampa project. Co-investor is Jeffrey Vinik (owner of the city’s professional hockey team, the Tampa Bay Lightning). The 55-acre mixed-use development project at the heart of the city’s downtown corridor recently received the title as North America’s first WELL: 

Certified Community, thanks to its sustainability and livability standards. That seems to fit perfectly into the UN Agenda 2030.

The Water Street Tampa project redefines a booming downtown area, taking advantage of the city’s prime waterfront setting. See this.

It is said that Bill Gates intends on making Tampa a 15-minute city. 

While fool proof the evidence is scanty, what looks like targeted storms, raises many questions. Geoengineering and weather manipulation is on the mind of ever more people. Keeping the narrative of “conspiracy theory” alive, is ever more difficult. People are waking up.

They are connecting the dots between the crisscrossed chemtrails skies, extreme hurricanes, and unpredictable severe weather variations, from cold to hot, to rain, to sunny, foggy, hail – an unusual and unhealthy mix. And now, with the interview by Redacted with Eric Hecker, even destructive killer-earthquakes are no longer mysteries.

Here is what is said about Hurricane Helene – with the potential multi-billion dollars lithium mining in the Asheville, NC, region: see video below.

See also this and this and this.

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As to Hurricane “Milton”, Paul Craig Roberts notices that it evolved in such an unusual way that it didn’t seem real. See this.

The following 14 minute-video provides a history of the amazing ability to intensify and radically change the path of hurricanes.

Concluding, weaponizing weather and climate, makes nuclear war superfluous. “Weather” and earthquakes can be targeted to specific areas as in war.

Also, avoiding nuclear wars avoids nuclear radiation and nuclear fallouts that can last from a few decades to thousands of years, and may affect the commandeering elite, as much as the common plebs.

What We, the People, want to avoid is nuclear war and weaponized weather and / or climate.

We do not want wars of any kind.

We seek Peace and the Light that will bring Peace. 

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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.

Zelensky’s 5/8ths Victory Plan

October 18th, 2024 by Dr. Jack Rasmus

Earlier this month de facto president of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky, visited the White House to present his new Victory Plan to US president Joe Biden. Days before the meeting, Zelensky announced to the world he had a new comprehensive plan for Ukraine’s victory in its war with Russia but provided no details. Biden was the first to learn of it, before Zelensky publicly revealed its contents this past week when he finally shared details of his plan with the world in his speech to the Ukrainian parliament on October 16, 2024.

So what are the details of the Zelensky Victory Plan? Is it a roadmap to eventually winning the war militarily? How different—or not—is it from his and Ukraine’s previous plan and strategy for conducting the war?

The first thing to know about it is the Victory Plan has five critical points Zelensky described in his speech—AND three other critical points he didn’t reveal. Three of the plan’s key elements must remain a ‘secret’, he said

So what we got from Zelensky on October 16 was a 5/8ths Victory Plan. Or, to restate: a 62.5% roadmap to winning the war with Russia. More on the ‘secret three’ shortly.

Joe Biden certainly knows of the three ‘secret’ points. Undoubtedly Zelensky share all eight points with him in his recent meeting. And just as certain, Biden and Zelensky must have mutually agreed not to make the ‘secret three’ points public.

It’s also likely the leaders of other main European NATO countries who Zelensky visited after his meeting with Biden weeks ago—Starmer in the UK, Scholz in Germany, Macron in France—are aware of the full picture but are remaining mute.

But we the public in the USA and Europe, and the rest of the world as well, only get to hear 5/8ths of the Victory Plan. The three secrets are obviously too dangerous or outrageous to share.

Zelensky’s 5-Point Victory Plan

Of the five points he did describe in his speech, at the top of his list as point number one, Zelensky said Ukraine was inviting NATO to offer it immediate membership in NATO. Note this meant that Ukraine was no longer waiting for NATO to invite it, Ukraine, to join; Ukraine was inviting NATO to ask it to join. The Zelensky Plan’s precondition for victory was thus immediate NATO membership!

Zelensky called his second point Defense. That meant NATO providing Ukraine still more weapons, especially more missiles, planes and drones. To quote him directly, Zelensky called for “joint shooting down of Russian planes and missiles”.  That suggests direct involvement by NATO planes and NATO manned anti-missile systems. It perhaps even suggests a NATO enforced ‘no fly’ zone, a demand that Zelensky has been proposing for quite some time.

Even more ominous, Zelensky’s point two included “removal of restrictions on (Ukraine’s) use of weapons”. That statement was undoubtedly a reference to Ukraine’s long standing demand that NATO (UK and Germany) give it long range cruise missiles to let it strike with them deep into Russia, including presumably as far as Moscow which would be within their range.

Point three of the Victory Plan was called Deterrence. By Deterrence Zelensky meant stationing a permanent, albeit non-nuclear, NATO military force within Ukraine. As he said, to ensure victory Ukraine proposed to host a NATO “strategic deterrence package on its soil.” To put it bluntly this could only mean permanent NATO troop ‘boots on the ground’.

The fourth point of the Victory Plan called for the West to tighten sanctions on Russian oil prices and shipments. To date these measures have not had much effect on Russian oil production or sales. The ‘Russian oil price caps’ sanction issued earlier this year has had no effect on Russian oil prices. And Western media largely admits Russia has found various ways around shipping its oil. Russian natural gas continues to ship via two southern Europe pipelines into Europe, one through Turkey and the other actually through Ukraine, both transporting Russian natural gas into Hungary, Bulgaria, the Balkans and even Italy. And from those countries, some of the gas gets resold to elsewhere in Europe. Russian liquefied natural gas has also continued to flow via by sea into western Europe ports. Other official sanctions have proved no less ineffective. Point four wants all that to stop.

Point four also made reference to Ukraine strengthening its economy. Most economic indicators show Ukraine’s economy has continued to deteriorate steadily in 2023-24 as the war has intensified. Ukraine has publicly admitted, for example, it requires $8 billion/month just to keep its government functioning and pay the salaries, pensions and benefits of government employees, among other costs.

The US $61B aid package passed by the US Congress last April will soon be spent. US Speaker of the House, Johnson, has publicly said there’s no more money from Congress for Ukraine. He won’t bring another proposal to the House floor.

Meanwhile, Europe is struggling to pass some kind of measure to raise bonds to fund Ukraine and the war in 2025 by either using the $260 billion of frozen Russian assets in its banks or by using the $260 billion as collateral for raising private money to buy new Euro bonds it would issue. However, neither measure has gained much political traction in Europe which itself is steadily slipping into recession. Either requires the approval of other EU members like Hungary and Slovakia both of which continue to block such measures. Euro neocons are so frustrated they are proposing to throw Hungary and Slovakia out of the EU entirely.

If the preceding four points appear wishful thinking—given that recent US and NATO statements that have rejected all of them—point five is even more fantastic: in it Zelensky said that points one to four would assure Ukraine’s victory. That would then leave Ukraine’s military one of the largest, most experienced and effective military forces in Europe and NATO after the war. A victorious Ukraine would “strengthen NATO” and represent a “guarantee of security in Europe”.  Furthermore, the USA would no longer have to keep its forces in Europe since Ukraine’s forces could “replace the US contingent”.

Zelensky summarized his five points by saying if the US, NATO and the West adopted these five points it would result in the “end of the war no later than next year”! (Zelensky’s full speech is in writing on the Ukraine government’s website).

One can hardly call Zelensky’s Victory Plan a roadmap for military victory. Zelensky’s position remains as it has been since the start of the war: all Russian forces must be driven from Ukraine, including from Crimea, and Ukraine’s 1991 borders restored. His position has been—and remains—Ukraine will commence negotiations with Russia only after it leaves Ukraine. In other words, no negotiations unless Russia first capitulates. Still remains Ukraine’s position even as continues to steadily retreat from territory in its former eastern provinces as its forces are encircled and are being now pushed out of Russia’s Kursk region that Ukraine invaded this past August.

All along the eastern Donbass front Ukraine’s military has been forced out of its former strongholds in key cities like Vuledar, Andeyevka, Robotyne, Toretsk, and is being encircled there as well in various locations like Kourakova, Chasov Yar, Kupiansk and elsewhere. In Kursk three current encirclements have threatened the capture of four Ukraine battalions and Ukraine has given back more than 500 square kilometers of former captured territory. It may have to exit Kursk before the US November election.

In short, the reality is that Zelensky’s Victory Plan is a political wish list, not a military roadmap to a victory that continues to slip away for Ukraine by the day.

The Victory Plan, moreover, is not just a political plan. It is a plan to get NATO into the war more directly in order for Ukraine to win.  It represents an ultimatum to NATO: either accept the Plan’s five points or else Ukraine may lose, Zelensky seems to be saying. And if Ukraine loses, so does NATO lose. NATO may even unravel if that happens.

In addition, Zelensky indirectly is saying the economic cost to the West will be significant. It may lose all the funds thus far invested in Ukraine and all the West’s corporations who have also committed heavily to investing in Ukraine will lose their money as well.

The Zelensky 5-Point Victory Plan is therefore not just an ‘ultimatum’ to NATO but a form of political blackmail to it: either accept the Victory Plan, Zelensky seems to say, or Ukraine will lose the war and so will you NATO!

Russia’s Hardening Position

From the very beginning of the war Russia’s number one demand has always been ‘No NATO’ in Ukraine and Ukraine must remain politically neutral. Its second demand, cemented in concrete in the fall of 2022 as well is that Crimea and the four other provinces are now part of Russia. That will never be reversed. That too is non-negotiable now.  After that, according to Putin, remaining issues are negotiable. He called it, ‘Istanbul II’, last June. It is the start pointing for negotiating. Instanbul is a reference to the first deal agreed to in April 2022 between Russia and Ukraine as result of discussions in Instanbul Turkey. That tentative deal Zelensky subsequently backed out of as result of NATO urging him to reject it outright in April 2022 and to resort to  a military solution to the war backed by NATO weapons and money.

Russia has recently added to its Instanbul II position in its latest warning and red line it recently communicated directly to NATO and the US Pentagon: giving Ukraine the green light to use NATO long range missiles to attack deep into Russia and its major cities means Russia will attack NATO forces directly as well.  Putin added to this warning intimating that Russia response might include using tactical nuclear weapons if necessary. Apparently this warning was taken seriously by most NATO military establishments, including the US Pentagon.

US Neocons vs the Pentagon

When Zelensky visited Washington DC to meet with Biden earlier this month he was accompanied by the newly elected UK prime minister, Keir Starmer. Both he and Starmer were reportedly assured by US Secretary of State, Tony Blinken, that Biden would approve the delivery of UK long range ‘storm shadow’ missiles to Ukraine and their use to strike deep into Russia. But Zelensky-Starmer and Blinken went away empty handed. Biden did not give his approval.

The reason was the Pentagon and US military Joint Chiefs of Staff generals pushed back and US neocons broke rank.

Neocon Jake Sullivan sided with the Pentagon and generals and together they convinced Biden to hold off granting Ukraine and UK approval to deploy and use UK’s storm shadow long distance missiles. That remains the tentative status quo, at least until the US November election after which Biden may change his mind—especially if Trump wins the election.

USA’s Split Positions

The USA notably has not endorsed Zelensky’s Victory Plan. In fact, it has reaffirmed its prior position it does not agree to green light Zelensky’s request for long distance missiles to attack Russia.  The USA—and for that matter NATO in general—has not agreed to fast track Ukraine’s membership into NATO either.

As for the other elements of Zelensky’s 5 point plan, there’s clearly no more money from Congress for Ukraine. The USA position is and remains: Europe is sitting on $260 billion of Russian assets. It should find a way for it to use those assets to fund Ukraine. That possibility is easier said than done, however, since Hungary, Slovakia and soon perhaps Spain and Italy are not too happy about stealing Russia’s assets. Russia has threatened to seize those countries’ business assets in Russia in turn and may have already begun some action in that regard.  And then there’s the question of Russian natural gas that continues to flow into southern Europe, Italy in particular.

There is not a single unified position among the US elite on continuing to fund or militarily support Ukraine, however.  The US neocons are looking for a formula to revive it. And they are increasingly on the defensive in that regard.

Another faction in the elite want to push Ukraine to negotiate with Russia on the basis of proposing a ceasefire and NATO membership in exchange for conceding the territory already virtually won by Russia on the ground so far: Crimea and the four east Ukraine provinces that Russia has legally annexed as part of Russia. But the US doesn’t want to initiate negotiations; it wants Ukraine to do so and offer the ‘land for NATO’ proposal. That proposal, however, is a non-starter for Russia. It will never agree to a NATO presence in even part of Ukraine. It sees that as just a hiatus in the war that will eventually resume later.

Then there is a faction among the US military that wants to focus on preparing for military conflict with China, which it sees as the real challenge to USA hegemony. More than one general has slipped up and publicly admitted war with China was likely by 2030. The longer the Ukraine Project goes on the more the delay in confronting China. Were it over in one year was accepted, but it’s now going on three and the generals and admirals are getting nervous.

Last, and not least, there’s the Israel faction. They see an imminent and costly conflict in the middle east on the horizon. Israel has more political influence by far in the USA than Ukraine. This faction wants to dump Project Ukraine on the Europeans and focus on Israel-Iran.

For now the dominant US position with regard to continuing ‘Project Ukraine’ is twofold:

First, in the very short term keep the status quo in Ukraine as is until the US November 5 elections. The US and Biden regime do not want a collapse of Ukraine before the election. Nor do they want an unforeseen major escalation precipitated by either Ukraine or Russia should the former start launching long range UK missiles into Moscow.

The slightly longer term period from November 5 to January 20, 2025 is less clear. Will Biden still not want a collapse of Ukraine ‘on his watch’, as they say? Or will he allow Ukraine to escalate and leave the mess for his successor, especially if Trump, which now seems likely. Biden has a visceral dislike of Putin and Russia. And who knows how deep his resentment of his own Democrat party goes after they unceremoniously dumped him as their candidate this summer. Then there’s his unknown mental state of mind as a factor. In short, Biden could ‘go all in’ after November 5, as they saying goes, and give Ukraine a green light to further escalate using the long range missiles… or worse.

Which brings the situation of Project Ukraine to the latest event.

Zelensky & Biden in Berlin

It is strange that both the mainstream media in the US and West, as well as those sources more favorably disposed to Russia’s position, have largely ignored discussing the issue of the ‘three secret’ points of Zelensky’s Victory Plan.

Perhaps some light has just been thrown on the ‘three secrets’ by Zelensky himself the day after his speech to his parliament. He attended a general NATO meeting in Brussels yesterday, the 17th of October, after which he gave a press interview.  In that interview Zelensky made a remarkable statement.  He said that when he was last in New York he spoke with Trump as well as Harris. He then said that Trump told him, after Zelensky apparently shared some of the elements of his Victory Plan, that Trump said Ukraine should either be admitted to NATO or be allowed to have a nuclear weapon!

Zelensky added in the interview that he told Trump he’d rather have NATO membership than the nuclear weapon.  This is a remarkable exchange. Did Trump actually say that? Or is Zelensky trying to undermine Trump on behalf of Biden and the Dems? Trump has yet to reply. Regardless it shows something of Zelensky’s thinking, state of desperation, and potentially how far he’s prepared to go.

What is especially curious about this exchange is that the same day of his interview and statement about choosing the nuclear weapon or NATO, the politically well positioned German magazine BILD said Ukraine had all the knowledge and materials to build a nuclear weapon in just weeks! And most likely it would build one in the vicinity of one of its several Nuclear Power Plants.

To make matters even more intriguing, Ukraine’s foreign minister on the same day as Zelensky’s interview and the BILD article said Russia was planning soon to attack and destroy Ukraine’s nuclear power plants.

This all coincidentally sounds like Zelensky and Ukraine resorting indirectly to nuclear blackmail of NATO and the West, and not just Russia.

In his interview after yesterday’s NATO meeting in Brussels, is Zelensky (with assistance of European neocons) telling NATO: either let us into NATO now or we will build a nuclear weapon as a last resort to try to force Russia to capitulate! Is he bluffing? Or is he saying Ukraine has nothing to lose if Russia advances on Kiev and it is about to be defeated.

In conclusion, maybe…just maybe…something similar to what Zelensky revealed in his interview is hidden in the ‘three secret’ points of Zelensky’s Victory Plan that Biden and US neocons don’t want publicly? At least not until after the November 5 election perhaps.

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

Dr. Rasmus is author of the books, ‘Central Bankers at the End of Their Ropes’, Clarity Press, 2017 and ‘Alexander Hamilton and the Origins of the Fed’, Lexington Books, 2020. Follow his commentary on the emerging banking crisis on his blog, https://jackrasmus.com; on twitter daily @drjackrasmus; and his weekly radio show, Alternative Visions on the Progressive Radio Network every Friday at 2pm eastern and at https://alternativevisions.podbean.com.

He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

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Alexander Hamilton and the Origins of the Fed

By Jack Rasmus

Publisher:‎ Lexington Books (February 28, 2019)

Hardcover: ‎146 pages

ISBN-10:‎ 1498582842

ISBN-13:‎ 978-1498582841

Alexander Hamilton and the Origins of the Fed describes how US federal governments, often in cooperation with the largest US private banks, introduced and expanded central banking functions from 1781 through the creation of the Federal Reserve Act of 1913. Based on an analysis of the evolution of the US banking system – from pre-1781, through the 1787 US Constitutional Convention, Congressional debates on Hamilton’s reports to Congress, the rise and fall of the 1st and 2nd Banks of the United States, and through the long period of the National Banking System form 1862-1913, the book shows how central banking in the US evolved out of the private banking system, and how following the financial crash of 1907 big New York banks pushed through Congress the Federal Reserve Act of 1913, creating a central bank which they then managed for their interests.

Click here to purchase

Imagine you’re a retiring politician getting ready to close the door on a long and suspiciously lucrative career of taking advantage of the American people.

What would you do as your final act? What would be the perfect way to swindle your constituents one final time?

Pardoning your notoriously criminal son would do the trick. And that’s exactly what Joe Biden may be planning.

Could he really get away with that?

We’re on the brink of finding out, and longtime political columnist Miranda Devine joined today’s Tucker Carlson Show to spill all the details of how that last-second deal could go down, the extent to which the president is in bed with Ukraine, all of the Biden family crimes, and more.

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

Featured image: This caricature of Hunter Biden was adapted from in the public domain from the US Congress (PDF). The body was adapted from in the public domain from The White House’s Flickr photostream.

The “Victory Plan” presented by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is an acknowledgment of capitulation because it is obvious that, even in his estimation, without the massive involvement of NATO countries in the conflict, the Ukrainian army will not be able to hold back Russian forces in the foreseeable future.

Zelensky presented his Victory Plan to the Ukrainian parliament on October 16 and the European Council on October 17. The plan consists of five points and three secret amendments. In addition to admitting defeat, Zelensky’s Victory Plan also reveals a desire for maximum escalation of the conflict, where, of course, the main burden should be borne on NATO countries and not Ukrainian forces.

The Ukrainian president thinks that escalating what led to the suffering of his citizens and destroyed the economy will lead to Ukraine’s victory.

At the same time, his Victory Plan could be used to pressure Biden or his successor to make decisions about striking deep into the Russian Federation without, supposedly, provoking Moscow to react excessively. Nonetheless, the Kremlin has already said Russia will respond to any attacks.

The Victory Plan truly hinges on US support and not European. Therefore, bodies such as the Council of Europe only serve to give the Biden administration legitimacy when ​​he puts pressure on some parts of the American establishment that are clearly resisting further support for Ukraine.

The first point of Zelensky’s Victory Plan is geopolitical and concerns Ukraine’s immediate invitation to NATO. The other points concern the Ukrainian military and its allies destroying Russia’s aviation, deploying a non-nuclear strategic containment package on its territory, strengthening sanctions on Russia, and allowing Ukrainian soldiers to replace part of the American contingent in Europe in the post-war period.

According to the latest available data, 84% of Ukrainians want their country to be a member of NATO. Despite the widespread support for joining the alliance and although NATO has declared Ukraine’s membership path irreversible, it cannot be completed during the war, and the alliance declined to put a timeline. In effect, NATO has categorically ruled out membership until the war is over, which already makes Zelensky’s Victory Plan detached from reality since the very first point of the plan to defeat Russia is to join the bloc.

For this reason, Russian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova condemned Zelensky’s Victory Plan as nothing more than a collection of “incoherent slogans.”

“This is, of course, no plan at all. It is a collection of incoherent slogans. It is blood foam at the mouth of a neo-Nazi murderer,” the spokeswoman stated during a briefing on October 16.

She also criticised Zelensky’s intention to damage the Russian air force with the assistance of his allies, saying,

“He is pushing NATO to a direct conflict with our country and again insists on getting permission to use long-range weapons on Russian territory, knowing perfectly well, at least those who wrote him these speeches, realised what it would lead to because the corresponding statements by the Russian leadership were made just a week ago.”

“Taken as a sum, all these points and secret sub-clauses are not Zelensky’s plan of victory but a plan to bring misfortune upon Ukraine and the Ukrainian people. This aims to keep the money flowing and present his terrorist capabilities. I think that today Zelensky definitively proved to everyone that he hates Ukrainians to the extent that can be characterised as Ukrainophobia,” Zakharova added.

Since Zelensky evidently does not have any plans to begin serious negotiations, as seen by his Victory Plan, any negotiations conducted in the short term can be used by the West and the Kiev regime to freeze the conflict in Ukraine, replenish their capabilities and launch new attacks against Russia.

According to Western media, including The Washington Post, Zelensky has shown himself more open to holding talks with Russia amid Ukraine’s weakening positions. At the same time, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said that no adequate proposals had yet been received regarding the settlement of the Ukrainian conflict, apart from the hype in the Western media.

Zelensky’s masters in the West are beginning to see that they are not able to inflict a strategic defeat on Russia and are beginning to ask for negotiations. For the moment, they are resorting to negotiation chatter, as mentioned, to try to freeze the conflict and build up forces. In this context, the only way to end the conflict is the complete defeat of Ukraine, peace on Moscow’s terms, and the strategic retreat of the West from Russia’s borders.

The Victory Plan has certainly dominated headlines and occupied the attention of many world leaders, but Kiev has no way of enforcing it, especially since, from the very first point, it ensures failure, considering NATO has been very clear on Ukraine’s membership path, which cannot progress until the war is already over.

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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.

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Israeli security sources have told ABC News and CNN that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has approved a set of targets for retaliation strikes on Iran, considered imminent, following the Oct. 1 major Iranian ballistic missile attack on Israel.

Still, no timeline has been given—only that the attack is expected to be carried out before November 5th, election day in America. “American officials expect Israel will retaliate against this month’s Iranian attack before November 5, sources tell CNN — a timeline that would thrust the growing volatility in the Middle East squarely into public view within days of the US presidential election,” CNN has written. Russia and China are among the lone global voices urging against any new attack or escalation from Israel.

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Beijing’s concerns were conveyed in a call between the Chinese and Israeli foreign ministers early this week. The Chinese side also condemned attacks on the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL), following reports that the IDF wounded two of the UN peace keepers. China repeated its stance of wanting to see an immediate, complete and permanent cease-fire in Gaza.

But amid reports that Israel’s expected attack on Iran could come at any moment, Russia has been the most forceful in its new warnings.

On Thursday Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov conveyed Russia’s position that Israel must not even think about hitting Iran’s nuclear energy sites or infrastructure.

He said that any “hypothetical” Israeli attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities would be “catastrophic” – as quoted in TASS.

“We have repeatedly warned and continue to warn, to caution [Israel] against even hypothetically considering the possibility of a strike on nuclear facilities and nuclear infrastructure [of Iran],” Ryabkov said. “This would be a catastrophic development and a complete negation of those postulates in the area of ​​ensuring nuclear safety that exist.”

Netanyahu has reportedly told the White House that Israel will commit to attacking only Iranian military sites; however, reports out of Israel continue to suggest that all options remain on the table.

Russia and Iran have of late deepened their relationship on the economic and military fronts. The West has even accused Tehran of transferring ballistic missiles to Russia for its war in Ukraine – something which Iranian and Russian officials have denied. 

But the US and EU have still used the accusation to slap new sanctions on top Iranian and defense sector officials. Additionally the sanctions “target companies and individuals accused of being involved in the transfer of the weapons to Russia, including the country’s flagship carrier Iran Air, as well as airlines Saha Airlines and Mahan Air.”

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

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Florida authorities on Oct. 16 sued the U.S. government, alleging that U.S. officials are illegally refusing to cooperate with Florida’s effort to remove noncitizens from its voter rolls.

State law requires state authorities to maintain accurate voter registration records. Federal law requires the federal government to respond to inquiries from federal, state, and local government agencies that are “seeking to verify or ascertain the citizenship or immigration status of any individual within the jurisdiction of the agency.”

But when the Florida Department of State asked U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) for data on individuals whom Florida authorities identified as potentially being noncitizens who are registered to vote, USCIS’s director wrote back and said the agency could not offer any information that is not contained within the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements program.

Florida authorities have access to the program, but it is insufficient to check all possible noncitizens, according to the suit, because the program requires officials to have biographic information and an immigration identification number to check a person’s citizenship status.

“Without further information from [the Department of Homeland Security], Florida is unable to fulfill its statutory duties to ensure the integrity of its elections and maintain accurate voter registration records,” Florida Attorney General Ashley Moody and other state lawyers said in the complaint. “Florida’s inability to carry out its statutory obligations inflicts sovereign injury upon the state.”

The complaint was filed in federal court in Pensacola.

Florida authorities are asking the court to declare USCIS’s refusal to provide information on the individuals illegal, compel U.S. officials to provide the information, and award Florida costs and attorneys’ fees.

The suit is against the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS)—the parent agency of USCIS—and the DHS secretary.

“Voting is a right granted to American citizens—not illegal immigrants or other noncitizens,” Moody said in a statement. “The Biden–Harris administration has allowed millions of illegal immigrants into the country, and we must ensure that only citizens are on our voter rolls. I am taking legal action against the Department of Homeland Security and Secretary [Alejandro] Mayorkas to ensure Florida is able to maintain the integrity of our state’s voter rolls.”

The suit did not specify how many potential noncitizens Florida authorities had identified. Florida authorities said in the filing that they will not publicly disclose information about the individuals but “should it be necessary to the resolution of this case, Florida is willing to file redacted information in an amended complaint or to provide the information to Defendants and the Court under a protective order.”

A DHS spokesperson told The Epoch Times in an email that the agency does not comment on pending litigation.

“USCIS has engaged with Florida and will continue to correspond with them directly through official channels,” the spokesperson also said.

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

Zachary Stieber is a senior reporter for The Epoch Times based in Maryland. He covers U.S. and world news. Contact Zachary at [email protected] 

Featured image: Official photo of Attorney General of Florida Ashley Moody (From the Public Domain)

Top government officials in Slovakia are moving to ban “dangerous” Covid mRNA shots from the country after an explosive investigation determined that the pandemic was a “fabricated operation” and the “vaccines” were a resulting “act of bioterrorism.”

The findings were revealed in a Slovak government commission report on the nation’s investigations into the Covid pandemic.

The investigation was led by Commissioner Peter Kotlár.

In releasing his report, Kotlár held a press conference to call for the immediate ban of the Covid mRNA injections and called on governments around the world to do the same.

Due to the severity of the findings detailed in the report, Kotlár has called for an emergency “session of the government” to immediately ban the “vaccines” and to cut the nation’s ties with the globalist World Health Organization (WHO).

While the report has not yet been made public, Kotlár confirmed that it will be released after the “session of the government.”

However, he did reveal that the report details evidence showing that Covid was artificially created in a biolab and deliberately spread worldwide.

“The most serious consequence of the whole fabricated operation called the COVID-19 pandemic is the endangerment of human health and the confirmation of the naivety of the world population to be subconsciously obedient,” Kotlár said.

“Let us at least make the right gesture together by stopping the administration of mRNA preparations until their effectiveness and safety have been proven,” Kotlar demanded when presenting his report.

The most serious finding is that mRNA preparations alter human DNA, he notes.

The vaccines are therefore dangerous, the commissioner warns.

During the press conference, Kotlár specifically named Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates.

Kotlár asserted that government investigators found that the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation was funding the “fabricated operation.”

Dr. Fleming has been tipped to lead the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) if President Donald Trump wins re-election.

Both Fleming and Kotlár made several references to Trump and noted that the 45th president shares their views on bringing justice to those behind the pandemic.

Fleming said he hopes the findings in Slovakia will provoke similar investigations in the United States.

“It is my hope that the materials provided will give you clarity so that you will have the courage to call for the investigation of the Americans through the U.S. government responsible for evolving these bioweapons.

“That you will withdraw these eugenic genetic vaccines from the Slovakian population.

“Stopping the harm and injury occurring to Slovakians, particularly your children.

“And to stand firm in your resolution to not sign the 2024 IHR and to go further with revocation of any presumed actions by the UN giving them authority over your country.”

The commission’s findings have sent shockwaves through the Slovakian government.

Health Minister Zuzana Dolinkova resigned almost immediately after Kotlár’s bombshell press conference.

Her resignation came after only eleven months in office.

Dolinkova justified it with differences of opinion over the budget, which provides for deep cuts in the healthcare system.

However, the sudden resignation was conveniently timed with Kotlár’s announcement about the government commission’s report.

Meanwhile, the government of Slovakia’s Prime Minister Robert Fico has declared its opposition to mRNA vaccines.

As a first step, it announced that it would end its cooperation with the WHO over the pandemic and the mRNA vaccine campaign.

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

Thanks to Dr. William Makis for bringing this article to our attention.

Featured image is a screenshot from one of the videos above


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 term “Ukraine fatigue” is certainly not new. We’re accustomed to the political West using it, particularly during the fall and winter, when Europe’s dependence on Russian energy is most apparent. However, it seems the latest usage of the term breaks off from the usual pattern and may indicate that the world’s most aggressive power pole is looking for ways to leave the Neo-Nazi junta to fend for itself.

The main issue seems to be how to accomplish this without it looking like yet another pathetic defeat. Obviously, the United States and EU/NATO are directly responsible for this dilemma, as the mainstream propaganda machine spent the last two and a half years claiming that “Ukraine is winning”. Anyone with a modicum of knowledge about the actual situation would laugh at this notion, but the vast majority of regular people simply don’t have access to such information.

However, top-ranking officials in US/EU/NATO often tell us what’s really going on with spelling it out. Namely, in an interview with FT, Finnish Foreign Minister Elina Valtonen talked about the aforementioned “Ukraine fatigue” and stated that “it’s real, and increasingly so”. According to her assessment, wars in the Middle East (specifically Gaza and Lebanon) have further “heightened this fatigue”, as they’re also distracting the political West’s attention and resources away from supporting the Kiev regime.

“These two conflicts are, of course, very much linked. But for us Europeans, it would be important to realize that if we allow Russia to win in Ukraine, then essentially we end the credibility of our deterrence,” Valtonen said, adding: “There is support for Ukraine, but what is sufficient? That is the question. Many [countries] would like to think, since especially with the war waiting in the Middle East, it would be great if we found an answer to this war.”

As per usual, (geo)political schizophrenia is the standard practice in NATO, as it makes no sense to whine about “Ukraine fatigue” and then reiterate the “necessity of defeating Russia”. And yet, that’s exactly what high-ranking officials such as Valtonen continue to do. The need to win the NATO-orchestrated Ukrainian conflict might be a matter of prestige for the political West, but it’s a matter of survival for Russia, which is why the former will never be able to match the latter’s motivation and determination.

For the US/EU/NATO, the matter of “winning” is primarily tied to maintaining a certain reputation. However, they fail to understand that it’s long gone, particularly in the aftermath of a crushing and humiliating defeat in Afghanistan. Thus, there’s simply no reputation to speak of, as even the Taliban seem like heroes in comparison to the political West. As a result, the very idea that prolonging the NATO-orchestrated Ukrainian conflict would ameliorate this is ludicrous.

Not to mention that it’s also causing more “Ukraine fatigue”, both in Europe and North America. In addition, even the Europeans seem to be trying to get on Trump’s good side (something the Neo-Nazi junta is terrible at). Namely, he repeatedly promised to “end the war on the first day”. Given his popularity, many in the EU are likely preparing for his second term, as he might try at the very least.

We don’t really know if Trump will succeed in changing American foreign policy. However, his rhetoric certainly suggests he’ll try. During one of his recent campaign speeches, he pledged to “end the war in Ukraine, stop the chaos in the Middle East and prevent WW3”. Regardless of his true intentions, such statements are certainly welcome, particularly at a time when the Deep State and other war criminals in Washington DC and Brussels keep insisting on escalating the NATO-orchestrated Ukrainian conflict by continuously provoking Russia, including by trying to assassinate Putin. Combined with repeated attempts on Trump’s life, it’s clear what the warmongering oligarchy wants for the world. Thus, the ongoing power shift is leading to expected changes in the official narrative. Even the mainstream propaganda machine seems to be engaged in it.

Namely, headlines in Europe and the US now suggest that the Neo-Nazi junta’s situation is nowhere near the previous chest-thumping about “Russia losing”. This has been replaced by whining about dwindling supplies of weapons and munitions, massive losses, Russian advances and generally gloomy prospects for the Kiev regime. Germany and the US, both top suppliers, are complaining they have no heavy weapons to spare, with the Pentagon warning that “our supplies are not endless”, stressing they have to meet the needs of “both Israel and Ukraine”. Volodymyr Zelensky himself has been complaining about this, although this didn’t prevent him from presenting the laughable “victory plan” that even the infamous CNN isn’t too happy about. The document is essentially more of the same, only “wrapped a bit differently” to make it look “brand new”.

Even the staunchest supporters of the Neo-Nazi junta seem to be highly critical of it, including Julian Roepcke (better known as Jihadi Julian), one of the more prominent “military experts” at the Bild, a German tabloid. NYT is talking about a “not so good situation in Kursk [oblast]”, while the general situation on the battlefield is so bad that the US wants the Kiev regime to forcefully mobilize teenagers. However, in order to achieve this, the latter’s Territorial Recruitment Office (TCC) needs more foreigners. Multiple sources indicate that nearly 50% of its personnel are Poles and that this will swell to at least 70% by December. People simply don’t want to fight, which is why TCC has effectively become a genocidal organization detested by all regular Ukrainians, as it’s directly responsible for the deaths of at least 75 people every single day.

Even NATO-funded think tanks, such as the ISW (Institute for the Study of War), are reporting that around 20% of forcefully conscripted Ukrainians are beaten to death by TCC personnel. If such an organization is reporting these numbers, the actual situation is almost certainly orders of magnitude worse. However, even 20% is simply horrifying. Still, this begs the question, why would anyone in the political West reveal such information after years of trying to build the image of the Neo-Nazi junta as the “beacon of democracy”, particularly when nobody really asked for it.

It seems that Zelensky, whose lionization was the primary task of the mainstream propaganda machine, is now being thrown under the bus, as it can only be expected that he’s responsible for the policies of the TCC and other institutions of the Kiev regime. So, are we seeing the political West bailing out?

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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 source

The International Crisis Summit (ICS) is an all star team of scientists, doctors, lawyers, and activists united in a mission to help save the world. Please donate generously to support ICS in completing our mission. We are fighting for you and your family.

Here is the first official material I have to share from ICS6 in Japan. Myself and others traveled from around the world, joining Japanese scientists and leaders on a mission to stop the next generation of genetic experiments on humans: self-replicating RNA injections for COVID-19.

While we did not succeed in prompting a government order to cancel the licensing of these injections, which were scheduled to begin on October 1st, we have definitely inspired the Japanese people. Reports suggest that many are rejecting this experiment, and even nursing homes are refusing to administer the injections. The manufacturer has seen nearly zero sales and is now threatening to sue our Japanese colleagues for ruining their profits.

Please help support the work of the International Crisis Summit.

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My Speech to the Japanese Public

Here is my first speech to the Japanese parliament, urging them to reject genetic injections and embrace natural health and traditional wisdom.

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Click here to watch the video

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ICS6 Media Conference

Here are the full five panels from this September 26th, 2024 ICS6 media conference, held at the Trunk Hotel in Tokyo.

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ICS 6 Speakers

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Panel 1:

Dr. Ryan Cole (USA),

Dr. Chris Flowers (USA),

Dr. Izumi Kamijo (Japan),

Dr. Seiji Kojima (Japan),

Professor Yasufumi Murakami (Japan),

Dr. Harvey Risch (USA)

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Click here to watch the video

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Panel 2:

Dr. Byram Bridle (Canada),

Dr. Miki Gibo (Japan),

Dr. Niel Karrow (Canada),

Dr. William Makis (Canada),

Dr. Jessica Rose (Canada),

Dr. Mark Trozzi (Canada)

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Click here to watch the video

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Panel 3:

Mr. Jason Christoff (Canada),

Professor Chikatsu Hayashi (Japan),

Mr. James Lindsay (USA),

Professor Shigetoshi Sano (Japan),

Dr. Andrea Stramezzi (Italy),

Dr. Simone Gold (USA)

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Click here to watch the video

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Panel 4:

Ms. Renate Holzeisen (Italy),

Dr. Maria Hubmer-Mogg (Austria),

Professor Masayasu Inoue (Japan),

Mr. Takayuki Kikuchi (Japan),

Dr. Meryl Nass (USA),

Dr. David Bell (USA)

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Click here to watch the video

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Panel 5:

MEP Ms. Christine Anderson (Germany),

Dr. Alejandro Diaz (Mexico),

Rev. Dr. Wai-Chin Lee (Japan),

Dr. Robert Malone (USA),

Dr. Sorin Muncaciu (Romania),

Dr. Panagis Polykretis (Greece),

Pietro Stramezzi (Italy)

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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 

Featured image is from the author

The rift between India and Canada over the killing of Khalistani activist Hardeep Singh Nijjar has deepened into a first-rate diplomatic crisis with the ‘tit-for-tat’ expulsion of senior diplomats, including the heads of missions. 

That this happened on a day when an Indian team of officials was heading to Washington for talks relating to the alleged plot to kill a US citizen in New York City may be a coincidence, but the coordinated moves by Canada and the US is an open secret. 

Meanwhile, the broader question of alleged Indian interference in the  internal affairs of the two North American countries is becoming the leitmotif. It hurts. A Reuters commentary hit the nail on the head:

“For a developing country courting overseas investment, seeking to embed itself into the world’s supply chains, and encouraging its companies to go global, it is unhelpful, to say the least, to be dubbed by a rich country as the second-most significant “foreign interference” threat after China…

“Canada is home to some of the world’s big global investors, from Brookfield to the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board and Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan. Their leaders, who between them manage some $1.7 trillion in assets may suddenly, for example, find it awkward to travel and negotiate deals in India if their government is effectively persona non grata in the emerging market.”

Puzzling out in what year this alleged shift in the Indian policies towards the North American region began, the Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau’s narrative puts 2019-2020 as the timeline. 

Indeed, 2020 happened to be a tumultuous year in Indian politics,  when the farmers’ protests threatened to create an insurrectionary situation in Delhi that is commonly associated with ‘colour revolutions’. And the incontrovertible fact is that Trudeau government poured oil into the fire by empathising gratuitously with the agitating farmers who were mostly Sikhs.  

Again, 2019-2020 was a turbulent period in American politics, too. The hugely controversial Howdy, Modi event in Houston, Texas, was emblematic of it, as the Indian prime minister shared a podium with the embattled US president Donald Trump who was battling impeachment attempts in the US Congress spearheaded by the Democratic Party. 

The Washington Post succinctly captured the matrix of Howdy Modi  when the daily reported that

“A rousing endorsement of Modi from a US immigrant group that is highly successful, by income and education metrics, and is the largest Indian diaspora in any country, sends multiple signals. The huge crowds of supporters overseas help reaffirm Modi’s support at home, and offer a jab at his detractors. For the broader audience in the host country [US], the message is that this support could transfer to Modi’s hosts [in the Beltway], if they are well disposed to India’s concerns [eg., farmers’ protests, Khalistani separatism, etc.]”         

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President Donald J. Trump holds hands with Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India as they take a surprise walk together Sunday, Sept. 22, 2019, around the NRG Stadium in Houston, Texas. (Official White House Photo by Shealah Craighead/Public Domain)

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Tacitus, one of the greatest Roman historians in the annals of civilisations of antiquity, once wrote that “all transactions of pre-eminent importance are wrapt in doubt and obscurity; while some hold for certain facts the most precarious hearsay, others turn facts into falsehoods; and both are exaggerated by posterity.” How true! 

The choice, therefore, is between writing for today, with adrenaline flowing, or to put the crisis in the India-Canada-US triangle in proper perspective through a candid political dialogue, seal it in a lead casket  and bury it for posterity. 

For all three countries, the stakes are exceedingly high for ensuring that a new normal is restored as quickly as possible. But the probability is that a denouement may have to wait. The Canadian federal election must take place by October 20, 2025  and the post-Biden presidency in the US begins on January 20. 

No doubt, foreign interference in the democratic process in Canada and the US is a combustible campaign issue. And the ethnic Sikh population in the two countries is assertive. Delhi suspects collusion between the local authorities and the Sikh separatists. 

Washington and Delhi have thus far managed a trapeze act by keeping their interactions largely in diplomatic exchanges. But a trial is about to begin in the US federal court shortly. Top US officials have admitted that Ottawa and Washington coordinated their investigations into the alleged Indian assassination plots. In fact, US president Joe Biden and Trudeau first raised this issue with Prime Minister Narendra Modi on the sidelines of the G20 Summit in Delhi in September last year! 

Are we to believe that coordinated moves by the Canadian and US authorities are no longer taking place? The US and Canada are tied to each other by an umbilical cord, which is not only about their Anglo-Saxon ancestry, but their tight embrace as strategic partners. Analysts even predicted a future annexation of Canada by its Big Brother. 

When it comes to security issues, the US and Canada operate from an exclusive platform of international spy network created during World War 2 — the Five Eyes which also includes the UK, Australia and New Zealand — borne out of a profound realisation that while intelligence is not a magic bullet in the wider context of decision-making, marrying up intelligence record with strategic and operational decisions can be a game changer. 

Suffice to say, the tensions within the India-Canada-US triangle today arise when transparency is lacking in their relationships. It is a moot point whether it all began when Modi waded into the cauldron of US domestic politics or whether Trudeau triggered it by canvassing for the farmers’ protest in India. Anyway, Modi did the right thing by giving up the idea of a meeting with Trump during his last visit to the US in September.

The US is the only winner here. The Biden White House skilfully handled the fallouts from the alleged assassination plot against Pannun. Several billion dollars worth arms deals have been wrapped up in these past couple of years alone. Modi cleared a $3 billion drone deal just last Wednesday (within a month of Biden raising it in Delaware). The arms trade between India and the US has touched an impressive figure of $25 billion. At the present rate, the US arms industry may give a run for the money to Russians in a conceivable near term. 

An emboldened Delhi takes a hard line on Trudeau, whereas, it is offering ‘cooperation’ to the US. A modus vivendii becomes possible if the US accepts the Indian finding that certain rogue elements might have acted on their own.  

The catch is, once the hearings in the US federal court begin, new facts may emerge. But then, it is not as if the USG lacks the authority to stem the tide from damaging its ties with India, whom Washington describes as one of the “consequential” countries in the world.  

However, the big question remains: Why is there such ambivalence on the part of Washington and Ottawa regarding Khalistani separatism? This is not a new phenomenon. One bloody saga ended after much suffering all around in India culminating in a traumatic ‘regime change’ four decades ago. That is why, a discussion at the political level with the US and Canadian leaderships becomes necessary.

Even if one were to assume that India now has a state policy to erase Khalistani separatist elements from the face of the earth, is that  something typical of Indian statecraft? The US holds the champion’s trophy in political assassinations.

Remember, Trump, in collaboration with Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu, assassinated the Iranian general Qassem Soleimani while on a visit to Baghdad — and later bragged about it to his friends. The paradox is, Biden today has turned into Trump’s guardian angel, and sternly  demands from Tehran that the tragic chapter be closed. 

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

Featured image: The Guru Nanak Gurdwara, outside of which Nijjar was killed (Licensed under CC BY-SA 3)

France’s defeat against Germany in the Franco-Prussian War, or Franco-German War, of the early 1870s provided stark evidence of the country’s regression. The French birth rate by this point was largely stagnating and the population of France was scarcely higher in 1870 compared to half a century before, at little more than 30 million.

French industrial capacity was trailing behind and at the time of the Franco-Prussian War France had been in decline for some decades. France was unable to recover from Napoleon Bonaparte’s ill-advised, unprovoked invasion of Russia in June 1812, which resulted in the decimation of French military forces by the more powerful and larger Russian Army.

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The Siege of Paris in 1870 (From the Public Domain)

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Near the time of the French attack on Russia, the Russian population was estimated to be 40.7 million, which was bigger than France’s population recorded in 1820 (30.5 million), and the Russians had greater material resources at their disposal. Russia is easily the biggest country in the world which presents a daunting challenge for an enemy force, while the Russian soldiers can be counted on to fight tenaciously, with much skill and discipline, and equipped with advanced military hardware produced by renowned manufacturers like the Tula Arms Plant.

Particularly as a result of the failed attack against Russia, France was left exhausted, shaken, and its resources diminished. France’s troubles were then compounded by being in opposition to Germany in 1870. From 1864, the German General Staff was developed by recruiting the most capable officers available. These men were highly trained, devoted to their country, and were encouraged to explore the latest military ideas.

What’s more the well-known German company, Krupp, was producing advanced weapons and was heavily supplying the German Army. Krupp would furnish German soldiers with giant siege guns like Big Bertha, which was eventually upgraded by 1918 to fire a 1-tonne shell over a distance of 23 miles; but these guns, although very powerful and impressive to look at, were quite cumbersome, slow to transport, and didn’t prove as effective as the Germans had hoped. Having a strong, professional army was a necessity for Germany. The nation’s vulnerable position in central Europe meant that in a continental war the Germans could be faced with conflicts along 2 fronts, on its western and eastern borders.

To further alleviate the threat of a 2 front war the Germans built a modern railway system, with routes running from east to west across the country. The railway lines could carry 2 army corps from East Prussia (in eastern Germany) to the Rhineland (in western Germany) in 18 hours, and vice versa. It ensured that in the event of war breaking out the German high command could rapidly deploy its troops to different battlefronts.

From the 1890s Russia was also faced with a potential war on 2 fronts should a global conflict begin. Japan’s emergence as a major power, and that country’s rivalry with Russia, meant it was not an impossibility that the Japanese would some day invade eastern Russia. In such a scenario Germany, and maybe its ally Austria, could have proceeded in a predatory fashion by attacking western Russia.

Unlike Germany, France, and Japan, Russia has had a large population and by 1890 there were an estimated 118 million Russians, a total that was bigger than any other European state and Japan. This remains the case today with a Russian population of about 150 million, while there are around 122 million Japanese, 83 million Germans, and 65 million French.

Russia has enjoyed having greater industrial capacity and resources like oil and natural gas compared to its rivals mentioned. The continued construction and expansion of Russia’s Trans-Siberian Railway from the late 19th century onward, the biggest railway on earth stretching across thousands of miles of land, was an example of Russia’s manufacturing power and innovation; and the sort of venture which the western European nations and Japan could only dream about.

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Trans-Siberian Railway, c. 1904 (From the Public Domain)

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Russia by itself has proven capable of winning conflicts both of a short and long duration, months or years. Resource-poor countries with populations limited in size, like Germany and France, were only capable on their own of winning wars within a short time frame. The French on their own have not triumphed in a major conflict in Europe since the beginning of the 19th century under Napoleon’s reign. Defeat against the Russians in 1812 could be excused by the French as their having been beaten by a more formidable rival. Defeat in the early 1870s to Germany, France’s neighbour and a country of similar size, was more difficult for the French to accept.

For centuries France had held the upper hand over the Germans, managing to keep German provinces like Prussia and Bavaria weak and divided by political or military measures. The tide turned with the Franco-Prussian War. The French defeat and the founding of the new German empire in 1871 drastically altered the balance of power in western and central Europe. Almost right away Germany seemed to inherit France’s claims to greatness.

This had long-lasting psychological effects on the French. In losing the Franco-Prussian War they had lost the territories of Alsace and Lorraine which the German leadership annexed to the Reich, and an inferiority complex and a hatred developed in French minds about the Germans. France’s birth rate and population continued to stagnate while Germany’s increased. In 1880 there were 45.2 million Germans and 37.4 million French. By 1890 the German population was 49.4 million while there were 38.1 million French in 1890. The gap continued growing.

What was alarming too for the French was that German industry was outstripping them. Relating to pig iron production, an important commodity in a civilian or war economy, France produced almost 1.2 million tonnes of pig iron in 1870. That same year Germany produced 1.4 million tonnes of pig iron and they increased the figure to 9.8 million tonnes by 1903. France in 1903 produced 2.8 million tonnes of pig iron.

France left to its own devices would never be a threat to Germany again; but their defeat in the Franco-Prussian War had not resulted in pacifist feelings emerging in France, nor did it for the Germans in victory, who like the French continued to believe in solving problems by military solutions if necessary. In France after 1871 army reforms were enacted, universal compulsory military service was introduced, new fortifications were built and more weapons were designed or upgraded.

Many Frenchmen longed for the return of past glories and the restoration of Alsace-Lorraine. These territories were home to a population who mostly spoke German as a first language, and the region had historical links to Germany (while after World War I there was a large pro-German separatist movement in Alsace-Lorraine between 1924 and 1929, demanding reunion with Germany, after France had retaken Alsace-Lorraine with plenty of help from her wartime allies).

Image: Napoleon after his abdication in Fontainebleau, 4 April 1814, by Paul Delaroche (From the Public Domain)

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A risky, semi-mystical quality in French military thinking based on ultra-offensive tactics had sprung up following the Franco-Prussian War. Napoleon’s old saying “The moral is to the material as 3 is to 1” was much quoted and officers like Louis de Grandmaison, the chief of the Operations Branch of the French General Staff, increasingly pushed an all-out attacking war plan.

When war did break out in 1914, the French Army from the outset suffered unsustainable casualties mainly because its commanders time after time sent their soldiers on suicidal offensives across no-man’s-land, or into areas with thick vegetation where the Germans were waiting for them. De Grandmaison himself would be killed in battle in February 1915, one of numerous French officers and generals who died.

France’s gung-ho tactics played a key part resulting in the mass mutinies of the spring and early summer of 1917, nearly 3 years into World War I. The French Army was actually in the process of collapse. From April to June 1917 the French high command would acknowledge that 170 acts of mutiny had occurred during that time, of which the most severe outbreaks had involved 79 infantry regiments, 8 artillery regiments, 21 chasseur (light infantry) battalions, a Senegalese battalion, and a dragoon (mounted infantry) regiment.

The French Army rebellions were worse than Paris admitted to, involving hundreds of thousands of soldiers, and in all probability the acts of mutiny were considerably higher than 170. In the 35-mile distance between Soissons and Reims in northern France, the entire frontline was heaving with revolt. By 9 June 1917 mutinies had affected 54 French divisions. There was large-scale desertion as well, with 27,000 troops having fled to Paris alone. In the French capital city the deserting soldiers tried to conceal their identities by purchasing civilian clothes from shops beside train stations, where they had disembarked.

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Possible execution at Verdun during the mutinies in 1917. The original French text accompanying the photograph notes that the uniforms are those of 1914/15 and that the execution may be that of a spy at the beginning of the war. (From the Public Domain)

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Drunkenness is an example of rebellious or at least unprofessional conduct, for soldiers who are often drunk obviously can’t fight properly and in many instances will refuse to fight. Part of the problem was that alcohol was readily available to French troops, with pinard, a cheap red wine, present along the frontlines in too plentiful a supply.

The sight of drunken French infantrymen was all too common and the easy access to wine had a role in the mutinies breaking out, as did anti-war pamphlets and enemy propaganda. It was the case too that France had a disturbing number of defeatists and traitors, among them many liberals, who preferred defeat to Germany than for the war to continue.

That spring and summer of 1917, in French military formations where no mutiny was recorded by the authorities, more than 50 percent of troops returning from leave were also reporting back drunk. They must have gotten intoxicated at home, or in bars and cafes, in the hours before they returned to the front. All of this was a sign of a massive breakdown in discipline and morale.

Stern measures taken by the French high command helped to quell the insurrections, including executing the ringleaders, executing troops with the worst record of past offences, random executions as a form of intimidation, sending mutineers into no-man’s-land where they were killed by the French artillery, penal servitude for men who had committed lesser offences.

Promises were made to the French soldiers they wouldn’t be ordered to make any more suicidal attacks, that the quality of food and medical services was to be improved, and they would be allowed periods of rest. The supply of wine to the troops was curtailed though they were still allowed the occasional drink.

On 4 June 1917, when the rebellions were approaching their worst, the French war minister Paul Painlevé told the country’s leader, Raymond Poincaré, that between the German frontlines and Paris there were just 2 fully dependable French divisions, both of which were cavalry formations lacking in heavy weapons. As Poincaré and Painlevé were aware, had the Germans gone on the offensive at this time they would have won the war with ease, but they failed to attack.

The Germans did receive reports of the French mutinies. For example, 3 German prisoners who had escaped from a camp beside Fismes, 75 miles east of Paris, made their way back to German lines. They provided reliable accounts to their superior officers of a vast deterioration of discipline in the French ranks including wide-scale rioting, poor morale, the refusal of soldiers to obey orders, and drunkenness.

These reports were forwarded to the German military command but were ultimately ignored. The country’s warlord, General Erich Ludendorff, must have thought the reports were exaggerated. In any case he had set his heart months ago on pursuing a mostly defensive strategy of warfare for 1917, while building up German manpower reserves for a major offensive in the spring of 1918, approaching 4 years into the war.

From about 20 June 1917 the harsh measures of the French high command started to take effect and the unrest was dying down. It would be a partial recovery at best for the French Army. The failure of Germany to launch an attack against France in June 1917 must rank as one of history’s great missed opportunities. Had the Germans been victorious in 1917, the German empire would not have collapsed and the Nazis would never have come to power.

Britain, France’s ally, was of course aware of the rebellions afflicting the French Army. At the beginning of June 1917 the French chief of staff, General Marie Eugène Debeney, cautiously told Field Marshal Douglas Haig, commander of the British Expeditionary Force (BEF), of widespread unrest in the French forces.

Haig was not surprised and chose to keep the news of the French mutinies a “military secret”. He decided not to inform the British government what was going on. Haig had already complained to the head of the British Army, Field Marshal William Robertson, that it was clear how the French lacked the moral fibre needed and Britain would have to shoulder the burden of the war effort.

France’s hierarchy suppressed information about the rebellions long after World War I had ended. The root causes of the discord, such as poor command and discipline, were not properly analysed and dealt with. The malady within the French Army was transmitted to the next generation of French troops, which would have dire consequences in World War II.

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

This article was originally published on Geopolitika.ru.

Shane Quinn obtained an honors journalism degree. He is interested in writing primarily on foreign affairs, having been inspired by authors like Noam Chomsky. He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG).

Sources

“Big Bertha, captured by the Australians in 1918”, National Army Museum

“History of Alsace and Lorraine”, feefhs.org

“Crude birth rate in France, from 1800 to 2020”, Statista, 4 July 2024

Donald J. Goodspeed, The German Wars: 1914-1945 (Bonanza Books, 1 January 1985)

“Population of the major European countries in the 19th century”, Wesleyan University

“The Franco-Prussian War Museum at Woerth (Alsace), History of Modern France at War”, 27 September 2019

Featured image: Revue du 14 juillet 1917 [Paris] (From the Public Domain)

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So, you want someone to name names, cite documents and expose the facts about the decades-long globalist takeover?

Then you’ve come to the right place!

Join James for this week’s edition of The Corbett Report where he breaks down Dr. Meryl Nass’ presentation to the International Crisis Summit in Tokyo and provides context and further reading about the cadre of elitists who are attempting to take control of the planet and its resources.

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

First published on April 23, 2023

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At first sight you may wonder what do Ursula Von der Leyen and McKinsey and Pfizer have in common? The answer is: Corruption. Utmost corruption. Madame Von der Leyen, unelected President of the European Commission (EC) has several corruption scandals on her neck. 

It was recently revealed that Madame von der Leyen’s son, David, had a “summer intern” stint at McKinsey, the giant US-based management consulting firm. Though, records of David’s responsibilities with McKinsey are purposefully flimsy, it appears that his employment was much more than a “summer intern”. He had consulting teams under his responsibilities and worked for McKinsey for more than 3 years.

Is it coincidence that he left McKinsey in 2019, just before his mom was appointed – not elected – President of the European Commission (EC)?

We know there are no coincidences.

Was David perhaps paving the way for the future EC President’s – his mother – easy access to McKinsey’s higher management ranks?

More about that later.

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Let’s start with a scandal already fairly well known among informed sources: Ursula Von der Leyen’s direct negotiations with Pfizer for purchasing 900 million Pfizer vaxx doses, with the option of another 900 million, a total of 1.8 billion doses. Repeat, in case you think you misread: 1.8 billion of the maligned Pfizer mRNA gene modifying vaxx doses – yes, for a population of some 450 million. This would amount to 4 doses per person of the European Union (EU).

These “negotiations” went on in 2021 as exchanges of texts were discovered between von der Leyen and Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla. Pressure on the EC to release the texts was simply ignored.

This has happened preceding the signing of the 1.8 billion doses contract. It is clearly an infraction against EU rules of competition, i.e., competitive bidding. The contracts were signed in May 2021. Totally against EU international competitive bidding rules. Aside from that, how were 4 doses per EU citizen justified?

What is the total price of this insane package?

Ursula von der Leyen: “Mrs. 4.5 Billion Doses”

In recent developments Van Der Leyen is involved in negotiating another big contract with Pfizer: 

“The price of each vaccine dose has been negotiated directly with the President of the EU Commission, Ursula von Der Leyen, who’s is known to be corrupt. 

The broader objective of Pfizer’s CEO Dr. Bourla is to negotiate a 4.5 billion vaccine doses contract for a EU population of  450 million, In other words, 10 doses per person. These are additional doses to those already purchased by the EU (In excess of 800 million)

Madame Von der Leyen’s close ‘’collaboration’’ with Pfizer may be just the tip of the iceberg.

Her husband Heiko is the medical director of Orgenesis, a US Biotech company specializing in gene therapies such as Pfizer and Moderna vaccines.

Ursula has been on Orgenesis’ scientific council since 2019. Pfizer and Orgenesis have a very close relationship since Orgenesis was actively involved in the development of the Pfizer vaccine. Heiko von der Leyen has a long relationship with Pfizer. See this for more details. 

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Back to the vaxxes. What will happen with the billions of superfluous useless — and dangerous – jabs?

The way the Pharma-EU corruption seems to play out, it wouldn’t be surprising if the vaxxes would be relabeled for another purpose. How would anybody know? 

After all, over the last three years, with the implementation of the WEF’s Great Reset and the UN Agenda 2030 – which are basically identical, as the UN is in bed with the WEF — it has become redundantly clear that vaccination has nothing to do with health, preserving people’s health but rather with large-scale genocide.

One of the key objectives of the Reset / Agenda 2030 is a massive population reduction. What we can see so far, after barely over two years of so-called vaccination, most of it coerced injections, hundreds of thousands, if not millions of deaths and people maimed for life, as well as rapidly increasing miscarriages, as well as infertility of both women and men.

And this is only the beginning. The bulk of the crime may play out within the coming 5 to 10 years, when nobody will be able to prove the cause being the covid jabs. These are the warning words of Michael Yeadon, former VP and Chief Science Officer, Pfizer. See this.

Was the European Public Prosecutor’s Office investigating von der Leyen’s criminal case? Nobody knows. Imagine nobody knows and nobody asks!

Politico reports, in April 2021, von der Leyen told the New York Times that she had traded texts with the Pfizer CEO for a month in the run-up to the EU signing its contract with the US pharmaceutical giant. 

In the deal, the Commission committed to buy 900 million Pfizer-BioNTech shots on behalf of EU members, with an option to purchase another 900 million. This or these contracts must be worth hundreds of millions, if not in the billions of dollars. The figure has never been officially disclosed and EU watchdogs close their eyes to the scandal.

That in itself is a horrendous disgrace.

Later, the EU Ombudsman revealed that the Commission had never explicitly asked von der Leyen’s team to look for the texts, since it didn’t consider them “documents” that merited preservation. In a report on its findings, the ombudsman simply called the approach “maladministration.”

For its part the European Commission countered that it can’t provide the texts because “short-lived, ephemeral documents are not kept.”  See this.

End of story for now. But lest you tend to forget, the European Union, especially the non-elected EC, is one of the world’s most corrupt institutions. And, so far, it seems to be getting away with it.

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Back to McKinsey. The McKinsey consulting firm is full of scandals of its own. The firm’s work for both authoritarian governments and the Pentagon raises questions about conflicts of interest.

When in the early 21st century the dot.com bubble crash destroyed many corporations, and with them also the potential for management consulting, McKinsey was faced with a dilemma. They needed to find ways to enlarge their client pool. So, McKinsey started competing for government contracts not just within the United States, but worldwide.

The New York Times reports that McKinsey’s decision to venture into the public sector at home and abroad created a business model rife with conflicts of interest

A US domestic example is well-known. McKinsey advising the Federal Drug Administration (FDA), while also advising pharmaceutical giant Purdue Pharma. Internationally, McKinsey’s work at times appears equally extensive with potential conflicts of interest, courting state clients as diverse as the Pentagon, China, and Saudi Arabia. 

While McKinsey took up hundreds of millions of dollars in US defense contracts, it also advised a cadre of foreign companies and governments. McKinsey’s own website boasts about these connections: “We have long-standing relationships with ministries and departments of defense worldwide.”

In another, by now well-known case, global consulting firm McKinsey faces criminal charges for corruption in South Africa. The case centers on McKinsey’s role in the country’s biggest post-apartheid scandal, known as the state capture scandal under former president Jacob Zuma. It involved the misappropriation of public funds on a vast scale, as reported in February 2023, see this.

That says it all. The key is international high-level government connections. It may never be proven, but a profound suspicion prevails, that Heiko and Ursula von der Leyen’s son, David, may have had a role in preparing the way for McKinsey to buy off governments around the globe to go along with the tremendous and deadly covid vaxx fraud.

See this for full details.

The question Europeans, not the corrupt governments, but We, the People, have to ask ourselves, how long do we continue tolerating Ursula von der Leyen’s Presidency of the EC?

Of course, Ursula von der Leyen is a darling of Klaus Schwab’s, WEF CEO. On the behest of his corrupt financiers, he put her in this position. She is not only a scholar of the WEF’s Young Global Leaders (YGL) academy, but she is also on the WEF’s Board of Trustees.

That protection may be waning, though, as the WEF’s standing in the world is quietly gliding away. Just think of the January 2023 WEF disaster in Davos. See this.

Europe’s Central Bank

Or, an even better question, how long do Europeans tolerate the current ultra-corrupt EC / EU set up? Time to demolish the EU to go back to nation states and local currencies is long overdue. It would be a tremendous boost for the European economy and the European people’s wellbeing.

The longer We, the People, wait, the more difficult it will become to step out of the financial prison matrix.

See this from Christine LaGarde, President of the European Central Bank (ECB). She promises prison, if you spend a thousand euros in cash. 

Ironically, Christine LaGarde who runs the ECB on behalf of powerful financial interests has a criminal record.

Screenshot: The Independent, December  2016  

Click here to view the video

How much longer until we wake up?

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Note to readers: Please click the share button above. Follow us on Instagram and Twitter and subscribe to our Telegram Channel. Feel free to repost and share widely Global Research articles.

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

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

Featured image: EC President von der Leyen, 2023. (Source: Facebook)

The Belgrade Forum for a World of Equals expresses deep concern over the growing threat to the Republika Srpska (RS) and the Serbian people in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) by open attacks on the institutions and competences of the RS guaranteed by the Dayton-Paris Agreement (1995).

The Belgrade Forum condemns all attempts of the western power centers aimed at the abolishment of the Republika Srpska and the revision of the 1995 peace agreement and stands for the full respect of the Dayton Paris Agreement, especially for respect of the constitutional principle of equality of the two entities and the three constituent peoples of Bosnia and Herzegovina.

The Belgrade Forum points out the inadmissibility of the systematic usurpation of the competences of the institutions of BiH and the RS by the illegally imposed so-called High Representative Christijan Schmidt, which leads to the blocking of the constitutional functioning of BiH and the entities and raising political tensions. The Belgrade Forum considers that the High Representative is a remnant of the past neo-colonialist concepts and a serious obstacle to the rule of law and democracy, and that it is high time for its abolition.

Nobody is authorized to disempowered the RS of its constitutional rights or to stop its legitimate demands for the restitution of all the usurped powers provided for by the Dayton Paris Agreement and the Constitution, including the right to develop special parallel relations with neighboring Republic of Serbia.

Current processes and attacks on the President of the RS, Milorad Dodik, are unfounded and politically motivated. They confirm the plans of the Western power centers aimed at abolishing of the RS, disregarding of the Dayton-Paris Agreement and the creation of a unitary BiH under the domination of the Bosniak elite in Sarajevo. On the other hand, the same power centers continue to violate the UN Security Council resolution 1244 (1999) in order to legitimize unilateral separation of the so-called Kosovo thus imposing yet another Albanian state on the territory of the Republic of Serbia. Both – endeavors to create unitary BiH and greater Albania – have common denominator anti-Serbian geopolitical projects aimed at establishing full control over the Balkan Peninsula expanding NATO and the West, in general, to the East.

The creation of a unitary BiH and its inclusion in NATO is contrary to the determination of the Serbian people to freely decide on their development and future, respecting the same rights of other Balkan nations. Ongoing pressures and threats against the institutions and acquired rights of the Republika Srpska represent a danger for the freedom and equality of the Serbian people in the Balkans and require unanimous support to the full respect and implementation of the international law, particularly the Dayton Paris Peace Agreement and UN SC resolution 1244.

The Belgrade Forum emphasizes the importance of the Declaration of the All-Serbian Congress held on June 8, 2024 and calls on all patriotic forces for unity, national solidarity and decisive support to the Republika Srpska and its legitimate leadership, in defense of all rights guaranteed by the Dayton Agreement and the Constitution.

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

Featured image: President Slobodan Milosevic of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, President Alija Izetbegovic of the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina, and President Franjo Tudjman of the Republic of Croatia initial the draft of the Dayton Peace Accords. (From the Public Domain)

Video: Japan Rising. The Tokyo International Crisis Summit. The New “Replicon” Self-amplifying mRNA Vaccines

By The Corbett Report, October 17, 2024

The International Crisis Summit descended on Tokyo last week to warn about the new “replicon” self-amplifying mRNA vaccines that are about to be unleashed like a third atomic bomb upon the population of Japan.

Bayer’s ‘Backward’ Claim: A Bid to Reap Control of Indian Agriculture

By Colin Todhunter, October 17, 2024

For some critics, if one firm tops a league table for anti-people, anti-nature business practices, it is Bayer (although there are many other worthy candidates). Nevertheless, the Indian Council for Agricultural Research (ICAR) signed a memorandum of understanding with Bayer in September 2023.  

“Surviving the Unipolar Era: North Korea’s 35-year Standoff with the United States”: A Review of A.B. Abrams’s New Book

By Richard C. Cook, October 17, 2024

The origins of the Korean conflict lie in the standoff between the Communist and Western blocs that formed at the end of World War II. The Korean peninsula had been under Japanese rule since 1905, but an indigenous revolt had begun to take power during the latter stages of the war. The U.S. moved to prevent that revolt from taking over all of Korea.

The US Fears an Uncontrollable Escalation Sequence with Russia Much More Than with Iran

By Andrew Korybko, October 17, 2024

The US has no qualms about shooting down Iranian missiles launched against Israel but won’t consider shooting down Russian ones launched against Ukraine, which has upset Zelensky and some of his compatriots who thus feel like second-class allies.

Race, Class and the Death Penalty in the United States

By Abayomi Azikiwe, October 17, 2024

Even though the United States government praises itself for representing what is claimed to be the “leading democracy” in the world, the character of the legal and criminal justice system is largely based upon an unequal class structure and racial stratification.

October 7, 2001: America’s “Just War” against Afghanistan: Women’s Rights “Before” and “After” America’s Destructive Wars

By Prof Michel Chossudovsky, October 15, 2024

The NeoCons’ agenda is not to “win the war” but to engineer the breakup of sovereign nation states, destroy their culture and national identity, derogate fundamental values and human rights.

German Lawyer Dr. Reiner Fuellmich’s Persecution in Prison

By Reiner Fuellmich and Peter Koenig, October 14, 2024

13 October 2024 will be the first anniversary of Reiner Fuellmich’s pre-trial prison custody. His conditions, especially for someone who has not committed and is not suspected of a criminal act of violence are, to say it benignly, horrendous, bordering on torture.

For some critics, if one firm tops a league table for anti-people, anti-nature business practices, it is Bayer (although there are many other worthy candidates). Nevertheless, the Indian Council for Agricultural Research (ICAR) signed a memorandum of understanding with Bayer in September 2023.  

Bayer’s approach to agricultural development involves promoting a model of industrial agriculture dependent on corporate products, including its toxic chemicals and genetically modified crops, and advocating for precision, data-driven agriculture that relies heavily on its proprietary technologies and software.

Simon Wiebusch, Country Divisional Head of Crop Science for Bayer South Asia, recently stated that India cannot become a ‘developed nation’ with ‘backward’ agriculture. He believes India’s agriculture sector must modernise for the country to achieve developed nation status by 2047.  

Bayer’s vision for agriculture in India includes prioritising and fast-tracking approvals for its new products, introducing genetically modified (GM) food crops, addressing labour shortages (for weeding) by increasingly focusing on herbicides and developing herbicides for specific crops like paddy, wheat, sugarcane and maize.  

Government institutions like the ICAR seem likely to allow Bayer to leverage the agency’s infrastructure and networks to pursue its commercial plans.  

Wiebusch’s comments have received much media coverage. There is a tendency for journalists and media outlets to accept statements made by people in top corporate jobs as pearls of wisdom never to be critically questioned, especially in India when there is talk of the country achieving ‘developed status’. But people like Wiebusch are hardly objective. They are not soothsayers who have an unbiased view of the world and its future.    

Bayer has a view of what agriculture should look like and is gaining increasing control of farmers in various countries in terms of having a direct influence on how they farm and what inputs they use. Its digital platforms are intended to be one-stop shops for carbon credits, seeds, pesticides and fertilisers and agronomic advice, all supplied by the company, which gets the added benefit of control over the agronomic and financial data harvested from farms.   

As for carbon credits, the non-profit GRAIN argues that, like digital platforms per se, carbon trading is about consolidating control within the food system and is certainly not about sequestering carbon.   

So, what does Wiebusch mean when he talks about modernisation of a backward agriculture in India? All of what is set out above and more.  

Like Wiebusch, corporate lobbyists often refer to ‘modern agriculture’. Instead, we should say: a system that produces healthy food for all while sustaining farming communities and livelihoods. Because the term ‘modern agriculture’ is deliberately deceptive: it means a system dependent on proprietary inputs and integrated with corporate supply chains. Anything other is defined as ‘backward’.  

According to Bayer, Wiebusch is a star player who can drive market share and create business value for the company. On the Bayer India website it says: Simon’s key strengths include unlocking business growth, redefining distribution strategies, driving change management and building diverse teams that drive market share and create business value.  

Stripped of the corporate jargon and any talk of ‘helping’ India, the goal is to secure control of the sector and ensure corporate dependency.  

India has achieved self-sufficiency in food grains and has ensured there is enough food (in terms of calories) available to feed its entire population. It is the world’s largest producer of milk, pulses and millets and the second-largest producer of rice, wheat, sugarcane, groundnuts, vegetables, fruit and cotton.  

So, we might ask: who needs Bayer?  

Bhaskar Save certainly did not on his impressively bountiful organic farm in Gujarat. In 2006, he described in an eight-page open letter (along with six annexures) to M S Swaminathan (widely regarded as the father of the Green Revolution in India) how the type of chemical-intensive agriculture that Bayer promotes and the urban-centric model of development favoured by the government has had devastating environmental economic and social consequences for India.  

Save offered agroecological alternatives to address the problems, including solutions to boost farmer incomes and rural communities, cultivate a wider range of nutrient-dense crops, build soil fertility, improve water management, enhance on-farm ecology and increase biodiversity.  

Vandana Shiva recently posted on X:  

“India’s agriculture was sustained over 10,000 years because it was based on nature’s laws of diversity, recycling, regeneration & circularity. Albert Howard spread organic farming worldwide learning from Indian peasants. Working with nature is sophistication, not backwardness.  

“Bayer calling India’s agriculture backward is a new toxic colonisation. Bayer/Monsanto, the poison cartel whose roots are in war, has driven biodiversity to extinction with monocultures, spread cancers with glyphosate & herbicides, destroyed democracy.”  

Bayer promotes a corporate expansionist ‘development’ agenda that is self-sustaining and can be described as anything but development (see the online article Resisting Genetically Mutilated Food and the Eco-Modern Nightmare).  

Companies like Bayer present their technologies and products as fixes for the problems created by the model of ‘growth’ and ‘development’ they promote. ‘Scientific innovation’ is touted as the answer. The proposed solutions often create new problems or worsen existing ones. This leads to a cycle of dependency on corporate products and technologies. Monsanto’s failed Bt cotton in India being a case in point.  

Problems created by corporate-led development become opportunities for further corporate inputs and the commodification of knowledge and further ‘expert’ interventions. The primary motivation is financial gain rather than genuine societal improvement.  

Corporate-driven ‘development’ is a misnomer, especially in agriculture, as it often leads to regression in terms of health, environmental sustainability and rural community resilience, while perpetuating a cycle of problems and ‘solutions’ that primarily benefit large corporations.  

But the type of agroecological solutions presented by the likes of Bhaskar Save run counter to Bayer’s aims of more pesticides, more GMOs, more control and corporate consolidation. For example, the industry seeks to derail the EU’s farm to fork strategy (which involves a dramatic reduction in agrochemical use), and Bayer spends record amounts to shape policies to its advantage, courtesy of its entrenched lobbying networks.  

Of course, Bayer presents its neocolonial aspirations in terms of helping backward Indian farmers. A good old dose of Western saviourism.  

To promote its model, Bayer must appear to offer practical solutions. It uses the narrative of climate emergency to promote a Ponzi carbon trading scheme that is resulting in land displacement across the world. And Bayer says that labour shortages for manual weeding in Indian agriculture are a significant challenge, so the rollout of toxic herbicides like glyphosate are a necessity.  

But there are several approaches to address this issue beyond relying on herbicides like glyphosate (it will kill all plants that do not have the herbicide tolerant trait), which is wholly unsuitable for a nation comprising so many small farms cultivating a diverse range of crops.  

Mechanical weeding using animal-drawn or tractor-powered implements for larger farms is one solution, and there are several agronomic techniques that can help suppress weeds and reduce labour needs: crop rotation disrupts weed lifecycles, higher planting densities shade out weeds, proper fertilisation gives crops a competitive advantage and use of cover crops and mulches can suppress weed growth.  

Even here, however, there are cynical attempts to get farmers to change their cultivation methods (with no tangible financial benefits) and move away from traditional systems.  

In the article The Ox Fall Down: Path Breaking and Treadmills in Indian Cotton Agriculture, for instance, we see farmers being nudged away from traditional planting methods and pushed towards a method inconducive to oxen ploughing but very conducive for herbicide-dependent weed management. That article notes the huge growth potential for herbicides in India, something companies like Bayer are keen to capitalise on.    

Wiebusch talks of India reaching ‘developed status’. But what does the type of ‘development’ he proposes entail?  

We need only look around us for the answer: decision-making centralised in the hands of government and corporate entities, traditional local governance structures weakened and standardised, top-down policies and corporate consolidation through mergers and acquisitions with local independent enterprises struggling to compete.  

Consolidated corporations have greater lobbying power to shape regulations in their favour, further entrenching their market position. In other words, political centralisation and corporate consolidation are often intertwined. Centralised political structures tend to align with the interests of large, consolidated corporations, and both centralised governments and large corporations exert greater control over resources.  

This dual process has led to reduced economic diversity and resilience, weakened local communities and traditions, increased vulnerability to systemic shocks and diminished democratic participation.  

‘Developed status’ also means accelerated urbanisation, land amalgamations for industrial-scale farming and depopulation of the countryside.  

It has been estimated that between 2016 and 2030, globally, urban areas will have tripled in size, expanding into cropland and undermining the productivity of agricultural systems. Around 60% of the world’s cropland lies on the outskirts of cities. This land is, on average, twice as productive as land elsewhere on the globe.    

As cities expand, millions of small-scale farmers are displaced. These farmers produce the majority of food in the Global South and are key to global food security.  

A combination of urbanisation and policies deliberately designed to displace the food-producing peasantry will serve to boost the corporate takeover of India’s agrifood sector.  

But none of this is inevitable. Many of us know what the response should be: prioritising sustainable, locally appropriate solutions and restoring food sovereignty and the economic vibrancy of rural communities; focusing on holistic human well-being rather than narrow economic metrics of ‘growth’; preserving traditional knowledge that underpins highly productive  farming practices for the benefit of farmers, consumer health and the environment; and empowering communities through localism and decentralisation rather than creating state-corporate dependency.  

Such solutions are markedly different from those characterised by rural population displacement, the subjugation of peoples and nature, nutrient-poor diets, degraded on-farm and off-farm ecosystems and corporate consolidation.  

There are alternative visions for the future, alternative visions of human development. But these do not boost corporate margins or control and do not fit the hegemonic narrative of what passes for ‘development’.  

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

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 is from Sebastian Rittau via Wikimedia Commons

Why Are African States Joining BRICS?

October 17th, 2024 by Kester Kenn Klomegah

Geopolitical changes and the reconfiguration of economic architecture towards the Global South, under the rapidly-growing influence of BRICS+ (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) on the global stage are driving majority of African States to move away the United States draconic hegemony, its hidden ambiguity and obscurity, as well as rules-based political order combined with authoritarianism. Without much doubts, African States are increasingly showing skyline interest in BRICS+, primarily due to its distinctive-focused objectives including global peace, the strategic development paradigms, food and energy security directions in the 21st century and beyond.

Ultimately, African States are shrugging off relations with the Western and European world, alternatively settling for better beneficial economic cooperation and targeting to tap existing opportunities with countries in the Global South. Researchers and policy experts have argued that the main aim within the association is to create conditions for the sustainable development for BRICS+ member countries and their people. There are other several factors or reasons, but for Africa the central question remains what concretely these countries wanted to gain from BRICS+ association. This article explores some of the driving reasons:

Exemplary Leadership

At least, Africa is in search for an exemplary leadership for the next decade. What is really needed is statesmanship, leaders who understand and recognise clearly the basic principles of shaping the future of global collaboration, particularly in the economic architecture. Generally Africa views China, Russia, India and other members of BRICS upholding and advocating for the principles of equality in political participation, respect for sovereignty and integrity as well as complete fairness both in bilateral and multilateral cooperation. That however, the exceptionally poor choice of new BRICS members (Ethiopia and Egypt) in Johannesburg has increasingly wretched the BRICS pursuit of global peace and security. The destructive ill-discipline of two new members was observed when BRICS foreign ministers abruptly closed a meeting in New York in late September 2024, due to Egypt and Ethiopia crashing over UN Security Council reforms, as they apparently considered South Africa and Nigeria would be unsuitable choices as non-veto-voting permanent members. (See further reports on Ethiopia and Egypt’s blatant conflict over Somaliland, in the Horn of Africa).

Beneficial Economic Cooperation

Acknowledging the current low levels of development, African leaders have consistently been forging a broader relations with external powers, on one hand. On the other hand, African States expressed absolute frustration over economic exploitations, foreign multinational financial institutions’ stringent conditions and Western hegemony. As an alternative step, majority are now consolidating their positions based on a balance of interests, and simultaneously prioritizing economic cooperation and  partnerships with BRICS, particularly China and Russia. According to information sources monitored, many African countries in the continent have expressed the desire ascend and ready to strictly adhere to the principles outlined by BRICS+ association. Applications filed by African countries conform to the agreed guiding principles, standards, criteria and procedure for BRICS membership expansion. With optimism, it is however expected approx. 15 African States’ applications for membership would be approved during the late October summit – under the motto “Strengthening Multilateralism for Equitable Global Development and Security” – in Kazan, capital city of Republic of Tatarstan. In practical terms, BRICS’ unique enlargement will, in the near future, embrace potential new members from the Global South and Global East.

Image: Bb3015 / Wikipedia

Despite the challenges, African States have high hopes and will explore the possibility of taking concessionary loans, and/or securing adequate funding through BRICS’ New Development Bank (NDB) which was established in 2015. For the NDB is in steady evolutionary process, but hopes to forge economic partnerships within BRICS+, and facilitate access to diverse markets, enhance trade and investment opportunities across emerging economies. At its annual board meeting, from August 29 to 31, 2024, in South Africa, the NDB restated its insights to offer a more inclusive and flexible approach to financing, support the reshaping long-term development goals, better suited to the unique needs of BRICS members and other developing countries.

In addition, BRICS+ has set significant task to ensure a fairer interconnectedness between states, and enlist their active participation in the reconstruction of global economic architecture away from existing unipolarity. In order to realize this, BRICS plans to introduce new financial payment systems. The concept of ‘de-dollarization’ and the term ‘multipolarity’ are now admired by majority of developing countries in the Global South. An appreciated driver for this process is BRICS platform created to resonate broader common objectives, to engage in steadfast reforms and no doubt, to roadmap better alternative socio-economic and political directions.

While African States continue to forge alternative economic and governance structures that challenge the the Britton Woods institutions, multinational financial system, the World Bank and International Monetary Fund with their existing dynamical network still operate in nearly all countries across Africa. Egypt and Ethiopia (both BRICS members) are engrossed with funding from IMF and the World Bank. For example, Egypt, struggling with economic challenges, recently secured an $8 billion bailout from the western-dominated International Monetary Fund, while Ethiopia, facing financial strain and internal crises of its own, also turned to the IMF for a $3.4 billion loan. This suggests that a significant departure from dollar reliance and existing financial institutions remains a distant prospect. According to June report from the World Bank, Africa’s real GDP growth, which dropped to 3.1 percent in 2023 from 4.1 percent in 2022. Looking forward, however, the economic outlook is more positive, with growth expected to increase to 3.7 percent in 2024 and 4.3 percent in 2025, highlighting the strong resilience of African economies, as it targets access to new markets, investment and technology.

Meanwhile among current members of BRICS, China with a cutting-edge maintains the most admirable robust economic relations with Africa, especially under its policy flagship the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) which it started in 2013 to establish beneficial economic relations and equal opportunities and foster cooperation in the different parts of the world. China’s private sector is now likely to lead trade and investment in Africa, while new initiatives like the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) will promote the growth of region. According to the International Monetary Fund (IMF), this amounted to a record $282 billion in total trade volume in 2023. Trading largely in military arms and weaponry, Russia has a meagre $25 billion trade statistics with Africa.

Africa’s Security Expectations

An analysis and monitoring show that Africa in dare need of peace and of security, an ingredient for development. Further analysis also highlights African countries’ divergent interests in politics, economy and social spheres. The same applies to their foreign policies with external partners, while majority still pursues a multi-alignment strategy, engaging with both the U.S. and the other major powers.

The current Commander of the U.S. Africa Command, Michael E. Langley, stated that the purpose of the command is to work alongside African military personnel to support their military operations. The White House official documents categorically stated that Africa Command “will strengthen our security cooperation with Africa and create new opportunities to bolster the capabilities of our partners in Africa. Africa Command will enhance our efforts to bring peace and security to the people of Africa and promote our common goals of development, health, education, democracy, and economic growth in Africa.”

Over the past decades, Africa’s security objectives have remained fragmented, and in many countries the United States African Command (AFRICOM), responsible for U.S. military operations, including fighting regional conflicts, has terribly failed to attain their purpose of creating military bases on the continent. It has huge yearly budget for sustaining military relations with 53 African States.

With the changing geopolitical tides, African Union (AU) and individual African States now envision to re-align with BRICS+ to address peace and security questions throughout the continent. BRICS+ has become Africa’s salvation. Russia has contributed immensely towards the expulsion of Europeans, particularly France out of French-speaking States in West Africa. These included Burkina Faso, Malian Republic and Niger. The Horn of Africa is still in delicate fragile situation. In a few other places such Mozambique, Guinea and Chad partially get financial support for military operations from Europe and the United States.

The Declaration adopted at the XV BRICS Summit held in South Africa, reiterated absolute commitment to inclusive multilateralism towards supporting peace and security in Africa. It underscored “commitment to the peaceful resolution of differences and disputes through dialogue and inclusive consultations in a coordinated and cooperative manner and support all efforts conducive to the peaceful settlement of crises.”

It finally stressed commitment to multilateralism and to the central role of the United Nations which are prerequisites to maintain peace and security. And for this, it is imperative to refrain from any coercive measures not based on international law and the UN Charter.

Critical Weak Points

In reaction at the first stage in deciding whether to expand, BRICS has to guide against its internal instability and possible negative influence. The association should seriously consider the importance of reviewing and working on its basic instruments, instead of making any hasty decisions. BRICS is looking to the Global South – developing countries with sharp disparities but together account for 40 per cent of the world’s GDP and 80 per cent of its population.

Many analysts have made powerful narratives that BRICS policies may not bring any real change because of diverging interests in politics, economy and culture. Many have different perceptions about the essence of what often referred to as a multipolar world. While expressing readiness to leverage unto BRICS platform which is largely considered symbolic in the current geopolitical situation, there are many practical things that are difficult to promote. Notwithstanding that, new BRICS members have multiple domestic issues to settle and still have to traditionally rely on western institutions. Shifting their alliance away from these institutions implies driving a sharp-edged dagger into the dynamics of their economic development. Russia has made an economic impact especially in Africa and Asian countries, in addition to China and India, despite the fact that its agenda is dominated by the Ukraine war.

BRICS Under Russia’s Presidency

Today, new players representing the Global South and Global East have stepped onto the international political stage. The geopolitical ambitions of the new global players are buttressed by their economic potential. Their numbers are growing, according Foreign Affairs Minister Sergey Lavrov, and to support his argument, he made reference to President Vladimir Putin who said at the G20 extraordinary summit on November 2023, that a “significant portion of global investment, trade and consumer activity is shifting to the Asian, African and Latin American regions, which are home to the majority of the world’s population.”

At the Primakov Readings held in Moscow, Sergey Lavrov further remarked “the trends shaping the multipolar order are new realities. The unbalanced and unfair model of globalization is becoming a thing of the past. The emergence of new global development centres, the increasing self-awareness of many developing countries and their refusal to blindly follow former colonial powers.

As often understandably described, BRICS countries represent about 46% of the world’s population and over 36% of global GDP, according to recent estimates by global financial institutions. As an informal association, its aim is to amplify the voice of major emerging economies to counterbalance the Western-centered global order and related structured institutions. In a nutshell, BRICS, as a symbol of multipolarity, overlooks its role in highlighting the huge deficiencies and enormous challenges of the existing international framework. It was founded in 2006 by Russia, Brazil, India and China, with South Africa joining in 2010. In January 2024, it expanded to include Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran,  Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates.

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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.

Featured image: © Sputnik/Photo host agency brics-russia2020.ru

Today’s Humanity Is Victim of Powerful Political Cults

The trajectory of daily aerial bombardments, targeted killings of fellow human beings, planned destruction of human habitats and cries for help by innocent children, men and women go unanswered for more than a year. It is madness, inhumanity, complete breakdown and impotence of global organizations such as the UNO and its Security Council and complete indifference of global leaders to challenge the animosities perpetuated by Israel and bombed by using American supplied weapons on the masses who should be protected by the so-called civilized world of the 21st century if there is any left intact.

The global thinking hubs wondered how to avert the tyranny and oppression to safeguard the innocent people of Gaza. President Biden and Secretary Blinken claimed to be deescalating the war in the Middle East and focusing on humanitarian aid desperately needed by the entrapped civilians across Gaza, but they appear preoccupied in sending THAAT and weapons of mass destruction to level Gaza and make it available to Israeli settlers. Their words and actions are self-contradictory, treacherous and misleading as Israel extends bombardment on Lebanon to crush the will of the civilian population for security and survival. Essentials of human survival are being weaponized. The global humanity must be concerned, why Israel is stopping foods, medicine and water supplies to the entrapped civilians in Northern strip and why it is repeatedly bombing the Al-Aqsa hospital and places of worhsip across Gaza? PM Netanyahu and his Far-Right extremists coalition live in a political fantancy not representative of the people of Israel. The contradictions covered up adroit formulation but continue to haunt the Israeli masses for peace and belonging to the land of Palestine: 

People of Israel Feel Denied Freedom and Curse of Political Lies

Ari Shavit (“Israel Takes its Last Breath”, Haaretz, Israel: 10/8/24), clarfies the essence of current affairs: It appears we have passed the point of no return, and it may be that “Israel” can no longer end the occupation, stop colonization, or achieve peace. It seems impossible to reform Zionism, save democracy, and divide the people of this land.

He added: If the situation is as it is, then:

  • There is no reason to live in this country.
  • There is no reason to write in “Haaretz.”
  • There is no reason to read “Haaretz.”

We must follow what Rogel Alpher suggested two years ago—leave the country… If “Israelism” and Jewishness are no longer a vital part of one’s identity, and if every Israeli citizen holds a foreign passport, not only technically but psychologically, then it’s over. We should say goodbye to our friends and move to San Francisco, Berlin, or Paris.

Ari Shavit points out: The curse of lies is what haunts the Israelis, and day after day it strikes them in the face in the form of a knife in the hand of a Jerusalemite, Hebronite, or Nabulsi, or with a stone or from a bus driver from Jaffa, Haifa, or Acre. The Israelis realize they have no future in Palestine; this is not a land without a people as they falsely claimed. Another writer acknowledges not just the existence of the Palestinian people but rather their superiority over the Israelis. This is Gideon Levy, the leftist Zionist, who says this.

Aluf Benn, Editor, Haaretz: “Israel’s Paradox of Defeat” (Transcend Media: 10/16/24), spells out the fear of common citizens: But even with the IDF occupying about a third of Gaza’s territory, to many Israelis, the current situation feels like defeat. …..This calamitous stasis, coupled with Israel’s growing global isolation and increasingly gloomy economic outlook, contribute to a national sense of hopelessness and despair. In fact, paradoxically, important facets of Israeli politics and society have changed surprisingly little since the immediate aftermath of Hamas’s attack. Citizens of border communities in the north and the south remain unable to return to their homes. Rather than uniting Jewish Israelis against a common external enemy, Israel’s now multifront fight against its external enemies has only widened preexisting social and political fissures between Netanyahu’s opponents and his supporters. Beating the expectations of his foes and his friends alike, Netanyahu continues to act as the center of gravity in Israeli politics. The right-wing coalition that keeps him in power has amped up its quest to crush the Palestinian statehood movement and “replace the Israeli elite,” a euphemism for demolishing Israel’s democratic and liberal institutions. 

The thinking Israelis are fast awakening to question the doctrine of Zionism, acclaimed Jewish superiority over others and systems of fake democracy. The 21st century age of knowledge and human expectations offer a grim picture of the present and future in-waiting. Israeli citizenry protesting against the war and calling for an immediate ceasefire, return of hostages and peace wants PM Netanyahu to resign alleging he is inept, greedy, self-centered who heavily rely on Israeli extremist policies and practices to undermine their future. Once in power, is Netanyahu irrelevant, problematic and paranoid to see the people’s interests? Biden and Netanyahu both appear to have lost sense of reality and awareness and most importantly, consciousness of the self and the political environment around them. They have become psychopaths who baffle with time and tides of political mismanagement, wars on mankind and destroy cultures and civilizations to overrun those who challenge their obsessed ignorance and viciousness.

Living time and encompassing realities demanding a navigational change are ignored in political statements, policies and actions. Aggressive cults are working across America and Israel mysteriously as if Joe Biden, Blinken and Netanyahu would have an infinite lifespan. They breathe oxygen in a self-generated conflict zone without any accountability. The cults used them for their own vested interests. Every egoistic leader is an enemy of the self and mankind. Throughout history men of power and influence commit horrible crimes against the humanity of which they are an essential part. Why? The answer lies with their individualistic absolutism and mindset. Is it part of the human nature that man should be cruel against man? We, the People are at a RISK of Extinction. Global warriors are the elite class born to rule – the men of king, who are most often hated and feared and always dream of glory and triumph to achieve at a cost of ruthlessness, triviality and success leading to degeneration and viciousness across the human societies. They are influential to defy accountability for their crimes.

We, the People, and Earth Sustains Life and Humanity and Our Enemies Destroy It

The Earth was a Divine “trust” to mankind for its existence, survival and progress. We, the people of the Earth, are standing and moving faster than the speed of sound. It could be hard to imagine or believe it. But you were standing on solid ground, and not in the cockpit of a supersonic jet. At any given moment, we are all moving at a speed of about 1,674 kilometers an hour, thanks to the Earth’s rotation and thanks to the Creator of the Earth.We live on Earth created by God for Man and Humanity and all other living beings: In Chapter 23: verse 72, The Quran makes a vivid revelation:

“We did indeed offer the Trust to the Heavens and the Earth. And the Mountains but they refused to undertake it, being afraid thereof: But man undertook it; He was indeed unjust and foolish.”

Western cultures are neglectful of the memory of God and lack rational understanding of the imperatives of living Earth and how it sustains life and humanity and all that could be imagined. Does reason operate the functionalities of the Earth or is it the Command of God to ensure miraculous operations for billions of years? Is it unreasonable to believe in the Divine Revelations and be the People of REASON? Earth’s average orbital speed is about 30 kilometers per second. In other units, that’s about 19 miles per second, or 67,000 miles per hour, or 110,000 kilometers per hour (110 million meters per hour). The earth rotates once every 23 hours, 56 minutes and 4.09053 seconds, called the sidereal period, and its circumference is roughly 40,075 kilometers. Thus, the surface of the earth at the equator moves at a speed of 460 meters per second–or roughly 1,000 miles per hour. Across the varied spectrums of human thoughts hardly any thinking people reflect upon the existing and continuous balanced environmental gases which sustain the living creatures on earth. Our environment contains 78% nitrogen, 21% oxygen, 0.97% argon and carbon dioxide 0.04% and the air safeguards the atmosphere and life on earth by absorbing ultraviolet solar radiation and reducing the temperature extremes in constant and systematic changing of days and nights. 

The US and Israel Could be Charged by the ICJ for Crimes Against Humanity and Genocide 

Wars kill people and destroy human habitats. Yet, the paranoid and most hated maniacs put up a show of war celebrations – a success achieved by strangulating the humanity – cost of ruthlessness, human degeneration and lack of imagination. To glance ahead it seems that the Western world failed to see a dreadful tragic history in the making of the end of time and loss of ingenuity to understand the consequences of naive egoism of Israeli leadership making war as an instrument of territorial expansion and conquest across Palestine, Lebanon and the larger Arab Middle East. If Lebanon had responsible public institutions and leadership they should have formed a legtimate government to encounter the Israeli onslaught. Not so, they appear their own enemies working against the interest of people just like the Arab-Muslim leaders lacking sense of honesty and capacity, unable to challenge the US-Israel war against the helpless masses of Gaza. The Israeli leaders prophesize “greater Israel” and the US hegemoney over the oil exporting Arab states. The Arab-Muslim leaders could well be described as a scum floating on a torrent. If Israel is not stopped, soon the leading oil exporting Arab states could fly Israeli-American flags for a change. Please see How Arab Leaders Betray Islam and Defy the Logice of Political Change, Peace and Security.”

The UNO and its Security Council and the EU shamefully became dubious and void in the 21st century global norms of civility, human rights, freedom, justice and safety of civilians. The UNSC resolutions for ceasefire and peace turned out to be a joke to mankind’s hopes as Israel refused to honor them. The US and Israeli leaders are not conscious of their own end game and could be charged and prosecuted for crimes against humanity and genocide. PM Netanyahu and his extremist regime would see Gaza and occupied West Bank more like an experimental lab for that end game. Animals live and do not reflect on the imperatives of life whereas, we, the human beings cannot act like animals as we are supposed to be intelligent and responsible species on this Earth. At the edge of reason, the notion of evil leads to realization of evil and tyranny of war must be stopped by all means and those responsible for the genocide and crimes against humanity must be held accountable to restore the manifestation of a sustainable human future.

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

Dr. Mahboob A. Khawaja specializes in international affairs-global security, peace and conflict resolution and has spent several academic years across the Russian-Ukrainian and Central Asian regions knowing the people, diverse cultures of thinking and political governance and a keen interest in Islamic-Western comparative cultures and civilizations, and author of several publications including: One Humanity and the Remaking of Global Peace, Security and Conflict Resolution, and a forthcoming book: Global Humanity and the Remaking of Peace, Security and Conflict Resolution beyond the Lens of Human Consciousness.

Featured image is from Fuad Alymani

Israeli warplanes have launched dozens of airstrikes across Lebanon over the past 24 hours despite US ‘guarantees’ that Tel Aviv would scale down its aggression.

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“The mayor of Nabatieh, among others… was martyred. It’s a massacre,” Nabatieh Governor Howaida Turk told AFP. “For now, 11 strikes have mainly hit Nabatieh but also its surroundings,” Turk added, and described how the intense raids “formed a kind of belt of fire” in the area.

“The Israeli enemy raid … on two buildings, that of the Nabatieh municipality and the union of municipalities, killed six people in a preliminary toll,” Lebanon’s Health Ministry said in a statement, adding that rescuers were searching for survivors under the rubble.

At least 43 others were injured in the attack.

Lebanese authorities announced on Tuesday that the death toll from Israeli attacks over the last year has reached 2,350, with 10,906 injured.

In response to the violent raid of the southern Lebanese town, caretaker Prime Minister Najib Mikati said Israeli jets “deliberately struck a municipal council meeting focused on addressing the city’s relief and service needs.”

“This new assault, along with the ongoing crimes committed by Israel against civilians, is a direct challenge to the international community, whose silence only emboldens the occupation to continue its violations and crimes,” Mikati added.

The Lebanese premier also took aim at the “international community” for being “deliberately silent” about the Israeli aggressions. “What solution can be hoped for in light of this reality?” he said in a statement.

Caretaker Interior Minister Bassam Mawlawi confirmed that the Nabatieh municipality was targeted during a meeting held to coordinate relief work and aid distribution for people who have remained in southern Lebanon. He said a civil defense member was killed and others injured in the strike.

The attack came just hours after Israel renewed its bombing campaign of Beirut’s southern suburbs after a six-day pause. On Tuesday, Mikati claimed to have “received a kind of guarantee to reduce the escalation in the southern suburbs and Beirut.”

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

Featured image: L’Orient Le Jour/Muntasser Abdallah

The Syrian Arab Army (SAA) and the Russian Air Force are escalating attacks on Radical Islamic terrorists who occupy Idlib, killing 30 militants on October 13.

The terrorist groups have been preparing to launch attacks on civilians in northern Syria, including the Idlib countryside, Latakia, and Aleppo.

The SAA has been conducting continuous attacks using heavy artillery and Russian warplanes, targeting Idlib and the western Aleppo countryside over the past few weeks.

On October 12, SAA forces shelled villages west of Aleppo and Idlib countryside with heavy artillery and suicide drones, while targeting terrorist groups.

Idlib has extensive tunnels dug by terrorists over the last 12 years, with one strike targeting an underground vehicle depot near the cannery factory in Idlib city.

Syrian-Russian strikes also hit areas controlled by the Turkistan Islamic Party (TIP) in the hills of Kabani, in Latakia’s countryside west of Idlib.The headquarters of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) leaders were targeted as they arrived at a location near the town of Nayrab, between Idlib and Aleppo.

The main terrorist group holding Idlib is HTS and includes the National Liberation Front, part of the Syrian National Army (SNA), alongside Jaish al-Izza.

The leader of HTS is Mohammed al-Julani, a Syrian who grew up in Saudi Arabia. Indoctrinated there in Radical Islam, he traveled to Iraq in 2003 to fight the American Army. While in an American prison in Iraq, he became associated with Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the leader of ISIS. Once Julani was released, he went to Syria and founded the first Al Qaeda branch there, Jibhat al-Nusra.

Nusra became the most vicious, and successful armed group in Syria, and the US-sponsored Free Syrian Army (FSA) ceased to exist, having been absorbed within HTS. After years of battles, the SAA regained territory lost, and Idlib became the last remaining terrorist-controlled area.

Baghdadi and his successor were killed by US commandos in Idlib, as the area became a magnet for Radical Islamic terrorists. Perhaps Julani gave the US the location coordinates for the leader of ISIS, even though Julani still has a $10 million bounty on his head from the US government.

Regardless of the terrorist classification of the leader of Idlib, the American media has come to Idlib to interview Julani to re-brand him as a moderate ‘freedom fighter’ and worthy of the support from Washington and the UN. Julani changed the name of his group from Jibhat al-Nusra to HTS because the US and the UN had out-lawed Nusra as a terrorist group.

Experts who research Radical Islamic terrorist groups know that HTS is just a new name, to allow the US and international humanitarian groups to continue to work alongside and support the HTS. As the old saying goes, ‘a leopard can’t change his spots’.

In 2019, a deal was signed between Russia and Turkey, in which Turkey guaranteed the safe passage of cars, trucks, and buses between Latakia and Aleppo on the M4 highway. However, Turkey never fulfilled their promise.Turkey, a US ally, participated in the Obama-designed US-NATO attack on Syria for ‘regime change’.

Turkey became the staging ground and transit hub for the international terrorist groups coming to Syria through the border at Idlib. One of the terrorist groups is the Turkistan Islamic Party (TIP), which is made up of Chinese citizens known as Uyghurs. About 3,500 TIP terrorists live in Idlib and speak Turkic, the root language of Turkey. President Erdogan of Turkey expedited their travel from western China to Idlib. However, Erdogan wants to restore his relationship with the Assad government in Damascus.

With Turkey’s economy in ruins, it is important to get the Syrian business back, which was the biggest export destination of Turkish goods before 2011. In mid-summer 2024, Turkey fought several battles against their former ally, the Idlib terrorists, in the Kilic Valley south of Kessab in the north Latakia countryside. Turkey wants to cut ties with the terrorists there but is taking faltering steps in the process, perhaps in consideration of the civilians who are in the middle.

President Assad of Syria has asked Turkish occupation forces in Syria to leave before discussion of renewed diplomatic relations. Despite Ankara’s rhetoric, the withdrawal has not happened, but the mid-summer battles by Turkey against the terrorists were promising a change in foreign policy.

Idlib is an agricultural province that lies east of the port of Latakia, and the industrial capital of Syria to the east, Aleppo. Idlib is important because it is a rich olive-growing area, and because it sits on the border with Turkey. In 2011, the first murder victim in Idlib, carried out by the US-supported FSA, was a pharmacist who had been an advocate for secular political values.

He was executed and burned along with his pharmacy. The US-supported FSA were followers of Radical Islam, which is a political ideology, and not a religion or sect, but is followed by some Sunni Muslims. In Saudi Arabia they refer to it as ‘Political Islam’, and it is the fundamental belief system of the Muslim Brotherhood, Al Qaeda, and ISIS.

According to Axios, the US has about 900 troops in Syria, of which 100 are tasked with supporting the FSA. The only territory in Syria currently occupied by ‘rebels’ is Idlib.

The Western media refers to Idlib as the “last rebel stronghold”, but when you research who controls Idlib, you find it is HTS, which is a Radical Islamic terrorist group. There are no ‘opposition rebels’ in Syria; only terrorists.There are about 3 million persons in Idlib, and many are unarmed civilians, such as women, children, and the elderly.

These people are used effectively as human shields by the terrorists. For many years, the UN has been warning of a humanitarian disaster in Idlib should it be attacked by Syria or Russia.

The UN, and other Western humanitarian organizations, keep delivering food, medicines, and other supplies to keep the civilians, the ‘human shields’, alive. All the goods delivered pass through the hands of HTS, and are distributed according to their priorities.

People who have complained about the strict Islamic law adhered to by HTS, or the arbitrary arrests, torture, and executions by HTS, do not get their share of the free goods. The undistributed free goods are placed in Julani’s shopping mall, Al Hamra Mall, and sold. The UN enables HTS, and the dictator Julani, to keep the civilians under lock and key, and without a voice to complain.

Humanitarian organizations complained when their warehouses were stormed by the HTS when they offered classes designed for women to gain skills for employment, and the HTS strictly forbids women from attending.

The Turkish-backed SNA held Syrians for ransom on October 14 north of Aleppo. These were Syrians who had been living in Lebanon for years and were attempting to return home to flee the Israeli attack on Lebanon.The SNA set up roadblocks and demanded $100 in ransom from each person they held. 57 were freed after paying the extortion, and the remaining victims who could not pay were being held as hostages in the SNA prisons of al-Bab and Azaz, north of Aleppo.

While the world is watching events in Gaza and Lebanon, perhaps Idlib can be liberated from the terrorist groups holding 3 million as human shields and preventing families and cargo from traveling between Latakia and Aleppo. The terrorists have prevented the full recovery of Aleppo, which was liberated in December 2016 by holding the M4 highway as impassable.

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

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: Photo taken from southern Turkish border town of Ceylanpinar on Oct. 10, 2019 shows smoke rising from the northern Syrian city of Ras al-Ain during an attack launched by Turkish army. (Xinhua/Mustafa Kaya)

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and the Liberal Party of Canada have become so despised after nine years in power that only a quarter of the electorate is considering voting for him. Yet, despite the many current problems in Canada, Trudeau continues to prioritise external matters, such as Ukraine and Sikh separatism in India.

“His failings hold lessons for liberals the world over,” said the British newspaper The Economist in an article titled “Justin Trudeau is wrecking Canada’s liberal dream.”

After losing the support of its government ally, the New Democratic Party, and being defeated in two by-elections, the Liberal Party fears that a plan to increase its vote share is not being considered. The outlet claimed that a letter is circulating among Liberal MPs calling on Justin Trudeau to resign from his post as Prime Minister.

Canadians, who supported him in 2015 to come to power and backed his re-election in 2019 and 2021, are turning against his government.

Housing prices are “central” to understanding the prime minister’s downfall. According to the newspaper, the cost of buying a home has increased by 66% since Justin Trudeau took office, and the lack of supply is particularly acute in Canada.

Mike Moffatt, a housing economist quoted by The Economist, said a “wartime effort” is needed to triple the pace of construction to achieve 5.8 million homes built over the next ten years.

The media outlet added that the large number of migrants arriving in the United States during the administration of the liberal prime minister has aggravated the crisis in the demand for housing.

“Demand for housing from the large number of immigrants who arrived during Mr Trudeau’s decade in power has worsened the crunch,” The Economist reported.

However, the health and education systems are also being affected by the growth in the number of foreign workers, which rose from 109,000 in 2018 to around 240,000 in 2023.

In addition, the number of non-permanent residents, including students and asylum seekers, increased to more than 3 million as of last July, according to the British outlet.

“Canada suffers from laggardly productivity growth,” the Economist said, adding that this situation is exacerbated by a mediocre economy in the United States. The slowdown in productivity growth is holding back wages, and although investment has been “strong” in oil and gas fields, it has been “overshadowed” elsewhere.

The outlet noted that rather than “adapting to or confronting challenges thrown up by his policies,” Trudeau “has preferred to attack his critics” and “seemed inert as the erosion of his party’s support has accelerated.” As a result, “too many” Canadians have “forsaken” the prime minister and the causes he “stood for.”

Yet, even with Canada gripped by a housing and cost-of-living crisis, Trudeau has been unrelenting in his support for Ukraine, recently signing the Fourth Additional Agreement for CA$400 million.

“Canada is one of the leaders in supporting Ukraine and a strategic partner that has provided significant assistance since the first days of the full-scale invasion. Direct budgetary support since February 2022 has reached more than US$5 billion. I am grateful to the Government and citizens of Canada for their solidarity with Ukraine and their crucial contribution to the stability of Ukraine’s financial system,” said Ukrainian Finance Minister Serhii Marchenko on October 11.

It is recalled that last month, Trudeau championed Ukraine’s efforts to receive approval to use NATO-provided long-range weaponry to strike deep into Russian territory.

“[Canada fully supports Ukraine using long-range weaponry to] prevent and interdict Russia’s continued ability to degrade Ukrainian civilian infrastructure,” he said on September 13.

At the same time, Canada’s relations with India have soured once again, with both countries expelling diplomats on October 14 as part of the escalating dispute over the June 2023 assassination of a Sikh separatist, Hardeep Singh Nijjar, in Canada. Trudeau claims that the Indian government is behind Nijjar’s assassination but has yet to offer any evidence.

The pro-Khalistan, or Sikh independence, has been the main issue between Canada and India, with Indian authorities repeatedly highlighting that the Trudeau government offers a safe haven for what New Delhi recognises as terrorists. Sikhs comprise nearly 2% of Canada’s population, and community members have taken up prominent positions in the country, including politics, and for this reason, they are an important voter constituency.

India’s Foreign Minister said in a statement on October 14,

“The Government of India strongly rejects these preposterous imputations and ascribes them to the political agenda of the Trudeau Government that is centred around vote bank politics,” adding that Trudeau’s Government depended on “a political party, whose leader openly espouses a separatist ideology vis-à-vis India” and was also responsible for “aggravating matters.”

Trudeau certainly wrecked Canada’s liberal dream, with a big part attributed to prioritising lost causes for foreign countries rather than dealing with domestic issues. As Canada has become unaffordable for the average citizen, he has instead sought to challenge Russia through the Ukrainian proxy and is missing out on valuable trade with India to defend a vote bank recognised as terrorists by New Delhi. These priorities have come at the price of not only ruined external relations but also the impoverishment of Canadian citizens.

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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 is from Canadian Press/Shutterstcok

Non-nuclear Iran is incapable of existentially threatening the US like nuclear-armed Russia could.

Politico cited a senior Senate aid and two sources in the Biden Administration to report on Wednesday that the US is much more afraid of an uncontrollable escalation sequence with Russia than with Iran due to the first’s nuclear capabilities. As proof of this, the US has no qualms about shooting down Iranian missiles launched against Israel but won’t consider shooting down Russian ones launched against Ukraine, which has upset Zelensky and some of his compatriots who thus feel like second-class allies.

The difference between Russia/Ukraine and Iran/Israel in this regard accounts for the US’ different approach towards each pair. As was explained last month in this analysis about why “Putin Explicitly Confirmed What Was Already Self-Evident About Russia’s Nuclear Doctrine”, the comparatively more pragmatic policymakers who still have the final say in Russia and the US have thus far managed to avoid the uncontrollable escalation sequence that their respective hawkish rivals want. Here’s how they did it:

“[The US hawks’] comparatively more pragmatic rivals who still call the shots always signal their escalatory intentions far in advance so that Russia could prepare itself and thus be less likely to ‘overreact’ in some way that risks World War III. Likewise, Russia continues restraining itself from replicating the US’ ‘shock-and-awe’ campaign in order to reduce the likelihood of the West ‘overreacting’ by directly intervening in the conflict to salvage their geopolitical project and thus risking World War III.

It can only be speculated whether this interplay is due to each’s permanent military, intelligence, and diplomatic bureaucracies (‘deep state’) behaving responsibly on their own considering the enormity of what’s at stake or if it’s the result of a ‘gentlemen’s agreement’. Whatever the truth may be, the aforesaid model accounts for the unexpected moves or lack thereof from each, which are the US correspondingly telegraphing its escalatory intentions and Russia never seriously escalating in kind.”

There’s no equivalent balance of nuclear power between the US and Iran, with the most that Iran can do is launch saturation strikes against American bases in the region, not existentially threaten it like Russia can. If Iran’s potential retaliation to Israel’s expected strike harms or kills some of the nearly 100-member team operating the US’ THAAD in the self-professed Jewish State, then the US could either take the hit, retaliate against Iranian-aligned Resistance groups in the region, or strike the Islamic Republic.

Regardless of whatever might happen, non-nuclear Iran is incapable of existentially threatening the US like nuclear-armed Russia could if the latter retaliated to the interception of its missiles by hitting targets inside of NATO, which could easily catalyze a possibly apocalyptic escalation sequence. To be sure, there are indeed some US hawks who want to risk that scenario and the abovementioned comparatively less consequential one in West Asia, but their more pragmatic rivals are still able to stop them for now.

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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, Andrew Korybko’s Newsletter.

Andrew Korybko is an American Moscow-based political analyst specializing in the relationship between the US strategy in Afro-Eurasia, China’s One Belt One Road global vision of New Silk Road connectivity, and Hybrid Warfare. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from danielo / Shutterstock

August 29, 2024:

The “experts” at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry were officially challenged via a freedom of information order (pgs 1/2) to provide or cite any studies in their possession, custody or control authored by anyone, anywhere, ever:

1. that scientifically prove/provide evidence of the existence of any alleged “HPV” aka “Human Papillomavirus” (simply showing that the alleged particles exist and cause the illness/symptoms that they are alleged to cause… the institutions weren’t even challenged to demonstrate that the particles hijack cells and replicate), or

2. that even describe someone finding and purifying particles alleged to be “HPV” directly from the bodily fluid/tissue/excrement of so-called “hosts”, or

3. wherein the purported “genome” of the alleged “HPV” was found intact in the bodily fluid, tissue or excrement of any supposedly infected “host” (as opposed to fabricated in silico, aka a computer model), or

4. that scientifically demonstrate contagion of the illness / symptoms that are allegedly caused by purported “HPV”.

I included a reminder that scientific evidence requires use of the scientific method to test falsifiable hypotheses through valid, rigorous, repeatable controlled experiments.

And as usual I asked that if records matching my request were held by the institutions but were already publicly available, I be given citations.

October 16, 2024:

Roger Andoh acting as FOIA Officer in the Office of the Chief Operating Officer responded (pgs 7, 8, #24-01612-FOIA):

“A search of our records failed to reveal any documents pertaining to your request. Specifically, subject matter experts were unable to locate records that match the records described in your request as written.”

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And now we await the same confession from the FDA in response to FOIA order #2024-7649, of which Sarah Kolter acting as Director acknowledged receipt on August 30, 2024.

Note that Sarah has already officially confessed that the FDA has no such records for the imaginary “monkeypox virus” (FDA FOIA 2024-7353) or the imaginary “avian influenza virus” (FDA FOIA 2024-6486) and she was not able to cite any for the imaginary “SARS-COV-2” either (FDA FOIA 2024-7837)…

…because virology has always been pseudoscience, no virus has ever been shown to exist, contagion is “public health” mythology and literally hundreds of earlier FOI responses from 40 different countries on dozens of alleged “viruses” also yielded no valid scientific evidence (see further below for more links).

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Note: this newsletter has also been sent to the “Reuters Fact Check Team” and ~200 people who work for “the state”, lamestream media, etc. at Canada, Isle of Man, England and the U.S., so they can’t claim later that they didn’t know.

Recommended Reading/Viewing:

Re “HPV” see:

viroLIEgy.com for articles dismantling the myth

Dr. Sam Bailey’s HPV, Pointless Tests and Toxic Shots

Joan Shenton’s documentary Sacrificial Virgins: The Dangers of the HPV VaccineAmandha Vollmer’s article HPV – The Virus that Wasn’t: How is the Gardasil Vaccine Still on the Market?

The Chain of Causation – Mike Stone, virology

The absolutely necessary scientific evidence required.

I was truly honoured to have a recorded chat recently with my friends Drs Sam and Mark Bailey in New Zealand. Mike Stone accurately describes them as “the Dynamic Duo” and they have helped to keep a lot of people grounded and sane during these last few years!

Christine Massey: “Don’t trust Public Health.” – Drs Sam and Mark Bailey

Dr Sam White on the Medical Mafia – Dr Sam Bailey

Debunking the Debunker! – Dawn Lester

I personally haven’t watched this one yet but am looking forward to it: A Look at the Human Genome Project – Dr. Tom Cowan

Official Confessions/Evidence Confirm that Virology is Pseudoscience

Freedom of Information Responses reveal that health/science institutions around the world (225 and counting!) have no record of SARS-COV-2 (the alleged convid virus) isolation/purification, anywhere, ever: https://www.fluoridefreepeel.ca/fois-reveal-that-health-science-institutions-around-the-world-have-no-record-of-sars-cov-2-isolation-purification/

Excel file listing 225 institutions: https://www.fluoridefreepeel.ca/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/Institution-list-for-website.xlsx

FOI responses re other imaginary “viruses” (HIV, avian influenza, HPV, Influenza, Measles, etc., etc., etc.):
https://www.fluoridefreepeel.ca/fois-reveal-that-health-science-institutions-have-no-record-of-any-virus-having-been-isolated-purified-virology-isnt-a-science/

FOIs re secretive and unscientifically “mock infected” cells (aka invalid controls) and fabricated “virus genomes”: https://www.fluoridefreepeel.ca/do-virologists-perform-valid-control-experiments-is-virology-a-science/

3000+ pages of “virus” FOIs in 8 compilation pdfs, and my notarized declarations re the anti-scientific nature of virology: https://tinyurl.com/IsolationFOIs

Failed freedom of Information responses re contagion: https://www.fluoridefreepeel.ca/freedom-of-information-responses-re-contagion/

Do health and science institutions have studies proving that bacteria CAUSE disease? https://www.fluoridefreepeel.ca/do-health-authorities-have-studies-proving-that-bacteria-cause-disease-lets-find-out-via-freedom-of-information/

Because “they” (HIV, influenza virus, HPV, measles virus, etc., etc., etc.) have never been shown to exist, clearly don’t exist and virology isn’t a science.

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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, Christine Massey’s “germ” FOI Newsletter.

Featured image is from Children’s Health Defense

Emanuel Pastreich’s campaign for US President “Fear No Evil” comes at a crucial moment in history. Humanity faces an inflection point as the forces of global finance push for World War III to solve the deep contradictions created by a bankrupt economic system.

When we look for a candidate in this critical election who has not only spoken out about specific humanitarian horrors but has also identified the ideological and structural causes of this war economy and made concrete proposals for a solution that addresses the imperialist foundations of the American economy, Pastreich stands alone.

The fact that he has been blocked out throughout the election process in the Green Party, and as an independent, using nefarious means, and that he has had to continue the campaign from Japan without getting on the ballot in a single state does not disqualify him in our opinion, but instead gives him legitimacy in an election that is being held amid unprecedented institutional collapse.

In other words, Pastreich’s demands for ethics, accountability, and transparency in government can serve as the foundations for a mass political movement that can achieve what this patently rigged election could not possibly achieve.

The United States stands atop a rotten pile of “Western powers” accustomed to ruling the globe unchallenged, who have relabeled “imperialism” as “aid to developing nations” and who cannot face the prospect of playing second fiddle to the rising Eurasian powers: China, Russia, Iran. They disdain to uphold the principles of international law and diplomacy that they demand of others.

The ruling elites in the USA and Europe, and their quislings in Canada, Australia, Japan and South Korea, have decided that rather than treat the rapidly developing East and Global South (which make up vast majority of humanity and, increasingly, the economy) as a partner, they would rather risk everything in order to hang on to their privileges pushing for total war abroad and a brutal technology-driven totalitarian rule at home.

Emanuel Pastreich opposes not only the nightmare scenario of war with Russia or Iran but also all the wars waged by the West. In his speeches, he highlights how the false concept of growth, the promotion of overproduction, and the glorification of extraction and exploitation push us toward war.

Pastreich makes it clear on his website that he welcomes comprehensive dialogue with all the world’s nations, as indicated by his speeches addressed to the citizens of the earth in 43 languages. Those speeches include tributes to the great civilizations of the world, from Laos to Peria, from Turkey to Nepal, as well as apologies for American war crimes and imperialist exploitation.

Pastreich is making an internationalist, not globalist, appeal for a new age of true cooperation based on citizens’ rights and the diversity of human civilization and that refuses the blood money of banks and corporations.

Pastreich is not in denial about the industrial, manufacturing, scientific, and industrial power of the People’s Republic of China and its synergetic interplay with the economies of the Russian Federation, the Islamic Republic of Iran and others via organizations like BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Ethiopia and the United Arab Emirates) and the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO).

He embraces a new vision for the United States that breaks, in a sense that even Roosevelt and Wallace failed to do, with the ghosts of the British Empire, the multinational banks and trusts pulling our chains whose blood money was wrung from workers over five centuries of exploitation and plunder of the great civilizations of India, Bangladesh, China, Africa and South America.

This global ruling class understands that time is not on their side and that the East and the Global South will surpass them in a rapidly emerging multilateral world.

Pastreich is the only presidential candidate who is fluent in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean, has written extensively in those languages, and delivers speeches in those languages. He feels that respect for all the civilizations of the Earth is essential to peace and that English is no longer a language of absolute status, just as the dollar is no longer the unshakable currency.

Pastreich has spoken out about the exact nature of the COVID operation to destroy civil society through induced mental trauma, to usher in totalitarianism cloaked as healthcare, and to employ supposedly “leftist” parties and organizations as a velvet glove for the steel fist of corporate fascism.

Pastreich stood his ground during the intense repression meted out by the capitalist states during the Covid reign of terror, refusing to embrace the anti-scientific popularism that asserted that evil is the work of Satan, that viruses do not exist, that climate change is myth, and that the crimes we witness are the product of inflexible bureaucrats—rather than global capitalists. His three years of unemployment and life abroad testify to that commitment.

Pastreich asserts that it is not enough to say we will be more careful with vaccinations in the future, but rather we must demand that the assets of the corporations responsible for these state crimes be seized and redistributed to the injured. He declares that corporations do not have any legal status, that Wall Street’s criminal economy must be ended and replaced by a cooperative economy run by the people, and that respect for actual work and for our shared environment must be at the core of the economy.

Pastreich proposes a complete transformation of the working masses’ relationship with large-scale industrial and manufacturing whose ownership is claimed by corporations. He also asserts that private banks cannot control the creation of money that belongs to the people through a transparent and democratically elected Congress.

The rich and powerful have created an impossible choice for the workers. On the one side is a reactionary, pro-business, anti-government, isolationist political culture that degrades the status of workers but that is allowed to recognize the crimes of 9/11, of the Federal Reserve, of false flag shootings, and of Covid 19. On the other side is a progressive political culture that accurately identifies the dangers of capitalism but refuses to acknowledge state crimes and the deep corruption of the entire political and economic system.

Pastreich lays the ground for a movement that will address economic contradictions and state crimes without holding up messiah figures or opposing genuine internationalism. This can only be achieved by eliminating the hidden effective government of the United States and other nations: the multinational banks and multinational corporations.

Pastreich proposes that revolution is the only way forward and that such revolution is legitimated by the Declaration of Independence which established the nation, stating:

“When a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object, evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security.”

His efforts to revive the revolutionary elements of the American political tradition, which has currency with citizens, without dismissing the achievements of the Marxist revolutionary tradition, offer real potential for a united front as we enter into an age of revolutionary politics.

We have a choice between a constructive and egalitarian revolution dedicated to the needs of workers or a right-wing “revolution” for the benefit of billionaires such as is being led by Donald Trump and planned by Steve Bannon.

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

Featured image is from Korea IT Times

Nuclear Fever: War Mongering on Iran

October 17th, 2024 by Dr. Binoy Kampmark

The recent string of exaggerated military successes – or at least as they are understood to be – places Israel in a situation it has been previously used to: prowess in war.  Such prowess promises much: redrawing boundaries; overthrowing governments; destroying the capabilities of adversaries and enemies.  Nothing, in this equation, contemplates peace, let alone diplomatic resolution. It’s playground pugilism that rarely gets out of the sandpit.

In Washington, a fever has struck regarding Israel’s advances.  The outbreak has stirred much enthusiasm in a doctrine that has been shown, time and again, to be wretchedly uncertain and grossly dangerous.  With no concrete evidence of imminent harm to US interests, it featured in the highest policy planning circles that oiled an invasion of Iraq in 2003.  While the stated objective was the disarming of Saddam Hussein’s regime for having Weapons of Mass Destruction it turned out not to have, the logic was one of pre-emptive strike: we attack the madman in Baghdad before he goes nuclear and loses it.

The establishment wonk on empire and espionage at The Washington Post, David Ignatius, offers a fairly meaningless assessment in terms of claimed Israeli dominance over Iran and its proxies.  After a year of conflict, Israel had “gained what military strategists call ‘escalation dominance’”.  The implication: a decisive attack on Iran is imminent.

The point here (at this juncture, the mind lost seeks sanctuary in a mental asylum of lunatic reassurances), is that attacking Iran in toto will not result in much by way of retaliatory detriment.  Some bruising, surely, but hardly lingering flesh wounds.  Israel has, it would seem, been working some magic, spreading its own view that Iran has a gruesome plan in its military vault: eliminating Israel by 2040.

In Foreign Policy, Matthew Kroenig, generously self-described as a national security strategist, blusters for war.  “Indeed, now is an ideal opportunity to destroy Iran’s nuclear program,” he asserts with childish longing.  The reason for such an attack lies in a presumption.  Yet again, the doctrine of preemption, one hostile to international law and the UN Charter, plays out its feeble rationale.  Evidence, in such cases, is almost always scanty.  Kroenig, however, is certain.  Iran will secure one bomb’s worth of weapon-grade material within a matter of weeks.  The rest is obvious.  No evidence is offered, nor does it even matter, given Kroenig’s longstanding zeal in wishing to rid Iran of its nuclear facilities.

The Atlantic Council has also suggested a policy that what is good for the goose of Christian-Jewish freedom is not good for the gander of Persian Shia ambition.  It is exactly this full-fledged hypocrisy that the despots of the secular tyranny in North Korea realised in dealing with Washington.  Beware the nostrums against nuclear armament.

In a report authored by both Democrats and Republicans for the Council, a warning of chilling absurdity is offered:

“The United States needs to maintain a declaratory policy, explicitly enunciated by the president, that it will not tolerate Iran getting a nuclear weapon and will use military force to prevent this development if all other measures fail.”

Instead of resisting belligerent chatter, the authors suggest that the US threaten Iran through announcing “yearly joint exercises with Israel, such as Juniper Oak and seek additional funding in the next budget cycle to speed research and development of next-generation military hardware capable of destroying Iran’s nuclear program.”

Kroenig shows his usual stuffing.  Iran can never have nuclear weapons, because the United States and Israel say so.  (The Sunni powers, for their own reasons, agree.)  This form of perennial idiocy could apply to all the powers that have nuclear weapons, including Israel itself.  At one point, no state should have had that relic of sadism’s folly.  Then they came in succession after the United States: the Soviet bomb, the Britannic bomb, the Gallic bomb.  Throw in China, India, Pakistan, Israel.  Plucky, deranged North Korea, was wise to note the trend, showing lunacy to be eternally divisible.

It is precisely that sort of logic that has drawn such comments as this from the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in a May interview:

“Iran’s level of deterrence will be different if the existence of Iran is threatened.  We have no decision to produce a nuclear bomb, but we will have to change our nuclear doctrine if such threats occur.” 

This month, almost 40 legislators penned a letter to the Supreme National Security Council calling for a reconsideration of current nuclear doctrine.  The greater the fanatic’s desire to remove a perceived threat, the more likely an opponent will give basis to that threat.

For all the faux restraint being officially aired in Washington regarding Israel’s next round of military assaults, there is enormous sympathy, even affection, for the view that wrongs shall be righted, and the mullahs punished.  Bedding for a more hostile response to Iran also features in the inane airings of the presidential election.  Vice President Kamala Harris, in an interview with 60 minutes, remarked that, “Iran has American blood on its hands, okay?” In making that claim, she suggested that Tehran was somehow Washington’s greatest adversary.

In response to this fatuous remark, Justin Logan of the Cato Institute offers an ice-cold bath of reason: “This is not the Wehrmacht in 1940.”  The path to dominating the Middle East hardly involves such tools as propaganda, proxy operations and psychological warfare “much less becoming the greatest threat to the United States.”

The nuclear option is now available to governments that should never have had them.  But acquiring the dangerously untenable followed.  To assume that brutal, amputation loving theocrats in Tehran should not have them defies the trajectory of a certain moronic consistency.  The Persian bomb is probably imminent, and it is incumbent on the murderous fantasists in Israel and the United States to chew over that fact.  Unfortunately for the rest of us, the fetish against acquisition risks expanding a conventional conflict through testing the will and means of a power that, while wounded, hardly counts as defeated.

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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 is from The Libertarian Institute

AI Translation of this Article in Korean, Scroll Down

“단극시대 생존: 북한과 미국의 35년 간의 대립”: A.B. 에이브람스의 새 책 리뷰

이 기사의 한국어 AI 번역, 아래로 스크롤

A Short Quiz:

1.     With what nation has the U.S. been at war for almost 75 years?

2.     What nation has never been colonized by a Western power?

3.     What nation has never bowed to U.S. pressure to surrender any aspect of its sovereignty to the New World Order?

4.     What nation survived the collapse of its patron, the Soviet Union, followed by natural disasters, possibly manmade, that took its population to the brink of starvation in the 1990s?

5.     What nation negotiated a possible peace settlement with the Clinton administration only to have President George W. Bush declare it part of an “axis of evil”?

6.     What nation was #1 on the U.S. regime change hit list in 2002, ahead of Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Yemen, Syria, and Iran?

7.     What nation was called by the U.S. “a very tough nut to crack,” forcing the U.S. to back down from an attack after it utilized its own resources to develop a nuclear deterrent?

8.     What nation created a massive underground fortification complex that may have inspired Iran, Hamas, and Hezbollah?

9.     What nation has a nuclear deterrent possibly capable of dropping H-bombs on the U.S. mainland?

Overview 

Obviously the answer is North Korea, a part of the world about which most Western readers know absolutely nothing. What they think they know is often based on the lies of the mainstream media that routinely fabricates atrocity stories about every U.S. “adversary” that raises its head.

Now Clarity Press has come out with a new book by Korea expert A.B. Abrams that reads like a thriller but tells you much of what you need to know about an epic story by a resilient country that has turned its small, mountainous land into a fortress of survival in today’s mortally dangerous international environment.

The origins of the Korean conflict lie in the standoff between the Communist and Western blocs that formed at the end of World War II. The Korean peninsula had been under Japanese rule since 1905, but an indigenous revolt had begun to take power during the latter stages of the war. The U.S. moved to prevent that revolt from taking over all of Korea.

In August 1945 the U.S. proposed a temporary division of Korea into areas of Soviet and U.S. trusteeship at the 38th parallel. The Koreans in the North who had formed people’s committees operated with considerable autonomy. Those in the South worked under tight U.S. control, declaring the Republic of Korea as rulers of the entire peninsula on August 15, 1948.

By now a civil war had broken out, with the leaders to the North declaring their own Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) in September 1948. In 1950, full-scale war began, and within 72 hours the forces of the South had been defeated. The U.S. military now stepped in and the Korean War was on.

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Hundreds of thousands of South Koreans fled south in mid-1950 after the North Korean army invaded. (From the Public Domain)

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The violence was horrendous, with massive civilian deaths. U.S. bombing killed a million North and South Koreans and left six million homeless. The U.S.-led land army invaded the north but was driven back by Chinese intervention. The final armistice was at the point where hostilities began, the 38th parallel.

U.S. air power carried out massive indiscriminate bombing on a scale that had only been exceeded by the assault on Japan in World War II. The U.S. dropped 32,557 tons of napalm. Bombing of the Yalu River dams destroyed 250,000 tons of rice and caused floods and starvation. Altogether, three to four million North Koreans died in the war, a number declared by many observers to be genocidal.

During the war, U.S. commander Douglas MacArthur recommended nuclear strikes against 26 Korean and Chinese targets. These were deterred by the Soviet Union’s possession of a nuclear strike capability that could be used against American East Asian bases. The Korean War also led China to believe it needed a nuclear deterrent against the U.S.

Despite the existence of the 1953 Armistice, there was never a treaty of peace between the U.S. and North Korea or between North and South, causing a state of war to be in existence to this day. It’s the oldest condition of open hostilities on earth, with the U.S. never recognizing the existence of the North Korean state and never backing off from its official policy that a North Korean government and nation must cease to exist.

So the question arises as to how North Korea has managed to survive after all these years? What is their secret in being able to do what no other nation has done that is not part of the official Western hegemony?

This is the question addressed by A.B Abrams in his most recent book. The answer, of course, is complex but includes North Korea’s own decision to acquire nuclear weapons and missiles to attack the American homeland. It’s also a question that hit the front-page headlines when President Donald Trump visited North Korea and engaged with its leader, Chairman Kim Jong Un, and became the first U.S. chief executive to say anything about North Korea other than insults.

Under the Biden administration, North Korea returned to the crosshairs, though with its support of Russia in Ukraine and the creation of a new multipolar world led by Russia and China, a page may have been turned, with matters still being far from settled. Thus the future of North Korea remains an open question, and North Korea is not backing down.

The following paragraphs consist of a brief synopsis of A.B. Abrams’ text, along with pertinent quotations. For the full impact, read the entire book. Your worldview may never be the same by the time you turn the final pages. You will also discern the implications of the latest news of North Korea’s assistance being provided to Russia in Ukraine.

“Introduction” 

At the end of a lengthy Introduction, A.B. Abrams summarizes:

“Where they were not properly deterred, America and the wider Western world would not hesitate to bring ruin and immeasurable suffering to populations that remained outside their control, which was a lesson learned at cost to the peoples of both North and South Korea during the Korean War, and subsequently strongly reinforced by Western militaries’ conduct over the following several decades.”

Chapter 1: “The Post-Cold War Years: A New Era of Conflict” 

During the Cold War, North Korea became the most urbanized and industrialized country in Asia. Dams being built were “engineering masterpieces.”

With the growth of the Western bloc, North Korea became increasingly isolated. After the fall of the Soviet Union in 1989-1991, North Korea found itself “in a very small minority of states outside of Western influence.”

Image: USAF aircraft of the 4th Fighter Wing (F-16, F-15C and F-15E) fly over Kuwaiti oil fires, set by the retreating Iraqi army during Operation Desert Storm in 1991. Almost the same as Image:USAF F-16A F-15C F-15E Desert Storm pic.jpg save for the size and tint (From the Public Domain)

Iraq/Desert Storm and the dismemberment of Yugoslavia showed North Korea the danger of a sudden Western assault. Demonization of North Korea began with an April 10, 1991, article by the U.S. Council on Foreign Relations entitled “North Korea: The Next Nuclear Nightmare,” with parallels being drawn between Iraq and North Korea. Regime change was in the air, including pre-emptive attacks.

North Korea had decided to develop nuclear weapons, starting by 1990. They saw Iraq facing the U.S. without nuclear weapons as its fatal mistake. North Korea withdrew from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and fired a large ballistic missile capable of hitting U.S. bases in Japan on May 29, 1993.

The U.S. moved to impose sanctions against North Korea along with planning a major attack with 100,000 troops. North Korea moved for full normalization of relations with the U.S., which the Clinton administration refused. Ex-president Jimmy Carter was then called in to negotiate, resulting in the October 21, 1994, “Agreed Framework.” North Korea agreed to give up nuclear weapons development in exchange for technical aid in power generation and movement toward normal state-to-state relations. 

Meanwhile, North Korea had lost the support of the former Soviet Union as a bulwark, while the U.S. foreign policy establishment was convinced that North Korea would soon collapse. In 1995-1998 the North Korean economy did come close to collapsing due to catastrophic flooding followed by drought. The U.S. claimed North Korea was deliberately starving its people. But North Korea recovered, with Chinese support replacing Russia’s. During this time, “North Korea has proven amazingly resilient,” with U.S. Neocons calling on the U.S. government to “tear down this tyranny.”

The U.S. failed to live up to the Agreed Framework by normalizing relations, and by the end of the Clinton administration the opportunity had been lost.

Chapter 2: “The George W. Bush Years: Deterring an Invasion and Becoming a Nuclear Weapons State” 

Within three years the Bush administration “would collapse the Agreed Framework and again bring the two countries to the brink of war.” Bush labeled North Korea a member of the “axis of evil,” along with Iran and Iraq. On September 17, 2002, the U.S. issued a new National Security Strategy “announcing the option of using nuclear weapons against rogue states thought to be developing weapons of mass destruction.”

Feeling the threat, North Korea resolved to become a nuclear weapons state.

The U.S. plan was to go to war against North Korea, followed by Iraq, Syria, Iran, and others. Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz said, “We want to end all challenges, no matter how indistinct they might be to American power.”  But it was the Pentagon that took North Korea off the list as #1 because of North Korea’s military strength and the estimate that the U.S. and South Korea would take 500,000 casualties in the first 90 days of war. So the U.S. decided to go after the “low-hanging fruit” in the Middle East instead.

Meanwhile, North Korea had heavily fortified itself against potential U.S. nuclear attack. “Almost all of North Korea’s critical industries are now located underground.” A ground U.S. assault was deemed impossible, while “winning the war from the air would not be viable.”

In 2003, North Korea announced its withdrawal from the Agreed Framework and reactivated its plutonium facility. By June 2003, North Korea had enough plutonium for 3-4 new warheads. After the fall of Baghdad, the U.S. began to prepare an attack on North Korea, but as Iraq became a quagmire of insurgencies, the U.S. bogged own. By the end of 2003, the Bush administration concluded that there was no good military solution, with a consensus that North Korea was winning the confrontation.

The U.S. now escalated existing financial and trade sanctions against North Korea, while in 2006 North Korea put into service its first intermediate range ballistic missile and on October 9, 2006, detonated its first nuclear warhead in an underground test.

Now the U.S. moved toward a more conciliatory posture via sanctions relief, while North Korea froze plutonium development. Meanwhile, its trade with China was booming as the Iraq war paralyzed U.S. action against such adversaries as Russia, China, Iran, Syria, and Libya.

Chapter 3: “The Barack Obama Years: A New Phase of the Conflict” 

Abrams writes that the Barack Obama administration which commenced in January 2009 “brought a new global cold war.” Stable ties with China were disrupted by Obama’s “Pivot to Asia.” This was the start of comprehensive war planning by the Western powers against a part of the world increasingly dominated by China. Bush-era improvements in relations with Syria and Libya were reversed and relations with Russia shattered by the 2014 Maidan coup in Ukraine. Relations were also destabilized with Pakistan, Yemen, and Turkey.

Obama said of East Asia: “America should write the rules. America should call the shots. Other countries should play by the rules America and our partners set and not the other way around.” Regarding North Korea, the Obama administration decided that “full and unilateral disarmament was a precondition for any talks.”

Behind Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, the U.S. moved to implement a new range of financial and trade sanctions. North Korea now detonated another nuclear bomb and accelerated testing of ballistic missiles. The U.S. predicted North Korean collapse due to the ailing health of Chairman Kim Jong Il.

In mid-2009 the U.S. used the Stuxnet Worm in a major cyberattack on North Korea’s nuclear program. There was also a joint Israel-U.S. cyberattack against North Korea and Iran. The attack against North Korea failed, as they had “near-unique resistance” to Western cyberattacks.

Chairman Kim Jong Il died and was succeeded by his son Kim Jong Un, who had been educated in Switzerland. Despite U.S. propaganda, North Korea remained stable, with major cultural, economic, and technological advances. North Korea escalated its nuclear testing, with the aim of becoming capable of ballistic missile launches.

Major U.S. military exercises in March 2013 caused North Korea to decide on developing an ICBM that could be aimed at the U.S. mainland. On March 13, North Korea announced it was nullifying the original Korean War Armistice Agreement and would now be engaging in “merciless retaliation” to any Western attack. On April 1, North Korea declared itself a “full-fledged nuclear weapons state.” North Korea’s reliance on indigenous resources was seen as making its weapons program virtually immune to sanctions.

In 2014, President Obama personally ordered the stepping up of cyber and electronic attacks on North Korea, but from 2014-2017, its missile program advanced tremendously, marking a major U.S. policy failure.

In 2014, North Korea announced development of a submarine-launched missile, another game-changer. When North Korea asked the Obama administration to abandon its hostilities and negotiate for peace, the U.S. refused. The U.S. Department of Defense now assessed that North Korea was capable of reaching the U.S. mainland with nuclear weapons. January 6, 2016, saw North Korea’s first test of an H-bomb-fission-type device.

President Obama now said the U.S. “could obviously destroy North Korea,” while a U.S. State Department official said that Chairman Kim would “immediately die” if they initiated a nuclear attack. But by the later stages of the Obama administration, the U.S. had concluded that North Korea was not “a backwards state anymore.”

Chapter 4: “The Obama Administration on the Offensive”

Toward the end of Obama’s term, his administration still wanted to launch an attack on North Korea’s nuclear facilities, while Obama himself wanted “to attack and eliminate the North Korea leadership.” The Council on Foreign Relations issued a paper advocating destruction of North Korea and its absorption by South Korea, also promising economic benefits to China if it remained neutral.

CFR’s preferred U.S. strategy for this era of world history was disclosed in a January 2017 article in Foreign Affairs by CFR President Richard N. Haass entitled “World Order 2.0.” Haass advocated moves “to amend the concept of self-determination on the part of an entity seeking a state of its own and replace it with the notion that statehood is something to be granted rather than asserted.” States accused of humanitarian abuses should have their statehood stripped through military intervention, [an extension of a standing U.S. doctrine that such “abuses” justified U.S.-enforced regime change]. The article had a photo of Chairman Kim Jong Un and other North Korean leaders. Haass’s article defined the outlook of the U.S. foreign policy establishment as President Donald Trump entered the White House.

Two factors had prevented Obama from ordering an attack on North Korea in 2016: 1) North Korea was more heavily armed and fortified than any immediate adversary since World War II; and 2) options to degrade its nuclear missile program with air strikes were non-existent due to dozens of its nuclear warheads being placed deep underground. Also, North Korea was “without parallel the toughest intelligence target in the world,” so any attack would be hit-or-miss.

Consequently, Obama’s doctrine was called, somewhat disdainfully, “Strategic Patience,” at a time when asymmetric warfare was on the ascendant. It was also a time when the U.S. was reluctant to send massive armies abroad as it had done in Afghanistan and Iraq, so was now utilizing state and non-state proxies, such as ISIS in the Middle East, along with emergent technologies like the internet as instruments of war.

Information warfare targets multiplied, including Hong Kong, Ukraine, Syria, and Iran. A NATO policy paper stated: “Information can be used to disorganize governance, organize anti-government protests, delude adversaries, influence public opinion, and reduce an opponents’ will to resist.” Google Ideas became one avenue of information warfare.

Information attacks against North Korea were part of the Department of Defense’s budget, with broadcasts of American soap operas an example of attempts to induce favorability to Western interests. An NGO with the goal of overthrowing the North Korean government was the North Korea Strategy Center, which invested heavily in smuggling flash drives across the border with such content as Wikipedia and programs such as Friends, Superbad, and Sex and the City. The New York-based Human Rights Foundation oversaw the dropping of 10,000 copies of the anti-North Korean film The Interview into North Korea via balloon. There were also suggestions among NGOs of dropping $1 bills infected with the COVID virus.

Meanwhile, ubiquitous atrocity stories appeared on YouTube, all fabricated, that were heavily promoted by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. (See A.B. Abrams, Atrocity Fabrication and Its Consequences: How Fake News Shapes World Order, Clarity Press: 2023.) A constant flow of fake newspaper articles “also reached entirely new levels in the Obama years.” These were “all closely coordinated with military and diplomatic efforts to isolate the country.” Under President Donald Trump, slander toward North Korea became even worse behind Stephen Miller, Senior Adviser to the President and White House Director of Speechwriting.

Chapter 5: “Fire and Fury: The Military Standoff that Ended an Era” 

Open warfare between the U.S. and North Korea has never been so close as it was during the last year of the Obama administration and the first two years of the Trump presidency. But by the end of this period, North Korea had won its battle for independence behind a nuclear deterrent the U.S. was unable to prevent.  

This period saw major advances in North Korea’s ballistic missile development, while its miniaturized H-bomb put it on course to flight test an ICBM capable of hitting the U.S. mainland. Economic sanctions had reached their limit, with no further way to pressure North Korea to back off its deterrent program.

The U.S. now turned to pressuring China to take a stand against North Korea. The Council on Foreign Relations raised the threat of a major war on China’s border. But China paid only lip service, while non-Western trading partners continued to deal with North Korea behind the scenes.

Obama told Trump that North Korea would be his “toughest foreign policy challenge.” But within six months, North Korea had gained intercontinental range nuclear delivery capability. Trump now expressed willingness to personally negotiate with Chairman Kim and even invite him to the White House. Trump had also pledged to pull troops out of Afghanistan and Syria. This showed that “as president, Trump quickly came into conflict with the foreign policy establishment.”

On July 4, 2017, North Korea conducted its first confirmed launch of an ICBM. This was the first time in history a medium or small state had gained a long-range nuclear deterrent. A U.S. general stated that this “changed the entire structure of the world.” North Korea would soon be able to launch up to 60 nuclear warheads.

Trump’s strategy on North Korea now became “tough talk.” Using the same words Truman spoke against Japan, he said: “North Korea best not make any more threats to the U.S. They will be met with fire and fury the world has never seen.” Chairman Kim chided back that the U.S. thought its mainland to be “an invulnerable Heavenly Kingdom,” even threatening a pre-emptive attack.

On September 19, 2017, Trump went before the UN General Assembly where he threatened “to totally destroy North Korea.” North Korea responded that its “ultimate goal is to establish the balance of power” with the U.S. Some U.S. advisers said they at least wanted to give North Korea “a bloody nose.”

The U.S. then assembled an unprecedented armada offshore from Korea with three carrier strike groups and disclosed they still had nuclear silos in South Korea. Navy SEALS were deployed capable of launching assassination missions. North Korea had instituted a missile testing moratorium which it now ended, saying Trump was “begging for nuclear war.”

Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov now said the U.S. was “playing with fire” and that Russia would “do its utmost” to prevent the U.S. from starting a war. The Chinese Global Times warned that China would intervene to support North Korea if the U.S. attacked, while China and Russia both staged military exercises in the region.

While President Trump insulted Chairman Kim as “Little Rocket Man,” and “Washington had left no clear path to negotiations,” the Trump administration now began to shift against a military attack. Even so, Senator Lindsey Graham lobbied for war as did top military brass. In January 2018, Foreign Affairs published an article entitled: “It’s Time to Bomb North Korea.” But by now, “U.S. intelligence believed that North Korea had developed the capability to deliver nuclear retaliation against much of the American mainland.”

Abrams makes clear that it was North Korea’s nuclear deterrent and determination to use it that prevented war. “Had North Korea failed to develop an ICBM capability when it did, the possibility of the U.S. initiating a war in Northeast Asia to the severe detriment of all regional states and populations would have been considerably greater.” This would have involved the loss of hundreds of thousands of lives, particularly in South Korea.

Chapter 6: “North Korea Wins: Coming to Terms with a New Status Quo”

The beginning of 2018 saw the end of a two-year standoff between North Korea and the U.S. Russian President Vladimir Putin said, “I believe Mr. Kim Jong Un has certainly won this round.” On January 1, 2018, Chairman Kim said, “The nuclear button is on my office desk all the time.” What was left, according to Abrams, was only “to mass-produce nuclear warheads and ballistic missiles.”

Having reached this point, North Korea now froze testing of all missiles. South Korea also attempted to de-fuse the situation, with the “Olympic Détente” coming next. The Trump administration could not admit its failure to stop North Korea from acquiring a nuclear deterrent. North Korea also released three U.S. citizens serving prison sentences.

On June 12, 2018, President Trump and Chairman Kim met in Singapore, “a major landmark in the softening of the American position.” Trump also thanked China’s Chairman Xi Jinping for his help. Trump wrote on Twitter, “There is no longer a nuclear threat from North Korea.”

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President Donald J. Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un sign a joint statement | June 12, 2018 (Official White House Photo by Joyce N. Boghosian)

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Claiming a win for his administration, Trump met with Kim a second time in Hanoi on February 27, 2019, but without a normalization agreement. North Korea had asked for a lifting of sanctions, while Trump followed the advice of National Security Advisor John Bolton in demanding that North Korea transfer its entire nuclear arsenal and all nuclear fuel to the U.S. and “declare all its chemical and biological inventories.” Talks collapsed, with Kim walking away. Secretary of State Pompeo demanded that North Korea completely denuclearize unilaterally, but Trump refused to approve any new punitive sanctions.

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Donald Trump and Kim Jong Un shake hands at the Hanoi Summit in Vietnam, February 27, 2019. Photo credit: White House

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North Korea now resumed its missile development and testing program, focusing on defeating U.S. missile defense systems. Trump said he was not concerned: “I am in no rush….I am very happy with the way it’s going.” On June 30, 2019, Trump met Kim for the 3rd time in the DMZ, the first president in history to enter North Korea. “Trump reportedly invited Chairman Kim to visit Washington, ‘when the time is right,’ and used conciliatory language unprecedented and entirely unheard of from an American president.”

The Atlantic called the meeting: “The day denuclearization died.” Still, North Korea was being seen by some as Trump’s only “major foreign policy or geopolitical success,” while John Bolton referred to Kim as “a dictator of a rat-shit little country.”

Détente ended with failure of October 2019 talks in Stockholm, where North Korea broke off the meeting, with the U.S. resuming offshore military exercises. Kim announced resumption of testing of strategic weapons, as North Korea “unveiled a new heavier class of ballistic missile submarine.”

Then came COVID in early 2020. North Korea closed its borders on January 22, 2020, with the New York Times applauding this as achieving what Trump could not: “choking the North’s economy.” But North Korea survived the lockdowns, shocking observers. “This tremendous demonstration of resilience to any possible future economic warfare efforts seriously undermined Western hopes for the future of the sanctions regime.”

After the election of Joe Biden on November 3, 2020, the U.S. began to press for disarmament talks, which North Korea rejected as another U.S. “delaying-time trick.” But the Biden administration was at an impasse as it faced growing criticism for not having a viable policy on North Korean arms control. On March 25, 2017, Foreign Affairs wrote: “It is time for a realistic bargain with North Korea,” though Biden himself spoke of total denuclearization.

Meanwhile, North Korea continued to advance with rail-based missiles, missiles to elude defensive systems, hypersonic glide missiles, highly maneuverable cruise missiles, and improved air defense systems. On November 18, 2022, North Korea resumed ICBM testing. North Korea was now poised to have one of the most formidable nuclear deterrents in the world. North Korea also made major advances in conventional weaponry and defense. In response, the U.S. now “announced the full resumption of large-scale military exercises.”

Abrams summarizes: “The Biden administration’s tenure in many respects marked a return to the Cold War era.” But by the 2020s, North Korea “was far less of an outlier in the world order,” while the U.S. position was “increasingly unfavorable.”

Chapter 7: “The Second Cold War: A New Era for North Korea”

The North Korean economy was far ahead of South Korea in the 1950s and 60s, but was surpassed by the 80s as the Soviet Union stagnated. In the 1990s and early 2000s, North Korea came under intensive siege from the West. But under Obama, the global order began to fracture, leaving North Korea with more potential partners. Many countries looked at North Korea favorably as it had “remained a fortress unlike any other.”

The tremendous economic growth of China in the 21st century has benefited North Korea greatly. China’s trade policies have significantly undercut Western economic and trade sanctions. Chinese Chairman Xi Jinping visited North Korea in 2019. Tourism and technology transfer from China have increased. North Korea opened its channels to Chinese media and culture to offset U.S. and South Korean fare. North Korea has also moved closer to China militarily.

Russia, on the other hand, collapsed in the 1990s and was a much weaker strategic partner than had been the Soviet Union. But North Korea “proved to be among Russia’s most reliable supporters in its conflict with NATO and Ukraine from 2022” and began to send workers to Donetsk and Lugansk by 2024.

On September 5, 2022, U.S. intelligence revealed that Russia was purchasing “millions of North Korean artillery shells and rockets” for use in Ukraine. Russian defense minister Sergei Shoigu visited North Korea in July 2023. Later in September, Chairman Kim visited Russia’s Far East to review military aircraft production facilities with an eye to acquisition. Another area of interest was space satellite technology.

Russia also intensified its use of North Korean ballistic missiles against Ukrainian targets and began to acquire North Korean combat vehicles to use against U.S.-supplied Javelins.  

On June 18-19, 2024, Russian President Vladimir Putin paid his first visit to North Korea in 24 years. The two countries then signed a “comprehensive strategic partnership” treaty providing for “military and other assistance” in time of war. North Korea now recognized Russia as “unprecedently vital to its security interests.” Relations also continued to open between North Korea and other states targeted by the U.S., including Syria and Iran.

North Korea also believed that the transition from a unipolar to a multipolar world would bring significant benefits. Chairman Kim called North Korea “a powerful independent country.” An example of this transition is the growth of national payment systems away from the U.S. dollar as the world’s trading currency.

Chapter 8: “Future Trajectories in the U.S.-DPRK Conflict” 

2016-2024 also saw a vast modernization of North Korea’s conventional warfare capabilities, showing its attention to the military concept of the “escalation ladder.” North Korea realized that if it relied too heavily on its nuclear deterrent, lower-level conventional attacks by the U.S. might come into play. Thus “Pyongyang’s adversaries could continue to contemplate provocations such as a ‘bloody nose’ strike.” Escalation management has been used effectively elsewhere in the world, as with Hezbollah vs. Israel and by Russia in Ukraine.  

Thus North Korea focused on creating a multi-tiered arsenal. It unveiled its first tactical nuclear warhead on March 24, 2023. Another key element was development of drones. The West now judged that North Korea was capable of knocking out U.S. bases on Guam, Hawaii, Okinawa, and the U.S. 7th Fleet in Japan.

By 2020, the U.S. had lost its ability to fight a near-peer adversary as it would have to against North Korea, due to its focus on fighting only insurgencies, guerrillas, and terrorists for a generation. The U.S. was poorly equipped “to engage in conventional war against major militaries,” while both China and North Korea had built their militaries specifically against the U.S. in case of an East Asian war. By 2020, the U.S. was “a much weakened superpower in a world where Western dominance was facing challenges unprecedented in centuries.”

North Korea represented “one of the most direct contradictions to the idea of a new world order centered on the economic and military power of the Western world and the global triumph of Western values.” It was viewed by the West as the “ultimate outlier,” while retaining “the military capacity to devastate cities across the Western world with thermonuclear strikes…seemingly indefinitely.”

North Korea also professed having learned the lessons from Iraq and Libya that giving up its strength “to make the West happy” was a fatal mistake. So North Korea remains “one of the few places in the world where Western states had never imposed their rule.” And the U.S. retains its central policy of advocating for North Korea’s “total destruction.” Thus “the Western world is expected to sustain longer-term efforts to gradually weaken the country with the aim of achieving a…final collapse.” Whether that policy will ever succeed is the question.

Conclusion

The preceding synopsis is only the tip of the iceberg. A.B Abrams’ book is a highly effective case study of a world on the more-or-less constant brink of nuclear war.

During the 71 years between the end of the Korean War and today, there were only two instances of a U.S. presidential administration moving toward a rapprochement with North Korea.

The first was the Clinton administration’s “Agreed Framework” negotiated by former President Jimmy Carter, and the second was when President Donald Trump reached out personally to Korean Chairman Kim Jung Un. Trump can be credited for taking steps for peace in the face of the hostility of the entire foreign policy establishment of the U.S. and its Western allies.

Otherwise, this is the story of a determined and resilient small nation-state brooking the hostility of the U.S. superpower to chart an independent course in a world dominated by Western interests that is now experiencing challenges from a worldwide revolt. A multipolar world is emerging that the U.S. has tried to prevent since the start of World War II and that the Anglo-American-Zionist imperial sphere has tried to smother for over a century.

Despite the demonization of North Korea by the Western media, its motivated and gifted population has stood by the country’s leadership in making its stand. In so doing, the nation has had the benefit of a compact, homogeneous population, ideologically committed, well-educated, and technologically-oriented that is also able to resist the blandishments of Western corruption such as internet propaganda and pornography. To reach this point, of course, has required near-total military mobilization.

These characteristics have also enabled North Korea to function in an increasingly complex military environment where cyberwarfare, electronic warfare, information warfare, and escalation management play a larger role than ever before. On top of everything else are its airtight security systems.

Finally, in light of Abrams’ book, recent developments between North Korea and Russia can also be understood. Russian President Vladimir Putin has asked the State Duma to ratify the new strategic partnership with North Korea signed during Putin’s visit in June that pledged each nation to assist the other in case of foreign aggression. Notably, the treaty makes a stand against Western sanctions, which opens the Russian-Korean border to free movement of all persons and commodities. Along with trade between North Korea and China, the Western sanctions regime has been defeated. Parallel with this, North Korea has taken new measures to seal and fortify its border with South Korea, thus preventing any ground attack from that direction should rising tensions in East Asia lead to open warfare.  

One could indeed argue that 21st century North Korea has been one source of stability around which the multipolar world in the making has crystallized. A.B. Abrams’ book, Surviving the Unipolar Era: North Korea’s 35-Year Standoff with the United States, shows how this has come to pass and thus should be high on the must-read list for all students of geopolitics and the history of our era.

Disclosure and Disclaimer: Clarity Press is the publisher of my own book, Our Country, Then and Now. The book here under review, Surviving the Unipolar Era: North Korea’s 35-Year Standoff with the United States by A.B. Abrams, is the third book published by Clarity Press that I have reviewed. I have received no consideration for these reviews nor any editorial suggestions nor requirements. Nor have I utilized any other than public open sources.

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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.

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 at https://montanarcc.substack.com/publish/posts and his American Geopolitical Institute articles at https://www.vtforeignpolicy.com/category/agi/.

“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 download the Kober Press edition of The Book on the Living God here.


“단극시대 생존: 북한과 미국의 35년 해적”: AB 에이브람스의 새 책 리뷰

by Richard C. Cook

짧은 퀴즈:

1. 미국은 어떤 나라와 거의 75년간 전쟁을 벌였나요?

2. 서양 강대국에 식민지화된 적이 없는 나라는 어디인가요?

3. 어느 나라가 미국의 압력에 굴복하여 자국의 주권의 어떤 측면이라도 신세계질서에 양보한 적이 없습니까?

4. 1990년대에 후원국이었던 소련의 붕괴와 그에 따른 자연재해(아마도 인재)로 인해 인구가 기근 직전까지 몰린 상황에서 살아남은 나라는 어디입니까?

5. 클린턴 행정부와 평화 협상을 했지만 조지 W. 부시 대통령이 “악의 축”으로 선언한 나라는 어디입니까?

6. 2002년 미국 정권 교체 대상국 명단에서 이라크, 리비아, 소말리아, 예멘, 시리아, 이란을 제치고 1위를 차지한 나라는 어디였습니까?

7. 미국은 어떤 나라를 “까기 힘든 난제”라고 불렀고, 미국이 핵 억지력을 개발하기 위해 자체 자원을 사용한 후 공격에서 물러나도록 강요했습니까?

8. 이란, 하마스, 헤즈볼라에게 영감을 주었을 수 있는 대규모 지하 요새 단지를 만든 나라는 어디입니까?

9. 미국 본토에 수소폭탄을 투하할 수 있는 핵 억지력을 보유한 나라는 어디입니까?

개요

분명히 답은 북한입니다. 대부분의 서양 독자가 전혀 모르는 세계의 일부입니다. 그들이 알고 있다고 생각하는 것은 종종 머리를 드는 모든 미국의 “적”에 대한 잔혹한 이야기를 일상적으로 조작하는 주류 미디어의 거짓말에 근거합니다.

클라리티 프레스에서 한국 전문가 AB 에이브럼스가 쓴 새로운 책을 출간했습니다. 이 책은 스릴러처럼 읽히지만, 오늘날의 치명적으로 위험한 국제 환경에서 작고 산악 지대를 생존의 요새로 바꾼 회복력 있는 한 나라의 서사시에 대해 알아야 할 많은 내용을 담고 있습니다.

한국 갈등의 기원은 2차 세계 대전이 끝난 후 형성된 공산주의와 서방 진영 간의 대치에 있습니다. 한반도는 1905년부터 일본의 지배를 받았지만, 전쟁 후반에 원주민 반란이 권력을 잡기 시작했습니다. 미국은 반란이 한국 전체를 점령하는 것을 막기 위해 움직였습니다.

1945년 8월 미국은 38도선을 따라 소련과 미국의 신탁통치 지역으로 한국을 일시적으로 분할하자고 제안했습니다 . 인민위원회를 구성한 북측의 한국인들은 상당한 자율권을 가지고 운영되었습니다. 남측의 한국인들은 엄격한 미국의 통제 하에 일하면서 1948년 8월 15일에 대한민국을 전체 반도의 통치자로 선언했습니다.

이제 내전이 발발했고, 1948년 9월 북측 지도자들은 조선민주주의인민공화국(DPRK)을 선언했습니다. 1950년, 본격적인 전쟁이 시작되었고, 72시간 만에 남군은 패배했습니다. 이제 미군이 개입했고 한국전쟁이 시작되었습니다.

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한정되지 않은

1950년 중반 북한군이 침공한 후 수십만 명의 남한 사람들이 남쪽으로 피난을 떠났습니다. (퍼블릭 도메인에서)

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폭력은 끔찍했고, 민간인이 대량으로 사망했습니다. 미국의 폭격으로 남북한 주민 100만 명이 사망했고 600만 명이 집을 잃었습니다. 미국이 이끄는 육군은 북쪽을 침공했지만 중국의 개입으로 밀려났습니다. 최종 휴전은 적대 행위가 시작된 지점인 38선에서 이루어 졌습니다 .

미국 공군은 제2차 세계대전 당시 일본에 대한 공격에 비하면 규모가 훨씬 큰 무차별 폭격을 감행했습니다. 미국은 32,557톤의 네이팜탄을 투하했습니다. 압록강 댐 폭격으로 25만 톤의 쌀이 파괴되었고 홍수와 기근이 발생했습니다. 전체적으로 300만에서 400만 명의 북한 주민이 전쟁에서 사망했는데, 많은 관찰자들은 이 숫자를 집단 학살이라고 선언했습니다.

전쟁 중에 미국 사령관 더글러스 맥아더는 26개의 한국과 중국 목표물에 대한 핵 공격을 권고했습니다. 이는 소련이 미국 동아시아 기지에 사용할 수 있는 핵 공격 능력을 보유하고 있었기 때문에 억제되었습니다. 한국 전쟁은 또한 중국이 미국에 대한 핵 억제력이 필요하다고 믿게 만들었습니다.

1953년 휴전 협정이 존재했음에도 불구하고 미국과 북한 사이 또는 남북한 사이에 평화 조약이 없었고, 이로 인해 전쟁 상태가 오늘날까지 존재하게 되었습니다. 이는 지구상에서 가장 오래된 공개적 적대 행위 조건으로, 미국은 북한 국가의 존재를 인정하지 않았고 북한 정부와 국가가 존재하지 않아야 한다는 공식 정책에서 결코 물러서지 않았습니다.

그래서 북한이 이렇게 오랜 세월을 견뎌낸 이유가 무엇인지 의문이 생깁니다. 공식적인 서방 패권에 속하지 않는, 다른 어떤 나라도 하지 못한 일을 할 수 있는 비결은 무엇일까요?

이것은 AB Abrams가 그의 가장 최근의 책에서 다룬 질문입니다. 물론 답은 복잡하지만 북한이 미국 본토를 공격하기 위해 핵무기와 미사일을 획득하기로 한 결정이 포함됩니다. 또한 도널드 트럼프 대통령이 북한을 방문하여 지도자인 김정은 위원장과 대화하고 북한에 대해 모욕 외에 아무 말도 하지 않은 최초의 미국 최고 경영자가 되었을 때 1면 헤드라인을 장식한 질문이기도 합니다.

바이든 행정부 하에서 북한은 다시 조준선으로 돌아갔지만, 우크라이나에서 러시아를 지원하고 러시아와 중국이 이끄는 새로운 다극 세계를 만들면서 한 페이지가 바뀌었을 수 있으며, 문제는 여전히 해결되지 않았습니다. 따라서 북한의 미래는 여전히 미지수이며, 북한은 물러서지 않고 있습니다.

다음 문단은 AB Abrams의 텍스트에 대한 간략한 요약과 관련 인용문으로 구성되어 있습니다. 전체적인 영향을 얻으려면 책 전체를 읽으세요. 마지막 페이지를 넘길 때까지 여러분의 세계관은 결코 예전과 같지 않을 수도 있습니다. 또한 우크라이나에서 북한이 러시아에 지원을 제공한다는 최신 뉴스의 의미를 분별하게 될 것입니다.

“소개”

긴 서론의 마지막에서 AB Abrams는 다음과 같이 요약합니다.

“적절하게 억제되지 않으면 미국과 서방 세계는 통제 밖에 있는 인구에게 망신을 주고 헤아릴 수 없는 고통을 주는 것을 주저하지 않을 것입니다. 이는 한국 전쟁 동안 북한과 남한의 사람들이 비용을 들여 얻은 교훈이었고, 이후 수십 년 동안 서방 군대의 행동으로 강력하게 강화되었습니다.”

제1장: “냉전 이후 시대: 갈등의 새로운 시대”

냉전 동안 북한은 아시아에서 가장 도시화되고 산업화된 나라가 되었습니다. 건설 중인 댐은 “엔지니어링 걸작”이었습니다.

서방 진영의 성장으로 북한은 점점 고립되었습니다. 1989-1991년 소련 붕괴 이후 북한은 “서방의 영향력 밖에 있는 아주 소수의 국가”에 속하게 되었습니다.

이미지: 4번째 전투 비행단(F-16, F-15C 및 F-15E)의 USAF 항공기가 1991년 사막의 폭풍 작전 중 후퇴하는 이라크 군대가 일으킨 쿠웨이트의 석유 화재 위를 날고 있습니다. 크기와 색조를 제외하고는 Image:USAF F-16A F-15C F-15E Desert Storm pic.jpg와 거의 동일합니다(퍼블릭 도메인에서 가져옴)

이라크/사막의 폭풍과 유고슬라비아의 해체는 북한에 서방의 갑작스러운 공격의 위험을 보여주었습니다. 북한에 대한 악마화는 1991년 4월 10일 미국 외교 관계 위원회가 “북한: 다음 핵 악몽”이라는 제목으로 기사를 쓰면서 시작되었으며, 이라크와 북한 사이에 유사점이 그려졌습니다. 선제 공격을 포함한 정권 교체가 공중에 떠돌았습니다.

북한은 1990년부터 핵무기를 개발하기로 결정했습니다. 그들은 이라크가 핵무기 없이 미국에 맞서는 것을 치명적인 실수로 보았습니다. 북한은 핵확산금지조약을 탈퇴하고 1993년 5월 29일 일본에 있는 미군 기지를 타격할 수 있는 대형 탄도 미사일을 발사했습니다.

미국은 10만 명의 병력을 투입해 대규모 공격을 계획하는 것과 함께 북한에 제재를 가하기로 했습니다. 북한은 미국과의 관계 정상화를 요구했지만 클린턴 행정부는 거부했습니다. 그러자 지미 카터 전 대통령이 협상에 참여했고, 1994년 10월 21일 “합의된 틀”이 성립했습니다. 북한은 핵무기 개발을 포기하는 대가로 발전 기술 지원과 국가 간 정상 관계로의 전환을 약속했습니다.

한편, 북한은 방벽 역할을 하는 구소련의 지원을 잃었고, 미국의 외교 정책 기관은 북한이 곧 붕괴될 것이라고 확신했습니다. 1995-1998년 북한 경제는 엄청난 홍수와 가뭄으로 인해 붕괴 직전까지 갔습니다. 미국은 북한이 고의로 국민을 굶기고 있다고 주장했습니다. 하지만 북한은 회복되었고, 중국의 지원이 러시아의 지원을 대체했습니다. 이 기간 동안 “북한은 놀라울 정도로 회복력이 강하다는 것이 증명되었고”, 미국의 네오콘들은 미국 정부에 “이 폭정을 무너뜨릴 것”을 촉구했습니다.

미국은 관계 정상화를 통해 합의된 틀을 이행하는 데 실패했고, 클린턴 행정부 말기에는 그 기회가 사라졌습니다.

2장: “조지 W. 부시 시대: 침략 억제와 핵무기 국가 되기”

3년 안에 부시 행정부는 “합의된 틀을 무너뜨리고 두 나라를 다시 전쟁 직전까지 몰고 갈 것”이라고 했습니다. 부시는 북한을 이란과 이라크와 함께 “악의 축”의 일원으로 규정했습니다. 2002년 9월 17일, 미국은 “대량 살상 무기를 개발하고 있는 것으로 생각되는 불량 국가에 핵무기를 사용할 수 있는 옵션을 발표하는” 새로운 국가 안보 전략을 발표했습니다.

북한은 위협을 느껴 핵무기 보유국이 되기로 결심했습니다.

미국의 계획은 북한과 전쟁을 치르고, 그 다음에는 이라크, 시리아, 이란, 그리고 다른 나라들과 전쟁을 치르는 것이었습니다. 폴 울포위츠 국방부 부장관은 “미국의 힘에 아무리 모호하더라도 모든 도전을 끝내고 싶습니다.”라고 말했습니다. 하지만 북한의 군사력과 미국과 한국이 전쟁의 첫 90일 동안 50만 명의 사상자를 낼 것이라는 추정 때문에 북한을 1위 목록에서 제외한 것은 펜타곤이었습니다. 그래서 미국은 대신 중동에서 “손쉽게 따먹을 수 있는 과일”을 노리기로 결정했습니다.

한편, 북한은 잠재적인 미국의 핵 공격에 대비해 강력하게 요새화했다. “북한의 거의 모든 중요 산업은 이제 지하에 위치해 있습니다.” 미국의 지상 공격은 불가능하다고 여겨졌고, “공중에서 전쟁을 이기는 것은 실행 불가능할 것입니다.”

2003년 북한은 합의된 틀에서 탈퇴하고 플루토늄 시설을 재가동한다고 발표했습니다. 2003년 6월까지 북한은 3~4개의 새로운 탄두를 위한 플루토늄을 충분히 확보했습니다. 바그다드 함락 후 미국은 북한에 대한 공격을 준비하기 시작했지만 이라크가 반란의 늪이 되자 미국은 스스로를 곤경에 빠뜨렸습니다. 2003년 말까지 부시 행정부는 좋은 군사적 해결책이 없다는 결론을 내렸고 북한이 대결에서 승리하고 있다는 데 의견이 일치했습니다.

미국은 이제 북한에 대한 기존의 금융 및 무역 제재를 강화했고, 북한은 2006년에 최초의 중거리 탄도 미사일을 실전 배치했고, 2006년 10월 9일에는 지하 실험에서 최초의 핵탄두를 폭발시켰습니다.

이제 미국은 제재 완화를 통해 보다 화해적인 자세로 움직였고, 북한은 플루토늄 개발을 동결했습니다. 한편, 이라크 전쟁으로 인해 러시아, 중국, 이란, 시리아, 리비아와 같은 적대국에 대한 미국의 행동이 마비되면서 중국과의 무역이 급증했습니다.

3장: “버락 오바마 시대: 갈등의 새로운 국면”

에이브럼스는 2009년 1월에 출범한 버락 오바마 행정부가 “새로운 세계 냉전을 가져왔다”고 썼다. 중국과의 안정적인 관계는 오바마의 “아시아로의 전환”으로 인해 깨졌다. 이는 서방 강대국이 점점 중국이 지배하는 세계의 일부에 대한 포괄적인 전쟁 계획을 시작한 것이었다. 부시 시대 시리아와 리비아와의 관계 개선은 역전되었고, 러시아와의 관계는 2014년 우크라이나의 마이단 쿠데타로 인해 산산이 조각났다. 파키스탄, 예멘, 터키와의 관계도 불안정해졌다.

오바마는 동아시아에 대해 “미국이 규칙을 작성해야 합니다. 미국이 주도해야 합니다. 다른 나라들은 미국과 우리의 파트너들이 정한 규칙에 따라야지 그 반대가 되어서는 안 됩니다.”라고 말했습니다. 북한과 관련하여 오바마 행정부는 “완전하고 일방적인 군축이 모든 회담의 전제 조건”이라고 결정했습니다.

힐러리 클린턴 국무장관의 뒤를 이어 미국은 새로운 범위의 금융 및 무역 제재를 시행하기 시작했습니다. 북한은 이제 또 다른 핵폭탄을 터뜨리고 탄도 미사일 시험을 가속화했습니다. 미국은 김정일 위원장의 건강 악화로 인해 북한이 붕괴될 것이라고 예측했습니다.

2009년 중반 미국은 Stuxnet Worm을 사용하여 북한의 핵 프로그램에 대한 대규모 사이버 공격을 감행했습니다. 또한 이스라엘과 미국이 북한과 이란을 상대로 공동으로 사이버 공격을 감행했습니다. 북한에 대한 공격은 실패했는데, 그 이유는 북한이 서방의 사이버 공격에 “거의 독특한 저항”을 했기 때문입니다.

김정일 위원장이 사망하고, 스위스에서 교육을 받은 그의 아들 김정은이 왕위를 계승했습니다. 미국의 선전에도 불구하고 북한은 안정을 유지했고, 주요 문화, 경제, 기술의 발전이 있었습니다. 북한은 탄도 미사일 발사 능력을 갖추기 위해 핵 실험을 확대했습니다.

2013년 3월의 주요 미국 군사 훈련으로 인해 북한은 미국 본토를 겨냥할 수 있는 ICBM을 개발하기로 결정했습니다. 3월 13일 북한은 원래 한국전쟁 휴전 협정을 무효화하고 이제 서방의 공격에 대해 “무자비한 보복”을 할 것이라고 발표했습니다. 4월 1일 북한은 자신을 “본격적인 핵무기 국가”라고 선언했습니다. 북한이 토착 자원에 의존하는 것은 무기 프로그램이 제재에 사실상 면역이 되는 것으로 여겨졌습니다.

2014년 오바마 대통령은 북한에 대한 사이버 및 전자 공격을 강화하라고 직접 명령했지만 2014년부터 2017년까지 북한의 미사일 프로그램이 엄청나게 진전되어 미국의 주요 정책 실패로 나타났습니다.

2014년 북한은 잠수함 발사 미사일 개발을 발표했는데, 이는 또 다른 게임 체인저였습니다. 북한이 오바마 행정부에 적대 행위를 포기하고 평화 협상을 요청했을 때 미국은 거부했습니다. 미국 국방부는 이제 북한이 핵무기로 미국 본토에 도달할 수 있다고 평가했습니다. 2016년 1월 6일 북한은 수소폭탄 핵분열형 장치를 처음으로 시험했습니다.

오바마 대통령은 이제 미국이 “분명히 북한을 파괴할 수 있다”고 말했고, 미국 국무부 관리는 김 위원장이 핵 공격을 시작하면 “즉시 죽을 것”이라고 말했다. 하지만 오바마 행정부 후반에 미국은 북한이 “더 이상 후진 국가”가 아니라는 결론을 내렸다.

4장: “공세에 나선 오바마 행정부”

오바마의 임기가 끝나갈 무렵, 그의 행정부는 여전히 북한의 핵 시설에 대한 공격을 시작하고 싶어했고, 오바마 자신은 “북한의 지도부를 공격하고 제거하고 싶어했습니다.” 외교관계위원회는 북한의 파괴와 남한에 의한 흡수를 옹호하는 논문을 발표했으며, 중국이 중립을 유지하면 경제적 이익을 얻을 것이라고 약속했습니다.

CFR이 선호하는 이 세계사 시대에 대한 미국의 전략은 CFR 회장인 Richard N. Haass가 Foreign Affairs 에 기고한 2017년 1월 기사 “세계 질서 2.0″에서 공개되었습니다. Haass는 “자체 국가를 추구하는 주체의 자결 개념을 수정하고 국가 지위는 주장하기보다는 부여해야 할 것이라는 개념으로 대체”하는 움직임을 옹호했습니다. 인도적 학대 혐의를 받은 국가는 군사 개입을 통해 국가 지위를 박탈해야 합니다. [이러한 “학대”가 미국이 강제하는 정권 교체를 정당화한다는 기존 미국 교리의 연장]. 이 기사에는 김정은 위원장과 다른 북한 지도자들의 사진이 실렸습니다. Haass의 기사는 도널드 트럼프 대통령이 백악관에 입성하면서 미국 외교 정책 기관의 전망을 정의했습니다.

오바마가 2016년에 북한에 대한 공격을 명령하지 못하게 막은 두 가지 요인이 있었습니다. 1) 북한은 2차 세계 대전 이후 가장 직접적인 적보다 더 무장하고 요새화되어 있었습니다. 2) 수십 개의 핵탄두가 지하 깊숙이 배치되어 있어 공습으로 핵 미사일 프로그램을 약화시킬 수 있는 옵션이 존재하지 않았습니다. 또한 북한은 “비교할 수 없는 세계에서 가장 강력한 정보 타깃”이었기 때문에 어떤 공격도 성공하거나 실패할 수밖에 없었습니다.

결과적으로 오바마의 독트린은 비대칭 전쟁이 우세하던 시기에 다소 경멸조로 “전략적 인내”라고 불렸습니다. 또한 미국이 아프가니스탄과 이라크에서 그랬던 것처럼 해외에 대규모 군대를 파견하는 것을 꺼려했던 시기였고, 이제는 중동의 ISIS와 같은 국가 및 비국가적 대리인과 인터넷과 같은 신흥 기술을 전쟁 도구로 활용하고 있었습니다.

홍콩, 우크라이나, 시리아, 이란을 포함한 정보전 목표가 늘어났습니다. NATO 정책 문서는 “정보는 통치를 무질서하게 만들고, 반정부 시위를 조직하고, 적대자를 속이고, 여론에 영향을 미치고, 적대자의 저항 의지를 약화시키는 데 사용될 수 있습니다.”라고 명시했습니다. Google Ideas는 정보전의 한 경로가 되었습니다.

북한에 대한 정보 공격은 국방부 예산의 일부였으며, 미국의 멜로드라마 방송은 서방의 이익에 호의를 유도하려는 시도의 한 예였다. 북한 정부를 전복하는 것을 목표로 한 NGO는 북한 전략 센터로, 위키피디아 와 프렌즈, 슈퍼배드, 섹스 앤 더 시티 와 같은 프로그램이 담긴 플래시 드라이브를 국경 너머로 밀수하는 데 막대한 투자를 했다. 뉴욕에 있는 인권 재단은 반북한 영화 인터뷰 10,000부를 풍선 을 통해 북한에 투하하는 것을 감독했다. NGO들 사이에서는 코로나 바이러스에 감염된 1달러 지폐를 투하하자는 제안도 있었다.

한편, 유튜브에는 힐러리 클린턴 국무장관이 대대적으로 홍보한, 모두 조작된, 널리 퍼진 잔혹 행위에 대한 이야기가 등장했습니다. (AB 에이브럼스, Atrocity Fabrication and Its Consequences: How Fake News Shapes World Order, Clarity Press: 2023 참조) 끊임없이 쏟아지는 가짜 신문 기사는 “오바마 시대에 완전히 새로운 수준에 도달했습니다.” 이러한 기사는 “모두 국가를 고립시키려는 군사 및 외교적 노력과 긴밀히 조율되었습니다.” 도널드 트럼프 대통령 하에서 북한에 대한 중상모략은 대통령 수석 고문이자 백악관 연설문 작성 책임자인 스티븐 밀러의 뒤를 이어 더욱 심해졌습니다.

5장: “불과 분노: 한 시대를 끝낸 군사적 대치”

미국과 북한 간의 공개적인 전쟁은 오바마 행정부의 마지막 해와 트럼프 대통령의 첫 2년 동안만큼 가까이 있었던 적이 없었습니다. 하지만 이 기간이 끝날 무렵, 북한은 미국이 막을 수 없었던 핵 억제력 뒤에서 독립을 위한 전투에서 승리했습니다.

이 기간 동안 북한의 탄도 미사일 개발은 큰 진전을 이루었고, 소형화된 수소폭탄은 미국 본토를 타격할 수 있는 ICBM의 비행 시험을 진행했습니다. 경제 제재는 한계에 도달했고, 북한이 억제 프로그램을 철회하도록 압력을 가할 더 이상의 방법은 없었습니다.

미국은 이제 중국에 압력을 가해 북한에 맞서게 했습니다. 외교관계위원회는 중국 국경에서 대규모 전쟁이 일어날 수 있다는 위협을 제기했습니다. 하지만 중국은 그저 입으로만 말하는 반면, 비서방 무역국들은 북한과 뒷전에서 거래를 계속했습니다.

오바마는 트럼프에게 북한이 “가장 힘든 외교 정책 도전”이 될 것이라고 말했습니다. 하지만 6개월 만에 북한은 대륙간 핵 운반 능력을 확보했습니다. 트럼프는 이제 김 위원장과 개인적으로 협상하고 백악관에 초대할 의향을 표명했습니다. 트럼프는 또한 아프가니스탄과 시리아에서 군대를 철수하겠다고 약속했습니다. 이는 “대통령으로서 트럼프가 외교 정책 수립자들과 빠르게 갈등을 빚었다”는 것을 보여줍니다.

2017년 7월 4일, 북한은 ICBM의 첫 번째 확인 발사를 실시했습니다. 이는 역사상 중소 국가가 장거리 핵 억제력을 획득한 첫 번째 사례였습니다. 한 미국 장군은 이것이 “세계의 전체 구조를 바꾸었다”고 말했습니다. 북한은 곧 최대 60개의 핵탄두를 발사할 수 있을 것입니다.

트럼프의 북한에 대한 전략은 이제 “강경한 말”이 되었다. 트루먼이 일본에 대해 한 것과 같은 말을 사용하여 그는 “북한은 미국에 더 이상 위협을 가하지 않는 것이 좋다. 그들은 세계가 본 적 없는 불과 분노에 직면할 것이다”라고 말했다. 김 위원장은 미국이 본토를 “무적의 천국”이라고 생각한다고 반박하며 선제 공격을 위협하기도 했다.

2017년 9월 19일, 트럼프는 유엔 총회에 나가 “북한을 완전히 파괴하겠다”고 위협했습니다. 북한은 “궁극적인 목표는 미국과의 힘의 균형을 확립하는 것”이라고 대응했습니다. 일부 미국 고문은 최소한 북한에 “코피를 흘리게” 하고 싶다고 말했습니다.

미국은 한국에서 3개의 항공모함 타격대를 거느린 전례 없는 함대를 해안에서 편성했고, 한국에 여전히 핵 저장고가 있다고 밝혔다. 해군 특수부대가 암살 임무를 수행할 수 있도록 배치되었다. 북한은 미사일 시험 중단을 제정했고, 트럼프가 “핵전쟁을 간청하고 있다”며 중단했다.

러시아 외무장관 라브로프는 이제 미국이 “불장난”을 하고 있으며 러시아가 미국이 전쟁을 시작하는 것을 막기 위해 “최선을 다할 것”이라고 말했습니다. 중국 글로벌 타임스는 미국이 공격하면 중국이 북한을 지원하기 위해 개입할 것이라고 경고했고, 중국과 러시아는 모두 이 지역에서 군사 훈련을 실시했습니다.

트럼프 대통령이 김 위원장을 “작은 로켓맨”이라고 모욕하고 “워싱턴은 협상으로 가는 명확한 길을 남기지 않았다”고 비난하는 동안, 트럼프 행정부는 이제 군사적 공격에 반대하는 입장을 취하기 시작했습니다. 그럼에도 불구하고, 린지 그레이엄 상원의원은 최고 군 간부들과 마찬가지로 전쟁을 위해 로비 활동을 했습니다. 2018년 1월, 포린 어페어스는 “북한을 폭격할 때가 됐다”는 제목의 기사를 게재했습니다. 하지만 지금까지 “미국 정보부는 북한이 미국 본토 대부분에 핵 보복을 가할 수 있는 능력을 개발했다고 믿었습니다.”

에이브럼스는 북한의 핵 억제력과 그것을 사용하려는 의지가 전쟁을 막았다고 분명히 밝혔습니다. “북한이 ICBM 능력을 개발하지 못했을 때, 미국이 동북아시아에서 전쟁을 일으켜 모든 지역 국가와 인구에 심각한 피해를 입힐 가능성이 상당히 커졌을 것입니다.” 이는 수십만 명의 목숨을 앗아갔을 것이며, 특히 한국에서 그랬을 것입니다.

6장: “북한의 승리: 새로운 현상유지 수용 ”

2018년 초, 북한과 미국 간의 2년간의 대치가 끝났습니다. 러시아 대통령 블라디미르 푸틴은 “김정은 씨가 이번 라운드에서 확실히 승리했다고 믿습니다.”라고 말했습니다. 2018년 1월 1일, 김 위원장은 “핵 단추는 항상 제 사무실 책상 위에 있습니다.”라고 말했습니다. 에이브럼스에 따르면, 남은 것은 “핵탄두와 탄도 미사일을 대량 생산하는 것”뿐이었습니다.

이 지경에 이르자 북한은 이제 모든 미사일 시험을 동결했습니다. 한국도 상황을 해소하려고 시도했고, 그 다음은 “올림픽 데탕트”였습니다. 트럼프 행정부는 북한이 핵 억지력을 획득하는 것을 막지 못했다는 것을 인정할 수 없었습니다. 북한은 또한 감옥에 수감되어 있는 미국 시민 3명을 석방했습니다.

2018년 6월 12일, 트럼프 대통령과 김 위원장은 싱가포르에서 회동했는데, 이는 “미국의 입장 완화에 있어 중요한 이정표”였습니다. 트럼프는 또한 중국의 시진핑 주석에게 도움에 감사를 표했습니다. 트럼프는 트위터에 “더 이상 북한의 핵 위협은 없습니다.”라고 적었습니다.

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도널드 J. 트럼프 대통령과 북한 김정은 국무위원장이 공동 성명에 서명 | 2018년 6월 12일(조이스 N. 보고시안이 촬영한 공식 백악관 사진)

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트럼프는 자신의 행정부의 승리를 주장하며 2019년 2월 27일 하노이에서 김정은을 두 번째로 만났지만 정상화 합의는 없었다. 북한은 제재 해제를 요청했고, 트럼프는 존 볼턴 국가안보보좌관의 조언을 따라 북한이 모든 핵무기와 모든 핵연료를 미국으로 이전하고 “모든 화학 및 생물학적 재고를 신고”할 것을 요구했다. 회담은 결렬되었고 김정은은 떠났다. 폼페이오 국무장관은 북한이 일방적으로 완전히 비핵화할 것을 요구했지만, 트럼프는 새로운 징벌적 제재를 승인하지 않았다.

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도널드 트럼프와 김정은이 2019년 2월 27일 베트남 하노이 정상회담에서 악수하고 있다. 사진 출처: 백악관

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북한은 이제 미사일 개발 및 시험 프로그램을 재개하여 미국의 미사일 방어 시스템을 무너뜨리는 데 집중했습니다. 트럼프는 걱정하지 않는다고 말했습니다. “저는 서두르지 않습니다… 저는 지금의 진행 방식에 매우 만족합니다.” 2019년 6월 30일, 트럼프는 역사상 처음으로 북한에 입국한 대통령으로서 김정은을 DMZ에서 세 번째로 만났습니다 . “트럼프는 김 위원장을 ‘적절한 시기에’ 워싱턴을 방문하도록 초대했으며, 미국 대통령에게서 전례가 없고 전혀 들어보지 못한 화해적인 언어를 사용했다고 합니다.”

애틀랜틱은 이 회의를 “비핵화가 죽은 날”이라고 불렀습니다. 그래도 북한은 일부 사람들에게 트럼프의 유일한 “주요 외교 정책 또는 지정학적 성공”으로 여겨졌고, 존 볼튼은 김정은을 “쥐똥 같은 작은 나라의 독재자”라고 불렀습니다.

데탕트는 2019년 10월 스톡홀름 회담의 실패로 끝났고, 북한은 회담을 중단했고 미국은 해상 군사 훈련을 재개했습니다. 김정은은 북한이 “새로운 중형 탄도 미사일 잠수함을 공개”하면서 전략 무기 시험을 재개한다고 발표했습니다.

그러다 2020년 초에 코로나가 왔습니다. 북한은 2020년 1월 22일에 국경을 봉쇄했고, 뉴욕 타임스는 트럼프가 달성하지 못한 것을 달성했다고 칭찬했습니다. “북한의 경제를 질식시켰다.” 하지만 북한은 봉쇄에서 살아남았고, 관찰자들은 충격을 받았습니다. “이러한 미래의 경제 전쟁에 대한 엄청난 회복력의 입증은 서방이 제재 체제의 미래에 대한 희망을 심각하게 훼손했습니다.”

2020년 11월 3일 조 바이든이 당선된 후 미국은 군축 회담을 촉구하기 시작했지만 북한은 이를 또 다른 미국의 “시간 지연 속임수”로 거부했습니다. 하지만 바이든 행정부는 북한 군비 통제에 대한 실행 가능한 정책이 없다는 비판이 커지면서 교착 상태에 빠졌습니다. 2017년 3월 25일, 포린 어페어스는 “북한과 현실적인 협상을 할 때가 왔다”고 썼지만, 바이든 자신은 완전한 비핵화를 언급했습니다.

한편, 북한은 레일 기반 미사일, 방어 시스템을 회피하는 미사일, 초음속 글라이드 미사일, 고도로 기동성 있는 순항 미사일, 개선된 방공 시스템으로 계속 진격했습니다. 2022년 11월 18일 북한은 ICBM 시험을 재개했습니다. 이제 북한은 세계에서 가장 강력한 핵 억제력 중 하나를 보유할 태세를 갖추었습니다. 북한은 또한 재래식 무기와 방어에서도 큰 진전을 이루었습니다. 이에 대응하여 미국은 이제 “대규모 군사 훈련의 완전한 재개를 발표했습니다.”

에이브럼스는 이렇게 요약합니다. “바이든 행정부의 임기는 여러 면에서 냉전 시대로의 복귀를 의미했습니다.” 하지만 2020년대에는 북한이 “세계 질서에서 훨씬 덜 이상치”가 되었고, 미국의 입장은 “점점 더 불리해졌습니다.”

제7장: “제2차 냉전: 북한의 새로운 시대”

북한 경제는 1950년대와 60년대에는 남한보다 훨씬 앞섰지만, 소련이 침체되면서 80년대에 추월당했습니다. 1990년대와 2000년대 초반에 북한은 서방으로부터 집중적인 포위를 받았습니다. 하지만 오바마 집권 하에서 세계 질서가 깨지기 시작했고, 북한은 더 많은 잠재적 파트너를 갖게 되었습니다. 많은 국가가 북한을 호의적으로 보았는데, 북한은 “다른 어떤 곳과도 다른 요새로 남아 있었기” 때문입니다.

21 세기 중국의 엄청난 경제 성장은 북한에 큰 혜택을 주었습니다. 중국의 무역 정책은 서방의 경제 및 무역 제재를 상당히 약화시켰습니다. 중국 주석 시진핑은 2019년에 북한을 방문했습니다. 중국에서의 관광과 기술 이전이 증가했습니다. 북한은 미국과 한국 음식을 상쇄하기 위해 중국 미디어와 문화에 채널을 열었습니다. 북한은 또한 군사적으로 중국과 더 가까워졌습니다.

반면 러시아는 1990년대에 붕괴되었고 소련보다 훨씬 약한 전략적 파트너가 되었습니다. 하지만 북한은 “2022년부터 NATO와 우크라이나와의 갈등에서 러시아의 가장 신뢰할 수 있는 지원자 중 하나임이 입증”되었고 2024년까지 도네츠크와 루간스크에 노동자를 파견하기 시작했습니다.

2022년 9월 5일, 미국 정보부는 러시아가 우크라이나에서 사용하기 위해 “수백만 개의 북한 포탄과 로켓”을 구매하고 있다고 밝혔습니다. 러시아 국방부 장관 세르게이 쇼이구는 2023년 7월에 북한을 방문했습니다. 9월 말, 김 위원장은 인수를 염두에 두고 군용기 생산 시설을 검토하기 위해 러시아 극동을 방문했습니다. 또 다른 관심 분야는 우주 위성 기술이었습니다.

러시아는 또한 우크라이나 목표물에 대한 북한의 탄도 미사일 사용을 강화했고, 미국에서 공급한 재블린에 대항하기 위해 북한의 전투 차량을 획득하기 시작했습니다.

2024년 6월 18-19일, 러시아 대통령 블라디미르 푸틴이 24년 만에 처음으로 북한을 방문했습니다. 이후 두 나라는 전쟁 시 “군사 및 기타 지원”을 제공하는 “포괄적 전략적 파트너십” 조약에 서명했습니다. 북한은 이제 러시아를 “자국의 안보 이익에 전례 없이 중요한” 나라로 인정했습니다. 또한 북한과 시리아, 이란을 포함한 미국이 표적으로 삼은 다른 국가들 간의 관계도 계속 개방되었습니다.

북한은 또한 단극 세계에서 다극 세계로의 전환이 상당한 이익을 가져올 것이라고 믿었습니다. 김 위원장은 북한을 “강력한 독립 국가”라고 불렀습니다. 이러한 전환의 한 예는 세계 무역 통화인 미국 달러에서 벗어나 국가 지불 시스템이 성장하는 것입니다.

제8장 “미북 갈등의 미래 궤적”

2016-2024년에는 북한의 재래식 전쟁 역량이 크게 현대화되어 군사적 개념인 “에스컬레이션 사다리”에 주의를 기울였다는 것을 보여주었습니다. 북한은 핵 억제력에 지나치게 의존하면 미국의 저수준 재래식 공격이 작용할 수 있다는 것을 깨달았습니다. 따라서 “평양의 적들은 ‘코피’ 공격과 같은 도발을 계속 고려할 수 있습니다.” 에스컬레이션 관리가 헤즈볼라 대 이스라엘과 러시아가 우크라이나에서 한 것처럼 전 세계에서 효과적으로 사용되었습니다.

따라서 북한은 다층 무기고를 만드는 데 집중했습니다. 2023년 3월 24일에 첫 번째 전술 핵탄두를 공개했습니다. 또 다른 핵심 요소는 드론 개발이었습니다. 서방은 이제 북한이 괌, 하와이, 오키나와의 미군 기지와 일본의 미 7함대를 파괴 할 수 있다고 판단했습니다.

2020년까지 미국은 북한에 맞서 싸울 때와 같은 수준의 적과 싸울 능력을 잃었습니다. 한 세대 동안 반란군, 게릴라, 테러리스트와만 싸우는 데 집중했기 때문입니다. 미국은 “주요 군대에 대한 재래식 전쟁에 참여할” 준비가 제대로 되어 있지 않았고, 중국과 북한은 모두 동아시아 전쟁이 발생할 경우를 대비해 미국에 대항하는 군대를 특별히 건설했습니다. 2020년까지 미국은 “서구의 지배력이 수세기 동안 전례 없는 도전에 직면한 세계에서 크게 약화된 초강대국”이 되었습니다.

북한은 “서구 세계의 경제 및 군사력과 서구 가치의 세계적 승리를 중심으로 한 새로운 세계 질서라는 생각에 가장 직접적인 모순 중 하나”를 나타냈습니다. 서구는 북한을 “궁극적인 이질적 존재”로 여겼지만 “열핵 공격으로 서구 세계 전역의 도시를 파괴할 수 있는 군사적 능력은… 겉보기에 무한정”을 유지했습니다.

북한은 또한 이라크와 리비아에서 교훈을 얻었으며, “서방을 기쁘게 하기 위해” 자신의 힘을 포기하는 것은 치명적인 실수라고 공언했습니다. 따라서 북한은 “서방 국가가 결코 통치를 강요하지 않은 세계에서 몇 안 되는 곳 중 하나”로 남아 있습니다. 그리고 미국은 북한의 “완전한 파괴”를 옹호하는 중심 정책을 유지하고 있습니다. 따라서 “서방 세계는 최종 붕괴를 달성하기 위해 국가를 점진적으로 약화시키려는 장기적인 노력을 지속할 것으로 예상됩니다.” 그 정책이 성공할지는 의문입니다.

결론

앞의 요약은 빙산의 일각일 뿐입니다. AB Abrams의 책은 핵전쟁 직전의 세계에 대한 매우 효과적인 사례 연구입니다.

한국전쟁이 끝난 후 오늘까지 71년 동안 미국 대통령 행정부가 북한과 화해를 향해 나아간 사례는 단 두 번뿐이었습니다.

첫 번째는 지미 카터 전 대통령이 협상한 클린턴 행정부의 “합의된 틀”이고, 두 번째는 도널드 트럼프 대통령이 김정은 북한 국무위원장에게 직접 손을 내밀었을 때입니다. 트럼프는 미국과 서방 동맹국의 외교 정책 수립 전체의 적대감에 직면하여 평화를 위한 조치를 취한 공로를 인정받을 수 있습니다.

그렇지 않으면, 이것은 서구의 이익이 지배하는 세계에서 독립적인 길을 그리기 위해 미국 초강대국의 적대감을 용납하는 단호하고 회복력 있는 소규모 국가에 대한 이야기입니다. 이 세계는 현재 전 세계적 반란으로 인해 도전을 받고 있습니다. 미국은 2차 세계 대전이 시작된 이래로 막으려고 노력해 왔고, 영미 시오니스트 제국권은 1세기 이상 억압하려고 노력해 온 다극적 세계가 등장하고 있습니다.

서방 언론이 북한을 악마화했음에도 불구하고, 북한의 동기 부여되고 재능 있는 주민들은 북한의 지도부를 지지하여 입장을 표명했습니다. 그렇게 함으로써 북한은 이념적으로 헌신적이고, 교육 수준이 높으며, 기술 지향적인 작고 동질적인 주민이라는 이점을 얻었으며, 인터넷 선전과 음란물과 같은 서방의 부패에 대한 유혹에도 저항할 수 있었습니다. 물론 이 지점에 도달하려면 거의 완전한 군사 동원이 필요했습니다.

이러한 특성 덕분에 북한은 사이버전, 전자전, 정보전, 에스컬레이션 관리가 그 어느 때보다 더 큰 역할을 하는 점점 더 복잡해지는 군사 환경에서 기능할 수 있었습니다. 무엇보다도 철저한 보안 시스템이 있습니다.

마지막으로, Abrams의 책에 비추어 볼 때, 북한과 러시아 간의 최근 발전 사항도 이해할 수 있습니다. 러시아의 블라디미르 푸틴 대통령은 국가 두마에 푸틴의 6월 방문 당시 서명된 북한과의 새로운 전략적 파트너십을 비준해 달라고 요청했습니다. 이 파트너십은 각 국가가 외국의 침략이 있을 경우 서로를 지원하기로 약속했습니다. 주목할 점은 이 조약이 러시아-한국 국경을 모든 사람과 상품의 자유로운 이동에 개방하는 서방의 제재에 반대한다는 것입니다. 북한과 중국 간의 무역과 함께 서방의 제재 체제는 무너졌습니다. 이와 병행하여 북한은 남한과의 국경을 봉쇄하고 강화하기 위한 새로운 조치를 취하여 동아시아의 긴장이 고조되어 전쟁이 발발할 경우 해당 방향에서 지상 공격을 차단했습니다.

21 세기 북한은 다극 세계가 만들어지는 데 결정적으로 기여한 안정의 원천 중 하나 라고 주장할 수도 있습니다 . AB Abrams의 책, Surviving the Unipolar Era: North Korea’s 35-Year Standoff with the United States는 이것이 어떻게 이루어졌는지 보여주며, 따라서 지정학과 우리 시대의 역사를 공부하는 모든 학생이 꼭 읽어야 할 책 목록 상위에 올라와야 합니다.

공개 및 면책 조항: Clarity Press는 저의 저서 Our Country, Then and Now의 출판사입니다. 여기서 리뷰하는 책 Surviving the Unipolar Era: North Korea’s 35-Year Standoff with the United States (AB Abrams 지음)는 제가 리뷰한 Clarity Press에서 출판한 세 번째 책입니다. 저는 이러한 리뷰에 대한 고려 사항이나 편집 제안 또는 요구 사항을 받지 않았습니다. 또한 공개 오픈 소스 외에는 다른 것을 활용하지 않았습니다.

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새는 폭탄이 아니다: 전쟁이 아닌 평화의 세계를 위해 싸우자 

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Richard C. Cook은 American Geopolitical Institute의 공동 창립자이자 수석 조사관입니다. Cook은 은퇴한 미국 연방 분석가로, 미국 공무원 위원회, FDA, 카터 백악관, NASA, 미국 재무부를 포함한 다양한 정부 기관에서 광범위한 경험을 쌓았습니다. 그는 윌리엄 앤 메리 대학을 졸업했습니다. 챌린저호 참사 당시 고발자로서 그는 우주 왕복선을 파괴한 결함이 있는 O-링 조인트를 폭로했고, 그의 이야기를 “Challenger Revealed”라는 책에 기록했습니다. 재무부에서 근무한 후 그는 사적 금융 통제 통화 시스템을 강력히 비판했으며, “We Hold These Truths: The Hope of Monetary Reform”에서 그의 우려를 자세히 설명했습니다. 그는 American Monetary Institute의 고문으로 일했고, 의원 데니스 쿠시니치와 협력하여 연방준비제도를 진정한 국가 통화로 대체할 것을 옹호했습니다. 그의 신간, Our Country, Then and Now (Clarity Press, 2023)를 읽어보세요. 또한 그의 Three Sages Substack( https://montanarcc.substack.com/publish/posts) 과 American Geopolitical Institute 기사( https://www.vtforeignpolicy.com/category/agi/) 를 읽어보세요 .

“모든 인간의 기업은 삶에 이바지해야 하고, 지상에서의 삶을 풍요롭게 해야 합니다. 그렇지 않으면 인간은 자신의 영토를 확립하고자 하는 곳에서 노예가 될 것입니다!” Bô Yin Râ(Joseph Anton Schneiderfranken, 1876-1943), Posthumus Projects Amsterdam 번역, 2014. 또한 Kober Press에서 발행한 The Book on the Living God를 여기에서 다운로드하세요 .

Race, Class and the Death Penalty in the United States

October 17th, 2024 by Abayomi Azikiwe

Even though the United States government praises itself for representing what is claimed to be the “leading democracy” in the world, the character of the legal and criminal justice system is largely based upon an unequal class structure and racial stratification.

Since its origins as a nation-state, the U.S. ruling interests were dependent upon the forced removals and enslavement of the oppressed Indigenous, African, Latin American and other peoples of color.

In the present century, more than 2 million people are incarcerated in local, state and federal institutions. The overwhelming majority of those detained are from the most exploited and oppressed sections of the population.

The implementation of capital punishment has its origins in the same circumstances which arose to defend the inherent unequal society within the U.S. Not all states sentence inmates to die through lethal injection or electrocution. Nonetheless, the federal death penalty, although not nearly as frequently used, remains in use.

Over the last few weeks numerous southern states have carried out the executions of men who have already been locked up for decades. In several cases exculpatory evidence examined within an impartial courtroom could have exonerated those who were put to death by prison officials.

The federal government, including the executive, legislative and judicial branches, uphold the view that these executions are occurring on a state level and therefore there is no legal basis for halting them. Nonetheless, the political impact of the rising executions in some of the southern states are being felt on a global scale. In the bourgeois democracies of Canada, Western Europe and the United Kingdom, the use of capital punishment has been banned for decades.

Although Canada and these European countries belong to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) therefore being compelled to participate in imperialist war drives in Eastern Europe, West Asia, East Asia, Africa and Latin America, they remain uncomfortable in regard to the regular usage of the death penalty by the U.S. This reality should not be surprising since as already alluded to, the U.S. has the largest per capita prison population than any other country in the world. Despite astronomically high rates of imprisonment the country is extremely violent resulting in the murders and injuries of hundreds of thousands annually.

State violence against African Americans, Latin Americans, immigrants, among others, reinforce the status quo. Since the beginning of the 21st century, thousands of oppressed, working class and poor people have been abused, injured, framed and murdered by law-enforcement agents.

The experience of this century is a continuation of a pattern which emerged under British colonialism in the 17th century. With the independence of the thirteen colonies after the War of 1776-1783, African enslavement and the policy of racially oriented removals remained the mainstay of the Republic up until the Civil War of 1861-1865. The emancipation of four million people of African descent during 1865 ushered in an attempt to reconstruct the U.S. on a more democratic framework. This project was abandoned after the national elections of 1876 resulting in the reinstitution of near slave-like conditions for African Americans.

Mass lynching as a mechanism for social control had its judicial component within the criminal justice system. The penal institutions were utilized for the exploitation of labor which was perfectly legal under the 13th Amendment stating that involuntary servitude was prohibited by the Constitution only apart from the imprisonment of people. The enforcement of laws in the U.S. were designed to gain maximum profits for the capitalist ruling class.

During the post-civil rights era beginning in the 1980s, the U.S. experienced rapid growth in police agencies, law-enforcement tactics utilized against the oppressed population groups and the incarceration of people of color and the working poor. Over a period of three decades, the number of people imprisoned grew by 400 percent.

Racism, State Executions and the Class Character of the U.S. Today

It is necessary to place the present series of executions within a historical context to fully grasp the class character of U.S. society. At the height of the African American movement for equality and self-determination during the early 1970s, the death penalty was suspended by the U.S. Supreme Court between 1972-1976.

Over the last five decades there have been many executions. Sean Murphy wrote for the Associated Press on September 26:

“Death row inmates in five states have been put to death in the span of one week, an unusually high number of executions that defies a yearslong trend of decline in both the use and support of the death penalty in the U.S. The first execution was carried out on Friday in South Carolina. Two more death row inmates, in Missouri and Texas, were pronounced dead Tuesday evening following executions, and an Oklahoma inmate was executed Thursday. When Alabama used nitrogen gas later Thursday to execute a man, it marked the first time in more than 20 years — since July 2003 — that five were held in seven days, according to the nonprofit Death Penalty Information Center, which takes no position on capital punishment but has criticized the way states carry out executions. The United States has reached 1,600 executions since the death penalty was reinstated by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1976, said Robin Maher, the center’s executive director.” 

Delays in executions in recent years are attributed to controversy surrounding the methods used to put inmates to death. Lethal injections often run into difficulties and failures requiring postponements. The lack of availability of preferred substances inducing sudden death has been one cause for the gaps between executions. See this.

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Death penalty map in the United States

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In Alabama recently, nitrogen gas was used to execute Alan Eugene Miller, 59, a white man. Perhaps the most widely known execution in the recent period was that of African American Marcellus Williams, 55, of Missouri, who maintained his innocence for many years. As the execution date neared, Williams changed his plea to no contest, yet it was not enough to stave off his ordered death by lethal injection.

Image: Marcellus Williams executed by the State of Missouri

Many questions were raised about the errors in the murder case against Williams. However, the State Supreme Court ruled against him as Governor Mike Parsons rejected a clemency request from Williams sealing his fate.

Death Penalty in the U.S. Can Never be Considered Justifiable

Due to the racial and class history of the U.S., the implementation of the death penalty can never be justified on political and moral grounds. Irrespective of the crimes these inmates were sentenced for by the courts, the level of injustice embedded in the judicial system is a clear reflection of the power dynamics within society as a whole.

Elements within the ruling class have committed far greater crimes against people inside the U.S. and abroad while never facing prosecution let alone capital punishment. Just within the last sixty years, wars of occupation, forced removals and genocide have and are still occurring. Those who have systematically denied the rights of millions to due process and to live a decent life free of impoverishment, racial profiling and all forms of oppression and exploitation can by no means sit in judgment against anyone from the working class and poor.

Those who are utilizing street crime as a rationale for mass incarceration of the largely Black, Brown and poor masses should be more concerned about the abolition of inequality and national oppression rather than seeking to impose social control. The death penalty is the ultimate and final level of state punishment. Therefore, in a racist capitalist system its implementation must be analyzed within the framework of the actual history of the U.S.

The abolition of capital punishment and the entire prison-industrial complex is an integral part of the struggle to overturn the unjust system. A rethinking of the death penalty over recent decades must create the atmosphere for the organizational and mobilizing of social forces aimed at realizing the fundamental change needed to bring into being a truly democratic society.

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

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

All images in this article are from the author

You’re Not Crazy. This Genocidal Dystopia Is Crazy.

October 17th, 2024 by Caitlin Johnstone

You’re not crazy. They are crazy. The ones who are going around acting like everything’s fine. The ones dismissing the Gaza genocide as a “single issue”. The ones who don’t like it when you talk about this stuff because it bums them out. They are the crazy ones.

I say this because living in the west during a western-backed genocide can make you feel like you’re going insane. Like maybe there’s something wrong with you for not being able to go along as though your government isn’t helping Israel burn people alive, shoot kids in the head, deliberately destroy Gaza’s healthcare system, and target civilian populations with deadly siege warfare in order to annex Palestinian territory. Like maybe you’re defective if you can’t be as chill about all this as everyone else is being.

But there’s nothing wrong with you, and you are not defective. There is something very wrong with a civilization that could go along with all this. It is our genocidal dystopia that is defective.

History is rife with examples of horrific mass atrocities to which the majority of the population did not respond with the appropriate revulsion and urgency at the time. Slavery. The Holocaust. The systematic extermination of other indigenous populations in other settler-colonialist projects. Most of the people who now look back and judge those evils correctly in hindsight are sleepwalking right through their present-day reiteration in Palestine.

Those who stood against the mass atrocities of history tended to be in the minority, because if opposing them was conventional wisdom they wouldn’t have happened in the first place. This shows us that there is no correlation between conventional wisdom and real moral clarity. We cannot look to others to evaluate whether our position on an issue is the correct one, because history tells us that the majority is very often wrong on the most important issues in the present moment when it matters.

And the majority is wrong now. The ones flagrantly supporting Israel’s abuses are wrong.

The ones who try not to think too much about what’s being done in Gaza and Lebanon are wrong. The ones who say it’s all so tragic and heartbreaking but it’s oh so very complicated and Israel has a right to defend itself are wrong. The ones who don’t oppose Israel’s atrocities but only oppose their own country sending boots on the ground or spending their tax dollars on it are wrong. The ones who know a genocide is happening but avoid making too much noise about it because they want to make sure the Democrats win the election are wrong. The ones who know it’s a genocide but don’t respond to this reality with the appropriate level of urgency, forcefulness and focus are wrong.

All around us we are bombarded with messages trying to gaslight into believing that we are the ones who aren’t perceiving reality correctly. These messages can be overt, like the propaganda of the mass media and the talking points of the Israel apologists we run into online. They can also be subtle, like the unspoken messages we get when nobody around us is talking about Gaza and how people grow uncomfortable when we do.

But those messages are lying to us. We absolutely are the ones who are seeing things correctly. We absolutely are the ones who are responding to this nightmare appropriately. They are the ones acting like a bunch of lunatics casually strolling around in the middle of a house fire. 

Don’t look to others to evaluate your own level of clarity. In a civilization that has gone insane, you have to sort out what sanity looks like for yourself. When our leaders are throwing their support behind an active genocide in a society that is awash with propaganda-induced delusions, we’ve all got to be brave enough to stand on our own two feet.

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

Featured image is from the author

Israel’s War on the World

October 17th, 2024 by Medea Benjamin

Each new week brings new calamities for people in the countries neighboring Israel, as its leaders try to bomb their way to the promised land of an ever-expanding Greater Israel.

In Gaza, Israel appears to be launching its “Generals’ Plan” to drive the most devastated and traumatized 2.2 million people in the world into the southern half of their open-air prison. Under this plan, Israel would hand the northern half over to greedy developers and settlers who, after decades of U.S. encouragement, have become a dominant force in Israeli politics and society. The redoubled slaughter of those who cannot move or refuse to move south has already begun.

In Lebanon, millions are fleeing for their lives and thousands are being blown to pieces in a repeat of the first phase of the genocide in Gaza. For Israel’s leaders, every person killed or forced to flee and every demolished building in a neighboring country opens the way for future Israeli settlements. The people of Iran, Syria, Iraq, Jordan, Egypt and Saudi Arabia ask themselves which of them will be next.

Israel is not only attacking its neighbors. It is at war with the entire world. Israel is especially threatened when the governments of the world come together at the United Nations and in international courts to try to enforce the rule of international law, under which Israel is legally bound by the same rules that all countries have signed up to in the UN Charter and the Geneva Conventions.

In July, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) ruled that Israel’s occupation of Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem since 1967 is illegal, and that it must withdraw its military forces and settlers from all those territories. In September, the UN General Assembly passed a resolution giving Israel one year to complete that withdrawal. If, as expected, Israel fails to comply, the UN Security Council or the General Assembly may take stronger measures, such as an international arms embargo, economic sanctions or even the use of force.

Now, amid the escalating violence of Israel’s latest bombing and invasion of Lebanon, Israel is attacking the UNIFIL UN peacekeeping force in Lebanon, whose thankless job is to monitor and mitigate the conflict between Israel and Hezbollah.

On October 10 and 11, Israeli forces fired on three UNIFIL positions in Lebanon. At least five peacekeepers were injured. UNIFIL also accused Israeli soldiers of deliberately firing at and disabling the monitoring cameras at its headquarters, before two Israeli tanks later drove through and destroyed its gates. On October 15th, an Israeli tank fired at a UNIFIL watchtower in what it described as “direct and apparently deliberate fire on a UNIFIL position.” Deliberately targeting UN missions is a war crime.

This is far from the first time the soldiers of UNIFIL have come under attack by Israel. Since UNIFIL took up its positions in southern Lebanon in 1978, Israel has killed blue-helmeted UN peacekeepers from Ireland, Norway, Nepal, France, Finland, Austria and China.

The South Lebanon Army, Israel’s Christian militia proxy in Lebanon from 1984 to 2000, killed many more, and other Palestinian and Lebanese groups have also killed peacekeepers. Three hundred and thirty-seven UN peacekeepers from all over the world have given their lives trying to keep the peace in southern Lebanon, which is sovereign Lebanese territory and should not be subject to repeated invasions by Israel in the first place. UNIFIL has the worst death toll of any of the 52 peacekeeping missions conducted by the UN around the world since 1948.

Fifty countries currently contribute to the 10,000-strong UNIFIL peacekeeping mission, anchored by battalions from France, Ghana, India, Indonesia, Italy, Nepal and Spain. All those governments have strongly and unanimously condemned Israel’s latest attacks, and insisted that “such actions must stop immediately and should be adequately investigated.”

Israel’s assault on UN agencies is not confined to attacking its peacekeepers in Lebanon. The even more vulnerable, unarmed, civilian agency, UNRWA (UN Relief and Works Agency), is under even more vicious assault by Israel in Gaza. In the past year alone, Israel has killed a horrifying number of UNRWA workers, about 230, as it has bombed and fired at UNRWA schools, warehouses, aid convoys and UN personnel.

UNRWA was created in 1949 by the UN General Assembly to provide relief to some 700,000 Palestinian refugees after the 1948 “Nakba,” or catastrophe. The Zionist militias that later became the Israeli army violently expelled over 700,000 Palestinians from their homes and homeland, ignoring the UN partition plan and seizing by force much of the land the UN plan had allocated to form a Palestinian state.

When the UN recognized all that Zionist-occupied territory as the new state of Israel in 1949, Israel’s most aggressive and racist leaders concluded that they could get away with making and remaking their own borders by force, and that the world would not lift a finger to stop them. Emboldened by its growing military and diplomatic alliance with the United States, Israel has only expanded its territorial ambitions.

Netanyahu now brazenly stands before the whole world and displays maps of a Greater Israel that includes all the land it illegally occupies, while Israelis openly talk of annexing parts of Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq and Saudi Arabia.

Dismantling UNRWA has been a long-standing Israeli goal. In 2017, Netanyahu accused the agency of inciting anti-Israeli sentiment. He blamed UNRWA for “perpetuating the Palestinian refugee problem” instead of solving it and called for it to be eliminated.

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Families have been forced to moved repeatedly in Gaza. UN United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA).

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After October 7, 2023, Israel accused 12 of UNRWA’s 13,000 staff of being involved in Hamas’s attack on Israel. UNRWA immediately suspended those workers, and many countries suspended their funding of UNRWA. Since a UN report found that Israeli authorities had not provided “any supporting evidence” to back up their allegations, every country that funds UNRWA has restored its funding, with the sole exception of the United States.

Israel’s assault on the refugee agency has only continued. There are now three anti-UNRWA bills in the Israeli Knesset: one to ban the organization from operating in Israel; another to strip UNRWA’s staff of legal protections afforded to UN workers under Israeli law; and a third that would brand the agency as a terrorist organization. In addition, Israeli members of parliament are proposing legislation to confiscate UNRWA’s headquarters in Jerusalem and use the land for new settlements.

UN Secretary General Guterres warned that, if these bills become law and UNRWA is unable to deliver aid to the people of Gaza, “it would be a catastrophe in what is already an unmitigated disaster.”

Israel’s relationship with the UN and the rest of the world is at a breaking point. When Netanyahu addressed the General Assembly in New York in September, he called the UN a “swamp of antisemitic bile.” But the UN is not an alien body from another planet. It is simply the nations of the world coming together to try to solve our most serious common problems, including the endless crisis that Israel is causing for its neighbors and, increasingly, for the whole world.

Now Israel wants to ban the secretary general of the UN from even entering the country. On October 1st, Israel invaded Lebanon, and Iran launched 180 missiles at Israel, in response to a whole series of Israeli attacks and assassinations. Secretary General Antonio Guterres put out a statement deploring the “broadening conflict in the Middle East,” but did not specifically mention Iran. Israel responded by declaring the UN Secretary General persona non grata in Israel, a new low in relations between Israel and UN officials.

Over the years, the U.S. has partnered with Israel in its attacks on the UN, using its veto in the Security Council 40 times to obstruct the world’s efforts to force Israel to comply with international law.

American obstruction offers no solution to this crisis. It can only fuel it, as the violence and chaos grows and spreads and the United States’ unconditional support for Israel gradually draws it into a more direct role in the conflict.

The rest of the world is looking on in horror, and many world leaders are making sincere efforts to activate the collective mechanisms of the UN system. These mechanisms were built, with American leadership, after the Second World War ended in 1945, so that the world would “never again” be consumed by world war and genocide.

A US arms embargo against Israel and an end to U.S. obstruction in the UN Security Council could tip the political balance of power in favor of the world’s collective efforts to resolve the crisis.

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

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

Nicolas J. S. Davies is an independent journalist, a researcher for CODEPINK and the author of Blood on Our Hands: The American Invasion and Destruction of Iraq.

Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J. S. Davies are the authors of War in Ukraine: Making Sense of a Senseless Conflict, with a new, updated edition due out in February 2025. They are regular contributors to Global Research.

Featured image is by Muhammad Mahdi Karim, Wikimedia Commons

The International Crisis Summit descended on Tokyo last week to warn about the new “replicon” self-amplifying mRNA vaccines that are about to be unleashed like a third atomic bomb upon the population of Japan.

James Corbett was there to cover the proceedings, to document the speeches, to participate in a massive rally in the heart of Tokyo against this dangerous new medical intervention, and to lecture sitting members of the Japanese Diet about his bodily sovereignty.

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

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Destabilizing the social, political and economic structure of 190 sovereign countries cannot constitute  a “solution” to combating the virus. But that was the imposed “solution” which was implemented in several stages from the very outset of the corona crisis in January 2020.  It’s the destruction of people’s  lives. It is the destabilization of civil society.

Fake science was supportive of this devastating agenda. The lies were sustained by a massive media disinformation campaign. 24/7, Incessant and Repetitive “Covid alerts” in the course of the last two years.

The  historic March 11, 2020 lockdown triggered economic and social chaos Worldwide. It was an act of “economic warfare”: a war against humanity. 

This diabolical agenda has undermined the sovereignty of nation states. It has contributed  to a wave of bankruptcies. It has impoverished people Worldwide.  It has led to a spiralling dollar denominated global debt. 

The March 11, 2020 Lockdown applied simultaneously in 190 countries has resulted in: “The confinement of the labor force” coupled with “The paralysis of the workplace”. The predictable impact: The most serious economic crisis in world history. 

Michel Chossudovsky, Global Research, December 9, 2023

 

Video. Interview with Michelle Leduc Catlin, National Citizens Inquiry (NCI)

 

 

 


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.

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

 

O Ocidente Coletivo continua a intensificar as suas constantes provocações contra a Federação Russa, especialmente na esfera nuclear. No meio de tensões e receios de uma guerra mundial total, a OTAN lançou exercícios nucleares em grande escala, piorando significativamente a situação de segurança na Europa e mesmo em todo o mundo.

A aliança atlantista iniciou recentemente os exercícios militares “Steadfast Noon” na Europa Ocidental, supostamente preparando-se para o possível cenário de um conflito aberto com Moscou em solo europeu. Os exercícios envolvem um grande esforço militar, com pelo menos treze Estados participando na operação sob a liderança dos EUA.

Os exercícios centram-se na avaliação e melhoria da capacidade da OTAN para implantar e utilizar armas nucleares americanas em solo europeu. Pelo menos 2.000 soldados de países da OTAN estão destacados na Europa para ajudar na operação. Uma ampla gama de equipamentos é usada nos exercícios, incluindo bombardeiros, aeronaves de escolta, caças e sistemas avançados de guerra eletrônica. A maioria dos exercícios tem lugar na Bélgica e nos Países Baixos, mas exercícios específicos também estão a ser realizados noutros países, como o Reino Unido e a Dinamarca.

“Num mundo incerto, é vital que testemos a nossa capacidade de defesa para que os nossos adversários saibam que a OTAN está pronta e é capaz de responder a qualquer ameaça”, disse o Secretário-Geral da OTAN, Mark Rutte, ao comentar sobre o exercícios.

Como é sabido, a Federação Russa envolveu-se recentemente em exercícios militares conjuntos com o seu principal aliado, a República de Belarus, lançando manobras para se preparar para uma guerra nuclear. Moscou e Minsk têm um acordo que estabelece uma cooperação irrestrita devido ao Pacto de União dos Estados, razão pela qual qualquer ataque ao território bielorrusso é automaticamente visto como um ataque à Rússia, legitimando uma resposta nuclear. Esta cooperação russo-bielorrussa tem sido frequentemente criticada pelo Ocidente, que não aceita qualquer outra forma de cooperação internacional que não seja a mantida entre os Estados ocidentais.

Também recentemente, Moscou e Belarus realizaram exercícios nucleares conjuntos, que foram relatados pelo Ocidente como uma “violação” das normas internacionais. A iniciativa conjunta russo-bielorrussa é legitimada pelo direito internacional, uma vez que ambos os países têm um acordo de defesa coletiva no âmbito do Estado da União. Os exercícios serviram precisamente para provar a disponibilidade da Rússia para responder a qualquer ameaça contra si mesma e contra a República de Belarus – que é reconhecida pelo governo russo como o seu principal parceiro estatal.

Neste sentido, o Ocidente legitima os atuais exercícios usando a retórica de que é “necessário” responder aos testes das suas capacidades nucleares pela Rússia – ignorando obviamente o fato de a própria Rússia ter acabado de lançar um programa nuclear internacional em resposta às constantes provocações americanas. A melhor coisa que o Ocidente pode fazer no atual momento de tensões é reduzir as suas intenções hegemônistas e começar a cooperar para a paz e a redução das tensões, alcançando assim um equilíbrio nuclear na Europa.

Ao lançar exercícios nucleares em grande escala na Europa neste momento, mesmo sem utilizar projéteis nucleares reais, Washington está simplesmente a agravar as tensões e a contribuir para o aumento da escalada. Não é possível que tais exercícios possam ajudar a trazer um equilíbrio estratégico, sendo simplesmente uma forma de piorar os já tensos laços entre o Ocidente e a Rússia. Neste sentido, é urgente que sejam tomadas medidas de desescalada antes que o ponto sem retorno seja ultrapassado.

As atitudes crescentes do Ocidente não têm outro propósito senão continuar as hostilidades constantes. Se a OTAN continuar a realizar exercícios nucleares na Europa, mesmo com sinais de descontentamento russos, o resultado final será um grave desequilíbrio no equilíbrio nuclear global. Este cenário só pode ser revertido através de um esforço real pela paz – algo que Washington infelizmente não parece disposto a fazer neste momento.

Por seu lado, Moscou mantém uma posição muito clara. Nenhuma agressão nuclear será tolerada, nem mesmo através de proxies. Recentemente, a doutrina nuclear russa foi alterada para responder a possíveis ataques a alvos civis por parte de potências não nucleares como legitimação de uma resposta nuclear – desde que tais ataques sejam realizados com o apoio de uma potência nuclear. Isto significa que a tolerância de Moscou às provocações externas está a diminuir, o que é uma consequência direta da postura irresponsável do Ocidente.

No final, mais uma vez a segurança europeia – e a de todo o mundo – é ameaçada pelas ações irresponsáveis ​​dos EUA, que se recusam a reconhecer a inevitabilidade da criação de um mundo multipolar.

Lucas Leiroz de Almeida

 

Artigo em inglês : NATO-led nuclear exercises escalate tensions and threaten European security, InfoBrics, 16 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

Beef Spikes Insulin More Than Pasta

October 16th, 2024 by Dr. Ashley Armstrong

Beef causes a greater insulin release than white pasta, challenging common beliefs about carbohydrates and insulin

High carbohydrate and sugar intakes are not associated with insulin resistance and diabetes; increasing carbohydrate consumption can actually increase insulin sensitivity

Avoiding carbohydrates can induce physiological insulin resistance by downregulating enzymes and metabolic machinery important for proper carb metabolism

Free fatty acids play a key role in developing insulin resistance, with elevated levels preventing cells from effectively using carbohydrates

Type 2 diabetes is associated with increased total plasma free fatty acid concentrations

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In the world of health and nutrition, few topics have sparked as much debate and confusion as insulin. This hormone, essential for regulating blood sugar levels, has become the subject of countless diet trends, health theories, and heated discussions. But why is there so much confusion surrounding insulin, and what’s the truth behind the hype?

I completely understand why so many are interested in the topic — as many people are not metabolically healthy. Estimates suggest that about 1 in 3 adults in the U.S. may be insulin resistant. And 2024 CDC data indicates that the obesity rate in the U.S. is around 42% to 43% among adults.

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obese adults

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Insulin resistance is a condition where the body’s cells become less responsive to insulin, a hormone produced by the pancreas that helps regulate blood sugar levels. When insulin resistance occurs, more insulin is needed to help glucose enter the cells. Over time, this can lead to higher insulin levels in the blood and may contribute to various health issues.

Having insulin resistance is certainly not desirable and is a real problem in modern society. However, is insulin something we should fear?

The Insulin Dilemma: Why Are We So Confused?

It’s easy to see why many people feel overwhelmed when it comes to understanding insulin’s role in our bodies. On one side, we have health gurus promoting the “carbohydrate insulin model,” suggesting that insulin is the primary culprit behind weight gain and metabolic issues. On the other side, we have scientific research that paints a more nuanced picture. So, how did we get here?

The carbohydrate insulin model, promoted by figures like Dr. Jason Fung, presents a seemingly straightforward explanation for weight gain and metabolic problems. According to this model, the consumption of carbohydrates can lead to insulin spikes that promote fat storage and contribute to obesity.

  1. Insulin tells your body to store calories.
  2. Carbohydrates cause insulin spikes.
  3. Therefore, high carbohydrate diets lead to weight gain and metabolic issues.

This explanation is appealing in its simplicity. It offers a clear villain (carbohydrates) and a simple solution (reduce carbs to reduce insulin). For many people struggling with weight or health issues, this model provides a sense of control and a clear path forward.

The carbohydrate insulin model then suggests that a higher protein and higher fat intake is best because it doesn’t increase insulin. It also causes many people to fear carbohydrates and can lead to eating-disorder like behaviors for others. While a diet higher in fat may keep insulin levels lower, it doesn’t fix the underlying metabolic problem (which is the inability to use carbohydrates). And when it comes to protein, did you know that protein actually spikes insulin as well?

In a study where researchers gave subjects 240-calorie servings of 38 different types of foods and measured insulin levels, they found that while higher carbohydrate foods generally caused greater insulin secretion, the results weren’t as clear-cut as many would expect.1 Surprisingly, beef caused a greater insulin release than white pasta! This finding challenges the common belief that only carbohydrates significantly impact insulin levels.

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insulin index of foods

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Other studies have shown that whey protein powder also stimulates the release of insulin following intake.2 So, if protein-rich foods like beef and whey can stimulate insulin release, does that make them “bad” according to the insulin fear-mongering logic? Of course not! This realization helps put the insulin debate into perspective.

Reality: It’s More Complicated Than That

The carbohydrate insulin model is an oversimplification of a much more complex system. Recent research has shown that the relationship between insulin, carbohydrates, and body fat is far more nuanced.

Like every other hormone in your body, insulin has a specific purpose and isn’t inherently good or bad. In fact, insulin plays crucial roles in our body beyond just regulating blood sugar. Insulin facilitates glucose and amino acid uptake into muscle cells, promoting muscle growth and preventing muscle protein breakdown.

So, if insulin isn’t the primary villain, what is? Again, having elevated insulin and insulin resistance is not a good thing. But what is the reason for the elevated insulin? The inability to utilize carbohydrates.

Consider this: Some bodybuilders inject significant amounts of insulin, yet remain extremely lean. On the flip side, if someone consumed large quantities of pure fat, they would gain substantial body fat despite having very little insulin increase.

Research demonstrates that obesity and inactivity are the biggest contributors to insulin resistance, not carbohydrates themselves. In fact, high-fat diets have even been shown to negatively impact insulin sensitivity. These examples illustrate that the relationship between insulin and fat gain isn’t as straightforward as some would have us believe.

Carbohydrates Are Not the Enemy You Think They Are

Contrary to popular belief, high carbohydrate and sugar intakes are not associated with insulin resistance and diabetes.3,4,5,6,7 In fact, increasing carbohydrate consumption can actually increase insulin sensitivity.8,9,10,11,12

This doesn’t mean that all carbohydrates are created equal or that unlimited consumption is advisable. However, it does suggest that demonizing all carbohydrates based on their effect on insulin is misguided.

Interestingly, avoiding carbohydrates can actually induce physiological insulin resistance. How? When we drastically reduce carb intake, our bodies downregulate the enzymes and metabolic machinery important for proper carb metabolism. Additionally, elevated levels of fatty acids can interfere with insulin signaling pathways. Again, removing the trigger instead of fixing the underlying problem.

A study comparing high-fat and low-fat diets found that participants on the high-fat diet experienced a decrease in glucose disposal rates during insulin infusion, indicating reduced insulin sensitivity.13 There’s also evidence suggesting that low-carbohydrate intake in healthy individuals of normal weight might lead to dysfunctional glucose homeostasis over time.14

One of the key players in the development of insulin resistance is often overlooked: free fatty acids. When we avoid carbs, our bodies can rely more on stress hormones like adrenaline to regulate blood sugar. This adrenaline release triggers the release of free fatty acids from our stored fat into the bloodstream.

Higher circulating free fatty acids prevent our cells from effectively using carbohydrates. As one study notes:

“Dysregulation of free fatty acid metabolism is a key event responsible for insulin resistance and Type 2 diabetes. According to the glucose-fatty acid cycle of Randle, preferential oxidation of free fatty acids over glucose plays a major role in insulin sensitivity and the metabolic disturbances of diabetes mellitus …”15

Another study adds:

“Elevated plasma FFA levels have been shown to account for up to 50% of insulin resistance in obese patients with Type 2 diabetes mellitus. Lowering of FFAs in these patients or interfering with steps in the pathway through which FFAs cause insulin resistance could be a new and promising approach to treat Type 2 diabetes mellitus.”16

In fact, did you know that Type 2 diabetes is associated with increased total plasma free fatty acid concentrations?17 The root cause is often an alteration in oxidative phosphorylation (the process of using oxygen to produce energy from glucose — burning carbs the ‘right’ way) and an increased reliance on glycolysis (breaking down glucose without oxygen, the least efficient way).18

Oxidative phosphorylation leads to more ATP production and more CO2. While glycolysis leads to less ATP, less CO2, and more antimetabolic breakdown products like lactic acid.

When carbs aren’t being used efficiently to produce energy, it builds up in the cells. This excess sugar blocks more sugar from entering the cells, which prevents insulin from doing its job.19 At the heart of insulin resistance lies an inability to effectively use carbohydrates to produce energy. This impairment inhibits the function of insulin. Simply avoiding carbohydrates may reduce insulin levels, but it doesn’t fix this underlying problem — it merely removes the trigger.

The Long-Term Effects of Carb Avoidance

If you’re thriving on a low-carb diet, there’s no need to change your approach. Stick with what works for you and makes you feel your best. However, some people experience frustrations with this dietary style despite being told it is the answer to all of their problems. They may struggle to lose weight, notice thinning hair, have difficulty digesting certain foods, or face issues with sleep and digestion. (The result of poor energy production.)

For others, they may feel great at the beginning or for a few years, until their health starts to take a turn, or they re-gain their weight. It feels good, until it doesn’t. Removing carbohydrates from your diet can force your body to produce more adrenaline and cortisol to compensate, which can actually worsen carb metabolism over time.

This is why some individuals with hypothyroidism who follow a low-carb diet long-term may see their blood sugar “stabilize” initially, only to have it increase again later, regardless of how few carbohydrates they consume. (Why you see some on a low carb diet have elevated fasting glucose levels, despite eating little to no carbs.)

It’s crucial to understand that when you don’t eat carbohydrates, your body will make it from your own tissues or dietary protein to provide for the cells that require glucose. The only way to truly solve the problem of metabolic dysfunction is to address the underlying dysfunction that causes it.

So, what’s the solution? As with many aspects of health and nutrition, the answer lies in balance and individualization. Here are some strategies that can help improve insulin sensitivity and overall metabolic health:

1. Eat 3 to 4 balanced meals a day, focusing on whole, minimally processed foods — Fasting all day in the name of ‘health’ is not going to improve metabolic function. On the flip side, you don’t need to be snacking all day.

2. Minimize eating out and avoid heavily processed foods.

3. Exercise consistently, incorporating both strength training and cardiovascular exercise —Remember, rest days are important too, but complete inactivity isn’t the answer. Muscle mass is inversely associated with insulin resistance.20 So the more muscle mass you have, the more insulin sensitive you will be. More muscle means a greater capacity to take up glucose from the bloodstream.

4. Aim for 8,000 to 10,000 steps per day to increase nonexercise activity thermogenesis (NEAT).

5. Reduce consumption of polyunsaturated fatty acids (PUFAs), which can impair proper glucose oxidation21,22 and potentially damage insulin-producing beta-cells in the pancreas.23

6. Remain mindful of total dietary fat intake — Dietary fat is not ‘bad’, but overconsuming fat is not required to reap the hormonal and micronutrient benefits. Remember, excess fat consumption can negatively impact carb oxidation, especially when in an insulin resistant state.

7. Include animal protein sources, eggs, and dairy for B vitamins and the micronutrients required to properly oxidize carbohydrates — It is best to choose collagen-rich cuts of meat to get a boost in beneficial amino acids like glycine, which further help your body regain metabolic function. (Example cuts would be slow cooked beef shanks, bone in roasts, beef cheeks, tendons, oxtail, pork hocks, lamb shanks, etc.)

Embracing Metabolism for Better Health

The journey to optimal health and metabolic function isn’t about finding a single villain to eliminate from our diets. It’s about understanding the complex interplay of various factors — including diet, exercise, stress, and sleep — and how they affect our individual bodies.

Insulin, far from being the enemy, is a crucial hormone that plays multiple important roles in our bodies. By focusing on overall metabolic health rather than demonizing specific nutrients or hormones, we can develop a more balanced, sustainable approach to nutrition and health.

Remember, if you’re feeling confused or overwhelmed by conflicting health information, you’re not alone. The key is to focus on foundational healthy habits and listen to your body. If a particular approach is working for you — you feel great, have good energy levels, and maintain a healthy weight — then stick with it. But if you’re still struggling, don’t be afraid to reassess and try a different approach.

Ultimately, the path to health is a personal journey. By arming ourselves with accurate information and maintaining an open, curious mindset, we can navigate the complex world of nutrition and find what truly works for our individual bodies.

Transform Your Health — One Step at a Time

Ashley and her sister Sarah have put together a truly groundbreaking step-by-step course called “Rooted in Resilience.” They have compiled what clearly is the best application of Dr. Ray Peat’s work on Bioenergetic Medicine that I have ever seen.

It is so good that I am using the core of their program to teach the many Health Coaches that I am in the process of training for the new Mercola Health Clinics I am opening this fall. It took these women working nearly full-time on this project for a year to create it.

This has to be one of the absolute best values for health education I have ever seen. If you want to understand why you struggle with health problems and then have a clear program on how to reverse those challenges, then this is the course for you.

It is precisely the type of program I wish I would have had access to when I got out of medical school. I fumbled around for decades before I reached the conclusion they discuss in the course and share with you so you can restore your cellular energy production and recover your health.

  • Select and eat the right foods to heal your metabolism and improve glucose utilization
  • Balance your hormones to help reduce anxiety, weight gain and sleep disturbances
  • Use reverse dieting to increase your calories without gaining weight and tanking your metabolism, all while improving your energy levels
  • Heal your gut for proper immune function, mood and weight management
  • Tweak your diet and lifestyle habits to improve your mindset and mental health
  • Crush your fitness goals with ease and get your life back on track
  • Master the most essential habits for health with bonus guides, including over 100 meal plans to take the stress out of meal time planning and shopping, and so much more!

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

Ashley Armstrong is the co-founder of Angel Acres Egg Co., which specializes in low-PUFA (polyunsaturated fat) eggs that are shipped to all 50 states (join waitlist here), and Nourish Cooperative, which ships low-PUFA pork, beef, cheese, A2 dairy and traditional sourdough to all 50 states. Waitlists will reopen shortly.

Notes

1 Am J Clin Nutr. 1997 Nov;66(5):1264-76. doi: 10.1093/ajcn/66.5.1264

2 Am J Clin Nutr. 2004 Nov;80(5):1246-53. doi: 10.1093/ajcn/80.5.1246

3 Diabetes Care. 2005 Jun;28(6):1397-403. doi: 10.2337/diacare.28.6.1397

4 Am J Clin Nutr. 1992 May;55(5):1018-23. doi: 10.1093/ajcn/55.5.1018

5 Diabetes Care. 2003 Apr;26(4):1008-15. doi: 10.2337/diacare.26.4.1008

6 The Journal of Nutrition, Volume 131, Issue 10, October 2001, Pages 2782S–2786S, doi: 10.1093/jn/131.10.2782S (Archived)

7 Diabetes Metab. 2005 Apr;31(2):178-88. doi: 10.1016/s1262-3636(07)70184-2

8 J Physiol. 1934 Mar 29; 81(1): 29–48. doi: 10.1113/jphysiol.1934.sp003113

9 The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, Volume 52, Issue 3, September 1990, Pages 524–528, doi: 10.1093/ajcn/52.3.524 (Archived)

10 The Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism, Volume 67, Issue 5, 1 November 1988, Pages 951–957, doi: 10.1210/jcem-67-5-951

11 American Journal of Physiology, Endocrinology and Metabolism, Volume 280, Issue 4, April 2001, Pages E576-E583

12 Diabetologia 44, 2038–2043 (2001)

13 Eur J Nutr. 2017 Feb;56(1):431-443. doi: 10.1007/s00394-015-1108-6. Epub 2015 Nov 28

14 Front Public Health. 2023; 11: 1115333. Published online 2023 Mar 16. doi: 10.3389/fpubh.2023.1115333

15 Curr Opin Clin Nutr Metab Care. 2007 Mar;10(2):142-8. doi: 10.1097/MCO.0b013e328042ba90

16 Curr Opin Clin Nutr Metab Care. 2002 Sep;5(5):545-9

17 Nutrients. 2019 Sep; 11(9): 2022

18 J Appl Physiol (1985). 1997 Jul;83(1):166-71

19 PLoS Med. 2007 May;4(5):e154. doi: 10.1371/journal.pmed.0040154

20 J Clin Endocrinol Metab. 2011 Sep;96(9):2898-903. doi: 10.1210/jc.2011-0435. Epub 2011 Jul 21

21 Cardiovascular Disease, Stimulatory Action of Polyunsaturated Fatty Acids on Pyruvate Oxidation, pp 483–493

22 Journal of Applied Physiology, Volume 104, Issue 1, January 2008, Pages 1-9

23 Endocrine. 2011 Apr;39(2):128-38. doi: 10.1007/s12020-010-9432-3. Epub 2010 Dec 15

Featured image is from Mercola

Um dos maiores problemas do mundo contemporâneo é a ameaça constante de uma guerra nuclear entre o Ocidente e a Rússia. Os EUA, a OTAN e os seus aliados têm frequentemente provocado Moscou numa tentativa de escalar o conflito ucraniano. O objetivo ocidental parece ser esgotar a paciência da Rússia, incitando assim uma resposta violenta que poderá levar a uma guerra mundial total.

No entanto, apesar desta postura extremamente provocativa, o presidente dos EUA, Joe Biden, continua a dizer que o seu país está disposto a cooperar para a paz. Segundo Biden, Washington está pronto para desempenhar um papel diplomático, incentivando o diálogo nuclear internacional. Numa declaração recente, apelou às potências mundiais para que agissem racionalmente no processo de tomada de decisão em relação a armas nucleares, evitando ações que pudessem afetar a segurança global.

Biden disse que os EUA estão prontos para negociar termos diplomáticos sobre a questão nuclear com todos os países rivais, incluindo Rússia, China e Coreia do Norte. O objetivo de tal diálogo seria alegadamente reduzir os riscos da ameaça nuclear através de um acordo mutuamente benéfico para todas as partes – conseguindo assim uma possível redução das tensões globais.

“Os EUA estão prontos para iniciar conversações com a Rússia, a China e a Coreia do Norte sem condições prévias para reduzir a ameaça nuclear. Não há nenhum benefício para as nossas nações ou para o mundo em impedir o progresso na redução dos arsenais nucleares”, afirmou o presidente dos EUA.

Ironicamente, as palavras de Biden foram proferidas num discurso de felicitações à organização anti-armas nuclear com sede no Japão, Nihon Hidankyo – que ganhou o Prêmio Nobel da Paz pelo seu intenso trabalho a favor da desnuclearização. É curioso que Biden parabenize tal organização, uma vez que Nihon Hidankyo foi criado precisamente por cidadãos japoneses que sobreviveram aos ataques nucleares americanos em Hiroshima e Nagasaki. Aparentemente, Biden “esqueceu” que os EUA são o único país do mundo que utilizou armas nucleares numa situação real de combate – precisamente contra o Japão.

Além da inconsistência histórica, as palavras de Biden soam extremamente hipócritas, considerando que o presidente americano lidera o país num dos momentos mais instáveis ​​da história recente, quando o risco nuclear é consideravelmente elevado devido às ações irresponsáveis ​​de Washington e dos aliados ocidentais.

Por exemplo, Biden mencionou a Rússia, a China e a Coreia do Norte como nações com as quais os EUA estariam dispostos a negociar termos diplomáticos. No entanto, os EUA atualizaram recentemente a sua estratégia nuclear para estabelecer um “plano de ataques múltiplos” contra estes três países no caso de uma escalada de tensões. É impossível estabelecer negociações entre nações quando um lado planeja abertamente usar armas nucleares contra o outro, razão pela qual o discurso de Biden deve ser visto como mera retórica hipócrita e propagandística.

Toda a escalada das tensões nucleares globais está a acontecer por causa dos EUA. A atitude de países como a Rússia, a China e a Coreia do Norte é claramente defensiva, com o único objetivo de se defenderem das constantes ameaças impostas por Washington através da sua política externa agressiva. Diante de tantas provocações e agressões, os países rivais dos EUA não têm outra alternativa senão se prepararem para o pior cenário – o que explica, por exemplo, atitudes como a reforma da doutrina nuclear russa, os investimentos militares chineses e a estratégia coreana de testes de lançamento de mísseis.

Obviamente, nenhum dos lados da política internacional está realmente interessado numa guerra nuclear, uma vez que não haveria vencedores num tal conflito. No entanto, os EUA estão claramente dispostos a arriscar a segurança mundial para proteger os seus interesses egoístas. Desconfortáveis ​​com a transição geopolítica para a multipolaridade, os EUA fazem todo o possível para impedir a criação de uma nova ordem global, razão pela qual guerras e sanções são utilizadas contra países considerados “inimigos”.

Na verdade, nunca haverá qualquer diálogo nuclear liderado pelos EUA simplesmente porque Washington é o principal agente provocador e desestabilizador nesta questão. Para evitar uma escalada nuclear global, os EUA devem deixar de agir com uma mentalidade unipolar e hegemônista, admitindo que as mudanças no cenário político não podem ser evitadas. Só quando os EUA derem o passo definitivo para acabar com as suas obsessões hegemônicas é que haverá uma possibilidade real de diálogo de paz e de diplomacia nuclear. Enquanto Washington continuar a tentar salvar a ordem unipolar em declínio, o mundo continuará em constante risco de catástrofe.

Lucas Leiroz de Almeida

 

Artigo em inglês : Joe Biden hypocritically talks about nuclear dialogue while provokes Russia, InfoBrics, 16 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

It’s been over two months since the Kiev regime launched its incursion into the Kursk oblast (region). The area was previously limited only to cross-border skirmishes, artillery duels and occasional sabotage operations, which was why the Russian military deployed Rosgvardiya, particularly the “Akhmat” special forces mostly composed of personnel from Chechnya. These units were not equipped to handle army-sized invading forces and it took some time for the regular military to move in and prevent further advances by the Ukrainian troops. Expectedly, as PR “victories” are the most important segment of the latter’s strategy, this was heavily (ab)used to sow discord within Russia, with the Kiev regime trying to present Chechens as “TikTok soldiers”. However, war propaganda was the least of the Neo-Nazi junta’s crimes in the occupied parts of this Russian region.

Namely, the invading force committed gruesome atrocities against Russian civilians, while Nazi-style treatment of the local population is a common practice.

This is yet another proof that “nomen est omen” is not just a simple saying. While militarily unjustified, the Kiev regime still went ahead with the incursion. Generals were against it, thinking it was a waste of the Neo-Nazi junta’s increasingly scarce resources. Other high-ranking officials also strongly opposed the move, seeing it as nothing more than Zelensky’s risky (geo)political gambit. This includes former top commander General Valery Zaluzhny, currently holding the largely ceremonial role of ambassador to the UK. The mainstream propaganda machine’s reaction was mixed, with some reporting it as risky, while others continued the usual “Ukraine is winning” narrative, insisting that the incursion “embarrassed” Russia.

CNN ran stories about Moscow’s supposed “inability” to push back the Neo-Nazi junta forces, quoting the latter’s field commanders who claimed that “Russian advances are mostly happening on the flanks of our foothold” and that “they’re only making incremental gains, but lose to them to counterattacks”.

However, even the mainstream propaganda machine was forced to admit this wasn’t the case, as the Russian military made fast and steady advances in recent weeks, leading to serious breakthroughs. There’s even a strong possibility that the Kiev regime forces in the area could soon be encircled. The Russian advance has been so fast in some areas that not even NATO personnel were able to flee, with Moscow’s forces neutralizing some Americans fighting for the Kiev regime. The Russian military also has foreign fighters (particularly Serbs), although they’re volunteers.

However, as Moscow’s forces keep advancing, they’re finding evidence of war crimes by the Kiev regime. Perhaps the most concerning is the disappearance of around 1000 locals. The Kremlin has issued a formal accusation that Ukrainian forces kidnapped 1,000 residents of the Kursk region. Russian authorities confirmed this after the relatives of the missing locals pleaded with the government to help find them.

“I’ve received messages regarding more than 1,000 such people from relatives trying to find them. We know nothing about their fate. This is a gross violation of their rights and international norms of treatment of civilians,” presidential human rights commissioner Tatyana Moskalkova said on October 14, adding: “I think it would be useful to remind you that the forced removal of civilians from their places of permanent residence is a gross violation of the Geneva Convention. And the world community should probably give this a proper assessment.”

However, the so-called “international community” (a rather pathetic euphemism for a NATO-occupied fraction of the actual world) is busy with prosecuting (or persecuting, to be precise) President Vladimir Putin for evacuating kids from an active warzone. In fact, enemy combatants who waged war on the people of Donbass for years (including as part of Neo-Nazi units) were actually allowed to go to Russia and take their kids (although this too was used for anti-Russian propaganda).

So far, Moscow had to evacuate over 112,000 residents displaced by the Kiev regime forces. However, based on footage posted on social media, some civilians remained, mostly elderly people.

The Neo-Nazi regime keeps insisting that the locals in occupied areas are treated “humanely”. Still, evidence on the ground suggests otherwise. There were instances where civilians were shot in cars by the Neo-Nazi junta forces, while first reports about kidnappings appeared just days after the Kursk oblast incursion was launched.

What’s probably even more disturbing is the direct involvement of the US-led political West, which not only supported the PR attack, but also took part in its planning. Namely, leaked documents show that several high-ranking American officials and at least one Washington DC-based think tank directly contributed to drawing up plans for the Kiev regime’s attack.

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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 InfoBrics

The alternative news has been under attack especially by the Western political establishment and the mainstream media for quite some time now calling us “Conspiracy Theorists” for the many things we have been exposing for years. One of the things we have been talking about is the Greater Israel Project. Most people in the West believe that Israel only wants a small piece of Palestinian land and once that’s accomplished, Israel will have a secure state that will finally live in peace with its Arab neighbors, but that is farther from the truth.

The Middle East Eye (MEE) published an interesting report ‘Bezalel Smotrich calls for Israel’s borders to extend to Damascus’ about a documentary video produced by a European Public Service channel, Arte called ‘Israel: Ministers of Chaos’ based on the ideas of two radical Israelis, Bezalel Smotrich, the Minister of Finance and Itamar Ben Gvir, the Minister of National Security who call for “re-founding biblical Israel”:

Two men embody the radical initiatives of this government. Two leading ministers who occupy regalian functions: Internal Security and Finance. Their names: Itamar Ben Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich. Two complete unknowns on the international scene, brought to light by the events of recent months. They are the heirs of two ideological currents that were once marginal: Kahanism and religious Zionism. Today, they are throwing all their weight behind their ideological agenda: imposing Jewish supremacist legislation in the case of the former, and re-founding biblical Israel in the case of the latter.

According to the MEE report, the Israeli Minister of Finance, Bezalel Smotrich said “that Israel would expand “little by little” and eventually encompass all Palestinian territories as well as Jordan, Lebanon, Egypt, Syria, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia” and that “It is written that the future of Jerusalem is to expand to Damascus,” he said, citing the “greater Israel” ideology, which envisions the expansion of the state across the Middle East.

One of the actions committed by Bezalel Smotrich was when he deliberately blocked US- flour shipments back in February to starve the Palestinians as reported by Al Mayadeen:

Bezalel Smotrich’s office affirmed to Axios that he directed the customs service to withhold the flour shipments. In collaboration with Netanyahu, he also allegedly requested officials to explore an alternative delivery method.

It is worth noting that more than 2.2 million people, constituting the entire population of Gaza, are confronting crisis or even more severe stages of famine, as per a report from a UN-supported organization released late last year. The risk of famine is escalating daily in the region. The report disclosed that approximately half of Gaza’s population is experiencing emergency levels of food insecurity.

Itamar Ben Gvir, if you remember, is another Israeli extremist who entered Al-Aqsa Mosque‘s courtyards in the occupied East Jerusalem to inflame tensions or we can say, to pick another fight with the Palestinians.

Not only is actions are well-documented, his words are also quite revealing, Middle East Monitor reported on November 23, 2023 that “During an interview with the Israeli Channel 12, Ben-Gvir said “To be clear, when they say that Hamas needs to be eliminated, it also means those who sing, those who support and those who distribute candy, all of these are terrorists.” It seems that Ben-Gvir believes that Israel needs to eliminate Palestinian men, women and children.

There are other extremists such as Dennis Avi Limpkin, an Israeli citizen who is an anti-Islam activist, born in Flushing, New York, then moved to Israel as a teenager in 1968, then in 1972, he joined the Israel Defense Forces becoming a major and eventually promoted to becoming a military spokesman for the IDF.  By 1988, he was involved in the Far-Right Likud campaign and then from 1989 to 1990, he was part of the news department for Yitzhak Shamir’s press office.  At one point, Limpkin lectured in Christian-Zionist churches and synagogues throughout the United States.

Dennis Avi Limpkin published five books under two different names.  The first three books were under his alias, Victor Mordecai which was to hide his identity, his first book, Is Fanatic Islam a Global Threat? (1997) which is described as “proof” that Islam is a threat to world peace, Christian Revival for Israel’s Survival (1999) and ‘Islamic Threat Updates Almanac’ (2003).  The other two books are under his real name, Israel’s Bible Bloc (2006) which promoted a Jewish-Christian Party in Israel founded by Limpkin called Gush Hatanachi or the Bible Bloc Party and then Islam Prophesied in Genesis published in 2010.

In 2009, Limpkin was involved in what was considered a racial incident in Switzerland where he was pro-active in the Swiss Minaret Initiative or the Swiss Minaret Dispute to persuade the Swiss population to ban the construction of Minarets, which are either elevated stands or towers that calls for Muslims to pray at the mosque. Limpkin gave an anti-Islam speech where he compared Allah to Satan. In an article by The Aargauer Zeitung, a Swiss daily newspaper ‘Anti-minaret initiative: Israeli condemned for racial discrimination’ described what happened regarding Limpkin’s actions and its aftermath:

The Islamophobic Israeli Avi Lipkin has been sentenced to a conditional fine and a fine by the Bern-Mittelland examining magistrate’s office for racial discrimination and disruption of freedom of belief and worship

Limpkin criticized Islam in his speech in October 2009 for a Pro-Israel organization in Wichtrach, Bern:

In a speech before the anti-minaret vote, he described Islam as “psychosis”, compared Allah to Satan and called for a ban on Islam. “Avi Lipkin had made several statements against Islam that I classify as racially discriminatory,” said the responsible public prosecutor Thomas Perler to “NZZ am Sonntag”.

“It can be said that his speech contained statements that amounted to a demonization of Islam.” Lipkin gave the speech in October 2009 at the invitation of the “Pro Israel” organization in Wichtrach, Bern, around a month and a half before the anti-minaret vote

The following video shows Limpkin describing Israel’s plan for its expansionist agenda in the Middle East:

The Greater Israel is not a Conspiracy Theory, it never was. The words and actions by Israeli politicians and activists throughout the years have more or less spoken about their Greater Israel plan which is alive and well in the hearts and minds of many Israelis.

Will they be successful in accomplishing a Greater Israel? We can say that even if they are willing to go to war with the Muslim world for the foreseeable future, they have no chance even if the collapsing US empire remains on their side, it will never happen.

The Muslim world will not allow such a project to be a success because that will murder and displace not only the Palestinians, but the Jordanians, Lebanese, Egyptians, Syrians, Iraqis even the Saudis. How much more will the Muslim world tolerate?

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

Timothy Alexander Guzman writes on his own blog site, Silent Crow News, where this article was originally published. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

One of the main postulates of strategic thinking is to prevent the creation of an all-encompassing alliance against yourself. Wise leadership will always try to ensure that current and potential enemies remain as divided as possible. However, there’s wise leadership and then there’s the warmongering oligarchy in the United States, desperate to maintain Cold War-like conflicts and start proxy wars that could feed the Military Industrial Complex (MIC) for decades.

The history of American interventionism (a rather outdated euphemism for what’s truly an unprovoked US/NATO aggression against the entire world) shows that the war criminals and plutocrats in Washington DC will always find the “perfect excuse” to engage in invasions against any remotely sovereign(tist) country. This hasn’t changed in the slightest to this very day.

However, technological advances in the last half a century or so have ensured that America simply cannot engage in wars against certain countries. Their ability to inflict untold damage on the US mainland was what kept the warmongers in check. And yet, in the last 30+ years, the end of the (First) Cold War created the illusion that the US “won” and that it can do whatever it wants with absolute impunity. This is precisely why we’ve had an unprecedented number of American invasions and wars of aggression against much of the world in the same time period, particularly in Eastern Europe (Serbia/former Yugoslavia and Russia/former Soviet Union) and the Middle East (over half a dozen countries ravaged and/or destroyed). However, after attacking isolated and largely defenseless countries, now is the time for the “big prize”.

In the last decade or so, Washington DC has been preparing for near-peer confrontation, creating tensions with superpowers such as Russia and China, while also eyeing strong regional players, particularly North Korea and Iran. Expectedly, the said countries understand that their opponent(s) is the same and that they need to work together to keep it at bay. However, instead of trying to drive a wedge between these countries, the US kept pushing against each and everyone simultaneously, further cementing their determination to form what can only be described as an alliance. Moscow, Beijing and Pyongyang might not even be too keen to use the word to describe their trilateral relations, but the reality is that it’s becoming exactly that. The level of their coordination in terms of military and foreign policy certainly suggests that’s the case.

In the last two and a half years, Russia effectively rekindled the relatively dormant military cooperation with North Korea. The two countries are now effectively bound by a mutual defense pact, the first Moscow signed with a non-Soviet state since 1991.

Their close ties also extend to conventional capabilities, including on operational and tactical levels. The political West and its Neo-Nazi puppets insist that North Korean troops are already fighting in Ukraine, but they provide(d) no evidence to support such claims, as per usual. What’s certainly possible is that Pyongyang sent personnel to help their Russian colleagues with the integration of North Korean weapons and munitions into the Kremlin’s arsenal. However, not much more than that can be expected, as there would be far more evidence to the contrary.

On the other hand, China and North Korea are also strengthening their ties, with Xi Jinping telling Kim Jong Un that Beijing is ready for closer strategic coordination with Pyongyang. The two neighbors have been allies since the formation of North Korea and this process is not only expected, but simply natural, as the US keeps militarizing the Asia-Pacific region, including by remilitarizing Japan, a country that never really apologized (let alone paid damages) for its aggression in the area prior and during WWII. Tokyo killed millions of civilians across East Asia (particularly China), cementing strong anti-Japanese sentiment in most countries in the region, including South Korea, otherwise an unmistakably compliant US vassal. Still, America plans to turn Japan into a military powerhouse that would go against Russia, China and North Korea.

As a result, closer ties are being built in the cases of Russia-China, Russia-North Korea and China-North Korea. This is very reminiscent of the way the Entente was formed in decades and years before WWI, when Russia, France and the UK agreed to keep the then-nascent German expansionism in check. Members of the Entente often didn’t have much in common other than this, with Russia and the UK effectively being enemies for centuries as both had competing interests in various parts of the world. Still, the dangers of leaving Berlin’s imperialist tendencies unchecked far eclipsed this centuries-old rivalry. Thus, if the pathologically Russophobic London was able to find common ground with Moscow (or, to be precise, St. Petersburg back then), imagine the ease with which Russia, China and North Korea could form an Entente-like alliance.

They have not only much more in common (in terms of strategic thinking), but are also direct neighbors, with clear economic interests and ties that only keep growing, particularly as the US-led political West is still trying to isolate all three and minimize their economic (and societal) prospects. This simultaneous aggression against all three further strengthens their resolve to coordinate efforts and push back. On October 14, Russian Defense Minister Andrei Belousov arrived in Beijing, where he met his Chinese counterpart Dong Jun. Both sides expressed intent to “deepen strategic collaboration” and “continuously advance military relations”. Once again, these bilateral ties will inevitably lead to a trilateral alliance that could be the progenitor of an invincible (Eur)Asian monolith that others would surely join.

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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 InfoBrics

The question yet stands: what potential countries with high aspirations are gearing to join BRICS+, an informal association of developing economies, during the forthcoming summit this October 22-24?

In the context of preparations for the BRICS+ summit, a number of significant issues, including the expansion of the association, were reviewed and considered at the sidelines of the 79th session of the United Nations General Assembly in New York. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov reiterated “the creation of a category of partner states” for current association of BRICS+. Lavrov had already indicated the “suspension” of membership into BRICS+ and further emphasized that “the ministers reviewed the efforts to coordinate the modalities of the new category, BRICS partner countries” as far back in June 2024 during the BRICS Foreign Ministers Council in Russia’s Nizhny Novgorod.

In late September in New York, Lavrov told a news conference following his participation in the high-level week of the 79th session of the UN General Assembly that BRICS+ considered further expansion inappropriate for now, the current BRICS member-countries now considered it not feasible to admit new members, but countries expressing readiness would only become supporting partners and would maintain permanent contacts. These partner members could use BRICS+ to pursue the common goals of fighting United States dominance and Western hegemony. BRICS is also steadily working towards creating a multipolar world.

“As for the prospects for BRICS expansion, at this stage all affiliated countries consider it reasonable not to make new decisions for the time being and to adapt the organization, an association of like-minded members. There were five of us, now there are ten. Of course, this requires some kind of habituation and smooth entry of new members into the work in line with the traditions that the quintet has developed over years,” Lavrov said.

On the other hand, the transition towards a new economic architecture, characterized by de-dollarization and diversification of global financial frameworks, presents immense opportunities and challenges for the Global South. Russia’s engagements with mostly common geopolitical like-minded countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America regions underscore strategic importance for future development of BRICS+.

Meanwhile, BRICS+ rising against United States hegemony and dominance, ultimately helps create the situation or conditions for China to emerge as the global economic power. The ultimate result – BRICS+ is rather driving China, with estimated population of 1.5 billion, to establish global presence, Russia has been cooperating within the external economic parameters especially with China and India.

Under Russia’s BRICS presidency which began January 2024, Ethiopia, Egypt, Iran, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates became the second wave of the newest members to join BRICS.

South Africa ascended in 2011 under China’s initiative. In 2015, BRICS established the New Development Bank (NDB), the only financial instrument to compete with other multilateral institutions such the International Monetary Bank and the World Bank. While these operate worldwide, the NDB has limited scope of operations over the past decade. Nevertheless, NDB has made a significant headway, at least, for consolidating its position and has also taken a few steps in raising the possibility of forging sustainable economic cooperation and collaborating on investment partnerships among member states. According to media reports, NDB primarily intended to pursue a flexible financial framework to create a fairer, more equitable system, in contrast to IMF and the World Bank. By advocating for these essential reforms, NDB portrays itself as the main instrument for reshaping the financial landscape for the Global South.

As often emphasized, BRICS+ functions on the basis of consensus. The consensus principle primarily aims at finding agreements that reflect the mutual accord of all participants. BRICS+ is an informal association of emerging economies based on respectful attitude towards each other and on mutual consideration to promote collaboration based on a balance of interests and strictly adhere to the principle of the sovereign equality of states and non-interference in each other’s internal affairs. Moreover, its transforming structure remains as an emerging force for a new global architecture.

In these previous years, BRICS+ has been emerging as a key player in this world, has the potential to drive significant economic growth and development but BRICS+ and the Global South collaboration face the challenges of diversity in politics, economy and culture. This is evidently noticeable in the dynamism of tackling complex issues such as economic development, trade, climate change, and global governance. The degree of variations significantly in terms of their level of economic development and political influence could complicate efforts to create a cohesive alliance, according to experts’ interpretations.

Leaders will decide on BRICS membership expansion on the basis of full consultation and consensus. The following countries have either expressed interest in joining BRICS or have already applied for membership:

(i) AFRICA

Algeria: In terms of market size, Algeria has the tenth largest proven natural gas reserves globally, is the world’s sixth-largest gas exporter, and has the world’s third-largest untapped shale gas resources.

According to reports, Africa States have submitted applications: Angola, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Central African Republic, Congo, DR Congo, Ghana, Kenya, Libya, Mali Republic and Niger Republic.

Nigeria: Nigeria’s Foreign Minister Yusuf Tuggar has announced that the country intends to become a member of the BRICS group of nations within the next two years. Nigeria has a GDP of $448 billion, a population of 213 million and a GDP per capita of $2,500. It has the world’s 9th largest gas reserves and significant oil reserves.

Senegal: It is a medium capacity gold mining and energy player, with reserves in gold, oil, and gas. The energy industry is at a growth stage as reserves have only recently been found. The energy-hungry BRICS nations will be keen to secure its supplies.

Sudan: Sudan’s top five export markets are 100% BRICS – China, Russia, Saudi Arabia, India, and the UAE. Sudan also has regional clout. It is Africa’s third-largest country by area, and is a member of the League of Arab States (LAS). Should Sudan join the BRICS it would give the group complete control of the Red Sea supply routes East Africa: South Sudan, Tanzania, Tunisia, Uganda and Zimbabwe.

(ii) AMERICAS 

Bolivia: Asset-rich but relatively poor, Bolivia has the fastest GDP growth rate in Latin America.

There are also Chile, Colombia and Costa Rica.

Cuba: Cuba’s sanctions defiance has long made it a favorite of China and Russia when wanting to annoy the United States. It also has significant agreements with China and Russia, is a member of the BRI and has significant Caribbean and LatAm influence.

Ecuador: Ecuador is negotiating Free Trade Agreements with both China and the Eurasian Economic Union. It would make sense to substitute these with a looser BRICS arrangement

El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras.

Nicaragua: Nicaragua is a mining play and the leading gold-producing country in Central America. It has a Free Trade Agreement with the ALBA bloc, and is an influential player in the Caribbean.

El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras, Panama and Peru.

Uruguay : Uruguay has joined the BRICS New Development Bank – a sure sign that official BRICS membership is pending.

Venezuela: Another outlier, but its energy reserves and political stance fit well with China and Russia’s needs.

(iii) ASIA

Afghanistan: : An outlier, but Afghanistan has significant resources and is a member of the BRI. Diplomatic changes are required, but China, India and Russia are all keen to see redevelopment in the country once political stability can be secured.

Azerbaijan and Bahrain.

Bangladesh: Bangladesh is one of the world’s top five fastest growing economies and is undergoing significant infrastructure and trade development reforms. It shares a 4,100 km border with India.

Indonesia: One of Asia’s leading economies, Indonesia’s potential has again been raised to join BRICS. In July 2023, Jakarta accepted an invitation to participate in the 2023 BRICS summit.

Kazakhstan: Kazakhstan’s economy is highly dependent on oil and related products. In addition to oil, its main export commodities include natural gas, ferrous metals, copper, aluminum, zinc and uranium.

Others include Iraq, Kuwait, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar.

Mongolia: Mongolia is both a problem and solution, while geographically attractive. It requires extensive investment in its energy sector; yet is resource-rich and a transit point between Russia, Kazakhstan and China. It is not a member of any trade bloc, with a looser BRICS arrangement better suited to maintaining its regional impartiality.

Pakistan: Pakistan has filed an application to join the BRICS group of nations in 2024 and is counting on Russia’s assistance during the membership process, the country’s newly appointed Ambassador to Russia Muhammad Khalid Jamali has stated.

Sri Lanka: Sri Lanka isn’t keen on opening up its markets yet has significant economic problems. China is interested in port and Indian Ocean access while Russian tourism investments are increasing. A BRICS agreement would be loose enough to satisfy all concerns, while India will want to keep an eye on it.

Turkiye: Turkiye’s trade figures with the current and most of the upcoming BRICS members show significant growth. Getting access to BRICS NDB funding may also prove attractive for Ankara as talks are expected across a number of issues.

Thailand: Thailand is one of ASEAN’s largest economies, via ASEAN it has additional Free Trade Agreements with Australia, New Zealand, Japan, South Korea, China, Hong Kong and India, and agreements with Chile, and Peru. Thailand is also a signatory to the RCEP FTA between ASEAN and Australia, China, Japan, New Zealand, and South Korea.

Uzbekistan: Uzbekistan is one of Central Asia’s fastest growing economies, yet it is hampered by being double-landlocked. Membership of BRICS would give it market access to China, Europe, and the rest of Asia in a more protected manner.

These have also shown potential interest: Syria, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, Vietnam and Yemen.

(iv) EUROPE

Azerbaijan and Belarus: In the former Soviet space, Belarus and Azerbaijan have recently expressed their sanonymized interest to leverage unto BRICS platform. Based on the historical fact that Belarus and Russia have already formed a Union State, Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko irreversibly promised Belarus’ ascension into BRICS.

“Azerbaijan has filed an official application for joining BRICS,” Azerbaijan’s news agency quoted Foreign Ministry’s spokesman, Aykhan Hajizada.

Baku’s intention to jump the bandwagon of BRICS reflected in the joint declaration on strategic partnership between Azerbaijan and China, which was signed on the sidelines of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) summit in Astana in early July.

That however, Belarus sees BRICS as a basis for economic development and is ready to join integration processes within the framework of the informal association.

“We are interested in getting involved in integration processes in that space. BRICS is another footing to help us maintain balance and economic stability,” BelTA agency quoted Lukashenko as emphatically asserted.

Notably, Azerbaijan and Belarus are former Soviet republics, with common historical background despite the stark indications of disparity in approach to current politics and economic development, much still remains uniquely common in cultural practice and in the society. Undoubtedly, both the older and current generations have comprehensive understanding of Soviet history and culture. Azarbaijan and Belarus becoming BRICS members will fortify the SCO operations in the region. Therefore, Azerbaijan and Belarus governments and their state institutions such as the cabinet, legislature and judiciary, would endorse aligning to BRICS, and its contribution towards shaping a new post-Soviet space within the framework of emerging new geopolitical reality.

Meanwhile, as Sergey Lavrov noted “the weight, prestige and role of an individual candidate country and, of course, its position in the international arena” would be taken into account in decision-making on accepting new members to expand, a bit later, BRICS. An updated list of candidate countries for BRICS membership, which was “suspension” for the time being, would still be prepared for consideration at October summit under Russia’s chairmanship.

Amid heightening of geopolitical changes, the forthcoming BRICS summit in Kazan on October 22-24 presents an opportunity, most possibly, to determine and review critical pending issues including the association’s structure, and membership. Ensuring qualitative geopolitical influence must be the key priority. Political and economic impact should be paramount instead of anti-western rhetoric and stringent confrontation. As the situation stands, the numerical strength of BRICS is equally important as well as creating the necessary instruments and taking step-by-step comprehensive measures for promoting global peace and future development-oriented aspirations. Despite positive achievements and future expectations, challenges remain. Perhaps, some of the new members with political divergences have already began to manipulate their national interest and therefore discrediting BRICS as demonstrated by Ethiopia and Egypt at the UN Generally Assembly in New York.

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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.

Europe is at a turning point: it could either become a world power or fall into decline and lose ground to its main international competitors, such as the United States or China, according to an analysis by Bloomberg.

The European Union is currently facing a series of challenges that call into question its viability as a relevant player at the international level and even lead to its certain downfall in several respects.

“After decades of warnings and sub-par growth, the region’s leaders are suddenly confronting a barrage of evidence that decline is becoming unstoppable,” the American outlet specialising in economics and finance warned.

The analysis highlights that a combination of political paralysis, external threats, and economic malaise could end the EU’s ambitions to become a global force. This situation, it suggests, leads its member states to prioritise their own interests above those of the bloc. The outlet added that these factors have made it clear that the EU has shown its inability to act as a homogeneous group in the face of economic, market, security, and defence problems, such as the conflict in Ukraine.

“Those developments all underpin the EU’s failure to act as a cohesive and dynamic economic bloc, eroding its status and degrading its capacity to respond to a wide range of threats from Chinese industrial policy to Russian military aggression, or even a future antagonistic administration in the US,” Bloomberg added.

The article cited analysts saying Europe is responding too slowly to global changes, including global warming, demographic change, and the shift to a post-industrial economy in which China has become a major competitor.

“Something is changing very, very dramatically and very, very deeply in this world,” former Polish President Aleksander Kwasniewski said in an interview with Bloomberg. “We can’t react correctly, because we are too slow.”

But the EU’s decline may have started even as early as the bloc’s monetary union, with another analysis by Bloomberg Economics suggesting the bloc’s economy would be about €3 trillion larger if it had kept pace with the US over the past 25 years.

In September, Mario Draghi, the former president of the European Central Bank (ECB), presented a plan to revitalise the European bloc while describing the danger of the region’s decline as an economic force.

“The foundations on which we built are now being shaken,” Draghi said in the introduction to his report. “This is an existential challenge.”

However, the analysis added that the report had not been received well, with some policymakers fearing the region is running out of room for manoeuvre.

“It’s obvious that Europe is falling behind its main trading partners, the US and China,” Greek Finance Minister Kostis Hatzidakis said in a September 24 interview. “If it doesn’t take immediate action, the decline will eventually become non reversible.”

It is recalled that in its semi-annual financial stability review in May this year, the ECB warned that European countries are “vulnerable to adverse shocks” arising from geopolitical tensions and persistently high interest rates due to their inability to continue reducing their public debt.

The ECB stressed that one year after the COVID-19 emergency, many European nations have not fully reversed the support measures introduced to protect consumers and businesses from the impact of the health emergency and, subsequently, the conflict in Ukraine. This, in turn, generated high inflationary levels and increases in energy prices. Added to this is the conflict in the Middle East and its influence on fuel prices.

The financial institution considered that “high debt levels and lenient fiscal policies could raise borrowing costs further and have negative financial stability effects, including via spillovers to private borrowers and to sovereign bond holders.” The ECB also said sovereign debt would likely remain elevated, pointing to “lax fiscal policies” as the main cause for concern.

Despite these slight advances, the European financial institution expects total public debt to remain above pre-pandemic levels, at 90% of GDP in 2024, and to increase slightly next year. Nonetheless, this points to the fact that the collective European economy is no longer comparable to that of the US and China and will be surpassed by India within the coming decades, ensuring that the bloc will not be the great power it envisages.

Not mentioned in the Bloomberg analysis or by the ECB, the major factor in the EU’s economic woes is the anti-Russia sanctions that have boomeranged. Germany, France, and Italy, the three biggest economies in the EU, are the countries that were the worst affected by the anti-Russia sanctions, which have dragged them down into recession. So long as the EU maintains sanctions on Russia, the bloc will never be able to recover, let alone compete with the US and China.

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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: Banksy does Brexit (detail) Image by dullhunk Creative Commons BY

Selected Articles: Does Your Feminism Include Palestine?

October 16th, 2024 by Global Research News

Does Your Feminism Include Palestine?

By Nour Jaghama and Grace Siegelman, October 16, 2024

Women’s Marches are being planned across the country ahead of Election Day to “show the strength of our feminist movement.” However, curiously missing from the talking points around the strength of the feminist movement is the women of Palestine – who have endured the brutality of anti-feminist policies for decades under the illegal occupation by Israel.

Video: There Never Was a COVID Pandemic. Prof. Michel Chossudovsky with Daniel Estulin

By Prof Michel Chossudovsky and Daniel Estulin, October 16, 2024

The lies were sustained by a massive media disinformation campaign. 24/7, incessant and repetitive “Covid alerts” in the course of more than three years. In turn, the ongoing fear campaign had devastating impacts on people’s health. The  historic March 11, 2020 lockdown triggered economic and social chaos Worldwide. It was an act of “economic warfare”: a war against humanity. 

Martinique Masses Continue Rebellion Against French Colonial System

By Abayomi Azikiwe, October 16, 2024

In the Caribbean Island of Martinique which remains under French colonial rule, social unrest has flared up again prompted by hyperinflation and the heavy-handed tactics utilized by security forces under the control of Paris.

COVID Roundup: Slew of 55 Toxic Chemicals Discovered in Current Shots, ‘Self-Amplifying’ mRNA Shots in Pipeline

By Ben Bartee, October 16, 2024

Dumping toxic chemicals in experimental drugs and not listing any of them on the insert, then cajoling corporations and government institutions to mandate them through fiat, is obviously immoral and illegal. The question is: what is the American government going to do about it?

More on Israeli Atrocities. Attacking UN Peacekeepers Is a Dangerous Policy

By Philip Giraldi, October 16, 2024

Spain, France, Ireland and Italy, all of which contribute to the peacekeepers force (UNIFIL), and which continued to look the other way when Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his band of war criminals committed atrocity after atrocity against Arabs, are now finding themselves mortified when European soldiers are being attacked and wounded by cannon fire from snipers and Israeli tanks.

Conspiracy Theory

Brace Yourselves: A Tsunami Approaches. “There Is Something Being Concocted in the Dens of Power”

By John W. Whitehead and Nisha Whitehead, October 16, 2024

While we squabble over which side is winning this losing battle to lead the country, there is something being concocted in the dens of power, far beyond the public eye, and it doesn’t bode well for the future of this country.

The Present State of Israel vs. the Israel of the Bible: Understanding the Difference. “The Present State of Israel Is Not the Israel of God”

By Prof. Ruel F. Pepa, October 16, 2024

The modern State of Israel, established in 1948 in the land of Palestine, is often erroneously equated with the Israel of the Bible, to whom God made significant promises. Many Christians, due to a misinterpretation of biblical prophecy and misunderstanding of historical facts, continue to view the current State of Israel as a continuation of biblical Israel, believing it to be the fulfillment of divine promises.

“What happened here was the gradual habituation of the people, little by little, to being governed by surprise; to receiving decisions deliberated in secret; to believing that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand, or so dangerous that, even if the people could understand it, it could not be released because of national security… And all the crises and reforms (real reforms, too) so occupied the people that they did not see the slow motion underneath, of the whole process of government growing remoter and remoter.”—Historian Milton Mayer, They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45

Brace yourself: a tsunami approaches.

While we squabble over which side is winning this losing battle to lead the country, there is something being concocted in the dens of power, far beyond the public eye, and it doesn’t bode well for the future of this country.

Anytime you have an entire nation so mesmerized by the antics of the political ruling class that they are oblivious to all else, you’d better beware.

Anytime you have a government that operates in the shadows, speaks in a language of force, and rules by fiat, you’d better beware.

And anytime you have a government so far removed from its people as to ensure that they are never seen, heard or heeded by those elected to represent them, you’d better beware.

We’ve got to get our priorities straight if we are to ever have any hope of maintaining any sense of freedom in America.

As long as we allow ourselves to be distracted, diverted, occasionally outraged, always polarized and content to view each other—rather than the government—as the enemy, we’ll never manage to present a unified front against tyranny (or government corruption and ineptitude) in any form.

Mind you, by “government,” I’m not referring to the highly partisan, two-party bureaucracy of the Republicans and Democrats. Rather, I’m referring to “government” with a capital “G,” the entrenched Deep State that is unaffected by elections, unaltered by populist movements, and has set itself beyond the reach of the law.

This is the hidden face of a government that has no respect for the freedoms of its citizenry.

So, stop with all of the excuses and the hedging and the finger-pointing and the pissing contests to see which side can out-shout, out-blame and out-spew the other.

Enough already with the short- and long-term amnesia that allows political sycophants to conveniently forget the duplicity, complicity and mendacity of their own party while casting blame on everyone else.

This is how evil wins.

This is how freedom falls and tyranny rises.

This is how good, generally decent people—having allowed themselves to be distracted with manufactured crises, polarizing politics, and fighting that divides the populace into warring us vs. them camps—fail to take note of the looming danger that threatens to wipe freedom from the map and place us all in chains.

The world has been down this road before, as historian Milton Mayer recounts in his seminal book on Hitler’s rise to power, They Thought They Were Free.

We are at our most vulnerable right now.

The gravest threat facing us as a nation is not extremism but despotism, exercised by a ruling class whose only allegiance is to power and money.

We’re in a national state of denial, yet no amount of escapism can shield us from the harsh reality that the danger in our midst is posed by an entrenched government bureaucracy that has no regard for the Constitution, Congress, the courts or the citizenry.

No matter how often the team colors change, the playbook remains the same. The leopard does not change its spots.

Scrape off the surface layers and you will find that nothing has changed.

The police state is still winning. We the people are still losing.

In fact, the American police state has continued to advance at the same costly, intrusive, privacy-sapping, Constitution-defying, heartbreaking, soul-scorching, relentless pace under the current Tyrant-in-Chief as it did under those who occupied the White House before him (Trump, Obama, Bush, Clinton, etc.).

Consider for yourselves:

  • Police haven’t stopped disregarding the rights of citizens.
  • SWAT teams haven’t stopped crashing through doors and terrorizing families.
  • The Pentagon and the Department of Homeland Security haven’t stopped militarizing and federalizing local police.
  • Schools haven’t stopped treating young people like hard-core prisoners.
  • For-profit private prisons haven’t stopped locking up Americans and immigrants alike at taxpayer expense.
  • Censorship hasn’t stopped.
  • The courts haven’t stopped marching in lockstep with the police state.
  • Government bureaucrats haven’t stopped turning American citizens into criminals.
  • The surveillance state hasn’t stopped spying on Americans’ communications, transactions or movements.
  • The TSA hasn’t stopped groping or ogling travelers.
  • Congress hasn’t stopped enacting draconian laws.
  • The Department of Homeland Security hasn’t stopped being a “wasteful, growing, fear-mongering beast.”
  • The military industrial complex hasn’t stopped profiting from endless wars abroad.
  • The Deep State’s shadow government hasn’t stopped calling the shots behind the scenes.
  • And the American people haven’t stopped acting like gullible sheep.

So you can try to persuade yourself that you are free, that you still live in a country that values freedom, and that it is not too late to make America great again, but to anyone who has been paying attention to America’s decline over the past century, it will be just another lie.

The German people chose to ignore the truth and believe the lie.

They were not oblivious to the horrors taking place around them. The warning signs were definitely there, blinking incessantly like large neon signs.

“Still,” historian Robert Gellately writes, “the vast majority voted in favor of Nazism, and in spite of what they could read in the press and hear by word of mouth about the secret police, the concentration camps, official anti-Semitism, and so on.”

The German people backed Hitler because for the majority of them, life was good.

In a nutshell, life was good because their creature comforts remained undiminished, their bank accounts remained flush, and they weren’t being discriminated against, persecuted, starved, beaten, shot, stripped, jailed and turned into slave labor.

Life is good in America, too.

Life is good in America as long as you’re able to keep sleep-walking through life, cocooning yourself in political fantasies that depict a world in which your party is always right and everyone else is wrong, and distracting yourself with bread-and-circus entertainment that bears no resemblance to reality.

Life is good in America as long as you don’t mind being made to pay through the nose for the government’s endless wars, subsidization of foreign nations, bloated workforce, secret agencies, fusion centers, private prisons, biometric databases, invasive technologies, arsenal of weapons, and every other budgetary line item that is contributing to the fast-growing wealth of the corporate elite at the expense of those who are barely making ends meet—that is, we the 99%. 

Life is good in America for the privileged few, but as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, it’s getting worse by the day for the rest of us.

So, please spare me the media hysterics and the outrage and the hypocritical double standards of those whose moral conscience appears to be largely dictated by their political loyalties.

Anyone who believes that the injustices, cruelties and vicious callousness of the U.S. government are unique to any one particular administration has not been paying attention.

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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.

The modern State of Israel, established in 1948 in the land of Palestine, is often erroneously equated with the Israel of the Bible, to whom God made significant promises. Many Christians, due to a misinterpretation of biblical prophecy and misunderstanding of historical facts, continue to view the current State of Israel as a continuation of biblical Israel, believing it to be the fulfillment of divine promises. However, this perspective is based on a flawed exegesis and a misunderstanding of the political motivations behind the establishment of the modern Israeli state. It is crucial to differentiate between the biblical Israel, a covenant people of God, and the modern state, which was created through political maneuvers and carries a Zionist agenda that is largely secular.

The Creation of Modern Israel: A Political Project

Image: Arthur Balfour (From the Public Domain)

The modern State of Israel was established through the Balfour Declaration of 1917, a document that signaled British support for the establishment of a Jewish homeland in Palestine. This was not an act of divine fulfillment, but a political deal made between the British government and influential figures like Baron Rothschild. The Balfour Declaration was part of a broader strategy during World War I, when Britain sought support from the Zionist movement—a political movement that aimed to establish a national homeland for Jews. Zionism, however, was not a religious movement. It was driven primarily by political and nationalist motives.

Zionism sought to gather Jews from around the world to form a state in Palestine, but it was not a movement grounded in the religious or moral mandates of the Bible. In fact, many leading Zionists were secular or even atheists. They envisioned a Jewish state not as the fulfillment of God’s covenant with the Israelites, but as a solution to the Jewish diaspora’s challenges, particularly after centuries of persecution and, most devastatingly, the Holocaust.

Zionism vs. Judaism: A Fundamental Difference

A critical point often overlooked is the distinction between Zionism and Judaism. Judaism is a religion with ancient roots, based on the Torah and the worship of the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Zionism, on the other hand, is a modern political ideology that seeks to establish and maintain a Jewish state, irrespective of religious beliefs.

Many Jews, both inside and outside Israel, oppose Zionism and the state of Israel, particularly due to the injustices committed against the Palestinians. Groups like Neturei Karta, an Orthodox Jewish movement, have long argued that the creation of a Jewish state before the coming of the Messiah is a violation of Jewish law. Additionally, many Jews around the world have expressed solidarity with Palestinians, recognizing the ongoing suffering inflicted upon them since the establishment of the Israeli state in 1948. Therefore, equating Zionism with Judaism is not only inaccurate but also unjust to the many Jews who oppose the state of Israel on both religious and moral grounds.

The Israel of the Bible: A Covenant People, Not a Political State

In the Bible, the term “Israel” refers to the descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, whom God chose as His covenant people. This choice was not based on their inherent worth but on God’s grace and His desire to use them to reveal His nature and will to the world. The biblical Israel was called to uphold God’s laws, promote justice, and embody holiness as a “light to the nations” (Isaiah 42:6). Central to this covenant was a relationship based on obedience to God’s commandments, justice, and mercy.

The promises made to Israel in the Bible were always conditional on their faithfulness to God. Throughout the Old Testament, Israel faced judgment and exile whenever they strayed from God’s commandments and engaged in injustice, idolatry, and immorality. For example, the prophet Amos condemned Israel’s failure to uphold justice, warning of God’s coming judgment: “Let justice roll on like a river, righteousness like a never-failing stream!” (Amos 5:24).

Given this biblical context, it is clear that the modern state of Israel, which operates as a secular nation-state with no overarching commitment to biblical principles, cannot be equated with the Israel of the Bible. The fact that a significant portion of Israeli citizens—around 60%—identify as atheists or secular further undermines the claim that the modern state represents the fulfillment of God’s covenant with His people.

The Misinterpretation of Biblical Prophecy

Many Christians who support the modern state of Israel do so under the belief that the re-establishment of a Jewish homeland in Palestine is a fulfillment of biblical prophecy. They point to passages like Genesis 12:3, where God tells Abraham, “I will bless those who bless you, and whoever curses you I will curse,” as evidence that Christians must unconditionally support the state of Israel.

However, this interpretation overlooks key aspects of biblical hermeneutics. First, the promises made to Abraham and his descendants were never solely about physical land but about their role in the spiritual redemption of humanity, culminating in the coming of Jesus Christ. Galatians 3:16 clarifies that these promises find their ultimate fulfillment in Christ: “The promises were spoken to Abraham and to his seed. Scripture does not say ‘and to seeds,’ meaning many people, but ‘and to your seed,’ meaning one person, who is Christ.”

Secondly, the physical land of Israel was always tied to the covenant relationship with God, which included moral and ethical responsibilities. The Israel of the Bible was to uphold justice, care for the poor, and live in obedience to God’s commandments. The modern state of Israel, by contrast, has been involved in an ongoing conflict with the Palestinians, many of whom have been displaced, oppressed, and subjected to what many call systemic injustice and violence. The ongoing conflict in Gaza, where the Israeli military has been accused of war crimes and the killing of innocent civilians, starkly contrasts with the biblical mandate for justice and mercy.

The Moral Failure of Christian Zionism

Christians who uncritically support the actions of the modern state of Israel, often citing biblical prophecy, have lost their moral compass. By turning a blind eye to the suffering of Palestinians, including Christians living in Gaza and the West Bank, these Christians betray the very message of the Gospel. Jesus Christ taught love, justice, and mercy—values that cannot be reconciled with the violent oppression of any people.

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Palestinian families walk through destroyed neighbourhoods in Gaza City on 24 November 2023 as the temporary truce between Hamas and the Israeli army takes effect (MEE/Mohammed al-Hajjar)

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Furthermore, Christians who support the political state of Israel based on their reading of the Bible have, in effect, created a distorted image of God—one that aligns more with nationalism and political power than with the God revealed in Jesus Christ. This is a dangerous misstep, as it replaces the God of justice and compassion with a strange god, one that blesses injustice and oppression.

Conclusion: The Present State of Israel Is Not the Israel of God

It is a profound error to equate the modern state of Israel with the Israel of the Bible. The current Israeli state is a political entity created through secular, Zionist aims, not the fulfillment of God’s covenant promises. It operates without regard for the biblical principles of justice, mercy, and righteousness that God commanded His people to follow.

Christians must recognize that the true Israel of God is not defined by nationality or land but by faithfulness to God’s will, as revealed in Jesus Christ. To continue supporting the state of Israel unconditionally, in the face of its moral failings and the ongoing suffering of the Palestinian people, is to abandon the teachings of Christ and to misinterpret the promises of Scripture. Let us, therefore, pursue peace, justice, and truth, remembering that God’s kingdom transcends earthly politics and boundaries.

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

Prof. Ruel F. Pepa is a Filipino philosopher based in Madrid, Spain. A retired academic (Associate Professor IV), he taught Philosophy and Social Sciences for more than fifteen years at Trinity University of Asia, an Anglican university in the Philippines. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

The Invention of the Land of Israel: From Holy Land to Homeland by Shlomo Sand (2012).

Zionism: A Brief History by Michael Stanislawski (2017).

The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine by Ilan Pappé (2006).

The Bible and the Land: An Encounter by André Trocmé (2010).

Christian Zionism: Road-map to Armageddon? by Stephen Sizer (2004).

Featured image: The Mosaic of Rehob, delineating the boundaries of the Land of Israel and the laws applying within. (Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0)

Does Your Feminism Include Palestine?

October 16th, 2024 by Nour Jaghama

Women’s Marches are being planned across the country ahead of Election Day to “show the strength of our feminist movement.” However, curiously missing from the talking points around the strength of the feminist movement is the women of Palestine – who have endured the brutality of anti-feminist policies for decades under the illegal occupation by Israel.

Nour, CODEPINK’s Palestinian-American organizer, shares a story of her grandmother’s sacrifice to take care of her children under occupation:

“In Palestine, Israeli forces routinely impose curfews on Palestinian villages, forcing Palestinians to stay confined in their homes after dusk. The penalty for the slightest movement outside — or even within their homes — can mean immediate arrest or being shot on sight. My mother often recounts a story of my grandmother risking her life during curfew one night. My uncle, who was an infant at the time, was crying for milk, and my grandmother, with no other choice, had to slip out into the night. She moved silently through the shadows, hiding from Israeli soldiers as she crossed the village to find milk for her baby. My mother still remembers the fear she felt, thinking it might be the last time she’d see her mother alive. But my grandmother returned safely because Palestinian women, shaped by decades of occupation and resistance, have learned to navigate the militarized reality that surrounds them, finding ways to perform even the most basic acts of care under unimaginable conditions.”

This story is not new or singular; Palestinian families have faced it on a daily basis for decades. It sparked our reflection on the co-option of feminism in the belly of the beast—where we’re writing from.

Nadia Alia wrote about the 2014 Israeli invasion in Gaza, citing many reporters detailing the “disproportionate” number of women and children victims during this violent attack. She then begged the question, what is a proportionate amount of women and children harmed during war and conflict? When did gender-based violence and violence towards the oppressed become an inevitable part of world relations? And if simply men were killed, would the crime scream quieter? When did we start weighing the scale of a tragedy based on gender — and when did we decide Palestinian men being murdered and imprisoned doesn’t impact their entire community?

Feminism may not be definitive, but at its heart is a commitment to family and community care — a stark contrast to militarism, which injects itself into every aspect of human life and erodes these fundamental values. Palestinian women embody this incompatible relationship between feminism and militarism through their constant resistance to the occupation’s infringement on their health, education, and ability to provide for their families. When the women of Palestine are forced to become breadwinners and protectors because Israel has murdered or imprisoned every man in their family, the necessity for feminism to include the women of Palestine is undeniable. To narrowly define feminism is to be inherently anti-feminist, as we are building new ways to be just, to be equitable, and to show up for our community every day — just as the women of Palestine do. However, co-opting feminism to enact harm and destruction to people and the planet is against all feminist principles and praxis. And to further assume a false sense of superiority over the communities that have been harmed by imperialism is not only inherently anti-feminist, it’s anti-human. Feminism, at its core, is antithetical to all forms of oppression, exploitation, and violence. Feminism devoid of intersectionality becomes a weapon for imperialists by depriving it of its otherwise inherently liberatory nature.

Alia’s writing from 2014 still rings clear today. We just passed a year marker of the October 7 act of resistance from Gazans defending their homeland and 76 years of Palestinians living in an open-air prison inside their own homes. Meanwhile, we head into an election season using feminism as a gateway towards further surveillance, policing, and genocide, both at home and in all corners of the earth. Women’s marches throughout the country won’t even utter the names of the hundreds of thousands of women killed in Palestine to date.

What is feminist about wanting to be the most lethal force in the world?

What is feminist about continuing to arm a genocidal war against Palestine and Lebanon?

What is feminist about using our tax dollars that should go towards natural disaster relief and healthcare to fund murder?

Supplying militarism under the guise of women’s empowerment is again not new. Still, the complacency and ignorance we see from elected officials here in the U.S. and those who appear to care for the well-being of women is always horrific and devastating. It cannot be overstated: there are no feminist bombs, feminist prisons, feminist cops, or feminist wars. There are only paid actors who have convinced people that their eventual demise and the demise of the planet is what will empower their lives today.

Israel’s occupation of Palestine creates a constant state of fear and instability, eroding the rights, safety, and dignity of millions, particularly Palestinian women who bear the weight of war and imperial feminism in devastating ways. CODEPINK started as an immediate reaction to the 2002 Bush Administration creeping closer to invading Iraq based on ‘saving women and children’ only to cause over 15,000 women in Iraq to be killed. The ‘rescue’ narrative we have seen play out in Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Palestine, and all across the globe from imperial players like the U.S., Great Britain, and Israel has truly shown the lengths that liberal, western feminism will go to justify the oppression of the women and children it claims to save. It reveals the true intent this movement has for feminism: to keep the status quo and to keep marginalized lives, as Marc Lemont Hill describes it, “directly tied to the needs and interests of the powerful.”

Feminist education, activism, and community care must always come from a place of love and understanding but must also be in steadfast values of abolition and divestment. We cannot let ourselves be co-opted to kill Palestinians. We cannot allow our work to be undermined to kill the people of the Congo, of Sudan, of Yemen, of Ukraine, of Russia. And we must not let our lives and choices be tied to a small group of people reaping the benefits of war.

To support Palestinian liberation means embracing a vision of feminism that stands firmly against militarism, imperialism, and colonialism. It means committing to fight for the rights of Palestinian women and all women who are oppressed in the name of advancing imperialist interests. Feminism calls us to see the connection between the liberties we fight for at home and the rights denied to women and girls across the globe. A genuinely feminist stance fights for a world where no woman, no child, and no community live under the constant threat of violence. Supporting Palestine is about embodying this vision, standing in solidarity, and fighting for a world where imperialism and colonialism are universally resisted.

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

Nour Jaghama is CODEPINK’s Palestine and Iran Campaigner. Nour graduated from DePaul University with a bachelor’s degree in International Studies in June 2022. She has been advocating for Palestinian liberation for over 5 years, including organizing within her university. She also organizes around related issues, such as abolition.

Grace Siegelman is CODEPINK’s digital engagement manager and feminist foreign policy project coordinator. Her organizing and research focus on prison and police abolition, queer theory, gendered violence and anti-war efforts. She connects her own work to the communities in Chicago and communities across the globe, in Palestine, Yemen and Cuba.

Featured image is from CODEPINK

That Israel is now attacking United Nations peacekeepers in south Lebanon might well be decisive in turning its few remaining “friends” against it.

Spain, France, Ireland and Italy, all of which contribute to the peacekeepers force (UNIFIL), and which continued to look the other way when Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his band of war criminals committed atrocity after atrocity against Arabs, are now finding themselves mortified when European soldiers are being attacked and wounded by cannon fire from snipers and Israeli tanks.

In one incident, Israeli armored vehicles smashed their way through the gate of a UNIFIL base, allegedly using chemical weapons that injured 15 UN soldiers. The Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez is urging Europeans to cut off all trade and especially weapons sales with Israel. French President Emmanuel Macron declared an embargo on selling weapons to Israel and called for an immediate ceasefire while several prime ministers have all expressed their “outrage” at the Israeli actions. Even the occupied-by-Israel UK declared itself to be “appalled.” Giorgia Meloni of Italy observed that two bases manned by Italians soldiers had been hit. Her Minister of Defense Guido Crosetto called the attack on the UNIFIL bases “totally unacceptable,” elaborating that

“This was not a mistake and not an accident. It could constitute a war crime and represents a very serious violation of international military law.”

He might have also added that since it was a gross violation of the UN Charter countries including permanent Security Council members China and Russia are demanding a full investigation of what took place.

As usual, Israel portrayed itself as the innocent victim surrounded by evil neighbors. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has called on the UN chief to remove the UN peacekeepers who are now deployed in southern Lebanon. He claimed, without providing any evidence, that UNIFIL was serving as a

“human shield to Hezbollah terrorists… This endangers both [those in UNIFIL] and the lives of our soldiers… Mr. Secretary General, get the UNIFIL forces out of harm’s way. It should be done right now, immediately.”

The reality is, of course, that anyone encountering armed Israelis is automatically in “harm’s way,” ask any Palestinian. The Israeli armed forces, having already killed scores of UN workers during their 13-month siege of Gaza, appear set to double down and take on UN peacekeeping forces on their mission to expand the war to Syria and Iran. United Nations Secretary General Antonio Guterres has thus far refused to remove UNIFIL.

Regarding UNIFIL, the United States characteristically played its usual game of protecting Israel and throwing in a couple of misrepresentations of fact while saying nothing substantive. A National Security Council spokesman said that the White House is “deeply concerned” by reports Israel fired on the UN peacekeeper headquarters and bases in south Lebanon.

“We understand Israel is conducting targeted operations near the Blue Line to destroy Hezbollah infrastructure that could be used to threaten Israeli citizens. While they undertake these operations, it is critical that they not threaten UN peacekeepers’ safety and security.”

It was an all too rare expression of the reality that the United States is being dragged into a war in which it has no real interests by a ruthless client state that has been able to buy or coerce nearly all Congressmen into cheering and singing its song while also controlling much of the relevant bureaucracy and the White House itself. It is also being reported that a beefed up CIA station at the US Embassy in Beirut is collecting information on Hezbollah that is passed on to Israel to assist in its targeting.

It is not the first attack by Israel on United Nations personnel and it will probably not be the last as the Israel Occupation Force (IOF) has been de facto waging war against the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) in Gaza over the past year, targeting and killing its personnel and denying or blocking its largely humanitarian mission. And the United Nations is also a target more generally speaking. At his most recent visit to the UN in New York, the monstrous Netanyahu exhibited a new low even for him, shouting to a nearly empty General Assembly room that the UN has become a “swamp of antisemitic bile,” again playing his favorite tune that Israel is always the victim. And the US has played a role in that campaign, denying any funding to the UNRWA denying any funding to the UNRWA and other international humans rights bodies while also attacking the UN’s broader mission which has been to prevent wars of choice like what is occurring in what was once Palestine.

Inevitably, however, the Zionist fanatics in power in Washington are still motivated to ride the Israeli horse no matter who Netanyahu marks for death, leading to strident calls in Congress, mostly coming from Christian Zionist Republicans, to defund or even leave the United Nations completely. Given Donald Trump’s total fealty to Israel, it is something he just might consider doing if he is reelected. And the threats from individual congressmen to kill UN officials as well as justices and their families who serve on the international courts are all part of what one is hearing.

Image: Former white house advisor Matthew Brodsky [Social media/X]

Former white house advisor Matthew Brodsky [Social media/X]

One particularly charming threat comes from a Jewish former White House advisor Matthew Brodsky, who has lived and studied in Israel. Brodsky recommended in a tweet on X that Israel should attack Irish peacekeepers in South Lebanon, suggesting what kind of advice the White House and Congress are accustomed to receive regarding Israel and Palestine from their overwhelmingly Jewish foreign policy team, which consists of nearly all confirmed Zionists, including President Biden, and also includes a number of dual nationals who hold Israeli citizenship. Brodsky’s background includes briefing members of Congress, the Department of State, Department of Defense and the National Security Council on Iran, Syria and Palestinian-Israeli issues.

Brodsky is currently a Senior Fellow at the Gold Institute for International Strategy and a former Director of Policy at the Jewish Policy Center. He wrote that:

“Israel should carpet bomb the Irish area and then drop napalm over it.”

The tweet included a map showing the deployment of Ireland’s peacekeeping force in Southern Lebanon, presumably to help guide the Israeli pilots.

There is considerable evidence that Brodsky is far from alone in expressing his complete loyalty to Israel no matter what crimes it commits. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, also Jewish and possibly a dual national, has been acting as Israel’s lawyer, complete with lies about Israeli behavior to cover-up war crimes like the deliberate starving of the Gazan people that equates to genocide. And he is joined in the Middle East by Amos Hochstein, Joe Biden’s personal roving ambassador to the region, who reportedly connived at Israel’s recent invasion of Lebanon. And clearly there is a long tradition of asserting Jewish supremacism within the upper levels of the US government. Last year Stuart Seldowitz, a former US State Department official, was filmed in New York City threatening an ethnic Egyptian halal food street vendor, calling him a terrorist. Seldowitz was recorded saying that the death of 4,000 Palestinian children “wasn’t enough”, highlighting legitimate concerns about anti-Palestinian sentiment among some former US officials. Seldowitz worked for former State Secretary Madeline Albright, who in a shocking interview once justified the killing of 500,000 Iraqi children, stating her view that the killings were “worth it”.

So where do we go from here.

Sometimes recognizing that we have a problem can be the first step in coming up with a solution. To my mind, the rot started with President Harry Truman, who sold out to Jewish money and media power in the 1948 creation of the state of Israel, which real statesmen like Secretary of State George Marshall warned against.

Some would put the betrayal earlier, with the creation of the Federal Reserve Bank in 1913. In any event, it is now counter to actual US interests to be so totally subservient to Israeli priorities. A good first step would be to require the constituent groups that make up the Israel Lobby to register as foreign agents under the Foreign Agents Registration Act of 1938, which would require them to reveal their sources of income and their connections to Israel. It would also prohibit them from interfering in US politics. In addition, it does not make sense to send American Ambassadors and Emissaries to Israel who are far more loyal to Israel than to the United States, as the last several have been. Nor does it make sense to have a Jewish/Zionist Secretary of State backed up by a largely Jewish staff and White House cabinet to carry out diplomacy in the Middle East. Diplomacy is precisely what Blinken has not been doing and if he had any decency, which he does not, he would in any event recuse himself from involvement with anything having to do with Israel.

The unconditional ironclad pledge to defend a nation carrying out a genocide while simultaneously seeking to go to war with all its neighbors is a formula for initiating World War 3, which will kill millions of people. Indeed, Biden, who has been discussing with Netanyahu how to attack Iran, has now deployed to Israel a $1.15 billion Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) missile defense system to be manned by 100 American soldiers on the ground in Israel. The Washington Post is reporting that Israel has decided to attack military sites in Iran before the US election. This is just what Netanyahu wants as he will initiate a new conflict with Iran, Iran will retaliate, possibly killing US military based inside Israel, and bingo the US will be at war. In truth, the world needs less of a rabid dog Jewish state calling the shots as well as less of a corrupted and befuddled America dedicated to protecting the ravening beast. International lawyer John Whitbeck has described the current reality best:

“By their venality, cowardice, moral bankruptcy and near-treason, the American political class is flushing a once great country down history’s toilet, and the Global West, if it does not liberate itself from domination by the Israeli-American Empire, risks a similar fate.”

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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: UNIFIL peacekeepers patrol between Ras Naqoura and Labounieh along the Blue Line in southwestern Lebanon. © UNIFIL/Pasqual Gorriz

COVID Propaganda Roundup: The latest updates on the “new normal” – chronicling the lies, distortions, and abuses by the ruling class.

Mask Mandates Return to Blue America

Via Gateway Pundit (emphasis added):

“This month, Santa Clara County decided that everyone — patients, caregivers, and healthcare providers alike — must don the all-too-familiar face masks in public patient care areas in hospitals, clinics, and long-term care facilities. This directive is not for a week or a month but for the entire “winter respiratory virus period,”Mercury News reported.

This mandate is slated to span from November 1 to the end of March. That’s a whole five months of mask-wearing, in spite of declining COVID cases.

Marin County has jumped on the bandwagon, implementing a comparable order. As if that weren’t enough, Alameda, San Mateo, Contra Costa, and Sonoma counties aren’t far behind, mandating their healthcare workers to be masked up in patient care areas starting this week.”

Study: Over Four Dozen Undisclosed Toxic Chemicals Discovered in COVID Shots 

Via International Journal of Vaccine Theory, Practice, and Research (emphasis added):

We report laboratory results from high precision Inductively Coupled Plasma Mass Spectrometry (ICP-MS) that confirm and expand previous results by SEM-EDX. To this end, the contents of vials from different lots of the brands AstraZeneca/Oxford, CanSino Biologics, Pfizer/BioNTech, Sinopharm, Moderna and Sputnik V were analyzed. Among the undeclared chemical elements were detected 11 of the 15 cytotoxic lanthanides used in electronic devices and optogenetics. In addition, among the undeclared elements were all 11 of the heavy metals: chromium was found in 100% of the samples; arsenic 82%; nickel 59%; cobalt and copper 47%; tin 35%; cadmium, lead and manganese in 18%; and mercury in 6%. A total of 55 undeclared chemical elements were found and quantified with ICP-MS.”

Dumping toxic chemicals in experimental drugs and not listing any of them on the insert, then cajoling corporations and government institutions to mandate them through fiat, is obviously immoral and illegal.

The question is: what is the American government going to do about it?

If Mamala’s masters retains power, the firm answer is definitely nothing, but even if Trump somehow overcomes the election rigging, the answer is probably nothing — unless he makes good on his pledge and appoints RFK Jr. to a top position to take a blowtorch to the pharmaceutical industry and Public Health™ institutions.

Adverse Side Effects: Mechanisms Explained

Recently published research sheds light on the mechanisms by which two key ingredients — lipid nanoparticles (LPNs), polyethene glycol (PEG) — along with the spike proteins the shots are designed to trigger production of, drive inflammation, anaphylaxis, heart attacks, and the other reactions we have seen in the injected by the thousands, if not millions.

Via Diseases (emphasis added):

Acute adverse reactions to COVID-19 mRNA vaccines are a major concern, as autopsy reports indicate that deaths most commonly occur on the same day of or one day following vaccination. These acute reactions may be due to cytokine storms triggered by lipid nanoparticles (LNPs) and anaphylaxis induced by polyethene glycol (PEG), both of which are vital constituents of the mRNA-LNP vaccines. Kounis syndrome, in which anaphylaxis triggers acute coronary syndrome (ACS), may also be responsible for these cardiovascular events. Furthermore, COVID-19 mRNA-LNP vaccines encompass adjuvants, such as LNPs, which trigger inflammatory cytokines, including interleukin (IL)-1β and IL-6. These vaccines also produce spike proteins which facilitate the release of inflammatory cytokines. Apart from this, histamine released from mast cells during allergic reactions plays a critical role in IL-6 secretion, which intensifies inflammatory responses.”

Let us never forget, nor forgive, the Public Health™ and corporate media criminals who assured you these were “safe and effective” products despite having never been tested sufficiently on humans and who ought to be on trial via military tribunal for crimes against humanity.

UK: New Massive Study Drops on Injected Kids and Myocarditis

Via Slay News (emphasis added):

A major study involving 1.7 million children has found that heart damage only appeared in children who had received Covid mRNA vaccines.

Not a single unvaccinated child in the group suffered from heart-related problems.

In addition, the researchers note zero children from the entire group, vaccinated or unvaccinated, died from COVID-19.

Furthermore, the study found that Covid shots offered the children very little protection from the virus, with many becoming infected after just 14 to 15 weeks of receiving an injection.”

Via MedRxiv (emphasis added):

“With the approval of NHS England, we conducted an observational study in the OpenSAFELY-TPP database, including a) adolescents aged 12-15 years, and b) children aged 5-11 years and comparing individuals receiving i) first vaccination with unvaccinated controls and ii) second vaccination to single-vaccinated controls. We matched vaccinated individuals with controls on age, sex, region, and other important characteristics…

Amongst 820,926 previously unvaccinated adolescents, the incidence rate ratio (IRR) for positive SARS-CoV-2 test comparing vaccination with no vaccination was 0.74 (95% CI 0.72-0.75), although the 20-week risks were similar

There were no COVID-19-related deaths in any group. Fewer than seven (exact number redacted) COVID-19-related critical care admissions occurred in the adolescent first dose vs unvaccinated cohort. Among both adolescents and children, myocarditis and pericarditis were documented only in the vaccinated groups, with rates of 27 and 10 cases/million after first and second doses respectively.”

‘Self-amplifying’ mRNA Shots Hit Japanese Market, Destined for America 

Via Children’s Health Defense (emphasis added):

Japan is offering a self-amplifying mRNA vaccine as one of the five routine COVID-19 vaccines available to the public for the 2024-2025 fall and winter seasons.

Japanese regulators approved the ARCT-154 shot in November 2023. According to a press release, ARCT-154 is the world’s first self-amplifying mRNA COVID-19 vaccine. Japan’s Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare approved the vaccine for adults. It is jointly produced by the biotechnology firm CSL and Arcturus Therapeutics.

“The approval is based on positive clinical data from several ARCT-154 studies … which achieved higher immunogenicity results and a favorable safety profile compared to a standard mRNA COVID-19 vaccine comparator,” CSL said.

Japan’s vaccination program will offer the vaccines to people 65 and over, and 60- to 64-year-olds with severe underlying conditions, at a maximum cost of 7,000 yen (approximately $47). People not in these two categories can also receive the shots, but the fee will not be capped.”

What makes these shots — which were only tested on 800 people and produced a 90% adverse event rate prior to Japan approving them — “self-amplifying” is that they contain, in addition to the traditional mRNA in the current generation of COVID shots, RNA-dependent RNA polymerase (RdRp) that turbocharges spike protein production.

Continuing:

“Epidemiologist Nicolas Hulscher told The Defender, “These products are completely new. There is absolutely no long-term safety data on them.”…

Hulscher told The Defender that the risks associated with self-amplifying mRNA vaccines “are likely far greater than the risks of conventional mRNA injections.”

[Professor of microbiology Karina Acevedo] Whitehouse explained how self-amplifying mRNA injections are different than synthetic mRNA injections. Synthetic mRNA vaccines contain foreign mRNA that the body’s cells translate into a protein.

Self-amplifying mRNA injections also contain a foreign protein — but in addition, they contain an enzyme that instructs the body on how to make more mRNA.

Whitehouse said, “The function of this enzyme — RNA-dependent RNA polymerase (RdRp) — is to copy RNA,” which means that “once the cell produces the RdRp, it will make new copies of the foreign mRNA as well as more copies of its own instructions.” likening this function to that of a photocopier.

She likened the process to how a photocopier works. “It keeps going and going and going, making more copies that, in turn, help make more copies,” Whitehouse said.”

 

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

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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

Daniel Estulin interviewed Prof. Michel Chossudovsky on his article “There Never Was a “New Corona Virus,” There Never Was a Pandemic“.

Here is an excerpt from the article:

Destabilizing the social, political and economic structure of 190 sovereign countries cannot constitute  a “solution” to combating a novel coronavirus  which mysteriously emerged in Wuhan, Hubei province (PRC) in late December 2019. That was the imposed “solution” —implemented in several stages from the very outset–, leading to The March 2020 Lockdown and the Rollout of a so-called Covid 19 “Vaccine” in December 2020, which since its inception has resulted in an upward trend in excess mortality. 

It’s the destruction of people’s lives Worldwide. It is the destabilization of civil society.

Fake science was supportive of this devastating agenda. The lies were sustained by a massive media disinformation campaign. 24/7, Incessant and Repetitive “Covid alerts” in the course of more than three years. In turn, the ongoing fear campaign had devastating impacts on people’s health

The  historic March 11, 2020 lockdown triggered economic and social chaos Worldwide. It was an act of “economic warfare”: a war against humanity. 

The New Virus: 2019-nCoV

The official story is that a dangerous NEW VIRUS was detected in Wuhan, Hubei Province, China in December 2019. It was entitled 2019-nCoV which stands for “2019 New (n) Corona (Co) Virus (V)”.

On  January 1, 2020, “the Chinese health authorities closed the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in Wuhan following Western media reports claiming that wild animals sold there may have been the source of the virus.

As of early January 2020, it was the object of extensive media coverage and an unfolding Worldwide fear campaign.  Media disinformation 24/7 went into high gear.

The Chinese authorities (allegedly) “identified a new type of virus” on January 7, 2020, using the RT-PCR test. No specific details were provided regarding the process of isolation of the virus.

Click here to read the full article.

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Click the image below or click here to watch the interview.

.

 

Below link to the article: 

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There Never Was a “New Corona Virus”, There Never Was a Pandemic

By Prof Michel Chossudovsky, September 21, 2024

 

 

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


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

In the Caribbean Island of Martinique which remains under French colonial rule, social unrest has flared up again prompted by hyperinflation and the heavy-handed tactics utilized by security forces under the control of Paris.

Due to its colonial dependency the rate of rising prices in Martinique far exceeds that of the colonial power in France.

During September thousands of people took to the streets in response to the escalating prices for food and other consumer goods. Riot police from France were deployed to put down the unrest which involved industrial actions among the workers.

Nonetheless, despite the repressive atmosphere, people rose up at an even larger level starting on October 9 shutting down the airport. The center of the unrest in the latest outbreak took place in the two largest urban areas of Fort-de-France and Le Lamentin.

The French prefect Jean-Christophe Bouvier declared an emergency and imposed a curfew in the two cities. Between October 10-13, at least one person was killed while many others were wounded including twelve gendarmes.

There were reports of property damage and the taking of consumer goods. These actions illustrated the desperate conditions under which the population of approximately 350, 000 people are forced to live.

A police station was set on fire along with several automobiles. Roadblocks were set up by the people to bring attention to the broad dissatisfaction which exists within the Island.

Food prices in Martinique are on average 40 percent higher than those in France. This is undoubtedly a result of the subordinate political situation in comparison to what has prevailed in France.

The latest round of demonstrations and civil unrest erupted on the day prior to the holding of a scheduled meeting between representatives of the struggle and the French colonial authorities. People in Martinique want policy changes and not more empty promises coming from the authorities who have nothing to offer except maintaining the status quo through coercion and state violence.

On October 10, rumors circulated that a new contingent of French police would be arriving at the airport in Fort-de-France. People marched to the area in efforts to halt their deployment aimed at suppressing the people protesting the rapidly deteriorating economic conditions.

Controversial French riot police units were deployed in September after the labor actions and mass demonstrations. It had been declared that these security forces would not be utilized in the uprising since they were banned after the suppression of similar unrest in 1959 when people were brutalized and killed.

In a report published by Euro News and the Associated Press on October 10, it emphasized that:

“On Thursday night, protesters overran the tarmac on the airport in the island’s capital, Fort-de-France, and tried to force their way into the main entrance, where hundreds of passengers had taken shelter, according to videos posted on social media. Police securing the entrance were seen fending off assaults from the demonstrators and firing what appears to be tear gas in their direction. The airport later said on Facebook that flights had been suspended. Three planes carrying some 1,000 passengers had to be diverted to the nearby island of Guadeloupe on Thursday, Martinique local prefecture said in its statement. Another 500 passengers who were supposed to board those flights were stuck at the Fort-de-France airport, it said.” 

These demonstrations were launched by the Assembly for the Protection of Afro-Caribbean Peoples and Resources. The organization has charged the French colonial state of racial and social discrimination against the population which is overwhelmingly of African descent.

People in French Colonies Are Demanding Autonomy and Independence

The situation in Martinique is by no means isolated from developments in other territories controlled by Paris. In recent years there have been mass demonstrations, strikes and rebellions against the exploitative and oppressed conditions imposed by successive French governments.

President Emmanuel Macron has consistently opposed greater autonomy and national liberation in the colonies which are located in the Indian Ocean, the Caribbean, South America and the Pacific. New Caledonia, also known as Kanaky, was the scene of mass demonstrations during May when the French government sent in troops to put down a rebellion that resulted in the deaths of 7 people.

The people of New Caledonia were protesting against a new law which would grant the right to vote to non-indigenous people in efforts to thwart the demands for self-determination and independence in the Southwest Pacific territory. In 1988 amid a protracted struggle demanding self-rule, the Noumea Treaty was signed in order to curtail the unrest.

A state of emergency was declared in May by the colonial state which lasted for two weeks. New Caledonia is located thousands of miles away from Europe where the French government is based.

The proposed bill by the French government has still not been withdrawn by Macron despite the widespread opposition to the legislation in the Southwest Pacific territory. Macron visited the area earlier in the year and said that there should be dialogue in New Caledonia over the merits of the bill.

In the territory known as French Guiana located on the north coast of South America, the conditions of the people have worsened in recent years as a result of illegal mining, impoverishment and a skyrocketing crime rate. Although the people have demanded greater autonomy in a referendum held in 2020, no changes have been allowed by the government in Paris.

In the geographical proximity of Martinique, other French controlled areas are facing a similar fate. The Anadolu news agency reporting on the situation noted in June:

“The Caribbean Island of Guadeloupe, with a population of 400,000 people located approximately 7,000 kilometers from France, is experiencing security difficulties due to crime rates that are six times higher than the French national average and armed robbery rates that are 20 times higher. Due to the increasing involvement of young people in crimes, a curfew was imposed in April for Pointe-a-Pitre, the commercial capital of the island, for those younger than 18. There were intense protests on the island due to lockdown measures implemented by the French government during the coronavirus pandemic. France sent security forces to the region to suppress protests spreading in Martinique from other colonies.” 

Other contested areas under French colonial control are Reunion in the Indian Ocean east of Madagascar, Mayotte also in the Indian Ocean’s northern Mozambique Channel and French Polynesia in the South Pacific. All of these territories continue to be denied the right to self-determination for their people.

Although the popular views internationally are that classic colonialism was a phenomenon of the 15th to the 20th centuries, in regard to France and other imperialist states, external political and economic domination is still very much the order of the day. The social conditions in these geo-political regions are worsening as the crisis in the world capitalist system becomes more acute.

A Way Out for the People

The only real solution to the continuing crises of colonialism and neo-colonialism is the unity and genuine independence of the oppressed nations. These areas which remain under European domination must unite in a political struggle to win their independence and social emancipation.

The situation today in Martinique illustrates clearly that the movement against colonial domination remains an important aspect of the world movement for freedom against imperialism. Nonetheless, judging from the lessons of the 20th century, the demand for autonomy, self-determination and independence can only achieve effective results when it is combined with the efforts to break the chains of economic dependency.

Developments in the Sahel region of West Africa in recent years have exposed several contradictions within independent states. Although these countries were members of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), United Nations and the African Union (AU), continuing reliance on France, the United States and its NATO allies represents an extension of the colonial and neo-colonial projects.

The African states and the African Diaspora should by all means advocate and organize for the total emancipation from colonialism and neo-colonialism. As a well-known Martinican, Dr. Frantz Fanon, said more than six decades ago:

“So, comrades, let us not pay tribute to Europe by creating states, institutions and societies which draw their inspiration from her. Humanity is waiting for something other from us than such an imitation, which would be almost an obscene caricature. If we want to turn Africa into a new Europe, and America into a new Europe, then let us leave the destiny of our countries to Europeans. They will know how to do it better than the most gifted among us. But if we want humanity to advance a step farther, if we want to bring it up to a different level than that which Europe has shown it, then we must invent and we must make discoveries. If we wish to live up to our peoples’ expectations, we must seek the response elsewhere than in Europe.” 

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

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

Featured image is from the author