All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the Translate Website button below the author’s name.
To receive Global Research’s Daily Newsletter (selected articles), click here.
Follow us on Instagram and Twitter and subscribe to our Telegram Channel. Feel free to repost and share widely Global Research articles.
***
A trolley load of books, chapters and treatises have been written on the subject of sovereignty. Usually, the concept entails control and power, the latter a corollary of the former. In international law, sovereignty finds some form of expression in the Montevideo Convention of 1933 but can hardly be seen as exhaustive. In truth, the concept is a fruit-salad and medley, an “organized hypocrisy”, as Stephen D. Krasner describes it.
All of this leaves some room for the pantomime element sovereignty might allow: the eccentric who declares his own principality; the refusenik determined to avoid the taxing authorities; the clerical error that might spawn a new creation. That such entities are permitted to exist, however, lies in an enduring conceit. No army in modern times – barring, exception – is going to expend its resources against daft declarations of sovereignty over randomly picked stretches of land. The problem lies, however, in the risks, or lack of them, such declarations pose to the central authorities.
An exceedingly colourful personality, streaked with lunacy, is probably key to this. Take Louis Marinelli, a figure long associated with efforts to make California secede from the United States. Following the 2016 US election, Marinelli decided to open a foreign embassy in Moscow to represent the Independent Republic of California. The embassy shares the same office building with the Russian Anti-Globalization movement, which has also thrown in a measure of support.
In creating the centre, Marinelli acknowledged its limitations. It served no “diplomatic function” at the time and Russians wishing to travel to California had to go through the US Embassy. But he dared dream of independence. “That notion is embedded in the very question we intend to put before the voters: ‘Should California become a free, sovereign, and independent country.’” This remains, to put it mildly, a work in progress.
Marinelli’s efforts are hardly fleeting, nor remotely odd. The micronation experiment flutters and snaps in the wind, a persistent phenomenon. One need only recall the efforts of the Segway inventor Dean Kamen, self-proclaimed ruler of the Kingdom of Dumpling off the coast of Connecticut, to convince President George H.W. Bush to sign a faux non-aggression pact.
Sociologist Judy Lattas could only wonder in 2005 why there was “no significant study in the scholarly press on the micronationalism that is the contemporary phenomenon of ordinary people (however quirky), in long-established democracies, getting the idea to create their own countries”.
Of all the countries on planet Earth most addicted to the concept of micronations, Australia is exceptional, a truly idiosyncratic wonder. Size, a blood-soaked frontier history and an addled penal past may account for why a third of them have found a home there, giving Australia the title of being “Micronation Central”. Matt Siegel, writing for The Atlantic, suggested that such a micronation obsession might have arisen from that tired description of larrikinism supposedly inherent in the Australian character.
In 1970, perhaps the most famous of these colourful upstarts, the Principality of Hutt River, was founded by Leonard Casley. A 76-square-kilometre property in Western Australia’s mid west became the subject of interest for Casley, who had bickered over wheat production quotas in 1970.
That year, in letters addressed to Australia’s Governor General, the West Australian Premier, and the Governor of Western Australia, Casley claimed to be formally seceding and called upon all parties to “resolve co-operatively and mutually successfully this problem”. In time, his curious entity secured some 13,000 citizens worldwide, even though never having more than a population of 30 or so. Hutt River currency was issued, along with entrance visas to curious visitors. Residents were exempted from income tax, though this proved unenforceable.
In December 1977, Prince Leonard even made a declaration of war via telegram to the Governor-General of Australia, hoping that the gesture would grant his principality serious standing. The true inspiration for that was his perennial bugbear, the Australian Tax Office. The declaration was ignored in Canberra and withdrawn a few days later without a single shot fired.
In 2020, the Royal Hutt River Legion Major Richard Ananda Barton announced that his principality would rejoin the Commonwealth of Australia. “His Highness, Prince Graeme, has informed me that the Government of the Principality of Hutt River has decided to dissolve the Principality, which will, once again, become part of the Commonwealth of Australia.”
Two legal academics, Harry Hobbs and George Williams, recently considered this curious subject and concluded that Australia, in contrast to many states, “largely ignores micronations (and Indigenous nations) provided they comply with taxation and other laws.” They advance three reasons why this might be so: that Australia has a culture appreciative of those who thumb “their nose at authority”; that the country’s sense of sovereignty is secure and stable; and a combination of factors relating to demography and geography.
The implications of the last two factors should be clear enough. Australia remains one of the most urbanised countries on the planet, with 89% of individuals concentrated in urban centres. And given that there are 25 million or so individuals spread across a continent spanning 7.6 million square kilometres, the room for threatening and meaningful declarations of independence seems rather small.
This is not, however, to say that overt threats to secede have not ruffled a few feathers. Western Australia’s effort in the 1930s, spurred on by the Dominion League and the Great Depression, was considered serious enough to require obstruction by both the Australian Commonwealth and Britain. The 1933 state referendum result was overwhelmingly in favour of secession, emboldening a state delegation to journey to the British Parliament to make their case of becoming a self-governing Dominion within the British Empire.
Westminster’s response was fairly typical: the establishment of a Joint Select Committee that concluded that the delegation’s petition could not be legally entertained. The 1931 Statute of Westminster had granted Australia dominion authority, thereby making Canberra the arbiter as to whether WA could secede.
In the end, the only reason why such micronations are tolerated must lie in their unthreatening, idiosyncratic nature. Their ineffectualness is what saves them from destruction and prevents their official recognition. President Abraham Lincoln showed the Confederate States how a threatening effort backed by force of arms to separate from the United States could play out. The Civil War that followed cost 620,000 lives and entrenched the holy mystery of the compact that is the Union.
From Turkey to China, secessionist movements are targeted as genuine threats to the national unit, its advocates to be put down, incarcerated and crushed. But in the absence of guns, a coherent ideology, and the presence of maddening humour, the micronations of the world can only multiply.
*
Note to readers: Please click the share buttons above. Follow us on Instagram and Twitter and subscribe to our Telegram Channel. Feel free to repost and share widely Global Research articles.
Dr. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He currently lectures at RMIT University. He is a regular contributor to Global Research and Asia-Pacific Research. Email: [email protected]
All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the Translate Website button below the author’s name.
To receive Global Research’s Daily Newsletter (selected articles), click here.
Follow us on Instagram and Twitter and subscribe to our Telegram Channel. Feel free to repost and share widely Global Research articles.
***
First Washington supported a soft coup against Pakistan’s Prime Minister Imran Khan. Then the unelected regime banned his speeches, charged him with “terrorism,” and banned him from politics. Now a failed assassination attempt may be the straw that breaks the camel’s back.
Pakistanis have been out on the streets protesting in the millions over the past few months. Even though the country has been afflicted by the horrific floods, the political momentum for radical change has not abated.
An assassination attempt on former Prime Minister Imran Khan this November has brought matters to a tipping point. Today, Khan’s popularity as a political leader and public figure is at its peak – a fact even his detractors will concede.
And this is precisely what has got him into trouble.
Khan was ousted in a regime-change operation at the beginning of April. We can now conclusively say that the group responsible for the ouster included virtually the entire corrupt feudal-dynastic political class, the chief of army staff and some of his cohorts in the military high command, and of course the godfather overseeing it all: the United States.
It was a classic case of a “color revolution,” which unfolded within just a few weeks. Elite sections of civil society, including the ostensibly more “progressive” ones, as well as the entire mainstream media, set the stage for the powerful to do their dirty work through lawfare.
With political support from Washington, they organized a bogus vote of no confidence, with the help of huge sums of money coming from both inside and outside Pakistan to buy off members of Khan’s own party, the Movement for Justice (PTI).
What has followed has been nothing less than historic. Pakistan has seen many civilian politicians deposed unceremoniously, but the bulk of ordinary people have been fairly indifferent to such elite intrigues.
Imran Khan address a rally in Lahore, Pakistan in October
Imran Khan’s PTI broke the two-party dictatorship
The curse of the country has been that sometimes the civilian politicians in power, and their blatant plundering of the country, have actually made military rule seem better – or at least no different.
The ouster of Imran Khan engendered sadness and anger among large segments of the population, who believed that the “Khan experiment” was now dead.
But the former prime minister demonstrated an indefatigable resolve to fight back, which is frankly miraculous in a country where wealth and power are so obscenely monopolized by civilian and military elites who despise Khan.
From one city to the next, all across the country, Khan has held major rallies. His speeches have aroused a population that otherwise thought they would just have to live in despair, with the ancien régime coming back to power.
Over the past few months, in the scorching heat of the summer and through the devastating floods, Khan has not budged an inch on his simple core demand: elections to determine who should be governing the country.
But what seems like a fairly banal demand is anathema to the traditional mainstream political parties, especially the two which have played musical chairs in impoverishing the country, the Pakistan Muslim League (PML-N) and the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP).
PML-N in particular, with its current unelected Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, has gone into panic mode, because it has always been accustomed to dominating the most powerful and populous province of the country, Punjab.
The most fascinating and encouraging aspect of Khan’s PTI is that it is perhaps the first national political party that has constituencies and support in all of Pakistan’s provinces.
This is no small feat for a young political party that has broken the stranglehold of the two-party duopoly that has dominated Pakistani political life for the past three decades.
Surely, it seems to strongly indicate that Pakistanis desperately wanted political change – and a lot of it.
A rally in support of Imran Khan in Lahore, Pakistan in October
Pakistan’s military is internally divided
While Imran Khan was giving speeches at massive demonstrations throughout the country for the simple demand of elections to take place, it seemed like the new PDM (Pakistan Democratic Movement) regime was just interested in concocting ridiculous tricks to indict Khan.
The unelected government has tried pretty much everything: It sought to outlaw voting by overseas Pakistanis (who it knows overwhelmingly support Khan). It hit Khan with absurd “terrorism” charges. And it used its Electoral Commission to disqualify Khan from contesting elections.
Rather than addressing the gargantuan social and economic problems that Pakistan is confronting at the moment, it was obvious to any person that the regime is fixated on destroying Khan and quashing his overwhelming support among the population.
But of course the current government is not alone in this saga, nor is it perhaps the principal player. There are two national security states, one deep and another even deeper, involved in the attempts to crush Khan.
For the first time in the history of Pakistan, the majority of the armed forces, the middle and junior ranks of the officers, and especially the soldiers, support and believe in Khan much more than their chief of army staff and other sections of the top brass.
This is unprecedented. And this is why a heavily militarized national security state like Pakistan’s has been so reluctant to repress these popular mobilizations. Top General Qamar Javed Bajwa knows fully well that if he did implement such orders, the officers’ and soldiers’ guns may turn the other way – and a potential rebellion within the military could take place.
These are the same armed forces that for the past 20 years have been forced to sacrifice and die for America’s “War on Terror.” It seems fairly obvious that, by this point, they are more attracted to Khan’s pledge that he will be a friend with America in peace but not in war than they are to any new orders the military high command comes up with in connivance with Washington.
Khan knows this sentiment among the armed forces very well. In fact, a barrage of retired soldiers and officers, in addition to ordinary Pakistanis, are volunteering full-time as Khan’s security detail. The government “protection” that former prime ministers receive is more a threat to Khan than managing his welfare and safety.
Washington’s hand behind the scenes
It is in this context that Chief of Army Staff Bajwa has gone in full panic mode. Both he and the United States can see that the buffoons in charge of Pakistan have completely ruined their plans of eliminating Khan from the political scene.
Their regime change, in short, has blatantly backfired.
To relieve his stress and receive some “wise counsel,” General Bajwa made a trip to Washington for meetings with high-ranking US officials. This was highly unusual, as the chief of army staff (COAS) was expected to retire in just a few weeks.
Bajwa met with US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, and the second-in-command of the State Department, Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman.
This year marks the 75th anniversary of relations between the U.S. and 🇵🇰 Pakistan. It was my pleasure to host Pakistan’s Chief of Army Staff, General Qamar Javed Bajwa, to the Pentagon where we discussed our long-standing defense partnership and areas of mutual interest. pic.twitter.com/ptiZDiqc8I
— Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III (@SecDef) October 5, 2022
According to media reports and statements by multiple officials, including Pakistan’s ambassador to the US, four principal issues were underscored in those meetings:
The next COAS, to be determined by the end of November, should be pro-Washington and restart security cooperation, approving drone attacks and American military bases in Pakistan.
Pakistan must start distancing itself from its age-old ally, Beijing, by reducing CPEC (China-Pakistan Economic Corridor) initiatives, especially in the port of Gwadar; and it should not interfere with terrorist actions undertaken by the extremist ETIM (East Turkestan Islamic Movement) from Afghanistan or Pakistan.
Islamabad should “normalize” relations with the Israeli apartheid regime, manufacturing consent with a massive psyops media campaign.
No elections should be held until Khan’s popularity decreases in some way or the other.
Perhaps feeling emboldened and empowered by his meeting with the mafia don in Washington, General Bajwa granted some authority to the military-intelligence apparatus to openly speak against Khan. That was a fatal mistake.
In a very foolish and infantile press conference by the Director-General (DG) of the ISI (Pakistan’s military intelligence, perhaps second only to the COAS himself in terms of power in the country), the DG went wild and loose with criticisms of Khan.
General Bajwa has maintained all along that the military is completely “neutral” in the country’s political process. This press conference demolished that myth.
Then, in another unprecedented move, Khan hit right back at the DG of the ISI, scathingly shaming him.
Messing with the DG of the ISI is just not done. Yet Khan did it.
Most importantly, and extraordinarily, this has led to widespread condemnation of the top echelons of the military-intelligence apparatus by ordinary Pakistanis.
This is despite the fact that the regime threatened people who criticize the military on social media with seven years in prison.
The genuine fear that Pakistanis have of their national security state seemed to have vanished overnight.
BEWARE FOLKS: FIA will now have powers to take action on tweets, vlogs etc available on social media that attempt to harm army, navy or air force–OR anything on social media that is likely to cause mutiny. The offender will get seven years imprisonment.pic.twitter.com/99fYi5IhF3
Meanwhile, the political parties in government, which in the past showcased themselves as being at the forefront in the struggle against the military establishment, are not only silent but complicit in what that establishment is doing to critics.
Illegal detentions, torture, and murders are happening on this government’s watch. High-profile journalist Arshad Sharif, who had exposed corruption in the regime, was murdered in strange circumstances after he fled to Kenya.
But the PDM government, the so-called “anti-establishment” forces, are simply watching this all happen.
The only positive outcome of this is that these political groups have been thoroughly exposed for their hypocrisy, lies, and opportunism.
China makes rare criticism of Pakistan
After General Bajwa made his trip to reassure Washington that its demands would be met, Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif visited China in a period of unusual friction between the two countries.
Though soundbites of being “all-weather friends” were regurgitated, President Xi Jinping, in a highly unusual fashion, stated that Pakistan needs to do more to protect Chinese workers.
“President Xi expressed his great concern about the safety of Chinese nationals in Pakistan, and conveyed his hope that Pakistan will provide a reliable and safe environment for Chinese institutions and personnel working on cooperation projects there,” Beijing’s Foreign Ministry reported.
This kind of public criticism had never been done before. It seems to indicate that Beijing knows very well how Islamabad is concerning itself with improving ties with Washington, rather than retaining the deep ties it has held over decades with China.
A series of terror attacks have killed and wounded Chinese citizens in Pakistan, especially targeting geostrategic infrastructure projects that are part of the Belt and Road Initiative.
Beijing has asked for permission to send its own security detail to protect their citizens, but Islamabad has apparently taken Washington’s orders to reject this request.
Pakistan is arguably China’s most powerful ally, but we are seeing tensions emerge now that were never witnessed in the past.
Despite Prime Minsiter Sharif’s reassurances, Beijing knows very well that the real power lies in the hands of General Bajwa and the military high command. And the latter’s renewed love affair is with Washington, not Beijing.
Failed assassination of Imran Khan backfires
A gunman tried to murder Iman Khan on November 3 as he marched through Wazirabad in a protest.
The would-be assassin fired several shots; one hit Khan in his shin; one killed a PTI official; and several others were injured.
Khan himself claimed he had information from supporters inside the intelligence agencies that showed Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif and his allies ordered the assassination attempt.
"How did I get the information? From within the intelligence agencies."
At this point, one can only speculate about the thinking behind this atrocity. Many Pakistanis believe that, if a trained shooter from the intelligence agencies wanted to kill Khan, then he could have.
But General Bajwa is due to retire in just a few weeks, and is not too keen about the possibility of setting off a civil war, or at least significant social unrest.
Many observers believe the shooting was a warning to Khan and his supporters.
But this explanation seems weak because, by now, the whole world knows that Khan is as hard as a rock, and virtually nothing has deterred him from openly confronting the powers that be – be they in Islamabad or Washington.
This assassination attempt may, once again, backfire badly.
The grotesque action took place in the midst of the “long march” called by Khan, starting in Lahore and ending in Islamabad.
It is important to note that not only has Khan forcefully emphasized that his rallies and marches must remain peaceful, but that indeed these tens of millions of Pakistanis who have come out have been incredibly disciplined and peaceful in their protests.
This fact should silence Western orientalists who propagate the idea that large “Mozlem” crowds engage in frenzied violence when let loose.
The myth that Imran Khan was the military’s puppet
The routine mantra that has been repeated ad nauseum is that Imran Khan had previously been a darling of the military establishment, but that he later had a falling out with the high command at the end of 2021, and that is what led General Bajwa and his colleagues to dump Khan and punish him.
This line of thinking stems from the very useful term of propaganda employed to describe Khan’s ascent to power: the so-called “hybrid regime.”
Though it is virtually impossible to find a consistent definition of what this term actually meant, we can surmise that it was a liberal smear implicating Khan as a puppet of the military, who would obediently follow its script.
While it is undoubtedly true that the Pakistani military wanted to punish the other two political parties by reminding them who is really in charge of national security policy in the country, it is simultaneously true that Imran Khan was the most popular politician in the country – and by a long shot.
It is completely erroneous to claim that the army’s top brass felt like it was getting its puppet into power. In fact, the military needed Khan more than Khan needed it, given that Khan and his political party were the only ones popular enough for the army to retake power.
The important detail is that the military high command knew it was a gamble to empower a fiercely independent Imran Khan – but it was a risk they felt they had no choice but to take.
At the very least, the military top brass knew that Khan would not engage in conspiratorial plots with the Americans to undermine the military, as the other parties had done.
A rally in support of Imran Khan in Lahore, Pakistan
The fact that both Khan and the military had similar views on ending the war in Afghanistan hardly qualified Khan to be called a puppet.
In fact, well before the tussle between Khan and General Bajwa over who should be the next director general of the ISI at the end of 2021, the military and their friends in the Persian Gulf were irritated by Khan’s constant reference to the Chinese way of eliminating poverty and the need for a welfare state, as he spoke to crowds of rich Arabs in the UAE and Saudi Arabia.
On top of this, Khan’s unflinching and vocal support for the Palestinians and his consistent condemnation of apartheid Israel led the establishment to consider him a “loose cannon” who could not be controlled, a civilian politician who would not simply take orders on issues of national security.
If the term “hybrid regime” simply meant civilian politicians unwilling to defy the military-intelligence apparatus of their states – or deep states – then virtually every US administration can be described as a hybrid regime.
The one American leader who did try to defy the consensus of the national security state during the Cold War was John F. Kennedy – and we know the price he paid for it.
Thus, this entire narrative was farcical. If anything, so-called hybrid regimes existed all throughout the 1990s and afterward in Pakistan.
The “progressive” government of the late Benazir Bhutto, for instance, was plundering the country along with her husband at home, while allowing the military establishment to fully support the rise to power of the Taliban in Afghanistan. That sounds like a hybrid regime more than anything under Khan.
Pakistan’s role in the US new cold war
It is difficult to write about these political developments that are unparalleled in the history Pakistan.
The sheer audacity of Imran Khan and the tens of millions of protestors who detest the current regime and sections of the top brass of the military is rather extraordinary.
Nevertheless, we must not lose sight of the larger geopolitical power plays at work here.
We have seen how Washington has been humiliated by its own former puppets, like Saudi Arabia and India, which have refused to go along with this “new cold war” that the US is waging against China and Russia.
In such conditions, it seems that Washington wants to resuscitate its old Cold War relationship with the formidable Pakistani military.
In its crusade to halt the progress of China’s Belt and Road Initiative, to prevent the expansion of BRICS, and in general to impede Eurasian integration, Washington wants the new Pakistani chief of army staff to play old Cold War games of subversion, terrorism, and hybrid warfare.
Khan is no revolutionary socialist. But one doesn’t need to be a revolutionary socialist to believe your country has the right to have its own independent foreign policy.
And because Khan is committed to that, be it in defense of his relationship with China and Russia and especially his robust defense of Kashmiris and Palestinians, he will remain an impediment for the godfather in Washington.
The outcome of this chaotic situation in Pakistan is deeply uncertain. But there is one thing that is crystal clear: the political battle is between Khan and the overwhelming majority of Pakistanis on the one side; and the powerful and wealthy civilian and military Pakistani elites and their sponsor, Washington, on the other.
Despite legitimate criticisms of how Khan governed when in power, progressives clearly ought to be able to figure out where they stand now.
*
Note to readers: Please click the share buttons above. Follow us on Instagram and Twitter and subscribe to our Telegram Channel. Feel free to repost and share widely Global Research articles.
Junaid S. Ahmad teaches Religion, Law, and Politics and is the Director of the Center for the Study of Islam and Decoloniality. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.
Featured image: Imran Khan addresses a rally in Pakistan in October 2022 / All images in this article are from Multipolarista
The short clip above is important because Christine Anderson is getting at an important point, which must be researched. There is evidence that Pfizer and Pfizer’s CEO Albert Bourla have corrupted government leaders worldwide. That this corruption is deep and wide.
Anger is simmering over Italy’s refusal to let in migrants plucked from the sea. A German rescue charity organization says it will take legal action against the Italian government for violating international law.
After February 2008 when Kosovo Albanian-dominated parliament proclaimed Kosovo’s independence (without organizing a referendum) with obvious US diplomatic support (unilateral recognition) with the explanation that the Kosovo case is unique in the world (i.e. it will be not repeated), one can ask the question: Is the problem of the southern Serbian province of Kosovo really unique and surely unrepeatable in some other parts of the world as US administration was trying to convince the rest of the international community?
While we will be discussing the most unwelcome news of increased death rates, I am happy to report that a leading British Member of Parliament, Andrew Bridgen brought up, in the UK parliament no less, the relationship between vaccination and excess deaths.
In just a few short months, we will be three years away from the beginning of the pandemic in the United States. But instead of a “return to normal”, more shortages are on the way. And in some cases, they could even be life threatening.
According to a US official, the Ukrainian tragedy appears to be just a “warmup” in the face of challenges Washington will see in the near future. US Navy Admiral Charles Richard, head of US Strategic Command, recently stated that his country has been preparing for prolonged conflicts with Russia and China.
Above all, last Sunday’s municipal elections on November 6th, were an optimal consolidation of the Nicaragua’s now serene and stable electoral culture, ensuring extremely efficient, orderly elections, and increased confidence for voters.
Today Service Corporation International, the largest for-profit funeral operator in North America, had its quarterly earnings call. SCI had another great quarter, you’ll be pleased to hear! So far in 2022 the company has made almost $500 million in profits – and its stock rose more than 10 percent today after its earnings report.
President Xi Jinping made history by opening the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of China (CPC), when he announced the beginning of a New Era of socio-political development with focus on the Global South.
I have never known the Federal Reserve make a good decision.Indeed, disastrous decisions are the Fed’s hallmark.There are many such disasters.Among them the Great Depression, the decade long consequence of the Federal Reserve Board’s failure to prevent the shrinkage of the US money supply.
All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the Translate Website button below the author’s name.
To receive Global Research’s Daily Newsletter (selected articles), click here.
Follow us on Instagram and Twitter and subscribe to our Telegram Channel. Feel free to repost and share widely Global Research articles.
***
PressTV Interview with Peter Koenig and Max Civili, PressTV Correspondent in Rome
Background
Anger is simmering over Italy’s refusal to let in migrants plucked from the sea. A German rescue charity organization says it will take legal action against the Italian government for violating international law.
The organization says it will file petition in courts in two Italian cities of Rome and Catania. That after Italy barred around 200 migrants to get off a rescue ship in Catania. Prior to that, Italian authorities let in 144 vulnerable passengers on board a German-flagged vessel, while refusing to accept others. Those allowed to disembark were children and the sick. The ship was then ordered to leave the port of Catania. Italy is now facing criticism for its selective approach toward receiving migrants. Human rights groups have called on Rome to stop discrimination. They say the law of the sea requires that all rescued migrants should be disembarked in a safe place. Hello hi
Introduction
Italy is being accused of Human Rights abuse by refusing the refugees of a migrant boat – German flagged – to disembark in Catania, Sicily.
In reality, the refugee question is much more complex than just one of human rights. Yes, HRs are always used to shut up critical analysts. Because who would dare say anything against human rights? As presented with the refugee issue, human rights is a multifaceted issue.
The Meloni government has said from the beginning that Italy would accept refugees with health problems, women, especially pregnant women, and children.
Following government-ordered summary “vulnerability” assessments by two doctors selected by the authorities, 144 people from the rescue vessel “Humanity 1” and 357 people from the “Geo Barents” were allowed to disembark in Catania. They were mainly women, children, and men with physical health problems.
Not all of the refugees have health problems; and many of the refugees pay dearly to be rescued by so-called humanitarian NGOs, many of which are Europeans, to be ferried to southern European harbors.
This doesn’t mean, they are not suffering politically and / or economically. To the contrary. And they deserve a better future. But the EU refugee system is wantonly unequal.
Many of the NGOs behind these refugee boats are not even from the countries from where the refugees come. They are Europeans, some of them Germans.
The unelected EU Commission in Brussels – a band of shady politicians – is always dancing on various fiestas at the same time, they learned well from the US.
On the one hand, they want to debilitate / punish right wing EU governments, by directing refugees towards these countries, now Italy, but also Greece — and who knows maybe soon also Portugal and even Spain.
Why?
Because these countries do not follow the “neoliberal left”, meaning the Washington and WEF-imposed globalist agenda.
The “left” in the Global North has been hijacked by the globalists, and most of the left – and the rest of the people haven’t even noticed yet.
On the other hand – the refugee issue absorbs a lot of resources, money, infrastructure, care personnel… and it is debilitating countries. And that’s precisely what Brussels want. The refugee issues have always been used to divide countries, groups of countries, in this case the EU – and even continents.
As crazy as it may sound, the EU’s agenda is to destroy the EU – to follow the globalist dictate of Washington and the WEF.
A One World Order cannot tolerate a united block of 27 countries, whose combined GDP may be competing with the one of the hegemon, the US of A.
Then, there is the controversy of the European double standard.
Look at refugees from Ukraine. They have all the rights and get whatever they want in Europe and the Global North in general. Many – of course not all, by far – flee their war-torn country in luxury cars westwards – where they are received literally with open arms. They receive free housing, food, medical care. Many are way better off, then the poor of the recipient countries.
Ukraine has just been granted an 18-billion-euro grant for “budget support” — a subsidy for the country and her citizens. This is in addition to the almost 100 billion dollars in weaponry Ukraine received from the West to fight Russia.
Compare this with the nothing, zero, zilch – the poor and often destitute North African and Middle East countries, receive from where the refugee boats arrive at southern European ports.
If the size of “subsidies” Ukraine receives, was to flow to North Africa and the Middle East, maybe the refugee crisis could be resolved.
But the north doesn’t want to resolve it. They want to continue exploiting it.
See this interview.
*
Note to readers: Please click the share buttons 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 is a non-resident Senior Fellow of the Chongyang Institute of Renmin University, Beijing.
All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the Translate Website button below the author’s name.
To receive Global Research’s Daily Newsletter (selected articles), click here.
Follow us on Instagram and Twitter and subscribe to our Telegram Channel. Feel free to repost and share widely Global Research articles.
***
After February 2008 when Kosovo Albanian-dominated parliament proclaimed Kosovo’s independence (without organizing a referendum) with obvious US diplomatic support (unilateral recognition) with the explanation that the Kosovo case is unique in the world (i.e. it will be not repeated), one can ask the question: Is the problem of the southern Serbian province of Kosovo really unique and surely unrepeatable in some other parts of the world as US administration was trying to convince the rest of the international community?
Consequences of recognition of Kosovo’s independence by one (smaller) part of the international community are already (and going to be in the future) visible primarily in the Caucasus because of the very similar problems and the situation in these two regions. In the Caucasus (where around 50 different ethnolinguistic groups are living together) self-proclaimed independence has already was done by Abkhazia and South Ossetia during their wars of 1991−1993 against the central authorities of Georgia but up to the mid-2008, both of these two separatist regions from Georgia were not internationally recognized by any state in the world. The region of Nagorno-Karabakh, which proclaimed its independence in 1991 from Azerbaijan with full military and political support from Armenia, was also not recognized before Kosovo’s independence. We must remember that separatist movements in the Caucasus in the 1990s occurred at the time when Slovenia, Croatia, Macedonia, and Bosnia-Herzegovina proclaimed their independence from the rest of Yugoslavia (Montenegro and Serbia) and have been soon recognized as independent states and even became accepted members of the Council of Europe and the United Nations.[1]
However, only several months after the self-proclaimed independence of Kosovo on February 17th, 2008 a wave of recognition of three Caucasus separatist states started as a classic example of a domino effect policy in international relations. It must be noticed that the experts from the German Ministry of Foreign Affairs expressed even in 2007 their real fear that in the case of the US and the EU’s unilateral recognition of Kosovo independence the same unilateral diplomatic act could be implied by Russia (and other countries) by recognition of Abkhazia and South Ossetia as a matter of diplomatic compensation and as result of domino effect in the international relations. It is also known and from official OSCE sources that the Russian delegates in this pan-European security organization have been constantly warning before 2008 the West that such a scenario is quite possible, but with one peculiarity: from 2007 they stopped to mention the possibility of Russian recognition of Nagorno-Karabakh’s self-proclaimed independence in 1991. It was most probably because Moscow did not want to spoil good relations with Azerbaijan (and Turkey) – a country with huge reserves of natural gas and oil.[ii]
It can be said that the Albanian unilaterally proclaimed Kosovo independence in February 2008 is not at all a “unique” case in the world without direct consequences to similar separatist cases following the “domino effect” (Abkhazia, South Ossetia, South Sudan, East Timor[iii], Crimea, Donbas…). That is the real reason why, for instance, the government of Cyprus is not supporting “Kosovo Albanian rights to self-determination” as the next “unique” case can be easily the northern (Turkish) part of Cyprus which is by the way already recognized by the Republic of Turkey (in 1981) and under de facto Ankara’s protection. Or even better example: the Spanish government does not want to recognize Kosovo’s independence for the very “Catalan” reason as a domino effect of separatism can be easily spilled over to the Iberian Peninsula.
It must be noticed that there are around 200 territorial-national separatist movements around the world for whom the case of Kosovo’s “precedent” is going to serve as the best moral and legal foundation for their independence. Subsequently, the Republic of Nagorno-Karabakh is recognized now by three non-UN member states according to Kosovo’s pattern: Transnistria, Abkhazia, and South Ossetia. Furthermore, in 2012 (four years after Kosovo’s independence proclamation), a member of Uruguay’s foreign relations committee stated that his country could recognize Nagorno-Karabakh’s independence. Further, the Parliament of New South Wales (Australia) called upon the Australian government to recognize Nagorno-Karabakh. Two other Transcaucasian separatist republics of Abkhazia and South Ossetia became like Nagorno-Karabakh recognized after Kosovo’s independence proclamation in 2008 by several states and quasi-states: Russia, Nicaragua, Venezuela, Nauru, Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic, Nagorno-Karabakh, Transnistria, Tuvalu, Vanuatu, and Abkhazia and South Ossetia (each other).[iv]
Kosovo’s independence proclamation in February 2008 became, in fact, not “precedent” as the US’s and the EU’s administrations declared: it became rather a boomerang example of a “domino effect” in international relations. The case of Crimea in 2014 was in this respect quite clear: the Crimean popular self-determination rights to separate the peninsula from Ukraine and to become part of Russia were at least formally founded on the same rights used by Kosovo’s Albanians (as a majority in the province) to proclaim the state independence from Serbia.
*
Note to readers: Please click the share buttons above. Follow us on Instagram and Twitter and subscribe to our Telegram Channel. Feel free to repost and share widely Global Research articles.
Dr. Vladislav B. Sotirović is a Former university professor in Vilnius, Lithuania. He is a Research Fellow at the Center for Geostrategic Studies. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.
Notes
[1] On the Caucasian geopolitics, see [Chorbajian Levon, Patrick Donabedian, Claude Mutafian, The Caucasian Knot, Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Zed., 1994; Jorge Heine, “The Conflict in the Caucasus: Causing a New Cold War?”, India Quarterly: A Journal of International Affairs, vol. 65, no. 1, 2009, 55−66].
[ii] On the issue of connection between geopolitics and energy, see [Klare Michael, Rising Powers, Shrinking Planet: The New Geopolitics of Energy, New York: Metropolitan Books, 2008].
[iii] A referendum on the independence of East Timor was organized on August 30th, 1999, i.e. only 2.5 months after NATO aggression on the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (ended on June 10th, 1999 by the Kumanovo Agreement). After the Kosovo War, this province of Serbia became de facto separated from the motherland and independent in relation to Serbia. The formal independence of East Timor from Indonesia was achieved on May 20th, 2002.
[iv] On quasi-states, see [Pål Kolstø, “The Sustainability and Future of Unrecognized Quasi-States”, Journal of Peace Research, vol. 43, no. 6, 2006, 723−740].
All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the Translate Website button below the author’s name.
To receive Global Research’s Daily Newsletter (selected articles), click here.
Follow us on Instagram and Twitter and subscribe to our Telegram Channel. Feel free to repost and share widely Global Research articles.
***
Christine Anderson: A member of the European Parliament. She represents the Alternative for Germany (AfD), which is labelled as a “populist political party” in Germany. AfD is known for its opposition to the European Union, as well as the open border/immigration to Germany policies which the EU mandates. As she does not believe in open borders, Christine Anderson is labelled with such terms as “far-right,” and “anti-Islamic.” Near as I can tell, these are just more propaganda talking points by Wiki and their ilk.
The short clip above is important because Christine Anderson is getting at an important point, which must be researched. There is evidence that Pfizer and Pfizer’s CEO Albert Bourla have corrupted government leaders worldwide. That this corruption is deep and wide.
The people have been lied to. It was a gigantic lie. And on this lie, everything that governments, especially in the Western democracies did to infringe on people’s rights, to take away their freedom, to lock them in their homes, imposing curfews, all of this was based on that gigantic lie.
Ursula von der Leyen, EU Commission president is now under a lot of pressure, and rightly so. The people have a right to know what went on in these contracts with her exchange of SMS with CEO Pfizer, Bourla. The people need to know who they can hold responsible and accountable for whatever may have gone on behind the scenes. Things are changing now, their house of cards is tumbling down, and it is doing so rightfully.
And you know what? One more thing though, I am sick and tired of being called a COV-idiot. And I’d much rather be a COV-idiot than being a GOV-idiot, because that’s what all these people that blindly trusted their governments turned out to be. And I will say it again, it was never, never, ever about public health, it was never about breaking any waves, it was always about breaking people. But, and that’s the good news, they failed. It didn’t work. And that I am very proud of, and I’m proud of the people that I am so honored to be allowed to represent. And I will continue to do just that. Thank you very much.
Ursula Gertrud von der Leyen is president of the European Commission since 2019. The European Commission is the leadership of the European Union. It operates as a cabinet government, with 27 members of the Commission headed by the President (now Ursula Gertrud von der Leyen). It includes an administrative body of about 32,000 European civil servants.
Leyen had been secretly communicating with the CEO of Pfizer about the purchase of COVID-19 vaccines via text messages. In early 2022, a journalist requested for copies of these texts and the European commission rejected the request. This has opened the door for widespread speculation of malfeasance and corruption.
The EU is elitist, aloof and distant from the citizens. With its tentacles, it takes a stranglehold on the sovereignty of the European nations and dictates to the citizens in every detail how they have to behave.
I want an honest and free Europe of free people and not a construct of political elites. I consider putting a stop to these false elites here in Brussels and Strasbourg to be the most urgent task in my political work.
*
Note to readers: Please click the share buttons above. Follow us on Instagram and Twitter and subscribe to our Telegram Channel. Feel free to repost and share widely Global Research articles.
Featured image is from Health Thoroughfare
The Worldwide Corona Crisis, Global Coup d’Etat Against Humanity
by Michel Chossudovsky
Michel Chossudovsky reviews in detail how this insidious project “destroys people’s lives”. He provides a comprehensive analysis of everything you need to know about the “pandemic” — from the medical dimensions to the economic and social repercussions, political underpinnings, and mental and psychological impacts.
“My objective as an author is to inform people worldwide and refute the official narrative which has been used as a justification to destabilize the economic and social fabric of entire countries, followed by the imposition of the “deadly” COVID-19 “vaccine”. This crisis affects humanity in its entirety: almost 8 billion people. We stand in solidarity with our fellow human beings and our children worldwide. Truth is a powerful instrument.”
ISBN: 978-0-9879389-3-0, Year: 2022, PDF Ebook, Pages: 164, 15 Chapters
All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the Translate Website button below the author’s name.
To receive Global Research’s Daily Newsletter (selected articles), click here.
Follow us on Instagram and Twitter and subscribe to our Telegram Channel. Feel free to repost and share widely Global Research articles.
***
Pfizer’s chief financial officer has described the Covid pandemic as a ‘multi-billion dollar franchise’ — and expects profit to continue.
David Denton told investors in an earnings call last week his company’s vaccine and antiviral would still be ‘relevant for many years to come’.
The CFO said he expects the Covid virus to be ‘somewhat like a flu… but more deadly’ — meaning therapeutics will still have a massive role in controlling the virus.
So far Pfizer reaped about $80 billion in yearly revenue from sales of Covid vaccines and the antiviral drug Paxlovid.
Note to readers: Please click the share buttons above. Follow us on Instagram and Twitter and subscribe to our Telegram Channel. Feel free to repost and share widely Global Research articles.
Featured image is from Children’s Health Defense
The Worldwide Corona Crisis, Global Coup d’Etat Against Humanity
by Michel Chossudovsky
Michel Chossudovsky reviews in detail how this insidious project “destroys people’s lives”. He provides a comprehensive analysis of everything you need to know about the “pandemic” — from the medical dimensions to the economic and social repercussions, political underpinnings, and mental and psychological impacts.
“My objective as an author is to inform people worldwide and refute the official narrative which has been used as a justification to destabilize the economic and social fabric of entire countries, followed by the imposition of the “deadly” COVID-19 “vaccine”. This crisis affects humanity in its entirety: almost 8 billion people. We stand in solidarity with our fellow human beings and our children worldwide. Truth is a powerful instrument.”
ISBN: 978-0-9879389-3-0, Year: 2022, PDF Ebook, Pages: 164, 15 Chapters
Comments Off on A Slap in the Pface: Pfizer Chief Boasts to Investors that COVID Will Continue to be a ‘Multi-billion Dollar Franchise for Many Years to Come’ — As Firm Prepares to Stick 10,000% Markup on Its Vaccine
All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the Translate Website button below the author’s name.
To receive Global Research’s Daily Newsletter (selected articles), click here.
Follow us on Instagram and Twitter and subscribe to our Telegram Channel. Feel free to repost and share widely Global Research articles.
***
While we will be discussing the most unwelcome news of increased death rates, I am happy to report that a leading British Member of Parliament, Andrew Bridgen brought up, in the UK parliament no less, the relationship between vaccination and excess deaths.
Even a casual glance at the data shows that there’s a VERY STRONG CORRELATION between excess DEATHS & the level of vaccine uptake in that country. Surely we must have an investigation? These are 10s of thousands of PEOPLE who are DYING.
Please watch his speech below.
UK MP @ABridgen: “even a casual glance at the data shows that there’s a VERY STRONG CORRELATION between excess DEATHS & the level of vaccine uptake in that country. Surely we must have an investigation? These are 10s of thousands of PEOPLE who are DYING..”pic.twitter.com/EBwCV5Mncvhttps://t.co/JocCkR7MTO
(After this speech, Andrew was suspended from Parliament for 7 days for a supposedly “unrelated offense.”)
Where did Andrew Bridgen get his (correct) idea? I am not sure, but I posted an original analysis statistically tying “excess mortality” to vaccination rate by country on August 30, 2022.
Obviously not claiming that he somehow got it through me — I hope that many other people performed similar analyses, and one of them was noticed by Mr. Bridgen. The more people analyze this data, the better. I am happy.
New Data Looks Even Worse.
I decided to re-do the calculation of excess mortality vs. vaccine, or booster uptake, using two more months’ worth of mortality data.
I use the same exact methodology as in my “proven relationship” article. Please read it if you are interested in details or want to replicate the results. Instead of weeks 10 to 35, I now analyze “excess mortality” in weeks 20 to 44 (to be precise, the max week available up to week 44 in the short-term mortality database – the data has a lag). Everything else stayed the same. The data is here:
A few notes on the data above:
The least vaccinated country Bulgaria has NEGATIVE excess mortality (lowest of all).
Chile really had more boosters given out than it has people due to multiple boosters per person, and is experiencing the HIGHEST excess mortality.
Sweden, sadly, moved into positive excess mortality territory, although I am glad to say that it is still low.
The questions I want to explore is: Is there an association between vaccine or booster uptake and excess mortality in Weeks 20-44? Did the association get weaker or stronger compared to weeks 10-35?
Let’s look.
Excess Mortality vs. Vaccination Rate:
Excess Mortality vs. Booster Uptake:
We can see that both vaccination rates (number of fully vaccinated people per 100), as well as booster doses administered per 100 persons, are VERY STRONGLY ASSOCIATED WITH EXCESS MORTALITY. Both have very low P-values, which suggests that this association is highly unlikely to have happened by random chance.
Here’s the worst part: During weeks 10-35, the vaccination rate explained only 27% of the variation in excess mortality, and the booster rate explained only 40% of excess mortality. (the so-called R-Squared). (see the previous article on this topic for regressions)
During weeks 20-44, both vaccination and booster rates explain NEARLY HALF of excess mortality variation (49% for both). That’s a lot greater explanatory power!
This means that over time, the strength of the association between excess mortality and vaccination is INCREASING!
EDIT: Also note that the SLOPE of the line, for example, for vaccination rate, increased from 0.0024 in my August article to 0.0034 two months later! A 40% increase in slope. What does it mean? It means that the magnitude of the effect also increased, not just the explanatory power. Things are getting worse in a measurable way.
This is Counterintuitive and Concerning!
Please take a minute to understand that increasing the strength of association, as time passes after the event causing the association (vaccination), is
very unusual
very worrisome
What is going on? The clock is ticking; unvaccinated people are not really getting vaccinated anymore. And yet, as time goes on, more and more excess deaths are explained by vaccination rate (49% in weeks 20-44, instead of 27% 10 weeks prior). Vaccination rate, for the most part, refers to vaccinations that happened in the relatively distant past, a year ago or so. Something is happening in the bodies of people who were vaccinated over a year ago that increases the degree of that association of vaccines vs. deaths as time goes on!
Stop. This is NOT normal.
Consider a typical poison like rat poison. Let’s say that a careless cook accidentally sprinkled varying amounts of rat poison over the salads of restaurant visitors. Some received more, some less, so some would die of rat poison. It would be understandable to expect that “restaurant visit” was associated with “excess mortality” of unfortunate diners within the first week or two after the visit. A year later, though, we would not be expecting any such relationship as the effects of poison wear off.
However, the association of vaccination (distant past event) with mortality (present event) is increasing as time goes on!
What could explain it? To be honest, I am not certain. I can offer two explanations:
Vaccination has a delayed effect that causes excess mortality to increase. Regular poisons do not do that. Carcinogens do exactly that. They set a chain of biological processes in motion that lead to increased mortality down the road.
Vaccination had negative AND positive effects on mortality, and the protective effects are wearing out. Covid vaccines did, a while ago, provide some protection from Covid deaths. However, as time went on, that protection dwindled. So, as protective effects dwindle and negative effects continue, the explanatory power of vaccinations may be increasing.
Disclaimer: Correlation vs. Causation
Correlation is not causation. These linear regressions are showing correlation and not causation. They are an alarm that needs an honest and in-depth analysis.
Seeing a correlation is akin to seeing smoke. Is there a fire?
We Urgently Need an Investigation, Instead of Stonewalling and “Pandemic Amnesty”
An honest leader of a good country, upon hearing such concerning news, would hire new people who are not tarnished with the baggage and responsibility for recklessly vaccinating millions with an unproven new technology with a track record of failure, infertility, and death of lab animals.
These new people would include talented medics, sophisticated biostatisticians, experienced coroners, biologists, historians, detectives, etc. They would devise a public, open, and sophisticated process of looking at excess deaths on an individual level, as well as comparing outcomes of vaccinated or unvaccinated people, and so on.
They would examine the bodies of hundreds of young and healthy people who are dying suddenly to truly understand what exactly was the chain of events that caused their sudden and unexpected death. They would similarly try to understand why cancer rates are soaring far beyond typical levels.
Their findings and underlying data would be accessible to the community so that input could be provided by interested members of the public.
Lastly, such an investigation can save thousands, or millions of lives, if the mechanism of excess deaths is properly understood and the chain of deadly aftereffects is broken. I hope that these deaths can be somehow stopped!
None of this is happening.
All we have is increasing excess deaths, denial, and coverup. Google does NOT want you to search for “excess mortality 2022” in the “search suggestion” bar.
Google knows about “excess mortality 2022”; that’s why it is blocking search suggestions for this term. But Google does not want YOU to know.
Why the stonewalling? Because the powers-to-be are afraid of responsibility and are now begging for amnesty.
We do not need to give them amnesty — but we do need to find out what is happening and why people are dying.
Dear reader, please let me know: why do you think they are stonewalling all inquiries and suspending UK Parliament members? What is the reason? Misguided concern for continued vaccine uptake? Fear of responsibility? Or something worse?
*
Note to readers: Please click the share buttons above. Follow us on Instagram and Twitter and subscribe to our Telegram Channel. Feel free to repost and share widely Global Research articles.
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.”
ISBN: 978-0-9879389-3-0, Year: 2022, PDF Ebook, Pages: 164, 15 Chapters
All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the Translate Website button below the author’s name.
To receive Global Research’s Daily Newsletter (selected articles), click here.
Follow us on Instagram and Twitter and subscribe to our Telegram Channel. Feel free to repost and share widely Global Research articles.
***
Do you remember in early 2020 when they told us that the shortages that we were experiencing would just be temporary? Of course some of them were, but then more shortages just kept on erupting. That wasn’t supposed to happen, and now it appears that our supply chain problems could potentially get a whole lot worse. In just a few short months, we will be three years away from the beginning of the pandemic in the United States. But instead of a “return to normal”, more shortages are on the way. And in some cases, they could even be life threatening.
Let me give you an example. We need Amoxicillin to treat some of the most common infections that our children experience. Unfortunately, the FDA is warning us that we are now facing a very serious shortage of Amoxicillin…
Ear infections and strep throat.
Both are common childhood illnesses, for which the go-to prescription is in short supply, according to a recent nationwide alert from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.
The warning specifically involves the powder, which pharmacists use to mix liquid Amoxicillin for childhood infections.
This is a really big deal.
According to one recent survey, close to two-thirds of all pharmacies in the nation are having difficulty getting Amoxicillin right now, and the national shortage of Adderall is even worse…
Nearly 66% of pharmacies are having challenges obtaining amoxicillin, according to a new National Community Pharmacists Association (NCPA) survey of 8000 pharmacy owners and managers, whereas 89% are realizing a shortage of Adderall.
Of course we are dealing with lots of other drug shortages at this moment as well.
In fact, according to the official FDA drug shortage list there are nationwide shortages of a whopping 183 different drugs in the United States right now.
The Canadian healthcare system is experiencing an acute shortage of basic painkillers, particularly acetaminophen and ibuprofen, which are commonly used to relieve pain and fever in children during flu season.
Canada’s Association of Medical Assistance in Dying Assessors and Providers (CAMAP) chose this perhaps awkward moment to roll out a webinar for healthcare professionals that advised them to offer assisted suicide to their suffering patients.
So why don’t the Canadians have enough Acetaminophen and Ibuprofen right now?
CBC News quoted health officials who blamed “a lack of raw ingredients to make the drugs,” “an uptick in respiratory viruses fueled by the relaxed [Chinese coronavirus] measures,” and “panic buying” for the shortage of painkillers for children.
As I have covered in previous articles, most of the basic ingredients that go into our pharmaceutical drugs come from China.
So if you think that things are bad now, just wait until war with China erupts.
Once that happens, our pharmacies will get really empty and our entire healthcare system will experience a historic meltdown.
Switching gears, with Thanksgiving coming up I wanted to talk about the fact that we are now facing a nationwide shortage of turkeys…
As CNBC reports, the price of turkey is up 73% from last year, a pretty astonishing figure. Experts attribute it to the bird flu, which has devastated turkey stocks this year. Apparently, the disease normally doesn’t flourish during the summer as farmers get their holiday flocks together. But, you know, the 2020s haven’t been easy so naturally, the flu hit hard right in the middle of the year when it could do the most damage.
The good news, if you want to call it that, is that you will still probably be able to get a turkey if you are willing to pay enough.
The bad news is that supplies of turkey just keep getting tighter and tighter.
One business owner in San Francisco recently stated that it is “like pulling teeth trying to get turkeys from the companies” at this stage…
But it’s not just the Thanksgiving bird that’s at risk — it’s your lunchtime turkey sandwich, too. San Francisco delis and butchers are already feeling the effects of the shortage.
“It’s like pulling teeth trying to get turkeys from the companies,” said Sal Qaqundah, owner of Arguello Market, a San Francisco cult favorite for its “world famous” turkey sandwich.
Unfortunately, we are also facing a shortage of butter in the weeks ahead.
The USDA is urging consumers not to “panic buy” butter so that there will be enough to go around for everyone…
Butter is another area where the war and cost of dairy products has affected supply, as the price of the condiment and baking ingredient has gone up a dollar per pound since January of this year, per Eater. Fearing a full-blown butter shortage, the USDA has asked consumers not to rush or panic buy, but simply secure what they need at a given time, per Best Life.
Did you ever imagine that we would be talking about a butter shortage in late 2022?
Things just keep getting crazier and crazier.
And if the diesel fuel shortages eventually get as bad as some are projecting, we could soon be facing severe shortages of countless products.
Our ships, our trains and our trucks run on diesel fuel.
So if there is not enough diesel fuel, we are going to have a real problem trying to fill up our stores with enough stuff for everybody.
Even now, supplies of diesel fuel are so tight that one big player in the industry just issued a major alert…
A major fuel supply and logistics company is raising a red flag on upcoming diesel fuel shortages.
Mansfield Energy issued the alert Friday stating there was a developing diesel fuel shortage in the southeastern region of the United States. The company speculated that the shortage could be generated from “poor pipeline shipping economies” and a historically low supply of diesel reserves.
“Poor pipeline shipping economics and historically low diesel inventories are combining to cause shortages in various markets throughout the Southeast,” the company said. “These have been occurring sporadically, with areas like Tennessee seeing particularly acute challenges.”
There are a number of reasons why supplies of diesel fuel have gotten so tight.
But the primary reason is the cutoff of Russian imports. Prior to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the U.S. was importing nearly 700,000 barrels per day (BPD) of petroleum and petroleum products. Most of those imports were finished products and refinery inputs that boosted distillate supplies in the U.S.
The loss of those Russian imports have caused problems for refineries as they struggle to fill holes in their product slates. Refineries do have a small amount of flexibility in shifting gasoline production to diesel production. But it’s a relatively small amount (e.g., ~5% in a refinery I once worked in). That also means that if refiners do shift production, that also potentially creates shortages in the gasoline market.
So why don’t we just produce more ourselves?
Well, thanks to our politicians, the number of refineries in the United States has actually been declining in recent years even as our population has grown.
At this point we simply do not have enough refineries, and this is a problem that is not going away any time soon.
In the months ahead, we aren’t going to completely run out of diesel fuel as some people out there are suggesting.
But supplies may get so tight that it could potentially create widespread supply chain nightmares that are quite severe.
Let us hope that such a scenario does not materialize.
Because the American people are already angry enough about the economy. In fact, a brand new survey has found that it is the number one issue for U.S. voters at this moment…
The Washington Post and ABC gave Americans eight top issues they will be considering when making their decision in a poll that showed likely voters split between the Democrats and Republicans.
The economy was cited by 26 percent of likely voters as one of the most important factors, followed by abortion with 22 percent and inflation and threats to democracy each by 21 percent.
For decades, we have been able to rely on our supply chains to continuously fill our stores with mountains of cheap goods.
I know that many of you have been patiently waiting for a long time for life to “return to normal”.
Sadly, that isn’t going to happen. The incredibly bad decisions that our leaders have been making are now catching up with us in a major way, and a great deal of pain is ahead.
*
Note to readers: Please click the share buttons above. Follow us on Instagram and Twitter and subscribe to our Telegram Channel. Feel free to repost and share widely Global Research articles.
All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the Translate Website button below the author’s name.
To receive Global Research’s Daily Newsletter (selected articles), click here.
Follow us on Instagram and Twitter and subscribe to our Telegram Channel. Feel free to repost and share widely Global Research articles.
***
My research team is currently monitoring online political content being sent to voters in swing states through more than 2,500 computers owned by a politically-diverse group of registered voters (our “field agents”), and we are concerned about what we’re seeing.
We are aggregating and analyzing search results on the Google and Bing search engines, messages displayed on Google’s home page, autoplay videos suggested on YouTube, tweets sent to users by the Twitter company (as opposed to tweets sent by other users), email suppression on Gmail, and more.
We have so far preserved more than 1.9 million “ephemeral experiences” – exposure to short-lived content that impacts people and then disappears, leaving no trace – that Google and other companies are able to use to shift opinions and voting preferences, and we expect to have captured more than 2.5 million by Election Day.
In emails leaked from Google to The Wall Street Journal in 2018, Googlers (that’s what they call themselves) discussed how they might be able to use “ephemeral experiences” to change people’s views about Trump’s travel ban. The company later denied that this plan was ever implemented, but leaked content (including multiple blacklists) and startling revelations by Tristan Harris, Zach Vorhies, and other whistleblowers show that Google is indeed out to remake the world in its own image. As the company’s CFO, Ruth Porat, said in a November 11th, 2016 video that leaked in 2018, “we will use the great strength and resources and reach we have” to advance Google’s values.
Since early 2016, my team has been developing and improving Neilsen-type monitoring systems that allow us to do to Google-and-the-Gang what they do to us and our children 24/7: to track their activity, and, specifically, to preserve that very dangerous and persuasive ephemeral content.
Since 2013, I have been conducting rigorous controlled experiments to quantify how persuasive that kind of content can be. I’ve so far identified about a dozen new forms of online manipulation that make use of ephemeral experiences, and nearly all these techniques are controlled exclusively by Google and, to a lesser extent, other tech companies.
These new forms of influence are stunning in their impact. Search results that favor one candidate (in other words, that lead people who click on high-ranking results to web pages that glorify that candidate) can shift the voting preferences of undecided voters by up to 80 percent in some demographic groups after a single search.Carefully crafted search suggestions that flash at you while you are typing a search term can turn a 50/50 split among undecided voters into a 90/10 split with no one knowing they have been manipulated. A single question-and-answer interaction on a digital personal assistant can shift the voting preferences of undecided voters by more than 40 percent.
In 2020, the 1.5 million ephemeral experiences we aggregated from the computers of our 1,735 field agents showed us manipulations that were sufficient, in theory, to have shifted more than six million votes to Joe Biden (whom I supported) – again, without people knowing they were being manipulated. Among other findings: Google was sending more go-vote reminders to liberals and moderates than to conservatives; that’s a brazen and powerful manipulation that would go completely undetected unless someone was monitoring.
Our preliminary analyses of the data we have collected so far in 2022 are equally disturbing. In swing states, and especially in Wisconsin, Arizona, and Florida, we are finding a high level of liberal bias in Google search results, but not in search results on Bing (the same pattern we have found in every election since 2016). In several swing states, 92 percent of the autoplay videos being fed to YouTube users are coming from liberal news sources (YouTube is owned by Google). Unless Google backs down, it will shift hundreds of thousands of votes on Election Day itself with those brazen targeted go-vote reminders – and we will catch them doing so.
That brings me to some surprisingly hopeful news. Just before the November 3, 2020 Presidential election, I was so unnerved by the extreme bias we were seeing in our data that I decided to go public. Ebony Bowden at the New York Post wrote a powerful story about election rigging that might have made the front page, but on October 30, after a phone call between an editor and a Google official, the piece was killed – no doubt because the Post was getting 45 percent of its online traffic from the company in question.
On November 5, however, three U.S. Senators sent an intimidating letter to the CEO of Google summarizing my preliminary findings, and the company instantly turned off all manipulations in the Georgia Senate races.
We were monitoring those races through more than a thousand computers owned by a diverse and undetectable pool of real voters in Georgia, and not one received a go-vote reminder. Even more striking, political bias in Google search results dropped to zero. I had thought that such a feat would be impossible, but Vorhies explained that Google can turn bias on and off “like flipping a light switch.” He also pointed me to leaked company documents such as the manual for the company’s Twiddler software, used for “re-ranking” search results.
Will the article you are now reading change the course of history? Will it cause Google to take its digital thumb off the scales in our midterm elections? Whatever Mr. Pichai, its CEO, decides to do, we will know, and we will preserve the evidence.
And this time, we will continue to expand the monitoring system, and we will be monitoring content going not just to voters but also to America’s children. By late 2023, we will have a digital shield in place – a panel of more than 20,000 field agents in all 50 states – and we will shame Big Tech into staying clear of our elections and our kids for many years to come.
*
Note to readers: Please click the share buttons above. Follow us on Instagram and Twitter and subscribe to our Telegram Channel. Feel free to repost and share widely Global Research articles.
Robert Epstein, Ph.D. (@DrREpstein), former editor-in-chief of Psychology Today, is senior research psychologist at the American Institute for Behavioral Research and Technology. A Ph.D. of Harvard University, he has published 15 books and more than 300 articles on AI and other topics. His 2019 Congressional testimony on Big Tech’s threat to democracy can be accessed at https://EpsteinTestimony.com. You can learn more about his research on online influence at https://MyGoogleResearch.com.
All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the Translate Website button below the author’s name.
To receive Global Research’s Daily Newsletter (selected articles), click here.
Follow us on Instagram and Twitter and subscribe to our Telegram Channel. Feel free to repost and share widely Global Research articles.
***
Russian forces are still on the defensive on almost all Ukrainian front lines but they continue storming Ukrainian strongholds in the Donbass region.
Heavy fighting continues in the Ugledar area, where Russian assault groups are trying to dislodge Ukrainian units from Pavlovka in order to take control of the strategically important belt road. After days of fighting, the battle for the village turned into positional clashes.
To the north, fighting is ongoing in Novomikhailovka, where Russian troops are trying to advance and cut the supply road between Ugledar and Mariinka. Over the past day, no Russian attempts to storm Ukrainian positions have been reported. The Russians began to dig in and strengthen the line of defense in the eastern part of the village.
The Russians also went on offensive on the eastern bank of the Kakhovka water reservoir. Russian troops launched assault operations towards the village of Shcherbaki in order to cut an important section of the road.
On the front lines of the Luhansk People’s Republic, fierce battles near Belogorovka have continued for several days. On November 7, the Wagner fighters reportedly broke through the Ukrainian defenses and launched the mop up operation in the town. If Russian forces succeed, they will pose significant problems for Ukrainian units on the right bank of the Seversky Donets River.
The Russian military has recently claimed control of the territory of the Donetsk airport. All airport facilities were taken by the DPR forces back in 2015 but Russians have finally repelled Ukrainian units from the runways on the western outskirts. Fighting is ongoing north of the Donetsk Ring road near the villages of Opytne and Vodyanoe.
To the south of Bakhmut, the Wagner fighters went on the offensive towards Andreevka in order to take control of the railway. To the north, they attacked Yakovlevka and cut off military supplies of Ukrainian units along the northern road.
The situation remains tense in the Kherson region. Despite the evacuation of civilians and claims of Russian military commanders about a possible retreat, there is still no evidence of the withdrawal of Russian troops from their positions on the front lines. The Russian military continues strengthening the defense and mine the area. The large-scale Ukrainian offensive is yet to come.
The pace of Russian advance on Donbass front lines is very slow. The ongoing offensive operations are still of a tactical importance. In its turn, the Ukrainian military is also yet to take any decisive measures to somehow change the situation on the front lines in other regions.
*
Note to readers: Please click the share buttons above or below. Follow us on Instagram and Twitter and subscribe to our Telegram Channel. Feel free to repost and share widely Global Research articles.
All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the Translate Website button below the author’s name.
To receive Global Research’s Daily Newsletter (selected articles), click here.
Follow us on Instagram and Twitter and subscribe to our Telegram Channel. Feel free to repost and share widely Global Research articles.
***
U.S. military forces have been engaged in unauthorized hostilities in many more countries than the Pentagon has disclosed to Congress, let alone the public, according to a major new report released late last week by New York University School of Law’s Brennan Center for Justice.
“Afghanistan, Iraq, maybe Libya. If you asked the average American where the United States has been at war in the past two decades, you would likely get this short list,” according to the report, Secret War: How the U.S. Uses Partnerships and Proxy Forces to Wage War Under the Radar. “But this list is wrong – off by at least 17 countries in which the United States has engaged in armed conflict through ground forces, proxy forces, or air strikes.”
“This proliferation of secret war is a relatively recent phenomenon, and it is undemocratic and dangerous,” the report’s author, Katherine Yon Ebright, wrote in the introduction. “The conduct of undisclosed hostilities in unreported countries contravenes our constitutional design. It invites military escalation that is unforeseeable to the public, to Congress, and even to the diplomats charged with managing U.S. foreign relations.”
The 39-page report focuses on so-called “security cooperation” programs authorized by Congress pursuant to the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force, or AUMF, against certain terrorist groups. One such program, known as Section 127e, authorized the Defense Department to “provide support to foreign forces, irregular forces, groups or individuals engaged in supporting or facilitating authorized ongoing military operations by United States special operations forces to combat terrorism.”
According to the report, that “support” has been broadly — or, more accurately, too broadly — interpreted by the Pentagon. In practice, it has enabled the U.S. military to “develop and control proxy forces that fight on behalf of and sometimes alongside U.S. forces” and to use armed force to defend its local partners against adversaries (in what the Pentagon calls “collective self-defense”) regardless of whether those adversaries pose any threat to U.S. territory or persons, and, in some cases, whether or not the adversaries have been officially designated as legitimate targets under the 2001 AUMF.
In Somalia in 2016, for example, U.S. forces invoked “collective self-defense” to launch a strike against a rival militia of the Puntland Security Force, an elite brigade that had originally been recruited, trained, and equipped by the CIA and subsequently taken over by the Pentagon in 2011.
Moreover, the Pentagon deployed the PSF, which was largely independent of the Somali government, to fight al-Shabab and the Islamic State of Somalia, sometimes alongside U.S. forces, for several years before the executive branch designated al-Shabab as legitimate targets. It has never so designated the ISS.
Similarly, in Cameroon, U.S. forces accompanying a partner force on an “advise and assist” mission ended up shooting and killing an adversary. The Pentagon has used a Section 127 program there to pursue leaders of Boko Haram, a terrorist group that has “never been publicly identified as an associated force of Al-Qaeda, and thus a lawful target, under the 2001 AUMF,” according to the report.
Congress rarely hears of these incidents because, according to the report, DOD insists they are too minor or “episodic” to rise to the level of “hostilities” that would trigger reporting requirements under the 1973 War Powers Resolution.
An exception, however, came in October 2017 when four U.S. soldiers, who were deployed to Niger under a related “security cooperation” program known as Section 333, which authorizes the Pentagon to “train and equip” foreign forces anywhere in the world. Their presence in the field, however, was authorized under a standing executive order, or EXORD, that permits U.S. forces to engage in combat under particular circumstances, a parallel authority of which Congress had not been previously informed. The incident shocked lawmakers who were unaware that U.S. troops were operating in the field in Niger.
“I’ve got guys in Kenya, Chad, Cameroon, Niger [and] Tunisia who are doing the same kind of things as the guys in Somalia, exposing themselves to the same kind of danger and not just on 127 echoes,” bragged Brigadier Gen. Donald Bolduc (ret.), who commanded U.S. special forces in Africa until 2017 and is currently running as a Republican for the U.S. Senate in New Hampshire. “We’ve had guys wounded in all the types of missions that we do.”
The report, which relies on published work by investigative reporters, interviews with knowledgeable officials and congressional staff, official documents and records, as well as the author’s legal analysis, identifies 13 countries with Section 127e programs in addition to Somalia and Cameroon. They include Afghanistan, Egypt, Iraq, Kenya, Lebanon, Libya, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Niger, Nigeria, Syria, Tunisia, and Yemen. But it stressed that the list is almost certainly not exhaustive.
Fifty countries, from Mexico to Peru in the west to Indonesia and the Philippines (where U.S. forces are known to have taken part in combat operation) in the east, and covering 22 countries in North and sub-Saharan Africa alone (not to mention Ukraine) had Section 333 programs in place as of mid-2018, according to the report.
Perhaps even more dangerous than the Section 127e counterterrorism programs, according to the report, are security cooperation programs undertaken pursuant to Section 1202 of the National Defense Authorization Act of 2018. Using language that mirrors Section 127e, that provision goes beyond the counterterrorism purposes of Section 1273e by authorizing “support” to partner forces “engaged in supporting or facilitating irregular warfare operations by the United States Special Operations Forces.”
“Irregular warfare” is defined by DOD as “competition …short of traditional armed conflict” or “all-out war.” Pentagon officials have described Section 1202 as “a highly useful tool for enabling irregular warfare operations…to deter and defeat …revisionist powers and rogue regimes.” They have also insisted that “irregular warfare is likely to be increasingly relied on as DOD begins to “prioritize great power competition.”
“Broadly speaking, the purpose of the [Section] 1202 authority is to take the department’s [Section] 127e approach of creating and controlling partner forces and wield it against countries like China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea,” according to the report. “Section 1202, in short, raises the same potential as § 127e for hostilities that Congress has not authorized, but with far graver consequences because the enemy could be a powerful, nuclear-armed state.”
Given the increased risks, simply repealing or reforming “outdated and overstretched AUMFs …[is] insufficient,” the report concludes. “Congress should repeal or reform the Department of Defense’s security cooperation authorities. Until it does so, the nation will continue to be at war – without, in some cases, the consent or even knowledge of its people.”
*
Note to readers: Please click the share buttons above. Follow us on Instagram and Twitter and subscribe to our Telegram Channel. Feel free to repost and share widely Global Research articles.
Featured image: U.S. Army Africa 1st Lt. Salvatore Buzzurro, Africa Contingency Operations Training & Assistance program military mentor, gives a Sierra Leone Armed Forces Soldiers advice on movement techniques. The SL Army has been training with the ACOTA program for two years, and this is the fifth company prepping for their peacekeeping mission in another country. Photo by U.S. Army Africa.
All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the Translate Website button below the author’s name.
To receive Global Research’s Daily Newsletter (selected articles), click here.
Follow us on Instagram and Twitter and subscribe to our Telegram Channel. Feel free to repost and share widely Global Research articles.
***
Of all the great tension both doctors and patients have faced in the COVID-19 crisis is the lack of assurances on long-term safety of COVID-19 vaccines. Americans were told these genetic products were brought through testing at “warp speed.” While that may be wonderful for the Starship Enterprise, warp speed should not be viewed as favorable in drug or vaccine development.
Observation time in research is very important to evaluate the emergence of problems, particularly for the long-lasting mRNA vaccines and their biologic product, the coronavirus Spike protein. For a typical live-attenuated, killed, or antigen-based vaccine, the minimum period for safety observation in clinical development is 2 years. For genetic products which includes mRNA and adenoviral DNA, the minimum time is 5 years.
Now with mass indiscriminate population, we have roughly two thirds of adult populations who have received a novel vaccine and the progression of their baseline medical problems is specific aim of research going forward at many centers. Canney et al studied 1105 patients who had stable glomerular kidney disease in 2020 before mRNA, and then followed them after receiving one or more of the COVID-19 vaccines.[i]
Glomerular kidney disease can worsen to complete kidney failure and dialysis, so the consequences are significant if there is a problem with mRNA, Spike protein, and progression of disease. As shown in the table, for the double vaccinated, there was more than a two-fold increase in progression of kidney disease.
That means a loss of renal function which is usually permanent for the vaccinated. Using multivariable adjustment, this effect persisted. The inference is the worsening of kidney disease is attributable to the vaccine and none of the other traditional risk factors (high blood pressure etc). So if you or a loved one has kidney disease and was pressured into vaccination by a primary care physician or nephrologist, please share this Substack with them and suggest that they never again promote an experimental product without any long-term assurances on safety. Such a product should only be considered by the patient as one would in a research trial, purely on the basis of personal preference and willingness to be involved in a form of clinical investigation.
If you find “Courageous Discourse” enjoyable and useful to your endeavors, please subscribe as a paying or founder member to support our efforts in helping you engage in these discussions with family, friends, and your extended circles.
*
Note to readers: Please click the share buttons above. Follow us on Instagram and Twitter and subscribe to our Telegram Channel. Feel free to repost and share widely Global Research articles.
The Worldwide Corona Crisis, Global Coup d’Etat Against Humanity
by Michel Chossudovsky
Michel Chossudovsky reviews in detail how this insidious project “destroys people’s lives”. He provides a comprehensive analysis of everything you need to know about the “pandemic” — from the medical dimensions to the economic and social repercussions, political underpinnings, and mental and psychological impacts.
“My objective as an author is to inform people worldwide and refute the official narrative which has been used as a justification to destabilize the economic and social fabric of entire countries, followed by the imposition of the “deadly” COVID-19 “vaccine”. This crisis affects humanity in its entirety: almost 8 billion people. We stand in solidarity with our fellow human beings and our children worldwide. Truth is a powerful instrument.”
ISBN: 978-0-9879389-3-0, Year: 2022, PDF Ebook, Pages: 164, 15 Chapters
All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the Translate Website button below the author’s name.
To receive Global Research’s Daily Newsletter (selected articles), click here.
Follow us on Instagram and Twitter and subscribe to our Telegram Channel. Feel free to repost and share widely Global Research articles.
***
According to a US official, the Ukrainian tragedy appears to be just a “warmup” in the face of challenges Washington will see in the near future. US Navy Admiral Charles Richard, head of US Strategic Command, recently stated that his country has been preparing for prolonged conflicts with Russia and China.
Since 2018, Moscow and Beijing have played a central role in American international strategy, being seen as threats to the US-controlled world order. In this sense, major confrontations are expected, with the current conflict in Eastern Europe being a mere initial stage of this period of tensions.
Richard explains that the US would be entering a “great power competition”, in which the disputes with its two biggest geopolitical rivals would become intense. For him, Russia and China are the leaders in a process of overthrowing the American project for the post-Cold War world – and Washington seems really willing to take drastic measures to prevent the Chinese and Russian plans from materializing.
As head of the US nuclear arsenal, Richard analyzes the current global situation with concern and seeks realistic solutions to problems. The commander claims that the US is about to be “tested” in a very serious way. He believes that in the face of new dangers the quality of US military forces will not even matter, as there will simply not be enough resources to carry out US involvement in these conflicts. Therefore, Richard defends a rapid and effective reformulation of the American defense and security strategy, which adapts the country to the new geopolitical circumstances.
“We have to do some rapid, fundamental change in the way we approach the defense of this nation (…) This Ukraine crisis that we’re in right now, this is just the warmup (…) The ‘big one’ is coming. And it isn’t going to be very long before we’re going to get tested in ways that we haven’t been tested in a long time (…) It isn’t going to matter how good our [operating plan] is or how good our commanders are, or how good our horses are – we’re not going to have enough of them. And that is a very near-term problem”, he said during a recent interview.
Indeed, Richard seems pessimistic about his country’s ability to reverse its position in the power competition scenario. Currently, Washington is already behind China in terms of missiles. Beijing already has a new generation of ultra-long-range cruise missiles, in addition to a variety of ballistic missiles and hypersonic weapons, in the face of which the US has no equivalent equipment.
In addition, the Chinese armed forces also have warships equipped with radars capable of detecting stealth aircraft, surpassing the potential of the American F-22 and F-35 fleets. Also, as far as space warfare is concerned, China seems to grow much more than Washington, with the Pentagon having several times expressed concerns about the modern Chinese system of fractional orbital bombing.
Although such data are not enough to say that China is “overcoming” the American military power, they point to a scenario of Chinese growth in war technology in front of which the US, with so many internal and external problems, does not seem able to respond with equivalent progress. Washington remains the main military power but has fewer and fewer intermediate weapons preventing the use of the nuclear arsenal, which makes the situation quite tense and worrying, since in the face of eventual intense and prolonged conflicts the US will quickly tend to resort to the use of the extreme force.
It must also be mentioned that during the Russian special military operation in Ukraine, the US encouraged an irresponsible escalation of the conflict by supplying Kiev with weapons, including modern long-range missiles, but they did not achieve any success in their objectives, as Russia continues to maintain absolute control of the military situation. For this reason, the West quickly escalated the rhetoric, appealing to clear nuclear blackmail, worrying the entire international society. The case accurately illustrates what may happen in any new conflict situations – such as a possible Chinese intervention in Taiwan, in which the US would certainly send weapons and mercenary troops to support Taipei.
In fact, Richard’s analysis is supported by the recent US government document establishing a National Defense Strategy focused on Russia and China as central adversaries in a major global competition. The US is willing to use all its resources to prevent emerging nations from questioning the unipolar world order. And, in this sense, regional conflicts, which could be resolved quickly without foreign interference, are prolonged so that Washington “warms up” and “tests its strength” for the new “challenges”.
Faced with the emergence of Multipolarity, the best thing for the US to do is simply accept it and adapt to it, consolidating it as a regional power and abdicating any role of “global police”.
*
Note to readers: Please click the share buttons above. Follow us on Instagram and Twitter and subscribe to our Telegram Channel. Feel free to repost and share widely Global Research articles.
Lucas Leiroz is a researcher in Social Sciences at the Rural Federal University of Rio de Janeiro; geopolitical consultant. You can follow Lucas on Twitter and Telegram.
Featured image is licensed under the Public Domain
November 9th, 2022 by Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East
All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the Translate Website button below the author’s name.
To receive Global Research’s Daily Newsletter (selected articles), click here.
Follow us on Instagram and Twitter and subscribe to our Telegram Channel. Feel free to repost and share widely Global Research articles.
***
Last week in Ramallah, in a meeting with Canada’s mission to the Palestinian Authority, Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East (CJPME) drew urgent attention to the issue of Israel’s violent repression of Palestinian human rights organizations. In a useful but frank meeting with Canada’s new Representative to the Palestinian Authority, David Da Silva, CJPME Vice President Michael Bueckert highlighted the existential threat faced by six of Palestine’s most prominent human rights organizations and urged Canada to denounce Israel’s criminalization of these groups. Bueckert is currently visiting Palestine on a delegation with representatives of the Ottawa Forum on Israel Palestine and the United Network for Justice and Peace in Palestine and Israel (UNJPPI).
“Canada’s ongoing silence as Israel escalates its persecution of Palestinian human rights defenders is unacceptable,” said Michael Bueckert, Vice President of CJPME. Bueckert was told by Da Silva that instead of being vocal on various issues, Canada believes it is better able to leverage its friendship with Israel behind the scenes. However, CJPME notes that this means that Canada effectively does not take a public position on many serious human rights issues. “Canada should be open and direct in challenging Israel’s violations, instead of asking Canadians to trust that they are saying the right thing behind closed doors,” added Bueckert.
Earlier on the same day, CJPME and other delegation members had visited the Ramallah offices of Defence for Children International – Palestine (DCIP) and Addameer, two of the organizations recently criminalized by Israel. Both organizations described the state of insecurity and uncertainty that Israel’s false “terrorism” designations have caused, with employees in constant fear of being arrested and prosecuted at any time. Both organizations stressed the need for Canada to demand that Israel revoke the designations, but confirmed that Canada has been “missing in action.” In contrast, many European states have publicly criticized Israel’s repressive actions and have offered support to the six organizations. CJPME and the delegation raised these concerns with Canada’s mission.
The delegation also raised the consensus in the human rights sector that Israel is practicing apartheid against the Palestinians, as detailed in multiple major reports by Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, UN experts, and Israel’s largest human rights group B’Tselem. Canada has rejected all of these reports out of hand without offering any explanation. When pressed, however, Canada’s mission was still unable or unwilling to provide a single reason or explanation for rejecting the analysis of Amnesty International or the other organizations. CJPME emphasized that the government will have to engage with the reality of apartheid eventually, and looks forward to further consultations on these matters.
*
Note to readers: Please click the share buttons above. Follow us on Instagram and Twitter and subscribe to our Telegram Channel. Feel free to repost and share widely Global Research articles.
Featured image: Israel has occupied the West Bank since 1967 [Nurphoto]
All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the Translate Website button below the author’s name.
To receive Global Research’s Daily Newsletter (selected articles), click here.
Follow us on Instagram and Twitter and subscribe to our Telegram Channel. Feel free to repost and share widely Global Research articles.
***
Above all, last Sunday’s municipal elections on November 6th, were an optimal consolidation of the Nicaragua’s now serene and stable electoral culture, ensuring extremely efficient, orderly elections, and increased confidence for voters. The very high level of participation of Nicaragua’s young people and women in every aspect of the electoral process highlighted the profound democratization of Nicaraguan society that has taken place in the last fifteen years. Absent US and EU country interference, with its poisonous culture of corruption and violence, fear and hatred, last year’s national elections and these municipal elections of 2022 represent the triumph of Nicaragua’s sovereignty and the commitment of its population to Peace.
At an institutional level, the year-on-year progress of the Supreme Electoral Council in its increasing technical and administrative skills and in its communications and organizational capacity, have made both the voting process and the process of counting of votes highly efficient and reliable, a true model for the region. The collaboration of the country’s entire society, from the national universities to the National Police and the Nicaraguan Army and the various political parties, guaranteed the elections’ democratic integrity. The exceptional dedication, commitment and goodwill of the tens of thousands of people who provided their voluntary support to the electoral process ensured its undeniable sovereign legitimacy.
All day on that Sunday, tens of thousands of women and men voluntarily helped voters at the reception kiosks and at the polling stations or as electoral supervisory police. It is also important to note the essential role of the thousands of political party representatives who monitored the voting process for their respective political parties from the opening of the polls until their closure and then monitored the process of counting the votes. These municipal elections of 2022 have been the culmination in Nicaragua’s electoral history of the process of restitution of rights, of the People as President and the People as the protagonists of their local municipal authority.
After the controversial general elections of 1996, every municipal election exercise in Nicaragua has resulted in a progressive increase in support for the Sandinista National Liberation Front. In 2000, although it won in the municipality of the capital city, Managua, in the rest of the country the FSLN only won a total of 52 mayors nationwide. However, in the successive municipal elections that followed, the party’s popular support greatly increased. In 2004 the FSLN won 87 municipalities, in 2008, it won 109, in 2012 it won 127 and in 2017 it won 135.
The population of the municipality of Managua, with a third of the national population, has elected Sandinista mayors in every municipal election since 2000. Now in 2022, the FSLN has won all 153 municipalities in the country, even in the traditional strongholds of the national right wing parties, which , as usual, were hopelessly divided . The level of participation was 57% with an average vote in favor of the FSLN of around 74% and for the combined opposition parties an average of around 26%.
Throughout the past series of municipal elections and even more so with this latest electoral triumph of the FSLN, the population has come to rely more and more on the ability of the mayors and councilors of the Sandinista Front to improve the quality of life and the social and economic conditions of their communities. It is important to understand why the Nicaraguan people have demonstrated their confidence in the Sandinista Front in a progressively stronger way. The fundamental explanation is the revolutionary commitment of the FSLN to its historical program of 1969 and the development since January 2007 of a vision of the Common Good under a Government of Reconciliation and National Unity.
During the decade from 2007 to 2017, the government of President Comandante Daniel Ortega promoted and developed a successful consensus among virtually all sectors of Nicaraguan society. Everyone, apart from a small but vociferous recalcitrant minority, seemed to be in favor of social and economic stability and progress towards the much longed for realization of the Common Good. But, in 2017, the municipal elections of that year seem to have convinced the anti-patriotic opposition and their US and European owners that it would be impossible in the short or medium term to achieve an electoral defeat of the Sandinista Front and its alliance with other national political forces.
So the United States and its European Union allies encouraged their ciphers and pawns inside Nicaragua to mount the violent failed coup attempt of 2018. Then, during the following two years, repeated national surveys indicated that the vast majority of Nicaraguans wanted to resume the socio-economic course of the country set out by President Daniel Ortega and Vice President Rosario Murillo before 2018. The November 2021 national elections overwhelmingly confirmed that sentiment.
The People as President, the vast majority of Nicaraguans, ratified in those national elections the decisions and actions of the government, the National Assembly and the other institutions of the country to strengthen national sovereignty and defend Nicaraguan society actively against foreign interference, internal subversion and treason. This is the political logic that Nicaraguan society has followed, overcoming in short order the very serious economic and social effects of the failed coup attempt. The country has also overcome the health and economic consequences of Covid-19 and the severe lockdown measures applied internationally, which caused so much damage to economic and social activity in general around the world.
So, on the one hand, it is indeed reasonable to evaluate the results of these 2022 municipal elections as a kind of referendum on Nicaragua’s national policies in the regional and international context. The results have been a forceful vindication of the government of President Daniel Ortega and Vice President Rosario Murillo. On the other hand, it is impossible to assess adequately these local election results in terrms of the People’s control over their local municipal authorites without taking into account the central government policies that have reinforced and complemented the municipal authorities’ capacity for implementing programs and projects promoting the economic, social and cultural development of their municipalities. National Assembly deputy Carlos Emilio López highlighted this in a recent article:
“The Development Model promoted by the Government of Reconciliation and National Unity (GRUN) has as its center the human person, their rights, needs, desires, aspirations, dreams and demands… This Development Model, in which the Municipality is the territorial epicenter, has been promoted by the Government of Reconciliation and National Unity since 2007, by means of the National Human Development Plan, national and sectoral policies and socio-economic and cultural programs.”
As Carlos Emilio points out in his article, Nicaragua’s Law 466 guarantees transfers from central government to the municipalities which now amount to 10% of the national budget, under rigorous control to ensure its efficient and transparent use. But it is also worth emphasizing the range of central government actions integrally linked to development at the local government level. There are many examples.
The installation, fitting out and equipping of 156 new fire stations in almost all municipalities of the country has greatly strengthened the capacity of local civil defense. Apart from allowing better control of fires and accidents, these emergency facilities strengthen the municipal structures of the National System for Disaster Prevention and Mitigation (SINAPRED). Similarly, the municipal authorities collaborate with the Ministry of Health in the maintenance of more than 180 maternity shelters. These shelters which accommodate and support rural women in the last weeks of their pregnancy and have been instrumental in achieving the dramatic reduction in the incidence of maternal mortality from more than 90 deaths per 100,000 births in 2006, to 31 in 2021.
Together with the National Institute of Technology (INATEC), the municipalities strengthen vocational training through their local vocational skills training programs. Endorsed by INATEC, these programs certify thousands of young and not-so-young people every year in new trades and skills. Local governments also coordinate closely in their respective municipalities with the Ministry of Transport and Infrastructure. Every year they build new road and bridge infrastructure and carry out maintenance of existing infrastructure. With the Ministry of Family, Community, Cooperative and Associative Economy and the Nicaraguan Institute of Tourism, the municipalities promote the popular and creative economy.
They provide support to micro and small businesses, promote local fairs selling local products and developing the activities and initiatives of the Creative Cities Network. With the Nicaraguan Institute of Culture, the local municipal authorities have created more than 130 municipal choirs and an equal number of dance schools. The municipal authorities play a vital role, together with the Nicaraguan Sports Institute, in the development of the infrastructure and organization of recreational and sports activities across the whole country.
In all these areas of activity and various others, such as education, health or access to housing for low-income families, the municipal authorities work closely with the respective central government and State bodies to promote municipal development. So, in the context of the last 15 years of Sandinista government and given the centrality of municipal interventions for the current National Plan to Combat Poverty and for Human Development, it is very difficult, practically impossible, to distinguish between the national relevance of these municipal elections and their local importance.
In the national sense, winning the 153 municipalities nationwide reflects a tremendous, unquestionable affirmation of the People as President’s faith in the government of President Daniel Ortega, in Vice President Rosario Murillo, in their ministerial team and in the great institutional advances the country has made, especially in this context in relation to the Supreme Electoral Council. In the sense of the People as protagonists of their municipal authorities, these elections confirm popular satisfaction with the performance of the Sandinista municipal authorities and people’s confidence in the ability of their newly elected local governments to ensure the integral development of their municipality and so help guarantee the Christian, Socialist, Solidarity-based common good of all Nicaragua’s People. Following these municipal elections, the Sandinista Popular Revolution in Nicaragua is moving more united than ever towards yet more impressive advances and victories.
*
Note to readers: Please click the share buttons above or below. Follow us on Instagram and Twitter and subscribe to our Telegram Channel. Feel free to repost and share widely Global Research articles.
This article was originally published on Tortilla con Sal, translated from Spanish.
Stephen Sefton, renowned author and political analyst based in northern Nicaragua, is actively involved in community development work focussing on education and health care. He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG).
All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the Translate Website button below the author’s name.
To receive Global Research’s Daily Newsletter (selected articles), click here.
Follow us on Instagram and Twitter and subscribe to our Telegram Channel. Feel free to repost and share widely Global Research articles.
***
How bad is the rise in mortality?
So bad funeral companies are starting to worry.
Today Service Corporation International, the largest for-profit funeral operator in North America, had its quarterly earnings call. SCI had another great quarter, you’ll be pleased to hear! So far in 2022 the company has made almost $500 million in profits – and its stock rose more than 10 percent today after its earnings report.
(Death is your best investment!)
SCI’s management seems fairly open with investors. For many years, much of the company’s growth came from buying family-run funeral homes as their operators, umm, died out. The underlying funeral business is slow growth and very predictable.
If you go back in this industry and particularly with SCI, year-to-year you would see the numbers of deaths — probably in one year you may be down 1% or 2%, in the next year you’re up 1% or 2% which you could predict was pretty good accuracy over a year and over a big footprint like ours what was probably going to happen… 2020 comes along, Covid, game-changer, right. We’re having to do at one point of time 20 percent more funerals which is unheard of in a year versus, let’s say, a year or two before.
So Service Corporation expected that once Covid passed, its business would go back to normal…
What we would have expected is, why wouldn’t we go back towards, let’s say, a 2019 level, maybe you get a percent or so growth of 2019, I would expect that. So that would be a reasonable level that we think would stabilize. And that’s kind of what we anticipated…
Only that’s not what has happened.
What we’re telling you is, the third quarter of this year, we did 15% more calls than we did in the third quarter of 2019. That is not what anybody would have anticipated and that has just a very de minimis amount of Covid deaths [emphasis added] in it.
Covid is gone. But people keep dying. Why?
Unsurprisingly, Ryan did not mention mRNA vaccines anywhere. Why would he? Doing so would only make for headaches he and Service Corporation do not need.
But, earlier in the call, he did point to “more cancer deaths” and more broadly a decline in overall health:
We believe these excess services are more permanent in nature into a combination of aging demographics, higher risk, less healthy lifestyle developed during the pandemic.
Ryan also suggested delayed medical care might be an issue.
These explanations are… strained, at best. Aging demographics are hardly new, and the lockdowns that drove a “less healthy lifestyle” ended as early as mid-2020 in most red states and by early 2021 almost everywhere. Opioids and overdoses generally remain a horrendous crisis, but deaths appear to have peaked in early 2022 and fallen slightly since. And for all the discussion of delays in medical care, hospitals and doctors offices have functioned essentially normally for at least 18 months.
In any case, the United States is hardly alone in seeing a large and so far unexplained spike in deaths in 2022. Countries from Germany to Australia to Taiwan are seeing similar trends.
They all have something in common. No points for guessing what.
In any case, Service Corporation is expecting business to stay good for years to come.
“These trends are hard to reverse quickly,” Ryan said. “I hope three, four, five years from now will subside a bit. But I don’t think it’s any time soon.”
*
Note to readers: Please click the share buttons above. Follow us on Instagram and Twitter and subscribe to our Telegram Channel. Feel free to repost and share widely Global Research articles.
Featured image is from Children’s Health Defense
The Worldwide Corona Crisis, Global Coup d’Etat Against Humanity
by Michel Chossudovsky
Michel Chossudovsky reviews in detail how this insidious project “destroys people’s lives”. He provides a comprehensive analysis of everything you need to know about the “pandemic” — from the medical dimensions to the economic and social repercussions, political underpinnings, and mental and psychological impacts.
“My objective as an author is to inform people worldwide and refute the official narrative which has been used as a justification to destabilize the economic and social fabric of entire countries, followed by the imposition of the “deadly” COVID-19 “vaccine”. This crisis affects humanity in its entirety: almost 8 billion people. We stand in solidarity with our fellow human beings and our children worldwide. Truth is a powerful instrument.”
ISBN: 978-0-9879389-3-0, Year: 2022, PDF Ebook, Pages: 164, 15 Chapters
All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the Translate Website button below the author’s name.
To receive Global Research’s Daily Newsletter (selected articles), click here.
Follow us on Instagram and Twitter and subscribe to our Telegram Channel. Feel free to repost and share widely Global Research articles.
***
President Xi Jinping made history by opening the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of China (CPC), when he announced the beginning of a New Era of socio-political development with focus on the Global South.
The initiative embarks on a path of peaceful modernization and moderate prosperity, bringing more equilibrium to a world often beset by conflicts.
He made again history by having been confirmed for his 3rd five-year term as China’s leader. This is good for continuity of a successful policy of growth and for the transformation of China as moderately prosperous society – a socialism with Chinese characteristics.
The next five years will focus on expanding the policy of growth and transformation with more emphasis on peacefully integrating the Global South.
President Xi pointed out, there would be no change in strategy vis-à-vis Taiwan, Hong Kong and China’s zero-Covid policy. Regarding Taiwan, China is aiming at a nonviolent unification. This is entirely an internal matter. China would not tolerate any foreign intervention.
*
The new 7 member Standing Committee are poised to make a strong team to tackle the many challenges China will face during the next 5 years, envisaging an even longer horizon, until 2049, the Centenario of Modern China.
China has a stellar record of success stories during her 70-plus years of peaceful existence as a modern socialist country. Unfortunately, they are mostly ignored by western politicians and journalists.
Just to mention a few of the many achievements during President Xi’s 20-year tenure.
Poverty reduction – lifting 800 million people out of poverty (equivalent to ten times the population of Germany);
Health – impressive improvement in China’s health system; increasing China’s average life expectancy from about 71 years in 2000 to close to 79 years in 2021. This exceed many so-called developed countries (compare this to the US – 76 years life expectancy in 2021).
Most Chinese have access to FREE healthcare which is rare in the West.
Dedollarization – is achieved through the gradual debunking of the sanction-prone US-dollar, by concentrating on developing internal and Asian regional markets and through a massive de-dollarization program, which includes:
Development of a Chinese digital central bank yuan, for use in international transactions;
China and ever more Asian and western countries are trading in Yuan and local currencies;
China’s economy and that of other Asian countries will be backed by their actual economic outputs – and most-likely by a basket of commonly used commodities;
Attracting many (former) “western orbit countries” into Asian regional organizations, such as (a) the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO); (b) the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement (RCEP) of ASEAN+5 countries (15 altogether) – which is the worldwide largest free trade agreement; and (c) the BRICS+, …. to mention just a few. These countries will trade in other currencies than the US-dollar.
The Belt and Road Initiative – BRI – may be the Crown Jewel of China’s achievements during the past two decades. It is a direct initiative of President Xi, launched in 2013. It will celebrate next year its tenth anniversary.
BRI has created already at least six land and maritime “roads” that are gradually spanning the globe to connect people of different cultures with infrastructure, with projects for joint research, learning, as well as the development of alternative sources of energies — and much more.
At present more than 150 countries and international organizations are connected to the Belt and Road.
The most recent addition of a BRI connection, may be the Port of Hamburg, a Chinese participation, for which the German Government has just given its Green Light.
Key elements of China’s projected and visionary New Era include
Continuation and enhancement of the new autonomous monetary system – detached form the fiat “dollar world”. The new system could become a trailblazer for other countries. It might become the gateway for a sanction-free world economy.
Embracing the Global South – proposing peaceful development and detachment from the fangs of western exploitation, while offering partner countries of the Global South technical assistance and development projects addressing their socioeconomic priorities.
The Belt and Road, beyond its worldwide expansion, may become a first-class instrument to implement a program of peaceful modernization of the Global South, preparing joint ventures and connections between countries and regions, including for trade, as well as research into alternative energy resources.
China’s Governancemiracle is the result of a long-term strategic vision. Her peaceful and effective governance has successfully dealt with crises and problems. The path of the past will lead to successful governance into the future.
Key governance challenges ahead may include
Peaceful integration of Taiwan into mainland China;
Maintaining Hong Kong’s internal peace, protecting HK from foreign interference;
Becoming rapidly self-sufficient in the semi-conductor production, for which the Biden Administration is attempting barring China from access to the needed technology.
This new US sanctions scheme seems to be an unrealistic endeavor. China is already master of these technologies. Besides, China disposes of the necessary raw materials, rare earths, for which the West depends largely on China’s exports.
In conclusion
China has been successful in her 70-plus years existence, because of her peaceful approach to development and to selective growth. China is pursuing a multipolar world, rather than hegemonic power.
China uses her peaceful governance to address injustices and irrationalities in the current international order, including in conflicts with the US and its western allies.
Peaceful global governance initiatives include the BRI, Global Development Initiative, Global Security Initiative, BRICS+ Mechanism, Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), the world’s largest Free Trade Agreement, the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP), and more.
Enhancing global governance initiatives is China’s long-term vision, an important feature of what distinguishes the East from the West.
The 20th CPC Congress outlines an outlook to 2035 – with a horizon 2049 – pointing to the 100th anniversary of the “New Communist China” that successfully evolved to a socialism with Chinese characteristics.
As a momentum for closing, please allow me to present a brief 3-minute video:
Note to readers: Please click the share buttons 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). 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 non-resident Senior Fellow of the Chongyang Institute of Renmin University, Beijing. He is also a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG).
All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the Translate Website button below the author’s name.
To receive Global Research’s Daily Newsletter (selected articles), click here.
Follow us on Instagram and Twitter and subscribe to our Telegram Channel. Feel free to repost and share widely Global Research articles.
***
I have never known the Federal Reserve make a good decision.Indeed, disastrous decisions are the Fed’s hallmark.There are many such disasters.Among them the Great Depression, the decade long consequence of the Federal Reserve Board’s failure to prevent the shrinkage of the US money supply. See this.
Image: Brooksley Born (Photo by the US Government, licensed under the Public Domain)
In more recent times we had Brooksley Born, head of the Commodities Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), blocked from regulating over the counter derivatives and credit default swaps that resulted in financial panic and economic collapse.Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan, Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, Deputy Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, and SEC Chairman Arthur Levitt conspired to have Congress block Brooksley Born from doing her job.The four dumbshit officials told Congress that “markets are self-regulating.”Greenspan when later questioned by Congress admitted that his ideology “had a flaw.” See this.
The Fed has abandoned effective financial regulation and helped to kill the 1933 Glass-Steagall Act that had kept commercial and investment banking separate.It is ironic that it was the formerly progressive Democrat Party in the clutches of the Clintons that repealed the progressive Glass-Stegall Act in 1999, thus setting up the line of financial troubles that caused the Fed to pump out money for 12 years in an effort to stabilize the financial system.Gretchen Morgenson and Joshua Rosner’s 2011 book, Reckless Endangerment documents the failure of financial regulation.Michael Lewis’s books, such as Flash Boys (2014), among others, demonstrate that the financial sector no longer serves any public purpose.All the years while the Fed was printing money hand over fist to keep the financial system intact, Wall Street was making its money by front-running stock purchases.
In 1890 monopolies were regarded as restraints on trade and efforts were made to prevent them with the passage of the Sherman Anti-Trust Act, followed by the passage of two subsequent anti-trust acts.Enforcement was spotty and the act was not always well applied, but monopoly was recognized as undesirable. Today that is not the case.Globalization produced the view that only large corporations and banks could compete on a global basis.Consequently, the Sherman Anti-Trust Act became a dead letter law. US monopolization of finance became an important foundation of US world hegemony.
This brief account brings us to the present day.The current Federal Reserve Board has confused a shortage of goods and services due to Washington-induced supply constraints with an excess demand inflation, and is raising interest rates in order to reduce aggregate demand.This policy is nonsensical.The incompetent Biden regime’s Covid lockdowns and Russian sanctions caused large reductions in supply.Businesses were closed and many failed to reopen.Supply chains were disrupted. Sanctions against Russia reduced the supply of energy, thus kicking up its price and the price of everything dependent on energy–essentially everything.
The Fed’s policy of raising interest rates simply raises costs higher.Everything dependent on credit costs more, including home mortgages. The Biden regime’s sanctions against Russia are the source of the largest part of the higher prices because of their impact on energy costs.
Far from reducing inflation, the Fed’s policy is benefitting private capital firms by driving prospective home owners out of the housing market by raising the interest cost of carrying a mortgage, thus aiding private capital companies to purchase housing for cash and turn them into rental units. The rental income is sheltered by depreciation, and when the properties are depreciated, they are sold, the money reinvested in new purchases, and the process begins again.Home ownership by individuals cannot be depreciated, and home ownership by individuals has declined.Is the Fed in bed with the private capital companies or just incompetent?
Washington’s Russian sanctions are being used to destroy European businesses, thus removing European competition with US firms.Consider just two aspects of the sanctions:European firms have been forced to break off profitable business relations with Russia and those with operations within Russia have had to abandon them.Europe, especially Germany, is being cut off from energy, thus endangering not only living standards but the existence of domestic industries.There are reports that the US is using the lure of plentiful and relatively cheap energy to recruit German car makers and other industries to relocate to the United States.In other words, the US is trying to recover from the disaster of relocating its own industry offshore in Asia by using “Russian sanctions” to relocate Europe’s industry in the US.
Washington’s EU puppets long ago ceased to think and just follow orders.
The German car companies want to survive, and if survival requires exiting Germany, they will exit.
The deindustrialization of Germany and Europe would greatly reduce the pressure of NATO on Russia.Europe desolate of industry would have no money to purchase weapons from American weapons corporations and no means of equipping soldiers.The Kremlin, of course, might again ruin things for itself by coming to Europe’s energy rescue.The Russians will end up Goody Two Shoeing themselves to ruin.
If the Kremlin’s keeps its nose out of it, Washington will succeed in cutting Europe off from energy and relocating European industry to the US.
The great defect of Western peoples is that they always take their governments’ policies at face value.It doesn’t occur to them that government is covering up a dark agenda with a moralistic campaign against Russia that requires sacrifices by the West.
Conservatives have tendency to attack real explanations as unpatriotic, and woke liberals attack the truth as misinformation.As there is no media serving as watchdog, there is no obstacle to dark agendas.
Note to readers: Please click the share buttons above or below. Follow us on Instagram and Twitter and subscribe to our Telegram Channel. Feel free to repost and share widely Global Research articles.
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.
We are living in an ever-more intense “Death Tsunami”, Dr. Sherry Tenpenny tells us. She says in the UK, 1 in 73 people who got the shot are already dead, according to US government data. She adds, about a 1,000 people a week die, as a result of the coerced vaxx campaign.
In this Canadian Patriot Review documentary produced by Jason Dahl, narrated by myself and based on the work of Cynthia Chung, you will be introduced to the ancient origins of the occult societies that penetrated the heart of America’s intelligence agencies after the murder of William McKinley in 1901.
Einstein was right when he said the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. Every two years, Americans vote for the same uniparty selected candidates expecting the serious issues of inflation, crime, drugs, etc. to be addressed, only to get broken campaign promises and more of the same.
According to mainstream media, hospitalizations for respiratory infections are on the rise and “experts” warn of a potential “tripledemic” this winter, as people contract COVID, seasonal influenza and respiratory syncytial virus (RSV).
Arab leaders attending the meeting tip-toed around the Abraham Accords, which saw the United Emirates and Bahrain normalize their relations with Israel, with Saudi Arabia later allowing for over-flights of the Kingdom by Israeli aircraft, and is seen as a potential precursor to wider Arab normalization with Israel.
Indeed, Britain’s role in the current Ukraine crisis goes as far back as November 2013, when the Euromaidan colour revolution was launched in response to then-President Viktor Yanukovych’s decision to suspend an EU trade deal in order to pursue closer ties with neighbouring Russia.
To be sure there is an election coming up today in the United States and President Joe Biden has clearly taken the low road in the lead up to it by speaking before friendly audiences and repeating over and over the bromides that cause the brain to go numb.
The Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists or OUN is the most successful post-war fascist group. During the war the OUN played a major role in helping the Germans carry out the Holocaust, which claimed 1.2 million Jewish lives.
The essence of man consists in feeling, thinking, acting, in short, in moving in a way that distinguishes him from other things with which he compares himself.
All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the Translate Website button below the author’s name.
To receive Global Research’s Daily Newsletter (selected articles), click here.
Follow us on Instagram and Twitter and subscribe to our Telegram Channel. Feel free to repost and share widely Global Research articles.
***
As I write this, Americans are going to the polls to vote for this or that faction of the corporate uniparty. Einstein was right when he said the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. Every two years, Americans vote for the same uniparty selected candidates expecting the serious issues of inflation, crime, drugs, etc. to be addressed, only to get broken campaign promises and more of the same.
Ukraine is hardly on the radar—and yet tens of billions of dollars added to an astronomical debt, conservatively estimated at over 30 trillion, will not go to help the American people. It will be spent in one of the only growth sectors of the economy— “defense,” where death merchants embrace windfalls—and the destructive, poverty-inducing policies of the federal reserve and central bankers will continue to be explained away as corporate greed.
In fact, the neocons and “humanitarian (sic) interventionists” are pushing to increase weapons sales. “Bill LaPlante, the Pentagon’s chief weapons buyer, said that he expects Congress to grant the authority to allow wartime purchasing power at a level not seen since the Cold War,” writes Dave DeCamp.
To continue arming Ukraine, LaPlante has been calling for the Pentagon to be granted the authority to lock in multiyear contracts for weapons purchases, which are typically reserved for procuring naval vessels and warplanes. The idea is to get arms makers the incentive to ramp up production.
Congress will not seriously address—except during elections—rising crime rates, an opioid crisis, the dissolution of the middle class, and out-of-control inflation (now 20%, not the “official” number of 8.6%). Inflation is driven by a “loose” monetary policy and the foolish injection of trillions of dollars into the economy to mollify an increasingly grumpy populace during a blown-out-of-proportion pandemic.
If you read the “news,” however, you get the impression inflation is created by greedy corporations. Democrats love this fallacious explanation peddled by the corporate media.
During a recent House oversight subcommittee hearing, Rep. Katie Porter, D-Calif., pointed to data from an Economic Policy Institute report which found that more than half of the increased prices people are paying are coming from increases in corporate profits, and not from higher overhead costs associated with operation and labor.
In other words, this Democrat suffers from either a) stupidity and an inability to comprehend economic theory—which you’d think would be part of her job—or b) lying to divert attention away from the real culprits, the ruling financial elite.
Bigger corporate profits account for *over half* of the higher prices people are paying. pic.twitter.com/RZr5O0X4oJ
As Ron Paul noted last May as the lockdowns waned, the federal reserve enables the disastrous spending OCD affliction rampant across a bought-and-paid-for Congress.
[Fed Chairman Jerome] Powell does not want to admit that the real reason the Fed will continue to keep rates low is that increasing rates will cause the federal government’s interest payments to rise to unsustainable levels.
Congress will speed up the effort to impoverish the nation, and turn it into a third-world hellhole, by magically creating a mountain of devalued fiat dollars and steering it toward the insatiable maw of the death merchants—all in the deceptive name of saving non-existent “democracy” from the evil machinations of Vladimir Putin, Kim Jong-un, Xi Jinping, and other selected enemies.
The Senate has added an amendment to its version of the 2023 National Defense Authorization Act to grant the authority [to purchase an endless supply of death machines]. It would allow the Pentagon to make multiyear purchases through 2023 and 2024 of certain arms made by Lockheed Martin, BAE Systems, Kongsberg Defence & Aerospace, and Raytheon, the former employer of Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin.
LaPlante was ecstatic. “They [Congress] are supportive of this. They’re going to give us multiyear authority, and they’re going to give us funding to really put into the industrial base―and I’m talking billions of dollars into the industrial base―to fund these production lines,” he said during a press conference last week.
They are, of course, far less supportive of doing something about an economy that is turning vicious and threatening a recession (in fact, a depression) that will strip millions of Americans of their dignity and ability to maintain a modicum of security for their families.
Zelenskyy and his coterie of nasty Russophobic Nazis are far more important than the welfare of a public that only matters on a day like today, the first Tuesday in November, when ballots are counted, ignored, and stuffed.
In fact, the path we are on—a debt-financed primrose path terminating in poverty and want, to say nothing of thermonuclear war—is precisely what the original neocons called for: endless war and a population locked in serfdom to the state. During Bush’s war, Danny Postel interviewed the academic Shadia Drury, author of The Political Ideas of Leo Strauss and Leo Strauss and the American Right.
The ancient philosophers whom Strauss most cherished believed that the unwashed masses were not fit for either truth or liberty, and that giving them these sublime treasures would be like throwing pearls before swine.
Strauss and his followers embraced the philosophy of Plato, Nietzsche, Thrasymachus, and Machiavelli.
[Strauss, Alexandre Kojève, and Carl Schmitt] were convinced that liberal economics would turn life into entertainment and destroy politics; all three understood politics as a conflict between mutually hostile groups willing to fight each other to the death. In short, they all thought that man’s humanity depended on his willingness to rush naked into battle and headlong to his death. Only perpetual war can overturn the modern project, with its emphasis on self-preservation and creature comforts. (Emphasis added.)
And perpetual war is what we have endured decade after decade as the neocons wormed their way into the halls of government. The Obama administration, while initially campaigning to end neocon wars, embraced the big kahuna neocon Frederick Kagan to oversee the illegal and devastating (for civilians) war in Afghanistan. Obama made certain the neocon to-do list was accomplished—continuing and expanding the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan while laying the ground for additional horrors in Syria and Libya. Sanctions continued to be imposed on Iran for its fictional building of a nuclear bomb.
On the so-called Left, excuses were made for Obama’s neocon-ish foreign policy. “More than five years into his presidency, Barack Obama has failed to take full control over his foreign policy, allowing a bureaucracy shaped by long years of Republican control and spurred on by a neocon-dominated U.S. news media to frustrate many of his efforts to redirect America’s approach to the world in a more peaceful direction,” wrote the late Robert Parry in 2014.
The Obama administration’s Assistant Secretary of State, Victoria Nuland, the wife of Robert Kagan, micromanaged the illegal coup in Ukraine that brought Russian-hating ultranationalists into the government.
The policy directives of the ruling elite span both factions of the USG uniparty. It does not matter who sits in the Oval Office (so long as it is not an outlier like Trump), foreign policy is set in stone, and decided by the likes of the Council on Foreign Relations.
“Since the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the U.S. policy of support for Ukraine’s sovereignty has been strong across the U.S. political spectrum,” declares Sarah Dixon Klump, writing for the Kennan Institute at the globalist Wilson Center. (In order to put this statement in its proper context, do a non-Google search on Cold War architect George Kennan.)
The late William Green Miller, Bill Clinton’s ambassador to Ukraine, according to Dixon Klump,
…recommended that the Obama administration, like the Bush and Clinton administrations before it, voice its support for Ukraine’s eventual entry into NATO. In the meantime, however, Miller pointed out that the U.S.—through the signing of the Tri-Partite Agreement of January 14, 1994—is explicitly and formally obliged to support Ukraine in the event that its sovereignty, territorial integrity, or independence is threatened militarily, economically, or politically.
Russia considers Ukraine and NATO a red line, the same as the US would declare a violation of a red line if Russia placed its war machines and troops up against the US-Canada or Mexico borders. Hubris and double standards rule the day in the “indispensable nation,” as the advocate of child murder, Madeline Albright, who defended the engineered death of over 500,000 Iraqi children, described the USG.
The wishes of the American people have nothing to do with such foreign policy decisions and their needs are routinely dismissed. The wisdom of spending trillions of dollars to overturn elections, invade foreign countries, kill disfavored people abroad, and build a police and surveillance state at home is rarely discussed.
Democrats and Republicans put on a good show, making millions of Americans believe there are distinctive differences between what are in reality two factions of a uniparty that takes marching orders from the likes of the Council on Foreign Relations (as Hillary Clinton admitted.)
Millions of Americans are sadly misinformed on the growing daily prospect of thermonuclear war. Unlike the Cuban Missile Crisis, there is no Robert Kennedy behind the scenes arranging diplomatic exchanges between the USG and Russia. The neocon and lib interventionists have left the decision to negotiate the fate of humankind up to a man threatened with murder if he does not tow the neo-nazi line on Russia.
The neocons are not and never have been interested in diplomacy. They sincerely believe they make their own reality and thermonuclear war is not on the agenda.
As an adviser to George W. Bush (said to be Karl Rove) declared in 2004 during an interview with Ron Suskind of The New York Times,
We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.
However, if we follow the rationale of neocons and liberal interventionists—that Russia is an evil empire and the USG must depose Putin—the new reality will be nuclear winter and the extinction of life on planet Earth.
*
Note to readers: Please click the share buttons above. Follow us on Instagram and Twitter and subscribe to our Telegram Channel. Feel free to repost and share widely Global Research articles.
All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the Translate Website button below the author’s name.
To receive Global Research’s Daily Newsletter (selected articles), click here.
Follow us on Instagram and Twitter and subscribe to our Telegram Channel. Feel free to repost and share widely Global Research articles.
According to mainstream media, hospitalizations for respiratory infections are on the rise and “experts” warn of a potential “tripledemic” this winter, as COVID, seasonal influenza and respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) are all in circulation
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports a 1% increase in new admissions of patients with confirmed COVID-19. Maine — which has one of the nation’s highest COVID jab rates — has the most COVID hospitalizations. RSV cases are also unseasonably high
“Health experts” are now calling for voluntary indoor masking again, even though all the evidence garnered over the past three years confirms that face masks cannot prevent viral infection and spread
The first-ever RSV vaccines are now in the pipeline, directed at pregnant women, newborns and seniors. Some of them are based on mRNA technology
No vaccine for RSV has ever been successfully developed before, because the vaccines had a persistent tendency to cause worse disease, a phenomenon known as antibody-dependent enhancement (ADE)
According to mainstream media, hospitalizations for respiratory infections are on the rise and “experts” warn of a potential “tripledemic” this winter, as people contract COVID,1 seasonal influenza and respiratory syncytial virus (RSV).2
“The CDC [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] reports a 1% increase in new admissions of patients with confirmed COVID-19 in the U.S.,” Yahoo! News reported at the end of October 2022.3
Far from being a pandemic of the unvaccinated, however, most COVID patients are now, in fact, fully jabbed. As noted by Yahoo! News (before urging everyone to stay up to date on their boosters):
“The state with the most COVID hospitalizations is Maine even though it has one of the country’s highest full vaccination rates, which means a person has received their primary series of vaccinations (whether that’s one or two doses) and two weeks have passed since their last dose.”
RSV cases are also unseasonably high.4 According to Dr. Margaret R. Moon, co-director of Johns Hopkins Children’s Center in Baltimore, the hospital “is experiencing a surge of patients due to an increase in cases of RSV, as well as other reasons, and many surrounding hospitals are facing the same.”5
Scare Tactics to Sell You on RSV Vaccine
Fear sells, they say, and that’s certainly the adage used by Big Pharma when it comes to vaccines. A perfect example of this was recently published by Vox.6 “New RSV Vaccines Are Coming. This Is Very, Very Good News,” the headline states. Why good news? Because RSV is a “baddie responsible for much of the mayhem” now seen in hospitals. Vox publishes classic fear porn:
“RSV generally causes cold symptoms but can also lead to severe lung inflammation or infection in very young and very old people. And it’s started off cold season with a bang:
As of October 22, babies under a year old were being hospitalized at rates six times higher than they were at the same point in 2019, and the overall hospitalization rate was seven times higher for people of all ages.
Every year, hundreds of children die of RSV, and tens of thousands more are hospitalized … RSV disease is one of the first pediatric illnesses that young pediatricians learn to fear, said [Amy] Edwards [a pediatric infectious disease specialist in Cleveland].
Babies with the infection have terrible coughs and make wheezing noises as they struggle to move air through their swollen airways. ‘Once you’ve seen it, it’s like you never forget it,’ she said …
In the US, the infection leads to about 58,000 hospitalizations and 100 to 300 deaths among young children each year, making it the country’s top cause of hospitalization in infants.
Although it’s a particularly risky infection for babies born prematurely and for those with lung problems or heart abnormalities, about 40 percent of American infants who died of RSV over the past few decades were otherwise healthy.
However bad RSV is in the United States, it’s worse globally. Every year, it causes an estimated 120,000 infant deaths worldwide … There is currently no approved antiviral treatment for RSV in either adults or children, and the one preventive option that currently exists is far from perfect …
Babies need something better — something affordable that can protect all infants, not just the highest-risk ones, from this seasonal scourge. Adults, too, need something to protect them from a virus that reliably causes an immense amount of disease — ideally, something that’s as good as a flu shot, or better.”
“Something as good as a flu shot.” Really? The 2017/2018 seasonal influenza vaccine’s adjusted overall effectiveness for the U.S. was just 36% against influenza A and influenza B virus infection,7,8and between 2005 and 2015, the flu vaccine’s adjusted overall effectiveness was less than 50% more than half the time — with a low of only 10% in the 2004-05 season.9,10
Other than the COVID jab, it’s difficult to find another example of where a commercial product can fail to work more than half the time and still be recommended and even mandated. Not to worry, though, because according to Vox, “RSV vaccines are super effective.” Where have we heard that before?
Expect Insane COVID Measures to Resume
As predicted, “health experts” are starting to call for voluntary indoor masking again,11 even though all the evidence garnered over the past three years confirms what we already knew in 2020, which is that face masks do nothing to stop viral infections.
And, as before, in the absence of actual scientific evidence the narrative focuses instead on virtue. Masking up is said to be a way to protect everyone,12 so just “do your part” and wear it, even though, in reality, it protects no one.
The same goes for vaccination. Both the flu vaccine and the COVID shots are proven ineffective, yet the recommendation13 to get them continues. And this season, you’re expected to get both!
First-Ever RSV Vaccines Expected in 2023
The fact that RSV is now being highlighted as a severe risk is understandable in light of the fact that the first-ever RSV vaccines are now in the pipeline. According to CNN,14 four different RSV shots are “nearing review by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration” and more than a dozen others are in trials.
This includes a “long-acting injection” specifically for babies, to be given “right after birth” to protect them from RSV “for as long as six months.” If that’s not a perfect example of how media tries to change the perception of the basic meaning of a term, I don’t know what is. Six months is hardly long-acting!
Historically, most vaccines have at least offered antibody-only “protection” for years, not months. Please recognize all vaccines fail to use cellular immunity to protect you, which is far more important than humoral antibody protection. This extremely short duration of antibody-only protection appears to be a hallmark of mRNA technology however, and indeed, at least some of these new RSV shots are mRNA based.
Moderna has announced it is working on an mRNA jab for RSV, which is scheduled for release in 2023.15 They’re also working on a combination mRNA jab for COVID, RSV and the flu. (Ultimately, Moderna wants to create an annual mRNA shot that covers all of the top 10 viruses that result in hospitalizations each year.16)
Janssen is also working on an RSV shot using an adenovirus vector, the same technology used in its COVID shot, while Pfizer and GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) are testing “protein subunit” RSV vaccines for pregnant women and seniors.17
According to Forbes,18 Pfizer announced November 1, 2022, that it is ready to seek FDA authorization for its RSV vaccine. In clinical trials this shot was given to pregnant mothers and the efficacy was measured not by whether it prevented RSV, but by severity of the infection in hospitalized babies during their first months of life.19
Why No RSV Vaccine Ever Made It to Market
No vaccine for RSV has ever been successfully developed before. Why? Because the vaccines had a persistent tendency to cause worse disease, a phenomenon known as antibody-dependent enhancement (ADE). As explained by CNN:20
“The hunt for an effective way to protect against RSV stalled for decades after two children died in a disastrous vaccine trial in the 1960s.
That study tested a vaccine made with an RSV virus that had been chemically treated to render it inert and mixed with an ingredient called alum, to wake up the immune system and help it respond. It was tested at clinical trial sites in the US between 1966 and 1968.
At first, everything looked good. The vaccine was tested in animals, who tolerated it well, and then given to children, who also appeared to respond well.
‘Unfortunately, that fall, when RSV season started, many of the children that were vaccinated required hospitalization and got more severe RSV disease than what would have normally occurred,’ said Steven Varga, a professor of microbiology and immunology at the University of Iowa, who has been studying RSV for more than 20 years and is developing a nanoparticle vaccine against the virus.
A study21 published on the trial found that 80% of the vaccinated children who caught RSV later required hospitalization, compared with only 5% of the children who got a placebo. Two of the babies who had participated in the trial died.
The outcomes of the trial were a seismic shock to vaccine science. Efforts to develop new vaccines and treatments against RSV halted as researchers tried to untangle what went so wrong … ‘It is in fact, in many ways, why we have some of the things that we have in place today to monitor vaccine safety,’ Varga said.”
Is Anyone Monitoring Vaccine Safety?
The sad irony here is that while we do have vaccine safety monitoring tools in place, the data are not being properly evaluated and used in the decision-making process. So, no, we do NOT have a functioning vaccine safety monitoring in the U.S. If the FDA and CDC were actually monitoring safety, using the tools at their disposal as intended, the COVID shots would have been withdrawn within months of their release.
They are, by any measure, the most dangerous and lethal injections ever released in history. Yet the FDA and CDC have ignored all safety signals and recently added the COVID jab to the childhood vaccination schedule. If there’s no safety monitoring for the COVID jab, there’s no reason to expect safety monitoring for any other new vaccine or mRNA shot.
What’s more, there’s no reason to assume researchers have actually figured out how to make an RSV shot that doesn’t cause ADE or immune imprinting, both of which pervert your immune response to subsequent exposures of the pathogen “immunized” against so you actually get sicker than if you had never been jabbed.
Public health technocrats foolishly believe mRNA technology will circumvent the problem encountered previously, but considering we’re now seeing signs of ADE and immune imprinting — or original antigenic sin — in those who got the COVID jab, there’s no precedent to assume such a thing.
It’s important to realize that the COVID pandemic has radically altered the authorization and approval processes for medical interventions. Everything is now on the fast track, which opens the floodgates for quick profits.
Instead of requiring trials that span a decade or more, mRNA shots are being rolled out after mere months of testing, and much of the safety is assumed based on the alleged safety of the COVID shots.
“Alleged safety” are the key words here, as more than 1.4 million adverse event reports following the COVID jab have been logged in the Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System (VAERS), including well over 31,600 deaths.22 According to the FDA and CDC, NONE of these deaths are attributable to the shots, which is a statistical impossibility.
Fearmongering Is a Tool to Foster Obedience
The biosecurity crisis needs to continue indefinitely because it’s the primary justification behind The Great Reset. That’s why, over the past three years, the goal post for “public safety” has been moved further and further away as we’ve gone along. At regular intervals, there’s been another Chicken Little warning that the sky is still falling and that we must not let down our guard.
As fall and winter set in, we’ll see another wave of doom and gloom being predicted for anyone refusing to wear a mask and get all the shots. At some stage, you must realize that the more you give in and obey, the more you have to give in and obey. There really is no end to what they can and will take from you, and holding on to the belief that your government would never [fill in the blank] is becoming more dangerous by the day.
It’s also important to realize that your government isn’t the ultimate power. Our government officials take orders too, from what is often referred to as the deep state. It’s not a government at all, but a global, hidden power structure that is accountable to no one, while influencing and manipulating everyone to bring about a new world order.
In years past, this shadowy cabal of power brokers were referred to under the term the New World Order. In 2020, the World Economic Forum came out on the public stage and announced The Great Reset, which is nothing but the NWO rebranded.
In the video above, investigative journalist Harry Vox talks about disease outbreaks, quarantines and curfews being essential tools in the ruling class’ toolkit, and how these tools were planned to be used to usher in the next phase of control.
The interview, which took place in 2014, sounds more than a little prophetic today, as these three indispensable tools for totalitarian control have been part of our reality for three years. In it, Vox also refers to “Scenarios for the Future of Technology and International Development,”23 a document by the Rockefeller Foundation, in which they laid out a “Lockstep” scenario, which details the global response to a fictional pandemic.
They’ve Already Told You What the End Game Is
While the name and origin of the virus differ, the scenario laid out in “Scenarios for the Future of Technology and International Development”24 closely matches what we’ve gone through in the era of COVID, especially its deadly effect on economies.
The scenario predicted international mobility coming to a screeching halt, debilitating industries, tourism and global supply chains. “Even locally, normally bustling shops and office buildings sat empty for months, devoid of both employees and customers,” the document reads.
In the Rockefeller narrative, China is hailed for its rapid imposition of universal quarantines of all citizens which proved effective for curbing the spread of the virus. It’s important to note that universal quarantining — lockdowns of healthy people — has never ever been used in infectious disease control before, and there’s a reason for that. We already knew it doesn’t work.
Many other nations where leaders “flexed their authority” and imposed severe restrictions on their citizens — “from the mandatory wearing of face masks to body-temperature checks at the entries of communal spaces like train stations and supermarkets” — also fared well, in this Rockefeller scenario.
Listen to the disbelief in the interviewer’s voice when he asks if Vox actually believes that such a thing could happen, that we would have to stand in line to get our temperature checked before entering a building.
Well, every single one of us has now had to do this, so we know it’s possible. And if that’s possible, why not the rest of the Lockstep plan, which tells us that: “Even after the pandemic faded, this more authoritarian control and oversight of citizens and their activities stuck, and even intensified.”
Fool Me Once, Shame on You, Fool Me Twice …
We can no longer afford to disbelieve the lengths to which the globalist elites, the unelected deep state, can and will go to seize total control. They’ve already told us what the ultimate plan is — to use bioterrorism to take control of the world’s resources, wealth and people.
All we need to do is to believe it, and realize that the only thing giving them the power to impose their will is our fear. As long as we choose fear and demand our government keep us safe, they have every chance of winning. Hopefully, a clear majority of people will have learned this lesson by now, and won’t fall for the same tricks a second time.
Will they be using the same playbook this winter? You bet. Already, we’re seeing the call to virtue. They’re telling us mask wearing and vaccination are voluntary but recommended, “to protect others.” That’s how it all started in 2020, and look where we ended up.
Do you really want to go through all of that again? If not, just say “no” from the start. Say no to masks. Say no to social distancing. Say no to canceling the holidays. Say no to lockdowns. Say no to flu vaccines and COVID shots. Just say “NO” to their fearmongering and live your life. Fear is a tool used to control you, but that only works if you buy into it.
Ditch the Fear and Just Take Control of Your Health
While influenza, RSV and COVID can be problematic and dangerous for certain high-risk individuals, the overall risks associated with them are negligible for most. Just think back on your life — how many times have you had a cold or flu? Are you still here? How many people do you know who died from a cold or flu?
At this point, the vast majority of people have also had COVID, and are here to attest to its nonlethality. Unfortunately, those who have gotten several COVID shots are now in the high-risk category and may in fact experience more severe infection. For the unjabbed, the latest variants pose exceptionally low risk.
Keeping your immune system strong is the best way to protect yourself against all infections, and there are many effective ways to do that, including the following. For more details, follow the hyperlinks provided.
• Optimize your vitamin D level — Higher levels of vitamin D have been shown to decrease your risk of developing a severe case of, and dying from, COVID-19. Vitamin D supplementation has also been shown to reduce your risk of colds25 and influenza,26,27 as it boosts your innate immunity.
NAC, meanwhile, is a precursor to reduced glutathione, which appears to play a crucial role in COVID-19 specifically. Benefits of NAC include inhibiting expression of proinflammatory cytokines, improving T cell response and inhibiting the hypercoagulation that can result in stroke and/or blood clots that impair the ability to exchange oxygen in the lungs.
All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the Translate Website button below the author’s name.
To receive Global Research’s Daily Newsletter (selected articles), click here.
Follow us on Instagram and Twitter and subscribe to our Telegram Channel. Feel free to repost and share widely Global Research articles.
***
The Arab League met in Algeria for the first time in two years, and their final declaration called for freedom for the Palestinian people who have suffered under a brutal Israeli military occupation for almost six decades. The meeting of nearly 22 nations across the Middle East and North Africa coincided with Israeli elections, which has brought to power a far-right party that wants to annex the West Bank and deport Palestinians from their homes.
Arab leaders attending the meeting tip-toed around the Abraham Accords, which saw the United Emirates and Bahrain normalize their relations with Israel, with Saudi Arabia later allowing for over-flights of the Kingdom by Israeli aircraft, and is seen as a potential precursor to wider Arab normalization with Israel.
Although the Arab world is deeply divided and polarized, the League managed to deliver a final declaration focused on the core issue of Palestinian human rights and freedom.
The Arab League General Secretariat affirmed its rejection of all Israeli settlement plans, condemned what it described as the annexation of Palestinian territory, stressed the need to compel the Israeli occupation to implement the relevant UN resolutions and work toward a comprehensive and fair two-state solution under the 2002 Arab peace initiative.
“Our main and first cause, the mother of all causes, the Palestinian issue, will be at the heart of our concerns and our main priority.”
United Nations
Secretary General of the United Nations,Antonio Guterres, attended the meeting and appealed for unity across the Arab world.
“Division opens the door to foreign, non-Arab, interference, terrorism, manipulation, and sectarian strife. But united, your leadership can shape a region that makes the most of its enormous potential and contributes to global peace and security,” Guterres said.
Foreign intervention in the Middle East has mainly come from the US. Muammar Gadhafi of Libya famously addressed the Arab League in 2008 and held up a paper that was sent to him and all other Arab leaders from the US telling them what their agenda was to be, and the expected results of that Arab League meeting. Gadhafi went on to prophetically warn his counterparts that the US had eliminated Saddam Hussein, and they could all expect they would be next.
Guterres focused attention on the continued suffering of the Palestinian people, underlining the UN’s explicit position that the occupation must end.
“Our shared goal remains two States – Israel and Palestine – living side by side in peace and security, with Al-Quds/Jerusalem as the capital of both States,” he said.
“We must do all we can to ensure the continued success of the Black Sea Grain Initiative to provide relief to those in need, including countries in the Middle East and North Africa relying on accessible and affordable food and fertilizers — both from Ukraine and the Russian Federation,” he said.
The UN is concerned with global famine due to the Ukraine war, but where was the UN when the huge wheat stores in northeast Syria were stolen by the Radical Islamic terrorists utilized by the US-NATO attack on Syria for ‘regime change’? The wheat was taken to Turkey and then sold to the EU where France used it for their croissants, and Italy for its pasta.
Syria was not invited back
Syria’s participation in the Arab League has been suspended since November 2011, which demonstrates a large group of Arab nations supported the US-NATO attack on Syria using the Muslim Brotherhood ideology and terrorist foot soldiers.
Arab countries have inched closer toward restoring ties with Syria in recent years, most notably the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain. In October 2021, Jordan’s King Abdullah II received a call from President Assad, the first between the two leaders in a decade.
“Syria’s absence from the Arab League harms cooperation between Arab countries,” said Algerian Foreign Minister Ramtane Lamamra, speaking at a news conference with his Syrian counterpart, Faisal Mekdad, and having met with President Assad while delivering a letter from Algerian President Abdelmadjid Tebboun.
Israeli elections and far-right move
While the Arabs were meeting in Algeria, Likud party leader Benjamin Netanyahu, on trial on corruption charges, was engineering his return to power in Israel through an unusual alliance with an ultra-nationalist party.
Itamar Ben-Gvir, the leader of Israel’s Jewish Power faction, lives in the illegal settlement of Kiryat Arba in the Palestinian city of Hebron. The far-right extremist leader appears likely to take a senior role in government after the Religious Zionism bloc he co-heads, with Bezalel Smotrich, became the third-largest in parliament with 14 seats, the largest gain of any religious party in Israel.
Besides deporting all Palestinians, Ben-Gvir also plans to expel Palestinians who are Israeli citizens and have been democratically elected to the Knesset, along with leftist Israeli Jews who are MPs.
“When we form the government, I will promote the Deportation Law, which will deport anyone who acts against the State of Israel or IDF soldiers,” Ben-Gvir said in an interview last August.
Ben-Gvir pulled his gun and admonished police officers responding to an altercation with Palestinians,
“If they are throwing stones, shoot them.”
The path forward for Netanhayu’s government may depend on the upcoming November 8 elections in the US, where Republicans may make gains, which may be a green light for Netanyahu and extremism.
The settlements
The 1949 Geneva Convention, which Israel signed, it is prohibited for an occupying power to move its own population into the territory. Since the occupation of the West Bank in 1967, numerous UN resolutions affirm that Israel’s occupation is illegal, and the settlements on the West Bank have no legal basis.
Despite the international consensus, Israel continues to build illegal settlements on the West Bank, which currently number over 100, with 450,000 Israeli settlers living there, and another 220,00 Jewish settlers living in East Jerusalem.
Israel is an apartheid state
On March 25, 2022, Michael Link, UN Special Rapporteur, concluded that Israel met the conditions of an apartheid state. His findings reported that an institutionalized regime of systematic racial oppression and discrimination has been established, a system of alien rule had been established with the intent to maintain the domination of one racial-national-ethnic group over another, and the imposition of this system of institutionalized discrimination with the intent of permanent domination had been built upon the regular practice of inhumane acts.
The question for liberal western democracies is, “Can democracy, religious extremism, and apartheid policies co-exist?” A follow-up question is, “Can the west continue to support Israel?”
*
Note to readers: Please click the share buttons above. Follow us on Instagram and Twitter and subscribe to our Telegram Channel. Feel free to repost and share widely Global Research articles.
All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the Translate Website button below the author’s name.
To receive Global Research’s Daily Newsletter (selected articles), click here.
Follow us on Instagram and Twitter and subscribe to our Telegram Channel. Feel free to repost and share widely Global Research articles.
***
Thursday’s report by investigative website The Grayzone, that British Military Intelligence is planning to train Ukrainian insurgents in order to carry out a terrorist campaign in Crimea, comes at a time of increasing tensions between Moscow and London.
The Kremlin has already accused Downing Street of being involved in the Nord Stream explosions on the 26th of September, the Kerch Bridge explosion on the 8th of October, and last Saturday’s drone attack on the key Crimean port of Sevastopol, with UAVs being a key component of a recent military aid package gifted to Kiev by London.
Indeed, Britain’s role in the current Ukraine crisis goes as far back as November 2013, when the Euromaidan colour revolution was launched in response to then-President Viktor Yanukovych’s decision to suspend an EU trade deal in order to pursue closer ties with neighbouring Russia.
Britain’s history of arming and training terrorist groups however, as outlined in last week’s report, goes back even further.
In 1971, the occupied north of Ireland had been in the grip of violence for two years.
Inspired by the civil rights campaign taking place in the United States at the same time, the north’s Nationalist community – those in favour of Irish reunification and generally descended from the indigenous Irish population – had begun a campaign in 1967, demanding equal rights within the British-created statelet.
Though peaceful in nature, the civil rights movement would be violently beaten and teargassed every time they took to the streets, by a police force composed almost entirely of Unionists, those in favour of remaining under British rule and generally descended from English and Scottish settlers, planted in the region in the 17th century.
As a result, support for militant Irish Republicanism was quickly growing and the Provisional IRA would be formed in December 1969.
The British Army, deployed to the region earlier in the year in order to enforce London’s rule, would quickly take sides in the emerging conflict.
To this end, the Military Reaction Force (MRF) was formed; a clandestine special forces unit intended to trigger a civil war between the IRA and Loyalist factions in order to draw Republican attention away from Crown Forces.
In order to implement this strategy, the MRF would carry out the murders of unarmed Nationalist civilians, usually in drive-by shootings, in the hope that the IRA would blame Loyalist groups such as the UVF and UDA.
The Unit would directly with Loyalist terrorists on the 4th of December 1971 however, when they arranged for British army checkpoints to be cleared from the New Lodge, a staunchly Republican area of Belfast, thus allowing a UVF team to bomb a local pub, McGurk’s Bar, leaving 15 civilians dead. This attack would mark the beginning of formal relations between British Military Intelligence and Loyalist death squads, a relationship that would soon escalate.
In 1974, relations between London and Dublin had been placed under significant strain owing to British atrocities in the north such as the Ballymurphy massacre, the 1971 murder of nine civilians by British paratroopers over the space of two days in Belfast, and Bloody Sunday in Derry, when British paratroopers again opened fire on a civil rights demonstration in January 1972, leaving 14 men dead.
Indeed, following the initial outbreak of hostilities in 1969, then-Taoiseach Jack Lynch had mooted the possibility of sending troops to the north, and in the aftermath of Bloody Sunday, Irish police stood by as demonstrators burned down the British Embassy in Dublin.
Britain, fearing that the southern state would dissent from its traditionally pro-British stance and become a state sponsor of the IRA, decided that a message had to be sent.
On the 17th of May 1974, a Friday, three no-warning car bombs would detonate during rush hour traffic in Dublin, killing 27 people and injuring 300. A further seven people would be killed 90 minutes later when another bomb detonated in the border country of Monaghan, intended as a diversion to allow the bombing team to escape back into the occupied north. The death toll would be the largest of any single day during near 30 years of conflict.
The bombings, carried out by the UVF under the direction of the MRF’s successor, the Special Reconnaissance Unit (SRU) would ultimately result in the 26 County administration returning to its pro-British stance, and no further attacks would be carried out in the southern state on the same scale. In the north however, British Military Intelligence would continue to work hand in glove with Loyalist death squads, a relationship that would grow to accommodate the UDA as the 1980s dawned.
Although it had not yet carried out attacks on the same scale as the UVF, the UDA dwarfed its more well-known counterpart in terms of membership, counting 40,000 at its peak. It was not long before British Military Intelligence saw the group’s potential for use as a proxy, thus the Force Research Unit (FRU) was born.
A clandestine unit in the same vein as the MRF and SRU, the FRU’s purpose was to turn the UDA into a more ‘professional’ force, one that targeted IRA members, rather than the Nationalist civilians that both the UDA and UVF were known for killing in indiscriminate attacks.
To this end, the FRU would send Brian Nelson, a senior UDA figure, to South Africa in 1985, where a weapons deal was organised with Armscor, the official defence contractor of the-then Apartheid state. An arrangement that would lead to a deadly escalation of the UDA’s murderous campaign and would ultimately result in the killing of human rights lawyer, Pat Finucane.
Finucane, a Belfast native, had rose to prominence in the 80s through his representation of high-profile Republican prisoners, including IRA hunger striker Bobby Sands. Quickly becoming a thorn in the side of the British establishment, the final straw would come in November 1988, when he successfully defended an IRA Volunteer against charges related to the deaths of two British soldiers.
On the 12th of February 1989, a UDA unit smashed down the front door of Finucane’s family home and shot him 14 times as had Sunday dinner with his wife and children. Less than a month beforehand, senior Thatcher cabinet member Douglas Hogg had given a speech in the House of Commons, where he spoke of solicitors in the north of Ireland who were ‘unduly sympathetic to the cause of the IRA’, effectively sanctioning Pat Finucane’s murder at the highest level of government.
Indeed, official British sponsorship of terrorist groups was not a tactic confined solely to Ireland at the time, with Downing Street also supporting the Afghan Mujahideen during the same period, a strategy they would also use in Libya and Syria during the past decade, and now, as the new decade dawns, Russia now appears to be the latest target in the long history of British-sponsored terrorism.
*
Note to readers: Please click the share buttons above or below. Follow us on Instagram and Twitter and subscribe to our Telegram Channel. Feel free to repost and share widely Global Research articles.
Gavin O’Reilly is an activist from Dublin, Ireland, with a strong interest in the effects of British and US Imperialism. Secretary of the Dublin Anti-Internment Committee, a campaign group set up to raise awareness of Irish Republican political prisoners in British and 26 County jails. His work has previously appeared on American Herald Tribune, The Duran, Al-Masdar and MintPress News. He is a regular contributor to Global Research. Support him on Patreon.
All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the Translate Website button below the author’s name.
To receive Global Research’s Daily Newsletter (selected articles), click here.
Follow us on Instagram and Twitter and subscribe to our Telegram Channel. Feel free to repost and share widely Global Research articles.
***
As the COVID lies are now being exposed at exponential speed, some of those proven wrong are getting nervous — so nervous, in fact, they’re now pleading for amnesty and to just let bygones be bygones
While some now argue ignorance as their defense, there was no lack of data proving their positions were wrong, dangerous, destructive and deadly, right from the start
Health and government officials weren’t just wrong once and then changed course. No, they’ve doubled, tripled and quadrupled down on errors, even in the face of overwhelming evidence that they’re wrong. Granting amnesty to individuals who have been wrong from Day 1, without a single apology, is an untenable proposition. The price society has paid for their errors is far too great for that
They were wrong about masks working and natural immunity not working,
they were wrong about asymptomatic spread,
lockdowns,
and the safety and effectiveness of the COVID shots.
They were also wrong about SARS-CoV-2 jumping naturally from bats to humans by way of a wet market in Wuhan, China,
and they were wrong when they insisted that mandating an experimental gene therapy was within legal bounds.
Demanding that officials be held accountable for these errors is not gloating. It’s reestablishing a baseline of conduct and accountability to the public.
There can be no amnesty for COVID narrative pushers as people proven right are still being persecuted as “misinformation spreaders,” and illegal government censorship continues without abatement. In fact, the Department of Homeland Security now views censorship and controlling the information space as one of its core duties
*
As the COVID lies are now being exposed at exponential speed, some of those proven wrong are getting nervous — so nervous, in fact, they’re now pleading to just let bygones be bygones.
The Atlantic1 has come under fire for suggesting that all the terrible pandemic-era decisions over lockdowns, school closures, masking and punishing an entire class of people who questioned the efficacy and wisdom of taking a rushed, experimental vaccine — for a virus with a 99% survival rate in most — should all be water under the bridge.
Brown University economist Emily Oster writes in The Atlantic,2
“We need to forgive one another for what we did and said when we were in the dark about COVID.”
Brendon Marotta in his Substack Hegemon Media3 recounts:
“I believe perpetrators call for forgiveness because they fear punitive justice. If the perpetrators were held accountable in our current justice system, the scale of the wrongdoing would result in punishments the perpetrators could not bear.
These punishments would also not give those who lost their jobs, businesses, friends, family, health, or freedom anything back. What if there was another way that would be better for both victims and perpetrators?
The wrongdoing of the pandemic has not been acknowledged. Those responsible have made no apologies. Calls for ‘forgiveness’ appear dishonest when those responsible haven’t apologized, which is usually a prerequisite to asking for forgiveness.
Creating equity would mean taking the ill-gotten gains of perpetrators and redistributing them to the people who lost their jobs and businesses during the pandemic. In short, it would mean reparations. Equity is not just about money. Losses during the pandemic were not just financial.
People lose their friends, family, and freedoms. Much of the harm done was cultural, emotional, and social. No amount of money can replace the ability to grieve in person at your loved one’s funeral.”
Oster’s plea for the decency that she and the mainstream media and public health officials failed to offer Americans during the throes of the pandemic comes at a point when the COVID narrative has been all but lost by the current administration and the mainstream media.
Their Lies Have Been Exposed
For nearly the last three years, I have been exposing and documenting all of the lies that the global cabal has been promoting in their mainstream media propaganda. As expected they have now been exposed to be falsehoods, cluelessness and lies:
Their Crimes Must Be Reconciled
You weren’t allowed to say goodbye to your loved ones or attend their funerals, but the chosen ones dined at extravagant restaurants and allowed liquor stores and Wal-Mart to stay open. Your small business was destroyed, while Amazon made billions.
These murderous hypocrites killed thousands of seniors by knowingly putting infected patients into old age homes.
They killed thousands more by putting treatable patients on ventilators and Fauci’s remdesivir, and additional thousands were killed by not allowing safe and effective treatments like ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine to be prescribed by doctors.
They have killed and injured hundreds of thousands through coercion, threats, mandates and a never-ending stream of lies that forced people into taking a dangerous and untested, toxic concoction — a Big Pharma bioweapon.
These “experts” seeking forgiveness, ostensibly because they were just caught up in the “hysteria” of the moment, weren’t wrong. They were lying from the outset and need to pay dearly for their crimes against humanity.
We were scorned, ridiculed, ostracized, censored, fired, deplatformed and wished dead by the authoritarian-minded sheep who demanded compliance, and treated like outcasts by family members who believed the narrative hook, line and sinker.
They pushed their agenda too far and too fast out of desperation, as the financial underpinnings of their fake world order began to strain and crumble. This desperation exposed their blatant lies to a vast array of critical thinkers across the world who have not been deterred in exposing the falsehoods on social media, blogs and free-speech websites.
Why We Must Reject Amnesty Plea
The reasons we must reject Oster’s amnesty plea are manifold. First and foremost, while some now want to argue ignorance as their defense, there was no lack of facts and data, right from the start, proving their positions were wrong, dangerous, destructive and deadly.
Since data were readily available, the real question they need to ask themselves is: “Why did I believe all the lies and propaganda?” Self-reflection is needed here. Related to this is Oster’s ridiculous claim that “getting something right had a hefty element of luck.” Absolutely not. Give me one example where luck played a role.
People who got it right did so because they exercised their critical thinking skills and a) read the data, b) correctly analyzed that data and c) drew rational conclusions based on that analysis. Analysis and reason are not reliant on luck.
No luck was needed to know that masks were useless. The published science told us as much. Ditto for the conclusion that natural immunity is superior to vaccine-induced immunity. No luck was needed to know there was no such thing as asymptomatic spreaders, because again, science. Not only can you not have a “hot” infection without symptoms, but research looking at millions of individuals confirmed what we already knew from basic virology.
No luck was needed to correctly predict that lockdowns would have a dramatically negative effect on health, education and the economy. That was just plain rational, but early cost-benefit analyses also confirmed it.
No luck was needed to know that the COVID jab was useless because data from around the world rapidly grew to show that case rates rose in tandem with the shots.Dr. Anthony Fauci, President Joe Biden and CDC director Dr. Rochelle Walenskyhave also demonstrated this.
All were jabbed more than once, and all got COVID — more than once! Seventy percent of jabbed CDC employees also got COVID, and on several occasions, ships where 100% of crew and passengers were jabbed reported outbreaks. None of this would occur if the shots actually prevented infection and spread, and you need no special skills other than clear-headed reason to come to that conclusion.
You also don’t need special skills to see that the COVID shots are killing healthy people. Just look at all the sudden deaths of professional athletes and children. It’s so common they’ve even given it a new name: Sudden Adult Death Syndrome. Look at the excess mortality statistics and the skyrocketing life insurance claims.
Oster’s proposition that luck was behind correct analyses is a cop-out and a sign that she’s not ready to accept that she was gullible and irrational — and possibly cruel toward others. Recall, threatening the lives of the unvaccinated and mocking their deaths was basically part of the public policy.4
Forgiving the ignorant because they don’t know what they’re doing may be the spiritual imperative, but social etiquette demands that if you WANT someone to forgive you, you FIRST apologize and THEN ask for forgiveness. What’s missing from Oster’s call to forgive her and everyone else who’s been proven wrong is an apology.
Government Officials Must Be Held Accountable
This is even more important when it comes to media and our health and government officials. Granting amnesty to individuals who have been wrong from Day 1, without a single apology, is an untenable proposition. The price society has paid for their errors is far too great for that.
They may ask for forgiveness, and they may be forgiven by many, but they STILL must be held accountable for their errors. Demanding that officials be held accountable for errors is not gloating. It’s reestablishing a baseline of conduct and accountability to the public — something we seem to have lost.
Their reckless behavior has caused people to lose their businesses, their livelihoods; they’ve lost family members to reckless medicine; they’ve lost out on weddings and funerals; drug use and suicides have skyrocketed; children have fallen years behind on their schooling and the economy has been destroyed. The list goes on. Being wrong has a price, and society will be paying it for quite some time.
What’s more, our health and government officials weren’t just wrong once and then changed course. No, they’ve doubled, tripled and quadrupled down on errors, even in the face of overwhelming evidence that they’re wrong, and we’re just supposed to “let bygones be bygones”? Not a chance.
First, we have to set the record straight, so everyone actually knows what the truth is, and then we have to make sure these kinds of errors cannot be committed again. A truce is a distant third on the list of how to move forward.
Those Proven Right Are Still Persecuted
Setting the record straight starts with ending the persecution of those proven to be right. It also requires putting an end to censorship and the promulgation of propaganda.
With regard to the propaganda, this will require rewriting the law. The use of state propaganda against the American public was illegal until 2012, when then-president Obama legalized it through an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA).5 That amendment must be repealed so that media can again be held accountable for the illegal dissemination of government propaganda.
Moving forward, we also likely need to either abolish or radically reassess the role of medical boards. As it stands, medical boards have been weaponized to silence doctors who go against the state propaganda and tell the truth about COVID.
The latest victim of this government orchestrated persecution is Dr. Peter McCullough, one of the most well-credentialed and respected cardiologists in the world. He’s now being stripped of his medical credentials for the crime of speaking truth to the public (and thereby contradicting the legalized propaganda).6
He’s also been terminated from his position as editor-in-chief of Cardiorenal Medicine and Reviews in Cardiovascular Medicine (RCM) — all without due process. RCM was even so cowardly to publicly claim he “stepped down” as his term of office had ended. As noted by McCullough, there are “powerful dark forces” at work in academic medicine “to expunge any resistance” to the COVID jab.
Editor Forced to Resign Over McCullough’s COVID Paper
Anyone who dares publish McCullough’s research also skates on thin ice. Dr. Jose Luis Domingo, editor-in-chief of the science journal Food and Chemical Toxicology (FCT) for the past seven years, was recently forced to resign for that very reason. As reported by the Epoch Times:7
“Though Domingo has himself received three vaccinations (two AstraZeneca and one Pfizer), he told The Epoch Times that he has been bombarded with insults, threats, and accusations of being ‘anti-vaccine’ ever since he approved the publication of a scientific paper8 [by McCullough, Stephanie Seneff, Greg Nigh and Anthony Kyriakopoulos] that explores potential mechanisms of harm of injected synthetic mRNA …
This research was co-authored by a team of preeminent scientists, including Stephanie Seneff, Ph.D., a senior research scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Dr. Peter McCullough, an internationally known cardiologist who has published over a hundred peer-reviewed articles during his 40-year career; and Dr. Anthony Kyriakopoulos, a Greek clinical microbiologist, medical doctor, and researcher who has a Ph.D. in medical and molecular microbiology.
Their research proposed that alterations in the vaccine mRNA may ‘hide the mRNA from cellular defenses and promote a longer biological half-life and high production of spike protein.’ In doing so, these scientists posited, mRNA vaccines may interfere with the body’s natural immune response.
They described this interference as ‘profound impairment,’ which, they believe, comes about specifically because the spike protein interferes with a critical early innate immune response mechanism, called the type I interferon response.
If they are correct, injected synthetic mRNA will have a variety of negative consequences on human health, including making our bodies less able to control infections and suppress cancer …
About a month after the paper was published, Domingo said, he began receiving angry emails and messages. These included insults, calls to resign, demands to retract the paper, and even threats … The angry messages, he said, were filled with ad hominem attacks against him and against the paper’s co-authors, but did not specify their scientific objections to the contents of the paper …
Though he would have preferred to stay at the helm of the journal until the end of 2023 … Domingo has issued his resignation from the journal to maintain his scientific independence.
He told us he is first and foremost a scientist, and that he does not regret publishing the paper. Despite the attacks, he was not willing to give in to the pressure from the journal’s publisher … Jagna Mirska …
Domingo said that the journal has already picked a successor for his position — someone with clear ties to the pharmaceutical industry: Bryan Delaney, Ph.D. According to his LinkedIn page, Delaney is a toxicologist who currently works for Haleon. Haleon is pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKlein’s new brand name for its consumer health unit.”
What Else Have They Been Wrong About?
The list of so-called “errors” is a long one. They were wrong about masks working and natural immunity not working, they were wrong about asymptomatic spread, lockdowns and the safety and effectiveness of the COVID shots. They were also wrong about SARS-CoV-2 jumping naturally from bats to humans by way of a wet market in Wuhan, China.
Not even a month has passed since we witnessed the stunning revelation that Pfizer never tested its COVID shots for transmissibility before proclaiming publicly that the vaccine protected against transmission. Then they had the CDC put the bioweapon on the childhood vaccine schedule and the same day increased the price of their jab by 400%.
As reported by Rising host Robby Soave (video above) and Vanity Fair,9 a report by the Minority Oversight Staff of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, released in October 2022, concluded that “a research-related incident is the most likely explanation for COVID-19.”
The COVID jab tyrants were also wrong when they insisted that mandating an experimental gene therapy was within legal bounds. Such mandates have since been overturned in a number of districts. Most recently, a New York judge ruled that New York City’s COVID jab mandate for municipal workers was enacted illegally and any employee fired for noncompliance must be immediately reinstated — and receive back pay.10
According to Supreme Court Justice Ralph Porzio, the Health Commission’s jab mandate “violates the separation of powers doctrine” enshrined in the state constitution, as well as workers’ due process rights. In his ruling, Porzio noted:
“The vaccination mandate for City employees was not just about safety and public health; it was about compliance. If it was about safety and public health, unvaccinated workers would have been placed on leave the moment the order was issued. If it was about safety and public health, the Health Commissioner would have issued city-wide mandates for all residents.”
The New York City law department immediately filed an appeal, which blocked the reinstatement of the workers. Time will tell, but I suspect that in the end, the city will just end up having to pay out even more in back pay.
US Government Still Plans to Police Wrong-Think
As mentioned earlier, amnesty for COVID dictators is impossible in light of continued censorship, and there’s no sign of that ending any time soon. On the contrary, leaked documents show the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has every intention of policing wrong-think.
Biden’s “Ministry of Truth” may have been disbanded in the wake of public mockery, but the plan for such an entity was not shelved. As reported by The Intercept:11
“Years of internal DHS memos, emails, and documents — obtained via leaks and an ongoing lawsuit, as well as public documents — illustrate an expansive effort by the agency to influence tech platforms …
Behind closed doors, and through pressure on private platforms, the U.S. government has used its power to try to shape online discourse.
According to meeting minutes and other records appended to a lawsuit filed by Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt, a Republican who is also running for Senate, discussions have ranged from the scale and scope of government intervention in online discourse to the mechanics of streamlining takedown requests for false or intentionally misleading information …
In a March meeting, Laura Dehmlow, an FBI official, warned that the threat of subversive information on social media could undermine support for the U.S. government …
There is also a formalized process for government officials to directly flag content on Facebook or Instagram and request that it be throttled or suppressed through a special Facebook portal that requires a government or law enforcement email to use. At the time of writing, the ‘content request system’ at facebook.com/xtakedowns/login is still live …
According to a draft copy of DHS’s Quadrennial Homeland Security Review, DHS’s capstone report outlining the department’s strategy and priorities in the coming years, the department plans to target ‘inaccurate information’ on a wide range of topics, including ‘the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic and the efficacy of COVID-19 vaccines, racial justice, U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, and the nature of U.S. support to Ukraine.’”
As you can see, censorship is not restricted to COVID issues alone. They include a variety of national politics and geopolitical issues as well. In other words, Americans’ views of the world and our country are being shaped by a propaganda arm of the U.S. government itself — not another country — and the reason they have no qualms about doing this is because Obama legalized the use of government propaganda against Americans during his presidency.
Censorship Is Now a Core Duty of the DHS
In addition to abolishing or radically reforming medical boards, the FDA and CDC, we probably need to do the same to the DHS. As reported by The Intercept, documentation shows the “DHS views the issue of tackling disinformation and misinformation as a growing portion of its core duties.”
I don’t know about you, but when I think about what Homeland Security should be doing, policing and punishing my personal views about health, medicine, climate change, political actors and geopolitical actions is not at the top of the list. Yet that’s precisely what they’re doing, and will be doing more of in the years to come.
To control the information space, the DHS intends to “leverage advanced data analytics technology” and work with nongovernmental agencies and other civil society organizations “to build resilience to the impacts of false information.”
Government Censorship by Surrogate Is Still Illegal
For now, Schmitt is combating this tyrannical and unconstitutional overreach in court. As reported by The Intercept:12
“In May, Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt took the lead in filing a lawsuit to combat what he views as sweeping efforts by the Biden administration to pressure social media companies to moderate certain forms of content appearing on their platforms.
The suit alleges governmentwide efforts to censor certain stories, especially ones related to the pandemic. It also names multiple agencies across the government that have participated in efforts to monitor speech and ‘open collusion’ between the administration and social media companies …
October 21, the judge presiding over the case granted the attorneys general permission to depose Fauci, CISA officials, and communication specialists from the White House.
While the lawsuit has a definite partisan slant, pointing the finger at the Biden administration for allegedly seeking to control private speech, many of the subpoenas request information that spans into the Trump era and provides a window into the absurdity of the ongoing effort.
‘There is growing evidence that the legislative and executive branch officials are using social media companies to engage in censorship by surrogate,’ said Jonathan Turley, a professor of law at George Washington University, who has written about the lawsuit.
‘It is axiomatic that the government cannot do indirectly what it is prohibited from doing directly. If government officials are directing or facilitating such censorship, it raises serious First Amendment questions.’”
No Chance of Amnesty for US Leadership
To bring us back to where we started, with Oster’s plea for amnesty for those who ignorantly chose to be on the wrong side of history, I am not alone in my view that her proposition is an unworkable one.
Sure, on a personal level, many are likely willing and able to bury the hatchet and join hands again with friends and family who shunned and berated them as “conspiracy theorists” and “anti-science anti-vaxxers” (although following the science and the data was precisely what we were all doing).
But on the leadership level, amnesty is out of the question. Leaders must be held accountable for decisions based on lies. They must be held accountable for their fraud and deception.
Agency heads must be held accountable for their data manipulation and obfuscation, Big Tech leadership must be held accountable for their efforts to aid government in the circumvention of our Constitutional rights, and mainstream media, including individual hosts and reporters, must be held to account for their propaganda role, which has injured and killed hundreds of thousands of Americans who trusted them.
A court recently ruled Alex Jones must pay nearly $1 billion in damages to families for falsely claiming that no children died in the 2012 Sandy Hook shooting,13 an event that many in alt media suspected was a false flag operation at the time. Now, that fine is quite a precedent.
What would be the appropriate fine for journalists who claim no one has died from the COVID shot? Or that COVID jab injuries are “exceedingly rare”? What would be the appropriate fine for tech platforms that censor the personal testimonies of the injured and families of the dead, thereby perpetuating the lie that injuries and deaths don’t occur?
What would be an appropriate payout by federal agencies that falsified data to hide adverse effects and deaths? If you guessed in the trillions you would have profoundly underestimated the damage they have done.
No Chance of Amnesty for Enforcers of False COVID Narrative
The American Conservative had this to say about the “Soviet blue-check media” in the United States:14
“There can be no amnesty for the unthinking enforcers of the narrative of the regime. I don’t know how to put this gently to my fellow members of the blue-check media class, so I will say it bluntly. You guys resemble nothing so much as the info apparatus of some failing ideological state — late-Soviet apparatchiks, only without the erudition that was demanded of regime intellectuals in Moscow back in the day …
In February 2020, the Washington Post published a news story with the headline: ‘Tom Cotton Keeps Repeating a Coronavirus Conspiracy Theory That Scientists Have Debunked.’
More than a year later … the paper ‘rewrote the article’s headline, softening ‘conspiracy theory’ to ‘fringe theory’ and noting that scientists have ‘disputed’ it rather than ‘debunked’ it.’ How generous. How scrupulous …
If the lab-leak theory were a rare instance in which blue-check media abdicated basic journalistic responsibility in favor of elite narrative enforcement, one could forgive and forget, as the Atlantic now demands.
But such lapses are utterly commonplace — systemic, you might say. Remember when Big Tech and Big Media and Big Intelligence teamed up to frame the New York Post’s Hunter Biden reporting in October 2020 as ‘misinformation’ — only to concede, once the election was safely over, that it was, in fact, entirely accurate?
Remember the absolute unanimity with which blue-check media defended the efficacy of COVID vaccines in stopping transmission — before begrudgingly admitting that, erm, actually, they really don’t work as advertised?
Remember when blue-check media were dead-certain that Jussie Smollett was the victim of a racist attack? And on and on and on. Once the falsity of the old narrative is definitively established, most blue-checks shamelessly move on to the next elite narrative in need of media reinforcement — no apology, no introspection.
The few willing to acknowledge their errors, meanwhile, insist they were merely following the ‘expert’ consensus at the time. This is risible. The job of the reporter isn’t to parrot what the experts say at any given moment: it is to question what anyone in power claims.
‘If your mother tells you she loves you, check it out,’ used to be the journalistic motto. Dr. Anthony Fauci, Pfizer, WHO, and 50 former intelligence officials deserve far more exacting scrutiny than Mom.”
Rhetorical Constructs of Manipulative Language
Another rebuttal to Oster’s call for amnesty that I want to highlight is from the anonymous Substack writer known only as “A Midwestern Doctor,” who dissects the “manipulative language” used by Oster in her article. The anonymous doctor writes:15
“When I read through this article, I realize the author highlighted a very common problem … The author is demanding to receive forgiveness for their conduct, but … is refusing to admit they did anything wrong.
In order to accomplish this, they utilized a variety of manipulative rhetorical constructs that are relatively simple and frequently utilized. Because it is so common to encounter propaganda pieces like this, I thought there might be some value in illustrating my thought process as I read this article.”
The doctor goes on to share screenshots of Oster’s article, with arrows to sentences and thoughts inserted in red. Below are a few of those screenshots. For the rest, please see the original Substack article.16
Take Control of Your Wealth
Financial collapse is an inevitable outcome of the COVID plandemic. In the video above, finance guru Catherine Austin Fitts and attorney Carolyn Betts review the tools you need to take control of your finances at this critical time in history. We must reclaim our independence from the central banks and denounce their planned digital currency, as both are part of a massive control and slave system.
*
Note to readers: Please click the share buttons above. Follow us on Instagram and Twitter and subscribe to our Telegram Channel. Feel free to repost and share widely Global Research articles.
The Worldwide Corona Crisis, Global Coup d’Etat Against Humanity
by Michel Chossudovsky
Michel Chossudovsky reviews in detail how this insidious project “destroys people’s lives”. He provides a comprehensive analysis of everything you need to know about the “pandemic” — from the medical dimensions to the economic and social repercussions, political underpinnings, and mental and psychological impacts.
“My objective as an author is to inform people worldwide and refute the official narrative which has been used as a justification to destabilize the economic and social fabric of entire countries, followed by the imposition of the “deadly” COVID-19 “vaccine”. This crisis affects humanity in its entirety: almost 8 billion people. We stand in solidarity with our fellow human beings and our children worldwide. Truth is a powerful instrument.”
ISBN: 978-0-9879389-3-0, Year: 2022, PDF Ebook, Pages: 164, 15 Chapters
All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the Translate Website button below the author’s name.
To receive Global Research’s Daily Newsletter (selected articles), click here.
Follow us on Instagram and Twitter and subscribe to our Telegram Channel. Feel free to repost and share widely Global Research articles.
***
A new scientific study published in the sociological journal Minerva details how medical professionals with views contradicting the mainstream narrative on COVID-19 were censored and suppressed. The study, titled “Censorship and Suppression of Covid-19 Heterodoxy,” also covers how medical professionals pushed back against censorship.
The study was co-authored by a group of scholars from Australia and Israel, and the Yaffa Shir-Raz of the University of Haifa, who leaked a video of an internal meeting at the ministry of health in Israel about how some findings on the relatively rare adverse effects of the Pfizer vaccine were hidden.
On Substack, Hebrew University of Jerusalem’s Josh Guetzkow, one of the authors of the study, explained how the study was conducted. The study is “based on in-depth interviews with scientists and doctors around the world who have faced censorship and suppression due to their views on COVID-19.”
He said the scientists and doctors could be familiar to his audience, but everyone interviewed was kept anonymous in the report. He continued to say that “the current stark reality of censorship and suppression is also undoubtedly familiar to most people reading this, it will be news to many outside our circles.” Therefore, they “felt there would be value in having it documented and discussed in a peer-reviewed academic literature.”
The summary of the report states that “the emergence of COVID-19 … led to numerous controversies over COVID-related knowledge and policy” and a “perceived threat from doctors and scientists who challenge the official position of governmental and intergovernmental health authorities.”
Supporters of the “official position,” which the authors referred to as “orthodoxy,” responded by moving “to censor those who promote dissenting views.”
The researchers found out that the media and Big Tech played a central role in “attempting to stifle debate over COVID-19 policy and measures.” That was followed by “widespread use” of censorship and “tactics of suppression that damaged the reputations and careers of dissenting doctors and scientists, regardless of their academic or medical status and regardless of their stature prior to expressing a contrary position.”
The censorship and suppression tactics that respondents of the study described included
“exclusion, derogatory labeling, hostile comments and threatening statements by the media, both mainstream and social; dismissal by the respondents’ employers; official inquiries; revocation of medical licenses; lawsuits; and retraction of scientific papers after publication.”
The report states that “mainstream media, which until then had seen them as desirable interviewees, stopped interviewing them and accepting opinion pieces from them.”
Another tactic of suppression was official inquiry, including being threatened with license revocation, lawsuits, and even police searches at private healthcare centers.
Others had their research “retracted by the journal [which had originally published it] after publication,” while many others had their submitted papers “rejected from journals (often multiple times) without peer review” or with the publication process taking longer than usual.
Respondents of the study said they were “shocked and surprised,” but they did not give up. The censorship made them “even more determined and eager to expose the information that was being censored.”
*
Note to readers: Please click the share buttons above. Follow us on Instagram and Twitter and subscribe to our Telegram Channel. Feel free to repost and share widely Global Research articles.
All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the Translate Website button below the author’s name.
To receive Global Research’s Daily Newsletter (selected articles), click here.
Follow us on Instagram and Twitter and subscribe to our Telegram Channel. Feel free to repost and share widely Global Research articles.
***
Before both, Olaf Scholz, Chancellor of Germany, and unelected President of the European Commission (EC), Ursula von der Leyen, two Germans, were chosen to economically destroy Europe, beginning with Germany, they were indeed vetted for months by the neoliberal hegemons in Washington and the Pentagon / NATO.
When eventually they “qualified”, they enhanced the media lie-machine, betraying and lying to the people in Europe about energy shortages, food shortages, astronomical inflation – and fear-mongering about the multiple disastrous consequences of these calamities.
They imposed stern energy savings program under threat of severe punishment, including fines and imprisonment. This, despite the fact that German gas tanks are full to about 94 %, the most they have ever been in the last 5 years. The energy situation in other EU countries is similar – it would appear, not at all disastrous.
Yet, the dumbfounded European public went along – with fear and anxiety.
But the German industrialists did not.
They didn’t and still don’t agree with the German – and by association, the European industry-destruction, also called deindustrialization policy. They had in the past already heavily lobbied with Madame Merkel, making semi-secret deals with Russia.
German industrialists know that the divide-and-conquer policy is being imposed by Washington – to reach eventually a unipolar world, which is only possible with a fractured Europe, not with a “United Europe”. The US GDP is estimated to reach in 2022 about US$ 20 trillion, as compared to a fast-catching-up European GDP of some US$ 17 trillion (2022 est.).
German business leaders didn’t go along with official German economic policy. Destroying their country economically is going too far. Knowing that Europe in the long-run needs Russia and with an even longer vision, also China, German industrialists made semi-clandestine pacts with Moscow.
German Chancellor Scholz’s one-day visit to Beijing, meeting with President Xi Jinping, consisted of a large delegation – several dozen representatives of German key businesses and industries. To the delight of Washington, Scholz told the world: “The world needs China.”
It’s now European economic leaders who call the shots; Olaf Scholz has little choice. The WEF, Washington and Brussels appear to be sidelined.
Germany, the people, is very much interested in becoming part of the Xi-Initiative, the Belt and Road. The 25% concession in the port of Hamburg to the Chinese company, Cosco, was a first step – a sign that Germany was ready to sign up to the New Silk Road, the same as did Italy and Greece with Piraeus, already years before.
The original proposal was a Chinese participation of about 35% to 40%. Political pressure from Brussels and from within Germany reduced the Chinese share to 25%. The reduction is unimportant. What counts is Germany’s “entry” into the BRI.
Washington, Brussels and NATO may not like it. But what can they do, if the EU-lead country, Germany, decides to resist the planned collapse?
Europe Signs US$ 17 billion Trade Deal with China
In agreement with France and other EU countries, Olaf Scholz entered into a Trade Deal with China for the equivalent of about US$ 17 billion. See video below.
Finally, prompted by German industrialists, Europe may see the US for what it is. Officials in the Biden Administration are attempting to raise issues about the Sino-German trade, claiming that China wants to separate Europe from the US. Talks about “sanctions” are already emerging. But sanctioning Europe and China — where would it leave the US? Alone and isolated.
Therefore, Washington is thinking twice before applying their usual weapon of mass destruction, sanctioning “misbehaving” partners.
Chancellor Scholz apparently made it clear that the visit to China is the right decision. Washington, NATO and Brussels won’t be able to decouple Germany from China. No way should the United States be able to intervene and interfere.
At the same time, preceding the Scholz visit to Beijing, Germans revealed fears for financial survival in a recent poll (RT, 7 Nov 2022).
Half of the respondents are afraid, they might not have enough money to financiallysurvive the coming winter, according to the BILD journal of last Sunday (6 November). Most people believe the government’s relief measures to alleviate the industrial fallout of the ongoing energy crunch are not enough.
According to the INSA polling agency (Institute for New Social Answers), only about a third of respondents believe that government measures will help them get by. Another third admitted they would not be able to afford any Christmas presents for their loved ones this season. They also believe that Scholz is not up to the task facing him in the coming years.
Chancellor Scholz’s approval rating is with 25% the lowest of any German Chancellor duirng the past 50 years. His trip to China may improve his popularity.
This negative reaction was triggered by fear that Germany may not be able to handle the announced “energy crisis”. This is clearly a fear reaction by people unaware of the hoax behind the crisis; not knowing that Germany’s, like most European countries’ energy reserves, are at their highest for years, and before Chancellor Scholz’s trip to Beijing.
Their fear was also driven by inflation and the ever-increasing cost of energy, combined with worries about a potentially “chilling winter” across Europe.
Will the revelation of the new German-China connection ease the tension?
Time will tell. Of special importance will also be the response of other EU countries. Will they return to sovereign nation states – moving away from the imposed globalist concept?
*
Note to readers: Please click the share buttons 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 is a non-resident Senior Fellow of the Chongyang Institute of Renmin University, Beijing.
Featured image: Federal Chancellor Olaf Scholz and General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party, Xi Jinping. (Photo: Federal Government/Imo)
All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the Translate Website button below the author’s name.
To receive Global Research’s Daily Newsletter (selected articles), click here.
Follow us on Instagram and Twitter and subscribe to our Telegram Channel. Feel free to repost and share widely Global Research articles.
***
To be sure there is an election coming up today in the United States and President Joe Biden has clearly taken the low road in the lead up to it by speaking before friendly audiences and repeating over and over the bromides that cause the brain to go numb. During the past week it was all about saving “American democracy” from the MAGA barbarians. And Democracy is, inevitably, tied to the Democratic Party etymologically, which, in a sense, makes it the presumed sole possessor of the right stuff when it comes to delivering freedom to all, including most recently a truly delusional pledge by Biden to “free Iran.”
The problem for the president is that Bidenspeak is being seen by some as devoid of content, choosing to skip over any discussion of the actual policies that have benefitted or harmed the American people over the past two years. That omission is convenient as many voters look around and see high inflation, a struggling economy, surging crime rates and an open border that may have produced, according to Tucker Carlson, a tidal wave of as many as five million illegal immigrants in the country. And, of course, there is also the war threatening to go nuclear over the Russian intervention in Ukraine, a conflict that threatens no American interest but which nevertheless has been elevated into a genuine saga of good versus evil through the combined efforts of the US and British governments ably assisted by the western mainstream media.
And it has become a real war, thanks to the joint UK-US bombing of one of the Nord Stream pipelines that connect Russia to northern Europe. Washington has warned repeatedly that it would take steps to shut down the pipeline, which it regards as a security threat in that it makes Europe dependent on Russia for energy, and it appears that the plucky Brits did the dirty work. Britain’s then Foreign Minister Liz Truss reportedly texted US Secretary of State Antony Blinken immediately after the pipeline blew up, telling him “It’s done!” Neither Truss nor Blinken were apparently aware that Russian intelligence had penetrated the security on the connection and recorded the communication.
And, of course, it is all about Ukraine even if the ultimate objective by the US is to weaken Russia militarily while also removing President Vladimir Putin. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has emerged as some kind of puppet master in his control of the White House, the US Congress and the mainstream media, drawing an estimated 60 billion dollars in economic and military aid from the US Treasury and also committing Washington to support his country until it “wins” against Putin. Zelensky, whose middle name must be Svengali, reportedly was involved recently in a phone call with Biden in which the US president expressed frustration over Zelensky’s frequently repeated demands for more money and weapons. Biden vented and even shouted but Zelensky wound up with the cash, some of which will certainly go to support the Ukrainian president’s various real estate holdings in Israel and Florida.
And then there is the “dirty bomb” story making the rounds. It has two components. First is the technology of a dirty bomb itself, which is a high explosive device that is seeded with radioactive waste that is lethal and contaminates a large area when it is detonated. A dirty bomb is considered a weapon of mass destruction and its use is categorized as a war crime, much like using a chemical or biological weapon. Second, there is the false flag aspect to the tale that is circulating. The Russian government, the source of the report, is claiming that Zelensky’s government is preparing to put together and detonate a dirty bomb somewhere inside Ukraine and before blaming the development on Putin and his government. That attribution of an action falsely to a country or government that was not involved is a false flag and the intention is to create a perception that someone is breaking the rules on what is allowed even during wartime.
False flags attacks were used most recently in the western supported insurgency in Syria, most notably at the Damascus suburb of Ghouta in 2013, where a chemical-weapons claimed attack that may have killed as many as 1700 people took place. The attack was inevitably attributed to the Syrian government by the United States but it was in fact, much more plausibly carried out by the rebels who controlled the area at that time.
So why would Zelensky detonate a dirty bomb within the area he controlled? Well, Zelensky has long sought increased and direct US and NATO involvement on his side in the fight against Russia. Being able to point to a major war crime that he would attribute to the Russians through a false flag operation might just be enough to do the trick and bring in larger scale western involvement. It is certainly something that Zelensky and his neocon advisers would consider an acceptable ruse de guerre. Given the effective neocon control over foreign policy and the media outlets in the US it would also in all likelihood involve the United States in a major war that was avoidable with devastating consequences for all parties involved.
So, if Joe Biden wants to talk about his achievements in the run-up to elections, why doesn’t he explain his reasons for enabling and expanding the war with Russia over Ukraine? That war has not only brought about a flow of billions of dollars in aid for the most corrupt country in Europe, it has also resulted in a worldwide energy crisis that has fueled inflation and disrupted trade. More to the point, it has led to a global movement to confront the United States over its presumption that it is the hegemonistic power that sets the rules for everyone else. That is also contributing to increasing rejection of the US dollar as the world’s reserve currency, which will have an incalculable impact on the American economy and the country’s standard of living.
Has it all been worth it, Joe, to craft a narrative that ignores the real issues just so you can stay in power? The America that you and I were brought up in is sliding down into a deep dark hole, and you and your delusional neocon and neoliberal friends have been largely responsible for the descent even as you use your bully pulpit to cry about “democracy” at every opportunity.
*
Note to readers: Please click the share buttons above. Follow us on Instagram and Twitter and subscribe to our Telegram Channel. Feel free to repost and share widely Global Research articles.
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].
All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the Translate Website button below the author’s name.
To receive Global Research’s Daily Newsletter (selected articles), click here.
Follow us on Instagram and Twitter and subscribe to our Telegram Channel. Feel free to repost and share widely Global Research articles.
***
The Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists or OUN is the most successful post-war fascist group. During the war the OUN played a major role in helping the Germans carry out the Holocaust, which claimed 1.2 million Jewish lives.
They also attempted genocide against the Polish population in Volhynia and Galicia in what is today Western Ukraine. These mass murders were carried out in the most brutal manner imaginable.
Jews were beaten to death with iron bars. Poles were chopped up with axes or cut in half with saws. The OUN took a sadistic delight in humiliating their victims and torturing them to death. Russians were sometimes skinned alive.
The 2014 CIA coup in Ukraine made the OUN ideology the official ideology of the Ukrainian state. Even Ukraine’s current Jewish president Zelensky, whose family were victims of the mass murder in Ukraine, said of Stepan Bandera “He is a hero for a certain percentage of Ukrainians, and it’s normal, and it’s cool.” Ukrainian history has been falsified to portray the OUN as heroes who battled both the Nazis and the Soviets.
Yet it is not only in the madhouse that is post-Maidan Ukraine that the history of Ukraine has been falsified. Because of the close ties of the OUN to the American, British, German, Polish and other governments the OUN have also been able to make their twisted mythology into the accepted mainstream version of events.
The OUN were considered too valuable by the CIA and other intelligence agencies to have their wartime crimes exposed. Equally importantly the OUN became a major source for anti-Soviet propaganda, which then became mainstream history. During the Cold War academia became a major weapon in the battle between capitalism and communism.
Today nothing has changed and in the new cold war with Russia Ukraine is currently the most important battleground. Shielding Western publics from the truth about the insanity and cruelty of the Ukrainian fascists the West are supporting is the main goal of the media and academia when it comes to Ukraine.
Ukraine is only the most extreme example of the “memory wars” being waged across the former Soviet Union and the former Warsaw pact countries of Eastern Europe where pro-western governments seek to turn Nazi collaborators into heroes, demonize the Soviet Union, and destroy all monuments to the role the Soviet Union played in defeating fascism. I will be relying mainly on the brilliant work Stepan Bandera: The Life and Afterlife of a Ukrainian Nationalist Fascism, Genocide and Cult by Grzegorz Rossolinski-Liebe, the first critical and scholarly account of the history of the OUN. Ironically his book was released just before the start of the 2014 civil war and Ukrainian nationalists did everything they could to prevent the book from being published, waging a public campaign against the author.
In part one of this series I described the origins of Ukrainian nationalism and its transformation into a fascist movement. I explained how present day Ukraine had long been divided with Central and Eastern Ukraine controlled by Russia. Western Ukraine, which was originally part of Poland, became part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire when Poland was dismembered in the 18th century. After World War One it became part of a reborn Poland known as the Second Republic, which had absorbed the short, lived Republic of Western Ukraine.
I traced the origins of the OUN and its terrorist campaign within Poland. The OUN engaged in assassinations, massacres, arson and other crimes. This landed the leader of the OUN’s Homeland executive Stepan Bandera in prison although his two trials made him famous. The OUN was controlled by its leaders in exile. After Stepan Bandera escaped from prison, thanks to the German invasion of Poland in September 1939, he tried to seize the leadership of the OUN. This led the organization to split into an OUN/M answering to Andrei Melnyk and an OUN/B answering to Bandera. During the brief two-week window after the German invasion of Poland, but prior to the Soviet invasion, the OUN massacred thousands of Jews and also murdered many of the defeated Polish army who were trying to escape or return home. The OUN leaders then headed for Western Poland.
Eastern Poland became Western Ukraine. Once the Soviets arrived they reunified Ukraine and cracked down hard on Polish nationalists as well as on the OUN.
The exiled OUN leaders in German-occupied Poland, known as the General Government, along with tens of thousands of their supporters who had fled the Soviets, were busy working closely with the Germans, who had been their sponsors for decades, to plan the invasion of the Soviet Union. Stepan Bandera and the other OUN/B leaders wrote down their plans in the months before the German invasion of the Soviet Union.
It was known as the “Struggles and Activities” plan. It called for the OUN/B to activate its networks to give a welcome the Nazis and form militias for elimination of Jews, Poles, and all non-Ukrainians as well as any Ukrainians who opposed the OUN. The OUN/B came up with a bunch of fascist anti-communist and anti-Semitic slogans with which to blanket the country.
The OUN/B and OUN/M were both working closely with the Abwehr, German military intelligence, who provided military training, police training, and political training. 800 OUN/B members joined special task forces who were to follow the Wehrmacht into the Soviet Union and mobilize Ukrainians to support their planned Nazi puppet Government. 800 other OUN/B members joined the Nachtigall battalion, which was controlled by the Abwehr.
The OUN/B also had a network of 20,000 active members in Soviet western Ukraine along with 1.5 million supporters that could be mobilized. The OUN/B planned to declare an “independent” Ukrainian state with Stepan Bandera as its Providnyk or fascist dictator. Hitler however had other plans for Ukraine.
Hitler viewed Ukrainians as sub-human Slavs, like the Russians, who would have to be massacred or enslaved to make way for German settlers. Ukraine’s rich black soil would feed the German Reich.
Hitler thought Ukraine would be for Germany what India was for the British or America was for the U.S. who wiped out the Native Americans. The OUN did have a major Nazi ally in the form of Alfred Rosenberg, Reich Minister for the Occupied Eastern Territories. Rosenberg saw the potential of an OUN-controlled Ukraine as a valuable ally.
This was the situation on the eve of Nazi Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union, which began on 22 June 1941.
The war would lead to the death of 27 million people in the Soviet Union. 5.2 million civilians would die in Ukraine. 2.3 Million Ukrainians would be deported to German slave labour camps.
Of Ukraine’s 2.7 million Jews 1.6 million would be killed. 700 cities and town were destroyed in Ukraine along with 28,000 villages.
The impact of the OUN on the success of the Nazi plans to exterminate the Jews was dramatic.
In areas that had been long subjected to OUN propaganda in Western Ukraine local Jews had much less chance of survival. In Ternopil in Western Ukraine 97% of the Jews were killed. In contrast, in Kharkov in eastern Ukraine 91% of the Jews managed to survive.
The OUN/B had been warned in advance of the invasion date and had smuggled the “Struggles and Activities” plan into Ukraine with its blueprint for the coming genocide.
OUN activists spread out across the countryside setting up militias, and local governments. On 25 June 1941, the OUN/B tried to stage an uprising in Lvov but it was crushed by the Soviets. Sometimes the OUN/B forces would attack the retreating Red Army.
However they usually waited until after the Red Army retreated before entering an area. On 30 June 1941, the Wehrmacht entered the city including the Ukrainian Nachtigall battalion whom locals greeted with flowers, calling them the Stepan Bandera battalion.
The Nachtigall battalion seized control of the radio station and began broadcasting Nazi and OUN propaganda.
That morning the Germans and the OUN discovered that the Soviet secret police the NKVD had massacred its political prisoners when the German invasion began to prevent them from collaborating with the Germans. Many were doubtless OUN members killed before they could carry out horrific crimes, like Roman Shukhevych’s brother.
This happened in a number of areas and was used by the OUN to scapegoat the Jewish population for the killings. They were falsely accused of being NKVD informants and blamed for the victims’ deaths.
This would be the pattern across western Ukraine and where there had been no recent executions those executed in the terror years earlier were dug up to enflame the masses. Thus already on 30 June 1941 small-scale massacres of the Jews of Lvov began. That night at 8 PM Yaroslav Stetsko held a ceremony in which he declared a new Ukrainian state under the leadership of Stepan Bandera.
The day would be celebrated by OUN exiles until today as a national holiday. With Stetsko were the Metropolitan of the Greek Catholic Church in Lvov Andrei Sheptyts’kyi, clergyman and Nachtigall battalion member Ivan Hryn’okh and two officers in the German Abwehr Hans Koch and Wilhelm Ernst zu Eikern.
Metropolitan Sheptys’kyi endorsed the idea of a Ukrainian state led by Bandera but paid lip service to the idea of tolerance for minorities. His church would later be implicated in inciting genocide against both the Jews and Polish Catholics. The German Abwehr officers welcomed the celebration but warned that it was not time to declare independence and that only Hitler could decide.
Hitler had already decided against an “independent” Ukraine, which was why Stepan Bandera had been forbidden from returning to Ukraine.
According to OUN mythology and to the OUN’s western apologists Stepan Bandera was immediately sent to a concentration camp because of Stetsko’s premature declaration of independence. Actually he and Stetsko were placed in “honourable confinement” which initially meant simply that he was confined to Berlin where he could roam freely and was even allowed to carry a pistol for self-defence.
It was the later OUN/B murders of leaders of the OUN/M carried out in broad daylight that then provoked a mild German crackdown on the OUN/B. I will return to this topic later. Even when Bandera was sent to a concentration camp he was incarcerated in a special section reserved for prisoners who might prove useful later, like the leader of the Romanian Iron Guard or Stalin’s son. Bandera was given special privileges and needless to say was not treated like the other inmates in a concentration camp. He was not gassed, enslaved, shot, tortured, experimented on or starved to death. On the contrary he was allowed conjugal visits from his wife who served as his go between to the OUN. Bandera received weekly care packages, and was not even confined to a cell.
To return to Lvov by 1 July 1941 the OUN/B and the Germans had whipped the populace up into a fury directed at the city’s Jews. An angry mob rounded up thousands of Jews and brought them to the prisons where the NKVD’s victims had been found. The Jewish men were made to move the rotting corpses while they were brutally beaten to death. Jewish women were made to wash the rotting corpses and kiss their hands before being beaten to death, often after being raped. Others were shot by German military units.
The OUN/B had formed a Ukrainian militia to conduct the executions on the day they arrived. They would soon be transformed into the Ukrainian police on the orders of Heinrich Himmler, the leader of the SS.
They would answer to the SS but remained loyal to Stetsko. It was in their role as auxiliary police recruits that the OUN/B would play a major part in the Holocaust. It was their role to round up the victims, to enforce all the anti-Jewish laws. They often also acted as executioners. Much of the killing in Lvov was carried out by angry mobs fired up by OUN propaganda.
They loved to humiliate their victims before killing them. Women were stripped naked and often raped in the streets.
Jews were forced to clean up broken glass, with their bare hands and clean streets in front of jeering crowds, whipping them with steel cables.
Jews were forced to sing communist songs before being shot or they were forced to shout Slava Ukraini before being beaten to death.
Everywhere there were Nazi and Ukrainian flags and the walls were plastered with genocidal OUN slogans. The pogrom would last until 3 July 1941.
On 2 July, the Germans took thousands of Jews out to the forest for a mass execution.
Ukrainian peasants streamed in from the countryside with carts to carry the loot they planned to steal from their victims. Greed is often a major motivator in genocide.
At the high end it involved German corporate takeovers of Jewish-owned business, often financed by American investors.
In the Soviet Union there were no big businesses. Yet genocidal Ukrainians and other collaborators or German soldiers were able to loot their victims’ personal property.
Robbery and extortion were a constant in these Ukrainian pogroms. Always the victims were threatened into turning over their valuables then murdered anyway.
Banderites became synonymous with bandits in the view of their potential victims. Around 8,000 Jews were killed in a couple days during the first Lvov Pogrom but the Nazis and the OUN were just getting started. During the Lvov Pogrom the OUN/B also supplied a death list of Polish professors, their families and hundreds of their students. The professors were shot along with some of their family members and 100 Polish students. A month later to please the OUN/B, angry about Germany’s refusal to recognize Ukraine’s independence and the arrests of Bandera and Stetsko, the Germans gave them permission to hold a second Lvov Pogrom from 25-28 July 1941, known as the Petliura days in honour of the mass murdering Symon Petliura. Petliura was infamous for his army’s massacres of Jews during the Russian Civil War, which I discussed in Part 1.
Image: Emblem of OUN-B (Photo by Alex Tora, licensed under CC BY 3.0)
All across the countryside the same pattern was repeated. The OUN/B held Independence Day ceremonies, destroyed all communist symbols, put up Ukrainian flags and Nazi Swastikas and then launched pogroms. There were up to 140 Pogroms in Western Ukraine in July 1941 and they claimed 35,000 to 39,000 victims. The biggest pogroms besides Lvov were in Ternopil and Zolochiv. During this period the OUN/B were not merely carrying out German orders but were enthusiastically carrying out genocide in line with their own ideology.
They conducted massacres of Jews in places where there was no German presence. When the Hungarian forces forbade the OUN from carrying out a big pogrom, they defiantly carried out a little one and then complained to the Germans. Across the countryside the OUN erected triumphal arches welcoming the Nazis and praising Stepan Bandera and Adolf Hitler. The Nazis were greeted by adoring crowds and their invasion was blessed by the Greek Catholic clergy. OUN/B activists had the crowds sign “plenipotentiary letters” which praised Hitler and the German Army while also asking for the release of Stepan Bandera and Yaroslav Stetsko.
During the early days of the German invasion, Stepan Bandera had set up his headquarters close to Ukraine and used couriers to communicate his orders to the OUN/B. He had ordered and approved of the massacres of Jews. Stetsko’s 30 June 1941 declaration of independence had angered the Germans.
Bandera did his best to repair relations with the Nazis. On 3 July 1941, Bandera attended a meeting in Cracow with the Undersecretary of State for the General Government Ernst Kundt (German occupied Poland). Bandera argued that as leader of the OUN it was the will of the people that he head Ukraine. Kundt countered that only Hitler could decide such matters. Bandera conceded that he could only create a Ukrainian state with German permission. On 5 July 1941, Bandera was sent to Berlin and placed in “Honourable Captivity”.
On 8 July 1941, someone tried to assassinate Yarsolav Stetsko and on 9 July 1941, Stetsko was arrested and escorted by the Abwehr to Berlin. On 12 July 1941 Stetsko was freed. On 14 July 1941 Bandera was freed.
They were confined to Berlin and lived together in an apartment. Bandera was allowed to carry a gun and held an ID issued by the RSHA (Heidrich’s “Homeland Security” department). These two networked with the Lithuanian fascists in exile and the Japanese ambassador. Stetsko kept busy writing his autobiography for his German handlers: writing that, while he considered Moscow his main enemy, he fully endorsed exterminating the Jews since he considered them tools of Moscow.
On 19 July 1941, Hitler decided to incorporate Eastern Galicia into the General Government.
This offended the OUN/B who wanted to rule a united Ukraine.
Now their territory was being absorbed back into German-occupied Poland.
Actually it turned out to be beneficial to the OUN/B’s interests as Ukrainians in Galicia were favoured over the Poles and Jews and they were allowed to continue to carry out Ukrainization of Polish educational institutions.
Ukrainians in East Galicia were treated like fascist allies Slovakia and Croatia.
The Nazis set up UTSK in the Ukrainian Central Committee run by Volodymyr Kubiiovych in the General Government area. Kubiiovych had been a close ally of the OUN in the 1930s and shared their ideology while being more flexible. He lobbied for the creation of a Ukrainian National Army to fight alongside the Nazis and argued that all Jewish property should be turned over to Ukrainians.
In 1943 he would get his wish with the creation of the Waffen-SS Galizia division, composed of Ukrainians. Ukrainians in the former Soviet Ukraine on the other hand were mercilessly exploited. All education beyond the 4th grade was banned. The Germans modelled their behaviour in Soviet Ukraine on American plantation owners treating Ukrainian peasants like Black slaves who could only be kept in check with whips and clubs. The main goal was to loot Ukraine’s grain. The result would be very different attitudes towards the memory of the Nazis in Western and Eastern Ukraine.
On 30 August 1941, the OUN/B assassinated the OUN/M leaders Melina Senyk and Mykola Stibors’kyi in broad daylight on the streets in Zhytomyr. This outraged the Germans and other Ukrainian nationalists. The Germans were further outraged when the OUN/B tried to blame Germany for the killings. The OUN/M provided the Germans with names and addressees of OUN/B leaders who were then arrested.
The Germans also shot some OUN/B members as looters and closed their offices in Berlin and Vienna.
They tried and failed to purge the administration and police of OUN/B members. On 13 September 1941, Bandera and Stetsko were arrested again.
Despite this both continued efforts to repair relations with the Germans. Both sent orders to the OUN/B not to resist the Germans and to continue to supply recruits for the police and the puppet government.
Even after being sent to a cushy concentration camp and even after two of his brothers died in a concentration camp, Bandera never ceased attempts at reconciliation with the Germans. Even when it became clear the Germans were losing in 1944, Bandera was more committed then ever to allying the OUN/B with the Nazis. The German purge was totally ineffective. The OUN/B was continually flooded with new recruits and continued to grow in power. The head of the Ukrainian police simply ignored orders to get rid of OUN/B members. In other words even when the Nazis turned on the OUN/B the organization continued to supply recruits for the police, which would play a major role in carrying out the holocaust. Many Ukrainian police would also go on to join the Waffen SS Galizia division. Others would later join the UPA, using their experience in mass murder to massacre Poles.
The Ukrainian police were formed from the Ukrainian militias that the OUN/B had recruited in the wake of the German invasion. They were known as the Schutzmannschaften or auxiliary police. In March 1942, despite the Nazi’s earlier crackdown, the OUN/B ordered its members to join the police en masse. The Ukrainian police answered ultimately to Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler, overall commander of the SS. It was ordered that they be given two hours of Nazi indoctrination every day.
In the cities the Ukrainian police assisted in raids, deportations, and shootings. They also patrolled the ghettoes. They enforced the anti-Jewish laws, forced Jews to wear identifying arm bands, created death lists by interviewing locals, rounded up the victims, guarded the prisoners, escorted them to the site of the execution and often shot the victims, especially if they were children. The Nazis had their own killing squads, the Einsatzgruppe C that also carried out many of the mass executions.
In the countryside there were few German forces or German police and the Ukrainian Police played the leading role in destroying the Jews and then spent years hunting down the survivors. The Ukrainian police often displayed the same sadistic brutality the OUN/B had shown in the Lvov pogroms.
One survivor recounted being locked in a bathhouse with dozens of victims who were forced to desecrate their holy books. Some had had their beards set aflame. The fire then spread to their clothes and they were burned alive. Others were beaten to death. Throughout it all the victims were forced to sing to entertain their Ukrainian tormentors. The Ukrainian police were used not only to terrorize Ukraine but also to terrorize Belarus, Poland, Slovakia and other areas. Particularly infamous was Battalion 201, which included Roman Shukhevych.
He would also join the Waffen-SS Galizia division and become leader of the UPA. Shukhevych, a monster like Bandera, is now widely promoted as a “Hero of Ukraine.” In addition to carrying out mass murders of Jews, Byelorussians and Poles; Shukhevych loved to have Eastern Ukrainian’s shot for little or no reason and privately contemplated exterminating them all. Many recruits to Battalion 201 like Shukhevych had been part of the Abwehr’s Nachtigall and Roland battalions and carried out mass murders of Byelorussian civilians as part of their anti-partisan warfare in 1942.
Early in 1943 Heinrich Himmler created the Waffen-SS Galizia division, also known as the 14th Grenadier Division of the Waffen-SS. It was called Galician instead of Ukrainian to pander to Hitler.
Hitler, born in Austria-Hungary, felt that since Galicia had once been part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, there was probably some German blood in them. Over 80,000 Ukrainians volunteered to join the SS Galizia but only 8,000 were accepted.
It soon expanded to 14,000 men by recruiting members of the Ukrainian police.
The Ukrainian general commanding the SS Galicia was Pavlo Shandruk. The SS Galicia was established to battle the Red Army. It was also deployed to crush the Slovakian national uprising and played a major role in the destruction of Warsaw after the Warsaw uprising.
On 22 July 1944 the Waffen SS Galicia division, by then much larger, was encircled and destroyed by the 1st Ukrainian Front of the Red Army under the command of Pavel Rybalko.
They were decimated by the Soviet artillery and Katyusha rocket batteries. However the Germans were able to replace the units by recruiting more members and the SS Galicia division went on to wage dirty wars against partisans and civilians in Italy, Yugoslavia, France and Czechoslovakia. They surrendered to the British two days after the war ended and with the help of the Vatican were able to avoid deportation back to the Soviet Union by claiming to be Polish citizens.
Eventually they would end up in Britain before being resettled in Canada and America strengthening the OUN diaspora during the Cold War. Unknown to most citizens of Canada and the US there are public monuments to these Waffen SS veterans in both countries.
In 1943 at the same time that the OUN/B were joining the Waffen SS en masse, and while they were setting up the UPA to exterminate the Poles, the OUN/B was publicly distancing themselves from the Nazis and secretly trying to forge an alliance with the western allies for a future struggle with the Soviet Union. Here the considerations were the Soviet victory at Stalingrad foreboding Germany’s ultimate defeat. The more farsighted Nazis were already planning their escapes, and their deals with Western intelligence agencies. The hardliners in American and British Intelligence like Allen Dulles were already gearing up for a covert war against the Soviet Union using committed anti-communists and anti-Russians among their current fascist “enemies” (for men like Dulles they were friends and business partners).
When Poland was investigating the Pieracki assassination in the mid-1930s, it discovered that the OUN had ties to MI6 as well as the German Abwehr. When it comes to such matters the historical evidence is always a sanitized version or some sort of limited hang out. The CIA spent decades destroying incriminating records and declassifying misleading or altered records. Which is my way of saying we will never know the early history of the ties of the OUN with MI6 and the OSS and US military intelligence during the war.
The OUN/B was already trying to improve their image in the west in April 1942. At their second OUN/B conference they claimed that they would no longer take part in anti-Jewish actions. At the same conference they still condemned Jews as “a tool of Russian Bolshevik Imperialism. In addition the OUN/B did not quit the police and so continued to be a vital element in carrying out the mass murder of Jews. By 1943 the Jews had largely been eliminated in western Ukraine. The survivors were being hunted by the Ukrainian police, which was full of OUN/B members. At their third Conference from 17-21 February, the OUN/B was now claiming that it would fight both Germany and the USSR and that they were now democrats ruled by a triumvirate, led by the (war criminal) Roman Shukhevych. In July 1944 the OUN sent emissaries to attempt to make a deal with the Western allies, including Mykola Lebed, head of the OUN internal security branch or SB, known for its bloodthirsty assassinations of alleged OUN traitors. Lebed would later receive decades of backing from the CIA. In July of 1944 the OUN/B furthered their “Democratic” rebranding, creating the front group UHVR, the Supreme Liberation Council of Ukraine. It would later provide many recruits for the CIA and MI6.
A few months before the February 1943 OUN conference, the OUN started what was to become the UPA. Contrary to myth the UPA only attacked Germans when it needed to steal arms. It made a secret deal with the German military to avoid confrontations. The UPA was formed for the purpose of exterminating the Poles and despite the OUN’s public statements that it would fight the Germans, the UPA was secretly funded by the Abwehr (German military intelligence). When the Germans retreated the Abwehr secretly turned over the Wehrmacht’s huge arms stockpiles to the UPA. Still the OUN’s two-faced strategy to win Western support would be very useful later for muddying the historical record and creating the myth that the OUN had battled both the Nazis and the Soviet Union. The UPA would later become a CIA proxy army run with the help of war criminal Reinhard Gehlen. It would wage an anti-Soviet war for five more years after the end of World War 2. Seventy years later the return of Ukrainian fascism to power via the Maidan coup would be universally celebrated as the triumph of “Democracy.”
Cover of Bandera’s OUN II Conference Resolutions which legalize the existence of Bandera’s OUN. OUN leader Andriy Melnyk denounced it as “saboteur”. April 1941 General Government (Licensed under the Public Domain)
The UPA was founded at the November 1942 OUN conference although it originally was called the UVV the Ukraine Liberation Army. The OUN/B stole the name UPA or Ukrainian Insurgent Army from a rival group of Ukrainian fascists lead by Taras Bulba-Borovets who led his own armed group in Ukraine with a similar ideology and methodology to the OUN/B. It too shared responsibility for mass murders of Jews and other Ukrainians. The OUN/B waged war on this rival group assassinating Bulba-Borovets’ wife and many of his top officers. When he went to the Germans for help they instead sent him to the same cushy concentration camp as Bandera and Stetsko. In March and April of 1943 OUN/B sent out word that its many members in the Ukrainian police should quit and join the UPA. Of 12,000 police, 5000 quit to join the UPA. Other Ukrainian police joined the Waffen-SS Galizia division. The new UPA recruits brought their experience in mass murder of Jews to the new plan for ethnic cleansing of Volhynia and Galicia of Poles. Poles were given the ultimatum leave or die. Often the threat was posted on a murdered Pole who had been unspeakably tortured and mutilated.
In February and March of 1943 the UPA began experimental massacres that claimed hundreds of lives. Whole Polish villages were wiped out. Soon Mykola Lebed ordered the complete cleansing to begin. The UPA would arrive in carts to carry away the loot and often recruited local Ukrainian peasants to join their massacres. The massacres were often carried out in the most horrific way possible with axes, pitchforks and saws. The UPA would sometimes spend hours sadistically torturing their victims to death. The aim was both to save bullets and to terrorize the Poles into fleeing. Another of their favourite methods was to attack churches with hand grenades or set them on fire when the whole town was attending. They also liked to gather all their victims up for a town hall meeting and burn them alive. The UPA would usually return again a couple days after their massacre so that they could kill all the survivors. They even slaughtered nuns who were caring for Polish orphans. On 11 July 1943, the UPA launched attacks on 96 different Polish villages in a single day killing 10,000 Poles. The UPA killed between 100,000 and 250,000 Poles during this genocidal campaign. The UPA would often pretend to be Soviet partisans and in addition to carrying out false flag attacks that could be blamed on the partisans they were probably playing their role for German intelligence, gathering information on which villages were sympathetic to the partisans.
The UPA also continued to hunt the few remaining Jews who were hiding out in the forests or in Polish villages. The UPA had learned from the Germans how to exploit their Jewish victims. Some were kept as slave labour working the farmlands of massacred Poles and then killed before they could be liberated by the Red Army. Others Jews who were doctors, dentists, nurses or tailors were conscripted into the UPA and then murdered when the Red Army was approaching. Later these facts would be spun by OUN apologists into the myth that the UPA wasn’t allied to the Nazis because it had Jewish members or that the UPA had acted to “save” the Jews. By 1944 the UPA had grown to 25,000-30,000 members. With Soviet forces advancing the UPA was now openly allied with Nazi Germany. The UPA attacks on the Jews hiding in the forests were so terrible that some Jews actually fled to German concentration camps believing their chances of survival would be better as slave labourers. In the summer of 1944 the Red Army would liberate Western Ukraine. The UPA would continue to kill Poles and increasingly began to target any Ukrainians who submitted to Soviet authority. Anyone who paid their taxes or joined a collective farm could be killed or have their home burnt down by the UPA. The UPA would become a sort of proto-Gladio, a stay-behind network behind enemy lines, created first by the Nazis and then absorbed by MI6 and the CIA. The UPA war with the Soviet Union would continue until 1950. Their network would survive into the 1960s. The UPA war was not only waged in Ukraine but also in Poland, Byelorussia, and Czechoslovakia. The story of the UPA will be continued in Part 3 of this series dealing with the Cold War.
As the war turned in favour of the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany faced defeat, the Germans increasingly realized that they needed the OUN/B. The Nazis granted an OUN/B request to be allowed to meet with Stepan Bandera. The details of Bandera’s imprisonment are clouded in mystery. It is not clear when exactly he was transferred from Gestapo custody following the OUN/M murders to his cushy Sachenhausen concentration camp, where he received care packages and visits from his wife. Stetsko claimed it was in January 1942.
Bandera claimed it was in 1943. Records claim it was October 1943. On 28 September 1944, the Germans released Stepan Bandera and soon thereafter also released Stetsko, Melnyk, Bulba-Borovets and 300 more OUN/B prisoners. Melnyk had been arrested when the OUN/M tried to contact Western intelligence in 1944.
The OUN/M had had much better relations with the Nazis and was appointed to serve in the puppet government. It had supplied many recruits to the Waffen SS Galicia division.
Bandera would spend the rest of the war working with the Nazis to recruit Ukrainian support to their cause. However Bandera would refuse to merge OUN forces with the Vlasov army’s KONR- the Committee for the Liberation of the Peoples of Russia- created 14 November 1944.
Bandera claimed they were “Russian Imperialists.”
Instead Rosenberg set up the separate Ukrainian National Committee (UNK), which included Bandera, Melnyk, Kubiiovych and was headed by Shandruk, the general commanding the Waffen SS Galicia division on 23 February 1945. Prior to this, in December 1944, Bandera and Stetsko helped train the Abwehr Commando’s unit of Ukrainian paratroopers who were to be dropped into Lvov with one million rubles for UPA head Roman Shukhevych to continue the fight against the Soviet Union. Bandera sent the message that he would return soon, a promise he never kept. Stetsko claimed that he was still Prime Minister of Ukraine because of his earlier declaration back in 30 June 1941; the one that had unleashed a wave of OUN/B massacres.
Bandera’s next stop, after celebrating Greek Catholic Christmas with his family, was Weimar, Germany. Bandera argued that the OUN/B must give its “Full Support” to Nazi Germany until the end. He was busy recruiting for the soon to be created Ukrainian National Army (UNA). Bandera spent three weeks in Berlin. He then headed for Vienna where he was elected head of the Foreign Units of the OUN (ZCh OUN). On 5-6 February 1945, the OUN in Ukraine elected Bandera as their leader but decided he should remain in exile. On 17 March 1945, the Germans announced the creation of the Ukrainian National Army (UNA).
The Waffen SS Galicia division was rebranded the 1st division of the UNA and its commander, Shandruk, was named commander of the UNA. Meanwhile Bandera fled Vienna as the Red Army approached, escaping to Czechoslovakia and then Innsbruck in Austria. Eventually Bandera would end up under the protection of the infamous Reinhard Gehlen, the first president of the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND), the espionage service founded by the US Forces in the American occupation zone. Gehlen had been recruited by the US intelligence services because he had been responsible for occupied Eastern Europe in the Abwehr.
When German forces fled the Red Army back in the first half of 1944 over 120,000 Ukrainian collaborators and war criminals fled west with them. During the Cold War many of these escaped Ukrainian war criminals would work for Western intelligence services. Many would eventually be resettled in the US and Canada. Ukrainian fascism would live on in exile for decades. Eventually with the help of its Western sponsors it would seize power in Ukraine yet again sparking a new covert war and triggering the on-going proxy war between NATO and Russia.
For Ukraine the war would not truly end until 1950. However that is the subject for Part 3. This is only a scratch to the surface of the history of Ukraine during the war. The crimes of the Nazi Germany would require their own articles or books. The Nazis created massive machinery for genocide. However they relied on Ukrainian collaborators every step of the way. An article also needs to be written just about the German conquest of Ukraine and the Soviet liberation of Ukraine. These were huge battles between millions of men.
However the crimes of the OUN are clear. They propagandized the Ukrainians to carry out mass murder. The OUN/B created militias that carried out genocide in 1941 and again in 1943. They supplied recruits to the Ukrainian police, which played a major role in the Holocaust. They joined the Waffen SS Galicia division along with the OUN/M. They formed the UPA to carry out genocide and ethnic cleansing against the Poles.
Bandera was unable to supervise this directly but he came up with the plans before being imprisoned and after his release he worked enthusiastically for the Nazis. Bandera never admitted to the OUN/B’s crimes, let alone apologizing or condemning them. His OUN followers took an active role carrying out unspeakable atrocities. Banderite became a synonym for murderous bandits. There has been shamefully little written about the history of the OUN and much of what was written was from a pro-OUN perspective. Sadly due to the nature of academia the more relevant the story of the OUN becomes the fewer people will dare to tell it for fear of being labelled “Russian propagandists.”
After the Orange revolution of 2004 Stepan Bandera was declared a “Hero of Ukraine”. Even a postage stamp was issued commemorating him. During the 2014 Maidan coup, a huge poster of Stepan Bandera hung on the stage. Few in the west had ever heard of Stepan Bandera or the OUN back in 2014. Now in 2022 the world is on the brink of nuclear war and the global economy is collapsing all because CIA and other western intelligence agencies have been using Ukrainian fascists as proxies for nearly 80 years. In Parts 3 and 4, I intend to trace the history of the OUN and its ideological heirs through the Cold War and post-Cold War eras up to the Maidan coup and the Ukrainian civil war.
*
Note to readers: Please click the share buttons above. Follow us on Instagram and Twitter and subscribe to our Telegram Channel. Feel free to repost and share widely Global Research articles.
With special thanks to T.P. Wilkinson.
Sources
My main source is Stepan Bandera: The Life and Afterlife of a Ukrainian Nationalist: Fascism, Genocide and Cult, an in depth history of Stepan Bandera and the OUN. It is a must read although written with the standard academic anti-Soviet bias.
I also read “Children of the Borderlands” by Lucyna Kulinska, a collection of survivors’ testimonies from the Polish victims of the UPA genocide. An English translation is available on EBay. It gives a vivid and horrifying picture of events. However it is edited from a strongly anti-Soviet perspective. Still the author should be applauded for exposing a forgotten genocide, which the strongly pro-Ukrainian Polish government is intent on covering up.
Hitler’s Shadow Nazi, War Criminals, U.S. Intelligence and the Cold War by Richard Breitman and Norman J.W. Goda has a chapter on Mykola Lebed and the CIA ties to the OUN. Based on declassified U.S. intelligence files, it provides a limited hangout version of events.
Nazi Empire Building and the Holocaust in Ukraine by Wendy Lower provides a horrifying picture of the German occupation and the complex machinery that carried out the genocide.
However it is extremely misleading whenever discussing the OUN/B, always portraying it as hostile to the Nazis. Perhaps that is because the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute funded her work. Worse still, she worked closely with the archetypical Cold War propagandist/historian Timothy Snyder, who helped her edit the book. Generally if you want to uncover an author’s shady connections look in the acknowledgments section which most people skip.
One of my favourite documentary series the Unknown War had an episode on Ukraine while it doesn’t mention the OUN/B it does describe the epic battle to liberate Ukraine
Evan Reif on the history of the OUN Part 1, Part 2
All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the Translate Website button below the author’s name.
To receive Global Research’s Daily Newsletter (selected articles), click here.
Follow us on Instagram and Twitter and subscribe to our Telegram Channel. Feel free to repost and share widely Global Research articles.
***
We are living in an ever-more intense “Death Tsunami”; Dr. Sherry Tenpenny tells us.
SCROLL DOWN TO VIEW VIDEO
She says in the UK, 1 in 73 people who got the shot are already dead, according to government data. She adds, about a 1,000 people a week die, as a result of the coerced vaxx campaign.
About 900 professional athletes have already died – and the number is rapidly increasing, mostly from myocarditis, a result of the vaxxes.
When they first started with the shots in early 2021, Dr. Tenpenny says, we saw hundreds of people with electronic charges – Instagram pics with keys and other metal pieces, clinging to arms and foreheads. You may remember having seen such photos.
This is clearly the result of heavy doses of Graphene Oxide in the shots.
She suggests, they may have changed the formula of the injections, as such pics have largely disappeared – but the substance is still there.
This looks like the first lots were sort of “trial balloons”. They got away with them. Nobody stopped them.
Graphene Oxide, when exposed to hydrogen, takes on a magnetic charge. Dr. Tenpenny refers to hundreds of scientific documents testifying to this.
She reminds us that “they” want 3 to 5 billion people to be eliminated from the planet.
It’s a “slow killing”– sometimes very, very painful. Most people don’t connect the dots.
What Dr. Tenpenny says is substantially the same as expressed as a warning to the world earlier by Dr. Mike Yeadon, former VP and Chief Science Officer of Pfizer.
Dr. Tenpenny ends by recommending that anybody who is listening to this – or gets the message otherwise, should never ever take any Covid shot anymore.
Definitely NO BOOSTERS!
This cautioning also applies to simple flu shots, or combinations of flu-Covid shots – which are now being marketed. Because all these shots – “they” don’t tell you – will contain killer formulas.
Conclusion, yes, indeed, just about a year after the extremely forced shots began – mass-dying started – the death tsunami is flooding humanity, literally.
See this brief 2-minute video.
*
Note to readers: Please click the share buttons 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 is a non-resident Senior Fellow of the Chongyang Institute of Renmin University, Beijing.
Featured image is from Children’s Health Defense
The Worldwide Corona Crisis, Global Coup d’Etat Against Humanity
by Michel Chossudovsky
Michel Chossudovsky reviews in detail how this insidious project “destroys people’s lives”. He provides a comprehensive analysis of everything you need to know about the “pandemic” — from the medical dimensions to the economic and social repercussions, political underpinnings, and mental and psychological impacts.
“My objective as an author is to inform people worldwide and refute the official narrative which has been used as a justification to destabilize the economic and social fabric of entire countries, followed by the imposition of the “deadly” COVID-19 “vaccine”. This crisis affects humanity in its entirety: almost 8 billion people. We stand in solidarity with our fellow human beings and our children worldwide. Truth is a powerful instrument.”
ISBN: 978-0-9879389-3-0, Year: 2022, PDF Ebook, Pages: 164, 15 Chapters
All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the Translate Website button below the author’s name.
To receive Global Research’s Daily Newsletter (selected articles), click here.
Follow us on Instagram and Twitter and subscribe to our Telegram Channel. Feel free to repost and share widely Global Research articles.
***
The enemies of the most honest and most popular political leader in Pakistan’s history tried to assassinate him. Since they suffered major defeats in election after election, could not succeed in their repeated efforts to have him declared ineligible for election, they realized that they could not beat Khan electorally. So they tried to kill him. He and many of his party leadership were injured, and one of them, sadly, did not survive.
The assassin’s statement that he was acting alone and not influenced by anyone could have been credible if, just recently, a prominent investigative journalist, Arshad Sharif, had not been assassinated in Kenya, where he was trying to hide after numerous threats to his life by Pakistan’s establishment. Those very people who had Arshad Sharif assassinated are responsible for this cowardly assassination attempt on Khan’s life. Their action signals a clear and decisive end to their decades long corruption and looting of the country’s wealth because now every Pakistani except a very few people have united behind Khan and expressed an unshakable resolve to rid the country of the foreign-installed imported government, murderers, and mafia leeches, who have been sucking the blood of the masses for decades.
The Day of Reckoning Is Fast Approaching in Pakistan
I am still grappling with the reality of what is happening in Pakistan. It continues to unroll like scenes from a nightmare. It is shocking that whereas anyone can file an FIR (First Information Report) with police for the most trivial of reasons, Imran Khan is not being allowed that basic protection from further attempts on his life. The Supreme Court has to intervene here.
If Pakistan’s judiciary fails to do its duty and safeguard Pakistan’s constitution and the rule of law, the criminals in all branches of the government, including the traitors in the army, will be tried in the People’s Court, consisting of nearly 90% of the country’s population, in a revolution that has already been forced on Pakistan’s people by the dastardly assassination attempt on their leader, Imran Khan.
In addition, the murders of the journalist Arshad Sharif and numerous other killings of honest government officials who unveiled the mafia’s corruption will not go unpunished. The Day of Reckoning is fast approaching. Loyal Pakistanis are confident that their brethren, the overwhelming majority in all branches of the government, including the army, who are controlled by just a handful of villainous, self-seeking, and country-betraying oppressors, will get rid of them in a peaceful transfer of power to those who have the people’s mandate and trust.
*
Note to readers: Please click the share buttons above. Follow us on Instagram and Twitter and subscribe to our Telegram Channel. Feel free to repost and share widely Global Research articles.
Prof. Abdul Jabbar has been teaching for more than half a century in San Francisco, California. He is a specialist in world literatures and the politics of the Muslim world.
All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the Translate Website button below the author’s name.
To receive Global Research’s Daily Newsletter (selected articles), click here.
Follow us on Instagram and Twitter and subscribe to our Telegram Channel. Feel free to repost and share widely Global Research articles.
***
Do leading members of secret societies managing many of the levers of influence throughout history wield genuine “knowledge known only to the inner elites”… or is something else at play?
In this Canadian Patriot Review documentary produced by Jason Dahl, narrated by myself and based on the work of Cynthia Chung, you will be introduced to the ancient origins of the occult societies that penetrated the heart of America’s intelligence agencies after the murder of William McKinley in 1901.
This journey will take you into the heart of ancient occult societies that managed wars, financial and cultural policies over two millenia ago. You will learn of the underlying methodology of manipulation used to induce foolish kings and generals into self destruction during the days of the Persian Empire which continue to be used to this very day.
With this overview, you will be introduced to
1) the British roots of the Scottish Rite of Freemasonry founded in 1801 by British grand strategists in South Carolina,
2) a figure named Albert Pike who led in the largest expansion of this foreign agency within the USA after Lincoln’s victory in 1865 and
3) the “seat of government” which 33rd degree FBI director J. Edgar Hoover managed in the USA during the course of eight presidencies.
This dark history is contrasted to the courageous efforts of men who devoted their lives resisting the growth of this occult agency including President Franklin Roosevelt, Senator Thomas J Walsh, Congressman Hale Boggs, Attorney General of New Orleans Jim Garrison,Martin Luther King Jr, Bobby Kennedy and his brother John F Kennedy.
This documentary was based on the essay
“The Origins of America’s Secret Police” by Cynthia Chung, whose new book on the growth of 20th century fascism can be purchased here.
Watch the full movie on Rumble, Youtube, Bitchute and don’t forget to share it far and wide.
*
Note to readers: Please click the share buttons above or below. Follow us on Instagram and Twitter and subscribe to our Telegram Channel. Feel free to repost and share widely Global Research articles.
In his new two volume series The Clash of the Two Americas, Matthew Ehret introduces a new analysis of American history from the vantage point that the globally-extended supranational shadow government that managed the British Empire was never fully defeated and has acted within the USA itself since 1776 as a continuous multi-generational fifth column managing every significant event and assassination of American presidents for the next 250 years.
Family physicians are seeing less interest in vaccination against Corona, according to data from a physicians’ professional organisation. “Vaccination is our best sword in the fight against severe outcomes. It’s therefore that much more regrettable that the vaccination campaign is currently stagnating,” the national chairman of the German General Practitioners’ Association, Markus Beier, said …
Doctors no longer receive nearly as many requests for vaccination from patients as the Standing Commission on Vaccination recommends be vaccinated, Beier said. “Of course, our doctors use every opportunity in their practices to educate patients about vaccination, but the results is now rather meagre.” The truth must be told: “The run on Corona vaccinations has now slowed to a crawl.”
This is rough news especially for the vaccinators in the German Health Ministry, who rolled out their truly dismal “Ich schütze mich” (“I protect myself”) ad campaign less than a month ago – to absolutely no effect whatsoever.
Screen grab from one of the bafflingly bad Ich schütze mich ads. The student Marla explains that she’s chosen to protect herself so that she can maintain her sense of taste and smell.
As with many of the most important stories, this one has been carefully downplayed by the press. The only commentary I can find is this tepid piece in FAZ, which complains about “the aggressive counter-campaign from the ranks of the antivaxxers.” Maybe vaccine critics have changed a few minds here or there, but it’s nothing in comparison to what the vaccinators have done to their own cause. Never before in history have Germans been so rapidly and so widely exposed to a new pharmaceutical as they have to the Corona vaccines, and now that personal experience of the jabs is at an all-time high, enthusiasm could hardly be lower. This is the final repudiation of the vaccinators, and the one that matters the most.
*
Note to readers: Please click the share buttons above. Follow us on Instagram and Twitter and subscribe to our Telegram Channel. Feel free to repost and share widely Global Research articles.
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.”
ISBN: 978-0-9879389-3-0, Year: 2022, PDF Ebook, Pages: 164, 15 Chapters
Comments Off on German Doctors Lament “Stagnating” Vaccination Campaign as the Health Ministry Sits on Millions of Doses that Will Never be Administered
What we all should be asking is what do they have planned for 2023 and beyond or even to 2030?
*
Note to readers: Please click the share buttons above. Follow us on Instagram and Twitter and subscribe to our Telegram Channel. Feel free to repost and share widely Global Research articles.
Featured image is from the author
The Worldwide Corona Crisis, Global Coup d’Etat Against Humanity
by Michel Chossudovsky
Michel Chossudovsky reviews in detail how this insidious project “destroys people’s lives”. He provides a comprehensive analysis of everything you need to know about the “pandemic” — from the medical dimensions to the economic and social repercussions, political underpinnings, and mental and psychological impacts.
“My objective as an author is to inform people worldwide and refute the official narrative which has been used as a justification to destabilize the economic and social fabric of entire countries, followed by the imposition of the “deadly” COVID-19 “vaccine”. This crisis affects humanity in its entirety: almost 8 billion people. We stand in solidarity with our fellow human beings and our children worldwide. Truth is a powerful instrument.”
ISBN: 978-0-9879389-3-0, Year: 2022, PDF Ebook, Pages: 164, 15 Chapters
All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the Translate Website button below the author’s name.
To receive Global Research’s Daily Newsletter (selected articles), click here.
Follow us on Instagram and Twitter and subscribe to our Telegram Channel. Feel free to repost and share widely Global Research articles.
***
Recently leaked information obtained by The Intercept has validated the fact the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is engaged in illegal activities designed to censor and deny the basic human right of free speech. DHS is engaged in an operation to influence social media to remove and censor content that runs contrary to its views. Facebook even created a direct portal to allow DHS to pull down truthful information, that would be information the DHS deems false. Censorship targeted information related to the Afghanistan withdrawal, election integrity, and information related to the apparent Covid 19 bioweapon, and Covid gene therapy shots, which also appear a biological weapon unleashed on humanity.
As The Intercept points out even Tom Ridge, former head of DHS, has stated that the United States government routinely lies whether it is about the Vietnam or Iraq wars, or the origination of Covid 19. DHS coordinated with Facebook, Twitter, and other social networking platforms. It is unclear of the level of interaction between DHS and other government agencies, and other private sector companies, although, based on the sudden engagement in politics and censorship by corporations, it is a safe bet that the DHS and other agencies are integrated with them.
The whole premise of government is to protect the Natural Rights of the individual. Some of these Natural Rights are codified in the Bill of Rights. Any government agency with an express purpose to undermine any of the Bill of Rights, or other obvious Natural Rights (I say obvious because we could get into levels of abstraction when conceptualizing rights) is in fact an enemy of the people. The government or its agencies can’t assault the Constitution and the Bill of Rights without becoming an enemy of the United States. When I say the United States, I mean the constellation of states that have entered into a compact and the people that those states they are designed to represent. Such actions by the DHS are literally illegal as they are a direct assault on the law and the essential purpose of government.
Many people consider treason to a betrayal of the State/Government. That is not actually necessarily the case. Let’ take a peek at a dictionary definition of treason:
1 the offense of acting to overthrow one’s government or to harm or kill its sovereign.
2 a violation of allegiance to one’s sovereign or to one’s state.
3 the betrayal of a trust or confidence; breach of faith; treachery.
Treason can be construed as betraying the legitimate authority of the government or its sovereign, which in the case of the United States is the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. In our republic, treason can be considered the betrayal of the rights of the people since the only legitimate purpose of government is to protect those rights.
The DHS and its private sector collaborators appear to be violating the first, second, and third definition above. This becomes clear when it is recognized that the sovereign is the Constitution, including the Bill of Rights. The legitimate government is bound by the Constitution. The DHS is behaving in a treacherous way and has violated all trust and its allegiance to the legitimate Constitutionally bound government. The DHS may be engaging in treason. The actions of the DHS in censoring information related to election integrity after the fraud committed in the 2020 election would certainly appear supportive of a coup.
The scam response to 911 included the Patriot Act, a couple stupid wars, DHS, TSA, and so on. The level of government involvement in 911 is murky at best. The scam response to 911 created an authoritarian environment at the airport and the template for a police state. The level of government involvement in Covid and Covid shots is obvious. The difference is that the scam response to Covid is to make the whole country the airport.
The DHS should be disbanded immediately. It was created in a lie after 911. It is an unnecessary organization whose purpose was clearly to target American citizens at its inception. If that was not clear at the time it should be now. The DHS website states that the organization was created in the dark hours after the 911 attacks and its mission includes counterterrorism and homeland security, protecting the nation’s borders, cyber security and critical infrastructure, and preserve and uphold the nation’s prosperity and economic security.
Don’t let that dribble about prosperity and economic security get your hopes up. DHS is not going to start promoting and teaching the Austrian school of economics…..
The DHS has grossly failed in protecting and policing the borders and this is because it is largely spying on and policing American citizens and engaging in violating Free Speech rights. We’ll leave alone the Fourth Amendment here, although the DHS is clearly trampling that one too. If it was effective at counterterrorism, it would have shut down the Covid shots immediately. Instead, it has engaged in a campaign of misinformation and censorship and apparently has actually been supporting terrorism by censoring information about potential risks associated with Covid shots. In the world of the DHS, it isn’t much of a leap to interpret cybersecurity as meaning reading your emails and social media posts.
The government and any of its agencies are not capable of determining truth. Any government that conceptualizes itself as being capable of doing so is a dangerous threat. Such a position runs contrary to the First Amendment. It is often difficult to discern truth. The idea of allowing many perspectives does not denigrate truth, it allows truth to flourish. If a position actually represents the highest truth in any given context this will become more evident as other fallacious views are presented. Take the concept of a scientific hypothesis as an example. A hypothesis can’t be proven. It can only be supported or not supported by the evidence. Over time it often becomes apparent what the truth is. I say often because this is not always the case. Scientific orthodoxy can seem supported by the evidence for decades if not centuries only to be upended with new discovery.
How the hell can the DHS determine truth?
*
Note to readers: Please click the share buttons above. Follow us on Instagram and Twitter and subscribe to our Telegram Channel. Feel free to repost and share widely Global Research articles.
All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the Translate Website button below the author’s name.
To receive Global Research’s Daily Newsletter (selected articles), click here.
Follow us on Instagram and Twitter and subscribe to our Telegram Channel. Feel free to repost and share widely Global Research articles.
***
The USS Rhode Island, the world’s largest nuclear submarine, left the Port of Gibraltar on Spain’s south coast last week. It was last seen entering the Mediterranean and headed south towards the Black Sea as a warning to the Kremlin.
British newspaper Daily Express said the nuclear submarine, which is also called “the rider of the apocalypse”, is under “intense protection” from the Royal Marines as it reportedly heads towards the Black Sea. The USS Rhode Island’s departure comes as fears grow over what Vladimir Putin will do after what the mainstream media is continuing to call a retreat.
🇺🇸⚔️⚡⚓ The US nuclear-powered submarine USS Rhode Island, dubbed the "rider of the apocalypse", has entered the Mediterranean Sea. The submarine is capable of carrying 24 Trident II intercontinental ballistic missiles capable of engaging targets at ranges of up to
Captain John Craddock, the commander of the US Navy’s Task Force, commented earlier this week:
“Rhode Island’s port visit to Gibraltar reinforces our ironclad commitment to our allies and partners in the region.”
“The US and UK share a strong history of cooperation, through exercises, operations, and cooperation activities such as this, that enhance our combined capabilities and partnership. The complexity, lethality, and tactical expertise of Rhode Island epitomizes the effectiveness and strength of the submarine force,” Craddock added.
Yesterday, the Russian President called for civilians to leave Kherson in the south of Ukraine due to the advancing counter-offensive on the occupied city. Officials and Russian commanders who had been installed by the Kremlin in the occupied region were seen fleeing as the Ukrainian counter-offensive pushed south.
Putin’s regime has repeatedly claimed Ukraine was planning to set off a dirty bomb – an explosive laced with radioactive material – which intelligence officials believe may be a precursor to a false flag operation.
The USS Rhode Island is an Ohio-class sub, and can, therefore, patrol continuously as a highly-effective tool for the NATO nuclear deterrence force and could be headed to a strategic position near the Black Sea.
It could be an obvious outward visible show of the advancement of this war, and the insistence by the United States and the United Kingdom to ignite into something bigger than it already is.
*
Note to readers: Please click the share buttons above. Follow us on Instagram and Twitter and subscribe to our Telegram Channel. Feel free to repost and share widely Global Research articles.
ISBN Number: 978-0-9737147-5-3
Year: 2012
Pages: 102
PDF Edition: $6.50 (sent directly to your email account!)
Michel Chossudovsky is Professor of Economics at the University of Ottawa and Director of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG), which hosts the critically acclaimed website www.globalresearch.ca . He is a contributor to the Encyclopedia Britannica. His writings have been translated into more than 20 languages.
Reviews
“This book is a ‘must’ resource – a richly documented and systematic diagnosis of the supremely pathological geo-strategic planning of US wars since ‘9-11’ against non-nuclear countries to seize their oil fields and resources under cover of ‘freedom and democracy’.” –John McMurtry, Professor of Philosophy, Guelph University
“In a world where engineered, pre-emptive, or more fashionably “humanitarian” wars of aggression have become the norm, this challenging book may be our final wake-up call.” -Denis Halliday, Former Assistant Secretary General of the United Nations
Michel Chossudovsky exposes the insanity of our privatized war machine. Iran is being targeted with nuclear weapons as part of a war agenda built on distortions and lies for the purpose of private profit. The real aims are oil, financial hegemony and global control. The price could be nuclear holocaust. When weapons become the hottest export of the world’s only superpower, and diplomats work as salesmen for the defense industry, the whole world is recklessly endangered. If we must have a military, it belongs entirely in the public sector. No one should profit from mass death and destruction. –Ellen Brown, author of ‘Web of Debt’ and president of the Public Banking Institute
All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the Translate Website button below the author’s name.
To receive Global Research’s Daily Newsletter (selected articles), click here.
Follow us on Instagram and Twitter and subscribe to our Telegram Channel. Feel free to repost and share widely Global Research articles.
***
Tomorrow is election day and polls suggest that Americans are going to overturn Democratic Party control of the House and Senate. Politicians and the media always say that this is the most important election ever, but all too often once the voting is over and the smoke has cleared, not much changes. The Washington uni-party takes over and makes sure the status quo is maintained.
It doesn’t have to be this way. An incoming Republican House and Senate, for example, could take early steps to reassure their supporters that their votes weren’t wasted on Tweedledee vs. Tweedledum in Washington. Here are three suggestions to get things off to a good start.
First, Republican Party Leadership must vow to end the massive money spigot opened by the last Congress for Ukraine. By some estimates some $60 billion dollars have been authorized for Ukraine to fight a proxy war between the US/NATO and Russia.
This would be a move strongly supported by the Republican base. A recent Wall Street Journal poll showed that only 37 percent of Republicans support sending more US aid to Ukraine. Republican firebrand Representative Marjorie Taylor-Greene said recently that under Republicans, not another penny will go to Ukraine. While I am skeptical that her party leadership would support such a move, it’s clear Republican voters would.
Plus, ending this proxy war would carry with it the benefit of reducing the dangerously high possibility of global nuclear war. That’s not a bad trade-off.
Second, Republicans can signal that they will de-fund the Department of Homeland Security. At the time this monstrosity was created, I said this on the House Floor:
“The list of dangerous and unconstitutional powers granted to the new Homeland Security department is lengthy. Warrantless searches, forced vaccinations of whole communities, federal neighborhood snitch programs, federal information databases, and a sinister new ‘Information Awareness Office’ at the Pentagon that uses military intelligence to spy on domestic citizens are just a few of the troubling aspects of the new legislation.”
Unfortunately all of these things came to pass…and more. As we recently learned, the DHS has been colluding with social media companies to try and prevent Americans from being able to say or post opinions the government doesn’t want others to hear.
They promised that a Department of Homeland Security would keep us safer, but there is nothing that makes us less safe than the destruction of our Constitution.
Finally, the third task an incoming Republican House and Senate can take is maybe the easiest one: pass the Audit the Fed bill. Ten years ago the US House voted in a bipartisan manner to pass my Audit the Fed legislation only to see it stall in the Senate. With Republican control of both houses of Congress there is no reason a broadly-supported bill to open the books at the Federal Reserve cannot find its way to President Biden’s desk. We all support transparency, right?
Inflation is out of control and causing real harm to the American middle class. The Biden Administration seems determined to lead us to a potentially life-ending war with Russia. The Department of Homeland Security has turned into a weapon mobilized against the American people and our Constitution.
A Republican-controlled House and Senate can actually do something to fix these problems and thus make us more safe and more free. Will they?
*
Note to readers: Please click the share buttons above. Follow us on Instagram and Twitter and subscribe to our Telegram Channel. Feel free to repost and share widely Global Research articles.
All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the Translate Website button below the author’s name.
To receive Global Research’s Daily Newsletter (selected articles), click here.
Follow us on Instagram and Twitter and subscribe to our Telegram Channel. Feel free to repost and share widely Global Research articles.
***
While the Arab Summit in Algeria affirmed its adherence to the so-called ‘Arab Peace Initiative’ as a final solution to the Palestinian issue, Israel’s response came quickly and resolutely with the return to power of Benjamin Netanyahu and the anti-Arab religious Likud bloc.
In the 1 November legislative elections, Israelis voted in large numbers for the anti-Arab, racist, religious parties, which openly embrace a policy of killing and expelling Palestinians from all of occupied Palestine, and promote a solely Jewish-Zionist identity of the country.
The “Jewish Power” party, which won 15 seats, and is led by the two most racist figures in the short history of the Jewish state, Bezael H. Cherish and his deputy Itamar Ben Gvir, will be the backbone of Netanyahu’s coalition government.
The leader of this party, which will be the most prominent partner of the Arab monarchs who signed peace agreements with Israel, has called for killing Arabs, expelling them and wrapping the bodies of the martyrs in pigskin “in honor” of them.
Normalization the new norm
Nonetheless, it is likely that red carpets will be laid out for Ben Gvir and Netanyahu in Arab capitals, where they will enjoy Arab hospitality and drink from their gilded goblets. Indeed, there is no difference between the winning Israeli coalition and the defeated one (Lapid-Gantz).
Both converge on their mutual hostility and hatred of Arabs and Muslims. General Benny Gantz, the Israeli Minister of Defense in the previous government, used to boast that he was the Israeli who killed the largest number of Arabs – and this is true, as his government has killed 166 Palestinians since the beginning of this year.
There is a silver lining, however: This racist government will hasten Israel’s demise and lead to its inevitable end, not at the hands of the battered Arab armies, but at the hands of the Palestinian resistance and their regional allies, their missiles and drones.
There are three steps that the Netanyahu government and his extremist coalition may take upon assuming power:
First, a return to reviving the Trump-era ‘Deal of the Century,’ the annexation of the West Bank, and the deportation of most of its Palestinian residents to Jordan as an “alternative homeland.”
Second, the escalation of incursions into the Al-Aqsa Mosque, the consolidation of Jewish control over East Jerusalem, and the obliteration of its Arab and Islamic identity. The first step may be dividing it on the model of the Ibrahimi Mosque in Hebron, then demolishing it, and erecting the alleged “temple” on its ruins.
Third, the canceling or freezing of the maritime border demarcation agreement with Lebanon, similar to what happened to the Oslo Accords with Palestinians. Netanyahu announced his intent to do so openly in his election campaign.
This option appears especially likely given that extraction of gas and oil from the Karish field has already begun, while the Qana field, which was “partially” recognized as Lebanese, remains untouched, with no surveys or exploration conducted until this moment.
It is likely that the Lebanese gas fields will lay dormant for the foreseeable future. The same US mediators did not guarantee the implementation of even 1 per cent of the Oslo Accords, and they will most likely not guarantee the rights of the Lebanese people.
Renewed Palestinian armed resistance
But Netanyahu is set to assume control over a very different state of affairs, both domestically and internationally. For starters, Israel is facing an escalating internal conflict, and most importantly, a revived intifada in the form of West Bank armed resistance.
We cannot talk about West Bank resistance without discussing the phenomenon of The Lions’ Den whose political and military influence is expanding, while the Palestinian public’s embrace of the movement is growing. Not a day passes without witnessing a commando operation in various parts of the West Bank; in Nablus, Jenin and Hebron – later in Ramallah, and then in the pre-1948 occupied Palestinian territories.
Netanyahu may succeed in including one or two more Arab governments in the Abraham Accords, which was signed under his last premiership. However, such political acrobatics will have no value in light of the “awakening” of the Palestinian people and their return to armed resistance.
The returning Netanyahu will not forget the May 2021 battle of the “Sword of Jerusalem” that humiliated him, and its missiles that isolated the occupying state for more than 11 days, forcing millions of Israeli settler-colonizers into shelters and bunkers.
These missiles are still present and ready, along with hundreds of armed drones. Perhaps it is also worth reminding the incoming Israeli Prime Minister of how he ended an electoral meeting in the city of Ashdod (my ancestors’ hometown) and fled in terror from the 400 missiles launched by the Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) movement in retaliation for the assassination of its leader, Baha Abu al-Atta.
Just another day in the office?
The “Israel” to which Netanyahu returns is not the same Israel he left, and the world he knew when he was last in power, is not the same world today. His US supporter is mired in an unprecedented proxy war of attrition with Russia in Ukraine, where his co-religionist, Volodymyr Zelensky, has so far lost about a fifth of his country’s territory, and has plunged it into darkness and despair.
While Netanyahu is viewed as as being close to Russian President Vladimir Putin, that friendship had deepened before the Ukraine war. The situation has now changed dramatically, and he will be forced to choose between Washington and Moscow in an era of multipolarity.
As for the Lions’ Den, they have effectively changed all the equations and rules of engagement in occupied Palestine – and perhaps in the Arab world as well – and within this context will actually “welcome” the hardliner Netanyahu’s return to power.
*
Note to readers: Please click the share buttons above. Follow us on Instagram and Twitter and subscribe to our Telegram Channel. Feel free to repost and share widely Global Research articles.
The reactions of western governments, elected officials, and media have been strangely muted and accommodating when one considers that two more European Union member states, including one of its original founding members, Italy, have consecutively fallen to the far right, this time putting in power nothing less than, first, a party founded by neo-Nazis in the 1980s, and then the direct descendants of Mussolini’s fascists.
The embarrassed timidity of the reactions is understandable. The elections being perfectly democratic and legitimate, it is hard to criticise Italy’s choice without interfering directly in the internal political affairs of an ally, as EU Commission chief Ursula von der Leyen quickly realised.
The ‘business as usual’ spin
Pundits, but also experts in Italian politics and academics, had for months largely diminished the notion of a “fascist threat” by pointing out that Italian neo-fascist parties had for long been incorporated into democratic parliamentary and electoral politics, or that the Brothers of Italy was actually not a fascist party but a traditionalist, conservative, populist-nationalist, or even “techno-sovereignist” one.
Commentators have worked overtime to reassure us that Brothers of Italy is not extremist but moderate, realist, and pragmatic on issues like EU relationships, the economy, and foreign policy; that there will be strong continuity with the previous Mario Draghi government; that Meloni will have her hands tied anyway by her coalition and the EU itself; and that this coalition may not even survive more than a year or two.
Major newspapers like France’s Le Monde have soothed us by reminding us of the capacity of a supposedly fundamentally “centrist” Italian system with strong counter-powers to force compromises and tame radicalism, while Meloni herself went out of her way to moderate her image, assuring the public that there was nothing to fear and that she would serve as a “uniter” who would “govern for everyone”, not just those who voted for her.
Finally, it is well known in political science that the electorate of a party does not necessarily share its ideological orientations or even know its programme.
This particular Italian vote was indeed largely a protest vote where people rooted for the “anti-system” candidate, the “outsider”, the “underdog” in order to express their profound dismay at the traditional government parties, starting with their inability to improve everyday life on bread-and-butter issues.
Meloni capitalised on that popular discontent and on her (false) outsider image. In other words, people voted for her not because she is a fascist but because she is not the establishment.
Historical fascism
Many media outlets thus helped Meloni polish her image and present her as business as usual, often to the point of functioning as her own communications agency. Yet, her efforts to separate herself from her previous statements or Italy’s historical fascism by claiming it is a thing of the past are also not at all convincing.
Her party is in direct affiliation with the Italian Social Movement (MSI) created by Mussolini’s own ministers, regime officials, and hard-core partisans. Far from disavowing this affiliation, Meloni has always proudly touted those roots.
The tricoloured flame she chose as the logo of her party comes from the MSI movement; her headquarters in central Rome are located at the same address where the MSI set up its offices in 1946; and Meloni has campaigned with Mussolini’s own granddaughter Rachele Mussolini, herself a member of Brothers of Italy.
Her discourses on “God, Family, Country” and rhetoric on minority communities are all fully congruent and in direct continuity with those of historical fascism. Meloni is no new Mussolini, but her party represents a toxic, right-wing ideology.
Enthusiastically greeted by the entire European far right from Russia to France (and beyond), Meloni’s accession to power is just the latest evidence of a dramatic political groundswell across the whole continent: the mainstreaming of right-wing forces who not so long ago were fringe, even taboo parties, have in a mere two decades become genuine mass movements increasingly capable of reaching power.
Continuous ‘waves’
It would be a mistake to consider the latest Swedish and Italian elections as anomalies, exceptions, or aberrations. They are on the contrary in full continuity with the rise of the far-right across not just Europe and the West but throughout the world.
This is furthermore not a new trend but one that already spans decades, dating back to the pre-war fascist era of the 1930s and 1940s and even the 19th century. For example, Zemmour’s Reconquest Party found its ideological roots in writings of Edouard Drumont (1844-1917) and Action Française leader Charles Maurras’s (1868-1952) political movement.
He even named his party after Mediaeval Europe’s Reconquista moment. Books and articles about “the rise of the far-right across Europe” and ultra-nationalist populism were already filling shelves in the early 2000s, and political scientists have demonstrated that what we have here is not a rupture with the past but a series of continuous “waves”, each new one larger than the previous.
Despite this strong historical continuity, this latest phase of the far-right success presents five major novelties.
First, it consecrates the electoral victories and accession to power of parties and ideologies that postwar Europe had for decades managed to keep marginalised and excluded from the mainstream.
In countries like Poland, Hungary, Sweden, and now Italy, this last protection barrier has now yielded, and the far-right parties now control their governments. Second, despite unique contexts, the similarities are even stronger regarding their nativist and xenophobic ideology.
Global Islamophobia
Third, we are now seeing these right-wing movements coalescing, emulating each other, and finding inspiration in one another. They are increasingly establishing trans-border connections and institutionalised political alliances.
Fourth, the far right wins even when it loses at the polls by imposing its discourse in national debates and by forcing other conservative, centrist, and sometimes even leftist parties to adopt their themes and policy proposals in their own programmes in the hope of hedging electoral losses.
That is especially true for the hostile fixation on Islam and Muslims; the policies this racism generates are now being advanced more by other parties than by the far right itself.
Fifth, this far-right, exclusionary “new Nativism” particularly targets Muslims whose lifestyle and belief system is seen as antithetical to the “national identity” of those European countries.
The dramatic expansion of the far-right, itself a sub-set of an even larger de-democratising trend or “democratic deconsolidation” is generating a veritable Islamophobia International that is casting Muslims even more than they already are in the position of both internal and external threats, with Islam itself as the principal enemy against which society must supposedly mobilise.
In many of those countries, this positioning is actually relatively new. Yet, in a short amount of time it has already placed Muslims in the structural “outsider” position including most dramatically in their own countries of birth and citizenship.
That process is already well underway, but because of the explosion of the far-right across entire continents, anti-Muslim sentiments have intensified to generate this historically novel global Islamophobia.
*
Note to readers: Please click the share buttons above. Follow us on Instagram and Twitter and subscribe to our Telegram Channel. Feel free to repost and share widely Global Research articles.
Dr Alain Gabon is Associate Professor of French Studies and chair of the Department of Foreign Languages & Literatures at Virginia Wesleyan University in Virginia Beach, USA. He has written and lectured widely in the US, Europe and beyond on contemporary French culture, politics, literature and the arts and more recently on Islam and Muslims. His works have been published in several countries in academic journals, think tanks, and mainstream and specialized media such as Saphirnews, Milestones. Commentaries on the Islamic World, and Les Cahiers de l’Islam. His recent essay entitled “The Twin Myths of the Western ‘Jihadist Threat’ and ‘Islamic Radicalisation ‘” is available in French and English on the site of the UK Cordoba Foundation.
Featured image: Meloni speaking at the 2022 Conservative Political Action Conference in Florida (Photo by Vox España, CC0)
All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the Translate Website button below the author’s name.
To receive Global Research’s Daily Newsletter (selected articles), click here.
Follow us on Instagram and Twitter and subscribe to our Telegram Channel. Feel free to repost and share widely Global Research articles.
***
The bipartisan project of dismantling our democracy, which took place over the last few decades on behalf of corporations and the rich, has left only the outward shell of democracy. The courts, legislative bodies, the executive branch and the media, including public broadcasting, are captive to corporate power. There is no institution left that can be considered authentically democratic. The corporate coup d’état is over. They won. We lost.
The wreckage of this neoliberal project is appalling: endless and futile wars to enrich a military-industrial-complex that bleeds the U.S. Treasury of half of all discretionary spending; deindustrialization that has turned U.S. cities into decayed ruins; the slashing and privatization of social programs, including education, utility services and health care – which saw over one million Americans account for one-fifth of global deaths from Covid, although we are 4 percent of the world’s population; draconian forms of social control embodied in militarized police, functioning as lethal armies of occupation in poor urban areas; the largest prison system in the world; a virtual tax boycott by the richest individuals and corporations; money-saturated elections that perpetuate our system of legalized bribery; and the most intrusive state surveillance of the citizenry in our history.
In “The United States of Amnesia,” to quote Gore Vidal, the corporate press and the ruling class create fictional feel-good personas for candidates, treat all political campaigns as if it is a day at the races and gloss over the fact that on every major issue, from trade deals to war, there is very little difference between Democrats and Republicans. The Democratic Party and Joe Biden are not the lesser evil, but rather, as Glen Fordpointed out, “the more effective evil.”
Biden supported the campaign to discredit and humiliate Anita Hill to appoint Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court. He was one of the principal architects of the endless wars in the Middle East, calling for “taking Saddam down” five years before the invasion of Iraq. He rehabilitated the de facto ruler of Saudi Arabia, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, after vowing to make the country a pariah because of the assassination of the Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi. Biden is a fervent supporter of Israel, calling the apartheid state “the single greatest strength America has in the Middle East” and declaring “I am a Zionist. You don’t have to be a Jew to be a Zionist.” His campaigns have been lavishly funded by the Israel lobby for at least two decades.
In the 1970s, he fought school busing, arguing that segregation was beneficial for Blacks. He and South Carolina’s racist senator, Strom Thurmond, sponsored the Comprehensive Crime Control Act, which eliminated parole for federal prisoners and limited the amount of time sentences could be reduced for good behavior. Biden sponsored and aggressively pushed the 1994 crime bill, which he also helped draft, calling for its passage because “We have predators on our streets that society has in fact, in part because of its neglect, created.” The bill expanded the death penalty for dozens of existing and new federal crimes and mandated life imprisonment for a third violent felony, also known as the “three strikes and you’re out” rule, more than doubling the nation’s prison population. The bill provided funds to add 100,000 new police officers and build new prisons, on the condition that prisoners serve their entire sentences. He pushed through the 1996 Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, which gutted the federal writ of habeas corpus, abolished the rights of death row prisoners and mandated harsh federal sentencing rules.
Biden takes credit for writing the 2001 Patriot Act, which expanded the government’s ability to monitor anyone’s phone and email communications, collect bank and credit reporting records, and track activity on the Internet. He backed austerity programs, including the destruction of welfare and cuts to Social Security. He fought for NAFTA and other “free trade” deals which fueled inequality, deindustrialization, a significant drop in wages and the offshoring of millions of manufacturing jobs to underpaid workers who toil in sweatshops in countries like Mexico, Malaysia, China or Vietnam.
He also backed the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act that, as Human Rights Watch writes, “eliminated key defenses against deportation and subjected many more immigrants, including legal permanent residents, to detention and deportation.”
Biden long opposed abortion, writing in a letter to a constituent: “Those of us who are opposed to abortion should not be compelled to pay for them. As you may know, I have consistently — on no fewer than 50 occasions — voted against federal funding of abortions.”
He was at the forefront of deregulating the banking industry and the abolition of Glass-Steagall, which contributed to the global financial meltdown, including the collapse of nearly 500 banks, in 2007 and 2008. He is a favorite of the for-profit insurance and pharmaceutical industry, which contributed $6.3 million to his 2020 presidential campaign, almost four times more money than they channeled to Donald Trump’s campaign. Biden and the Democrats annually increase the military budget, approving $813 billion for fiscal year 2023. He and the Democrats have provided over $60 billion in military aid and assistance to the war in Ukraine, with no end in sight. In the Senate, Biden abjectly served the interests of MBNA, the largest independent credit card company headquartered in Delaware, which also employed Biden’s son Hunter.
The decisions of politicians like Biden have a staggering human cost, not only for the poor, workers and the shrinking middle class but for millions of people in the Middle East, millions of families ripped apart by mass incarceration, millions more forced into bankruptcy by our mercenary for-profit medical system where corporations are legally permitted to hold sick children hostage while their frantic parents bankrupt themselves to save them, millions who became addicted to opioids and hundreds of thousands who died from them, millions denied welfare assistance, and all of us barreling toward extinction because of a refusal to curb the greed and destructive power of the fossil fuel industry, which has raked in $2.8 billion a day in profit over the last 50 years.
Biden, morally vacuous and of limited intelligence, is responsible for more suffering and death at home and abroad than Donald Trump. But the victims in our Punch-and-Judy media shows are rendered invisible. And that is why the victims despise the whole superstructure and want to tear it down.
These establishment politicians and their appointed judges promulgated laws that permitted the top 1 percent to loot $54 trillion from the bottom 90 percent, from 1975 to 2022, at a rate of $2.5 trillion a year, according to a study by the RAND corporation. The fertile ground of our political, economic, cultural and social wreckage spawned an array of neo-fascists, con artists, racists, criminals, charlatans, conspiracy theorists, right-wing militias and demagogues that will soon take power.
Decayed societies, such as Weimar Germany or the former Yugoslavia, which I covered for The New York Times, always vomit up political deformities who express the hatred a betrayed public feel for a corrupt ruling class and bankrupt liberalism. The twilight of the Greek, Roman, Ottoman, Habsburg and Russian empires were no different.
These political deformities play the role of the Snopes clan in William Faulkner’s trilogy “The Hamlet,” “The Town” and “The Mansion.” The Snopeses wrested control in the South from a degenerate aristocratic elite. Flem Snopes and his extended family — which includes a killer, a pedophile, a bigamist, an arsonist, a mentally disabled man who copulates with a cow, and a relative who sells tickets to witness the bestiality — are fictional representations of the scum that hijacked the Republican Party.
“The usual reference to ‘amorality,’ while accurate, is not sufficiently distinctive and by itself does not allow us to place them, as they should be placed, in a historical moment,” the critic Irving Howe wrote of the Snopeses. “Perhaps the most important thing to be said is that they are what comes afterwards: the creatures that emerge from the devastation, with the slime still upon their lips.”
“Let a world collapse, in the South or Russia, and there appear figures of coarse ambition driving their way up from beneath the social bottom, men to whom moral claims are not so much absurd as incomprehensible, sons of bushwhackers or muzhiks drifting in from nowhere and taking over through the sheer outrageousness of their monolithic force,” Howe wrote. “They become presidents of local banks and chairmen of party regional committees, and later, a trifle slicked up, they muscle their way into Congress or the Politburo. Scavengers without inhibition, they need not believe in the crumbling official code of their society; they need only learn to mimic its sounds.”
Biden and other establishment politicians are not actually calling for democracy. They are calling for civility. They have no intention of extracting the knife thrust into our backs. They hope to paper over the rot and the pain with the decorum of the polite, measured talk they used to sell us the con of neoliberalism. The political correctness and inclusivity imposed by college-educated elites, unfortunately, has now become associated with the corporate assault, as if a woman CEO or a Black police officer is going to mitigate the exploitation and abuse. Minorities are always welcome, as they were in other species of colonialism, if they serve the dictates of the masters. This is how Barack Obama, whom Cornel West called “a Black mascot for Wall Street,” became President.
Freedom for millions of enraged Americans has become the freedom to hate, the freedom to use words like “nigger,” “kike,” “spic,” “chink,” “raghead” and “fag;” the freedom to physically assault Muslims, undocumented workers, women, African-Americans, homosexuals and anyone who dares criticize their Christian fascism; the freedom to celebrate historical movements and figures that the college-educated elites condemn, including the Ku Klux Klan and the Confederacy; the freedom to ridicule and dismiss intellectuals, ideas, science and culture; the freedom to silence those who have been telling them how to behave; the freedom to revel in hypermasculinity, racism, sexism, violence and patriarchy.
These crypto-fascists have always been part of the American landscape, but the disenfranchisement of millions of Americans, especially white Americans, has inflamed these hatreds. Voting for the architects of what political philosopher Sheldon Wolincalls our system of “inverted totalitarianism” will not make them go away; in fact, it will further discredit liberal ideas and liberal democracy. This puts liberals in a terrible bind. They have every right to fear the far right. All the dark scenarios are correct. But by backing Biden and the ruling corporate party, they ensure their political irrelevance.
The Democratic Party has spent millions funding far-right “pied piper” candidates assuming they would be easier to defeat, a tactic foolishly copied from the Clinton campaign, which secretly “elevated” Trump in the hopes that he would win the Republican nomination. They have worked to censor critics from the left and the right on social media. They claim they are the last bulwark against tyranny. None of these subterfuges will work. America will descend into a Viktor Orbán-type of authoritarianism without profound political, social and economic reform.
After the Iraq war went sour, I, as someone who publicly opposed the invasion and had been the Middle East Bureau Chief for The New York Times, was often asked what we should do now. I answered that Iraq could no longer be put back together. It was broken. We broke it. Those who ask if we should support the Democrats as a tactic to halt our descent into tyranny are in a similar dilemma. My answer is no different. We should have walked out on the Democratic Party while we still had a chance.
*
Note to readers: Please click the share buttons above. Follow us on Instagram and Twitter and subscribe to our Telegram Channel. Feel free to repost and share widely Global Research articles.
Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist who was a foreign correspondent for fifteen years for The New York Times, where he served as the Middle East Bureau Chief and Balkan Bureau Chief for the paper. He previously worked overseas for The Dallas Morning News, The Christian Science Monitor, and NPR. He is the host of show The Chris Hedges Report.
All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the Translate Website button below the author’s name.
To receive Global Research’s Daily Newsletter (selected articles), click here.
Follow us on Instagram and Twitter and subscribe to our Telegram Channel. Feel free to repost and share widely Global Research articles.
***
A number of US troops and logistics forces have been arriving in the Syrian city of Raqqa recently, and are in the process of establishing a new military base in the area, in Hasakeh Province.
The location makes some sense, though no official announcement has been made yet. The US has an estimated 1,000 troops left in Syria, and 28 declared military sites. They are mostly in Hasakeh, so it makes sense that the new base would be there too.
The timing is particularly telling, however. Just over a week prior, the US said they had “no plans” to withdraw from Syria militarily, and the National Security Council’s John Kirby said the US presence is “solely to combat ISIS.”
There is an ISIS presence around Raqqa, mostly lingering remnant forces in and around the desert area. Those forces often end up fighting Syrian and Russian forces, and sometimes the Kurdish YPG.
The US military intervention in Syria mostly began around 2011 with support for anti-Assad rebels, though late in the Bush Administration the US had launched some attacks. It was President Obama who started the deployment of troops on an official basis in 2015 to fight ISIS but also with a close eye on regime change as a secondary goal.
The US has imposed growing sanctions against the Syrian government, again meant to harm their ability to resist the rebels and to push regime change. This has had little impact, but US officials say there is no plan to remove any of those sanctions. That’s unsurprising, as the US tends to make sanctions a permanent fact of international diplomacy.
Obama’s escalation led to US and YPG forces chasing ISIS out of most of its cities, and into the wilderness areas they presently occupy. President Trump began a pullout from Syria, though he ultimately reversed course and announced the remaining troops would stay to “take the oil.”
The remaining presence is centered on two bases, the base on the Jordanian border at al-Tanf, and a smaller base at one of the Syrian oilfields meant to facilitate a US company taking the oil. Locals say the new Raqqa base has a similar design to the smaller oilfield base.
This ends questions about the US pullout, and now it looks like re escalation is again the order of the day. Though we don’t know how many troops will be stationed in Raqqa, it looks relatively small. The troops are not invited by the Syrian government, and may find themselves at odds with Syrian forces.
This area is also in YPG territory, which normally wouldn’t be a problem since the US and Kurds are on good terms. Turkey has been fighting the Kurds and threatening bigger invasions. This could put the US into a deconfliction issue with the fellow NATO member.
Lacking any vision for what the US end to Syria involvement would look like, it has seemed the US was keeping troops in Syria just for the sake of keeping troops there. That has long risked unintended consequences, and the addition of more US troops and another base only increases that risk.
*
Note to readers: Please click the share buttons above. Follow us on Instagram and Twitter and subscribe to our Telegram Channel. Feel free to repost and share widely Global Research articles.
Jason Ditz is senior editor of Antiwar.com.
Featured image: Syrian General Aktham at the bridge to Raqqa, one of many destroyed by US planes (Photo by Tim Anderson)
Order Mark Taliano’s Book “Voices from Syria” directly from Global Research.
All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the Translate Website button below the author’s name.
To receive Global Research’s Daily Newsletter (selected articles), click here.
Follow us on Instagram and Twitter and subscribe to our Telegram Channel. Feel free to repost and share widely Global Research articles.
***
Libertarian Robert Murphy emphatically emphasizes the crucial matter of the destructive nature of war as the principle issue the American electorate faces on Election Day next Tuesday. The insane madmen and women in governments who have enabled this catastrophic war of confrontation between Ukraine and Russia have us at the very brink of nuclear annihilation and destruction. While there are dozens of extremely serious issues facing the nation to consider for this November election, this should be the ultimate litmus test, the definitive line in the sand for all candidates.
Libertarian Candidate for US Senate Robert Murphy’s Statement on War
For well over a century there have been factions within our government that have viewed the United States – and themselves – as leaders of a world empire. From the Spanish-American War to the war in Ukraine, these factions have done their best to convince us that their motives are pure, that they are acting to protect us from foreign enemies, as well as to secure the blessings of liberty for people around the world. The fact is that these acts have mostly benefited financial elites, international corporations, and the egos of neoconservative policymakers. All this while leaving behind a legacy of corruption, death, and destruction.
Nowhere is this stark reality more evidently displayed than with the recent sabotage of the Nordstream 1 and 2 gas pipelines from Russia to Germany. These pipelines were to transport relatively cheap Russian gas to Europe, bypassing existing pipes through Poland and Ukraine. They had been shut down by Germany due to US-sponsored sanctions against Russia because of Russian military operations in Ukraine. Their destruction ensures that there’s no chance that Germany and Europe can compromise with Russia and end the sanctions.
This action will be devastating to the people and economies of Europe. They will freeze in the dark this winter. Industries will be shuttered, electricity will be rationed, cell phones and internet access will be intermittent, and people may starve in unheated homes. This amounts to an act of war by the United States against our European allies.
There can be no doubt that the Pentagon and the CIA were the prime movers in this sabotage. The technology involved to accomplish it was available on US Navy vessels recently engaged in maneuvers in the Baltic Sea. Poland and Ukraine, who gain transport fees from the pipe going through their lands, may have helped. Norway, whose pipeline was reopened the next day, may have also been involved. The only certainty is that Europe will now be dependent on US and international corporations for gas supplies, global gas prices will increase, and Americans will not be immune to these higher prices.
The price inflation we are enduring now is a direct result of generations of constant warfare paid for with borrowed money. Trillions of dollars and thousands of lives have been sacrificed for the egos of unelected Pentagon and State Department bureaucrats. Our Congress seems helpless to even question the reasons for these sacrifices for fear of seeming unpatriotic. It is well known that the US Media is owned and controlled by the Deep State. Any dissent from the war narrative is met with scorn and accusations of domestic terrorism. War propaganda is relentless.
Republicans and Democrats both, financed by billions in campaign donations, are complicit in this terrifying betrayal of the American people. As a Congressman my Republican opponent in this election, Markwayne Mullins, has continually slavishly approved the NDAA that allows the government to engage in military operations overseas without a formal declaration of war. Kendra Horn, my Democrat opponent, did the same when she was in Congress.
History has shown that warfare bankrupts nations, enriching elites while the people suffer. It is time to end the idea of American global hegemony and bring our troops home.
*
Note to readers: Please click the share buttons above. Follow us on Instagram and Twitter and subscribe to our Telegram Channel. Feel free to repost and share widely Global Research articles.
All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the Translate Website button below the author’s name.
To receive Global Research’s Daily Newsletter (selected articles), click here.
Follow us on Instagram and Twitter and subscribe to our Telegram Channel. Feel free to repost and share widely Global Research articles.
***
The international crisis over the status of the Crimean Peninsula was in February-March 2014 when the peninsula became returned to the state’s territory of Russia from Ukraine. The Western Russophobic narrative immediately accused Russia of illegitimate annexation of the peninsula as well as of the occupation of the eastern Donbas region of Ukraine.
However, the same narrative is not telling that Crimea became, in fact, illegally annexed by Ukraine from Russia even in 1956 by the personal decision of the Ukrainian boss of the USSR – Nikita Khrushchev (1894−1971).
At that time as of 2014, 2/3 of the Crimean population have been ethnic Russians while ethnic Ukrainians all the time were a tiny minority of the peninsula. In 1956, however, it was no organized referendum about the political destiny of Crimea different from the case in 2014 when a majority of the peninsula’s population expressed their free will to join Russia instead of the Russophobic Ukraine. A new Russophobic course of the government in Kiev as well as provoked the (Russian) people of Donbas to secede from undemocratic Ukraine which the government took an open neo-Nazi course.
In fact, the Ukrainian crisis in general came from the decision by Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych in December 2013 in Vilnius (Lithuania) not to support the deal to bring Ukraine closer to the EU and, of course later to NATO. Instead of the Western economic, political, and military structures he rationally and practically decided to support traditional good ties with Russia for the sake of a general benefit to all people of Ukraine. Nonetheless, a such decision sparked (by Western support) the Euromaidan protest in the Ukrainian capital Kiev – a protest which led to violent clashes with regular security forces. The protest spread out to other Ukrainian cities where in some of them like Odesa it took the form of pogroms against the local Russian speakers. The “sniper massacre” happened in Kiev when pro-Euromaidan Georgian snipers shot the civilians with the purpose to accuse the Yanukovych government of the bloodshed on the streets. According to Western sources, some 80+ people have been killed in Kiev in and around Maidan Square during the protest.
Nevertheless, it became obvious that the final aim of the Euromaidan protesters was to overthrow legally elected President V. Yanukovych and his administration in order to install a puppet pro-Western government that will seek membership of Ukraine in both the EU and NATO followed by the oppression of the Russians in East Ukraine.
President Yanukovych, therefore, was simply forced to flee from Ukraine to neighboring Russia. Soon, for the sake of both protecting Russians in Crimea and her national interests, the Russian military started with a covert military operation that was called by the Russophobic Western media the aggression of “little green men” – Russian soldiers in uniforms with all insignia removed.
However, for the pure matter of comparison, for instance, the US Army invaded the independent state of Grenada in 1983 with all US Army insignia on the soldiers’ uniforms, occupied the whole country (island), and finally changed the government which was previously democratically elected. In addition, in Grenada was living no one American except several students but in Crimea, a qualified majority of people have been ethnic Russians living there for decades and centuries.
In Crimea, in Sevastopol on the Black Sea, Russia for decades had a major naval base according to the agreement signed with Ukraine. According to Western sources, on February 27th, 2014 the Crimean Parliament building became occupied by the Russian military “little green men” in Simferopol. On March 6th, 2014, Crimean policymakers authorized a vote for independence from the Russophobic Ukrainian Euromaidan regime in Kiev. Ten days later (on March 16th, 2014) was organized a referendum on which 97% of people voted for Crimea as a part of Russia (i.e., for the reunification with a motherland). The West (USA, NATO, and the EU), except official critics of Moscow in the case of the Crimean crisis, in fact, did not launch any counteracting military operation with the purpose to return Crimea under the Ukrainian administration.
The situation in 2014 concerning the international relations, truly speaking, was opposite to the case of the Crimean War in 1853−1856 when against Russian action contra the Ottoman Empire several West European countries created a coalition and launched a successful war on Russia. Obviously, during the last 170 years, the position of Russia in global politics and international relations is cardinally changed to the direction that the Russophobic West now has to fully respect Russian power and influence what they did not do even in 1999 during NATO aggression on the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (Serbia and Montenegro). Nonetheless, since March 2014 and the reunification of Crimea with Russia, Russia actually transformed the Black Sea into the “Russian lake” that is quite visible now during the Russian special military operation in Ukraine for the matter of its denazification.
*
Note to readers: Please click the share buttons above. Follow us on Instagram and Twitter and subscribe to our Telegram Channel. Feel free to repost and share widely Global Research articles.
Dr. Vladislav B. Sotirović is a Former university professor in Vilnius, Lithuania. He is a Research Fellow at the Center for Geostrategic Studies. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.
Paul-Henry Thiry d’Holbach (1723-1789), one of the leading figures of the French encyclopaedists, in his book “System of Nature”, published in 1770, wants to lead man, who is the “work of nature, exists in it and is subject to its laws”, back to nature (1). On this, see Part I: “Men must know the truth.” (2)
Holbach’s book is still acknowledged today as one of the key works of the Enlightenment because of its radically sensualist argumentation, which attributes all knowledge to sensory perceptions alone. With it, he openly declared war on the ruling ideology and powers.
For the sensing, thinking and acting human being, Holbach’s “discoveries” from the time of the “Enlightenment” can still lead to the purification of human consciousness from individual and collective prejudices. The “enlightened mind” is capable of envisaging healthy life goals.
Quote from Pliny as dedication
Holbach dedicated a quotation from Pliny (“Natural History”) to his book. This is presumably a quotation from the Roman historian and writer Gaius Plinius Secundus Maior (also Pliny the Elder) (23-79) from his encyclopaedic work on natural history “Naturalis historia”. This “natural history” deals with topics that today would be assigned primarily to the natural sciences. It is the oldest completely preserved systematic encyclopaedia. It comprises 37 books with a total of 2493 chapters. According to the bibliography, nearly 500 authors were involved (3):
“Naturae rerum vis atque majestas in omnibus momentis fide caret, si quis modo partes eius, ac non totam domplectatur animo.” (The power and dignity of nature always remain incomprehensible, if one grasps only its parts and not its totality). (4)
The essence of man consists in feeling, thinking, acting, in short, in moving in a way that distinguishes him from other things with which he compares himself.
The following is a selection of quotations from the 1st chapter “Of Nature” (5):
“Men will always err if they abandon experience for the sake of such systems as have been created by imagination. Man is the work of nature, he exists in nature, he is subject to its laws, he cannot free himself from it, he cannot even get away from it by thinking; in vain does his spirit strive beyond the limits of the visible world, he is always forced to return to it.
(…)
Let man, therefore, cease to seek beings outside the world he inhabits, which are to provide him with a happiness which nature denies him: let him study nature, learn its laws, and contemplate its energy and the unchanging way in which it acts; let him use his discoveries for his own happiness, and tacitly submit to laws from which nothing can escape him; let him refrain from inquiring into the causes which are surrounded for him with an impenetrable veil, let him bear without grumbling the decisions of a universal power which can neither turn back nor ever deviate from the rules which its nature prescribes for it.
(…)
It is also because man has insufficiently studied nature and its laws, and has made insufficient attempts to discover its auxiliary sources and properties, that he is profoundly ignorant or takes such slow and uncertain steps to improve his lot. His indolence finds satisfaction in preferring to be led by example, by conventionality, by authority, rather than by experience, which requires action, and by reason, which requires deliberation.
Hence that aversion which men show to everything which seems to them to deviate from the rules to which they are accustomed; hence their stupid and fearful respect for everything old and for the most nonsensical institutions of their fathers; hence the fear which seizes them when the most advantageous changes or the most promising experiments are proposed to them.
For this reason we see the peoples caught in a shameful lethargy and groaning under abuses dragged along from century to century. They tremble at the very idea of what might remedy their sufferings. It is through the same inertia and lack of experience that medicine, physics, agriculture, in a word all useful sciences, make so little perceptible progress and remain so long in the fetters of authority: those who practise these sciences prefer to follow the paths marked out for them rather than to blaze new ones; (…).
(…)
In short, by renouncing, either through laziness or fear, the testimony of their senses, men have been guided in all their actions and undertakings only by imagination, by rapture, by habit, by prejudice, and especially by authority, which has known how to use the ignorance of men to deceive them. Systems created by imagination took the place of experience, reflection, reason: (…).
(…)
In this way the human race (…) has remained in a long childhood, from which it costs it so much effort to free itself. (…).
(…)
So let us rise above the mists of prejudice. (…). Let us distrust a fickle imagination, let us take experience for our guide; let us ask nature for advice; (…. ); let us go back to our senses, which we have been falsely led to regard as suspect; let us consult reason, which has been shamefully slandered and degraded; let us look attentively at the visible world, and see if it is not sufficient to enable us to judge of unknown realms of the spiritual world; perhaps we shall find that no right has been had to make a distinction between the two, and that two kingdoms have been separated without reasons, which are equally under the dominion of nature. “
*
Note to readers: Please click the share buttons above. Follow us on Instagram and Twitter and subscribe to our Telegram Channel. Feel free to repost and share widely Global Research articles.
Dr. Rudolf Lothar Hänsel is a teacher (retired headmaster), doctor of education (Dr. paed.) and graduate psychologist (Dipl.-Psych.). He taught and trained professionals for many decades. As a retiree, he worked as a psychotherapist in his own practice. In his books and educational-psychological articles, he calls for a conscious ethical-moral values education as well as an education for public spirit and peace.
Notes
(1) Holbach, P.-H.T. (1978). System der Natur oder von den Gesetzen der physischen und der moralischen Welt. Frankfurt am Main
(2) https://www.globalresearch.ca/bringing-people-back-nature-paul-thiry-dholbach/5797669 and http://www.nrhz.de/flyer/beitrag.php?id=28317§css
(3) https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plinius_der_Ältere and https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naturalis_historia
(4) Holbach, P.-H.T. (1978). System der Natur oder von den Gesetzen der physischen und der moralischen Welt. Frankfurt am Main, p. 16
(5) Holbach, P.-H.T. (1978). System of nature or of the laws of the physical and moral world. Frankfurt am Main. Part I: “Of nature and its limits, Of man, Of the soul and its faculties, Of the doctrine of immortality, Of happiness”. Chapter 1: “Of Nature”, pp. 17-25
All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the Translate Website button below the author’s name.
To receive Global Research’s Daily Newsletter (selected articles), click here.
Follow us on Instagram and Twitter and subscribe to our Telegram Channel. Feel free to repost and share widely Global Research articles.
***
During the days after former Prime Minister Imran Khan was ousted from office, there was jubilation by the Pakistani liberal-left. But they figured out quickly that they had to go into overdrive to produce and police a narrative of what happened. But bizarrely, that narrative wasn’t being constructed for Pakistanis, but for some mysterious ‘Western Left.’
The Pakistani Left’s success was given a tremendous boost by the incredibly biased coverage this Pakistani Left wanted the Western Left to hear in a few segments of Democracy Now. Apparently, only socialist and communist party cadres who report to their politburo represent all of the people of Pakistan for Democracy Now. However, Democracy Now was so thoroughly embarrassed itself after receiving a plethora of highly critical email feedback indicting its incredibly biased and shallow coverage of some of the largest popular mobilizations in the country. It thankfully stayed away from the subject from that time onwards.
But this began a pattern. A Pakistani Left which normally is involved in or at least supportive of the most important social struggles in the country all of a sudden became obsessed with a ‘Western Left’ that may consider these mobilizations and the figure of Imran Khan as something meaningful, as an important political development that clearly entailed massive numbers of protestors against the new regime.
Sadly, the Pakistani Left seemed to prioritize how the Western Left sees Imran Khan over everything and everyone else. As Prof. Sher Ali Tareen (is this Quetta-born outstanding Pakistani scholar a part of the Western Left to?), Imranophobia was at its peak at this point.
Bewildered by how a man whose period of governance was less than desirable could mobilize millions throughout the country, the Pakistani Left – rather than trying to engage in a period replete with possibilities of bringing more radical proposals to the table – turned its attention to privileged Western Left academics and activists rather than millions of ordinary Pakistanis out in the streets.
It was rather comical how the Pakistani Left had to keep changing their script: oh, well Khan just has an urban educated base of support. Oh wait, there is huge support among the Pashtuns as well. And perhaps he also some significant support in the Punjab and in Karachi. They were trying every trick in the book to downplay mass support for Khan, and resentment for the new regime.
In fact, Pankaj Mishra’s deployment of the term resentiment seemed very appropriate in capturing the mood in the country. A profoundly angry population was tired of sitting on the sidelines as spectators to the shenanigans of the power elite of their country.
But the Pakistani Left ensured that these were footnotes to be ignored and that these popular mobilizations entailed either fascists, youthful idiots, and whatever other condescending (very of often vulgar and abusive) term you want to use for them. Massive rallies in city after city taking place, incredibly disciplined and peaceful, were taking place and the Pakistani Left’s concern was how to bury these developments, hot to veto them out of history as Chomsky often says.
The Pakistani Left, just like any other Pakistani, is correct to be critical of Khan on many fronts. But this insidious game they played to police and discipline different narratives about what’s happening in the country was Stalinism and McCarthyism at its finest.
The Obsessive Compulsive Disorder involved in their relationship with the Western Left seemed utterly outlandish. It was a colonized mind at its finest, concerned more with what the White Man thinks of you than you think of yourself and your people.
We also wondered who the heck is this ‘Western Left’ that our Pakistani leftist luminaries kept referring to. Is it the International Socialist Organization (ISO), white Antifa-type anarchists, BLM activists, the DSA, who? Or an individual here and there sitting in their basement tweeting away. Regardless, the obsession seemed farcical.
A ‘Western Left’ that is barely relevant in their own countries is now being bombarded by an equally impotent Pakistani Left to regurgitate a tight script on political developments in Pakistan: Khan is no ‘anti-imperialist hero,’ he’s a demagogue, he doesn’t really have mass support (unlike us Pakistani leftists of course), and the people you do see who are coming out are buffoons or fascists. We are the Pakistani Left, even though half of us will reside most of our lives living in the West, so we know best and the ‘Western Left’ better just shut up about anything concerning Pakistan.
That also was a comical component of this saga: the constant criticisms of expat Pakistani intellectuals and ordinary Pakistanis for not being and living in Pakistan (and therefore having warped views of Pakistan) by many Pakistani Leftist intellectuals who themselves are not working and living in Pakistan! Now that’s something to chuckle about. These Pakistani Leftist intellectuals are more or less genuine in their progressive politics, so I would rather not use the term ‘hypocrites’ for them. But in any other case, hypocrisy is the only word one can think of to describe such behavior.
Indeed, the entire saga over the past few months has been highly instructive. Instead of trying to join and engage popular mobilizations to radicalize the movement even further, fairly privileged and elite Pakistani Left intellectuals and activists, either sitting abroad or at campuses which are virtual extensions of the US embassy or the Pakistani military establishment, were fixated on one thing and one thing alone: how this amorphous, undefined, supposedly monolithic ‘Western Left’ must view Pakistan, Khan, the popular mobilizations, etc. The Pakistani Left could have cared all this time about how a Kashmiri thought of Khan, or a Palestinian, or a Pashtun – but no, the Western Left controls independent and alternative media and hence, they are a far more important audience to target. These Western Leftists are the ones that are going to turn to ‘us’ and give us global standing and legitimacy, even though that legitimacy rarely exists in Pakistan itself!
Meanwhile, elderly women, working class students, displaced persons from the ‘War on Terror’ – all a part of these mobilizations, mattered nothing to the Pakistani Left because the latter had a more important job: ensuring that the Western Left continues to anoint them as the saviors of Pakistan, and not be distracted by Khan or these millions of people rallying for change.
The saddest part is that genuine organic left movements in the Global South mostly don’t give a damn about what some mythical ‘Western Left’ thinks about them. They are busy in the struggle to shape their societies for the better. And while the Pakistani Left is usually doing incredibly laudable work and activism, since April their intellectual twitteratis have had nothing better to do than to condemn some phantom ‘Western Left’ for being bamboozled into believing that Washington or the Pakistani military may have had something to do with Khan’s ouster.
Rarely do we see genuine organic left movements in countries so obsessed not with what their own countrywomen and men think of them, or the most oppressed, but with how the ghosts of the ‘Western Left’ perceives them, and more importantly, Imran Khan.
It is sad that a much-needed Pakistani Left has abandoned genuine political criticisms, and has propelled Imranophobia (thanks SherAli Tareen) on overdrive. It is a shame that psychological envy (why can Khan mobilize tens of millions while we can only mobilize tens) has replaced meaningful political engagement within the Pakistani Left. Nevertheless, it does seem like psychoanalysis would possibly reveal more about the Khan and Khan-supporter hatred among the Pakistani Left. And that is very unfortunate when we are at a very rare but exciting moment when transformational politics can be advanced and radicalized to take on a military establishment in panic mode.
*
Note to readers: Please click the share buttons above. Follow us on Instagram and Twitter and subscribe to our Telegram Channel. Feel free to repost and share widely Global Research articles.
Azhar Imran teaches law and politics at the University of Punjab, Pakistan.
Zerrish Khan is a progressive national student activist with an international relations background.
“We need to forgive one another for what we did and said when we were in the dark about COVID… There is an emerging (if not universal) consensus that schools in the U.S. were closed for too long: The health risks of in-school spread were relatively low, whereas the costs to students’ well-being and educational progress were high. The latest figures on learning loss are alarming. But in spring and summer 2020, we had only glimmers of information.”
“Across the country, math scores saw their largest decreases ever. Reading scores dropped to 1992 levels. Nearly four in 10 eighth graders failed to grasp basic math concepts. Not a single state saw a notable improvement in their average test scores, with some simply treading water at best.”
The social engineers responsible for this are likely worried about the looming GOP takeover of Congress and what that might mean in terms of investigations, assuming the GOP pharma cucks aren’t sufficiently bribed.
Their vicious totalitarianism requires a response from a free people, lest they similarly transgress during the next Current Thing™. They should not be permitted to skate without a reckoning.
We ought to ignore the crocodile tears shed by sociopathic technocrats because they can’t maintain their murderous narrative anymore. This is performative and not an expression of sincere remorse.
They can feel the rising popular rage. Their only recourse now is to plead for mercy — as if their misdeeds were innocent mistakes, as if they were just making the best decision possible based on the information they had at hand.
Their narrative is belied by the fact that millions, perhaps billions, of free-thinking people worldwide with fewer information resources and professional credentials than the elites did not cave to the orchestrated manipulation, fearmongering, and cajoling.
If the COVIDians could have managed to keep the hysteria going strong, further suppress dissent, and sustain the lockdowns/vaxx mandates indefinitely, the US would more closely resemble “Zero COVID” China than it currently does.
Justin Trudeau: "There's a level of admiration I actually have for China because their basic dictatorship is allowing them to actually turn their economy around on a dime." pic.twitter.com/Vxwn2DhpgZ
Unless examples are made – including hardcore prosecutions – there is no substantial disincentive to engage in the same malfeasance in the future.
The corporate state will introduce a series of new permanent emergencies in the coming months and years. And, when it does, if it doesn’t pay any price this go-’round, the Brown University professor who now requests clemency will be back at it. And so will all of her colleagues in the managerial class.
Note to readers: Please click the share buttons above. Follow us on Instagram and Twitter and subscribe to our Telegram Channel. Feel free to repost and share widely Global Research articles.
This article was originally published on The Daily Bell.
Ben Bartee is an independent Bangkok-based American journalist with opposable thumbs. Follow his stuff via Armageddon Prose and/or Substack, Patreon, Gab, and Twitter. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.
Featured image is from TDB
The Worldwide Corona Crisis, Global Coup d’Etat Against Humanity
by Michel Chossudovsky
Michel Chossudovsky reviews in detail how this insidious project “destroys people’s lives”. He provides a comprehensive analysis of everything you need to know about the “pandemic” — from the medical dimensions to the economic and social repercussions, political underpinnings, and mental and psychological impacts.
“My objective as an author is to inform people worldwide and refute the official narrative which has been used as a justification to destabilize the economic and social fabric of entire countries, followed by the imposition of the “deadly” COVID-19 “vaccine”. This crisis affects humanity in its entirety: almost 8 billion people. We stand in solidarity with our fellow human beings and our children worldwide. Truth is a powerful instrument.”
ISBN: 978-0-9879389-3-0, Year: 2022, PDF Ebook, Pages: 164, 15 Chapters
The U.S. government is still waging war on America’s military veterans.
Especially veterans who exercise their First Amendment right to speak out against government wrongdoing.
Consider: we raise our young people on a steady diet of militarism and war, sell them on the idea that defending freedom abroad by serving in the military is their patriotic duty, then when they return home, bruised and battle-scarred and committed to defending their freedoms at home, we often treat them like criminals merely for exercising those rights they risked their lives to defend.
As first reported by the Wall Street Journal, the government even has a name for its war on America’s veterans: Operation Vigilant Eagle.
This Department of Homeland Security (DHS) program tracks military veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan and characterizes them as extremists and potential domestic terrorist threats because they may be “disgruntled, disillusioned or suffering from the psychological effects of war.”
Coupled with the DHS’ dual reports on Rightwing and Leftwing “Extremism,” which broadly define extremists as individuals, military veterans and groups “that are mainly antigovernment, rejecting federal authority in favor of state or local authority, or rejecting government authority entirely,” these tactics bode ill for anyone seen as opposing the government.
Yet the government is not merely targeting individuals who are voicing their discontent so much as it is taking aim at individuals trained in military warfare.
Don’t be fooled by the fact that the DHS has gone extremely quiet about Operation Vigilant Eagle.
Where there’s smoke, there’s bound to be fire.
And the government’s efforts to target military veterans whose views may be perceived as “anti-government” make clear that something is afoot.
In recent years, military servicemen and women have found themselves increasingly targeted for surveillance, censorship, threatened with incarceration or involuntary commitment, labeled as extremists and/or mentally ill, and stripped of their Second Amendment rights.
In light of the government’s efforts to lay the groundwork to weaponize the public’s biomedical data and predict who might pose a threat to public safety based on mental health sensor data (a convenient means by which to penalize certain “unacceptable” social behaviors), encounters with the police could get even more deadly, especially if those involved have a mental illness or disability coupled with a military background.
Incredibly, as part of a proposal introduced under the Trump Administration, a new government agency HARPA (a healthcare counterpart to the Pentagon’s research and development arm DARPA) will take the lead in identifying and targeting “signs” of mental illness or violent inclinations among the populace by using artificial intelligence to collect data from Apple Watches, Fitbits, Amazon Echo and Google Home.
These tactics are not really new.
Many times throughout history in totalitarian regimes, such governments have declared dissidents mentally ill and unfit for society as a means of rendering them disempowering them.
For example, government officials in the Cold War-era Soviet Union often used psychiatric hospitals as prisons in order to isolate political prisoners from the rest of society, discredit their ideas, and break them physically and mentally through the use of electric shocks, drugs and various medical procedures.
This age-old practice by which despotic regimes eliminate their critics or potential adversaries by declaring them mentally ill and locking them up in psychiatric wards for extended periods of time is a common practice in present-day China.
What is particularly unnerving, however, is how this practice of eliminating or undermining potential critics, including military veterans, is happening with increasing frequency in the United States.
Remember, the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) opened the door for the government to detain as a threat to national security anyone viewed as a troublemaker. According to government guidelines for identifying domestic extremists—a word used interchangeably with terrorists—technically, anyone exercising their First Amendment rights in order to criticize the government qualifies.
It doesn’t take much anymore to be flagged as potentially anti-government in a government database somewhere—Main Core, for example—that identifies and tracks individuals who aren’t inclined to march in lockstep to the government’s dictates.
In fact, as the Washington Post reports, communities are being mapped and residents assigned a color-coded threat score—green, yellow or red—so police are forewarned about a person’s potential inclination to be a troublemaker depending on whether they’ve had a career in the military, posted a comment perceived as threatening on Facebook, suffer from a particular medical condition, or know someone who knows someone who might have committed a crime.
The case of Brandon Raub is a prime example of Operation Vigilant Eagle in action.
Raub, a 26-year-old decorated Marine, actually found himself interrogated by government agents about his views on government corruption, arrested with no warning, labeled mentally ill for subscribing to so-called “conspiratorial” views about the government, detained against his will in a psych ward for standing by his views, and isolated from his family, friends and attorneys. Within days of Raub being seized and forcibly held in a VA psych ward, news reports started surfacing of other veterans having similar experiences.
“Oppositional defiance disorder” (ODD) is another diagnosis being used against veterans who challenge the status quo. As journalist Anthony Martin explains, an ODD diagnosis
That the government is using the charge of mental illness as the means by which to immobilize (and disarm) these veterans is diabolical. With one stroke of a magistrate’s pen, these veterans are being declared mentally ill, locked away against their will, and stripped of their constitutional rights.
If it were just being classified as “anti-government,” that would be one thing.
Unfortunately, anyone with a military background and training is also now being viewed as a heightened security threat by police who are trained to shoot first and ask questions later.
Police encounters with military veterans often escalate very quickly into an explosive and deadly situation, especially when SWAT teams are involved.
For example, Jose Guerena, a Marine who served in two tours in Iraq, was killed after an Arizona SWAT team kicked open the door of his home during a mistaken drug raid and opened fire. Thinking his home was being invaded by criminals, Guerena told his wife and child to hide in a closet, grabbed a gun and waited in the hallway to confront the intruders. He never fired his weapon. In fact, the safety was still on his gun when he was killed. The SWAT officers, however, not as restrained, fired 70 rounds of ammunition at Guerena—23 of those bullets made contact. Apart from his military background, Guerena had had no prior criminal record, and the police found nothing illegal in his home.
John Edward Chesney, a 62-year-old Vietnam veteran, was killed by a SWAT team allegedly responding to a call that the Army veteran was standing in his San Diego apartment window waving what looked like a semi-automatic rifle. SWAT officers locked down Chesney’s street, took up positions around his home, and fired 12 rounds into Chesney’s apartment window. It turned out that the gun Chesney reportedly pointed at police from three stories up was a “realistic-looking mock assault rifle.”
Ramon Hooks’ encounter with a Houston SWAT team did not end as tragically, but it very easily could have. Hooks, a 25-year-old Iraq war veteran, was using an air rifle gun for target practice outside when a Homeland Security Agent, allegedly house shopping in the area, reported him as an active shooter. It wasn’t long before the quiet neighborhood was transformed into a war zone, with dozens of cop cars, an armored vehicle and heavily armed police. Hooks was arrested, his air rifle pellets and toy gun confiscated, and charges filed against him for “criminal mischief.”
It stands to reason that if the government can’t be bothered to abide by its constitutional mandate to respect the citizenry’s rights—whether it’s the right to be free from government surveillance and censorship, the right to due process and fair hearings, the right to be free from roadside strip searches and militarized police, or the right to peacefully assemble and protest and exercise our right to free speech—then why should anyone expect the government to treat our nation’s veterans with respect and dignity?
Certainly, veterans have enough physical and psychological war wounds to overcome without adding the government to the mix. Although the U.S. boasts more than 20 million veterans who have served in World War II through the present day, large numbers of veterans are impoverished, unemployed, traumatized mentally and physically, struggling with depression, suicide, and marital stress, homeless, subjected to sub-par treatment at clinics and hospitals, and left to molder while their paperwork piles up within Veterans Administration offices.
On average, 6,000 veterans kill themselves every year. However, a recent study suggests that the rate of suicide among veterans may be more than double what federal officials report annually.
The plight of veterans today—and their treatment at the hands of the U.S. government—remains America’s badge of shame.
*
Note to readers: Please click the share buttons above. Follow us on Instagram and Twitter and subscribe to our Telegram Channel. Feel free to repost and share widely Global Research articles.
All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the Translate Website button below the author’s name.
To receive Global Research’s Daily Newsletter (selected articles), click here.
Follow us on Instagram and Twitter and subscribe to our Telegram Channel. Feel free to repost and share widely Global Research articles.
***
Annually, each year, since 2005, the U.S. Government has been one of only from 1 to 3 Governments to vote in the U.N. General Assembly against an annual statement by the General Assembly against racism and other forms of bigotry — an annual Resolution condemning it, and expressing a commitment to doing everything possible to reduce bigoted acts. For the first time ever, on November 4th, America was joined not only by one or two voting against it, but 55 nations, and almost all gave as reasons that Russia was for it and has invaded Ukraine. Ukraine is the only country that has almost always been joining America in opposing such resolutions; and many countries now vote against the resolution because Ukraine always does, and thus vote in solidarity with Ukraine against Russia — condemn the resolution because Russia supports it.
This year’s Resolution particularly offended America and its allies because “Nazism” is mentioned and condemned specifically in it.
No specific nation is ever mentioned in such resolutions.
The U.N. makes its documents and voting records as difficult as possible for the public to find, but, after many hours I have been able to find the following records regarding the 4 November 2022 resolution and vote.
The Resolution was completed in draft on 29 September 2022, and here it is (though the U.N. tends to change URLs in order to make documents unfindable, and also this and many other documents at the U.N. are designed so as not to be copyable into web archiving services; so, this document might soon become unfindable: see this.)
I made the first copy of it at the main web archive, and that archived image is very different, not the document itself. This is typical for the U.N. But, anyway, if you can see it, then at least you will be able to know the Resolution’s text.
The U.N. likewise makes its voting records as difficult as possible for journalists to be able to report the specific votes of specific nations — the U.N. provides photo-images (such as in this case) of the nation-by-nation vote so that journalists will need to type everything out character-by-character instead of do copy-pastes, and journalists on rapid deadlines won’t typically retype an entire document. I have done it in this case, and here that is:
Since Austria backs the EU’s statement on this, here is that statement from the EU.
The U.S. Government seems to be having remarkable success making even nazism fashionable among its allies.
*
Note to readers: Please click the share buttons above. Follow us on Instagram and Twitter and subscribe to our Telegram Channel. Feel free to repost and share widely Global Research articles.
This article was originally published on The Duran.
Investigative historian Eric Zuesse’s new book, AMERICA’S EMPIRE OF EVIL: Hitler’s Posthumous Victory, and Why the Social Sciences Need to Change, is about how America took over the world after World War II in order to enslave it to U.S.-and-allied billionaires. Their cartels extract the world’s wealth by control of not only their ‘news’ media but the social ‘sciences’ — duping the public. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.
All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the Translate Website button below the author’s name.
To receive Global Research’s Daily Newsletter (selected articles), click here.
Follow us on Instagram and Twitter and subscribe to our Telegram Channel. Feel free to repost and share widely Global Research articles.
***
It must be excruciatingly difficult having to decide whether to put some of one’s hundreds-of-billions of dollars, along with potential future profit, at risk to affirm one’s previous public declaration of support for the freedom of speech principle. That is the dilemma that Musk has before him.
Musk finds Twitter threatened with an advertiser boycott. As I previously alluded to, the boycotters of free speech on Twitter could well find themselves boycotted by free-speech supporters. Two can play the boycott game. Musk seems to realize that now. He warned of a “thermonuclear name & shame” reprisal against boycotting advertisers.
Musk has expressed willingness to fight the “activist groups pressuring advertisers” and their compliant advertisers who are “trying to destroy free speech in America.”
But has Musk provided a free speech forum for all Twitter users? Yours truly, a small-fry free-speech, anti-racism, anti-war, anti-disinformation sporadic user of Twitter have been banished without notice or reason for several months now. I assume it is for my progressivist principles that are not shared by Democrats working in the Twitter space (e.g., support for Palestinian rights, support for Indigenous rights, support for all human rights, etc).
But changes are afoot at Twitter. Musk has cut the Twitter workforce in half. This is unfortunate for the ordinary workers just trying to earn an honest living; but, as far as cleaning out the anti-free-speech riff raff at Twitter, it might signal an opening for free-speech advocates.
Donald Trump (a personality equally reprehensible to Joe Biden) has, as far as I know, not been invited for reinstatement to Twitter. I dislike most of Trump’s ideological views, but I support his right to express them honestly.
Then there is the case of Scott Ritter, an American patriot who comes across as a fierce critic of US imperialism. For his anti-imperialist views, he found himself banned from Twitter. After the takeover of Twitter by Musk, Ritter set up a new Twitter account and sent out a tweet, stating that Ukraine was behind the massacre at Bucha, as a challenge to Musk. Ritter, a former marine intelligence officer, found himself promptly banned from Twitter again.
Ritter quoted The Who: “Won’t get fooled again. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.”
It is the early days of Twitter under Musk. Nonetheless, if Musk truly is a free speech devotee, truly is a man of principle, then he will use his Twitter ownership for the promotion of respectful free speech.
I submit that Musk might best demonstrate this by setting in motion a twitter storm pushing for the release of Julian Assange, a heroic free-speech advocate and a principled supporter of the public’s right to know.
Assange has suffered at the hands of corrupt American power abetted by its minions for which he should never have been targeted or persecuted. Conversely, he should be celebrated for his actions which include exposing US war crimes in Iraq. If there is any justice in empire, then Assange must be released, exonerated of all wrongdoing, fairly recompensed, and regarded with all due respect for his sacrifice to humanity — as should all those brave souls who spoke out about the crimes of empire and find themselves languishing under unjust circumstances.
*
Note to readers: Please click the share buttons above. Follow us on Instagram and Twitter and subscribe to our Telegram Channel. Feel free to repost and share widely Global Research articles.
Kim Petersen is an independent writer and former co-editor of the Dissident Voice newsletter. He can be emailed at: kimohp at gmail.com. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.
All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the Translate Website button below the author’s name.
To receive Global Research’s Daily Newsletter (selected articles), click here.
Follow us on Instagram and Twitter and subscribe to our Telegram Channel. Feel free to repost and share widely Global Research articles.
***
According to the New York Times those naughty Russians are at it again. Today’s online lead story entitled “Russia Reactivates Its Trolls and Bots Ahead of Tuesday’s Midterms” with the subtitle “Researchers have identified a series of Russian information operations to influence American elections and, perhaps, erode support for Ukraine” marks a new low in what the Gray Lady, self-designated as one of America’s “newspapers of record,” prefers to call “journalism.”
The author of the piece, clearly somewhat biased over Russia and Putin, is one “Steven Lee Myers [who] covers misinformation for The Times. He is also the author of “The New Tsar: The Rise and Reign of Vladimir Putin.”
Here is what it is all about:
“The user on Gab who identifies as Nora Berka resurfaced in August after a yearlong silence on the social media platform, reposting a handful of messages with sharply conservative political themes before writing a stream of original vitriol. The posts mostly denigrated President Biden and other prominent Democrats, sometimes obscenely. They also lamented the use of taxpayer dollars to support Ukraine in its war against invading Russian forces, depicting Ukraine’s president as a caricature straight out of Russian propaganda.”
Per the Times,
“The goal, as before, is to stoke anger among conservative voters and to undermine trust in the American electoral system. This time, it also appears intended to undermine the Biden administration’s extensive military assistance to Ukraine.”
Well, one might object that Ukraine’s president is indeed a figure tailor-made for ridicule as he used to play a piano with his penis, but that is perhaps a secondary issue.
The more significant theme is that people who oppose the Ukraine war, for any number of reasons, and, particularly if they are conservatives, are becoming trolls for Russia in part due to the disinformation efforts and are being influenced by way of discussion fora like Gab.
The targets “are generally US conservatives who are maybe more accepting of conspiratorial claims” according to one of the cybersecurity experts consulted by the author. The Times links Berka, who might indeed be a made-up identity “posing as an outraged American,” to the secretive Russian Internet Research Agency in St Petersburg which it claims was involved in interfering in both the 2016 and 2020 US elections.
The Times also cites another site that it links to Russia, electiontruth.net
“For its contact information, electiontruth.net lists a cafe inside a converted gas station in Cotter, Ark., a town of 900 people on a bend in the White River. The cafe has closed, however… No one at Election Truth responded to a request for comment submitted through the site.”
One might object that neither Berka nor election.truth would appear to be a major disinformation effort sponsored by a foreign government intended to bring down the Republic. Nevertheless, the article clearly adheres to the view that anyone objecting to the continuing war in Ukraine is a Russian dupe.
It cites Liz Cheney, who has called the few Republicans who want to cut funding for the war as “the Putin wing of the Republican Party,” and Myers observes that the disinformation unfortunately echoes “a theme that has gained some traction among Republican lawmakers and voters who have questioned the delivery of weapons and other military assistance.”
Another “expert” cited in the article, one Edward P. Perez, a board member with the OSET Institute, a self-described “nonpartisan election security organization,” called the Russian efforts “manufactured chaos” in the country’s body politic – in part because the divisions in American society are already such fertile soil for disinformation. “Since 2016, it appears that foreign states can afford to take some of the foot off the gas because they have already created such sufficient division that there are many domestic actors to carry the water of disinformation for them.”
So, there is the main point of the piece. Americans who oppose the involvement of the United States in the war against Russia are little more than “domestic actors” who are peddling disinformation provided by the Kremlin. Given that this article appeared two days before national elections, the intent is clear. The Russians are, per the Times, generating disinformation about Ukraine and Americans who go along with the lies are being manipulated. Moscow is again interfering in a US national election! Vote for the Democratic candidates as they will be the ones that can be relied upon to keep the war going! Three cheers for Joe Biden!
*
Note to readers: Please click the share buttons above. Follow us on Instagram and Twitter and subscribe to our Telegram Channel. Feel free to repost and share widely Global Research articles.
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.
All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the Translate Website button below the author’s name.
To receive Global Research’s Daily Newsletter (selected articles), click here.
Follow us on Instagram and Twitter and subscribe to our Telegram Channel. Feel free to repost and share widely Global Research articles.
***
Ukrainian Front Lines Are Still Inflamed By Heavy Battles. The Ukrainian military clearly does not refuse plans to attack the towns of Svatovo and Kremennaya in the Luhansk People’s Republic. Russian forces continue to push them back far from the strategically important road between the two towns.
Ukrainian units continue daily attempts to attack Chervonopopovka but fail. At the same time, the Russian military went on the offensive a few kilometers to the north, near Makeevka. Ukrainians attempted to advance north of Svatovo in the area of Novoselovskoe while Russians launched a counteroffensive on Ukrainian positions south of Kremennaya near Belogorovka. Neither of the warring sides has claimed success so far.
The Russian offensive in the area of Soledar continues. Fighting is ongoing near Verkhnekamenskoye and Spornoe.
In the area of Bakhmut, Russians continue the mop up operation in the industrial area on the eastern outskirts, while approaching the city from the southern direction. Fighting for control of Opytnoe is ongoing. The tactical task of the Wagner group which is storming the city is to push the Ukrainian troops to the right bank of the Bakhmutka River. They are yet to achieve this goal.
The Somalia battalion of the DPR has claimed some successes on the outskirts of Avdeevka. They managed to take control of some Ukrainian positions, destroying about 20 servicemen of the Ukrainian Army.
In the Ugledar region, the Ukrainian military attempted to stop the Russian offensive and attacked Russian positions near Nikolskoe and Ravnopolye. They did not manage to take control of new territories but distracted the Russian military from the ongoing battle for control of the village of Pavlovka located on the southern outskirts of Ugledar. The Russian goal is to secure the control of the road and push the Ukrainian Army to the northern bank of the Kashlygach River.
In the Kherson region, the front lines remained unchanged. Ukrainian forces continue their attempts to break through Russian defenses but fail and suffer heavy losses. The evacuation of civilians on the left bank of the Dnieper River continues. On November 3, the Russian flag was taken out of the of the city administration building in Kherson. The local authorities suppose that the Russian forces may leave their positions and cross the river to reinforce their defensive lines along the Dnieper. In turn, the Ukrainian military remains cautious, afraid that Russian claims are only an information campaign aimed at luring the Ukrainian army into trap.
*
Note to readers: Please click the share buttons above or below. Follow us on Instagram and Twitter and subscribe to our Telegram Channel. Feel free to repost and share widely Global Research articles.
Carefully documented video below on “Who Blew Up Nord Stream Pipeline”. And who was that foreign state actor? EU politicians and the Western media in chorus place the blame on Russia. “The Russians Did It…”
I forgive this employee for having to follow a script that must have been set out by the town, for all the small businesses to follow, in some bizarre, coercive methodology, as this out-of-the-blue, un-American and inappropriate question was posed all at once somehow, in store after store, in my little town, in the nearby towns, even in New York City, during a certain moment in the bad year of 2021.
As environmental advocates call on regulators to “lead with sound science” regarding the proposed release of thousands of genetically engineered mosquitoes on a weekly basis in central California, eight Democratic lawmakers on Thursday demanded that officials reject the proposal without an in-depth review of its potential impacts.
People around the world have expressed concerns about Israelis empowering indicted former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to form the nation’s most far-right government in history since Israel held its fifth election in less than four years on Tuesday.
The European Union has been quietly celebrating a consistent decline in gas and electricity consumption this year amid record-breaking prices, a cutoff of much of the Russian gas supply, and a liquidity crisis in the energy market.
By now, you probably know about the plans for digital IDs and digital currencies. But how far along are these plans exactly in various places around the world? What steps are being undertaken right now? Why are digital “identities” so problematic? And what are possible solutions? We will explore these questions in this article.
The EU has responded aggressively to warn Musk not to allow greater free speech or face crippling fines and even potential criminal enforcement. After years of using censorship-by-surrogates in social media companies, Democratic leaders seem to have rediscovered good old-fashioned state censorship.
Consider: we raise our young people on a steady diet of militarism and war, sell them on the idea that defending freedom abroad by serving in the military is their patriotic duty, then when they return home, bruised and battle-scarred and committed to defending their freedoms at home, we often treat them like criminals merely for exercising those rights they risked their lives to defend.
The commander that oversees US nuclear forces delivered an ominous warning at a naval conference last week by calling the war in Ukraine a “warmup” for the “big one” that is to come.
There is a five-fold higher risk of seizures from the MMR vaccine than seizures from measles infection, and a significant portion of MMR-vaccine seizures may cause permanent harm. For example, a Danish study of 1.54 million people, published in the American Journal of Epidemiology in 2007, examined the association between febrile seizures and epilepsy, a chronic brain disorder that leads to recurring seizures.
All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the Translate Website button below the author’s name.
To receive Global Research’s Daily Newsletter (selected articles), click here.
Follow us on Instagram and Twitter and subscribe to our Telegram Channel. Feel free to repost and share widely Global Research articles.
***
I live in a picture-perfect region — the Hudson Valley, memorialized by painters and poets; a patchwork of autumn reds and yellows, majestic hillsides, storied waterfalls, and little homesteads dotted picturesquely on the slopes of sleepy hamlets.
Towns in our area look like Norman Rockwell paintings: there is Main Street, Millerton, with its white 19th century church steeple, its famous Irving Farm cafe with the excellent curated coffee beans, its charming antiques mall, its popular pizzeria.
When you drive to Millerton, it looks like you are driving into the heart of archetypal America; everything that Woody Guthrie songs memorialize, everything of which American soldiers dreamt when they were far away — everything decent and pure, is to be found in Hudson Valley towns.
It sure looks that way, anyway.
But these days, I am obliged to maintain a fervent inner monologue, just so I can pleasantly go about my business in the local hardware store, in the local florist, in the post office.
Because an emotional massacre has taken place in these little towns. And now we are expected to act as if — this never happened at all.
But psychically, emotionally, there is blood flowing in the streets; and bodies are stacked up, invisible, in front of the candy stores, the high end wine stores, the pretty memorials to the World War Two dead; outside the farmers’ market on Saturdays, outside the tapas bars.
So my quiet internal mantra, is: I forgive you.
I forgive you, Millerton movie theatre. Your owner, who was interviewed just before the pandemic, saying lovely things in a local paper about how the revamped theatre would enhance the local community, posted a sign in 2021 saying that only vaccinated people could enter. You needed to really look for the fine print to see that you could walk through those doors, if unvaccinated, but only with a PCR test.
I forgive the young ladies who worked behind the popcorn counter, for telling me that I could not enter further. That I could not sit down, with other human beings in my community, to watch a film alongside of them.
I forgive the young ticket taker for telling me that I had to go back outside, onto the sidewalk. I could not even stand in the lobby.
I forgive these young people who just wanted jobs, and who had to discriminate in the most heinous and scarring way — scarring to me, and to them too no doubt — just to keep their jobs. I forgive them. I forgive them for the mortifying scene they had to cause.
I forgive the movie theatre owner for shouting at me defensively when I questioned this policy.
I forgive the elderly couple nearby in the lobby; the woman who started shrieking at me alarmingly that she was glad of the policy and did not want me anywhere near her. I forgive her. I forgive her silent, embarrassed husband for his silence.
I forgive the employee of the Millerton flower shop who demanded, “Are you vaccinated?” when I walked in – when I just wanted some nice-looking flowers, some artificial olive branches, perhaps, like those I had seen in a decorating magazine, to arrange in a vase in my study.
I forgive this employee for having to follow a script that must have been set out by the town, for all the small businesses to follow, in some bizarre, coercive methodology, as this out-of-the-blue, un-American and inappropriate question was posed all at once somehow, in store after store, in my little town, in the nearby towns, even in New York City, during a certain moment in the bad year of 2021.
I forgive these store owners for stripping me of a great benefit of a free society — the great gift of liberty, of America — that right to be dreamy, to have some privacy, and to be preoccupied with one’s own thoughts.
I forgive this employee for intruding on my privacy in a way that was startling, ill-mannered, and entirely beside the point, given the fact that she was simply selling flowers and I was simply trying to buy them.
I forgive her for the way this demand made my adrenaline levels jump, as they do when things are unstable around you; in 2021, you could not tell which stores would confront you, or when, with that urgent, bullying question — when you happened to wander in, just wanting some toothpaste, or a slice of pizza, or to look at some antiques.
Not — expecting an inquisition.
I forgive this flower shop employee for presenting me with this startling question that each time made me, with my clinically diagnosed PTSD from a very old trauma, feel ambushed, violated and humiliated. Surely this sense of ambush was felt by trauma survivors everywhere.
Are you vaccinated?
Are you? Vaccinated?
Are you vaccinated?
Are you naked? Are you helpless?
Are you mine? My possession?
The viral clip of the Pfizer marketing rep, admitting to the European Parliament that the mRNA vaccines never stopped transmission, should make every single one of these moments, into a source of deep embarrassment and self-criticism for all those people — all of them —- who inflicted these violations of privacy on others, or who excluded in any way, their neighbors and fellow countrymen and women. They did so, it is clear now to all, on the basis of arrant nonsense.
But meanwhile, I forgive them. I have to. Because otherwise the rage and sorrow would exhaust me to death.
I forgive my neighbor who froze when I hugged her.
I forgive my other neighbor, who told me that she was making homemade soup and fresh bread, and that I could join her to have some, if I was vaccinated. If I was unvaccinated, however, she explained, someday she might consent to walk outside with me.
I forgive the monitor — what else could one call him — surely appointed by the local Board of Health, who told me that I could not go inside a church at an adorable outdoor town festival at the tiny mountain hamlet of Mt Washington, to see an exhibit, because I was unmasked. I forgive him for the steely look in his eyes as he remained unmoved when I explained that had a serious neurological condition, and thus could not wear a mask. I forgive the nervous lady at the table full of trinkets, who had apparently ratted us out to the Board of Health representative, when we were simply browsing outdoors, surrounded by fresh air, on a peaceful June day, our faces uncovered, at her table.
I forgive them for making a miserable scene about all of this in front of my then-ten-year-old stepson. The unmasked and unvaccinated are eternally accused of having made scenes, but the scenes were made, really, by the actions of those who were coercing and conforming.
I forgive them for driving us to leave the festival. I forgive their manifesting a pathetic and indefensible lesson in servility, and in submission to things that made no sense, to an impressionable American child.
I forgive the teller at my local bank for throwing a paper napkin at me to cover my face, when I explained respectfully and gently, from twenty feet away from her, why I did not wear a mask.
I forgive the staff at the Walker Hotel, in lower Manhattan, for warning me that they would call the manager, who no doubt would then call law enforcement, if I sat at the Blue Bottle Coffee lunch counter with my unvaccinated self.
I forgive my loved ones for keeping us from the Thanksgiving table.
I forgive one of my best friends for her having left the country without having said goodbye to me; the reason was that she was “disappointed” in me for my stance on masks and vaccines. No matter that this was entirely my risk, my body, my decision, my life. Her “disappointment” led her to assume the burden of censuring me for something that had nothing to do with her. I forgive her, though my heart broke.
I forgive the friend whose daughter had a baby, and who would not let me indoors to see the child.
I forgive the friend who said he did not sit indoors with unvaccinated people.
I forgive the family members who pressed my loved one to get one more booster – thus leading directly to her sustaining heart damage.
I forgive them, because my soul instructs me that I must.
But I cannot forget.
Are we supposed to just pick up again, as if emotional limbs were not crushed, as if emotional hearts and guts were not pierced, as if with sharp objects? And that, again and again?
As if there has been no savagery, no massacre here?
All those people — now that athletes are dropping dead, now that their own loved ones are sickening and hospitalized, now that the “transmission” is known to be a lie and the vaccines’ “efficacy” itself is known to be a lie – are they — sorry? Are they reflecting upon themselves, on their actions, on their consciences; on their immortal souls; on what they have done to others; on their part in this shameful melodrama in American and world history – a time that now can never be erased?
I don’t hear it. I don’t hear any apologies.
I don’t see signs on the Millerton movie theatre saying, “Dear Customers. We are so sorry we treated many of you as if we were all living under Jim Crow laws. We did so for no reason at all.
There is no excuse, of course, for such discrimination, then or now. Please forgive us.”
Nothing. Have you seen anything like this? I haven’t. Not one conversation. Not one sign. Not one article. “My friend, I was a beast. How can you forgive me? I behaved so badly.” Have you heard that? No, nothing.
Instead people are reacting to the fact of their awfulness, of their profound wrongness, of their foolishness, of their ignorance and credulity, like sneaky, guilty dogs. They are sidling up.
In the city, they are quietly adding one to the guest list. In the country, they are stopping their cars in the sunny autumn air to have a little chat.
They are calling up just to say hi — after two and a half years.
Two and a half years of brutal, ignorant ostracism.
I can and must forgive all those I enumerated. But it is harder to forgive – others.
That personal, internal forgiveness of deluded individuals, or of coerced small business owners, which is my own internal labor – work I do daily between myself and my God, just so that I won’t turn to stone with my burden of rage and fury – has nothing to do, of course, with the wrongdoers’ need on their side of the relationship, truly to self-examine and truly to repent; and it certainly does not forestall or avert the grave and terrible accounting of crimes, and the enactment of true justice, for the leaders and spokespeople and institutions who committed evil, that is now utterly necessary.
Without accountability, and truth and reconciliation commissions, and terrible, commensurate levels of justice served to suit the crimes committed, as South Africa, Sierra Leone, Rwanda and Germany have all learned to their cost, there is nothing at all to ensure that the exact same crimes won’t be committed again. And that process of investigation, accountability, trials and sentencing, when one half of a nation abused the other systematically, is painful and severe and takes years to reach its conclusion.
(And yes, I added this clarifying paragraph in response to Dr Emily Oster’s ignorant, self-deluding and dangerous plea in The Atlantic for “amnesty”, an essay written after this one was published. Let there be no misunderstanding. “Amnesty” for crimes of this severity and scale is not an option. There was no group hug after the liberation of Auschwitz).
It is hard to forgive the high school in Chatham, that forced a teenager to be mRNA vaccinated against her wishes, in order to play basketball, and thus hope for a college scholarship. The officials must be held accountable.
It is hard to forgive the doctors, the hospitals, the pediatricians, who knew and knew and knew. And bowed their heads, and plunged the needles into the arms of innocents, and committed evil. The doctors who today say, of the horrific side effects brought about by their own hands, their own collusion — “We are baffled. We have no idea.”
When did Western doctors, before 2020, ever have no idea?
The doctors and hospitals and medical organizations must be held accountable.
It is hard to forgive the Mayor of New York City, who drove the brave First Responders who did not wish to submit to a dangerous experiment, to have no income with which to feed their families. He and other political leaders must be held accountable.
It is hard to forgive the Ivy League universities, who took the money and forced all the members of their communities to submit to a deadly or dangerous experimental injection — one that will damage the fertility of who knows how many young men and women; one that will kill who knows how many community members.
They took the money and there is blood on their hands. Have you, parents of college age children, received a letter of apology? “We are so sorry we forced your son/your daughter to submit to an experimental injection that can harm him or her, that may cripple your daughter with bleeding every single month of her childbearing years, and that may lead your son to drop dead on the track field. And one that, it turns out, has nothing to do with transmission. We can’t apologize enough. (But the money — it was just such a lot.) Really sorry. Won’t do it again, rest assured.”
Did you get that letter, America’s parents?
The deans and trustees who took the money and ‘mandated’ our kids, must be held accountable.
It is almost impossible to forgive the churches, the synagogues, who took the money and stayed closed. Or who took the money, and then locked their doors at High Holy Day Services against the unvaccinated. To this day. (Hi there, Hevreh Synagogue of the Southern Berkshires. Shalom. Shabbat Shalom. Good Yom Tov.)
“Please note that we require proof of vaccination upon entry for all High Holy Day Services. Please bring a copy with you. Masks are optional and encouraged for all who are comfortable wearing them.”
The rabbis and priests and ministers who took the money and practiced unlawful discrimination, and abandoned their spiritual calling, must be held accountable.
These are great, great sins.
But meanwhile, you have errands to run. You have books to return to the library and flowers to pick up from the florist perhaps – you have to go to the kids’ soccer game, you have to go to the movie theatre; the hardware store. Back to church. Back to synagogue.
You have to pick up your life again.
You have to step around the bodies decomposing invisibly in the charming streets of our nation. You have to pick up again as if we were not annihilated in spirit. Or, you have to pick up again if you were the abuser.
Will you apologize, if you did wrong?
Will you forgive, if you were wronged?
Can this nation, which fell so far short of its true identity and its founders’ intention, ever, ever heal?
Can we heal — we ourselves?
Forgiveness on an internal level — of coerced or deluded individuals — may help us or heal us as private individuals.
But only the gravest of reckonings, the truth pursued to its limit in every single case, investigations and trials launched according to the beautiful rule of our law, and somber justice then served to leaders, spokespeople (hey, Dr Oster) — and institutions — will ever allow us to heal, or even move safely forward together— as a nation.
*
Note to readers: Please click the share buttons above. Follow us on Instagram and Twitter and subscribe to our Telegram Channel. Feel free to repost and share widely Global Research articles.
We sued in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia after the National Institutes of Allergies and Infectious Diseases (a component of HHS) inadequately responded to a June 1, 2022, FOIA request for:
All safety studies, data, reports, and analyses produced by the Division of Microbiology and Infectious Diseases (DMID) relating to the safety of ‘vaccines’ and/or gene therapies to treat and/or prevent SARS-CoV-2 and/or COVID-19 made by Pfizer, BioNTech, Moderna, Johnson & Johnson, and Janssen.
All emails sent to and from the following DMID officials relating to the safety of ‘vaccines’ and/or gene therapies to treat and/or prevent SARSCoV-2 and/or COVID-19 made by Pfizer, BioNTech, Moderna, Johnson & Johnson, and Janssen:
The Director of DMID
The head of the Office of Genomics & Advanced Technologies
The head of the Office of International Research in Infectious Diseases
The head of the Office of Regulatory Affairs
The head of the Office of Clinical Research Affairs
The head of the Clinical Trials Management Section
The head of the Virology Branch
The head of the Respiratory Diseases Branch
The head of the Influenza, SARS, and Other Viral Respiratory Diseases Section
On May 3, 2022, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) released a paper titled “Safety and Immunogenicity of a Third Dose of SARS-CoV-2 mRNA Vaccine – An Interim Analysis” that “evaluated early safety and immunogenicity after a third mRNA vaccination in adults who received the mRNA-1273 primary series in the Phase 1 trial approximately 9 to 10 months earlier.”
Contributors to that study include three affiliates of the DMID: Mamodikoe Makhene (DMID medical officer), Wendy Buchanan (DMID Clinical Project Manager) and Paul Roberts (DMID Chief Respiratory Pathogens Clinical Research).
The Biden administration is playing shell games with documents on the COVID vaccine. The arrogant cover-up of COVID vaccine safety information further undermines public confidence in these already controversial drugs.
Through previous FOIA activity, we uncovered a substantial amount of information about COVID-19 issues:
In October, we uncovered FDA records regarding the COVID booster vaccines through a FOIA lawsuit for records of communication from the former director and deputy director of the FDA’s Office of Vaccines Research and Review, Dr. Marion Gruber and Dr. Philip Krause. On September 13, 2021, Gruber and Krause were among a group of resigning doctors who agreed that, “Available evidence doesn’t yet indicate a need for COVID-19 vaccine booster shots among the general population …”
In July 2022, NIH records revealed an FBI “inquiry” into the NIH’s controversial bat coronavirus grant tied to the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The records also show National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) officials were concerned about “gain-of-function” research in China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology in 2016. The Fauci agency was also concerned about EcoHealth Alliance’s lack of compliance with reporting rules and use of gain-of-function research in the NIH-funded research involving bat coronaviruses in Wuhan, China.
FDA records showed top officials being pressured by companies and the Biden administration to impose timelines on approval for the booster shots “that make no sense”
HHS records revealed that from 2014 to 2019, $826,277 was given to the Wuhan Institute of Virology for bat coronavirus research by the NIAID.
NIAID records showed that it gave nine China-related grants to EcoHealth Alliance to research coronavirus emergence in bats and was the NIH’s top issuer of grants to the Wuhan lab itself. The records also included an email from the vice director of the Wuhan Lab asking an NIH official for help finding disinfectants for decontamination of airtight suits and indoor surfaces.
HHS records included an “urgent for Dr. Fauci ” email chain, citing ties between the Wuhan lab and the taxpayer funded EcoHealth Alliance. The government emails also reported that the foundation of U.S. billionaire Bill Gates worked closely with the Chinese government to pave the way for Chinese-produced medications to be sold outside China and help “raise China’s voice of governance by placing representatives from China on important international counsels as high-level commitment from China.”
HHS records included a grant application for research involving the coronavirus that appears to describe “gain-of-function” research involving RNA extractions from bats, experiments on viruses, attempts to develop a chimeric virus and efforts to genetically manipulate the full-length bat SARSr-CoV WIV1 strain molecular clone.
HHS records showed the State Department and NIAID knew immediately in January 2020 that China was withholding COVID data, which was hindering risk assessment and response by public health officials.
University of Texas Medical Branch (UTMB) records show the former director of the Galveston National Laboratory at the University of Texas Medical Branch (UTMB), James W. Le Ducwarned Chinese researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology of potential investigations into the COVID issue by Congress.
HHS records regarding biodistribution studies and related data for the COVID-19 vaccines show a key component of the vaccines developed by Pfizer/BioNTech, lipid nanoparticles (LNPs), were found outside the injection site, mainly the liver, adrenal glands, spleen and ovaries of test animals, eight to 48 hours after injection.
Records from the Federal Select Agent Program (FSAP) reveal safety lapses and violations at U.S. biosafety laboratories that conduct research on dangerous agents and toxins.
HHS records include emails between National Institutes of Health (NIH) then-Director Francis Collins and Anthony Fauci, the director of National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), about hydroxychloroquine and COVID-19.
HHS records show that NIH officials tailored confidentiality forms to China’s terms and that the World Health Organization (WHO) conducted an unreleased, “strictly confidential” COVID-19 epidemiological analysis in January 2020.
Fauci emails include his approval of a press release supportive of China’s response to the 2019 novel coronavirus.
Despite all of this work, Judicial Watch is just getting started! I’ll keep you updated as more lawsuits are filed and more information comes in!
Dozens on Terrorist Watchlist Among Record 2.4 million Migrants Caught in 2022
Among the millions pouring across our southern border are some of the worst of the worst: violent gang members and potential terrorists. Our Corruption Chronicles blog paints the disturbing picture.
Besides shattering a U.S. record for apprehending nearly 2.4 million illegal immigrants along the Mexican border in fiscal year 2022, Border Patrol agents arrested hundreds of gang members—mostly from the famously violent Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13)—and dozens of people on the national terrorist watchlist. Federal agents also confiscated thousands of pounds of drugs, mainly methamphetamine, according to government figures released by Customs and Border Protection (CBP) just days ago. The startling year-end (fiscal years run from October to September) stats depict a chaotic Mexican border region rife with lawlessness that is inevitably seeping north.
It is serious enough that the number of migrants arrested in 2022 increased significantly over 2021, which at the time seemed like a crisis at 1.73 million. The Biden administration’s open border policies inspired a last-minute surge of 227,547 illegal aliens in September alone, the figures show. The overwhelming majority of those caught were single adults with the rest of the family units and unaccompanied minors. The Del Rio Border Patrol sector in Texas saw the most traffic with 480,930 illegal alien encounters, an increase of 85% over 2021. The Rio Grande Valley sector, also in Texas, came in second with 468,124 encounters. Other busy stations include Yuma in Arizona (310,094), El Paso (307,884) and Tucson (251,984).
As if the record-breaking figures were not disturbing enough, violent gangbangers, terrorists and drugs also crossed the border. The feds arrested 751 gang members compared to 348 in 2021. Nearly half—312—of those apprehended in 2022 belong to the MS-13, a feared street gang of mostly Central American illegal immigrants that has spread throughout the U.S. and is renowned for drug distribution, murder, rape, robbery, home invasions, kidnappings, vandalism and other violent crimes. The Justice Department’s National Gang Intelligence Center (NGIC) says criminal street gangs like the MS-13 are responsible for the majority of violent crimes in the U.S. and are the primary distributors of most illicit drugs. More than 145 members of Paisas, a prison gang of inmates from Mexico, were also apprehended crossing the border in 2022 and 146 from the 18th Street gang, a Los Angeles-based tribe known for recruiting youths.
In addition to all this, nearly 100 people on the U.S. government’s terrorist watchlist were apprehended at the Mexican border, the year-end figures reveal. That is a huge increase over 2021, when only 16 suspected terrorists were caught. The 98 people busted this year appear on a government database called Terrorist Screening Dataset (TSDS) that contains sensitive information on known or suspected terrorists as well as individuals who represent a potential threat to the U.S., including known affiliates of individuals on the watchlist, according to CBP. The agency claims in the year-end stats that encounters with individuals on the terrorist watchlist at U.S. borders is very “uncommon.” Judicial Watch has long reported on the increasing number of Muslim migrants—including from terrorist nations—entering the U.S. through the Mexican border. This includes a growing population from Bangladesh, a recruiting ground for terrorist groups such as the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) and Al-Qaeda Indian Subcontinent (AQIS), getting caught by federal agents along the U.S.-Mexico border.
Last year a Bangladeshi man based in Mexico was sentenced to 46 months in prison for operating an “international human smuggling conspiracy” during a period in which the U.S. saw a spike in migrants from terrorist nations entering the country through the famously porous southern border. The smuggler, 41-year-old Mohamad Milon Hossain, lived in Tapachula in the southeast Mexican state of Chiapas bordering Guatemala. The smuggling operation run by Hossain is part of a broader crisis involving a growing demographic of illegal aliens from terrorist nations entering the U.S. through the Mexican border. The government classifies them as Special Interest Aliens (SIA) and they are flowing north via Latin America in huge numbers, thanks to established Transitional Criminal Organizations (TCO) that facilitate travel along drug and migrant smuggling routes. Tens of thousands of SIAs—from the Middle East, Asia, and Africa—entered Panama and Colombia in recent years. Nearly all the SIA migrants were headed to the United States and most came from Syria, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Somalia, Bangladesh, and India.
DHS Slammed for Failing to Counter Terrorism, Manage Explosive Devices
It should come as no surprise that the massive federal agency created to protect the homeland (including our border) is a bureaucratic disaster. Our Corruption Chronicles blog has the details.
Two decades after the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) was created to protect the U.S. from another 9/11, the agency faces serious management and performance challenges that prevent it from fulfilling its critical mission, according to a federal audit that says DHS must improve how it identifies domestic terrorism threats and better manage its efforts to counter homemade explosive devices. DHS also got slammed for one of its biggest lapses, failing to secure the southern border. “Migrant surges require a whole-of-government approach,” according to the report issued days ago by the DHS Inspector General. However, a coordinated response did not occur because DHS failed to conduct multi-component planning between Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
Furthermore, the surges in immigration exposed technology challenges which impede CBP and ICE personnel from tracking migrants from apprehension to release or transfer, the probe found. “Technology deficiencies also meant that data was not consistently documented in DHS’ systems of record, which can delay DHS from uniting children with families and sponsors, or cause migrants to remain in DHS custody longer than legally allowed,” the watchdog writes in its report. Investigators also trash the way DHS managed the sudden influx of Ukrainian and Afghan citizens. Specifically, screening, vetting, and inspecting all evacuees after the Biden administration withdrew American troops from Afghanistan was a “challenge,” the report reveals, adding that the watchdog continues to evaluate CBP’s access to critical data necessary to fully vet individuals trying to enter the U.S.
The report delves into other areas such as DHS’ cybersecurity weaknesses and the famously corrupt Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), the 20,000-employee conglomerate created by former President Jimmy Carter’s executive order in 1979. FEMA operates under DHS and lists helping people before, during and after disasters as its mission. The agency has been involved in a multitude of scandals surrounding pervasive fraud in its COVID-19 relief programs. DHS and FEMA need to analyze systemic weaknesses across the spectrum of disaster-related funding and services, the IG writes, adding that the agencies must make overarching improvements in risk assessment, controls, policies, systems and applications, resources, training, and data. “As of July 31, 2022, OIG had received more than 7,500 complaints and initiated more than 300 investigations related to COVID-19, including allegations that fraud networks have secured pandemic-related benefits,” the new report states. Fraud and corruption is so rampant in the government’s massive COVID-19 cash giveaway that the Department of Justice (DOJ) created a COVID-19 Fraud Enforcement Task Force to “enhance efforts to combat and prevent pandemic-related fraud.”
This probe did not dig deeply into the pandemic fraud cases but offered enough information to convey the problem. Attached to the 17-page audit is a document issued by DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas and the “leadership team across all DHS components” listing the agency’s 12 priorities for 2022. They include advancing Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility (DEIA) in the workforce and to protect the privacy, civil rights, civil liberties, and human rights of the communities served as well to ensure DHS reflects the diversity of the communities it serves. Another priority is securing the nation’s borders by giving the agency’s workforce the tools to interdict irregular migration and illicit flows of drugs, weapons, and other contraband. Record-breaking illegal immigration in fiscal year 2022 proves that it never materialized. DHS also made it a priority to build a fair, orderly, and humane immigration system and to implement lawful pathways as alternatives to irregular migration and enhanced policies to administer the nation’s laws and uphold our values as a nation of immigrants expeditiously and fairly. The rest of the priorities include preparing the nation to respond and recover from disasters and combat the climate crisis, increasing cybersecurity and combatting all forms of terrorism.
After getting blasted by auditors, DHS struck back claiming in a lengthy letter that the report is “misleading” and accusing its watchdog of being “inaccurate, contextually incomplete and confusing.”
Until next week…
*
Note to readers: Please click the share buttons above. Follow us on Instagram and Twitter and subscribe to our Telegram Channel. Feel free to repost and share widely Global Research articles.
Featured image is from Children’s Health Defense
The Worldwide Corona Crisis, Global Coup d’Etat Against Humanity
by Michel Chossudovsky
Michel Chossudovsky reviews in detail how this insidious project “destroys people’s lives”. He provides a comprehensive analysis of everything you need to know about the “pandemic” — from the medical dimensions to the economic and social repercussions, political underpinnings, and mental and psychological impacts.
“My objective as an author is to inform people worldwide and refute the official narrative which has been used as a justification to destabilize the economic and social fabric of entire countries, followed by the imposition of the “deadly” COVID-19 “vaccine”. This crisis affects humanity in its entirety: almost 8 billion people. We stand in solidarity with our fellow human beings and our children worldwide. Truth is a powerful instrument.”
ISBN: 978-0-9879389-3-0, Year: 2022, PDF Ebook, Pages: 164, 15 Chapters
All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the Translate Website button below the author’s name.
To receive Global Research’s Daily Newsletter (selected articles), click here.
Follow us on Instagram and Twitter and subscribe to our Telegram Channel. Feel free to repost and share widely Global Research articles.
***
In the wake of fresh revelations that The Department of Homeland Security has been working relentlessly to shut down speech it deems to be ‘dangerous’ or ‘disinformation,’ Senator Rand Paul has promised to introduce legislation that would make it illegal for government agencies and private big tech to secretly collude on such enterprises.
Appearing on Fox News, Paul said of the Democratic Party,
“You know, for all the talk of democracy, it seems to be that they’re undermining the very basic principles of our constitutional republic.”
“Freedom of speech was listed in the first amendment because it was one of the most important rights that our Founders thought should be protected. But having the government collude with Big Tech to censor speech is something that goes against every grain of everything that anyone has ever spoken about as far as freedom of speech,” Paul urged.
The Senator continued,
“So when we get back in session, I’m going to introduce legislation that will forbid the government from colluding with private companies to censor speech.”
Paul further explained that
“this is a tricky situation because many people believe that the First Amendment doesn’t allow us to regulate the speech of private companies. But without question, we can regulate the government, and we can prevent and forbid the government from colluding with private tech on speech.”
“I think we should also preclude them and prohibit them from gathering up our data,” Paul further asserted, adding “we can’t really tell people on the Internet they can’t collect our data, you know, for sales and for marketing. But we can tell the government they can’t collect that data, because I don’t want the government profiling every citizen.”
“That goes against everything that we all believe in as far as the foundation of our constitutional republic,” The Senator proclaimed.
Paul further charged that Democrats “actually want to emulate China,” noting that
“They would weld your doors shut if they could.”
“This is the party of authoritarianism. The impulse to authoritarianism came with COVID. But the impulse to gather our information actually probably started with the Patriot act, all the way back to 2001. There was this impulse — we must be safe, we must be protected from terrorists,” Paul explained.
Referring to his father former Texas Congressman Ron Paul, The Senator noted “my dad warned — he warned early on that this kind of going after terrorists would ultimately be used on us.”
“When they finally came and used the Patriot Act on Donald Trump, that was when we knew this wasn’t about terrorism, it was about suppressing dissent from people they disagree with,” Paul stated.
As we highlighted yesterday, ‘fact checking’ isn’t the real principle driving the Biden regime’s drive to censor, as they continue to pump out their own disinformation on social media.
*
Note to readers: Please click the share buttons above. Follow us on Instagram and Twitter and subscribe to our Telegram Channel. Feel free to repost and share widely Global Research articles.
All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the Translate Website button below the author’s name.
To receive Global Research’s Daily Newsletter (selected articles), click here.
Follow us on Instagram and Twitter and subscribe to our Telegram Channel. Feel free to repost and share widely Global Research articles.
***
The US Defense Department finally released the 2022 Nuclear Posture Review (NPR) last Thursday (October 27). It reveals a shocking naïveté about how the real world works by ignoring two basic defense principles: the “security dilemma” and the “fallacy of the last move.” For example, the NPR describes US nuclear modernization plans as a necessary response to Russia’s and China’s activities and ignores the logical and inevitable response of both countries to US plans. By building new military capabilities to try to increase US security, Russia and China will likely feel threatened and respond by taking steps that will undermine US security. No one can have the last move. And on it goes.
A wise defense planner would consider the likely response of its adversaries—and seek to not undermine their nuclear security as well—for the hard-nosed reason that doing so is in the security interest of the United States.
Moreover, the NPR’s statement that there is an “urgent need to sustain and strengthen deterrence” is absurd, as if deterrence was some type of delicate flower that needed constant care and feeding to stay alive. The notion that the willingness of any country to launch nuclear weapons at the United States or its allies would depend on any specific aspect of the US arsenal is equally absurd.
In addition to these broader issues, the NPR includes several important revelations.
Using nuclear weapons. First, the good news. Obama’s 2010 NPR declared “the US will not use or threaten to use nuclear weapons against non-nuclear weapons states that are party to the NPT and are in compliance with their non-proliferation obligations.” (This declaration holds in the face of conventional, chemical, or biological attacks.)
For the remaining four nations—China, Iran, North Korea, and Russia—the United States reserved the option to use nuclear weapons in response to non-nuclear attacks, but only “in extreme circumstances to defend the vital interests of the United States or its allies and partners in a narrow range of contingencies.”
Both the Trump and Biden NPRs repeat these declarations word-for-word. It appears that Obama’s policy has become firmly embedded in US nuclear policy.
Reducing the hedge. Second, some other (maybe) good news. The new NPR states: “Hedging against an uncertain future is no longer a stated role for nuclear weapons.”
The United States has long maintained a stockpile of stored weapons roughly equal in size to the deployed arsenal for two reasons: to replace one type of weapon with another type should an unexpected technical problem arise, and to allow a rapid increase in deployed weapons by adding more warheads to US missiles, which can accommodate far more weapons than are deployed. No US administration has taken either of these steps.
This statement seems to make good on the pledge in Obama’s NPR which stated that “By modernizing our aging nuclear weapons-supporting facilities and investing in human capital, we can substantially reduce the number of stockpiled nuclear weapons we retain as a hedge against technical or geopolitical surprise.” Over the past decade, the United States has made those investments and should now be able to essentially eliminate the roughly 2,000 weapons in its hedge stockpile.
Yet, the statement has odd and unclear wording. Does it mean the Pentagon will continue to hedge, but not state it publicly? Is this indicative of Pentagon foot-dragging—in which case it won’t happen without the insistence of Biden and future presidents and a Congressional requirement with corresponding budget constraints? Biden did not insist on a sole authority policy, so it is unlikely he will insist on reducing the hedge.
Now for the bad news.
Reliance on nuclear weapons and a “sole purpose” policy. The NPR takes a substantial step back from Obama’s objective of “reducing the role of nuclear weapons in US security strategy.”
In contrast, Biden’s NPR states that the United States is “taking steps to advance the goal of reducing reliance on nuclear weapons.” Moreover, moving in this direction will require that several (quite substantial) “security, political and technology conditions evolve in ways that allow [the United States] to do so.” Clearly, reducing reliance is no longer on the Pentagon’s agenda. (Ironically, the NPR states that Russia and China “have demonstrated little interest in reducing their reliance on nuclear weapons.”)
An essential element of reducing reliance on nuclear weapons is a “sole purpose” policy in which the only purpose of US nuclear weapons is to deter the use of such weapons against itself and its allies and partners and, if necessary, respond.
Obama’s NPR stated the US goal was to adopt a sole-purpose policy and, during the 2021 presidential campaign, Biden pledged he would adopt do so if elected. However, his NPR does not include this policy and, far worse, it rejects a sole-purpose policy now and far into the future, stating that it “would result in an unacceptable level of risk” and that “for the foreseeable future US nuclear weapons will continue to provide unique deterrence effects.” These “unique deterrence effects” refer to the belief that nuclear weapons are uniquely capable of deterring and responding to some non-nuclear threats.
Arms control with Russia and China. Biden’s NPR states that the United States is committed to putting “diplomacy first” and is placing renewed emphasis on arms control. At the top of the list is a follow-on to the New START agreement, which expires in 2026. However, when the agreement was extended in 2021, Russia made clear that it would not make further cuts in its strategic arsenal unless the United States accepted constraints on its missile defenses. China certainly has similar concerns. Until the United States is willing to limit its defenses against long-range missiles, nuclear arms control will be at a dead end.
This was the logic underlying the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty that strictly limited US and Soviet defenses against long-range missiles: Without such limits, both countries would simply build more weapons to overwhelm these defenses. The United States withdrew from the treaty in 2002 and now the chickens have come home to roost. The increased capacity of the Aegis sea-based missile defense system could result in a significant expansion of US defenses against long-range missiles—a clear concern to Russia and China.
New nuclear weapon types. The new NPR has completely abandoned Obama’s nominal pledge “to not develop new nuclear weapons.” Unfortunately, Obama’s NPR left a large loophole—that the weapons labs exploited. Nuclear weapon designers began working on new designs, arguing their new supercomputers allow them to do so without the need for explosive testing.
The original purpose of these supercomputers was to allow US weapons laboratories to better maintain the warheads in the current arsenal after the United States stopped nuclear explosive testing in 1992 in preparation for negotiations on the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT). (The United States signed the CTBT in 1996 although it has yet to ratify it.) US plans to design and build new nuclear weapons completely undermine the explicit purpose of the CTBT to prevent such “vertical proliferation.” Moreover, even if the weapons laboratories are confident in these new designs, it opens the door to future calls for renewed explosive testing which would be an international disaster, and almost certainly lead to the resumption of testing by other nations.
Yet, Biden has doubled down on new weapons.
The NPR calls for reestablishing the capabilities and infrastructure to return to full-scope nuclear weapons production, which will allow “regular and timely incorporation of advanced technologies to improve safety, security and reliability.” In other words, new warheads will be designed, produced, and dismantled on a regular cycle. This is a return to the Cold War practice of continuously building new types of warheads.
This NPR is a repudiation of Obama’s pledge to “seek the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons.” It is shocking that President Biden signed off on this document.
*
Note to readers: Please click the share buttons above. Follow us on Instagram and Twitter and subscribe to our Telegram Channel. Feel free to repost and share widely Global Research articles.
Lisbeth Gronlund is a research affiliate with the Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering at MIT.
Featured image: President Joe Biden delivers remarks to Department of Defense personnel at the Pentagon on February 10, 2021. (DoD/Lisa Ferdinando)
All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the Translate Website button below the author’s name.
To receive Global Research’s Daily Newsletter (selected articles), click here.
Follow us on Instagram and Twitter and subscribe to our Telegram Channel. Feel free to repost and share widely Global Research articles.
***
As environmental advocates call on regulators to “lead with sound science” regarding the proposed release of thousands of genetically engineered mosquitoes on a weekly basis in central California, eight Democratic lawmakers on Thursday demanded that officials reject the proposal without an in-depth review of its potential impacts.
Biotech company Oxitec aims to make California the second state—after Florida—to have an experimental release of its genetically engineered (GE) mosquitoes, and has applied for a permit to conduct research with its product at 48 test sites in Tulare County. The experimental release would target the mosquito species Aedes aegypti and aim to reduce its population in Tulare County.
According to the California Department of Pesticide Regulation (DPR), which can approve or deny the research authorization, between 5,000 and 30,000 GE mosquitoes would be released on a weekly basis at each site and the permit would be effective through April 30, 2024.
While Oxitec has previously highlighted the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s conclusion that such releases don’t adversely affect humans or the environment, the California lawmakers said in a letter to the DPR that a review of the proposal by the EPA is not sufficient.
“Significant scientific research is still needed to understand the potential public health and environmental concerns associated with the release of this novel insect prior to any approval,” wrote the legislators. “It is our understanding that while the U.S. EPA did approve the GE mosquitoes to be released in California, the agency did not conduct a thorough scientific review of the impacts of this insect on public health or the environment. California must require more and better information prior to any approval.”
The lawmakers suggested the DPR conduct a public review of data from Florida regarding the state’s experimental release of GE mosquitoes, hold public meetings where community members can express concerns and hear from independent experts, and establish an independent scientific advisory panel to review Oxitec’s proposal.
“Before we permit the use of genetically engineered mosquitoes, the California Department of Pesticide Regulation should provide for clear rules and a review of public health and environmental risks of releasing the insects in a public process,” said Assemblymember Laura Friedman, who represents Glendale. “There are too many unknown factors when it comes to how it could affect our biodiversity in the long run, including how this might influence populations of birds, bats, fish species, and other insects.”
Rebecca Spector, West Coast director at the Center for Food Safety, applauded the legislators for “taking action to protect public health and the environment from the unknown impacts of GE mosquitoes.”
“They rightfully are asking DPR to conduct a more comprehensive review and public meetings for residents that will be impacted, before approving this permit,” said Spector.
Angel Garcia, a Tulare County resident who is co-director of Californians for Pesticide Reform, called the push to conduct the experiment “an environmental justice issue.”
“Tulare County residents are already impacted by some of the worst pollution problems, and climate change has already exacerbated environmental destruction, economic and social inequity,” said Garcia. “People have not consented to being part of this open-air biopesticide experiment.”
From Common Dreams: Our work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.
*
Note to readers: Please click the share buttons above. Follow us on Instagram and Twitter and subscribe to our Telegram Channel. Feel free to repost and share widely Global Research articles.
All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the Translate Website button below the author’s name.
To receive Global Research’s Daily Newsletter (selected articles), click here.
Follow us on Instagram and Twitter and subscribe to our Telegram Channel. Feel free to repost and share widely Global Research articles.
***
People around the world have expressed concerns about Israelis empowering indicted former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to form the nation’s most far-right government in history since Israel held its fifth election in less than four years on Tuesday.
“If you are shocked and horrified by this growing, emboldened Israeli fascist movement, ask yourself how you’ll commit to opposing Jewish supremacist ideology, policies, and institutions in days and years ahead,” Simone Zimmerman, co-founder of the American Jewish group IfNotNow, tweeted late Wednesday. “Fighting fascism, authoritarianism, and racism everywhere is our only hope.”
The results were confirmed Thursday. Netanyahu’s party, Likud, secured 32 seats in the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, followed by outgoing Prime Minister Yair Lapid’s Yesh Atid with 24 seats. The bloc breakdown, as Haaretz reported, is 64 seats for the Netanyahu camp and 51 for the current coalition.
“The election’s biggest surprise is the resounding success of the radical right-wing Religious Zionism coalition,” Mitchell Plitnick, president of ReThinking Foreign Policy, wrote Wednesday for Responsible Statecraft, stressing that party leaders Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir will have “enormous influence in the coalition politics of the next Israeli government.”
The far-right alliance, which won 14 seats, “was put together from several smaller lists, including Otzma Yehudit (‘Jewish Power’), Noam, which fights for conservative ‘family values,’ the National Union-Tekuma and Jewish Home,” Middle East Eyeexplained.
Jewish Power (let that name sink in) Ben Gvir has a conviction record of incitement & support for terrorism. Israel’s occupation army considered him so extreme, unhinged, & violent that they wouldn’t let him enlist. Congratulate Israel on its next minister of public security! https://t.co/VHzu7A7wcwpic.twitter.com/kuA4HMPvXS
The other parties that won some of the 120 seats were: National Unity Party (12), Shas (11), United Torah Judaism (7), Yisrael Beitenu (6), Hadash-Ta’al (5), the United Arab List (5), and Labor (4). Haaretz noted that “left-wing party Meretz was just a few thousand votes short of making it into the next Knesset, ending a three-decade-long era of political representation.”
Netanyahu—who has been charged with accepting bribes, breach of trust, and fraud but denied any wrongdoing—will soon have four weeks to form a government.
The Associated Presshighlighted that Netanyahu will have to work with Smotrich, “a West Bank settler who has made anti-Arab remarks” and aspires to lead Israel’s Defense Ministry, and Ben-Gvir, “a disciple of a racist anti-Arab rabbi,” Meir Kahane.
Meet Itamar Ben-Gvir, "the David Duke of Israel," who is on course to join Israel's new coalition government & makes Marjorie Taylor Green look like a woke leftist.
My take on the Israeli elections, U.S. parallels, & Israel's own turn towards neo-fascism:pic.twitter.com/rfVmsAjDln
Ben-Gvir says he wants to end Palestinian autonomy in parts of the West Bank and until recently hung a photo in his home of Baruch Goldstein, an American-Israeli who killed 29 Palestinians in a West Bank shooting attack in 1994. Ben-Gvir, who seeks to deport Arab legislators, says he wants to be put in charge of the national police force.
Religious Zionism has promised to enact changes to Israeli law that could make Netanyahu’s legal woes disappear and, along with other nationalist allies, they want to weaken the independence of the judiciary and concentrate more power in the hands of lawmakers.
“Netanyahu has never led a coalition with such ideological cohesion,” Yousef Munayyer, a senior fellow at the Arab Center Washington D.C., tweeted of Israel’s longest-serving prime minister, warning of a “stable, unified, right-wing religious nationalist government” that will pursue an “extra racist agenda.”
Aida Touma-Suleiman, a Knesset member for Hadash, toldThe New York Times: “These are difficult days… This isn’t the ordinary, classic right that we know. This is a change—in which a racist, violent right-wing threatens to turn into fascism.”
IfNotNow said in a series of tweets Wednesday that “as Jews, we’re repulsed by the results of the Israeli election. But we’re not surprised. We need to recognize how we got here. The victory for Kahanists is the product of an apartheid regime that suppresses the rights of Palestinians on both sides of the green line.”
“Itamar Ben-Gvir and other Kahanists only became the third largest party in Israel with the support of Jewish-Israeli leaders across the political spectrum who prefer empowering Jewish ultranationalists and fascists to partnering with Palestinians,” the group continued. “Those right-wing leaders confirmed what we already know: For them, Jewish power means trampling on freedom and equality to uphold a system of supremacy and exclusion.”
We are standing alongside our Palestinian partners, demanding equity, fairness, justice, and freedom for Jews and Palestinians.
And we’re working alongside those who are resisting authoritarians, fascists and ethnonationalists around the world.
The U.S. group Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) declared that “Israeli elections make clear the truth that Palestinians have always known: The Israeli state isn’t just founded on Jewish supremacy, it depends on it.”
Hagai El-Ad, executive director of the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem, said that “with today’s rise of the racist ‘Jewish Power’ party, the quiet part of Israel’s regime of Jewish supremacy over Palestinians has never been louder. To date, the world was mostly silent in the face of this 21st century reality of apartheid.”
“No one should be allowed to continue pretending that the ugly reverberations of Israel’s decadeslong subjugation, disenfranchisement, and oppression of Palestinians hasn’t reached their ears,” he argued. “Global silence was, and remains, complicity. It underwrote today’s political outcome. That silence must now—ever so belatedly—be replaced with action, effective consequences, and accountability.”
Some observers specifically focused on the United States, a key ally that provides Israel with billions of dollars in military aid each year.
“The inclusion of far-right Jewish supremacists in Israel’s governing coalition will add to the ongoing narrative shift that is making it increasingly difficult for folks to continue to make excuses for Israel’s war crimes and human rights violations,” Tariq Kenney-Shawa, U.S. policy fellow at the Palestinian think tank Al-Shabaka, toldAl Jazeera.
Yes, truly inspiring to see record numbers of Israelis turn out to the polls to show support for violent Jewish supremacists, all while 5 million + Palestinians who will continue being oppressed were held under lockdown on election day.
Beth Miller, political director at JVP Action, told Al Jazeera that the election results serve as a “moment of exposure” for Israel’s “Jewish supremacist” policy as well as an “escalation” in an already unjust system of “apartheid,” a term increasingly used by human rights advocates.
“Israel shouldn’t be separated from the rise of far-right authoritarianism and fascism across the globe,” Miller said. “At the same time, the U.S. has a long-standing history of always turning its head the other way whenever the Israeli government is carrying out systemic human rights violations.”
“Now, what that means is that we’re in a moment of reckoning here in the U.S.,” she added.
In his piece for Responsible Statecraft, Mitchell made the case that “the power and influence Ben-Gvir, Smotrich, and other far-right figures will inevitably wield” in the new government “should provoke a reassessment in Washington’s approach to diplomacy with Israel, particularly regarding the Palestinians.”
However, Mitchell also expressed skepticism that President Joe Biden—who on Wednesday night delivered an impassioned speech about rising authoritarianism in the United States, just days before the midterm elections—will make any major changes to the U.S. relationship with Israel:
Indeed, U.S. inaction has only made conditions for progress worse. It has effectively allowed the issue of Palestinian rights, let alone prospects for a resolution of the conflict, to be swept from view. Even Palestinian citizens of Israel, who hoped for progress last year when, for the first time in Israeli history, a party that represented some of their community was part of the governing coalition, now find themselves in a very dangerous position with openly racist parties in control of their government. Millions more Palestinians under occupation were, of course, denied the vote and must now prepare themselves for more assaults by settlers and Israeli soldiers.
This is not a time to hope things get better. The Biden administration must make it clear to Israel that all Palestinians are entitled to basic human rights. The Israeli right has long made a point of “standing up” to its patron in Washington. This new government is certain to lean heavily on that idea. It will be crucial for Biden to stand up against that, though his track record offers little hope that he will.
In an early signal of the Biden administration’s position, a spokesperson for the U.S. State Department, Ned Price, told reporters Wednesday that “we hope that all Israeli government officials will continue to share the values of an open, democratic society including tolerance and respect for all in civil society, particularly for minority groups.”
After the election results were confirmed Thursday, the U.S. ambassador to Israel, Tom Nides, tweeted that during a “good call” with Netanyahu, “I congratulated him on his victory and told him I look forward to working together to maintain the unbreakable bond.”
From Common Dreams: Our work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.
*
Note to readers: Please click the share buttons above. Follow us on Instagram and Twitter and subscribe to our Telegram Channel. Feel free to repost and share widely Global Research articles.
All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the Translate Website button below the author’s name.
To receive Global Research’s Daily Newsletter (selected articles), click here.
Follow us on Instagram and Twitter and subscribe to our Telegram Channel. Feel free to repost and share widely Global Research articles.
First published by GR on October 16, 2022
***
Sometimes top military warriors tell US war presidents the painful truth.
That happened yesterday when retired admiral Mike Mullen, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under George W. Bush and Barack Obama, urged President Biden to begin negotiations to end America’s newest endless war.
And a peculiar endless war it is….America squandering its desperately needed treasure so Ukraine can squander its economy, infrastructure and precious blood on a war it can’t win short of America nuking Russia.
President Biden is doing precisely the opposite: funneling endless billions to keep the war going while dismissing negotiations out of hand.
Mullen didn’t mince words, telling Biden to “back off” scaremongering words of nuclear Armageddon and quickly bring Ukraine and Russia to the negotiating table. He called Biden’s remarks as being “at the top of the language scale” and he wasn’t being complementary.
Mullen was channeling those of us in the peace community when he said “As is typical in any war, it’s gotta end and usually there are negotiations associated with that. The sooner the better, as far as I’m concerned.”
Biden’s war conduct has been worse than simply poo-pooing negotiations. He directly undermined a potential 15 point peace agreement in March brokered by Turkey that could have ended the war in its first month.
Turkey, bless em, will try again tomorrow when their President Erdogan will meet with Russian President Putin to discuss Turkey brokering a new round of peace talks.
That should be encouraging. But it’s likely to go nowhere when America, in its lust to degrade, weaken, Russia, keeps Ukraine President Zelensky’s hopeless dreams of victory alive.
Biden and the US war party still view perpetual war as the wealth of the state. More likely it’s the death of the state. This time it may include all of us.
*
Note to readers: Please click the share buttons above or below. Follow us on Instagram and Twitter and subscribe to our Telegram Channel. Feel free to repost and share widely Global Research articles.
Featured image: United States Navy Admiral Michael G. Mullen, 17th Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. (Photo by United States Department of Defense, licensed under the Public Domain)
The Worldwide Corona Crisis, Global Coup d’Etat Against Humanity
