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I was appalled, but not surprised, when on Saturday, September 24, the Dean of Students at Wellesley College, where I am a student, buried at the end of an email to the student body that all students at Wellesley would be required to receive a shot of the new bivalent Covid-19 booster. Then on October 11, we were informed this mandate would take effect on December 1, nearly three weeks before the end of the semester. 

This announcement follows similar decisions from Tufts University, Harvard University, and the University of California, among others. It also follows a growing body of evidence that there are, for a non-trivial percentage of the vaccinated—especially the young—serious, potentially lifelong, and potentially fatal side effects—such as myocarditis and autoimmune disease—to the vaccine, which CDC director Rochelle Walensky acknowledges does not stop transmission of the coronavirus.

Moreover, this newest bivalent vaccine, designed to protect against the now-defunct Omicron variant, was approved without any trials confirming safety or efficacy. And regarding the latter, at least, the slim evidence we do have is not promising. So why is Wellesley—and why are all these other colleges—mandating their disproportionately young, disproportionately healthy students partake in a human trial for a vaccine that does not stop the transmission of a variant that became almost entirely obsolete months ago?

The message from Wellesley could not be more clear: the education of students here, or at least our ability to complete it, is contingent on our willingness to take a medical treatment that did not exist when I enrolled here. There is no consent, only coercion, with participation in a human trial joining physical education and foreign language proficiency as a prerequisite for graduation.

Administrators, rather than trusting the students whom they admitted to make our own risk-return analyses, have chosen to override basic bodily autonomy in favor of pushing vaccines that seem increasingly concerning for the young, a fact which is now being recognized around the world: in Denmark for instance, public health officials halted vaccines entirely for low-risk people under 50; Norway is not even doing first shots anymore for those under 45 years of age. At some point, the question must be asked whether colleges which ask students to play immunization-card Russian roulette are colleges whose credentials signal anything more than willingness to comply.

What risk to safety are colleges such as mine asking students such as myself to assume? When the administrators of Wellesley, a women’s college, mandate a fourth shot of a vaccine that is now known to cause menstrual irregularities, a fact confirmed by study after study and acknowledged by even the strongest proponents of vaccination, what they are saying is not only that we have to choose between immunization against a months-old variant and our educations, but that we have to choose between disruptions to our menstrual and ovulatory cycles and our educations.

To be blunt, this has the potential not just to disrupt overall health, but fertility, too, so colleges are not just telling us they get to control and disrupt our bodies, but also, potentially, our families; not just our presents, but also, potentially, our futures.

This is not even mentioning heart or autoimmune health that covid vaccination is known to take a toll on, and the host of conditions vaccination has been proven to cause. Will colleges—and college administrators—be footing medical bills for any health-related problems their mandates cost? Will administrators experience the physical and emotional burden?

Because administrators seem to have decided that there is no overreach too personal to commit against students: this is despite the fact that the risk-return analysis that these same administrators conducted last year now appears dubious at best, outright dangerous at worst.

If their compulsion to impose more mandates is not about health or efficacy, it must be about something else. The simplest explanation is that this compulsion is about the mandate itself—about the appearance of progressivism and elite stature, given that progressive and elite institutions now define themselves by their willingness to look like they are “taking Covid-19 seriously” at the expense of essentially every other consideration.

Here is a question no administrators seem to be asking: what does it mean when a college tells its students that their bodies belong to the whims of bureaucrats rather than to themselves? It means that students are being groomed to believe that being an educated person means keeping one’s head down and submitting to every top-down order uncritically.

While a place like Wellesley prides itself on the atmosphere of intellectualism it claims to foster and while it claims to value academic freedom—which formed the basis of President Paula Johnson’s speech at convocation in September—all of Wellesley’s commitments to autonomy of speech are utterly meaningless when its community is denied autonomy of body, which is also autonomy of mind.

On some level, then, ongoing vaccine mandates like Wellesley’s represent the decay of American academia and show where its real loyalties lie. Educating and forming students is, for college administrators, secondary to being part of the “right” ideological crowd (whether or not that ideological crowd is right). Not all institutions have caved to this pressure: in July, the University of Chicago rescinded its booster mandate and is no longer requiring exemptions from vaccination, and Williams College (which, like Wellesley, is an elite liberal arts college in Massachusetts) at least appears to have walked back its booster mandate.

But seeing other institutional policies almost makes the reality at a place like Wellesley worse. Despite all available evidence, and despite other institutions reversing course, many administrators across the nation who are supposed to concern themselves with the well-being of their students are making decisions not on scientific evidence nor on the safety of their students, but instead on politics. This should scare everyone.

Rumblings of anger can be heard at Wellesley, but the constant cycles of cancellation and gaslighting from the College and within the community have rendered many would-be dissenters too emotionally wounded to say a word about college vaccination policies. (There is a reason I am writing this anonymously.) But this silencing cannot possibly last forever.

If Wellesley—or if any one of the other institutions with remaining vaccine mandates—thinks it faces no consequences, it is sorely mistaken: as students, as well as faculty and staff, trace their own adverse medical events back to college mandates, the buck for the physical damage will stop with colleges, morally, legally, and financially. The mandates will fade, but the memory of the mandates will not; colleges like mine have all but ensured they are dead men walking.

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Anon Wellesley student remains that way because she would like to continue as a student.

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In a two-hour conversation last week, Megyn Kelly, a journalist, lawyer and political commentator, and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., discussed a wide range of topics including censorship and how Pfizer’s $1 million donation to former President Trump killed Trump’s vaccine safety commission.

One of the topics they hit on was censorship — specifically, how Dr. Scott Gottlieb, a former U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) official who is a director at Pfizer — was likely instrumental in getting Twitter to censor Alex Berenson for questioning the government’s official COVID-19 narrative.

Berenson, a former New York Times journalist and author, recently revealed that Scott Gottlieb “secretly pressed” Twitter to censor him days before Twitter suspended his account last year.

“So here you have a Pfizer director running cover for [Dr. Anthony] Fauci,” Kelly said, adding that Gottlieb is “just one example” of former government regulators who “miraculously wind up at Big Pharma getting big paychecks right after they leave” their government jobs.

“This system is corrupt and it leads to disinformation,” she added.

Kennedy, chairman of the board and chief legal counsel for Children’s Health Defense, agreed — and then he told Kelly a larger part of the story about Gottlieb’s ties to the pharmaceutical industry’s attempts to prevent cogent information from reaching the public about vaccines.

In January 2017, Kennedy was asked by then-president Trump to run a vaccine safety commission, he said.

Kennedy agreed to head the commission to “make sure the right studies were being done to make sure that each vaccine was actually working” by conducting control studies — “the same studies that are required for every other medication.”

But when it was announced that Kennedy would lead the vaccine safety commission, “there was panic throughout the industry and the public health regulatory agencies,” he said.

Next, came a financial power play.

Pfizer made a $1 million contribution to Trump, Kennedy told Kelly, after which Trump appointed two people “hand-picked by Pfizer” as top officials for the government’s health regulatory agencies.

Those two people were Alex Azar, to run the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), and Gottlieb to run the FDA.

Both Azar and Gottlieb had executive ties to Big Pharma. That signaled the premature death of the control studies on vaccines.

“They killed the vaccine safety commission,” Kennedy said. “I don’t know exactly how it happened, but as soon as those guys got in there they stopped answering our calls or communicating with us.”

Kelly said Gottlieb dodged tough questions when she interviewed him earlier on her show about COVID-19 masking policies for children, telling her team after the interview, “I’m a respected authority, you know.”

“It’s like, ‘oh, okay … but that doesn’t give you a pass on tough questions,’” Kelly said.

Kennedy and Kelly covered a host of other topics relating to public policy, politics and children’s health.

Here are some of the highlights:

• 6:25: U.S. founders thought that “the free flow of information annealedin the furnace of debate would yield the most beneficial public policies.”
• 7:31: The U.S. Bill of Rights was “plowed under” during the COVID-19 pandemic.
• 10:54: COVID-19 countermeasures “were a war on the poor” as Kennedy explained in his latest book, “A Letter to Liberals.”
• 11:26: Children lost 22 IQ points during the pandemic.
• 22:07: Injuries related to COVID-19 vaccination are real, with a particular risk of myocarditis in men ages 16-24.
• 25:40: Pfizer and Moderna don’t want to release data on the comorbidities and ages of participants in their clinical trials. “It’s troubling that the FDA has intervened on behalf of Pfizer to say ‘we don’t want anybody to see this data for 75 years,’” Kennedy said.
• 42:01: “It’s hard to come up with exact numbers” regarding COVID-19 because of the U.S. government’s obfuscation of vaccine-related data.
• 43:52: Other countries, such as Singapore, Japan and the U.K., are producing quality COVID-19 data.
• 44:16: Recent studies are showing “antibody-dependent enhancement” in individuals who received COVID-19 vaccines.
• 45:53: The official data do not count individuals as “vaccinated” until two weeks after the second shot, so deaths that occur prior to that are attributed as “unvaccinated.”
• 51:31: Fauci’s agency, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, owns 50% of the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine and gets royalties from its sales.
• 57:32: Alex Berenson revealed Scott Gottlieb was instrumental in getting him banned from Twitter.
• 1:03:58: Dr. Joseph Ladapo, surgeon general of Florida, is “frustrated with the lack of honesty coming from the vaccine companies,” and was also censored by Twitter.
• 1:06:10: Ladapo is a “problem” for Democrats because he’s “very courageous and he’s very credible.”
• 1:09:52: The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, or VAERS, is broken.
• 1:10:42: A Harvard three-year study concluded that VAERS collected fewer than 1% of vaccine injuries.
• 1:12:11: The CDC “ran away” when presented with a new, effective solution for tracking vaccine-related injuries.
• 1:15:25: Opinions of the American Academy of Pediatrics “have nothing to do with public health but have to do with pharmaceutical profits and promoting the pharmaceutical paradigm.”
• 1:23:00: It took many years for Kennedy to “get a more expansive view” about what’s happening with Big Pharma’s impact on children’s health, so he doesn’t expect members of his own family “who don’t have the time to make this kind of exploration” to believe him.
• 1:24:02: Kennedy does not hold it against them but invites a “congenial, respectful debate” that focuses on the science and stays away from ad hominem attacks.
• 1:24:45: He said he is not hard-headed about his worldview and is open to changing his opinions based on “new factual inputs” and someone showing him where he was mistaken.
• 1:25:09: They discussed Kennedy’s opinions of Trump and how Trump’s approach to politics differed from that of Kennedy’s father.
• 1:37:51: The war in Ukraine is a complicated issue that Kennedy’s family debates at the dinner table.
• 1:38:11: Kennedy’s 26-year-old son joined the Foreign Legion and has been fighting in Ukraine.
• 1:42:38: President Eisenhower gave “probably the most important speech in American history” warning the American public about the rise of the military-industrial complex and how it would subdue and destroy American democracy.

Kelly and Kennedy concluded their conversation by discussing past U.S. political figures and global politics.

Watch the full interview here:

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Suzanne Burdick, Ph.D., is a reporter and researcher for The Defender based in Fairfield, Iowa. She holds a Ph.D. in Communication Studies from the University of Texas at Austin (2021), and a master’s degree in communication and leadership from Gonzaga University (2015). Her scholarship has been published in Health Communication. She has taught at various academic institutions in the United States and is fluent in Spanish.

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

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Video link links to stories discussed.

RFK Jr. called it “an act of child abuse on a massive scale.” Thursday’s CDC decision to add COVID mRNA vaccines to the childhood schedule was certainly abusive. But it could be argued that it wasn’t just child abuse, but also an avatar of the ancient ritual of child sacrifice.

Before diving deeper into the human sacrifice angle, let’s clarify what just happened: Children are being injected with a potentially dangerous substance that brings them essentially no health benefits whatsoever.

COVID mRNA vaccines are still classified as experimental. That means the CDC is trying to force American children to participate in a scientific experiment—a blatant violation of the Nuremburg Code.

The ostensible justification for forcing entire populations to participate in medical experiments is the “emergency” of the COVID pandemic. MRNA vaccines are only permitted under an Emergency Use Authorization. But not only is the emergency phase of the pandemic obviously over, there never was any children’s health emergency to begin with. A Nature Medicine study using the British National Health Service National Child Mortality Data Base found that the COVID mortality rate in children is .0002%, or approximately two in a million. And of that vanishingly small number of deaths, three-quarters involved chronic health conditions, two-thirds had multiple co-morbidities, and 60% had life-limiting conditions.

So why on earth would anyone mRNA-vaccinate their child? Presumably for the same reason that elders deliberately devastated American children’s educational and emotional-psychological development by closing schools and forcing children as young as two years to wear masks: They believe the damage to children’s health and well-being is worth it (just as Madeleine Albright thought murdering half a million Iraqi children was worth it) because by abusing the children “we are saving grandma” (and to a lesser extent teachers, parents, and other adults).*

Madeleine Albright’s enthusiastic approval of the murder of half a million children, like America’s deliberate devastation of its children during and after the COVID pandemic, appears at first glance to be an oversight. Surely Albright cannot have meant that! Certainly Americans wouldn’t intentionally inflict debilitating handicaps and dangerous experiments on their own kids!

It depends what you mean by words like “deliberately” and “intentionally.” Poets and storytellers have always known what Freud claimed to have discovered in the late 19th century: Much human motivation is unconscious, especially when it involves the darker, atavistic aspects of our psyches.

With that in mind, let’s consider the possibility that something is driving Americans to sacrifice their young. Evidence for that thesis abounds: Not just the way kids have been thrown to the COVID Moloch, but also:

• The fact that Americans are killing almost a million of their unborn children every year;
• The ongoing scandal of ever-expanding routine vaccinations (currently 72 injections of 91 antigens), the probable cause of the explosion of chronic illnesses that has crippled younger generations;
• The way babies and young childen are ripped from their mothers’ arms at ever-earlier ages and consigned to the not-so-tender mercies of commercial day care facilities;
• The way the welfare system and degenerating social mores have conspired to ensure that ever-greater numbers of American children grow up in emotionally-, culturally-, and economically-impoverished single-parent families;
• And finally, the existence of widespread child trafficking and sex slavery, in which the highest level of American political, economic, and journalistic elites are deeply implicated.

Let’s face it: As George Clinton said, America eats its young.

But how is that “sacrifice”? Where does Moloch come in? To answer those questions, we need to review the seminal work of anthropologist-philosopher René Girard, who argued that all cultures are grounded in human sacrifice. As Stanford News noted in its November 2015 obituary:

“Girard was interested in the causes of conflict and violence and the role of imitation in human behavior. Our desires, he wrote, are not our own; we want what others want. These duplicated desires lead to rivalry and violence. He argued that human conflict was not caused by our differences, but rather by our sameness. Individuals and societies offload blame and culpability onto an outsider, a scapegoat, whose elimination reconciles antagonists and restores unity.”

The scapegoat onto which blame is offloaded is typically a powerless, marginalized individual or community. The scapegoat’s innocence, paradoxically, may make them even more of a target: Think of the virgins thrown to volcanos, or the blameless goat laden with the community’s sins and driven into the wilderness. And who is more innocent, powerless, and marginalized than childen? No wonder children are the preferred victims of so many sacrificial societies, from the Moloch-worshipping Canaanites, to the pre-colonial Ibo described in Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, to the satanic cultists of America’s power elite who gather at places like Bohemian Grove (and, some believe, certain Washington DC restaurants).

Girard’s notion of sacrifice was a momentous intellectual breakthrough in the human sciences. But it misses two important aspects of the phenomenon, what we might call the pragmatic and the spiritual dimensions of sacrifice. Pragmatically, there have been times and places in the course of human history when sacrificing certain people just seemed like the sensible and realistic thing to do. It happens all the time, in military affairs, to this day. And it has happened in non-military contexts quite regularly among widely diverse peoples. Among the nomadic Khoi-San of Africa, when elders became an intolerable burden, or the food supply wouldn’t support the current crop of babies, the non-productive elders or youngers were simply killed. In pre-Islamic Arabia, baby girls were regularly buried alive, which limited the population in a hostile environment, and rectified the male-female ratio in a culture where men typically died young from incessant raiding and feuding. Today, as the global population is expanding toward eight billion, perhaps there is a subliminal feeling among the masses, and a fully-conscious awareness among elites, that every new child makes the terrifying population-resources equation a little bit worse.

And then there is the all-important spiritual dimension. Our spiritual state is largely determined by our capacity to sacrifice the self (especially its base desires) for the Other (both human and divine). Those who succeed most magnificently in this sacrifice or surrender (islam) of the lower self become prophets/saints/mystics, while those who fail most spectacularly by sacrificing the Other to the self rather than the other way around become monstrous egotists, sybarites, and power-hungry greedheads, narcissists, and sociopaths.

Americans, many of them anyway, once immolated their egos for something bigger than themselves. A concrete expression of that spiritual state was the way they sacrificed themselves for their children, working hard at unpleasant low-status jobs so their childrens’ lives could be better. This was genuinely done for the children, not for the parents’ ego-satisfaction.

Today, some upwardly-striving middle- and upper-middle class Americans do seem to make extraordinary sacrifices for their children by hiring them tutors, chauffering them to soccer practice, and trying every trick in the book and then some to get their kids admitted to high-status universities. But none of this is really about the kids. It’s about the parents’ egos. They want to be able to brag about “my son the Harvard student” or “my daughter the doctor.” This narcissistic aspect of American culture in general and parenting in particular has accelerated in the era of social media, when people’s overweening concern with their image and perceived status seems to dominate the national conversation.

If you need more proof that America is sacrificing its children, just look at the economic statistics. Young married people with children have been getting a shrinking slice of the national pie for decades, while pre-boomer and now boomer retirees and other older non-parents and post-parents hoard the proverbial lion’s share of the wealth. All sorts of frivolous luxury goods and services proliferate, mostly servicing older wealthier folks, while one in seven children live in poverty, housing becomes increasingly unaffordable, and most young parents need two incomes to stay afloat—depriving their children of the parental care they would enjoy in a one-income two-parent family.

So spiritually, we are in a decadent, narcissistic phase, a steep downturn in the graph of civilizational rises and falls; and pragmatically, we sense that children, at such a bleak and precarious historical moment, are not such a good thing. The result is a culture capable of choosing leaders who tell us to line our children up and inject them with dangerous experimental compounds for no apparent reason. And if it turns out, as some evidence suggests (see HERE, HERE, and HERE) that the real purpose of MRNA COVID vaccines is to damage fertility and thereby prevent the birth of children, the enormous scope of that monstrously mendacious erasure of the unborn could conceivably echo down through the generations and supplant Madeleine Albright’s as the biggest mass child sacrifice in human history.

Will parents rebel against this new ritual of technocratic child sacrifice? By rejecting the MRNA vaccines and joining the wave of school board rebellions against the transhumanist technocrats’ war on humanity in general and children in particular, will American parents not only save their children, but their civilization as well?

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Yes, I know the COVID vaccines aren’t effective against transmission, so the people who think vaccinating their kids will save grandma are wrong. But still, that is what they think.

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In my interview on “The Joe Cohen Show,” I discussed several fundamental health principles that virtually everyone can integrate into their lives to achieve better health

Even small changes add up to meaningful health improvements over time, especially when you know where to focus your energy

Eliminating vegetable/seed oils from your diet and getting more sun exposure top my list of healthy habits

Embracing time restricted eating, which means limiting your eating window to six to eight hours per day, is also important

Exercise and protecting yourself from electromagnetic fields round out my five top habits for a healthier life

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Looking for straightforward advice to set your health on a path toward wellness instead of disease? My recent interview featured on “The Joe Cohen Show” is for you. I discussed several fundamental health principles that virtually everyone can integrate into their lives to achieve better health.

It can feel overwhelming to make positive lifestyle changes, but when you make them one step at a time it’s much more manageable. The secret is that even small changes add up to meaningful health improvements over time, especially when you know where to focus your energy. Here, I’ve detailed several examples where a relatively small “investment” in terms of lifestyle changes will lead to major health rewards.

Five Tips for a Healthier Life

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***

There is no U.S. government agency with oversight for cell tower radiation health effects:

no research reviews, no reports, no environmental monitoring, no risk mitigation and no post market health surveillance for the daily, full body radio-frequency (RF) radiation exposure from cell towers. Cell tower radiation exemplifies the concept of a regulatory gap. 

The FDA

“The FDA does not regulate cell towers or cell tower radiation. Therefore, the FDA has no studies or information on cell towers to provide in response to your questions.” –Ellen Flannery, Director, FDA Policy Center for Devices and Radiological Health to a California mother with a cell tower on her street who asked the FDA about safety, July 11, 2022

The National Cancer Institute (NCI)

“As a Federal research agency, the NCI is not involved in the regulation of radio frequency telecommunications infrastructure and devices, nor do we make recommendations for policies related to this technology”

–National Cancer Institute letter to Denise Ricciardi, member of the New Hampshire State Commission on 5G, July 30, 2020

The American Cancer Society (ACS)

The ACS does “not have any official position or statement on whether or not radiofrequency radiation from cell phones, cell phones towers, or other sources is a cause of cancer.” –American Cancer Society Website

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)

“EPA’s last review was in the 1984 document Biological Effects of Radiofrequency Radiation. The EPA does not currently have a funded mandate for radiofrequency matters.” -Lee Ann B. Veal Director, EPA Radiation Protection Division Office of Radiation and Indoor Air, July 8, 2020 Letter to Theodora Scarato

The Center for Disease Control (CDC)

Fact: There are no scientific reports by the CDC on cell tower radiation safety, nor does the agency have staff with expertise monitoring the science and evaluating risk. Public information requests found thatseveral CDC website pages on radio frequency were found to be drafted with a wireless industry consultant.

The Department of the Interior

“The electromagnetic radiation standards used by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) continue to be based on thermal heating, a criterion now nearly 30 years out of date and inapplicable today.” – U.S. Department of Interior Letter to FCC, 2014

The World Health Organization

Fact: The World Health Organization (WHO) EMF Project has not reviewed the science since 1993. The WHO webpages on cell phones and cell towers are not based on a published scientific review. The WHO EMF Project webpages were written by a scientist who used wireless industry money to start the WHO EMF Project and who is now a consultant to industry.

In contrast, the WHO International Agency for Research on Cancer (a separate WHO entity vetted for conflicts of interest) determined RF radiation to be a Class 2 B “possible” carcinogen in 2011. Many scientists now state the evidence showing cancer has increased.

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255 scientists who have published in the field signed the EMF Scientists Appeal which states “numerous recent scientific publications have shown that EMF affects living organisms at levels well below most international and national guidelines. Effects include increased cancer risk, cellular stress, increase in harmful free radicals, genetic damages, structural and functional changes of the reproductive system, learning and memory deficits, neurological disorders, and negative impacts on general well-being in humans. Damage goes well beyond the human race, as there is growing evidence of harmful effects to both plant and animal life.”

419 scientists and doctors have signed the European Union 5G Appeal which states “5G will substantially increase exposure to radiofrequency electromagnetic fields [RF-EMF] on top of the 2G, 3G, 4G, Wi-Fi, etc. for telecommunications already in place. RF-EMF has been proven to be harmful for humans and the environment.”

Over 3,500 medical doctors signed onto a 2020 Consensus statement that wireless RF has been proven to damage biological systems at intensities below government limits (See signatures here, PDF of Consensus Statement).

Examples of Numerous Appeals by Medical Professionals: International Society of Doctors for Environment, Cyprus Medical Association, the Vienna Austrian Medical Chamber and the Cyprus National Committee on Environment and Children’s Health, Belgium Doctors Appeal, Canadian Doctors, Cyprus Medical Association, Physicians of Turin, Italy, the German Doctors Appeal, International Appeal to Stop 5G on Earth and Space, Letter to President Trump, Letter to President Biden and Chilean Doctors. 

There have been appeals and position statements for decades, read a full list here.

The New Hampshire State Commission 5G Report has 15 recommendations to protect the public.

• The Pittsburgh Law Review: The FCC Keeps Letting Me Be: Why Radiofrequency Radiation Standards Have Failed to Keep Up With Technology explains how the FCC and FDA have failed to develop adequate safety limits.
• The Harvard Press Book “Captured Agency: How the Federal Communications Commission is Dominated by the Industries it Presumably Regulates” details how wireless companies are using the Big Tobacco playbook and how the FCC is a captured agency.

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Research on 5G and Small Cell Radiation Exposure

American Academy of Pediatrics 

Website Electromagnetic Fields: A Hazard to Your Health? 

“In recent years, concern has increased about exposure to radio frequency (RF) electromagnetic radiation emitted from cell phones and phone station antennas. An Egyptian study confirmed concerns that living nearby mobile phone base stations increased the risk for developing:

• Headaches
• Memory problems
• Dizziness
• Depression
• Sleep problems

Short-term exposure to these fields in experimental studies have not always shown negative effects, but this does not rule out cumulative damage from these fields, so larger studies over longer periods are needed to help understand who is at risk. In large studies, an association has been observed between symptoms and exposure to these fields in the everyday environment.” –American Academy of Pediatrics 

Outdoor levels of RF are increasing due to the densification of wireless networks

Research documents increasing RF levels outdoors. An article published in The Lancet Planetary Healthdocuments the increasing RF exposures and scientific research linking exposure to adverse effects (Bandara and Carpenter 2018).

“It is plausibly the most rapidly increasing anthropogenic environmental exposure since the mid-20th century…”

A 2021 report by the French government on 5G analyzed more than 3,000 measurements and found that RF levels had not yet significantly increased, but this was due to the lack of 5G traffic. So the researchers did additional measurements specific to 5G in the 3500 MHz band with artificially generated traffic and concluded, “initial results suggest an eventual increase of about 20% in overall exposure.”

A 2018 multi-country study published in Environment International measured RF in several countries and found cell tower/base station radiation to be the dominant contributor to RF exposure in most outdoor areas (Sagar et al. 2018). Urban areas had higher RF.

A study measuring RF exposure in the European cities of Basel, Ghent and Brussels found the total RF exposure levels in outdoor locations had increased up to 57.1% in one year (April 2011 to March 2012) and most notably due to mobile phone base stations.

A 2018 study published in Oncology Letters documented “unnecessarily high” RF levels in several locations in Stockholm, Sweden. The authors conclude, “Using high-power levels causes an excess health risk to many people.”

A 2017 Swedish study of Royal Castle, Supreme Court, three major squares and the Swedish Parliament found, despite the hidden, architecturally camouflaged RF-emitting antennas, passive exposure to RF radiation from cell antennas that was higher than RF levels associated with non-thermal biological effects in studies. The researchers note that the heaviest RF load falls on people working or living near hotspots.

A 2016 study at Stockholm Central Railway Station in Sweden documented higher RF levels in areas where base station antennas were located closest to people. Importantly, the RF from the downlink of UMTS, LTE, GSM base station antennas contributed to most of the radiation levels.

Published Reviews Recommend Cell Towers Be Distanced Away From Homes and Schools  

• The review paper entitled “Limiting liability with positioning to minimize negative health effects of cellular phone towers” reviewed the “large and growing body of evidence that human exposure to RFR from cellular phone base stations causes negative health effects.” The authors recommend restricting antennas near homes, and restricting antennas within 500 meters of schools and hospitals to protect companies from future liability (Pearce 2020).
• An analysis of 100 studies published in Environmental Reviews found approximately 80% showed biological effects near towers. “As a general guideline, cell base stations should not be located less than 1500 ft from the population, and at a height of about 150 ft” (Levitt 2010).
• A review published in the International Journal of Occupational and Environmental Health found people living less than 500 meters from base station antennas had increased adverse neuro-behavioral symptoms and cancer in eight of the ten epidemiological studies (Khurana 2011).

A paper by human rights experts published in Environment Science and Policy documented the accumulating science indicating safety is not assured, and considered the issue within a human rights framework to protect vulnerable populations from environmental pollution. “We conclude that, because scientific knowledge is incomplete, a precautionary approach is better suited to State obligations under international human rights law” (Roda and Perry 2014, PDF).

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***

Alexander Mercouris headlined on October 29th, “Biden quietly moves world closer towards armageddon. Finland ready to host nukes”, and discussed the U.S. plan to trap Russia by positioning its nuclear missiles about 500 miles or 7 minutes of missile-flying distance from The Kremlin, a “checkmate” (a beheading of Russia’s central command so that Russia won’t have enough time to launch its retaliatory missiles) and demand Russia’s surrender (since there is no way that Russia’s central command would be able to assess the situation within only 7 minutes and get its missiles launched).

There is a history to this plan, and the U.S. Government decision to do this seems to have been made in or around 2006, when America’s two most prestigious national security academic journals, Foreign Affairs and National Security, both recommended (though ever so tactfully) replacing the idea (actually meta-strategy) of “Mutually Assured Destruction” or “M.A.D.” (that nuclear weapons exist only in order to prevent a WW III), by the new U.S. meta-strategy, of “Nuclear Primacy” — that America will use them so as to win a nuclear war, WW III, against Russia.

Positioning those missiles in Ukraine was supposed to be the way to do this, but, since that is looking increasingly unlikely now, it is to be Finland (the second-nearest nation to The Kremlin) which is taking on this function (if Turkiye’s President Tayyip Erdogan will allow it into NATO, which will be his most fateful decision ever).

Then, on 1 March 2017, two leading American experts on nuclear-arms control published in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists saying that a new type of nuclear fuse that was being installed on U.S. missiles “creates exactly what one would expect to see, if a nuclear-armed state were planning to have the capacity to fight and win a nuclear war by disarming enemies with a surprise first strike.” That strike now is expected to be coming from Finland, instead of from Ukraine.

On October 28th, Russia’s RT News bannered “Biden backtracks on nuclear pledge: The Pentagon has failed to impose a limit on use of the atomic option despite president’s promise”, and reported that President Biden had switched his policy because of advice from The Pentagon, which says that America will need to have an option to start nuclear war with Russia — not merely to respond to it from Russia. Russia’s policy on nuclear first-use is very clear — and is NO Russian version of America’s Nuclear-Primacy policy:

There are four scenarios in which Russia reserves the right to use nuclear weapons, that is, to go beyond nuclear deterrence.

1. obtaining reliable information about the launch of ballistic missiles attacking Russia;

2. the use of nuclear weapons and other weapons of mass destruction against Russia;

3. some impact on objects, the failure of which will lead to the disruption of the response of nuclear forces;

4. aggression against Russia with the use of conventional weapons, when the very existence of the state is threatened.

Of course, there is also the possibility that the situation in Ukraine could develop into one in which condition #4 might be the one that would spark a Russian first-strike against America and its allies. But that now seems less likely than a U.S. first-strike from Finland does. (Also: Finland was part of Hitler’s Operation Barbarossa invasion of the Soviet Union — it allied with Hitler. This time, it would be allied with Biden.)

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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.

Featured image is from The Unz Review

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***

Well, we’re finally there: stocks are officially trading off nuclear war headlines.

Moments ago, as part of his closely-watched speech, Vladimir Putin appeared to talk down the likelihood of a nuclear attack in Ukraine: PUTIN: NO POLITICAL, MILITARY REASON IN NUKE STRIKE IN UKRAINE 

Which, however, is more than can be said about the US.

As Bloomberg just reported, the Pentagon’s new National Defense Strategy rejects limits on using nuclear weapons long championed by arms control advocates (and, in the not too distant past, by Joe Bide) citing burgeoning threats from Russia and China.

“By the 2030s the United States will, for the first time in its history face two major nuclear powers as strategic competitors and potential adversaries,” the Defense Department said in the long-awaited document issued Thursday. In response, the US will “maintain a very high bar for nuclear employment” without ruling out using the weapons in retaliation to a non-nuclear strategic threat to the homeland, US forces abroad or allies.

In yet another stark reversal for the senile occupant of the White House basement, in his 2020 presidential campaign Biden had pledged to declare that the US nuclear arsenal should be used only to deter or retaliate against a nuclear attack, a position blessed by progressive Democrats and reviled by defense hawks. But, like with every other position held by the pathological liar who even trumps Trump in the untruth department, this one has just been reversed as well as “the threat environment has changed dramatically since then” and the Pentagon strategy was forged in cooperation with the flip-flopping White House.

In a stunning move that should – or rather “should” – spark outrage among the so-called progressives but will at best prompt some very sternly retracted letters, the nuclear report that’s part of the broader strategy said the Biden administration reviewed its nuclear policy and concluded that “No First Use” and “Sole Purpose” policies “would result in an unacceptable level of risk in light of the range of non-nuclear capabilities being developed and fielded by competitors that could inflict strategic-level damage” to the US and allies.

meanwhile…

Putin: The only country in the world that has used nuclear weapons against a non-nuclear state is the United States of America

— Paul Sonne (@PaulSonne) October 27, 2022

The nuclear strategy document doesn’t spell out what non-nuclear threats could produce a US nuclear response, but current threats include hypersonic weapons possessed by Russia and China for which the US doesn’t yet have a proven defense.

It does spell out, however, in the strongest terms, what would happen to another nuclear power, North Korea, if it launched a nuclear attack on the US, South Korea or Japan. That action “will result in the end of that regime,” it says. US nuclear weapons continue to play a role in deterring North Korean attacks.

So, the brilliant neocon minds behind the report concluded, it is better to instill the fear of a disproportionate nuclear retaliation, thus making an outright nuclear attack far more likely (if the US will nuke you anyway, may as well go all out).

In the document, which was framed well before the invasion, the Pentagon says Russia continues to “brandish its nuclear weapons in support of its revisionist security policy” while its modern arsenal is expected to grow further. In other words, the Pentagon knew what Putin would do even before he did it and that defined the dramatic revision in US nuclear posture. Almost as if the Pentagon directed the entire sequence of events…

Meanwhile, China remains the US’s “most consequential strategic competitor for coming decades,” Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said in a letter presenting the new defense strategy. He cited China’s “increasingly coercive actions to reshape the Indo-Pacific region and the international system to fit its authoritarian preferences,” even as it rapidly modernizes and expands its military. China wants to have at least 1,000 deliverable nuclear warheads by the end of the decade, the nuclear strategy document says, saying it could use them for “coercive purposes, including military provocations against US allies and partners in the region.”

The nuclear strategy affirmed modernization programs including the ongoing replacement of the aging US air-sea-land nuclear triad. Among them are the Navy’s Columbia-class nuclear ICBM submarine, the ground-based Minuteman III ICBM replacement, the new air-launched Long-Range Standoff Weapon and F-35 fighter jets for Europe carrying nuclear weapons.

The review confirmed previous reports that the Pentagon will retire the B83-1 gravity bomb and cancel the Sea-Launched Cruise Missile program. But the review endorses a controversial Trump-era naval weapon, the low-yield W76-2 submarine-launched nuclear warhead, which is described as providing “an important means to deter limited nuclear use.”

The broader strategy report also offered gently worded criticism of major US weapons programs, which often runs years behind plans and billions of dollars over initial budgets.

“Our current system is too slow and too focused on acquiring systems not designed to address the most critical challenges we now face,” the Pentagon said. It called for more “open systems that can rapidly incorporate cutting-edge technology” while reducing problems of “obsolescence” and high costs.

The Pentagon strategy documents were sent to Congress in classified form in March so they were considered during congressional approval of the fiscal 2023 defense budget.

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So how to trade all of this? Well, the initial instinct now that nuclear war headlines are being lobbed around is that it may be time to sell… but as Art Cashin so insightfully put it some time ago, “Never bet on the end of the world, because it only happens once.”

Now thanks to the Biden admin, that “once in a lifetime” event is that much closer to taking place.

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Featured image: Photos from the first second of the Trinity test shot, the first nuclear explosion on Earth. (Los Alamos National Laboratory)

“Towards a World War III Scenario: The Dangers of Nuclear War” 

by Michel Chossudovsky

Available to order from Global Research! 

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   

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***

The presidency of Lebanon’s Michel Aoun is coming to a close and politicians are anticipating a possible power vacuum if a decision cannot be made soon to fill the office.

The parliament voted on October 24, but with only a week left to Aoun’s term, some ballots were left blank. Independent MP Michel Mouawad and scholar Issam Khalife both received votes. The next vote was set for October 27 by Speaker of the Parliament, Nabih Berri.

Prime Minister Najib Mikati is currently serving as caretaker, and politicians have suggested presidential powers could pass to Mikati and a new cabinet should a president not be agreed upon, who must be a Maronite Christian according to the sectarian system.

Aoun, a former military general, has served as President of Lebanon since October 31, 2016. Experts are warning of a constitutional crisis if his replacement is not agreed upon. Unity and agreement are hard to come by in Lebanon in the best of times, and now Lebanon faces multiple crises after May’s elections which saw newcomers elected to parliamentary seats in an effort by the voters to dissemble the ruling political elite, who they blame for the three-year-old financial meltdown.

Michel Aoun and his legacy

In 1984, Aoun became the youngest Commander of the Army, and four years later was appointed as head of a military cabinet. He survived an assassination attempt on October 12, 1990.

Aoun then fled to the French Embassy in Beirut and was later granted asylum in France where he lived for 15 years. Aoun founded the Free Patriotic Movement (FPM) while in exile.

On February 14, 2005, Prime Minister Rafik Hariri was assassinated in Beirut, and the Syrian Arab Army later withdrew from Lebanon and Aoun returned to Beirut on May 7. Aoun was elected to Parliament with his FPM snatching 21 out of 128 seats in parliamentary elections, which represented the largest Christian bloc.

In 2016, Aoun was endorsed by Hezbollah and other parties to become the thirteenth President of Lebanon. He promised to defend Christian rights after the community had lost some of its political power at the end of the 15-year civil war which ended in 1990.

Aoun chose to work with Hezbollah, the resistance movement in Lebanon. Aoun’s military background made him aware that the Lebanese Army was not capable of defending the southern border with Israel, but Hezbollah was.

The south of Lebanon suffered under a brutal Israeli military occupation for 20 years, and the only way to prevent a repeat was a strong defense.

Lebanon’s economic meltdown

In 2019, mass protests broke out across Lebanon demanding the ruling political elite, many of whom were family dynasties and warlords left over from the civil war, get out.  The popular uprising was demanding a change to the same faces who they equated with corruption and sectarianism.

While the country was suffering under bank closures and hyperinflation for a devalued currency, the Beirut port exploded in 2020 in the world’s biggest non-nuclear explosion, killing over 200 people and parts of the capital destroyed.

The currency sunk by 90%, making the middle class the new poor, and leaving the poor destitute. The banks remain paralyzed with some depositors holding up the banks just to get their funds released.

The US meddling in Lebanon

On October 11, US President Joe Biden spoke with Aoun to congratulate him on the agreement to establish a permanent maritime boundary between Lebanon and Israel for offshore energy resources.

The US Embassy in Lebanon is known to exert pressure on most aspects of political life, which experts on Lebanon say amounts to meddling in the democratic process. Dorothy C. Shea was appointed by President Trump as Ambassador to the Lebanese Republic on February 14, 2020.

In June 2020, Ambassador Shea gave negative comments concerning Hezbollah to Saudi media.

The head of Hezbollah had blamed the US for a dollar shortage which led to a devalued Lebanese pound, from 1,500 to the dollar to above 7,000 on the black market.

“The issue of dollars is an American conspiracy against Lebanon, its people, its pound, and its economy,” Hassan Nasrallah said on June 16.

In response to Shea’s comments, Lebanese Judge Mohammed Mazeh issued an order banning local and foreign media organizations from interviewing or hosting Shea for a year. Penalties for violation would be a one-year work ban and a fine of $200,000.

Mazeh said Shea’s comments amount to meddling in domestic affairs in violation of diplomatic norms. He said the comments “insult many Lebanese (and) contribute in pitting the Lebanese people against each other and” against Hezbollah, and stoke sectarian and political strife.

Mazeh’s position on the Urgent Matters Court gives him the authority to prevent actions harmful to “civil peace.”  At the time, the country was experiencing street protests and very serious violence.

Syrian refugees are going home

On October 26, hundreds of Syrian refugees living in Lebanon returned home as organized repatriations by Beirut began. Around 700 Syrians had agreed to leave from the northeastern border from Arsal, which had been a Free Syrian Army (FSA) camp in the early years of the conflict. The FSA was founded and supported by the CIA and Pentagon in the Obama war on Syria for ‘regime change’. The FSA lived at Arsal and housed their wives and children there safely while they crossed the border to the battle zone at Qalamoun in Syria. The Lebanese officials were very concerned with housing armed terrorists following Radical Islam in Arsal, and on several occasions, the Lebanese Army and security forces entered the refugee camp to arrest FSA terrorists.  Because the US-supported FSA was often aligned with Al Qaeda and ISIS, the Lebanese security officials viewed the camp as a terrorist safe haven.

The UN, the US, and other groups have denounced the voluntary repatriation coordinated by the General Security agency.  Even though the Syrian conflict is over, there are no battle zones, and the roads and movement around Syria are safe, some groups oppose the return of Syrians. This is a political position they have taken because to admit that Syria has survived the war and that people can live there safely once again, would be admitting they had supported the losing side: the FSA, which became Al Qaeda and finally morphed into ISIS. The UN, US, EU, and others aligned with the west, must maintain that Syria is still a conflict zone, otherwise, they would need to help Syrians rebuild their lives in Syria, instead of using the US-EU sanctions which prevent importing materials to repair and improve critical infrastructure lost to the war.  Syria is currently battling cholera due to the lack of water treatment systems on the Euphrates River which is at its lowest level due to climate change.

Lebanon is home to more than 800,000 Syrians registered with the UN refugee agency, andpreviously Lebanon had hosted around 1.2 million.

On October 12, Aoun said Lebanon would begin sending Syrian refugees back home.

“As of next week, we will see the start of returning Syrians to their home country in batches,” said Aoun on Twitter.

Issam Charafeddine, Lebanon’s minister for displaced people, in July announced a plan that he said would seek to return some 15,000 refugees to Syria per month.

Lebanese officials say the influx of refugees has cost the crisis-hit country billions of dollars and further damaged its crippled infrastructure while it struggles with a financial meltdown.

Syrian migrants have set sail for Cyprus from Lebanon, with at least 94 dying last month after the ship capsized.

After 10 years of war, Syria is still offering free hospital visits, free vaccines for children, free Covid vaccines and boosters, as well as free education for children. Lebanon does not offer free medical or free education services to its citizens, or refugees.

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

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***

Democratic Congressman Jamie Raskin has issued a statement saying ongoing military aid to Ukraine is essential because Russia is mean to gay and transgender people.

Yes, really.

Raskin released the statement after 30 “progressive” Democrats watered down their call for peace talks in a letter to Joe Biden.

Raskin (D-MD) is apparently concerned that any slide in support for Ukraine represents an abandonment of woke values:

“Moscow right now is … a world center of antifeminist, antigay, anti-trans hatred, as well as the homeland of replacement theory for export,” said the statement.

Calling Vladimir Putin an “imperialist” and a “colonizer,” Raskin went on to demonize the entire country.

“Moscow right now is a hub of corrupt tyranny, censorship, authoritarian repression, police violence, propaganda, government lies and disinformation, and planning for war crimes … In supporting Ukraine, we are opposing these fascist views, and supporting the urgent principles of democratic pluralism. Ukraine is not perfect, of course, but its society is organized on the radically different principles of democracy and freedom,” the statement said.

As we have previously highlighted, the bizarre intersection of sending advanced weaponry to foreign conflicts in the name of defending far-left identity politics reared its head right at the start of the war.

Back in February, the head of MI6, who includes his preferred pronouns in his Twitter bio, faced backlash for suggesting that a large part of the war in Ukraine was about “LGBT+ rights.”

“With the tragedy and destruction unfolding so distressingly in Ukraine, we should remember the values and hard won freedoms that distinguish us from Putin, none more than LGBT+ rights. So let’s resume our series of tweets to mark #LGBTHM2022,” tweeted Richard Moore (he/him).

One of the principal organizers of Dublin’s gay pride parade also decided to add the colors of Ukraine to the LGBTQ rainbow flag, presumably to ensure support for all ‘current things’ were covered.

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Featured image: Raskin speaking at the 2020 AFGE Legislative Conference (Photo by AFGE – 2020, licensed under CC BY 2.0)

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***

I fully realize that when it comes to Ukraine, one is supposed to focus exclusively on Russia’s invasion and not on what the Pentagon did to gin up the crisis, a crisis that has gotten us perilously close to a world-destroying nuclear war with Russia. 

Nonetheless, the Pentagon’s role in this crisis needs to be emphasized, over and over again, just as the Pentagon’s role in ginning up the Cuban Missile Crisis also needs to be emphasized, over and over again.

Yes, what I am emphasizing is the Pentagon’s role in ginning up both of these crises that have gotten us so close to nuclear war with Russia. 

At the end of the Cold War racket, there was absolutely no reason for NATO to remain in existence. Its purported mission of protecting Europe from a Soviet (i.e., Russian) attack had been fulfilled. The Cold War was supposedly over. 

The only problem was that it wasn’t over for the Pentagon and the CIA. If they had had their druthers, their Cold War racket would have gone on forever. After all, what better justification for their ever-increasing budgets and power within the federal governmental structure?

That’s why they kept NATO in existence. While they were engaging in their interventionist antics in the Middle East, which led to their war-on-terrorism racket, they were, at the same time, using NATO to provoke Russia, with the aim of reigniting their old Cold War racket. Instead of dismantling their old Cold War dinosaur, they used used it to absorb former members of the Warsaw Pact, which enabled the Pentagon and the CIA to move their nuclear missiles and military forces inexorably closer to Russia’s border, over Russia’s vehement objections.

Ultimately, they threatened to absorb Ukraine into their NATO racket, knowing full well that Russia had vowed for some 25 years to invade Ukraine to prevent that from happening. Their scheme succeeded. Once Russia invaded Ukraine, the loyal followers of the Pentagon and the CIA focused exclusively on  the invasion and not also on the NATO racket that had provoked the invasion.

It was no different with the Cuban Missile Crisis. The reason that Cuba and the Soviet Union installed nuclear missiles in Cuba was to deter another invasion of the island by the CIA and the Pentagon. Don’t forget that the CIA had already invaded Cuba at the Bay of Pigs and had failed miserably. After that, the Pentagon continually exhorted President Kennedy to initiate a full-scale military invasion of Cuba. That’s what the Pentagon’s fraudulent false-flag operation known as Operation Northwoods was all about, which Kennedy, to his everlasting credit, summarily rejected.

What legal justification did the Pentagon and the CIA have to invade Cuba? None! The fact that Cuba had a communist regime certainly never justified an invasion (or, for that matter, repeated murder attempts against Fidel Castro). Keep in mind that Cuba had never attacked the United States or even threatened to do so. In the long relationship between communist Cuba and the United States, it has always been the U.S. government that has been the aggressor, including with its old Cold War economic embargo that continues to target the Cuban people with death and impoverishment as a way to achieve regime change on the island.

Cuba and Russia knew full-well that the CIA and the Pentagon were fully determined to invade Cuba again, with the aim of replacing the Fidel Castro regime with another pro-U.S. dictatorship, like the one that preceded the Castro regime. That’s why Cuba and Russia installed those nuclear missiles in Cuba — to deter another illegal U.S. invasion of the island. 

Why can’t the loyal acolytes of the U.S. national-security establishment see all this? Because for them, the Pentagon, the CIA, and the NSA are their triune god. Who wants to question or criticize god? 

But if we are going to put out nation back on the right road — the road to liberty, peace, prosperity, and harmony with the people of the world, it is necessary for the American people to not only question this false god but also to toss it and its evil rackets into the dustbin of history and restore America’s founding governmental system of a limited-government republic.

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Jacob G. Hornberger is founder and president of The Future of Freedom Foundation. He was born and raised in Laredo, Texas, and received his B.A. in economics from Virginia Military Institute and his law degree from the University of Texas. He was a trial attorney for twelve years in Texas. He also was an adjunct professor at the University of Dallas, where he taught law and economics. In 1987, Mr. Hornberger left the practice of law to become director of programs at the Foundation for Economic Education. He has advanced freedom and free markets on talk-radio stations all across the country as well as on Fox News’ Neil Cavuto and Greta van Susteren shows and he appeared as a regular commentator on Judge Andrew Napolitano’s show Freedom Watch. View these interviews at LewRockwell.com and from Full Context. Send him email.

Featured image is from FFF

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***

There exists a numerically-miniscule but economically-powerful set of inbreeding oligarch families in Haiti, who are not descendants of deported and enslaved Africans, like 99% of Haitians. The first ancestors of these “white oligarchs” arrived on the island in the late 1800s, as refugees from Syria, Palestine, Lebanon or later as WWII European refugees of Jewish heritage. Many are of mixed-heritage through strategic marriages with light skin Haitians who, decades after Haiti’s abolitionist revolution, carry visible evidence of having European slavers’ (French, British, Spanish) DNA. The white oligarchs of Haiti are known to collude with elites in the U.S., Canada, Europe, with foreign corporations as well as organized crime, to exploit the resources of the impoverished Caribbean country.

You might rarely, if ever, see their names or pictures on the New-York Times, CBC, CNN or France 24. But they are at the very heart of the bloody mayhem that now engulfs Haiti. They always had and have powerful allies in Washington, Ottawa, and Paris. Many of Haiti’s so-called “invisible elephants,” the white warlords, have been implicated in coups d’état, drug trafficking, mass killings, presidential assassinations, illegal gun importation through their private ports as well as mobilizing deadly gangs of Black youth who specialize in terrorizing poor and middle-class Haitians. On this very matter, I recommend “Confessions of Haitian Kidnapper Arnel Joseph,” a published interview with Arnel Joseph by an anonymous source first published in French (Arnel Joseph parle comme un rossignol). It describes how the former notorious gangster once described his recruitment by the white warlords of Haiti – a few months before he was gunned down like a dog, in the streets of L’Estère, on February 27, 2021.

For over a century now, with US complicity, ultra-national “white” families routinely pick “Black faces” to front dictatorships in Haiti that do their bidding. There is recurring evidence that, every now and then, the same families, always in coordination with Washington bosses, opt to dispose of a Black-face Haitian puppet “president” which they deem no longer useful to the clan’s interest. Haiti’s top tier oligarchs who are universally perceived as vultures who take much from the impoverished nation but refuse to contribute even regular taxes and custom duties to Haitian society, are known as BAM BAM, phonetically in Creole “Gimme, Gimme.” The acronym stands for the Brandt, Acra, Madsen, Bigio, Apaid and Mevs families.

Due to historical conflict of interest, this ugly and very disturbing racial dimension to the contemporary Haitian story is one you might seldom, if ever, see addressed in mainstream media. Take for instance, a recent piece in the NewYork Times titled “Lesson plan: Investigating Haiti’s History and the Damage Caused by the ‘Double Debt.’” While its closing section addresses the connection between the long history of foreigners ransoming Haitians and the current uprisings against a US-backed puppet regime over repression and economic misery amidst outrageous calls for further international intervention, the NYT article makes no mention of Haiti’s strangely invisible white elephants, local white families who control every facet of Haiti’s import-export and banking businesses. The latter have historically been prime benefactors of foreign military interventions in Haiti.

Multiple ransoms collected at gunpoint (gun-boat diplomacy) from the Haitian treasury by the Germans, the Brits, Americans, the Spaniards as well as the French, throughout the 19th century, went directly to compensate local white merchants who claim that the Haitian state failed to protect their affairs during social upheavals. As is suspected to have happened for instance in 1883, these upheavals in question might be instigated and financed by some of the very individuals who end up collecting foreign gun-boat enforced compensation.

Indeed, in the midst of popular riots in the capital city of Port-au-Prince in September 1883, diplomatic representatives of France, Britain, Germany, Belgium, Spain, Holland, Norway and Sweden signed an ultimatum threatening Haitian President Lysius Félicité Salomon Jeune of bombing Haiti’s National Palace with him inside unless he paid millions of dollars in reparations.. (see Haytian law for the settlement of claims arising out of the events at Port-au-Prince in September 1883)

In recent times, the U.S. army and CIA intervened twice to remove Jean-Bertrand Aristide, a popular, democratically-elected president who raised the minimum wage and pressured members of sweatshops owning BAMBAM families to pay taxes.

This following excerpt is from “an inside look at Haiti’s business elite”,  a 1995 publication by Multinational Monitor:

“You can imagine what kind of pressure that must be when you know that there are six million peasants that basically could rise up and tear your house down some night… I’ve witnessed what they call “dechoukaj” where they just basically firebomb, loot and gut a house. It’s a terrifying thing. This is always in the mind of the elite Haitians… And you’d better believe these rich people have got machine guns. The poorest Haitians cannot rise up. I mean there will not be a revolution in Haiti because you cannot fight these machine guns with sticks and rocks and machetes. There’s only so far you can fight”.

Unlike the situation described by the Multinational Monitor in 1995, today, there are heavily-armed gangs in different parts of Haiti. However, these are not peasants who are organized for revolution. As Arnel Joseph confessed back in 2019, several gangs were created, armed and mobilized by members of the BAMBAM, the illegal Parti Haitien Tèt Kale (PHTK) regime in power since 2011, and its foreign allies/accomplices. Installed PHTK president Martelly would go on to recruit several criminals to join his administration.

In “Confessions of Haitian Kidnapper Arnel Joseph,” the author states:

“Zuraik, a good friend of (PHTK Senator) Gracia Delva, recommended Arnel to Reynold Deeb who needed someone to monitor the environment at Port-au-Prince customs. He found Arnel at the right time. Indeed, the war was waging between Deeb and Bigio who had launched the gangs of Chancerelles and Bas Delmas. In Arnel, Deeb found his game-changer for the control of Lower Town and, thus, won the war against Bigio. Since then, he has elevated Arnel among his important pawns”.

Haitian people were shocked and in awe when, in her report dated September 25, 2020, Helen Lalime, the current representative of the United Nations Integrated Office in Haiti (BINUH), heralded the federation of armed gangs throughout the country a net reducer of violence. Now, said gangs which were federated as “G9”, presumably to facilitate an elusive peaceful disarmament process, under BINUH’s guidance, are serving as pretext for foreign boots returning massively on Haitian soil. Those who point to the obvious logical conclusions are deemed “conspiracy theorists.” Yet, it is plain to see that foreign troops are being mobilized to help secure some of the most ruthless criminals of Haitian society, including BINUH, US, PHTK and white oligarchs-protected mass murderer for hire, G9 federated gang leader Jimmy “Babekyou” Cherizier, who feel threatened by an unarmed but justifiably angry population. As they often say at multiple popular demonstrations, Haitian people seek to uproot “dechouke” the system. Its beneficiaries and guardians are doing everything in their power to safeguard the system.

Under the system, in colonial times, 30,000 white slavers in Saint-Domingue (Haiti) had no chance of survival among 450 000 enslaved Africans, unless they benefited from the unflinching support of the armies of France, Britain, or Spain. This was the slavers’ real source of power and dominance. In neo-colonial Haiti, the system still works whereby “white” oligarch families effectively rule over a lucrative, barbaric, organized disorder thanks in great measure to military, diplomatic, and economic backing they receive from the United States, Canada, and Europe.

Following the racist 2004 coup and invasion of Haiti, UN troops (MINUSTAH) deployed to subdue impoverished angry Haitians were some of the most ruthless forces of repression in the world, including those of Brazil, China, Jordan and the U.S. Is it any surprise that numerous massacres, contagions and sexual exploitation (including pedophile rapes) have exclusively targeted the country’s most impoverished, blackest men, women and children? MINUSTAH’s egregious violations of human rights are well-documented, with some studies published, as early as November 2004 in the Miami School of Law and in the British Medical Journal, The Lancet, in 2005.

“Regarding current HNP (Haitian National Police) operations in poor neighborhoods, the police explained that if 10 civilians are killed, on average only four are “targeted individuals” and six are innocent bystanders. Because “targets” are being killed, rather than arrested, the police try to kill all witnesses. The killing of the innocent is “sometimes on purpose, sometimes by accident,” they said. Innocent people in the poorest neighborhoods are also arrested “because they tolerate the bad ones.” They admitted that the former soldiers sometimes assist in HNP operations” (Tom Griffin , November 2004)

Thus was described the routine work of a police force receiving Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) training, operating under the aegis of the Canadian-led, U.N.-mandated Civilian Police component of MINUSTAH.

“Shoot them and ask questions later…Right now our country needs security. Unless you clean up the bad people, the gangs, there will be no progress. It will be a massacre, people will die. But let us do it or it will be worse.” Jean Philippe Sassine, Assistant Mayor of Port-au-Prince, appointed illegally by the post-coup foreign-imposed regime as quoted Nov. 30, 2004.

Aside from its own US political bosses, MINUSTAH was under constant pressure from the infamous local “white oligarchs” to conduct massacres against the “unruly black masses of Haiti”.

MINUSTAH’s marching orders became especially clear following the “suicide” of its former military leader, Brazilian General Bacellar, who was found dead on January 7, 2006, following a night of heated exchange with members of Haiti’s business elite who were openly critical of him for being too “soft” with “slum gangs” or “bandits”.

In a January 2022 interview he gave to Brazilian media, former Brazilian Foreign Minister Celso Amorim, had this to day about the MINUSTAH occupation mission that his troops once led in Haiti:

“Nevertheless, it’s very likely that some of our troops committed crimes… If you look at what the UN was saying at the time, primarily the US and some countries in Europe, it was that they all wanted us to use more force… If you look at the interviews with him at the time after he (General Heleno – Bacellar’s predecessor) was removed from Haiti, he was saying, ‘what do you guys want me to do? I don’t want to be tried in the International Criminal Court in the Hague.’”

It is evident that Haiti’s very population has been and is treated as a “threat” to the white oligarchs and their foreign allies. Deceptively-baptised “peacekeeping” troops were and are being deployed to contain that black Haitian “threat.”

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People of good will in the United States, Canada, Europe – worldwide – must listen to the Haitian People’s loud and persistent demand that Black Nationhood and Black humanity be finally shown due consideration and respect. For this, we, the people, law-abiding decent tax contributors, must force racist imperialist forces within our nations to cease their program which has for far too long directly or indirectly armed and shielded criminals in Haiti. The US must stop supporting white warlords in Haiti! Force Joe Biden to drop the BAMBAM!

*

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This article was originally published on Jafrikayiti.

Jafrikayiti, also known as Jean Saint-Vil, is an Ottawa-based author, radio host and social justice activist who publishes in English, Kreyòl and French on his blog http://Jafrikayiti.com. With Solidarité Québec Haiti comrades, Jafrikayiti often tweets #BlackNationhoodMatters. He continually calls on Canada to stop interfering in the governance of his native Haiti.

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***

“It’s very clear now that groups of Russian forces numbering over five hundred thousand have assembled in Western Russia, southern Ukraine, and in Belorussia. So an offensive, a major conventional what we would call “high end conventional” offence is coming in November and December!”

– Col Douglas Macgregor (from this week’s interview)

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As the month of October reaches its conclusion, and as Russia’s military intervention into Ukraine has crossed the eight month long offensive, major events have surfaced signaling, if nothing else, even more escalations of violence inside the besieged country.

• September 21: Vladimir Putin ordered the draft of 300,000 reserves to support the war not only against Ukraine, but against its Western backers. Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu also announced in a televised address that 5,937 Russian soldiers had been killed since the start of the conflict. [1]

• September 26: The Nord Stream pipelines 1 and 2 suffered from leaks, potentially stemming from a deliberate action. President of the European Commission Ursula von der Leyen said she suspected the pipelines were probably sabotaged. The Nord Steam 1 supplied 35% of all gas exported to the EU by Russia. [2]

• September 30: Russia unilaterally declared its annexation of four Ukrainian oblasts – Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson after the four regions voted on the decision to declare independence and then join the Russian Federation. Ukraine and Western countries dismissed the referenda as a land-grab. [3][4]

• October 8: A massive explosion crippled part of the Crimean Bridge connecting Kerch with Russia. Vladimir Putin blamed Ukraine for launching a terrorist attack against Russia. [5][6]

• October 10-12: Russian missiles launched their biggest aerial assault since the beginning of the war on cities across Ukraine forcing thousands to flee bomb shelters and prompting Kiev to halt electricity transports to Europe. Russia claimed it was hitting all designated targets on the Ukrainian military, communications and energy infrastructure. [7]

• October 11: Ukrainian President Zelenskiy attended the G7 Crisis Summit and asked for more air defense systems and an international monitoring system on the Ukraine -Belarus border. [8]

• October 23: Russian Defense Minister warned his NATO counterparts that Kiev may be preparing a false flag attack on itself using a “dirty bomb” in order to accuse Moscow of nuclear terror. Such an endeavor would irradiate wide swath of land and endanger thousands of lives. Washington, Paris, and London dismissed the warning the same day, calling it a “false allegation” and suggesting “the world would see through any attempt to use this allegation as a pretext for escalation.” [9]

Throughout the month in the Western Press, the threat of the confrontation warping into a nuclear conflict is relayed as “far worse” than at any time since the Cuban Missile Crisis exactly sixty years ago this month. There seems to be no off-ramp for de-escalation. [10]

At the same time, beyond Ukraine, what is to become of Europe, now forced to go through a frigid winter with sizable supplies of natural gas for heat and electricity denied to them?

This week on the Global Research News Hour, as the corporate Western Press continues to depict the situation as one in which Putin is losing and in frustration is desperately attempting to escalate affairs, we get the alternate perspective of two analysts who offer different takes on the current Ukraine War State of affairs.

In our first half hour, U.S. Colonel Douglas Macgregor shows up to explain that the Ukrainians are far more beaten than the Press allows us to believe. He also talks about the “dirty bomb” threat and also the picture of a surge into Ukraine in late autumn.

The geopolitical analyst Pepe Escobar shows up next to talk about the recent developments in the former Soviet Territory, Europe attempting to adjust to life without gas, and about how the world at large is now radically changed forever.

Col. Douglas Macgregor is a retired US army Colonel and government official. He was a former advisor to the Secretary of Defense.

Pepe Escobar, born in Brazil, is a correspondent and editor-at-large at Asia Times and columnist for Consortium News and Strategic Culture. Since the mid-1980s he’s lived and worked as a foreign correspondent in London, Paris, Milan, Los Angeles, Singapore, Bangkok.

(Global Research News Hour Episode 366)

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The Global Research News Hour airs every Friday at 1pm CT on CKUW 95.9FM out of the University of Winnipeg. The programme is also podcast at globalresearch.ca .

Other stations airing the show:

CIXX 106.9 FM, broadcasting from Fanshawe College in London, Ontario. It airs Sundays at 6am.

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Cowichan Valley Community Radio CICV 98.7 FM serving the Cowichan Lake area of Vancouver Island, BC airs the program Thursdays at 9am pacific time.

Notes:

1. https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/russias-partial-mobilisation-will-see-300000-drafted-defence-minister-2022-09-21/
2. https://www.bbc.com/news/58888451
3. Shaun Walker (September 23, 2022), “‘Referendums’ on joining Russia under way in occupied Ukraine”, The Guardian; https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/sep/23/occupied-parts-of-ukraine-prepare-to-vote-on-joining-russia
4. https://uk.news.yahoo.com/why-international-community-calling-ukrainian-203201724.html
5. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-63192757
6. https://edition.cnn.com/2022/10/08/europe/crimea-bridge-explosion-intl-hnk/index.html
7. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/10/11/russia-ukraine-war-list-of-key-events-day-230
8. Peter Borger (October 11, 2022), ‘Zelenskiy asks G7 for monitoring of Ukraine’s border with Belarus’, The Guardian; https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/oct/11/russia-accused-of-war-crimes-as-it-continues-to-hit-ukraine-infrastructure
9. Ilya Tsukanov (October 25, 2022), ‘What is a ‘Dirty Bomb’ and Why is Russia Warning About It?’, Sputnik; https://sputniknews.com/20221025/what-is-a-dirty-bomb-and-why-is-russia-warning-about-it-1102619770.html
10. https://uk.movies.yahoo.com/60-years-cuban-missile-crisis-105500119.html

Mentre si aggrava la crisi, in Europa si rafforza il “governo della Goldman Sachs”, la potente banca d’affari USA: ossia la nomina ad alte cariche governative di politici appartenenti al gotha finanziario. Dopo Mario Draghi a capo del governo italiano, un altro “uomo della Goldman Sachs”, Rishi Sunak, viene messo a capo del governo britannico: esperto in fondi speculativi, ha sposato la figlia di un miliardario indiano che lo ha messo a dirigere una sua società finanziaria. Analoga la carriera del presidente francese Emmanuel Macron, formatosi nella banca d’affari statunitense Rothschild.

Questi e altri politici, che allo stesso tempo occupano posti chiave nell’Unione Europea, trascinano l’Europa nel baratro della crisi facendo il gioco di Washington. L’inflazione dell’Eurozona segna un altro record toccando il 10% a settembre. All’origine c’è il fortissimo aumento del prezzo del gas, provocato dalle sanzioni alla Russia. Il gas russo a basso prezzo viene sempre più sostituito, nella UE, dal costoso gas naturale liquefatto (GNL) statunitense in base al prezzo di riferimento della Borsa di Amsterdam controllata da una grande società finanziaria statunitense.

Allo stesso tempo viene impedito all’Italia di importare petrolio e gas a basso prezzo dalla Libia, in quanto il governo italiano “riconosce” e finanzia il governo fantoccio di Tripoli e dichiara “illegale” il vero governo libico, quello di Bengasi. Nell’intervista realizzata da Michelangelo Severgnini, un importante esponente politico di Bengasi – Abdul Hadi Al-Huweej, già Ministro degli Esteri del Governo Al-Thani, segretario del Partito del Futuro Libico – dichiara che il governo di Bengasi può fornire all’Italia petrolio e gas a prezzi molto inferiori a quelli di mercato e può offrire alle imprese italiane grosse opportunità di lavoro in Libia.

Da qui la necessità che l’Italia da un lato abolisca le sanzioni alla Russia e riapra l’import di gas russo, dall’altro faccia un accordo economico con Bengasi. Per fare questo occorre che l‘Italia esca dalla guerra — militare, economica, politica, mediatica, ideologica — che sta travolgendo la nostra vita: obiettivo vitale della Campagna FUORI L’ITALIA DALLA GUERRA che, lanciata pochi giorni fa, sta raccogliendo crescenti adesioni. Il sito della Campagna è https://www.fuorilitaliadallaguerra.it/

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***

Introduction

The rapid spread of the science-based Enlightenment (c1687-c1804) across Europe during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was a cause of much dismay to the reigning monarchies of the time. The source of their anxiety, the philosophes,  were propagating a radical new range of ideas “centered on the value of human happiness, the pursuit of knowledge obtained by means of reason and the evidence of the senses, and ideals such as liberty, progress, toleration, fraternity, and constitutional government.”

The conservative reaction to such ideas was to declare the power of nature and the primacy of god as the controlling force in the universe. On an individual level, the emotions and spirituality were asserted to be more important than science and reason.

This early reaction to the Enlightenment, i.e., the emphasis on capricious feeling or overwhelmed emotions (‘the inflamed passions’) as described in the works of the Irish philosopher Edmund Burke (1729–1797), and later in the Romanticist (c1790s-c1850) movement, turned culture into a burden on society. This is because, from the idea of the cathartic terror of nature, to the Byronic romantic hero, and on to the superheroes of today, Romanticism has diverted people away from real change and real working-class heroes.

The Romanticist escape to Utopia, the remote, the exotic, and the unknown, is in stark contrast with the real lives of past leaders of communitarian movements who suffered, struggled and died for real social change. Now we live in stark, dark times, surrounded by media that is saturated with the Romanticist gloop of horror, terror, fantasy, science fiction, romantic egoism etc., that threatens to slow society down and trap us into infinite and endless imagination to the detriment of any progressive forms of social consciousness and societal change.

Edmund Burke’s sublime:”by the contagion of our passions”

Edmund Burke set out a new way of looking at nature not as a ‘demonstration of order but an invitation of reverence’. For example, this reverence can be seen in the language used by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) in his book The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774). Goethe wrote: ‘From the forbidding mountain range across the barren plain untrodden by the foot of man, to the end of the unknown seas, the spirit of the Eternal Creator can be felt rejoicing over every grain of dust.’ [1]

This new emphasis on reverence for the Creator and fear of nature was a reaction to the Enlightenment desire to refocus society on man and an understanding of nature. In the writing of the Enlightenment philosophes, Nature was given meaning, not abstracted into the anger of a revengeful God. For Diderot,

“a picture of high mountains, ancient forests and immense ruins evoked episodes of classical or religious history. The roar of an invisible torrent led him to speculate on human calamities. Everything in nature was referred to man in society: ‘Man is born for society … put a man in a forest and he will become ferocious.’ For Rousseau, man only reached his highest insights when alone and humbled by the savage force of nature. Both were alike in their search for natural spontaneity, but what turned one towards society drove the other into solitude.” [2]

Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) had also rejected the rationalism of the Enlightenment philosophes (the development of knowledge and the intellect), “in favor of a form of nonrational, spiritual “enlightenment” centered on the “holy and beneficent” inner voice of conscience engraved on our hearts by God.” [3]

Image: Jean-Jacques Rousseau. 1766 portrait of Rousseau wearing an Armenian papakha and costume, Allan Ramsay

Thus, Rousseau moved “away from the Enlightenment’s reliance on empiricism, reason, and knowledge towards a stress on the active nature of the mind and the inner spiritual life of the individual”. By doing this, “he helped to launch what would eventually develop into a full blown revolt against the rationalism and intellectualism of the eighteenth century in the name of religion, emotion, imagination,and the heart, themes central to the thought of the Romantic period that Rousseau helped to inspire.” [4]

Burke developed the concept of the sublime (great, elevated, or lofty thought or language) in his book, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin Of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. He wrote:

“Whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain, and danger, that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a source of the sublime; that is, it is productive of the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling.”

Burke changed the emphasis from description to drama, especially in his emphasis on passionate language to ‘inflame the heart’. He writes:

“We yield to sympathy what we refuse to description. The truth is, all verbal description, merely as naked description, though never so exact, conveys so poor and insufficient an idea of the thing described, that it could scarcely have the smallest effect, if the speaker did not call in to his aid those modes of speech that mark a strong and lively feeling in himself. Then, by the contagion of our passions, we catch a fire already kindled in another, which probably might never have been struck out by the object described.” [5]

Thus, the power of rhetoric (using ‘modes of speech’ combined with ‘strong and lively feeling’,’we catch a fire already kindled in another’) takes over from reality itself: “The influence of most things on our passions is not so much from the things themselves, as from our opinions concerning them; and these again depend very much on the opinions of other men, conveyed for the most part by words only.” [6]

In this way the passions of men can be inflamed by a strong use of imaginative rhetoric. As reason is secondary, the implications of such behaviour, such an idea, on a mass scale (passions creating a wildfire across nations) can later be seen in the wars of the twentieth century.

Also, to overemphasise the passions diminished the role of reason and rationalisation in individual acts. For example, as Diderot claimed, “it is wrong to attribute the crimes of men to their passions: it is their false judgements which are at fault. The passions always inspire us rightly, for they inspire us only with the desire for happiness. It is the mind that misleads us and makes us take false roads.” [7]

Romantic heroes:”misery in his heart”

If we combine Burke’s “ideas of pain, and danger,” with Rousseau’s “inner voice of conscience engraved on our hearts” we can see the beginnings of the construction of the Romantic hero in pursuit of his/her own passions, and who can be described thus:

“A romantic hero is an exceptional and often mysterious person, usually in exceptional circumstances. The collision of external events is transferred to the inner world of the hero, in whose soul there is a struggle of contradictions. As a result of this kind of reproduction, romanticism has extremely highlighted the value of the personality, inexhaustible in their inner depths, revealing its unique inner world. Man in romantic works is also embodied with the help of contrast, antithesis: on the one hand, she understood the crown of creation, and on the other – a frivolous toy in the hands of fate, unknown and unaffected forces that play with her feelings. Therefore, she often becomes a victim of her own passions.”

The characteristics of the Romantic hero tend to emphasise someone who has been “rejected by society and has themselves at the center of their own existence”, with various combinations of “introspection”, “wanderlust, melancholy, misanthropy, alienation, and isolation.”

Image: The Lord Byron FRS. Portrait by Thomas Phillips, c. 1813

The Byronic hero was popularised in Byron’s poem Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1812–1818) with the passions emphasied as “misery in his heart, a scorner of his kind, implacable in revenge, yet capable of deep and strong affection”. A solitary figure and resigned to suffering which was reflected in the trials and tribulations of Byron’s own life and death in Italy and Greece.

The Romantic hero can be seen as an individualist who suffers from psychological traumas associated with alienation from society and life itself.

Working class heroes: “complaints of the hungry proletariat”

As with the Romantic movement, the Romantic hero was a reaction to the changing world of the ancient regime‘s control and rule through aristocracy and monarchy. The rediscovered and popularised ideologies of republicanism, democracy and socialism took to the stage and soon provoked conservative reaction.

As Otto Grotewohl noted in 1948: “Romanticism sought models in the dark mysticism of the Middle Ages and viewed with complete contempt not only democracy and revolution but also the emancipation of the people”.

And although many of the romantics fled to the mountains or the sea to escape burgeoning capitalism, Pyotr Semyonovich Kogan wrote that “inevitably even in the work of such a poet as Hugo, the noise of the street and the complaints of the hungry proletariat burst in and drowned out the gloomy sounds of medieval organs and the tender songs of Oriental odalisques.”

Kogan criticises the Romantic interest in melancholy music and the other-worldly exotic of Orientalism. As the practical materialism (science-based) of the proletariat excluded Romanticism (irrationalism), among the working classes anti-social individualism was replaced with collectivism.

The many aspects of the working class condition e.g. hunger, loneliness, alienation, poverty, joblessness, depression or lacking in health care (many aspects actually glorified in the Romantic hero) are reversed in the common aim of working-class solidarity and activism. Thus, the characteristics of the working class hero are the opposite of the romantic hero.

The male and female working class heroes given to us by history are ordinary people who rose above their living and social conditions to create a better world for all, fighting for better wages and working conditions, birth control and health services for both workers and migrants. Some examples:

Image: Mother Jones, American labor activist.

“Mother Jones (1837 – 1930) Mary ‘Mother’ Jones was a trade union activist who helped to organise strikes to campaign for better pay and conditions for workers. She was an organiser for “The Knights of Labor” and the American Mine Workers Union. She sought to enforce child labour laws. Referred to as ‘the most dangerous women in America’ she revelled in her cause to liberate the working class of America.

Margaret Sanger (1879 – 1966) Sanger was a member of the New York Socialist Party and supported striking workers in the early 1910s. She published her first articles on birth control in a socialist magazine. After the First World War, she concentrated on promoting birth control and allowed her socialist policies to elapse.

Aneurin Bevan (1897–1960) Bevan was the son of a miner and left school at the age of 13 to work in the mines himself. He became active in local union politics and rose in the Labour Movement to become a key figure of the Party. After the 1945 election, he set up the new National Health Service, which offered universal health care.

Walter Reuther (1907 – 1970) Reuther was an influential trade union leader who took on the major car firms and gained recognition for unions. Under his leadership, UAW became a major force, gaining substantial concessions from car companies. For his campaign to win workers rights, he was beaten up by Ford’s men and subject to two assassination attempts.

Cesar Chavez (1927 – 1993) Chavez was the son of Latino-immigrants and started life working for very low wages as an agricultural labourer. He became an American labor leader and civil rights activist who co-founded the National Farm Workers Association. Chavez sought to create better working conditions for migrant farm workers.”

Modern romantics: From Ziggy Stardust to Harry Potter

There are many contemporary working-class heroes that we don’t hear about as the mass media will inevitably exclude anyone that opposes the current global dominance of neo-liberal ideology. What is promoted, however, are the abstracted, alienated, other-worldly characters such as superheroes: bourgeois heroes, guilt-ridden for not carrying out the claims of universality of their class (liberté, égalité, fraternité), that can only try to ameliorate the down side of capitalism: the proliferation of criminality.

The Romantic heroes of today have not changed much from those of the nineteenth century. They still have the same aloof characteristics of difference, alienation and disillusionment with the same desires:

“A longing for home and a longing for what is far off- these are the feelings by which the romantics are torn hither and thither; they miss the near-at-hand, suffer from their isolation from men, but, at the same time they avoid the other men and and seek zealously for the remote, the exotic and the unknown. They suffer from their estrangement from the world, but they also accept and desire it. Thus Novalis defines romantic poetry as the “the art of appearing strange in an attractive way, the art of making a subject remote and yet familiar and pleasant,” and he asserts that everything becomes romantic and and poetic, “if one removes it in a distance,” that everything can be romanticized, if one “gives a mysterious appearance to the ordinary, the dignity of the unknown to the familiar and an infinite significance to the finite.”” [8]

Image: David Bowie performing as Ziggy Stardust at Newcastle City Hall in 1972.

“The escape to Utopia and the fairy tale, to the unconscious and the fantastic, the uncanny and the mysterious, to childhood and nature, to dreams and madness, were all disguised and more or less sublimated forms of the same feeling, of the same yearning for irresponsibility and a life free from suffering and frustration – all attempts to escape into that chaos and anarchy against which the classicism of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries had fought at times with alarm and anger, at others with grace and wit, but always with the same determination.” [9]

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Apparently not content with the billions of dollars it already receives from the multinational corporate sector and related non-state financiers, the World Health Organization (WHO) has quietly begun seeking still further funding directly from companies.

Operating through a little-known WHO Foundation set up during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, the new funding drive is headed by Anil Soni, a former pharmaceutical executive who has been a senior advisor to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. With WHO Foundation board members and other senior officials having additional conflicting histories and connections with organizations such as the World Economic Forum (WEF), the corporate money capture of the WHO and its activities has reached a new level of control.  

Set up in May 2020, the WHO Foundation claims it exists because the WHO itself lacks sufficient resources to fulfil its mandate. In fact, so dependent is the WHO already becoming on corporate financing, its 194 member states now provide only around 16 percent of its income through membership fees. The rest comes from so-called ‘voluntary contributions’, 88 percent of which go to projects that are specified by the donors. The majority of such donations come from the multinational corporate sector and related non-state financiers, with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation providing hundreds of millions of dollars a year and being by far the largest non-government contributor.

Promising ‘economic returns’ to investors

Headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland, in close proximity to the WHO itself, the WHO Foundation is affiliated to the WHO and, while legally independent from it, has a close relationship with its leadership. Regular meetings take place between representatives of the two organizations, with the WHO having an Assistant Director-General sitting as an observer on the WHO Foundation’s board.

In a particularly disturbing development, the WHO Foundation has recently partnered with venture capital firm OurCrowd to launch a $200 million ‘Global Health Equity Fund’. Speaking at the launch of the project, which took place in September 2022 at the Clinton Global Initiative in New York, WHO Foundation CEO Anil Soni openly boasted that the fund was looking for “return-seeking private capital” and “economic returns” for investors. While a share of the profits will go to the WHO, it is difficult to see this enterprise as anything other than blatant profiting from disease.

Unsurprisingly, therefore, the biographies of the WHO Foundation’s board and leadership reveal links to industries, organizations, and individuals seen by many as putting profit before health. CEO Anil Soni was Head of Global Infectious Diseases at pharmaceutical company Viatris, for example. He has also served as CEO of the Clinton Health Access Initiative and was a senior advisor to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Chief Operating Officer Karen Hitschke was previously Chief Financial Officer for pharmaceutical company Affectis AG, while board member Clare Akamanzi was a Young Global Leader of Klaus Schwab’s World Economic Forum. Board member Dr. Silvia Gold cofounded multinational pharmaceutical company Insud Pharma.

Funding from the Gates Foundation

Given its vast ongoing donations to the WHO, it is hardly surprising that the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has also started giving money to the WHO Foundation. An initial donation of $280,000 was made in May 2021 to “support fundraising efforts for the COVAX AMC and vaccine equity”, with an additional $1,000,000 then given in April 2022 to “support the organizational capacity of the WHO Foundation”. With concern growing over the influence Gates already wields over the WHO, his funding of the new WHO Foundation will only invite still further suspicion.

Global health surely deserves better than this. As the COVID-19 pandemic has demonstrated once again, the pharmaceutical industry and its allies view human life purely as a source of endless profits to be made from the sale of patented drugs and vaccines. Far from seeking to change this unethical business model, the WHO and the WHO Foundation would instead appear to be fully supportive of it. It is therefore imperative that a new body is created to replace the WHO corporate setup and tasked with making natural preventive health a human right worldwide. Achieving ‘Health for All’ on a global scale depends on it.

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

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

He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

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***

Here is one. Click here to watch the video.

Here is another. Watch below or click here.

Here is the third. Watch below or click here.

The first, which is 11 minutes, proves that the overthrow of the democratically elected President of Ukraine in February 2014 was a U.S. coup that was hidden behind popular anti-corruption demonstrations that themselves had actually been in the planning stages within the Obama Administration ever since at least June 2011. And here is the smoking gun, an excerpt of which was shown in that 11-minute video. To see it fully is to understand more clearly how the coup was being carried out. If one wants to see a transcript of that phone-conversation, in which the code-phrases and personnel that are referred-to in it are explained, that’s here.

The second, which is 8 minutes, proves that lying by the leaders in order to deceive the American public is virtually universal in both the Republican and Democratic Parties, in Congress, the White House, throughout the Administration, and in both Democratic Party and Republican Party propaganda-media (‘news’-media), to so extreme an extent as to display the rulers’ deep contempt of the public as being so stupid and passive about the ‘information’ they receive, as for the public to accept what the rulers and their propaganda-media allege, even if what they allege is so illogical as to be virtually impossible on its very face. If you want to see an article about that video in which the outrageousness of those lies is documented by providing the actual history behind the event which is shown in that video to be rampantly lied-about by America’s leaders, you can read that here.

The third video, which is 4 minutes, proves that America’s (and UK’s) leaders have been, and are, trying to replace the non-sectarian existing Government of Syria, by a jihadist Sunni, Al-Qaeda-led, Government of Syria. If you want to see an article that provides broader perspective on this, it is here.

*

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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.

Featured image is from Mideast Discourse

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First published on August 23, 2022

***

The problem with Covid vaccination is the problem with all vaccinations. All governments, and indeed almost everybody, but with significant exceptions, have accepted the germ theory and proceeded with vaccination in the face of monstrous failure and ineffectiveness.

But to question the germ theory and vaccination is like, in an earlier era, questioning the centrality of the earth in the universe. However, as was the case then, there is very good evidence for doing so.

The germ theory is primarily the result of the work of Louis Pasteur, Edward Jenner, and Robert Koch. If someone reads the book Béchamp or Pasteur by Ethel Douglas Hume, the work of Pasteur must come into question. Koch is renowned for his work on anthrax and tuberculosis, yet his vaccinations often resulted in disaster. Jenner in his own words has been caught trying to hide deaths resulting from his vaccinations.

Many Doctors and other scientists have raised questions about the germ theory in the past only to be vilified. For example Dr. Charles Creighton, generally considered the father of British epidemiology was asked to write the Encyclopedia Britannica article on vaccination, but decided to research the matter and come to his own conclusions:

“It is difficult to conceive what will be the excuse made for a century of cowpoxing; but it cannot be doubted that the practice will appear in as absurd a light to the common sense of the twentieth century as bloodletting now does to us. Vaccination differs, however, from all previous errors of the faculty, in being maintained as the law of the land on the warrant of medical authority. That is the reason why the blow to professional credit can hardly help being severe, and why the efforts to ward it off have been, and will continue to be so ingenious.”

Or let us take Lord Lister.

“Joseph Lister, 1st Baron Lister, OM, PC, PRS, FRCSE, FRCP Glas (5 April 1827 – 10 February 1912[1]) was a British surgeon, medical scientist, experimental pathologist and a pioneer of antiseptic surgery[2] and preventative medicine. Joseph Lister revolutionized the craft of surgery in the same manner that John Hunter revolutionized the science of surgery.[3]”

Lister was originally a supporter of Pasteur’s ideas, but through his work he was forced to change his mind and reject the possibility of airborne infection.

What was Lord Lister’s final judgment, after having abandoned the method into which he was misled by Pasteur? Here are his own words, as quoted by Dr. George Wilson:

“The floating particles of the air may be disregarded in our surgical work, and, if so, we may dispense with antiseptic washing and irrigation, provided always that we can trust ourselves and our assistants to avoid the introduction into the wound of septic defilement from other than atmospheric sources.”

Koch achieved immortal fame by isolating the tubercle bacillus in 1882 and the cholera vibrio the following year. He got the Noble Prize. However. Dr J.W. Browne, Medical Superintendent of the Kalyra Sanatorium, South Australia says:

“To date, upwards of two hundred different forms of tuberculin have been prepared and described.

The simple fact of the matter is that no one has yet been able to repeat Koch’s experiment successfully. There is no evidence but Koch’s in favour of tuberculin as a therapeutic cure for tuberculosis in guinea pigs, in calves, or in man. No one but Koch has been able to cure an infected guinea pig by the use of tuberculin of any sort.

Koch, as Shera says, was an optimist. There is no question that tuberculin can do infinite harm. Scores of people have died prematurely at its hands.

Never was there such a commercial vaccine as this one, and never has there been such a gigantic hoax. Tuberculin, Shera says, should not come within the range of vaccine therapy. Whatever good results are imputed to tuberculin must have occurred in spite of it, for its virtues are founded on experiments which cannot be repeated.

The disbeliever too, can point to many cases where the administration of tuberculin in pulmonary disease has been undoubtedly followed by disaster and, while he freely admits the undoubted powers of the tuberculin therapist to stir up the embers and kindle the fire, he has hitherto asked him in vain for any evidence of power to extinguish the fire.”

Herbert Shelton in Orthopathy describes many attempts to induce diseases by giving subjects germs supposedly known to cause them in food, swabs, and even injections without inducing any disease. He mentions the case of the murderer, Dr. Waite, and his victims, Colonel and Mrs. Peck. Waite tried at first to kill Mrs. Peck by giving her a disease. Here is an account of it written buy Lisa Mullenneaux.

As a fake physician, he had access to laboratory cultures from sources such as the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research and the Cornell Medical Center. Detectives later found hidden in his apartment hundreds of test tubes and glass slides with labels such as “typhoid,” “diphtheria,” “pneumonia,” “tetanus,” and “asiatic cholera.” Disgustingly, the old lady refused to sicken when Waite added germs to her soup…”

No one has ever been able to induce disease through airborne infection. The theory of infectious, airborne disease, though as entrenched in the mind as once was the belief of the centrality of earth in the universe, does not stand up to scrutiny, and without it the efficacy of vaccines also disappears. But since vaccines often insert decayed biological substances or other toxic materials directly into the bloodstream, they can and often do cause diseases themselves. These diseases are not restricted to those the vaccine was intended to cure. This too is abundantly documented.

Here is an example of a vaccine associated with an increase in the disease it was supposed to prevent, small pox. This is a chart for the city of Leicester

As noted, vaccination became compulsory in 1840 and again in 1867. But in 1845 there was a huge outbreak of smallpox. By 1871 97.5% of the population had been vaccinated. Yet in 1872 3523 cases were recorded, the largest number by far in any year.

Dr R. Garrow, Medical Officer of Health for Chesterfield, England, asks why it is that the case mortality rate from smallpox in all persons over the age of 15 in England and Wales for the years 1923-6 was five times as high in the vaccinated (0.3%), as in those who were unvaccinated (0.06%)! He used official figures, and calculated only to one and two decimals; when figured to four decimals the rates become 0.324% and .0578%, nearer six times, the ratio between them being 5.6055 to 1.

Or again, in January 1899, Chief Surgeon Lippencott of the U.S. Army, writing from Manila, said: “The entire Command has been vaccinated at least four times since the appearance of the disease (smallpox).”

In the following March, he wrote again to state that all danger was over. However, in the reports of the Surgeon-General of the U.S.A. Army are to be found the following figures of smallpox cases and deaths:

During the same period, the smallpox fatality rate among the far less vaccinated general population of the United States did not exceed 3%!

Pasteur’s first claimed success was with anthrax. Paul de Kruff in Microbe Hunters gives this account of Pasteur’s work on anthrax as evidence that even the great man can sometimes slip up.

“But one of Pasteur’s most charming traits was his characteristic of a scientific Phoenix, who rose triumphantly from the ashes of his own mistakes … so it is not surprising to find him, with Reux and Chamberlain, in 1881 discovering a very pretty way of taming vicious anthrax microbes and turning them into a vaccine…”

“Gradually, hardly a year after the miracle of Pouilly-le-Fort, it began to be evident that Pasteur, though a most original microbe hunter, was not an infallible god. Disturbing letters began to pile up on his desk; complaints from Montpotheir and a dozen towns of France, and from Packisch and Kapuvar in Hungary. Sheep were dying from anthrax – not natural anthrax they had picked up in dangerous fields, but anthrax they had got from those vaccines that were meant to save them! From other places came sinister stories of how the vaccines had failed to work – the vaccine had been paid for, whole flocks of sheep had been injected, the farmers had gone to bed breathing ‘Thank God for our great man Pasteur’, only to wake up in the morning to find their fields littered with the carcasses of dead sheep, and these sheep – which ought to have been  immune – had died from the lurking anthrax spores that lay in their fields.

And this from a Pasteur cheerleader.

As mentioned earlier, vaccination is often associated with diseases other than the one it was meant to prevent. In 1881, the Sanitary Commission of the Hungarian Government said of the vaccine viruses used in the anti-anthrax inoculation:

“The worst diseases, pneumonia, catarrhal fever, etc., have exclusively struck down the animals subjected to injection. It follows from this that the Pasteur inoculation tends to accelerate the action of certain latent diseases and to hasten the mortal issue of other grave affections.”

In 1888 an institute in Odessa, Russia, sent some anti-anthrax vaccines to Kachowka in southern Russia, where 4,564 sheep were soon vaccinated, and 3,696 of them promptly turned up their toes and died; a death rate of 81 percent, and from a supposed ‘preventative’ vaccine at that!

The Zoophilist for May 1st 1891 reported deaths in 123 ‘selected’ cases [of tuberculosis] in Berlin from November 1890 to February 1891 which caused Koch to fall ‘under a cloud’, but he did not give up until the government finally closed him down because of the terrible death rate!

The Chief of the Bureau of Animal Industry of the US. Department of Agriculture says in his report for 1902:

“Most veterinary text books state that foot and mouth disease is a mild infection and that only 1 or 2 percent of the animals attacked die from it, the reader being left to infer that the losses do not exceed 2 or 3 percent of the value of the animals. Such a conclusion would be a grave mistake.”

However, it seems to have been mild before its cause was traced to vaccines. The Secretary of Agriculture says in the department1914 Year Book, page 20:

“There were outbreaks of foot and mouth disease in this country in 1870, 1880, 1884, 1902, and 1908. Since the close of the fiscal year 1914, the sixth outbreak has occurred. The first three, those of 1870, 1880 and 1884 were comparatively trifling. Those in 1902 and 1908 were more grave. The present one is the most serious and extensive of all.

In 1902, the outbreak occurred in the New England States. In 1908 it originated in Detroit. The origin of each of these new outbreaks was traced to the importation of vaccine virus for the propagation of vaccine for use in vaccinating people against smallpox. The vaccine was imported from Japan where the foot and mouth disease exists. Each of these outbreaks was stamped out by methods which have proved most effective in preventing the disease from gaining a footing. These methods involved the killing of all infected and exposed animals, the burying of the carcasses, and the thorough disinfection of all premises with which the animals may have come in contact.”

The first part of the 1914 outbreak was ascribed to ‘an imported article used in tanning’ (hides?) but when this was stamped out, a recurrence occurred near Chicago, in August 1915, that was traced to a Chicago laboratory making hog-cholera vaccines. Foot and mouth disease was found in 8 of 11 herds that had used this vaccine.

The Secretary of Agriculture says of this in the1915 Year Book (p.27):

“It seems certain that this infection was produced by contaminated hog-cholera serum prepared in Chicago, in October 1914, at an establishment where the disease had not been known to exist at any time.

…pending investigation, all shipments of serum from Chicago were prohibited. It was found that some of the product of the establishment had been used on 11 herds of hogs.

…infected hogs were found in eight of the herds and all 11 herds were slaughtered at once.”

The Foot and Mouth Disease Commission of the U.S. Department of Agriculture published a chart showing the trend of foot and mouth disease in Germany from 1886 to 1924, which is reproduced below. Note the tremendous increase in deaths that accompanied the first general use of serums in 1920.

The Department’s Farmers’ Bulletin No. 666 says:

“Foot and mouth disease has prevailed in Europe for a great many years and has occasioned tremendous economic losses there. In Italy, France, Switzerland, Germany and Russia the plague has existed so long and has gained such a foothold that it is economically impossible to fight it with the American methods of slaughter and disinfection.”

Italy, France, Germany and Switzerland have compulsory vaccination, hence large vaccine plants that can spread the disease, as occurred in the cases cited in the United States. And of course neighbouring states with or without compulsory vaccination would be overrun by importation from these countries, though some, such as England, kept it out pretty well.

Other places where vaccination is pushed, such as Brazil, also have the disease, while Canada, the United States, Mexico, Australia and New Zealand, all of which are comparatively free from intensive vaccination drives, also seem to have only sporadic attacks of foot and mouth disease, which are generally easily stamped out.

How can the ‘scientists’ account for this?

Here is a chart Parsons, in Pasteur: Plagarist, Imposter, shows that compares Tuberculosis rates in countries with heavy vaccination with those with less or none.

In the past, from time to time, the disaster of vaccination became obvious to nearly everyone except, of course, doctors and government officials.

The growing feeling for anti-vaccination reached full force in the 1890s with the National Anti-Vaccination League. The group organized protests and produced its own publications to distribute anti-vaccine propaganda. Ultimately, the voices of the anti-vaccination movement became too loud for the government to ignore and the government made it possible for people to opt-out of vaccination.

Around 1900, after the improvements in health due to sanitation and nutrition had had time to be weighed against that of vaccination, most of the people of England began to refuse vaccination, which resulted in a greater decline in smallpox, but in certain cities of India the British government was still able to keep up rigid enforcement. The following chart shows the high smallpox death-rate in three of these Indian cities as compared to the decreased death-rate in London after the clean up (health) campaign:

Perhaps the biggest vaccination success is the eradication of polio. Salk vaccine was introduced in 1955 and by 1962 polio was all but gone. But Post hoc ergo propter hoc is a logical fallacy that states: “Since event Y followed event X, event Y must have been caused by event X.” Other important events happened during this time. In particular DDT production and use declined dramatically.

Other pesticides were also heavily used in this period. BHC was known to cause fatalities. Arsenic compounds were also heavily used and were withdrawn during this period. Although DDT lagged behind polio incidence in the early 40’s, other arsenides were used heavily.

The connection between DDT and polio was more than just coincidental. Mortan Biskind’s research discovered this connection almost immediately.

Particularly relevant to recent aspects of this problem are neglected studies by Lillie and his collaborators (74, 75) of the National Institutes of Health, published in 1944 and 1947 respectively, which showed that DDT may produce degeneration of the anterior horn cells of the spinal cord in animals. These changes do not occur regularly in exposed animals any more than they do in human beings, but they do appear often enough to be significant. When the population is exposed to a chemical agent ‘known to produce in animals lesions in the spinal cord resembling those in human polio, and thereafter the latter disease increases sharply in incidence and maintains its epidemic character year after year, is it unreasonable to suspect an etiologic relationship?

But polio research focused almost exclusively on seeking a viral cause.

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The evidence for corruption and obvious deception among vaccination’s proponents is ample. John Baron, in his Life of Jenner quotes Jenner,

“‘When I found Dr. Woodworth about to publish his pamphlet relative to the eruption (smallpox) cases at the Smallpox Hospital, I entreated him in the strongest terms, both by letter and conversation, not to do a thing that would so disturb the progress of vaccination.”

Thomas Morgan in his Medical Delusions writes,

“Jenner soon discovered that vaccination did not give immunity from smallpox, including some who had been vaccinated by himself and had died from it. Not wishing to bring vaccination into disrepute, he endeavored to suppress reports, and in writing to a friend, said, ‘I wish my professional brethren to be slow to publish fatal results after vaccination.”

Pasteur’s questionable practices are well documented in Béchamp or Pasteur.

At home, too, there were annoyances. At the Academy of Medicine, voices were raised against the germ theory of disease, and in particular M. Peter ridiculed Pasteur’s all-conquering microbe. It was easy for him to do this, as in March 1882 the reputation of the vaccine for anthrax had met with a disastrous downfall.

It had come about in this way; in Italy it had been thought worth while for a commission composed of members of the University of Turin to perform experiments such as Pasteur had described, and thus test his prophylactic. As a result, to quote René Vallery-Radot,

“All the sheep, vaccinated and unvaccinated, had succumbed subsequently to the inoculation of the blood of a sheep that had died of charbon.”

After about a year of dispute and passing the buck by correspondence, the Turin professors published a pamphlet in June 1883, containing some of Pasteur’s contradictory statements together with their cutting criticisms thereof, under the title Of the Scientific Dogmatism of the Illustrious Professor Pasteur, which was signed by six professors of high standing. This, by citing contradictory statements Pasteur had made in different papers, along with their comments, just about destroyed his theories on anthrax.

This paper was translated into French, but Pasteur, with some adroit dissimulation, managed to survive the blow, and went on pushing his anthrax vaccine.

Medical professionals of high repute seriously questioned and offered significant evidence against the germ theory and the program of vaccination. Creighton expected it to be long discredited, indeed incredible, by now. At the beginning of the nineteenth century medical education was unregulated and informal, and medical practice included a number of different approaches, but “preventive” medicine was not among them. How did “preventive” medicine and the universal acceptance of vaccination as its primary treatment become the orthodoxy it is today?

Industrialization in the nineteenth century required social and political transformations and the creation of a workforce from a recalcitrant population of farmers and craftsmen. E. Richard Brown in Rockefeller Medicine Men argues that

“corporate capitalists turned to philanthropy, the universities, and then to medicine to solve some of the many problems that grew out of capitalist industrialization… For the brief period from about 1900 to World War I science-oriented medical schools and the AMA joined forces to press for the acceptance of scientific medicine.”

Scientific medicine, insofar as it was preventive, was primarily adherence to the ideas of Jenner, Pasteur, and Koch. The Carnegie Foundation for the Excellence of Teaching and the Rockefeller foundation allied with the AMA before WW II to produce this result. Brown argues that these foundations did not manipulate medicine for financial gain, but to shape it to serve the new social structure of industrial capitalism rapidly developing by the end of the nineteenth century.

It was a time when the “trusts” had come under strong political pressure. Class war seemed to be in the cards. The super rich justified the new industrial society by arguing for its rationalism. Monopoly, because of the economy of size, was considered the rational organization of production. Social Darwinism justified ruthlessness. Science, it was argued, justified industrialism. Philanthropic successful capitalists supported charities to spur the poor to ameliorate their condition.

They financed Universities to encourage scientific education to produce the needed educated workforce. There was a need to prove that industrialism and its titans of industry were good. These concerns combined in an interest in medicine. ”This union of corporate philanthropy, the managerial professional stratum, and the universities in supporting science spawned the Rockefeller medicine men and their new system of medicine,” Brown argues.

Brown quotes Rockefeller:

The best philanthropy, the help that does the most good and the least harm, the help that nourishes civilization at its very root, that most widely disseminates health, righteousness, and happiness, is not what is usually called charity. It is, in my judgment, the investment of effort or time or money, carefully considered with relation to the power of employing people at a remunerative wage, to expand and develop the resources at hand, and to give opportunity for progress and healthful labour where it did not exist before. No mere money-giving is comparable to this in its lasting and beneficial results.

To make a long story short the conclusion was that scientific philanthropy must concern itself with “prevention rather than relief,” according to Amos Warner, a Stanford economist active in the movement.

The inclusion of science in university curriculum had already begun.

On the last day of April in 1846 Edward Everett, the new president of Harvard University laid before his inaugural convocation a proposal, that Harvard found a “school of theoretical and practical science” to teach “its application to the arts of life,” to furnish a “supply of skillful engineers” and other persons who would explore and develop the “inexhaustible natural treasures of the country, and to guide its vast industrial energies in their rapid development.”

The industrialist Abbott Lawrence underwrote the new school, and the push for sciences to be taught in the American universities grew apace. Now medicine came under this umbrella.

William H. Welch was a doctor who openly despised medical practice with patients and, after returning in 1878 from studies with Robert Koch in bacteriology in Germany, sought a university position as a pure researcher. He achieved that goal with, first, a position at Bellevue and, in 1884, a position at Johns Hopkins. In 1893 he became Johns Hopkins medical school’s first dean. Brown quotes Donald Fleming’s biography, William H. Welch and the Rise of Modern Medicine.

“In 1901 he [Welch] came to the attention of Frederick T. Gates, the grand master of the Rockefeller philanthropies. Welch was asked to help organize the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research. He soon became chief adviser to the Rockefeller foundations on medical projects, assisting in important ways in funding medical education in the United States and China,..Under the skillful direction of foundation officers, the Rockefeller wealth became the largest single source of capital for the development of medical science in the United States, the conversion of medical education to a scientific research basis, and the development of public health programs in the United States and abroad.”

Brown continues:

By 1928 Rockefeller gifts to the institute totaled $65 million, an enormous sum for the period. Although the elder Rockefeller and his son are most widely known for the benefactions, it was Frederick T. Gates who formulated the strategies and initiated the investments in medical research, medical education, and public health.

Gates, in his memoir recounting how he came to the project tells of a minister who recommended the work of William Osler, which Gates obtained and read in one night.

When I laid down this book, I had begun to realize how woefully neglected in all civilized countries and perhaps most of all in this country, had been the scientific study of medicine. I saw very clearly also why this was true. In the first place, the instruments for investigation, the microscope, the science of chemistry, had not until recently been developed. Pasteur’s germ theory of disease was very recent. Moreover, while other departments of science, astronomy, chemistry, physics, etc., had been endowed very generously in colleges and universities throughout the whole civilized world, medicine, owing to the peculiar commercial organization of medical colleges, had rarely if ever, been anywhere endowed, and research and instruction alike had been left to shift for itself dependent altogether on such chance as the active practitioner might steal from his practice.

That July Gates dictated a memorandum to Rockefeller pointing out the usefulness of the Koch and Pasteur Institutes. Although it took several years, partially because Rockefeller senior supported homeopathy against his son and Gates who were advocates of “science,” the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research began its work in 1901 with Dr. Simon Flexner, one of Koch’s students, as its executive director. Brown grants that Gates had genuine humanitarian motives, but was primarily influenced by Simon Flexner and William Welch, both students of Koch. Brown quotes Gates from Some Elements of an Effective System of Scientific Medicine in the United States that “the fundamental aim of medical science ought to be not primarily the cure but primarily the prevention of disease.” Naturally he was inclined to support preventive vaccination.

Medical scientists, when they returned from scientific study in Europe, got prestigious faculty jobs in the new university departments. Johns Hopkins was staffed almost entirely with students who had studied in Germany. These were the people, rather than the clinicians who actually saw patients, that the Philanthropists turned to.

At the turn of the century the scientists joined with elite practitioners to gain control of the AMA where they worked to introduce more elaborate and expensive educational requirements and so reduce the number of lesser practitioners. Reformers within the AMA used the technical requirements to set standards which more and more favored laboratory scientists and students of substantial means at the expense of clinical practitioners and poorer, however talented, students.

The AMA was founded in 1847 as a trade association whose purpose was to serve the interests of doctors, but was essentially ineffective until 1901 when it was reorganized under Dr. George H. Simmons who, though educated in homeopathy later rejected it. Simmons increased the power of the AMA by creating a hierarchical representative structure and strengthening the local societies. Brown quotes the committee on reorganization that its intention was “to foster scientific medicine and to make the medical profession a power in the social and political life of the republic.”

“From its founding onward, the AMA was hostile to the interests of proprietary medical colleges and their faculties. The practitioners [AMA] wanted to reduce the output of medical schools in order to reduce competition within the profession, while the medical faculties opposed any attempted reforms because of their interests in maximizing their lecture fees and future consulting fees…

Within two years the state medical societies, under the guidance of the Council on Medical Education, dominated the state boards. Through the influence of the state societies and direct contact by the council, the licensing boards increasingly became agents of the council’s plan of action.

Once in control of the reorganized AMA and the state boards in charge of licensing, the reformers launched their most effective tool for transforming the profession. In 1904 the AMA replaced its temporary committee on medical education with a permanent Council on Medical Education, headed by the energetic and resourceful Arthur Dean Bevan, The council inspected every one of the country’s 160 medical schools and gave them grades primarily on their scientific facilities and requirements for entrance.

In 1907 Bevan had invited Henry S. Pritchett, president of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, to examine the survey materials collected by the council. Bevan convinced Pritchett of the value of a Carnegie supported study of medical education. Pritchett discussed the proposed study with Charles Eliot, president of Harvard and a trustee of the Carnegie Foundation, Rockefeller’s General Education Board, and the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research. He also talked with Dr. Simon Flexner, a Koch student and director of the Rockefeller Institute. Flexner suggested a director for the study, his brother Abraham.

Abraham Flexner was not a doctor, and when he met with Pritchett he told him so, but Pritchett assured him that he wanted a layman for the job, not a doctor. In any case Abraham Flexner was in no position to judge the science in “scientific” medicine. In his Autobiography Flexner reveals himself as a fanboy of great minds.

Pasteur, Lister, Koch, Ehrlich, and an unending line of physicists and chemists had their feet in both worlds—the world of practice and the world of theory. Minds that are fundamental in their searching, whatever the spring that moves them…

He describes his preparation for his task.

Having finished my preliminary reading, I went to Baltimore—how fortunate for me that I was a Hopkins graduate!—where I talked at length with Drs. Welch, Halsted, Mall, Abel, and Howell, and with a few others who knew what a medical school ought to be, for they had created one. I had a tremendous advantage in the fact that I became thus intimately acquainted with a small but ideal medical school embodying in a novel way, adapted to American conditions, the best features of medical education in England, France, and Germany. Without this pattern in the back of my mind, I could have accomplished little. With it I began a swift tour of medical-schools in the United States and Canada—155 in number, every one of which I visited.

According to Brown the Carnegie imprimature suggested future support for schools Flexner approved of in his famous Flexner Report and the competition for students made schools all fear bad publicity for those he didn’t. For whatever reason almost all schools opened themselves to Flexner’s inquiry.

“If many competing medical schools that cooperated with the Carnegie study got a large advantage—for example, a new laboratory or an endowment—the financial collapse and demise of the disadvantaged was assured.”

By 1910 the number of schools had fallen from a high of 166 to 131. With AMA domination of the state licensing boards it was impossible for a student in a downgraded school to get licensed, and so those schools failed. Schools embraced the germ theory and vaccination or else.

Superfluous educational requirements justified by “science” and especially the germ theory served the aims of the AMA by reducing the number of practitioners. “From the moment it opened its doors in 1893, Johns Hopkins medical school led the way by requiring a bachelor’s degree for admission and four years of instruction for its prestigious M.D. degree. When Harvard instituted the baccalaureate requirement in 1901, its entering medical class dropped from an all-time high of 198 students the previous year to sixty-seven.”

To limit the number of doctors the AMA sought to make Medicine a “profession.”

Eliot Freidson [a theorist on professions] has observed, any occupation wishing professional status creates a systematic body of theory, claims exclusive authority of its practitioners, adopts a code of ethics, tries to build solidarity among its practitioners around formal values, norms, and symbols, and otherwise cloaks itself with the well-known medallions of professions to support its claims. “If there is no systematic body of theory,it is created for the purpose of being able to say there is.”

What the medical reformers sought was the power to enforce the instruments of professionalism that assure high incomes, social status, and continued prosperity for the profession.”

A profession has a code of “ethics.” The AMA code of ethics gave doctors unquestioned authority over medical decisions. “”The obedience of a patient to the prescriptions of his doctor should be prompt and implicit,” the code of ethics instructed. The patient “should never permit his own crude opinions as to their fitness to influence his attention to them.” The code of ethics also forbids a doctor from commenting on the practices of another. The confidentiality of medical records prevents criticism of medical practice by other doctors. The AMA realized that to become a profession medicine had be become a “science” with “an ideology and a practice that was consistent with the ideas and interests of socially and politically dominant groups in the society.”

Being a “science” was in opposition to being a science. Although these institutions called themselves scientific, the education they provided, and provide today is anything but. John L. Spivak in The Medical Trust Unmasked quotes Dr. David L. Edsall, then Dean of the Harvard Medical School:

“Almost all subjects must be taken at exactly the same time and exactly the same way by all students and the amount introduced into each course is such that few students have the time and energy to explore any subject in the spirit of independent interest… A little comparison shows that there is less intellectual freedom in the medical course than in almost any other form of professional education in this country.”

It is no wonder that the germ theory, so obviously faulty, could be so casually accepted and those who question it called crackpots. Anyone who objected couldn’t get licensed. Dr. Edsall continues:

“I was, for a period, a professor of therapeutics and pharmacology, and I know from experience that students were obliged then by me and by others to learn about an interminable number of drugs, many of which were useless, some probably even harmful, some others relatively valueless, because they were still discussed in some text books, which had never been officially discarded and were sometimes asked about by State Boards of Medical Examiners.”

These are the words of an authority upon this subject, not only about machine-made doctors, but about the control that the medical examining board, themselves controlled by the AMA with its restrictive agenda, has upon the medical curriculum. The germ theory fit the needs of both the AMA and the philanthropists. Brown comments,

“The germ theory of disease was especially attractive to both the regular profession and these new industrial and corporate elites. The germ theory emphasized discrete, specific, and external causal agents of disease. It gave encouragement to the idea of specific therapies to cure specific pathological conditions. The payoff for the medical practitioners would be increased technical effectiveness and improved standing in the eyes of the public….Disease was thus seen as an engineering problem, surmountable with sufficient talent and resources… Scientific medicine wrapped the modern doctor in an aura of therapeutic effectiveness, and the limited improvements gave support to that aura.”

In summary, by the beginning of the twentieth century embracing “scientific” medicine was a requirement for medical licensing, forcing out homeopathy, chiropractic and other practices even though, as we have seen, it was not having therapeutic success and experiencing frequent disasters. But the philanthropists, whose interests the theory served, could not judge of the quality of the therapy and the “scientists” had vested interests in burying unpleasant news. The use of “science” to restrict entry into the profession satisfied the AMA for it was the ideal tool to control licensing. But the adoption of “science” had nothing to do with science.

The discrediting of Peter Duesberg for questioning the connection between AIDs and HIV, even though there is no experimental evidence of this connection, proves that this censorship is, if anything, even more virulent today. This victory should not be attributed to any ulterior motives on the part of the philanthropists. Although they were men of business, ravenous for profit, I have found no evidence that they thought they were doing anything but good, though their idea of good, the shaping of society for the benefit of industrialism, could be questioned. But these motives, praiseworthy or not, were not those that should motivate science.

The motives of Pasteur, Koch, and the other “scientists” are less pure. There is no doubt that desire for fame and fortune clouded their judgment and led them to suppress unfavorable results including vaccine related deaths. Interestingly Welch, in Munich, found a man Named Max von Pettenkofer who had ideas very much like those of today’s terrain theorists. But this did not suit the ambitious Welch. In my opinion corruption is an almost inevitable result of the commercialization of science. A scientist hoping to make a killing will inevitably be tempted to suppress any evidence of his failure and denigrate the successes of opponents. There is plenty of evidence that these men did so. Flexner was notorious for refusing to finance any experiments that might bring the germ theory into question. Today it is said that up to 80% of the experiments published by The Lancet are not reproducible. The commercialization of science undermines a scientist’s necessary objectivity. One need only gaze upon the deplorable behavior of drug companies.

Béchamp, ignoring the forces allied against him, attributed Pasteur’s theoretical victory to the simplicity of his theory. Two microscopic armies contending within the body is easy to imagine. One might wonder that so many experiments that seem to confirm the germ theory could yet be so wrong. This is a product of the ignorance about the difference between Béchamp’s theory and Pasteur’s.

Pasteur argued that bacteria were invaders from outside met by antibodies created by the human body to defeat them. Disease was a result of a loss by the home team. Vaccination provided a skirmish that the home team could more easily win and in the course would cause it to produce specialized weapons, antibodies, that would be ready should another encounter with the same enemy occur.

Béchamp thought disease was a crisis in the body’s ability to eliminate toxins, which is usually handled by unnoticed routine. Vomiting, excess mucus, diarrhea, skin eruptions,and fever are ways that the body in crisis eliminates toxins. Disease is the body’s response to a crisis and should not be inhibited. Bacteria, produced by the body itself, are part of the normal mechanism of toxin removal. There are also alien bacteria that have a similar function outside — to turn organic waste, dead matter, into a form that could then be taken up by new life. They are an essential element of the life cycle. If outside bacteria enter the body they do not reproduce there and are treated by the body like any other toxin, and like any other toxin can produce inflammation and disease, but do not commandeer cell mechanisms to reproduce themselves. This rarely happens in any serious way unless the body’s protective barriers— skin, mucus membrane, stomach acid– is bypassed as it is with vaccination or wounds.

So in both theories bacteria would be present in sites of disease. Experiments that found bacteria at such sites would be consistent with both theories, and the experiments mistakenly thought to confirm the germ theory were such experiments. It is sometimes said that constant conjunction does not prove causation, but this is logically incorrect. Constant conjunction does prove causation but not the direction of causation. Advocates of Béchamp offer the analogy of fire trucks always at fires but not the cause of them. In this case the fires are the cause of the presence of the trucks. Constant conjunction shows that one thing is the cause of another but not which in the cause which the effect, or that both have a third common cause. Common conjunction cannot determine which of these three possibilities obtains.

Alien bacteria, like any other toxin could, if they managed to pass the body’s barriers, cause a toxic crisis, though it might not look like the one germ theorists have associated with it. They might even have been seen to have done the damage. But they are a toxin and do not reproduce in the body. On the other hand the body’s own bacteria might appear to reproduce within cells, but these would be cells already damaged or dead. These bacteria are beneficial and do no damage. They eliminate toxins, which includes the body’s own damaged cells.

That vaccinations are associated with diseases different from those they were meant to prevent is well documented. Swelling and reddening around vaccination sites is routine, though such reactions might not be one of the symptoms associated with the specific disease. Florence Nightingale, the famous nurse, insisted that there were no specific diseases, and that those who were ill exhibited symptoms of many supposedly separate diseases during the course of the illness. Béchamp demonstrated that bacteria could change their shape in response to the toxins present.

One experiment Bechamp performed was to bury a dead cat in sand in a container and seal the container. When he opened it he found bacteria below the cat but not above, seeming to prove that the bacteria did not get into the container afterwards through the lid. This should be an easy test for the external entrance of bacteria or the body’s ability to produce them itself.

Since the 1990’s the presence of the microbiome has become accepted. We now all recognize the presence of “good bacteria” in the digestive tract that aid digestion by consuming indigestible fibre. That is, they do just what Béchamp said they did. Experiments have cleanly shown that the microbiome is unique to each individual.

“The results showed that the codes were unique among hundreds of individuals, and that a large fraction of individuals’ microbial “fingerprints” remained stable over a one-year sampling period.”

If so how can these bacteria have come from outside?

What about epidemics?

THE devastating Black Death which killed hundreds of millions of people in the 14th century may have been triggered by an asteroid impact, scientists have sensationally claimed. By NATHAN RAO

The Black Death may have been triggered by asteroid impact

The shocking revelation threatens to debunk one of the biggest chunks of British history and turn the world of science and academia on its head….

It is widely accepted that the 14th century epidemic, the most catastrophic ever recorded in Europe’s history, was a caused by the bacteria Yersinia pestis which spread from China. However experts now claim something “much bigger” happened at the time to kill off 60 per cent of the population.

Author and dendochronologist Professor Mike Baillie said studies of tree rings reveal a major event just before 1350, just at the time the disease was sweeping across Europe.

Something catastrophic occurred to change the composition of the atmosphere and provide ideal conditions for a lethal infection to spread, he claims.

The great influenza pandemic of 1918-19 has no easily provable explanation, but there are several possible factors that do not involve a virus. First, of course, is the Great War, with its gas attacks and horribly unsanitary trenches. Then, one of the strongest ENSO incidents of the twentieth century occurred during those same years and contributed to famines, floods, and the spread of malaria. And finally, of course there were increased vaccination of troops and others during the war. In any case the description of the spread of the pandemic through contagion is pure conjecture without any possibility of evidence.

Ralph R. Scobey, M.D. offers a wealth of evidence of a toxic origin of polio. Here is a comparison of polio incidence and pesticide production.

How about Malaria? “Malaria is caused by Plasmodium parasites. The parasites are spread to people through the bites of infected female Anopheles mosquitoes, called ‘malaria vectors’.” Although Anopheles mosquitoes and Plasmodium parasites exist on every continent except Antarctica, malaria is restricted to tropical regions. However, during the fifteenth century malaria was found in parts of England. This included a period known as “the little ice age” during which England was considerably colder than it is now. However, the CDC web page entitled Where Malaria Occurs states that, “Temperature is particularly critical.”

Germ theorists claim that some people get ill in a pandemic while others don’t because of the varying strengths of immune systems. But people with strong immune systems are invariably those who are healthy in general. People who eat properly, get sufficient exercise, and live in sanitary conditions will have strong “immune systems.” But this is just the terrain theory by another name. To say someone has a strong immune system is to say they are healthy. All we have to do is realize that this is what is important, not germs. Vaccines, bypass the bodies barriers to insert toxins, and damage general health. Of course there is not much profit in encouraging healthy living.

Were preventive medical practice truly scientific these considerations should raise questions about the germ theory and vaccination, but because the highly profitable theory is unscientifically held as a truth universally accepted, and those who question it held as crackpots, they don’t.

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Michael Doliner studied with Hannah Arendt at the University of Chicago and taught (awhile ago) at Ithaca College and Valparaiso University. He has a degree in Mathematics.

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There are growing fears that the energy shortages and price rises resulting from the Russian invasion of Ukraine, European Union sanctions against Russia, and Russian cuts in gas supplies could lead to something approaching the “de-industrialisation” of Europe, as factories with high and inflexible energy needs shut down or relocate to other parts of the world.

Worries about this are especially acute in Germany, the industrial powerhouse of Europe, which has so far managed largely to avoid the steep decline in manufacturing capacity that has affected other European countries over the past two generations. As of 2021, manufacturing’s share of German GDP stood at almost 20 percent, twice that of France.

Industry is critical not only to the German economy, but to national identity and the stability of its political system. After the catastrophic defeat and humiliation of the Second World War, the “economic miracle” of the 1950s, with its recreation of famous German industries, was central to the re-establishment of the nation’s self-respect.

Industry’s share of the German economy has fallen in recent years; but its representatives still form the core of the political base of the two largest political parties: unionized labor for the Social Democrats (SDP); and for the Christian Democrats (CDU/CSU), the “Mittelstand,” the self-employed German middle classes, often from family-owned small and medium-sized industrial enterprises.

The CDU and SPD share of the vote has already declined considerably over the past two decades, in part — as elsewhere in the West — because of a belief among former industrial classes that they have been abandoned by the political elites. If Germany were to undergo the kind of rapid and radical de-industrialization experienced by Britain in the early 1980s, it seems likely that Germany would see a surge of support for extremist parties: on the Right, Alternative fuer Deutchland (AFD); at the other end of the spectrum, Die Linke (the Leftists).

Under Germany’s system of parliamentary government and proportional representation, this would lead to a situation of radical polarization and would risk either making parliamentary government effectively unworkable, or the handing of power to the extreme Right, as has just occurred in Italy. At this point, liberal democracy in Europe as a whole would lie in ruins. Incidentally, this in turn would deal a crippling blow to the ideological foundations of American global leadership.

Faced with this rather obvious danger — quite apart from the apocalyptic threat of nuclear war — it seems probable that previous German governments would have been doing their utmost to restore Russian gas supplies by bringing about a peace settlement or at least a ceasefire in Ukraine: mediating between Washington, Moscow, and Kiev and putting forward Germany’s own peace proposals.

In the 1970s and 1980s, after all, the Social Democratic governments of Willy Brandt and Helmut Schmidt initiated Ostpolitik (“Eastern Policy”), the normalization of relations between West Germany and the Communist states of Eastern Europe that was inherited by the Christian Democratic government of Helmut Kohl. And both SDP and CDU governments agreed on the creation of  new infrastructure supplying Soviet natural gas to West Germany and western Europe. These moves were conducted despite strong opposition from many in Washington.

By contrast, since the threat of a Russian invasion of Ukraine first emerged almost a year ago, there has been no serious autonomous German effort either to prevent the war or to bring it to an end. The German public is uneasy about the economic consequences of the war, but the German media, think tanks, and most of the political establishment seems completely committed to the U.S. and NATO line that peace talks are entirely a matter for Ukraine.

Without German leadership there is no possibility whatsoever of any European Union initiative for peace. The French will not act alone, and the smaller countries are incapable of doing so. During a recent visit to Berlin, I met a few independent thinkers who supported the idea of a German peace initiative. I met nobody who thought that it could actually happen at present. A general view was that only the imminent threat of nuclear war could shake the German establishment into any sort of action — by which time it could well be far too late.

What explains this change in Germany? And could the German approach change again?

A key part of the explanation is of course horror at the Russian invasion, and the destruction and atrocities that have resulted. This cannot however be the sole explanation. After all, both Ostpolitik and the construction of the Soviet gas supply network took place at the height of the Cold War, while East German border guards were shooting down fellow-Germans trying to flee to West Berlin, and while the Soviet Union was invading and occupying Afghanistan.

Part of the explanation for the paralysis of Germany’s ability to act in pursuit of peace is that a narrative has taken hold and been accepted by most of the establishment, whereby previous German governments should be ashamed of their attempts to promote good relations with Moscow, and in particular of the way that they made the country dependent on Russian gas.

This narrative has been assiduously promoted by Washington, by Poles and other East Europeans, and by the German Greens, who were not in government when these decisions were made and find this accusation a convenient stick with which to beat the other parties.

There is an easy answer to this accusation — but it is one that the German establishment (and indeed Western establishments in general) cannot make, for it would involve accepting the degree to which they were previously engaged in deceiving their own populations.

The establishment of Soviet gas supplies to Germany obviously preceded the fall of the Soviet Union and the expansion of NATO into eastern Europe. Leading experts and former officials, including Helmut Schmidt in Germany, warned that NATO expansion was likely to lead to war. The German government, like other European governments, however told its people that NATO expansion was essentially risk free — because if they had they addressed these risks and proposed in consequence a radical reduction in Russian gas supplies, with resulting steep rises in energy prices, a majority of Germans would most probably have turned decisively against NATO expansion.

Thus after the Russo-Georgian War of 2008 (which followed closely on NATO declaration of a commitment eventually to admit Georgia and Ukraine), I asked a former member of the NATO Secretary General’s staff whether NATO had had any contingency plan to defend Georgia in the event of war. He told me that not merely was there no plan, but also that no plan had even been discussed.

When I expressed incredulity, he explained that since Western publics had been assured that the expansion of NATO involved no risk of war, any official at NATO headquarters who suggested that it did would have been branded as an opponent of enlargement, and their careers would have suffered accordingly.

Aware of the danger of war in Ukraine, but afraid either to demand sacrifices and an acceptance of risk from German voters, or to defy Washington and split Europe by standing firmly for compromise with Russia, a succession of German governments took the path of least resistance: continuing dependence on cheap and plentiful Russian gas together with continual acquiescence to U.S. policies that they had been warned were extremely likely to lead to conflict.

The bitterly ironic result is that a combination of German policies founded firmly in political cowardice has now led Germany into the greatest dangers it has faced since the catastrophe of World War II.

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***

In October 2022, the World Health Organization (WHO) announced a new initiative called One Health Joint Plan of Action

The plan was launched by the Quadripartite, which, in addition to WHO, includes the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and the World Organisation for Animal Health (WOAH)

The World Health Organization already has too much power; this new initiative will only give it more

The One Health Joint Plan of Action combines multiple globalist organizations and synchronizes their plans, while at the same time combining their resources and power to create a global superpower

Decentralized health care and pandemic planning makes sense, as both medicine and government work best when individualized and locally oriented. As it stands, however, the opposite global agenda is being applied

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In October 2022, the World Health Organization (WHO) announced a new initiative called One Health Joint Plan of Action. The plan was launched by the Quadripartite, which, in addition to WHO, consists of the:¹

• Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO)
• United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP)
• World Organisation for Animal Health (WOAH, founded as OIE)

The World Health Organization already has too much power. This new initiative amounts to taking multiple globalist organizations and synchronizing their plans, while at the same time combining their resources and power to create a One Health plan.

“The Quadripartite will join forces to leverage the needed resources in support of the common approach to address critical health threats and promote the health of people, animals, plants and the environment,” according to a WHO press release.² One can only imagine what this really means, particularly as they highlight “emerging and re-emerging zoonotic epidemics.”³

What Is the One Health Joint Plan of Action?

On paper, WHO states the One Health Joint Plan of Action (OH JPA) “seeks to improve the health of humans, animals, plants, and the environment, while contributing to sustainable development.”⁴ Its five-year plan, which spans 2022 to 2026, intends to expand capacities in six One Health areas:⁵

The plan includes a technical document “informed by evidence, best practices and existing guidance,” which covers a set of actions intended to advance One Health at global, regional and national levels.

“These actions notably include the development of an upcoming implementation guidance for countries, international partners, and non-state actors such as civil society organizations, professional associations, academia and research institutions,” a WHO press release reads.⁶

In other words, the ultimate goal is to create rules to be followed on a global scale, including the following “operational objectives”:⁷

• Providing a framework for collective and coordinated action to mainstream the One Health approach at all levels
• Providing upstream policy and legislative advice and technical assistance to help set national targets and priorities
• Promoting multinational, multi-sector, multidisciplinary collaboration, learning and exchange of knowledge, solutions and technologies

WOAH director general Dr. Monique Eloit stated, “Using a One Health lens that brings all relevant sectors together is critical to tackle global health threats, like monkeypox, COVID-19 and Ebola.”⁸ Meanwhile, WHO Director-General Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus repeated the rhetoric that a “One Health” approach would be necessary to save the world:⁹

“It’s clear that a One Health approach must be central to our shared work to strengthen the world’s defences against epidemics and pandemics such as COVID-19. That’s why One Health is one of the guiding principles of the new international agreement for pandemic prevention, preparedness and response, which our Member States are now negotiating.”

Is WHO Trying to Preserve the Status Quo?

Timing-wise, WHO’s One Health Joint Plan of Action announcement may be serving the purpose of covering up the lab origins of SARS-CoV-2, so they can continue to go into caves and other areas, dig up new, or unknown, viruses and bring them back into densely populated areas where high-security biosafety laboratories are typically located.

WHO’s investigation into COVID-19’s origin was a “fake” investigation from the start. China was allowed to hand pick the members of WHO’s investigative team, which included Peter Daszak, Ph.D., who has close professional ties to the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV).

The inclusion of Daszak on this team virtually guaranteed the dismissal of the lab-origin theory, and in February 2021, WHO cleared WIV and two other biosafety level 4 laboratories in Wuhan, China of wrongdoing, saying these labs had nothing to do with the COVID-19 outbreak.¹⁰

Molecular biologist Richard Ebright, Ph.D., laboratory director at the Waksman Institute of Microbiology and member of the Institutional Biosafety Committee of Rutgers University and the Working Group on Pathogen Security of the state of New Jersey, called out the members of the WHO-instigated investigative team as “participants in disinformation.”¹¹

Only after backlash, including an open letter signed by 26 scientists demanding a full and unrestricted forensic investigation into the pandemic’s origins,¹² did WHO enter damage control mode, with Ghebreyesus and 13 other world leaders joining the U.S. government in expressing “frustration with the level of access China granted an international mission to Wuhan.”¹³

Of note, according to Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in his book “Vax-Unvax,”¹⁴ of which I received a preview copy, Ghebreyesus was chosen to be WHO’s director general by Bill Gates — not because of his qualifications, as Tedros has no medical degree and a background that includes accusations of human rights violations, but due to this loyalty to Gates.

Gates, through his billions in donations to WHO, has significant leverage over WHO’s decisions. So who is ultimately controlling WHO’s One Health Joint Plan of Action and its initiatives aimed at further controlling global health and society?

Trust WHO? Watch This to Learn About the Real WHO

Giving WHO and its cronies more global control is a bad idea. Decentralized health care and pandemic planning — moving from the global and federal levels to the state and local levels — makes sense, as both medicine and government work best when individualized and locally oriented. As it stands, however, the opposite global agenda is being applied.

If there were any doubt, watch TrustWHO, above, a documentary film produced by Lilian Franck that delves into the corruption behind the preeminent organization that’s being trusted with public health. In it you’ll learn that industry influences, from Big Tobacco to the nuclear industry and pharmaceuticals, dictated WHO’s global agenda from the start.

WHO’s 2009 H1N1 pandemic response was heavily influenced by the pharmaceutical industry. Many are also unaware that WHO signed an agreement with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), which is “promoting peaceful use of atomic energy,” in 1959, making it subordinate to the agency in relation to ionizing radiation. WHO works closely with IAEA and has downplayed health effects caused by the Chernobyl and Fukushima nuclear disasters.¹⁵

WHO’s Strong Allegiance to China

If history is any indication, WHO’s assembly of global superpowers striving to control everything from health to the environment is not going to act in the public’s best interest. During the COVID-19 pandemic, WHO acted to protect its allegiance to China above all else — including public health.

According to a Sunday Times investigation published in August 2021, WHO’s allegiance to China was secured years earlier, when China secured WHO votes to ensure its candidates would become director-general. Further:¹⁶

“The WHO leadership prioritized China’s economic interests over halting the spread of the virus when Covid-19 first emerged. China exerted ultimate control over the WHO investigation into the origins of Covid-19, appointing its chosen experts and negotiating a backroom deal to water down the mandate.”

Its China ties played a “decisive role” in the course of the pandemic. On January 28, 2020, four weeks after Taiwan had alerted WHO that a mysterious respiratory illness was spreading in China, WHO had not yet taken action and continued to praise China.

Ghebreyesus even praised China for their transparency and said the Chinese president had “shown ‘rare leadership’ and deserved ‘gratitude and respect’ for acting to contain the outbreak at the epicenter,” the Sunday Times reported. “These ‘extraordinary steps’ had prevented further spread of the virus, and this was why, he said, there were only ‘a few cases of human-to-human transmission outside China, which we are monitoring very closely.’”¹⁷

Speaking with the Sunday Times, Ebright said it was this close connection that ultimately steered the course of the pandemic:¹⁸

“Not only did it have a role; it has had a decisive role. It was the only motivation. There was no scientific or medical or policy justification for the stance that the WHO took in January and February 2020. That was entirely premised on maintaining satisfactory ties to the Chinese government.

So at every step of the way, the WHO promoted the position that was sought by the Chinese government … the WHO actively resisted and obstructed efforts by other nations to implement effective border controls that could have limited the spread or even contained the spread of the outbreak.

It is impossible for me to believe that the officials in Geneva, who were making those statements, believed those statements accorded with the facts that were available to them at the time the statements were made. It’s hard not to see that the direct origin of that is the support of the Chinese government for Tedros’s election as director-general …

This was a remarkably high return on [China’s] investment with the relatively small sums that were invested in supporting his election. It paid off on a grand scale for the Chinese government.”

WHO Goes All in on Global Superpower Plan

It’s already clear that WHO’s usefulness as a guardian of public health needs to be reevaluated. Now, it stands to become even more powerful. Rather than learning anything from the course of the pandemic response, it seems they’re willing to risk it all and continue following what got us into this mess in the first place. Only now, they’ll be doing so with additional collaborative powers.

The One Health Joint Plan of Action’s continued focus on “zoonotic epidemics,” when evidence strongly suggests SARS-CoV-2 came from a lab,¹⁹ is revealing. So, too, are its claims that only One Health can save us from “ecosystem degradation, food system failures, infectious diseases and antimicrobial resistance.”²⁰

The disturbing part is One Health sounds like a fairy tale that will lead to a utopian society. In reality, the “health” it’s spreading isn’t health like you’re thinking, but rather health in the form of whatever product, technology or globalist agenda they’re pushing. By joining forces, they become that much harder to overcome — and they’re already moving ahead on financing and plans for “implementation.”

According to WHO,

“Efforts by just one sector or specialty cannot prevent or eliminate infectious disease and other complex threats to One Health … Building on existing structures and agreements, mechanisms for coordinated financing are under development to support the plan’s implementation.”²¹

*

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Notes

^{1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 20, 21} WHO October 17, 2022

¹⁰ The Washington Post February 9, 2021

¹¹ Independent Science News March 24, 2021

¹² Open Letter March 4, 2021 (PDF)

¹³ Washington Post March 30, 2021

¹⁴ Amazon

¹⁵ IndependentWHO, The collective IndependentWHO

^16, 17, 18 The Sunday Times, Archive.Today August 14, 2021

¹⁹ Zenodo January 29, 2021

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***

U.S. leaders have amassed a long track record of deception about Washington’s international objectives and the nature of U.S. foreign clients. Modest or even minor threats and disruptions became supposed existential threats to America’s security, as well as threats to regional or world order, in Washington’s overwrought propaganda narratives. In addition, multiple administrations routinely whitewashed the record of authoritarian foreign clients. Thus, autocrats such as Nicaragua’s Anastasio Somoza Debayle, Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak, and ugly extremists, such as Syria’s Sunni Jihadists, all became honorary members of the “Free World.”

Both components are present in Washington’s current campaign of disinformation with respect to the Ukraine war. Two deceptive arguments in U.S. propaganda are so egregious that they stand out as gigantic whoppers. The first whopper is that:

Russia’s war against Ukraine was entirely unprovoked; nothing Ukraine, the United States, or NATO did, this story goes, threatened Russia or contributed in the slightest to the current bloody tragedy.

The second whopper is that

Ukraine is a liberal democratic country whose mere existence as a model in Russia’s neighborhood terrifies Vladimir Putin and his inner circle of authoritarian oligarchs.

In his initial statement from the White House, President Biden stated flatly that Russia’s invasion was “unprovoked and unjustified.”

The following day, he described the attack as a “brutal assault on the people of Ukraine without provocation, without justification, without necessity.”

The “unprovoked” mantra soon became a staple of the narrative put out by the administration and its allies in the news media and the foreign policy blob.

Criticisms of Russia’s military action as brutal and over-the-top are entirely justified. The argument that it was utterly unprovoked, however, is misleading at best and an outright falsehood at worst.

Respected analysts had warned for more than a quarter century that expanding NATO eastward to Russia’s border would turn out badly, no matter who ruled in Moscow, since the move was inherently menacing and intruded on important Russian interests.

Yet, multiple U.S. administrations casually spurned those recommendations for caution. Indeed, Bush, Obama, Trump, and Biden administration policymakers continued to push for Ukraine’s inclusion in NATO, despite the Kremlin’s repeated and steadily escalating warnings that such a step would cross a red line and trigger a crisis.

Critics who dare contend that such Western actions constituted unwise provocations and were a major factor in the breakdown of East-West relations have been subjected to a barrage of vilification, led by the Biden administration. The favorite allegation is that they are echoing “Putin’s talking points.” The historical record, however, contains abundant evidence against such a simplistic smear.

Somewhat more sophisticated proponents of the thesis that the United States and NATO did nothing to provoke Russia, argue that there was no realistic prospect that Ukraine could join the Alliance for many years, if ever, so Putin had no reason to worry. Those arguments conveniently dodge the point that Moscow did not merely object to Ukraine getting a NATO membership card; more fundamentally, Russian leaders objected to Ukraine becoming a NATO military asset, whether formal membership was a feature or not.

It is an important distinction, because Western weaponry poured into the country, U.S. personnel trained Ukrainian military and intelligence forces, and U.S. forces conducted joint war games (military exercises) with Ukrainian military units, as did forces from other NATO countries. There is even credible evidence that U.S. and Ukrainian intelligence operatives conducted joint cyberattacks on Russian targets. To contend that such actions did not constitute a major provocation is profoundly dishonest.

So much for the first whopper.

Now on to whopper two. A coordinated barrage of propaganda from the administration and its ideological allies insists that Ukraine is a bastion of freedom and democracy now under assault by a brutal authoritarian neighbor.

Former CIA station chief Dan Hoffman contended that “What scares Vladimir Putin at the heart of this conflict is democracy.” He added that “Putin couldn’t stomach a democracy on his border with a Russian‐​speaking population and commercial links to Europe.”

At best, that argument is only half right. Russia is the aggressor in the current war, and there is no doubt that Russia is a nasty, authoritarian state. Democracy in that country has been dying a slow death for two decades at Putin’s hands.

However, the notion that Ukraine is a democracy—much less a liberal democracy—is belied by extensive facts. Even during the early years after the 2014 “Maidan Revolution,” there were numerous worrisome features to Kyiv’s conduct. The new government under President Petro Poroshenko implemented onerous censorship measures, harassed and even jailed regime critics, shelled civilians in the secessionist Donetsk and Luhansk regions, and continued the systematic corruption that had plagued Ukraine since it became independent in 1991. Those trends have persisted under current President Volodymyr Zelensky.

By the standards of corruption and political freedom alone, Ukraine was not a liberal democracy even before the war with Russia began. The annual report on corruption put out by Transparency International, published in early 2022, should have been extremely sobering to Ukraine’s defenders. Transparency evaluated 180 countries, and on a 1 to 180 scale, with 1 being the country with the least corruption. Ukraine ranked 122, just 14 points better than notoriously corrupt Russia.

In its 2022 annual report on political freedoms, Freedom House rated Ukraine just “partly free,” a status similar to that given to countries ruled by such sketchy regimes as Rodrigo Duterte’s in the Philippines. Even that was a generous rating at the time, and according to multiple accounts, developments across the board have shown serious deterioration since the war began. Zelensky has outlawed opposition political parties, closed nearly all opposition news outlets, and imprisoned numerous critics and even officials in his own administration, accusing them of being pro-Russian traitors. There are even credible reports of torture being used in political prisons and of pro-regime death squads operating with impunity throughout the country.

Zelensky and his colleagues have no tolerance for critics, domestic or foreign. The willingness to target and attempt to intimidate foreign critics became abundantly clear this summer when his government’s Center for Countering Disinformation (partly funded by U.S. taxpayers, no less) published a “blacklist” of such opponents. Numerous prominent Americans were on that list, including University of Chicago Professor (and the dean of foreign policy realists), John Mearsheimer, Fox News host Tucker Carlson, former congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard, and Cato Institute Senior Fellow Doug Bandow. The ominous, threatening nature of the blacklist became even clearer in late September, when the CCD issued a revised roster (including addresses) of the top 35 targets in early October. That narrower, high-priority list denounced those critics as “disinformation terrorists” and “war criminals.” Such conduct definitely is not consistent with the behavior of a liberal democracy. Yet official Washington and its media echo chamber persist in trying to market that whopper.

Washington’s pervasive, dishonest propaganda campaign is certain to continue, aided and abetted by a shamelessly pro-war news media. The more pertinent question is whether the American people will wake up and realize that they’ve been deceived yet again about a dubious U.S. overseas intervention on behalf of an even more dubious foreign client.

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Ted Galen Carpenter, a senior fellow in defense and foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute and a contributing editor at the American Conservative, is the author of 13 books and more than 1,100 articles on international affairs. His latest book is Unreliable Watchdog: The News Media and U.S. Foreign Policy (2022).

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***

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***

Last week, the government announced that it does not want to try Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and four of his colleagues whom it claims are the remaining conspirators of the attacks on 9/11.

All five are awaiting trial at the U.S. Naval Base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The allegations are that these five conspired to commit mass murder, a capital offense. Even though conspiracy is not a war crime, the feds are planning to try these defendants before a military tribunal under the rules utilized in federal criminal trials.

All five were detained from around 2003 to 2006 at CIA black sites, where they were kept in solitary confinement and egregiously tortured. After the CIA torture was concluded, the five were transferred to military custody at Gitmo in 2006.

There, the tortures resumed until FBI agents arrived to interrogate them. For all of its faults in other cases, the FBI put a stop to the military torture and solitary confinement.

The decisions to have the CIA torture these detainees, not to charge them with capital offenses in federal district courts in the U.S. as the Constitution mandates, to implement military torture, to charge these folks with crimes not recognized under the laws of war before military tribunals, to scuttle the constitutionally mandated jury system, and to keep the Department of Justice out of these cases were all made by the legally ignorant, Constitution-defying President George W. Bush.

After 12 years of litigation and numerous changes in the prosecution teams and the judges hearing the case, as a result of Bush’s profound incompetence, the feds are giving up on trying these men.

Here is the backstory.

The guarantee of due process in the Bill of Rights protects persons, not just Americans. The only exception to this principle is for crimes against the laws of war. If the United States is at war with the government of a foreign country and its agents or troops harm American civilians, even then, basic due process applies, yet treaties to which the U.S. is a party permit military tribunals as the venue for the trials of war crimes.

If crimes are committed by foreign civilians against American civilians in America, the venue for the prosecution of the foreign civilians is the federal district court that is physically nearest to the scenes of the crimes. In the case of 9/11, that would be Manhattan for the World Trade Towers; Arlington, Virginia, for the Pentagon; and central Pennsylvania for the crash in Shanksville.

But Bush would have none of this. He must have been terrified that he’d be called to account for his failures on 9/11, hence his belligerence in Afghanistan and Iraq, his orders for criminal torture and his firm determination that the 9/11 detainees not get fair jury trials, but rather military tribunals, where, to his primitive way of thinking, the detainees were more likely to be convicted quickly and sentenced to die.

Last week, the military judge presiding over these cases — the only cases at Gitmo involving 9/11 — adjourned all pre-trial hearings and the trial date pending plea negotiations. The government, which seeks the death penalty and has not yet publicly shown its hand, claims that the evidence of the guilt of these defendants is overwhelming.

If the government’s claims are truthful, then why the adjournment for plea negotiations?

Enter Majid Khan. Khan is a Pakistani-born and American-raised young man who was tortured by the CIA for three years and then brought to Gitmo. The charge against him was delivery of cash to colleagues in Indonesia who used the money to destroy a hotel in Jakarta at which some Americans were killed. Rather than contest the charges against him, Khan pleaded guilty.

Because the government had charged him with a capital offense — accomplice to murder — he was entitled to a hearing before a jury that would sentence him.

At Khan’s sentencing hearing, he recounted to his military jury the horrific tortures visited upon him by the CIA at one of its foreign black sites. The government presented no evidence to contradict Khan’s testimony. This may have been the first time in American history where a criminal defendant claimed the government tortured him and the government did not challenge those claims.

At the end of the trial, the jury sentenced Khan to 26 years in jail, but seven of the eight jurors wrote to the judge asking that Khan be sentenced to time served. The stated reason for this unprecedented request for mercy from a military jury was Khan’s torture. He was sentenced to time served and released.

Now, back to Khalid Shaikh Mohammed. He was tortured for four years during which the CIA and the military used the same techniques on him as they did on Khan. The government fears that Mohammed, who is now fluent in English, will be able to relate to his jury and to the public and press at his trial the horrors visited upon him by the government.

The government also fears Mohammed’s articulation of a necessity defense, which would enable him and his expert witnesses to show all the wrongs the U.S. government committed upon innocents in the Middle East, going back to the CIA’s overthrow of a popularly elected secular leader in Iran during the Eisenhower administration.

Look at what George W. Bush has wrought! President Joe Biden has a Hobson’s choice: Accept a plea with life imprisonment or permit a trial at which American foreign policy will be trashed. Bush’s unfathomable ignorance of the basic principles of law, his schoolyard determination to appear tough, and his willingness to torture and slaughter in order to divert the eyes of history from his own failure to see 9/11 coming have brought about monumental injustices at his $10 billion Devil’s Island.

Gitmo should be razed, Bush should be tried for war crimes, and the rule of law should be returned to all prosecutions.

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***

A wind farm is being dismantled in western Germany to make way for an expansion of an open-pit lignite coal mine in a “paradoxical” situation highlighting the current prioritization of energy security over clean energy in Europe’s biggest economy.  

The dismantling of at least one wind turbine at the wind farm close to the German coal mine Garzweiler, operated by energy giant RWE, has already started. RWE says that lignite, or brown coal, has been mined from the Garzweiler coalfields for over 100 years.

RWE also said at the end of September that three of its lignite-fired coal units that were previously on standby would return to the electricity market on schedule in October.

“The three lignite units each have a capacity of 300 megawatts (MW). With their deployment, they contribute to strengthening the security of supply in Germany during the energy crisis and to saving natural gas in electricity generation,” RWE said last month.

Now the company is expanding the lignite mine at Garzweiler after a court in Münster in the western German state of North Rhine-Westphalia ruled in favor of the energy group in a land dispute in March this year to expand the lignite mine.

Commenting on the dismantling of wind turbines to make way for expanding a coal mine, Guido Steffen, a spokesperson for RWE, told the Guardian,

“We realise this comes across as paradoxical.”

“But that is as matters stand,” Steffen added.

Earlier this week, the ministry for economic and energy affairs of the state of North-Rhine Westphalia urged RWE to abandon the plan to dismantle the wind farm.

“In the current situation, all potential for the use of renewable energy should be exhausted as much as possible and existing turbines should be in operation for as long as possible,” a spokesperson for the state’s ministry told the Guardian.

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Michael Kern is a newswriter and editor at Safehaven.com and Oilprice.com.

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***

A New York State Supreme Court judge on Tuesday ordered New York City to reinstate — with back pay — sanitation workers who were fired for failing to get vaccinated for Covid-19, calling the vaccine mandate “arbitrary and capricious.”

The city terminated over 1,750 public employees for failing to take the jab pursuant to an October 2021 order from Health Commissioner David Chokshi. Sixteen former Department of Sanitation workers filed suit after they were ousted in February, their exemption requests having been summarily denied.

Justice Ralph Porzio found in favor of the former employees primarily because of the city’s inconsistent mandates. Two months after Chokshi mandated vaccinations for city employees, he issued a similar order for private employees. Then, in March, Mayor Eric Adams issued his own order exempting athletes, performers, and others from the private-employee mandate. This sequence of events, wrote Porzio, “violated the petitioners’ equal protection rights as the [public-employee] mandate is arbitrary and capricious.”

“Either there is a mandate for all, or there is a mandate for none,” he declared.

Porzio also found that “the Board of Health does not have the authority to unilaterally and indefinitely change the terms of employment for any agency.” City employees have never been required to be vaccinated against any disease, and the plaintiffs were working under a contract that did not mandate Covid-19 jabs. “This court believes that a new ‘condition of employment’ cannot be imposed upon these employees when the ‘condition’ did not exist when they accepted contracted employment,” penned the judge.

Moreover, he opined, “states of emergency are meant to be temporary.” (Emphasis in original.) Chokshi, he maintained, does not have the authority “to enact a permanent condition of employment during a state of emergency” and, in so doing, “is in violation of separation of powers” by enacting rules not grounded in existing legislation.

Unlike Chokshi and Adams, Porzio believes in individual responsibility. To the city’s claim that the fired sanitation workers were a threat to civilians, “hundreds of thousands of whom are unvaccinated,” Porzio responded:

This argument is patently incorrect. The petitioners work primarily outdoors and have limited interaction with the public. Those “hundreds of thousands of whom are unvaccinated” are responsible for their own health. They choose for themselves whether to be vaccinated or whether to risk infections. City employees should also have the right to make their own choice regarding their own health.

Furthermore, he observed, “Being vaccinated does not prevent an individual from contracting or transmitting Covid-19…. We have learned through the course of the pandemic that the vaccine against Covid-19 is not absolute. Breakthrough cases occur, even for those who have been vaccinated and boosted.”

Porzio concluded his opinion:

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 vaccination for all residents. In a city with a nearly 80% vaccination rate, we shouldn’t be penalizing the people who showed up to work, at great risk to themselves and their families, while we were locked down.

If it was about safety and public health, no one would be exempt. It is time for the City of New York to do what is right and what is just.

Unfortunately for the ex-employees, the New York Supreme Court, despite its name, is not the highest court in the state. A spokesman for the city Law Department, which is also appealing a Porzio ruling in favor of a fireman who lost his job because of the vaccine mandate, said the department had already filed an appeal of Porzio’s decision for the former sanitation workers, adding that “the mandate remains in place” for all other city employees.

However, as the plaintiffs’ attorney, Chad LaVeglia, pointed out, “every city employee who has been terminated because of the mandate could bring civil actions against the city,” which would cost taxpayers dearly.

For Chokshi and Adams, though, it is a small price to pay to maintain their status as absolute rulers of the Big Apple.

*

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Michael Tennant is a freelance writer and regular contributor to The New American.

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NATO Wants to Place Nuclear Missiles on Finland’s Russian Border — Finland Says Yes.

By Eric Zuesse, October 28, 2022

According to Newsweek, on October 26th, “Finland Will Allow NATO to Place Nuclear Weapons on Border With Russia”. They cite Finnish media reports. Allegedly, a condition that NATO had placed on Finland to join NATO was to allow America’s nuclear missiles to be positioned on Finland’s Russian border, which is closer to Moscow than any other except Ukraine’s.

“Color Revolutions”, Major Power Rivalries in Eurasia, Battle for Strategic Supremacy

By Shane Quinn, October 28, 2022

The Caspian Sea, the earth’s biggest lake, is extremely rich in natural resources and “is one of the oldest oil-producing areas in the world” and “an increasingly important source of global energy production” according to the US Energy Information Administration (EIA). The EIA estimated in 2012 that the Caspian Sea and its environs contain proven oil quantities of 48 billion barrels, more than is present in either America or China.

Everybody Wants to Hop on the BRICS Express, “Bypassing the US Dollar”

By Pepe Escobar, October 28, 2022

Let’s start with what is in fact a tale of Global South trade between two members of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO). At its heart is the already notorious Shahed-136 drone – or Geranium-2, in its Russian denomination: the AK-47 of postmodern aerial warfare.

COVID-19 Vaccines Have Caused 84% of All Deaths Recorded in VAERS for the Past 32 Years – Pfizer #1 in Vaccine Deaths, Even Before COVID

By Brian Shilhavy, October 28, 2022

The U.S. Government Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System (VAERS) was started in 1990 to track injuries and deaths reported after receiving a vaccine. Congress mandated by law that the government maintain this database as part of the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program.

Post-jab Prion Disease Case History in Sunnyvale, CA

By Steve Kirsch, October 28, 2022

All the Stanford doctors who looked at the case, which started a week after Moderna vaccination, are clueless as to the potential cause of this deadly disease. In this video, we hear the case history.

Ukraine War: Climbing the Escalation Ladder to Oblivion

By Prof. Richard Falk, October 27, 2022

Ever since the Ukraine War started on 24 Feb 2022, the NATO response, mainly articulated and materially implemented by the U.S., has been to pour vast quantities of oil on the flames of conflict, increasing the scale of violence, the magnitude of human suffering, and dangerously increasing the risk of a disastrous outcome.

Video: The COVID Vaccine Gigantic Lie. “The Cat Is Out of the Bag.” Christine Anderson

By Christine Anderson, October 27, 2022

“It was a gigantic lie what they told us that the vaccines will prevent you from catching the virus or prevent the transmission. … Well none of that is true, as it turns out. And based on that lie, all of the mandates, all of the lockdowns, pharmaceutical measures such as wearing masks, staying-at-home, curfews — all of that were based on that gigantic lie; and yet, they will not acknowledge it.”

The Endless Proxy War, by Design. “Direct Conflict and Then Go Nuclear”

By Aaron Mate, October 28, 2022

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has presented the White House with a geopolitical crisis that it played a critical role in creating. In February 2014, Victoria Nuland, a current senior State Department official and former Dick Cheney advisor, was caught on tape plotting the installation of a new Ukrainian government – a plan, she stressed, that would involve Biden and his then-top aide, and current National Security Advisor, Jake Sullivan.

Donate to Azov Nazi Psychopaths Via Your Credit Card

By Kurt Nimmo, October 28, 2022

In September, the Azov Nazis came to America in search of loot to finance their ongoing effort to murder and ethnically cleanse any hint of Russian ethnicity in Ukraine.

Senate Foreign Relations Committee Asleep on the Job. “US Army’s 101st Airborne deployed to combat zone for the first time since WW II”

By Renee Parsons, October 28, 2022

As the Democrats and its mockingbird media remain panic-stricken with the promise of the 2022 mid term elections bringing a red-hot tsunami, the question is whether the tyrannical Anglo Saxon Alliance (ASA) (as represented by the US and UK) will escalate the Ukraine conflict to create a nuclear related threat sufficient to defer the upcoming election.

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***

Voter analytics firm PredictWise harvested location data from tens of millions of US cellphones during the initial Covid lockdown months and used this data to assign a “Covid-19 decree violation” score to the people associated with the phones.

These Covid-19 decree violation scores were calculated by analyzing nearly two billion global positioning system (GPS) pings to get “real-time, ultra-granular locations patterns.” People who were “on the go more often than their neighbors” were given a high Covid-19 decree violation score while those who mostly or always stayed at home were given a low Covid-19 decree violation score.

Not only did PredictWise use this highly sensitive location data to monitor millions of Americans’ compliance with Covid lockdown decrees but it also combined this data with follow-up surveys to assign “Covid concern” scores to the people who were being surveilled. PredictWise then used this data to help Democrats in several swing states to target more than 350,000 “Covid concerned” Republicans with Covid-related campaign ads.

In its white paper, PredictWise claims that Democrats were able to “deploy this real-time location model to open up just over 40,000 persuasion targets that normally would have fallen off” for Mark Kelly who was running for Senate at the time and has now been elected.

“PredictWise understood that there were potential pockets of voters to target with Covid-19 messaging and turned high-dimensional data covering over 100 million Americans into measures of adherence to Covid-19 restrictions during deep lockdown,” the company states in the white paper.

PredictWise doesn’t provide the exact dates when this location data was collected but its white paper does note that the data was collected during Covid lockdowns and used during Senator Kelly’s 2020 election campaign. State-level US lockdowns began on March 15, 2020 and Kelly was elected on November 4, 2020 so the data appears to have been collected during the first few months of this 11 month period.

Location data and survey data are just two of the many types of data PredictWise claims to have access to. According to its white paper, PredictWise also tracks “telemetry data” (which is “passively sourced cell-phone data”), media consumption data, and unregistered voter data (which contains verified data on over 50 million unregistered voters that’s updated daily and sourced from credit files and portal registration data). Additionally, PredictWise claims that “Crate&Barrel” (which seems to be a reference to the online furniture and home decor shopping portal Crate & Barrel) is one of the portal registration data sources it has access to.

In total, PredictWise says its data “tracks the opinions, attitudes, and behaviors” of over 260 million Americans – a figure that represents 78% of the entire US population of 333 million.

PredictWise uses the data it collects to create scores on 13 issue preference clusters and 7 value-frame, or psychometric clusters. These clusters use more than 30 million behavioral data points. PredictWise also claims to be able to use this data to predict the party of unregistered voters.

This mass surveillance of location data and lockdown compliance is just one of the many examples of the large-scale data harvesting that occurred during the pandemic. Private companies tracked the everyday activities of citizens, pushed remote learning surveillance technologies, increased surveillance in the workplace, and more. Meanwhile, governments ushered in numerous forms of surveillance such as forcing citizens to wear ankle bracelet trackers, secretly surveilling vaccine recipients via their phones, and combining vaccine passports with digital IDs.

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***

As the Democrats and its mockingbird media remain panic-stricken with the promise of the 2022 mid term elections bringing a red-hot tsunami, the question is whether the tyrannical Anglo Saxon Alliance (ASA) (as represented by the US and UK) will escalate the Ukraine conflict to create a nuclear related threat sufficient to defer the upcoming election. 

It is noteworthy that as the Ukraine conflict threatens world peace, Congressional Committees with jurisdiction, such as the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee, have rarely bothered to exhibit any leadership qualities in the pursuit of peace.  The Committee has provided no justification to militarily support Ukraine’s Nazis with a near total lack of recognition of any foreign policy implications as Congress continues to mindlessly acquiesce its policy responsibility to the grievously misguided Biden Administration.

In addition, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, a shell of its former self, has conducted no meaningful public hearing in light of an on-going full scale military war whether continued US financial, military or political involvement with NATO and Ukraine are in the best interests of the American people.

Having once produced eight US presidents, today’s Committee remains a dumbed-down substitute as its May 12^th hearing featured second rate witnesses to address vague policy goals as the current Democratic leadership along with its acquiescent minority continue to sidestep its historic role of public inquiry.

Given that the Administration and its Democratic elite cabal have brought the US to the sharp edge of multiple extreme crises, one calamity after another, the Senate Foreign Relations Affairs Committee remains strangely indifferent to conducting a public analysis into whether the US – NATO proxy war is justified, whether NATO’s militarist presence on its borders represents an existential threat to Russia or whether the existence of a ‘dirty bomb’ (aka radiological dispersal device) is of sufficient global concern.

As the Committee remains AWOL about Ukraine’s accelerated attacks on Russia, the war has reached a new level of nuclear tensions.  With an aggressive increase in military strikes within Russian borders; including the explosion of the Nord Stream pipelines and the Kerch Strait Bridge daring Russia to forcefully respond, the US Army’s 101^st Airborne has been deployed to a combat zone for the first time since WW II.

US troops are to back up NATO troops which are now fully engaged militarily in Ukraine even as Biden had previously confirmed he ‘will not send American servicemen to fight in Ukraine.” Once the 101^st enters Ukraine, the Russians have promised to protect four recently annexed Ukraine Districts from attack.

In response to the Kerch Bridge destruction, Russia retaliated against Ukraine’s energy and water infrastructure as retired  General David Petraeus predicted that a ‘new coalition of the willing,’ a US led multi national force, would occupy Ukraine.

For anyone who has followed the Ukraine war, it is a no-brainer that the war began with the Maidan coup in 2014 at the initiation of the Obama State Department to force a confrontation with Russia and the ultimate removal of Russian President Vladimir Putin. Ukraine is merely the inconveniently located prop as the necessary excuse for NATO to make its move on Russia under command of the ASA.

As a reminder, Russia’s Special Military Operation (SMO) of February 2021 was initiated when Ukraine (and the ASA) refused to enforce the Minsk Agreement that would have protected Russian sovereignty from NATO’s provocative presence; a stone’s throw from the Russian border.

As the war takes front and center with American troops prepping for combat with Russia, Congress remains conspicuously absent from any serious participation on the direction of US foreign policy.  One obvious benefit of a full Committee hearing is to better inform the American public on those topics that warrant further elucidation regarding its impact on the country.  Without full committee hearings, the American public is easier to manipulate, to control their level of knowledge, maintain a disinformation campaign and politicize American foreign policy options.

Some might even suspect that the lack of Congressional full committee hearings is a deliberate strategy meant to keep the American public in the dark as the Uniparty maintains its hegemony over Congress and public policy.

While it is true that sixty nine Members of the House, including fifty four Republicans and fifteen Democrats voted against Biden’s $1.5 trillion omnibus spending package with a hefty $15 billion or so going to ‘aid’ Ukraine,  thirty one Republican Senators voted against the ‘reckless spending’ as  Ukraine President Zelensky made a personal Zoom appeal to the Senate in support of Ukraine’s fight against Russia.

However, none of the Congressional votes translated into direct opposition for the war as the US Congress continues to provide an inordinate share of American weapons and seemingly unlimited taxpayer funds without constitutional authorization.

As the Ukraine war continued, the Committee held a closed-to-the-public briefing, ‘Update on the Russian Invasion” on September 29^th featuring testimony by Biden’s Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs Victoria Nuland.  A zealot neo con, Nuland came to public attention in 2014 handing out cookies to Ukraine’s Maidan protestors as she cursed out the EU in support of Ukraine’s neo-Nazis.  There is no public video or transcript of her testimony.

*

In 1786, Delegates gathered to amend the Articles of Confederation which was little more than an alliance of independent states without formation of a centralized government.  Hence, the Articles contained inherent weakness as it no longer provided the necessary organizational and legal framework to strengthen the fledgling country such as the conduct of foreign policy.

Thanks to James Madison, the most experienced legislator at the time, the newly recognized United States Constitution (1787) included three branches of government, a system of checks and balances and a bicameral legislative Congress.

As conceived by Madison, the Senate would act “with more coolness, with more system, and with more wisdom” and would consist of “generally a more capable set of men” than the lower House.  Committee Chair John Dickinson suggested that the Senate consist of “the most distinguished characters, distinguished for their rank in life and their weight of property, and bearing as strong a likeness to the British House of Lords as possible.”

Thus, by 1867 the Senate came to be regarded as the “world’s most deliberative body”  although less obvious today with its laissez-faire approach on a variety of vital international challenges.  The once-prestigious Senate Foreign Relations Committee does not carry the same quality or authority it once did as it was meant to be a powerful instrument in developing and broadly influencing US foreign policy (including arms sales and ally training) has deteriorated considerably to a lesser standard of legislative achievement.

*

While the Senate Foreign Relations Committee has lost its moral authority to a weakened, corrupt executive branch to totally usurp foreign policy considerations including its constitutionally delineated war powers; hypothetically speaking, soon-to-be elected Senators JD Vance (Ohio) and Blake Masters (Arizona), among others, are desperately needed to reinvigorate the lackluster committee which remains dormant in the face of multiple international crises and return the Committee to its celebrated and constitutional oversight role with courage, commitment and consciousness.

*

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Renee Parsons served on the once prestigious ACLU’s Florida State Board of Directors and as president of the ACLU Treasure Coast Chapter. She has been an elected public official in Colorado, staff in the Office of the Colorado State Public Defender, an environmental lobbyist for Friends of the Earth and a staff member of the US House of Representatives in Washington DC. She can be found at [email protected].

She is a regular contributor to Global Research.

Featured image: Cartoon shows the figure of Peace as a pretty woman and angel, standing in the aisle of a train or bus, while Senators Borah, Lodge, and Johnson occupy the seats. The cartoon refers to the successful efforts of the Republican isolationists after World War I to block Senate ratification of the Treaty of Versailles establishing the League of Nations. The cartoonist suggests that the failure of the United States to join the League is a blow to the prospects for peace. (Licensed under the Public Domain)

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***

In September, the Azov Nazis came to America in search of loot to finance their ongoing effort to murder and ethnically cleanse any hint of Russian ethnicity in Ukraine.

All you really need to know is that Azov Regiment leaders were just in the US on a lobbying tour, where they proudly displayed their explicit Nazi-derived Wolfsangel insignia and raffled off their patches as prizes. No one proclaimed any anti-semitic danger. It's just a farce https://t.co/We4nuMhk14

— Michael Tracey (@mtracey) October 26, 2022

For the Azov Nazis, the Russian “special operation” to disarm and get rid of them is a fine way to manipulate the emotions of clueless, headline-skimming Americans and convince them to donate money under the pretense of fighting against Russian tyranny.

For details on this under-reported Nazi tour, see “‘Now, All of You Are Azov’: Ukrainian ‘Neo-Nazis’ Tour U.S.” by Moss Robeson, posted in early October on his Ukes, Kooks & Spooks blog.

Robeson writes the Ukronazi “delegation” is not only hunting for cash in America but also attempting to sanitize the Azov Battalion image.

With the myth-making about Azov's supposed depoliticization reaching new heights, this cofounder of the regiment couldn't even get the story straight whether they "got rid" of their far-right elements or never had them to begin with. https://t.co/As3xHlAgvV

— Moss Robeson (@mossrobeson__) October 5, 2022

Nazi thugs are apparently popular with at least some of America’s “representatives” in Congress.

‘Now, All of You Are Azov’: ‘openly neo-Nazi’ Ukrainian delegation meets Congress, tours US https://t.co/Rj9J1CxXoE by Moss Robeson (@TheGrayzoneNews) #geopolitics #UkraineRussiaWar #UkraineWar #geoeconomics

— metacode (@metacode) October 6, 2022

Almost missed this: Adam Schiff, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, also met the Azov delegation https://t.co/lm2naH74zx

— Moss Robeson (@mossrobeson__) September 28, 2022

It is now safe to support Nazis—who we are told are not Nazis—or the Uke version of nazism based on the same principles as their mentors in fascist Germany in the 1930s and 40s: disappearance, murder, ethnic cleansing of subhumans, and good old fashion lebensraum in eastern Ukraine.

If you use a corporate search engine, you will discover this Uke Nazi thing is a figment of Russian propaganda and delusional thinking. Consider the following brief examples:

• Putin’s “Nazi” rhetoric reveals his terrifying war aims in Ukraine
• How the Russian Media Spread False Claims About Ukrainian Nazis (this one is behind a paywall, so you have to shell out your hard-earned money for revisionist history)
• Why Does Russia’s Leadership Keep Saying that Ukrainians Are Nazis?
• The Shadowy Russian Scheme That Dumped Nazis Into Ukraine (the “nazi problem” is Russia’s fault)
• One of the worst ways Putin is gaslighting the world on Ukraine (“Putin isn’t fighting neo-Nazism. He nurtures it, making his pretext for invading Ukraine even more repellent.”)

According to the corporate war propaganda media (all of the above are members in good standing), the real Nazi is Vladimir Putin and, as we are told in the last “news story,” Russian “Nazi” mercenaries are fighting alongside defenders of Donbas.

Never mind many of these propaganda outlets, reading from USG scripts, denounced the “far-right” supposedly ascendant in much of Europe, especially Ukraine, prior to Russia’s “invasion,” are now de-ranked, the internet version of Orwell’s memory hole.

Suppose you write or speak historical truth at odds with USG war propaganda—or a number of other topics considered “conspiracy theories”—and you utilize PayPal for donations or commercial transactions. In that case, you may not only lose access to its banking microcosm but also have your money stolen.

PayPal will apparently still fine you 2500$ for what they decide is hate speech… Even though @PayPal told everyone they removed that. That company is so bad in so many ways. From @Timcast https://t.co/Fj7mEKALxw pic.twitter.com/A9olciFHQL

— Mikhaila Peterson (@MikhailaFuller) October 27, 2022

However, if you financially support the Azov Nazis, you may proceed unhindered, as the screen capture above reveals.

Paypal has reinstated it's $2,500 fine for "Misinformation" and "Hate Speech" but they have no problems allowing the Ukrainian Neo-Nazi Azov Battalion to crowd fund using their service.

Recently, donations were used to commemorate and rename streets in honor of fallen Neo-Nazis. pic.twitter.com/DiVQrfTISl

— Jay Altons (@jayaltons) October 27, 2022

This includes donating war materiel to the Nazis.

📢Call for donation!

We need your help to buy summer tactical boots 20pcs for soldiers who serve in the "Azov" unit of the Armed Forces of Ukraine

Any amount will help to buy it!
Estimated cost ~3000$

📌PayPal: [email protected]

Everyone please if you can, retweet this! pic.twitter.com/0TMPrKZCyw

— Roman Kyryliuk🇺🇦 (@KyryliukRoma) July 8, 2022

Note the Azov logo with its Norse runic Wolfsangel symbol, a favorite of the Wehrmacht, Das Reich, and the Sturmabteilung (SA Brownshirts, and later the SS).

But never mind. Millions of Americans have no idea this is a Nazi symbol and that the Azov Battalion is responsible for torturing, raping, disappearing, bombarding, and murdering thousands of ethnic Russians that have lived in what was, before “annexation” (voting to leave the Nazi-infested Ukraine), Novorossiya (New Russia, beginning in 1764 and ending in 1917 when the region was incorporated in the Ukrainian People’s Republic).

In the ongoing effort to demonize and undermine Russia, the USG and its media are pulling out all the stops, and are fully engaged in a brazen attempt to revise history and memory-hole reality.

Such idiocy may eventually play a role in the thermonuclear extinction of life on planet Earth.

Finally, as to the role played by banks and Wall Street in financing nazism, see Antony Sutton, “Wall Street and the Rise of Hitler.” Banker support for Hitler and the Nazis began in 1924 with the Dawes Plan.

*

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This article was originally published on the author’s blog site, Kurt Nimmo on Geopolitics.

Kurt Nimmo is a regular contributor to Global Research.

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***

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has presented the White House with a geopolitical crisis that it played a critical role in creating. In February 2014, Victoria Nuland, a current senior State Department official and former Dick Cheney advisor, was caught on tape plotting the installation of a new Ukrainian government – a plan, she stressed, that would involve Biden and his then-top aide, and current National Security Advisor, Jake Sullivan. Weeks later, the democratically elected Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych was ousted and replaced by Washington-backed leaders – including a prime minister selected by Nuland.

The regime change in Kiev made Biden the most influential US political figure in Ukraine, as underscored by the lucrative Burisma board seat gifted to his son Hunter. While the Biden family and other well-connected players profited, Ukraine fell into civil war.

In the eastern Donbas region, Kremlin-backed Ukrainian rebels took up arms against a fascist-infused coup government that cracked down on Russian culture and countenanced murderous assaults on dissidents. Rather than promote the 2015 Minsk II accords — the agreed-upon formula for ending the Donbas conflict – the US fueled the fight with a weapons and training program that turned Ukraine into a NATO proxy. Influential US politicians left no doubt about their intentions. As the Donbas war raged, lawmakers declared that they were using Ukraine to “fight Russia over there” (Adam Schiff) and vowed to “make Russia pay a heavier price,” (John McCain). In February of this year, Russia invaded to bring the eight-year fight to an end, leaving Ukraine to pay the heaviest price of all.

The Biden administration shunned multiple opportunities to prevent the Russian assault. When Russia submitted draft peace treaties in December 2021, the White House refused to even discuss the Kremlin’s core demands: a pledge of neutrality for Ukraine, and the rollback of NATO military forces in post-1997 member states that neighbor Russia. At the final round of talks on implementing Minsk II in early February, the “key obstacle,” the Washington Post reported, “was Kyiv’s opposition to negotiating with the pro-Russian separatists.” Siding with Ukraine’s far-right, which had threatened to overthrow Volodymyr Zelensky if he signed a peace deal, the US made no effort to encourage diplomacy. Emboldened to escalate its war on the Donbas, the Ukrainian government then massively increased shelling on rebel-held areas in the days immediately preceding Russa’s February 24th invasion.

Looking back at the pre-invasion period, Jack Matlock, the US ambassador to the Soviet Union under Bush I, now concludes that “if Ukraine had been willing to abide by the Minsk agreement, recognize the Donbas as an autonomous entity within Ukraine, avoid NATO military advisors, and pledge not to enter NATO,” then Russia’s war “probably would have been prevented.”

For Washington, preventing the war would have interfered with longstanding objectives. As US policymakers have openly recognized, Ukraine’s historical, geographical, and cultural links to Russia could be used as a tool to achieve regime change in Moscow, or, at minimum, leave it “weakened.”

As Ukraine enters another winter of war, this time facing an intensified Russian assault, the Biden administration is apparently in no mood to end a crisis that it helped start.

In an interview with CNN, President Biden declared that he has “no intention” of meeting with Vladimir Putin at the upcoming G20 summit. “I’m not about to, nor is anyone else prepared to negotiate with Russia,” Biden said.

A recent account in the Washington Post details the White House’s prevailing mindset:

Privately, U.S. officials say neither Russia nor Ukraine is capable of winning the war outright, but they have ruled out the idea of pushing or even nudging Ukraine to the negotiating table. They say they do not know what the end of the war looks like, or how it might end or when, insisting that is up to Kyiv.

“That’s a decision for the Ukrainians to make,” a senior State Department official said. “Our job now is to help them be in absolutely the best position militarily on the battlefield … for that day when they do choose to go to the diplomatic table.”

If the US knows that its ally Ukraine is not “capable of winning the war”, why would it choose to prolong it? The stated aim to put Kiev “in absolutely the best position militarily on the battlefield,” has been offered for months. Yet during this time Russia has held on to about 20% of Ukrainian territory and positioned itself for a major escalation. The Russian army is preparing to deploy some 300,000 reservists, and has recently conducted its most ferocious missile barrages to date, causing serious damage to Ukraine’s civilian infrastructure, as US officials had predicted.

While Ukraine has scored some battlefield successes, there is no indication that its strategic position has significantly improved. The counter-offensive in Kharkiv reportedly came at the cost of high Ukrainian casualties, a type of victory that is unsustainable. The Russian pullback, a Western official told Reuters, was more likely a “withdrawal, ordered and sanctioned by the general staff, rather than an outright collapse… the Russians have made some good decisions in terms of shortening their lines and making them more defensible, and sacrificing territory in order to do so.” The most audacious of Ukraine’s counter-attacks – the bombing of the Kerch bridge – “did not appear to have done permanent damage to the bridge — or to Russia’s war effort,” the New York Times reported. Instead, it only triggered a far more destructive Russian retaliation.

The stated White House position of treating diplomacy as “a decision for the Ukrainians to make” is also based on a false premise. For one, when Ukraine previously did “choose to go to the diplomatic table,” with Russia and even made significant progress, its Western backers in London and Washington sabotaged it, according to multiple accounts.

And whether Ukraine wants to negotiate, the US is not obligated to supply the weaponry and intelligence that sustains the fight. The US role as a co-belligerent in the US conflict is a political choice, not a law of nature. And given that US officials privately admit that Ukraine is not “capable of winning the war,” that would seemingly obligate them all the more to use their considerable leverage to bring this un-winnable war to a speedy end.

Yet another imperative for resolving the conflict is the nuclear threat that it continues to fuel. According to Leon Panetta, the former CIA director and defense secretary, “intelligence analysts now believe that the probability of the use of tactical nuclear weapons in Ukraine has risen from 1-5 percent at the start of the war to 20-25 percent today.” In this “proxy war between Washington and Moscow,” former State Department official Jeremy Shapiro warns, both sides “are locked in an escalatory cycle that, along current trends, will eventually bring them into direct conflict and then go nuclear, killing millions of people and destroying much of the world.” Even if these warnings are overblown, the very fact that they are even being articulated by well-placed former US officials should obligate all parties to demonstrate an effort for peace.

In both the US and Russia, the only apparent response to the threat of terminal conflict is to fuel it. This week, NATO has kicked off its annual nuclear exercises, featuring a fleet of aircraft including U.S. long-range B-52 bombers. Russia is slated to hold its own maneuvers as well.

Meanwhile, rather than negotiating, the US and its partners are devoted to global arms dealing. To procure the Russian-style weapons that Ukrainian soldiers are trained to use, “the United States and other allies have been scouring the globe,” the New York Times reports. Relieved of any need to attempt diplomacy, Secretary of State Antony Blinken has visited Asia, Africa, and Latin America “in a painstaking, behind-the-scenes diplomatic campaign to countries that have demonstrated support for Ukraine but are still reluctant to supply lethal aid.” Over the long-term, a senior NATO official told Politico, the Western goal is “to get Ukraine fully interoperable with NATO.”

Lost in this “painstaking” scramble to find weapons for the Ukraine proxy war is the question of whether there will be any of Ukraine left behind. “[T]he longer the war continues,” Matlock, the former US ambassador to the USSR, writes, “the harder it is going to be to avoid the utter destruction of Ukraine.” A prolonged war also threatens a “winter of de-industrialization” in Europe, along with increased hunger and impoverishment around the globe.

Despite his experience as a US diplomat who helped negotiate an end to the Cold War, Matlock’s opposition to the current cold war has left him banished from establishment US media outlets. In this militaristic climate, it is only on rare occasions that voices of restraint can break the sound barrier.

Speaking recently to ABC News, retired Admiral Mike Mullen, the nation’s top military officer under both Bush II and Obama, urged the White House to find an off-ramp. Of Biden’s warning of a nuclear “Armageddon,” Mullen said: “I think we need to back off that a little bit and do everything we possibly can to try to get to the table to resolve this thing… The sooner the better as far as I’m concerned.”

The Biden administration has taken the inverse position: for their proxy war against Russia, the longer the better, no matter how many more lives in Ukraine are sacrificed by policies designed in Washington.

*

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“Towards a World War III Scenario: The Dangers of Nuclear War” 

by Michel Chossudovsky

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ISBN Number: 978-0-9737147-5-3
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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   

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***

All the Stanford doctors who looked at the case, which started a week after Moderna vaccination, are clueless as to the potential cause of this deadly disease. In this video, we hear the case history.

Executive summary

Prion diseases, which are always fatal, have been associated in the scientific literature with the COVID vaccination.

For example, see Studies Link Incurable Prion Disease With COVID-19 Vaccines points out:

The French study identified 26 cases across Europe and the United States. Twenty of the individuals had already died by the time the study was written, with death occurring, on average, 4.76 months after being vaccinated. Among the 20 deaths, eight of the individuals experienced sudden death, in an average time period of 2 1/2 months after vaccination.

I’ve written about prion diseases before in PROOF: COVID vaccines cause prion diseases and, most recently, in this article: Twitter made a huge mistake. I was right about prion diseases. They were wrong. Surprised?

Professor Byram Bridle speculated in May 2021 that the COVID vaccines would cause prion diseases.

In this video, I interview the husband and mother of Tammy Pottorff about what happened to Tammy after she got the shot. Within a week, the signs of prion disease were present.

To this day, the doctors at Stanford act completely clueless as to what might have caused Tammy’s brain to fail.

All the doctors refuse to consider it could have been the vaccine despite overwhelming evidence that these vaccines cause prion diseases.

It simply couldn’t be the vaccine but they won’t say how they can rule this out.

Richard Pottorff’s wife came down with CJD, a fatal prion disease, a week after getting the shot

CJD is extremely rare… 1 case per million people per year. There are many reports of this happening shortly after COVID vaccination. Here’s a case history in Sunnyvale, CA of this happening. It looks like it won’t be written up in the medical literature since nobody wants to talk about it.

The doctors cannot figure out the cause or an effective treatment. It took 6 months for them to get an appointment because the neurologists are so overbooked due to a flood of neurological cases… they don’t know why.

None of the 10 doctors who looked at this case think there is any possibility it is the vaccine despite the medical literature showing dozens of such cases immediately starting right after the patient took the COVID vaccine.

I wish I could interview these doctors on camera but you know what the chances of that happening are… zero.

In this video interview, you’ll hear from Tammy’s husband and mother what they think about what happened to Tammy.

Because of what happened to Tammy, about 10% of Tammy’s friends won’t be getting any further shots. The other 90% are not deterred by the story and want to be protected (even though there is no evidence that booster shots add protection).

The one doctor who is aware of what is going on and told the family not to take the vaccine is not speaking out publicly because he doesn’t want to have his medical license taken away.

Since the doctors aren’t going to write up this case history for the medical journal, the responsibility for surfacing these stories falls upon misinformation spreaders such as myself.

Poll

This poll should be shocking to everyone. Consider this:

So that means if the average person knows 1,000 people, we’d expect 1 person in 1000 to know someone with a current prion disease. As you can see, the rate is 100X what we’d expect. How will they explain that one?

Whole lotta CJD happening to vaccinated people

Here’s a recent tragic story and another. These stories are celebrity CJD deaths; non-celebrity deaths wouldn’t generate a story. A celebrity dying of CJD was pretty much unheard of before the COVID vaccines rolled out. This suggests that the rate in the general public is huge.

Note that Mad Cow is not classic CJD. Here’s the CDC page on CJD.

So don’t make that mistake. But other than that, this is a good post:

Summary

We knew prion diseases were a risk factor from these vaccines since May 2021. When Professor Byram Bridle got the biodistribution data from Pfizer, he voiced his concern publicly at the time. I was on the call. He was right.

What happened to Tammy is tragic. What’s worse is that the medical community is taking a blind eye to what has happened. Not only will they not acknowledge the cause or speak out publicly about what has happened, they won’t even document these cases in the medical literature. So these deaths will keep happening and most people will be none the wiser. And “that’s just the way it goes” as Dr. Eric Rubin might have said.

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According to Newsweek, on October 26th, “Finland Will Allow NATO to Place Nuclear Weapons on Border With Russia”. They cite Finnish media reports. Allegedly, a condition that NATO had placed on Finland to join NATO was to allow America’s nuclear missiles to be positioned on Finland’s Russian border, which is closer to Moscow than any other except Ukraine’s. Whereas Ukraine’s would be 5 minutes from blitz-nuking Moscow so as to preemptively decapitate Russia’s retaliatory command, Finland’s would be 7 minutes — only around 120 seconds longer for Russia to be able to launch its retaliatory strikes.

Finland now is to vote on the bill joining NATO, on that basis (i.e., to become America’s spearhead to defeat Russia in WW III). Obviously (assuming that NATO had, indeed, given Finland’s leaders to believe that saying yes to this would increase NATO’s likelihood of expediting Finland’s application to join), NATO is set upon checkmating Russia into capitulation if Finland does join.

Newsweek reports also that

“The U.S. already has around 100 nuclear weapons in Europe, positioned in Belgium, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and Turkey according to the Federation of American Scientists. Britain and France, both NATO members, also maintain their own independent nuclear arsenals.”

None of those countries borders Russia. They’re all much farther away.

During the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, JFK refused to allow the Soviet Union to place its missiles only 1,131 miles away from Washington DC and warned that the U.S. would launch WW III if they did; so, the Soviet Union decided not to.

The Finnish border reaches as close as 507 miles away from Moscow, at the Finnish city of Kotka. The Ukrainian border reaches significantly closer: 317 miles from Shostka to Moscow, and 353 miles from Sumy to Moscow — as being the Russia-bordering nation that would pose the biggestdanger to Russia if added to NATO. Finland is #2 — only Ukraine is even worse in a Russian view.

Russia invaded Ukraine in order to be able to move that potential 317 miles back to at least the 1,131 miles that everyone in 1962 agreed would be too close to Washington DC and therefore justification for America to launch WW III to prevent.

The reason why the difference between 317 miles versus 507 miles is only around two minutes, is that the slowest part of the flight is the earliest, while accelerating. Practically speaking, for Washington to position its nuclear-warheaded missiles 507 miles from The Kremlin is virtually the same as to position them at the nearest point on Ukraine’s border. One can already see that Russia actively resists this.

In 1962, missiles were far slower than they are today. So, in order for there to be an equivalency between the 1,131 miles from Cuba in 1962, Russia would need to keep U.S. missiles about 2,000 miles from America’s closest land-based nuclear missiles today. The present situation is considerably more dangerous to Russia than the Cuban Missile Crisis was to America in 1962.

According to leading American scientists who specialize in evaluating such matters, America’s recent nuclear-weapons policy “creates exactly what one would expect to see, if a nuclear-armed state were planning to have the capacity to fight and win a nuclear war by disarming enemies with a surprise first strike.”

Newsweek’s disclosure on October 26th suggests that this is, indeed, what the U.S. Government has been, and is, planning for: “to fight and win a nuclear war by disarming enemies with a surprise first strike.” (That meta-strategy is called “Nuclear Primacy,” and in America it replaced the “M.A.D.” or Mutually Assured Destruction meta-strategy in around 2006.)

During WW II, Finland was on the Nazi side and participated with the Germans in their “Operation Barbarossa invasion of the Soviet Union.” If it joins NATO, Finland would be repeating that now, but only against Russia.

All U.S. foreign polices, in both the Democratic Party and the Republican Party, are “neocon,” and that means funded by and for U.S.-and-allied billionaires and centi-millionaires — not for ANY public — in order to increase yet further the scope of their global empire.

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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.

“Towards a World War III Scenario: The Dangers of Nuclear War” 

by Michel Chossudovsky

Available to order from Global Research! 

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   

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***

President George W. Bush’s “freedom agenda” could be defined as subversion, that is the attempt to undermine the structure of a foreign nation in order to attain regime change or political goals. Propaganda is a core element of subversive actions, and includes the dissemination of largely false material so as to discredit regimes abroad. 

This was the case 20 years ago in the build-up to the March 2003 invasion of Iraq, when Saddam Hussein was wrongly accused of among other things possessing weapons of mass destruction (WMDs). Propaganda can be spread readily enough through the corporate media, as seen relating to Iraq, Afghanistan, Serbia and so on.

Most useful too in stoking unrest are US organisations like the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), National Democratic Institute (NDI), USAID, Freedom House, the Open Society groups of George Soros, and of course the CIA.

Many of the above supported and funded the “color revolutions” which occurred in such states as Georgia (2003), the Ukraine (2004) and Kyrgyzstan (2005). These either share a border with Russia or are former Soviet republics, nor is that a coincidence. The color revolutions were, quite plainly, a convenient means for the Bush administration to pursue its encirclement policy of Russia.

For example in February 2005 the Wall Street Journal acknowledged that, in the Central Asian state of Kyrgyzstan, organisations like USAID, the NED and Soros’ Open Society were funding the anti-government opposition there, a key instigator of Kyrgyzstan’s “Tulip revolution”. In the preceding years, USAID alone had dispensed with hundreds of millions of dollars towards such activities. Nations like Kyrgyzstan were identified by president Bush as important not only to contain Russia, but as a launching pad for US military offensives.

From December 2001 the Americans arrived in Kyrgyzstan in force, using the capital Bishkek as a logistics centre to support their invasion of Afghanistan. Washington was also trying to increase its presence in the highly-desired Caspian Sea and Black Sea regions, along with the surrounding areas further contested between Russia and the Western powers.

Regarding the significance of these territories Michel Chossudovsky, a geostrategist and analyst wrote,

“What is at stake is an integrated system of waterways which connects the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea to the Baltic and the Northern Sea Route. In this regard the narrow Kerch Strait in Eastern Crimea is strategic. The 2014 union of Crimea with Russia redefines the geography and the geopolitical chessboard of the Black Sea Basin. Since 2014, the reunion of Crimea to the Russian Federation represented a major setback for US-NATO, whose longstanding objective was to integrate Ukraine into NATO, while extending Western military presence in the Black Sea Basin”.

Moreover, Chossudovsky observed,

“Following the union of Crimea to Russia, The Russian Federation now controls a much larger portion of the Black Sea, which includes the entire coastline of the Crimean peninsula. The Eastern part of Crimea –including the Kerch strait– are under Russia’s jurisdiction. On the Eastern side of the Kerch strait is Russia’s Krasnodar region and extending southwards are the port cities of Novorossiysk and Sochi. Novorossiysk is also strategic. It is Russia’s largest commercial port on the Black Sea, at the cross-roads of major oil and gas pipelines between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea”.

Despite Washington interfering in states like Georgia and the Ukraine, the Americans did not particularly wish to sow instability in the South Caucasus nation of Azerbaijan, another former Soviet republic which borders Georgia to the north. In Azerbaijan the Americans needed a stable environment, because they had interests in oil infrastructure connecting the production fields of Baku, Azerbaijan’s capital, into the deep water Mediterranean port of Ceyhan, in southern Turkey, which could receive tankers each carrying over 300,000 tons of oil.

Baku had furnished Soviet Russia with at least 80% of its entire oil during World War II, without which the heavily mechanised Red Army could probably not have won the war against Nazi Germany. Azerbaijan today still contains considerable quantities of oil, and its strategic importance remains clear. Azerbaijan shares an extensive shoreline with the Caspian Sea, while it is an important energy route linking the Caucasus and Central Asia, as Zbigniew Brzezinski had highlighted when he was the US National Security Advisor (1977-81).

Rather than dispatching American soldiers to safeguard Washington’s goals in Azerbaijan, the Pentagon sent mercenaries from private military companies like Blackwater. The aim was to protect the Caspian Sea’s oil and gas deposits, controlled historically by Russia to the largest extent.

The Caspian Sea, the earth’s biggest lake, is extremely rich in natural resources and “is one of the oldest oil-producing areas in the world” and “an increasingly important source of global energy production” according to the US Energy Information Administration (EIA). The EIA estimated in 2012 that the Caspian Sea and its environs contain proven oil quantities of 48 billion barrels, more than is present in either America or China. The US Geological Survey has calculated that the Caspian’s real oil reserves are greater than the proven quantities, containing perhaps another 20 billion barrels of undiscovered oil.

In 2012 the Caspian region produced, on average, 2.6 million barrels of crude oil per day, amounting to about 3.4% of global supply. Much of the oil is extracted near the Caspian shorelines, but further out into its waters are also large amounts of oil. Altogether, the Caspian’s oil output is believed to have surpassed that of the North Sea, and exploratory drilling in the latter body of water dropped from 44 wells in 2008 to only 12 in 2014. Yet there are still 16 billion recoverable barrels of oil off the coast of the Scottish city of Aberdeen and west of the Shetland Islands further north.

The US Energy Information Administration estimated that the Caspian Sea contains “probable reserves” of 292 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. The US Geological Survey believes, on top of that, there is another 243 trillion cubic feet of undiscovered gas in the Caspian, most of which is located in the South Caspian Basin. Russia and its neighbour Kazakhstan have controlled the biggest part of the Caspian.

At the Fourth Caspian Summit convened in Astrakhan, Russia, on 29 September 2014, the five nations that share a coast with the Caspian Sea – Russia, Iran, Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan – decided unanimously they would uphold the security of the region, and prevent it from being penetrated by outside powers. This agreement sought to protect the heart of Eurasia from the expansionist NATO, in effect meaning the US, whose military presence in recent years has been significantly reduced in Central Asia.

The settlement reached, at the Fourth Caspian Summit, closed off the Caspian Sea to president Barack Obama’s designs. The US would find it difficult to advance in an area where it previously maintained close relations with Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan since the 2001 military attack on Afghanistan, which was supported by NATO countries Germany, Britain, Italy and Canada. The US had distorted the role of NATO to become an offensive military instrument with global reach. Among Washington’s ambitions was to secure a permanent presence astride the Hindu Kush and Pamir mountain ranges of Central and South Asia, along with the Caucasus.

In May 2005 president Bush had visited the Georgian capital Tbilisi, and he said that Georgia had become a “beacon of liberty”. Bush viewed control of the South Caucasus and Central Asia as vital to achieving victory in Afghanistan further east. Bush’s White House secured US military bases in Central Asia, such as in southern Uzbekistan, not far from Tajikistan, and Manas Air Base in northern Kyrgyzstan. The strategic objective was not merely to support the “war on terror”, but to ensure US control over the region’s fossil fuel reserves and pipelines while negating Russian influence.

Washington attempted to position its military power in the heartland of Eurasia, particularly in Georgia and Azerbaijan, where NATO troops could be sent on to Afghanistan and Iraq. US military bases in Georgia would serve as a back-up for the Pentagon’s bases in Turkey, a short distance from Georgia; while a US military presence in Azerbaijan would give the Bush administration the option of launching an attack on Iran, something which has long been discussed in Washington. Most American elites have since realised that a military offensive against Iran would be highly risky and unlikely to succeed. The US Armed Forces failed to overcome Iraq, a much smaller and weaker country than Iran.

The successful 2008 Russian military intervention in Georgia reminded the West that the Caucasus, like the surroundings of the Black Sea and Caspian, is in Russia’s sphere of influence. The Kremlin would not allow greater expansion by America. Of all the ex-Soviet republics, Georgia had aligned itself most closely with the US, after the “Rose revolution” in late 2003, which had been supported by the Pentagon and bankrolled by US government-linked groups (NED, Freedom House, etc.) and billionaire Soros’ Open Society.

The unsuccessful 2008 Georgian attack on South Ossetia was planned by the US-backed regime of Mikheil Saakashvili – only after the Bush administration had sanctioned military action – according to Georgia’s former Ambassador to Russia, Erosi Kitsmarishvili, who provided this testimony to the Georgian parliament. US vice-president Dick Cheney also informed the Georgian leader Saakashvili that “We have your back”, in the event of a Russo-Georgian conflict. As it turned out, there was little the Americans could do to prevent a Georgian defeat.

It can be recalled that the Soviet Union had not been beaten militarily by the US. Early this century Russia had 1.2 million troops in its armed forces, and possessed 14,000 nuclear warheads of which 5,192 were operational. The US, on the other hand, possessed 9,962 nuclear warheads in 2006, of which 5,736 were operational, and the US military had 1.3 million active service members. There is not much disparity between these figures.

Russia still possessed more than enough weaponry to compete with America. Political scientist Moniz Bandeira wrote,

“Washington had not heeded the fact that Russia had inherited the huge military firepower of the Soviet Union, and that strategic parity had not come to an end, despite the disintegration of the socialist bloc”.

President Bush, as with his predecessor Bill Clinton, needlessly provoked Russia. Shortly after taking office in 2001, Bush withdrew the US from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty (ABM) which had been signed in 1972 with the Soviet Union, in order to implement the anti-missile defense system, and thereby reduce the threat of nuclear war.

Bush continued his dangerous moves by establishing missile infrastructure in NATO states Poland and the Czech Republic, and then led NATO to the frontiers of Russia by incorporating the Baltic states into the military organisation in 2004. Bush refused to ratify the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty (1996) along with modifications to the SALT 2 agreement on the reduction of strategic armaments.

However, Russia could not be subdued as Germany has been, because the soil of Russia was never conquered by foreign powers, as German terrain had been from 1945. Unlike Germany too, Russia is a resource-rich state positioned in a pivotal area of Eurasia. Russia has the ability to use its influence, furthermore, to dictate business deals with the European Union relating to important deliveries of oil and gas. The Europeans are much more dependent on the Russians than the other way around.

Russia was growing stronger internally after the upheaval of the 1990s. In 1998 almost 40% of Russians were living below the poverty line; but the number of Russians living in poverty had been reduced to 11% by 2013, a lower figure than in the US where at least 15% of Americans were poverty-stricken in 2014.

Russia has benefited from the high oil and gas prices in the international market, and its industrial growth has risen sharply. Increasing too was Russia’s domestic and foreign investment especially in the automobile industry, which rose by 125%, while the country’s GDP grew by 70% placing Russia among the world’s largest economies.

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Shane Quinn obtained an honors journalism degree and he writes primarily on foreign affairs and historical subjects. He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG).

Sources

U.S. Energy Information Administration, “Oil and natural gas production is growing in Caspian Sea region”, 11 September 2013

Michel Chossudovsky, “The Kerch Strait and the Sea of Azov: Black Sea Geopolitics and Russia’s Control of Strategic Waterways”, Global Research, 12 October 2022

Wall Street Journal, “In Putin’s backyard ‘democracy’ stirs – with U.S. help”, 25 February 2005

Guardian, “Bush hails Georgia as ‘beacon of liberty’”, 10 May 2005

Luiz Alberto Moniz Bandeira, The World Disorder: US Hegemony, Proxy Wars, Terrorism and Humanitarian Catastrophes (Springer; 1st ed., 4 Feb. 2019)

Andrew Cockburn, “The Bloom Comes Off the Georgian Rose”, Harper’s Magazine, 31 October 2013

U.S. Energy Information Administration, “Overview of oil and natural gas in the Caspian Sea region”, 26 August 2013

Daily Telegraph, “North Sea oil production rises despite price fall”, 3 August 2015

Luiz Alberto Moniz Bandeira, The Second Cold War: Geopolitics and the Strategic Dimensions of the USA (Springer; 1st ed., 23 June 2017)

PBS, “Who counts as poor in America?”, 8 January 2014

Featured image is from Adam Garrie

History of the World War II

Operation Barbarossa, the Allied Firebombing of German Cities and Japan’s Early Conquests

By Shane Quinn

The first two chapters focus on German preparations as they geared up to launch their 1941 invasion of the Soviet Union, called Operation Barbarossa, which began eight decades ago. It was named after King Frederick Barbarossa, a Prussian emperor who in the 12th century had waged war against the Slavic peoples. Analysed also in the opening two chapters are the Soviet Union’s preparations for a conflict with Nazi Germany.

The remaining chapters focus for the large part on the fighting itself, as the Nazis and their Axis allies, the Romanians and Finns at first, swarmed across Soviet frontiers in the early hours of 22 June 1941. The German-led invasion of the USSR was the largest military offensive in history, consisting of almost four million invading troops. Its outcome would decide whether the post-World War II landscape comprised of an American-German dominated globe, or an American-Soviet dominated globe. The Nazi-Soviet war was, as a consequence, a crucial event in modern history and its result was felt for decades afterward and, indeed, to the present day.

Read the e-reader here.

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***

Let’s start with what is in fact a tale of Global South trade between two members of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO). At its heart is the already notorious Shahed-136 drone – or Geranium-2, in its Russian denomination: the AK-47 of postmodern aerial warfare.

The US, in yet another trademark hysteria fit rife with irony, accused Tehran of weaponizing the Russian Armed Forces. For both Tehran and Moscow, the superstar, value-for-money, and terribly efficient drone let loose in the Ukrainian battlefield is a state secret: its deployment prompted a flurry of denials from both sides. Whether these are made in Iran drones, or the design was bought and manufacturing takes place in Russia (the realistic option), is immaterial.

The record shows that the US weaponizes Ukraine to the hilt against Russia. The Empire is a de facto war combatant via an array of “consultants,” advisers, trainers, mercenaries, heavy weapons, munitions, satellite intel, and electronic warfare. And yet imperial functionaries swear they are not part of the war. They are, once again, lying.

Welcome to yet another graphic instance of the “rules-based international order” at work. The Hegemon always decides which rules apply, and when. Anyone opposing it is an enemy of “freedom,” “democracy,” or whatever platitude du jour, and should be – what else – punished by arbitrary sanctions.

In the case of sanctioned-to-oblivion Iran, for decades now, the result has been predictably another round of sanctions. That’s irrelevant. What matters is that, according to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), no less than 22 nations – and counting – are joining the queue because they also want to get into the Shahed groove.

Even Leader of the Islamic Revolution, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, gleefully joined the fray, commenting on how the Shahed-136 is no photoshop.

The race towards BRICS+

What the new sanctions package against Iran really “accomplished” is to deliver an additional blow to the increasingly problematic signing of the revived nuclear deal in Vienna. More Iranian oil on the market would actually relieve Washington’s predicament after the recent epic snub by OPEC+.

A categorical imperative though remains. Iranophobia – just like Russophobia – always prevails for the Straussians/neo-con war advocates in charge of US foreign policy and their European vassals.

So here we have yet another hostile escalation in both Iran-US and Iran-EU relations, as the unelected junta in Brussels also sanctioned manufacturer Shahed Aviation Industries and three Iranian generals.

Now compare this with the fate of the Turkish Bayraktar TB2 drone – which unlike the “flowers in the sky” (Russia’s Geraniums) has performed miserably in the battlefield.

Kiev tried to convince the Turks to use a Motor Sich weapons factory in Ukraine or come up with a new company in Transcarpathia/Lviv to build Bayraktars. Motor Sich’s oligarch President Vyacheslav Boguslayev, aged 84, has been charged with treason because of his links to Russia, and may be exchanged for Ukrainian prisoners of war.

In the end, the deal fizzled out because of Ankara’s exceptional enthusiasm in working to establish a new gas hub in Turkey – a personal suggestion from Russian President Vladimir Putin to his Turkish counterpart Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

And that bring us to the advancing interconnection between BRICS and the 9-member SCO – to which this Russia-Iran instance of military trade is inextricably linked.

The SCO, led by China and Russia, is a pan-Eurasian institution originally focused on counter-terrorism but now increasingly geared towards geoeconomic – and geopolitical – cooperation. BRICS, led by the triad of Russia, India, and China overlaps with the SCO agenda geoeconomically and geopoliticallly, expanding it to Africa, Latin America and beyond: that’s the concept of BRICS+, analyzed in detail in a recent Valdai Club report, and fully embraced by the Russia-China strategic partnership.

The report weighs the pros and cons of three scenarios involving possible, upcoming BRICS+ candidates:

First, nations that were invited by Beijing to be part of the 2017 BRICS summit (Egypt, Kenya, Mexico, Thailand, Tajikistan).

Second, nations that were part of the BRICS foreign ministers’ meeting in May this year (Argentina, Egypt, Indonesia, Kazakhstan, Nigeria, UAE, Saudi Arabia, Senegal, Thailand).

Third, key G20 economies (Argentina, Indonesia, Mexico, Saudi Arabia, Turkiye).

And then there’s Iran, which has already already shown interest in joining BRICS.

South African President Cyril Ramaphosa has recently confirmed that “several countries” are absolutely dying to join BRICS. Among them, a crucial West Asia player: Saudi Arabia.

What makes it even more astonishing is that only three years ago, under former US President Donald Trump’s administration, Crown Prince Muhammad bin Salman (MbS) – the kingdom’s de fact ruler – was dead set on joining a sort of Arab NATO as a privileged imperial ally.

Diplomatic sources confirm that the day after the US pulled out of Afghanistan, MbS’s envoys started seriously negotiating with both Moscow and Beijing.

Assuming BRICS approves Riyadh’s candidacy in 2023 by the necessary consensus, one can barely imagine its earth-shattering consequences for the petrodollar. At the same time, it is important not to underestimate the capacity of US foreign policy controllers to wreak havoc.

The only reason Washington tolerates Riyadh’s regime is the petrodollar. The Saudis cannot be allowed to pursue an independent, truly sovereign foreign policy. If that happens, the geopolitical realignment will concern not only Saudi Arabia but the entire Persian Gulf.

Yet that’s increasingly likely after OPEC+ de facto chose the BRICS/SCO path led by Russia-China – in what can be interpreted as a “soft” preamble for the end of the petrodollar.

The Riyadh-Tehran-Ankara triad

Iran made known its interest to join BRICS even before Saudi Arabia. According to Persian Gulf diplomatic sources, they are already engaged in a somewhat secret channel via Iraq trying to get their act together. Turkey will soon follow – certainly on BRICS and possibly the SCO, where Ankara currently carries the status of extremely interested observer.

Now imagine this triad – Riyadh, Tehran, Ankara – closely joined with Russia, India, China (the actual core of the BRICS), and eventually in the SCO, where Iran is as yet the only West Asian nation to be inducted as a full member.

The strategic blow to the Empire will go off the charts. The discussions leading to BRICS+ are focusing on the challenging path towards a commodity-backed global currency capable of bypassing US dollar primacy.

Several interconnected steps point towards increasing symbiosis between BRICS+ and SCO. The latter’s members states have already agreed on a road map for gradually increasing trade in national currencies in mutual settlements.

The State Bank of India – the nation’s top lender – is opening special rupee accounts for Russia-related trade.

Russian natural gas to Turkey will be paid 25 percent in rubles and Turkish lira, complete with a 25 percent discount Erdogan personally asked of Putin.

Russian bank VTB has launched money transfers to China in yuan, bypassing SWIFT, while Sberbank has started lending out money in yuan. Russian energy behemoth Gazprom agreed with China that gas supply payments should shift to rubles and yuan, split evenly.

Iran and Russia are unifying their banking systems for trade in rubles/rial.

Egypt’s Central Bank is moving to establish an index for the pound – through a group of currencies plus gold – to move the national currency away from the US dollar.

And then there’s the TurkStream saga.

That gas hub gift

Ankara for years has been trying to position itself as a privileged East-West gas hub. After the sabotage of the Nord Streams, Putin has handed it on a plate by offering Turkey the possibility to increase Russian gas supplies to the EU via such a hub. The Turkish Energy Ministry stated that Ankara and Moscow have already reached an agreement in principle.

This will mean in practice Turkey controlling the gas flow to Europe not only from Russia but also Azerbaijan and a great deal of West Asia, perhaps even including Iran, as well as Libya in northeast Africa. LNG terminals in Egypt, Greece and Turkiye itself may complete the network.

Russian gas travels via the TurkStream and Blue Stream pipelines. The total capacity of Russian pipelines is 39 billion cubic meters a year.

TurkStream was initially projected as a four-strand pipeline, with a nominal capacity of 63 million cubic meters a year. As it stands, only two strands – with a total capacity of 31,5 billion cubic meters – have been built.

So an extension in theory is more than feasible – with all the equipment made in Russia. The problem, once again, is laying the pipes. The necessary vessels belong to the Swiss Allseas Group – and Switzerland is part of the sanctions craze. In the Baltic Sea, Russian vessels were used to finish building Nord Stream 2. But for a TurkStream extension, they would need to operate much deeper in the ocean.

TurkStream would not be able to completely replace Nord Stream; it carries much smaller volumes. The upside for Russia is not being canceled from the EU market. Evidently Gazprom would only tackle the substantial investment on an extension if there are ironclad guarantees about its security. And there’s the additional drawback that the extension would also carry gas from Russia’s competitors.

Whatever happens, the fact remains that the US-UK combo still exerts a lot of influence in Turkey – and BP, Exxon Mobil, and Shell, for instance, are actors in virtually every oil extraction project across West Asia. So they would certainly interfere on the way the Turkish gas hub functions, as well on determining the gas price. Moscow has to weigh all these variables before committing to such a project.

NATO, of course, will be livid. But never underestimate hedging bet specialist Sultan Erdogan. His love story with both the BRICS and the SCO is just beginning.

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This article was originally published on The Cradle.

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

He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from The Cradle

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

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***

The U.S. Government Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System (VAERS) was started in 1990 to track injuries and deaths reported after receiving a vaccine. Congress mandated by law that the government maintain this database as part of the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program.

The National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program is a no-fault alternative to the traditional legal system for resolving vaccine injury petitions.

It was created in the 1980s, after lawsuits against vaccine companies and health care providers threatened to cause vaccine shortages and reduce U.S. vaccination rates, which could have caused a resurgence of vaccine preventable diseases.

Any individual, of any age, who received a covered vaccine and believes he or she was injured as a result, can file a petition. Parents, legal guardians and legal representatives can file on behalf of children, disabled adults, and individuals who are deceased. (Source.)

Since the emergency use authorization of the COVID-19 vaccines in December of 2020, through the latest update of the VAERS database on October 14, 2022, 84% of all deaths reported after vaccination for the past 31+ years have been reported following COVID-19 vaccines. (Source.)

The company that has produced the most vaccines resulting in deaths recorded in VAERS is Pfizer, and they held that top honor even before they partnered with Biontech to produce their mRNA COVID-19 vaccine, when they partnered with Wyeth to produce other various vaccines.

Moderna, which had never produced a vaccine before producing their mRNA COVID vaccine in 2020, now holds the second spot at nearly 24% of all deaths ever recorded following a vaccine injection. (Source.)

As the public becomes more aware of these government statistics in VAERS, there are efforts to downplay their significance. One argument is that since there were so many doses of the COVID-19 vaccine administered, the statistics are naturally higher for adverse events following COVID-19 vaccines.

Well, that claim is very easy to debunk using the U.S. Government’s own statistics.

The National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program has published a report that lists the total number of doses administered for all FDA approved vaccines from 2006 through 2021. You can view the .pdf here on the U.S. Government website.

So let’s compare the number of cases filed in VAERS and the number of deaths reported to VAERS for the second most deadly vaccine according to VAERS, which HIB, Haemophilus influenzae, a vaccine that is primarily given to babies and children under the age of 5.

Prior to the COVID-19 EUA vaccines, it was the most deadly vaccine given to children.

Here is what the CDC says about the HIB vaccines:

Why get vaccinated?

• Pneumonia
• Severe swelling in the throat, making it hard to breathe
• Infections of the blood, joints, bones, and covering of the heart
• Death

This is the information about HIB vaccines that the CDC provides for doctors to give to parents.

Here is the information that they do NOT give to these parents, which is what is recorded in VAERS for the HIB vaccines:

There have been 5 vaccines approved by the FDA that contain the HIB vaccine, and since they have been on the market, there have been 2,387 recorded deaths, 1,448 recorded permanent disabilities, over 25,000 visits to the ER, and over 14,000 hospitalizations.

And remember, this is on the CDC immunization schedule, and these shots are primarily given to babies and children under the age of 5.

If you are a parent considering giving this vaccine to your child, wouldn’t you want to know these statistics? And how many children under the age of 5 get HIB each year?

It is hard to find current stats because the CDC is famous for providing “estimates” and not raw data on causes of death, but a study published in 2012 looked at data from 1999 through 2008 in 5 states and 5 metropolitan areas representing a population of 27,779,979 in 1999 and 35,559,550 in 2008.

During that 9-year period they identified 4,839 cases of HIB, which included 828 children. That’s less than 100 children per year, and no children between the age of 1 and 17 died, and among the few deaths of children under 3 months of age, half of them were born prematurely.

And yet, the CDC keeps this vaccine in their immunization schedule for children, and every year thousands of cases of adverse reactions are filed in VAERS, and dozens of children die after receiving the vaccine, and those are just the cases filed in VAERS, which is vastly under-reported and only about 1% of all cases. (Source.)

And who are the companies producing these vaccines that keep making money off of them?

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Author’s Note

This article was first published on July 8, 2016

America’s pre-emptive nuclear doctrine was firmly entrenched prior to Donald Trump’s accession to the White House. The use of nukes against North Korea has been on the drawing-board of the Pentagon for more than half a century. 

In June 2016 under the Obama administration, top military brass together with the CEOs of the weapons industry debated the deployment of nuclear weapons against Russia, China, Iran and North Korea.

The event was intended to sensitize senior decision makers. The focus was on building a consensus (within the Armed Forces, the science labs, the nuclear industry, etc) in favor of pre-emptive nuclear war 

It was a form of “internal propaganda” intended for senior decision makers (Top Officials) within the military as well as the weapons industry. The emphasis was on “building peace” and “global security” through the “pre-emptive” deployment of nukes (Air, Land and Sea) against four designated “rogue” countries, which allegedly are threatening the Western World. 

One of keynote speakers at the Doomsday Forum, USAF Chief of Staff for Nuclear Integration, Gen. Robin Rand, is presently involved under the helm of Secretary of Defense General Mattis in coordinating the deployment of strike capabilities to East Asia. Gen. Robin Rand heads the Air Force’s nuclear forces and bombers. His responsibility consists in “moving ahead with plans to deploy its most advanced weapons to the [East Asian] region…” Recent reports confirm an unfolding consensus within the military establishment:

“Military leaders regularly, and since the change of administration, have listed China, Russia, North Korea, Iran, and ISIS as the major areas of concern for the future. From a security standpoint, tensions with North Korea continue to escalate, with reverberations throughout the region. In response to Pyongyang’s nuclear missile program, … the U.S. sped up the deployment of THAAD anti-missile interceptors to South Korea. This may reassure Seoul, and to a lesser extent Tokyo, but it has incensed Beijing.” Defense One, March 17, 2017

The DPRK is a a buffer state, a “stepping stone”. The unspoken truth is that the THAAD missiles stationed in South Korea are not intended for the DPRK, they are also slated to be used against China and Russia.

Michel Chossudovsky, April 28, 2017, revised January 21, 2017, Hiroshima Day, 6 August 2022

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On June 21, 2017,  250 top military brass, military planners, corporate military-industrial  “defense” contractors, top officials and scientists from the nuclear weapons laboratories as well as prominent  academics gathered at the Crowne Plaza Hotel in Albuquerque, New Mexico to discuss, debate and promote the Pentagon’s One Trillion Dollar Nuclear Weapons program.

Russia is allegedly “threatening the Western World”. The objective is to develop the pre-emptive use of nuclear weapons (i.e. nuclear war as a means of self-defense).

The event organized by “The Strategic Deterrent Coalition” (a non profit organization) was  funded by Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Orbital ATK, BAE Systems  among other generous donors.

Among the main speakers (see program here)  were Adm. Cecil Haney, Commander of the US Strategic Command (STRATCOM), Lt. Gen. Jack Weinstein, Dep. USAF Chief of Staff for Nuclear Integration, Gen. Robin Rand, Commander, Air Force Global Strike Command, Gen. (ret.) Frank Klotz, Administrator, National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), as well senior officials from America’s top weapons labs including Sandia, Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore. Representatives from the UK, Canada, Denmark and the Republic of Korea (ROK) were also in attendance.

According to STRATCOM Commander Adm. Cecil D. Haney, (image right) “America is quickly running out of time to ensure the viability of its nuclear deterrence and must invest the funds to upgrade not only its nuclear weapons stockpile, but the missiles, submarines and bombers capable of delivering a strike we hope we never have to make”. (Albuquerque Journal, June 22, 2016)

Adm Haney refers to “deterrence”, a Cold War concept which was officially scrapped in 2002 (under the 2001 Nuclear Posture Review). What is contemplated under America’s nuclear doctrine is the first strike pre-emptive use of nuclear weapons against both nuclear as well as non-nuclear states.

The enemies of America were clearly identified. The aggressor nations against which the “preemptive” use (for self-defense) of  advanced nuclear weapons is contemplated were  explicitly mentioned:

Haney presented an overview of the world’s “strategic environment” which he said may be at its most precarious point in history – in large part because of the actions of Russia, China, North Korea, Iran and extremist groups such as the Islamic State and al-Qaida.

Russia poses a threat just by virtue of the size of its nuclear arsenal, which it continues to modernize, but it’s also improving its conventional military forces, maintaining a significant quantity of non-strategic nuclear weapons and aggressively pursuing new war-fighting technologies, he said. (Albuquerque Journal, June 22, 2016)

The event sponsored by the Strategic Deterrent Coalition (SDC) was geared towards the “education of decision-makers on the importance of a “valid nuclear triad” – strategic bombers, land-launched missiles and submarine-launched missiles – according to its board president, Sherman McCorkle.” The notion of Triad “relates to the fact that U.S. strategic nuclear weapons are based in the water, on land and in the air”

Propaganda: Sensitizing “Top Officials”

The SDC’s “educational endeavor” largely consists in building a consensus in favor of pre-emptive nuclear war (within the Armed Forces, the science labs, the nuclear industry, etc). It’s is a form of “internal propaganda” intended for senior decision makers (Top Officials) within the military as well as the weapons industry. The emphasis is “building peace” and “global security” through the “pre-emptive” deployment of nukes (Air, Land and Sea) against four designated “rogue” countries, which allegedly are threatening the Western World.

The debate was coupled with veiled threats pointing to the possible use of nuclear warheads on a first strike basis against Russia, North Korea and Iran:

Coupled with Russian President Vladimir Putin’s rhetoric and “destabilizing actions in Syria and Ukraine,” Haney cautioned that “Russia must understand that it would be a serious miscalculation to consider nuclear escalation as a viable option.”

North Korea continues to undermine regional stability by conducting nuclear tests and advancing its ballistic missile technology, Haney said.

Iran’s continued involvement in Middle East conflicts and development of ballistic missile programs and cyberspace capabilities require vigilance, particularly if there are any shifts in Iran’s nuclear ambitions, he said. (Albuquerque Journal, June 22, 2016)

Theater of the absurd: the US is intent upon using nuclear weapons as a means of self defense against Al Qaeda and ISIS under the Administration’s counter-terrorism initative:

And the United States is part of an international campaign against violent extremist organizations groups “seeking to destroy our democratic way of life.”

To effectively keep adversaries and potential adversaries in check, America must maintain “a safe, secure, effective and ready nuclear deterrent.”

Lest we forget, Al Qaeda was created by the CIA and the ISIS is supported and funded by two of America’s staunchest allies: Turkey and Saudi Arabia.

“Today, our stockpile is the oldest it’s ever been, with the average age of a (nuclear) warhead at 27 years and growing,” he said.

The nation’s national security labs – like Sandia, Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore – are key to ensuring the viability of the nuclear arsenal.

Despite the challenges, Haney said, “U.S. Strategic Command is a ready force capable of delivering comprehensive war-fighting solutions.”

In  response to this venue, the Los Alamos Study Group (LASG) organized a counter-event symposium on June 20-21. The LASG referred to the  Strategic Deterrent Coalition’s Symposium as the “Doomsday Forum”.

According to Los Alamos Study Group (LASG) director Greg Mello: “This Symposium comes at a time when ambitious US nuclear weapons plans, expected to cost $1 trillion over the next 30 years, are coming under withering criticism from recent US senior military and civilian defense officials, independent analysts, members of Congress, and diplomats”.

The nuclear weapons plan constitutes a multibillion dollar bonanza, ironically, for the military industrial contractors which generously financed the Symposium:  “…Air Force nuclear weapons replacements and upgrades are expected to cost hundreds of billions of dollars. Much of that money would go to the sponsors of this symposium.”

This important event –which consists in building a consensus in favor of a possible first strike pre-emptive US nuclear attack against Russia, China, Iran and North Korea– has barely been covered by the mainstream media.

Oops….The organizers must have got their countries mixed up: North Korea was on the list of invitees. Canada was not mentioned. (see below)

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Ukraine has been wracked by shocking destruction and deadly violence since Russia invaded the country in February. Estimates of the death toll range from a confirmed minimum of 27,577 people, including 6,374 civilians, to over 150,000. The slaughter can only get more horrific as long as all sides, including the United States and its NATO allies, remain committed to war.

In the first weeks of the war, the United States and NATO countries sent weapons to Ukraine to try to prevent Russia from quickly defeating Ukraine’s armed forces and conducting a U.S.-style “regime change” in Kyiv. But since that goal was achieved, the only goals that President Zelenskyy and his Western allies have publicly proclaimed are to recover all of pre-2014 Ukraine and decisively defeat and weaken Russia.

These are aspirational goals at best, which require sacrificing hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, of Ukrainian lives, regardless of the outcome. Even worse, if they should come close to succeeding, they are likely to trigger a nuclear war, making this the all-time epitome of a “no-win predicament.”

At the end of May, President Biden responded to probing questions about the contradictions in his Ukraine policy from the New York Times Editorial Board, replying that the United States was sending weapons so that Ukraine “can fight on the battlefield and be in the strongest possible position at the negotiating table.”

But when Biden wrote that, Ukraine had no position at any negotiating table, thanks mainly to the conditions that Biden and NATO leaders attached to their support. In April, after Ukraine negotiated a15-point peace plan for a ceasefire, a Russian withdrawal and a peaceful future as a neutral country, the United States and United Kingdom refused to provide Ukraine with the security guarantees that were a critical part of the agreement.

As now disgraced British prime minister Boris Johnson told President Zelenskyy in Kyiv on April 9th, the “collective West” was “in it for the long run,” meaning a long war against Russia, but wanted no part in any agreement between Ukraine and Russia.

In May, Russian forces advanced through Donbas, forcing Zelenskyy to admit, by June 2nd, that Russia now controlled 20% of Ukraine’s pre-2014 territory, leaving Ukraine in a weaker, not a stronger position.

Six months after Secretary Austin declared in April that the new goal of the war was to decisively defeat and “weaken” Russia, President Biden is rejecting calls for a new peace initiative. So the United States and United Kingdom had no reservations about intervening to kill peace talks in April, but now that they’ve sold President Zelenskyy on fighting an endless war, Biden insists that he has no say in the matter if Zelenskyy rejects peace negotiations.

But it is axiomatic that wars end at the negotiating table, as Biden acknowledged to the Times. The perennial thorny question for war leaders is “When to negotiate?” The problem is that, when your side seems to be winning, you have little incentive to stop fighting. But when you appear to be losing, there is no incentive to negotiate from a weak position either, as long as you believe that the tide of war will sooner or later shift in your favor and improve your position. That was the hope on which Johnson and Biden convinced Zelenskyy to stake his country’s future in April.

Now Ukraine has launched localized counter-offensives and recovered parts of its territory. Russia has responded by throwing hundreds of thousands of fresh troops into the war and starting to systematically demolish Ukraine’s electricity grid.

The escalating crisis exposes the weakness of Biden’s position. He is gambling with hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian lives, which he has no moral claim over, that Ukraine will somehow be in a stronger military position after a winter of war and power outages, with hundreds of thousands more Russian troops in the areas Russia controls. This is a bet on a much longer war, in which U.S. taxpayers will shell out for thousands of tons of weapons and millions of Ukrainians will die, with no clear endgame short of nuclear war.

Thanks to the moral and intellectual bankruptcy of the U.S. mass media, most Americans have no inkling of the deceptive way that Biden and his bubble-headed British allies cornered Zelenskyy into a suicidal decision to abandon promising peace negotiations in favor of a long war that will destroy his country.

The horrors of the war, the contradictions in Western policy, the blowback on European energy supplies, the specter of famine stalking the Global South and the rising danger of nuclear war are provoking a worldwide chorus of voices urgently calling for peace in Ukraine.

If you’re on a media diet of the thin gruel that passes for news in America these days, you may not have heard the calls for peace from UN Secretary General Guterres, Pope Francis or the leaders of 66 countries speaking at the UN General Assembly in September, representing the majority of the world’s population.

But there are also Americans calling for peace. From across the political spectrum, from retired military officers and diplomats to journalists and academics, there are “adults in the room” who recognize the dangerous contradictions of U.S. policy on Ukraine, and are joining leaders from around the world in calling for diplomacy and peace.

Image: Jack F Matlock, Jr., U.S. Ambassador to USSR and Czechoslovakia (Licensed under the Public Domain)

Jack Matlock served as the last U.S. Ambassador to the Soviet Union, from 1987 to 1991, after a 35-year career as a Soviet specialist in the U.S. Foreign Service. Matlock was at the embassy in Moscow during the Cuban missile crisis, where he translated critical messages between Kennedy and Kruschev.

On October 17, 2022, in an article in Responsible Statecraft titled “Why the US must press for a ceasefire in Ukraine,” Ambassador Matlock wrote that as principal arms supplier to Ukraine and the sponsor of the most punitive sanctions on Russia, the United States “is obligated to help find a way out” of this crisis. The article concluded, “Until… the fighting stops, and serious negotiations get underway, the world is headed for an outcome where we all are losers.”

Another veteran U.S. diplomat who has spoken out for diplomacy over Ukraine is Rose Gottemoeller, the Deputy Secretary General of NATO from 2016 to 2019 after she served as President Obama’s senior adviser on arms control, disarmament and nonproliferation. Gottemoeller recently wrote in the Financial Times that she sees no military solution to the crisis in Ukraine, but that “discreet talks” could lead to the kind of “quiet bargain” that resolved the Cuban missile crisis 60 years ago.

On the military side, Admiral Mike Mullen was the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff from 2007 to 2011. After President Biden chatted at a fundraising party about the war in Ukraine leading to nuclear “Armageddon,” ABC interviewed Mullen about the danger of nuclear war.

“I think we need to back off that a little bit and do everything we possibly can to get to the table to resolve this thing,” Mullen replied. “It’s got to end, and usually there are negotiations associated with that. The sooner the better as far as I’m concerned.”

Economist Jeffrey Sachs was the director of the Earth Institute and now the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University. He has been a consistent voice for peace in Ukraine ever since the invasion. In a recent article on September 26, titled “The Great Game in Ukraine is Spinning out of Control,” Sachs quoted President Kennedy in June 1963, uttering what Sachs called “the essential truth that can keep us alive today:”

“Above all, while defending our own vital interests, nuclear powers must avert those confrontations which bring an adversary to a choice of either a humiliating retreat or a nuclear war,” said JFK. “To adopt that kind of course in the nuclear age would be evidence only of the bankruptcy of our policy–or of a collective death-wish for the world.”

Sachs concluded,

“It is urgent to return to the draft peace agreement between Russia and Ukraine of late March, based on the non-enlargement of NATO… The world’s very survival depends on prudence, diplomacy, and compromise by all sides.”

Even Henry Kissinger, whose own war crimes are well documented, has spoken out on the senselessness of current U.S. policy. Kissinger told the Wall Street Journal in August,

“We are at the edge of war with Russia and China on issues which we partly created, without any concept of how this is going to end or what it’s supposed to lead to.”

In the U.S. Congress, after every single Democrat voted for a virtual blank check for arming Ukraine in May, with no provision for peacemaking, Progressive Caucus leader Pramila Jayapal and 29 other progressive Democratic Representatives recently signed a letter to President Biden, urging him to “make vigorous diplomatic efforts in support of a negotiated settlement and ceasefire, engage in direct talks with Russia, explore prospects for a new European security arrangement acceptable to all parties that will allow for a sovereign and independent Ukraine, and, in coordination with our Ukrainian partners, seek a rapid end to the conflict and reiterate this goal as America’s chief priority.”

Unfortunately, the backlash within their own party was so blistering that within 24 hours they withdrew the letter. Siding with calls for peace and diplomacy from all over the world is still not an idea whose time has come in the halls of power in Washington DC.

This is an extremely dangerous moment in history. Americans are waking up to the reality that this war threatens us with the existential danger of nuclear war, a danger most Americans thought we had survived once and for all at the end of the First Cold War. Even if we manage to avoid nuclear war, the impact of a long, bloody war will destroy Ukraine and kill millions of Ukrainians, cause humanitarian catastrophes across the Global South, and trigger a long-lasting global economic crisis.

That will relegate all humanity’s urgent priorities, from tackling the climate crisis to hunger, poverty and disease, to the back-burner for the foreseeable future.

There is an alternative. We can and must resolve this conflict through peaceful diplomacy and negotiation, to end the killing and destruction and let the people of Ukraine live in peace.

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

Nicolas J. S. Davies is an independent journalist, a researcher with CODEPINK and the author of Blood on Our Hands: The American Invasion and Destruction of Iraq.

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

Featured image: Biden and Jayapal at a negotiating table in October 2021 (Photo credit: The White House)

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A public interest litigation is currently before India’s Supreme Court which challenges the drive to commercialise the growing of genetically modified (GM) mustard in India. On 26 October 2022, however, the country’s apex regulatory body – the Genetic Engineering Appraisal Committee – sanctioned commercialisation of the crop.   

The central government has in the past stated commercialisation will not go ahead prior to the court’s decision, but this remains to be seen.

Approval is a significant moment for the agri biotech industry, not least because GM mustard can be regarded as a pioneering crop that could open the doors to a range of other GM food crops that are in the pipeline.

At this point, only one GM crop is legally cultivated in India, Bt cotton – designed to resist certain pests. Prominent policy makers and lobbyists have been claiming that, due to the success of Bt cotton, it should serve as a template for the introduction of GM food crops.

But this claim is not grounded in reality. Bt cotton has been far from successful and has caused immense hardship for cotton farmers (in fact, it is a template for a monumental catastrophe). This is evidentially supported by Prof Andrew Paul Gutierrez, Dr Hans R Herren and Dr Peter E Kenmore, internationally renowned agricultural researchers.

In India, Bt cotton is a failing technology that has severely negatively impacted many farmers. And before anyone says that farmers in India have consciously opted for GM cotton, they should read what researcher and academic Andrew Flachs says.

Flachs conducted fieldwork on cotton cultivation in the South Indian state of Telangana. His book Cultivating Knowledge: Biotechnology, Sustainability and the Human Cost of Cotton Capitalism in India reveals the ugly reality of ‘choice’ and cotton cultivation on the ground.

Consider too that what is happening also goes against the recommendations of four high-level reports that have advised against the adoption of GM crops in India.

The article Agri Biotech Motivated by Monopoly Control (25 October 2022) lists these reports and describes how – through deception, scientific fraud, technological sleight of hand and regulatory jugglery – GM mustard is designed (once commercialised) to facilitate the process of (chemical-dependent) GM food crop cultivation in India.

The premise behind GM mustard is to increase yields and reduce the import bill for edible oils. However, as the article mentioned above shows, there is actually no trait for yield and this GM mustard does not outperform conventional varieties. Moreover, the increase in edible oil imports is not due to low productivity of India’s indigenous edible oils sector but the political decision to cut tarrifs on imports at the behest of global agri commodity traders.

Official reports have been scathing about India’s regulatory system for GMOs, highlighting its inadequacies and inherent serious conflicts of interest. One can only assume that given there is no need (the key prerequisite for introducing a GM crop) for GM mustard, there are other motives for its promotion.

The GM project is not about the industry’s much-touted PR slogans of ‘feeding the world’ or helping farmers’. For the sake of brevity, readers can consult the online article Challenging the Flawed Premise Behind Pushing GMOs into Indian Agriculture which dismantles these claims.

Regardless of any claimed benefits, GMOs have first and foremost been about value capture and creating market dependency. They are also about securing ownership of seed germplasm developed over centuries by farmers via acquiring intellectual property rights – corporations claim their genetic manipulation (no matter how fruitless the effect) turns a seed into a patentable product. This would restrict farmers’ access to seeds and place the biotech companies in control of cultivation and breeding.

Where India is concerned, the GM project must also be viewed as forming part of a wider dependency paradigm. There has been a three-decades-long plan to restructure the Indian economy and Indian agriculture. The plan stems from the country’s 1991 foreign exchange crisis which was used to impose IMF-World Bank debt-related ‘structural adjustment’ conditionalities.

The details of this plan appear in a 2021 article by the Mumbai-based Research Unit for Political Economy – Modi’s Farm Produce Act Was Authored Thirty Years Ago in Washington DC. Although focusing on now-repealed (due to farmer protests) farm legislation, the article locates agricultural ‘reforms’ within a broader process of Western imperialism’s increasing capture of the Indian economy.

We often hear of the need to embrace technology and ‘modern agriculture’. On the surface, all well and good. But what this really means is acquiescing to the needs of global (GM) seed and agrichemical corporations and commodity traders: fitting into global supply chains that siphon value from the food system into the hands of the billionaires who own these conglomerates (we should not forget that Bt cotton enabled Monsanto to suck hundtreds of millions of dollars from poor cotton farmers).

To achieve this, where India is concerned, it means destroying self-reliant, indigenous systems of production by deliberately making smallholder farming financially non-viable, dismantling public buffer food stocks and state-backed price support mechanisms and distribution systems.

Having cleared the way for corporate interests to control the policy space left open by the retreat of the public sector and to amalgamate farms to entrench industrial-scale agriculture, the Indian government would then be compelled to attract ‘foreign direct investment’ by implementing further neoliberal reforms. This would build up foreign reserves which would then be used to purchase agricultural commodities on the international market.

The type of ‘food security’ demanded by ‘modern agriculture’ means eradicating self-sufficiency and implementing food-import dependency on unscrupulous global conglomerates and volatile markets vulnerable to manipulation and shocks (as we are currently witnessing in 2022).

And that’s not all. Privately owned but taxpayer subsidised ‘modern agriculture’ imposes certain costs, including nutrient-poor food contaminated by GMOs and chemical additives, the use of toxic pesticides, spiralling rates of ill health, the degradation of soil, the pollution of waterways, the eradication of thriving ecosystems and the destruction of rural communities.

The GMO issue ties into the ‘development’ agenda being pushed on India. Powerful interests are being handed India’s agrifood sector on a plate and both farmers and consumers will pick up the tab.

The author is an independent writer. For more in-depth insight into what is described in this article, readers can access the free ebook ‘Food, Dispossession and Dependency: Resisting the New World Order’ by clicking on this link. 

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

Featured image is licensed under Creative Commons

Read Colin Todhunter’s e-Book entitled

Food, Dispossession and Dependency. Resisting the New World Order

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

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is also involved (documented in ‘Gates to a Global Empire‘ by Navdanya International), whether through buying up huge tracts of farmland, promoting a much-heralded (but failed) ‘green revolution’ for Africa, pushing biosynthetic food and genetic engineering technologies or more generally facilitating the aims of the mega agri-food corporations.

Click here to read.

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Ever since the Ukraine War started on 24 Feb 2022, the NATO response, mainly articulated and materially implemented by the U.S., has been to pour vast quantities of oil on the flames of conflict, increasing the scale of violence, the magnitude of human suffering, and dangerously increasing the risk of a disastrous outcome.

Not only did Washington mobilize the world to denounce Russia’s ‘aggression,’ but supplied advanced weaponry in great quantities to the Ukrainians to resist the Russian attack, and did all it could at the UN and elsewhere to build a punitive coalition hostile to Russia but coupled this with a variety of sanctions and the demonization of Putin as a notorious war criminal unfit to govern. This perspective of state propaganda was faithfully conveyed by a self-censoring Western media filter that graphically portrayed on a daily basis the horrors of the war experienced by the Ukrainian civilian population and a newly West-oriented enthusiasm for the ICC gathering as much evidence as possible of Russian war crimes.

Such a posture contradicted its intense past opposition to ICC efforts to gather evidence for an investigation of war crimes by non-signatories in relation to the U.S. role in Afghanistan or Israel’s role in occupied Palestine. To some degree such one-sidedness of presentation was to be expected, but its intensity in relation to Ukraine has been dangerously irresponsible and amateurish with respect to the wider human interests at stake, and in a profound sense, the wellbeing of Ukraine and its people.

Even Stephen Walt, an influential commentator on U.S. foreign policy, who is a prudent critic of the Biden failure to do his best to shift the bloody encounter in Ukraine from the battlefield to diplomatic domains, nevertheless joins the war-mongering chorus by misleadingly asserting without qualification that “Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is illegal, immoral, and unjustifiable.” [Walt, “Why Washington Should Take Russian Nuclear Threats Seriously,” Foreign Policy, May 5, 2022] It is not that such a characterization is incorrect, but unless softened by explanations of context it lends credibility to the war-oriented, self-righteous mentality displayed by the Biden presidency. Perhaps Walt and others of similar persuasion were striking this posture of going along with this public portrayal of the Ukraine Crisis as part of striking a Faustian Bargain to gain a seat at the table so that their message of caution could be effectively delivered.

To be clear, even if it can be argued that Russia/Putin have launched a war that is unlawful, immoral, and unjustified, context is important if peace is to be restored and catastrophe avoided. For one thing, the Russian attack may be all of those things alleged, and yet form part of a geopolitical pattern of established behavior that the U.S. has itself established in a series of wars starting with the Vietnam War, and notably more recently with the Kosovo War, Afghanistan War, and the Iraq War. None of these wars were legal, moral, and justifiable, although each enjoyed a geopolitical rationale that made them persuasive with U.S. foreign policy elites and its closest alliance partners. Of course, two wrongs do not make a right, but in a world where geopolitical actors enjoy a license to pursue their strategic interests, it is not objectively defensible to so self-righteously condemn Russia without taking account of what the U.S. has been doing around the world for several decades.

In a somewhat insightful fit of frustration, George W. Bush after a failure to gain UN Security Council authorization in 2003 for the use of regime-changing force against Iraq, declared that the UN would lose its ‘relevance’ if it failed to go along with the American imperial plan of action, and so it did. The ambiguity as to international law arises from the UN Charter own equivocation, asserting that all non-defensive uses of force are prohibited, a position reinforced by the amended Rome Statute governing the International Criminal Court by declaring ‘aggression’ as a crime against the peace, while conferring a conferring a right of veto.

How can this right of veto be conferred on the five permanent members of the Security Council, which has the effect of precluding any decision that clashes with their strategic interests, be reconciled with the prohibition on aggression.

Such a right of exception is complemented by the experience of international criminal law, which from Nuremberg to the present has exempted from accountability dominant geopolitical actors, even for such incredible acts as dropping atomic bombs on overwhelmingly civilian targets at the end of World War II.

This gray zone separating law from power is further reinforced by the existence of spheres of influence claimed and dominated by geopolitical actors, which if territorially proximate and identified as such, tend to be respected by adversaries. Such compromised sovereignty of these borderland countries is descriptive of the mutual tolerance exhibited during the Cold War of the division of Europe, showing forbearance even in the face of ‘unlawful’ violent interventions. In this sense, Ukraine finds itself in the unenviable position of Mexico. Long ago the great Mexican cultural figure, Octavio Paz, proclaimed the tragedy of his country ‘to be so far from God and so close to the United States.’

These considerations are mentioned here not to defend, much less exonerate Russia, but to show that the world order context of the Ukraine War is deeply problematic in relation to normative authority, especially when invoked in such a partisan manner. In contemporary geopolitical relations, as distinct from normal state-to-state or international relations, precedent takes the place of norms and rule-governed behavior. Antony Blinken has muddied the waters of international discourse by falsely claiming that the U.S., unlike adversaries China and Russia, is as observant of rule-governed behavior as are ‘normal states’ in relation to peace and security.

April 27, 1999, Surdulica, Serbia, in the series of  NATO’s civilian bombing, the house of Milić was hit by projectile and the whole family was killed: Milorad (15 years), Stamenka (65), Aleksandar (35), Miljana (14), Vladimir (11), Vesna (35) and three more neighbours who sheltered in the house were killed as well

In this sense, it is appropriate to look back at NATO’s clearly unlawful war of 1999 that fragmented Serbia by granting Kosovo political independence and territorial sovereignty before uncritically condemning the Russian annexation of four parts of eastern Ukraine after admittedly dubious referenda. Again, it is important to recognize that there may be cases where the fragmentation of existing states is justifiable on humanitarian grounds and others where it is not, but to claim that Russia overstepped the limits of law in a context where power has shaped behavior and political outcomes in similar cases is to prepare the public for a wider war rather than leading it to seek and be pragmatically receptive to a diplomatic compromise.

This contextual understanding of the Ukraine War is in my judgment highly relevant as it makes the current fashion of mounting legal, moral, and political arguments of condemnation distract from following an otherwise rational, prudent, and pragmatic courses of action, which from the beginning strongly supported an all-out effort to encourage an immediate ceasefire followed by negotiations aiming at a durable political arrangement not only between Russia and Ukraine, but also NATO/U.S. and Russia. That the U.S. Government never to this day has indicated any interest, much less a commitment to stopping the killing and encouraging diplomacy, despite the mounting costs and risks of prolonged warfare in Ukraine should be shocking to the conscience of peace-minded persons and patriots of humanity everywhere.

Beyond this, catastrophic costs are presently being borne by many vulnerable societies throughout the world from the spillover effects of anti-Russian sanctions and their impact on food and energy supplies and pricing. Such a deplorable situation, likely to get worse as the war is prolonged and intensified, is now also bringing closer to reality growing risks of the use of nuclear weapons as Putin’s alternatives may be narrowing to acknowledging defeat or personally falling from power. While not relenting a bit on implementing an aggressive approach to gaining Ukraine’s ambitions of victory, Biden himself acknowledges that any use of even a tactical nuclear weapon in Ukraine would with near certitude lead to Armageddon. This duality of assessment (combining escalating the war and anxiety as to where it might lead) seems like an embrace of geopolitical insanity rather than a recognition of the somber realities at stake.

As always actions speak louder than words. Blinken facing a rising public clamor for negotiations responds with his usual feckless evasions. In this instance, contending that since Ukraine is the victim of Russian aggression it alone has the authority to seek a diplomatic resolution and the U.S. will continue to support Ukraine’s maximal war aims, including even their extension to Crimea, which has been part of Russia since 2014.

Context also matters in relation to the conduct of the war. Its major escalation within the month of the sabotage of Nord Stream gas pipeline to Europe, which Blinken again confounded by calling it ‘a tremendous opportunity’ to make weaken Russia and lead to greater European energy independence. Such an operation initially implausibly attributed to Russia, yet later more or less acknowledges as part of the expansion of the war by reliance on ‘terrorist’ tactics of combat.

Its latest expression is the suicide bombing of the strategic Kerch Bridge on October 7^th, connecting Crimea and Russia, a major infrastructure achievement of the Putin period of Russian leadership and supply line for Russian troops in Southern parts of Ukraine. These operations contain the fingerprints of the CIA and seem designed as encouragement to the Ukrainian resolve to go all out for a decisive victory, sending Putin unmistakable signals that the U.S. remains unreceptive to a responsible geopolitics of compromise. The U.S. anger directed at Saudi Arabia for cutting its oil production is one more sign a commitment to a victory scenario in Ukraine as well as a reaction against the Saudi resistance to U.S. hegemonic geopolitics. With such provocations, it is hardly surprising, although highly unlawful and immoral, for Russia to retaliate by unleashing its version of ‘shock and awe’ against the civilian centers of ten Ukrainian cities. Such is the vicious escalation!

Always lurking in the background, and at Ukraine’s and the world’s expense, is Washington’s geopolitical opportunism, that is, seeking to defeat Russia and deter China from daring to challenge the hegemonic unipolarity achieved after the Soviet disintegration in 1992. It this huge investment in its militarist identity as the sole ‘global state’ that alone explains this cowboy approach to nuclear risk-taking and the tens of billions expended to empower Ukraine.

Such a tragic political drama unfolds as the peoples of the world and their governments, along with the United Nations, watch this horrendous spectacle unfold, seemingly helpless witnesses not only to the carnage but to their own national destinies.

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Richard Falk is a member of the TRANSCEND Network, Albert G. Milbank Professor Emeritus of International Law at Princeton University, Chair of Global Law, Faculty of Law, at Queen Mary University London,  Research Associate the Orfalea Center of Global Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and Fellow of the Tellus Institute. He directed the project on Global Climate Change, Human Security, and Democracy at UCSB and formerly served as director the North American group in the World Order Models Project. Between 2008 and 2014, Falk served as UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights in Occupied Palestine. His book, (Re)Imagining Humane Global Governance (2014), proposes a value-oriented assessment of world order and future trends. His most recent books are Power Shift (2016); Revisiting the Vietnam War (2017); On Nuclear Weapons: Denuclearization, Demilitarization and Disarmament (2019); and On Public Imagination: A Political & Ethical Imperative, ed. with Victor Faessel & Michael Curtin (2019). He is the author or coauthor of other books, including Religion and Humane Global Governance (2001), Explorations at the Edge of Time (1993), Revolutionaries and Functionaries (1988), The Promise of World Order (1988), Indefensible Weapons (with Robert Jay Lifton, 1983), A Study of Future Worlds (1975), and This Endangered Planet (1972). His memoir, Public Intellectual: The Life of a Citizen Pilgrim was published in March 2021 and received an award from Global Policy Institute at Loyala Marymount University as ‘the best book of 2021.’ He has been nominated frequently for the Nobel Peace Prize since 2009.

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***

The Wall Street Journal, citing sources close to the Saudi government, reported that Crown Prince Mohamed bin Salman commented to his close team on perceived blunders committed by United States President Joe Biden. More interestingly, according to the report, the crown prince was not afraid to insult the elderly US president either.

The relationship between the US and Saudi Arabia seems to be far from reaching a stable point. This is at a time when the West is seeking an agreement that will allow it to stem the rise in energy prices. Relations between the two nations are cooling due to OPEC+’s refusal to boost oil production despite the meeting between Biden and the crown prince in July.

It was hoped that Washington’s request to the Saudi-led OPEC+ would see inflation reduce in the energy market, weeks before the total embargo on Russian gas and oil in Europe is applied, which will likely aggravate prices even more.

In the midst of this tension, The Wall Street Journal revealed that there is a direct mockery of the US president from the Saudi upper echelons as he constantly suffers from memory lapses, confusion and various errors that have called into question his mental clarity. According to the outlet, Mohammed bin Salman has questioned Biden’s mental abilities and said that he prefers former President Donald Trump.

The sources said that “members of the Saudi government have been privately mocking US president Joe Biden and his mental acuity.” The same sources added that the Saudi leader told his advisers that he has not been impressed by Biden since he was vice president during the Obama administration.

For his part, since he took office, Biden refused for over a year to speak with the Saudi crown prince. According to the news report, at their meeting last July, members of the Saudi government felt that Biden did not want to be there.

Geopolitical and economic forces have been driving wedges in the US-Saudi relationship for years, but the feud between Biden and the prince has deepened tensions. According to Aaron David Miller, a veteran US diplomat in the Middle East and current fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace think tank, the relationship between Washington and Riyadh has rarely been so acrimonious.

“Rarely has the chain of broken expectations and perceived insults and humiliations been greater than they are now,” Miller was quoted by the WSJ as saying. “There’s almost no trust and absolutely no mutual respect.”

Likewise, the WSJ pointed out that the decision of OPEC+ to reduce its oil production by up to two million barrels per day was a decision that, from the perspective of the Biden government, brought the Saudis closer to Russia. The Saudis, for their part, see an opportunity to assert their own interests in a world in which the US is not the undisputed superpower.

Following the article’s publication, Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Faisal bin Farhan denied that the crown prince had ever mocked Biden.

“These allegations made by anonymous sources are entirely false. The kingdom’s leaders have always held the utmost respect for US presidents, based on the kingdom’s belief in the importance of having a relationship based on mutual respect,” said Prince Faisal.

However, it is recalled that in April, a state-owned Saudi TV channel aired a comedy skit of Vice President Kamala Harris having to constantly correct Biden and keep him awake.

Saudi-US ties have been strained since OPEC+ announced a huge oil production cut earlier this month to shore up oil prices despite US pressure. The US president warned Saudi Arabia on October 11 that it would face “consequences” in the wake of production cuts that come as the world struggles to cope with high energy prices due to the war in Ukraine.

The decision by OPEC+ undermines the EU’s plans to impose a cap on the price of Russian oil. The Democratic party are especially annoyed with the production cut as it comes before the crucial midterm elections next month.

Although Saudi Arabia said that the production cut by two million barrels per day was not aimed at driving up prices and was taken to stabilise the oil market, it does not contribute to the alleviation of energy prices in the West and therefore the cost-of-living crisis. These factors will have a negative impact for the Democratic Party in the midterm elections, which makes it the most immediate issue Biden has with the Saudis. And although the Saudis denied mocking Biden, there are very few who would actually believe this.

*

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

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***

FACT: Likud’s far-Right, annexation/settlement policy involves forced occupation by the IDF: the violent razing of Arab houses and villages and the killing of those, mainly young Palestinians,  defending their homes, businesses and families – continuously since 1947. This atrocity is anathema to democracy, justice and morality, as well as a deliberate violation of Resolution 2334 that was passed by 14-0 votes in the Security Council of the United Nations, in December 2016.

FACT:  The state of Israel is the only undeclared nuclear weaponised power in the world and, as such, is not a ratified party to the IAEA, the NPT, the OPCW, the CWC or the BWC* and, therefore, the only UN member state that treats the global community with such complete contempt.

FACT:  It is also the only state in the world that is supported militarily and economically by the American taxpayer to the extent of billions of US dollars every year, upon the authority of the AIPAC, Christian Zionist, lobby-influenced, US Congress.  In effect, Israel is the 51st  State of the Union albeit not subject to US law. Consequently, it has grown to be a constant, belligerent threat to both the indigenous Palestinian Arab, the entire Middle East and the wider world.

FACT:  Equally important is the effect of US-Israeli policies of immigration and illegal settlement in former Palestine upon the worldwide Jewish diaspora, centred in New York, Paris and London – who total in the region of eight million. They are now increasingly subject to antisemitic invective and action in their communities by those sympathetic to the Palestinian cause – both on campus and generally – who are clearly incensed by the obvious injustice against a dispossessed, indigenous people of 5m whose families have lived in Palestine for over a thousand years as the dominant demographic.

FACT:  The acceptance of the IHRA definition of antisemitism, although widely adopted, does nothing to ameliorate this shocking situation and is, sadly, often just a distraction.

FACT: The status quo that has allowed the government of one of the smallest countries in the world, Israel,  to become a secret nuclear power capable of destroying an entire continent with its reportedly uninspected, 100-200 ICBMs / nuclear warheads, in its underground storage silos/ bunkers at the Negev Nuclear Research Centre in Dimona and the Jericho Missile Base at Sdot-Micha, is unconscionable and one of the most potentially dangerous factors that could lead to nuclear, world war (WW3), today.

Israel’s secret nuclear arsenal should be de-weaponised, and its government made to comply with the resolution of the United Nations Security Council, failing which there should be a total trade embargo instituted upon all Israeli exports, both to the EU and worldwide.

When the threat of nuclear WMD is removed, and compliance with the will of the UN Security Council, observed,  then would global trade be resumed and the Israeli state returned to full membership of the international community.

Post script: Israel’s current refusal to send to Ukraine military aid, is likely related to its close political and military arrangement with Putin, both being Russian-speaking, non-members of NATO.  Looking both ways is a not an unusual characteristic of Israeli government policy.

*

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Hans Stehling (a pen name) is a regular contributor to Global Research.

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***

Watch Christine Anderson speak about COVID-19 at a press conference with other members of the European Parliament.

“It was a gigantic lie what they told us that the vaccines will prevent you from catching the virus or prevent the transmission. … Well none of that is true, as it turns out. And based on that lie, all of the mandates, all of the lockdowns, pharmaceutical measures such as wearing masks, staying-at-home, curfews — all of that were based on that gigantic lie; and yet, they will not acknowledge it.”

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Video: Pakistan Coup Regime Bans Imran Khan, Dissidents Killed, as US Eyes China Ties, Israel Normalization

By Junaid S. Ahmad and Ben Norton, October 27, 2022

After Prime Minister Imran Khan was overthrown in a US-backed soft coup, Pakistan’s unelected “imported government” has banned the country’s most popular politician from office, sparking huge protests.

“Oath Keepers”, American Justice and “the Secret ‘American’ Army”

By Brett Redmayne-Titley, October 27, 202

While the destructive monocracy strangely known as the United States House of Representatives continues its evisceration of the US Constitution while criminalizing peaceful public decent and factually derived free speech opposition, it is of no surprise that Americans know little about the Oath Keepers.

Sudanese Continue Demonstrations One Year After the Latest Military Coup

By Abayomi Azikiwe, October 27, 2022

It has been one year since the latest military seizure of power in the Republic of Sudan where a committed movement continues to protest against the suppression of civilian democracy in one of Africa’s most oil-rich states.

How U.S. and Allies Increasingly Rely Upon “Theft and Asset Seizures” to Conquer the Rest of the World

By Eric Zuesse, October 27, 2022

On October 26th, Russia’s President Vladimir Putin spoke the literal truth when he said that Ukraine “has actually lost its sovereignty and is directly controlled by the United States, which uses it as a battering ram against Russia.”

Tactical Nuclear Fantasists

By Dr. Binoy Kampmark, October 27, 2022

Bogeyman politics tends to be flatly unimaginative.  The image of the nuclear-mad Russian President, counting his diminishing options, has caught the imagination of press and propaganda outlets across the West.  Will Mad Vlad go the distance and deploy a nuclear weapon in Ukraine?

The European Union as the Modern Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation?

By Dr. Vladislav B. Sotirović, October 27, 2022

In 1946, ex-British war PM, Sir Winston Churchill delivered his famous Zurich speech calling for the establishment of the United States of Europe. However, his idea of a united (Western) Europe excluded his native country – the UK. At that time, he envisaged West Europe as composed of independent, free, and sovereign states that would rise from the ashes of WWII and reach for a destiny of unprecedented harmony and democracy.

Moscow Denounces Ukrainian Plan to Use “Dirty Bomb” Against Its Own People

By Lucas Leiroz de Almeida, October 27, 2022

Once again, Kiev acts in a destabilizing way and tries to escalate the conflict to higher levels of violence. The Russian government recently reported, based on intelligence data, that the Ukrainian forces are planning to use a “dirty bomb” in a false flag operation against Moscow.

Video: China’s President Xi Jinping Secures Third Term – And Earns Western Criticism

By Peter Koenig, Haz Al-Din, and Press TV, October 27, 2022

After closing on 22 October of the 20^th Chinese Communist Party (CPC) Congress, President Xi Jinping was reappointed for a third 5-year term as China’s leader. This was expected. Also expected was that he would reassemble the Politburo and his innermost circles with loyalists.

Belgrade Forum’s Appeal to Endorse Dialogue, Diplomacy and Detente as the Only Possible Path for Preventing a Global Conflict that Threatens the Future of Humanity

By Belgrade Forum, October 27, 2022

The Belgrade Forum for a World of Equals expresses its deepest concern regarding the worsening of the global confrontation which is accompanied by a deep-seated economic and social crisis in Europe as well as worldwide. This crisis which is worsening on a daily basis, constitutes a threat to global life, peace and security.

75th Anniversary of the Hollywood Blacklist Takes on Added Significance with Escalation of New Cold War

By Ed Rampell, October 25, 2022

This month marks the 75^th anniversary of the start of the Hollywood Blacklist. On October 27, 1947, screenwriter John Howard Lawson, the first member of what came to be known as the “Hollywood Ten,” testified before the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC).

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***

“Speaking of contempt of Congress, the real contempt is the existence of the January 6th Committee in the first place. It has been a partisan show trial from the beginning, where the only two “Republican” Members were not chosen by Republicans but by Nancy Pelosi.” – Former US Congressman Ron Paul (TX)

While the destructive monocracy strangely known as the United States House of Representatives continues its evisceration of the US Constitution while criminalizing peaceful public decent and factually derived free speech opposition, it is of no surprise that Americans know little about the Oath Keepers.

Image: Founder Stewart Rhodes (Photo by Gage Skidmore, CC BY-SA 2.0)

Founder and alleged insurrectionist, Stewart Rhodes, is currently on trial charged with Seditious Conspiracy. But Rhodes’ lot as the star of yet another DNC-orchestrated show trial is more a metaphor for the ongoing shrinkage of, at least, the First, Second, Fourth and Fifth Amendment protections. This trial is rigged to silence Rhodes, the Oath Keepers and their important reminder by way of example to a rapidly growing American army: That their Oath of Service is to country and the American people… not the government.

When correctly detailed it is the platform offered by the Oath Keepers that is on trial because that “oath”provides hope, not fear, to a hopeless America struggling under the grinding boot of increasing monocracy.

Those Oath Keepers- as you will read– have already defeated the US government without firing a shot.

Twice.

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Since the DNC picked Merrick Garland as the DOJ’s capo de capo arrests regarding the legitimate Jan 6 protests have resulted in brutal pre-trial incarceration of Americans with opposing factually based viewpoints regarding the legitimacy of the 2020 Presidential election. This witch hunt has reached Stazi-like proportions.

From the non-violent Jan 6 protesters who did not enter the Capitol building to parents speaking out against their DNC-controlled state forcing its Woke whims on their children’s genitalia, or the FBI’s fabrication of crimes against dissidents (as seen in the ridiculous Gretchen Witmer kidnapping entrapment), Garland has weaponized the American judicial system as another DNC tool used to retain control by crushing the power of First Amendment protest.

Hence, Rhodes and the Oath Keepers, like the US Constitution, are public enemy #1.

Image: Billboard, Pine River, MN, July 2015 (Photo by Myotus, CC0)

But informed Americans would do well to look through this media distortion and censorship at the real motive to this trial, the same ulterior motive of the Kangaroo Court of a Jan. 6 Committee…keeping Donald Trump from being elected again by criminalizing legitimate opposition.

All this, to feed an utterly corrupt DNC and their pet RINOs.

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Who’s On First? What’s On Second?

When a government crushes the First and therefore primal Constitutional Amendment, one scripted from rebellion, that government  forces the need for the Second.

Or, so I was told. By two Oath Keepers.

Elmer Stewart Rhodes III is the founder of the much-maligned national organization, the Oath Keepers. He sits in jail, on trial with four other Oath Keepers; Kelly Meggs, Kenneth Harrelson, Jessica Watkins, and Thomas Caldwell. All are charged within the archaic Insurrection Act.

In total, eleven Oath Keepers are facing Seditious Conspiracy charges. Oath Keepers Roberto Minuta, Joseph Hackett, David Moerschel and Edward Vallejo are set to go on trial this November.

The Justice Department has so far charged more than 870 people in connection with the Capitol protests. As of last month, about 300 people have pleaded guilty to misdemeanors, and eighty have pleaded guilty to felonies. Approximately 132 people have been sentenced to a period of incarceration, while at least twenty-one of them have been sentenced to prison.

Unlike your average gun-totting liquor store robber or knife-wielding, smash and grab dept. store assailant of colour, there is no bail for these five Americans. Punishment before trial has been routine and outrageous for many who gathered to peacefully protest, on Jan 6, 2021, a very questionable presidential election on the very day the Electoral College was to be certified in favour of Joe, “the Big Guy,” Biden.

As one of the very few reporters who managed to get the factual allegations of this historic election fraud to the public eye- thanks to the courage of his publishers- those in doubt of this fraud would do well to consider parts One thru Five of this series [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] that detailed the multi-pronged attack by the DNC- again– on a presidential election.

The case against Rhodes and the other Oath Keepers amounts to, according to the prosecution, that on Jan. 6, 2021, Oath Keepers were captured on camera storming the Capitol in military-style “stack” formation. Rhodes isn’t accused of going inside the Capitol, but phone records show he was communicating with Oath Keepers who did enter around the time of the riot, and he was seen with members outside afterwards, according to court documents.

The defendants do not deny this portion of the allegations. They are proud of them.

Tear Gas outside United States Capitol (Photo by Tyler Merbler, CC BY 2.0)

 A conviction for seditious conspiracy calls for up to 20 years behind bars. The last time prosecutors secured a seditious conspiracy conviction at trial was in 1995 in the case against Islamic militants who plotted to bomb New York City landmarks.

On behalf of the five defendants, the defence according to their attorneys will show that Rhodes and his four co-defendants were in Washington on Jan. 5 and 6 to do security for events like they’ve done throughout the 12-year history of the Oath Keepers.

For those familiar with the Oath Keepers and their past appearances when needed this defence is quite plausible.

Rhodes did not enter the Capitol and was explicit to the members not to bring weapons to the protest site. The prosecution says all were there to overthrow the government. The defense says that all intended to defend the congress from the DNC’s Antifa and related thuggery. The judge is already in the bag. The prosecution is fabricating evidence. The jury has been rigged.

And, Elmer Stewart Rhodes? He is… absolutely fucked!

Of course, you won’t read that in The Times.

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A Country Borne of Insurrection

“The Insurrection Act has been there from the beginning, but it really got strengthened up post-Civil War. …it gives the president the plenary authority… for him to determine when there’s an insurrection in effect”- Stewart Rhodes- Founder/ The Oath Keepers.

True.

Attorneys for Rhodes said he hoped Trump would invoke the Insurrection Act in response to widespread rioting, looting, and vandalism that occurred throughout 2020 and the likelihood of Trump using it on Jan 6.

The Insurrection Act traces its earliest roots to 1792 with the Calling Forth Act, which was repealed and replaced by the Militia Act of 1795. The Insurrection Act of 1807 was then enacted by the Ninth Congress. The Suppression of Rebellion Act of 1861 and the Ku Klux Klan (Civil Rights) Act of 1871 are the other two pieces of what collectively is now known as the Insurrection Act.

As reported by Joseph M. Hanneman of The Epoch Times, The Insurrection Act has been legally invoked 30 times by 17 presidents, according to the Brennan Center for Justice, a New York-based law and policy centre.

“The Insurrection Act allows the president to deploy the military inside the United States and use it against Americans, making it one of the executive branch’s most potent emergency powers,” the Brennan Center’s Joseph Nunn and Elizabeth Goitein wrote in the organization’s guide to the Insurrection Act.

Bright told The Epoch Times that the Oath Keepers case involves the intersection of…

 “two vague, broad, centuries-old laws that ironically share similar characteristics. Seditious conspiracy proscribes conspiring to oppose the execution of federal laws, and the Insurrection Act can be used to quell such a conspiracy.

“… But, here, in its theory of prosecution, the government potentially argues, via several filings and various motions, that asking a president to invoke the Insurrection Act to suppress a seditious conspiracy is itself a seditious conspiracy.”[emph. added]

Trump did not invoke the Insurrection Act, but Trump had previously threatened to use it during a June 2, 2020 speech outside the White House in the Rose Garden. “The Act does confer broad authority to presidents to use the militia to quell ‘unlawful obstructions, combinations, or assemblages’ or ‘any insurrection, domestic violence … or conspiracy,”  Rhodes attorney James Lee Bright wrote in a memorandum filed with the court.

If this duplicity was being heard by an impartial jury it would play a major role in whether these five Oath Keepers defendants on trial for seditious conspiracy in Washington are convicted of an alleged plot to attack the Capitol on Jan. 6 or acquitted because one can’t conspire to do something that is already legal.

Rhodes’ rationale seems legit when considering that at the 2016 Republican National Convention, the Oath Keepers were used to provide “security” and then to defend shops and citizens from DNC-inspired anti-police violence and BLM protesters in the summer and fall of 2020.

In an interview with two FBI agents on May 3, 2021, Rhodes said his big concern leading up to Jan. 6 was Antifa making good on threats to sack the White House.

“And our big concern was Antifa,” said Rhodes. “My concern was Antifa was gonna go kinetic.”  Rhodes offered to testify live before the House January 6 panel but was refused.

The prosecution will have none of it. However, from personal knowledge and briefly interviewing several more Oath Keeper over the last seven years after- as you will read-  meeting two Oath Keepers by chance in 2015, Rhodes and the Oath Keepers members are not stupid, nor an undisciplined militia wanting a shootout. Examples of their successes on behalf of Americans show this deliberate and metered approach.

The Oath Keepers were founded by Rhodes in 2009. Rhodes is a former Army paratrooper and Yale-educated lawyer, who clerked for Arizona Supreme Court Justice Mike Ryan before becoming a staffer for Texas Libertarian and former Republican Representative Ron Paul. In founding the Oath Keepers, Rhodes’ mission was simple, clear, and effective: To remind and clarify to all Military and Police, both veterans and active duty, the true meaning of their Oath of Serviceand to remind them all that they are increasingly likely to be called on to honour that oath.

Soon.

With the rise of authoritarianism on both sides of the aisle in the US congress Rhodes message- I have been told repeatedly- was an easy sell.

Reportedly, over 200,000  have accepted this epiphany.

Correctly Defining American Justice

This trial is much too important not to be rigged.

In reviewing the judge, Amit Mehta, a 2014 Obama appointee to the DC court, his decisions have already shown his predilection for DNC bootstraps. As prosecutors and defence lawyers worked to narrow down the pool of 120 jurors to the final panel of twelve and  four alternates – who will all remain secret- Mehta, when asked about the jury, stated with a straight face,

“By and large… jurors came to the selection process with no preconceived notions about the Oath Keepers or the defendants.”

Really?

Reportedly, jury selection featured those with a pro-administration bent: An employee at the US Agency for International Development; a defense contractor whose wife works at the Justice Department; and a defense lobbyist. Another potential juror said she was a social acquaintance of Capitol Police Officer Harry Dunne, who publicly testified in July before the House committee investigating the January 6, 2021, election protests and an elementary school principal who has a close friend who was close with a police Officer Sicknick, who died of natural causes a day later (which they waited over three months to release).

Mehta defending the impartiality of the selected jury flew in the face of a Reuters report that at least two of the prospective jurors questioned compared the Jan. 6 riot to the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks carried out twenty-one years ago by jihadist terrorists.

Mehta also denied the defence’s very prudent Motion for a Change of Venue after  survey results were submitted to the court showing a biased local jury pool within Washington DC with 68% of the respondents holding an “Unfavorable View of the Oath Keepers.”

Next, when defence attorneys arrived at DC District Court on the first Tuesday morning, the prosecution suddenly provided four terabytes of new information and evidence for them to review at the last minute. This is a move right out of the UK Assange extradition trial (article: here) Despite being only days from the trial and the defense filing a Motion for Continuance to properly address this new alleged evidence, Mehta refused.

Next, in what was certainly designed to prejudice the jury, Mehta denied the defense’s motion to bar the introduction of allegations against another Oath Keeper, former Green Beret Jeremy Brown. The FBI, during a raid on his property nine months later somehow found two hand grenades in the RV he drove to DC in preparation for Jan 6.

However, as the defense proved to Mehta, a mixture of DNA was found on the pin of one grenade. Male DNA was also found on the body of the other grenade. Brown was not a match to any of the DNA on the explosives, according to a report from the FBI Laboratory in Huntsville, Ala.

Regardless, Mehta ruled in an omnibus order (pdf) on Sept. 6, that evidence about the grenades was admissible. These allegations and the seemingly planted evidence although unrelated to the five defendants will certainly affect the jury and leave the defence to wipe the fabricated mud from out of their eyes.

Brown has said he believes the September 2021 raid on his property and federal indictments were retaliation for his refusal to become an FBI informant and spy on the Oath Keepers. Agents from the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force met with Brown at a Florida restaurant in December 2020, according to a detailed letter (pdf) he sent to The Epoch Times on Dec. 31, 2021.

Brown is scheduled to go on trial separately on Dec. 5 in U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Florida.

With the judge and jury firmly in the bag, and all video recordings from the Jan 6 event very conveniently missing without credible explanation, the FBI is leaving little more to chance.

The FBI arrested Attorney Kellye Sorelle on the first Thursday morning after she secretly told attorneys for Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes that she would testify in defense of Rhodes.

Jonathon Moseley, who previously represented Oath Keepers defendant Kelly Meggs before his law license was revoked, said in an FBI interview that video and testimony from a U.S. Capitol Police officer show the Oath Keepers protected the officer from an angry mob near the Capitol Rotunda on the afternoon of Jan. 6, 2021.

Conveniently for the prosecution, the FBI had previously obtained a  court order sealing this important evidence from availability to the defense.

“This document—together with a photograph of the moment inside the U.S. Capitol on January 6—proves that the prosecution is lying to the jury,” Moseley said in the statement (pdf). “No one who engages in seditious conspiracy or insurrection stops to come to the aid of the police against the mob.

The FBI document in question is a Form 302 summary of officer Harry Dunn’s interview with two special agents. It was brought to Mehta’s attention on Oct. 6. Prosecutor Jeffrey Nestler informed Mehta that Moseley was “threatening” to release a sealed document. In response, Mehta took the unusual step of suggesting the news media covering the trial to post messages to Moseley on social media saying that he would be jailed if he released the document.

The two FBI agents interviewed Dunn on May 18, 2021, about the incident in the Small House Rotunda. According to video footage from an independent journalist, and portions of the FBI summary of Dunn’s interview reviewed by The Epoch Times, a group of Oath Keepers came upon a volatile standoff in the Small House Rotunda at 2:48 p.m. on January 6. The Oath Keepers “got in between that cop and the Trump supporters and calmed things down and de-escalated the situation,” Rhodes said, “…and protected him.”

Going further, another FBI Special Agent-Justin Eller-admitted he did not see/ hear anything illegal in the Oath Keepers communications before Jan. 6.

Courtroom observers have noticed prosecutors using other outrageous evidence to inflame the jury. They showed weapons taken from defendant Watkins’ Ohio apartment. Watkins is a registered gun owner. There was no evidence showing these weapons were in DC.

The prosecution next highlighted a helmet with a medic cross and a tactical vest with medical supplies. Watkins is trained to serve as a medic and was preparing to assist in the event of an emergency at the rally earlier that day.

*

The Oath Keepers and a Bomb Shell Story…Of Censorship

It was the winter of 2015 and I was in DC on business for a few days. I had heard rumors of a rising underground group, The Oath Keepers. Apparently, Rhodes had quietly reminded active duty and military veterans of their Oath of Service, previously taken, to defend the US Constitution and the American people- from all threats, foreign…and domestic.

Not surprisingly, many heartedly agreed. More than 200,000 was the legend.

Image: Oath Keepers logo (Licensed under the Public Domain)

As an aficionado of America’s systemic decline at the hands of its own elected representatives, I was interested to hear more.

While at lunch in DC with two former ranking veterans, one an Army Staff Sergeant and the other a Navy aircraft carrier pilot, I casually brought up what I had heard. To my surprise, both admitted membership enthusiastically.

This conversation lead to my on-scene expose, “The Secret ‘American’ Army,” an article that detailed Rhodes and the Oath Keepers, and when published created an unexpected and huge reaction. This disproportionate response and the resultant censorship of the story was the certification of just how worried the American Stazi and its media machine were regarding any accurate public acknowledgement of the Oath Keepers.

And that was in 2015.

The 2015 article, “The Secret ‘American’ Army” was first published during my time as an editor for Op-ed News. At the time there were far fewer news websites, and OEN was, then, a rising quality publication. As an editor for OEN and author of some sixty articles, I could publish directly. The piece went out on a Monday morning. By 10 am it was number one, and the FaceBook and internal metrics showed it going viral. Fast.

At approx 11:45 AM the article vanished.

Having always had a cordial relationship with the publisher of OEN, Rob Kall, I phoned him which was not unusual due to my regular on-scene reporting. His screaming commenced on the second ring.

I was accused of supporting a “pernicious” group of “supremacists.” Kall continued with several more exclamation points of his displeasure at a slightly lower volume.

I, of course, defended my piece as accurate investigative reporting on a controversial topic, ie., damn good copy.

This he did not challenge, only the subject. But he pulled the piece, anyway.

This parable of Gate Keeper censorship by alternative media will be expanded on in a subsequent article, “Shining ‘The Light’ on the Lie of Alternative Media”, however my displeasure with Kall and his censorship was expressed sincerely in my immediate resignation. The fall-out lead to other resignations. Kall had made a serious error in judgment in stoking the ire of investigative journalists working in concert.

Much was revealed about Rob Kall and OEN, to be discussed subsequently, but it was his likely source of funding, revealed by another journalist, that was very possibly the behind-the-scenes reason for him pulling a very popular and factual expose.

As proof of the popularity of the topic, when next writing for Press TV/ Iran, the article ran under the same title. It immediately went viral, again. It remains in the top ten of all my 200-plus published articles.

I live in an area with the largest Marine Corp. base in America, a naval base, two Air Force bases and more than our share of well-armed cops. So, as it was in the opening article, I have kept an eye open for any opportunity to ask, “The Question.”

Since the OEN article was first published I have spoken privately with six Marines, two more Army veterans, a sailor, two Air Force flight deck crew, one policeman and, interestingly, two firefighters. All admitted to membership. Not one of these people, like the two referenced veteran Oath Keepers in the story ( below), struck me as terrorists. Far from it. All were rational and expresses no interest in any of the many underground militias swelling across the country. All expressed love for their country and concern for its decline. They are dedicated professionals with families and strong ties to their community. None were looking for a fight. But all were… prepared.

These many conversations and their firm handshakes of “Good Bye” left a lasting impression.

One might charge the author with presenting his epiphany of sorts regarding a rationale for the Second Amendment. To this, I will reply, “Guilty.”

But like the bullied and lonely school child who prays each night for an unknown Big Brother’s help, in these times of increasing national desperation, the Oath Keepers have already- before Jan 6- proven to be a rising-and effective- form of Guardian Angels… of hope.

With Stewart Rhodes on trial for sedition, an objective mind might want to know, “why?” To do so requires an understanding of the reality of the Oath Keepers. This is hidden from the public by the likes of Rob Kall and Judge Mehta, because of what Rhodes and his Oath Keepers have already accomplished and their invitation.

And what is yet to come.

But more importantly, what is most hidden is the growing need by desperate Americans, day by day, for… A Secret American Army.

*

On October 7, 2022, President Joe Biden’s handlers quietly had him sign an Executive Order supposedly enhancing Safeguards for United States Signals Intelligence Activities. Instead, this edict further demolishes what little is left of Americans’ constitutional protections against increased unauthorized government intrusion into their lives.

So….

Presented for your edification, with no further introduction…

The Secret ’American’ Army (2015)

A new American army is growing. On American soil. They are prepared.

In hushed tones during conversations across the breadth of the heartland of America, there are whispers. Quiet talk. About an army. Of Americans? An army prepared to defend an increasingly oppressed population craving reprieve from their government’s increasingly draconian methods. Oath Keepers?

This army, they say, is growing.

After firm handshakes all around, Dan T. and Gene R., who I had good reason to believe were both retired military, settled into our task at hand. I was in their company for the day on business. During the one-day meeting, Dan and Gene revealed that they were indeed career military. Dan, Army. Gene, retired Navy. I attempted to politely avoid political discussion in the interest of decorum.

So at the first comment on politics from my hosts, I took a long deep breath. My opinions, despite being armed with facts, don’t go over well in conservative America. Much less with ex-military. I sighed. No doubt,  patience would be needed.

Two hours later we clashed the mugs of our third round of beers together in a boisterous toast.

“This country is going to hell!”, I offered just a bit too loudly in the confines of the cramped bar.

“Damn right it is,” agreed Dan. At 6’4″, and a stout 280 pounds, Dan would make a fine nose tackle. “Quite frankly, I’m in favor of ringing America with an expanded Navy to protect us. It’s time our Military went back to protecting our Nation. Leave the world alone. But…the real question right now in America is…,” and now he lowered his voice, giving me a direct stare, “are you prepared?”

Indeed America is going to hell. A sleeping public has no idea of the depth of the plot against them. Those few who are paying attention have good reason to fear the direction of their country and their government. But their military?

The savvy American knows about the FEMA incarceration camps. These camps are intended for them. This is confirmed by a leaked two-hundred-fifty-four page US Army manual “REX 84” showing the designs of the camps, and also defining who is to be culled from that population, and who is to be put to death.

Sound crazy? I have a copy. These same Americans also know that their America has recently purchased 1.5 Billion rounds of hollow point ammunition and 800 million rounds of double-aught shotgun shells. This ammo is designed for one purpose; killing… people. Americans. Police and National Guard are having trouble getting their own ammo, while this massive arsenal is being distributed via the Dept. of Homeland Security to points unknown.

They also know that the FBI formally requested in writing to assassinate with a high-powered rifle the leaders of the Houston Occupy protest camp in 2012.

Now, on Tuesday, April 29, 2014, the US Supreme Court approved this behaviour and a myriad of other authoritarian controls straight from the manuals of Dachau, Auschwitz, or the Gulag. The US Constitution was suspended within 100 miles of any US border thanks to the ill-named Patriot Act.

The informed American should be terrified.

As an activist journalist, I had heard and read rumblings of a ground-swell movement within the American military. This quiet, passionately pro-American, pro-Constitution, pro-democracy army is- I had been told- rapidly growing.

This Army does exist. It has already faced down the US empire twice. Their mission: to save Americans from their Government. They call themselves, “Oath Keepers.”

“I Do Solemnly Swear That I Will Uphold the Constitution of the United States of America, Against All Enemies, Foreign and Domestic…Pledging My Life, My Fortune, and My Sacred Honor. So Help Me God.” 

– US Military Oath of Service

Oath Keepers are the predictable historical reaction of a population to its endemic political, financial, and corporate corruption and the systemic destruction of their society.  Realizing a puppet president, malicious congress, and constitutionally irrational court system, to more and more Americans the Oath Keepers are becoming an effective counterweight- a choice- to a tyrannical empire.

Consider. There are approximately 21.5 million military veterans of all ages and ethnic backgrounds in America. Estimates put Oath Keepers membership in excess of 200,000. Within this American army is every military rank from all five branches of the US military. From Gunny Sergeant to Admiral, from Army Chaplain to Naval Captain, Marine Corp. General to PFC, America’s veteran military corp. remains full of a vast wealth of very expensive and thoroughly trained military minds.

Oath Keepers include these active duty service men and women who keep their membership very private. Their numbers are reportedly swelling.

All these men and women were trained to fight. They remember their training. They remember that they are first and foremost Americans, sworn to protect the constitution and the American people. That has not changed. These real American patriots have not forgotten the Oath of Service they swore to so many years before.               

Few, however, thought the day would come when, rather than providing protection from foreign adversaries, they would actually be forced to heed the currently two most important words therein, “… and Domestic.”

By all current reports, Americans hold over 320 million non-military firearms of all makes, models, and calibers. That figure is only for the guns that are accounted for. Actual numbers are higher. With the recent gun buying surge across America, this number is ever-rising. Many of these people are buying these weapons for the same reasons whether they are aware of the Oath Keepers or not, and hold very similar views on their Government’s authoritarian intentions.

Combine all these weapons with the millions of American veterans and you have a highly trained and well-armed militia ready, willing, and waiting to protect Americans from their own government. Was this not the original and foundational wisdom for the inclusion of the US Constitution’s very controversial Second Amendment?

Today, freedom-loving Americans have only two distinct choices. Either use their First Amendment right of assembly and free speech to produce a massive showing of outrage that retrieves the remains of true democracy at the ballot box…

Or…it will be the Second Amendment.

I asked Dan and Gene to comment.

Dan slams his glass down in agreement, since it is empty, looking intently out from under a beat-up, bleached out, somewhat still red-ish baseball cap.

“That’s a good way to put it,” he says while eying me carefully over the foam atop a freshly poured beer. “The question remains…” he says again quietly, “are you prepared?”

In America’s desperate condition, being prepared runs the gambit from eliminating one’s personal debt, eliminating unnecessary possessions,  putting assets into gold or silver, and stocking away a sensible amount of cash, supplies and provisions just in case. It means having the presence of forethought to realize the dire reality of America’s true social and political condition.

It also implies being prepared to protect and defend those possessions, and freedoms, from growing government tyranny. With a gun.

A whole lot of well-trained, well-armed, Americans have seen this day coming.

The Oath Keeper’s motto is, “Not On Our Watch!” Their pro-American, pro-constitutional oath has been sworn to by all Oath Keepers whether active military, veterans, police officers, national guardsmen, TSA officials, firemen, or peace officers. The Oath is defined clearly in ten separate guarantees to Americans:

Oath Keepers will NOT obey any order to:

• Disarm the American people.
• Conduct warrant-less searches of the American people,
• Detain American citizens as “unlawful enemy combatants”
• Impose martial law or a “state of emergency” on a state.
• Invade and subjugate any state that asserts its sovereignty.
• Blockade American cities, turning them into giant concentration camps.
• Force American citizens into any form of detention camps.
• Assist or support the use of any foreign troops on U.S. soil.
• Confiscate the property of the American people.
• Infringe on the right of the people to free speech, to peaceably assemble, and to petition their government for a redress of grievances.

Barely two days ago the Supreme Court of the United States formally gave approval for US Government to reap all of these horrors on all Americans.  On Tuesday, the court in Hedges v. Obama, U.S. Supreme Court, No. 13-758, refused to review the 2^nd US Circuit Court of Appeal’s (traditionally the president’s pocket court) decision to overturn a lower court decision that did, temporarily, protect Americans from these unconstitutional war crimes of Sect. 1021 of the Obama-inspired National Defense Authorization Act. All ten horrors are, right now, legal across America.

Foolishly I had mistakenly interpreted the oath of the Oath Keepers to mean that those who take the oath would lay down their weapons under such extreme circumstances.

“Wrong!” said Paul immediately, tipping himself,  his bar stool and his beer forward twelve inches and now giving me a  penetrating glance before setting the next empty down. “We’re not laying down our weapons for anyone!”

Gene was also eying me keenly. Quickly forgiving my small indiscretion, he offered support saying, “Yeah. You’re absolutely right about the oath. But if you don’t have your weapons you’re not going to fight back. That’s what the recent increase in gun sales is all about.”

Gene’s a retired Navy aircraft carrier pilot, one of the Navy’s most highly trained servicemen. Of a Bantam weight’s build, and just as feisty, grey-haired and sixty Gene is looking as youthful as his days in the cockpit. He is just as assured and straight talking.

I told them about the FBI study that concluded that American citizens and their massive private, and growing, arsenal could never defeat the US military, should the populous finally fight back.

Gene smiled slyly, then laughed. “They’ve got that one wrong.” Gene is quite likely correct.  Quantifying the totality of a potentially armed pushback by an armed American public, using guerilla tactics the total truly shows the dire consequences befalling America.  It is no wonder that Gene is smiling.

Sadly, that result will be bloodier than the Civil War, just as apocalyptic, and spell the darkest days in the history of America, should it remain a nation when the sands of time have finally cleared the wreckage.

The American Empire has been keeping any news of Oath Keepers out of the media. The regime does not want an example of courage and successful opposition getting to the minds of its subjugated and endemically fearful people. The regime fears the Oath Keepers for a very good reason; this army has already beaten the devil back down below.

Twice.

When the sequestration cuts agreed to by a tepid congress and a flaccid president took effect in late 2013, the Obama administration decided to punish Americans instead for his failure. He proceeded to close the ocean to recreational fishing and boating and closed access to lakes and national parks. His minions in the Forest Service went so far as to ring the famous geyser, “Old Faithful,” a major US tourist attraction, with a twelve-foot high solid plastic fence. This made sure that no one could see and enjoy it. Tourists who went to the third floor of an adjacent hotel to sneak a peek were arrested.

Then the puppet President went too far.

American veterans come from across America to remember their friends and loved ones at the Vietnam and World War II war memorials. During sequestration, Obama closed these too, leaving those who had also travelled hundreds of miles disappointed. This was a call to action for the Oath Keepers.

With the Second Amendment still in force in DC, wearing side arms, and in uniform, the Oath Keepers showed up en-mass. They proceeded to escort arriving visitors past the equally armed Capitol Police and then protected them throughout their visit. To everyone privy to this successful operation, the Oath Keepers were heroes.

They were called again.

Two weeks ago another corrupt US Senator, Harry Reid ( D-NV), tried to use his equally corrupt connections at the Bureau of Land Management to order the US Marshal’s Service to seize Clive Bundy’s Nevada ranch so Reid could lease it to the Chinese. Two hundred-plus people showed up to defend the ranch, with more trying to get there. The siege was turning ugly. Marshalls were tasering peaceful protesters, terrorizing them with dogs and slamming elderly women to the ground in order to elicit a violent reaction by the crowd that would have allowed them a reason to raze the camp. Things were getting very bad. Anyone who left was arrested. Anyone trying to arrive was detained. And more BLM goons were arriving by the hour. We could see the snipers as they zeroed in from their positions on the hill just to the south. Would they shoot? I remembered Houston the whole time.

Then the Oath Keepers arrived.

Armed and ready, several dozen Oath Keepers took up positions and began patrols on Clive Bundy’s property. They directed operations. Defensive perimeters were set up, sandbags stacked and the new terms of engagement established firmly. Everyone helped.

A former Army Colonel walked some three-quarters of a mile down the one-blockaded road towards the US Marshalls along with three other Oath Keepers. All armed, they arrived at the perimeter to speak with whoever was running this operation. While we all stared on through camera lenses and binos a conversation began… our terms… were delivered.

Further violence against protesters would be met with rifle fire. The Bundy Ranch would not be abandoned peacefully. Attempts to breach the perimeter would be resisted as trespassing. No one in the camp wanted violence at any time. It was time to talk.

In reaction, two hours later the BLM forces were multiplying. It was getting worse. But the fuckers were now leaving us alone as a siege commenced.

But then, good journalism, by a good investigative journalist revealed the truth about this stand-off and how BLM had been used for communist purposes.

The standoff in the Nevada desert wasn’t about a desert tortoise or a rancher’s failure to pay grazing fees. It was about the state’s senior senator again enriching himself and his family at public expense.

Sunlight is said to be the best disinfectant, and the end, at least temporarily, to the Bureau of Land Management’s armed standoff with Cliven Bundy was due in part to the exposure given to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s role in the attempt to confiscate Bundy’s cattle and shut down his ranch.

“A tortoise isn’t the reason why BLM is harassing a 67-year-old rancher; they want his land,” journalist and blogger Dana Loesch notes. “The tortoise wasn’t of concern when Harry Reid worked with BLM to change the boundaries of the tortoise’s habitat to accommodate the development of his top donor, Harvey Whittemore.”

Last year, Whittemore, 59, who headed a billion-dollar real estate company, was found guilty by a federal jury on three counts tied to nearly $150,000 illegally funnelled to Reid’s re-election campaign in 2007. Unfortunately, Cliven Bundy was not a Reid donor.

The Bureau of Land Management was at the time headed by former longtime Reid aide Neil Kornze, who was confirmed by the Senate as BLM director on April 8, just as federal authorities descended on the cattle ranch. Kornze, 35, worked as a senior policy adviser on land-use issues in Reid’s office from 2003 to 2011 before joining the BLM.

Coincidentally, part of that solar energy expansion included a plan by China’s ENN Energy Group to build what would be America’s largest solar energy complex. The site chosen with the guidance of Reid’s son, Rory, is in Laughlin, Nev. Laughlin is in Clark County, where Bundy’s ranch is, and where Rory Reid formerly chaired the county commission. Rory is currently a lawyer with the firm of Lionel Sawyer & Collins and is representing ENN.

What?!

Reid, who just weeks ago was forced to return campaign money funneled to his granddaughter, has been one of the project’s most prominent advocates, helping recruit the company during a 2011 trip to China and using his political clout on behalf of the project in Nevada.

Knowing that Bundy would not relinquish his land and heritage, the Chinese utilized their congressional asset named Harry Reid, who called BLM and they dutifully trumped up a bunch of reasons to evict Bundy.

With the siege growing in national attention on every major network, and these networks demonizing Bundy and the protesters, when the factual news of the Reid family’s dual national loyalties hit alternative media, legacy media- starting with FOX- splattered duplicitous excrement all over Reid geriatric face and by extension the DNC.

So, two days after Loesch’s revelations hit alternative media and twenty-four hours after Fox picked it up, with interviews, the BLM and its four hundred-plus Federal Marshals went home.

The cheers were deafening and worldwide.

But it can be said, within the meager list of real victories of Americans over their government, that should the Oath Keepers not have furthered their duty- as referenced above- the outcome would have been brutal. Instead, it was victory!

My conversation with Dan and Gene had been enlightening, optimistic, and supportive, but at the same time terrifying. To discover that so many very conservative American active and retired military members are actually of like mind as many passionate pro-American liberal progressives who hold similar radical viewpoints, was surprising and heartening.

Knowing that former members of America’s military had already sworn an oath to protect me, and other Americans, from the very real threat of being shot, or incarcerated without a warrant, by our government was reassuring.

The Oath Keepers will be called to order again soon. Their numbers are legion. Their ranks reportedly growing. Their weapons: many.

With a US government unwilling to change its course straight into a new form of National Socialism, it will not accept a return of freedoms, liberty, or factual discussion.

Many people fear their government. The government does not fear the people. I do not fear the Oath Keeper. I have met them.

Perhaps the reader may now understand why the US government does fear the Oath Keepers.

And, that is terrifying.

*

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Brett Redmayne-Titley has spent the last twelve years documenting the “Sorrows of Empire.” He has authored over 200 articles all of which have been published and often republished and translated by news agencies worldwide. An archive of his published work can be found at watchingromeburn.uk.  He can be contacted at live-on-scene ((@)) gmx.com. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

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***

It has been one year since the latest military seizure of power in the Republic of Sudan where a committed movement continues to protest against the suppression of civilian democracy in one of Africa’s most oil-rich states.

In the Republic of Sudan since December 2018, mass demonstrations and civil unrest has wracked the country which is a gateway between northern, central and east Africa.

During April 2019, due to the uncertainty caused by the mass demonstrations, strikes and rebellions, the former administration of President Omar Hassan al-Bashir was overthrown by a group of high-ranking military officers. Just two months later, as thousands of youth and workers occupied Khartoum in the area near the ministry of defense, the protesters were attacked leaving many dead and even more injured.

The most recent military coup grew out of the failure of a African Union (AU) brokered peace agreement to establish a transitional regime which would after more than three years result in the election of a civilian government. On October 25, 2021, the Transitional Military Council (TMC) led by General Abdel-Fattah Burhan and General Mohammed Hamdan Dagalo abolished the first Sovereign Council which was ostensibly the transitional ruling body of the country. An interim Prime Minister Abdalla HamdoK was detained by the TMC as people once again engaged in mass demonstrations and civil disobedience.

Several weeks after the October 25 putsch, Hamdok would emerge saying he had reached agreement with the TMC leaders and that the youth should leave the streets and support this undemocratic initiative. Despite all of this, Hamdok would later resign and go into obscurity leaving the Sudanese workers and youth to their own devices in the quest for democratic governance.

Military leaders then created yet another “Sovereign Council” replacing civilian leaders with some of the armed opposition groups inside the country who were based in Darfur and in the southern areas of the country on the border with the Republic of South Sudan. The partitioning of Sudan between the north and south has only resulted in a precipitous decline in the economic and social status of the developing state.

For many years the break-up of Sudan was championed by Washington, London and Tel Aviv in an effort to weaken its oil industry and create further sectional violence which has plagued both governments in Juba (South Sudan capital) and Khartoum.

People Demand Removal of Military Rule

Many indications from the character of the demonstrations in Sudan surrounding the October 25 coup anniversary was the wholesale objection to the United States influenced talks being pushed by the Secretary of State Antony Blinken. The administration of President Joe Biden has maintained the same imperialist foreign policy towards Sudan that was in practice during his predecessors Donald Trump and Barack Obama.

Sudan has been pressured by Washington to maintain a pro-western foreign policy and to politically recognize the State of Israel. Under the Trump administration he had boasted that “sleepy Joe” Biden could not have pulled off a deal in which the interim administration of Hamdok and the TMC acknowledged Tel Aviv.

In fact, this unilateral maneuver by Sudanese technocratic and military leaders aimed at removing the country from the U.S.-contrived “terrorist list” and making the state eligible for IMF loan refinancings during 2020 was a violation of its own Israeli Boycott Act passed by a motion within the parliament in the early years of independence from Britain in 1958. In January 1956, Sudan was one of the first countries to win national liberation from British colonialism. See this.

Al Jazeera noted in regard to the mobilizations that:

“The mass protests also signaled a popular rejection of ongoing US-led talks that aim to broker a new civilian-military partnership between a loose coalition of political parties known as the Forces for Freedom and Change (FFC) and the military coup leaders. During Tuesday’s (Oct. 25) demonstrations, many people were chanting: ‘No negotiations, no dialogue, no partnership,’ referring to popular demands for a fully civilian government in power without involvement from the military or armed groups. The night before the protests, the Friends of Sudan – a coalition of countries that includes the European Union (EU), the UK and the US – released a statement that reaffirmed their support for a civilian-led government, which they said was needed to stop the country’s economic decline and worsening humanitarian crisis. However, the country’s pro-democracy movement is wary of the phrase ‘civilian-led’, seeing it as a euphemism for a reformed partnership with military figures since that was the same language used to describe the civilian-military government before it was toppled last year.”

Reports from inside the country on October 25 said that some protesters blocked streets and roads with burning tires while the security forces used teargas in efforts to disperse the demonstrations. One person was killed in the twin city of Khartoum, Omdurman, when a police truck ran over a marcher. The Sudanese authorities claimed that they only  fired teargas when the demonstrations became violent without addressing the root causes of the unrest.

This response from the military regime follows a pattern since the beginning of the unrest nearly four years ago. Over the last year the Central Committee of Sudanese Doctors, an important organization within the civilian Forces for Freedom and Change (FFC), have issued press releases saying that well over 100 people have been killed by the security forces, including the military. During the demonstrations in late October participants said that plainclothes operatives representing the authorities were infiltrating the rallies and demonstrations utilizing violence against activists.

U.S. Seeks to Undermine Revolutionary Movement in Sudan

Mike Hammer the U.S. envoy to the Horn of Africa for the State Department has visited the region on numerous occasions ostensibly to assist in reaching a political settlement. However, Washington has a long history of interference in the internal affairs of Sudan.

Under the presidential tenure of the former President al-Bashir, the U.S. accused the government of committing genocide in the western Darfur region. The government in Khartoum was fighting an armed insurgency which had the support of outside interests including U.S. imperialism.

Several attempts were made to have al-Bashir arrested and sent to the Netherlands to stand trial before the International Criminal Court (ICC). This institution has only targeted African political and rebel leaders while refusing to conduct any serious investigations against the crimes of genocide carried out by the U.S. and its NATO allies against geo-political regions of the Global South as well as oppressed peoples in their own jurisdictions.

In the present crisis of instability, the U.S. under Biden continues the attempts to conceal its true motivations. Secretary of State Blinken said on the anniversary of the coup:

”The U.S. stands ready to use all the tools at its disposal against those who seek to derail progress toward Sudan’s democratic transition, the senior official noted, which was considered a hint that new sanctions may be imposed on whoever obstructs the democratic transition process in the country. ‘As we did a year ago, we continue to reject military rule and stand with the people of Sudan in their demands for freedom, peace, and justice for all Sudanese,’ the statement stressed. State Department spokesman Ned Price also hailed the Sudanese people’s “longstanding struggle to achieve democratic, civilian-led governance. We remain committed to helping the Sudanese people achieve the goals of their revolution, as a country that is stable, prosperous, and at peace with itself and its neighbors,’ Price stated, urging all Sudanese actors to engage constructively in ongoing negotiations toward establishing a civilian-led transition.” See this.

Although these words may sound as if Washington is sincerely concerned with ensuring a democratic transition from military rule, the reality is that the U.S. is only committed to civilian control in Sudan if its realization maintains a subservient posture towards imperialism. What the Biden administration and its ruling class backers fear more than anything is the potential for the ascendancy of a revolutionary democratic dispensation in Sudan which would reestablish its role as a leading force in the anti-imperialist struggle in Africa and throughout the world.

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

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On October 26th, Russia’s President Vladimir Putin spoke the literal truth when he said that Ukraine “has actually lost its sovereignty and is directly controlled by the United States, which uses it as a battering ram against Russia.”

He meant that the U.S. and its allies are doing this and are carrying out a more sophisticated version of Hitler’s “Operation Barbarossa” against the Soviet Union — a version of grabbing Russia that uses lying lawfare, instead of (as-of yet) direct military invasion, overt warfare.

The next phase of their plan — using their “lawfare” — is to be outright theft. But this technique has a history; and, a hundred years ago, it had been used against Germany by the U.S. and its allies. So, we can see what the results will be if it succeeds.

What’s going on now is the restoration of the type of massive theft from Germans by the Versailles Treaty that ended WW I on 28 June 1919, which Treaty was declared by John Maynard Keynes to have been imposed as a “Carthaginian peace [by theft that’s propagandized as ‘reparations’]”.

No ‘reparations’ were being imposed against Germany’s enemies in that war, but, in historical retrospect, there is general agreement, among historians, that the Allied side, against Germany and Austria, was perhaps equally to blame for that War, though the Versailles Treaty required ALL of the blame for it to go ONLY to Germany (and, so, only German taxpayers were to pay reparations for it, to the victor-nations — the victors).

There were no reparations by the U.S. and its allies after they raped and destroyed Iraq in 2003 on the basis of lies (which continue). The case for reparations by U.S. taxpayers (and the execution of George W. Bush as an international war-criminal) as restitution to the Government of Iraq, is far stronger than the case for the Versailles Treaty was, but nobody in The West states it (except here).

There were no reparations by the U.S. and its allies after they raped and destroyed Syria during 2012-now on the basis of lies (which continue). The U.S. Government refuses ever to restitute Syria, but instead demands Syria’s capitulation (“regime-change”).

However, now, the U.S. and its allies increasingly are demanding reparations by the countries that they still have not yet conquered, such as Russia and others that the U.S.-and-allies impose their illegal sanctions against.

Under U.N. law, sanctions are permissible ONLY if proposed by the Security Council and passed by the General Assembly; but the U.S. gang routinely ignore law, and impose their own sanctions regardless — they commit to sanctions first, and then try to find ways to ‘interpret’ international law that would allow the sanctions that they already are determined to impose regardless.

When these sanctions are asset-seizures, they are theft (even more clearly than the Versailles Treaty was), but, in some instances (such as America’s systematic massive ongoing oil-thefts from Syria), they rely upon the cooperation of their ‘news’-media instead, to so suppress that reality so as to enable the continued passivity and inattention from their voters to continue these thefts by their nation against the one (such as, in that case, Syria) that is targeted ultimately for destruction (“regime-change”). The media are part of the regime that carries-out the regime’s policy for “regime-change,” by the U.S. regime, against (for the conquest of) other countries — further expansion of the U.S. empire.

In February 2014, the U.S. Government seized control over Ukraine’s Government by means of a very bloody coup that was hidden behind public anti-corruption demonstrations that the U.S. had been organizing ever since 2011, and promptly turned that previously Russia-friendly country rabidly against its bordering nation of Russia, and tried to ethnically cleanse it of Russians so as for the U.S. ultimately to become, by ‘democratic’ means, through elections, able to post its missiles in Ukraine only about 300 miles (five minutes of missile-flying time) away from blitz-nuking Moscow so as to be able to dictate to The Kremlin the terms of regime-change there. On 17 December 2021, Russia demanded America and its NATO to promise that this now rabidly anti-Russian Ukraine never be admitted into NATO, but on 7 January 2022 NATO said that whether or not Ukraine becomes a member of NATO is none of Russia’s business. So, the only way for Russia to protect itself would be for Russia to invade Ukraine and take enough land there so that Ukraine’s closest border to Moscow would be moved back at least 1,000 miles (instead of 300 miles) from The Kremlin. On 24 February 2022, Russia launched that invasion; and the U.S.-and-allied nations promptly intensified their illegal sanctions against Russia, for this invasion, that the U.S. and its allies had forced.

On 27 June 2022, the Canadian Broadcasting Company headlined “Canada can now seize, sell off Russian assets. What’s next?”, and reported:

Selling Russian-owned assets to pay for Ukraine’s reconstruction may sound like a logical approach to restitution, but as the Canadian government gains new powers to begin this process, questions remain about how it will work, and whether some issues are headed to court.

C-19, the budget implementation bill, received royal assent last Thursday [The Queen in England authorized the thefts.]. …

Canada’s stepped-up sanctions powers were discussed with U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen during her visit to Toronto last week. [The Queen in America likewise authorized the thefts.]

“We think it’s really important to extend our legal authorities because it’s going to be really, really important to find the money to rebuild Ukraine,” Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland told Canadian and American reporters. “I can think of no more appropriate source of that funding than confiscated Russian assets.” …

That sentiment was shared by Ontario Sen. Ratna Omidvar [Indian-Iranian pro-Shah] who proposed her own Senate legislation to enable similar asset seizures two years ago. …

“Kleptocrats must pay for their crimes, not through simply being sanctioned and their assets being frozen, but by their assets being repurposed and confiscated,” said Omidvar. …

“The question no longer is ‘if we should confiscate,’” the senator said. “The question is: ‘How should we repurpose? … This move by Canada — and potentially other G7 countries meeting in Germany this week — is unprecedented. …

“Operationalizing this is going to be a little bit of a challenge,” said fellow senator and former G7 sherpa Peter Boehm. “This is all very, very new.” … 

Taxpayers in Canada, the U.S. or other countries don’t want to bear the full cost of this war, [Rachel] Ziemba [an adjunct senior fellow with the Centre for a New American Security who advises companies and countries on sanctions policy] said … as governments embark on asset seizures …  

Russia’s central bank is on Canada’s sanctions list. Should these reserves be seized and handed over to Ukraine too?

[U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet] Yellen’s argued against doing this in the U.S., even though it could provide more funds to rebuild Ukraine.

“That might send a message to other countries that are investing in [international currency and bond] markets,” Ziemba said — think of China’s buying power, for example. “That, I think, is why the [U.S.] treasury department and even the [U.S. federal reserve] are wary of these moves.” …

On 25 October 2022, FORTUNE bannered “Raid Russia’s ‘huge pot of gold’? Europe grapples over confiscating frozen assets to pay for rebuilding Ukraine”, and reported:

Can Brussels raid the tens of billions of euros in Russian assets frozen by the European Union to pay for Ukraine’s recovery? 

This thorny legal question is currently under examination by the EU Commission as the cash-strapped bloc looks for potentially €18 billion ($18 billion) next year to keep Ukraine afloat as it fends off Moscow’s invasion.

Ursula von der Leyen, the EU Commission’s president, told reporters on Tuesday in Berlin that she had set up a task force to map what assets exist as well as the preconditions that must be met to seize them.

“The will is there, but legally it is not trivial. There is a lot of work still in it to reach that goal,” she said during a press briefing on the sidelines of an international conference of experts for the reconstruction of Ukraine. 

“Always to keep in mind we insist on the rule of law, and therefore we abide by the rule of law, and therefore this process has to be legally sound.” …

Ukraine Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal said on Tuesday … “It’s the biggest investment project on the European continent ever.” …

While Canada has already enacted legislation to seize Russian assets, EU member states are divided as the issue could have repercussions that extend far beyond its borders and affect the future for a long time to come.

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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.

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***

During the final weeks of 2020, hundreds of millions of people worldwide eagerly awaited the opportunity to be vaccinated against the SARS-2 virus. They were given assurance that these vaccines were highly effective for preventing infection and were perfectly safe. Since the new and novel mRNA vaccines are built upon a completely new genetic-based technological platform than older conventional vaccines, they were easily sold to the public as uniquely innovative and more safe. Moreover we were told they are 95 percent effective. They would also prevent transmission, so we were told, and this would ultimately bring an end to the pandemic.  Life would return to normal. Across the medical establishment and media airwaves these new vaccines heralded a miracle of medical science in record-setting time.

It didn’t require much time after the vaccines’ rollout that signs appeared that their promises were at best wishful thinking.  In October 2022, Pfizer’s Chief Executive for Developing Markets testified before a European Parliament special committee on Covid-19 and admitted the vaccine had never been tested for the prevention of viral transmission.

This was shock to many and directly contradicted everything people were being told.  Furthermore reports of serious and life-threatening vaccine-induced injuries and deaths increased exponentially.

Now almost 2 years after the Pfizer and Moderna mRNA therapies were launched, tens of thousands of physicians and clinicians, professors of prestigious medical schools and researchers worldwide are stepping forward to demand an immediate halt to Covid-19 vaccination, particularly for young adults and children. Several national health ministries, including Denmark and Sweden, have stopped vaccinating adolescents and children altogether.

In Israel, health authorities are voicing their concerns. Opinions in the Israel National News reported that Pfizer had used the nation as a staging ground for rolling out its Covid-19 vaccine, the first country to have done so. In effect and without consent, former Israeli President Netanyahu recruited up to seven million citizens to unwittingly participate in a grand experiment.

Israeli citizens were deprived of sufficient information about Pfizer’s vaccine to make a personal risk-benefit analysis.  “What they [Israeli citizens] are being asked to inject is not a vaccine defined by the CDC as a product that stimulates a person’s immune system to produce immunity to a specific disease,” writes Jerusalem Health Wellness counselor Ilana Rachel Daniel in an oped, “rather it is an experimental and novel technology…. It is in fact a medical device, a physical device that comes in a molecular sized package.”

Today, Pfizer, Moderna and Anthony Fauci at the National Institutes for Allergies and infectious Disease (NIAID) have walked back many of their earlier claims about the benefits of Covid vaccines. They made it abundantly clear that these vaccines are not intended to stop transmission but only to prevent serious illness and death.  But even that is highly questionable after taking into account the high rates of SAARS-2 infections among the vaccinated.

In the US, as of the first week of August 2022, the US’ and European Union’s vaccine injury reporting systems cumulatively recorded 76,880 deaths and 6.1 million injuries serious enough to require special medical assistance or hospitalization. 

US figures (29,800 deaths and 1.4 million injuries) are only those recorded in the CDC’s Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System (VAERS). VAERS data is available for public access; however, the system does not include adverse events reported in the separate Data Link reporting system, a privately controlled database that is regarded as more thorough.

For decades before the advent of the novel mRNA gene therapy injections, the mainstream medical and scientific communities have promulgated an unassailable decree that vaccines are safe and effective, whether administered individually or in combination. For more cautious medical professionals there remains an unchallenged belief that vaccines are effective but not always safe. Vaccine-injured children and adults are simply regarded as exceptionally rare cases who unpredictably suffered unfortunate consequences.

Even many parents with two children developing neurological complications after vaccination will continue to follow the recommended vaccine schedule with unwavering blind faith in their physicians and the nation’s medical authorities.

Any medical physician, scientist, nurse, public health advocate, politician, or journalist who questions the myth of vaccine safety and efficacy is often immediately attacked, ridiculed, and designated a conspirator.  The pro-vaccine propaganda machine recruits articulate doctors and university professors, who often sit on federal vaccine oversight boards and committees, to engage in ad hominem personal attacks against vaccine dissenters.

Today the situation is different. During the Covid-19 pandemic the number of medical professionals speaking out against the mRNA vaccines, as well as the adenovirus vector vaccines developed by Astra Zeneca and Johnson & Johnson, has grown exponentially. No longer are those who question vaccine efficacy and safety lone individual voices. Today medical doctors are organizing themselves.  Before the pandemic it would have been unheard of that physicians and professors from prestigious medical schools would organize and convene conferences and seminars to present their scientific findings and research to discredit the official pandemic and vaccine narratives.

The question before us is:  if the captains and generals of our national health system, their medical advisors and pharmaceutical executives who approve and advocate for compulsory vaccination could get the evaluation of the Covd-19 vaccines so wrong, is there any reason to not assume they have been equally incorrect about the efficacy and safety for all conventional vaccines?  What if all of these individuals and their institutions and publications, and their shadow lobbying foundations and think tanks, are wrong? What if the vaccine paradigm itself is gravely flawed? What if vaccines have never been satisfactorily confirmed to be safe and effective? Did the CDC and vaccine manufacturers always know about vaccines’ shortcomings, yet intentionally ignored them?  After several decades of studying the scientific literature regarding vaccines, following the money trails, and interviewing many dozens of toxicologists, immunologists, research physicians, pediatricians, and medical journalists, the vaccine paradigm can now be accurately deconstructed with reliable independent science.

Herd Immunity

At the start of the Covid-19 vaccine rollout, Americans were given assurances by the medical authorities that massive vaccination compliance was crucial to reach herd immunity.  We were told that vaccination was absolutely necessary to protect us from the unvaccinated. It was citizens’ patriotic and moral duty to get vaccinated in order to protect the most vulnerable and the immune deficient from serious SARS-2 infections.  If enough of the population gets vaccinated, we were told we would reach herd immunity and bring an end to the pandemic. But is there any strong evidence to give credibility to this viewpoint?

A foundational truth across all scientific research is replication of laboratory experiments and clinical trials with the results being the same as the original findings.  On a monthly basis, even with very high vaccination rates, the target for reaching hypothetical herd immunity continues to change. Even if compliance increases, vaccine-induced immunity and efficacy wanes; hence there is a constant need to administer frequent shots or boosters.  For example, the influenza vaccine is known to be useless for conferring long-term immunity. Annually, flu vaccines must be specially formulated. Developing seasonal flu shots is based upon hypothetical calculations to predict which strains might appear that year. In the past, these predictions have been seriously flawed and have often failed to lessen infection rates.

Image is from Children’s Health Defense

Dr. Fauci was confronted with the question of why the vaccination herd immunity threshold for SARS-2 was changing. Fauci was unable to provide a scientifically sound reply because there isn’t one.

What Fauci and other advocates of the vaccine herd immunity theory categorically ignore is the role of natural immunity within the population.  They also leave out the unknown percent of people who already have very robust immune systems, live a healthy lifestyle and do not have any medical conditions that might seriously compromise their health if they were to catch an infectious disease. Healthy individuals may certainly contract an infectious virus or bacteria; however they are more likely to be asymptomatic and will benefit by strengthening natural immunity.  There is now many studies providing evidence that unvaccinated individuals who have been infected by SARS-2 have longer lasting immunity than that provided by the vaccines.

In the promulgation of herd immunity, neither of the above populations were considered to ascertain a more effective and vigorous preventative strategy to reduce the severity of and successfully treat SARS-2 infections. To the contrary those advocating for the importance of natural immunity were ridiculed and silenced.

The question is why is there such disdain towards anyone who questions the official narrative, even with facts warranting discussion. One problem is that the edifice upon which our modern vaccination regime is built relies on the hypothesis of herd immunity. Absent a belief in the plausibility of herd immunity, there is no sound basis to enforce vaccination mandates. Modern herd immunity theory is largely a dishonest marketing stunt. It follows the old adage of garbage in, garbage out. In order for a vaccine to be truly effective, it must be able to prove that vaccinated persons are unable to transmit a pathogen. A fully vaccinated person may still harbor a pathogen, may be asymptomatic, and still infect others.

For many years, scientists who espouse the vaccine herd immunity argument have claimed that approximately 95% of the population must be vaccinated in order to protect the smaller percentage who are not immunized; by following such a stratagem infectious diseases will eventually be eradicated. But for this theory to have any viability, vaccines must be perfectly effective and provide long-term immunity. None are. Nor should vaccine induced immunity have a termination date; yet no vaccine has been proven with any certainty to confer life-long immunity.

As we have observed during the start of the Covid-19 vaccination campaigns, the NIAID’s 95% compliance target was a fabricated number. Other percentages touted were as low as 70 percent.  This is a fundamental problem for calculating herd immunity thresholds for other vaccines. Such thresholds are based upon algorithmic computer modeling, which never accurately imitates real life scenarios. The Israeli authors in the recent book Turtles All the Way Down: Vaccine Science and Myth – a voluminous and heavily cited critique of the CDC’s childhood vaccination schedule – notes that the discrepancy in calculations to determine herd immunity thresholds can diverge as much as 40 percent. This is the case for the measles and diphtheria shots. For rubella, there is a 30 percent discrepancy range. These degrees of inaccuracy alone raise serious doubts about the biological legitimacy of herd immunity.

Periodic and localized measles outbreaks have frequently fueled vaccine hysteria. We can take the measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccine as an example that shatters the credibility of herd immunity. For the measles vaccine, according to a CDC study, the population at any given time may have less than 70% immunity. This is despite the fact that at one time MMR compliance in the US reached 98 percent. One of the most opportunistic incidences of a measles outbreak took place at Boston University a month after a campus blood drive. As a result, health officials had access to a large selection of students’ blood samples, both infected and measles-free. Laboratory analysis found that eight out of nine students who contracted measles were vaccinated.

China offers another example, which is believed to have the highest vaccination compliance rate in the world. The measles vaccine is mandatory on the Chinese mainland. So, why were there over 700 measles outbreaks in a three-year period between 2009 and 2012 when 99 percent of Chinese were vaccinated for measles? Clearly, the vaccine is incapable of reaching fictitious herd immunity.

Another medical discovery that debunks the MMR herd immunity theory is that live virus vaccines shed; this means that a vaccine’s viral component can be transmitted and infect persons that a vaccinated person comes into contact with. Perhaps the best-documented case occurred in New York City in 2011 when an adult woman received two MMR shots and subsequently infected four others in her workplace. Two of those infected were also immunized with two MMR doses. All cases involved in the incident were confirmed by laboratory testing and government health officials concluded that the outbreak was due to a failure in the MMR vaccine. In other words, the vaccine infected others.  It may also be noted that it is not uncommon in out-patient cancer clinics to provide instructions for persons who are severely immunocompromised to avoid contact with persons who have been recently vaccinated. This is especially true for live viral vaccines.

If a vaccinated person can infect others then this would present a working hypothesis and rationale to argue against vaccination mandates. Vaccine fear porn promotes the idea that an unvaccinated child poses a danger to everyone he or she comes into contact with, especially other children and the elderly who are immunocompromised with serious illnesses such as cancer or an autoimmune disease. Yet this is an untruth. Attorney Kevin Barry calls this propaganda strategy “effective brainwashing.” The facts are quite the opposite. With respect to the MMR and other live virus vaccines, it is the vaccinated person who equally poses a threat to immuno-compromised individuals.

The rollout of the Covid-19 vaccines has taught us another lesson.  During the less than two years since their Emergency Use Authorization, we have witnessed a rapid emergence of new SARS-2 coronavirus strains. There is also growing evidence that those fully vaccinated may be most susceptible for being infected by new strains they were not vaccinated against.  The reason behind this is inconclusive. Some medical experts and physicians are posing the question as to whether vaccination might be contributing to the emergence of these new polymorphic variants.

There are examples of new vaccine-related variants likely associated with over-vaccination. Outbreaks of whooping cough have risen. State and local health authorities investigating and gathering statistics on pertussis outbreaks discovered the highest numbers of infected persons among the vaccinated.  For example, Mississippi, with the highest vaccination rate in the country, had a significant increase in whooping cough cases, with 91 percent of those infected being fully vaccinated. Across the nation, the most highly infected are those who have received three or more pertussis shots and boosters.

Australian researchers at the government’s National Center for Immunization and Research of Vaccine Preventable Diseases found that the pertussis vaccine’s effectiveness was waning far more rapidly than expected, even among vaccinated 3 year olds. Moreover, in 2014, a study confirmed that individuals vaccinated against pertussis can be infectious carriers of the Bordetella bacterium and can likely infect others who either do not respond immunologically to the vaccine or who are unvaccinated.  A conclusion is that pertussis vaccinated individuals may now be endangering the health of the unvaccinated and vaccinated alike.

While health officials launched a media campaign to blame unvaccinated individuals for upsurges in pertussis outbreaks, the CDC publicly announced the contrary. Dr. Anne Schuchat from the CDC stated,

“We know there are places around the country where there are large numbers of people who aren’t vaccinated. However, we don’t think those exemptors are driving this current wave. We think it is a bad thing that people aren’t getting vaccinated or exempting, but we cannot blame this wave on that phenomenon.”

The current DPT vaccines do not protect against the new and more virulent strains of B. pertussis. The first identification of a new virulent strain was made in Australia. Shortly thereafter outbreaks appeared in southern California. Subsequently, Australian immunologists suggested that the emergence of a new vaccine-resistant B. pertussis variant may be due to over vaccination. Similar to what the world has witnessed with antibiotic resistant organisms, due to the overuse and abuse of antibiotic medications, this might also be occurring with viruses targeted by vaccines.  If new pathogenic strains are arising due to over vaccination campaigns, this destroys the possibility of reaching herd immunity through vaccination.

Finally, aside from these contradictory findings that discredit herd immunity, infectious disease outbreaks are financial boons for drug makers. Following the Disneyland measles outbreak, Bloomberg Business News reported that Merck’s quarterly MMR sales increased by 24 percent, proving that fear mongering is a highly profitable enterprise.

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Richard Gale is the Executive Producer of the Progressive Radio Network and a former Senior Research Analyst in the biotechnology and genomic industries.

Dr. Gary Null is host of the nation’s longest running public radio program on alternative and nutritional health and a multi-award-winning documentary film director, including his recent Last Call to Tomorrow

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After Prime Minister Imran Khan was overthrown in a US-backed soft coup, Pakistan’s unelected “imported government” has banned the country’s most popular politician from office, sparking huge protests.

Pakistani scholar Junaid S. Ahmad speaks with Ben Norton about army chief Bajwa’s friendly trip to Washington and US efforts to pressure Pakistan to weaken ties with China, arm Ukraine in its war with Russia, and recognize apartheid Israel. We also address the assassination of prominent dissident journalist Arshad Sharif.

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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.

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Bogeyman politics tends to be flatly unimaginative.  The image of the nuclear-mad Russian President, counting his diminishing options, has caught the imagination of press and propaganda outlets across the West.  Will Mad Vlad go the distance and deploy a nuclear weapon in Ukraine?

Certainly, his rhetoric suggests the possibility.  Vladimir Putin has promised to “make use of all weapon systems available to us” in the event Russia’s territorial integrity is threatened.  Moving Russian doctrine away from using nuclear weapons to defend the state’s existence to defending “territorial integrity” suggests an expeditious revision. But let us not simply focus on the customary trope of the mad Russian who thirsts for violence. The tactical nuclear weapon has always lingered as a viable option for those who have it.

The moment the innocents of Hiroshima were incinerated in August 1945, a weapon of mass lethality became a political option, the means to extract concessions and terrify opponents.  Even more disturbingly, it also created an incentive on the part of powers to prevent others from getting it, thereby creating an exclusive club equipped with special amenities and privileges.

During a number of teeth-chattering moments of the Cold War, the use of nuclear weapons was contemplated.  Historians note Cuba, Berlin and the Middle East.  That they were not actually unleashed was a matter of unalloyed dumb luck and faux theory.  Over time, this spawned an accepted, if nonsensical literature about the merits of having such lethal means. Precisely because of their potency, such weapons would never be used.  Possessing them would be, to use a modern comparison, much like having unconvertible digital currency of huge value, more a matter of impressing your rivals than drawing direct benefit from them.

Having said that, one category of nuclear weapon has continued to mark a grey area, lending a disturbed, even lunatic’s legitimacy to the battlefield deployment of such weapons.  The tactical nuclear weapon is deceptively seductive to military planners. Being of lower yield than their strategic, all-killing counterparts, they are seen as, in the words of the Union of Concerned Scientists, “more militarily useful, and less politically objectionable, and thus more likely to be used.” This does little to dampen the awful reality that such weapons can have yields greater than that of the first atomic weapon ever used.

The nature of such weapons is disturbingly nebulous in the military argot.  In 2018, James Mattis, as US Secretary of Defense, opined to the House Armed Services Committee that there was no “such thing as a ‘tactical nuclear weapon’.  Any nuclear weapon used at any time is a strategic game changer.”

Tactical nuclear weapons can comprise any number of devices with yields ranging from 1 kiloton to 50 kilotons.  Alistair Millar, writing for Arms Control Today, mentions a few, including nuclear landmines, nuclear artillery shells, and missile warheads dropped by air or launched by missiles.

The 2018 US Nuclear Posture Review does away with much of the sentiment of the 2010 NPR in stressing the need to improve capabilities against Russia in various areas, including nonstrategic nuclear options.  Moscow is specifically blamed for embracing a “limited first use” policy involving low-yield weapons that might “provide coercive advantage in crises and at lower levels of conflict.”

Special attention is reserved for Washington’s own nonstrategic nuclear options, with low-yield warheads for submarine launched ballistic missiles and a new submarine launched cruise missile being suggested additions.  As Moscow had heavily invested in such tactical weapons, NATO forces would be caught short with only strategic options at its disposal.  “We do not believe Russia would be expanding their limited resources to modernize and expand their nonstrategic nuclear forces if they had little or no confidence in this strategy,” asserted deputy director for strategic stability, Greg Weaver, one of the authors of the 2018 NPR.

The military and security establishments of such powers has effectively legitimised the potential use of such weapons.  During the Gulf War of 1991, then Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney chewed over the prospects of using tactical nuclear weapons against Iraqi forces.  He went so far as to commission a study on how many would be needed to, in the words of then President George H.W. Bush, “take out an Iraqi Republican Guard division, if necessary.”  The astonishing answer was 17.

During the administration of George W. Bush, tactical nuclear weapons became an object of serious interest.  The ghoulish spectacle of civilian planes finding their targets against the Twin Towers in New York and the Pentagon in Washington did its fair share of unsettling.  Cheney, for one, continued showing interest in using nonstrategic versions of such weapons in battle.  According to Seymour Hersh, he mulled over using low-yield nuclear weapons such as the bunker-buster B61-11 against Iran’s underground nuclear sites, including the Natanz main centrifuge plant some two hundred miles south of Tehran.

Ambiguity when it comes to a prospective use of nuclear weapons is considered one of the great flaws of military and political planning.  Each party should know what the other proposes to do in certain circumstances, be it in terms of command structure, control and communications.  Who has the authority to launch what weapons and when?  What are the safeguards to cope with error?  As far as Putin’s threats go, NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg holds to the traditional view: the Russian leader “knows very well that a nuclear war should never be fought and can never be won.”

Opacity is another factor complicating the whole business of how we cope with nonstrategic nuclear weapons.  Numbers regarding the world’s tactical nuclear stockpiles remain sketchy.  “Greater transparency regarding the size of tactical nuclear stockpiles would be an important first step towards establishing international norms against their modernisation,” proposesBrendan Thomas-Noone.

Paradoxically, even as such measures as the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons gather greater popularity, the old members of the nuclear club continue to make mischief, modernising and adjusting their arsenals with little intention of ever abolishing them.  The sheer allure of such weapons is unlikely to dissipate till their political dividends diminish.  In the Ukraine War, such dividends abound.

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Dr. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge.  He currently lectures at RMIT University. He is a regular contributor to Global Research and Asia-Pacific Research. Email: [email protected]

Featured image is from The Unz Review

“Towards a World War III Scenario: The Dangers of Nuclear War” 

by Michel Chossudovsky

Available to order from Global Research! 

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   

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***

In 1946, ex-British war PM, Sir Winston Churchill delivered his famous Zurich speech calling for the establishment of the United States of Europe. However, his idea of a united (Western) Europe excluded his native country – the UK. At that time, he envisaged West Europe as composed of independent, free, and sovereign states that would rise from the ashes of WWII and reach for a destiny of unprecedented harmony and democracy.

Neutral Switzerland, with its centuries-old harmonious co-existence of four languages and cultures (and international money laundering banks), was to be the blueprint for a multilingual and multicultural Europe that would never again see maniac dictators and supra-national demagogues bent on imposing their will on member nations.

Initially, W. Churchill’s vision seemed to be advancing according to the plan. Former Nazi Germany and fascist Italy decentralized political power and became parliamentary democracies. Nazism and fascism became discredited throughout Europe like Communism in its western part.

However, soon, the events took a different turn. The Schuman plan of 1950 proposed the supra-national pooling of the French and German coal and steel industries as a means of forging European economic unity (the 1951 ECSC by the Treaty of Paris). The two economies were interwoven to such an extent that a new war between these traditional enemies became virtually impossible.

The European Economic Union (the EEC), established in 1957 by the Treaty of Rome, brought Italy and the three Benelux countries into the closer union with France and Germany but represented a further step towards a pan-European economy by tying economic development to the city of Rome.[i] Significantly, the Treaty of Rome also gave Europe a sense of supranational religious unity and the Roman Catholic Church protection against the existent threat of the spreading of Communism outside of East-Central Europe.

1962 was the year of the Common Agricultural Policy resulting in the creation of a common market (transformed in 1993 into the European Single Market – the ESM) with price-fixing – a further step towards economic uniformity and, basically towards the command economy which was at the same time so heavily criticized by the Western liberal democracies in the cases of the economies of the so-called real socialism.

Nevertheless, in the same 1962, year, some Western technocrats recognized the EEC as a project that is already much behind simply and economically united Europe with the comments that fascism in Europe is about to be reborn in respectable business attire, and the 1957 Treaty of Rome will finally be implemented to its fullest extent. Some of them shared the opinion that the dream of a medieval Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation (962−1806 – the HREGM) is returning to power to dominate and direct the so-called forces of the Christian mankind of the Western world. Simply, such an idea was not dead yet but still stalks through the antechambers of every national capital of continental Western Europe, in the determination of the leaders in the common market to restore the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation with all that means.[ii]

Surely, West Germany, constrained in its international role and influence after 1945, saw European unification as a very convenient international platform to pursue its own foreign policy.

Nevertheless, the word “economic” was ominously dropped from the official title of the community in 1967 in favor of the description of it just as the European Community (the EC) meaning that the integration process is now directed toward political direction what was clearly seen in 1979 when the first direct elections to the European Parliament in Strasbourg have been organized. Even the former European Assembly was renamed into the European Parliament in order to stress a clear direction toward the creation of a supranational political entity–state.

The policy of enlargement continued with Greece joining in 1981, and Spain and Portugal in 1986, when in the same year the Single European Act was signed to prepare the EC for the transformation into the EU – a higher level of economic, financial, social, legal, legislative, and above all political integration with the German leadership. In other words, the Single European Act meant the gradual transfer of executive, legislative, and judicial powers from the Member States to the central authorities of the EC and since 1993 of the EU (the HREGN). Consequently, the EU could make ever-increasing political inroads into the national sovereignty of the Member States and the London-Dublin conspiracy attempted to force the British people of Northern Ireland by stealth and terror towards a united Ireland under European rule, while arrogant and spineless politicians in Westminster continued politely to play the enemy’s game, or, as Dr. Paisley once put it metaphorically, to “feed the brute instead of slaughtering it”.

When the (in)famous Maastricht Treaty on the European (political) Union was signed in February 1992 (to come into force in November 1993) with the ultimate aim of transforming the EC into a federal superstate – now significantly redesigned as the European Union (EU) – many of the politicians elected to Brussels, including those from Great Britain, fell for the confidence trick within the ideological framework of the HREGN. Today, when Great Britany as a focal US colony in Europe left the EU, a real perspective for Berlin and Vatican to transform the EU into a virtual HREGN is on the tangible agenda.

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Dr. Vladislav B. Sotirović is a Former university professor in Vilnius, Lithuania. He is a Research Fellow at the Center for Geostrategic Studies. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

Notes

[i] In fact, there were two Treaties of Rome signed on March 25^th, 1957: 1) Creating Euratom, to coordinate policy in nuclear energy, the new strategic industry; and 2) Creating the European Economic Community, oriented towards improving trade and investment but as well as towards further political steps in the creation of the European superstate.

[ii] See more in [Professor Arthur Noble, “The Conspiracy Behind the European Union: What Every Christian Should Know”, Lecture delivered at the Annual Autumn Conference of the United Protestant Council in London on Saturday, November 7^th, 1998].

Featured image is from the author

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***

Once again, Kiev acts in a destabilizing way and tries to escalate the conflict to higher levels of violence. The Russian government recently reported, based on intelligence data, that the Ukrainian forces are planning to use a “dirty bomb” in a false flag operation against Moscow. The purpose of such a plan would be to accuse the Russians of using prohibited weapons and thus justify greater Western involvement in the conflict.

On October 23, Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu issued a statement to American, French, British and Turkish authorities warning about the results of investigations carried out by Moscow’s security forces pointing to the existence of dirty bombs in Ukrainian territory, which would be about to be used by Kiev. As expected, NATO officials ignored the alert and treated the matter as irrelevant or “unproven”. In Kiev, there was no official pronouncement either, remaining the international society silent in the face of this serious threat.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov commented on the case criticizing Western irresponsibility:

“The fact that they do not trust the information which was provided by the Russian side does not mean that the threat of the use of such a dirty bomb ceases to exist. The threat is present. This information was brought to the attention of the [Russian] defense minister’s interlocutors. It’s up to them whether they want to believe it or not”.

The next day, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov publicly commented on the topic, reinforcing the credibility of the information obtained by his country’s security forces and stating that Moscow has even reliable evidence about which exact Ukrainian scientific institutions have the necessary technology to produce such bombs.

“We have specific information about the scientific institutions in Ukraine which have the technology to build a dirty bomb. We have information which we’ve double-checked using the appropriate channels confirming that this is not an empty suspicion, and that there is good reason to believe that such [provocations] can be planned”.

Precise data on whether or not such bombs would have been produced with technology provided by the West have not yet been published, but more detailed information on the matter may be released soon. It is very likely that Ukrainian scientists are using technical apparatus from allied countries to produce this type of material, considering the current precarious circumstances of the Ukrainian military industry and the high level of cooperation between Kiev and NATO. In addition, it must be remembered that Western intelligence is acting in Kiev directly, coordinating joint actions with local troops and cooperating with terrorist attacks, which leads to the conclusion that, if there is a Ukrainian plan to use a dirty bomb, NATO agents certainly already know this, but continue to deny the reality.

The magnitude of the situation is such that Moscow has summoned a meeting of the UN Security Council to discuss the matter. The Russian mission to the UN sent a letter to Secretary-General Antonio Guterres providing information on the Ukrainian threat. In the letter it is possible to read:

“The Kiev regime plans to camouflage the explosion of such a ‘dirty bomb’ as an explosion of a Russian low-yield nuclear warhead (…) By this provocation the Kiev regime seeks to intimidate the population, increase the flow of refugees, and accuse the Russian Federation of ‘nuclear terrorism”.

In fact, when such reports arise, it is unacceptable for the international society to remain inactive. Investigations are necessary and if the information is proven, it is needed to act decisively in order to neutralize the risk. The recent history of terrorism represented by Kiev shows that the Ukrainian neo-Nazi regime seems to have no ethical or humanitarian limits to follow with its war plans. The Zaporozhye nuclear power plant bombings and Zelensky’s call for NATO to “preemptively” launch nuclear weapons against Russia are examples of how the Ukrainians seem genuinely willing to promote this kind of escalation. And if the West remains silent, it simply shows connivance.

The use of such “dirty” weapons would not even represent a possibility of reversing the military scenario in favor of Kiev. These weapons have low combat impact, their only purpose being to cause terror and contamination. They are called “dirty” because they are non-nuclear weapons that hide extremely contaminating radioactive material inside. The explosions are on a small scale, but the health and environmental damage is catastrophic. If such weapons were used in Ukraine, the civilian population would be the most affected part, which shows the terrorist nature of the Ukrainian plan.

As a result of the current threat, the Russian Federation’s nuclear forces were placed on combat alert. In addition, Russian troops are being prepared to act under radioactive contamination. The escalation is worrying and points to a disastrous course for this conflict that could easily be avoided if the West stopped its interventionism.

*

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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 from InfoBrics

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***

After closing on 22 October of the 20^th Chinese Communist Party (CPC) Congress, President Xi Jinping was reappointed for a third 5-year term as China’s leader. This was expected.

Also expected was that he would reassemble the Politburo and his innermost circles with loyalists.

Every president and leader around the world does the same – staffing their cabinets and advisory teams with loyalists.

Just as a parenthesis, Madame Merkel was “elected” for four terms to the German Chancellor’s Office, for a total of 16 years (22 November 2005 – 8 December 2021). That was OK. No bad-mouthing.

But if China or Russia, does it, it’s called tightening the grip on power – what a double standard applied by western bought, yes, corrupted, media.

People ought to just think about it.

So, as also expected, western media could not just concentrate on the substance of the week-long conference and report on their substantive analysis. But they filled the airwaves and print-news with heavy critic on the “appearance” – without any comparison with their own western systems.

PressTV Iran dedicated their Monday evening (24 October) “Spotlight” Interview to the 20^th CPC Congress, the key achievements and the western media reaction.

See this 23-min video recording of the interview.

*

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

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

People Dying in Their Sleep Linked to Vaccines, Explains Dr. Peter McCullough, Cardiologist

By Dr. Jennifer Margulis, October 25, 2022

At a conference for medical professionals in Sedona, Arizona this past weekend, several speakers–all physicians–commented on a disturbing trend: an increase in otherwise healthy people dying in their sleep.

Scotland: Independence for Peace and the Peace for Justice

By Konrad Rękas, October 25, 2022

If Scots do not want to die for the British jingoism – they have to choose the independence.  Independence means no war for Scottish people and no need to pay for the Tories crisis.  Simple and true slogans can make our future.

The Cult of the Branch Covidian and the Banality of Evil

By David Penner, October 25, 2022

The Branch Covidian putsch is the most heinous crime ever perpetrated in the history of medicine, and some would argue, in the history of the world. Its success is attributable to the strong presence of Nazi bioethics within the ranks of Western physicians, as well as a broad base of support from the ranks of neoliberals.

Israel Escalates Continual Airstrikes in Syria

By Steven Sahiounie, October 25, 2022

Israel has carried out hundreds of airstrikes across Syria for many years, and the latest was on October 24 in a rare daytime attack in Damascus.  Israel views Iran as their chief national security threat.  Iran supports the resistance movement against the Israeli occupation of Palestine, and Hezbollah, the Lebanese resistance group.

The Stages of Totalitarianism: America Is Moving from Authoritarian to Totalitarian

By Dr. Mark McDonald, October 25, 2022

I felt much freer in Bosnia this summer than I do now in the United States. In every city I visited there, I found no restrictions on travel, speech, or medical decision-making. Criminality was frowned upon, rather than encouraged. The people I spoke with appeared to be well-informed on issues of importance to their local community. In contrast, Los Angeles, where I live and work, is an authoritarian city. So is the state of California.

Glory to God in the Lowest – Journeys to an Unholy Land

By Jim Miles, October 25, 2022

In “Glory to God in the Lowest” Donald Wagner set out three themes for his memoirs:  his transition from political apathy and social conservatism to activism in the civil rights and anti-war movements;  a theological transition from fundamentalist Christian zionism to progressive and liberation theology; and advocacy for Palestinian political and human rights.

Thirty Progressive House Democrats Urge Biden to Negotiate with Russia

By Dave DeCamp, October 26, 2022

In a letter to Biden signed by 30 House Democrats, the lawmakers said they have supported Biden’s Ukraine policy but that the risk of nuclear war and “catastrophic escalation” means that the US should be pushing for negotiations.

Commission of Inquiry Finds that the Israeli Occupation Is Unlawful Under International Law

By Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, October 26, 2022

There are reasonable grounds to conclude that the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory is now unlawful under international law due to its permanence and the Israeli Government’s de-facto annexation policies, according to the first report to the General Assembly issued today by the United Nations Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, and Israel.

Political ‘Justice’ in America

By Daniel McAdams, October 26, 2022

Josef Stalin’s top henchman famously said, “show me the man and I’ll show you the crime.” What it meant was that Soviet justice was about politics, not the rule of law. First decide who, for political reasons, is to be punished, and then the state will provide the crimes for which he will be charged.

Fauci, Jen Psaki, and Top Biden Officials to be Deposed in Free Speech Case

By Ryan King, October 24, 2022

A court approved a request Friday to depose Dr. Anthony Fauci, former White House press secretary Jen Psaki, and a bevy of other Biden administration officials in a free speech case.

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***

A group of progressive House Democrats is urging President Biden to negotiate with Russia and seek a diplomatic solution to the war in Ukraine.

In a letter to Biden signed by 30 House Democrats, the lawmakers said they have supported Biden’s Ukraine policy but that the risk of nuclear war and “catastrophic escalation” means that the US should be pushing for negotiations.

“We urge you to pair the military and economic support the United States has provided to Ukraine with a proactive diplomatic push, redoubling efforts to seek a realistic framework for a ceasefire,” the letter reads.

The letter was led by Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-WA), the chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus. In a statement to The Washington Post, she said,

“The longer the war in Ukraine goes on, the greater the risk of escalation — to widespread, devastating effect.”

The Biden administration has shown little interest in diplomacy with Russia despite the president’s recent warning that there is a higher risk of nuclear “armageddon” today than at any time since the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. The Washington Post reported earlier this month that US officials have ruled out pushing Ukraine to the negotiating table even though they don’t think Kyiv can win the war “outright.”

The lawmakers said in the letter that they agree with the administration’s position that it’s not the US’s “place” to pressure Ukraine’s government. But they added that “as legislators responsible for the expenditure of tens of billions of US taxpayer dollars in military assistance in the conflict, we believe such involvement in this war also creates a responsibility for the United States to seriously explore all possible avenues.”

One avenue the lawmakers said Biden should explore is direct talks with Russia, and they said a framework for a ceasefire could include “some form of sanctions relief.”

The progressive Democrats concluded the letter by calling on Biden to “make vigorous diplomatic efforts in support of a negotiated settlement and ceasefire, engage in direct talks with Russia explore prospects for a new European security arrangement acceptable to all parties that will allow for a sovereign and independent Ukraine, and, in coordination with our Ukrainian partners, seek a rapid end to the conflict and reiterate this goal as America’s chief priority.”

In response to the letter, the White House rejected the idea of diplomacy with Russia. “It’s clear Mr. Putin is in no mood to negotiate,” said National Security Council spokesman John Kirby. “We’re not going to have conversations with Russian leadership without the Ukrainians being represented.”

Some prominent signatories to the letter include Reps. Barbara Lee (D-CA), Ro Khanna (D-CA), Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), Ilhan Omar (D-MN), and Rashida Tlaib (D-MI). Each signatory voted in favor of spending tens of billions on the war, including the $40 billion Ukraine aid bill that was passed in May, which only faced opposition from a small group of Republicans.

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Dave DeCamp is the news editor of Antiwar.com, follow him on Twitter @decampdave.

Featured image is from The Last Refuge

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***

There are reasonable grounds to conclude that the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory is now unlawful under international law due to its permanence and the Israeli Government’s de-facto annexation policies, according to the first report to the General Assembly issued today by the United Nations Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, and Israel.

Underlining that under international humanitarian law the occupation of territory in wartime is a temporary situation and does not deprive the occupied Power of its statehood nor its sovereignty, the three-person Commission called on the General Assembly to request an urgent Advisory Opinion from the International Court of Justice on the legal consequences of Israel’s continued refusal to end its occupation of the Occupied Palestinian Territory.

“Recent statements by the Secretary-General and numerous member States have clearly indicated that any attempt at unilateral annexation of a State’s territory by another State is a violation of international law and is null and void; 143 member States including Israel last week voted in favour of a General Assembly resolution reaffirming this”, stated Navi Pillay, Chair of the Commission. “Unless universally applied, including to the situation in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, this core principle of the United Nations Charter will become meaningless”, she added.

In reaching its findings, the Commission reviewed the policies and actions employed by the Governments of Israel to maintain the occupation, and annex parts of the Occupied Palestinian Territory. The Commission’s review was based on interviews with experts and stakeholders, and submissions received following a call for submissions issued on 22 September 2021.

The 28-page report focuses on the sustenance and advancement of the settlement enterprise, including statements made by Israeli officials indicating the intent to maintain permanent control over the land in violation of international law. The Commission concludes that by continuing to occupy the territory by force, Israel incurs international responsibilities and remains accountable for violations of the rights of the Palestinians individually and as a people.

“By ignoring international law in establishing or facilitating the establishment of settlements, and directly or indirectly transferring Israeli civilians into these settlements, successive Israel governments have set facts on the ground to ensure permanent Israeli control in the West Bank”, Ms. Pillay stated.

In producing its report, the Commission reviewed Israel’s expropriation and exploitation of land and natural resources, and Israel’s restrictive urban planning and zoning policies in the West Bank, noting that land is often confiscated for military purposes but is then used for settlement construction. The Commission reviewed statements by Israeli officials indicating that Palestinian construction is seen as an impediment to Israeli settlements, requiring action such as confiscation, demolitions and displacement. The Commission also observed similar processes in East Jerusalem where the restrictive planning and zoning regimes, which have obstructed adequate housing, infrastructure and livelihoods, have contributed to shrinking space for Palestinians.

The report also points to Israeli Government policies which have had a serious and multi-faceted impact on all areas of Palestinian life, including access to clean and affordable water, which has impacted the entire Palestinian agricultural sector, limiting opportunities for livelihoods particularly affecting women.

“There is so much ‘silent harm’ and psychological trauma, that may not be immediately apparent, resulting from the erosion of economic, social and cultural rights. These debilitating processes have severe short and long-term consequences and must be urgently addressed”, said Commissioner Miloon Kothari.

The Commission dedicated a significant part of its report to reviewing the impact of Israel’s occupation and de-facto annexation policies on Palestinian human rights, noting the coercive environment intended to force Palestinians to leave their homes and alter the demographic composition of certain areas. To this effect, the Commission reviewed the demolition of homes and destruction of property, the excessive use of force by security forces, mass incarceration, settler violence, restrictions of movement, and limitations on access to livelihoods, basic necessities, services and humanitarian assistance.

The Commission emphasised that this ongoing coercive environment has fragmented Palestinian society and ensured that Palestinians are unable of fulfil their right to self-determination among other rights. The Commission also noted the extremely harmful impact of the air, land and sea blockade of Gaza on Palestinian human rights.

The report outlines a specifically damaging impact on children, who experience constant military presence, arrest and detention, frequent attacks and acts of violence, restrictions on movement, home demolition and destruction of infrastructure and property. The Commission emphasised that the cumulative effects of occupation practices, including restrictions on movement, have had a pervasive discriminatory effect on Palestinian women, noting that they experience gender-based violence during their everyday activities.

The report concludes by saying that some of the policies and actions of the Israeli Government leading to permanent occupation and de-facto annexation may constitute elements of crimes under international criminal law, including the war crime of transferring, directly or indirectly, part of one’s own civilian population into occupied territory, and the crime against humanity of deportation or forcible transfer.

“The actions of Israeli Governments reviewed in our report constitute an illegal occupation and annexation regime that must be addressed”, stated Commissioner Chris Sidoti. “The international system and individual States must act and uphold their obligations under international law. That must begin at this session of the General Assembly with a referral to the International Court of Justice”, he added.

Background

The UN Human Rights Council mandated the Commission on 27 May 2021 to “investigate, in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, and in Israel, all alleged violations of international humanitarian law and all alleged violations and abuses of international human rights law leading up and since 13 April 2021”. In July 2021, the President of the Human Rights Council announced the appointment of Navanethem Pillay (South Africa), Miloon Kothari (India) and Christopher Sidoti (Australia) to serve as the three members of the Commission and indicated that Ms. Pillay would serve as Chair. Resolution A/HRC/RES/S-30/1 further requested the commission of inquiry to “investigate all underlying root causes of recurrent tensions, instability and protraction of conflict, including systematic discrimination and repression based on national, ethnic, racial or religious identity.” The Commission of Inquiry was mandated to report to the Human Rights Council and the General Assembly annually from June 2022 and September 2022, respectively.

The Commissioners will present their report to the General Assembly on 27 October.

The full report in six languages and more information on the work of the United Nations Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, and in Israel, can be found at: https://www.ohchr.org/en/hr-bodies/hrc/co-israel/index

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Featured image: Palestine graffiti (Source: Jewish Voice for Labour)

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***

Josef Stalin’s top henchman famously said, “show me the man and I’ll show you the crime.” What it meant was that Soviet justice was about politics, not the rule of law. First decide who, for political reasons, is to be punished, and then the state will provide the crimes for which he will be charged.

This dark era of politicized “justice” has returned with former Trump campaign advisor Steve Bannon’s recent sentence to four months in jail for “contempt of Congress” over his refusal to appear before the House January 6th Committee.

How is it politicized justice for Bannon to be punished for ignoring a subpoena from the US Congress? Because many before him have been charged with contempt of Congress – including Democratic Party luminaries such as Eric Holder, Janet Reno, and Lois Lerner – and were never sentenced to jail time.

Bannon’s sentence is meant to convey a political message to America: if you support Trump you are a criminal and you may find yourself in a cell next to Steve Bannon.

And you do not have to support Trump to understand the danger in this. Everyone should be afraid of political justice. It cuts both ways and there is no guarantee that Republicans if they capture Congress will not also follow this precedent.

Sending your political opponents to jail is what happens in a banana republic. It is un-American. But here we are.

The goal of the January 6th Committee is not to seek justice for the “crime” of trespassing and putting feet on Pelosi’s sacred desk, but to make sure that Donald Trump is never allowed to run for President again. That is the reason hundreds have been unjustly arrested and held in terrible conditions for non-crimes. As they say, if you want to make an omelet you have to break some eggs.

Speaking of contempt of Congress, the real contempt is the existence of the January 6th Committee in the first place. It has been a partisan show trial from the beginning, where the only two “Republican” Members were not chosen by Republicans but by Nancy Pelosi. The purpose of the Committee has been to prop up the false narrative that somehow a few rowdy protesters who broke into the Capitol Building were the equivalent of the storming of the Bastille.

The US Administration is also involved in narrative control in other areas. The media reported last week that Tesla and Space-X chief Elon Musk has come under a “national security review” over, it seems, his on-again-off-again purchase of Twitter and perhaps even his proposing a peace plan for Russia and Ukraine that does not include a nuclear strike on Moscow.

Musk has also come under fire from the “cancel culture” Left over his repeated vows to return Twitter to a free speech platform once he is in charge. As we have seen in so many cases, including with former New York Times journalist Alex Berenson, Twitter has been working closely with the Biden Administration to silence and ban any users who dare challenge the “accepted wisdom” on Covid, Ukraine, and a number of other things.

When justice becomes tangled in politics, freedom and liberty go out the window. We are not so naïve to think this is something that just arrived with the Biden Administration, but there seems little doubt it is spreading like a cancer. We must reject political justice if the Republic is to survive.

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Israeli forces killed six Palestinians and wounded at least 20 more after a violent army raid in the northern occupied West Bank on Tuesday. 

A large army force stormed Nablus around midnight local time, equipped with dozens of armoured vehicle and anti-tank guided missiles, and clashed with Palestinian fighters in the city.

Five Palestinians, at least two of them unarmed, were killed during the three-hour raid and a sixth person was fatally shot in Ramallah hours later, according to the Palestinian health ministry.

The names of those who died during the Nablus assault were identified as Hamdi Sobeih Ramzi Qayem, 30; Ali Khaled Omar Antar, 26; Hamdi Muhammad Sabri Hamid Sharaf, 35; Wadi Sabih Houh, 31; Mishaal Zahi Ahmed Baghdadi, 27.

The sixth Palestinian, identified as Qusai Tamimi, 20, was killed in a separate incident in the village of Nabi Saleh in the Ramallah district.

فلسطين تودع ٦ شهداء خلال اشتباكات ومواجهات فجر اليوم.

١- حمدي صبيح رمزي قيم 30 سنة
٢- علي خالد عمر عنتر 26 سنة
٣- حمدي محمد حامد شرف 35 سنة
٤- وديع صبيح حوح 31 سنة
٥- مشعل زاهي بغدادي 27 سنة
٦- قصي محمود التميمي/ رام الله pic.twitter.com/ELRHyvqkaN

— شجاعية (@shejae3a) October 25, 2022

A general strike and a day of mourning were observed across the occupied West Bank and the Gaza Strip on Tuesday, as thousands of angry residents joined the funeral processions in Nablus.

“The situation this morning, the city woke up so sad, they lost five lives. The atmosphere is very sad and there are strikes across the West Bank today,” Zayd al-Azhary, a Nablus-based activist, told Middle East Eye.

The Tuesday operation came amidst a 14-day siege on Nablus by the Israeli army, which has blocked the city’s entrances and crippled people’s movement in and out.

The Israeli army says the measures were enforced to stop attacks against Israeli targets carried out by a newly-formed armed group in the city called the Lions’ Den.

Nablus and neighbouring city Jenin have witnessed a resurgence of armed resistance in recent months. Palestinian fighters have been increasingly attacking army checkpoints and posts, as well as confronting Israeli troops during city raids.

Undercover incursion  

According to Palestinian media, the attack on Nablus began just after midnight on Tuesday when security forces belonging to the Palestinian Authority (PA) pulled over a “suspicious vehicle” next to the Old City.

The vehicle was carrying undercover Israeli special forces, local sources said. When the PA officers confronted the Israeli forces in the vehicle, the Palestinian officers reportedly came under fire from Israeli snipers that were stationed on rooftops in the area.

After the Israeli special forces’ cover was blown, an exchange of fire reportedly took place between the PA forces and Israeli soldiers, resulting in the injury of four PA officers, according to local reports.

The gunfire exchange between the PA officers and Israeli soldiers tipped off armed groups in Nablus’ Old City that an Israeli operation in the city was underway.

Snipers are being positioned at the mountains, ISF are firing from planes. pic.twitter.com/2sGcWb1rNh

— Younis Tirawi -يونس الطيراوي (@ytirawi) October 24, 2022

Palestinian fighters began exchanging fire with Israeli forces who raided the area, while dozens more Israeli army jeeps began rolling into the city.

One resident said “chaos broke out” after that, as Israeli troops descended on the Old City in large numbers, targeting members of the Lions’ Den group.

The Israeli army confirmed in a statement that the operation targeted a site “used by the main operatives of the Lion’s Den”, describing it as a “headquarters and a workshop for making weapons”. It added that it “responded with live fire toward the armed suspects shooting at them.”

The Lions’ Den group also said in a statement on Telegram that it engaged in shootouts with Israeli troops and confirmed that at least one of its members was killed.

‘War zone’

Local sources said approximately 60 Israeli armoured military vehicles were used in the operation in which the Old City was raided and besieged.

The first two Palestinians that were shot were reportedly bystanders walking through the Old City.

“They were in the wrong place at the wrong time,” al-Azhary told MEE. “They were just walking down the road and of course, the Israelis shot them without asking any questions.”

It remained unclear the identity of the first two Palestinians that were killed, and if they were members of the armed groups who were fighting against the army incursion. Videos published on social media showed Palestinian medics attempting to resuscitate two Palestinians in civilian clothing as they lay on the street, bleeding and unconscious.

At around 1am, as gunfire rang throughout the city of Nablus, Palestinians in the Old City turned to the minarets in mosques to call for backup from residents to support the resistance fighters and civilians stuck inside.

An hour later, Israeli forces reportedly struck a vehicle in the Ras al-Ain area with a missile, killing a man in his car. Another Palestinian, Wadee al-Houh, who Israel was reported to be one of the commanders of the Lion’s Den group, was killed in his house.

The Israeli military released a statement saying that al-Houh was one of the primary targets of the army’s operation in the city. The Lions’ Den group released a statement on Tuesday morning commemorating Houh but did not specify his role in the group.

As Palestinian armed groups continued to clash with Israeli forces into the early hours of the morning, confrontations were reported across the city, including the Balata refugee camp.

Al-Azhary described the scene as a “war zone”.

“More than 9,000 people live in the Old City and all of them were under fire, and in danger – kids, old people, families etc, not just resistance fighters. It is not an easy life or position to be in,” he said.

‘Trying to resist’

Thousands of Palestinians joined the funeral procession of the five people killed in the Israeli raid as protests are expected to take place across the West Bank against growing Israeli violence.

The Tuesday raid took the Palestinian death toll this year to more than 175 people who have been killed by Israeli forces and settlers, including killed 125 in occupied East Jerusalem and the West Bank.

More than 44 were killed in the last two months alone.

According to the UN, 2022 is so far “the highest year for Palestinian fatalities in the West Bank, compared to the same period in the previous 16 years”.

Nablus was placed under blockade earlier this month after an Israeli soldier was killed on 11 October at a military post on the outskirts of Nablus city. The Israeli army embarked on a widespread manhunt for the shooter, who reportedly belonged to the Lions’ Den.

On Sunday 23 October, a Palestinian member of the nascent group, Tamir al-Kilani, was killed in a remote explosion in the Old City of Nablus. The group claimed he was assassinated by the Israeli army, though the military did not publicly comment on the killing.

Following the raid on Tuesday, Israeli Prime Minister Yair Lapid told the Kan public broadcaster “Israel will never be deterred from acting for its security,” saying that members of the Lions’ Den “are the people who hurt Ido Baruch,” referring to the soldier who was killed on 11 October.

On Twitter, Israeli Defence Minister Benny Gantz vowed that the military will continue its crackdown on the Lions’ Den and other armed groups, saying: “There aren’t and won’t be sanctuary cities for terrorists.

“We will continue to act against anyone who tries to harm the citizens of Israel, wherever and whenever necessary,” he said.

In response to the statements, al-Azhary dismissed Israeli claims the Palestinian groups are “terrorists”, saying they were created as a response to the ongoing Israeli mistreatment and occupation of Palestinians.

“Palestinians are trying to resist Israel taking away their rights and dignity as people. They are not terrorists, they are a group of people who have been pushed into a corner,” al-Azhary said.

“What Israel is doing now is trying to make this group into a terrorist group instead of focusing on what we as Palestinians actually need.”

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UK increases its own military assets in Ukraine.  Even before the Russian invasion, Britain trained at least 22,000 Ukrainian soldiers (Operation Orbital).  

In early September, the outgoing PM Boris Johnson promised to train another 10,000, probably in Poland. 

Since February, Westminster has transferred £1.3 billion to Kiev, supplied thousands of NLAW anti-tank missiles, rocket launchers and artillery systems, including NATO M109.  Apparently small, but significant symbol of the British influence on Ukrainian affairs is that the final of the Eurovision Song Contest, which was to be hosted by Ukraine next year, will be organised in… the United Kingdom. 

Only people who cannot recognise changes in international politics may still think that the Ukrainian game is being played by (only) Russia and the United States. 

Of course, the American hegemon still keeps general control over entire geopolitics of the Western hemisphere, but it is choking our economies.

The reality is that if the US does not focus on the Chinese question, it will not only lose its (already broken) primacy of the World’s first economy.  America will also be dethroned as the most important centre of global capital, which is already considering whether to change the side supported.  Howbeit Washington dominated and paralysed Europe for so many decades not to leave it without the enlightened Anglo-Saxon leadership now.  History and geopolitics have come full circle, when we are witnessing a bizarre, but absolutely serious attempt to rebuild the British Empire.  Not Americans but jingoist Britons are main Russia opponents in Ukraine.  In fact the Westminster has taken full control over the foreign policy (including energy security) of Poland and the Baltic States.  The phantom menace of the full scall war in that region, with at least partial participation of the NATO members is absolutely real.  And all of that when people in the UK face the most depressing decline of the life conditions since early Thatcher.

And then the First Minister, Nicola Sturgeon is coming with a promise of the next year referendum, but not with a single word questioning pro-war and pro-austerity line of the Westminster.  Is it only a tactical mistake or obvious SNP emergency exit to avoid keeping promises?  There is no way to effectively provide pro-independence campaign in the realities of the war scare propaganda.  That would just a gift for the Unionists to let them ague “Only the British Army can protect Scotland!”.  And there will be no proper answer, when under SNP Scotland wants to be first to fight for the Empire again!  What kind of the (former?) leftist would send £65 million to Ukraine not as a humanitarian aid, but for military purposes, just to keep war going?  If Scotland, together with the whole UK, starts to be involved in the full war and support it, there will be absolutely no space for any kind of pro-independence and pro-social campaign at all.  And just opposite, war could and should be strong argument for the Scottish separation, politics of disarming and non-alignment with military pacts, as well as focusing on economic issues and preventing social costs of the financial and energy crisis.  Only there is one condition: we have to be against this imperialist war. Always and despite the circumstances and propaganda.  There is no other choice.

If Scots do not want to die for the British jingoism – they have to choose the independence.  Independence means no war for Scottish people and no need to pay for the Tories crisis.  Simple and true slogans can make our future.  Social and national transformation of Scotland simply has to be pacifist or will fail in the interests of Imperialists only.  There is not only the war menace over Europe.  Even in Scotland, among our old comrades we can recognise symptoms of the “consummated opportunism”, this well-known “fellow traveller” of any liberalism.  So, either we oppose that misdirection, or we can farewell our chance for the social justice in own independent state.

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Konrad Rękas is a renowned geopolitical analyst and 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.

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***

“Everyone is the other and no one is himself.” – Martin Heidegger, Being and Time

The Branch Covidian putsch is the most heinous crime ever perpetrated in the history of medicine, and some would argue, in the history of the world. Its success is attributable to the strong presence of Nazi bioethics within the ranks of Western physicians, as well as a broad base of support from the ranks of neoliberals. This inhuman cult dogma, so destructive to the human spirit and antithetical to democracy, is anchored in a contempt for informed consent, and is fueled by careerism, hubris, blind obedience, and an unwavering belief in the infallibility of the public health agencies.

Like any other cult ethos, Branch Covidian dogma operates outside the boundaries of logic and reason. Moreover, all totalitarians are amnesiacs in the sense that they have lost the ability to place political events in their appropriate historical context. Consequently, they can be lied to repeatedly without this leading them to question the veracity of an official narrative mired in pseudoscience and malevolent propaganda.

American doctors have been groomed for the biosecurity putsch for years, as their military-style training is predicated on the notion that their superiors are demigods that must be obeyed unquestioningly. Pronouncements frequently parroted by the legacy media that end up being demonstrably untrue, such as the tale that the mRNA vaccines will take us to herd immunity, fail to break the stranglehold that the cult has over its followers, but rather, as Mattias Desmet has noted, only seem to reinforce it. The claim (reminiscent of Nazi anti-Semitism) that the unvaccinated are spreaders of disease, and that they will have to live with the shame of having murdered their friends and relatives, is still being reiterated even long after it has become apparent that the vaccines do not prevent transmission.

There are dozens of studies that show the ineffectiveness of masks, and dozens that underscore their deleterious health effects when worn incessantly. There are also no less than 140 studies demonstrating that natural immunity to Covid-19 is durable, robust, and long-lasting. The new claim by the apostolic power, that the vaccines diminish virulence, is clearly an attempt on the part of the health care papacy to invent a new narrative following the failure of the “immunization drive.”

“Follow the science” is in fact a euphemism for “Be quiet and do as you’re told.”

The claim that an experimental vaccine can be rigorously tested in under a year and found to be “safe and effective” is absurd, as the process typically takes at least ten years using traditional vaccine technologies. Yet the Branch Covidian isn’t interested in the rule of law, science, morality or even basic common sense. Like the followers of Jack in Lord of the Flies, they are transfixed by the intoxicating power of the death cult.

A few weeks ago I asked one of my doctors how the vaccines could be safe when there were over 30,000 deaths on the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS), to which he replied, “Well, a lot of people took them.” In other words, this is an acceptable degree of collateral damage. In many ways, this is an even more deranged line of reasoning than that made by Dr. Gerhard Rose, head of the Koch Institute of Tropical Medicine during the Third Reich.

Rose attempted to justify doing typhus vaccine experiments on concentration camp prisoners at the Doctors’ Trial by claiming that it was acceptable to sacrifice a hundred men if tens of thousands of German soldiers could potentially be saved, as the Wehrmacht was being ravaged by typhus. This argument was rejected by the court, and he was incarcerated. Like Fauci, Walensky, and Collins, Rose was also “really smart.”

Yet another one of my physicians recently brought up the issue of Covid and suggested that I might consider getting the mRNA vaccine. His reasoning was as follows: he had a difficult bout with Covid despite being “fully vaccinated.” In other words, instead of concluding, as any rational person would, that the Covid vaccines demonstrate questionable efficacy, he concluded that the vaccine saved his life, that it dramatically reduced virulence, and that without it he might have ended up in an intensive care unit. Both doctors attended prestigious schools, and at least ostensibly, are of sound mind.

When the FDA panel met to discuss whether to go ahead with approving the investigational inoculations for children aged five to eleven, Harvard professor and editor-in-chief of The New England Journal of Medicine Dr. Eric Rubin said “We’re never going to learn about how safe this vaccine is unless we start giving it. That’s just the way it goes.” Does one have to be a graduate of an elite medical school to see that this is an utterly depraved argument?

The government of the Third Reich deceived millions of Germans into believing that they had a vast array of enemies, all of which were the spawn of the Nazi propaganda apparatus: Jews, communists, Russians, and Poles to name some of the most prominent. A similar thing has transpired with the Branch Covidians, who have been taught to despise “anti-vaxxers,” “science deniers,” “flat-earthers,” “conspiracy theorists,” and “misinformation spreaders.”

This scapegoating is inextricably linked with efforts to dismantle the First Amendment, as authoritarian regimes cannot abide criticism. In an article in The Federalist by doctors Harvey Risch, Robert Malone, and Byram Bridle, the eminent authors warn of a regime which is increasingly intolerant of dissent:

“Questioning the competence and integrity of government bureaucracies like the FDA doesn’t make someone a bad person or a spreader of disinformation. Government bureaucracies can be wrong, and historically the citizens of democracies have viewed it as not only their right but their duty to scrutinize public officials’ decisions. Dissent is an integral part of the sacred compact between government and governed that underpins a free society, and Americans allow the current regime of censorship to continue at their extreme peril.”

When giving an introduction to Naomi Wolf’s The Bodies of Others at a book event in New York City, Dr. Harvey Risch denounced the devastating effects of the lockdowns, saying that the isolation has turned us into “sub-people.” Chelsea Manning has compared the lockdowns with putting billions of human beings into solitary confinement, saying “people are going to take years to recover from this.”

Blatant lies spewed by the three letter agencies, such as the claim that Hydroxychloroquine can damage the heart, or that Ivermectin is only a veterinary drug when it is on the World Health Organization’s Model List of Essential Medicines, fail to shake the Branch Covidian belief that the orchestrators of the Covid response are irreproachable. (As Dr. Pierre Kory has done with Ivermectin, an entire book could be written on the war on Hydroxychloroquine).

Calls to halt the disastrous mRNA vaccine program are being ignored, even when they come from distinguished voices such as the World Council for Health and renowned cardiologists Aseem Malhotra and Peter McCullough. Only those who represent the Branch Covidian priesthood – replete with its artful pope, cardinals, and bishops – are ordained to be “the experts.”

The Western elites are acutely aware of the fact that if they can obliterate informed consent they can destroy democracy, as this would render both freedom of speech and habeas corpus obsolete. Having reached the zombie stage of capitalism, the Branch Covidian wallows in a state of unreason, amorality, and an atavistic yearning. Like Adolf Eichmann, they no longer live in a world where good and evil exist. There is only one’s career, the illusion of having overcome an excruciating alienation, and the sense of ecstasy that comes from a newfound sense of belonging to the Covid religion.

For many years the education system has played a key role in fomenting totalitarianization by replacing humanities courses with increasingly specialized vocationally oriented courses, while rewarding ideological subservience and punishing creativity, integrity, honesty and critical thinking. It is not a coincidence that many of the most indoctrinated Americans went to the most competitive schools, as they were invented for this very purpose.

Intertwined with the ongoing weaponization of medicine, medical students and residents are often mentored in a manner where they invariably acquire a derisive attitude towards informed consent. For example, practice pelvic exams done on anesthetized patients, patients arm-twisted into accepting the presence of trainees during their physician office visits, trainees instructed to disregard do-not-resuscitate orders (or its antithesis), trainees immersed in an environment where unnecessary surgeries are regularly performed, pediatric residents inculcated with contempt for parental informed consent, gynecology residents trained to blackmail women into having Pap smears in exchange for birth control; and a willful failure to caution trainees regarding the highly addictive nature of opioids, benzodiazepines, barbiturates, and many psychotropic drugs – all are commonplace in American teaching hospitals.

As transpired in Weimar Germany, the West is undergoing a period of cataclysmic destabilization which has led to a growing sense of meaninglessness, alienation, unprecedented levels of atomization, and an unraveling of centuries-old mores and ethical norms. This disintegration of communities, coupled with a growing economic inequality, has brought about the rise of a hyper-careerism where millions of people will do anything to advance their careers. The more coveted the job, the more professional success demands a deep-seated ideological and political conformity. Since there is no perceived benefit in the eyes of the hyper-careerist to being educated regarding the many serious and complex political and socio-economic problems that we face, self-imposed ignorance presents itself as a sensible course of action.

The failure of the Branch Covidian doctor to acknowledge the irrationality behind “the science” (often preposterous even to a layperson), along with their inability to acknowledge the absence of a sound risk-benefit analysis behind any of the official Covid policies, is indicative of their having lost their souls to the cannibalistic machinery of corporate medicine. Every physician, especially in the West, should have been able to immediately ascertain that the lockdowns, mask mandates, vaccine mandates, forced testing, etc., had nothing to do with medicine and everything to do with authoritarianism due to the utter absence of informed consent. That this didn’t occur, underscores how, with the exception of the handful of courageous doctors that have spoken out, the medical profession has been led into a morass of profound moral degradation.

Undoubtedly, those who have doubts about the official narrative yet remain silent, do so out of fear of losing their job. What they fail to understand, is that this craven silence may eventually lead to a situation where the penalty for speaking out will be a loss of freedom which is total and absolute. Indeed, if informed consent is irrevocably lost, the pathologizing of dissent will be normalized. This is evidenced by the fact that Canadian physician Dr. Mel Bruchet, and for a somewhat shorter duration Swiss cardiologist Dr. Thomas Binder, were committed and handed over to the Cult of Psychiatry for expressing heretical views on Branch Covidian theology, and so the process is already underway. This is the last stage of biofascism.

The penchant for overspecialization (which many doctors are presently hiding behind), ruthless ambition, and an indifference towards the most outrageous forms of regulatory capture has caused the biomedical technocrat to be molded into an insensate automaton of a rapacious oligarchy. How is a Branch Covidian doctor who believes that the psychopathic Covid mandates have been necessary to protect people from a virus any less deluded than an American soldier who is sent to Vietnam, Iraq, or Afghanistan and believes that they are “fighting for democracy?”

Writing in Eichmann in Jerusalem, Hannah Arendt emphasizes the connection between evil and mindlessness:

“Evil comes from a failure to think. It defies thought for as soon as thought tries to engage itself with evil and examine the premises and principles from which it originates, it is frustrated because it finds nothing there. That is the banality of evil.”

Karl Brandt, Reich Commissioner for Health and Sanitation and one of the most senior Nazi doctors on trial at Nuremberg, insisted that he was innocent of any wrongdoing when taking the stand at the Doctors’ Trial, despite having been a leading proponent of the Nazi euthanasia program and having been involved in forced medical experimentation on concentration camp inmates. The Nazi medical establishment believed that these ghastly crimes, which were in such incontrovertible violation of the Hippocratic Oath, were acceptable due to the credo of “the greater good” being upheld. Indeed, the Nazi doctor’s sense of utilitarianism regarded German society as one organism, with each person like a cell that collectively comprised this organism. Hence, killing Jews, the mentally ill, along with other Untermenschen, was rationalized in the same way that an oncologist today would regard liquidating cancer cells in an attempt to save a single human life. Today, the Volk is not a race per se, but the Western elites.

This extreme collectivist mentality, which is as intertwined with Branch Covidian doctrine as it was with the Nazi medical ethos, is antithetical to the informed consent ethic and has played a critical role in laying the foundation for a burgeoning health dictatorship.

One must get vaccinated to protect other people. One must wear a mask to protect other people. One must practice social distancing to protect other people. One must get tested to protect other people. The foundational precept of the Nuremberg Code is that medical ethics is rooted in the right to informed consent of the individual.

Dr. Paul Alexander, a pandemic advisor under the Trump administration, who has repeatedly decried the catastrophic harms of the lockdowns, and who possesses more empathy than the overwhelming majority of American doctors put together, has recounted a story about how he asked a senior CDC official where they got the science of the “six feet rule” of social distancing from, to which the official laughed and said it had nothing to do with science – it was about power.

Mindless compliance with policies which are obviously not backed by science, which have an irrational risk-benefit analysis, and which trample on every human being’s inalienable right to bodily autonomy, have brought us to a crossroads where we are hovering over an abyss of a brutal authoritarianism. Nevertheless, it is essential that we continue to intellectually challenge the sleepwalkers.

The Pentagon sacked Iraq; the Romans, Carthage; and the Greeks, Troy. Yet the Branch Covidians have sacked the whole world. Only through the restoration of reason and compassion can humanity cleanse itself from this demonic and fiendish scourge.

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David Penner’s articles on politics and health care have appeared in Dissident Voice, CounterPunch, Global Research, The Saker blog, OffGuardian and KevinMD; while his poetry has been published with Dissident Voice and Mad in America. Also a photographer, he is the author of three books of portraiture: Faces of The New Economy, Faces of Manhattan Island, and Manhattan Pairs. He can be reached at [email protected]. 

Featured image is from Medical Tyranny