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Former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, one of Japan’s most influential postwar leaders, died Friday at the age of 67 after being shot while delivering a stump speech in the western city of Nara two days ahead of a national election.

Japan’s longest-serving leader was shot by a 41-year-old man who approached him from behind at around 11:30 a.m. as he was speaking in front of Kintetsu Railway’s Yamato-Saidaiji Station, police said, adding he collapsed on the ground after two shots were heard. He was rushed to a hospital with blood seen on his shirt.

A doctor with the Nara Medical University Hospital later said at a press conference that Abe was pronounced dead at 5:03 p.m. and the wound was deep enough to reach his heart, adding the cause of death is believed to be blood loss.

Former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe (C) lies on the ground on the side of a road after being shot by a gunman while delivering a stump speech in Nara, western Japan, on July 8, 2022, ahead of the July 10 House of Councillors election. (Kyodo)

Tetsuya Yamagami, a resident of Nara, was arrested at the scene on suspicion of attempted murder, the police said. The suspect was formerly a member of the Maritime Self-Defense Force, apparently for about three years through 2005, according to government sources.

“It’s not a grudge against the political beliefs of former Prime Minister Abe,” the Nara prefectural police quoted Yamagami, whose recent occupation remains unknown, as saying. His home was later searched by the police, who found an item that could be an explosive, they said.

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Featured image: Image from video footage shows former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe delivering a stump speech in Nara on July 8, 2022, shortly before he was shot by a gunman. (Kyodo)

All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the “Translate Website” drop down menu on the top banner of our home page (Desktop version).

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***

The phoney “genocide” in Srebrenica marks its twenty-seventh anniversary on 11 July this year. As politically convenient fabrications go, it must be admitted that it has been extraordinarily effective in serving the purposes for which it was created, but this year’s rather low key observances suggest that it is at the end of its cycle.

There are two heavy hints to that effect. The genocide resolution illegally tabled in the UN General Assembly by Bosnia’s sectarian central government representative Sven Alkalaj, in disregard of the veto placed by the country’s Serb entity, Republika Srpska, has gone practically unnoticed and uncommented by major Western media and political figures. By contrast, in the past, it would have triggered unendurable evocations of the saga of “8,000 men and boys” and their unique suffering.

Concomitantly, as the narrative faces a deficit of global attention, this year simple mathematical realities are reducing the formerly massive funerals of exhumed “victims” to barely a trickle. The annual 11 July interments at the Srebrenica Memorial Centre in Potocari are the centrepiece of the Srebrenica cult. But the recklessness of past years, when every July hundreds of caskets would be buried in tear-jerking ceremonies, is finally taking its toll. As the total number of Srebrenica burials approaches the mandated total of about 8,000, reducing the annual count from hundreds to just a few dozen is the only way to ensure that the drama could be stretched out for a few more years.

Image on the right: Gravestones at the Potočari genocide memorial near Srebrenica (Source: Wikimedia Commons)

Srebrenica is the oddest of genocides for several interesting reasons. For one, it went largely unnoticed for over two years until it was finally “discovered” and publicised at an international conference seemingly convened for that purpose in 1997 in Sarajevo. The supposed genocide went undetected also in the confidential intelligence reports of Sarajevo military and civilian authorities, the aggrieved side which should have been the first to become aware of it. The damning reportswere assembled, perhaps inadvertently, by the Hague Tribunal, the very body whose tendentious verdicts these reports discredit.

Equally curious is the forensic situation, which is completely at odds with what should be expected if a genocide had taken place. It does not support the standard narrative and Hague Tribunal claims which follow that narrative closely. It must be deemed extraordinary that in two and a half decades physical evidence in the form of 8,000 bodies has completely failed to materialise. Exhumation autopsy reports, the only relevant indicator, point to the presence of about 1,920 bodies in Srebrenica related mass graves, but of those only half, or roughly a thousand, exhibit a pattern of injury consistent with execution. The majority of the remainder have unmistakable combat injuries, pointing away from the execution of captured prisoners. That is consistent with known facts on the ground after 11 July 1995. Following the fall of Srebrenica, a large military force from within the supposedly “demilitarised” enclave conducted an armed break-out over a sixty-mile stretch of Serbian territory, along the way engaging Serbian forces in fierce combat and sustaining heavy losses.

The quiet shelving, after 2001, of autopsy-based Srebrenica evidence came in the form of Hague Tribunal’s rather brash attempt to substitute fluidly defined “DNA evidence” for hard forensic data, once it became clear that traditional methods would yield nowhere near the required 8,000 bodies.

From a juridical standpoint, even if the claimed victim figures were granted, a “genocide” whose organisers could not be identified (as freely admitted by ICTY judge Jean-Claude Antonetti in his separate opinion in the Tolimir case), which assuming anything like it had occurred was limited to the municipal level, and whose alleged death toll was only 8,000 in a population of over three million, literally beggars belief. And even more so, ICTY’s preposterous judgment that two weeks later the killing of three individuals in the neighbouring enclave of Zepa also constituted “genocide” because the victims were key community figures without whom the life of the surviving 5,000 inhabitants was rendered unsustainable.

The politically inspired “genocide” in Srebrenica stands out also because it is the only known occurrence of its type that, in the process of supposedly owning up to the failures that led to it, precipitated a world-wide slaughter of literally over a hundred times greater magnitude.

The stark fact is that the utter and most likely deliberate misrepresentation of what happened in Srebrenica, amplified by a powerful media and political machine, was behind the creation of the odious R2P “humanitarian intervention” doctrine. The scope and impact of that mendacious construct are well enough known to require elaboration. Suffice it to say that from Kosovo to Iraq, Libya, and Syria, the interventionist rationale ultimately rooted in fabrications generated around Srebrenica has destroyed an estimated two million lives, enabled imperialist plunder on an epic scale, and led to seemingly irreparable devastation of international law through the pernicious activity of the Hague Tribunal and subsequently its successor, the ICC.

Srebrenica has been an unmitigated human disaster because of the effects of its cynical misuse by the global powers that be, for the basest of purposes. Weaponised in Bosnia as a generator of vicious inter- communal enmity and enduring instability, globally it has wreaked death and destruction on an unprecedented scale, all the more appallingly because of the humanitarian veneer put on to conceal the utter cynicism and amorality of the perpetrators.

The gradual but inexorable disintegration of the phoney Srebrenica narrative should be welcomed by every person committed to honesty and truth.

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Stephen Karganovic is president of “Srebrenica Historical Project,” an NGO registered in the Netherlands to investigate the factual matrix and background of events that took place in Srebrenica in July of 1995.

He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the “Translate Website” drop down menu on the top banner of our home page (Desktop version).

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***

The European Union is adamant that it is a “union of equals” and that the “interests and concerns of all of its current and/or prospective members will be taken into consideration”. Within the EU legal system, this is also made crystal clear by Article 4(2) TEU which states that “the Union shall respect the equality of Member States before the Treaties”. Still, the reality is starkly different. On paper, every member state is equally important. However, nobody truly believes that countries like Luxembourg or Malta could ever be as important and powerful as Germany or France. Worse yet, even France has trouble matching German dominance in the EU, to say nothing of other member states, particularly those in Southern and Eastern Europe.

As then there’s Southeast Europe. Current and prospective EU members there are as overlooked and dismissed as they could possibly be. Greece, by far the most important and powerful member in Southeast Europe is held in perpetual debt enslavement, while Bulgaria and Romania are virtually without sovereignty. And last, the so-called “Western Balkans” or former Yugoslavia (and Albania). This region’s EU perspective is questionable, at best. However, not so much thanks to the region itself. It is the bureaucratic empire that has treated the region as an outright colony, the one it created by destroying the relatively prosperous (and sovereign) Yugoslavia, instead creating half a dozen neo-colonies with little in terms of actual historical heritage and identity, a practice better known as the so-called “nation-building”, which is an expertise of the US and NATO.

The only exception to this is Serbia, the original founding state and by far the most important member of former Yugoslavia. Currently a semi-sovereign state, Serbia has been through a lot in recent decades, particularly since 1991, when the political West placed the country under a decade-long siege, destroying and dismantling Yugoslavia, while doing everything possible to expand the territorial scope of everyone else in the region, at the expense of ethnic Serbs, who have been expelled from nearly all regions of former Yugoslavia. The EU itself was (and still is) instrumental in this, together with the US. To achieve this, the political West has bombed Serbs 3 times in less than a decade, starting with the Republic of Serbian Krajina (1994-1995), Republika Srpska (1994-1995) and Serbia itself (1999).

It was catastrophic for Serbs, with tens of thousands killed, nearly a million refugees being forced out of their millennia-old ancestral lands and the ensuing economic and social devastation, the result of which was decades of stagnation. However, the EU and the US weren’t done with destroying the country. Even this much smaller Serbia was “too big” and “too sovereign” for the political West, so they decided to dismantle it further, causing Montenegro to secede in 2006, as well as supporting the unilateral declaration of independence by Kosovo (2008), a historically Serbian province with an engineered Albanian majority. Since then, 22 out of 27 EU member states have recognized the narco-terrorist entity. Brussels has tried to convince others to do so as well.

Formally, the EU never set Kosovo recognition as a condition for EU membership, although it did imply it many times since. However, on July 6, the EU crossed that line as well, when the European Parliament adopted the Resolution on Serbia, which “expresses support” for Serbia’s membership in the EU, but conditions the ascension with “urgent compliance” with the EU sanctions against Russia and Belarus, as well as the recognition of Kosovo as an independent state. These two requirements are now set as mandatory for further ascension talks. Top EU bureaucrat for Serbia Vladimir Bilcik emphasized Brussels expects Serbia to fully comply.

“That is why it is important that Serbia moves towards the EU, and not to any other side,” said Bilcik.

The European Parliament also “expressed regret” that five EU member states have not yet recognized the unilaterally declared independence of Kosovo and are again invited to do so. While Serbia was criticized for not sanctioning Russia and Belarus, the narco-terrorist neocolonial entity in occupied Kosovo was praised by the European Parliament for aligning with the European Union’s position on sanctions against Russia and Belarus.

Naturally, these terms are absolutely unacceptable to Serbia and can be considered indecent, to say the least. Neither Russia nor Belarus have ever done anything wrong to Serbia. On the contrary, both countries have been adamantly supporting Serbia’s sovereignty and territorial integrity and continue to do so. Historically, Serbia has been supported by Russia for centuries. Without the involvement of the Eurasian giant, it’s highly unlikely Serbia would’ve ever gotten its independence, let alone survived numerous brutal invasions and genocides coming from the political West in the last 100 years.

Turning against Russia for the sake of becoming a full colony of a centuries-old enemy could only be described as a mindless stab in the back which no government in Serbia would be able to survive, as it would be tantamount to political suicide. Thus, this resolution by the European Parliament means that Serbia’s EU ascension is effectively dead. Considering that the majority of Serbs don’t want to become part of the EU anyway, all they themselves could say is good riddance.

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Drago Bosnic is an independent geopolitical and military analyst.

Featured image is from InfoBrics

All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the “Translate Website” drop down menu on the top banner of our home page (Desktop version).

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

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***

Once upon a time, in a galaxy not far away, the Empire of Chaos launched the so-called “War on Terror” against an impoverished cemetery of empires at the crossroads of Central and South Asia.

In the name of national security, the land of the Afghans was bombed until the Pentagon ran out of targets, as their chief Donald Rumsfeld, addicted to “known unknowns,” complained at the time.

Operation ‘Enduring Captivity’

Civilian targets, also known as “collateral damage,” was the norm for years. Multitudes had to flee to neighboring nations to find shelter, while tens of thousands were incarcerated for unknown reasons, some even dispatched to an illegal imperial gulag on a tropical island in the Caribbean.

War crimes were duly perpetrated – some of them denounced by an organization led by a sterling journalist who was subsequently subjected to years of psychological torture by the same Empire, obsessed with extraditing him into its own prison dystopia.

All the time, the smug, civilized ‘international community’ – shorthand for the collective west – was virtually deaf, dumb and blind. Afghanistan was occupied by over 40 nations – while repeatedly bombed and droned by the Empire, which suffered no condemnation for its aggression; no package after package of sanctions; no confiscation of hundreds of billions of dollars; no punishment at all.

The first casualty of war

At the peak of its unipolar moment, the Empire could experiment with anything in Afghanistan because impunity was the norm. Two examples spring to mind: Kandahar, Panjwayi district, March 2012: an imperial soldier kills 16 civilians and then burns their bodies. While in Kunduz, April 2018: a graduation ceremony receives a Hellfire missile greeting, with over 30 civilians killed.

The final act of the imperial “non-aggression” against Afghanistan was a drone strike in Kabul that did not hit “multiple suicide bombers” but instead eviscerated a family of 10, including several children. The “imminent threat” in question, identified as an “ISIS facilitator” by US intelligence, was actually an aid worker returning to meet his family. The ‘international community’ duly spewed imperial propaganda for days until serious questions started to be asked.

Questions also keep emerging on the conditions surrounding the Pentagon training of Afghan pilots to fly the Brazilian-built A-29 Super Tucano between 2016 and 2020, which completed over 2,000 missions providing support for imperial strikes. During training at Moody Air Force base in the US, more than half of the Afghan pilots actually went AWOL, and afterward, most were quite uneasy with the pile up of civilian ‘collateral damage.’ Of course the Pentagon has kept no record of Afghan victims.

What was extolled instead by the US Air Force is how the Super Tucanos dropped laser bombs on ‘enemy targets:’ Taliban fighters who “like to hide in towns and places” where civilians live. Miraculously, it was claimed that the “precision” strikes never “hurt the local people.”

That’s not exactly what an Afghan refugee in Britain, sent away by his family when he was only 13, revealed over a month ago, talking about his village in Tagab: “All the time there was fighting over there. The village belongs to the Taliban (…) My family is still there, I do not know if they are alive or died. I don’t have any contact with them.”

Drone diplomacy

One of the first foreign policy decisions of the Obama administration in early 2009 was to turbo-charge a drone war over Afghanistan and the tribal areas in Pakistan. Years later, a few intelligence analysts from other NATO nations started to vent off the record, about CIA impunity: drone strikes would get a green light even if killing scores of civilians was a near certainty – as it happened not only in ‘AfPak’ but also across other war theaters in West Asia and North Africa.

Nevertheless, imperial logic is ironclad. The Taliban were by definition “terra-rists” – in trademark Bush drawl. By extension, villages in Afghan deserts and mountains were aiding and abetting “terra-rists,” so eventual drone victims would never raise a ‘human rights’ issue.

When Afghans – or Palestinians – become collateral damage, that’s irrelevant. When they become war refugees, they are a threat. Yet Ukrainian civilian deaths are meticulously recorded and when they become refugees, they are treated as heroes.

A massive ‘data-driven defeat’

As former British diplomat Alastair Crooke has remarked, Afghanistan was the definitive showcase for technical managerialism, the test bed for “every single innovation in technocratic project management” encompassing Big Data, Artificial Intelligence and military sociology embedded in ‘Human Terrain Teams’ – this experiment helped spawn Empire’s ‘rules-based international order.’

But then, the US-backed puppet regime in Kabul collapsed not with a bang, but a whimper: a spectacular “data-driven defeat.”

Hell hath no fury like Empire scorned. As if all the bombing, droning, years of occupation and serial collateral damage was not misery enough, a resentful Washington topped its performance by effectively stealing $7 billion from the Afghan central bank: that is, funds that belong to roughly 40 million battered Afghan citizens.

Now, exiled Afghans are getting together trying to prevent relatives from 9/11 victims in the US to seize $3.5 billion of these funds to pay off debts allegedly owed by the Taliban – who have absolutely nothing to do with 9/11.

Unlawful does not even begin to qualify the confiscation of assets from an impoverished nation afflicted by a currency in free fall, high inflation and a terrifying humanitarian crisis, whose only ‘crime’ was to defeat the imperial occupation on the battleground fair and square. By any standards, would that persist, the qualification of international war crime applies. And collateral damage, in this case, will mean the termination of any “credibility” still enjoyed by the “indispensable nation.”

The full amount of foreign reserves should be unequivocally returned to the Afghan Central Bank. Yet everyone knows that’s not going to happen. At best, a limited monthly installment will be released, barely enough to stabilize prices and allow average Afghans to buy essentials such as bread, cooking oil, sugar and fuel.

The west’s own ‘Silk Road’ was dead on arrival

No one remembers today that the US State Department came up with its own New Silk Road idea in July 2011, formally announced by then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in a speech in India. Washington’s aim, at least in theory, was to re-link Afghanistan with Central/South Asia, yet privileging security over the economy.

The spin was to “turn enemies into friends and aid into trade.” The reality, however, was to prevent Kabul from falling into the Russia/China sphere of influence – represented by the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) – after the tentative withdrawal of US troops in 2014 (the Empire ended up formally being expelled only in 2021).

The American Silk Road would eventually allow the go-ahead for projects such as the TAPI natural gas pipeline, the CASA-1000 electricity line, the Sheberghan thermal power facility and a national fiber optic ring in the telecom sector.

There was much talk about  “development of human resources;” building infrastructure – railways, roads, dams, economic zones, resource corridors; promotion of good governance; building the capacity of “local stakeholders.”

A zombie of an empire

In the end, the Americans did less than nothing. The Chinese, playing the long game, will be leading Afghanistan’s resurgence, after patiently waiting for the Empire to be expelled.

Afghanistan for its part will be welcomed into the real New Silk Roads: the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), complete with financing by the Silk Road Bank and the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), and interconnecting with the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), the Central Asian BRI corridor, and eventually the Russian-led Eurasia Economic Union (EAEU) and the Iran-India-Russia-led International North South Transportation Corridor (INSTC).

Now compare and contrast with imperial minions NATO, whose “new” strategic concept boils down to expanded warmongering against the Global South, and beyond – including the outer galaxies. At least we know that should NATO ever be tempted back into Afghanistan, then another ritual, excruciating humiliation awaits.

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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” drop down menu on the top banner of our home page (Desktop version).

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

Follow us on Instagram and Twitter and subscribe to our Telegram Channel. Feel free to repost and share widely Global Research articles.

***

While front lines in Eastern Ukraine are burning, another battle is gaining momentum in the capital. The Kiev regime seems to face another crisis between the military and political leadership in the country.

Joint forces of the Donetsk, Luhansk People’s Republics and Russia claim new victories in the Donbass. After the Severodonetsk-Lisichansk metropolitan area came under control of the LPR, Russian-led forces achieved significant successes in their advance to the west. In the direction of Seversk, the town of Verhnekamenka became the stronghold of Russian units which will attack Seversk from the east.

In the morning on July 6, the advancing forces aligned the front and claimed control of the village of Spornoe located to the south of Verhnekamenka. At the moment, the mop up operation continues. Retreating Ukrainian units are shelling the village with artillery. The Russian advance was acknowledged in the evening summary by the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, which claimed Russian forces “had partial success in the area of the village”. This gain allows the Russians to attack Zvanovka and blockade Seversk from the southern direction.

Russian units are also approaching Seversk from the north-eastern direction. The offensive is developing on the right bank of the Seversky Donets River in the direction of Grigorovka and Serebryanka.

In the other regions, heavy positional fighting continues.

Suffering heavy losses on the front lines, the Kiev regime attempts to stop the outflow of civilians who can be conscripted into the military. However, it cannot decide on the necessary measures.

Earlier, the Ukrainian General Staff declared a legislative ban on leaving their place of residence for men of military age without the permission of the military enlistment office during the period of martial law.

On July 5, a bill has been submitted to the Verkhovna Rada clarifying the procedure for the departure of conscripts and reservists from their place of residence within Ukraine.

In turn, President Zelensky attempted to support his ruined reputation amid the unpopular regulation. On July 6, the President publicly demanded the General Staff not to take such decisions without him.

“I instructed the Minister of Defense, the Chief of the General Staff and the Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of Ukraine to report to me tomorrow all the details regarding the decision on the procedure. I ask the General Staff not to take such decisions without me in the future,” Zelensky said.

Such claims are humiliating for the Ukrainian general commanders.

Disagreements between the office of Vladimir Zelensky and the command of the Ukrainian army over the conduct of military operations have already been reported in the last months. In particular, the military reportedly believed that it was necessary to retreat on several fronts, while the president’s office insisted that no retreats were possible. As a result, the Armed Forces of Ukraine suffered heavy losses in manpower on the front lines.

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George Orwell in his dystopian novel 1984 introduced the concepts of “Newspeak” and “Thoughtcrime” or the curtailing of freedom of expression, narrowly defined.

Orwell’s depiction of an authoritarian society continues to reverberate four decades on. 

We live in an age of fear brought about by disinformation, amplified by absolute tyranny. This is demonstrated by the COVID-19 crisis where free press and free speech are being outlawed. 

Is this the kind of “democracy” we are passing on to future generations?

Global Research acts as a global platform for much needed debate and dialogue within the context of a very complex crisis. We have in the course of the last two years provided daily coverage and analysis of the COVID crisis, which is affecting people’s lives worldwide.

Our intention is to continue to relentlessly promote independent and authoritative voices that speak out on issues which are deliberately neglected or distorted by the corporate media.

To deliver on this intention, we need your help. Please support us: donate or become a member now by clicking below.

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The present war, in which NATO countries are involved, providing Ukraine with modern weapons, including offensive weapons, is the most dangerous military conflict since the Second World War. It is a huge threat to the economic situation of the world and to world peace.

Klaus Schwab’s “Great Reset” Dream Soon to Burst? Now Also Peasant Protests and Blockades in Spain

By Bettina Sauer, July 07, 2022

Are there now farmers’ protests across Europe against insane, home-made inflation, the energy crisis and the EU? After the farmers in the Netherlands had been fighting against the EU’s “Green Deal” and thus against Schwab’s Great Reset dream for weeks by taking the protest to the streets, it’s now happening again in Spain – like last time in March – to protests by farmers. Ever larger parts of the population are behind the farmers and show solidarity with them.

New Australian Labor Government Fails on Nukes, Poverty & Climate

By Gideon Polya, July 07, 2022

Most Australians welcomed the defeat by Labor of the mendacious, corrupt, incompetent, climate criminal, and racist Australian Coalition Government in the 21 May 2022 elections. However the Australian Albanese Labor Government, while vastly better than its predecessor, is egregiously neoliberal, cowardly, pro-Zionist, US-beholden and pro-fossil fuels, and has so far failed on nuclear weapons, poverty and climate change that are the 3 key existential threats to Humanity.

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***

Like the political equivalent of a cockroach, UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson survived and endured one strike after another.  His credibility was shot, his mendacity second to none.  He lost the confidence of a party that delighted in his buffoonish performances and appeal.  Fearing electoral punishment, senior ministers and aides have left his side.  Labour opposition leader, Sir Keir Starmer, found himself making a witticism, calling this the first instance in history of the ship leaving the sinking rat.

No chronology on this would be sufficient.  But the recent turn of events has been something verging on spectacular.  There was partygate, which demonstrated the fullness of contempt shown by the Prime Minister and his staff to their constituents.  In April, he was fined for breaking his government’s own lockdown rules, having attended a gathering for his birthday in June 2020.  He also apologised for attending a “bring your own booze” party held in the Downing Street garden held during the first lockdown.  Despite showing some contrition, he believed, for the most part, that he had been following the rules and operating within them.

The occasion led to fines aplenty, though even the Police, at some point, drew a line underneath the sad and sorry saga.  Sue Gray, the senior civil servant tasked with investigating a series of social events held by political staff, came up with a grave conclusion.  “The senior leadership at the centre, both political and official, must bear responsibility for this culture.”

On June 16, the Tory leader survived a no-confidence vote from his own party, in which four out of ten parliamentarians voted against him.  Most PMs would have made a hasty exit.  Not Johnson, who seemed quixotically willing to make his last stand.

Then came the by-election losses in Tiverton and Honiton and Wakefield of June 23^rd.  Instead of treating them as symptoms of a malady requiring treatment, Johnson simply put them down to the UK “facing pressures on the cost of living” and the fact that “in mid-term, governments post-war lose by-elections.”

The latest, and typically seedy entry in the scandals inventory, was the sexual harassment imbroglio involving Chris Pincher (“Pincher by name, Pincher by nature,” Johnson is said to have quipped).  As Conservative deputy-chief whip, he went to a private members’ club in London on June 29, got sozzled and was accused of groping two men.

A number of sexual assault allegations followed, some duly dusted for the occasion.  Despite a formal complaint being made against Pincher, Johnson denied knowledge of the “specific allegations”.  Not so, suggested former civil servant, Lord McDonald, seeing that he briefed the PM about it.  True to form, Johnson subsequently admitted he had been told in 2019, and regretted appointing Pincher to the party position in the first place.

Over the course of 48 hours, the Tory front bench was dramatically thinned of members.  Law makers and government officials left in an exodus of calculated and self-interested disaffection.  Stripped of support from across the most powerful figures in the party, the decision was made.

The resignation speech exuded reluctance, sounding more like a resume pitch for a return to the job.  It reflected the spectacular tone-deafness of his rule, with Johnson going so far as to lament those “Darwinian” rules that govern Westminster politics, driven by the hungry, remorseless “herd”.  The herd had moved and found their quarry.

Johnson extolled his government’s pandemic response on the vaccine front despite incompetence and bungling that led to the deaths of tens of thousands during the pre-vaccine phase.  Confused health directions on everything from mask wearing to whether Christmas might go ahead as usual, did not help.  When those responses firmed up in the form of strict lockdown rules, Johnson, his colleagues, and advisors flouted them with condescension and arrogance.

While being self-congratulatory on his own Brexit record, the report card is far from glowing.  Despite advertising the deal to electors as “oven ready”, the withdrawal agreement with the EU proved half-baked and raw at the core.

Even after reaching an accord with the EU, his government, last month, introduced plans to override parts of it, thereby threatening relations with the Union, the unity of the United Kingdom and the Irish peace process.  Only Johnson could term scrapping sections of the Protocol, which covers the way goods enter Northern Ireland from the rest of the UK, “a relatively trivial set of adjustments.”

There was little chance Johnson would leave Ukraine out of his resignation speech.  Detractors, and even some of those sympathetic to him, had noticed how willingly he seemed to extol the virtues of Ukraine as each crisis engulfed him.  He was the first leader of any major Western nation state to visit Kyiv, and also pledged a number of weapons, including the Javelin and NLAW missiles, and M270 precision-guided rocket launchers.

Another largely neglected legacy of the Johnson years should be noted.  Domestically, his conduct in centralising power during the course of Brexit and the COVID-19 pandemic at the expense of Parliament has emboldened the executive arm of government and damaged accountability.  In August 2019, he suspended, or prorogued Parliament for 5 weeks, just prior to the return of MPs from the summer recess.  The following month, the UK Supreme Court declared the prorogation unlawful.  “It is impossible for us to conclude, on the evidence which has been put before us, that there was any reason – let alone good reason – to advise Her Majesty to prorogue Parliament for five weeks”.

Through the course of his political career, Johnson never changed.  He had his supporters, his conspirators, his plotters.  He stayed true to his lies, abject opportunism and tabloid-styled villainy.  His administration proved rotten, but so were the various figures that gave him succour, including the indignant former advisor Dominic Cummings who now plays the role of stone-thrower in chief against his former boss.

Even now, some journalists and commentators detected throbbing notes of magnanimity and grace in his resignation speech, showing again how a profession that Johnson himself corrupted with such glee cannot be trusted to assess this legacy.

*

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Dr. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge.  He currently lectures at RMIT University. He is a regular contributor to Global Research and Asia-Pacific Research. Email: [email protected]

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***

The United States Supreme Court on June 24, 2022 handed down its decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization that reversed the landmark US Supreme Court Roe v. Wade (1973) decision that granted the right to abortion for women in all states and US territories.  

Roe was the most important US Supreme Court case since Brown v. Board of Education (1954) if measured by the numbers of Americans it impacted. The Court held in Roe that protected “privacy” included the basic right of a woman to procure an abortion from a doctor in the first trimester of pregnancy.  “Privacy” replaced “freedom of contract.” This demonstrated that the Court was willing to interpret the Constitution as containing rights not obvious from reading the text. [Emphasis added] (McCloskey 2000, 172; Carter 2022).

Dobbs also reversed Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992) where the Rehnquist Court ruled that laws requiring awareness of a spousal abortion were invalid because they placed an undue burden on a woman seeking an abortion of a “nonviable fetus.”  In short, Planned Parenthood v. Casey upheld Roe, but abandoned privacy as the foundation for the ruling.  On May 2, Justice Samuel Alito’s draft ruling for Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization was leaked and published in Politico.  US Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts confirmed the draft’s authenticity and called for an investigation to reveal the leaker.  The Dobbs ruling abolished the right to abortion for 175 million women (Carter 2022).

Dobbs declares that it is the states’ prerogative to prohibit or regulate abortion and therefore this right is “returned” to the state governments.  This decision paves the way for state and local jurisdictions to institute restrictive laws that prohibit abortions outright and to bar women from traveling to obtain an abortion.  Additionally, draconian laws would allow jail sentences and fines for doctors, nurses, friends, and family members who “aid and abet” an abortion.  At least thirteen states have already passed so-called trigger laws that went into effect when the US Supreme Court handed down its decision.  Twenty-six states as of April 2022 are certain or likely to ban abortion subsequent the Court’s decision (Carter 2022; Nash and Cross 2022).

The Dobbs ruling ignored the primary task of juris prudence to respect the right of “Precedent.”  Since 1973, High Court Justices examined Roe v. Wade and upheld the decision.  The Roberts Court fails to address the concerns that led those Justices to their decisions.  Indeed, it ignores their predecessors’ conclusions and reasoning.  The Roberts Court in Dobbs(and the majority’s opinion) flies in the face of centuries of judicial tradition.  The Court’s omission must be stressed in light of the testimonies of Justices in the majority opinion who during their Senate confirmation hearings emphasized the importance of “settled law” (Tigar 2022).

Immediately following the leaked Dobbs decision, legal scholars warned ominously that the majority opinion challenges the fundamental rights that stem from the Fourteenth Amendment that lays the foundation for citizens’ rights, “due process of law,” and “equal protection of the laws.”  The Dobbs ruling also opens the door for further restrictions on the elementary principle of personal privacy—same sex or interracial marriage, LGBT rights, and legal contraception (Against the Current 2022; Ziegler 2022).

The High Court rationalized its ruling in Dobbs to end the 50-year-old Roe v. Wade decision by asserting that it was egregiously wrong from the beginning.  The majority stated that Roe was a badly reasoned decision by even the most ardent supporters of abortion rights including the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg.  The majority suggested that Plessy v. Ferguson(1896) that  instituted the “separate but equal” doctrine that legitimized racial segregation as constitutional is the best comparison to Roe (and Planned Parenthood v. Casey, the ruling that saved abortion rights in 1992) (Ziegler 2022).

Mary Ziegler, a law professor at the University of California, Davis warned: “If this decision signals anything bigger than its direct consequences, it is this: “No one should get used to their rights….  With Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Organization is a stark reminder that this can happen.  Rights can vanish….  They [the majority] tell us that the right to abortion is unlike other privacy rights, such as the right to marry whom you wish or to use whatever contraception you choose.  Abortion in their view is distinct from these because it puts someone else’s life on the line.  And, so, if we believe the Court’s conservative justices, this is a reckoning about abortion and nothing more” (Ziegler 2022).

Notwithstanding the Court’s assurances that no other rights will be forfeited—convincingly or not— the majority normalizes striking down with questionable logic a 50-year-old US Supreme Court decision that allowed for women to control their own bodies.

The Roe v. Wade decision spawned “a consensus around a woman’s right to choose has broadened and strengthened in the years since Roe was decided,” Tigar said.  In contrast, Justice Alito’s argument is that the Constitution is silent on abortion; he then cobbles together a string of laws dating from the sixteenth century that limited women’s rights (Tigar 2022; Ziegler 2022).

The Dobbs decision establishes a new legal test that any constitutional rights previously upheld by precedent can be erased without warning.  Dobbs mandates that rights not listed verbatim in the Constitution are unenforceable.  Any rights not widely recognized after December 1791 when the Bill of Rights was ratified are not guaranteed.  The High Court’s new legal test could be applied to all “fundamental Rights” that are not mentioned anywhere in the Constitution.  It also calls all “unenumerated rights” into question by referring to them as “putative rights,” i.e., rights that are assumed to exist but that might not exist in reality (London 2022; Carter 2022).

While the majority argued that they could find no tangible support in the Roe v. Wade decision to affirm its constitutionality, the Ninth Amendment states, “The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.”  The founders were cognizant that lists can deceive people into believing that any right not specifically mentioned implies that the right is unimportant or does not exist at all.  Alito’s logic could be turned to render the conclusion that abortion is a right because the Constitution does not specifically grant the government any right to prohibit it.  The Ninth Amendment serves as a safety valve to account for future generations’ new understandings (Tigar 2022; Carter 2022).

Michael E. Tigar, Professor Emeritus of Law at Duke University scorned Alito’s “originalist” analysis as “one of the stupidest and most ahistorical bits of writing in Supreme Court history that includes, one must recall, the Dred Scott [1857] case dictum that African Americans have ‘no rights that a white man is bound to respect.’”

Thomas Jefferson observed in 1816: “Some men look at the Constitutions with sanctimonious reverence, and then deem them, like the ark of the covenant, too sacred to be touched.”  Finally, there was little discussion in the Alito narrative that considered the damage that reversing Roe v. Wadewill inflict upon the most vulnerable women and children in US society (Tigar 2022; Ziegler 2022; Carter 2022).

Dobbs denounces the landmark decision Obergefell v. Hodges (2015) that legalized gay marriage throughout the United States.  Dobbs also criticized Griswold v. Connecticut (1965) that struck down legislation that prohibited the use of contraceptives based upon in part on the “right of privacy”—even though it is not mentioned specifically in the Constitution.

Writing for the majority, Justice William O. Douglas wrote the text in the Bill of Rights contained “penumbras and emanations” that protected marital privacy.  The notion that the Constitution is a document that is subject to interpretation in accordance with changes in social, economic, political, and technology must be acknowledged as having a firm basis in law.  The Roberts Court ignores this foundation and attempts to define modern law based on assumed doctrines of more than two centuries ago.   The repudiations of settled law delivered in the Roberts Court are frightening and dangerous in their scope of laying the foundations for potential attacks on the private lives of individuals (London 2022; McCloskey 2000).

 There are six ultraconservative Justices who came down as a bloc against Roe: John Roberts, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, Clarence Thomas, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett.  Republicans nominated them all.  President Donald Trump named three of the six during his single term in the Oval Office: Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett.

Democrats nominated the remaining three “liberal” Justices who opposed Dobbs.  Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Stephen Breyer, who retired on June 30.  On February 25, 2022, President Joseph Biden nominated Ketanji Brown Jackson to take the bench upon Justice Breyer’s retirement.  The Senate confirmed Jackson on April 7, and Chief Justice John Roberts swore her into office on June 30.

Both major political parties with the Republicans acting aggressively and the Democrats passively acquiescing to their every whim brought the US Supreme Court to the point where settled law is no longer the foundation of the law.  Instead, six of the nine Justices on the Court hold a super majority whereby they act in concert to further a reactionary ideology based on religious beliefs and the erosion of democratic rights.

*

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Edward B. Winslow is a historian and writer.  Readers can reach Edward at [email protected]

Sources

Against the Current. 2022. “The Rightwing’s Supreme Court Coup.” againstthecurrent.org. June 24. Accessed June 29, 2022. https://againstthecurrent.org/atc219/the-rightwings-supreme-court-coup/.

Carter, Tom. 2022. “The Legal Implications of the US Supreme Court’s Draft and Anti-abortion Decision.” wsws.org.May 13. Accessed June 29, 2022. https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2022/05/14/scot-m14.html.

London, Eric. 2022. “The Supreme Court’s Ruling on Abortion: The Speahead of a Massive Assault on Democratic Rights.” wsws.org. May 7. Accessed June 29, 2022. https://wsws.org/en/articles/2022/05/07/ukvl-m07.html.

McCloskey, Robert G. 2000. The American Supreme Court, Third Edition. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

Nash, Elizabeth, and Lauren Cross. 2022. “26 States Are Certain or Likely to Ban Abortion Without Roe: Here’s Which Ones and Why.” guttmacher.org. April 19. Accessed July 3, 2022. guttmacher.org/article//2021/10/26–states-are-certain-or-likely-ban-abortion—-without-roe-heres-which-ones-and-why.

Tigar, Michael E. 2022. “mronline.org.” The Supreme Court, Rights, and Judicial Abdication. June 27. Accessed June 28, 2022. https://mronline.org/2022/06/27/the-supreme-court-rights-and-judicial-abdication/?mc_cid=774a45390f&mc_eid=1b93ae7950.

Ziegler, Mary. 2022. “If the Supreme Court Can Reverse Roe, It Can Reverse Anything.” theatlantic.com. June 24. Accessed July 1, 2022. https://theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/06/roe-overturned-dobbs-abortion-supreme-court/661263/.

Featured image is from The Conversation

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***

The following text is a translation by Evolve to Ecology of an article published in Uruguay’s El Observador

***

At 9 a.m. this morning, Recarey began the hearing for the appeal led by lawyer Maximiliano Dentone to stop vaccination against covid to children under 13 years of age. Maximiliano Dentone said at the hearing that he wants to suspend the vaccination of children under 13 years of age until it is proven that it does not harm health.

The Uruguay judge has submitted 18 questions to Pfizer that need to be answered by Thursday 7th July, morning, before 9am.

Since 9 a.m., the Ministry of Public Health (MSP) and the pharmaceutical company Pfizer have been in a hearing in the Judiciary for the appeal led by the lawyer Maximiliano Dentone, who has petitoned to suspend vaccination against covid in children, and requests information on vaccines and contracts for the purchase and sale of these.

The substitute judge for Administrative Litigation, Alejandro Recaray, approved the appeal, and made a list of 15 requests to the government and the US company, which the government prepared to present this day, Wednesday the 6th of July, 2022.

Both Recaray and Dentone are supported by a group of protesters outside the Courts, who ask that vaccination be suspended in children like the lawyer. Among them is PERI deputy César Vega, whom Dentone defended in a defamation case.

At the beginning of the hearing, the judge asked the lawyer three questions:  whether “he understands acting in a personal capacity and to what extent. Dentone responded that he is acting in “his own best interest”, but also “defending minors” of young age. The second question from Recarey was “What is the age range for which the suspension of the vaccination campaign is requested?”, to which the lawyer replied that he seeks to suspend vaccination for those under 13 years of age.

The third question was based on knowing if Dentone seeks to “limit or condition the suspension to some specific factor. For the complainant, the suspension would be limited “until it is proven that there is no harm to health” from being vaccinated against the coronavirus, he replied at the hearing.  To get to that point, he understands, the delivery of information from the government and Pfizer is necessary. The reason being is that “The population was instructed to give consent to the vaccine without being fully informed”, he highlighted at the end of this response.

Judge ordered Salinas to answer 18 questions about vaccination he judge ordered that an clerk take a statement in his office

The Minister of Health, Daniel Salinas, had been summoned by Judge Alejandro Recarey but did not appear, so he was represented by lawyers from the MSP. At the hearing, the judge ruled that the minister must testify and answer 18 questions about vaccination. For this, he arranged for a bailiff or an clerk to take a statement from his office.

In the decree issued by Recarey, he indicated “personally request the response of Daniel Salinas by the bailiff and/or clerk at his work address,” and ordered that the response must be added to the case file this Thursday at 9 a.m. The hearing for the amparo appeal will continue this Thursday.

The 18 questions Salinas will have to answer:

1. Beyond any contractual reserve, have independent studies been carried out by the Uruguayan State on the information provided by their manufacturers, to verify the safety and effectiveness of the vaccine substances in use in Uruguay? Were international independent studies also used?

2. Starting from the reservation regarding the composition of the vaccine substances, how were they made, if they did, the identity and quality controls of each consignment of imported vaccines, one by one, as what were coming to our country? If so, detail -synthetically- amount of analysis and methodology.

3. Were and are all the batches of vaccines that are injected the same? Demonstrate if your answer is born from an effective knowledge of its components, or not.

4. For what reason were different types and brands of vaccines administered to different groups or population groups (for example, age groups, for police officers, health personnel, minors, etc?

5. Are there differential assessment criteria regarding effectiveness and safety for the different brands (Pfizer, Sinovac or Coronavac)?

6. What vaccine is injected to minors, and what are the proven scientific criteria that lead to preferring this one to others?

7. Did the MSP monitor the vaccinated and a control group of non-vaccinated individuals to determine rates of infection, re-infection, and death in both groups, obtaining statistically valid and generalizable data? If so, what was it, where can it be examined, who did it and how?

8. It is already known that vaccines, or some of them, contain the so-called “spike protein”. Are you aware if your inoculation has adverse effects -in the short, medium and long term- on the structure of the natural immune system? of people (in general and especially in children)? If you know there are no negative effects, based on what studies? If studies in this regard had been analyzed by the MSP (or any other national health authority), what were these specifically, what were their origins and who were their authors?

9. Do you know if the “spike protein” has any level of toxicity in itself? If you know that it is not, based on what information?

10. Is Covid-19, Sars Cov-2, a disease deemable as high or significantly aggressive for children? Does it cause, on average, serious effects? Or is there a predominance of mild effects in the child population? If statistical gravity is established in the aforementioned effects, based on what studies is it done?

11. Has the correlation between the occurrence of the disease and vaccination been studied, at the national state level, in the cases of those already vaccinated? That is, contagion, and development of the disease in these hypotheses.

12. Did the cases of Covid-19 in minors grow -of whatever level of severity- after vaccination, in relation to those that had been verified before (for the same age group, of course), in the period that ran from the initial validity of the health emergency of the year 2020, and the beginning of the inoculations to minors? In the event that after vaccinating minors an increase in cases had been reported in them, have the causes been studied? How?

13.Does the vaccination process during an epidemic increase the variability of mutations in virus proteins? Does it harm in any way the natural reaction of the immune system of those inoculated, especially minors?

14. Has it been studied whether, in the case of the vaccines supplied in Uruguay, the usual three-year trial protocols with control groups have been followed? Are you aware that the Pfizer company, in relation to the vaccine that is supplied to minors in Uruguay, has eliminated its control groups? Or avoided in any way its implementation and development?

15. If the answer to the previous question shows that the effects of vaccines have not been analysed, with due safety protocols, could it be technically argued that vaccination implies a risk factor, even a relative risk? Or not (and in your case why)?

16. Are you aware of the existence of international reports, such as those of the VAERS (or others), who report deaths or serious secondary effects -at any age- linked to the vaccines that are supplied in Uruguay? If so, have they been studied by the Uruguayan State? At what level, by whom and with what results?

17. Has the evidence been studied in Uruguay to conclude that vaccination against Covid 19 in minors produces more benefits than risks? If so, at what level, by whom, and with what results?

18. Did the Uruguayan State study the report of the “Pharmacology and Therapeutics Committee of the Uruguayan Society of Pediatrics”, dated 9.XI.2021 (and written by seven university professors), which pointed to the risks of vaccination in minors 12 years old? In your case, what scientific-technical reasons would have led to the MSP being discarded (in practice)?

*

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***

On June 25, the U.S. Navy sent a warship, the USS Benfold, to the South China Sea, only one day after a U.S. spy plane provocatively flew over the Taiwan Strait under the close monitoring of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA).

According to CNN, the U.S. flyover came after China sent 29 planes into Taiwan’s self-declared air defense identification zone (ADIZ).

Satellite image of USS Benfold entering South China Sea on June 25 through Verde Island passage. [Source: twitter.com]

From China’s point of view, the U.S. spy plane mission on June 24 was especially provocative because it was the first U.S. military activity in the region after China made it clear that there are no “international waters” in the Taiwan Strait.

Under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, China claims jurisdiction over the Taiwan Strait.

Source: wikipedia.org

The PLA Eastern Theater Command organized aerial and ground forces and tracked the spy plane’s movements on high alert throughout its entire course on June 24 according to Senior Colonel Shi Yi, spokesperson of the PLA Eastern Theater Command.

Shi slammed the Biden administration’s move as being “intentional,” whose purpose was “to disrupt the regional situation and endanger the cross-Straits peace and stability. We firmly oppose this,” she said.

Turning Taiwan into a Porcupine

Ever since the Obama administration launched a “pivot to Asia,” the U.S. has expanded its military forces and provocative military maneuvers in an effort to encircle and intimidate China. The Biden administration, following Trump, has extended this policy, with National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan stockpiling the National Security Council (NSC) with China hawks.^[1]

U.S. strategic planners consider Taiwan—which broke away from China in 1949 after the defeated Guomindang in China’s civil war took refuge there with U.S. backing—essential in blockading China and a key source for the manufacture of advanced computing chips essential to the U.S. military and industry.^[2]

When Biden made a commitment to backing Taiwan militarily, he effectively overturned the “One China Policy”—established when the U.S. resumed diplomatic relations with China in 1979—recognizing Beijing to be the legitimate government of all China, including Taiwan.^[3]

Since 2019, the U.S. has sold more than $14 billion in weaponry to Taiwan and sent military advisers to train its Special Forces. A U.S. government official described the U.S. strategy as being designed to turn Taiwan into a “porcupine”— a territory bristling with armaments and other forms of U.S.-led support that makes it “appear too painful to attack.”

Rejecting China’s Claim of Sovereignty over the Taiwan Strait

In line with this latter strategy, the Biden administration rejects China’s claims to sovereignty over the Taiwan Strait. The U.S. Indo-Pacific Command said that the spy plane’s transit demonstrates the United States’s “commitment to a free and open Indo-Pacific.”

U.S. State Department spokesman Ned Price told Bloomberg News that “the Taiwan Strait is an international waterway” where freedom of navigation and overflight “are guaranteed under international law. The United States will continue to fly, sail and operate wherever international law allows, and that includes transiting through the Taiwan Strait.”

According to Price, China’s assertion that “there are no international waters” in the Taiwan Strait is not legitimate but is intended to “deter the U.S. from sailing through the Strait,”something that Beijing says “harms stability and send[s] the wrong signal to ‘Taiwan independence forces.’”

Under the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, which China has ratified but the U.S. has not, nations are entitled to territorial waters stretching 12 nautical miles (22km) from their coast.

They may also claim an exclusive economic zone (EEZ) stretching another 200 nautical miles—beyond that are the high seas.

At its widest, the Taiwan Strait spans about 220 nautical miles; however, at its narrowest, it is 70 nautical miles—meaning recent U.S. actions are illegal.

If one accepts that Taiwan is part of China, as the U.S. nominally still does under the One China policy, then the entirety of the strait generally falls under Chinese jurisdiction—as China alleges.

A Habitual Aggressor

According to the Global Times, the USS Benfold—a guided missile destroyer built by Ingalls Shipbuilding—is a habitual aggressor in the South China Sea and the Taiwan Strait.

In January 2022, the destroyer illegally entered the Chinese territorial waters off the Xisha Islands in the South China Sea without authorization from the Chinese government, leading the PLA Southern Theater Command to organize naval and air forces to warn it away.

U.S. Navy spokesmen referred to the USS Benfold’s operations as “freedom of navigation operations.”

They accused China of violating international law by establishing baselines around dispersed islands like the Paracels in the South China Sea, which allows China to “claim more internal waters, territorial sea, exclusive economic zone, and continental shelf than it is entitled to under international law.”

China, however, accuses the U.S. of “infring[ing] on China’s sovereignty and security,” while “pursuing maritime hegemony and militarizing the South China Sea. Facts fully prove that the U.S. is a ‘risk-maker’ in the South China Sea and the ‘biggest destroyer’ of peace and stability in the South China Sea.”

The South China Sea Is Not the Gulf of Mexico

We should remember that the name of the Sea where the U.S. is sending its naval vessels and spy planes is the South China Sea—and not the Gulf of Mexico.

If China were sending its warships on provocative missions off the coast of Mexico or Canada, U.S. leaders would respond with hysterics and probably immediately begin bombing.

Rising Specter of Nuclear War

Mark Selden, the editor of The Asia-Pacific Journal and academic expert on China, raised concern in an interview about “the rising specter of nuclear war,” particularly “in the wake of the Russian invasion of Ukraine” and “at a time when [the] U.S. calculus has shifted from welcoming growing Chinese economic and geopolitical strength, notably in the Nixon era, to across-the-board pressures on China.”

According to Selden, the shifting U.S. calculus “includes mounting U.S. military support for Taiwan and stepping back from its position of calculated ambiguity on the future of the island in favor of direct and indirect challenges of China’s claims. The result is the largest increase in U.S. military spending since World War II in the form of $70 billion in aid…at a time when U.S.-China conflict again centers on Taiwan.”

Tally of Provocative Military Maneuvers

The Committee for a SANE U.S.-China Policy, an activist group that aims to prevent war, has compiled a tally of provocative military maneuvers and close encounters between the U.S. and China since January 2021 in the South China Sea and Taiwan Strait.

According to their findings, the U.S. in that time initiated 45 incidents, and the Chinese 53.

Joseph Gerson and Michael T. Klare, the founders of the committee, write that

“almost every day, China and/or the United States deploy their ships and warplanes in a menacing (“muscle-flexing”) fashion to demonstrate resolve and to throw the other side off balance….While officials on both sides claim that their forces are merely conducting military drills that pose no threat to their rival, these mock combat operations in the vicinity of opposing forces send an unmistakable signal of hostile intent. It is not unusual, moreover, for ships and planes of one side to monitor the operations of the other, and even, on occasion, to interfere with them. When this occurs, there is always the risk of a collision or unintended shooting incident, leading to further military action and full-scale conflict.”

Source: apjjf.org

In short, the specter of war between the U.S. and China has never been greater. It is up to us, consequently, to try to avert conflict and restore legality and sanity to U.S. foreign policy through concerted political activism.

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Jeremy Kuzmarov is Managing Editor of CovertAction Magazine. He is the author of four books on U.S. foreign policy, including Obama’s Unending Wars (Clarity Press, 2019) and The Russians Are Coming, Again, with John Marciano (Monthly Review Press, 2018). He can be reached at: [email protected].

Notes

1. One of the hawks was Kurt Campbell, an architect of Obama’s pivot who declared that “the period that was broadly described as engagement [with China] has come to an end.” 

2. Peter Symonds, “U.S.-China tensions flare over Taiwan Strait,” World Socialist Website, June 24, 2022, https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2022/06/25/pbhh-j25.pdf. The Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company produces more than 90% of the world’s most advanced computing chips. 

3. Bob Menendez (D-NJ) and Lindsey Graham (R-SC) have introduced the bipartisan Taiwan Policy Act into Congress that, according to Peter Symonds, “would drop any pretense of ‘strategic ambiguity’ and commit the U.S. to a war with China over Taiwan. As well as providing almost $4.5 billion in military assistance to Taiwan, the bill would designate Taiwan as a Major Non-NATO ally.” 

Featured image: Biden laughing in 2021. [Source: ia.acs.org]

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***

American media dedicated at least some coverage to Ukraine’s recent ban on the pro-Russian “Opposition Platform—For Life Party,” which effectively eliminated electoral competition in the country. But Ukraine’s sedition law of March 9 this year is less known. 

The Rada Bill 7116, known as the Not a Step Back law, stipulated punishment for collaboration and sedition under martial law. It established life imprisonment with property confiscation as the maximum penalty for individuals found guilty of treason.

Among the accused under the law are mayors and other elected officials of the towns that surrendered to the Russian army when the Ukrainian armed forces withdrew, who allegedly provided the Russian Federation with logistical support. The law also applies to individuals who transmit information about troop movements. More controversially, it has prescribed penalties to Ukrainians who speak favorably of Russia.

Since the the law passed, I have been clipping news items about random citizens who fall under the latter category.

For instance, one entry on the KharkivLife Telegram Channel discusses police “exposing” a “malefactor.” The malefactor is a forty-year-old woman who, in a private conversation, recorded by a person she apparently trusted, said “I’m waiting for Russia, yes. You know why? [unclear] because I am for Russia and because I am a person of Russian soul.” She is now under investigation for acts of collaboration.

A similar incident is recorded approvingly by KievLive Telegram. Ukrainian border police arrested a man for supporting Russia, exchanging photos and videos of artillery fire, and being in the possession of Russian food rations.

According to the Ukrainian channels, Ukrainian border cops arrested a man for supporting Russia, exchanging photos and videos of artillery fire and being in the possession of Russian food rations. pic.twitter.com/LefJHK2MrQ

— Katya Sedgwick (@KatyaSedgwick) June 29, 2022

A drunk man brandishing a machete was arrested in Odessa for screaming pro-Russian “propaganda.” I admire the Odessa cops for arresting the lout—as a resident of the San Francisco Bay Area, I don’t take law and order for granted—but I find it difficult to see his actions as treason.

In another video posted on KharkivLife, a frightened thirty-four-year-old resident of the area issued a public apology for “actively expressing her hate of Ukraine’s defenders.” Her crime was “discovered” during routine “monitoring of social media,” presumably by security services. After “a conversation” with cops she decided to ask for forgiveness.

A news clip released by the Associated Press shows an arrest and a visit to the house of alleged traitors in the city of Kharkiv. One man, we are told, was found filming the aftermath of an artillery strike and this act drew suspicion. The man was later found to have exchanged electronic messages with enemy forces and his father confirmed that he is a Russian sympathizer. Creepily, a babushka from the neighborhood remarks that the security forces will “cure him.”

Another man in the video appears to be guilty of nothing more than displaying pro-Russian messages on social media. Visibly frightened, he apologized to Ukrainian Security Service during his arrest, saying that he already changed his mind. An arresting officer reassured an older member of the household that everything will proceed as prescribed by the law.

The rule of law in Ukraine is notoriously shaky. It was bad in peacetime, and I doubt the war is helping. In April Vitaly Kim, the genial-looking governor of Nikolaev Oblast, said in an interview with the Ukrainian Channel 24:

Today, a Russian blogger was shot dead in his car [in Nikolaev]. This means that there are still Russian traitors in Ukraine and all traitors will be executed. I am not afraid of this world: it will be so. And we will not be able to stop people from shooting traitors either.

He added that Ukraine has the best cybersecurity in the world, and that they will be able to track everyone and “nobody will be able to escape justice.”

The ill-fated blogger was accused of informing the Russian forces of Ukrainian troop movements. If that was indeed his crime, of course no country would let him continue operations. But in Ukraine, where a man can be tried for sedition in court under the law, security services assassinated him and a government official called for lynching.

Lynchings are apparently taking place with the approval of verified and official Telegram channels. I have seen no dead bodies, but plenty of humiliation of alleged collaborators and Russian sympathizers—people kneeling and tied to the polls with plastic wrap, signs of recent beatings and partially naked bodies in full display.

I have found no estimate of prevalence of mob attacks on the alleged traitors. Thousands of alleged collaborators are now under investigation by the Ukrainian government. The actual number of Russian sympathizers is unknown.

Given that Ukraine is in the midst of a major war, a tightening of rules regarding dissent should be expected. Our country has done the same: Abraham Lincoln suspended habeas corpus during the Civil War and the German-American ethnic identity was stamped out after U.S. entry into the First World War.

The recently banned “Opposition Platform—For Life Party” was the second largest faction in the country. It joins ten other parties already banned by the state. It is worth noting that Zelensky himself was elected on the platform of rapprochement with Russia and that prior to the 2014 Maidan overthrow of Victor Yanukovich, his “Party of Regions” commanded about half the country.

The key question about Ukraine is whether it can ever exist as a Western democracy. The country is contiguous to Russia, about one third of Ukrainians have relatives in the Russian Federation, and a large section of the population prefers the Russian language. If in a very tightly controlled media environment Ukraine can’t convince its people that Russia is their enemy, what will happen if the regime ever relaxes the rules?

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Katya Sedgwick is a writer in the San Francisco Bay area. You can follow her on Twitter @KatyaSedgwick.

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***

Uruguayan government officials and Pfizer were ordered to appear in court Wednesday to provide documents for review regarding vaccine ingredients, adverse effects and contracts shielding the pharma giant from liability.

Uruguayan government officials and Pfizer on Wednesday appeared in court after a judge gave them 48 hours to present detailed information on Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine while the court considers an injunction request to halt COVID-19 vaccinations for children 5 and older.

Judge Alejandro Recarey of the Administrative Litigation Tribunal used his inquisitorial powers to demand the Uruguayan Ministry of Public Health, State Health Services Administration and the President’s Office submit all information regarding the contracts for the purchase of COVID-19 vaccines, including contractual information related to any clauses of civil indemnity or criminal impunity of the suppliers in the event of adverse effects.

According to a court order released on Saturday, Judge Recarey ordered Pfizer and government officials to:

• Provide full and unredacted, certified copies of “each and every one of the purchase contracts (as well as any other related negotiation agreement), of the so-called anti-COVID vaccines that you have signed, own or are simply within your reach.”

• Explain whether “these instruments” contain clauses of “civil indemnity and/or criminal impunity of the suppliers regarding the occurrence of possible adverse effects.”

• Provide extensive detail about the biochemical composition of “so-called vaccines against SARS-CoV-2 in supply to the national population, especially the one aimed at children.”

• Explain if the “different doses are distributed in batches or differential (different) items,” and if so, “clarify for what reason, and based on what criteria, each would be provided to different population levels, whether the drugs in each batch are diverse by their content and how and for whom they would be distinguishable. If it “turns out to be the real existence of different lots,” doses of each are “requested for judicial expert examination.”

• Specify if the “so-called vaccines” contain messenger RNA by explaining, if necessary, what that means. Explain what “therapeutic or extra therapeutic consequences — adverse or not — [mRNA] can have for the person inoculated with it. It must be specified with regard to the latter, and in a negative hypothesis in terms of alleged damages, if there is indeed — with scientific rigor — the possible safety of the messenger RNA, or if there is simply a lack of information on the point.”

• State “very specifically and beyond what has been inquired, it is requested that it be said if it is known to you that those labeled as vaccines contain or may contain nanotechnological elements. Clarifying, if not, whether such a temperament would arise from an effective verification of its absence, or from mere ignorance of the components of the referred ‘vaccinal’ substances.”

• Certify whether the substances contained in the “so-called vaccines” supplied in Uruguay are experimental or not. That is, “explain in full and detail whether they are approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), or equivalent body, according to the usual protocols, or if they have some other type of emergency permission.” If this is the case, explain “granted by whom and with what guarantees and based on what regulations.”

In short, you “must also respond if you are aware that either the manufacturer and/or supplier, or any academic or governmental body (domestic or foreign), have admitted — in any way that may be — the experimental nature of the aforementioned vaccines.”

• Present complete and up-to-date information in your possession about “what is scientifically known — and what is not known — about the effectiveness of those labeled as vaccines” and their possible short, medium and long-term adverse effects.

• “Provide official figures that demonstrate the negative or positive incidence of so-called vaccination in the number of infections and deaths diagnosed with COVID from the beginning of the campaign to date.”

• State whether “studies have been carried out to explain the noticeable increase in deaths for COVID-19 since March 2021 or if information is in your possession — with sufficient scientific support and evidence — about it.”

• Provide information on the total number of deaths in Uruguay due to COVID-19 since the beginning of the “so-called pandemic,” the global average age and how many were for “COVID-19 in an exclusive causal relationship” and how many were “with COVID-19” — that is, with the presence of the virus, but was not the main cause of death.

• “Demonstrate scientifically — with evidence of national or international studies that have been done — whether the status of non-vaccinated poses a health hazard to the entire population or third parties.“

If it is the case, two other things will be required: the determination and demonstration of the degree of danger, and the reason that explains why, if this were eventually the case,” vaccination would not have been mandated. Prove whether both the vaccinated and unvaccinated infect equally. If they do not, explain what this would be like and in what proportions — and prove what is stated.

• Clarify the reasons for the “lack of preview informed consent, in relation to the act components of what the government itself presents as a vaccination campaign.”

• “Detail, with first and last names, the identity of the professional technicians who have directed and direct the aforementioned campaign, or anyone who has provided advice at any level.”

Also provide relevant data for their location “for their judicial interrogation, adding to the required information, data about whether any of them are part of any foreign governmental or para governmental organization, or they have worked for one of them in any way, or, where appropriate, manage in a multinational company” focused on healthcare. “Detail, if necessary, the personal names and organizations or companies involved.”

• Explain if alternative therapies for COVID-19 have been studied for any variants. If not, clarify why those were not explored. “If positive, give the research results — giving an account of whether those were used in Uruguay or not.”

For the latter option, provide the reasons that would have been taken to discard the use of alternative therapies, adding whether or not “you know that they have been used in other countries successfully, still relative, or not.”

The order also required Pfizer to state within 48 hours whether it has “admitted, in any area, internal or external to it and its partners, the verification of adverse effects” of its COVID-19 vaccines in children.

“I applaud Uruguayan judge Recarey for posing many tough questions to Pfizer over its COVID shots and the contracts it imposed on Uruguay,” Mary Holland, president of Children’s Health Defense (CHD), told The Defender in an email.

“From the beginning, Pfizer has hidden its data and liability-free contracts to avoid liability from the shots,” Holland said.

She explained:

“Many countries, including those in Latin America, have relied on U.S. regulatory agencies in the past to guide health policy. But the U.S. regulatory bodies have failed regarding COVID.

“There is no scientific or ethical justification to authorize COVID shots for children, as some countries, including Denmark, now acknowledge. We know that children are at almost zero risk of dying from COVID. The FDA has extended Emergency Use Authorization for the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine while illegitimately ‘approving’ Comirnaty, thus engaging in a fraudulent ‘bait-and-switch’ scheme to avoid all liability while hawking ‘approved’ vaccines.”

Holland said CHD is currently pursuing two lawsuits against the FDA for its arbitrary and capricious decisions on COVID-19 shots, and she is “pleased to see that other countries are stepping into the scientific and legal breach.”

“I hope Pfizer complies with the judge’s order, but given its long criminal rap sheet, it remains to be seen,” Holland added.

Dr. Salle Lorier on Twitter called Judge Recarey’s historic ruling a “judicial Maracanazo,” and posted a video explaining the order.

Fallo historico en Uruguay, un verdadero "Maracanazo judicial";Juez ordena al Gobierno mostrar contrato de las vacunas y múltiples medidas investigativas, como por ejemplo, declaración de autoridades de Pfizer. Video explicativo del fallo del Juez Recarey https://t.co/35tSe599CP

— Dr. Salle Lorier (@sallelorier) July 2, 2022

Although Judge Racarey took it upon himself to review data presented by Pfizer and government officials on COVID-19 vaccines, Uruguay is one of 47 co-sponsoring countries that agreed to the Biden administration’s amendments to the World Health Organization’s (WHO) 2005 International Health Agreements that attempted to place member states’ health sovereignty in the hands of WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus and its regional directors.

U.S. judge requires FDA to turn over Pfizer COVID-19 documents

This is not the first time government officials or Pfizer have been required to turn over data regarding COVID-19 vaccines.

A federal judge on Feb. 2 rejected a bid by the FDA, with the support of Pfizer, to delay the court-ordered release of nearly 400,000 pages of documents pertaining to the approval of Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine.

Federal Judge Mark Pittman of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas issued an order requiring the FDA to release redacted versions of the documents in question according to the following disclosure schedule:

• 10,000 pages apiece, due on or before March 1 and April 1, 2022.
• 80,000 pages apiece, to be produced on or before May 2, June 1 and July 1, 2022.
• 70,000 pages to be produced on or before Aug. 1, 2022.
• 55,000 pages per month, on or before the first business day of each month thereafter, until the release of the documents has been completed.

The ruling was part of an ongoing court case that began with a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request filed in August 2021 by Public Health and Medical Professionals for Transparency (PHMPT).

PHMPT, a group of more than 30 medical and public health professionals and scientists from institutions such as Harvard, Yale, and UCLA, in September 2021 filed a lawsuit against the FDA after the agency denied its original FOIA request.

In that request, PHMPT asked the FDA to release “all data and information for the Pfizer vaccine,” including safety and effectiveness data, adverse reaction reports, and a list of active and inactive ingredients.

The FDA argued it didn’t have enough staff to process the redaction, claiming it could process only 500 pages per month. This would have meant the cache of documents would not be fully released for approximately 75 years.

In his Jan. 6 order, Pittman rejected the FDA’s claim and instead required the agency to release 12,000 pages of documents by Jan. 31 and an additional 55,000 pages per month thereafter.

Pfizer responded to the Jan. 6 order with a request to intervene in the case for the “limited purpose of ensuring that information exempt from disclosure under FOIA is adequately protected as FDA complies with this court’s order.”

Pfizer claimed to support the disclosure of the documents, but asked to intervene in the case to ensure that information legally exempt from disclosure will not be “disclosed inappropriately.”

Lawyers for PHMPT, in a brief submitted Jan. 25, asked Pittman to reject Pfizer’s motion, prompting the Feb. 2 order.

The first batch of documents produced in Nov. 2021, which totaled a mere 500 pages, revealed more than 1,200 vaccine-related deaths within the first 90 days following the release of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine.

Since then, thousands of documents released as a result of Pittman’s court order raise serious questions about the data used by U.S. regulatory agencies to justify the authorization and approval of Pfizer and BioNTech’s COVID-19 vaccines.

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Megan Redshaw is a staff attorney for Children’s Health Defense and a reporter for The Defender.

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***

While traveling to London to meet with his British counterpart, the head of the Federal Bureau of Investigation warned Western business leaders that their companies could be impacted by crime from Beijing. 

During a joint press conference attended by executives in various financial sectors, MI5 Director General Ken McCallum cautioned that China presented the most significant threat. “By volume, most of what is at risk from Chinese Communist Party aggression is not, so to speak, my stuff. It’s yours. The world-leading expertise, technology, research, and commercial advantage developed and held by people in this room, and others like you,” he said.

FBI Director Christopher Wray also claimed that China seeks to steal “innovation” from Western firms. “We’ve seen the regional bureaus of China’s MSS – their Ministry of State Security – key in specifically on the innovation of certain Western companies it wants to ransack.” He added, “I’m talking about companies everywhere from big cities to small towns – from Fortune 100s to start-ups, folks that focus on everything from aviation, to AI, to pharma.”

Wray pushed corporate leaders to work with the FBI and MI5, insisting “We’re not just in the business of articulating problems, we’re doing something about them, together with MI5, with the private sector itself, with other government partners.” He also warned that China is insulating its economy from potential western sanctions that would come if Beijing ordered the military takeover of Taiwan.

The meeting between the two intelligence chiefs came days after President Joe Biden and Prime Minister Boris Johnson signed off on a new NATO security strategy which names China as a top threat. Following a major summit in Madrid last week, the alliance released its new Strategic Concept document, stating Beijing poses a “systemic challenge to Euro-Atlantic security.”

An additional source of friction between Beijing and Washington came after the US ambassador to China recently demanded that the Chinese Communist Party stop spreading Russian “lies.” On Wednesday, the National Counterintelligence and Security Center also issued a bulletin warning state and local governments that Beijing is stepping up its information warfare.

China “understands that US state and local leaders enjoy a degree of independence from Washington and may seek to use them as proxies to advocate for national US policies Beijing desires,” the agency said.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken is reportedly set to meet with Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi on the sidelines of the G20 summit in Bali later this week, where he is expected to press the FM on Beijing’s ties with Moscow.

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Kyle Anzalone is news editor of the Libertarian Institute, assistant editor of Antiwar.com and co-host of Conflicts of Interest with Will Porter.

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***

One of the leading candidates to take over as the chief of the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) has called for Israel to step up assassinations of leaders of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC).

IDF Maj. Gen. Eyal Zamir made the case in a 74-page paper for the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, a pro-Israel American think tank based in Washington. He said the assassinations were necessary to stop Iran from further entrenching itself in Syria.

Israel frequently bombs Syria and frames the strikes as attacks on Iranian assets in the country, although the airstrikes often kill Syrian soldiers or target civilian infrastructure. Zamir said if Israel invades Lebanon to fight Hezbollah, Iran could launch attacks from Syria to hit Israeli forces.

Zamir described the IRGC as the “backbone” of Iran and “the main means by which it seeks to dominate the region.” He outlined several ways Israel could work with allies to target IRGC leaders, including what he called the “Soleimani model,” referring to the January 2020 assassination of Qasem Soleimani, the former head of the IRGC’s Quds force. Soleimani was killed by a US drone strike in Baghdad.

In recent months, Israel has stepped up its covert attacks inside Iran and is suspected of several killings, including against scientists working for Iran’s military. US officials have said Israel was behind the killing of IRGC Col. Hassan Sayyad Khodaei, who was gunned down in Tehran at the end of May.

Zamir is a candidate to replace Avi Kohavi, the current IDF chief of staff. Israeli Defense Minister Benny Gantz has said he plans to appoint a new chief of staff before the upcoming Israeli election in November. Gantz has named other candidates, but whoever is appointed will likely agree to put more pressure on Tehran.

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Dave DeCamp is the news editor of Antiwar.com, follow him on Twitter @decampdave.

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***

Guest: Sören Pohlen, a gastronomer, former owner of the “Scotch&Sofa” a cocktail bar in Berlin.

This session is a discussion on the events and his experiences since the founding of the party “Team Freiheit” and the termination of the lease for his cocktail bar Scotch&Sofa.

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***

Obvious examples of Central Intelligence Agency covert action abroad are difficult to identify today, save for occasional acknowledged calamities, such as the long-running $1 billion effort to overthrow the government of Syria, via funding, training and arming barbarous jihadist groups.

In part, this stems from many of the CIA’s traditional responsibilities and activities being farmed out to “overt” organizations, most significantly the National Endowment for Democracy (NED).

Founded in November 1983, then-CIA director William Casey was at the heart of NED’s creation. He sought to construct a public mechanism to support opposition groups, activist movements and media outlets overseas that would engage in propaganda and political activism to disrupt, destabilize, and ultimately displace ‘enemy’ regimes. Subterfuge with a human face, to coin a phrase.

Underlining the Endowment’s insidious true nature, in a 1991 Washington Post article boasting of its prowess in overthrowing Communism in Eastern Europe, senior NED official Allen Weinstein acknowledged, “a lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA.”

It Begins

Fast forward to September 2013, and Carl Gershman, NED chief from its launch until summer 2021, authored an op-ed for The Washington Post, outlining how his organization was hard at work wresting countries in Russia’s near abroad – the constellation of former Soviet republics and Warsaw Pact states – away from Moscow’s orbit.

Along the way, he described Ukraine as “the biggest prize” in the region, suggesting Kiev joining Europe would “accelerate the demise” of Russian President Vladimir Putin. Six months later, Ukraine’s elected president Viktor Yanukovych was ousted in a violent coup.

Writing in Consortium News earlier that month, investigative legend Robert Parry recorded how, over the previous year, NED had funded 65 projects in Ukraine totaling over $20 million. This amounted to what the late journalist dubbed “a shadow political structure of media and activist groups that could be deployed to stir up unrest when the Ukrainian government didn’t act as desired.”

NED’s pivotal role in unseating Yanukovych can be considered beyond dispute, an unambiguous matter of record – yet not only is this never acknowledged in the mainstream press, but Western journalists aggressively rubbish the idea, viciously attacking those few who dare challenge the established orthodoxy of US innocence.

As if to assist in this deceit, NED has removed many entries from its website in the years since the coup, which amply underline its role in Yanukovych’s overthrow.

For example, on February 3rd 2014, less than three weeks before police withdrew from Kiev, effectively handing the city to armed protesters and prompting Yanukovych to flee the country, NED convened an event, Ukraine’s lessons learned: from the Orange Revolution to the Euromaidan.

It was led by Ukrainian journalist Sergii Leshchenko, who at the time was finishing up an NED-sponsored Reagan–Fascell Democracy Fellowship in Washington DC.

Alongside him was Nadia Diuk, NED’s then-senior adviser for Europe and Eurasia, and graduate of St. Antony’s College Oxford, a renowned recruiting pool for British intelligence founded by former spies. Just before her death in January 2019, she was bestowed the Order of Princess Olga, one of Kiev’s highest honors, a particularly palpable example of the intimate, enduring ties between NED and the Ukrainian government.

While the event’s online listing remains extant today, linked supporting documents – including Powerpoint slides that accompanied Leshchenko’s talk, and a summary of “event highlights” – have been deleted.

What prompted the purge isn’t clear, although it could well be significant that Leshchenko’s talk offered a clear blueprint for guaranteeing the failure of 2004’s Orange Revolution – another NED-orchestrated putsch – wasn’t repeated, and the country remained captured by Western financial, political and ideological interests post-Maidan. It was a roadmap NED subsequently followed to the letter.

Along the way, Leshchenko specifically highlighted the importance of funding NGOs, exploiting the internet and social media as “alternative [sources] of information,” and the danger of “unreformed state television.”

So it was that on March 19th, representatives of the far-right Svoboda party – which has been linked to a false flag massacre of protesters on February 20th, an event that made the downfall of Yanukovych’s government a fait accompli – broke into the office of Oleksandr Panteleymonov, chief of Ukraine’s state broadcaster, and beat him over the head until he signed a resignation letter.

That shocking incident, motivated by the station broadcasting a Kremlin ceremony at which Vladimir Putin signed a bill formalizing Crimea as part of Russia, was one of many livestreamed by protesters that traveled far and wide online.

The brutal defenestration of Ukraine’s state TV chief notwithstanding, much of this livestreamed output served to present foreign audiences with a highly romantic narrative on the demonstrations, and their participants, which bore little or no relation to reality.

The Revolution Will Be Televised

Writing in NED’s quarterly academic publication Journal of Democracy in July that year, Leshchenko discussed in detail the media’s role in the Maidan coup’s success, drawing particular attention to the fundamental role of “online journalist” Mustafa Nayyem.

He kickstarted the protests the previous November, rallying hundreds of his Facebook followers to protest in Kiev’s Independence – now Maidan – Square, after Yanukovych scrapped the Ukrainian-European Association Agreement in favor of a more agreeable deal with Moscow.

Nayyem was no ordinary “online journalist”. In October 2012, he was one of six Ukrainians whisked to Washington DC by Meridian International, a State Department-connected organization that identifies and grooms future overseas leaders, to “observe and experience” that year’s Presidential election.

Funded by the US embassy in Kiev, over 10 days they “[gained] a deeper understanding of the American electoral process,” meeting candidates and election officials, and touring voting facilities. They were also invited to discuss “Ukraine’s progress towards a more fair and transparent election process” with “equally curious” representatives of US government agencies.

With whom the sextet met is unstated, although promotional pictures show Nayyem filming a personal summit with John McCain on his smartphone. The video was posted to his personal YouTube channel – in it, Nayyem asks the noted warhawk for his thoughts on Ukraine, to which he responds, “I’m concerned with the influence of Russia.”

This is striking, for McCain flew to Kiev in December 2013 to give an address to Maidan protesters, flanked by known Neo-Nazi Oleh Tyahnybok. Then-State Department official Victoria Nuland, now Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs, was also present, notoriously handing out motivational cookies to attendees.

On February 4th 2014, one day after Leshchenko’s NED presentation, an intercepted recording of a telephone call between Nuland – now Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs – and US Ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt was leaked, in which the pair discussed how Washington was “midwifing” Yanukovych’s ouster, and named several handpicked individuals to head the post-coup government.

Whether Nayyem’s influential US contacts in any way motivated his decision to ignite the Maidan demonstrations in November 2013 isn’t certain. The pivotal part he played in promoting the protests globally is far clearer, for he was a key founder of digital broadcaster Hromadske TV.

In his Journal of Democracy article, Leshchenko records how Hromadske hadn’t even officially launched when it began streaming Maidan demonstrations live, the literal second they erupted at Nayyem’s direction.

While Leshchenko coyly states that Hromadske “drew most of its modest funding from international organizations and the donations of Ukrainian citizens,” it actually received hundreds of thousands of dollars in financing from a variety of questionable sources, including the US Embassy in Ukraine, intelligence front USAID, George Soros’ International Renaissance Foundation, American oligarch Pierre Omidyar, and – of course – NED.

Hromadske’s audience expanded rapidly both within and without Ukraine thereafter, its embedded output eagerly recycled by countless mainstream news outlets, meaning Western viewers were presented with a single, partisan perspective on the unrest – and a highly misleading one at that.

Based on Hromadske’s coverage, overseas onlookers would’ve been entirely forgiven for concluding the protests were wholly energized by concerns over human rights and democracy, and overwhelmingly – if not universally – popular.

In a representative February 2014 essay dismissing as Russian propaganda the demonstrable fact that both the Maidan demonstrators and their leadership were riddled with neo-Nazis, academic and Journal of Democracy contributor Andreas Umland boldly declared that “the movement as a whole…reflects the entire Ukrainian population, young and old.”

Nothing could’ve been further from the truth. An extraordinarily revealing Washington Post op-ed by North American academics Keith Darden and Lucan Way published that same month detonated that narrative, which has endured – and intensified – ever since.

The pair forensically exposed how less than 20 percent of protesters professed to be driven by “violations of democracy or the threat of dictatorship,” only 40 – 45 percent of Ukrainains were in favor of European integration, Yanukovych remained “the most popular political figure in the country,” and no poll conducted to date had ever indicated majority support for the uprising.

In fact, “quite large majorities oppose the takeover of regional governments by the opposition,” and the population remained bitterly divided on the future of Ukraine, Darden and Way wrote. Such hostility stemmed from “anti-Russian rhetoric and the iconography of western Ukrainian nationalism,” rife among the demonstrators, “not [playing] well among the Ukrainian majority.”

Of the 50 percent of Ukraine’s population residing in regions that had “strongly identified with Russia” for over two centuries, “nearly all [were] alienated by anti-Russian rhetoric and symbols.”

“Anti-Russian forms of Ukrainian nationalism expressed on the Maidan are certainly not representative of the general view of Ukrainians. Electoral support for these views and for the political parties who espouse them has always been limited,” Darden and Way concluded. “Their presence and influence in the protest movement far outstrip their role in Ukrainian politics and their support barely extends geographically beyond a few Western provinces.”

‘Pro-Ukrainian Agenda’

Despite – or perhaps because of – such slanted coverage, Hromadske only grew from strength to strength subsequently. Such was its surging popularity, Leshchenko records, even Ukraine’s state broadcaster “struck a deal” to amplify its output, “thus handing this small ‘garage’ webcasting enterprise an audience of millions.” In the process, Ukrainians – and the world – were well-educated in the false narrative of Yanukovych being overthrown via popular will.

Hromadske’s potential to influence perceptions was evidently not lost on other Western governments either. In 2015, the British Foreign Office provided significant funds to develop “radio broadcasting” initiatives in the Russian-majority regions of Donetsk and Luhansk, for a project dubbed “Donbas calling”. The next year, London proferred more sums to the outlet, so it could serve as a local “information provider” to an “audience of up to one million people.”

In 2017, Hromadske again received hundreds of thousands of pounds to expand even further into the breakaway regions. Among other things, Britain supported the installation “of 16 FM transmitters in Ukraine-controlled areas along the contact line and ‘grey zone’ in the east,” meaning the station could reach up to two million citizens potentially possessed of separatist perspectives.

The public profiles of Leshchenko and Nayyem concurrently rose exponentially too. In Ukraine’s October 2014 elections, both were elected to parliament as part of Petro Poroshenko’s bloc, the former becoming a member of its anti-corruption committee, the latter its cross-party group on European integration, leading to glowing profiles in the Western media. All along, NED closely monitored their progress, hailing the pair as emblems of the new, liberated Ukraine that flowered in the wake of Maidan.

Nonetheless, Leshchenko’s personal commitment to democracy was rather undermined in August 2016, when he and Artem Sytnyk, head of Kiev’s National Anti-Corruption Bureau, leaked documents – dubbed the “the black ledger” – identifying payments to Donald Trump’s then-campaign manager Paul Manafort from Yanukovych’s Party of Regions, to the US media.

Leshchenko expressed his “hope” that the disclosure would damage Trump’s electoral chances and would be “the last nail in Manafort’s coffin lid,” as “a Trump presidency would change the pro-Ukrainian agenda in American foreign policy.” He was one of several prominent politicians in Kiev “involved to an unprecedented degree in trying to weaken the Trump bandwagon,” as the Atlantic Council, NATO’s propaganda arm, conceded at the time.

Manafort duly resigned, and the RussiaGate racket erupted – a connivance that went some way to ensuring the “pro-Ukrainian agenda in American foreign policy” wasn’t compromised one iota.

Indeed, Trump’s term in office was typified by ever-escalating hostility between Washington and Moscow, the Oval Office resident going to dangerous lengths his predecessor had consistently refrained from to arm and galvanize the most reactionary and violent elements of the Ukrainian armed forces, including the notorious Neo-Nazi Azov Battalion, and tear up Cold War arms control treaties, much to Moscow’s chagrin.

In December 2018, a Ukrainian court ruled that Leshchenko and Sytnyk’s release of the “black ledger” was illegal, amounting to “interference in the electoral processes of the US” that “harmed the interests of Ukraine as a state.”

In May the next year, a corruption probe was launched after Leshchenko purchased a $300,000 apartment in central Kiev, a sum far in excess of his apparent means. Two months later, he was voted out of parliament, a candidate of Zelensky’s Servant of the People party taking his seat in a landslide. His friend and collaborator Nayyem simply opted not to stand, in order to seek a government post “connected to the Donbas.”

Despite no longer being part of the legislature, Leshchenko has continued to wield significant sway over the Ukrainian government, directly advising Zelensky on “Russian disinformation” to this day.

What direct influence NED still exerts over him – and Ukraine’s President by extension – isn’t certain. Although, mere days before the Russian invasion began, in an interview with The Guardian, Leshchenko referred to the Minsk Accords – which Zelensky stood on a specific platform of implementing – as “toxic”, suggesting the leader would “betray” his country by adhering to their obligations, which included granting autonomy to Donetsk and Luhansk.

This reflects NED’s position – on February 14th this year, its Journal of Democracy published an article declaring the Accords to be “a bad idea for the West and a serious threat to Ukrainian democracy and stability,” not least because they would mean “tacitly accepting  Russia’s false narratives about the Donbas conflict” – namely, that the conflict “was caused by the West-orchestrated ‘coup’ in 2014.”

Screenshot from Journal of Democracy

In other words, an objective analysis of what actually happened and why, in which NED is completely central. Still, the organization didn’t need to rely purely on Leshchenko to keep the Minsk Accords moribund. Its extensive network of assets in the country, and Washington’s dark alliance with Ukraine’s far-right, was more than sufficient to ensure that Zelensky’s overwhelmingly popular mission of restoring relations with Russia would and could never be fulfilled.

‘In Solidarity’

In the hours following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, NED hurried to remove any and all trace of its funding for organizations in Ukraine from its website.

A search of the NED grants database today for Ukraine returns “no results,” but a snapshot of the page captured February 25th reveals that since 2014, a total of 334 projects in the country have been awarded a staggering $22.4 million. By NED President Duane Wilson’s reckoning, Kiev is the organization’s fourth-largest funding recipient worldwide.

An archive of NED funding in Ukraine over 2021 – which has now been replaced with a statement “in solidarity” with Kiev – offers extensive detail on the precise projects backed by the CIA front over that pivotal 12-month period.

It points to a preponderant focus on purported Russian misdeeds in eastern Ukraine. One grant, of $58,000, was provided to the NGO Truth Hounds to “monitor, document, and spotlight human rights violations” and “war crimes” in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions.

Another, of $48,000, was provided to Ukraine’s War Childhood Museum to “educate the Ukrainian public about the consequences of the war through a series of public events.” Yet another received by charity East-SOS aimed to “raise public awareness” of “Russia’s policies of persecution and colonization in the region, and document illustrative cases,” its findings circulated to the UN Human Rights Council, European Courts of Human Rights, and International Court of Justice.

There was no suggestion this wellspring would be used to document any abuses by Ukrainian government forces. UN research indicates 2018 – 2021, over 80 percent of civilian casualties were recorded on the Donbas side. Meanwhile, Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe reports show that shelling of civilian areas in the breakaway regions intensified dramatically in the weeks leading up to February 24th, potentially the precursor of a full-blown military offensive.

As such, NED’s expurgation of records exposing its role in fomenting and precipitating the horror now unfolding in southeast Ukraine not only protects de facto CIA agents on the ground. It also reinforces and legitimizes the Biden administration’s sprawling, fraudulent narrative, endlessly and uncritically reiterated in Western media, that Russia’s invasion was entirely unprovoked and groundless.

Ukrainians now live with the mephitic legacy of that reckless, unadmitted meddling in the most brutal manner imaginable. They may well do so for many years to come. Meanwhile, the men and women who orchestrated it rest comfortably in Washington DC, insulated from any scrutiny or consequence whatsoever, every day cooking up fresh schemes to undermine and topple troublesome foreign leaders, hailed as champions of liberty by the mainstream press every step of the way.

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***

On 25 June 2022, in the Parliament of the Republic of Poland there was a press conference and a meeting of the Parliamentary Team for International Relations and the Interests of Poland and the Polish Diaspora, organized by Mr. Grzegorz Braun, MP, with the participation of prof. M. Piotrowski, prof. S. Bielen and prof. W. Korab-Karpowicz.

The Statement on Peace in Ukraine (Oświadczenie o pokoju na Ukrainie) was signed.

Its English translation is given below.  

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The individuals and organizations gathered here call for an immediate end to the war in Ukraine and for a compromise between Russia and Ukraine that will lead to lasting peace. War is a huge human and cultural tragedy. People die on both sides every day: they take their dreams and the personal potential they represent with them irretrievably. War is associated with perversion. In the time of duration, there are acts of cruelty and war crimes. War teaches us to be hostile and to hate. It degenerates us as human beings. In the name of the defense of life and our humanity, the armed conflict between Russia and Ukraine should be stopped immediately.

The present war, in which NATO countries are involved, providing Ukraine with modern weapons, including offensive weapons, is the most dangerous military conflict since the Second World War. It is a huge threat to the economic situation of the world and to world peace. The populations of many countries are now threatened with starvation due to the decline in grain exports from Ukraine and Russia. In addition, the world is experiencing a sharp increase in fuel prices, produced by Russia. As a consequence, we are threatened by a global economic crisis with unimaginable effects.

But even a more serious disaster would be the situation when the present war gets out of hand and turns from a local conflict into a continental war or another world war. This would involve hundreds of millions of casualties, the destruction of states, and the collapse of all our civilization achievements.

We believe that for peace and the resolution of the conflict, it is important to understand its causes well. The primary factor that often causes wars is fear. In this case, Russia is afraid of NATO enlargement and the neighboring countries fear that Russia is a power. Therefore, in order to resolve the conflict, mutual fear must be removed, and this can only be achieved by professional diplomacy and a willingness to compromise, and not by a military action.

Another reason for the current war, which is less discussed, is the introduction of changes to the language law in Ukraine that is discriminatory to the Russian linguistic minority. This has led to a referendum in Crimea and a war in Donbas. The current war is therefore also a consequence of a wrong Ukrainian domestic politicy. It leads us to huge human tragedy and enormous destruction. These problems should not be settled by war and by having the whole world is involved in it, but by negotiations and compromise. Therefore we are calling for negotiations, compromise and peace.

We live in a globalized world, where countries are interdependent. Due to the world position of Russia and Ukraine, the consequences of the current war are having a catastrophic effect on the whole planet. It is not too late to resolve this armed conflict, which is very harmful and dangerous for all of us. We call for reason, reflection and peace.

“Nothing is lost by peace. Everything can be lost by war.”

Grzegorz Braun, MP, Konfederacja Korony Polskiej (The Confederation of the Polish Crown)

Prof. Mirosław Piotrowski, Ruch Prawdziwa Europa (The True Europe Movement)

Prof. Włodzimierz Korab-Karpowicz, Wolne Wybory (Free Elections)

Dr Leszek Sykulski, Polskie Towarzystwo Geostrategiczne (The Polish Geopolitical Society)

Prof. Ryszard Zajączkowski

Prof. Jakub Z. Lichański

Prof. Stanisław Bieleń

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***

Kommt es jetzt europaweit zu Bauernprotesten gegen wahnsinnige, hausgemachte Teuerung, Energiekrise und die EU? Nachdem sich seit Wochen bereits die Bauern in den Niederlanden gegen den “Green Deal” der EU und somit gegen Schwabs Great-Reset-Traum stemmen, indem sie den Protest auf die Straße tragen, kommt es nun auch wieder in Spanien – wie zuletzt im März – zu Protesten durch Bauern. Immer größere Teile der Bevölkerung stehen hinter den Bauern und solidarisieren sich mit ihnen. 

Nach den Bauernprotesten in den Niederlanden kommt es nun auch in Spanien wieder zu Straßenblockaden. Der Protest andalusischer Bauern richtet sich erneut – wie bereits im März, wo 150.000 Bauern aus ganz Spanien protestierten – gegen die hohen Preise für Treibstoffe und Grundnahrungsmittel. Vor allem im südlichen Teil Spaniens, in Andalusien, protestieren die Bauern wegen der Inflation und der enorm gestiegenen Preise für Energie und Lebensmittel. In Spanien lag die Inflation im Juni bereits über 10 Prozent.

In einem auf Twitter veröffentlichten Video sind dutzende Bauern mit gelben Westen bekleidet – im Hintergrund ihre Traktoren –  zu sehen, die eine Autobahnauffahrt blockieren.

Spanish farmers block A4 highway in Jaén, Andalusia and protest against rising fuel prices@auraxchan pic.twitter.com/I5YxYsAX8m

— Elaine 🧚‍♀️ 🗣 (@KalsElaine) July 1, 2022

Spanish farmers blocked the highway in Andalusia.

They are protesting against the increase in prices for fuel and essential goods.#Spain #Spanish #SpanishFarmers #HighFuelPrices #FuelPrices #Gasprices #Andalusia #Protest pic.twitter.com/NCyFpMeDmy

— WeAreProtestors (@WeAreProtestors) July 2, 2022

Die Proteste reihen sich in niederländischen Bauernproteste ein, die derzeit von den Behörden dort versucht werden zu unterbinden. Wie jouwatch berichtete, hat die niederländische Polizei am Mittwoch erstmals Schüsse auf die Demonstranten abgefeuert. Ein Video zeigt, dass dies völlig grundlos geschah. Die Systemmedien  hüben wie drüben konstruieren aktuell eine Gefährdungsgeschichte, auf welche die Polizei „nur“ reagierte. Zudem belegen weitere Aufnahmen, dass bezahlte Provokateure gezielt versuchen, die Situation eskalieren zu lassen.

Laut den grünen Umbaupläne des “Green Deal” der EU und somit nach Schwabs Great-Reset-Plan soll nicht nur eine Reduktion des CO2-Ausstoßes durch die Zerstörung der Automobilindustrie vorgenommen werden, sondern auch die Fleischproduktion minimiert werden. Dafür sorgt eine EU-Verordnung, die vorsieht, die Stickstoffemission bis Ende 2030 um 50 – 95 Prozent zu reduzieren. Für viele holländische Bauern bedeuten diese Pläne das Aus. Die betroffenen Landwirte sollen ihre Betriebe freiwillig aufgeben und dafür eine Entschädigung enthalten – unter der Bedingung, dass sie zukünftig keinen landwirtschaftlichen Betrieb mehr aufnehmen. Sollten sie damit nicht einverstanden sein, kann es zur Enteignung kommen.

Unter den holländischen Landwirten kursieren offenbar Gerüchte , dass die niederländischen Bauern gar den Migrationsplänen der EU im Wege stehen. Die Massenzuwanderung im Zuge des “UN Replacement Population Plan” könnte der Grund für die massenhafte Enteignung der Bauern sein. So käme die Regierung billig an Land, heißt es in nachfolgendem Beitrag:

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***

Translated from German

Are there now farmers’ protests across Europe against insane, home-made inflation, the energy crisis and the EU? After the farmers in the Netherlands had been fighting against the EU’s “Green Deal” and thus against Schwab’s Great Reset dream for weeks by taking the protest to the streets, it’s now happening again in Spain – like last time in March – to protests by farmers. Ever larger parts of the population are behind the farmers and show solidarity with them.

After the farmers’ protests in the Netherlands, there are now road blockades again in Spain. The protests of Andalusian farmers are again directed against the high prices for fuel and staple foods, as they did in March, when 150,000 farmers from all over Spain protested. Especially in the southern part of Spain, in Andalusia, the farmers are protesting because of the inflation and the enormously increased prices for energy and food. In Spain, inflation was already over 10 percent in June.

In a video posted to Twitter, dozens of farmers dressed in yellow vests can be seen, with their tractors in the background, blocking a highway entrance.

Spanish farmers block A4 highway in Jaén, Andalusia and protest against rising fuel prices@auraxchan pic.twitter.com/I5YxYsAX8m

— Elaine 🧚‍♀️ 🗣 (@KalsElaine) July 1, 2022

Spanish farmers blocked the highway in Andalusia.

They are protesting against the increase in prices for fuel and essential goods.#Spain #Spanish #SpanishFarmers #HighFuelPrices #FuelPrices #Gasprices #Andalusia #Protest pic.twitter.com/NCyFpMeDmy

— WeAreProtestors (@WeAreProtestors) July 2, 2022

The protests are part of Dutch peasant protests that the authorities there are currently trying to stop. As Journalistenwatch reported, the Dutch police fired shots at the demonstrators for the first time on Wednesday. A video shows that this happened completely without reason. The system media here and there are currently constructing a story of danger to which the police “only” reacted. In addition, further recordings show that paid provocateurs are specifically trying to escalate the situation.

According to the green conversion plans of the EU’s “Green Deal” and thus according to Schwab’s Great Reset Plan, not only should CO2 emissions be reduced by destroying the automotive industry, but meat production should also be minimized. This is ensured by an EU regulation that provides for a 50-95 percent reduction in nitrogen emissions by the end of 2030. For many Dutch farmers, these plans mean the end. The farmers affected should give up their farms voluntarily and receive compensation for this – on the condition that they no longer start farming in the future. If they do not agree to this, it can lead to expropriation.

Apparently, rumors are circulating among Dutch farmers that Dutch farmers are actually standing in the way of EU migration plans. Mass immigration as part of the “UN Replacement Population Plan” could be the reason for the mass dispossession of farmers. This is how the government would get ashore cheaply, according to this article.

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***

During a press conference last week, I interrupted Chrystia Freeland to ask whether Canada sent special forces to fight Russia in Ukraine. I also queried the deputy prime minister on whether Canada was at war with Russia and if she’s concerned about the possibility of nuclear war. I also asked if she considered NATO an aggressive alliance.

Before receiving a response, I was ushered out of the room at the Maison du développement durable in Montréal. But a reporter later asked Freeland about a New York Times report that Canadian special forces are working with US, British, Lithuanian and French counterparts in Ukraine. The elite troops are assisting Ukrainian forces with training and intelligence gathering. According to that article Canada’s secretive commandos are operating alongside a CIA mission to help coordinate US intelligence support for Ukraine’s war effort.

In her response, Freeland refused to confirm the deployment, instead focusing on the illegality of Russia’s actions. While most Canadians would agree with Freeland’s description of Russia’s horrendous invasion, we deserve to know if we are at war with a nuclear-armed state.

Today I asked Deputy PM @cafreeland whether she sent Canadian special forces to fight Russia in Ukraine. I also asked whether we are at war w/ Russia & if she's concerned about the possibility of nuclear war. Additionally, I asked if she thinks NATO is an aggressive alliance. pic.twitter.com/29z3aPdwDX

— Bianca Mugyenyi (@Bianca_Kabibi) June 29, 2022

Alongside special forces, Ottawa has encouraged retired soldiers to take up arms against the Russians. Hundreds of Canadians have been assisting the war effort, including former top generals Rick Hillier and Trevor Cadieu.

Ottawa has also delivered or allocated $600 million in heavy weaponry to repel Russian forces from the eastern region of Ukraine, known as the Donbas. Canadian assistance includes howitzers and light armoured vehicles as well as tens of thousands of artillery shells, grenades and rocket launchers. The Communications Security Establishment is also helping the military deliver the weapons into Ukraine and assisting with other operations in the region.

About 1,400 Canadian troops are currently stationed in eastern Europe as part of Operation Reassurance. Since 2017 Canada has led a NATO battlegroup on Russia’s doorstep, which is set to more than double in size to 5,000 personnel. Canada’s deployment to Latvia was recently extended, which may violate the 1997 NATO-Russia Founding Act’s prohibition on permanently stationing troops in former Warsaw Pact countries.

Last week two Canadian vessels left Halifax to participate in NATO missions in the Baltic and North Sea. They are joining two other Canadian warships patrolling near Russia’s territorial waters.

NATO is bolstering its operations in eastern Europe in response to a war partly spurred by the alliance’s enlargement. When NATO moved to expand eastward in contravention of promises made to Soviet officials, the architect of US containment strategy towards the Soviet Union, George Kennan, warned that it would “inflame the nationalistic, anti-Western and militaristic tendencies in Russian opinion.” In a 1997 New York Times op-ed Kennan predicted NATO expansion would “impel Russian foreign policy in directions decidedly not to our liking.”

Still, Ottawa pushed to expand the alliance, including Ukraine’s adhesion to NATO. In a 2008 cable to the secretary of state, the Moscow-based diplomat William Burns, who currently leads the CIA, wrote, “Ukrainian entry into NATO is the brightest of all redlines for the Russian elite (not just Putin).”

While not formally part of NATO, Ukraine has been drawn into the alliance since elected President Viktor Yanukovich, who legislated the country’s neutrality, was ousted with Western support in 2014. With Canadian soldiers leading the charge, NATO has trained and armed 10,000 Ukrainian troops annually over the past seven years. Canadian military trainers repeatedly said one of their aims was to pave the way for full Ukrainian participation in NATO by making its forces interoperable with the rest of the alliance.

Ottawa’s policies have aggravated tensions in eastern Europe. To help ensure the conflict doesn’t escalate even further we need to start asking tough questions of our political leaders.

At a minimum we should be told by our government if Canadian forces are on the ground in Ukraine.

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Bianca Mugyenyi is an author, activist and director of the Canadian Foreign Policy Institute. She is based in Montréal.

Featured image: The NATO Enhanced Forward Presence Battle Group conducts an exercise in the Camp Ādaži training area in Latvia as part of Operation Reassurance, September 1, 2019. Photo by Corporal Djalma Vuong-De Ramos/DND.

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***

Throughout the non-mainstream media there has been a plethora of praise for the pioneering work and courageous efforts of the dissident physician Dr. Vladimir Zelenko who suddenly passed away from lung cancer on June 30 at the young age of 48. Dr. Zelenko earned a reputation for himself by treating patients testing positive for the SARS-2 virus very early during the pandemic. It may be recalled that when Covid-19 deaths spiked dramatically, particularly in New York City, there was no FDA approved treatment specifically targeting SARS coronavirus infections. People who tested positive were simply told to return home and isolate themselves. Consequently, infected individuals, especially the senior citizens, locked themselves down until their symptoms worsened and death knocked at their door. They would subsequently be rushed to hospital ICUs, placed on ventilators, and would often die in the absence of their families and loved ones. The same was witnessed throughout the nation’s nursing homes in the regions where Covid-19 cases were high.

Despite the inept efforts to treat Covid patients in hospitals and conventional medical facilities, with only a small handful of exceptions, there were nevertheless physicians who made efforts to delve more deeply into the medical literature in order to find potential FDA approved drug candidates that might effectively and safely treat SARS-2 infections. Dr. Zelenko was among the earliest of these doctors.  In the absence of any forthcoming therapeutic recommendations from government health officials and the professional medical associations, he prescribed a combination of the inexpensive generic malaria drug hydroxychloroquine (HCQ), azithromycin, and a zinc supplement. Moreover, the Zelenko protocol cost a mere several dollars. He also had a very high success rate in treating Covid patients that far excelled the medical facilities that followed the Anthony Fauci rules-based doctrine minus any viable therapeutic value.

The Fauci formula was a do-nothing strategy except to distance and isolate patients until a new novel drug and/or a vaccine appears on the market. Until such a time arrived, there was nothing an infected patient could do except pray or a recovery. Yet, very early in the pandemic, other nations, including China, were already promoting a variety of treatments. HCQ was already being widely accepted as one feasible course of SARS-2 treatment before Trump touted it publicly and was widely attacked by the liberal media.

Just two months after the first public report about the new coronavirus contagion in Wuhan, Zhejiang University School of Medicine, one China’s oldest and most prestigious universities, publicly released its “Handbook of CoVid-19 Prevention and Treatment” worldwide. Having been the first on the front lines against the new SARS strain, it was perhaps the most concise document for healthcare measures to prevent and contain the spread of the virus. For example, the Chinese report recommended the use of chloroquine following a favorable electrocardiogram. In addition to conventional treatments, the Zheijiang scientists listed herbal formulas based upon Traditional Chinese Medicine studies.

Yet Fauci and the US federal health agencies would have none of that. HCQ and ivermectin were not profitable for Fauci, the NIAID/FDA, and their deep financial collaborations with the pharmaceutical industry and vaccine makers.

The New York Times and its biase reporting has been at the forefront to advance the Fauci doctrine by ridiculing and damning physicians and medical experts such as Dr. Zelenko, Dr. Paul Marik formerly at Eastern Virginia Medical School, Dr. Pierre Kory and many more. Therefore when the Times published an obituary about Dr. Zelenko, it would seem that the obituary’s author continued to promote the CDC’s talking points. The obituary ignores the human story about a brave outspoken physician deeply cared for the lives of his patients and wanted to save them at all costs. Dr Zelenko and many other doctors found it unconscionable to blindly follow the vague and uncertain dictates of medical bureaucrats in Washington whose delusional belief in themselves as the stalwarts of science placed their hubris above the lives of millions of frightened and confused people about a new virus waiting around every corner. Aside from begging for patience, there were no serious solutions coming forth from Washington.

Put into proper context, the Times agrees with Fauci’s do-nothing strategy, insisting “that months of research would be needed to find an effective treatment.” America waited and during those months of waiting death’s mounted into the hundreds of thousands until Fauci’s largely ineffective magic bullet, Remdesivir, reached the market at a whopping $3,100 cost for a 5-day treatment.

It is important to note that the New York Times obituary to discredit Dr. Zelenko’s HCQ protocol provides an excellent example of corporate media’s blatant misreporting, abysmal due diligence and fact checking and perhaps shameless malfeasance. Even the sad and untimely death of a courageous and compassionate doctor who does everything within his power and medical knowledge to save lives, can be turned into a weapon against one’s enemies.

In order to discredit Dr. Zelenko’s HCQ protocol, the article references the highly flawed University of Minnesota study published in the August 2020 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine. This study has been thoroughly criticized and debunked by many medical experts. On the one hand, the Minnesota study relied upon excessively high doses of HCQ that to our knowledge no practicing physician would ever prescribe in their clinical practice. Second, the study did not include zinc supplementation in its course of treatment, a key item in Dr Zelenko’s protocol. Zinc is crucial for HCQ’s effectiveness and against the SARS-2 virus and all HCQ advocates include zinc in their protocols. HCQ works in conjunction with zinc, as explained by Los Angeles emergency room specialist Dr. Anthony Cardillo, who like Dr. Zelenko and now thousands of other physicians are successfully treating Covid patients. In an interview Dr. Cardillo explains that “hydroxycholoroquine opens a zinc channel, zinc goes into the cell, it then blocks the replication of the cellular machinery.” “Every patient I’ve prescribed it to has been very very ill,” Cardillo stated, “and within 8 to 12 hours they were basically symptom free.” In many countries, zinc is now part of a standard course of treatment against SARS-2.

But there is more.  Citizens expect individuals who pride themselves as responsible journalists to investigate their subject matter thoroughly. We expect journalists to at least have a somewhat knowledgeable background on the topic and to fact check any reference material used to support their argument. This makes the Time’s reference to the Minnesota study all the more egregious as a weapon against the advocates of HCQ. Besides its poor design, the trial underwent several curious methodological changes.  When a clinical trial is pre-registered, the researchers are confirming that the methodology will be uniform throughout the course of the study. Trial changes recorded in the National Library of Medicine’s Clinical Trials data system indicate that the Minnesota study was altered as it was being conducted in order to assure that HCQ would show unfavorable results.  This included changes to the actual targets the study was trying to measure. The study was originally scheduled to last a full year – until May 2021. But several days after Trump’s public recommendation of chloroquine drugs, the trial timeline was reduced to two months. During that time, the trial’s methodology was substantially changed at least six times, including the number treatment days being reduced from 6 days to 4.

Moreover, the clinical trial’s lead corresponding author, Prof. David Boulware, reported no conflicts of interests. However, while the study was underway, the Canadian drug company Revive Therapeutics appointed Boulware as its new Scientific Advisor for infectious disease. In its March 24th press release, Revive was developing “the use of Bucillamine as a potential novel treatment for Covid-19.” Boulware himself stated, “I am excited to assist Revive in their objective in pursuing the clinical development of Bucillamine for infectious diseases and its prospect as a potential solution for COVID-19.”  According to Brad Geyer at the website Grant Fraud, Boulware “reportedly advised the President [Trump] to stop taking hydroxychoroquine” and failed to disclose his other conflict of interest with Gilead, the developers of remdesivir.

In our opinion, based upon the written and reported evidence, and the unreported conflicts of interests, this entire study was a sham. Yet two years later, the New York Times continues to tout this junk study as having medical value.

HCQ, and later the more effective anti-parasite drug Ivermectin, have been prescribed for early treatment and as a prophylaxis by physicians working on pandemic’s front lines with enormous success.  Yet these American physicians, including Dr. Zelenko, who struggled to get the urgent message out about these drugs’ success rates were marginalized and ridiculed en masse.

The entire American corporate media has used scare tactics to attack both HCQ and ivermectin. In the case of HCQ, the government attempted to flout studies emphasizing its toxicity. However, this was only at very high doses that are never recommended in a clinical setting. Otherwise, HCQ has an exemplary safety profile. The 60-year old, five-dollar drug has been prescribed to approximately 5 million people annually for a variety of illnesses, including malaria, rheumatoid arthritis and lupus. A study conducted by Dr. Stephen Smith, a former research scientist at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases showed that when HCQ dosage was properly adjusted to a patient’s weight it improved Covid patients’ survival rate by over 100 percent.  Likewise the corporate media demonized ivermectin under the misleading label as a veterinarian deworming drug for horses.  Corporate media tabloids such as the New York Times and Washington Post consistently repeated this talking point despite ivermectin having one of the longest safety profiles in medical history and having been prescribed to over 3.5 billion people worldwide. Both drugs are listed on the World Health Organization’s essential drug list.

Hence we are providing an accurate overview and update of the current status on the medical research supporting the use of HCQ and ivermectin.

Worldwide, 421 studies, in 51 nations, have been conducted to investigate the effectiveness of HCQ against SARS-2. As of July 4, 2022, 323 studies are peer-reviewed and 348 clinical trials compare treatment and control groups.  All total, the 348 clinical trials enrolled over 458,000 participants and 72 percent showed HCQ’s positive effects in reducing length of symptoms, and rates of morbidity and mortality. For early Covid treatment, HCQ showed an average 63 percent improvement and 72 percent lower mortality. It is true that HCQ has been shown to be relatively ineffective for late treatment. Excessive doses, which make up the majority of the negative studies, such as the University of Minnesota trial, argue against HCQ’s use. In addition, unfavorable studies were overwhelmingly retrospective, which are highly unreliable for drawing sound conclusions. American funded HCQ studies show a large bias towards publishing negative results.  In fact, American studies had a 260 percent higher rate of reporting negative results than studies originating from other countries.

Ivermectin has an even more impressive success profile across the entire course of SARS-2 infection: 83 percent improvement as a prophylaxis, 63 percent improvement for early and 39 percent for late treatment. One hundred eighteen of 172 ivermectin studies have been peer-reviewed and 88 were clinical trials comparing ivermectin treatment and control groups. Only about 20 studies reported negative results and over half of these were retrospective. Forty six studies show that ivermectin lowers overall mortality by an average 52 percent. Twenty-two countries have officially adopted ivermectin for early treatment.

If we look outside the US, UK, Canada and a few other nations we will find tens of thousands of physicians and medical facilities regularly including HCQ and ivermectin in their therapeutic regimens to treat SARS-2 infections.  Yet in the US and other US-aligned nations where the medical establishment has become an authoritative regime, there can be no room for dissent. What we are witnessing is a frontal assault against doctors that is unprecedented in the history of medicine. Since when does the successful clinical experience of 1000s of physicians count less than the highly politicized opinions of corporate journalists who deny outright the full scope of peer-reviewed literature and refuse to interview the physicians who use alternative therapies and their patients? The only necessary proof is that doctors prescribing HCQ, ivermectin and other repurposed drugs have saved far more lives than those physicians who simply follow the Fauci doctrine. More chilling, at the behest of Washington, state medical boards and professional medical associations are making efforts to criminalize health professionals who support and advocate alternative Covid treatments and who speak out against the life-threatening risks of the gene therapy based Covid vaccines.

Johns Hopkins University claims that over 1 million people died of Covid-19 in the US alone.  Despite the numerous arguments that can be made about the actual cause of these deaths, there is a more important question to ask. How many of these people might still be alive if American medicine were not an authoritative operation creating obstacles to physicians practicing their profession? And if the majority of peer-reviewed clinical evidence validates these treatments, is the government, the pharmaceutical industry and their lobbyists and the corporate media, such as the New York Times, complicit in preventing patients from having access to life-saving drugs?

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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. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

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***

Two Brazilians were killed in Ukraine in the first week of July after a Russian drone operation in Kharkiv. In all, three Brazilian mercenaries have died in Ukraine since the beginning of the Russian special military operation on February 24th. In the South American country, the mainstrem media has a strong pro-Western ideological orientation, which is why it encourages “volunteers” to go to Eastern Europe. In their speech, the media outlets claim that it is “easy” to fight against Russians because Kiev is supposedly “winning” the conflict. However, upon arriving in Ukraine, the foreign mercenaries are faced with a different and much harsher reality.

Between the night of July 1 and the morning of July 2 Brazilian mercenaries Douglas Rodrigues Búrigo and Thalita do Valle died after a Russian attack in Khakiv. Douglas was a former soldier of the Brazilian Army and had been fighting in Ukraine since May. Thalita was a model, lawyer, and professional sniper, who had previously worked as a military volunteer and propaganda agent for the Kurdish women’s battalions in the Middle East. Apparently, she died of asphyxiation while trying to flee her accommodation in the face of a drone attack, while Douglas was reportedly hit by shrapnel from mortar shells on the outside.

In June, another Brazilian had already died in Ukraine. André Hack Bahi was fatally shot during Russian bombing raids in Severodonetsk. Bahi was a former fighter in the French Legion and had already participated in some missions in Africa, but he was not able to survive the intense reality of the fighting in Ukraine. It is also necessary to mention that not all the dead have been properly identified yet, which leads to believe that there may be more Brazilians among the dead in Ukraine, since there is ample participation of mercenaries from the South American country in the region.

There is still no official report by the authorities indicating the precise number of Brazilian citizens who are fighting for Kiev’s side in the conflict, but the number is certainly greater than what was expected from a neutral country with good relations with Russia. Even Brazilian parliamentarians fought in favor of Kiev, such as former deputy Artur do Val, who had a quick and scandalous performance in Ukraine, where he committed acts of sexual harassment against Ukrainian women. It is also known that over the last eight years several Brazilians have tried to join the Ukrainian neo-Nazi paramilitary troops to fight in Donbass, having been rejected due to the anti-Latin racism of these groups. Now these same militants are finding their way into the Ukrainian positions due to Kiev’s policy of accepting all foreign volunteers.

But it is absolutely impossible to analyze the situation without criticizing the destabilizing role that the Brazilian local media has played in its coverage of the events in Ukraine. Pro-Western media outlets report the conflict fallaciously, pointing to a non-existent “Ukrainian victory” and “ease” in fighting Moscow’s forces, portraying voluntary combat as a kind of “hunting safari” against Russians. Obviously, when the “volunteers” (almost all of them being paid private soldiers linked to mercenary companies) arrive on the battlefield, they are faced with situations very different from those reported by the journalists who encourage volunteering.

Agencies also have tried to publicize an image of “heroism” when talking about Brazilians fighting in Ukraine, ignoring important issues, such as the fact that they are cooperating with neo-Nazi militants and supporting a government that practices genocidal policies against the Russian population. Since the beginning of the Russian operation, Brazilian media agencies and Brazilian branches of foreign agencies have praised the “heroism” of the mercenaries who would be “helping to fight the invasion”, which also serves as propaganda and incentive for volunteering.

Brazilian media is not acting alone, but following the agenda imposed by the great world media agencies, which have increasingly bet on the speech of “Ukrainian victory” as a way to raise the morale of the troops and justify the irresponsible military aid that the Western countries are sending to Kiev.

Private security companies hired to help Kiev are the ones that profit most from the propagation of this fallacious speech among the public opinion, as they manage to convince an increasing number of volunteers to go and fight in Ukraine. In fact, some of these volunteers are not designated for direct combat but remain in safe places taking photos and videos to publish on the internet, reproducing propaganda to encourage more men to go – always trying to convince that combats are “easy” and “safe”, so that more people enlist in the mercenary companies. The result is that of the deluded enlisted men only a few are directed to propaganda, while others die on the battlefield.

Obviously, for Western countries and for private companies, investing in this type of propaganda is strategic and profitable, but not for Brazil. As a member of the BRICS, not participating in anti-Russia sanctions and being Moscow’s partner in several areas, the Brazilian government should act more incisively to monitor the destabilizing role that its media agencies are playing, seeking to prevent foreign speeches from taking Brazilians to die on the battlefield. Furthermore, it is not at all beneficial to Brasilia’s international image that the country is known for having a large number of citizens volunteering to fight alongside neo-Nazi battalions.

It is important to remember that mercenaries and “volunteers are not considered prisoners of war, but common criminals, which means that Brazilian citizens can be tried by courts in the liberated parts of Ukraine if they are captured. This type of situation will certainly generate diplomatic discomfort and, as Brazil and Russia are members of the BRICS, this is not a favorable condition for either side.

The best thing for the Brazilian government to do is to ban its citizens from volunteering in wars that do not concern the national interest of Brazil.

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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.

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***

On June 2, Saudi-led OPEC and its allies announced it will accelerate oil production in July and August, as the cartel’s key player, Saudi Arabia, agreed to U.S. pleadings that it take action to cool crude oil prices. The sharp rise in the price of a barrel of crude since the start of hostilities in Ukraine has threatened to stall the global economy with the United States being especially vulnerable.

OPEC indicated it would increase output by nearly 650,000 barrels a day in the next two months, which is a sharp increase on the previously scheduled increase of 400,000 b/d. The announcement followed in the wake of a statement from the European Union that member states had agreed to impose a partial ban on Russian oil imports.

This only served to underline fears in the energy markets that shortages will be exacerbated and cause a further scramble for ever rarer surplus supplies. The expectations around the OPEC meeting were that most of the supply increase will be met by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.

The extra supplies will come after months of high-level U.S. diplomacy to repair relations with Riyadh.

It also represents a climbdown for the Biden administration, which came to power in 2021 on election slogans which had seen Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the de facto ruler of Saudi Arabia, being labeled a “murderer” and Saudi Arabia itself a “pariah state” by candidate Joe Biden.

The U.S. welcomed OPEC’s statement in what it termed an “important decision” and gave a very vocal credit to Saudi Arabia ensuring that the OPEC gathering succeeded in “achieving…consensus amongst the group members.” The White House also recognized the “positive contributions of the UAE, Kuwait, and Iraq.”

OPEC’s decision comes ahead of a planned visit to the Middle East by U.S. president Joe Biden.

The U.S. president has now added Riyadh to his itinerary, a move that was thought unthinkable as recently as February of this year, and which some are saying is tantamount to a “pardon for murder.”

The Russian invasion of Ukraine has forced Joe Biden to not only soften his previous antipathy toward Prince Mohammed but to retreat so aggressively from that position that any veneer of self-respect has been thoroughly removed.

Joe Biden has maintained a distance from the Crown Prince because of his links to the murder of U.S.-based journalist Jamal Khashoggi. Realpolitik, however, means that the U.S. is forced to improve ties with Saudi Arabia, with energy a cornerstone of the bilateral relationship stretching back nearly 75 years.

Background briefings indicate that Saudi Arabia’s softening of its stance toward the Biden administration follows weeks of shuttle diplomacy by the White House’s top Middle East energy envoys, Brett McGurk and Amos Hochstein, who paved the way for an improvement in relations between Riyadh and Washington.

All of this begs the question: Why does the Biden administration refuse to reach compromise with the oil giant that is Venezuela? This is a country with the largest proven reserves of oil in the world and it is located right next to the U.S.’s backyard.

Historically, the Venezuelan oil industry has been as much under the de facto control of U.S. Big Oil as was Saudi oil for decades. It is a fact that several of the largest refineries located on the Gulf Coast of the United States were built specifically to refine Venezuelan crude. So why then Biden’s unwillingness to step forward with an extended hand and grasp the opportunity for rapprochement with the government of President Maduro?

That the U.S.’s attempts to install former head of the Venezuelan National Assembly Juan Guaidó as “interim president” has been an embarrassing failure is no longer a matter for debate. Even an attempted coup in early 2020 fell comically flat on its face with evidence emerging in its aftermath of ludicrously high success fees having been offered by Guaidó and his inner circle to the ringleaders.

Juan Guaidó and Donald Trump. [Source: venezuelaanalysis.com]

Further revelations about misuse of substantial donor funds, with fingers pointing directly at Guaidó’s brother, have also eroded what little support remained for the former National Assembly chief. Another source of embarrassment for Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken is that Guaidó today is not even an elected official.

What little authority he had has been greatly reduced since the time that Donald Trump anointed him “Interim President.” The fickle Trump soon pulled back from Guaidó and clearly viewed him with disdain and contempt, as revealed in former Secretary of Defense Mark Esper’s recent book “A Sacred Oath.”

The only viable alternative, Nicolás Maduro, is the man who, despite the best laid plans of Washington hawks like Mike Pompeo and John Bolton, has remained in power since being passed the baton by late President Hugo Chávez in 2013.

Nicolás Maduro has shown a very astute political acumen which has surprised many outsiders who have failed to grasp the loyalty the vast majority of Venezuelans feel toward him. He has been able to navigate Venezuela through the worst ravages of the COVID pandemic to the edge of a sustained economic recovery.

Shops in downtown Caracas are once again full, the local stock market has been amongst the best-performing globally over the past 12 months and 2021 saw annual GDP in positive territory for the first time in several years. And now, Venezuela is projected to have a whopping 20 percent growth in 2022, an eye-catching turnaround, but not good enough for Joe Biden, Secretary of State Blinken and others. It seems that Venezuela can do nothing right.

Or perhaps in keeping with the way U.S. administrations have behaved over the past decade, the Biden administration only shows respect to those who show it no respect in return. Historically, Venezuela has been as close an ally of the United States as the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Perhaps the reason for the truculence of President Biden is that he would rather seek to exploit the natural resources of Venezuela whereas, in the case of Saudi Arabia, the U.S. would rather take advantage of that country’s very significant cash reserves and sell more overpriced weapons and second-hand technology polished up to look brand new.

In March of this year, after a few days of fighting in Ukraine, it appeared that the Biden White House had awakened and recognized the Bolivarian Republic for the friend that it has always been rather than the pariah that the Trump regime (and indeed the late-Obama period) had painted it. No sooner had it been confirmed that the highest level delegation in many years to officially visit had arrived in Caracas, that the anti-Venezuela brigade went apoplectic, claiming to anyone who would listen that the event was akin to the betrayal of Christ and that the end of civilization was near!

President Joe Biden with Juan S. González, who headed the U.S. delegation to Venezuela in March. [Source: venezuelaanalysis.com]

Nevertheless, it is a fact that the visit to Caracas was long overdue. Any serious first-year student of political science would be able to confirm that. Unfortunately, in what passes for civilized political discourse (you shout, I shout, we both shout, we both tweet videos of the other person shouting, and both call the other out for being radical), the anti-reconciliation coalition led by Marco Rubio (R-FL) ratcheted up the noise to such a level that any dialogue became impossible.

Even the substantial gesture of goodwill shown by President Maduro in releasing two Americans held in Venezuela was condemned as “tokenism” by Senator Rubio. Indeed, the hysteria from the right rose to such a level that the Biden administration was forced onto the back foot to such an extent that it appeared for a few days that this initiative, based on political and economic realities, was all but dead.

The problem for President Biden and Secretary of State Blinken is that this is not where this matter can be allowed to end. There is far too much at stake for the initiative to be buried by the rabid right.

And, of course, the situation has the added complexity of the ongoing detention in Miami of Venezuelan diplomat Alex Saab.

Alex Saab is the Venezuelan Special Envoy who was forcibly and unprecedentedly brought to the United States from the West African state of Cape Verde in October 2021. He had been detained by the Cape Verdean authorities since June 12, 2020, during a refueling stop en route from Caracas to Iran to undertake a humanitarian special mission at the peak of the COVID pandemic.

What makes Saab’s ongoing detention in Miami unique and a matter of concern to not just Venezuela, but especially to the global diplomatic community, is that, as a Special Envoy traveling from Venezuela to Iran, where he was accredited to Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, he was entitled to diplomatic immunity and inviolability and protected by centuries-old rules which govern the freedom of movement of diplomats and political agents.

Saab’s detention, initially in Cape Verde and now in Miami, had to be cloaked in allegations of criminal activity in order to justify it, which is a widely held view beyond U.S. law enforcement circles. It is the fulfillment of a political goal—the overthrow of the government of President Nicolás Maduro—which has been behind the pursuit of Saab who was indicted and sanctioned by the United States on July 25, 2019.

What began as an openly declared political objective of the Trump administration (the removal of Nicolás Maduro from office) had become increasingly untenable over the past 18 months even before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Unfortunately for the United States, President Maduro has not only remained in office but strengthened his power-base with an unwaivering campaign of defying the economic and political blockade of Venezuela by the United States.

The dramatic rise in the price of gasoline, together with the increasing incidences of “heat or eat” in conjunction with upcoming U.S. mid-term elections, have combined to create a perfect storm that should result in a significant reset of the Venezuela-U.S. political and economic relationship. Only it has not.

This is why the inability of Biden, Blinken and others to reach an accommodation with Venezuela when they have shown an astonishing ability to undertake a U-turn with Saudi Arabia without so much as a blush of embarrassment is extraordinary.

The Biden administration has been criticized for ineptitude on several fronts but its schizophrenic approach toward President Maduro has shocked many and is now in danger of collapsing altogether. Venezuela has made it clear that it wants its diplomat, Alex Saab, released and allowed to return to Caracas. Is this really so difficult to do?

It seems that, making nice with Saudi Arabian officials, whom Biden once warned of “significant changes” in their country’s relationship with the U.S. as a result of the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, was not hard to do. Perhaps because it comes with a different level of political risk assessment. No Marco Rubio or Ted Cruz or noisy social media activists telling anyone who will listen that you are soft on this or that. Or that you are giving in to communists. The Saudis may be many things but communists they are not.

The recent Summit of the Americas held in Los Angeles, which was meant to be a showcase for President Biden’s engagement with South America, was a public relations disaster with several prominent no shows. The debacle has left Biden, Blinken and the summit’s chief organizer, Juan González, desperate for a “win” in their backyard. However, with Colombia (one of the few remaining allies that the U.S. has in its backyard) recently following the region’s trend and turning politically left, the Troika is now adrift.

González, who has the grandiose titles of “Senior Adviser and Special Assistant to the President of the United States and the Senior Director for the Western Hemisphere at the National Security Council,” came into his post in early January 2021 with high expectations. One article referred to his appointment this way: “As for the Western Hemisphere, after four years of the [Trump] anti-immigrant and xenophobic stances on the region, González’s appointment represents the start of new relations between the United States and Latin America.”

Coming on the heels of “America is back!” there was genuine optimism that the return of a Democratic administration in Washington would lead to a rebuilding of historical ties; however, that early optimism has been shattered by a combination of surprising political naivete and acute political partisanship which means the two sides of the congressional aisle cannot agree which day of the week it is, let alone agree on a meaningful approach to dealing with a whole continent.

Juan González has, in the eyes of many observers, been a disappointment. It has not helped, of course, that those above him have shown an inability to provide any leadership. Nonetheless, the cringe-worthy knots into which the White House has tied itself since making an initial approach to Caracas in March, following the commencement of hostilities in Ukraine and the accompanying surge oil prices, has been embarrassing.

That the U.S. needs Venezuelan oil is self-evident. That Caracas is willing to supply that oil is very self-evident. That the Trump-anointed Juan Guaidó is irrelevant is self-evident. That the diplomat Alex Saab’s release is a must for the political progress Washington wants is very self-evident.

The time has come for the grown-ups in the White House to accept that Nicolás Maduro is not leaving his presidential palace any time soon, accept that international law provides Alex Saab with immunity and inviolability, stop creating artificial barriers to political dialogue and accept that American authority will be better served by being engaged with one of its most economically significant neighbors rather than continuing with a discredited political policy that the U.S. neither needs nor wants.

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Daniel Kovalik graduated from Columbia University School of Law in 1993. He then served as in-house counsel for the United Steelworkers, AFL-CIO (USW) until 2019. Mr. Kovalik received the David W. Mills Mentoring Fellowship from Stanford University School of Law and was the recipient of the Project Censored Award for his article exposing the unprecedented killing of trade unionists in Colombia. He has written extensively on the issue of international human rights and U.S. foreign policy for the Huffington Post and Counterpunch and has lectured throughout the world on these subjects. He is the author of several books including The Plot To Overthrow Venezuela, How The US Is Orchestrating a Coup for Oil, which includes a Foreword by Oliver Stone. Daniel can be reached at [email protected].

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***

Since January 17, 1961, the circumstances surrounding the kidnapping and assassination of Congolese Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba has remained a symbol of the legacy of colonialism on the African continent.

Lumumba rose to prominence during 1958-1960 due to his involvement in independence politics when the people of the former Belgian colony of Congo rose up in rebellion to demand national liberation.

His only known bodily remains, a tooth, had been held in Belgium as a souvenir from those who carried out his torture and execution. As an act aimed at making amends for the legacy of colonialism in the Belgian Congo, the tooth was returned to the DRC and given a proper burial by the current government of President Felix Tshisekedi. (See this)

The details of the murder of Lumumba and two of his cabinet members, Maurice Mpolo, Minister of Youth and Sports along with Joseph Okito, the Second Vice President of the Senate, were gruesome. After being taken to Thysville, located approximately 100 miles from Leopoldville, a disagreement erupted among the Congolese troops who were divided over whether to support the MNC-Lumumba.

Lumumba and his comrades were killed by a firing squad of Belgian troops. Later their bodies were destroyed with acid in efforts to conceal the evidence.

U.S. and Belgian-backed puppet leader, Col. Mobuto Sese Seko, who had declared himself leader of the country at the aegis of Washington in September 1960, arrived at the military camp in Thysville just days prior to the assassinations. Mobuto and other Belgian officers ordered Lumumba, Okito and Mpolo taken to Elizabethville, (now known as Lubumbashi), the center of the mining areas in Katanga province. This area had been deliberately broken off by a secessionist putsch during the early days of independence in efforts to undermine the MNC-Lumumba administration in Leopoldville.

After taking office on June 30, 1960, in the capital of Leopoldville (now Kinshasha), Lumumba and his Congolese National Movement (MNC) political party set out to institute a people’s government in the newly independent state. However, the imperatives of the Belgian colonialists and their western allies had no interest in allowing MNC-Lumumba to implement a program based upon anti-imperialism and Pan-Africanism.

This intransigence on the part of Brussels and Washington was clearly based upon the strategic mineral wealth which exists in the country now known as the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). The imperialist powers could not afford to allow these vast reservoirs of natural resources such as cobalt, diamonds, gold, copper, cassiterite (tin ore) and coltan, as well as timber, coffee and oil to be utilized by the African people to build an independent existence in cooperation with other states.

After Lumumba and his comrades were removed by the Belgian military officials and the western-backed collaborators in the DRC, he was tortured and killed in Elizabethville, Katanga. Moise Tshombe, who had been selected, groomed and installed by the Belgium government and the United States as head of Katanga, was projected by the imperialist-oriented media outlets as one of the responsible leaders in the country. These developments created chaos in Leopoldville (now Kinshasha), isolating the capital in the west of the country from the mineral rich areas of the south and east of the country.

The Role of the U.S. in the Coup Leading to the Assassination of Lumumba

To establish a pretext for the elimination of Lumumba, the administration of President Dwight Eisenhower labelled him as “pro-communist” and a threat to western interests. Lumumba sought to build good relations with the U.S. as well as the Soviet Union in 1960. The Congolese prime minister even visited the U.S. during the summer of 1960 in order to meet with the president. Nonetheless, Eisenhower refused to talk with him and continued the hostile policy towards the new government in Leopoldville.

High-level Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) officers working in the U.S. embassy in Leopoldville, were ordered to overthrow the MNC-Lumumba administration and to bring about his liquidation. A 2001 report into the assassination by a Belgian Commission provided details of the joint U.S.-Belgian plan to kill Lumumba.

Initially there was a CIA plot to poison Lumumba right at the headquarters of the independence government. President Dwight D. Eisenhower, according to documents released decades later, had authorized the assassination of Lumumba in 1960.

Nonetheless, the plot to poison him was unsuccessful. CIA-employed chemist Sidney Gottlieb concocted poisonous agents to be used for the assassination. During September 1960, Gottlieb transported the poison to Leopoldville while Larry Devlin, a CIA operative with official diplomatic cover, came up with a scheme to infect Lumumba’s toothbrush or his food. Despite these plans, Devlin’s operatives were unable to carry out the assassination at this time.

A voluminous book by Madeleine G. Kalb, entitled Congo Cables, documents communications by Devlin at the time which encouraged the assassination of Lumumba. Later the CIA station chief helped to conduct the search for Lumumba after he left Leopoldville to join his supporters in establishing an alternative government in the east of the vast country. Devlin was a key figure in arranging Lumumba’s transfer to Katanga while the CIA base chief in Elizabethville was in direct touch with the assassins the same day that Lumumba was killed.

John Stockwell, a CIA officer in the Congo and later a station chief, wrote in 1978 in his book entitled In Search of Enemies, that a CIA agent had the bodies in the trunk of his car in order to dispose of them. Stockwell believed that Devlin knew more than anyone else about the assassination of Lumumba, Okito and Mpolo.

Kalb also asserts that it was during a National Security Council meeting in Washington that Eisenhower gave the order to eliminate Lumumba. The assassination was carried out just three days prior to the inauguration of President John F. Kennedy on January 20, 1961. Kennedy, after taking office, covered up the U.S. role in the coup against the MNC-Lumumba government and the assassination of these three African leaders.

After the assassination of Lumumba, the U.S. administrations beginning with Kennedy right up until Bill Clinton, supported the regime of Mobuto. Untold national wealth was expropriated from the DRC by banks and mining conglomerates, a process which continues until today. The Mobuto regime was overthrown by the Allied Democratic Forces for Liberation (ADFL), led by Laurent Kabila in 1997.

Image on the right: Patrice Lumumba and Kwame Nkrumah

Other imperialist states have been implicated in the plot to overthrow and liquidate Lumumba including Britain and Canada. The United Nations military forces, which were invited into the country by Lumumba in his attempt to end the Belgian occupation, refused to secure the MNC government and instead objectively sided with the forces of counter-revolution. (See this and this)

After the assassination of Lumumba and the destabilization of the Congolese Revolution, the imperialist turned their attention to removing the first independence government in the West African state of Ghana (formerly a British colony known as the Gold Coast) led by Dr. Kwame Nkrumah, the prime minister and later president of the country. Although Nkrumah wrote in his post-coup book, Dark Days in Ghana (1968), that the CIA utilizing the U.S. embassy coordinated his removal from office, Stockwell in his 1978 work, In Search of Enemies, confirmed that the CIA station chief engineered the removal of Nkrumah’s Convention People’s Party (CPP) administration on February 24, 1966.

The coup in Ghana was conducted in a manner that made it appear as if it was a military and police operation. However, Nkrumah’s removal could not have taken place without the leading role of the CIA and the State Department. Documents related to this blatant interference in the internal affairs of Ghana have been subsequently declassified.

These historical events illustrate the vested interests of imperialism in preventing the genuine independence and unity of the African continent. Even in the current period, Washington and Wall Street are still seeking to maintain their hegemony over Africa and other geo-political regions of 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.

All images in this article are from the author

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***

Things Still Fall Apart shows that Africa is a neglected and exploited continent. Since it was invaded c.1500 by Europeans, it has accumulated only 1 per cent of the world’s wealth, despite containing 16 per cent of the world’s population and immense natural and human resources.

This collection of memories by a Brazilian economist, from his 20 years working on the continent, explains that this relative stationary situation is caused mostly by political decisions. Political decisions made on behalf of domestic rulers and rich countries; meanwhile, the poor have no voice or power.

The book challenges many historical narratives of the continent and unveils issues such as negative primitive accumulation and the politics of sexuality. The findings of this book reflect the reality of the poor and may be considered alarming and challenging – they need special attention and funding. If not, further stagnation, civil conflicts and migratory waves will persist. As a result, suffering for poor and future costs for rich countries will increase.

Nelio Dorea de Oliveira was born in Bahia, Brazil, in 1944. He studied Economics at the Federal University of Bahia, and the University of Glasgow in a PhD programme. He worked at the Ministry of Finance and the National Socio Economic Development Bank (BNDES) in Rio de Janeiro. He moved to Africa to work with the African Development Bank, in conjunction with the World Bank and IMF. Nelio also consulted with the UNDP and Goldman Sachs. He taught at Rio de Janeiro University, Oporto University and at the Tunis Business School. His international career has enabled him to gain a wide range of skills and exposure to different cultures and languages. He is married with two daughters and lives in London.

Click here to order the book.

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Pfizer Crimes Against Our Children: Cardiac Arrest of Two Month Old Baby an Hour After Experimental Vaccine

By Ranit Feinberg and Yaffa Shir-Raz, July 06, 2022

An analysis of VAERS reports shows that contrary to the FDA’s briefing document claiming that the majority of adverse events in Pfizers’ clinical trial were non-serious – at least 58 cases of life-threatening side effects in infants under 3 years old who received mRNA vaccines were reported.

Crime and Punishment. Government Officials Must be Held Accountable: Dr. Philip Giraldi

By Philip Giraldi, July 06, 2022

It has long been known that the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), in the wake of 9/11, resorted to torture in its overseas “black” prisons, but details of what took place and anything that would stand up in court as evidence has been difficult to discern as it has been easy for the Agency to shroud its more nefarious deeds through claims of protecting “states secrets.”

Syrian Troops and Civilians Chase Away US Occupation Convoy in Hasakah

By The Cradle, July 06, 2022

The Syrian Arab Army (SAA), along with local citizens from the village of Al-Mujaibara, have expelled a US army convoy that tried to break into an area under the control of the Syrian government in the northeastern Hasakah governorate.

EU Economies Are Down on Their Knees

By M. K. Bhadrakumar, July 06, 2022

On July 1 at the White House, US President Joe Biden made a startling disclosure that “the idea we’re going to be able to click a switch, bring down the cost of gasoline, is not likely in the near term

Two and Three-Year-Old Kids with Seizures Is “the New Normal”, 2-5 Days After COVID Vaccine

By Steve Kirsch, July 06, 2022

Doctors are mystified by a rash of seizures, rashes, etc. happening to 2 and 3-year-old kids. The only thing these kids have in common is that they were given the COVID vaccine just days earlier (two to five days earlier).

“Baby, It’s Cold Outside” (and Inside). Natural Gas to Heat Homes. What’s to Come this Winter…

By Ken Meyercord, July 06, 2022

Baby, it’s Cold Outside” is a song from the 1950s where, in contrapuntal verses, a woman explains why she must leave (“I really can’t stay”) and a man counters with a reason she should stay (“But, baby, it’s cold outside”). In light of the disruption in the global trade in oil and natural gas ensuing from the conflict in Ukraine, the last line of the song (“At least there will be plenty implied / If you got pneumonia and died”) might be a premonition of what’s to come this winter.

The Serpent and the Staff: Symbols of Safety and Security in the Propaganda of a Global Medical Tyranny

By Prof. Daniel Broudy and Dr. Valerie Kyrie, July 06, 2022

Understanding the bizarre social and economic transformations afoot in the world today requires a considerably wider view of history than is presented in contemporary corporate media. In this present era of an emerging Bio-Nano Age, we can see, if we squint at history, the faint contours of ancient cultures practicing mystic rites, medicine, and alchemy.

Russia and India Expand Cooperation on Modernizing Indian Air Force

By Drago Bosnic, July 06, 2022

Russia’s contribution to India’s reestablishment as one of the world’s great powers cannot be overstated. This is especially true when it comes to the Asian giant’s military, which according to various estimates uses up to 85% of Soviet and Russian weapons and equipment in its massive arsenal.

Black Alliance for Peace Condemns Massacre of African Migrants by US-backed Moroccan Armed Forces

By Black Alliance for Peace, July 06, 2022

Video images captured the horrific actions of Moroccan security forces armed and trained by the United States through the U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM) and working on behalf of the Spanish government, systematically beating and slaughtering African migrants on June 24, 2022.

Rogue Cops: The Supreme Court Is Turning America Into a Constitution-Free Zone

By John W. Whitehead and Nisha Whitehead, July 06, 2022

The Supreme Court has spoken: there will be no consequences for cops who brutalize the citizenry and no justice for the victims of police brutality. Although the Court’s 2021-22 rulings on qualified immunity for police who engage in official misconduct were largely overshadowed by its politically polarizing rulings on abortion, gun ownership and religion, they were no less devastating.

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***

Former Chief of the General Staff, General Lord Richard Dannatt, believes that the plan to slash 9,500 soldiers from the British Army is “madness” and could “break” what remains of the force. According to him, cutting troop numbers from 82,000 to just 72,500 will put unsustainable pressure on what is left of the British Army. But what does this mean for the bold plans of a New Roman Empire claimed by British Prime Minister Boris Johnson?

“It’s a mere fact of life, we will break the remainder of our Army if our Army is not large enough, trained well enough and equipped well enough to do what the Government of the day wants us to do,” the retired officer, who was head of the Army during operations in Afghanistan, told Sky News. “You can’t make people work endlessly with such small numbers, so numbers in terms of our land forces really, really matter.”

Although the British Army is being downsized in terms of manpower, UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson said at the NATO Summit in Madrid that defense spending would boost to 2.5% of GDP from the current 2.12% by the end of the decade. However, General Dannatt urged Johnson to abandon the cuts because of the Russian military operation in Ukraine.

“Frankly, that’s madness because if NATO is going to have 300,000 high-readiness troops, we’ve got to play our part in that and reducing our Army further just makes no sense whatsoever.”

It’s recalled that NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg announced that the bloc, which has 40,000 response troops, would bolster that to 300,000 high-readiness forces following the war in Ukraine.

This development comes as Johnson supported the French President’s proposal on the European Political Community by suggesting the creation of a kind of new Roman Empire encompassing Turkey and major North African countries. The union of countries, as suggested by the British prime minister, would extend from the UK to the Maghreb region in North Africa and would also include Turkey and Ukraine.

Johnson said that although French President Emmanuel Macron claims credit for the idea, its origins are from when he “first became foreign secretary.” Speaking at the press conference on the way to the NATO summit on June 29, the prime minister said he believes that “we should basically be recreating the Mare Nostrum of the Roman Empire” – Mare Nostrum being the Roman name of the Mediterranean and adopted at the time when the empire controlled most of Europe, the coast of North Africa and Anatolia.

Macron’s proposal to the political community, which would be broader than the 27-member European Union, would primarily be for Ukraine and other Eastern European countries to be part of an extended organization in the hope of weakening Russian influence.

Recently, at the G7 summit in Germany, the Élysée Palace suggested that the British prime minister and the French president showed interest in their respective ideas. Although relations between the leaders of France and the UK have been quite cold in the recent past, both agreed to a fresh start at the G7 summit. A senior British official described the new partnership as “Le Bromance”, however, a French official was less excited, describing the meeting as just having gone well.

Even so, there are still many issues on which Johnson and Macron disagree, with Paris reportedly unhappy with the British prime minister’s turnaround on the Brexit issue, as well as his public claims that Macron is not aggressive enough in his negotiations with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

The question begs then whether Johnson can achieve his new Roman Empire with a smaller army?

Britain’s ‘Future Soldier’ program envisages educating, ameliorating, and making the lowly Non-Commissioned Officer more tech-savvy to make up for the army’s smaller size. Maj Gen Paul Griffiths, its Director of Personnel, said in an interview with the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), that:

“Think widely about using technology because a smaller army does not have mass. We are going to increase our mass by using machines. So, the young Corporal has to think not only about his section but probably the weapons systems that are with him in the fight bringing people and machines together as a team.”

But as British Chief of General Staff General Patrick Sanders said at a RUSI conference on June 28, with UK Defense Secretary Ben Wallace, United States Secretary of the Army Christine Wormuth and Germany’s Army Chief of Staff Lieutenant General Alfons Mais all in attendance:

“The war in Ukraine reminds us of the utility of Land Power: it takes an army to hold and regain territory and defend the people. It takes an Army to deter. If this battle came, we would likely be outnumbered at the point of attack and fighting like hell […] You can’t cyber your way across a river. No single platform, capability, or tactic will unlock the problem.”

Effectively, Johnson’s attempts to carve out an imperial-like influence in the 21st century is struggling to materialize, as seen with the British army’s downsizing.

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Paul Antonopoulos is an independent geopolitical analyst. 

Featured image is from InfoBrics

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***

All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the “Translate Website” drop down menu on the top banner of our home page (Desktop version).

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***

On May 13, two days after the killing of Al Jazeera journalist Shireen Abu Akleh by Israeli Occupation Forces, as her loss still dominated international news cycles, thousands of Palestinian mourners gathered to pay tribute to the woman who had given them voice for so long. They came to lay her body to rest.

Immediately, as the funeral procession was just starting, images emerged of Israeli forces attacking the pallbearers as they attempted to carry her coffin across the courtyard from the French hospital in East Jerusalem. One of the first reports came from British-Egyptian correspondent Emir Nader with BBC News investigations, who posted footage and said on Twitter (5/13/22):

“Horrible scenes as Israeli security forces beat the funeral procession for slain journalist Shireen Abu Akleh and the crowd momentarily lose control of her casket.”

Al Jazeera carried the funeral live on air, and the footage showing the attack was widely shared over social media. One Twitter user (5/13/22) described the video, referring to the IOF, or Israeli Occupation Force:

Everyone switch on to Al Jazeera right now. This is one of the most horrifying things I’ve seen. IOF is attacking mourners carrying Shireen’s body from the hospital right now. They’re using stun grenades and tear gas and charging at them with horses and batons.

The Intercept (5/13/22) noted the footage that unfolded on live television, stunned viewers and only “intensified the outrage over her death.” Video was quickly remixed and shared, and the article linked a 45-second video on Twitter (5/13/22) posted by Rushdi Abualouf, a Palestinian journalist working for the BBC. Described as “the closest video” of the attack, it mixed Arab instrumental music over a slowed version that show helmeted, uniformed riot police singling out pallbearers and smashing bare arms with batons as mourners struggled to keep the casket upright.

The language of obfuscation

Mirroring the euphemism-dominated coverage of Abu Akleh’s killing (FAIR.org, 5/20/22), many of the first corporate press reports employed language that mystified what was happening at the funeral.

MintPressNews editor Alan MacLeod recognized the language of obfuscation, posting a series of news headlines on Twitter (5/13/22) that transformed black-clad Israeli riot squads wantonly beating pallbearers into “clashes.” Referring to an article he wrote for FAIR (12/13/19), MacLeod (5/14/22) observed that the word “clash” is used by media “when they have to report on violence, but desperately want to obscure who the perpetrators are.”

Violence comes from nowhere, it simply erupts: CBS‘s headline (5/13/22) was, “Shireen Abu Akleh Funeral Sees Clashes Between Israeli Forces and Palestinian,” updated later that day to report that “Violence Erupts” at the funeral as Israeli forces “Confront” mourners. The Times of Israel (5/13/22) had “Violence Erupts as Journalist’s Casket Emerges From Jerusalem Hospital.” And the BBC (5/13/22) went with “Shireen Abu Akleh: Violence at Al JazeeraReporter’s Funeral in Jerusalem.”

CBS‘s language prompted one Twitter user (5/13/22) to wonder about

the best term for lies by omission, untruths couched in deliberately obfuscating language. Perhaps “willfully misleading”? Denial of facts, even gaslighting, given the footage circulating of attacks on pallbearers….

An exception was a report from Jerusalem by Atika Shubert for CNN (5/13/22) headlined, “Video Shows Israeli Police Beating Mourners at Palestinian-American Journalist’s Funeral Procession.” It opened:

Israeli police used batons to beat mourners carrying the coffin of Al Jazeera journalist Shireen Abu Akleh…. Tear gas was fired by Israeli forces and at least one flash bomb was used.

Mondoweiss (5/13/22) pointed out that the “White House says it ‘regrets the intrusion’ into Shireen Abu Akleh’s funeral, but it doesn’t condemn Israeli police actions.”

Repression as retaliatory

Reporting went from bad to worse when the Israeli government issued an official statement claiming that police had to respond to Palestinian violence. Many Western news outlets repeated the claims.

Under an early BBC video (5/13/22), after “clashes broke out” and “violence erupted,” the text read, “Projectiles are seen flying towards the police, who also fired tear gas,” and then, “Israeli police said officers at the scene were pelted with stones and ‘were forced to use riot dispersal means.’”

In a later, longer version, the BBC text (5/13/22) opened with, “Police said they acted after being pelted with stones,” and repeated, “Police said officers ‘were forced to use riot dispersal means.’” The body of the text included on-the-ground reporting that accurately described what happened, only to be followed with more back-and-forth accusations.

The descriptive reporting on the funeral attack and Israeli brutality, followed with patched, confused “balance” between Palestinian and Israeli statements–contention often going back decades–began to characterize coverage. This style of journalism presents repression surrounded in a fog of inevitability, rendering even eyewitness accounts inexplicable, without context or solution.

As many reports repeated Israeli justifications for the attacks, presenting Israeli state repression as retaliatory, the Intercept (5/13/22) refuted the official Israeli version, showing how it fabricated Palestinian violence.

On Twitter (5/13/22), activist Rafael Shimunov explained how the Israeli police account used drone video to “prove” that two of the mourners had thrown rocks at police:

But a comparison of that video to ground-level news footage showed that the police video had been edited to remove the initial police charge and slowed down to make it seem as if a man who just waved his arms in frustration had thrown something at the officers.

Shimunov concluded that the mourner had no stone, his “action was putting his body between them and Shireen Abu Akleh’s casket.” He added: “To be clear, no stone justifies attacking mourners at a funeral of a journalist assassinated by your military.”

‘This isn’t a tussle’

All the media techniques come together on a CBS video posted on Twitter (5/13/22), with overlaid text saying police “clashed” with mourners, and that the “tussling” was so bad they almost dropped the coffin. “Projectiles could be seen flying through the air as Palestinians chanted anti-Israeli slogans,” the network declared.

The response on Twitter was outrage. One user (5/13/22) replied:

This isn’t a tussle or push back. This is an occupying force abusing its power. The sooner @CBSNews calls it how it is, the sooner we can pressure change. Do better.

Another “fixed” the headline, changing “clashes” to “attacking,” and switching Abu Akleh being “killed” to “assassinated.” Another Twitter used said, “These are violent occupiers (who killed journalists prior #ShireenAbuAkleh) invading a funeral… not a ‘tussle.’” Yet another asked:

Oh clashing was it? Clashing? Very interesting choice of words for being attacked by armored thugs during a peaceful memorial for a journalist those armored thugs also murdered.

Another tweeter was “imagining the headline ‘Ukrainians left dead in Bucha after clashes with Russian forces.’”

Posting an unedited video in response to CBS, a user asked: “Why was this clip cut?… to falsify the facts of course.”

In fact, the actual footage was stunning for its clear view of one-sided violence—beginning unmistakably when helmeted Israeli forces stormed the crowd and began to beat pallbearers with batons. The pallbearers stumble and are sometimes ripped from their positions, but they never retaliate. One tries to shield his head with his arm. A man wearing jeans, tennis shoes and a sleeveless shirt kicks at the helmeted, uniformed police, trying to stop them from hitting the pallbearers. Those carrying the coffin do all they can to prevent it from falling, ignoring the blows.

Al Jazeera (5/12/22) interviewed Marc Owen Jones, an assistant professor of Middle East Studies at Hamad Bin Khalifa University, who said that Israel has a track record of creating ambiguity over social media as a strategy to “muddy the waters,” knowing that many press accounts will repeat their claims.

‘Incitement’ or expression?

Explaining the funeral attacks, the Intercept (5/13/22) reported, Israeli police “said they attacked the procession because mourners waved Palestinian flags and chanted nationalist slogans.”

NPR (5/13/22) also reported, “Police said the crowd at the hospital was chanting ‘nationalist incitement,’ ignored calls to stop and threw stones at police.” It added, citing police, that “the policemen were forced to act.” NPR went on to explain why police raided Shireen’s family home, saying they “went” there “the day she was killed and have shown up at other mourning events in the city to remove Palestinian flags.”

The CBS video (5/13/22) posted on Twitter overlaid with text also read, “Al Jazeera said Israel had warned her brother to limit the size of the funeral and told him no Palestinian flags should be displayed and no slogans chanted.” They followed with, “The network said he neglected to take that guidance given the outpouring of grief and anger over the reporter’s killing.”

No comment is made about Israeli repression of Palestinian freedom of expression. “Neglected” and “guidance” are unlikely choices of words from Al Jazeera, given that the network published a scathing piece (5/12/22) slamming Western media coverage for obscuring and denying Israel’s murder of its journalist, calling it a “whitewash.” Al Jazeera has assigned a legal team to refer the killing of Shireen Abu Akleh by Israeli forces to the International Criminal Court (Al Jazeera, 5/27/22).

Though CNN journalist Atika Shubert (5/13/22), reporting from the funeral, acknowledged Israeli attacks, she ended by saying that the family was “told not to display the Palestinian flag, that was a special request, but as you can imagine, it’s very difficult to control these crowds,” and the flags were flying. The “request” was a raid on Abu Akleh’s family home, where flags were forcibly removed. Restrictions on flying the Palestinian flag are normalized within these stories, not exposed as violations of human rights and freedom of expression.

When US media routinely repeat without comment Israeli “reasons” for “clamping down” on any display of support for Palestinian statehood, or that Palestinians were “chanting nationalistic slogans,” amounting to “incitement,” they condone the repression of Palestinian rights, which would cause other countries to be called dictatorships, or at least authoritarian regimes. Yet Israel is still listed as a democracy. As Nolan Higdon (5/28/22) pointed out, “You Can Kill and Censor Journalists or You Can have Democracy—You Can’t Have Both!” Such attitudes toward Israeli repression of Palestinian expression are a major contradiction by US media institutions, which themselves enjoy press freedoms and should be able to recognize when those freedoms are being violated.

Rashid Khalidi, Palestinian American and Columbia University professor, told FAIR that US media are “terrified of being attacked if they don’t repeat the Israeli versions of events. They live in constant fear. This happens on the ground, and during editing.” These practices were confirmed in an article published in Slate (5/22/21) last year, when a journalist admitted having trouble “reporting the truth” from Gaza.

‘System of domination’

There are rules for occupying forces articulated by the International Committee of the Red Cross on Occupation and International Humanitarian Law (4/8/04); these prohibit the collective punishment of occupied peoples. Violent repression of nationalist slogans and the Palestinian flag violates the International Declaration of Human Rights, rights which are established for those living under occupation.

Writing for Common Dreams (5/23/22), the Institute for Policy Studies’ Phyllis Bennis and Princeton’s Richard Falk noted that Israeli forces “threw Palestinian flags to the ground and violently beat mourners—including the pallbearers.” They placed the attacks into a context of “the structural nature of Israeli violence against Palestinians,” citing an Amnesty International report on Israeli violence in the Occupied Territories characterizing it as a “Cruel System of Domination and Crime Against Humanity.”

The killing of Shireen Abu Akleh and the supposedly defensive attacks on mourners are part of a “pattern of repression…far more pervasive,” and in fact codified in the country’s Law of 2018, which grants only Jewish citizens the right of self-determination. Along with Amnesty, Human Rights Watch and B’tselem, Bennis and Falk concluded that this “constitutes the crime of apartheid.”

This point was made visually online by Tony Karon (Twitter, 5/13/22) , a lead editorial writer at Al Jazeera, who set pictures of South African apartheid next to Israeli attacks on the funeral with the text:

African police in ‘87 attacking the coffin of Ashley Kriel to seize the ANC flag that draped it: Israeli police attacked the coffin of #ShireenAbuAkleh today, trying to seize Palestinian flags. Apartheid regimes waging war on their victims, even after death.

US responsibility 

For decades, the United States has unconditionally provided Israel with “political, diplomatic, economic and military support,” Bennis and Falk wrote. Military subsidies alone amount to about $3.8 billion every year, “most of it used to purchase US-made weapons systems, ammunition and more. This makes the US complicit in Israel’s criminal wrongdoing.”

With 20% of Israeli’s military budget supplied by the US, “the bullet or the gun used to kill Shireen could have even been purchased from US weapons manufacturers with our own money.” The use of US military aid for repression is a violation of US law:

The Leahy Law’s restriction on military aid is unequivocal: “No assistance shall be furnished,” it says, “to any unit of the security forces of a foreign country if the Secretary of State has credible information that such unit has committed a gross violation of human rights.”

To date, there have been six investigations into the killing of Abu Akleh, all that find conclusive evidence that the journalist was killed by Israeli Forces. “A reconstruction by the Associated Press lends support to assertions” from both the Palestinian Authority and Abu Akleh’s colleagues, the news service (5/24/22) reported, “that the bullet that cut her down came from an Israeli gun.” CNN (5/26/22) explained, “There were no armed clashes in the vicinity,” and the text over a map reads, “Footage from the scene showed a direct line of sight towards the Israeli convoy.”

Demanding the fatal bullet

Much has been made of the bullet that killed Abu Akleh, and the Israeli demands that it must be turned over to them (New York Times, 5/12/22). This offers a last talking point for Israeli’s claim that Palestinian fighters are responsible for shooting her.

For example, when Reuters (5/26/22) reported on the investigations into her killing, it added Israeli Defense Minister Benny Gantz’s response on Twitter(5/26/22): “Any claim that the IDF intentionally harms journalists or uninvolved civilians is a blatant lie.” Reuters also included his demand that the Palestinian Authority hand over the bullet for ballistic tests to see if it matched an Israeli military gun.

Palestinian tests, noted by Reuters (5/27/22), have determined that the bullet that killed Abu Akleh “was a 5.56 mm round fired from a Ruger Mini-14 semiautomatic rifle, which is used by the Israeli military.” But Reuters followed that with the Defense minister’s claim that the “same 5.56 caliber can also be fired from M-16 rifles that are carried by many Palestinian militants,” adding: “Al-Khatib did not say how he was sure it had come from an Israeli rifle.”

As Khalidi pointed out, “Anything the Israelis say, even about an investigation, will be repeated, you will still get the Israeli version—that in the name of balance.”

The Committee to Protect Journalists (5/26/22) cited the numerous reports, including the findings of the Dutch-based Bellingcat Investigative Team, confirming Israeli culpability, and joined 33 other press freedom and human rights groups calling for an independent investigation into Abu Akleh’s killing.

‘The world knows very little’

Yet on June 3, 2022, the New York Times’ editorial board wrote, “The world still knows very little about who is responsible for her death.” The wordy piece repeated every Israeli talking point, including the justification of the funeral attack, saying Israeli police “appeared to want to prevent” the funeral from becoming a “nationalist rally,” and said the officers had acted against a mob “in violation of a previously approved plan.” In other words, pallbearers and mourners were attacked for expressing political opinions and allowing Palestinian society to participate in the burial of Abu Akleh.

The Middle East Eye (6/8/22) reported that when Abby Martin, host of the Empire Files, confronted Secretary of State Anthony Blinken at the Summit of the Americas in Los Angeles, she asked why there has been “absolutely no repercussions” for Israel over Abu Akleh’s killing. Blinken responded that the facts had “not been established” in the killing of the veteran Al Jazeera journalist, yet no independent investigation has been started.

Washington Post reporters (6/12/22) reviewed the audio, video, social media and witness testimony of Abu Akleh’s killing, and confirmed that an Israeli soldier likely shot and killed her. Mondoweiss (6/12/22) reported the findings, expressing hope that the report would “add pressure on Secretary of State Antony Blinken to actually demand an independent investigation and accountability.”

Yet even though the Post’s editorial board (6/13/22) referred its its own reporter’s investigation as “impressive,” it still called on the Palestinian Authority to agree to a joint investigation with Israel, with US participation. In what amounts to an attempt to control the narrative about Abu Akleh’s killing, the Post editorial cited “emotional” reasons for refusing to back calls for an international investigation, saying, “We’re skeptical such an impartial inquiry is possible given the high emotions, and low trust, that permeate global discussion of the Middle East.”

On June 14, 2022, journalist Dalia Hatuqa, who covers Israeli/Palestinian affairs, told Slate’s Mary Harris (6/14/22) that Blinken had promised Shireen’s family that there would be a full investigation, then she continued: “But honestly, nothing’s happened. It’s been a month. It’s not that hard: There’s footage, eyewitnesses, all kinds of stuff. This isn’t a mystery.”

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Robin Andersen teaches media studies at Fordham University. (Follow her @MediaPhiled).

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***

GR Editor’s Note

US threatens the world with the unthinkable, blames Russia for Ukraine, etc., whilst illegally invading, inhabiting, recruiting terrorists, stirring, stealing, destabilizing, terrorizing in Syria.

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The Syrian Arab Army (SAA), along with local citizens from the village of Al-Mujaibara, have expelled a US army convoy that tried to break into an area under the control of the Syrian government in the northeastern Hasakah governorate.

According to local sources, a US convoy of five vehicles made an attempt to cross through the village towards one of its bases in the countryside of Hasakah on 5 July. It was intercepted by locals and SAA troops, who forced the occupation troops to turn tail.

On the same day, several protests were reported in the villages of Yusufiya and Al-Junaidah in Rmelan, Hasakah, with locals blocking roads and chanting slogans against the US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF).

This is the second time in the span of a week that Syrian troops intercept US occupation forces, as another US convoy on 1 July was stopped as it tried to make its way through the village of Qabur al-Granja in the Qamishli area.

Discontent has been growing against the US army and its proxy militias across Syria, with many protests taking place over the past year.

Tuesday’s events came just one day after a large missile strike reportedly targeted a US occupation base in Deir Ezzor governorate.

Hours before the attack, a US convoy consisting of 55 tanker trucks smuggled stolen oil from Hasakah to the Kurdish region of northern Iraq.

Hundreds of trucks filled with Syrian wheat and oil have been smuggled out of the war-torn country over the past 18 months alone, forcing Damascus to rely on the solidarity of regional powers to fulfill its needs.

The presence of US forces in Syria is illegal under international law, as troop deployment in the war-torn country was implemented without the consent of Damascus or the UN.

Earlier this year, The Cradle reported that US forces transferred dozens of ISIS detainees, including high-ranking commanders, to Deir Ezzor governorate, close to the Iraqi border.

This was reportedly an attempt to ‘revive ISIS’ for the purposes of destabilizing a region that had recently been liberated by the SAA, with the help of Russian troops.

A recent report also suggests that the CIA is actively working to recruit ISIS militants imprisoned by the SDF in northeast Syria to join the fight against the Russian army in Ukraine.

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Quite likely a majority of Americans would agree that it is wrong for the government or police to torture someone, though some would surely accept the “ticking time bomb” exemption, where a detainee is withholding information that could save many lives. It is in fact illegal to torture someone as well as it being morally wrong. Indeed, it could constitute a crime against humanity or a war crime depending on circumstances. The United States, which has signed the United Nations Convention Against Torture and is bound by it, has thereby accepted legal sanctions to back up the view that torture is never permissible. Under US law, torture committed by “government officials and their collaborators upon a person restrained by the government is a felony punishable by up to 20 years in federal prison, and its fruits are inadmissible in all courts.” Given that background, one is astonished to learn that some in the government have not taken the obligation seriously. To be sure, the US has been quick to react when lower ranking officials, contractors and ordinary soldiers have reportedly been involved in torturing prisoners, as occurred with Abu Ghraib prior to 2004, but the higher one goes up the ladder of power the less do laws apply to even the most egregious misbehavior.

It has long been known that the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), in the wake of 9/11, resorted to torture in its overseas “black” prisons, but details of what took place and anything that would stand up in court as evidence has been difficult to discern as it has been easy for the Agency to shroud its more nefarious deeds through claims of protecting “states secrets.” But now some more details have emerged.

The news that former Donald Trump appointed CIA Director Gina Haspel during her tour overseeing a prison in Thailand in 2002 personally observed at least one terrorist suspect being tortured by waterboarding, which simulates being drowned repeatedly until a confession is obtained. Waterboarding was used by the Japanese on prisoners of war in the Second World War and was subsequently considered to be torture, a war crime.

The new information came from one of the creators of the Agency’s “enhanced interrogation techniques” program, psychologist James E. Mitchell, who was testifying in a May pretrial hearing at Guantanamo Prison relating to the treatment of Saudi al-Qaeda linked terrorist suspect Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, who has been accused of being complicit in the bombing of the USS Cole in 2000 that killed 17 American sailors. Al-Nashiri, who was shipped to Gitmo in 2006 and who has been waiting sixteen years for his trial, could face the death penalty if he is convicted. His defense is seeking to demonstrate that the evidence against him was obtained by torture and should therefore be inadmissible.

Al-Nashiri was subjected to four months of waterboarding as well as to what have been described as “other coercive techniques” during his questioning in Thailand. According to testimony, the hooded interrogators repeatedly slammed al-Nashiri’s head into a wall and forced him naked into a small confinement box. When he briefly went on a hunger strike due to his treatment he was fed rectally. It is not known how frequently Gina Haspel, the senior officer in charge of the base, observed the torture, which she allegedly watched but did not participate in, but she drafted up the classified cables detailing what had occurred and what information had been developed. Oddly, al-Nashiri was freely answering the questions from the interrogators, who recommended that the extreme measures be stopped, but CIA Headquarters insisted that the torture continue in the belief that nothing is “true” until it is verified under torture. Rather than resigning to demonstrate her disagreement, Haspel allowed the process to continue, which is why in part some of her former Agency colleagues regularly refer to her as “Bloody Gina.”

Videotapes were made of the torture but they were subsequently destroyed. Haspel participated in the November 2005 destruction of hundreds of hours of recordings contained on 92 tapes showing at least two interrogations of Abu Zubaydah and al-Nashiri. She did so while serving as chief of staff to the Director of the National Collection Service Jose A. Rodriguez Jr. At her Senate confirmation hearing as Director in 2018, she said “I would also make clear that I did not appear on the tapes.” Rodriguez, who made the decision to destroy the tapes, also reportedly determined how to handle a suspected terrorist detainee Gul Rahman. Rahman was chained, nearly naked, to a concrete floor for an extended time and then froze to death. There was an internal CIA investigation but no officer on-site nor at the Agency headquarters was punished – let alone prosecuted. In fact, Rodriguez, who was in charge of the detention site, received a $2,500 bonus for his “consistently superior work.”

The Agency currently regards the existence of the black prisons and the procedures used to elicit information as a “state secret” even though the existence of the sites is widely known and has been reported on extensively. After serving as Director of Central Intelligence Haspel retired from CIA in January 2021. She currently works for a major Washington law firm King & Spalding L.L.P., a typical transition for senior officials who are able to exploit the revolving door between government and the private sector. She reportedly is part of the firm’s Government Matters practice where she “advise[s] clients on cybersecurity and information technology, among other issues.”

Every instance of torture by the federal government or its agents is by law a separate felony. Beyond that, what went on in the Agency’s black overseas prisons is shocking even in a Washington where no crime is too low to the contemplated by the governments we have unfortunately placed into power. Some might object that Gina’s actions amounted to oversight of a dreadful necessity, but there is something particularly loathsome about a powerful Administration intelligence officer finding time to watch the horrors performed on a suspect who undoubtedly was not afforded any due process before he arrived in his cell to be experimented on by a team of modern-day Torquemadas.

The unfortunate fact is the Gina Haspel is not alone. She committed what are undeniably felonies and now enjoys a well-paid sinecure with a law firm that deals extensively with the government. One might recall similar trajectories relating to the former CIA Director George Tenet who lied America into a war with Iraq that is regarded as the greatest foreign policy failure since the Second World War. He was rewarded with a professorship at Georgetown.

And then there is his partner in crime Paul Wolfowitz, he of the fabricated intelligence, who was named head of the World Bank only to subsequently step down after an unacceptable sexual relationship with a subordinate whom he rewarded with promotions was exposed. He is now a Senior Fellow at the neocon affiliated American Enterprise Institute think tank. George and Paul just might consider how the Nuremberg Trials regarded starting a war of aggression as “the ultimate war crime.” And they might suggest a bit of retrospection from their friends George Bush, Doug Feith, Scooter Libby, and Condi Rice, all of whom have been complicit in the same infamy. And then there is Donald Trump’s assassination of Iranian General Qassem Soleimani based on a lie that he was seeking to kill Americans. They are all doing quite well, thank you, either still active or ensconced in highly respected retirement positions, shielded by their wealth and power.

As long as there is no accountability in Washington the farce of government “of the people, and for the people” will continue. That a government can use the “secrets privilege” to conceal and avoid any consequences when killing people without any due process is despicable. If you use government resources to murder someone, you should be tried and go to prison. If you start a war through deliberate lying, you should stay in prison forever. Those who make the decisions to commit crimes are wired into the system and are in a sense bullet-proof, while the public has been completely brainwashed and the beat goes on.

Another recent story tells how the CIA was apparently planning to kill currently imprisoned journalist Julian Assange in London. It reportedly included scenarios for a possible shoot-out in the heart of the city, the ramming of Russian diplomatic vehicles and the disabling of any airplane that might be involved in an escape attempt. Who came up with that one? It dates back to 2010, when the noted constitutional lawyer Barack Obama was president. Didn’t he or his advisers know that murder is against the law?

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This article was originally published on The Unz Review.

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

He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

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On July 1 at the White House, US President Joe Biden made a startling disclosure that “the idea we’re going to be able to click a switch, bring down the cost of gasoline, is not likely in the near term.” 

American gas exporters have positioned themselves accordingly to fill the gap as Europe turns away from Russian imports. FT reported recently that “US liquefied natural gas producers have announced a string of deals to boost exports as the industry capitalises on shortages that have left Europe with a mounting energy crisis.” 

The deals are so lucrative that Cheniere, America’s leading gas exporter, has taken an investment decision to push ahead with a project that will boost its capacity more than 20 per cent by late 2025, anticipating long-term supply deals and locked in purchases of US gas over the coming decades. The US producers of gas are reportedly running plants flat-out to increase supplies to the EU. 

The US has overtaken Russia for the first time as Europe’s top gas supplier. Although LNG from the US is sold to Europe at much higher costs than pipeline gas from Russia, EU countries have no choice. 

With Russian supply via Nord Stream at just 40% of capacity, and deliveries to be halted completely for annual maintenance on July 11-21, the outlook for near-term Russian gas supply to Europe appears bleak. 

Germany has warned of the risk that Nord Stream gas may not return at all following the maintenance. At any rate, Russian supply to Europe is at record lows and is “set to remain constrained through the third quarter,” per S&P Global.

Germany is heading for a major economic crisis. The head of the German Federation of Trade Unions has been quoted as saying in the weekend, “Entire industries are in danger of collapsing forever because of the gas bottlenecks — especially, chemicals, glass-making, and aluminium industries, which are major suppliers to key automotive sector.” Massive unemployment is likely. When Germany sneezes, of course, Europe catches cold — not only the Eurozone but even post-Brexit Britain. 

Welcome to the European Union’s “sanctions from hell.” The US literally hustled the Europeans into the Ukraine crisis. How many times did Secretary of State Antony Blinken travel to Europe in those critical months in the run-up to the Russian invasion of Ukraine to ensure that the door to any meaningful talks with the Kremlin remained shut! And American energy companies are today making windfall profits selling gas to Europeans. Won’t Europeans have the common intelligence to realise they have been had? 

Now, Biden has washed his hands off the gas crisis. He brusquely stated at a press conference in Madrid on June 30 that such premium on oil prices will continue “as long as it takes, so Russia cannot, in fact, defeat Ukraine and move beyond Ukraine. This is a critical, critical position for the world. Here we are.  Why do we have NATO?” 

Biden’s counterfactual narrative is that the sanctions against Russia are going to work eventually and a long war in Ukraine would be Russia’s undoing. The US narrative is that if you look under the hood of the Russian economy, it may not be flexible and resourceful enough to develop an entrepreneurial bunker spirit and adopt new business models to neutralise the sanctions. Biden is convinced that Russian economy is in the grip of industrial mafias that are not very innovative and, therefore, there aren’t many options for Russia under the western sanctions. 

Biden said in Madrid:

“Look at the impact that the war on Ukraine has had on Russia… They’ve (Russians) lost 15 years of the gains they made in terms of their economy…  They can’t even — you know, they’re having — they’re going to have trouble maintaining oil production because they don’t have the technology to do it.  They need American technology. And they’re also in a simi- — similar situation in terms of their weapons systems and some of their military systems. So they’re paying a very, very heavy price for this.” 

But even if that’s the case, how does all that help the Europeans? On the other hand, President Putin’s strategic calculations with respect to the war remain very much on track. Russian forces made indisputable progress in establishing full control over Luhansk. On Monday, Putin gave the green signal to a proposal from the army commanders to launch “offensive operations.” Five months into the war, Ukrainians are staring at defeat and Russian army generals know it.

Russia didn’t wander into Ukraine unprepared, either. Evidently, it took precautionary steps both before and since the war to shield its economy. And this enables the Russian economy to settle down to a “new normal”. Washington’s options are quite limited under the circumstances. Fundamentally, western sanctions do not address the causes of the Russian behaviour, and therefore, they are doomed to fail to solve the problem at hand. 

To be sure, Putin has some nasty surprises in store for Biden closer to the November mid-term elections. Biden blithely assumes that he controls all the variables in the situation. Schadenfreude is never a rational basis for statecraft. 

Yesterday, the strategically important Kherson region bordering Crimea formed a new government with the First Deputy Prime Minister of Russia’s Kaliningrad region heading the cabinet and Russian nationals among his deputies. Now that HIMARS multiple launch rocket system, contrary to Biden’s promise, is blasting Russian cities, expect some major Russian retaliation. 

The pathway of Russia’s offensive operations is being relaid to include Kharkov and Odessa as well, apart from Donbass. The influential Kremlin politician and chairman of Duma Vyacheslav Volodin said on Tuesday, 

“Some people are asking what our goal is and when all this will end. It will end when our peaceful cities and towns no longer come under shelling attacks. What they are doing is forcing our troops not to stop on the borders of the Lugansk and Donetsk republics (Donbass) because strikes (on Russian regions) are coming from the Kharkov regions and other regions of Ukraine.”

How long does Biden think the Europeans will want to be involved in a protracted proxy war with Russia? Bild reported on Sunday that 75% of German respondents see recent price hikes as a heavy burden, while 50% said they feel their economic conditions are worsening; every second German fears a lack of heating this coming winter due to reduced Russian gas supplies and rising inflation in the European Union. 

Yet, Biden says war will go on “for as long as it takes” and fuel shortage will continue “for as long as it takes.” The European economy is expected to start contracting over the course of the second half of 2022 and the recession may continue until the summer of 2023 at least. 

Analysts at JP Morgan Chase, the US investment bank, said last week that Russia could also cause “stratospheric” oil price increases if it used output cuts to retaliate. It said, “The tightness of the global oil market is on Russia’s side.” Analysts wrote that prices could more than triple to $380 a barrel if Russia cut production by 5m barrels a day.

Putin’s decree last week is ominous — the Kremlin taking full control of the Sakhalin-2 oil and gas project in Russia’s Far East. State-owned Gazprom held a 50% plus one share stake in the project and its foreign partners included Shell (27.5%), Mitsui (12.5%), and Mitsubishi (10%). The decree stipulates that Gazprom will keep its majority stake, but foreign investors must ask the Russian government for a stake in the newly created firm within one month or be dispossessed. The government will decide whether to approve any request. 

An aerial view of the liquefaction plant, part of the Sakhalin-2 liquefied natural gas project in Sakhalin, Russia, described as one of the world’s largest integrated oil & gas project. (Source: Indian Punchline)

This will unsettle energy markets further and put more strain on the LNG market, and can be seen as a move to put more pressure on the West by concurrently restricting gas supplies to Europe and creating more demand for LNG in Asia that will draw off supplies currently going to Europe. Sakhalin-2 supplies circa 4% of the global LNG market! 

The only part of the US agenda that is going well seems to be the unspoken part of it: the very same Anglo-American objectives that Lord Ismay once predicted as the rationale behind the NATO’s existence —”to keep the Russians out, the Americans in, and the Germans down.”  

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***

When Mexico President Andrés Manuel López Obrador meets with United States President Joe Biden on July 12, he plans to once again urge the US government to drop the charges against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.

Obrador is one of the few presidents in the world, who has expressed genuine support for Assange and even offered to engage in talks about asylum in Mexico.

“If they take him to the United States and he is sentenced to the maximum penalty and to die in prison, we must start a campaign to tear down the Statue of Liberty,” Obrador said, as he referred to Assange during a press conference on July 4.

According to El País, Obrador insisted that the Statue of Liberty would “no longer be a symbol of freedom” if Assange was extradited. He maintained there could be “no silence” on the matter.

The UK government authorized Assange’s extradition on June 17. Assange’s legal team appealed the decision.

While it is a welcome development that an ally and neighboring country is challenging the US to uphold press freedom, the remarks from Obrador apparently came while deflecting criticism of Mexico from Reporters Without Borders (RSF).

Mexico is one of the more dangerous countries in Latin America for journalists. RSF, which also supports Assange, condemned Mexico after “Yesenia Mollinedo, the founder and editor of the Facebook news outlet El Veraz, and Sheila Johana García, a video reporter for El Veraz,” were “gunned down in broad daylight in Cosoleacaque, in the eastern state of Veracruz.”

“[RSF] is appalled by the murders of three more reporters in less than a week in Mexico, which—subject to confirmation by RSF’s investigations—will bring the total number of Mexican journalists killed in connection with their work since the start of the year to 11,” the press freedom organization declared.

With no evidence, Obrador suggested RSF’s statement was part of a “smear campaign against the government of Mexico.”

But Obrador is not alone when it comes to invoking the Assange case to deflect responsibility. Several leaders throughout the world, including in China, Russia, and Azerbaijan, have responded to Western criticism of how their governments treat journalists by asking how the US and United Kingdom can claim to support press freedom when Assange is in jail.

Additionally, supporting Assange is a way for the Mexico government to assert its independence and breakaway from a history of US meddling and destabilization in Latin America. After all, this is partly why Ecuador President Rafael Correa granted political asylum to Assange in 2012 and allowed the WikiLeaks founder to live in the country’s London embassy.

Obrador is recognized as Mexico’s first left-wing president in decades.

In the last week of June, Obrador contended that Assange is the “best journalist of our time, in the world. And he has been, I repeat, very unjustly treated, worse than a criminal. That is a shame for the world.” He added, “Mexico opens its doors to Assange.”

Obrador, as Ben Norton recounted for Multipolarista, paused during this press conference to show a clip from the “Collateral Murder” video, which was released by US Army whistleblower Chelsea Manning to WikiLeaks. The video showed a 2007 Apache helicopter attack by US soldiers in Baghdad. The troops killed two Reuters journalists and a father who stopped his van to provide aid.

The Mexico leader took a firm stand in June and refused to attend the Summit of the Americas, which was hosted by the US State Department in Los Angeles. He boycotted the summit because the leaders of Venezuela, Cuba, and Nicaragua were barred.

Obrador’s boycott inspired the leaders of Bolivia, Guatemala, and Honduras to join Mexico in giving the US government the cold shoulder. It effectively ensured the so-called democracy summit was sparsely attended and would be an entirely inconsequential gathering for all involved.

To deal with the fallout, US officials invited Obrador to the White House.

One of the earliest statements of support from Obrador came on January 3, 2020. He highlighted the US diplomatic cables that Assange published, which also came from Manning.

“I don’t know if he has recognized that he acted against rules and norms of a political system, but at the time these cables demonstrated how the world system functions in its authoritarian nature,” Lopez Obrador said. “Hopefully consideration will be given to this, and he’s released and won’t continue to be tortured.”

Obrador asked President Donald Trump to pardon Assange, but Trump was too concerned with whether senators in the Republican Party would vote to impeach him. He declined to issue a pardon.

On January 4, 2021, Obrador cheered the initial decision by a UK district court to block Assange’s extradition. He also offered asylum.

The Crown Prosecution Service ruthlessly used Obrador’s asylum offer to keep Assange in jail.

Clair Dobbin QC, a prosecutor, claimed Assange had a history of attempts to evade extradition. He was willing to live in the Ecuador embassy and might “flee” to the Mexico embassy if he believed the US government would ultimately win their appeal, she argued.

The tactic helped to persuade District Judge Vanessa Baraitser. Bail was denied two days after ruling that incarceration in the United States would lead Assange to act upon a single-minded determination to take his own life, an impulse he could not control.

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Kevin Gosztola is Managing editor of Shadowproof, host of the “Dissenter Weekly,” co-host of the podcast “Unauthorized Disclosure,” and member of Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ).

Featured image: Screen shot of Mexico President Andrés Manuel López Obrador from MILENIO broadcast of press conference on July 4, 2022 (Source)

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Doctors are mystified by a rash of seizures, rashes, etc. happening to 2 and 3-year-old kids.

The only thing these kids have in common is that they were given the COVID vaccine just days earlier (two to five days earlier).

The doctors cannot figure out what is causing the seizures (since it couldn’t be the vaccine since those are safe and effective). The medical staff is not permitted to talk about the cases to the press or on social media or they will be fired.

One nurse posted something to the effect of “how is this legal????” I had to paraphrase to protect the poster.

This is why you are hearing these reports from me. They can’t fire me.

There is nothing on the mainstream media about this since the nurses and doctors aren’t allowed to talk about it.

This will all come out some day, but for now, everyone is keeping quiet about it and the doctors are instructed to convince the parents that it isn’t vaccine related and that they are the only ones having the problem.

Because that’s how science works.

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Allysia Finley, a member of Wall Street Journal’s editorial board, Monday called into question the motives behind the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s decision to extend emergency use of Pfizer and Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccines to infants and toddlers.

A Wall Street Journal (WSJ) editorial board member Monday called into question the motives behind the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) decision to extend Emergency Use Authorization of Pfizer and Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccines to toddlers and infants as young as 6 months old, writing that the decision was motivated by politics and pressure rather than science.

In her WSJ opinion piece — “Why the Rush for Toddler Vaccines?” — Allysia Finley wrote:

“The FDA standard for approving vaccines in otherwise healthy people, especially children, is supposed to be higher than for drugs that treat the sick.

“But the FDA conspicuously lowered its standards to approve COVID vaccines for toddlers. Why?”

Finley started her piece with a quote from President Biden, which praised the FDA’s recommendation: “This is a very historic milestone. The United States is now the first country in the world to offer safe and effective COVID-19 vaccines for children as young as six months old.”

She responded, writing, “In fact, we don’t know if the vaccines are safe and effective.”

She continued:

“The rushed FDA action was based on extremely weak evidence. It’s one thing to show regulatory flexibility during an emergency. But for children, Covid isn’t an emergency.

“The FDA bent its standards to an unusual degree and brushed aside troubling evidence that warrants more investigation.”

“Mr. Biden’s hypocrisy is hard to stomach,” she wrote, listing many reasons for caution in vaccinating young children against COVID-19, including:

• Children are at low risk of dying from COVID-19: Only 209 kids between 6 months and 4 years old have died from COVID-19 — about 0.02% of all virus deaths in the U.S. About half as many toddlers were hospitalized with COVID-19 between October 2020 and September 2021 as were hospitalized with the flu during the previous winter.
• The two children in Pfizer’s trial who got sickest with COVID-19 also tested positive for other viruses. It’s possible that many hospitalizations attributed to COVID-19 this winter were instigated or exacerbated by other viruses.
• The FDA authorized vaccines for toddlers based on a comparison of the antibodies they generated to the original Wuhan variant with those in young adults who had received two doses. But two doses offer little if any protection against Omicron infection in adults, and even protection against hospitalization is only around 40% to 60%.
• Vaccinated toddlers in Pfizer’s trial were more likely to get severely ill with COVID-19 than those who received a placebo. Most children who developed multiple infections during the trial were vaccinated.

“FDA granted the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines for toddlers an emergency-use authorization allowing the agency to expedite access for products that ‘prevent serious or life-threatening diseases or conditions,’” wrote Finley.

“While adult COVID vaccines clearly met this standard in late 2020, the toddler vaccines don’t.”

As to why the FDA “rushed” and “bent its standards,” Finley suggested, “perhaps [the FDA] felt pressure from the White House as well as anxious parents.”

White House COVID-19 response coordinator Ashish Jha repeatedly told parents that he expected vaccines for toddlers would be available in June, she wrote.

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Susan C. Olmstead is the assistant editor of The Defender.

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“Baby, it’s Cold Outside” is a song from the 1950s where, in contrapuntal verses, a woman explains why she must leave (“I really can’t stay”) and a man counters with a reason she should stay (“But, baby, it’s cold outside”). In light of the disruption in the global trade in oil and natural gas ensuing from the conflict in Ukraine, the last line of the song (“At least there will be plenty implied / If you got pneumonia and died”) might be a premonition of what’s to come this winter. What would be implied today is that some country or group of countries should be held accountable, should millions in Western Europe or the United States or both freeze to death this winter for lack of ability to heat their homes.

Such a dire situation is widely predicted as Russia has been reducing the amount of natural gas supplied to many NATO member countries. Because natural gas is the primary fuel used to heat homes (either directly or through gas-fired electric power plants), we don’t have to wait till winter to gauge how likely the prediction is to come true. This precognition is made possible because of the way natural gas is produced, stored, traded, and consumed.

The demand for natural gas varies greatly over the course of a year, with peak demand coming in the colder months. For instance, in the United States consumption of natural gas in the winter is around 150 bcf (billion cubic feet) per day but less than 100 bcf per day in summer. For technical reasons, the supply of natural gas is more or less constant throughout the year, currently about 100 bcf per day in the US.

Source: US Energy Information Administration

To handle the seasonal variation in the demand for natural gas, the industry stores excess gas in the warmer months, then taps the stored gas to meet the greater demand in winter. Natural gas cannot be stored in tanks like oil because of its diffuse, i.e., gaseous, nature (the tanks would need to be a degree of magnitude larger than those used to store oil). So, what the industry does is inject some of the gas they just extracted back underground during summer (using depleted fields as storage tanks) and taps the reserved gas as needed in winter.

The issue of volume does not arise with gas transported by pipeline, as the gas is pumped in its diffuse state, but it does in the case of gas transported by ship. So, for maritime transport, natural gas is converted to a liquid by lowering its temperature to -260° Fahrenheit (The volume of natural gas in its liquid state is about 600 times smaller than its volume in its gaseous state). The liquified natural gas (LNG) is converted back into a gas in regasification terminals at the tankers’ destinations.

Transport by ship is much more expensive than transport by pipeline. Hence, gas from Russia is sent to Germany through the infamous Nord Stream pipelines, not shipped across the Baltic Sea. If Europeans have to depend on LNG shipped from the United States or the Middle East this winter, it will cost them a lot more to heat their homes (Prior to the hostilities in Ukraine, Russian gas delivered by pipeline was about 40% cheaper for Europeans than LNG shipped from the United States).

More fundamental than price as to whether we or the Europeans will be freezing this winter is supply. Russia has curtailed deliveries of natural gas to several European countries and more curtailments are likely to follow if hostilities continue. The United States’ NATO allies are depending on the US to make up for any shortfalls, but is that possible? Only if the US increases production or cuts domestic consumption (so as to have more gas available for export). As to increasing production, the price natural gas is traded at on the global market has risen from around $4 last year to over $8 today. This should motivate our drillers to bring marginally profitable fields into production, though it’s unlikely that can be done in time to ameliorate any shortage this winter (Even if we had more LNG to send to Europe, the amount we could provide is constrained by a lack of enough regasification terminals there).  Reducing domestic consumption is fraught with the danger of sociopolitical turmoil (look at the chaos resulting from airlines reducing their flight schedules, which may have more to do with an unstated goal of reducing domestic consumption of jet fuel than a lack of pilots).

The interplay amongst the various factors which determine the provisioning of natural gas to consumers is too complex to go into here (even if I understood it!), but I do believe there is a simple, indicative metric which lies at the nexus of all these factors. This metric is the rate at which underground storage of natural gas is being replenished during the low demand season. Here’s a chart showing the amount of natural gas (in bcf) in underground storage in the United States over the last 3 1/2 years:

As can be seen, underground storage went from being depleted to being replenished around April 1^st this year, which is normal. However, the rate of replenishment is slower than all other years (e.g., 2095 bcf in the latest week, versus 2203 bcf in 2019). If the growth in stored gas is slower than normal, it means either production is not growing apace with consumption or domestic supplies are being diverted for export.

In 2014 the amount of gas in storage hit a low of 822 bcf (in March), which caused a number of public utilities to shutter some of their power plants for lack of fuel. One electric company executive warned that we had dodged “not a bullet, but a cannonball” that year. So, keep an eye on how fast underground storage is being refilled in the coming months here. If it’s significantly slower than the 5-year average listed on the right of the chart (2429 bcf for the latest week), then bundle up, baby, because it’s going to be cold outside—and inside, too—come winter.

Below is a chart of US exports of natural gas last year and for the first three months of this year (Source: US Energy Information Administration).

Some things of note are:

(1) The increase in our exports to NATO allies (France, Spain, Turkey, UK) this year, from less than 800 bcf/yr to 2200 bcf/yr (on a projected annualized basis). Note that the increase in our exports to these countries began before hostilities in Ukraine began on Feb. 24th (compare Jan 2021 to Jan 2022: France – 4 bcf vs. 50 bcf, Spain – 7 bcf vs. 49 bcf, etc.).

(2) Exports to Brazil, Chile, India, Japan, and South Korea have dropped over the same time period, from almost 2000 bcf to 800 bcf (on a projected annualized basis). Again, the decrease began before Russia invaded Ukraine (compare Jan 2021 to Jan 2022: especially China – 39 bcf vs. 0 bcf, Japan – 64 bcf vs. 22 bcf, South Korea – 56 bcf vs. 22 bcf). To what country are these countries turning to to make up the shortfall (Russia?).

(3) Total gas exports from the US have increased from 6653 bcf in 2021 to over 7000 bcf this year (projected), while production has remained constant at around 41,000 bcf/yr and withdrawals from underground storage have increased from 1547 bcf in the first three months of 2021 to 1816 bcf in the same period this year (see this), which hints at increased pressure on our natural gas supply.

An interesting graph from Bloomberg on the price of natural gas around the world:

Note that price had risen sharply even before Russia invaded Ukraine, raising the question “Which came first?”- the Russian gas cut-offs to Europe or a price rise which led the NATO countries to feel it was time for a showdown with Russia and so they provoked one?

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This article was originally published on Ken’s Blog.

Ken Meyercord is a retired computer type living in Reston, Virginia, where he fills his ample spare time with taking fitness classes at the Y; hiking, biking, and kayaking the USA; and maintaining a blog (kiaskblog.wordpress.com) for which he has cobbled together enough tall-tales, iconoclastic views, and misinformation to generate over 80 postings. Ken has self-published four books: a treatise on economic theory, “The Ethic of Zero Growth”; a memoir of the Vietnam War years, “Draft-Dodging Odyssey” (under the penname “Ken Kiask”); a eulogy to his starry-eyed, star-crossed son, “At the Forest’s Edge” (under the son’s name: Khaldun Meyercord); and a course teaching a simplified version of English, “Ezenglish” (all available online wherever fine books are sold). In pre-COVID times he haunted think-tank events to ask provocative, iconoclastic questions (see “Adventures in Think Tank Land” on YouTube) and produced a public access TV show, “Civil Discord”, on which discordant views on controversial topics were discussed in a civil manner (episodes of the show can be viewed on YouTube; search for “Civil Discord Show”). 

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Introduction

Understanding the bizarre social and economic transformations afoot in the world today requires a considerably wider view of history than is presented in contemporary corporate media. In this present era of an emerging Bio-Nano Age, we can see, if we squint at history, the faint contours of ancient cultures practicing mystic rites, medicine, and alchemy. It is hardly a stretch of the imagination to witness traces of the mythological past expressed in the present and to see the use of symbols as integral to such practices.

Mass consent to these radical changes is due, in large measure, to powerful forms of propaganda and the effective use of key symbols working on populations terrorized consistently by authority figures issuing ominous warnings of certain societal doom. Why are signs and symbols in the hands of power structures so elemental to a particular social order?

Public consent in democratic societies necessitates that power and authority manufacture or maintain the significance of symbols that will, in the popular imagination, help regiment perception, thought, and behavior. The people must be conditioned to recognize and perceive in the symbol shared meanings, whether consciously or unconsciously, and think about or respond to them in the approved and appropriate ways. This is the job of integration and agitation propaganda — to agitate emotion and enfeeble human reason to sufficient degrees so as to integrate the mass public into approved plans of acceptable social practice.

“Because of their transcendent practical importance,” Walter Lippmann noted, “no successful leader has ever been too busy to cultivate the symbols which organize his following”. This article examines the history of the symbol as an organizing material principle of social control central to the purpose of propagandizing acceptable social practices and conditioning the masses to follow — in the present age — the dictates of an emerging bio-secure global economy. The aim is to show how symbols in ancient cultural practices wield significant influence in the new tyrannical normal and what this kind of social reproduction might portend for the future.

Ancient Concepts & Practices

Since nothing of productive value can come from chaos, efforts to organize social control are not always rooted in some hidden sinister scheme. “What privileges do within the hierarchy,” Lippmann observes, “symbols do for the rank and file. They conserve unity”. A unified people, however, can be both a blessing and a curse.

Some of the earliest recorded instances of a culturally unified response to symbols can be found in the Biblical record of Numbers. Here, it is recorded, the Israelites wandered in the wilderness of Sinai for years, and some — struck by pit vipers — were instructed to look upon a bronze serpent crafted by Moses as a symbol of Yahweh’s miraculous power to attend personally to the afflicted. Though the faithless masses had failed to see their own offence of unbelief — even as they had witnessed their own unlikely freedom from bondage — Yahweh made a way to atone. The overtly futile act of simply gazing upon a bronze serpent for an ailing Israelite, immensely humbled, served as a material lesson in the curative powers of repentance.

The symbol of the serpent in time became a powerful point upon which to focus attention for necessary healing. “From the totem pole to the national flag, from the wooden idol to God the Invisible King, from the magic word to some diluted version of Adam Smith or Bentham,” Lippmann says “symbols have been cherished by leaders, many of whom were themselves unbelievers, because they were focal points where differences merged”.

Over the years, however, the bronze serpent also became for the Israelites a mysterious expression of magic that, for them, morphed eventually into an idol of worship. The story of the cult of the serpent cautions us to consider today the claims of corruptible mortals who, with overweening pride, arrogate to themselves unassailable powers of complete healing.

In ancient Greek narratives, too, the serpent figured prominently in the development of medical practice. The Staff of Aesculapius, an ancient Greek symbol of healing and medicine, depicts a serpent entwined around a wooden sceptre. The symbol is associated with the Greek demigod Ascleplius, a master healer who, according to legend, acquired his powers through the whispering of snakes.

The medicinal power of snakes in myth and scripture is said to emanate from the dual ability of their venom to both kill and heal, just as drugs can poison or cure and incisions wound or repair. Biblically, whether the serpent exerted its deadly or curative power rested with the faith of the follower. According to Moses’ account, the snakes that plagued the Israelites served as chastisement for their loss of belief in Him who had called them out of captivity. Cure for the deadly snake bites came only by virtue of faith in Moses’ bronze serpent, which brought healing through the redemption of restored faith. Thus, the serpent’s medicinal power is historically infused with penance for sin, and salvation through a return to devotion.

In these ways, the serpent and the staff combine the authority of a king’s sceptre and the magic of a wand with the menacing creature whose deadly venom turns magically medicinal in the hands of a saintly healer. Together, the two symbols signify an alchemical transformation of the flesh from condemnation to redemption, poison to potion, curse to cure and death to life, through faithful belief in the anointed staff-bearer.

Current Concepts & Practices

Image on the right: Steffen Heilfort, Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0

As Lippmann notes, “the leader knows by experience that only when symbols have done their work is there a handle he can use to move a crowd. In the symbol emotion is discharged at a common target, and the idiosyncrasy of real ideas blotted out”. Consistent exposure to society’s key signs and symbols in education, advertising, and public discourse conditions us to heed the warnings offered by authorities who embody the associated “mythologies” of contemporary medical practice. In this sense, the individual’s psyche is subdued and with it each unique human perspective and idea subordinated to the plans and demands of leadership.

The Staff of Aesculapius is today an internationally recognised symbol of medicine. Just as Moses and the temple of Asclepius brought physical transformation and staved off death, so too do doctors in today’s medical temple — the hospital — whose powers of healing may appear equally as miraculous. We, as anesthetized patients, may be put to sleep in one broken physical state and awakened to another renewed. We enter a doctor’s office bearing suffering and exit with a recipe for relief. Our doctors fathom the mysteries of the invisible world inside our bodies, our cells, our organs, our brains, with nearly magical insights divined from arcane realms of knowledge known only to the initiated. They make us better, stronger, safer, and keep us alive. We sin. We eat too much, we drink too much, we sit too much, we become too stressed. Our doctors redeem us. They forgive us. Our only responsibility is to trust them and to do what they say without question. Follow doctors’ orders.

As a key symbol of medicine, the Staff of Aesculapius codes for these medicinal and healing powers, and for the roles and relationships that sustain them, with all the attendant expectations those roles require, on our doctors and ourselves. Doctors are expected to know and understand. The lay public are not. Doctors are expected to lead. We are expected to follow. Doctors are expected to be god-like. We are expected to place our life in their hands.

Under the current invocation of serpent and staff, since the advent of the COVID-19 narrative and the global medicalisation of politics, the roles and responsibilities of doctors have been fused with those of the state. Medical interventions have morphed into political expedients implemented by the world’s powerbrokers on a worldwide scale. The doctor-patient relationship has migrated from the interpersonal privacy of the doctor’s office to a geopolitical stage. Along with it, the archetypal good-liness and godliness of doctors (hand-selected by The State and The Plutocracy) has been projected onto our governing institutions and authorities. Whole societies are now cast in corporate media as vectors of infectious disease wards, and citizens as patients whose primary responsibility is not to be functioning members of society but merely potential carriers of pathogens. The new role foisted upon citizens is that of the perpetual patient who follows, without question, the doctor’s orders synthesized in the orders of the state.

Image below: World Health Organization, public domain

Thus, under the blue and white staff of Aesculapius, the citizen-patient’s unquestioning faith is summoned from on high by the World Health Organization. Of course, we cannot help but recall a corollary during the post-9/11 hysteria when Tucker Carlson claimed that David Ray Griffin’s critical analysis of the official 9/11 Report was “blasphemous and sinful.” Perhaps one of the main permutations of this present form of “unquestioned fealty to authority” is that it is now a call for global deference rather than a deification of nationalism.

With social interactions medicalised today, the social contract and the very nature of citizenship — and even human existence — has been radically restructured in the name of the pandemic, the virus, and the holy ‘case’. The high priests of politico-medical alchemy call all adherents to publicly signal the latest virtues of devotion to the state: “Attacks on me, quite frankly, are attacks on science,” sayeth Anthony Fauci, posing as Moses.

Thus, the mere mortal, whose FDA and its brethren receive billions from, and enjoy patent and profit rights to, the pharmaceutical giants and products they purportedly oversee, elevates himself from a lowly human prone to greed, grandiosity and power-hunger, to a status on par with an infinite order underpinning reality itself: The Science™. Obedient disciples of the vaccination cult of COVID-19, with its official state-sanctioned rites and remedies for healing, can purchase devotional candles casting Fauci as a holy being, and even, reportedly, view the objects of veneration on his own bookshelf.

This cult of personality, as Mark Crispin Miller observes, is reinforced by the celebrity hero-worship of Anthony Fauci. Although public support for the cult appears to be waning somewhat, as of this writing, we suspect that its influence and presence will re-emerge during whatever “next one … will get attention”, just as Gates had forewarned.

Trump White House Archived, Public domain

In this reconfigured global order founded on governance-by-health-emergency and health czar, the politico-medical prescription is drawn not from the repository of medicine but from that of totalitarianism, in the form of social control, with the dispensaries our social institutions: schools, police, the military, the media and the courts. Heavy doses of censorship and oppression are administered daily; strict adherence to the political regimen in medical disguise is imposed. Questions, critical thought, debate, and dissent threaten to neutralise the prophylactic control mechanisms and are assessed as public health threats to be eradicated. The active citizen, the beating heart of democracy, is the noncompliant patient who must be restrained. For their own good. Only following doctor’s orders.

Symbolically and archetypally, to question the word of public health bodies in this context is to question the word of the Lord: it is a feeble uninformed attempt by the unwashed masses to strip the staff-bearer and serpent-tamer of their godly powers. Dissent, the currency of a vibrant democracy, becomes blasphemy. Curiosity and critical questioning become heresy. Disrobing the high priests of political medicine leaves the faithful forsaken and unprotected, at the mercy of certain death in the viral wilderness, as the Israelites plagued by serpents in the Sinai. By these symbolic mechanisms, the medical bureaucracy of today assumes the role of the Holy Roman Empire in Galileo’s age. Unbelievers who seek to hold their governing institutions accountable are sinners who must be shunned and excommunicated. Scientists bearing evidence and reason are heretics to be damned.

Future Concepts & Practices

That this fundamental restructuring of governance and citizenship unfolded in 2020 is worthy of note. 2020 is the year that had been earmarked by the national security state as the commencement of a Bio-Nano Age. This new Bio-Nano era was to be ushered in under social and economic disruption that would pave the way for innovations including tele-everything, genetic modification of human beings, AI, synthetic biology, smart dust, cyborgs, and nanotags, for “everything, everywhere”. The endeavour, outlined in a 2001 NASA document citing DARPA, the CIA, DIA, the Australian Defence Department, NASA itself, and others, amounted to a roadmap toward a transhumanist future.

If the serpent that beguiled Eve in the Garden of Eden was a key symbol of supernatural deception, it is ironic that the symbol serves today in this global movement toward a hyperrational transhumanism. The ideology, in fact, has an ancient past grounded in man’s wish to live forever — to transcend by his own power the physical limitations of the flesh. To reach this unattainable goal, faithful adherents believe the human body must be “upgraded”  through technological innovations. Transhumanism can be understood today as a global scientific and social movement focused on the development of technologies aimed at enhancing the human condition. Practitioners summon the alchemical powers of biotech to integrate human beings with new technologies that “upgrade” sense perception, cognitive capacity, and to solve issues in maintaining constant connectivity to the “global central nervous system” — the internet.

As the head of the World Economic Forum has suggested consistently over the years, we must all prepare for a future that sees the convergence of biological life, synthetic technologies, and digital currencies.

This sort of future, however, is unfolding now. In the context of COVID-19 ‘vaccines’, Broudy and Kyrie trace the connections between COVID-19 and NASA’s Bio-Nano blueprint. They note that the mRNA technology rolled out in response to SARS-CoV-2 bears transhumanist footprints, from its origins with DARPA, the US Defense Department’s R&D arm, and NASA’s Bio Nano collaborator, to mRNA technology’s transhumanist applications in genetic engineering and nano-biology, to the fact that key actors behind both transhumanist research and COVID-19 interventions are one and the same.

Should 2020 have delivered on the national security state’s roadmap for social disruption, heralding a new Bio-Nano transhumanist age, the compliant patient-citizen is today’s perfect creature made fit for a post-human tomorrow. Primed for worship and blind faith, the all-too-human devotees offer up their arms, and those of their children, in a self-sacrificial ritual of obeisance and virtue. No questions asked. For the betterment of humankind. In the name of Pfizer.

The good patient-citizen takes their politico-medical sacrament by donating their body to science, shot by shot, booster by booster in infinitude for purification and atonement. Practicing the rite of receiving a piercing puncture and risking a life-altering injury atones for the original sin of an unclean, diseased, infectious bodily state. The infusion with state-of-the-art nanoparticle gene-based agents cleanses, at the molecular level, all biochemical traces of selfish human indulgence from the sins of social intercourse: travel, work, friendship, love, conversation, affection, sex, reproduction. Thus, man as a carbon-based life form can practice in self-righteous faith the new state rituals of self-loathing and self-denial by despising, as he is instructed to do, his own carbon footprint. Furthermore, the pain of the injection site, the fatigue, the headaches, the nausea, the blood clots, the heart attacks, the strokes, all hallowed suffering — marks of martyrdom — punish the flesh to chase out the demons of infectiousness.

The needle in this context becomes the instrument of a holy flagellant act, a symbol of the virtue of self-sacrifice and the miracle of medicine. Smallpox, polio and diphtheria all exorcised by the magic of the jab. The ultimate real-world impact of the vaccination campaign against COVID-19 matters not, even as it is revealed to be snake oil in the premier medical journal the Lancet. It is the act of submission to the needle that keeps the faith alive, the magic of medicine intact, and viral damnation at bay. The mask, in all its futility and discomfort, symbolises the humiliation and shame of the perpetually fallen and infectious human state.

As a first psychological step toward transhumanism, the imposition of regular and routine genetic nanoparticle-based injections may seem like a small step for humankind, but it is a giant leap for synthetic biology. The zealous disavowal of natural immunity in response to COVID-19, contrary to evidence and pure reason, has not only fuelled the Cult of Vaccinatus, but has opened the door to perpetual improvement upon the natural human state, via synthetic immunity, in genetic bio-nano form.

The underlying psychological erasure of our human biology (natural immunity) has fostered mass consent to a foundational shift toward perpetual (six monthly) injectable technological, bio-nano upgrades, in the guise of vaccines. Thus, the symbol of Aesclepius has served its global masters by mobilising emotions capable of nudging humanity ever closer to a transhumanist existence. The staff and serpent have, thereby, functioned as a symbolic camouflage of sorts, behind which those directing bio-nano tyranny can hide: the refuge of mad scientists.

Conclusion

As we suggested at the outset, symbols are central to the organization of disparate peoples pursuing conflicting interests. Stanley Milgram had famously contemplated the symbolic powers of fascist authority embodied in official lab coats calmly handling clipboards, taking notes, and issuing insights on how to conduct this or that experiment or examination. He had wondered how perfectly ordinary people, seemingly possessed of sound mind and intellect, could obey orders to participate explicitly or tacitly in the slaughter of millions of their fellow human beings.

Milgram’s experiments were horrifying because they confirmed not just the banality of evil, but the power of symbols to embody the connotations of accepted authority. When used in the right situations among people sufficiently primed to receive directions or commands, symbols represent key focal points of attention where the masses can direct shared emotions at material forms of official power or disgust.

As with Nazi Germany when Jewish people were recast in public discourse as vermin to be marginalized then eradicated, so too do we see today in state-corporate propaganda the casting of recalcitrant masses as infectious rodents rejecting mandates with untested mRNA platforms. Like the serpent’s venom, the lauded mRNA technology comes with the threat of death. It is only, however, the positive connotations associated with the WHO’s ubiquitous serpent and staff that are reinforced daily in corporate media.

The aim in this purposeful repetition is to organize a global following under the banner of the WHO, with the compliant passivity of a medicalised social order. As history shows, because symbols serve to organise and subordinate people to a common cause, and because they are so common to human experience, their significance to our willing submission goes largely unnoticed, leaving the subliminal imagery to whisper, instead, to our unconscious mind, like the somnambulance of a hypnotist’s trance.

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This article was originally published on Propaganda in Focus.

With a doctorate in applied psycholinguistics and experience as an imagery analyst, Daniel Broudy lectures in areas ranging from communication theory to visual rhetoric and from composition to rhetorical grammar. His research focuses on sounds, symbols, signs, images, and colors as tools deployed by centers of power to shape knowledge and influence human perception and emotion. Selections of his scholarly work can be found at ResearchGate. Daniel is an Associate Researcher with the Working Group on Propaganda and the 9/11 Global ‘War on Terror’.

Working in the areas of political psychology, the psychology of atrocity, and psychological operations, Valerie Kyrie holds a doctorate in psychology on the topic of reality-perception and its manipulation. She has contributed to work in the areas of international human rights, media, advocacy and policy, focusing on the deceptions, tactics and machinations underpinning collective violence and atrocity. Her most recent work analyses bio-tech intrusions on human biology. Valerie is an Associate Researcher with the Working Group on Propaganda and the 9/11 Global ‘War on Terror’.

Featured image: Eugène Roger, Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0

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Russia’s contribution to India’s reestablishment as one of the world’s great powers cannot be overstated. This is especially true when it comes to the Asian giant’s military, which according to various estimates uses up to 85% of Soviet and Russian weapons and equipment in its massive arsenal. This close strategic partnership has been going on for decades and has survived the end of the (First) Cold War. Even throughout the troublesome 1990s, Russia provided critical technology transfers, ensuring India’s military and technological lead in the Global South. One of the most prominent examples (and one of the cornerstones) of this cooperation is the Su-30MKI multirole fighter jet, forming the backbone of the Indian Air Force, the fourth largest in the world, operating approximately 2,200 aircraft.

The Su-30MKI is based on Russia’s legendary Su-27 “Flanker” air superiority jet. Started as a joint venture between Russian Sukhoi (now part of the United Aircraft Corporation) and Indian Hindustan Aeronautics Limited, a state-owned aerospace corporation, the jet is being manufactured in India under license in one of the production facilities of the Hindustan Aeronautics Limited (HAL), where the Indian state-owned corporation receives preproduction parts, better known as “completely knock downed” (CKD) kits produced in Russia’s Irkutsk aircraft plant. The joint project is being carried out under the successful “Make in India” program, which has seen numerous technology transfers and helped India’s domestic military-industrial sector grow exponentially.

Russia has been the first to accept India’s requests in the framework of the “Make in India” program and has supported the Asian giant in establishing a robust domestic military production and design capability. Technology transfers between Russia and India include everything from assault rifles to advanced aircraft and missile technology, including the latest hypersonic weapons. This [М1]  cooperation has been instrumental in not just ensuring India’s security, but also establishing the Asian giant as one of the premier global military powers. Thus, India chose to continue the close cooperation, despite ongoing attempts to diversify its arms procurement and create an even more independent domestic Military-Industrial Complex.

Russia and India are also continuing their close cooperation and will carry out joint work on modernizing the multirole jet, including the integration of the latest weapons and avionics. According to various reports, India is planning to upgrade its Su-30MKI fighters with Russian Phazotron Zhuk-AE AESA (Active Electronically Scanned Array) radars and other next-generation advanced sensors. Although the details of any upgrade negotiations and possible agreements are a state secret, a number of reports indicate that the upgrades may also include the Saturn AL-41F1S afterburning turbofan 3D thrust-vectoring jet engines, used on the advanced Russian Su-35S air superiority/multirole fighter jets. Other upgrades are likely to include the integration of various air-to-air, air-to-ground and anti-ship missiles, giving the Su-30MKI multirole capabilities which are unrivaled anywhere in the Global South.

This year marks the 45th anniversary of the maiden flight of the Su-27 fighter prototype developed by the legendary Pavel Osipovich Sukhoi himself, founder of the Sukhoi Design Bureau, paving the way for the emergence of not just the Su-27 and its variants, but also the Su-30 and Su-35 air superiority/multirole fighter jets, in addition to the Su-34 fighter-bombers. The Su-30 itself has been one of the most successful jets in the world in recent decades, seeing the development of multiple variants and international orders from Latin America to Southeast Asia. In addition to the Russian Aerospace Forces, the Su-30’s global customers include India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Vietnam, China, Algeria, Angola, Uganda, Belarus, Armenia, Kazakhstan and Venezuela, with Iran and Argentina reportedly showing interest in acquiring the advanced jet.

Since the early 2000s, Sukhoi has delivered approximately 700 Su-27/Su-30 fighter jets to the global market, with avionics, engines, sensors, systems, weapons and other components all produced in Russia. According to Alexander Mikheev, Director General of Rosoboronexport, Russia’s main weapons export agency, over the past 10 years, “the share of aircraft supplies in Russia’s total arms exports has stood at 40-50%, and even exceeds this figure today.” Due to its “open architecture” design, the Su-30 can integrate foreign-made avionics and weapons systems, with customers being able to integrate locally-made weapons and other systems to customize the fighters in accordance with their requirements.

This is especially useful for India and its “Make in India” program, which has integrated a number of domestically designed and produced components on its Su-30MKI jets, in addition to French and Israeli systems, subsystems and avionics. No other jet in the world comes even close to the modularity of the Su-30, making it a very sought-after weapons platform, ensuring the customer’s sovereignty and independence. What’s more, the Russian jet comes with no political baggage and blackmail, unlike many other weapons designed and produced in the countries of the political West, which is precisely what countries like India need, as they are working to establish a more optimized and independent military production capabilities.

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Drago Bosnic is an independent geopolitical and military analyst.

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***

Video images captured the horrific actions of Moroccan security forces armed and trained by the United States through the U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM) and working on behalf of the Spanish government, systematically beating and slaughtering African migrants on June 24, 2022. The migrants’ only crime was attempting to cross from Morocco to Europe via the Spanish held enclave of Melilla. For that, at least 39 human beings were beaten to death, as recorded by the NGO Walking Borders. This racist barbarism by a U.S.-backed neo-colonial regime and the lack of swift and unambiguous condemnation by the U.S. State demonstrates, yet again, that human life, especially African lives hold no value for U.S. officials. 

The Black Alliance for Peace (BAP) denounces first, the Moroccan government’s security forces and the Spanish government for their collaboration in this massacre and their ongoing dehumanizing treatment of African asylum seekers. We must note that, as the Moroccan police were beating and hog-tying the African migrants, AFRICOM was carrying out “Operation African Lion” – military exercises in Morocco with more than 7,500 troops from Western nations and African neo-colonies. Soon after, NATO nations (the coterie of U.S. minions) held their meeting in Spain, with no acknowledgement of the massacre.

We especially condemn the United States government for its unmitigated hypocrisy in claiming that its presence and policies in Africa are to “promote regional security, stability, and prosperity.” The only securing and stabilizing AFRICOM and U.S. policy are doing in Africa are for the prosperity of international finance capital and hegemony of U.S. interests. We know that U.S. militarism – which guarantees European imperialism on the African continent, while giving cover to the repressive actions of neo-colonial states such as Morocco – will continue to be the main cause of escalating violence for the African people.

“All evidence suggests that U.S. militarism and training of police, and other repressive forces in Africa has only intensified death and destruction;” says Netfa Freeman, Co-Coordinator of BAP’s Africa Team 

BAP extends solidarity to all the African migrants and their families, victims of the brutal racist attack. We also demand a full independent investigation and indictment of the actions of Morocco, Spain, and the U.S. And we demand, once again, that the U.S. get out of Africa and that NATO and AFRICOM be shut down!

The Black Alliance for Peace calls on all anti-imperialists to join the U.S. Out of Africa Network to help us achieve this imperative.

U.S. Out of Africa!

Shut Down AFRICOM!

*

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***

“No one should get used to their rights. Predicting with certainty which ones, if any, will go, or when, is impossible.”—Mary R. Ziegler, legal historian

The Supreme Court has spoken: there will be no consequences for cops who brutalize the citizenry and no justice for the victims of police brutality.

Although the Court’s 2021-22 rulings on qualified immunity for police who engage in official misconduct were largely overshadowed by its politically polarizing rulings on abortion, gun ownership and religion, they were no less devastating.

The doctrine of qualified immunity was intended to insulate government officials from frivolous lawsuits, but the real purpose of qualified immunity is to ensure that government officials are not held accountable for official misconduct.

In Egbert v. Boule, the Court gave total immunity to Border Patrol agents who beat up a bed-and-breakfast owner, in the process carving out a massive exception to the Fourth Amendment for border police (and by extension, other federal police) who unconstitutionally use excessive force. As journalist Ian Millhiser concludes, “Egbert v. Boule is a severe blow to the proposition that law enforcement must obey the Constitution.”

In Cope v. Cogdill, the Court let stand a Fifth Circuit ruling that granted qualified immunity to jail officials who watched a suicidal inmate strangle himself without intervening or calling for help. Likewise, in Ramirez v. Guadarrama, the Court let stand a lower court ruling granting qualified immunity to police officers who fired their tasers at a suicidal man who had doused himself in gasoline, causing the man to burst into flames.

Both Cope and Ramirez move the goal posts for the kind of misconduct that merits qualified immunity, suggesting that even sheer incompetence is excusable when it involves a cop.

It’s a chilling reminder that in the American police state, ‘we the people’ are at the mercy of law enforcement officers who have almost absolute discretion to decide who is a threat, what constitutes resistance, and how harshly they can deal with the citizens they were appointed to ‘serve and protect.”

This is how unarmed Americans keep dying at the hands of militarized police.

Under the guise of qualified immunity, there have been no consequences for police who destroyed a private home by bombarding it with tear gas grenades during a SWAT team raid gone awry, or for the cop who mistakenly shot a 10-year-old boy after aiming for and missing the non-threatening family dog, or for the arresting officer who sicced a police dog on a suspect who had already surrendered.

Qualified immunity is how the police state stays in power.

Although the U.S. Supreme Court recognized in Harlow v. Fitzgerald (1982) that suing government officials for monetary damages is “the only realistic avenue” of holding them accountable for abusing their offices and violating the Constitution, it has ostensibly given the police and other government agents a green light to shoot first and ask questions later, as well as to probe, poke, pinch, taser, search, seize, strip and generally manhandle anyone they see fit in almost any circumstance, all with the general blessing of the courts.

Whether it’s police officers breaking through people’s front doors and shooting them dead in their homes or strip searching motorists on the side of the road, these instances of abuse are continually validated by a judicial system that kowtows to virtually every police demand, no matter how unjust, no matter how in opposition to the Constitution.

Make no mistake about it: this is what constitutes “law and order” in the American police state.

These are the hallmarks of a police state: where police officers, no longer mere servants of the people entrusted with keeping the peace, are part of an elite ruling class dependent on keeping the masses corralled, under control, and treated like suspects and enemies rather than citizens.

Unfortunately, we’ve been traveling this dangerous road for a long time now.

A review of critical court rulings over the past several decades, including rulings affirming qualified immunity protections for government agents by the U.S. Supreme Court, reveals a startling and steady trend towards pro-police state rulings by an institution concerned more with establishing order, protecting the ruling class, and insulating government agents from charges of wrongdoing than with upholding the rights enshrined in the Constitution.

Indeed, as Reuters reports, qualified immunity “has become a nearly failsafe tool to let police brutality go unpunished and deny victims their constitutional rights.” Worse, as Reuters concluded, “the Supreme Court has built qualified immunity into an often insurmountable police defense by intervening in cases mostly to favor the police.”

For instance, police can claim qualified immunity for warrantless searches. In Anderson v. Creighton, the Supreme Court ruled that FBI and state law enforcement agents were entitled to qualified immunity protections after they were sued for raiding a private home without a warrant and holding family members at gunpoint, all in a search for a suspected bank robber who was not in the house.

Police can claim qualified immunity for using excessive force against protesters. In Saucier v. Katz, the Court ruled in favor of federal law enforcement agents who forcefully tackled a protester as he attempted to unfurl a banner at Vice President Gore’s political rally. The Court reasoned that the officers acted reasonably given the urgency of protecting the vice president.

Police can claim qualified immunity for shooting a fleeing suspect in the back. In Brosseau v. Haugen, the Court dismissed a lawsuit against a police officer who shot Kenneth Haugen in the back as he entered his car in order to flee from police. The Court ruled that in light of existing case law, the cop’s conduct fell in the “hazy border between excessive and acceptable force” and so she did not violate clearly established law.

Police can claim qualified immunity for shooting a mentally impaired person. In City of San Francisco v. Sheehan, the Court ruled in favor of police who repeatedly shot Teresa Sheehan during the course of a mental health welfare check. The Court ruled that it was not unreasonable for police to pepper spray and shoot Sheehan multiple times after entering her room without a warrant and encountering her holding a knife.

Police officers can use lethal force in car chases without fear of lawsuits. In Plumhoff v. Rickard, the U.S. Supreme Court declared that police officers who used deadly force to terminate a car chase were immune from a lawsuit. The officers were accused of needlessly resorting to deadly force by shooting multiple times at a man and his passenger in a stopped car, killing both individuals.

Police can stop, arrest and search citizens without reasonable suspicion or probable cause. In a 5-3 ruling in Utah v. Strieff, the U.S. Supreme Court effectively gave police the go-ahead to embark on a fishing expedition of one’s person and property, rendering Americans completely vulnerable to the whims of any cop on the beat.

Police officers can stop cars based on “anonymous” tips or for “suspicious” behavior such as having a reclined car seat or driving too carefully. In a 5-4 ruling in Navarette v. California, the U.S. Supreme Court declared that police officers, under the guise of “reasonable suspicion,” can stop cars and question drivers based solely on anonymous tips, no matter how dubious, and whether or not they themselves witnessed any troubling behavior. Then in State v. Howard, the Kansas Supreme Court declared that motorists who recline their car seats are guilty of suspicious behavior and can be subject to warrantless searches by police. That ruling, coupled with other court rulings upholding warrantless searches and seizures by police renders one’s car a Constitution-free zone.

Americans have no protection against mandatory breathalyzer tests at a police checkpoint, although mandatory blood draws violate the Fourth Amendment (Birchfield v. North Dakota). Police can also conduct sobriety and “information-seeking” checkpoints (Illinois v. Lidster and Mich. Dep’t of State Police v. Sitz).

Police can forcibly take your DNA, whether or not you’ve been convicted of a crime. In Maryland v. King, a divided U.S. Supreme Court determined that a person arrested for a crime who is supposed to be presumed innocent until proven guilty must submit to forcible extraction of their DNA. Once again the Court sided with the guardians of the police state over the defenders of individual liberty in determining that DNA samples may be extracted from people arrested for “serious” offenses. The end result of the ruling paves the way for a nationwide dragnet of suspects targeted via DNA sampling.

Police can use the “fear for my life” rationale as an excuse for shooting unarmed individuals. Upon arriving on the scene of a nighttime traffic accident, an Alabama police officer shot a driver exiting his car, mistakenly believing the wallet in his hand to be a gun. A report by the Justice Department found that half of the unarmed people shot by one police department over a seven-year span were “shot because the officer saw something (like a cellphone) or some action (like a person pulling at the waist of their pants) and misidentified it as a threat.”

Police have free reign to use drug-sniffing dogs as “search warrants on leashes.” In Florida v. Harris, a unanimous U.S. Supreme Court determined that police officers may use highly unreliable drug-sniffing dogs to conduct warrantless searches of cars during routine traffic stops. The ruling turns man’s best friend into an extension of the police state, provided the use of a K-9 unit takes place within a reasonable amount of time (Rodriguez v. United States).

Not only are police largely protected by qualified immunity, but police dogs are also off the hook for wrongdoing. The Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in favor of a police officer who allowed a police dog to maul a homeless man innocent of any wrongdoing.

Police can subject Americans to strip searches, no matter the “offense.” A divided U.S. Supreme Court actually prioritized making life easier for overworked jail officials over the basic right of Americans to be free from debasing strip searches. In its 5-4 ruling in Florence v. Burlington, the Court declared that any person who is arrested and processed at a jail house, regardless of the severity of his or her offense (i.e., they can be guilty of nothing more than a minor traffic offense), can be subjected to a strip search by police or jail officials, which involves exposing the genitals and the buttocks. This “license to probe” is now being extended to roadside stops, as police officers throughout the country have begun performing roadside strip searches—some involving anal and vaginal probes—without any evidence of wrongdoing and without a warrant.

Police can break into homes without a warrant, even if it’s the wrong home. In an 8-1 ruling in Kentucky v. King, the U.S. Supreme Court placed their trust in the discretion of police officers, rather than in the dictates of the Constitution, when they gave police greater leeway to break into homes or apartments without a warrant. Despite the fact that the police in question ended up pursuing the wrong suspect, invaded the wrong apartment and violated just about every tenet that stands between us and a police state, the Court sanctioned the warrantless raid, leaving Americans with little real protection in the face of all manner of abuses by police.

Police can use knock-and-talk tactics as a means of sidestepping the Fourth Amendment. Aggressive “knock and talk” practices have become thinly veiled, warrantless exercises by which citizens are coerced and intimidated into “talking” with heavily armed police who “knock” on their doors in the middle of the night. Andrew Scott didn’t even get a chance to say no to such a heavy-handed request before he was gunned down by police who pounded aggressively on the wrong door at 1:30 a.m., failed to identify themselves as police, and then repeatedly shot and killed the man when he answered the door while holding a gun in self-defense.

Police can carry out no-knock raids if they believe announcing themselves would be dangerous.Police can perform a “no-knock” raid as long as they have a reasonable suspicion that knocking and announcing their presence, under the particular circumstances, would be dangerous or futile or give occupants a chance to destroy evidence of a crime (Richards v. Wisconsin). Legal ownership of a firearm is also enough to justify a no-knock raid by police (Quinn v. Texas). For instance, a Texas man had his home subject to a no-knock, SWAT-team style forceful entry and raid based solely on the suspicion that there were legally-owned firearms in his household. The homeowner was actually shot by police through his closed bedroom door.

Police can recklessly open fire on anyone that might be “armed.” Philando Castile was shot and killed during a routine traffic stop allegedly over a broken taillight merely for telling police he had a conceal-and-carry permit. That’s all it took for police to shoot Castile four times in the presence of his girlfriend and her 4-year-old daughter. A unanimous Supreme Court declared in County of Los Angeles vs. Mendez that police should not be held liable for recklessly firing 15 times into a shack where a homeless couple had been sleeping because the grabbed his BB gun in defense, fearing they were being attacked.

Police can destroy a home during a SWAT raid, even if the owner gives their consent to enter and search it. In West v. Winfield, the Supreme Court provided cover to police after they smashed the windows of Shaniz West’s home, punched holes in her walls and ceilings, and bombed the house with so much tear gas that it was uninhabitable for two months. All of this despite the fact that the suspect they were pursuing was not in the house and West, the homeowner, agreed to allow police to search the home to confirm that.

Police can suffocate someone, deliberately or inadvertently, in the process of subduing them. “I can’t breathe” has become a rallying cry following the deaths of Eric Garner and George Floyd, both of whom died after being placed in a chokehold by police. Dozens more have died in similar circumstances at the hands of police who have faced little repercussions for these deaths.

Clearly, as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, the system is rigged.

Because the system is rigged, because the government is corrupt, and because the U.S. Supreme Court has consistently chosen to protect the police at the expense of the people, we are dealing with a nationwide epidemic of court-sanctioned police violence carried out with impunity against individuals posing little or no real threat.

This is how “we the people” keep losing.

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This article was originally published on The Rutherford Institute.

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

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

They are regular contributors to Global Research.

Featured image is from Medical Extremism

All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the “Translate Website” drop down menu on the top banner of our home page (Desktop version).

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***

An Emirati-Israeli group brought a delegation to Israel in May that included Pakistani nationals and Pakistani Americans.

Israel and Pakistan have no formal relations. Every Pakistani passport bears the inscription, “This passport is valid for all countries of the world except Israel.”

Still, the 15-member delegation appears to be part of an effort to pressure Pakistan into recognizing Israel – something that would violate one of Pakistan’s core political principles since its founding.

Trip to promote Israel

The trip was organized by Sharaka, a shadowy group that says it has offices in the United Arab Emirates and Israel that was formed after the so-called Abraham Accords.

These are the deals brokered by the US between Israel and several Arab states since 2020 – despite the popular opposition of citizens of those countries to normalizing relations with Tel Aviv.

The Washington-based American Muslim and Multifaith Women’s Empowerment Council (AMMWEC) also helped arrange the junket.

Anila Ali, president of AMMWEC and now a board member of Sharaka, led the delegation.

A Pakistani-born US citizen, Ali describes herself as a “centrist Democrat” who previously served as a delegate to the Democratic National Convention.

She is a long-time defender of Israel who has repeatedly characterized Palestinians as “terrorists.”

Her organization lists among its “partners” the US Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Department of Homeland Security, several police departments and Hillel, a national US Jewish organization which boasts that Israel, an apartheid state, “is at the heart” of all of its work.

While claiming to offer a welcoming home to Jews on American campuses, Hillel boycotts Jews and non-Jews who disagree with its hardline pro-Israel positions.

AMMWEC also partners with the Anti-Defamation League, an Israel lobby group that plays a major role in attacking and smearing Palestinians and supporters of their rights.

The delegation Ali led met with Israeli President Isaac Herzog, to whom Ali gifted a book written by her father – a biography of Pakistan’s founder Muhammad Ali Jinnah, a staunch opponent of Zionism.

I’m honored to be the first Pakistani & American to present a book, an eyewitness account of the #Pakistan movement written by my father, Qutubuddin Aziz, to the President of Israel, @Isaac_Herzog. The president’s warmth & grace humbled me. @ammwecofficial @sharakango pic.twitter.com/TY6qe2xRYX

— Anila Ali (@anilaali) May 12, 2022

“The delegates spoke to the president about their efforts to develop relationships with Israel,” AMMWEC said.

It “was an amazing experience because we haven’t had a group of Pakistani leaders in Israel ever in such scope,” Herzog later told the World Economic Forum in Davos.

“And that all stemmed from the Abraham Accords, meaning Jew and Muslim can dwell together in the region, of course with Christians who live in the region and Druze and other religions.”

The delegation went to Israel’s parliament, the Knesset, and the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial.

Thank you @AmbDaniDayan for speaking to our historic American-Pakistani delegation at @yadvashem pic.twitter.com/tx07K41kJm

— Sharaka – شراكة (@sharakango) May 10, 2022

They also visited the al-Aqsa mosque compound in occupied East Jerusalem – a frequent site of attacks by Israeli forces on Palestinian worshippers.

The tour guide who took us to Masjid #Aqsa, Dome of the Rock, Wailing Wall, Church of Holy Sepulcher was a #Palestinian #Muslim Arab. Since maj of us were Muslims he’s sharing history. ⁦@sharakango⁩ ⁦@ammwecofficial⁩ ⁦@VOANews⁩ ⁦⁦@washingtonpost⁩ pic.twitter.com/rNqq8K5Cmn

— Anila Ali (@anilaali) May 31, 2022

Fury in Pakistan

The trip caused outrage in Pakistan, where solidarity with Palestine has always been a foundational principle.

The delegation included Pakistani journalist Ahmed Quraishi and Jewish Pakistani Fishel BenKhald.

Beautiful to see a Pakistani Jew ✡️ Fishel BenKhald @Jew_Pakistani finally praying at the Western Wall in Jerusalem. This was a dream come true for this man. Religious freedom is a basic right. Good work Pakistan 🇵🇰 , great work @sharakango and @ammwecofficial 👍🏼 pic.twitter.com/1XbCdRwoYo

— حسن سجواني 🇦🇪 Hassan Sajwani (@HSajwanization) May 19, 2022

Quraishi was fired from his position at state broadcaster PTV for making the trip.

“Persons indulging in cheap publicity should have thought of their national interests first and last,” PTV stated.

“In lieu of unacceptable actions, Pakistan Television has terminated the contract of an individual who proceeded to travel to a specific country out of his own accord.”

Although Quraishi, who was born and raised in Kuwait, claimed the junket was “private,” he told Ellie Cohanim, a broadcaster and formerly the Trump administration’s deputy special envoy for anti-Semitism, that he hoped the controversy would help persuade his fellow Pakistanis of the case for relations with Israel.

“This is the moment really for us to finally have peace with Israel and deal directly with Israel,” Quraishi said.

Quraishi also revealed himself to be a Muslim Zionist. “As a Muslim, I think we need to own what’s written also in the Quran about the story of Israel and the Israelites and the people of Israel,” he asserted, “and there’s a claim, a very strong one, that the Jewish people have to their historical homeland.”

In a resolution passed after the trip, the Senate of Pakistan condemned recent Israeli attacks against worshippers at the al-Aqsa mosque compound in Jerusalem.

And a Pakistani senator called for the revocation of the citizenship of those who went to Israel.

What is Sharaka?

Sharaka – which means “partnership” in Arabic – also led a delegation of young Arabs and Muslims to Auschwitz, the site of the World War II German government death camp in Poland earlier this year.

Although it claims to be motivated by pursuing interfaith harmony, Sharaka has the stated goal of “realizing the tremendous potential of the Abraham Accords.”

Sharaka’s website presents the group as a grassroots, non-governmental initiative “founded by young leaders from Israel and the Gulf in order to turn the vision of people-to-people peace into a reality.”

Sharaka’s Israeli co-founder, Amit Deri, is also the founder of Reservists on Duty, a group of Israeli soldiers dedicated to combating the Palestinian-led boycott, divestment and sanctions movement – a campaign promoting Palestinian freedom and equality.

David Brog, former executive director of the fanatically anti-Palestinian group Christians United For Israel, and pro-Israel lobbyist Arsen Ostrovsky, are also on Sharaka’s board.

And although Sharaka claims to be nongovernmental, its Emirati co-founder Majid al-Sarrah says in a Sharaka video promoting Israel that “I consider myself a representative of the Emirati state and its policies.”

The reality is that no such organization would be permitted in the United Arab Emirates – where there is no freedom of speech or association – without government approval.

Though it solicits donations through its website, Sharaka is silent about where it obtains the substantial funding that would be needed to finance the various delegations it sponsors. Its website provides no information about where the organization is registered.

Sharaka did not respond to a request for comment regarding where it is registered as a nonprofit organization and whether it receives any government funding.

Notably, Jared Kushner, the adviser and son-in-law to President Donald Trump, was personally present in December when Sharaka signed a cooperation agreement with the Abraham Accords Peace Institute, a US-based group with a similar pro-Israel mission.

Normalization under the banner of religion

The Abraham Accords were brokered by the Trump administration and are supported by the Biden administration to formalize diplomatic relations between Israel and Arab states. They aim to consolidate military, economic and political cooperation between Israel and other local American client regimes while putting an end to the Palestinian national liberation struggle.

These efforts are often marketed as promoting “interfaith” cooperation – relying on the misrepresentation that the violence arising from Israel’s belligerent occupation and colonization of Palestinian land is really rooted in religious strife.

Promoting the myth that Muslim-Jewish disharmony is the root of conflict is a common tactic used by Israel propagandists.

Similarly, Israel has long promoted the falsehood that commemoration of the German-led European genocide of millions of European Jews during World War II is inextricably linked to the recognition of Israel as a Jewish state.

“Israeli Zionists have appropriated events in Jewish history, including the Holocaust, for propagandistic purposes to assert their ‘right’ to Palestine – a land to which they had laid their suspect colonial claim half a century before the genocide,” Columbia University professor Joseph Massad recently wrote in relation to the Sharaka-sponsored trip to Auschwitz.

“Palestinians and other Arabs were called upon to accept the linkage between the Holocaust and Israel’s ‘right to exist as a Jewish state’ as a package deal.”

The bid to “engage Palestinians and other Arabs with the history of the Holocaust is an attempt to deflect Palestinian and Arab engagement away from the Zionist Jewish and Israeli present and an attempt to justify Israel’s ongoing crimes against the Palestinian people,” Massad adds.

“Israeli demands that Palestinians and Arabs commemorate the Holocaust are not about the Holocaust at all, but about the other part of the formula, namely recognizing and submitting to Israel’s ‘right to exist’ as a settler-colonial, racist Jewish state,” Massad concludes.

US-Pakistan “reset”

It is clear that bringing Pakistani nationals to Israel is an attempt to push Pakistan – a Muslim state with a population of 220 million people and an arsenal of nuclear weapons – towards recognition of and normalization with Israel.

Indeed, this issue may be at the heart of recent political turmoil in the country. An April no-confidence vote removed Imran Khan as Pakistan’s prime minister.

Analysts saw Khan’s unwavering solidarity with Palestinians and refusal to warm up to Israel as key motivators for what was effectively a US-backed putsch against him.

Rumors emerged last year that Saudi Arabia had been pushing Pakistan to normalize relations with Israel after Khan was asked about such pressure in a November 2020 interview with local broadcaster GNN.

Saudi Arabia is both a key – though informal – ally of Tel Aviv and a major source of financing for Islamabad.

Pakistani PM Imran Khan being pressured to recognize Israel pic.twitter.com/6E9gryf5zR

— LifeRacer (@LifeRacer_1) November 13, 2020

“How much pressure is on you to recognize Israel?” the interviewer asked the then-prime minister.

“The pressure is because Israel has a big influence on America,” Khan said, adding that this had increased under the Trump administration.

“Now, it was never in our thinking that we can recognize Israel,” Khan said.

He added that since Pakistan’s founding, its policy has been that until Palestinians “get their rights and a just settlement,” there can never be recognition.

Pakistan’s refusal to cut ties with Russia following the latter’s invasion of Ukraine earlier this year may also explain the American animosity towards Khan.

Khan went to Moscow just hours after Russian forces entered Ukraine in late February.

Although the visit had been pre-planned, the Pakistani leader rebuffed Washington’s efforts to persuade him to cancel it.

Khan also revealed his willingness to buy Russian gas and grain just as the US and EU were pressuring the rest of the world – albeit unsuccessfully – to impose sanctions on Moscow.

Following Khan’s removal from office, his replacement as prime minister, Shehbaz Sharif, expressed enthusiasm for “deepening” Pakistan’s relationship with the United States.

Imperial courtiers in Washington also view Khan’s downfall as a golden opportunity to “reset” the US relationship with Pakistan.

Writing for the Brookings Institution think tank, CIA veteran Bruce Riedel and Brookings fellow Madiha Afzal denounce Khan as an “anti-American” ideologue who was “leaning away from America toward Russia and China.”

Though they acknowledge the legendary corruption of the Sharif family – Shehbaz’s brother Nawaz was prime minister several times before being barred from office due to corruption – Riedel and Afzal view them as “pragmatic men” with whom Washington can do business.

Similarly, pro-Israel Pakistanis may view this moment as a golden opportunity to fulfill the dream of seeing the Israeli flag fluttering over a Zionist embassy in Islamabad.

*

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Tamara Nassar is associate editor and Ali Abunimah is executive director of The Electronic Intifada.

Featured image: A delegation including Pakistani nationals visits the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial in May. (via Twitter)

All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the “Translate Website” drop down menu on the top banner of our home page (Desktop version).

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***

Introduction

Many millions of families in Western nations have been internally stressed, if not broken, as a result of the global Covid-19 infection and the policies surrounding it.

Note that I do not refer to Covid as a pandemic. The definition of “pandemic” was changed in July 2008, soon before the swine flu “pandemic”, which fizzled. Neither infection would qualify under earlier definitions.[1]

However, the widespread divisiveness that remains in its wake is a pandemic.

During the early months of “flatten the curve,” few would have disputed or resisted the public health instructions to wear masks, keep a distance of six feet, wash hands frequently, and stay home if possible.

 

During the first year, with many small businesses failing, governments eased financial disruption with handouts, as most people pulled together to put the disease behind them.

Throughout much of 2020, while the vaccines were still in development, prominent epidemiologists were presenting high-level evidence that early treatment protocols could save millions of lives.[2] This evidence was ignored and/or ridiculed in the media.[3]

Cracks in public confidence began to emerge in December 2020 with the arrival of the mRNA vaccines, along with passports to monitor vaccination status.

Suddenly there was a rift in society between the willing and the unwilling.  The latter were not only socially restricted and unemployed, but were systematically prevented from using alternative early treatments by the ubiquitous, media-backed policy of preventing “vaccine hesitancy”.

Social media discipline followed, with any discussion of early treatments causing suspensions and banishments from Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

But what was happening between the willing and the unwilling in families and friendships across the land?

My Own Case

I am a retired career medical librarian who served public health executives in a large government agency for 25 years. I have written many articles tracking and analyzing Covid policy as it developed.[4]

As a health information professional, accompanied by other health professionals close to the situation, I opted to stock up on early treatment medications rather than to choose one of the new mRNA vaccines, which have had FDA emergency use status only.

When the national US, UK, and European databases started blinking red about Covid vaccine injuries in the spring of 2021, I pointed this out to people in my family, and to my husband’s family, and also reported some of the database evidence on Twitter (from which I was permanently suspended on March 1, 2022).

A member of my immediate family and two of my closest long-time friends have been dismayed at my position – one indicating that it was based on a character flaw. These relationships are on hold, with no contact.

My husband’s family opted for vaccination. Although the incessant drumbeat tested our relationships, we chose to keep them strong and loving.

Others, whom I know more casually, have withdrawn their warmth and in the street simply nod to me.

What is at the Heart of this Divisiveness?

Everyone within reach of a news source on this planet has heard the singular narrative that Covid-19 is a frightening 100-year pandemic with only one solution: vaccination.

This has been repeatedly emphasized every day for more than two years.

Its effect on populations has been analyzed by Belgian clinical psychologist and professor, Dr. Mattias Desmet.

Desmet has identified the population effect as mass formation psychosis. He says that about 30% of people are solidly hypnotized by the public health media barrage. A further 40% go along with it, and only 20-30% remain free of its power.[5]

So there is great divisiveness. Within this divisiveness, two important things may be constructively discussed between people who are in conflict:

1.     Sources of Information:

Often when people are arguing, they have been influenced by different sources. The argument is most primarily between the sources, rather than between those who read them. This is why the alternative sources have been suppressed and censored:  So that many people will believe there is no argument.

Thus it is very important to start the discussion by considering the sources that each has read or listened to.  Ultimately, it is the sources that disagree, and if people want to preserve their relationships, they should trust each other to look at each other’s sources together.

This is challenging because the most qualified sources that disagree with the singular narrative have been actively suppressed and censored by the Trusted News Initiative,[6] and by social media.  Many health professionals know this, and their family and friends really should be open to what they have to say.

2.     The Need to be Right:

Most families were already subject to the ordinary pressures of life before Covid came along. Even before Covid, basic family dynamics under the pressures of life kept psychologists, antidepressants, and divorce lawyers in business.

Underneath it all has been the fragility of self-worth, which inevitably looms up when people are in disagreement or conflict.

Disagreements and conflicts always point to the possibility of being wrong.

Being wrong is something no one wants to be.  In competitive argument it is a losing position. Being right, on the other hand, is a dominant position. Conflict is about winner over loser, about strength over weakness, about being admired over being disdained.

So it is no wonder that the two positions during a reportedly lethal global pandemic – being vaccinated or unvaccinated – have become so utterly contentious and divisive.

The unvaccinated are constantly aware of their pariah status among Desmet’s completely hypnotized 30%.

Meanwhile, if the new mRNA injections are indeed causing unprecedented adverse effects, acknowledgement of this puts some of Desmet’s 40% who went along with vaccination into a state of unsettled anxiety.

Not to mention those among Desmet’s independently aware 20-30%, who feared the new injections but capitulated to save their jobs, marriages, and social status.

It’s an ugly situation – an ongoing divisiveness across society unlike any other we have experienced as a culture.

How can we Heal this Situation?

This is perhaps the most important question we are facing.

How can people who are on opposite sides of what they have been led to believe is a life-and-death issue, resolve their positions without losing face?

These questions, in this order, might be useful to ponder:

1.     Were there already unresolved stresses in your relationship(s) before the pandemic, which then became worse?

2.     Do you trust the character of the persons/people you are at odds with?

3.     If yes, do you want to have the relationship(s) restored to good faith?

4.     If yes, are you willing to examine the information sources that those you disagree with have been trusting?

5.     Overall, do you embrace the idea that the Spirit is in each one of us, that everyone is born good and wants happy relationships?

6.     If so, are you willing to try to rise above conflict by encouraging transactions among the various personality types, based on the “I’m OK; You’re OK” approach to peace?[7]

Negative Emotion: We Must Find Another Way of Being

Many of us are addicted to negative emotion.

Indeed, negative emotion has increasingly captured society as a whole through the incessant media preoccupation with fear, fear, fear – and panic.

Recently, Canadian Members of Parliament were issued with “panic buttons” in case members of the public threatened them. What would Winston Churchill have said about the implied “panicky” Members of Parliament?  Do we have frightened people running the country?

Perhaps we do. Philosopher P.D. Ouspensky in his book, “The Fourth Way,” notes that “there is not a single useful negative emotion, useful in any sense. Negative emotions are all a sign of weakness.”

As one author has summarized him:

Many of us dwell on the negative far past the time when it is relevant, allowing it to diminish the joy of the present. In politics, in jobs, in personal life, we take great liberties in imposing our negative emotions on others, and we often derive a great deal of pleasure from it. Ouspensky points out that “almost all of our personal negative emotions are based on accusations, somebody else is guilty,” but if we realize “we are the cause of all that happens to us, that changes things…” He goes on to say that “You do not realize how much you lose by these spontaneous manifestations of negative character. They make so many things impossible.”[8]

Most specifically, they make love impossible.

And as the world’s great religions agree — and which Martin Luther King’s grandfather observed:

In conclusion, it’s time to consciously acknowledge and overcome the spiritual weakness that has been revealed in the West — by its panicked, divisive response to a virus with a very high infection survival rate:

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This article was originally published on Lizzy’s Newsletter.

Elizabeth Woodworth is highly engaged in climate change science and activism. She has published 42 articles on Global Research, is co-author of “Unprecedented Climate Mobilization”, “Unprecedented Crime: Climate Science Denial and Game Changers for Survival,” and co-producer of the COP21 video “A Climate Revolution For All.” She is author of the popular handbook on nuclear weapons activism, “What Can I Do?” and the novel, “The November Deep”. For 25 years, she served as head medical librarian for the BC Government. She holds a BA from Queen’s and a Library Sciences Degree from UBC.

Notes

[1] Ron Law, “WHO Changed Definition of Influenza Pandemic,” BMJ, 06 June 2010 (https://www.bmj.com/rapid-response/2011/11/02/who-changed-definition-influenza-pandemic ). See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_swine_flu_pandemic

[2] U.S. Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, “Early Outpatient Treatment: An Essential Part of a COVID-19 Solution,” 19 November 2020, (https://www.hsgac.senate.gov/hearings/early-outpatient-treatment-an-essential-part-of-a-covid-19-solution ).

[3] Ashish Jha, “The Snake-Oil Salesmen of the Senate,” New York Times, 24 November 2020 (https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/24/opinion/hydroxychloroquine-covid.html ).

[4] https://muckrack.com/elizabeth-woodworth/articles

[5] Mattias Desmet, “How To END The Phenomena Of Mass Formation Psychosis, 2 November 2021

[6] Elizabeth Woodworth, “COVID-19 and the Shadowy ‘Trusted News Initiative’

How it Methodically Censors Top World Public Health Experts Using an Early Warning System,” 22 January 2022

(https://www.globalresearch.ca/covid-19-shadowy-trusted-news-initiative/5752930). See also short video, “What is the Trusted News Initiative,” 2 January 2022, 3:55 min

[7] “I’m OK, You’re OK – How to Develop Your Attitude,” (https://ta-course.com/im-ok-youre-ok/ )

[8] Jessica’s blog, “Ouspensky’s ‘The Fourth Way’ and Negative Emotions,” 14 September 2012 (https://searchingforthegracefulmuse.blogspot.com/2011/07/ouspenskys-fourth-way-and-negative.html ).

All images in this article are from the author

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Guest: Dr. Hedley Rees – Managing Director of Pharmaflow, author and advocate for modernisation of the pharmaceutical industry. He held senior positions at Bayer UK, British Biotech, Vernalis and others. He is also author of Taming The Big Pharma Monster: by Speaking Truth to Power (2019).

In this session, the panel discusses that there is evidence that the drugs were rushed to market, taking significant shortcuts to make money rather than offering the safest and most effective product possible. Further in the discussion are:

• How MHRA/EMA did not follow its own rules and guidelines described in its Orange Guide. They did not meet
  their very own terms for conditional approval of the injections.
• How -70°C (ultra-frozen) injections were a gross contravention of GMP, as they were not fully finished as unit doses on leaving the factory, and they had to circumvent pharmaceutical wholesalers (licensed to comply with GDP) because they were not equipped to handle those temperatures.

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Featured image is a screenshot from the video

Former Pfizer Exec Believes Leaky Vaccine Was Intentional: Dr. Michael Yeadon

By Dr. Joseph Mercola, July 05, 2022

Yeadon is uniquely positioned to speak on this topic, as he has degrees in biochemistry and toxicology, and studied respiratory pharmacology. You have likely seen Yeadon being interviewed many times previously, but I strongly encourage you to watch this one as he explains items I have never heard him previously discuss. He is one of the sharpest guys out there in this area and you will be glad you took the time to listen.

AUKUS Submarines: Beasts of Nuclear Proliferation

By Dr. Binoy Kampmark, July 06, 2022

Members of the nuclear club engage in an elaborate ceremonial in claiming that their nuclear weapons inventory will eventually be emptied.  Non-nuclear weapons states allied to such powers go along with appearances, taking comfort that nuclear weapons states will offer them an umbrella of security.

The COVID Lockdown, “Controlled Demolition” of the Air Travel Industry. The Derogation of the “Right to Travel”

By Joachim Hagopian, July 05, 2022

This presentation will focus on the apparent controlled demolition of just one highly important, critical industry slated allegedly for sacrificial destruction – the airline industry as part of the elites’ lockdown control agenda potentially even forbidding our right to travel.

Pentagon Agency Wants to Send Weapons Inspectors to Monitor Arms Transfers to Ukraine

By Marcus Weisgerber, July 05, 2022

Pentagon leaders should consider sending weapons inspectors to Ukraine to monitor the billions of dollars’ worth of U.S. arms flowing to the country, a top Defense Department official said.

“Religious Precepts” Sustained by the COVID Crisis: The UN “Sustainable Development” Project Serves the Interests the Financial Elites

By Dr. T. P. Wilkinson, July 05, 2022

I am skeptical about what sustainability really means. I am also skeptical about the knowledge claims underlying the so-called Global Sustainable Development Goals (GSDG or simply SDG). I especially do not believe that we should rely on models— at least not the models that have been used to justify the seriously misguided and destructive policies asserted to support those goals.

The Federal Reserve’s Policy Is Mistaken: Supply Disruptions Lead to Inflation

By Dr. Paul Craig Roberts, July 05, 2022

The likely cause of the current inflation in US consumer prices is supply disruption.  The Covid lockdowns and mandatory closing of businesses disrupted and destroyed supply chains. Shipping disruptions, which certainly reduce the supply of goods in an economy such as the United States, a country that has offshored so much of its manufacturing for internal markets, further reduced supply.

Saudis Unwilling to Upset Putin as Biden Begs for More Crude

By Tsvetana Paraskova, July 05, 2022

The world’s largest crude oil exporter, Saudi Arabia, continues to keep close ties with Russia while the top oil consumer, the United States, pleads with major producers—including the Kingdom—to boost supply to the market and help ease consumers’ pain at the pump.

Game Changer: Russian MoD Confirms Luhansk ‘Fully Liberated’ – Here’s What It Means

By Patrick Henningsen, July 05, 2022

Make no mistake: this latest development is a major blow to the Zelensky regime, but it will be even more devastating for the geographically-challenged boffins in Washington and London, who are still determined to paint every resounding defeat for Kiev as a ‘strategic pause’.

$3.2 Billon Taxpayer-Funded Deal with Pfizer Will ‘Enrich Shareholders of Most Profitable Industry in History’

By Megan Redshaw, July 05, 2022

The Biden administration on Wednesday announced a $3.2 billion deal to purchase 105 million doses of Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine for a fall vaccination campaign, with options to buy up to 300 million doses.

Regime Change Comes to Uzbekistan. Part of a Broader Agenda of Political Destabilization of the Russian Federation?

By Gavin OReilly, July 05, 2022

On Saturday, a month-long state of emergency was declared in the former Soviet Republic of Uzbekistan, to address the violent protests in response to government plans to revoke the autonomy of the north-eastern republic of Karakalpakstan, a decision which Uzbek President Shavkat Mirziyoyev would later drop following a visit to the region.

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When faced with the option of acquiring nuclear technology, states have rarely refused.  Since the splitting of the atom and the deployment of atomic weapons in war, the acquisition of a nuclear capacity has been a dream.  Those who did acquire it, in turn, tried to restrict others from joining what has become, over the years, an exclusive club guarded by self-justified psychosis.

Members of the nuclear club engage in an elaborate ceremonial in claiming that their nuclear weapons inventory will eventually be emptied.  Non-nuclear weapons states allied to such powers go along with appearances, taking comfort that nuclear weapons states will offer them an umbrella of security.

This insane hypocrisy underlines such arrangements as the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons.  Central to the document is the discouragement of non-nuclear weapons states from weaponizing nuclear technology as long as members of the nuclear club pursue “good-faith” disarmament negotiations. While it is true to say that the NPT probably prevented a speedier, less infectious spread of the nuclear virus, it remains a constipated regime of imperfections that has merely delayed proliferation.

Most tellingly of all, most non-nuclear weapon states have complied with their undertakings.  Nuclear weapons states have not, disregarding serious multilateral nuclear disarmament.  Nor do they have an incentive to alter current arrangements, given that any changes to the NPT can only take place with the unanimous support of the three treaty depositories: Russia, the United Kingdom and the United States.

The NPT supporters pour scorn at alternative approaches to nuclear weapons, such as the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW), which had its first meeting of state parties in Vienna from June 21 to 23.  While the Albanese government did send Susan Templeman MP to the meeting as an observer, Canberra has remained consistently opposed to the TPNW as a threat to the accepted disarmament and NPT framework.  Dated and spurious concepts such as extended nuclear deterrence and the interoperability of Australian and US military systems tend to be common justifications.

The AUKUS security partnership that was announced in September 2021 by Australia, the United States and the United Kingdom, has muddied the pool of non-proliferation.  A central component of the agreement is a promise to share nuclear propulsion technology with Australia, enabling it to acquire eight nuclear submarines to be supposedly built in Adelaide, South Australia.  While much of this is wishful thinking (Australia has no expertise in the field, and will have to rely wholeheartedly on expertise from the other two), the glaring problem in the arrangement is what it does to non-proliferation arrangements.

While the previous Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison was ignorantly confident that the agreement would comply with Australia’s own non-proliferation commitments, such confidence is misplaced.  For one thing, Article III of the NPT exempts naval reactors from nuclear safeguards, which threatens a pillar of the regime, namely, limiting the production and use of highly enriched uranium (HEU) which can be used, in turn, to make nuclear weapons.

Non-proliferation experts have not been enthusiastic with these promised new beasts for the Royal Australian Navy. Daryl G. Kimball, director of the Arms Control Association, notes the salient difference between deepening defence cooperation on the one hand with allies and proliferating “sensitive HEU nuclear propulsion tech in contravention of US and global nonpro principles.”

Hans Kristensen, director of the Nuclear Information Project at the Federation of American Scientists, greeted AUKUS with much gloom when it was announced.  Its provisions on nuclear technology would “further intensify the arms race in the region and the dynamics that fuel military competition.”

The International Atomic Energy Agency’s Director General Rafael Mariano Grossi is visiting Australia to discuss the issue of safeguards regarding nuclear material used for naval propulsion.  This is nothing short of problematic, given that IAEA inspectors are unable to inspect such material for extended periods of time when the vessel is at sea.

Grossi, in mild understatement, calls this “quite complex”, though is keen to accommodate Australian commitments to non-proliferation alongside the acquisition of nuclear technology.  “There is a period of 18 months which was given by the three partners – the United States, United Kingdom and Australia – to define how the project is going to be implemented but, already we have started this interaction, this joint work of technical levels so that we can reconcile both things.”

In a statement made prior to Grossi’s visit, Foreign Minister Penny Wong reiterated Australia’s “longstanding” support of the “IAEA’s mission to harness the peaceful use of nuclear technology in areas like medicine, industrial processes and environmental monitoring, as well as upholding the international nuclear non-proliferation regime.”

This world as described by Senator Wong is distinctly pre-AUKUS.  Despite promises of “open and transparent engagement with the IAEA on nuclear safeguards”, the whinnying horse of proliferation has bolted from the stable.  Assurances to avoid the future development of an Australian nuclear weapons capability or a national nuclear fuel cycle also ring hollow.

The precedent of permitting Australia to be the only non-nuclear weapons state with HEU-propelled technology is also seismic on another level.  There will be nothing stopping China and Russia doing what the United States and the UK promise to do: proliferate naval reactor technology and long-range missiles with a nuclear capability.

*

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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 Wikimedia Commons

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“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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This presentation will focus on the apparent controlled demolition of just one highly important, critical industry slated allegedly for sacrificial destruction – the airline industry as part of the elites’ lockdown control agenda potentially even forbidding our right to travel.

With the COVID pandemic outbreak in early 2020, by mid-April 2020, the US government committed a $25 billion bailout to the air travel industry after the pandemic banned virtually all international travel. Despite the compensation package, the airline industry has been floundering ever since. In February 2022, the World Economic Forum reported the industry suffered its “worst year in history”:

International passenger demand dropped 75.6 percent and domestic demand fell 48.8 percent below 2019 levels.

Just as declared pandemics facilitate elites’ centralized authoritarian lockdown control keeping the human population literally isolated, largely cut off inside their homes, unable to assemble in groups, preventing crucial face-to-face contact with friends and loved ones in a devastating assault to destroy our basic human need for social bonding and regular social interaction, the elimination of our capacity for air travel constitutes a derogation of freedom of movement and “mobility rights”.

With the manipulative, pathological manufacturing of mass fear and assorted dangers of sheer nonstop crises designed for societal collapse, social impoverishment and life-threatening globalized poverty on an immobilized, traumatized human population, already fully beta tested from the elites’ globally orchestrated COVID pandemic, national governments are allegedly planning to limit, if not totally prohibit, human travel both near and far altogether.

A July 2^nd ZeroHedge article written by Alex Kramer entitled “The Coming Collapse of the Air Travel Industry” addresses the very real probability that planetary controllers are not only engineering the collapse of both the food production and fossil fuel industries, but also the airline industry as well.

Based on the author’s recent Zoom conversation with German member of European Parliament Christine Anderson and three insiders working in the air travel industry (one a pilot), Alex Kramer’s shocking takeaway was that the globalists are very likely planning to soon eliminate the commercial airline industry entirely for public use and access. According to every person on this conference call “in no uncertain terms, the industry is now being systematically and deliberately demolished.”

MEP Christine Anderson shared her disgust after her European Parliament piggybacking off the European Commission voted on June 23^rd to renew the EU Digital Covid Certificate for another year, despite 99%+ of their constituents strongly opposing it. The 453 in favor versus only 119 against (with 19 abstentions) only confirms what we already pathetically know. Members of governments today are merely following the orders dictated by their powerful puppet masters.

Amidst government mandates illegally coercing citizens to take their kill shot, in June 2021 the EU’s digital certificate originally adopted for “safe” travel amongst the EU nation-states, quickly morphed into the illegal digital ID and worldwide digital passport granting the vaxxed easy unobstructed access to the otherwise restricted venues to enter food stores, shopping malls, restaurants, concert halls, all deemed off limits to the lowly vexed and forsaken unvaccinated crowd.

This illegal apartheid, divide and conquer form of governance, promoted by three out of four European Parliament members in their June 23^rd plenary session without as much as a debate, signed off on the digital passport in direct obedience to their bloodline masters for at least another year, if not permanently.

With the Hegelian dialectic “problem, reaction, solution,” the elites’ proven winning formula repeatedly uses their fake carrot stick illusion of “security” to galvanize their endgame of social subordination. When the European Commission disingenuously launched its “Have Your Say” constituent feedback loop from February 3^rd to April 8^th, asking whether to renew the certificate, going through the “democratic” pretense of offering choice, virtually the entire public feedback voted resoundingly against renewing the certificate. French Parliament member Virginie Joron posted on Twitter:

I read hundreds of responses at random with my team. I did not find any in favor of extending the QR code [i.e. the digital certificate]. Based on this large survey, it seems obvious that virtually all the responses were negative.

Despite the Commission unanimously receiving virtually all 385,000 no votes from the public reacting so vociferously against renewal, did this overwhelming response to their fake feedback gesture in any way alter or change the final outcome renewing the “vere-ah-yoe-paypurs?” prison planet policy? Hell no.

Today, governments merely pay lip service falsely pretending to value or care about your opinion, your vote, your well-being, while busily slitting your throat. After all, actions speak louder than empty words, false promises and fake pretenses.

Be it the US federal government or the EU or the European Parliament, all these supposed Western democratic governmental bodies in name only as defined by their overt actions are bonafide oligarchies, not representing the interests of citizens they ostensibly serve, but strictly the special interests of the globalist elite controlling them. The actual truth that does “follow the science,” thoroughly debunks the COVID threat and “safe and effective vaccines” as complete criminal fraud. Therefore, voting to continue to endorse this totally fraudulent hoax in order to justify continual despotic restrictions, clearly signifies that the centralist cabal agenda that defies both science and our well-being, is misusing its irrefutably exposed health dictatorship to push yet more authoritarian, draconian measures to come, in lockstep with the pandemic architects Gates and Fauci continuously sounding the alarm of yet more pandemics arriving.

Citing “the wave of dysfunction” within the “energy industry, oil production, supply chains and healthcare,” Alex Kramer questions all the sudden chaos at airports reported around the globe as odd if not downright suspicious, after listing links to a half dozen articles from May 31 through June 27, he summarily observes:

All of a sudden, we have thousands of flights cancelled or delayed, luggage handling process stalling, hours’ wasted in check-in and security checks, and all this happening pretty much everywhere? Coincidence theorists will swallow the official explanations with a shrug of acceptance, but I do find all this extremely strange.

Alex then points out that one of the conference call participants claiming to have closely scrutinized “the WEF documents and all of UN’s Agenda 2020/30/50,” insisted that the systemic chaos and dysfunction we are now witnessing in today’s air travel is the elites’ specific, explicit objective, in so many words, concluding:

The ultimate intent is to do away with travelling and to establish a feudal arrangement where people remain fixed in place and all travel is banned. 

The official explanation reported by the same scripted mainstream media headlines is that the airline industry after two straight years of layoffs and downsizing due to the severe pandemic impact, the commercial airlines were caught off guard with the lifting of restrictions and as a result, are severely understaffed to keep up with the sudden public demand to fly this summer. Again, as always, this is complete nonsensical BS. A June 19^th USA Today with the “Travel Armageddon” headline specified:

Travel issues continued piling up for fliers on Sunday as weekend flight delays and cancellations topped 10,000 — a tumultuous weekend for holiday travel blamed on staffing shortages, packed planes and the ripple effects from previous bad weather. 

These are sorry ass, ultra-minor, insignificant excuses designed to obscure the blatant truth, dictated to the monopolizing MSM corporate giants to all claim the same false narrative reasons.

Yet simple logic sees the deceptive fallacy in this lame argument. The airline industry clearly foresaw the Covid-19 health threat finally winding down by late last year, leaving many, many months in advance of this summer’s busiest flying season to adequately prepare.

Yet having had such ample opportunity to reasonably rehire or hire and train thousands of new industry employees to meet the expected demand, all the major airlines chose not to. Why?

Partially because of the insanely malicious industry-wide mandates imposed on staff last year to retain employment, they were forced to submit to receiving death jabs against their free will that no doubt did injure and kill thousands, placing the safety and well-being of both their enormous number of employees and even larger public in harm’s way. Of course, many of the more prudent employees that did their due diligence and checked out the medical facts, chose to quit their jobs before risking injury and/or death. Among those numbers, many would undoubtedly return to the aviation workforce in a heartbeat if given the chance to (minus any more insane criminal mandates).

Like all the large sized population of workers throughout the healthcare, governments from local, state to federal, the US armed forces and larger companies with over 100 employees (illegally shot mandated by Biden), virtually all the highest management leaders in all major critical infrastructure industries had plenty of access to the explicit scientific information conveying the dire warning of life and death danger associated with the poisonous vaccines.

The airline CEOs, the imposter US president, his Secretary of Defense and virtually the entire leadership of all the major industries had to know full well that the experimental “Warp Speed” Covid-19 vaccinations carried high risk that was detrimental to human health. (hundreds of thousands of victims (morbidity and mortality) within the public and private sectors).

 Few within top leadership positions could honestly pretend ignorance. If nothing else but for the sake of corporate profit, it’s their job and responsibility to ensure their employees are healthy, safe and productive.

Therefore, the elephant in the room explanation as absolutely the biggest glaring reason to account for today’s air travel industry’s widespread chaos and dysfunction has to be by willfull, malicious design to destroy the airline industry. No doubt a sizeable segment of those having received the lethal jab is indeed too unhealthy now to work, but if by June top heymanagement failed to hire and train replacement staff, especially by the end of last year when the proverbial writing had already been clearly on the wall for months, today’s airline industry implosion breakdown has to be have been both preplanned and clearly avoidable…

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

He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from BigPharmaNews.com

All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the “Translate Website” drop down menu on the top banner of our home page (Desktop version).

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Introduction

How does one measure the health of a society?  

When scholars from across the world are given the same society to analyze, they often come up with discordant, even diametrical conclusions. Why is that? Although a rare occurrence in natural science, such discordance is, unfortunately, a common scene in social science. The main reason is that those scholars often use different metrics. Social scientists have yet to come up with a unified set of metrics to objectively evaluate societal health—one that is independent of their individual ideologies. Our world has many versions of ideology metrics, which are all based on peoples’ belief systems, such as religious preferences and social-political predispositions. These are biased, by nature. The social sciences desperately need a set of metrics with objective qualities similar to those in natural science. 

The social sciences include disciplines like sociology, politics, and anthropology. The natural sciences include physics, chemistry, and biology. By and large, those in the latter group have universally accepted principles (such as gravity, chemical reactions, microorganisms) that can be objectively and repeatedly demonstrated. These are known as proven truths. Where such demonstrations cannot be done, there are usually working theories that are constantly being refined. If natural scientists happen to disagree, they are confident that through perseverance in experimentations, truth will in due time emerge and dissolve the disagreement.

On the contrary, social scientists are in constant disagreement. This is because they do not have any universally accepted principles. No social science theories can be put to objective and repeated testing; therefore, proven truths cannot be developed. “Truth” becomes a matter of opinion, and different scholars often hold different opinions. Thus, says Canadian sociology professor Kenneth Westhues of the University of Waterloo, “Different sociologists have different principles—assumptions, predispositions, basic ideas underlying what they say and write on specific subjects.”

Since social science has no unified principles, does that mean there is no way to objectively evaluate how well a society is doing? This article would argue that there is a way. Embedded in every modern society are four basic human conditions that originate from natural science, which can serve as objective metrics of societal health. Primarily, these metrics arise from the natural science disciplines of psychology and biology.

Knowledge arisen in any given discipline must be compliant with that of a more fundamental discipline. For a theory (a proposed new knowledge) in a discipline to be considered credible, it has to be compliant with the already established principles (or working theories) of a more fundamental discipline. For example, it would be difficult to consider a physics theory credible, if it disobeys algebra (a principle of mathematics, a discipline more fundamental than physics). By the same token, one would more likely consider the discovery of a new virus (a biology theory) credible when it comes supported by a corresponding new RNA sequence (a principle of biochemistry, a discipline more fundamental than biology).

Here, our topic is about how best to evaluate society.

Since sociology is all about how human beings behave in communities, we should start by exploring the principles and theories of human behavior, namely psychology (a branch of natural science and a discipline that is more fundamental than sociology).

Using the above premise, we are now ready to derive a natural-science based method to objectively evaluate society. In this method, four human conditions (wealth, population, health, education) will be identified as manifestations of established principles/theories of human psychology and biology, which function effectively like the guts and backbones of society. If just one of them falters, the entire society can potentially collapse. How well each of them is functioning reveals clues about which “organs” of the society are thriving and which are failing.  Effectively, we can consider them as the society’s vital signs.

By focusing on these vital signs, we should be able to assess the health of our society more accurately, thereby developing public policies more effectively, as well as conducting cross-cultural dialogues more meaningfully.

Knowledge hierarchy and compliance with fundamentals 

As mentioned above, there is a hierarchy among the knowledge disciplines, each ranking according to its predecessor, with the predecessor always being the one that is more fundamental.  Here, a picture is worth a thousand words. The graph depicted below (top graph) is from the 19th century French philosopher, Auguste Comte, and that below is from the 21st century Australian communications scholar, JT Velikovsky, PhD.

Aside from the addition of a few modern terminologies (such as psychology, anthropology), the overall structure of this hierarchy has not changed significantly in two hundred years, with mathematics still being the most fundamental discipline. Note that the discipline that is next to but more fundamental than sociology is psychology, followed by biology.

As alluded to in Introduction, the knowledge obtained from each discipline depends on that of its predecessor, though the reverse is not needed. For example, in order for a physics theory to be credible, it must obey the principles of mathematics. But, those mathematical principles will remain, irrespective of the validity of the physics theory. Therefore, it is always the discipline that is less fundamental that needs to be compliant with the one that is more fundamental. Every credible biology theory must obey the principles of biochemistry; every credible psychology theory must obey biology; and so forth. Hence, for our proposed sociology theory to be credible, it must obey psychology and biology.

Psychology 

Psychology has few established principles, and there is none regarding what motivates human beings to behave the way they do. However, there is a resounding theory. First introduced by American psychologist Clark Hull in the 1930s, the Drive-Reduction Theory remained the dominant theory of human behavior for three decades. By the mid 1970s, proponents of the theory became somewhat disappointed that it could not fully explain all human behaviors. The zeal of many psychologists who thought they had found an all-encompassing human behavior theory started to cool. Yet, to this day, psychologists still have not developed a theory with enough all-encompassing qualities to replace it. Although seemingly fallen out of favor, Hull’s theory has had a primordial influence on later theories all through the remaining 20th century and into the early 21th. For example, the prominent 20th century Discrimination of Learning Theory by Spence and Hierarchy of Learning Theory by Marslow both have roots in Hull’s theory. By the same token, the 21th century Homeostasis Reinforcement Theory by Keramati and Gutkin, as well as the artificial intelligence theory of Self-Referential Model-Building Control Systems by Schneider and Adamy are both based significantly on the theory of Hull. Therefore, the Drive-Reduction Theory is still very much alive and is the topic of our following discussion.

Drive-reduction theory 

Drives are the internal forces that motivate people to maintain homeostasis (stable physiological-mental state), which are categorized as primary and secondary.

Primary drives aim to maintain physiologic balance. Essentially, primary drives comprise thirst, hunger, and sex. The first two are for sustenance, and the third is for procreation.  Overall, these drives ensure species survival.

Secondary drives come into play once primary drives are satisfied. These are learned behaviors that human beings believe will bring about mental satisfactions in life. Their propensity to fulfill such satisfactions is so strong that it has become a “necessity,” in order to maintain a mental form of homeostasis, analogous to the physiological homeostasis in primary drives. However, as learned behaviors, these can vary considerably, influenced by factors such as tradition and religion.

This theory has many finer details, such as behavior prediction by motivation computations. However, we shall not belabor with these. Our aim here is only about how to apply the theory’s most basic concepts to better understand society. In a nutshell, primary drives are about what we humans need, while secondary drives are about what we want.

What we need (primary drives)

As alluded to above, in order to maintain sustenance homeostasis, each human being (as a terrestrial mammal) is constantly trying to ensure enough supplies of fresh water and food, motivated by the drives of thirst and hunger.  Furthermore, to be fit for survival, he must also be successful in procreation. Thus, in order to maintain procreation homeostasis, he is constantly engaging in activities leading to offspring, motivated by sex drive. It is on the basis of primary drives that the first two metrics are derived: wealth as a measure of sustenance and resources, as well as population as a measure of procreation.

1. Wealth

In the cave dwelling days of our early history, the drives of thirst and hunger motivated us to be constantly finding fresh water and food. When we evolved to living in early societies, finding fresh water and food transformed into securing territories with such natural resources. By the time we started to live in complex societies (including most modern societies), territorial control further transformed into acquisition of money. Therefore, through the evolution of societal complexity, securing wealth has become today’s manifestation of the primary drives of thirst and hunger. Hence, the wealthier the people in a society, the closer that society is to sustenance homeostasis. By the same token, the poorer the people in a society, the more distant that society is from such homeostasis. In terms of societal health, the former is thriving and the latter is stressed.

2. Population

Unlike the drives of thirst and hunger, sex drive for procreation has not significantly changed through the evolution of societal complexity. For the individual, procreation homeostasis is measured by one’s offspring and his capacity to generate more offspring. For society, it is measured not just by the society’s population size, but also its collective capacity to maintain and potentially increase it. For example, while comparing two societies with the same population size, the one with an optimal childbearing demographic is thriving, whereas that with an aging demographic is stressed.

Here, we can see that our social-science compliance with the fundamentals goes beyond psychology, reaching one level further to biology. In the biologic laws of survival and natural selection, a population whose genetic representation in the world is increasing is biologically more fit, whereas one whose such representation is decreasing is less fit. If the latter is allowed to persist for too long, that population will risk being extinct. For this reason, population is the most important of the four vital signs of societal health (this will be elaborated on later).

What we want (secondary drives)

When our needs (primary drives) are met, we turn our attention to what we want, which is by and large guided by pleasure. However, pleasure can be learned, and the list of pleasures we can learn is endless. Consider food seeking as a behavior. On the surface, it seems to be a matter belonging to primary drive; however, seeking food that is cooked in certain ways would elevate the matter to secondary drive. A person who used to like bread baked one way can learn to enjoy it baked in several other ways. Through learning, people have greatly expanded the scope of their pleasurable wants to encompass vast areas, such as cooking, clothing, music, sports, religions, social systems, concepts of heroism, and many more.

Because people are by nature very different across the world, so are their wants. These wants can vary tremendously not only from person to person, but also from society to society, as well as from time to time in a given person or society. A persona adored at one time could become abhorred two decades later. A religion loved by one society could be loathed by another. A political system valued by one country could be despised by another. There are so many different wants, coming from so many different societies, as well as from different peoples within each society, that finding a common denominator among them to objectively measure secondary drives might be an impossible task.

Health and education

Fortunately, this vast commotion of human wants is only confined to the surface. Below that surface, anchored deep in the human psyche, are two common denominators that have remained unperturbed through time and across cultures. What we humans want the most in life are health and education. This is evident in modern-day polls as well as ancient scrolls.

1. Modern-day polls: 

In a 2017 PEW research, when Americans were asked what factors they considered to give life most satisfaction, they named four and ranked health at the very top. Ranking second was spousal partnership, which in our discussion belongs to the primary drive of sex. Ranking third was job/career.

In a separate PEW report in 2016, Americans expressed how much they value the college diploma, as it often results in higher earnings and lower unemployment, suggesting that they consider education to be essential to ensuring job satisfaction.

That modern-day human beings highly value health and education should come as no surprise. These have been the forefront of what people want across the world for thousands of years.

2. Ancient cultures of Asia:

Although our world has many ancient cultures, only some of them have developed literature (an effective means to pass on knowledge to future generations).  Among those, many have suffered significant interruptions (such as Egypt, Greece and Persia), mainly due to having been conquered by other powers. Fortunately, two of them have survived to this day more or less intact. The most well preserved is China. Although India had been colonized by the British for some 200 years, Hinduism as a religion and philosophy has survived essentially unscratched.

China

What Chinese people have been wanting for centuries can be seen overtly displayed in their homes, as well as at the front doors of businesses and shops in Chinese societies across the world. They are the symbols of the triad gods.

According to Mary H. Fong, art history professor of the University of California, Davis: “Of all the popular gods in Ming-Qing China, Fu Lu Shou were among the greatest favourites of the people. Although they first appeared as a triad in art and literature produced for the upper echelons of society, they were soon accepted by all social classes, the literary elite as well as the working masses.”

In the picture above from left to right are the gods of Fu, Lu, and Shou. Fu grants happiness/joy, who is often depicted carrying offspring (secondary drive bridging over to primary drive). Lu grants social prestige (the kind that is attained through knowledge). The scepter on his right hand symbolizes high social status. The scroll on his left hand symbolizes the esteemed level of education he has acquired to achieve that status. Shou grants longevity/good health. His right hand holds the peach of immortality, while his left holds a staff on which is tied a gourd containing the elixir of life.

Interestingly, these three desires (Joy, Knowledge, Longevity) of the Chinese are similarly reflected in Hindu philosophy (the essence of Indian culture for thousands of years).

India

Among the seven major religions of the world, Hinduism stands out as the only one that confronts the question: “What do people want in life?” While searching for what they want, it describes, people are initially guided by The Path of Desire and then by the Path of Renunciation, eventually coming to realize that what they really want in life are:

1. Being–we don’t want to die; we want life.
2. Awareness–existence is not enough; curiosity and knowledge is more important.
3. Joy–the feeling of well-being

The embodiment of good health, Being here represents our desire to live on. According to Huston Smith, professor of religion: “ Everyone wants to be rather than not to be…None of us take happily the thought of a future in which we shall have no part.”  As for Awareness, continues the professor: “Whether it be scientists probing the secrets of nature, a typical family watching the nightly news, or neighbors catching up on local gossip, we are insatiably curious. Experiments have shown that even monkeys will work longer and harder to discover what is on the other side of a trapdoor than they will for either food or sex. ” Joy is simply the feeling described above.

Now, let us analyze the three elements of Joy/Happiness, Being/Longevity, Awareness/Knowledge closely to see how to properly incorporate them into our metrics to evaluate societal health, the kind of metrics with standards of objectivity similar to those in natural science. Although Joy/Happiness is truly part of what people want, it is also intangible and thus not quantifiable; therefore, we cannot objectively include it in our metrics.

Furthermore, as hinted by professor Smith, Awareness/Knowledge can come in various forms, ranging from neighborhood gossip to the daily news, to laboratory scientific research. Because many of these are not quantifiable, for the most part, they should also not be incorporated into our metrics. However, peoples’ educational statuses are quantifiable in most societies; therefore we shall choose Education to be the metrics for Awareness/Knowledge.

Being/Longevity is best represented by the metrics of Health. In most societies, information about their peoples’ state of health is regularly measured and reported.

In concluding our analysis of what we want (secondary drives), the metrics we have derived are Health and Education. When the people in a society are healthy and well educated, the society is thriving. When the people are not healthy and/or deficient in education, the society is stressed.

Metrics

In compliance with the principles and theories of psychology and biology, we now have a natural-science based methodology to better understand society through the four metrics of Wealth, Population, Health, Education.  Next, we need to compile the actual data needed to compute these metrics.

In all developed and most developing countries, the following data are reasonably obtainable.

Wealth: various measurements of the economy, which are recognized by most economists, such as GDP, GDP per capita, NNDI, DINA, and PPP GDP

Population: size, age and gender demographics at national, provincial, and local levels

Health: life expectancy, infant mortality, successful births from desired pregnancies

Education: literacy rate, high-school-student rank in international competitions, percentage of population with university degrees or higher, Nobel Prizes received

The above measurements are examples only. They do not represent all or the only measurements that can or should be used. Different societies in different circumstances may wish to modify such measurements according to their specific needs. For example, in a society with a low literacy rate, measurements of Nobel Prizes and PhD degrees might not be meaningful, whereas measurements of pre-university education might be more useful.

Government, attitude, and social priority

Since wealth, population, health, and education are four human conditions that can reliably serve as metrics of societal health, we can consider them as the society’s vital signs. When these conditions are thriving (not stressed), it can be said that the vital signs are normal—the society is homeostatic. When a sign deviates from normal, the society veers from homeostasis and is feeling stressed in the corresponding condition. By attentively monitoring these signs, the government can efficiently identify areas where the society is not homeostatic and promptly institute remedies to resolve the corresponding stress.

Furthermore, since it is clear that we can evaluate societal health objectively, it would be unfruitful (probably also unwise) for us to insist on evaluating it subjectively. When criticizing societies, we should refrain from using language with ideology overtones, such as conservative, liberal, secular, fanatic, authoritarian, oppressive, and so forth.  As mentioned in Introduction, because such criticisms are construed based on ideologies (not based on objective metrics), they are inherently biased.

It is not to say that ideologies do no matter in society. The point is that every modern society has certain basic issues that matter a lot more.

Consider the treatment of a patient in the emergency room. From first glance, the evaluating physician has already noticed that the patient is obese and has a large black mole on her left forearm. However, he would not allow these observations to distract him. He must prioritize his attention to reviewing her vital signs. In this case, her blood pressure is abnormally low and rapidly dropping, which he must treat immediately; otherwise, she could go into shock and potentially die. Concerns regarding her obesity and mole, while important in their own rights, can wait to be addressed later.

Likewise, in managing societal health, we should keep our priorities straight and always focus first on the four vitals. Only when every one of them is normal, do we have the luxury to consider venturing into some other social interests (ideology-based or otherwise). Furthermore, we must safeguard ourselves from overindulgence in these “luxury” interests, constantly making sure that such ventures do not end up costing us our vitals.

Example societies

Now, we shall assess the health of some existing societies. We will always begin by analyzing the vital signs, followed by noting any significant luxuries (nonessential social programs), ending with suggestions regarding how to help the society decrease stress and become more homeostatic.

This is simply a conceptual exercise to illustrate how the proposed methodology can be applied. The exercise is not intended to be all-inclusive, accounting for all the relevant variables that exist in these societies.  Of course, in real-life situations, the more inclusive the better. By the same token, the way the four vitals are applied here is also not the only applicable way.  Different societies may wish to fine tune the methodology to suit their specific needs according to circumstances.

The United States

1. Wealth:  Because its GDP has been the highest in the world since 1871, one might think that it has been thriving. However, the income of the lower half of the nation has been stagnant for half a century; at least half of people are stressed.
2. Population: Given its geography, its population is relatively sparse and can afford to significantly increase. Indeed, it has been growing and is therefore thriving.
3. Health: For a rich country, its infant mortality record is appalling. According to the 2017 CIA report, it ranks behind 55 countries, including over ten positions behind Poland and Cuba. Its adults are not faring any better. Among thirteen comparable countries, the US life expectancy ranks the lowest and is still decreasing. Stress level is high.
4. Education: It has won more Nobel Prizes than any other in the past 100 years. However, its high school students are not up to par, often scoring poorly in international competitions. Some aspects here are thriving, while others stressed.
5. Luxuries: It has the largest military in the world and is still trying to grow it. In fact, the US spends more on its military than the next ten countries combined.
6. Suggestions: If all four vitals were normal and the Americans chose to spend more money in the military, that would be fine. In reality, the vitals are far from normal. There is severe stress in Health, as well as moderate stress in Wealth and Education. Therefore, some of the military budget should be diverted to help boost K-12 education, elevate the living standards for the poorer half of the country, and overhaul the healthcare system.

 

It is absurd that when it comes to healthcare for children, wealthy Americans are losing out to needy Poles and Cubans.

Japan

1. Wealth: In the past two decades, its GDP has ranked among the top three in the world, indicating a steady long period of thrive. However, its economy has contracted in the past few months. If this contraction continues, it will likely generate stress.
2. Population: The Japanese have been aging for half a century, with its population in steady decline for the past decade. By 2013, diapers for adults already started to outsell those for babies. The stress level is high.
3. Health: The life expectancy of its people has ranked among the top for decades. Its infant mortality rate ranks among the lowest in the world. This has been thriving.
4. Education: Japan’s high school students score among the highest in the PISA competitions, and the country ranks number six in the world in the number of Nobel Prizes won, testifying that its entire education system is of good quality. Like that in Health, this is also thriving.
5. Luxuries: If Population were thriving, immigration (as a social program) might be less important.  In reality, Population is severely stressed, where immigration can be a game changer. Unfortunately, Japan has been reluctant to accept immigrants.
6. Suggestions: An all out effort is needed to halt (preferably reverse) the population decline. As mentioned above, Population is the most important of the four vitals. As long as a society still has enough people, it can in due time improve the inadequacies of any or all of the other three vitals. However, no matter how well it is thriving in these three, if it does not have enough people, the society will soon die. Given the best available in-vitro fertilization technology of date, no country in the world can technologically (or ethically) mass produce human babies. Unless Japan can open its doors to rapidly and massively attract immigrants, the advancing age of its population could soon reach a critical point after which race extinction would become unavoidable.

 

Population decline is a serious (potentially fatal) societal stress, and Japan is not experiencing it alone. Many countries in the world, notably those in eastern Europe, have been experiencing similar stress. According to the 2019 World Population Prospects published by the United Nations, Ukraine, Lithuania, Bulgaria are each projected to lose more than 20% of its population by 2050.

Conclusion

The above discussion illustrates that Wealth, Population, Health, and Education are objective and reliable natural-science based metrics that can and should be used to evaluate societal health. Effectively, they serve as the four vital signs of society. When these signs are normal, the society is in homeostasis, meaning that it is thriving and experiencing no significant stress. If any of them deviates from normal, the society is stressed because it is no longer homeostatic. The more severe a sign is deviated, or the more number of signs that are deviated, the more stressed is the society. As the society’s guardian, the government should proactively monitor these signs and keep them as normal as possible. It should also alert its people about any undue indulgence in (or prejudice toward) nonessential social programs. As we have seen in the above examples, even societies with supreme wealth and esteemed level of education can neglect some of their most basic needs. Therefore, the use of national resources should be prioritized to safeguard the country’s most vital interests.

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Stephen E. Ling, MD is an internist from Santa Clara, California. Visit his website: www.forestgrace.net. 

Featured image is from Mercola

All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the “Translate Website” drop down menu on the top banner of our home page (Desktop version).

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Guest: Margaret Anna Alice – Writer/Blogger, Substack: Margaret Anna Alice Through the Looking Glass. “Examining media narratives, propaganda, mass control, politics, psychology, history, philosophy & health with a focus on COVID to unmask totalitarianism.”

She is an author of books and articles (selection):

• The Vapor, the Hot Hat, & the Witches’ Potion (2021): is a COVID/New Normal/Great Reset fairy
  tale [Book]
• A Mostly Peaceful Depopulation (2022) [P1 of an article series]

This session is about:

• Introduction: Synopsis of the past 2 years formulated as why questions, the answers to which can only be 1) profit; 2) power; and 3) democide
• The definition and nature of a philanthropath (like Bill Gates): a socio/psychopath masquerading as a philanthropist.
• The reality of the unfolding democide and progression to one-world dictatorship: Evidence documenting the depopulation agenda dating back to the Club of Rome 1971 Predicament of Mankind Project and 1974 Kissinger Report and up through the present-day “prophecies” of Yuval Noah Harari.

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Featured image is a screenshot from the video

All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the “Translate Website” drop down menu on the top banner of our home page (Desktop version).

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This informative Defense One report confirms the Pentagon’s involvement in monitoring the massive transfer of U.S. weapons to Ukraine.

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Pentagon leaders should consider sending weapons inspectors to Ukraine to monitor the billions of dollars’ worth of U.S. arms flowing to the country, a top Defense Department official said.

All U.S. officials can do now is review receipts of the arms transfers from other locations in Europe and take Ukrainian officials’ word that the weapons are being properly used and stored.

“Over time, we would like to be able to extend our insights with greater presence on the ground,” said Jed Royal, deputy director of the Defense Security Cooperation Agency, the arm of the Pentagon that oversees U.S. arms sales.

Royal spoke as U.S. lawmakers push to create a new U.S. government watchdog to oversee the more than $6 billion in security assistance sent in the wake of Russia’s February invasion.

Royal said senior administration officials, outside of DSCA, will decide if and when weapon inspectors enter Ukraine.

If such teams are sent in, they would not be “some kind of operational detachment or anything along those lines,” he told reporters on a Thursday conference call.

Read Complete article

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Featured image: US Department of Defense photo

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Michael Yeadon, Ph.D., a former vice-president and chief scientific adviser for the drug company Pfizer, shares why he believes that the narratives around COVID-19 are false and were put into place deliberately to exert control over society

Yeadon says you’ve been lied to about the magnitude of the threat represented by this entity called SARS-CoV-2 and the disease COVID-19

The 2009 H1N1 (swine flu) pandemic was a “dress rehearsal” for the COVID-19 pandemic

The use of the spike protein in the shot was a diabolical mistake, as 90% of the immune response mounted after natural COVID-19 exposure is not to the spike protein

Spike protein is also toxic and mutates rapidly, which essentially destroys virtually any protection that the shot provides shortly after it’s given

The fact that virtually every country worldwide followed suit in imposing ineffective lockdowns and other COVID-19 mandates suggests a coordinated, supranational effort was underway

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Michael Yeadon, Ph.D., a former vice-president and chief scientific adviser for the drug company Pfizer and founder and CEO of the biotech company Ziarco, now owned by Novartis, has become one of the most prominent critics of COVID mandates and COVID-19 shots.

In this riveting interview with British radio presenter Maajid Nawaz, he shares why he believes that the narratives around COVID-19 are false and were put into place deliberately to exert control over society.

Yeadon is uniquely positioned to speak on this topic, as he has degrees in biochemistry and toxicology, and studied respiratory pharmacology. You have likely seen Yeadon being interviewed many times previously, but I strongly encourage you to watch this one as he explains items I have never heard him previously discuss. He is one of the sharpest guys out there in this area and you will be glad you took the time to listen.

In the film, he says: “So, I understand … inside of cells and how cells and tissues talk to each other, and how dangerous chemicals can affect and injure humans and others.”¹ Not only does Yeadon explain why COVID-19 shots aren’t effective, but he details why using spike protein in the vaccine was one of the most diabolical mistakes made.

“First,” Yeadon says, “you’ve been lied to about the magnitude of the threat represented by this entity called SARS-CoV-2 and the disease COVID-19. Been lied to about that, in every way, shape and form … the bottom line is, we’ve been lied to and it’s deliberate, and they knew it, and no action was needed whatsoever, other than if you’re sick, stay home.”² Further, the wheel may have been set into motion in 2009, during the swine flu pandemic.

The 2009 Swine Flu Was the Final Dress Rehearsal for COVID

During the 2009 H1N1 (swine flu) pandemic, secret agreements were made between Germany, Great Britain, Italy and France with the pharmaceutical industry before the H1N1 pandemic began, which stated that they would purchase H1N1 flu vaccinations — but only if a pandemic level 6 was declared by the World Health Organization.

Six weeks before the pandemic was declared, no one at WHO was worried about the virus, but the media were nonetheless exaggerating the dangers.³ Then, in the month leading up to the 2009 H1N1 pandemic, the WHO changed the official definition of pandemic, removing the severity and high mortality criteria and leaving the definition of a pandemic as “a worldwide epidemic of a disease.”⁴

This switch in definition allowed WHO to declare swine flu a pandemic after only 144 people had died from the infection worldwide. In 2010, Dr. Wolfgang Wodarg, then head of health at the Council of Europe, accused pharmaceutical companies of influencing WHO’s pandemic declaration, calling swine flu a “false pandemic” that was driven by Big Pharma, which cashed in on the health scare.⁵

According to Wodarg, the swine flu pandemic was “one of the greatest medicine scandals of the century,”⁶ — and it shares many similarities with the COVID-19 pandemic. Yeadon explained:⁷

“He [Wodarg] was public health officer and a politician during the swine flu pandemic in 2009. And some very similar things that happened in COVID were happening in 2009. There’s a very interesting experience here and I think 2009 was the final dress rehearsal for COVID.

They misused PCR, they overdiagnosed cases, they twisted the arms of governments all around the world to pay for billions of dollars’ worth of vaccines, and not very good antivirals.

And then they all ran off. And Wodarg was the one that managed to point out in the second season that it was a false positive pseudo epidemic. It was all bad PCR testing. And as soon as they fix the PCR, it all went away. All went away.”

PCR Tests Labeled Healthy People Sick

For the first time in history, during the COVID-19 pandemic the polymerase chain reaction (PCR) tests were used to dictate whether someone was healthy or sick. If the test was positive, then you’d be labeled as sick and counted as a case, even if you had no symptoms.

The PCR tests used for COVID-19 use a powerful amplification process that makes them so sensitive they can even detect the remains of a dead virus, long after infection.⁸

Wodarg said COVID-19 “was a ‘test’ pandemic. It was not a virus pandemic,”⁹ because PCR tests may give a positive result when it detects coronaviruses that have been around for 20 years.¹⁰ PCR tests weren’t meant to be used for clinical diagnoses, according to their inventor, the late Kary Mullis, Ph.D. Yeadon explained:¹¹

“And the reason is … that the PCR test has a theoretical lower limit, that is, what’s the smallest amount it might detect and give a positive result, the smallest amount is one, one virus, one piece of a virus.

… And then basically, every time you run a cycle of this polymerase chain reaction, like cranking a handle, it gets hot and cold, hot and cold, and it goes through basically a doubling, every cycle is a doubling …

So basically, if there’s an infinitesimally tiny amount of a piece of a virus, or the sequence you allege is a virus, in the sample, and then you run it 40 cycles, you could get a positive result even though there’s only one piece of one virus — not enough to make you ill, not enough to make you infectious.”

The same strategy was used in COVID as deaths characterized as being COVID related, but only because they had been falsely lumped into that category due to a positive test being recorded within 28 days of death. “If you die from something entirely unrelated but you’ve tested positive by a PCR test, and you die within that 28 days that’s counted as a COVID death,” Nawaz noted.¹²

90% of COVID Immune Response Is Not to Spike Protein

Yeadon stresses that there are “design errors” in COVID-19 shots. “The main problem with them is there’s no dose where you can get obvious signs of benefit without attendant harms, that are much greater at a population level than any possible benefit.” Further, the use of the spike protein was a mistake, as it’s been known for more than 10 years that it causes adverse effects in humans:¹³

“There are no gene based vaccines on the market for very good reasons. And that’s one of the problems. But let’s see, you could like pull it pull it apart, you can pull the spike off, you could pull the ball in the middle of this virus, which bit would you give to people? … what you would do is ask, what’s the toxicity of the bit I’m going to give to a person?

So if I told you that the spike protein, like a floating landmine in … the sea with the spikes sticking out, I told you that we’ve known for more than a decade that the spike bits from related viruses had unwanted biology that could cause blood to coagulate and activate platelets and make blood clots. That’s true.

And if you knew those things, you’d think well, probably a bad idea then to give them the spike to train on … So the fact that they chose spike protein, gene for spike protein, make your body become a manufacturing center briefly to make that virus spike protein — that’s the first mistake.”

Further, according to Yeadon, the human body mounts its best immune responses after natural COVID-19 infection, not exposure to the spike protein in the shots. He states, “90% of the immune response to COVID are two bits of the virus that are not spike protein. So I think I am right that that was not the best bit to give, because it’s not the thing your body likes to respond to.”¹⁴

Spike Protein Mutates Rapidly, Destroying Shots’ Protection

By choosing the spike protein on which to base COVID-19 shots, scientists picked a protein that was known to be toxic to humans and that was not the part of the virus that prompted the best immune response. On top of that, spike protein mutates rapidly, which essentially destroys virtually any protection that the shot provides shortly after it’s given. The end result is a seemingly never-ending series of annual shots and boosters.

COVID-19 shots have been found to have dismally low effectiveness rates of 12% in children, according to research conducted by the New York State Department of Health.¹⁵ Among adults, within four to five months post-booster, protection against emergency department and urgent care visits due to COVID-19 decreased to 66%, then fell to just 31% after five months or more post-booster.¹⁶ Yeadon explained:¹⁷

“What you should do is pick the bits of the virus that’s genetically most stable. Now, I don’t know that we knew it at the beginning, but it’s certainly true now that the thing that undergoes variation most quickly is the spike protein … now you’ve picked something that’s going to rapidly go out of focus to rapidly evolve to a different variant, new vaccine won’t work anymore.”

Further, because the spike protein is similar to “lots of bits in humans,” it can prompt your body to make an immune response to human proteins — “that’s called an autoimmune response,” Yeadon says. Yet, scientists chose the spike protein anyway — even though it violated all of the “rules” when it comes to creating a safe and effective product. Yeadon believes this wasn’t a mistake at all; it was intentional:¹⁸

“So just to say, again, you deselect things that are toxic in their own right, you pick things that are genetically stable, and you pick things that are most different from humans, all three of those, in the words of patents, they teach away, they will teach you away from picking spike protein.

But guess what? Moderna picks spike protein and so does Pfizer, and AstraZeneca, and Johnson & Johnson. So I put it to you, colleagues, any scientists out there or just logical people. How the hell would they pick?

No team I was ever part of would ever have picked bloody spike protein for this vaccine. And you know, what, if we did, and we have competing groups, we would not, all four of us, make the same mistake. Not possible. It’s collusion and malfeasance. The did it on purpose, knowing it would hurt you.”

For the Next Pandemic Understand Vaccines Are Not the Answer’

Bill Gates has made it plain the next pandemic is inevitable, by stating publicly that COVID-19 was “pandemic one” and “pandemic two” is coming. “We’ll have to prepare for the next one. That will get attention this time,” he said — while smiling.¹⁹ The implication is that “next time” another experimental mRNA shot will be available much quicker with which to inject the population. But Yeadon wants the public to learn from COVID-19 and understand that the shots aren’t the answer:²⁰

“It’s really important that you listen to me here, that if there’s another respiratory virus, you must know this time that whatever however they design, the damn vaccine is the wrong answer. It’s the wrong answer for loads of reasons. One is, you will generate an immune response in your blood that cannot possibly affect infection, it doesn’t matter what it is, it won’t affect infection.

Secondly, if you if you design it using spike protein from some other virus, then if it has that same property of causing toxicity, it will cause toxicity because when you inject these gene based vaccines, it’s like launching a go kart that has an accelerator, no steering wheel and no brakes … there’s nothing in the design of these vaccines that limits where they go.

Some of it will go into your brain, the back of your eyes, your ovaries or testes, your blood vessels or your heart … you can’t develop rapid vaccines, and then give them to billions of people, because you will never have enough safety data to allow you to know whether that was a good bet or not. And without that data, it’s reckless. Don’t do it.”

What else can be learned from the COVID-19 fiasco, Yeadon says, is that the nonpharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) — things like masks, lockdowns, border closures and mass testing of the population — were also useless in curbing the spread of the disease, and world leaders knew this in 2019, when a paper by WHO scientists showed that most NPIs were ineffective in stopping the spread of respiratory viruses.

“Of course, many of them have really serious side effects on the economy, psychology, social relationships and so on,” he noted.²¹

Evidence of Supranational Coordination

“Public health officials knew perfectly well those things didn’t work,” Yeadon said, but the fact that virtually every country worldwide followed suit nonetheless suggests a coordinated effort was underway. “I think it’s the strongest evidence of supranational coordination, something happening above the level of country,” Yeadon said, and he wants to get the word out:²²

“They were doing it because there was pressure to do it … They did not oppose what was happening. That’s the most disappointing and frightening thing that why, why none of the scientists from Germany, Holland, Belgium, France, Spain, Portugal, Britain, why none of them, said, ‘You know, this is absurd.

I’m not doing this. And if you’re going to do it, I’m resigning, and then I shall go to the media.’ Either that didn’t happen or they tried to try this and BBC … said, ‘Well, we’re not interviewing you.’ That’s possible.

… There was a supranational agreement or pressure to do it. I don’t know whether that pressure was instantiated in spring of 2020, or whether they had already agreed to do it a few months ago, but either way, nobody spoke up. And as far as I know, nobody resigned even though what was being imposed on all of those countries was … ineffective and would damage their economies. That’s the kindest thing you can possibly say.”

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Notes

¹ Odysee, Radical w/Maajid Nawaz June 12, 2022, 7:24

² Odysee, Radical w/Maajid Nawaz June 12, 2022, 33:30

³ BitChute, TrustWHO

⁴ Wayback Machine, WHO Pandemic Preparedness September 2, 2009 (PDF)

⁵ Daily Mail January 17, 2010

⁶ The Times of Israel May 14, 2020

⁷ Odysee, Radical w/Maajid Nawaz June 12, 2022, 1:08

⁸ The Fat Emperor, Podcast, December 11, 2020

⁹ Rumble, Planet Lockdown, Wolfgang Wodarg, Full Interview, October 18, 2021, 14:02

¹⁰ Rumble, Planet Lockdown, Wolfgang Wodarg, Full Interview, October 18, 2021, 9:40

¹¹ Odysee, Radical w/Maajid Nawaz June 12, 2022, 55:29

¹² Odysee, Radical w/Maajid Nawaz June 12, 2022, 44:05

¹³ Odysee, Radical w/Maajid Nawaz June 12, 2022, 1:05

^14, 17, 18 Odysee, Radical w/Maajid Nawaz June 12, 2022, 1:09

¹⁵ medRxiv February 28, 2022

¹⁶ The New York Times February 11, 2022

¹⁹ Rumble, The Plan May 4, 2022, 0:37

²⁰ Odysee, Radical w/Maajid Nawaz June 12, 2022, 1:17

²¹ Odysee, Radical w/Maajid Nawaz June 12, 2022, 1:22

²² Odysee, Radical w/Maajid Nawaz June 12, 2022, 1:33

Featured image is from Arshad Ebrahim / YouTube

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Thirty years ago I organized an International Congress on Environmental Consciousness and Mass Media, held in Dresden at the Deutsche Hygiene Museum.[i] The central concern of that conference attended by journalists, PR and advertising experts, corporate communications officers and artists from more than 23 countries, was what does the mass media do to shape our awareness of issues and the importance we assign to them? (It took several years after the 1991 Gulf War for people to realize that what they thought was live combat reporting was in mainly televised “video game” footage.) The question was also asked what is the relationship between consciousness and action? Does the awareness of something always motivate and define action? After some thirty years of observing the way environmentalism has been transformed from a marginal fetish of opposition politics to a central dogma of multinational corporations and government policy.[ii] I believe the past thirty years and especially the past three years have provided me the experience to justify an empirical skepticism regarding the sincerity of this transformation.

Empirical Skepticism

The title expresses that skepticism. I am skeptical about what sustainability really means. I am also skeptical about the knowledge claims underlying the so-called Global Sustainable Development Goals (GSDG or simply SDG). I especially do not believe that we should rely on models— at least not the models that have been used to justify the seriously misguided and destructive policies asserted to support those goals. I believe much of our present misery— not yet fully appreciated in its scope— is due to a superstitious belief in ”Science” and its models and a refusal or at least a severe hesitance to observe and act on the basis of what we can find at the empirical frontier.

The most recent UN report on sustainability is the 2019 Global Sustainable Development Report, entitled The Future is Now: Science for achieving sustainable development. Written by the “independent group of scientists appointed by the Secretary General (UN)”, the report focuses on “how science can best accelerate the achievement of the sustainable development goals”.  The authors call for “sustainability science”. The authors add that, “science and technology are at the heart of the 2030 Agenda, included as one of the means of implementation under Goal 17.”[iii]

This raises the question “what is science?” I believe most people would answer this question with the admission that “science is what scientists do”. There are sciences, like physics, chemistry, biology, that are called the natural sciences, sometimes the “hard” sciences.

Then there are those relatively new fields like psychology and sociology or economics, which are frequently called human, or social, or “soft” sciences. The distinction implies that physical or natural sciences are somehow more scientific—by which people generally mean experimentally based, tested, fact-oriented while social sciences are not really experimental, not very accurate or lacking in universally accepted methods. I do not want to open this debate here. However I think it is very important to recognize that even under normal conditions there is no universal answer to the question what constitutes science.

What is meant by sustainable, especially sustainable development? The UN definition says this is development that “meets then needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.” So if we accept this definition—at least for the sake of argument—then what does science tell us about sustainable development and how best to accelerate its achievement?

I want to argue here that “science” actually does two things. One, it provides models for interpreting reality. Two, it provides the rhetorical foundation for what must be believed, that is what we call Truth.

At the end of the 19^th century there was a change in economic theory and in the structure of the sciences as a whole. In what has been called the Marginal Revolution, led by economists like Stanley Jevons, Carl Menger, Léon Walras and Alfred Marshall, economics ceased to be the study of the allocation of surplus and became the study of scarcity.[iv] At the same time economists shifted their attention from the real economy and industrial development to mathematical models of the economy. This was the time when mathematics became the language of science. Science defined reality in mathematical terms and therefore reality was supposed to be the most logical, coherent and efficient mathematical formula. Today that mathematical modeling is also computer-based modeling. We are supposed to assume that the model is not just a selection or a hypothesis about reality—but that it is identical with reality.

In the 1970s there was a series of high-level international meetings at which the human environment was debated.[v] All of these meetings focused on the claim that the world was overpopulated and that this overpopulation was causing all the social and economic disruption that had been increasing since the end of the Second World War. Then as now, supposed overpopulation and scarcity of resources was made the central policy issue to be governed by global action. However the only way one could possibly claim that population was excessive was to build a mathematical model. Any such model requires assumptions—which cannot be proven—and a choice of parameters from a potentially infinite number of factors. The main assumption, better said concern, by those attending these international meetings was: after the world war and the independence of many European and American colonies, population was growing again. These people would want to live at least at the same level as their former colonial masters did. This problem was defined as overpopulation. A cottage industry emerged producing mathematical models to show that such development would lead to disaster—leaving it rather vague as for whom.

Already at the 1972 Stockholm conference the People’s Republic of China objected to the population model proposed. China was justified in its objection at least because, like the Soviet Union, it had lost about 20 per cent of its population due to World War II and the subsequent civil war (fought also to prevent re-colonisation of the country as had occurred in Korea and Indochina after 1945). While world population has grown since 1945, this growth has not been uniform. While consumption has expanded, that too has not been distributed uniformly. US diplomat and “Cold Warrior” George Kennan advised the US government in the immediate post-war era that it would take military and economic coercion to assure that the US – with approximately 20 per cent of the world’s population—could continue to consume about 60 per cent of the world’s resources. In short, the main assumption of the overpopulation model was the equilibrium needed to preserve the status quo for now and “for future generations”. The model for population growth treated the non-while (including China and the Soviet Union) like a rabbit infestation. It assumed that such rabbits would naturally consume more resources and reduce that 60 per cent claim. Just as the marginal revolution seems to have coincided with the abolition of slavery in the 19^th century, the basis of population science and its peculiar form of environmentalism emerged with the end of European colonialism.

Moreover the insistence that a necessarily finite series of factors were isomorphic with the earth’s environment requires a political decision and the power to impose it. The choice to eliminate all natural phenomena, e.g. solar or lunar influences or the movement of the Earth in the solar system (or universe) from any calculations is based on limited and in part erroneous assumptions—foremost of which is that the model is identical with reality. Add to this some of the factual absurdities like “zero carbon” or “net zero carbon dioxide emissions”. All aerobic animals—of which humans are just the most conspicuous—produce carbon dioxide by metabolizing oxygen from the atmosphere. At the same time nearly all plant life depends on the absorption of carbon dioxide. Carbon is not the foundation of fossil fuels but the foundation of life itself on this planet. Hence “carbon neutral” is just another euphemism for an equilibrium in which the status quo—for the ownership/ ruling class—is preserved at the expense of respiration for the rest of the planet and osmosis for the Earth’s plant life. Systems theories also emerged together with cybernetics at the same time as these population reduction models. Why was that? It was surely no coincidence that the leading edge systems theory acolytes joined the military-industrial complex. Probably the most notorious system developed was the counter-insurgency program in Vietnam known as Phoenix. Systems theory together with CIA –funded social anthropology were developed to manage emerging populations that had previously been managed by missionaries and the colonial services. Cybernetics as well as artificial intelligence (AI) continued where Taylorism finished in the reorganization of factory labour. Despite extravagant scientific assertions and miraculous claims for improvement of work processes, the real scientific value produced by “compulsive calculators” is not beyond dispute.[vi]

All these models purport to predict the future (because they claim to represent the real world) but are in fact only tools for social management, like Tarot cards. Fortune reading can influence behavior and perceptions but that is not the same as predicting the future. That should be obvious once we ask what our particular future would mean for someone on another continent whom we do not even know. Scientists respond with statistics and measurements but these too are only structured guesses. One can only measure something one already assumes exists. We do not know therefore the possible importance of all the things we are not measuring!

The universe or the planet might be treated as a system but there is absolutely no way to know whether it is a system or whether the description of such a system in mathematical or computer simulation is accurate. The only thing that a model can do is provide instructions for people to behave in certain ways. Thus a policy based on a model is no different from a policy based on arbitrary command or fantasy.

The next problem we have is “the ability of future generations to meet their own needs”. If these needs are truly—their own—how can we know what they are or how they could be met? What we really mean is – assuming that the future will be like the present, preserving the ability to meet needs perceived today in some unknowable future will lend ability to those who actually live in the future. That is if they are like us. That is what “the science” tells us.

Essentially since 1945, when the largest industrial science project in the world (at that time) the Manhattan Project, established the US as the world’s single biggest funder of all scientific activity, Science has been transformed into a new religion, complete with priests and an ecclesiastical hierarchy.[vii]

This was possible not only because of the enormous amounts of money spent to produce the atomic bombs but because everyone involved at any level of scientific management was sworn to secrecy and loyalty. These priests in this religion of science also claim to know the Truth.

That is they claim the right to tell us what must be believed– even if it contradicts lived experience. The church of Science is based on that access to power first obtained by the ability to make terrible weapons of mass destruction. The flows of money and privilege to universities, research centres, publications, hospitals, schools, in short everywhere where knowledge is produced or transmitted, also mean the capacity to control access to those resources and institutions.[viii] We are talking in other words not about the science that tells us how to build a house or a car but the Science that tells us what we have to believe about the world and about ourselves.

Sustainability is not a rational question, nor is it a scientific question. It is a political question.

It is a question we have to ask ourselves in real time in real space. If we use a model we must remember that it is just a model. The CAD/CAM image is just an image and not the product. The ingredients on the package are not identical with what you eat or drink. Science cannot tell us what we need, let alone what future generations will need. These are political decisions and not scientific ones. Of course if one abandons political criteria using real data in real time and space for whatever some authority claims is “the science” then it should be clear that any decisions that result are based on what we are told to believe not on what we know.

The GSDGs claim to be based on Science because that has become our universal faith. Science has changed from the techniques of knowing, e.g. experimental feedback, trial and error, into the model for Truth, as religious dogma.[ix] Science has become just another way of saying “the word of god”. This does not mean that everything discussed or proposed under the Sustainable Development Goals lacks empirical sense. However the goals can really only make sense if they are subject to empirical testing and reflect the real living conditions of the people in the places where action is contemplated. In fact careful reading of the UN documents shows a plan to convert people to a vision and persuade them to apply this vision just the way the missionaries did since exploration and colonial expansion began some 500 years ago. The stakeholder is either a financial beneficiary or someone who will be burned at the stake for the benefit of the former.

The central premise of the official version of sustainable development—as promoted by the UN—has always been that nothing could be modified in the surviving system that could jeopardize the survival and growth of the victors in the Great War against socialism. To put it in a vulgar but more sincere form, sustainability meant (and means) sustainable profits and growth of the victors‘ system, the capitalist system, in particular finance capitalism— concentrated in the US and EU, but dominated by the tandem financial hubs, Wall Street and the City of London. Since 2000 and again 2008 and again 2020, the rhetoric of the Sustainable Development Goals, although attributed to the UN, is really verbatim the language of the World Economic Forum, the ecumenical council of finance capitalism.

The SDG and the repeated proposals for their implementation are religious precepts. As such they lack both historical and empirical perspectives. They are dogmatic assertions. The policies and eventual laws, rules and regulations proposed or already adopted do not rely on life experience, history or local reality. While lip service is paid to participation and admissions that there is no “one size fits all” policy, the actual imposition of these dogmas has no basis in the observed empirical frontier. It is like so many other clerical dogmas, a top down regime. There is no real feedback loop or interest in what happens in daily life.

To illustrate my point: in 2020 almost the entirety of small and medium-sized business was ordered to halt. Computer models were used to produce absurdly exaggerated projections of mortality and healthcare system risk. At the highest international level, so-called scientific experts claimed that they knew what would happen to the health and survival of the world‘s population. In fact the historical record shows that these models were rehearsed repeatedly over the past 20 years.[x]

Yet these experts at no time were able to construct a model for the survival of the SME sector. There was no risk management plan to preserve the critical employers and producers. In fact these issues were never substantive elements of the tabletop exercises of which there were more than 20 held since 2001. We know here in Portugal how important the SME sector is for employment and survival of many families. This was not a discovery of 2020. If we are honest we know that many people had to work covertly for fear of incurring serious financial penalties. We know that under such conditions another “illness” is promoted, corruption. The SME sector is vulnerable to the corruption regime by which one has to find favors from the local police or administration— just to work or do business. We can only guess how much it cost or would cost when people who need to work for survival are forced to pay protection to do jobs that are completely lawful.

Although global systems planning anticipated the use of the mass media and other centrally controlled facilities in the event of a “health emergency”, none of the models and none of the policies derived from them in any way addressed the local economic conditions. Moreover while there were constant reports of alleged cases, there were no details available for how many people were unemployed (sacked) or businesses that closed permanently. There was enormous concern for the supply of medical products. However the obvious disruption of supply chains— attenuated by virtue of years of “just in time” (JIT) downsizing and outsourcing— were disregarded— at least for the SME sector. What was clear — no later than the end of 2020– is that the global online distribution cartel had no such problems moving goods or money.[xi]

On the SDG website one can watch the short video introducing the 2019 GSGD Report. The narrator explains what an opportunity was created by the 2020 “pandemic”. It is praised as an opportunity to destroy much of the economy to “build it back better”.[xii]  So if you think that the SDG are a United Nations project, supported by an international consensus of people who want to sustain a decent quality of life for humans wherever they live, then you will find you are mistaken. The SDG are a project of the most powerful business corporations in the world: it is a project to manage their risks by transferring them entirely to you.

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Notes

[i] See Gerhard de Haan, (Ed.) Umweltbewußtsein und Massenmedien: Perspektiven ökologische Kommunikation, Berlin, 1995.

[ii] T.P. Wilkinson, “The Temperature Movement: The Reincarnation of a Perennial Anglo-American Obsession”, www.dissidentvoice.org  29 October 2019

[iii] In the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development: “Science for sustainable development is the focus of Chapter 32 of Agenda 21. It calls for: strengthening the scientific basis for sustainable management; enhancing scientific understanding; improving long-term scientific assessment; and building up scientific capacity and capability. (www.sdgs.un.org)

[iv] See Nuno Ornelas Martins, „Interpreting the capitalist order before and after the marginalist revolution“ in Cambridge Journal of Economics(2015), 39, 1109-1127.

[v] The 1970s were an era of great unrest, the US war against Vietnam, independence wars in Africa, domestic protests, the first “oil shocks”. In 1972, the Club of Rome issued its report The Limits to Growth. Based on the World 3 computer model the authors insisted that the world’s resources would be exhausted by continued population growth.

[vi] See Joseph Weizenbaum, Computer Power and Human Reason, New York, 1976.

[vii] The Manhattan Project started in 1939. By the time the atomic bombs were deployed the project was employing more than 130,000 people and spending the equivalent of approximately USD 23 billion. The project’s secrecy was so great that long after the project had formally ended the US government executed Julius and Ethel Rosenberg in 1953 for allegedly supplying the Soviet Union information about the atomic bombs. One of the project’s leading scientists, Robert Oppenheimer, was purged and deprived of his security clearances for opposing the development of the hydrogen bomb. Already “Big Science” had emerged as a combination of huge research budgets and political power.

[viii] Another example is the US National Institutes of Health, originally part oft he US military. The subunit National Institute for Allergies and Infectious Diseases, headed by Dr Anthony Fauci since 1984, has a budget of more than USD 8 billion per year to dispense as research grants, making it one of the world’s largest single funders of scientific research. A substantial portion of that money comes from the US military budget, too.

[ix] See Morse Peckham, Explanation and Power, New York, 1979 and Stanley Aronowitz, Science as Power: Discourse and Ideology in Modern Society, Minneapolis, 1988.

[x] See Robert F. Kennedy Jr. The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health, New York, 2021.

[xi] “The 13 top consumer-focused e-commerce businesses increased their revenues sharply during the pandemic. In 2019, these companies made sales worth USD 2.4 trillion. Following the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020, this rose sharply to USD 2.9 trillion, and a further increase followed in 2021, taking total sales to USD 3.9 trillion … Alibaba, Amazon, JD.com and Pinduoduo increased their revenues by 70% between 2019 and 2021 and their share of total sales through all these 13 platforms rose from around 75% in 2018 to over 80% in 2020 and 2021.“ www.unctad.org This does not take profits into account.

[xii] See Klaus Schwab (World Economic Forum), Covid-19 The Great Reset, 2020. “The pandemic represents a rare but narrow window of opportunity to reflect, reimagine and reset our world.” For a critical discussion of the real economics behind the past thirty years, in particular the fallout from the 2008 subprime mortgage crisis which is irradiating the world economy to this day, see the work of economist Michael Hudson, starting with Superimperialism (first published in 1968) and subsequent work: www.Michael-Hudson.com

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On June 18 the government of Lithuania acted on a decision by the European Commission that goods and cargo subject to European Union sanctions could be prohibited from transiting between one part of Russia to another, so long as they passed through E.U. territory.

Almost immediately Lithuania moved to block Russia from shipping certain categories of goods and materials by rail to the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad, encompassing the former East Prussian Baltic port city of Konigsberg and its surrounding environs. They were absorbed into Russia proper as a form of war reparations at the end of the Second World War.

Lithuania cited its legal obligation as an E.U. member to enforce E.U. sanctions targeting Russia. Russia, citing a 2002 treaty with Lithuania which ostensibly prohibits such an action, has called the Lithuanian move a blockade and has threatened a military response.

Lithuania, as a member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, or NATO, is afforded the collective security guarantees spelled out in Article 5 of the NATO Charter, which stipulate that an attack against one member is an attack against all. Through its actions, Lithuania risked bringing Russia and NATO to the brink of armed conflict, the consequences of which could be dire for the entire world given the respective nuclear arsenals of the two sides.

From the moment Russia initiated its so-called “Special Military Operation” in Ukraine, the nations that comprise NATO have been engaged in a delicate dance around the issue of how to support Ukraine and punish Russia without crossing the line of committing an overt act of war that could prompt Russia to respond militarily, thereby triggering a series of cause-effect actions that could lead to a general European conflict, and perhaps World War III.

A formation of NATO fighter jets flying over Lithuania in 2015. (NATO)

In retrospect, the early debates in the European halls of power about whether to provide Ukraine with heavy weaponry seem almost innocent when compared to the massive infusion of weaponry that is taking place today.

Even Russia has softened its hardline stance going in, where it had threatened unimaginable consequences for any nation that interfered with its military operation in Ukraine.

Today the situation has evolved to the point where NATO is engaged in a de facto proxy conflict with Russia on Ukrainian soil which is designed, frankly speaking, to kill as many Russian soldiers as possible.

Russian Objectives  

Russia, for its part, has adapted its posture into one that is designed to absorb these NATO-linked blows while pursuing its stated military and political objectives in Ukraine with a single-minded purpose.

Ukraine has used NATO-provided weapons and NATO-provided intelligence to lethal effect on the battlefield, killing several Russian generals, sinking the flagship of the Russian Black Sea Fleet and killing and wounding thousands of Russian soldiers while destroying hundreds, if not thousands, of vehicles and pieces of military equipment.

The relative restraint of the Russian approach is evident when contrasted with the hysteria of the United States during its two wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Qassem Suleimani, an Iranian general who oversaw an Iraqi resistance against the U.S. occupation of Iraq in the mid-2000’s that was purportedly responsible for the deaths of hundreds of U.S. servicemen, was assassinated by the U.S. government more than a decade after his alleged activities. And it was only a year ago that the U.S. media was in an uproar over allegations (subsequently proven false) that Russia was offering bounties to the Taliban to kill U.S. soldiers stationed in Afghanistan.

The latter claim best illustrates the hypocrisy of the U.S. today. The “bounty” claim was premised on a single attack that left three U.S. servicemen dead. The U.S. today openly brags about killing hundreds of Russians in Ukraine.

Red Lines

Russia’s red lines in Ukraine have evolved to encompass two basic principles — no direct military intervention by NATO forces on Ukrainian soil/airspace and no attack against Russia proper.

Even here, Russia has displayed great patience, tolerating the presence of U.S. special operations forces in Ukraine and holding back when Ukrainian forces, most likely supported by NATO-provided intelligence, engage in limited attacks on targets inside Russia.

Rather than respond by attacking the “decision making centers” outside Ukraine responsible for supporting these actions, Russia has engaged in a graduated campaign of escalation inside Ukraine, striking the very weapons being delivered under the oversight of U.S. commandos and the Ukrainian forces who use them.

It is in this context that the Lithuanian decision to impose a rail blockade on Russia seems to be a stark departure from current NATO and E.U. policy.

Russia immediately made its ire known, indicating that it viewed the Lithuanian actions as an overt act of war which, if not reversed, would result in “practical” measures outside the realm of diplomacy to rectify the situation.

The rhetoric was ratcheted up to high, however, when Andrey Klimov, a Russian senator who chairs the Commission for the Defense of State Sovereignty, called the Lithuanian action “an act of aggression” which would result in Russia seeking to “solve the problem of the Kaliningrad transit created by Lithuania by ANY means chosen by us.”

The Suwalki Gap

Close-up at the Suwalki Gap. (Jakub Luczak, Wikimedia Commons)

For years, NATO has worried about the possibility of a war with Russia in the Baltics. Much of NATO’s attention has been focused on defending the “Suwalki Gap,” a 60-mile-long stretch of border between Poland and Lithuania that separates Belarus from Kaliningrad. Western military experts have long speculated that, in the event of any conflict between Russia and NATO, Russian forces would seek to advance on the Suwalki Gap, joining Kaliningrad with Belarus and severing the three Baltic nations from the rest of Europe.

But while NATO has focused on defending the Sulwaki Gap, a Russian lawmaker has suggested that any Russian military attack in the Baltics would avoid involving Belarus. Instead, it would focus on securing a land bridge between Kaliningrad and Russia by driving north, along the Baltic coastline, to Saint Petersburg.

A series of wargames conducted by RAND around 2014 showed that NATO was, at the time, not able to adequately defend the Baltics from a concerted Russian attack. According to the wargame results, Russian forces were able to overrun the Baltics in about 60 hours.

Similar projections of Russian offensive prowess against Ukraine — where some military officials, including U.S. chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Mark Miley, predicted that Russian forces would take Kiev within 72 hours — proved wrong. But the reality is that the militaries of the three Baltic nations are not on par with those of Ukraine, either in quality or quantity, and there is little doubt Russia, even distracted in Ukraine, could deliver a fatal blow to the militaries of the three Baltic nations.

Escalating Rhetoric

The rhetoric out of Russia continues to escalate. Vladimir Dzhabarov, a deputy head of the Foreign Affairs Committee in the lower house of Russia’s Parliament, has threatened that any continued blockade of Kaliningrad “could lead to an armed conflict,” noting that “the Russian state must protect its territory and ensure its security. If we see that a threat to our security that is fraught with a loss of territory, we will certainly take extreme measures, and nothing will stop us.”

If there is one take away from the Russian military operation in Ukraine, it is that Russia doesn’t bluff. NATO and the rest of Europe can rest assured that unless a solution is found that brings an end to Lithuania’s blockade of Kaliningrad, there will be a war between NATO and Russia.

With this reality in mind, the E.U. is working on a compromise arrangement with Lithuania that seeks to have the Russian rail connection  with Kaliningrad returned to normal in the near future. This deal, however, must work to Russia’s satisfaction, an outcome which is yet uncertain.

Unlike the Ukrainian conflict, a war in the Baltics will have existential aspects for both sides which brings the possibility — indeed probability — of nuclear weapons being used. This is an outcome that benefits no one and threatens everyone.

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Scott Ritter is a former U.S. Marine Corps intelligence officer who served in the former Soviet Union implementing arms control treaties, in the Persian Gulf during Operation Desert Storm and in Iraq overseeing the disarmament of WMD. His most recent book is Disarmament in the Time of Perestroika, published by Clarity Press.

Featured image: Lithuanian government building in Vilnius. (Pofka, CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons)