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President Joe Biden’s litigation opponents are seizing on his remark that the pandemic is “over” as they challenge policies adopted in response to the public health crisis.

Republican attorneys general in six states noted Biden’s comment to “60 Minutes” last month in a Sept. 29 suit challenging his plan to eliminate federal student loan debt for more than 40 million Americans. Similarly, a federal appeals court judge asked during oral arguments on Sept. 21 how it could impact a case challenging the government’s vaccine mandate for federal contractors.

Litigants say Biden’s remark bolsters their argument that the administration is using the pandemic purely to service his political agenda.

“It is a huge game changer for all of us,” said Daniel Suhr, managing attorney at the Liberty Justice Center. The group represented parties in cases challenging the vaccine mandate for private sector workers, which the Supreme Court blocked in January, and the vaccine mandate for Head Start teachers, which a federal judge in Louisiana permanently blocked in 24 states on Sept. 21.

The government has been arguing judges need to defer to its public health judgment in these and other cases and Suhr said “that’s just no longer true if the president is saying the pandemic is over.”

Pandemic Protocols

During the interview, Biden acknowledged Covid-19 is still a problem that the US is working on but said the pandemic is over. Sara Rosenbaum, a health law and policy professor at George Washington University, contends he was talking as a person not as the president.

“He was not declaring the public health emergency over, which is a technical legal matter that must be done according to certain procedures and must be done by certain officials, and that has not happened,” she said. “What he was trying to say, of course, is having to live in pandemic conditions, meaning as another American citizen living in pandemic conditions, is past us.”

Still, Rosenbaum acknowledged some courts may see it differently.

“A court that is grasping for reasons to rule for the plaintiffs in these cases will hold that somehow the president made law and there’s just no basis for finding that the president made law,” she said.

The White House didn’t respond to a request for comment. But Biden’s press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, and his chief medical adviser, Anthony Fauci, sought to clarify Biden’s remark days later. While speaking at the Atlantic Festival, Fauci said Biden was making the point that we’re in a very different place in the pandemic but that his next words were “we still have a problem with Covid.”

Courts have previously signaled they’re paying attention to what’s said by administration officials and staff.

In November 2021, the New Orleans-based US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit cited a retweet by White House Chief of Staff Ron Klein in its reasoning for reaffirming its decision to block the Occupational Safety and Health Administration mandate that required workers at companies with more than 100 employees to get the Covid-19 vaccine or test weekly.

That tweet, originally posted by an MSNBC anchor, said, “OSHA doing this vaxx mandate as an emergency workplace safety rule is the ultimate work-around for the Federal govt to require vaccinations.”

Government Credibility

The Justice Department is fighting in the Atlanta-based US Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit to have the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) mask mandate on planes and other mass transit reinstated. While Biden’s comment is not part of the legal record in that case, the attorney for the Health Freedom Defense Fund and two Florida residents challenging the mandate said it helps his clients’ case.

The president’s comment “adds to the impression that this Administration does not regard COVID-19 as a serious threat to public health,” Florida lawyer Brant Hadaway said in an email.

The DOJ declined to comment. In court filings, the agency argued preventing the spread of communicable disease falls squarely within the CDC’s statutory powers.

“Indeed, prevention is so central to the CDC’s mission that Congress took the trouble to amend the agency’s official name to add the words ‘and Prevention,’” DOJ said.

Beyond masking mandates and vaccine requirements, Biden is relying on the pandemic for other major policy priorities. In August, he cited the public health crisis as justification for his plan to relieve federal student loan debt. That was backed by a legal opinion from DOJ declaring the Higher Education Relief Opportunities for Students Act of 2003 gives the education secretary the power to provide this relief in a national emergency.

The six states challenging the debt relief plan cited Biden’s “60 Minutes” interview in their complaint as proof the administration’s reliance on Covid-19 “is disingenuous—a mere pretext and post hoc rationalization.”

“Biden’s the president of the United States,” said Robert Henneke, executive director and general counsel at the Texas Public Policy Foundation, which has its own case challenging the government’s vaccine mandate for federal workers.

“What he says is policy for the country and given that the basis for this student loan forgiveness policy is premised on the justification of the continued Covid disaster that the president said doesn’t exist anymore, that, I think, is going to be something the courts will factor in.”

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“I suggest that US foreign policy can still be defined as “kiss my ass or I’ll kick your head in.” But of course, it doesn’t put it like that. It talks of “low intensity conflict…” What all this adds up to is a disease at the very centre of language, so that language becomes a permanent masquerade, a tapestry of lies.”

– Harold Pinter (1990) [1]

“It is more than a century since Edward Bernays, the father of spin, invented “public relations” as a cover for war propaganda. What is new is the virtual elimination of dissent in the mainstream.”

– John Pilger (February 2022) [2]

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In the spirit of the German pastor Martin Niemöller who’s famous “First They Came” quote is now on display in the Permanent Exhibition of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, I wonder how many other independent reporting outlets saw similar fates of removal as well after InfoWars got shut off from YouTube, Apple and Facebook in August of 2018. [3]

Indeed, when the world witnessed a “Special Military Operation” being waged against Ukraine in February of this year, we started to see the victims of the independent media round-up really kicking into gear.

Consortiumnews, Mint Press News, The Corbett Report, TheGrayZone, and even Global Research are being targeted for daring – for having the unmitigated GALL – to correct all the assumptions about U.S. Foreign Policy, particularly in Ukraine! And at levels I personally have not seen in my 14 years as a journalist!

Private and public agencies are closing in on these nefarious “truth tellers” on the internet by not only threatening to close access to the major social media channels, but also by smears and threats to de-platform them altogether.

In spite of the public’s appetite for mainstream media being near an all-time low, it will be a major feat for the press propaganda to remain virtually unchallenged, really for the first time since the Second World War! At least! [4]

For journalists seeing their craft dying, we need to know more about the forces at work, and whether or not their own days may be numbered. On that note, we introduce you to a very special episode of the Global Research News Hour focusing on the drive toward making ALL MEDIA vehicles of raw propaganda as we veer toward what may be a terminal moment for the history of humanity.

In our first half hour, we bring on the highly revered journalist and film-maker John Pilger who has been covering wars since Vietnam, has reported for a number of mainstream media outlets and amassed a vast string of awards since 1966. He will give his assessment of how far today’s reporting has fallen from grace, the degree to which news today is contaminated by Propaganda, and to what extent today’s honest reporters will have to go to reverse this bitter journey.

In our second half hour, we are joined again by Max Blumenthal of TheGrayZone. In the duration of the show, he will talk about the work of his outlet not only being subjected to pressure, but also to the proven record of some of the “disinformation guardians” actually being networked with British Intelligence, the connections with the attack on Jeremy Corbyn and Stop The War, and the efforts of his own team to correct the records of well intention journalists still in the mainstream media.

John Pilger is a world-renowned journalist and filmmaker. The author of several books and maker of over 60 documentaries (the latest being The Coming War on China and The Dirty War on the NHS), Pilger has won dozens of prestigious awards and has been honored by several universities

Max Blumenthal is the founder and editor-in-chief of The Gray Zone. He is an award-winning journalist and the author of several books, including best-selling Republican Gomorrah, Goliath, The Fifty One Day War, and The Management of Savagery. .

(Global Research News Hour Episode 364)

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Click to download the audio (MP3 format)

Transcript of John Pilger. October 5, 2022.

Global Research: The mainstream press has gone from prioritzing the facts needed to propel wars to eliminating the opposition views altogether. Some very established award-winning journalists have also commented and lamented the downward spiral of the news that has been taken in the last decade. John Pilger is an Australian-British journalist and filmmaker based in London. In 2017, the British Library announced a John Pilger Archive of all his written and filmed work. The British Film Institute included his 1979 film Year Zero: The Silent Death of Cambodia among the 10 most important documentaries of the 20th Century. John Pilger has twice won Britain’s highest award for journalism and has been International Reporter of the Year, News reporter of the Year, and Descriptive Writer of the Year. He has made 61 documentary films and has won an Emmy, a BAFTA, and the Royal Television Society Prize. He has contributed to BBC Television Australia, BBC Radio, BBC World Service, London and Broadcasting, as well as The Guardian, The Independent, New Statesman, The New York Times. And of course, he’s also contributed to the independent news sites, including: Information Clearing House, Truthout, CNET, Common Cause, Truthdig, and of course, Global Research.

John Pilger, welcome to the Global Research News Hour.

John Pilger: Thank you, Michael. Interesting, in that biography of me you read, really the newspapers that I used to write for, I no longer write for, —

GR: Uh-huh.

JP: — because they are no– they just – they’re a part of our – I think what we’re going to discuss. They are no longer open to journalists like myself, and my work now is almost exclusively on the Net. And I think that shift really says a great deal about, first of all, the Internet has provided some – itself – some extraordinary opportunities in journalism. But it’s also provided a refuge for those like myself who spent entire careers in the mainstream media and find they are no longer wanted in the mainstream media. That’s really, I think, probably an indication of the seriousness of the closing down of a pluralistic media – a genuinely democratic media, if it ever existed – than anything else. You simply can’t get a say anymore.

GR: I remember some aspects of the Iraq war and the Afghan war. And they were relaying some misleading information, but it’s nothing compared to what we are experiencing today with regard to the NATO-Ukraine-Russia war. You have reported through, what, seven or eight different wars, shooting wars, if I’m not mistaken. I think you commented that the distortion is now worse than ever. Could you give an account of why this reporting has gotten so bad? Is it a product of the government censors figuring out how to change media to their satisfaction, or is it something else going on altogether?

JP: The voices are being silenced, as I was saying. I mean, even as recently as the invasion of Iraq in 2003, the invasion even more recently, the invasion and destruction of Libya in 2011, or even the real beginning of the Ukraine war, which was in 2014, there were journalists in the mainstream, across the mainstream, very few, small minority, but who were questioning the official narrative. The official narrative now rules supreme. There are no more dissenters. Those who put their hand up to dissent are quickly silenced. The most extreme case of this, of course, is Julian Assange. Julian Assange, the impact of Wikileaks and its revelations on the so-called narrative, were so dramatic, so traumatic, it turned it inside-out. That rather trite expression “truth to power,” well there you had truth as a tsunami to power. And of course, the result of that has been the persecution of Julian Assange to the point where he’s now awaiting extradition to the United States where he will be tried on bogus charges. Tried for the crime of journalism, in fact.

GR: We’re hearing that our reporting is devolving essentially to the point of – would you say – maybe 1930’s propaganda in Germany? I thought we had overcome that, but you know, as we had racism and anti-Semitism and sexism in other matters, it seems that we’re sliding back, or perhaps, we’re experiencing a cycle of some sort. I mean, do you think that fear of the public, and I suppose, journalist’s fear, is essentially an accomplice of the state. And if so, what are the key events that helped mould us into this new McCarthyistic paradigm?

JP: Well, I mean, essentially, of course, not a lot has changed. Journalists have always been compliant. Most censorship has been – has come from compliant journalists, those who will go along with the system. Those who don’t go against the grain, those who just don’t do their job, don’t question power, they’ll only question power as long as it’s an official enemy or something that the prevailing order doesn’t like. But it will never look in the mirror. The difference today is, compared with a few years ago, a few years ago there was a scattering of journalists who did have spaces, one of the precarious spaces within the media to question, to do their job as real journalists. Those spaces have closed, they’ve shut down completely. I mean, you mentioned the ‘30s, there was more outspokenness in the ‘30s than there is now. There’s more media now. And I suppose the comparison itself is not completely valid, because we now have this extraordinary phenomenon: the Internet. Which, if you really want to find out something, you can, but you have to know how to navigate through the Internet. But the mainstream media, comparing the two, there were outspoken voices in the 1930s. The newspaper I used to work for in London, The Daily Mirror, had the most extraordinary editorial writers, a popular newspaper, which were blowing whistles on practically everything they wrote. And when the war began, they turned those whistles around on the British High Command and started to blow whistles on incompetent generals. Would we have anything like that today? Most certainly not.

GR: What strikes you as the most significant omission in terms of the Ukraine war or anything else that demonstrates just how bad we’ve become?

JP: I’ll give you an example. Somebody I know with whom I’m quite friendly has sent me an article he’s written, he’s very pleased with it. I don’t think he’ll be listening to this. But I read this article with dismay. It was about the Ukraine war and how it started. And it’s a collection of all the assumptions that have been accepted without any real critical discussion in the West about the Ukraine war. The fact is, it did not start with Vladimir Putin’s invasion in February, it started in 2014, there’s no question about that. And unless we understand the context of why it started, then almost any opinion on it doesn’t hold a great deal of worth. But the media today is awash with these – with much worse than the article I’ve just read, I have to say. Well, like a kind of unfettered, puerile, patriotism straight out of the 19th Century. You can imagine people sitting there in their pith helmet plumes writing it. Just – some of it is laughable. But the anti-Russia sense – which has a very powerful and very interesting and very tragic history itself – but the Russia hating has almost come to a head. And that Russian hating, of course, goes right back to 1917. Talking of invasions, it was the invasion the other way, in 1918, 1919. But the sense of – it’s almost as if the West is reclaiming the history that it’s felt rather insecure about. Now that is, who won the Second World War? The decisive winner of the Second World War was the Red Army. I don’t think there’s any doubt statistically and in every other way. Without the Red Army’s victory over Hitler, the war would not have been won as conclusively. As a pause, that’s not what we’re told in the West. And since 1945, much of the coverage of the wars of Western politicians, especially Anglo-American politicians, has been drawn from this other great ethical invention, that this was the pure war which was won by the United States and won by Britain, and somehow, the real enemy was the Soviet Union, and today is Russia. That Russia hating, which has a racist tone about it, can never be underestimated. And it runs through everything now, to the point where it’s just irrational. Much of the coverage.

GR: The late Robert Parry, while he was alive, was an astounding reporter. But the material he submitted with Consortium News on Ukraine, while accurate, has been the source of a lot of controversy, and the disinformation identifiers out there, the agencies and such, has targeted the work of Consortium News and other independent outlets as being either misinformation or being a propagandist for Vladimir Putin. I mean, this is the degree of control they have now. I mean, dare I ask how much worse this can get? I mean, will we see independent journalists, you know, I mean, possibly even yourself disagreeing with the Western narrative on Ukraine actually being jailed?

JP: Well, I think we’re dealing with one who is jailed at the moment. And getting him out of jail is really where our efforts are. But yes, that’s at the end of the road, whether people like myself and others who simply do our jobs find ourselves threatened like that. Well, we’re threatened at the moment, of course, we’re threatened by silence. It’s very difficult to have work published, and there’s no greater sanction than that. So, you know, Parry told the truth and the people you – you, well, you didn’t quote them but you refer to them – are nobodies. Parry was a very distinguished journalist who was largely responsible for the revelations about Irangate, and founded in the 1990s, Consortium News, which was following his death under its editor, Joe Lauria, has carried on that tradition. And yes, it has been threatened because we have a form of insidious McCarthyism which runs through everything today. Journalists are watched, and unless they obey, unless they put out the so-called narrative, they will probably in the first instant find myselfs out. Or if not, they will be harassed in the way that Consortium News has. It’s a very bad situation, and one that should be taken out of the area of the media. And I think the public needs to understand that it concerns them, because it is about illegitimate power, dark power, power from behind the facade of democracies, reaching out and silencing. History has plenty of precedents about that.

GR: Finally, I mean with everything that – I mean, you have the incarceration of Julian Assange, and he was not publishing anything that Daniel Ellsberg did, isn’t doing anything that Daniel Ellsberg did – didn’t do. He was just publishing leaked information, yet he’s being put through hell. Now I’m wondering, like, how can we turn this around as journalists or how can we recreate a more civil and – a society in which journalism, true journalism, is being practised and not just propaganda?

JP: Well, Robert Parry didn’t – he wasn’t just a side-player, he also interpreted these events. And some of his best work has been an interpretation, explanation, which is the job of a journalist. Not just simply to be the message carrier, but also to explain it. And that’s what Robert Parry did which made him such an excellent journalist. And an answer to your broader question: look, for as long as I’ve been alive, media has been an arm of the prevailing order, of power. When I first went to work as a correspondent in the United States in the 1960s, I was struck by how all the newspapers, which were then descended of television and there was no social media, of course. And they all agreed with each other. And there’s a rather amusing story of a lot of Russians arriving from the Soviet Union, absolutely stunned that they – that in the United States they could pull off this uniformity without shoving people in prison, as they didn’t do in those days. It’s the same thing in this country and Britain, the media has always been an empire of powerful, wealthy interests, corporations. And that’s true today and so is social media. So, in many ways, real journalism is an aberration. It breaks the mould. So, a system was setup already, and it didn’t – it wasn’t a good system that’s gone bad. The system always was as it is today, but it is the gaps in it in which independent journalistic voices could be heard have closed. That’s the point.

GR: Mr. Pilger, we are out of time, but your voice is a rare and pivotal one. I thank you, again, very, very much for sharing your thoughts on this subject with the Global Research News Hour.

JP: You’re very welcome. Bye.

Transcript of Max Blumenthal. September 27, 2022.

Global Research: My guest is Max Blumenthal. He is the founder and editor-in-chief of The Gray Zone. He’s an award-winning journalist and the author of several books, including the best-selling “Republic Gomorrah,” “Goliath,” “The 51-Day War,” and “The Management of Savagery.” In recent months, his group, The Gray Zone, has been facing a campaign to de-platform them, along with MintPress News, Consortium News, and other independent media presenting alternative facts in a war of lies. The authorities say that, knowingly or unknowingly, these media outlets are putting out “false facts,” and “disinformation” at the behest of Russia President Vladimir Putin. So, the art of presenting them this way is the best method to make their discoveries melt without being subject to good, old-fashioned debate. Max Blumenthal, however, goes one step further insofar as he exposes the exposers and found out that these transparent journalists and disinformation-detectors are running their info in touch with – and, in fact, at the behest of British intelligence. Max Blumenthal joins us right now to describe what he has found. It’s a pleasure having you back, Max. Welcome to the Global Research News Hour.

Max Blumenthal: Thanks for having me back, Michael.

GR: Now, how long ago did you realize these people were targeting your journalism?

MB: Well, we’ve been targeted ever since the Syrian Dirty War, which was around the time we came out as The Gray Zone Project at Alternet under the umbrella of a more mainstream, progressive publication. That publication tanked, it went under like so many progressive institutions because of dysfunctional culture inside the institution, to put it lightly. And we went independent, continued to challenge the Syrian Dirty War, and I became the target of what was, obviously, a coordinated campaign that did involve lease contractors for British intelligence that were involved in the Dirty War. And we go on to explain this at-length at The Gray Zone. But, what we were able to do, finally, and what I had always dreamed of doing, was – as you put it – exposing the exposers, obtaining hard evidence of coordination and collusion between individuals who appeared to be acting in an independent fashion as journalists and social media influencers, and the intelligence services. And we got that hard evidence in the form of a tranche of e-mails. That actually followed a separate tranche on British intelligence intrigues and illegal activity by people in high positions in the British state as well as NATO. We got – we obtained a tranche through an anonymous e-mail account that pertained to the supposedly leftist British journalist Paul Mason, a veteran Trotskyist, who was coordinating a campaign, in his words, to “relentlessly de-platform The Gray Zone.” That was actually – those are – no, I’m sorry. Those are actually the words of someone he was working with named Amil Khan, who was one of these contractors. He ran a firm that had contracted with the British Foreign Office and had even embedded with jihadist elements in Syria, and was deeply involved in setting up media fronts inside Syria to push the anti-Assad narrative and drive the campaign for regime change for several years. We exposed him for a separate operation. And so, he got together with Paul Mason and then they went to a person who appears to have been Paul Mason’s handler, named Andy Price, who exists within the Foreign Office, which – as scholars of British intelligence know – is basically the overt umbrella, or parent organization of the MI5, MI6 and hosts many people who are working within the intelligence services. And Andy Price, actually held a post that was dedicated to supposed counter disinformation operations. These were intelligence operations, absolutely, and he is someone who has the power to go to YouTube, to go to social media platforms and instruct them on who to de-platform. I’ll get to how I think this played out. But what we found was that, first, Paul Mason and Amil Khan, the British contractor, British intelligence contractor, proposed hosting an anti-Gray Zone summit in London with figures and organizations including Bellingcat, which poses as an open-source, grassroots media organization taking on bad actors in Russia, in Syria, but which Paul Mason correctly identified as “intelligence services-by-proxy.” In other words, they’re a cut-out for the British intelligence and US intelligence services. And as we know, this is just an established fact, it’s on Bellingcat’s financial disclosures. They’re funded primarily by the US Government through the National Endowment for Democracy, the regime-change arm of the US Government. So, they are proposing this summit also with someone at the BBC named Chloe Hadjimatheou, who was a producer on several specials attacking those who exposed the Syrian White Helmets, attacking me, painting me as a Russian agent, and so on. I don’t think this summit ever happened, but it was very revealing. And what they were planning to do was to dig up the true Russian links between The Gray Zone and, you know, Putin’s FSB, or the military intelligence GRU. They had this theory – Paul Mason, primarily, identified it – that anyone who criticized him, or who publicly criticized the Ukraine proxy-war, must have been a Russian agent. And so, they thought that if they held this summit they would find out the truth about us, which was actually a gigantic lie and libel. And then, they would – in the words of Amil Khan – relentlessly de-platform us, stage lawsuits against us, and they also had planned a phony sting operation to kind of embarrass me and other people affiliated with The Gray Zone, which —

GR: (inaudible) —

MB: — I think – I’ll just kind of elude to it vaguely, I think they’ve already attempted this and they’re not very smart. But, — so, that’s the over-arching attack on us and you know, it played out in various ways after we exposed them.

GR: I mean, you mentioned Amil Khan. Was there a particular story that you were working on that seems to have invoked the wrath, and they say, “Hey, we got to go after this guy.” I mean, it’s not just – I mean, it’s not just that they’re – The Gray Zone is being targeted among others, I mean, they seem to have a particular emphasis on The Gray Zone. So, what was the story that you were working on would you say?

MB: Well, we’ve exposed a lot of shady characters over the years, so they all have their knives out for us. Paul Mason was actually someone who we just – I and Aaron Mate – criticized or mocked on Twitter. He held this leftist rally in support of the Ukraine proxy-war demanding direct military intervention by NATO with, you know, labour unionists, and we kind of made fun of him and that triggered him. But, then there’s Amil Khan, who we actually exposed – not we, but Kit Klarenberg and myself. Kit is one of the best journalists working today on British intelligence affairs from a critical angle. Unlike other British journalists, he’s not a stenographer for the intelligence services, he actually exposes what they do. And we reported that Amil Khan was contracted through the Royal Institution, which was funded under the watch of then-Prince Charles, now King Charles, to AstroTurf a media propaganda campaign to take on critics of COVID restrictions and vaccine mandates. And they recruited a self-styled socialist influencer on YouTube who was very popular and did these high-production – high production value history lessons and also what were considered de-radicalisation seminars to help pull people away from the extreme left and the extreme right, particularly the extreme right. And Amil Khan, with money through the Royal Institution, which was itself funded by the British state under the watch of then-Prince Charles setup an entire channel for this YouTube influencer to pose as grassroots and organic and they are basically – so, basically the British state was funding YouTube influencers to attack critics of COVID restrictions inside the UK and paint them as extremists and try to turn people away from that line of thinking. And we got the documents – Kit Klarenberg had the documents, he had all the files showing that this took place. This is – I mean, it’s not illegal, but it’s obviously a kind of Operation Mockingbird-style manipulation of the public by the state, working through a series of cut-outs, making it seem like, “Oh, we’re just being influenced by people who aren’t being incentivised in any particular way and have no connection to any government.” And that triggered him, so that’s what brought him together, somehow, with Paul Mason. We don’t know how they got together. But it’s just – there are just layers and layers here of illicit activities of intelligence, intrigue, and basically of the covert subversion of the public by people who pose as journalists and democratic actors and who are anything but.

GR: Yeah, I’ve read through a lot of your work. I mean, I know that in his own account, Paul Mason presented an epic list of connections that resemble a spider web of sources and associations and influencing. I note that Jeremy Corbyn, the former Labour leader now – now he’s with the Stop the War – he’s an immense target on that radar screen. Where does he fit into all of this do you think?

MB: Well, he’s at the centre of this Paul Mason mind-map that Kit Klarenberg turned up in one of the e-mails we obtained. Paul Mason drew, what he called, a mind-map illustrating Russian and Chinese influence on the anti-war left, particularly the British left. And this is an absolutely bonkers chart. It starts with the Russian and Chinese state to the left, then moves through the anti-war movement through a series of lines and connections. I don’t know who drew it, I don’t think Paul Mason has the technical wherewithal to do it, but he had someone produce it as kind of a professional-looking document. And you’d see figures like Medea Benjamin or the Morningstar UK, which is a socialist paper in the UK, connected between the Russian or Chinese state and then another line pointing to Dianne Abbott, who is a top supporter of Jeremy Corbyn in the British Parliament. And as you move right, it moves towards the centre and Jeremy Corbyn is sitting right there at the centre, which is highly disturbing and revealing because Paul Mason posed as one of the top supporters of Corbyn and Corbynism within the British media. And all along, he saw Jeremy Corbyn as an agent of Russian influence, apparently. So, was he infiltrating Jeremy Corbyn’s campaign? Then, the map moves further to the right to show who this influences within British society, and all the way to the right you have the black community. You have the young, networked left, you know, the laptop class of left – left-wing socialists whose, you know, behind Corbyn-mania. You have Scottish nationalists, labour unions. And basically, Paul Mason was pointing to all of these key constituencies of Jeremy Corbyn – and Labour in general – as vehicles for Russian influence and Chinese influence. That’s what he thinks of the left. So, was Paul Mason an infiltrator all along? And it does appear pretty clear that he is, at the very least, a security state collaborator, from these e-mails. And there’ another e-mail that’s very revealing, where Paul Mason briefs the person who appears to be his handler in the Foreign Office, Andy Price, on a conference of Podemos, the sort of social-democratic Spanish party that they convened with many more left-wing or Marxist elements against the Ukraine proxy-war. And Mason provided a briefing that he found encouraging, that the conference failed, that their calls for, you know, not sending arms to Ukraine fell on deaf ears in the Spanish government and that it was nothing to worry about. But, I don’t think anyone at that conference who encountered Paul Mason knew that he was there to report back to one of the countries that is engaged in a proxy-war with Russia to an official of that country. So, it does appear he was infiltrating.

GR: I don’t know if he actually believes all this stuff or not. But, in any case, he’s got all these connections. And I note that he’s also going after anti-war academics. Maybe you can maybe describe his, like – or, have we seen this sort of attack before? Is it like the return of – what was it – McCarthyism?

MB: Well, it’s McCarthyism, but not carried out in the open. Joseph McCarthy and Roy Cohn and their team at HUAC were not exactly hiding what they were trying to do. Paul Mason is, and he’s saying in private to Andy Price, who appears to be his handler, that he – it’s the “rogue academics” that he’s after, those are his words. And by “rogue academics,” he means the group of – the propaganda working-group that consisted of a handful of British academics who were critical of the Syrian Dirty War, and who published exposes of the various propaganda machinations waged by the British intelligence services to cultivate support among the British public for the war and to essentially create the Syrian White Helmets as an information operation. They examined the various claims of chemical attacks in Syria and exposed holes in the official narrative, and they fell under enormous attack. Front page of the Times of London featured a blistering and falsehood-laden attack on these academics. And Mason has extended the attack, apparently, with various collaborators as Kit Klarenberg exposed at The Gray Zone, relying on leaked e-mails, hard evidence, showing that Mason was working through this pipeline of figures that went all the way into the BBC to attack academics who criticized the Ukraine proxy-war, Justin Schlosberg being one, who actually managed to force the BBC to issue an apology and various corrections in its smear-laden report. Now who produced that? It’s the producer that I mentioned before who smeared me as a Russian agent on Syria, who smeared all the critics of the Syrian Dirty War, her name is Chloe Hadjimatheou. And she’s someone Kit Klarenberg has also exposed as having a close, long-term working relationship with ARK, which is a British intelligence contractor that was active in the Syrian Dirty War. So, what we’re exposing here is much bigger than all the names you’re hearing. We’re exposing a new kind of Operation Mockingbird where the media is acting as the publicity arm for the intelligence services which are waging these various proxy wars and covert wars and destabilizing entire regions of the Middle East. And this is a war on the minds of the – on the cognition, on the critical thinking of ourselves and our friends and our neighbours and that’s why I think it’s so important to expose. And it is a war, nonetheless.

GR: Why do you think British intelligence – it seems to be very much, you know, at the heart of this. But, do you know anything about operations in the United States where – are they doing something similar?

MB: Well, of course, and we just haven’t obtained the hard evidence to just produce a suite of stories exposing it, but know that to be the case. Politico EU published a hit-piece on Kit for exposing all of this anti-democratic behaviour and activity on the part of not just Paul Mason and all the characters I’ve listed, but on other figures like former MI6 Chief, Richard Dearlove. We did a series on him and his, you know, friends within NATO and the British Civil Service on how they sought to sabotage Theresa May because they wanted a hard-Brexit, and you know… These are just stories that I think are in the public interest. The public deserves that level of transparency about these major issues like Brexit or Ukraine and we’re providing that to them whether you agree with us or not. And Politico attacked him for providing – for literally just doing journalism, and smeared him, smeared us. They called in all of their counter-disinformation pseudo-experts who are all funded by the British state and have called for us to be de-platformed. People like Ross Burley from this phony cutout called the “Centre for Information Resilience.” And what was so interesting about that article – of course, it primarily involves the UK, Kit Klarenberg is British. One of the first accounts, if not the first account, to tweet it out was the cyber warfare division of the US Army. So, I mean, I assume we’re on their radar, they took a great interest in this.

But with the Ukraine war, I mean, it – we know that the US is taking the lead, but the British state, at least under Boris Johnson and I assume under Liz Truss, they are always trying to push the boundaries and expand the parameters of what NATO and the US are doing there. And I think that, you know, that has to do with a historical relationship between the UK and Russia and the UK’s desperation to restore its, kind of, neo-colonial influence.

GR: One final point, Max: you were in Canada earlier this year as part of a meeting of mainstream media outlets. Tell us about some of the things that you said and the responses you got from colleagues.

MB: Yeah, it was called “Collision,” and – I, actually, when my seminar took place with Aaron Mate we got like 15 minutes on stage. We had to miss a Q&A with Eric Schmidt, one of the founders of Alphabet Google, who is working with the Pentagon on its fourth offset to produce an AI weapon to use against China. And I’d seen him speak earlier that day, and Eric Schmidt was predicting – and actually touting a future in which all of us will have an AI twin that will guide us through our lives. Deeply dystopian conference, but very educational for me and interesting. And, you know, you also had the Obama Foundation pushing their counter-disinformation agenda the day before. You had people from the Institute for Strategic Dialogue which had labelled my colleague, Aaron Mate, the “Number one propagator of disinformation on Syria.” They are funded by the State Department in the UK Foreign Office. These are the kind of people on stage at the conference. So, Aaron and I got 15 minutes to just go nuts on them. And we packed in as much as we could, along with a call for the freedom of Julian Assange and emphasizing the importance of his – of combating his persecution. And I warned the people who attended our seminar who were – many of them were young people who were seeking investment for their start-ups. Others were just looking for gigs doing coding. And not everyone there was some reptilian transnational elite. I told them that the policies of people like Eric Schmidt or the Biden Administration and the Trudeau Administration were pursuing, whether in Taiwan or Ukraine, we’re going to do them, and their start-ups would not be starting up and they will not be able to be homeowners and they will not be able to afford to heat their homes, in any case, and they will suffer. And that they need to stop following the corporate media that is trying to redirect their outrage at their own situation to phony villains, and to see that their enemy wasn’t some Trumper in the barroom. It was some heartless suit in the boardroom. That was kind of the message I wanted to send there. We – because the sessions were running like 15 minutes, you had another session coming up with top ABC executives, people from Reuters to talk about, I don’t know, “disinformation.” The panel before us was about January 6^th, and it was the lead ABC producer discussing how they were doing everything within their power to maximize the impact of the January 6^th hearings, so that the public absorbs it as much as possible. And I was saying, ‘Why are we still focusing on January 6^th when the US is waging January 6^th on steroids across the world? Like, do we ever hear about that?’ and that really offended people. The green room afterwards was tense, I got icy glares from mainstream media colleagues. One person from ABC, I heard her kind of ranting about us in the corner of the room and we were shuffled out immediately. Then a number of media personnel went to the planners of the conference and complained about us and were really upset. So, that made me feel good, that was a (inaudible, 24:38).

GR: Heh heh!

MB: And outside the room, I invited everyone outside the room to come have an informal Q&A with me, anyone who wanted to yell at me or express disagreement, I would wait in the hall for them. And what we got were a handful of young people who attended the conference. All of whom were of immigrant backgrounds, mostly from the Middle East, also from South Asia, who told us they identify with our perspective and it’s really, you know, upsetting to see what’s happening in these countries that their families now call home.

GR: Wow, that’s interesting. You know, Gandhi famously said that, “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, and then you win.” So, it seems these people wanting to preserve the Western-friendly media narrative are at Stage 3. Max, —

MB: Yeah.

GR: — it’s been – it’s been a pleasure having you on, technicalities aside. Thank you for joining us on the Global Research News Hour.

MB: Well, I look forward to joining you again when we’re still in Stage 3!

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Notes:

1. “Oh, Superman”, broadcast for Opinion, Channel 4, 31 May 1990; Various Voices: Prose, Poetry, Politics 1948-2005, rev. ed. (1998; London: Faber and Faber, 2005) 198-99.
2. https://johnpilger.com/articles/war-in-europe-and-the-rise-of-raw-propaganda
3. https://www.npr.org/2018/08/06/636030043/youtube-apple-and-facebook-ban-infowars-which-decries-mega-purge
4. https://consortiumnews.com/2022/02/17/war-in-europe-the-rise-of-raw-propaganda/

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***

“It is the function of mass agitation to exploit all the grievances, hopes, aspirations, prejudices, fears, and ideals of all the special groups that make up our society, social, religious, economic, racial, political. Stir them up. Set one against the other. Divide and conquer. That’s the way to soften up a democracy.”― J. Edgar Hoover, Masters of Deceit

The U.S. government has become a master of deceit.

It’s all documented, too.

This is a government that lies, cheats, steals, spies, kills, maims, enslaves, breaks the laws, overreaches its authority, and abuses its power at almost every turn; treats its citizens like faceless statistics and economic units to be bought, sold, bartered, traded, and tracked; and wages wars for profit, jails its own people for profit, and has no qualms about spreading its reign of terror abroad.

Worse, this is a government that has become almost indistinguishable from the evil it claims to be fighting, whether that evil takes the form of terrorism, torture, drug trafficking, sex trafficking, murder, violence, theft, pornography, scientific experimentations or some other diabolical means of inflicting pain, suffering and servitude on humanity.

With every passing day, it becomes painfully clear that this is not a government that can be trusted with your life, your loved ones, your livelihood or your freedoms.

Just recently, for example, the Pentagon was compelled to order a sweeping review of clandestine U.S. psychological warfare operations (psy ops) conducted through social media platforms. The investigation comes in response to reports suggesting that the U.S. military has been creating bogus personas with AI-generated profile pictures and fictitious media sites on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram in order to manipulate social media users.

Psychological warfare, as the U.S. Army’s 4th Psychological Operations Group explained in a recruiting video released earlier this year, enables the government to pull the strings, turn everything they touch into a weapon, be everywhere, deceive, persuade, change, influence, and inspire.

Of the many weapons in the government’s vast arsenal, psychological warfare (or psy ops) can take many forms: mind control experiments, behavioral nudging, propaganda.

In the 1950s, MK-ULTRA, the mind control program developed under CIA director Allen Dulles as part of his brain warfare Cold War campaigns, subjected hundreds of unsuspecting American civilians and military personnel to doses of LSD, some having the hallucinogenic drug slipped into their drinks at the beach, in city bars, at restaurants. For Operation Midnight Climax, the CIA hired prostitutes to lure men into a bugged room, where they would be dosed with LSD and observed having sex.

As Brianna Nofil explains, “MK-Ultra’s ‘mind control’ experiments generally centered around behavior modification via electro-shock therapy, hypnosis, polygraphs, radiation, and a variety of drugs, toxins, and chemicals.”

The CIA spent nearly $20 million on its MKULTRA program, reportedly as a means of programming people to carry out assassinations and, to a lesser degree, inducing anxieties and erasing memories, before it was supposedly shut down.

As one study reported, detainees held in CIA safe-houses abroad “were literally interrogated to death in experimental methods combining drugs, hypnosis and torture, to attempt to master brainwashing techniques and memory erasing.”

Similarly, the top-secret Montauk Project, the inspiration for the hit Netflix series Stranger Things, allegedly was working to develop mind-control techniques that would then be tested out on locals in a nearby village, triggering crime waves or causing teenagers to congregate.

As journalist Lorraine Boissoneault concludes, “Despite MK-ULTRA violating ethical norms for human experiments, the legacy of brainwashing experiments continued to live on in U.S. policy. The same methods that had once been used to train American soldiers ended up being used to extract information from terrorists in Abu Ghraib, Iraq and Guantanamo Bay.”

Fast forward to the present day, and it’s clear that the government—aided and abetted by technological advances and scientific experimentation—has updated its psy ops warfare for a new era. For instance, the government has been empowered to use its ever-expanding arsenal of weapons and technologies to influence behaviors en masse and control the populace.

It’s a short hop, skip and a jump from a behavioral program that tries to influence how people respond to paperwork to a government program that tries to shape the public’s views about other, more consequential matters. Thus, increasingly, governments around the world—including in the United States—are relying on “nudge units” to steer citizens in the direction the powers-that-be want them to go, while preserving the appearance of free will.

Back in 2014, for example, a Fusion Center in Washington State (a Dept. of Homeland Security-linked data collection clearinghouse that shares information between state, local and federal agencies) inadvertently released records on remote mind control tactics (the use of “psycho-electronic” weapons to control people from a distance or subject them to varying degrees of pain).

Indeed, the COVID-19 pandemic could easily be considered psychological warfare disguised as a pandemic threat. As science writer David Robson explains: “Fears of contagion lead us to become more conformist and tribalistic… Daily reminders of disease may even sway our political affiliations… Various experiments have shown that we become more conformist and respectful of convention when we feel the threat of a disease… the evocative images of a pandemic led [participants in an experiment] to value conformity and obedience over eccentricity or rebellion.”

This is how you persuade a populace to voluntarily march in lockstep with a police state and police themselves (and each other): by ratcheting up the fear-factor, meted out one carefully calibrated crisis at a time, and teaching them to distrust any who diverge from the norm.

This is not a new experiment in mind control.

Add the government’s inclination to monitor online activity and police so-called “disinformation,” and you have the makings of a restructuring of reality straight out of Orwell’s 1984, where the Ministry of Truth polices speech and ensures that facts conform to whatever version of reality the government propagandists embrace.

This “policing of the mind” is exactly the danger author Jim Keith warned about when he predicted that “information and communication sources are gradually being linked together into a single computerized network, providing an opportunity for unheralded control of what will be broadcast, what will be said, and ultimately what will be thought.”

We’ve already seen this play out on the state and federal level with hate crime legislation that cracks down on so-called “hateful” thoughts and expression, encourages self-censoring and reduces free debate on various subject matter.

The end goal of these mind-control campaigns—packaged in the guise of the greater good—is to see how far the American people will allow the government to go in re-shaping the country in the image of a totalitarian police state.

The government’s fear-mongering is yet another key element in its mind-control programming.

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

A populace that stops thinking for themselves is a populace that is easily led, easily manipulated and easily controlled whether through propaganda, brainwashing, mind control, or just plain fear-mongering.

Fear not only increases the power of government, but it also divides the people into factions, persuades them to see each other as the enemy and keeps them screaming at each other so that they drown out all other sounds. In this way, they will never reach consensus about anything and will be too distracted to notice the police state closing in on them until the final crushing curtain falls.

This Machiavellian scheme has so ensnared the nation that few Americans even realize they are being brainwashed—manipulated—into adopting an “us” against “them” mindset. All the while, those in power—bought and paid for by lobbyists and corporations—move their costly agendas forward.

This unseen mechanism of society that manipulates us through fear into compliance is what American theorist Edward L. Bernays referred to as “an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country.”

It was almost 100 years ago when Bernays wrote his seminal work Propaganda:

“We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of… In almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons…who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind.”

As I point out in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, to this invisible government of rulers who operate behind the scenes—the architects of the Deep State—we are mere puppets on a string, to be brainwashed, manipulated and controlled.

For years now, the powers-that-be—those politicians and bureaucrats who think like tyrants and act like petty dictators regardless of what party they belong to—have attempted to brainwash us into believing that we have no rights: to think for ourselves, make decisions about our health, protect our homes and families and businesses, act in our best interests, demand accountability and transparency from government, or generally operate as if we are in control of our own lives.

Well, the government is wrong.

We have every right, and you know why? Because, as the Declaration of Independence states, we are endowed by our Creator with certain inalienable rights—to life, liberty, property and the pursuit of happiness—that no government can take away from us.

It’s time we started reminding the government that “we the people” are the ones in charge.

*

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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.

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***

Haim Yativ and Dr. Seligmann declare that for them, “this is a new Holocaust,” in face of Israeli authority pressure to vaccinate citizens; Pfizer and Bourla did this to Israel, a 2021 ‘KILLING FIELDS

A re-analysis of published data from the Israeli Health Ministry by Dr. Hervé Seligmann, a member of the faculty of Medicine Emerging Infectious and Tropical Diseases at Aix-Marseille University, and engineer Haim Yativ reveal, in short, that the mRNA experimental vaccine from Pfizer killed “about 40 times more (elderly) people than the disease itself would have killed” during a recent five-week vaccination period. Among the younger class, these numbers are compounded to death rates at 260 times what the COVID-19 virus would have claimed in the given time frame.’

Source 1

Source 2

‘Their findings are:

• There is a mismatch between the data published by the authorities and the reality on the ground.
• They have three sources of information, besides the emails and adverse event reports they receive through the Internet. These three sources are Israeli news site Ynet, the Israeli Health Ministry database, and the U.S. federal Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) database.
• In January 2021, there were 3,000 records of vaccine adverse events, including 2,900 for mRNA vaccines.
• Compared to other years, mortality is 40 times higher.
• On February 11, a Ynet article presented data related to vaccination. The authors of the Nakim article claim to have debunked this analysis based on data published by Ynet itself: “We took the data by looking at mortality during the vaccination period, which spans 5 weeks. By analyzing these data, we arrived at startling figures that attribute significant mortality to the vaccine.”
• The authors say “vaccinations have caused more deaths than the coronavirus would have caused during the same period.”
• Haim Yativ and Dr. Seligmann declare that for them, “this is a new Holocaust,” in face of Israeli authority pressure to vaccinate citizens.

They also invite specialists to complete their analyses, and intend to pursue legal follow-up to their discovery. The Health Ministry was not available for comment on a France Soir query regarding the findings.

The authors also deplored “the fact of not being able to communicate on this vital information” to their fellow citizens.’

*

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***

The twists and turns of the Nord Stream 2 (NS2) saga have yielded yet another stunning game-changer.

It started with Gazprom revealing that the Line B string of NS2 is intact; not only it escaped Pipeline Terror but may “potentially” be used to pump gas to Germany.

That confirms once again that NS2 is an engineering marvel. In fact the whole system: the pipes are so strong they were not broken, but merely punctured.

Russian Deputy Prime Minister Aleksandr Novak followed up, with a caveat: restoration of the whole system, including NS, is possible, and “requires time and appropriate funds”. But first, in Russia’s order of priorities, the perpetrators must be conclusively identified.

Sources in Moscow confirmed Gazprom’s assessment of NS2. Even Bloomberg had to report it.

Subsequently in Vienna, attending the Opec+ meeting, Novak remarked the Russian Federation is “ready to supply gas through the second line of Nord Stream 2. This is possible if necessary”.

So we know it’s possible. “Necessary” will depend on a political decision by Germany.

Novak also sharply noted that neither Russia nor the Nord Stream operators are allowed to investigate Pipeline Terror. Russia insists that without its participation the investigation is flawed.

Whatever the modus operandi of Pipeline Terror, incompetence was part of the package. No explosive charges were placed or detonated on Line B of NS2.

That means, as Novak said, it’s virtually ready for business. Line B is capable of pumping 27.5 billion cubic meters of gas a year, which happens to be half of the total capacity of NS.

NS’s capacity had been reduced to 20%, due to the interminable turbine saga, before it was completely shut down. Crucially, Line B of NS2 would still pump 2.75 times the capacity of the recently inaugurated Baltic Pipe from Norway to Poland via Denmark. Which basically profits Poland, unlike NS2 servicing several EU customers.

NATO investigates NATO

In a rational world, Berlin would scrap the Russian sanctions pile up and immediately order the start of forever-delayed NS2, guaranteed to at least attenuate the ongoing process of de-energization, de-industrialization and deep socio-economic crisis imposed by the usual suspects on Germany.

But the collective West remains enslaved by geopolitical psychopaths guided by irrationality. So that’s not likely to happen.

For starters, the “investigation” of how Pipeline Terror happened feels like Kafka rewritten by NATO.

The operators of NS and NS2 – Nord Stream AG and Swiss-based Nord Stream 2 AG – cannot reach the scene of the crime because of absurd restrictions imposed by the Danes and the Swedes. The operators need no less than 20 working days to obtain the “permits” to carry out their own inspections.

Copenhagen police is handling the crime scene near the Danish exclusive economic zone (EEZ), in parallel to the Swedish Coast Guard around the Swedish EEZ.

If this looks like one of those Scandinavian noir series popular on Netflix, that’s because it is. With a crucial twist: it’s NATO investigating itself – Sweden is about to enter NATO – with no Russians allowed. All top working hypotheses on Pipeline Terror point to an intra-NATO dirty op against NATO member Germany.

So any disturbing evidence pointing to NATO actors may conveniently “disappear” or be tampered with during these long 20 days necessary for the “permits” to be issued.

Meanwhile, the consequences of the energy war imposed by the US on Europe against Russia will keep piling up, and cost the EU up to a whopping 1.6 trillion euros, according to a report by Yakov & Partners, the former division of McKinsey in Russia.

Considering a NS2-deprived EU plus non-stop rising energy prices on the spot market, the EU GDP may decrease by as much as 11.5% (1.7 trillion euros), with about 16 million people thrown into unemployment.

EU gas storage at current high levels (90%) does not mean having enough gas for the winter. Total gas storage amounts to about 90 days of demand. The EU could easily be out of gas by March or even earlier at the current pace of just a trickle of gas flowing.

This means that the EU will have to cut gas consumption by at least 20% overall. And never forget that imported Norwegian or American gas is ridiculously more expensive than fixed-contract Russian gas.

The Return of the Morgenthau Plan

The sanctions dementia never stops though. The G7, in three subsequent stages, will target Russian crude, diesel and naphtha, according to the US Treasury. They still insist on an oil price cap – which neither Russia nor several Global South customers will follow.

The Big Picture remains the same. Pipeline Terror was a desperate gambit to keep Germany from concluding a sanctions carve-out for the Nord Streams with Russia.

A secret channel of negotiation was in effect. It’s enlightening to consider that all previous actions by Berlin and Moscow, delaying and restricting the gas flow, were carried out to keep the Empire from following through on its threat of terminating NS2.

Then the Empire made its move.

From Moscow’s point of view, that changes nothing in the Grand Chessboard. The Kremlin has manipulated Washington’s absolute desperation in refusing to admit to the greatest foreign policy debacle since Vietnam; the Russians meanwhile keep pursuing the objectives of the Special Military Operation (SMO), which is about to metastasize into a Counter-Terrorist Operation (CTO).

As it stands, Moscow is not affected by the interconnected energy, fuel and resource crises coupled with immense, worldwide supply chain disruptions.

Russians are essentially bemused spectators contemplating the slowdown of industrial production in the eurozone coupled with capital outflows, the rise of inflation and the about-to-explode social protests.

There’s a dangerous window for irrational imperial actions from now to the G20 next month in Bali. Afterwards we will have a completely different ball game, not only in the Ukrainian battlefields but mostly across a mired in distress EU.

The Morgenthau Plan after WWII was concocted to literally starve Germany to death via the destruction of the Ruhr coalmines. It’s strikingly similar to the Straussian plan by American neocon psychos to cut Germany off from Russian natural gas by bombing NS and NS2.

The first Morgenthau Plan would have led to the deindustrialization of Germany. According to Clause 3, the entire Ruhr “should not only be stripped of all…existing industries but so weakened and controlled that it cannot for the foreseeable future become an industrial area.”

The ending of Germany as an industrial state would have created massive, permanent unemployment affecting 30 million people, according to Henry Stimson, the US Secretary of War. Morgenthau’s response was that the surplus population could be dumped on North Africa.

US intel was very much aware of the rapprochement between Berlin and Moscow. Striking NS and NS2 was the signature gambit of the Morgenthau Plan remixed by the Straussian/neocon combo.

Yet it ain’t over till the Wagnerian lady sings. No need for Gotterdammerung: Germany may have its own destiny on its hands after all. Just turn on the switch on NS2.

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This article was originally published on PressTV.

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.

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***

Over two weeks ago, a delegation from Ukraine of the neo-Nazi-led Azov movement arrived in the United States, at a time when myth making about the far-right network’s “depoliticization” has reached a fever pitch. Since that “Ukes, Kooks, and Spooks” scoop, more information has come to light about Azov’s recent outreach in the country, including efforts to reverse Congress’ ban on the U.S. supplying arms and training to the Azov Regiment.

The delegation included three veterans of the Azov Regiment formerly holed up in the Azovstal steel plant in Mariupol. They were led by Giorgi Kuparashvili, the only one not taken prisoner by the Russians. According to Kuparashvili, a cofounder and instructor of the Azov Regiment, they met over fifty members of Congress, far more than anyone has realized.

The trio was accompanied by two spouses and a mother of POWs captured at Azovstal. This included Kateryna Prokopenko, married to the far-right commander of the Azov Regiment, who was freed in a prisoner exchange and declared a Hero of Ukraine during her visit to the United States. The delegation’s other Azov wife was Yulia Fedosyuk, the leader of “Silver of the Rose,” an anti-feminist group linked to the Azov movement, according to journalist Oleksiy Kuzmenko.

Anti-feminist groupuscule “Silver of the Rose” that appears in @5050oD video has been embraced by 🇺🇦’s influential anti-LGBT, “pro-family” “Vsi Razom” org. In a recent interview SOR’s leader Fedosyuk https://t.co/gBQeDz4hd7 says “feminism is ready to mutilate and sell women” pic.twitter.com/iktwqi7PPv

— Oleksiy Kuzmenko (@kooleksiy) May 4, 2020

Earlier this year, Prokopenko and Fedosyuk met the Pope. While in the United States, they spoke at a small rally in front of the White House, appeared for an interview on the pro-Trump channel Newsmax, and took meetings with numerous members of Congress. Newsmax separately interviewed two of the Azov veterans, including Giorgi Kuparashvili.

On Saturday, September 24, half of the delegation including Kuparashvili appeared before a sizable audience at a Ukrainian church in Detroit. The Ukrainian-American Crisis Response Committee of Michigan (UACRCM), formed earlier this year, live-streamed the event, which was organized by US partners of the Azov movement’s charity wing.

Standing on one side of the room was Borys Potapenko, a member of the UACRCM and an international coordinator of Stepan Bandera’s Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN-B) who is also among the leadership of the far-right “Capitulation Resistance Movement” in Ukraine, which allied with Azov’s National Corps against Volodymyr Zelensky in 2019–22. (More about this coming soon on the “Bandera Lobby Blog”…)

Giorgi Kuparashvili spoke to the audience in English, largely about the Azov delegation’s success in Washington. “We went to the Senators, Congressmen, from both parties. Honestly, the majority we met, there were like over fifty of them, and head of their fractions [Democrats and Republicans], they all gave 100% support. They started to work right from their office in front of us, picked up the phone, and started calling to different organizations which can influence — right now, we’re having problems with the Geneva Conventions. Geneva Conventions is not working, not for Russia…”

Later on, Kuparashvili indicated that the delegation had more on its political agenda than detailing Russian war crimes, criticizing the International Red Cross, and securing the release of Azov POWs. He predicted that this year Congress will lift its ban on the U.S. supplying arms and training to the Azov Regiment.

The Azov delegation’s audience at their first stop in New Jersey largely consisted of children (Source: Ukes, Kooks & Spooks)

In his closing remarks, Giorgi Kuparashvili appeared to conflate his least two favorite members of Congress: Ro Khanna, a progressive Democrat from Silicon Valley, thanks to whom Congress curtailed U.S. support for the Azov Regiment in 2018, and Max Rose, a former Congressman (and right-wing Democrat) from Staten Island, who called on the State Department to label the Azov Regiment a “Foreign Terrorist Organization” in 2020.

“From year ’14, ’15, ’16, until today,” claimed Kuparashvili, “there is a bill which, I don’t remember the name, but the Congressman who lobbied, I don’t know how… He left Congress a couple years ago, he initiated to put the Azov as a restriction in a bill. This week, we talked to all the Congressmen and Senators, everybody understands, because when you bring the bill to Congress, they have to read it. Unfortunately, nobody read it, so they approved it again.”

“Now we told them, ‘are you supporting this?’ And everybody knows it’s just a mistake in it. As the Congressmen and Senators says, this bill goes until 2025. They’re not going to wait until 2025, and gonna make the correction on this year, to remove it from there… We’re dealing with the situation and fixing it, and majority of the job is already done, and Congress and Senate, both parties are supporting this.”

Before Kuparashvili made his closing remarks, there was an auction on behalf of the Azov charity project, which ultimately raised $33,416 in Detroit. The auction ended with bidding on three Azov Regiment patches featuring their wolfsangel, a Nazi runic symbol. Before the bidding commenced, Kuparashvili insisted that things are not as they appear. “If you know, there is a symbol,” he said, tapping the patch on his left arm, “which I’m gonna explain now, because they call us Nazis, all this crap.” At that point he mockingly put his hand over his mouth, and said, “sorry my language — ha!”

Evolution of the Azov symbol. The “Black Sun” confirms that this is a neo-Nazi symbol. (Source: Ukes, Kooks & Spooks)

“This is actually two letters, two Latin letters, N and I. The N stands for National; I, it’s Idea. National Idea. National Idea. For regiment, it’s our slogan. National Idea. Every country, it doesn’t matter, it’s U.S., Ukraine, whatever. When the country was in problem, center of gravity always became the nationalists. The National Idea. All the nation gathers around the nationalists, and around the National Idea. For us, National Idea is Ukraine. If they don’t like what is Ukraine, and what it’s National Idea, hell with them…” Kuparahsvili, touching on the totalitarian Ukrainian Nationalist concept of “Natiocracy,” all but admitted Azov’s affinity for white nationalists in the West.

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

— Moss Robeson (@mossrobeson__) October 5, 2022

According to Kuparashvili, before, only Azov members could wear their wolfsangel patches, but he bestowed permission on the audience to place their bids, because “now, all of you are Azov.” There was another disclaimer that Kuparashvili shared only after the winners emerged. “It’s a responsibility,” he said.

“We’re just handing over it,” Kuparashvili told the audience about the Azov Regiment patches. “We’re giving to those our responsibility. We have the soldiers where they go through the basic training, go through all the trainings, and difficulties. If they don’t deserve, you can’t graduate… But if you deserve it, with this comes a responsibility… Your National Idea is Ukraine. You gotta fight for it. Not just put it in a room or a shelf somewhere, but you gotta fight for it. Fight for your National Idea…” The winners each saluted Kuparashvili in the Azov fashion.

There was a charity auction of three Azov Regiment wolfsangel patches at the recent Azov event in Detroit. Azov Regiment cofounder Giorgi Kuparashvili then informed the winners, "you gotta fight for it," and appeared to symbolically swear them in. pic.twitter.com/VY1vCnECTt

— Moss Robeson (@mossrobeson__) October 5, 2022

Two days later, the Ukrainian Institute of Modern Art in Chicago hosted another Azov charity auction, co-sponsored by the Banderite-led Illinois Division of the Ukrainian Congress Committee of America. Its most influential member, Pavlo Bandriwsky, an OUN-B leader in Chicago (aka “the Strategist”), took pictures with the Azov veterans. This event featured a battle flag of the Azov Regiment that was apparently auctioned off with the promise that every surviving member will sign it after the war is won. The Consul Generals of Germany and Poland also spoke at the event.

Left to right at the Ukrainian Institute of Modern Art in Chicago: Wolfgang Mössinger, German Consul General; Paweł Zyzak, Polish Consul General; and Giorgi Kuparashvili (Source: Ukes, Kooks & Spooks)

On Saturday, October 1, after returning to Washington, the full delegation, except for Kateryna Prokopenko, who left to be reunited with her husband in Turkey, made an appearance at Stanford University. Yulia Fedosyuk concluded her remarks, “Glory to the Azov Regiment.” At some point, Stanford professor Michael McFaul, the dangerously foolish former US Ambassador to Russia (2012–14), stopped by to offer words of support for Ukraine, if not the Azov Regiment itself.

Source: Ukes, Kooks & Spooks

Earlier this year, Stanford’s Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC) published a detailed report on the “Azov Movement… a far-right nationalist network.” Michael McFaul directs the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, of which the CISAC is part. He apparently took no issue with the neo-Nazi symbol projected behind him.

This might not have been the Azov delegation’s last stop in the United States, but it would be rather fitting. Stanford University is in the Congressional district adjacent to Ro Khanna, whose restrictions on US support for the Azov Regiment should be lifted this year, according to one of the event’s speakers. But these days, even Khanna might not object.

NYT, July 2015: Azov is "openly neo-Nazi."

NYT, October 2022: Azov is "celebrated." https://t.co/7b69ORUbbx pic.twitter.com/XLs2h5wkNn

— Aaron Maté (@aaronjmate) October 5, 2022

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***

Some interpreted the Ukrainian leader’s statement as implying some desire on behalf of his American patron, seeing as how he functions as its proxy. That’s an inaccurate reading of what just happened, however.

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***

Italian activists sent me the signed November 2020 Advance Purchase Agreement (APA) between the EU member states and Pfizer/BioNTech. This appears to be genuine, but has not been independently verified.

The 59 page contract and the 45 pages of attachments can be found here.

Due to the vast amount of information in this document, I am not going to try to analyze it all today. In fact, I am hoping that my readers, other reporters, attorneys and analysts will help with this task. I do ask (not required in any way) that if you write up your results and want to link the document, that you link back to the Malone Institute landing page and the PDF documents found there.

Please use this document responsibly – I have not altered anything in it.

Rather than try to recreate what is in the document, please read for yourself. Over the course of time, expect more analysis.

*

Quoted text directly from the Agreement:

1.1.1 Quality tests and checks The Contractor shall perform all bulk holding stability, manufacturing trials, validation (including, but not limited to, method, process and equipment cleaning validation), raw material, in-process, bulk finished product and stability (chemical or microbial) tests or checks required to assure the quality of the Product and tests or checks required by the Specifications and Good Manufacturing

11.6.4 Limits on liability

(i)             Taking into account the unprecedented nature of the current COVID-19 situation and the exceptional circumstances under which the Vaccine shall be delivered, the parties explicitly agree that the Contractor and its Affiliates cannot be held liable for any damages except for proven damages which are suffered by the Commission or the Participating Member States as a direct consequence of a breach by the Contractor or its Affiliates of its obligations under this APA or a Vaccine Order Form, and that the Contractor and its Affiliates shall in any case not be liable for late deliveries (subject to the Contractor’s obligation to use Best Reasonable Efforts as contained in Article 1.6.3), loss of revenue, loss of anticipated savings, loss of business, loss of profit, loss of goodwill, reputational damages, loses from economic disruption or cost of alternative supply.

11.6.4         No limitation of liability

(i)             Nothing in this APA excludes or limits the liability of either party for:

(a)                       wilful intent, fraud or fraudulent misrepresentation;

(b)                      any breach of Article 11.9 (Confidentiality);

(i)             Nothing in this APA excludes or limits the liability of either party for:

(a)                       wilful intent, fraud or fraudulent misrepresentation;

(b)                      any breach of Article 11.9 (Confidentiality);

(1.12.1) The Commission, on behalf of the Participating Member States, declares that the use of Vaccines produced under this APA will happen under epidemic conditions requiring such use, and that the administration of Vaccines will therefore be conducted under the sole responsibility of the Participating Member States. Hence, each Participating Member State shall indemnify and hold harmless the Contractor, their Affiliates, sub­ contractors, licensors and sub-licensees, and officers, directors, employees and other agents and representatives of each (together, the “Indemnified Persons”) from and against any and all liabilities incurred, settlements as per Article I.12.6, and reasonable direct external legal costs incurred in the defence of Third Party Claims (including reasonable attorney’s fees and other expenses) relating to harm, damages and losses as defined in Article I.12.2 (together, the “Losses”) arising from or relating to the use and deployment of the Vaccines in the jurisdiction of the Participating Member State in question.    

1.12.8 The parties explicitly agree that:

(i)             any warranties given by the Contractor, whether express or implied, under this APA as regards compliance with Good Manufacturing Practice or conformity of the Product with the Specifications shall be without prejudice to the provisions of this Article I.12, which shall apply independently of and prevail over such warranties, including any (claimed) breach of such warranty; and

a Participating Member State does not have the right to suspend and/or otherwise not perform its obligations under this clause

except where the Participating Member State puts forward reasonable evidence that one of the situations listed in this Article I.12.1(i) and (ii) is applicable and the matter is brought for dispute resolution under Article I.13

ANNEX Ill: PARTICIPATING MEMBER STATES

Germany France Italy Spain Austria Greece Cyprus Malta Denmark Sweden Finland Ireland Portugal Belgium Luxembourg Netherlands Poland Romania Bulgaria Slovenia Croatia, Czech Republic Hungary Slovakia Lithuania Latvia Estonia

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***

The sabotage of the two Nord Stream pipelines leaves Europeans certain to be much poorer and colder this winter, and was an act of international vandalism on an almost unimaginable scale. The attacks severed Russian gas supplies to Europe and caused the release of enormous quantities of methane gas, the prime offender in global warming.

This is why no one is going to take responsibility for the crime – and most likely no one will ever be found definitively culpable.

Nonetheless, the level of difficulty and sophistication in setting off blasts at three separate locations on the Nord Stream 1 and 2 pipelines overwhelmingly suggests a state actor, or actors, was behind it.

Western coverage of the attacks has been decidedly muted, given that this hostile assault on the globe’s energy infrastructure is unprecedented – overshadowing even the 9/11 attacks.

The reason why there appears to be so little enthusiasm to explore this catastrophic event in detail – beyond pointing a finger in Russia’s direction – is not difficult to deduce.

It is hard to think of a single reason why Moscow would wish to destroy its own energy pipelines, valued at $20 billion, or allow in seawater, possibly corroding them irreversibly.

The attacks deprive Russia of its main gas supply lines to Europe – and with it, vital future revenues – while leaving the field open to competitors.

Moscow loses its only significant leverage over Germany, its main buyer in Europe and at the heart of the European project, when it needs such leverage most, as it faces down concerted efforts by the United States and Europe to drive Russian soldiers out of Ukraine.

Even any possible temporary advantage Moscow might have gained by demonstrating its ruthlessness and might to Europe could have been achieved just as effectively by simply turning off the spigot to stop supplies.

Media Taboo

This week, distinguished economist Jeffrey Sachs was invited on Bloomberg TV to talk about the pipeline attacks. He broke a taboo among Western elites by citing evidence suggesting that the US, rather than Russia, was the prime suspect.

Professor Jeffrey Sachs [Columbia] on Bloomberg causing chaos saying US was most likely involved in Nordstream leaks according to data & other experts 😂😂😂 “even reporters tell me …. privately of course …” and that we are on a pretty dangerous path to a nuclear conflict pic.twitter.com/U6FsC2tdp6

— detty (@0ddette) October 3, 2022

Western media like the Associated Press have tried to foreclose such a line of thinking by calling it a “baseless conspiracy theory” and Russian “disinformation”. But, as Sachs pointed out, there are good reasons to suspect the U.S. above Russia.

There is, for example, the threat to Russia made by U.S. president Joe Biden back in early February, that “there will be no longer a Nord Stream 2” were Ukraine to be invaded. Questioned by a reporter about how that would be possible, Biden asserted: “I promise you, we will be able to do that.”

BIDEN admits US behind sabotage of Nordstream 1 and 2.

Biden: "If Russia invades…then there will be no longer a Nord Stream 2."

Reporter: "But how will you do that, it's in germany's control?"

Biden: "I promise you, we will be able to do that." pic.twitter.com/idlxQYuAqU

— Syrian Girl 🇸🇾🎗 (@Partisangirl) September 27, 2022

Biden was not speaking out of turn or off the cuff. At the same time, Victoria Nuland, a senior diplomat in the Biden administration, issued Russia much the same warning, telling reporters: “If Russia invades Ukraine, one way or another, Nord Stream 2 will not move forward.”

Victoria Nuland: “If Russia invades Ukraine, one way or another, Nord Stream 2 will not move forward”

Also this is the same Victoria Nuland who said fuck the EU, and she sure did it to you Germany.#NordStream2 #Nordstream #Nordstream1pic.twitter.com/GGMzrSbwT7

— Syrian Girl 🇸🇾🎗 (@Partisangirl) September 28, 2022

That is the same Nuland who was intimately involved back in 2014 in behind-the-scenes maneuvers by the U.S. to help overthrow an elected Ukrainian government that led to the installation of one hostile to Moscow. It was that coup that triggered a combustible mix of outcomes – Kyiv’s increasing flirtation with NATO, as well as a civil war in the east between Ukrainian ultra-nationalists and ethnic Russian communities – that provided the chief rationale for President Vladimir Putin’s later invasion.

And for those still puzzled by what motive the U.S. might have for perpetrating such an outrage, Nuland’s boss helpfully offered an answer last Friday. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken described the destruction of the Nord Stream pipelines, and the consequent environmental catastrophe, as offering “tremendous strategic opportunity for the years to come”.

Blinken set out a little too clearly the “cui bono” – “who profits?” – argument, suggesting that Biden and Nuland’s earlier remarks were not just empty, pre-invasion posturing by the White House.

Blinken celebrated the fact that Europe would be deprived of Russian gas for the foreseeable future and, with it, Putin’s leverage over Germany and other European states. Before the blasts, the danger for Washington had been that Moscow might be able to advance favorable negotiations over Ukraine rather than perpetuate a war Biden’s defense secretary, Lloyd Austin, has already stated is designed to “weaken” Russia at least as much as liberate Ukraine. Or, as Blinken phrased it, the attacks were “a tremendous opportunity once and for all to remove the dependence on Russian energy, and thus to take away from Vladimir Putin the weaponization of energy as a means of advancing his imperial designs.”

Though Blinken did not mention it, it was also a “tremendous opportunity” to make Europe far more dependent on the U.S. for its gas supplies, shipped by sea at much greater cost to Europe than through Russia’s pipelines. American energy firms may well be the biggest beneficiaries from the explosions.

Meddling in Ukraine

U.S. hostility towards Russian economic ties with Europe is not new. Long before Russia’s invasion, Washington had been quite openly seeking ways to block the Nord Stream pipelines.

One of Blinken’s recent predecessors, Condoleezza Rice, expressed the Washington consensus way back in 2014 – at the same time as Nuland was recorded secretly meddling in Ukraine, discussing who should be installed as president in place of the elected Ukrainian government that was about to be ousted in a coup.

Speaking to German TV, Rice said the Russian economy was vulnerable to sanctions because 80% of its exports were energy-related. Proving how wrong-headed American foreign policy predictions often are, she asserted confidently:

“People say the Europeans will run out of energy. Well, the Russians will run out of cash before the Europeans run out of energy.” Breaking Europe’s reliance on Russian energy was, in Rice’s words, “one of the few instruments we have… Over the long term, you simply want to change the structure of energy dependence.”

She added:

“You [Germany] want to depend more on the North American energy platform, the tremendous bounty of oil and gas that we’re finding in North America. You want to have pipelines that don’t go through Ukraine and Russia.”

Now, the sabotage of Nord Stream 1 and 2 has achieved a major U.S. foreign-policy goal overnight.

It has also preempted the pressure building in Germany, through mass protests and mounting business opposition, that might have seen Berlin reverse course on European sanctions on Russia and revive gas supplies – a shift that would have undermined Washington’s goal of “weakening” Putin. Now, the protests are redundant. German politicians cannot cave in to popular demands when there is no pipeline through which they can supply their population with Russian gas.

‘Thank You, USA’

One can hardly be surprised that European leaders are publicly blaming Russia for the pipeline attacks. After all, Europe falls under the U.S. security umbrella and Russia has been designated by Washington as Official Enemy No 1.

But almost certainly, major European capitals are drawing different conclusions in private. Like Sachs, their officials are examining the circumstantial evidence, considering the statements of self-incrimination from Biden and other officials, and weighing the “cui bono” arguments.

And like Sachs, they are most likely inferring that the prime suspect in this case is the U.S. – or, at the very least, that Washington authorized an ally to act on its behalf. Just as no European leader would dare to publicly accuse the U.S. of carrying out the attacks, none would dare stage such an attack without first getting the nod from Washington.

That was evidently the view of Radek Sikorski, the former foreign and defence minister of Poland, who tweeted a “Thank you, USA” with an image of the bubbling seas where one pipeline was ruptured.

Sikorski, it should be noted, is as well-connected in Washington as he is in Poland, a European state bitterly hostile to Moscow as well as its pipelines. His wife, Anne Applebaum, is a staff writer at The Atlantic magazine and an influential figure in U.S. policy circles who has long advocated for NATO and EU expansion into Eastern Europe and Ukraine.

Sikorski hurriedly took down the tweet after it went viral.

But if Washington is the chief suspect in blowing up the pipelines, how should Europe read its relations with the U.S. in the light of that deduction? And what does such sabotage indicate to Europe’s leaders about how Washington might perceive the stakes in Europe? The answers are not pretty.

Demand for Fealty

If the U.S. was behind the attacks, it suggests not only that Washington is taking the Ukraine war into new, more dangerous territory, ready to risk drawing Moscow into a round of tit-for-tats that could quickly escalate into a nuclear confrontation. It also suggests that ties between the U.S. and Europe have entered a decisive new stage, too.

Or put another way, Washington would have done more than move out of the shadows, turning its proxy war in Ukraine into a more direct, hot war with Russia. It would indicate that the U.S. is willing to turn the whole of Europe into a battlefield, and bully, betray and potentially sacrifice the continent’s population as cruelly as it has traditionally treated weak allies in the Global South.

In that regard, the pipeline ruptures are most likely interpreted by European leaders as a signal: that they should not dare to consider formulating their own independent foreign policy, or contemplate defying Washington. The attacks indicate that the US requires absolute fealty, that Europe must prostrate itself before Washington and accept whatever dictates it imposes.

That would amount to a dramatic reversal of the Marshall Plan, Washington’s ambitious funding of the rebuilding of Western Europe after the Second World War, chiefly as a way to restore the market for rapidly expanding U.S. industries.

By contrast, this act of sabotage strangles Europe economically, driving it into recession, deepening its debt and making it a slave to U.S. energy supplies. Effectively, the Biden administration would have moved from offering European elites juicy carrots to now wielding a very large stick at them.

Pitiless Aggression

For those reasons, European leaders may be unwilling to contemplate that their ally across the Atlantic could behave in such a cruel manner against them. The implications are more than unsettling.

The conclusion European leaders would be left to draw is that the only justification for such pitiless aggression is that the U.S. is maneuvering to avoid the collapse of its post-war global dominance, the end of its military and economic empire.

The destruction of the pipelines would have to be understood as an act of desperation: a last-ditch preemption by Washington of the loss of its hegemony as Russia, China and others find common cause to challenge the American behemoth, and a ferocious blow against Europe to hammer home the message that it must not stray from the fold.

At the same time, it would shine a different, clearer light on the events that have been unfolding in and around Ukraine in recent years:

• NATO’s relentless expansion across Eastern Europe despite expert warnings that it would eventually provoke Russia.
• Biden and Nuland’s meddling to help oust an elected Ukrainian government sympathetic to Moscow.
• The cultivation of a militarized Ukrainian ultra-nationalism pitted against Russia that led to bloody civil war against Ukraine’s own ethnic Russian communities.
• And NATO’s exclusive focus on escalating the war through arms supplies to Ukraine rather than pursuing and incentivizing diplomacy.

None of these developments can be stripped out of a realistic assessment of why Russia responded by invading Ukraine.

Europeans have been persuaded that they must give unflinching moral and military support to Ukraine because it is the last rampart defending their homeland from a merciless Russian imperialism.

But the attack on the pipelines hints at a more complex story, one in which European publics need to stop fixing their gaze exclusively at Russia, and turn round to understand what has been happening behind their backs.

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Jonathan Cook is a MintPress contributor. Cook won the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. His latest books are Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East (Pluto Press) and Disappearing Palestine: Israel’s Experiments in Human Despair (Zed Books). His website is www.jonathan-cook.net.

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***

The European Commission is hoping to impose a cap on gas prices as the current energy crisis will inevitably deepen over the winter. However, European Union member states are divided over the proposed measures, which are designed to lower soaring inflation amid Moscow’s response to sanctions imposed for its military operation in Ukraine. 

Although France, Italy, Poland and 12 other EU countries urged the Commission to propose a broader price cap targeting all wholesale gas trade, the Netherlands, Denmark and Germany – Europe’s biggest gas buyer – are among those opposed against the measure as they believe capping prices could endanger the security of supply as it undermines the EU’s ability to attract gas deliveries.

It is recalled that in early September, Russian President Vladimir Putin described the idea of a price cap as “stupid”, highlighting that the EU was “in no position to dictate”. After warning that the EU would “freeze” if such a cap was imposed, Putin said:

“We will not supply gas, oil, coal, heating oil – we will not supply anything.”

While EU leaders are doggedly and obsessively calling for a price cap, industry experts show their scepticism, and in some cases concern on the repercussions of such an action. It is already noted that EU sanctions imposed against Russia are already affecting European economies far worse than the Russian economy.

In this light, chairman and CEO of French energy major TotalEnergies, Patrick Pouyanné, said on October 5:

“Honestly, I am not sure that a price cap on Russian oil is a good idea.”

“What I am sure is that if we do that (cap), then Putin will say that ‘we don’t sell my oil’ – and the price will not be at $95, it will be at $150,” Pouyanné said.

For her part, Elisabetta Cornago, a senior energy researcher at the Centre for European Reform, explained that “It’s hard to picture such a level of market intervention. This is uncharted territory.” Another expert, Bram Claeys, a senior advisor at the Regulatory Assistance Project, said that the energy price cap would “quickly start costing billions” because it would force governments to continually subsidise the difference between the real market price and the artificially capped price.

Despite the scepticism from energy experts, the head of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, maintains the need to introduce a ceiling on the price of Russian gas. At the end of August, she announced that the European Commission was taking quick and long-term measures to improve the situation amid rising electricity prices in the EU.

However, it appears that Russia is already pre-emptively responding to price cap suggestions by convincing its partners in OPEC+ (Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries) to reduce oil production by 2 million barrels per day from November. This will cause a severe crisis, which will reverberate in Europe and the United States, especially as the OPEC+ decision was made just weeks before the US midterm elections.

For this reason, the White House angrily said in a statement that Biden was “disappointed by the shortsighted decision by OPEC+ to cut production quotas while the global economy is dealing with the continued negative impact of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.”

OPEC+ comprises of 24 members, many of them close partners with Russia, such as Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Iran and Venezuela, and not a single member is Western. In addition, the most influential members have significant differences with Washington, and unlike in decades past, are not afraid to pushback to defend their own interests.

Washington is trying to impose the No Oil Producing and Exporting Cartels, or NOPEC bill, which is designed to protect US consumers and businesses from oil spikes. However, OPEC’s most influential members have warned that this legislation would cause chaos in the energy market.

Saudi Energy Minister Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman said on October 5:

“We will continuously prove that OPEC+ is here not only to stay but here to stay as a moderating force to bring about stability.”

It is recalled that when Biden arrived in Saudi Arabia earlier this year on a mission to urge one of the world’s largest oil exporters to ramp up production in a bid to help bring down gasoline prices, OPEC+ raised oil output by a minuscule 100,000 barrels per day in what was widely seen as an insult to Biden.

In this way, it is demonstrated that Western influence over energy is waning and that OPEC+ members are behaving more confidently in protecting their own interests. Putin has delivered on every warning he has made whenever a red-line was crossed, and there is little doubt that if Europe imposes a cap, he will counteract Europe’s economic aggression by significantly cutting energy flows, which will make prices soar. There is effectively very little Europe and the US can do to stop this and must accept the fact they are at the mercy of OPEC+ and can no longer impose their condescending and hegemonic demands over the organisation and its member states.

*

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Ahmed Adel is a Cairo-based geopolitics and political economy researcher.

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***

Global Research Editor’s Note

Important statement  by IPPNW: “By accident or miscalculation”.  

The emphasis on the nine countries is misleading:

“broken system which allows nine nations to hold the world hostage with their genocidal weapons.”

Moreover it casually places the blame on Russia without acknowledging that the major danger comes from the U.S. and it’s 1.3 trillion dollar nuclear weapons program, which is slated to increase to $2 trillion in 2030.

The statement fails to address America’s preemptive nuclear doctrine, which repeals the Cold War Doctrine of “Mutually Assured Destruction”.

Nor does it address the history of nuclear war. On record, the Manhattan Project was intent upon waging a nuclear war against the Soviet Union.

The US threat of nuclear war against Russia was formulated more than 76 years ago in September 1945, when the US and the Soviet Union were allies. It consisted in a “World War III Blueprint” of nuclear war against the USSR, targeting 66 cities with more than 200 atomic bombs. This diabolical project under the Manhattan Project was instrumental in triggering the Cold War and the nuclear arms race.

Michel Chossudovsky, October 7, 2022

***

Honorable President, Distinguished Delegates, and friends,

I join you as a representative of the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War and a young person inheriting the world you are building in these very halls. Today, on the International Day for the Total Elimination of Nuclear Weapons, 77 years after the world stumbled into the nuclear age, we stand on the precipice of nuclear annihilation. 

If action is not taken, it is only a matter of time until nuclear weapons are used, whether on purpose, by accident or miscalculation. Studies show that a nuclear war using less than 3% of the world’s nuclear weapons could kill up to every 3rd person on earth. A full-scale nuclear war between Russia and the United States would threaten human survival.

Despite their empty promises, all nine nuclear weapon states are enhancing, modernizing, and increasing their nuclear arsenals. These deadly investments take precious resources away from addressing the other existential threat to our future: the climate crisis. Climate justice cannot be reached while nuclear weapons continue to plague our planet.

Recent nuclear threats are a symptom of a broken system which allows nine nations to hold the world hostage with their genocidal weapons. We call on all nations to condemn all threats to use nuclear weapons. But condemnation is not enough. The only way we can step back from the brink of disaster is by eliminating these weapons.

Distinguished Delegates,

A world without nuclear weapons is possible.

A new generation of changemakers — many of whom are witnessing the climate crisis first hand — are waking up to the shocking reality of our global nuclear architecture for the first time. We demand action be taken before our future is ripped out from under our feet. We reject the complacency of nuclear-armed states and their allies, and thank those who have paved the path to abolition.

The abolition of nuclear weapons is not an abstract goal. The Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons was adopted by this UN General Assembly in 2017 and held its first Meeting of States Parties earlier this year in Vienna. With the landmark Vienna Declaration and a growing number of supportive states, the TPNW is a beacon of hope in an otherwise bleak landscape.

Distinguished Delegates,

As the threat of nuclear war grows, so does the global opposition to nuclear weapons. In response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, one million people worldwide signed IPPNW’s petition with 16 Nobel Peace Prize Laureates calling on Russia and NATO to renounce any use of nuclear weapons in this conflict and urging all countries to support the TPNW.

While nuclear sabers are rattling, I stand with the support of over one million individuals and once again urge Russia and NATO to use the 77th General Assembly to heed our call and renounce the use of nuclear weapons. To the Member States who have not signed or ratified the TPNW: do not delay your support until it is too late.

Distinguished Delegates,

The time for rhetoric is over. If we survive this moment, we must learn from our worldwide near-death experience and never again find ourselves on the edge of a precipice of our own making.

It is either the end of nuclear weapons, or the end of us. The choice is yours.

*

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Featured image: The world’s first nuclear explosion – the U.S. ‘Trinity’ atomic test in New Mexico, July 16, 1945. If a nuclear war breaks out today, the devastation caused by modern nuclear weapons would make Trinity’s power look small by comparison. Most life on Earth would likely be wiped out. | U.S. Department of Energy

“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   

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

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***

Although the African continent has about 9% of the world’s natural gas reserves and 12% of its oil, most of the continent’s countries have been struggling with energy issues for years, including power and fuel shortages. Even oil-producing nations such as some Central African States have capacity issues and lack financing, which makes them dependent on imported refined products. Many such states have focused mostly on crude sales and several energy projects have failed to come through. The 4,128 km-long Trans-Saharan gas pipeline (which involves Algeria, Niger, and Nigeria) was planned and agreed upon in 1970 and still exists only on paper. But other projects are moving forward.

In early September the Democratic Republic of Congo and the Congo Republic, as well as Angola, Equatorial Guinea, Cameroon, Gabon, and Chad (all Central African nations) signed an agreement to create, by 2030, their own regional gas and oil pipeline network and hub infrastructures to reduce dependence on imports of refined energy sources. Such a project in this case requires foreigner know-how. According to NJ Ayuk, CEO of pan-African corporate conglomerate Centurion Law Group, and African Energy Chamber executive chairman,

“Russians are the best when it comes to pipelines”, and African leaders were inviting Russian energy players to have bilateral talks on “how to use Russian or Chinese expertise to make this work”.

In addition, in mid-September, the Nigerian National Petroleum Company (NNPC) signed a memorandum of understanding with Morocco to start building a 7,000-kilometer offshore gas pipeline which is to run across 13 African nations. The Nigeria-Morocco Gas Pipeline (NMGP) can boost economic integration in the continent, reliably and sustainably supply gas, and can also improve overall living conditions. Once completed, it could supply approximately three billion standard cubic feet of gas per day across the West African Coast, while also delivering gas to northern Morocco, where it can be connected with the Maghreb European Pipeline (MEP), from which it could supply gas to Spain too. Another such project is the Tanzania and Uganda’s East African Crude Oil Pipeline (EACOP).

Could these projects fly? If the US-led West has its way, the answer is no. In fact, local African energy projects have been facing strong Western opposition which has been voiced in terms of the climate agenda. For example, on September 15, the EU Parliament passed a resolution stating that the Uganda-Tanzania EACOP project, might pose “social and environmental risks.”  The European Parliament has thus advised its member states not to support Uganda’s gas and oil projects – either financially or diplomatically. Uganda’s Deputy Speaker of Parliament Thomas Tayebwa responded to that by describing the resolution as the “highest level of neocolonialism and imperialism” against Uganda’s and Tanzania’s sovereignty.

Another interesting example: last month, the US special presidential envoy for climate (often informally called the “Climate Czar”) John Kerry warned investors against funding the Nigeria-Morocco gas pipeline project which could benefit Africa and also Europe – he casted doubts on its long-term viability. In fact, Washington’s foreign policy on Morocco, particularly regarding the Western Sahara issue, is not in Europe’s best interests: the US recognition of Western Sahara has increased tensions in the region, which has been a kind of “protective barrier” for the European continent.  Moreover, while speaking to Reuters on the sidelines of the 18th session of the African Ministerial Conference on the Environment (AMCEN) in Dakar, Senegal, on October 3, Kerry in fact discouraged investing in long-term gas projects in the African continent in general.

Ironically, Africa in 2020 accounted for merely 3.8% of the worlds’ CO2 emissions from industry and fossil fuels. As of now, EU nations (the most vocal promoters of green energy and economy) are resurrecting coal-fired electricity plants amid the global energy crisis. According to Mamdouh G. Salameh, global energy expert and international oil economist, oil and gas should still drive the global economy throughout the 21st century, and the EU and the US won’t abandon their own gas and oil projects. Thus, Western environmental agendas might mask veiled interests in maintaining the continent energy-starved with its energy resources kept underground so that they may be used in the future for the West’s own needs.

Sudanese-British billionaire Mo Ibrahim recently attacked the hypocrisy of the Global North in preventing African countries from developing their own hydrocarbon gas reserves over climate change concerns, while at the same time seeking to explore African resources themselves.

In this regard, from an African perspective, China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and  Russia can offer countries in this region a much better deal. Last month, the Russian Ministry of Energy signaled that the Russian Federation is willing to develop joint projects with African nations to boost energy supplies to their markets.

Another case in point is Egypt’s Russian-built nuclear plant, which has placed Cairo into the global nuclear club. The project marks the advancement of Russian-Egypt collaboration in spite of intense American pressures and is yet another sign of the new age of non-alignment and multi-alignment.

Geoenergetic interests thus remain one of the main issues and driving forces of the 21st century. The irony is that the US-led West’s “Green Agenda” hampers African energy security but also even Europe’s. While European powers might have their interests in Africa resources (which are often described as “neocolonial”), Europe itself has been played by Washington’s interests to the detriment of its own energy security.

*

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Uriel Araujo is a researcher with a focus on international and ethnic conflicts.

Featured image is from InfoBrics

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***

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on Thursday called for NATO to launch a “preventative strike” on Russia to prevent Moscow from using nuclear weapons, a move that would almost certainly spark World War III and possibly nuclear war.

“What should NATO do? Exclude the possibility of use of nuclear weapons by Russia,” Zelensky said via video link at an event hosted by the Lowy Institute, an Australian think tank.

“But the most important, I’m again addressing the international community, is how it was before February 24: preventative strikes, so that they know what will happen if they use [a nuke],” he said. “And not the opposite, waiting for Russia to strike and then saying ‘oh, that’s how you are, now you can take it from us.’ Reconsider how you apply pressure, the order of application.”

The Kremlin jumped on the comments and said that Zelensky was trying to spark a world war. Ukrainian officials tried to downplay what Zelensky said, with his advisor Mykhailo Podolyak insisting that Zelensky “said nothing about a preventive nuclear strike” on Russia.

Serhii Nikiforov, Zelensky’s press secretary, also said that the Ukrainian leader was not calling for a nuclear strike and claimed he was talking about other actions, such as sanctions. “The president was speaking about the period before February 24. Preventative measures should have been used at that time to prevent Russia from unleashing a war. I will remind you that the only measures discussed at that time were preventative sanctions,” he said.

But Zelensky has previously called for direct US and NATO military intervention in the conflict. Earlier in the war, Zelensky pushed hard for the Western powers to impose a “no-fly zone” over Ukraine, which would have required shooting down Russian warplanes and bombing surface-to-air missile systems inside Russia.

*

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

Featured image is from OneWorld

“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   

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

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

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

***

Misinformation and outright lies are at the base of elections in the United States. Following the FBI-staged post-election “insurrection” at the Capitol, it has become tantamount to an act of treason to discuss the possibility the election was in some way rigged or stolen.

Politics, circa 2022, is a chaotic three-ring circus with lies, card tricks, and drama taking center stage. For instance, in August of 2021, the FBI concluded that neither Trump nor his supporters organized an attempt to overturn the election result.

Naturally, it didn’t get a lot of play.

In a court filing in April, the attorney representing nearly a dozen members of the Oath Keepers discovered evidence of government infiltration and possible agent provocateur behavior during the protest.

Just the News reported,

“At least 20 FBI and ATF assets were embedded around the Capitol on J6,” a footnote in the motion reads. The motion also states that attorneys “combed through a mountain of discovery” including summaries of interviews conducted by FBI agents and that members of the Oath Keepers, a far-right group, were “being monitored and recorded prior to J6.”

The attorney, David Fischer, wrote in the brief “that despite carefully inspecting a significant amount of evidence during discovery, he has not found ‘one iota of proof’ that the defendants pre-planned or had any ‘intention, design, or scheme to specifically enter the Capitol Building on J6.’”

The FBI, America’s political police apparatus, doesn’t take kindly to narrative-busting information leaking out of the agency. For instance, veteran agent Steve Friend was suspended last month, stripped of his gun and badge, and escorted out of the FBI field office in Daytona Beach, Florida, for exposing a number of FBI dirty tricks in relation to the fake narrative that American “democracy” is threatened by right-wing extremists.

Friend alleges the “Washington, DC, field office is ‘manipulating’ FBI case management protocol and farming out J6 cases to field offices across the country to create the false impression that right-wing domestic violence is a widespread national problem that goes far beyond the ‘black swan’ event of Jan. 6, 2021.”

The suspended agent also claims

“FBI domestic terrorism cases are being opened on innocent American citizens who were nowhere near the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, based on anonymous tips to an FBI hotline or from Facebook spying on their messages. These tips are turned into investigative tools called ‘guardians,’ after the FBI software that collates them.”

No doubt, however, the allegations only scratch the surface. It has been known for decades the FBI, most notably under the illegal COINTELPRPO, provoked violence during demonstrations, entrapped nonviolent activists, engineered the destruction of careers, and even stand accused of political assassination (of Martin Luther King, Fred Hampton, and Malcolm X, among others of less repute). It spied on and closely followed the entirely constitutional activity of thousands of Americans. For instance, the FBI collected a 1,884-page file detailing the activities of the author and activist James Baldwin. As a comparison, consider that one of the longest works of literary fiction, “War and Peace,” by Leo Tolstoy, is just over a thousand pages.

The FBI’s favorite tactic, beyond destroying political organizations from the inside out, is inventing terror groups out of whole cloth and then entrapping victims, many of them mentally ill.

“In all these law enforcement schemes the alleged terrorists masterminds end up seeming, when the full story comes out, unable to terrorize their way out of a paper bag without law enforcement tutelage,” writes Rick Perlstein for Rolling Stone. A CBS website page detailing a pattern of entrapment since September 11, 2001 has since disappeared.

Entire books and documentaries have been written and produced on the illegal political deeds of the FBI—and yet millions of Americans, deluged their entire lives with tidal waves of propaganda and official lies, unquestioningly believe whatever falsehoods the national security state’s political police enforcers invent. Millions of Americans actually believe unruly demonstrators on January 6 were somehow able to overthrow the government and thus solitary confinement is an appropriate response to wrongthink.

News that is politically disadvantageous for the state is successfully suppressed. For instance, the case of Hunter Biden, the degenerate son of the president.

Emily Crane writes:

FBI officials told agents not to investigate first son Hunter Biden’s infamous laptop for months — vowing that the bureau was “not going to change the outcome of the election again,” according to whistleblower claims made public Wednesday by Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.)

“These new allegations provide even more evidence of FBI corruption and renew calls for you to take immediate steps to investigate the FBI’s actions regarding the laptop,” Johnson wrote in a letter to Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz.

According to the senator, “individuals with knowledge” had told his office that “local FBI leadership” had slow-walked the laptop investigation after the computer was recovered from a Wilmington, Del. repair shop in December 2019.

In other words, a supposed agency established to fight crime has itself engaged in massive criminality, including withholding information that would have undoubtedly influenced how Americans voted. This is exactly what the state and its media did with the widely debunked and quite frankly absurd “Russian collusion” accusations against Trump. The infamous Steele Dossier is a work of fiction, and a vulgar one at that.

“A cursory examination of the Steele Dossier should have convinced the CIA or the FBI that it was fake news,” writes Paul R. Gregory for the Hoover Institution.

Any residual doubt would have vanished after learning that its author, Christopher Steele, was an opposition researcher paid by the Democrats to dig up dirt on Trump. That our most sophisticated government officials acted as if the Dossier were legitimate leads to only one conclusion. They were a knowing and willing  part of the Democratic and media smear of a presidential contender, and then president, that paralyzed U.S. politics for three years.

In short, the Democrats fed an unrelenting mountain of lies into the eager megaphone of the corporate media, and this did in fact warp the election (although it may have taken election tampering to achieve the final result of a senile old man becoming president).

The vast majority of the “fake news” came from Democrats desperate to prevent the American people from voting for the wrong candidate. Russia’s supposed disinformation campaign paled in comparison. Russia, like much of the rest of the world, was reporting on the election from its perspective. In the United States, this is considered subversion.

Now that the midterm elections are upon us, it’s time to ramp up the discredited old lies, throw them against the wall, and see what sticks. Once again, the FBI is instrumental.

FBI officials warn that Russia and China are working to interfere in November’s midterm elections in the U.S. by amplifying misinformation that’s already been floating around.

The feds expressed their concerns to state and local officials last month, according to an unclassified intelligence advisory. Russian operatives hope to further sow doubt in election integrity, while China is working to “hinder candidates perceived to be particularly adversarial to Beijing,” the FBI says.

Because so many Americans are little more than headline skimmers, there is a reduced chance they will arrive at the third paragraph, which states no “credible threats to election infrastructure have so far been detected by intelligence officials,” however insisting “U.S. adversaries in 2016 used social media to confuse and misinform voters. Platforms like Twitter and Facebook later took measures to fact-check information being posted online prior to the 2020 election.”

Left unsaid is the fact the USG and its conspiratorial media are permitted, even encouraged, to twist facts and pass off easily debunked lies as truth on all of its platforms, including and especially Facebook and Twitter.

Obviously, the “adversaries” are the American people, who may wander from the strict confines of official narratives, many debunked in short order, and vote for yet another outlier. The midterms will decide which “party” controls congress and if the president will be a “lame duck,” to match his lame cognitive ability.

All of this is an ongoing effort to tighten up a dysfunctional voting system. For decades, it has been little more than a meaningless ritual. This video reveals—admittedly with a hard partisan twist and a Fox News hoofprint—that it is indeed possible to rig voting machines.

However, to now even insinuate as much will get you investigated (or taken down) by the FBI.

“A U.K. based company that has provided voting machines for 16 states, including important battleground states like Florida and Arizona, has direct ties with billionaire leftist and Clinton crusader George Soros,” reports  Joe Jankowski for The Last American Vagabond.

With recent WikiLeaks emails showing that Hillary Clinton received foreign policy directives and coordinated on domestic policy with Soros, along with receiving tens of millions of dollars in presidential campaign support from the billionaire, concerns are growing that these shadowy players may pull the strings behind the curtains of the [2016] presidential election.

The hysterical and irrational response by the state and its media to the American people voting Trump into office—a man obviously not educated on policy and with at best a sketchy grasp of geopolitics—is evidence enough elections are meaningless unless the vetted and establishment elected candidate wins.

It was apparently so serious, they had to have a Brit cook up a “dossier” of lies, the most notorious and tawdry being Trump supposedly urinating on a bed where Obama once slept. No obscenities or absurdities are beyond these people.

Meanwhile, the current president’s son illegally cavorted with prostitutes, smoked crack cocaine “every fifteen minutes,” and worst of all, entered into secret business deals with China and Ukraine. We knew this before the election, and yet it was scrubbed from the corporate and social media to make certain Biden would be clean as a whistle when duped voters performed their “democratic duty” ritual.

*

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Kurt Nimmo writes on Kurt Nimmo on Geopolitics where this article was originally published. He is a regular contributor to Global Research. 

Featured image is from Kurt Nimmo on Geopolitics

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***

The New York Times reported on Wednesday that US intelligence agencies believe parts of the Ukrainian government were behind the slaying of Darya Dugina, the daughter of the prominent Russian philosopher Alexander Dugin.

Dugina, who was a political scientist and journalist, was killed by a car bomb outside of Moscow back in August while driving a car owned by her father, who is suspected to have been the ultimate target of the blast. The Times report said that US officials “admonished” Ukrainian officials over the killing and that the US didn’t take part in the assassination.

The US officials said they fear Ukraine’s covert operations inside Russia could escalate the war in Ukraine to a wider conflict. But Dugina’s killing hasn’t changed Washington’s policy as the report said the US concerns had “not prompted any known changes in the provision of intelligence, military and diplomatic support to Mr. Zelensky’s government or to Ukraine’s security services.”

Russia has blamed Ukraine’s intelligence services for the killing and named two Ukrainian suspects. For their part, the Ukrainian government has denied any role in the murder, a position that Ukrainian presidential advisor Mykhailo Podolyak reiterated to the Times.

Like her father, Dugina supported Russia’s war in Ukraine and she was placed on the infamous Ukrainian website Myrotvorets, known as the Ukrainian “kill list.” Since her death, Dugina has been listed as “liquidated.” Thousands of people are listed on the site as “enemies of Ukraine,” including prominent Westerners.

Pope Francis commented on Dugina after her killing, describing her as an innocent victim of the war, which drew backlash from Ukraine.

“I think of that poor girl blown up by a bomb under the seat of her car in Moscow,” the pope said. “Innocents pay the price of war.”

The pope’s comments drew a rebuke from Ukraine’s envoy to the Vatican and the Ukrainian Foreign Ministry.

“I will say frankly that the Ukrainian heart is torn by the pope’s words. It was unfair,” Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba said after summoning Pope Francis’ envoy to Ukraine.

*

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

Featured image is by 1RNK, licensed under CC BY 3.0

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***

It is impossible to track the geoeconomic turbulence inherent to the “birth pangs” of the multipolar world without the insights of Professor Michael Hudson at the University of Missouri, and author of the already seminal The Destiny of Civilization.

In his latest essay, Professor Hudson digs deeper into Germany’s suicidal economic/financial policies; their effect on the already falling euro – and hints at some possibilities for fast integrating Eurasia and the Global South as a whole to try to break the Hegemon’s stranglehold.

That led to a series of email exchanges, especially about the future role of the yuan, where Hudson remarked:

“The Chinese whom I’ve talked to for years and years did not expect the dollar to weaken. They’re not crying about its rise, but they are concerned about flight capital from China as I think after the Party Congress [starting on October 16] there will be a crackdown on the Shanghai free-market advocacy. Pressure for the coming changes has been long building up. The spirit of reform to rein in ‘free markets’ was spreading among students over a decade ago, and they have been rising in the Party hierarchy.”

On the key issue of Russia accepting payment for energy in rubles, Hudson touched upon a point rarely examined outside of Russia:

“They don’t really want to be paid just in rubles. That’s the one thing Russia doesn’t need, because it can just print them. It only needs rubles to balance its international payments to stabilize the exchange rate – not to push it up.”

Which brings us to settlements in yuan:

“Taking payment in yuan is like taking payment in gold – an international asset that every country desires as a non-fiat currency that has a value if one sells it (unlike the dollar now, which may simply be confiscated, or ultimately left abandoned). What Russia really needs are critical industrial inputs like computer chips. It could ask China to import these with the yuan Russia provides.”

Keynes is back

Following our email exchanges, Professor Hudson gracefully agreed to answer in detail a few questions about the extremely complex geoeconomic processes in play across Eurasia. Here we go.

The Cradle: The BRICS are studying the adoption of a common currency – including all of them and, we expect, the expanded BRICS+ as well. How could that be practically implemented? Hard to see the Brazilian Central Bank harmonizing with the Russians and the People’s Bank of China. Would that involve only investment – via the BRICS development bank? Would that be based on commodities + gold? How does the yuan fit in? Is the BRICS approach based on the current Eurasia Economic Union (EAEU) discussions with the Chinese, led by Sergey Glazyev? Did the Samarkand summit advance, practically, the interconnection of BRICS and the SCO?

Hudson: “Any idea of a common currency has to start with a currency-swap arrangement among existing member countries. Most trade will be in their own currencies. But to settle the inevitable imbalances (balance-of-payments surpluses and deficits), an artificial currency will be created by a new Central Bank.

This may look superficially like the Special Drawing Rights (SDRs) created by the International Monetary Fund (IMF), largely to fund the US deficit on military account and the rising debt service owed by Global South debtors to US lenders. But the arrangement will be much more like the ‘bancor’ proposed by John Maynard Keynes in 1944. Deficit countries could draw a specified quota of bancors, whose valuation would be set by a common selection of prices and exchange rates. The bancors (and their own currency) would be used to pay countries in surplus.

But unlike the IMF’s SDR system, the aim of this new alternative Central Bank will not be simply to subsidize economic polarization and indebtedness. Keynes proposed a principle that if a country (he was thinking of the United States at the time) ran chronic surpluses, that would be a sign of its protectionism or refusal to support a mutually resilient economy, and its claims would begin to be extinguished, along with the bancor debts of countries whose economies prevented their ability to balance their international payments and support their currency.

Today’s proposed arrangements would indeed support lending among the member banks, but not for the purpose of supporting capital flight (the main use of IMF loans, when “left-wing” governments seem likely to be elected), and the IMF and its associated alternative to the World Bank would not impose austerity plans and anti-labor policies on debtors. The economic doctrine would promote self-sufficiency in food and basic essentials, and would promote tangible agricultural and industrial capital formation, not financialization.

It is likely that gold also would be an element of international monetary reserves by these countries, simply because gold is a commodity that hundreds of years of world practice already have agreed on as acceptable and politically neutral. But gold would be a means of settling payments balances, not defining domestic currency. These balances would of course extend to trade and investment with western countries that are not part of this bank. Gold would be an acceptable means of settling western debt balances to the new Eurasian-centered bank. That would prove a vehicle for payments that western countries could not simply repudiate – as long as the gold was kept in the hands of the new bank members, no longer in New York or London as has been the dangerous practice since 1945.

In a meeting to create such a bank, China would be in a similar dominant position to that which the United States enjoyed in 1944 at Bretton Woods. But its operating philosophy would be quite different. The aim would be to develop the economies of bank members, with long-term planning or trade patterns that seem most appropriate for their economies to avoid the kind of dependency relationships and privatization takeovers that have characterized IMF and World Bank policy.

These development objectives would involve land reform, industrial and financial restructuring, and tax reform, as well as domestic banking and credit reforms. Discussions at the SCO meetings seem to have prepared the ground for establishing a general harmony of interests in creating reforms along these lines.”

Eurasia or bust

The Cradle: In the medium term, is it feasible to expect German industrialists, contemplating the coming wasteland, and their own demise, to revolt en masse against the NATO-imposed trade/financial sanctions against Russia, and force Berlin to open Nord Stream 2? Gazprom guarantees the pipeline is recoverable. Don’t need to join the SCO to make that happen…

Hudson: “It is unlikely that German industrialists will act to prevent their country’s de-industrialization, given the US/NATO stranglehold on Eurozone politics and the past 75 years of political meddling by US officials. German company heads are more likely to try and survive with as much personal and corporate wealth intact as they can in the wake of Germany being turned into a Baltic-state-type economic wreckage.

There already has been talk of shifting production – and management – to the United States, which will block Germany from obtaining energy, metals and other essential materials from any supplier not controlled by US interests and their allies.

The great question is whether German companies would emigrate to the new Eurasian economies whose industrial growth and prosperity seem likely to far overshadow that of the United States.

Of course the Nord Stream pipelines are recoverable. That is precisely why US political pressure from Secretary of State Blinken has been so insistent that Germany, Italy and other European countries double down on isolating their economies from trade and investment with Russia, Iran, China and other countries whose growth the US is trying to disrupt.”

How to escape “There Is No Alternative”

The Cradle: Are we reaching the point when the key players of the Global South – over 100 nations – finally get their act together and decide to go for broke and stop the US from keeping the artificial neoliberal global economy in a state of perpetual coma? This means the only possible option, as you have outlined, is to set up a parallel global currency bypassing the US dollar – while the usual suspects float the notion of a Bretton Woods III at best. Is the FIRE (finance, insurance, real estate) financial casino omnipotent enough to smash any possible competition? Do you envisage any other practical mechanisms apart from what is being discussed by BRICS/ EAEU/ SCO? 

Hudson: “A year or two ago it seemed that the task of designing a full-fledged alternative world currency, monetary, credit and trading system was so complex that the details hardly could be thought through. But US sanctions have proved to be the needed catalyst to make such discussions pragmatically urgent.

The confiscation of Venezuela’s gold reserves in London and its US investments, the confiscation of $300 billion of Russia’s foreign-exchange reserves held in the United States and Europe, and its threat to do the same to China and other countries resisting US foreign policy has made de-dollarization urgent. I have explained the logic in many points, from my Valdai Club article (with Radhika Desai) to my recent book on The Destiny of Civilization, the lecture series that I prepared for Hong Kong and the Global University for Sustainability.

Holding securities denominated in dollars, and even holding gold or investments in the United States and Europe, is no longer a safe option. It is clear that the world is breaking into two quite different types of economies, and that US diplomats and their European satellites are willing to tear up the existing economic order in hopes that creating a disruptive crisis will enable themselves to come out on top.

It also is clear that subjugation to the IMF and its austerity plans are economic suicide, and that following World Bank and its neoliberal doctrine of international dependency is self-destructive. The result has been to create an unpayable overhead of debts denominated in US dollars. These debts cannot be paid without borrowing credit from the IMF and accepting terms of economic surrender to US privatizers and speculators.

The only alternative to imposing economic austerity on themselves is to withdraw from the dollar trap in which US-sponsored “free market” economics (markets free from government protection, and free from government ability to recover the environmental damage from US oil companies, mining companies and the associated industrial and food dependency) is to make a clean break.

The break will be difficult, and US diplomacy will do everything it can to disrupt the creation of a more resilient economic order. But US policy has created a global state of dependency in which literally there is no alternative but to break away.”

Germanexit?

The Cradle: What is your analysis on Gazprom confirming Line B of the Nord Stream 2 was not touched by Pipeline Terror? This means Nord Stream 2 is practically ready to go – with a capacity to pump 27.5 billion cubic meters of gas a year, which happens to be half of the total capacity of – damaged – Nord Stream. So Germany is not doomed. This opens a whole new chapter; a solution will depend on a serious political decision by the German government.   

Hudson: “Here’s the kicker: Russia certainly won’t bear the cost again, only to have the pipeline blown up. It will be up to Germany. I bet the current regime says “No.” That should make for an interesting rise of the alternative parties.

The ultimate problem is that the only way Germany can restore trade with Russia is to withdraw from NATO, realizing that it is the major victim of NATO’s war. This could only succeed by spreading to Italy, and also to Greece (for not protecting it against Turkey, ever since Cyprus). That looks like a long fight.

Maybe it’s easier just for German industry to pack up and move to Russia to help modernize its industrial production, especially BASF for chemistry, Siemens for engineering, etc.. If German companies relocate to the US to get gas, this will be perceived as a US raid on German industry, capturing its lead for the US. Even so, this won’t succeed, given America’s post-industrialized economy.

So German industry can only move eastward if it creates its own political party as a nationalistic anti-NATO party. The EU constitution would require Germany to withdraw from the EU, which puts NATO interests first at the federal level. The next scenario is to discuss Germany’s entry into the SCO. Let’s take bets as to how long that will take.”

*

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This article was originally published on The Cradle.

Michael Hudson is an American economist professor of economics at the university of Missouri Kansas City and a researcher at the Levy Economics Institute at Bard College. He’s a former Wall Street analyst political consultant commentator and journalist. He identifies himself as a classical economist. Michael is the author of J is for Junk Economics, Killing the Host, The Bubble and Beyond, Super Imperialism: The Economic Strategy of American Empire, Trade Development and Foreign Debtand The Myth of Aid, among others. His books have been published translated into Japanese, Chinese, German, Spanish and Russian.

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.

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***

After “parties not-so-unknown” bombed the Nordstream gas pipeline, Anthony Blinken celebrated the “tremendous opportunity.” He assumed the whole Nordstream operation was out of commission. That would have given US producers the chance to make billions of dollars robbing Europe blind selling overpriced gas.

But Blinken may have celebrated too soon. According to Bloomberg News:

After the suspected sabotage of the network last week in a series of explosions, Gazprom said on Monday three of the lines were affected and one wasn’t. The gas giant has lowered pressure on the unaffected line B of Nord Stream 2 to inspect the link for damage and potential leaks, it said in a statement on its Telegram account.

An Unz Review commenter explained:

“The vaunted US Navy screwed up. In the murky depths of the Baltic Sea they planted their explosives to blow up the ***FOUR*** pipes of the NS 1 & NS2 gas pipelines. (You didn’t know there were four pipes, did you? Neither did I.) But they appear to have screwed up and placed two of the explosive packages on one of the NS2 pipes — line A — leaving the other pipe — line B — with no explosive charge, and subsequently ***NO DAMAGE***. Line B is therefore ***READY TO GO*** with a capacity of 27.5 billion cubic meters per year … which for comparison is 50% of total capacity of Nordstream 1, which as you may recall was recently reduced to 20% capacity before being shut down completely. (2.75 times the capacity of the newly-opened Norway-to-Poland gas pipeline).”

So if Germany gets annoyed at the arrogant American terrorists’ attempt to loot and wreck their economy, all the Germans have to do is cancel their sanctions on Russia and ask Putin to turn on the spigot, which could cause NATO to quickly unravel. If that happens, the Nordstream terror attack will turn out to be one of the worst own goals in strategic history.

Even if this worst-case scenario (from the US perspective) fails to quickly materialize, the botched Nordstream bombing could rebound disastrously against the perpetrators. Cutting Germany’s Russian gas lifeline and replacing it with inadequate quantities of overpriced US gas may have sounded like a good idea in the short term, since it will butress the dollar against the euro and keep the EU tethered to its US vassal status, cut off from the vast resources of Russia. But over the medium term, as non-Western nations continue to gain ever-greater shares of global GDP while the West declines, sabotaging the economy of your biggest vassal seems self-defeating, even in the unlikely event that the Europeans never decide to push back.

The Nordstream terror fiasco takes its place in a long series of stunningly stupid moves by the world’s erstwhile hegemon. The US could have thrived in the post-Cold-War environment by making win-win deals with all major nations and civilizations. Instead, as Putin observed in last week’s speech, it has managed to alienate most of the world with its psychopathic arrogance and blood-splattering vandalism. By looting Russia and pushing NATO eastward in the 1990s, launching a false flag war on Islam in 2001, and more recently alienating Russia, China, Iran, and the whole Islamic world simultaneously, the strategic geniuses running America’s national security state seem to be deliberately creating the mother of all anti-Western coalitions.

Does the Empire harbor a secret death wish? Is unconscious guilt (at betraying the American Republic and mass murdering millions abroad) driving the national security brain trust to self-destruct? Maybe. But first let’s consider two other explanations, one obvious, the other conspiratorial.

First the obvious one: The permanent US national security state has been absolutely corrupted by absolute power. When the Cold War ended and the US emerged as a unipolar hegemon, the managers of empire started to believe “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.” That’s hubris at best, psychosis at worst. They started to think they could get away with just about anything. Such delusions of grandeur unleashed a feeding frenzy among those who gorge themselves at the military-industrial-complex trough. Corruption and incompetence danced off together in a self-reinforcing positive feedback loop. Nobody had to worry much about the real-world consequences of bad decisions, because “we” lived in “our own reality” of apparent omnipotence.

But US policy has been so conspicuously self-destructive that it’s hard not to wonder whether it might be intentional. Could some hostile power have taken over the American brain and driven the nation to self-destruction, the way toxoplasmosis parasites take over the brains of mice and make them fall in love with cats?

The nation poised to gain the most from self-defeating US policies is China. Whoever decided to export American manufacturing to China, then waste more than $7 trillion fighting Muslims for no particular reason, then pick a fight with Russia in Ukraine, might as well have been a Chinese sleeper agent. Even the belated anti-China trade war launched in 2019, followed by the apparent COVID attack on Wuhan, were so insanely ineffective that they could easily have been scripted by a CCP version of Dr. Fu Manchu.

But there is no evidence that the CCP is secretly running US foreign policy. If there is a toxoplasmosis type parasite steering Uncle Sam’s brain, it would be the Zionist neocons. These people are drunk on Leo Strauss’s self-styled philosophy of evil. The whole notion of win-win give-and-take diplomacy and negotiation is foreign to them. They never met an act of extreme imperial chutzpah they didn’t like. From 9/11 and the wars it was designed to spark, to the 2014 de facto declaration of war on Russia through the coup in Kiev, to the late autumn 2019 COVID attack on Wuhan and Qom, to the recent blundering attempt to take Nordstream permanently off-line, the neocons keep doing insane things ostensibly designed to strengthen the US empire, but covertly undermining it.

Are the Zio-cons scheming to destroy the US and then dominate the New World Order that arises from its ashes? Or are they merely so unhinged and fanatical in their pro-US-imperial hubris that they keep doing insanely counterproductive things?

*

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***

As Moscow’s envoy addressed the United Nations, the Pentagon announced a list of new weapons for Kyiv. This is seen as provocation and advancement of war on the part of the United States, and one Russia warns could result in a “direct military clash.”

Diplomat Konstantin Vorontsov told the UN General Assembly on Tuesday that the U.S.’s continued supply of weapons to Ukraine will only be tolerated for so long.  Moscow’s envoy was speaking after the Pentagon announced the contents of another military shipment to Ukraine, valued at $625 million.

“The US is increasing the deliveries of weapons to Ukraine, providing its military with intelligence information, ensuring the direct participation of its fighters and advisers in the conflict,” Vorontsov, who is the deputy head of the Russian delegation, told the General Assembly’s First Committee, a body charged with arms control and security issues. This “not only prolongs hostilities and leads to new casualties, but also brings the situation closer to the dangerous line of a direct military clash between Russia and NATO,” Vorontsov added.

The latest batch of weapons and equipment, valued at $625 million, includes four High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems (HIMARS) and ammunition for them, 16 each of the 155mm and 105mm howitzers, 75,000 rounds for artillery ammunition – including guided rounds and remote mine-laying ones – small arms and mortar rounds, and 200 MRAP armored vehicles. –RT

In February 2022, the Kremlin recognized the Donbass republics as independent states and demanded that Ukraine officially declare itself a neutral country that will never join any Western military bloc including NATO. Kyiv insists the Russian offensive was completely unprovoked yet has recently applied for fast-tracked approval to join NATO.

While it appears that a world war is quickly approaching, some say we are already in the third world war.

With the amount of involvement the U.S. has in supplying Ukraine with weapons, it does appear that the pope may be correct. It will take very little at this point to ignite a direct conflict with the U.S.

*

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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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***

Humanity has reached a tipping point. It is time for governments, international institutions and people everywhere to take stock and act with renewed urgency.

The Ukraine conflict is inflicting death, injury, displacement and destruction, exacerbating a global food crisis, driving Europe into recession, and creating shock waves across the world economy.

The Taiwan conflict is threatening to escalate into outright war that would devastate Taiwan and turn East Asia into a powder keg.

More troubling still is the toxic relationship between the United States on the one hand and China and Russia on the other. Here lies the key to both conflicts.

What we are seeing is the culmination of decades of gross mismanagement of global security. The United States has been unwilling to accept, let alone adapt to, the rise of China and the re-emergence of Russia. It remains unwilling to break with outdated notions of global dominance – a legacy of the Cold War and the triumphalism that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union.

A global power shift is taking place. The West-centric world, in which first Europe and then the United States held sway, is giving way to a multi-centric, multi-civilisational world in which other centres of power and influence are demanding to be heard.

Failure to accept this new reality spells immense danger. A new Cold War is now in full swing, which can at any moment mutate into a hot war. In the words of UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, “humanity is one misunderstanding, one miscalculation away from nuclear annihilation”.

Even if nuclear apocalypse is averted, discord between nuclear armed states inhibits cooperative problem-solving, the provision of global public goods and an effective and independent UN system.

To rise to the challenge we need a coherent, sustained and multifaceted response by governments and international institutions, inspired and driven by an ever watchful and engaged civil society. Several steps suggest themselves, some immediate, others longer term.

The first steps must aim to end the conflict in Ukraine and defuse the tensions over Taiwan. More substantial efforts are needed to foster a framework of cooperative coexistence between the United States, Russia and China – an essential building block for peace across both Europe and Asia.

To this end, we believe the UN Secretary-General or a group of middle powers acting – ideally the two acting in concert – could set in train a multi-pronged initiative aimed at securing an effective and durable ceasefire in Ukraine and the relaxation of tensions over Taiwan.

In the case of Ukraine, the aim must be to secure the cessation of all combat by Russian and Ukrainian forces and separatist groups based in the Donbas region. This would be a ceasefire monitored by a United Nations team reporting regularly and directly to the UN Secretary-General.

A ceasefire, however, is unlikely to hold for long without a durable settlement of the Ukraine-Russian conflict. This will in turn depend on bringing to an end the cynical use of the Ukraine war by great powers intent on pursing their geopolitical ambitions. Only then will it be possible to achieve:

• the phased withdrawal of Russian military forces; 
• an end to the delivery of lethal military aid to Ukraine;
• a constitutionally enshrined policy of neutrality for Ukraine;
• the resolution of jurisdictional issues, notably Crimea and the Donbas region, coupled with a process aimed at healing regional, ethnic and religious animosities within Ukraine.
• All prisoners of war, refugees, and civilians in captivity to be returned to their respective countries and all their rights respected as provided by the Geneva Conventions.

These arrangements will need to be complemented by a wider agreement involving other interested parties, with a view to securing: an adequately funded international program to address the humanitarian crisis in Ukraine; international guarantees to safeguard Ukraine’s independence, neutrality and territorial integrity; and the removal of all sanctions placed against Russia and the restoration of normal trade relations.

In the case of the Taiwan conflict, the first step must be to defuse the current level of tension. To this end, the international community should reaffirm the principles set out in the Shanghai communiqué of 1972, notably the ‘one China’ principle which now commands widespread international support. In line with this principle, the international community must use all means at its disposal to dissuade Taiwan from making any unilateral declaration of independence. The UN Secretary-General in tandem with ASEAN is well placed to spearhead such a course of action.

These relatively short-term initiatives must pave the way for a series of interlinked consultations, culminating in an international conference, whose primary purpose would be to frame a new global security architecture, sustained by appropriate reforms in global governance and designed to:

1. Stop the march to nuclear oblivion, and set in motion an ambitious program for nuclear disarmament, beginning with a series of arms control and disarmament agreements and leading within a specified timeframe to universal membership of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons;
2. Reflect the reality of a multi-centric, multi-civilisational world which respects the independence and legitimate rights of all sovereign nations, and in which no actor seeks to exercise imperial or hegemonic ambitions. 
3. Enshrine the principles of common, cooperative and comprehensive security, and translate these into effective regional arrangements, especially in Europe and the Asia-Pacific region;
4. Initiate a series of measures that can reverse the militarisation of the international system, including limitations on the reach and scope of military alliances and overseas deployments of military forces, as well as a progressive reduction of national military budgets, thereby redirecting resources to areas of pressing social, economic and environmental need;
5. Set in motion the far-reaching reform of international institutions, especially the UN system, so that they can more effectively mount the necessarily cooperative response to existential threats, notably climate change, biodiversity loss, and present and future pandemics.

None of this will happen without a massive global awakening of human wisdom and energy. Important as governments and international institutions are, the initiative for a coherent response to the challenges we face lies largely with the people, with civil society.

Leadership of various kinds is needed. Which is why this message is also addressed to intellectuals, artists, scientists, journalists, religious leaders, advocates and other engaged citizens.

Equally, we have in mind groups working on the rights of indigenous peoples, aid and development, conflict resolution, civil liberties and human rights, violence against women, refugees and asylum seekers, climate change and other threats to our environment, public health (not least Covid), justice for the poor and marginalised, and ethnic, religious and cultural diversity.  ALL are adversely affected by great power confrontation, oppressive security laws, rising military budgets and destructive military activities, not to mention the prospect of nuclear catastrophe. ALL have a crucial part to play.

Trade unions, professional networks (in education, law, medicine, nursing, media, communications), farmer organisations, religious bodies, human-centred think tanks and research centres have also much to contribute to the conversation for a habitable future.

It is time for people everywhere to take the initiative personally and collectively – to set in motion conversations, small and large, formal and informal, online and in person, using the written and spoken word, as well as the visual and performing arts. This is a moment for collective reflection on where we’re at, where we should be heading and the steps needed to get us there.

The stakes are high. We need bold thinking that connects people and issues within and between countries. We must revive and reframe the global security conversation. There is not a moment to lose.

Click here to sign the petition.

Prepared by

Richard Falk, Emeritus Professor of International Law, Princeton University; Chair of Global Law, Queen Mary University London; Research Associate UCSB

Joseph Camilleri, Professor Emeritus, La Trobe University, Melbourne; Fellow, Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia; President, Conversation at the Crossroads

Chandra Muzaffar, Former Professor of Global Studies, Universiti Sains Malaysia, Penang; President of the International Movement for a Just World (JUST)

Endorsed by

Prof. Abdelllah Hammoudi, Professor of Anthropology, Emeritus; Founding Director of the Transregional Institute, Princeton University

Ajarn Sulak Sivaraksa, Co-founder and Chairperson of Advisory Committee of International Network of Engaged Buddhists

Ashis Nandy, Homi Bhabha Fellow, Centre for the Study of Developing Societies

Brad Wolf, Executive Director of Peace Action Network of Lancaster.

Prof. Alfred de Zayas, Professor of international law, Geneva school of diplomacy; Former UN Independent Expert on International Order (2012-18)

Dr. Arujunan Narayanan, Academic teaching International Relations, International Law and Western Philosophy – UKM, UM, HELP University, Armed Forces Defence College, Institute of Diplomacy and Foreign Relations.

Prof. Assaf Kfoury, Professor of Computer Science, Boston University

Prof. Azyumardi Azra (deceased), Rector of Syarif Hidayatullah State Islamic University, Jakarta, Indonesia (1998-2006); Professor of History, State Islamic University, Jakarta, Indonesia (1997-on)

Celso Luiz Nunes Amorim, Former Foreign Minister; Former Defense Minister, Brazil

Prof. Chaiwat Satha-Anand, Former President of Social Science Association of Thailand; Former Vice Rector for Academic Affairs, Thammasat University; presently Expert, Toda Peace Institute, Prof. of Politcal Science, Thammasat University; Thammasat University Distinguished Scholar

Chris Hedges, American Journalist, Author and Commentator

David Swanson, Author, Executive Director of World BEYOND War

Prof. Farish A. Noor, Professor, Department of History, University Malaya

Fredrik S. Heffermehl, Lawyer and Author, Norway, Nobel Peace Prize Watch.

Prof. Ilan Pappe, Director of European Center for Palestine Studies, University of Exeter, Britain

Ivana Nikolic  Hughes, President, Nuclear Age Peace Foundation; Senior Lecturer in Chemistry, Columbia University

Prof. Jeffrey Sachs, University Professor, Columbia University

Jorge Casteneda, Former Foreign Minister of Mexico, New York University

(Rt Hon.) Jeremy Corbyn, Independent MP for Islington North

John K. Stoner, 1040forpeace.org

Prof. Jomo Kwame Sundaram, Professor Emeritus, Economics, University Malaya

Prof. Junaid S. Ahmad, Director, Center for the Study of Islam and Decoloniality, Islamabad, Pakistan

Dr. Kate Hudson, General Secretary, Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament

Kathy Kelly, Board President, World BEYOND War

Kishore Mahbubani, Founding Dean, Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, NUS.

Prof. Kevin Clements, Director, The Toda Peace Institute, Tokyo Japan

Dr. Lim Teck Ghee, Policy Analyst

Prof. Mahmood Mamdani, Herbert Lehman Professor of Government, Columbia University, NYC

Mairead Maguire, Peace Laureate; Co-founder Peace People; Northern Ireland

Prof. Maivan Clech Lam, Emeritus Professor of International Law, Ralph Bunche Institute for International Studies at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.

Maung Zarni, Burmese Dissident & Co-founder of FORSEA.

(Tan Sri.) Mohamed Jawhar Hassan, Adjunct Professor, Asia-Europe Institute, University of Malaya; Former Chairman and Chief Executive, Institute of Strategic and International Studies (ISIS) Malaysia

Dr. Ramzy Baroud, Center for Islam and Global Affairs, Zain University, Istanbul

Prof. Shad Saleem Faruqi, Emeritus Professor at Faculty of Law, Universiti Malaya; Chair Holder, Tunku Abdul Rahman Foundation

Shahanaaz Habib, Ex journalist, The Star

Susan Wright, Ph.D., Research Scientist and Lecturer Emerita, History of Science, University of Michigan

Victoria Brittain, Journalist and Author

Yanis Varoufakis, Member of Greek Parliament and MeRA25 leader, DiEM25 co-founder; Professor of Economics – University of Athens ; Honorary Professor of Political Economy –  University of Sydney ; Honoris Causa Professor of Law, Economics and Finance – University of Torino ; Distinguished Visiting Professor of Political Economy, Kings College, University of London

Hans von Sponeck, UN Assistant Secretary-General (ret.)

Dr. Michael Jeyakumar, Chairperson of Socialist Party of Malaysia

Noam Chomsky, American linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, historical essayist, social critic, and political activist

Phyllis Bennis, Director, New Internationalism Project, Institute for Policy Studies

Ronnie Kasrils, Retired South African Minister, Activist and Author.

*

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***

Never underestimate the power of failure.  As the Liz Truss Disaster Show demonstrates, the next pitfall is probably just around the corner.  The UK Prime Minister has shown, along with her distinctly oblivious Chancellor of the Exchequer, how to ballsup the economy in the shortest timeframe imaginable.

Chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng’s “mini-Budget” delivered on September 30, designed to evade the eagles at the Office of Budget Responsibility, was greeted with shock from the market boys and girls to the chattering classes.  The Bank of England took it upon itself to exercise some sober restraint in the face of rampant fiscal recklessness.

The ailing British pound received another battering on October 5 after Truss’s speech at the Conservative Party conference.  It had risen relative to the US dollar on October 3 in response to the decision to abandon the policy of removing the top 45p tax rate, only to suffer another precipitous decline.

Her comically abysmal, half-hour speech, delivered to party members increasingly unsettled by her recent performances, was peppered with ideological dross and economic denialism.  Conservatism, she stated, was about “a belief in freedom, in fair play and the great potential of the British people.”  She was “not interested in how many two-for-one offers” a person bought from the supermarket or “how you spend your spare time, or in virtue signalling.”

What did interest her was attacking the “anti-growth coalition”, a mysterious cabal that has it in for the British economy.  They comprised Labor, the Liberal Democrats, and the Scottish Nationalist Party, not to mention the unions, the talking heads, the Brexit deniers, Extinction rebellion and “some of the people we had in the hall earlier.”

This was a coalition on the warpath, spreading its wings, busying itself wanting more taxes and restraining economic gain.  And they would dare express such views in the BBC offices.  To combat such forces, she offered an unconvincing, managerially massaged formula: growth, growth and growth.  Explaining the decision to reverse the scrapping of the 45p rate of income tax as something of a distraction, Truss insisted that low taxes was the way to go.  Stamp duty, the basic rate of income tax, and the corporate tax rate would be cut, while the rise in national insurance would be reversed.

In trying to sound chummier with voters, she went for the personal touch. “I have fought to get where I am today.”  She had “juggled” her career while raising her two daughters.  She had “seen people left with no hope turning to drugs” and “families struggling to put food on the table.”  Interestingly enough, the period during which these things took place was one marked by divisive, ruinous Tory rule.

A peculiar touch came with recalling what seemed to be a particularly scarring incident.  Poor Liz recalled “as a young girl being presented on a plane with a ‘Junior Air Hostess’ badge.  Meanwhile, my brothers were given ‘Junior Pilot’ badges.  It wasn’t the only time in my life that I have been treated differently for being female or for not fitting in.”  Never fear, it made the psychologically wounded aspirant “determined”.

The awfulness of the dull display would have been more complete had it not been interrupted by two young boisterous women from Greenpeace holding the yellow sign sporting the words “Who Voted For This?”  This galvanised the conference attendees, who managed to turn on the protestors with envigored venom.

In the end, the words from Truss hardly mattered, their inconsequential sprinkles vanishing down the drainpipe of vacant rhetoric.  There was no plan for generating actual economic growth.  There was nothing to address the one fundamental problem the UK faces: that it invests too little.

For Iain Martin, writing in The Times, it would have made little difference even if the speech had been the movingly equivalent version of the Gettysburg Address, or something like the Sermon on the Mount.  “[I]t would not have shifted the underlying reality.”  That reality entailed one unmissable fact: the new Conservative leader is simply not liked.

Senior market analyst at Hargreaves Lansdown, Susannah Streeter, humourlessly suggested that Truss’s mention of one word three times did little to sway things.  “She may have hoped that her triple promise of growth would have calmed markets further but with nothing new to offer on the table, her words have not had the desired effect so far.”

The Truss Disaster Show has even left a number of conservatives worried, even panicked.   According to Paul Goodman, editor of Conservative Home, she has been left with no good options.  Sticking to her mini-Budget measures would guarantee defeat in the Commons, thereby eroding her authority.  Abandoning them would have much the same effect.

The Spectator has also been running a number of querying meditations and the decline and fall of the new PM.  “There’s something not entirely grown up about the Prime Minister,” Lloyd Evans suggests. “She has a permanent air of naïve euphoria – like a bouncy new teacher taking the class on a jolly exciting trip.”

Barely into her prime ministership, Truss has laid the basis for its demise.  When she and her party return to Westminster, the sense of vultures circling will be palpable.  While recent years tell us that polls are nonsensical excursions of fancy, rarely to be trusted, it is hard to sense that the current figures are off.  Should they remain at their current levels, a massacre at the ballot box is in the making.

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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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***

Southern Serbia’s autonomous province of Kosovo and Metochia (KosMet) has been subject to a gradual, but a permanent change of its demographic content during the time of Titoslavia (Socialist Yugoslavia, 1945−1991). Three principal factors were crucial to the drastic demographic change in this Serbian province in favor of ethnic (Muslim) Albanians and at the expense of ethnic (Christian Orthodox) Serbs and Montenegrins.

Demographic explosion

First and the most important has been the demographic explosion, due to the enormous birth rate of Albanians. In the situation when this trend on the global scale was in the opposite direction, with even African countries diminishing their birth rate, the only European regions with breeding out of all proportions, have been Albania and KosMet. In a comprehensive article in Newsweek,[1] entitled “Demographic Bomb Is No Longer As It Used To Be”, it has been estimated that by 2050 the only regions with more than 2 children per woman will be the Caribbean Islands, Pakistan, Eastern Guinea, and African countries (except for North and South Africa). And one region in Europe – KosMet.

Analyzing the world situation, the author writes:

“If the figures are correct, they signify that almost half of the world population lives in the countries whose demographic regime is situated below the replacement level: comments Ebershtadt”.

Nevertheless, there are noticeable exceptions. In Europe, Albania and Kosovo make even more children. Asia has the pockets of the large natality, with Mongolia, Pakistan, and the Philippines. Saudi Arabia represents the birth rate largest in the world (5.7), after Palestinian Territories (5.9) and Yemen (7.2). However, some countries have some surprises in store: an Arab Muslim state Tunisia has fallen below the reproduction threshold.

It is noticed that during Titoslavia, the birthrate in Albania was noticeably lower than on KosMet. How to explain this, since in both regions ethnic Albanians constitute the overwhelming majority?

Albania is an independent state, responsible for her own wellbeing. The uncontrollable rise in population implies more hungry mouths, more unemployed, more public expenditures for social needs, etc. But what is unfavorable for a responsible, sovereign state appears favorable for the society which relies on the rest of the state it lives in. The more populous the ethnic minority is, the more convincing demands for financial and other supports are. The more children in the family, the less income per capita is, and again the more justifiable demands for public financial help. However, this cannot continue ad infinitum, of course.  Once the final goal has been achieved, the secession realized (in the case of KosMet in 1999), the logic takes the opposite direction – family planning. The logic: “make children in the evening and submit the bill to the state in the morning” does not work any longer, for this is your own state. That is exactly what is going on in present-day Albania.

Immigration from Albania & emigration to Central Serbia

Second, it was the influx (illegal) of ethnic Albanians from neighboring Albania into KosMet (and partially into Yugoslav Macedonia), both the migrant slow and steady and those termed as metanastatic movements. The first immigrant phenomenon appears slow and has effects which reveal along centuries, just like the high-rate natality effect. The second is noticeable and has profound psychological effects on the indigenous population, in this case, the Serbs and Montenegrins. It provokes massive moving out of the autochthonous inhabitants, mainly into Central Serbia. The rate of this migration deserves particular attention, for this reveals more than any of the political and demagogical “explanations”.

It has been noticed since this phenomenon has been observed and followed statistically that the rate of outflow migration appears constant in time. What does this fact signify? Central Serbia outnumbers the Serb population on KosMet by more than an order of magnitude. Equally, the area of Serbia is almost an order of magnitude larger than KosMet. Now, suppose that all Serbs (and non-Albanians, for that matter) were willing to quit KosMet (voting by feet, as some Western political commentators were eager to emphasize while describing emigration from Milošević’s Serbia), their number on KosMet would diminish exponentially, for the number of emigrants would depend solely on the number of the existing at the spot. However, the number of emigrants depends on the possibility of the external reservoir to absorb the influx, too. The constant rate of emigration means that Central Serbia cannot absorb the immigrants all at once, but only gradually since its capacity is large but finite. That is, had Serbia been many times larger, the number of non-Albanians on KosMet would have been zero by now.

Suppression

Third, the question arises naturally, the question above questions, as legitimate as forbidden: Which kind of people were those “suppressed” on KosMet when the other population flees from them? Or put it in this way: Who was suppressing whom?

It is so far presented the global phenomena, as the general frame for the depopulation of KosMet from non-Albanians and overpopulation of the ethnic-Albanians (the Shqiptars as the Albanians are calling themselves). Now it has to be turned to the mechanism which is responsible for this effect as the third and probably the focal reason for the drastic demographic change in KosMet during the lifetime of Titoslavia – suppression. For the sake of clarity, it has to be distinguished two principal strategies, as used by the (newcomers) Albanians (Shqiptars) for taking over land and estate from the rest of KosMet (autochtonous) population – the Serbs and the Montenegrins (in fact, ethnolinguistic Serbs).

We start with quasi-violent tactics. In the villages with a mixed population, non-Albanian houses, or families, adjacent to Albanian ones, are living under constant pressure, even fear from their neighbors. Any conflict, however innocent, may easily pass into a dangerous one, regarding the nature of the Albanian ethos and their social units, tribe (fis) or otherwise. Since the members of the latter outnumber the former, and Albanians are, as a rule, well equipped with arms, ready to use them, the neighboring (non-Albanian) houses live in a permanent fear from eventual conflict and, therefore, the use of the arms by neighboring Albanians. The latter may arise for various reasons. Trespassing, livestock damages, “wrong look” at Albanian wife or daughter, etc., as the case in any rural community may arise. Any serious conflict may initiate a blood feud and this may be resolved by leaving the area only.[2]  Whatever the surface outlook may be, the relationship between populations who do not share the same ethos and are endowed with a different mentality is anything, but relaxed. It is the neighborhood where jokes have no place, since the sensitivity of Albanians, even regarding their own compatriots, is pathologically pronounced. Many families, finding this environment unsupportable simply sell the estate and move away (in Serb case to Central Serbia).

If it is not found in the above example any bad intentions, the other causes of emigration are not that innocent. The most frequent cause of moving away is a combined physical pressure and financial “encouragement” (in sum, suppression). As mentioned before, many inhabitants of underdeveloped and even moderately advanced economic regions in the former Yugoslavia used to work in West Europe, as “Gastarbeiter(s)” (guest workers). If one is traveling through Serbia’s countryside, for instance, he/she will notice a high percentage of new houses, usually unfinished. They are property of the Gastarbeiter(s), who plan to complete those constructions when returning definitely to the homeland (with cash and pensions). The rationale for this economic mismatch between the homeland and advanced Western society is mainly the disproportion between the nominal and real values of the currencies. One Deutsche Mark – DM (now one Euro) in West Europe, values in Serbia, for instance, as five DM (Euros) or something like that. This disproportion appears considerably more pronounced on KosMet. Since the most vigorous members of non-Albanian families have already left their homes, either moving to towns or simply to Central Serbia, the remaining Serbs are not in a position to compete with Albanians (i.e., KosMet’s Albanian Gastarbeiter(s) and their families) in financial terms.

The general stratagem

The general stratagem for overtaking non-Albanian land in KosMet appeared, in fact, like this:

• Initial stage: If the village appears purely non-Albanian, several Albanian families join the money and offer to the most prominent house in the village a considerable amount, exceeding several times its real economic value at that time on the market. The target family resists for some time, but after persistent offerings and usually psychological and even physical suppression, it usually gives up and sells the estate, moves to Central Serbia, and buys a much bigger estate.
• Middle stage: The next target house is offered a somewhat smaller amount and the procedure is repeated with an increased level of suppression.
• Final stage: As the number of remaining (Serb and Montenegrin) families diminishes, the (Albanian) buyers offer ever less amount and the price goes below the economic one that is followed by in many cases very brutal suppression. In the final stage, estates are sold for symbolic prices, and the village is emptied from the “alien peasants” (of Serb and Montenegrin origin). Consequently, the larger part of KosMet has been evacuated from the “undesirable inhabitants” (who moved to Central Serbia).

It is needless to say that in the case of places with already mixed populations the process is much easier and faster. In fact, in many cases, it was a spontaneous leaving homes and moving away from the troublesome environment. It is the common case that when talking with Albanians, ordinary people, and political activists alike, that the evacuation of KosMet by the indigenous (Serbo-Montenegrin) population is explained by the desire of the latter to move to the more prosperous regions (of Central Serbia), for purely economic reasons.  In this way, two aims are achieved. First, it implies the poverty of KosMet, and second the free choice of those who leave the region. Since such an explanation has been on the market for decades, it obviously sells well among the “international community”. Otherwise, such a cynical argument would be cut off by any serious interlocutor. However, none of the latter has asked those Albanians, who keep on blaming non-Albanians in Serbia for suppression, even torture as: Why don’t they (Albanians) leave KosMet for a better place of life, like their country of origin, Albania? Of course, none has illusions that the attitude of the foreign leaders is based on insufficient acquaintance with the actual situation.

This stratagem has been applied not only on KosMet, but everywhere in Serbia where ethnic Albanians are present in rural areas, including the so-called Preševo valley (Bujanovac, Preševo, and Medveđa in Central Serbia neighboring North-East KosMet). All these counties were predominantly inhabited by non-Albanians, in 1945, when KosMet was constituted as the autonomous region, but now only in Medveđa the Serbs are still the majority. The state of Serbia tried to prevent this illegitimate taking over of non-Albanian (Serbian) land by posing in the 1980s and 1990s the law of non-transfer of the real estate property (the land) between different ethnic partners (Serb-Albanian), but this measure has had little effect. Many non-Albanians simply take money without recording the transfer before the court. At the moment it is almost impossible to estimate whose legally is the land on KosMet and in the Preševo valley. Presumably, this domino effect is operative in other regions where ethnic Albanians live in noticeable numbers, as in the western parts of North Macedonia. Persistent bargain offers combined with intimidations, like burning haystacks, killing live stocks, dogs, etc., cannot fail to produce desired effect – moving away from wild (Albanian) neighbors.

Xenophobia

Moving where to? Living in such an environment, isolated from the rest of the world, including Central Serbia, those unfortunate people have acquired many attributes of Albanians themselves. Settling down in Central Serbia, by buying land or house/flat, they find themselves apart from the local population, who treat them as alien elements.[3] The principal effect of the isolation at KosMet has been the conservation of the ethos and folklore. In fact, these Serbs from KosMet represent the best-preserved traditional autochthonous culture of the Slavic population in Serbia and around. KosMet has proved to be the largest enervate of Serbian folklore and tradition in general. It is presumably this fact that makes the local population in Central Serbia suspicious, concerning the manner of the KosMet immigrants. This conservation phenomenon appears common to all Dinaric regions, but KosMet was the national, cultural, political, and historic core of Serbia and it was not for the physical geography that the retardation took place, but due to the human extraneous element, as mentioned above.

We should stress here that this effect hits not only Serbs but any non-Albanian ethnicity in KosMet. The latter have been moving from KosMet continuously, as well as from the western parts of North Macedonia. A typical example is the village of Janjina, very near to Priština and Gračanica, inhabited entirely by the Croats. The later have completely abandoned the village at the beginning of the Albanian (the Kosovo Liberation Army) rebellion (terrorism acts) in February 1998 and have moved to Croatia. The same applies to Roma and other “ethnic minorities”, like the so-called Egyptians,[4] Ashkalias, Turks, and Muslim Bosniaks.[5]  It is the xenophobia that is creating a driving force of the Albanians (in Albania, North Macedonia, and KosMet alike) that is feeling uneasy in the close contact with other nationalities.

Nevertheless, the situation in urban areas is technically different but equally uneasy. The older Albanian generations, aware of the historicity of their non-Albanian neighbors and cultural heritage it implies, are reluctant to mix with the human environment. The young generations, on their part, rising with the meteoric speed in number, experience the rest of the non-Albanian urban population as an unpleasant perturbation. It was a stunning impression for the European visitors to KosMet to see the segregation between Albanian and non-Albanian youth walking in the evening on the streets (the so-called “Corso”) in KosMet towns, including very Priština. The same applied to cafes, pubs, etc., where “ethnically pure public” was present only. As the number of non-Albanians decreased, the ever-smaller communities in towns found themselves isolated and “stranger at home”. It was this psychological pressure that prompted non-Albanian youth to leave KosMet, even before the open hostilities started in February 1998 – the Kosovo War.

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Dr. Vladislav B. Sotirović is a Former university professor in Vilnius, Lithuania. He is a Research Fellow at the Center for Geostrategic Studies. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

Notes

[1] Translated from Courrier International, No. 149, March 2005, p. 44.

[2] In fact, many families in Central Serbia have arrived there from Dinaric regions (Montenegro, Herzegovina) in order to escape blood feud, especially in the 19^th century.

[3] The same was and is with the Serb refugees from Croatia to Central Serbia from 1971 onward. They are in many cases called “Croats” by autochthonous people of Central Serbia. However, the Serbs from KosMet are never called “Albanians” by the local authochthonous population of Central Serbia but rather “Kosovars”.

[4] What relationship is of this minority (in fact, Roma) with the Egyptians proper is difficult to determine now, but this is of minor importance to us here.

[5] The Balkans is not only the melting pot of various ethnicities but also the rich source of new ones, real and imaginary.

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***

As recently as late September 2022, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention director Dr. Rochelle Walensky claimed it’s perfectly safe for pregnant and nursing women, and those planning a pregnancy, to get the COVID jab. According to Walensky, “There’s NO bad time to get a COVID vaccine”

Meanwhile, Pfizer’s data show the risk of miscarriage could be as high as 87.5%

Safety for nursing mothers was not evaluated in the initial clinical trials, and subsequent investigations have been scarce. In mid-July 2021, a small study found no trace of mRNA vaccine in breastmilk, but a September 2022 study did find mRNA in breastmilk for up to 48 hours post-jab

These studies did not analyze the breastmilk for the presence of spike protein. Even if the mRNA is only transferable during the first 48 hours post-jab, that does not mean it’s safe to breastfeed thereafter. The breastmilk could potentially also transfer spike protein produced by the mother’s body, and that production, we know, can continue for at least four months, and likely longer

Walensky also continues to claim the COVID shots have no adverse effects on fertility, even though birth rates have plummeted since the rollout of the shots, raising alarm across the world. A Pfizer-BioNTech rat study found the injection more than doubled the incidence of infertility

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There is NO bad time to get a #COVID19 vaccine. Whether you are thinking about having a baby, currently pregnant, recently delivered your baby, or are breastfeeding, it is safe for you to get vaccinated. Protect yourself and your growing family: https://t.co/bfOV5VzBpq. pic.twitter.com/w40FqGV5TL

— Rochelle Walensky, MD, MPH (@CDCDirector) September 30, 2021

Despite mountains of evidence showing the COVID jabs are a lethal disaster that shouldn’t be given to anyone, let alone pregnant women, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention director Dr. Rochelle Walensky continues to spread the death cult gospel, boldly claiming:1 2

“There’s NO bad time to get a COVID vaccine. Whether you’re thinking about having a baby, currently pregnant, recently delivered your baby, or are breastfeeding, it is safe for you to get vaccinated. Protect yourself and your growing family.”

In that same interview, Walensky also spoke out of both sides of her mouth when she added that pregnant women who develop COVID symptoms should get monoclonal antibodies to prevent severe infection. If that’s the case, why do they need the mRNA jab, which we know doesn’t prevent infection?

 Cover-Up 

The fact that Walensky keeps insisting pregnant women get this experimental injection is beyond unconscionable. In her interview,3 she insists the data supports it, but where is that data? They must be hidden somewhere, because the data that are actually available to the public tell a very different story.

Pfizer’s own data show the risk of miscarriage could be as high as 87.5% — a shocking conclusion reviewed in an August 20, 2022, Substack article4 by Dr. Pierre Kory.

Kory, after diving into one of the Pfizer data dumps, brought attention to Section 5.3.6, Page 12, of a document called “Cumulative Analysis of Post-Authorization Adverse Event Reports,” which states there were 270 pregnancies in vaccinated women during the first 12 weeks of the vaccine campaign.

No outcome was provided for 238 of those women, which leaves 32 pregnancies for which the outcome was reported. However, even for those 32, outcomes were only specified for 29: 26 ended in some form of miscarriage, two were premature births with neonatal death (meaning the babies died shortly after being born early), and one birth was normal.

Kory points out that the report is nebulous and unclear about the other three pregnancy outcomes, but were we to count those as live births, we’re looking at 28 deaths out of 32 pregnancies, which means 87.5% of pregnant women (for whom they had data) lost their babies.

For the record, the failure to record and report the outcomes of 238 out of 274 pregnancies during a drug trial is simply unheard of. It’s shockingly unethical and criminally fraudulent. And the fact that both the Food and Drug Administration and the CDC accepted this, and claim there’s “no evidence” of harm to pregnant women and their babies is proof positive of reprehensible malfeasance.

2021 — ‘No mRNA Found in Breastmilk’

I also sincerely doubt the FDA and CDC have corroborating data to support the COVID jab for nursing mothers, seeing how that was not part of the initial clinical trials, and follow-up has been scarce.

In mid-July 2021, Reuters reported5 that “no trace of mRNA vaccine” could be found in breastmilk, according to one small study.6 Based on analysis of 13 breastmilk samples obtained from seven breastfeeding women who had received an mRNA COVID jab, the researchers concluded that while antibodies are known to pass from mother to child via breastmilk, no mRNA is transferred through this route. As reported by Reuters at the time:7

“The World Health Organization recommends that breastfeeding mothers be vaccinated against COVID-19 and does not advise stopping breastfeeding afterward.

Many mothers have declined vaccination or discontinued breastfeeding due to concern that the vaccine may alter breast milk. Writing in JAMA Pediatrics,8 the authors of the new study said more data is needed to better estimate the vaccines’ effect on breastfeeding.

But the new results ‘strengthen current recommendations that the mRNA vaccines are safe in lactation, and that lactating individuals who receive the COVID vaccine should not stop breastfeeding,’ coauthor Dr. Stephanie Gaw of the University of California, San Francisco, said in a statement.”

2022 — mRNA Found in Breastmilk

Fast-forward to September 22, 2022, and mRNA has been — you guessed it — detected in breastmilk or 48 hours post-jab. The study, also published in JAMA Pediatrics, notes:9

“The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends offering the COVID-19 mRNA vaccines to breastfeeding individuals, although the possible passage of vaccine mRNAs in breast milk resulting in infants’ exposure at younger than 6 months was not investigated.

This study investigated whether the COVID-19 vaccine mRNA can be detected in the expressed breast milk (EBM) of lactating individuals receiving the vaccination within 6 months after delivery.”

Here, 11 lactating mothers were enrolled. The first breastmilk samples were collected before getting the shot, to establish a baseline control. Samples were then collected after receiving either the Moderna or Pfizer shots, for up to six months post-delivery. As explained by the authors:

“A total of 131 EBM [expressed breastmilk] samples were collected 1 hour to 5 days after vaccine administration. Extracellular vesicles (EVs) were isolated in EBM using sequential centrifugation, and the EV concentrations were determined by ZetaView (Analytik).

The presence of COVID-19 vaccine mRNA in different milk fractions (whole EBM, fat, cells, and supernatant EVs) was assayed using 2-step quantitative reverse transcriptase–polymerase chain reaction. The vaccine detection limit was 1 pg/mL of EBM.

Of 11 lactating individuals enrolled, trace amounts of BNT162b2 and mRNA-1273 COVID-19 mRNA vaccines were detected in 7 samples from 5 different participants at various times up to 45 hours postvaccination.

The mean (SD) yield of EVs isolated from EBM was 9.110 (5.010) particles/mL, and the mean (SD) particle size was 110.0 (3.0) nm. The vaccine mRNA appears in higher concentrations in the EVs than in whole milk. No vaccine mRNA was detected in prevaccination or postvaccination EBM samples beyond 48 hours of collection …

The limitations of this study include the relatively small sample size and the lack of functional studies demonstrating whether detected vaccine mRNA is translationally active. Also, we did not test the possible cumulative vaccine mRNA exposure after frequent breastfeeding in infants.

We believe it is safe to breastfeed after maternal COVID-19 vaccination. However, caution is warranted about breastfeeding children younger than 6 months in the first 48 hours after maternal vaccination until more safety studies are conducted.

In addition, the potential interference of COVID-19 vaccine mRNA with the immune response to multiple routine vaccines given to infants during the first 6 months of age needs to be considered. It is critical that lactating individuals be included in future vaccination trials to better evaluate the effect of mRNA vaccines on lactation outcomes.”

Does Spike Protein Transfer Through Breastmilk? 

Now, it’s important to keep in mind that mRNA and spike protein are two different things. The mRNA is what instructs your cells to produce the spike protein. When a mother breastfeeds in the days after her injection, she may be transferring the actual mRNA into her newborn infant, whose cells might then begin to produce spike protein.

However, this study did not analyze the breastmilk for the presence of spike protein. Even if the mRNA is only transferable during the first 48 hours post-jab, that does not mean it’s safe to breastfeed thereafter.

The breastmilk could potentially also transfer spike protein produced by the mother’s body, and that production, we know, can continue for at least four months, and likely longer.

Spike Antibodies Transfer and That Could Be a Bad Thing

Studies10 have shown SARS-CoV-2 antibodies, i.e., antibodies against the spike protein being produced by the COVID jab, do transfer through breastmilk, and contrary to popular belief, that may not be a good thing. Why?

Because it may trigger immune imprinting. As discussed in “Original Antigenic Sin — The Hidden Danger of COVID Shots,” immune imprinting, also known as original antigenic sin, describes a process in which the first antibodies produced against a given virus starts to predominate, making antibodies against newer strains less and less effective at neutralizing the virus.11

In short, the fear is that repetitive boosting might make you less and less able to ward off new variants, and thus more prone to symptomatic infection. If a baby is exposed to anti-spike antibodies every day for months on end, will that render them more prone to infection as the SARS-CoV-2 virus mutates? We don’t know, but it’s a concern that can’t simply be dismissed with a shoulder shrug.

Fertility Is Clearly Being Impacted 

Walensky also continues to cling to the claim that the COVID shots have no adverse effects on fertility, even though real-world data from around the world are screaming that something has gone terribly wrong. Birth rates have plummeted since the rollout of the shots, raising alarm across the world.

In Germany, birth rates were 10% below the annual norm during the first quarter of 2022.12 Sweden was a 14% drop that same quarter.13 14 According to Gunnar Anderson, a Swedish professor in demographics at Stockholm University, “We have never seen anything like this before, that the bottom just falls out in just one quarter.”15

Between January and April 2022, Switzerland’s birth rate was 15% lower than expected, the U.K.’s was down by 10% and Taiwan’s was down 23%.16 17 18 Hungary saw a 20% drop in birth rate during January 2022, compared to January 2021.19

In a July 5, 2022, Counter Signal article, Mike Campbell reported that in the five countries with the highest COVID jab uptake, fertility has dropped by an average of 15.2%, whereas the five countries with the lowest COVID jab uptake have seen an average reduction of just 4.66%. Below is a chart from Birth Gauge20 on Twitter comparing live birth data for 2021 and 2022 in a large number of countries.

Click here to enlarge

Similar trends are seen in the U.S. as well, which Walensky ought to be well aware of. Provisional data from North Dakota show a 10% decline in February 2022, 13% reduction in March and an 11% reduction in April, compared to the corresponding months in 2021.21

Other Disturbing Evidence

In addition to real-world data showing fertility is suddenly in freefall, there’s scientific evidence suggesting the shots could affect fertility in both women and men.

“A Pfizer-BioNTech rat study found the injection more than doubled the incidence of infertility.”

For example, a Japanese biodistribution study for Pfizer’s jab showed the spike protein from the shots accumulate in female ovaries and male testes,22 23 and there’s credible concern that the COVID jabs will cross-react with syncytin (a retroviral envelope protein) and reproductive genes in sperm, ova and placenta in ways that may impair fertility and reproductive outcomes.

A Pfizer-BioNTech rat study24 found the injection more than doubled the incidence of preimplantation loss (i.e., the risk of infertility), and led to mouth/jaw malformations, gastroschisis (a birth defect of the abdominal wall) and abnormalities in the right-sided aortic arch and cervical vertebrae.25 26

We’re also seeing a sudden uptick in infant mortality. The Exposé27 recently highlighted data from Scotland, showing neonatal deaths in March 2022 were 119% higher above the annual norm.

Male fertility is also under attack by these bioweapons. Israeli research28 29 published in the journal Andrology found the Pfizer COVID jab temporarily but significantly impairs male fertility, dropping sperm concentration by 15.4% and total motile count by 22.1%, compared to baseline pre-jab.

Both eventually recovered, some three months after the last jab, but if you destroy a man’s sperm for three months every time he gets a COVID shot, you’re significantly reducing the probability of him fathering a child for a good part of any given year and the stats reviewed above support this.

Remember, the mRNA shots are recommended at three-month intervals for the original series, and boosters are now being recommended at varying intervals thereafter. In the video below, Amy Kelly, project director for the Daily Clout’s Pfizer document analysis team, reviews this study and other post-jab male fertility concerns.30

End the COVID Shots Now, Before It’s Too Late to Recover 

As noted by Kory in his August 20, 2022, Substack article:31

“… when a new medicine or device is introduced, you must first assume any adverse effects or deaths reported to be related to the intervention until proven otherwise …

We must assume the vaccines are impacting fertility unless some other provable or credible explanations for a sudden drop in month to month birth rates. So stop the shots until you can prove they are not …

Too many young people dying,32 too many becoming disabled, too many pregnancies resulting in fetal or neonatal death … and now we find out that if we continue with this vaccine obsession, they will not be replaced. This is a humanitarian catastrophe heaped atop the one caused by dangerous gain-of-function research.

When will the world wake up to this rapidly unfolding horror? For those of us who know what is going on, it is hard not to feel helpless as we are forced to watch increasingly apparent and widespread needless death. But we will continue to try to get these truths out despite the massive censorship and propaganda overwhelming the globe.

We have a moral and ethical obligation and take that responsibility seriously no matter what befalls us. Stop the vaccines, now. And if we can’t stop them, we must try to convince everyone we know to no longer agree to get vaccinated. Their lives and our future depend on it.”

At this point, it appears we’re looking at a certain depopulation event. The question then is, are you willing to accept the risks? Are you willing to risk your fertility, even if only temporarily? Are you willing to risk the life of your baby? Are you willing to risk your own? If not, the answer is simple. Don’t take the jab, and if you’ve already taken one or two (or three), never take another.

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Guest is Alexandra (Sasha) Latypova, former pharmaceutical industry executive with 25 years of experience in pharmaceutical research and development. She started a number of successful companies — primarily focused on creating and reviewing clinical trials. She was born in Ukraine and moved to the United States in the 1990s.

This session is about all safeguards and regulations that the public has relied on for years and assumed to be in place for pharmaceutical products that have been effectively removed for mRNA-based vaccines. She found the reason how this is even possible: she obtained Department of Defense contracts for COVID vaccines, therapeutics, diagnostics, and all related products.

Pfizer and Moderna violated all rules because the products they are making are, according to the contracts, manufactured under defense prototype agreements, with no accountability and no real requirements for safety or efficacy. The DOD contracts remove all liability as long as manufacturers and everyone involved “follow orders” under PREP Act.

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Two new studies  — one about thyroid eye disease and one about encephalitis —  highlighted negative health outcomes associated with COVID-19 vaccination, and a third study suggested the COVID-19 vaccine provided only 15% protection against the risk of “long COVID.”

Taken together, the studies highlight the fact that COVID-19 vaccines are associated with serious risks for some, while their protective benefit has been overestimated.

Dr. Peter Kally reported on a small case series at last month’s American Society of Ophthalmic Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery’s fall scientific symposium.

Kally, of Consultants in Ophthalmic and Facial Plastic Surgery and Beaumont Eye Institute in Michigan, concluded ophthalmologists should monitor patients with thyroid eye disease if they receive a COVID-19 vaccine because the shot may trigger thyroid eye disease flare.

“It stands to reason that the immune response that you may get from a COVID vaccine or any vaccination may also trigger an autoimmune response,” Kally said, adding, “COVID vaccination is possibly associated with thyroid eye disease reactivation.”

The case series, Kally said, involved five patients — four women and one man, average age of 60.2 years — who were seen between March 2020 and March 2022 at a single medical center for thyroid eye disease reactivation following their COVID-19 vaccination.

Three patients received the Pfizer shot, one received the Moderna vaccine and one received the Johnson & Johnson vaccine.

The patients, who had received prior evaluations, including thyroid-specific tests and examinations, presented with worsening thyroid eye disease after their vaccinations.

The average presentation was 43 days after vaccination, with a range of 10-65 days, he noted.

The post-vaccination labs showed elevation of thyroid-stimulating immunoglobulin (TSI) with an average increase of 5 points. “TSI was a marker for current disease activity,” Kally explained.

“Correlation does not prove causation with any of this,” he added … “but this report is in alignment with other reports we have seen.”

Vaccine-related encephalitis and myocarditis contributed to man’s death, autopsy shows

A case report published Oct. 1 in the journal Vaccines presented the autopsy results of a 76-year-old man with Parkinson’s disease who died three weeks after his third COVID-10 shot. The autopsy showed that vaccine-related encephalitis and myocarditis were “contributors to the death.”

Report author Dr. Michael Mörz, of the Georg Schmorl Institute of Pathology at the Municipal Hospital Dresden-Friedrichstadt, Germany, said, “The stated cause of death appeared to be a recurrent attack of aspiration pneumonia, which is indeed common in Parkinson’s disease.”

However, the detailed autopsy — done at the request of the patient’s family due to his “ambiguous symptoms” — revealed additional pathology, in particular necrotizing encephalitis and myocarditis.

Mörz added:

“A causal connection of these findings to the preceding COVID-19 vaccination was established by immunohistochemical demonstration of SARS-CoV-2 spike protein.”

The patient’s histopathological signs of myocarditis were “comparatively mild,” Mörz noted, however, the patient’s encephalitis had resulted in “significant multifocal necrosis and may well have contributed to the fatal outcome.”

Encephalitis often causes epileptic seizures — and the autopsy found the patient was biting his tongue at the time of death, suggesting he may have suffered a seizure. Prior research on other cases of COVID-19 vaccine-associated encephalitis with status epilepticus reported this occurring in other patients.

But Mörz’s case report, he said, was the first to show there was spike protein within the encephalitic lesions of the patient that could only be attributed to the COVID-19 vaccine — and not a possible COVID-19 infection.

If a person suffers a COVID-19 infection, two proteins show up in the tissue: spike protein and nucleocapsid protein.

“During an infection with the [COVID-19] virus, both proteins should be expressed and detected together,” Mörz explained.

“On the other hand, the gene-based COVID-19 vaccines encode only the spike protein and therefore, the presence of spike protein only (but no nucleocapsid protein) in the heart and brain of the current case can be attributed to vaccination rather than to infection,” he concluded, noting that this matched the patient’s health history, which included three COVID-19 vaccinations but no positive COVID-19 lab tests or clinical diagnoses of a COVID-19 infection.

Mörz added:

“Since no nucleocapsid protein could be detected, the presence of spike protein must be ascribed to vaccination rather than to [COVID-19] viral infection.”

Mörz also noted that the clinical history of the case showed “some remarkable events” in correlation to his COVID-19 vaccinations, further suggesting that the vaccine-related encephalitis and myocarditis contributed to the man’s death.

Upon receiving a first dose of the AstraZeneca vaccine May 2021, the man “experienced cardiovascular symptoms which needed medical care and from which he recovered only slowly.”

Then in July 2021, the man received a second COVID-19 shot — this time with the Pfizer vaccine — and suffered a “sudden onset of marked progression” of his Parkinson’s disease symptoms, leading to “severe motor impairment” and a recurrent need to use a wheelchair from which he “never fully recovered.”

Finally, in December 2021, the man received his third COVID-19 vaccination — again with the Pfizer shot. Two weeks later while eating dinner, he “suddenly collapsed.”

“Remarkably,” Mörz said, “he did not show any coughing or other signs of food aspiration but just fell from his chair. This raises the question of whether this sudden collapse was really due to aspiration pneumonia.”

Mörz continued:

“After intense resuscitation, he recovered from this more or less, but one week later, he again suddenly collapsed silently while taking his meal. After successful but prolonged resuscitation attempts, he was transferred to the hospital and directly set into an artificial coma but died shortly thereafter.”

Commenting on Kally’s case series report and Mörz’s case report, Dr. Madhava Setty, senior science editor for The Defender, said,

“We are still in an embryonic stage when it comes to understanding how the SARS-COV-2 virus and the mRNA ‘vaccines’ affect our physiology. This is why these kinds of case series and reports are important.”

Setty added:

“In medicine, it is the ‘anecdotal’ stories that lead to case reports and series which lead to larger observational studies that help assess risk vs. benefit.

“With regard to thyroid eye disease ‘flare-ups’ following COVID-19 vaccination, this potential correlation would be vital to those who suffer these conditions.

“The case of encephalitis and myocarditis has unequivocally demonstrated that the vaccine was responsible for this patient’s death. The risks of post-jab sequelae like these are still impossible to quantify even nearly two years out from the vaccine roll-out because of the lack of any long-term safety data from the trials.”

Additionally, Setty said — referencing a study published May 25 in Nature Medicine — that the “potential risks of non-COVID-19 complications from the vaccine must be weighed against the still unknown benefit of the vaccine in preventing ‘long COVID,’ which may be more meager than advertised.”

Vaccine provides only 15% likelihood of protection against long COVID

The Nature Medicine study involved more than 13 million people and reported that vaccination against COVID-19 appeared to lower the risk of “long COVID” after infection by only about 15%.

“Long COVID” refers to illness that persists for weeks or months after a COVID-19 infection.

The study authors, Dr. Ziyad Al-Aly, a nephrologist at Veteran Affairs (VA) Saint Louis Health Care System in St Louis, Missouri, and his colleagues, examined VA health records from January to December 2021 of three groups of people: about 34,000 vaccinated people who had breakthrough COVID-19 infections, about 113,000 people were infected but did not receive the vaccine and more than 13 million people who were not infected — making this the largest cohort study on long COVID to date, reported Nature.

Based on their analyses, the authors said that vaccination seemed to reduce the likelihood of long COVID for those who were vaccinated and had a breakthrough infection by only about 15%. That number is substantially lower than smaller previous studies showed.

It’s also much lower than a U.K. study that used data from 1.2. Million U.K. smartphone users and reported the odds of having COVID symptoms for 28 days or more after a post-vaccination infection were roughly halved by getting two doses of the COVID-19 vaccine.

The authors compared symptoms such as brain fog and fatigue in vaccinated versus unvaccinated people for up to six months after they tested positive for COVID-19 and found no difference in type or severity of symptoms between the vaccinated versus unvaccinated.

“The findings suggest that vaccination before infection confers only partial protection in the post-acute phase of the disease,” the authors concluded.

Reliance on the vaccine as “a sole mitigation strategy may not optimally reduce long-term health consequences” of COVID-19 inflection, they added.

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

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Amid the upcoming Russian winter military campaign, the Kiev regime is in a hurry to advance and repel Russian units from strategically important settlements.

In the north-east of the country, the advance of Ukrainian forces has almost stopped in recent days.

Fighting reached the territory of the LPR. The Ukrainian Army is advancing on the left bank of the Oskol River. Most recently, they claimed control of the villages of Borovskaya Andreevka and Boguslavka which is a clear sign that they are strengthening their foothold for an attack in the eastern direction.

At the moment, the main target of the Ukrainian military is the town of Svatovo. In the case of success, they are expected to move forward to the east towards Starobelsk and then attack the Severodonetsk-Lisichansk agglomeration.

The town of Kremennaya remains under Russian control as well as the road leading to Svatovo. The Russian military is preparing for defense, reinforcing protective constructions near the town as well as around the Severodonetsk-Lisichansk agglomeration.

In the south of Ukraine, Ukrainian forces have forced Russian units to leave their positions in the northern part of the Kherson region. Russian forces in Olgino and adjacent settlements came under the threat of encirclement. Also, Russian troops left Davydov Brod, where there were fierce battles for two months.

The Russian Army is creating a new line of defense, avoiding the threat of falling into the cauldron due to the tactically successful Ukrainian offensive. The defensive positions of the Russian Army now pass along the Kostromka — Bruskinskoye — Borozenskoye— Mylovoye line.

Along the Dnieper River, Ukrainian units managed to reach the village of Dudchany where clashes are ongoing. Russian units blew up the bridge over the local reservoir and retreated to the southern part of the village. The main target of the Ukrainian military are the towns of Berislav and Novaya Kahovka located 50 kilometers to the north-east of the city of Kherson.

At the same time, Ukrainian forces continue probing actions west of the capital of the region, attacking in small groups the Russian positions near Posad-Pokrovskoe.

Ukrainian forces are also preparing an offensive in the Snigerevka area, transferring reinforcements there.

In an attempt to disrupt Russian military communications in the region, Ukrainians continued shelling the Antonovsky Bridge across the Dnieper River. On October 4, 6 missiles launched with Us-made HIMARS MLRS hit the bridge.

So far, the Ukrainian military has not begun a large-scale offensive on the city of Kherson. They are currently strengthening their positions, transferring reserves to the newly occupied areas. However, new large-scaled offensive operations are expected in the coming days, as Kiev has to hurry up amid reinforcement of the Russian grouping in the region by hundreds of recently mobilized servicemen.

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Vector politics in Ukraine has added new dimensions to the 222 day-old conflict.

Typically, any conflict behavior should end when a new balance of powers has been determined. But the ‘balancing of powers’ will not end until a balance is actually achieved – and evidence abounds that Ukraine is about to enter yet another ‘re-balancing.’ 

Russian Duma’s ratification of the annexation of four regions of Ukraine (Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics, as well as the Kherson and Zaporozhye Regions), and the adoption of the relevant laws thereof, creates a new dynamic and will take some time to create a new balance of forces on the ground within Ukraine. 

Meanwhile, the external environment is also phenomenally transforming. The deepening energy crisis in Europe following the sabotage of the Nord Stream gas pipelines becomes a serious contradiction. There is no knowing how it can be reconciled. 

Thus, a complex situation presents itself, as all this is also happening against the backdrop of a massive Russian military build-up around Ukraine in the Kharkov region and in the southern Black Sea region, with long convoys of armor reportedly heading toward Crimea from Russia.

Russia’s new borders

The Duma’s unanimous ratification of the accession of four regions to Russia on Monday was to be expected, the relevant legislation was duly ratified on Tuesday by the Federation Council (the upper house of the parliament), and possibly, President Putin too will sign off on the documents today, following which it will come into force. That is to say, as of October 5, the annexed Ukrainian regions will have become part of Russia. 

Importantly, the Duma has approved the government’s proposals on the establishment of the new regions’ borders, based on the delimitation of territories which “existed on the day of their establishment and accession to Russia.”

The relevant treaties outline that the borders adjacent to the territory of a foreign country will be Russia’s new state border. Plainly put, the old boundaries of the Soviet era are being restored in those regions. 

The determination of the Russian state boundaries has security implications. In the Donbass and Zaporozhye Regions, there are vast areas that still remain under the control of the Ukrainian forces. Liman city in Donetsk Republic was captured by the Ukrainian forces only three days ago. The Ukrainian incursions into Kherson continue. Heavy fighting is reported.  

Evidently, much unfinished business remains for Moscow to bring under control the “occupied” territories that previously formed part of Donetsk and Lugansk. The Zaporozhye Region (which also happens to be an important littoral region on the Azov Sea and forms a part of what Russians historically call “Novorossiya”), is another priority where the capital city of the oblast itself is not yet under Russian control. 

‘Nyet’ from NATO

In the emergent situation, Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky formally applied for Ukraine’s NATO membership on an expeditious basis, but within hours, the alliance poured cold water on that request, explaining that any decision will require support from all 30 member states.

It signals that there isn’t going to be any NATO intervention in Ukraine. Moscow will take note. The recent “loud thinking” about the use of nuclear weapons seems to have served its purpose. 

The US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan’s meeting with the head of Ukraine’s presidential office Andriy Yermak in Istanbul on Sunday was a low-key affair. The White House said Sullivan pledged Washington’s steadfast support for Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity and discussed with Yermak the situation at the Zaporozhye Nuclear Power Plant and Ukraine’s continued work with the United Nations to export food to the world.

The White House readout on President Joe Biden’s call with Zelensky on Monday mentioned a new $625 million security assistance package by Washington that includes additional weapons and equipment, including HIMARS, artillery systems and ammunition, and armored vehicles. Biden “pledged to continue supporting Ukraine as it defends itself from Russian aggression for as long as it takes.” 

Later, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said that the recent aid delivery would bring the overall cost of US military aid to Ukraine to more than $17.5 billion.

“Recent developments… only strengthens our resolve,” Blinken said in a statement on Tuesday. “We will continue to stand with the people of Ukraine.”

“The capabilities we are delivering are carefully calibrated to make the most difference on the battlefield and strengthen Ukraine’s hand at the negotiating table when the time is right,” he added. 

Revamping Russia’s strategy

On the other hand, the Russian military command will probably have to reset the parameters of the special military operations, since its forces will henceforth be safeguarding the country’s territorial integrity and sovereignty. What form its takes remains to be seen.

So far, the actual Russian deployment has been less than 100,000 troops. Most of the fighting was done by the militia groups such as fighters from Donbass and Chechnya and the Wagner Group of ex-special services personnel and other volunteers from Russia. 

Certainly, the induction of 300,000 troops with previous military experience will impact the overall military balance to Russia’s advantage. Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu has said that another 70,000 men have also volunteered, which will put the total strength of the additional forces at around 370,000.

Now, that is a huge increase. To get a sense of proportions, at the peak of the Vietnam War, the US deployment stood at around half a million troops. For the first time, Russia will have vast numerical superiority over Ukrainian forces. Therefore, it is entirely conceivable that the old pattern of “grinding” the Ukrainian forces may change and the objective will be to end the war quickly and decisively. 

The US decision to set up a command centre outside Ukraine (in Germany) seems to anticipate Russian attacks on command centres in Kiev and elsewhere with much bigger use of airpower, as in Syria. In fact, the new commander of the Western Military District Lt. Gen. Roman Berdnikov previously led the Russian intervention in Syria. 

Military experts anticipate that once autumn rains give way to the winter and the ground hardens, the Russian operations will intensify. Voices of dissent are heard lately within Russia that the war is meandering with no timeline as such. This may change. 

Plainly put, the point of no return is fast approaching from where Russia will have no alternative but to push for a regime change in Kiev and pave the way for an altogether new Ukrainian leadership that shakes off the vice-like Anglo-American grip, and is willing to settle with Russia. 

A Kafkaesque moment   

Unsurprisingly though, the attention in Europe is turning more and more towards the economic crisis with looming double-digit inflation and recession, which can lead to social unrest and political turmoil all across the continent. The growing public discontent is turning into protests in many European countries already. The crisis can only deepen once winter sets in. 

Conceivably, the shift in the popular mood may prompt the European governments to concentrate on their domestic issues rather than dabble in the Ukraine war. The most ardent votary of open-ended war with Russia is Britain, but even London is caught up in massive economic (and political) crises of its own. Prime Minister Liz Truss is fighting for political survival. The Conservatives have practically forfeited their mandate to rule. 

Germany’s predicament

Again, the centre-right Christian Democratic Union/Christian Social Union opposition bloc in the German Bundestag stalled a motion urging the government to “immediately” allow the export of German battle tanks and infantry fighting vehicles to Ukraine. Politico reported that “A vote on weapons deliveries in the Bundestag would have risked revealing fatal cracks in the government unity and could even have led to a defeat of (Chancellor Olaf) Scholz in parliament.”

On the other hand, the German government also faces mounting pressure from the Eastern European allies in recent weeks to drastically increase the scale and type of Berlin’s military support to Ukraine. 

The influential Foreign Policy magazine in Washington wrote last week,

“In the eyes of Berlin’s NATO allies in Eastern Europe, particularly the countries that border Russia, Germany, the economic and political power centre of Europe, isn’t doing nearly enough. And the longer it delays, the more it risks a long-term diplomatic fracture with those allies in the East.” 

But despite this pressure tactic, polls show that while some 70 percent of Germans are supportive of Ukraine generally, only 35 percent endorse stronger military support. 

In this situation, the sabotage of the Nord Stream gas pipeline dovetails into the energy crisis in Europe and threatens European countries with “de-industrialization.”

For Germany, in particular, the country’s economic model is riveted on the availability of abundant gas supplies from Russia, per long-term contracts, at cheap prices, through pipelines. Clearly, the sabotage of the Nord Stream has monumental implications. 

To be sure, whoever perpetrated that terrorist attack calculated shrewdly that Russian gas should not flow to Europe for the foreseeable future. The perennial fear in Washington is that a German-Russian proximity may develop if energy ties are restored. Besides, today, US oil companies are having a huge windfall of profits in the European energy market, replacing Russia, by selling LNG at five to six times the US domestic price. 

Preventing Russian-German reconciliation

What complicates matters is that Europe needs energy security in the short and medium term without also wrecking climate targets. It means heightened geopolitical sensitivity. The point is, Europe’s orderly energy transition away from fossil fuels critically needs Russian gas and was built on the earlier assumption that there would be cheap and plentiful natural gas. 

Arguably, Moscow kept hoping that Nord Stream would eventually be a catalyst to heal the rupture in German-Russian energy ties. Interestingly, on Monday, Russian energy giant Gazprom proposed to European gas customers that part of the damaged Nord Stream network could still transport fuel — but only on the newly constructed Nord Stream 2. Nord Stream 1 is virtually destroyed.  

A Gazprom statement in its Telegram account said that one of the three lines of the Nord Stream 2 remains unaffected and the gas giant has lowered the pressure to inspect the link for damage and potential leaks. Nord Stream 2 has a shipment capacity of 55 billion cubic meters per year, which means its line B could deliver as much as 27.5 billion cubic meters per year to Germany across the Baltic Sea.

However, the Nord Stream 2 requires EU approval, which is problematic given the tensions between Brussels and Moscow. These tensions may only increase if the EU approves the US-led decision by the G7 countries to impose a price cap on Russian oil. 

Most certainly, that is also Washington’s calculus — pin down Germany and keep Russia out. The spectre that haunts Washington is that Berlin may lose interest in the Ukraine war. The ascendancy of the Atlanticists in the echelons of power in Berlin in the most recent years – and their nexus with the virulently Russophobic EU bureaucrats in Brussels – has so far worked splendidly in Washington’s favor.

The EU is effectively over

But the ground beneath the feet is shifting, as the dramatic turn in Sweden and Italy’s politics has shown. 

Do not underestimate the “Meloni effect.” The heart of the matter is that the far-right forces invariably have more to offer to the electorate in times of insecurity and economic hardship.

In France too, President Macron is immobilized, lacking a parliamentary majority to legislate, and is being worn down by serial crises. As for Britain, the financial crisis triggered by the Chancellor of Exchequer Kwasi Kwarteng’s budget highlights fundamentally the scarcity of feasible alternative economic models. Sterling is in free fall. Two consecutive Tory administrations failed to come up with a post-Brexit model, while Labour never wanted Brexit. The Truss government is the last chance to get Brexit really done, but no-one is holding their breath. And then, the Deluge — events will intrude. 

What all this means is that the three main power centers within the Eurozone and Britain are finding it hard to escape the old, dying industrial world of the 20th century and this is not the best of time to take on the half-million strong Russian allied forces in Ukraine, the Biden Administration’s bravado notwithstanding. 

Do not lend credence to the inaugural summit of the European Political Community (EPC) in Prague on Wednesday bringing together the leaders of 27 EU member states and up to 17 non-EU countries – namely, the UK, Turkey, North Macedonia, Montenegro, Albania, Serbia, Kosovo, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Georgia, Ukraine, Moldova, Norway, Switzerland, Iceland, Liechtenstein, Armenia, Azerbaijan and Israel. 

The plain truth is that the European integration project is over and done with. Any attempt to impose it will produce severe backlash. Looking back, therefore, the rupture with Russia has ushered in a new geopolitical landscape in Europe where Brussels’ conundrum regarding EU expansion stands exposed. The EPC is nothing but a disguised French ploy to slow down actual EU membership for countries in Eastern Europe and the Balkans. 

The EPC summit at the Prague Castle only serves to highlight that this is a Kafkaesque moment in European politics. This must be Ukraine’s revenge on Europe for staging such a cynical, violent coup in 2014 to cut its umbilical cord with Russia. 

*

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***

Ministers from a group of oil exporting countries led by Saudi Arabia and Russia agreed on Wednesday to slash output by two million barrels a day, prompting pushback from the US and igniting fears that it could propel global inflation higher. 

The decision came despite heavy lobbying by Washington in Gulf capitals against the move.

“It’s clear that Opec+ is aligning with Russia with today’s announcement,” White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said aboard Air Force One.

“The president is disappointed by the shortsighted decision of Opec+,” national security advisor Jake Sullivan and top economic advisor Brian Deese said in a statement.

The cut, equivalent to two percent of daily global supply, was proposed by the Saudi-led Opec+ meeting in Vienna on Wednesday. It is substantially higher than the one million barrels analysts had expected, and the biggest cut since April 2020.

Saudi Arabia and Russia aim to support prices amid signs that the global economy is slowing, with the possibility of a recession on the horizon. Oil prices usually drop when global economic growth slows.

The decision to cut production is likely to put pressure on relations between the US and Saudi Arabia, with Wednesday’s move seen as a win for Russia, particularly as it has faced battlefield losses in Ukraine, and reduced revenue from falling oil prices in recent weeks.

‘Technical and not political?’

US President Joe Biden visited Saudi Arabia in July in a bid to repair strained ties with Saudi Arabia. Shortly after meeting with Saudi rulers, including Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, Biden said he expected Riyadh to take “further steps” to boost oil supply.

The backlash against Wednesday’s production cut has already appeared in some quarters of Washington.

US Democratic Senator Chris Murphy, a noted critic of Saudi Arabia, said the Opec+ decision should lead to “a wholesale re-evaluation of the US alliance with Saudi Arabia”.

Gulf states are pushing back against that narrative.

“Tell me where is the act of belligerence,” Saudi Energy Minister Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman said during a news conference at Opec’s headquarters in Vienna, when asked if the cut would strain ties with the US.

“We shall act and react to what is happening to the global economy in the most responsible and responsive way.”

The energy minister of the United Arab Emirates, Suhail al-Mazrouei, said the cut in production was “technical and not political”.

OPEC Secretary-General Haitham Al Ghais, from Kuwait, said the cartel was trying to ensure “security [and] stability to the energy markets.”

“Everything has a price,” Ghais said. “Energy security has a price as well.”

Recession headwinds

Oil prices skyrocketed above $100 a barrel earlier this year after Russia invaded Ukraine.

While they have fallen about 32 percent from their highs over the past four months, the drop has been due mainly to fears of slowing economic growth – particularly in China – as opposed to increased production.

Some say Riyadh needs little motivation outside of economics to back the production cut.

“Saudi Arabia sees a recession coming next year and they don’t want to be stuck with millions of barrels of cheap oil. They see now as the time to get the best price,” a former senior US official told Middle East Eye, on condition of anonymity.

The kingdom’s coffers have been buoyed by high crude prices. Earlier this year, Saudi Aramco overtook Apple as the world’s most valuable company.

Saudi Arabia is expected to be one of the world’s fastest-growing economies this year, and is using its oil wealth to push ahead with pro-business reforms and mega-projects such as Neom, designed to wean the country off its reliance on petrodollars.

And with an inflation rate of 2.8 percent, the oil-rich kingdom has also been more insulated from the price rises that are sweeping the globe – a hot-button political issue for Biden’s party in the November midterm elections.

‘Reduce Opec’s control’

In response to Wednesday’s decision, Biden called on his administration and US Congress to explore ways to “boost US energy production and reduce Opec’s control over energy prices,” the White House said.

The statement said Biden was ordering another dip into the country’s Strategic Petroleum Reserve, with 10 million barrels set to be put on the market next month in an attempt to dampen price rises.

However, those reserves are fast emptying after record withdrawals were ordered by the administration, starting back in March. The reserves are now at their lowest level since July 1984, and it is not clear when the administration plans to purchase a refill.

Oil prices had risen about five percent since Friday, in anticipation of Wednesday’s meeting. International benchmark Brent was up 1.86 percent, at $93.47 a barrel on Wednesday morning.

Analysts say the cut was likely to hinder western countries’ efforts to cut Russia’s profits on oil sales. The European Union has moved towards agreeing a G-7 plan to cap the price paid for Russian oil.

Also on Wednesday, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen called for EU countries to make deeper cuts to gas demand, while proposing a raft of price cap measures designed to protect consumers and businesses.

In September, Russia cut gas supplies to Europe via the Nord Stream 1 pipeline in response to Western sanctions. Soaring energy prices have prompted Europe to look to alternative suppliers of gas, including Israel, Egypt, Algeria and Qatar to fill the void left by Russia.

*

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***

The US insists on escalating the situation in Ukraine and deteriorating the global security crisis. On October 4, the US government announced another package of military aid to Kiev, valued at more than 625 million dollars. Despite the country being under a serious political, social, and economic crisis, with the public debt exceeding 30 trillion dollars, supporting Kiev’s neo-Nazi regime is the number one priority of the unpopular Biden administration.

However, more serious than the mere act of helping Ukraine is the type of assistance that has been provided. A few months ago, the US began sending M142 High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS) to Ukraine, ignoring several Russian requests that such weapons not be supplied to Kiev. At the time, American officials stated that such weapons would be used by their partners only within Ukrainian territorial limits, not hitting targets in Russia.

The problem is that the US does not recognize Russian sovereignty over the recently reintegrated regions and not even over Crimea, which in 2014 was admitted as part of Russia after the popular will in this sense was attested by referendum. With that, the impasse remains: for the US, weapons can be used within the entire territorial limit that Kiev claims to have, which includes Russian areas.

Shortly after the announcement of the latest aid package by the Biden government, the US Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Russian, Ukrainian and European Affairs, Laura Cooper, commented on the case and emphasized the ability of the weapons provided to reach Russian Crimea:

“It’s our assessment that with the existing GMLRS [Guided Multiple Launch Rocket System] capability that they have on the HIMARS and that we’re providing more of, with this package, that they can reach the vast majority of targets on the battlefield, including Crimea (…) [This package is] valued at up to $625 million [and] will contribute to meeting Ukraine’s critical defense needs”.

It is well known that such weapons, depending on where they are located, could reach Crimea. What was expected was the American willingness to demand from its Ukrainian proxies a rational posture, limiting the use of lethal equipment to zones within the disputed territory. Crimea is not even a conflict zone, as Russian sovereignty in the region has been pacified since 2014. Hitting Crimea, as Ukrainian forces have already done several times and Russia ignored in order to avoid escalation, is an offensive on Russian territory. And Cooper’s words at this point sound like a kind of “authorization” on the part of Washington for this type of conduct to be carried out by Kiev.

In fact, the situation is more serious than that. The very justification for this recent package was the “need” to react to the Russian referenda, considered by the West as an illegal maneuver. This was confirmed by Secretary of State Anthony Blinken himself, who commented on the package stating:

“Recent developments from Russia’s sham referenda and attempted annexation to new revelations of brutality against civilians in Ukrainian territory formerly controlled by Russia only strengthens our resolve”.

In practice, the statements by Cooper and Blinken only confirm that the US will not respect the popular decision of the peoples of those regions to be part of Russia, and therefore there is no requirement on the part of Washington for Kiev to limit its attack capacity. Bombings against Kherson, Zaparozhye, Donetsk, Lugansk and even Crimea are “authorized” and are even encouraged by the West as a way of ending what is considered an “illegal Russian occupation”.

A more flexible stance on the part of the West could be achieved if there was a diplomatic disposition. Not having recognition does not mean allowing bombings and encouraging destabilization. It would be absolutely possible for Washington, even not recognizing the legitimacy of Russian sovereignty in these regions, to prevent Kiev from bombing them, just in order to avoid an even greater military escalation. However, for the US and NATO, decelerating the conflict and seeking peace was never a priority. The West seems really ready to take the fighting to its ultimate consequences, as long as Russia continues to be confronted and attacked in every possible way.

The conflict radically changes its nature from the moment the Russian Federation becomes the target of attacks. The special military operation for the demilitarization and denazification of Ukraine now coexists with an operation for the territorial defense of regions that are part of Russia. Protecting territorial integrity is a top priority for any national state and Moscow will certainly take all necessary measures to prevent its reintegrated regions from being bombed by foreign regimes.

*

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Lucas Leiroz is a researcher in Social Sciences at the Rural Federal University of Rio de Janeiro; geopolitical consultant. You can follow Lucas on Twitter and Telegram.

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***

Iraq remains in turmoil three years after mass protests erupted across the country. Thousands of Iraqis gathered last Saturday in Tahrir Square in Baghdad to mark the anniversary of demonstrations against mismanagement, corruption and the sectarian regime imposed on Iraq by the US occupation regime. They chanted, “Ash-sha’b yurid isqat an-nizam,” “The people want to bring down the regime.” This was the chant adopted by Egyptians in their Tahrir Square during the 2011 Arab Spring of discontent.

Iraqi security forces responded with tear gas, stun grenades and rubber bullets, injuring dozens, and arresting scores. Protests also erupted in the south, including Nasiriya, Diwaniya and Basra.

News of the September 19th killing of Iraqi teenage girl, Zeinab Essam, allegedly, by gunfire from US military Camp Victory near Abu Ghraib has also stirred resentment over the residual US presence in Iraq.  Reports of her death been widely circulated on social media and prompted pro-Iran Shia militias to demand the expulsion of all US troops from the country.

Her demise has enraged her parents and other farming families living near the camp. They had previously complained about stray bullets. Amwaj media reported that US Baghdad operations command has pledged to carry out an investigation into the incident. Amwaj has pointed out that some Iraqis using Twitter have criticised the limited reporting on [her] killing compared to the media focus on Mahsa Amiri, a young Iranian woman who recently died in custody after being detained by morality police in Iran for failing to wear her headscarf properly.

The 2019 demonstrators not only demanded a new secular political system but also called for an end to US and Iranian interference in Iraq’s affairs. More than 560 people were killed before COVID cancelled mass demonstrations in 2020. They brought down Prime Minister Adil Abdul-Mahdi but not the dysfunctional system which decrees that the president must be a Kurd, the prime minister a Shiite and the assembly speaker a Sunni. His successor Mustafa Kadhimi has also failed to meet the protesters’ demands and is now a caretaker premier. Last October’s parliamentary election was meant to clarify and improve the situation but, instead, exacerbated political turmoil.

Meanwhile, the high price of oil has provided increased revenue to the Iraqi government but has not benefitted the population which continues to suffer from higher costs of essential imports and rising inflation.  Due to multiple crises which have afflicted Iraq since Daesh occupied Mosul and much of the north, the poverty rate has risen from 19 to 30 per cent.  Unemployment and food insecurity are driving household and child poverty. Five years after Daesh was driven from its false “caliphate”, 1.2 million Iraqis remain in displacement camps, due to the destruction of their homeowns and villages, rejection by Iraqis now living there, and exclusion by Shiite militias in control of the areas where they once lived.

Sweden’s International Development Cooperation Agency reports that the situation in Iraq has deteriorated dramatically because of “climate change, coupled with severe environmental degradation and mismanagement of natural resources”, creating “a very real danger for ecosystem collapse in Iraq, specifically threatening biodiversity, water and food security as well as long term stability.”

The 2021-2022 drought has dried Iraq’s ancient rivers, agricultural production and turned the country into a dust bowl. The temperature is rising and heatwaves last longer. In August this year, Basra recorded a temperature of 51.8ºC, the highest in the world to date.  Once considered the Venice of the region, Basra has long been afflicted with power cuts and water shortages, making it one of the most unliveable cities on earth.

Compounding misery with illness, the BBC has revealed that communities living near the oil fields in Basra province are at risk of suffering leukaemia because the burning of gas released in oil drilling which emits pollutants that cause cancer. The BBC reports that British Petroleum and Italy’s multi-national ENI are the main firms present in the Basra area. The Iraqi health ministry blamed flaring for a 20 per cent increase in cancer between 2016-2018. Farmers interviewed by the BBC said they also have kidney disease and breathing problems. Children have been particularly susceptible but have not been offered compensation to provide them with health care. Iraq, of course, depends on these companies and has not raised legal cases.  There are five major oil fields in Basra province. The largest, Rumaila is the chief polluter.

When I was a child living in the US mid-west, Iraqi dates were an annual Christmas treat in our household. As far as I knew at that time, Iraq was the world’s main source of dates. Indeed, I later learned Iraq did export most of the dates reaching world markets. The war with Iran (1980-1988) and the 2003-2011 US occupation reduced by half Iraq’s 30 million date palms. Consequently, Iraqi date exports are only 5 per cent of global consumption. Shortage of water, disease, and lack of care have taken their toll among date palms although the trees are said to be making a comeback in leafy suburbs of Baghdad. The tall palms in the large garden of my friends, Suad, Selma, Nuha and Abbad al-Radi were ailing when I last visited the compound in 2004 and the Radis did not know if they could be saved. Perhaps they have. The date palm has been a symbol of Iraq long before oil rigs sprouted in its deserts.

Oil-rich Iraq should be flourishing but is, instead, floundering on the edge of collapse thanks to internal disputes and the never-ending politico-military-economic interventions of Western and regional powers.

*

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***

Russian President Vladimir Putin has decreed Ukraine’s Zaporozhye Nuclear Power Plant is a Russian federal asset, absorbing all facilities and employees as the Kremlin’s push in the east loses momentum against Ukrainian forces.

The nuclear facility, the largest in Europe, was captured by Russian forces in March, with Ukrainian employees running day-to-day operations under siege conditions that have the world’s nuclear watchdog, the IAEA, concerned about the facility’s vulnerability to disaster.

In a decree published Wednesday by Russia’s Tass news agency, Putin ordered the official takeover of Zaporozhye nuclear assets, stating:

“The Russian government shall take measures to establish federal ownership of the Zaporozhye Nuclear Power Plant and other facilities necessary for its operation.”

According to Tass, Putin also instructed the government to set up the Zaporozhye Nuclear Power Plant federal state unitary company, granting “the joint-stock company the Operator of the Zaporozhye NPP the status of an organization with operations in the area of nuclear energy”.

Ukraine’s state energy agency has responded with a categorical rejection of Putin’s decree, announcing that its state energy agency head was taking over the plant.

“All further decisions regarding the operation of the station will be made directly at the central office of Energoatom,” Ukraine state energy chief Petro Kotin said in a video address posted on Telegram, as reported by Reuters.

“We will continue to work under Ukrainian law, within the Ukrainian energy system, within Energoatom,” Kotin said.

The plant is located in Zaporizhzhia, a region that Putin officially integrated into Russia on Wednesday, following sham referendums. Russia has now annexed four partially Russian-occupied territories in Ukraine.

Moscow formally annexed the Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson regions into the Russian Federation earlier on Wednesday.

Three weeks ago, Ukraine was forced to shut down the nuclear facility amid heavy shelling. At the time of Putin’s decree, Ukraine was considering whether to restart Zaporozhye to ensure the equipment is not undermined.

*

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Charles is a writer for Oilprice.com.

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***

Polish President Andrzej Duda said in an interview published Wednesday that Poland is open to hosting US nuclear weapons and has approached Washington about the idea.

Currently, NATO members Belgium, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, and Turkey host US nuclear weapons under NATO’s nuclear sharing program. The US and NATO have previously said that they wouldn’t place nuclear weapons in countries that joined the alliance after the Cold War, but Duda said discussions on the issue are happening.

“There is always a potential opportunity to participate in the nuclear sharing program,” Duda told the newspaper Gazeta Polska. “We have spoken with American leaders about whether the United States is considering such a possibility. The issue is open.”

The provocative statements from Duda come amid soaring tensions between the US and Russia that largely stem from NATO expansion east of Germany since the end of the Cold War and the alliance’s promise to eventually absorb Ukraine.

The US recently announced it was building a permanent military base in Poland, breaking from an agreement with Russia known as the 1997 NATO-Russia Founding Act. Under the act, the US and NATO agreed not to establish permanent bases east of Germany.

The US argues that the base in Poland doesn’t violate the act because troops will be deployed to the facility on a rotational basis, but it’s unlikely Moscow will see it that way.

*

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

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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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First published on by Global Research on October 8 2021

***

“But again, the thing to emphasize here is that we’re not eager to have the United States come in and become an occupying power in Afghanistan… At the same time, we want to see to it that what is left behind gives the Afghan people the opportunity to develop a strong representative government, a government that can guarantee that in the future, no terrorists will once again find sanctuary or safe harbor in Afghanistan.”

– U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney (December 9, 2001)[1]

LISTEN TO THE SHOW

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On October 7, 2001 military strikes over Afghanistan were launched by U.S. and British forces – the long awaited other shoe to drop following the 9/11 terrorism attacks. [2]

NATO was also involved, responding to the Article Five call to retaliate collectively against an attack by the country in question (which was never proven.) Over time, the Taliban was routed from power and a new supposedly democratic government put in place. [3][4][5]

It was the starting pistol marking the war “which would not end in our lifetimes.”

Ten years later, Osama Bin Laden, the lead man behind the 9/11 attacks (though his involvement was never actually established) was allegedly found, killed and thrown into the sea – truly a testament to the dedication of legality and due process! Yet it would be another ten years before the forces dispatched to the West Asian country would finally be withdrawn.[6]

And what was upshot of two decades of occupation, nearly a trillion dollars in military power and the deaths and injuries of over 100,000 civilians? Afghanistan is once again in the hands of the Taliban![7]

The sad factor is that this tragedy started not with the September 11 attacks, but more than twenty years previously to that when it was a secular country already exciting much of the populace with reforms and constitutional change, including more equal rights for women! U.S. actions initiated the violent measures that essentially created the Taliban and all the other Mujahedin fighters determined to replace progressive developers with brutal killers.

On this sad anniversary week, the Global Research News Hour intends to reflect on the origins behind the chaos which seems to be as remote now as it was back in 2001 when the venture against terror was established. We’ll also look to the future of the country with the U.S. and company hi-tailing it away from there.

Our first guest, Professor John Ryan, looks at Afghanistan’s history by examining his own visit in November 1978 and the sequence of U.S. covert operations which led to the downfall of the Afghan of a progressive government and the rise of Islamic jihadists. He is followed by Professor Rodrigue Tremblay who reflects on the reasons why the U.S. essentially lost the war, and what this decision enacted under President Biden would mean in the foreseeable elections. Our final guest, Professor Michel Chossudovsky expresses the informed viewpoint that the U.S. withdrawal was in fact a victory with respect to some of the real reasons for attacking the country in the first place.

John Ryan is a retired Professor of Geography and Senior Scholar of Geography at the University of Winnipeg. He is also a long-time socialist. He was one of the few Western academics to visit and report on his experiences in Afghanistan in a unique period in the late 1970s.

Rodrigue Tremblay is an International economist, is the author of the book about morals “The code for Global Ethics, Ten Humanist Principles” of the book about geopolitics “The New American Empire“, and the recent book , in French, “La régression tranquille du Québec, 1980-2018“. He holds a Ph.D. in international finance from Stanford University. He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization.

Michel Chossudovsky is Founder and Director of the Centre for Research on Globalization in, Montreal, and Editor of Global Research. He is Professor of Economics (emeritus) at the University of Ottawa, and award wining author of 11 books including The Globalization of War, America’s Long War against Humanity (2015) .

(Global Research News Hour Episode 327)

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

Other stations airing the show:

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

WZBC 90.3 FM in Newton Massachusetts is Boston College Radio and broadcasts to the greater Boston area. The Global Research News Hour airs during Truth and Justice Radio which starts Sunday at 6am.

Campus and community radio CFMH 107.3fm in  Saint John, N.B. airs the Global Research News Hour Fridays at 7pm.

CJMP 90.1 FM, Powell River Community Radio, airs the Global Research News Hour every Saturday at 8am. 

Caper Radio CJBU 107.3FM in Sydney, Cape Breton, Nova Scotia airs the Global Research News Hour starting Wednesday afternoon from 3-4pm.

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

Notes:

1. NBC News Transcripts SHOW: Meet the Press – NBC December 9, 2001 ;   http://www.leadingtowar.com/PDFsources_claims_atta/2001_12_09_NBCmtp.pdf
2. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/1556588.stm
3. Great Britain: Parliament: House of Commons: Defence Committee (2006). The UK Deployment to Afghanistan: Fifth Report of Session 2005–06; Report, Together with Formal Minutes, Oral and Written Evidence. The Stationery Office. p. 39
4. https://www.belfercenter.org/publication/natos-lessons-afghanistan
5. Press for Conversion Issue #59, (September 2006), p. 5, ‘The New Face of Terror in Afghanistan: How so-called “Democracy” Empowered our Allies: the Fundamentalists, Warlords and Drug Barons’
6. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2012/11/22/secret-details-of-bin-laden-burial-revealed
7. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-47391821

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Bright Light News Reports: Drs. Charles Hoffe and Stephen Malthouse, Canadian doctors vilified for daring to uphold their oath and share the truth about Covid-19 “vaccines,” join co-founder Cris Vleck, vaxjustice.org, to give a voice and support to those who did what they were asked: get “vaccinated” to protect themselves and others to stop the “pandemic.”

Instead, they suffered injuries and were then ignored and ridiculed for making such claims. The U.S. OPENVAERS system reporting over 1.4 million adverse events and 31,000 deaths is small testament to the incontrovertible fact that something seriously dangerous and unjust is afoot.

Join Drs. Hoffe and Malthouse and Vleck, as they discuss the 10-day touring campaign to bring Justice for the Vaccinated and visit vaxjustice.org if you or somebody you know has been injured to make a report and/or to receive support or to make a donation.

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“If you can’t say ‘F@#k’ you can’t say, ‘F@#k’ the government.’”— Lenny Bruce, comedian

Anti-government speech has become a four-letter word.

In more and more cases, the government is declaring war on what should be protected political speech whenever it challenges the government’s power, reveals the government’s corruption, exposes the government’s lies, and encourages the citizenry to push back against the government’s many injustices.

Indeed, there is a long and growing list of the kinds of speech that the government considers dangerous enough to red flag and subject to censorship, surveillance, investigation and prosecution: hate speech, conspiratorial speech, treasonous speech, threatening speech, inflammatory speech, radical speech, anti-government speech, extremist speech, etc.

Things are about to get even dicier for those who believe in fully exercising their right to political expression.

Indeed, the government’s seditious conspiracy charges against Stewart Rhodes, the founder of Oath Keepers, and several of his associates for their alleged involvement in the January 6 Capitol riots puts the entire concept of anti-government political expression on trial.

Enacted during the Civil War to prosecute secessionists, seditious conspiracy makes it a crime for two or more individuals to conspire to “‘overthrow, put down, or to destroy by force’ the U.S. government, or to levy war against it, or to oppose by force and try to prevent the execution of any law.”

It’s a hard charge to prove, and the government’s track record hasn’t been the greatest.

It’s been almost a decade since the government tried to make a seditious conspiracy charge stick—against a small Christian militia accused of plotting to kill a police officer and attack attendees at his funeral in order to start a civil war—and it lost the case.

Although the government was able to show that the Hutaree had strong anti-government views, the judge ruled in U.S. v. Stone that “[O]ffensive speech and a conspiracy to do something other than forcibly resist a positive show of authority by the Federal Government is not enough to sustain a charge of seditious conspiracy.”

Whether or not prosecutors are able to prove their case that Rhodes and his followers intended to actually overthrow the government, the blowback will be felt far and wide by anyone whose political views can be labeled “anti-government.”

All of us are in danger.

In recent years, the government has used the phrase “domestic terrorist” interchangeably with “anti-government,” “extremist” and “terrorist” to describe anyone who might fall somewhere on a very broad spectrum of viewpoints that could be considered “dangerous.”

The ramifications are so far-reaching as to render almost every American with an opinion about the government or who knows someone with an opinion about the government an extremist in word, deed, thought or by association.

You see, the government doesn’t care if you or someone you know has a legitimate grievance. It doesn’t care if your criticisms are well-founded. And it certainly doesn’t care if you have a First Amendment right to speak truth to power.

What the government cares about is whether what you’re thinking or speaking or sharing or consuming as information has the potential to challenge its stranglehold on power.

Why else would the FBI, CIA, NSA and other government agencies be investing in corporate surveillance technologies that can mine constitutionally protected speech on social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram?

Why else would the Biden Administration be likening those who share “false or misleading narratives and conspiracy theories, and other forms of mis- dis- and mal-information” to terrorists?

According to the Department of Homeland Security’s terrorism bulletin, “[T]hreat actors seek to exacerbate societal friction to sow discord and undermine public trust in government institutions to encourage unrest, which could potentially inspire acts of violence.”

By the government’s own definition, America’s founders would be considered domestic extremists for the heavily charged rhetoric they used to birth this nation.

Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin would certainly be placed on a terrorist watch list for suggesting that Americans should not only take up arms but be prepared to shed blood in order to protect their liberties.

“What country can preserve its liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance. Let them take arms,” declared Jefferson. He also concluded that “the tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.”

Observed Franklin: “Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch. Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote!”

Thomas Paine, Marquis De Lafayette, John Adams and Patrick Henry would certainly be labelled domestic extremists for exhorting Americans to defend themselves against the government if it violates their rights.

“It is the duty of the patriot to protect his country from its government,” insisted Paine.

“When the government violates the people’s rights,” Lafayette warned, “insurrection is, for the people and for each portion of the people, the most sacred of the rights and the most indispensable of duties.”

Adams cautioned, “A settled plan to deprive the people of all the benefits, blessings and ends of the contract, to subvert the fundamentals of the constitution, to deprive them of all share in making and executing laws, will justify a revolution.”

And who could forget Patrick Henry with his ultimatum: “Give me liberty or give me death!”

Conduct your own experiment into the government’s tolerance of speech that challenges its authority, and see for yourself: stand on a street corner—or in a courtroom, at a city council meeting or on a university campus— and try denouncing the government with some of the founders’ rhetoric.

My guess is that you won’t last long before you get thrown out, shut up, threatened with arrest or at the very least accused of being a radical, a troublemaker, a sovereign citizen, a conspiratorialist or an extremist.

Or maybe you’ll just be fined.

It’s happening all across the country.

In Punta Gorda, Florida, for instance, two political activists were fined $3000 for displaying protest flags with political messages that violated the city’s ordinance banning signs, clothing and other graphic displays containing words that the city deems “indecent.”

During the first month of the new ordinance being enacted, Andrew Sheets was cited four times by police for violating the ordinance by displaying phrases which said “F@#k Policing 4 Profit,” “F@#k Trump,” and “F@#k Biden.” Richard Massey was cited for violating the ordinance by displaying a sign which proclaimed, “F@#k Punta Gorda, trying to illegally kill free speech.”

Coming to the defense of the two activists, The Rutherford Institute challenged the City of Punta Gorda’s ban on indecent speech as unconstitutionally vague and a violation of the First Amendment’s safeguards for political speech that may not be censored or punished by the government.

We won the first round, with the Charlotte County Circuit Court ruling against the City, noting that the ordinance was “designed to cause the preemptive self-silencing of speakers whose messages are entitled to constitutional protection.”

In other words, as the court recognized, the ordinance was clearly designed to chill political speech, which is protected under the First Amendment.

You see, the right of political free speech is the basis of all liberty.

No matter what one’s political persuasion might be, every American has a First Amendment right to protest government programs or policies with which they might disagree.

The right to disagree with and speak out against the government is the quintessential freedom.

Every individual has a right to speak truth to power using every nonviolent means available.

This is why the First Amendment is so critical. It gives the citizenry the right to speak freely, protest peacefully, expose government wrongdoing, and criticize the government without fear of reprisal.

Americans of all stripes would do well to remember that those who question the motives of government provide a necessary counterpoint to those who would blindly follow where politicians choose to lead.

We don’t have to agree with every criticism of the government, but we must defend the rights of allindividuals to speak freely without fear of punishment or threat of banishment.

This is how freedom rises or falls.

As comedian Lenny Bruce, a lifelong champion of free speech, remarked, “If you can’t say ‘F@#k’ you can’t say, ‘F@#k’ the government.’”

Bruce, foul-mouthed, insightful, irreverent, and incredibly funny, was one of the First Amendment’s greatest champions who dared to “speak the unspeakable” about race, religion, sexuality and politics. As Village Voice writer Nat Hentoff attests, Bruce was “not only a paladin of free speech but also a still-penetrating, woundingly hilarious speaker of truth to the powerful and the complacent.”

Bruce died in 1966, but not before being convicted of alleged obscenity for challenging his audience’s covert prejudices by brandishing unmentionable words that, if uttered today, would not only get you ostracized but could get you arrested and charged with a hate crime.

Hentoff, who testified in Bruce’s defense at his trial, recounts that Lenny used to say, “What I wanted people to dig is the lie. Certain words were suppressed to keep the lie going. But if you do them, you should be able to say the words.”

Not much has changed in the 50-plus years since Bruce died. In fact, it’s gotten worse.

What we’re dealing with today is a government that wants to suppress dangerous words—words about its warring empire, words about its land grabs, words about its militarized police, words about its killing, its poisoning and its corruption—in order to keep its lies going.

What we are witnessing is a nation undergoing a nervous breakdown over this growing tension between our increasingly untenable reality and the lies being perpetrated by a government that has grown too power-hungry, egotistical, militaristic and disconnected from its revolutionary birthright.

The only therapy is the truth and nothing but the truth.

If the government censors get their way, there will be no more First Amendment.

There will be no more Bill of Rights.

And, as I point out in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, there will be no more freedom in America as we have known it.

*

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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.

Featured image is from City News Service

Bosnia Herzegovina: In the Republic of Srpska, So Far Another Orange Revolution Falls Flat

By Stephen Karganovic, October 05, 2022

In the midst of several geopolitically important elections (Brazil, Bulgaria) which all took place on Sunday, the one in the Republic of Srpska may have gone somewhat under the radar. Arguably, however, it was no less important.

Local and National organizations Call Upon the City of Calgary to “Keep CAF Out of Calgary”

By Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East, October 06, 2022

The campaign is intended to pressure Mayor Gondek, Calgary City Council, and the Green Line Board to terminate their contract with CAF (Construcciones y Auxiliar de Ferrocarriles), the Basque multinational corporation that the Green Line Board awarded the light rail vehicle (LRV) procurement contract to, with construction set to begin in 2023.

Rethinking the Second Amendment

By Emanuel Pastreich, October 05, 2022

As we struggle to bring Americans together from across the political spectrum, to form substantial and committed institutions that will support the battle for freedom and equality, the struggle against slavery and corporate governance by the billionaires, the Second Amendment of the Constitution, the right to bear arms, keeps coming up as a point of contention, of division, in our discussions.

Human Chain for Julian Assange this Saturday, October 8

By Don’t Extradite Assange, October 05, 2022

The assembly time is 1pm but we expect people to start arriving from 12.30. Our stewards will direct you to the end of the chain and ask you to take your place. There will be some travel disruptions on the rail network due to strike action on 8 October so please check your travel for the day and plan accordingly: (nearest tube: Westminster / buses: 12,159,453)

Property “Personal”: “Freedom and Personal Property Lost in the Last 2 1/2 Years”

By Peter Koenig, October 05, 2022

The question of what is property and what is possession arises for me from a philosophical-human analysis. It shows that property is closely connected with freedom. So, it is intimately linked with “today”, the time in which every day more of our freedom – and by association — of our personal property, is taken away.

Moldovan President Sandu Cares Little for Her Country’s Sovereignty

By Ahmed Adel, October 05, 2022

Moldovan President Maia Sandu told Russian pranksters Vovan and Lexus, in thinking she was speaking to Ukrainian Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal, about her willingness to transfer the southern town of Giurgiulești to Kiev for several years.

Will Biden Know When to Stop?

By Alastair Crooke, October 05, 2022

The meeting of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) in Samarkand has prompted a geo-economic earthquake – as did President Putin’s subsequent announcement of a partial mobilisation and referenda in four oblasts (provinces) of Ukraine, which almost certainly will result in their lightening integration into Russia.

Ukraine and the Balkans. US-NATO Flagrant Violations of Human Rights

By Dr. Vladislav B. Sotirović, October 05, 2022

The long-term crisis in the relations between the Russian Federation and Ukraine entered its final – war phase on February 24^th, 2022. The official reactions to the latest dramatic events in East Europe, which come from the Westerners, including the most important overseas Western political address, are usually dominated by two phrases.

India Can Live with US-Pakistan Makeover

By M. K. Bhadrakumar, October 05, 2022

The US state department spokesman Ned Price has put External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar on the mat as regards the latter’s remarks questioning the raison d’etre of the US-Pakistan relationship. 

The Coutts Four: Alberta Is Home to Political Prisoners

By Prof. Anthony J. Hall, October 04, 2022

The Coutts Four, convicted so far of nothing, are being held in custody until their trial begins sometime in mid-to-late 2023. Being made to suffer in prison for a year and a half before they can face their accusers in open court is sufficient justification for advancing the case that Alberta is now home to political prisoners.

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On October 5th, 2022 at 12:00 pm, Justice for Palestinians (JfP) and Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East (CJPME) will be launching a campaign called “CAF out of Calgary”, to take place in front of the Calgary Municipal Building. The campaign is intended to pressure Mayor Gondek, Calgary City Council, and the Green Line Board to terminate their contract with CAF (Construcciones y Auxiliar de Ferrocarriles), the Basque multinational corporation that the Green Line Board awarded the light rail vehicle (LRV) procurement contract to, with construction set to begin in 2023.

CAF is a company that has deep relations with Israeli companies involved in the construction of the Jerusalem rail line which is in the process of being expanded to connect illegal Israeli settlements to Jerusalem, as part of the larger annexation of occupied East Jerusalem. This is a continuation of the land theft that has been occurring in the neighborhoods of Sheikh Jarrah and Silwan, which has been thoroughly documented and continues to be covered by the media in recent years.

“It is critical that Calgarians and Canadians are made aware of the types of relationships their city leadership is fostering, especially with a $5.5 billion investment from our local, municipal,l and federal governments,” said Saba Amro of Justice for Palestinians in Calgary.

CAF’s complicity with and profiteering from Israeli apartheid, illegal annexation of Palestinian land, and ethnic cleansing of the indigenous population has been well researched and documented by activists in Calgary and across the globe. This campaign is a call to action to urge the City of Calgary to drop this contract as long as CAF is involved in the expansion of the Jerusalem Light Rail into Occupied Palestine.

“Awarding a large contract to CAF is unethical, and turns a blind eye on CAF’s involvement with Israeli institutions and companies which have been repeatedly and harshly condemned for their human rights violations against Palestinians,” said Thomas Woodley with CJPME, adding that “publicly funding CAF for the Calgary Green Line is tantamount to putting a stamp of approval on Israel’s policies, laws, and practices that oppress and harm Palestinians.” The October 5th noon hour launch will include music, local and national speakers, and media, followed by detailed actions that can be taken to continue the work that activists in Calgary began after Mayor Jyoti Gondek announced this deal in November 2021.

*

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Featured image: Graffiti on the Israeli separation wall dividing the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Abu Dis (Photo: Ryan Rodrick Beiler via shutterstock.com)

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Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on Tuesday signed a decree that ruled out any talks with Russian President Vladimir Putin, declaring they would be an “impossibility.”

The decree was first put forward by the National Security and Defense Council of Ukraine. According to the Ukrainian newspaper Ukrainska Pravda, the decree states “the impossibility of holding negotiations with the president of the Russian Federation Vladimir Putin.”

The move formalized comments that Zelensky made on Friday following Putin’s approval of annexing four Ukrainian territorites.

“He does not know what dignity and honesty are. Therefore, we are ready for a dialogue with Russia, but with another president of Russia,” Zelensky said.

Responding to Zelensky’s move, the Kremlin said it would wait until he changes his position or until there’s a new president in Kyiv to hold talks. “We will now wait either until the incumbent Ukrainian president changes his position, or until there is another president in Ukraine who will change his position for the sake of the Ukrainian people,” Peskov said.

During his speech Friday, Putin said he was open to talks with Ukraine but said the status of the territories Russia is annexing is not up for discussion.

“We call on the Kyiv regime to immediately cease fire and all hostilities; to end the war it unleashed back in 2014 and return to the negotiating table,” he said.

“We are ready for this, as we have said more than once. But the choice of the people in Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia, and Kherson will not be discussed,” Putin added.

The US has shown no signs of supporting a diplomatic solution and the Biden administration has no plans to back down on their support for Ukraine despite the risk of provoking Moscow.

*

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

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As we struggle to bring Americans together from across the political spectrum, to form substantial and committed institutions that will support the battle for freedom and equality, the struggle against slavery and corporate governance by the billionaires, the Second Amendment of the Constitution, the right to bear arms, keeps coming up as a point of contention, of division, in our discussions.

Although there are real differences of opinion, some based on profound philosophical divergences, the crux of the issue has been intentionally obscured by the corporate powers who have manipulated the public for their own benefit and who block any serious debate about the nature of this amendment to the Constitution from seeing the light of day.

We are drowned in incomplete arguments on all sides about the Second amendment that mislead us and that confuse us.

On the one hand, we have those (largely, but not exclusively, people we call progressives) who point to the horrific levels of gun violence in the United States, and who compare the number of gun deaths in the United States with those in just about any other country, thus demonstrating that the United States has a run-away problem with guns. They then suggest that this problem originates with the Second Amendment which the conservatives have misinterpreted as giving the citizen a carte blanche to possess weapons and to use them.

This side of the debate advocates strict regulations on the possession of guns as Federal policy as the best way to end this nightmare.

On the other hand, we have those, for the most referred to as conservatives, who hold that citizens have the right to bear arms as guaranteed by the Constitution, and who hold that 1) if firearms are made illegal then only criminals will have firearms; 2) arming of the citizens is necessary to resist the tyranny of the government.

Both sides of this argument have been distorted and misused by powerful corporate interests who control the message that is put out in the media and who create needless conflicts and unnecessary misunderstandings as part of their strategy of confusion.

That is no surprise. The corporate sponsors of these defending the right of the citizens to bear arms and of those calling for its restriction have their own agendas.

Part of that agenda is forcing citizens to support either the Republican Party or the Democratic Party in order to move forward. This intentional misdirection of political power towards the whores of the corporations is a big business in itself. But corporations have other reasons for wanting to create this conflict, and to encourage it, as I will detail below.

Let me also tell you how I feel about the Second Amendment. I felt that the unlimited sales of firearms and the culture of guns had created untold tragedy in the United States and that the mindless loyalty of certain Americans to the broad interpretation of the Second Amendment was responsible for this sad state of affairs. I supported gun control measures and also wanted the end of the glorification of gun culture (which I still do).

The growing institutional and political chaos that I witnessed in the United States over the last twenty years, however, which has taken an ominous turn for the worse over the last two years, led me to reconsider the Second Amendment. I came to realize that the steady state of accountable governance in the United States was far from certain and that the tyranny that the founders of the United States feared is now knocking at the door.

Is necessary to have local militias in place to defend us against a rotten Federal Government possessed by the globalists, the minutemen of our age?

The Federal Government that played a vital role in the fight against slavery under Lincoln, in the fight against fascism under Roosevelt, and in the fight against racial discrimination under Truman and Kennedy has vanished and in its place stands a lumbering monster, supported by multinational investment banks, military contractors, real estate speculators, and energy monopolies, a monster that is leading us to our doom.

There are quite a few good people still left in that Federal Government, but the FBI, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, and local and state police have been deeply corrupted as the institutions of the United States decayed following the 9.11 incident, COVID19, and other on-going crimes.

Let us read the Second Amendment, and read it carefully. None of those talking heads, branded “progressive” or “conservative,” actually does so.

I am not reading the Second Amendment for you because I assume it is sacred, or because I assume the Constitution is perfect.

Rather, just as was the case in 1860, it is critical in this moment of chaos that we start from our philosophical and moral foundations. The Constitution forms common ground and it defines what is, and what is not, government. Interpreting the Constitution in a manner that addresses the current crisis is the best way to form consensus. It does not mean that we cannot modify the Constitution, or the Second Amendment, in the future.

“A well-regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.”

Like psalms, so much meaning is compressed in this short phrase.

The emphasis of the passage is not on the right of anyone to own any weapon and shoot it off at will for his or her pleasure. The right of the citizen to “keep and bear,” to own and to employ, arms is protected in that it is related to a larger, more critical, project.

The violence porn, gun worship, and the horrific promotion of violence in the media that has encouraged such broad ownership and use of firearms is not a product of the second amendment. It is a byproduct of the military industrial complex and the cult of war promoted in a decadent empire.

The fortunes made by the gun manufactures who sprinkle money on the National Rifle Association to promote a reckless vision of the American dream are the result of the pursuit of profit at the expense of the citizen.

Let us read that text again.

“A well-regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.”

The first part is clearly the primary clause that necessitates the right to keep and bear arms mentioned in the second part.

“A well-regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state” resonates for us in this age of chaos.

There are three elements missing in the United States of America today that are mentioned therein. Let us consider each one.

The first is “a well-regulated militia.”

The current militia, the military, is an unregulated monster that has merged with criminal forces around the world and has devolved into a mercenary power which strives to extract wealth for the rich and powerful through the use of force, and to generate revenue through the sale of weapons, the enforcement of sanctions, and other services for pay.

Such a “militia” is not well regulated; it is suicidal.

The second word is “security.” The current military, industrial, financial, intelligence, medical, trade complex has nothing to do with security for the citizens of our nation. Of course there are groups in the military who are serious about security, who remain loyal to the Constitution and to the people of our nation. But they are not the dominant force.

We need a system for national and regional security that is focused on real security, not threats made up for profit. If we do not have such a system, then the current military is a clear and present danger in that it grants multinational criminal operations access to the full range of weapons, starting with mass psychological manipulation, while the citizens are left unarmed.

The third phrase is “a free state.”

It would be hard to call the current government of the United States, a toy of multinational corporations and billionaires, a “free state.” For that reason alone, addressing the question of who will have the right to bear arms is pressing.

We are looking at a collapsing empire with a military out of control. There is no Republic left—although one could be established again.

To promote guns and the culture of guns for profit, either profits for gun manufacturers or for police and private security corporations, is horrible and must be stopped.

On the other hand, to leave the citizens unarmed if they face a predatory Federal government is also unacceptable.

The stress in the second amendment falls on keeping the military accountable to the people, and not on the sale of weapons to citizens for profit.

Thus, our primary concern must be with getting back to a democratic, participatory, and transparent system for security that includes the citizens and that assures that a tyranny cannot emerge from the military or from the police, one taken over by private interests, one that uses the state’s weapons to oppress the citizens of the nation, the citizens with whom sovereignty rests.

The answer is to end the mercenary military.

We should not be so naïve as to think that eternal peace is possible. Militias and police are necessary. But standing armies that are not composed of the citizens doing their service, but of men and women who are paid to fight, forced to fight to survive economically, who report to generals who then report to corporate CEOs, such armies are threat to us all.

We must create an accountable military that is linked to us, the citizens, at the local level. If the government is to exercise deadly force, then citizens must know what those weapons are and how they are used.

If deadly force is used, it should be used by trained citizens who are trusted by their neighbors, and not by strangers who are distant from us.

But what if there is a war? You ask.

First, note that the United States is full of weapons at every level that are held in a non-transparent manner by government agencies whose actions are classified so as to make them unaccountable.

That unaccountable military and police are already at war with us.

The next war may not be like the wars we prepared for. It may be a world war, or a civil war, or something hybrid, a matching of likes with likes around the world.

That could mean that you, the citizen, must be armed and ready to defend yourself.

I think that it was such a crisis that the founding fathers imagined back then. They did not adhere to the cult of guns, the sick culture that surrounds weapons today. But they knew that no political system will be stable forever and it is a mistake to have the state in control of all forms of deadly force.

It is also clear that many of the efforts to promote gun control in recent days are fundamentally different from what came before.

Today much of gun control legislation is not about reducing the deaths from gun violence, but rather about extending the authority of the Federal government to do whatever it pleases to citizens without accountability. I watched, sadly, this shift over the last twenty years.

We need to simultaneously combat the sick culture of guns and to reduce the number of guns on the street while at the same time raising the understanding of weapons on the part of citizens, and creating a military that is participatory and that is run by citizens, one committed to the long-term interests of our nation. We need citizens who can handle weapons and who can participate in the local militia while condemning the cult of guns, while being committed to peace.

There will be no room for military contractors, for investment banks, or for the promoters of the cult of guns in such a vision for our country.

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This article was originally published on US Provisional Government.

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

He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

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The Ancient Woods Foundation, a Lithuanian non-profit organization that preserves biologically diverse forests, saved a unique forest parcel, preserving the only habitat of a rare endangered fungus Lavender Baeospora in the country. This is a scientifically valid finding at both national and global levels, as the habitat could have been destroyed by deforestation, and there are only 400 of them worldwide.

Lithuanian non-profit organization the Ancient Woods Foundation, which takes firm steps in reducing deforestation in the country by preserving biologically unique old-growth forest parcels, has discovered a rare mushroom type in one of the forests under the organization’s protection—Lavender Baeospora (Baeospora myriadophylla).

According to Dr. Reda Iršėnaitė, a mycologist who discovered the fungus and works closely with the Foundation, this is a scientifically momentous finding since it is the only known habitat of the fungus in Lithuania and one of the only 400 habitats in the world—several of which are drastically decreasing due to deforestation and climate change.

The rare mushroom habitat in Lithuania could have been easily destroyed by logging. The Ancient Woods Foundation bought out the almost 50-acre Moniškis forest parcel just in time to save it, meanwhile, another valuable parcel next to it was entirely cut down.

Lavender Baeospora. © Rimantė Paulauskaitė-Digaitienė

Incentive for forest preservation at the national level

The Ancient Woods Foundation is preserving biologically valuable forest parcels with all life forms in them. The organization is creating an ancient wood that allows a variety of organisms—over 15k—to live and prosper unobstructed by human activity.

“A multitude of trees of varied ages and kinds grow in the ancient woods, creating an ideal habitat for thousands of species which need different conditions to live. Only biodiversity found in old-growth forests can ensure an “evolution reactor” that would allow the forests to change, adapt, and survive even with climate change happening right now,” Mindaugas Survila, a renowned documentary filmmaker, who co-founded the Ancient Woods Foundation, said.

According to Mr. Survila, the sixth mass species extinction has already started, and the loss of ancient woods has caused fungi like Lavender Baeospora to become extremely rare.

“Lithuania has many biologically valuable forest parcels, which create conditions for species like this to prosper. The rapid deforestation might further cause many of the endangered species to go fully extinct if no action is taken. Therefore, the Foundation hopes to buy out as many such parcels as possible and let them be untouched,” he added.

Mixed forests protect endangered species

The fungi variety is extremely important for all ecosystems because it interacts with other organisms like mycorrhizal and endofit fungi and provides food and water to humans. Baeospora myriadophylla is a saprotrophic fungus that feeds on wood and grows on giant decomposing firs, maples, alders, or, in some cases, on decomposing aspen trunks.

The species has been listed as endangered on national Red Lists of ten European countries while its habitats decreased by 15-25% within the last 50 years due to old-growth wood destruction. Scientists presume this decrease will continue in the future, therefore highly endangering the fungus. The last example of this species in Lithuania was found 50 years ago.

Dr. Reda Iršėnaitė says that Moniškis forest parcel had ideal unique conditions for the Lavender Baeospora to grow. There are many old aspen trees, which are especially valuable for decomposers like fungi, insects, and animals.

“The fungus is small but exceptional and very important to the forest ecosystem that takes a million years to develop. The decomposing aspen trunks preserved are a biodiversity treasure. The fungus probably would not have survived had the Ancient Woods Foundation not preserved this forest parcel. It is not included in the Lithuanian Red List as there have been no remaining examples of its habitat up until now,” she added.

The Foundation notes that large old mixed wood plots full of dead wood and organism variety may slow down biodiversity loss. For instance, Moniškis parcel has 130-year-old oaks, dead wood, and rare flora, fauna, and fungi species: a beaver house, signs of ungulate activity, and the habitats of white-backed woodpeckers and grey-headed woodpeckers listed as endangered species. The mycologist also found a crown-tipped coral (Artomyces pyxidatus), which grows on old decomposing aspens, tree lungwort (Lobaria pulmonaria), thriving on steady habitat conditions and clean air, as well as other kinds of lichen, moss, and fungi.

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Featured image: Lavender Baeospora. © Mindaugas Survila

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***

Dear Attendees,

Thank you for pledging to join the human chain this Saturday, we are hoping more of you will join who haven’t signed up yet. Here’s just a few notes to let you know what to expect when you arrive in Parliament Square, London, GB SW1P.

The assembly time is 1pm but we expect people to start arriving from 12.30. Our stewards will direct you to the end of the chain and ask you to take your place. There will be some travel disruptions on the rail network due to strike action on 8 October so please check your travel for the day and plan accordingly: (nearest tube: Westminster / buses: 12,159,453)

A team of stewards will be at Westminster station to direct people to the chain.

When everyone has arrived and it’s time to link arms and form the chain megaphone sirens and air horns will give the signal. Another signal will sound to bring the protest to a close after Stella Assange and others have made statements to the press. The protest will be finished after our video team has had the opportunity to film the whole chain.

Please feel free to bring Free Assange banners, wear Assange t-shirts etc.

And remember it’s not too late to contact more people and bring them along!

Thank you and see you on Saturday.

Source: Don’t Extradite Assange

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Featured image: Julian Assange was secretly recorded while living at the Ecuadorean embassy in London. (Source: EPV)

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***

“Belief in a bigger and better future is one of the most powerful enemies of present freedom.” – Aldous Huxley, author of the 1932 novel Brave New World, now considered visionary.

The question of what is property and what is possession arises for me from a philosophical-human analysis. It shows that property is closely connected with freedom. So, it is intimately linked with “today”, the time in which every day more of our freedom – and by association — of our personal property, is taken away.

To start with, let’s separate “property” from “possession”. Possession is what one appropriates: house, car, bicycle, television, etc.

Property is what we are born with. Namely, our body; our freedom; free thought, free written, oral expression; to move freely – and the right to have a say in government, to participate actively in a democracy, or at least in what we now call “democracy”.

One of the most important properties I have, if not the most important one, is my body. This means that I can decide about my body, that I can decide about what to do for my health.

It is also important to be able to decide about our individual incomes, our individual money. This supposes cash. No digital money that is controlled by the banks, the authorities; and, depending on our behavior, can be blocked or even expropriated. What I create is my property – which I may freely share, if I so decide – not the government or another “superior” authority.

Digitalization is based on linear thinking. But life is not linear, it is dynamic. A digital world is an unnatural world. It destroys our property to be able to lead a dynamic life.

Introducing digital money is outright criminal.

Total digitalization, as envisaged by the “Great Reset”, the UN Agenda 2030, and the World Economic Forum’s (WEF) “Fourth Industrial Revolution”, is mankind’s demise. Hardly anyone, who can see the consequences, desires an electronic world. Although, younger generations, brainwashed by the mainstream media 24/7, still embrace the short-sighted convenience of a digital world. We have to shake them awake.

We must also vehemently oppose the very Engine of Digitization – the ultra-short waves 5G. Lest we will lose personal and social property through total surveillance.

The ultra-shortwave, 5G – and soon 6G – drives the 4^th Industrial Revolution. It is also destroying our physical and spiritual health. The around-the-globe bought governments of the entire 193 UN member countries are watching, as we humans are destroyed. With deliberate lies and brain manipulation, our property, our lives, our humanity is being transformed into transhumanity.

How much longer will it take, until a majority will wake up and scream STOP, and act to save our humanity, our lives, our most valuable property? Our sovereign selves.

Freedom and personal property have been largely lost in the last 2 1/2 years. If not yet completely, all roads point in that direction – for a dictatorial world government, with censorship, digital surveillance, an all-encompassing digital identity. We must and we shall STOP it.

What we are facing, if we as people worldwide do not join hands in solidarity and spirituality to avoid over the next eight years – UN Agenda 2030 – the incorporation into a totally digital world order planned by a small global financial elite, we will soon find ourselves without individual, social, political, cultural sovereignty and autonomy.

This would be the fulfillment of the “Great Reset.” Human individuals would be transformed into a chipped transhuman society where no one owns anything – physically or spiritually – and all think robotically, are controlled by algorithms – but are happy.

We are threatened with complete deprivation of freedom, of our personal property. This is what is coming to us, if we do not wake up from our comfort slumber, and in solidarity and spiritually, without hatred – but always accompanied by The Light, free ourselves from this diabolical cult, to regain our personal property, our absolute human freedom, with which we were all born.

It may require creating life in a new parallel society.

It takes courage to begin.

We can do it. Once begun, with our positive spirit and vision – human and societal dynamics may lead our way.

We are many – “they” are few.

“They” have money and capital. We have an absolute solidary and willpower to regain our freedom, our bodily and spiritual property.

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

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

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***

In the midst of several geopolitically important elections (Brazil, Bulgaria) which all took place on Sunday, the one in the Republic of Srpska may have gone somewhat under the radar. Arguably, however, it was no less important. The Republic of Srpska is the Serbian entity within Bosnia and Herzegovina, and it wields considerable influence and veto power over key policies (generally exercised to the detriment of Western objectives). In the latest confrontation arising from the conflict in Ukraine, it has taken a strongly pro-Russian position, preventing the creation of a solid anti-Russian front of satellite statelets in the Balkans and vetoing imposition of sanctions against the Russian Federation by Bosnia.

For all these, as well as a number of other compelling reasons, Srpska’s government has been targeted for destruction by the West. Destruction in this particular case is not an exaggeration since the ultimate goal is more than mere regime change. In the estimate of Western powers and their intelligence apparatus (correct in this case) the Serbian population which under the terms of the Dayton Agreement controls slightly under half of Bosnia is overwhelmingly pro-Russian and intuitively anti-NATO.  Therefore, Western thinking goes, nothing approaching even limited statehood should be permitted to them, strategically situated as they are deep in the rear of the Western alliance.

The government in the Republic of Srpska, which since 2006 has been overseen in various capacities by Milorad Dodik, has no doubt been an irritant to the collective West, and it was often targeted for replacement by compliant local Serbian collaborators. While regime change in the Republic of Srpska was always the minimal objective, Western policy makers regarded systemic change as by far the preferred option.

In the Bosnian context, for Western powers that means the dismantlement of the system of governance enshrined in the Dayton Agreement which in 1995 ended the armed conflict in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

The Dayton agreement provided for two autonomous ethnically defined entities, the Serb Republic and the Muslim-Croat Federation, and a weak central administration in Sarajevo with few effective powers assigned to it. Clearly, Western governments had viewed Dayton from the start as merely a transitional and not a permanent arrangement, leading relatively soon thereafter to the establishment of a strong central government, which they could more easily control, and with greatly weakened and diminished constituent entities.

The steadfast opposition of the Dodik government to these planned encroachments over the last decade and a half has been the central political drama in Bosnia. In seeking to preserve the status of the Republic of Srpska as provided by the Dayton Agreement, Dodik has sought political allies, and he found them in the Russian Federation and lately also in Orban’s Hungary.

For the collective West, this stance of the Republic of Srpska leadership is intolerable. In order to remedy the situation, it has used the standard instruments at its disposal to instigate an “orange revolution” at least twice around election time, in 2014 and 2018. The current attempt is the third in the series.

In order to accomplish their maximum objective, the abolishment of the Republic of Srpska, Western policymakers have relied on two principal tools. Firstly, they have used Hague Tribunal judgments about Srebrenica to argue that the Republic of Srpska is a “genocidal entity” which does not have the moral right to exist in the modern world. In addition, they have engineered a judgment in the international court at Strasbourg convenient to their objectives. The judgment overrides the Dayton Agreement and holds that ethnically based internal distribution of powers, even if originally agreed to by the parties, is discriminatory and therefore unacceptable. (Belgium’s strikingly similar constitutional arrangements are never cited as a problem.) The Strasbourg decision, enshrined in the Sejdic and Finci case, aims to overturn Dayton’s principal restraining provisions and impose the one man – one vote principle, which obviously would favor Bosnia’s more compliant non- Serbian majority.

Enter Jelena Trivić, candidate for president of the coalition of Republic of Srpska’s main opposition parties, whose common denominators are close and frequent social contacts with principal Western embassies in Sarajevo and strident anti-corruption rhetoric of the sort that in Gene Sharp’s playbook usually sets the stage for orange revolutions. Never mind that many of these “anti-corruption” champions are recycled operatives of former West-friendly or at least cooperative regimes who are themselves waist-deep in corruption.

Apparently, allegations of such nature have not bypassed Mrs. Trivić herself because two weeks ago a letter emerged, composed in fairly decent (though not impeccable) English and on what purports to be official US government letterhead, requesting a transfer of the equivalent of about $10 million to the Trivić campaign. The jury may still be out on the authenticity of the compromising letter, but it fits in neatly with the known modus operandi in similar situations.

The color revolution playbook was followed faithfully on Sunday evening when Mrs. Trivić, not bothering to wait for the votes to be counted, unilaterally declared victory and proclaimed herself the next President of the Republic of Srpska. This-in-your-face Balkan Guaido moment was greeted approvingly by her followers who poured into the street from her campaign headquarters to celebrate victory.

As election results were coming in, it soon became apparent that the victory celebration was a bit premature and that Dodik in fact held a comfortable lead. It should be recalled that according to Gene Sharp’s ideal contested election scenario there should be a tight race in which the opposition candidate favoured by Western interests could plausibly be portrayed as the real winner, inflaming the outraged masses to demand he or she be immediately installed regardless of the actual vote count.

It seems that the plausibility of Mrs.Trivić’s asserted victory soon became questionable over the course of the election night, so much so that the victory parade was mysteriously called off shortly after it began. The following morning, on Monday 3 October, the main opposition figures from Mrs. Trivić’s camp congregated at the British embassy in Sarajevo. Presently, there is no reliable information about the topics they discussed with the deputy ambassador, but it may plausibly be surmised that tactics to jump start the stalled orange revolution in the Republic of Srpska may have been high on the agenda.

Things appear to be quiet in the streets of Republic of Srpska’s main cities and towns at the time this is being written. A plausible electoral theft narrative has not yet been formulated but it should not be discarded that British specialists might come up with a storyline sufficient to inflame the discontented masses. The third time may not be a charm, but further developments in the Republic of Srpska should be carefully monitored.

Both the Dodik government and its Western backed and financed opponents (judgement still being reserved on the now famous $10 million letter, but there is plenty of other evidence of foreign interference and financial corruption of the political process) are plagued by low quality cadres. The Dodik administration’s lacklustre performance in most fields other than vociferous nationalist rhetoric and its inability to attract to its ranks young, educated, and competent persons who could infuse a new life into the institutions of government and help move the Serb entity forward has alienated large segments of the population. On the other hand, what passes for the opposition also consists of familiar old faces of ambitious but incompetent politicians who have nothing to show for their long-time parasitism in public life. They are being embraced and financed by Western interests only as a stepping stone to the destruction of the Republic of Srpska, after which they will be discarded like the used toilet paper that they are, to be replaced by the crop of subservient WEF “young leaders” who are undoubtedly being trained to take over a centralised Bosnia and neutered Republic of Srpska as this is being written.

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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. 

Featured image: Dodik with Russian President Vladimir Putin, 22 September 2016 (Photo by kremlin.ru, licensed under CC BY 4.0)

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***

Moldovan President Maia Sandu told Russian pranksters Vovan and Lexus, in thinking she was speaking to Ukrainian Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal, about her willingness to transfer the southern town of Giurgiulești to Kiev for several years.

“When I was in Kiev, we discussed the issue of the village of Giurgiulești and made a proposal. Its people came and inspected the territory, which we are ready to give them while we are still trying to resolve the legal problems with the port as a whole. But we can offer them land for years to come,” Sandu said during the prank, which was posted on the Vovan and Lexus Telegram channel. However, she continued by saying that after the technicians arrived and inspected the territory, the Moldovan authorities received no further response.

“So, I wonder if he is still interested in this proposal or if he has already found other solutions,” Sandu said, referring to the Ukrainian prime minister.

None-the-less, the Presidential Administration of Moldova declared that the video recording of the conversation between Sandu and the Russian pranksters is a fake. The denial is because giving away Giurgiulești would be a major scandal as it is the home of Moldova’s only port that is accessible to seagoing vessels.

The prank, which demonstrates that Sandu is ready to throw away Moldova’s sovereignty to Ukraine, comes as a security aide claimed that Moldova can no longer rely only on its neutral status and must ramp up its defensive military power. This is despite the country being one of the poorest in Europe, reflected in the fact that it can allocate only 0.45% of GDP for defence spending despite war waging in neighbouring Ukraine.

Moldova applied for European Union membership this year and strongly condemned Russia’s military operation in Ukraine. However, the country also contends with the fact that Russian peacekeepers are based in its breakaway Transnistria region and relies heavily on Russia for energy.

“Moldova can no longer rely exclusively on foreign policy instruments, one of which is its neutral status, to ensure state stability,” said Dorin Recean, the security aide. “Moldova must start work on increasing its defence potential… The authorities need to obtain the conscious support of citizens who should understand it is critical to the state’s survival.”

For his part, Minister of Foreign Affairs and European Integration, Nicu Popescu, said during a press conference that the strengthening of partnerships in the field of security and defence with states and organisations is a key objective. These partnerships will continue and even be strengthened, he added.

Asked if the authorities in Chisinau intend to take steps to strengthen relations with NATO, Popescu stated that the authorities in Chisinau want to modernise their defence capabilities to the highest international standards, and this implies strengthening external partnerships, including in the field of security and defence.

“This involves strengthening our partnerships with Great Britain, but also other states and organisations. You know very well that we have defence partnerships with the United States of America and the European Union through the European peace initiative. We have a partnership with NATO, for a very long time, based on the individual action plan initiated in 2006,” declared Popescu.

Given that Ukraine has humiliatingly lost Crimea, Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson and Zaporozhye to Russia, it must be questioned whether Giurgiulești, situated on the border of Moldova, Romania and Ukraine, might be a pathetic appeasement for Kiev and perhaps be a condition for Moldova to one day join NATO.

It also comes as protests against Sandu increase, especially as energy prices are sky-rocketing. Moldova’s gas regulator raised prices by 27% for households on September 21. Romanian Prime Minister Nicolae Ciucă said earlier this month that there were discussions with the Moldovan Prime Minister to deliver gas to Moldova, but this cannot be more than five million cubic metres of gas per day.

“I discussed with Prime Minister Gavriliţa, 150 million cubic metres… We still have to see what quantities we can secure in the next period. In warehouses today, we have stored… about 87%, which means that if we manage to have contracts signed for the winter period, to maintain the balance in the system and to have the necessary quantities on cold days, we can ensure the respective quantity,” the Romanian Prime Minister declared to the press.

At the same time, Ciucă stated that Romania cannot provide Moldova with the necessary gas if Russia stops deliveries.

In this way, Moldova finds itself in a difficult position as its pro-Western president is even willing to sacrifice sovereignty for the sake of Ukraine. Now there are discussions of Moldova growing its military budget with the aim of eventually joining NATO despite the fact that Moldova is already one of the poorest countries in Europe, which is amplified as living costs are soaring.

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Ahmed Adel is a Cairo-based geopolitics and political economy researcher.

Featured image is from InfoBrics

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***

The Federal Reserve recently ordered another “super-sized interest hike” — the fifth rate hike this year — in what appears to be a hopeless effort to contain runaway inflation. Additional rate hikes are also anticipated. Some fear the Federal Reserve may be pushing us too hard, which could bring us from recession into deflation

Data from the Bureau of Labor statistics report the highest annual increase in food prices since the 1970s, with the cost of food rising 10.9% in the last 12 months. Overall, energy prices have seen the highest increases, rising by 41.6% between June 2021 and June 2022. For comparison, the Federal Reserve’s annual inflation target is 2%

As bad as the economic trend appears, that’s not all we have to contend with. Financial crisis historian Adam Tooze predicts several crises may converge over the next six to 18 months, including food crises, energy crises, pandemic outbreaks, stagflation, a Eurozone sovereign debt crisis and potential nuclear war

Our current situation is not accidental. It’s not even the result of pure ineptitude. Once you understand the globalist cabal’s plan for a Great Reset, you realize that all of these things need to happen in order for The Great Reset to be implemented. The rational conclusion, then, is that our food, energy, medicine and financial systems are being dismantled and hobbled on purpose

We can’t stop these crises from happening, but we can prepare to survive the destruction and then rebuild systems to our own liking, rather than accept their slave systems

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While the White House administration has tried to downplay the seriousness of inflation, reality has a stubborn way of paying no attention to fantasies and make-believe.

As reported by several news outlets in recent days,1 the Federal Reserve (which is not federal at all but rather a private entity that prints and lends fiat currency to the government) has ordered another “super-sized interest hike” — the fifth rate hike this year — in what appears to be a hopeless effort to contain runaway inflation. As reported by NPR, September 21, 2022:2

“The Federal Reserve ordered another super-sized jump in interest rates today, and signaled that additional rate hikes are likely in the coming months, as it tries to put the brakes on runaway prices.

The central bank raised its benchmark interest rate by 0.75 percentage points Wednesday, matching hikes in June and July. The Fed has been boosting borrowing costs at the fastest pace in decades. But so far, its actions have done little to curb the rapid run-up in prices.”

‘Exceptional Level of Economic Uncertainty’ Ahead

Higher interest rates, of course, increase the cost of borrowing, making home mortgages, car loans and credit card balances more expensive and, for many, unaffordable. And we haven’t even seen the worst of it yet. According to MSN,3 the Federal Reserve anticipates additional rate hikes after this, in the hopes of limiting stagflation, a situation in which prices rise and employment goes down.

Some, however, fear the Federal Reserve may be pushing us from recession into deflation. As reported by MSN September 21, 2022:4

“The World Bank last week raised the specter of a global recession, driven by higher rates in the U.S. and abroad. Investors are increasingly worried that disruption in the U.S. government debt market could worsen as the Fed raises borrowing costs.

The housing and stock markets are reeling. And some executives like Tesla CEO Elon Musk even say the economy is in danger of entering a period of deflation … the Fed’s policies take time to feed through the economy, meaning the central bank could end up depressing economic activity more than necessary before realizing it, given the sheer speed at which it’s jacking up rates — the fastest pace in three decades.

‘There’s the old expression that sometimes they’ll tighten until something breaks,’ said Liz Ann Sonders, chief investment strategist at Charles Schwab. ‘It’s a legitimate concern at this point.’ The predicament creates an exceptional level of economic uncertainty for the country … Also at stake is the central bank’s own credibility as the nation’s chief inflation-fighting authority.”

Record Inflation in 2022

In early August 2022, President Biden claimed the U.S. had “zero-percent inflation” in the month of July. Alas, boasting about a single-month index change was a Jedi mind trick that didn’t work on most people. The federal Consumer Price Index earlier that day published data showing an annual inflation rate of 8.5% for July, down from 9.1% in June, which was the highest rate since 1981.5

Data from the Bureau of Labor statistics also reported the highest annual increase in food prices since the 1970s, with the cost of food rising 10.9% in the last 12 months. Overall, energy prices have seen the highest increases, rising by 41.6% between June 2021 and June 2022. For comparison, the Federal Reserve’s annual inflation target is 2%.6

Later in that same speech, Biden “proceeded to accidentally step on his own message,” to quote the New York Post,7 by urging Congress to pass his Inflation Reduction Act.

Putting his foot even further down his own throat, Biden added the bill would “keep inflation from getting better.”8 Clearly, what he meant to say was that the bill would keep it from getting worse, but he spoke the truth in this instance nonetheless.

The better-titled Inflation Act is strongly biased toward financing of “green” programs, which will be funded by additional taxes, including a new 15% minimum corporate tax and massively increased IRS enforcement. Commenting on the bill shortly after it passed the Senate, Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis, said:9

“The Orwellian named ‘Inflation Reduction Act’ will do no such thing, as a number of prominent experts and economic policy groups have indicated. The Penn Wharton Budget Model,10 the Tax Foundation,11 and the Congressional Budget Office12 all found the bill won’t lower inflation and may make it worse.

The IRS would more than double in size, unleashing 87,000 new enforcement agents on American families … [and the] nonpartisan Joint Committee on Taxation says that 78% to 90% of the revenue raised from misreported income would likely come from those making under $200,000.”

Impending Polycrisis

As bad as the economic trend appears, that’s not all we have to contend with in coming days. As detailed in “Economy Expert Explains the Impending Polycrisis of Doom,” global citizens are currently facing a whole host of intersecting and interconnected crises.

Adam Tooze, a financial crisis historian and director of the European Institute at Columbia University, predicts several crises may erupt and converge over the next six to 18 months, including food crises, energy crises, pandemic outbreaks, stagflation, a Eurozone sovereign debt crisis and potential nuclear war.

As explained by Tooze, “polycrisis” is not merely the presence of several crises at once. Rather, it’s “a situation … where the whole is even more dangerous than the sum of the parts.”13 These crises are hitting us all at once, and several of them reinforce and worsen each other. Also notable is the fact that there’s great uncertainty associated with some of them, making it extremely difficult to make predictions.

Beyond the influences highlighted by Tooze, others could also be added into the mix, such as the weaponization of the U.S. dollar, which is encouraging countries to de-dollarize and create alternative reserve currencies, NATO and U.S. meddling in the Russia-Ukraine conflict, the push to expand NATO, and allowing health agencies to dictate economic policy, just to name a few.

These Crises Are Not Accidental

What’s perhaps most infuriating about our current situation is that it’s not accidental. It’s not even the result of pure ineptitude. Once you understand the globalist cabal’s plan for a Great Reset, you realize that all of these things need to happen in order for The Great Reset to be implemented. Since the reset can’t happen unless all of the old systems are first destroyed, the rational conclusion is that they’re being dismantled and hobbled on purpose.

The global economic system is being dismantled to bring in a programmable central bank digital currency (CBDC), so they can monitor and control your spending from a centralized location.

The energy grids of the Western world are being dismantled and incapacitated in order to justify a new “green” economy based on carbon credits. It will also push people to the brink of despair, which makes them more likely to accept “solutions” that would normally be rejected as unacceptable.

A “green” all-electric vehicle society — were it even possible, which it’s not — would also dramatically limit your ability to travel and, in fact, all travel could then be monitored and restricted from a central location, just like your bank account. Both CBDCs and electric vehicles are tools through which a centralized cabal can control your every move.

Agriculture and the food industry, meanwhile, are being crippled in part by irrational nitrogen reduction laws that will result in less food being grown and fewer livestock being raised, and in part by no longer coincidental fires, so that a new food system can be introduced — one based on “micro livestock,” i.e., insects, cultured meat, plant-based meat alternatives and GMO plant foods.

The common denominator is that all foods need to be patentable. Lack of food, like lack of energy, also makes people more “malleable” and willing to give up rights and liberties to survive.

Health care is also being undermined and getting more dangerous by the day as doctors are being muzzled through new laws, and the World Health Organization is pushing — using biosecurity as its justification — to grant itself the power to dictate and control health care worldwide. I think the reason for centralizing health care under the WHO is to make the transition to transhumanism easier.

The WHO is diligently working on a global vaccine passport, and President Biden recently signed an executive order14 that fast-tracks mRNA shots and other gene therapies “to be able to write circuitry for cells and predictably program biology in the same way in which we write software and program computers.” So, it’s no longer a stretch to imagine a world in which you have to get regular gene therapy injections in order to be able to function in society.

And, between Biden’s executive order and the Food and Drug Administration’s new “future framework” that allows reformulated mRNA shots to be rolled out without testing, it seems humanity at large will be the guinea pigs for untold numbers of genetic experiments to see what works and what doesn’t.

In the end, the transhumanist cabal intends to make themselves immortal super-humans. But they need test subjects to perfect these radical technologies — and that’s going to be all of us. I could go on, but I think you get the gist. The breakdowns we’re experiencing are not by chance. They’re intentional.

The goal is to break everything apart, and then roll out a “new and improved” society consisting of a ruling class, and disposable masses that will be controlled through technology-driven social engineering and control mechanisms like surveillance, “biosecurity,” CBDCs, electric cars, gene therapies, carbon credits and social credit scores.

What You Can Do to Prepare 

The central banking cabal and its many allies have infiltrated governments and institutions across the world for many decades, slowly turning the systems against us. We are now in the final chapter of their technocratic, transhumanist takeover.

They’ve told us their plans. It’s all spelled out in white papers, reports, books and on websites. The Great Reset is the overarching plan for the global takeover, previously referred to as the New World Order. The Fourth Industrial Revolution is the transhumanist piece of that plan, and the Green Agenda is the piece that will usher in essential control mechanisms.

Without a doubt, they wield formidable weapons. But before you drown in despair, remember that we still outnumber these megalomaniacs by tens of millions to one, if not more. And, believe it or not, they need our cooperation. If enough of us withhold our cooperation, their plans start falling apart. I’m not saying it will be easy. It’ll require sacrifice. But that’s nothing new. Freedom has always required sacrifice.

Two of the most important things everyone can do right now is 1) prepare ourselves and our families for hard times (if you were not a prepper before, now’s the time), and 2) start building parallel structures and systems to replace the ones that are being dismantled.

The idea is to survive and rebuild a world of our own choosing rather than being forced to accept theirs out of sheer desperation. Strategies that can strengthen individual and local resilience to the stresses facing us include the creation of local food systems15 and the strengthening of neighborhood and community connections.

By building a strong local food system, you reduce food insecurity, and by building a community network of specialists, you reduce the effects of a crumbling financial system as you can simply barter goods and services. For those who aren’t skilled at growing food it is wise to align with local farmers that you resonate with and can add complementary skill sets. Remember it takes a community to get through this.

Social cohesion also offers many psychological benefits.16 Local food systems and community networks both also reduce individuals’ reliance on government handouts, and by extension, they’re less likely to be forced into these new Great Reset slave systems. A 2017 StrongTown article17 provides several excellent suggestions for those willing to spearhead a local food movement in their own hometown.

Additional Suggestions

It’s important that you continue to prepare for the inevitable financial catastrophe and become as independent and resilient as possible. Shore up supplies and figure out how to live in an “off grid” scenario, in case daily conveniences suddenly vanish. This year I have offered many articles on how you can prepare for food, water and other crises, which you can find in my Substack library.

Aside from “investing” in storable food, a water catchment system and other essentials that will only go up in price or become unobtainable, you may also consider buying physical precious metals, which can help protect against currency devaluation. Investing in real assets, such as land could be another.

It’s hard to make definitive recommendations, as your strategy will depend on your personal situation, so take some time to think things through. If you do nothing to hedge your bets, you may one day find yourself left with nothing — which is precisely what the World Economic Forum has declared will be our lot.

It’s also essential to become as healthy as possible. A recent study showed that 93% of U.S. adults are metabolically unhealthy, and those stats were four years old. It’s likely that number is now over 95%. You want to be the 1 person in 20 who is healthy. Make it your goal to be in that group.

This is so important that I’m devising a poll to find out what that percentage is for our subscribers. It would be a bit more accurate as I’ll include metrics like vitamin one hour a day of sun exposure and exercise. So, start getting metabolically fit now.

Also prepare yourself mentally, emotionally and spiritually for what could be stressful and challenging times as the globalist cabal continues to push The Great Reset forward, which will require more “emergencies.”

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Notes

2 NPR September 21, 2022

3 MSN September 21, 2022

4 MSN Money September 21, 2022

5 NY Post August 10, 2022

6 NY Post August 10, 2022

7 NY Post August 10, 2022

8 NY Post August 10, 2022

9 NY Post August 10, 2022

10 Penn Wharton Budget Model

11 Tax Foundation August 12, 2022

12 Congressional Budget Office August 4, 2022

13 Adam Tooze Substack June 24, 2022

14 Executive Order on Advancing Biotechnology and Biomanufacturing Innovation for a Sustainable, Safe and Secure American Bioeconomy

15 Treehugger October 11, 2018

16 NPR January 3, 2013

17 StrongTown August 7, 2017

Featured image is from Mercola

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***

On October 2, during an interview on ABC’s “This Week,” retired United States Army general and former Director of the CIA David Petraeus stated that if Russian President Vladimir Putin used nuclear weapons against the Kiev regime, the United States would “quickly intervene to take out Russian forces in Ukraine, including Crimea.” He added that this would also be a collective US-led NATO response.

The retired general claims that “direct US involvement is necessary in that scenario” and that “the political West must take the Kremlin’s latest nuclear rhetoric seriously.”

Petraeus thinks that this is what the US government has in mind when it comes to the recent statements of “catastrophic consequences” for Moscow. Lately, the belligerent thalassocracy has ramped up its unfounded rhetoric that Russia was supposedly planning on using tactical nuclear weapons against the Kiev regime forces. The narrative has been heavily (ab)used by the mainstream propaganda machine.

“And what would happen?” show co-anchor Jonathan Karl asked Petraeus.

“Well, again, I have deliberately not talked to Jake [Sullivan] about this. I mean, just to give you a hypothetical, we would respond by leading a NATO, a collective effort, that would take out every Russian conventional force that we can see and identify on the battlefield in Ukraine and also in Crimea and every ship in the Black Sea,” former CIA chief stated.

Then, the “This Week” anchor mentioned the scenario in which the radiation fallout from the supposed Russian nuclear strike could directly impact much of Eastern Europe, including nearby NATO member states.

“Yes. And perhaps you can make that case. The other case is that this is so horrific that there has to be a response, it cannot go unanswered. But it doesn’t expand, it doesn’t — it’s not nuclear for nuclear,” Petraeus claimed. “You don’t want to, again, get into a nuclear escalation here. But you have to show that this cannot be accepted in any way,” the retired general said.

While the retired US Army general and former CIA director is not speaking from a position of legal authority, as he is not officially part of the troubled Biden administration or in any capacity as an active government official, his opinion can still be considered a reflection of what the US foreign policy and military establishment think, especially considering the positions he held in the past. The very idea that such a high-ranking (former) official thinks that Russia would stand idle while NATO targets its forces is quite indicative of the deteriorating state of America’s top brass, both political and military. This is also quite terrifying for the rest of the world, as it is expected that the US, which operates the second most powerful nuclear arsenal in the world, is led by at least somewhat reasonable people whose main concern should be not to lead the world into thermonuclear annihilation.

Petraeus further explained his view that Putin has “no qualms” about surrounding European countries and Western backers of Ukraine suffering too.

“Well, he’s trying to cast this in any way that he can in a way to appear threatening, to be threatening, to try to get Europe to crack. He thinks he can out-suffer Europe, if you will,” he continued. “And, you know, the Russians have out-suffered Napoleon and the Nazis and so forth. But I don’t think he’s going to out-suffer Europe. Europe’s going to have a tough winter, there’s going to be very reduced flow of natural gas, but they’ll get through it and I don’t think they’ll crack on the issue of support for Ukraine,” Petraeus stated and then went on with claims that the battlefield situation was “deteriorating for Russian forces” and that if they “continue to be backed into a corner” this would supposedly “make Putin more unpredictable and dangerous.”

In recent weeks, the propaganda machine of the political West has been producing a flurry of ominous headlines based on a false narrative that Russia is threatening everyone with nuclear weapons.

On September 19, Russian President Vladimir Putin warned that the Russian military would use everything at its disposal to defend the country and its territorial integrity, adding that the warning wasn’t a bluff. Although Putin never mentioned nuclear weapons, it’s clear that Russia could deploy them if the US tried to escalate. The statement was immediately taken out of context and the mainstream media started constructing the narrative that Russia would supposedly resort to using nuclear weapons against Kiev regime forces.

Standing at approximately 6,200 warheads, the Russian military is well-known for possessing the world’s most powerful nuclear arsenal. However, unlike the US, Russia never used these weapons in war. Its nuclear weapons serve as a deterrent and this was exactly what Russian President Vladimir Putin had in mind when giving the statement. Moscow has also announced low-level mobilization, clearly implying that the Russian military doesn’t plan on using nuclear weapons, as it would make no sense to send hundreds of thousands of soldiers into an area subjected to their use.

In addition, according to Pentagon sources, there have been no observed changes in Russian nuclear posture or any significant movement of the country’s nuclear forces. US intelligence services claim they have “stepped up their surveillance and monitoring“, but this has not led to any changes in America’s nuclear posture either, clearly implying that the whole narrative is a scare tactic aimed at galvanizing even more Russophobia.

*

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Drago Bosnic is an independent geopolitical and military analyst.

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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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***

The meeting of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) in Samarkand has prompted a geo-economic earthquake – as did President Putin’s subsequent announcement of a partial mobilisation and referenda in four oblasts (provinces) of Ukraine, which almost certainly will result in their lightening integration into Russia.

The aftershocks are being felt everywhere, but particularly in Washington and Brussels.  All wait to see what happens next.

The West chose to leap upon Russia’s very limited Ukraine operation – the SMO (Special Militarily Operation) – to brand it: “an invasion of Ukraine”, which it was not (any more than Russian support in Syria constituted an invasion).

For, like its Syrian prototype, the SMO was crafted as the minimum of Russian military support that might provoke and catalyse a negotiated settlement along Minsk II lines. The perfect fit of the SMO to Russia’s Syria ‘footprint’ makes it clear — it was aimed to elicit a political settlement; one which so nearly occurred in Istanbul in March — until nixed by Britain and the US.

One may imagine, however, that in opting for such a restrictive posture, the Russian High Command may not have counted on Kiev’s willingness to throw so many of its soldiers’ lives into defending indefensible positions, or the abandonment by which the West would throw money and weapons at the Kiev forces.

It was not money and weapons alone: The West escalated its psyops deceptions to unheard-of heights of fantasy. It flooded the media with stories of the ‘invasions’ slow progress, claiming that this portrayed Russian weakness and failure.

All this taken together represents a crucial and deliberate choice of optics over real strategy, which has painted Washington into today’s dangerous corner.

That is to say that since the go-slow nature of the Russian offensive was intended essentially to minimize the impact on civilian lives and infrastructure — and also to give the parties plenty of time in order to reach the conclusion that negotiations were required before events turned existential, for one side or the other.

Unfortunately, the propaganda flooding the media has been so successful – touching on neuralgic and deeply layered currents of Russophobia – that western leaders have become hostage to this contrived ‘staging’ of a ‘panicked, faltering and weak Russia’.

Thus, against such an adverse backdrop, the Kremlin finally opted to incorporate culturally-Russian parts of Ukraine into Russia.

It is a gamble. The force of logic here is clear:  The conflict then would either have to cease, as Russia commits to defending those annexed territories as ‘Mother Russia’ — a game-changing shift that implies irresistible force mounted against Kiev, were it to further assault these territories. Or alternatively, the West must escalate further.

Putin’s gamble posits therefore the ending of conflict, and therefore the threat of nuclear conflict, or else continuing the (problematic) NATO war against Russia which more directly does risk nuclear war: Team Biden’s choice.

However, Biden – though he says he has no stomach for a war with Russia and will not permit one – likes to tout the idea that “our democracy” is under threat. “We have an obligation, a duty, a responsibility to defend, preserve, and protect ‘our democracy’”, he says.

Biden is not referring to generic democracy as a whole, but specifically to America’s liberal-élite hegemony (aka ‘our democracy’), and to its predilection for forever wars abroad being under threat — not just in Ukraine, but in Samarkand where the Eurasian giants such as China, India, Russia, Pakistan and Iran are integrating their economies to new levels and promising to create rival trading and communications system (away from the dollar).

In a speech made in Philadelphia recently, Biden – speaking in an eerie set-up at Independence Hall – extended threats to ‘our democracy’ from those abroad to warn against the threat of a different terror, closer to home — from “Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans” who “represent an extremism that threatens the very foundations of our republic”.

Arta Moeini and Professor Carment argue that US politics have moved a complete circle: From Bush’s initial warning to the external world that, in the War on Terror, you are either ‘with us or against us’ — to Biden “weaponising the mythos of our democracy for partisan gains”.

Seen together, Biden’s rhetoric depicts his administration’s war against the amorphous specter of “MAGA fascism” at home and its stated goal of militarily defeating autocracies abroad as being but two sides of the same coin.

This doctrine ensnares all sides of the spectrum — by enmeshing them in false equivalencies: Deny the Establishment’s liberal interventionist foreign policy (in say, Ukraine) and be branded as an ‘extremist’ or even a ‘traitor’ – as Hungarian PM Viktor Orbán has been labeled in the European parliament, for taking Russia’s side in EU deliberations. Or, defend America’s civil liberties and due process toward participants in the 6 January demonstrations, and (then again) you are tarred as being in league with Putin.

So here is the rub: The Biden Administration still exhibits decidedly hawkish attitudes in respect to toppling Putin; to defending Taiwan; and containing Iran, in order to save ‘our democracy’. And he now uses this existential framing to attack his American political opponents at home, and to coerce American support for his agenda: “A battle for the soul” of the United States and the “challenge of our time” (autocracies).

But by linking them, were he to walk back one, he would undermine the other. Can Biden afford to see the Ukraine war end on terms favourable to President Putin, without it also being perceived as undermining his war on Trumpist ‘authoritarianism’ too? Is Biden trapped by his own ‘clever’ language game, one that was predicated on the expectation of Putin losing in Ukraine?  Yet, dare he risk nuclear escalation to maintain the ideological equivalence?

Moeini and Carment have noted:

“This logic has now become the operating principle behind what may be called the Biden Doctrine, which is expected to be unveiled in the administration’s forthcoming National Security Strategy. It holds that the fight for democracy is incessant, totalising, and all-encompassing. That neutralising the alleged threat of fascism at home, personified by MAGA and former president Trump, is part of a larger apocalyptic struggle to defend the liberal international order abroad.”

The West and its delusions are deeply entrenched. It can end as a débacle for the Biden ‘doctrine’.

*

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Alastair Crooke is Director of Conflicts Forum; Former Senior British Diplomat; Author.

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***

Auch wenn die Überlebensfrage der Menschheit angesichts eines möglichen präventiven Atomkriegs (1) gegenwärtig im Zentrum aller Überlegungen steht, sollten weise Aufklärer „über den Tag hinaus“ denken und überlegen, wie die Mitmenschen in einer Neuen Weltordnung asiatischer Prägung leben wollen. Frieden, Freiheit und Gerechtigkeit sind weiterhin erstrebenswerte Ziele aller Menschen. 

Wie auch immer sich die Welt entwickeln wird – ohne die Erkenntnisse der wissenschaftlichen Psychologie wird die Menschheit nicht weiterkommen. Als langjähriger Psychologe und Psychotherapeut steht der Autor zu seiner Prognose. Im Folgenden soll die Entwicklung der modernen Psychologie kurz dagestellt werden.

Es wird nicht leicht sein, Mitbürgern mit verschiedenem Bildungsgrad sowie Jung und Alt das Wissen über sich selbst und die Menschen generell zu vermitteln. Bis heute werden sie von Eltern, Kirche und Staat autoritär und religiös erzogen und so programmiert, dass es schwer sein wird, sie auf ihre Probleme aufmerksam zu machen.

Doch Bildung bedeutet, den Menschen zu vermitteln, wie sie ihre Probleme lösen und wie sie leben können. Auch sollten sie erfahren, welche Meinung sie über sich selbst, ihre Partner, Nachbarn, über den Staat und die Gemeinde und welche Haltung sie gegenüber ihren Kindern haben sollen.

Erst in der Neuzeit begannen die Menschen, sich zu erkennen

Vor dem Zeitalter der Psychologie herrschte im Gegensatz zur auf Kausalität beruhenden Wissenschaft die magische Weltanschauung des Mittelalters und der Religion, die die Menschen fest im Griff hatte. Man war der Meinung, dass die Seele des Menschen hier auf dieser Welt nur eine Prüfung durchmacht und dass der Mensch in den Himmel gehört; dort sei das ewige Leben.

Erst Ludwig Feuerbach hat dieses Problem erschüttert, indem er aufzeigte, dass dem nicht so ist (2). Doch seine Erkenntnis wird immer noch bekämpft und nicht weitervermittelt. Noch heute gilt in den Schulen das alte Prinzip der Religion, der übernatürlichen Bestimmung des Menschen. Auch die Gefühle der Menschen durften nicht erforscht werden; die Kirche war dagegen. Naturforscher waren deshalb auf dem falschen Weg, wenn sie andere Völker – die sogenannten Wilden – beobachtet haben.

Erst durch die materialistische Geschichtsauffassung im vorletzten Jahrhundert haben die Menschen angefangen, sich mit sich selbst zu befassen. Sie begannen, den Menschen zu erkennen, zu deuten und sich zu erklären, warum er sich so verhält. Das war der Beginn der Neuzeit.

Die materialistische Geschichtsauffassung war ein großer Einbruch in die Gefühlswelt der Menschen. Karl Marx und die freiheitlichen Sozialisten haben angefangen, den Menschen richtig zu sehen. Wären diese Gedanken nicht bekämpft worden, wäre die Menschheit bereits viel weiter; die Menschen könnten sich das Leben in jeder Beziehung besser einrichten. Dabei hatte Marx den deutschen Philosophen Wilhelm Hegel als Vorbild. Und der hatte noch Gott und das Absolute in der Natur gesehen.

Karl Marx stützte sich jedoch auf Feuerbach ab, lehnte die übernatürliche Tendenz ab und fand heraus, dass die Haltung des Menschen geändert werden kann. Die Tiefenpsychologie bestätigt das. Marx war der Auffassung, dass das Bewusstsein des Menschen durch die Verhältnisse geprägt wird (Das Sein bestimmt das Bewusstsein.). Er hat den Menschen zurückgeholt auf die Erde. Auch hatte er Recht, dass sich die Menschen ändern, wenn ihr Leben gesichert ist, wenn sie einen gedeckten Tisch haben. Sie haben dann andere Gedanken, andere Gefühle und eine andere Beziehung zu den Mitmenschen. Solange die Menschen Angst haben, glauben sie. In der materialistischen Geschichtsauffassung hörte der Glaube an Götter und übernatürliche Wesen auf.

Wenn die gesellschaftlichen Verhältnisse die Menschen ändern, assoziieren sie sich mit ihren Mitmenschen, glauben an sie und fühlen sich in sie ein, indem sie an sie appellieren. Der andere Mensch will so gut leben wie ich, er will ein Dach über dem Kopf haben. Er macht mit, sagten die freiheitlichen Sozialisten, die Anarchisten. Vor den anderen Menschen muss man keine Angst haben und in ihrer Freiheit keine Gefahr sehen. Die freiheitlichen Sozialisten wollten eine Gemeinschaft haben, wo jeder Mensch entscheidet, welchen Weg er wählen, mit wem er sich assoziieren, wie er leben will. Diese Freiheit sollte man allen Menschen geben.

Freiheit bedeutet, dass der Mensch seine Sicherheit hat und nicht um die Kirchensuppe betteln muss. Das Prinzip der Freiheit sollte so verstanden werden, dass jeder arbeitende Mensch weiß, dass wenn er nicht mehr arbeiten kann, wenn er erkrankt, dass er dann dieselbe Möglichkeit hat zu leben, dass er den Lohn, den er heute hat, weiter haben wird, dass er seine Wohnung behalten, dass er weiterleben kann.

Doch eines hat Karl Marx den Menschen nicht zugemutet: dass man sie sofort freilassen kann. Er hatte es sich so vorgestellt, dass Revolutionäre die Macht und den Staat übernehmen und diese dann Gerechtigkeit und das Recht auf Leben, Grund und Boden schaffen. Wenn in den Fabriken Arbeiterräte das Sagen hätten, würde der Staat absterben, sich zurückziehen. Doch das hat sich als Irrtum erwiesen, weil sich Menschen unter dem Prinzip der Gewalt und Autorität nicht entwickeln können, sondern korrupt werden.

Wenn das Sein das Bewusstsein bestimmt, wie Marx sagte, dann beginnt das Sein, wenn den Menschen die Freiheit gegeben wird – und zwar sofort! Nicht der Staat, sondern die Gemeinschaft der Menschen entscheidet: der Bauer, der Angestellte, der Arbeiter in der Fabrik und die Gemeinde. Es muss kein Kommissär oder Städter kommen und Anordnungen treffen. Was will jemand, der das Problem nicht kennt, dem Bauern beibringen?

Die Tiefenpsychologie – ein Kind der Naturwissenschaft

Ohne materialistische Geschichtsauffassung wäre die Psychologie in ihrer Forschung nicht auf dem heutigen Stand. Die Psychologie ist eine Wissenschaft über das Wesen des Menschen, über die menschliche Natur. Als empirische Wissenschaft erforscht sie das geistige und seelische Leben des Menschen mittels systematischer Beobachtung und aufgrund von Erfahrungen: wie wird der Mensch, wie wächst er heran, welche Erlebnisse macht er und wie findet er sich in seinem Leben zurecht.

Naturwissenschaftlich orientierte Psychologen beobachten, messen und analysieren mit dem Ziel, Regelmäßigkeiten zu erkennen und ihre Forschungsergebnisse allen Menschen zur Verfügung zu stellen. Damit kann die Psychologie den Menschen vermitteln, wie sie naturgemäß leben und ihre Lebensprobleme lösen können. Auch lernen sie, die eigenen Gefühle und Reaktionsweisen und diejenigen der anderen Menschen zu erkennen und zu verstehen. Wenn sie die Gefühlswelt der Mitmenschen kennen lernen, dann können sie auch ihre Taten und Handlungsweisen einschätzen – diejenigen ihrer Mitbürger und diejenigen von Politikern und Machthabern.

Leider wird die Wissenschaft der Psychologie in vielen Ländern immer noch unterschätzt oder falsch eingeschätzt. Es gibt nämlich keine Politik ohne Psychologie und auch die Tatsache, dass Kriege geführt werden, ist auf den Mangel an psychologischer Erkenntnis zurückzuführen. Während des deutschen und weltweiten Faschismus haben die meisten Psychologen kläglich versagt und sich für mörderische Kriege einspannen lassen (3).

Der entscheidende Durchbruch in den intellektuellen Gesellschaftsschichten gelang den Naturwissenschaften erst im 17. Jahrhundert. Das löste im Zusammenhang mit der Aufklärung eine wissenschaftliche Revolution aus. Über zwei Jahrhunderte später entdeckte und erforschte der österreichische Arzt, Tiefenpsychologe, Kulturhistoriker und Religionskritiker Sigmund Freud das Unbewusste im Menschen und begründete die Psychoanalyse.

Freud war der Auffassung, dass die ganze Welt ein Spital sei, ein Kranken- oder Irrenhaus. Es gäbe keinen Menschen, der seine Probleme lösen könne. Wenn wir uns heute in der Welt umschauen, stellen wir fest, dass alle Menschen ohne Ausnahme durch die traditionelle Erziehung nicht gesund, sondern psychisch irritiert sind. Erfahrene Psychotherapeuten bestätigen dies. Aus diesem Grunde sind Aufklärung und Bildung der Menschen von großer Bedeutung. Wichtiger jedoch ist das Problem der Erziehung, welches – nach dem deutschen Schriftsteller Jean Paul – den eigentlichen Hebelarm der Kultur darstellt.

Die Bedeutung der Erziehung für eine lebenswerte Zukunft

Wenn es uns ein Anliegen ist, dass alle Bürger zukünftig in einer friedlichen, freien und gerechten Welt leben, dass die Menschen sich und ihre Mitmenschen verstehen und dass Gewalt, Kriege und die Herrschaft von Menschen über den Menschen ein ende finden, dann müssen wir uns dem Erziehungsproblem zuwenden und über die vergangenen und zukünftigen Erziehungsmethoden sprechen.

Die neuere tiefenpsychologische Forschung hat Eltern, Lehrkräften, Pädagogen, Psychologen und allen anderen Interessierten bewusst gemacht, dass der Mensch in einem derartigen Maße das Produkt seiner Erziehung ist, dass man die Hoffnung haben darf, durch bessere, das heißt psychologische Erziehungsmethoden Menschen heranbilden zu können, die gegen die Verstrickungen des Machtwahns gefeit sein werden.

Die Erziehungsmethoden der Vergangenheit schufen einen Menschentypus, der die Tragödie der Geschichte verursachen konnte. Das autoritäre Prinzip, jahrhundertelang als fraglos-gültige Grundlage des erzieherischen Verhaltens angesehen, drosselte bereits in den Kindheitsjahren das Gemeinschaftsgefühl der Menschen und stattete sie mit jener Aggressionsbereitschaft aus, durch die eine gewalttätige Welt im Zustand der Gewalttätigkeit verharren konnte.

Indem die Pädagogik in Elternhaus und Schule auf unangemessenes Autoritätsgebaren und auf Gewaltanwendung verzichtet und sich mit wahrem Verständnis dem kindlichen Seelenleben widmet, wird sie einen Menschentypus hervorbringen, der keine „Untertanen-Mentalität“ besitzt und darum für die Machthaber in der Welt kein gefügiges Werkzeug mehr sein wird.

Die Demokratisierung der Erziehung im Sinne der Achtung vor der kindlichen Persönlichkeit und die freundschaftliche Zuwendung des Erziehers zu seinem Zögling auf der Grundlage einer konsequenten zwischenmenschlichen Anti-Autorität wird den wertvollsten Beitrag zum Aufbau einer humanen Gesellschaftsordnung leisten.

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Dr. Rudolf Lothar Hänsel ist Lehrer (Rektor a. D.), Doktor der Pädagogik (Dr. paed.) und Diplom-Psychologe (Dipl.-Psych. mit Schwerpunkt: Klinische-, Pädagogische-, Medien- sowie Individual-Psychologie). Viele Jahrzehnte unterrichtete er und bildete Fachkräfte fort. Als Pensionär arbeitete er als Psychotherapeut in eigener Praxis. In seinen Büchern und pädagogisch-psychologischen Fachartikeln fordert er eine bewusste ethisch-moralische Werteerziehung und eine Erziehung zu Gemeinsinn und Frieden. Sein Lebensmotto (nach Albert Camus): Geben, wenn man kann. Und nicht hassen, wenn das möglich ist.

Noten 

1. https://www.globalresearch.ca/the-privatization-of-nuclear-war/5458265

2. Feuerbach, Ludwig (1994). Das Wesen des Christentums. Stuttgart

3. Baumgarten, Franziska (1949). Die Deutschen Psychologen und die Zeitereignisse. Zürich

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***

During her campaign for the leadership of the British Conservative Party, Liz Truss told the Conservative Friends of Israel (CFI) that, if elected, she would consider relocating the British embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. At a subsequent meeting at the UN, Prime Minister Truss repeated the promise of a review to her “good friend” Yair Lapid, the interim Israeli prime minister. 

The status of Jerusalem is the thorniest issue in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, one of the most bitter, prolonged and intractable international conflicts of modern times. East Jerusalem, along with the rest of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, were captured by Israel in the June 1967 war and have ever since been viewed by the international community as occupied territory.

Israel claims the entire city as its eternal, undivided capital, while the Palestinians claim the eastern part as the capital of their hoped-for future state.

Israeli officials were naturally delighted that Truss floated the idea of moving the embassy to Jerusalem, and thereby recognising Israeli sovereignty over the city, as one of her first foreign policy moves as prime minister.

Palestinian leaders have warned that moving the embassy would undermine the two-state solution and destroy their relations with Britain. Husam Zomlot, the Palestinian ambassador to the UK, said it was “extremely unfortunate” that Truss used her first appearance at the UN as prime minister to “commit to potentially breaking international law”.

Violating UN resolutions

It is difficult to think of a foreign policy issue that is less in need of a review than the location of the British embassy in Israel. Moving the embassy to Jerusalem would violate a raft of UN resolutions and amount to an abrupt reversal of British policy since 1967. This policy, part of a broad international consensus, has held that all embassies should stay in Tel Aviv until a comprehensive peace agreement is reached between Israel and the Palestinians, with Jerusalem as the shared capital of two states.

During her tenure as foreign secretary, Truss made no attempt to relocate the embassy. One can only speculate that she instigated the review for reasons of political expediency: to ingratiate herself with Israel and its supporters in Britain, and more specifically, with the CFI, whose membership includes most of the cabinet and around 80 percent of Tory backbenchers.

One Israeli newspaper recently described Truss as potentially the “most pro-Israel British prime minister ever”. This was no doubt intended as praise, but it ignores Britain’s historic responsibility for creating the problem in the first place.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict was made in Britain. It all began with the Balfour Declarationof 1917 in support of a national home for the Jewish people in Palestine, although the Jews were only 10 percent of the country’s population at that time. The commitment that this would not be at the expense of “non-Jewish communities” was completely ignored by successive British governments. The declaration thus enabled a systematic Zionist colonial takeover of Palestine, a process that is still ongoing.

In June 1967, Israel completed the takeover of the whole of historic Palestine. Two weeks after the guns fell silent, Israel unilaterally annexed East Jerusalem and merged it with West Jerusalem. The UN Security Council immediately denounced these measures as unlawful and invalid.

In 1980, when the Knesset formally annexed East Jerusalem, the Security Council censured Israel “in the strongest terms”. The United Kingdom voted for all of these resolutions.

Outrage and condemnation

US President Donald Trump was first world leader to break the long-standing agreement of the international community not to base embassies in Jerusalem until a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is reached. His decision to move the American embassy to Jerusalem in 2018 was met with outrage across the Arab world and provoked widespread international condemnation. It also led to a flareup of violence in which dozens of Palestinians were killed by Israeli forces. Theresa May, the British prime minister at the time, criticised the move.

Trump’s much-vaunted “deal of the century” was a crude attempt to redefine the two-state solution as Greater Israel, including about a third of the West Bank and the whole of Jerusalem, and a fragmented Palestinian mini-state surrounded by Israeli settlements and military bases. It was promptly and contemptuously rejected by the Palestinian Authority (PA).

Despite Trump’s best efforts, only three states have followed his example of moving their embassies to Jerusalem: Kosovo, Guatemala and Honduras. All other 82 countries with diplomatic missions in Israel opted to keep their embassies in Tel Aviv. Some of these countries, including Britain, also have a consulate general in East Jerusalem, which serves as a channel of communication with the PA in Ramallah.

In her singularly pro-Israel stance and apparent indifference to Palestinian rights, Truss belongs to the mainstream of her party. All three prime ministers under whom she served have been staunch supporters of Israel. David Cameron described himself as a “passionate friend” of Israel and insisted that nothing could break that friendship.

Theresa May was probably the most pro-Israel leader in Europe during her premiership. In an address to the CFI in 2016, she described Israel as a “remarkable country … a thriving democracy, a beacon of tolerance, an engine of enterprise and an example to the rest of the world”. She furiously rejected a public petition, of which I was one of the signatories, to issue an official apology for the Balfour Declaration.

Strained relations

Boris Johnson carried the Israel-first Conservative policy a step further by placing Israel above international law. He resisted attempts to call it to account for its illegal actions and war crimes. In 2021, he announced that he opposed an International Criminal Court investigation into alleged war crimes in the occupied territories, noting in a letter to the CFI that while his government respected the independence of the court, it opposed this particular inquiry.

“This investigation gives the impression of being a partial and prejudicial attack on a friend and ally of the UK’s,” he wrote. The perverse logic of this statement is that being a friend and ally of the UK places Israel beyond international law and international scrutiny.

Like Johnson, Truss is a passionate proponent of post-Brexit Global Britain. Breaking international law, however, will do nothing to promote this brand – nor will it help to get a trade agreement with the US, which was touted as one of the major benefits of an independent foreign policy.

Truss’s loudly proclaimed intention, when she was foreign secretary, to unilaterally scrap the agreement with the European Union on Northern Ireland had already strained her relations with US President Joe Biden because of the peril he thought this would pose to the Good Friday agreement.

Following Trump’s example by moving the British embassy to Jerusalem would not go down well in the White House. Although Biden has not reversed the move of the American embassy, he has undertaken a series of measures to limit the damage done by his predecessor, and he has reverted to working with allies through the UN.

To move the British embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem would be morally indefensible, legally questionable and politically damaging. It would be one of the most savage British blows to Palestinian statehood since the Balfour Declaration. It would also encourage Israel to continue to act with impunity, reinforcing the arrogance of power.

Israel and its supporters in this country would surely welcome the move, despite the damage to Britain’s standing in the world.

Rather than review the location of its embassy, the British government should reassess its relationship with Israel in light of present-day realities. In the last two years, reports by three major human rights organisations have concluded that Israel has become an apartheid state. These reports carefully document Israel’s ongoing ethnic cleansing, land confiscations, house demolitions, persecution of human rights defenders, detention of minors and tolerance of settler violence.

The sad truth is that since 1967, Israel has become addicted to occupation. A true friend does not indulge an addiction but tries to wean the addict from it.

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Avi Shlaim is an Emeritus Professor of International Relations at Oxford University and the author of The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World (2014) and Israel and Palestine: Reappraisals, Revisions, Refutations (2009).

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***

Even if the question of humanity’s survival in the face of a possible pre-emptive nuclear war (1) is currently at the centre of all considerations, wise Enlightenment thinkers should think “beyond the day” and consider how fellow human beings want to live in an Asian-style New World Order. Peace, freedom and justice remain desired goals of all human beings.

No matter how the world develops, humanity will not advance without the insights of scientific psychology. As a psychologist and psychotherapist of many years’ standing, the author stands by his prognosis. In the following, the development of modern psychology will be briefly presented.

It will not be easy to teach fellow citizens with different levels of education as well as young and old the knowledge about themselves and people in general. Up to now, they have been brought up in an authoritarian and religious way by parents, church and state and they are programmed in such a way that it will be difficult to make them aware of their problems.

But education means teaching people how to solve their problems and how to live. They should also learn what opinion they should have about themselves, their partners, neighbours, about the state and the community, and what attitude they should have towards their children.

It was not until the modern era that people began to recognise themselves

Before the age of psychology, in contrast to science based on causality, the magical worldview of the Middle Ages and religion held a firm grasp on people. It was believed that man’s soul was only undergoing a trial here in this world and that man belonged in heaven; there was eternal life.

It was Ludwig Feuerbach who shook up this problem by showing that this was not so (2). But his insight is still fought against and not passed on. Even today, the old principle of religion, the supernatural destiny of man, is still valid in schools. Even people’s feelings were not allowed to be researched; the Church was against it. Naturalists were therefore on the wrong track when they observed other peoples – the so-called savages.

It was only through the materialistic view of history in the century before last that people began to concern themselves with themselves. They began to recognise and interpret human beings and to explain to themselves why they behave the way they do. That was the beginning of the modern age.

The materialist conception of history was a great incursion into the world of people’s feelings. Karl Marx and the liberal socialists began to see man in the right way. If these thoughts had not been fought, humanity would already be much further ahead; people would be able to arrange life better for themselves in every respect. Marx had the German philosopher Wilhelm Hegel as his model. And he still saw God and the Absolute in nature.

Karl Marx, however, based himself on Feuerbach, rejected the supernatural tendency and found that man’s attitude can be changed. Depth psychology confirms this. Marx believed that man’s consciousness is determined by conditions (Being determines consciousness.). He brought man back to earth. He was also right that people change when their lives are secure, when they have a laid table. They then have different thoughts, different feelings and a different relationship with their fellow human beings. As long as people are afraid, they believe. In the materialistic view of history, belief in gods and supernatural beings ceased.

When social conditions change people associate with their fellow human beings, believe in them and empathise with them by appealing to them. The other person wants to live as well as I do, he wants to have a roof over his head. He joins in, said the liberal socialists, the anarchists. One must not be afraid of other people and see no danger in their freedom. The liberal socialists wanted to have a community where each person decides which way he wants to choose, with whom he wants to associate, how he wants to live. This freedom should be given to all people.

Freedom means that man has his security and does not have to beg for church soup. The principle of freedom should be understood in such a way that every working man knows that if he can no longer work, if he falls ill, that he will then have the same opportunity to live, that he will continue to have the wage he has today, that he can keep his home, that he can continue to live.

But there is one thing Karl Marx did not demand of people: that they could be set free immediately. He had envisaged revolutionaries taking over power and the state and then establishing justice and the right to life, land and property. If workers’ councils were in charge in the factories, the state would die off, withdraw. But this has proved to be a mistake, because people cannot develop under the principle of violence and authority, but become corrupt.

If consciousness is determined by being, as Marx said, then being begins when people are given freedom – and immediately! It is not the state that decides, but the community of people: the peasant, the employee, the worker in the factory and the community. There is no need for a commissioner or a city official to come and issue orders. What does someone who does not know the problem want to teach the farmer?

Depth psychology – a child of natural science

Without a materialistic view of history, psychology would not be at its present level of research. Psychology is a science about the being of human beings, about human nature. As an empirical science, it investigates the mental and spiritual life of man by means of systematic observation and on the basis of experience: how does man become, how does he grow up, what experiences does he have and how does he find his way in life.

Scientifically oriented psychologists observe, measure and analyse with the aim of recognising regularities and making their research results available to all people. In this way, psychology can teach people how to live naturally and solve their life problems. They also learn to recognise and understand their own feelings and ways of reacting and those of other people. When they learn about the emotional world of fellow human beings, they can also judge their deeds and ways of acting – those of their fellow citizens and those of politicians and those in power.

Unfortunately, the science of psychology is still underestimated or misjudged in many countries. Indeed, there is no politics without psychology, and the fact that wars are fought is also due to the lack of psychological knowledge. During German and worldwide fascism, most psychologists failed miserably and allowed themselves to be used for murderous wars (3).

The decisive breakthrough in the intellectual circles of society was only achieved by the natural sciences in the 17th century. This triggered a scientific revolution in connection with the Enlightenment. More than two centuries later, the Austrian physician, depth psychologist, cultural historian and religious critic Sigmund Freud discovered and researched the unconscious in humans and founded psychoanalysis.

Freud believed that the whole world was a hospital, a sick or insane asylum. There would be no human being who could solve his problems. If we look around the world today, we see that all people without exception are not healthy but psychologically irritated by traditional education. Experienced psychotherapists confirm this. For this reason, enlightenment and education of people are of great importance. More important, however, is the problem of education, which – according to the German writer Jean Paul – is the real lever arm of culture.

The importance of education for a future worth living

If we are concerned that all citizens live in a peaceful, free and just world in the future, that people understand each other and their fellow human beings, and that violence, wars and the domination of people over people come to an end, then we must turn to the problem of education and talk about past and future methods of education.

Recent research in depth psychology has made parents, teachers, pedagogues, psychologists and all other interested parties aware that man is the product of his upbringing to such an extent that we can hope that better, i.e. psychological, methods of upbringing will be able to train people who will be immune to the entanglements of the mania for power.

The educational methods of the past created a type of human being that could cause the tragedy of history. The authoritarian principle, for centuries regarded as the unquestionably valid basis of educational behaviour, already throttled people’s sense of community in their childhood years and equipped them with that readiness for aggression through which a violent world could persist in a state of violence.

By renouncing inappropriate authority and the use of violence in the parental home and school and devoting itself with true understanding to the child’s soul, pedagogy will produce a type of human being that does not have a “subject mentality” and will therefore no longer be a docile tool for those in power in the world.

The democratisation of education in the sense of respect for the child’s personality and the friendly devotion of the educator to his pupil on the basis of a consistent interpersonal anti-authority will make the most valuable contribution to the building of a humane social order.

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Dr. Rudolf Lothar Hänsel is a teacher (retired headmaster), doctor of education (Dr. paed.) and graduate psychologist (Dipl.-Psych. with specialisation in clinical, educational, media and individual psychology). He taught and trained professionals for many decades. As a retiree, he worked as a psychotherapist in his own practice. In his books and educational-psychological articles, he calls for a conscious ethical-moral values education and an education for public spirit and peace. His motto in life (after Albert Camus): Give when you can. And not to hate, if that is possible.

He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

Notes

(1) https://www.globalresearch.ca/the-privatization-of-nuclear-war/5458265

(2) Feuerbach, Ludwig (1994). The essence of Christianity. Stuttgart

(3) Baumgarten, Franziska (1949). The German Psychologists and the Events of the Times. Zürich

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***

US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin on Tuesday will host Pakistan Army chief Gen Qamar Javed Bajwa at the Pentagon for talks amidst signs of enhanced military engagement between the two countries.

Last week, Pakistani Foreign Minister Bilawal Bhutto Zardari was in the town meeting top officials of the Biden Administration, including Secretary of State Tony Blinken.

Bajwa will be accorded an “enhanced honour cordon” at the riverside entrance of the Pentagon by Austin following which the two will be holding a meeting on bilateral and regional issues.

America’s engagement with Pakistan, in particular with its military, has increased in recent months. Last month, the US announced a $450 million F-16 fighter jet sustenance package for Pakistan — a move that was widely speculated as retaliation of India’s reluctance to criticise Russia for its invasion of Ukraine.

The F-16 package drew criticism from Indian external affairs minister S. Jaishankar, who called on the US to reflect on its relationship with Pakistan, and observed it ‘is not fooling anyone’ by claiming support for Pak’s F-16 was meant for counter-terrorism.

“At the end of the day… to say I am doing it for ‘counterterrorism’… you are talking of an aircraft of the capability of a F-16 (and) everyone knows where they are deployed. You are not fooling anybody by saying these things,” he said.

The US state department spokesperson Ned Price defended the decision.

“We don’t view our relationship with Pakistan… our relationship with India… in relation to one another… both partners of ours with different points of emphasis…” he said, responding to Jaishankar’s criticism.

“We look to both as partners, because we do have in many cases shared values. We do have in many cases shared interests. And the relationship we have with India stands on its own. The relationship we have with Pakistan stands on its own,” he said.

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***

The long-term crisis in the relations between the Russian Federation and Ukraine entered its final – war phase on February 24^th, 2022. The official reactions to the latest dramatic events in East Europe, which come from the Westerners, including the most important overseas Western political address, are usually dominated by two phrases:

“flagrant violation of international public law” and “violation of the territorial integrity of an internationally recognized state”.

The perpetrator of the acts is, of course, Russia, and, as it is claimed, the innocent victim is neighboring Ukraine.

However, the same Westerners do not want to see either flagrant violations by the Kiev regime of human rights in the Donbass Region since 2014 onward or flagrant violations of international public law and territorial integrity of the internationally recognized state in the case of the Balkans (Yugoslavia) in the 1990s. 

The ignorant attitude towards the provisions of international public law relevant to the Balkan case resulted, therefore, in the break-up of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, the long wars in its two former federal units (Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina) that took about 150,000 lives, produced more than two million displaced people and left behind a region to this day, almost three decades later, it has not politically stabilized and consolidated.

The West demonstrated an identical attitude towards the branch of law that it is ardently calling for these days concerning Ukraine, several years after the end of those wars, when it decided to actively engage in “protecting the endangered human rights of Kosovo Albanians” and “stopping the humanitarian catastrophe to which they were exposed”, as the official Western narrative was, explaining 78 days of the barbaric campaign of bombing Serbia and Montenegro in the spring of 1999. As we know, it ended with the complete physical destruction of the country and the de facto exclusion of Kosovo from its constitutional and legal framework of the Republic of Serbia. The self-proclaimed independence of Kosovo in February 2008 was, as well as the aggression against Serbia and Montenegro in 1999 contrary to all relevant customs of international public law. However, Western countries that today are leading in condemning similar Russian acts in Ukraine, were among the first to recognize the self-proclaimed independence of Kosovo.

The policy of “double standards” in international relations and global politics used by great powers is not unknown and unrecorded in history.

However, after the Cold War 1.0 (1949−1989) up today, the absence of any Western standards in the practice of generally accepted and binding rules of the international “game”, however, is one of the focal dimensions of the international relations in the world politics.

The well-known dictum that sums up that insight – “The strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they have to” – came from the pen of the famous ancient Greek historian and military leader from Athens – Thucydides (c. 460−c. 400 BC). Thus, almost two and a half millennia ago, the great historian taught that justice and rights, as its codified forms, exist in international relations and can only be among equals (inter pares). Major disagreements in this regard, which are the basis of what is happening today in Ukraine with potentially catastrophic consequences, occur when this “equal”, in this case, the great and powerful Russia, is not recognized as such and is not as such respected. Today, the Western policymakers made a crucial mistake with Russia as thinking this is the same state as it was in the 1990s during the wars of the Yugoslav succession. Unfortunately for them, today’s Russian Federation is not a Western puppet state from the Yeltsin’s period – it is today at least equal with the Western great powers including NATO as well. Those Western actors in global politics who would continue to overlook this “hard” fact concerning Russia and her role in the politics of the contemporary world, would lead the world to the dangerous edge of the abyss and push the world into it very quickly with their indolence and old policy of gangsterism in international relations.

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Dr. Vladislav B. Sotirovic, former University Professor, a Research Fellow at Centre for Geostrategic Studies, Belgrade, Serbia www.geostrategy.rs, [email protected]

He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

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***

Participation of almost 208,000 Sikhs in the Khalistan referendums held in four countries to demand the liberation of Indian Punjab show that Sikhs have accelerated their movement.

So far, four referendums have been held in UK, Geneva, Italy and Canada in which the Sikh community actively participated in a huge number and favoured an independent Khalistan.

The first Khalistan referendum was held on October 31, 2021 in the UK, in which 30,000 Sikhs participated. On December 10, last year, over 6,000 people took part in referendum in Geneva and in Italy 62,000 Sikhs participated on July 4, 2022 in referendum. But, the huge turnout for the Sikh referendum, organised by the pro-Khalistani advocacy group Sikhs For Justice (SFJ) was held on September 18, this year in Brampton city-in the Canadian province of Ontario, which depicted that the issue of the Sikh independence movement is becoming a mainstream movement, as it was an unprecedented show of power, in which more than 110,000 Canadian Sikhs participated.

During the referendum, the Sikh community raised anti-India and pro-Khalistan slogans, while more than 2,000 cars took part in the pro-Khalistan rally.

Organisers of the SFJ, and Canada’s Member of Parliament for Niagra West for the Conservative party said: “Amazing turnout at Gore Meadows community centre in Brampton…attendance in Ontario for Khalistan voting has broken all previous records of voting in UK, Italy and Geneva.”

In interaction with media entities, Sikh leader Gurpatwant Singh Pannun-General Counsel to SFJ displayed a proposed Khalistan Map with Shimla as its capital. He elaborated that referendum in Canada was organised in a peaceful and democratic way.

Gurpatwant Singh added: “Today, Canadians voted in the independence referendum to reclaim Shimla as the capital once Punjab is liberated from the Indian occupation. The voting in Punjab for the Khalistan referendum will start from January 26, 2023, coinciding with India’s 74th Republic Day.”

Undoubtedly, the referendum campaign by the SFJ has raised awareness in a global community regarding atrocities committed against Sikhs by New Delhi. It will also further pressurise India to hold an official referendum.

Notably, Sikhs’ referendum campaign is in accordance with the UN article which gives people the right to self-determination—stating that a referendum for independence in a peaceful and democratic way is the right of everyone.

Using its typical shrewd diplomatic tactics, India issued multiple requests to the Canadian government to stop the Khalistan referendum.

But, the Canadian government refused to stop the SFJ from holding a referendum and categorically informed the Indian rulers that it was held in a peaceful and democratic way within the legal parametres of Canadian Law.

And the Indian Ministry of External Affairs strongly objected to the referendum, terming it as a “farcical exercise held and supported by politically motivated extremist elements.”

Even, the Indian leading media outlets did not cover the peaceful demonstration of Sikh community and instead negatively covered the entire event.

In fact, India which, apparently, claims to be the largest democracy, acting upon the principles of liberalism and secularism has broken all the records of mistreatment of religious and ethnic minorities by acceleration of violence, genocide and massacre, perpetrated on them.

Since Narendar Modi, the leader of the fanatic ruling party BJP became the Indian Prime Minister, he started implementing ideology of Hindutva ((Hindu Nationalism). Under his regime, persecution of religious minorities such as Christians and particularly Muslims and Sikhs, including even of lower cast-Hindus have been intensified by the extremist Hindus.

In this respect, in its annual report of 2017, Human Rights Watch which conducted investigative work in 2016 pointed out Indian government’s failure to control growing attacks on Dalits and religious minorities—Sikh community.

The report explained: “Authorities continue to use sedition and criminal defamation laws to prosecute citizens who criticise government officials or oppose state policies. In rare cases in 2016, police were held accountable for abuses. In April, 47 policemen were sentenced to life in prison for involvement in the killing of 11 Sikhs in 1991 in the Pilibhit district of Uttar Pradesh state. Despite calls for repeal of the Armed Forces Special Powers Act, soldiers continue to have immunity from prosecution when deployed in areas of internal conflict.”

However, the Sikhs are fighting for a separate homeland since 1947, but the movement attained impetus by the efforts of Sant Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale, which in 1984 resulted in most brutal operation against a highly sacred Sikh religious place-the Golden Temple complex (Harmandir Sahib) in Amritsar, Punjab, which resulted in killings of thousands of Sikhs.

In this connection, Indian Army led by General Kuldip Singh Brar, supported by troops and armoured vehicles had broken all records of the state terrorism and extra-judicial killings through the barbaric Operation Blue Star which occurred between 3–8 June 1984, ordered by the then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi to control over the Harmandir Sahib complex.

In this context, in their book, “The Sikh Struggle”, Ramnarain Kumar and George Sieberer writes, “The army killed every Sikh who could be found inside the temple-complex. They were hauled out of rooms, brought to corridors on the circumference of the temple and with their hands tied behind their back, were shot in cold blood. Among the victims were many old men, women and children…However, all visitors were locked up in rooms for two days without any food, water, or electricity and were starved to death. Besides, the Harmandir Sahib remained under the army control for many months”.

The brutality of the Operation was not confined to the Harmandir Sahib. Indian armed forces simultaneously attacked 40 other historical gurdwaras all over East Punjab. When Sikhs in other states came to know about the desecration of the Harmandir Sahib and massacre of their brethren, they quickly left for Punjab. New Delhi tried to stop them before they could reach Punjab. Many Sikhs were assassinated on the way and many others were arrested.

In the same year of November, two dedicated Sikhs named Beant Singh and Satwant Singh who were posted at Premier Indira Gandhi’s residence in New Delhi, assassinated her. Then Hindu riots erupted in the capital and other cities in which more then 15,000 Sikhs were murdered in broad daylight by the supporters of Indira Gandhi, while police watched silently so as to provide the Hindus with free hand to massacre Sikhs.

Nevertheless, the attack on the Harmandir Sahib and genocide of Sikhs accelerated the liberation movement for Khalistan, as Bhindrenwale became a folk hero.

To maintain its control over the Harmandir Sahib, another attack was launched on the Temple in 1987, called ‘Operation Black Thunder’. That time only Sikh resistance which was natural outcome of the tragedy was the main target. Afterwards, ‘Operation Woodrose’ and ‘Operation Black Thunder-II’ were conducted against the Sikh community, which also killed them extra-judicially.

After these barbaric operations, Sikhs organised themselves into an armed power in order to fight the Indian state terrorism. Many Sikhs left India to escape religious persecution. Sikhs have spread out all over the world to keep the struggle for Khalistan alive.

It is of particular attention that New Delhi and Indian intelligence agency RAW is trying to create division between the Sikh community-platforms in the USA, UK, Canada, Australia and Pakistan etc. In this context, a deliberate campaign has been launched to ban or disallow Indian diplomats or officials’ entry to gurdawaras for misusing them for their ulterior motives so as to divide the Sikh community.

In a statement, Gopal Singh Chawla leader of the Khalistan movement for independence had announced that “Peace for Sikhs” has stepped up registration process for the Khalistan referendum. He has asked the other Sikhs to resign and join the movement and revealed that 11000 to 13000 Sikh have already left Indian Army without any benefits and joined Khalistan movement—have reiterated that from now onward Sikhs will not fight for India. He pointed out that the Sikhs leaders have realised that Indian military leadership always post Sikh outfits on borders to meet any operation confrontation and it is either Sikhs or low caste Hindus who lay their lives for India, from now onwards Sikhs will only lay their lives for Khalistan.

Referring to the promise of Gandhi made with Sikhs in 1947 for Khalistan, which was never fulfilled by cunning Hindu rulers; Gopal Singh claimed that “Khalistan is the basic right if Sikh nation and Sikhs will now create Khalistan at any cost.”

Nonetheless, the timeline of various Khalistan referendums and rapid increase in the number of Sikhs who voted in favour of Independent Khalistan reflect that Sikhs have accelerated the movement for the liberation of Indian Punjab.

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Sajjad Shaukat writes on international affairs and is author of the book: US vs Islamic Militants, Invisible Balance of Power: Dangerous Shift in International Relations. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from referendum2020.org

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On September 27, 2022, a tropical cyclone—Hurricane Ian—struck Cuba’s western province of Pinar del Río. Sustained winds of around 125 miles per hour lingered over Cuba for more than eight hours, bringing down trees and power lines, and causing damage not seen during previous tropical cyclones. The hurricane then lingered over the warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico, picking up energy before striking the U.S. island of Cayo Costa, Florida, with approximately 155 mph winds. The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) called it “one of the worst hurricanes to hit the area in a century.”

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Climate Prediction Center said that this year will be the “seventh consecutive above-average hurricane season.” Both Cuba and Florida have faced the wrath of the waters and winds, but beneath this lies the ferocity of the climate catastrophe. “Climate science is increasingly able to show that many of the extreme weather events that we are experiencing have become more likely and more intense due to human-induced climate change,” said WMO Secretary-General Petteri Taalas.

Prepare and Relieve

Cuba, said the WMO, is one of the “world leaders in terms of hurricane preparedness and disaster management.” This was not always the case. Hurricane Flora hit the eastern coast of the island on October 4, 1963. When news of the approaching hurricane reached Fidel Castro, he immediately ordered the evacuation of the homes of people who lived in the projected path of the storm (in Haiti, former dictator François Duvalier did not call for an evacuation, which led to the death of more than 5,000 people). Castro rushed to Camagüey, almost dying in the Cauto River as his amphibious vehicle was struck by a drifting log. Two years later, in his Socialism and Man in Cuba, Che Guevara wrote the Cuban people showed “exceptional deeds of valor and sacrifice” as they rebuilt the country after the devastation caused by Flora.

In 1966, the Cuban government created the Civil Defense System to prepare for not only extreme weather events such as hurricanes but also the outbreak of epidemics. Using science as the foundation for its hurricane preparedness, the Cuban government was able to evacuate 2 million people as Hurricane Ivan moved toward the island in 2004. As part of disaster management, the entire Cuban population participates in drills, and the Cuban mass organizations (the Federation of Cuban Women and the Committees for the Defense of the Revolution) work in an integrated manner to mobilize the population to respond to disasters.

The day before Hurricane Ian hit Cuba, 50,000 people were evacuated and taken to 55 shelters. No private vehicles or public transportation was visible on the streets. Work brigades were mobilized to work on the resumption of electricity supply after the storm had passed. In Artemisa, for instance, the Provincial Defense Council met to discuss how to react to the inevitable flooding. Despite the best efforts made by Cubans, three people died because of the hurricane, and the electrical grid suffered significant damage.

Damage

The entire island—including Havana—had no power for more than three days. The electrical grid, which was already suffering from a lack of major repairs, collapsed. Without power, Cubans had to throw away food that needed to be refrigerated and faced difficulty in preparing meals, among other hardships. By October 1, less than five days after landfall, 82 percent of the residents of Havana had their power restored with work ongoing for the western part of the island (the amount of time without power in Puerto Rico, which was hit by Hurricane Fiona on September 18, is longer—a quarter of a million people remain without power more than two weeks later).

The long-term impact of Hurricane Ian is yet to be assessed, although some believe the cost of damages will surpass $1 billion. More than 8,500 hectares of cropland have been hit by the flooding, with the banana crop most impacted. The most dramatic problem will be faced by Cuba’s tobacco industry since Pinar del Río—where 5,000 farms were destroyed—is its heartland (with 65 percent of the country’s tobacco production). Hirochi Robaina, a tobacco farmer in Pinar del Río, wrote, “It was apocalyptic. A real disaster.”

Blockade

Mexico and Venezuela immediately pledged to send materials to assist in the reconstruction of the electrical grid on the island.

All eyes turned to Washington—not only to see whether it would send aid, which would be welcome, but also if it would remove Cuba from the state sponsors of terrorism list and end sanctions imposed by the United States. These measures cause banks in both the United States and elsewhere to be reluctant to process any financial transactions, including humanitarian donations. The U.S. has a mixed record regarding humanitarian aid to Cuba. After Hurricane Michelle (2001), Hurricane Charley (2004), and Hurricane Wilma (2005), the U.S. did offer assistance, but would not even temporarily lift the blockade. After the fire at a Matanzas oil storage facility in August 2022, the U.S. did offer to join Mexico and Venezuela to help the Cubans put out the fire. Cuba’s Deputy Foreign Minister Carlos Fernández de Cossio offered “profound gratitude” for the gesture, but the administration of U.S. President Joe Biden did not follow through.

Rather than lift the sanctions even for a limited period, the U.S. government sat back and watched as mysterious forces from Miami unleashed a torrent of Facebook and WhatsApp messages to drive desperate Cubans onto the street. Not a moment is wasted by Washington to use even a natural disaster to try to destabilize the situation in Cuba (a history that goes back to 1963, when the Central Intelligence Agency reflected on how to leverage natural disasters for political gains). “Most people don’t shout out freedom,” a person who observed one of these protests told us. “They ask for power and food.”

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This article was produced by Globetrotter.

Vijay Prashad is an Indian historian, editor, and journalist. He is a writing fellow and chief correspondent at Globetrotter. He is an editor of LeftWord Books and the director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. He is a senior non-resident fellow at Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies, Renmin University of China. He has written more than 20 books, including The Darker Nations and The Poorer Nations. His latest books are Struggle Makes Us Human: Learning from Movements for Socialism and (with Noam Chomsky) The Withdrawal: Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, and the Fragility of U.S. Power.

Manolo De Los Santos is the co-executive director of the People’s Forum and is a researcher at Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. He co-edited, most recently, Viviremos: Venezuela vs. Hybrid War (LeftWord Books/1804 Books, 2020) and Comrade of the Revolution: Selected Speeches of Fidel Castro (LeftWord Books/1804 Books, 2021). He is a co-coordinator of the People’s Summit for Democracy.

Featured image is from Countercurrents

Pipeline Terror Is the 9/11 of the Raging Twenties

By Pepe Escobar, October 05, 2022

There’s no question that future unbiased historians will rank Russian President Vladimir Putin’s address on the Return of the Baby Bears – Donetsk, Lugansk, Kherson, and Zaporizhzhia – on September 30 as a landmark inflection point of the Raging Twenties.

Twenty-one Years Ago: US Invasion of Afghanistan

By Shane Quinn, October 04, 2022

More than two decades ago on 7 October 2001 the United States, backed by its close allies Britain, Canada and Australia, began a military invasion of Afghanistan in south-central Asia.

“Preemptive Nuclear War”: The Historic Battle for Peace and Democracy. A Third World War Threatens the Future of Humanity

By Prof Michel Chossudovsky, October 04, 2022

At no point since the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima on August 6th, 1945, has humanity been closer to the unthinkable. All the safeguards of the Cold War era, which categorized the nuclear bomb as “a weapon of last resort”, have been scrapped.

US, UK Behind Nord Stream Sabotage? Military Expert

By Lucas Leiroz de Almeida, October 04, 2022

Western media have tried to suggest that the Nord Stream pipeline incident was the result of a Russian sabotage operation, but this narrative does not seem to convince even Western experts. Recently, a former Pentagon adviser stated that the US and UK appear to be responsible for the operation that led to the Nord Stream 1 and 2 explosions.

More Studies Confirm the COVID Jab “Does More Harm Than Good”

By Dr. Joseph Mercola, October 04, 2022

The COVID jabs are an absolute disaster, with injuries and deaths piling up by the day. Yet so-called health authorities, doctors, media, drug makers and many of the jabbed themselves claim there’s nothing to see here. Ever since their release, brave medical professionals have spoken out against them, calling for a more cautious approach.

How a U.S. Colony Works: The Case of Germany

By Eric Zuesse, October 04, 2022

On 15 July 2022, Britain’s Reuters news agency headlined “70% of Germans back Ukraine despite high energy prices, survey shows”, and reported that “Some 70% of those polled backed Germany’s support for Ukraine, … found the survey conducted between July 12-14 by broadcaster ZDF.” ZDF is funded by the German Government — German taxpayers. 

“Gone in 30 Minutes” – Next on Europe’s Doomsday List: Collapse of Cell Phone Networks

By Zero Hedge, October 04, 2022

It’s not just heating that could be missing across Europe this winter: cell phones may be the next to go. That’s because if power cuts or energy rationing knocks out parts of the mobile networks across the region, mobile phones could go dark around Europe this winter according to the latest doomsday reporting from Reuters.

Researchers Use GMO Mosquitoes to Vaccinate Humans in NIH-Funded Malaria Study

By Michael Nevradakis, October 04, 2022

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) funded a malaria vaccine trial study that used genetically modified (GM) mosquitoes to “vaccinate” humans. A team of researchers at the University of Washington conducted the study, which was published in the Science Translational Medicine journal.

NATO in the Horns of a Dilemma After Former Ukrainian Regions Vote to Join Russia. Scott Ritter

By Scott Ritter, October 04, 2022

By infusing tens of billions of dollars’ worth of military aid into Ukraine, NATO produced a “game-changing” dynamic designed to throw Russia off balance. By undertaking the referendums in Kherson, Zaporozhye, Donetsk, and Lugansk, Russia changed the game altogether.

The China Coup Dupes

By Dr. Binoy Kampmark, October 04, 2022

It all caused a flutter amongst the ignorant and expectant on September 21.  China, it was said, was in the grip of an intriguing internal crisis. Air traffic had dramatically altered, with some 9,583 flights cancelled.  There were talking heads aflame with interest on the latest social media morsel, minute and yet profound.

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