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A peer-reviewed scientific review in the Journal of Insulin Resistance, written by cardiologist Dr. Aseem Malhotra, calls for the immediate suspension of all COVID shots as real-world data show they cause more harm than good

Data from Israel shows myocarditis post-jab is occurring at a rate of 1 in 6,000. Hong Kong data from male children and teens found a rate of 1 in 2,700

Data from the British Yellow Card system shows 1 in 120 people who have received at least one mRNA injection suffer an adverse event “that is beyond mild.” In Norway, the rate of serious adverse events post-jab is 1 in 1,000 after two doses of Pfizer

Researchers looking at data from the FDA, Health Canada and the Pfizer and Moderna trials concluded the absolute risk of a serious adverse event from the mRNA shots was 1 in 800, which massively exceeds the risk of COVID-19 hospitalization found in randomized controlled trials

Leaked audio from a June 2022 meeting between Israeli researchers and the Israeli Ministry of Healthy reveals the Pfizer jab causes long-term adverse effects and is associated with more severe side effects upon rechallenge (i.e., with repeated doses). While the researchers wanted to warn the public, the Ministry altered their final report to say that adverse effects are mild and short-lived. The government then canceled any further research into adverse effects

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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.

Now, a peer-reviewed scientific review,1 2 3 published in two parts4 5 in the Journal of Insulin Resistance calls for the immediate suspension of all COVID shots as real-world data show they cause more harm than good.

According to this paper, “Curing the Pandemic of Misinformation on COVID-19 mRNA Vaccines Through Real Evidence-Based Medicine,” authored by cardiologist Dr. Aseem Malhotra:

“In the non-elderly population the ‘number needed to treat’ to prevent a single death runs into the thousands. Re-analysis of randomized controlled trials using the messenger ribonucleic acid (mRNA) technology suggests a greater risk of serious adverse events from the vaccines than being hospitalized from COVID-19.

Pharmacovigilance systems and real-world safety data, coupled with plausible mechanisms of harm, are deeply concerning, especially in relation to cardiovascular safety.

Mirroring a potential signal from the Pfizer Phase 3 trial, a significant rise in cardiac arrest calls to ambulances in England was seen in 2021, with similar data emerging from Israel in the 16–39-year-old age group.

Conclusion: It cannot be said that the consent to receive these agents was fully informed, as is required ethically and legally. A pause and reappraisal of global vaccination policies for COVID-19 is long overdue.”

COVID Jab Boomerang 

In recent months, disability, excess mortality and live birth statistics all point in the same direction. Something horrific started happening around April 2021, and continues to get worse. Something is killing an extraordinary number of people in the prime of their life, who should have decades left to live. Something is causing people to file for permanent disability in numbers we’ve not seen before.

What changed in the world, in 2021? That is the question. The answer is ridiculously simple to answer, yet many choose to drive their heads deeper into the sand than face plain facts. The COVID shots, using mRNA technology to trigger antibody production in a way that had never been used before, were rolled out in 2021 under emergency use authorization. That’s what changed.

At the time of their rollout, human trials were far from finished, and much of their value had already been destroyed by unblinding the trials and offering the real injection to everyone in the placebo groups.6

This year, we’ve also come to realize that Pfizer, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have all repeatedly lied about the safety and effectiveness of the shots, as Pfizer’s own trial data show they’re about as dangerous as they come.

The only reason we now know this is because the FDA was sued and forced by a judge to release the trial data they initially wanted to keep hidden for 75 years. Pfizer data is now being released at a pace of 55,000 pages per month,7 and these batches have proven to be a treasure trove of bad and worse news.

Pfizer hid serious injuries, falsely categorizing almost all of them as unrelated to the shot without investigation, and misrepresented data showing massive risks as being of no concern. Participants who suffered serious injuries were often simply withdrawn from the trial, and their data excluded from the results.8

Real-world data now conclusively show these risks are extremely real. For example, Pfizer’s Phase 3 clinical trial showed an increased risk for cardiac problems, and during 2021, U.K. ambulance services recorded an extra 27,800 cardiac arrest calls above the national average in previous years, or about 500 per day9 10 — and disproportionally among the young.11 Importantly, COVID-19 cannot account for this rise, as the relevant increase began in the spring of 2021.

A Change of Heart

In his paper, Malhotra details his personal journey from staunch COVID jab proponent to concerned questioner. He got Pfizer’s two-dose regimen at the end of January 2021. You can see more of Maholtra’s efforts in the lecture he recently gave captured in the video above.

A few months later, his father, who also got the shot, suffered cardiac arrest six months after his second dose. The post-mortem findings were “shocking and inexplicable,” Malhotra writes, and got him to take another look at the data.

“After six months of critically appraising the data myself, speaking to eminent scientists involved in COVID-19 research, vaccine safety and development, and two investigative medical journalists, I have slowly and reluctantly concluded that contrary to my own initial dogmatic beliefs, Pfizer’s mRNA vaccine is far from being as safe and effective as we first thought,” Malhotra writes.12

He goes on to review how post-mortem examination revealed his father, who was extremely active and fit, had severe blockages in two of the three major arteries. His left anterior descending artery was 90% blocked and his right coronary was 75% blocked. The last scan, “a few years earlier,” according to Malhotra, had revealed perfect blood flow and no obstructions. He continues:13

“I couldn’t explain his post-mortem findings, especially as there was no evidence of an actual heart attack … This was precisely my own special area of research. That is, how to delay progression of heart disease and even potentially reverse it … Then, in November 2021, I was made aware of a peer-reviewed abstract published in Circulation, with concerning findings.

In over 500 middle-aged patients under regular follow up, using a predictive score model based on inflammatory markers that are strongly correlated with risk of heart attack, the mRNA vaccine was associated with significantly increasing the risk of a coronary event within five years from 11% pre-mRNA vaccine to 25% 2–10 weeks post mRNA vaccine.

An early and relevant criticism of the validity of the findings was that there was no control group, but nevertheless, even if partially correct, that would mean that there would be a large acceleration in progression of coronary artery disease, and more importantly heart attack risk, within months of taking the jab.

I wondered whether my father’s Pfizer vaccination, which he received six months earlier, could have contributed to his unexplained premature death and so I began to critically appraise the data.”

Data Points to Consider 

Malhotra reviews a number of data points in the paper, including:14

• Pfizer data showing there were four cardiac arrests in the injection group and only one in the placebo group.
• The misleading use of relative risk reduction (95%) when speaking of effectiveness, rather than absolute risk reduction, which was only 0.84%.
• 119 people would have to be injected to prevent one positive test, which may or may not be indicative of infection.
• Pfizer’s trial found no statistically significant reduction in serious illness or COVID mortality from the injection over the course of six months (the length of the trial). Moreover, the risk of serious COVID-19 infection in the placebo group was only 0.04%, showing just how low the risk of serious illness was in the first place, and this despite the fact that the regions chosen for the trial were chosen for their perceived high prevalence of infection.
• While there were two deaths from COVID in the placebo group and only one COVID death in the injection group, all-cause mortality over a longer period revealed 19 deaths in the injection group and 17 deaths in the placebo group.
• The pediatric trial used a surrogate measure of antibody levels rather than reduction in symptomatic infection, even though there was no known correlation between antibody levels and protection from infection. The FDA even warns that: “[R]esults from currently authorized SARS-COV-2 antibody tests should not be used to evaluate a person’s level of immunity or protection from COVID-19 at any time, and especially after the person received a COVID-19 vaccination.”

Extrapolating Data to Determine Protection Against Death

Malhotra goes on to describe how he extrapolated data to determine the level of protection these mRNA shots provide against COVID-related death:15

“Now that we know what the published trial did and did not show in terms of the vaccine efficacy, we can attempt to extrapolate what the effect of the vaccine would be in reducing mortality or any other adverse outcome from the virus.

If there is a 1 in 119 chance the vaccine protects you from getting symptomatic infection from ancestral variants, then to find the protection against death, this figure (n = 119) must be multiplied by the number of infections that lead to a single death for each age group.

This would give (for up to two months after the inoculation) the absolute risk reduction (for death) from the vaccine. For example, if my risk at age 44 from dying from Delta (should I get infected with it) is 1 in 3,000, then the absolute risk reduction from the vaccine protecting me from death is 1 over 3,000 multiplied by 119, that is, 1 per 357,000 …

From observational data it is possible to calculate the number who would need to be vaccinated to prevent a COVID-19 death. For example, comparing the population death rates during the Delta wave gives 230 for people over 80s needing to be vaccinated to prevent a single death in that period with that number rising to 520 for people in their 70s and 10,000 for people in their 40s …

Depending on your age, several hundreds or thousands of people like you would need to be injected in order to prevent one person from dying from the Delta variant of COVID-19 over a period of around three months.

For the over 80s, this figure is at least 230, but it rises the younger you are, reaching at least 2,600 for people in their 50s, 10,000 for those in their 40s, and 93,000 for those between 18 and 29 years. For omicron, which has been shown to be 30% – 50% less lethal, meaning significantly more people would need to be vaccinated to prevent one death.”

What Are the Harms? 

Next, Malhotra reviews the hams, noting that one of the most common side effects reported is myocarditis, or inflammation of the heart, especially among young men. He rejects health authorities’ claim that myocarditis is far more prevalent in those who suffer serious COVID infection, stating:16

“Incidence of myocarditis rocketed from spring 2021 when vaccines were rolled out to the younger cohorts having remained within normal levels for the full year prior, despite COVID-19.

With the most up-to-date evidence, a paper from Israel found that the infection itself, prior to roll- out of the vaccine, conferred no increase in the risks of either myocarditis or pericarditis from COVID-19, strongly suggesting that the increases observed in earlier studies were because of the mRNA vaccines, with or without COVID-19 infections as an additional risk in the vaccinated …

Although vaccine-induced myocarditis is not often fatal in young adults, MRI scans reveal that, of the ones admitted to hospital, approximately 80% have some degree of myocardial damage. It is like suffering a small heart attack and sustaining some — likely permanent — heart muscle injury.”

Data from Israel shows myocarditis post-jab is occurring at a rate of 1 in 6,000. Hong Kong data from male children and teens found a rate of 1 in 2,700. Data from the British Yellow Card system shows 1 in 120 people who have received at least one mRNA injection suffer an adverse event “that is beyond mild.”

In Norway, Malhotra notes, the rate of serious adverse events post-jab is 1 in 1,000 after two doses of Pfizer. These are injuries that are life changing for the worse.

In all, nearly 500,000 adverse events had been reported to the Yellow Card system when Malhotra wrote this paper, which he points out is “unprecedented in the modern medical era and equals the total number of reports received in the first 40 years of the Yellow Card reporting system (for all medicines — not just vaccines) up to 2020.”

What VAERS Data Tell Us 

The same trend is seen in the U.S., where the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) has received more adverse event reports for the COVID jabs than all other vaccines over the last 30 years combined. Malhotra writes:

“As with the UK’s system, the level of reports — including serious ones — associated with COVID-19 vaccines is completely unprecedented. For example, over 24,000 deaths have now been recorded in VAERS as of March 2, 2022; 29% of these occurred within 48 h of injection, and half within two weeks.

The average reporting rate prior to 2020 was less than 300 deaths per annum. One explanation often given for this is that the COVID-19 vaccine roll-out is unprecedented in scope; however, this is not valid, since (for the last decade at any rate) the United States has administered 150 million – 200 million vaccinations annually.”

Another criticism of VAERS is that ‘anyone can make an entry,’ yet, in fact, an analysis of a sample of 250 early deaths suggested that the vast majority are hospital or physician entries, and knowingly filing a false VAERS report is a violation of Federal law punishable by fine and imprisonment.

Given that VAERS was set up to generate early signals of potential harm for new vaccines, and was instrumental in doing so for several products, it seems perverse to only now criticize it as unreliable when there seem to have been no changes in the way it operates.”

It has been estimated that serious adverse effects that are officially reported are actually a gross underestimate, and this should be borne in mind … For example, a paper by David Kessler (a former FDA Commissioner) cites data suggesting that as few as 1% of serious adverse events are reported to the FDA. Similarly, in relation to the Yellow Card scheme in the United Kingdom, it has been estimated that only 10% of serious adverse effects are reported.”

1 in 800 Absolute Risk of Serious Side Effect

Malhotra also cites a recent study17 “coauthored by some of the most trusted medical scientists in the world in relation to data transparency,” which looked at data from the FDA, Health Canada and the Pfizer and Moderna trials.

“Researchers looking at data from the FDA, Health Canada and the Pfizer and Moderna trials concluded the absolute risk of a serious adverse event from the mRNA shots was 1 in 800, which massively exceeds the risk of COVID-19 hospitalization found in randomized controlled trials.”

They concluded the absolute risk of a serious adverse event from the mRNA shots was 1 in 800, which massively exceeds the risk of COVID-19 hospitalization found in randomized controlled trials.

“Given these observations, and reappraisal of the randomized controlled trial data of mRNA products, it seems difficult to argue that the vaccine roll-out has been net beneficial in all age groups … and when the possible short-, medium- and unknown longer-term harms are considered (especially for multiple injections, robust safety data for which simply does not exist), the roll-out into the entire population seems, at best, a reckless gamble,” Malhotra writes.18

“It’s important to acknowledge that the risks of adverse events from the vaccine remain constant, whereas the benefits reduce over time, as new variants are (1) less virulent and (2) not targeted by an outdated product.

Having appraised the data, it remains a real possibility that my father’s sudden cardiac death was related to the vaccine. A pause and reappraisal of vaccination Policies for COVID-19 is long overdue.”

The Israeli Cover-Up

In related news, leaked audio from a June 2022 meeting between Israeli researchers and the Ministry of Healthy reveals the researchers knew the COVID shots were associated with serious risks and wanted to alert the public.

However, whereas the researchers pointed out evidence showing the Pfizer jabs cause long-term adverse effects and are associated with more severe side effects upon rechallenge (i.e., with repeated doses), the Ministry altered the researcher’s final report to say that adverse effects are mild and short-lived. The government then canceled any further research into adverse effects.

At the end of September 2022, GB News interviewed Dr. Yaffa Shir Raz, who broke the story internationally19 (see video above for leaked audio and GB’s report).20 21 Importantly, the researchers noted the phenomenon of rechallenge is very strong evidence of causality, meaning the shots are definitely causing the problems reported.

However, they also warned the Ministry of Health that they’d have to be careful with the wording and think “medical-legal,” as the evidence would expose the government to liability, since they’d not been upfront with the risks and had endorsed the shots. The Ministry, apparently, decided to simply alter the conclusions of the study and close down further investigation rather than risk liability.

COVID Jab Makers Seek Authorization for Child Boosters 

At the same time as more and more damning data are coming to light, Pfizer and Moderna are both seeking emergency use authorization for their bivalent COVID boosters for children. Moderna is seeking authorization for children ages 6 through 17, while Pfizer’s shot is for children aged 5 through 11.22 As reported by Reuters September 23, 2022:23

“… the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said it expects COVID-19 vaccine boosters targeting circulating variants of the virus to be available for children aged 5-11 years by mid-October.

Moderna’s mRNA-1273.222, a bivalent booster shot, contains the dominant BA.4/BA.5 variants along with the original coronavirus strain. The updated vaccine is already authorized for adults, while rival Pfizer’s bivalent vaccine is authorized as a booster dose for children over 12 years of age.”

Follow the Data and Think for Yourself

Considering how reckless the FDA and CDC have been so far, there’s little doubt they’ll authorize these reformulated boosters for children, even though they’ve only been tested for antibody levels in mice. Meanwhile, in the real world, the injuries and deaths continue to pile up.

Were there any sanity and humanity left inside the walls of our health agencies, these shots would be pulled from the market without delay. Unfortunately, that doesn’t appear to be the case, which means We the People are the ones who must put a stop to the carnage by educating each other and simply saying “NO” to these and all future mRNA shots.

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Notes

1 Journal of Insulin Resistance 2022; 5(1): a71

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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. 

Germany’s AfD Party is one of the two Parties in Germany that are less than enthusiastically backing Germany’s anti-Russia position, the other such Party being “Die Linke” or “The Left” Party, which is Germany’s only socialist democratic Party, despite West Germany’s “Social Democratic Party” calling itself “democratic socialist” while being neither. 

The AfD Party issued a press release, on 25 August 2022, “Stephan Brandner: Skandalöse „Politische Filter“ beeinflussen NDR-Berichterstattung” or “Stephan Brandner: Scandalous ‘political filters’ influence NDR reporting.” It reported that Mr. Brandner, who is an AfD Member of the German Parliament, said that

After the self-service affair about the now hated RBB director Schlesinger, reminiscent of feudal structures, an online magazine now reports that employees on North German radio complain about ‘political filters’ from their superiors. According to the report …, public service broadcasting executives act like ‘ministerial press officers’. … 

As an AfD politician I am not surprised. After all, ARD and ZDF only report on the AfD with a ‘political filter’ and, for example, no longer invite AfD politicians to talk shows. … Compulsory contributions [by taxpayers, to ‘public broadcasting’] should be abolished.

Mr. Brandner provided no evidence for any of his allegations. (That’s the way politics is in a dictatorship. How can the public vote intelligently if they are routinely accepting allegations that are being made without supplying documentation? That’s a dictatorship by lies and liars, and no democracy-capable public would accept it. In science, what is not documented to be true is assumed to be false — not assumed to be true. A democratic country operates on the basis of science, not on the basis of faith.)

However, this doesn’t mean that Mr. Brandner’s allegations there are necessarily false. One reason why they could very well be true is that there are six Parties in Germany, and the current governing coalition consists of the three that take the hardest line against Russia, and for America, and for the post-2014, U.S.–coup, anti-Russian, Ukrainian Government.

The ruling coalition, those three Parties, are called the “traffic-light coalition”, and include the rabidly neoconservative (or pro-U.S.-empire) anti-Russian Green Party, plus the U.S. Democratic Party-allied so-called “Social Democratic Party,” plus the rabidly libertarian or “neoliberal” (pro-free-market, anti-regulation, and generally U.S.-Republican-Party-allied) Free Democratic Party; and they EXCLUDE (or give the red light to, and prevent from participating in the Government) the three least-anti-Russian Parties, which are The Left Party (the authentic democratic socialists, or progressives, ideologically opposed to any imperialism), the AfD Party (nationalists), and the U.S.-Republican-Party-allied CDU/CSU Christian Democratic and Christian Social Union Party. 

Brandner raised an important question, without providing any evidence regarding its solution. But here are some relevant facts, regarding the extent to which Germany’s Government tolerates corruption (which includes corruptness of a Government and of its ‘news’-media):

On 14 December 2021, I did an analysis comparing the anti-corruption laws in three nations, and headlined “Political Corruption in U.S., Germany, and Russia”. I concluded that 

Although this is a very incomplete indicator of a country’s corruptness, it does present the U.S. in a very favorable light, and present Germany (11 out of 12 “No”s [meaning no law against corruption]) as being rather astoundingly corrupt. Russia is midway between those two, perhaps because after Yeltsin’s abominable rule, Putin cleaned up Russia’s Government, but a lot of that job still remains undone, even after 21 years.

Germany’s Government was more shaped by Truman than perhaps any in the world except America’s own Government. But, from the present indicator, America’s vassal nations would appear to be even more corrupt than the imperial center, the U.S., itself, is — at least insofar as their political campaign-finance laws (“what’s written in black and white” in the lawbooks) are concerned.

Here was the summary, specifically regarding Germany:

Following here will be answers that are solidly grounded in the written laws of each of these three countries (though not necessarily reflecting how those laws are enforced — or not), regarding the 12 most clearly important questions that were studied. I present those dozen questions in the order that seems to me to provide the clearest sequence in order for the reader to interpret them, not in the order that was employed by the source:

GERMANY

“8. Is there a ban on anonymous donations to candidates?” “There are no explicit provisions regarding donations to candidates.”

“2. Is there a ban on donations from foreign interests to candidates?” “There are no explicit provisions regarding donations to candidates.”

“18. Is there a limit on the amount a donor can contribute to a candidate?” “There are no explicit provisions regarding donations to candidates.”

“10. Is there a ban on donations from corporations with government contracts to candidates?” “There are no explicit provisions regarding donations to candidates.”

“4. Is there a ban on corporate donations to candidates?” “There are no explicit provisions regarding donations to candidates.”

“6. Is there a ban on donations from Trade Unions to candidates?” “There are no explicit provisions regarding donations to candidates.”

“5. Is there a ban on donations from Trade Unions to political parties?” “There are [is] no explicit … ban on donations from Trade Unions to political parties”

“3. Is there a ban on corporate donations to political parties?” “Ban on donation from corporate bodies, but accepted if it is a business enterprise, of whose shares more than 50 per cent of shares are owned by Germans …”

“9. Is there a ban on donations from corporations with government contracts to political parties?” “No.”

“14. Is there a limit on the amount a donor can contribute to a political party during a non-election specific period?” “No.”

“16. Is there a limit on the amount a donor can contribute to a political party during an election?” “No.”

“27. Are there provisions requiring donations to go through the banking system?” “No.”

Consequently, Brandner’s allegations might be expected to be true, simply because Germany, especially after the U.S. Government blew up the Russian gas pipelines to Germany and yet Germany’s Government continues to be a U.S. vassal-nation, despite that U.S. act of war against both Germany and Russia. This indicates Germany’s Government to be extremely corrupt, willing to ditch its own population in order to please its U.S. masters.

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This article was originally published on The Duran.

Investigative historian Eric Zuesse’s new book, AMERICA’S EMPIRE OF EVIL: Hitler’s Posthumous Victory, and Why the Social Sciences Need to Change, is about how America took over the world after World War II in order to enslave it to U.S.-and-allied billionaires. Their cartels extract the world’s wealth by control of not only their ‘news’ media but the social ‘sciences’ — duping the public. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

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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A consortium of four private groups worked with the departments of Homeland Security (DHS) and State to censor massive numbers of social media posts they considered misinformation during the 2020 election, and its members then got rewarded with millions of federal dollars from the Biden administration afterwards, according to interviews and documents obtained by Just the News.

The Election Integrity Partnership is back in action again for the 2022 midterm elections, raising concerns among civil libertarians that a chilling new form of public-private partnership to evade the First Amendment’s prohibition of government censorship may be expanding.

The consortium is comprised of four member organizations: Stanford Internet Observatory (SIO), the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public, the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, and social media analytics firm Graphika. It set up a concierge-like service in 2020 that allowed federal agencies like Homeland’s Cybersecurity Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and State’s Global Engagement Center to file “tickets” requesting that online story links and social media posts be censored or flagged by Big Tech.

Three liberal groups — the Democratic National Committee, Common Cause and the NAACP — were also empowered like the federal agencies to file tickets seeking censorship of content. A Homeland-funded collaboration, the Elections Infrastructure Information Sharing and Analysis Center, also had access.

In its own after-action report on the 2020 election, the consortium boasted it flagged more than 4,800 URLs — shared nearly 22 million times on Twitter alone — for social media platforms. Their staff worked 12-20 hour shifts from September through mid-November 2020, with “monitoring intensif[ying] significantly” the week before and after Election Day.

The tickets sought removal, throttling and labeling of content that raised questions about mail-in ballot integrity, Arizona’s “Sharpiegate,” and other election integrity issues of concern to conservatives.

The consortium achieved a success rate in 2020 that would be enviable for baseball batters: Platforms took action on 35% of flagged URLs, with 21% labeled, 13% removed and 1% soft-blocked, meaning users had to reject a warning to see them. The partnership couldn’t determine how many were downranked.

The First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution prohibits Congress from passing any laws that abridge free speech, and courts have ruled that prohibition extends to federal agencies funded by the legislative branch. Participants were acutely aware that federal agencies’ role in the effort strayed into uncharted legal territory.

For instance, SIO’s Renee DiResta said in a CISA Cybersecurity Summit video in 2021 that the operation faced “unclear legal authorities” and “very real First Amendment questions.” She joined SIO from a firm exposed by The New York Times for creating “a ‘false flag’ operation” against Republican Senate candidate Roy Moore.

Also, we're getting the band back together (with several improvements) for the midterms — working with a range of collaborators to address rumors, misinformation, and disinformation around election processes and procedures: https://t.co/IuwvV27R1L. Follow @2020Partnership.

— Kate Starbird (@katestarbird) August 7, 2022

Mike Benz, an ex-State Department official who was slated to be the department’s first-ever digital freedom ambassador if President Donald Trump had won a second term, discovered much of the consortium’s work in research for his new Foundation for Freedom Online, a nonprofit which advocates for free speech globally while monitoring growing U.S. censorship.

He told Just the News the consortium was the largest federally-sanctioned censorship operation he had ever seen, a precursor to the now-scrapped Disinformation Governance Board and one that is likely to grow in future elections.

“If you trace the chronology, you find that there was actually 18 months’ worth of institutional work to create this very apparatus that we now know played a significant role in the censorship of millions of posts for the 2020 election and has ambitious sights for 2022 and 2024,” he said.

“Amazingly, there are now so many Ministry of Truth functionaries within the Department of Homeland Security,” he added.

“There are so many Ministry of Truth tasks, so many Ministry of Truth points of contact, so many different Ministry of Truth, policies for whether to remove something, reduce it, slap a fact checking label on it.”

Rep. Andrew Clyde (R-Ga.), a member of the House Homeland Security Committee, called the revelations “stunning” and said the 2020 operation amounted to the federal government sanctioning and outsourcing censorship.

“The government knows that they cannot do it by themselves because of the First Amendment of the Constitution, which prohibits it,” Clyde told the “Just the News, Not Noise” television show. “And then they decide to partner with another entity, a private entity. a social media platform or university.

“And then they say, ‘Hey, we’re going to feed you information that we think is disinformation, or we want to be disinformation. And then you go ahead and you do the de-platforming. You label it as misinformation, or disinformation.'”

Clyde said he expects Republicans to investigate the consortium next year if they gain control of Congress and that he is drafting legislation called the Free Speech Defense Act to address censorship issues.

“This bill would prevent the federal government from labeling anything through a proxy entity, like a social media company, as disinformation, labeling it as misinformation or labeling it as true,” he explained. “And then it would also give an opportunity for those people who have been injured by it to take legal action.”

Homeland Security, CISA, EIP and the Stanford and UW projects did not immediately respond Thursday to a request for comment from Just the News.

It wasn’t just blogs and individual social media users whose content was targeted for removal and throttling as “repeat spreaders” of misinformation. News and opinion organizations, including the New York Post, Fox News, Just the News and SeanHannity.com were also targeted.

The partnership’s members published the 292-page public report in March 2021, though the most recent version is dated June 15, 2021. The launch webinar featured former CISA Director Christopher Krebs, “who led the effort to secure electoral infrastructure and the response to mis- and disinformation during the election period.”

“I think we were pretty effective in getting [platforms] to act on things they haven’t acted on before,” both by pressuring them to adopt specific censorship policies and then reporting violations, SIO founder and former Facebook Chief Security Officer Alex Stamos told the launch webinar. (He and Krebs started their own consultancy after the election.)

“Platform interventions” in response to “delegitimization of election results,” for example, went from uniformly “non-comprehensive” in August 2020 to “comprehensive” by Election Day, the report says.

The partnership has not drawn widespread attention, however. Congressionaltestimony has approvingly cited the report, which was also filed as evidence in a lawsuit against Massachusetts officials for allegedly deplatforming a Twitter user.

Benz’s Foundation for Freedom Online brought new scrutiny on the partnership in August and shared its own summary of the report with Just the News, with links to primary documents and background on CISA and its private partners.

FFO spent “16 weeks mapping virtually every element of DHS partnerships and operations connected to Internet censorship,” including the partnership’s report, Benz wrote, pledging to dribble out “revelations” from FFO’s research over several months. It has already published assorted video evidence.

“DHS’s Ministry Of Truth has evaded public attention for so long [because] it acts like a coordinator of a censorship network, rather [than] an implementer of specific censorship acts,” similar to how the CIA and Pentagon “outsource” wars to private military contractors, he said.

SIO officially launched the partnership 100 days before the election, “in consultation with CISA and other stakeholders,” the partnership report says. It attributes the idea to SIO-funded interns at CISA, noting that censorship by that agency and domestic social media monitoring by intelligence agencies would likely be illegal.

“This limited federal role reveals a critical gap for non-governmental entities to fill,” the executive summary says. “Increasingly pervasive mis- and disinformation, both foreign and domestic, creates an urgent need for collaboration across government, civil society, media, and social media platforms.”

The partnership said it limited itself to flagging social media content “intended to suppress voting, reduce participation, confuse voters as to election processes, or delegitimize election results without evidence,” the latter cited in 72% of all tickets.

It wasn’t enough to be provably false, however. Simply “exaggerating [the] impact” of factual information was enough to be reported. The flagged content most likely to draw action by tech platforms was “misleading statistics.”

A graphic on “cross-platform participatory misinformation” suggests the purpose was to stop content from reaching a “virality threshold” where it could lead to “IRL [in real life] actions”: protests, legal action and “mainstream coverage.”

During the launch webinar, the Atlantic Council’s Emerson Brooking said they wanted to stop the “amplification and legitimation” of “far-right influencers [who] would be doing all they could to try to catch the eye of a Fox News producer,” making it likely that President Trump, “the social media death star,” would see their content.

Government entities were involved in real-time chats with the partnership and social media platforms over specific content under review.

A chat screenshot in the report shows an unidentified government partner rejecting the Sharpiegate claim that “sharpies aren’t read at all” by ballot-counting machines, and a platform provider responding that it was now reviewing those claims.

The partners all received federal grants from the Biden administration in the next two years.

The National Science Foundation awarded the Stanford and UW projects $3 million in August 2021 “to study ways to apply collaborative, rapid-response research to mitigate online disinformation.”

UW’s press release about the award noted their earlier work on the partnership and praise for the report from ex-CISA director Krebs, who called it “the seminal report on what happened in 2020, not just the election but also through January 6.”

Graphika, also known as Octant Data, received its first listed federal grant several weeks after the 2020 election: nearly $3 million from the Department of Defense for unspecified “research on cross-platform detection to counter malign influence.” Nearly $2 million more followed in fall 2021 for “research on co-citation network mapping,” which tracks sources that are cited together.

The Atlantic Council, which hosted then-Vice President Joe Biden for a keynote address at its 2011 awards dinner, has received $4.7 million in grants since 2021, all but one from the State Department. That far exceeds the think tank’s federal haul in previous years, which hadn’t approached $1 million in a single year since 2011.

Those figures don’t include the federal contracts for each partnership member. Graphika/Octant, for example, received nearly $100,000 in 2021 for its “Contagion Monitor” surveillance and services that use “advanced network science to analyze PRC [Chinese] influence.”

UW’s project, SIO and Graphika also collaborated on the Virality Project, which tracks and analyzes purported “COVID-19 vaccine misinformation and social media narratives related to vaccine hesitancy.”

The government “consultation” on censorship stands in stark contrast to recent media coverage of SIO and Graphika.

The Washington Post said an August report by the two organizations exposed years of “covert campaigns” to promote American interests abroad by fake social media accounts, which Facebook and Twitter had repeatedly taken down for alleged U.S. military ties. The Pentagon is reportedly auditing its “internet information operation” in response.

Graphika and its cadre of former U.S. intelligence agents was the subject of a critical profile in February by The Washington Standard, which dubbed it “The Deep State’s Beard for Controlling the Information Age.”

The Department of Homeland Security, CISA, Election Integrity Partnership and its two leaders, the Stanford Internet Observatory and UW’s Center for an Informed Public, didn’t respond to queries about the new scrutiny.

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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.

While everyone knows by now that Europe’s chances of rationing and power shortages have exploded ever since Moscow suspended gas supplies, in France, the situation is even worse as several nuclear power plants are shutting down for maintenance. And the cherry on top: telecom industry officials told Reuters they fear a severe winter will put Europe’s telecoms infrastructure to the test, forcing companies and governments to try to mitigate the impact (i.e., more bailout demands).

The problem, as four telecoms executives put it, is that currently there are not enough back-up systems in many European countries to handle widespread power cuts, raising the prospect of mobile phone outages. Realizing that in just weeks Europe could be cell phone free, countries including France, Sweden and Germany, are scarmbling to ensure communications can continue even if power cuts end up exhausting back-up batteries installed on the thousands of cellular antennas spread across their territory.

Alas, like with everything else in Europe, it’s too little, too late and Europe is facing a truly historic cell phone black out because while Europe has nearly half a million telecom towers, most of them have battery backups that last around 30 minutes to run the mobile antennas. After that they go dark.

One of the alternatives being discussed is pushing Europe back to communist era blackout regimes: In France, a plan put forward by electricity distributor Enedis, includes potential power cuts of up to two hours in a worst case scenario, two sources familiar with the matter said.

The general black-outs would affect only parts of the country on a rotating basis. Essential services such as hospitals, police and government will not be impacted, the sources said. And now, it appears that cell phones are considered essential too: the French Federation of Telecoms (FFT), a lobby group representing Orange, Bouygues Telecomand Altice’s SFR, put the spotlight on Enedis for being unable to exempt antennas from the power cuts.

Enedis said it was able to isolate sections of the network to supply priority customers, such as hospitals, key industrial installations and the military and that it was up to local authorities to add telecoms operators infrastructure to the list of priority customers.

“Maybe we’ll improve our knowledge on the matter by this winter, but it’s not easy to isolate a mobile antenna (from the rest of the network),” said a French finance ministry official with knowledge of the talks.

Telcos in Sweden and Germany have also raised concerns over potential electricity shortages with their governments, several sources familiar with the matter said. Swedish telecom regulator PTS is working with telecom operators and other government agencies to find solutions, it said. That includes talks about what will happen if electricity is rationed. PTS is financing the purchase of transportable fuel stations and mobile base stations that connect to mobile phones to handle longer power outages, a PTS spokesperson said.

The Italian telecoms lobby was even more forceful, and told Reuters it wants the mobile network to be excluded from any power cut or energy saving stoppage and will raise this with Italy’s new government. The power outages increase the probability of electronic components failing if subjected to abrupt interruptions, telecoms lobby chief Massimo Sarmi said in an interview.

Until a solution is reached, to save power, telecom companies are using software to optimise traffic flow, make towers “sleep” when not in use and switch off different spectrum bands, Reuters sources said. The telecom operators are also working with national governments to check if plans are in place to maintain critical services. In Germany, Deutsche Telekom has 33,000 mobile radio towers and its mobile emergency power systems can only support a small number of them at the same time, a company spokesperson said.

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***

On March 16, 2020, following a long weekend of negotiations and deals about the coronavirus, Donald Trump, Deborah Birx, and Anthony Fauci spoke at a White House press conference for the first time about nationwide lockdowns.

They handed out a sheet of paper – it mostly consisted of conventional health advice – that said in tiny print:

“bars, restaurants, food courts, gyms, and other indoor and outdoor venues where groups of people congregate should be closed.”

Shut it all down. Everything. Everyone. As if the whole economy were a nightclub closing early.

This amounted to a full repudiation of not only the Constitution but also freedom itself. At the very least, it was a fundamental attack on the First Amendment guarantees of the freedom of religion because it attacked the rights of Christians, Jews, Muslims, and everyone.

All evidence suggests that Trump did not know that the tiny text was in there.

The reading of the text was left to the question and answer session.

Even when it was read by Fauci from the podium, Trump seemed distracted by something else, almost as if he did not hear or did not want to hear it. Later he bragged that the whole thing was his doing, but looking back at the history of that day, it is not so clear.

Let’s take this apart frame by frame to understand what happened in these 70 seconds as part of the Q&A session. A reporter starts by asking whether the federal government is telling people to “avoid restaurants and bars” or if the government is saying that “bars and restaurants should shut down over the next 15 days.”

Both Fauci and Birx knew for sure that the guidelines were calling for them to shut down.

After a long and tedious press conference about not much, following a very precise question, Trump turns to Fauci to have him answer. This might be because he wasn’t listening carefully and did not know how to respond. Fauci then motions to Birx, who rises to the podium. Fauci probably believed that she would be the one to do the dirty work of announcing the lockdowns. Fauci is clearly egging her on: now is your time.

Birx begins her answer with a strategic deflection, speaking tendentiously about how long the virus lives on surfaces. It was nothing but smokescreen, and there is every reason to believe that she knew it. She pointedly was not answering the question. She chickened out at the last moment.

A possibly frustrated Fauci interrupts her with a hand signal from the side. Birx immediately realizes what he was going to do: he was going to read the order that Trump did not know was there. So she decides to pass the buck. She gets giddy and silly with excitement, adrenaline flowing. She starts stumbling around with her words, and says in a faux-girlish way that she will let Fauci speak because he is her mentor.

This was her way of saying that she would gladly pass this hot potato onto him.

She likely knew that this was the great moment they had all been waiting for. She was mad with excitement. Oddly, Trump was smiling too but possibly because of her antics, not because of what was about to happen.

Fauci steps up to the microphone. He does not personally call for lockdowns. Instead he reads the guidance word for word.

Dr. Fauci: The small print here. It’s really small print. “In states with evidence of community transmission, bars, restaurants, food courts, gyms and other indoor and outdoor venues where groups of people congregate should be closed.”

As he reads, Birx herself is smiling from ear to ear, as if the words were poetry to her. It was not an unfamiliar text. She had been working on these words the entire weekend. Finally all her work had come to fruition.

Even better, she didn’t have to read it. Fauci did.

What was Donald Trump doing during this time? He got distracted by someone in the audience who got his attention. He smiles and points a finger. One wonders who and why. Here is a screenshot.

Was someone assigned to do the job of distracting him? One cannot rule it out. This was the most significant moment of all. The big reveal had come. And Trump’s attention was clearly elsewhere. To whom was he pointing and smiling?

Was he just pretending not to hear?

Who can say?

Fauci reads the text and then he steps away from the microphone. He had just read what is in fact the most totalitarian instruction ever given by any government in the history of the world – I can’t think of another case of such a thing – that all human interaction must stop from sea to shining sea. After all, all congregate places include homes too. Then Fauci steps away from the microphone.

Trump then comes back to the podium. He briefly rolls his eyes, as if to say “There he goes again” but without a conception of what was just read or what it meant.

At this point, what happens? Birx is gleaming, internally cheering. The deed has been done. It’s over. They worked for many weeks to pull off this caper and in an instant it was done.

Notice here that Fauci catches Birx’s eye and gives a little nod. She smiles back. They were giving visual affirmations to each other.

It was then that Trump clarified that he is not telling anyone or anything to shut down, but this statement contradicts what was just read a few seconds ago.

The exchange went as follows:

Reporter: So Mr. President, are you telling governors in those states then to close all their restaurants and their bars?
Trump: Well we haven’t said that yet.
Reporter: Why not?
Trump: We’re recommending but-
Reporter: But if you think this would work.
Trump: … we’re recommending things. No, we haven’t gone to that step yet. That could happen, but we haven’t gone there yet.

This was another strange moment because Trump explicitly contradicted the words that were just read. The paper reporters were looking at were clearly a lockdown order. Any astute reporter would have seen the huge chasm separating the edict from Trump’s own words or understanding.

Here you can watch the full 70 seconds. Deconstruct it yourself. See what you think. It was momentous, probably the most significant in American history, the culmination of weeks of persuasion and planning.

Everything followed from that brief moment: lockdown chaos, the closed schools and churches, the end of basic rights, the wrecking of business, and then began the spending, inflating, mad welfare checks, and the demoralization of the population that continues to this day.

The population now subjected to shock and awe, the mask and vaccine mandates seemed minor by comparison.

All of it unfolded in 70 seconds on March 16, 2020. So far as I know, this is the first and only article written so far to reconstruct this brief moment in time.

Watch the video here.

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***

Ever since the Kiev regime’s actions in Donbass forced Russia’s hand in late February, the Neo-Nazi junta in power has been expecting nothing but full support. Anything less than that and one might as well be a “Kremlin bot”, “Russian troll” or any other Russophobic slur normalized by the mainstream propaganda machine.

This is precisely what happened to Elon Musk, the somewhat eccentric multibillionaire who has even supported the Kiev regime forces through his SpaceX Starlink network. And yet, all it took for the Kiev regime to accuse him of supposedly “supporting Russia” and even hurl insults at him was a tweet that Musk posted on October 3. The tweet boiled down to a four-point peace plan:

Ukraine-Russia Peace:

– Redo elections of annexed regions under UN supervision. Russia leaves if that is will of the people.

– Crimea formally part of Russia, as it has been since 1783 (until Khrushchev’s mistake).

– Water supply to Crimea assured.

– Ukraine remains neutral.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 3, 2022

 – Redo the referendum [in the Donbass, Kherson and Zaporozhye regions] under UN supervision, with Russia agreeing to leave if that’s what the people decide;

 – Crimea formally part of Russia, as it has been since 1783 (until Khrushchev’s mistake);

 – Water supply to Crimea assured;

 – Ukraine remains neutral.

“This is highly likely to be the outcome in the end – just a question of how many die before then,” Musk added, also noting “that a possible, albeit unlikely, outcome from this conflict is nuclear war.”

The plan could hardly ever be considered pro-Russian, and yet, it sent the Kiev regime into a raging frenzy, with Volodymyr Zelensky himself claiming that Elon Musk was now “supportive of Russia.” Others, such as the controversial Neo-Nazi junta’s ambassador to Germany, Andriy Melnyk, infamous for his defense of Neo-Nazi collaborator Stepan Bandera, showed much less restraint.

“F**k off is my very diplomatic reply to you Elon Musk,” Melnyk said on Twitter. “The only outcome is that now no Ukrainian will EVER buy your f…ing Tesla c**p. So good luck to you,” he added.

As previously mentioned, Elon Musk, the owner of SpaceX, is known (or rather infamous) for sending thousands of Starlink satellite network kits, which the Kiev regime openly boasted about and admitted using for military purposes.

“SpaceX has sent thousands of Starlink satellite internet kits to Ukraine,” company President Gwynne Shotwell told CNBC in late March. “I’m proud that we were able to provide the terminals to folks in Ukraine. It’s been enormously helpful, I think, to ensure people are still communicating,” Shotwell added.

In June, Musk himself claimed that over 15,000 kits were sent to the Neo-Nazi junta and that they were “helping fight Russian forces”. The admission that a supposedly “commercial satellite network” such as Starlink could be used in military operations sets a dangerous precedent that further blurs the line between civilians and the military. With SpaceX admitting the use of their products and services to help the Kiev regime forces target Russian and the Donbass republics troops, the company has effectively exposed itself as a party to the conflict, prompting Russia to contemplate using its anti-satellite weapons, both missiles and directed energy weapons such as lasers, microwaves, etc.

Thus, Musk risked one of his most prominent companies and its assets to aid the Kiev regime, and yet, he is now considered “pro-Russian”, with the Neo-Nazi junta’s “diplomatic elite” throwing insults and profanities at him for even suggesting that a peaceful solution to the Ukraine crisis should ever be considered. Nothing seems to be enough for the Kiev regime’s corrupt oligarchs and Neo-Nazi radicals. It seems the very concepts of common sense and basic gratitude are entirely unknown in Kiev.

In addition, Musk’s proposal isn’t very different from what Russia has been suggesting for years. Trying to avoid direct confrontation, Moscow attempted to come to a mutually acceptable agreement that would guarantee Ukraine’s neutrality, while respecting the will of the people of Crimea. The Donbass republics of DNR and LNR were supposed to keep a special status within Ukraine, while the country’s constitutional reform would guarantee the Russian-speaking population their basic human rights.

Still, neither the political West nor their favorite Neo-Nazi puppet regime wanted to even consider the possibility of a peaceful settlement that would prevent further bloodshed. Instead, the regime chose escalation and continued its shelling of the Donbass. The moment Russia decided it had had enough, the solution proposed by Musk became all but impossible.

Moscow is well aware of the fact that it cannot trust anything the political West claims. After decades of outright lies and arbitrary violations of existing treaties, be it political or military/arms control agreements, the Russian leadership realized that the only guarantees they could possibly have are those provided by the military. As it has been forced to directly intervene for the last 7 months, Moscow’s red lines are extremely unlikely to go back where they were before February 24. As stated by its top officials, Russia will fulfill all of the goals set by the special military operation.

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Drago Bosnic is an independent geopolitical and military analyst.

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First published on September 21, 2022

The Covid Pandemic was a Fraud from the Outset

On March 11 2020, a worldwide lockdown was declared: there were 44,279 cumulative confirmed cases (January-March 2020) Worldwide outside of China.  That was the justification for triggering economic and social chaos Worldwide. 

On September 18th 2022, Joe Biden stated with authority that the pandemic is over opening the door towards complete normalization.

One day later, on September 19, 2022, 1,241,693 new “Confirmed Cases” Worldwide were recorded by the WHO. That was the justification to declare that the pandemic was over. 

There NEVER WAS A PANDEMIC 

For a detailed and comprehensive analysis including the devastating economic and social impacts:

Recently released Book.

The Worldwide Corona Crisis, Global Coup d’État Against Humanity

Destroying Civil Society, Engineered Economic Depression

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Destabilizing the social, political and economic structure of 190 sovereign countries was presented as the “solution” to combating the deadly virus. Fake science was supportive of this devastating agenda. 

And now we have reached a new climax: 

President Biden has stated emphatically that the pandemic is over. 

“We still have a problem with COVID. We’re still doing a lotta work on it. But the pandemic is over. If you notice, no one’s wearing masks. Everybody seems to be in pretty good shape. And so I think it’s changing.”  (September 18, 2022)

What was the “scientific basis” for making this far-reaching statement? 

On September 21, 2022, at the time of writing there were according to the WHO:

• More than 610 million PCR cumulative “confirmed cases” Worldwide,
• Almost half a million new cases (468,763) recorded in the last 24 hours, which suggests “an upward movement in the disease”;
• In the United States, there were more than 94 million cumulative confirmed cases on September 21, 2022 
• 57,676 new cases were recorded in the US in the last 24 hours. 
• 13,810 new cases recorded in the U.S. the previous day (September 20, 2022)

The above data are fully endorsed by the Biden Administration.

Since Biden’s statement (18 September), there have been more than 71,000 new confirmed cases in the U.S. And he tells us the “pandemic is over”.

This is either sheer incompetence on the part of President Biden and/or a tacit (and corrupt) acceptance that the official PCR Covid-19 “confirmed cases” used to justify the pandemic and sustain the fear campaign are invalid (“Fake”).

The Biden Administration has from the outset been instrumental in spearheading an upward movement in “Covid-19 confirmed cases”. And now Biden is faced with an uncomfortable dilemma. The continued rising tide of fake data (PCR, antigen, home tests) is at odds with Biden’s “pandemic is over” narrative.

Almost half a million new cases (468,763) have been recorded Worldwide (September 21) in the last 24 hours, coinciding with Biden’s “End of Pandemic” narrative. 

(see WHO diagrams below)

official WHO figures:  468,763 confirmed cases (Worldwide) in the last 24 hours. (September 21, 2022)

In the U.S.

U.S. more. than 94 million cumulative cases and 57,676 new cases in the last 24 hours (see WHO diagram above).

57, 676 cases (recorded on September 21, 2022) in the US in the last 24 hours does not under any circumstances confirm that the pandemic is over in the U.S., unless one acknowledges that the PCR test used to generate these numbers is flawed and totally invalid.

Very fishy: There are substantially more confirmed cases today (including a “recorded” upward trend of the disease) following Biden’s “pandemic is over” statement when compared to the data pertaining to the Covid-19 pandemic when it was first launched in March 2020. See data below.

Embarrassing Political Dilemma: “Decision to Launch the Pandemic” vs. “Pandemic is over”

Coinciding with Biden’s September 18 “Pandemic is Over” statement, the “Covid Confirmed Cases” are “VERY HIGH” (exceedingly high) when compared to the VERY LOW number of confirmed cases used to justify the “Launching of the pandemic” in March 2020. (see below)

44,279 cumulative confirmed cases Worldwide outside of China (January 7 to March 11, 2020) used to justify the “Decision to Launch the Pandemic” on March 11, 2020

Versus

468,783 cases Worldwide recorded in the last 24 hours (on September 21, 2022) to justify Biden’s “Pandemic is Over Decision” 

On the day following Biden’s statement (19 September, 2022) there were  1,241,693 new “Confirmed Cases” Worldwide

It’s Topsy Turvy. Draw your own conclusions.

These are all official figures compiled by the WHO. 

Flash Back to January-March 2020.

Fake science was supportive of a devastating agenda. The lies were sustained by a massive media disinformation campaign. 24/7, Incessant and Repetitive “Covid alerts” in the course of more than two years.

Let us compare the “pandemic is over” figures to the ridiculously low numbers used to justify the pandemic in the first place.

The January 30 2020 Covid Public Health Emergency

The initial phase of this crisis was the launching of a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC) by the WHO on January 30th, 2020: 83 Cases Worldwide outside China, 5 in the U.S, 3 in Canada. And the following day President Donald Trump discontinued air travel with China.

There was no “scientific basis” to justify the launching of the PHEIC 

Screenshot of WHO table, January 29, 2020,

March 11, 2020: The Lockdown. 

44,729 “Cumulative Confirmed Cases” (PCR positive) Worldwide (excluding China), namely 6.5 billion people was used as a Justification to declare a Worldwide Pandemic leading to the Lockdown imposed on 190 countries.

In Canada on March 9, 2020, there were 125 “confirmed cases” out of a population of 38.5 million people

  Screenshot of WHO graph Interactive WHO graph.

The figures speak for themselves.

Today, there are more new recorded cases following Biden’s statement than those recorded when the pandemic was first launched in March 2020.

Moreover, the official figures (September 2022) indelibly suggest an upward movement of the disease, which visibly contradicts the substance of Biden’s statement.

In some regards, “Joe Biden is right”. He did not consult or quote the official data prior to making his historic statement: “The pandemic is over”.

The evidence amply confirms, based on extensive research: The PCR test and its home/antigen tests ARE INVALID.  There never was a pandemic.

The March 11, 2020 number of PCR “confirmed cases” is not only invalid, it is ridiculously low.

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The Worldwide Corona Crisis, Global Coup d’État Against Humanity

Destroying Civil Society, Engineered Economic Depression

By Michel Chossudovsky

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Michel Chossudovsky,  September 21, 2022

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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.

The study involved 26 participants who received three to five “jabs” — or bites from a small box containing 200 GM mosquitoes — over a 30-day period.

Sanaria, a company funded in part by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF), is closely connected to the research, and the researchers involved in the trial use a gene-editing technology heavily promoted by Bill Gates.

Genetically modified mosquitoes used as ‘flying syringes’

The trial used malaria-causing Plasmodium mosquitoes that were genetically modified to avoid causing sickness in humans to infect participants with a “minor” version of malaria — insufficient to cause severe illness, but enough to make the humans create antibodies.

Dr. Sean Murphy, lead author of the study, told NPR, “We use the mosquitoes like they’re 1,000 small flying syringes.”

Despite the publicity generated by this study, however, results appear to have been mixed.

Of the 14 trial participants exposed to malaria, seven contracted the disease. For the remaining seven, the protection conferred by the “vaccine” did not last more than a few months and eventually dissipated.

According to the study:

“Half of the individuals in each vaccine group did not develop detectable P. falciparum infection, and a subset of these individuals was subjected to a second [Controlled Human Malaria Infection] 6 months later and remained partially protected.”

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), “infections caused by P. falciparum are the most likely to progress to severe, potentially fatal forms” of malaria.

Adverse reactions in trial participants reportedly were “what one would expect after getting bit by hundreds of mosquitoes and nothing more.”

For example, trial participant Carolina Reid told NPR her entire forearm “swelled and blistered.”

Despite the study’s mixed results, the researchers claimed the “results support further development of genetically attenuated sporozoites as potential malaria vaccines.”

The researchers suggested several reasons for using live mosquitoes rather than a vaccine that could be delivered via a syringe, including that the use of live insects made sense, as the P. falciparum parasite quickly matures inside the mosquito.

In addition, the process of developing a version of the parasite that could be delivered via a syringe was described as “costly and time consuming.”

Nevertheless, according to Murphy the study will not be used for the mass vaccination of humans. However, the researchers involved in the trial said they believe the approach they used can eventually result in the development of a “substantially more effective” malaria vaccine.

At present, only one malaria vaccine is in use. The RTS,S vaccine produced by GlaxoSmithKline was approved by the World Health Organization in October 2021, but reportedly has an efficacy rate of only 30-40%.

Dr. Kirsten Lyke, a vaccine researcher at the University of Maryland, described the use of a genetically modified live parasite as a vaccine as “a total game changer,” saying the team of researchers “went old school with this one.”

“All things old become new again,” Lyke told NPR.

Lyke, who was not involved in the GM mosquito malaria trial, led the Phase 1 trials for the Pfizer/BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine and also served as co-investigator for COVID-19 vaccine trials administered by Moderna and Novavax.

Stefan Kappe, a parasitologist at the University of Washington and the Seattle Children’s Research Institute — who was one of the authors of the study — said that the approach described by Lyke is already being worked on by the team, adding that the team believes “we can obviously do better.”

However, according to Kappe, “increasing production capability to scale up manufacturing will require investment.”

The research team said that the vaccine developed from this process will eventually be administered via syringes, in order to administer a “more accurate dosage.”

According to Lyke, the use of a slightly more mature version of the GM parasite used during this trial could better equip the human body to prepare an immune response.

Murphy added that his team’s approach utilizes a whole weakened parasite rather than one of the proteins the parasite produces, as with the RTS,S vaccine.

Gates-linked firm provided GM parasites used in trial

According to NPR, the University of Washington partnered with Sanaria, a “small company” that produces the modified parasites.

According to its website, Sanaria is “a biotechnology company developing vaccines protective against malaria,” and its “vaccines have proven highly protective against Plasmodium falciparum infection in humans.”

The company also said it developed “an innovative approach to malaria using Plasmodium falciparum (Pf) sporozoites (SPZ) as the platform technology for immunizing people against malaria infection.”

Two of Sanaria’s listed donors — PATH MVI and the Institute for OneWorld Health — are beneficiaries of funding from the BMGF.

PATH, which founded the Malaria Vaccine Initiative (MVI), describes itself as “an international nonprofit organization that drives transformative innovation to save lives and improve health,” working “with partners in private industry, government, and academia to develop malaria vaccines.”

PATH MVI said it advises and partners with “public institutions, businesses, grassroots groups, and investors to tackle the world’s toughest global health problems — which includes malaria, a notoriously complex parasite.”

As far back as 2008, when it received a $168 million grant, PATH MVI has received funding from the BMGF.

Aside from the BMGF, other PATH MVI donors include Chevron, the ExxonMobil Foundation, the USAID Malaria Vaccine Development Program and Open Philanthropy.

As Open Philanthropy — one of whose main funders is Dustin Moscovitz, co-founder of Facebook along with Mark Zuckerberg — funded a monkeypox tabletop simulation that  “predicted” a global monkeypox pandemic in May 2022, the same month an outbreak occurred.

Open Philanthropy has, over the past decade, provided hundreds of millions of dollars in donations and grants for “global health,” “biosecurity and pandemic preparedness” and “global catastrophic risks.”

In turn, the Institute for OneWorld Health, which claims it “partner[s] with communities in developing countries to bring permanent, sustainable healthcare to the chronically underserved,” has received multiple grants from the BMGF, including a 2004 grant for the development of a malaria vaccine.

Other Sanaria donors include the NIH and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, headed by Dr. Anthony Fauci, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Center for Infectious Disease Research, the National Institute of Standards, the Military Infections Disease Research Program and the European Vaccine Initiative.

Gates’ enthusiasm for gene-editing technology ‘off the charts’

One of the novel aspects of the University of Washington trial was that the parasites used were “disarmed” using CRISPR — or Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats — gene editing tools.

CRISPR is described as “a component of bacterial immune systems that can cut DNA” that “has been repurposed as a gene editing tool,” acting “as a precise pair of molecular scissors that can cut a target DNA sequence, directed by a customizable guide” — a piece of RNA with a “guide” sequence that attaches to the target DNA sequence.

According to geekwire.com:

“When it comes to fighting malaria and other mosquito-borne diseases … CRISPR-Cas9 and other gene-editing tools are being used to change the insects’ genome to ensure that they can’t pass along the parasites that cause those diseases.”

Gates — an enthusiastic proponent of CRISPR — previously suggested CRISPR could be used to eliminate mosquitoes that transmit malaria.

According to a 2018 Business Insider report:

“Gates has long been supportive of using genetic editing tools. He was one of the early investors in Editas Medicine, one of the first companies to start trying to use CRISPR to eliminate human diseases.

“Gates Foundation researchers have worked for nearly a decade on ways to use genetic editing to improve crops and to wipe out malaria-carrying mosquitoes.”

In a 2018 Foreign Affairs article written by Gates, he specifically addressed CRISPR’s potential malaria-related applications:

“Scientists are also exploring other ways to use CRISPR to inhibit mosquitoes’ ability to transmit malaria — for example, by introducing genes that could eliminate the parasites as they pass through a mosquito’s gut on their way to its salivary glands, the main path through which infections are transmitted to humans.”

In a 2021 blog post addressing recent CRISPR-related developments, Gates said his “excitement about CRISPR has grown from super high to off the charts.”

And in a July tweet commemorating the 10th “birthday” of CRISPR, Gates described it as “one of the most important inventions in medicine, biology, and agriculture.”

Gates also helped fund the currently approved RTS,S malaria vaccine — as did Gavi, The Vaccine Alliance, with which the BMGF is a partner.

Some scientists, however, are less enthusiastic about CRISPR’s gene-editing applications, warning they may result in unintended, harmful consequences.

For instance, in testimony submitted to the British Parliament in 2020, scientists Claire Robinson of GMWatch and Michael Antoniou of King’s College London warned:

“GM (including gene editing) of crops, animals and foods leads to several different types of unintended genetic mutations, which unpredictably alter the function of multiple gene systems of the organism.

“Altered patterns of gene function will unpredictably change the biochemistry of the organism.”

And even Gates, in his 2018 Foreign Affairs article, could not ignore the myriad of ethical controversies associated with CRISPR.

Nevertheless, Gates and the BMGF have been proponents of GM mosquitoes even beyond CRISPR.

For instance, the BMGF provided funding to Oxitec, a firm that has conducted pilot projects in Florida and Brazil using GM mosquitoes, purportedly with the aim of reducing the spread of mosquito-borne viruses.

In Brazil, the GM mosquitoes that were released were said to lack the ability to produce offspring — but were nevertheless found to have reproduced.

The BMGF also reportedly was “heavily involved” in trials using GM mosquitoes in India — and even went as far as to propose, in 2017, alongside the Johns Hopkins Center for Communication Programs, the development of a mosquito emoji, to be “used for public health campaigns.”

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Michael Nevradakis, Ph.D., is an independent journalist and researcher based in Athens, Greece.

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***

Today, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) denied a legal petition by Center for Food Safety (CFS), Pesticide Action Network of North America, and others, demanding that the agency fix its failure to regulate pesticide-coated seeds, which are known to be widely harming bees and other pollinators. These crop seeds are coated with systemic insecticides known as neonicotinoids, the most widely used insecticides, and have devastating environmental effects. CFS filed the rulemaking petition in 2017 that would close the loophole. When EPA failed to answer the petition as of late 2021, CFS was forced to take them to court. Today’s response is issued pursuant to a court-set deadline.

“We gave EPA a golden chance and a blueprint to fix a problem that has caused significant harm to people, bees, birds, and the environment — and it stubbornly refused,” said Amy van Saun, senior attorney with the Center for Food Safety. “It’s extremely disappointing and we’ll be exploring all possible next steps to protect communities and the environment from the hazard of pesticide-coated seeds, including a lawsuit challenging this decision.”

Crops grown from pesticide-coated seeds, such as corn, soybean, and sunflower seeds cover over 150 million acres of U.S. farmland each year. Neonicotinoids are taken up into the plant’s circulatory system as the plant grows, permeating leaf, pollen, nectar, and other plant tissues. Neonicotinoids affect the central nervous system of insects, causing paralysis and death. Sublethal impacts include impaired navigation and learning. As a result, beneficial insects, valuable pollinators, and birds—including threatened and endangered species protected under the Endangered Species Act—are killed or injured. For songbirds, ingesting just one neonic coated seed can cause serious harm or death. Additionally, more than eighty percent of the pesticide coating can leave the seed, contaminating the air, soil, and waterways of surrounding environments. Most notably, clouds of neonicotinoid-laced dust released during planting operations has caused mass die-offs of honeybees and wild native bees.

Earlier this year, EPA admitted grave harm to hundreds of endangered species from the pesticide active ingredients that coat these treated seeds. On June 16, 2022 EPA released its final biological evaluations for clothianidin, thiamethoxam, and imidacloprid (three major neonic active ingredients), as required by a settlement in an earlier CFS case. EPA found that each neonic is likely to adversely affect from two-thirds to over three-fourths of America’s endangered species—1,225 to 1,445 species in all.

These pesticidal seeds also pose danger to communities. For example, the devastation caused in the village of Mead, Nebraska from the fumes and runoff of an ethanol plant using coated seeds as feedstock. The pollution has caused bee dieoffs and even eye and throat irritation and nosebleeds to local residents from the neurotoxins coating the corn seeds.

The 2017 petition demanded EPA close the regulatory loophole that allows seeds coated with systemic pesticides (coated seeds) to evade the registration and labeling requirements of the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act (FIFRA). EPA currently exempts coated seeds from FIFRA’s registration requirements and has failed to assess the risks of these unregulated seeds—while never providing the public with any justification for this exemption.

In EPA’s response denying the petition, the agency instead stated that it would “continue to review labeling instructions for pesticides registered for seed treatment” to ensure those instructions are “complete” for the seeds ultimately coated with these biocides. EPA also promised to issue an Advanced Notice of Proposed Rulemaking “to seek additional information on pesticide seed treatment and to explore the option of issuing a rule pursuant to FIFRA section 3(a) to regulate the use of pesticide-treated seed.”

CFS, through its Pollinators & Pesticides program, has long advocated for thorough, science-based safety testing and proper regulation of new pesticide product uses prior to any marketing and cultivation of crops, in a manner that minimizes lethal and sublethal effects on non-target species.

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A mild flutter ensued after External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar’s recent meeting with his Turkiye counterpart Mevlut Cavusoglu on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly session in New York on September 21 when it came to be known that Cyprus figured in their discussion. Jaishankar highlighted it in a tweet.  

The Indian media instinctively related this to Turkish President Recep Erdogan making a one-line reference to the Kashmir issue earlier that day in his address to the UNGA. But Jaishankar being a scholar-diplomat, would know that Cyprus issue is in the news cycle and the new cold war conditions breathe fresh life into it, as tensions mount in the Turkish-Greek rivalry,  which often draws comparison with the India-Pakistan animosity, stemming from another historical “Partition” — under the Treaty of Lausanne (1923) that ended the Ottoman Empire. 

The beauty about peace treaties is that they have no ‘expiration date’ but the Treaty of Lausanne was signed for a period of a hundred years between Turkiye on one side and Britain, France, Italy, Greece, and their allies on the other. The approaching date heightens the existential predicament at the heart of Turkiye’s foreign policy. 

The stunning reality is that by 24th July 2023, Turkey’s modern borders become “obsolete”. The secret articles of the 1923 Treaty, signed by Turkish and British diplomats, provide for a chain of strange happenings — British troops will reoccupy the forts overlooking the Bosphorus; the Greek Orthodox Patriarch will resurrect a Byzantine mini state within Istanbul’s city walls; and Turkey will finally be able to tap the forbidden vast energy resources of the East Mediterranean (and, perhaps, regain Western Thrace, a province of Greece.) 

Of course, none of that can happen and they remain conspiracy theories. Nonetheless, the “end-of-Lausanne” syndrome remains a foundational myth and weaves neatly into the historical revisionism that Ataturk should have got a much better deal from the Western powers. 

All this goes to underline the magnitude of the current massively underestimated drama, of which Cyprus is at the epicentre. Suffice to say, Turkey’s geometrically growing rift with Greece and Cyprus over the offshore hydrocarbon reserves and naval borders must be properly understood in terms of the big picture.

Turkiye’s ruling elite believe that Turkey was forced to sign the Treaty of Sevres in 1920 and the “Treaty of Lausanne” in 1923 and thereby concede vast tracts of land under its domain. Erdogan rejects any understanding of history that takes 1919 as the start of the 1,000-year history of his great nation and civilisation. “Whoever leaves out our last 200 years, even 600 years together with its victories and defeats, and jumps directly from old Turkish history to the Republic, is an enemy of our nation and state,” he once stated. 

The international community has begun to pay attention as Turkiye celebrates its centenary next year, which also happens to be an election year for Erdogan. In a typical first shot, the US State Department announced on September 16 — just five days before Jaishankar met Cavusoglu — that Washington is lifting defence trade restrictions on the Greek Cypriot administration for the 2023 fiscal year. 

Spokesman Ned Price said,

“Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken determined and certified to Congress that the Republic of Cyprus has met the necessary conditions under relevant legislation to allow the approval of exports, re-exports, and transfers of defence articles.” 

The US move comes against the backdrop of a spate of recent arms deals by Cyprus and Greece, including a deal to purchase attack helicopters from France and efforts to procure missile and long-range radar systems. Turkiye called on the US “to reconsider this decision and to pursue a balanced policy towards the two sides on the Island.” It has since announced a beefing up of its military presence in Northern Cyprus.  

To be sure, the unilateral US move also means indirect support for the maritime claims by Greece and the Greek Cypriot administration, which Turkiye, with the longest continental coastline in the Eastern Mediterranean, rejects as excessive and violates its sovereign rights and that of Turkish Cypriots. 

Whether these developments figured in Jaishankar’s discussion with Cavusoglu is unclear, but curiously, India too is currently grappling with a similar US decision to offer a $450 million military package to Pakistan to upgrade its nuclear-capable F-16 aircraft. 

Indeed, the US-Turkey-Cyprus triangle has some striking similarities with the US-India-Pakistan triangle. In both cases, the Biden administration is dealing with friendly pro-US governments in Nicosia and Islamabad but is discernibly unhappy with the nationalist credo of the leaderships in Ankara and New Delhi. 

Washington is annoyed that the governments in Ankara and New Delhi preserve their strategic autonomy. Most important, the US’ attempt to isolate Russia weakening due to the refusal by Turkiye and India to impose sanctions against Moscow. 

The US is worried that India and Turkiye, two influential regional powers, pursue foreign policies promoting multipolarity in the international system, which undermines US’ global hegemony. Above all,  it is an eyesore for Washington that Erdogan and Prime Minister Modi enjoy warm trustful personal interaction with Russian President Vladimir Putin. 

The photo beamed from Samarkand during the recent SCO summit showing Erdogan arm in arm with Putin must have infuriated President Biden. Modi too displayed a rare moment of surging emotions when he told Putin at Samarkand on September 16, 

“The relationship between India and Russia has deepened manifold. We also value this relationship because we have been such friends who have been with each other every moment for the last several decades and the whole world also knows how Russia’s relationship with India has been and how India’s relationship with Russia has been and therefore the world also knows that it is an unbreakable friendship. Personally speaking, in a way, the journey for both of us started at the same time. I first met you in 2001, when you were working as the head of the government and I had started working as head of the state government. Today, it has been 22 years, our friendship is constantly growing, we are constantly working together for the betterment of this region, for the well-being of the people. Today, at the SCO Summit, I am very grateful to you for all the feelings that you have expressed for India.” 

Amazingly, the western media censored this stirring passage in its reports on the Modi-Putin meeting! 

Notably, following the meeting between Modi and Erdogan in Samarkand on Sept. 16, a commentary by the state-owned TRT titled Turkiye-India ties have a bright future ahead signalled Erdogan government’s interest to move forward in relations with India. 

India’s ties with Turkiye deserve to be prioritised, as that country is inching toward BRICS and the SCO and is destined to be a serious player in the emerging multipolar world order. Symptomatic of the shift in tectonic plates is the recent report that Russia might launch direct flights between Moscow and the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, a state supported and recognised only by Ankara. (Incidentally, one “pre-condition” set by the Biden administration to resume military aid to Cyprus was that Nicosia should roll back its relations with Moscow!)  

Without doubt, the US and the EU are recalibrating the power dynamics in the Eastern Mediterranean by building up the Cyprus-Greece axis and sending a warning to Turkiye to know its place. In geopolitical terms, this is another way of welcoming Cyprus into NATO. Thus, it becomes part of the new cold war. 

Can South Asia’s future be any different? Turkiye has so many advantages over India, having been a longstanding cold-war era ally of the US. It hosts Incirlik Air Base, one of the US’ major strategically located military bases. Kurecik Radar Station partners with the US Air Force and Navy in a mission related to missile interception and defence. Turkey is a NATO power which is irreplaceable in the alliance’s southern tier. Turkey controls the Bosphorus Straits under the Montreux Convention (1936).

Yet, the US is unwilling to have a relationship of mutual interest and mutual respect with Turkiye. Pentagon is openly aligned with the Kurdish separatists. The Obama administration made a failed coup attempt to overthrow Erdogan. 

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***

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 ancient Greeks spoke of lemma as representing a logical premise, a matter taken for granted. This contrasted with a dilemma, or “dual premise”, where one would be presented with an either/or proposition. The Romans furthered this notion, referring to a “double premise” as argumentum cornutum, of the “horned argument,” because by answering one argument, an individual would be impaled by the logic of the second. Thus are the ancient roots of the modern idiom, “on the horns of a dilemma.”

This is the ultimate objective of maneuver warfare, for example: to position your forces in such a manner as to present the enemy with no good option – should they react to one pressing threat, they would find themselves overwhelmed by the other.

The Russian military operation that has been underway in Ukraine for more than seven months now has provided ample examples of the military forces of both sides being confronted with a situation that compelled them to alter their preferred course of action; the Russian “diversion” against Kiev early on in the SMO prevented the Ukrainians from reinforcing their forces in eastern Ukraine, and the recently concluded Ukrainian counteroffensive in Kharkov compelled a hasty Russian withdrawal from a significant swath of previously occupied Ukrainian territory.

Both examples cited presented one side with a lemma, or a single problem, which needed to be addressed. But neither was able to put its opponent “on the horns of a dilemma,” forcing a response which would result in impalement regardless of the option chosen. The reason for this is simple – very rarely will competent military commanders allow themselves to be presented with a military problem for which there is no viable response. War, it seems, is hard work, and dilemmas don’t fall from trees.

Or do they? Ever since Boris Johnston flew to Kiev in April to convince Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky to pull out of peace talks then ongoing with Russia in the Turkish city of Istanbul, NATO has embarked on a program designed to provide Ukraine with tens of billions of dollars in military and financial assistance, including the transfer of modern heavy weapons and the use of facilities on Western soil where tens of thousands of Ukrainian troops could be trained and organized without fear of Russian intervention.

The purpose behind the NATO infusion of weaponry into Ukraine was straightforward – to empower Ukraine to not only lengthen the conflict, but also to undertake offensive military operations designed to evict Russia from what Kiev and its backers consider occupied Ukrainian territory, including the Donbass and Crimea. The counteroffensive in Kharkov in early September underscored the serious consequences of NATO’s actions – even though, given the massive loss of life and material suffered by the attacking Ukrainian forces, made the Kharkov victory Pyrrhic in nature, it was a Ukrainian victory, and one which compelled a Russian retreat.

By transforming the Ukrainian army into a NATO army which was manned by Ukrainians, the US-led bloc had, in fact, changed the nature of the game from a straightforward Russia-versus-Ukraine “special military operation” into a “Russia-versus-the collective West” struggle where the military resources originally allocated by Moscow to the fight were now insufficient to the task.

Russia, however, was not taking the game-changing actions of NATO standing still. Responding to the new reality on the ground in Ukraine, Russian President Vladimir Putin opted not to simply up the ante in this new NATO-driven game of increasing military power but change the game altogether. Not only did he order the partial mobilization of some 300,000 Russian reservists to reinforce the troops currently committed to the SMO, Putin also approved referendums in the four territories where Russian forces are presently fighting – Kherson and Zaporozhye (formerly occupied Ukrainian regions), and Donetsk and Lugansk (former regions of Ukraine, de-facto independent since 2014). These referendums asked the citizens of these four territories one simple question: do you wish to become part of Russia?

After five days of voting, the results from all four territories were clear – by an overwhelming majority, the participants in the referendums approved the proposition. Shortly thereafter, they were incorporated into the Russian Federation. What was once Ukraine has now become Mother Russia.

Russia didn’t just change the rules of the game – it changed the game itself. Instead of Ukrainian forces fighting Russian forces on the territory of Ukraine, any future combat carried out by Ukraine against Russian forces would represent an attack on the Russian homeland itself.

Where does this leave NATO? The bloc’s leadership has made it clear from day one that it is not seeking direct confrontation with Russia. While its members have poured in tens of billions of dollars of material into Ukraine to help reconstitute its military, and provided critical logistics, intelligence, and communications support to Ukraine, it has repeatedly and insistently stated that it has no desire to fight a war with Russia directly and has made it clear that it would rather have the Ukrainians serve as a de facto NATO proxy in resisting Moscow.

NATO has gone “all in” both economically and politically when it comes to supporting Ukraine, to the extent that some of its members, having stripped their respective military structures of equipment and material, have nothing left to give. Despite this, European political and economic elites continue to articulate their strong support for Ukraine going forward.

This support, however, was predicated on the fundamental assumption that by providing Ukraine with this massive level of support, NATO would not get directly involved in a conflict with Moscow. But Russia, by transforming the battleground from one being fought on Ukrainian soil to one where it’s now defending its own land, has flipped the script.

NATO, having overcommitted to Ukraine, now finds itself “on the horns of a dilemma” – if it continues to provide massive material and financial support to Ukraine, it will, in effect, become a direct party to the conflict, something no one in the bloc wants. However, if it backs away from supporting Ukraine, the various Western political leaders and institutions which have made support for Kiev a sacred obligation will be seen as going back on their word.

How NATO opts to proceed has yet to be manifest, but indications are that it will not be in a manner which continues to double down on supporting Ukraine no matter what. Secretary General Stoltenberg’s tepid speech condemning Russia while showing no enthusiasm for Zelensky’s “accelerated application” for membership is indicative of the less-than-resolute nature of its support for Kiev.

NATO now will find its role diminished by the consequences of the Russian mobilization and referendums. Years from now, when the history of the conflict is finally written, the decision by President Putin to simultaneously mobilize the Russian reserves while absorbing the territory of southern and eastern Ukraine into the Russian Federation will serve as one of the premier modern-history examples of putting an adversary “on the horns of a dilemma.” The effective neutering of NATO by this action will more than likely be seen as a turning point in the conflict, one which sealed the fate of Ukraine in the face of an inevitable Russian victory.

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Scott Ritter is a former US Marine Corps intelligence officer and author of ‘Disarmament in the Time of Perestroika: Arms Control and the End of the Soviet Union.’ He served in the Soviet Union as an inspector implementing the INF Treaty, served in General Schwarzkopf’s staff during the Gulf War, and from 1991 to 1998 served as a chief weapons inspector with the UN in Iraq. Mr Ritter currently writes on issues pertaining to international security, military affairs, Russia, and the Middle East, as well as arms control and nonproliferation. Follow him on Twitter @RealScottRitter and on Telegram @ScottRitter

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***

Mr. Ryan Turner,
General Manager and Circulation Manager,
Lethbridge Herald

Dear Mr. Turner;

Below please find the text of a lengthy article from the New York Times. The essay is entitled “‘Somebody Planted The Guns:’ In Canada a Raided, Distrusting Village Blames the Police.”  This NYT article presents an interpretation of the case that basically offers consistent support for the position of the Crown in the genesis of a show trial being planned for the Lethbridge Court House sometime next year.

The four men that are the subject of this trial were charged last February 14 with “conspiracy to commit the murder” of RCMP officials. As evidenced by the New York Times’ interest, these charges, as well as the collective failure of the Coutts Four to receive bail, are attracting worldwide attention. The ante is being raised this October 4 as the Crown brings new charges against three leaders of the Coutts action. So far 17 individuals have been charged by the RCMP unit and the Crown prosecutors involved in the Coutts investigation.

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.

The bias of the NYT story is consistent with the notorious bias of the regime media. Since 2020 the regime media have been hellbent on making history replete with wholesale deceit, fraud and censorship embedded in much of its reporting on the manufactured COVID crisis.

The New York Times like the Lethbridge Herald consistently lied to its audiences reassuring us that the COVID injections were safe and effective. They were, in fact, no such thing. Both media venues supported the likes of Prime Minister Justin Tudeau in giving credence to his injection policies that have resulted in many deaths and injuries of large numbers of victims. The same pattern is being re-enacted in county after country where significant portions of the population have been jabbed with the clot shots.

Since mid-2021 these victims have been showing up in statistical abundance in a variety of ways in spite of the ongoing efforts of the media and their captive governments to continue to hide and downplay the reality of what is actually going on. Within this framework of misrepresentation the Alberta government made a laughing stock of itself with its report that the highest death rate in the province in 2021 was due to “unknown causes.” The cause is only “unknown” among those who have been shielding themselves from one of the most significant news developments of the twenty-first century.

The big news is still being obscured. Its essence is that the real plague of mortality and crippling injury overtaking us emanates from the needles of gene-modifying injections that do not prevent the spreading of COVID or infection by COVID. We have been lied to and thereby put in harm’s way by the governments and media that still insist on trying to silence, discredit and deplatform those endeavouring to insert scientific methodology into the poisonous mix of deadly disinformation.

In the case of Catherine Porter’s version of the regime media’s disinformation, the biases in her story have been fashioned into personal attacks that are meant to be unflattering to the culture and prevailing mentality of those of us who wear our identity as Albertans proudly. The subtext is that the Canadian Freedom Convoy movement that largely took shape in this province as well as in the broadly-based constituency that converged at Coutts are intellectually and academically substandard.

The failure of the NY Times to do justice to this story of the Truckers and especially the Coutts contingent of dissidents should be addressed by the Lethbridge Herald. After all, a major portion of the Lethbridge Herald’s readership showed up by the tens of thousands at Coutts in a very active period when demonstrators came and went for 17 days. The demonstrators included some elected officials of the Alberta provincial government. Why can’t this important chapter in Alberta’s history find fair and balanced representation in our own Albertan mainstream media?

Perhaps the attention being directed this way by the New York Times forms a fitting demonstration that important things can and do happen in this region. In my view our community, including our local media, sometimes drop the ball by failing to take proper ownership of the important controversies that sometimes unfold in this locale. What is to be said about our local paper dropping the ball to the NY Times? Its reporter, Catherine Porter, plays to all the worst caricatures and stereotypes in depicting Alberta as some sort of reactionary ghetto far from what she probably considers the woke wonders of New York.

In her bias, Porter embraces the so-called Canadian Anti-Hate Network whose highly politicized spokespeople often assert that those who question, for instance, injection mandates are motivated by an urge “to dismantle democracy.”

In fact it is the government of Justin Trudeau that seems most contemptuous of democracy. He is trying to fulfill his vaccine fixation by denying constructive consultation with his own constituents in order to please his real masters including those in Klaus Schwab’s World Economic Forum. We need a Canadian government based in Parliament, not in Davos.

Trudeau in fact was tagged as an enemy of democracy by several elected members of the European Parliament. His effort to wrongfully criminalize his political opponents in order to drag them through the mud of terrorist accusations was specifically noted by MEP Christine Anderson.

See this.

Trudeau is no democrat when it comes to the disproportionate amount of effort he and his government have invested in legal processes to charge, imprison, and return dissident Albertans to jail. Ms. Porter, for instance, did not address the case of Tamara Lich from Medicine Hat Alberta. This founder of the Freedom Convoy movement was re-jailed supposedly because she broke bail by appearing with a friend in a photograph during an awards ceremony where she was being honoured.

The number of those charged at Coutts has recently risen to 17 as Marco Van Huigenbose, Alex Van Herk, and George Janzen appear in court on 4 October to face $5,000 fines for mischief.

The membership of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police conducts activities that are deeply intertwined with those of the FBI in the United States. In Alberta the RCMP doubles as both the federal police force and a provincial police so it is sometimes difficult to know what jurisdiction is responsible for any particular police action.

In this instance there is little doubt that the Trudeau government was shopping through the RCMP at Coutts for some reference it could make to Trucker “terrorism.” The PM needed such a reference in order to give the appearance of substance, especially to his government’s outrageous break and entry without any judicial order into the internal security of Canada’s banking system on 14 February. This intervention was justified on the basis of the Emergency Act introduced just as the “conspiracy to commit murder” charges were being made public throughout Canada and around the world.

The Anti-Hate Network is itself deeply bound up with its own mispresentations of the 9/11 crimes and of the RCMP’s history of entrapping Islamic patsies with the goal of providing propaganda to demonize Muslims and thereby advance government agendas in the “War on Terror.” See this.

The Anti-Hate Network has imported all this controversy into the treatment of those 17 individuals criminalized at Coutts by employing Mubin Shaikh as an expert concerning the details of the case.

Shaikh worked closely with CSIS and the RCMP between 2006-2010 in setting up the entrapment/conviction of the “Toronto 18” as part of Canada’s original demonstration of the required spectacle meant to arouse fear of “homegrown Islamic terrorism.” Shaikh’s central role on this fiasco has been highlighted by Prof. Michael Kiefer’s “The Toronto 18 Frame-Up: Fraud and Fear-Mongering in the War on Terror.” Ms. Porter’s essay returns us to the paradigm of fear mongering as a staple in mainstream journalism. See this.

Catherine Porter repeats the strategy of lazy journalists working for the most discredited agencies in the regime media by merely declaring that those who agree with her and her backers are honest truth tellers and that those who disagree are despicable conspiracy theorists. The question of what the actual evidence does or does not support, however, almost never comes up with her. It almost never comes up because the point of the whole exercise, it seems, is not to get at the truth but rather to convict those already injected into trial-by-media procedures.

This trial-by media is intended to deprive the accused of fair hearings. Increasingly court processes, many of them palpably corrupt while in the pocket of those possessing high accumulations of wealth and power, count for much less than the media trials that precede them and often predetermine their outcomes.

In the title of her New York Times article Ms. Porter indicates that almost everyone in the town of Coutts came to a similar conclusion that the RCMP somehow staged the photograph of the weapons arsenal to set in motion a spurious process that has been playing itself out for several months now largely in the Lethbridge court house. Why not wait for the trial before pronouncing on such a crucial matter as the background of how the widely-distributed picture said to depict the Coutts weapons arsenal actually came to be?

Doesn’t such a widespread suspicion among so many of the people most close to the Coutts debacle merit some closer investigation? Or does Ms. Porter simply disqualify those who have made their lives in Coutts from having sufficient sophistication and insight to weigh in on such a grave matter.

Maybe the Lethbridge Herald would serve its home audience better by initiating some genuine investigation that takes its readers beyond the predictable stigmatization of one side and the automatic lionization of those that support the establishment narrative of the COVID debacle.

The failure of the regime media to show balance and objectivity in delving into the distinction between fact and fiction in the manufactured COVID crisis is holding us back from resolving a variety of contentions. These contentions have discredited many of our major institutions including government, media, the medical profession, universities, schools, churches, courts and banks.

It is time to put a stop in the COVID crisis to the disqualification from equitable representation of the large component of society who have done their own independent research with the goal of working towards a more healthy society. In such a society debate would be welcomed and embraced, not smeared and subjected to criminalizing processes such as those unfolding at the Lethbridge court house.

Yours Sincerely,

Anthony James Hall,
Professor Emeritus, University of Lethbridge

From The New York Times

“Somebody Planted The Guns:” In Canada a Raided, Distrusting Village Blames the Police” 

By Catherine Porter

Published Sept. 24, 2022, Updated Sept. 30, 2022

COUTTS, Alberta — The village’s only restaurant offers smiles and two pamphlets, one denouncing Covid-19 vaccines for children, the other saying the United Nations’ mission includes creating a “microchipped society” for “tracking and controlling.”

So pervasive is the belief here that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is a dictator-in-the-making that even a top official in the village admits she “may have” a flag telling Canada’s leader where to go — rudely.

And many residents of the village, Coutts, Alberta, think the biggest event that occurred here in recent memory — when the police raided a local home in February and revealed a frightening cache of weapons — was a hoax perpetrated by the police to silence an antigovernment protest.

Read the full article here.

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Dr. Anthony Hall is editor in chief of the American Herald Tribune. He is currently Professor of Globalization Studies at University of Lethbridge in Alberta, Canada. He has been a teacher in the Canadian university system since 1982. Dr. Hall, has recently finished a big two-volume publishing project at McGill-Queen’s University Press entitled “The Bowl with One Spoon”.

He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

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***

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.

The issue of flight cancellations was then spuriously linked to claims that President Xi Jinping had gone absent on his return from the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) meeting in Uzbekistan.  To this could be added two unconnected facts.  General Li Qiaoming, after having occupied his post for five years, was moving on, though where was not certain.  There were also the remarks of a retired centurion, a 105-year-old former politician, who spoke about respecting elders.

The media rush to tie the string around these events was aggressive.  It involved Gordon Chang, infamous proponent of the “collapse of China” theory, being consulted for expert advice by such outlets as Newsweek.  Chang’s tweets were generously quoted as sagacious observations:

“[W]hatever happened inside this #Chinese military during the last three days – evidently something unusual occurred – tells us there is turbulence inside the senior #CCP leadership.”

The lack of news from #China over the last few hours suggests coup rumors are untrue, but whatever happened inside the #Chinese military during the last three days—evidently something unusual occurred—tells us there is turbulence inside the senior #CCP leadership.

— Gordon G. Chang (@GordonGChang) September 24, 2022

Another gem from Chang was the view that much smoke had been detected, suggesting that “there is fire somewhere.  We don’t think there has actually been a coup, but at this point there have been some extremely troubling developments at the top of the Communist Party as well as the top of the People’s Liberation Army, which reports to the party, so something is terribly wrong.”

From this failed soothsayer, the “decision to cancel 60 per cent of its flights on Wednesday” and a “widely shared video” shared on social media showing “a line of military vehicles up to 80 kilometres long heading into Beijing” were key indicators that something was amiss in the centre of power.

Going further back the line of disinformation, one finds the channel New Tang Dynasty TV taking interest in the opinions of a dissident Zhao Lanjian, who made much of the flight cancellations.  That particular assessment was always going to be influenced by the fact that New Tang Dynasty is an important platform for the views of the religious group Falun Gong.  The group has, as its primary ambition, the elimination of the Chinese Communist Party.  The network also fanned the disappearance narrative regarding Xi and his apparent house arrest.

Then came the role of Jennifer Zeng, a New York-based Falun Gong blogger, asking the question whether Xi had been arrested and whether three senior anti-Xi officials had been sentenced to death.  Her efforts, according to The Print, were part of a “sprawling media ecosystem” backed by Falun Gong.

The rumour mill began to move at giddying speed.  India became the hotspot of dissemination.  The Noida-based Hindi news channel India TV was an avid enthusiast of the coup conspiracy theory.  The Indian politician Subramanian Swamy, with a Twitter following of 10 million, also got busy with tweeting on September 24, wondering about the “rumour” that the leaders of the Chinese Communist Party had “removed Xi from the Party’s in-charge of Army.  Then House arrest followed.”

By September 26, flights had resumed their merry way, with that occasionally useful tracking site flightradar24 showing a resumption of traffic from the Beijing Daxing International Airport.  But that did not get away from the other fact missed by the starry-eyed coup assessors: that the previous three weeks had also seen high cancellation rates for flights.  These included 60.1 per cent, 69 per cent and 64.1 per cent respectively.

The evidence supposedly mounted in favour of a coup began to look sketchy and even absurd.  There was no evidence of a military convoy stretching 80km entering the capital, despite the excitement caused by a video purporting to make that claim.  Logically, a British tech company that claims to “tackle” the harms arising from “misleading and deceptive online discourse”, found that the coverage in question related to a military convoy on the move last year.

Another video claiming to show an explosion that had supposedly taken place in the course of the alleged coup was from 2015, identifiable on Daily Motion and titled “Huge Explosion in Tianjin, China, 200 Tons TNT Equivalent.”  That particular conflagration was distinctly not fictional.  In the course of the explosion, 700 tonnes of sodium cyanide kept at the facilities of Ruihai International Logistic caught fire, leading to 173 fatalities.

The China Coup episode deserved a good mocking and Georg Fahrion of Der Spiegel was happy to do so. “Today in Beijing,” he noted with chirpy promise, “I investigated the China coup so you don’t have to.  At considerable personal risk, I ventured out to some neuralgic key points in the city.  Disturbing finds.  Brace yourself.”

Fahrion went on to talk about the main entrance to Zhongnanhai compound, “where the entire central leadership works, including Xi Jinping.”  Mockingly, he tells us that paratroopers of elite grade “have wrested control over the gate, cunningly disguised as the five middle-aged dudes who always stand there.”

The logic and strength of a lie is its fecund, reproductive power.  Mentioned constantly, reiterated and spread, it grows the legs of truth, and does a merry dance.  Sometimes, that dance is innocent enough; often, it’s not.  When it comes to speculating about coups and plots in such centres of power as China, the implications of getting that wrong are too grave to contemplate.

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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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***

“He who controls the weather controls the world” – Lyndon B. Johnson, 1962

Watch video below.

What we are seeing these days with hurricane “Ian” ravaging the Caribbean, the Florida coasts and inland, then all the way up to South Carolina – causing massive destruction of infrastructure, cropland, death of animals and people, as well as cancellations of all flights from NYC to Florida, this is a state of war.

It is also called geoengineering.

In the last couple of years it has become common place.

“Chemtrails”, the by now common term for spraying the higher atmosphere by airplanes literally with tons of tens of thousands of different chemical particles, has become a technology covered by hundreds if not thousands of patents. Not just US patents. Patents from countries around the world.

Did you know that Spain along with over 50 countries are currently carrying out “activities to artificially change the weather”. So said recently the Spanish weather agency AEMET and speaks of “chemical contrails” or “chemtrails”. See this.

To get a full picture of what geoengineering is all about, its history – back to at least 1947, probably longer – its scientific background, secrecy – and power – war power, literally to be used for weather warfare, you ought to watch “The Dimming” (linked below).

Geoengineering may be similar to Project Manhattan (The Manhattan Project was the code name for the American-led effort to develop a functional atomic weapon during World War II), see this “The Dimming” – Full Length Climate Engineering Documentary (https://www.GeoengineeringWatch.org, 10 March 2021)

According to Florida’s meteorological stations, Ian is the worst hurricane hitting Florida in decades, possibly ever.

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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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***

This horrible war that could have been avoided, shouldn’t have been launched and could have been ended early through a negotiated settlement has reached an unimagined brink. The major parties to the war, Russia, Ukraine and the US, can continue on the path of escalation and go over the brink, or they can start to talk and to listen to each other.

Russia has been brought to the realization that there will be no negotiations with the West. Putin’s December 2021 requests for negotiations before the war and Russia’s accompanying proposal on mutual security guarantees were spurned by the US. At the start of the war, the State Department discouraged Ukraine from pursuing its interests and negotiating an end to the war in favor of continuing the war to fight for broader US interests. When a negotiated settlement was within reach, and it appeared that the war would not last much longer, the foreign minister of Turkey, the nation that hosted the promising Istanbul talks, charged that the promise of peace had been killed by “countries within NATO who want the war to continue.”

On September 21, Putin said that he “would like to make public for the first time” that “After the start of the special military operation, in particular after the Istanbul talks, Kiev representatives voiced quite a positive response to our proposals. These proposals concerned above all ensuring Russia’s security and interests. But a peaceful settlement obviously did not suit the West, which is why, after certain compromises were coordinated, Kiev was actually ordered to wreck all these agreements.” Russia had realized that there would likely not be a negotiated end to the war.

Russia also realized that they were no longer fighting the regional war against Ukraine they had launched. Ukraine’s response had been hijacked by the US, turning the war into a wider war between Russia and the US and NATO. The scale of the West’s provision of weapons, combined with training and targeting intelligence had already led Russia to see the US as risking crossing that line. Already by the end of April, Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov had said that “NATO, in essence, is engaged in a war with Russia through a proxy and is arming that proxy.”

But from Russia’s perspective, the crossing of the line could no longer be denied after the September Ukraine counteroffensive that exposed direct US involvement that included intelligence sharing that, according to New York Times reporting, “allowed the United States to provide better and more relevant information about Russian weaknesses” and to increase “feeds of intelligence about the position of Russian forces, highlighting weaknesses in the Russian lines.” The US then war-gamed the counteroffensive with the Ukrainian military and advised them on “avenues for a counteroffensive [that] were likely to be more successful than others.” The US was providing everything but the soldiers who would die: they were providing the weapons, the training, the intelligence and the plan.

Russia had realized “that it is now in a direct war with the US, that this is now an American war.” On September 21, Putin said that Russia is fighting “the entire Western military machine.” And for Russia that meant that, even if Ukraine wasn’t in NATO, the existential threat that had long before Putin been Russia’s red line, NATO was in Ukraine. That conclusion was only reinforced by Zelensky’s September 30 statement that “De facto, we have already made our way to NATO.”

NATO is in Ukraine, and Ukraine is “de facto” in NATO. In 2008, when NATO promised at its Bucharest summit that Ukraine would become a NATO member, Russia declared it an existential threat that it would stop. According to Russian reporting at the time, Putin “flew into a rage” and promised that “if Ukraine joins NATO, it will do so without Crimea and the eastern regions.”

On September 30, an official signing ceremony was held in Moscow, following the referendums in Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson, and Zaporizhzhia, that began the process of absorbing those four eastern regions into Russia.

Russia has promised to use any weapons necessary to defend its territory. The eastern regions of Ukraine are now seen by Russia as its territory. To ensure the manpower to keep the promise to defend its expanded territory, Russia simultaneously ordered a partial mobilization of up to 300,000 reserves.

The war has now escalated to the brink. The two sides have pushed as far as they can without risking going over. Though Ukraine is not officially in NATO, NATO is in Ukraine, completing the push east to Russia’s borders that Moscow has long feared. Russia has now annexed the eastern regions as they promised they would in 2008 if NATO came to Ukraine and consistently with their stated goal to protect Russian nationals in the Donbas whether through autonomy, independence or ascension to Russia. Having reached this pivotal point, Russia now called for the resumption of talks. On September 30, in a line in his speech at the signing ceremony that has gone unreported in the West, Putin called on Kiev to return to talks: “We call on the Kiev regime to immediately cease fire, all hostilities, to stop the war that Kiev started back in 2014, and to return back to the negotiating table.”

There is a brief window for Russia, Ukraine and the US to act on that moral responsibility and turn back from the brink and return to talks.

This is not the first time that it has come to Russia’s perceived need for nuclear threats. In 1962, Russia famously placed nuclear missiles in Cuba. Less famously, in April 1999, in a furious phone call as the NATO bombing of Kosovo came to a head, Boris Yeltsin warned President Clinton, “Don’t push Russia into this war? You know what Russia is, you know what Russia has at its disposal!”

The US and Russia that time talked and listened. It took time, and the relationship was, perhaps, irreparably damaged, but a compromise agreement was reached. NATO stopped its bombing of Kosovo, Serbian forces withdrew and a NATO and Russian peacekeeping forces were deployed to Kosovo under the banner of the UN.

In 1962, Kennedy and Khrushchev also listened and talked—if secretly. In 1962, Khrushchev feared American aggression in Cuba. Kennedy’s Operation Mongoose had the explicit goal of overthrowing Castro. When Edward Lansdale, who was running the operation, drew up the timeline for the coup, he said that “final success will require decisive US military intervention”. Equally importantly, Khrushchev feared American aggression in Russia: the US had Jupiter missiles in Turkey and Italy complete with nuclear warheads. Kennedy and Khrushchev stepped back from the brink. Exchanged secret messages led to negotiations. Russia would remove its nuclear missiles if the US would remove its nuclear missiles. To feel safe removing the missiles from Cuba, Khrushchev further demanded guarantees that the US would not invade Cuba. Kennedy agreed to provide an informal promise not to invade.

The US and NATO broke their promise not to expand NATO east of Germany and mocked Russia’s security concerns and red lines as they moved closer to Russia’s borders. Russia escalated by launching a war on Ukraine. The US continued the escalation by deeper and more direct involvement in the war. Russia further escalated by annexing the eastern regions. Now is the moment to end the escalation and urgently begin to listen and to return to talks.

What would have happened if Kennedy had not listened to Khrushchev and if the two had not secretly talked?

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Ted Snider has a graduate degree in philosophy and writes on analyzing patterns in US foreign policy and history.

Featured image: 03 June 1961  President Kennedy meets with Chairman Khrushchev at the U. S. Embassy residence, Vienna. U. S. Dept. of State photograph in the John Fitzgerald Kennedy Library, Boston.

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***

The UK anticipated a “serious confrontation between Russia and Ukraine” as far back as 1992, declassified files show. One senior official even questioned whether Ukraine was “a real country”.

When British intelligence warned that Vladimir Putin was about to attack Ukraine earlier this year, the spooks’ foresight won many plaudits. Yet their prediction mirrored a scenario Whitehall had long known might unfold.

In May 1992, just six months after the Soviet Union broke up, Britain’s then Prime Minister John Major was being briefed by his staff. They were concerned about a potential clash between Russia and Ukraine over Crimea.

The peninsula in the Black Sea had belonged to Russia until the Soviet Union gifted it to Ukraine in 1954. For the rest of the Cold War, Crimea retained a significant Russian presence, including a strategically important warm water port for the Kremlin’s navy.

Such was the strength of Russia’s legacy in the area that during the 1990s local politicians wanted a referendum on independence from Ukraine. “Most of the population in Crimea is Russian,” an advisor told Major in a handwritten note.

They warned:

“If Crimea becomes independent, Ukraine’s ability to control the Black Sea fleet – based at Sevastopol – goes with it.”

Gordon Barrass, a senior UK intelligence official, added:

“The Ukrainians will try to prevent the referendum from being held…The issue will arouse passions among nationalists in Kiev and Moscow and could stir up inter-ethnic conflict within Crimea.”

Among those living in Crimea were the Tartars, an historic Muslim community that had been brutally oppressed under Soviet rule and wanted to remain part of Ukraine.

Percy Cradock, a veteran British diplomat and intelligence supremo, warned the situation “excites strong emotions in Crimea and amongst the powerful nationalist lobby in Kiev (as well as in Moscow).”

He believed:

“There must be a real possibility that the situation will slip out of control. That could mean violence in Crimea, and serious confrontation between Russia and Ukraine.”

Ukraine’s sovereignty questioned

In the event, there was a messy compromise. Crimea’s parliament declared independence, while also acknowledging Ukraine’s authority. Yet the situation remained volatile.

Major’s foreign policy advisor and former ambassador to Moscow, Rodric Braithwaite, wrote a confidential background note that would today be considered heretical.

“It is not entirely clear, even to the Ukrainians, still less to the Russians, that Ukraine is a real country,” Braithwaite noted. “Hence the tensions between the two.”

Braithwaite, who went on to chair the Joint Intelligence Committee later in 1992, gave the Prime Minister a potted history of the region, stretching back to the middle ages. He highlighted the “artificial famine which [Soviet leader Joseph] Stalin imposed on the Ukraine in 1930-31, when many millions of peasants were deported or starved to death.”

“So it was not surprising then very many Ukrainians greeted the Germans as liberators in 1941, and that large numbers agreed to join the German army”, Braithwaite reasoned, referring to Nazi collaborators during World War II.

‘An integral part of Russia’

Although these resistance groups were ultimately defeated by Stalin, Ukrainian nationalism survived as a political movement.

“Throughout 1990 the number and size of popular demonstrations for independence swelled,” Braithwaite noted, adding that Russia looked like an “empire” to Ukrainians.

On the other hand, he said:

“Russians would simply not recognise the picture. For Russians, the Ukraine is an integral part of Russia, its history and its culture. The Ukrainian language is no more than a dialect”.

He went on:

“I have not met a single Russian, even among the most sophisticated, who really believes that the Ukraine is now permanently severed from the motherland.”

In a candid remark, Braithwaite said:

“The Ukrainians know that. They also know that Ukraine itself is divided: between the ultra-nationalist…Western Ukraine…and the East which is predominantly inhabited by ethnic Russians.”

As tensions escalated, a confidential Whitehall planning paper warned: “We need to pay more attention to Ukraine.” It noted there were “fears over long term allegiance of ethnic Russian minority (22% of population)” and concerns that President Yeltsin “will be replaced by nationalists/neo-imperialists” in the Kremlin.

‘Reabsorbed by Russia’

At the end of 1993, Foreign Office planners thought “Ukraine might be reabsorbed by Russia unless it faced up to the need for painful economic and political reforms” to make it less dependent on money from Moscow.

Ukraine’s deputy foreign minister, Borys Tarasyuk, did not dispute the analysis when British diplomats came to Kiev to meet him in early 1994 for “some six hours of confidential exchanges”.

Tarasyuk believed Moscow “was determined to try to assert as much control as possible over all the republics of the former Soviet Union”, and would “use the well tried strategy of destabilising their neighbours in order to justify intervention”.

The Ukrainian politician was apparently “particularly exercised about the Crimea where recent elections have demonstrated the strength of pro-Russian separatist feeling.”

Roger Bone, a senior British diplomat who would later run arms giant Boeing, “reassured Tarasyuk that the West was very much alive to the risk of a shift in Russian foreign policy” and “would not acquiesce in the re-establishment of a Russian sphere of influence.”

Battle for influence

Plans were made to bring Ukraine’s economy into the Western orbit, through promoting privatisation and engagement with the International Monetary Fund. Financial aid was to be conditional on Ukraine restructuring its economy towards a free market model.

It would take another 20 or 30 years for the significance of these discussions to become fully apparent. In 2014, Ukraine’s democratically elected president was toppled in a popular “coup”, after he opted for an economic deal with Russia instead of the European Union.

Russia, now led by the nationalist Vladimir Putin, reacted to the loss of his ally by annexing Crimea. Residents supposedly voted by 97% to join Russia in a referendum, which was boycotted by Tartars and not recognised by Britain.

Meanwhile, Moscow helped destabilise Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region, by backing separatist rebels in Donetsk and Luhansk. Peace talks failed and the conflict dramatically escalated this February when Putin launched a full scale invasion of Ukraine.

Putin is now repeating his referendum tactic by holding disputed polls in the Donbas, despite the ongoing war. While British intelligence has recently won credit for predicting the conflict, the declassified files make clear this was a risk Whitehall had long known about.

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Phil Miller is Declassified UK’s chief reporter. He is the author of Keenie Meenie: The British Mercenaries Who Got Away With War Crimes. Follow him on Twitter at @pmillerinfo.

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***

The Ukrainian government is prepared to give the Joe Biden administration virtual control over its selection of Russian targets. Kiev made the proposal in a bid to receive longer-range weapons from the White House, according to multiple sources speaking with CNN.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky will provide a full list of possible targets while allowing the White House to veto any of the potential sites. Kiev is hoping the increased transparency will pave the path to Biden authorizing more weapons transfers. Zelensky made the offer to Washington to alleviate concerns in the Biden administration that new weapons will be used to target Russian territory.

However, Kiev, Washington and Moscow currently have different views on what is Russian versus Ukrainian territory. After a 2014 coup in Ukraine that saw US-backed elements overthrow a democratically elected government, Russia annexed the Crimea peninsula. Last week, Moscow claimed four additional regions of Ukraine as its own.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has vowed to defend all of his country’s territory with the full arsenal at his disposal. The Kremlin stated that it considers its newly added regions as it would the rest of Russia. On Sunday, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin acknowledged the possibility that Putin could order a nuclear strike in Ukraine, defending these new regions. The Pentagon chief then vowed Washington would support Kiev’s “efforts” for “as long as it takes” to “take back all of the territories” within its “sovereign borders.”

Concurrently, Moscow claims there has been an increase in Ukrainian attacks within Russia proper, encouraged by NATO. During a recent press conference, Putin publicly noted, for the first time, attempted Ukrainian attacks on Russia’s nuclear power plants.

The US has provided Ukraine with 16 High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems (HIMARS), and authorized sending over a dozen more to Kiev in an arms package last week. So far, the White House has only sent Ukraine with munitions for HIMARS that can travel 50 miles. Kiev is seeking Army Tactical Missile Systems (ATACMS) surface-to-surface missiles that can fly around 200 miles by the HIMARS. When the Biden administration began providing HIMARS to Ukraine, it was insisted that Kiev had provided “assurances” that these weapons would not be used to target Russian territory. In June, Antiwar.com contacted the State Department to ask if this condition applied to the Crimean Peninsula, a department spokesman replied “Crimea is Ukraine.”

The White House has made clear that they will not recognize the new Russian territories, and NATO has said they will escalate their support for the proxy war.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has previously said that if the West provides Kiev with longer-range weapons, then the Kremlin would expand its war goals in Ukraine. In July, Lavrov wrote an article claiming NATO was already on the battlefield coordinating attacks on Russian targets using the rocket systems.

“NATO instructors and Multiple Launch Rocket Systems aimers are, apparently, already directing the actions of the Ukrainian Armed Forces and nationalist battalions on the ground,” Lavrov said.

In addition to the CIA presence on the ground in Ukraine, NATO commandos from Lithuania, Canada, Britain, and France are also present. Notably, there are several Donald Trump-aligned Republicans in the legislature, including Rep. Mike Waltz (R-FL) eager to “[go] for the kill” and overtly deploy American military advisors to Ukraine. Former US special operators are already on the ground near the contact line, training Kiev’s forces and developing battle plans.

Harry Kazianis wrote in Responsible Statecraft that in multiple war game simulations, Washington sending advanced weapons led to nuclear war.

I have fought more than thirty combat simulations in wargames under my own direction for a private defense contract…In every scenario I tested, the Biden Administration slowly gives Ukraine ever more advanced weapons like ATACMS, F-16s, and other platforms that Russia has consistently warned pose a direct military threat…In fact, in 28 of the thirty scenarios I have run since the war began, some sort of nuclear exchange occurs.

Kazianis does report that in some of the war games, diplomacy, rather than escalation prevailed, and nuclear conflict was averted.

The good news is there is a way out of this crisis — however imperfect it may be. In the two scenarios where nuclear war was averted, direct negotiations led to a ceasefire. The Biden Administration and its NATO allies should be testing Putin’s recent comments about a ceasefire to test his seriousness.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken, America’s top diplomat, has declared Washington’s goal is to see Russia suffer a “strategic defeat” in Ukraine. During the war, he spoke to Lavrov once and for only 25 minutes, they merely discussed a potential bilateral prisoner exchange. Likewise, UK Prime Minister Liz Truss has ruled out diplomacy until Moscow is “defeated.”

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

Connor Freeman is a writer and assistant editor at the Libertarian Institute, and co-hosts Conflicts of Interest.

Featured image is from TLI

9/11, Osamagate and the “Blowback”. America’s “Just War” Against Afghanistan

By Prof Michel Chossudovsky, October 03, 2022

From the outset, the objective was to use 9/11 as a pretext for launching the first phase of the Middle East Central Asian War, which consisted in the bombing and occupation of Afghanistan. This was achieved by sustaining the myth that Muslim terrorists supported by the Afghan government had attacked the WTC on September 11, 2001.

Americans Find Gangsters Suitable to Lead the Country

By Eric Zuesse, October 03, 2022

Here are some of the top agents in this U.S.-headed gang, agents of U.S. billionaires. These individuals don’t even need to worry about elections, such as politicians do, and they remain in office for as long as they want if they do what America’s billionaires want them to do.

China Is Not Capitalist and It Is Not Yet Communist

By Kim Petersen, October 03, 2022

There are many western commentators who, apparently in profound dismay that a country which holds up the banner of socialism could be so economically successful, tiresomely deny that China practises socialism and insist that it is instead capitalist.

Blinken Calls Sabotage Attacks on Nord Stream Pipelines a “Tremendous Opportunity”

By Zero Hedge, October 03, 2022

Ever since the recent unprecedented sabotage attacks on the Russia to Europe Nord Stream pipelines, the central question has continued to remain who did it and correspondingly cui bono?

Germany Spends 2.5 Billion Euros on 100 Million Bivalent Boosters Only to Discover That Nobody Wants Them

By eugyppius, October 03, 2022

The German government has ordered 100 million doses of BA.1 and BA.4/5 bivalent vaccines at a cost of 2.5 billion Euros, and almost nobody wants them.

Increased Risk of Myocarditis: Doctor Who Promoted COVID Shots on TV Calls for Global Stop to COVID-19 Vaccines

By Marina Zhang and Dr. Yuhong Dong, October 03, 2022

Lately, Dr. Aseem Malhotra, a British cardiologist who was previously supportive of COVID-19 vaccines has been the topic of breaking news stories for demanding a global stop to the distribution of the same vaccines he once promoted.

Dutch Government Obstructs Excess Mortality Research

By Gideon van Meijeren, October 03, 2022

The Netherlands have been struggling with unexplained excess mortality for more than a year. Since the second half of 2021, over ten thousand more people have died than expected. In October 2021, the leader of Forum for Democracy, Thierry Baudet, was the first to draw attention to this topic, in parliamentary questions to the then Minister of Health, Hugo de Jonge.

Should Europeans ‘Thank’ the Americans for Destroying Nord Stream?

By Robert Bridge, October 03, 2022

With an investigation continuing into the destruction of the Nord Stream gas pipeline that provided energy supplies to Europe from Russia, there appears to be just one prime suspect, and that should surprise nobody.

Biden’s Nordstream Destruction Prediction, Draped in Nazi Blood and Soil

By Kurt Nimmo, October 03, 2022

Thomas Reed, a senior US national security official, claims in his book “At The Abyss” that the United States allowed the USSR to steal pipeline control software from a Canadian company. This software included a Trojan Horse that caused a major explosion of the Trans-Siberian gas pipeline in June 1982. The Trojan ran during a pressure test on the pipeline but doubled the usual pressure, causing the explosion.

Please Some Straight Talk from the Peace Movement

By Philip Giraldi, October 03, 2022

The so-called Israel Defense Forces, whose Chief Rabbi Eyal Karim approves of his soldiers raping ‘attracting Gentile women’ as a way to keep up morale, are also continuing to kill Palestinians at an unprecedented rate and have covered-up the murder four months ago of Palestinian-American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh, admitting only that the woman was apparently killed by a soldier who claimed that he thought her to be an armed Arab rioter.

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***

On 13 November 2019, the U.S. President said, regarding Syria, “We’re keeping the oil, we have the oil, the oil is secure, we left troops behind only for the oil.” That was at a press conference, and none of the reporters asked him any question about that statement. They certainly thought to be unremarkable, and not surprising, to hear an American President say that our country is stealing oil from a country that we have invaded and still are militarily occupying despite having no legal authority to position any troops there — publicly admitting to international gangsterism, in the very boldest way (yet without surprising anyone there).

That statement had followed a U.S. ‘Defense’ Department’s statement, on 25 October 2019, saying, with more tact, that, “The United States will maintain a reduced presence in Syria, to deny ISIS access to oil revenues as the next phase of the defeat-ISIS campaign.” It was tactful because it lied to claim this is to be done (and no reference to stealing anything) “to deny ISIS access to oil revenues” — the false underlying assumption being conveyed that this oil is ISIS’s and NOT Syria’s, so that even IF that oil is being stolen from ISIS (which wants to overthrow Syria’s Government, just as much as does the U.S. Government, though for different reasons), then it still is being done for a reason that America’s voters would approve of: conquering ISIS. In other words, the U.S. ‘Defense’ Department was tactful enough to misrepresent what the reason for these ongoing international thefts is.

On 10 August 2022, when that President’s successor was (and still is) in office, The Cradle news-site headlined “Washington steals over 80 percent of Syria’s oil output per day: The losses incurred by the trafficking campaign surpass $100bln, according to Syria’s oil ministry”, and they presented a stunning brief aerial-shot video (perhaps from Russian drones) showing the long strings of tanker-trucks hauling away that oil from Syria. Though the U.S. President now was from a different U.S. political Party, the U.S. foreign policy remained unchanged.

That President’s successor, though of the opposite political Party, continued these thefts. The thefts had been started by a President of this President’s Party, back in 2012, who was working with European partners perhaps as early as 2009, and definitely wanted “regime-change” in Syria at that time, but definitely by no later than 2012 he decided to support Al Qaeda in Syria against Syria’s existing Government at that time, late in 2012, and the planning for this overthrow of Syria’s Government was already functioning in June of 2011. The U.S. Government was doing this overthrow-operation not for any legitimate reason — Syria had never threatened, nor posed any threat to, the United States. It presented no national-security risk to the United States, whatsoever — and never had. This was purely an international-gangland operation, in order to benefit the billionaires who control (buy the winning politicians in) each of its participating Governments. All members of this international gang settled upon their plan “behind closed doors, at the sidelines of the Atlantic Council’s Energy Summit in Istanbul, Turkey, on November 22 – 23, 2013.” The Atlantic Council is NATO’s chief PR organization. Furthermore, allegedly, ISIS’s “two heads are the royal family of Saudi Arabia and the CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, U.S.A.” Lots more evidence along the same lines was given in the U.S. magazine Homeland Security Today, on 18 March 2019, interviewing “The ISIS Ambassador to Turkey”, who, for some reason, seems to have left ISIS. One of the U.S. gang’s mainstream news-media, TIME magazine, presented this operation as-if the U.S. Government were debating within itself pro-and-con about it, instead of fully committed to it (which the U.S. Government had been ever since 1949). They headlined about it, “Syria’s Opposition Hopes to Win the War by Selling Oil”, as-if “Syria’s Opposition” were anything more than Al Qaeda in Syria, and Kurdish separatists in Syria’s northeast — America’s proxy-forces to overthrow Syria’s committedly secular Government and replace it with a government that would be controlled by the Saud family.

On 29 September 2022, Steven Sahiounie headlined at The Duran, “Cholera and US sanctions killing Syrian civilians”, and reported that,

The deadly outbreak has claimed 39 lives in Syria, with thousands of suspected cases across the country. In areas under the Ministry of Health in Damascus, 23 deaths were reported recently, 20 of them in Aleppo, and at least 253 cases.

In the northeast region of Syria controlled by the US-backed SDF — a [separatist] Kurdish militia … — are a reported 16 deaths and 2,867 cases since September 5. The US occupation forces there are controlling the main oil fields in Syria to prevent the Damascus government from using the oil to provide electricity for people’s homes, water pumping stations, and gasoline for their cars. …

Health authorities tested the Euphrates and found the bacteria causing cholera.  The river is polluted by raw sewage and oil spills from the US-occupied oil wells at Deir Ez Zor. …

According to the UN, nearly two-thirds of water treatment plants, half of the pumping stations, and one-third of water towers have been damaged by more than a decade of war.

Last winter, Syrians died in their homes without heating. … Diesel fuel is used in Syria for home heating, but it is expensive and often in short supply because of the US occupation of the oil wells in the northeast, and the US sanctions preventing importing fuels. Most Syrians get about one hour [per day] of electricity because the fuel used to generate electricity is taken by the US troops.

Sahiounie says that because of the heavy paperwork that’s required by the U.S. sanctions in order for Syrians to buy foreign medicines, hospital treatments for the cholera victims are impeded.

Here are some of the top agents in this U.S.-headed gang, agents of U.S. billionaires. These individuals don’t even need to worry about elections, such as politicians do, and they remain in office for as long as they want if they do what America’s billionaires want them to do. Like the politicians, they are answerable only to the billionaires and a few centi-millionaires, who fund their careers, but their jobs are easier than for publicly elected officials, who are constantly competing against one-another to win over those big-dollar donors. In fact, some of these agents had formerly been successful politicians, U.S. office-holders, but then ‘retired’ upstairs, where it’s far easier to remain in their jobs, not only because of the constant competition for mega-buck donors, but because constantly fooling their voters is hard work, not so easy as being a lobbyist is. These agents are ONLY agents, but they all are extremely well rewarded financially, for their services to the gangsters who own them — who have funded the wealth or their lobbyists and other agents. And you see there some of the U.S. mega-corporations that fund these peoples’ careers, on behalf of those corporations’ controlling stockholders. But, of course, the names of the billionaires themselves aren’t shown there. The billionaires generally stay behind the scenes, because they don’t want to be the people who will get blamed for the resulting Government. 

Of course, the same things were true of this gang’s operations to take over Iraq, and are true today of the gang’s operations to retain control of Ukraine, which they had won in 2014. The American people find acceptable to be constantly lied-to, and to be ruled by, the agents of international gangsters — billionaires’ agents. It has been going on now blatantly since at least 9 December  2020, and actually ever since at least 25 July 1945, when this gang, these gangsters, America’s super-rich, took over the country, and have continued to hold control over America’s Government.

The majority of Americans vote for these gangsters’ stooges, instead of do anything to rebel against and replace virtually all of these stooge-officials who occupy congressional seats and the White House. So, the promises that are made to the public remain unfulfilled, while the promises that are privately made to the mega-dollar donors get turned into government-policies and laws. Even at the level of state governments, “Politicians Don’t Actually Care What Voters Want”. But, apparently, Americans find gangsters — agents of the billionaires — suitable to lead the country (on behalf of their funders — NOT of their voters). And those agents of billionaires then get to choose whom our judges will be. And, that’s okay. Or: Is it? Is it democracy, at all?

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This article was originally published on The Duran.

Investigative historian Eric Zuesse’s new book, AMERICA’S EMPIRE OF EVIL: Hitler’s Posthumous Victory, and Why the Social Sciences Need to Change, is about how America took over the world after World War II in order to enslave it to U.S.-and-allied billionaires. Their cartels extract the world’s wealth by control of not only their ‘news’ media but the social ‘sciences’ — duping the public. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

Order Mark Taliano’s Book “Voices from Syria” directly from Global Research.

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Author: Mark Taliano

ISBN Number: 978-0-9737147-9-1

Year: 2017

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List Price: $6.50

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***

There are many western commentators who, apparently in profound dismay that a country which holds up the banner of socialism could be so economically successful, tiresomely deny that China practises socialism and insist that it is instead capitalist.

Author Jeff Brown wrote that China is “history’s most successful socialist and communist country.”

This conflation of communism and socialism is common but inaccurate. It fudges that, according to Marxist thought, socialism is an earlier stage in the process of reaching the end goal of communism.

That writer Ron Leighton asserts in his piece that “China is Capitalist” is rather simplistic. Laissez faire capitalism, neoliberalism, and exploitation of other nations are antithetical to Chinese political-economic practice.

Dictionary Definitions

Socialism: “a theory or system of social organization that advocates the ownership and control of the means of production and distribution, capital, land, etc., by the community as a whole, usually through a centralized government.”

Communism: “a theory or system of social organization based on the holding of all property in common, actual ownership being ascribed to the community as a whole or to the state.”

Capitalism: “an economic system in which investment in and ownership of the means of production, distribution, and exchange of wealth is made and maintained chiefly by private individuals or corporations, especially as contrasted to cooperatively or state-owned means of wealth.”

Is there an extant purely capitalist society? What do hospitals, schools, the fire department, the police, military, etc represent? The fact is that capitalism, because of its proclivity to concentrate wealth in a few hands, could not survive in a society without wealth redistribution.

The Communist Party of China prioritized pulling all its citizens out of absolute poverty and achieved this in late 2021. What “capitalist” country has achieved this? The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea — despite a scorched earth bombardment by the US, climatological disasters suffered, and continuous sanctions against it — has achieved tuition-free education for all, kindergarten through university; free preschool; universal healthcare; full employment; and universal housing. What capitalist countries have achieved this? In fact, my North Korean guide proudly opined that the DPRK was more socialist than China.

China now strives toward becoming a xiaokang society, a moderately prosperous society — basically a society where almost everyone has attained a middle class level. This is hardly what one would expect to be prioritized under capitalism’s law of the jungle.

Unhindered, a system of socialism should function without need for capitalism.

Nonetheless, arguing about whether China is communist or capitalist is futile. China is neither.

If one wants to know what political-economic system China adheres to then check in with China’s chairman Xi Jinping. He states clearly in his book On the Governance of China that China follows and applies Marxist-Leninism to the Chinese context and that China is currently in the early stage of socialism, what Chinese call Socialism with Chinese Characteristics. The “Communist” in the Communist Party of China indicates the end goal, as Xi also makes clear in his book.

China emphasizes peace, the freedom for each nation to choose a system which best suits it, win-win commerce, and an improved life for people of all nations. It does not seek to impose a political-economic system on others, and it does not emphasize profit over people.

Sounds quite distant from capitalism.

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Kim Petersen is an independent writer and former co-editor of the Dissident Voice newsletter. He is a regular contributor to Global Research. He can be emailed at: kimohp at gmail.com.

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***

Ever since the recent unprecedented sabotage attacks on the Russia to Europe Nord Stream pipelines, the central question has continued to remain who did it and correspondingly cui bono?

Just when speculation and an avalanche of theories have inundated the web on an array of international outlets, the Biden administration has bluntly (and apparently lacking self-awareness) boasted that the pipeline bombings present an “opportunity”.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in a Friday joint press briefing with Canada’s top diplomat that the damage and disruption to the pipelines are being seen in Washington as a “tremendous opportunity” to greatly reduce European energy imports on Russia.

In addressing the ‘mystery’ sabotage incidents, Blinken began,

“I think first it’s important to make clear that these pipelines – that is, Nord Stream 1 and Nord Stream 2 – were not pumping gas into Europe at this time.  Nord Stream 2 never became operational, as is well known.  Nord Stream 1 has been shut down for weeks because of Russia’s weaponization of energy.”

A mere few sentences later, he followed by saying “ultimately this is also a tremendous opportunity. It’s a tremendous opportunity to once and for all 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.”

He at the same time touted that the Untied States has now become “the leading supplier of LNG [liquefied natural gas] to Europe,” stressing too that the Biden administration is helping to enable European leaders to “decrease demand” and “speed up the transition to renewables.”

Tellingly, in that single section of comments while speaking alongside his Canadian counterpart, Foreign Minister Mélanie Joly, Blinken had repeated the word “opportunity” while highlighting the European energy crisis no less than three times.

According to @SecBlinken, the Nord Stream pipeline bombing "offers tremendous strategic opportunity for the years to come." Too bad that this tremendous opportunity for DC bureaucrats will come at the expense of everyone else, especially this coming winter. pic.twitter.com/T2eacQUuBF

— Aaron Maté (@aaronjmate) October 1, 2022

Canada’s Joly for her part pointed the finger at Russia for sabotaging its own pipeline during a panel discussion the same day, telling an Atlantic Council conference that the world is “not naïve” about who is responsible for the acts of “sabotage”. She’s the latest top official of a NATO government to do so.

But the Canadian foreign affairs minister stopped short of naming Russia directly in the exchange:

“At this point we’re still investigating, but obviously we want to make sure that we do things the right way, but we’re not naïve,” she said.

“You’re not naïve as to who’s behind it?” Sciutto responded.

“As I said, we won’t speculate but at the same time, we want to make sure that — the world needs to understand that this is very important European infrastructure that was sabotaged,” the minister added.

On the other side of the question of culprits and the crucial cui bono question, The American Conservative offers the following commentary:

One could certainly see why sabotaging Nord Stream benefits the US. We didn’t want Europe to get Nord Stream in the first place, because it would make Europe dependent on Russian gas. This is perfectly reasonable, from an American point of view. However, if Washington sabotaged those pipelines in the middle of the Ukraine-Russia war, that would mean an insane escalation of the war, to sabotaging critical infrastructure.

Think about it: if Russia can’t deliver gas to Europe anyway, because the pipelines are too damaged, that makes it harder to make peace and restore energy flow to Europe. This fits Washington’s policy goals. That doesn’t mean Washington is responsible for this sabotage, but there’s a lot more reason for Washington to have blown the pipelines up than for Russia.

The publication continues, “Prominent Polish politician Radek Sikorski understood this, firing off this ill-advised tweet as soon as the news broke.”…

Finally, we note that China state-affiliated media mouthpiece could not resist commenting on Blinken’s apparently cluelessly ironic comments, saying what much of the rest-of-the-world is perhaps thinking…

Taking the sabotage of Nord Stream pipelines as a "tremendous opportunity" is such undisguised comment, isn't it? Isn't Mr. Blinken worried that his remarks will make the world believe "whoever benefits did it"? pic.twitter.com/X8NwAX75w2

— Hu Xijin 胡锡进 (@HuXijin_GT) October 2, 2022

Below is the full section of transcript and context wherein Secretary Blinken dubbed the pipeline incident and European energy crisis a “tremendous opportunity” [emphasis ours]…

“I think first it’s important to make clear that these pipelines – that is, Nord Stream 1 and Nord Stream 2 – were not pumping gas into Europe at this time.  Nord Stream 2 never became operational, as is well known.  Nord Stream 1 has been shut down for weeks because of Russia’s weaponization of energy.

What we’ve been doing – and we’ve also been working on this together for many, many weeks as we saw the Russian aggression in Ukraine and as we saw the ongoing weaponization of energy by Russia – is to work very closely with European partners as well as countries around the world to make sure that there is enough energy on world markets.  And so we’ve significantly increased our production as well as making available to Europe liquefied natural gas.  And we’re now the leading supplier of LNG to Europe to help compensate for any gas or oil that it’s losing as a result of Russia’s aggression against Ukraine.

We’ve worked to release oil from our Strategic Petroleum Reserve to make sure as well that there is oil on the markets and to help keep prices down.  We’ve engaged with the European Union and established months ago a task force to work directly with Europe on ways to decrease demand to help get through the winter, as well as to pursue additional supply and to find ways to speed up the transition to renewables even as we’re getting through this challenging period.  So all of that work is ongoing.

My own sense – and I mentioned this the other day – is, look, there’s a lot of hard work to do to make sure that countries and partners get through the winter.  Europe itself has taken very significant steps to both decrease demand but also look at ways to pursue the transition to renewables at the same time.  And ultimately this is also a tremendous opportunity. It’s a tremendous opportunity to once and for all 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.

That’s very significant and that offers tremendous strategic opportunity for the years to come, but meanwhile, we’re determined to do everything we possibly can to make sure that the consequences of all of this are not borne by citizens in our countries or, for that matter, around the world.”

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The German government has ordered 100 million doses of BA.1 and BA.4/5 bivalent vaccines at a cost of 2.5 billion Euros, and almost nobody wants them. An amusing Welt article chronicles the scenes unfolding at our deserted regional vaccination centres, which for some reason are still open:

Michael Hubmann did not expect that so few would come. Only 85 people had themselves vaccinated against Covid-19 on Thursday in Fürth in Middle Franconia, a district with 120,000 inhabitants. “We’ve tried to make it as easy as possible for people,” says Hubmann, a paediatrician who is coordinating the vaccination campaign. He explains that vaccinations were offered simultaneously in two shopping centres, a bus, a home for the elderly and in a former shop in the pedestrian zone. “Yet hardly anyone wanted to have the fourth dose.”

The medical bureaucrats are baffled, just baffled:

“Unfortunately, interest in the fourth dose has been pretty low so far,” says Markus Beier, Chairman of the German Association of General Practitioners. At the same time, he says it’s important that people over 60 and those with previous illnesses in particular protect themselves with a further dose. “There is uncertainty among the population as to what further vaccinations will achieve. But they still strengthen protection against severe outcome.”

Meanwhile, vast quantities of vaccine are expiring. At the end of August alone, 3.9 million doses of Moderna and another 700,000 doses of Novavax had to be binned.

Bivalent booster uptake fail. (Source: eugyppius)

The chart above tells the whole sordid story of our recent experiment with mass vaccination. Demand for this snake oil was highest in the beginning, before anybody had any direct experience with it; and in the Fall, when the government tied vaccination to specific social privileges. As overt vaccinator coercion has faded and millions of people have tried these doubtful elixirs for themselves, interest has all but entirely evaporated. This is the ultimate vindication for all those who have been saying that the vaccines are lousy overhyped pharmaceuticals with a bad side-effect profile. A safe and effective product would only gain momentum with the population. It took less than two years for these to wear out their welcome.

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Lately, Dr. Aseem Malhotra, a British cardiologist who was previously supportive of COVID-19 vaccines has been the topic of breaking news stories for demanding a global stop to the distribution of the same vaccines he once promoted.

It was certainly a first for a doctor who had heavily promoted the vaccines to publicly demand a global stop to the mRNA injections.

In February 2021, Malhotra was asked to appear on Good Morning Britain, after a previously vaccine-hesitant film director Gurinder Chadha, Order of the British Empire (OBE)—who was also interviewed—explained that she was convinced by Malhotra to take the jab.

However, more than a year later, in August 2022, Malhotra appeared on GB News, revealing that he had sent an open letter to the then-Prime Minister Boris Johnson and President Joe Biden calling for the immediate release of the raw data from Pfizer’s original COVID-19 vaccine trial.

A month later, in an article he published in the Journal of Insulin Resistance on Sept. 26, 2022, Malhotra discussed the current problems with the COVID-19 vaccinations and demanded an immediate stop to these vaccines. He also discussed how the decades-long accumulation of problems within the medical and pharmaceutical community have led to the global disaster of COVID-19 vaccinations.

What got him to change his mind?

Well, it was his own personal tragedy that changed him into a doctor calling for a global stop to the very vaccines he once promoted.

A Personal Tragedy

As a leading cardiology consultant for many years, Malhotra was taught the benefits of vaccines, believed in them, and advocated for them.

In his first article, Malhotra wrote that vaccinations are some of the safest interventions in the world compared to most drugs, given that they are administered to prevent disease in healthy people and not to treat illness.

With this belief, Malhotra welcomed the news in the summer of 2020, when several pharmaceutical companies, including both Pfizer and Moderna, announced that they had developed a vaccine with more than “95 percent effectiveness” at preventing infection from the dominant circulating strain of SARS-CoV-2 2019.

Malhotra, as a proponent of vaccines, volunteered at a vaccine center and was one of the first to receive two doses of Pfizer’s messenger ribonucleic acid (mRNA) vaccine.

He also recommended that his patients and the people around him take it.

His late father, Dr. Kailand Chand, a general practitioner, former deputy chair of the British Medical Association (BMA) and its honorary vice president, also took two doses of the Pfizer mRNA injection. Dr. Chand received the honorary Order of the British Empire (OBE) from the late Queen Elizabeth II of the UK in 2009.

Six months later, however, on July 26, 2021 Chand suffered a cardiac arrest at home after experiencing chest pain.

A subsequent inquiry revealed that a significant ambulance delay likely contributed to his death. Though his passing was a shock, what astounded Malhotra was Chand’s autopsy results.

The autopsy showed that two of his father’s three major coronary arteries had severe blockages, with 90 percent blockage in his left anterior descending artery and a 75 percent blockage in his right coronary artery.

This finding shocked everyone, according to Malhotra, as Chand was “an extremely fit and active 73-year-old man.”

It was particularly difficult for Malhotra to accept these results as he knew Chand’s medical history and lifestyle habits.

“My father, who had been a keen sportsman all his life, was fitter than the overwhelming majority of men his age,” Malhotra wrote.

“Since the previous heart scans (a few years earlier, which had revealed no significant problems with perfect blood flow throughout his arteries and only mild furring), he had quit sugar, lost belly fat, reduced the dose of his blood pressure pills, started regular meditation, reversed his pre-diabetes, and even massively dropped his blood triglycerides, significantly improving his cholesterol profile,” Malhotra wrote.

Even during the lockdowns, Chand walked an average of 10,000 to 15,000 steps everyday.

Malhotra could not explain the autopsy findings, it looked to him as if there was no heart attack but only a severe blockage, which was unexpected given Chand’s lifestyle habits.

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The Netherlands have been struggling with unexplained excess mortality for more than a year. Since the second half of 2021, over ten thousand more people have died than expected. In October 2021, the leader of Forum for Democracy, Thierry Baudet, was the first to draw attention to this topic, in parliamentary questions to the then Minister of Health, Hugo de Jonge. The minister directly attributed the excess mortality to COVID. This was incorrect, because the excess death waves did not coincide with the COVID waves at all. Moreover, the excess mortality often exceeded the number of COVID deaths in the same period – to say nothing of the fact that the definition of “COVID death” is, of course, highly controversial.

In December 2021, the House of Representatives ordered the government to conduct an independent investigation into the ongoing excess mortality. In addition to an investigation by Statistics Netherlands and the Dutch National Institute for Public Health and the Environment (RIVM), independent scientists were also supposed to be granted access to the data, via research financier ZonMW, in order to do their own research. However, that never happened.

An alarming letter obtained by FVD MP Gideon van Meijeren shows that independent scientists do not have access to the data they need. The letter comes from research financier ZonMW and is addressed to the Ministry of Health, Welfare and Sport. The Dutch National Institute for Public Health and the Environment (RIVM) as well as the Municipal Health Services (GGD) do not want to release the vaccination data and test results, hiding behind privacy rules as an excuse. But that argument does not hold water: the General Data Protection Regulation they rely on does not apply to deceased persons.

In the meantime, the RIVM and the GGD are making it impossible for independent scientists properly to carry out their assignment. Because of this, they cannot check the research done by RIVM and Statistics Netherlands, nor even do their own, even though these are basic conditions for sound scientific research. Moreover, the researchers say that this creates the appearance of self-interest on the part of the RIVM and the GGD.  According to them, it is precisely “in the interest of public trust in government to avoid any appearance of self-interest”. Duly noted.

The position of the RIVM and the GGD also shows their hypocrisy. Firstly, the RIVM has made data available when it comes to other studies. Secondly, without any objection, those very same RIVM and GGD made available the vaccination data and test results for the sake of the QR code, as a result of which the entire Dutch population had to throw its privacy into the bin on order to regain its social life.

Now that there are concrete indications that this may have had criminal consequences – after all, there is a real chance that the excess mortality is (partly) the result of the massive vaccination campaigns that have been imposed – this is being swept under the carpet. FVD wants to get to the bottom of the matter and is asking parliamentary questions, calling on Minister Kuipers to force the RIVM and the GGD to release the data.

Gideon van Meijeren’s parliamentary questions:

1. Do you recall that on November 19, 2021, in response to parliamentary questions about excess mortality from May 2021, your predecessor said that “Statistics Netherlands (CBS) states that the excess mortality, or the difference between the observed number and the expected number of deaths, is almost entirely caused by death from COVID-19”? Where and when did CBS state this? Do you agree with this statement? If so, why? If not, why not?
2. Are you familiar with the article ‘Every week hundreds more Dutch people are dying than usual, and nobody knows why’ from the Volkskrant dated 8 September 2022? What is your opinion of it?
3. Have you received in good order the letter from ZonMW dated 30 August 2022, to which the article refers? If so, why did you not immediately share it with the House of Representatives? What is your view on the fact that FVD had to obtain this letter via its own means?
4. What is your assessment of the contents of this letter and the accompanying appendices? Do you endorse these? If not, why not?
5. Do you share the scientists’ main concern – namely that the lack of data, in particular vaccination data and test results from the RIVM and the GGD, respectively, hinders research into the excess mortality? If not, why not? Do you recognise that, because of this, the scientists cannot carry out their assignment properly? If so, how will you ensure that the researchers can still carry out their assignment properly? If not, why not?
6. Do you share the opinion of the scientists from the sounding board group, as set out in appendix 2 of the letter, that failure to disclose data can give the appearance of other (self)interests of organisations such as the RIVM and the GGD and that it is “in the interest of public trust in government to avoid any appearance of self-interest”? If not, why not?
7. Do you recognise that the GDPR does not apply to data regarding the deceased? Do you recognize that the AVG should therefore not form an obstacle to the sharing of vaccination data and test results, as the RIVM and GGD claim it does according to this article? Do you therefore agree with the scientists who claim in Appendix 2 of the letter they sent (see question 4) that the GDPR leaves sufficient room to share the data necessary for the research?
8. Are you familiar with the 8 September response of the GGD to the article in the Volkskrant, in which the GGD indicates that it would be happy to make the necessary data available for the independent investigation, while also being able to guarantee people’s privacy?  What is your assessment of this response from the GGD? What is your assessment of this contradiction between the statement of the GGD (stating that the GGD does want to share the data) and that of the independent scientists (stating that the GGD does not want to share the data)? Could you please ensure that the necessary data from the GGD is shared with the researchers as soon as possible?
9. What is your assessment of the fact that scientific research into causes of death of recently deceased persons is frustrated by the RIVM, whereas the RIVM does make datasets available to researchers for other studies (whether accompanied by a material transfer or data sharing agreement or not)?
10. Do you acknowledge that, according to art. 3(1)(e) of the RIVM Act, you are authorised to order the RIVM to share the required vaccination data with the researchers (anonymously or not)?
11. Are you prepared to order the RIVM to share the vaccination data with the researchers as soon as possible, so that they can continue the research they have to carry out on behalf of the House of Representatives?

*

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***

Fifty percent of young adults who get myocarditis from the Covid-19 vaccine will die within five years, according to former Eastern Ontario COVID Response Team member, Dr. Chris Alan Shoemaker.

In a recent episode of “The Ben Armstrong Show,” the host talked about the possible long-term consequences of the COVID-19 vaccine that people are yet to see happen. Based on Shoemaker’s data, around 95 percent of people in intensive care units are fully vaccinated – which makes sense as their immune systems are now damaged.

Shoemaker is a licensed physician with 45 years of experience and has worked in emergency medicine, family practice and on military bases. His works in direct patient care at the West Ottawa COVID Care Clinic and the Eastern Ontario Response Team to COVID-19, as well as his experience with the vaccines, have convinced him that the vaccine is more toxic than the virus. More toxic, more damaging and more lethal, especially in the long term as it damages the T-cells.

“Your T-cells are an important part of your immune system to fight viruses and cancer. It will kill you quickly or slowly,” Shoemaker explained.

“They make you four times more likely to get COVID. In the last eight months, 95 percent of the people in the ICU are fully vaccinated. The vaccinated have been harmed. Their immune systems are being harmed. Stop harming your immune systems. You are only going to perpetuate the pandemic.”

Moreover, Shoemaker believes that the vaccines are especially dangerous for children and is calling on the Canadian government to stop all COVID shots for them. (Related: Britain bans COVID vaccine for children under 12, says they are at very low risk of developing severe COVID.)

“Keep your needles out of the shoulders of our children. The medical facts on this are beyond dispute. Children are given zero help by these vaccines,” he said at a weekend demonstration from London, Ontario. “It kills two out of every 1,000 within a year. Do you want your child to be one of those two who will die?”

Britain’s Office of National Statistics recently released a report showing the vaccine’s horrific toll on children. After studying the first eight months of vaccination, hoping for a 10 percent reduction in death cases, they found the opposite: Double-vaccinated children died by 5,200 percent more than non-vaccinated ones.

“Your 10 to 14-year-old is now, by proven statistics out of the United Kingdom, 100 times more likely to die in the following six months than a non-vaccinated child. This is a horrible number,” Shoemaker said of the data.

In South Africa, where the rate of vaccination is only six percent, COVID-19 cases are minimal.

But in Israel and New Zealand, where vaccination rates are extremely high, disease rates are climbing.

“It’s all junk. It has bad stuff in it. The toxicity of this human-designed genome injected into your shoulder is 100 times worse than getting the virus,” Shoemaker said. “The shots go straight into your bloodstream, into your bone marrow, your brain, to your myocardium, ovaries, testicles.”

It also appears that COVID-19 vaccines are killing young doctors in Canada, where 38 doctors under the age of 50 died in a span of 40 days. “Many of them died within 10 days of their fourth jab. They were just following the rules. They were good people,” Shoemaker said.

The death statistics are too damning, and according to Shoemaker, the vaccines don’t even work.

Shoemaker called on Canada’s top officials to ban the vaccines to save children’s lives. “You are killing children in Canada by foisting these vaccinations onto them,” he said.

He also implored Canadians to stand up against the government. “They are feeding you a line. They are perpetuating a myth. They are not making you safer.”

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***

With an investigation continuing into the destruction of the Nord Stream gas pipeline that provided energy supplies to Europe from Russia, there appears to be just one prime suspect, and that should surprise nobody.

Following the sabotage of the Nord Stream 1 and 2 gas pipelines, former Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski already seemed to know the identity of the perpetrator when he tweeted out: “Thank you, USA.”

At first glance, it seemed that Sikorski was speaking sarcastically, berating Washington for carrying out an attack that will have severe repercussions for the people of Europe. After all, how could anyone see any good coming from the termination of Europe’s primary source of gas reserves with winter just around the corner? It was Sikorski’s homeland of Poland, after all, that urged its citizens to collect firewood in the face of dwindling gas reserves.

In fact, the Polish diplomat was speaking one-hundred percent literally, thanking the United States for plunging the continent deeper into the abyss. This has been the attitude of European leaders from the start of Russia’s special military operation in Ukraine: ‘we will accept our self-destruction as scripted by Washington policymakers so long as the baddies in Moscow hears our virtue-signaling whimpers and screams.’ European capitals are about to learn the hard way that virtue signaling does not put food on the table or heat homes.

Judging by the rising temperature in Europe, however, last seen in Italy where a far-right leader has come to power on the wave of voters fed up with high electricity bills and loose immigration, the phrase ‘Thank you, USA’ may eventually be chiseled into Europe’s tombstone.

But first, the big question: was the United States really responsible for the destruction of Nord Stream, as Sikorski seems to believe? Well, if we were are to take bumbling Joe Biden at his word, then the answer would seem to be yes.

“If Russia invades, that means tanks or troops crossing the border of Ukraine, again, then there will be — there will be no longer a Nord Stream 2,” the U.S. leader told reporters two weeks before Russia began its Ukrainian mission. “We will bring an end to it.”

When asked to specify, Biden responded, “I promise you, we’ll be able to do it.”

There are other clues that point to American complicity.

On September 2, an American helicopter with the call sign FFAB123 was observed maneuvering in the area of the Nord Stream pipelines. According to the site ads-b.nl, six aircraft used this call sign that day, of which the tail numbers of three were established. All of them were Sikorsky MH-60S. By overlaying the FFAB123 route on the scheme marking the areas of the explosions, it is observable that the helicopter either flew along the Nord Stream-2 route, or exactly between the points where the ‘accident’ occurred.

Meanwhile, on Twitter, there are screenshots of other American aircraft flights as of September 13th in exactly the same area. In June there was an article in Sea Power magazine where the Americans boast of experiments in the field of underwater drones that they set up at the BALTOPS 22 exercises – in the area of Bornholm Island, the Danish island where the explosions were reported to have occurred.

“Experimentation was conducted off the coast of Bornholm, Denmark, with participants from Naval Information Warfare Center Pacific, Naval Undersea Warfare Center Newport, and Mine Warfare Readiness and Effectiveness Measuring all under the direction of U.S. 6th Fleet Task Force 68,” Sea Power reports.

Such an “experiment” would have required the deep-sea equipment needed for reaching the depths where the Nord Stream pipelines are located.

Finally, here’s one last tantalizing piece of information for all of the ‘coincidence theorists’ out there. On the day after Nord Stream 1 and 2 went offline, Poland, Norway and Denmark’s leaders attended the opening ceremony of the new Baltic Pipe, which will transport natural gas from Norway via Denmark and through the Baltic Sea to, yes, Sikorski’s ferociously Russophobic homeland of Poland. Yes, just a coincidence.

However, the main motivating factor for Washington having a hand in destroying Nord Stream is the awesome powers – both financial and political – that it will reap. The economic crisis in Europe is already forcing companies and corporations to consider relocating to the U.S., which is providing a better business environment and more or less affordable electricity bills.

And after the destruction of Nord Stream, the economic situation on the continent will deteriorate significantly. Even though the NS-II was not launched, there was the chance of its launch, and this “chance” had a considerable effect on the market. Now, without its main energy supplier, Europe is doomed while America will soar.

The economic destruction of Europe makes it totally dependent on the U.S. economically, politically, and militarily, turning it into a toothless tiger with no political will and independence. At the same time, Europe will become almost completely dependent on the U.S. for its (prohibitive) gas. The United States plans to supply at least 15 billion cubic metres (bcm) of liquefied natural gas (LNG) to European Union markets this year as Europe seeks to wean itself off Russian gas supplies.

In other words, the transformation of the EU into a banana republic – albeit it one in the northern hemisphere with winter quickly approaching – has already begun.

Europe, you really should have heeded the advice of Henry Kissinger, who understands the nature of the U.S. better than anyone: “To be an enemy of the U.S. is dangerous, but to be a friend is fatal.”

*

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Robert Bridge is an American writer and journalist.

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***

Thanks to a reader, I was tipped off on an earlier pipeline explosion, this one arranged by the CIA during the Soviet era.

Thomas Reed, a senior US national security official, claims in his book “At The Abyss” that the United States allowed the USSR to steal pipeline control software from a Canadian company. This software included a Trojan Horse that caused a major explosion of the Trans-Siberian gas pipeline in June 1982. The Trojan ran during a pressure test on the pipeline but doubled the usual pressure, causing the explosion. (CIA Trojan Causes Siberian Gas Pipeline Explosion.)

This act of sabotage was kept hidden for decades.

Around Halloween 1982, an explosion occurred in the middle of Siberia, vaporizing a large segment of the newly-built trans-Siberian pipeline. The explosion –which was reported to be 1/7 the magnitude of the nuclear weapons dropped on Japan during WWII– severely damaged the pipeline, which was set to produce $8 Billion in petroleum revenue annually for the USSR. Only recently has this silently successful CIA operation been disclosed to the public.

Does this mean the CIA or associated intelligence/military organizations are responsible for the Nordstream explosions? No, but it does demonstrate they are capable and have a history of sabotaging Russian operations.

Recall the cognitively vapid one, pretending to be the “leader” of the “free world,” saying they’d put an end to Nordstream one way or another. He said this prior to Russia going into Ukraine to denazify it.

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

Is it my imagination, or is that a “blood and soil” flag draped behind Biden? The black and red (Blut und Boden) is a Nazi ethnic cleansing symbol (related to Lebensraum, the German concept of stealing land for the “racially pure” and exterminating the Untermenschen, or subhumans, who lived there for centuries).

So, here we have the president of the United States delivering a rambling answer on Nordstream while standing before a flag used by Ukronazi thugs, adopted from German Nazis (with whom they collaborated during WWII)  as they kill ethnic-Russian children, mothers, and old folks.

*

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Kurt Nimmo is a regular contributor to Global Research.

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***

Imperialist wars are waged to conquer lands, peoples, territories.  Gangster wars are waged to remove competitors.  In gangster wars you issue an obscure warning, then you smash the windows or burn the place down.

Gangster war is what you wage when you already are the boss and won’t let any outsider muscle in on your territory.  For the dons in Washington, the territory can be just about everywhere, but its core is occupied Europe.

By an uncanny coincidence, Joe Biden just happens to look like a mafia boss, to talk like a mafia boss, to wear a little lopsided half smile like a mafia boss.  Just watch the now famous video:

Pres. Biden: "If Russia invades…then there will be no longer a Nord Stream 2. We will bring an end to it."

Reporter: "But how will you do that, exactly, since…the project is in Germany's control?"

Biden: "I promise you, we will be able to do that." https://t.co/uruQ4F4zM9 pic.twitter.com/4ksDaaU0YC

— ABC News (@ABC) February 7, 2022

Pres. Biden: “If Russia invades…then there will be no longer a Nord Stream 2. We will bring an end to it.”

Reporter: “But how will you do that, exactly, since…the project is in Germany’s control?”

Biden: “I promise you, we will be able to do that.”

Able for sure.

It cost billions of dollars to lay the Nord Stream 2 pipeline across the Baltic Sea, from near Saint Petersburg to the port of Greifsfeld in Germany. The idea was to ensure safe natural gas supplies to Germany and other European partners by going around troublesome Ukraine, known for readiness to use its transit rights to siphon off gas for itself or blackmail clients.

Nord Stream 2 area map. (Berria Egunkaria, CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons)

Of course, Ukraine was always vehemently hostile to the project.  So was the United States. And so were Poland, the three Baltic States, Finland and Sweden, all attentive to what went on in their sea.

The Baltic Sea is a nearly closed body of water, with narrow access to the Atlantic through Danish and Swedish straits. The waters near the Danish island of Bornholm where the Nord Stream pipelines were sabotaged by massive underwater explosions is under constant military surveillance by these neighbors.

“It seems completely impossible that a state actor could carry out a major naval operation in the middle of this densely monitored area without being noticed by the countless active and passive sensors of the littoral states; certainly not directly off the island of Bornholm, where Danes, Swedes and Germans have a rendezvous in monitoring the surface and undersea activities,” writes Jens Berger in the excellent German website Nachdenkseiten.

Last June, Berger reports,

“the annual NATO maneuver Baltops took place in the Baltic Sea. Under the command of the U.S. 6th Fleet, 47 warships participated in the exercise this year, including the U.S. fleet force around the helicopter carrier USS Kearsarge. Of particular significance is one particular maneuver conducted by the 6th Fleet’s Task Force 68 — a special unit for explosive ordnance disposal and underwater operations of the U.S. Marines, the very unit that would be the first address for an act of sabotage on an undersea pipeline.”

In June this year this very unit was engaged in a maneuver off the island of Bornholm, operating with unmanned underwater vehicles.

Crew member from the LVNS Talivaldis in the operations room, controlling and tracking the movement of the underwater robot during the BALTOPS maritime exercise in June 2020. (NATO)

Berger considers that a major sabotage operation “could not have been carried out directly under the noses of several littoral states without anyone noticing.”  But he adds this clever observation: “if you want to hide something, it is best to do so in public.”

In order to be able to attach explosive devices to a gas pipeline halfway unnoticed, one would need a plausible distraction — a reason for diving near Bornholm without immediately being suspected of committing an act of sabotage. It doesn’t even have to be directly related in time to the attacks. Modern explosive devices can, of course, be detonated remotely. So, who has been conducting such operations in the maritime area in recent weeks? As luck would have it, exactly the same task force around the USS Kearsarge was again in the sea area around Bornholm last week.

In short, during NATO maneuvers, some participant could have laid the explosives, to be blown up at a later chosen moment.

By an odd coincidence, only a few hours after the sabotage of Nord Stream 1 and 2, ceremonies began opening the new Baltic Pipe carrying gas from Norway to Denmark and Poland.

The Political Significance of the Sabotage

A Royal Marine commando briefs Royal Marines, U.S. Marines, Royal Navy personnel and Singaporean observers in the vehicle deck of HMS Ocean (U.K.) during BALTOPS 2016. (NATO)

Due to Western sanctions against Russia, gas was not being delivered through the destroyed pipelines. However, gas inside the pipelines is leaking dangerously. The pipelines remained ready for use whenever an agreement could be reached.  And the first, dramatic significance of the sabotage is that henceforth, no agreement can be reached.  Nord Stream 2 would have been the key to some sort of settlement between Russia and the Europeans.  The sabotage has virtually announced that the war can only intensify with no end in sight.

In Germany, the Czech Republic and some other countries, movements were beginning to grow calling for an end to the sanctions, specifically to solve the energy crisis by putting Nord Stream 2 into operation for the first time.  The sabotage has thus invalidated the leading demand of potential peace movements in Germany and Europe.

This act of sabotage is above all a deliberate sabotage of any prospect of a negotiated peace in Europe.  The next move from the West has been for NATO governments to call on all their citizens to leave Russia immediately.  In preparation of what?

The Russians Did It

In this catastrophic situation, Western mainstream media are all wondering who could be the guilty party, and suspicion automatically fixes on… Russia.  Motive? “To raise the price of gas” or “to destabilize Europe” — things that were happening anyway.  Any far-fetched notion will do.

European opinion-makers are showing the result of 70 years of Americanization.  Especially in Germany, but also in France and elsewhere, for decades the United States has systematically spotted up-and-coming young people, invited them to become “young leaders,” invited them to the United States, indoctrinated them in “our values” and made them feel like members of the great trans-Atlantic family.  They are networked into top positions in politics and media. In recent years, great alarm is raised about alleged Russian efforts to exert “influence” in European countries, while Europeans bathe in perpetual American influence: movies, Netflix, pop culture, influence in universities, media, everywhere.

When disaster strikes Europe, it can’t be blamed on America (except for former President Donald Trump, because the American establishment despised and rejected him, so Europeans must do the same).  It has to be the bad guy in the movie, Putin.

The fanatically anti-Russian former Polish Foreign Minister Radek Sikorsky couldn’t restrain himself and joyously greeted the massive natural-gas leaks from the destroyed pipeline with a cheerful tweet, “Thank you, USA.” But Poland was certainly also willing, and perhaps even able.  So perhaps were some others in NATO-land.  But they all prefer to publicly “suspect” Russia.

Officially, so far, no NATO government knows who dunnit.  Or maybe they all know. Maybe this is like the famous Agatha Christie mystery on the Orient Express train, where suspicion falls on all the passengers, and are all guilty.  And all united in Omerta.

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Diana Johnstone is the author of Fools’ Crusade: Yugoslavia, NATO, and Western Delusions. Her latest book is  Circle in the Darkness: Memoirs of a World Watcher (Clarity Press). The memoirs of Diana Johnstone’s father Paul H. Johnstone, From MAD to Madness, was published by Clarity Press, with her commentary. She can be reached at [email protected].

Featured image: Crew from the LVNS Talivaldis performing mine countermeasures training in the Baltic Sea during during the annual BALTOPS maritime exercise in June 2020. (NATO)

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***

It has been a normal couple of weeks for reporting on what is going on in Israel, which is to say that the bad things it has been doing have been carefully suppressed by the US government and the media. The Israelis continue their program to isolate, humiliate and terrify the Palestinians by destroying their civil and human rights organizations while also limiting foreigner access to the remaining Arab inhabited areas on the West Bank. Israeli Jews now routinely refer to all Palestinians as “terrorists” to justify the harsh measures used to steal their land and homes while also destroying their livelihoods.

The so-called Israel Defense Forces, whose Chief Rabbi Eyal Karim approves of his soldiers raping ‘attracting Gentile women’ as a way to keep up morale, are also continuing to kill Palestinians at an unprecedented rate and have covered-up the murder four months ago of Palestinian-American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh, admitting only that the woman was apparently killed by a soldier who claimed that he thought her to be an armed Arab rioter. No further action will be taken. A US State Department briefer accepted the verdict saying that the action “underscore[s] the importance of accountability in this case, such as policies and procedures to prevent similar incidents from occurring in the future.”

Actually, the Israeli statement does no such thing as it lacks any accountability. The White House should have blocked the $3.3 billion gift that Israel gets every year from the US Treasury for starters. And the shoot-first policies by Israeli soldiers will continue, a position emphasized by Israel’s Prime Minister Yair Lapid, who firmly rejected proposals to change the Army’s current rules of engagement which led to the Akleh killing, saying that he would not allow outsiders to “dictate our open-fire policies.”

When it comes to the exercise of Jewish power in the United States, the word “hypocrisy” should immediately come to mind. A recent report on extremism in America has been compiled by the indefatigable Anti-Defamation League (ADL) which has a “Center on Extremism” that has examined “more than 38,000 names on leaked Oath Keepers membership lists and identified more than 370 people it believes currently work in law enforcement agencies — including as police chiefs and sheriffs — and more than 100 people who are currently members of the military. It also identified more than 80 people who were running for or served in public office as of early August… The data raises fresh concerns about the presence of extremists in law enforcement and the military who are tasked with enforcing laws and protecting the US.”

It is not hard to guess what the ADL didn’t look for: radical armed “extremist” Jewish groups fundraising and operating cooperatively in the US and Israel. Nor did it look at black radical groups like Black Lives Matter and the other organizations that were spawned in the wake of the George Floyd death that have produced chaos in a number of American cities. Only white conservatives need apply under the standards of “extremism” set by the ADL, which should surprise no one.

The issue of Jewish and Israeli invisibility when they are doing something horrific struck me recently when I attended a peace rally that included a number of speakers over the course of about five hours. The theme of the gathering was resistance to the warmongering policies that have driven the US government to the verge of nuclear war. When the event was concluded I observed that Israel or the Jewish/Israeli Lobby had not even been mentioned once, even when describing situations in the Middle East that begged for a comment regarding Israeli complicity and its dominance over US policy in the region. One particularly delusional speaker, who would benefit from a basic course in Middle Eastern history, actually claimed that the current hostility between Washington and Tehran is the result of the CIA overthrow of Iran’s Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh in 1954. That constitutes a cute evasion of reality but the fact is that US-Iran policy is driven not by lingering concerns over Mossadegh, but rather by Israel and its lobby.

To illustrate the level of Israeli control, President Joe Biden bowed to Israeli pressure and has placed “off the table” any consideration of a new nuclear non-proliferation deal with Iran, even though it would be in America’s interest. There are no other significant American national interests as Iran does not actually threaten the United States or its economy. The reality is that the US military is in Syria and Iraq for the same reason, i.e. to provide protection and support for Israel, while it also heavily bribes Israel’s neighbors in Egypt and Jordan to keep the peace with the Jewish state.

It is all a world turned upside down with Israel controlling Washington, as former prime ministers Ariel Sharon and Benjamin Netanyahu have boasted, and part of the control mechanism is to manage the narrative so the American public never really sees what is going on. But what is really interesting is how so-called peace activists, like at the gathering I attended, toe the line and are terrified of offending Israel or the powerful domestic Jewish groups that use their money and political access to promote the wars in the Middle East as well as against Russia in Ukraine. Some of them clearly are fearful of being labeled anti-Semites, which is the weapon most frequently used by groups like ADL to ward off criticism of the Jewish state.

Interestingly, one of the speakers at the meeting I attended demonstrated how it is possible to make a point about Israel and the Jewish power behind it without using either the “I” or “J” word. He observed that the foreign and national security policies of both major US political parties are largely driven by the personal interests of their donors, whom he described as “billionaire oligarchs, some of whom are not even Americans.” The allusion was pretty clear to most members of the audience. It sure sounded like arch globalist George Soros, who has used his money to corrupt local and state governments, and, more to the point, Israeli citizens Haim Saban and the recently deceased Sheldon Adelson. Hollywood denizen Saban, the top single contributor to the Democrats, has said that he is a “one issue guy” and that issue is Israel. Adelson, who is buried in Israel, contributed $100 million to the Republicans and was the man who in return got President Donald Trump to move the US Embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, recognize the incorporation of the Golan Heights into the Israeli state, and have a free hand to suppress the Palestinians.

The good news is, however, that pushback is developing, and it is in part coming from some Jews. The Jewish peace group Tikkun has recently published a devastating article by Jeffrey Sachs on the Jews who have been activists for Israel who have been agitating for the post 9/11 wars. It is entitled “Ukraine Is the Latest Neocon Disaster” and describes how “The war in Ukraine is the culmination of a 30-year project of the American neoconservative movement. The Biden Administration is packed with the same neocons who championed the US wars of choice in Serbia (1999), Afghanistan (2001), Iraq (2003), Syria (2011), Libya (2011), and who did so much to provoke Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The neocon track record is one of unmitigated disaster, yet Biden has staffed his team with neocons. As a result, Biden is steering Ukraine, the US, and the European Union towards yet another geopolitical debacle…”

It is actually worse than that as a global nuclear confrontation threatens. It is time for those in America and Europe who genuinely want peace to begin to be honest about who is pushing for the wars and why. Euphemisms and evasions to avoid offending the culprits help no one and just empower those who believe themselves “chosen” and would seek to establish the supremacy of one particular ethno-religious state even if it brings disaster to everyone else.

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This article was originally published on The Unz Review.

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

He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from TUR

Towards a “Global Censorship System”? International Alliance to Censor Speech

By Kurt Nimmo, October 01, 2022

New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, for some reason deemed a “liberal,” has called for a global system of repression against speech she does not agree with, namely questioning climate change.

It Was a Surprisingly Wise Move by the West Not to Fast-Track Ukraine’s NATO Membership

By Andrew Korybko, October 03, 2022

The US-led West’s Golden Billion has been provoking Russia for the past three decades like President Putin explained at length in his historic speech Friday afternoon ahead of signing the documents on Novorossiya’s reunification with his civilization-state, yet it surprisingly chose not to go any further than it already has on that exact same day by declining to fast-track Ukraine’s NATO membership.

Imperialist Militarism and the African Crisis

By Abayomi Azikiwe, October 03, 2022

This webinar comes at a critical period in world history where the unfolding of a shifting balance of forces between the western industrialized states and the overwhelmingly world majority of the Global South has created social and political tensions which are being manifested in numerous ways on the international scene.

The Practice of Lying: The Psychopathic Nature of the U.S. Government

By Eric Zuesse, October 02, 2022

Every psychopath is well practiced at lying; anyone who tolerates that person’s lying is not only encouraging psychopathy but is, oneself, psychopathically unconcerned about the public’s welfare, because any such encouragement will, itself, facilitate the further spreading of lies and deception of the public.

American Russophobia: A Tale of Neocon, Liberal, and Progressive Warmongers

By Carl Boggs, October 02, 2022

After several months of Russian “special operations” in Ukraine, it might be worth asking whether the U.S.-Russia proxy war is headed toward regime-change in Moscow, or at least efforts at regime change. For Washington, after Serbia, Iraq, Libya, Ukraine, and all the others, Russia must surely represent the ultimate, perhaps final, such operation.

Revolution and Human Development

By Stephen Sefton, October 02, 2022

The United States and its allies constantly act to deny the right to self-determination of peoples. They have never accepted prioritizing the human person over the accumulation of wealth. Western capitalism seeks to minimize the role of the national state, reducing the public sector to a minimum.

Fifth Generation (5G) Directed Energy Radiation Emissions in the Context of Contaminated Nanometal COVID-19 Vaccines with Graphite Ferrous Oxide Antennas

By Mark Steele, October 02, 2022

5G, unlike all of the other generations (Gs) of telecommunications, is technically identified as an urban radar directed energy in air emission, which requires the antenna to be designed to cause the focused energy in air for the high-speed compression of data to and from antennas designed to send and receive focused energy through a theoretical collimated and coherent signal.

Enforcing Islamic Attire on Women Sparks Protests in Iran

By Prof. Akbar E. Torbat, October 01, 2022

On September 13, 2022, Mahsa Amini, a 22-years-old woman, was arrested by Morality Police (Gashte Ershad) presumably for not having proper Islamic attire. Mahsa, who lived in the city of Saqqez in the province of Kurdistan, had come to Tehran with her family.

Why Capitalism Is Incongruous with Democracy

By David Skripac, October 01, 2022

In the capitalist system, the wage the employer pays to the employee will always be of less value than the worker’s labor plus the other inputs used during the entire production process. In other words, to make a profit the employer must pay the worker less than the surplus income his labor generates.

The Road to World War III: How US-NATO Forces Turned Libya into Hell on Earth

By Timothy Alexander Guzman, October 01, 2022

The West fears a new multipolar world order as it would enable smaller nations (who have been under Washington’s thumb) to extend their diplomatic and economic relationships with whomever they want instead of dealing with Western powers who has kept most of the global south in debt and in continuous wars for decades.

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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***

This was originally published on GR in October 2021.

The heavily decorated panzer commander Hasso von Manteuffel knew Adolf Hitler reasonably well, having met him on numerous occasions from the summer of 1943 until the spring of 1945.

During their discussions, Manteuffel recognised Hitler’s extensive knowledge of military history but, crucially, the German general discerned also the dictator’s shortcomings as a commander. Hitler’s inadequacies in the military domain were hardly surprising, for he was not really a soldier at all, but a politician, who had no formal military education; unlike Manteuffel who was a renowned strategist.

The American historians Samuel W. Mitcham and Gene Mueller, in their co-authored book ‘Hitler’s Commanders’, outlined the following, “Although Manteuffel was impressed with Hitler’s grasp of combat from the field soldier’s point of view, as well as the Fuehrer’s knowledge of military literature, he recognized Hitler’s weaknesses concerning grand strategy and tactical awareness, even though the Fuehrer had a flair for originality and daring. Although he was always respectful, Manteuffel always expressed his own views, regardless of how they might be received by Hitler”. (1)

It is no exaggeration to state that the outcome of World War II rested mostly upon Hitler’s deficiencies as a military leader – and specifically the decisions made, from June to August 1941, relating to grand strategy in the invasion of the Soviet Union (Operation Barbarossa). The turning point in the war had come over a year before the German defeat at Stalingrad. (2)

Beginning on 22 June 1941 the German-led attack on the USSR, which culminated late that year in the Battle of Moscow, apart from being the most brutal and murderous invasion ever, was by a strategic standpoint deeply flawed. From the start, the Wehrmacht’s invasion force of three million German soldiers was sliced up into three Army Groups, which were ordered to capture a number of difficult targets simultaneously (Leningrad, the Ukraine, Moscow, the Crimea, the Caucasus, etc.).

The most important objective by far was the capital city, Moscow, the Soviet Union’s biggest metropolis. Almost all roads and railways in the western USSR led irresistibly to the gates of Moscow, like spokes directed into the centre of a wheel (3). If the wheel (Moscow) is put out of action, the rest of the structure cannot function properly. Moscow was the communications hub and power centre of Soviet Russia, where Joseph Stalin and his entourage were headquartered. Stalin himself placed immense store in Moscow’s survival.

Stalin asked his famous general, Georgy Zhukov, late in 1941 “with an aching heart” whether “we will hold Moscow?… Tell me honestly, as a Communist” (4). General Zhukov replied to Stalin that Moscow will be held “without fail”. Stalin made sure that the road to Moscow was defended whenever possible by large Soviet forces, even when Hitler had turned his attention elsewhere.

Commanded by the 60-year-old Field Marshal Fedor von Bock, Army Group Centre was tasked with capturing the Russian capital. Hitler’s criminal intentions regarding Moscow were clear, as he remarked on the night of 5 July 1941, “Moscow, as the center of the doctrine [Bolshevism], must disappear from the earth’s surface as soon as its riches have been brought to shelter. There’s no question of our collaborating with the Muscovite proletariat”. (5)

From 22 June 1941, had Army Group Centre been directed in a single great thrust towards Moscow, and in doing so protected by Army Group North and Army Group South acting as flank guards, the German Army could well have taken Moscow by the end of August 1941 (6). Top level German commanders like Franz Halder, Heinz Guderian and von Bock recognised Moscow’s importance. Were the capital to fall, the Soviet rail and communications systems would have been shattered. With their centre blown apart, this would have posed enormous difficulties for the Red Army in supplying and bolstering their northern and southern fronts.

German armored column advances on the Moscow front, October 1941 (Source: Public Domain)

General Halder stated in a memorandum, of 18 August 1941, that the bulk of the Red Army was being massed in front of Moscow for its defence. If these Soviet divisions were defeated “the Russians would no longer be able to maintain a joined-up defensive front”, Halder wrote. (7)

It is necessary to stress that the Soviet military was not ready for war with Nazi Germany in mid-1941. However, the damage inflicted by Stalin’s purges on the Red Army, from 1937, has routinely been blown out of proportion in the West.

Experienced British scholar Evan Mawdsley, a specialist in Russian history, noted correctly how “The Red Army commanders who were executed were not proven military leaders” in mechanised warfare and “Many able middle-level commanders survived the purges”; but he acknowledged too that “the execution of even a few hundred officers would be a traumatic event in any army” and this “was particularly devastating at the uppermost levels”. (8)

Considerable harm was caused then but it was far from fatal, which events would show, as the Red Army boasted top class commanders such as Zhukov, Konstantin Rokossovsky and Aleksandr Vasilevsky. The Soviet military reforms were not close to completion by June 1941, debunking the right-wing fantasy that Stalin was then preparing an attack on Germany. Stalin knew that the conflict with Nazism was approaching, but he hoped to put it off until 1942 or later; Stalin’s close associate Vyacheslav Molotov recalled the former saying shortly after the Fall of France, “we would be able to confront the Germans on an equal basis only by 1943”. (9)

The Germans, therefore, had a huge advantage as they attacked an ill-prepared and static Soviet military in June 1941. By the first week of July 1941 for example, nearly 4,000 Soviet aircraft were destroyed, most of them on the ground (10). Yet with Operation Barbarossa’s strategic design of attacking the entirety of the western USSR at once, the strength of the Nazi blow was ultimately diluted. The Russians were given time to recover, and to their credit they did not collapse like the French the year before.

Two months into the invasion, on 21 August 1941 Hitler compounded the early strategic errors of Barbarossa, by fatefully postponing the advance on Moscow. Mitcham and Mueller describe this decision as “one of the greatest mistakes of the war” as the Soviets’ “most important city [Moscow]” was demoted to secondary stature (11). Hitler ordered that the Wehrmacht instead take the Crimea, the Donbas and the Caucasus while he also demanded “the investment of Leningrad and the linking up with the Finns”.

Three days before, on 18 August 1941, the German high command (OKH) had issued a request for the capture of Moscow post haste, but Hitler replied that “The army’s suggestion for continuing operations in the east does not conform to my intentions” (12). It was to the Wehrmacht’s detriment that Hitler, through his force of personality, had succeeded in gaining complete control over all German military operations. With these new orders of 21 August 1941, Nazi Germany’s defeat in the Second World War was assured. (13)

Donald J. Goodspeed, a military historian who had fought against the Nazi empire with the Canadian Army Overseas, wrote of Hitler’s 21 August directive,

“Thus a clear-cut, feasible, and single military objective [capturing Moscow] was set aside, and for it was substituted a double-headed monstrosity. Hitler was greedy and saw too many things at once. Army Group Center was to be halted, immobile, around Smolensk [240 miles west of Moscow], while rich new territories were to be taken in the south and Leningrad was to be eliminated in the north. Nor was it only that a double objective had been substituted for a single one. In the south Hitler wanted the Crimea, the Donbas and the Caucasus; in the north he wanted both Leningrad and the Karelian Isthmus”. (14)

In late August 1941, Army Group Centre was stripped of its armour which was sent south to the Ukraine. The march into the Ukraine did result in a major German victory as its capital Kiev, the USSR’s third largest city, fell to a giant pincers movement on 19 September 1941. Stalin ignored the advice of among others Zhukov, who had sensed impending danger weeks before by warning on 29 July 1941, “the Red Army should withdraw to the east of the Dnepr river”. (15)

Moscow women dig anti-tank trenches around their city in 1941 (Source: Public Domain)

Around Kiev by 26 September 1941, no less than 665,000 Soviet troops were caught within the German pincers and taken prisoner, the biggest surrender of forces in military history. The Soviet prisoners of war (POWs) now had to face the horrors of Nazi captivity.

Mawdsley, in his lengthy analysis of the Nazi-Soviet War, wrote that “In terms of scale, the fatalities among Red Army POWs were second only to the mass murder of the European Jews. Although an important part of the charges at the Nuremberg Trials, the story was far less prominent in the Cold War years. A quarter to a third of all the USSR’s 10 million military deaths were soldiers who died in captivity. The exact figure can never be calculated, but the most commonly accepted German figure is 3,300,300 Soviet POWs dying in captivity, some 58% of the 5,700,000 taken prisoner. The Russians accept a lower figure of Red Army POWs, 4,559,000, and 2,500,000 deaths, but with a similar death rate of 55%”. (16)

Dreadful as the loss of Kiev ranked, September was almost gone and the worst of autumn was closing in fast. The German Army, along with its panzer divisions, was weakened by the hundreds of miles they traversed in the Ukraine. Hitler had issued Directive No. 35 on 6 September 1941, belatedly assigning Moscow as the next principal target. When the Wehrmacht’s claws closed around Kiev on 14 September, the German high command began to reinforce Army Group Centre.

Field Marshal von Bock, leading Army Group Centre, would soon have more than 1.5 million men under his command. Despite efficient German staff work, it was 26 September 1941 before final orders could be relayed for the assault on Moscow, and not until six days later did the offensive begin, hopefully titled Operation Typhoon. Hitler’s interference had resulted in a critical six week delay.

On 2 October 1941, as the Battle of Moscow commenced, it seemed to many outside observers that the Germans would yet prevail. The weather, overall, held good for the time being and the countryside was relatively flat and open, suitable terrain for the panzer formations. During the first three weeks of October 1941, an incredible 86 Soviet divisions were destroyed. Army Group Centre captured 663,000 Soviet soldiers and eradicated 1,200 enemy tanks. The English historian, Geoffrey Roberts, wrote that total Soviet personnel losses in the opening phase of October “numbered a million, including nearly 700,000 captured by the Germans”. (17)

Most of the damage done to the Red Army here came in another massive pincers manoeuvre, which the Germans implemented around the medieval Russian towns of Vyazma and Bryansk, 150 miles apart. The northern pincer at Vyazma was the more effective, as five Russian armies were trapped and annihilated by 13 October 1941. The ring was not so tightly held at the southern pincer around Bryansk, where three Russian armies were caught and wiped out.

German soldiers west of Moscow, December 1941 (Licensed under CC BY 3.0)

Roberts highlighted that, “The encirclements were a devastating blow to the Bryansk, Western and Reserve fronts defending the approaches to Moscow” (18). When the Wehrmacht reached Vyazma on 7 October 1941, they were less than 140 miles from Moscow. On that day, the first snow flurries arrived in western Russia, an ill omen for the lightly-dressed Germans and their Axis allies, such as the Romanians and Italians. The snow was not heavy and quickly disappeared.

On 5 October 1941, the Soviet cause had been given a significant boost, when Stalin telephoned General Zhukov in Leningrad and asked him “can you board a plane and come to Moscow?” Zhukov was being designated with leading the defence of the capital. Zhukov agreed by replying, “I ask for permission to fly out tomorrow morning at dawn” and Stalin said, “Very well. We await your arrival in Moscow tomorrow”. (19)

For now, there was only so much that Zhukov could do. On 12 October 1941 Army Group Centre stormed the Russian city of Kaluga, 93 miles south-west of Moscow (20). A week later, 19 October, the Germans occupied the abandoned town of Mozhaysk, just 65 miles west of Moscow. The road apparently lay open and panic started to grip the capital. It is little wonder that Zhukov considered the dates, between the 10th to the 20th of October 1941, as “the most dangerous moment for the Red Army” in the entire war. (21)

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Shane Quinn obtained an honors journalism degree. He is interested in writing primarily on foreign affairs, having been inspired by authors like Noam Chomsky. 

He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Notes

1 Samuel W. Mitcham Jr., Gene Mueller, Hitler’s Commanders (Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2nd Edition, 15 Oct. 2012) p. 135

2 Donald J. Goodspeed, The German Wars (Random House Value Publishing, 2nd edition, 3 April 1985) pp. 396-397

3 Ibid., p. 395

4 Evan Mawdsley, Thunder in the East: The Nazi-Soviet War, 1941-1945 (Hodder Arnold, 23 Feb. 2007) p. 115

5 Adolf Hitler, Hitler’s Table Talk, New Foreword by Gerhard L. Weinberg (Enigma Books, 30 April 2008) p. 6

6 Goodspeed, The German Wars, pp. 403-404

7 Volker Ullrich, Hitler: Volume II: Downfall 1939-45 (Vintage, 1st edition, 4 Feb. 2021) Chapter 5, The War Turns, 1941-42

8 Mawdsley, Thunder In The East, p. 21

9 Robert Service, Stalin: A Biography (Pan; Reprints edition, 16 April 2010) p. 406

10 Mawdsley, Thunder In The East, p. 59

11 Mitcham, Mueller, Hitler’s Commanders, p. 37

12 Ullrich, Hitler: Volume II, Chapter 5, The War Turns, 1941-42

13 Goodspeed, The German Wars, pp. 396-397

14 Ibid., p. 396

15 Geoffrey Roberts, Stalin’s General: The Life of Georgy Zhukov (Icon Books, 2 May 2013) p. 111

16 Mawdsley, Thunder In The East, p. 103

17 Geoffrey Roberts, Stalin’s Wars: From World War to Cold War, 1939-1953 (Yale University Press; 1st Edition, 14 Nov. 2006) p. 107

18 Ibid.

19 Roberts, Stalin’s General: The Life of Georgy Zhukov, pp. 133-134

20 Alexander Werth (Foreword by Nicolas Werth) Russia at War: 1941-1945, A History (Skyhorse Publishing, 30 March 2017) Part Two, Chapter 10, Battle of Moscow Begins – The October 16 Panic

21 Mawdsley, Thunder In The East, p. 105

Featured image: “Defense of Moscow”. Anti-aircraft gunners on the roof of Moscow’s central Hotel “Moskva”. The Great Patriotic War (1941-1945). Reprophoto. (Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0)

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***

The US-led West’s Golden Billion has been provoking Russia for the past three decades like President Putin explained at length in his historic speech Friday afternoon ahead of signing the documents on Novorossiya’s reunification with his civilization-state, yet it surprisingly chose not to go any further than it already has on that exact same day by declining to fast-track Ukraine’s NATO membership. Zelensky’s response to his Russian counterpart’s act was to sign his own for accelerating that crumbling former Soviet Republic’s accession to the bloc, yet it was rebuffed by NATO, the US, and the EU.

NATO Secretary General Stoltenberg downplayed that development several hours after it happened during a press conference where he reiterated the so-called “open door” policy while emphasizing the need to focus on immediate support at this time instead. US National Security Sullivan echoed his words that same day, adding that “Right now, our view is that the best way for us to support Ukraine is through practical, on-the-ground support in Ukraine, and that the process in Brussels should be taken up at a different time.”

Meanwhile, Secretary of Defense Austin – the same American official who came the closest to officially confirming in late April that the conflict is actually a US-led NATO proxy war on Russia through Ukraine – said “That work will have to be done in the future. But right now, we’re focused on doing everything we can to make sure that Ukraine has what it needs to be successful.” Finally, EU foreign policy chief Borrell also chimed in to share his thoughts on the subject, declaring that “this is not the main issue at this time.” Quite clearly, the West has no stomach for admitting Ukraine into NATO.

Several conclusions can be arrived at from these four official policy statements. First, Ukraine remains ineligible to join that anti-Russian bloc by its own admission criteria considering its unresolved territorial disputes with Moscow. Second, it’s already an informal or “shadow” member of NATO as it is since the only reason why that crumbling former Soviet Republic continues fighting is because it’s backed the hilt by this American-led alliance after senior Ukrainian advisor Arestovich admitted in late March that Russia had destroyed his side’s military-industrial complex by that time.

Third, it therefore naturally follows that the US-led NATO proxy war on Russia through Ukraine will indefinitely continue since each previously cited official also reaffirmed their commitment to recognizing their proxy’s pre-2014 borders. Fourth, in spite of the aforementioned, they’ve yet to order Kiev to launch an overwhelming NATO-backed but Ukrainian-fronted invasion force of Russia’s newly reunified territory and thus risk forcing the Kremlin to resort to tactical nukes as an absolute last resort in self-defense.

And finally, the last conclusion that can be reached thus far is that leading Western officials are still deliberating the pros and cons connected with that preceding scenario, which still nevertheless remains in the cards. Altogether, it can therefore be said that the West reacted wisely to Zelensky’s demand for fast-tracking his crumbling country’s NATO membership by refusing to agree to it at this time. Their rejection is a major soft power embarrassment for the Ukrainian leader, who failed to marshal any meaningful response to Russia’s reunification with its historical region of Novorossiya.

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This article was originally published on OneWorld.

Andrew Korybko is an American Moscow-based political analyst specializing in the relationship between the US strategy in Afro-Eurasia, China’s One Belt One Road global vision of New Silk Road connectivity, and Hybrid Warfare. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

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As most observers of American politics may agree that the Biden Administration has a tendency to screw up everything it initiates – the boomerang of the sanctions against Russia being one stupendous example as well as Russia’s military conquest in Ukraine which led to the ultimate annexation of historic Russian territory.   Instead of taking down Russia’s economy and creating a world-class crisis, the ruble is solid as western economies are in the final throes of fiscal and societal collapse, grasping at EU straws to remain relevant.

Nevertheless, the implications of the recent remotely detonated explosions of the Nord Stream 1 and 2 pipelines, as part of the let’s-blame-Russia-for-everything game lies a horrific reality of exactly how far US foreign policy has declined when its European allies may be tools to salvage the floundering Empire.  It would be no surprise for the Biden Administration to be narrow minded enough to destroy the pipeline without thoroughly thinking through the implications of what the destruction of NS will bring to US allies: no gas/no heat/no electricity/no fertilizer/no food/no modern convenience.

Some might call it ‘bad karma’ of which there is no doubt; these people cannot seem to do anything of civic value but most importantly, have exhibited no sense of a moral compass.  Domestically speaking, the Biden inner circle of criminal neocons, globalist elites and political anarchists, continue to weaponize the American legal system, with no conscience, no respect for Constitutional law, American tradition, custom or history, as the wheel of unintended consequences, otherwise known as the American voter, is about to retrieve their country from the grasp of an illegitimate gang of felonious thugs.

While speculation immediately focused on Russia, there is now general agreement that the senseless bombings were the result of a deliberate act of sabotage with Poland’s former defense minister Radek Sikorski almost immediate twitter ‘Thank You USA’ while citing US President Joe Biden speaking to reporters on February 7,

“If Russia invades, that means tanks or troops crossing the border of Ukraine again, there will no longer be a Nord Stream 2. We will bring an end to it.”

In addition, there is no dispute that the CIA warned Germany within weeks of a possible pipeline attack perhaps as a covering their butt tactic.  Then almost immediately, US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken wasted no time to brag that destruction of NS provided the US with a ‘tremendous opportunity’ to once and for all remove the dependence on Russian energy” and provide Europe with American LNG.  The US has long opposed creation of the NS.

Only a political novice or intense Russia-phobe could seriously assert that Russia blew up its own pipeline when it could have just as easily flipped a switch.   It is of course too vile to consider the notion that the US would consciously undermine its own allies who have willfully played second fiddle to the Empire for decades.  Regardless of who and when the culprits may be acknowledged, the unprecedented attack on Russian infrastructure and European sovereignty by virtue of the impact on all European states is undeniable as those who stand to gain from the attack may continue to avoid public condemnation.

At the same time, Ukraine submits an accelerated NATO application as Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg suggested that NATO countries will not in any way recognize Russian sovereignty over the four newly declared annexed territories and yet suggests that  “NATO is not a party to conflict.”   In other words, as long as Ukraine is not a bona fide member of NATO, there is no obligation on the part of NATO’s thirty members to initiate a massive war against Russia except that a NATO presence encroaching on Russian borders would cross a red line.  Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov asserted that by supplying Ukraine with weapons, NATO members were already committed to the conflict.

Essential questions remain:  what ‘state actor’ has the sophisticated equipment and technical skill to accomplish a massive underwater explosion of 500 kg of TNT at a depth of 80 meters to cause the equivalent of a magnitude 2.3 earthquake?  Who would benefit from thwarting the private German-Russian discussions attempting to resolve outstanding NS issues?

Perhaps it was coincidental that the USS Kearsarge, the Navy’s Amphibious Assault ship, was on an international  training exercise in the Baltic Sea with Sweden amid a historic visit to Finland during the time of the explosion.  On September 21^st, unconfirmed reports claimed that the Kearsarge was tracked 30 km from Nord Stream 1 and 50 km from Nord Stream 2 with an assertion that its transponder was frequently turned off.   The Russians have the necessary satellite and electronic monitoring to confirm any suspicions.  The Kearsarge is a state-of-the-art ship, fully equipped for command and control missions to support Navy Seal, Special Forces operations and helicopter deployments, with its homeport at the Norfolk Naval Station which is also home to NATO North America.

While the newly opened Baltic Sea Offshore pipeline built to provide gas between Poland and Denmark with access through Sweden was curiously not attacked as NS, the Germans remain silent and Americans sit outside the loop begs the question whether any other NATO members are more knowledgeable.

Will Russia follow through on its earlier promise to defend all ‘liberated’ Russian territory including the NS pipelines or the Kersh Strait Bridge as well as to hold ‘foreign actors’ responsible for any military incursion against Russian sovereignty?

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Renee Parsons served on the once prestigious ACLU’s Florida State Board of Directors and as president of the ACLU Treasure Coast Chapter. She has been an elected public official in Colorado, staff in the Office of the Colorado State Public Defender, an environmental lobbyist for Friends of the Earth and a staff member of the US House of Representatives in Washington DC. She is a regular contributor to Global Research.

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Author’s Note: The following address was delivered in part at a webinar sponsored by the Black Alliance for Peace (BAP) on October 1. The event was held under the theme: “Colonialism, Compradors & The Militarized Crisis of Capitalism in Africa”. This program began an International Month of Action Against AFRICOM. Other panelists were Chris Matlhako, South African Peace Initiative; Ezra Otieno, Revolutionary Socialist League Central Committee (Kenya); and Jamila Osman, Resist US-Led War. The webinar was moderated by Salome Ayuak, BAP Africa Team.

This webinar comes at a critical period in world history where the unfolding of a shifting balance of forces between the western industrialized states and the overwhelmingly world majority of the Global South has created social and political tensions which are being manifested in numerous ways on the international scene.

There is the upcoming COP27 United Nations Climate Conference in Sharm-el-Sheikh, Egypt during November once again providing a forum for the ever-intensifying debates over the necessity of addressing problems of atmospheric and land pollution which has resulted in extreme weather events impacting the supply of water, food and quality housing for several billion people throughout the world.

The COVID-19 pandemic beginning in early 2020, worsened the already unequal distribution of economic resources in both the developing and western capitalist countries. Workplace closures, the lack of adequate healthcare personnel and the failure of the United States to act rapidly early on in the pandemic, has had a devastating impact on the peoples of various geopolitical regions.

Even in the U.S., the largest capitalist economy in the world, millions of workers were idled or forced to shift to a new employment paradigm. Hundreds of thousands of small and medium-sized enterprises were forced to go out of operation due to a lack of demand as well as disruptions in the availability of employees.

In the U.S., well over $2 trillion in capital infusions in 2020-2021 were interjected into the national economy in order to stave off an economic depression on the scale of the period between 1929-1941. Enormous grants, loans and other incentives were awarded to corporations while extended unemployment benefits and stimulus checks were sent to workers.

Despite all of these measures by the U.S. and other western capitalist governments aimed at stabilizing their societies, much uncertainty remains due to the advent of an inflationary spiral reflected in the rise of transportation, housing, food and other commodity prices. The disruptions in supply chains related to industrial parts, computer chips, tools and building materials has created further pressure on pricing for products and services.

Currently the financial markets in the U.S. and in Western Europe are experiencing tremendous losses prompting fears of an even deepening recession. A recession in the U.S. is defined by two consecutive quarters of negative growth. This has already occurred during 2022 although the term “technical recession” is never used by the current administration of President Joe Biden.

The U.S. central bank, known as the Federal Reserve, in reflecting the desires of finance capital, fears inflation far more than worsening poverty. Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell has raised interest rates charged to borrowers in the hope that the rise in prices will cease. However, the inflation persists at a rate which is even troublesome to major capitalist investors.

In the U.S., the policy decisions of the Biden administration have not challenged the role of the banks, energy firms and agribusiness interests in fueling inflation. There are no plans for the implementation of price controls nor the mass distribution of government surplus food stuffs which could lower prices for energy and agricultural products. The administration has periodically “warned” oil companies about taking advantage of the extreme weather events, such as Hurricane Ian, to raise prices even higher, yet the overall strategy of the Biden White House is to largely ignore the burgeoning economic crisis and the impoverishment of working and oppressed peoples in lieu of the upcoming midterm congressional and gubernatorial elections in early November.

However, the results of recent opinion polls illustrate discontent with the administration among the U.S. electorate. Biden’s approval rating has fallen to a range of 39-41 percent. Most voters, when asked, expressed concerns about the economy while losing faith in the ability of the administration to effectively address the current problems of rising prices, supply shortages, the threat of job losses and homelessness.

Despite the administration propaganda related to the proxy war in Ukraine, there is a direct correlation between military spending and inflation. Tens of billions of dollars are being sent to the NATO client regime in Kiev amid the declining prospects for economic stability in the U.S.

The current militarist approaches of successive U.S. administrations should not be a surprise to the anti-imperialist and antiwar constituencies both domestically and worldwide. Unfortunately, there are elements within the peace and social justice movements, for various reasons, have bought into the notions that the major source of instability internationally resides outside of the White House, Pentagon and Wall Street.

Placing demands upon the Russian Federation or any other adversary of the U.S. while at the same time not holding the administration in Washington and the bankers on Wall Street responsible for the crises of climate change, economic recessions, food deficits and the overall problems of governance within the imperialist states themselves, in effect nullifies any meaningful acts of solidarity with the Global South. As people living inside the capitalist-imperialist citadel of unipolarity dogmatism, it is essential that those who advocate for the ending of war and for a just world speak clearly in regard to the actual source of the instability within the existing world system.

Origins of Imperialist Militarism: The Atlantic Slave Trade and Colonialism

Western corporate and government media are inherently ahistorical in their approach to international affairs. This is quite evident in the coverage of the racial situation in the U.S. where African Americans and other oppressed peoples are subjected to disproportionate rates of impoverishment, police and racist vigilante violence, incarceration and victimization from environmental degradation.

During the era of the Atlantic slave trade, African people were turned into a source of enrichment through super-exploitation and national oppression based upon racial characteristics. From the early-to-mid 15th century until the latter years of the 19th century, millions of Africans were trafficked into an economic system which only benefitted the colonial rulers. As has been documented in the past, the origins of the major industries within the world capitalist system such as shipping, commerce, banking, manufacturing, criminal justice, etc., were spawned by the profits and military prowess refined during the feudal, mercantilist and incipient capitalist periods of economic history.

African enslavement and colonial occupation were never voluntary processes. These economic systems which provided the basis for the rise of industrial and monopoly capitalism were born in the military assaults and defeats of the African and other peoples of the Asia-Pacific and the Western Hemisphere. The interventions of European enslavers and colonialists disrupted traditional societies, city-states and nation-states. These exploitative and destructive patterns could have never been achieved without the maximum utilization of European military forces.

One source on the military aspect of the Atlantic slave trade noted that:

“Millions of Africans were captured and sent not only to America, but to different locations around the world as slaves. Wars also tended to break out on the continent between groups of people, and it became especially contentious when various African groups began conducting raids to capture and sell people for a profit.  In America, the price of this trade relationship was paid by the Native Americans, as diseases spread throughout their tribes. With the influx of foreign peoples to the country, different bacteria were brought in, much of which the Native Americans’ bodies could not fight off. The plantation economy also developed as a result of the institution of slavery. Furthermore, a strict social hierarchy went into effect, pitting races and groups of people against one another. Europeans, mixed people, natives, and the enslaved all suddenly pertained to a specific rank in society. Europe derived great wealth from the Triangle of Trade and saw a diffusion of not only European cultural customs, but of people as well. They were known to have spread weapons across the regions, especially to their trade partners on the African continent.”

Resistance to enslavement and colonialism took place over the centuries in various territories which were occupied by the Europeans. There were the wars fought by the people of Dahomey against France; the Maji Maji revolt of the people of Tanzania against colonial Germany during the early 20th century; people in Angola under their Queen Ann Zinga fought to liberate people from Portuguese colonialism; among many other instances. The colonial occupation of Africa and the enforcement of legalized institutional racism and segregation in numerous territories on the continent and in the Western Hemisphere were created and perpetuated through military force.

Consequently, the national liberation movements and revolutions were a continuation of this process of resistance. These historical developments were not peculiar to African people as all geo-political regions and territories witnessed revolts against exploitation, oppression and political repression by the colonizing forces.

Nonetheless, in the post-colonial period the threat of imperialist militarism has not receded on the African continent and other areas of the world. Since the consolidation of U.S. hegemony within the capitalist world after 1945, numerous wars of occupation and genocide have been waged by Washington.

In southeast Asia during the 1960s and early 1970s, millions were killed in the failed attempt to defeat the national liberation movements in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos. Revolutionary wars against colonialism in Africa also resulted in the deaths and displacement of millions between the 1950s to the 1990s.

Therefore, by viewing the contemporary situation in Africa and around the world through an historical lens illustrating the impact of the Atlantic slave trade and colonial conquest, today’s struggles against exploitation and oppression become clearer. The rise of a multipolar world system is a threat to the hegemony of the U.S., U.K and the European Union (EU).

The Russian Federation has refused to cooperate with the expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) to the point of this military alliance maintaining bases bordering its country. Since the Russian special military operation in Ukraine beginning on February 24, NATO has extended its tentacles to Sweden and Finland. On September 30, the same day in which Moscow announced the merging of the Donbass and Lugansk provinces into the Russian Federation, U.S.-backed Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky made a formal request to join NATO.

Washington has been pressuring the AU member-states to provide political support for its efforts to eliminate Russian influence in Ukraine. A Russia-Africa Summit is scheduled to convene in Ethiopia in November and December. Repeatedly these attempts by the Biden administration have been met with rejection.

On a grassroots level there have been numerous reports of pro-Russian demonstrations in AU states such as Mali and Ethiopia. There are historical and contemporary reasons for African solidarity with Russia. During the period of the Soviet Union, Moscow maintained a diplomatic posture of being in solidarity with independence movements and post-colonial states pursuing non-capitalist and socialist oriented development programs. In the post-Soviet era, particularly under the leadership of President Vladimir Putin, Moscow has enhanced its trade with various AU member-states along with Ukraine.

These realities have been highlighted in recent months with the current food deficits impacting East Africa and other regions. Russia and Ukraine supply in many cases between 50-90 percent of grain, maize and other agricultural imports. Agricultural inputs such as fertilizer are imported as well from Russia and Ukraine.

A joint meeting several months ago involving President Putin, AU Commission Chair Moussa Faki Mahamat and the Chairman, Senegalese President Macky Sall, in Sochi, the framework for the opening of a humanitarian corridor to facilitate trade amid the escalating war in Ukraine was proposed. Although this plan was later facilitated by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the food deficits have become acute in the Horn of Africa. A combination of drought, internal conflict stoked by western military interference along with economic distress engendered by inflation and burgeoning national debt has endangered millions throughout the East Africa region.

The post-pandemic economic situation cannot be properly addressed while the White House continues to ship arms to Ukraine in their desperate attempt to continue the war. Biden and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin stated openly that the foreign policy objectives of Washington are to weaken and remove the Russian government under President Putin.

The position of the AU in regard to the Ukraine war emphasizes the necessity of finding a diplomatic solution to the protracted dispute. This cannot be done as long as the Biden administration views as its principal foreign policy objective the forced removal of strategic competitors out of office from Moscow to Beijing.

It does not serve the interests of African working people, farmers and youth to become embroiled in a renewed Cold War instigated by the NATO countries at the aegis of the U.S. government and ruling class. At present, the advent of multipolarity as an approach to foreign relations will continue to heighten the paranoia and hostility of the U.S. ruling class and state government.

Nevertheless, the African people and other nonwestern nations around the world must stand firm in their convictions which diverge from imperialist interests. This attitude was reflected in discussions between South African President Cyril Ramaphosa during his visit to Washington, D.C. in mid-September. The same thrust was articulated by numerous African presidents and ministerial officials at the debates surrounding the United Nations General Assembly 77th Session held in New York City.

In a Foreign Policy article analyzing the visit of Ramaphosa to Washington for talks with Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris and Secretary of State Antony Blinken, the report emphasizes:

“The continent’s importance was highlighted after the United Nations voted to condemn Russian aggression, in which half of the abstentions came from African countries. Having been long neglected in U.S. foreign policy, most African countries are now largely aligned with China in their political and economic partnerships. As a result, Africa has played a major role in furthering China’s and Russia’s goal of weakening the United States as the dominant great power. South Africa’s position is important as the only African member of the G-20. Other African nations have followed its lead in refusing to bow to Western pressure on Russia. As expected, Ramaphosa raised objections to a draft U.S. bill that would sanction Africans doing business with Russian entities that are under U.S. sanctions. The bill, called the Countering Malign Russian Activities in Africa Act, would monitor African governments’ dealings with Russia and has been called ‘Cold War-esque’ as well as described as ‘offensive’ by South African Foreign Minister Naledi Pandor. In Washington, Ramaphosa said Africans should not be punished for their historic nonaligned position. ‘We should not be told by anyone who we can associate with,’ he said—a position that has been popular across Africa, Asia, and Latin America, as Shivshankar Menon noted in FP in July, even if the ideology may not have much to offer in this day and age, as C. Raja Mohan argued recently.”

This intrusive neo-colonial legislation labeled “countering Russia’s malign influence in Africa” is designed to bolster the already existing military presence of Pentagon troops and intelligence officials on the continent. Such a bill if passed would be tantamount to imposing a Cuba-like blockade on the AU member-states.

The Failure of the U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM): Greater Instability and Economic Distress

After 14 years, the AFRICOM project which was announced in 2007 by the administration of President George W. Bush, Jr. and became operational in 2008, has been a disaster for the AU member-states whether they have participated or not with this entity. Initially, the African states rejected the stationing of the AFRICOM headquarters on the continent.

Image: AFRICOM in Somalia (Source: Abayomi Azikiwe)

Later after a reframing of the AFRICOM mission by the Pentagon, where the purpose was to assist African states by strengthening military cooperation and therefore enhancing security, numerous governments allowed the escalation of the presence of U.S. forces. In the Horn of Africa, the French military base at Camp Lemonnier, became the major outpost for Pentagon troops on the continent.

According to the AFRICOM website:

“In response to our expanding partnerships and interests in Africa, the U.S. established U.S. Africa Command in 2007. For the past 14 years, U.S. Africa Command has worked with African partners for a secure, stable and prosperous Africa. The creation of U.S. Africa Command has advanced this vision through a whole-of-government, partner-centric lens by building partner capacity, disrupting violent extremists, and responding to crises. Through consistent engagement, we strengthen our partnerships and assure our allies. Only together can we realize security goals vital for global interests and free trade. Allies and partners are critical in realizing our shared vision while enabling contingency operations, maintaining superiority over competitors, monitoring and disrupting violent extremist organizations, and protecting U.S. interests.”

However, in reality the security situation in Africa has worsened since the creation of AFRICOM and the deployment of thousands of U.S. troops on the continent. These military forces have constructed drone stations and makeshift bases while engaging in purported trainings of local military units along with engaging in what is described as counter-insurgency operations.

By 2011, AFRICOM was prepared for a large-scale military operation on the continent resulting in regime change and the destruction of population groups. In Libya, beginning in February of 2011, a rebel insurgency was trained and turned loose in the northern city of Benghazi with the aim of overthrowing the government of Col. Muammar Gaddafi.

After the defeat of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)-sponsored rebels in several regions of Libya, the U.S. went to the United Nations Security Council where they engineered the passage of resolutions 1970 and 1973 as a cover for the blanket bombing of the oil-rich North African state, then the most prosperous of the AU member-states. On March 19, the bombing of Libya began by the U.S. Air Force accompanied by NATO and allied units.

The result of the war which lasted for nine months killed tens of thousands of Libyans, Africans from other states working in the country and guests from other geopolitical regions. With the installation of a puppet regime in Tripoli after the murder of Gaddafi in October 2011, the conditions in Libya only deteriorated further.

Since 2011, the situation inside the country has not stabilized. The Libyan counter-revolution was the first major combat operation of AFRICOM. The administration of President Barack Obama and his Secretary of State Hillary Clinton championed the war as a victory for “democracy.” In reality, the instability within Libya spread throughout other neighboring states in North and West Africa.

In Mali just one year later in 2012, several insurgent groups began attacks on government institutions and civilian populations in the north and central regions of the country. President Amadou Toumani Toure, a former paratrooper in the Malian military, who had staged a coup in 1991, later changed his military uniform for civilian clothes and won the presidency of the country.

Burkina Faso coup leader Ibrahim Toure appears on State TV (Source: Abayomi Azikiwe)

One report from National Public Radio (NPR) in March 2012 said of the-then situation:

“’The Tuareg have been making demands for ages,’ says Houngnikpo, who studies civil-military relations at the Africa Center for Strategic Studies in Washington. ‘This is the first time they have posed such a dangerous military threat.’ The army mutineers who seized control of Mali’s government say they have been taking heavy casualties in the recent fight against the Tuareg rebels, because Toure never provided them with adequate weapons or resources.

Mali has also been fighting an offshoot of al-Qaida, which calls itself the Al-Qaida Organization in the Islamic Maghreb, designated as a terrorist group by the U.S. State Department. The coup is a worrisome development for West African analysts such as Jennifer Cooke, head of the Africa Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Cooke says the coup is ‘a major setback to Mali’s political development,’ especially disturbing after the country had won a reputation for the growth of its democratic institutions and economic reforms. Cooke says the disruption will hamper the fight against the Tuareg rebels. And on Friday, word came that the rebels had advanced southward and occupied a strategic government military camp.”

Over the last decade there have been another two military coups in Mali. The leaders of these putsches were all trained within Pentagon military colleges in the U.S. After the March 2012 coup, French military forces were invited into Mali to assist in the fighting against the insurgents in the north and central areas of the country in early 2013. The presence of French forces was facilitated by AFRICOM which had already been operating inside the country.

Implications of the Recent Military Coups in Three West African States

A resumption of civilian rule in Mali after elections in 2013 saw the rise of President Ibrahim Boubacar Keita. The administration of Keita remained closely aligned with France.

Keita was reelected five years later in 2018. By this time opposition to his rule had grown substantially. In the early months of 2020, various parties and mass organizations began to demonstrate demanding the resignation of the government in Bamako.

Both AFRICOM and the French-coordinated Operation Barkhane had expanded their presence in Mali and throughout the Sahel region. Nonetheless, the attacks by Islamists intensified making the security situation in Mali far more precarious.

A coalition of opposition groups known as the June 5 Movement—Rally of Patriotic Forces (M5-RFP) continued their demonstrations setting the stage for a mutiny within the military on August 18, 2020. Keita and his Prime Minister Boubou Cisse were forced to resign and dissolve parliament.

Col. Assimi Goita emerged as the leader of the coup which was labelled as the National Committee for the Salvation of the People. Goita had been a member of the French Foreign Legion forces and was trained by the Pentagon. Later in 2021, the divisions within an interim governing structure resulting in another Goita-led coup reinforcing his role as the central figure within the Malian government.

Just two-and-a-half weeks after the August 2020 putsch in Mali, in neighboring Guinea-Conakry, there was another military coup led by Col. Mamady Doumbouya against the highly unpopular civilian regime of President Alpha Conde. The ousted president had initiated the revision of the Guinean constitution allowing him to run for a third term in office.

In the wake of the September 5, 2020 coup in Guinea, there was tremendous public support for the military seizure of power. When the 15-member regional Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) denounced the putsch, there were opposition parties which spoke in favor of the military regime.

On the same day of the coup in Guinea, the AFRICOM forces were engaged with the local military in what was described as a training exercise. Green Beret soldiers were videoed and photographed in the streets of Conakry as the coup was unfolding.

Even the New York Times took notice of the situation and reported:

“For the Pentagon, though, it is an embarrassment. The United States has trained troops in many African nations, largely for counterterrorism programs but also with the broad aim of supporting civilian-led governments. And although numerous U.S.-trained officers have seized power in their countries — most notably, Gen. Abdel Fattah el-Sisi of Egypt — this is believed to be the first time one has done so in the middle of an American military course…. As a four-wheel-drive vehicle with Guinean soldiers perched on the back pushes through the crowd chanting ‘Freedom,’ one American appears to touch hands with cheering people. ‘If the Americans are involved in the putsch, it’s because of their mining interests,’ said Diapharou Baldé, a teacher in Conakry — a reference to Guinea’s huge deposits of gold, iron ore and bauxite, which is used to make aluminum.”

In Burkina Faso there has been another military coup, the second within eight months. On September 30, a group of officers announced the overthrow of Col. Paul Henri Damiba who had cited the growing atmosphere of insecurity as a rationale for his actions in January. Damiba was himself ousted by another military grouping led by Capt. Ibrahim Traore.

The leader of the latest coup was a part of the initial putsch in January under the banner of the Patriotic Movement for Safeguarding and Restoration. Traore was quoted by media sources as saying the decision was made to remove Damiba after he returned from the United General Assembly earlier in the month due to what the coup makers described as the ineffectiveness of the former military junta leader.

A series of attacks by Islamist insurgents over the last several months has eroded the legitimacy of the proclamations of the Damiba regime. Burkina Faso has experienced numerous coups since its independence in 1960. A period between 1983-1987, a revolutionary movement led by Capt. Thomas Sankara, sought to break the cycle of neo-colonial domination and debt obligations to the former colonial power of France.

Sankara, a popular figure and international statesman, advocated the cancellation of foreign debt obligations to international finance capital. Unfortunately, he fell victim to a violent coup in October 1987. The overthrow of Sankara was engineered by France through the then pro-western government in Ivory Coast.

The Guardian newspaper said of the September 30 coup led by Traore:

“Members of Burkina Faso’s army have seized control of state television, declaring that they had ousted military leader Paul-Henri Damiba, dissolved the government and suspended the constitution and transitional charter. In a statement read on national television late on Friday, Captain Ibrahim Traore said a group of officers had decided to remove Damiba due to his inability to deal with a worsening Islamist insurgency. He announced that borders were closed indefinitely, and that all political and civil society activities were suspended. It is the second takeover in eight months for the West African state. Damiba took power in a coup in January that ousted democratically elected president Roch Marc Kaboré. Damiba and his allies promised to make the country more secure, but violence has continued unabated and frustration with his leadership has grown in recent months. The statement came after a day of uncertainty, with gunfire ringing out in the capital, Ouagadougou. ‘In the face of the continuing deterioration of the security situation, we have repeatedly tried to refocus the transition on security issues,’ said the statement read aloud on Friday evening by the soldiers. The soldiers promised the international community they would respect their commitments and urged Burkinabes ‘to go about their business in peace.’”

There are new rhetorical dimensions articulated by the military leaders who have taken power in West Africa since 2020. The interim Prime Minister of Mali, Abdoulaye Maiga, in his address to the UN General Assembly condemned France and its role in the current instability in the country. Maiga even asserted that French troops had been observed delivering military equipment to some rebel forces operating against the central government in Bamako.

Guinean military leaders have publicly demanded the investment in new industries by the mining firms which are exploiting the vast aluminum and iron ore resources. These anti-Paris and anti-Western sentiments have also been extended to Burkina Faso where mass groupings outside the government are advocating for greater Russian involvement in the security concerns of the West Africa region.

Although there appeared to be substantial support from civilian organizations for the September 2021 coup in Guinea, in recent months mass demonstrations have taken place demanding the removal of the military administration. These protests were sparked by the rapid increase of prices for essential goods and fuel.

Al Mayadeen in its reporting on the latest coup in Burkina Faso wrote that:

“On September 28, a convoy carrying supplies was attacked in the town of Djibo, leaving 11 soldiers killed and around 50 civilians missing. More than 40% of the African nation, previously a French colony, is not under government control as most of the Sahel, including Niger and Mali, is suffering from the outcomes of the insurgency, which is beginning to spill over into the Ivory Coast and Togo.

Mali witnessed a large presence of French forces for nearly a decade, but French President Emmanuel Macron decided to withdraw his troops and the Malian military took over. The last French troops from Barkhane departed last month.”

On October 1, there were reports from Burkina Faso that the ousted interim coup leader, Col. Damiba, had taken refuge at a French military base inside the country. Demonstrations erupted outside the French embassy in the capital of Ouagadougou as protesters charged the former colonial power of involvement in an attempt to reimpose Damiba. Also, in the second largest city of Bobo Dioulasso, the French Institute was subjected to an arson attack by crowds.

Photographs of the demonstrations in Burkina Faso showed people carrying Russian flags. This gesture represents the rejection of the NATO countries as it relates to their presence in West Africa.

These developments portend much for the future of western military interventions in the AU member-states. In the final analysis, it is the African people who must wrestle their territories from neo-colonialism which is bolstered by imperialist militarism.

The rationale for assistance from AFRICOM, NATO, the French Foreign Legion and the European Union Forces have rapidly evaporated. Many of the same social elements dominating African military structures can no longer see a way forward through an unconditional alliance with the western capitalist governments and financial interests.

A long-term solution would require the restructuring of military forces in Africa enabling them to effectively represent the national and class interests of the people. After the transformation of the entire character of the post-colonial states, the basis for realignment of political forces on an international scale would be established.

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Abayomi Azikiwe is the editor of the Pan-African News Wire. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

Featured image: Burkina Faso demonstration outside French embassy (Source: Abayomi Azikiwe)

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In his statement on the occasion of the 212^th anniversary of Mexican independence, delivered on Sept. 16, the President of Mexico Andrés Manuel López Obrador presented his proposal for the establishment of a High-Level Caucus for Dialogue and Peace in Ukraine. Yesterday, during his statement in the Security Council, and later in the general debate of the 77^th General Assembly, Secretary of Foreign Affairs Marcelo Ebrard formally presented Mexico’s proposal.

This article will address the rationale behind this initiative, its proposed operation, and steps that have been taken toward its realization.

Standstill at the United Nations

The escalation of tensions in the ongoing war against Ukraine is deeply worrisome. From Feb. 24 to July 31, 2022, the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights recorded 12,584 civilian casualties in Ukraine. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees has recorded 7,278,696 refugees from Ukraine across Europe. And according to a July Report of the Food and Agriculture Organization, initial estimates indicate a damage to agriculture between USD $4.3 billion and USD $6.4 billion due to the war.

In addition to these appalling figures, the precarious situation at the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Station, which the International Atomic Energy Agency called “untenable,” has added a new threatening nuclear dimension to international peace and security.

In the meantime, given the direct involvement of a permanent member in the conflict, the Security Council has proven unable to take action, thus failing to comply with its U.N. Charter-mandated primary responsibility for the maintenance of international peace and security. So far, the only declaration it has adopted is the brief Presidential Statement S/PRST/2022/3 of May 6, 2022, co-authored by Mexico and Norway, in which the Council expressed strong support for Secretary-General António Guterres’ efforts in the search for a peaceful solution. However, it has not been able to back the diplomatic efforts undertaken by him that led first to the opening of humanitarian corridors that allowed the evacuation of civilians and, more recently, to the facilitation, along with Türkiye, of the Black Sea Grain Initiative, which allows the export and safe transportation of grain from Ukraine as well as the Memorandum of Understanding on promoting Russian food products and fertilizers to world markets.

Given the paralysis of the Security Council and building on General Assembly resolution A/RES/ES-11/1, Mexico and France also co-authored General Assembly resolution A/RES/ES-11/2, entitled “Humanitarian consequences of the aggression against Ukraine,” adopted on March 24 with overwhelming support. This resolution “strongly encourages the continued negotiations between all parties, and again urges the immediate peaceful resolution of the conflict between the Russian Federation and Ukraine through political dialogue, negotiations, mediation and other peaceful means in accordance with international law.”

But tensions continue to escalate and urgent action is needed.

Mexico’s Foreign Policy As a Peace-Loving Nation

As we emphasized in another Just Security piece, one of Mexico’s key priorities as an Elected Member to the Security Council for the term 2021-2022 has been the peaceful settlement of disputes and mediation.

Mexico’s foreign policy as a peace-loving nation has borne fruit in the past. This was the case with the creation of the Contadora Group in the 1980’s that led to the Accords for the establishment of a firm and lasting peace in Central America. More recently in 2019, it also led to the establishment, together with Uruguay, of the Montevideo Mechanism with the purpose of opening a path for dialogue and negotiation in Venezuela.

Regarding the war in Ukraine, Mexico made clear its position on a political solution in its Feb. 25 statement in the Security Council, in which the following six points were highlighted:

1. We are facing the invasion of a sovereign country by another, which represents a flagrant violation of Article 2, paragraph 4 of the UN Charter and constitutes, in addition, an aggression by the terms of resolution 3314 (XXIX) of the General Assembly, adopted by all members of the United Nations.
2. Mexico has suffered four invasions during its history as an independent state: two by France (1838 and 1862-67) and two by the United States (1846-48 and 1914). The first U.S. intervention in 1846 resulted in the loss of almost half of our national territory at the time.
3. Mexico has always condemned all acts of aggression, as was evidenced by our protest before the League of Nations against the annexation of Ethiopia and Albania by Italy (1935-36) and the annexation of Austria by Germany (1938).
4. Our rejection of the use of force led us to convene, in 1945, the Inter-American Conference on the Problems of Peace and War in Mexico City, in order to arrive at the San Francisco Conference with a clear and defined regional position on this issue.
5. Mexico’s foreign policy is pacifist. Since the founding of the United Nations, it has defended and will continue to defend, in this organization and in all other forums, the prohibition on the threat or use of force in international relations.
6. In 1988, we inscribed in our Constitution (art. 89, X) the principles of the Charter of the United Nations as normative principles of our foreign policy.

Given its long-standing tradition for peace and diplomacy, embedded in our national Constitution, and in accordance with our responsibility as an Elected Member of the Security Council, it is only natural that Mexico has decided once again to champion a political solution to the conflict and to exhaust all efforts towards that end.

Pursuing a High-Level Caucus for Dialogue and Peace

Mexico’s proposal on the establishment of a High-Level Caucus for Dialogue and Peace in Ukraine is intended to boost the mediation efforts of Secretary-General Guterres and would therefore operate under his leadership, in partnership with other Heads of State and Government. Given their high moral character, it is hoped that the Prime Minister of India, H.E. Narendra Modi, and H. H. Pope Francis would support Guterres in this endeavor.

The objective of this Caucus would be to serve as a diplomatic channel to engage with both the Russian Federation and Ukraine, with a view toward confidence-building measures, lowering tensions, and brokering a cease-fire that could lead to a truce, thus opening a path for dialogue towards the ultimate goal of achieving a sustainable peace agreement.

Needless to say, this is easier said than done. Mexico is fully cognizant that the precondition for any mediation effort to succeed is the political will of the parties and we are cognizant that tensions continue to grow. In the past days, we have led several bilateral meetings with all relevant actors at the ambassadorial level on this proposal in New York, and more will take place at the ministerial level on the margins of the General Assembly’s high-level week. So far, albeit with caution, all parties have expressed their interest in learning more details about this proposal.

Conclusion

We are convinced that it is the duty of all Members of the United Nations to exhaust all diplomatic efforts towards the peaceful settlement of disputes. Indifference is unacceptable. It is precisely in dire times like these that our endurance is put to the test. We cannot and must not give in to despair. This initiative is now at the mercy of the political will of the parties. We hope that it leads to a new chapter in this conflict, one governed by diplomacy and political dialogue, for the sake of the people of the world who continue to suffer from the scourge of war and to whom we will always remain accountable for our actions and for our omissions.

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The Defense Department announced Wednesday that the United States and its allies are planning to “expand their nations’ industrial base” for building bombs, rockets and artillery for the war with Russia in Ukraine.

In the name of “providing long-term support to Ukraine,” the world’s leading imperialist powers are massively escalating their wartime production of “ground-based long range fires, air defense systems, air-to-ground munitions.”

The New York Times called the announcement a “Turning Point for Allies Arming Ukraine” and a “sign that the United States and its allies believe that the fighting in Ukraine will last years.”

That same day, Washington announced plans to more than double the number of long-range HIMARS missile launchers sent to Ukraine. According to the Pentagon, the US will spend another $1.1 billion on arms shipments to the country.

These moves come as Russia has declared that it would recognize the independence of four Ukrainian territories partially under its control, in what is expected to be the prelude to their formal annexation on Friday.

On Monday, a series of attacks took place on the Nord Stream I and Nord Stream II pipelines, which have the capability of transferring natural gas from Russia to Germany. Ending the Nord Stream II pipeline project was a major goal of the United States in seeking to provoke a war with Russia.

Although no state has taken responsibility for the attacks, Radosław Sikorski, the former Foreign Minister of Poland and husband of US state operative Anne Applebaum, tweeted, “Thank you, USA,” before subsequently deleting the tweet.

These developments follow a major military debacle for Russian forces in northeastern Ukraine earlier this month, in which Ukrainian US-NATO proxy forces advanced dozens of miles in a matter of days. In the wake of the collapse of Russian defenses in the Kharkiv region, the Kremlin threatened to use nuclear weapons in the war, while US officials declared that they would not be “deterred” from escalating their involvement in the war by the threat of nuclear annihilation.

The lightning advance by Ukraine was made possible by the fact that the United States had provided its most sophisticated ground-based missile and anti-aircraft systems to Ukrainian troops and had proposed, organized and led the offensive.

The United States, having transformed the Ukrainian army into a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Pentagon, has effectively emptied its armories of all available weapons to send to the country.

The weapons shipment announced by the Pentagon on Wednesday will be the first in which the United States is not drawing down existing inventories of weapons but rather directly commissioning defense contractors to build weapons potentially years in the future, the Pentagon said.

“Unlike Presidential Drawdown Authority (PDA), which DoD has continued to leverage to deliver equipment to Ukraine from DoD stocks at a historic pace, USAI is an authority under which the United States procures capabilities from industry,” the Pentagon said. “This announcement represents the beginning of a contracting process to provide additional priority capabilities to Ukraine in the mid- and long-term.”

The Pentagon noted,

“In total, the United States has now committed approximately $16.9 billion in security assistance to Ukraine since January 2021. Since 2014, the United States has committed approximately $19 billion in security assistance to Ukraine more than $16.2 billion since the beginning of Russia’s unprovoked and brutal invasion on February 24.”

The US has, for example, sent more than 1.5 million 155mm howitzer shells to Ukraine, while it only produces 30,000 shells per year in peacetime.

“The military stocks of most [European NATO] member states have been, I wouldn’t say exhausted but depleted in a high proportion, because we have been providing a lot of capacity to the Ukrainians,” Josep Borrell, the EU’s High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security, said earlier this month.

NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg declared,

“We are now working with industry to increase production of weapons and ammunition, somehow as a whole to increase production.”

“The United States needs to maintain stockpiles to support war plans,” Mark Cancian, a former US Marine Corps colonel and a senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), told CNBC. “For some munitions, the driving war plan would be a conflict with China over Taiwan or in the South China Sea,” he said.

Alongside its rearmament plan, the United States has this week announced plans to reorganize how it commands, arms and equips its proxy forces in Ukraine, creating a unified command structure to organize the war effort.

So far, the Pentagon has not admitted to the creation of the new command structure in order to, according to the New York Times, “avoid feeding into the narrative of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia that his country is at war with the United States.”

The Times reports that “The system would be placed under a single new command based in Germany that would be led by a high-ranking U.S. general, according to several military and administration officials.”

The newspaper added,

“The new command, which would report to General Cavoli, would carry out the decisions made by the Ukraine Defense Contact Group, a coalition of 40 countries that the Defense Department created after the Russian invasion to address Ukraine’s needs and requests.

“About 300 people would be dedicated to the mission, which would be in Wiesbaden, Germany, the U.S. Army’s headquarters in Europe. Much of the training of Ukrainian soldiers on U.S. weapons systems is already taking place there or nearby,” the New York Times reported.

Amid the escalation of the war, the US Embassy in Moscow has urged its citizens to leave Russia, declaring,

“U.S. citizens should not travel to Russia, and those residing or traveling in Russia should depart Russia immediately while limited commercial travel options remain.”

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A New York hospital pulled a 30-second ad about myocarditis in children after Children’s Health Defense (CHD) and numerous doctors accused the hospital of normalizing and trivializing the condition.

New York-Presbyterian Hospital in early September published the 30-second ad, which promoted the medical center’s pediatric services for treating the condition.

The hospital pulled the ad amid public outcry following three CHD.TV episodes featuring discussions about how the ad appeared to normalize and trivialize myocarditis in children. CHD.TV is produced by Children’s Health Defense.

The ad, “Pediatric Patient Story,” featured a young girl named Suri and transitioned between live-action footage and animation.

“I’ve been into fashion since I can remember,” Suri said in the ad. “But one day, I had a stomachache so bad I didn’t want to do anything.”

Suri continued:

“The team at NewYork-Presbyterian said it was actually my heart. It was severely swollen — something called ‘myocarditis.’

“But doctors gave me medicines and used machines to control my heartbeat. They saved me. So now I can become the next great fashion designer.”

The ad ended with the caption “Stay Amazing” and then faded to the hospital’s logo, without any mention of what may have caused the potentially fatal heart condition.

Data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) show a strong link between cases of myocarditis and COVID-19 vaccines.

Between Dec. 14, 2020, and Sept. 16, 2022, 23,926 cases of myocarditis and pericarditis were reported to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, or VAERS, with 18,186 cases attributed to Pfizer, 5,304 cases to Moderna and 410 cases to the Johnson & Johnson COVID-19 vaccine.

VAERS is the primary government-funded system for reporting adverse vaccine reactions in the U.S. Historically, VAERS has been shown to report only 1% of actual vaccine adverse events.

‘ … they make a ton of money on providing medical help.’

“I almost have no words for this type of advertisement,” said Aimee Villella McBride, CHD director of communications, in a Sept. 9 episode of CHD.TV’s “Friday Roundtable.”

“It left me speechless the first time I saw it,” she said.

Summit News on Sept. 16 called out the hospital’s commercial for treating myocarditis in children “as if it’s a common illness.”

Dr. Vinay Prasad, a hematologist-oncologist and professor of epidemiology and biostatistics at the University of California, San Francisco, retweeted the ad on Sept. 18, adding his own questions and comments.

Why would anyone try to normalize myocarditis, when it is easy to try to reduce it?
Lower doses
Space out doses
No moderna & Fewer doses in young men
Exemptions for future doses for people who already had COVID19

All preferable to TV ads hinting heart inflammation is no biggie https://t.co/DrOOAzqLkO

— Vinay Prasad MD MPH (@VPrasadMDMPH) September 18, 2022

On Sept. 19, America’s Frontline News said the ad targeted children and noted that myocarditis is a “hallmark side effect of the COVID-19 injections.”

And in the Sept. 19 episode of CHD.TV’s “This Week,” Mary Holland, CHD president and general counsel, pointed out the significance of the ad, noting that NewYork-Presbyterian, which is affiliated with Columbia University, is not “any old hospital.”

“This is one of the biggest and most prestigious hospitals in New York City,” Holland said.

Holland highlighted how the girl in the ad says the hospital’s doctors “saved me.”

“I think what’s left out of this ad,” Holland said, “is, ‘Yes, and they also injured her.’”

She added:

“They are the people — if they gave her a COVID shot — that caused myocarditis. They first injured her. They made a little bit of money on that. And then they made a ton of money on providing her medical help.

“And they lied to her about what the cause might be. I think they also neglected to say that myocarditis can result in needing a heart transplant within a matter of years.”

Holland commented further in a Sept. 18 tweet:

‘They make a little bit of money on [the shot], + then they make a ton of money on providing medical help.’ — Mary Holland on recent NY Presbyterian Myocarditis ad

‘This is turning the healthcare system against the people.’ #ThisWeek #CHDTVhttps://t.co/rLDXWMB3Yq

— Children’s Health Defense (@ChildrensHD) September 19, 2022

On Sept. 22, Tucker Carlson of Fox News  discussed the ad with Dr. Marty Makary, a researcher at Johns Hopkins University, who early on warned the CDC that they needed to “rigorously study the long-term effects of vaccine-induced myocarditis.”

“Severe heart damage in otherwise healthy children” is not something “we’ve always had” happening, Carlson said. “What type of life will someone have at age 50 when they suffer unnecessary heart damage as a child?”

That same evening, Dr. Peter McCullough, an internist and cardiologist in Dallas, Texas, retweeted a clip of the Fox news interview with Makary, with this comment:

Dr. Mackary on with Tucker Carlson. Long term effects of myocarditis devastating and far more common than the CDC led Americans to believe. Tucker asks: "What type of life will someone have at age 50 when they suffer unnecessary heart damage as a child?" pic.twitter.com/wiPxNWTSw2

— Peter McCullough, MD, MPH (@P_McCulloughMD) September 23, 2022

The next day, McCullough pointed out during the Sept. 23 episode of CHD.TV’s “Friday Roundtable” that there have been many fatal cases documented of vaccine-related myocarditis.

He pointed to a U.K. study published in August that reported 100 deaths due to vaccine-related myocarditis.

Sometime between Sept. 23 and Sept. 29, the hospital pulled the ad, which is still available on alternative media sites. The original youtube video is listed as private.

The Defender reached out to NewYork-Presbyterian’s public relations department to inquire about the ad and why it was pulled, but officials there did not respond by deadline.

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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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On Wednesday, the leaders of four regions in eastern and southern Ukraine called on Russian President Vladimir Putin to incorporate their territories into Russia.

Once the results of the accession referendums held in the previous days were known, the leaders of the self-proclaimed republics of Lugansk and Donetsk, Leonid Pasechnik and Denis Pushilin, traveled to Moscow to personally request President Vladimir Putin to incorporate these regions into the Russian Federation.

The heads of the administrations of Kherson and Zaporizhia also issued statements in which they also advocated “reunification” with Russia, highlighting the support this decision received in the referendums that were held between September 23 and 27 amid attacks perpetrated by Ukrainian forces.

The Russian news agency RIA published the results of the referendums held in the four separatist regions, where the majority of their populations voted in favor of annexation to Russia. The votes in favor of YES were as follows: Kherson (97%), Zaporizhia (98.19%), Lougansk (97.82%), and Donetsk (98%).

My statement at a press conference in #Donetsk yesterday after 4 days observing referendum prep & voting, ballot counting & external voting. The West has always lied & it will continue to lie especially when people resist their tyranny & oppression. #Donbass_is_Russia pic.twitter.com/g2SZleeeZ2

— vanessa beeley (@VanessaBeeley) September 28, 2022

The annexation process of Donetsk, Lugansk, Kherson, and Zaporozhie to the Russian Federation might be completed in just 12 days.

According to Russian law, Putin must first recognize the independence of Kherson and Zaporizhia before approving their accession to Russia. This already happened on Feb. 21, three days before the start of the Russian special military operation in Ukraine.

On Oct. 3, the Russian Lower House will hold an extraordinary session to deal with the issue. A day later, the Senate plans to debate the annexation of the new territories. Once both houses give their approval, President Putin will do the same.

However, according to the Institute for the Study of War and the British intelligence, the news about the annexation could even come on Friday, Sept. 30.

Majority of Ukraine's four regions support referendum on accession to Russia – #Russia #Ukraine pic.twitter.com/IRZuaiKiZ1

— teleSUR English (@telesurenglish) September 28, 2022

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The emergency authorizations of Pfizer’s and Moderna’s bivalent COVID boosters are based on preliminary test results from a grand total of eight mice, and that data hasn’t even been made public

Based on the antibody response in eight mice, the Biden administration has ordered 171 million doses of the two boosters

A reanalysis of data from the Pfizer and Moderna COVID vaccine trials found that, combined, the jabs were associated with a risk increase of serious adverse events of special interest at a rate of 12.5 per 10,000 vaccinated. Meanwhile, the risk reduction for COVID-19 hospitalization was only 2.3 per 10,000 participants for Pfizer and 6.4 per 10,000 for Moderna

According to a recent risk-benefit analysis of a third booster for university students, for each COVID hospitalization prevented, the booster will cause 18 to 98 serious adverse events

A number of top officials with the FDA, CDC and the NIH reportedly have serious concerns about the direction we’re going in, yet are too afraid to speak out or push back

*

August 31, 2022, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration authorized the reformulated COVID bivalent booster shots by Moderna and Pfizer1 — all without the required convening of its Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee (VRBPAC), which would typically discuss or vote on the authorization or approval of a new vaccine.

Instead, the FDA pushed the matter before the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP). ACIP met for eight hours September 1, 2022, and authorized the untested boosters 13-to-1.2 3 CDC director Dr. Rochelle Walensky endorsed the recommendation later that evening.

Pfizer’s new booster, authorized for people age 12 and older, is a bivalent injection targeting Omicron subvariants BA.4 and BA.5, which are the two currently in circulation.

Moderna’s shot, authorized for adults only, aged 18 and older, targets the already extinct Wuhan strain and Omicron subvariant BA.1.4 The two bivalent boosters is only be available to those who have already received the primary two-dose series and/or a monovalent booster at least two months ago.5

Safety and Efficacy Assumed Based on Mouse Data

As explained in “What They’re Not Telling You About the New mRNA Boosters,” the emergency authorization of these reformulated boosters is based on nothing more than preliminary test results from a grand total of eight mice,6 and that data hasn’t even been released to the public.

In an August 30, 2022, article, Science explained the makeup of the reformulated boosters:7

“Both the Pfizer-BioNTech collaboration and Moderna make their vaccines from messenger RNA (mRNA) coding for the spike protein of SARS-CoV-2. The new vaccines are bivalent.

Half of the mRNA codes for the spike protein of the ancestral virus strain that emerged in Wuhan, China, in late 2019, which is also in the original shots; the other half codes for the spike protein in BA.1 or the one in BA.4 and BA.5, which have identical spikes …

For the BA.4/BA.5 boosters, the companies have submitted animal data. They have not released those data publicly, although at the June FDA meeting, Pfizer presented preliminary findings in eight mice given BA.4/BA.5 vaccines as their third dose.

Compared with the mice that received the original vaccine as a booster, the animals showed an increased response to all Omicron variants tested: BA.1, BA.2, BA.2.12.1, BA.4, and BA.5.

The companies say clinical trials for the BA.4/BA.5 vaccines will begin next month [i.e. September 2022]; they need clinical data both for full approval of the vaccines — their recent submissions are only for emergency use authorization — and to help develop future updates.

Presumably they will measure recipients’ antibody levels, but not the vaccine’s efficacy against infection or severe disease. Such trials are very expensive and were not done for the BA.1 shot either.”

FDA and CDC Rely on Assumptions, Not Actual Data 

A key take-home here is that efficacy against infection and severe disease has NEVER been ascertained. Those trials were not done for the original shot, and won’t be done for the reformulated boosters. Yet the efficacy of these boosters is assumed and declared as having been “proven” based on the original trials.

Talk about a circular argument! It’s just assumptions piled upon assumptions. Yet, based on the antibody response in eight mice alone, the Biden administration has now ordered 171 million doses of the two boosters.

Let’s not forget that the mice actually did get infected with Omicron,8 although we don’t know to what degree, since they haven’t released the data. For all we know, the mice may have had a good antibody response, got sick and then dropped dead.

What’s more, the monovalent Pfizer booster authorized for children aged 5 to 11, back in May 2022, was based on the antibody levels of just 67 children.9 So, when the FDA claims the original human trials were exhaustive and have conclusively proven the shots are both safe and effective, they’re flat out lying.

In addition to apparent fraud being committed, and the fact that they eliminated the placebo groups midway, those human trials won’t even be finalized for another two years or so, as all clinical trials require follow-up.

All we have are preliminary analyses, and FOIA released documents clearly show Pfizer has been less than transparent about adverse effects, as they mislabeled and dismissed almost all of them.

A reanalysis10 of data from the Pfizer and Moderna COVID vaccine trials found that, combined, Pfizer and Moderna mRNA COVID-19 jabs were actually associated with a risk increase of serious adverse events of special interest of 12.5 per 10,000 vaccinated. Meanwhile, the risk reduction for COVID-19 hospitalization was only 2.3 per 10,000 participants for Pfizer and 6.4 per 10,000 for Moderna. So, again, the risk-benefit is crazy lopsided AGAINST the shots.

Repeat Boosting Can Destroy Your Immune Function

Aside from the risk of immediate adverse effects of these experimental gene transfer injections, there’s also the issue of immune destruction through repeat exposure. A number of scientists have warned that repeated injections appear to be breaking down people’s immune systems. As noted by independent journalist Rav Avora:11

“The European Medicines Agency has warned12 against the potential adverse immunological effects of repeated boosting every four months.

As Dr. Marty Makary from Johns Hopkins has noted,13 recent research shows a ‘reduced immune response against the Omicron strain among people previously infected who then received three COVID vaccine doses compared to a control group that previously had COVID and did not have multiple shots.’

It is just impossible to overstate the unconditional absurdity of the FDA and CDC decision. Not only is the booster merely available to the public … but it is recommended by the state for everyone, including children and teenagers — those with least to gain and most to lose.”

Indeed, the population most likely to be mandated to take a bivalent booster are students, and according to a recent risk-benefit analysis,14 which assessed the impact of booster mandates for university students, between 22,000 and 30,000 previously uninfected students (aged 18 to 29) must be boosted to prevent a single COVID-19 hospitalization.

And, for each COVID-related hospitalization prevented, the booster will cause 18 to 98 serious adverse events, including 1.7 to 3 “booster-associated myocarditis cases in males,” plus another 1,373 to 3,234 cases of “grade ≥3 reactogenicity which interferes with daily activities.”

In short, mandating a third COVID shot for university students will result in a net expected harm of massive proportions, which is completely unethical. Anyone who cannot compute that 18 to 98 serious injuries plus another 3,000+ injuries that are bad enough to interfere with daily living is WORSE than one COVID hospitalization really should not be in a public health position. They belong in a remedial first-grade math class.

Public Health Officials Go Along to Get Along

Sadly, a number of top officials within the FDA, CDC and the National Institutes of Health reportedly have serious concerns about the direction we’re going in, yet are too afraid to speak out or push back, so the death toll keeps mounting. In a July 15, 2022, Substack article, Makary and Dr. Tracy Beth Hoeg shared the following:15

“The calls and text messages are relentless. On the other end are doctors and scientists at the top levels of the NIH, FDA and CDC. They are variously frustrated, exasperated and alarmed about the direction of the agencies to which they have devoted their careers.

‘It’s like a horror movie I’m being forced to watch and I can’t close my eyes,’ one senior FDA official lamented. ‘People are getting bad advice and we can’t say anything.’

That particular FDA doctor was referring to two recent developments inside the agency. First, how, with no solid clinical data, the agency authorized COVID vaccines for infants and toddlers, including those who already had COVID. And second, the fact that just months before, the FDA bypassed their external experts to authorize booster shots for young children …

At the NIH, doctors and scientists complain to us about low morale and lower staffing: The NIH’s Vaccine Research Center has had many of its senior scientists leave over the last year, including the director, deputy director and chief medical officer. ‘They have no leadership right now …’ one NIH scientist told us …

Another CDC scientist told us: ‘I used to be proud to tell people I work at the CDC. Now I’m embarrassed.’ Why are they embarrassed? In short, bad science. The longer answer: that the heads of their agencies are using weak or flawed data to make critically important public health decisions … And that they have a myopic focus on one virus instead of overall health …

An official at the FDA put it this way: ‘I can’t tell you how many people at the FDA have told me, ‘I don’t like any of this, but I just need to make it to my retirement.’”

Even Dr. Paul Offit, one of the most prominent pro-vaccine propagandists in U.S. history and a member of the FDA’s VRBPAC, has the common sense to question the sanity of rolling out untested shots to millions of people. In late August 2022, just two days before the FDA authorized the two bivalent boosters, he told the Wall Street Journal:16

“I’m uncomfortable that we would move forward — that we would give millions or tens of millions of doses to people — based on mouse data.”

Why Is FDA Making Unsubstantiated Claims in Ads?

The FDA is also advertising the COVID shots — and making bizarre unscientific claims in those ads. Here are two recent COVID booster campaign messages tweeted out by the FDA:

“It’s time to install that update! #UpdateYourAntibodies with a new #COVID19 booster.”17“Don’t be shocked! You can now #RechargeYourImmunity with an updated #COVID19 booster.”18

By law, the FDA should not engage in the advertising of drugs — historically, they’ve never even worked with drug companies to create ads19 — and the agency certainly should not put out false and misleading claims about drugs, as this is illegal. So, why are they doing both? As reported by Tablet magazine:20

“The continuation of unchecked conflicts of interest, and several recent authorizations for uses of new medical products that are in many ways unproven, demonstrate that the FDA is essentially unresponsive to public outrage, culminating in the bizarre spectacle of … promoting bivalent boosters on social media through unsubstantiated claims …

[A]cting not as a neutral regulator but actively advertising on behalf of pharmaceutical companies with government purchase contracts. The FDA’s disregard for its congressional mandate is not unique to this moment — it is a symptom of its decadeslong transformation into an agency captured by the corporations it is tasked with regulating.”

Why Is FDA Ignoring Red Flags?

Tablet magazine also highlights the FDA’s now-consistent disregard for safety issues, even when data clearly point to problems. This includes data showing frequent boosters can weaken immune function, and the fact that Pfizer, in its pediatric trial, actually observed a higher rate of severe COVID in the vaccine group than the placebo group.

The FDA also allowed Pfizer to discount 365 symptomatic cases in the pediatric trial and only count 10 cases that occurred after the third dose. This is how they got to 80% efficacy. In reality, however, the efficacy was negative after doses 1 and 2. As noted by Tablet magazine:21

“In a vaccine meant to prevent illness for an age group that is already at extremely low risk, this data should have been a red flag for the FDA. Why, then, has the body charged with protecting Americans from inadequately tested products been so eager not just to authorize these products for emergency use, but to enthusiastically recommend them?”

Clearly, the fact that 75% of the FDA’s funding comes from the drug industry is one factor that contributes to this corruption. Another is the revolving door between the agency and industry, with officials passing back and forth between the two.

A third factor is the financial conflicts of interest of individual officials. Tablet magazine reviews several examples of VRBPAC members receiving hundreds of thousands and even millions of dollars from drug companies, be it in the form of research grants, speakers’ fees or consulting fees.

Recent Studies Demonstrate Insanity of Continuing Boosters

In closing, at least three new studies demonstrate the insanity of continuing down the path of boosters:

1. Japanese researchers have found in vitro evidence of antibody dependent enhancement (ADE) following Moderna’s mRNA injection.22 23

2. A preprint study24 posted on bioRxiv in mid-September 2022 found Omicron sublineage BA.2.75.2 is exceptionally good at escaping neutralizing antibodies.

On average, this sublineage was neutralized fivefold less potently than BA.5, making it the most resistant variant to date. According to the authors, “These data raise concerns that BA.2.75.2 may effectively evade humoral immunity in the population.”

3. Another September preprint25 26 27 by Chinese researchers detail how and why SARS-CoV-2 variants are outracing vaccination efforts, and the role played by original antigenic sin.

4. In addition to BA.2.75.2, other variants with impressive immune evading capabilities include BR.1, BJ.1, and BQ.1.1. According to the authors,28 many of the variants now emerging have mutations converging in particular “hotspots” on the receptor binding domain (RBD).

They suspect this convergent evolution is linked to humoral immune imprinting, in other words, the phenomenon of original antigenic sin,29 the end result of which is reduced immunity and an increased risk of symptomatic infection.

If you’re up for some, at times, complex scientific jargon, check out coauthor Yunlong Richard Cao’s Twitter thread in which he does his best to lay out the findings. Cao explains the convergent RBD evolution as follows:

“Due to immune imprinting, BA.5 breakthrough infection caused significant reductions of nAb [neutralizing antibody] epitope diversity and increased proportion of non-neutralizing mAbs [monoclonal antibodies], which in turn concentrated immune pressure and promoted the convergent RBD evolution.”

The take-home message here is that this convergent RBD evolution — which is making new variants increasingly capable of evading neutralizing antibodies — is the result of a narrow antibody response.

It’s a byproduct of “vaccinating” the world during an active outbreak. The end result is that both natural immunity and the COVID jabs are rendered more or less null and void. If that’s not reason enough to quit this booster madness, I don’t know what is.

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Notes

1 New York Times August 31, 2022 (Archived)

2 Rumble, Friday Roundtable September 2, 2022

3 Pharmacy Practice News September 1, 2022

4 Sky News August 15, 2022

5 FDA August 31, 2022

6 Tablet September 18, 2022

7 Science August 30, 2022

8 Rav Arora Substack September 12, 2022

9 Forbes May 17, 2022

10 SSRN June 23, 2022, Revised September 9, 2022

11 Rav Arora Substack September 12, 2022

12 Bloomberg January 11, 2022

13 Sensible Medicine August 23, 2022

14 SSRN September 12, 2022

15 CommonSense July 15, 2022

16 WSJ August 28, 2022

17 Twitter FDA September 7, 2022

18 Twitter FDA September 9, 2022

19 FDA.gov Drug Advertising Q&A

20 Tablet September 18, 2022

21 Tablet September 18, 2022

22 Scientific Reports 2022; 12 Article number 15612

23 Eugyppius September 19, 2022

24 BioRxiv September 16, 2022 DOI: 10.1101/2022.09.16.508299

25 BioRxiv September 16, 2022 DOI: 10.1101/2022.09.15.507787

26 Twitter Ulrich Elling September 17, 2022

27 Twitter Yunlong Richard Cao September 16, 2022

28 Twitter Yunlong Richard Cao September 16, 2022

29 Journal of Immunology January 15, 2019; 202(2): 335-340

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***

Soaring energy costs in Europe are shutting down businesses and threatening a bloc-wide recession. Yet not everyone accepts this fate. Some companies are moving to cheaper locations: the U.S. Steel giant ArcelorMittal said earlier this month that it would slash by half production at a steel mill in Germany and a unit at another plant, also in Germany. The company said it had based the decision on high gas prices.

Separately, ArcelorMittal more recently warned it expected its steel output for the fourth quarter of the year to be 1.5 million tons lower than it was in the final quarter of 2023, again citing excessive prices along with slumping demand.

At the same time, ArcelorMittal earlier this year announced it had plans to expand a Texas operation, describing the state as a “region that offers highly competitive energy and, ultimately, competitive hydrogen.” It is just one of the Europe-based companies that are beginning to see the benefits of growing in the United States, according to a report by the Wall Street Journal’s David Uberti.

Uberti cites industry executives as saying that it has not exactly been a difficult decision to make. Basically, according to the report, it comes to a simple dilemma between folding in the face of exorbitant energy bills and moving to a much cheaper energy environment, complete with fresh incentives for certain industries.

Chemicals, batteries, green energy—these are all areas set to benefit substantially from the Inflation Reduction Act passed last month. No wonder, then, that companies active in these areas see it as a good idea to either move or expand in the United States.

Meanwhile, in Europe, more and more companies are switching into survival mode. That’s because, for a lot of them, the time is coming to renew their electricity supply contracts with utilities. Thanks to energy inflation, these are set to be much higher than the contracts for the current year, with front-year prices reaching over $1,000 in France and Germany.

The New York Times’ Liz Alderman wrote in a recent story that energy-intensive industries such as manufacturing and fertilizer production were especially vulnerable precisely because of their higher energy needs. She cited the case of a glass-making major, Arc International, which is also shutting down production units to cope with higher energy costs.

The European Commission has promised to help by capping the revenues of electricity generators that use a primary source of energy other than gas, and taxing the “excessive” profits of oil, gas, and coal companies. According to the EC, raking in cash under the current circumstances was wrong, even though profits in themselves were something good.

Plans are to collect some 140 billion euros—almost equal to the same sum in dollars—to distribute among households and struggling businesses. Critics, however, note that this will not be enough to save companies from going under. European Aluminium, the industry association, even said energy costs could result in the breakdown of the aluminum industry in Europe.

“I think we’ll muddle through two winters,” the chief executive of refractory products maker RHI Magnesita told the Wall Street Journal. However, if gas doesn’t get cheaper, Stefan Borgas said, “companies will start to look elsewhere.”

It looks like businesses packing and leaving for cheaper jurisdictions is yet another unintended consequence of the policies favored by European governments, especially in the energy department. It is also one more risk for the survival of the bloc as a competitive industrialized formation in the future. And this risk presents one more conundrum for governments and the administration in Brussels to solve in short order.

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Irina is a writer for Oilprice.com with over a decade of experience writing on the oil and gas industry.

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***

On September 9, the US and its allies unveiled the next step in their plan to cap the price of Russian-sold oil – a bold next step that goes above and beyond initial embargoes.

So, what does this move really mean?

Impeding Russian oil sales is no small move. The bulk of Russia’s 11.3 million-barrels-a-day production in January 2022 was crude oil (10 million barrels a day) according to the IEA. Now, the agency forecasts that Russian oil production could fall by 1.9 million barrels a day by February, once the EU embargo on imports comes into force. Vortex estimates the decline at 2.5 million bpd.

From a monetary perspective that means that the reality is different from the intention. Indeed, Russia seems to be making more money, not less money, in spite of all these sanctions – including recent decisions by the US and the EU banning imports of oil and oil products.

The goals of the new guidance, backed by US, the G7 and the EU, are threefold:

1.     Maintain a reliable supply of seaborne Russian oil to the global market.

2.     Reduce upward pressure on energy prices – a huge impact on soaring inflation in the West.

3.     Reduce the Russian Federation’s revenue from oil.

By going after Russia’s global market, these new sanctions stand to influence Russian trading beyond those independently set up by the US and the EU. In terms of regulation, this is perhaps the most complex – and novel – regulations on trading and shipping the world has ever seen.

But it’s not the first of its kind. Let’s rewind by two years: Effectively, the first significant sanctions regulations on global shipping was issued by the Trump administration in May 2020. These regulations established a set of expectations for all relevant parties – from traders and banks, to shipping companies, insurers, ports and other related parties – to start rigorously screening for “deceptive shipping practices” beyond the standard vetting of simply “list matching” (i.e. checking that someone you do business with isn’t blacklisted).

These recent sanctions stand on the shoulders of the May 2020 edict in that they effectively tell companies how to carry out maritime transactions – not to mention that although these two regulatory decisions are unique, the uncertainty each has caused within the shipping and trading ecosystem is comparable.

So, What’s New? 

This new advisory means that companies aren’t allowed to offer maritime services – including transportation, insurance, maintenance, and more – to anyone trading above the price cap. It also mandates that anyone involved in the wider shipping supply chain must continually screen any trade partners for deceptive shipping practices – both those outlined in May 2020, alongside additional risk factors and abnormal patterns.

These guidelines bring about several key changes:

• Historically, most sanctions focused solely on dirty oil tankers, while the new regulations make clean petroleum a key part of the equation. In the past, not only were clean oil tankers subject to few – if any – compliance checks or audit trials, but trading desks and trade banks dealing in clean petroleum were largely unregulated. These new guidelines will bring tighter compliance standards to approximately 5,500 additional ships.
• Traders and related parties must now screen every transaction and document the whole chain of prices through every deal. Only once a deal is confirmed to be under the price cap and the services are at market price, can the deal go through.
• It extends the audit trail to five years.
• It expands the risk factors that companies must screen for – new company vetting, abnormal patterns, and more.
• Finally, it puts many more companies in the spotlight and raises widespread scrutiny around sanctions enforcement.

The Significance

So why do these sanctions matter so much?

Firstly, the shipping and trading world is far from binary and can’t just be broken down into good guys and bad guys. Accordingly, most of the affected shipping and trading companies are Western or trade in the West. For instance, it’s reported that a majority of Russia’s oil is transported by Greek shipowners, who operate in the EU and are now direct targets of this advisory.

Secondly, the US, EU and G7 are guiding these sanctions. Considering the sway these national entities have on global affairs, the effects will be further reaching than just G7 countries. While the May 2020 sanctions were exclusively American, these new restrictions could involve 30-plus additional new countries as partners in enforcing this price cap.

On the flip side, we can almost certainly expect that Russia and its partners will align with maritime transportation operators outside of the G7, EU, and the coalition allies. That means we’ll see more and more companies formed in the GCC area – China, Russia, Turkey – who will be buying ships and setting up insurance or finance facilities.

Major Challenges to Implementation

This manufactured, artificial means of controlling and containing oil prices can easily backfire – it will take a very fine balancing act to ensure that the measure is adopted, heeded, and achieves the right outcome. It also gives Russia an “out” to continue selling its oil and getting a benefit, so even if prices are capped and regulated in some capacity, it erodes and bypasses the intentions and effectiveness of initial sanctions.

Enforcing these regulations will be very difficult even if every transaction is documented. How will this be policed? By whom and when? The “speed cameras” analogy probably holds true here – will videoing a few people who commit felonies impact the rest of the market?

There is the risk that companies might do larger deals in parcels or fragment deals in order to get around the oil price cap.

The cost of implementing all the necessary controls for these restrictions will put many reputable companies off. By the time any big company implements this, we may be past the need for it.

While the US has released its advisory, we will have to wait for the European version of this same guidance because that is where all this really matters and where the impact on curtailing Russian oil is felt. This might be difficult to obtain due to the consensus way of making decisions in the EU.

So, does it make things more complicated or easier?

The new regulation focuses on two areas – pricing and maritime transportation. In a sense we believe this actually makes it much easier for firms to apply the sanctions, even if the task to maintain these standards is Sisyphean.

Although tracking flows of cargoes of Russia oil and the origin of each product is quite complicated, especially since bills of lading can and are being forged, this system does help properly define who are Tier 1, Tier 2,and Tier 3 players as laid out in the US Treasury Department’s advisory, and it lays out different requirements for each of them.

An example of the impact of this price cap are the two million barrels a day that are being shipped via Russia’s Baltic ports and require tugboat services to cross the Baltics. Without proof of trading under the price cap, these tugboat services will not be allowed to be rendered, thus impairing these exports.

Board Level Issue

Considering that recent sanctions have raised tensions, one thing is clear: it’s becoming more complicated to trade safely in this world. It requires more technology, more processes, more know-how – and sometimes, more sanctions. And the risk just took one huge step up. The US said clearly that they’ll be looking to enforce.

The United States’ bold statement of intent to enforce these sanctions is a board level risk, and all relevant stakeholders would be wise to take the advice of a consultant or a lawyer to review their processes and risk policies and decide on concrete next steps. While the guidance only comes into effect on December 6, players in the shipping game will only get there safely if they start moving now.

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Ami Daniel is the co-founder and CEO of the maritime risk management and intelligence company Windward.

Featured image: The Primorsk Oil Terminal near St. Petersburg (file image)

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***

U.S. presidents routinely violate international law and the United Nations Charter. Yet every year they appear before that body and proclaim American innocence.

It takes a special kind of hubris for a president of the United States to speak at the United Nations, the place where international law is supposed to be upheld and defended. Yet the representative of the worst violator of international law predictably shows up every September when the United Nations General Assembly holds its annual session. The late Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez got it right when he spoke in 2006:

“Yesterday, ladies and gentlemen, from this rostrum, the president of the United States, the gentleman to whom I refer as the devil, came here, talking as if he owned the world. Truly. As the owner of the world. I think we could call a psychiatrist to analyze yesterday’s statement made by the president of the United States. As the spokesman of imperialism, he came to share his nostrums, to try to preserve the current pattern of domination, exploitation, and pillage of the peoples of the world.”

Chavez is no longer with us, and Joe Biden is the third man to serve as U.S. president since George W. Bush was compared to the devil. But the words are as true now as they were then. This year Biden’s speech was replete with the usual drivel about the United States being some sort of guarantor of peace. Among other things, he said that permanent members of the Security Council should “…refrain from the use of the veto, except in rare, extraordinary situations, to ensure that the Council remains credible and effective.”

Perhaps Biden thinks that the rest of the world has amnesia. Every time the members of UN General Assembly condemn Israeli apartheid it is the U.S. that predictably steps in with a Security Council veto to protect its ally and partner in crime. Twelve of the 14 U.S. vetoes since 2000 were made on behalf of Israel. Any U.S. proposal calling for change in the Security Council structure is intended to weaken China and Russia’s veto power and to bring in its own puppets such as Germany and Japan.

Of course, Russia bashing was the focus of Biden’s speech with false claims of a nuclear threat, unprovoked attack, and accusations of war crimes. He didn’t mention well documented Ukrainian war crimes such as the shelling of civilians in Donetsk. Worse yet, there was no acknowledgement that Ukraine and Russia were negotiating until the U.S. and the U.K. intervened and scuttled the talks. Biden’s speech was full of projection and every condemnation leveled against Russia or Iran or Venezuela was instead an indictment of U.S. behavior in the world.

The world has changed but American administrations don’t. They continue behaving as if the U.S. is still the all-powerful hegemon that will always get what it wants. It does have the world’s reserve currency and the biggest military, but it can’t control the world without doing harm to itself and its allies. The United States cynically used the United Nations to call for a “no fly zone” over Libya, which allowed it to destroy that nation. Partnerships with jihadists brought destruction to Libya and to Syria, causing a humanitarian disaster which displaced millions of people. The 2014 coup against the elected government of Ukraine has turned into all out war. The sanctions targeting Russian gas and oil have raised prices all over the world and damaged European economies more than any others. The ruble has risen in value and the euro has declined. Even hegemons don’t always get their way.

While Biden mouthed platitudes and falsehoods at the United Nations, Russia’s foreign minister Sergei Lavrov met with representatives from China, Cuba, Eritrea, Serbia, Laos, Jordan, Nicaragua, Ethiopia, Algeria, Burkina Faso, India, Mali, Sudan, South Sudan, Equatorial Guinea, St. Vincent and the Grenadines, and Mexico among others. So much for Washington’s claims that Russia is an isolated pariah.

While Washington rails against Moscow, it continues to ignore UN votes to end sanctions against Cuba. This year Cuba will again submit a resolution calling on the U.S. to end its trade embargo. During the 2021 vote only the U.S. and Israel voted no. The next vote will have the same result, and reveal Biden’s words, “The United States will always promote human rights and the values enshrined in the U.N. Charter in our own country and around the world,” as a sham.

The United Nations is in serious need of reform. It is part of the Core Group which chooses presidents for Haiti and acts against the will of its people. Biden mentioned Haiti in passing and called for an end to gang violence. But that violence is the direct result of U.S. interventions there. The 75-year history of allowing the permanent Security Council members to dictate to the rest of the world should change. But who should do the changing? Not the U.S., which always has ulterior motives and dirty hands.

Biden did make one valid statement. “Because if nations can pursue their imperial ambitions without consequences, then we put at risk everything this very institution stands for.” It is unfortunate that the U.S. ignores the consequences of its own actions.

*

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Margaret Kimberley is the author of Prejudential: Black America and the Presidents. You can support her on Patreon and also find her work on Twitter  and on Telegram.  She can be reached via email at Margaret.Kimberley(at)BlackAgendaReport.com.

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***

I address this to a friend who worked designing manned and unmanned underwater vehicles – UUVs. 

He left that firm and might no longer be in that field.  I know he was unhappy because there were, later on, contracts with the US Department of Defence.  He might have some insight into the Luciferan’s interest in our wonderful oceans which cover 5/6s of our globe.

I know in addition that the ‘hegemon’, a direct descendant of Nazi Germany, is active in the Caribbean Sea. ‘Fibre optic cable laying’ might be a front.  But consider the mineral wealth of Venezuela and the usual US attempts to subvert, subordinate and capture it, as with most other South and Central American nations.

So blatant – like the US navy stopping 6 Iranian oil tankers about a year ago on their way to Venezuela.  The crude was pumped into 2 vast US oil tankers that then went to lie off Houston.  I followed them on one of the websites tracking marine traffic. You can bet the oil was later refined there to pour down the thirsty US gullet.  And it is said is it not, that this vast and rich country of Venezuela has the largest reserves of oil.

Fact: World War III is being fought and it started before that obvious part of the war – COVID-19 and ”’vaccination”’ – global, as advised by Gates and the paramount psychopath and war criminal Blair, et. al.

Read this and this.

For truth and for ‘no mother and her child should be in the least harmed anywhere in our still beautiful world’. Millions endangered.

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The Context

Read this. Do not forget that ‘nuclear first strike’ with ”’tactical’, cement penetrating nuclear weapons is official US ‘policy’.  And these can be ‘deployed’ in ‘theatre’ by commanders in the field.  These weapons are on US surface and sub vessels, and no doubt the ‘greatest ally’ has these too.

The word is fascism. My definition – the subjugation of the individual’s will and freedom by an overweening state. Humanity withers, freedom of speech is stifled and the soul dies. Self-preservation becomes a dominant drive.

*

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***

Russian President Vladimir Putin, by signing a new decree on legal recognition of four regions’ independence which are now joining the Russian Federation. The decree, made available on the database, was published on the official Internet portal for legal information on September 30.

On September 23-27, the republics of Donetsk and Lugansk (DPR and LPR) as well as the Kherson region and the liberated territories of the Zaporozhye Region, held referendum to join Russia.

In all of these regions, the overwhelming majority of voters favoured becoming part of the Russian Federation. These regions have been a thorny question these past several years, and with the accusation against Kiev for committing the highest level of human rights including intimidation, discrimination and maltreatment of Russian-speaking population in the Eastern Ukraine.

“In accordance with the generally recognized principles and norms of international law, recognizing and confirming the principle of equal rights and self-determination of peoples enshrined in the United Nations Charter, and taking into consideration the will expressed by the people of the Kherson region at the referendum held on September 27, I hereby order that the state sovereignty and independence of the Kherson region be recognized,” the president’s decree on recognition of the Kherson region said.

Russia has recognized the independence of the Kherson and Zaporizhzhya regions in line with decrees signed. A similar document signed by Putin “recognizes the state sovereignty and independence of the Zaporizhzhya region.” Accordingly, a colourful ceremony of signing accession treaties with four new territories – the people’s republics of Donetsk and Lugansk (DPR and LPR), as well as the Zaporozhye and Kherson regions – was held in the Kremlin.

In all of these regions, Donetsk and the Lugansk People’s Republics as well as the Zaporozhye and the Kherson regions, with the results of the referendum showing a very high turnout, the overwhelming majority of voters favoured becoming part of the Russian Federation. The referendum ballots in all the four regions have been considered valid. The heads of the regions officially ask Russia’s leadership to admit them into the Russian Federation.

Below are the results of the referendum: Voting Turnout

• In the Kherson Region, 571,001 people took part, or 78.86% of the population.
• In the Zaporozhye Region, 541,093 people cast their ballots, or 85.4% of the total number of voters
• The LPR reported a turnout rate of 94.15%, with 1,662,607 people having cast their votes.
• Turnout in the DPR where 2,131,207 people participated in the voting hit 97.51%.

Final results

• In the Kherson Region, 87.05% of those who voted opted for joining Russia (497,051 people), with 12.05% (68,832) opposing the idea.
• In the Zaporozhye Region, the initiative was supported by 93.11% of voters (430,268 people).
• In the DPR, 99.23% of the electorate said they would favor uniting with Russia.
• In the LPR, 98.42% of the participants in the referendum voted for joining Russia.

What’s next? The United States and the entire European Union, as well as Germany, Canada and Japan have already stated they will not recognize the results of the vote. The United States has prepared a draft resolution asking the UN Security Council to condemn the referendum.

UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres pointed out that the UN position on the referendum as unequivocal and slammed, in unreserved terms, the accession unto the Russian Federation.

Secretary General Antonio Guterres said:

“Any decision to proceed with the annexation of Donetsk, Lugansk, Kherson and Zaporozhye regions of Ukraine would have no legal value and deserves to be condemned.”

“The UN Charter is clear,” Guterres stressed, “Any annexation of a State’s territory by another State resulting from the threat or use of force is a violation of the Principles of the UN Charter and international law. The United Nations General Assembly is equally clear.”

He further stressed that

“Russian Federation, as one of the five permanent members of the Security Council, shares a particular responsibility to respect the Charter. It cannot be reconciled with the international legal framework. It stands against everything the international community is meant to stand for. It flouts the Purposes and Principles of the United Nations. It is a dangerous escalation. It has no place in the modern world. It must not be accepted.”

Guterres pointed out that the UN position on the referendum is unequivocal.

“We are fully committed to the sovereignty, unity, independence and territorial integrity of Ukraine, within its internationally recognized borders, in accordance with the relevant UN resolution. I want to underscore that the so-called referenda in the occupied regions were conducted during active armed conflict, in areas under Russian occupation, and outside Ukraine’s legal and constitutional framework. They cannot be called a genuine expression of the popular will.”

“Any decision by Russia to go forward will further jeopardize the prospects for peace. It will prolong the dramatic impacts on the global economy, especially developing countries and hinder our ability to deliver life-saving aid across Ukraine and beyond. It is high time to step back from the brink. Now more than ever, we must work together to end this devastating and senseless war and uphold the UN Charter and international law,” Guterres concluded.

That however, the Russian Permanent Mission to the United Nations said Guterres remained silent about the Kiev government’s actions in Donbass after 2014, and also about the situation around Kosovo but stopped short of condemning the US and NATO’s occupation of a part of the Syrian territory.

“Against this backdrop such a direct assault by the UN Secretary-General on the fundamental right of self-determination expressed by the population of DPR, LPR, Kherson and Zaporozhie regions represents yet another example of double standards,” Russian diplomats said in an official statement September 29.

“We regret that instead of acting as foreseen by the UN Charter, the Secretary General chose to be instrumental in influencing the position of UN Member States ahead of the anticipated initiation by the Western countries of the discussion of the issue of referenda in the GA,” the statement reads.

In addition to above, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said at her weekly media briefing that

“The (Ukrainian President Vladimir) Zelensky regime and, of course, most importantly, its American handlers do not want to accept reality, do not want to see this side of international law. On the contrary, they cynically question the procedure of the plebiscite and its results, considering them null and void.”

Zakharova stressed that the referendum in the DPR, the LPR, as well as in the Kherson and Zaporozhye regions were held “in full compliance with the norms and principles of international law and did not contradict international practice, and that they were legal.”

“Everything is questioned: both the form and the essence. They call names, stick labels, and do everything in their power to show their significance and rightness. Of course, they resort to the image of democracy, which is sacred for them,” the spokeswoman continued.

“These are statements of those who for many years have been flagrantly violating human rights everywhere: in Ukraine, in Western countries, on the territories of the occupied countries in different parts of the world. This is said by those who contributed to the transformation of the young Ukrainian state into a totalitarian, aggressive, neo-Nazi state. And today it encourages with money and arms orders to shell peaceful cities with artillery,” she added.

Russian experts have expressed their views, especially after the referendum on joining Russia ended with positive results. The local Russian Vedomosti wrote that throughout Russia, most people support the entry of the new territories.

“Over 70% of those surveyed are ready to support their accession,” All-Russia Public Opinion Research Center Director General Valery Fyodorov told the paper. “It’s even higher than support for the special military operation, which has remained at about 70%,” he added.

As for the international recognition of the plebiscites, Russian International Affairs Council Director General, Andrey Kortunov, told widely circulated Russia’s Izvestia that “there is the precedent of Crimea’s accession, which, as we all know, almost no one recognized, including Russia’s partners in the CIS, China and the vast majority of nations in the global South.”

“The sanctions that will be imposed on these territories and their population are crucial. Another important thing is that after the areas join Russia, the possibility of political dialogue with Kiev will be hard to imagine. Clearly, the Ukrainian authorities will be reluctant to hold peace talks with Russia on such terms as it would be tantamount to political suicide. These are the consequences that Moscow will have to take into account,” the expert added.

“The main goal of the referendum is to assure the people that Russia will protect these territories and they will not change hands,” Leading Researcher at the Russian Academy of Sciences’ Institute of World Economy and International Relations, Dmitry Trenin, noted. “It is the military’s job to fix the line of contact, it’s not done through political measures. The military will be far more motivated to defend the sovereign territory of Russia than some Ukrainian region that Russia controls,” the analyst emphasized.

In his sparkling speech in the Kremlin, Putin said Moscow would protect the newly incorporated regions by “all available means” and vehemently insisted that the question of handing them back would never be discussed and renegotiated. He clearly portrayed the special military operation and the snapshot referendum as part of efforts to reclaim Russia’s great power status and, on the other hand, to counter global Western domination. “History has called us to a battlefield to fight for our people, for the grand historic Russia, for future generations,” he said.

With Ukraine vowing to take back all occupied territory and Russia pledging to defend its gains, threatening nuclear-weapon use and mobilizing an additional 300,000 troops despite protests, the two nations are on an increasingly escalatory collision course.

Over these years Putin, concerned about security risks and lack of security guarantees from the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) observing its promise of not expanding further eastward, embarked on “special military operation” ultimately aims at “demilitarization and denazification” of the former Soviet republic of Ukraine on February 24 after both Federation Council and the State Duma (legislative chambers) approved and gave the greenlight for this operation.

As a new world is awakening to the worsening situation, global leaders still believe that all countries have to respect and operate within the confines of international law. That all countries must be guided profoundly by the principles of non-interference in internal matters, respect for national sovereignty and territorial integrity. Russia is currently experiencing a raft of sanctions imposed by the United States and Canada, European Union, Japan, Australia, New Zealand and a host of other countries.

*

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Kester Kenn Klomegah, who worked previously with Inter Press Service (IPS), is now a regular contributor to Global Research. As a versatile researcher, he believes that everyone deserves equal access to quality and trustworthy media reports.

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***

Every psychopath is well practiced at lying; anyone who tolerates that person’s lying is not only encouraging psychopathy but is, oneself, psychopathically unconcerned about the public’s welfare, because any such encouragement will, itself, facilitate the further spreading of lies and deception of the public.

This is how psychopathy, which is a merely personal disease, becomes spread and pandemic, thereby producing a dysfunctional society, widespread deception. It happens not only due to the presence of psychopaths, but also due to their passive assisters, who fail to call-out the lie and the liar and to expose them publicly so as to assist in penalizing them, instead of to assist the lies and liars, for those to spread and thrive.

Being a member of a society is to have both rights and obligations within it. Silence in the face of lies that one knows are false is a failure of such an obligation: an obligation to avoid willingly spreading a social disease — the disease of spreading those lies and that falsehood, to a rampantly and ever-increasingly contaminated public.

This was how it came to be that in 2003 the U.S. & UK Governments busted and neutered the U.N. by invading and occupying Iraq solely upon the basis of lies, and never prosecuted for having done so. Neither the Governments (their leaders) were prosecuted for it, nor the news-media (their controlling owners) that were controlled by the same group of billionaires (America’s billionaires, of both political Parties), were prosecuted for these international-war crimes.

None of those leaders and their propaganda-organizations (or news-media — their owners) were prosecuted for having done, or assisted in doing, this. That clear fact has established a precedent which has been followed, ever since, by constant international lying by those same two psychopathic regimes, and now it is heading toward production of a World War III on the same basis, of constant Governmental and news-media lying and spreading of lies.

It is for “regime-change in Russia” instead of for “regime-change in Iraq,” but, just like before, the regimes that desperately NEED to be “changed” are the perpetrators of this enormous fraud, the ones that are in the United States and in the United Kingdom. The United Nations is sadly incapable of doing this — it has been virtually nullified ever since 2003 — but it must be done, before the end-result will annihilate us all.

The psychopathy of America’s leadership is now posing a mortal danger not only to the residents in one nation (Iraq; or, say, in Syria — there are so many other examples) but to the residents in all nations (WW III); and, if it is not stopped now, then the world will be stopped, and soon. This would be the extreme end of the pandemic of lies that go not only unpunished but hidden from the public, instead of exposed to the public (such as is being done here).

If this pandemic — which is vastly worse even than the covid-19 disease or any other merely physical pandemic in all of human history — does not now get exposed in the full light of honest public disclosure (presumably by means of news-media that are NOT owned by U.S.-and-allied billionaires), then what hope will there be, for our children, and for their grandchildren (if this pandemic of evil will not have expired the world before then)? It is an obligation not ONLY to the wider public, but even to one’s own descendants (if any), because it is an obligation to — and on behalf of — everyone. This hiding of guilt needs to stop now, because later might be too late. So: please send the URL of this article to everyone you know, and to as many people as possible whom you don’t know, because it concerns everyone.

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Investigative historian Eric Zuesse’s new book, AMERICA’S EMPIRE OF EVIL: Hitler’s Posthumous Victory, and Why the Social Sciences Need to Change, is about how America took over the world after World War II in order to enslave it to U.S.-and-allied billionaires. Their cartels extract the world’s wealth by control of not only their ‘news’ media but the social ‘sciences’ — duping the public. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

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After several months of Russian “special operations” in Ukraine, it might be worth asking whether the U.S.-Russia proxy war is headed toward regime-change in Moscow, or at least efforts at regime change. For Washington, after Serbia, Iraq, Libya, Ukraine, and all the others, Russia must surely represent the ultimate, perhaps final, such operation.  In fact, since the very first days of the Bolshevik Revolution precisely one century ago, American ruling elites have savored the idea of turning the great Russian expanse into a vassal state allowing exploitation of its unparalleled natural resources.

Joe Biden, or those running his White House, is no doubt poised to take matters to more dangerous levels, seemingly indifferent to any prospects of nuclear catastrophe. After sending tens of billions of dollars worth of high-tech weapons to the Kiev regime, Biden, during his visit to Poland, would say: “For God’s sake, this man [Vladimir Putin] cannot remain in power.”  

There can be little ambiguity: for years the U.S. goal has been to weaken, isolate, and eventually destroy the Putin government.  What Stalin and his successors desperately feared for decades – Western capitalist encirclement and strangulation – seems finally (and menacingly) to have arrived.

Washington has been waging nonstop war against Russia since Putin ascended to power more than two decades ago, along multiple fronts:

• Intervention by means of dispersed anti-Moscow groups – NGOs, CIA covert operations, George Soros “pro-democracy” organizations, propaganda outlets such as Radio Free Europe – throughout Ukraine and other former Soviet republics, going back to the late 1980s.
• Continuous push eastward of NATO military forces toward Russian borders since the early 1990s. This expansion has been accompanied by the proliferation of new member states across eastern Europe.
• The 2014 “Maidan” coup in Kiev, orchestrated by the Obama-Biden gang working with neocons, friendly NGOs, and Ukrainian neo-fascist forces.  The Russian population of Donbass and elsewhere would be targeted politically, economically, and militarily across the succeeding eight years.
• Ongoing NATO military operations, including establishment of new military installations close to Russian territory, boosting regional nuclear capabilities, arms shipments to NATO members, and continuous provocative armed-forces maneuvers.

Harsh economic sanctions imposed by the U.S. and European Union on the Russian Federation — flagrant acts of war explicitly intended to destroy a nation’s financial system  and, ultimately, its general economy.

• Aggressive efforts by the U.S. and other Western powers to bring Ukraine into both NATO and the European Union – that is, organizations strongly hostile to Russian interests and ongoing threats to the country’s national sovereignty.
• To this could be added the manufactured tremors of Russiagate – several years of phony allegations by the Washington and media elites of Russian collusion with Donald Trump to rig the outcome of the 2016 presidential election. These charges, the media hysteria, and series of investigations into Russian “interference” in American politics worked to fan the flames of Russophobia.

The crackpot idea of war against Russia has managed to achieve elite consensus in the U.S., its destructive passion most visible among those considered leftists and progressives.

As Biden recently proposed sending more billions to expand proxy warfare in Ukraine, Congressional liberals and progressives eagerly added to the amount.   Not only Bernie Sanders and the Squad, but every member of the Congressional Progressive Caucus joined the warmongering crowd.  American progressives, at present no different than garden-variety neocons, appear scarcely troubled by specter of a ”nuclear exchange” with the Russians.

As noted, the idea of U.S-engineered regime change in Moscow has a long history, starting with president Woodrow Wilson’s military intervention at the end of World War I.  All told, more than 200,000 “allied” forces invaded Russia in 2018, including an estimated 15,000 American troops sent to the vicinity of Vladivostok and Archangelsk in the Far East.  This had become known as the peace-loving “Polar Bear Expedition”.    The erudite, cosmopolitan, liberal Wilson had just sent U.S. armed forces to join the pointless European slaughter of World War I – after repeatedly invading Mexico, Haiti, and Central America.   The Polar Bear efforts found a country in the midst of military defeat, famine, disease, and poverty, yet those efforts to sabotage the new Bolshevik regime ended in miserable failure.

Once Soviet control was established, regime change would be unthinkable.  By the 1940s, moreover, Washington and its allies urgently needed the Red Army to help defeat the Germans in World War II.

With the 1991 Soviet collapse, matters quickly and dramatically changed.  President Bill Clinton, another enlightened liberal Democrat, was ready to pick up where Wilson’s scheme ran aground.   The embryonic, shaky Russian government was easy pickings, as U.S. elites and their Ivy League “advisers” intervened quickly to reduce the Federation to a dependent state open to unfettered resource exploitation.   They found a compliant ruler – the grossly incompetent Boris Yeltsin – to serve these imperial objectives.

The Clintonites pursued the Wilsonian dream with special fervor.  “Shock Therapy” (more shock than therapy) transformed the Russian economy into a rampant corporate oligarchy now open to Western exploitation.   The U.S. rigged the 1996 Russian elections to favor the extremely unpopular Yeltsin.   Meanwhile, Clinton worked indefatigably to dismember Yugoslavia through a mixture of economic sanctions, political maneuvers, and military aggression, thus sweeping away the last vestiges of independent power in Europe while paving the way toward further NATO expansion.   It turned out that the Democrats’ plan to create a vassal state was finally halted with Putin’s rise to power in 2000.   For this, of course, Putin earned the U.S. designation of “another Hitler”.

Putin’s revitalized Russia soon confounded Western efforts to achieve hegemony over the larger Eurasian region.  Emergent neocons and old-fashioned imperialists came together in fierce opposition to Putin, now the object of intensified Russophobia.  The main problem with Putin (leaving aside his reputed despotic rule) was his strong dedication to Russian sovereignty against Western attacks.

While neocons at that time were famously obsessed with the Middle East, others turned to resource wars driven by prospective energy shortages.  None other than Zbigniew Brzezinski, once president Jimmy Carter’s foreign-policy guru, laid out an imperial strategy that would ultimately lead to the gates of Moscow, in his 1997 manifesto titled The Grand Chessboard.  Brzezinski believed the noble superpower was entitled to whatever natural resources it could access in Eurasia, a territory stretching from Europe to the borders of China.  Here it was determined that oil, gas, mineral, and other reserves dwarfed those accessible anywhere else on the planet.  Russia itself would be a special prize, just as Wilson in his ill-defined global liberalism had been the first to recognize.

Ever the crusader for U.S. global supremacy, Brzezinski pointed out that “Eurasia was the globe’s central arena.  Hence, what happens to the distribution of power in the Eurasian region will be of decisive importance to America’s global primacy and to America’s historical legacy.”  With a foothold there, moreover, Washington would secure enough leverage to simultaneously neutralize Russia, China, and Iran, Brzezinski adding: “A power that dominates Eurasia would control two of the world’s three most economically productive regions.  A mere glance at a map also suggests that control over Eurasia would almost automatically entail African subordination, rendering the Western Hemisphere peripheral.”

Brzezinski looked covetously toward U.S. penetration of the old Soviet republics, starting with Ukraine and then Georgia, Armenia, Kazakhstan, and Uzbekistan.  By 1997, of course, the Balkans had been taken well along the path of colonization.  The overall main priority was to “prevent the emergence of any hostile force that could seek to challenge American primacy.”  Brzezinski concluded, ominously: “America is not only the first, as well as the only truly global superpower, but it is likely to be the very last.”    In U.S. geopolitical strategy, it follows, Russia was destined to be a vassal state fully open to the plunder of its rich natural resources.

Later neocon statements would ritually echo Brzezinski’s predatory globalism that called for unchallengeable U.S. world domination, always shrouded in sanctimonious pretenses of bringing democracy to backward cultures.    Woodrow Wilson had furnished the template: “make the world safe for democracy”.    Russia, with its enormous territory and super-abundance of energy and mineral resources, would be the ultimate conquest.

Brzezinski’s post-Soviet world has in fact become one of grand imperial delusions.  Those at the summits of Washington power did actually believe the U.S. would have the power to do what it wanted, when it wanted — despite nettlesome constraints here and there (usually in the form of “evil dictators” like Putin).  They could exploit resources, labor, and markets to the maximum extent.  They could bring unspeakable violence to societies with impunity, with little fear of serious blowback.  Violations of U.N. statutes, global treaties, and international law would pose no problem.   This outlook would define the post-Soviet “American consensus” and nowadays underpins all the hyper-ventilating Russophobia, but in an emergent multipolar world it serves nothing but geopolitical disaster.

Fortunately, Putin and the Russians have little interest in being reduced to a hapless puppet state – and they have plenty of nuclear weapons to back up their resolve.   Their resources will not be the object of Western larceny.   Thanks to the Ukraine war and all the counter-productive Western sanctions, Moscow is appropriately turning eastward, toward Iran, China, and India, toward the Shanghai Cooperative Organization, in effect checkmating U.S. and NATO geostrategic schemes.  Still, the specter of escalating military conflict between two nuclear powers – in the absence of strong counter-forces on both sides – can hardly be comforting to a world in turmoil.

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Carl Boggs, PhD in Soviet Studies, has written extensively on such topics as twentieth-century Marxism, social movements, ecological politics, and United States military interventions.  His latest book is Fugitive Politics (Routledge, 2022). He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

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Three years ago, at the Summit on Sustainable Development Goals on September 25, 2019, the Nicaraguan representation observed:

“In order to comply with the implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals, it is necessary to establish a new economic and financial model, and create new production and consumption patterns consistent with sustainable lifestyles and friendly to Nature … the lack of resources and the slow pace of the implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in general are worrying, running the risk of not fully complying, globally, with all the goals set.”

With that intervention Nicaragua indicated a fundamental reality, namely, that for the majority world the main obstacle to its development is the bad faith of the United States and its allies, who are never going to agree to give up  their historical advantages built on  colonial conquest, genocide and slavery. Another clear example of this reality was presented last week when the Russian Federation offered to donate 300,000 tons of fertilizers to the countries most in need, on ships currently stalled in European ports due to financial sanctions affecting insurance and shipping companies. Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov explained at the UN General Assembly,

“We have been reminding the European Union for weeks that there are 300,000 tons of fertilizers being held at European ports, and we have long offered to transfer them free of charge to needy countries in Africa, but the EU has not responded.”

This is yet one more shameful example of the West’s endless war against the majority world in which the system of wealth accumulation for the benefit of an elite obsessed with dominating the world collides against a multilateral vision and practical solidarity focused on the development of the human person in a multipolar world. So when Nicaragua called in 2019 for a new economic and financial model, it was preaching an imperative which is currently being imposed with great urgency. This clash between different visions of development has always characterized international relations. Perhaps its most elaborate expression was the Declaration on the Right to Development adopted in December 1986 with 146 votes. The United States voted against.

Currently that historic declaration exists mostly as a ghost haunting the bad faith of the world’s rich countries which have done everything possible to bury it because it set very inconvenient precedents for the United States and its allies. The Right to Development defends the principle of the self-determination of peoples, requires decisive interventions on the part of national governments and its obligations are binding on all actors who may affect human rights by their actions or omissions. Clearly, these characteristics make the Declaration completely unacceptable to Western elites.

The United States and its allies constantly act to deny the right to self-determination of peoples. They have never accepted prioritizing the human person over the accumulation of wealth. Western capitalism seeks to minimize the role of the national state, reducing the public sector to a minimum. The Declaration’s recognition of the large number of actors affecting human rights challenges the Western biased interpretation that only States can violate human rights, another way of undermining the importance of social and economic rights.

The Declaration requires that developed countries provide effective cooperation to impoverished countries and that all States promote international peace and security. It also insists that States protect their populations from foreign interference and threats of aggression, something particularly relevant in the case of Nicaragua. The Declaration not only affirms the right of Peoples to self-determination but also to sovereignty over their natural wealth and resources. It stipulates the right and duty of States to formulate national human development policies promoting the constant improvement of their populations based on active participation and an equitable distribution of resources.

It is important to remember these principles in the current international and regional context because the 1986 Declaration on Development in effect established the norms of the multipolar world that is emerging now. And this largely explains why the elites of the United States and the governments they buy every four years are so obsessed with the destruction of the Sandinista government in Nicaragua. Because only with the governments of the Sandinista National Liberation Front has Nicaragua had successful National Human Development Plans.

The plans have been implemented from 2007 to 2011, from 2012 to 2016 and, despite the multi-million losses caused by the failed coup attempt, from 2017 to 2021. Now in the period 2022 to 2026 the current National Plan for the Fight against Poverty and for Human Development is being implemented. These plans have complied in an exemplary manner with the principles embodied in the Declaration on the Right to Development of 1986, and have been successfully implemented in a very adverse regional and international context. The mere fact of having a National Human Development Plan is deeply revolutionary because its implementation committed to an unalterable focus on the human person represents a radical challenge to the ideological status quo of capitalism in its neoliberal phase.

It is easy to list the social and economic achievements of Nicaragua led by President Comandante Daniel Ortgea and Vice President Compañera Rosario, especially in relation to poverty reduction. These are achievements recognized by various international institutions, from the World Bank to the Pan American Health Organization, UNESCO and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO). The focus of human development policies on poverty reduction has consisted of a broad democratization of the economy so as to integrate, as actively productive subjects, large sectors of the population previously effectively excluded from  participation in the economy, especially women.

A natural and logical progression can be seen in Nicaragua’s National Human Development Plans. Poverty reduction through economic democratization requires the expansion and modernization of road and port infrastructure, electricity, water and sanitation, and also the guarantee of universal access to quality health services and education. But this is also a revolutionary practice in the context of the dominance of international speculative financial capitalism. The massive investment in public infrastructure to promote and facilitate national production and productivity contradicts the logic of financial extraction of neoliberal capitalism that has destroyed productive sustainability in the United States and elsewhere.

The human development policies in Nicaragua effectively reaffirm the revolutionary value of the principles of the Declaration on the Right to Development, especially in the face of the virulent reactionary and xenophobic policies of the United States and the European Union. The cynical elites that dominate those countries have never intended to promote the development of their historical victims. Nicaragua offers a model example to the countries of the region of how a small country, historically exploited and impoverished, can guarantee unprecedented levels of human development to its population when it has a government motivated by genuine revolutionary commitment.

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This article was originally published on Tortilla con Sal, translated from Spanish.

Stephen Sefton, renowned author and political analyst based in northern Nicaragua, is actively involved in community development work focussing on education and health care. He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG).

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The three leaks that were discovered on Monday at the Nord Stream 1 and Nord Stream 2 gas pipelines connecting Russia with Germany — one after another within hours of each other in the exclusive economic zones of Sweden and Denmark — were caused by blasts. Swedish Foreign Minister Ann Linde tweeted that the blasts “are consequences of detonations, probably caused by sabotage. We continue to collect information and do not rule out any cause, actor or motive.”

Swedish Prime Minister Magdalena Andersson shared the same opinion and described the event as “a matter of sabotage,” adding that no version is currently being ruled out. Prime Minister of Denmark Mette Frederiksen has since been quoted by Reuters as saying,

“It is now the clear assessment by authorities that these are deliberate actions. It was not an accident.”

Earlier, the Danish authorities issued a statement that the pipeline incidents were not caused by an accident. 

Meanwhile, Radoslaw Sikorski, a European Parliament member and a former Polish foreign minister, has thanked the US for damaging the Nord Stream pipelines.

“A small thing, but so much joy,” Sikorski tweeted, adding, “Thank you, USA.” 

Sikorski cited US President Joe Biden who had threatened on February 7 before Russia began its military operation in Ukraine, that if Moscow acted against Kiev, “there will no longer be a Nord Stream 2. We will bring an end to it.” When a journalist asked Biden to clarify, he said enigmatically: “I promise you, we will be able to do that.”

Indeed, there are reports that two groups of US warships were sighted recently within 30 kms of the site of the incident where Nord Stream was attacked.

According to Sikorski, the damage to the Nord Stream narrowed Russia’s room for maneuver, since Moscow will now have to talk to the countries controlling the Druzhba and Yamal gas pipelines — Ukraine and Poland respectively —  to resume gas supplies to Europe. 

The German security services are of the opinion that only a state actor could have damaged the undersea pipeline, suggesting “divers or a mini-submarine” could have installed mines or explosives on the pipeline. When asked to comment, the US Secretary of State Antony Blinken was non-committal saying “these are initial reports (of sabotage) and we haven’t confirmed them yet. But if it is confirmed, that’s clearly in no one’s interest.”

From the US perspective, as Blinken put it, while there are “clear challenges in the months ahead” in terms of Europe’s energy supply, “there is also a very significant opportunity to do two things.” The first is to “finally end the dependence of Europe on Russian energy” and the second is to “accelerate the transition to renewables” so the West can address the “climate challenge.” 

Clearly, for Washington, going ahead, the priority is to impose a price cap on Russian oil exports and “surge” supplies of LNG to Europe at a juncture when the US became the world’s largest LNG exporter this year, partly due to the embargo against Russia imposed by the West. And the price cap decision needs EU endorsement. 

The geopolitical ramifications are self-evident. The attack on the Nord Stream took place even as the referendum got under way on Monday in the Donbass, Zaporozhye and Kherson on these regions’ accession to Russia. On Sunday, Biden had issued a strong statement saying the US will never recognise Ukrainian territory as anything other than part of Ukraine and that “Russia’s referenda are a sham.”

The point is, as Sikorski pointed out, with Nord Stream lethally damaged, if Russia were to resume gas supply to Germany in the conceivable future, it can only be through the Soviet-era pipelines that run through Poland and Ukraine. But Warsaw and Kiev will not be in a mood to cooperate in the prevailing circumstances.

Principally, Russia loses whatever leverage it has over German policies at a juncture when a grave economic crisis looms ahead and there is growing demand to review Berlin’s decision against the commissioning of Nord Stream 2. Last week, large demonstrations took place in Germany calling for the commissioning of Nord Stream 2 to resolve energy shortage. 

As for the German leadership, it too no longer has an option to bite the bullet and seek resumption of Russian gas supplies (except by begging Poland and Ukraine to cooperate in the reopening of the Yamal and Druzhba pipelines.) On the other hand, Chancellor Scholz’s trip to the Gulf region (Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Qatar) last weekend seeking more oil supplies failed to produce the results he had hoped for. 

Saudi Arabia, which is aligned with Russia on regulating oil output, maintains an ambiguous position on the global stage as the West confronts Russia over total energy independence. In the UAE, Scholz achieved somewhat better results by signing an agreement on energy security, which provides for delivery of LNG before the end of 2022. 

From another perspective, the Nord Stream pipelines have been disabled at a defining moment in the Ukraine conflict when a lull is expected through the fall until December. Conceivably, this presents a small window of opportunity  for dialogue with Moscow. There are rumours that Scholz’s Gulf tour also aimed at seeking help from Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman who has excellent relations with Russian President Vladimir Putin. (Prince Salman recently got the prisoner exchange arranged recently between Moscow and Kiev where according to a report in the Wall Street Journal on Sept 23, the Russian oligarch and politician Roman Abramovich acted as intermediary.) 

The bottom line is, in any architecture for dialogue between Europe and Russia, the resumption of Russian energy supplies to ease the economic crisis in Europe would be a leitmotif. Therefore, whoever struck Nord Stream struck had a perfect sense of timing. This dastardly act is state-sponsored and it only highlights that there are powerful forces in the West who want the conflict to prolong and will go the whole hog, no matter what it takes, to smother any incipient stirrings that aspire for ceasefire and dialogue. 

Such a “deliberate act of sabotage” needed much advance planning. Unsurprisingly, the Kremlin says it is “is extremely concerned about the incident.” What has happened is of a piece with the Anglo-American sabotage of the Istanbul agreement between Kiev and Moscow in late March, which extended the war by five months. 

In the present case, the war lobby has removed the pontoon bridge and made sure that European countries have no means to retrace now to source Russian gas and salvage their economies. As the Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban remarked sarcastically, the American oil companies have become “war profiteers.” The US not only replaced the Russian energy supplier but is forcing the Europeans to pay 8-10 times the contracted price with Gazprom.

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The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is refusing to release the results of autopsies conducted on people who died after getting COVID-19 vaccines.

The FDA says it is barred from releasing medical files, but a drug safety advocate says that it could release the autopsies with personal information redacted.

The refusal was issued to The Epoch Times, which submitted a Freedom of Information Act for all autopsy reports obtained by the FDA concerning any deaths reported to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System following COVID-19 vaccination.

Reports are lodged with the system when a person experiences an adverse event, or a health issue, after receiving a vaccine. The FDA and other agencies are tasked with investigating the reports. Authorities request and review medical records to vet the reports, including autopsies.

The FDA declined to release any reports, even redacted copies.

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“Queen of Soul” cited in 270 pages of documents declassified by the FBI as they pursued Black revolutionary and communist influences in political and cultural life during the 1960s and 1970s

On August 16, 2018, Aretha Franklin, popularly known as the “Queen of Soul”, passed away at her home in Detroit, Michigan at the age of 76.

Born in Memphis, Tennessee on March 25, 1942, Aretha came to Detroit in 1946 with her parents, vocalist Mrs. Barbara Siggers Franklin and Rev. Clarence L. Franklin, a well-known minister who originated in the Delta region of Mississippi. Franklin became a minister while he was a teenager in Mississippi.

Rev. Franklin was recruited to come to Detroit from Buffalo, New York in late 1945 and in subsequent years built the New Bethel Baptist Church into an internationally recognized religious institution located on Hasting Street on the eastside of Detroit. The community surrounding the church was later targeted in the late 1950s and early 1960s for demolition in a so-called “urban renewal” project fostered by the then City of Detroit government and the Federal Highway Administration based in Washington, D.C.

By the early 1960s, Detroit was seething with discontent over the massive displacement of more than 100,000 people from the lower east side communities known as Paradise Valley and Black Bottom. Many small businesses, social clubs, churches and as well as thousands of homes were destroyed by the racist white city administration.

New Bethel relocated on Linwood Avenue in the Virginia Park District on the west side in the Spring of 1963. This was the same year of the massive “Walk to Freedom” down Woodward Avenue on June 23. The demonstration was the largest civil rights manifestation in the United States and would set the stage for the “March on Washington” just two months later. The Detroit Walk to Freedom was led by Rev. C. L. Franklin, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), Rev. Albert Cleage of the Central Congregational Church, also located in the Virginia Park District on Linwood Avenue, among other community and labor leaders.

Rev. Franklin was heavily involved with the SCLC as a board member and fundraiser. Dr. King and his organization, in which he served as president, were subjected to intense spying and disruption efforts by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) along with segregationist southern state governments bolstered by law-enforcement agencies and business interests.

Aretha Franklin often traveled with her father during the 1950s in his highly popular gospel tours throughout the South and other regions of the U.S. By 1960, Aretha had signed a recording contract with Columbia Records in New York City. Later in 1967, she switched to Atlantic Records where her first album catapulted the soul artist to the top of the charts.

FBI Sought to Document “Communist Infiltration of the SCLC”

Of the 270 pages of FBI files which were the topic of several newspaper articles in early September, a substantial portion of the documents focus on the SCLC and its activities during 1967-1969. Dr. King in early 1967, had come out solidly in opposition to the U.S. occupation of Vietnam and described the war as an “enemy of the poor.”

King’s position on Vietnam coincided with a radicalization of the SCLC and other organizations such as the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), the emergence of the Black Panther Party (BPP) and the Republic of New Africa (RNA), to name some of the most well-known groupings. In late July 1967, the city of Detroit erupted in a Black rebellion, the largest of such occurrences among all other municipalities during the period. New Bethel Church was located in the heart of the hardest hit areas of the rebellion, yet the building was unscathed by the violence.

A declassified FBI document from Atlanta, Georgia, dated August 1, 1967, noted that the SCLC was holding its annual convention in the city between the 14-17th of that month. This document reported that a weekly African American newspaper announced that “Carol Hoover (Special Fund-raising Officer, SCLC) is serving as coordinator of the convention. Sidney Poitier, popular actor, will be the featured speaker at the opening banquet August 14, 1967, and Aretha Franklin, popular entertainer, will also appear at the banquet.”

Dr. King was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee on April 4, 1968 after intervening in a citywide sanitation workers strike which had gone on for two months. Although the FBI and then Attorney General Ramsey Clark immediately claimed that King’s murder was not the result of a conspiracy, there is ample documented evidence that the SCLC co-founder and president was the subject an incessant surveillance and destabilization campaign by the federal government.

The SCLC convention was held in Memphis just four months after the assassination of King. On August 16, FBI sources in a document from the Special Agent-in-Charge to the Director of the FBI, under the topic “Communist Infiltration of the SCLC”, cited Rev. James Bevel, a SCLC staff member stating that:

“’The United States Government is involved in acts of genocide against the Vietnamese people in a systematic murder of non-whites.’ He stated that the United States is in Vietnam for the reason that it wants to gain physical control of Vietnam because the United States wants Vietnam’s rice and Tungsten. He described Vietnam as ‘the rice bowl of Asia’ and stated that the United States wanted to use Vietnam as a military base from which to dominate all Asia.”

In the first and second paragraphs of the confidential document dated August 21 on the 1968 SCLC convention in Memphis, it states:

“Enclosed herewith for the Bureau are 11 copies, Atlanta 4 copies, and for all listed offices 2 copies, an LHM (letterhead memorandum) and captioned as above. Copies are being furnished to the United States Attorney and United States Secret Service, Memphis, and to regional offices of Military Intelligence.”

This same report from an FBI source noted a performance by Aretha Franklin at the convention along with comments made by her father, Rev. C.L. Franklin. The document quoted Rev. Franklin as saying:

“England has degenerated from a first to a third-rate power. He stated that Communist China has evolved from a second-rate to a first-rate power and now has atomic energy.”

The Angela Davis Defense Campaign

On August 7, 1970, Jonathan Jackson, 17, the younger brother of Black Panther Party Field Marshal and prison writer, George L. Jackson, died in an ambush by Marin County Sheriff Deputies. Jackson had attempted to take a judge and several jurors hostage in an effort to free George from San Quentin prison. George Jackson was killed one year later on August 21, 1971 in another effort to win freedom.

Arms utilized in the operation on August 7, 1970 in California were connected to Angela Davis, a then-member of the Communist Party (CPUSA) who had been fired in 1969 from her teaching position at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) at the aegis of Governor Ronald Reagan due to her political affiliations. Davis had been a leader in the Soledad Brothers defense campaign and was immediately put on the FBI’s most wanted list. She was later captured in October 1970 spawning an international campaign demanding her release.

Aretha Franklin in 1970 offered to post bond for Angela Davis (Source: Abayomi Azikiwe)

In a December 1970 article in Jet magazine Aretha offered to post bail for Angela Davis. She was quoted as saying:

“Angela Davis must go free. I’ve been locked up… and I know you got to disturb the peace when you can’t get no peace. Jail is hell to be in. I’m going to see her free if there is any justice in our courts, not because I believe in communism, but because she’s a Black woman and she wants freedom for Black people. I have the money; I got it from Black people.”

Other documents released by the FBI point to Aretha being mentioned in meetings hosted by the Young Workers Liberation League (YWLL), a youth group connected to the CPUSA during the early 1970s. The meeting merely suggested her as a performer for fundraising activities aimed at building the Angela Davis defense campaign.

An August 26, 1971 document from the FBI office in Los Angeles suggests that Aretha Franklin was being solicited to perform at a function hosted by the Black Panther Party. Bobby Seale, the then Chairman of the BPP, was scheduled to oversee a free food distribution event where 5,000 needy families would be served. There is no evidence that Aretha appeared at the program.

An FBI memorandum dated May 29, 1973 from the Special Agent-in-Charge of New York to the Acting Director of the FBI said:

“Document C-173 is a letter from Harold R. Washington, requesting that she donate funds to the Women’s Bail Fund. This fund was used for bail of inmates at the Women’s House of Detention in NYC.”

However, the memorandum went on to say that:

“On 5/2/73 (redacted name) advised that to the best of his knowledge, Aretha Franklin has never been associated with the Black radical movement. In view of the fact there is no evidence of involvement by Miss Franklin in BLA (probably Black Liberation Army) activities and in view of her fame as a singer, it is felt that it would not be in the best interests of the Bureau to attempt to interview her.”

In the final document related to the counterintelligence program of the FBI which are present in the declassified files on Aretha Franklin, dated September 22, 1976, it reports:

“Captioned individual, not further identified may be identical with one female entertainer by the same name, who has not been the subject of an investigation conducted by this Bureau. Our files, however, reveal that ‘The Daily People’s World’, a West Coast communist newspaper, carried a story under March 6, 1972, dateline, citing star performers raised $38,000 at Los Angeles for the Committee to Free Angela Davis…. In September 1972, a confidential source abroad advised that Coordinating Council for the Liberation of Dominica (CCLD) was a Black extremist group bent on disturbing the tranquility of the island of Dominica and the CCLD may have established a base of operation in the New York City area. The same source identified persons associated or known to Roosevelt Bernard Douglas, a Black extremist of international note, and the CCLD. One of the persons named was ‘Aretha Franklin, publicly known entertainer.’”

This same document from 1976 also reports: “In April 1973, during a review of documents obtained concerning the Black Liberation Army (BLA), one document bore the address of ‘Mrs. Aretha Franklin’ in care of Queens Booking Agency, 1650 Broadway, Room 1410, New York, New York. The BLA was a quasi-military group composed of small guerrilla units employing the tactics of urban guerrilla warfare against the established order with a view toward achieving revolutionary change in America. The significance of association of Franklin into the BLA is not known to this Bureau.”

In reviewing these documents one comes away with the feeling that there are additional entries which may have remained classified by the FBI. Other documents deal with suspicious letters sent to Aretha Franklin between 1968 and 1979 which came to the attention of the FBI through her managers and attorneys.

The last section of the declassified documents dwelled extensively on a copyright infringement investigation which led to an FBI raid on a private individual in Ohio. This investigation was initiated by a Detroit-based law firm which was handling Aretha Franklin’s affairs between 2005-2007. However, the FBI did not pursue the prosecution of the individual who admitted to unlawfully reproducing Franklin’s music and videos.

These documents do shed light on the extensive level of surveillance and destabilization launched by the U.S. government against the Civil Rights, Black Power and Left movements of the 1960s and 1970s. With the FBI being the chief law-enforcement agency in the country, this reveals that the state has never fully accepted the right of African American people to full emancipation and self-determination.

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Abayomi Azikiwe is the editor of the Pan-African News Wire. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

Featured image: Aretha Franklin, Rev. C.L. Franklin and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in Detroit, Feb. 16, 1968 (Source: Abayomi Azikiwe)

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***

There are high ranking individuals within Colleges of Physicians and Surgeons across Canada, who weaponize these organizations against the lawful positions of ethical doctors. The victims and degrees of harm caused by their actions, goes far beyond the severe violation of our best doctors.

They have violated the entire population; they have caused massive suffering, death and disease, by unlawfully enforcing both the denial of proper covid treatment; and the deception, coercion, and cover-up of the misrepresented genetic injections that continue killing and maiming Canadians across this country. Colleges of Physicians and Surgeons in Canada unlawfully target any physician who treats covid infections with safe, cheap and effective medication.

They target any physician who writes an exemption for any man, woman, or child to be spared from the forced essentially bioweapon injections. They target any physician who shares any tidbit of truthful covid information, like “These injections are genetic experiments, and they are dangerous”. The Colleges of Physicians and Surgeons across Canada demand that physicians face professional and financial destruction if they do not submit and participate in a mass crime against humanity.

Please see the video below from Canadian Rights Watch. It includes Dr Peter McCullough, Dr Judy Mikovits, Dr Crystal Luchkiw, Dr William Makis, Dr Akbar Khan, and lawyers Michael Alexander and Leslie Smith.

If you only have ten minutes, start with Canadian cancer specialist and ground breaking cancer researcher Dr Makis. His ten minute testimonial starts at 19:00 and ends at 29:00. Dr Makis story shows how corrupt and criminal these organization were even before they started their current devote role in the gross violence that is the covid crimes against humanity.

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***

Since the Iranian revolution in 1979, the ruling clerics have strictly enforced the Islamic hijab on women in Iran. The clerics require women above puberty age to wear headscarves and avoid wearing tight clothing.

On September 13, 2022, Mahsa Amini, a 22-years-old woman, was arrested by Morality Police (Gashte Ershad) presumably for not having proper Islamic attire. Mahsa, who lived in the city of Saqqez in the province of Kurdistan, had come to Tehran with her family.

Three days later, Mahsa who had gone to comma under suspicious circumstances while in police custody, was confirmed dead in a hospital. Her death has sparked wide protests against the Islamic regime across many cities in Iran. A series of demonstrations began on September 16 in the streets and universities in major cities in Iran and is ongoing.

The protests did not have any leaders. The protesters chanted, “mullahs must be lost,” and “death to the dictator.” Women in many cities protested by setting their headscarves on fire and cutting their hair in public. As of September 26, 2022, at least 40 persons had been killed. The protests are the largest since the protests over the increasing price of gasoline in November 2019, which were quelled by security forces and caused 1500 deaths, according to Reuters.

The protesters targeted the Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, and the Islamic regime as a whole. Khamenei has been in the hot seat since 2021 when he engineered the presidential election to make his protégé Ebrahim Raisi president. In mid-September, Khamenei canceled all his meetings and public appearance due to illness as was reported by New York Times. He has contemplated for some time placing his son Mojtaba Khamenei as his successor, but Mojtaba is not favored by the people of Iran. The regime has tried to promote its ideology by incorporating religious and superstitious ideas into the schools’ curricula to indoctrinate students. This has led to wide criticism from teachers. Furthermore, the regime subsidizes pilgrimage to Mecca and Shia imams’ shrines in Iraq to fortify its Shi’a ideology throughout the region. This year the regime supported millions of Iranians to travel to Karbala to observe September 17, the 40-days anniversary (Arbaeen) 0f the death of Hossein ibn Ali, the Prophet Mohammad’s grandson, about 1400 years ago.

The Iranian Government Response  

The government authorities said the protesters violated the norm of civil disobedience, and it deployed a large security force and plain clothes Basij forces to quell the protesters. The protesters were beaten by batons and dispersed by teargas and water cannon. Some protesters confronted the Basij and set on fire their cars and motorcycles. The security authorities arrested a number of political activists and journalists. Also, for security reasons, the government slowed the internet speed, and access to WhatsApp and Instagram was restricted to prevent further spread of the protests. In response, the US Department of Treasury exempted sanctions and let internet providers expand the range of internet services to Iranians.

On September 23, the government brought its supporters into the streets. After Friday prayers, the pro-government crowd walked from Tehran university toward Azadi square. They condemned the insults to the Holy Qur’an, burning of mosques, and desecrating of the veil of Moslem women in Iran.  Further demonstration by the pro-regime crowd took place on September 25 (3 Mehr). The demonstrators gathered in Revolution Square in Tehran, protesting against the rioters. Similar crowds also gathered in other major cities.

Kayhan, a widely circulated pro-Khamenei newspaper, wrote the faithful people of Iran rose up against the oppressors and the rioters. The paper wrote that reformists and some celebrities who had supported the protesters are the lackey of the United States who must be brought to justice.  The paper claimed Iran’s progress in Shanghai Cooperation Organization membership and neutralization of the United States sanctions have made the Iranian enemies miserable.

In the past few decades, the Western powers had publicly criticized the ruling clerics in Tehran while tacitly supporting them to remain in power. Since president Raisii has come into office, this has changed course as Tehran has warmed up relations with China and Russia. The West is willing to loosen sanctions to let Iranian oil flow into the world market to reduce oil prices. However, Iran has not conceded to the West’s demands on its nuclear program.

Is another Velvet Revolution in the Cards?  

It is hard to speculate whether the current protests are the consequence of Mahsa Amini’s death or they had been pre-planned to launch a velvet revolution. The Iranian authorities have stated that the protests were instigated by anti-revolutionary groups from abroad. They blamed the riots on foreign-based Persian language media outlets such as Iran International, a television station based in London and staffed by a group of Iranian journalists. Tehran has said the station is financed by Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman. Also, the government authorities blamed the Persian BBC of the British government and the Iranian exiled group Mujahedin-e-Khalq (MEK) for the instigations. On September 25, Iran’s Foreign Ministry said it summoned Britain’s ambassador Simon Shercliff, to protest what it described as a hostile atmosphere created by the London-based Farsi language media outlets. The ministry complained that the Persian news outlets had provoked disturbances and riots.

In the past few days’ demonstrations, many MEK members were seen in New York, London, Paris, and Frankfort who were waving their leaders’ pictures among the other protesters. MEK does not have supporters in Iran, and its members are considered mercenaries who are serving the US interests.

MEK was previously based in Iraq and also had a presence in France. The United States removed the MEK’s terrorist designation in 2012. In recent years, some Republicans, including the former Bush and Trump administrations’ officials, have openly embraced the group and have given speeches inside the organization camp. In 2014, the United States asked Albania to host the MEK.

Subsequently, Albania accepted some 3,000 members of the exiled group. Since then, Albania and Iran have had tense relations. Finally, on September 7, 2022, Albania cut diplomatic ties with Iran blaming Tehran for cyberattacks and asked Iranian diplomats to leave Albania within 24 hours.[1] It is not known whether the Iranian government obtained any information about future operations of the group by hacking the websites in Albania. In the meantime, the media inside Iran revealed that there were about 8 million tweets with Mahsa Amini’s hashtag on Twitter from abroad, which included 4 million from Israel, 2 million from Saudi Arabia, and nearly 2 million from Albania.

Dream of Balkanization  

Tehran feels the Western powers may take advantage of the recent riots to fan the flame of the Kurdish uprising. The Western powers and their regional allies want to radicalize the Kurds in northwest Iran, which is bordered by Iraq and Turkey, to advocate autonomous self-rule, which is wishful thinking for the balkanization of Iran.   Even though the Kurds are mostly secular and Sunni and oppose the theocratic government ruled by the Shia clerics, they are genuine Iranians and spread in several other regions in Iran. Incidentally, on September 25, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) announced that after the entry of Komala’s armed groups towards Iran’s border towns for creating chaos, the ground forces of IRGC attacked the group’s headquarters in Iraq’s Kurdistan region. Komala is a secular Kurdish party engaged in guerrilla warfare against the Iranian government. The Guard said these groups are linked to global arrogance.  

Have the Iranian Women Won?  

It appears the Iranian women have been successful in challenging the clerics’ enforcement of the hijab, as almost no officials in the regime talked about continuing to enforce the clerical guidelines on women’s attire. The fact is that enforcing the Islamic hijab in Iran is a form of violence against Iranian women, and the Morality Police must be abolished. Though the regime may abolish Morality Police, the protests are against the theocratic regime and may come back in another form. While foreign agents may have been at work to instigate the protesters, the ruling clerics’ repression and imposition of their religious ideology in the education curricula and people’s lives have created the potential for more protests.

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Akbar E. Torbat ([email protected])  is the author of “Politics of Oil and Nuclear Technology in Iran,” Palgrave Macmillan, (2020), https://www.palgrave.com/gp/book/9783030337650 . He received his Ph.D. in political economy from the University of Texas at Dallas.  

Note

[1] https://www.reuters.com/world/albania-cuts-iran-ties-orders-diplomats-go-after-cyber-attack-pm-says-2022-09-07/

Featured image: Iranian protestors on the Keshavrz Boulvard (Photo by Darafsh, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0)

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***

A classic “Cui bono?” explanation looks first to determine whom the beneficiaries from a crime are, and then seeks for possible evidence that those persons who benefit from the crime had initiated the crime — perhaps hired the agents who had carried out the crime. Those agents are then sought for and investigated in order to find evidence that they had been rewarded by the crime’s beneficiaries, for having perpetrated the crime.

In a “Cui bono?” approach to justice, those who created and organized and hired the crime would get the severest punishment for that crime; their mere agents would receive lower sentences.

However, in our popular media, the closest that normally is done to adhere to this methodology for finding an explanation and assigning blame is to identify corporation(s) that MIGHT have benefited from the crime.

Then, ultimately, if there is to be any prosecution at all against those possible beneficiaries, only the lower level of the corporation’s employees who had been incentivized by its top management to do the crime are pursued by the law, and the corporation’s controlling investors — whom those peons had been actually those investors’ agents, working on their behalf — suffer, at most, nothing more than a fraction of 1% of the corporation’s annual profits as slap-on-the-wrist fines, and even less than that percentage of their own stock-value in the corporation.

So: if there is any prosecution against the corporation, that firm’s investors are held harmless, protected by the law. This is NOT a “Cui bono?” system of justice; it is, at best, a ‘Cui bono?’ system of ‘justice’ — actually, a system of injustice.

Why do we have a system of injustice, not a system of justice?

The same persons who control the major corporations — and almost all of them are billionaires, who are the approximately 1,000 wealthiest individuals in the United States and control not only all of the major corporations but also those corporations’ hired lobbyists, and also all of the major news-media — are the major donors to the political Parties, and to the PACs that also fund those; and they thereby control also the U.S. Government, via those agents (including virtually everyone in Congress) and their millions of sub-agents who are the employees of those agencies.

In such a situation, how can justice be even possible? Those billionaires — both the ones who fund the Democratic Party, and the ones who fund the Republican Party — are well-represented by this Government, but the general public is represented almost not at all by it. So, the question is: How does the public become successfully fooled to believe that they live in a democracy?

I shall propose here what I believe to be the answer, which explains how this con-job is done:

The dominant ideology of these countries is called in the United States “libertarianism” and in Europe “neoliberalism,” and it holds that even if the Government is unjust (or unfair), the economy is just (or fair) if it is “free” — as unsubject to the political power (the government) as possible.

The underlying belief is that corruption comes from the government and NOT from the economy itself.

Consequently: corruption comes from the holders of public offices, but NOT from the corporations UNLESS there are “a few bad apples” in that lot, who do what the corporation doesn’t want them to do. At worst: corporations are “negligent,” in this scenario. The economy ITSELF is not systematically corrupt. Consequently, the billionaires are to be viewed more as “wealth-creators” by means of their investments, than as being, by any means, the incentivizers of crimes against the public, often exploiting the public and profiting thereby.

That neoliberal or libertarian view is the viewpoint by conservatives (or “The Right”), but is it ALSO the viewpoint by liberals (or “The Left”)? Yes, and here is how it is:

Karl Marx is generally held to be the founder of “The Left,” and he blamed “the bourgeoisie” or middle economic class, as being the exploiters and the persons who benefit from capitalism or a free market. He did not blame the aristocracy — the top economic class, who control the corporations and constitute what today are commonly called “billionaires” — for political problems. He really believed that the middle class — and NOT or NOT ONLY the super-rich — are the cause of society’s injustices. If he had blamed “the aristocracy” (the wealthiest class), then he would never have been able to win the financial support from the aristocracy that he did and which enabled him to publish. So: he blamed “the bourgeoisie” INSTEAD OF “the aristocracy.” Consequently: leftism became corrupted, even at its very start. It was corrupted BY the aristocracy.

Marx blamed ALL STOCKHOLDERS, and not ONLY the ones who own the controlling blocks of stock in the major corporations — not ONLY “the aristocracy” — and this is the reason why the Soviets purged the “kulaks” or small-business owners, and not ONLY the few individuals who had held the vast majority of the nation’s wealth.

A good example of this leftist mentality is a recent article by, and news-interview video of, a leftist news-analyst, Thomas Fazi. The article was titled “Civil disobedience is coming”, and at 4:50 in the video-interview of him about it, he was asked,

“Who are these people? Who is benefitting from all of these bad things?”

and Fazi answered:

“Well, it’s the usual suspects. If we take Covid, we know that the lockdowns, the Covid measures, they caused immense harm to most citizens, they caused immense harm to small and medium businesses, but they allowed Big Tech, Big Pharma companies, to reap in billions, tens of billions in profits, and to acquire even more power than they already had. .. If we look at the current crisis, it’s exactly the same. In this case, we’re … talking about Big Oil, Big Energy, Big Gas.”

The major funders of Britain’s Labour Party, and of America’s Democratic Party, could hire or sub-contract to such a writer, just as the liberal aristocrats during Marx’s time funded him and his work. It holds the corporations responsible — WHEN it does — ONLY in such ways as to protect the biggest beneficiaries of corporate crimes.

But such thinking is not progressive; it is not conducive to increasing democracy, and to equal rights and obligations of each and every person, under the law, and which contains no systematic favoritism toward the super-rich, and no systematic denigration and further weakening of the very poor. 

Ultimately, such leftism is remarkably close to neoliberalism (libertarianism), because it accepts the view that the billionaires hire people to promote to the public: that billionaires are “entrepreneurs” instead of “exploiters,” and that they had gotten so rich because they had earned every cent of it and not depended upon the state and its (billionaires’-created) system in order to become so rich.

This billionaires-funded view makes fundamentally no distinction, except Fazi’s rhetorical one, between those “small and medium businesses” on the one hand, versus such international megacorporations as ExxonMobil and Lockheed Martin on the other.

AND it focuses blame against “corporations” INSTEAD OF against the individual beneficiaries from its crimes.

That leftism is a false, crippled, leftism, not authentic progressivism, which DOES AND CONSISTENTLY make that distinction — by identifying the billionaires who actually CONTROL those giant corporations, and by seeking to get the laws changed so as to finally provide ACCOUNTABILITY to “Cui bono?” Obviously, billionaires will not fund writers such as that, progressive ones.

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This article was originally published on The Duran.

Investigative historian Eric Zuesse’s new book, AMERICA’S EMPIRE OF EVIL: Hitler’s Posthumous Victory, and Why the Social Sciences Need to Change, is about how America took over the world after World War II in order to enslave it to U.S.-and-allied billionaires. Their cartels extract the world’s wealth by control of not only their ‘news’ media but the social ‘sciences’ — duping the public. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

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***

It has begun. The next step is to round up the “terrorists,” and we know what the state does to them.

Next, they'll start rounding up people. This the predictable path of authoritarians. https://t.co/TPXYEUGr7D

— Another Day in the Empire (@day_empire) September 27, 2022

New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, for some reason deemed a “liberal,” has called for a global system of repression against speech she does not agree with, namely questioning climate change.

I am referring to the classic definition of liberalism, a political ideology based upon the protection of individual liberty, including and most importantly free speech.

Jacinda Ardern is not a liberal. She is a fascist.

Merriam-Webster defines fascism as a tendency toward or actual exercise of strong autocratic or dictatorial control, including the sort of “solution” proposed by Ardern to demonize and criminalize those who disagree with her, but also Hillary Clinton and other modern autocratic “liberals” masquerading as saviors of the people (so long as they agree and vote for them).

“New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern is the latest liberal leader to call for an international alliance to censor speech,” writes Jonathan Turley, a legal scholar holding the Shapiro Chair for Public Interest Law at The George Washington University Law School, where he teaches constitutional law.

Unsatisfied with the unprecedented corporate censorship of social media companies, leaders like Hillary Clinton have turned from private censorship to good old-fashioned state censorship. Speech regulation has become an article of faith on the left. Ardern used her speech this week to the United Nations General Assembly to call for censorship on a global scale.

Ardern noted how extremists use speech to spread lies without noting that non-extremists use the same free speech to counter such views.   To answer her question on “how do you tackle climate change if people do not believe it exists” is that you convince people using the same free speech.  Instead, Ardern appears to want to silence those who have doubts.

In addition to silencing and eventually criminalizing those who have legitimate arguments countering the theory of manmade climate change, Ardern “defended the need for such global censorship on having to combat those who question climate change and the need to stop ‘hateful and dangerous rhetoric and ideology,” in other words, those who oppose the non-classic “liberal” ideology.

Ardern’s proposal “is the same rationale used by authoritarian countries like China, Iran, and Russia to censor dissidents, minority groups, and political rivals.  What is ‘hateful’ and ‘dangerous’ is a fluid concept that government have historically used to silence critics or dissenters,” Truly continues.

For Ardern and the ruling financial elite she serves, speech is a “weapon of war,” not “hypothetical” but as real and dangerous as physical weapons. “ The weapons of war have changed, they are upon us and require the same level of action and activity that we put into the weapons of old,” she insists.

For those of us who have lived through twenty long years of the so-called “war on terror,” some understand how these globalist fascists deal with “terrorists”—outright murder without trial, abduction, torture (in CIA dungeons), and indefinite confinement without trial. Are these the tactics were can expect from fascist leaders of Ardern’s ilk in response to those who disagree with the globalist agenda.?

Age and gender are meaningless for these psychopathic killers. Consider the case of sixteen-year-old Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, a U.S. citizen born in Denver in 1995, and his Yemeni cousin, both killed by the US military in Yemen. Abdulrahman was the son of Anwar al-Awlaki, a supposed al-Qaeda figure and cleric who in the past worked with the CIA. He was also assassinated by the CIA.

“The Obama administration’s top Pentagon lawyer [in January 2012] said that American citizens who join Al Qaeda can be targeted for killing and that courts should have no role in reviewing executive branch decisions about whether someone has met such criteria,” The New York Times reported (emphasis added).

Free speech “extremists” and “terrorists” are a far worse threat to “democracy” than the CIA’s al-Qaeda, according to the FBI.

“The rise in domestic terrorism — as profiled in a captivating New York Times Magazine report from 2018 — is largely driven by an uptick in far-right extremism. Of the 263 acts of domestic terrorism that occurred between 2010 and the end of 2017, 92, around a third, were committed by Americans on the far right,” according to New York Mag’s Intelligencer.

The precise boundaries of “far-right extremism” are rarely if ever defined or clarified—and this is not a mistake. The ambiguity allows the state to declare any non-‘liberal” individual or group as “far-right” extremist.

In addition, the FBI has long honed the art of setting up and framing people as terrorists, from COINTELPRO in the 1960s until today. Revelations of FBI involvement in the capitol “insurrection” should be instructive.

Ardern and the “liberal” fascists will not rest until conservatives, civil libertarians, and others in opposition to their agenda are either imprisoned or eliminated.

Supposed climate change is simply the beginning. Ardern and her disciples, all working in the service of the neoliberal state, will not rest until blogs such as this one are wiped off the internet and opposition activists are either squelched or, short of that, locked up (or possibly even assassinated) on domestic Gitmos.

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

Kurt Nimmo is a regular contributor to Global Research.

Featured image: Ardern speaking during the session “Safeguarding Our Planet” at the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos, 22 January 2019 (Photo by Foundations World Economic Forum – Safeguarding Our Planet at the Annual Meeting 2019, licensed under CC BY 2.0)

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Recently held referendums in the republics of Donetsk and Lugansk and in Zaporozhye and Kherson oblasts will affect the military operation in Ukraine as, besides the high degree of support for accession, any attack by the US or NATO on these territories would be a direct attack on the Russian Federation. Any Western attack against the new Russian territories could be considered a declaration of war and unleash an open conflagration, something that the US and its NATO allies are unlikely wanting to directly engage in.

The referendum, in this sense, has been a political instrument of great importance since it has allowed the Donbass region, the ancestral territory of the Cossacks, to return to Russia. The result of the elections was expected because historically the regions of the Don River basin have deep Slavic roots, speak the Russian language and profess the Orthodox Christian religion. It was only after the founding of the Soviet Union in 1922 that Moscow ceded those territories to Ukraine.

In addition, the annexation of these regions is a strategic step in the current confrontation between Russia and Ukraine. This is especially the case as a harsh winter is approaching and the political and energy crises in the European Union is seemingly leading to an economic recession.

According to official statistics, with 100% of the ballots counted, 99.23% of Donetsk voters voted in favour of joining Russia, and 98.42% of the Luhansk electorate also voted yes. In Zaporozhye, the yes vote received 93.11%, while the Kherson oblast was the only one with less than 90% of the votes favourable to joining Russia, with a massive 87.05% none-the-less.

Source: InfoBrics

These territories called for a referendum, considering them necessary for the “defence against terrorist acts” perpetrated by the Ukrainian government and the NATO members which supplies them. In turn, several countries and international organisations condemned the holding of the votes and made it clear that they will not recognize their results.

During all the days of voting, the Ukrainian military bombed the regions to try and prevent people from participating in the referendum. The authorities of these regions assure that with their integration into Russia, security will be guaranteed and a historical justice restored. They also stressed that it was necessary to take such a decision due to the permanent attacks by the nationalist regime in Kiev.

Russian President Vladimir Putin declared that Russia will support the decision made by the inhabitants of Donbass, Zaporozhye and Kherson. The US, the EU, the OSCE and other countries and international organisations described the call as illegal, made it clear that they will not recognize the results and threatened new sanctions packages.

This comes as Russia’s ambassador to Washington, Anatoly Antonov, warned that the US and other “sponsors of Ukrainian neo-Nazi criminals” are approaching a red line by allowing Western weapons to be used to attack Donetsk, Lugansk, Zaporozhye and Kherson.

“The sponsors of neo-Nazi criminals are approaching that dangerous line of which we clearly warned repeatedly. The United States becomes a party to the Ukrainian conflict,” the ambassador said in a statement.

Antonov warned that Washington is encouraging Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to continue attacking with the weapons that NATO countries have sent without measuring the consequences.

“Diplomatic efforts to find a peaceful solution to the crisis cannot be effective as long as Western countries use the Zelensky regime as a mercenary against Russia,” he stressed, adding that Russia’s defensive response will be forceful.

Earlier, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken assured that the White House was not going to prevent Zelensky from attacking Donetsk, Lugansk, Zaporozhye and Kherson with US weapons after these entities become a part of Russian territory. The US also announced that it will impose a raft of new sanctions against Russia, which is already the world’s most sanctioned country.

The European Union also seems poised to adopt new sanctions on Russia, though some EU members are questioning existing restrictions as economic pain is already hurting Europe more than Russia. The Biden administration, for its part, is looking to target government-linked Russian financial institutions, including the Russian Deposit Insurance Agency, which is intended to protect Russians bank accounts, and the National Payment Card System, or Mir, an electronic funds-transfer system.

However, further sanctions and encouraging Ukraine to continue attacking Russia’s new regions will not lead to a reversal of the reality on the ground – Donetsk, Lugansk, Zaporozhye and Kherson will soon be integral parts of the Russian Federation. With some of these regions still under Ukrainian occupation, it now appears that Moscow has a clear end-game to its military operation in Ukraine, the full liberation of these territories from Ukraine.

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

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***

Once upon a time, cops were tasked primarily with things like catching murderers and rapists and protecting property.

They were always used, of course, whenever necessary, to protect state interests – but, then again, the state’s interests weren’t always so obviously nefarious and illegitimate as they are today.

Law enforcement’s purview expansion is explained in large part by securitization theory.

As a result of the this process, peculiar new breeds of law enforcement – Public Health© officers and green police – have sprung up throughout the West.

Securitization theory: the advent of new security threats

The basic premise of securitization theory in political science is that, given the opportunity, a state will endlessly concoct new security “threats” as a justification to exercise greater power outside of the constraints of the normal political process:

“Securitisation theory shows us that national security policy is not a natural given, but carefully designated by politicians and decision-makers. According to securitisation theory, political issues are constituted as extreme security issues to be dealt with urgently when they have been labelled as ‘dangerous’… by a ‘securitising actor’ who has the social and institutional power to move the issue ‘beyond politics’.”

The process, in a nutshell, works like this:

• The government identifies a new existential “threat,” either legitimate or overblown, either naturally occurring or cynically engineered by the state itself.
• The corporate media and corporate state stoke fear about the threat into the hearts and minds of a gullible public
• In the fog of panic, the state slyly provisions itself with new authority and resources to combat the threat, thereby increasing its power

The threats change, but whether “domestic terrorism,” COVID-19, or climate change, the process largely remains the same.

Once you download the blueprint for the securitization process, analyzing the state’s actions in real-time becomes as easy as reading lines off a script.The average pre-9/11 American wouldn’t have believed that a trumped-up flu could ever be conceived as a “national security threat.”

But, 9/11 changed everything. Securitization became routine.

The corporate state’s apparatuses, like the Rand Corporation, were ready to pounce on the new COVID-19 Public Health© emergency and cast it as a “national security” issue. Here the Rand Corporation likens COVID-19 hysteria to World War II:

“COVID-19 is the greatest threat to the United States to materialize in over a century. To put it into perspective, World War II, which many consider to have been an existential threat, claimed an average of 9,000 American lives per month… And when the safety of the nation is endangered, the situation becomes a matter of national security and it should be treated as such. “

America used to go to war with Nazis; now it goes to war against microbes and climate.

Security issues require securitizing actors – enforcement mechanisms to counter the threat. Hence the Public Health© officer. Hence biomedical martial law.

The rise of the Public Health© officer

Meet the biomedical state’s new frontline enforcer: the Public Health© officer.

This miserable creature is here to ensure you take your shots, wear your mask, and, most importantly, shut your mouth.

He is granted full enforcement power and broad jurisdiction to enforce Public Health© orders, such as:

• “Curfew – regulates times during which a person is required to stay indoors.”
• “Social distancing – maintaining distance between people to avoid the spread of disease.”
• “Quarantine – restricts the movement of people who show symptoms or are potentially infected by a disease.”
• “Self-quarantine – the voluntary act of putting oneself in quarantine.”*
• “Isolation – separates sick people from those who are not.”
• “Shelter-in-place (stay at home) – requires individuals stay in a safe, non-public location (home) except for essential activities and work, until told otherwise”

(*Somehow, “self-quarantine” is both voluntary and enforceable by a Public Health© officer if you won’t do it yourself.)

Here’s one in action:

This is frightening and this is what Canada has become. pic.twitter.com/wKOL8YZBlk

— Alexandra Lavoie (@ThevoiceAlexa) July 16, 2022

Here, the masked, portly Canadian Public Health© officer detains a pair of overpolite Canadian travelers, confiscates their passports and demands proof of vaccination for “noncompliance” with COVID protocols. He cites the broad power granted in the Canadian Quarantine Act as the source of his authority.

Is the robot police dog here with a mounted RPG for the vaxxed, or unvaxxed?

“Science provided possibility of liberation but science itself is not liberator

When ideals of humanity are war & conquest, tools become as dangerous as razor in hands of child

Fate of humanity is entirely dependent upon its moral development”

Einstein pic.twitter.com/v7S5jS2NiI

— Double Down News (@DoubleDownNews) August 15, 2022

Let’s consider the pertinent points:

A.) The corporate state controls the police.

B.) The corporate state – from Australia to Canada to Great Britain — insists on vaccine mandates and have enforced draconian lockdowns for years.

C.) We’ve seen the hell they’ve unleashed on anti-mandate protesters worldwide using actual flesh-and-bones dogs.

ENGLAND: Police set an attack dog on a protester IN Newcastle at the anti-covid passport protest over the weekend. pic.twitter.com/EdV6OcvZ5l

— Apex World News (@apexworldnews) August 30, 2021

Seems like a recipe for more of the same, just with robots instead of Rover.

How long until the RPG dog gets sicced on you?

Welcome to Techno-Hell.

The Public Health© Officer’s Successor: ‘Green Police’

France recently created a legion of “green police” brigades to combat climate change offenders:

“Gérald Darmanin, who serves as France’s Minister of the Interior, has announced that he aims to create 3,000 posts for new ‘green police’ officials, a move that he has deemed necessary in the face to tackle climate change.”

European and North American “green police” will enforce increasingly common North Korea-tier curtailing of basic human dignity, like forcing shop owners to turn off their lights at night and limiting heating and air conditioning.

‘Just following orders’: no dice

“Just following orders” is the oldest, lamest excuse for government goons to excuse their aberrant behavior – one that didn’t save the Nazi camp guards at Nuremberg, and won’t this time either if we don’t allow it.

We’re long overdue for Nuremberg II, which should be a pillar of every opposition candidate’s platform.

As for individual action, get free with the parallel economy.

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This article was originally published on The Daily Bell.

Ben Bartee is an independent Bangkok-based American journalist with opposable thumbs. Follow his stuff via Armageddon Prose and/or Substack, Patreon, Gab, and Twitter. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

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***

The recent incident on the Nord Stream pipeline has drawn the attention of the entire world. Authorities on both sides of the global geopolitical scenario pointed to possibilities indicating deliberate sabotage and terrorism. Kiev baselessly accuses Moscow of being responsible for the act, however several evidence indicate that the biggest suspect of having operated this sabotage is the US.

On September 27, the Swedish National Seismic Network (SNSN) reported a series of strong underwater explosions in the region of the Nord Stream 1 pipeline facilities. As a result of the explosions, many gas leaks occurred, huge sea waves were generated, and the structure of the entire gas pipeline was severely harmed. Interestingly, the day before, a similar incident had already been reported by Nord Stream AG – the company that manages the gas transport – at the installations of the second pipeline. Strong pressure drops hit Nord Stream 2 and left worrying damage to the facilities. Now, Nord Stream 1 and 2 are both damaged.

Obviously, the economic and environmental damage of a tragedy like this is countless and irreparable. However, what is most remarkable is the fact that both gas pipelines collapsed at virtually the same time and precisely at this moment of so many international tensions involving the West and Russia. In fact, the possibility that the explosions in both pipelines occurred accidentally was not received with credibility by either side on the world scenario. EU Foreign Policy Chief Josep Borrell said he did not believe in the hypothesis of an accident, which led Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Alexander Grushko to mention in an interview that Moscow is willing to cooperate with the EU in investigations if there is a request to do so.

As expected, some Ukrainian and Western leaders immediately began to unjustifiably accuse Russia, despite Moscow’s willingness to cooperate with Europe to find those responsible for the possible sabotage. Kiev’s presidential adviser Mikhaylo Podolyak, for example, commented on his social media:

“The large-scale ‘gas leak’ from Nord Stream 1 is nothing more than a terrorist attack planned by Russia and an act of aggression towards the EU. [Moscow is seeking to] destabilize the economic situation in Europe and cause pre-winter panic”.

However, at no time was any plausible evidence presented to support this “conclusion” of Russian participation in the sabotage.

From different points of view, it is possible to say that it would not be in Moscow’s interest to promote such an action. The Nord Stream project was a very important part of Russo-European energy relations and there would be no strategic reason for either side to try to boycott the pipelines.

Source: InfoBrics

On the other hand, if there is one side that has repeatedly expressed an interest in boycotting Russian-European relations, it is the US. In order to isolate Russia and increase European dependence on Washington and its allies, the US government boycotted Nord Stream on several occasions with sanctions and coercive measures. Before the start of the Russian special military operation in Ukraine, the US had already tried to dissuade Europeans from continuing energy cooperation with Moscow, which was intensified by anti-Russian packages of measures since February. In fact, Washington has used the operation in Ukraine as an excuse to advance its agenda of complete separation between Russia and Europe.

More than that: US officials have made it clear on some occasions that they would take direct action against Nord Stream if Russia “invaded” Ukraine. On January 7, President Biden stated in a press conference:

“if Russia invades, then there will be no longer a Nord Stream 2. We will bring an end to it. I promise you, we will be able to do that”. Also, earlier Victoria Nuland had already said, in January, that “if Russia invades Ukraine, one way or another, Nord Stream 2 will not move forward”.

Considering that the beginning of the special military operation for the demilitarization and denazification of Ukraine is seen by the West as an “invasion”, these threats made by the American authorities in the past sound today practically as a confession of guilt for the possible sabotage against the gas pipelines. In fact, this is the opinion even of some pro-Western authorities, such as the former Polish Foreign Minister Sikorski who posted on his social network a photo of the explosion on Nord Stream 1 writing “Thank you, USA”, admitting believing that Washington provoked the tragedy.

It is important to remember that Poland was also interested in the end of the Nord Stream project, as the gas pipeline directly connects Russia and Europe, ending the dependence on the Polish route, which made costs higher and gave the Polish government bargaining power with Europe. In fact, the US and Poland would be the most suspect countries in the case of sabotage against Russian-European gas pipelines and this seems evident from the pronouncements of these authorities.

Now, it remains to be seen how Europe will deal with these facts. It is essential that this tragedy serves as an example to illustrate the anti-strategic aspect of this subservient relationship that the EU has been maintaining with the US in recent decades.

Washington exhibits an authoritarian and aggressive behavior and is possibly involved in a sabotage operation that will worsen the European energy crisis during this coming winter. This is more than enough reason for European states to start adopting a sovereign foreign policy.

*

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

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***

September 14, 2022, Politico published a special report based on four dozen interviews with U.S. and European officials and global health specialists, who admit Bill Gates is running the global COVID response

Four health organizations — The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, GAVI, the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI) and the Wellcome Trust — rapidly took a lead on the global pandemic response, and while all four claim to be independent organizations, they’re all actually founded and/or funded by Gates

During the earliest days of the outbreak, the Gates Foundation, GAVI, CEPI and the Wellcome Trust began a coordinated effort to identify vaccine makers, fund tests, drug treatments and mRNA shots, and develop a global distribution plan in collaboration with the World Health Organization. In the end, they failed to meet their own goals on all fronts

Gates is unqualified to make health recommendations, and he’s never been elected to represent the public

Gates has used his wealth, influence and sheer shrewdness to get him into a position where he can dictate global health policy for his own financial benefit

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The idea that Bill Gates exerts undue influence over global health has consistently been denied and dismissed as a loony conspiracy theory. But as with so many other things, this conspiracy theory is now turning out to be a conspiracy fact.

September 14, 2022, Politico published an extensive special report based on “four dozen interviews with U.S. and European officials and global health specialists,” headlined, “How Bill Gates and His Partners Took Over the Global COVID Response.”1

As noted by Igor Chudov on Substack,2 within hours the headline was edited to read: “How Four Private Groups Used Their Clout to Control the Global COVID Response — With Little Oversight,”3 as illustrated in Chudov’s screen captures below.

Curiously, five hours after that edit, Politico changed the headline back, so at the time of this writing, it reads:4 “How Bill Gates and Partners Used Their Clout to Control the Global Covid Response — With Little Oversight.” The only word now missing from the original headline is “his.” You can see how the headline shifted back and forth over the course of 15 hours on archive.today.5

Four Gates Organizations Monopolize the Global COVID Response

According to Politico,6 four health organizations — the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, GAVI, the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI) and the Wellcome Trust — rapidly took a lead on the global pandemic response, and while all four claim to be independent organizations, they’re all actually founded and/or funded by Gates.

“When Covid-19 struck, the governments of the world weren’t prepared,” Politico writes. “While the most powerful nations looked inward, four non-governmental global health organizations began making plans for a life-or-death struggle against a virus that would know no boundaries.

What followed was a steady, almost inexorable shift in power from the overwhelmed governments to a group of non-governmental organizations, according to a seven-month investigation by POLITICO journalists based in the U.S. and Europe and the German newspaper WELT.

Armed with expertise, bolstered by contacts at the highest levels of Western nations and empowered by well-grooved relationships with drug makers, the four organizations took on roles often played by governments — but without the accountability of governments.”

Six Takeaways From Politico’s Investigation

During the earliest days of the outbreak, while governments were still debating the seriousness of it, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, GAVI, CEPI and the Wellcome Trust began a coordinated effort to identify vaccine makers, fund tests, drug treatments and mRNA shots, and develop a global distribution plan in collaboration with the World Health Organization. In a side bar, Politico highlights six key takeaways from their investigation:7

“1 The four organizations have spent almost $10 billion on COVID since 2020 – the same amount as the leading U.S. agency tasked with fighting COVID abroad.

2 The organizations collectively gave $1.4 billion to the World Health Organization, where they helped create a critical initiative to distribute COVID-19 tools. That program failed to achieve its original benchmarks.

3 The organizations’ leaders had unprecedented access to the highest levels of governments, spending at least $8.3 million to lobby lawmakers and officials in the U.S. and Europe.

4 Officials from the U.S., EU and representatives from the WHO rotated through these four organizations as employees, helping them solidify their political and financial connections in Washington and Brussels.

5 The leaders of the four organizations pledged to bridge the equity gap. However, during the worst waves of the pandemic, low-income countries were left without life-saving vaccines.

6 Leaders of three of the four organizations maintained that lifting intellectual property protections was not needed to increase vaccine supplies – which activists believed would have helped save lives.”

Unqualified and Unelected

As detailed by Politico, through Gates’ lobbying and financial might, the international response to COVID rapidly shifted from individual governments to “a privately overseen global constituency of nongovernmental experts.”

“What makes Bill Gates qualified to be giving advice and advising the U.S. government on where they should be putting … tremendous resources?” ~ Kate Elder, senior policy adviser for the Doctors Without Borders’ Access Campaign

In the U.S., president Biden has earmarked $500 million to CEPI alone in his $5 billion COVID budget, which has yet to be approved by Congress. But, as noted by Kate Elder, a senior vaccines policy adviser for the Doctors Without Borders’ Access Campaign:8

“What makes Bill Gates qualified to be giving advice and advising the U.S. government on where they should be putting … tremendous resources?”

Lawrence Gostin, a Georgetown University professor who specializes in public-health law told Politico:

“I think we should be deeply concerned. Putting it in a very crass way, money buys influence. And this is the worst kind of influence. Not just because it’s money — although that’s important, because money shouldn’t dictate policy — but also, because it’s preferential access, behind closed doors.

[It’s] anti-democratic, because it’s extraordinarily non-transparent, and opaque [and] leaves behind ordinary people, communities and civil society.”

Gates ‘Owns’ the WHO

Many have pointed out that Gates, through his billions in donations to the WHO, has significant leverage over the WHO’s decisions. In September 2021, Astrid Stuckelberger, Ph.D., a WHO insider, blew the whistle on Gates, explaining how the WHO is, in fact, controlled by Gates, who in turn dictates policy for his own personal financial benefit.

Of the four organizations Politico focuses on, GAVI, the Vaccine Alliance, may be the most important. GAVI, founded by Gates, is headquartered in Switzerland. In 2009, GAVI was recognized as an international institution and granted total blanket immunity, including qualified diplomatic immunity, which is extremely odd considering the organization has no political power that would warrant diplomatic immunity.9

Odder still is that GAVI’s immunity clauses go beyond even that of diplomats. GAVI’s immunity covers all aspects of engagement, including criminal business dealings. Equally strange is the fact that they’re completely tax exempt.

GAVI can basically do whatever it wants without any repercussions. Police can’t even investigate or collect evidence from GAVI were they to be implicated in a criminal investigation. That’s how well-protected they are. And, according to Stuckelberger, GAVI is the entity that is really directing the WHO.

According to Stuckelberger, Gates did, in 2017, request to be put on the WHO’s executive board — like a member state — ostensibly because he gives them so much money. There’s no evidence that Gates was ever officially granted the status of a member state, but it appears he figured out an alternative power play.

Stuckelberger pointed out that Gates and the WHO entered into a three-way contract agreement with Swissmedic, the Food and Drug Administration of Switzerland, which is highly unusual. So, essentially, when Gates did not get voted in as a one-man nation state, he created three-party contracts with member states and the WHO, essentially placing him on par with the WHO!

One curiosity that supports the idea that Gates is either the real power behind the WHO, or has the same amount of power as the WHO, is the fact that Gates has repeatedly been the first to announce what the world needs to do to address the pandemic, and then the WHO would come out with an identical message that member states then had to follow.

But who the heck is Gates to direct global health and pandemic responses? He’s a nobody. He has no medical training. He’s completely unqualified to speak to any health issues whatsoever. He didn’t even graduate college. And he’s never been elected to represent the people in any capacity.

Basically, what we have here is one wealthy individual who figured out a way to unofficially monopolize the decision-making ability of a global health authority in order to enrich himself, which is beyond crazy.

The WHO Was Instrumental in Gates’ Rise to Power

Gates’ influence over the WHO is undoubtedly why the WHO allowed these four Gates-funded groups to direct the global response to COVID in the first place. As reported by Politico:10

“The WHO was crucial to the groups’ rise to power. All had longstanding ties to the global health body. The boards of both CEPI and Gavi have a specially designated WHO representative.

There is also a revolving door between employment in the groups and work for the WHO: Former WHO employees now work at the Gates Foundation and CEPI; some, such as Chris Wolff, the deputy director of country partnerships at the Gates Foundation, occupy important positions.

Much of the groups’ clout with the WHO stems simply from money. Since the start of the pandemic in 2020, the Gates Foundation, Gavi, and the Wellcome Trust have donated collectively more than $1.4 billion to the WHO — a significantly greater amount than most other official member states, including the United States and the European Commission, according to data provided by the WHO.”

It would be one thing if these organizations actually did an excellent job. But they didn’t. An independent review11 by Dalberg Global Development Advisors, a New York policy advisory firm, found the initiative created by Gates’ groups, the Access to COVID-19 Tools Accelerator (ACT-A), failed on all fronts.

Despite a $23 billion budget,12 ACT-A procured only 16% of its target number of tests for low-and middle-income countries, and of the 245 million treatments it was supposed to deliver to low- and middle-income countries, they only allocated 1.8 million. Similarly, of the 2 billion COVID shots that were supposed to be delivered by the end of 2021, only 319 million doses were delivered.

Of course, one could argue that failure to deliver fraudulent CPR tests and dangerous treatments and mRNA shots were a blessing in disguise. But the fact remains that these organizations are far from excellent and fail miserably in reaching many of their stated goals.

They overpromise and underdeliver. They’re willing to sacrifice lives to maintain control over moneymaking patents. And, while they’re more or less singlehandedly shaping the global response to pandemics, there’s no one to hold them to account for their performance.

What Politico Left Out

While Politico’s report is sweeping in breadth, it still failed to include a number of important puzzle pieces listed in Chudov’s Substack article. For example:13

• SARS-CoV-2 appears to be an intentionally engineered bioweapon.
• The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation helped organize Event 201, a tabletop pandemic preparedness exercise in October 2019 that prophetically predicted COVID-19 — and the need for a massive propaganda and censorship campaign to quash “conspiracies” about the virus.
• Gates purchased 3.1 million shares of BioNTech in September 2019 for $55 million.14 15 At the time, BioNTech was working on patient-specific immunotherapies for cancer and other chronic diseases. In mid-March 2020, BioNTech partnered with Pfizer to develop a COVID mRNA jab.16 By August 2021, Gates’ prescient investment was worth $1.7 billion.
• The Gates Foundation financed EcoHealth Alliance,17 the organization suspected of having a hand in the development of SARS-CoV-2.
• The Gates Foundation also financed the University of North Carolina (UNC) with at least 56 different grants, where Ralph Baric, Ph.D., conducted gain-of-function research linked to the development of SARS-CoV-2. Baric also worked with EcoHealth Alliance and the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV).

As noted by Chudov in his closing remarks:18

“Nevertheless, the mere publication of this article has huge importance. The things that most of us know and talk about, are appearing in the so-called ‘mainstream press’ — after the damage was all done, of course.

The virus was released; millions died; over a billion young people were force-vaccinated under false pretenses. When it is too late to change anything, Politico is finally stating the obvious. Still, it is better than nothing.

Almost everything in the Politico article was known a year ago. Where was Politico then? Busy taking government COVID vaccine advertising money. The pandemic was a crime, not an accident.”

The Gates-Fauci Scheme to Vaccinate the World

Gates is far from the only nemesis in this orchestrated drama, however. Dr. Anthony Fauci is another key player. Ironically, Gates claims he’s “taken the brunt of COVID conspiracy abuse” because Europeans are not familiar with Fauci. He recently told Fortune magazine:19

“It was quite a phenomenon; here in the U.S., it focused on myself and Tony Fauci, and internationally it was more just me because they didn’t know who Tony was — he really missed out on that!”

But while Gates tries to pass it off people’s concerns about his undue influence over their health as a joke, there’s no shortage of evidence that he really is pulling strings he’s far from qualified to pull.

In “Bill Gates Lays Out Plan for Global Takeover,” I review Gates’ role in the WHO and the WHO’s plan to, ultimately, seize control over all health care decisions, worldwide. I’ve also reviewed how Gates and Fauci have collaborated, forming a formidable public-private partnership that wields incredible power over the American public.

As early as 2000, Fauci and Gates formed an agreement to control and expand the global vaccine enterprise, which in 2021 culminated in a plan to inject every man, woman and child on the planet with an experimental COVID shot. Gates and Fauci’s collaboration are detailed in Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s best-selling book, “The Real Anthony Fauci.” The video at the top of this article summarizes their joint scheme.

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Notes

2 Igor Chudov Substack September 15, 2022

3 Politico September 14, 2022 (Archived w changed headline)

4 Politico September 14, 2022

5 Archive.today Screenshots of Politico article between Sep 15, 2022 02:09 through Sep 20, 2022 01:29

6 Politico September 14, 2022

7 Politico September 14, 2022

8 Politico September 14, 2022

9 GAVI.org June 23, 2009

10 Politico September 14, 2022

11 Dalberg Global Development Advisors, ACT-Accelerator Strategic Review

12 Politico September 14, 2022

13 Igor Chudov Substack September 15, 2022

14 Sec.gov Investment Agreement

15 BioNTech September 4, 2019

16 BioNTech March 17, 2020

17 Gates Foundation Committed Grants to EcoHealth Alliance

18 Igor Chudov Substack September 15, 2022

19 Fortune September 13, 2022 (Archived)

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