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“Rights aren’t rights if someone can take them away. They’re privileges. That’s all we’ve ever had in this country, is a bill of temporary privileges. And if you read the news even badly, you know that every year the list gets shorter and shorter. Sooner or later, the people in this country are gonna realize the government … doesn’t care about you, or your children, or your rights, or your welfare or your safety… It’s interested in its own power. That’s the only thing. Keeping it and expanding it wherever possible.”— George Carlin

We’re in a national state of denial.

For years now, the government has been playing a cat-and-mouse game with the American people, letting us enjoy just enough freedom to think we are free but not enough to actually allow us to live as a free people.

Case in point: on the same day that the U.S. Supreme Court appeared inclined to favor a high school football coach’s right to pray on the field after a game, the high court let stand a lower court ruling that allows police to warrantlessly track people’s location and movements through their personal cell phones, sweeping Americans up into a massive digital data dragnet that does not distinguish between those who are innocent of wrongdoing, suspects, or criminals.

Likewise, although the Supreme Court gave the go-ahead for a death row inmate to have his pastor audibly pray and lay hands on him in the execution chamber, it refused to stop police from using hidden cameras to secretly and warrantlessly record and monitor a person’s activities outside their home over an extended period of time.

For those who have been paying attention, there’s a curious pattern emerging: the government appears reasonably tolerant of those who want to exercise their First Amendment rights in a manner that doesn’t challenge the police state’s hold on power, for example, by praying on a football field or in an execution chamber.

On the other hand, dare to disagree with the government about its war crimes, COVID-19, election outcomes or police brutality, and you’ll find yourself silenced, cited, shut down and/or branded an extremist.

The U.S. government is particularly intolerant of speech that reveals the government’s corruption, exposes the government’s lies, and encourages the citizenry to push back against the government’s many injustices. For instance, Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, the latest victim of the government’s war on dissidents and whistleblowers, is in the process of being extradited to the U.S. to be tried under the Espionage Act for daring to access and disclose military documents that portray the U.S. government and its endless wars abroad as reckless, irresponsible, immoral and responsible for thousands of civilian deaths.

Even political protests are fair game for prosecution. In Florida, two protesters are being fined $3000 for political signs proclaiming stating “F—k Biden,” “F—k Trump,” and “F—k Policing 4 Profit” that violate a city ban on “indecent” speech on signs, clothing and other graphic displays.

The trade-off is clear: pray all you want, but don’t mess with the U.S. government.

In this way, the government, having appointed itself a Supreme and Sovereign Ruler, allows us to bask in the illusion of religious freedom while stripping us of every other freedom afforded by the Constitution.

We’re in trouble, folks.

Freedom no longer means what it once did.

This holds true whether you’re talking about the right to criticize the government in word or deed, the right to be free from government surveillance, the right to not have your person or your property subjected to warrantless searches by government agents, the right to due process, the right to be safe from militarized police invading your home, the right to be innocent until proven guilty and every other right that once reinforced the founders’ belief that this would be “a government of the people, by the people and for the people.”

Not only do we no longer have dominion over our bodies, our families, our property and our lives, but the government continues to chip away at what few rights we still have to speak freely and think for ourselves.

My friends, we’re being played for fools.

On paper, we may be technically free.

In reality, however, we are only as free as a government official may allow.

We only think we live in a constitutional republic, governed by just laws created for our benefit.

Truth be told, we live in a dictatorship disguised as a democracy where all that we own, all that we earn, all that we say and do—our very lives—depends on the benevolence of government agents and corporate shareholders for whom profit and power will always trump principle. And now the government is litigating and legislating its way into a new framework where the dictates of petty bureaucrats carry greater weight than the inalienable rights of the citizenry.

With every court ruling that allows the government to operate above the rule of law, every piece of legislation that limits our freedoms, and every act of government wrongdoing that goes unpunished, we’re slowly being conditioned to a society in which we have little real control over our lives.

As Rod Serling, creator of the Twilight Zone and an insightful commentator on human nature, once observed, “We’re developing a new citizenry. One that will be very selective about cereals and automobiles, but won’t be able to think.”

Indeed, not only are we developing a new citizenry incapable of thinking for themselves, we’re also instilling in them a complete and utter reliance on the government and its corporate partners to do everything for them—tell them what to eat, what to wear, how to think, what to believe, how long to sleep, who to vote for, whom to associate with, and on and on.

In this way, we have created a welfare state, a nanny state, a police state, a surveillance state, an electronic concentration camp—call it what you will, the meaning is the same: in our quest for less personal responsibility, a greater sense of security, and no burdensome obligations to each other or to future generations, we have created a society in which we have no true freedom.

Government surveillance, police abuse, SWAT team raids, economic instability, asset forfeiture schemes, pork barrel legislation, militarized police, drones, endless wars, private prisons, involuntary detentions, biometrics databases, free speech zones, etc.: these are mile markers on the road to a fascist state where citizens are treated like cattle, to be branded and eventually led to the slaughterhouse.

Freedom, or what’s left of it, is being threatened from every direction. The threats are of many kinds: political, cultural, educational, media, and psychological. However, as history shows us, freedom is not, on the whole, wrested from a citizenry. It is all too often given over voluntarily and for such a cheap price: safety, security, bread, and circuses.

This is part and parcel of the propaganda churned out by the government machine.

That said, what we face today—mind manipulation and systemic violence—is not new. What is different are the techniques used and the large-scale control of mass humanity, coercive police tactics and pervasive surveillance.

We are overdue for a systemic check on the government’s overreaches and power grabs.

By “government,” I’m not referring to the highly partisan, two-party bureaucracy of the Republicans and Democrats. Rather, I’m referring to “government” with a capital “G,” the entrenched Deep State that is unaffected by elections, unaltered by populist movements, and has set itself beyond the reach of the law.

For years now, we have suffered the injustices, cruelties, corruption and abuse of an entrenched government bureaucracy that has no regard for the Constitution or the rights of the citizenry.

We have lingered too long in this strange twilight zone where ego trumps justice, propaganda perverts truth, and imperial presidents—empowered to indulge their authoritarian tendencies by legalistic courts, corrupt legislatures and a disinterested, distracted populace—rule by fiat rather than by the rule of law.

Where we find ourselves now is in the unenviable position of needing to rein in all three branches of government—the Executive, the Judicial, and the Legislative—that have exceeded their authority and grown drunk on power.

We are the unwitting victims of a system so corrupt that those who stand up for the rule of law and aspire to transparency in government are in the minority. This corruption is so vast it spans all branches of government: from the power-hungry agencies under the executive branch and the corporate puppets within the legislative branch to a judiciary that is, more often than not, elitist and biased towards government entities and corporations.

The predators of the police state are wreaking havoc on our freedoms, our communities, and our lives. The government doesn’t listen to the citizenry, it refuses to abide by the Constitution, which is our rule of law, and it treats the citizenry as a source of funding and little else.

The American kleptocracy (a government ruled by thieves) has sucked the American people down a rabbit hole into a parallel universe in which the Constitution is meaningless, the government is all-powerful, and the citizenry is powerless to defend itself against government agents who steal, spy, lie, plunder, kill, abuse and generally inflict mayhem and sow madness on everyone and everything in their sphere.

This dissolution of that sacred covenant between the citizenry and the government—establishing “we the people” as the masters and the government as the servant—didn’t happen overnight. It didn’t happen because of one particular incident or one particular president. It is a process, one that began long ago and continues in the present day, aided and abetted by politicians who have mastered the polarizing art of how to “divide and conquer.”

Unfortunately, there is no magic spell to transport us back to a place and time where “we the people” weren’t merely fodder for a corporate gristmill, operated by government hired hands, whose priorities are money and power.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, our freedoms have become casualties in an all-out war on the American people.

If we continue down this road, there can be no surprise about what awaits us at the end.

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This article was originally published on The Rutherford Institute.

Constitutional attorney and author John W. Whitehead is founder and president The Rutherford Institute. His books Battlefield America: The War on the American People and A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State are available at www.amazon.com. He can be contacted at [email protected].

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

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

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Today in Florida the only places you need a mask are offices of medical conglomerates, such as Ascension (Sacred Heart), a hospital group that also has doctor’s offices where the MD is hired and not in private practice, and Quest Diagnostics where medical tests are performed.  In bureaucratic organizations, once a rule is introduced the enforcement bureaucracy tends to retain it. 

As the news narrative shifted overnight from the “Covid crisis” to the “Ukrainian crisis,” that is, from one deception to another, the “Russian threat” has replaced the “Covid threat” before people understand what was done to them. 

Covid was a threat, not so much in itself as in the protocols enforced to combat it.  Most of the people who died did so because they were denied effective treatment with Hydroxychloroquine and Ivermectin for the sole purpose of profit for pharmaceutical companies and profit for those, such as Tony Fauci, associated with them.  The emergency use authorization of the untested mRNA “vaccines” could only happen because “medical authorities” declared that there were no known treatments or cures for Covid.  To make this falsehood stick, scientists on Big Pharma’s payroll wrote “studies” published in prestigious medical journals by gullible or corrupt editors falsely characterizing the known cures as dangerous and ineffective.  To be clear, people died from lack of treatment.

The mRNA “vaccines” are not vaccines in the normal meaning of the word. As evidence conclusively shows, the “vaccines” turn the vaccinated person’s immune system into a weapon against the person’s health, producing in many severe adverse reactions and deaths, and makes the vaccinated more susceptible to Covid.  A large amount of evidence, much of it posted on this website and available in throughly documented form in Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s book, The Real Anthony Fauci, indicates that the mRNA “vaccines” are more dangerous than Covid.

It is likely that the alleged “pandemic” was an orchestration.  The falsehood that the virus originated in a bat to human transfer in a market in Wuhan China has been disproved. It is a manufactured virus.  It is a fact revealed by NIH documents that Tony Fauci financed “gain-of-function” research first at the University of North Carolina and then at the Wuhan laboratory from which the virus allegedly escaped.  There is circumstantial evidence that the research at Wuhan was financed as a cover-story for the intentional release of the virus for profit and control purposes. Simulations of the “pandemic” were conducted just prior to the appearance of the virus, and the protocols followed the procedures established by the simulation.  This will never be investigated.

The only purposes served by the lockdowns and mask mandates, both ineffective in preventing Covid transmission, was to train and accustom populations to obey mandates that violate constitutionally protected civil liberty.  The vaccine mandates are strictly medical crimes in violation of the Nuremberg Laws preventing coercive testing on human populations.  There are legal efforts underway to hold those responsible for vaccine mandates accountable, but no government will indict itself or its own public health authorities.

In his book, Robert Kennedy describes the massive conflicts of interest between the NIH, CDC, FDA, and WHO and the pharmaceutical industry.  In short, the so-called “public health agencies” are just shills for Big Pharma.  The occasional fines are just window dressing to give the appearance of enforcement, but no pharmaceutical employee, whether executive or scientist, is ever indicted for inflicting death and injury.  As Kennedy puts it: “By all accounts, Anthony Fauci has implemented a system of dysfunctional conflicts and a transactional culture that have made NIAID a seamless appendage of Big Pharma. There is simply no daylight between NIAID and the drugmakers. It’s impossible to say where Pharma ends and NIAID begins.”

Several decades ago the University of Chicago economist George Stigler pointed out that the problem with regulation is that the regulatory agencies are sooner or later captured by the regulated industry and become servants of the industries they were created to regulate.  This has happened in the United States, and the purest example is the pharmaceutical industry.

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Dr. Paul Craig Roberts writes on his blog site, PCR Institute for Political Economy, where this article was originally published. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from Zero Hedge

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

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***

Remember the Beatles’ song that went like this: “I read the news today, oh boy!”? To be sure there has not been much good news to savor recently, though notably, under the cover provided by the war in Ukraine’s domination of the news cycle, the Israel Lobby in the United States has been working harder than ever to promote the interests of the country that is most dear to its heart. It’s associated media arm has been ignoring the regular killing of Palestinians by Israeli security forces while also dismissing the ultra-violent incursion by the Jewish state’s police at one of Islam’s holiest sites, the al-Aqsa Mosque complex, during Ramadan prayers.

Recently, the Zionist focus has been most intense on one area: to kill the stalled negotiations over the renewal of US participation in the currently ineffective multiparty Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) agreement with Iran to monitor its nuclear program and prevent its development of a weapon. Ironically, Israel, unlike Iran, already has an undeclared nuclear weapons arsenal that is even protected from exposure by US officials, who are not allowed to mention it in spite of the fact that its existence is widely acknowledged. Recently, Sam Husseini, a critic of the US pandering to Israeli interests, tweeted how “I recently contacted the offices of @IlhanMN, @AOC, @CoriBush, @RashidaTlaib, @SenSanders and 10 others asking if they would acknowledge that Israel has nuclear weapons. None would do so.” Not one of the fifteen, mostly describable as progressives, would even confirm that the Israelis possess such weapons, so terrified were they of even mentioning what the entire world knows to be true.

I recently contacted the offices of @IlhanMN, @AOC, @CoriBush, @RashidaTlaib, @SenSanders and 10 others asking if they would acknowledge that Israel has nuclear weapons. None would do so. My resulting piece — “The Ostrich Caucus" — is in the pilot issue of https://t.co/L5dGpg0oCY pic.twitter.com/cijT0NFqn4

— Sam Husseini (@samhusseini) April 18, 2022

To be sure, the issue of what to do about Iran is certainly the number one foreign policy problem for Israel as it is the only regional opponent of the Jewish state that could reasonably be described as militarily formidable. For something like thirty years successive Israeli governments have been seeking to convince a number of gullible American presidents to treat the Islamic Republic as a serious international threat, which is ridiculous as Iran has neither the necessary resources nor a history of seeking to dominate even its own region. This Israeli persuasion has included manipulation of a bought and paid for Congress and media which support a steady flow of propaganda seeking to depict Iran in the most negative terms, intended to appeal to the American desire to frame its foreign policy in terms of “good versus evil” with the US/Israel always being good no matter what wartime atrocities they might commit.

One might reasonably observe that the pattern of “good versus evil” is also playing out with regard to Russia in Ukraine. Given such a faux ethically based worldview, the US rarely acts in terms of genuine national interests, witness the relationship with Jerusalem more generally speaking. Israel’s security service Mossad has as its motto “By Way of Deception Thou Shalt Do War.” With that in mind it has been hard at work fabricating “intelligence” that the Iranian leadership has initiated a secret nuclear proliferation program. A laptop that surfaced in 2004 through the dissident Iranian group MEK allegedly contained information regarding covert plans for an Iranian nuclear bomb. It was, however, revealed to be a clever Mossad forgery.

Image on the right is from OneWorld

Israel has never quite convinced the White House to take the final step and make war directly against the Iranians, though it came close when a gullible Donald Trump ordered the assassination of senior Iranian general Qasem Soleimani, who was in Baghdad for peace talks in January 2020. But Israel has nevertheless managed to obtain what is apparently considerable covert CIA collaboration in its own semi-secret program to kill scientists and technicians that might be involved in nuclear research, while also hacking into and sabotaging Iranian computer systems and other infrastructure. Under Trump, CIA Director Mike Pompeo focused particularly on Iran, setting up a “special action group” to counter its presence and claimed “malign activities” in the Middle East. That task force presumably still exists under the current Director William Burns appointed by Joe Biden.

The Joe Biden Administration has long been dancing around re-joining the JCPOA, which was entered into under President Barack Obama in 2015. President Donald Trump withdrew from the agreement in 2018, convinced by his neocon and hardline advisers that it would only provide Iran cover to ramp up its secret program and produce a nuclear weapon. Trump’s associates argued that JCPOA would actually make eventual Iranian acquisition of a nuke inevitable.

As of right now, the discussions on JCPOA in Vienna are at a standstill and appear about to break down completely, though some reports alternatively claim that a new agreement is within reach. The Iranians believe that the US is not negotiating in good faith and is failing to take even relatively minor steps that could lead to a reasonable understanding without compromising the vital interests of any of the parties involved. Those steps could include removing the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Force from the US terrorist list and releasing some frozen Iranian assets, while also cutting back on sanctions. It appears that Biden would actually like to renew the agreement, but his own associates at the State Department, whose top three officials are Zionists, as well as the powerful Israel Lobby are pushing against such a course of action.

In reality the JCPOA is in the interest of the United States, pledged as it is to stop nuclear proliferation, since it permits unannounced inspection of virtually all Iranian research facilities by UN officials. It would make attempted proliferation by Iran extremely difficult, even if an elaborate deception operation were attempted. Nevertheless, a number of the usual journalists and self-proclaimed “experts” continue to push the Trumpean neocon derived argument that the agreement would actually accelerate an Iranian nuclear weapons program. Think tanks like the Foundation of Defense of Democracies (FDD) and the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) have been lobbying Congress and the White House assiduously, as have some conventionally conservative groups like the Heritage Foundation, which argues that reviving JCPOA would be a “dangerous mistake.” In a recent paper it maintains that “Reviving the deeply flawed Iran nuclear deal would reward and empower a hostile dictatorship by lifting sanctions and squandering US bargaining leverage. Iran never fully complied with the JCPOA and is currently in violation of it on several accounts. A much more restrictive agreement is necessary. A new agreement should include Iran’s ballistic missile program, disclosure of its past nuclear weapons efforts, and better protection for Israel and Arab allies.”

The Heritage paper is, of course, more speculative than fact-based and false in several respects, particularly the claim that Iran never fully complied with the agreement. Iran opened up to UN inspectors and it was the United States that continued with sanctions contrary to the intent of the original deal. If Iran were to abandon its missile program and provide “better protection” for Israel and select Arab states it would be basically surrendering its sovereignty in the area of national defense.

Another recent effort to attack JCPOA comes from an article written by two Israelis featured in The Atlantic magazine entitled “A Case Against the Iran Deal: Reviving the JCPOA will ensure either the emergence of a nuclear Iran or a desperate war to stop it.” One of the two authors is Michael Oren, until recently the Israeli Ambassador to the United States. The article’s title is self-explanatory and the argument it makes, largely based on what passes for Israeli “intelligence,” is that Iran has a secret weapons program and already has enough of enriched uranium to begin construction of a weapon within a few months. If its clandestine activities are in a sense shielded by a revived JCPOA, they will no doubt do just that, according to the authors.

Against the Israeli argument which, by implication, calls for war to disarm the Iranians, a sustainable inspection routine run by the UN would seem to be a preferable option but a number of Democratic Party Congressmen apparently do not agree and are pressuring President Biden to rethink his acceptance of the desirability of something like a rapprochement with Iran. Eighteen Democratic Congressmen, led by Josh Gottheimer and Elaine Luria, both of whom are Jewish, are pushing back against the Biden efforts, arguing that the agreement is flawed. Gottheimer added that “We need a longer and stronger deal, not one that is shorter and weaker. It’s time to stand strong against terrorists, protect American values and our allies.” Note the emphasis on protecting “our allies,” though one need not point out that there is only one ally in the region that matters to Washington politicians, particularly to folks like Gottheimer.

Republicans are also on board. They are expressing particular concerned because Russia is a signatory to the agreement and would be a guarantor of it, or at least that is what they are arguing to block any Biden effort to reengage. Pennsylvania Representative Brian Fitzpatrick, who is on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, remarked that he was very concerned about a new deal because “Russia should not be at any table with us right now. They’re committing egregious acts of terrorism and murder in a free democracy in Ukraine, in Europe right now.” That Fitzpatrick, on the Foreign Affairs Committee, should be so ignorant of actual US interests as well as regarding the nuances of the Russia-Ukraine conflict illustrates better than anything the abysmal level of ignorance that prevails in the federal government, leading to a collapse of what used to be called Diplomacy 101.

Finally, nothing better illustrates the disarray in US foreign and national security policy than a brief exchange that took place more than three weeks ago in Israel, where US Secretary of State Tony Blinken was trying in part to sell the possibility that the Biden Administration might actually re-enter the JCPOA. Israel of, course, strongly opposes that option, particularly if it involves any concessions to Iran, while Blinken’s State Department persists in repeating the Israeli line that Iran is the “world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism” while also asserting that “this administration’s commitment to Israel’s security is sacrosanct.” So, what did an obviously between a rock and a hard place Blinken do? He asked Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett for suggestions of what might be arranged in lieu of an actual agreement. Naftali reportedly suggested harsher sanctions on Iran. When the US senior-most representative involved in crafting foreign policy feels compelled to ask the agenda-driven head of a rogue foreign government to tell him what to do, there is something very wrong in Washington.

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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

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

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

Visit and follow us on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook. Feel free to repost and share widely Global Research articles.

***

 

With the Ukraine war expanding and the threat of nuclear catastrophe rising, Bill Clinton has written an article in The Atlantic magazine trying to defend what many see as indefensible: his administration’s support for the expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in March 1999 into Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic against a pledge by the Bush administration to Mikhail Gorbachev that NATO would not expand “one inch eastward.”

Clinton had been warned at the time by Russian President Boris Yeltsin (1991-1999) that NATO expansion would result in “nothing but humiliation for Russia” and could provoke a new Cold War.

Yeltsin told Clinton:

“How do you think it looks to us if one bloc [from the Cold War] continued to exist when the Warsaw Pact has been abolished? It’s a new form of encirclement if the one surviving Cold War bloc expands right up to the borders of Russia.”^[1]

A similar warning was issued by George F. Kennan, the father of the Cold War containment doctrine.

He wrote in an op-ed in February 1997 that NATO expansion would amount to a “strategic blunder of epic proportions” and the “most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-Cold War era,” as it would “inflame the nationalistic, anti-Western and militaristic tendencies in Russian opinion,” and “restore the atmosphere of the cold war to East-West relations,”^[2] which is exactly what happened.

Nearly 20 years after Kennan’s op-ed was published, Clinton’s former Defense Secretary, William J. Perry, gave an interview to the London Guardian in which he acknowledged that the U.S. bore a large degree of blame for the proxy war that had broken out between the U.S. and Russia in eastern Ukraine.

Perry stated:

“Our first action that really set us off in a bad direction was when NATO [North Atlantic Treaty Organization] started to expand, bringing in Eastern European nations, some of them bordering Russia. At that time, we were working closely with Russia and they were beginning to get used to the idea that NATO could be a friend rather than an enemy … but they were very uncomfortable about having NATO right up on their border and they made a strong appeal for us not to go ahead with that.”^[3]

Invoking the Trope of Russian Expansion to Justify U.S. Imperialism

In his Atlantic essay, Clinton claimed that his administration had first worked to foster cooperative relations with Boris Yeltsin and democratize Russia, and supported NATO expansion as a fallback to protect European security in case Russia returned to “ultranationalism” and its “aspirations to empire like [in the era of] Peter the Great and Catherine the Great.”^[4]

Guy Mettan, in his book Creating Russophobia: From the Great Religious Schism to Anti-Putin Hysteria(Atlanta: Clarity Press, 2017), points out that the threat of Russian expansion has been invoked by Western leaders since the era of Charlemagne to justify their own expansionist policies.

The United States during Clinton’s presidency wanted to capitalize on the collapse of the Soviet Union to expand its power and influence in the Eurasian heartland, which geopolitical strategists like Zbigniew Brzezinski viewed as key to global domination.^[5]

NATO expansion under Clinton coincided with support for “color revolutions” targeting pro-Russian and socialist leaders such as Alexander Lukashenko of Belarus,^[6] and aggressive penetration of Central Asia in an attempt to pry its oil wealth away from Russia.

In 1997, the U.S. Department of State told Congress that the Caspian Basin held as much as 200 billion barrels of oil—about ten times the amount found in the North Sea, and one-third of the Persian Gulf’s total reserves.^[7]

In the next three years, the Clinton administration provided $175 million in arms and military training and more than $1 billion in aid to countries in the region. Strategic planners sought to incorporate it into a “vast U.S. dependency,” which NATO would help secure.^[8]

Oil rigs in the Caspian Sea—which the U.S. wanted to control over Russia. [Source: off-shore-technology.com]

Some $302 million was provided to the Georgian government of Eduard Shevardnadze, who had come to power in a coup d’état backed by the Western powers which toppled nationalist Zviad Gamsakhurdia, who died under suspicious circumstances a year later.^[9]

Eduard Shevardnadze and President Clinton sign a bilateral investment treaty at the White House in March 1994. [Source: commons.wikimedia.org]

Shevardnadze’s main value to the West was his commitment to protecting the primary oil export pipeline that crossed Georgia from Azerbaijan on the way to Turkey in an attempt to bypass Russia.

Route of Baku-Tbilisi pipeline. [Source: independent.co.uk]

The Clinton administration forged another defense alliance with Kazakh dictator Nursultan Nazarbayev (1990-2019), who had sold a 20% stake in the Tengiz offshore oil fields to Chevron after being bribed by an oil industry consultant, and carried out military training exercises in Uzbekistan under the auspices of the NATO Partnership for Peace (PFP) Program, in which the U.S. military nurtured “the embryo of a NATO-led military force in Central Asia.”^[10]

Clinton’s essay erroneously makes it seem that NATO expansion was purely defensive and in reaction to potential future Russian aggression—rather than rooted in any U.S. imperial designs. Clinton also omits the role of military lobbies: According to an analysis prepared for The New York Times by a research company in Springfield, Virginia, America’s six largest military contractors spent $51 million on lobbying for NATO expansion between 1996 and 1998.^[11]

Democracy Promotion American-Style

Clinton’s claims about trying to democratize Russia under Yeltsin’s rule are absurd, considering that Clinton expressed full support for Yeltsin after he ordered a siege of the Russian parliament in September 1993.

This was after the parliament repudiated the rapid privatization or “shock therapy” policies supported by the Clinton administration that resulted in the selling off of Russian state assets for a fraction of their worth to Yeltsin’s cronies and a new class of oligarchs.^[12]

Burning of Russian parliament on Yeltsin’s order after constitutional crisis in October 1993. [Source: reddit.com]

The Clinton administration went on to sabotage Russian democracy further when it intervened to rig the 1996 Russian election on Yeltsin’s behalf.

The National Endowment for Democracy (NED)—which gave nearly $1 million between 1990 and 1992 to the anti-communist Democratic Russia Movement that provided Yeltsin his political base^[13]—received USAID grants for conferences, message development, focus groups, polling methods and television ads that were provided to members of Yeltsin’s political machine.

Three American political consultants also went to work on Yeltsin’s re-election bid promoting dirty tricks urging Yeltsin to “go negative” by rallying the oligarch-controlled Russian media to whip up “a wild anti-Communist psychosis among the people,” as one sympathetic news editor put it.^[14]

Some great democracy promotion.

Madeleine’s Ghost

At the end of his Atlantic essay, Clinton provided a tribute to his former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, a Czech émigré who had exclaimed “hallelujah” after Clinton had signed off on NATO expansion in March 1999.

According to Clinton, “few diplomats have ever been so perfectly suited for the times they served as Madeleine….she understood that the end of the Cold War provided the chance to build a Europe free, united, prosperous, and secure for the first time since nation-states arose on the continent.”

Unfortunately, we see today that the policy of NATO expansion has not secured a prosperous, united, and free Europe as Albright envisioned.

Rather it has resulted in a divided and unequal one embroiled in a devastating war that threatens to extend further.

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

Notes

1. “Summary Report on One-on-One Meeting Between Presidents Clinton and Yeltsin, May 10, 1995, 10:10 a.m. – 1:19 p.m., St. Catherine’s Hall, The Kremlin,” National Security Archive, https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu//dc.html?doc=4950563-Document-04-Summary-report-on-the-one-on-one 

2. George F. Kennan, “A Fateful Error,” The New York Times, February 5, 1997. 
3. Quoted in Thomas L. Friedman, “This Is Putin’s War. But America and NATO Aren’t Innocent Bystanders,” The New York Times, February 21, 2022, https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/21/opinion/putin-ukraine-nato.html 
4. Bill Clinton, “I Tried to Put Russia on Another Path,” The Atlantic, April 7, 2022, https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/04/bill-clinton-nato-expansion-ukraine/629499/ 
5. See Zbigniew Brzezinski, The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and its Geostrategic Imperative (New York: Basic Books, 1998). Zbig’s son Mark, who served on Clinton’s National Security Council from 1999-2001 and is now U.S. ambassador to Poland, was a key figure carrying out Clinton’s policy of NATO enlargement. 
6. See Stewart Parker, The Last Soviet Republic: Alexander Lukashenko’s Belarus (London: Trafford, 2007), 136, 137. 
7. Michael T. Klare, Resource Wars: The New Landscape of Global Conflict (New York: Holt, 2002), 84, 85. 
8. Klare, Resource Wars, 85. 
9. Lutz Kleveman, The New Great Game: Blood and Oil in Central Asia (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2003), 44; Michael Pullara, The Spy Who Was Left Behind: Russia, the United States, and the True Story of the Betrayal and Assassination of a CIA Agent (New York: Scribner, 2018), 17, 18, 19. 
10. Nasser Saghafi Ameri, “The Emerging NATO: Impact on Europe and Asia,” in Europe and Asia: Perspectives on the Emerging International Order, V.P. Malik and Erhard Crome, eds. (New Delhi: Lancer Publishers & Distributors, 2006), 153; Ken Silverstein, The Secret World of Oil (London: Verso, 2014), 21, 22. Uzbekistan at the time was ruled by Islam Karimov, who was accused of boiling political opponents alive. 
11. Katharine Q. Seelye, “Arms Contractors Spend to Promote an Expanded NATO,” The New York Times, March 30, 1998. 
12. Sean Guillory, “Dermokratiya, USA,” Jacobin, March 13, 2017; David Foglesong, The American Mission and the “Evil Empire”: The Crusade For a “Free Russia” since 1881 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007),208; Helen Thomas, “Clinton Supports Yeltsin in Crisis,” UPI Archives, September 21, 1993, https://www.upi.com/Archives/1993/09/21/Clinton-supports-Yeltsin-in-crisis/7235748584000/ 
13. Colin Cavell, Exporting ‘Made in America’ Democracy: The National Endowment for Democracy & U.S. Foreign Policy (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2002), 110. 

14. Peter Beinart, “The U.S. Needs to Face Up to Its Long History of Election Meddling,” The Atlantic, July 22, 2018; Eleanor Randolph, “Americans Claim Role in Yeltsin Win,” Los Angeles Times, July 9, 1996; Fred Weir, “Betting on Boris,” CovertAction Quarterly(Summer 1996), 38, 41; Holly Sklar and Chip Berlet, “NED, CIA and the Orwellian Democracy Project,” CovertAction Quarterly 39 (Winter 1991-1992); Dick Morris and Eileen McGann, Because He Could (New York: Regan Books, 2004), 171. 

Featured image: Bill Clinton signs NATO expansion legislation in May 1998. [Source: aparchive.com]

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‘World Localization Day’ will be celebrated on 20 June. Organised by the non-profit Local Futures, this annual coming together of people from across the world began in 2020 and focuses on the need to localise supply-chains and recover our connection with nature and community. The stated aim is to “galvanize the worldwide localization movement into a force for systemic change”.  

Local Futures, founded by Helena Norberg-Hodge, urges us to imagine a very different world, one in which most of our food comes from nearby farmers who ensure food security year round and where the money we spend on everyday goods continues to recirculate in the local economy.

We are asked to imagine local businesses providing ample, meaningful employment opportunities, instead of our hard-earned cash being immediately siphoned off to some distant corporate headquarters.

Small farms would be key in this respect. They are integral to local markets and networks, short supply chains, food sovereignty, more diverse cropping systems and healthier diets. And they tend to serve the food requirements of communities rather than the interests of big business, institutional investors and shareholders half a world away.

If the COVID lockdowns and war in Ukraine tell us anything about our food system, it is that decentralised, regional and local community-owned food systems based on short(er) supply chains that can cope with future shocks are now needed more than ever.

The report Towards a Food Revolution: Food Hubs and Cooperatives in the US and Italy offers some pointers for creating sustainable support systems for small food producers and food distribution. Alternative, resilient food models and community supported agriculture are paramount.

Localization involves strengthening and rebuilding local economies and communities and restoring cultural and biological diversity. The ‘economics of happiness’ is central to this vision, rather than an endless quest for GDP growth and the alienation, conflict and misery this brings.

It is something we need to work towards because multi-billionaire globalists have a dystopian future mapped out for humanity which they want to impose on us all – and it is diametrically opposed to what is stated above.

The much-publicised ‘great reset’ is integral to this dystopia. It marks a shift away from ‘liberal democracy’ towards authoritarianism. At the same time, there is the relentless drive towards a distorted notion of a ‘green economy’, underpinned by the rhetoric of ‘sustainable consumption’ and ‘climate emergency’.

The great reset is really about capitalism’s end-game. Those promoting it realise the economic and social system must undergo a reset to a ‘new normal’, something that might no longer resemble ‘capitalism’.

End-game capitalism  

Capital can no longer maintain its profitability by exploiting labour alone. This much has been clear for some time. There is only so much surplus value to be extracted before the surplus is insufficient.

Historian Luciana Bohne notes that the shutting down of parts of the economy was already happening pre-COVID as there was insufficient growth, well below the minimum tolerable 3% level to maintain the viability of capitalism. This, despite a decades-long attack on workers and corporate tax cuts.

The system had been on life support for some time. Credit markets had been expanded and personal debt facilitated to maintain consumer demand as workers’ wages were squeezed. Financial products (derivatives, equities, debt, etc) and speculative capitalism were boosted, affording the rich a place to park their profits and make money off money. We have also seen the growth of unproductive rentier capitalism and stock buy backs and massive bail outs courtesy of taxpayers.

Moreover, in capitalism, there is also a tendency for the general rate of profit to fall over time. And this has certainly been the case according to writer Ted Reese, who notes it has trended downwards from an estimated 43% in the 1870s to 17% in the 2000s.

The 2008 financial crash was huge. But by late 2019, an even bigger meltdown was imminent. Many companies could not generate enough profit and falling turnover, squeezed margins, limited cashflows and highly leveraged balance sheets were prevalent. In effect, economic growth was already grinding to a halt prior to the massive stock market crash in February 2020.

Fabio Vighi, professor of critical theory, describes how, in late 2019, the Swiss Bank of International Settlements, BlackRock (the world’s most powerful investment fund), G7 central bankers, leading politicians and others worked behind closed doors to avert a massive impending financial meltdown.

The Fed soon began an emergency monetary programme, pumping hundreds of billions of dollars per week into financial markets. Not long after, COVID hit and lockdowns were imposed. The stock market did not collapse because lockdowns occurred. Vighi argues lockdowns were rolled out because financial markets were collapsing.

Closing down the global economy under the guise of fighting a pathogen that mainly posed a risk to the over 80s and the chronically ill seemed illogical to many, but lockdowns allowed the Fed to flood financial markets (COVID relief) with freshly printed money without causing hyperinflation. Vighi says that lockdowns curtailed economic activity, thereby removing demand for the newly printed money (credit) in the physical economy and preventing ‘contagion’.

Using lockdowns and restrictions, smaller enterprises were driven out of business and large sections of the pre-COVID economy were shut down. This amounted to a controlled demolition of parts of the economy while the likes of Amazon, Microsoft, Meta (Facebook) and the online payment sector – platforms which are dictating what the ‘new normal’ will look like – were clear winners in all of this.

The rising inflation that we currently witness is being blamed on the wholly avoidable conflict in Ukraine. Although this tells only part of the story, the conflict and sanctions seem to be hitting Europe severely: if you wanted to demolish your own economy or impoverish large sections of the population, this might be a good way to go about it.

However, the massive ‘going direct’ helicopter money given to the financial sector and global conglomerates under the guise of COVID relief was always going to have an impact once the global economy reopened.

Similar extraordinary monetary policy (lockdowns) cannot be ruled out in the future: perhaps on the pretext of another ‘virus’ but possibly based on the notion of curtailing human activity due to ‘climate emergency’. This is because raising interests rates to manage inflation could rapidly disrupt the debt-bloated financial system (an inflated Ponzi scheme) and implode the entire economy.

Permanent austerity   

But lockdowns, restrictions or creating mass unemployment and placing people on programmable digital currencies to micromanage spending and decrease inflationary pressures could help to manage the crisis. ‘Programmable’ means the government determining how much you can spend and what you can spend on.

How could governments legitimise such levels of control? By preaching about reduced consumption according to the creed of ‘sustainability’. This is how you would ‘own nothing and be happy’ if we are to believe this well-publicised slogan of the World Economic Forum (WEF).

But like neoliberal globalization in the 1980s – the great reset is being given a positive spin, something which supposedly symbolises a brave new techno-utopian future.

In the 1980s, to help legitimise the deregulated neoliberal globalisation agenda, government and media instigated an ideological onslaught, driving home the primacy of ‘free enterprise’, individual rights and responsibility and emphasising a shift away from the role of state, trade unions and the collective in society.

Today, we are seeing another ideological shift: individual rights (freedom to choose what is injected into your own body, for instance) are said to undermine the wider needs of society and – in a stark turnaround – individual freedom is now said to pose a threat to ‘national security’, ‘public health’ or ‘safety’.

A near-permanent state of ‘emergency’ due to public health threats, climate catastrophe or conflict (as with the situation in Ukraine) would conveniently place populations on an ongoing ‘war footing’. Notions of individual liberty and democratic principles would be usurped by placing the emphasis on the ‘public interest’ and protecting the population from ‘harm’. This would facilitate the march towards authoritarianism.

As in the 1980s, this messaging is being driven by economic impulses. Neoliberalism privatised, deregulated, exploited workers and optimised debt to the point whereby markets are now kept afloat by endless financial injections.

The WEF says the public will ‘rent’ everything they require: stripping the right of personal ownership under the guise of ‘sustainable consumption’ and ‘saving the planet’. Where the WEF is concerned, this is little more than code for permanent austerity to be imposed on the mass of the population.

Metaverse future 

At the start of this article, readers were asked to imagine a future based on a certain set of principles associated with localization. For one moment, imagine another. The one being promoted by the WEF, the high-level talking shop and lobby group for elite interests headed by that avowed globalist and transhumanist Klaus Schwab.

As you sit all day unemployed in your high-rise, your ‘food’ will be delivered via an online platform bought courtesy of your programmable universal basic income digital money. Food courtesy of Gates-promoted farms manned by driverless machines, monitored by drones and doused with chemicals to produce crops from patented GM seeds for industrial ‘biomatter’ to be engineered, processed and constituted into something resembling food.

Enjoy and be happy eating your fake food, stripped of satisfying productive endeavour and genuine self-fulfilment. But really, it will not be a problem. You can sit all day and exist virtually in Zuckerberg’s fantasy metaverse. Property-less and happy in your open prison of mass unemployment, state dependency, track and chip health passports and financial exclusion via programmable currency.

A world also in which bodily integrity no longer exists courtesy of a mandatory vaccination agenda linked to emerging digital-biopharmaceutical technologies. The proposed World Health Organization pandemic treaty marks a worrying step in this direction.

This ‘new normal’ would be tyrannical, but the ‘old normal’ – which still thrives – was not something to be celebrated. Global inequality is severe and environmental devastation and human dislocation has been increasing. Dependency and dispossession remain at the core of the system, both on an individual level and at local, regional and national levels. New normal or old normal, these problems will persist and become worse.

Green imperialism  

The ‘green economy’ being heavily promoted is based on the commodification of nature, through privatization, marketization and monetary valuation. Banks and corporations will set the agenda – dressed in the garb of ‘stakeholder capitalism’, a euphemism for governments facilitating the needs of powerful global interests. The fear is that the proposed system will weaken environmental protection laws and regulations to facilitate private capital.

The banking sector will engage in ‘green profiling’ and issue ‘green bonds’ and global corporations will be able to ‘offset’ (greenwash) their environment-degrading activities by, for example, protecting or planting a forest elsewhere (on indigenous people’s land) or perhaps even investing in (imposing) industrial agriculture which grows herbicide-resistant GMO commodity crop monocultures that are misleadingly portrayed as ‘climate friendly’. Imperialism wrapped in green.

Relying on the same thinking and the same interests that led the world to where it is now does not seem like a great idea. This type of ‘green’ is first and foremost a multi-trillion market opportunity for lining pockets and part of a strategy that may well be used to secure compliance required for the ‘new normal’.

The future needs to be rooted in the principles of localization. For this, we need look no further than the economics and the social relations that underpin tribal societies (for example, India’s indigenous peoples). The knowledge and value systems of indigenous peoples promote long-term genuine sustainability by living within the boundaries of nature and emphasise equality, communality and sharing rather than separation, domination and competition.

Self-sufficiency, solidarity, localization and cooperation is the antidote to globalism and the top-down tyranny of programmable digital currencies and unaccountable, monopolistic AI-driven platforms which aim to monitor and dictate every aspect of life.

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Renowned author Colin Todhunter specialises in development, food and agriculture. He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG) in Montreal.

The author receives no payment from any media outlet or organization for his work. If you appreciated this article, consider sending a few coins his way: [email protected] 

Featured image is from Food and Water Watch

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Read Colin Todhunter’s e-Book entitled

Food, Dispossession and Dependency. Resisting the New World Order

We are currently seeing an acceleration of the corporate consolidation of the entire global agri-food chain. The high-tech/big data conglomerates, including Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook and Google, have joined traditional agribusiness giants, such as Corteva, Bayer, Cargill and Syngenta, in a quest to impose their model of food and agriculture on the world.

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is also involved (documented in ‘Gates to a Global Empire‘ by Navdanya International), whether through buying up huge tracts of farmland, promoting a much-heralded (but failed) ‘green revolution’ for Africa, pushing biosynthetic food and genetic engineering technologies or more generally facilitating the aims of the mega agri-food corporations.

Click here to read.

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Following the meeting US Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin had with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on April 24, Kiev is seemingly more determined to not negotiate with Moscow to bring an end to the war. In fact, the US is only encouraging and emboldening Ukraine to continue its war effort despite little prospect for victory. Essentially, the US is hoping Ukraine will be a permanent issue for Russia, and for his part, Zelensky is happily submitting to this demand that will ensure the war will wage on longer than necessary.

Speaking at a news conference at an undisclosed location in Poland near the Ukrainian border, Austin said:

“We want to see Russia weakened to the degree that it can’t do the kinds of things that it has done in invading Ukraine. So it has already lost a lot of military capability. And a lot of its troops, quite frankly. And we want to see them not have the capability to very quickly reproduce that capability.”

Blinken for his part told reporters that Vladimir Putin’s attempts to “subjugate Ukraine and take its independence” has “failed” and that as a “result of sanctions” the Russian economy “is in shambles.”

Despite the reality on the ground that the Russian military are on Kiev’s doorstep and that town after town are being captured by Russian-backed separatist forces in Donbass, the top US officials are still encouraging Ukraine to continue its war effort by disingenuously claiming that the Russian military has lost “capability” and admitting that their goal is to see Russia permanently weakened.

In this way, it appears that Austin hopes Ukraine can become some kind of quagmire for Russia that will absorb a lot of its resources, energy and focus – something akin to the 20-year American occupation of Afghanistan. Because of this, Kiev will certainly become more defiant in its negotiations with Moscow.

In support of this endeavour, Austin announced that the US would allocate more than $700 million in direct and indirect military assistance to Ukraine. As reported by the New York Times, the trip to Kiev was planned in top-secret conditions, with Blinken and Austin flying on a US Air Force cargo plane, accompanied by a handful of officials from the departments.

Blinken and Austin’s trip to Kiev was the first by senior US officials to Ukraine since the war began, making it all the more symbolic as it comes at a time when Russian forces are engaged in a massive campaign in Donbass that has already seen major settlements fall and elements of the Ukrainian military and their neo-Nazi Azov Battalion allies reduced to holding nothing but a single factory in the major port city of Mariupol.

A National Security Council spokesperson said on April 21 that the US wants Ukraine to win and “that’s why we’re doing everything we can to help Ukraine defend its sovereignty and territorial integrity, and to strengthen the Ukrainians’ hands on the battlefield and at the negotiating table.”

Even if Ukraine agrees to maintain a neutral status with external security guarantees, there is every possibility that in only a few years’ time there could be a new Maidan coup in Kiev. This possibility has already made Moscow suspicious, but the US commitment to help Ukraine weaken Russia only heightens this.

The US hosted in Germany on April 26 talks on Ukraine that were led by Austin. General Mark Milley, chairman of the US joint chiefs of staff, said a key goal of the talks was to coordinate mounting security assistance to Kiev that included heavy weaponry, such as howitzers, as well as armed drones and ammunition.

“The next several weeks will be very, very critical,” Milley said. “They need continued support in order to be successful on the battlefield. And that’s really the purpose of this conference.”

In this way, it again highlights that the West is not seeking a way to conclude the war, but a way to maintain it for as long as possible in the daft hope that the Russian military weakens to significant proportions that it will no longer be able to defend its interests, whether it be in Eastern Europe, Central Asia, the Caucasus, the Middle East or elsewhere. Not only will this Western hope fail to materialize, but it also prolongs the suffering of the Ukrainian people.

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Paul Antonopoulos is an independent geopolitical analyst.

Featured image is from InfoBrics

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According to a recent survey of data on trade in military material between EU and Russian points to the existence of a profitable market, with ample flow of capital and goods. Russia and Western Europe are historically partners with mutually compatible commercial interests, however, given the current context of conflict in Ukraine, the mere existence of the partnership in the past generates scandal.

More than ten EU member states have operated military trade relations with Russia in recent years, totaling more than 350 million euros in transactions, The Telegraph reported. Among these countries, France and Germany stand out significantly, being responsible for more than 78% of bilateral military trade. Missiles, rockets, guns, and bombs are among the various equipment exported by European countries to Russia – much of which is apparently being used by Moscow’s forces in the current special military operation in Ukraine.

What has caused great discomfort in the Western media is the fact that much of this trade was operated “bypassing” a series of trade restrictions imposed by an active collective agreement to embargo Russia, signed in 2014 as a retaliation for the Russian intervention in Crimea. Basically, countries interested in trading military material with Russia used contracts prior to the embargo agreement to justify the continuity of relations, increasing trade and generating profits for the European military industry in the last eight years.

Indeed, the data on the military partnership comes at a delicate moment in relations between Russia and the West. Media agencies have severely criticized any position of Western governments that is not in absolute alignment with the policy of total boycott against Russia. Taking notes on the exports of weapons to Moscow, in this sense, sounds like a real scandal, resulting in denunciations and alarmism about an alleged “European connivence” with Russia’s actions in Ukraine.

Commenting on the case, Romanian MEP Cristian Terhes, responsible for the abovementioned data collection research on military trade, said:

“While Ukraine is desperately crying out for weapons to defend itself from Putin’s invasion, Germany and France are silent, but were happy enough to quietly and disgracefully sell their wares to Moscow”.

The situation is particularly serious when we consider the German case. Previously, European newspapers were focused on criticizing Berlin for continuing its billion-dollar partnership with Russian energy companies, despite the current sanctions. Now, everything tends to get worse in mainstream media’s opinion about the German government, as for their respective experts all that matters is that Moscow receives sanctions and economic blockades in every way possible.

As a result, pressure is also increasing for Germany to send military and financial aid to Ukraine. Trying to maintain stable its energy relations with Russia and to avoid an escalation of the conflict, the German government has remained silent so far when questioned about German ability to send heavy weapons to Kiev. Now, with the data on German military trade with Russia being exposed, this pressure to “help Ukraine” will be intensified.

Scholz has already commented on the reasons why he has avoided allowing weapons to be sent to Ukraine. For him, this level of involvement on the part of NATO countries tends to escalate tensions even further, harming European security. For example, these were some of his words about the case during a recent interview:

“That’s why it is all the more important that we consider each step very carefully and coordinate closely with one another (…) To avoid an escalation towards NATO is a top priority for me (…) That’s why I don’t focus on polls or let myself be irritated by shrill calls. The consequences of an error would be dramatic”.

What is curious about all this is the sensationalist way in which the western media opines about international trade. There is nothing ideological about commercial relationships, they are just ties aimed at profits and the supply of products. By selling weapons to Russia, European nations are not contradicting their condemnation of Moscow’s actions in Ukraine, they are just stating that they have commercial and strategic interests in maintaining ties with the Russians despite not agreeing with the Kremlin’s decision to launch a military operation on Ukrainian soil.

France and Germany – and the other nations that maintain small military deals with Moscow – only prove that, despite the propagandistic idealism spread by the pro-NATO media, nations are guided by realistic politicians and advisers, who take state interests more seriously than unrealistic issues, such as the idea of ​​”canceling Russia”.

Military trade with Europe represents a small fraction of the Russian arsenal. If pressure from NATO – mainly from the US and UK – for Europe to suspend military trade ties is carried forward, the only harmed party will be Europe itself, which will lose a significant source of business, without any effect being seen in the special operation.

Finally, it is necessary to mention that the act of “bypassing” – not violating – collective embargo agreements is a common practice in the global scenario and that it does not represent any illegality according to international law. If there were ties between Europeans and Russians before 2014, the subsequent embargo cannot dissolve them as there is an international principle of justice that states that law does not retroact – it only legislates from the moment it was created. There is no media alarmism or pressure from NATO able to change the evident legality of trade between Europe and Russia.

It would be better to respect free decisions of each state and abdicate outdated measures of economic embargo in the face of the European interest in maintaining mutually benefitted trade ties.

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Lucas Leiroz is a researcher in Social Sciences at the Rural Federal University of Rio de Janeiro; geopolitical consultant.

Featured image is from Strategic Culture Foundation

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On April 1, a decree signed by Russian President Vladimir Putin came into force, requiring nonfriendly countries that have imposed illegal sanctions on Moscow to pay for Russian gas in rubles.

Under the European Commission’s proposal, companies will transfer their payments in euros or dollars to a bank account in Russia, from where the currency will be converted into rubles. Payments will be completed once the foreign currency is deposited in the Russian bank.

Amid sanctions imposed by London on Gazprom, the British Treasury has issued a temporary waiver allowing British companies to transfer funds to Russia’s Gazprombank to pay for gas. UK firms will be able to meet Moscow’s new demand to pay for gas in rubles through the waiver of sanctions, which will last until May 31.

The Russian ruble-based mechanism emerged in response to sanctions imposed by European and Western countries since the start of Moscow’s special military operation in Ukraine on February 24. Russia has said that this mechanism will provide the country with payment guarantees.

To get around US forced sanction, EU changes tune on ruble gas payments. The settlement switch may be possible without breaching sanctions, the European Commission says. pic.twitter.com/68hgHGsLMO

— [email protected] (@frederickcheng5) April 22, 2022

Similarly, the decree also followed the decision of Western governments to illegally freeze the foreign currency assets of the Central Bank of Russia held in their countries. Moscow recently promised to take those governments to court over the measure to fight for the freeing up of the funds.

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A report by The New York Times has revealed that Ukrainian troops fired cluster munitions, banned by 110 countries around the world, on a Ukrainian village.

The cluster bombs that the Ukrainian forces used against a village populated with civilians on their own territory are banned by countries around the world for their capacity to haphazardly kill innocent civilians, according to the Convention on Cluster Munitions. Almost 20% of these munitions fail to detonate on impact, and remain a threat to civilians long after hostilities end, killing and maiming them indiscriminately.

The United States, Ukraine, Russia, China, Brazil, “Israel” and Pakistan have opposed signing the treaty.

“It’s not surprising, but it’s definitely dismaying to hear that evidence has emerged indicating that Ukraine may have used cluster munitions in this current conflict,” said Mary Wareham, advocacy director of the arms division at Human Rights Watch. “Cluster munitions are unacceptable weapons that are killing and maiming civilians across Ukraine.”

Ukraine’s Ministry of Defense declined to comment.

Ukrainian forces had also used cluster bombs in 2015 in battles against the breakaway republics of Lugansk and Donetsk to the country’s east. More recently, they fired such munitions on Donetsk on March 14, killing 20 people and wounding 37 others.

Donetsk republic leader, Denis Pushilin, said that downtown Donetsk was hit by a Ukrainian Tochka-U missile filled with cluster munitions.

“We would need further information to see whether we can confirm that,” UN deputy spokesperson Farhan Haq said Monday when asked whether the UN had any evidence of Ukrainian forces using cluster munitions.

The head of the Defense Ministry’s National Defense Management Center, General Mikhail Mezentsev, touched on Ukraine’s actions in Donetsk, revealing the toll of the Ukrainian Tochka-U attack, a missile containing cluster munition. He described the bombing as a “war crime.”

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Featured image: Part of an Uragan cluster munition that was most likely fired by Ukrainian forces in Husarivka (Source: NYT)

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For more than one reason, the US President Joe Biden’s call with Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett on Sunday is hugely consequential. This has been Biden’s second phone conversation with Bennett in four weeks. On March 30 Biden called to express his “deepest condolences” following the terrorist attacks that killed 11 people in three Israeli cities.

This time around, his call coincided with the joint meeting of the US secretaries of state and defence with the Ukrainian president in Kiev on Sunday signifying that Washington is raising the ante in the conflict with Russia and marking a shift in the conflict, signalling readiness to wade deeper into the conflict after initial qualms.

The US and NATO allies are showing readiness to supply heavier equipment and more advanced weapons systems to Ukraine. After the trip to Kiev, Defence Secretary Austin told journalists in Poland that Ukraine can win the war against Russia if it has the right equipment.

“We believe that we can win, they can win if they have the right equipment, the right support,” he said.

Officials in Kiev had earlier drawn up a list of weapons that they urgently needed from the US, which includes anti-missile and anti-aircraft systems. Ukraine is known to have sought advanced weaponry from Israel previously, including the famous “Iron Dome” anti-missile system and the infamous Pegasus spyware for use against Russia. But Israel didn’t want to stick out its neck for Ukraine due to fears of jeopardising its tacit deconfliction measures with Moscow during its operations against Iranian targets in Syria. 

However, things changed dramatically in the past fortnight or so, as Israel gave up its neutrality toward Russia’s special operation and accused Moscow of committing war crimes. Biden’s conversation with Bennett took place as Russia-Israel relations began plummeting. Interestingly, the White House readout flagged a pointed reference by Biden to Israel’s Iron Dome system. 

Both the White House readout (here) and the statement from Bennett’s office (here) mentioned the situation around Iran. It is entirely conceivable that the sudden unexplained shift in Israel’s stance vis-a-vis Russia in the Ukraine conflict is prompted by some sort of modus vivendi with the Biden Administration regarding the lifting of sanctions against Iran. 

Israel has been pulling out all stops to prevent the Biden administration from conceding the Iranian demand for the removal of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) from Washington’s watchlist on terror groups. The Israeli statement not only mentioned that the IRGC issue was  discussed but quoted Bennett as saying, “I am sure that President Biden, who is a true friend of Israel and cares about its security, will not allow the IRGC to be removed from the list of terrorist organisations. Israel has clarified its position on the issue: The IRGC is the largest terrorist organisation in the world.” Biden has accepted an invitation from Bennett to visit Israel “in the coming months.” 

In the entire West Asian landscape, there is not a single country other than Israel that the US can count on today as an ally against Russia. Clearly, the security climate in West Asia will change phenomenally if the Biden Administration were to turn its back at this point on the negotiations relating to JCPOA. The White House readout highlighted that Biden and Bennett discussed “shared regional and global security challenges, including the threat posed by Iran and its proxies.” 

A powerful lobby in the Beltway, starting with none other than the Democratic Senator Bob Menendez, Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, is opposed to any deal with Iran. These lobbyists argue that with Iran continuing to rapidly escalate its nuclear program and making clear that its ballistic missiles and regional policies are not negotiable, there is little left for the US to salvage out of the JCPOA.  

Speaking at the US Senate Armed Services Committee, the Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Mark Milley, said recently, “In my personal opinion I believe the IRGC Quds Force to be a terrorist organisation and I do not support them being delisted from the Foreign Terrorist Organisations list.” Again, in an open letter to Biden, 70 national security professionals have opposed the delisting of the IRGC as a foreign terrorist organisation. In another open letter, 46 retired US generals and admirals have opposed the ongoing nuclear deal. 

Viewed from another angle, now that Europe is not contemplating an oil / gas embargo against Russia, Washington is no longer under pressure to lift the sanctions against Iran’s energy exports. And at any rate, the US will be mindful of the possibility that Iran may provide a lifeline to Russia to beat Western sanctions. 

Meanwhile, Biden administration’s priority is also shifting away from economic sanctions against Russia to “finally breaking the back of Russia’s ability to project power outside of Russia to threaten Georgia, to threaten Moldova, to threaten our Baltic allies” — to borrow the words of former US Army Europe Commander Ben Hodges from a recent interview. 

Austin has called at short notice a meeting tomorrow at the American base in Germany with counterparts from allied countries to discuss the scope for vastly increased military supplies to Ukraine on a long-term basis. Biden’s call to Bennett just prior to that meeting suggests that the US may have persuaded Israel to be an active participant in the war in Ukraine, which would “bleed” Russia “white.” 

What motivates Israel would be that the Biden administration is willing to accommodate Israeli concerns over a US-Iran nuclear deal. That explains Bennett’s “confidence” that Biden will not concede Iran’s demand to remove IRGC from the terror watchlist.  

The bottom line is that Tehran is left with no other option now but to either accept a new deal or stick to its demands and pay for the consequences. The US estimates that Tehran, having come so close to the US lifting the sanctions, which will of course be a game changer for Iran’s besieged economy, would think twice about walking away with empty hands. 

Biden’s call with Bennett messages to Tehran that the US is prepared to turn to other options if the negotiations fail in Vienna. 

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Former NATO top commander Gen. Philip Breedlove is the latest big name to come out for putting troops on the ground in Ukraine. Breedlove, who has been angling for weeks for a more muscular policy against Russia, told The Times of London that it’s time for real action. And he may have the ear of the White House: the article says he’s named as one of “several high-ranking retired commanders advising the Biden administration on Ukraine.”

“So what could the West do? Well, right now there are no Russian troops west of the Dnieper River. So why don’t we put Nato troops into western Ukraine to carry out humanitarian missions and to set up a forward arms supply base?”

Of course it wouldn’t stop there. Most likely Russia will react aggressively, if not explosively, since setting up “a forward arms supply base” would be fully entering this war on the side of Ukraine. NATO would be a co-belligerent in every way, with its 40,000 troops now stationed on alliance’s eastern front considered future enemy combatants. At the end of April, the Pentagon mobilized some 14,000 troops, along with F-35 strike fighters and Apache helicopters to Poland, Hungary, and the Baltics. A total of 100,000 U.S. troops now spread across Europe would no doubt be on some level of alert if NATO entered the fray.

Breedlove, who served as NATO’s Supreme Allied Commander from 2013 to 2016, said this move was essential for the protection of Odesa, a strategic Ukrainian port city on the Black Sea.

“If Odesa falls, Ukraine will become a land-locked country with no access to the Black Sea. The impact on Ukraine’s GDP would be huge. It would be ruinous for the economy,” he told the Times.

“The West is saying it is providing everything Ukraine needs to defend against the Russians. But the people of Mariupol had to fight without Stingers [anti-aircraft missiles]. That was a failure by the West.”

He added:

“Now we need to make sure that the Ukrainians win the battle for Odesa.”

Earlier this month, Breedlove was complaining that the West’s fears of nuclear war were working in Putin’s favor.

“We have been so worried about nuclear weapons and World War III that we have allowed ourselves to be fully deterred. And [Putin], frankly, is completely undeterred. He has switched into the most horrific war against the citizens of Ukraine, it is beyond criminal at this point.”

U.S. weakness on this score bleeds over to our relations with Iran, North Korea, and China, he asserts:

“The message we’re sending to the entire world is if you get a nuclear weapon, you’re going to have a certain reaction from the West and certainly from the United States…[that’s all]. And I don’t think that’s the message we want to send them.”

Of course, a month before this Breedlove said he was “not advocating a war” when asked about what appeared to be his support for a “humanitarian no fly zone.” Today, advocating NATO involvement directly in Ukraine would be a giant leap beyond that, and who knows what kind of opening for others coming down with similar war fever in Washington. Last week, Delaware Sen. Chris Coons was forced to walk back comments he made that suggested he too, was in favor of putting troops on the ground against Russia.

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Featured image: General Philip Breedlove, then Supreme Allied Commander Europe, in 2014. (NATO)

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First published on WSWS in July 2019

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Judge Emma Arbuthnot has refused to recuse herself from WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange’s US extradition hearings. This is what “class justice” looks like.

Arbuthnot, Chief Magistrate and Senior District Judge for England and Wales, is flouting fundamental legal principles to ensure that she presides over a show trial against Assange, due to resume at Westminster Magistrates Court on February 25. If extradited, Assange faces charges under the Espionage Act, carrying a 175-year prison sentence. Further charges are pending, which could include the death penalty.

The “Guide to Judicial Conduct” in England and Wales, published in 2018, states that,

“Judicial independence is a cornerstone of our system of government in a democratic society and a safeguard of the freedom and rights of the citizen under the rule of law. The judiciary must be seen to be independent of the legislative and executive arms of government both as individuals and as a whole.”

Arbuthnot should have automatically recused herself on this basis.

Her husband, James Norwich Arbuthnot, is a Conservative member of the House of Lords. He is intimately connected with the British armed forces and security services, whose criminal operations were exposed by WikiLeaks.

As a Tory MP, Lord Arbuthnot was between 2005 and 2014 the chair of the Defence Select Committee, the body overseeing the Ministry of Defence and Britain’s armed forces. His watch covered ongoing military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as the wars for regime change in Libya and Syria.

He is currently co-chair of the UK advisory board for defence manufacturer Thales and is an advisory board member of the Royal United Services Institute for Defence and Security Studies (RUSI). Lord Arbuthnot is also a former director at security and intelligence consultancy firm SC Strategy, where he worked for two years alongside co-directors Lord Carlile and Sir John Scarlett.

Carlile is a prominent defender of MI5 who supported the Investigatory Powers Act 2016 (nicknamed the Snoopers’ Charter) enabling the British state to access internet connection records without a warrant. He argued that Edward Snowden’s exposures of illegal mass state surveillance “amounted to a criminal act.’’ He oversaw the implementation of anti-terror legislation and reviewed national security procedures in Northern Ireland.

Scarlett is former head of MI6 and chair of the government’s Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC). He oversaw the production of a report arguing for the right of the secret services to “collect bulk communications data” and was responsible for compiling the “dodgy dossier” on Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq.

The activities of Lord Arbuthnot and his colleagues were the subject of thousands of WikiLeaks disclosures. There are almost 2,000 references in the WikiLeaks’ database to Thales and nearly 450 to RUSI. Lord Arbuthnot himself can be found in over 50 entries.

As Assange’s legal team and UN Rapporteur on Torture Nils Melzer have argued, this “strong conflict of interest” requires Lady Arbuthnot to stand down from Assange’s case. Her husband’s entire political life has been dedicated to crushing the sort of transparency and accountability advocated by WikiLeaks.

The “Guide to Judicial Conduct” explicitly states, “Where a close member of a judge’s family is politically active, the judge needs to bear in mind the possibility that, in some proceedings, that political activity might raise concerns about the judge’s own impartiality and detachment from the political process and should act accordingly.”

Furthermore, “personal animosity towards a party is also a compelling reason for disqualification.”

Arbuthnot’s animosity toward Assange is on public record.

No legal argument will convince Arbuthnot to recuse herself. Her connections via her family to the security services are the very reason she has been selected to oversee this case. The British ruling class requires an official to rubber stamp Assange’s transfer to the US, in what amounts to an extraordinary rendition.

Two previous instances of judges recusing themselves from English court cases provide a stark contrast to the WikiLeaks founder’s case.

The first involves Arbuthnot herself. In August 2018, she was obliged to stand down from a case against Uber after the Observer revealed that her husband had a business interest in the ride hailing company via SC Strategy and its client, the Qatar Investment Authority. A judicial spokesman said “as soon as this link was pointed out to her, she assigned the case to a fellow judge. It is essential that judges not only are, but are seen to be, absolutely impartial.”

No such concerns are evident in the case of Assange. Not one article in the mainstream media has reported on the glaring contradiction between Arbuthnot’s actions in 2018 versus today.

The second instance is of a judge failing to recuse himself in 1998 during the attempt to extradite former Chilean dictator, torturer and executioner Augusto Pinochet to face criminal charges in Spain.

Lord Hoffmann was savaged for failing to make clear his connections with the human rights group Amnesty International, which was a party to the case. He was chair of the charity’s fundraising department in a voluntary capacity. Hoffmann had been one of three Law Lords out of five to vote to overturn a High Court decision affirming Pinochet’s claimed immunity from prosecution due to his being a head of state at the time of his crimes. In an unprecedented move, the House of Lords’ verdict against Pinochet (involving Hoffmann) was scrapped by five law lords and only re-confirmed a year later—with significant qualifications invalidating most of the charges against Pinochet.

The Law Lords, led by Lord Browne-Wilkinson, developed arguments which would absolutely require Arbuthnot to recuse herself from the Assange case. Previously, whether a judge was automatically disqualified from a case depended on having a financial interest in its outcome. Lord Browne-Wilkinson’s decision extended the principle of automatic disqualification to apply to the much looser categories of non-financial “interests” or support for “causes.”

The overturn verdict accepted Pinochet’s claim that he had been denied the right to a fair trial under Article 6 of the European Convention on Human Rights, which states, “Any judge in respect of whom there is a legitimate reason to fear a lack of impartiality must withdraw.”

Denunciations of Hoffmann were brutal. The Guardian reported January 16, 1999 that five law lords had “criticised Lord Hoffmann for flouting the basic principle that ‘justice must not only be done but must be seen to be done.’ The devastating criticism cast doubt over Lord Hoffmann’s future as a law lord.”

The Guardian continued,

“The judges accuse Lord Hoffmann of ignoring a basic judicial tenet learned by every student in the first year of law school. So well-known is the rule, said Lord Hope, that no civil court in the United Kingdom has had a judgment set aside for a breach of it this century… ‘Judges are well aware they should not sit in a case where they have even the slightest personal interest in it, either as defendant or as prosecutor,’ Lord Hope said.

“Lord Hutton said public confidence in the integrity of the administration of justice would be shaken if Lord Hoffmann’s deciding vote that General Pinochet could be prosecuted was allowed to stand.”

In January 2000, the Blair Labour government’s Home Secretary Jack Straw intervened to protect the mass murderer, overruling the House of Lords and insisting that extradition proceedings should be halted on the grounds of Pinochet’s supposed ill-health. Pinochet arrived back in Chile on March 3, landing at Santiago Airport where he rose from his wheelchair to the cheers of his fascistic supporters.

Clearly, “judicial impartiality” means one thing when it comes to defending a vicious dictator and long-time ally of US and British imperialism. It means another when it amounts to persecuting a world-renowned journalist who has exposed the crimes of the ruling class.

Assange’s scalp must be taken at all costs to further imperialism’s colonial-style wars of conquest and the global assault on the social and democratic rights of the working class. To silence him forever, not only the judiciary but the entire state apparatus and its defenders in the media are shedding all democratic and liberal pretensions.

The Socialist Equality Party backs the demands being raised by Assange’s supporters that Arbuthnot recuse herself. But we warn that the sole force capable of freeing Assange is the international working class mobilized in a collective political struggle against the ruling class and its legal apparatus.

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In an interesting short work, Giving up is not an option – Memoirs of a Palestinian American,  Hani Khoury outllines the thread of his life from growing up in Palestine followed by his move to the U.S. for educational purposes.  Along the way he hits upon several themes – one of the main ones being his path through life with a disability that kept him confined to a wheelchair for most of his life.   Two other themes intermix with this:  first are comments on Palestine and Israel; and another large theme is education, in particular the study of mathematics.

Khoury was born in Nablus with spinal muscular atrophy, a disability in Palestine severely limiting accessibility to already limited activities.  Education became his focus and at the age of eighteen he moved to the U.S. to continue his studies, a journey that occupied thirty years of his life as student and educator.

A very human context is given, a personal perception of historical events while in school, an examination of the moral aspects of occupation, and comments on the dehumanizing actions by occupiers in everyday life.  It was his “Misfortune to live and grow up under one of the most brutal military occupations in the world.”

Education

Having experienced and looked at the different religions of his native land, Khoury says his beliefs are of a secular humanist, based partly on “the fruits of science”  and “education as a philosophy of liberation, for it can and should provide all of us with hope for a better future.”

Relating to his specialty in the field of mathematics, he tends to indicate that math, with its required thinking skills, is a major component of critical thought leading to democracy.  Again speaking of education and democracy he says, “ Informed engagement in civic and political life are essential prerequisites for democracy….including mathematics education.”   While I believe he gives too much emphasis to math’s influence on critical thinking skills and democracy, it is readily understood from his personal life story and success as a math teacher.

A return to Palestine

After many years of teaching, Khoury returns to his hometown, Nablus.  He provides a precis of the historical changes that have occurred between his departure and return.  He notes the failure of the Oslo Accords, the security cooperation between Israel and the Palestinian Authority [PA], and the common strategic interests Israel has with the U.S.: oil, geopolitics, and military superiority.

In his summary he says the PA “has failed the aspirations of the Palestinian people.”  On the settlements he indicates their “massive spread” is “impossible to reverse,” leading to the current apartheid system and the future need for a democratic unitary state.

He concludes with notes on international law, but more personally on education, risk taking, courage and honesty, and, as per the title, not giving up.  Giving up is not an option – Memoirs of a Palestinian American is a short readily accessible read and provides a unique Palestinian view of a life directed towards education and critical reasoning as a necessary part of life and democracy.

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Jim Miles is a regular contributor to Global Research.

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***

Joshua Yoder, an airline pilot and co-founder of the U.S. Freedom Flyers said during an interview Wednesday that a cardiologist told him that if the airlines were conducting certain health screenings, 30 percent of the pilots currently flying would probably be disqualified due to vaccine-induced heart conditions.

Yoder told tech millionaire and Vaccine Safety Research Foundation founder Steve Kirsch that his group has received hundreds of reports about pilots flying planes while suffering from adverse side effects from the COVID vaccines.

The most prominent health issues being reported, the pilot noted, include chest pains, myocarditis, and pericarditis. Yoder said that three vaccinated pilot called him yesterday and said that they’re “currently flying with chest pains,” and another one said he is being treated by a cardiologist. He noted that the pilots want to remain anonymous because they don’t want to lose their jobs.

Yoder said the U.S. Freedom Flyers would like to find a solution for these pilots, and work with doctors, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), airlines, and unions to come up with a protocol so they have “some kind of immunity” that would allow the pilots to talk openly about what is happening to them.

The USFF formed last fall to help employees in the transportation industry oppose the federal laws surrounding vaccinations.

“I’m afraid if we keep going down this path, at some point it’s going to end in catastrophe,” he said.

“If passengers actually knew what was going on at the airlines and the FAA, they would be livid, and everyone would be jumping on a class action suit against all of them,” he said.

Yoder said that world renowned cardiologist Dr. Peter McCullough told him that if the pilots were regularly tested, a significant number of them would probably have to be grounded.

“He [McCullough] said that if every vaccinated pilot were to be screened, there would be somewhere around a 30 percent loss in manpower,” Yoder told Kirsch.

McCullough, along with Idaho pathologist Dr. Ryan Cole, Robert Kennedy Jr, Lt. Col Teresa Long M.D., Lt. Col. Peter Chambers D.O. and other experts signed letter to the Federal Aviation Administration and the major airlines on Dec. 15, 2021, urging them to flag all vaccinated pilots, and administer EKGs, D-dimer tests, troponin tests, and cardiac MRIs to assess their health.

The doctors warned that adverse events from vaccination could cause “a pilot (to lose) control of his aircraft” and lead to “untold devastation.”

As American Greatness reported on Wednesday, an American Airlines pilot recently suffered a cardiac arrest six minutes after landing his airbus at the Dallas-Fort Worth airport.

Captain Robert Snow nearly died when his heart stopped on April 9, according to Yoder.

“They had to shock him three times with the AED [automated external defibrillator] to bring him back,” he said.

Yoder noted that Snow was taken to Baylor, Scott and White Health Center, which is only ten minutes from both American Airlines, and the union (the Allied Pilots Association), yet no one from the airline or union called Snow while he was in the hospital, or stopped by to visit him. The only thing the airline did was fly his family to the hospital to meet with him.

Snow called the U.S. Freedom Fliers for help, and the group assembled a “world-class” team of doctors and lawyers to assist him. Snow is now recuperating at home, Yoder said.

Yoder acknowledged that it is pretty clear that Snow’s cardiac arrest was caused by the Johnson and Johnson vaccine, but the pilot has been undergoing a series of tests to confirm it.

Yoder told Kirsch that the airline industry does not seem to want to deal with the potentially dangerous incident.

“American Airlines is trying to create as much distance between themselves and this incident as humanely possible,” he said. “So is the FAA, and so are the unions. We can’t even get a response.”

Yoder said that Snow would be speaking out soon, and when he does “you’re going to hear some very interesting details that are going to be very damning for American Airlines, the Allied Pilots Association, the FAA, and everyone else involved.”

Yoder also mentioned two other pilots who have bravely come forward to talk about their vaccine injuries.

Pilot Greg Pierson has spoken out against the COVID vaccines ever since he suffered a stroke after getting the jab under duress, last year. Pierson said during an interview last December that if he had had his stroke while piloting a plane, he could have caused a crash.

WATCH AND SHARE Brave Pilot Greg Pearson Speaks Out About The Dangers Of The #Vaccine #ClotShot #Booster #vaccineinjury #VaccineSideEffects #VaccineAdverseEffects #VaccineAdverseReaction pic.twitter.com/MficeyMOu0

— information Chaser🕷 (@tsubject) December 31, 2021

Cody Flint was an agricultural pilot up until he was vaccinated in February of 2021. A couple of days after his jab, he suffered a mid-flight blackout, landing safely only “by the grace of God,” he says.

Flint was diagnosed with a neurological disorder that caused him to have severe headaches and vertigo.

Since then, his career has collapsed, he’s had multiple surgeries and countless doctor visits. And so far, nobody responsible for vaccine development or roll out has been willing to talk to him, or others like him.

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Debra Heine is a conservative Catholic mom of six and longtime political pundit. She has written for several conservative news websites over the years, including Breitbart and PJ Media.

Featured image is from Children’s Health Defense

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***

As of April 8, 2022, 74 cases of severe hepatitis that health officials can’t explain have been reported in children up to 10 years old

In October 2021, a case report involving a 47-year-old, previously healthy, man demonstrated conclusive evidence that COVID-19 shots may trigger hepatitis

A Journal of Hepatology paper noted that seven additional cases of suspected immune-mediated hepatitis have been reported following COVID-19 shots

Researchers have uncovered innate immune suppression triggered by COVID-19 shots and other disturbances that could cause liver disease

Recently released Pfizer documents also show that, in the first week after the shot, people of all ages experienced a temporary weakening of the immune system; could this increased susceptibility to infection also be playing a role in hepatitis and other cases of liver disease?

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A strange outbreak of severe hepatitis in young children has been reported in the U.S. and Europe, puzzling public health officials. The children were tested for common hepatitis viruses, but they were not to blame, leaving the cause unknown.

In a news release, Graham Cooke, a professor of infectious diseases at Imperial College London, suggested that if the hepatitis was caused by COVID-19, “it would be surprising not to see it more widely distributed across the country given the high prevalence of (COVID-19) at the moment.”¹

Potential links to COVID-19 injections appear not to have been widely explored yet, even though the shots have been previously associated with the development of hepatitis.² British health officials did state, however, that none of the affected children had received a COVID-19 shot.³

Young Children Developing Mysterious Liver Disease

In the U.S., nine children in Alabama have developed severe hepatitis, or inflammation of the liver, that health officials can’t explain. All of the children were ages 6 years and younger and were previously healthy.⁴ Symptoms of the liver disease include diarrhea, nausea and vomiting, along with jaundice in some. Liver enzymes were also elevated.

Five of the children tested positive for adenovirus type 41, which are respiratory viruses that can cause the common cold. Health officials have suggested that adenovirus type 41 could be to blame, but Dr. Wes Stubblefield, district medical officer for the Alabama Department of Public Health, admitted to NBC News, “This is unusual. This virus hasn’t, in the past, been associated with this constellation of signs, symptoms and injury.”⁵

Others have also discounted this theory, as adenoviruses are extremely common in children, meaning that it’s quite possible they could test positive for adenoviruses without them being the cause of the hepatitis.⁶ As of April 8, 2022, 74 cases of hepatitis had been reported in children up to 10 years old. Some of the children required hospitalization and six have undergone liver transplants, but no deaths were reported as of April 11, 2022.

With the increase in cases reported over the last month, the World Health Organization expects that more cases of the mysterious hepatitis illness will be uncovered in children. So far, laboratory testing has ruled out hepatitis type A, B, C, and E viruses, along with hepatitis D where applicable.

“Overall,” WHO reported, “the etiology of the current hepatitis cases is still considered unknown and remains under active investigation. Laboratory testing for additional infections, chemicals and toxins is underway for the identified cases.”⁷

COVID-19 Shots May Trigger Hepatitis

A case report involving a 47-year-old, previously healthy man demonstrates conclusive evidence that COVID-19 shots may trigger hepatitis. “Immune-mediated hepatitis with the Moderna vaccine,” researchers wrote in the Journal of Hepatology in October 2021, “[is] no longer a coincidence but confirmed.”⁸

The man featured in the case report received his first Moderna COVID-19 shot on April 26, 2021. Three days later, he developed malaise and jaundice, a yellowing of the skin that can occur if your liver isn’t processing red blood cells efficiently; it’s a hallmark of hepatitis, and a symptom being experienced by some of the children noted above.

The man had his liver function tested four years earlier, with tests coming back normal, and had no history of acetaminophen usage, which can cause liver damage, and only minimal alcohol usage. Yet, three days after the shot, liver tests showed concerning results:⁹

“Investigations on the 30th April showed serum bilirubin 190 μmol/L (normal 0-20), alanine aminotransferase (ALT) 1,048 U/L (normal 10-49), alkaline phosphatase (ALP) 229 U/L (normal 30-130) …”

By the end of June, the man’s jaundice and liver function tests improved, but then he received a second dose of the Moderna shot on July 6, 2021. Within days, the jaundice returned and liver function tests declined. “The pattern of injury on histology was consistent with acute hepatitis, with features of autoimmune hepatitis or possible drug-induced liver injury (DILI), triggering an autoimmune-like hepatitis,” the researchers explained, adding:¹⁰

“This case illustrates immune-mediated hepatitis secondary to the Moderna vaccine, which on inadvertent re-exposure led to worsening liver injury with deranged synthetic function. This occurred in a well man with no other medical problems. The onset of jaundice associated with the mRNA vaccine was unusually rapid.”

Hepatitis Cases Reported Following Shots

The case report above isn’t an isolated one. The Journal of Hepatology paper noted that seven additional cases of suspected immune-mediated hepatitis have been reported following COVID-19 shots, including both Pfizer’s and Moderna’s.

They hope to raise awareness so that vaccination centers will routinely check for signs of immune-mediated hepatitis prior to administering second doses and state, “Long-term follow up of identified individuals will be essential in determining the prognosis of this immune-mediated liver injury.”¹¹

In a separate letter to the editor, published in the Journal of Hepatology in June 2021, researchers again raised concerns that COVID-19 shots could cause hepatitis. In this case, a 56-year-old woman developed severe autoimmune hepatitis following her first dose of Moderna’s COVID-19 shot.¹²

Prior to this, in April 2021, researchers also described a case of autoimmune hepatitis that developed after a COVID-19 shot, this time in a 35-year-old woman who was three months postpartum. In autoimmune hepatitis, the body’s immune system mistakenly attacks the liver, causing inflammation and damage, and it’s possible the shot triggered the autoimmunity via spike-directed antibodies:¹³

“To our knowledge, this is the first reported episode of autoimmune hepatitis developing post-COVID-19 vaccination, raising concern regarding the possibility of vaccine-induced autoimmunity. As causality cannot be proven, it is possible that this association is just coincidental.

However, severe cases of SARS-CoV-2 infection are characterized by an autoinflammatory dysregulation that contributes to tissue damage. As the viral spike protein appears to be responsible for this, it is plausible that spike-directed antibodies induced by vaccination may also trigger autoimmune conditions in predisposed individuals.”

Is Immune Suppression to Blame?

Researchers from Ireland noted in November 2021, “It is speculated that SARS-CoV-2 can disturb self-tolerance and trigger autoimmune responses through cross-reactivity with host cells and that the COVID-19 mRNA vaccines may trigger the same response.” They also reported the cause of autoimmune hepatitis that developed after a COVID-19 injection in a 71-year-old woman with no risk factors for autoimmune disease.

She noticed jaundice four days after the shot and had “markedly abnormal” liver function tests. The researchers raised the possibility that this is a case of vaccine-related drug-induced liver injury and, like the other teams that reported similar cases, noted:¹⁴

“These findings raise the question as to whether COVID-19 mRNA vaccination can, through activation of the innate immune system and subsequent non-specific activation of autoreactive lymphocytes, lead to the development of autoimmune diseases including AIH or trigger a drug-induced liver injury with features of AIH.

The trigger, if any, may become more apparent over time, especially following withdrawal of immunosuppression. As with other autoimmune diseases associated with vaccines the causality or casualty factor will prove difficult to tease apart … But it does beg the question of whether or not these individuals should receive the second dose of an mRNA COVID-19 vaccine.”

Stephanie Seneff, a senior research scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and colleagues have also highlighted the innate immune suppression triggered by COVID-19 shots.¹⁵

mRNA COVID-19 shots teach your cells to produce a protein, or piece of protein, that triggers an immune response, including the production of antibodies.¹⁶ However, because natural mRNA is easily broken down, this means the experimental gene therapy needs a special delivery system to make it to the body’s cells.

The shots use lipid nanoparticles that contain polyethylene glycol (PEG)¹⁷ for this purpose. The mRNA is wrapped in lipid nanoparticles (LNPs) that carry it to your cells, and the LNPs are “PEGylated” — that is, chemically attached to PEG molecules to increase stability.¹⁸

Usually, if you were to inject RNA into your body, enzymes would immediately break it apart, but the COVID-19 shots are specifically designed so that doesn’t happen. As such, “mRNA vaccines promote sustained synthesis of the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein,” Seneff and colleagues write in Food and Chemical Toxicology.¹⁹ The spike protein is not only neurotoxic but also impairs DNA repair mechanisms, while suppression of type I interferon responses result in impaired innate immunity, they explain.²⁰

COVID Shot Disturbances Could Cause Liver Disease

Seneff’s research suggests genetic modifications introduced by COVID-19 shots may induce immune cells to release large quantities of exosomes into circulation. Exosomes are extracellular vesicles that contain protein, DNA, RNA and other constituents, and may contain mRNA along with spike protein. According to Seneff and colleagues:²¹

“[W]e present evidence that vaccination induces a profound impairment in type I interferon signaling, which has diverse adverse consequences to human health. Immune cells that have taken up the vaccine nanoparticles release into circulation large numbers of exosomes containing spike protein along with critical microRNAs that induce a signaling response in recipient cells at distant sites.

We also identify potential profound disturbances in regulatory control of protein synthesis and cancer surveillance. These disturbances potentially have a causal link to neurodegenerative disease, myocarditis, immune thrombocytopenia, Bell’s palsy, liver disease, impaired adaptive immunity, impaired DNA damage response and tumorigenesis.”

In one example noted in their study, the shot appears to have caused a case of viral reactivation that led to liver failure. The case involved an 82-year-old woman who had hepatitis C (HCV) in 2007. Just days after she received a Pfizer COVID-19 shot, “a strong increase in HCV load occurred,” along with jaundice. She died from liver failure three weeks after the injection.²²

They also report that the release of exosomes containing microRNAs following COVID-19 shots could interfere with IRF9 synthesis, leading to reduced synthesis of sulfatide in the liver. This cascade, they believe, could represent a “plausible factor” in the multiple case reports that have found liver damage following COVID-19 shots.²³

When they reviewed data from the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS), including symptoms that “clearly represent serious liver problems,” they identified 731 events following COVID-19 shots — representing more than 97% of cases out of all vaccines in 2021.²⁴

Pfizer documents released by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in April 2022 must also be taken into account. Buried in one of the documents is the statement, “Clinical laboratory evaluation showed a transient decrease in lymphocytes that was observed in all age and dose groups after Dose 1, which resolved within approximately one week …”²⁵

What this means is Pfizer knew that, in the first week after the shot, people of all ages experienced transient immunosuppression, or put another way, a temporary weakening of the immune system, after the first dose. Could this increased susceptibility to infection also be playing a role in hepatitis and other cases of liver disease following the shots? An investigation is warranted to find out.

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Notes

^1, 3, 6 Yahoo April 19, 2022

^2, 8 Journal of Hepatology October 4, 2021

^4, 5 NBC News April 15, 2022

⁷ WHO April 15, 2022

⁹ Journal of Hepatology October 4, 2021, Case description

¹⁰ Journal of Hepatology October 4, 2021, Case description, Discussion

¹¹ Journal of Hepatology October 4, 2021, Discussion

¹² Journal of Hepatology June 17, 2021

¹³ Journal of Hepatology April 13, 2021

¹⁴ J Hepatol. 2021 Nov; 75(5): 1252–1254

^15, 19, 21 Food and Chemical Toxicology June 2022, Volume 164, 113008

¹⁶ U.S. CDC December 18, 2020

¹⁷ Anthrax Vaccine January 11, 2021

¹⁸ Science December 21, 2020

²⁰ Food and Chemical Toxicology June 2022, Volume 164, 113008, Highlights

²² Food and Chemical Toxicology June 2022, Volume 164, 113008, Section 9

²³ Food and Chemical Toxicology June 2022, Volume 164, 113008, Section 11

²⁴ Food and Chemical Toxicology June 2022, Volume 164, 113008, Section 15.2

²⁵ The Naked Emperor Substack March 29, 2022

Featured image is from The Conservative Woman

Lady Emma Arbuthnot: Who Is Behind the Chief Judge Who Was Trying Julian Assange?

By Manlio Dinucci, April 25, 2022

Judge Lady Arbuthnot is married to Lord James Arbuthnot, a well-known Tory “hawk,” and former Minister for Defense Procurements, with links to the Military-Industrial Complex, British and US intelligence.

China’s Security Pact with the Solomon Islands: The Misbegotten Notion that the South Pacific Is a US Sphere of Influence

By Daniel Larison, April 25, 2022

The U.S. is scrambling to check the growth of Chinese influence in the Pacific nation of the Solomon Islands after Beijing struck a security pact with the islands that would allow China to dock their ships, deploy security forces to protect Chinese-built infrastructure, and help the government restore order.

The Triumph of Deceit: How Thinking in Labels Has Killed Democracy. France’s Presidential Election

By Eric Zuesse, April 25, 2022

On April 19th, Glenn Greenwald, who is not only a great lawyer but one of the world’s most brilliant investigative and analytical journalists, headlined “The WashPost’s Doxxing of @LibsOfTikTok Reveals Who Corporate Journalists See as Their Targets”, and he exposed how the billionaires (the controlling owners of those mega-corporations) have used their ownership and control of the U.S.-and-allied ‘news’-media in order to blackball and blacklist, from their liberal media, anyone or anything that would constitute a real threat against their own control over the media, over the government, and over their profit and nonprofit corporations.

The Tragedy of Julian Assange

By Emanuel Pastreich, April 25, 2022

We must understand that the end of journalism, and the end of justice, are products of the massive concentration of wealth, a process that has produced new political players who are rarely mentioned in the media at all.

Anzac Day in Australia and New Zealand: The Slaughter of the Unthinking by the Unaccountable

By Dr. Binoy Kampmark, April 25, 2022

ANZAC, the name of the Australian New Zealand Army Corps, hardly sounds promising as the basis of a religion.  But since the needless, bungled operation in the Dardanelles that led to the slaughter of Australian and New Zealand Troops in April 1915, along with Turkish, British and French soldiers, the acronym has become scented, meaningful and powerful.

Kiev Says Ready to Attack Crimean Bridge at First Opportunity

By Lucas Leiroz de Almeida, April 25, 2022

The Ukrainian government seems to be willing to further increase its military actions just to continue a conflict in which it has no chance of winning. On April 21, a Kiev official announced that they are about to bomb and destroy the Crimean Bridge.

Ukraine Is a Pawn on “The Grand Chessboard”

By Rick Sterling, April 25, 2022

Zbigniew Brzezinski’s book “The Grand Chessboard” was published 25 years ago. His assumptions and strategies for maintaining U.S. global dominance have been hugely influential in US foreign policy. As the conflict in Ukraine evolves, with the potential of escalating into world war, we can see where this policy leads and how crucial it is to re-evaluate.

Another Layer of Corruption in the Opioid Scandal Revealed

By Dr. Joseph Mercola, April 25, 2022

In 2021, McKinsey & Company, one of the largest consultants to corporations and governments worldwide, settled a lawsuit brought by 47 state attorneys general over its role in the U.S. opioid crisis. The firm agreed to pay $573 million in fines for driving up sales of Purdue Pharma’s OxyContin painkiller, even as Americans were dying in droves.

Gitmo Detainees Held at Former CIA-run Camp Should Get Reduced Sentences, Lawyers Say

By Middle East Eye, April 25, 2022

Defence lawyers have argued that prisoners held at a secretive CIA-run camp at the Guantanamo Bay detention centre should receive reduced sentences because the conditions to which they were subject were “exceedingly disturbing”.

Video: WashPost’s Doxing of @LibsOfTikTok Reveals Who Corporate Journalists See as Their Targets

By Glenn Greenwald, April 25, 2022

Trump-era corporate journalism ceased viewing real power centers as adversaries (CIA/NSA/FBI/WallSt). The real enemy are citizens with the wrong politics. Rather than confront real power centers, the largest and richest media corporations – e.g. the Bezos-owned WPost – allied with those factions and attack citizens.

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On April 19th, Glenn Greenwald, who is not only a great lawyer but one of the world’s most brilliant investigative and analytical journalists, headlined “The WashPost’s Doxxing of @LibsOfTikTok Reveals Who Corporate Journalists See as Their Targets”, and he exposed how the billionaires (the controlling owners of those mega-corporations) have used their ownership and control of the U.S.-and-allied ‘news’-media in order to blackball and blacklist, from their liberal media, anyone or anything that would constitute a real threat against their own control over the media, over the government, and over their profit and nonprofit corporations.

In short: he exposed that the money-power people won’t allow their control to be effectively challenged or weakened. He explained how fascism, and even nazism (racist fascism), can be liberal, and not ONLY conservative — can be leftist, and not ONLY rightist; can be far left, and not ONLY far right. (His presentation there includes also a brief summary of how he had switched from being a lawyer, to his becoming an investigative journalist — a profession that he describes as, and was attracted to on account of its being aimed at — “exposing the secrets and crimes and improprieties of the most powerful actors in society.”)

Greenwald, being the genius that he is, was able there quickly to expose — rip off the mask of — nazism, and to reveal it so deeply as to penetrate beyond and beneath the superficial level of the standard ideological labels, so that the public might ultimately become able to be freed from the lies by which the billionaire-class has captured and mentally enslaved the public — enslaved them into neoconservative-neoliberal beliefs and commitments that benefit ONLY the super-wealthy, such as are those billionaires themselves.

That masking is the phenomenon which has caused the publics in all of the U.S.-and-allied nations to think in terms of “us” versus “them” as being inter-ethnic, or inter-‘racial’, or inter-religious, INSTEAD OF as being inter-economic-class: the owners of mega-corporations, versus the employees and customers of mega-corporations — the super-wealthy versus all of the “ethnicities,” and all of the ‘races’, and all of the “religions.” (While the other partisan distinctions do play a role, that role is, in reality, vastly less powerful than that of the one distinction which is the same in ALL countries, and which actually controls almost all countries’ governments — the distinction between the rich versus the poor.)

Labor unions become crushed in this way (by the public’s having the wrong targets — targets that aren’t the billionaires).

Consumers’ rights to safe products become crushed in this way. All protections of the weak against the strong become crushed in this way. All accountability (obligations that the owners have toward their employees and other agents, and toward their corporations’ customers) become crushed in this way. And “this way” can be liberal, and not ONLY conservative. Fascism and even nazism can be liberal, and not only conservative. (The only difference there, is the difference between liberal billionaires versus conservative billionaires, but rule by ANY billionaires is an aristocracy not a democracy. It doesn’t represent the public; it represents the super-rich.)

France’s Presidential Election

A good example of this phenomenon is the French election for that nation’s Presidency, on April 24th, between Marine Le Pen and Emmanuel Macron: On April 24th occurred the second and final round of voting for the next French President. Macron beat Le Pen by 58% to 42% — a 16% lead above Le Pen — and the reason why that happened was this engineered-by-the-super-rich confusion of ideological labels.

Screenshot from The National

On the night prior to the April 24th election, Politico’s French “Poll of Polls” showed very clearly that immediately after the first-round voting on April 10th, Le Pen rose and Macron fell in the voter preferences, so that at the time of the April 20th lone Presidential candidates’ debate between the two top finishers in the first round (Le Pen and Macron), the voters’ preference of Macron over Le Pen was at its lowest point ever, around 6%, but that between the 20th and the 23rd, it had grown back to around 10% — which it had previously been.

This had happened despite the major polling organization Elabe having found that whereas only 16% of viewers of the debate said that Le Pen came across as “arrogant,” 50% of its viewers said that Macron came across that way.

Yet in that same poll, 59% said Macron won the debate, while only 39% said Le Pen did. So: very clearly, the French public viewed Le Pen’s “non-arrogant” performance in that debate to have attracted them less than Macron’s “arrogant” performance in it did. What could explain this? It was purely the labeling thing. Not only did the report of that poll refer to Le Pen as being “la candidate d’extrême droite” (the candidate of the extreme right), but all of France’s ‘news’-media did.

And yet, Le Pen, on issue after issue during that debate, was advocating a more progressive, or more social-democratic, a more leftist, position than the moderate conservative (pro-corporate-dictatorship) Macron did, and she stated very clearly what she would do differently than what Macron had done as President, virtually all of which was to Macron’s left — she was consistently favoring the rights of the poor over the rights of the rich, workers over stockholders, small businesses over the mega-corporations, economic competition over concentrated economic power and monopolies, and consumers over the big corporations.

While Macron praised the former French Empire, Le Pen did not: she was anti-imperialistic. Though those were all views that were closer to the polled policy-preferences of French voters than were the positions that Macron espoused and had been practicing as France’s President, her expressed views appealed to the voters less than did the more right-wing views that Macron expressed and had done. What seems to have been absolutely decisive is that all of the French media, and all of France’s leading politicians — prominently including the leading leftist candidate in the first round, the socialist Jean-Luc Melenchon, who had come in third with 22% of the vote in the first round, and who, as Wikipedia accurately summarized, “advised his voters not to vote for Le Pen in the second round, but did not endorse Macron” — even Melenchon and other “leftists” were referring to Le Pen as being “far-right.” (In fact, Melenchon’s Party, when they had met to decide on their recommendation to voters, “The option of voting for Le Pen was not given to respondents.” They said: no Melenchon follower should even consider voting for her.)

In other words: Melenchon and other self-declared “leftists” were advising their followers to prefer actually the (by far) more conservative candidate. Those ‘leftists’ were saying: if you’re going to vote for a candidate in the second round (but please do not), then vote for Macron. Melenchon and all of the self-alleged “leftist” parties said that Le Pen is “far-right” (and thus ideologically beyond the pale). That label was believed by “leftist” voters. Those voters followed the labelings that were being applied by the leading people who had been describing themselves as “leftists.” It’s like, in a sense, a mob mentality, but not against a minority ethnic group; it was instead against an ideological label, no matter how fraudulently that ideological label was actually being applied. Furthermore, in France, which had been so brutalized by Hitler’s Nazis, no political label is even nearly as toxic to a candidate as is the label “far right.” That label, alone, prevented the Presidential candidate who had the (by far) most progressive platform and political commitments, from defeating France’s incumbent, very unpopular, moderate conservative President Macron. That is how France’s billionaires won — yet again. As their Reuters ‘news’ report said, “One notable winner has been the hard-left Jean-Luc Melenchon, who scored 22% in the first round and has already staked a claim to become Macron’s prime minister in an awkward ‘cohabitation’ if his group does well in the June vote.” Another report on the outcome said “Leftist voters — unable to identify with either the centrist president or Ms Le Pen’s fiercely nationalist platform — were agonising with the choice on Sunday. Some trooped reluctantly to polling stations solely to stop Ms Le Pen, casting joyless votes for Mr Macron.”

On the morning of the April 24th vote, the American ZeroHedge financial news site bannered “As France Votes For President, Wall Street Warns Le Pen Upset Would Be Bigger Shock Than Brexit”. France’s ‘leftists’ and ‘news’-media had been campaigning actually for the same candidate (Macron) that the billionaires had been backing in this contest. Whereas many of those ‘leftists’ might have been doing it because they were sincerely suckered, few if any of the billionaires had been like that — they instead had been financing that suckering.

The same thing had happened during the 2017 contest, which likewise had been between Le Pen and Macron. (The only difference then was Le Pen’s greater emphasis then on “protecting our borders” against an unlimited influx of Muslims and possibly even jihadist ones into France. In 2022, that was no longer a big issue for her, and the Party that Le Pen had inherited — which once had been conservative — became even more progressive than it was in 2017.)

The 2022 result, in other words, was basically history repeating itself. And this is the way that billionaires continue effectively to rule a country, by getting the public to vote for labels instead of for policies. The public fall for it time after time; they don’t turn against the people who were lying to them before. They vote for them yet again. There is thus no accountability. It’s easy for people to do if they pay more attention to labels than to policies. And no democracy can actually function in that way. And none does. Only an aristocracy can. And it does.

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Investigative historian Eric Zuesse’s next book (soon to be published) will be AMERICA’S EMPIRE OF EVIL: Hitler’s Posthumous Victory, and Why the Social Sciences Need to Change. It’s 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.

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

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Gloating over “poetic justice” dispensed to Russia, the official Twitter account of Ukraine’s defense ministry tweeted Thursday: “Corruption and irresponsibility in Russia has dealt another insidious blow to its war efforts. In Tver, a research institute that develops Russia’s Iskander missiles and systems for SU-27 and TU-160 bombers, which have been destroying peaceful Ukrainian cities, has burned down.”

Corruption and irresponsibility in russia has dealt another insidious blow to its war efforts. In Tver, a research institute that develops russia’s Iskander missiles and systems for SU-27 and TU-160 bombers, which have been destroying peaceful Ukrainian cities, has burned down.

— Defence of Ukraine (@DefenceU) April 21, 2022

The blaze that engulfed an administrative building of Russia’s top-secret aerospace defense forces’ central research institute, which operates under the Russian defense ministry and develops Russia’s nuclear-capable ballistic missiles, quickly engulfed the building’s upper three floors, forcing those inside to jump from windows and causing the roof to cave in. The research institute is located in Tver, a city about 160km (100 miles) northwest of Moscow.

The blaze that started in one of the rooms on the second floor of the administrative building spanned across some thousand square meters. Photographs of the main building showed it was completely gutted by fire. Seven people were killed in the fire while 25 were injured and at least 10 people were missing, therefore the number of casualties could increase further.

The incident was followed hours later by unconfirmed reports of a fire at one of Russia’s largest chemical plants. Images on social media purported to show a large fire at the Dmitrievsky chemical plant in Kinsehma about 400km (250 miles) northeast of Moscow.

Although Ukraine’s defense ministry promptly pinned the blame for these acts of sabotage deep inside Russia on alleged “corruption and irresponsibility in Russia,” resorting to “plausible deniability” would convince nobody, least of all Russia.

For humanitarian reasons, Russia has delivered substantial amount of aid to the people in the recently liberated areas in east Ukraine and accepted over half a million refugees displaced by the conflict, mainly from Russian-majority Donbas region. Reportedly, scores of covert operatives of the SBU, Ukraine’s notorious intelligence agency, have infiltrated into Russia disguised as refugees.

These saboteurs have been trained and equipped by the CIA. Among other state-of-the-art espionage equipment, these undercover agents have been trained to operate a recently unveiled version of portable Switchblade drone that has specifically been designed for sabotage operations in Ukraine and Russia by the US Air Force.

The Phoenix Ghost, a lethal drone produced by California-based Aevex Aerospace, that the Pentagon is reluctant to detail, except to say it will take on many of the qualities of the kamikaze Switchblade drones already in the theater, has specifically been tailored for targeting Russia’s military and industrial infrastructure.

“It provides the same sort of tactical capability that a Switchblade does,” a defense official told media. “As you know, Switchblade is a one-way drone, if you will, and it clearly is designed to deliver a punch. It’s a tactical UAS [unmanned aerial system], and the Phoenix Ghost is of that same category.”

The small Switchblade 300 weighs about 6 pounds and can fit in a backpack. It’s tube-launched, and when fired, can hit targets up to 10 kilometers away, according to Aerovironment’s website. It can loiter for up to 15 minutes and be called off target if necessary, though most of the 700 Switchblade drones provided to Ukraine’s security forces by the Pentagon were Switchblade 600 variant having anti-armor capabilities.

In addition to 700 Switchblade drones previously provided to Ukraine’s security forces by the Pentagon, the 121 Phoenix Ghost drones are part of the latest $800-million security assistance package to Ukraine, announced Thursday by President Joe Biden. The package also includes 72 155mm howitzers and 144,000 artillery rounds; 72 Tactical Vehicles to tow 155mm howitzers and field equipment and spare parts.

Clearly, Ukraine’s intelligence operatives disguised as refugees and equipped with portable drones, among other advanced espionage equipment, have infiltrated Russian cities. All they needed to do was to find a secure location in any city, and the remotely operated drones with a range of 10 km could easily target any military or industrial site the covert operatives were tasked to sabotage.

Besides the portable kamikaze drones, Ukraine officials were also in talks with General Atomics to procure one of the most lethal drones to have ever been developed by the defense production industry, the MQ-9 Reaper armed drones, Forbes reported, citing a manufacturer spokesperson.

“We have aircraft available now for immediate transfer,” General Atomics spokesman C. Mark Brinkley told Forbes correspondent last week. “With support from the U.S. government, those aircraft could be in the hands of Ukrainian military pilots in a matter of days.”

Although Ukraine’s security forces already have the Turkish-made TB-2 Bayraktar, the MQ-9A payload capacity of 1,700 kilograms (3,800 pounds) allows it to carry more deadly and longer-range munitions than the TB-2 at 150 kilograms (330 pounds).

More importantly, the American aircraft’s superior range of 1,200 miles (1,900 kilometers) to the 150 kilometers of the TB-2 affords takeoff from safer positions and strikes deeper into enemy territory.

In addition, the aircraft’s superior ISR (intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance) capacity would allow the Ukrainian military much more accurate monitoring of enemy troop movements.

According to the outlet, the drone’s estimated cost of $32 million apiece, plus ground stations, spare parts and training valued at $600 million, wouldn’t be a “significant hurdle,” as the tab would be picked up by the US.

Besides the prohibitive cost, another reason the US has thus far hesitated from providing larger armed drones to Ukraine is that so far, the MQ-1 Predator and the MQ-9 Reaper have only been tested in areas – Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria – where the adversary lacked serious air defense capabilities.

Whereas Russia’s globally acclaimed military equipment – including S-300 and -400 air defense systems, Kinzhal hypersonic and Kalibr cruise missiles and Sukhoi aircraft – would decimate slow-flying Predators and Reapers as easily as the Russian Air Force eliminated the Ukrainian MiG fleet in the early days of the military campaign.

In addition to mounting subversive acts deep inside Russia’s territory using Ukrainian intelligence operatives, the Pentagon announced Tuesday Ukraine’s military had received additional aircraft in a deal facilitated by Washington as well as parts for repairs to get damaged aircraft flying again. Pentagon spokesman John Kirby did not offer details on which countries provided aircraft, but acknowledged new transfers.

“They have received additional aircraft and aircraft parts to help them get more aircraft in the air,” Kirby told a news briefing. “We certainly have helped with the trans-shipment of some additional spare parts that have helped with their aircraft needs, but we have not transported whole aircraft,” he added.

Apparently, the Pentagon did not take Ukraine’s military authorities into confidence before making the announcement, because the official Twitter account of Ukraine’s air force tweeted Wednesday:

“Officially, Ukraine did not receive new aircraft from partners! With the assistance of the US Government, @KpsZSU received spare parts and components for the restoration and repair of the fleet of aircraft in the Armed Forces, which will allow to put into service more equipment.”

After being severely castigated and reprimanded by his bosses at the Pentagon for spilling the secret, Kirby backtracked on his previous statement and sheepishly apologized hours after the denial of the aircraft transfer by Ukraine’s air force on Wednesday.

“I was mistaken,” Kirby said, adding that, although he did not say that “Ukraine had received ‘whole aircraft’,” that was “the impression that I gave you.” The spokesman explained that he himself got a misguided impression about another nation following through with its offer to provide Ukraine with “whole fixed-wing aircraft.” “It has not. So, I was in error in saying that, in past tense, they had been given whole aircraft. I regret the error,” Kirby added.

Considering that Kirby is a Biden administration official and “Sleepy Joe” himself has a reputation of making frequent gaffes, the Pentagon spokesman could be forgiven for “the slip of the tongue.” But his previous statement, affirming the aircraft transfer to Ukraine, was clear and unambiguous.

Kirby told a news briefing Tuesday Ukraine had “received additional aircraft and aircraft parts.” After a reporter inquired whether the US had transferred the whole aircraft to Ukraine, implying the delivery of some of the 16 Mi-17 helicopters pledged by the Biden administration in the $800 million military assistance package to Ukraine, the official replied: “We certainly have helped with the trans-shipment of some additional spare parts that have helped with their aircraft needs, but we have not transported whole aircraft,” implying the US hadn’t transferred any of the rotary-wing aircraft from the Pentagon’s own armory till then, and instead a third country had delivered fixed-wing aircraft to Ukraine.

Rather than an oversight on the part of the Pentagon spokesman, the comedy of errors appeared to be a result of lack of coordination between military authorities of Ukraine and the United States. The real reason Ukraine’s air force officials want to keep aircraft transfer under the wraps is that previously Russian forces claimed to have destroyed an S-300 air defense system that Slovakia transferred to Ukraine in a Kalibr cruise missiles strike hitting a hangar on the southern outskirts of the city of Dnepropetrovsk.

Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu boasted last month that 123 of Ukraine’s 152 fighter jets had been destroyed, as well as 77 of its 149 helicopters and 152 of its 180 long- and medium-range air defense systems, while its naval forces had been totally eliminated.

As demilitarization of Ukraine, alongside denazification and liberation of Donbas, was one of the principal objectives of Russia’s month-long military campaign lasting from late February to late March, therefore Russian forces would never allow vital military assets, especially air defense systems and fixed- and rotary-wing aircraft, to remain in the possession of Ukraine’s air force. Ukraine’s aircraft are safe only as long as they remain grounded and concealed from Russia’s advanced air surveillance systems.

Although the Pentagon spokesman refused to identify the country that delivered the aircraft to Ukraine due to secrecy of the shady transfer deal, the only NATO member state that was in talks with Washington and Kyiv to transfer its Soviet-era fleet of a dozen MiG-29 aircraft was Slovakia.

Reportedly, a batch of Ukraine’s highly skilled pilots traveled to Slovakia last week, took the delivery of the aircraft and then flew them all the way to concealed air force hangars at military airports in Kyiv while maintaining low altitudes in order to avoid detection by Russia’s advanced air surveillance systems. The Pentagon that has deployed extensive ISR, or intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance, assets along Ukraine’s borders fully coordinated the entire clandestine operation of transferring the aircraft.

After the scuttled aircraft-transfer deal that would’ve seen Poland handing over its fleet of 28 Soviet-era MiG-29s to Ukraine in return for the United States “backfilling” the Polish Air Force with American F-16s last month, Slovakia was in talks with NATO about an arrangement that could allow Bratislava to send fighter jets to Ukraine, Prime Minister Eduard Heger told reporters on April 11.

Eduard Heger said his government wanted to “move away from reliance on the Soviet MiGs” in any case. “This is equipment that we want to finish anyway, because we’re waiting for the F-16s,” he added, referring to US-made jets that Slovakia was scheduled to receive in 2024, though Bratislava could receive American fighter jets earlier as it has now delivered on the pledge of transferring the dozen MiG-29 aircraft Slovakia was reported to have to Ukraine.

In early March, Poland made a similar offer of transferring its fleet of 28 Soviet-era MiG-29s to Ukraine in return for receiving American F-16s, but the Pentagon rejected the proposal due to apprehensions over direct confrontation with Russian forces in Ukraine.

The prospect of flying combat aircraft from NATO territory into the war zone “raises serious concerns for the entire NATO alliance,” the Pentagon said on March 9. “It is simply not clear to us that there is a substantive rationale for it,” Pentagon spokesman John Kirby added.

But considering that Slovak aircraft have already been delivered to Ukraine, it seems plausible that the Polish proposal of transferring its aircraft might also be reconsidered by the Biden administration and Ukraine could receive additional Polish MiG-29 aircraft in the coming weeks.

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Nauman Sadiq is an Islamabad-based geopolitical and national security analyst focused on geo-strategic affairs and hybrid warfare in the Middle East and Eurasia regions. His domains of expertise include neocolonialism, military-industrial complex and petro-imperialism. He is a regular contributor of diligently researched investigative reports to Global Research.

Featured image is by @kamilkazani/Twitter

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

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We bring to the attention of our readers excerpts from this timely report by Al Jazeera. Our thanks to Al Jazeera for bring this article to our attention.

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Russia is investigating whether sabotage experts from the United Kingdom’s Special Air Service (SAS) special forces have been deployed to western Ukraine.

Russia’s top state investigative body said on Saturday it was looking into a Russian media report alleging that the SAS had been sent to the Lviv region in Western Ukraine.  …

In a statement, Russia’s Investigative Committee said it would follow up on the report that the SAS had been sent in “to assist the Ukrainian special services in organising sabotage on the territory of Ukraine”.

The British Ministry of Defence had no immediate comment on the Russian investigation.

…

‘Requisite training’

Since the start of the war, the UK has provided Ukraine with anti-ship, anti-aircraft and light anti-tank weapons, which have proved useful for mobile Ukrainian fighters to use against Russia’s armoured vehicles.

The British government confirmed this week that a small number of Ukrainian troops are being trained in the UK for the first time since the start of the Russian invasion.

…

The United States military is also training Ukrainian troops on using howitzer artillery while the UK is training Ukrainians in Poland to use anti-aircraft weapons.

Click here to read the full article.

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***

The decision of a London Court to honor the request from the United States government for the extradition of Julian Assange, whistleblower and founder of the famed Wikileaks website which revealed the criminal actions of the United States military to the world, is most certainly of historic significance.

If the British government gives final approval for this extradition to the United States, Assange will be the likely subject for show trial in which he will be charged with capital offenses under the rarely employed, and constitutionally flawed, Espionage Act.

At that trial we will witness the collapse of the republican government of the United States of America into a morass resembling the decayed imperial governance of the Roman Empire under the emperors Caligula and Nero.

The 18 criminal charges filed against Assange for releasing classified diplomatic cables that documented the criminal and immoral actions of the United States military are being held up as grounds for him to spend 175 years in prison. Granted the decline in his health as a result of his imprisonment, it is unlikely he will serve out that term.

This charge is a transparent travesty which would be comic were it not so profoundly tragic.

But there is more to this case than meets the eye. Assange has become the popular face for resistance to technofascism and to the rise of totalitarian governance. That is all well and fine, but there are questions that need to be asked about why Assange has this special status, questions which few, if any, dare to ask.

 

Why is Assange constantly in the news while numerous Americans, Europeans, and others, who have been dismissed from their jobs, thrown out of the country, or suffered even worse fates, do not even exist in the alternative media?

Has Assange, for all the tragedy of his case, come to serve as a limited hangout for intellectuals, a means for citizens to pat themselves on the back without addressing the broader rise of totalitarian governance around the world, at every level, without considering the thousands of victims of similar persecution?

Also, why do we accept the narrative of a dispute between nation states, the United States, Great Britain, or Sweden, which are engaged in a process of negotiations? Why do we attribute this tragedy to the greed, the cruelty and the foolishness of politicians?

 

 

That narrative is increasingly distant from reality. In fact, the United States and the United Kingdom have ceased to serve as functional republics and are run directly by private equity, lobbying firms of the super-rich, private intelligence companies, and a broad range of pay-to-play consulting operations whose make up, whose structure, is hidden from us in even the reports of the truth seekers.

Talking about the tragedy of Assange without addressing the transformation of governance and without painting a detailed picture of who actually makes the decisions, is disservice for the public, one that misleads and that keeps us from focusing on the real source of the problem in institutional decay, and the real revolutionary solution.

Then there is the problem of Assange’s selective reporting. I understand, and I sympathize with, his desire to get his story out and to avoid the fate of others. But the assumption that he was a unique victim of the persecution of truth tellers is questionable.

Assange studiously avoided difficult questions about the 9.11 incident and he stayed away from a discussion of the details of how privatized elements in the US military and intelligence, cooperating with operatives from Israel (and elsewhere) played a role in gutting the United States government and in reducing it, and Israel as well, to for-hire puppets of the powerful.

Without an analysis of the structural shifts in the United States that resulted in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks (and that are also linked to the Oklahoma bombings), without a consideration of how such operations as 9/11 are planned and carried out in a limbo land inhabited by military contractors that lies in between Washington and Tel Aviv, the documentation of specific crimes is of limited value.

Moreover, Assange does not engage in an analysis of class issues. He seems allergic to the serious consideration of the possibility that we are looking at something beyond a particular nation state (granted some are in deeper than others) but rather the effort of a class of the super-rich to use new technologies to dumb us all down, to consolidate the control of all resources, and to control the entire world.

That the United States will play the role of the bad guy in the Assange show trial is without any doubt true. But I seriously doubt that the senile Joe Biden, or his cabinet of political figures created by multinational corporations through WestExec, Palm Island Capital Partners and the Asia Group, will be the ones behind the curtain who pull the strings.

Freeing Julian Assange is absolutely essential to restoring the rule of law and to defending freedom of the press. It is regrettable that Assange spoke so little about the thousands of others who have suffered similar fates-but that is now all in the past.

We must understand that the end of journalism, and the end of justice, are products of the massive concentration of wealth, a process that has produced new political players who are rarely mentioned in the media at all.

That is to say that those who most want to punish Assange, are not on trial and in many cases their names are unknown to the public.

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This article was originally published on US Provisional Government.

Emanuel Pastreich served as the president of the Asia Institute, a think tank with offices in Washington DC, Seoul, Tokyo and Hanoi. Pastreich also serves as director general of the Institute for Future Urban Environments. Pastreich declared his candidacy for president of the United States as an independent in February, 2020.

He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

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***

 

 

Um Krieg zu führen, müssen die Herrscher das Volk hinter sich bringen. Deshalb werden mit Hilfe der Massenmedien Feindbilder aufgebaut und irrationale Ängste geschürt. Damit werden Furcht und Gehorsam der Untertanen verstärkt. Machiavelli, ein Mensch, der weiß, worin die Regierungsmacht besteht, wie man sie erwirbt und erhält, soll gesagt haben: „Auf der Kriegskunst beruht das ganze Geheimnis der Macht eines Herrschers.“ Leo Tolstoy (1)

Das ist auch heute so: Vor zwei Jahren wurden die Bürger durch eine weltweit ausgerufene Virus-Epidemie in panische Angst versetzt, was einen Gehorsamsreflex ausgelöste, wie man ihn nur aus Diktaturen kennt. Mit der Androhung einer Betrafung bei Verweigerung einer genverändernden „Impfung“ wird der Angst-Pegel konstant gehalten.

Seit einem Monat kommt ein Krieg im Herzen Europas hinzu; weitere Kriege folgen bereits. Wieder werden bei den Bürgern starke Ängste ausgelöst; dieses mal vor einem möglichen Atomkrieg und dem „jüngsten Gericht“. Dabei wird verdrängt, dass wir alle an den miserablen gesellschaftlichen Verhältnissen in der Welt mitschuldig sind.

Denkt man die verfügbaren Nachrichten zusammen, gelangt man zu der Überzeugung, dass die „schicksalhaften“ Weltereignisse die Bürger gedanklich absorbieren und abhalten sollen, mutig und entschlossen auf das hinzuschauen, was allen bevorsteht: Nichts mehr besitzen – und glücklich sein damit. Das bisherige Menschsein wird dabei gänzlich in Frage gestellt. Auf dem Weg dorthin sollen irrationale Ängste die Bürger in Atem gehalten, ihr Denken gelähmt und sie dazu gebracht werden, das Schicksalhafte bereitwillig und demütig hinzunehmen.

Als Kinder unserer Zeit waren wir leider nicht in der Lage, die leuchtenden Menetekel an der Wand richtig zu deuten.

Die Pläne der Philanthropen David Rockefellers Jr. und Bill Gates sind seit eineinhalb Jahrzehnten bekannt. Sie waren der Auffassung, dass man das angeblich bedrohliche Bevölkerungswachstum durch eine dramatische Bevölkerungsreduktion auf eine Milliarde Menschen eindämmen sollte. Doch wer nahm sie ernst?

Zu dieser tödlichen Agenda passt sowohl das theoretisch durchgespielte Modell, durch einen Atomkrieg circa eine Milliarde Menschen für immer auszulöschen (2) als auch Hitlers „Masterplan Eugenik“, der bei Klaus Schwab, dem Gründer des „World Economic Forums“ bis heute weiterlebt. Die Präsidenten Vladimir Putin und Xi Jinping waren oder sind noch Teil von Klaus Schwabs „Big Club“.

Dass man Politikern keinesfalls die Lösung der Menschheitsprobleme übertragen sollte, wissen die meisten von uns nicht erst seit Tolstojs „Rede gegen den Krieg“ von 1905 und seiner Warnung, dass die Regierenden „häufig die schlechtesten, unbedeutendsten, grausamsten, sittenlosesten und besonders die verlogensten Menschen sind“. (3)

Von Russlands Außenminister Sergei Lawrow konnten wir vor kurzem erfahren, dass Russlands Militäroperation in der Ukraine darauf abzielt, „der rücksichtslosen Expansion und dem rücksichtslosen Streben nach totaler Vorherrschaft der USA und der übrigen westlichen Länder auf der internationalen Bühne ein Ende zu bereiten“ (4). Wer wird die neue Welt anführen?

Die Idee der Abschaffung von Nationalstaaten gibt es lange vor der Ausrufung der Weltgesundheitsorganisation WHO zur neuen Weltregierung und die „Umwandlung“ von sogenannten Demokratien oder „stillen Diktaturen“ in „offene Diktaturen“ sind aus allen Teilen der Welt hinlänglich bekannt.

Wir Menschen haben unser Gefühlsleben und unsere Reaktionsweisen nicht erkannt

Da wir Menschen unser Gefühlsleben und unsere Reaktionsweisen aus Mangel an Psychologie nicht erkannt haben, überraschen uns nicht nur die aggressiven diabolischen Pläne der Herrschenden, sondern auch unsere absoluten Gehorsamsreflexe. Somit stehen wir unversehens am Rande des Abgrunds.

Unser Geist ist nicht frei und die anerzogene Ängstlichkeit vor den Mitmenschen können wir nicht abwerfen. Von Kindesbeinen an bläut man uns ein, an kirchliche und staatliche Autoritäten zu glauben und ihnen hörig zu sein als seien wir „tote Körper“ (Ignatius von Loyola). Staat und Kirche agieren dabei als Spießgesellen, die sich wie zwei Beutelschneider verstehen (Jean Meslier). Deshalb weisen erwachsene Menschen in weltanschaulichen Dingen jene geistigen und seelischen Beeinträchtigungen auf, die ihnen in der Kindheit zugefügt wurden.

Viele von ihnen reagieren auf Politiker wie Kinder oder wie die primitiven Urmenschen reagierten – in Form eines „magischen Autoritätsglaubens“: kritiklos und umnebelt von Stimmungen, Gefühlen und Glücksverheißungen. Und das hat Folgen: die Autoritätsgläubigkeit führt unweigerlich zur Autoritätshörigkeit, die in der Regel den Reflex eines absoluten geistigen Gehorsams und eine Verstandeslähmung auslöst. Vollsinnige Erwachsene können dann nicht mehr selbständig denken und vernünftig urteilen und übergeben die Entscheidungsgewalt sittenlosen Politikern.

Was tun? 

Die Meinung des einen oder anderen Präsidenten ist nicht entscheidend. Entscheidend ist, dass sich die Präsidenten der drei Großmächte mit den hinter ihnen stehenden „Welt-Beherrschern“ wohl darin einig sind, dass diejenigen, die „oben“ sind, gegenüber denjenigen, die „unten“ sind, die Oberhand behalten müssen. Dass diejenigen, die „oben“ sind, genauso arm sind wie die „unten“, wissen die „da oben“ nicht. Für die „da unten“ prophezeit WEF-Gründer Klaus Schwab: „Sie werden in 10 Jahren nichts mehr besitzen – und glücklich damit sein.“

Da wir Menschen solange wir atmen die Hoffnung nicht aufgeben, werden wir den Traum einer freiheitlichen und gerechten Welt weiterträumen – ungeachtet aller Mühsal und Widrigkeiten.

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Dr. Rudolf Lothar Hänsel ist Lehrer (Rektor a. D.), Doktor der Pädagogik (Dr. paed.) und Diplom-Psychologe (Schwerpunkte: Klinische-, Pädagogische- und Medien-Psychologie). Als Pensionär arbeitete er viele Jahre als Psychotherapeut in eigener Praxis. In seinen Büchern und pädagogisch-psychologischen Fachartikeln fordert er eine bewusste ethisch-moralische Werteerziehung und eine Erziehung zum Gemeinsinn und Frieden.

He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

Noten 

1. Tolstoj, L. N. (1983). Rede gegen den Krieg. Politische Flugschriften. Herausgegeben von Peter Urban. Insel Verlag. Frankfurt am Main, S. 74

2. https://www.pravda-tv.com/2022/04/ukraine-eskalation-us-kriegssimulation-sagte-atomkrieg-voraus-video/

3. Tolstoj, L. N. (1983). Rede gegen den Krieg. Politische Flugschriften. Herausgegeben von Peter Urban. Insel Verlag. Frankfurt am Main, S. 74

4. https://de.rt.com/russland/135976-lawrow-russlands.militaeroperation-in-ukraine/

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This incisive article by Manlio Dinucci first published by Global Research on September 18, 2020 points “conflict of interest” of chief judge Emma Arbuthnot who conducted the trial for the extradition of Julian Assange.

Judge Lady Arbuthnot is married to Lord James Arbuthnot, a well-known Tory “hawk,” and former Minister for Defense Procurements, with links to the Military-Industrial Complex, British and US intelligence.

Was Judge Emma Arbuthnot in conflict of interest? In 2020, she refused recusal. Did Assange’s lawyers issue a request for her recusal?

***

Emma Arbuthnot is the chief judge who conducted the trial for the extradition of Julian Assange in London to the USA, where a 175 year prison sentence awaits him for “espionage,” that is, for having published evidence of US war crimes, including videos of civilians’ killings in Iraq and Afghanistan, as an investigative journalist. At the trial, assigned to Judge Vanessa Baraitser, every defense request was denied.

 In 2018, after Sweden’s sexual assault charges fell through, Judge Arbuthnot refused to cancel the arrest warrant, so that Assange could not obtain asylum in Ecuador. Arbuthnot rejected the United Nations Working Group’s findings on the arbitrary detention of Assange. The UN Officer’s remarks against torture also went unheard:

“Assange is detained in extreme conditions of unjustified isolation, and shows the typical symptoms of prolonged exposure to psychological torture.”

In 2020, while thousands of detainees were transferred to house arrest as an anti-Coronavirus measure, Assange remained in prison, exposed to the infection in compromised physical condition.

 In court, Assange cannot consult with lawyers, but is kept isolated in an armored glass cage, and threatened with expulsion if he opens his mouth. What is behind this persistence?

Being Lord James Arbuthnot’s wife, married to a well-known Tory “hawk,” former Minister for Defense Procurements, linked to the Military-Industrial Complex and to the Secret Services, Judge Arbuthnot has the title of “Lady.” Lord Arbuthnot is, among other things, Chairman of the British Advisory board of Thales, a French multinational specialized in aerospace military systems, and a member of Montrose Associates, specialized in Strategic Intelligence (highly paid positions).

Lord Arbuthnot is also part of the Henry Jackson Society (HJS), an influential transatlantic think-tank linked to the US Government and Intelligence Agency. Last July, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo spoke at a round table of the HJS in London: since he was the CIA Director in 2017, he accused WikiLeaks, founded by Assange, of being “an enemy spy service.”

The Henry Jackson Society led the same campaign accusing Assange of “sowing doubts on the moral position of Western democratic governments, with the support of autocratic regimes.” Ms. Priti Patel, current United Kingdom Secretary of the Interior, who is responsible for the extradition order of Assange was until recently on the political board of the HJS, alongside Lord Arbuthnot.

Lady Arbuthnot is essentially connected to this pressure group that is conducting a pounding campaign for the extradition of Assange, directed by Lord Arbuthnot and other influential characters.

She was appointed by the Queen as chief magistrate in September 2016, after WikiLeaks published the most compromising documents for the USA in March. These documents included emails from Secretary of State Hillary Clinton revealing the true purpose of the NATO war on Libya: to prevent Libya from using its gold reserves to create a pan-African currency alternative to the dollar and the CFA franc, the currency imposed by France on 14 former colonies.

The real “crime” for which Assange is being tried is that of opening cracks in the political-media silence wall that covers the real interests of powerful elites who, operating in the “Deep State,” play the war card. It is this occult power that subjects Julian Assange to a trial, instructed by Lady Arbuthnot, who recalls those of the Holy Inquisition as to how the accused is treated.

If Assange is extradited to the US, he would be subjected to “special administrative measures” much harsher than those in Britain: he would be isolated in a small cell, unable to contact his family or speak, not even through lawyers who would be indicted if they brought forth his message. In other words, he would be sentenced to death.

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This article was originally published in Italian on Il Manifesto.

Manlio Dinucci is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization.

Featured image: Lady Emma and Lord James Arbuthnot of Edrom at Buckingham Palace in May 2017 [Source: Instagram]

Dear Readers,

Global Research is going through a difficult period. Various procedures of censorship (search engines, social media templates, mainstream media smears, etc.) are ongoing. 

In the course of the last week, Global Research has been the object of a diabolical DoS (“A Denial of Service”) cyberattack, which consists in bombarding globalresearch.ca with millions of malicious requests. Over the last week, we have been assaulted with more than 700 million malicious requests from 5 countries.

The ultimate intent of this coordinated cyberattack was to shut down Global Research while making our website inaccessible to our readers. “DoS attacks accomplish this by flooding the target with traffic, or sending it information that triggers a crash”.   

Thanks to our security specialists, the cyberattacks have failed. Nonetheless, this has had impacts on our readers as well as on our weekly traffic. 

To ensure our security, for several countries, we have now inserted the familiar “Manage Challenge, with boats and trains”.  

We are at the crossroads of one of the most serious crises in world history.

Freedom of Expression is threatened in the most despicable fashion. 

Extending over 20 years, a vast data bank of more than 100,000 Global Research articles by renowned journalists, scholars, scientists, human rights and anti-war activists is threatened.

Our request to our readers and authors: continue with the promotion of Global Research articles through referrals and cross-posts, forwarding to friends and colleagues.

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The Ukrainian government seems to be willing to further increase its military actions just to continue a conflict in which it has no chance of winning. On April 21, a Kiev official announced that they are about to bomb and destroy the Crimean Bridge.

In a recent speech, Secretary of the National Security and Defense Council, Oleksiy Danilov, revealed that Kiev’s armed forces are ready to attack the bridge at any time, having plans to act at the first possible opportunity. His words during an interview with Radio NV leave no doubt about the Ukrainian intentions: “If we had the ability to do it, we would have already done it. If there is an opportunity to do it, we will definitely do it”. Danilov also commented on the reasons behind the plan, mentioning the strategic value of the bridge, which destruction would largely obstruct the movement of Russian troops.

There are many problems with Danilov’s statement. In fact, it is possible to speak of a “strategic value” in its destruction of the Crimean Bridge, but this is far from implying any justification. Many anti-humanitarian measures have “strategic value” but should be avoided simply because they are legally and ethically wrong procedures. For example, it is precisely to avoid unreasonable civilian casualties and damage to historical heritage that Moscow refrains from excessive using of air force during the special military operation in Ukraine. No doubt there would also be strategic value in escalating the use of air force.

Carefully measuring one’s own acts to avoid mass victims should be the attitude of any side during a conflict. And this is what should be expected of Kiev, considering that the destruction of the bridge would cause civilian casualties, since non-military people still circulate in the region and would completely obstruct the flow of goods between Crimea and the rest of the Russian territory, which could lead to large supply deficits and social crises.

But, apart from the humanitarian and ethical argument, the main factor is another: Kiev is announcing military attacks on the sovereign territory of the Russian Federation. Both Kerch and Taman, cities connected by the bridge, are part of Russia, so the attack would hit a non-border Russian zone and its respective marine territory, generating a serious provocation. The risk of escalating the conflict into Russia’s sovereign territory may be too high for the Ukrainian side.

The words of Dmitry Medvedev, deputy chairman of the Russian Security Council, confirm this prediction of reaction in the event of an attack: “I hope he [Oleksiy Danilov] understands what Russia would target in retaliation”. Earlier, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov had already announced that Moscow would interpret a bombing of the bridge as a terrorist attack and announced that Moscow is already acting to prevent any Ukrainian action in this regard:

“Such a statement [about the potential bombing of the Crimean Bridge] is nothing but an announcement of a possible terrorist act; this is unacceptable (…) All the necessary security measures and precautions by the relevant service are being taken around the bridge and all strategic facilities”.

Still, it is necessary to emphasize the omission of Western countries and international organizations in this case. Kiev announces that it is organizing terrorist-like attitudes and Moscow condemns it, but with no statement of the rest of international society. Ignoring Kiev’s threats seems to have become standard, commonplace action in recent years while, on the other hand, actions of the Russian army are automatically condemned.

Finally, Kiev is on the verge of an escalation of the conflict in which it will not be able to deal with the consequences. If there’s really a plan going on to destroy the bridge, the best thing to do is to abort it.

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Lucas Leiroz is a researcher in Social Sciences at the Rural Federal University of Rio de Janeiro; geopolitical consultant.

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Zbigniew Brzezinski’s book “The Grand Chessboard” was published 25 years ago. His assumptions and strategies for maintaining U.S. global dominance have been hugely influential in US foreign policy. As the conflict in Ukraine evolves, with the potential of escalating into world war, we can see where this policy leads and how crucial it is to re-evaluate.

The need to dominate Eurasia

The basic premise of “The Grand Chessboard” is outlined in the introduction:

• with the collapse of the Soviet Union, the United States is the sole global power
• Europe and Asia (Eurasia) together have the largest land area, population and economy
• U.S. must control Eurasia and prevent another country from challenging US dominance

Brzezinski sums up the situation:

“America is now the only global superpower, and Eurasia is the globe’s central arena.” He adds “It is imperative that no Eurasian challenger emerges, capable of dominating Eurasia and thus of challenging America.”

The book  surveys the different nations in Eurasia, from Japan in the east to the UK in the west. The entire land mass of Europe and Asia is covered. This is the “grand chessboard” and Brzezinski analyzes how the US should “play” different pieces on the board to keep potential rivals down and the US in control.

Brzezinski’s Influence

Brzezinski was a very powerful National Security Advisor to President Carter. Before that, he founded the Trilateral Commission. Later he taught Madeleine Albright and many other key figures in US foreign policy.

Brzezinski initiated the “Afghanistan Trap”. That was the secret 1979 US program to mobilize and support mujahedin foreign fighters to invade and destabilize Afghanistan. In this period, Afghanistan was undergoing dramatic positive changes. As described by Canadian academic John Ryan, “Afghanistan once had a progressive secular government, with broad popular support. It had enacted progressive reforms and gave equal rights to women.”

The Brzezinski plan was to utilize reactionary local forces and foreign fighters to create enough mayhem that the government would ask the neighboring Soviet Union to send military support. The overall goal was to “bog down the Soviet army” and  “give them their own Vietnam”.

With enormous funding from the US and Saudi Arabia beginning in 1978, the plan resulted in chaos, starvation and bloodshed in Afghanistan which continues to today. Approximately 6 million Afghans became refugees fleeing the chaos and war.

Years later, when interviewed about this policy, Brzezinski was proud and explicit:

“We didn’t push the Russians to intervene, but we knowingly increased the probability that they would.” When asked if he had regrets for the decades of mayhem in Afghanistan, he was clear: “Regret what? That secret operation was an excellent idea. It had the effect of drawing the Russians into the Afghan trap and you want me to regret it? …. Moscow had to carry on a war that was unsustainable for the regime, a conflict that brought about the demoralization and finally the breakup of the Soviet empire…. What is more important in world history? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some agitated Muslims or the liberation of central Europe and the end of the Cold War?”

Afghanistan was a pawn in the US campaign against the Soviet Union. The amorality of US foreign policy is clear and consistent, from the destruction of Afghanistan beginning in 1978 continuing to the current starvation caused by US freezing of Afghan government reserves.

Pulse nightclub exterior, with holes made by the BearCat and bullet holes (Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0)

The blow-back is also clear. The foreign fighters trained by the US and Saudis became Al Qaeda and then ISIS. The 2016 Orlando nightclub massacre, where 49 died and 53 were wounded was perpetrated by the son of an Afghan refugee who never would have come to the US if his country had not been intentionally destabilized. Paul Fitzgerald eloquently describes the tragedy in his article Brzezinski’s vision to lure Soviets into Afghan Trap now Orlando’s nightmare.

US Supremacy and Exceptionalism

The “Grand Chessboard” assumes US supremacy and exceptionalism and adds the strategy for implementing and enforcing this “primacy” on the biggest and most important arena: Eurasia.

Brzezinski does not countenance a multi-polar world.

“A world without US primacy will be a world with more violence and disorder and less democracy and economic growth ….” and “The only real alternative to American global leadership in the foreseeable future is international anarchy.”

These assertions continue today as the US foreign policy establishment repeatedly talks about  the “rules based order” and “international community”, ignoring the fact that the West is a small fraction of humanity. Toward the end of his book, Brzezinski suggests the “upgrading” the United Nations and a “new distribution of responsibilities and privileges” that take into account the “changed realities of global power.”

The importance of NATO and Ukraine 

With the dissolution of the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact, many people in the West believed NATO was no longer needed. NATO claimed to be strictly a defensive alliance and its only rival had disbanded.

Brzezinski and other US hawks saw that NATO could be used to expand US hegemony and keep weapons purchases flowing. Thus he wrote that, “an enlarged NATO will serve well both  the short-term and the longer-term goals of U.S. policy.”

Brzezinski was adamant that Russian concerns or fears should be dismissed. “Any accommodation with Russia on the issue of NATO enlargement should not entail an outcome that has the effect of making Russia a de facto decision making member of the alliance.” Brzezinski was skillful at presenting an aggressive and offensive policy in the best light.

Brzezinski presents Ukraine as the pivotal country for containing Russia. He says,

“Ukraine is the critical state, insofar as Russia’s future evolution is concerned.” He says, “Without Ukraine, Russia ceases to be a Eurasian empire.”

This is another example of his skillful wording because Ukraine as part of a hostile military alliance does not only prevent a Russian “empire”; it presents a potential threat.  Kyiv is less than 500 miles from Moscow and Ukraine was a major route of the Nazi invasion.

Brzezinski was well aware of the controversial nature of Ukraine’s borders. On page 104 he gives a quote that shows many people of eastern Ukraine wanted out of Ukraine since the breakup of the Soviet Union. The 1996 quote from a Moscow newspaper reports,

“In the foreseeable future events in eastern Ukraine confront Russia with a very difficult problem. Mass manifestations of discontent … will be accompanied by appeals to Russia, or even demands, to take over the region.”

Despite this reality, Brzezinski is dismissive of Russian rights and complaints. He bluntly says,

“Europe is America’s essential geopolitical bridgehead on the Eurasian continent.” and “Western Europe and increasingly Central Europe remain largely an American protectorate.”

The unstated assumption is that the US has every right to dominate Eurasia from afar.

Brzezinski advises Russia to decentralize with the free market and a loose confederation of “European Russia, a Siberian Russia and a Far Eastern Republic”.

Afghanistan is the model

Brzezinski realizes that Russia presents a potential challenge to US domination of Eurasia, especially if it allies with China. In the “Grand Chessboard”, he writes,

“If the middle space rebuffs the West, becomes an assertive single entity, and either gains control over the South or forms an alliance with the major Eastern actor, then America’s primacy in Eurasia shrinks dramatically.” Russia is the “middle space” and China is the “major Eastern actor”.

What was feared by the US strategist has happened:  For the past 20 years, Russia and China have been building an alliance dedicated to ending US hegemony and beginning a new era in international relations.

This may be why the US aggressively provoked the crisis in Ukraine. The list of provocations is clear:  moral and material support for Maidan protests,  rejection of the EU agreement (“F*** the EU”), the sniper murders and violent 2014 coup, ignoring the Minsk Agreement approved by the UN Security Council, NATO advisors and training for ultra-nationalists, lethal weaponry to Ukraine, refusal to accept Ukrainian non-membership in NATO, threats to invade Donbass and Crimea.

Before Russia’s intervention in Ukraine, active duty soldier and former Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard said

“They actually want Russia to invade Ukraine. Why would they? Because it gives the Biden administration a clear excuse to levy draconian sanctions… against Russia and the Russian people and number two, it cements this cold war in place. The military industrial complex is the one who benefits from this. They clearly control the Biden administration. Warmongers on both sides in Washington who have been drumming up these tensions. If they get Russia to invade Ukraine it locks in this new cold war, the military industrial complex starts to make a ton more money …. Who pays the price?  The American people … the Ukrainian people … the Russian people pay the price. It undermines our own national security but the military industrial complex which controls so many of our elected officials wins and they run to the bank.”

This is accurate but the reasons for the provocations go deeper. Hillary Clinton recently summed up the wishes and dreams of Washington hawks:

“The Russians invaded Afghanistan back in 1980 … a lot of countries supplied arms, advice and even some advisors to those who were recruited to fight Russia….a  well funded insurgency basically drove the Russians out of Afghanistan…. I think that is the model people are now looking toward.”

US foreign policy has been consistent from Brzezinski to Madeleine Albright,  Hillary Clinton and on to Victoria Nuland.  The results are seen in Aghanistan, Iraq, Yugoslavia, Libya, Syria and now Ukraine.

As with Afghanistan,  the US “didn’t push Russia to intervene” but “knowingly increased the probability that they would.” The purpose is the same in both cases: to use a pawn to undermine and potentially eliminate a rival. We expect the US will make every to prolong the bloodshed and war, to bog down the Russian army and prevent a peaceful settlement. The US goal is just what Joe Biden said: regime change in Moscow.

Like Afghanistan, Ukraine is just a pawn on the chessboard.

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Rick Sterling is an investigative journalist in the SF Bay Area. He can be contacted at [email protected]. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

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***

“Data was very easily used by influencers and decision-makers to fit particular narratives,” Norman Fenton, Ph.D., a mathematician at Queen Mary University of London, said in an interview on “RFK Jr. The Defender Podcast.”

From the outset of the COVID-19 pandemic, Norman Fenton, Ph.D., could see health officials were misusing data and misleading the public.

A professor of risk information management at Queen Mary University of London, Fenton is a mathematician who focuses on critical decision-making and quantifying uncertainty.

Throughout the pandemic, he closely examined and criticized how officials used data to make decisions about lockdowns, testing and vaccines.

Fenton spoke last week with Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. on “RFK Jr. The Defender Podcast.”

“When the COVID pandemic emerged, what kind of challenges did you specifically see?” Kennedy asked Fenton.

Fenton replied:

“It was clear I think from the start that most of the data that governments put out — not just the UK government, but most governments around the world … were kind of misleading because it was based on very easily manipulated statistics.”

This was true of both the nature of COVID itself and the vaccines, Fenton said.

“There was an immediate rush to draw conclusions, which were sort of based on over-simplistic data on case numbers and deaths,” he said.  “… the problem was that that data was very easily used by influencers and decision-makers to fit particular narratives that exaggerated the scale of the crisis.”

Fenton’s team published some of the first research providing more accurate estimates about the infection rate versus the fatality rate compared with official estimates he said were based on faulty data.

The research showed the virus was more widespread than people assumed, but nowhere near as dangerous as was being claimed.

Fenton also addressed issues with PCR tests.

Although it was clear early on that a proper understanding of the virus depended on accurate diagnostic tests, he said, “we were initially led to believe that the PCR test was an accurate diagnostic test.”

“But later, of course, we discovered that wasn’t true. And the impact of that has been catastrophic,” he said.

Kennedy agreed.

“The magnitude of [the epidemic] was enormously and deceptively amplified by the misuse of the PCR test,” he said.

Fenton first came under attack in the summer and early fall of 2020, when he challenged how COVID deaths were classified, he said, and questioned the widespread testing of asymptomatic people.

“That was when we were finding the real problems about the false positives and the scale of the false positives,” Fenton said.

Excessive testing led to “absolutely ridiculous decisions,” he said, including new lockdowns.

Information concerning deaths following COVID vaccination also was manipulated, Fenton said, as part of the official claim that the vaccine was the only way to keep people from becoming seriously ill and dying.

Data adjusted to take into account misclassification show a peak in mortality shortly after vaccination, he said, cautioning:

“Now, of course, it could well be that these are people who are indeed immunosuppressed seriously. Also … the vaccination might just be bringing forward the death, which would’ve occurred shortly afterward anyway.

“But nevertheless, that’s what we believe is there in the data, but is of course being hidden.”

Watch the full podcast here or click the image below:

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

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The most severe level of inflation since the 1980s is affecting the average US and European citizen more so then ever. The price of gasoline and the price of electricity, caused by anti-Russia sanctions, are constantly increasing, and interestingly even America’s beloved fast food is becoming more expensive.

According to the US Department of Labor, the Consumer Price Index (CPI) rose 8.5% in the year to the end of March. In February, the index was 7.9%. Gasoline prices broke records, rising more than $4 a gallon. Not far behind are electricity bills and rent that account for about a third of total spending. Shipping costs have increased and the price of fast food, obsessively loved by Americans, hit the highest increase in 41 years. According to the Big Mac Index, the price of the popular McDonald’s burger rose 7% last year. In the past 10 years, the price of the Big Mac jumped 40%.

US President Joe Biden blamed his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin for rising inflation in America, saying on April 14 that the 70% increase in pricing last month was a result of “Putin’s price hike.”

“Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has driven up gas prices and food prices all over the world,” Biden said, adding: “What people don’t know is that 70% of the increase in inflation was the consequence of Putin’s Price Hike because of the impact on oil prices. Seventy percent.”

However, this is disingenuous as commodity prices in the US began to rise last year. Biden is attempting to halt the wave of disapproval he is receiving for allowing the average American citizen to economically suffer by blaming Moscow instead of admitting his own mistakes.

At the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic when the US economy was struggling to stay afloat as politicians shut down the economy, the Federal Reserve began aggressively printing trillions of dollars, swelling the Fed’s balance sheet to nearly $9 trillion in 2021.

“You flooded the system with money,” 60 Minutes journalist Scott Pelley said in a 2021 interview with Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell.

“Yes, we did,” Powell replied. “That’s another way to think about it. We did.”

Although the Federal Reserve aggressively pumped more money, they also decided to keep interest rates near zero. Pumping dollars in huge volumes only brings profits to banks and investors in the stock market. But as a result, all commodities have risen sharply: from grains and oil to transportation services.

The Fed insisted that inflation is only a short-term phenomenon, but their sluggishness has hit American pockets hard. In this way, inflation was already a result of bad American economic policy, but it has only been exacerbated by the anti-Russia sanctions.

It is recalled that on March 8, Biden officially announced a ban on energy imports from Russia despite warnings that the decision would impact consumers. Unsurprisingly, the price of oil immediately rose to $130 per barrel. The sharp drop in oil and gas use has led to rising fuel prices and rising inflation. However, Biden of course does not want to mention this as he would rather blame Putin for his own mistakes.

At the same time, Washington is putting pressure on the EU to give up energy imports from Russia. Unfortunately for Biden though, as the European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen highlighted, some European countries were completely dependent on Russian oil and gas.

Meanwhile, prices in Europe are also skyrocketing. In March, inflation in 19 EU countries reached 7.5%. Inflation was particularly severe for some others though, hitting double digits in four member states, with Lithuania leading the way with 15.6%.

The inflation rate in Germany reached 7.3%, the highest level in 40 years. According to Karl von Rohr, deputy governor of Deutsche Bank, inflation for the year in Germany will be at 7-8%. Deutsche Bank experts also predicted that inflation would exceed 10% in the event of a complete embargo on Russian energy.

In March, energy prices in Europe recorded the biggest increase. In second place was food, alcohol and tobacco. In third place are services. Unfortunately for Europe, prices will continue to rise, especially as the Ukraine war and anti-Russia sanctions have created supply chain and logistics disruptions, as well as shortages of raw materials.

The UK is not protected either and inflation has also soared to record levels. The annual inflation rate rose to 7.0% in March, the highest level since March 1992. Electricity and gas bills rose 54% – from £1,227 to £1,971, and it is expected that energy prices will again increase in October.

This deadly mix of bad economic policy and sanctioning Russia without an exit strategy means that the average Western citizen is being most affected. Just as sanctions never saw the downfall of Castro in Cuba, Assad in Syria or Kim Jong-Un in North Korea, it will not lead to a capitulation of Putin or the Russian state, effectively meaning that sanctions are a pointless exercise that only further concentrates wealth into fewer hands in the West and out of the average citizen.

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In 2021, McKinsey & Company, one of the largest consultants to corporations and governments worldwide, settled a lawsuit brought by 47 state attorneys general over its role in the U.S. opioid crisis

A U.S. House investigation reveals McKinsey was advising the U.S. Food and Drug Administration on the safety of opioids, while at the same time advising Purdue how to maximize sales

Jeff Smith, a senior McKinsey consultant, worked on a risk evaluation and mitigation strategy (REMS) for OxyContin while simultaneously advising the FDA about the drug’s safety

McKinsey promoted its FDA connections when pitching services to its pharmaceutical clients. The FDA, meanwhile, claims it had no idea McKinsey was working with Purdue

Purdue knew the dangers of its drug, covered it up, and hired FDA insiders to advise its sales strategy and how to influence the FDA. They also hired Publicis to manage its marketing. Publicis, the world’s largest PR company, funds and partners with “fact checking” organizations to suppress and censor the truth

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In 2021, McKinsey & Company, one of the largest consultants to corporations and governments worldwide, settled a lawsuit brought by 47 state attorneys general over its role in the U.S. opioid crisis. The firm agreed to pay $573 million in fines¹ for driving up sales of Purdue Pharma’s OxyContin painkiller, even as Americans were dying in droves.

Between 1999 and 2019, nearly 500,000 Americans died from overdoses involving opioid drugs,² and false advertising and bribery were at the heart of this tragedy. As reported by The New York Times:³

“McKinsey’s extensive work with Purdue included advising it to focus on selling lucrative high-dose pills, the records show, even after the drugmaker pleaded guilty in 2007 to federal criminal charges that it had misled doctors and regulators about OxyContin’s risks. The firm also told Purdue that it could ‘band together’ with other opioid makers to head off ‘strict treatment’ by the Food and Drug Administration.”

Worse Than We Thought

We now find out that the situation is even more corrupt than we previously thought. A U.S. House investigation^4,5,6 into McKinsey, based on materials obtained through the discovery process of this and other lawsuits, has revealed McKinsey was advising the FDA on the safety of opioids, while at the same time advising Purdue how to maximize sales.

In one instance, McKinsey wrote “scripts” for Purdue to use in its meeting with the FDA to discuss the safety of OxyContin in pediatric populations. In another, Jeff Smith, a senior McKinsey consultant, worked on a risk evaluation and mitigation strategy (REMS) for OxyContin while simultaneously advising the FDA about the drug’s safety.⁷

As noted by investigative journalist Paul Thacker,⁸ “Just think about that for a moment — for years McKinsey played both cop and robber.” As reported by The New York Times, April 13, 2022:⁹

“Since 2010, at least 22 McKinsey consultants have worked for both Purdue and the FDA, some at the same time, according to the committee’s 53-page report …

The firm provided no evidence to the committee that it had disclosed the potential conflicts of interest as required under federal contracting rules — an ‘apparent violation,’ the report said.

McKinsey also allowed employees advising Purdue to help shape materials that were intended for government officials and agencies, including a memo in 2018 prepared for Alex M. Azar II, then the incoming secretary of health and human Services under President Donald J. Trump.

References to the severity of the opioid crisis in a draft version of the memo, the documents show, were cut before it was sent to Mr. Azar.

‘Today’s report shows that at the same time the FDA was relying on McKinsey’s advice to ensure drug safety and protect American lives, the firm was also being paid by the very companies fueling the deadly opioid epidemic to help them avoid tougher regulation of these dangerous drugs,’ Representative Carolyn Maloney, the New York Democrat who chairs the committee, said in a statement …

A bipartisan group of lawmakers last month introduced legislation¹⁰ aimed at preventing conflicts of interest in federal contracting, citing McKinsey’s experience with Purdue and the FDA.”

The FDA, in response, has stated that it “relies on its contractors to assess and report potential conflicts of interest,” The New York Times reports.¹¹ In other words, it’s just pointing fingers and refusing to take responsibility for working with advisers that clearly could, and should, be suspected of having ulterior motives, based on their client base.

Isn’t it obvious that McKinsey, working to improve sales for its opioid-making clients, might give the FDA biased advise on behalf of those clients? Remarkably, in October 2021, the FDA wrote¹² to senators claiming they had no idea McKinsey was even working for Purdue, and didn’t find out about it until media reported it in early 2021.

It seems beyond irrationally foolish that the press could find out about it, but not the FDA — somewhat like the head of the CDC, Dr. Rochelle Walensky, going on CNN and quoting Pfizer press releases as factual data.

McKinsey Advised FDA on Opioid Safety

The FDA hired McKinsey as an adviser in 2011. The company worked with the FDA office overseeing drug companies plans to monitor safety of risky products such as opioids, and internal documents show that, on multiple occasions, McKinsey promoted its FDA connections when pitching services to its pharmaceutical clients.¹³

For example, in a 2009 sales pitch, McKinsey wrote that it provided direct support to regulators, “and as such have developed insights into the perspectives of the regulators themselves.”¹⁴

In a 2014 email to Purdue’s chief executive, McKinsey consultant Rob Rosiello wrote, “We serve the broadest range of stakeholders that matter for Purdue. One client we can disclose is the FDA, who we have supported for over five years.”¹⁵

Evidence also suggests McKinsey took “steps to limit material that could be subpoenaed” once Purdue was sued, The New York Times reports.¹⁶ In one instance, printed hardcopies of slide decks were sent to Purdue instead of being emailed because they knew Purdue staff would be deposed and didn’t want their email correspondence to “get sucked into it.”

Did McKinsey Influence FDA Commissioner?

The Interim Majority Staff report¹⁷ by the Committee on Oversight and Reform, titled “The Firm and the FDA: McKinsey & Company’s Conflicts of Interest at the Heart of the Opioid Epidemic,” published April 13, 2022, also includes emails in which McKinsey employees claim to have influenced an opioid safety speech by then-FDA commissioner Dr. Scott Gottlieb.

Gottlieb denies the accusation, but the fact that McKinsey was working so intimately with the FDA means they certainly would have been capable of such influence. Gottlieb also has financial ties to the opioid industry, having received $45,000 in speaker’s fees from companies that manufacture and distribute opioids.¹⁸

In 2012, Gottlieb also wrote a Wall Street Journal essay, attacking the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) for pursuing the criminal activity of opioid distributors, saying it would burden patients, “including those with legitimate prescriptions who may be profiled at the pharmacy counter and turned away.”¹⁹

Intent to Harm

What we have here is a picture of gross conflicts of interest with an apparent intent to harm. Purdue Pharma was as crooked as they come, conducting sham studies and bribing doctors to prescribe its highly addictive opioid, while its consultant, McKinsey advised the FDA on the drug’s safety.

At the same time, Purdue also worked with the Publicis Groupe — the largest PR company in the world as of November 2021²⁰ — which funded the startup of NewsGuard, a “fact checking” group that rates websites on criteria of “credibility” and “transparency.” In April 2021, Publicis partnered with NewsGuard specifically “to fight the ‘infodemic’ of misinformation about COVID-19 and its vaccines.”²¹

NewsGuard’s health-related service, HealthGuard,²² is also partnered with the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) — a progressive U.K.-based cancel-culture leader²³ with extensive ties to government and global think tanks that has labeled people questioning the COVID-19 vaccine as “threats to national security.”

At the beginning of May 2021, the Massachusetts attorney general filed a lawsuit^24,25 against Publicis Health, accusing the Publicis subsidiary of helping Purdue create the deceptive marketing materials used to mislead doctors into prescribing OxyContin.^26,27,28,29

Like Purdue, Publicis also cashed in on the opioid addiction it helped create by pitching its services to organizations working to end addiction. As reported by Forbes,³⁰ the agency “won the account to work on drugfree.org after touting how it’s been ‘immersed in the evolving national opioid medication dialogue going on between pharma companies, the government and FDA, and the public via inside access as a trusted and informed consulting partner.’”

So, to summarize, Purdue knew the dangers of its drug, covered them up, hired FDA insiders to advise its sales strategy and influence the FDA, and is connected with a PR company that had the ability to suppress and censor negative news to manage its marketing. It’s hard to describe this scheme as anything but intentional mass murder.

The Spin Doctors

The reality may even be worse, and much larger, than that, seeing how Publicis is also a partner of the World Economic Forum (WEF),³¹ which is leading the call for a “reset” of the global economy and a complete overhaul of our way of life.³²

As detailed in the featured video, Publicis’ fingerprints can be found throughout the net of censorship and misdirection that is now being cast across the digital landscape. As the No. 1 PR company in the world, Publicis has just the right credentials and influence to pull off a deception of this size.

It’s part of an enormous network that includes international drug companies, fact checkers and credibility raters, Google, Microsoft, public libraries, schools, the banking industry, the U.S. State Department and Department of Defense, the World Health Organization and Disney, just to name a few. As noted by investigative reporter David Marks in “How PR Giant Publicis Promotes Greed, Deception on Behalf of World’s Most Powerful”:³³

“The essential skill of these expert spin doctors is their ability to fabricate a favorable interpretation of damaging information or activity or diminish the impact of the truth.

Through tried and true psychological ploys, repetition of false information or casting doubt on factual realities, ad agencies and PR firms target those who need to be influenced on behalf of their clients …

An examination of one of the largest entities neck-deep in managing these mass psychological operations reveals the depth of the dysfunction afflicting the planet. The vast activities of the Publicis Groupe demonstrate how the tentacles of greed, profit and privilege connect the catastrophic agendas of the most powerful enterprises on Earth …

Using sophisticated social psychology and incorporating the cutting edge of artificial intelligence, Publicis PR experts are masters of damage control, the manipulation of words and people, and of selling the unsellable. Publicis is organizing influential activities worldwide, overtly revealing its mission and priorities.

… [Its] website reveals who actually benefits from the company’s services: ‘The entire Publicis Groupe transformation was designed to put clients at the center of all we do. Their needs and objectives drive the solutions we provide in order to help them win and grow’ …

In considering the range of activities Publicis engages in, the dots are so close there is no need to connect them. The PR giant’s methodology is transparent.

Whether promoting opioids or pushing vaccines, rebranding status quo profiteering as a Great Reset, supporting cigarette sales, disguising the true nature of the fossil fuel industry, increasing soft drink consumption or covering for assassinations — Publicis has all the skills and facilities to create whatever fabrications are needed to sell products and influence how their wealthy collaborators are viewed.

The Publicis Groupe and its allies are at the hub of a worldwide insidious, destructive disinformation campaign, relying on the duplicitous ways of advertising and public relations in the loyal service of clients.”

A Plan to Drug the Useless Eaters?

As a WEF partner and global PR machine for some of the most powerful industries on the planet, it seems reasonable to assume Publicis is helping to coordinate the WEF’s Great Reset agenda. Sadly, that includes not only the management and control of the peoples of the earth, but also the elimination of “undesirables.”

In a 2015 interview (video above), Yuval Noah Harari, a history professor and adviser to WEF founder Klaus Schwab, discussed what Schwab refers to as The Fourth Industrial Revolution (i.e., transhumanism), noting that we’re now learning to “produce bodies and minds” (meaning augmented bodies, and cloud and artificial intelligence-connected minds) and that one of the greatest challenges we face will be what to do with all the people that have become obsolete in the process.

How will unaugmented people find meaning in life when they’re basically “useless, meaningless”? How will they spend their time when there’s no work, no opportunity to move up in some kind of profession? His guess is that the answer will be “a combination of drugs and computer games.”

This raises a disturbing question. Was the opioid crisis the result of an intentional plan — a conspiracy in the literal sense of the word — to hook the masses on an addictive drug? This is purely speculative, of course, but it surely fits in with The Great Reset agenda as a whole.

If people are addicted, the drug and medical industries make money (and they’re without doubt part of The Great Reset network), and if people die, well, that’s in accordance with The Great Reset plan too, as they insist there are too many “useless eaters” on the planet, and they either must be managed or eliminated.

Publicis Is Part of the Global Monopoly

In closing, it’s worth noting that Publicis is partially owned by the Vanguard Group,³⁴ one of the two largest asset management firms in the world. Together with BlackRock, Vanguard has a hidden monopoly on global asset holdings and exerts control through their ownership of some 1,600 American companies.³⁵

Combined, BlackRock and Vanguard own nearly 90% of all S&P 500 firms.³⁶ To learn more about how Vanguard and BlackRock own just about everything in the world, and have monopoly control over all industries, check out the 45-minute video above, “Monopoly — Follow the Money.”

In short, the idea that there is competition in the marketplace is a cleverly disguised illusion. In reality, everything is controlled by a small group of asset managers that win no matter what. The end goal is to own and control all the world’s assets, which includes people.

The WEF slogan “You’ll Own Nothing and Be Happy” really summarizes The Great Reset plan for mankind. They will own everything; you will own nothing, not even your own body, and you’ll be too drugged up and lost in a make-believe computer game world to realize you’re a slave. If they can somehow make a profit from your useless existence, they’ll let you live. If they can’t, you’ll be eliminated. That’s really what the plan comes down to.

The plan for global authoritarianism is advancing with each passing day, but all is not lost yet. By informing ourselves and sharing what we know with others, we can reach the critical mass needed to end their plan and take back control.

It’s going to require standing together, unified in favor of freedom and liberty. It’s going to require legal and legislative efforts to weed out the corruption and infiltration that has occurred throughout the corporate world and our governments. It’s going to require honest men and women to step into positions of power that they never wanted. It may take a lot of time and effort, but if we want our descendants to experience freedom, no price can be too great to pay.

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Notes

^1, 3 New York Times February 3, 2021 (Archived)

² CDC Opioid Epidemic

^4, 17 Interim Majority Staff report, Committee on Oversight and Reform, The Firm and the FDA: McKinsey & Company’s Conflicts of […] April 13, 2022

^5, 7 Endpoint News April 13, 2022

⁶ Epoch Times April 16, 2022

^8, 18, 19 The Disinformation Chronicle April 19, 2022

^{9, 11, 13, 14, 15, 16} New York Times April 13, 2022 (Archived)

¹⁰ S.3905, To Prevent Organizational Conflicts of Interest in Federal Acquisition, and for Other Purposes

¹² Maggie Hassan Senate October 27, 2021

²⁰ Forbes November 3, 2021

²¹ Twitter Publicis Health Media April 27, 2021

²² NewsGuard HealthGuard

²³ Off-Guardian August 11, 2020

²⁴ Commonwealth of Massachusetts Superior Court Complaint CA No. 21-1055 (PDF)

²⁵ STAT News May 6, 2021

²⁶ Boston Globe May 8, 2021

^27, 30 Forbes May 7, 2021

²⁸ CommonHealth May 7, 2021

²⁹ Courthouse News May 6, 2021

³¹ World Economic Forum, Publicis Groupe

³² World Economic Forum, The Great Reset

^33, 34 Abundant Hope January 6, 2022

³⁵ The Puppet Masters Portfolios July 31, 2021

³⁶ The Conversation May 10, 2017

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Vaccine-free Canadians hoping to cross into the United States via a land border will still be banned from entry after the Biden administration extended a rule mandating that non-U.S. citizens going into the U.S. have the COVID shots.

According to an update yesterday from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the vaccine mandate for land border crossings remains in place indefinitely.

“As of Thursday, April 21, 2022, DHS will extend COVID-19-related land border entry requirements. Non-U.S. travelers seeking to enter the United States via land ports of entry and ferry terminals at the U.S.-Mexico and U.S.-Canada borders are required to be fully vaccinated against COVID-19 and provide proof of vaccination upon request,” the DHS said.

The department noted that the restrictions apply to “non-U.S. travelers who are traveling for essential or non-essential reasons. They do not apply to U.S. citizens, Lawful Permanent Residents, or U.S. nationals.”

The “temporary rule” mandating COVID jabs via land border crossings was originally put in place on January 22. According to the U.S Federal Registry, it was set to expire at midnight April 21 before being extended.

Travelers entering the United States by air are mandated as well to prove they have the COVID jabs.

Republican U.S. Rep. Elise Stefanik of New York blasted the Biden administration’s extension of the COVID land border vaccine mandate.

In a statement, she said such mandates hurt northern communities and show the “Biden administration’s hypocrisy.”

“For over two years, communities in Upstate New York and the North Country have been devastated by Northern Border travel restrictions, which hurt tourism, harm supply chain, and keep families apart. Instead of leading the way for our Canadian partners by dropping all restrictions on Northern Border travel, the Biden Administration is doubling down on harmful restrictions on Northern Border travel, while proposing an end to Title 42, which will fuel illegal immigration across the Southern Border,” Stefanik said.

According to the DHS, upon entry into the U.S. via a land border, one must “verbally attest to their COVID-19 vaccination status,” and if asked for proof of the vaccine, must show the border agent a “CDC-approved COVID-19 vaccination, as outlined on the CDC website.”

Despite the land border mandate being in place, some have said that they were never asked about their vaccine status by border guards when crossing into the United States.

LifeSiteNews spoke with one individual, who asked to remain anonymous, and he said he had no issues driving into the U.S. via a land border last month despite not having the vaccine.

“They never asked me if I had the jabs, so I was just let on through, and honestly, these jab rules are an afront to a person’s personal dignity and rights as a human,” the individual said.

“Coming back into Canada will be a pain as they still make you quarantine as I don’t have the jabs.”

Others without the jabs trying to cross into the United States via land borders have not been so lucky.

A recent report in the Western Standard documents the horror story of a man without the COVID vaccine who tried in vain to get to Costa Rica. After being denied traveling by air, he tried to cross into the U.S. via car at a land border but was turned back.

While in the past the DHS allowed an “essential” travel exemption, this has been removed.

Children under age 18 are exempt from the rule, however, and there are no COVID testing requirements in place.

The DHS does list some narrow exemptions that could allow a vaccine-free person to cross via a land border. These include diplomats, people issued “a humanitarian or emergency exception by the Secretary of Homeland Security,” and those deemed a “national interest, as determined by the Secretary of Homeland Security.”

Also, there is an exemption for “individuals with medical contraindications to receiving a COVID-19 vaccine as specified in the CDC order.”

Before the rule was put in place in January, the vaccine-free were allowed to cross via land borders into the U.S., including truckers.

However, when the Canadian government under Prime Minister Justin Trudeau mandated that all truckers and others be vaccinated for entry into Canada via land borders starting January 15, the U.S. under President Joe Biden quickly enacted a similar rule.

The Trudeau COVID jab land border mandate was met with fierce opposition from many in the trucking industry, as well as some Conservative Party of Canada MPs.

It was also the catalyst for the trucker Freedom Convoy, which saw thousands of Canadians descend upon Ottawa to demand an end to all COVID mandates.

The Freedom Convoy, however, was crushed by Trudeau in an unprecedented move when he enacted the Emergencies Act to clear them out.

Civil liberties groups have called for an independent public inquiry into Trudeau’s use of the EA.

Also in place in Canada is a travel ban by air, rail or sea for those who have chosen not to get the COVID vaccines.

COVID vaccine mandates have split Canadian society and the shots themselves approved for use in Canada have been linked to a multitude of negative and often severe side effects in children.

They also have connections to cell lines derived from aborted babies. As a result of this, many Catholics and other Christians refuse to take them.

COVID-19 has extremely high survivability among most groups, and studies show a minimal risk of asymptomatic spread. Research also indicates that post-infection natural immunity is far superior to vaccine-induced immunity.

*

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***

International organisations have written to Home Secretary Priti Patel urging her to reject the US government’s request for the extradition of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.

The 20 press freedom, free expression and journalists’ organisations have also requested a meeting with Ms Patel to discuss their concerns over the case.

The letter was sent after chief magistrate Paul Goldspring referred Mr Assange’s case to Ms Patel, paving the way for him to face prosecution for exposing US war crimes.

Ms Patel is now responsible for deciding in the next two months whether to accept the extradition request.

Mr Assange’s lawyers warn that the prosecution is politically motivated and that their client faces up to 175 years in jail.

Signatories of the letter to Ms Patel include Reporters Without Borders, Article 19, Big Brother Watch, Pen International, the International Federation of Journalists, the National Union of Journalists and the European Centre for Press and Media Freedom.

In the letter, the organisations express “serious concerns” about the possibility of extraditing the WikiLeaks founder, including over his physical and mental health.

They warn that Mr Assange would be unable to adequately defend himself in US courts due to a lack of a public interest defence in the Espionage Act and that his prosecution would set a dangerous precedent for journalism internationally.

The letter reads:

“We ask you, Home Secretary, to honour the UK government’s commitment to protecting and promoting media freedom and reject the US extradition request.

“We ask you to release Mr Assange from Belmarsh prison and allow him to return to his young family after many years of isolation.

“Finally, we ask you to publicly commit to ensuring that no publisher, journalist or source ever again faces detention in the UK for publishing information in the public interest.”

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***

Ask a hundred Americans and you’ll be lucky to find even one who’s ever heard of Minsk II. But ask those same Americans how the Ukraine war started, and you’ll like get ‘Russian President Putin woke up one day and decided to re-establish the Soviet empire, starting with Ukraine.’

That is because our government and its slavishly loyal media have created a false narrative for maximum propaganda to support pouring billions in weaponry into the Ukraine war zone, ensuring that death and destruction will proceed endlessly.

Minsk II was the 2015 agreement hammered out by Russia, Ukraine, France and Germany to end the civil war in Ukraine between the pro-west, ultra-nationalist government and the pro-Russian Ukrainians in the eastern Donbas provinces of Lugansk and Donetsk.

Why a civil war in Ukraine? Historically, Ukraine was cobbled together first by the Russian Empire, then the Soviet Union over 4 centuries, containing disparate peoples. The main ones were the Western leaning, Ukrainian speaking people in the north and west, and the Russian speaking in the east and south.

Their relationship was always toxic, but under Soviet rule relative peace prevailed. Once freed from Soviet rule in 1999, the tension between the two disparate groups resurfaced. Fifteen years on the U.S. essentially blew up whatever chance for peaceful resolution by aiding a coup which violently removed Russian-leaning President Yanukovych, replacing him with an ultra-nationalist government under Petro Poroshenko.

 

Leaders meeting in Minsk: Belarus’ President Alexander Lukashenko (L), Russia’s President Vladimir Putin (2nd L), Ukraine’s President Petro Poroshenko (R), Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel (C) and France’s President Francois Hollande pose for a family photo during peace talks in Minsk, February 11, 2015.

Thus began the civil war in the Donbas that has killed over 14,000 Ukrainians in Kiev’s effort to subjugate and marginalize the hated Russian-leaning Ukrainians. And leading the carnage for the past 3 years is current president Volodymyr Zelensky. Calling him the new Churchill doesn’t quite fit.

But Ukraine had an off ramp from civil war early on in the form of the Minsk and then the Minsk II agreements in 2014 and 2015. The latter called for autonomy for the breakaway provinces Donetsk and Lugansk, amnesty to the combatants and representation in the Ukraine government.

But goaded by the U.S. and the ultra-nationalists with the real power, both post coup presidents Poroshenko and Zelensky opted to continue the civil war to both retake the breakaway provinces and recapture the Crimea, seized by Russia after the 2014 coup threatened their naval base at Sebastopol in the Crimea.

In the months leading up to Russia’s criminal war, Ukraine, with the help of weaponry and training by Uncle Sam, dramatically increased its criminal shelling of the Donbas, even massing a hundred thousand troops for a possible invasion predicted for March.

Did that, and the threat of NATO’s encroachment in Ukraine up to Russia’s borders, make Russia’s invasion legal or necessary for Russia’s national defense? Of course not. But expecting Russia would sit back and do nothing made their invasion virtually inevitable.

On February 24, that inevitability occurred, costing thousands of senseless deaths, putting the world in danger of worldwide recession, millions of poor worldwide facing starvation from food shortages and worst of all….nuclear war.

Millions of words have been spilled by our government and our media framing this war as the madman in the Kremlin and his dreams of a reconstituted Soviet empire. But they could do better with just two words that Ukraine and U.S. refused to honor and implement: Minsk II.

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***

Defence lawyers have argued that prisoners held at a secretive CIA-run camp at the Guantanamo Bay detention centre should receive reduced sentences because the conditions to which they were subject were “exceedingly disturbing”.

Lawyers for the detainees held at Camp 7 from 2006 to 2021 are currently inspecting the site, and have told The New York Times that conditions at the camp were substandard, with the experience of imprisonment there being like getting “buried alive”.

They are currently gathering information and evidence, including taking photographs and bringing experts to inspect the now-abandoned site. The attorneys also want anything that the men said while detained at the camp to be excluded from their cases, arguing that the camp was “indistinguishable” from the CIA black sites where detainees were tortured.

Susan Hensler, who represents Iraqi detainee Abd al-Hadi al-Iraqi, told The Times that the place was “chilling” and “akin to being entombed”.

“You’re disappeared off the face of the map at Camp 7,” said Alka Pradhan, who represents Ammar al-Baluchi, a defendant in the 9/11 case.

Another criminal defence lawyer, Christine Funk, said of the camp:

“I’ve seen everything from minimum to medium to maximum security [prisons]. I’d stay in any one of them rather than stay in that prison down at Guantanamo.”

Camp 7 was a once-secret prison camp that held the most high-level detainees who were transferred to the site in 2006 after being held in CIA custody.

However, after several years, military officers described the site as in need of an entirely new facility with the current camp having serious structural problems, including its foundation having shifted.

The military had sent multiple funding requests in the tens of millions of dollars.

But instead of building a new facility, it was closed in April 2021. The US military had long refused to acknowledge the location of the camp, and journalists have been denied access to it.

“It feels like there’s an element of unpredictability built into that prison at Guantanamo, by design, that is its own form of torture,” Funk told The Times. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”

The Biden administration has repeatedly stated it aims to close the prison.

Of the 37 prisoners that currently remain in the prison, 19 have been approved for transfer, six are in indefinite detention, 10 are awaiting trial, and two have been convicted, including Majid Khan who has finished his sentence and is in need of a country to be transferred to.

Earlier this week, the US approved the transfer of another detainee, Said bin Brahim bin Umran Bakush, the last Algerian national to be held at the detention facility.

Last month, Mohammed al-Qahtani was transferred to his home country of Saudi Arabia where he will receive treatment for schizophrenia after nearly two decades of imprisonment.

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***

 

 

In order to wage war, rulers have to get the people behind them. Therefore, with the help of the mass media, images of the enemy are built up and irrational fears are stirred up. This increases the fear and obedience of the subjects. Machiavelli, a man who knows what governmental power consists of, how to acquire it and how to maintain it, is reported to have said: “On the art of war rests the whole secret of a ruler’s power.” (1)

***

It is the same today: Two years ago, citizens were thrown into panic by a virus epidemic declared worldwide, triggering a reflex of obedience known only from dictatorships. With the threat of punishment for refusing a gene-altering “vaccination”, the fear level is kept constant.

A war in the heart of Europe has been added to this for a month now; other wars are already following. Again, strong fears are triggered among the citizens; this time of a possible nuclear war and the “last judgement”. The fact that we are all partly to blame for the miserable social conditions in the world is being suppressed.

If you put the available news together, you come to the conclusion that the “fateful” world events are supposed to absorb the citizens mentally and prevent them from looking courageously and resolutely at what is in store for everyone: No longer possessing anything – and being happy with it. In the process, the previous human condition is completely called into question. Along the way, irrational fears are supposed to keep citizens in suspense, paralyse their thinking and make them willingly and humbly accept what is fated to happen.

We should have known

As children of our time, we were sadly unable to correctly interpret the shining portents on the wall.

The plans of philanthropists David Rockefeller Jr. and Bill Gates have been known for a decade and a half. They believed that the supposedly threatening population growth should be curbed by dramatically reducing the population to one billion people. But who took them seriously?

This deadly agenda includes both the theoretical model of wiping out about a billion people forever through nuclear war (2) and Hitler’s “Master Plan Eugenics”, which still lives on in Klaus Schwab, the founder of the World Economic Forum. Presidents Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping were or are still part of Klaus Schwab’s “Big Club”.

Most of us have known that politicians should not be entrusted with the solution of humanity’s problems since Tolstoy’s “Speech against War” of 1905 and his warning that those in power “are often the worst, most insignificant, most cruel, most immoral and especially the most mendacious people”. (3)

We were recently able to learn from Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov that Russia’s military operation in Ukraine is aimed at “putting an end to the ruthless expansion and pursuit of total domination of the US and the rest of the Western countries on the international stage” (4). Who will lead the new world?

The idea of abolishing nation states has been around long before the proclamation of the World Health Organisation (WHO) as the new world government and the “transformation” of so-called democracies or “silent dictatorships” into “open dictatorships” are well known from all parts of the world.

We humans have not recognised our emotional life and our ways of reacting

Since we humans have not recognised our emotional life and our ways of reacting due to a lack of psychology, we are surprised not only by the aggressive diabolical plans of the rulers, but also by our absolute reflexes of obedience. Thus we stand unawares on the edge of the abyss.

Our minds are not free and we cannot throw off the fearfulness we have been brought up to have of our fellow human beings. From childhood, we are inculcated to believe in church and state authorities and to be in bondage to them as if we were “dead bodies” (Ignatius of Loyola). The state and the church act as henchmen who understand each other like two cutthroats (Jean Meslier). That is why adult people show in ideological matters those mental and emotional impairments that were inflicted on them in childhood.

Many of them react to politicians like children or like primitive man reacted – in the form of a “magical belief in authority”: uncritical and clouded by moods, feelings and promises of happiness. And this has consequences: the belief in authority inevitably leads to obedience to authority, which usually triggers the reflex of absolute spiritual obedience and paralysis of the mind. Full-headed adults can then no longer think for themselves and judge rationally, and hand over decision-making power to immoral politicians.

What to do?

The opinion of one president or another is not decisive. What is decisive is that the presidents of the three great powers are probably in agreement with the “world rulers” behind them that those who are “above” must have the upper hand over those who are “below”. That those who are “up there” are just as poor as those “down there” is something the “up there” do not know. For those “down there”, WEF founder Klaus Schwab prophesies: “In 10 years, they will own nothing – and be happy with it.”

Since we humans will not give up hope as long as we breathe, we will continue to dream the dream of a free and just world – regardless of all hardships and adversities.

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Dr. Rudolf Lothar Hänsel is a teacher (retired headmaster), doctor of education (Dr. paed.) and graduate psychologist (specialising in clinical, educational and media psychology). As a retiree, he worked for many years as a psychotherapist in his own practice. In his books and educational-psychological articles, he calls for a conscious ethical-moral values education and an education for public spirit and peace.

He is a regular contributor to Global Research and Asia-Pacific Research.

Notes

(1) Tolstoy, L. N. (1983). Speech against war. Political pamphlets. Edited by Peter Urban. Insel Verlag. Frankfurt am Main, p. 74

(2) https://www.pravda-tv.com/2022/04/ukraine-eskalation-us-kriegssimulation-sagte-atomkrieg-voraus-video/

(3) Tolstoy, L. N. (1983). Speech against war. Political pamphlets. Edited by Peter Urban. Insel Verlag. Frankfurt am Main, p. 74

(4) https://de.rt.com/russland/135976-lawrow-russlands.militaeroperation-in-ukraine/

Featured image is from Silent Crow News

“Synthetic Left” Joins “Corporate Right” in Getting Ukraine War Wrong. Historical Analysis

By Max Parry, April 24, 2022

Since the Russian military operation to de-Nazify and de-militarize Ukraine began in late February, there is a common misperception that the Western left is “split” over the conflict in its response.

Video: WashPost’s Doxing of @LibsOfTikTok Reveals Who Corporate Journalists See as Their Targets

By Glenn Greenwald, April 25, 2022

Trump-era corporate journalism ceased viewing real power centers as adversaries (CIA/NSA/FBI/WallSt). The real enemy are citizens with the wrong politics. Rather than confront real power centers, the largest and richest media corporations – e.g. the Bezos-owned WPost – allied with those factions and attack citizens.

The Global Virome Project (GVP) and “The China Connection”

By Matt Ridley and Prasenjit Ray, April 24, 2022

In August 2016, a group of public health experts, policymakers and donors met in the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Conference Center overlooking Lake Como. Their aim was ambitious: to agree on “bold global action” that would mark the “beginning of the end of the pandemic era”. In other words, they hoped to find which viruses might cause the next pandemic, and get a head start on developing vaccines and drugs.

The COVID Mandates and “The Right to Smile”

By Prof Michel Chossudovsky, April 24, 2022

Smiling is also a means of expressing love and emotion, which has been suppressed by the Covid mandates. Is it relevant? The devastating impacts of the covid mandates on mental health, (including a wave of suicides) which are largely the result of social engineering are amply documented.

Turkey Says Some NATO Members Want Longer Ukraine War to Hurt Russia

By Dave DeCamp, April 24, 2022

Since Russia invaded on February 24, the US and many of its NATO allies have abandoned diplomacy with Russia. Instead of seeking a diplomatic solution, the Western powers are pouring weapons into Ukraine and waging an economic sanctions campaign against Russia.

“Pandemic Treaty” Will Hand WHO Keys to Global Government

By Kit Knightly, April 24, 2022

The first public hearings on the proposed “Pandemic Treaty” are closed, with the next round due to start in mid-June. We’ve been trying to keep this issue on our front page, entirely because the mainstream is so keen to ignore it and keep churning out partisan war porn and propaganda.

Indonesia Bans Edible Oil Exports, Sparks “Mayhem” as Global Food Crisis Ahead

By Zero Hedge, April 24, 2022

The world’s biggest palm oil producer, Indonesia, is the latest country to embrace protectionist measures to mitigate domestic food shortages, according to Bloomberg.

Israel Is Still Arming Ukrainian Nazis

By Asa Winstanley, April 24, 2022

A video published by Ukraine’s Azov Battalion on Twitter this week showed one of its fighters firing an anti-tank missile. In the tweet Azov claimed it had hit a Russian vehicle. Israeli media on Wednesday identified the missile system in the Azov video as a Matador, a weapon developed by a consortium involving Rafael, a state-owned Israeli arms manufacturer.

What Is COVID Injection Fatality Rate?

By Tessa Lena, April 24, 2022

Dr. Pantazatos mentioned in the interview that even before 2020, he was well aware of the fact that the process of getting scientific works published in prestigious journals was tainted. He referred to the 2005 article in “PLOS Medicine” called, “Medical Journals Are an Extension of the Marketing Arm of Pharmaceutical Companies” that talked about how exactly the journals are incentivized by pharma companies.

Governments, Industry and Conservationists vs Tribal and Indigenous peoples. Aren’t There Better Ways to Mend the Earth?

By Michael Welch, April 23, 2022

On the Earth Day organizing site earthday.org there is a lot of attention focused on climate change, regenerative agriculture, rejecting plastic, cleaning up or avoiding litter, conservation and restoration. There is however very little said about the role of Indigenous people in protecting natural habitats.

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***

Trump-era corporate journalism ceased viewing real power centers as adversaries (CIA/NSA/FBI/WallSt). The real enemy are citizens with the wrong politics. Rather than confront real power centers, the largest and richest media corporations – e.g. the Bezos-owned WPost – allied with those factions and attack citizens.

The 2018 CNN obscenity featured in this video is most illustrative: they confronted an old lady with a tiny pro-Trump FB page on her yard. We recall when CNN threatened to dox someone who made an anti-CNN meme and when the Daily Beast published dirt and the real name of someone who published a video making Nancy Pelosi look drunk.

This is the key lesson of the latest tawdry episode with the WashPost’s Taylor Lorenz: ever since a Trump presidency became a possibility, the largest liberal media corporations – over and over – have used their vast resources to target and punish private citizens for the wrong politics.

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The Azov Battalion is based in Mariupol.

The Population of Mariupol which is part of Donbass is predominantly Russian.

***

This article is written by an independent reporter embedded in Ukraine with the Russian army.

We believe that if people want to understand the war in Ukraine, they need to read widely about it, from different perspectives, including the Russian one, to try and discern the truth about what is going on for themselves. CAM Editors

 

Residents of Mariupol receiving humanitarian aid from the Russian army in collaboration with the DPR army. [Source: Photo courtesy of Sonja van den Ende]

Where shall I begin?

Can a man endure so much suffering? Can you write about so much suffering without getting emotional?

Probably not.

Mariupol has been wiped out, buildings have collapsed mostly due to rocket attacks and, of course, there have been bombings as well.

Devastation in Mariupol. [Source: rferl.org]

The Western media, of course, blame the Russians for these bombings, but Ukraine also has planes that drop bombs, so how on earth can you say a few thousand kilometers away that it is the Russians?

It is not like in the West where, when there was a terrorist attack, the perpetrators left their passports or IDs.

This is a war of destruction that I have seen before—in Syria, in Homs. Perhaps also like in Dresden, toward the end of WWII, although, of course, Dresden I cannot verify.

Homs, Syria. [Source: theatlantic.com]

The West has turned it into a propaganda war. All the while it sponsors the Ukrainian army and its neo-Nazi battalions and has completely lost sight of what this is really about.

For years the media ignored the Ukrainian army assaults on the people of Eastern Ukraine, who were forced to survive in underground bunkers.

They act as if the war started in February, when it actually started in 2014 as a war by the Ukrainian government against its own people.

Eight years of destroyed villages and towns—why? Because eastern Ukraine is inhabited by a predominantly Russian-speaking population, who grew up in the Soviet system.

After the 2014 Maidan coup backed by the U.S., they were supposed to become part of the EU and the pro-European “puppet” government in Kyiv. All their values, norms, culture and language had to be thrown overboard.

In order to achieve these ends, first President Petro Poroshenko and then Zelensky, have carried out “special operations” which they called “fighting terrorists.”

U.S. puppets Petro Poroshenko and Volodymyr Zelensky don their war gear. [Source: tellerreport.com]

The Ukrainians started bombing the Donetsk airport and then carried out attacks on the civilian population.

Ruins from Donetsk airport after Ukrainian bombing (Feb, 2015). [Source: channel4.com]

When this did not go as planned, they recruited and made the Azov Battalion and other right-wing groups part of the regular army.

These battalions are indeed neo-Nazis, from father to son they are indoctrinated with the Nazi ideology of the Stepan Bandera cult.

Azov Battalion at ceremony in Kyiv in October 2018. [Source: foreignpolicy.com]

You can compare them to jihadists of ISIS (DAESH), ideologically indoctrinated and fighting on speed or other drugs so, as many witnesses say, they kill civilians randomly.

This is exactly the same script that happened in Syria, where jihadists even cut out the hearts of the Syrian Army soldiers and hung their chopped heads on poles.

Destroyed flat, shelled by the Ukrainian Army and the Azov Battalion. [Source: Photo courtesy of Sonja van den Ende]

A man looking for water, worth more than gold. [Source: Photo courtesy of Sonja van den Ende]

A destroyed shopping mall in the city center [Source: Photo courtesy of Sonja van den Ende]

People walking through the destroyed city, looking for food, water and their relatives who might be dead or lost. [Source: Photo courtesy of Sonja van den Ende]

People are waiting for food and water, delivered by the Russians. [Source: Photo courtesy of Sonja van den Ende]

Children and grandmother waiting. [Source: Photo courtesy of Sonja van den Ende]

The “bombed” city theater

On March 16, 2022, the Donetsk Regional Drama Theater in Mariupol, Ukraine, was allegedly bombed. It was reportedly used as an air raid shelter during the siege of Mariupol, allegedly holding 1,300 civilians in the days before March 16, and at least 300 victims might have been killed.

According to Western media, the theater was bombed by the Russian forces. According to the Russian spokesman and many eyewitness accounts, who lived near the theater, they did not hear any bombardment in their neighborhood and the theater.

Mariupol theater. [Source: businessinsider.com]

So, again, the Western media appear to be lying—blaming Russia for every atrocity in the war without proof, while failing to give any context for how the war started and who is responsible.

The goal is clearly to mobilize public opinion against Russia in support of regime change or even a full-scale war against them.

The partly destroyed theater in Mariupol, not bombed as you can see, but imploded inside from the basement. [Source: Photo courtesy of Sonja van den Ende]

I was given a completely different story about the Mariupol theater “bombing” from a Russian army spokesman whom I interviewed. He said the following:

“According to eyewitnesses, there were about 300 people in the theater, but this cannot be verified, the Ukrainian army and battalions did not keep records of the attendance, so it could be more or less people. The cellars were used as bomb shelters for rocket attacks and bombs. On the day of the destruction, March 16, 2022, according to eyewitnesses, there were no bombings, but heavy rocket attacks. Ammunition and explosives from the Ukrainian army and its battalions were stored in the cellars. The Ukrainian army and battalions heard that the Russians were coming and detonated the explosives in the shelters, where many people still took refuge from the ongoing fighting. This is not new for the Ukrainians to perform such deeds, especially the AZOV battalion, who, just like in Syria at the time of the war, the jihadists were high on drugs, Captagon and speed, which explains their brutality and violent reaction. Same as for these neo-Nazi fighters who are highly infiltrated in the Ukrainian army.”

Inside the theater are photos of previous performances. [Source: Photo courtesy of Sonja van den Ende]

Inside the theater. [Source: Photo courtesy of Sonja van den Ende]

The place where the explosion took place, in the middle of the theater. [Source: Photo courtesy of Sonja van den Ende]

The media in the West, in conjunction with politicians, sell stories to the public, at least half of which I dare to say are fabricated or used from other conflicts.

Mariupol is destroyed and most likely more than half of its inhabitants fled the city, either to the West, to Russia or surrounding villages and towns. Nobody knows at the moment. People are afraid and searching for their relatives, who might have been killed.

As I said earlier, food and water and other humanitarian help is distributed on a daily basis by the Russian army—every day in a different place because, when the Ukrainian army and its Nazi battalions know the place, they will try to shell it and kill the people.

It will take a while before the city can be rebuilt. Maybe, the Azov steel factory has to be taken, the last stronghold of the Azov Battalion, the Russian army is fighting a heavy battle there.

Mariupol steel factory. [Source: intellinews.com]

Everyone is anxiously waiting to see if the NATO command center, which is most likely under the factory, is being dismantled. Whether a biological (one of many) laboratory is really located under the AZOV steel factory, we will soon see. I will definitely report on it again.

Inside the city near the theater. [Source: Photo courtesy of Sonja van den Ende]

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Sonja is a freelance journalist from the Netherlands who has written about Syria, the Middle East, and Russia among other topics. Sonja can be reached at: [email protected].

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First published in November 2021.

***

 

 

 

 

 

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***

First published on January 27, 2022. Included as a Chapter in Michel Chossudovsky’s E-book entitled

The 2020-21 Worldwide Corona Crisis: Destroying Civil Society, Engineered Economic Depression, Global Coup d’État and the “Great Reset”

***

What is presented in this article is a preliminary draft: suggested concepts and ideas pertaining to the formulation of a Worldwide People’s Movement.  

***

The Storming of the Bastille occurred in Paris on the afternoon of July 14, 1789. The Bastille was a medieval armory, fortress, and political prison. It was the symbol of Royal Authority under the reign of King Louis XVI. 

The French monarchy was obliged to accept the authority of the newly proclaimed National Assembly as well endorse the Fundamental Rights contained in the “Declaration des Droits de l’Homme et du Citoyen” (Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen), formulated in early August 1789.   

More than 230 years later, these Fundamental Rights (Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité) are now being contravened by corrupt  governments around the World on behalf of a totalitarian and illusive financial establishment.

Bastille 2022

Bastille 2022 pertains not only to the restoration of these fundamental rights. It seeks to reverse and disable the criminal COVID-19 agenda which in the course of the last two years has triggered economic, social and political chaos Worldwide in 193 member states of the United Nations, coupled with bankruptcies, unemployment, mass poverty and despair. Famines have been reported in 25 countries. 

Starting in November 2020, an experimental mRNA vaccine launched by our governments (allegedly with a view to combating the spread of the virus) has resulted in an ascending Worldwide trend of vaccine related deaths and injuries. It’s a killer vaccine. It’s a crime against humanity. 

Bastille 2022 is not a “protest” movement narrowly defined.

We do not seek to negotiate with corrupt government officials. We question their legitimacy. They are liars.

Our intent is to confront the powerful actors behind this criminal endeavor which is literally destroying people’s lives Worldwide, while creating divisions within society. The impacts on mental health on population groups Worldwide are devastating.  

The numerous lockdowns (stay at home of the work force), fear campaigns, COVID-19 policy mandates imposed on 193 member states of the United Nations have also contributed to undermining and destabilizing:

1. The very fabric of civil society and its institutions including education, culture and the arts, social gatherings, sports, entertainment, etc. 
2. All public sector activities including physical and social infrastructure, social services, law enforcement, etc.
3. All major private sector activities which characterize national, regional and local economies including small, medium and large corporate enterprises, family farms, industry, wholesale and retail trade, the urban services economy, transport companies, airlines, hotel chains, etc.
4. The structures of the global economy including international commodity trade, investment, import and export relations between countries, etc. The entire landscape of the global economy has been shattered. 

In turn, a process of enrichment by the elite billionaires together with widening social inequalities has unfolded. The massive debts incurred by the Nation-State resulting from corruption as well fiscal collapse have skyrocketed. Increasingly national governments are in a straitjacket, under the brunt of powerful creditor institutions. Mounting debts at all levels of society are the driving force. 

The Creation of a Mass Movement 

What is at stake is the creation of a mass movement (Nationally and Worldwide) which questions the legitimacy and authority of the architects of this insidious project which broadly speaking emanates from: Big Money, Big Pharma, the Information Technology Conglomerates, the Security Apparatus, Intelligence, the Military Industrial Complex, Big Energy, the Corporate Media.

Ironically, the architects of the COVID-19 “pandemic” are now actively involved in formulating the “Solution”. The World Economic Forum’s Great Reset consists in installing a Worldwide totalitarian regime. What is contemplated is a system of “Global Governance”.

A 190+ UN member nation states are slated to be weakened and undermined. They are under the grip of the most serious debt crisis in World history. Under the Great Reset, the institutions of parliamentary democracy and the Welfare State are to be replaced by an unelected “public-private partnership” dominated by the upper echelons of the financial establishment. In the words of the late David Rockefeller:

“…The world is now more sophisticated and prepared to march towards a world government. The supranational sovereignty of an intellectual elite and world bankers is surely preferable to the national auto-determination practiced in past centuries.” (quoted by Aspen Times, August 15, 2011, emphasis added)

Restoring Real Democracy

We will seek all avenues through peaceful means to disable and undermine this totalitarian project including dialogue with and within public and private institutions, law enforcement officials, members of the military and the judicial.

What is required is to break down the structures of corruption, hierarchy and abusive authority, namely to pursue what might be described as:

“the democratization of decision-making within our institutions”.

The Art of Deception

We must nonetheless understand the limitations of conducting effective judicial procedures against national governments. The judges are often pressured, threatened and corrupt, aligned with both dominant financial interests and politicians.

Moreover, inasmuch as this insidious project is enforced by national governments Worldwide, the International Criminal Court (ICC) which is officially “independent” in regards to the UN Security Council, has a longstanding record of side-stepping US-NATO war crimes. The ICC is controlled by the same financial elites which control the governments.

We must also understand the complexities of  this carefully designed and coordinated totalitarian project, namely the role of various fraudulent financial institutions, corporate advisory and lobby groups, consultants, “scientific advisors’, etc. acting as intermediaries on behalf of Big Pharma and the financial elites. 

There is a hierarchy in the structures of authority. This complex and intricate decision making process is used to co-opt, bribe and manipulate government officials. Almost identical policy mandates (emanating from higher authority) are implemented simultaneously in numerous countries, requiring active coordination.   The same powerful lobby firms are acting at one and the same time in different countries (e.g. in North America and the European Union).

An extensive multi-billion dollar budget has been allocated to the implementation Worldwide of COVID-19 policy mandates. The latter have been conducive to the destabilization of civil society and its institutions including the disruption of health services, education, sports, cultural activities, etc.

The legitimacy of politicians and their powerful Big Money sponsors must be challenged, including the police state measures adopted to enforce the imposition of a digital vaccine passport as well as the wearing of the face mask, social distancing, etc.

What are our Priorities? Counter Propaganda 

More than 7 billion people Worldwide are directly or indirectly affected by the corona crisis. Several billion people have already been vaccinated by an “unapproved” experimental mRNA “vaccine”, which has resulted in a Worldwide wave of mortality and morbidity.

While this tendency is confirmed by official figures pertaining to vaccine-related deaths and adverse events, the mainstream media and the governments are in a state of denial.

The devastating health impacts of the COVID-19 vaccine are rarely acknowledged. It’s the same catch phrase (which is an outright lie) repeated ad nauseam: “the virus is far more dangerous than the vaccine”.

“we actually have more safety data on the vaccine than the virus, and already see that the virus is far more dangerous than the vaccine. (Intercare)

Dr. Alan Schroeder thinks it’s very natural for parents to worry, but said for teens, the virus is more dangerous than the vaccine. (NBC)

Doctors are on the lookout for it in children, but the bottom line remains that the virus is far more dangerous than the vaccine.

“The mutations in the omicron variant make it [the virus] more prolific, dangerous, and elusive“

etc.

This propaganda consensus must be broken. With regard to the vaccine, informing people across the land regarding the data on deaths and adverse events is the first step.

The COVID Crisis initiated in January 2020 is unprecedented in World History. Propaganda under Nuremberg is a Crime.

Dismantling the propaganda apparatus is crucial.  Counter-propaganda plays a key role in revealing the lies used to justify the policy mandates.

Without persistent media disinformation, the official COVID narrative falls flat.

First and foremost we must forcefully challenge the mainstream media, without specifically targeting mainstream journalists, who have been instructed to abide by the official narrative. We should in this regard favor dialogue with individual (independent) journalists.

We must ensure that people Worldwide achieve an understanding of the history and devastating impacts of the COVID crisis supported by scientific concepts, analysis, testimonies and data.  This endeavor will require a parallel process at the grassroots level, of sensitizing fellow citizens and establishing dialogue on the nature of  the alleged pandemic, the mRNA vaccine, the RT-PCR test, as well as the devastating economic and social impacts of the lockdowns.

While we must put an end to the fear campaign, we must nonetheless inform our fellow citizens regarding the dangers of the mRNA vaccine as well as the engineered chaos of this totalitarian agenda of “global governance” on the very structures of civil society.

The “fear campaign” is to be replaced by  “information, concepts, analysis and data” as well as “strategies” to confront Big Pharma, corrupt officials in high office as well as their Big Money sponsors.

We must also ensure the conduct of dialogue and debate at the grassroots of society.

Putting an End to The “Killer Vaccine”

Our first task is to immediately halt and cancel the so-called COVID-19 “vaccine” which has triggered a wave of mortality and morbidity Worldwide. 

According to Dr. Thomas Binder: 

“The gene injections are unsafe. They can cause anaphylactic reactions, thromboembolism, thrombocytopenia, disseminated intravascular coagulation, and myocarditis in the short term.

There is possible immunosuppression and antibody-dependent enhancement, ADE, in the medium-term.

And in the long term there are possible autoimmune diseases, cancer and infertility, risks that have not been ruled out yet.”

According to Doctors for COVID Ethics, in the EU, UK and US the data respectively tabulated by EudraVigilance, MHRA (UK) and VAERS (US):

“have now recorded many more deaths and injuries from the COVID-19 “vaccine” roll-out than from all previous vaccines combined since records began”

With regard to the mRNA “vaccine”, the catastrophic number of injection related deaths has NOT been reported by the mainstream media, despite the official figures being publicly available.

“The signal of harm is now indisputably overwhelming, and, in line with universally accepted ethical standards for clinical trials, we demand that the COVID-19 “vaccination” programme be halted immediately worldwide.

Continuation of the programme, in the full knowledge of ongoing serious harm and death to both adults and children, constitutes Crimes Against Humanity/Genocide, for which those found to be responsible or complicit will ultimately be held personally liable”

 

Video: The COVID-19 vaccine was launched in mid to late December 2020. 

In many countries, there was a significant shift in mortality following the introduction of the mRNA vaccine

The Pfizer Confidential Report

It is worth noting that a Confidential Pfizer Report released as part of a Freedom of Information (FOI) procedure provides data on deaths and adverse events recorded by Pfizer from the outset of the vaccine project in December 2020 to the end of February 2021, namely a very short period (at most two and a half months):  

In a twisted irony, the data revealed in this “insider report” refutes the official vaccine narrative peddled by the governments and the WHO. It also confirms the analysis of numerous medical doctors and scientists who have revealed the devastating consequences of the mRNA “vaccine”.

What is contained in  Pfizer’s “confidential” report is detailed evidence on the impacts of the “vaccine” on mortality and morbidity. This data which emanates from the “Horse’s Mouth” can now be used to confront as well formulate legal procedures against Big Pharma, the governments, the WHO and the media.

In a Court of Law, the evidence contained in this Big Pharma confidential report (coupled with the data on deaths and adverse events compiled by the national authorities in the EU, UK and US) is irrefutable: because it is their data and their estimates and not ours. (Analysis  of Pfizer Confidential Report)

It is an admission on the part of both the governments and Big Pharma that the COVID-19 vaccine is a criminal undertaking “Pfizer knew from the outset that it was a killer vaccine. No attempt has been made by the governments to call for the withdrawal of the killer vaccine.”

It is with noting that Pfizer has a criminal record (2009) with the US  Department of Justice on charges of “fraudulent marketing”.

 

As part of the 2009 DoJ settlement, Pfizer was put on parole:

“Pfizer also has agreed to enter into an expansive corporate integrity agreement … [which] provides for procedures and reviews to be put in place to avoid and promptly detect conduct similar to that which gave rise to this matter.”

But we are no longer dealing with “fraudulent marketing”:

“Killing is Good for Business”: The vaccine is a multibillion dollar operation worldwide. It’s manslaughter.

Once the “vaccine” has been halted, the criminality of Big Pharma will be fully revealed and understood. In turn, the legitimacy of the official COVID narrative based on lies and fake science will inevitably be impaired. This is the first step towards breaking the “official” COVID narrative. 

The Truth is an important peaceful weapon. Without propaganda and media disinformation, the architects of this project do not have a leg to stand on.

Let us break the “official” COVID-19 consensus and the propaganda apparatus which provides “legitimacy” to a criminal agenda.

Once it collapses, it will open up the road towards reversing the broader process of economic, social and political chaos generated in the course of the last two years.

The Geopolitical Dimension

What is unfolding is a new and destructive phase of US imperialism. It’s a totalitarian project of economic and social engineering. 

The Biden administration has endorsed the COVID Agenda, which has been used to destabilize and weaken national economies including those of “enemy nations”.

We cannot divorce our understanding of the COVID Crisis from that of US foreign policy and America’s hegemonic agenda: e.g.  US-NATO confrontation with Russia in Eastern Europe, the militarization of the South China Sea directed against China, Iran and the geopolitics of the Middle East, the ongoing sanctions regimes against Venezuela and Cuba, etc.

“Big Money including the billionaire foundations are the driving force. It’s a complex alliance of  Wall Street and the Banking establishment, The Big Oil and Energy Conglomerates, the so-called “Defense Contractors”, Big Pharma, the Biotech Conglomerates, the Corporate Media, the Telecom, Communications and Digital Technology Giants, together with a network of think tanks, lobby groups, research labs, etc. The ownership of intellectual property  also plays a central role.

This powerful digital-financial decision-making network also involves major creditor and banking institutions: The Federal Reserve, the European Central Bank (ECB), the IMF, the World Bank, the regional development banks, and the Basel based Bank for International Settlements (BIS), which plays a key strategic role.

In turn, the upper echelons of the US State apparatus (and Washington’s Western Allies) are directly or indirectly involved, including the  Pentagon, US Intelligence (and its research labs), the Health authorities, Homeland Security and the US State Department (including US embassies in over 150 countries).” (Michel Chossudovsky, E-book, Chapter XIII)

Integrating All Sectors of Society

It should be noted that organized opposition in many Western countries is weak. Why? Because “progressive forces” including left intellectuals, NGO leaders, trade union and labor leaders both in Western Europe and North America have  from the outset endorsed the official COVID narrative. Many of these progressive movements are supported by corporate foundations. 

The same billionaire foundations (Rockefeller, Ford, Gates, et al) which are the unspoken architects of the “Great Reset” and “Global Governance” are also involved in (generously) financing various social movements. “They control the opposition”.  

What this means is that  grassroots activists are often misled and betrayed by their leaders who are routinely coopted by their billionaire sponsors.

It is essential that these grassroots activists be integrated into the mainstay of the movement against the COVID-19 consensus.

The Road Ahead

What is required is the development of a broad based grassroots network which confronts both the architects of this crisis all well as all levels of government (i.e. national, states, provinces, municipalities, etc.) involved in imposing the vaccine as well carrying out the lockdown and closure of economic activity.

This network would be established (nationally and internationally) at all levels of society, in towns and villages, work places, parishes. Trade unions, farmers organizations, professional associations, business associations, student unions, veterans associations. Church groups would be called upon to integrate this movement.

“Spreading the word” through social media and independent online media outlets will be undertaken bearing in mind that Google as well as Facebook are instruments of censorship.

Legal procedures and protests are unfolding in all major regions of the World. As part of a Worldwide network of initiatives, it is important to establish mechanisms of communication, dialogue and exchange within and between countries. 

The creation of such a movement, which forcefully challenges the legitimacy of the financial elites, Big Pharma, et al., as well as the structures of political authority at the national level, is no easy task. It will require a degree of solidarity, unity and commitment unparalleled in World history.

What is required is the breaking down of political and ideological barriers within society (i.e. between political parties) and acting with a single voice towards Building a Worldwide Consensus against Tyranny. 

Worldwide Solidarity and Human Dignity is the Driving Force.

***

See Michel Chossudovsky’s E-Book (13 Chapters) entitled

The 2020-21 Worldwide Corona Crisis: Destroying Civil Society, Engineered Economic Depression, Global Coup d’État and the “Great Reset”

About the Author

Michel Chossudovsky is an award-winning author, Professor of Economics (emeritus) at the University of Ottawa, Founder and Director of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG), Montreal, Editor of Global Research.

He has undertaken field research in Latin America, Asia, the Middle East, sub-Saharan Africa and the Pacific and has written extensively on the economies of developing countries with a focus on poverty and social inequality. He has also undertaken research in Health Economics (UN Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC),  UNFPA, CIDA, WHO, Government of Venezuela, John Hopkins International Journal of Health Services (1979, 1983)

He is the author of 13 books including The Globalization of Poverty and The New World Order (2003), America’s “War on Terrorism” (2005),  The Globalization of War, America’s Long War against Humanity (2015).

He is a contributor to the Encyclopaedia Britannica.  His writings have been published in more than twenty languages. In 2014, he was awarded the Gold Medal for Merit of the Republic of Serbia for his writings on NATO’s war of aggression against Yugoslavia. He can be reached at [email protected]

See Michel Chossudovsky, Biographical Note

Michel Chossudovsky’s Articles on Global Research

 

 

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Since the Russian military operation to de-Nazify and de-militarize Ukraine began in late February, there is a common misperception that the Western left is “split” over the conflict in its response.

Indeed, it is true there has been infighting within organizations such as the U.S.-based Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) between its “International Committee”—whose official statement rightly faulted NATO enlargement for “setting the stage” for Russia’s actions in Ukraine—and local branches of the group which released their own takes distancing themselves from the former.

Similar sectarian splinters have occurred among the U.S. Green Party over the issue with the Howie Hawkins-led wing on one side endorsing sending lethal aid to Ukraine and its peace action committee on the other.

However, all of them fell in line behind the corporate media in characterizing the Russo-Ukrainian conflict as an “invasion” by Moscow to be condemned. For what the late Edward S. Herman called the “cruise missile Left,” the 14,000 ethnic Russians killed in Donbass by the Ukrainian army since 2014 are “unworthy victims,” as Herman and Noam Chomsky defined the notion in Manufacturing Consent. With a few notable exceptions, the vast majority of the so-called left wing in the United States and Western Europe have gotten Ukraine totally wrong.

Edward S. Herman, co-author of Manufacturing Consent. [Source: rollingstone.com]

International relations scholar John Mearsheimer warned for years that NATO expansion threatened Moscow’s legitimate security interests and would likely lead to a hot war in Ukraine. Then again, Joe Biden himself acknowledged as much as a senator back in 1997.

Now that the U.S. president has openly called for regime change in Moscow, one wonders what new excuses NATO apologists will invent to maintain that the eastward encroachment on Russia’s borders is benevolent. Still, the source of the widespread misunderstanding today can be traced much further back in history—long before the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the reunification of Germany.

In the lead-up to the escalation of hostilities, many on the Left made reference to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s speech formally recognizing the Novorussian republics. They pointed to Putin’s blaming the Soviet policy on the Ukrainian national question for the current crisis as evidence that the Russian head of state is a reactionary and, therefore, Moscow’s actions unjust.

A recent article in Jacobin magazine, the unofficial flagship publication of the Harringtonite reformist tendency in the U.S. [Michael Harrington was a social democrat who was anti-communist], continued this line of thought by distorting early Soviet history. In particular, the modestly self-professed “leading voice of the American left” sought to historically sever the ancestral relations between Russified communists in Donbass over a century ago from the latter-day militants in the Eastern Ukrainian republics.

Never mind that it was the Communist Party of the Russian Federation, the largest political opposition to Putin, which first proposed to the State Duma back in January that the Kremlin should recognize the Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics.

Russian Parliament in process of voting to approve recognition of Luhansk and Donetsk Republics—something first proposed by the Russian communists. [Source: euronews.com]

It is impossible to understand the struggle between the two countries and the Left’s misapprehension without putting it in the context of the former Soviet Union and its demise. Leaving aside his own politics, Putin’s assertion that the Bolsheviks carved up territory of the former Russian Empire to form a Ukrainian state is a historical fact.

That this controversial decision determined the course of the next century of events from the Second World War through Ukraine’s independence to the current flare-up is also valid.

To its credit, one of the legacies of the USSR and its ethnic federalism was that it greatly reduced the frequently violent conflicts between the more than 120 different oppressed nationalities of the old Tsarist autocracy. With that being said, it would be a disservice to the socialist movement in failing to recognize that mistakes were made by the Soviet leadership over the national question. More importantly, what many self-described leftists would like us to forget is that there were other prominent Marxists at the time who were at odds with Lenin over Ukraine’s right to statehood, chiefly among them Polish-German revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg.

As the Slovene provocateur Slavoj Žižek once noted, it is a “historical irony” that Ukrainian nationalists have been tearing down statues of Lenin, considering that not only did the USSR redraw Ukraine’s borders and extend its territory several times—including the mostly Russian-speaking Crimea which was transferred by Nikita Khrushchev in 1954 after nearly 200 years as Russian land—it was during the first decade of the Soviet era when Ukrainian culture, identity and language was revitalized and promoted by the state. Putin also called attention to this paradox when he mocked Kyiv’s “decommunization” laws, pointing out that, if it were not for communism, there would be no modern Ukraine.

Despite the fact that the mother tongue of most Ukrainians was Russian, the local dialect only began to be taught in schools when the Soviet education system was introduced. Having said that, the choice to establish a Ukrainian state did not come without considerable debate among the Marxist school beforehand.

Prior to the overthrow of the Romanov dynasty, there were many concerns among the Russian revolutionaries as to whether the calls for self-determination by the heterogenous demographics which composed the Tsarist Empire would make an eventual Soviet entity impossible to govern.

The Bolsheviks hoped to appease minority ethnic groups by formulating a policy which in principle offered autonomy and sovereignty but a form of national rights that did not take precedence over socialist internationalism—or as Lenin called it, a “voluntary union of nations.”

In The Socialist Revolution and the Right of Nations to Self-Determination, the Marxist revolutionary leader explained the policy of indigenization (korenizatsiya) or nativization which sought to integrate the many non-Russian nationalities into the Soviet system:

“The proletariat of the oppressing nations cannot confine itself to the general hackneyed phrases against annexations and for the equal rights of nations in general, that may be repeated by any pacifist bourgeois. The proletariat cannot evade the question that is particularly “unpleasant” for the imperialist bourgeoisie, namely, the question of the frontiers of a state that is based on national oppression. The proletariat cannot but fight against the forcible retention of the oppressed nations within the boundaries of a given state, and this is exactly what the struggle for the right of self-determination means. The proletariat must demand the right of political secession for the colonies and for the nations that “its own” nation oppresses. Unless it does this, proletarian internationalism will remain a meaningless phrase; mutual confidence and class solidarity between the workers of the oppressing and oppressed nations will be impossible.”

Soviet poster in Ukrainian on indigenization. [Source: lsvsx.livejournal.com]

Following the October Revolution, Luxemburg argued in her polemic that the right of oppressed peoples to self-determination should be on the condition that progressive orientations would be in control of the newly formed nation-states.

Lenin disagreed and upheld the position that the right to sovereignty should be unconditional, even if reactionary forces were to take power. Upon Moscow’s exit from World War I, the Baltic states gained their first period of independence and the Finnish Civil War resulted in a Red defeat.

Vladimir Lenin, left, Rosa Luxemburg, right. [Source: links.org.au]

Meanwhile, Luxemburg’s native Poland declared its autonomous status despite opposition from her own SDKPiL (Social Democracy of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania) faction on the basis of a commitment to proletarian internationalism. Part of her pragmatic reasoning was that the ex-Tsarist colonies were instantly pulled into imperialist orbit once they seceded, culminating in the Allied intervention in the Russian Civil War.

Her 1918 essay on The Russian Revolution is more well-known for its criticism of the one-party rule of the Bolsheviks, but its third chapter examines the nationalities question:

“The Bolsheviks are in part responsible for the fact that the military defeat was transformed into the collapse and breakdown of Russia. Moreover, the Bolsheviks themselves have, to a great extent, sharpened the objective difficulties of this situation by a slogan which they placed in the foreground of their policies: the so-called right of self-determination of peoples, or—something which was really implicit in this slogan—the disintegration of Russia… One is immediately struck with the obstinacy and rigid consistency with which Lenin and his comrades stuck to this slogan, a slogan which is in sharp contradiction to their otherwise outspoken centralism in politics as well as to the attitude they have assumed towards other democratic principles. While they showed a quite cool contempt for the Constituent Assembly, universal suffrage, freedom of press and assemblage, in short, for the whole apparatus of the basic democratic liberties of the people which, taken all together, constituted the “right of self-determination” inside Russia, they treated the right of self-determination of peoples as a jewel of democratic policy for the sake of which all practical considerations of real criticism had to be stilled.”

In retrospect, whether or not Lenin’s stance was correct and Luxemburg’s wrong is a matter of debate, though the consensus seems to be the former on the left, particularly when applied to the many anti-colonial and national liberation struggles in the global south. So too is the matter of whether Ukraine had the right to become a separate country from Russia, albeit both Eastern Slavic nations along with Belarus evolved from the medieval Kievan Rus state and they are essentially the same ethnic group. Nevertheless, what is more pertinent is that Luxemburg was ominously accurate in her assessment of the particularly dangerous character of Ukrainian nationalism. After all, Lenin died in 1924 and did not live to witness the Great Patriotic War and Ukrainian collaboration with the Axis powers.

Ukrainians greet German soldiers in western Ukraine in 1941. [Source: wikipedia.org]

Then again, the early warning signs were all there in the many pogroms against tens of thousands of Jews, Poles and Russians by Ukrainian ultra-rightists under the leadership of Symon Petliura who tried to create a racially homogenous state during the Soviet-Ukrainian War (1917-1921).

Historically, Ukraine’s independence movement began as part of the broader extremist coalition which became European fascism and its defeat only further radicalized its exiled right-wing émigrés during the interwar period, eventually leading to the founding in Vienna of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) in 1929. A decade earlier, Luxemburg had forewarned that placation of Ukrainian ultranationalism would serve as a counterrevolutionary call to arms and fragment Ukraine:

“Ukrainian nationalism in Russia was something quite different from, let us say, Czechish, Polish or Finnish nationalism in that the former was a mere whim, a folly of a few dozen petty-bourgeois intellectuals without the slightest roots in the economic, political or psychological relationships of the country; it was without any historical tradition, since the Ukraine never formed a nation or government, was without any national culture, except for the reactionary-romantic poems of Shevschenko. It is exactly as if, one fine day, the people living in the Wasserkante should want to found a new Low-German (Plattdeutsche) nation and government! And this ridiculous pose of a few university professors and students was inflated into a political force by Lenin and his comrades through their doctrinaire agitation concerning the “right of self-determination including etc.”

Lenin remained unconvinced and proceeded with the policy. In hindsight, Luxemburg appears clairvoyant. Two decades later when Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union, many Ukrainians did not view the Wehrmacht as conquerors but liberators and more than a quarter of a million local quislings were recruited from ultranationalist organizations by the Third Reich to participate in the mass murder of Poles, Jews, Roma and other so-called undesirables.

Those same far-right terrorist forces under Stepan Bandera’s command in the OUN continued a violent insurgency against the Soviets during the Cold War with the covert support of Western intelligence agencies in Project AERODYNAMIC. Central Intelligence Agency documents verify that the CIA sponsored Ukrainian Nazi collaborators like Bandera and Mykola Lebed in order to “exploit nationalist cultural and other dissident tendencies in Ukraine” and “exploit the minority nationality question in the Soviet Union.” A declassified CIA document from 1953 states:

“The purpose of Project AERODYNAMIC is to provide for the exploitation and expansion of the anti-Soviet Ukrainian resistance for cold war and hot war purposes. Such groups as the Ukrainian Supreme Council of Liberation (UHVR) and its Ukrainian Insurgent Army (OUN), the Foreign Representation of the Ukrainian Supreme Council of Liberation (ZPUHVR) in Western Europe and the United States, and other organizations such as the OUN/B will be utilized.”

The Banderovtsi were ultimately defeated in the late 1950s but Ukraine was never truly de-Nazified, as Khrushchev made yet another disastrous blunder in allowing many Ukrainians deported during the Stalin years to repatriate while releasing others from imprisonment.

Right-wing nationalism and anti-Russian sentiment remained underground for several decades until its reappearance when the USSR dissolved and would later become one of the biggest factors in the 2004 Orange Revolution and the Maidan ten years later. [CIA agitation was also of course a factor].

Modern Ukraine itself had grown out of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, the Habsburg Empire, and Imperial Russia to become a multinational state with a significant minority population of Russian speakers.

When Ukraine was incorporated into the USSR, the nationality question was kept under control by the fact that Soviet citizenship was not restricted by ethnic identity and all Ukrainians were citizens of the Soviet Union.

Immediately after Kyiv declared its independence in 1991, ethno-nationalism resurfaced just as it did in nearly every ex-communist country in Eastern Europe and Central Asia, from the breakup of the former Yugoslavia to more than three decades of frozen conflict in Nagorno-Karabakh.

Once the Warsaw Pact disbanded, the West began to absorb all of its former signatories into NATO, reneging on the agreement made between Mikhail Gorbachev and then-U.S. Secretary of State James Baker who promised that it would not move “one-inch to the east.”

Once Eastern European countries started to pursue integration into NATO and the European Union, Boris Yeltsin signaled that the Russian Federation’s long-term aspiration was to eventually join the alliance and superstate as well. Even in the first term of Putin’s incumbency, Moscow naively continued to hope that it could one day be accepted into the Atlanticist and European projects.

By 2004, NATO had acceded eleven additional countries since the end of the Cold War, but it was not until three years later, at the Munich Security Conference, when Putin finally challenged NATO’s continuous extension eastward and from that point on became a pariah in the West.

Even though Ukraine’s induction into the transatlantic alliance was opposed by France and Germany in 2008, the possibility of Kyiv’s eventual membership in the NATO bloc took center stage in souring relations with its neighbor. Former National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski summed up the rationale behind using Ukraine as a beachhead to attack Russia in his influential 1997 book The Grand Chessboard:

“Ukraine is a new and important space on the Eurasian chessboard, is a geopolitical pivot because its very existence as an independent country (means) Russia ceases to be a Eurasian empire.”

It all came to a head in 2014 when Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych was thrust in the middle of the two competing spheres of influence. Faced with a choice between an EU Association Agreement which offered bilateral support in return for draconian austerity measures or a more favorable bailout loan from Russia, Yanukovych eventually accepted Putin’s offer.

Immediately, Western-backed mass protests in the so-called “Revolution of Dignity” began and within months he was removed in a parliamentary coup with Washington strategists handpicking his replacement. When it turned out that Brussels [EU} preferred the former professional boxer and current Mayor of Kyiv Vitali Klitschko to be his successor—instead of the U.S.’s choice—it was revealed in a controversial leaked phone call that Victoria Nuland, Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs, told U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt, “Fuck the EU.”

Victoria Nuland and Geoffrey Pyatt: “Fuck the EU.” [Source: eleventimezones.com]

This was not the only occasion when the former foreign policy adviser to Dick Cheney would divulge Washington’s dirty secrets. Speaking to the National Press Club inside the Beltway, Nuland bragged that the supposedly spontaneous pro-EU demonstrations in which she notoriously handed out cookies had actually been funded in part by the U.S. State Department. Or as then-President Obama put it, “we brokered a deal to a transition in power in Ukraine.”

Victoria Nuland with Pyatt behind her handing out cookies to Maidan Square demonstrators. [Source: csmonitor.com]

Yanukovych’s NATO-installed substitutes—former investment banker Arseniy Yatsenyuk and oligarchic chocolatier Petro Poroshenko—both advocated a nationalist agenda which included enacting legislation making Ukrainian the country’s sole official language and pressuring the Ukrainian Orthodox Church into severing ties with the Patriarch of Moscow. Current Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has only deepened the stratification with the signing of indigenous people’s laws recognizing Crimean Tatars and other minorities at the exclusion of ethnic Russians.

These steps, along with the emboldening of neo-Nazism, divided the country on ethnic lines and set off the bloody conflict in Donbass which is native to a significant Russian ethnolinguistic community. Threatened by the Banderite regime’s discriminatory policies and genocidal neo-fascist militias, the people of Novorussia sought protection from the Motherland. Since then, Kyiv and the separatists both agreed to a ceasefire in the 2015 Minsk Agreements to which the post-Maidan regime has consistently failed to adhere.

With the peace process undermined by the far right—including the Azov battalion—and Western military aid, the likelihood of a resolution to the conflict dwindled. If there was ever to be an end to the ongoing ethnic cleansing and war crimes in the Donbass region, a Russian intervention became almost inevitable.

For eight years, the people of Donetsk and Luhansk lived through a perpetual state of war as the NATO powers refused to provide Moscow with any security guarantee that Ukraine would not re-nuclearize or become a member state.

In the meantime, the Western yellow press has portrayed a war driven by complex historical developments as a Manichean dichotomy of a Russian bear picking on its little brother. Without much distinction, many on the so-called Left has drawn a false equivalence between the two sides.

While Putin is certainly a conservative, there is a magnitude of difference between Moscow and Kyiv where in the former the Communist Party is the second-largest political organization which urged the Kremlin to recognize the pro-Russian breakaway oblasts, and the latter in which the Communist Party is banned and fascists openly serve in parliament.

It should be acknowledged that there are many parts of Putin’s historical analysis which are incorrect, starting with his sweeping statements concerning the formation of Ukraine and incognizance of the connection between revived ultranationalism and the reinstitution of free enterprise. However, rebuke of those errors means nothing coming from the Western Left which only lends tacit support to NATO when it turns reality on its head to portray the alliance’s confrontation with Moscow as an “inter-imperial rivalry.”

In order to understand why this is false, we should turn to Lenin who in 1920 reformulated the pre-industrial, traditional definition of imperialism into categories of “oppressor” and “oppressed” nations:

“That is why the focal point in the Social-Democratic programme must be that division of nations into oppressor and oppressed which forms the essence of imperialism, and is deceitfully evaded by the social-chauvinists and Kautsky. This division is not significant from the angle of bourgeois pacifism or the philistine Utopia of peaceful competition among independent nations under capitalism, but it is most significant from the angle of the revolutionary struggle against imperialism.”

In the context of U.S. global hegemony, the Russian Federation would definitely fall into the oppressed nation distinction and still occupies the geopolitical space once filled by the former Eastern Bloc when it supported the movements of Third World national liberation. Although post-Soviet Russia has undeniably returned to the international stage, it remains a relatively weak capitalist country since the neoliberal “shock therapy” of the 1990s.

Those suffering from Putin derangement syndrome selectively omit that the Russian statesman acknowledges that the fall of the Soviet Union was a tragedy and that Ukraine has only become the poorest country in Europe since the restoration of capitalism, during which, on the advice and encouragement of U.S. advisors, Russia’s most valuable assets and natural resources (which belonged to the Russian people) were privatized, plundered, and “sold” for virtually nothing to Yeltsin’s cronies, who became today’s oligarchs.

Oddly enough, modern Ukraine itself would never have been established if not for Lenin’s rethinking of imperialism and the Russian Empire as a “prison house of nationalities” which colonized and subjugated oppressed nations.

Motivated by colonial guilt over actions taken by the Tsars, the Bolsheviks partitioned new boundaries within the communist state so that marginalized groups could exercise self-rule. Putin takes issue with the Soviets because, when these lines were created, they permitted a large geographical distribution of Russian speakers who found themselves suddenly stateless as soon as the USSR crumbled. Yet the faux-Left which misrepresents his words fails to mention this part of the address and instead zeroes in on the Russian President’s criticism of Lenin and his claim that modern Ukraine was founded by the Bolsheviks arbitrarily without the permission of its inhabitants.

Admittedly, Putin does leave out many historical details in which multiple quasi-governments were declared during the Ukrainian War of Independence. These included the nationalist Ukrainian People’s Republic set up in Kyiv after the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, its follow-up the Second Hetmanate or “Ukrainian State,” and the Kharkiv-based Ukrainian Soviet Republic government in the east which appealed to Moscow for military support against its rivals.

However, the Ukrainian Soviet Republic was not the only communist state-like formation at the time—there was also an Odessa Soviet Republic pseudo-state as well as a Donetsk Soviet Republic. This oversight makes Putin’s conclusion that the mostly Russian-populated Donetsk Basin was dictatorially added to Soviet Ukraine incomplete. In fact, historical records show that Lenin was at one point in favor of the Donetsk-Krivoy Rog Soviet Republic remaining independent from the Ukrainian SSR and respected its territorial integrity.

The option to incorporate the Donbass was only taken because the province did not wish to remain secluded and vulnerable after its previous occupation by Ukrainian nationalists in collaboration with the Central Powers.

The region was also an industrial hub and, without it, Soviet Ukraine would have been an agrarian-based society, so it was an economic as well as a political decision, not simply an autocratic decree by Lenin. As it happens, the present-day self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic considers itself the descendant to the short-lived proto-state of 1918.

1921 Soviet poster: “Donbass Is the Heart of Russia.” [Source: istorya.ru]

While there was no referendum to include Donbass in Ukraine, the Bolsheviks introduced the most democratic structures the one-time Tsarist territory had ever experienced in its history. Where Putin’s point would be more applicable as an instance when the Soviets did actually transfer Russophone territory without the consent of its people was when Khrushchev gifted the Crimean peninsula to his native Ukraine. Even so, it was not the abolition of the Crimean Autonomous Republic in 1954 that led to the current schism but the fall of the USSR which Putin fails to identify as the real cause of ethnic tensions between Galicia, or western Ukraine, and Donbass.

Above all, it was the removal of the Soviet policy of the “Friendship of Peoples” and the Soviet of Nationalities chamber which eliminated the guarantee of equal representation of minorities.

The reinstatement of the free market did not just make Ukraine impoverished as Putin concedes but was also what opened up political space for the Ukrainian ultranationalism of the Orange Revolution and Euromaidan which had been kept in check under communism. After all, few remember that, in March 1991, more than 70% of the Ukrainian population voted to preserve the Soviet confederation and to remain in one country with Russia before capitalism was forced upon them, an inconvenient truth to the narratives of both the West and Putin alike.

Putin’s nationalism often overlaps in interests with his communist political opponents in terms of geopolitics but just as frequently diverges. For example, he regards the 1918 Treaty of Brest-Litovsk as a national humiliation. While the peace agreement between the Bolsheviks and Central Powers did cede a large amount of Russian imperial land, the negotiations were supported by the majority of Russians as the communists rose to power on the slogan of “peace, bread and land” and had to deliver on their promise to the Russian people which the provisional government betrayed after the February Revolution. Moreover, much of the area that was surrendered was later regained following World War II, including the Baltic states which rejoined the USSR despite having previously been colonized by Tsardom.

Borders drawn up in 1918 Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. [Source: wikipedia.org]

And what is the tragedy of the execution of the Romanov family compared to the millions of Russian peasants who Nicholas II sent to their deaths in World War I? Putin seems to forget that the needless imperial bloodbath was what propelled the success of the Russian Revolution to begin with. The reigning Russian leader is also just as seemingly unaware that Lenin did not reject Russian nationalism outright as the mainstream Left critics of his speech. To distinguish Soviet patriotism from the reactionary monarchist Black Hundreds, Lenin wrote in On the National Pride of the Great Russians:

“Let us, Great-Russian Social-Democrats, also try to define our attitude to this ideological trend. It would be unseemly for us, representatives of a dominant nation in the far east of Europe and a goodly part of Asia, to forget the immense significance of the national question—especially in a country which has been rightly called the “prison of the peoples,” and particularly at a time when, in the far east of Europe and in Asia, capitalism is awakening to life and self-consciousness a number of “new” nations, large and small; at a moment when the tsarist monarchy has called up millions of Great Russians and non-Russians, so as to “solve” a number of national problems in accordance with the interests of the Council of the United Nobility and of the Guchkovs, Krestovnikovs, Dolgorukovs, Kutlers and Rodichevs.

Is a sense of national pride alien to us, Great-Russian class-conscious proletarians? Certainly not! We love our language and our country, and we are doing our very utmost to raise her toiling masses (i.e., nine-tenths of her population) to the level of a democratic and socialist consciousness. To us it is most painful to see and feel the outrages, the oppression and the humiliation our fair country suffers at the hands of the tsar’s butchers, the nobles and the capitalists. We take pride in the resistance to these outrages put up from our midst, from the Great Russians; in that midst having produced Radishchev, the Decembrists and the revolutionary commoners of the seventies; in the Great-Russian working class having created, in 1905, a mighty revolutionary party of the masses; and in the Great-Russian peasantry having begun to turn towards democracy and set about overthrowing the clergy and the landed proprietors.”

Lenin distinguished what he considered socialist patriotism from bourgeois nationalism and its promotion by the Soviet state was not confined to the time after his death as it is widely portrayed. Constantly likening Putin to Stalin, the contemporary pseudo-left considers the post-Lenin period a revision of original Soviet federalism, when they fail to remember that Lenin supervised his Georgian-born Commissar of Nationalities in the writing of Marxism and the National Question where Stalin provided the Marxist-Leninist definition of ‘nation’ itself in unambiguous terms:

“A nation is a historically originated stable community of people, originated on the basis of a common language, common territory, joint economic life and common mental characteristics revealing themselves in a common culture.”

Regardless of whether, if Ukraine constitutes a real nation per se distinct from Russia, Putin deserves credit for delivering a thoughtful speech providing historical context, however imperfect, on its formation in order to communicate to the Russian people the reasons for the special operation, something Western leaders seldom if ever do to their constituents when they go to war.

It is little wonder why no corporate outlet would dare broadcast the speech in full, for it might remind Americans how incompetent their own politicians are. His remarks expanded upon a lengthy op-ed “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians” authored last year which is worth examining as a companion piece.

[Source: ne-np.facebook.com]

While he may not fall on the left of the political spectrum, Putin’s Bonapartism arguably saved the Russian state from complete collapse by re-nationalizing the energy sector after the economic genocide of the Yeltsin era. This is the main reason the former KGB officer consistently polls at more than 70% approval in Russia, a figure that has only risen since the start of the intervention in Ukraine. It is true that Putin has many faults, but the misrepresentation of his words by the pro-NATO Left is more worthy of condemnation.

Rosa Luxemburg’s and Putin’s critiques of Lenin may be a century apart but they converge in one crucial respect. They both assert that the Russian revolutionary declaration that all nations have the right to self-determination was excessive. By endorsing self-determination, the Bolsheviks ensured the outcome seen now in the numerous ethno-territorial conflicts in post-Soviet states.^[1]

It is worth noting that Lenin broke from Karl Marx in his emphasis on nationality, though the latter’s position evolved during his final years regarding the Irish question where, even though the Irish nationalist movement was not necessarily socialist, Marx came to regard it as progressive, prompting attacks from the Russian anarchist thinker Mikhail Bakunin.

That Bakunin’s teachings influenced the Ukrainian anarchist Nestor Makhno, whose forces were accused of anti-semitic pogroms during the Russian Civil War, perhaps might explain why contemporary anarchists often take the de facto side of Ukrainian nationalism in the current conflict whose brand is anything but progressive.

Some on the U.S. left today are infected with such amateurishness.

Like their maturation on Irish republicanism, so too did Marx and Friedrich Engels later convert on the Polish question. On the other hand, Rosa Luxemburg adamantly opposed Polish independence until her death and deviated from Marx and Engels on nationalism as much as Lenin, advocating socialist revolution and self-government for her country of origin but within the boundaries of the former Russian Empire.

More than a century after Luxemburg’s death, the German-naturalized revolutionary left behind a complicated legacy, one whose theoretical shortcomings in a denial of the need for revolutionary vanguardism in Western Europe may have contributed to her own murder by social fascists in the Spartacist uprising of the failed German Revolution. Nonetheless, Rosa’s unheeded premonition regarding the Ukrainian question still resonates today and revisiting her dialogue with Lenin can help the Western Left better grasp the difficult processes driving the bloodshed between peoples of a foreign land.

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Max Parry is an independent journalist and geopolitical analyst based in New York City. His writing has appeared widely in alternative media and he is a frequent political commentator featured in Sputnik News and Press TV. Max can be reached at [email protected]

Notes

1. Although conversely conflicts might have been avoided by giving each ethnic area the equivalent of Commonwealth status and limited control of local affairs, as states have in the U.S. 

Featured image is from Kim Petersen

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In August 2016, a group of public health experts, policymakers and donors met in the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Conference Center overlooking Lake Como. Their aim was ambitious: to agree on “bold global action” that would mark the “beginning of the end of the pandemic era”. In other words, they hoped to find which viruses might cause the next pandemic, and get a head start on developing vaccines and drugs.

Known as the Global Virome Project, the scheme was officially launched in February 2018. By 2019, it had appointed a board of directors and made the “transition to a legal and operational reality”, according to an email from its head. Yet when a pandemic did break out at the end of that year, instead of leaping into action the Global Virome Project fell silent. It made no announcements, issued no press releases, arranged no public events.

Today, its website is an online zombie. In the greatest pandemic in a century, caused by exactly the sort of novel emerging virus it was designed to predict and prevent, it lists just three publications on its website, one of which is a dead link and the others four and six-years-old. Its “in the news” page lists no article after April 2021. What happened?

Using embassy cables, emails released under freedom of information, and government reports, we have pieced together the history of this wide-ranging international collaborative project and how it vanished just when it was most needed.

The seeds of the project were sown between 2009 and 2019, when the US government funded a big push into virus hunting in wildlife in tropical regions through a programme called PREDICT. When this funding came to an end, the main players got together to seek private and charitable funding to continue the work. These included, from government, Dennis Carrol, director of the Emerging Pandemic Threats Division within the United States Agency for International Development; from academia, Jonna Mazet of the University of California at Davis, who had been director of the PREDICT project; from the non-profit world, Peter Daszak, head of the EcoHealth Alliance, who became treasurer of the new project; and from the private sector, Nathan Wolfe, founder of the DNA database firm Metabiota.

The first meeting of the GVP’s steering committee took place in Beijing in January 2017. George Fu Gao, the incoming head of the Chinese Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, was quick out of the blocks with China’s contribution to the GVP, overseeing the rapid creation of the China National Virome Project. It was formed so quickly that by August 2017 Eddy Rubin, chief scientific officer at Metabiota, wrote: “The project appears to be moving faster than expected with a China component already funded and poised to generate data”.

However, as the GVP was preparing to launch, some scientists had misgivings: did the project even make sense?

As two Australian virologists told a reporter for the Atlantic, the work was “unlikely to be informative in predicting the next pandemic”. Spotting the one virus among millions that might cause a pandemic would make finding needles in haystacks look easy. “What you’re trying to predict is likely something that happens maybe once out of tens of billions of encounters, with one virus out of millions of potential viruses. You will lose your fight against the numbers,” said Jemma Geoghan and Ed Holmes.

Other virologists shared their doubts. “Making promises about disease prevention… that cannot be kept will only further undermine trust,” wrote Dr Holmes, in a joint article with Edinburgh University’s Andrew Rambaut and the Scripps Institute’s Kristian Andersen. “I still fail to see at this point how it’s going to better prepare the human race for the next infectious disease that jumps from animals to humans,” wrote Michael Osterholm, the director of the University of Minnesota’s Center for Infectious Diseases Research and Policy.

Nonetheless, ignoring these awkward objections, the GVP team pressed ahead with the project. It was formally launched in February 2018, with an article in Science magazine, authored by Carrol, Daszak, Wolfe, Gao and Mazet with four others. China was poised to play the leading role. “Funding has been identified to support an initial administrative hub, and fieldwork is planned to begin in the first two countries, China and Thailand, during 2018,” the article declared.

In a cable from September 2017, Ping Chen, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases office in the US embassy in Beijing, had reported that the China part of the project was being funded by grants from the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

Shi Zhengli of the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), China’s leading coronavirus virologist, was quoted in the cable as saying: “CAS has already allocated funding for GVP-related research”.

Wang Zhengwu, of the Department of International Affairs at CAS, was further quoted as saying “CAS is working on a process and mechanism to support Chinese scientists with backing from the Ministry of Sciences and Technology and The National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) for Global Virome Project type research”.

Sure enough in January 2018, Shi Zhengli received two research grants, one each from NSFC and CAS to study the risk of cross infection of humans by bat-borne SARS-like coronaviruses. It appears the Wuhan Institute had already been entrusted with the main work of the China National Virome Project.

In April 2018, confirming the link between this work and the GVP, a US embassy cable noted that “The Wuhan Institute of Virology’s Shi Zhengli… is the forerunner to the Global Virome Project.”

Meanwhile, in March 2018, the EcoHealth Alliance, WIV and others had submitted a joint proposal to DARPA, the Pentagon’s research funding agency.

It included a section in which the researchers detailed plans to introduce a genetic sequence called a furin cleavage site into novel SARS-like viruses to increase their ability to infect cells in the laboratory and make them easier to grow. This is the very sequence that has turned up in the virus causing Covid, and in no other SARS-like coronavirus.

The proposal, titled DEFUSE, was turned down by DARPA. Shortly after, however, a “Special Project” was initiated by the CAS with Shi Zhengli in charge for one of the subprojects. The scope largely corresponds and overlaps with the GVP and Project DEFUSE.

The goal was to “change the passive response situation of emerging infectious diseases to active monitoring and early warning”, “explore and identify pathogens with potential risks of infecting humans, studying their ability to invade different host cells and their replication ability in different host cells”, and “analyse the key molecules affecting its cross-species infection and its pathogenic mechanism”. In November 2018, at a conference in Bangkok, Hongying Li, the coordinator for the China National Virome Project, showed a slide of the “GVP viral database model”. It included “virus isolation”, the technical term for growing live viruses in the lab.

Some have therefore speculated that the unfunded DEFUSE project could have continued with funding from the CAS. In a recent Vanity Fair article, the prominent Pasteur Institute virologist Simon Wain-Hobson was quoted as saying that “it is possible the WIV would have wanted to copy what it viewed as cutting-edge science”.

The output of the GVP was intended to be a global database of all viruses collected, available to the world.

“I believe that our Chinese side can make our great contributions for the development of GVP database system and data portal by the support from China CDC and CAS,” George Fu Gao noted in an email.

[Dr. George Gao Fu has a professional relationship with Anthony Fauci, et al. He is an Oxford graduate. He was a participant in the October 201 Table Top Simulation]

But there was unease in the West about this. As a State Department cable put it:

“Who will own the samples that are collected from many countries? Where will they be analysed? Will all the GVP data be freely available to the public?”

Another US embassy cable noted: “Other countries… are skeptical on whether China could remain transparent as a “gatekeeper” for this information.” Eddy Rubin was more blunt: “There is a concern about data sharing if only China takes the lead.”

They were right to be concerned. By 17 July 2019, the Wuhan Institute of Virology had built one of the world’s largest databases of bat and rodent viruses, holding more than 22,000 samples and data entries of pathogens. It has repeatedly refused to share this data with international scientists since the pandemic began. Some of those viruses were collected with funding from US taxpayer dollars, and some samples were collected from countries neighbouring China, such as Laos.

On 12 September 2019, this database was suddenly taken offline. The Institute has not published any details of the SARS-like viruses they were studying after 2016, claiming that people were trying to hack the database. This, of course, makes no sense: sharing data, as intended, makes hacking unnecessary.

Yet far from drawing back because of the data-sharing concerns, in November 2018, Dr Ping Chen of the US Embassy in Beijing sent an email to the National Institutes of Health in the United States detailing proposals for America to share the cost of China’s virus hunting projects. In the version obtained by Judicial Watch under Freedom of Information, most of the email has been redacted, as has most of an attached presentation from July 2019 by the Ecohealth Alliance entitled “Working Towards a China-led Virome project”. What is in these documents, prepared about a year before the pandemic broke out in the city with the most active contribution to the GVP, and caused by a virus of the kind being most actively studied by that project? It would be nice to know.

In a March 2019 article in the journal Biosafety and Health, Dr Geroge F. Gao drew attention to the extra risk of causing a pandemic by studying viruses in the laboratory: “genetic modification of pathogens, which may expand host range as well as increase transmission and virulence, may result in new risks for epidemics.” This was exactly what the Wuhan Institute of Virology was doing to the viruses it was collecting in the wild: working with full-length infectious clones, manipulating their spike genes, creating “chimera” hybrids and testing their infectiousness in human cells and humanised mice.

In August 2019, Dr Gao spoke at length on a podcast, saying that part of the GVP would involve altering viruses in the lab:

“[In] GVP you might isolate some virus, you look at it and there is nothing to do with humans, however through adaptation, evolution, you might have some virus adapt to human beings, so as basic scientists you will do all these either in a lab or do the surveillance.”

For some reason, professional journalists have shown little appetite for investigating the GVP since the pandemic began, arguing that it was still just an idea, not yet in operation, which is true outside China. In a recent exchange on Twitter, for instance, Jon Cohen of Science magazine suggested that the GVP had not started as a data-collecting network before the pandemic hit. The independent data analyst Gilles Demaneuf responded that China forging ahead without an agreement about data sharing was a red flag that should call the existence of the GVP into question.

As for the China National Virome Project, almost nothing has been heard of it in the past two years, as if it never existed.

The Global Virome Project has also largely evaporated. Both were designed to predict and prevent the next pandemic, a task at which plainly they failed: the research was a year and a half in the making and provided no benefit when the Covid pandemic began. That this work might instead have caused the pandemic is a possibility that must be investigated.

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Matt Ridley is the co-author of Viral: the Search for the Origin of Covid 19.

Prasenjit Ray, who tweets as The Seeker, is an independent data analyst based in India.

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In an interview on Wednesday, Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu said some NATO member states want the war in Ukraine to last longer as a way to hurt Russia.

“There are countries within NATO who want the war to continue,” Cavusoglu told CNN Turk. “They want Russia to become weaker.”

According to Iran’s Mehr News Agency, Cavusoglu did not think the war would last long after Russia and Ukraine held peace talks in Istanbul last month. But following a NATO foreign ministers meeting, he was given the impression that some alliance members don’t want the war to end.

Since Russia invaded on February 24, the US and many of its NATO allies have abandoned diplomacy with Russia. Instead of seeking a diplomatic solution, the Western powers are pouring weapons into Ukraine and waging an economic sanctions campaign against Russia.

The view among some NATO members on the war was summarized by a recent report from The Washington Post. The report said:

“For some in NATO, it’s better for the Ukrainians to keep fighting, and dying, than to achieve a peace that comes too early or at too high a cost to Kyiv and the rest of Europe.”

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

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***

 

 

 

 

 

Ukrainian tennis star Elina Svitolina has demanded that Russian and Belarusian players be subjected to ideological purity tests before they are allowed to compete in international tournaments.

The former world number three has insisted on a total ban on all Russian and Belarusian athletes if they fail to sign up to a series of statements regarding politics and the war in Ukraine.

“We noticed that some Russian and Belarusian players at some point vaguely mentioned the war, but never clearly stating that Russia and Belarus started it on the territory of Ukraine,” wrote Svitolina on Twitter.

She is presumably unhappy with Russian and Belarusian players merely calling for peace without explicitly denouncing their own country and asserting it is to blame for the war.

‼️💙💛🇺🇦✊🏼 pic.twitter.com/UK04g8OOh9

— Elina Monfils (@ElinaSvitolina) April 20, 2022

“The very silence of those who choose to remain that way right now is unbearable as it leads to the continuation of murder in our homeland,” claimed Svitolina, asserting that tennis players not correctly saying “Putin bad” is literally leading to people being killed.

She demanded players unfortunate enough to be born on a piece of land called ‘Russia’ properly answer the following questions.

1. Do you support Russia’s and Belarus invasion in Ukraine’s territory and as a result of that the war started by those countries?

2. Do you support Russia’s and Belarus military activities in Ukraine?

3. Do you support Putin’s and Lukashenko’s regime?

Any players answering yes to any of those questions should be slapped with a full scale tournament ban, according to Svitolina.

“In times of crisis, silence means agreeing with what is happening. There comes a time when silence is betrayal, and that time is now,” she wrote.

The Ukrainian’s demand that players pass ideological purity tests before being allowed to hit a ball with a racket isn’t even as draconian as the standard imposed by the organizers of the Wimbledon tennis tournament.

They’ve banned all Russians and Belarusians from competing, even those who have denounced Vladimir Putin and Russia.

Former world number one men’s champion Novak Djokovic called the decision “crazy,” saying politics shouldn’t interfere in sport.

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The rise of food protectionism by countries could exacerbate a massive hunger crisis that could take the world by storm later this year (well, that’s at least what the Rockefeller Foundation believes). 

The world’s biggest palm oil producer, Indonesia, is the latest country to embrace protectionist measures to mitigate domestic food shortages, according to Bloomberg.

President Joko Widodo on Friday announced the export ban of all cooking oil and palm oil products would begin on April 28.

Widodo said during a television broadcast that the measures aimed to ensure domestic markets had ample cooking oil supplies following a dramatic increase in prices.

“I will monitor and evaluate the implementation of this policy so availability of cooking oil in the domestic market becomes abundant and affordable,” he said.

Following the news, traders are placing bullish bets that world supplies of cooking oil and palm oil products will tighten even more. U.S. soyoil futures jumped more than 3% to a record high of 84 cents per pound.

“The news will certainly create a mayhem,” said Paramalingam Supramaniam, director at Selangor-based broker Pelindung Bestari.

“We have the largest producer banning the exports of palm products which will add more uncertainty to the already tight availability of vegetable oil worldwide,” Supramaniam said.

The Ukraine conflict has roiled the global edible oil market. The Black Sea region accounts for 76% of world sunoil exports. Commercial shipments in the region have been disrupted due mainly by insurers for vessels charging very high war premiums that make cargo nearly impossible in insure.

Indonesia’s move adds to the growing food protectionism as several other countries, including Argentina, have raised export taxes on edible oils. Meanwhile, Moldova, Hungary, and Serbia have banned some grain exports.

Increasing food protectionism is another worry for importers dependent on other countries (such as ones in the Middle East and Africa) that may lead to shortages and trigger unrest.

As we noted initially, the Rockefeller Foundation has given a timeframe on when the food crisis begins.

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Israeli anti-tank weapons are being used by Nazi soldiers in Ukraine.

A video published by Ukraine’s Azov Battalion on Twitter this week showed one of its fighters firing an anti-tank missile. In the tweet Azov claimed it had hit a Russian vehicle.

Israeli media on Wednesday identified the missile system in the Azov video as a Matador, a weapon developed by a consortium involving Rafael, a state-owned Israeli arms manufacturer.

‼️Полк «Азов» продовжує знищувати ворожу техніку pic.twitter.com/1B2RvgKNXE

— АЗОВ (@Polk_Azov) April 19, 2022

The weapon seen in the video does match with established photos of the Matador.

Yahoo News reported last month that Ukraine had bought 5,100 of the missile systems from a German manufacturer – the same firm that jointly developed the Matador with Rafael.

Matador is a portmanteau of “man-portable anti-tank, anti-door” since it is also used to blow holes in walls when fighting in urban areas.

An Israeli solider trains with a Matador anti-tank missile. The same weapon recently featured in an Azov Battalion video from Mariupol. (Wikimedia Commons)

Tested in Gaza

The Matador’s “wall opening function is particularly valued” by Israeli soldiers, The Jerusalem Post reports. Israel has used the weapon in “heavily built-up environments such as the Gaza Strip,” the newspaper adds – a euphemism for how Palestinian homes have almost certainly been attacked with the weapon.

The video posted by Azov this week was also filmed in an urban environment. Azov’s headquarters has long been in the southeastern port city of Mariupol, part of the largely Russian-speaking eastern Donbass region of Ukraine.

Mariupol has been the scene of intense fighting since the Russian invasion that began on 24 February. Both Russian and Ukrainian sources this week said the city was on the verge of falling to Russian forces.

On Thursday morning Russian defense minister Sergey Shoigu said that most of the city had been captured. The last 2,000 Ukrainian fighters in the city remain holed up in the Azovstal steel plant, he said.

Israeli anti-tank weapon Matador on display during Israel’s 2014 “independence day” celebrations of the 1948 destruction of Palestine. (Wikimedia Commons)

Azov has been a magnet for far-right volunteers who have flocked to Ukraine from around the world in recent months. On Monday, two British citizens captured in Mariupol by Russian forces appeared in handcuffs on Russian TV.

Captured volunteer Aiden Aslin was wearing an Azov Battalion t-shirt with its distinctive Nazi symbol the Wolfsangel.

“Big Israel”

The Azov Battalion itself is named after the Sea of Azov, which Mariupol overlooks.

Azov emerged out of the far-right street gangs and football hooligans that formed the vanguard of the 2014 coup against the elected Ukrainian government. The coup regime then integrated Azov into its regular armed forces.

Despite recent attempts by corporate media to whitewash Azov’s image, the group is widely accepted to be a far-right Nazi group – one with the state’s backing.

In 2018 The Electronic Intifada revealed that Israel was licensing Tavor-style special forces rifles in Ukraine which were being used to arm the government’s Nazi brigade.

Посол України в Державі Ізраїль 🇺🇦 Геннадій Надоленко спростовує fake news в ізраїльській 🇮🇱 газеті “Haaretz”.
The Ambassador of Ukraine 🇺🇦 to the State of Israel 🇮🇱 Hennadii Nadolenko refuted fake news in the Israeli newspaper "Haaretz". pic.twitter.com/hWDTYX455H

— Ukr Emb in Israel (@UKRinIsrael) July 10, 2018

The Ukrainian ambassador to Israel wrote a letter in response expressing “deep concern” over our report claiming it relied on “unproven evidence” and “biased information.”

But a letter from the Israeli defense ministry’s arms export agency, as well as photos and videos from Azov’s own online presence proved otherwise.

Ukraine’s Nazi Azov Batallion on parade in 2017. (Azov.org.ua)

As the letter we published as part of our original report explained, the Israeli defense ministry said it was “careful to grant licenses” to arms exporters “in full coordination with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and other government entities.” The letter – sent in response to a query by human rights lawyer Eitay Mack – did not deny arming Ukrainian Nazis.

The Ukrainian ambassador to Israel denied there had been any weapon supply from Israel “since 2014.” But in a related tweet, he seemed to contradict himself by admitting that the Tavor-style rifles were produced “under the licenses of IWI” – Israel Weapon Industries, an Israeli arms manufacturer whose licenses all must be approved by the Israeli government.

IWI’s Tavor rifles have been used by Israeli snipers to fire on Palestinians protesting near Gaza’s boundary with Israel in recent years.

Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky is a big supporter of apartheid Israel.

He has hailed a “big Israel” as the model for his country and said in his speech to the Israeli parliament last month that both countries face the same threats.

But in the speech he also criticized Israel for not sending enough weapons to Ukraine. Israel has close relations to both Ukraine and Russia – where many Israeli citizens actually come from.

Palestinian lawmakers in the Israeli parliament boycotted Zelensky’s speech in protest of his pro-Israel stance. “Zelensky’s speech was a Zionist one par excellence, hitting its bottom when he gave Israel the historical status of victim,” lawmaker Ahmad Tibi posted on Twitter.

Although the corporate media puts a lot of emphasis on Zelensky’s Jewish heritage, the president appears to be a hostage to domestic far-right and anti-Semitic forces.

Elected in 2019 on a platform of peace with Russia, the former comedian did a swift U-turn when threatened by Azov and other far-right militias. They prevented him from carrying out his election promise of implementing the Minsk peace agreements for de-escalation of the civil war that has been ongoing in the east of Ukraine since the 2014 coup.

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Boris Johnson visited a Tory donor on the first day of his tax-funded trip to India today.

The Prime Minister went on a tour of a new JCB facility in Vadodara, Gujarat, owned by Conservative peer Lord Bamford, flying to and from the site in a helicopter.

Lord Bamford backed Mr Johnson’s party leadership bid in 2019.

Mr Johnson faced renewed calls during his visit to speak up for minorities and democratic rights as he posed with JCB bulldozers.

Bulldozers have been used in New Delhi this week to tear down Muslim-owned properties.

The PM indicated that he would bring up those issues during talks with his Indian counterpart Narendra Modi.

He claimed: “We always raise the difficult issues, of course we do.”

Amnesty India said: “In the backdrop of Municipal Corporation of Delhi using JCB bulldozers to raze down shops of Muslims yesterday, [the] UK Prime Minister’s inauguration of a JCB factory in Gujarat is not only ignorant but his silence on the incident is deafening.”

Downing Street denied it was a conflict of interest for the PM to meet a Tory donor on the visit and said that he was meeting “a number of businesses, universities and science and tech firms.”

Asked if he visited JCB because Lord Bamford is a Tory donor, the PM’s official spokesman replied: “No, he chose to go to the JCB factory because it is a very good illustration of British business, working with India and the Indian government to benefit both nations.”

During his visit to the factory, Mr Johnson said that he hopes to broker a post-Brexit free trade deal with India “by the autumn” in an apparent hastening of his ambition, which was earlier targeted at the end of the year.

Global Justice Now trade campaigner Jean Blaylock said: “Boris Johnson’s India trip looks as dodgy as his partygate statements.

“India has long been known as the ‘pharmacy of the developing world’ for resisting some of the monopoly demands of Big Pharma. But Boris Johnson has been a shill for Big Pharma throughout the pandemic. Pharmaceutical lobbyists want to use trade talks to secure changes to India’s patent laws, and the risk is that Johnson will do their bidding.

“More broadly, farmers’ rights, food standards, climate goals and digital regulation could all be threatened by a UK-India trade treaty.”

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Dr. Spiro Pantazatos is a researcher at Columbia University who recently co-authored a study on “vaccine-induced fatality rate”

His initial reaction to the COVID pandemic was 100% mainstream, and it was the data (and his scientific integrity) that compelled him to change his mind

Dr. Spiro Pantazatos believes that the risk associated with COVID injections is comparable to the risk associated with getting COVID in 2020, with the injection risks increasing with each dose

His message for the fellow scientists is to find their voice and stop being silent

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Click here to watch the video.

This story is about a very brave researcher at Columbia University who co-authored a paper on risks associated with COVID vaccination (“vaccine-induced fatality rate”), in October 2021.

The researcher’s name is Spiro Pantazatos, Ph.D. He is an Assistant Professor of Clinical Neurobiology (Psychiatry) at Columbia University. He is also Research Scientist at the New York State Psychiatric Institute. The title of his paper (a preprint) is “COVID vaccination and age-stratified all-cause mortality risk”:

“Accurate estimates of COVID vaccine-induced severe adverse event and death rates are critical for risk-benefit ratio analyses of vaccination and boosters against SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus in different age groups. However, existing surveillance studies are not designed to reliably estimate life-threatening event or vaccine-induced fatality rates (VFR).

Here, regional variation in vaccination rates was used to predict all-cause mortality and non-COVID deaths in subsequent time periods using two independent, publicly available datasets from the US and Europe (month-and week-level resolutions, respectively).”

Currently Dr. Pantazatos is trying to fund a home for this paper but all journals where he submitted it have declined so far.

Dr. Pantazatos was interviewed for the “Perspectives on the Pandemic” series, and in my opinion, the interview came out stunning (with a disclaimer that the topic is gruesome, so it’s a stunning interview about a horrible thing). Dr. Pantazatos’ presentation is so graceful and even-headed that it could be “the” video to send to your friends who have been calling you crazy all this time!

Dr. Pantazatos’ Initial COVID Position Was 100% “Mainstream”

Early in the pandemic, Dr. Pantazatos was very moved by the vivid images that the media was feeding us — and, as a result, he became terrified of the virus. His initial plan was to lockdown inside his house until the vaccines came out.

What Compelled Him to Get More Skeptical

But then he started looking at data presented by scientists like John Ioannidis, for example, and he quickly realized that the situation was different from the one painted by the media.

Then Dr. Pantazatos’ co-author on this paper, Herve Seligmann, came up with an analysis of European data showing a consistent trend where a vaccination campaign seemed to be accompanied by an increase in all-cause mortality during the month following the vaccination campaign.

Dr. Pantazatos didn’t like that conclusion very much as it implied the unthinkable, and so he decided to do his own analysis based on the U.S. data (vaccinations and all-cause mortality), published by the CDC. And when he did his analysis using the U.S. data, it showed the same trend. His analysis of the CDC data showed that following a vaccination campaign in a given locality, there was an increase in all-cause mortality during the following month, followed by a decrease.

In Dr. Pantazatos’ opinion, the risk associated with COVID injections is comparable to the risk associated with getting COVID — if the risk associated with COVID is assessed at the high, early-in-the-pandemic level. And given that the two risks are comparable, and the injection risks seem to increase with each subsequent does — and the pharma companies are pushing for boosters from here into the horizon — he believes that we really need to discuss the VFR.

Why Rejection From the Journals Then?

Interestingly, Dr. Pantazatos mentioned in the interview that even before 2020, he was well aware of the fact that the process of getting scientific works published in prestigious journals was tainted. He referred to the 2005 article in “PLOS Medicine” called, “Medical Journals Are an Extension of the Marketing Arm of Pharmaceutical Companies” that talked about how exactly the journals are incentivized by pharma companies.

Furthermore, scientists themselves have developed a habit of trading total integrity of research for the prestige and benefits of having their works published — and so even before 2020, it was not uncommon for researchers to “massage” the angle etc. in order to fit in. From myself, I would like to add the following quote from the Lancet:

“Much of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue. Afflicted by studies with small sample sizes, tiny effects, invalid exploratory analyses, and flagrant conflicts of interest, together with an obsession for pursuing fashionable trends of dubious importance, science has taken a turn towards darkness,” wrote Richard Horton, the Editor-in-Chief of The Lancet in 2015.

Incidentally, I wrote an article about corruption in the medical establishment last year, in case you are curious.

The Importance of Speaking Out

Dr. Pantazatos is not shy at all about sharing his analysis, and he is also tremendously graceful and humble when presenting it. Personally, I am very impressed by Dr. Pantazatos’ scientific integrity and his ability to actually “follow the science” — as well as by the grace with which he presents this rather ugly topic.

He believes the issue is important, and speaking out is crucial. His message for other scientists is to find their voice and stop being silent.

Full transcript of the interview.

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Visits to Honiara, part plea, part threat.  Delegations equipped with a note of harassment.  That was the initial Australian effort to convince the Solomon Islands that the decision to make a security pact with Beijing was simply not appropriate in the lotus land of Washington’s Pacific empire.

Despite an election campaign warming up, Senator Zed Seselja found time to tell Prime Minister Manasseh Sogavare that Australia remained dedicated to supporting the security needs of the Solomon Islands, and would do so “swiftly, transparently and with full respect for its sovereignty”.  The Pacific country remained a friend, part of the “Pacific family”.  He went on to “respectfully” urge the Solomon Islands to reject the security pact with China and “consult the Pacific family in the spirit of regional openness and transparency, consistent with our region’s security frameworks.”

Having not convinced Honiara to change course, a range of reactions are being registered.  David Llewellyn-Smith, former owner of the Asia Pacific foreign affairs journal The Diplomat, took leave of his senses by suggesting that a Chinese naval base in the Solomons would see “the effective end of our sovereignty and democracy”.  In a spray of hysteria, he suggested that this was “Australia’s Cuban missile crisis”.

The Labor opposition, desperate to win office on May 21, are calling this one of the greatest intelligence failures since the Second World War, which perhaps shows their somewhat tenuous command of history.  Their leader, Anthony Albanese, seeking some safe mooring in a campaign that has lacked lustre, was particularly strident.  It was a chance to show that Labor was not shaky or wobbly on national security.  “The security agreement between China and the Solomons is a massive failure of our foreign policy,” stated the opposition leader as he campaigned in Bomaderry in southern New South Wales.  “We are closer here today to the Solomon Islands than we are to Perth.  That shows how strategic they are to Australia.”

This belligerent, simple note might have been stronger were it not for the fact that his deputy, Richard Marles, had previously made the unpopular suggestion that the Pacific islands were somehow sovereign entities who needed to be treated as such while China, in providing development assistance to them, should be “welcome” in offering it.  The goons of the Rupert Murdoch roundtable capitalised, hoping to find a Chinese Red under Marles’s bed.

Scratching for electoral gains, Labor thought that it was inappropriate to have sent the junior minister, as if that would have made much of a difference. Foreign Minister Marise Payne, it was said, should have been flown in to bully those misguided savages into submission.

In Australia, the message being fanned is that the deputy – in this case, Canberra – failed in the task, leaving it to the United States to come in and hold up what seemed like a sinking ship of strategy.  “The United States very much relies upon Australia and sees Australia as playing that key role in the Indo-Pacific,” lamented Albanese.  “Australia and Scott Morrison have gone missing.”

The Morrison government poured water on such criticism by suggesting a fair share of oriental deviousness at play.  Not only had the likes of Defence Minister Peter Dutton been advised by the intelligence fraternity to keep matters tame in terms of attacking the security pact; the agreement was the product of bribery.  On radio, Dutton responded to a question from 3AW host Neil Mitchell about the suggestion.  “You asked the question about bribery and corruption – we don’t pay off, we don’t bribe people, and the Chinese certainly do.”

This clean linen view of Australian conduct is fabulously ignorant, ignoring such inglorious chapters as the oil-for-food scandal which saw the Australian Wheat Board pay $300 million in kickbacks between 1999 and 2004 to the Iraq regime via Alia, a Jordanian trucking company.  These bribing arrangements, which breached UN Security Council sanctions imposed after Baghdad’s invasion of Kuwait in 1991, were unmasked in 2005.

With Australia failing to change minds, the paladins of the US imperium prepared to badger and bore Honiara.  On the list: President Joe Biden’s National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan; Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs Daniel Kritenbrink; and National Security Affairs Indo-Pacific chief Kurt Campbell.  It seemed like an absurd gathering of heft for a small Pacific Island state.

The theme was unmistakable.  A bullying tone was struck in a message from National Security Council spokesperson Adrienne Watson, who seemed to forget the Solomons was not some ramshackle protectorate of the Five Eyes.  Officials from the US, Japan, New Zealand and Australia had “shared concerns about [the] proposed security framework between the Solomon Islands and the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and its serious risks to a free and open Indo-Pacific.”

At the Washington Post, Henry Olsen was trying to speak home truths about an empire facing rust and decline.  The unipolar world that came into being after the demise of the Soviet Union had ended.  “Our adversaries can fight back, and they are increasingly using every means at their disposal to push back against American influence.”

He went on to put focus upon the thin stretch of territory in the Pacific that has exercised so many in Washington and Canberra.  “Lose too many places such as the Solomon Islands, and the threat will start to get uncomfortably close to home.”  It was more prudent “to spend big and push outward now rather than to be boxed into a corner later.”  In other words, more bribery, the very thing tut-tutted by Dutton, was needed.

As for the Solomon Islands itself, divided, fragmented and vulnerable to internal dissent and disagreement, Sogavare is unrepentant.  “When a helpless mouse is cornered by vicious cats it will do anything to survive.”  He has already told his country’s parliament that there is no intention “to ask China to build a military base in Solomon Islands.”  He felt “insulted” by such suggestions and felt that there was only one side to pick: “our national security interest.”

His confidant and former prime minister Danny Philip also reminded critics barking about the lack of transparency over the Sino-Solomon Islands deal that they should know better.  “People in Australia know very little about Pine Gap in the middle of the desert, the military base of the United States.”  There were “agreements that open up all major ports in Australia that are not being seen by all the citizens of that country.”

Unfortunately for the government in Honiara, thoughts of invasion and pre-emptive action on the part of Australia, possibly with aid from the United States, cannot be ruled out.  Instead of being parked in an asylum of inoffensive obscurity, pundits such as Llewellyn-Smith are encouraging invasion and conquest.  Australia, he advocates in a refreshing burst of honest, blood-filled jingoism, “should invade and capture Guadalcanal such that we engineer regime change in Honiara.”

Sovereignty for the Pacific was always a qualified concept for those exercising true naval power, and US-Australian conduct in recent weeks has made an utter nonsense of it.  At least some cavalier types are willing to own up to it.

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

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The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has issued a warning about the future, which looks grim.

If things continue as they are now – and they more than likely will – global food shortages will continue. The result will be supply issues and civil unrest, likely beginning in the Third World and spreading from there.

Protests have already erupted in Peru due to unrelenting inflation, and this is probably only a taste of what is to come as the problem spreads.

Sky-high food prices, especially in poorer countries, will make it unaffordable for many families to make ends meet. This will lead to protests and riots – and as the dominoes continue to fall throughout the rest of the world, hell on earth will ensue.

“This crisis unfolds even as the global economy has not yet fully recovered from the pandemic,” says Pierre-Olivier Gourinchas, the IMF’s research development director.

In a post he wrote, Gourinchas blamed a mix of high inflation and supply problems for the unfolding disaster that the world is witnessing. The most vulnerable countries, he added, will experience the fallout first, followed eventually by the rest of the world.

“Even before the war, inflation in many countries had been rising due to supply-demand imbalances and policy support during the pandemic, prompting a tightening of monetary policy,” Gourinchas added.

“In this context, beyond its immediate and tragic humanitarian impact, the war will slow economic growth and increase inflation.”

Will the entire world go hungry?

Gourinchas went on to talk about how increases in both food and fuel prices are likely to spur even more social unrest, starting in poorer countries. Central banks, he says, will have to adjust their policies somehow to try to anchor both medium- and long-term inflation expectations.

If they fail at this – and they eventually will, since central banking is a Ponzi scheme that cannot persist forever without eventually collapsing under its own weight – then the situation will spiral even more out of control.

Even if central banks can get a hold on inflation somehow, food shortages are likely to persist for years to come, Gourinchas further suggests. Countries like China are now hoarding food, while “breadbasket” countries like Ukraine are no longer exporting and not planting nearly as many acres as usual due to the war.

It is a perfect storm, you might say, that seems to have taken out the global economy already. The full fallout has just not manifested yet in its entirety.

It was the IMF, just to clarify, that used the words hell on earth in an earlier report to describe what it sees coming on the horizon.

“Failure to provide this year a few extra billion dollars means you’re going to have famine, destabilization, and mass migration,” says ex-Republican Gov. David Beasley, who now heads up the World Food Bank.

“If you think we’ve got Hell on earth now, you just get ready. If we neglect northern Africa, northern Africa’s coming to Europe. If we neglect the Middle East, [the] Middle East is coming to Europe.”

This almost reads like a threat, which is probably what it is. Give us more money, Beasley is basically saying, or else.

The Western world will not be immune to this, by the way. On top of the inflation we are already seeing, the fertilizer crisis alone will reduce crop yields, theoretically collapsing our food supply by up to one half of normal.

In Ireland, officials are already encouraging their farmers to plant extra grain crops over the coming year in anticipation of this squeeze. In Scotland, however, there appears to be a lot of denial as to the severity of the situation.

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***

The Westminster Magistrates’ Court in London has granted permission for WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange to be extradited to the US, where he faces up to 175 years in prison. WikiLeaks Editor-in-Chief Kristinn Hrafnsson stressed that the court had effectively signed the death penalty for Assange.

“16 months ago, this court decided that extraditing Assange would be a risk to his life, would be a death sentence. Now this court has been ordered to issue that death sentence,” Hrafnsson said.

Assange’s defence lawyer can appeal to the High Court in London until May 18, but as the attention of the world community is focussed on Ukraine, there is every possibility that the High Court’s decision will just be equally controversial. Essentially, British authorities are taking advantage of the fact that Assange will not get enough public attention.

More alarmingly, the Anglo Alliance (USA-UK-Australia), for all its rhetoric of liberty and freedom, have spearheaded one of the most vicious campaigns against a journalist in human history. Assange as an Australian citizen is isolated and ignored by Canberra, imprisoned in the UK, and sought for extradition to the US – making a complete Anglo Alliance assault against investigative journalism.

Essentially, the Anglo Alliance is warning journalists and publishers that they will be targeted and persecuted if they interfere or expose their war crimes and corruption. This is all the more crucial in this period of time as the Western mainstream media and their establishment backers are running a vitriolic propaganda campaign for Ukraine, endlessly disseminating fake news that is continuously exposed – such as Ghost of Kyiv, Snake Island, etc.

Julian Assange gained notoriety after the release of documents exposing the illegal actions of the US military during their invasion and occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq. Journalists published data on the killing of civilians by US soldiers on the WikiLeaks website. At the same time, the portal revealed information about the conditions of detention at Guantanamo Bay prison.

From June 2012, Assange was holed up in the Ecuadorian embassy in London for seven years, but was stripped of his diplomatic asylum and detained on April 11, 2019.

Following the court decision, Australian Finance Minister Simon Birmingham could only meekly say: “We have confidence in the independence and integrity of the British justice system” and that the Australian government was not arguing against the extradition. In this way, entrapped in the historical Anglo imperial capital of London, Assange has been abandoned by the Anglo colonial offshoot of Australia and now relies on 25 human rights groups and sympathisers to challenge extradition.

The human rights group say that Assange’s persecution poses a “grave threat to press freedom both in the United States and abroad.”

However, according to Fidel Narváez, a former diplomat at the Ecuadorean Embassy in London, “the greatest responsibility” for the persecution of Assange “falls on the media that do not fulfill this task of challenging the official agenda of governments and the prevailing political powers. If the US imposes an agenda of persecution on its whistleblowers, in this case on journalism that has revealed crimes, it is shameful that the mainstream media simply echoes that persecution, that they take as truth what Assange’s persecutors have said about him, instead of defending one of their own.”

Narváez, who was a diplomat in London when Assange entered the embassy and requested political asylum in 2012, maintained that the most powerful media are companies with an “economic and commercial logic”, so behind their owners there are “big businessmen, millionaires or groups that are aligned with the establishment of the different countries, and in this case, especially of the US.”

The former diplomat also pointed out that Assange believed that wars could not be possible without the complicity of the large Western media outlets, which “remained silent in the face of abuses and crimes.”

This is seen today with the Western media being unrelenting towards Russia’s military operation in Ukraine despite remaining utterly silent as the Ukrainian military and their neo-Nazi Republican Guard allies, such as the Azov Battalion, terrorized and persecuted the people of Donbass since 2014.

And it is perhaps for this very reason that, as war fever and Russophobia in the West has peaked to unprecedented heights in the 21st century, the Anglo Alliance is sending out warnings to journalists that if they do not follow the official narrative, they could very well end up like Assange too.

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Paul Antonopoulos is an independent geopolitical analyst.

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First published on April 4, 2022

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On February 24, Russian President Vladimir Putin undertook what he referred to as a “special military operation … to de-militarise and de-Nazify Ukraine.” Western media immediately decried these stated goals, regularly repeating that the allegations of Nazism in Ukraine are nothing more than Russian “fake news.”

Former U.S. ambassador to Russia, Michael McFaul, went so far as to flatly state that “there are no Nazis in the Ukraine.” Similar claims resound throughout the mass media’s echo chambers, and the fact that the current president of Ukraine is Jewish is often short-sightedly presented as the only “proof” necessary. 

Disputing the existence of Nazis and fascists in Ukraine serves the purpose of constructing a twisted but simplistic narrative loosely based on WWII: Putin is an evil, Hitler-like figure intent on attacking the freedom-loving Ukrainian government and its innocent supporters. The goal of such a narrative is to foster blind and unquestioning support for the Zelenskyy government, NATO and the imperialist Western powers.

A “humanitarian” war, meaning a brutal NATO intervention that would likely spark WWIII, is thereby presented as a viable option. In this context, any attempt to provide a sober and concrete analysis of the actual history of Nazism in the region runs the risk of being disingenuously labeled and dismissed as “pro-Putin” because it does not support this war-mongering narrative.

But an examination that accounts for the complexities of concrete situations reveals that there is indeed a deep and expansive history of fascism in Ukraine, which has been aided and abetted by the US government. This does not however mean that fascism is necessarily the dominant force in the country or even in every domain in which it exists (the military, paramilitary forces, the parliament, society at large, etc.). Moreover, it does not imply in the least that one has to support Russia’s invasion, or even assume that ‘denazification’ is its primary goal. On the contrary, it is possible to understand that fascism is a very real force in Ukraine while opposing Putin’s decision to deploy troops.

A brief history of Nazis, NATO and Ukraine

To understand the current conflict, it is important to recall that Russians and Ukrainians once lived in relative harmony, when they were both part of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, which was founded on the principle of the self-determination of nations. This was violently interrupted in 1941, when the Nazis invaded the USSR, taking over much of Ukraine.

According to John-Paul Himka, a quarter of all victims of the Holocaust lived in Ukraine, and Ukrainian ultra-nationalists collaborated with the Nazis in carrying out their horrendous deeds. The Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and its armed force, the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (Ukrainska povstanska armiia—UPA) participated in this genocidal rampage: “OUN militias were key actors in the anti-Jewish violence of summer 1941; OUN recruited for and infiltrated police formations that provided indispensable manpower for the Germans’ mobile killing units; and in 1943, thousands of these policemen deserted from German service to join the OUN-led nationalist insurgency, during which UPA killed Jews who had managed to survive the major liquidations of 1942.” According to Ian Sayer and Douglas Botting, “the OUN played a significant part in the extermination of the Jews and other ‘undesirables,’ often performing the dirty work of the German Einsatzkommando extermination squads (eg the killing of children), and continuing after the war under American sponsorship.”

Image on the right: Stepan Bandera

Indeed, in the postwar era, the U.S. government discreetly integrated an alarming number of Nazi collaborators into a veritable international network of anti-communist fascists. By 1952, John Loftus estimates that there were “hundreds if not thousands of important Nazi collaborators from Byelorussia, the Ukraine, the Baltic states, and the Balkans” who had been brought to the United States (and many more had been operationalized around the world). The US Counter Intelligence Core (CIC) ran operation Anyface to protect the fascist leader of the OUN–the renowned Nazi collaborator Stepan Bandera–from being brought to justice by the Soviets. Bandera’s chief of the national security service (SB), Mykola Lebed, was “the highest ranking Ukrainian Nazi to ever enter the United States.” CIA covert operations chief Frank Wisner admitted in 1951 there were “at least twenty former or active members of the SB of OUN/Bandera in the United States.”

The US intelligence services worked closely with several organizations of former Nazi collaborators like these in order to run extensive sabotage, terror and assassination campaigns against the USSR. In 1951, Wisner estimated that “over 35,000 members of the Russian secret police (MVD-MKGB) have been killed by OUN-UPA since the end of the last war.”

NATO was deeply involved in this anti-communist war, as demonstrated perhaps most clearly by Operation Gladio. Overseen by the CIA and MI6, NATO established a large secret army of trained militants, many of whom were well established Nazis and fascists. According to the official Italian Senate investigation into Gladio:

“It emerges without the shadow of a doubt that elements of the CIA started in the second half of the 1960s a massive operation in order to counter by the use of all means the spreading of groups and movements of the left on a European level.”

This included targeted killings and false flag terrorist attacks that were blamed on communists in order to terrify the civilian population into supporting rightwing governments and anti-communist raids.

The Supreme Allied Commander Europe of NATO from 1963 to 1969 was Lyman Lemnitzer, who had given the green light to Operation Northwoods in 1962. This operation, which was never implemented because President John F. Kennedy refused to sign off on it, consisted of planning false flag terrorist attacks against U.S. citizens that would be blamed on Cuba in order to justify a military invasion of the island.

Lemnitzer’s tenure overlapped with Adolf Heusinger’s, one of the many high-ranking Nazi and fascist officials who had been integrated into U.S. military and intelligence networks. Heusinger served as Hitler’s Chief of the General Staff of the Army and later became Chairman of the NATO Military Committee (1961-1964). NATO did not content itself, then, with having Nazis do some of its dirty work by recruiting them into its secret armies to run heinous anti-communist terrorist campaigns. It also integrated them directly into its leadership, thereby sending a clear message to the world regarding its political orientation.

The Maidan coup

In the ensuing years, the United States continued to work with Ukrainian fascists in their endless destabilization campaigns against the USSR. According to CIA specialist Douglas Valentine, “the CIA has been developing fascist assets in the Ukraine for 70 years.”

The Maidan coup in late 2013-2014, which was openly supported by the imperial powers in the United States and Europe, relied on far-right shock troops such as the fascist organization Right Sector and the ultranationalist Svoboda Party to overthrow the elected government of Viktor Yanukovych.

Three members of Svoboda were installed as members of the first post-coup government, and the co-founder of Svoboda, Andriy Paruby, was parliamentary speaker for five years.

Although Svoboda has since attempted to mollify its Nazi image, it maintains its substance as an ultranationalist, anti-communist party that openly praises Nazi collaborator Stepan Bandera, the politician and theorist of the militant wing of the fascist OUN.

The Azov Battalion was formed in May 2014 out of the ultra-nationalist Patriot of Ukraine (founded in 2005) and the Social National Assembly or SNA (founded in 2008) that is “known to have carried out attacks on minority groups.”

The Azov Battalion, Right Sector and other fascist militias played a key role in consolidating power for the post-coup government in numerous ways: engaging in street violence against the Left, running intimidation campaigns against uncooperative politicians, setting up indoctrination camps for children and youth, and exerting pressure on the government to revise the education curriculum, ban the Russian language, and rewrite official state history. This post-coup period of street violence and intimidation culminated in what some have called the worst Nazi atrocity since WWII, when some 42 leftists perished in an inferno set by fascists in the Odessa trade union building.

 

This U.S.-backed regime change operation is what prompted the outbreak of a civil war in the Donbas region of Eastern Ukraine. When pro-Russian separatists declared their independence from the fascist Ukrainian puppet government, it was unable to contain them. So the Azov battalion and other fascist militias were unleashed, leading to the death of some 14,000 people (just before the 2022 invasion, Putin recognized the independence of the two regions of the Donbas). Azov received backing from Ukraine’s interior minister, Arsen Avakov, as well as U.S. arms and training. Due to its purported effectiveness in fighting Russian separatists, the battalion was integrated into the Ukrainian National Guard in 2014, formally becoming part of the state.

In 2015, the CIA, according to five former intelligence and national security officials, set up “a secret intensive training program in the U.S. for elite Ukrainian special operations forces and other intelligence personnel.” The same year, the U.S. Congress passed a spending bill that featured “hundreds of millions of dollars worth of economic and military support for Ukraine, one that was expressly modified to allow that support to flow to the country’s resident neo-Nazi militia, the Azov Regiment.”

Image below is from Donbass Insider

Since there has been some debate regarding just how Nazi the Azov or other ultranationalist militias are, it is worth noting that the U.S. House of Representatives acknowledged in 2015 that Azov is “neo-Nazi.” Although the battalion has sometimes denied that it adheres to Nazi ideology as a whole, “Nazi symbols such as the swastika and SS regalia are rife on the uniforms and bodies of Azov members.” Their uniforms carry the neo-Nazi Wolfsangel symbol, which looks like a black swastika on a yellow background. Andriy Diachenko, the spokesperson for the regiment in 2015, claimed that “10% to 20% of the group’s members are Nazis.” It appears that he made this statement in order to downplay fears of Nazification. However, even if the numbers are that low, it necessarily follows that all of the other members of the Azov battalion are Nazi collaborators.

Regardless of whether or not Azov or similar battalions accept 100% of Nazi ideology, it is essential to recognize that their overall orientation is clearly fascist: they receive funding from reactionary elements of the capitalist ruling class to run violent para-state militias–which in some cases have been integrated into the state–that are ultranationalist, racist, pro-capitalist, and anti-communist. Andriy Biletsky is well positioned to understand their orientation because he served as the leader of the Patriot of Ukraine and the SNA, as well as the Azov Battalion, before serving as a member of the Ukrainian Parliament from 2014-2019. In an interview, he explained his position as follows: “The historic mission of our nation in this critical moment is to lead the White Races of the world in a final crusade for their survival. A crusade against the Semite-led Untermenschen [inferior races, according to the standard Nazi terminology].”

Fascism today in Ukraine

In Ukraine today, fascist elements are present in the capitalist ruling class, paramilitary organizations, the Ukrainian military, the parliament, and certain sectors of society. While it would be a mistake to assume that they are in each case the dominant force, it would be equally erroneous to ignore their presence, extensive reach and the support they enjoy from the Zelenskyy government and imperialist forces outside the country.

In the 2019 parliamentary election, Svoboda formed a united party list with other far-right parties: Right Sector, National Corps and the Governmental Initiative of Yarosh. They only obtained 2.15% of the votes, not surpassing the 5% threshold for a parliamentary seat. In the same election, Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s Servant of the People party, which ran on an anti-corruption platform and is described as centrist in the mainstream press, won 124 seats on the nationwide party list and 130 constituency seats.

Zelenskyy’s party is named after the eponymous hit Ukrainian TV series that appealed to “Ukrainians frustrated with the country’s oligarchic elite, and the failure to drain the swamp after the country’s 2014 revolution.” In the series, Zelenskyy, a career actor and comedian, played the role of none other than the President of Ukraine. His meteoric rise to the actual presidency was thus due in no small part to his celebrity status as a famous actor, not unlike other political puppets in bourgeois democracies. Moreover, he received ample funding from a handful of private donors, including most notably the billionaire oligarch Ihor Kolomoyskyi, who was his single biggest supporter.

Kolomoyskyi owns an ownership stake in 1+1 Media Group, whose TV station carried “Servant of the People,” which retrospectively looks a lot like an extended campaign advertisement. His media outlet also provided security and logistical backup for the actor’s political campaign, during which time he traveled 14 times to Geneva and Tel Aviv, where Kolomoyskyi is based. The Pandora Papers revealed a spider web of offshore networks and financial entanglements between Zelenskyy and Kolomoyskyi.

Kolomoyskyi is, moreover, one of the major funders of the ultranationalist militias in Eastern Ukraine, including the fascist Azov and Aidar battalions, which have been accused of heinous war crimes in the Donbas region over the past eight years. He also allegedly funds “the Donbas, Dnepr 1, Dnepr 2 volunteer battalions.” When he was appointed governor of his home state of Dnipropetrovsk in March 2014, he was instrumental in crushing the separatist movement there by “spending more than $10 million to create the ‘Dnipro battalion.’”

In 2015, it was estimated that there were some 30 nationalist militias fighting separatists in eastern Ukraine. Financially supported by wealthy oligarchs like Kolomoyskyi and Serhiy Taruta (the billionaire governor of the Donetsk region who also funded the Azov battalion), they function as a powerful paramilitary force that supplements the Ukrainian military. In July 2015, Russia issued a warrant for Kolomoyskyi’s arrest for “organizing the killing of civilians” due to his financial support of the militants.

Far from cracking down on these ultranationalist militias, many of which display open signs of Nazism and fascism, Kolomoyskyi’s actor-turned-president has not only allowed them to act with impunity, but he has also woven a tight relationship between his administration and open fascists.

For instance, in November 2021 Dmytro Yarosh, a former leader of Right Sector and avowed follower of Nazi collaborator Bandera, declared that he had been appointed as an advisor to the Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of Ukraine. Soon thereafter, Zelenskyy decorated Right Sector commander Dmytro Kotsyubaylo with the distinction “Hero of Ukraine.” On March 1 of this year, he appointed Maksym Marchenko, a former commander of the Aidar Battalion – which is accused of war crimes in Donbas – as the regional administrator of Odessa. There are numerous other ties between the Ukrainian government and military, on the one hand, and these ultra-nationalist and often fascist militias on the other.

While they’ve been busy empowering fascists, Ukrainian authorities also stripped communist parties of their right to participate in elections in 2015 and issued controversial ‘decommunisation’ laws: “The laws ban the display of Soviet symbols and change the status of the 09 May holiday marking the Soviet victory over Nazi Germany in World War 2. The laws will effectively remove all mentions of ‘the Great Patriotic War’ (a Soviet term for World War 2) and replace it with ‘Second World War’; ban the Soviet Victory flag; and rename streets, squares, and even whole cities.” Tens of thousands of streets have since been renamed, along with nearly one thousand cities and villages. Over two thousand statues and monuments have also been removed in this expansive anti-communist cultural project. Despite widespread criticism, the current government has refused to revoke the laws. According to Abdul Rahman, “Zelensky’s reluctance to take on right-wing groups in the same way that he is targeting allegedly pro-Russian groups is a sign of their influence in setting the political discourse in the country.”

There have also been a number of important symbolic gestures that glorify ultra-nationalists and Nazi collaborators, thereby fostering a broader culture of fascism within certain sectors of Ukrainian society. Zelenskyy claimed in an interview, for instance: “​There are indisputable heroes. Stepan Bandera is a hero for a certain part of Ukrainians, and this is a normal and cool thing. He was one of those who defended the freedom of Ukraine.” Zelenskyy also publicly defended Ukrainian footballer Roman Zolzulya as a “true patriot” when he was accused of being a Nazi due to his photos with Nazi collaborator Bandera and his open support of the Azov Battalion. Moreover, Zelenskyy’s former Prime Minister, Oleksiy Honcharuk appeared on stage at a neo-Nazi concert organized by the fascist C14 movement.

It is perhaps not surprising, then, that Ukraine was the only country, along with the United States, which voted against the UN General Assembly’s draft resolution “combating glorification of Nazism, neo-Nazism and other practices that contribute to fueling contemporary forms of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance.” Important media outlets have broadcast Nazi propaganda, which resound throughout the broader culture. In 2014, a Ukrainian journalist on Hromadske TV openly called for genocide in Donbas, claiming that “there is a certain category of people that must be exterminated.”

On March 13 of this year, Ukrainian TV presenter Fahruddin Sharafmal issued an impassioned call for genocide and the slaughter of Russian children on a morning show on Channel 24. With a photograph of the notorious Nazi Adolf Eichman behind him, he said:

“I allow myself to quote Adolf Eichmann, who said that in order to destroy a nation, you must destroy, first of all, its children. Because if you kill their parents, the children will grow up and take revenge. By killing children, they will never grow up and the nation will disappear.”

“And when I get the chance to take out the Russians,” he went on,

“I will definitely do it. Since you call me a Nazi, I adhere to the doctrine of Adolf Eichmann, and I will do everything in my power to ensure that you and your children never live on this earth. You have to understand that it’s about the victory of the Ukrainian people, not about peace. We need victory. And if we have to slaughter all your families – I’ll be one of the first to do it.”

Channel 24 is part of the TRK Lux media conglomerate that is controlled by wealthy Ukrainian businesswoman Kateryna Kit-Sadova and her husband Andriy Sadovyi (the mayor of Lviv and former leader of the Self Reliance political party).

Zelenskyy has recently used the Russian invasion as a pretext to ban 11 political parties, including the largest opposition party that holds 43 seats in the parliament, while having communist leaders arrested. Alleging to fight against Russian “misinformation,” he also took control of news outlets, imposing a centralized information policy that combines all national TV channels into “a single information platform of strategic communication.” Ukraine’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs is working directly with an international network of public relations firms to wage information warfare and control the narrative. According to a senior NATO official: “They are really excellent in stratcom [strategic communication] — media, info ops, and also psy-ops.”

Zelenskyy’s experience as a career actor has certainly been an asset in these endeavors. After all, he seeks to depict his government as free and democratic – not unlike the Western imperialist powers it is aligned with – while it supports fascist militias, receives funding from reactionary capitalists (who also fund Nazi battalions), glorifies ultranationalists and Nazi collaborators, emboldens a culture of fascism, bans political parties, and tightly controls news and information.

The fascist threat is international

Although Ukraine might seem to some in the United States or elsewhere to be a distant land with little bearing on one’s immediate political environment, it is actually an important center for the global fascist movement. According to Aljazeera: “Transnational support for Azov has been wide, and Ukraine has emerged as a new hub for the far right across the world. Men from across three continents have been documented to join the Azov training units in order to seek combat experience and engage in similar ideology.” In an investigative report from early 2021, Time found that

“Azov is much more than a militia. It has its own political party; two publishing houses; summer camps for children; and a vigilante force known as the National Militia, which patrols the streets of Ukrainian cities alongside the police […] it also has a military wing with at least two training bases and a vast arsenal of weapons, from drones and armored vehicles to artillery pieces.”

Olena Semenyaka, the head of international outreach for Azov, told the reporters: “It could be described as a small state within a state.”

Ali Soufan has estimated that “more than 17,000 foreign fighters have come to Ukraine over the past six years from 50 countries.” In 2019, U.S. lawmakers wrote a letter to the State Department in which they stated that “the link between Azov and acts of terror in America is clear.” A 2018 FBI affidavit stated that Azov “is believed to have participated in training and radicalizing United States-based white supremacy organizations.” This included members of the white-supremacist Rise Above Movement, which were indicted for having “‘violently attacked and assaulted counter-protestors’ at several white nationalist and white supremacist events throughout the U.S., including the violent ‘Unite the Right’ rally in Charlottesville.”

Nazism and fascism are very real factors in Ukraine, and they have been extensively documented. Recognizing this fact is essential to having a nuanced understanding of the current conflict, but it does not at all imply support for Putin’s military intervention, which has had horrific consequences for the lives of many innocent workers.

Finally, it should not be lost on us that the Biden administration, which came to power as a purported bulwark against the spread of fascism at home, is continuing the US policy of supporting fascist forces in one of the primary hubs for international fascism. This clearly demonstrates that the struggle against fascism can never be limited to a domestic battle. It must always be carried out within an internationalist framework and thus inseparably linked with a resolute anti-imperialism.

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The author expresses his gratitude to Helmut-Harry Loewen for his invaluable suggestions and assistance in locating the best sources on fascism in Ukraine.

Featured image: 2015 march in Kiev to celebrate the birthday of Nazi collaborator Stepan Bandera (pictured on black and red flag) (Source: Liberation News)

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The Pentagon announced Tuesday Ukraine’s military had received additional aircraft as well as parts for repairs to get damaged aircraft flying again. Pentagon spokesman John Kirby did not offer details on which countries provided aircraft, but acknowledged new transfers.

“They have received additional aircraft and aircraft parts to help them get more aircraft in the air,” Kirby told a news briefing. “We certainly have helped with the trans-shipment of some additional spare parts that have helped with their aircraft needs, but we have not transported whole aircraft,” he added.

Apparently, the Pentagon did not take Ukraine’s military authorities into confidence before making the announcement, because the official Twitter account of Ukraine’s air force tweeted Wednesday:

“Officially, Ukraine did not receive new aircraft from partners! With the assistance of the US Government, @KpsZSU received spare parts and components for the restoration and repair of the fleet of aircraft in the Armed Forces, which will allow to put into service more equipment.”

Despite the denial, nobody, not even Ukraine’s principal patron, the United States, deem preposterous claims made by Ukrainian sources credible, because Kyiv is known to have given exaggerated casualty counts and inflated figures of damage inflicted by the war in Ukraine in order to mount a disinformation campaign against Russia.

Privately, US officials recognized that Ukraine had an incentive to give only information that would bolster their case for more aid, more arms and more diplomatic assistance, CNN reported Tuesday.

“It’s a war—everything they do and say publicly is designed to help them win the war. Every public statement is an information operation, every interview, every Zelensky appearance broadcast is an information operation,” said a source familiar with Western intelligence.

Another reason Ukraine’s military authorities want to keep aircraft transfer under the wraps is that previously Russian forces claimed to have destroyed an S-300 air defense system that Slovakia transferred to Ukraine in a Kalibr cruise missiles strike hitting a hangar on the southern outskirts of the city of Dnepropetrovsk.

Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu boasted last month that 123 of Ukraine’s 152 fighter jets had been destroyed, as well as 77 of its 149 helicopters and 152 of its 180 long- and medium-range air defense systems, while its naval forces had been totally eliminated.

As demilitarization of Ukraine, alongside denazification and liberation of Donbas, was one of the principal objectives of Russia’s month-long military campaign lasting from late February to late March, therefore Russian forces would never allow vital military assets, especially air defense systems and fixed- and rotary-wing aircraft, to remain in the possession of Ukraine’s air force. Ukraine’s aircraft are safe only as long as they remain grounded and concealed from Russia’s advanced air surveillance systems.

Although the Pentagon spokesman refused to identify the country that delivered the aircraft to Ukraine due to secrecy of the shady transfer deal, the only NATO member state that was in talks with Washington and Kyiv to transfer its Soviet-era fleet of a dozen MiG-29 aircraft was Slovakia.

Reportedly, a batch of Ukraine’s highly skilled pilots traveled to Slovakia last week, took the delivery of the aircraft and then flew them all the way to concealed air force hangars at military airports in Kyiv while maintaining low altitudes in order to avoid detection by Russia’s advanced air surveillance systems. The Pentagon that has deployed extensive ISR, or intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance, assets along Ukraine’s borders fully coordinated the entire clandestine operation of transferring the aircraft.

After the scuttled aircraft-transfer deal that would’ve seen Poland handing over its fleet of 28 Soviet-era MiG-29s to Ukraine in return for the United States “backfilling” the Polish Air Force with American F-16s last month, Slovakia was in talks with NATO about an arrangement that could allow Bratislava to send fighter jets to Ukraine, Prime Minister Eduard Heger told reporters on April 11.

Eduard Heger said his government wanted to “move away from reliance on the Soviet MiGs” in any case. “This is equipment that we want to finish anyway, because we’re waiting for the F-16s,” he added, referring to US-made jets that Slovakia was scheduled to receive in 2024, though Bratislava could receive American fighter jets earlier as it has now delivered on the pledge of transferring the dozen MiG-29 aircraft Slovakia was reported to have to Ukraine.

In early March, Poland made a similar offer of transferring its fleet of 28 Soviet-era MiG-29s to Ukraine in return for receiving American F-16s, but the Pentagon rejected the proposal due to apprehensions over direct confrontation with Russian forces in Ukraine.

The prospect of flying combat aircraft from NATO territory into the war zone “raises serious concerns for the entire NATO alliance,” the Pentagon said on March 9. “It is simply not clear to us that there is a substantive rationale for it,” Pentagon spokesman John Kirby added.

But considering that Slovak aircraft have already been delivered to Ukraine, it seems plausible that the Polish proposal of transferring its aircraft might also be reconsidered by the Biden administration and Ukraine could receive additional Polish MiG-29 aircraft in the coming weeks.

In addition to transferring the aircraft to Ukraine, Slovakia also struck a deal with NATO earlier this month for transferring its Soviet-era S-300 air defense system to Ukraine in return for the transatlantic military alliance delivering four Patriot missile systems to Slovakia.

“I can confirm that Slovakia donated the S-300 air defense system to Ukraine based on its request to help in self-defense due to armed aggression from the Russian Federation,” Slovak Prime Minister Eduard Heger announced on April 8.

Although NATO has provided over 25,000 anti-aircraft MANPADS to Ukraine’s security forces and allied neo-Nazi militias, those were portable shoulder-fired surface-to-air missiles, whereas S-300 air defense system, equivalent in capabilities to American Patriots, is a vehicle-mounted advanced system that could practically enforce a “no-fly zone” over Ukraine’s airspace, a longstanding demand of Ukrainian politicians, within the range of the battery. The Slovak army website said its version of the S-300 battery had a range of 75 km and could strike targets up to 27 km above ground.

Negotiations for the transfer of S-300 air defense system to Ukraine had been going on for weeks before the announcement by the Slovak prime minister that Bratislava had “generously donated” its Soviet-era S-300 air defense system to Ukraine in return for the transatlantic military alliance delivering four Patriot missile systems to Slovakia.

The Dutch government announced on March 18 it would send a Patriot missile defense system to Sliac, Slovakia, as part of NATO moves to strengthen air defenses in Eastern Europe. “The worsened safety situation in Europe as a result of the Russian invasion of Ukraine makes this contribution necessary,” Dutch Defense Minister Kajsa Ollongren said in a statement. In addition, Germany also sent two Patriot missile systems to Slovakia.

Along with the Patriot batteries, the Dutch also announced sending a contingent of 150-200 troops, who would operate and also train Slovak forces in operating the American air defense system, as the security forces of Slovakia as well as Ukraine are only trained to operate Russian-made military equipment, which many NATO countries that are former Soviet states possess.

Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin’s trip to Europe in mid-March included not only NATO headquarters in Brussels, but also stops in Bulgaria and Slovakia — countries that own S-300s and SA-8s — before he headed back to Washington.

Previously, Slovakia’s defense minister said on March 17 that the country was willing to give Ukraine its S-300 surface-to-air missile defense systems if it received a “proper replacement.” Speaking at a press conference in Slovakia alongside US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, Slovak Defense Minister Jaroslav Nad said Slovakia was discussing the S-300s with the US and Ukraine. “We’re willing to do so immediately when we have a proper replacement. The only strategic air defense system that we have in Slovakia is S-300 system,” he added.

Lloyd Austin declined to say whether the United States might be willing to fill the gap.

“I don’t have any announcements for you this afternoon. These are things that we will continue to work with all of our allies on. And certainly, this is not just a US issue. It’s a NATO issue,” Austin said while diplomatically evading confirming the barter deal for which he had traveled all the way from Washington to Eastern Europe.

NATO member Slovakia had one battery of the S-300 air defense system, inherited from the Soviet era after the break-up of Czechoslovakia in 1993. Following the Slovakia visit, Lloyd Austin also visited Bulgaria on March 18. Bulgaria has S-300 systems, but the country made it clear it had no plans to send any to Ukraine.

Bulgarian President Rumen Radev prudently said that any arms supplies to Ukraine were equivalent to the country being dragged into war. Ultimately, he said, such an issue should be decided by the parliament. He also said that Bulgaria needed its S-300 for its own air defense, particularly for the Kozlodui nuclear power plant.

Slovak Prime Minister Eduard Heger said Slovakia would receive additional equipment from NATO allies to make up for the transfer. Defense Minister Jaroslav Nad subsequently announced that Slovakia would receive a fourth Patriot missile system from the United States a week after the announcement of the deal.

US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said the United States would place one Patriot system in Slovakia in the coming days and it would be operated by US troops. “Their deployment length has not yet been fixed, as we continue to consult with the Slovakian government about more permanent air defense solutions,” Austin said in a statement.

“As the Russian military repositions for the next phase of this war, I have directed my administration to continue to spare no effort to identify and provide to the Ukrainian military the advanced weapons capabilities it needs to defend its country,” President Joe Biden said while thanking Slovakia for sending its S-300 system to Ukraine.

Acknowledging President Biden’s gratitude, Russian forces claimed they had destroyed the S-300 air defense system that Slovakia transferred to Ukraine in a Kalibr cruise missiles strike hitting a hangar on the southern outskirts of the city of Dnepropetrovsk.

In his regular briefing on the military operation in Ukraine on April 11, Russian Defense Ministry Spokesman Major General Igor Konashenkov claimed the barrage of sea-launched Kalibr missiles destroyed four S-300 launchers and as many as 25 Ukrainian troops in the precision strike. The Russian official also reported destroying an S-300 targeting radar in a separate airstrike near Uspenovka.

The Pentagon revealed last week that the United States had committed more than $3.2 billion in security assistance to Ukraine since the beginning of the Biden Administration, including approximately $2.6 billion since the beginning of Russia’s “unprovoked assault” on February 24.

As of April 14, United States security assistance committed to Ukraine includes:

• Over 1,400 Stinger anti-aircraft systems;
• Over 5,500 Javelin anti-armor systems;
• Over 14,000 other anti-armor systems;
• Over 700 Switchblade Tactical Unmanned Aerial Systems;
• 18 155mm Howitzers and 40,000 155mm artillery rounds;
• 16 Mi-17 helicopters;
• Hundreds of Armored High Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicles;
• 200 M113 Armored Personnel Carriers;
• Over 7,000 small arms;
• Over 50,000,000 rounds of ammunition;
• 75,000 sets of body armor and helmets;
• Laser-guided rocket systems;
• Puma Unmanned Aerial Systems;
• Unmanned Coastal Defense Vessels;
• 14 counter-artillery radars;
• Four counter-mortar radars;
• Two air surveillance radars;
• M18A1 Claymore anti-personnel munitions;
• C-4 explosives and demolition equipment for obstacle clearing;
• Tactical secure communications systems;
• Night vision devices, thermal imagery systems, optics, and laser rangefinders;
• Commercial satellite imagery services;
• Explosive ordnance disposal protective gear;
• Chemical, Biological, Radiological, Nuclear protective equipment;
• Medical supplies to include first aid kits.

Despite making Ukraine an “ordnance depot” of NATO powers on Russia’s western flank, CNN reported Tuesday the US had few ways to track the substantial supply of anti-tank, anti-aircraft and other weaponry it had sent across the border into Ukraine, a blind spot that’s due in large part to the lack of US boots on the ground in the country—and the easy portability of many of the smaller systems pouring across the border.

“We have fidelity for a short time, but when it enters the fog of war, we have almost zero,” said one source briefed on US intelligence. “It drops into a big black hole, and you have almost no sense of it at all after a short period of time.”

Trucks loaded with pallets of arms provided by the Defense Department were picked up by Ukrainian armed forces, primarily in Poland, and then driven into Ukraine, Kirby said, “then it’s up to the Ukrainians to determine where they go and how they’re allocated inside their country.”

In making the decision to send billions of dollars of weapons and equipment into Ukraine, the Biden administration factored in the risk that some of the shipments may ultimately end up in unexpected places, a defense official said. But right now, the official said, the administration views a failure to adequately arm Ukraine as a greater risk.

Although NATO powers did provide caches of anti-aircraft Stingers to Afghan jihadists that helped turning the tide in the Soviet-Afghan war in the eighties, since then, despite providing anti-tank munitions and rest of weapons to militant groups in the proxy wars in Libya and Syria, Western powers have consistently avoided providing MANPADS to proxy forces, because such deadly anti-aircraft munitions could become a long-term threat not only to military aircraft but also to civilian airlines.

In the sheer desperation to inflict maximum material damage on Russia’s security forces, however, NATO appears to have breached its own long-standing convention of curbing the proliferation of anti-aircraft munitions. Testifying before the Senate Armed Services Committee on April 7, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Gen. Mark Milley revealed that US and NATO countries have collectively provided over 60,000 anti-tank weapons and 25,000 anti-aircraft weapons during NATO’s “weapons for peace” program to Ukraine since Russia’s invasion on Feb. 24.

Who would be responsible for the myopic and self-destructive policy of providing anti-aircraft munitions to Ukraine’s security forces and allied ultra-nationalist militias once the war ends and those MANPADS are found in black markets, notably in thriving weapons markets of Eastern Europe, posing grave risk to military aircraft as well as civilian airlines across the globe?

In fact, Russia alluded to the mortal risk posed by the proliferation of anti-aircraft munitions in its diplomatic demarche to the United States last week. The document, titled “On Russia’s concerns in the context of massive supplies of weapons and military equipment to the Kiev regime,” was forwarded to the State Department by the Russian Embassy in Washington, in which Russia accused NATO powers of violating “rigorous principles” governing the transfer of weapons to conflict zones, and of being oblivious to “the threat of high-precision weapons falling into the hands of radical nationalists, extremists and bandit forces in Ukraine.”

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Nauman Sadiq is an Islamabad-based geopolitical and national security analyst focused on geo-strategic affairs and hybrid warfare in the Middle East and Eurasia regions. His domains of expertise include neocolonialism, military-industrial complex and petro-imperialism. He is a regular contributor of diligently researched investigative reports to Global Research.

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First published on April 18, 2022

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Vaccine enthusiast Bill Gates recently spoke at the TED 2022 platform calling the anti-Vax movement a bunch of crazy people, here is what he said,

“So it’s somewhat ironic to have somebody turn around and say we’re using vaccines to kill people or to make money or we started the pandemic”

he continued

“Does this turn into something where there’s constantly crazy people showing up? Who knows?” 

Since the old days when the medical establishment expanded the use of vaccines to supposedly cure everything under the sun, they claim that they have saved countless lives, yet it seems that many people whether they are in the medical field or not, accept the notion that vaccines are the only answer that can cure a disease or help people stay healthy. I want to mention that there have been vaccines that were successful, but not all of them, these days its sort of playing Russian roulette with your life, so let’s take a step back and look at some of those vaccines that has caused injuries and deaths’ in its historical context.

During World War I, a major pandemic known as the Spanish Flu of 1918 shaped the way we view the use of vaccines.  It was a conspiracy that was astounding once you dive into what was behind the worldwide pandemic at the time.  It was estimated that the Spanish Flu had killed between 50 and 100 million people worldwide.  It is important to clarify that the Spanish Flu was not at all Spanish, it was American, and it began at an army base in Fort Riley, Kansas where the first case of the flu was discovered.

It basically began with billionaire tycoon John D. Rockefeller, an ambitious industrialist, founder of the Standard Oil Company who later joined the elite club of Globalists who helped turn Big Pharma into an influential industry controlled by the establishment.

During the height of the Spanish Flu pandemic, it was Rockefeller’s invisible hand that was behind the experimental ‘bacterial meningitis vaccine’ which was cultured in horses by the institution he funded and named after himself called the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research which is now

The Rockefeller University.  

It began in 1900, Rockefeller’s Big Oil monopoly played a major role in medicine because scientists discovered ‘petrochemicals’ which allowed them to extract different kinds of chemicals from oil to create plastics and other useful products.

The discovery also led scientists to produce vitamins leading up to the creation of new pharmaceutical drugs.

So, Rockefeller saw an opportunity to monopolize the medical industry through his oil enterprises, but he had to settle a major problem that was in the way of his new idea and that was to destroy the traditional medical practice of using natural and herbal medicines.

Holistic medicine and its uses can be traced to Europe and Indigenous tribal nations going back hundreds, even thousands of years.

Rockefeller then teamed up with another Globalist friend of his by the name of Andrew Carnegie of the Carnegie Foundation and sent Abraham Flexner who produced the Flexner Report that criticized hospitals and other institutions including medical schools that used homeopathic and natural medicines.

The result of the Flexner report forced these traditional medical institutions to close their operations.  At the same time, it led to the demonization of doctors and other health practitioners who advocated for natural and alternative medicines with the result of them ending up in prison.

Rockefeller gave more than $100 million to medical colleges and hospitals through the General Education Board (GEB), a philanthropy to support his new enterprise of producing pharmaceutical drugs from his oil companies by awarding grants to scientists who can identify which chemicals in certain plants can be used for curing diseases, then they had to produce a similar chemical in the lab from Rockefellers petroleum to recreate a new prototype of medicine that could be eventually patented and sold to the public.

The Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research (which is the birthplace of Big Pharma) had played a major role in the global pandemic at the time because it was their vaccine that caused flu-like symptoms. 

The experimental bacterial meningitis vaccine was administered between January 21^st to June 4^th, 1918, at Fort Riley with over 6 million American soldiers who were drafted for the war effort, many of them became human test subjects after receiving numerous doses of the experimental vaccine or the horse-infused bacteria.  At the same time, while fighting the war under harsh unsanitary conditions, American soldiers had spread the bacteria infused in their bodies even further on the battlefields of Europe.

However, after the war had ended on November 11, 1918, there were claims of returning soldiers spreading various diseases from Europe within the US, so a campaign spearheaded by the Rockefeller Institute to vaccinate the US population with the remaining vaccines took place resulting in the deaths of tens of millions of people.  What was shocking was the level of the vaccine experiments on the soldiers and then on the US population as autopsies revealed that the bacteria were caused by those same experimental bacterial meningitis vaccines that destroyed their immune systems.

A report from July 20, 1918, by Frederick L. Gates, M.D. First Lieutenant, Medical Corps of the US Army ‘Antimeningitis Vaccination and Observations on Agglutinins in the Blood of Chronic Meningococcus Carriers’ confirms the history of the experiments on American soldiers:

Following an outbreak of epidemic meningitis at Camp Funston, Kansas, in October and November, 1917, a series of antimeningitis vaccinations was undertaken on volunteer subjects from the camp. Major E. H. Schorer, Chief of the Laboratory Section at the adjacent Base Hospital at Fort Riley, offered every facility at his command and cooperated in the laboratory work connected with the vaccinations. In the camp, under the direction of the Division Surgeon, Lieutenant Colonel J. L. Shepard, a preliminary series of vaccinations on a relatively small number of volunteers served to determine the appropriate doses and the resultant local and general reactions. Following this series, the vaccine was offered by the Division Surgeon to the camp at large, and “given by the regimental surgeons to all who wished to take it

Preliminary Series. The preliminary series of vaccinations was carried out in the 342nd Field Artillery Regiment through the courtesy of Colonel Nugent and Major Czar C. Johnson, surgeon of the regiment. This organization volunteered en masse in response to the call issued by the Division Surgeon and offered a most promising opportunity for an extended series of observations. Moreover, only one case of meningitis had developed in the 342nd Field Artillery and the regiment had recently been covered in the search for meningococcus carriers. During the first experience the vaccination of known carriers was avoided, and this regiment appeared to be free from them

As the experiments continued, Gates reported that the men started to experience flu-like symptoms:

A survey of the reports of the regimental surgeons and of the observations in the preliminary series shows that headache was the most frequent symptom following injection and accompanied most of the other symptoms encountered. Sometimes the reaction was initiated by a chill or chilly sensation, and a number of men complained of fever or feverish sensations during the following night. Next in frequency came nausea (occasionally vomiting), dizziness, and general “aches and pains” in the joints and muscles, which in a few instances were especially localized in the neck or lumbar region, causing stiff neck or stiff back

However, bacterial meningitis is known to be very similar to flu-like symptoms as described in webmd.com that includes fever, headache, upset stomach or vomiting, stiff neck, etc.  Comparing the early symptoms of bacterial meningitis and even bacterial pneumonia to the flu is the sole reason why the vaccine experiments at Fort Riley, Kansas have been ignored as the main cause of the Spanish Flu.  In fact, an interesting article from the New Scientist published on August 4^th, 2008 ‘Bacteria were the real killers in 1918 flu pandemic’ partially admits that “Medical and scientific experts now agree that bacteria, not influenza viruses, were the greatest cause of death during the 1918 flu pandemic.” The reason I say that the article “partially admits” is that it was bacteria and not the influenza virus that was the cause of death because the article never mentioned that it was the bacterial meningitis vaccine that spread the flu among soldiers and civilians:

Government efforts to gird for the next influenza pandemic – bird flu or otherwise – ought to take notice and stock up on antibiotics, says John Brundage, a medical microbiologist at the Armed Forces Health Surveillance Center in Silver Spring, Maryland.

Brundage’s team culled first-hand accounts, medical records and infection patterns from 1918 and 1919. Although a nasty strain of flu virus swept around the world, bacterial pneumonia that came on the heels of mostly mild cases of flu killed the majority of the 20 to 100 million victims of the so-called Spanish flu, they conclude.

“We agree completely that bacterial pneumonia played a major role in the mortality of the 1918 pandemic,” says Anthony Fauci, director of National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Disease in Bethesda, Maryland, and author of another journal article out next month that comes to a similar conclusion

The article only mentions what lifelong bureaucrat and the director of the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Disease, Dr. Anthony Fauci had said regarding the vaccines:

Antibiotics and vaccines against bacterial pneumonia could limit deaths in the next pandemic. And while an effective influenza vaccine should nip an outbreak in the bud, such a vaccine could take months to prepare and distribute.

“The idea of stockpiling [bacterial] vaccines and antibiotics is under serious consideration,” says Fauci, who is on a US government taskforce to prepare for the next flu pandemic

Obviously Fauci’s statement must have been music to Big Pharma’s ears.

In the United States, the flu shot is advertised relentlessly to the public as a safe and effective way to combat the seasonal flu although there are various reports that suggest that they are dangerous.  On April 3^rd, 2020 The Children’s Health Defense published ‘An Unwelcome Milestone: Payouts for Influenza Vaccine Injuries Exceed $900 Million’ by Wayne Rohde who introduced a brief history of the development of the flu vaccine which began in the 1940’s:

Vaccine scientists have been developing inactivated influenza vaccines (IIVs) for decades, formulating the first bivalent (two-strain) IIV in the early 1940s and the first trivalent (three-strain) IIV in 1978. In 2003 , the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved the first three-strain live attenuated influenza vaccine (LAIV) for use in children and adults aged 5-49 years old, extending its approval to those aged 2-49 years old in 2007

Rohde explains that “numerous influenza vaccines using different technologies and targeting different age groups have entered the market” and that “the FDA approves some influenza vaccines using accelerated approval mechanisms” which reminds us of the Covid-19 experimental injections that received the same accelerated approval process under Operation Warp Speed.   As of March 2020, Rohde’s gives a detailed analysis of the total compensation paid to the victims and their families from the injuries and deaths caused by Big Pharma’s influenza vaccines as reported by the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (NVICP):

As of mid-March 2020, the total NVICP payout for all injuries and death from seasonal influenza vaccines was approximately $897,967,381.38 (based on my analysis of all decisions posted at the United States Court of Federal Claims website). In other words, just shy of $900 million dollars for damages, attorney fees and medical expert costs—for vaccines that have only been part of the compensation program for the last 15 years.

Another statistic that is concerning is the ever-growing number of petitions filed in the NVICP that await medical reviews or decisions. Over 2,000 influenza petitions alone are pending. Not even a year ago, that figure was 50% less

Some of the serious injuries included in the NVICP are Guillain-Barré syndrome (GBS) transverse myelitis (TM), chronic inflammatory demyelinating polyneuropathy (CIDP) and death.

On December 1^st, 2014 the Center for Infectious Disease and Policy (CIDRAP) at the University of Minnesota reported on the deaths of elderly people in Italy following the use of the Novartis Flu vaccine‘Novartis flu vaccine on hold in Italy after suspicious deaths’ claimed that

“Italian authorities have suspended the use of about 500,000 doses of Fluad, a Novartis influenza vaccine for elderly people, following 13 recent deaths in people who had received the shot, according to company and media reports.”

It was first reported on November 28^th in a statement released by Novartis that it was “two batches of the vaccine, amounting to about 500,000 doses, have been put on a “precautionary hold”following the reported deaths.”  And of course, the Big Pharma giant also claimed that there was “no causal link has been found between the vaccine and the deaths.”  However, CIDRAP mentioned reports from Bloomberg News on the suspicious deaths:

Italy’s drug regulatory agency, AIFA, suspended the two vaccine lots on Nov 28, after three people died within 48 hours of being vaccinated, Bloomberg News reported. On Nov 29 the number of suspicious deaths rose to 11, Bloomberg reported that day, and today the company put the number at 13

One important question that needs to be asked is what are the ingredients in the flu vaccines?  The World Mercury Project published a brochure titled ‘Flu Vaccines in Pregnancy and Childhood: What You Need to Know’ makes it clear that mercury is in the flu vaccines and warns “the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recommends pregnant women and infants get influenza vaccines, many of which contain ethylmercury from the preservative thimerosal” and that it may “result in mercury exposures exceeding the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) recommended maximum levels.”  Mercury is considered “toxic to brain tissue and can impact critical stages of brain development.”  The World Mercury Project exposes the hidden dangers behind the flu shots for pregnant women citing various studies below, one of them produced by the CDC:

A 2017 CDC study links miscarriage to flu vaccines, particularly in the first trimester. Pregnant women vaccinated in the 2010/2011 and 2011/2012 flu seasons had two times greater odds of having a miscarriage within 28 days of receiving the vaccine. In women who had received the H1N1 vaccine in the previous flu season, the odds of having a miscarriage within 28 days were 7.7 times greater than in women who did not receive a flu shot during their pregnancy.

A study published in 2016 that looked at the safety of flu vaccines found a moderately elevated risk for major birth defects in infants born to women who had received a flu vaccine during the first trimester of pregnancy.

A study published in 2017 found an elevated risk of autism spectrum disorders in children whose mothers had a first trimester flu shot. Flu vaccine administration is documented to cause an inflammatory response in pregnant women. Recent research found inflammation during pregnancy is associated with the development of autism spectrum disorders.

A large study in approximately 50,000 pregnant women over five flu seasons found no difference in the risk for developing influenza or similar illnesses between those who received the influenza vaccine during pregnancy and those who did not.

An independent 2014 review found no randomized controlled trials assessing vaccination in pregnant women. It states, “The only evidence available comes from observational studies with modest methodological quality. On this basis, vaccination shows very limited effects”

The conclusion is obvious, the flu vaccine is dangerous and for those who are skeptical, are completely justified in being so.

The Polio Vaccine and the Glorification of Jonas Salk and Albert Sabin

The medical establishment always flaunts how the Polio vaccine saved millions of people worldwide, but let’s take a closer look at the start of the Polio vaccine rollout.   An interesting article from The National Interest published in 2020 ‘Four Times in History Vaccines Failed (Lessons for a Coronavirus Vaccine?)’ mentioned how the polio vaccine resulted in paralysis.  There was also an increase of new cases of polio after the rollout:

In the 1955 Cutter Incident, some batches of polio vaccine given to the public contained live poliovirus—even though they had passed the required safety testing. More than 250 cases of polio were attributed to vaccines produced by one company, Cutter Laboratories. The mistake resulted in many cases of paralysis, and the vaccine was recalled as soon as new cases of polio were detected

What was known about the Cutter Incident which began on April 1955 when more than 200,000 children in the US had received the polio vaccine.  On March 2006 The Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine (JRSM) published ‘The Cutter Incident: How America’s First Polio Vaccine Led to a Growing Vaccine Crisis’ claimed that the

“polio vaccine in which the process of inactivating the live virus proved to be defective. Within days there were reports of paralysis and within a month the first mass vaccination programme against polio had to be abandoned.”

The reason behind the abandonment of the vaccine was due to investigations on the aftereffects.

 “Subsequent investigations revealed that the vaccine, manufactured by the California-based family firm of Cutter Laboratories, had caused 40 000 cases of polio, leaving 200 children with varying degrees of paralysis and killing 10.”

However, one of the most prominent advocates to vaccinate everyone for anything, Dr. Paul Offit, a well-known pediatrician who is a member of the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices who specializes in infectious diseases, immunology, vaccines (he is co-inventor of the Rotavirus vaccine) and virology uses the Cutter Incident as a platform to propagandize the struggle of the 20^th century on behalf of medical science and its fight against polio and other diseases:

He reminds us that, within a decade of Karl Landsteiner’s identification of the polio virus in 1908, an epidemic in New York killed 2400 people (mostly children) and left thousands more with a life-long disability. In the 1950s, summer outbreaks in the USA caused tens of thousands of cases, leaving hundreds paralysed or dead. `Second only to the atomic bomb’, polio was `the thing that Americans feared the most’

Obviously, the JRSM explains who Dr. Offit blames for the Cutter incident which is not the people or the science behind the polio vaccine, he blamed the manufacturer of the vaccine (Cutter Laboratories) and the inspection process of the federal government:

Offit provides a gripping account of how the `March of Dimes’, inspired in part by President Franklin D Roosevelt’s personal experience of polio, raised funds for research and focused national attention on the disease. He profiles leading figures, notably Jonas Salk and Albert Sabin —brilliant, egotistical and flawed characters—pioneers in vaccine development and as scientific celebrities, and notorious for their bitter personal rivalry.

Offit offers a balanced judgement on both the Cutter incident and on the Salk and Sabin vaccines. Reviewing failures in the manufacturing and inspection processes, he exonerates Salk from blame and concludes that `the federal government, through its vaccine regulatory agency… was in the best position to avoid the Cutter tragedy’. Three larger companies produced safe polio vaccines according to Salk’s protocol for inactivating the virus with formaldehyde. The lack of experience and expertise at Cutter Laboratories, undetected by the inspectors, caused the disaster

Let’s go deeper into Offit’s propaganda.  In 2015, an article I wrote titled ‘The Jonas Salk Polio Vaccine: A Medical Breakthrough or a Propaganda Campaign for Big Pharma?’ based on the December 1960 issue of ‘Herald of Health’ an influential health magazine at the time  published a critical report titled ‘The Great Salk Vaccine Fiasco: Misuse of statistics, blackout of vaccine cases, cited by eminent Chicago doctor’ By Ernest B. Zeisler, M.D. (www.vaclib.org) who basically disagreed with Dr. Salk’s claim that the polio vaccine was safe and effective. What he wrote to the publisher of the magazine is quite revealing since he was uncertain of the new vaccine that supposedly cured polio.  Dr. Zeisler wrote “No newspaper, periodical or medical journal will touch this. Many authorities in this field agree with me, and some have written me to say so and to congratulate me for what they call my ‘courage.’But no medical man will agree with me publicly.” Dr. Zeisler made a statement on what he observed on the safety issues of the polio vaccine:

On April 12, 1955, results of a 1954 field test were published and the Salk vaccine became a licensed product. Prof. Paul Meier of the School of Hygiene and Public Health at Johns Hopkins University revealed that “the vaccines used in the field trial, which were produced by two of the manufacturers, had been extensively tested in three laboratories and had been found negative for live virus. Many of the lots of vaccine released after the field trial had been produced by other manufacturers and had been tested only by the producer. Therefore, the safety of these lots could not properly be judged from the results of the field trial. All manufacturers had rejected some lots because live virus had been found in them, and therefore Salk’s theory that safety was guaranteed by the method of preparation obviously did not apply

Dr. Zeisler mentioned K.A. Brownlee from the University of Chicago whose work was published in the Journal of the American Statistical Association in 1955 as he criticized the biased field trials:

The field trial itself had violated the cardinal principles of scientific procedure. As said by Brownlee in the Journal of the American Statistical Association:

“. . . 59 per cent of the trial was worthless because of the lack of adequate controls. The remaining 41 per cent may be all right but contains internal evidence of bias in favor of the vaccinated. .. The reviewer . . . would point out that gamma globulin was triumphantly proclaimed effective by the National Foundation after a similar trial . . .”

Dr. Zeisler proclaimed that the US Public Health service continued to promote “gamma globulin” or human blood plasma made from donated human blood that contained the antibodies needed to combat polio.  He said, “it may be of interest to note that in May of 1954, several months after it had been shown to be valueless in preventing poliomyelitis, the U.S. Public Health Service continued to recommend and distribute gamma globulin “for use against poliomyelitis.” Zeisler also criticized the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) for not publishing Brownlee’s criticism of gamma globulin.  In 1955, an effort to promote the polio vaccine was in effect by the ‘National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis’ who published an inaccurate official report of the field trials.  But according to Dr. Salk the polio vaccine was safe.  In an interview conducted by LIFE magazine ‘Tracking the Killer’ Dr. Salk was asked if his “monkey vaccine was safe” and he said, “There is no question of ‘how safe is it?’ It is safe, and it can’t be safer than safe’.”

Dr. Zeisler said that

“the public was deceived into permitting mass vaccination of children with a vaccine which should have been known to be unsafe and which was not known to be of any value in preventing poliomyelitis” he continued “that certain lots of vaccine had produced a number of cases of poliomyelitis, and within another four weeks all the vaccine was withdrawn from use.”

On May 15^th, 1962, hearings took place before the Committee on Interstate and Foreign Commerce House of Representatives on H.R. 10541 with Clinton R. Miller who represented the National Health Federationwho asked the following question:

One of the most obvious pieces of misinformation being delivered to the American public is that the 50-percent rise in paralytic poliomyelitis in 1958 and the real accelerated increase in 1959 have been caused by persons failing to be vaccinated.  This represents a certain amount of doubletalk and an unwillingness to face facts and to evaluate a true effectiveness of the Salk vaccine.  It is doubletalk from the standpoint of logical reasoning: If the Salk vaccine is to take credit for the decline from 1955 to 1957, how can these individuals who were vaccinated several years ago contribute to the increase in 1958 and 1959? Are not these persons still vaccinated?

It was a legit question. Miller pointed out the obvious propaganda Dr. Salk used to exaggerate the benefits of the polio vaccine:

The tendency of a mass vaccination program is to herd people. People are not cattle or sheep. They should not be herded. A mass vaccination program carries a built-in temptation to oversimplify the problem; to exaggerate the benefits; to minimize or completely ignore the hazards; to discourage or silence scholarly, thoughtful and cautious opposition; to create an urgency where none exists; to whip up an enthusiasm among citizens that can carry with it the seeds of impatience, if not intolerance; to extend the concept of the police power of the state in quarantine far beyond its proper limitation; to assume simplicity when there is actually great complexity; to continue to support a vaccine long after it has been discredited;… to ridicule honest and informed consent

Today, polio vaccines are now causing a rise in new polio cases.  On November 25^th, 2019, The Associated Press (AP) published ‘More polio cases now caused by vaccine than by wild virus’ said that “four African countries have reported new cases of polio linked to the oral vaccine, as global health numbers show there are now more children being paralyzed by viruses originating in vaccines than in the wild.” The article continued:

In a report late last week, the World Health Organization and partners noted nine new polio cases caused by the vaccine in Nigeria, Congo, Central African Republic and Angola. Seven countries elsewhere in Africa have similar outbreaks and cases have been reported in Asia. Of the two countries where polio remains endemic, Afghanistan and Pakistan, vaccine-linked cases have been identified in Pakistan.

In rare cases, the live virus in oral polio vaccine can mutate into a form capable of sparking new outbreaks. All the current vaccine-derived polio cases have been sparked by a Type 2 virus contained in the vaccine. Type 2 wild virus was eliminated years ago

On November 18^th, 2020, The Science Daily published an article by the University of Michigan (Michigan Medicine) that should be an eye-opener ‘How the polio vaccine virus occasionally becomes dangerous’ stated the following:

The polio vaccine comes in two types: the Salk vaccine, made with a killed virus and the Sabin vaccine, made with a live but weakened, or attenuated, virus. The Sabin vaccine has several advantages for use in the developing world, including the fact that it does not need to be kept cold, and as an oral vaccine, it does not require needles. However, because it contains a live, albeit weakened polio virus, that virus is able to evolve into more virulent forms and cause outbreaks months to years following a vaccination campaign.

In a new paper, Adam Lauring, M.D., Ph.D., of the department of microbiology & immunology and the division of infectious disease and a collaborative team describe an enterprising study that allowed them to view the evolution of the vaccine virus into a more dangerous form in real time.  “Most outbreaks of type 2 polio virus are caused by the vaccine. Then you have a problem where our best weapon is that same vaccine, so you’re kind of fighting fire with fire,” says Lauring

If that statement by Dr, Lauring is not revealing, I don’t know what is.  However, Mami Taniuchi, Ph.D., from the University of Virginia, Michael Famulare, Ph.D from the Institute for Disease Modeling based in Seattle, Washington and a team from the International Centre for Diarrhoeal Disease Research conducted human experiments on children from Bangladesh:

In an effort to understand the basic biology of poliovirus and how it replicates, Lauring’s lab seized an opportunity to build on an earlier study of a new vaccination campaign in semi-rural Bangladesh. This study, which was run by Mami Taniuchi, Ph.D., of the University of Virginia and Michael Famulare, Ph.D,. of the Institute for Disease Modeling in Seattle, Washington, along with a team from the International Centre for Diarrhoeal Disease Research, Bangladesh, followed households where children were vaccinated with the live attenuated virus, collecting weekly stool samples from each household member. The virus within those samples was then genetically analyzed.

“There’s a lot of work being done to try and understand how the virus goes from attenuated to virulent again,” says Lauring. “What we haven’t known is what it is doing in those first few weeks or months. This was an opportunity to see those early steps”

The University of Michigan article concludes “yet every now and then, an enhanced virus makes it to a new host and gains a foothold, triggering disease. The hope, explains Lauring, is that this work will “inform in a better way to tinker with the vaccine so you get fewer downsides and still maintain its upsides — that it’s actually a very effective vaccine.”  

In November 2004, Neil Z Miller from the ‘Institute of Medical and Scientific Inquiry’ published ‘The polio vaccine: a critical assessment of its arcane history, efficacy, and long-term health-related consequences’ that can be found on researchgate.net gives an insight to what was in the polio vaccine:

Polio (poliomyelitis) is a potentially dangerous viral ailment. To combat this disease, researchers developed two polio vaccines (inactivated and live) grown in cultures made from monkey kidneys. Beginning in the 1950s, these vaccines were administered to millions of people in the United States and throughout the world. Officially, the polio vaccine is considered safe and effective, and has been credited with singularly reducing the incidence of this disease. These tenets are not supported by the data. A cancer-causing monkey virus-SV-40-was discovered in polio vaccines administered to millions of people. SV-40 has been found in brain tumors, bone cancers, lung cancers and leukemia. SV-40 is transmitted through sexual intercourse, and from mother to child in the womb. Monkeys that were used to make polio vaccines were infected with simian immunodeficiency virus (SIV), a virus closely related to human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), the infectious agent associated with AIDS. Some researchers question whether HIVs may simply be SIVs “residing in and adapting to a human host.” Polio vaccines also contain calf serum, glycerol and other parts of the cow that may have been infected with bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), or mad cow disease, a fatal brain-wasting ailment that some researchers link to Cruetzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD), its human equivalent. Current disease reduction techniques that emphasize short-term gains over long-term health consequences need to be reevaluated and discontinued while new and safer health paradigms are researched and implemented

The Most Dangerous Vaccine Ever? The Smallpox Vaccine

‘The Most Dangerous Vaccine’ was the name of an article published in 2002 from a report produced by CBS news long-time TV show 60 Minutes.  It started with “Smallpox may be the worst disease ever known to man. It killed about half a billion people from 1880 to 1980, before it was eradicated” continued “and the smallpox vaccine is deadly, too. Scientists call it the most dangerous vaccine known to man.” Then they jumped right into Iraq’s ‘WMDs’ “Today, smallpox is a potential weapon of mass destruction that could be wielded against the U.S. by enemies like Iraq and al Qaeda.”  Then the US government makes the smallpox vaccine available to everyone:

With that in mind, President Bush is expected to announce on Friday a plan which will gradually make the smallpox vaccine available to all Americans who want it.  That’s according to administration sources who say the shots will be mandatory for about 500,000 military personnel and recommended for another half-million who work in hospital emergency rooms and on special smallpox response teams.

The general public will be offered the vaccine on a voluntary basis as soon as large stockpiles are licensed, probably early in 2004, though the government will not encourage people to get them

At that time during the early stages of the US invasion of Iraq “the government has decided to bring back the vaccine because of fear that terrorists, or Iraq, could use the virus as a weapon.”  The article admits that the smallpox vaccine is dangerous and offers protection but with a catch, “but that protection has a price. Some people die from it; and others have serious reactions, some permanent. Scientists say it’s the most dangerous vaccine known to man.”  Once again, Dr. Paul Offit is mentioned in the article, “We know if we immunize a million people, that there will be 15 people that will suffer severe, permanent adverse outcomes and one person who may die from the vaccine.”

In an article from April 2003 written by Edward A. Belongia, MD and Allison L. Naleway, PhD for the  National Center for Biotechnology Information, U.S. National Library of Medicine(https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/) titled ‘Smallpox vaccine: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly’ exposes some truth behind the Smallpox vaccine:

Smallpox inarguably shaped the course of human history by killing countless millions in both the Old World and the New World. Dr. Edward Jenner’s discovery of vaccination in the late 18th century, and the global eradication of smallpox in the 1970s, rank among the greatest achievements in human history. Amidst recent growing concerns about bioterrorism, smallpox vaccination has resurfaced from the history books to become a topic of major importance. Inoculation with vaccinia virus is highly effective for the prevention of smallpox infection, but it is associated with several known side effects that range from mild and self-limited to severe and life-threatening. As the United States moves forward with plans to vaccinate selected health care workers and the military, and perhaps offer the vaccination to all citizens in the future, it is important to fully understand and appreciate the history, risks, and benefits of smallpox vaccination

Then the article describes what were the adverse effects of the vaccine:

Smallpox vaccine is less safe than other vaccines routinely used today. The vaccine is associated with known adverse effects that range from mild to severe. Mild vaccine reactions include formation of satellite lesions, fever, muscle aches, regional lymphadenopathy, fatigue, headache, nausea, rashes, and soreness at the vaccination site. A recent clinical trial reported that more than one-third of vaccine recipients missed days of work or school because of these mild vaccine-related symptoms.

In the 1960s, serious adverse events associated with smallpox vaccination in the United States included death (1/million vaccinations), progressive vaccinia (1.5/million vaccinations), eczema vaccinatum (39/million vaccinations), postvaccinial encephalitis (12/million vaccinations), and generalized vaccinia (241/million vaccinations). Adverse events were approximately ten times more common among those vaccinated for the first time compared to revaccinees. Fatality rates were also four times higher for primary vaccinees compared to revaccinees

In conclusion, the hidden dangers in the smallpox vaccine are undeniable:

The title of this article refers to the good, bad and ugly of smallpox vaccine. We have attempted to show that the vaccine is a critical tool for controlling smallpox (“the good”), despite a relatively higher risk of complications in some individuals (“the bad”). The “ugly” refers not to the vaccine, but to the potential reintroduction of smallpox more than 20 years after its eradication

The Trials of the HPV Vaccine

The HPV vaccine or the Human Papillomavirus vaccine was created in Australia with lead researchers Ian Frazer who is an immunologist and Jian Zhou, a Chinese virologist and cancer researcher are both credited with  the invention and patents of the HPV vaccine which today are known as Gardasil and Cervarix with help from researchers from Georgetown University Medical Center, the University of Rochester, and the U.S. National Cancer Institute.  In 2006, The FDA fast-tracked the approval process for HPV vaccines between 2007 and 2009 in various countries which was then promoted by Merck & Co.  The HPV vaccines was supposed to prevent several types of cancers in young girls including cervical cancer, anal cancer, vaginal cancer and other life-threatening illnesses associated with cancer.  It can prevent genital warts as well.  In another report from the  National Center for Biotechnology Information, U.S. National Library of Medicine from November 6th, 2007 ‘Adverse events reported for HPV vaccine’ by Laura Eggertson on the adverse results from the HPV vaccines in Canada:

As 4 provinces began immunizing schoolgirls to prevent the human papillomavirus, a watchdog group in the United States warned of dangerous adverse events stemming from the vaccine’s delivery — concern government regulators dismiss.

Public health officials in Ontario, Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island and Newfoundland and Labrador began administering the Merck Frosst vaccine Gardasil to select groups of girls (grades 6, 7 or 8) in September, just as the US advocacy group Judicial Watch released documents obtained through Freedom of Information indicating that 3 deaths and 1637 adverse events occurred after the vaccine was administered (prior to May 15)

Judicial Watch who exposed the danger of the HPV vaccine declared that the HPV vaccine should not be mandated by state governments:

The adverse events data comes from the US Food and Drug Administration’s Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, as of June 30, there were 2531 adverse reports, including 9 deaths, out of 7 million doses dispensed. The figures, however, can include multiple reports of the same event, since physicians, manufacturers and patients report to the same system

On July 22, 2008, the CDC reported on the adverse events of the HPV vaccine ‘Information from FDA and CDC on Gardasil and its Safety (Archived)’ found on the internet archives of the Way back Machine.  The following is a section of the report ‘Serious Reports (6% of Total Reports)’:

Concerns have been raised about reports of deaths occurring in individuals after receiving Gardasil. As of June 30, 2008, 20 deaths had been reported to VAERS. There was not a common pattern to the deaths that would suggest they were caused by the vaccine. In cases where autopsy, death certificate and medical records were available, the cause of death was explained by factors other than the vaccine.

Guillain-Barré Syndrome (GBS) has also been reported in individuals following vaccination with Gardasil. GBS is a rare neurological disorder that causes muscle weakness. It occurs spontaneously in unvaccinated individuals after a variety of specific infections. FDA and CDC have reviewed the reports of GBS that have been submitted to VAERS. To date, there is no evidence that Gardasil has has increased the rate of GBS above that expected in the population. While we continue to carefully analyze all reports of GBS submitted to VAERS, the data do not currently suggest an association between Gardasil and GBS.

Thromboembolic disorders (blood clots) have been reported to VAERS in people who have received Gardasil. Most of these individuals had risk factors for blood clots, such as use of oral contraceptives which are known to increase the risk of clotting. Thromboembolic disorders as well as other medical events are being studied through the VSD in previously planned controlled studies. The manufacturer has also committed to conduct a large post marketing study to further assess the vaccine’s safety

In 2010, the HPV vaccine was also administered to young girls in India which raised serious concerns according to the Indian Journal of Medical Ethics who reported in ‘Deaths in a trial of the HPV vaccine’that “the death of girls who were a part of a Human Papilloma Virus vaccine trial has raised an alarm about the nature of research in India as well as the value attached by the state to the lives of its citizens.”  The experimental trials were funded by humanity’s arch nemesis Bill Gates:

The trial was being conducted in Andhra Pradesh and Gujarat by the NGO PATH with support from the Indian Council of Medical Research and local health authorities. They were funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The vaccine is supplied by two companies, Merck Sharpe & Dohme and Glaxo Smith Kline.

When the government stopped the trials, three doses had already been administered to 30,000 participants, mostly tribal girls aged between 9 and 14. The union health minister, Ghulam Nabi Azad, has denied that the deaths have anything to do with the trials, and as things stand, there is no conclusive evidence of a causal link between the vaccine and the deaths. But the fact that the girls were a part of the trial is reason enough to warrant further investigations

On August 19, 2008, The New York Times ‘Drug Makers’ Push Leads to Cancer Vaccines’ Rise’ reminds us of the rapid rollout of the Covid-19 experimental injections:

But some experts worry about the consequences of the rapid rollout of the new vaccines without more medical evidence about how best to deploy them. They say that because of the aggressive marketing, even parents of girls who are far from being sexually active may feel pressured into giving them a vaccine that is not yet needed and whose long-term impact is still unclear. Legislative efforts to require girls to have the vaccine only add to the pressure.

In the United States, hundreds of doctors have been recruited and trained to give talks about Gardasil — $4,500 for a lecture — and some have made hundreds of thousands of dollars. Politicians have been lobbied and invited to receptions urging them to legislate against a global killer. And former state officials have been recruited to lobby their former colleagues

Big Pharma’s propaganda seems relentless in its pursuit of profits.  Sources from the CDC and FDA reported in the month of June 2008 that there were 9,749 reports of adverse events.  But keep in mind that the VAERS reporting system may be inaccurate since not everyone uses it as the CDC’s own website states in ‘Guide to Interpreting VAERS Data’:

“Underreporting” is one of the main limitations of passive surveillance systems, including VAERS. The term, underreporting refers to the fact that VAERS receives reports for only a small fraction of actual adverse events. The degree of underreporting varies widely. As an example, a great many of the millions of vaccinations administered each year by injection cause soreness, but relatively few of these episodes lead to a VAERS report. Physicians and patients understand that minor side effects of vaccinations often include this kind of discomfort, as well as low fevers. On the other hand, more serious and unexpected medical events are probably more likely to be reported than minor ones, especially when they occur soon after vaccination, even if they may be coincidental and related to other causes.

A report to VAERS generally does not prove that the identified vaccine(s) caused the adverse event described. It only confirms that the reported event occurred sometime after vaccine was given. No proof that the event was caused by the vaccine is required in order for VAERS to accept the report. VAERS accepts all reports without judging whether the event was caused by the vaccine

The fact that the VAERS reporting system is underreporting injuries and deaths can allow Big Pharma to suppress the dangers of vaccines.  However, The New York Times article admitted that the VAERS reporting system is voluntary which leads to inaccurate reporting:

The Centers for Disease Control asks health care centers to report side effects through its Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System; reporting is voluntary. There have been 9,749 reports, almost all from doctors and nurses, of patients experiencing adverse events after receiving the vaccine, the agency announced in a joint report with the Food and Drug Administration at the end of June. Ninety-four percent of them were not serious, ranging from arm pain to fainting, and 6 percent were classified as serious, including blood clots, paralysis and at least 20 deaths.

But 16 million doses of the drug have been distributed by Merck in the United States, and in a population so large, “by chance alone some serious adverse effects and deaths” will occur, the F.D.A. and C.D.C. said.  The agencies said there was no indication that the deaths or serious side effects were caused by the shot, concluding that “Gardasil continues to be safe and effective and its benefits continue to outweigh its risks”

Overall, administering vaccines in general is basically playing Russian roulette.  For those who are skeptical about vaccines should be.  There is a long history of vaccine injuries and deaths, now with the worldwide Coronavirus pandemic, which is still ongoing, now with Big Pharma’s new experimental injections called Covid-19 vaccines, the danger is clear.  The Children’s Health Defense updates the public on what the VAERS reporting system although not as accurate reported as of April 8^th, 2022:

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) today released new data showing a total of 1,226,314 reports of adverse events following COVID vaccines were submitted between Dec. 14, 2020, and April 8, 2022, to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS). VAERS is the primary government-funded system for reporting adverse vaccine reactions in the U.S.

The data included a total of 26,976 reports of deaths — an increase of 277 over the previous week — and 219,865 serious injuries, including deaths, during the same time period — up 2,564 compared with the previous week.  Excluding “foreign reports” to VAERS, 805,921 adverse events, including 12,471 deaths and 79,811 serious injuries, were reported in the U.S. between Dec. 14, 2020, and April 8, 2022

The European Union also has a system similar to VAERS called EudraVigilance as Health Impact Newspublished the latest data on March 26^th, 2022:

The European (EEA and non-EEA countries) database of suspected drug reaction reports is EudraVigilance, verified by the European Medicines Agency (EMA), and they are now reporting 42,507 fatalities, and 3,984,978 injuries

The pharmaceutical corporations who produce the current MRNA Vaccines include Moderna (CX-024414),  Pfizer-BIONTECH,  AstraZeneca and JANSSEN (AD26.COV2.S).

The Covid-19 experimental injections are dangerous as more injuries and deaths increase as time goes by, unfortunately, the worst is yet to come.  We are at the early stages of what will be known as one of the greatest crimes against humanity and I hope one day that those who are involved in the conspiracy including Big Pharma, government bureaucrats and the rest of the Globalist cabal will be brought to justice.

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Timothy Alexander Guzman writes on his own blog site, Silent Crow News, where this article was originally published. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

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First published on April 18, 2022

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VAERS data released Friday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention included a total of 1,226,314 reports of adverse events from all age groups following COVID vaccines, including 26,976 deaths and 219,865 serious injuries between Dec. 14, 2020, and April 8, 2022.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) today released new data showing a total of 1,226,314 reports of adverse events following COVID vaccines were submitted between Dec. 14, 2020, and April 8, 2022, to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS). VAERS is the primary government-funded system for reporting adverse vaccine reactions in the U.S.

The data included a total of 26,976 reports of deaths — an increase of 277 over the previous week — and 219,865 serious injuries, including deaths, during the same time period — up 2,564 compared with the previous week.

Excluding “foreign reports” to VAERS, 805,921 adverse events, including 12,471 deaths and 79,811 serious injuries, were reported in the U.S. between Dec. 14, 2020, and April 8, 2022.

Foreign reports are reports foreign subsidiaries send to U.S. vaccine manufacturers. Under U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) regulations, if a manufacturer is notified of a foreign case report that describes an event that is both serious and does not appear on the product’s labeling, the manufacturer is required to submit the report to VAERS.

Of the 12,471 U.S. deaths reported as of April 8, 17% occurred within 24 hours of vaccination, 21% occurred within 48 hours of vaccination and 59% occurred in people who experienced an onset of symptoms within 48 hours of being vaccinated.

In the U.S., 564 million COVID vaccine doses had been administered as of April 8, including 334 million doses of Pfizer, 212 million doses of Moderna and 19 million doses of Johnson & Johnson (J&J).

Every Friday, VAERS publishes vaccine injury reports received as of a specified date. Reports submitted to VAERS require further investigation before a causal relationship can be confirmed.

Historically, VAERS has been shown to report only 1% of actual vaccine adverse events.

U.S. VAERS data from Dec. 14, 2020, to April 8, 2022, for 5- to 11-year-olds show:

• 10,216 adverse events, including 242 rated as serious and 5 reported deaths.
• 18 reports of myocarditis and pericarditis (heart inflammation).
  The CDC uses a narrowed case definition of “myocarditis,” which excludes cases of cardiac arrest, ischemic strokes and deaths due to heart problems that occur before one has the chance to go to the emergency department.
• 39 reports of blood clotting disorders.

U.S. VAERS data from Dec. 14, 2020, to April 8, 2022, for 12- to 17-year-olds show:

• 31,048 adverse events, including 1,792 rated as serious and 44 reported deaths.
• 67 reports of anaphylaxis among 12- to 17-year-olds where the reaction was life-threatening, required treatment or resulted in death — with 96% of cases attributed to Pfizer’s vaccine.
• 651 reports of myocarditis and pericarditis, with 639 cases attributed to Pfizer’s vaccine.
• 166 reports of blood clotting disorders, with all cases attributed to Pfizer.

U.S. VAERS data from Dec. 14, 2020, to April 8, 2022, for all age groups combined, show:

• 20% of deaths were related to cardiac disorders.
• 54% of those who died were male, 41% were female and the remaining death reports did not include the gender of the deceased.
• The average age of death was 73.
• As of April 8, 5,404 pregnant women reported adverse events related to COVID vaccines, including 1,6936 reports of miscarriage or premature birth.
• Of the 3,647 cases of Bell’s Palsy reported, 51% were attributed to Pfizer vaccinations, 40% to Moderna and 8% to J&J.
• 860 reports of Guillain-Barré syndrome, with 42% of cases attributed to Pfizer, 30% to Moderna and 28% to J&J.
• 2,373 reports of anaphylaxis where the reaction was life-threatening, required treatment or resulted in death.
• 1,671 reports of myocardial infarction.
• 13,755 reports of blood-clotting disorders in the U.S. Of those, 6,169 reports were attributed to Pfizer, 4,911 reports to Moderna and 2,654 reports to J&J.
• 4,124 cases of myocarditis and pericarditis with 2,531 cases attributed to Pfizer, 1,402 cases to Moderna and 181 cases to J&J’s COVID vaccine.

Woman develops fatal brain disease after second Moderna dose

Carol Beauchine died from sporadic Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (CJD), a rapidly evolving, fatal degenerative brain disorder she developed after her second dose of Moderna’s COVID vaccine.

In an exclusive interview with The Defender, Carol’s son, Jeffrey Beauchine, said it was excruciating to watch his 70-year-old mother — who was healthy until she got the vaccine — die from a disease he believes the vaccine caused.

Beauchine said Carol received her first dose of Moderna on Feb. 16, 2021, and didn’t report any complaints. After getting the second dose on March 17, Carol immediately said she “felt different.” She developed numbness that spread throughout the entire left side of her body, blindness and hearing loss. She lost the ability to walk and communicate, and her brain degenerated until she passed away on Aug. 2, 2021 — just five months after receiving her second dose of Moderna.

In an exclusive interview with The Defender, Jeffrey Beauchine said his mother, Carol, knew her Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease was related to the Moderna shot. Watching her death was like “something you see out of a movie,” he said.https://t.co/z972KqtM9w

— Robert F. Kennedy Jr (@RobertKennedyJr) April 11, 2022

The family submitted a report to VAERS, but the CDC has not followed up on Carol’s death. The Defender has received numerous reports of people who died from sporadic CJD after receiving a COVID vaccine — all women who were between the ages of 60 and 70, including Cheryl Cohenand Jennifer Deason Sprague.

Biden administration extends COVID public health emergency needed to keep vaccines under EUA

The Biden administration on Wednesday extended the COVID public health emergency, now two years old, for an additional 90 days — allowing vaccines and other drugs to remain under Emergency Use Authorization (EUA). Keeping COVID vaccines and other countermeasures under EUA shields pharmaceutical companies from liability for the harms caused by their products.

According to Reuters, a public health emergency was initially announced in January 2020, when the COVID pandemic began. It has been renewed each quarter since and was due to expire on April 16.

The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) said in a statement it was extending the public health emergency and will give states 60 days’ notice prior to termination or expiration. This may be the last time HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra extends it, according to policy experts.

Pfizer to seek authorization from FDA for COVID booster shot for kids 5 to 11 years old

Pfizer and BioNTech Thursday said they plan to apply for EUA of a COVID booster dose for healthy 5- to 11-year-olds based on the results of a small study that has not been published or analyzed by independent experts.

Pfizer said in a press release the third dose of its vaccine produced significant protection against the Omicron variant in children 5 to 11 in a small Phase 2/3 clinical trial. The study was based on data from only 140 children 5 through 11 years old who received a booster dose six months after the second dose of Pfizer-BioNTech’s COVID vaccine as part of the primary series.

Pfizer claimed a closer look at 30 children showed a 36-fold increase in virus-fighting antibodies — levels high enough to fight the Omicron variant, and that a third dose was “well tolerated with no new safety signals observed.”

Although Pfizer said more than 10,000 children under the age of 12 have participated in clinical trials investigating Pfizer’s COVID vaccine, only 140 were selected for the study forming the basis for the company’s EUA request.

CDC launches internal review over failed COVID response

The CDC announced Monday it was launching a month-long comprehensive agency-wide review following widespread criticism of the agency’s response to the COVID pandemic.

The agency plans to evaluate its structure, systems and processes, CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky told staff in an email obtained by The Washington Post. Walensky said the goal of the review is to “modernize” the agency and “to position CDC, and the public health community, for greatest success in the future.”

The review will be conducted by Jim Mcrae, associate administrator for primary healthcare at the Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA). The HRSA and the CDC are part of the Department of Health and Human Services.

Last month, the CDC’s decision to remove from its data tracker website tens of thousands of deaths linked to COVID — including nearly a quarter of the deaths the agency said had occurred among children — eroded public trust in the CDC’s handling of case counts.

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Megan Redshaw is a freelance reporter for The Defender. She has a background in political science, a law degree and extensive training in natural health.

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First published on April 5, 2022

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Russian troops evacuated Bucha on March 30.

Ukrainian National Police began entering Bucha on March 31, and that same day the mayor of Bucha announced that 

At no time was there any suggestion by the mayor (watch video below) or any other Ukrainian official of mass killings undertaken by Russia.

Given that they are claiming bodies litter the streets they could hardly have escaped the attention of the Mayor!

 

It took four days for claims of a “war crime” to emerge (3rd of April).

Film of alleged victims on the roads in Bucha look suspicious, with “bodies” moving. (we know this has happened in other staged and acted films provided by Ukraine’s propaganda).

See Suspicious Video below

It is claimed that civilians had been shot and buried in shallow graves. We know from the behaviour of NATO allies in the Yugoslav war that in Racak dead soldiers were dressed up as civilians and then paraded as the victims of “a massacre” which was later debunked.

As of March 31st, Bucha was fully under the control of Ukrainian officials.

On April 2, the National Police of Ukraine released a video of “the mop up operation in Bucha”.

This official video of the Ukraine Police was  released a day prior to the release of the “suspicious video” (April 3, 2022)

Compare the two videos

Video: Ukraine Police Mop Up Operation (April 2, 2022)

 

There is also the possibility that those civilians in Bucha who were accused of cooperating with Russian forces could have been executed by Ukrainian forces following the Russian exit on 30th March.

It is also both unprecedented and suspicious that the U.K. Chair at the UN Security Council refused an emergency meeting called by Russia on 3rd April to discuss the Bucha claims.

A Ukrainian MP Ilya Kiva has accused the Ukrainian SBU [Security Service of Ukraine] of fabricating (with the help of MI6) the Bucha “crimes”. (see youtube unless it has been censored already!)

If only we could say that “time will tell” which side is telling the truth! But there is certainly no doubt about the self-filmed Ukrainian crimes in this post (see below).

The Cynical Sacrifice of Ukraine

In an interview with CNN ON 20th March, Ukraine’s President Zelenskyy said of Joe Biden and the NATO leadership (the interview)

“I requested them personally to say directly that we are going to accept you into NATO in a year or two or five, just say it directly and clearly, or just say no,” Zelensky said.

“And the response was very clear, you’re not going to be a NATO member, but publicly, the doors will remain open,”

Nothing shows the cynical sacrifice of Ukrainians more than this duplicitous treatment of Zelensky by NATO.

Privately NATO and the Biden administration were telling Zelenskyy Ukraine was never going to be in NATO, yet they told him they were going to act publicly as if the possibility existed. The latter position (together with Zelensky’s remarks about developing nuclear weapons) they knew would provoke Russia into war.

The German President has every reason to be angry at this, given that he promised Zelensky before the war that if he rejected NATO membership the Russians wouldn’t attack.

The evident (at least 8 year long) intent of the USA and NATO to provoke Russia into an attack was confirmed by Biden’s intemperate admission (on his visit to Poland) that he wanted regime change in Moscow.

As Madeleine Albright (recently deceased) said in 1998:

“If we have to use force, it is because we are America! We are the indispensable nation. We stand tall. We see further into the future.”

According to recent polls, one-third of the American people were enthusiastic about the idea of nuclear war with Russia. Even though as one commentator pointed out most of them would be Democrat supporting inhabitants of major cities which would be nuclear bomb targets! After years of wall to wall Russophobic bigotry and lies about Ukraine blasted out by tech companies, politicians and the mainstream media this mad mass psychosis is no surprise.

David Sanger reported for the New York Times that the Biden administration

“seeks to help Ukraine lock Russia in a quagmire without inciting a broader conflict with a nuclear-armed adversary or cutting off potential paths to de-escalation … CIA officers are helping to ensure that crates of weapons are delivered into the hands of vetted (!!!) Ukrainian military units, according to American officials.”

In fact (as happened with US weapons provided to Syrian rebel forces) hundreds of tanks and anti tank weapons have found their way into the hands of the Russians as Ukrainian troops have defected, been killed or captured.

The Mindless Western and Ukrainian War Propaganda

Here are some examples of the blatantly distorted media and image war. A picture of an injured child from Damascus is used again as anti Russian propaganda in Ukraine:

Here a “heartbreaking” image of a Ukrainian soldier leaving his loved one to go to war turns out to be from fiction film “The War of Chimeras”.

 

The BBC broadcast on the World Service the news that somewhere called “Tarkov” was resisting the Russians. Pity it is a fictional city from a computer game!

A film of a rocket ostensibly shooting down a Russian aircraft also turned out to be a scene from a commercial film!

Russian Civilians Killed in East Ukraine Don’t Make News

This DONETSK bombing by Ukrainian troops which killed 20 civilians was not reported in the western media. The missile was one used only by Ukrainian forces. See this.

Indeed there is a report that a far greater crime had been intended with civilians drawn by false information to an Administration building with fake text messages.

The very next day, Monday March 14th, at about 12:20 in the afternoon, the ukrops (Ukrainian forces) launched a Tochka-U ballistic missile with a 1,000 pound anti-personnel cluster bomb warhead at the Administration building in the city center.

The Nazis sent text messages and posted on social media (under fake pro-DPR accounts) for mothers, wives and sisters of our soldiers to gather at the administration building at noon on Monday to get information about their men. THIS was the intended target of the missile. 

As many civilian women as possible. And it is not a rumour, I can confirm I have seen the text message myself sent to the daughter of one of my comrades. Our air defence intercepted the missile and prevented it from reaching the target, but some of the cluster bomb cassettes fell on University Avenue in downtown Donetsk (where the 20 civilians were killed).

Ukrainian War Crimes and Propaganda

As befits a regime headed by a comedian and actor, never has one side in a war used so many actors to fake scenes for propaganda purposes. The most common has been the use of actors to fake dead bodies. The most recent being claims related to areas where Russian troops have withdrawn since 30th March.  Here a “body” moves and after the car goes by, starts to get up.

A similar film was taken a couple of weeks ago ostensibly from a morgue where some 30 “bodies” were lined up. Unfortunately some of them moved while the filming was going on!

Ukrainian Psychopaths

But such fakes are nothing compared to the treatment by Ukrainian soldiers of captured Russians in an infamous video.

At the beginning of the video, we can see Ukrainian soldiers shooting newly arrived prisoners through their legs. Needless to say they are not treated. Shock could have killed them due to the pain. In the rest of the video Russian POWs lying on the ground with bullet wounds in their legs. Some of them have their legs broken. It takes psychopaths to film their own atrocities and then make it public. All of this was filmed by Ukrainian soldiers themselves.

Article 13 of the Third Geneva Convention states: “Prisoners of war must at all times be humanely treated.” Here Ukrainian soldiers call up the mothers and wives of soldiers they have killed, mocking them

Ukrainian Soldiers Film Themselves Calling Up Mothers of Russian Soldiers Killed in Action And Mocking Them

Ukrainian Soldiers Film Themselves Calling Up Mothers of Russian Soldiers Killed in Action And Mocking Them

 

 

 

Ukrainian soldier using the phone of a dead Russian soldier to call the Russian’s mother and make fun of her and her son.
Disgusting pic.twitter.com/hPS5d8GTPA

— Angelo Giuliano 🇮🇹 🇨🇭 (@Angelo4justice3) March 25, 2022

Crimes in the Donbass

“Tatyana accompanies me to the hospital. She has also lived in Volnovakha most of her life. “The Ukrainians deliberately destroyed us. They needed the land. And then, it seems, the land was no longer needed, so they just beat us out of anger,” she says, pointing to holes blown into the hospital by shells and shrapnel-scarred asphalt. Then she takes me to the morgue, a small building that has also been noticeably damaged by shooting. The door turns out to be unlocked, and I see the morgue is completely filled with dead bodies. They lie in the corridor stacked up in two or three layers.

According to Tatyana, the National Guard soldiers siphoned diesel fuel from the hospital’s generators, so all the old people who depended on artificial ventilation devices died. “

The Ukrainian military allegedly said they would “leave nothing” in Volnovakha if they were ousted by pro-Russian forces.

See this.

When Fox News’ Bret Baier asked President Zelensky on Friday about reports of Azov Battalion committing atrocities, Zelensky appeared to brush them off by saying, “They are what they are, they were defending our country.” Fox then censored their report!

See this.

The main reason why so many civilian buildings have been damaged and destroyed in Ukrainian towns is because Ukrainian soldiers have used those buildings and the civilians in and around them as human shields. Here is a report from Odessa which although not yet the centre of Russian operations its preparing for an attack. Ukrainian troops have apparently taken up positions in Schools and hospitals.

See this.

Odessa native (Lev Vershinin) living in exile in the EU wrote in this article in Russian:

• Nazi/Ukr-soldiers taking positions in schools, hospitals:
• school no.1 at Mikhailovskiy-Place 10
• school no. 57 at Yamchinkiy street 7
• school no. 59 at Maraslievskyy street 60
• medical centre/surgery at Sudostroitelnaya 1
• Odessa University clinic at Tenista st. 8
• maternity clinics no.1 and no.4
• evening school no.25 at Staroportofrankovskiy st 45a
• Marinskiy gymnasium at Lev-Tolstoy-st 9

Aidar-leader Maksim Marchenko in a document of 16/3/2022 ordered his troops to prevent civilians from leaving the city (apparently a document with his stamp & signature exists). This has been the norm which is why the humanitarian corridors offered by the Russians were for a long time a dangerous failure. Only the Ukrainians have the incentive to bottle up civilians as human shields in the cities to which they have retreated. They know the Russians don’t want to destroy such heritage but are forced to fire on buildings which protect Ukrainian gun positions. Would the British Government station guns in St Paul’s Cathedral?

Oles Yanchuk – former mayor of Odessa, now leader of Nazi-battalion “Bratstvo” – said about Odessa: the city will be destroyed (by us): “if they come to Odessa, they will receive it only burned down and destroyed.”

Other buildings used by Ukrainian troops have been a synagogue and the famous Pecherskaya Lavra monastery in Kiev. See this.

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First published on February 21, 2022

In recent developments  A UK magistrates’ court has announced a decision on the extradition of Julian Assange to the US. A definitive endorsement from the UK Home Secretary is expected to be released in mid-May.

Should Priti Patel move to extradite Assange, the WikiLeaks founder and publisher will face numerous counts of “criminal acts” in the US and will be subjected to torture while in detention. 

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Wikileaks founder Julian Assange is being made an example of by the US government to deter investigative journalists from exposing state abuses, the current UN Special Rapporteur on torture says.

Nearly 12 years ago Wikileaks published the Afghan War Diary, one of the biggest leaks in US military history. More documents would folliow, exposing state secrets and allowing journalists to scrutinise and hold politicians to account.

To avoid extradition to the States to face espionage charges, Wikileaks founder Julian Assange took refuge in the Ecuadorian embassy in London for seven years, before Ecuador turned him over to Britain in 2019. He is currently in Belmarsh Prison in south-east London.

Nils Melzer, the current UN Special Rapporteur on Torture initially declined to get involved in Assange’s case. But as he writes in his new book The Trial of Julian Assange, when he started to look closely at the facts he found Assange to be a victim of political persecution.

He first met Assange in May 2019 when he visited him with two medical specialists at Belmarsh, four weeks after he had been arrested. The team were there to investigate claims of torture.

When Assange name first crossed his desk, he says his reaction was visceral – he dismissed Assange as a rapist, a narcissist and a hacker, based on media reports of his case. Assange’s lawyers had contacted him in December 2018 when he was still in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London asking for intervention under the conditions of the Anti-Torture Convention as his living conditions were considered inhumane.

It was only after looking at the medical reports that he acted and looked deeper into the case.

“I didn’t know Mr Assange,” he told Saturday Morning. “I had never analysed the case and I was under the same impression that many others are still under today from those narratives that had been spread in the press for 10 years about him – being suspected of rape, being a coward hiding in the embassy, a self-centred narcissist. I had also sub-consciously absorbed this narrative.

“So, when his lawyers reached out to me as the mandated UN human rights expert I had been so affected by this narrative that I was unable to objectively look at the case. I initially declined to look at it.

“It was only when his lawyers came back three months later and said they were afraid they might be imminently expelled from the embassy and sent to the US on espionage charges that they sent along a couple of pieces of evidence, including some medical opinion by Dr Sandra Crosby, who’s not an Assange activist. She’s a well-known independent medical expert in the US who had visited Guantanamo… and had specialised in examining torture victims for all of her career. She had visited Assange and had come to the conclusion that his living conditions had indeed breached the Convention against torture.”

On 8 April 2019, he requested that the UK and Ecuadorian government freeze the situation until he could visit and carry out an investigation. On 11 April Assange was expelled from the embassy and taken into custody without due process.

“I might even have accelerated this process. I don’t know that for sure,” he says.

Melzer has no binding authority on governments and can only point out allegations of torture and make recommendations to governments, but he was surprised at the UK government’s lack of engagement with him over Assange.

The UN Human Rights Council has an expectation that governments co-operate with their mandate, but cannot compel acfion. The Assange cases highlighted its lack of teeth, he says.

“The reaction of the states in the Assange case actually prompted me to conduct a wider analysis of the effectiveness of my interventions more generally and indeed about nine of the 10 requests don’t receive adequate responses where you could actually resolve a case and provide protection to a person,” Melzer says.

Assange’s position has been widely misunderstood due to a media narrative that suggested Assange had voluntarily remained at the embassy. His position had been ridiculed as someone paranoid of being arrested, as well as being portrayed as a person hiding to avoid justice in the Swedish courts on rape charges, Melzer says.

However, Assange felt compelled to stay at the London Embassy due to threats of rights violations if he left, Melzer points out.

In December last year the High Court in London ruled he could be extradited to the US to face charges under the Espionage Act, after a judge accepted assurances authorities would take measures to reduce his risk of suicide and wouldn’t impose restrictive prison conditions on him.

He faces a sentence of up to 170 years in prison.

“Espionage Act has the advantage for the US that it does not allow any form of defence on the part of the accused,” Melzer says.

“As soon as the accused is proven to have disclosed classified information protected by the Espionage Act, then he’s basically to be convicted for espionage.

“So, then he can’t raise a defence of public interest for example, saying ‘well the information I disclosed is evidence for serious misconduct if not war crimes on the part of the authorities and therefore cannot be protected by secrecy.

“That’s a defence that’s not allowed under the Espionage Act and that’s the main reason why they would want to accuse him and prosecute him under that piece of legislation, because otherwise Julian Assange would clearly start unpacking the content of the information he disclosed and the fact that no one has ever been prosecuted for those very serious crimes, and that would clearly make it very difficult for the US to maintain a viable case.”

Contrary to the High Court judge’s interpretation there were no substantive assurances given that Assange would be treated humanely by the US, he says.

“They have promised that they would not detain Julian Assange in a very specific supermax prison in Florence, Colorado that was used in eventual hearings as an example of particularly harsh conditions. But the United States has dozens of other supermax prisons… they have not been excluded in those assurances.”

Assange faces up to 15 years in strict solitary confinement while his legal team fights for him to serve his time in Australia, if the Australia government accepts this arrangement, Melzer adds.

For Melzer there has been so much misinformation released about Assange and Wikileaks that it’s important to distinguish between facts and false narratives circulating in media.

The US has never proven that lives of military personnel were put under threat because of Wikileaks, he points out. Much of those false accusations serve to mask the true intent of the US government’s actions against Wikileaks.

“What was so dangerous is the methodology of Wikileaks,” Melzer says.

“It’s not the actual content of the actual information that has been disclosed, but the mechanism that has been developed – that was revolutionary.

“We’ve had before massive leaks, such as that of the Pentagon Papers, for example. But because there was no internet at the time there was a natural limit to the amount of information you could leak and make available to the public. Through the Wikileaks platform that allows whistleblowers to remain anonymous and at the same time leak millions of pages of secret information from all over the world.

“If that replicates, if that would proliferate as a model and a few years later you might have 20,000 Wikileaks for all over the world, well, that would be the end of the business model of governments based on secrecy and impunity.

“That’s what the US government and their allies are afraid of and they’re setting on example with the Assange’s case to deter others because the actual real-world damage created by those specific publications… there has been no evidence that there has been more than embarrassment for the US.”

Melzer accepts the need in liberal democracies to create protective space for negotiations and bilateral dialogue between states and institution, but cautions there is an important distinction between confidentiality and secrecy..

“Confidentiality does not remove the content of those discussions from legal oversight should there be any crime committed behind the vale of secrecy.”

He says there cannot be any justification for removing any part of governance for public oversight, at least through an intermediary like the judiciary.

Much has also been said about how irresponsible Wikileaks had been dumping millions of pages of diplomatic papers into the public domain without redaction or curation. Melzer points out Assange warned the US about the file dump and suggested co-operative ways of mitigating threats.

“Wikileaks actually went to great lengths ensuring that there was a proper redaction and risk reduction,’ he says.

“The publication of unredacted diplomatic cables for example was not something that came from Wikileaks as the first publisher, but was apparently two Guardian journalists who published a book and in that book they published the passwords that they had been given by Wikileaks to work on those unredacted files. Through that password those unredacted files that had been stored on the internet encrypted were made available to the public and only after that happened Wikileaks decided to also publish files unredacted.”

Assange has been in Belmarsh Prison for three years now, with reports of his mental health deteriorating. Melzer says when he visited him he did not expect to find torture.

“I expected to find someone who was stressed out, who had some medical problems,” he says.

“He immediately reminded me of political prisoners I had visited around the world… He also reminded me, from his behavioural pattern, his body language, that really reflected the findings of the doctors that he had been exposed to enormous psychological pressure.”

His answers to questions were unfocused, Melzer says.

There were signs of autism, something that has been mischaracterised by some as evidence of narcissistic tendencies.

“I do believe the diagnosis of Aspergers, a slight form of autism, is probably the most appropriate way to describe him – as someone who is extremely focused on his own thoughts and you have to verbalise what you want to know from him, otherwise he will go off in his own thoughts.”

Assange never fully sleeps and has constant thoughts of suicide, suffering several psychological breakdowns and a very deep depression, he says.

“When you look at psychological torture you have to look at how the identity or the stability of someone’s psyche has been affected by his isolation the constant pressure he’s been under, the constant threats he’s been under, the separation from positive influences – all of these factors are being used quite deliberately in psychological torture to break down someone’s mental resistance and confuse him.”

Melzer says his investigation was objective, neutral and impartial, but when he found out Assange was subject to torture and ill-treatment, his job has been to defend him and call on states to respect legal obligations.

Western democracies such as Sweden and the UK rejecting those obligations has frustrated Melzer. He says he’s been so outspoken about the case because of the way political interests have been allowed to neutralise the judiciary and legal process.

Assange’s case, he says, provides evidence of a wider systemic failure.

“They simply refused to engage in a dialogue with me or to even provide any counter evidence of why my interpretation of those facts would be wrong and that really is something that I would not expected.”

There is no sign US President Joe Biden will show leniency to Assange, with the Democratic Party still holding Assange responsibly for Hilary Clinton losing the 2017 election on Wikileaks’ release of internal party emails prior to the vote and Russian hacking. Melzer says that has been another highly-dubious narrative used to corner Assange.

“I’m not trying to defend Assange. I’m not his lawyer,” he says.

“I’m trying to defend human rights and the rule of law. If states have any crime that they can indict Julian Assange and have evidence, by all means he has to stand trial like everybody else. My problem simply is, if you look at the US indictment, 17 of those 18 points refer to receiving and disclosing classified national security information. Julian Assange is not American.

“He has no duty or allegiance to the Americans, no contractual obligations. He was not in the US during the release of this information. That’s what investigative journalists do. The information that he published was in large parts in the public interest.”

The eighteenth point refers to a hacking charge. However, Melzer says Assange actually only helped the source of the leaks, Chelsea Manning, cover her tracks to avoid detection. “It was not to get access to information or steal information, but to do source protection… which is something that journalists do all the time with their sources.”

The real purpose behind Assange’s imprisonment and trial is to deter journalists from exposing state crimes and intimidate them into not publishing material that challenges dominant political interests, he says.

“What exactly are we accusing Julian Assange of? Even the rape allegations were dropped by the Swedish authorities… because they had not even sufficient evidence to press charges… That’s why I came to the conclusion that the purpose here is not prosecution for any serious crime. It is to deter journalists from doing what he has done.”

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Featured image is from Lawyers for Assange