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.
With foresight, this carefully researched article by Dr Pascal Sacré was first published in August 2020, several months prior to the launching of the mRNA vaccine.
**
The COVID-19 vaccine…
Is this THE final goal of this crisis, to impose a compulsory vaccination on everyone, with a biometric health passport and without it, the impossibility to move, to buy, to eat?
The near future will tell.
With time, the accumulation of side effects, the testimonies of more and more doctors, vaccination has become a subject of controversy, often passionate, sometimes violent.
This is not just a question of being for or against vaccination in general.
It is about being vigilant in the face of enormous pressure from companies and governments to inject billions of healthy people with a hastily manufactured product, using immature technologies such as DNA manipulation, with as yet unknown side effects.
The cure should not be worse than the disease.
Given the fear, the terror in people’s minds, given the enthusiasm of certain leaders and given the power of the vaccine companies and manufacturers, will we, as ordinary citizens, be able to resist, keep our cool and prevent these people from playing with our health?
Do you know what the marketing of vaccines brings to the pharmaceutical companies?
References on the Statista website, figures for the year 2019 [1] :
GSK (GlaxoSmithKline): more than 8 billion euros.
Merck: €7.3 billion
Pfizer: €5.9 billion
Sanofi: €5.8 billion
Billions, in a single year!
Do you think that the conservation of such gains would not motivate the transgression of limits by sweeping away everything in its path, all scientific ethics, all moral values?
As Emma Kahn [2] stated to the AIMSIB (International Association for Scientific, Independent and Benevolent Medicine) website, May 3, 2020:
“Strangely enough, the three vaccines in clinical trials in the West (excluding China) against COVID-19 are being developed by start-ups and not by Big Pharma (the nickname of the pharmaceutical industry). Why haven’t the big companies (Merck, GSK, Sanofi, Pfizer) launched any clinical studies? A first reason is worrying: … industry experts already know that coronavirus vaccines are too risky, they induce facilitation and immunopathological phenomena. The phenomenon of facilitation of infection by antibodies” is crucial to understand.
Vaccines too risky!
Facilitation and immunopathological phenomena!
This is not conspiracy, nor the elucubrations of a quidam [dictionary]. It is published data, well known to scientists, virologists and published in many journals.
These facts are particularly relevant to the coronavirus family and SARS [3].
With vaccines,
“the biggest problem is the fear of an ADE (antibody dependant enhancement, facilitation of infection by the vaccine, mediated by antibodies induced by vaccination): facilitation of the penetration of the virus into cells by the receptor for the Fc fragment of immunoglobulins” [4].
On March 5, 2020, Peter Hotez [5] (vaccine expert) warned the U.S. Congress about the facilitation of antibody infection and its relationship to vaccination [6] :
“We must be very careful and go slowly with clinical trials, animal trials have shown facilitation”!
So Big Pharma is cautious. This confirms the credibility of this information.
Not only will this vaccine not protect you at all or not enough, but it can make things worse by facilitating your infection with COVID-19!
The phenomenon of facilitating viral infection by antibodies (ADE or antibody dependent enhancement) has been known for a long time and exists for many viruses.
Antibodies of this type have been demonstrated in vitro in the case of SARS-CoV-2 and candidate vaccines would only aggravate this immunopathological effect!
This is even more likely if we skip the steps.
Journalist Céline Deluzarche, in an article on Futura Sciences (Futura Santé) of March 19, 2020 reviewed on June 15, said :
“Coronavirus: the dangers of a hastily developed vaccine.
Faced with the urgency, scientists call for speeding up testing procedures and dispensing with the usual animal tests. A laudable strategy, but one that could prove to be at best counterproductive and at worst cause deaths” [7].
“Normally, it takes between 15 and 20 years to obtain an effective, non-toxic and usable vaccine. The first step is to develop a formulation with the chemical and pharmaceutical prerequisites, conduct immunogenicity studies [8] in animals, evaluate the toxicity of the vaccine [9] in animals, then in humans, and finally test its effectiveness on a large scale.”
Yet some people are putting pressure on, invoking urgency.
Why do they do that?
They exploit fear to get reach their goal. It’s never good to decide anything out of fear.
What dangerous game are these people playing?
The Europe Union (EU) in particular, and its new president, Ursula von der Leyen, after organising a world telethon to fund research for a vaccine [10], is trying to impose the idea that only a vaccine can save us.
“… in the face of urgency and pressure from governments and health authorities, some are calling for the procedures to be speeded up. The president of the European Commission Ursula von der Leyen said Tuesday that she hoped for a vaccine against the new coronavirus before the autumn.” [7].
One has the feeling that all this was planned in advance, when one knows that Brussels, today, has been working for a long time on a “vaccine” passport in order to put the population under total surveillance and control [11].
Is COVID-19 just a pretext for imposing totalitarian measures which would otherwise have been impossible to accept?
I ask the question.
We find Peter Hotez [5], who advises us to be very careful:
“A vaccine is not insignificant: it is most often a deactivated or weakened virus, and in some cases it can aggravate the disease it is supposed to prevent. Peter Hotez, dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine, who worked on the SARS outbreak in 2003, found that some vaccinated animals developed even more severe symptoms when exposed to the virus because of a weakened immune system. This is called “antibody-dependent enhancement (ADE)” [7].
The work and research on vaccines against CVDO 19 in Cambridge, Oxford, sponsored by the NIH (National Institute of Health in the United States, Anthony Fauci, Donald Trump’s anti-COVID czar) does not reassure me at all, and should not reassure you either [12]!
These same people are behind one of the worst vaccine and medical scandals of the last ten years by wanting already, in 2009-2010, to vaccinate the entire population for a fake pandemic (H1N1) [13-14-15].
A survey in France reports that nearly a quarter (25%) of the French population do not intend to accept the vaccine against COVID-19 [16].
I understand them and even find it surprising that this figure is not higher.
These vaccines are a race for profits [17], huge amounts of money!
Even independently of plausible and frightening ideas such as the association of the vaccine with GMOs [18], with a puçage and tracing of the population [19], the inherent danger of any vaccine and the specific danger of an anti-coronavirus vaccine (facilitation of viral infection by antibodies – ADE or antibody dependent enhancement) should make all citizens think about accepting such a measure without flinching!
Through the fear instilled by our mainstream media, fear maintained by the experts of our own governments, people would be ready to accept remedies as dangerous as they are ineffective.
Like Tony Carlucci says:
“While Covid-19 may be a true pathogen, evidence suggests it does not justify the overreactions we’ve seen around the world. Covid-19 hysteria has – by far – a far more devastating impact on humanity than the virus itself. In the midst of this hysteria, the greatest real threat to human health – a corrupt pharmaceutical industry and its partners in government – are on the verge of increasing both their profits at the expense of the public and their power over the public.” [20]
Citizens should no longer take everything they are told at face value, even, or even more so, if it comes from the official media or governments [21].
Their health, mental and physical, is at stake.
As for the vaccine, the mere fact that it can itself facilitate coronavirus infection and aggravate symptoms should put a stop to any craze for it.
The loss of time and money in the search for this vaccine prevents the population from turning to other, healthier and more realistic solutions:
Return to a healthy social lifestyle with an acceptable compromise between imposing targeted and limited quarantines (for really sick people and not just RT-PCR positive), and allowing the virus to circulate among those least at risk (healthy youth and adults) protected by their healthy immunity.
Give greater preference to effective NPIs (non-pharmaceutical measures) such as hand washing, physical distance and ventilation of confined spaces, rather than continuous mask wearing, which is more harmful than beneficial.
Allow front-line physicians to freely prescribe hydroxychloroquine and zinc early enough at the onset of symptoms of COVID-19 under medical supervision to minimize the well-known cardiac risks of HCQ.
Give priority again to the recovery of the economy, of social activity, because today, the solution against the problem of COVID is worse than the problem itself (by far).
Remember that we have immunity! Innate and cell specific immunity, not just antibody-mediated immunity! That the best allies of these immunities are our lifestyles (diet, physical activity, stress management, mental management). Everything should be done, today more than ever, to improve this.
To deal with the immense fear and post-traumatic stress that have been generated in recent months by the media and by our governments.
This fear alone makes us more vulnerable both to illness and to totalitarian abuses.
Provided that we wean ourselves from fear, lies and illusions, everyone can regain power over their health, their society and their lives.
Note to readers: please click on the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your mailing lists. Publish this article on your blog site, web forums, etc.
[19] Coronavirus, vaccin, implant et traçabilité, Medias-Presse.info, 18 April 2020. Bill Gates, through his Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the ID2020 project that he finances and the pharmaceutical industries in which he holds important shares, intends to take advantage of the coronavirus to impose an almost global vaccination and include an identification and traceability implant.
Christmas is observed December 25 by Christians and others celebrating the spirit of the season while for those of the Eastern Orthodox faith the holiday falls on January 7. It’s to honor the birth of Jesus Christ even though it’s widely acknowledged not to be his birthday.
Along with its religious significance, the season is also for other celebratory events like winter festivals, parties, family get-togethers and Kwanzaa from December 26 – January 1 for Africans Americans to reconnect to their cultural and historical heritage. Jews as well celebrate the season with the Hanukkah Festival of Lights. It’s to commemorate their struggle for survival, but for Jewish children it’s their Christmas with gifts from parents like their Christian friends get.
Christmas is also the time when the national obsession to shop and consume reaches its zenith. It traditionally begins the day after Thanksgiving, runs through Christmas eve, and after the holiday continues into January with plenty of extra buying power from holiday gift cards, year-end bonuses and other resources gotten or borrowed. It’s for everything people never knew they wanted until creative advertising wizardry made their lives incomplete without them.
Perhaps this single dominant trait characterizes American culture more than any other. It’s a variant of the kind of consumerism economist/sociologist Thorstein Veblen called “conspicuous” in his 1899 book “The Theory of the Leisure Class.” F. Scott Fitzgerald explained that “the very rich….are different from you and me.” Veblen wrote about their spending habits and coined the phrase “conspicuous consumption.” Today, it’s called “keeping up with the Joneses” or consumerism, and it’s practiced by status-seeking people obsessed with personal gratification. But not just by the rich. Most people, except the poor, do it and to excess.
The term “consumption” originated hundreds of years ago. Then, it referred to infectious tuberculosis or TB. But its original meaning is relevant in today’s acquisitive society where consuming for essentials is worlds apart from gluttonous consumerism. This variant refers to overindulgent shopping and spending for things people buy irrespective of need but not without consequences for themselves and society.
Untreated TB, or consumption, consumes its victims in a slow, painful death. Consumerism mimics it with it’s similarly harmful fallout: ecological destruction; unhealthy and unsafe consumer products; corporate empowerment; profits pursued over people; militarism and foreign wars; health, education and other essential needs neglected; and democratic decay in a corporatist state disdaining the public interest.
People take pride saying “when the going gets tough, the tough go shopping” – but not without consequences. The personal fallout is over-indebtedness millions can’t handle in the wake of unexpected medical emergencies or loss of employment. The toll: since the early 1980s one in seven families forced into bankruptcy, over 2 million in 2005 alone (30% above 2004), and millions more ahead from unchecked borrow and binge-spending made worse by the subprime crisis.
Overindulgent spending is what clinicians call an obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). At its worst, it’s pathologically characterized by obsessive, repetitive thoughts that need compulsive tasks and rituals to relieve. For addicted consumers, it’s an obsession to shop and spend and a compulsion to buy and accumulate. In excess, it’s clinically pathological and destructive when it causes bankruptcy.
In America and the West, tens of millions of otherwise normal people shop excessively for what they never knew they wanted until Madison Avenue mind manipulators convinced them. Economist Paul Baran described the process as making us “want what we don’t need (all unessential consumer goods and services) and not….what we do (good health care, education, clean air and water, safe food, and good government providing essential services).”
Future insolvency is risked, but few consider the possibility until it’s too late. It’s worst at Christmas when it becomes a pathological orgy of frenzied spending dismissively called getting into the holiday spirit. Maybe for merchants, but not when bills come due with growing millions unable to pay them or needing more debt to delay for later what they can’t handle now.
Institutionalized consumerism also plays into social control. It’s empowered when people are focused on bread and circus distractions that include the sights and sounds of the season. Media theorist Neil Postman once called Americans the most over-entertained and under-informed people in the world and wrote about it in books like “Amusing Ourselves to Death.” Attracted to self-gratification and its reinforcing images, they’re diverted from what matters most – challenging wars of aggression, loss of civil liberties and human rights, violations of law, gutted social services, environmental harm, and policies benefitting the privileged at the expense of beneficial social change.
Consumerism also lets corporate power prosper and grow. It feeds unfettered capitalism and out-of-control greed. It helps direct our tax dollars to a militarized state instead of going for essential social needs. It diverts the national wealth to an imperial juggernaut that consumers finance through overindulgence. The more we shop, the stronger it gets and is better able to exploit new markets, resources and cheap labor at the expense of the more expensive kind at home whose future consumption is endangered by today’s self-gratifying excesses.
Adam Smith was capitalism’s ideological godfather who was also concerned about concentrated wealth and wrote about it in “The Wealth of Nations.” He explained an “invisible hand” of unseen forces worked best in a free market with many small businesses competing locally against each other. He contrasted them with concentrated mercantilism and wrote about the “merchants and manufacturers” who used their power to wreak “dreadful misfortunes” and grave injustices on the vast majority of people using the British East India Company as a case study example.
Today’s monopoly capitalism would have been unimaginable in his day, but he’d recognize it. He wrote that throughout history we find the wreckage of the “vile maxim of the masters of mankind….All for ourselves and nothing for other people….unless government takes pains to prevent” this outcome. No invisible hand works in manipulated markets where governments sanction Smith’s “vile maxim,” and the greater good is nowhere in sight. Under neoliberal rules, capital wins, people lose, and consumerism makes things worse. It’s most extreme at Christmas when shopping trumps the holiday’s meaning and seasonal sights and sounds drown out everything else.
The toll is tragic. Whatever Christmas was, it no longer is, and our behavior corrupts it and the spirit of the man it honors. He spread it in deeds and teachings from his Sermon on the Mount and message to “turn the other cheek,” love thy neighbor, not kill, and do unto others as you’d want them doing to you. The consumerist ethic glorifies receiving, not giving; condoning predatory capitalism and ignoring its harm; neglecting the greater good; sanctifying overindulgence while forgetting those most in need throughout the year. In the spirit of the season, thoughts should be on helping others and giving thanks. In an unfettered marketplace, it’s impossible.
It’s a sad testimony to a society obsessed with greed and gratification at the expense of beneficial social change. At Christmas, it defiles the holiday spirit and forgets the needy. For them, Christmas is “Bah Humbug,” and Santa Scrooge – all take and no give.
New Year’s Day
New Year’s day is one week after Christmas and concludes the long holiday season. It starts after Thanksgiving, reaches a climax around Christmas, ebbs for a day and builds again for a final celebratory new year’s welcome with more overindulgent eating, drinking, partying, and binge-shopping for nonessentials.
The new year is also a traditional time for resolutions that include some with merit like losing weight, quitting smoking and getting fit. Most are forgotten, and those most important never made: working for peace, good will toward others, loving they neighbor, respecting everyone, and treating people as we want to be treated in a society of caring and sharing with equity and justice for all. Wouldn’t that be a wonderful resolution for the new year. Long ago in simpler times before the old world became America, it was that way. It can be again, but wishing won’t make it so.
Award winning author Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at [email protected].
He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG)
Of relevance to the ongoing US-NATO agenda directed against the Russian Federation:
The history of Nuclear Weapons dates back to World War II. The Manhattan Project was intended to “Subdue The Soviets” while the US and the USSR were allies.
***
Though remaining unmentioned in official texts, the origins of the dubiously titled Cold War can be traced to policies pursued by American leaders during World War II itself. Following Nazi Germany’s calamitous defeat at Stalingrad in early 1943, Washington’s ongoing construction of the atomic bomb was implemented with the Soviets in mind.
Three months before even the D-Day landings US General Leslie Groves, a virulent anti-communist, confirmed in March 1944 that the atomic bomb was being produced in order to “subdue the Soviets”, then an irreplaceable ally of the West.
Aged 46, Groves assumed charge of the US nuclear program in September 1942, and he proved a ruthless, crafty figure who possessed huge power in his new position. Groves in fact held control over every facet of America’s nuclear project, from the technical and scientific aspects, to areas of production and security, along with implementing plans as to where the bombs would be deployed.
Nagasaki bombing, 1945
Less than six weeks after the atomic attacks over Japan, on 15 September 1945 the Pentagon finalized a list: Through which it expounded strategies to annihilate 66 Soviet cities with 204 atomic bombs, to be executed through synchronized aerial assaults. This ratio averages at slightly more than three bombs discharged upon each city.
However, six atomic weapons apiece were categorized to obliterate 10 of the Soviets’ biggest urban centres, that is 60 bombs combined would be dropped over the following: Moscow (Russian capital), Leningrad, Novosibirsk, Kiev (Ukrainian capital), Kharkov, Koenigsberg, Riga (Latvian capital), Odessa, Ulan-Ude and Tashkent (Uzbekistan capital). This alone would have gone a long way towards destroying the Soviet Union.
Yet it was the mere beginning. Five atomic weapons each (35 altogether) were identified to liquidate another seven large cities in the USSR: Stalingrad, Sverdlovsk, Vilnius (Lithuanian capital), Lvov, Kazan, Voronezh and Nizhni Tagil.
Continuing, four bombs apiece (28 in total) were earmarked to desolate seven more significant urban areas: Gorki, Alma Ata, Tallinn (Estonian capital), Rostov-on-Don, Yaroslavl, Ivanovo, and Chimkent.
In addition, three atomic bombs each (36 combined) were marked down to eliminate 12 other notable cities, ranging from Tbilisi (Georgian capital) and Stalinsk to Vladivostok, Archangel and Dnepropetrovsk.
Of these 36 Soviet cities outlined to be blown up – requiring between three to six atomic bombs per city – 25 of them belong to Russia, while the remaining 11 cities stretch across the Ukraine, Georgia, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan. The process of annihilation was to be directed not simply against eastern Europe and Russia, but extending to Central Asia too.
All of the USSR’s remaining 30 cities were highlighted as needing either one or two atomic weapons each, split down the middle: 15 cities necessitating two bombs apiece and the other 15 designated for one bomb each. Among these are yet more countries and well known places such as Minsk (Belarusian capital), Brest Litovsk, Baku (Azerbaijan capital) and Murmansk. The devastation was once more to spread past eastern Europe, and beyond Russia itself as far as Turkmenistan, where oil and gas rich Neftedag was to be hit with one atomic weapon.
A few of the above cities that the Pentagon was aiming to destroy are located in nations that have since joined NATO, a US-led military organization – like those in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, whose capital cities were listed as requiring 15 atomic bombs combined. The city of Belostok, in now NATO state Poland, was to be struck with two atomic weapons. These programs, if followed through, would have resulted in many tens of millions of deaths, far exceeding the loss of life during the Second World War.
Moreover, in 1945 some of the aforementioned Soviet urban regions were already lying in ruins following years of Nazi occupation, such as Kharkov, Vilnius, Tallinn and Rostov-on-Don. US atomic attacks over these places would largely have been hitting wrecked buildings. The Soviet Union lost more than 25 million people to Hitler’s armies, and was still reeling internally at war’s end.
Three weeks before Groves was completing his atomic plans, a late August 1945 Gallup poll found that nearly 70% of Americans believed the atomic bomb’s creation was “a good thing”, with just 17% feeling it to be “a bad thing”. It can be surmised these opinions would have altered somewhat, had the public been aware of what was occurring in the corridors of power.
One can but look on aghast at the sheer devious and audacious nature pertaining to the proposed demolition of 66 cities, across land areas spanning thousands of miles. In an age before the Internet and convenient handheld technology, these in depth stratagems would have required months of toil. The schemes may well have begun formulation around the time of Groves’ March 1944 confession to nuclear physicist Joseph Rotblat.
Groves was a driving force behind the plan to eviscerate all Soviet industrial and military capacity, with key assistance coming from Major General Lauris Norstad. Yet high ranking soldiers cannot undertake operations at this level without approval emanating from elite political circles.
As a consequence of America’s nuclear programs dating to World War II, it is grossly and historically inaccurate to suggest that the self-styled Cold War began in 1947 – as likewise are the claims that the Russians were to blame for resumption of hostile attitudes and policies. The masses have been sorely misled on these issues for more than seven decades.
Despite its importance, virtually the entire Western mainstream press (and most alternative media) have continued ignoring the Pentagon’s 1945 plan to incinerate dozens of Soviet cities. In isolation amid commercial media the British Daily Star newspaper, on 8 January 2018, issued a report regarding US proposals “to completely wipe Russia off the map” with “a stockpile of 466 bombs”.
Nonetheless the 466 total was then not a realistic one, and such high bomb estimates were dismissed by Groves himself as “excessive”, in his top secret memorandum to Norstad on 26 September 1945. Groves also outlined in the same letter that, “It is not essential to get total destruction of a city in order to destroy its effectiveness. Hiroshima no longer exists as a city, even though the area of total destruction is considerably less than total”.
Relating to their nuclear designs, Groves and Norstad had a most serious problem before their eyes, and one that would infuriate them both; along with, as we shall see, president Harry Truman. In late 1945, the US military held just two atomic bombs, and thoughts of decimating the USSR at this point were that of a pipe dream.
Accumulation of the necessary weapons was painstakingly slow, even for the world’s wealthiest nation. By 30 June 1946, the stockpile of US atomic bombs had increased to nine. Come November 1947 the arsenal had risen to 13 bombs, still remarkably small.
Seven months previously on 3 April 1947, president Truman, who was privy to proposals in wiping out the USSR, was himself informed of just how diminutive the US nuclear stash was. Truman “was shocked” to learn they had just a dozen atomic weapons, as he presumed the Pentagon had amassed a far greater number. Such was the secrecy of America’s nuclear program, few enjoyed intimate knowledge of the facts.
That same year, 1947, Winston Churchill implored Styles Bridges, a Republican senator visiting London, that an atomic bomb be dropped on the Kremlin “wiping it out”, thereby rendering Russia “without direction” and “a very easy problem to handle”. Churchill was hoping that Bridges would persuade Truman to effectuate this action. During the recent past, Churchill had received a royal welcome at the Kremlin and enjoyed a feast with Stalin there in August 1942, before he returned to Moscow for further meetings in late 1944. Three years later Churchill wished for the Kremlin to be turned into dust.
Meanwhile by 30 June 1948, the US nuclear cache climbed to 50 atomic bombs, and from therein the figures rocketed – come summer 1949, the US military finally held ownership of over 200 atomic bombs, heralding the era of “nuclear plenty”. Groves was since removed from his post, and even more dangerous individuals like General Curtis LeMay became prominent in American nuclear war planning.
In October 1949, LeMay expanded the plans so as to include 104 Soviet urban zones to be destroyed with 220 bombs “in a single massive attack”, and another 72 held back for “a re-attack reserve”. The 292 bombs allocated were available by June 1950.
However, the preceding year in August 1949, the global balance had irrevocably shifted, as Soviet Russia successfully detonated an atomic weapon over a testing ground in north-eastern Kazakhstan. Soviet acquisition of the bomb before 1950 came as a nasty shock to Washington. It would prove a vital deterrent to American nuclear designs, with the Russians having little choice but to follow suit and earmark urban areas in the West, relating to their own nuclear war schemes.
America’s invention of the hydrogen bomb in late 1952, quickly followed by the Soviets, dramatically altered the scope and killing estimates of nuclear war. The humble atomic bomb it seems was no longer of sufficient yield, and underwent an “upgrading” as humanity took a leap towards self-destruction.
The new hydrogen weapon, or H-bomb, was hundreds of times more powerful than its atomic cousin, and by the late 1950s H-bombs were being produced en masse by the Pentagon. Come December 1960 – with the American arsenal now at a staggering 18,000 nuclear weapons – it was calculated that practically every citizen in the Soviet Union would be killed, either from the hydrogen bombs’ blast radius or through resulting fallout. As was known, much of the radioactive poisoning would likely be blown on the wind across Europe, further affecting Warsaw Pact states and NATO allies.
Since 1950, the People’s Republic of China was added to the US nuclear hit list, a country which then consisted of over half a billion people; more than twice that of the USSR’s populace; while the Chinese themselves did not obtain nuclear weapons until the mid-1960s. Communist China and her cities were categorized to be levelled in tandem with Soviet metropolises, bringing an overall predicted death toll to hundreds of millions.
Due to a combination of deterrence, mutually assured destruction (MAD), and hefty portions of luck, no such terrible programs were executed, during what has been described for over 70 years as the “Cold War”. Rather than a cold conflict, the post-1945 years were organized for humanity to witness the hottest war in human history.
Because of Soviet intelligence reports, Stalin knew as early as four years prior to Hiroshima that America was developing “a uranium bomb”. By confirming to the Russians they held a new weapon of unparalleled destructive might Washington would furthermore, as envisaged, hold greater influence in boardroom negotiations with the Soviets.
*
Note to readers: please click the share buttons below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.
Shane Quinn obtained an honors journalism degree. He is interested in writing primarily on foreign affairs, having been inspired by authors like Noam Chomsky. He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG).
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.
After only three months in office, a prophetic President John F. Kennedy was fully aware at the time of dark forces swirling around him and our nation, firmly entrenched in power and posing an alarming threat to the safety and well-being of both America’s last great leader as well as our democratic way of life:
“The very word ‘secrecy’ is repugnant in a free and open society; and we are as a people inherently and historically opposed to secret societies, to secret oaths and to secret proceedings. We decided long ago that the dangers of excessive and unwarranted concealment of pertinent facts far outweighed the dangers which are cited to justify it.
Even today, there is little value in opposing the threat of a closed society by imitating its arbitrary restrictions. Even today, there is little value in ensuring the survival of our nation if our traditions do not survive with it. And there is very grave danger that an announced need for increased security will be seized upon by those anxious to expand its meaning to the very limits of official censorship and concealment… Our way of life is under attack.
Those who make themselves our enemy are advancing around the globe… no war ever posed a greater threat to our security. If you are awaiting a finding of ‘clear and present danger,’ then I can only say that the danger has never been more clear and its presence has never been more imminent…
For we are opposed around the world by a monolithic and ruthless conspiracy that relies primarily on covert means for expanding its sphere of influence – on infiltration instead of invasion, on subversion instead of elections, on intimidation instead of free choice, on guerrillas by night instead of armies by day. It is a system which has conscripted vast human and material resources into the building of a tightly knit, highly efficient machine that combines military, diplomatic, intelligence, economic, scientific and political operations. Its preparations are concealed, not published. Its mistakes are buried, not headlined. Its dissenters are silenced, not praised. No expenditure is questioned, no rumor is printed, no secret is revealed.”
A huge part of humanity’s current problem that we are all facing today is the direct result of allowing this very same monolithic, invisible shadow government that Kennedy so accurately confronted way back in 1961 to infiltrate, infest and continue to grow over the next six decades as today’s international crime cabal currently and brazenly operating as the crystalized enemy of all humanity in 2021, insidiously wielding its unsatiated power and control over the citizenry of both the US constitutional republic as well as the entire world.
As a grave consequence, we’re all now paying an enormously heavy price for collectively failing to heed JFK’s foreboding warnings.
But Kennedy was far from the first US president to alert citizens about the paramount importance of protecting and safeguarding our precious yet vulnerable freedoms. In 1912, former President Theodore Roosevelt alluded to this same elusively dangerous enemy of the people:
Behind the ostensible government sits enthroned an invisible government owing no allegiance and acknowledging no responsibility to the people. To destroy this invisible government, to befoul the unholy alliance between corrupt business and corrupt politics is the first task of the statesmanship of the day.
In three months, it’ll be a full century ago that then New York City Mayor John F. Hylan astutely stated:
The real menace of our Republic is the invisible government, which like a giant octopus sprawls its slimy legs over our cities, states and nation… The little coterie of powerful internationalbankers virtually run the United States government for their own selfish purposes. They practically control both parties, … and control the majority of the newspapers and magazines in this country.
They use the columns of these papers to club into submission or drive out of office public officials who refuse to do the bidding of the powerful corrupt cliques which compose the invisible government. It operates under cover of a self-created screen [and] seizes our executive officers, legislative bodies, schools, courts, newspapers and every agency created for the public protection.
Apparently President Woodrow Wilson felt so despairingly duped by those same invisible powers-that-be after signing into law the infamous Federal Reserve Act of 1913 that handed America’s money supply over to the private Rothschild central banks:
[W]e have come to be one of the worst ruled, one of the most completely controlled and dominated, governments in the civilized world – no longer a government by free opinion, no longer a government by conviction and the vote of the majority, but a government by the opinion and the duress of small groups of dominant men…
Since I entered politics, I have chiefly had men’s views confided to me privately. Some of the biggest men in the United States, in the field of commerce and manufacture, are afraid of something.
They know that there is a power somewhere so organized, so subtle, so watchful, so interlocked, so complete, so pervasive, that they had better not speak above their breath when they speak in the condemnation of it.
The Federal Reserve
It was exactly 108 years ago on December 23rd, 1913, after the vast majority of Congress had already gone home for the holidays that the Federal Reserve Act was snuck through in the dead of night, passed into law by order of the notorious secret 1910 Jekyll Island conspiracy between Rothschild, Rockefeller and JP Morgan bankers conspiring the financial coup d’état enabling the central banking cartel to begin printing fiat currency out of thin air. Such unbridled monopolistic power over America’s money supply gained purely by cunning deception and manipulation is how the psychopathic elite has stolen ungodly trillions from the ill-informed public.
That same year in 1913 the Federal Income Tax Act was also fenagled through, unconstitutionally swindling Americans out of tax dollars to pay off past war debt interests of engineered bankers’ wars. American citizens get reamed paying debtor interest on money the banks never even possess. This fraudulently rigged scheme was referenced by industrialist Henry Ford:
It is well enough that people of the nation do not understand our banking and monetary system, for if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning.
Along those exact same lines, it was President George H.W. Bushwho admitted in 1992 to longtime White House reporter Sarah McClendon:
If the people ever find out what we have done, they would chase us down the street and lynch us.
Today’s Fake Coronavirus Pandemic
For centuries it’s been more than evident that a relative handful of elite bloodline controllers have been calling the shots on planet earth, engaging in systematic rape, pillage and wholesale slaughter of all life forms that include both humans as well as natural resources.
But with the puppet masters’ Wuhan China launch of their fake Coronavirus pandemic outbreak in late 2019, inducing worldwide panic throughout 2020 based upon calculated lie after lie, the initial first step of their long-premeditated depopulation plan was sufficiently complete.
With nonstop mandated lockdowns and enforced mask wearing pumping unrelenting 24/7 fear porn propaganda into the increasingly paranoid public throughout 2020, the US lifespan from 2019 to 2020 has recently been reported by mainstream media to have dropped by an unheard of near two years, the largest drop in 75 years since WWII.
Then starting with Trump’s “warp speed” vaccine delivery that to this day he so proudly brags about, Step 2 of the elite’s depopulation agenda is the genocidal bioweapon that after one year in operation, by December 2021 is plunging humanity off its first Dark Winter die-off cliff.
So much for the great big lie of “flattening the curve” in two weeks for a back-to-normal life, or the incessant lies of a totally “safe and effective” nonvaccine. Bottom line, the earth controllers have used Big Pharma to globally buy off nearly every major politician, governmental public health “expert” corporate media and tech giant to perpetrate what is on track to becoming the worst and first global genocide in human history.
Meanwhile, the real experts, frontline doctors, nurses, virologists, that at great risk to themselves, have been courageously informing, educating and alerting the public about the Coronavirus hoax and lethal danger posed by experimental non-vaccines have been targeted for pervasive censorship, harassment or worse.
At the same time, 2020’s total number of human deaths worldwide due to Covid-19 turns out to be little different than any of the preceding pre-Covid years, anecdotally backed up by honest, brave whistleblowing morticians like UK’s John O’Looney.
Additionally, the near constant number of flu deaths that regularly occur every year, in 2020 was conveniently falsely blamed on the Covid-19 virus, and, as a result, the preposterous supposition that 2020’s number of flu deaths was virtually zero logically proves the pure absurdity and flagrantly false exposure that the crime cabal has been scamming the global population with the Gates-Fauci pre-concocted and gain-of-function patented, never scientifically isolated nor proven, virtually harmless so-called virus with a 99.7% survival rate.
But the Gates Foundation, the WHO, the Rockefeller Foundation and its NWO creation the United Nations in lockstep with the World Economic Forum’s Great Reset are all smelling mass blood sacrifice and like predatory sharks are zeroing in on their long-awaited dream of one world governance.
To head them off at the pass, legal pushback has arrived in the form of a 46-page lawsuit charging guilty parties with the genocidal crime against humanity filed December 6, 2021 at the International Criminal Court. Stateside challenges opposing imposter puppet Biden’s vaccine mandates have also been cropping up recently with several federal court judges ruling against his unconstitutional dictates.
One year after the vaccine rollout in combination with 2021’s widespread death jab mandates causing millions around the globe, including hundreds of healthy young athletes, to suddenly keel over and die en masse droves, the human lifespan in 2021 is fast plummeting to a far lower age of death like never before, all by diabolical elitist design.
And in keeping with the nonstop consistent deception, the nonvaccinated have been singled out, falsely blamed and scapegoated for spreading the virus and increasing the hospitalizations and deaths, bogusly hyped to justify booster shots every few months due to the latest confabulated variant “waves” like delta and now omicron, known to be so mild that its mortality rate is zero. In the West apartheid governments with vaccine mandates and passports are pitting the vaccinated against the unvaccinated, criminalizing the death jab resistors many of whom in 2022 are slated for concentration camp incarceration. But organized resistance to tyranny is growing.
Yet with worldwide death rates surging in nations with highest vaccination – Israel, Gibraltar, Singapore, Denmark, UK and Netherlands among them, there’s no denying it’s the vaccinations that are currently wreaking the most havoc, killing millions of hypnotized, brainwashed normies dying from blood clots, heart attacks, strokes, cancer and compromised autoimmune deficiency not unlike Fauchi’s AIDS.
Meanwhile, all these same nations are busily cancelling Christmas, international flights and imposing rigid lockdowns and mask mandate orders again… so much for those “safe and effective” kill shots.
It is the courageous dissenters worldwide, billions of us refusing to bow down and roll over and die, who are holding the line through active and peaceful civil disobedience that will be the difference between either succumbing to or defeating the Satanic enemy forces of evil bent on our destruction.
But it’s of paramount importance to recognize that there will be no external savior to rescue us from apocalyptic doom and gloom other than the brave souls exercising their freewill together who will successfully outlast the criminal elite’s agenda for mass extermination and total enslavement. Having recently taken his booster shot, Trump has shown his true colors as a sold-out Big Pharma cheerleader, publicly touting that his deluded, rushed experimental vaccine rollout has “saved millions of lives,” while his refusal to stand up for medical freedom and sovereign liberty clearly smacks of betrayal toward his loyal political base. Offering his lukewarm, tacit approval against forced vaccination is weak at best.
Likewise, all those “hopium pushers” who’ve been so cocksure their hero will be coming back any day, week, month and now year, constantly moving their goalposts back after being dead wrong so many times, have also posed a grave disservice to both humanity and the world wary, fragile truth movement.
For way too many years, too many of the pied piping hopium influencers on the internet with thousands of followers have been promising the patriot millions to sit back, break out the popcorn, and passively “trust the plan bro,” as their inside “intel sources” keep assuring us that all those thousands of unsealed indictments against all those high profile US traitors are receiving their just desserts, compliments of the military white hats quietly holding the evil ones accountable for their ungodly sins at their Gitmo military tribunals and still secret executions.
The masses have been patiently, complacently, desperately waiting and waiting and waiting for any real solid evidence that never seems to quite come, that the good guys are finally moving in to save the day, restoring what’s left of our battered and tattered US constitutional republic from a tragic fate of total ruin, collapse and controlled demolition, to destroy America from within.
Our window of opportunity for taking assertive action is fast closing. At this point, we’ve reached the endgame and it appears there will be no savior to rescue us, not Trump, nor his so-called white hats, not even advanced benign ETs, nope, it’ll be up to us alone to band together in solidarity with God’s support and guidance to stand up to evil, fight to right the wrongs and preserve our divine human species from utter decimation as an AI controlled, robotic transhuman cyborg hybrid.
About the Author
Joachim Hagopian is a West Point graduate, former Army officer and author of “Don’t Let the Bastards Getcha Down,” exposing a faulty US military leadership system based on ticket punching up the seniority ladder, invariably weeding out the best and brightest, leaving mediocrity and order followers rising to the top as politician-bureaucrat generals designated to lose every modern US war by elite design. After the military, Joachim earned a master’s degree in Clinical Psychology and worked as a licensed therapist in the mental health field with abused youth and adolescents for more than a quarter century. In Los Angeles he found himself battling the largest county child protective services in the nation within America’s thoroughly broken and corrupt child welfare system.
The experience in both the military and child welfare system prepared him well as a researcher and independent journalist, exposing the evils of Big Pharma and how the Rockefeller controlled medical and psychiatric system inflict more harm than good, case in point the current diabolically lethal pandemic hoax and genocide. As an independent journalist for the last 8 years, Joachim has written hundreds of articles for many news sites, particularly Global Research and lewrockwell.com. As a published author of a 5-book volume series entitled Pedophilia& Empire: Satan, Sodomy & the Deep State, Joachim’s books and chapters are Amazon bestsellers in child advocacy and human rights categories. His A-Z sourcebook series fully documents and exposes the global pedophilia scourge and remains available for free at Joachim’s blogsite at http://empireexposed.blogspot.com/ and https://pedoempire.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).
To receive Global Research’s Daily Newsletter (selected articles), click here.
First published on December 5, 2021, updated December 18, 2021
***
The Event 201 simulation pertained to a coronavirus epidemic entitled nCoV-2019. It was held on October 18, 2019, less than 3 months before SARS-2 was “officially” identified in early January 2020. Among the 201 John Hopkins table top scenario “players” were key personalities holding advisory or senior positions in a number of core organizations. Less than 3 months later, these 201 “players” became actively involved in the policy response to the Covid-19 pandemic.
It is also worth noting that the WHO initially adopted a similar acronym (to designate the coronavirus) to that of the John Hopkins Pandemic Event 201 Exercise (nCoV-2019). “…The new virus was initially named 2019-nCoV by WHO.”
**
Incisive and carefully researched video comparing Simulation 201 to Covid pandemic 2020-21
“The following prominent individuals from global business, government, and public health were exercise players tasked with leading the policy response to a fictional outbreak scenario in the Event 201 pandemic tabletop exercise”
The entities directly or indirectly “represented” by the “players” included the WHO, John Hopkins, the Global Alliance on Vaccines and Immunization (GAVI) (Dr. Timothy Grant Evans), US Intelligence, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (Dr. Chris Elias), the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI) (Chairwoman Jane Halton), the World Economic Forum (WEF), the UN Foundation, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) (Stephen Redd), China’s Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) (Director Dr. George Fu Gao). Big Pharma (Adrian Thomas), the World Bank and Global Banking, the Airline and Hotel industries. For more details click here.
It is worth noting that China’s CDC Director Dr. George Fu Gao played a central role in overseeing the Covid-19 outbreak in Wuhan in early 2020, acting in close liaison with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, John Hopkins et al. George Fu Gao is an Oxford graduate with links to Big Pharma. He was also for several years a fellow of the Wellcome Trust.
Dr. Stephen Redd (CDC) played a key role in the 2009 H1N1 vaccination campaign in the US, which turned out to be fake.
***
Above text is an excerpt from Chapter I of Prof. Michel Chossudovsky‘s E-Book entitled
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 at @crg_globalresearch.
For the first time ever since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Kremlin has put its foot down. No NATO for Ukraine and Georgia. Period.
As I predicted would happen, the Kremlin’s acceptance over many years of insults and provocations encouraged more until Russia’s very existence became threatened. Now that the foot has come down, will Washington’s arrogance and hubris allow Washington to notice?
Not if the Russian media keep whining about unfair treatment of Russia, now denounced for allegedly not meeting its WTO commitments and threatened with being kicked out of the international monetary and payments system.
A great power doesn’t whine. It presents as a danger that other countries avoid antagonizing. But this has not been the Russian way. The Russian Foreign Ministry sports its good will and good intentions as if Washington cared. Washington does not.
Washington sees Russia as an obstacle to Washington’s power and hegemony. Washington’s only interest is to destabilize Russia. Washington is willing to negotiate as long as it is Russia’s surrender.
Have the Kremlin and Russian media noticed that Nuland, the Obama regime assistant secretary of state who oversaw the US overthrow of the elected Ukrainian government and installation of a Washington puppet hostile to Russia, has now been promoted to Undersecretary of State in the Biden regime?
Washington always promotes those who cause trouble for Russia and gets rid of those who do not. President Trump, who wanted to normalize relations with Russia, was confronted with three years of “Russiagate” and evicted from office in a stolen election. Trump was proposing to leave the US military/security complex without an enemy–an unforgivable offense.
I understand that Russia wants peace–so do I–but the way you get peace is to show that you do not accept insults and provocations, not that, as Lavrov always says, “we are willing to negotiate with our partners.” In Washington good will is regarded as a weakness. It encourages provocations that eventually go too far and result in war.
Lavrov should have said: “Russia doesn’t accept insults from enemies.” The only thing Washington wants to negotiate with Russia is Russia’s surrender. Washington’s terms are: Russia can be part of the West as long as it is a puppet state like France, Germany, UK, and all the rest.
Had Russia shown strength and dangerousness instead of good will, the West would have approached Russia asking to negotiate. Russia will not ever have meaningful negotiations with Washington until Washington fears Russia. A country whose top officials and media are always whining about being treated unfairly is a country that Washington will NEVER take seriously.
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.
Since the early 2000’s, drone use in warfare became more prominent in US military planning and engagement. Successive US presidents, particularly Barack Obama, promised that the use of all-seeing drones and precision bombs would reduce civilian casualties. However, documents unveiled by the New York Times show flawed intelligence, faulty targeting, years of civilian deaths, and perhaps most disturbingly, scant accountability.
The New York Times shockingly outlines various cases of civilians in the Middle East, including children, being killed by US drone strikes with no repercussions for the war crime. The cases they outline were drawn from a hidden Pentagon archive of American airstrikes in the Middle East since 2014, i.e., since the US campaign against ISIS began.
The trove of documents revealed that by the US military’s own assessments, there were more than 1,300 reports of civilian casualties by American airstrikes. The author of the article, Azmat Khan, said that the unveiled documents “lays bare how the air war has been marked by deeply flawed intelligence, rushed and often imprecise targeting, and the deaths of thousands of civilians, many of them children, a sharp contrast to the American government’s image of war waged by all-seeing drones and precision bombs.”
She added that “despite the Pentagon’s highly codified system for examining civilian casualties, pledges of transparency and accountability have given way to opacity and impunity.” Khan also explained how despite the 1,300 reports of civilian casualties, “only [in] a handful of cases were the assessments made public” and “not a single record provided includes a finding of wrongdoing or disciplinary action.”
Despite thousands of people devastated by reckless American airstrikes, including survivors being left with horrific disabilities and expensive medical bills, less than a dozen of condolence payments were made to victims. This is an unsurprising outcome considering that the efforts to identify root causes or lessons learned from intelligence failures are rare.
Obama called the strikes against ISIS as “the most precise air campaign in history” and lauded it as being more protective for troops and civilians alike. However, this belief was contradicted by Captain Bill Urban, the spokesman for the US Central Command. In responding to questions from The Times, he said that “even with the best technology in the world, mistakes do happen, whether based on incomplete information or misinterpretation of the information available.”
Although he claimed that the US tries to learn “from those mistakes”, “[…] works diligently to avoid such harm” and “investigate each credible instance,” the evidence proves otherwise as the hidden documents show civilians regularly as collateral victims.
The Times, as Khan says, “did what military officials admit they have not done: analyzed the casualty assessments in aggregate to discern patterns of failed intelligence, decision-making and execution.” The investigation found that although it is impossible to determine the full civilian death toll from US strikes, it is certainly far higher than the 1,417 victims that the Pentagon actually admits to.
The London-based newspaper found that many civilian casualties had been summarily discounted, on-the-ground reporting involving a sampling of credible cases were dismissed, and lessons rarely learned.
It is unsurprising that lessons were not learned when chat logs accompanying some assessments revealed that American soldiers treated drone strikes as if they were playing video games. In one recorded case, American soldiers expressed glee over getting to fire in an area ostensibly “poppin” with ISIS fighters — without spotting the children in their midst. By removing soldiers from the ground and putting them behind a computer monitor, it not only reduces on-the-ground intelligence, but also desensitizes soldiers to the social and familial effects that their criminal actions have on ordinary civilians.
Captain Urban attempts to downplay this desensitization by saying that drone operators often “do not have the luxury of time” and that “the fog of war can lead to decisions that tragically result in civilian harm.”
However, in another recorded case in Mosul in 2016, three civilians were killed in a US-approved strike because they had decided to save more-precise weapons for other imminent strikes. In fact, The Times analysis found that civilians were frequently killed in airstrikes that were planned well in advance. This makes a mockery of Captain Urban’s claims that there are “collateral scans”. Disturbingly, some of these “collateral scans” were found to be only 11 seconds long.
Such lazy intelligence gathering has resulted in schools, bakeries and hospitals in Syria and Iraq being hit by targeted strikes, especially after they were removed from the “no-strike” list. For all the benevolence that the US espouses, especially in its “humanitarian interventions” (as it advertises its occupations of Syria and Iraq), its use of drones is really something incredible – operators treating strikes like playing video games, thousands of innocent civilians (including children) being exterminated, and no recourse or responsibility to face.
Effectively no courts, no judges and no prosecution for some of the worst war crimes perpetrated in modern history.
*
Note to readers: Please click the share buttons above or below. Follow us on Instagram, @crg_globalresearch. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.
Paul Antonopoulos is an independent geopolitical analyst.
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.
An academic called Jonah Walters has recently published a couple of attacks on the political and economic model being worked out in Nicaragua under the country’s Sandinista government led by President Daniel Ortega. One attack published by the North American Congress on Latin America “Ortega’s Developmentalism Is Based on the “Popular Economy”—But What Does that Mean?” alleges that the unquestionable economic democratization of Nicaragua’s economy is in fact a mirage, in reality reinforcing neoliberal patterns of oligarchic and corporate economic power in Nicaragua. Another attack in New Left Review, “Ortega’s Synthesis” deploys a series of falsehoods to justify Walters’ argument that Nicaragua’s political and economic model is in crisis and unlikely to survive.
Both attacks follow the familiar pathological moebius strip logic Western psychological warfare always follows against target nations from Cuba to Syria or Iran to Venezuela. NATO country governments fund local opposition media and NGOs to generate falsehoods frequently based on deliberate terrorist provocations by opposition political activists. Those false opposition reports get recycled as fact by Western academics, media and NGOs which in turn generate reactions in international institutions. Those reactions are then taken up by the original local sources of the false reports to intensify their NATO country funded psychological warfare campaign both domestically and overseas. The process is endless.
In that context, Walters’ articles are simply one more example of the faithless deceit and self-deceit of the Western pseudo-progressive intellectual managerial classes in academia and non governmental organizations overwhelmingly funded by NATO country governments and multinational corporations. In relation to Nicaragua, this phony-progressive intellectual managerial class have used their media outlets and NGOs for over twenty years to attack the Sandinista Front, categorically siding with the country’s US government sponsored, right wing aligned political forces, most particularly the social democrat Sandinista Renewal Movement originally led by Sergio Ramirez and Dora Maria Tellez, supported by other leading ex-Sandinistas like Monica Baltodano.
When Rodolfo Walsh wrote, “History looks much like a piece of private property whose owners are the the owners of everything else” he prefigured the class role of media outlets like NACLA and the New Left Review. These and other apparently radical or progressive media report on international affairs essentially publishing neocolonial propaganda with a progressive flavor. As often as not, these outlets instruct the majority world on where they have gone wrong and admonish majority world governments and political movements for alleged human rights failings or for not being sufficiently progressive or revolutionary.
Walter’s two articles on Nicaragua follow that neocolonial template. His NACLA article concludes of President Ortega’s government that “having already heightened the rate of exploitation in key capitalist sectors to an unsustainable degree, it also lacked the popular influence to contain disruptive social conflicts any longer. This is the source of the Ortega administration’s deep and ongoing political crisis, which will not be easily overcome…”
Walter’s false, obfuscating conclusions betray the fact that he lacks even the first clue of the grass roots development of Nicaragua’s political and economic life since 1990. His perspective is dominated by the delusional views of the social democrat ex-Sandinistas who split from the Sandinista Front in 1994. That fact becomes even more self-evident when one reads Walters’ misleading and downright inaccurate misrepresentations of the 2018 crisis that he advances in his New Left Review article where he attributes as a cause of the crisis in 2018: “a proposed social security reform that would have increased personal and employer contributions while imposing a 5% reduction in benefits”
To the contrary, there was no proposed across the board 5% cut in workers and pensioners benefits. The full text of the proposed Social Security reform clearly defends workers and pensioners rights, seeking to extend to pensioners the same comprehensive health care enjoyed by active contributing workers financed by a modest 5% levy on retired people’s pensions. Walters derisory summary completely ignores the reality of the proposed measure which put the burden of the Social Security increase on employers, not workers. In fact, the government sought to protect the social security health system and increase social security coverage and benefits as a collective public good, proposing:
Gradually increasing the employer’s contribution by 3.25 percent
Increasing the employee’s contribution by 0.75 percent
Increasing the government’s contribution for public sector workers by 1.25 percent
Making people on high salaries pay social security contributions proportionate to their income
Taking 5% from retirees’ pensions to offer them the same health care as that of active workers
Maintaining the number of weekly contributions to qualify for a full pension at 750
Maintaining the reduced pension and the minimum pension for those eligible
Maintaining the Christmas bonus
Maintaining pensions’ value against the annual Central Bank sliding devaluation
Keeping all INSS clinics in the public system
Supporters of Nicaragua’s social democrat political opposition, like Jonah Walters, constantly conceal the fact that the employers organization COSEP argued for stripping away most of these rights, doubling the number of weekly contributions and privatizing the INSS clinics. Thus, Walters’ account of the Social Security issue in Nicaragua in April 2018 is downright mendacious. Any conscientious editor would have spotted that. Instead, throughout his New Left Review article Walters’ gets away with advancing one US funded opposition lie after another while deliberately omitting accounts contradicting his misrepresentations.
For example, Walters also falsely asserts in the New Left Review that “the Ortega government has unleashed the police on striking workers and underwritten settler violence in Nicaragua’s indigenous regions.” But Nicaragua’s police under the Sandinista governments in office since 2007 have never attacked striking workers and Walters offers no examples of such attacks. If he has in mind the fierce confrontations of 2018, then in fact the police were under constant savage attacks from heavily armed protestors, often under cover of otherwise supposedly peaceful demonstrations as verified by these interviews here , here and also here.
Similarly, Walters’ claim of some government role in violence against indigenous peoples is utterly false. Since 2014, when the miskito Yatama party led by ex-CIA agent Brooklyn Rivera lost elections for control of the regional government in Nicaragua’s Northern Caribbean Autonomous Region, foreign progressives have persistently repeated Yatama and other opposition propaganda claiming government inspired violence against indigenous peoples. But the reality of decisive government support for indigenous people’s rights and of opposition lies about that reality can be gauged here, here, here and here. Nicaragua’s government promotes and defends one the most advanced systems of indigenous peoples’ self-government in the world.
Walters continues his mendacious account of events in Nicaragua in 2018 asserting : “On Mother’s Day, hundreds of thousands marched to mourn the university students slain by state forces. Police responded by firing bullets into the crowd.” In fact that day there were two huge marches, one by the opposition, largely organized by the Catholic Church, and one in support of the government. In the incidents Walters refers to in Managua, 20 police officers and several Sandinista supporters suffered serious injury from opposition snipers including several fatal woundings, those events have been covered here, here and here. That same day, in La Trinidad, near Estelí, opposition gunmen attacked a Sandinista peace caravan wounding a total of 47 police officers and Sandinista supporters, one of them fatally, while another died later of his wounds. Of around 260 deaths throughout the 2018 crisis around a dozen were either university or secondary school students of whom a number were killed by opposition violence.
These examples of Walters’ mendacity in his New Left Review article lead us back to the false conclusions he draws in his NACLA article. Walters’ key argument attacking Nicaragua’s revolutionary economic democratization is that government policies promoting the popular, cooperative and associative economy in fact foment a kind of “neoliberalism from below”. But applying that formulation in Nicaragua is ridiculous and crass, given that Nicaragua’s Sandinista Front has resolutely defended its historic 1969 revolutionary program for over fifty years. President Ortega’s government has delivered universal free health care, free education from pre-school to university including free vocational technical training, food security, land reform, accesible housing as well as having among the most advanced policies on gender equality and indigenous peoples rights in all the Americas.
Walters consistently betrays his comprehensive ignorance of Nicaragua’s reality and recent history, arguing for example, that leading Sandinista Orlando Nuñez Soto in the 1990s proposed a strategy for socialist transition, “which emphasized cooperative enterprise over political confrontation with neoliberalism”. But this too is simply untrue. On the contrary, what the Sandinista Front leadership, including Orlando Nuñez, proposed was that peasants and workers in the countryside and in the cities should organize to defend the properties they had seized after decades of struggle.
Between 1990 and 2006 Nicaragua witnessed fierce battles of the country’s popular sectors against neoliberalism, in defence of the revolutionary achievements of the 1980’s, against moves to privatize public services like water, and supporting the defence of the country’s universities’ statutory share of 6% of the nation’s budget, among many other examples of vigorous protests and determined civic action. Just as everywhere else in Latin America, Nicaragua during neoliberalism was a theatre of bitter social struggle, with the Sandinista Front both in its midst and at its head. The popular movement in post-1990 Nicaragua made key advances compared with other popular movements in the region.
Nicaragua had a mass radical political party, the largest in the country. It had decades of revolutionary experience with thousands of professionals from the popular sectors that had completed their university studies in the 1980’s. Above all, it could face a neoliberal state whose security forces had not been educated and trained to attack workers and peasants. This is why no massacres took place during that period in Nicaragua, despite repeated efforts by the US backed neoliberal administrations to get Nicaragua’s national police and army to use their firearms to shoot protestors.
Immediately after the electoral defeat of 1990, Comandante Daniel Ortega said that from then on the FSLN would “rule from below”, meaning an open political confrontation with neoliberalism. He also affirmed that the FSLN would return to power by popular vote, not by violence, convinced that Nicaragua’s people would inevitably hold the neoliberal US owned administrations accountable for the chaos and suffering caused by their policies. Daniel Ortega was proven right then and now, 30 years later, Nicaragua’s people have once more ratified their faith both in his leadership and in the Sandinista Front in the country’s first ever elections free of US and allied interference.
The country’s popular, family, cooperative and associative economy has pulled Nicaragua politically, economically and socially intact through the crisis of 2018 and the severely damaging effects of the global economic measures taken to address Covid-19. As a result Nicaragua’s economic growth in 2021 will be over 9% with conservative projections of between 4% and 5% for 2022. That reality makes nonsense of Walters assertion that the country has been undergoing a political crisis driven by economic contradictions. He pretends against all the facts that Nicaragua has experienced some kind of broad based popular resistance to the government’ economic policies.
The very opposite is true. Through 2018 and 2019 Nicaragua’s Sandinista government defeated a desperate, concerted attack by the country’s financial, business and media oligarchy allied with US funded opposition organizations with practically no popular base. Only the now widely despised and discredited reactionary Catholic Church hierarchy was able to mobilize truly mass support for demonstrations during April and May 2018. In June the general population reacted against the criminal repression they were suffering at the hands of the thugs and delinquents extorting, assaulting and killing people on the orders of the coup organizers. By mid July, the attempted coup was over.
Via the coup attempt they organized, the country’s US backed oligarchy – epitomized by the Chamorro family – sought to reverse the revolutionary economic democratization carried out under President Daniel Ortega since January 2007. Devoid of genuine popular support, they had to rely on criminal gangs like those organized by Felix Maradiaga in Managua that burned down the Managua central office of the country’s most important savings and loan cooperative CARUNA. Or the gangs supplied and paid by Dora Maria Tellez in Masaya that burned down a large part of Masaya’s popular market area.
This is the political and economic reality of the failed coup attempt in Nicaragua in 2018 which opposition apologists like Jonah Walters try to cover up in everything they write. Meanwhile in North America and Europe, the self same phony progressives and radicals attacking Nicaragua’s revolutionary Sandinista government policies have proven incapable of defending even the most basic rights of their peoples. They have twice failed to prevent massive transfers of wealth to the ruling elites in North America and Europe, first during the crisis of 2008-2009 and again in 2020. Instead, most recently, they have colluded in the the most reactionary State and corporate abuse of public health pretexts to reset their economies and remake their societies in an anti-democratic, anti-humanitarian corporate mould.
Nor have they been able to mobilize effectively to protest against their NATO country governments’ repeated overseas aggression targeting the majority world’s peoples about whom all those neocolonial progressives and radicals claim to care about so much. In Nicaragua’s case, the country’s people have many challenges ahead to meet and overcome. They are doing so with pride and confidence in their own abilities and justified optimism that their Sandinista government will help them realize their country’s sovereign potential. And they will do so together with the peoples of Bolivia, Cuba and Venezuela and the rest of the region to defeat continuing attempts from North American and European elites and governments and their class allies to dominate them.
Stephen Sefton, author and renowned political analyst based in northern Nicaragua, actively involved in community development work focussing on education and health care.
He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG)
*
Note to readers: Please click the share buttons above or below. Follow us on Instagram, @crg_globalresearch. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.
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.
If anything, Washington’s neoconservatives have an unerring instinct for survival. Having brought about multiple disasters in the two decades since 9/11—from the Iraq War to the twin debacles in Libya and Syria—the neoconservatives seem to have perfected the art of failing up.
Harvard University’s Stephen Walt once quipped that “Being a Neocon Means Never Having to Say You’re Sorry.” And in this regard, the story of the Kagan family is instructive. Robert Kagan, a contributing columnist for the Washington Post, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, and author of pseudohistories such as The Jungle Grows Back, has for years been a leading advocate of American militarism.
His brother, Frederick, is a resident scholar at the neoconservative American Enterprise Institute. Writing in the Hill on December 7, Frederick Kagan claimed that Russian control of Ukraine, “would create an existential threat to Poland and even to Romania—one that could be met only by major deployments of U.S. and European ground and air forces to what could become a new Iron Curtain.” He and his wife, Kimberly, who heads the Institute for the Study of War—another pro-war Washington think tank—were close advisers to the disgraced General and former CIA Director David Petraeus. Indeed, both Frederick and his wife are frequently cited as the brains behind the surge strategy pursued by George W. Bush’s administration in 2007-2008.
But the most powerful member of the Kagan clan is Victoria Nuland, who is the wife of Robert and is the U.S. undersecretary of state for political affairs. Under Obama, Nuland served as the State Department spokesperson, a position for which she was manifestly overqualified (and that becomes especially clear if one takes the qualifications of the current spokesman into consideration), before assuming the role of the assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs. It was in this role that Nuland helped orchestrate the overthrow of a democratically elected president of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych, in February 2014 that led to a civil war in Ukraine, in which more than 13,000 people have died, according to the United Nations.
Part of the reason the U.S. is at grave risk of a war with Russia—and there is precious little debate about the policies that have brought us to this point—is that foreign policy in Washington is conducted by a virtually closed circle.
And that circle is dominated by people like the Kagans.
Washington’s legacy media organizations play their part in perpetuating these foreign policies as well by functioning as the permanent bureaucracy’s echo chamber. For proof, look no further than the Washington Post editorial page, which from the very start of the Ukraine crisis has been cavalierly dismissing calls for diplomacy and engagement and, instead, has been calling for outright war.
An example of this is the Washington Post view published on their editorial page on August 21, 2014:
“…it is tempting to look for a cease-fire or some kind of time out that would lead to a period of diplomatic negotiation. But what would a pause and diplomacy accomplish? Any negotiations that leave this blight festering in Ukraine must be avoided. The only acceptable solution is for Mr. Putin’s aggression to be reversed.”
As Jacob Heilbrunn, the editor of the National Interest, and I
at the time, “Almost as bad as the callousness on display is the lack of candor. At no point did the [Washington] Post actually explain how it would propose to go about reversing Putin’s aggression.”
This remains the case even today. At no point do the armchair warriors braying for war with Russia over Ukraine discuss how such a “reversal” might be carried out, or, even more tellingly, what the odds might be of a successful outcome of a war between the U.S. and Russia.
Not much has changed since the start of the Ukrainian crisis nearly eight years ago. Consider for a moment the testimony on “Update on U.S.-Russia Policy” by Nuland made before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee (SFRC) on December 7.
“We don’t know whether Russian President [Vladimir] Putin has made a decision to attack Ukraine or overthrow its government but we do know he is building the capacity to do so. Much of this comes right out of Putin’s 2014 playbook but this time, it is on a much larger and more lethal scale. So despite our uncertainty about exact intentions and timing, we must prepare for all contingencies, even as we push Russia to reverse course.”
Nuland went on to note that the U.S. government has given $2.4 billion to Ukraine since 2014 “in security assistance,” which included $450 million that was given in 2021 alone.
What, one wonders, has been the United States’ return on this massive investment?
SFRC Chairman Bob Menendez, who, in 2015, was indicted on federal corruption charges, seems to be under the impression that Russians do not have the overwhelming military advantage on their own border. Likewise, Senator Ben Cardin (D-MD) intoned that a Russian invasion of Ukraine would “require us [the U.S.] to escalate.”
Nuland on “what measures are being considered by the administration to counter Russian aggression,” while Senator Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH) indicated
that during her conversations with members of parliament (MP) from Estonia, they spoke about the importance of “European unity with respect to Ukraine.” Also, the MPs from Estonia along with Poland and other Eastern European countries expressed anxiousness about “whether or not to station more troops in the Baltic nations,” Senator Shaheen said.
The most astute comment of the day came from Senator Ron Johnson (R-WI), who was clearly proud that the committee had achieved a rare bipartisan agreement for a change. He further emphasized that the U.S. stands “united” in support of Ukraine and against Russia.
And Johnson was absolutely correct: The committee was completely united in its desire for conflict over Ukraine, with whom the U.S. has no treaty obligations whatsoever.
Indeed, both Nuland and the SFRC seem to see U.S. national interests where none exist. More worrying still, they seem to possess a kind of blind faith in America’s ability, indeed duty, to shape outcomes of conflicts that are taking place thousands of miles from our shores through a combination of sanctions and military threats.
The SFRC hearing showed, if nothing else, that American foreign policy is held hostage by a venal, avaricious and, above all, reckless claque of elites: From the members of the SFRC to the high U.S. government officials who testify before them; from the staffers who brief them to the scholars and policy hands on whom the staffers rely; right down to the reporters and journalists who uncritically regurgitate what they are told by their ‘anonymous’ administration sources.
As such, one of the most urgent questions before us is: How do Americans of good conscience finally break their stranglehold on power before it’s too late?
*
Note to readers: Please click the share buttons above or below. Follow us on Instagram, @crg_globalresearch. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.
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.
Israeli authorities yesterday demolished the homes of the Palestinian Bedouin village of Al-Araqeeb in the southern Negev region, for the 196th time since the year 2000.
The demolition of the tents sheltering Al-Araqeeb’s residents during the winter storm came less than a month after the village was last levelled on 24 November.
This is the 14th time that the Israeli authorities have demolished the tents in Al-Araqeeb since the start of the year.
The village was first levelled in July 2010, and every time the residents of Al-Araqeeb rebuild their tents and small homes, occupation forces return to raze them, sometimes several times in a month.
Located in the Negev (Naqab) desert, the village is one of 51 “unrecognised” Arab villages in the area and is constantly targeted for demolition ahead of plans to Judaise the Negev by building homes for new Jewish communities. Israeli bulldozers, which Bedouins are charged for, demolish everything, from the trees to the water tanks, but Bedouin residents have tried to rebuild it every time.
Bedouin in the Negev must abide by the same laws as Jewish Israeli citizens. They pay taxes but do not enjoy the same rights and services as Jews in Israel and the state has repeatedly refused to connect the towns to the national grid, water supplies, and other vital amenities.
*
Note to readers: Please click the share buttons above or below. Follow us on Instagram, @crg_globalresearch. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.
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.
Russian President Vladimir Putin expressed Moscow’s great concern over the deployment of the US Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Systems near Russian borders, including their possible location in Ukraine.
“We are highly concerned over the deployment of the US ABM systems near Russian [borders],” the head of state noted at the expanded meeting of the Defense Ministry Board on Tuesday.
According to Putin, “if this infrastructure advances, if the US and NATO missile systems appear in Ukraine, then their flight time to Moscow will be reduced to 7-10 minutes, and speaking about hypersonic weapons – to 5 minutes.”
“For us, this is a serious hurdle, a challenge to our security,” the Russian leader noted.
“The buildup of US and NATO forces directly at the Russian borders, as well as holding large-scale drills, including unplanned ones, causes serious concern,” Putin pointed out.
The United States and its allies need to understand that Russia simply “has nowhere to retreat” if its weapons appear in Ukraine, Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Tuesday at an expanded meeting of the Defense Ministry board.
“They [the US] simply do what they want. But what they are doing on the territory of Ukraine now, or trying to do and going to do – this is not thousands of kilometers away from our national border. This is at the doorstep of our home. They must understand that we simply have nowhere to retreat further,” Putin said.
*
“Do they think we don’t see these threats? Or do they think that we are so weak-willed to simply look blanky at the threats posed to Russia? [Good question] That is the problem: we simply have nowhere to move further, that’s the question,” Putin said.
Standard Missile 3 of the sort currently deployed in Romania and soon in Poland.
*
Note to readers: Please click the share buttons above or below. Follow us on Instagram, @crg_globalresearch. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.
Rick Rozoff, renowned author and geopolitical analyst, actively involved in opposing war, militarism and interventionism for over fifty years. He manages the Anti-Bellum and For peace, against war website
He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG).
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.
Both are alleging without providing a speck of evidence that 97% of Covid cases/hospitalizations/deaths are the unvaccinated. This is a total lie.
Information from every country shows that it is the vaccinated who are suffering injuries and deaths.
The “Omicron variant” is being used to create a new wave of public fear and government control over civil liberties and citizens’ bodies–essentially rape with a needle–despite the known fact that the variant is rarely harmful. Hospitals are falsely reported to be full of Omicron patients.
The presstitute media stresses that the more or less harmless variant is highly contagious, and are creating fear out of the ease of catching it. People are urged to protect themselves by taking the jab even though it is a known fact that the Omicron variant is immune to the “vaccine.”
Acquaint yourself with the facts:
In Scotland for August to November 2021 over 85% of deaths were in the vaccinated. Boosters are merely boosting COVID infections. Some 40,000 deaths have occurred in the USA, UK and EU following vaccination but Omicron is mild. The UK Government has manipulated the data to blame the unvaccinated but the vaccinated are at greatest risk.
It was clear from the first cases in South Africa and now in the UK and EU that the new Omicron variant of the coronavirus results in mild disease and very few deaths [not from Covid but] “with COVID”. Indeed South African experts have advised stopping stop-and -trace and quarantining because most of the infected have no symptoms.
More evidence of the failure of vaccines in the face of new infections comes from the USA where one of the largest US outbreaks of the new Omicron variant to date is believed to have occurred at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, where almost all 930 cases over the past week are believed to be of the variant.
All of the confirmed Omicron cases in the Cornell University case are among people who are fully vaccinated, and some of them are in people who’ve also had the booster.
The booster is of course more of the same in the hope that the third dose will do what the first two doses were supposed to do! And the new variant, “omicron”?
Most of the Omicron cases in the United States have been among the vaccinated, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said in an update on Friday 10/12/21. Most patients have experienced mild symptoms.
When the media of the entire Western World lends itself to blatant lies in order to boost Big Pharma profits, enhance governments’ destruction of civil liberty, suppress dissent, and perhaps facilitate a depopulation agenda, the Western World is lost. It is the corrupt Western media that has conspired with governments to destroy freedom and nazify the Western World to the point that Australia has concentration camps for the unvaccinated and Germany and Austria intend to imprison the unvaccinated–all of this for a “vaccine” that all evidence proves beyond any question does not protect against a virus, a virus moreover that has a very low death rate and is easily cured and prevented with HCQ and Ivermectin.
Western peoples need to understand that their enemies are not Russia and China but their own governments and their own “public health” officials. It is these people who are the enemies of mankind.
*
Note to readers: Please click the share buttons above or below. Follow us on Instagram, @crg_globalresearch. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.
Dr. Paul Craig Roberts writes on his blog site, PCR Institute for Political Economy, where this article was originally published. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.
All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the “Translate Website” drop down menu on the top banner of our home page (Desktop version).
To receive Global Research’s Daily Newsletter (selected articles), click here.
News of the deployment of National Guard troops to an unspecified location in the Horn of Africa is an indication that US interference in the region will continue.
The dominant corporate and state media have reported for months that Addis Ababa, the capital of Ethiopia, will soon fall to the Tigrayan People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), a treasonous splinter of the Ethiopian National Defense Forces (ENDF) that started a civil war by attacking an Ethiopian federal army base on November 3, 2020. However, the dominant press have of late been unable to deny that the ENDF has retaken cities, towns, and territory in the Amhara and Afar Regional States, both of which border the Tigray Regional State.
The TPLF is a longstanding ally of the US, which supported its brutal 27-year, minority rule in exchange for its army’s service to the US agenda on the African continent. Its proponents have stridently called for US military action to stop what they call genocide in Tigray, even though UN and Ethiopian Human Rights Commission investigators concluded that there is no genocide taking place.
AG: Ann Fitz-Gerald, news came out this week that a thousand National Guardsmen from Virginia and Kentucky are deploying to Ft. Bliss, Texas now to train for deployment to the Horn of Africa at the turn of the year.
Nearly half the troops in Afghanistan and Iraq were National Guardsmen, so that’s nothing new. But what do you think of this escalation of boots on the ground? Especially to a region as increasingly volatile as the Horn?
AF: It’s not totally clear what these troops have been deployed for. A press release stated that it was to support safety and stability in the region. The statement said the objective is to provide security for the forward operating bases maintained by the Department of Defense, to build partnerships with host nations, and to improve safety and stability in the region.
The National Guard is a unique element of the military, with a direct line of command both to the state governor and the federal authorities. But they respond to domestic emergencies and overseas combat missions, counter drug efforts, reconstruction missions, and more. Sometimes the National Guards, which are often called “paramilitary forces” in other countries, are more effective than the regular military units in supporting things like domestic emergencies such as crowd control, disaster management, and community defense and resilience.
In this case, the deployment may be for contingency purposes, augmentation purposes. Should the military contingency force, known as CJTF—the Horn of Africa Combined Joint Task Forces— be deployed, maybe the National Guard troops would provide security to this and other forward operating bases and/or be used for other augmentation purposes, not only in the case where the main force would become deployed, but also for the purposes of drawing on wider competencies of the Guards, which are more oriented to domestic crises like civil unrest and natural disasters.
One may argue that it’s quite surprising with troops returning home from Iraq and Afghanistan, and the drawdowns in those theaters of operations, that the government would draw on the National Guard to deploy overseas. On the other hand, the National Guard could arguably cover a wider range of missions. We are dealing these days with wider security threats. So maybe the US government is looking for that wider flexibility and agility in support of its ongoing operations on the continent.
AG: It seemed for a moment that you might be saying the National Guard does especially nice things. But this is alarming, to say the least, to Ethiopians who’ve expected the US to start drone bombing, or invade in some other way, for the past year.
AF: That’s what the risk always is when the directives come across as very general or slightly unclear, and when there is a crisis in the region as well. It is easy to jump to conclusions and make assumptions.
And I am sure that constituencies in the US might also be alarmed by the costs of losing domestic support in states like Virginia to overseas missions. They might ask whether that’s the best use of the National Guard while we’re still in the COVID crisis and facing climate calamities like wildfires, hurricanes, and rising sea levels.
Others may assume that the US is scaling up its military operations in the Horn of Africa so as to take military action in Ethiopia, but I would encourage people not to jump to conclusions. This may be part of a wider vision that the US government has for its military footprint in Africa, not just in the Horn.
The US recently announced, back in March 2021, a new direction for national security that was intricately tied to the US’s economic interests at home and overseas. So it may be part and parcel of a wider mission, all of which would involve a more deeply embedded footprint in the Horn of Africa.
AG: I can’t say I find that reassuring.
AF: Well, it may also relate to the US Embassy in Addis Ababa encouraging US nationals to get out of the country as soon as they can and suggesting that they might need help.
In addition to that, there are more regional issues such as the recent coup in Sudan. The US military still has a dominant presence in the Sudanese government. We also see election uncertainty and unrest in Somalia.
AG: Do you think there’s any good reason for the US military to be in Africa and/or any benefit for the African people?
AF: Well, we’ve been talking for a long time now about African solutions to African challenges and a wider role to be taken on the by the African Union. And not just the African Union, but the continent’s regional economic mechanisms and regional economic communities.
The US Department of Defense was in the past focused on the potential for mass migration to Europe and North America. Another concern is keeping shipping routes and waterways protected and open.
AG: Today California 30th District Congressman Brad Sherman suggested blocking trade going in and out of Ethiopia and Eritrea through the Red Sea and the Gulf of Oman. With a Chinese base as well as a US base in Djibouti, that could cause a greater logjam than that cargo ship that got stuck in the Suez Canal earlier this year.
AF: I agree that doesn’t sound wise. Are Americans really served by a wider US military footprint than the one we have already seen on the African continent? During a time when the number of African standby forces across the continent has increased? When there have been efforts to develop a collaborative arrangement between the UN and the African Union (AU) to support African peacekeeping missions? One would think this US presence should now be scaled down to let Africans solve their own problems.
AG: Lots of people on the African continent, and those who are critical of US and Western policy in Africa, think that elite Western interests are just there to dominate, exploit, and indebt them, and steal their natural resources. Do you think they are honestly there for anything else?
AF: They are there to protect US foreign policy interests and US national security interests. It should also be noted that earlier on this year, the US announced new plans for their national security strategy to be indistinguishable from their plans for a new economic strategy.
That economic strategy has implications for building back better at home in the US vis a vis its overseas economic interests. So it seems that there is a renewed interest that the US has taken in mineral resources across the African continent and the Arabian/Nubian Shield . There is an interest in having access to those natural resources: lithium, niobium, and other minerals that are key to pivoting to a cleaner, greener economy, which is the main thrust of the US economic plans. That would require access to these minerals and resources, but also stability to support that access.
AG: But the US sows chaos wherever it goes, as it has in Libya, Syria, and Somalia, just to name those nations nearest Ethiopia.
AF: Well, its logical goals should be stability, peace, and security on the African continent. In the longer term, stability should in fact benefit the pursuit of American economic interests across the continent.
AG: I can’t help laughing. I’m sure you’ve noticed that I talk more colloquially, like a journalist, while you talk like an academic. We are both who we are.
AF: Yes we are. As an academic I’m required to discuss things in a certain way, but we agree about a lot and have enough in common to talk.
AG: OK, the TPLF has been claiming that they are winning the war in Ethiopia, and the western press has been chanting day after day that the TPLF is close to seizing Addis Ababa, the capital of Ethiopia. Every day there are reports in the US and European capitals that they are withdrawing embassy personnel and that NGO staff and foreign citizens are fleeing at the behest of their governments.
Today, however, these outlets, even the dominant corporate outlets, are reporting that the Ethiopian National Defense Force is recapturing northern towns and districts. What do you think is going to happen militarily?
AF: We’ve seen a lot of different media reports on issues concerning the trajectory of the conflict, and developments on the battlefield. And of course CNN published a story with photos taken way back in May in the Tigray Regional State, but said that they were TPLF rebel forces on the outskirts of Addis, and that the TPLF had the city encircled.
On the contrary, we’ve now learned from local Ethiopian media that the town of Lalibela has been retaken, as have a number of other northern districts in the North Wollo Regional State, the region just south of the Tigray Region. North Wollo is where there are communities all along the border with Tigray.
Lalabella is an historic and holy city, famous for its churches carved out of rock in the 12th and 13th centuries. It’s a UNESCO world heritage site, and people both inside and outside Ethiopia were alarmed when the TPLF seized it.
The national defense forces have also retaken cities including Gashena, where five strategic routes come together, including the road into Tigray Region and onward onto Tigray’s capital, Me’kele. We have also been informed by national and local media sources that the TPLF has suffered some very heavy losses at the front lines of these battle areas.
I understand that the TPLF no longer have a presence at all in the Afar Region.
Forced recruitment by the TPLF rebels, however, has continued across different segments of the Tigray Regional State population, and as a result, many people who lack experience in soldiering are coming to the front lines. This has resulted in large, tragic losses.
Local Ethiopian news is also reporting that there’ve been significant losses to the TPLF leadership. There was an announcement last week citing that 12 senior leaders had been killed. The Ethiopian army’s air strikes are also continuing and they have targeted the TPLF supply lines that were running between Mek’ele and other areas, and in the border region with Amhara Regional State.
We are seeing a likely TPLF defeat in the Amhara region, but the question is, now that Afar has been cleared of conflict, why do remaining TPLA fighters from Amhara keep increasing in numbers? What happens next? I expect a TPLF defeat, after which democracy and peace should be declared as the pillars of the post-conflict pathway.
Priority has to be given to an interim administration set up in the Tigray Region which makes space for all political groupings, all opposition groups as well—plural politics. And in all the conflict-affected regions, rebuilding the infrastructure must take priority.
The Ministry of Peace reported back in August that some critical infrastructure in Tigray had been destroyed repeatedly by TPLF fighters and had been reconstructed and rebuilt several times. But these services extend to banking as well. All these critical services need to be supported. And social programs. Support to these sorts of programs will win the support of the people. It is the confidence of these conflict -affected communities that the government really needs to win back.
Social programs are important for community healing and community-based and political-based dialogue. There are issues concerning accountability and rule of law, which very much depends on which leaders remain in position at the top of the TPLF organization.
What leaders were responsible for strategic command and control of the fighting, and specifically the attack on the northern manned outposts that launched this war in the first place? I would say, in the spirit of prioritizing peace and democracy, that in parallel with holding this very small group of leaders to account, the government should consider granting a blanket amnesty to all others. It would be a magnanimous move on the government’s part and it would help support the much needed healing and space for dialogue.
AG: The US has seemed determined to see the government of Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed fall. The constant calls of genocide in Tigray are like those that usually precede US bombing campaigns, as they did in Libya and Syria. There was a piece in The Guardiansaying that genocide is imminent and we must act. One of its authors was a former head of the United Nations Development Program, whom WHO Chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus—a former TPLF minister—had appointed to co-chair the WHO’s Independent Panel for Pandemic Preparedness and Response.
Do you see any retreat from all this crusading and the very real possibility that the US might attack Ethiopia, claiming it has to “stop genocide?”
AF: I’ve seen some concerning things that have come out as statements by US policy makers, particularly by the State Department. That has generated anti-U.S. sentiment back in Ethiopia and also across the Ethiopian diaspora community. There’s been constant criticism of the Ethiopian government, and punitive sanctions imposed on Ethiopia and its ally Eritrea, but none on the TPLF. This has emboldened the TPLF and given it no incentive to stand down. So the TPLF incursions outside Tigray have continued, the insurgency has continued, and the violence and destruction has continued.
On the genocide issue, I read some online US national news about this, which referred to a decision to halt any official decision made on a genocide designation. The claim of genocide has been debunked by a recent reportwritten by investigators from the UN and the Ethiopian Human Rights Commission, but despite this report, many media outlets, most of all CNN and its foreign correspondent Nima Elbagir, have continued to cry genocide. Elbagir, in her recent moderation of a panel hosted at Yale University—which featured 2 senators from the human rights caucus—seemed to be pushing the US to disregard the UN report and adopt a domestic designation of genocide.
AG: You were disinvited from that panel at Yale, weren’t you? I read this report, Yale hosts Ethiopia conference amid social media controversy, disinvites speaker . It quotes you saying, ““I had no objection to being asked to stand down from the event. I understand that others did complain on the basis that Ethiopian voices were not represented at the event.”
AF: There wasn’t a single Ethiopian voice and in the end, the panel was not only all white but also all male. CNN’s Nima Elbagir, the only woman and the only person of color, moderated.
AG: So they didn’t even much bother with the optics of ten white men debating the fate of a Black African nation.
AF: No, they didn’t.
AG: The US has also demanded “negotiations without preconditions” for almost a year, implying that the TPLF and the federal government are equals who should surrender everything, then just sit down and talk to each other. What do you think about that?
AF: The issue of negotiations, much less negotiations without preconditions, is a non-starter with Ethiopians. You can flip this on its head and say the Biden administration wouldn’t go to the negotiation table with the insurrectionists who stormed Capitol Hill after Trump lost the last US presidential election. Ethiopia should not be treated with different standards.
The Ethiopian people need this war to end. The world needs this war to end. The unnecessary loses, the destruction to livelihoods, all of this needs to stop. And a more peaceful pathway involving rebuilding, needs to start. This is not going to be an easy task, but it is one that the country must prioritize, one that should be supported and cannot be rushed. Healing, development, forgiveness, and social reconstruction will take many years. That’s what we should be thinking about, as western partner countries at the moment. Support for peace.
AG: Despite its protestations about negotiations, the US government has acted as though peace in the region is the last thing they’re interested in. Just as peace is the last thing they were interested in when they went to war with Libya and Syria. So why would you expect anything different?
AF: That’s the disappointing side of things about US policy on Ethiopia and the wider Horn of Africa region. While the US takes a very short term view of its own interests, enormous diplomatic and cooperative opportunities are foregone. Arguments about the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam, which US ally Egypt does not want to see completed, has taken away from discussions on regional economic cooperation that could have gone on in the meantime. The US needs to take a longer view of its own interests and those of the region.
AG: As a journalist, I feel it’s my job to describe what is as well as I can, and I can’t help being cynical, but I know that, as a professor at the Balsillie School of International Affairs , you need to propose a better way forward, as you’re doing.
AF: Trying to.
AG: This week, we’ve seen leaked footage of a meeting in which former and current western diplomats met with a senior TPLF member and spokesperson, despite US claims to neutrality. What do you think of this video?
AF: The video became viral and infamous quite quickly. It was a big leak. My own concerns about the video were the way in which a so-called civil society organization platformed a known leader of a nationally declared terrorist group, the TPLF.
AG: Hold on, you need to explain what you mean by “nationally declared terrorist group.”
AL: There was a vote in the Ethiopian parliament which designated the TPLF as a terrorist group following its attack on the Northern Command post on the 3rd and 4th of November 2020. To give a platform to Berhane Gebre-Christos, a leader and spokesperson of that group—for a civil society organization to do that—is not good practice. No one should provide platforms for groups that commit high crimes.
Berhane Gebre-Christos said he wanted to create a “transitional government,” meaning to topple the legitimately elected government of Ethiopia, and the Western diplomats and former diplomats there agreed with him.
It’s totally inappropriate for any current or previously serving diplomat to get mixed up with a group plotting a coup.
My other concern is that the website of this NGO in question claimed that the organization had been receiving funds from the USAID and the NED. And then, very quickly, after the video was released, we saw many so-called board members and founding members speaking out, claiming that they had in fact not been playing the role suggested by the video and the organization’s website.
AG: What organization?
AF: The civil society group that was hosting the meeting. It’s called Peace and Development Center Ethiopia, and its website is pdcethiopia.org . They hosted the meeting that the leaked video had covered.
AG: Is there anything you’d like to say about the role of the USAID and NED?
AF: I don’t know the extent of their projects that USAID and NED are funding.It just stated on the website that the organization did receive funds from both USAID and NED.
AG: The US government’s aggressive policy is so short sighted that it’s obviously pushing Ethiopia into collaboration with China, which is exactly what they’re trying to stop. It’s incredibly stupid. One might imagine that USAID Administer Samantha Power and Secretary of State Anthony Blinken are agents of the Chinese government.
AF: I agree that it’s very unwise and short-sighted. And it is the opposite of the U.S.’s stated and perceived goals.
AG: Is there anything else you’d like to say?
AF: I hope to see peace take root in Ethiopia and across the wider Horn of Africa region very soon. I hope we’ll be having interviews of a very different sort in the near future.
*
Note to readers: Please click the share buttons above or below. Follow us on Instagram, @crg_globalresearch. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.
Ann Fitz-Gerald is a professor at the University of Waterloo, Ontario, and the Director of the Balsillie School of International Relations . She has many years of experience working as a research professor across most of Ethiopia’s regional states and the wider Horn of Africa region. She has also supported internationally sponsored peace talks in the region and has worked as a Course Director for a masters program delivered in Addis Ababa.
Ann Garrison is a Black Agenda Report Contributing Editor based in the San Francisco Bay Area. In 2014, she received the Victoire Ingabire Umuhoza Democracy and Peace Prize for promoting peace through her reporting on conflict in the African Great Lakes Region. She can be reached on Twitter @AnnGarrison and at ann(at)anngarrison(dot)com. She is a frequent contributor to Global Research.
All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the “Translate Website” drop down menu on the top banner of our home page (Desktop version).
To receive Global Research’s Daily Newsletter (selected articles), click here.
Russian Deputy-Ambassador Dmitri Polyanskiy moderated this scintillating Arria Formula Meeting. The opening briefer was Dr. Fernand de Varennes, UN Special Rapporteur on Minorities Issues.
In a powerful exposure of egregious discrimination against ethnic minorities, residents of Latvia and Estonia and other Baltic states and Ukraine, denied their rights to citizenship, their rights to speak their native languages, denied their right to government representation, presented an alarming description of the fascistic trends throughout the Baltics, and Ukraine.
In a passionate and powerful presentation, Alexander Gaponenko, Civil activist of Latvia described the relegation to second, or third class citizenship of Russian speakers in Latvia, and the brilliant Valery Engel, Director of Latvia’s European Center for Democracy described the Kafkaesque reception he received in Estonia where he had been invited to present a speech on anti-Semitism in Latvia.
Dr. Engel was denied entry into Estonia on the basis of articles he had written exposing anti-Semitism in Latvia, despite the fact that he was a principal speaker invited to the conference denouncing anti-Semitism to be held in Estonia. To his great credit, Dr. Engel recognized the irony in this preposterous denial of entry.
In Latvia, the Russian language was prohibited in public and private schools, and Russian speaking children who were unable to speak with the fluency of their Latvian-speaking classmates, were often categorized as “retarded,” and refused promotion to grades of higher learning. And thus they were forced into categories of expertise beneath their favored Latvian classmates. A spiral of downward mobility was thus engineered, depriving Russian-speaking children of opportunities imperative for development throughout their life.
In an overwhelming and heartbreaking description of the surge of Nazism in Ukraine, Ms. Elena Berezhnaya, of the Ukranian Anti-Fascist-League described the scourge of neo-nazi groups in Ukraine, which were tacitly, and often actively supported by the Ukranian government “authorities,” undoubtedly on whose behalf they were rampaging throughout Ukraine.
Ms. Berezhnaya described the current deification of Ukraine’s most famous nazi-collaborator, Stefan Bandera, and she mentioned that in 2016 a law was passed in Ukraine making it illegal to criticize nazi collaborators.
When Russia’s moderator, Deputy Ambassador Dmitri Polyanskiy opened the meeting for comments by other Security Council members, the U.S. Representative made a statement bordering on the absurd, and revealing zero knowledge of history.
After stating that the United States was totally anti-nazi, and opposed all forms of Nazism, (despite the fact that the United States, with Ukraine was the only UN member state opposing the human rights resolution “Prohibiting the glorification of Nazism,”) the US representative totally ignored the fact that it was the U.S. government, led by Victoria “f**k the EU” Nuland that led the destabilization and violent overthrow of Ukraine’s democratically elected President Yanukovich, and Nuland then selected and packed the post-coup Ukranian government with pro-nazis, who have metastasized into the nazi horror from which the Donbass is desperately trying to escape, as the entire region is sliding (or being engineered) into confrontation with Russia.
*
Note to readers: Please click the share buttons above or below. Follow us on Instagram, @crg_globalresearch. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.
Carla Stea is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG) and Global Research’s Correspondent at UN headquarters, New York.
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.
Vaccine injury is everywhere. The federal government collects reports of vaccine injury through the Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System (VAERS). The system is intentionally clunky and difficult to navigate.
So some warrior mamas created OpenVAERS that takes all of the federal reports and makes them easily searchable. Pharma and the bougie mainstream are terrified of OpenVAERS because by making the reports easily searchable it wakes lots of people up to the catastrophic harms from vaccines.
OpenVAERS started before COVID. But with the introduction of COVID vaccines, OpenVAERS has become even more important. OpenVAERS tracks COVID vaccine injuries every week through what has become known as the Red Box Summaries. The Red Box Summaries are so powerful that Facebook and Instagram have programmed their artificial intelligence to censor screenshots from OpenVAERS in order to protect the Pharma cartel.
Over time, OpenVAERS has added additional charts and graphs to help people understand the data and its context. For example these two charts are better than anything produced by the federal government during this whole debacle.
This week the warrior mamas at OpenVAERS outdid themselves. They produced a new chart (below) that graphs the number “Fully” vaccinated (divided by 1,000), the number of covid vaccine injuries reported to VAERS, and the population (divided by 1,000) for all 50 states.
As you can see, the number of covid vaccine injury reports in each state corresponds to the number of people fully vaccinated in that state. While this is obvious to everyone who has been paying attention, this will be a revelation to people who tried to bury their head in the sand in hopes that this problem would go away on its own.
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services reports that a majority of VAERS reports are sent in by vaccine manufacturers (37%) and health care providers (36%). The remaining reports are obtained from state immunization programs (10%). Only 7% of VAERS reports are submitted by the vaccine injured and their families (with 10% of reports from other sources).
Nearly every independent scholar who has studied VAERS agrees that it is a significant undercount of actual vaccine harms.
Former FDA Director David Kessler in an article in the Journal of the American Medical Association stated that “only about 1% of serious events are reported to the FDA.” A report for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services by Harvard Pilgrim Healthcare Inc. confirmed that VAERS undercounts actual vaccine injuries by a factor of 100.
More recently several scholars have attempted to refine these initial estimates.
Kirsch, Rose, and Crawford estimate that VAERS undercounts fatal vaccine reactions by a factor of 41.
Dr. Jessica Rose, a statistician in Israel, recently calculated an under-reporting factor of 31 for all severe adverse events following vaccination.
We are in the midst of the most catastrophic vaccine campaign in U.S. history.
Sign up at OpenVAERS to have their weekly reports delivered to your email inbox for free.
Mess with a mama bear you’re gonna get mauled.
*
Note to readers: Please click the share buttons above or below. Follow us on Instagram, @crg_globalresearch. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.
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.
The White House was viciously mocked over the weekend after pushing the message that unvaccinated Americans would experience a winter of “severe illness and death” due to the omicron variant of the coronavirus.
President Biden, as well as White House COVID response coordinator Jeff Zients, each pushed the messaging last week, with the former issuing the stark and gloomy warning to Americans following a Thursday White House briefing on the pandemic.
“I want to send a direct message to the American people: Due to the steps we’ve taken, omicron has not yet spread as fast as it would have otherwise done,” Biden said.
“But it’s here now, and it’s spreading, and it’s going to increase … We are looking at a winter of severe illness and death for the unvaccinated – for themselves, their families and the hospitals they’ll soon overwhelm,” he added. “But there’s good news: If you’re vaccinated, and you have your booster shot, you’re protected from severe illness and death.” (emphasis added)
Conservatives on social media wasted no time blasting the morbid statement which some believed almost seemed to almost take pleasure in the thought of the suffering of the unvaccinated.
Read this Christmas Message from Resident Biden. The second paragraph can fuel panic and chaos. More than they already have. This administration is fkd up beyond all repair! pic.twitter.com/y8Ahkp7m9j
President Biden’s warning of a “winter of severe illness and death” makes President Jimmy Carter’s “malaise” speech urging Americans to lower expectations seem a cheerful upper by contrast. How do Democrats run as the party of “severe illness and death”? This is madness.
Note to readers: Please click the share buttons above or below. Follow us on Instagram, @crg_globalresearch. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.
Featured image: Joe Biden on Election Night in Pittsburg, Nov. 3, 2020. (Adam Schultz, Flickr, Biden for President)
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.
In a message that could have come straight out of Nazi Germany, Ryanair CEO Michael O’Leary has said that anyone who remains unvaccinated should be completely cut off from hospitals, planes, public transport, and the ability to get food at supermarkets. He added that governments should place increasing restrictions on the unvaccinated – including making vaccination mandatory for air travel.
“I have no difficulty saying to people, you can fly, but you have to be vaccinated.
We fully respect your right to be not vaccinated if you are one of the lunatic fringes who believe this is some government, big pharma conspiracy.
But if you are not vaccinated, you can’t go to the supermarket, you can’t go to the pharmacy. You shouldn’t be allowed into hospital if you’re not vaccinated”
Leaning into his enthusiasm for coercion, O’Leary added that not allowing unvaccinated people to participate in certain activities would incentivize them to get the vaccine.
“If you tell someone under 30 years of age that they cannot get into a pub they’d get vaccinated pretty damn quickly.
But governments should place increasing restrictions (on the unvaccinated) while recognizing the rights of everybody. If you want to be unvaccinated, that’s fine, but we should increasingly not allow those to go to work, to travel on the Underground, to fly etc.”
However, O’Leary did say that he ‘fully recognizes’ the choices of those who believe in conspiracy theories between government and big pharma not to get the jab, he does not think they should enjoy the same freedoms as those who have received the vaccination. In other words, he respects your choice, as long as you make the one he agrees with.
These kinds of comments are par the course for O’Leary, who is described on Wikipedia as arrogant and prone to making comments which he later contradicts. He has been extravagantly outspoken in his public statements, sometimes resorting to personal attacks and foul language.
We await to see whether he regrets his decision to back proposals that would hurt the airline he is running.
*
Note to readers: Please click the share buttons above or below. Follow us on Instagram, @crg_globalresearch. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.
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.
Last November, an expert group headed by Sergei A. Karaganov, the Honorary Chairman of the Presidium, Council on Foreign and Defense Policy, presented its final 150 paged assessment policy report with some recommendations intended to improve and scale up the existing Russia’s influence in Africa. The report, put together by 25 academic researchers and experts, further indicated concrete pitfalls and setbacks in the policy implementation in Africa.
This latest policy report unreservedly criticized Russia’s policy towards Africa. It claimed that there have been inconsistencies in the policy implementation. It said that the policy strategy regarding Africa has to spell out and incorporate the development needs of African countries.
While the number of top-most and high-level meetings have increased, the share of substantive issues on the agenda often remains intangible and negligibly small. There are little definitive results from such meetings, which were to demonstrate, a large extent, the “demand for Russia” by Africa and its leaders. In addition, disorganized Russian-African lobbying combined with lack of “information hygiene” at all levels of public speaking were listed among the main flaws of Russia’s current Africa policy.
“In many cases and situations, ideas and intentions are often passed for results, and unapproved projects are announced as going ahead. Russia’s possibilities are overestimated both publicly and in closed negotiations. Worse is many projects announced at the top and high political levels have not been implemented,” according to the report presented in November.
Long before the historic Russia-Africa summit, at least during the past decade, several bilateral agreements between Russia and individual African countries were signed. Besides, memoranda of understanding, declaration of interests, pledges and promises dominated official speeches. On the other side, Russia is simply invisible in economic sectors in Africa, despite boasting of decades-old solid relations with the continent.
It has however attempting to transform the much boasted political relations into a more comprehensive and broad economic cooperation. Its economic footprints are not growing as expected. Interestingly, Russian authorities always acknowledge the enormous potentials and advantages Russia has, and at the same are puzzled by the comparatively high level of economic influence by other foreign players in Africa.
Russia has intensified efforts to strengthen political dialogue, including the exchange of visits at the top levels. Interaction between foreign ministries is expanding. During the year prior to the first Russia-African summit, 21 African foreign ministers visited Russia. According to the calculation with information made available officially at the website, Sergey Lavrov and his deputy Minister, Mikhail Bogdanov, have held talks with nearly 100 African politicians including ministers, deputies between January and September 2019. Bogdanov interacted with all African ambassadors in the Russian Federation. Russian ambassadors and staff are also at their posts inside Africa.
Russians like historical references. As always expected, they have nostalgic interest towards Africa, relying on the traditions of friendship and cooperation established back to the days of the political liberation struggle for freedom and independence and eager to use that as unifying factor. Soviet Union, in many respects, supported most of the countries during the decolonization of Africa.
The question being asked three decades after the collapse of the Soviet Union: What has noticeably changed between Russia and Africa? In answering this basic question, Lavrov acknowledged talking to students and staff at the Moscow State Institute of International Relations (MGIMO): “Africa is one of our priorities. Our political ties in particular are developing dynamically. But economic cooperation is not as far advanced as our political ties.”
According to Lavrov, the process of Russia returning to Africa is taking the form of intensifying political dialogue, which has always been at a strategic and friendly level, and now moving towards a vigorous economic cooperation. It is necessary to consolidate these trends and draw up plans for expanding consolidated partnerships with the African countries.
That however, just as the coronavirus pandemic subsided leading to the opening of air space and borders, a lined-up of African foreign ministers including Algeria, Chad, Djibouti, Egypt, Ethiopia, Guinea-Bissau, Libya, Mali, Nigeria, Sudan, Sierra Leone and Togo came, as always, for political consultations and dialogue.
The significance of diplomatic meetings and most possibly those to follow preceding the next Russia-Africa summit slated for 2022, Lavrov has always indicated in his introductory speeches –these visits are to review the status of the bilateral relations and prospects for their further development.
Russian and African experts have expressed their concern about official visits proliferating both ways, with little impact on the sustainable development currently needed by the majority of African countries. While some see official visits simply as diplomatic tourism, a number of the African leaders keep in mind how bilateral policies would help tackle key questions such as rising unemployment, healthcare problems, poor infrastructure and industrial development – how to turn Russia’s focus towards realizing the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
Russia has shown interests in niche sectors such as nuclear power development, launching African satellites, and energy and mining projects. It has been seeking to exploit conventional gas and oil fields in Africa; part of its long-term energy strategy is to use Russian companies to create new streams of energy supply.
In terms of a strategic outlook and action on economic engagement, it is seriously lagging behind. Russia has long ago cut the “red-ribbon” marking the completion of an infrastructure project in Africa. With regard to other economic areas, it may have to identify wide range of sectors as with members of the European Union, China, the United States, India, the Gulf States and others.
Nevertheless, within the framework of the African Continental Free Trade (AfCFTA) that promises creating a single borderless market, it offers opportunities for localization, production and marketing of consumables throughout Africa. This should perhaps, be the strongest dimension of Russia’s dealings in Africa.
Currently, Russian trade is heavily concentrated in North Africa, especially with Algeria, Egypt, Tunisia and Morocco. Noticeably, in 2019 bilateral trade information from Russian Export Centre shows (trade statistics) that Russia’s relationship with North Africa is the most significant, US$17 billion of the aggregate total US$20 billion for the whole of Africa. President Vladimir Putin has asked that this trade figure be doubled, up to US$40 billion before the next summit planned for 2022.
In an interview with Steven Gruzd, Head of the African Governance and Diplomacy Programme at the South African Institute of International Affairs (SAIIA), he similarly noted that Africa is a busy geopolitical arena, with many players, both old and new, operating. Apart from EU countries, China and the US. There are players such as Iran, Turkey, Israel, the UAE, Japan and others. Russia has to compete against them, and distinctively remain focused its efforts. On the other side, Russia uses the rhetoric of anti-colonialism in its engagement with Africa, and that it is fighting neo-colonialism from the West, especially in relations with their former colonies. It sees France as a threat to its interests especially in Francophone West Africa, the Maghreb and the Sahel.
“I would largely agree that there is a divide between what has been pledged and promised at high-level meetings and summits, compared to what has actually materialized on the ground. There is more talk than action, and in most cases intentions and ideas have been officially presented as initiatives already in progress. There needs to be a lot of tangible progress on the ground for the second summit to show impact. It will be interesting to see what has been concretely achieved in reports at the second Russia-Africa summit scheduled for late 2022,” he said.
Steven Gruzd also heads the Russia-Africa Research Programme initiated this year at SAIIA, South Africa’s premier research institute on international issues. It is an independent, non-government think tank, with a long and proud history of providing thought leadership in Africa.
In another interview, George Nyongesa, a Senior Associate at the Africa Policy Institute in Nairobi (Kenya) reminded that Africa is heading for its defining moments. By 2050, a quarter of the world’s population especially its young people and thus the largest labor force will be in Africa.
Human capital is definitely an important feature of Africa’s global profile besides its natural resources. Thus, it is no wonder that global players like the United States, Europeans and Asians are competing for influence, simultaneously investing and focusing on the youth, on the African continent. The competition for the control of the continent by global players is a geopolitical reality and by nature multidimensional: economic, education and training, and social; and brings to memory the rivalry of the Cold War era when the United States often treated African states as pawns or prizes rather than partners, according to Nyongesa.
However, 21st century Africa is different in the sense that African leaders seem aware of their windfall potential in human capital and resources and are no longer interested in patrons or protector and this new attitude has opened wide a range of partners necessary for the achievement of security and prosperity they seek.
In the interview, he further underlined that “the continent is enjoying enviable attention as key global players from the United States, Europe and Asia continue to outfox each other. This can be seen from the fact that US retreat from its fight against violent extremism in Africa, allows Russia to fill in security gaps; hence the growing Russian military influence on the continent. At the same time, the United States expansion of trade and business in the continent is proving a constructive counter Chinese ever-increasing economic influence.”
There are still some challenges and persistent problems with perceptions. With economic engagement, Russia often interprets the influence of foreign players as neo-colonizers. In order to make successful economic inroads into Africa, Russia is signing agreements exchanging military weapons for mining concessions. It finds it expedient to militarize and deal with its competitor, as exemplified in Central African Republic, Guinea and Mali and in the Sahel-5 region.
Lipton Matthews, an American researcher and business analyst in recent discussions with this research writer about foreign players and the “scramble” for resources, he explained that the weak governance structures in Africa, the perception that China is colonizing Africa is a consequence of Africa’s history of defective governance. Though China through its infrastructural projects is presiding over the modernization of Africa, similar to what Europeans and Americans did in the developing world years ago.
On the other hand, he argued: “We must disabuse ourselves of the notion that colonialism is inherently exploitative. Most people would prefer sovereignty to colonial rule, but the truth is that colonial status does not impede economic growth and some colonies in Africa experienced faster growth during the colonial era. We should give greater priority to good governance than national sovereignty. It is better to be under the rule of benevolent colonizers than to be the subject of a dictator.”
In order to aid Africa, Russia should assist Africa in transitioning to a knowledge-based economy by promoting technology transfer agreements. Russians must also invest in more R&D collaborations with their African partners. This agreement will revolutionize Africa’s economy and a richer Africa is a positive for Russian investors. If Africa is properly managed, the continent should succeed with sustainable development and, to a considerable extent, attain an appreciable economic independence.
In October 2018, before the start of the first Russia-SADC business forum, Stergomena Lawrence Tax, then Executive Secretary of SADC, explained an exclusive interview that Russia has a long history of bilateral engagements with the Southern African countries, which constitute the Southern African Development Community.
On the other hand, for the past several years, it has not been that visible in the region as compared to China, India or Brazil. It is encouraging that, of late, Russia has positioned itself to be a major partner with Southern Africa and being part of the BRICS promotes engagement with the region. It has to move with concrete steps into such areas like agriculture, industrial production, high technology and transport.
In the interview, Stergomena shortlisted some of the southern Africa priorities that are also in line with SADC as indicated below:
Prospecting, mining, oil, construction and mining, purchasing gas, oil, uranium, and bauxite assets (Angola, Namibia and South Africa);
Construction of power facilities—hydroelectric power plants on the River Congo (Angola, Namibia and Zambia,) and nuclear power plants (South Africa);
Creating a floating nuclear power plant, and South African participation in the international project to build a nuclear enrichment centre in Russia;
Railway Construction (Angola);
Creation of Russian trade houses for the promotion and maintenance of Russian engineering products (South Africa).
Participation of Russian companies in the privatization of industrial assets, including those created with technical assistance from the former Soviet Union (Angola).
Stergomena further discussed questions relating to public diplomacy. Russia has all but overlooked or underestimated many aspects of it. These include cultural exchanges, scholarly visitors’ programmes, and of course, the use of media to cover and project issues on Africa from a Russian perspective.
These are instruments and aspects of public diplomacy, which would have the effect of reaching audiences on our continent and beyond and impacting positively on what Russia has to offer the world. In the same vein, this can be seen as a form of “soft power” as its aim is to appeal and attract partners rather than coerce them into a relationship of one form or the other, she in an emailed interview in October 2018.
There are the Intergovernmental Commissions on Economic, Scientific and Technical Cooperation and Trade fixed with African countries. There is the Russian Chamber of Commerce and Trade, the Moscow Chamber of Commerce and Trade. The Coordinating Committee for Economic Cooperation with African States established back in 2009.
According to historical documents, the Coordinating Committee for Economic Cooperation with African States was created at the initiative of the Chamber of Commerce and Industry of the Russian Federation and Vnesheconombank with the support of the Federation Council and the State Duma of the Federal Assembly of the Russian Federation. It has the support from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Ministry of Economy and Trade, the Ministry of Natural Resources, as well as the Ministry of Higher Education and Science.
Within the framework of the joint declaration adopted at the first Russia-Africa Summit, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation established the Secretariat of the Russia-Africa Partnership Forum. The Secretariat of the Russia-Africa Partnership Forum also moved to create an Association of Economic Cooperation with African States (AECAS). Alexander Saltanov, former Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs, is the Chairman of AECAS and feverishly stepping forward to advance significant issues of business cooperation between Russia and Africa.
The Secretariat of the Russia-Africa Partnership Forum has a useful structure, and its primary task is to find real opportunities for mutually beneficial cooperation and joint implementation of projects between Russian and African entrepreneurs. There are coordination, public and scientific councils operating under its roof. The Secretariat seems to coordinate and support some kind of public outreach initiatives from the civil society.
As most contemporary researchers do, they have offered additional strategic proposals and authorities have to bite on them to make the long-expected progress. It is a well-known and irreversible fact that Russia’s economic presence in Africa is significantly inferior in comparison to the top-ten key global players. It is time to overcome this yawning gap, use the existing structures to expeditiously operationalize the set goals and accelerate the economic return the continent.
Indeed, judging from the above discussions about the changing geopolitical relations, there are well-functioning structures and mechanisms to reap the benefits of a fully-fledged economic partnership and to achieve a more practical and comprehensive results expected from the new multifaceted relations between Russia and Africa.
By all purposes, the relationship requires a new approach, broad levels of interaction including the civil society to forge a new positive image and change public perceptions, and work consistently with the private sector for diversified corporate partnerships. Strategically speaking, Russia needs to adopt an agenda – rather than running on ad hoc basis– and it further needs an effective Action Plan, both the agenda and plan have to conform to African Union’s Agenda 2063 and the UN Development Goals 2030.
*
Note to readers: Please click the share buttons above or below. Follow us on Instagram, @crg_globalresearch. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.
Kester Kenn Klomegah, who worked previously with Inter Press Service (IPS), is now a frequent contributor to Global Research. As a versatile researcher, he believes that everyone deserves equal access to quality and trustworthy media reports.
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.
When Pavel Zavalny, the chairman of Russian parliamentary committee on energy, made the forecast last Friday that Nord Stream 2 pipeline could start shipping natural gas to Germany as early as next month, it was received with disbelief. But Zavalny was categorical, and was quoted by Reuters as saying, “I can say with a high degree of certainty that the first gas via Nord Stream 2 will go in January.”
He added that Europeans would not want to drag their feet with the certification process over Nord Stream 2 at a time when their storage levels of gas is so abysmally low.
But Zavalny was effectively contradicting the German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock who had stated only four days back previously that the certification process stood suspended “due to the existence of clear regulation in European law regarding the energy area on unbundling and other issues of the [company’s] structure.”
Expert opinion since then has been that the earliest the gas would flow through the new pipeline can be only by the second half of 2022, if at all.
Meanwhile, the lawmakers in the US Congress have been demanding that Washington should simply kill the pipeline project. Baerbock has the reputation of being a proxy of the Americans and the general impression is that after the exit of Angela Merkel as chancellor, 40-year old Baerbock is determined to steer Germany toward a “tough” line on Russia.
Conceivably, the Kremlin wasn’t amused. The undersea Nord Stream 2 pipeline has been built at a cost of $11 billion. But the Kremlin kept its thought to itself. We now know why.
The data from German network Cascade shows that all Russian natural gas shipments to Germany through a major transit pipeline known as the Yamal-Europe transnational gas pipeline reversed direction today.
The Yamal-Europe transnational gas pipeline runs from northwest Siberia to Frankfurt-an-der-Oder in eastern Germany via Belarus and Poland. Last year, around one-fifth of all natural gas sent to Western Europe went via Belarus.
The flows through the Yamal-Europe pipeline dropped to 6% of its capacity on Saturday, 5% on Sunday, and fell to zero by today morning.
Plainly put, Russia has halted its gas exports to Germany and it also transpires that Gazprom, the system’s operator in Russia and Belarus, has booked no capacity for transiting natural gas to Germany for the near future, either.
Moscow’s explanation is that Gazprom prioritises domestic consumption within Russia over export of gas to foreign countries and temperatures have plummeted in Moscow and other large Russian cities this week. It is a plausible explanation.
However, this is happening at an inflection point when due to the winter cold and the restricted supply, European energy prices have soared. The prices in Europe spiked 7% on Monday and are surging. (here, here and here)
Pressure is building on Germany as its emergency reserves have dropped to a “historically low level” of below 60% last week for the first time in years.
Moscow is offering that if only licence is granted to operate Nord Stream 2, Gazprom will promptly begin additional supplies to meet Germany’s needs. In anticipation of the German regulator’s approval, Gazprom even filled the first of the two parallel pipes with so-called technical gas in October and the second started to fill up in December.
But Germany claims it is a stickler for rules and regulations and the Nord Stream 2, which is registered in Switzerland, must first restructure its operations to comply with the requirements of the German energy watchdog BNetzA and abide as well by relevant EU law and only then can the intricate approval process, which started in September and was suspended in mid-November, resume.
The BNetzA head Jochen Homann predicted on Dec. 16 that a decision on Nord Steam 2 “won’t be made in the first half of 2022.”
The bottomline is that while all protagonists pretend that this is a commercial issue, the US has transformed it as a geopolitical issue. Simply put, the US abhors the very idea of Russia consolidating its presence further in the European energy market and wants to kill Nord Steam 2 in its cradle.
Second, Washington worries (rightly so) that such heavy German dependence on Russian energy will inevitably soften up Berlin’s attitudes toward Moscow in general, which will be detrimental to the interests of the transatlantic alliance.
Third, Washington wants Ukraine to continue to be the beneficiary of the transit fee of over 1 billion dollar annually which Gazprom was paying to Kiev for use of the Soviet-era pipelines passing through that country to western Europe. That is to say, whileworks systematically to turn Ukraine as an anti-Russian state, it expects Moscow to keep subsidising Ukrainian economy which is a basket case.
Finally, the US hopes to make inroads into the lucrative European market for its own shale gas exports. In a long term perspective, the US wants Europe to be dependent on its energy exports, just as NATO is its captive market for arms exports.
The new German government has walked into the American trap. By acting tough on Russia, Berlin forfeits Russia’s goodwill. The recent expulsion of two Russian diplomats posted to Berlin on dubious grounds most likely put Russia’s back up further. The German ministers have lately been speaking harshly about Russia in the context of Moscow’s tensions with NATO and the US.
Germany has played a double role on Ukraine running with the hare and hunting with the hounds. On the one hand, it played the role of a peacemaker along with Russia in the Normandy Four format (France, Germany, Ukraine, Russia) while at the same time secretly encouraging Kiev to be recalcitrant in the Donbas situation.
Moscow recently exposed Germany’s perfidious role by releasing its diplomatic correspondence with Berlin.
As the winter sets in and Germany’s energy requirements increase, it a shortage of gas can be expected in the coming weeks. The European continent may face rolling blackouts if the winter is cold. The price of gas will go through the roof, which will hit the consumers and German industry.
Moscow only can come to Germany’s and Europe’s rescue in these dire circumstances by exporting more gas via existing pipelines. But Gazprom linking it to clearance for the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, which it has constructed at heavy cost.
The catch is, the new German chancellor Olaf Scholz went one significant step further than Merkel and has agreed, pushed by Washington, to “consider” stopping Nord Stream 2 if Russia invades Ukraine (according to the FT).
German politicians ultimately pay heed to the captains of industry. Forty-year old Baerbock from the Green Party happens to be a greenhorn. Scholz, a conservative social democrat, has a lot of experience with political top jobs, albeit lacking in charisma and often underestimated.
In foreign policy, the buck stops at the Federal Chancellery — and Scholz stands for continuity in foreign policy so that he can focus on the German economy in pandemic times.Zavalny may have a point.
*
Note to readers: Please click the share buttons above or below. Follow us on Instagram, @crg_globalresearch. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.
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.
Moscow has recently taken the first step towards the rapprochement with Washington. Russia outlined an eight-point draft treaty of security guarantees aimed to lower tensions in Europe and defuse the crisis over Ukraine. The demands include ending Ukraine’s path towards NATO membership, limiting the deployment of troops and weapons close to Russia’s borders, and a halt to NATO’s eastward expansion.
Russian officials stressed that Moscow wants to begin negotiations “without delays and without stalling”, emphasizing that this is not some kind of ultimatum, but seriousness of their warning should not be underestimated. It was highlighted that ignoring Moscow’s request for discussions could lead to a “military response” similar to the 1962 Cuban missile crisis.
Vladimir Putin claimed that Russia will not be satisfied if Western partners want to “chat up” negotiations on security guarantees.
In her turn, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki claimed that there’s no reason the U.S. can’t do that, but it is going to do that in partnership and coordination with its European partners. Washington reportedly disagrees with parts of Moscow’s proposal, but is willing to discuss its content.
Unfortunately, there have been no official calls from Washington to launch the negotiation process yet. All the claims remain within diplomatic rhetoric. In fact, neither the United States nor NATO are changing their aggressive policy towards Russia.
On December 21, Lithuanian President Gitanas Nauseda called on NATO to increase its military capabilities in Eastern Europe as well as cooperation between the member countries to confront the threat from the East.
According to recent statements by some of its top officers, the Western military alliance plans to deploy troops in Romania and Bulgaria as a way to strengthen the current “security scheme” for Ukraine.
The offensive claims are accompanied by military aggression in Eastern Ukraine.
On December 21, the civilian settlement of Alexandrovka in the Donetsk People’s Republic was shelled with 20 rounds from the 120 mm mortars of the Ukrainian Armed Forces (UAF).
Russian Defense Minister General of the Army Sergei Shoigu confirmed that the number of the UAF attacks on civilians in Donbass and the positions of the DPR, LPR People’s militias is not decreasing, provoking local fighters to retaliate.
Sergei Shoigu revealed that more than 120 US PMCs were identified in the settlements of Avdiivka and Priazovskoye in the Donetsk region. They equip firing positions in residential buildings and social facilities; preparing for UAF operations as well as radical armed groups to increase hostilities.
Along with support preparing the attacks, the U.S. PMCs are preparing a chemical attack in Donbass. Russian Defence Minister claimed that tanks with unidentified chemical components were delivered to the settlement of Avdiivka and the village of Krasny Liman to commit provocations.
In practice, as winter has come, the situation in Eastern Ukraine revealed its dependence on fluctuations in natural gas prices. When the price increases, the situation worsens.
On December 21, the price of gas in Europe in the course of exchange trading broke another historical record and came up to $ 2,228 per thousand cubic meters. According to various experts, a rise to $2,500 and even up to $3,000 should be expected if there are no signals about the imminent launch of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline. Only a sharp increase in supply may change the situation in Europe.This is possible only with the conclusion of additional contracts with Russia for gas imports and the launch of Nord Stream 2.
*
Note to readers: Please click the share buttons above or below. Follow us on Instagram, @crg_globalresearch. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.
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.
Afghanistan was at the heart of the 17th Extraordinary Session of the Council of Foreign Ministers representing 57 nations at the Organization of Islamic Conference (OIC).
It was up to Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan to deliver the keynote address to the session, held on 19 December at the Parliament House in Islamabad.
And he rose to the occasion: “If the world doesn’t act, this will be the biggest man-made crisis which is unfolding in front of us.”
Imran Khan was addressing not only representatives of the lands of Islam, but also UN officials, the proverbial “global financial institutions,” scores of NGOs, a smattering of US, EU and Japanese bureaucrats and, crucially, Taliban Foreign Minister Amir Khan Muttaqi.
No nation or organization has yet formally recognized the Taliban as the new, legitimate Afghan government. And quite a few are frankly more interested in engaging in an elaborate kabuki, pretending to deliver some sort of aid to the devastated Afghan economy after 20 years of US/NATO occupation instead of actually coordinating aid packages with Kabul.
The numbers are dire, and barely tell the full extent of the drama.
According to the UNDP, 22.8 million Afghan citizens – over half of Afghanistan – are facing food shortages, and soon, acute hunger; while no less than 97 percent of Afghans could soon fall under the poverty line. In addition, the World Food Programme stresses that 3.2 million Afghan children risk acute malnutrition.
Imran Khan emphasized that the OIC had a “religious duty” to help Afghanistan. As for the ‘hyperpower’ that stunned the world with its humiliating withdrawal show after 20 years of occupation, he was adamant: Washington must “delink” whatever grudges it may hold against the Taliban government from the destiny of 40 million Afghan citizens.
Imran Khan did ruffle a few Afghan feathers – starting with former President Hamid Karzai, when he observed that “the idea of human rights is different in every society,” referring to Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, which borders Afghanistan.
“The city culture is completely different from the culture in rural areas …,” he said. “We give stipends to the parents of the girls so that they send them to school. But in districts bordering Afghanistan, if we are not sensitive to the cultural norms, then they won’t send them to school despite receiving double the amount. We have to be sensitive about human rights and women rights.”
This was interpreted in a few quarters as Pakistani interference – part of a secret, devious strategic narrative. Not really. The prime minister was stating a fact, as anyone familiar with the tribal areas knows. Even Afghan Foreign Minister Muttaqi said the prime minister’s words were not “insulting”.
Imran Khan also observed that there are already over three million Afghan refugees in Pakistan. Moreover, Islamabad is sheltering more than 200,000 refugees who overstayed their visas. “They can’t go back. We are already suffering from the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic. We are not in a position to deal with an influx of refugees.”
Would you ever trust NATO?
Then there’s the ultimate nut to crack: internal Taliban dynamics.
Diplomatic sources confirm off the record that it’s a non-stop struggle to convince different layers of the Taliban leadership to allow for some concessions.
Discussions with the NATO block are for, all practical purposes, dead: bluntly, there will be no help without visible concessions on girls’ education, women’s rights and the heart of the matter – on which everyone agrees, including the Russians, the Chinese and the Central Asians – a more inclusive government in Kabul.
So far, Taliban pragmatists – led by the Doha political office – have been on the losing end.
The OIC meeting at least came up with practical suggestions involving Islamic development banks. Pakistani Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi was keen to emphasize the necessity of getting Kabul to access banking services.
This is the heart of the problem: there are no solid banking channels after NATO departed. So it’s technically impossible to transfer financial aid into the system and then distribute it across hard-hit provinces. Yet, once again, this is ultimately linked to those lofty western humanitarian aid pledges crammed with conditionalities.
In the end, Qureshi, together with the OIC Secretary-General Hissein Brahim Taha, announced that a ‘humanitarian trust fund’ will be established as soon as possible, under the aegis of the Islamic Development Bank. The fund should be able to incorporate international partners, non-politicized westerners included.
Qureshi put out his bravest face, emphasizing that “the need is felt to forge a partnership between the OIC and the UN.”
Taha, for his part, was quite realistic. No funds whatsoever have been pledged so far for this new OIC humanitarian operation.
As Qureshi mentioned, there is one thing which Russia, China, Iran, Pakistan and other actors may decisively help with: investment “in the people of Afghanistan, bilaterally or through the OIC, in areas such as education, health and technical and vocational skills to the Afghan youth.”
So now it comes to the crunch – and fast. It’s up to the OIC to play the leading role in terms of alleviating Afghanistan’s dire humanitarian drama.
The official declaration calling on all OIC member states, Islamic financial institutions, donors, and unnamed ‘international partners’ to announce pledges to the humanitarian trust fund for Afghanistan will have to go way beyond rhetorical flourish.
At least, it’s all but certain that from now on, it will be up to the lands of Islam to decisively help Afghanistan. A bitter, defeated, vengeful, internally corroded NATO simply cannot be trusted.
Nobody today remembers that the Empire had concocted its own version of the New Silk Road over 10 years ago, announced by then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in Chennai in July 2001.
That was no ‘community of shared future for mankind,’ but a very narrow obsession on capturing energy resources – in Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan; ‘stabilizing’ Afghanistan, as in perpetuating the occupation; giving a boost to India; and ‘isolating’ Iran.
The energy supply routes to the west should have gone through the Caspian Sea, and then across Azerbaijan, Georgia and Turkey – the three actors of the BTC pipeline – thus bypassing Russia, which was already then being depicted in the west as a ‘threat’.
All this is dead and buried – as post-occupation Afghanistan alongside the five Central Asian ‘stans’ are now back as one of the key foci of interest of the Russia–China strategic partnership: the heart of a Greater Eurasia spanning from Shanghai in the east to St. Petersburg in the west.
Yet to make it happen, it’s imperative that the OIC helps Afghanistan as much as the Taliban must help themselves.
*
Note to readers: Please click the share buttons above or below. Follow us on Instagram, @crg_globalresearch. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.
Featured image: An earlier meeting between Taliban Foreign Minister Amir Khan Muttaqi and Pakistani Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureishi (Source: The Cradle)
All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the “Translate Website” drop down menu on the top banner of our home page (Desktop version).
To receive Global Research’s Daily Newsletter (selected articles), click here.
The fragility of the American democracy seems to be already visible even to pro-Western analysts. Recent studies and reports indicate that the American state is among the most politically vulnerable to internal threats in the world. This diagnosis is currently shared even by some of the biggest supporters of Washington. The internal reality of the US is showing itself as a major source of concern for the American government, which, on its part, should decline some of its international interests in order to improve its domestic scenario.
In November, the Stockholm-based International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance named American democracy as one of the most backward in the world. The institute emphasized the emergence of several authoritarian tendencies in the US, which can be perfectly understood when we look back on some recent events, such as the electoral violence last year, the constant allegations of electoral fraud, and others. However, this negative and “pessimistic” opinion about the future of the US now seems shared even by CIA advisers.
Barbara F. Walter, a CIA executive consultant and expert in analyzing scenarios of political instability, pointed out in a recent publication that the US is on the brink of a civil war. Barbara has written a book on this topic, which has been reviewed by The Washington Post. According to her, the process of polarization of American society has already surpassed the stages of “pre-insurgency” and “incipient conflict”, making it literally on the brink of starting an internal armed conflict.
These are some of Barbara’s words:
“We are closer to civil war than any of us would like to believe (…) the one wants to believe that their beloved democracy is in decline, or headed toward war. […] If you were an analyst in a foreign country looking at events in America — the same way you’d look at events in Ukraine or the Ivory Coast or Venezuela — you would go down a checklist, assessing each of the conditions that make civil war likely (…) We are no longer the world’s oldest continuous democracy (…) That honor is now held by Switzerland, followed by New Zealand, and then Canada. We are no longer a peer to nations like Canada, Costa Rica, and Japan, which are all rated at +10 on the Polity index”.
The author believes that her country has entered a very dangerous stage of political security, especially after the events earlier this year, when protesters invaded the Capitol during the height of popular demonsrations. For her, this event seems to have paved the way for Washington to enter the stage of “open insurgency”, which is a dangerous step towards a civil war. According to her, this entire scenario is a consequence of the anti-democratic process that advanced during the Trump administration, making the American state a sort of intermediary between an autocracy and a real democracy.
Considering all these factors and pointing to several indices from previous polls, the CIA consultant concludes that her country’s current political status can be defined as “high risk of civil war”, something truly similar to the internal scenario of polarization in the 19th century, before the beginning of the only civil conflict in American history. A combination of bad governance with undemocratic policies and institutional weakening makes Washington vulnerable to all internal threats.
Walter appoints Trump and the Republicans who for her have pushed the US into an “abyss” as culprits. She believes that Joe Biden’s government and the Democrats’ hegemony would be a hope for the American, but at the same time points out that the Trump administration left such a negative legacy that it makes it practically impossible to achieve the Democrats’ goals – materialized in Biden’s Build Back Better agenda, which becomes more and more unachievable.
In fact, much of the data pointed out by Barbara Walter is true, but in the end, the aim of her work seems to be just an attempt to legitimize the actions of Democrats and condemn all aspects of the Trump administration. While it is undeniable that Trump represented several setbacks for American democracy, it seems a real exaggeration to point him as the culprit in this entire process.
The first mistake is to idealize American democracy as the most perfect example of a political regime to be followed. Structural problems such as racism, social inequalities and public security crisis are nothing new in American history, but a reality that has been with the country for decades. The main problem that Trump represented for American democracy was precisely to damage its image, as the Republican president was explicit in its authoritarian and right-wing tendencies, while Democratic praxis consists of disguising such tendencies by promoting an agenda in defense of ethnic, sexual and social minorities. Trump has been explicit and Biden has been more moderate, but both represent the same advanced stage of US democratic decadence.
The arguments exposed in Barbara’s book seem like a true apology for Biden and his model of governance, as well as an attempt to highlight, from a strategic perspective – considering Barbara’s position at the CIA – the importance of implementing the Build Back Better agenda, which currently faces strong rejection in American political society. However, despite her overly pro-Biden stance, Barbara deserves special attention for correctly diagnosing the danger that currently most affects American society.
Civil war is no longer a distant scenario for the world’s greatest power. Social polarization in the country has reached really high levels. Racial tensions, political conflicts, separatist groups and several other factors have contributed to the increase in the country’s internal crisis. The uncontrolled immigration that began with the Biden government makes the situation even worse, escalating social problems and racist and xenophobic reactions. Amidst a scenario of weak democracy, polarization and totalitarian tendencies gain space and, with this, future scenarios such a civil war, Balkanization or even the beginning of a dictatorship are expected.
The best thing for the American government to do is to interpret Barbara Walter’s book as a true warning, a report by a CIA consultant about the problems that affect America, and not as a simple apology for the Biden administration. Washington’s problems are serious and it is no longer a matter of “Republicans vs. Democrats” but of “democracy vs. civil war”.
*
Note to readers: Please click the share buttons above or below. Follow us on Instagram, @crg_globalresearch. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.
Lucas Leiroz is a researcher in Social Sciences at the Rural Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, geopolitical consultant.
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.
With Julian Assange now fighting the next stage of efforts to extradite him to the United States to face 18 charges, 17 of which are based on the brutal, archaic Espionage Act, some Australian politicians have found their voice. It might be said that a few have even found their conscience.
Australia’s Deputy Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce was sufficiently exercised by the High Court judgment overturning the lower court ruling against extradition to demand an end to the matter. In his opinion piece for the Nine newspaper group on December 14, he argued that rights were “not created in some legal sonic boom at one undefined point of our existence nor switched off like the power to a fridge because of a fear or a confusion as to the worth of their contents.”
The deputy PM proved mature enough to admit that “whether you like him or despite him”, the importance of the case transcended his situation. “So we must hope for the British courts to do so, and we will judge its society accordingly.” (They have not and, accordingly, should be judged.)
The Nationals leader has little time for the role of whistleblowing or disclosing egregious misconduct by a State; less time for Assange as the publisher in history, the exposer of crimes by a great power. “They are a separate matter to the key issue: where was this individual when he was allegedly breaking US law for which the US is now seeking his extradition from London?”
Joyce’s reasoning, while jejune on the historical contributions of WikiLeaks, has the merit of unusual clarity. He argues that the UK “should try him there for any crime he is alleged to have committed on British soil or send him back to Australia, where he is a citizen.” Assange never pilfered any US secret files; did not breach Australian laws and was not in the US when “the event being deliberated in the court now in London occurred.” To extradite him to the US would not only be unjust but bizarre. “If he insulted the Koran, would he be extradited to Saudi Arabia?”
The move by the Nationals leader also brought a few voices of support from the woodwork. Liberal backbenchers Jason Falinski and Bridget Archer are encouraging diplomatic intervention. Falinski suggested that the Morrison government “do what it can to get an Australian citizen back to Australia as quickly as possible” though he refused to entertain “a public spat with America”. Archer believed that “he should be released and returned to Australia”.
The announcement that Caroline Kennedy would be heading Down Under as the new US ambassador to Australia was also seen as an opportunity. Former Australian Foreign Minister Bob Carr suggested to that Prime Minister Scott Morrison take the chance to discuss the Assange case with Kennedy. (This, from a man who once claimed that Assange “has had more consular support in a comparable time than any other Australian” while admitting that he did not “know whether this is the case.”)
Morrison might, suggests Carr, point out that Australia had its own challenges in facing war crimes allegations, notably “war crimes trials pending for Australian troops in Afghanistan who might have done the very things Assange exposed in Iraq.” Washington’s treatment of the publisher could well “turn this guy into a martyr.”
Carr sees such advice as part of the capital of trust between allies. It was a “small transaction under the architecture of what each sees as a mutually beneficial relationship.” It might even show that Australia was capable of behaving “like a sovereign nation” in “one tiny corner of our alliance partnership”. If Canberra were unable to “take up the cause of an Australian passport holder, what scope for any independent action do we allow ourselves?”
The former foreign minister shows, at stages, flashes of ignorance about aspects of the proceedings (the US prosecution, for instance, made a special point in not mentioning the Collateral Murder video in its proceedings), he is at least cognisant of the monstrous defects in the case, not least the fact that a good deal of the indictment is based on falsified accounts from former WikiLeaks volunteer, Sigurdur “Siggi” Thordarson.
The latest stirring of principled awareness in Australia should be treated warily. Australian governments tend to protect their citizens with a begrudging reluctance, except in the rarest of cases. They are notorious in playing the game of surrender and capitulation. In the context of the US-Australian alliance, one given an even more solid filling with the AUKUS security pact, the hope that Australia would ever be able to exercise sovereign choices on any issue that affects US security is almost inconceivable.
The lamentable behaviour from Canberra regarding Assange’s welfare has also been brought to light by the tireless exploits of lawyer Kellie Tranter. Using Freedom of Information (FOI) requests, Tranter developed a timeline revealing how Australian officials were updated on Assange’s condition (legal and physical) yet did little in the way of addressing it. Kit Klarenberg, making use of Tranter’s findings, also discusses the extent Australian officials knew about Assange’s plight.
In April 2019, for instance, the lawyer Gareth Pierce, acting for Assange, wrote to the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) warning that the publisher’s possessions were being held by the Ecuadorian authorities. These included a stash of privileged legal documents. DFAT, while claiming it would chase the matter up, concluded in May 2019 that Assange’s possessions were “under the authority and jurisdiction of the Judicial System of the Republic of Ecuador”. Australian diplomats, it followed, were unable to intervene. The result: Assange’s documents, held by the Ecuadorians, were seized by the FBI.
As extradition proceedings were taking place, Peirce wrote to the Australian High Commission that consular representatives would have “undoubtedly noted what was clear for everyone present in court to observe” – that the publisher was “in shockingly poor condition … struggling not only to cope but to articulate what he wishes to articulate.” DFAT’s report of those proceedings, intentionally or otherwise, was stonily silent on the issue.
Throughout, DFAT maintained that Assange had refused consular assistance or support. This was a point the publisher took up in a meeting at Belmarsh prison with consular officials on November 1, 2019, claiming that to be misguided nonsense. He also noted concerns by the prison doctor about his state, being “so bad that his mind was shutting down”, the appalling state of isolation which made it impossible for him “to think or to prepare his defence.”
Little then, can be expected from the compliant minions in Canberra desperately keen not to soil or sour relations with Washington. But it is at least mildly heartening that a few members of the Morrison government have woken up to the fact that this grotesque act of persecution against a publisher should end.
*
Note to readers: Please click the share buttons above or below. Follow us on Instagram, @crg_globalresearch. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.
Dr. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research and Asia-Pacific Research. Email: [email protected]
Featured image: Julian Assange in Belmarsh Prison in 2019 (Source: WSWS)
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.
The Austrian government is hiring people to “hunt down vaccine refusers,” according to a report published by Blick.
Yes, really.
The burden for enforcing the fines unjabbed Austrians will have to pay as part of their punishment will fall to their employers, necessitating a new army of ‘inspectors’ to ensure that process is running smoothly.
The city of Linz, which is home to 200,000 inhabitants, has a relatively low vaccination rate of 63 per cent.
In response, “Linz now wants to hire people who are supposed to hunt down vaccine refusers,” reports Swiss news outlet Blick.
The role of the inspectors will be to check on “whether those who do not get vaccinated really pay for it.”
The vaccine refusenik hunters will receive a wage of 2774 euros, which will be paid 14 times a year, making an annual income of 38,863 euros.
Nice work if you can get it.
“The job includes, among other things, the creation of penal orders as well as the processing of appeals,” according to the report, adding that workers need to be “resilient” and willing to work a lot of overtime.
The jobs are only open to Austrian citizens, all of whom will either have to be vaccinated against or fully recovered from COVID.
As we previously highlighted, the unvaccinated in Austria could find themselves imprisoned for a year under a new administrative law that would force them to pay for their own internment.
Austrians who don’t get vaccinated by February face fines of up to €7,200 ($8,000) for non-compliance, and those who refuse to pay would also face a 12 month jail sentence.
*
Note to readers: Please click the share buttons above or below. Follow us on Instagram, @crg_globalresearch. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.
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.
Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed of the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia has returned from the frontline in the battle to halt the advances of the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF).
TPLF rebels launched an attack on the Ethiopian National Defense Forces (ENDF) during early November of 2020 triggering a conflict which has resulted in the deaths of thousands and the displacement of several million people inside the country and in neighboring Sudan.
Abiy, who was elected to a full term of office in 2021, had already declared a unilateral ceasefire in June. Nonetheless, the TPLF continued the conflict by sending its rebel forces into the Amhara and Afar populated areas of Ethiopia.
Ethiopia, a vast country of over 115 million people, the second most populous state on the African continent, is composed of numerous ethnic groups and nationalities. Since the ascendancy of the Abiy administration in the aftermath of a national uprising against the TPLF-led Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) regime in the early months of 2018, the prime minister has sought to unite the country under the political banner of the Prosperity Party (PP).
The TPLF grouping which maintained control of the Tigray province after 2018 in the north of the country has consistently refused to participate in efforts aimed at building national unity in Ethiopia and Pan-African solidarity throughout the Horn of Africa region. The rebels held provincial elections in 2020 despite the call by the central government in Addis Ababa to postpone voting across the country due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Obviously, the central government was taken unawares after its forces were attacked in the Tigray provincial capital of Mekelle. In the first few months of the war, the ENDF retook Mekelle and other areas of the province prior to announcing a unilateral ceasefire in June for the purposes of allowing humanitarian assistance and the agricultural production of the farmers.
In recent weeks, after the prime minister visited the frontline, the character of the conflict has shifted once again. The Ethiopian military has been able to retake land from the TPLF in the most contested areas of the country.
United States media outlets apparently working in collaboration with the State Department and the Pentagon, began to spread misinformation about the purported “imminent collapse” of the Abiy government in Addis Ababa in November. These reports were contradicted by the Ethiopian government along with visitors to the country who repeatedly stated that the capital city was calm even with the prime minister’s declaration of a state of emergency.
The claims of mass starvation, sexual assault and accusations of ethnic cleansing and genocide flourished within the western governmental and corporate press agencies. The Ethiopian administration of Prime Minister Abiy was identified by the U.S. and its allies as the perpetuator of these crimes. However, the government denied these allegations saying the charges were solely being leveled by the TPLF and its supporters to further isolate Addis Ababa.
Eyewitness reports related to the war crimes committed by the TPLF’s Defense Forces (TDF) went largely ignored by the western media. TPLF forces took trucks and other equipment sent to the area for humanitarian purposes. The Abiy government accused elements working within the United Nations framework in Ethiopia as being collaborators with the rebels. In the modification of their allegations of war crimes committed by the central government, in recent weeks the western-backed agencies are now saying that abuses have occurred on both sides of the conflict. The prime minister and his government have categorically rejected any accommodation of the TPLF and its demands which often solidarizes with imperialist interests in the Horn of Africa.
An Ethiopian-oriented news agency, Borkena.com, reported on the recent situation on the battlefront noting that:
“Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) forces retreated to the Tigray region of Ethiopia after facing devastating military defeats in the Afar and Amhara regions of Ethiopia over the past three weeks. Six prominent TPLF military generals whose names are still undisclosed were killed in the Kasagita Front in the Afar region of Ethiopia, as reported by local Ethiopian sources about three weeks ago. After losing a fortified military stronghold in the areas, whose objective was said to be to cut off the supply route to Djibouti and hold Ethiopia in a choke position, losing battles became pervasive in the areas it controlled. In a span of less than two weeks, TPLF was forced to leave cities after cities in the western, Eastern and Wollo front in the center. Shewarobit, Debre Sina, Ataye, Kemissie, Kombolcham Batie, Dessie, Haik, Wuchale, Wurgehsa, Mersa, Woldia and Kobo were freed from TPLF forces one after the other.”
The Role of the U.S. and United Nations in the Conflict
Under the previous administration of President Donald J. Trump, threats against Addis Ababa were made related to the construction and operations of the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam Project (GERD). The project, which is the largest hydroelectric plant in Africa, has been planned for years by the Ethiopian government to enhance its own internal power supply and to assist other states within the broader region known as the Nile Basin Initiative. (See this)
Neighboring Egypt has sought to sabotage the GERD under the guise that it will severely curtail access to the waters of the Blue Nile which is shared by both countries. The current arrangements imposed by British imperialism during the early 20th century favors Egypt, its then colonial subject. Ethiopia, although occupied by the Italian fascist forces between 1936-1941, has never been subjected to direct colonial control by European powers.
Trump had urged Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi to “blow up” the GERD after Ethiopia rejected a deal imposed by Washington. The statement was made to Sudanese interim Prime Minister Abdalla Hamdok during 2020, at the time of Khartoum’s illegal “recognition” of the State of Israel.
Unfortunately, the United Nations humanitarian agencies have taken a position similar to the U.S. in regard to the war. Ethiopia has set strict limits on access to conflict areas which have been utilized by certain UN agencies to make accusations against the government in Addis Ababa.
However, what has created even more tension is the declaration by the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC) to conduct an investigation into the claims of war crimes since November of 2020 in the north of Ethiopia. The government in Addis Ababa has rejected the plans for an investigation saying it will not cooperate since these issues are internal matters.
A press briefing was held on December 21 in Addis Ababa featuring the spokeswoman for Prime Minister Billene Seyoum who addressed the announcement by the UNHRC. Borkena.com in an article on the briefing emphasized:
“Ethiopia says the resolution was politically motivated. Politically motivated because it discredited the efforts by the Ethiopian government to investigate rights abuses in the Tigray region. Earlier this year, the Ethiopian government martial court looked into cases of violations by members of the Ethiopian Defense Forces. Those who were found to be guilty were punished in accordance with the martial court. In regard to claims of genocide in Tigray by the TPLF surrogates and some state actors tacitly supporting the designated terrorist group, a joint investigation by the United Nations Human Rights Commission and Ethiopian Human Rights Commission ruled that there was no genocide in Tigray. The press secretary on Tuesday (Dec. 21) reflected a view that the UN Human Rights Council should stop practices that sound as partisanship and consider the importance of investigating rights abuses in the Afar and Amhara regions of Ethiopia where the TPLF carried out multiples of atrocities during the months of occupation in parts of these regions.”
The attacks on Ethiopia have generated mass demonstrations domestically and internationally known as #NoMore. Thousands of Diasporic Ethiopians and Eritreans have held joint demonstrations across the world including the U.S. These actions intensified after the announcement of sanctions by Washington against Ethiopia. In addition, a leaked videotape of a secret meeting involving the U.S., UK, European Union and TPLF officials where plans were being discussed for the imposition of a new government after the removal of Prime Minister Abiy. (See this)
These developments illustrate clearly the real aims and objectives of the war being waged against the Ethiopian government. Anti-imperialists throughout the world, with specific to the western capitalist states, must be in solidarity with the Ethiopian people in these attempts to destabilize and overthrow the legitimate administration inside the country.
*
Note to readers: Please click the share buttons above or below. Follow us on Instagram, @crg_globalresearch. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.
Abayomi Azikiwe is the editor of the Pan-African News Wire. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.
Israel was involved in the assassination of Iranian Revolutionary Guards’ Quds Force Commander Qassem Soleimani, the former head of Israel’s military intelligence said yesterday.
Soleimani, who was considered the mastermind of the pro-Iran proxies in the region, was killed in an American drone strike near the Iraqi capital Baghdad in January 2020.
According to Israeli daily Haaretz, former Israeli army intelligence chief Major General Tamir Hayman told the Israel Intelligence Heritage and Commemoration Centre that the killing of Soleimani was one of “two significant and important assassinations” during his tenure.
The other assassination, he said, was that of the military leader of the Islamic Jihad in Gaza, Bahaa Abu Al-Ata.
“Soleimani’s assassination is an achievement, since our main enemy, in my eyes, are the Iranians. Two significant and important assassinations can be noted in my term,” Hayman said.
Several days after Soleimani was killed, NBC News reported that Israeli intelligence helped the United States target him.
Hayman’s tenure as Israeli army intelligence chief ended in October. He has said that Israel has carried out multiple operations to disrupt the spread of Iranian weapons and funds throughout the region.
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).
There is an incredible gaslighting campaign happening in the United States right now, as COVID cases reach all time highs in the U.S. northeast and elsewhere.
On television and in corporate press outlets, there is a giant, ongoing memory-holing operation related to the once-promised idea that mRNA shots would stop the spread of the virus that causes COVID-19.
While they now claim otherwise, every single major government health official and pharmaceutical executive has claimed that COVID shots stop the virus.
Let’s take a look at what the top government health officials have said on the record about these shots over the past year.
Let’s start with the worst of offenders, Dr. Anthony Fauci.
“When you get vaccinated, you not only protect your own health and that of the family but also you contribute to the community health by preventing the spread of the virus throughout the community. In other words, you become a dead end to the virus. And when there are a lot of dead ends around, the virus is not going to go anywhere. And that’s when you get a point that you have a markedly diminished rate of infection in the community.”
“Our data from the CDC suggests that vaccinated people don’t carry the virus, don’t get sick and that it’s not just in clinical trials, but it’s also in real world data.” – CDC Director Rochelle Walensky.
“I’m very confident that transmission between people will be reduced by such a highly effective vaccine” -BioNTech CEO Ugur Sahin, whose company developed the “Pfizer vaccine.”
ファイザーは、分析の結果、開発中の新型コロナウイルスワクチンは90％以上の予防効果があったと発表 Pfizer’s Early Data Shows Vaccine Is More Than 90% Effective https://t.co/wQFslkmXAL 米ファイザー、ワクチンの効果9割超に https://t.co/tj4t9o2ftP https://t.co/vhTEDGqlsp https://t.co/2l2ju2PuyY
Now, why is it important to hold these people accountable?
Well, first off, they made a false proclamation and need to be held accountable for doing so.
But second, and much more important, is the reality that almost every single one of the failed “public health expert” strategies related to COVID-19 are tethered to the idea that the shots will end the pandemic.
Lockdowns were highlighted as a means of buying time for everyone to get injected with mRNA shots. Today’s “lockdowns of the unvaccinated” are designed to coerce people into taking the shots, with the thesis that they are a threat to the community for remaining unvaccinated.
Mandatory masking (and “social distancing”), particularly among schoolchildren, are justified as a temporary tool to be utilized until one has taken the shots.
Vaccine passports are implemented under the impression that a “fully vaccinated” crowd would not spread COVID among one another.
In August, Public Health and Medical Professionals for Transparency (PHMPT) submitted a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for all of the data within Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine biological product file — a body of information comprising some 329,000 pages.
.
The FDA, arguing its poorly staffed Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research did not have the capacity to quickly redact legally exempt material, such as Pfizer proprietary information and personal private information of trial participants, the agency asked to be allowed to release only 500 pages of this data per month, thus necessitating 55 years for full disclosure.
The agency later requested up to 75 years to complete the task. As of Nov. 17, only a fraction of the data in question had been released.
Here I will discuss one of these released documents, the “Cumulative Analysis of Post-authorization Adverse Event Reports.” This document constitutes one part of Pfizer’s responsibility for pharmacovigilance with respect to their Biological License Agreement with the FDA.
Pharmacovigilance refers to the science and activities relating to the detection, assessment, understanding and prevention of adverse effects or any other medicine-related problem.
Before we examine the quantity, seriousness and nature of the adverse events included in this document it is worthwhile to pause and consider just how significant this report should have been to the public.
Pfizer’s vaccine had yet to complete full safety and efficacy testing, yet its product was being rapidly deployed on a healthy population that dwarfed the size of the vaccine’s clinical trial.
The FDA and Pfizer were well aware that very real risks, if they existed, could not have been identified from the trials alone. There weren’t enough participants, and the participants had not been observed for very long.
Everything may seem okay if you experiment on 20,000 people, but what happens when you experiment on a million people?
The “Cumulative Analysis of Post-authorization Adverse Event Reports” should have been the “everything looks good so far” reassurance the FDA was seeking. Why was it necessary to impel the FDA to make this information public through a court order?
In the discussion section of the document (section 4), Pfizer assures the FDA it “… performs frequent and rigorous signal detection on BNT162b2 cases.”
What does “rigorous” signal detection mean? Did Pfizer survey a large number of vaccine recipients for adverse events and investigate them? No, it didn’t.
This report is merely a compilation of unsolicited, in other words, passive, reports of adverse events directly brought to Pfizer’s attention by recipients, cases reported by the health authorities, cases published in the medical literature, cases from Pfizer-sponsored marketing programs, non-interventional studies and cases of serious adverse events reported from clinical studies regardless of causality assessment.
In the report, Pfizer admitted the “magnitude of underreporting is unknown.”
It is well accepted that passive reporting will inescapably lead to underreporting. Nevertheless, according to Pfizer’s report:
“Due to the large numbers of spontaneous adverse event reports received for the product, the MAH (Marketing Authorisation Holder) has prioritised the processing of serious cases, in order to meet expedited regulatory reporting timelines and ensure these reports are available for signal detection and evaluation activity.”
The authors continued:
“Pfizer also taken a [sic] multiple actions to help alleviate the large increase of adverse event reports. This includes significant technology enhancements, [sic] and process and workflow solutions, as well as increasing the number of data entry and case processing colleagues.”
In other words, the number of adverse events reported overwhelmed Pfizer’s expectations, yet the vaccine maker concluded, “The findings of these signal detection analyses are consistent with the known safety profile of the vaccine.”
This paradoxical statement will prove to be an important clue as we dissect the data below.
What does the document reveal?
Through Feb. 28, a total of 42,086 recipients (cases) reported 158,893 events, or adverse reactions to the Pfizer vaccine. Approximately 50% of these events were deemed serious.
Figure 1: Total Numbers of BNT162b2 AEs by system organ classes and event seriousness
An overview of the characteristics of the recipients is given here:
Of note, 1,223 recipients of the vaccine had a fatal outcome. More than 11,000 had not recovered. The outcome of 9,400 was unknown. Nearly three-quarters were female.
These numbers are concerning, but do they represent a significant safety concern? The answer to that question depends entirely upon the number of people who had been vaccinated up to that point.
Pfizer provided this number to the FDA in the general overview section of the document, section 3.1.1. — but in the document released under the FOIA request, that number was redacted:
“It is estimated that approximately (b) (4) doses of BNT162b2 were shipped worldwide from the receipt of the first temporary authorisation for emergency supply on 01 December 2020 through 28 February 2021.”
In the above, “(b)(4)“ indicates that this number has been redacted.
The cumulative number of doses distributed worldwide as of Feb. 28 is not proprietary information, nor does it constitute personal, private data of individuals.
Yet without this key number there is no way to calculate the incidence of serious events, i.e., a safety signal.
The FDA chose, without explanation or any legal justification, to withhold this crucial piece of data.
Despite the FDA’s obvious intention to obfuscate, Pfizer provided a means of estimating this number when it unequivocally concluded: “… these signal detection analyses are consistent with the known safety profile of the vaccine.”
What was the known safety profile of the vaccine?
As of Feb. 28, the only known safety profile of the vaccine was determined by the initial results from the phase 3 trials from the autumn of 2020.
Thus, if these data are consistent with its known safety profile, and roughly 79,000 serious adverse events had occurred up to that time, we can estimate that approximately 13,550,000 (79,000 x 171.6) doses had been distributed.
Admittedly there is uncertainty in this calculation. Perhaps a different interpretation of the safety profile was implied.
However, Pfizer reported the number of doses that had been distributed, not administered.
Fewer doses would have been administered than delivered. Moreover, serious adverse events in the trials were distributed across participants who were fully vaccinated (having received two doses).
Here we are using the number of doses as the denominator. This estimation will result in the lower limit of the true incidence of adverse events.
In other words, by using these assumptions we are giving Pfizer’s vaccine the maximum benefit of the doubt.
Using this estimate of total doses given, the incidence of a fatal outcome is 1223/13.55 million or 1 in 11,079.
Permanent sequelae (conditions that result as a consequence of vaccination) = 520/13.55 million, or 1 in 26,057. Furthermore, 11,361 out of 13.55 million, or 1 in 1,193, had not yet recovered from an adverse event.
Pfizer inexplicably chose to group recipients who “recovered” with those who were “recovering.” How many in this large group (19,582) were still suffering from harm at the time of the report? On what basis did Pfizer determine a recipient still had a chance of full recovery?
With no clarification from the vaccine manufacturer, we are forced to lump them in with another large group of 9,400 whose ultimate outcome was “unknown” — leaving us with a high limit of 1 in 466 recipients having had an undetermined outcome.
Although none of these adverse events and fatalities were shown to be directly or indirectly caused by vaccination, Pfizer offered more data of concern around adverse events of “special Interest” (AESI).
According to Pfizer, 1,403 cardiovascular AESIs, 932 hematologic, 3,600 musculoskeletal, 501 neurologic and 3,674 “other” serious AESIs all occurred with a median time of onset of 24 hours or less from vaccination.
The 275 strokes and 449 cases of facial paralysis reported occurred with a median time of onset of two days from vaccination.
Though it is impossible to establish an unassailable causative link between vaccination and injury at this time, the temporal relationship between them is correlative and highly suggestive of causation.
Nevertheless, the authors of the Pfizer report concluded at the end of each AESI category that “This cumulative case review does not raise new safety issues.”
The report also included 24 serious cases in children younger than 12. Of those, 13 cases had not yet been resolved at the time of reporting. The mean age of these recipients was 3.7 years.
We must assume that very few children of that age were inoculated at that time given that Pfizer had authorization for use on adults only. With no number of inoculated children reported, we cannot know what the risk of injury is in children under 12.
Conclusions
Pfizer’s repeated assurances that no new safety issues exist are disingenuous at best.
The FDA was overtly obstructive by withholding crucial information required to make an accurate assessment of harm. However, by using reasonable estimations based on Pfizer’s own claims and published trial data, it is likely a safety signal does exist — and that safety signal was ignored by the very organization that is supposed to be listening for it, the FDA.
Pfizer’s estimated incidence of potential vaccine fatality, 1 in 11,079, is approximately twice that reported in VAERS. Given that the potential vaccine fatalities in this document have been passively reported, we can assume the actual incidence is higher.
More comprehensive analyses have demonstrated a VAERS underreporting factor of vaccine fatality approaching 41 or greater.
Underreported or not, the real and growing tragedy is that until an injury associated with vaccination is proven to be caused by it, it remains, for all intents and purposes, a non-existent signal to the very institutions responsible for public health and safety.
On what grounds can we as physicians and healthcare providers assure our patients this vaccine is safe if adverse events are not investigated or even acknowledged?
Is a nod from the FDA really good enough?
Or should we demand transparency, discussion or at the very least, unredacted data? What does the public expect of us?
Important article by Jane M. Orient, M.D. published by the AAPS
***
In addition to being subjected to various forms of censorship, for the first time in living memory American doctors are getting threat letters from licensure boards warning them against distributing “harmful misinformation.” Medical boards in 12 states have disciplined doctors because of this allegation. While it is claimed that there’s an epidemic of misinformation during the COVID-19 pandemic, the warnings don’t spell out what that means.
We don’t have an epidemic of patients dying because doctors told them to refuse treatment or to drink Clorox or aquarium cleaner.
In fact, no patients need to have suffered any harm at all for the medical board to investigate a doctor’s no-longer-free speech. All it takes is an anonymous complaint
Pharmacists who were converted into the overseers of physicians’ prescribing practices will complain that a doctor had prescribed ivermectin for COVID-19.
Or an employer might complain that a doctor supported a worker’s request for a medical exemption that wasn’t on the CDC’s list of acceptable reasons.
Or the doctor might have spoken at a political meeting at which mask mandates were being challenged.
Or a patient might complain that a doctor wasn’t wearing a mask in his private consulting room, even when no COVID-19 patients were anywhere near and the doctor had demonstrated immunity.
“Harmful misinformation” appears to mean anything that contradicts or asks questions or raises doubt about the dogma that “vaccines are safe and effective,” or suggests a treatment not endorsed by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), National Institutes of Health (NIH), and their corporate sponsors.
One source of the allegedly “harmful misinformation” is a database created and maintained by the CDC, the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS).
Anybody can enter a suspected vaccine adverse reaction, and the public can access it. So, “it can be abused by people trying to sow fear,” write Shayla Love and Anna Merlan in VICE News. One person filed a fraudulent report, promptly removed, claiming that an influenza vaccination had turned him into the “Incredible Hulk.”
Flawed as it is, VAERS is the best CDC has to offer for looking for “danger signals.” Of course, correlation doesn’t prove causality. As Lindy McGee from Texas Children’s Hospital correctly pointed out, “I can report if I get hit by a truck after I’ve gotten a vaccine and that would be reported as associated with a vaccine. It does not make any implication of causality.” However, there is a double standard. If you get hit by a truck, but test positive for COVID-19, the hospital will get paid for counting you as a COVID death.
Adverse reports to VAERS are many times higher for COVID-19 vaccines than for all other vaccines combined since the database was established in 1988. The website vaers.hhs.gov clearly states: “Knowingly filing a false VAERS report is a violation of Federal law (18 U.S. Code § 1001) punishable by fine and imprisonment.” So, presumably most of the approximately 20,000 reports of death concern people who really did die soon after getting the jab, most within a few days. It could be 20,000 coincidences, but the count is not “misinformation.”
Love and Merlan call the compilers of VAERS information at openvaers.com/covid-data “dumpster divers.” Matt Motta of Oklahoma State University and Dominik Stecuła of Colorado State University refer to that January article favorably in their Aug 25 essay that says VAERS is only good for researching “vaccine hesitancy.” They don’t mention that the featured VAERS death count of 329 from Jan 22, 2021, has steadily increased.
Also viewed as “misinformation” is the opinion of physicians and researchers that hydroxychloroquine, ivermectin, and other “repurposed” drugs are beneficial in COVID-19, as shown in more than 1,000 studies. Reports of dying patients who recovered when hospitals were legally forced to step aside and allow off-protocol treatment are ignored.
The safe option for doctors is to promote the jab or keep silent, and not to suggest anything different from what Anthony Fauci approves. By silencing doctors who are ethical professionals, one opens the gates for the reckless charlatans.
Recall that in Orwell’s Newspeak, the meaning of words is inverted. The Ministry of Love is in charge of torture; the Ministry of Plenty, of starvation; and the Ministry of Truth, of propaganda.
Just as President Biden’s unconstitutional vaccination mandates were being ripped up by the courts, authoritarian politicians, public health bureaucrats, and the mainstream media, announced a new Covid variant to justify another round of lockdowns and restrictions. The things that didn’t work last time would be a good idea to do again this time, they claim.
For these authoritarians, the timing of omicron’s emergence was perfect.
The variant was first discovered in South Africa, with the US and European media running endless scare stories. Authoritarian politicians used the manufactured fear to justify another attack on liberty.
Europe shut down and became a virtual prison camp. In Austria, Germany, and elsewhere, citizens became non-persons without a vaccine passport.
South African health officials reported that the variant seemed to be more contagious but far milder than previous variants, as usually happens with such viruses. But the lockdowners would not hear of it. From Boris Johnson in the UK to DeBlasio in New York City, the variant was perfect cover for them to put their boots back on the necks of terrorized citizens.
As to be expected, Fauci reveled in the emergence of the new variant, warning of “record deaths” for the unvaccinated. Similarly, President Biden warned that this would be a “winter of death” for the unvaccinated.
But here’s something the media isn’t reporting about the omicron outbreaks: they are taking place among the fully vaccinated. Cornell University, with 97 percent of the campus fully vaccinated and a mask mandate, has announced that it would return to online only instruction after a massive Covid outbreak.
Likewise, the National Football League has postponed several games this weekend due to Covid outbreaks, even though the League is virtually 100 percent vaccinated. And the National Basketball Association, which is above 95 percent fully vaccinated, has just announced that due to a surge in Covid cases it too will postpone games.
The vaccine is not working to prevent infection or transmission of the virus: cases are raging in states with the highest vaccine levels. Yet the “experts” continue to maintain that the only thing that can stop the spread of omicron is vaccines! More people are catching on that this makes no sense. If vaccines don’t stop the spread, how can vaccines stop the spread?
Meanwhile, South Africa, with one of the lowest rates of vaccination, has just announced that they are only seeing a tiny fraction of hospitalizations with omicron compared to previous variants. South Africa’s Covid response authority has written to the health minister recommending an end to containment efforts, contact tracing, and quarantines.
Unvaccinated South Africa is ending Covid restrictions while the hyper-vaccinated North is locking down. Something doesn’t add up.
Fauci loves to say that to question him is to question science, but this has nothing to do with science. It’s about power. Fauci, the political authoritarians, and the corrupt Big Pharma billionaires are trying to make a last stand, desperate to push omicron as a justification for further tyranny and profits. But actual science is not cooperating.
Omicron is spreading and vaccines are not stopping it. Thus far nearly half of omicron infections are asymptomatic. Some experts are predicting that omicron will spell the end of Covid-19. But we know that as long as people like Fauci are around, Covid-19 will never end. Unless, of course, we repudiate the charlatans and profiteers and reclaim our liberty!
The top eight Pfizer and Moderna shareholders saw their combined wealth rise by $10 billion in a seven-day windfall after the Omicron variant was discovered, according to a report in the Daily Mail.
With the discovery of Omicron making headlines globally from November 24, the personal wealth of Moderna CEO Stephane Bancel rose by $824 million alone amid the company’s rapid share growth, with the pharma boss selling 10,000 shares of his own stock in that period for a cool $3.19 million.
Investment giant Vanguard Group Inc. saw the value of its shareholdings in Pfizer and Moderna increase by more than $2.7 billion after the Omicron news, with Blackrock Inc.’s shares rising by more than $2.4 billion and Baillie Gifford & Co’s Moderna stock valuation climbing by more than $1.5 billion.
State Street Corp.’s Pfizer shareholdings increased in value by more than $1 billion, and Capital World Investors’ shares rose by more than $900 million, followed closely by Bancel’s $824 million and Flagship Pioneering’s $652 million gain on Moderna stock.
Bancel’s share value reportedly rose by $1.7 billion at one point during the last week of November, but a lost legal dispute concerning company patents brought his stocks down to an $824 million valuation.
Neither company denied the staggering figures when contacted by the Daily Mail.
Reacting to the news, Irish senator Sharon Keogan said politicians needed to “check the stock market” and “join the dots” in assessing who benefits from the global response to COVID, and to cease making the participation of people in society “contingent upon the consumption of the product of a private company under direct or indirect threat of force.”
The Pifzer CEO’s recent prediction that people will need an annual COVID vaccination for many years to come was sardonically compared by the senator to a Coca-Cola CEO recommending a can with every meal, “because I’m sure he’s just concerned for people’s safety.”
Keogan then laid out the remarkable discovery that “in the week of Omicron it was discovered the wealth of the eight top Pfizer and Moderna shareholders rose by a combined €9 billion ($10 billion USD).”
“Governments globally have collectively made ordinary participation in society contingent upon consumption of the product of a private company under direct or indirect threat of force,” Keogan lamented in her December 9 speech.
“Over the past two years, the livelihoods of ordinary people have been steadily siphoned into the pockets of pharma and tech giants — the only hope we have is in recognizing that this is an entirely unsustainable (situation), and will end,” she predicted.
LifeSiteNews last week reported how at least 75 federal legislators in the United States held stock in Moderna, Johnson & Johnson, or Pfizer in 2020.
The three companies are responsible for producing experimental, abortion-tainted COVID-19 injections.
The paper trail shows Big Pharma corporations also shelled out millions of dollars to finance electoral campaigns and lobby the federal government.
The data raised serious ethical concerns about the objectivity of the U.S. legislature, prompting questions about how much government actors stand to profit from coercive jab mandates that have deprived Americans of their rights and handicapped a struggling economy.
LifeSiteNews’ Ashley Sadler further reported in late November how Public Citizen, a consumer advocacy organization, had found Pfizer attempted to “silence governments, throttle supply, shift risk and maximize profits in the worst public health crisis in a century” through its vaccine contract negotiation strategies with various nation states.
Public Citizen’s report noted that Pfizer has negotiated contracts with nations to ensure it retains the right to actually “silence governments” while funneling disputes through private arbitrators rather than public courts.
In Brazil, for example, Pfizer demanded the country waive its “sovereign immunity waiver on public assets” and agree to a “lack of penalties for Pfizer if deliveries were late.”
After first arguing Pfizer’s terms were “unfair and abusive,” Brazil ultimately agreed to them, even consenting to “resolve disputes under a secret private arbitration under the laws of New York” and to “broadly indemnif[y] Pfizer for civil claims.”
In addition to Brazil, Pfizer also required Chile, Colombia, the Dominican Republic, and Peru to waive their sovereign immunity.
Indian news channel WION also reported that Pfizer had astoundingly asked Argentina to put “its bank reserves, its military bases, and its embassy buildings at stake as collateral.”
But Pfizer’s alleged “bullying” and apparent moves to silence governments has not been limited to Latin American countries.
The report added that in the United Kingdom, “[a] secret panel of three private arbitrators — not a U.K court — is empowered under the contract to make the final decision” in the event of a contractual dispute with Pfizer, while “[b]oth parties are required to keep everything secret.”
The same is true in the United States, in which both the U.S. government and Pfizer have agreed not to discuss the “existence, subject matter or terms” of the contract “without the prior written consent of the other.”
Pfizer is not unfamiliar with being hit with massive criminal and civil liability claims, which may explain its eagerness to defend itself against future lawsuits.
In 2009, in the largest pharmaceutical settlement in the history of the U.S. Department of Justice at the time, Pfizer was forced to pay a $2.3 billion settlement “to resolve criminal and civil liability arising from the illegal promotion of certain pharmaceutical products.”
According to the DOJ, Pfizer misbranded an anti-inflammatory drug that had been pulled from the market, promoting its sale “for several uses and dosages that the FDA specifically declined to approve due to safety concerns.”
Pfizer’s subsidiaries pleaded guilty to a felony for misbranding the drug “with intent to defraud or mislead,” and the company was ordered to pay a criminal fine totaling $1.3 billion, “the largest criminal fine ever imposed in the United States for any matter.” Pfizer paid out another $1 billion “to resolve allegations” related to the illegal promotion of three other drugs.
The reluctance of health authorities to approve the use of ivermectin as a viable and inexpensive treatment or prophylactic for COVID-19 has come under sustained criticism from many experts, with clear evidence emerging that some academics were coerced into suppressing favorable data.
Many critics have noted that the “emergency use authorization” given to the experimental vaccines by the FDA could only have been obtained in the absence of safe and effective alternative treatments, such as ivermectin.
The European (EEA and non-EEA countries) database of suspected drug reaction reports is EudraVigilance, verified by European Medicines Agency (EMA), and they are now reporting 32,649 fatalities, and 3,003,296 injuries, following COVID-19 injections.
This database maintained at EudraVigilance is only for countries in Europe who are part of the European Union (EU), which comprises 27 countries.
The total number of countries in Europe is much higher, almost twice as many, numbering around 50. (There are some differences of opinion as to which countries are technically part of Europe.)
So as high as these numbers are, they do NOT reflect all of Europe. The actual number in Europe who are reported dead or injured following COVID-19 shots would be much higher than what we are reporting here.
The EudraVigilance database (EEA and non-EEA countries) reports that through December 4, 2021 there are 32,649 deaths and 3,003,296 injuries reported following injections of four experimental COVID-19 shots:
From the total of injuries recorded, almost half of them (1,409,643) are serious injuries.
“Seriousness provides information on the suspected undesirable effect; it can be classified as ‘serious’ if it corresponds to a medical occurrence that results in death, is life-threatening, requires inpatient hospitalisation, results in another medically important condition, or prolongation of existing hospitalisation, results in persistent or significant disability or incapacity, or is a congenital anomaly/birth defect.”
A Health Impact News subscriber in Europe ran the reports for each of the four COVID-19 shots we are including here. It is a lot of work to tabulate each reaction with injuries and fatalities, since there is no place on the EudraVigilance system we have found that tabulates all the results.
Since we have started publishing this, others from Europe have also calculated the numbers and confirmed the totals.*
Here is the summary data through December 4, 2021.
Total reactions for the mRNA vaccine Tozinameran (code BNT162b2,Comirnaty) from BioNTech/ Pfizer: 15,061 deaths and 1,399,513 injuries to 04/12/2021
38,170 Blood and lymphatic system disorders incl. 217 deaths
43,454 Cardiac disorders incl. 2,204 deaths
404 Congenital, familial and genetic disorders incl. 38 deaths
18,886 Ear and labyrinth disorders incl. 10 deaths
286,356 General disorders and administration site conditions incl. 1,544 deaths
971 Hepatobiliary disorders incl. 62 deaths
499 Immune system disorders incl. 30 deaths
33,416 Infections and infestations incl. 441 deaths
12,583 Injury poisoning and procedural complications incl. 180 deaths
23,958 Investigations incl. 159 deaths
12,472 Metabolism and nutrition disorders incl. 96 deaths
161,308 Musculoskeletal and connective tissue disorders incl. 114 deaths
650 Neoplasms benign malignant and unspecified (incl cysts and polyps) incl. 25 deaths
223,680 Nervous system disorders incl. 1,007 deaths
533 Pregnancy puerperium and perinatal conditions incl. 14 deaths
191 Product issues incl. 1 death
20,150 Psychiatric disorders incl. 60 deaths
4,093 Renal and urinary disorders incl. 63 deaths
15,594 Reproductive system and breast disorders incl. 2 deaths
38,722 Respiratory thoracic and mediastinal disorders incl. 817 deaths
49,877 Skin and subcutaneous tissue disorders incl. 53 deaths
1,533 Social circumstances incl. 6 deaths
1,499 Surgical and medical procedures incl. 26 deaths
27,179 Vascular disorders incl. 457 deaths
Total reactions for the COVID-19 vaccine JANSSEN (AD26.COV2.S) from Johnson & Johnson: 1,989 deaths and 105,819 injuries to 04/12/2021
1,029 Blood and lymphatic system disorders incl. 41 deaths
1,952 Cardiac disorders incl. 169 deaths
36 Congenital, familial and genetic disorders
1,080 Ear and labyrinth disorders incl. 2 deaths
72 Endocrine disorders incl. 1 death
1,415 Eye disorders incl. 7 deaths
8,743 Gastrointestinal disorders incl. 80 deaths
27,925 General disorders and administration site conditions incl. 533 deaths
130 Hepatobiliary disorders incl. 11 deaths
473 Immune system disorders incl. 9 deaths
4,676 Infections and infestations incl. 157 deaths
974 Injury, poisoning and procedural complications incl. 20 deaths
4,927 Investigations incl. 111 deaths
664 Metabolism and nutrition disorders incl. 50 deaths
15,331 Musculoskeletal and connective tissue disorders incl. 45 deaths
59 Neoplasms benign, malignant and unspecified (incl cysts and polyps) incl. 4 deaths
20,725 Nervous system disorders incl. 219 deaths
43 Pregnancy, puerperium and perinatal conditions incl. 1 death
32 Product issues
1,479 Psychiatric disorders incl. 17 deaths
443 Renal and urinary disorders incl. 26 deaths
2,249 Reproductive system and breast disorders incl. 6 deaths
3,799 Respiratory, thoracic and mediastinal disorders incl. 259 deaths
3,241 Skin and subcutaneous tissue disorders incl. 8 deaths
337 Social circumstances incl. 4 deaths
718 Surgical and medical procedures incl. 58 deaths
3,267 Vascular disorders incl. 151 deaths
*These totals are estimates based on reports submitted to EudraVigilance. Totals may be much higher based on percentage of adverse reactions that are reported. Some of these reports may also be reported to the individual country’s adverse reaction databases, such as the U.S. VAERS database and the UK Yellow Card system. The fatalities are grouped by symptoms, and some fatalities may have resulted from multiple symptoms.
Comments Off on 32,649 Deaths 3,003,296 Injuries Following COVID Shots in European Database of Adverse Reactions as Young, Previously Healthy People Continue to Suffer
Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen ordered his country’s military to destroy or submit to warehouses all weapons that were produced in the US. The reason for such a harsh reaction by the Cambodian leader is because of provocative actions and further threats of sanctions from US authorities.
The White House has decided to punish Cambodia for daring to build their country’s military with Chinese support. What infuriates Washington is not so much the fact that the port of Ream in southern Cambodia is a part of the Belt and Road Initiative, but rather their belief that the Chinese are building a new naval base on a site that was recently constructed with American funding, something that Cambodian officials vehemently deny.
Despite this denial, Washington has imposed a series of sanctions against Cambodia, including an embargo on the supply of American weapons and military equipment.
Hun Sen wrote on his Facebook page: “The US embargo on the supply of weapons is a warning to the next generation of Cambodian citizens, to the leaders of the government. If you want your own independent defence bloc, don’t use American weapons.”
Cambodia’s leader, according to some sources, dreams that one day his eldest son, Lieutenant General Hun Manet, will become his successor. Manet is currently deputy commander-in-chief of the Royal Cambodian Armed Forces and Hun Sen believes that he is a future prime minister. In this way, if the US continues to sanction and antagonise Cambodia, the split between the two countries could become generational.
In modern international law, only sanctions imposed by the UN Security Council are recognized. Unilateral sanctions, such as those imposed by the US against a plethora of countries, are illegal according to international law, something that countries like Russia and China repeatedly highlight. With this in mind, the sanctions the US imposed against Cambodia were unilateral, and therefore illegal.
None-the-less, like other countries, Cambodia has the opportunity to buy weapons from elsewhere, and therefore the embargo is unlikely to affect the impoverished Southeast Asian country in a major way. It is recalled that Cambodia is one of the poorest countries in the Southeast Asia region and does not procure major weapons like advanced frigates or fourth/fifth generation fighter jets. Therefore, Cambodia’s military needs are modest and can be easily supplied from other countries.
Southeast Asian countries are a favoured destination for Russian, Chinese, Israeli and French military suppliers. The US lost its monopoly on a variety of products in the region and it appears that it is difficult for the Americans to acknowledge this bitter truth.
It is recalled that in 2016, the US refused to supply weapons to the Philippines, citing human rights violations in the country. At the time, the Filipino president asked China and Russia for help and his country received new weaponry. However, it appears once again that the US, despite being under a new administration, has not learned its lesson that countries will just simply move onto another supplier if the only way they can procure new military equipment is with conditions attached that dictates their domestic and foreign policies.
Cambodia is a minnow state within the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), but it took over the chairmanship of the bloc last week from Brunei. On December 6, Hun Sen stated that Myanmar should be entitled to attend the Association’s forum as a member of the ASEAN family. He also announced plans to meet with the ruler of Myanmar, General Min Aung Hlaing, saying: “If I don’t work with the leader, who can I work with?”
Although it is unlikely that there will be a substantive breakthrough in overcoming the crisis in Myanmar during Cambodia’s chairmanship of ASEAN, Phnom Penh has a greater willingness and ability than Brunei to coordinate action on Myanmar, especially as it does not place preconditions on meeting with General Hlaing like the Bruneians did.
Last week while on a trip to Malaysia, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Washington plans to impose further sanctions against Myanmar’s military leaders. Blinken did not rule out the possibility of assessing the actions of the Myanmar military against citizens as genocide. At the same time, Washington recently announced additional sanctions against organisations and individuals linked to Myanmar’s military.
With Cambodia holding the ASEAN chairmanship for the next mandate period and having ambitions to try and resolve the Myanmar crisis, it will surely lead to another point of tension with Washington. The US is trying to break China’s influence across Southeast Asia, and this has directly led to tensions with Cambodia, the Philippines and Myanmar.
This suggests that the problems between Washington and Phnom Penh will not subside anytime soon. Rather, off the back of US weapon embargoes and Cambodia’s intentions to reconcile Myanmar and ASEAN, relations will only continue to deteriorate, especially as Cambodia continues to unapologetically strengthen its relations with China.
La Federazione Russa ha consegnato agli Stati Uniti d’America, il 15 dicembre, il progetto di un Trattato e di un Accordo per disinnescare la crescente tensione tra le due parti. I due documenti sono stati resi pubblici, il 17 dicembre, dal Ministero degli Esteri russo. La bozza di trattato prevede, all’Art. 1, che ciascuna delle due parti «non intraprenda azioni che incidono sulla sicurezza dell’altra parte» e, all’Art.2, che «si adoperi per garantire che tutte le organizzazioni internazionali e alleanze militari a cui partecipa aderiscano ai principi della Carta delle Nazioni Unite».
All’Art. 3 le due parti si impegnano a «non utilizzare i territori di altri Stati allo scopo di preparare o effettuare un attacco armato contro l’altra parte». L’Art. 4 prevede, quindi, che «gli Stati Uniti non stabiliranno basi militari nel territorio degli Stati dell’ex Urss che non sono membri della Nato», ed «eviteranno l’adesione di Stati dell’ex Urss alla Nato, impedendo una sua ulteriore espansione ad Est». Nell’Art. 5 «le parti si astengono dal dispiegare le loro forze armate e i loro armamenti, anche nell’ambito di alleanze militari, nelle aree in cui tale dispiegamento può essere percepito dall’altra parte come una minaccia alla propria sicurezza nazionale». Quindi «si astengono dal far volare bombardieri equipaggiati con armamenti nucleari o non nucleari e dallo schierare navi da guerra nelle aree, al di fuori dello spazio aereo e delle acque territoriali nazionali, da cui possano attaccare obiettivi nel territorio dell’altra parte».
All’Art. 6 le due parti si impegnano a «non usare missili terrestri a gittata intermedia o corta al di fuori dei loro territori nazionali, nonché nelle zone dei loro territori da cui tali armi possano attaccare obiettivi sul territorio dell’altra parte». L’Art.7, infine, prevede che «le due parti si asterranno dallo schierare armi nucleari al di fuori dei loro territori nazionali e riporteranno nei loro territori le armi già schierate al di fuori» e che «non addestreranno personale militare e civile di paesi non nucleari all’uso di armi nucleari, né condurranno esercitazioni che prevedano l’uso di armi nucleari».
Il progetto di Accordo stabilisce le procedure di funzionamento del Trattato, basate sull’impegno che le due parti «risolveranno tutte le controversie nelle loro relazioni con mezzi pacifici» e «utilizzeranno i meccanismi delle consultazioni e informazioni bilaterali, comprese linee telefoniche dirette per contatti di emergenza». Il Ministero degli Esteri russo comunica che la parte statunitense ha ricevuto spiegazioni dettagliate sulla logica dell’approccio russo e di sperare quindi che, nel prossimo futuro, gli Stati uniti avviino seri colloqui con la Russia su tale questione critica.
Tace per ora la parte statunitense. Si fa sentire però la Voce dell’America, megafono multimediale di Washington che parla in oltre 40 lingue a centinata di milioni di persone in tutto il mondo: dice che «molti esperti sono preoccupati per questa mossa della Russia, che vuole sfruttare il fallimento del negoziato come pretesto per invadere l’Ucraina». Tace per ora la Nato, in attesa degli ordini da Washington. Tace l’Italia che, pur non essendo destinataria diretta della proposta russa, è parte in causa: tra le armi nucleari che gli Usa schierano al di fuori del proprio territorio vi sono le bombe B-61 installate a Ghedi e Aviano, tra poco sostituite dalle più micidiali B61-12, al cui uso viene addestrato il nostro personale militare nonostante l’Italia sia ufficialmente paese non nucleare. E gli Usa si preparano a installare in Italia anche nuovi missili nucleari a gittata intermedia.
Mentre i media calano una quasi totale cappa di silenzio sulla proposta russa, i gruppi parlamentari la ignorano come se non avesse niente a che fare con l’Italia, esposta a crescenti pericoli quale base avanzata delle forze nucleari Usa contro la Russia. Trovino almeno il tempo di leggere in pochi minuti la bozza che la Russia ha consegnato agli Usa per aprire la trattativa, e abbiano il coraggio politico di esprimere pubblicamente il loro giudizio. Se è negativo, spieghino perché è in contrasto con la nostra Costituzione e la nostra sicurezza.
On December 15, the Russian Federation delivered to the United States of America the project of a Treaty and an Agreement to defuse the growing tension between the two parties.
The two documents were made public by the Russian Foreign Ministry on December 17.
The draft treaty foresees in Art. 1, that each of the two parties “shall not undertake actions that affect the security of the other party” and,
In Art.2, that “shall seek to ensure that all international organizations and military alliances in which it is taking part adhere to the principles contained in the Charter of the United Nations.”.
In Art. 3 the two parties commit themselves “not to use the territories of other States with a view to preparing or carrying out an armed attack against the other Party“.
Art. 4 provides then, that “the United States shall not establish military bases in the territory of the States of the former USSR that are not members of NATO”, and “shall deny accession to the Alliance to the States of the former USSR to prevent further eastward expansion of NATO“.
In Art. 5 “the parties shall refrain from deploying their armed forces and armaments, including in the framework of military alliances, in the areas where such deployment could be perceived by the other party as a threat to its national security.”
Thus “they shall refrain from flying heavy bombers equipped for nuclear or non-nuclear armaments and from deploying warships in areas, outside national airspace and territorial waters, from where they can attack targets in the territory of the other party.”
In Art. 6 “the parties shall undertake not to deploy ground-launched intermediate-range and shorter-range missiles outside their national territories, as well as in the areas of their national territories, from which such weapons can attack targets in the national territory of the other Party” and that “shall not train military and civilian personnel from non-nuclear countries to use nuclear weapons, nor conduct exercises involving the use of nuclear weapons.”
InArt.7 “the parties shall refrain from deploying nuclear weapons outside their national territories and return such weapons to their national territories”, and “shall not train military and civilian personnel from non-nuclear countries to use nuclear weapons” nor “conduct exercises involving the use of nuclear weapons.”
The draft Agreement established procedures for the Treaty operation, based on the commitment that the two parties “will resolve all disputes in their relations by peaceful means“, and “will use the mechanisms of bilateral consultations and information, including hotlines for emergency contacts.” The US party was given detailed explanations regarding the logic of the Russian approach, and the Russian Foreign Ministry hoped that in the near future the United States will enter into serious talks with Russia on this critical issue.
The U.S. party is silent for now. However, the Voice of America, Washington’s multimedia megaphone that speaks to hundreds of millions of people around the world in more than 40 languages, is making its voice heard: it said that “many experts are concerned about the Russia’s gambit, which wants to use the failure of the negotiations as a pretext to invade Ukraine”.
NATO is silent for now, waiting for orders from Washington. Italy is silent, even though it is not the direct recipient of the Russian proposal but it is part of the cause: among the nuclear weapons that the US deployed outside its territory there are the B61 bombs [tactical nuclear weapons] installed in Ghedi and Aviano bases, soon to be replaced by the more deadly B61-12, and our military personnel is trained for their use despite Italy being officially a non-nuclear country. And the U.S. is preparing to install in Italy also new nuclear missiles with intermediate range.
While the media is maintaining an almost total silence on the Russian proposal, the Parliamentary groups are ignoring it as if it had nothing to do with Italy, the country is exposed to growing dangers as an advanced base for US nuclear forces against Russia. Make them at least find the time to read in a few minutes the draft that Russia handed over to the USA to open the negotiations, and have the political courage to publicly express their opinion. If it is negative, let them explain why it is contrary to our Constitution and our security.
First published by il manifesto, December 21, 2021. Translated from Italian by the author.
Manlio Dinucci is an award winning author, geopolitical analyst and geographer. He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG)
The CIA and British intelligence are feeding the public through their media assets the story that Russia’s security concern is really a cloak behind which hides Moscow’s plan to create a new Russian sphere of influence over eastern Europe.
Of course, Washington has a sphere of influence over eastern Europe called NATO, but it would be the end of the world for Russia to have any influence with countries that border it.
Another part of the CIA disinformation is that the White House is willing to discuss part of the Russian security demand but not the parts the White House disagrees with. This, of course, is nonsensical as the Kremlin made it clear that its demand for a halt to NATO expansion is not divisible. Expansion stops. Period. Or there will be “dire consequences.”
Western orientated Russian intellectuals at the Russian International Affairs Council are already at work undermining the Kremlin’s position on the non-expansion of NATO. The mission of the Council is to facilitate Russia’s peaceful integration into the global community, something that can only happen on Washington’s terms.
The Council’s director, Andrei Kortunov, quickly undermined the Kremlin’s position by describing the Kremlin’s ultimatum as “a bargaining position.” Washington already doesn’t take the Kremlin seriously, and Kortunov’s idiotic statement makes it certain Washington will dismiss the ultimatum as well. Indeed, as I reported, NATO’s Stoltenberg, the White House press spokesperson, and Biden’s national security adviser have already dismissed the Kremlin’s demand.
To make certain that the Kremlin understands that its demand is rejected, General Tod Wolters wants an even more aggressive response to the Kremlin. He is calling for NATO/US troops to be deployed in Romania and Bulgaria. Called Enhanced Forward Presenceit amounts to the US military occupation of Eastern Europe–the exact opposite of the response demanded by Russia.
Perhaps the Kremlin is learning, belatedly, that years of sweet-talking the West created the expectation that Russian complaints never have to be taken seriously. As I warned, the Kremlin’s behavior encouraged more provocations, which eventually would go too far and force the Kremlin to put a foot down.
With the CIA misrepresenting the Kremlin’s expression of a non-negotiable security concern as a plot to rebuild the Soviet Empire and the Russian International Affairs Council describing the Kremlin’s red line as just a bargaining position, we will see if the foot stays down or whether the Kremlin blows forever its credibility.
In the UK, after Government manipulation of hospitalisations and deaths to exclude more recent data, the truth is now emerging. In Scotland for August to November 2021 over 85% of deaths were in the vaccinated. Boosters are merely boosting COVID infections. Some 40,000 deaths have occurred in the USA, UK and EU following vaccination but Omicron is mild. The UK Government has manipulated the data to blame the unvaccinated but the vaccinated are at greatest risk.
It was clear from the first cases in South Africa and now in the UK and EU that the new Omicron variant of the coronavirus results in mild disease and very few deaths even “with COVID”. Indeed South African experts have advised stopping stop and trace and quarantining because most of the infected have no symptoms.
Considering the thousands of deaths and millions of injuries worldwide caused by the COVID vaccines there is very little difference between the decline in deaths between the least and most vaccinated countries.
LEAST VACCINATED COUNTRIES:
(Average vaccination rate 21%)
Decline of deaths from most recent peak:
Tanzania 100%
Nigeria 98%
Ethiopia 89%
Kenya 91%
Egypt 36%
S. Africa 92%
Pakistan 95%
Russia 18%
Average decline in deaths for 8 least vaccinated countries: 77%
MOST VACCINATED COUNTRIES
(Average vaccination rate 88%)
Decline of deaths from most recent peak:
UAE 90%
Cuba 98%
Chile 89%
Portugal 91%
Singapore 83%
Cambodia 94%
S. Korea 17%
Canada 98%
Average decline in deaths for 8 most vaccinated countries: 82%
If we take the 3 least vaccinated countries their decline in deaths from the recent peak averaged 95% whereas the three most vaccinated achieved 92%
With a vaccination rate 4 times the least vaccinated countries the 8 most vaccinated countries produce a mere 5% better decline in deaths from their recent peaks. A paltry return for vaccines which have caused nearly 2,000 deaths in the UK, 9,000 in the USA and 31,000 in the EU.
Even the Lancet has shown the vaccines do not work – as the third jab and talk of a fourth testify. To quote from the Lancet study:
“In the UK it was found that secondary attack rates among household contacts exposed to unvaccinated index cases was similar to household contacts exposed to unvaccinated index cases (25% for vaccinated and 23% for unvaccinated)”
VACCINATED AT GREATEST RISK OF DEATH
In the UK, after Government manipulation of hospitalisations and deaths to exclude more recent data, the truth is now emerging. In this graph from Scotland for August to November 2021 over 85% of deaths are in the vaccinated.
An exposure of how the Government has manipulated the data to blame the unvaccinated appears here: It turns out that the source of the statement “Of the Covid patients treated in intensive care in recent months, the majority – nearly 75 per cent according to the latest data – have chosen not to be vaccinated.” was data from May to July. The data above (from Scotland from August to November) suggests the exact opposite.
More evidence of the failure of vaccines in the face of new infections comes from the USA where one of the largest US outbreaks of the new Omicron variant to date is believed to have occurred at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, where almost all 930 cases over the past week are believed to be of the variant.
All of the confirmed Omicron cases in the Cornell University case are among people who are fully vaccinated, and some of them are in people who’ve also had the booster.
The booster is of course more of the same in the hope that the third dose will do what the first two doses were supposed to do! And the new variant, “omicron”?
Most of the Omicron cases in the United States have been among the vaccinated, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said in an update on Friday 10/12/21. Most patients have experienced mild symptoms.
OMICRON IS WEAK
Indeed it was clear from the first cases in South Africa that the new Omicron variant of the coronavirus results in mild disease, without prominent symptoms and it:
“presents mild disease with symptoms being sore muscles and tiredness for a day or two not feeling well. So far, we have detected that those infected do not suffer loss of taste or smell. They might have a slight cough. There are no prominent symptoms. Of those infected some are currently being treated at home”
– as Angelique Coetzee, the chairwoman of the South African Medical Association described it. Indeed the case fatality rate in S Africa – deaths as a proportion of cases 10 days earlier – was at the lowest level since covid started.
In the UK a mere 12 deaths have been “with” Omicron – in other words not death “from” Omicron!
The World Health Organization’s weekly epidemiological update for Dec. 7 showed that all 212 Omicron cases documented across eighteen European Union (EU) countries were either mild or asymptomatic.
Everywhere the Omicron variant seems to be supplanting the Delta variant but with much milder symptoms so that as the South African doctor Omar Hamada said the Omicron variant of COVID-19 may provide natural immunity without inducing severe illness, as the symptoms so far resemble more of a “mild, common cold” in South Africa.
“If the infectivity is greater, but the virulence or severity is less, this may be actually something good in terms of getting people immune to it without necessarily having to depend on a vaccine that’s not incredibly effective,” said Hamada.
BOOSTERS
The boosters being touted by Governments are controversial among experts. “The boosters are a perfect way to bias our immune system so we’re LESS able to respond to this new variant,” said Dr Robert Malone the inventor of the mRNA vaccine.
“This is [like] jabbing everybody with a flu vaccine from three seasons ago and expecting it to have effects against the current [flu strains].”
A top World Health Organization (WHO) official said there was “no evidence” to suggest that the vaccine booster doses would offer “greater protection” to healthy people. Dr. Mike Ryan, the WHO’s emergency director, questioned the logic of some countries trying to produce more booster doses to vaccinate anyone aged 18 and older.
“Right now, there is no evidence that I’m aware of that would suggest that boosting the entire population is going to necessarily provide any greater protection for otherwise healthy individuals against hospitalisation and death,” Ryan said.
France has even banned the Moderna booster.
UK BOOSTERS BOOST INFECTIONS
On 1st October when the Boosters started in the UK 153,912 were vaccinated. On 18th December there were 904,598 vaccinated an increase of 487%
New Infections on 1st October were 34,752 while on 18th December there were 90,109 new infections – an increase of 159%.Since there is a delay between vaccination and infection it is probable that that percentage increase in infections will catch up with the prior increase in vaccinations. And that further increase will lead the politician to call for more vaccinations and ruinous lockdowns!! which will in turn lead to more infections and so on ad absurdum and ad infinitum.
worldindata.org compared the European countries which had given boosters with those countries that had not and found that the infections gap between them was growing – from 19% more infections for the Booster countries to 21%.
It is quite clear that (as in previous periods of vaccine increases) there has been a consequent increase in COVID infections. This is a world wide pattern since vaccination programmes started. The excuse (if there is one at all given the horrendous numbers of deaths) was that those who fell ill were not so seriously ill as those who were unvaccinated. But that too we now know (see above) is rubbish.
The terrible toll of deaths and serious injuries among nurses, doctors, airline pilots and sportsmen around the world is unprecedented for any vaccine, never mind one which has proved so useless in preventing infections, infectiousness and deaths. The next Freenations post will deal with those deadly consequences.
The Democrats have held the presidency and a majority of both houses of Congress for only eleven months, but they have already put their stamp on the transformation of the United States from top to bottom. In reaction to those cascading accusations of “domestic terrorism,” many Americans are beginning to believe that the country is literally coming apart, with little in the way of a binding national spirit or sense of purpose. And the heavy hand that is being wielded to impose a revolution in areas like education and health mandates raises concerns that much worse is to come over the next three years.
That the country is in deep trouble is a view that I have come to share and each morning has become a chore to get up out of bed and scan through the news service headlines that had accumulated since the night before. I sometimes notice that there is more space given to reviews of television shows, the doings of “celebrities,” and sporting events than to the more serious issues that confront the American people. One might suspect that most readers don’t really care about the state of the nation, but I rather think that what we are seeing is a deliberate and all-encompassing media driven propaganda campaign designed to deliver bread and circuses while also reducing the choices that people are able to make in many of the aspects of their daily lives.
Three weeks ago there was an article featured in The New York Times, which is, of course, one of the worst and most persistent of the national libtard media, which headlined “A Pollster’s Warning to Democrats: ‘We Have a Problem’: Focus groups with Virginia voters led to a bluntly worded memo on what Democrats need to do going into the midterms.” The article begins with “Brian Stryker, a Democratic pollster, didn’t work for Terry McAuliffe’s campaign in the Virginia governor’s race. But Mr. McAuliffe’s narrow defeat in a liberal-leaning state alarmed him and most every Democratic political professional.”
Stryker was subsequently commissioned to do polling and prepare a no-holds-barred memo on what went wrong. “The [poll’s] participants hailed from the suburbs of Washington and Richmond and had the same political profile: Each supported Mr. Biden in 2020, and either voted for Mr. Youngkin in November or strongly considered supporting him.” The Times article consists mostly of an interview by the newspaper on the points made in the memo.
I confess that I read the entire article, a rare achievement with the NYT, and then sat back to have a good laugh. I was, after all, an actual Virginia voter involved in the campaign to defeat McAuliffe due largely to his “anti-parent involvement in education” beliefs as well as his close ties to the Clintons. I noted immediately that the polls undertaken by Stryker were focused on the limousine liberal voters in northern Virginia and around the capital Richmond. Those are not necessarily the voters who turned Virginia blue and their ability to send their children to private schools made education less of an issue than it was for ordinary working people who had to rely on the public system. So the responses were, one might suggest, skewed.
Most Virginians I know who voted against McAuliffe did so for a whole basket of issues relating to the Democrats punishing the white working and middle classes and disadvantaging their children because of their skin color. They were also responding to surging homicides and unpunished looting, arson and rioting nationally, which has been linked to the Democrats opportunistic support of the BLM phenomenon generated behavior. People in Virginia in general no longer feel safe on the streets of their towns and even in the schools because of the Democratic Party tendency to pander to the various constituencies harboring grievances that it has embraced. Note particularly one question from the NYT journalist to Stryker and the response:
“Q: What drives this perception that Democrats are fixated on cultural issues?
A: We probably haven’t been as focused on the economy as we should be. I think some of that is voters reading us talking about things that aren’t economic issues. Part of it is just a natural reaction, too: We’re in an economy they feel is tough. It’s hard for them to think we’ve solved problems when they see so many.”
Stryker not so skillfully dodges the question because the problem is that the Democratic Party is indeed “fixated on cultural issues,” which is why they are willing to turn public education into a “feel good waste of time” that many parents loathe and the taxpayer/homeowner is required to fund. McAuliffe lost the election when he declared that parents should not interfere in the education of their children and that there are too many school teachers who are white. Nevertheless, it is odd that Stryker was seemingly unable to figure out that it was not the economy that drove voters to reject McAuliffe, that citing the economy is the equivalent of no answer at all. Just maybe he was talking to the wrong people.
One can only hope that the Democrats are heading for a fall in 2022, but the punditry that makes its living off of the mainstream media is persisting in its attacks. Another recent article is by Max Boot, a ramshackle neocon of no particular distinction who wears a funny hat to distinguish himself from the other odd-looking neocons. Characteristically Jewish and born in Russia, he has inevitably exploited the usual networking to find a home as an opinion contributor at the extreme liberal Washington Post though he sometimes pretends to be a conservative. His article is entitled “Democrats are on course to lose in 2022 and 2024. If they do, we may lose our democracy.”
Boot is concerned because opinion polls show that Joe Biden and his party are seen increasingly unfavorably while the Republicans are gaining support. He describes the GOP as “extremist and authoritarian” but to give him some credit for being more alert to real issues than Stryker he observes that the Democrats are suffering from “progressive overreach” recounting how “[He] recently visited [his] alma mater, the University of California at Berkeley, and got an earful from friends about the excesses of ‘cancel culture,’ the unwillingness of many progressives to confront crime and homelessness, and, above all, all the damage done by Zoom classes and mask requirements for young children. These are complaints from liberals in one of the most progressive cities in the United States. Democrats are living in a dreamland if they continue to dismiss such worries as phony Republican attacks. Similar concerns cost Democrats in New Jersey and Virginia — and could haunt them again next year… [Biden]needs to attack the far-left activists who want to defund the police, boycott Israel and divide Americans by race.”
But Boot still is blind to what is happening to America fueled by the party that he clearly prefers. It is the Democrats who have introduced the COVID vax mandate; who opened up the southern border to unlimited illegal immigration; who promote racial and ethnic preferences; who continue to saber rattle against Iran, Russia and China; who refuse to arrest and try the rioters, looters and arsonists in America’s cities; who seek to restrict free speech and freedom of association; who continue the persecution of journalist Julian Assange; and who are going after ordinary Americans who protest against the destruction of the schools as “domestic terrorists.” If Max Boot really wants to know who has totalitarian tendencies and is threatening democracy in the United States all he has to do is turn around and look at his Democratic Party friends. And when he figures it out, he can explain it all to Brian Stryker.
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].
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.
Recent research from Israel gives some impressive data. For simplicity and a fair comparison, we look at data for 6 to 8 months after the event; in other words, the event being getting COVID infection and natural immunity or getting vaccination.
Here are the numbers in terms of confirmed infection rate per 100,000 risk days. The reason the researchers used ‘risk days’, rather than just ‘people’, is that the composition of each group changed over time. For example, some previously infected people chose to get vaccinated.
Here are the key data:
1. recovered from infection: 14
2. vaccinated and booster: 89
3. hybrid (natural immunity plus vaccination): 17
The point here is that the infections rate is much higher for vaccination and booster versus natural immunity from prior infection; in fact, it is more than six times greater. And even getting vaccination when having natural immunity adds a little higher infection rate.
Only one big scientific conclusion: Vaccination increases COVID infection and natural immunity is far more protective. You lose a little protection when you get vaccinated on top of having natural immunity, and that is not counting the many possible harmful health impacts of vaccines that can occur soon or much later than when you get the shots.
Every day all I hear about are all kinds of people, including many high level politicians like governors and senators getting COVID despite being vaccinated and also having received booster shots. Don’t reasonable, intelligent people say to themselves “than why in the hell is the government still pushing vaccines?” Now we also are hearing that omicron variant is becoming dominant. But the vaccines were not working when delta was the dominant variant. I guess the vaccines may be even more ineffective for the highly mutated omicron. Yet we still cannot get the government to sanction use of ivermectin and other treatments that a relatively few doctors are using with great success.
The real science data shows vaccines do not work and for many people they produce all kinds of bad health impacts. Who do you want to trust?
*
Note to readers: Please click the share buttons above or below. Follow us on Instagram, @crg_globalresearch. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.
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.
Just like when U.S. President John Fitzgerald Kennedy’s American Government, during the 1962 Cuban Crisis, warned that Soviet missiles in Cuba would mean World War 3, Russia’s President Vladimir Putin’s Russian Government warned, on 20 December 2021, that if its adjoining nation of Ukraine becomes a NATO member (which would present the danger of U.S. missiles only a 7-minute flight-time away from Moscow), it would mean WW3.
Soviet communism is gone, the Soviet dictatorship is gone, the Soviet response to NATO, the Warsaw Pact, is gone; but America and its allies have continued the Cold War against Russia; and, now, finally (after decades of NATO expansion right up to Russia’s borders), Russia has laid down the gauntlet to them, just as America had laid down the gauntlet to the Soviet Union and its allies, in 1962, regarding Cuba.
Russia’s RT News bannered on December 20th, “Russia promises ‘military response’ to any further NATO expansion”. Of course, any “military response” would be against NATO — all of it — and probably within less than an hour, most people on both sides of that nuclear war would be either dead or doomed soon to die — and even throughout the world there would be billions of deaths.
No military conflict between Russia and America (and its ‘allies’ or vassal-nations) would be able to remain non-nuclear, because whichever side would be losing any non-nuclear war would promptly release all of its nuclear stockpile against the other, and so the nuclear exchanges would become a part of any U.S.-v.-Russia war.
The reader-comments at that news-report were informative, especially if a reader there clicks onto “Best” so as to be reading first the most “like”ed of the reader-comments (and this means that the most representative of all of the comments are being posted at the top). Here they are:
COMMENTS — “BEST” (the top-listed ones)
TheFishhv2
About time. NATO expansion must stop, because NATO’s intentions are not good. This organization has done a lot of damage in the last 25 years, and it must be reigned in.
Sun Tzu TheFishhv2
NATO is a defense organization pal, they never attacked anyone!
1Beak1 Sun Tzu
How true as they were in Libya, Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Colombia – What a wretched Liar.
LaCarreta Sun Tzu
NATO in its 72 years of existence never defended a single member state only attacked, bombed, invaded a number of foreign nations.
On May 7, 1999, during the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia (Operation Allied Force), five U.S. Joint Direct Attack Munition guided bombs hit the People’s Republic of China embassy in the Belgrade district of New Belgrade, killing three Chinese journalists and outraging the Chinese public.
NWOD Sun Tzu
LOL, NATO is an aggressive imperialist enterprise. It has NEVER acted defensively – name a time it has – and every single war, battle, sabotage, and threat it has engaged in has been aggressive, unlawful and evil.
TheCruXx Sun Tzu
And how can you explain it to the world, that NATO was in several wars, when NO ONE ATTACKED THEM, OR ANYONE OF THEM. Kinda odd for a defense club…
LeftForward Sun Tzu
The best defense?
Libertarian4Eva TheFishhv2
When Russia is done with eastern Europe, think they’d mind coming to our US southern border? It’s not like it is defended at all, anyone can get through, and frankly the Russian troops would be good business for Texas. Considering our true enemy is in Washington DC, I think it would be a good breath of fresh air to have the visitors.
ELPuerco
One should keep in mind that during the 1990 negotiations between the Soviet Union and the US-led Western “bloc” over the issue of German reunification (the so-called fall of the German wall), the Western side promised that NATO would not expand itself into Eastern Europe. And yet, expand it did – and it has been expanding, and getting very close to Russia. To this day, Washington maintains a policy of “encircling” and “containing” Moscow. In fact, declassified documents that became public in 2017 show us that between 1990 and 1991, security assurances against any such NATO enlargement were given to Soviet authorities by western leaders of the highest level. This 1990 promise was broken, which makes Russia the aggrieved party – and not the other way around, as US narratives would have it. Basically, the so-called Iron Curtain fell, while its western counterpart (NATO) has grown larger and stronger – even though the Cold War supposedly ended. And that brings us to the current crisis.
*
Note to readers: Please click the share buttons above or below. Follow us on Instagram, @crg_globalresearch. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.
ISBN Number: 978-0-9737147-5-3
Year: 2012
Pages: 102 Print Edition: $10.25 (+ shipping and handling) PDF Edition: $6.50 (sent directly to your email account!)
Michel Chossudovsky is Professor of Economics at the University of Ottawa and Director of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG), which hosts the critically acclaimed website www.globalresearch.ca . He is a contributor to the Encyclopedia Britannica. His writings have been translated into more than 20 languages.
Reviews
“This book is a ‘must’ resource – a richly documented and systematic diagnosis of the supremely pathological geo-strategic planning of US wars since ‘9-11’ against non-nuclear countries to seize their oil fields and resources under cover of ‘freedom and democracy’.” –John McMurtry, Professor of Philosophy, Guelph University
“In a world where engineered, pre-emptive, or more fashionably “humanitarian” wars of aggression have become the norm, this challenging book may be our final wake-up call.” -Denis Halliday, Former Assistant Secretary General of the United Nations
Michel Chossudovsky exposes the insanity of our privatized war machine. Iran is being targeted with nuclear weapons as part of a war agenda built on distortions and lies for the purpose of private profit. The real aims are oil, financial hegemony and global control. The price could be nuclear holocaust. When weapons become the hottest export of the world’s only superpower, and diplomats work as salesmen for the defense industry, the whole world is recklessly endangered. If we must have a military, it belongs entirely in the public sector. No one should profit from mass death and destruction. –Ellen Brown, author of ‘Web of Debt’ and president of the Public Banking Institute
All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the “Translate 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.
Fool me once, shame on the trickster for resorting to trickery. Fool me twice, shame on me. When someone has earned the reputation of a trickster, one ought to be very skeptical of that trickster. Thus, to be fooled twice by the same trickster brings shame on the gullible person.
The United States has been duping the gullible among its citizenry and also gullible people in the world for quite a while. Near the end of WWII, there was the lie that the US had to drop nuclear weapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki to get Japan to surrender. There was the American deception surrounding the Gulf of Tonkin incident that served as a pretext to deepen American militarism in Viet Nam. There was the twisting of facts about Iraq’s possessing weapons of mass destruction that resulted in over a million Iraqis being killed, the country’s infrastructure being destroyed, and Iraq being occupied by US military to this day. The US lied to USSR/Russia about no eastward NATO expansion; the US lied about Syria using chemical weapons. Why would anyone continue to believe the word of a serial, unrepentant liar?
Nowadays, the US barks that Russia is about to invade Ukraine. Then there is the allegation that China is committing genocide against Uyghurs in Xinjiang. Considering the US involvement in the oppression and killing of Palestinians, Iraqis, Libyans, Syrians, and Iranians — the notion that the US would shed a tear for Muslims is sadly risible.
Scads of disinformation have been revealed about a purported genocide of Uyghurs.
With the outrageous claims against China dismissed as flimsy artifices, the US seized upon an interpersonal altercation: an alleged sexual assault of a Chinese female tennis player by a retired former high-ranking Communist Party official.
There was a deleted post on Weibo, a Chinese social media site, by the player, Peng Shuai. The post purportedly contained the allegation of sexual assault. Then she became a meme: #Where is Peng Shuai. Western media implied the Chinese state had deleted the post, scrubbed the net of references, and disappeared Peng.
I wrote an article with the commonsense title “Jumping to China-bashing Conclusions: Due process calls demands waiting for the facts.” In any justice-based system, people must not be tried in media; they must be tried in a functioning court of law by a preponderance of the evidence. That is why one must scrutinize the information and evidence before jumping to conclusions.
Yet, the WTA, a professional body overseeing professional women’s tennis, had already deemed China to be guilty by suspending its tournaments in that country.
Recently, on 19 December, Peng was approached by a reporter from the Singaporean Chinese-language newspaper Lianhe Zaobao. Peng looks genuinely surprised by the encounter, like a deer in the headlights, but knowing that she has to get this over with. (See the interview here.)
Peng emphatically states, “First, I would like to emphasize a very important point: I have never said nor written about anyone sexually assaulting me. This point must be very clearly emphasized.”
Whether a post on social media is a personal matter or not, people can debate, but Peng maintains it is. Peng also affirmed that an earlier email to the WTA denying a sexual assault was hers.
Unanswered in the interview was why the wording in the Weibo post seems to allege a sexual assault.
The WTA remains unsatisfied. It issued a statement: “We remain steadfast in our call for a full, fair and transparent investigation, without censorship, into her allegation of sexual assault, which is the issue that gave rise to our initial concern.” The tennis body headquartered in the US is, in effect, demanding that a powerful country of 1.4 billion people with a 5000-year history should submit a domestic crime allegation to its dictate. This demand presented to a country that rues its century of humiliation by outside powers will curry as much influence as an ant to a hungry aardvark.
Peng said she has no travel plans now. It seems the WTA ought to do its due diligence and visit Peng in China.
Not too quickly though, as Sinophobes in the West see a need to keep the heat turned up to try and spoil the Beijing Winter Olympics.
Talk about being a bad sport.
*
Note to readers: Please click the share buttons above or below. Follow us on Instagram, @crg_globalresearch. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.
Kim Petersen is a former co-editor of the Dissident Voice newsletter. He can be emailed at: kimohp@gmail. Twitter: @kimpetersen. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.
ISBN Number: 978-0-9737147-5-3
Year: 2012
Pages: 102 Print Edition: $10.25 (+ shipping and handling) PDF Edition: $6.50 (sent directly to your email account!)
Michel Chossudovsky is Professor of Economics at the University of Ottawa and Director of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG), which hosts the critically acclaimed website www.globalresearch.ca . He is a contributor to the Encyclopedia Britannica. His writings have been translated into more than 20 languages.
Reviews
“This book is a ‘must’ resource – a richly documented and systematic diagnosis of the supremely pathological geo-strategic planning of US wars since ‘9-11’ against non-nuclear countries to seize their oil fields and resources under cover of ‘freedom and democracy’.” –John McMurtry, Professor of Philosophy, Guelph University
“In a world where engineered, pre-emptive, or more fashionably “humanitarian” wars of aggression have become the norm, this challenging book may be our final wake-up call.” -Denis Halliday, Former Assistant Secretary General of the United Nations
Michel Chossudovsky exposes the insanity of our privatized war machine. Iran is being targeted with nuclear weapons as part of a war agenda built on distortions and lies for the purpose of private profit. The real aims are oil, financial hegemony and global control. The price could be nuclear holocaust. When weapons become the hottest export of the world’s only superpower, and diplomats work as salesmen for the defense industry, the whole world is recklessly endangered. If we must have a military, it belongs entirely in the public sector. No one should profit from mass death and destruction. –Ellen Brown, author of ‘Web of Debt’ and president of the Public Banking Institute
All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the “Translate 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.
In mainstream culture, social and political violence by the poor depicted in cinema is generally situated in narratives that try to maintain the legitimacy of the state. Consequently it also tries to delegitimize violence that may threaten the state. For example, the recent Mexican-French film New Order (2020) depicts the street violence and demonstrations of the poor as mindless violence, murder, and robbery, rather than as an inevitable reaction to decades of extreme poverty and oppression.
In these scenarios, the indigent, the poor, the working class, have no rational program, no ideological agenda, and no democratic future where they could be in the driving seat of economic and cultural progress. They are forever condemned to explosive, cathartic and senseless cyclical violence that is then simply stage-managed by the state through its courts, police, army and prisons. It could be argued that the main reason for these depictions of the poor is that mainstream culture is itself one of the tools used in the maintenance of that status quo.
Two recent Irish films, Arracht (‘Monster’) (2019) and Herself (2020), depict violence in very different eras. Arracht is based in Connemara in the middle of the nineteenth century, while Herself is set in a modern urban setting in Dublin. On another level, both films show how violence is allowed to be depicted in mainstream cinema.
Arracht, for example, is a well made film with much work gone into the authenticity of the depiction of the potato blight and the subsequent desperation of the local inhabitants. The narrative centres on Colmán Sharkey who lives on the Atlantic coast with his wife and young son. Colmán has taken on Patsy Kelly as a farmhand and fisherman, a dodgy character who was in the Royal Navy. The landlord has raised the rents and Colmán decides to talk to him personally, bringing Patsy with him. However,
“At the landlord’s estate, Colmán unsuccessfully tries to persuade him not to raise rents due to the famine devastating the country. Patsy wanders off where he encounters the two collection agents and the landlord’s daughter. He murders all three before being discovered by Colmán, who is shocked by what he finds and notices a frightened young girl has witnessed the scene. Patsy kills the landlord, leading to a confrontation with the Sharkey brothers in which Sean [Colmán’s brother] is fatally stabbed. Enraged, Colmán brutally beats Patsy and leaves him for dead.”
Soon these murders enter local nationalist folk culture in the form of a ballad sung by local fishermen. It is assumed that Colmán killed the landlord and he is seen as an heroic resistance fighter. However, it was shown that Colmán is not a violent person from an earlier scene when Patsy disarms an armed man sent to collect the rents, and Colmán orders Patsy to return the gun.
We know that the violence in the landlord’s house was committed by Patsy and not Colmán. In this case it is the actions of a sociopath (Patsy) which are immortalized in culture despite Colmán’s non-violent approach to resistance. There is a sleight of hand here that shows radical nationalist culture as illegitimate violence carried out by sociopaths and furthermore depicts the singers of the ballad as being ignorant of the facts of the situation, and that they are glorifying deeds that are basically portrayed as terrorism.
Given the severity of colonial oppression in Ireland in the nineteenth century, violence against the landlords or representatives of the state is unsurprising. Resistance by the peasants is delegitimized and limited to the legal and courts system, which is upholding the landlord rent increases and evictions that are exacerbating the conflict in the first place.
A similar cinematic sticking point over legitimate and illegitimate violence occurs in Neil Jordan’s film Michael Collins set during the Irish War of Independence. Jordan has the IRA explode a car bomb even though car bombs were not used until much later during the Troubles. Some critics focused in on this event as legitimating the later IRA campaign which they saw simply as modern terrorism unlike the earlier struggle for independence.
In Herself, the contemporary story of a woman (Sandra) fighting back against her violent ex-husband in the courts system, is a more positive narrative in that it shows her struggle against the structural violence of state bureaucracy. Furthermore, her tenacity in also resisting criminal violence by her ex-husband works well on both literal and symbolic levels.
While her battle against domestic violence is an uphill struggle against the prejudices of the state court system she eventually wins custody of her children. Her decision to build her own house in the back garden of the wealthy doctor she works for is an interesting twist in that her desire to be free and independent is determined by middle class power and control. However, her determination to create something for herself is significant as the learning processes involved in building a house counters modern consumerist ideology with the practical knowledge of production.
Furthermore, Sandra organizes a team to help her build the house, working for free, which harks back to an old Irish social tradition of a meitheal (where neighbours would come together to assist in the saving of crops or other tasks).
Unfortunately, the finished house is then burned down by her ex-husband in a criminal act of revenge. Yet this does not deter her (or her friends) from starting afresh. Thus the film carries a positive message that one can win out through struggle within the system, but also symbolically without the system, with the collective help of others despite enormous setbacks and challenges.
Despite the fact that the legitimacy of the state is maintained in Herself (winning custody of her children through the courts, her husband being caught and put away for years), the message of struggle, learning, and co-operation towards a common goal is quite subversive. She learns not only how to fight the system but also how to construct a new way of being within the system which has profound possibilities for the future (learning new skills, working collectively, solidarity, etc.).
A similar situation can be seen in The Wind that Shakes the Barley (2006), a film by Ken Loach set during the Irish War of Independence (1919–1921) and the Irish Civil War (1922–1923), wherein the First Dáil sets up a parallel court system to the colonial institutions, which not only became accepted and recognized by the local people (de facto) but were eventually to become de jure with the setting up of the new Irish state.
However, whether the message is conservative (Arracht) or progressive (Herself), it is usually oblique, as overtly radical content rarely gets screened. Cinema is an extremely costly business, and screenplay and finished film decisions are made by wealthy and conservative producers. Yet, every now and then films depicting working class life and struggles are produced which are significant, for example, Salt of the Earth (1954), The Organizer (1963) (Italian), The Battle of Algiers (1966)(Italian-Algerian), Blue Collar (1978) (USA), Norma Rae (1979) (USA), Vera Drake (2004) (UK), I, Daniel Blake (2016) (UK).
*
Note to readers: Please click the share buttons above or below. Follow us on Instagram, @crg_globalresearch. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.
Caoimhghin Ó Croidheáin is an Irish artist, lecturer and writer. His artwork consists of paintings based on contemporary geopolitical themes as well as Irish history and cityscapes of Dublin. His blog of critical writing based on cinema, art and politics along with research on a database of Realist and Social Realist art from around the world can be viewed country by country here.
He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG).
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.
Europe is on a precipice. It has marched, blindly, towards something very much resembling tyranny. Austria will shortly criminalize those who refuse the Covid vaccine. Germany looks set to follow.
Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission, is wondering out loud if every member state should do likewise and make offenders of those who reject this form of medication.
In Italy you are deprived of your livelihood rather than your liberty if you say no to vaccination: the unvaxxed are not permitted to work. Anywhere. In Greece, everyone over the age of 60 must pay the government 100 euros for every month they remain unvaxxed. As if the Greek government, in cahoots with its masters in Brussels, had not immiserated Greek pensioners enough already.
Police in Rotterdam opened fire on people protesting against Covid restrictions. Three were seriously injured. Austrian cops have wielded batons and shields against the thousands who took to the streets of Vienna to say no to mandatory vaxxing. In Brussels, the black, bureaucratic heart of the EU project, water cannons and tear gas were unleashed upon citizens agitating against vaccine passes. The irony is almost too much: in the European quarter of Brussels, the very part of Europe in which the modern European sensibility was forged by politicians, experts and technocrats, ordinary people make a blow for freedom and the forces of this supposedly liberal new continent beat them down. Rarely has modern Europe’s bluster about ‘human rights’ and ‘respect’ been so savagely exposed.
What is happening in Europe right now is nothing short of terrifying. We are not merely witnessing another round of Covid restrictions. This isn’t just the introduction of another set of emergency measures that some people believe are necessary to stave off the latest Covid wave and the Omicron threat lurking on the horizon. No, we are living through a chilling overhaul of the entire relationship between the state and the individual, with the state empowered to such an extraordinary degree that it can now instruct its citizens on what to inject into their bodies, and the individual so politically emaciated, so denuded of rights, that he no longer even enjoys sovereignty over himself, over that tiny part of the world that is his own body and mind. We are witnessing the violent death of European liberalism and the birth pangs of a new and deeply authoritarian era.
Many seem not to recognise how serious a development mandatory vaccination is. Even those of us who are pro-vaccination, who have been happily vaxxed against Covid-19, should look with nothing less than horror upon the proposal that it should be an offence not to be vaccinated; that a citizen should be fined thousands upon thousands of euros if he refuses this treatment. One of the ideas being discussed in Austria ahead of its mandatory vax law that will be introduced in February is that citizens who refuse vaccination will be summoned to a local court. If they ignore the summons twice they will face a fine of 3,600 euros. If they continue ignoring the state’s demand that they receive medical treatment that they do not want, they’ll be fined 7,200 euros. These are life-ruining fines. There is no talk – yet – of imprisoning people who reject the vaccine, but the Austrian state is making it crystal clear that it will happily wield its power to propel the unvaxxed into destitution.
Germany has already enforced a lockdown of the unvaccinated – that is, it has used the full force of the law to divide the populace between those who have made the ‘right’ (italics added) medical decision, and thus may enjoy some crumbs of liberty, and those who have not, and thus deserve nothing less than house arrest.
Now, outgoing chancellor Angela Merkel says mandatory vaxxing is likely to be introduced early next year. Ursula von der Leyen seems to think that every EU member state should force vaccination upon its citizens. How to ensure that everyone gets vaxxed ‘needs discussion’, she said recently. We must ‘potentially think about mandatory vaccination’, she continued. The 500million inhabitants of the European Union, of this supposed bastion of human rights, this political union we were told was necessary to preserve the dignity and freedom of modern Europeans, face the prospect of a neo-imperial diktat instructing them to receive medical treatment or else face severe consequences.
We underestimate at our peril just how grave an assault on personhood mandatory vaccination represents. To my mind, forced vaccination is such an obscenity that even justice secretary Dominic Raab’s assurance that it won’t happen in the UK was far too soft for my liking. ‘I don’t think’ it will happen here, he said. Don’t think? He should have said it will never happen here, over my dead body, because it would represent such an intolerable assault on the Enlightenment-derived liberties upon which our nation is built.
Everyone is saying mandatory vaccination goes against the Nuremberg Code, which insists voluntary consent must be given for medical intervention. But the ideal of individual sovereignty goes back much further than that. In his Letter Concerning Toleration (1689), the great Enlightenment philosopher John Locke sought to ‘settle the bounds’ between the individual and officialdom…
To Locke, as to other great European thinkers whose ideas gave rise to our Enlightened continent, the desire to ‘save’ an individual is not a good enough reason to meddle with his soul or his body. ‘God Himself will not save men against their wills’, he wrote. Yet where God once failed, the EU hopes to succeed. Where even the Almighty once feared to tread, held back by the small matter of man’s will, of man’s right to govern his own soul and body, the bureaucracies of 21st-century Europe will now rush in. They will brush aside the apparently trifling matter of bodily autonomy, they will discard the rights of self-government hard fought for over generations, and cajole people by brute law to submit themselves to medical intervention.
This spells the end of freedom as we know it.
Bodily autonomy is the foundation stone of self-government, and self-government is the thing that gives freedom meaning. If we do not enjoy sovereignty over our minds and our flesh, then we are not free in any meaningful way. And it won’t just be the minority of people who feel forced to receive the vaccine whose freedom will suffer under this new regime of state power over people’s bloodstreams and muscles and flesh – everyone’s freedom will. The state diktat determining that only those who receive a certain form of medical treatment will get to enjoy freedom will make freedom itself contingent upon doing what the state wants you to.
Even the vaxxed will not be truly free people in this world. Rather, we will be the beneficiaries of state favour, the enjoyers of small privileges, in return for our agreeing to receive an injection. We will have a license from on high to go about our daily lives. And we will know that that license could swiftly be revoked if we refuse medical treatment in the future. The redefinition of ‘freedom’, the making of liberty contingent upon submission to medicine, will throttle the rights of all of us – vaxxed and unvaxxed alike.
Strikingly, there is very little pushback from the so-called human-rights lobby against the proposed new regime of forced medication. Europhiles in the UK and elsewhere – the kind of people who assured us the EU was the great modern defender of the dignity of the individual – are meek as mice in the face of these state threats to strongarm citizens into medical compliance.
It wasn’t meant to be like this, you see. It was Brexit Britain, they said, that would become a hotbed of deranged authoritarianism, while the EU would hold a candle for the modern principles of rights and respect. And now that the opposite has proven to be the case, they look the other way, or they subtly give their nod to what amounts to a tyranny of the state over the souls and flesh of individual human beings. European liberalism is dying, the European Union stands exposed as a seat of extreme authoritarianism, and the future of this continent looks very uncertain indeed. Covid will look like a blip in the affairs of man in comparison with the fallout from this political and moral crisis of the European continent.”
*
Note to readers: Please click the share buttons above or below. Follow us on Instagram, @crg_globalresearch. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.
Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer.
Featured image: In Upper Austria nurses and doctors campaign against forced jabs. Their “experiences do not correspond to the image in the mainstream media”. Facebook/Free west Media
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.
“Worse Than the Disease: Reviewing Some Possible Unintended Consequences of mRNA Vaccines Against COVID-19,” by Stephanie Seneff, Ph.D., and Dr. Greg Nigh, is one of the most comprehensive descriptions of the many possible unintended consequences of the mRNA gene transfer technologies incorrectly referred to as “COVID vaccines”
As of December 3, 2021, the U.S. Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) has logged 19,886 COVID jab related deaths. Pfizer — the only company that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has granted full licensing for an as-yet unavailable COVID shot — accounts for 13,268 of them
Calculations suggest VAERS COVID-related reports are underreported by a factor of 41. That means that in the U.S. alone, the actual death toll may be closer to 374,576. Including international deaths reported to VAERS would put the death toll at 815,326
Key side effects that are now being reported in massive numbers include miscarriages, heart attacks, myopericarditis, thrombocytopenia (low platelet count), shingles, Bell’s palsy and a variety of permanent disabilities, many of which involve neurological dysfunction
The side effects we now see being reported were entirely predictable based on the known science detailed in Seneff’s and Nigh’s paper
*
MIT scientist Stephanie Seneff’s paper,1 “Worse Than the Disease: Reviewing Some Possible Unintended Consequences of mRNA Vaccines Against COVID-19,” published in the International Journal of Vaccine Theory, Practice and Research in collaboration with Dr. Greg Nigh, is still one of the best, most comprehensive descriptions of the many possible unintended consequences of the mRNA gene transfer technologies incorrectly referred to as “COVID vaccines.”
December 9, 2021, their paper was reprinted in the Townsend Letter, the Examiner of Alternative Medicine.2 Seneff, Ph.D., a senior research scientist at MIT who has been conducting research at MIT for over five decades, has spent a large portion of her career investigating the hazards and mechanisms of action of glyphosate.
Her attention was diverted to the science of mRNA gene transfer technologies in early 2020, when Operation Warp Speed was announced. As noted in her paper, many factors that lacked precedent, yet were being implemented at breakneck speed, included:
The first-ever use of PEG in an injection
The first-ever use of mRNA gene transfer technology against an infectious agent
The first-ever “vaccine” to make no clear claims about reducing infection, transmissibility or death
The first-ever coronavirus vaccine ever tested on humans (and previous coronavirus vaccines all failed due to antibody-dependent enhancement, a condition in which the antibodies actually facilitate infection rather than defend against it)
The first-ever use of genetically modified polynucleotides in the general population
An Insanely Reckless Process
In a May 2021 interview with me, Seneff said:
“To have developed this incredibly new technology so quickly, and to skip so many steps in the process of evaluating [its safety], it’s an insanely reckless thing that they’ve done. My instinct was that this is bad, and I needed to know [the truth].
So, I really dug into the research literature by the people who’ve developed these vaccines, and then more extensive research literature around those topics. And I don’t see how these vaccines can possibly be doing anything good …”
At the time, just five months into the mass inoculation campaign, Seneff suspected the COVID shots would end up killing far more people than the infection itself. Today, a full year into it, the statistics are grim beyond belief, proving her educated prediction to have been an astute one.
mRNA Jabs Are Shockingly Hazardous
As of December 3, 2021, the U.S. Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) has logged an astounding 927,738 COVID jab related adverse events, including 19,886 deaths.3 VAERS can receive reports from vaccine manufacturers and other international sources, and if we exclude those, the death toll reported in U.S. territories exclusively stands at 9,136.4
Of the total death reports, Pfizer — the only company that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has granted full licensing for an as-yet unavailable COVID shot — accounts for the vast majority: 13,268, compared to 4,894 for Moderna, 1,651 for Janssen and 73 for an undisclosed brand.
Pfizer also accounts for the vast majority of hospitalizations post-injection, and while those over the age of 66 make up the bulk of deaths, the 25-to-50 age group accounts for most of the hospitalizations. Key side effects that are now being reported in massive numbers include:5
All of these consequences were predicted by Seneff and Nigh in their paper, which makes the events all the more tragic. Importantly, VAERS is notoriously underreported, so the real-world impact of these shots is far greater than what those data suggest.
The Cure Is Indeed Worse Than the Disease
Calculations6 performed by Steve Kirsch, executive director of the COVID-19 Early Treatment Fund, and his team of statisticians suggest VAERS COVID-related reports are underreported by a factor of 41. This is a conservative estimate, supported by calculations using a variety of sources besides VAERS itself.
That means that in the U.S. alone (using the data for U.S. territories only), the actual death toll may be closer to 374,576 (including international deaths reported to VAERS would put the death toll at 815,326), and those are deaths that occurred within days or weeks post-injection.
As Seneff and Nigh explain in their paper, there’s overwhelming reason to suspect that these gene transfer injections will have devastating impacts in the long term, resulting in excess deaths over the next decade.
What’s more, it’s clear that the death toll from the COVID-19 infection itself in the U.S. has been vastly exaggerated, as it’s based on positive PCR tests and even mere suspicion of COVID in the absence of testing. Many died from other causes and just happened to have a positive COVID test at the time of death.
Kirsch estimates the real death tally from COVID-19 to be about 50% of the reported number (which is likely conservative). This means about 380,000 Americans died from COVID-19 (rather than with COVID), whereas the COVID shots may have killed more than 374,570 in the first 11 months alone.
As predicted in the title of Seneff’s paper, it seems the cure may indeed end up being worse than the disease. This is particularly true for children and young adults, who have either died or been permanently disabled by the shots by the thousands, while having an extraordinarily low risk of dying from or being seriously harmed by the infection itself.
Seneff suspects that in the next 10 to 15 years, we’ll see a dramatic spike in prion diseases, autoimmune diseases, neurodegenerative diseases at younger ages, and blood disorders such as blood clots, hemorrhaging, stroke and heart failure.
The Spike Protein Is the Most Dangerous Part of SARS-CoV-2
The reason we’re seeing all these problems from the COVID shots is because they program your cells to continuously produce SARS-CoV-2 spike protein, which we now know is the most dangerous part of the virus. Many experts noted this from the start, wondering what the vaccine developers could possibly be thinking, selecting this as the antigen for their shots.
While the mRNA injections can cause harm in many different ways, one basic problem is that they can overstimulate your immune system to the point of failure. In summary, as your cells start producing the viral spike proteins, your immune cells rally to mop up the proteins and dump them into your lymphatic system. (This is why many report swollen lymph nodes under the arms.)
The antibody response is part of your humoral immunity. You also have cellular immunity, which is part of your innate immune system. Your innate immune system is very powerful. If you’re healthy, it can clear viruses without ever producing a single antibody. Antibodies are actually a second-tier effect when your innate immune system fails.
The problem is that your innate immune system will not be activated and likely will fail to protect you if you get a COVID-19 shot, because it’s bypassing all of the areas where your innate immune system would be brought to bear.
Normally you breathe the virus in and stimulate the production secretory IgA antibodies that protect your respiratory system. When you bypass that route of exposure with a jab in the arm, no secretory IgA antibodies are produced, leaving you susceptible to the infection.
As explained by Ronald Kostoff in an excellent December 8, 2021, Trial Site News article, “COVID-19 ‘Vaccines’: The Wrong Bomb Over the Wrong Target at the Wrong Time”:7
“An effective vaccine would focus on cellular immunity in the respiratory and intestinal tract, in which secretory IgA is produced by your lymphocytes that are located directly underneath the mucous membranes that line the respiratory and intestinal tract.
The antibodies produced by these lymphocytes are ejected through and to the surface of the linings. These antibodies are thus on site to meet air-borne viruses and they may be able to prevent viral binding and infection of the cells.
Unfortunately, the main inoculants used presently for COVID-19 focus on antibodies (IgG and circulating IgA) that occur in the bloodstream. These antibodies protect the internal organs of the body from infectious agents that try to spread via the bloodstream.”
When you are injected with the COVID jab, your body will only induce IgG and circulating IgA — not secretory IgA, and these types of antibodies do not effectively protect your mucous membranes from SARS-CoV-2 infection. So, as noted by Kostoff, the breakthrough infections we’re now seeing “confirm the fundamental design flaws” of this gene transfer technology.
“A natural infection with SARS-CoV-2 (coronavirus) will in most individuals remain localized to the respiratory tract,” Kostoff writes.8 “The vaccines used presently cause cells deep inside our body to express the viral spike protein, which they were never meant to do by nature.
Any cell which expresses this foreign antigen on its surface will come under attack by the immune system, which will involve both IgG antibodies and cytotoxic T-lymphocytes. This may occur in any organ, but the damage will be most severe in vital organs.
We are seeing now that the heart is affected in many young people, leading to myocarditis or even sudden cardiac arrest and death. In other words, we are dropping the wrong bomb on the wrong target at the wrong time!”
In the end, your body will essentially believe that your innate immune system has failed, which means it must bring in the backup cavalry. In essence, your body is now overreacting to something that isn’t true. You’re not actually infected with a virus and your innate immune system has not failed, but your body is forced to respond as if both are true.
Effects Likely to Persist Long Term
What’s more, the synthetic RNA in the mRNA vaccines contains a nucleotide called methyl-pseudouridine, which your body cannot break down, and the RNA is programmed to trigger maximum protein production. So, we’re looking at completely untested manipulation of RNA.
It is very important to recognize that this is a genetically engineered mRNA for the spike protein. It is not identical to the spike protein mRNA that SARS-Cov-2 produces. It’s been significantly altered to avoid being metabolized by your body.
The spike protein your body produces in response to the COVID-19 vaccine mRNA locks into your ACE2 receptor. This is because the genetically engineered new spike protein has additional prolines inserted that prevent the receptors from properly closing, which then cause you to downregulate ACE2. That’s partially how you end up with problems such as pulmonary hypertension, ventricular heart failure and stroke.9,10
As noted in a 2020 paper,11 there’s a “pivotal link” between ACE2 deficiency and SARS-CoV-2 infection. People with ACE2 deficiency tend to be more prone to severe COVID-19. The spike protein suppresses ACE2,12 making the deficiency even worse. According to Seneff, the gene transfer injections essentially do the same thing, and we still don’t know how long the effects last.
Manufacturers initially guessed the synthetic RNA might survive in the human body for about six months. A more recent investigation found the spike protein persisted in recovered COVID patients for 15 months.13
This raises the suspicion that the synthetic and more persistent mRNA in the COVID shots may trigger spike protein production for at least as long, and probably longer.14 What’s more, the number of spike proteins produced by the shots is far greater than what you experience in natural infection.
As explained by Dr. Peter McCullough,15 this means that after your first shot, your body will produce spike protein for at least 15 months. But, when you get shot No. 2 a few weeks later, that shot will cause spike protein production to go on for 15 months or longer. With shot No. 3 six months after that, you produce spike protein for yet another 15 months.
With regular boosters, you may never rid your body of the spike protein. All the while, it’s wreaking havoc with your biology. McCullough likens it to “a permanent install of an inflammatory protein in the human body,” and inflammation is at the heart of most if not all chronic diseases. There’s simply no possible way for these gene transfer shots to improve public health. They’re going to decimate it.
Long-Term Neurological Damage Is To Be Expected
In her paper,16 Seneff describes several key characteristics of the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein that suggests it acts as a prion. This could help explain why we’re seeing so many neurological side effects from the shots. According to Seneff, the spike protein produced by the COVID shot, due to the modifications made, may actually make it more of a prion than the spike protein in the actual virus, and a more effective one.
For a detailed technical description of this you can read through Seneff’s paper, but the take-home message is that COVID-19 shots are instruction sets for your body to make a toxic protein that will eventually wind up concentrated in your spleen, from where prion-like protein instructions will be sent out, radically increasing your risk of developing neurodegenerative diseases.
Lung, Heart and Brain Diseases Are Predictable Consequences
Seneff also goes into great detail describing how the spike protein acts as a metabolic poison. While I recommend reading Seneff’s paper in its entirety, I’ve extracted some key sections below, starting with how the spike protein can trigger pathological damage leading to lung damage and heart and brain diseases:17
“The picture is now emerging that SARS-CoV-2 has serious effects on the vasculature in multiple organs, including the brain vasculature … In a series of papers, Yuichiro Suzuki in collaboration with other authors presented a strong argument that the spike protein by itself can cause a signaling response in the vasculature with potentially widespread consequences.
These authors observed that, in severe cases of COVID-19, SARS-CoV-2 causes significant morphological changes to the pulmonary vasculature … Furthermore, they showed that exposure of cultured human pulmonary artery smooth muscle cells to the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein S1 subunit was sufficient to promote cell signaling without the rest of the virus components.
Follow-on papers showed that the spike protein S1 subunit suppresses ACE2, causing a condition resembling pulmonary arterial hypertension (PAH), a severe lung disease with very high mortality … The ‘in vivo studies’ they referred to … had shown that SARS coronavirus-induced lung injury was primarily due to inhibition of ACE2 by the SARS-CoV spike protein, causing a large increase in angiotensin-II.
Suzuki et al. (2021) went on to demonstrate experimentally that the S1 component of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, at a low concentration … activated the MEK/ERK/MAPK signaling pathway to promote cell growth. They speculated that these effects would not be restricted to the lung vasculature.
The signaling cascade triggered in the heart vasculature would cause coronary artery disease, and activation in the brain could lead to stroke. Systemic hypertension would also be predicted. They hypothesized that this ability of the spike protein to promote pulmonary arterial hypertension could predispose patients who recover from SARS-CoV-2 to later develop right ventricular heart failure.
Furthermore, they suggested that a similar effect could happen in response to the mRNA vaccines, and they warned of potential long-term consequences to both children and adults who received COVID-19 vaccines based on the spike protein.
An interesting study by Lei et. al. (2021) found that pseudovirus — spheres decorated with the SARS-CoV-2 S1 protein but lacking any viral DNA in their core — caused inflammation and damage in both the arteries and lungs of mice exposed intratracheally.
They then exposed healthy human endothelial cells to the same pseudovirus particles. Binding of these particles to endothelial ACE2 receptors led to mitochondrial damage and fragmentation in those endothelial cells, leading to the characteristic pathological changes in the associated tissue.
This study makes it clear that spike protein alone, unassociated with the rest of the viral genome, is sufficient to cause the endothelial damage associated with COVID-19. The implications for vaccines intended to cause cells to manufacture the spike protein are clear and are an obvious cause for concern.”
The COVID Shots Activate Latent Viruses
As mentioned earlier, shingles infection is turning out to be a rather common side effect of the COVID shot, and like the neurological, vascular and cardiac damage we’re seeing, activation of latent viral infections was also predicted.
One reason why latent viral infections are cropping up in response to the shots is because the shots disable your type I interferon pathway. A second reason is because your immune system is overburdened trying to deal with the inflammatory spike proteins flowing through your body. Something’s got to give, so latent viruses are allowed to break through.
That’s not the end of your potential troubles, however, as these coinfections may worsen or accelerate other conditions, such as Bell’s Palsy, myalgic encephalomyelitis and chronic fatigue syndrome.
Herpes viruses, for example, have been implicated as a trigger of both AIDS18 and chronic fatigue syndrome.19 Some research suggests these diseases don’t appear until viruses from different families partner up and the type 1 interferon pathway is disabled.
With all of that in mind, it seems inevitable that, long term, the COVID mass injection campaign will result in an avalanche of a wide range of debilitating chronic illnesses.
*
Note to readers: Please click the share buttons above or below. Follow us on Instagram, @crg_globalresearch. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.
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.
Protests across the Western world exploded over the weekend with righteous indignation over vaccine passports and mandates, and the mainstream media responded with blatant, intentional silence.
In major cities across the Western world, tens of thousands, sometimes even hundreds of thousands in each city, marched against their government’s anti-freedom, anti-human agenda regarding COVID-19, mandatory vaccines, and the dehumanizing apartheid state the entire world seems hellbent on imposing.
These protests are so widespread that it would almost be easier to list the countries which didn’t have demonstrations rather than those that did.
Nonetheless, here are only a select number of cities that saw massive pro-freedom demonstrations, collectively constituting millions of freedom fighters:
London, England saw an easy hundred thousand protesters come out in solidarity against vaccine mandates, wielding signs of non-compliance and demanding the government return their freedoms as they marched on Parliament.
For a 24th consecutive week, thousands take to the streets in cities across France to protest Macron’s draconian vaccine pass regime and the COVID tyranny spreading across Europe. The French have shown they can do this for years if need be. Paris today.pic.twitter.com/3QbJmq9xo4
As Michael Senger notes, this will be the 24th consecutive week of protests in France over the “draconian vaccine pass regime and the COVID tyranny spreading across Europe.”
In Vienna, Austria, tens of thousands of freedom fighters tore down barricades and stormed the streets to protest lockdowns and vaccine-based segregation.
Those in Vienna were joined in protest by their brothers and sisters in Salzburg.
Thousands continue to take to the streets in cities all across Austria against compulsory vaccination, lockdown for the unvaccinated, and other aberrations of COVID tyranny. Salzburg today.pic.twitter.com/GsMWFt9hGK
Tens of thousands, possibly even hundreds of thousands, of Germans rallied in Hamburg to protest the emerging state of totalitarianism that hasn’t existed in the country since WWII.
Australians picked up the torch once again in Melbourne on December 17, filling the streets to oppose COVID prison camps and vaccine passports. Again, barely a mention by the mainstream media.
Note to readers: Please click the share buttons above or below. Follow us on Instagram, @crg_globalresearch. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.
“…the ones who call the shots (in war) won’t be among the dead and lame And on each end of the rifle we’re the same” — John McCutcheon
In World War I, as happens to be true in most American wars, the Christian church leadership joined in the patriotic fervor with very un-Christ-like, nationalistic and racial/religious domination stances.
Astonishingly, religious leaders on every side of the conflict truly believed that God was on their particular side. And so the pulpits all over Europe, including British, Scottish, French, Belgian, German, Austrian, Hungarian, Russian and Italian reverberated with flag-waving fervor, with clear messages to their doomed warrior-sons that it was their God-given Christian duty to march off to kill the equally brain-washed young Christian soldier enemies, who were also certain that God was on their side.
Five months into the miserable death and destruction of the perpetually dead-locked trench war (featuring the now-infamous mass slaughter via artillery, machine gun and poison gas weaponry), the first Christmas of the war on the Western Front came around.
Christmas was the holiest of Christian holidays on all sides of the war, but in this time of homesickness and having to live in the cold, rain and snow, the first Christmas of the war had special meaning. December 24, 1914 reminded the soldiers of the good food, warm homes and beloved family relationships that they had left behind – and which they now suspected that they might never experience again. The physically exhausted, spiritually-deadened, combat-traumatized soldiers on both sides of No Man’s Land desperately sought some respite from the water-logged, rat-infested and now increasingly frozen trenches.
The frontline soldiers on both sides were at the end of their emotional ropes because of the unrelenting artillery barrages against which they were defenseless. If they weren’t killed or maimed by the bombings, what would eventually destroy many of the survivors was the “shell-shock” (now known as combat-induced posttraumatic stress disorder – PTSD), with the horrifying nightmares, sleep deprivation, suicidality, depression, hyper-alertness and other mental and neurological distresses. Other common “killers” were the bad food, lice, trench foot, frostbite and gangrenous toes and fingers.
Suicidal “over the top” assaults against enemy machine gun nests were stupidly and repeatedly ordered by senior officers like Sir Douglas Haig, who didn’t have to participate in the bloody assaults. Sir Winston Churchill, in his British naval command role at the time, had obviously learned nothing from Haig’s disastrous tactic when, a year later, he also ordered repeated assaults against Turkish machine gun fire at the infamous massacre of Australian and New Zealand troops at Gallipoli, a blunder for which the disgraced Churchill resigned his commission in the British Admiralty.
The day-to-day horrors of trench warfare were punctuated by the screams of agony coming from the wounded soldiers who had to be left hanging on the barbed wire or lying in the bomb craters in No Man’s Land – their deaths often lingering on for days. The effect on the troops in the trenches who had to helplessly ignore the pleas for help was traumatizing. For any number of reasons, the morale of the troops on both sides of No Man’s Land had hit rock bottom during the months approaching Christmas.
Christmas in the Trenches
So, on December 24, 1914, the exhausted troops settled down to open Christmas gifts from home, expecting to have some respite from the war for a day or so. A magnanimous (and deluded) Kaiser Wilhelm had even ordered 100,000 Christmas trees with millions of ornamental candles to be sent up to the German front, expecting that such an act would boost troop morale. Using the supply lines for such militarily unnecessary items seemed to be an acceptable investment for the over-confidant emperor, but his generals disagreed. Nobody, however, suspected that the Christmas tree idea would backfire and instead be a catalyst for a famous event in the history of peace-making that was nearly censored out from recorded history.
That spontaneous event, the Christmas Truce of 1914, was expressed in a variety of ways at a multitude of locations all along the 600 miles of trenches that stretched across France, but it was an event that would never again be duplicated in the history of warfare.
The tradition that has emerged from this true story was that, in the silence of Christmas Eve night, the Germans started singing Christmas carols, with the British, French, Scots and Canadians doing the same, the two sides joining together bilingually when the Germans sang “Stille Nacht”. Before long, the divine spirit of peace and “goodwill towards men” prevailed over the demonic spirit of war.
While participating in the group sing along, the men sensed their common humanity, and the natural aversion to killing emerged, overcoming the brain-washing they had all been subjected to since basic training. And for a precious day or two, these men rose to a level of humanity that would not allow them to continue killing other humans even if ordered to do so.
Individual unarmed soldiers, disobeying orders from their superiors, cautiously stood up and walked out of their trenches into No Man’s Land. Nobody began shooting and slowly both trenches emptied out and a unique Christmas eve celebration began that had never happened before and – if the world’s military establishment has anything to say about it – will never happen again.
Soldiers that were deadly enemies just moments before shared chocolates, cigarettes, beer, wine, Schnapps, pictures from home and soccer games. Names and addresses were exchanged, and every soldier who genuinely experienced the dramatic event was forever changed.
Of course, on their way each soldier had to step around shell holes and over the frozen corpses of their dead friends, which were given respectful burials the following day; former enemies helping one another with the solemn job.
Fostering Peace on Earth in Times of War is Considered Treason
Fraternizing with the enemy (and refusing to obey orders in time of war) has historically been regarded by military commanders and politicians as an act of treason which has always been severely punished, sometimes by summary execution. In the case of the Christmas Truce of 1914, trying to avoid drawing public attention to this potentially contagious incident, most commanding officers threatened various punishments but only a few executions took place. One punishment that many of the newly antiwar German soldiers faced was their transfer to the Eastern Front where they would then be expected to kill and die in the equally suicidal battles against Orthodox Christian soldiers from Russia.
The prize-winning movie (almost winning the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film) that beautifully characterizes the spirit of the Christmas Truce is “Joyeux Noel” (French for “Merry Christmas”). “Joyeux Noel” tells the moving tale that has been adapted from the many surviving stories and letters home from soldiers who had been there.
This unique story of war resistance needs to be retold over and over again if our modern-era of false flag-generated wars of empire and corporate domination are to be effectively de-railed. These never-ending wars – always followed by armed occupations that inevitably generate armed resistance and revolt later – are fought by naïve but thoroughly indoctrinated, macho adolescents – many of whom are from devout Christian families. These not quite emotionally mature adolescents are at high risk of becoming spiritually damaged by active engagement in the “killing fields”. Indeed, combat soldiers are often doomed to a life overwhelmed by the realities of combat-induced PTSD (or sociopathic personality disorder), with suicidality, homicidality, loss of religious faith, traumatic brain injuries, and even neurological and autoimmune disorders because of the Pentagon’s aggressive over-vaccination agendas (often with experimental, poorly tested, fast-tracked vaccines, usually injected without informed consent as a part of some secret biodefense weapons research project.
Of course, militarists of every era in history do whatever they can to prevent soldiers from experiencing the humanity of their enemies. Shouldn’t that be the job of the chaplains, who are supposed to be nurturers of the souls of those soldiers who are in their care? Evidence suggests that military chaplains avoid counseling soldiers about Jesus’ Golden Rule, his clear command to love their enemies or the ethics of the Sermon on the Mount. I’m sure that there would be consequences for a chaplain if one was discovered doing that. Military chaplains are part of the apparatus of war that pays very little attention to any of the Ten Commandments, especially the ones that say: “thou shalt not kill” or “thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s oil”. In their defense, military chaplains, in their seminary training and, likely even in their Sunday School upbringing, may have never heard about the profoundly important gospel truths about non-domination, non-retaliation and the unconditional love of friend and enemy.
Theological Blind Spots of War
A couple of these theological blind spots are illustrated at the end of “Joyeux Noel” in a powerful scene depicting a confrontation between the Christ-like, antiwar Scottish chaplain and his pro-war bishop just as the humble chaplain was administering “last rites” to a dying soldier. The bishop had come to chastise the chaplain and relieve him of his duties because of his “treasonous and shameful” behavior on the battlefield (ie, being merciful to and fraternizing with the enemy).
The authoritarian bishop refused to listen when the chaplain proclaimed that he had just performed “the most important mass of my life” and that he wished to stay with his men, most of whom were losing their Christian faith. The bishop angrily denied the chaplain’s request and sent him home.
The bishop then delivered a rousing pro-war sermon to some fresh troops that had been brought in to replace the ones who were now refusing to kill anymore. The words of the sermon were chosen by the film-writers directly from a homily that had been delivered by an Anglican bishop in England later in the war. The subtle response of the chaplain to his sacking was very well portrayed by the filmmakers.
“Joyeux Noel” is an important film that deserves to be annual holiday fare. It has ethical lessons far more powerful than the scores of commonly recommended Christmas films such as “It’s A Wonderful Life” or “A Christmas Carol”.
Some of the lessons of the story of the Christmas Truce are illustrated in John McCutcheon’s important song, “Christmas in the Trenches”. Here are the lyric. Pay close attention to the last line:
Christmas in the Trenches
By John McCutcheon
Oh my name is Francis Tolliver, I come from Liverpool
Two years ago the war was waiting for me after school
From Belgium and to Flanders, Germany to here
I fought for King and country I love dear
Twas Christmas in the trenches and the frost so bitter hung
The frozen fields of France where still no Christmas songs were sung
Our families back in England were toasting us that day
Theie brave and glorious lads so far away
I was lying with my mess-mates on the cold and rocky ground
When across the lines of battle came a most peculiar sound
Says I now listen up me boys, each soldier strained to hear
As one young German voice sang out so clear
He’s singing bloody well you know, my partner says to me
Soon one by one each German voice joined in in harmony
The cannons rested silent and the gas clouds rolled no more
As Christmas brought us respite from the war
As soon as they were finished and a reverent pause was spent
God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen struck up some lads from Kent
The next thing sang was Stille Nacht, tis ‘Silent Night’ says I
And in two tongues one song filled up that sky
There’s someone coming towards us now the front line sentry said
All sights were fixed on one lone figure trudging from their side
His truce flag like a Christmas Star shone on the plane so bright
As he bravely trudged unarmed into the night
Then one by one on either side, walked in to No Man’s Land
With neither gun nor bayonet, we met there hand to hand
We shared some secret brandy and we wished each other well
And in a flare lit football game we gave them hell
We traded chocolates, cigarettes and photographs from home
These sons and fathers far away from families of their own
Young Sanders played the squeeze box and they had a violin
This curious and unlikely band of men
Soon daylight stole upon us and France was France once more
With sad farewells we each began to settle back to war
But the question haunted every heart that lived that wondrous night
Whose family have I fixed within my sights
Twas Christmas in the trenches and the frost so bitter hung
The frozen fields of France were warmed, the songs of peace were sung
For the walls they’d kept between us to exact the work of war
Had been crumbled and were gone forever more
Oh my name is Francis Tolliver, from Liverpool I dwell
Each Christmas comes since World War I have learned its lesson well
For the ones who call the shots won’t be among the dead and lame
And on each end of the rifle we’re the same
Check out the video of McCutcheon singing his song below:
For a good pictorial history of the reality of WWI’s trench warfare, watch below:
The full version of “Joyeux Noel” is still available online here. I strongly suggest family viewing for the holidays.
*
Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.
Dr Gary G. Kohls lives in the USA and writes a weekly column, entitled Duty to Warn, for the Duluth Reader, Duluth, Minnesota’s alternative newsweekly magazine. His columns deal with the dangers of American Friendly Fascism, corporatism, Oligarchy, militarism, racism, malnutrition, and Big Pharma’s over-drugging and over-vaccinating agendas as well as other movements that threaten the environment, democracy, civility, health and the sustainability and livability of the planet and the future of the children.
Roger Wicker, membro da Comissão dos Serviços Armados do Senado dos EUA, disse, numa entrevista à Fox News (8 de Dezembro), não excluir a possibilidade de uma intervenção militar directa dos EUA contra a Rússia para “defender a Ucrânia” e, sem que o entrevistador lhe tivesse pedido, acrescentou: “Sabe que não excluímos a possibilidade de uma acção nuclear como primeira utilização”. Esta é uma mensagem transversal a Moscovo sobre a determinação dos EUA em apoiar um eventual ataque de Kiev contra os russos de Donbass. Seria certamente apresentada como uma resposta a um ataque efectuado pelos russos de Donbass. Na mente daqueles que, desde 2014, têm concretizado a estratégia de tensão contra a Rússia esta seria ainda uma jogada vencedora.
Moscovo teria duas alternativas: não intervir militarmente em defesa dos russos de Donbass, deixando-os subjugados pelo ataque ucraniano apoiado de facto pela NATO e forçados a abandonar a região e a refugiar-se na Rússia, decisão que seria traumática para Moscovo sobretudo a nível interno; ou intervir militarmente para impedir o ataque ucraniano, expondo-se à condenação internacional por agressão e invasão de um Estado soberano.
Os generais ucranianos avisaram que não seriam capazes de “repelir as tropas russas sem uma infusão maciça de ajuda militar do Ocidente”. A infusão já começou: os Estados Unidos, que já deram a Kiev uma ajuda militar de 2,5 biliões de dólares, forneceram-lhe em Novembro mais 88 toneladas de munições como parte de um “pacote” de 60 milhões de dólares, incluindo mísseis Javelin já posicionados contra os russos de Donbass. Ao mesmo tempo, os EUA enviaram para a Ucrânia mais de 150 conselheiros militares que, juntamente com os de uma dúzia de aliados da NATO, dirigem, de facto, as operações.
A situação é ainda mais explosiva porque a Ucrânia – agora parceira mas, de facto, já membro da NATO – poderia ser oficialmente admitida como o 31º membro da Aliança, com a consequência de que, de acordo com o Artigo 5º do Tratado do Atlântico Norte, os outros 30 membros da NATO teriam de intervir militarmente na frente de Donbass em apoio à Ucrânia contra a Rússia. O Ministério dos Negócios Estrangeiros russo pediu à NATO que não admitisse a Ucrânia, para não aumentar ainda mais a tensão militar e política na Europa, recordando que desde o fim da Guerra Fria a Rússia recebeu repetidas garantias de que a jurisdição e as forças militares da NATO não avançariam um centímetro em direcção a Leste, mas estas promessas não foram cumpridas. O Ministério dos Negócios Estrangeiros russo propôs assim que a NATO abrisse negociações sobre acordos a longo prazo que impediriam uma maior expansão da NATO para Leste e a instalação de sistemas de armamento na vizinhança imediata do território russo. A proposta foi categoricamente rejeitada em 10 de Dezembro pela NATO através do Secretário Geral Stoltenberg: “A relação da NATO com a Ucrânia será decidida pelos 30 membros da Aliança e pela Ucrânia, e por mais ninguém”.
Imediatamente a seguir, ontem, 13 de Dezembro, os Ministros dos Negócios Estrangeiros do G7 (EUA, Canadá, Reino Unido, França, Alemanha, Itália, Japão) e o Alto Representante da União Europeia, reunidos em Liverpool, declararam que estavam “unidos na sua condenação do reforço militar da Rússia e da sua retórica agressiva em relação à Ucrânia” e que “a Rússia não deve ter dúvidas de que uma nova agressão militar contra a Ucrânia teria como resposta, consequências maciças e custos graves”.
Entretanto, a Finlândia, membro da União Europeia e parceira activa da NATO contra a Rússia, anunciou a compra de 64 caças F-35A da Lockheed Martin pelo preço de 8,4 biliões de euros, que, incluindo as infraestruturas, sobe para 10 biliões de euros, aos quais o governo acrescentará mais 10 biliões de euros para a sua manutenção e modernização. Os 64 aviões F-35A de ataque nuclear serão colocados na fronteira russa, apenas a 200 km de São Petersburgo e, de facto, sob comando dos Estados Unidos que, como recorda o Senador Wicker, não excluem serem os primeiros a usar armas nucleares.
That’s even worse than in America (which is famously controlled by the owners of its arms-producers and “MIC”), where the published answer is “No data.”
In other words: military procurement — selling (mainly) military products-weapons or services (the types of things that constitute the bulk of governmental purchases) to the French Government — is allowed by French laws to be corrupt. A prospective seller to the French Government is allowed to donate not only to a candidate but to a political party. (Obviously, this gives those government contractors immense influence over French foreign policies, and especially over ‘defense’ policies, including how much and which corporation’s weapons to buy.)
.
However in order to be able to contribute lots of money to a particular candidate or party, a coordinated operation that might include many cooperating donors from a given weapons-producer might be necessary. By contrast, in the United States, which nominally prohibits almost every type of corruption, the fine-print exceptions allow massive donations from any billionaire or mega-corporation via PACS and other allowed tricks.
.
On balance, therefore, France seems to be less corrupt than America, and far less corrupt than Germany, according to these legal yardsticks. And if military procurement were not an issue, then France would appear to be significantly less corrupt than America, as well as vastly less corrupt than Germany.
.
But, just as there are legal ways around the nominal anti-corruption provisions in America, there likewise are legal ways around the nominal anti-corruption provisions in France. Furthermore, in one way, France is far more corrupt even than America, because in France there is actually much more secrecy regarding campaign donations than there is in America. Also, an EU study of the various member-nations’ campaign-finance laws found that even foreign donations have been, at least until 2019, virtually unregulated, in all EU nations. Nonetheless, like in America, the owners of France’s weapons-producers have especially ready legal pathways to control the government (which is their main customer, the biggest buyer of their products).
.
So, in France, politicians who are unfavorable toward NATO and other weapons-marketing organizations will probably need to rely more on regular, run-of-the-mill donors, than on billionaires or their generally war-profiteering corporations.
.
In other words, any such candidate will need to have considerable left-wing populist appeal, in order to compete effectively against the better-financed contenders, who are more military-contractor-backed.
In any case, the main path to corruption in France seems to be through military procurement. That could turn out to be a major reason why one of France’s perennial Presidential candidates, Marine Le Pen, whose policies would be a threat to military contractors, will again lose.
Marine Le Pen is basically a populist leftist who inherited from her conservative populist father the Front Nationale Party and switched the name to the National Rally Party and moved it to a populist left ideological position, but her father’s reputation still haunts leftist voters, who, in a second-round election therefore peel off to the more-establishment liberal opponent, who then receives the endorsements of the candidates who had been eliminated in the first round, so that the French military-industrial complex will end up being represented by the next President. This is likely to happen again.
.
She also needs to retain at least some portion of the voters who had supported her fascist father, whom she despises (but can’t say so publicly, because she needs at least some of those voters, too). Therefore, she talks about her father as little as possible, and maintains ambiguity on lots of issues, in order to hold together, as much as possible, a populist coalition that’s both left and right, progressive and conservative. But the billionaires — both the conservative fascist ones and the liberal fascist ones — know that they wouldn’t be able to control France (as they do) if she were to become President. So, their media always refer to her as “far-right” in order to scare away voters, by portraying her as being secretly just like her father was — even though most of her policy-commitments are opposite to that (but only few voters actually base their votes on policy-positions, and politically involved billionaires know this). She continually walks a political tightrope. But one thing about Marine Le Pen seems clear: France’s billionaires fear her; none supports her.
.
On December 10th the Financial Times headlined “Valérie Pécresse, the woman who could beat Macron”, and Victor Mallet presented a credible case that that establishment conservative is the likeliest person to end up as the winner, in the second round. However, Mallet noted that “her hardline stance on law and order and her commitment to economic reform and fiscal orthodoxy will play well on the French right.”
.
If so, then a second-round contest between her and Le Pen could very likely produce a bigger-than expected liberal vote for Le Pen, as being a lesser-of-two-evils, in their view. The biggest barrier to that happening would be that this time, Le Pen might not end up in the second round, because Éric Zemmour, who hates her (and Muslims), and who appeals more than she does to rich conservatives, many of whom might be invested in armaments stocks, could end up reducing her first-round vote so that Le Pen won’t make it to the second round. He might even be largely financed in order to keep her out of the second round, so that Pécresse, or the current President, Macron, will win. Right now, Zemmour is campaigning mainly against Le Pen, but, if the final contest will be between Pécresse and Le Pen, then he would probably endorse Pécresse, which would cause many conservative voters to vote for her.
“The monthly poll puts National Rally candidate Marine Le Pen and Eric Zemmour, her competitor on the far-right, neck and neck with 14.5% of voter intentions, a score that would knock both of them out of the second round.”
.
That is exactly what France’s military-industrial complex, and French billionaires, would hope for. If Pécresse wins, then America’s billionaires will also win, because then there will be a France that is even more of a U.S. vassal than is now the case, under Macron.
Once again, NATO is on the verge of unnecessarily escalating tensions in Eastern Europe for the sole purpose of confronting Russia. According to recent statements by some of its top officers, the Western military alliance plans to deploy troops in Romania and Bulgaria as a way to strengthen the current “security scheme” for Ukraine. In practice, this type of attitude only tends to further increase polarization and discord between the states in that region, undermining any search for international peace and stability.
According to a recent report by Der Spiegel, NATO’s Supreme Allied Commander in Europe, General Tod Wolters, suggested that the Western alliance should send military forces to Bulgaria and Romania. The reason for such maneuver would be the supposed need to face the growth of the Russian military presence on the western border. Basically, Tod Walters advocates that Romania and Bulgaria be included in NATO’s current defense scheme for Ukraine, whose remnants also include Poland and the Baltics.
In that way, it would be possible to create an Eastern Europe almost entirely occupied by the alliance. Such an extended occupation plan has been called “Enhanced Forward Presence” and seems to be NATO’s bet in order to gain positions and undermine any Russian or Belarusian influence in Eastern Europe.
There is no doubt that such a plan would be harmful to the search for regional peace, but the big problem is that such a measure has also been called for by the Romanian and Bulgarian governments themselves, which seem increasingly misled by NATO’s narratives about supposed Russian plans for that region. States with less military and economic power and low international influence tend to be the most affected by the spread of this type of fallacious discourse and that is why there is currently a tendency among Eastern European nations to more and more demand a NATO presence in their territories. Romania and Bulgaria – as well as the Baltics and Poland – fear suffering the collateral effects of a possible conflict between Ukraine and Russia and have bet on the western alliance as an important ally in the face of this (non-existent) threat.
NATO has so far not provided any precise information about the possibility of boosting its troops in Romania and Bulgaria and has not commented about Wolters’ words. However, under pressure from the international media, spokespersons for the alliance said that the topic could be discussed in upcoming summits. Amid the current tensions on the Russian western border, any form of hardening opposition to Moscow is expected to be discussed, which worries security analysts around the world, considering the harmful effects of this type of attitude on the negotiation and rapprochement process that could start soon.
The recent virtual summit between Joe Biden and Vladimir Putin brought, despite the tensions and uncertainties, some kind of “hope”, as the meeting ended with a mutual promise of willingness for dialogue between the leaders of NATO and Russia. Moscow demanded an end to NATO military maneuvers in Eastern Europe as an elementary condition for a summit between Russia and the Western governments to happen. Now, with such a possibility of sending more troops to the region, the possibility of such a Moscow-NATO summit has diminished, further threatening the search for the pacification of the European space.
There are only two ways to interpret the deployment of new NATO troops at the present time: either the alliance is giving a clear signal that it has no interest in the summit or a peaceful solution to the eastern European situation, or it is giving the green light to the dialogue saying, on the other hand, that if its interests are not reached, the occupation of the region and the encirclement against Russia will increase even more. In both cases, NATO’s game looks like a big strategic mistake.
If Russia has no interest in invading or declaring war on any European country and NATO leaders and strategists know it does not. The Russian interest in the end of NATO’s occupation of Eastern Europe is to quell the violence and hostility that have remained for decades in the region, paving the way for a possibility of peaceful dispute between Moscow and the West to influence local states.
Russia is also interested in protecting its own borders, which suffer direct and collateral effects from the increase of enemy forces, but there is no “fear” on the part of Moscow regarding the presence of troops in neighboring countries, simply because there is no interest in the confrontation. That is why trying to play Russia using hostile forces in neighboring countries as a trump card seems like a big strategic mistake.
For the sake of peace and security of all states, the best thing for NATO to do is to decline any interest in escalating hostilities, focusing on the possibility of peaceful dialogue with Russia in search of a joint solution for the benefit of all sides.
Lucas Leiroz, researcher in Social Sciences at Rural Federal University of Rio de Janeiro; geopolitical consultant.
Incisive article. First posted on GR on May 15, 2021
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).
Visit and follow us on Instagram at @crg_globalresearch.
***
Say it’s 2014 and you’ve had this idea for a technocratic Great Reset of the world economy for some time now, but it only works if the entire planet is rocked by a pandemic. How do you go about selling your idea?
“The pandemic represents a rare but narrow window of opportunity to reflect, reimagine, and reset our world to create a healthier, more equitable, and more prosperous future” — Klaus Schwab, WEF
If you are World Economic Forum (WEF) Founder Klaus Schwab, you attempt to sell your vision of a global Utopia via a Great Reset of the world order in three simple steps:
Announce your intention to revamp every aspect of society with global governance, and keep repeating that message
When your message isn’t getting through, simulate fake pandemic scenarios that show why the world needs a great reset
If the fake pandemic scenarios aren’t persuasive enough, wait a couple months for a real global crisis to occur, and repeat step one
It took Schwab and the Davos elite about six years to watch their great reset ideology grow from a tiny Swiss seed in 2014 to a European super-flower pollinating the entire globe in 2020.
The so-called “Great Reset” promises to build “a more secure, more equal, and more stable world” if everyone on the planet agrees to “act jointly and swiftly to revamp all aspects of our societies and economies, from education to social contracts and working conditions.”
But it wouldn’t have been possible to contemplate materializing such an all-encompassing plan for a new world order without a global crisis, be it manufactured or of unfortunate happenstance, that shocked society to its core.
“In the end, the outcome was tragic: the most catastrophic pandemic in history with hundreds of millions of deaths, economic collapse and societal upheaval” — Clade X pandemic simulation (May, 2018)
So, in May, 2018, the WEF partnered with Johns Hopkins to simulate a fictitious pandemic — dubbed “Clade X” — to see how prepared the world be if ever faced with such a crisis.
A little over a year later, the WEF once again teamed-up with Johns Hopkins, along with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, to stage another pandemic exercise called Event 201 in October, 2019.
Both simulations concluded that the world wasn’t prepared for a global pandemic.
And a few short months following the conclusion of Event 201, which specifically simulated a coronavirus outbreak, the World Health Organization (WHO) officially declared that the coronavirus had reached pandemic status on March 11, 2020.
“The next severe pandemic will not only cause great illness and loss of life but could also trigger major cascading economic and societal consequences that could contribute greatly to global impact and suffering” — Event 201 pandemic simulation (October, 2019)
Since then, just about every scenario covered in the Clade X and Event 201 simulations has come into play, including:
Governments implementing lockdowns worldwide
The collapse of many industries
Growing mistrust between governments and citizens
A greater adoption of biometric surveillance technologies
Social media censorship in the name of combating misinformation
The desire to flood communication channels with “authoritative” sources
A global lack of personal protective equipment
The breakdown of international supply chains
Mass unemployment
Rioting in the streets
And a whole lot more!
After the nightmare scenarios had fully materialized by mid-2020, the WEF founder declared “now is the time for a “Great Reset” in June of this year.
Was it excellent forecasting, planning, and modeling on the part of the WEF and partners that Clade X and Event 201 turned out to be so prophetic, or was there something more to it?
Timeline
Below is a condensed timeline of events that tracks the Great Reset agenda that went from just a “hope” in 2014 to a globalist ideology touted by royalty, the media, and heads of state the world-over in 2020.
2014-2017: Klaus Schwab calls for Great Reset and WEF repeats message
Ahead of the 2014 WEF meeting in Davos, Switzerland, Schwab announced that he hoped the WEF would push the reset button on the global economy.
The WEF would go on to repeat that message for years.
Between 2014 and 2017, the WEF called to reshape, restart, reboot, and reset the global order every single year, each aimed at solving various “crises.”
2014: WEF publishes meeting agenda entitled “The Reshaping of the World: Consequences for Society, Politics and Business.”
2016: WEF holds panel called “How to reboot the global economy.”
2017: WEF publishes article saying “Our world needs a reset in how we operate.”
Then in 2018, the Davos elites turned their heads towards simulating fake pandemic scenarios to see how prepared the world would be in the face of a different crisis.
2018-2019: WEF, Johns Hopkins & Gates Foundation simulate fake pandemics
On May 15, 2018, Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security hosted the “Clade X” pandemic exercise in partnership with the WEF.
The Clade X exercise included mock video footage of actors giving scripted news reports about a fake pandemic scenario (video below).
The Clade X event also included discussion panels with real policymakers who assessed that governments and industry were not adequately prepared for the fictitious global pandemic.
“In the end, the outcome was tragic: the most catastrophic pandemic in history with hundreds of millions of deaths, economic collapse and societal upheaval,” according to a WEF report on Clade X.
“There are major unmet global vulnerabilities and international system challenges posed by pandemics that will require new robust forms of public-private cooperation to address” — Event 201 pandemic simulation (October, 2019)
Then on October 18, 2019, in partnership with Johns Hopkins and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the WEF ran Event 201.
During the scenario, the entire global economy was shaken, there were riots on the streets, and high-tech surveillance measures were needed to “stop the spread.”
Two fake pandemics were simulated in the two years leading up to the real coronavirus crisis.
“Governments will need to partner with traditional and social media companies to research and develop nimble approaches to countering misinformation” — Event 201 pandemic simulation (October, 2019)
The Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security issued a public statement on January 24, 2020, explicitly addressing that Event 201 wasn’t meant to predict the future.
“To be clear, the Center for Health Security and partners did not make a prediction during our tabletop exercise. For the scenario, we modeled a fictional coronavirus pandemic, but we explicitly stated that it was not a prediction. Instead, the exercise served to highlight preparedness and response challenges that would likely arise in a very severe pandemic.”
Intentional or not, Event 201 “highlighted” the “fictional” challenges of a pandemic, along with recommendations that go hand-in-hand with the great reset agenda that has set up camp in the nefarious “new normal.”
“The next severe pandemic will not only cause great illness and loss of life but could also trigger major cascading economic and societal consequences that could contribute greatly to global impact and suffering” — Event 201 pandemic simulation (October, 2019)
Together, the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, the World Economic Forum, and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation submitted seven recommendations for governments, international organizations, and global business to follow in the event of a pandemic.
The Event 201 recommendations call for greater collaboration between the public and private sectors while emphasizing the importance of establishing partnerships with un-elected, global institutions such as the WHO, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the International Air Transport Organization, to carry out a centralized response.
One of the recommendations calls for governments to partner with social media companies and news organization to censor content and control the flow of information.
“Media companies should commit to ensuring that authoritative messages are prioritized and that false messages are suppressed including though [sic] the use of technology” — Event 201 pandemic simulation (October, 2019)
According to the report, “Governments will need to partner with traditional and social media companies to research and develop nimble approaches to countering misinformation.
“National public health agencies should work in close collaboration with WHO to create the capability to rapidly develop and release consistent health messages.
“For their part, media companies should commit to ensuring that authoritative messages are prioritized and that false messages are suppressed including though [sic] the use of technology.”
Sound familiar?
Throughout 2020, Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube have been censoring, suppressing, and flagging any coronavirus-related information that goes against WHO recommendations as a matter of policy, just as Event 201 had recommended.
2020: WEF declares ‘Now is the time for a Great Reset’
After calling for a great reset in 2014, the Davos crowd repeated the same ideology for a few more years before pivoting towards simulating faux pandemic scenarios.
A few months after the WEF established that nobody was prepared to deal with a coronavirus pandemic, the WHO declared there was a coronavirus pandemic.
All of a sudden! the great reset narrative that the WEF had been nurturing for six years, found a place to pitch its tent in the “new normal” camp.
“The pandemic represents a rare but narrow window of opportunity to reflect, reimagine, and reset our world to create a healthier, more equitable, and more prosperous future,” Schwab declared on June 3, 2020.
And that’s where we’re at today.
The Davos elites said they wanted a global reset of the economy many years ago
They role-played what would happen if a pandemic were to occur
And now they’re saying that the great reset ideology is the solution to the pandemic, and it must be enacted quickly
The great reset is a means to an end.
Next on the agenda is a complete makeover of society under a technocratic regime of un-elected bureaucrats who want to dictate how the world is run from the top down, leveraging invasive technologies to track and trace your every move while censoring and silencing anyone who dares not comply.
*
Note to readers: Please click the share buttons above or below. Follow us on Instagram, @crg_globalresearch. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.
Tim Hinchliffe is the editor of The Sociable. His passions include writing about how technology impacts society and the parallels between Artificial Intelligence and Mythology. Previously, he was a reporter for the Ghanaian Chronicle in West Africa and an editor at Colombia Reports in South America. [email protected]
Moscow has outlined an eight-point draft treaty of security guarantees that would lead to lower tensions in Europe and defuse the crisis over Ukraine if the West were to adopt it. The demands include ending Ukraine’s path towards NATO membership, limiting the deployment of troops and weapons close to Russia’s borders, and a return to the pre-1997 status quo, i.e. before NATO’s eastward expansion.
Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov said on Friday that although there was no deadline for beginning talks to ease tensions, Moscow wants to begin negotiations “without delays and without stalling” and stressed that “we can go any place and any time, even tomorrow.” He also emphasized that “this is not about us giving some kind of ultimatum, there is none. The thing is that the seriousness of our warning should not be underestimated.”
Effectively, he warned that ignoring Moscow’s request for discussions could lead to a “military response” similar to the 1962 Cuban missile crisis.
Moscow’s call for talks comes as a Ukrainian soldier was killed on Friday during fighting with Donbass defense forces. Although Kiev is amassing forces and attaining new weapon systems like the US-made Javelin anti-missile system, the West lambasts Russia for deploying over 100,000 troops on its border to deter Ukraine from any new military adventures.
US President Joe Biden warned his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin of “sanctions like he’s never seen” before should Ukraine be attacked, an unlikely prospect since Moscow has repeatedly stressed that it has no interest in war or territorial expansion in Ukraine. Despite this guarantee though, it has not lessened the Western media campaign to demonize Russia.
The Guardian reported that the “Kremlin’s aggressive proposals are likely to be rejected in western capitals as an attempt to formalize a new Russian sphere of influence over eastern Europe.” This is extremely problematic as it claims that Moscow’s suggestion for Russia and NATO to “not consider each other adversaries” and “resolve all disputes peacefully and refrain from the use of force” is an “aggressive proposal.”
It brings to question why the London-based newspaper finds it “aggressive” to resolve disputes peacefully?
Although the British tabloid believes that Moscow’s proposals “are likely to be rejected” by the West, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said “there’s no reason we can’t do that moving forward to reduce instability, but we’re going to do that in partnership and coordination with our European allies and partners.”
A senior White House official told reporters on Friday that Washington disagreed with parts of Moscow’s proposal, but was willing to discuss its content.
“We are prepared to discuss them. That said, there are some things in this document that the Russians know will be unacceptable,” the official told reporters on condition of anonymity, demonstrating that the US is willing to negotiate rather than reject everything as The Guardian appears to hope.
Although it is unlikely that the West will stop military exercises in Poland and the Baltic states as the Kremlin hopes, demands like banning Ukraine from joining NATO and limiting the types of weapons near Russia’s borders could find success. The Kremlin likely does not expect all their demands to be met, however the proposals could force negotiations in the context of increased military tensions in eastern Ukraine.
Russia-based experts doubted that the West would accept the proposals, with Dmitry Trenin, director of the Carnegie Moscow Center, explaining that the “publication of Russian proposed agreements with US and NATO on [European security] may suggest that Moscow (rightly) considers their acceptance by the West unlikely.”
Andrei Kortunov, head of the Russian International Affairs Council (RIAC), agreed with Trenin’s assessment and said: “This is a bargaining position — [the Kremlin] is trying to get some degree of partial acceptance. Of course, there is a real risk to making these sorts of demands, especially if the West takes a harsh position, but clearly, the Kremlin thinks that the risk is justified in the circumstances.”
Regardless of whether the Kremlin knew if their proposal would be accepted or not, at the very minimum, an opening for negotiations has been made. It is now in the West’s hands to pursue this opening from Moscow, or face a Russia that has clearly said they will use a “military response” if NATO continues to encroach on its sphere of influence and security interests in Ukraine. It is likely that Washington will explore negotiations with Moscow as it too wants to pool more resources towards opposing and challenging China in Asia-Pacific rather than Russia in Eastern Europe.
American foreign policy, wrapped up in hubris inside American exceptionalism, is incapable of recognizing a dangerous situation.
And a dangerous situation is what we have.
The Russian deputy foreign minister Sergey Ryabkov speaking for the Kremlin has made it clear that Russia will tolerate no further movement of NATO toward Russia’s borders.
Russia has ruled out any possibility of the former Russian provinces of Ukraine and Georgia becoming NATO members. If this red line is ignored, the consequences, Ryabkov said, “will be dire.” Russia will respond militarily, and the West, he said, will find it has undermined its own security, not Russia’s.
In other words, as the Kremlin sees it, the incorporation of Ukraine and/or Georgia into NATO is an unacceptable threat to Russian national security. Period. It is not negotiable.
In a rational world such an unequivocal statement by a preeminent military power with hypersonic nuclear missiles would be taken seriously.
But the Western World is no longer rational. It is a world drunk on arrogance. The NATO secretary replied to what is, in effect, an ultimatum from a nuclear power by rejecting out of hand that power’s security concern:
“Whether Ukraine joins NATO is up to the bloc’s member states and its leadership, and Moscow doesn’t have input into the decision.” The idiot NATO secretary went on to boast, foolishly, that NATO was so little impressed with Russian objections that NATO was “already training Ukrainian troops and consulting with them, and are conducting joint exercises and providing military supplies and technology.”
The White House spokesperson replying for President Biden and the National Security Council said Washington “will not compromise” on NATO expansion, adding that Washington won’t accept the idea of halting NATO expansion, despite what Russia demands.
In other words–be certain to understand this and its consequences–Washington’s position is that Russia has NO legitimate national security interests except as defined by Washington.
Here we have a highly dangerous situation. One power says you are treading on me and we won’t tolerate it; the other power says you have no say in the matter.
During the 20th century Cold War we Cold Warriors heard every word, every intonation of what the Soviets said. To risk nuclear war because some fool had wax in his ears or was feeling macho that day was out of the question. In those days there were departments of Russian studies in US universities that were not dependent on funding from the military-security complex. There was public debate. There was always an independent expert, such as Stephen Cohen, to remind everyone of how the Russians saw the situation.
Today independent scholarship has disappeared. Russian studies programs in universities are Russophobic in keeping with their funding. As there are no objective scholars, there are no knowledgeable people in the US intelligence community. We can see this in the recent statement of Biden’s national security advisor Jake Sullivan, who reports that US intelligence agencies believe that Putin is “giving serious consideration” to an invasion of Ukraine.
Washington has been saying this since 2014 when Washington overthrew the Russian friendly Ukrainian government hoping to seize in the process the Russian naval base in Crimea. It is a fixed message. There is no thought. Just repetition of propaganda. So we have a National Security Council incapable of nothing but the repetition of propagandistic slogans.
In effect Washington is already at war with Russia.
Meanwhile last Thursday evening, December 16, Washington and its neo-nazi Ukraine puppet decided to confirm Russian suspicions that Washington and Ukraine represent revanchist Nazism. Only two countries voted against the UN resolution condemning Nazism. Yes, it was the United States and Ukraine. The utter total stupidity of the US vote is extraordinary. That Washington supports Nazism is the last thing the Kremlin needed to hear.
My generation was the last generation in the West to be educated instead of indoctrinated, and even we were fed lies about World War I and World War II.
Subsequent generations are largely unaware that in German-occupied Western Ukraine large armies were organized and incorporated into the German army’s march into Russia. It was remnants of these “Banderas” (Stepan Bandera) that Washington used to overthrow the Ukrainian government and install an American puppet state on former Russian territory while the Kremlin, ignoring its backyard, was enjoying the Sochi Olympics.
The mistakes that people make have more to do with world history than any good decisions.
I am watching Washington, which I know so well from a quarter century of high level participation, make the mistake of a lifetime. The Washington regime is so full of arrogance that it is unable to comprehend that Russia has run out of patience.
The Russians see a real problem. All Washington sees is a propaganda opportunity. This is a situation that leads directly to Washington miscalculating. The miscalculation will be fatal.
Update to America’s Foreign Policy Dilemma
In America Russophobia is running amuck.
The Propaganda Ministry repeats daily that Russia is on the verge of invading Ukraine.
The American people, long trained to regard Russia as the enemy, have heard the allegation so many times it has become a fact.
The arrogant Biden regime has rebuffed Russia’s security concern, and the Republicans are no better. Blind belligerence towards Russia is building as Republican senators add their voices to the propaganda that Putin intends to invade Ukraine and “rob the Ukrainian people of their sovereignty.”( Washington already did that when it overthrew the elected Ukrainian government in 2014 and established a puppet state in Kiev.)
The Republicans want to rush $450 million more in weapons to “the brave Ukrainian armed forces.” And for good measure, the Republicans want to have Russia designated a terrorist state.
The Ukraine crisis is in part an armaments marketing program as the Republicans backing the bill are in tight with the military/security complex. But everyone is overlooking the effect on the Kremlin whose trust in Washington has reached zero on the scale.
Perhaps in preparation for what the Kremlin sees will be a showdown over Washington’s indifference to Russia’s security concern, the Kremlin has ordered two strategic nuclear missile forces to combat duty. Additionally, Russia has closed the northern sea route and deployed radio engineering regiments and electronic domes to jam US over-the-horizon radar. If US naval provocations continue in the Black Sea, Russia might also close the Black Sea.
Meanwhile, the neo-nazi Ukrainian battalions armed by Washington are escalating the situation with the Donbass Russians.
Washington is setting itself up for an embarrassing backdown or a major confrontation for which Washington holds few cards.
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.
Note to readers: Please click the share buttons above or below. Follow us on Instagram, @crg_globalresearch. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.
When Julius Caesar, after some hesitation, crossed the small river Rubicon in 49 B.C., he took a decisive and irreversible step against his opponents in Rome. “Thither go,” he is said to have exclaimed, “where the sign of the gods and the wrong of the enemy calls. The die is cast.” (1) “The sign of the gods” was a figure that appeared to him and crossed the river in front of him to the sound of trumpets.
Should not those fellow citizens whose minds are free and who have cast off all timidity follow Caesar’s courageous example and cross the Rubicon together?
That is, courageously confront the enemies of humanity and stand up to them, because through long hesitation the evils grow stronger. Every further criminal attack on humanity by the diabolical “elite” must be thwarted with civil disobedience and further non-violent activities. It must not be allowed that a small insane clique of power-obsessed super-rich terrorises as well as tries to subjugate the whole of humanity and is already planning the next global economic and social crisis – while we citizens hesitate to put a stop to them once and for all.
Two examples from the invaluable fund of alternative media
In order to adequately describe the current global political situation – according to Michel Chossudovsky “the worst crisis in modern history” – and to glimpse the possible future, I draw on two recent articles from the indispensable fund of modern independent media. Both have been published on the academic website “Global Research” and provide an unvarnished insight into current world events.
“Never before had humanity been exposed to so intense barrage of falsehood and absurdity in the guise of truth, science, concern, and fact.” (2)
His article provides context to the attempted human destruction project we are witnessing and adds comments on reconstruction. Few could have guessed, let alone understood, according to Snefjella, the attack on humanity that was officially launched publicly in March 2020.
Professor Chossudovsky’s second article, dated 14 December 2021, provides a glimpse of the future and is titled:
Klaus Schwab, the founder and CEO of the WEF and architect of the “Great Reset” describes the crisis scenario as follows, according to Chossudovsky:
“The frightening scenario of a comprehensive cyber attack could bring a complete halt to the power supply, transportation, hospital services, our society as a whole. The COVID-19 crisis would be seen in this respect as a small disturbance in comparison to a major cyberattack.” (emphasis added)
WEF executive director Jeremy Juergens adds:
“I believe there will be another crisis. It will be more significant. It will be faster than what we’ve seen with COVID. The impact will be greater, and as a result the economic and social implications will be even more significant.” (emphasis added) (4)
So, what are we waiting for?
Embrace the warmongers too
Crossing the Rubicon requires also keeping an eye on the geopolitical situation and stopping the criminal warmongers. This is the concern of the new “Krefeld Appeal” of 16 November 2021 “Falling into the arms of the warmongers”. It was signed by well-known personalities, received much attention worldwide and warns against a war against humanity.
The new “Krefeld Appeal” complements the Public Declaration
“We Europeans Say NO to a War Against Russia”, which was already written many years ago. Both appeals can be viewed on the homepage of the “Neue Rheinische Zeitung” (NRhZ) and can still be signed. Please, dear fellow citizens, make up your own minds (5).
If we let it happen, everyone dies alone
In the autumn of 1946, the German author Hans Fallada wrote his last novel, “Everyone Dies for Himself”. With it, he created a panorama of the lives of “normal” people in Nazi-era Berlin: after their son is killed in Hitler’s war, a Berlin couple wants to set signs of resistance. The quiet, sober couple write messages on cards and distribute them around the city. But they dared to resist the Nazis alone; therefore it was futile.
In 1943 they were both executed. Hans Fallada learned of their fate from a Gestapo file that came into his hands through the poet Johannes R. Becher, later Minister of Culture of the German Democratic Republic (GDR). More than 60 years after Fallada’s death in 1947, his novel became an international event and, in the words of “The New York Times”, a “major literary event” (6).
In the preface to his book, Hans Fallada addresses a few words to the reader:
“Some readers will find that there is quite a lot of torture and death in this book. The author takes the liberty of pointing out that this book deals almost exclusively with people who fought against the Hitler regime, with them and their persecutors. In these circles, quite a lot died in the years 1940 to 1942 and before and after. About a good third of this book is set in prisons and asylums, and dying was very much afoot in them as well. It also often didn’t please the author to paint such a bleak picture, but more brightness would have meant lying.” (7)
What distinguishes the noble from the common?
I leave the serious final word to Hermann H. Mitterer, an officer of the Austrian Armed Forces and former colleague. He too, in the preface of his 2019 book “Population Exchange in Europe. How the Global Elite Use Mass Migration to Replace the Native Population”, to his readers, saying:
“It is not wealth, not social position, not academic education that distinguishes the noble from the common. It is the ability to recognise the importance of supra-temporal values and the will to give personal sacrifice and, if necessary, one’s own life for their preservation.” (8)
(6) Fallada, Hans (2011,9). Every man for himself dies. Berlin. Book cover
(7) op. cit., p. 5.
(8) Mitterer, Hermann H. (2009). Population Exchange in Europe. How a global elite uses mass migration to replace the native population. Rottenburg, p. 4
Dr Rudolf Lothar Hänsel is a retired rector, educationalist and graduate psychologist.
“It’s Christmas Eve! It’s the one night of the year when we all act a little nicer, we smile a little easier, we cheer a little more. For a couple of hours out of the whole year, we are the people that we always hoped we would be! It’s a sort of a miracle because it happens every Christmas Eve… There are people that are having trouble making their miracle happen… It’s not just the poor and the hungry, it’s everybody that’s gotta have this miracle!”— Scrooged (1988)
What a year.
It feels as if government Grinches, corporate Scrooges, and cancel culture humbugs have been working overtime to drain every last drop of joy, kindness and liberty from the world.
After endless months of gloom and doom, it can be hard to feel the joy of Christmas in the midst of rampant commercialism, political correctness and the casual cruelty of an apathetic, self-absorbed, dog-eat-dog world.
Then again, isn’t that struggle to overcome the darkness and find the light within exactly what Christmas—the celebration of a baby born in a manger—is all about? The reminder that we have not been forgotten or forsaken. Glad tidings in the midst of hard times. Goodwill to counter meanness. Innocence in the face of cynicism. Hope in the midst of despair. Comfort to soothe our fears. Peace as an answer to war. Love that conquers hate.
As “fellow-passengers to the grave,” we all have a moral duty to make this world (or at least our small corners of it) just a little bit kinder, a little less hostile and a lot more helpful to those in need.
No matter what one’s budget, religion, or political persuasion, there is no shortage of things we can each do right now to pay our blessings forward and recapture the true spirit of Christmas.
For starters, move beyond the “us” vs. “them” mentality. Tune into what’s happening in your family, in your community and your world, and get active. Show compassion to those in need, be kind to those around you, forgive those who have wronged you, and teach your children to do the same. Talk less, and listen more. Take less, and give more. Stop being a hater. Stop acting entitled and start being empowered. Learn tolerance in the true sense of the word. Value your family. Count your blessings. Share your blessings. Feed the hungry, shelter the homeless and comfort the lonely and broken-hearted. Build bridges, and tear down walls. Stand for freedom. Strive for peace.
One thing more: make time for joy and laughter. Shake off the blues with some Christmas tunes, whatever fits the bill for you, be it traditional carols, rollicking oldies, or some rocking new tunes. Watch a Christmas movie that reinforces your faith in the things that truly matter.
Here are ten of my favorite Christmas movies and music albums to get you started.
First the movies.
It’s A Wonderful Life (1946). An American classic about a despondent man, George Bailey who is saved from suicide by an angel working to get his wings. This film is a testament to director Frank Capra’s faith in people. Sublime performances by James Stewart and Donna Reed.
The Bishop’s Wife (1947). An angel comes to earth in answer to a bishop’s prayer for help. Cary Grant, David Niven and Loretta Young help energize this tale of lost visions and longings of the heart.
Miracle on 34th Street (1947). By happenchance, Kris Kringle is hired as Santa Claus by Macy’s Department Store in New York City for the Thanksgiving Day Parade. Before long, Kringle, who believes himself to be the one and only Santa Claus, has impacted virtually everyone around him. Funny, witty and heartwarming, this film is stocked with some fine performances from Maureen O’Hara, John Payne and young Natalie Wood. Edmund Gwenn won the Academy Award for best supporting actor for his role as Saint Nick.
A Christmas Carol (1951). This is the best film version of the penny-pinching Scrooge’s journey to spiritual enlightenment by way of visits from supernatural visitors. Alastair Sim as Scrooge gives one of the finest film performances never to win an Oscar. The Man Who Invented Christmas (2017) provides a wonderful glimpse into how Charles Dickens came to write A Christmas Carol.
A Christmas Story (1983). Ralphie is a young boy obsessed with one thing and only one thing: how to get a Red Ryder BB-gun for Christmas. Ralphie’s parents are wary, and his mother continually warns him that “you’ll shoot your eye out.” Based on Jean Shepherd’s autobiographical book In God We Trust, All Others Pay Cash, at the heart of this timeless comedy is the universal yearning of a child for the magic of Christmas morning. A great cast, which includes Darren McGavin, Peter Billingsley, Melinda Dillon and a voice-over narrative by Shepherd himself.
One Magic Christmas (1985). If you grew up in a family where times were tough, this film is for you. A guardian angel comes to earth to help a disillusioned woman who hates Christmas. This tale of redemption and second chances is a delight to watch. And Harry Dean Stanton makes a first-class offbeat angel.
Prancer (1989). This story of an eight-year-old girl who believes that an injured reindeer in her barn is actually one of Santa’s reindeer is one of the most down-to-earth Christmas films ever made. It’s a testament to the transforming power of love and childhood innocence. Sam Elliott and Cloris Leachman are fine in supporting roles, but Rebecca Harrell shines. Filmed on location in freezing, snowy weather, this film is a treat for those who love Christmas.
Home Alone (1990). Eight-year-old Kevin, accidentally left behind at home when his family flies to Paris for Christmas, thinks he’s got it made. Hijinks ensue when two burglars match their wits against his. A funny, tender tribute to childhood and the bonds of family.
Elf (2003). Another modern classic with a lot of heart. Buddy, played to the hilt by Will Ferrell, is a human who was raised by elves at the North Pole. Determined to find his birth father, Buddy travels to the Big Apple and spreads his Christmas cheer to everyone he meets. This film has it all: Santa, elves, family problems, humor, emotion and above all else, a large dose of the Christmas spirit. One of the best Christmas movies ever made.
The Christmas Chronicles (2018). The story of a sister and brother, Kate and Teddy Pierce, whose Christmas Eve plan to catch Santa Claus on camera turns into an unexpected journey that most kids could only dream about. Kurt Russell’s star turn as Santa makes for movie magic.
Now for the music.
Out of the hundreds of Christmas albums I’ve listened to over the years, the following, covering a broad range of musical styles, moods and tastes, each in its own way perfectly captures the essence of Christmas for me.
It’s Christmas (EMI, 1989): 18 great songs, ranging from John Lennon’s “Happy Xmas (War Is Over)” to Bing Crosby’s “White Christmas.” The real treats on this album are Greg Lake’s “I Believe in Father Christmas,” Kate Bush’s “December Will Be Magic Again” and Aled Jones’ “Walking in the Air.”
Christmas Guitar (Rounder, 1986): 28 beautifully done traditional Christmas songs by master guitarist John Fahey. Hearing Fahey’s guitar strings plucking out “Joy to the World,” “Good King Wenceslas,” “Jolly Old Saint Nicholas,” among others, is a sublime experience.
Christmas Is A Special Day (The Right Stuff, 1993): 12 fine songs by Fats Domino, the great Fifties rocker, ranging from “Amazing Grace” to “Jingle Bells.” The title song, written by Domino himself, is a real treat. No one has ever played the piano keys like Fats.
Christmas Island (August/Private Music, 1989): “Frosty the Snowman” will never sound the same after you hear Leon Redbone and Dr. John do their duet. Neither will “Christmas Island” or “Toyland” on this collection of 11 traditional and rather offbeat songs.
A Holiday Celebration (Gold Castle, 1988): The classic folk trio Peter, Paul & Mary, backed by the New York Choral Society, sing traditional and nontraditional holiday fare on 12 beautifully orchestrated songs. Included are “I Wonder as I Wander,” “Children Go Where I Send Thee,” and “The Cherry Tree Carol.” Also thrown in is Bob Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind.”
The Christmas Album (Columbia, 1992): Neil Diamond sings 14 songs, ranging from “Silent Night” to “Jingle Bell Rock” to “The Christmas Song” to “Come, O Come Emmanuel.” Diamond also gives us a great rendition of Lennon’s “Happy Xmas (War Is Over).” A delightful album.
A Charlie Brown Christmas (Fantasy, 1988): 12 traditional Christmas songs by the Vince Guaraldi Trio. The pianist extraordinaire and his trio perform “O Tannenbaum,” “The Christmas Song” and “Greensleeves.” Also included is the Charlie Brown Christmas theme.
The Jethro Tull Christmas Album (Fuel Records, 2003): If you like deep-rooted traditional holiday songs, you’ll love this album. The 16 songs range from “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen” to Ian Anderson originals such as “Another Christmas Song” and “Jack Frost and the Hooded Crow.” With Anderson on flute and vocals, this album has an old world flavor that will have you wanting mince pie and plum pudding.
A Twisted Christmas (Razor Tie, 2006): Twisted Sister, the heavy metal group, knocks the socks off a bevy of traditional and pop Christmas songs. Dee Snider’s amazing vocals brings to life “Oh Come All Ye Faithful,” “Deck the Halls,” “I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus,” among others—including “Heavy Metal Christmas (The Twelve Days of Christmas).” Great fun and a great band.
Songs for Christmas (Asthmatic Kitty, 2006): In 2001, independent singer/songwriter Sufjan Stevens set out to create a Christmas gift through songs for his friends and family. It eventually grew to a 5-CD box set, which includes Stevens’ original take on such standards as “Amazing Grace” and “We Three Kings” and some inventive yuletide creations of his own. A lot of fun.
Before you know it, Christmas will be a distant memory and we’ll be back to our regularly scheduled programming of “us vs. them” politics, war, violence, materialism and mayhem.
As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, there may not be much we can do to avoid the dismal reality of the American police state in the long term—not so long as the powers-that-be allow profit margins to take precedence over people—but in the short term, I hope you’ll do your part to “spread a smile of joy” and “throw your arms around the world at Christmastime.”
As you celebrate the season, take to heart the closing sermon in The Bishop’s Wife:
“Once upon a midnight clear, there was a child’s cry, a blazing star hung over a stable, and wise men came with birthday gifts. We haven’t forgotten that night down the centuries. We celebrate it with stars on Christmas trees, with the sound of bells, and with gifts… We forget nobody, adult or child. All the stockings are filled, all that is, except one. And we have even forgotten to hang it up. The stocking for the child born in a manger. It’s his birthday we’re celebrating. Don’t let us ever forget that. Let us ask ourselves what He would wish for most. And then, let each put in his share, loving kindness, warm hearts, and a stretched out hand of tolerance. All the shining gifts that make peace on earth.”—The Bishop’s Wife (1947)
American multinational aircraft manufacturer and government contractor Boeing has issued a statement declaring that it will not enforce Joe Biden’s controversial and divisive COVID-19 vaccine mandate after a series of federal rulings have dealt the White House devastating losses.
In a statement first obtained by Seattle-based KIRO, Boeing announced their intention to suspend the mandate.
“We continue to encourage our employees to get vaccinated and get a booster shot if they have not done so,” a Boeing spokesperson said.
“Meanwhile, after careful review, Boeing has suspended its vaccination requirement in line with a federal court’s decision prohibiting enforcement of the federal contractor executive order and a number of state laws.”
Boeing employs over 140,000 workers across the United States, and is the second largest federal contractor in the country.
Being a federal contractor, Boeing was subject to an executive order from the Biden White House demanding that all of its employs be vaccinated.
Related Report
This executive order was halted by a federal judge earlier this month.:Joe Biden and his White House’s legally questionable vaccine mandate for federal contractors’ was halted nationwide by a federal judge on Tuesday, it was confirmed this morning.
Set to take effect on January 4, 2022, the mandate applied to nearly one quarter of the entire United States workforce, as the mandate targeted all companies that do business with the federal government such as Microsoft, Google, Lockheed Martin, and General Motors.
This latest vaccine mandate shutdown comes after Kentucky federal judge’s grant of a preliminary injunction involving a lawsuit in Kentucky, Tennessee, and Ohio.
The Biden regime’s government contractor mandate sparked a vast flurry of federal lawsuits from Arizona, Florida, Texas, Oklahoma, and Georgia, which argued that the regime did not have the legal authority to require the experimental injections, and that any such mandate was in direct violation of the U.S. Constitution.
This marks the latest defeat to the Biden regime’s vaccination agenda, even as the vaccine is seemingly rendered useless by the spread of the Omicron variant.
The Event 201 simulation pertained to a coronavirus epidemic entitled nCoV-2019. It was held on October 18, 2019, less than 3 months before SARS-2 was “officially” identified in early January 2020. Among the 201 John Hopkins table top scenario “players” were key personalities holding advisory or senior positions in a number of core organizations. Less than 3 months later, these 201 “players” became actively involved in the policy response to the Covid-19 pandemic.
The entities directly or indirectly “represented” by the “players” included the WHO, John Hopkins, the Global Alliance on Vaccines and Immunization (GAVI) (Dr. Timothy Grant Evans), US Intelligence, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (Dr. Chris Elias), the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI) (Chairwoman Jane Halton), the World Economic Forum (WEF), the UN Foundation, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) (Stephen Redd), China’s Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) (Director Dr. George Fu Gao). Big Pharma (Adrian Thomas), the World Bank and Global Banking, the Airline and Hotel industries. 
In an overwhelming and heartbreaking description of the surge of Nazism in Ukraine, Ms. Elena Berezhnaya, of the Ukranian Anti-Fascist-League described the scourge of neo-nazi groups in Ukraine, which were tacitly, and often actively supported by the Ukranian government “authorities,” undoubtedly on whose behalf they were rampaging throughout Ukraine.
