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Sharmine Narwani is a brilliant journalist and analyst, has taught at Oxford and Columbia and has been published in The New York Times, USA Today, The Guardian, Huffington Post, Salon.com and other publications.

Of course, the ones listed above don’t publish her anymore, because she’s too much of a journalist, like Chris Hedges, Seymour Hersh, Aaron Maté, Max Blumenthal and others no longer welcome in today’s mainstream media.

Please see what Sharmine has to say in the short video below. 

According to her,

“Iran has a full map of Israel’s missile defense system banks. It gained incredible intelligence. It also got to see which countries would jump in to defend Israel. And the list was short: the US, the UK and France — all nuclear states — and then Jordan, because they need an Arab or Muslim fig leaf.”

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Featured image source

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***

“America last. America last. That’s all this is. America last, every single day.” – Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene

The man who is most responsible for the $95 billion giveaway to Ukraine and Israel, is the same guy who pretends to oppose America’s “wasteful” foreign wars. Donald Trump. It was Trump who consulted with Speaker Mike Johnson about the contents of the Ukraine aid package, just as it was Trump who concocted the idea of issuing loans instead of dispersing the standard welfare handout. It was also Trump who said:

“I stand with the Speaker, (Mike Johnson)” after which he added that Johnson is doing “a very good job.”

A “good job”?

So, secretly collaborating with the Democrat leadership to push through a bill that “reauthorizes FISA to spy on the American people without a warrant, (bans Tik Tok) fully funds Joe Biden’s DOJ that has indicted President Trump 91 times, and giving Biden’s political gestapo a brand new FBI building bigger than the Pentagon,” while not providing a dime to protect the southern border from the swarms of people entering the country illegally, is doing a “good job”?

The question we should all be asking ourselves is why has Trump decided to participate in this scam? He keeps saying that if he was president, he’d end the war in Ukraine in a day. If he’s sincere about that, then why did he collaborate on a bill that will drag the war out for another year or two? This is from a Twitter post by political analyst Michael Tracey:

Mission Accomplished. It is done: Donald Trump and the House GOP just completed one of the most epic swindles in political history, with Trump personally effectuating the largest-ever dispersement of Ukraine funding through his emissary, “MAGA Mike Johnson” (as Trump lovingly calls him) The $61 billion passed this afternoon is likely enough to underwrite the brutal, pointless trench warfare for at least another year or two. This after the same old endless media screeching that Trump and MAGA Republicans were being brainwashed by Putin and would never fund Ukraine. That fundamental hoax continues — only this time Trump was in on it…. Michael Tracey, Twitter

And the response from Luca Cabrilo:

Michael you’re 100% spot on. Trump could have at any point killed this monstrous bill if he wanted to, but he didn’t. He even let MAGA Mike go on TV and say that he and Trump are “100% agreed” on the Ukraine funding Trump screwed his base on this one, no other way about it.

Michael Tracey again: He didn’t just “not kill it,” he personally facilitated its passage

Here’s more background from Tracey:

The bill, designed after consultations between Mike Johnson and Trump, mysteriously gives the President the ability to forgive the purported “loan” to Ukraine — immediately after the November election…

And if that’s not brazen enough for you, here’s the catch: The funds eligible for “loan forgiveness” are the direct budgetary infusions to Ukraine — meaning the money that pays for the salaries of Ukrainian government workers and so forth — NOT the military “aid,” which comprises the vast majority of the package. So, only $8 billion of the $61 billion allocated to Ukraine is even *eligible* for “loan forgiveness” under the terms of this gargantuan bill. And even that was a fake “loan” to begin with — it never had to be paid back at all! So there’s your final Trump/Johnson bamboozle, as the House GOP prepares to usher through the *largest ever* infusion of US tax dollars to Ukraine, by far, since the beginning of the war. All with Trump’s blessing, as Johnson has made abundantly clear. To underscore his close collaboration with Trump, Johnson has spent the past several days making the rounds on various conservative media, touting the inclusion of Trump’s “loan concept” in the bill. Michael Tracey

It’s all a big shell game and Trump is playing along with it to improve his political prospects. How else would you explain his performance in this dismal charade?

Trump obviously knows that his return to the White House will require significant compromise with the national security hawks and Zionists who run the government. So, we shouldn’t be too surprised that he’s trying to curry favor with them now. But for the people who thought Trump was a straightshooter; this has got to be a real eye-opener. They thought he could be trusted, but now it’s obvious that he’s just another Beltway phony trying to ingratiate himself with the Washington power-elite in order to shoehorn his sorry a** back into the Oval Office. Here’s more from Tracey:

Sorry to be a “Broken Record,” but the “Elephant in the Room” here is genuinely Donald J. Trump. ….Trump even warned Rep Marjorie Taylor Greene directly not to oust Johnson, during their joint press conference at Mar-a-Lago last Friday, April 12 — just before Johnson unveiled his war funding strategy, for which he proudly declares having secured Trump’s endorsement. The bill even contains Trump’s repeated demand to structure the Ukraine funding as a so-called “loan”! Johnson proclaims that he and Trump are “One hundred percent united” on all of this (direct quote) …

Trump has used his vast political capital as three-time Republican Presidential Nominee to play his part assuring that the American political system mobilizes in perfect harmony to unleash $100 billion in endless-war funding. Michael Tracey

If Trump is willing to play such a duplicitous role in securing the funding for the MIC’s perpetual wars, then why in-heavens-name would any red-blooded conservative vote for him?

One of the few people who has acted honorably in this fiasco, is Rep Marjorie Taylor Greene, who is clearly one of the few members of Congress that genuinely gives-a-damn about the American people. Greene delivered an epic rant on the floor of the House yesterday following the vote on the Ukrainian aid package. Naturally, her heartfelt presentation appeared nowhere in the sellout media, so I transcribed most of what she said below. It’s worth the time:

…. The United States taxpayer has already sent $113 billion to Ukraine, and much of that money is unaccounted for. This is an example of a sick business model the US government wants to continue….. The Congress votes for money for foreign wars that the American people do not support….. The American people do not support a business model based on blood and murder and war in foreign countries while the government does nothing to secure our border.

The American people are over $34 trillion in debt and the debt is rising by $40 billion every night while we all sleep. But nothing is done to secure our border or reduce our debt. Inflation continues to rise every day and Americans can hardly afford to pay their grocery bills, they can hardly afford to put gas in their cars, and they can hardly afford the rent. And, now, average mortgage payments are over $3000 when they were just $1700 three years ago. Young Americans don’t think they will ever be able to buy a home and yet today, this congress thinks the most important thing they should do is to send another $61 billion to the war in Ukraine that the American people –by 70%– do not support!

… But, today, the most important thing this body thinks we should do, is not reduce spending, or drive down inflation, or secure our own border that is invaded every single day by people from over 160 different countries… We have over 1.8 million ‘got-aways’ and we don’t know who these people are… and yet we have people in this very congress ‘talking tough’ saying, “We have to defeat Russia. Oh, we have to protect Ukraine” and yet, all of you are unwilling to protect the American citizens that pay your salary, pay to keep the lights on, and pay to keep the federal government running. And for what?

For nothing! Ukraine isn’t even a member of NATO. But all you hear in Washington DC is “Oh, we have to keep spending America’s hard-earned tax dollars to continue to murder Ukrainians to wipe out a whole generation of young men so there are (thousands of) widows, and fatherless orphans, and not enough men to work in their industries. Oh, but you really support Ukraine. (sarcasm) What kind of support is that? It’s repulsive!

Shame on the American government! Shame on the American government! If we want to support our military, then support our military. We should be building up our weapons and ammunition, not sending it over to foreign countries to kill foreign people.

And if this body was what it pretends to be, every single one of us would be demanding peace in Ukraine; peace for these people, so that no more of them have to die. But you never hear anybody demanding peace. No, no, no. Peace is the last thing Washington wants because it doesn’t fit the business model. This is a business model they say builds the American economy and protects American jobs. What a disgusting business model. We should have a business model that builds-up our American companies and American jobs to serve American interests, and our military and our government should care about protecting the national security of the United States of America and the Americans who pay their hard-earned tax dollars to fund all this.

America last. America last. That’s all this is. America last, every single day.
Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene

Bravo, Marjorie Taylor Greene. You speak for a lot of us.

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This article was originally published on The Unz Review.

Michael Whitney is a renowned geopolitical and social analyst based in Washington State. He initiated his career as an independent citizen-journalist in 2002 with a commitment to honest journalism, social justice and World peace.

He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG).  

Featured image is from TUR

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***

A massive study of 99 million Covid-vaccinated people has just wrapped and the results are startling.

Dr. Peter McCullough joins us to break it down.

“Most of the risks described are in the two- to three-fold increase risk range. These are astronomical, thinking that the data were truncated just at 42 days, there is under-reporting, and they weren’t age-stratified.

Myocarditis is the big ticket issue, and peaks in men ages 18-24;

so if the overall risk for myocarditis was in the two to three or over three range, it must be astronomical for young men ages 18-24 taking the vaccine. I don’t consider this small.”

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Featured image is a screenshot from the video


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

by Michel Chossudovsky

Michel Chossudovsky reviews in detail how this insidious project “destroys people’s lives”. He provides a comprehensive analysis of everything you need to know about the “pandemic” — from the medical dimensions to the economic and social repercussions, political underpinnings, and mental and psychological impacts.

“My objective as an author is to inform people worldwide and refute the official narrative which has been used as a justification to destabilize the economic and social fabric of entire countries, followed by the imposition of the “deadly” COVID-19 “vaccine”. This crisis affects humanity in its entirety: almost 8 billion people. We stand in solidarity with our fellow human beings and our children worldwide. Truth is a powerful instrument.”

Reviews

This is an in-depth resource of great interest if it is the wider perspective you are motivated to understand a little better, the author is very knowledgeable about geopolitics and this comes out in the way Covid is contextualized. —Dr. Mike Yeadon

In this war against humanity in which we find ourselves, in this singular, irregular and massive assault against liberty and the goodness of people, Chossudovsky’s book is a rock upon which to sustain our fight. –Dr. Emanuel Garcia

In fifteen concise science-based chapters, Michel traces the false covid pandemic, explaining how a PCR test, producing up to 97% proven false positives, combined with a relentless 24/7 fear campaign, was able to create a worldwide panic-laden “plandemic”; that this plandemic would never have been possible without the infamous DNA-modifying Polymerase Chain Reaction test – which to this day is being pushed on a majority of innocent people who have no clue. His conclusions are evidenced by renown scientists. —Peter Koenig 

Professor Chossudovsky exposes the truth that “there is no causal relationship between the virus and economic variables.” In other words, it was not COVID-19 but, rather, the deliberate implementation of the illogical, scientifically baseless lockdowns that caused the shutdown of the global economy. –David Skripac

A reading of  Chossudovsky’s book provides a comprehensive lesson in how there is a global coup d’état under way called “The Great Reset” that if not resisted and defeated by freedom loving people everywhere will result in a dystopian future not yet imagined. Pass on this free gift from Professor Chossudovsky before it’s too late.  You will not find so much valuable information and analysis in one place. –Edward Curtin

ISBN: 978-0-9879389-3-0,  Year: 2022,  PDF Ebook,  Pages: 164, 15 Chapters

Price: $11.50 FREE COPY! Click here (docsend) and download.

You may also access the online version of the e-Book by clicking here.

We encourage you to support the eBook project by making a donation through Global Research’s DonorBox “Worldwide Corona Crisis” Campaign Page

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[Published in January 2024]

Liam was alert, happy & full of life on the day his mother Bri took him in for his six-month visit to the doctor. In fact, momma took a video of him playing peek-a-boo in the office, minutes before receiving the vaccines that would kill him. In the video, he is beautiful, perfectly healthy & his face is alight with huge baby grins as he laughs with his mother. He is the very picture of health. There is absolutely no hint of the tragedy that was about to unfold.

Records of that doctor visit show that Liam had a perfectly clean bill of health that day, both physically & developmentally. Then, he was vaccinated.

Liam received five vaccines—HepB, TDaP, Polio, Rotavirus, & Pneumococcal. Momma left the doctor’s office, reassured that her baby was healthy & developmentally on track. She had some errands to run & Liam fell asleep in the car on the way… [common] for a six-month-old who has just been through the trauma of the pediatrician’s office.

At home, Liam was fussier than usual. Bri nursed him then placed him in his bouncy chair while she loaded the dishwasher. Ten minutes later, when she checked on her baby boy—he was gone.

Lifting him from his seat, the panicked mother found him limp & completely unresponsive. Efforts to revive him were unsuccessful, as were efforts by the paramedics. He was pronounced dead at the hospital, just hours after his clean bill of health & vaccinations.

Liam’s death was reported to VAERS (Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System), both by his mother and by others—but she has not received a response. No one wants to admit that vaccines killed the otherwise healthy little boy, not even the medical office that administered the fatal injections. No one seems to want to know what made a perfectly healthy baby boy die suddenly, just hours after receiving injections that the public has been brain-washed into thinking are healthy & safe.

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Featured image is from COVID Intel

Will the Freedom Flotilla Sail to Gaza?

April 23rd, 2024 by Medea Benjamin

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***

The non-violence training to join the Freedom Flotilla Coalition’s ships to Gaza has been intense. As hundreds of us from 32 countries gathered in Istanbul, we were briefed about what we might encounter on this voyage. “We have to be ready for every possibility,” our trainers insisted. 

The best scenario, they said, is that our three ships–one carrying 5,500 tons of humanitarian aid and two carrying the passengers–will reach Gaza and accomplish our mission. Another scenario would be that the Turkish government might cave to pressure from Israel, the United States and Germany, and prevent the boats from even leaving Istanbul. This happened in 2011, when the Greek government buckled under pressure and ten boats were stalled in Greece. With our boats docked in Istanbul today, we fear that Turkish President Erdogan, who recently suffered a crushing blow in local elections, is vulnerable to any economic blackmail the Western powers might be threatening.

Another possibility is that the ships take off but the Israelis illegally hijack us in international waters, confiscate our boats and supplies, arrest and imprison us, and eventually deport us. 

This happened on several other voyages to Gaza, one of them with deadly consequences. In 2010, a flotilla of six boats was stopped by the Israeli military in international waters. They boarded the biggest boat, the Mavi Marmara. According to a UN report, the Israelis opened fire with live rounds from a helicopter hovering above the ship and from commando boats along the side of the ship. In a horrific display of force, nine passengers were killed, and one more later succumbed to his wounds. 

To try to prevent another nightmare like that, potential passengers on this flotilla have to undergo rigorous training. We watched a video of what we might face—from extremely potent tear gas to ear-splitting concussion grenades—and we were  told that the Israeli commandos will be armed with weapons with live rounds. Then we divided up into small groups to discuss how best to react, non-violently, to such an attack. Do we sit, stand, or lie down? Do we link arms? Do we put our hands up in the air to show we are unarmed? 

The most frightening part of the training was a simulation replete with deafening booms of gunfire and exploding percussion grenades and masked soldiers screaming at us, hitting us with simulated rifles, dragging us across the floor, and arresting us. It was indeed sobering to get a glimpse of what might await us. Equally sobering are Israeli media reports indicating that the Israeli military has begun “security preparations,” including preparations for taking over the flotilla.

That’s why everyone who has signed up for this mission deserves tremendous credit. The largest group of passengers are from Turkey, and many are affiliated with the humanitarian group, IHH, an enormous Turkish NGO with 82 offices throughout the country. It has consultative status at the UN and does charity work in 115 countries. Through IHH, millions of supporters donated money to buy and stock the ships. Israel, however, has designated this very respected charity as a terrorist group. 

The next largest group comes from Malaysia, some of them affiliated with another very large humanitarian group called MyCARE. MyCARE, known for helping out in emergency situations such as floods and other natural disasters, has contributed millions of dollars in emergency aid to Gaza over the years.

From the U.S., there are about 35 participants. Leading the group, and key to the international coalition, is 77-year-old retired U.S. Army colonel and State Department diplomat Ann Wright. After quitting the State Department in protest over the U.S. invasion of Iraq, Wright has put her diplomatic skills to good use in helping to pull together a motley group of internationals. Her co-organizer from the U.S. is Huwaida Arraf, a Palestinian-American attorney who is a co-founder of the International Solidarity Movement and who ran for congress in 2022. Arraf was key to organizing the very first flotillas that started in 2008. So far, there have been about 15 attempts to get to Gaza by boat, only five of them successful. 

The incredible breadth of participants is evident in our nightly meetings, where you can hear clusters of groups chatting away in Arabic, Spanish, Portuguese, Malay, French, Italian, and English in diverse accents from Australian to Welsh. The ages range from students in their 20s to an 86-year-old Argentine medical doctor.

What brings us together is our outrage that the world community is allowing this genocide in Gaza to happen, and a burning desire to do more than we have been doing to stop people from being murdered, maimed and starved. The aid we are bringing is enormous–it is the equivalent of over 100 trucks—but that is not the only purpose of this trip.

“This is an aid mission to bring food to hungry people,” said Huwaida Arraf, “but Palestinians do not want to live on charity. So we are also challenging Israeli policies that make them dependent on aid. We are trying to break the siege.”

Israel’s vicious attacks on the people of Gaza, its blocking of aid deliveries and its targeting of relief organizations have fueled a massive humanitarian crisis. 
The killing of seven World Central Kitchen workers by Israeli forces on April 1 highlighted the dangerous environment in which relief agencies operate, which has forced many of them to shut down their operations. 

The U.S. government is building a temporary port for aid that is supposed to be finished in early May, but this is the same government that provides weapons and diplomatic cover for the Israelis. And while President Biden expresses concern for the suffering Palestinians, he has suspended aid to UNRWA, the main UN agency responsible for helping them, after Israel made unsubstantiated claims that 12 of its 13,000 employees in Gaza participated in the October 7 attacks. 

Given the urgency and danger this moment presents, the Freedom Flotilla Coalition is entering rough and uncharted waters. We are calling on countries around the world to pressure Israel to allow us “free and safe passage” to Gaza. In the U.S., we are asking for help from our Congress, but having just approved another $26 billion to Israel, it is doubtful that we can count on their support. 

And even if our governments did pressure Israel, would Israel pay attention? Their defiance of international law and world opinion during the past seven months indicates otherwise. But still, we will push forward. The people of Gaza are the wind in our sails. Freedom for Palestine is our North Star. We are determined to reach Gaza with food, medicines and, most of all, our solidarity and love.

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Medea Benjamin is the cofounder of CODEPINK for Peace, and the author of several books, including Inside Iran: The Real History and Politics of the Islamic Republic of Iran.  

Featured image: The flotilla waits to sail from Istanbul. (Photo credit: Medea Benjamin)

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Stavroula Pabst joins us today to discuss her recent article, “Weaponizing Reality: The Dawn of Neurowarfare.”

From the military origins of brain-chip interfaces and neuroscience to the geopolitical ramifications of neuroweapons to the suspicious characters forwarding the controlled opposition “neurorights” movement, Pabst dives deep into the history and future of the age of neurowarfare.

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Featured image: Neurotechnology could help people with disabilities use their thoughts to control devices in the physical world. It may also be useful in weapons systems. Private companies, militaries, and other organizations are funding neurotechnology research. Credit: US Army.

First published on April 23, 2012, minor edits

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Shakespeare’s birthday: 23 April. 1564. 460 Years Ago. 

William Shakespeare, born 23 April 1564 (unconfirmed), baptised 26 April 1564, died 23 April 1616. It is also the anniversary of his passing. His legacy will live forever. 

Today, we celebrate the 460th anniversary of the birth of William Shakespeare. who taught us never to despair in our resolve to Seek the Truth and Confront the Lie.

 

“to unmask falsehood and bring truth to light”.

 

Signs of our times: war criminals in high office are celebrated as messengers of peace:

“And thus I clothe my naked villany, … And seem a saint, when most I play the devil.” (Shakespeare, in the words of King Richard III)

 

Those committed to “security by military means” have taken charge of the Nobel Peace Prize…

“Lawless are they that make their wills their law”.

 

The Lie becomes the Truth.

Realities are turned upside down.

War becomes Peace.

“Humanitarian wars” are waged with the most advanced weapons systems to come to the rescue of those who suffer oppression.

“The international community” is the repository of  the “Truth”, which can no longer be challenged.  The American inquisition prevails.

An unbinding political consensus is imposed.

Those who dare oppose “Peace” and NATO’s “Responsibility to Protect” (R2P) are branded as terrorists.

Bad guys are lurking.

Evil terrorists with kalashnikovs are threatening the security of the United States of America and its trillion dollar arsenal of “peace-making” nuclear weapons, which according to expert scientific opinion on contract to the Pentagon, are “harmless to the surrounding civilian population”. “(Oops kalashnikovs were invented by a Russian. Why are they not on the boycott Russia black list)

A good versus evil dichotomy prevails: a “Clash of Civilisations”.

The West has a “Mission”: “We must fight against evil in all its forms as a means to preserving the Western way of life.” The perpetrators of war are presented as the victims.

Breaking the Lie means breaking a criminal project of global destruction, in which the quest for profit is the overriding force.

When the Lie Becomes the Truth, There is no Turning Backwards

This profit-driven military agenda destroys human values and transforms people into unconscious zombies.

Let us reverse the tide.

In Shakespeare’s words regarding the architects of the New World Order: 

Hell is empty and all the devils are here.”  

 

Bad guys are lurking

Evil terrorists with kalashnikovs are threatening the security of the United States of America and its trillion dollar arsenal of “peace-making” nuclear weapons, which according to expert scientific opinion on contract to the Pentagon, are “harmless to the surrounding civilian population”.

(Oops kalashnikovs were invented by a Russian. Why are they not on the boycott Russia black list)

A good versus evil dichotomy prevails: a “Clash of Civilisations”.

The West has a “Mission”: “We must fight against evil in all its forms as a means to preserving the Western way of life.” The perpetrators of war are presented as the victims.

Breaking the Lie means breaking a criminal project of global destruction, in which the quest for profit is the overriding force.

When the Lie Becomes the Truth, There is no Turning Backwards

This profit-driven military agenda destroys human values and transforms people into unconscious zombies.

Let us reverse the tide.

In Shakespeare’s words regarding the architects of the New World Order: 

Hell is empty and all the devils are here.”  

Our indelible task is to send the “devils” of our time (Netanyahu, Biden, von Der Leyen, Scholz, Macron, Trudeau, Zelensky, et al) as well as the self-proclaimed architects of ‘humanitarian war” and the “free market”, down to where they rightfully belong. 

“I am sick when I do look on thee”

“One may smile, and smile, and be a villain!”

Challenge the “smiling” war criminals in high office and the powerful Big Money lobby groups which support them including Klaus Schwab, Bill Gates, Albert Bourla, et al. 

Break the American Inquisition.

Undermine the US-NATO-Israel military crusade. 

Close down the weapons factories and the military bases.

Members of the armed forces should disobey orders and refuse to participate in a criminal war.

Bring home the troops.

*

Happy Birthday Dear William.

Thanks for Helping Us “Deal with the Devils”.

Your Legacy Lives

 

On a concluding Note, Dear Readers,

More than Ever, Global Research needs your support. Our task as an independent media is to “Battle the Lie”.

“Lying” in mainstream journalism has become the “new normal”: mainstream journalists are pressured to comply. Some journalists refuse.

Lies, distortions and omissions are part of a multibillion dollar propaganda operation which sustains the “war narrative”.

While “Truth” is a powerful instrument, “the Lie” is generously funded by the lobby groups and corporate charities. And that is why we need the support of our readers.

Consider Making a Donation to Global Research

“When the Lie becomes the Truth, there is no turning backwards” 

Support Global Research.

 

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***

[First published on November 1, 2023]

The Israeli Ministry of Intelligence is recommending the forcible and permanent transfer of the Gaza Strip’s 2.2 million Palestinian residents to Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula, according to an official document revealed in full for the first time by +972’s partner site Local Call yesterday.

The 10-page document, dated Oct. 13, 2023, bears the logo of the Intelligence Ministry — a small governmental body that produces policy research and shares its proposals with intelligence agencies, the army, and other ministries. It assesses three options regarding the future of the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip in the framework of the current war, and recommends a full population transfer as its preferred course of action. It also calls on Israel to enlist the international community in support of this endeavor. The document, whose authenticity was confirmed by the ministry, has been translated into English in full here on +972.

The existence of the document does not necessarily indicate that its recommendations are being considered by Israel’s defense establishment. Despite its name, the Intelligence Ministry is not directly responsible for any intelligence body, but rather independently prepares studies and policy papers that are distributed to the Israeli government and security agencies for review, but are not binding. The ministry’s annual budget is NIS 25 million and its influence is considered relatively small. It is currently headed by Gila Gamliel, a member of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud Party.

However, the fact that an Israeli government ministry has prepared such a detailed proposal amid a large-scale military offensive on the Gaza Strip, following Hamas’ deadly assault and massacres in southern Israeli communities on Oct. 7, reflects how the idea of forced population transfer is being raised to the level of official policy discussions. Fears of such plans — which would constitute a serious war crime under international law — have grown in recent weeks, especially after the Israeli army ordered about 1 million Palestinians to evacuate the northern Gaza Strip ahead of escalating bombardment and incremental ground incursions.

The document recommends that Israel act to “evacuate the civilian population to Sinai” during the war; establish tent cities and later more permanent cities in the northern Sinai that will absorb the expelled population; and then create “a sterile zone of several kilometers … within Egypt, and [prevent] the return of the population to activities/residences near the border with Israel.” At the same time, governments around the world, led by the United States, must be mobilized to implement the move.

A source in the Intelligence Ministry confirmed to Local Call/+972 that the document was authentic, that it was distributed to the defense establishment by the ministry’s policy division, and “was not supposed to reach the media.”

‘Make It Clear There Is No Hope of Returning’

The document unequivocally and explicitly recommends transferring Palestinian civilians from Gaza as the desired outcome of the war. The existence of the plan was first reported last week in the Israeli business newspaper Calcalist, and the full text of the document is published and translated here [see Annex below for the full document].

The transfer plan is divided into several stages.

In the first stage, action must be taken so that the population of Gaza “evacuates south,” while the air strikes focus on the northern Gaza Strip.

In the second stage, a ground incursion into Gaza will begin, leading to the occupation of the entire Strip from north to south, and the “cleansing of the underground bunkers of Hamas fighters.”

Concurrently with the re-occupation of Gaza, Palestinian civilians will be moved into Egyptian territory, and not be allowed to return. “It is important to leave the travel routes to the south open to enable the evacuation of the civilian population toward Rafah,” the document states.

According to an official in the Intelligence Ministry, the ministry’s personnel stand behind these recommendations. The source stressed that the ministry’s research is “not based on military intelligence” and serves only as a basis for discussions within the government.

The document proposes promoting a campaign targeting Palestinian civilians in Gaza that will “motivate them to accept this plan” and lead them to give up their land. “The messages should revolve around the loss of land, making it clear that there is no hope of returning to the territories Israel will soon occupy, whether or not that is true. The image needs to be, ‘Allah made sure you lose this land because of Hamas’ leadership — there is no choice but to move to another place with the assistance of your Muslim brothers,’” the document reads.

In addition, the document encourages the government to lead a public campaign in the Western world to promote the transfer plan “in a way that does not incite or vilify Israel.” This would be done by presenting the expulsion of Gaza’s population as a humanitarian necessity to win over international support, by arguing that relocation will lead to “fewer casualties among the civilian population compared to the expected casualties if the population remains.”

The document also says that the United States should be enlisted in the process to exert pressure on Egypt to absorb the Palestinian residents of Gaza, and that other European countries — particularly Greece and Spain — as well as Canada should help absorb and settle the Palestinian refugees. The Ministry of Intelligence said the document was not yet formally distributed to U.S. officials, but only to the Israeli government and security agencies.

A Wider Policy Discussion

Last week, the Misgav Institute, a right-wing think tank headed by Meir Ben-Shabbat, a close associate of Prime Minister Netanyahu and a former head of Israel’s National Security Council, published a position paper that similarly called for the forced transfer of Gaza’s population to the Sinai. The institute recently deleted the post from Twitter and from its website after drawing strong international censure.

The deleted study was written by Amir Weitmann, a Likud activist and, according to sources familiar with him, a close associate of Intelligence Minister Gila Gamliel. Last week, on a Facebook page named “The Plan to Rehabilitate Gaza in Egypt,” Weitmann interviewed Likud MK Ariel Kallner, who told him that “the solution you propose, to move the population to Egypt, is a logical and necessary solution.”

This is not the only connection between the Likud, the Ministry of Intelligence, and the right-wing think tank. About a month ago, the Ministry of Intelligence pledged to transfer about NIS 1 million from its budget to the Misgav Institute to conduct research on Arab countries. If the Misgav Institute was somehow involved in drafting the ministry’s Gaza transfer recommendations, its logo, at least, does not appear on the document.

Sources in the Ministry of Intelligence said that the Gaza report was an independent study conducted by the ministry’s policy division, without the cooperation of an external party, but they did confirm that the ministry had recently begun working with the Misgav Institute, stressing that the government body works with various research groups with diverse political agendas. The Misgav Institute has not yet responded to queries for this article.

In addition, the Intelligence Ministry’s document was first leaked in a small internal WhatsApp group of right-wing activists who, together with Likud advocate Whiteman, promote the reestablishment of Israeli settlements in the Gaza Strip and the transfer of Palestinians living there.

According to one of these activists, the Intelligence Ministry document reached them through the mediation of a “Likud source,” and its public distribution is related to an attempt to find out whether “the Israeli public is ready to accept ideas of transfer from Gaza.”

The Preferred Option

The chances of fully implementing such a plan, which would amount to the total ethnic cleansing of the Gaza Strip, are negligible in many respects.

Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi has declared that he strongly opposes opening the Rafah Crossing to absorb the Palestinian population from Gaza.

He argued that the displacement of Palestinians to the Sinai would threaten Israeli peace with Egypt, and warned that it would lead to Palestinians using Egyptian territory as a base to continue armed confrontations with Israel. A similar plan has been presented in the past by Israeli officials, and until now, it too had not matured into a serious policy discussion.

Moreover, after weeks of reports that the United States was attempting to raise the possibility of moving Palestinians to Egypt as part of a “humanitarian corridor,” U.S. President Joe Biden asserted yesterday that he and Sisi were committed to “ensuring that Palestinians in Gaza are not displaced to Egypt or any other nation.”

The Intelligence Ministry document states that Egypt will have an “obligation under international law to allow the passage of the population,” and that the United States can contribute to the process by “exerting pressure on Egypt, Turkey, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE to contribute to the initiative, either with resources or with the absorption of displaced persons.” It also proposes conducting a dedicated public campaign aimed at the Arab world, with a “focus on the message of assisting the Palestinian brothers and rehabilitating them, even at the price of a tone that rebukes or even harms Israel.”

Finally, the document notes that the “large-scale migration” of non-combatants from combat zones is a “natural and sought-after outcome” that has also occurred in Syria, Afghanistan, and Ukraine, concluding that only the expulsion of the Palestinian population will constitute “an appropriate response [that] will enable the creation of significant deterrence in the entire region.”

The document presents two other options regarding what to do with the residents of Gaza the day after the war. The first is to allow the Palestinian Authority (PA), headed by the Fatah party in the occupied West Bank, to rule Gaza under Israeli auspices. The second is to cultivate another “local Arab authority” as an alternative to Hamas. Both options, the document claims, are undesirable for Israel from a strategic and security perspective, and will not provide a sufficient message of deterrence, especially to Hezbollah in Lebanon.

The authors of the study also noted that bringing the PA into Gaza was the most dangerous option of the three, because it could lead to the establishment of a Palestinian state.

“The division between the Palestinian population in Judea and Samaria and Gaza is one of the main obstacles today preventing the establishment of a Palestinian state. It is inconceivable that the outcome of this attack [Hamas’ Oct. 7 massacres] will be an unprecedented victory for the Palestinian national movement and a path to the creation of a Palestinian state,” the document said.

The document further argues that a model of Israeli military rule and PA civilian rule, as exists in the West Bank, is likely to fail in Gaza.

“There is no way to maintain an effective military occupation in Gaza only on the basis of military presence without [Israeli] settlements, and within a short time there will be internal Israeli and international pressure for withdrawal.”

The authors added that in such a situation, the State of Israel “will be considered a colonial power with an occupying army — similar to the current situation in Judea and Samaria, but even worse.” They noted that the PA has low legitimacy among the Palestinian public, and that based on Israel’s previous experience of handing over control of Gaza to the PA and Hamas’ eventual takeover, Israel should not “repeat the same mistake that led to the current situation.”

The other option, the formation of a local Arab leadership to replace Hamas, is undesirable according to the document, because there are no local opposition movements to Hamas and a new leadership is liable to be more radical. “The most plausible scenario is … not an ideological shift but rather the emergence of new, possibly even more extreme, Islamist movements,” it said. The authors mention the necessity of “creating ideological change” in the Palestinian population through a process of what it likens to “de-Nazification,” requiring Israel to “dictate the school curricula and enforce its use for an entire generation.”

Finally, the document argued that if Gaza’s population remained in the strip, there would be “many Arab casualties” during the anticipated re-occupation of the territory, which would damage Israel’s international image even more than expelling the population. For all these reasons, the Ministry of Intelligence’s recommendation is to promote the permanent transfer of all Palestinian civilians from Gaza to the Sinai.

The Defense Ministry, the army spokesperson’s office, and the Misgav Institute did not yet respond to +972’s requests for comment by the time of this article’s publication. Any responses received will be added here.

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Yuval Abraham is a journalist and activist based in Jerusalem.


Annex: Israeli Intelligence Ministry Policy Paper on Gaza’s Civilian Population, October 2023

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[This article was originally published on September 29, 2023.]

The official concluding statements by the UN and WHO at the completion of the UN General Assembly (UNGA) in New York regarding the High-level Meeting on Pandemic Prevention, Preparedness and Response are summarized as follows:

United Nations

The high-level meeting on pandemic prevention, preparedness and response will focus on the theme: “Creating and maintaining political momentum and solidarity for Pandemic Prevention, Preparedness and Response“. Plenary Segment: Statements by Member States and members of the United Nations specialized agencies.Issued on 20 Sept 2023.

WHO statement on the high-level meeting on pandemic prevention, preparedness, and response:

The World Health Organization welcomed today’s historic commitment shown by global leaders, at the UNGA, to strengthen the international cooperation, coordination, governance, and investment needed to prevent a repeat of the devastating health and socioeconomic impact caused by COVID-19, make the world better prepared for future pandemic, and get back on track to achieving the Sustainable Development Goals.

“The first-ever head of state summit on pandemic prevention, preparedness and response is a historic milestone in the urgent drive to make all people of the world safer, and better protected from the devastating impacts of pandemics,” said Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, WHO Director-General. “I welcome this commitment by world leaders to provide the political support and direction needed so that WHO, governments and all involved can protect people’s health and take concrete steps towards investing in local capacities, ensuring equity and supporting the global emergency health architecture that the world needs.”

The political declaration, approved by Mr Dennis Francis, President of the 78th United Nations General Assembly (2023), and the result of negotiations under the able leadership of Ambassadors Gilad Erdan of Israel and Omar Hilale of Morocco, underscored the pivotal role played by WHO as the “directing and coordinating authority on international health,” and the need to “commit further to sustainable financing that provides adequate and predictable funding to the WHO, which enables it to have the resources needed to fulfil its core functions.”Issued on 20 Sept 2023

Neither the UN nor the WHO statement mentions the number of world leaders or heads of state, who approved the crucial WHO documents, the severely revised (more than 90 points of revision) International Health Regulations (IHR), including the Pandemic Treaty – which is actually no longer a treaty, as it is planned to ram it through during the next World Health Assembly (WHA) in May 2024 – making the new IHR effective without a vote. See full interview with Dr. Astrid Stuckelberger here.

Since there are no official accounts from these “behind closed-door” UN / WHO meetings, we can rely only on “hearsay”, according to which there were several member states who abstained and others who objected to the revised IHR. Among the objectors was apparently the Russian Federation. See this.

The Mike Adams interview of Dr. Astrid Stuckelberger (26 September 2023) about the coming (planned) health dictatorship by the UN and WHO juxtaposes the official UN / WHO statements.

There is nothing constructive, nothing the world might want to look forward to that came out of these secret meetings, debates. Secretive, like a death cult, planning a worldwide genocide run as part of the “new” WHO / UN Agenda.

Imagine where the world has gone? And where the full UN Agenda 2030 is planning to take us?

With a corrupted UN system, with a World Health Organization that is no longer looking after the population’s health and disease, but is promoting death.

And that on a worldwide basis. All governments – more than 190 national governments, have all been coopted, corrupted coerced and outright threatened – if they do not go along and lie to the people who supposedly elected them, and if they do not betray the trust and the (tax) money these people have confided in them – people’s funds that also pay for the government bureaucrats generally generous wages.

Here are some of the key points Dr. Astrid Stuckelberger made during the BOMBSHELL interview. For courageously speaking out since the beginning of the outbreak of this criminal plandemic, Dr. Stuckelberger has been a beacon for truth. In response, the University of Geneva cut off all her courses and deprived her of her faculty position.

She is also otherwise threatened and coerced, often censored – to no avail: Astrid keeps speaking out, to spread the truth as far and widely as possible – so that people eventually may wake up – stand up – and stop obeying. Non obedience is everyone’s right.

Here are some of the highlights of Dr. Stuckelberger’s interview:

When during the organization’s earlier times, WHO stood for protecting the lives of the elderly and children, today WHO is promoting suicide for older people and forced killer vaccination for children.

WHO is eliminating staff – scientists, doctors, and researchers, who are ethical and true experts, replacing them with people who are no experts, unethical and corrupt.

WHO programs on food, nutrition or basic sanitation, have morphed into programs that are largely overseeing the extermination of people on planet earth, rather than promoting the health of people.

In the 1990s WHO was still warning about the dangers of 5G microwaves, the negative effects of holding the phone to your ear… how it affected the brain — no longer. These warnings have been eliminated from the WHO’s website. This is part of accelerating elimination of old age people and of dumbing the brains of children and young adults.

Also, WHO warned of the danger building 5G antennas on school buildings – as the effect on human brains and the development of human brains is devastating – this warning too, has disappeared from WHO’s website.

Around the year 2000, the private sector, with lobbies came into effect – and Bill Gates put his foot in WHO’s door. In 2012 he was literally in charge of WHO’s vaccination / immunization programs.

Today, WHO alone has a monopoly on all that concerns health – it is a tyrannical dictate – and is followed by severe censoring, including with punishment for those who do not follow the mandate. UN Secretary General, António Guterres, is echoing what WHO is doing, by promoting censorship [banning “fake news”], and digitizing health information – with a monopoly for WHO.

But WHO alone cannot control the world, as Ministers of Health, usually countries’ representatives at the World Health Assembly, may not agree with some dictates and they must listen to their governments [though, most of which have been corrupted], they need an overarching body to assure full compliance, the United Nations.

Therefore, the UN will claim the overall right of controlling censorship as well as dictates on health, i.e., vaccination / programs on immunization, delegated to WHO — no questions asked, all with the objective of massively reducing the world population, an objective which has been on the political drawing board since the 1970s.

See the Kissinger Report published in 1974, in the year following the U.S. sponsored military coup in Chile (September 11, 1973). 

WHO is the door to the most sensitive and vulnerable points in our lives: life and death, health and disease. It is the entry to their – the Beast’s – biotech neuro-weapon which is the so-called injection vaccine – and they want to roll out untold thousands of new types of vaccines, billions to be administered over the coming years – a perpetual program, feeding into the UN Agenda 2030 – to help accomplish the “17 Sustainable Development Goals” (SDG).

The first paragraph of the preparedness on pandemic prevention response, refers to the constant and repeated danger of covid and covid-related pandemics… triggering an eternal fear, as covid has been enshrined in the brains of the people as THE potentially death-bringing pandemic and danger.

They are generating constant fear with something that didn’t even exist, that has never been analyzed scientifically, never been isolated in laboratories, nor with the instruments of WHO — it’s always about infections, because you cannot see them (the viruses), and people do not know.

WHO along with the (bought) media is a psychological terrorist organization.

Under the new declaration WHO is becoming a permanent fear campaign mechanism, with the overarching worldwide tyrannical authority to demand “preventive” quarantine even against the policies of individual sovereign countries, and they are implementing them enforced by police and military – which country governments must obey, under threat.

But, says Astrid, “the Beast is losing power, because we are becoming more conscious, waking up and resisting.

The revised IHR and the Pandemic Convention – yes, it is not a treaty, as it will be adopted, not even voted on.

That is the imposition by the UN – sponsored, or imposed by the US. The IHR / Pandemic Convention will be adopted by the WHA in May 2024, without a vote. And during this UNGA 2023, WHO and its public (mainly the White House) and private (mainly the pharma-industry) sponsors are asking for the blessing of the UN; and “they” received the blessing of the UN.

Australia is already training their police and military to enforce mandated vaccinations – ramming in doors of family homes and making sure that schools comply with the vaxx-orders.

They want to get rid of children for depopulating the world – and of course of elderly people, who are not contributing to the economy, but using state money [that they contributed to] for living in retirement (pensions) – whom Klaus Schwab’s Israeli adviser, Yuval Noah Hariri, calls, “useless eaters”.

That is why former President Trump has already said, if he will be reelected President, he would propagate homeschooling.

WHO is run by McKinsey Consulting – Dr. Stuckelberger has seen the contract – and by the bought media.

They, “the Beast”, will invent a public emergency, either “natural” or a plandemic of a monster epidemic, to spread fear and lock people down.

They are rolling out a plan, to lock people down, they want the vaxx back – it is already visible from the media.

[In India a new pandemic has already been declared, with compulsory masks. An outbreak of Nipah virus (NiV) has been confirmed in India. Six cases of Nipah, including two deaths, have been reported – see video below (Annotation by PK)]

Three major corporate media outlets control the world:

  • AP = American Press;
  • AFP = French Press; and
  • Reuters.

They are paid to lie. They cannot be believed, but they distribute their news to all local mainstream media, which must report almost verbatim the going narrative.

We must create our own counter-media – like what you are doing, referring to Mike Adams and others, to spread the truth and let people know what is going on.

They – “the Beast” — are doing whatever they can with the help of the governments, which are no longer YOUR governments. Today’s governments across the globe are coerced to do what “the Beast” wants them to do, either by buying them or by threat.

They will create anything to maintain the level of fear, even the plague is a possibility.

All they need to do is create a fake disease in one city, and then declare it a pandemic – and all that comes with the pandemic — lockdowns, ramming in doors for forced vaccinations also in schools, a fear-based tyranny – where people will obey…. But will they? (Annotation PK)

Then they are going to use their real weapon, either by vaccine, or in the hospitals, like in NY, where they incubated people… until they died.

Or using 5G. 5G can be directed into the brain of people, paralyzing individuals, or programming them, à la Klaus Schwab’s transhumanism, digitized, robotized obeying transhumans.

With 5G they can do whatever they want; 5G is not only emitted from the endless antennas around the world, but also from street lamps, or other items you least expect, and don’t know; possibly also through your TV set.

“Vaccination” – people will be injected by a binary weapon, that can be activated by remote signaling… through 5G, maybe soon to come 6G.

This is made possible through graphene oxide in people’s bodies [those, who have been vaccinated] – who were injected with the false covid vaxxes, some of which contained graphene oxide, a highly electro-magnetic sensible substance that will react to the 5G micro-waves.

Pfizer’s Bio-n-Tech vaxx = bio nano tech, or bio neuro tech…and mRNA – a computer program — “mode” RNA – will make humans highly vulnerable to 5G. As humans, we are bio-electromagnetic, electro-encephalogram – making our brains vulnerable to 5G manipulation.

Astrid Stuckelberger: “Hacking the mind is at the center of what is going on.”

Dr. James Giordano: The Brain is the Battlefield of the Future 

The “Havana Syndrome” is one of the brain manipulations – first appeared in 2016 in the US and Canadian Embassies in Havana, Cuba. Since then, the syndrome has occurred in many other places – in Beijing, Moscow, Serbia…

We humans emit waves – “love waves” as well as “anger waves” – our moods are expressed in electromagnetic waves.

Controlled opposition talking about viruses, covid, mRNA, PCR-test, the vaccination that all may come back… that is their plan – the Beast’s plan, the perpetuation of an absolute fraud.

Mike Adams:

“We are seeing the complete perversion of science which will destroy the credibility of science and medicine. – There is no isolate of SARS-Covid-2, has never been – it is a total fraud.”

“While the next plandemic is being rolled out – and more and more people are being victimized by this fraud – genocide is unfolding in front of us.”

We, the People, cannot let that happen; we must win this war

These are the paraphrased final words of Astrid Stuckelberger

“We are gonna have a tough wave of time now, this may last for 6 months a year… who knows. So, take good care of yourself. If you are knowledgeable, you are better prepared for what may come – and take care of the elderly and the kids. I am worried about the children. They are gonna go after the children…”

“There is already a warning: in Norway, they must vaccinate all the young people… Take No Vaccine whatsoever, they are trying to sell you all sorts of common vaccines – don’t take them, they are all fake mRNA vaccines….”

Ending on a positive note:“I think we are protected for what we are ….”

Watch the full interview below.

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Peter Koenig is a geopolitical analyst and a former Senior Economist at the World Bank and the World Health Organization (WHO), where he worked for over 30 years around the world. He lectures at universities in the US, Europe and South America. He writes regularly for online journals and is the author of Implosion – An Economic Thriller about War, Environmental Destruction and Corporate Greed; and co-author of Cynthia McKinney’s book “When China Sneezes: From the Coronavirus Lockdown to the Global Politico-Economic Crisis” (Clarity Press – November 1, 2020).

Peter is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG). He is also a non-resident Senior Fellow of the Chongyang Institute of Renmin University, Beijing.

¿Por qué no se castiga a Israel y sí a Cuba?

April 23rd, 2024 by Marc Vandepitte

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Global Research Referral Drive: Our Readers Are Our Lifeline

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Human rights experts and activists are expressing concern over a flawed and seriously unbalanced report of the Group of Human Rights Experts on Nicaragua (GHREN), released by the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC) on February 24, 2024.

The UNHRC, says the Nicaragua Solidarity Coalition, is lending itself to the U.S. regime-change strategy against Nicaragua by highlighting only evidence supplied by opponents of Nicaragua’s government, while omitting highly pertinent information submitted to the GHREN by a number of individuals and groups. 

An open letter has been sent to the President of the UNHRC, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights and the UN Secretary General, pointing this out. Former UN Independent Expert on International Order, Alfred de Zayas, described the GHREN as set up for the purpose of “naming and shaming” the Nicaraguan government, not for objective investigation. Signed by leading human rights experts, 49 organizations and more than 300 individuals, the letter says that the GHREN’s report should never have been published.

Coordinator of the Nicaragua Solidarity Coalition, Barbara Larcom, said: 

“The work of the UN’s so-called group of experts is a disservice to the Nicaraguan people. It has deliberately ignored considerable evidence sent to it which contests its findings. This unprofessional report should immediately be withdrawn by the UN Human Rights Council and the group disbanded.”

The Coalition, which represents individuals and organizations across Nicaragua, other Latin American countries, the US and Europe, notes that April 18, 2024, marks the sixth anniversary of an attempted coup in Nicaragua. According to considerable evidence, this was financed by US agencies intent on regime change. Since the failed coup, the US has continued to apply pressure via other methods, including the GHREN report, using these to justify sanctions against Nicaragua’s economy and society.

Link to open letter, online version (Spanish)
Link to open letter, online version (English) 
See here for the full list of signatories.

The Nicaragua Solidarity Coalition is an international coalition of organizations and individuals in solidarity with Nicaragua, supporting its sovereignty and affirming its achievements. We are not affiliated with any governmental entity of any nation.  We provide accurate, verifiable information and other resources about Nicaragua, and we work to counter misinformation about the country disseminated by the media, public events, and other sources.  

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While the world’s most despotic criminals move freely around in their ivory towers, petty criminals and the righteous are firmly incarcerated behind bars. This is the way ‘the law’ functions in a world where injustice has taken the role of justice.

Deals made between those who occupy the highest seats of power, are increasingly made without any recourse to public interest, democratic procedures, international protocols or the law of the land in which they are enacted.

While down at the street level, public relations exercises make it look like some ‘national interest’ is being defended. Some inviolable truth being upheld that must not be challenged.

So it is that Britain, the USA and their closest allies ‘condemn’ – in a carefully coded public relations exercise – Israel’s ruthless murder of tens of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza, but continue to supply these murderers with the latest weapons of modern warfare.

Then, when Netanyahu ordered the destruction of the Iranian consulate in Damascus, killing 11 people, including at least two senior commanders in the al-Quds force of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, a warning was quickly received from the Iran leadership that it would revenge these deaths.

At this point, Western leaders who had condemned the Israeli army’s wanton killings in Gaza, jumped to their feet and brazenly announced an ‘iron clad’ guarantee that ‘they would not hesitate to defend Israel against her enemies’.

And so they did – when Iran held true – and in a carefully calculated response that used relatively slow moving projectiles and (we understand) a prewarning issued well in advance of its intent – launched a fleet of drones and rockets to disrupt Israel’s main military airfield. 

The UK government, disrespecting – as has become the norm –  international law and military engagement protocols, ordered its fighter planes into action over Israeli territory to down incoming Iranian warheads, at the expense of unconsulted British tax payers. The US involved itself in the same way.

Such (ongoing) predatory bravura is being displayed in the cause of defending the indefensible.

Iran is a country that has resisted buckling under pressure to become yet another permanent US military outpost. So it remains Middle Eastern public enemy No. 1 by Western warmonger definition.

After all, how could an Arab country still be allowed to operate according to its own cultural practices and traditions and not kneel before the might of big brother to conform to Western mores and energy demands?

So if a long awaited excuse arises to blow Iran out of the water, that will mean the completion of a clean sweep of US (and allies) hegemonic ambitions in the Middle East and an excellent chance to get their blood soaked hands on plenty more valuable minerals assets. At least that was the Neocon view before Iran started to build up a nuclear capability.

But don’t think too much about how Russia, China and other allies of Iran might react to such an outcome.

“No” says Lord Cameron, Foreign Secretary of the British government. “We must continue to sell arms to Israel. We must hold firm”. 

This, in spite of a global outcry against such an action by large numbers of sentient human beings still retaining real values, including the rapidly waning ability to think.

“Oh Gosh” says UK Finance Minister Jeremy Hunt “arms sales to Israel bring in billions, we can’t just cut them out, can we. The national economy can’t afford to go any further into debt.”

“But what about the coming general election?” says the Conservative hierarchy. “What if the electorate sides with the Palestinians and rejects our line?”

The Finance Minister doesn’t have to think long “In that case we’ll go with the electorate and ban the arms’ sales.  That might improve our chances in the Autumn. We’ll make up the financial loss by raising taxes on food and fuel. 

We must keep to our Great Reset and Green New Deal commitment to starve out the farmers, hit industry workers and rid the world of fossil fuels, right?”

The moral of this story is not hard to fathom: There is only one god – the god of power and control. The god of ‘full spectrum dominance’.

Moreover the deception game moves this way and that so as to make it seem like there’s some attempt being made to ‘uphold justice’ and strum the chords of democracy.

So, the architects of control say to themselves, ‘don’t let any humanitarian instincts into the picture. No, this means the beginning of the end of the world as we know it. After all, our centralised satanic control system is the new normal, it’s in our interest that most don’t want to be disturbed by changes to the status quo.’ 

Some readers may be wondering: what’s around the corner if these devils we know are replaced by devils we don’t know?

Well, actually, the current devils are stirring the same evil pot as their predecessors, so the next ones will no doubt continue the job: get any remaining resisters fully brain fugged, AI’d, microwaved and dispossessed of their assets. Get Nation States out of the way. Create a supranational centralised New World Order that makes any expression of love a criminal offence. Clear out the arts, spirituality and around 90% of the human population.

Have you seen the same writing on the wall?

Maybe you have, as its increasingly hard not to. But the tendency remains to scrub it off the bricks  – like Banksy’s startling truths – rather than face reality.

Defending the indefensible drags one down into the same snake pit as that occupied by genocidal murderers. It’s a suicide mission, and there is no light at the end of that particular tunnel.

We know what we ‘the purposeful people’ have to do. It’s repeated it in all my writings.

We should have strongly progressed our commitment to the defence of Life by now. 

We should be planning, every day, the actions we need to take to wrest back control of our destinies and join together with other non-zomby purposeful people to this same end.

The bottom-up revolution that will oust the demons-in-human form that are so assiduously vampiring our freedoms, unique powers of thought and even our very souls, is as close at hand as we collectively make it.

Supreme Source gave us all the power we need to Act. By not using this power we let it wither on the vine. This is a crime. A crime that makes one complicit in inviting internal and external colonisation by demons.  

We are fighting for the future of what we proclaim to be ‘love of life’. There can be no compromise in our determination to come through as victors in what has become a very literal clash between the forces of life and those of death.

But remember, ‘the darkest hour is just before dawn’. 

We each have a key role to play in inspiring tomorrow’s dawn to break over the horizon as a blazing herald of our energetic determination to rid this beautiful planet of power obsessed political parasites.

Those whose blood stained hands hold the profits of war to be more valuable than defence of the immeasurable gift of life. That gift which is the irreplaceable cardinal right of all peoples. Of all humanity.

Nota bene: the political dialogue portrayed in this article are the author’s words, not quotations of those cited.

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Julian Rose is an organic farmer, writer, broadcaster and international activist. He is author of four books of which the latest ‘Overcoming the Robotic Mind’ is a clarion call to resist the despotic New World Order takeover of our lives. Do visit his website for further information www.julianrose.info 

He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

WHO: Intel Agency for Gates Foundation?

April 22nd, 2024 by John Leake

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Reviewing BioNTech’s Disclosure of Classes of Share Capital for the year ended December 31, 2019, I noticed the following:

On August 30, 2019, BioNTech entered into agreements with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF). BMGF agreed to purchase 3,038,674 ordinary shares with nominal amount of k€ 3,039 of BioNTech for a total of k€49,864 (k$55,000). These agreements require BioNTech to perform certain research and development activities to advance the development of products for the prevention and treatment of HIV and tuberculosis. In the event of a breach of the underlying conditions, including such research and development activities, BMGF has the right to sell its shares back to BioNTech at the initial share price or fair market value, whichever is higher, subject to certain conditions. BioNTech’s ability to pay dividends is also limited under the terms of these agreements.

Less than two years after the Gates Foundation purchased the stock (pre-IPO) at $18 per share, it peaked on Aug. 6, 2021 at $389. At that price, the Foundation’s $55 million investment was worth $1,182,044,186.00 ($1.182 billion).

On September 18, 2019—just nineteen days after the Gates Foundation took its huge position in BioNTech stock— a report titled A World At Risk was published by the Global Preparedness Monitoring Board, which was founded in 2018 by the World Bank Group and the World Health Organization.

The report’s title page is illustrated with an image of a coronavirus, and its text is an urgent call to action for the world to invest far more in preparedness for a respiratory viral pandemic. As the report states on page 8:

The report mentions nothing about the need to invest in bolstering bio-laboratory safety. It expressly warns about the threat of a lethal respiratory pathogen “accidentally or deliberately released,” but its entire call to action is to invest a fortune to responding to such a pathogen instead of preventing it from being released in the first place.

This was in spite of numerous urgent warnings from Rutgers University biology professor Richard Ebright and others that many of the world’s bio-labs had a history of grave security lapses that were NOT being adequately addressed. In 2017, Professor Ebright expressed particular concern about the new BSL-4 lab that was about to open in Wuhan, China.

We now know that SARS-CoV-2 was officially detected in December of 2019 but probably emerged and started spreading in August or September of 2019—that is, around the same time A World At Risk was published.

The September 18, 2019 date of the report strongly suggests that someone doing bio-surveillance for the WHO in China obtained intelligence that a SARS coronavirus was already circulating.

Given that the Gates Foundation is the WHO’s second largest donor (after Germany, where BioNTech is headquartered) I wonder if this intelligence was passed to someonein the Gates Foundation months before December 31, 2019—the date the WHO claimed it received its first report of cases of pneumonia of unknown etiology in Wuhan.

Does the WHO—with its Country Offices obtaining bio-surveillance reports from the field—serve an an unofficial intelligence agency for the Gates Foundation?

If so, it would enable the Foundation to obtain extremely valuable information about emerging infectious disease pathogens—naturally emergent or accidentally or deliberately released—long before other market players obtain this information.

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Featured image is from Dr. Rath Health Foundation

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According to the Ukrainian portal Strana, Kiev is facing problems in increasing the number of military personnel as a new mobilisation law will take at least eight months to be imposed. Worsening the situation, military personnel in Odessa are threatening to abandon their positions and even kill if the new law does not allow them to demobilise.

On April 11, Ukraine’s Verkhovna Rada (Parliament) approved a bill on expanding mobilisation for the military. The National Security and Defence Committee removed the provision on demobilisation from the bill on the eve of its presentation to the Verkhovna Rada for its second reading. Dmitry Lazutkin, a representative of the Ukrainian Ministry of Defence, later said that a separate bill on demobilisation was planned, which would take eight months.

Ukrainian journalists in Odessa questioned military personnel about their thoughts towards the government’s decision to exclude demobilisation from the bill on military conscription.

In that case, “I will leave the unit without permission,” one of the soldiers told the Ukrainian portal Strana.

Another Ukrainian serviceman said that the deputies of the Verkhovna Rada should go to the front on an equal footing with them, whilst another believes that changes are necessary in the country and that it is not possible to fight with the same soldiers all the time, making demobilisation necessary.

“I’ll shoot them all. They don’t have such a right… So now I get up and go back to the war whilst they have grown their bellies and will sit in the Verkhovna Rada? This shouldn’t happen,” said another soldier.

“There is the expression ‘Servant of the People.’ It is not we who must serve them, but they who must serve us,” added another, in reference to the name of the ruling party founded by Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky.

These threats to go AWOL come as the New York Times reported that since the start of Russia’s special military operation, thousands of Ukrainian men have attempted to flee across the Tisza River from mandatory conscription. According to Romanian authorities cited by the American newspaper, approximately 6,000 men have arrived in their country across the river since February 2022.

“That thousands of Ukrainian men have chosen to risk the swim rather than face the dangers as soldiers on the eastern front highlights the challenge for President Volodymyr Zelensky as he seeks to mobilize fresh troops after more than two years of bruising, bloody trench warfare with Russia,” noted The New York Times

The new law toughens penalties for attempting to evade military conscription and aims to increase the number of troops on the frontline. The newspaper also highlights that many of the Ukrainians who rushed to volunteer have fought continuously since 2022, with only two weeks of annual leave.

“Soldiers are enlisted until the end of hostilities, with no defined date for release from their obligation to serve. With casualty rates high, being drafted, soldiers say, is like getting a one-way ticket to the front,” the New York Times reported.

The escape of Ukrainians from the country has allowed human trafficking to flourish. In 2023, for example, the Mukachevo Border Guard dismantled 56 criminal gangs involved in this activity.

According to Lieutenant Lesya Fedorova, spokesperson for the Mukachevo Border Guard unit, and whom the newspaper cited, the cost to be taken to the other side of the Ukrainian border currently amounts to $10,000. This is incredibly expensive when considering that the average monthly salary is about $500.

Crossing to the Romanian side via the Tisza River also carries dangers, with Fedorova reporting that at least 22 bodies have been found on the river’s banks, with many more likely having drowned but never found. Yet, this is a risk Ukrainians are evidently willing to take since deployment to the frontlines all but guarantees death or permanent injuries.

It is evident that the new mobilisation law will struggle to recruit the 450,000-500,000 men the Kiev regime is believed to want since there is no morale among the general population and because all those who are motivated to fight have already volunteered. Failure to mobilise enough men will also lead to active soldiers abandoning their posts or even mutiny, a scenario which will be devastating for the country once Russia launches its offensive, expected at the end of spring or summer, and the Ukrainian military is driven back with high casualty numbers.

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This article was originally published on InfoBrics.

Ahmed Adel is a Cairo-based geopolitics and political economy researcher. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

Featured image source

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Gaza and West Bank have been recording one of the highest rate of imprisonments and detentions in the world for several years. However this has increased at perhaps the fastest ever pace in recent times, doubling during the last six months or so of the conflict.

On the other hand, Hamas also took many Israeli civilian hostages (including women) at the time of the October 7 attack, saying that they will be able to use them to secure release of Palestinian prisoners. This cannot be supported or justified. The taking of innocent civilians as hostages is wrong under all circumstances. In the eyes of all justice loving people of world, this will harm the Palestinian cause, not help it.

Today there is a very strong case for the Hamas releasing all these hostages and Israel releasing at least 95% of all Palestinian prisoners, may be keeping a few in prison about whom there is very strong evidence of extreme violence. In addition, of course, it is of the highest urgency to declare an immediate and permanent ceasefire in Gaza and halt all cases of attacks by settlers in West Bank.

Let us consider the extreme injustice faced by Palestinians, including children, over the years in the form of imprisonments and detentions. We first examine the situation existing before October 7 2023 and then see how this has deteriorated since then.

A document of ‘United Nations Human Rights—Office of the High Commissioner’ released on 10 July 2023 tells us regarding the situation a little before the October 7 attack. This document says—

“Frances Albanese, Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territory occupied since 1967, presenting her report on arbitrary deprivation of liberty, said since 1967, Israel has detained approximately one million Palestinians in the occupied territory, including tens of thousands of children. Presently there were 5000 Palestinians in Israeli prisons including 160 children, and 1100 of them were detained without charges or trial.”

This statement must be read in the context of a total population of about five million Palestinians in the two territories so that this amounts to one out of five Palestinians being detained or arrested at one point or the other. This very high percentage of arrested or detained persons would be higher if data for only men is considered; it may then be closer to 2 out of 5.

Further the statement of United Nations Human Rights says—

“The occupying power framed the Palestinians as a collective incarcerable security threat , ultimately de-civilianizing them, namely eroding their status as protected persons…Israel’s unlawful carceral practices were tantamount to international crimes which warranted an urgent investigation by the International Criminal Court. All the more as these offences appeared to be part of a plan of ‘de-Palestinisation’ of the territory. This threatened the existence of people as a national cohesive group.”    

Around the same time as this UN report appeared, in July 2023, another leading organization ‘Save the Children’ also released a report on Palestinian children who had been detained or arrested by the Israeli authorities. This study based on 228 former child detainees revealed that 86% of them had been beaten during detention, even though 42% were already injured at the point of arrest, and some had suffered sexual violence too. The period of detention ranged from 1 to 18 months, and left long-lasting scars and adverse impacts. Many child detainees were handcuffed and kept in small cage like structures.

After October 7 2023 the number of arrested and detained persons increased rapidly, reaching around 9000 to 11000 according to various published estimates, thus almost doubling. The increase has been more in the West Bank region. Most of them are in Israeli jails which have rapidly become overcrowded and hence the condition of prisoners has deteriorated. In addition there are those detained in military camps in Gaza for varying lengths of time. Their number may be in hundreds at any given time but at other times it may be less. It is very difficult to estimate. In both kinds of detentions some deaths have been reported, increasing fears of mistreatment and torture.

Clearly the situation of Palestinian prisoners is very serious and urgency of release and relief for them should be highlighted in the form of a strong worldwide campaign. There should also be a campaign for the release of Israeli hostages.

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Bharat Dogra is Honorary Convener, Campaign to Save Earth Now. His recent books include A Day in 2071, Protecting Earth for Children, When the Two Streams Met and Planet in Peril. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.           

Featured image: Bound, blindfolded, and stripped Palestinian men sit on the ground after being detained by Israeli forces in the illegally occupied West Bank. (Photo: Breaking the Silence/X)

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Brutality, atrocity no end.

Horrendous indiscriminate firebombing of Gaza’s southernmost city, Rafah.

We know Netanyahu does not move a finger without Washington’s OK.

This was clearly proven by the benign counterattack on Iran – to “retaliate” against Iran’s 14 April “checkmate” (Scott Ritter) retaliatory attack on Israel. Retaliating against Israel’s blowing up Iran’s Consulate in Damascus on 1 April and killing seven Iranians, including two military officers.

President Biden demanded Netanyahu not to risk a large-scale war, to be soft with his retaliation.

By contrast, Biden must have given Netanyahu green light to do away with Rafah, where currently more than a million Palestinians are stranded – bombed from the North of Gaza to the southern tip, Rafah, the locked gate to Egypt.

See this 12-second video. It shows the horror these people must go through. No idea how many will be killed. Its extermination of an entire people – mandated by the Zionists in charge of the US of A and all the puppets in Europe.

This is way beyond shame – beyond crime, beyond evil – this crime inflicted by Zionist-Israel green-lighted by Washington and its Brussels vassals must be brought to justice. This, and the more than 75 years of “ethnic cleansing”, indiscriminate, never punished killing of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank.

The Open Prison Zionist-Israel has created of Gaza in 2008, closing all borders and militarily occupying the narrow strip of land at that time of 2.3 million people – no access to media, no access to witnesses – murders, tortures, indescribable atrocities committed, a Holocaust in hiding, of which occasional evidence leaked out.

Then the well-planned – at least three years ahead – Hamas assault of 7 October 2023 on Israel – organized between Zionist-Irael, the US, and UK Secret Services. The attack is now blamed on Hamas. Let us be clear, Hamas is a creation, including funding, by Zionist-Israel.

The purpose, partly to be a “terrorist” (Israel and the West) counterweight to the legitimate Palestinian Authority, partly, to have at any time a legit cause for a “false flag” – exactly as the world witnessed on 7 October.

Israel’s Defense Forces (IDF) reported that in the first hours of the Hamas attack, 1,200 Israelis were killed and more than 200 taken hostage. There is no proof for either claim. Yet, it is repeated ad nauseam even by the non-mainstream media, as if it were the truth.

There are Israeli witness accounts that the IDF was shooting and killing Israeli youth, participating in the Supernova Music Festival in the Negev desert, about five kilometers from the Gaza border on 7 October. The blame for murdering innocent party-goers was put on Hamas.

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This “final” assault on Rafah was announced for weeks by Netanyahu – but he needed to wait for approval of the Zionists commanding Washington.

What will happen to the survivors? Will Israel eventually open the gate to the Sinai Desert, where Egypt, in connivance with Netanyahu and possibly co-paid by Israel, has already built tent cities to accommodate at least some of the Palestinian refugees, never to return to their home land? How long and how many will survive, without adequate food and water, and sanitary facilities, health services?

It looks like the final straw of a well-planned extermination of the Palestinian people, to illegally appropriate their land, and the tremendous gas resources offshore of Gaza, conservatively estimated already more than 20 years ago at a trillion cubic feet. An updated assessment might be exponentially higher. But under the circumstances nobody talks or writes about it.

The illegal creation of Israel dates back at least to the Balfour Declaration of 1917 during WWI. At that time Palestine was part of the Ottoman Empire with a small Jewish population, living in peace together with the Palestinian majority.

The Balfour Declaration was contained in a letter dated 2 November 1917 from the United Kingdom’s Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour to Lord Rothschild, leader of the British Jewish Community, for transmission to the Zionist Federation of Great Britain and Ireland (Wikipedia).

This declaration served the British Government to propose to the United Nations in 1948, the creation of the State of Israel on the Palestine territory. This was illegal as Ottoman-occupied territories became free sovereign nations after WWI, including Palestine. The Mandate to the young, only 52-member strong United Nations in 1948 was illegal. See this “Israel Is an Illegal State”. Dr. Ralph Wilde at the ICJ (videos of ICJ court sessions of 2h 42min and Dr. Wilde’s Plaidoyer 26 min – 29 February 2024).

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How much longer will the world stand by – or worse encourage this horror show? Make no mistake, not about the people of the world, we are strictly talking about the so-called leaders (sic) of the Western world – most of them were never really democratically elected, but put in their positions with legislative trickery from a selection of the World Economic Forum’s (WEF) Academy for Young Global Leaders (YGL).  

On more than one occasion, Klaus Schwab, the WEF’s CEO, boasted about being proud having been able to infiltrate YGLs in governments throughout the world. These so-called Western leaders, they appear to be non-humans, bred by the non-human WEF which is supported and funded by Big Capital, including BlackRock / Vanguard, plus an inter-mingled crop of top Wall Street Financiers. 

How long will the West, especially the European people, stand by such unelected tyrants, like Ms. Von der Leyen, named President of the EU and the WEF appointed puppets, such as Emmanuel Macron, Olaf Scholz and Rishi Sunak? 

The Rafah onslaught may be another nail in Zionist-Israel’s coffin, from which a free Palestine may emerge. May Palestinians return to their old-new sovereign Palestine homeland.

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Peter Koenig is a geopolitical analyst and a former Senior Economist at the World Bank and the World Health Organization (WHO), where he worked for over 30 years around the world. He worked for four years in Palestine and is the author of Implosion – An Economic Thriller about War, Environmental Destruction and Corporate Greed; and co-author of Cynthia McKinney’s book “When China Sneezes: From the Coronavirus Lockdown to the Global Politico-Economic Crisis” (Clarity Press – November 1, 2020).

Peter is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG). He is also a non-resident Senior Fellow of the Chongyang Institute of Renmin University, Beijing.

A Collective “Common Enemy” Now Stalks Mankind

By Stephen Karganovic, April 22, 2024

Yuval Hariri, Klaus Schwab’s spokesman, recently made a statement that should send chills up everyone’s spine. “If bad comes to worse and the Flood comes,” Harari said, he and the likeminded cabal of shadowy world masters will “build an Ark and leave the rest to drown.”

US Blocking Full UN Membership for Palestine – And US Congress Passes Law Depriving Palestine of Freedom of Speech

By Peter Koenig, April 22, 2024

Palestine applied to become a full-fledged United Nations member. On 18 April 2024, the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) voted on the request. The United States single-handedly vetoed Palestine from full UN membership, thereby blocking the world body’s recognition of a Palestinian State.

Adolph Hitler

Adolph Hitler Is “The Torchbearer of Democracy” in Ukraine

By Prof Michel Chossudovsky, April 22, 2024

The Neo-Nazi parties of Ukraine’s so-called coalition government are actively supported by “the international community” namely our governments. The Nazi faction within the Kiev government exerts its power in the realm of intelligence, internal affairs, national security and the military. It’s a proxy regime in liaison with its U.S.-NATO sponsors. 

An Entirely Avoidable Humanitarian Crisis—US Embargo Continues to Inflict Immense Suffering on Cuba

By Bharat Dogra, April 22, 2024

Cuba provides an inspiring example of a very small country whose doctors have reached some of the most difficult areas of human distress and disasters to provide their medical services to people who needed them the most. US President Barack Obama said— “No one should deny the service that thousands of Cuban doctors have delivered for the poor suffering people.”

Iran in the Crosshairs: G7 Has Condemned Iran’s Attack Against Israel

By Manlio Dinucci, April 22, 2024

Italian Premier Giorgia Meloni convened the Group of Seven (United States, Canada, Great Britain, Germany, France, Italy, and Japan), being currently under the Italian presidency, G7 has “unequivocally and in the strongest terms condemned the direct and unprecedented attack of Iran against Israel”.

The Occult Tesla: Why Tesla Flattened Space and Attacked Einstein

By Matthew Ehret-Kump, April 20, 2024

While we don’t know if Nikola Tesla’s adoration of Sir Isaac Newton was connected to Newton’s fanatical occultism or Rosicrucian proclivities (as outlined in part 1 of this series), we can say that Tesla loved Newton’s three laws of motion which tended to flatten reality into assumed “natural” conditions of straight lines and constant motion devoid of any physical properties or curvature.

Israel vs Iran. If Israel Wins the Staring Match, the Earth May Lose!

By Michael Welch, Ed Lehman, Ken Stone, Dimitri Lascaras, and Larry Johnson, April 19, 2024

How much longer can the U.S. continue to silently support Israeli efforts in the area before taking matters into its own hands and launching their own long standing campaign against Iran as part of its hegemonic manoeuvres to dominate the Middle East and ultimately the globe?

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Author’s Introduction: The Vanities of Academic Politics 

I wrote my first book, Church Clothes in 1997. It was finally published in 2004. The essay was written because I had to write it. At the time when I began my work that would culminate in this book there was still a Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and a German Democratic Republic.

By the time Maisonneuve Press published Church Clothes both states were extinct.

I can only recall one review by a South African historian. He repeated the misunderstanding uttered by some of the doctoral committee that rewarded my work with a degree.

Today I do not hesitate to say that that “misunderstanding” and the vanities of academic politics combined to prevent the magnum cum laude grade.

The only committee member who opposed that honour was the chair herself. I mention this as a reiteration. My principal lecturer in political science as an undergraduate also told me that even though I was by far his best student he would never give me an “A” because I did not write what he wanted me to write in my assignments and exams.

Decades later I draw attention to these incidents in my academic curriculum vitae because they are exemplary not only for my personal intellectual development but for the sotto voce character of what so many distinguished scholars praise as the “peer review” system.

Just as I have found my arguments ignored rather than rebutted, I have repeatedly found that the data upon which I have drawn for my research has been similarly ignored or discounted without any attempt to establish its accuracy or soundness. The reasons for this are not unrelated to the central argument of this book.

Since the initiation of the Manhattan Project, the secret US program for developing the first atomic bombs, science has been progressively overwhelmed by a new sacerdotal class, enriched by the State and endowed with access to the plenitude of power and violence. This wholesale purchase of the institutions of learning and research and its subsequent devotion to the business of death first destroyed free inquiry in the natural science fields.

The best funded and highest paid in the natural sciences—those developing the weapons of mass murder and destruction for the State—became the envy and the measure for aspirant scholars, researchers and students. In imitation and greed for a share of that largesse and access, the social sciences followed, as did the humanities, albeit at a slower pace. The peer review system as well as what Morse Peckham called “publish and perish” was nothing less than the proliferation of little House Un-American Activities Committees (HUAAC) throughout American and then Western academia. In a country whose culture has been notorious for its conformism, subjecting intellectual labour to group consensus was perhaps an inherent national trait. In any event the system has functioned very well. It has rigorously defended the elusiveness of the obvious.

Thomas Kuhn, in his famous The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, argued that such “revolutions” do not occur gradually or because some prevailing prejudice has suddenly been disproven or discredited. Instead there is a change in the questions being asked usually starting with those about all the data that does not fit in the current theoretical framework. Peckham, who also knew Kuhn from Princeton, said that any human response in the world requires distinguishing something from everything. Inevitably a lot more is left out than included when limiting one’s behaviour, i.e. responding to the environment. What changes is not the data but the interest. Some data previously deemed irrelevant becomes central. The scholar or researcher is no different from anyone else here. Attention must be restricted in order to respond. That is to say an interest must be followed in order to distinguish from all the data to which they judge it is appropriate to respond. Joseph Weizenbaum’s primary argument against the validity of artificial intelligence focuses on the verb to judge. Machines and those humans who prefer to behave like them (or consider humans to be mere machines) cannot distinguish between data and information because they cannot judge. From an ethical point of view Weizenbaum also insists that the function of such machines, digital or analogue, should not be treated as judgment.

The creation of a vast system of inspection and certification of intellectual product was a logical consequence of organizing the highest levels of scientific activity based on secrecy and loyalty.

However it also applies to the laity. In the US it is virtually impossible to utter public criticism of the country or its institutions without first professing “love” for one’s country. (Needless to say, “love” for any other country is impermissible). Whether it was the adoption of the US version of the Ermächtigungsgesetz (Enabling Act) aka The USA Patriot Act in 2001 or the implementation of the mass incarceration and economic shutdown under the pretext of an alleged pandemic in 2020, even the most academically qualified and experienced critics have felt obliged to demonstrate that their scientific assertions have survived “peer review”. While the Soviet Union was extant Western scholars and scientists discounted or denounced all but the most technical work product as “under political control”. However, the semi-anonymous peer review is nothing less than the act of a collective political commissar with no personal responsibility.

As for the conforming student or scholar and researcher, everything works as if organized intellectual life (the university and its ancillaries) were centres of free inquiry. They are made and kept safe by one’s peers. The potential to become one of those peers depends on decisions taken early in one’s education. Some decisions, like what to write on a term paper or which thesis topic to choose, can make or break one’s career. Without peers there is no one to promote one’s work, whether merely incremental or potentially monumental. The work which never reaches the assent of peers may disappear utterly. The work from which assent has been withdrawn can perish. Lorie Tarshis’s The Elements of Economics is a case in point.

There is another reason I have decided to reissue Church Clothes. Not only did I argue in 1997 for recognition of the way mission, as a knowledge technology, transforms social formations, I also argued that the “land question” was fundamental for any serious political science and its systematic neglect a discredit to any politics claiming to serve human beings. To simplify the argument of the following pages: mission is the ecclesiastical expression of conquest.

Church conquest is essentially the domination of souls (minds) and hence also culture.

Since the soul or mind (a metaphor for the body of human responses) develops from the historical experience in the empirical world and reproduces the culture (instructions for performance), control over the material world is essential in order to produce culture. The Church (Christian mission in all its manifestations) engaged in mission to preach a culture it would create by conquering and dominating the space in which that culture was to be imposed. Following Kuhn, destroying the data sets and institutions for stabilizing responses to them was a prerequisite to conversion. The conquered population had to be redirected to other data and data structures—those preferred by the Church and those who own it. Kuhn’s scientific revolutions, at scale, are conversions not proofs. Expropriating the land, whether in North America, Australia or South Africa, to name but the most notorious, was not only a strategy for enrichment but for mass conversion. That mass conversion was essential to sustain what would otherwise have been transitory conquest.

Since the annexation of the German Democratic Republic, the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the demolition of the Yugoslav Federation, the official Western policy has been that all the pre-1989 borders were violations of the inherent national and ethnic identities of the peoples inhabiting those countries.

National and ethnic, following long-standing British political warfare strategy, are assumed to be identical for the purposes of forced conversion.

Two seemingly contradictory policies have been pursued vehemently for nearly forty years. On one hand, every ethnic group susceptible of recognition by either the US or EU is entitled to political self-determination. On the other hand, any nation that defends its territorial integrity against foreign intervention (overt or covert) can be denied its sovereignty regardless of ethnic composition. Thus although the dissolution of the Soviet Union was eased by the Union constitution that permitted (in contrast to the US Constitution) republics to secede, the vast distribution of large Russian majorities in those newly separate republics did not legitimate redefinition of the boundaries or guarantees for those who literally overnight had lost their Soviet citizenship, which had made them citizens wherever they lived in the USSR. The historical complexities of the Yugoslav Federation were irrelevant to the forces determined to destroy it and steal its resources, including the geographical advantages for trans-Eurasian rail and pipeline traffic.

In fact since 1947 only one nation-state has been able to guarantee by any means it deems necessary its territorial and “ethno-religious” homogeneity. The former POTUS Jimmy Carter even called the means by which its system of governance and territorial control—its land regime—are imposed, apartheid, after the original legal regime by that name had been abolished in South Africa. Although the title of my book refers to the “end of apartheid in South Africa” it did not suppose the end of apartheid as a policy per se. In 1948, the ethnic nationalist National Party was elected to govern South Africa. In the same year, the settler regime in Mandatory Palestine announced its independent statehood. South Africa declared itself a republic in 1961 and was practically expelled from the Commonwealth. The NP’s Afrikaner version of ethnic nationalism was offensive to the non-white Commonwealth members upon whom Britain’s material wealth depends. The National Party regime understood itself as a movement of ethnic national self-determination, antagonistic both to the Bantu and the British. It elaborated the Afrikaner identity but would have been incapable of dominating the country without including the British and other European “foreigners”. Thus its original ethnic base was diluted to establish a “white” nationalism while the “Bantu” majority was carefully segregated into language and tribal groups, later assigned by law to their own “national” territories, territories with no real sovereignty. This was the NP’s version of the “two state solution”. By 1991 there was an international consensus imposed upon the South African state. The Republic of South Africa was a unitary state and not a pseudo-confederation of white and black entities. After separation of amenities and other segregation measures were repealed, the acts creating the so-called Bantustans were also purged from the law. Meanwhile the other apartheid regime continues in force.

The persistence of apartheid and its fanatical violence in the West means the question “what is apartheid?” continues to be of the utmost importance. Furthermore, just as the South African state claimed an essentially Old Testament basis for its legitimacy until 1994, the surviving apartheid system in Palestine retains this rabbinical-scriptural foundation. Yet more importantly, the establishment and maintenance of apartheid today is inseparable from the land in dispute. There can be no doubt that apartheid is ultimately a strategy and justification for expropriation and exclusive control of land by the State, on behalf of those who own it.

Beyond the most obvious extant apartheid regime there are far greater forces at work. It is tempting to see the current 70+ year war in Palestine as a local conflict. Even those who worry about world peace because of the failure to reach a peaceful solution to the conflict between the occupying state and the aboriginal population are often blinded by the fanaticism with which the war is waged by the occupying state actor. Their concerns range from humanitarian to pragmatic-economic. It is impossible to deny that the Middle East has been a strategic interface for global trade and communications for millennia. The Latin Church waged centuries of war in order to dominate what it called the Holy Land. Here the Latin Empire battled the forces of Islam before a European sect adopted the territory as a settler-colonial project—just at the moment when Woodrow Wilson’s liberal cant had established the principle of decolonization (if only for the colonies of one’s rivals). His Britannic Majesty’s government, masters of indirect rule and exploitation at arm’s length, needed little prodding to support some kind of settlement proposal for an economically influential cult. It has been credibly argued that the Balfour Declaration was actually a clever bit of subterfuge that was very unpopular among much of Britain’s ruling elite. However the decision-makers, some very powerful members of the Rhodes-Rothschild Round Table and some essentially bribed agents of the same forces were able to impose this new white settler colony even while other white colonies in Africa were collapsing. The terrorism conducted against all opponents to the realignment of Mandate Palestine has been interpreted by many as proof that the policy subsequent to the Balfour Declaration was not only a mistake but injurious to British interests.

Such arguments rely on an antiquated concept of British interests. It relies on a view of Britain propagated precisely by those historians from the Round Table (RIIA) tradition who continue to dominate the history profession on both sides of the Atlantic, and hence the derivative historical research on the Continent. The principal innovation of the Netherlands and Great Britain in the 18th century was the amalgamation of the State and the joint stock company. Today this is called the “public-private partnership”. When the VOC and BEIC were formed, unlike their weaker counterparts in France and Denmark, they were not only stronger than the existing state apparatus, they had achieved quasi-personal union with the sovereign. The VOC was essentially a republic apparatus while the more advanced BEIC benefited by the patronage of a monarchy that was beholden to its financial class in the City of London. Although the British East India Company eventually went bankrupt and was dissolved as an entity, the piratical machine it has innovated—the precursor to the modern multinational corporation—survived and flourished as an instrument of empire. The geographical centre of that empire is the City of London, the Square Mile. In that enclave of financial adventurism, i.e. piracy or capitalism, the aim of all policy is the control over cash flow and risk throughout the world.

In other words it is necessary to look for the technology of social transformation in processes found in a variety of institutions. These may operate with different formal ideologies and organizational structures. Those structures provide constraints both as internal and external projections of power. In politics power is exercised by the ability to impose shared meaning. That in turn means the capacity to limit responses in ways that conform to a given culture. We tend to ignore power when politics succeeds in compelling consensus and marginalizing or eliminating dissent. That is as natural as the thoughtlessness by which a fork and knife are used to eat until one finds there is only soup.

If we recognize that apartheid did not end with the retirement of the NP regime and the adoption of the 1994 constitution, although its legal framework was largely abolished in South Africa, then we have to examine the phenomenon as something that is not specific to the Cape republic. We have to consider the South African experience just one historical example of a social formation and that there are other varieties that may share attributes but also exhibit differences from the system formally in place from 1948 until 1994. In 1997 I based my analysis of South African apartheid precisely on the premise that South Africa was a special case of a more general phenomenon.

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“Reserved for the sole use of members of the white race group” sign in English, Afrikaans, and Zulu at a beach in Durban, 1989 (Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0)

One of the founding myths of the South African epic was the claim that whites and blacks migrated into the Southern tip of Africa more or less at the same time. Hence black tribes had no prior territorial claims with precedence over those of the Dutch settlers at the Cape. This myth also asserted that nations, at least those that had emerged after the Thirty Years War, were politically and socially more mature forms of social organization and culture than anything the black inhabitants could claim. Maturity meant innate superiority. Hence Afrikaner nationalism was hierarchically superior to any other emergent nationalism, although potentially comparable to the nationalism in Britain’s other African colonies. A derivative myth was the foundation of the Group Areas Act. Allowing that each population, racially-ethnically defined, was entitled to its own development in its own space, separate spaces had to be recognized and assigned in which that development could occur. Beyond those boundaries black South Africans had no legal rights or privileges since these were residual to their own areas. In order to reconcile this legal fiction with the facts on the ground, the South African government began the process of forced removal. Cape Town and Cape Province was particularly disrupted because of the population of people called “Coloured” for whom there were no natural areas or “tribal homelands” to which these descendants of white settlers could be assigned.

In 1989 a global realignment began. While this has been analysed in terms of great power politics, the so-called Cold War, and the various strategic decisions by the Anglo-American Empire, another form of realignment was also initiated that cannot be subsumed by the Cold War model or the proposed Unipolar vs. Multipolar debate. This realignment is multi-layered and multi-faceted. Since the end of the Soviet Union has meant the end of grand theoretical analysis in any of the sciences, there has been enormous fragmentation combined with simplification in the study of the political-social-economic changes. This is due in large part to the absence of credible cultural history. By cultural history I do not mean either the comparative cultural studies associated with anthropology or sociology. Nor do I mean the sophistry and mendacity embedded in such pseudo-disciplines like “critical race theory”.

Cultural history is an integration of humanistic research methods with other tools aimed at explaining human behaviour, both individually and collectively, in the present using all the artefacts and documents available from the Past. Every explanation implies an organization and every organization can be understood as an explanation. There is no meta-position from which to study culture. We are in it to the end, till death do us part.

We have been witnessing—at least into the far reaches of the Anglo-American Empire—unprecedented human migration. Millions of people have been driven from their homes by wars, conventional and counter-insurgency (terrorism) and mysteriously transported over oceans no armies could cross, past borders once guarded by men at arms, into countries whose economies are being driven to collapse by the empire’s ruling oligarchy. Very little of the public debate, whether by laity or government functionaries, addresses the scope of this migration in anything resembling a coherent way. These flows in the millions within very short periods of time are not being repelled, like Asians or Southern Europeans were once repelled from US shores. On the contrary all the leading functionaries and officeholders in the West are insisting that these millions be admitted into the country on terms not only more favourable than lawful immigration (for which waiting lists and quotas apply) but also more favourable than for native-born or previously naturalized citizens. There is strong, if ineffective, resistance to this wave. However it is condemned rather than analysed.

Historical records show that massive waves of human migration are not in themselves new. What is unique about these migrations is that they are entirely man-made. China, central Eurasia, and Africa all experienced waves of migration when famine or other natural disasters accumulated to force people in large regions to move from desolation to new sources of food and shelter. Nowhere was such migration wholly without conflict. Yet what we have seen since 1989 is another kind of enforced migration. In an era where the monopoly of armed force as well as commercial and manufacturing power is in the hand of a small band of pirates calling themselves hedge funds or investment banks, two parallel forms of globalization have been accelerating. Until now the lead form of globalization was the relocation of industrial capacity to low wage countries and continued capture of their natural resources. In this shape there was little difference from the old colonial model, except that local governments run by natives had replaced imperial administrators and governors. The almost complete de-industrialization of the metropolitan countries has steadily reduced their populations to consumers and service workers. Thus the value extracted from those countries is derived from cash flow and the traffic in intangibles (finance and intellectual property). Population declines have been compensated by increase in the cost of consumption in order to maintain high cash extraction rates.

As a rule there has never been any interest in developing a similar consumer-based extractive economy in the low-wage, resource-rich parts of the world. This has led those who profit from the international flows of cash and resources to speculate by creating a massive international flow of human resources. Hence there has been a systematic series of wars incited and waged throughout the world to make large swathes of the planet uninhabitable. These wars constitute essentially strategic deportation of indigenous populations, whether from Syria, Palestine, Central Africa, Ukraine, or any other place where the land is worth more than the people living on it.

It is certainly no accident that high representatives of hedge funds, armaments, digital technology and mass media sit annually in ecumenical council in the heights of the Swiss Alps to devise such ideas as The Great Reset or the Fourth Industrial Revolutionfor a world in which the vast majority of people will “own nothing and be happy”. It should surprise no one that policies to concentrate populations like battery chickens in the urban conurbations of the temperate zone are to be administered by the PPP World Health Organization with its program of regular pandemics and constant inoculation. Much speculation and hysteria has been spent divining the motives, intentions and secret plans at the pinnacle of the sacerdotal and neo-feudal estate in aspiration. Unfortunately much of that has been impaired by fixation on a worldview that sentimentalizes the political ideologies of the English and Scottish Enlightenment at the same time demonizing the ideas of the French.

Both positions distract from the underlying cultural historical phenomenon upon which the West is built: the Latin Church, the original totalitarian system in the West. It has mutated many times since the Reformation and the Thirty Years’ War, however it remains the single most important explanation and organization in the West. It is the core of what Samuel Huntington meant by “the superiority in applying organized violence.” The Fourth Crusade was an early climax in the “clash of civilizations”, better said the clash of the West with civilization. Philanthro-capitalism, especially that attributed to Bill Gates and George Schwartz Soros, is atomic-strength or a viral form of the mass conversion model propagated by the Latin Church. When the 14-year-old Soros adopted the “deport and confiscate” practice of enrichment, as a willing helper to the occupying forces of Nazi Germany, he was confessing to the business model upon which his entire Open Society and Quantum Fund organizations are based. The International Organization for Migration, a UN specialized agency (PPP), turned the UN relief to workers compelled to migrate as labourers after World War 2 into the service provider to permanently displaced people. The overall objective pursued by the World Economic Forum, as the college of cardinals in the Church of Finance Capitalism (what the medieval Latin Church was in essence), can be seen when these prelates convene to put their seal upon the covenants by which capital, humanity, and natural resources are maintained in continuous flow to be allocated wherever the hierarchy deems desirable or necessary. The land upon which people are born, from which they derive their nutrition and habitation, in which their cultures emerge and the humanity unfolds, is to be seized de facto where people are deported and de jure where they still live or arrive. The hedge funds or carcino-capitalists like Gates, Soros and those whose names we will never hear or read are already buying whatever is vacated by force of arms or destitution, both in the source countries and the new targets.

Deprived of land and affordable, safe homes in the places they were born and where there families have lived, often for centuries, these human flows will be dehumanized, too. Their material culture no longer either natural or self-produced, it too becomes the discharge of planned obsolescence. A mass conversion is underway in the West. Instead of “group areas” there will be no areas and no groups. The grand apartheid of the future is that separation between those who own nothing and those who own everything. Perhaps that is a good reason to rethink what one thought one knew about the apartheid in South Africa.

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This article was originally published on Seek Truth from Facts Foundation.

Dr. T.P. Wilkinson writes, teaches History and English, directs theatre and coaches cricket between the cradles of Heine and Saramago. He is also the author of Church Clothes, Land, Mission and the End of Apartheid in South Africa. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

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Palestine applied to become a full-fledged United Nations member. On 18 April 2024, the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) voted on the request. 

The United States single-handedly vetoed Palestine from full UN membership, thereby blocking the world body’s recognition of a Palestinian State.

The vote in the 15-member Security Council was 12 in favor, the US opposed and two abstentions, the UK and Switzerland.

What is largely called Palestine, has since 2012 a non-member observer status. An application for full membership with voting rights must be approved by the UN Security Council and two-thirds of the General Assembly. See this.

The Palestinian Authority slams the US veto as an “aggression”, calling it “unfair, immoral, and unjustified.” This benign statement is far from reflecting the truth behind blocking the UN-recognized statehood of Palestine. The truth is that Washington under the Democrats led by Biden supports the Zionists thrive for exterminating Palestinians and eliminating the State of Palestine.

Simultaneous with the US veto, a bill requesting additional US$ 26 billion weapons and budget support for Israel reached the US House Floor. The Biden Administration, widely supported by its European puppet leaders, wants more Palestinians killed – especially Gazan inhabitants, or rather prisoners, need to be exterminated, killed by bombs, gunned down, starved to death and the survivors eventually expelled.

Probably the Sinai desert, where Egypt already built semi-clandestinely – for sure in agreement with Israel – tent cities to accommodate at least some of the expelled Palestinians. 

Imagine! Who will feed them? Who will provide health services and facilities? Simply, the Zionist intent is to let them slowly and miserably perish.

That is the Zionist extermination plan. In civilized language called “ethnic cleansing”.

The latter, of course, is a crime rather than an absurdity.

Here is absurdity driven to extreme. On Wednesday, 17 April, the US House of Representatives passed a Resolution, condemning the chanting of the phrase “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.”

Genocidal Congress representatives, either Zionists, or American Congress People coerced by Zionists, are such maniacs that they will not allow the Gaza-imprisoned Palestinians chanting their wish for freedom of their land “From the Jordan River to the Med-Sea, We, Palestine, shall be free”. 

If nothing else, the Resolution is a breach on Freedom of Speech, as per the US Constitution’s First Amendment:

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”

The Resolution passed Wednesday is a blatant attempt to abridge the freedom of speech.

It is reminiscent of book burning in the not-too-distant past. Yes, humanity is progressing fast but backwards. In more ways than one.

The supporters of the Resolution claim that the chant is “antisemitic”, even though the word Jew never appears in it. It only claims or wishes freedom for Palestine.

Whoever Congressperson introduced this abhorrently idiotic and contradictory bill – no names shall be named – his or her brain-power was sadly reduced to the size of a chick-bean. Maybe through the multiple-boostered vaxxes?

Looking back at almost forgotten history, on 13 December, 1993, then U.S. Secretary of State Warren Christopher, signed the Oslo Peace Accords. These accords, which have the force of U.S. Law, specified that Israel would withdraw from Gaza and the Palestinian West Bank by 1997 and turn their governance over to the Palestine Authority, that is, the State of Palestine.

Remember the famous 1993 picture of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) Chairman Yasser Arafat shaking hands on the White House lawn, both embraced by Bill Clinton.

File:Bill Clinton, Yitzhak Rabin, Yasser Arafat at the White House 1993-09-13.jpg

Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, U.S. president Bill Clinton, and PLO chairman Yasser Arafat. (Source: Vince Musi / The White House)

 

The Oslo Agreements proposed a two-state solution. Had they been implemented then; Palestine would indeed be free from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea.  

However, Netanyahu, leader of the far-right Likud party, never had any intentions to implement the Oslo Accords. He then, as today, played his dirty games of deception, of lying to the public, by letting the Accords being negotiated and signed.

An independent Palestine would have meant that Palestine would sovereignly own the natural resources on or under her soil, especially water resources. Of the combined Palestine Israel territory, pre-1967 borders, some 80% of all water resources belong to Palestine. 

This was not acceptable to Israel. Today, Israel is almost in full control of all the water, often building Jewish settlements on or by Palestinian groundwater- and surface water springs.

Here is a testimony on how Netanyahu boasts about manipulating America and derailing the Oslo Peace Process. See video below.

The Oslo Agreements were signed by one of Netanyahu’s predecessors, Yitzhak Rabin and PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat, witnessed and approved by then US President Bill Clinton.

It is not only absurd but an outright criminal act to pass a Zionist-pushed bill in the US Congress that forbids a chant of freedom, which has a full legal basis, the signed Oslo Agreements. 

As it looks now, Zionist-Israel does not need a US Law that prohibits the interpretation “From the (Jordan) River to the Sea, Palestine shall be Free”. Zionist-Israel does whatever she wants, irrespective of signed documents and international laws. They are overtaken by the “rules-based order”. 

The would-be sovereign State of Palestine was never allowed the freedom Israel and the PLO signed for in 1993. See this full report.

The tyranny of then, who is the tyrant of today, Netanyahu, has blocked that freedom for Palestine, with the Western world support, largely coerced by the all-powerful international Zionist lobby.

Netanyahu and his cohorts are doing whatever they can with their indiscriminate slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank to wipe out Palestine. However, the way it looks today, with worldwide support for Israel ever-more waning – about 90% of worldwide populations are backing Palestine – Israel may wipe herself off the map.

This concept is echoed ever more around the world. That might indeed be the best outcome – political suicide for a Zionist Israel.

Negotiations could then start for a non-Zionist Israel, an Israel for honest Jews; along and side-by-side with a sovereign Palestine. Equal rights and equal sovereignty shall reign.

Winning a war is insignificant. Everywhere in the world. Wars and conflicts divide. Not only the warriors, but also the public at large, as publicity drives them to take sides.

What counts is not winning, but PEACE.

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Peter Koenig is a geopolitical analyst and a former Senior Economist at the World Bank and the World Health Organization (WHO), where he worked for over 30 years around the world, including for 4 years in Palestine’s West Bank and Gaza on water resources. Peter writes regularly for online journals and is the author of Implosion – An Economic Thriller about War, Environmental Destruction and Corporate Greed; and co-author of Cynthia McKinney’s book “When China Sneezes: From the Coronavirus Lockdown to the Global Politico-Economic Crisis” (Clarity Press – November 1, 2020). 

Peter is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG). He is also a non-resident Senior Fellow of the Chongyang Institute of Renmin University, Beijing.

Featured image: The General Assembly adopted a resolution in 2012 granting to Palestine the status of non-member observer State in the United Nations. (UN Photo/Rick Bajornas)

A Collective “Common Enemy” Now Stalks Mankind

April 22nd, 2024 by Stephen Karganovic

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Yuval Hariri, Klaus Schwab’s spokesman, recently made a statement that should send chills up everyone’s spine. “If bad comes to worse and the Flood comes,” Harari said, he and the likeminded cabal of shadowy world masters will “build an Ark and leave the rest to drown.”

Elsewhere, Harari elaborates on the reasons for his fellow elitists’ cold-hearted indifference to the fate of the vast majority of Earth’s inhabitants:

“If you go back to the middle of the 20th century … and you think about building the future, then your building materials are those millions of people who are working hard in the factories, in the farms, the soldiers. You need them. You don’t have any kind of future without them.”

What he means is that you – referring to the dominant social and financial elites of that era – still “needed” the labour of millions in the various fields of economic endeavour in order to turn a profit. Since then, how have things changed according to “futurologist” Harari?

“Now, fast forward to the early 21st century when we just don’t need the vast majority of the population, because the future is about developing more and more sophisticated technology, like artificial intelligence [and] bioengineering, most people don’t contribute anything to that, except perhaps for their data, and whatever people are still doing something useful, these technologies increasingly will make them redundant and will make it possible to replace those people.”

Elitist mouthpiece Harari deserves credit for blood-curdling honesty, if not for the morality of his and his masters’ “visions.” He is plainly signalling the view that this writer, the editors of this portal, its readers and the rest of mankind are expendable and apart from whatever economic utility they still might possess are bereft of any inherent dignity or value.

Harari and his immediate superior in the elitist nomenklatura, Klaus Schwab, technically are private individuals. Their organisational vehicle, the World Economic Forum, is a private NGO registered in Switzerland. Formally, they neither represent nor do they speak for any government or official structure with a proper claim to legitimacy. They have no licence to plan or arrange the future of humanity, beside the self-authorisation to do so which they and the oligarchical globalist power centres they commune and mingle with have arrogated to themselves. No one elected or empowered them to plan anybody’s future, other than their own, and even that strictly in their private capacity.

Yet disposing of the future of mankind is precisely what they presume to do, in Davos in plenary session once a year and the rest of the time in conspiratorial confabulation amongst themselves.

The nature of the “planning” in which they engage should be of deep interest and grave concern to everyone. Not just for the unbridled hubris it displays but more pointedly for the homicidal design that underlies it, on a vast and hitherto unimaginable scale which Raphael Lemkin was incapable of conceiving when he coined the term “genocide.”

When and if the predicted “tsunami” to drown mankind occurs, and we may be confident that Harari and his cohorts have the capacity to make it happen at a time and in the manner of their choosing, as the recently fabricated health event has shown, they will not be mourning the victims. On the contrary, they will be delighted at the success of their handiwork. As the bulk of mankind “drowns,” they will gloat.

It is indisputable that Harari speaks not just in his own or Schwab’s name. He is publicly articulating the ideological vision of a depopulated Earth, cleansed of human presence and tinged with occultist misanthropy. That vision is widely shared by the luminaries of his elitist set. A high profile member of that set, Bill Gates, has been insistently stressing the need to dispose of the useless multitudes by any means, fair or foul. One of Gates’ alarmingly explicit elocutions on this subject was removed by YouTube, allegedly for “violating community guidelines.” The real reason for expunging his remarks from the internet was the danger that they could raise an alarm amongst the targeted “flood victims,” provoking them to react with uncontrollable rage once they discovered what the elitist “visionaries” have in store for them.

These psychopathic serial killers (we should not mince words) using their vast financial, political and media (brainwashing) resources are inexorably putting into effect a homicidal global depopulation agenda. Depopulation, as Harari has honestly admitted, means physically eliminating as many human beings as they deem superfluous or useless for their purposes. The concept of population control, again not to mince words, is their code for global genocide.

The Club of Rome, one of the institutional components of the depopulation network, in a programmatic document published in 1974 could not have put the main principle of their genocidal philosophy more starkly: “The Earth has cancer and the cancer is Man.” Is it necessary to clarify that cancers are not nurtured and  cultivated? Cancers are to be extirpated.

F. William Engdahl recently shined extraordinary light on the deep roots of the nefarious plan, discussed and implemented openly by its malevolent promoters in plain view of the intended victims. Engdahl has shown that perverts like Schwab and Harari are but public faces of a malevolent trans-generational scheme.

Engdahl quotes from a report issued by the Club of Rome, “The First Global Revolution.” It is admitted there that the CO2 global warming claims, serving as the convenient rationale to forcefully impose upon  humanity an endless array of destructive structural changes, are merely an invented ruse.

That is because “…the common enemy of humanity is man. In searching for a new enemy to unite us, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like would fit the bill. All these dangers are caused by human intervention, and it is only through changed attitudes and behavior that they can be overcome. The real enemy then, is humanity itself.”

“The agenda,” Engdahl sombrely concludes, “is dark, dystopian and meant to eliminate billions of us ‘ordinary humans.’”

An important clarification needs to be made. Humanity is not the enemy, but is on the contrary the crown of God’s creation. And it is humanity itself that now is facing an implacable enemy, in this case a collective incarnation of the defining characteristic Edward Gibbon attributed to the depraved emperors Commodus and Caracalla: “common enemy of mankind.”

This time round, however, humanity is no longer facing the perverse eccentricities of an individual deviant. Today, it must confront Commodus’ and Caracalla’s collective personification, in the form of a depraved global oligarchy, imbued with dangerous delusions of omnipotence and impunity.

Why have we chosen to dwell on this dark subject? In the first place, because the intended genocide victims world-wide are entitled to be informed and naturally they also have the right to self-defence, in order to preserve their own and their families’ lives, as well as to ensure the integrity of their societies, cultures, historical memory, and way of life.

But there is also another important reason, to expose the cynicism and utter amorality of the genocidal fanatics who still are directing the destiny of a considerable portion of mankind and exert their energies continuously to regain complete control over the remainder.

Acting through their proxies Germany and Rwanda, recently joined by France and a few other puppet governments, they had the impudence to submit in the General Assembly of the United Nations a resolution to condemn and memorialise the fabricated “genocide” in Srebrenica, censuring for genocide a nation that throughout the twentieth century has itself been the target for effective extinction.

That is the very crime that they themselves are brazenly plotting to commit, not in some remote Balkan municipality but upon humanity as a whole.

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

Featured image: Ted Talk video screenshot


Rethinking Srebrenica eBook : Karganovic, Stephen, Simic, Ljubisa: Amazon.co.uk: BooksRethinking Srebrenica

By Stephen Karganovic

Rethinking Srebrenica examines the forensic evidence of the alleged Srebrenica “massacre” possessed by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague. Even though the ICTY created more than 3,500 autopsy reports, many of these autopsy reports were based on bone fragments, which do not represent complete bodies. An examination of the matching femur bones found reveals that there were only about 1,900 complete bodies that were exhumed. Of these, some 1,500 autopsy reports indicated a cause of death consistent with battlefield casualties. Only about 400 autopsy reports indicated execution as a cause of death, as revealed by ligatures and blindfolds. This forensic evidence does not warrant the conclusion of a genocide having taken place.

Karganovic examines the events that took place in Srebrenica in July 1995 in a wholistic manner instead of restricting it to a three-day event. The ten chapters cover:

1) Srebrenica: A Critical Overview;

2) Demilitarization of the UN Safe Zone of Srebrenica;

3) Genocide or Blowback?;

4) General Presentation and Interpretation of Srebrenica Forensic Data (Pattern of Injury Breakdown);

5) An Analysis of the Srebrenica Forensic Reports Prepared by the ICTY Prosecution Experts;

6) An Analysis of Muslim Column Losses Attributable to Minefields, Combat Activity, and Other Causes;

7) The Genocide Issue: Was there a Demonstrable Intent to Exterminate All Muslims?;

8) ICTY Radio Intercept Evidence;

9) The Balance Sheet; and

10) Srebrenica: Uses of the Narrative.

  • ASIN:‎ B0992RRJRK
  • Publisher: ‎Unwritten History, Inc.; 2 edition (July 8 2021)
  • Language: ‎English

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The Greater Israel Project is the long term agenda of Revisionist Zionists within the hard-right Likud Party of modern day Israel. It is Israel’s lebensraum, their utopian dream of territorial expansion. It was part of the original platform of the Hatzohar political party, (Alliance of Revisionist Zionists) founded by Ze’ev Jabotinsky, and promoted by Israel’s first Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion and first President Chaim Weizmann.

 

 

Territorial expansion means capturing resources, and the Greater Israel Project’s main goal is to control the Middle East’s energy resources and the gas and oil transit routes. Ten countries in the Middle East account for only 3.4% of the area, but contain 48% of the world’s known oil reserves and 38% of natural gas reserves.

In terms of specific countries, Saudi Arabia holds the largest oil reserves in the Middle East, with 297.7 billion barrels in 2018, accounting for 17.2% of the world’s total proved oil reserves. Other major oil reserves in the Middle East are found in Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, and the United Arab Emirates.

 

 

As for natural gas, the Middle East holds 40% of the world’s conventional gas reserves.

Greater Israel cannot be achieved without conquering Iran, because Iran is in control of the Strait of Hormuz, which is the transit route of about 30% of the world’s total oil and gas consumption. If Israel were somehow able to subdue Iran, the Strait of Hormuz would fall under Israel’s control.

Iran Missile Attack

Israel launched an airstrike on the Iranian Consulate in Damascus, Syria, on April 1, killing several top commanders of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard. Iranian officials in the building were allegedly meeting with Palestinian militant leaders at the time of the attack.

 

 

Iran retaliated on April 13 with a drone swarm and airstrikes. Iran’s attack involved approximately 170 drones, over 30 cruise missiles, and more than 120 ballistic missiles. Israel and the US claimed the operation was defeated, but other commentators told a different story.

American military analyst Scott Ritter, said in an interview with George Galloway, that Iran responded shrewdly in its retaliatory attack over the weekend. Iran sent a clear message to Israel and the U.S., that it has the military capacity to evade any of Israel’s anti-missile defences.

From Scott Ritter’s Substack:

“On April 13-14, 2023, this system failed. In short, the combination of US and Israeli anti-ballistic missile defence capabilities deployed in and around the Negev desert made the Israeli air bases located there the most protected locations in the world from threats posed by ballistic missiles.

And yet Iran successfully struck both locations with multiple missiles.

The global strategic implications of this stunning Iranian accomplishment are game-changing—the US has long struggled conceptually with the notion of what is referred to as “A2/AD” (anti-access/area denial) threats posed by hostile ballistic missiles. However, the US had sought to mitigate against this AA/A2 threat by overlaying theater ballistic missile defense architecture like that had been employed in Israel. The failure of the combined US-Israeli defense systems in the face of a concerted Iranian missile attack exposed the short-comings of the US ballistic missile defense capabilities world-wide.”

Based on the success of the attack, it is apparent that Israel would have an extremely tough time conquering Iran.

Gaza Natural Gas Reserves

The Gaza Marine natural gas field is located in water about 36 kilometres (22 mi) offshore at a depth of 2,000 feet (610 m). The field was discovered in 2000 by British Gas Group, and it is estimated to contain more than 1 trillion cubic feet (28.32 km3) of natural gas, valued at about $3 billion.

Israel announced on October 29, 2023, that it awarded 12 licenses for exploring additional offshore natural gas fields to six companies, including British Petroleum and Italian energy giant Eni.

Israel and Egypt have already conducted talks in 2022 to develop the gas field, with some consultation with Hamas, though obviously the “consultation” is only informing Hamas that they are going to exploit it, because Palestinians are not allowed access to the area. Citizens of Gaza are only allowed to fish within a six nautical mile limit (11 km) from the coast. Violators are fired upon.

CIA Mercenary Group FogBow Building Pier

The US navy has concocted a dubious plan to build a temporary pier on the shore of Gaza, allegedly to provide humanitarian aid by cargo ship. The project will enlist over 1000 soldiers who will build a floating dock to moor to incoming vessels. Cargo will be unloaded to the dock and then ferried to a temporary pier for offloading to transport trucks.

 

 

This is a complete fabrication. Israel has reduced access to transport trucks at the main border crossing in Rafah. There are usually from 500 to 650 trucks permitted into Gaza each day, but now that number has been reduced to a mere 150 trucks per day. This is not sustainable, considering the dire condition of the population, who are starving to death with over 75,000 wounded.

The plan is being coordinated by a company called FogBow, that suddenly appeared on February 24, 2024, registered in Switzerland. Adding to the intrigue, it is run by former US Marine Corps, Sam Mundy and former CIA agent, Mick Mulroy, who is also co-founder of the Lobo (Wolf) Institute, that claims on their website: “Lobo Institute advises, consults, and teaches on current and future conflicts, how to end conflicts and prevent their recurrence, and how to help those most affected.”

A wolf in sheep’s clothing who claims he only wants to help is the stuff of fairy tales. 

A more plausible explanation is that FogBow is a private mercenary outfit providing a floating US naval base to offload military and construction equipment to prepare for further escalation in the region and the subsequent reconstruction of Gaza. Another possible reason for the port may be to evacuate en masse the entire population of Gaza and transport them to other regions. Israel has already asked Egypt to accept 2,000,000 Palestinians. Israel offered not only to pay for it, but they would also wipe a significant portion of Egypt’s national debt of $160 billion through the World Bank.

 

 

To add insult to injury, the above-mentioned pier is being built with the rubble from the bombed buildings that Israel destroyed. The bodies of thousands of dead Palestinians are still buried in the rubble, and the memory of this will no doubt haunt the pier for its entire existence.

Netanyahu Unveils Plan to Construct Settlements

Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu brazenly announced April 17 his plans to construct new settlements outside of Gaza with a $5 billion ($19 billion shekels) investment. The five-year plan is backed by Germany and the UK. He was careful to say the investment was outside Gaza, but those Jewish areas do not need rebuilding because they were not bombed into dust—another fabrication.

“The Hamas terrorists wanted to uproot us—we will uproot them while deepening our roots. We will build the Land of Israel and protect our country,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said.

The Ben Gurion Canal Project

The Suez Canal funnels 12% of global trade and 30% of global container traffic. It generates over $9 billion in revenue every year, and approximately 22,000 ships flow through the canal annually.

The proposed Ben Gurion Canal would re-route marine traffic up the Red Sea, where the canal, beginning at Eiliat, would terminate at the port at Ashkelon, just north of Gaza. It would move ships through a wider canal that would allow ships to move in both directions at once. The Suez Canal allows traffic in only one direction at a time.

 

 

This is in addition to the “Red Med” (Red Sea-Mediterranean Sea) project, part of the Chinese Belt and Road Initiative to connect the port of Eilat to the port of Ashdod via train and 63 bridges and tunnels at a cost ranging from $6.5 billion to $13 billion, according to Israeli think tank, BESAR.

China and Israel have cooperated on multiple infrastructure projects. China built the new port at Haifa in 2021 at a cost of $1.7 billion ($5.5 billion shekels). It is operated by the Shanghai International Port Group (SIPG), and it enables larger classes of cargo ships, carrying 18,000 containers or more, to dock in Israel.

China has more Belt and Road Initiative projects with Israel than with any other country in the region. These include projects in AI, medicine, telecom, Smart City and cybersecurity. It is apparent that Israel and China are fully in bed with mega-plans to integrate the entire Eurasian continent.

The New Middle East

All of these projects are part of a broader “New Middle East,” a term first used by US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice in June 2006, in Dubai. Rice said it would be achieved through “constructive chaos,” a phrase she repeated a few weeks later during a joint press conference with Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert when the 2006 Lebanon War broke out.

In an article in GlobalResearch.ca, geopolitical analyst Mahdi Nazemroaya commented, “This project, which has been in the  planning stages for several years, consists in creating an arc of instability, chaos, and violence extending from Lebanon, Palestine, and Syria to Iraq, the Persian Gulf, Iran, and the borders of NATO-garrisoned Afghanistan … This constructive chaoswhich generates conditions of violence and warfare throughout the region—would in turn be used so that the United States, Britain, and Israel could redraw the map of the Middle East in accordance with their geo-strategic needs and objectives.”

 

 

Just over six months ago, on Sept 22, 2023, at the United Nations General Debate, Prime Minister Netanyahu held up a map and he outlined his plan for a “New Middle East,” where Arab nations would normalize diplomatic relations with Israel and leave out the Palestinian issue.

The map he held up, showed Israel, but no Palestine. This is Israel’s idea of “peace.” Netanyahu proclaimed that “Palestinians must stop spewing Jew-hatred and finally reconcile themselves to the Jewish state.” Translated, this means Palestinians must roll over and die, and let Israel steal everything they own and expel them from the region. If they do not comply, it is “Jew-hatred.”

 

 

Netanyahu argued that the new rapprochement with Saudi Arabia was the beginning of a new era. Netanyahu made it clear with his map what normalization really means: eliminating Palestine from the region and legitimizing Greater Israel, all with the approval of Arab regimes.

In conclusion, it can be observed that Condoleezza Rice’s “constructive chaos” is nothing more than threatening the entire region with World War 3, and using it as leverage to push for greater territorial gains and greater regional control for Israel and the United States. The Arab nations are being forced to either accept the annihilation of Gaza, and get onboard with Israel’s restructuring of the Middle East, or face a major war.

Palestine is the pawn’s sacrifice in Israel’s grand game of chess. We are at a moral crossroads that will decide the future, not only of the region, but also of the whole planet. Will the Arab nations accept the sacrifice, and carry on business as usual, or will they show some spine and risk World War 3?

The whole world is watching Gaza to see which road we will go down.

“I sing hallelujah. It’s my duty, my job, my mission. It’s my mission to win as many people as possible, whatever the previous attitude, to the righteousness, the greatness, the centrality of the cause of Palestine, the cause of Gaza, which is the moral centre of the world. If you fail the test on the issue of Palestine, on the issue of Gaza you failed a very important test indeed, on which, I believe you will ultimately be judged in this life and the next.”

—George Galloway, MOATS

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Rick Thomas is a musician, activist and the author of How to Defeat the New World Order. For all articles  www.freepolitik.com. Social activism: www.freepolitik.org. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

Featured image: A view of Palestinians as they try to continue their daily life amid Israeli attacks at the Jabalia Refugee Camp in Jabalia, Gaz on February 17, 2024 [Dawoud Abo Alkas – Anadolu Agency]

New Research on Olive Leaf Extract and Cancer

April 22nd, 2024 by Dr. William Makis

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New Literature: 

  • (2022 July, Rishmawi et al) – A Comprehensive Review on the Anti-Cancer Effects of Oleuropein

  • (2023 Sep, Karousi et al) – Next-generation sequencing reveals altered gene expression and enriched pathways in triple-negative breast cancer cells treated with oleuropein and oleocanthal
  • (2024 Jan, Nsairat et al) – Oleuropein impact on colorectal cancer
  • (2024 Feb, Gervasi et al) – Use of Oleuropein and Hydroxytyrosol for Cancer Prevention and Treatment: Considerations about How Bioavailability and Metabolism Impact Their Adoption in Clinical Routine

Introduction

There are 5 forms of Olive Leaf available:

  • Olive Leaf raw dried leaves
  • Olive Leaf (whole) (supplement)
  • Olive Leaf Extract 6% Oleuropein
  • Olive Leaf Extract 15%, 20% or 25% Oleuropein
  • Olive Leaf Extract liquid drops

Rich in Phenolic Compounds

Olive is a small tree native to Asia whose domestication is believed to have taken place at the Turkey / Syria border 8000 years ago, and spread throughout the Mediterranean, Europe, Iran and Northern Africa. (Click here)

There are ~ 890 million olive trees in the world and 172 million of them are in Turkey. During the harvesting of olives together with pruning stages, considerable amount of by-product mainly consisting of olive leaves are accumulated, ~ 25 kg per tree. This biomass is generally used to feed animals. (Click here)

Olive trees are predominantly grown in the Mediterranean region, characterized by extended periods of sunlight and high rates of pathogen and insect attack. To combat these stressors, olive trees synthesize large volumes of polyphenols, which are largely stored in their thick leaves. (Click here)

Olive leaf (Olea europaea) extracts have been regarded as valuable items since ancient times. It is known that pharaohs were mummified using olive leaf extracts by Egyptians. In the next years, olive leaf extracts were used for health purposes such as healing fevers, and healing tropical diseases such as malaria. (Click here)

Olive leaves are rich in phenolic compounds such as oleuropein, hydroxytyrosol, verbascoside, apigenin-7-O-glucoside, and luteolin-7-O-glucoside and also triterpenoids such as maslinic, ursolic, and oleanolic acids that have been reported as anti–SARS-CoV-2 metabolites. (Click here)

Olive leaves have been reported to have biological activities such as: antioxidant, anti-inflammatory, anti-hypertensive, anti-hypercholesterolemic, cardioprotective, anti-obesity and anti-cancer. (Click here)

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2022 July, Rishmawi et al – A Comprehensive Review on the Anti-Cancer Effects of Oleuropein

  • Oleuropein is one of the primary elements in immature olive fruits and leaves
  • Oleuropein consumption has aided in cancer treatment as an antioxidant
  • It is now known that Oleuropein functions as both an anti-proliferative and an apoptotic promoter in many cancer cells

Anti-proliferative effects of Oleuropein

Life 12 01140 g002

  • has been shows to decrease proliferation of breast cancer cells in vitro
  • anti-proliferative effects by inhibiting NF-kB pathway, Akt Cascade
  • colon cancer: proliferation and angiogenesis is propmoted by COX2 pathway which is downregulared by Oleuropein
  • anti-metastatic effect by inhibiting activity of matrix metalloproteinases (which promote tumor metastasis)
  • APOPTOSIS: Oleuropein raises the expression of the proapoptotic proteins p53 and Bax while decreasing the expression of the antiapoptotic proteins Bcl-2 and HIF-1 (gliomas, pancreatic cancer, breast cancer)
  • Oleuropein upregulates Cannabinoid Receptor CB1 (tumor suppressor) – activation of this receptor initiates many cascades that prevent cancer onset, progression, and proliferation due to diverse mechanisms in multiple cancer cells, such as GI, lung, breast, and brain, prostate, pancreas, and thyroid.
  • anti-angiogenic effect in vivo breast cancer cell lines (lowers VEGF – vascular endothelial growth factor)
  • anti-oxidant effects – antioxidant properties stem from its capacity to chelate metal ions such as copper and iron, which catalyze free radical production reactions, as well as its ability to inhibit several inflammatory enzymes
    • Copper is a vital nutrient in the body, acting as a cofactor in a wide range of enzymatic operations as well as a structural component of proteins.
    • Copper dysregulation or increase has been associated with lymphoma; reticulum cell sarcoma; bronchogenic and laryngeal squamous cell carcinomas; and cervical, breast, stomach, and lung cancers
    • one study suggests Oleuropein complexing with copper is responsible for its ability to kill cancerous tissue (2017, Capo et al)
  • cancer cell viability – Oleuropein reduces cell viability in breast cancer cells, pancreatic cancer cells and seminoma cells.
  • cell cycle arrest – Oleuropein upregulates p53 and p21 and causes cell cycle arrest

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  • cytoskeleton disruptor – Oleuropein disrupts actin filaments in cytoskeleton of breast cancer cells and ovarian cancer cells
  • Fatty acid synthase inhibitor – Oleuropein inhibits fatty acid synthase enzyme which is overexpressed in many cancers (prostate, ovarian, breast, endometrial, thyroid, colorectal, bladder, lung, thyroid, oral, tongue, esophageal, hepatocellular, pancreatic, and gastric carcinomas; malignant melanoma; mesothelioma; nephroblastoma; and retinoblastoma; as well as soft tissue sarcoma)
  • Conclusion:
    • Oleuropein has aided in cancer treatment over the years. Ole functions as an anti-cancer agent by having anti-proliferative, anti-angiogenic and apoptotic, antioxidant, fatty acid synthase inhibiting, cytoskeleton disrupting, and anti-inflammatory properties. Oleuropein effects on cancer cells are influenced by Ole concentration, exposure time, and cancer cell type. Ole has strong synergistic effects when combined with anticancer medicines such as doxorubicin and other. Ole is a prospective anticancer candidate that could be utilized as a supplement to existing anticancer therapy guidelines or as a recurrence prevention therapy.

2023 Sep, Karousi et al – Next-generation sequencing reveals altered gene expression and enriched pathways in triple-negative breast cancer cells treated with oleuropein and oleocanthal

  • Triple-negative breast cancer (TNBC) is a subtype of breast cancer characterized by poor prognosis and limited treatment options.
  • Oleuropein and oleocanthal considerably reduced the proliferation of TNBC cells
  • expression profile of TNBC cells was significantly altered after treatment with these compounds
  • Pathway analysis revealed several significant pathways associated with TNBC, including cell death, apoptotic process, programmed cell death, response to stress, mitotic cell cycle process, cell division, and cancer progression
  • Conclusion: “Our findings suggest that oleuropein and oleocanthal have potential therapeutic benefits for TNBC and can be further investigated as alternative treatment options.
2024 Jan, Nsairat et al – Oleuropein impact on colorectal cancer
  • The Mediterranean Diet (MD) is associated with a low incidence of CRC (colorectal cancer) and Olive Oil is a main component of the diet
  • The olive (Olea europaea) tree’s leaf and fruit, as well as the extra virgin olive oil, are rich sources of oleuropein (OLR). OLR is nonflavonoid biophenol.
  • OLR inhibits cell proliferation – OLR inhibits NF-κB and its downstream targets cyclin D1 and cyclooxygenase-2 (COX2)
    • COX2 pathway is connected to CRC because it promotes proliferation and angiogenesis via increased prostaglandin production. OLR was demonstrated to downregulate COX2
    • OLR caused apoptosis in colon tumors
    • Additionally, OLR prevented CRC progression through upregulation of the gene coding for cannabinoid receptors (CB)
  • IN VIVO STUDIES:
  • mice studies with OLR supplemented showed decreased number of colon tumors, decreased tumor size, inhibition of growth of cancer cells, decreased inflammation
  • OLR also prevented CRC and DNA damage in mice treated with a carcinogen.
  • High concentrations of OLR administered in vivo were demonstrated to be safe, and studies on rodents showed that it had an excellent safety profile
  • Conclusion: “OLR is a good candidate that could be used as a supplement along with anticancer therapy as a preventive therapy. Due to the extraordinary therapeutic and preventive effect of OLR, we need to further exploit this key Mediterranean dietary component to promote human health.

2024 Feb, Gervasi et al – Use of Oleuropein and Hydroxytyrosol for Cancer Prevention and Treatment: Considerations about How Bioavailability and Metabolism Impact Their Adoption in Clinical Routine

  • Animal studies done on mice:
    • breast cancer (50mg/kg) – decrease in tumor size, decrease in proliferation, induction of apoptosis, increase in levels of tumor suppressor p21
    • colorectal cancer (50 and 100mg/kg) – reduced incidence of colonic neoplasms, reduced cancer cell proliferation
    • pancreatic cancer (200mg/kg HT – Hydroxytyrosol x 10- days) – suppressed tumor growth and proliferation
    • cholangiocarcinoma (500mg/kg peritoneal injection) – reduced tumor growth
    • melanoma (25mg/kg) – effective in preventing skin carcinogenesis, effective in prevention of melanoma growth and metastasis
  • Animal studies done on Oleuropein and chemo damage:
    • in vivo, 50 mg/kg, 100 mg/kg, and 200 mg/kg OLE showed a dose-dependent antioxidant activity, accounting for amelioration of cisplatin-induced pancreatic, liver, lung, and stomach damage in Spraque–Dawley rats
    • In the same in vivo model of cisplatin-induced oxidative stress, 50 mg/kg, 100 mg/kg, and 200 mg/kg OLE improved anemia, thrombocytopenia, and leukopenia
    • treatment of BALB/cN mice with 5, 10, and 20 mg/kg OLE suppressed signs of cisplatin-induced renal inflammation
  • Conclusion: “the multifaceted nature of OLE and HT interaction with molecular mediators in cancer cells and non-cancer tissues determines the need for safe strategies to improve OLE and HT bioavailability and delivery, also offering a more stable and highly selective anti-proliferative activity throughout time.”

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My Take…

A clinical trial was done in Iran with Olive Leaf Extract (30% Oleuropein) and COVID-19 patients, and was published in Aug.2023. It showed:

“Olive Leaf Extract effectively reduced respiratory rate, pulse rate, and body temperature; and increased blood oxygen saturation of COVID-19 patients. It decreased ESR and CRP levels in COVID-19 patients. Also, the findings showed that olive leaf extract can shorten the duration of hospitalization and lead to the early discharge of the patient. Moreover, there was no difference between the two doses of olive leaf extract (250 mg and 500 mg) in terms of efficacy.”

“Previous studies revealed that oleuropein, a secoiridoid, is a potent antiviral agent against HIV and influenza. A molecular study revealed that olive secoiridoids could interfere with the entry and replication of SARS-CoV-2. Olive secoiridoids block the spike protein of SARS-CoV-2, which facilitates virus entry by binding to ACE-2 receptors. Also, olive secoiridoids inhibit the main protease of SARS-CoV-2, a critical mediator in virus replication. Moreover, olive secoiridoids can suppress inflammation by targeting receptors of pro-inflammatory cytokines (IL-1β, IL-6, TNF-α). Many of the deaths in COVID-19 patients occurred following a cytokine storm. Olive leaf extract could act as an anti-inflammatory drug, suppress inflammatory storms, and decrease mortality.

From a very recent study by Wafik El-Deiry:

The suppressive effect of SARS-CoV-2 spike on p53-dependent gene activation provides a potential molecular mechanism…may impact tumorigenesis, tumor progression and chemotherapy sensitivity

To summarize the benefits of olive leaf extract: 

  1. Binds the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein (can be used to treat COVID-19 mRNA Vaccine Injury, shedding, Long COVID and acute COVID-19 Infection)
  2. Potent antiviral against coronaviruses, Influenza, RSV and even HIV
  3. Upregulates expression of p53 tumor suppressor protein in cancersp53 is the most frequently mutated gene in cancer, but even more importantly, it is particularly mutated in some of the most aggressive cancers we currently have, for example triple-negative breast cancer, ovarian cancer, etc”
  4. Potent anti-cancer agent: “Oleuropein has aided in cancer treatment over the years. Ole functions as an anti-cancer agent by having anti-proliferative, anti-angiogenic and apoptotic, antioxidant, fatty acid synthase inhibiting, cytoskeleton disrupting, and anti-inflammatory properties. Ole has strong synergistic effects when combined with chemotherapy. Ole is a prospective anticancer candidate that could be utilized as a supplement to existing anticancer therapy guidelines or as a recurrence prevention therapy.
  5. Animal models are very promising in breast cancer, colon cancer, pancreatic cancer, melanoma, cholangiocarcinoma

Olive Leaf Extract can bind the spike protein, treat spikeopathy in the COVID-19 Vaccine Injured (or Long COVID), protect against COVID-19 Infection, can serve as prophylaxis against cancer and probably has a role in the treatment of cancer (including Turbo cancer where p53 damage by spike protein may be a causative factor – with Olive Leaf having the ability to upregulate p53).

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Dr. William Makis is a Canadian physician with expertise in Radiology, Oncology and Immunology. Governor General’s Medal, University of Toronto Scholar. Author of 100+ peer-reviewed medical publications.

All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the Translate Website button below the author’s name (only available in desktop version).

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It has become abundantly clear that achieving long-term stability in the Middle East requires solving the Palestinian issue and ensuring the normalization of relations between Israel and the Arab nations.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu bowed to pressure from some of his own generals and political allies to attack Iran after Iran’s massive bombardment of Israel, which ended with no causalities or damages. The Israeli military claimed 99% of the projectiles were brought down.

But, ultranationalist Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir described the Israeli strike on Iran as “feeble” or “lame”.

Israel has come under huge international pressure from the U.S. and other Western allies not to take any action which risks turning the long-running proxy war between Israel and Iran into a direct conflict.

Israel started this latest cycle of violence after a striking the Iranian consulate in Damascus on April 1, which killed six Iranian officials and six Syrian civilians who were passersby.

The October 7th attack on Israel by Hamas set the region on edge, met by the Israel revenge attack which has now killed almost 34,000 Palestinians in Gaza, mainly women and children.

The war in Gaza is six months old, and with no end in sight. Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon trade almost daily strikes on each other. The Houthis in Yemen have captured or hit ships connected to Israel in the Red Sea as a sign of their support for the Palestinians.

The fear is that the Middle East is on the brink of an all-out war, with global as well as regional dangers.

The root cause of all these incidents and violence in the region is the ongoing occupation of Palestine. The people of Gaza and the West Bank live lies of oppression, and now genocide in Gaza. They are deprived of all human rights, while their Jewish neighbors live a modern lifestyle condoned and supported by the democratic western nations.

Steven Sahiounie of MidEastDiscourse asked Suat Delgen, a former Turkish naval warfare officer-turned-defense analyst with extensive NATO, EU, maritime security, emerging technologies, and West Asia expertise for his analysis on the Iran-Israel conflict now playing out before our eyes.

On October 7, 2023, Israel initiated a large-scale military operation against Gaza following a Hamas attack on Israeli territory, resulting in the deaths of over 30,000 people, mostly innocent women and children. This action escalated reactions against Israel not only in the Middle East but also globally. The U.S., by providing military support to Israel and vetoing United Nations Security Council draft resolutions for a ceasefire in Gaza, has faced increased backlash, particularly within the Arab community.

While opposition to the U.S. and Israel has surged, the Iranian-backed Houthis in Yemen have intensified their military engagements. They employed cruise missiles and kamikaze drones to attack ships traveling to Israeli ports via the Bab al-Mandeb Strait, aiming to enforce a ceasefire in Gaza. Additionally, Iranian-backed factions in countries such as Iraq and Lebanon openly opposed what they described as genocide in Gaza, thereby enhancing Iran’s reputation across the Middle East, even among Sunni populations.

In response to the growing influence of Iran and the public support it garnered through its anti-Israel stance, Israel targeted the Iranian consulate in Syria with an airstrike on April 1, in violation of the Vienna Treaties. This attack resulted in the deaths of several officers, including the general responsible for overseeing the Iranian Revolutionary Guards’ operations in the Middle East. Notably, Israel did not coordinate this attack with the U.S., informing it merely moments before the operation, thereby placing the U.S. in a challenging political situation. Essentially, the U.S. found itself compelled to support every decision made by the Netanyahu administration, compromising its strategic objectives.

On April 14, in a retaliatory move, Iran launched more than 300 kamikaze drones, ballistic missiles, and cruise missiles targeting Israeli territory. This development subsequently strengthened the U.S.’s political and military stance against Israel. Prior to this attack, Iran engaged in extensive diplomatic negotiations with the U.S. through intermediaries in third countries, indicating that Iran’s primary military goal was not merely to inflict significant damage on Israel from its territory.

Furthermore, Iran is aware that it is also detrimental to its interests for the U.S. to feel compelled to support Israel unconditionally. Hence, it is in Iran’s interest for the U.S. to act as independently as possible in its Middle East policy.

The fact that Iran had sufficiently informed the U.S. in advance of its retaliatory action and that Israel’s territory was protected with military assistance from the U.S. and Britain underscores Israel’s military dependency on the U.S. Consequently, a massive air attack on Israel by Iran cannot be repelled without U.S. assistance, indicating that Israel will no longer be able to act unilaterally in the Middle East without U.S. approval.

Iran’s April 14 attack might also accelerate the normalization process between Saudi Arabia and Israel.

With military relations between Russia and Iran strengthening, and Iran’s ability to transfer military technology from Russia enhancing its offensive capabilities, Saudi Arabia may be compelled to develop its own defense industry and increase its military production capacity. A cooperation between Israel and Saudi Arabia, mediated by the U.S., could be established following their normalization. It has become abundantly clear that achieving long-term stability in the Middle East requires solving the Palestinian issue and ensuring the normalization of relations between Israel and the Arab nations. The conditions emerging post-Iran’s attacks on April 14 are likely to prompt the U.S. to adopt bolder strategies in this context.

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This article was originally published on Mideast Discourse

Steven Sahiounie is a two-time award-winning journalist. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the Translate Website button below the author’s name (only available in desktop version).

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The reason for the many vaccine injuries and deaths and the surge in cancers is due to the COVID-19 vaccine mandates. 

Dr. William Makis, in his presentation below, discusses the medical corruption and criminal undertaking of the Canadian government in the administration of experimental COVID vaccines.

Click here to watch the video

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Note to readers: Please click the share button above. Follow us on Instagram and Twitter and subscribe to our Telegram Channel. Feel free to repost and share widely Global Research articles.

Dr. William Makis is a Canadian physician with expertise in Radiology, Oncology and Immunology. Governor General’s Medal, University of Toronto Scholar. Author of 100+ peer-reviewed medical publications.

Featured image is a screenshot from the video


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

by Michel Chossudovsky

Michel Chossudovsky reviews in detail how this insidious project “destroys people’s lives”. He provides a comprehensive analysis of everything you need to know about the “pandemic” — from the medical dimensions to the economic and social repercussions, political underpinnings, and mental and psychological impacts.

“My objective as an author is to inform people worldwide and refute the official narrative which has been used as a justification to destabilize the economic and social fabric of entire countries, followed by the imposition of the “deadly” COVID-19 “vaccine”. This crisis affects humanity in its entirety: almost 8 billion people. We stand in solidarity with our fellow human beings and our children worldwide. Truth is a powerful instrument.”

Reviews

This is an in-depth resource of great interest if it is the wider perspective you are motivated to understand a little better, the author is very knowledgeable about geopolitics and this comes out in the way Covid is contextualized. —Dr. Mike Yeadon

In this war against humanity in which we find ourselves, in this singular, irregular and massive assault against liberty and the goodness of people, Chossudovsky’s book is a rock upon which to sustain our fight. –Dr. Emanuel Garcia

In fifteen concise science-based chapters, Michel traces the false covid pandemic, explaining how a PCR test, producing up to 97% proven false positives, combined with a relentless 24/7 fear campaign, was able to create a worldwide panic-laden “plandemic”; that this plandemic would never have been possible without the infamous DNA-modifying Polymerase Chain Reaction test – which to this day is being pushed on a majority of innocent people who have no clue. His conclusions are evidenced by renown scientists. —Peter Koenig 

Professor Chossudovsky exposes the truth that “there is no causal relationship between the virus and economic variables.” In other words, it was not COVID-19 but, rather, the deliberate implementation of the illogical, scientifically baseless lockdowns that caused the shutdown of the global economy. –David Skripac

A reading of  Chossudovsky’s book provides a comprehensive lesson in how there is a global coup d’état under way called “The Great Reset” that if not resisted and defeated by freedom loving people everywhere will result in a dystopian future not yet imagined. Pass on this free gift from Professor Chossudovsky before it’s too late.  You will not find so much valuable information and analysis in one place. –Edward Curtin

ISBN: 978-0-9879389-3-0,  Year: 2022,  PDF Ebook,  Pages: 164, 15 Chapters

Price: $11.50 FREE COPY! Click here (docsend) and download.

You may also access the online version of the e-Book by clicking here.

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The New York Times reports:

The United States blocked the U.N. Security Council on Thursday from moving forward on a Palestinian bid to be recognized as a full member state at the United Nations, quashing an effort by Palestinian allies to get the world body to back the effort.

The vote was 12 in favor of the resolution and one — the United States — opposed, with abstentions from Britain and Switzerland.

The Palestinian envoy to the United Nations, Riyad Mansour, had described the bid for full-member status as an effort “to take our rightful place among the community of nations.”

After the vote, Mr. Mansour, visibly upset, delivered a passionate address:

“Our right to self determination is a natural right — a historical right — to live in our homeland Palestine as an independent state that is free and that is sovereign,” he said.

US State Department spokesperson Vedant Patel said,

“It remains the U.S. view that the most expeditious path toward statehood for the Palestinian people is through direct negotiations between Israel and the Palestinian Authority with the support of the United States and other partners.”

Al Jazeera adds:

The Palestinian group Hamas has accused the US of standing “in the face of international will” by exercising its veto power at the UN Security Council and denying Palestinians full membership in the world body.

Israel Katz, the Israeli minister of foreign affairs, said,

“I commend the United States for vetoing this shameful proposal.”

From Andalou Agency:

Russia’s Permanent Representative to the UN Vasily Nebenzya said, “Every American veto on Gaza is not just a voting statistic in the UN Security Council. We must not forget that it also had a specific terrible price — the lives of thousands of civilians in Gaza.”

He added, “The Israeli military is attacking humanitarian convoys, blocking their access, and slowing down the passage of cargo. Western countries harshly criticize them for this only if Western citizens die as a result.”

House Dems Vote to Advance $26 Billion for Israel to House Floor Despite a Rebellion from Republicans’ Right Flank

Jewish Insider reports:

“Democrats’ support in the Rules Committee was a highly unusual step, and effectively a signal that House Democratic leadership is backing the legislation. It’s unprecedented in at least the last 29 years for a House majority party to require minority party support to advance legislation out of the Rules Committee. But three conservative Republicans, Reps. Thomas Massie (R-KY), Ralph Norman (R-SC) and Chip Roy (R-TX), bucked Johnson and voted against advancing the package….”

A major question as the legislation moves ahead will be how many lawmakers ultimately vote against the package providing aid to Israel. More than 50 Democrats called to suspend and condition aid to Israel, but at least a few of them have publicly committed to voting for the bill. On the right, 14 Republicans voted earlier this year against providing aid to Israel, demanding it be paired with other budget cuts…..

ABC reports:

The The legislation provides roughly $26 billion for Israel. The measure is similar to legislation passed by a bipartisan group in the Senate back in February. (Trump had suggested changing the payment to a loan.) 

Rep. Chip Roy, R-Texas, said:

“This was all precooked,” Roy said. “It’s why President Biden and Chuck Schumer are praising it.”

Democrats, meanwhile, criticized Republicans for bringing dysfunction to the chamber…

Final votes are set for Saturday.

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Featured image: A view of the General Assembly Hall as a draft resolution to grant Palestine non-Member Observer State status in the United Nations was introduced. The resolution on the status of Palestine was adopted by a vote of 138 in favour to nine against with 41 abstentions by the 193-member Assembly. 29 November 2012. Credit: UN Photo/Mark Garten

Do Vaccines Make Us Healthier?

April 22nd, 2024 by Dr. Peter McCullough

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We can all accept that a better diet, fitness, body weight, and good sleep all would contribute to improvements in human health. But what about medical interventions that are applied to us as children and some continuing into adulthood. Products injected into us with no way of getting them out of the body?

The COVID-19 crisis and the mass vaccination debacle has caused all of us to re-evaluate the ever-expanding childhood and adult CDC ACIP vaccine schedule and similar programs outside of the United States.

Here is some key input from film-maker Greg Glaser of Do Vaccines Make Us Healthier?

“Americans remember churches locked down during Covid-19 but liquor stores kept open. They remember strangers with nose swabs pointing at their children. And they remember vaccine mandates for work and school. Americans do not want to repeat those Covid-19 experiences in the future. The people want recognition of their right to decline vaccination and testing. Americans are also interested to learn how the health of the vaccinated compares to the unvaccinated.

This new video “Do Vaccines Make Us Healthier?”, updated for 2024, catalogues important control group science to answer the question, and discusses a legal solution being introduced in the 2024 Congress: [insert your links to Rumble and X]

One of the most important lessons of Covid-19 is that America is a better place when people are nice to one another. Indeed, the clear majority of Americans (2/3) oppose all vaccine mandates for school entry, even for vaccines other than Covid-19. See e.g., Des Moines Register Poll (2022) (“Just 34% of Iowa adults now say all children should be required to receive standard shots unless they have a doctor-signed statement showing they have a medical reason not to be vaccinated, the poll shows. That’s down from 59% who supported such a requirement in 2015, when the Iowa Poll asked a similar question about childhood vaccinations.”) 

Individual rights and science are not mutually exclusive, but they are mutually under attack. Learning from covid tyranny, America can become stronger and more resilient. The key is to put new learning into action.”

So please sit back and enjoy this important video production (see above) and share with others as we all try to see out of the fog of vaccine hubris and gain some clarity on what is going on with human health.

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Sources (Courtesy of Greg Glaser and Dr. Brian Hooker)

1.  Unvaccinated Study #1: Analysis of health outcomes in vaccinated and unvaccinated children: Developmental delays, asthma, ear infections and gastrointestinal disorders – https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/2050312120925344

2.  Unvaccinated Study #2: Revisiting Excess Diagnoses of Illnesses and Conditions in Children Whose Parents Provided Informed Permission to Vaccinate Them – https://ijvtpr.com/index.php/IJVTPR/article/view/59  

3.  Unvaccinated Study #3: Health versus Disorder, Disease, and Death: Unvaccinated Persons Are Incommensurably Healthier than Vaccinated – https://ijvtpr.com/index.php/IJVTPR/article/view/40

4. Unvaccinated Study #4: Pilot comparative study on the health of vaccinated and unvaccinated 6- to 12-year-old U.S. children – https://www.oatext.com/pdf/JTS-3-186.pdf

5.  NY Times bestselling book: VAX-UNVAX: Let the Science Speak – https://www.skyhorsepublishing.com/9781510766969/vax-unvax/

6.  Court documents: Expert reports – https://vaxcheckers.org/expert-reports/

7.  CDC on chronic illness: The majority of vaccinated Americans suffer chronic illness – https://www.cdc.gov/chronicdisease/about/index.htm

8.  Article: Effort to Kill New Vaccine Studies Fails – American College for Advancement of Medicine (ACAM) on the false claim that the Mawson study had been retracted:  https://www.acam.org/news/347977/Effort-to-Kill-New-Vaccine-Studies-Fails.htm

9.  US Census Bureau’s National Survey of Children’s Health (NSCH) questionnaires ( ~170 questions yet silent about vaccination status):

https://www.childhealthdata.org/learn-about-the-nsch/survey-instruments

10.  Vaccines classified as “unavoidably unsafe” by law – CFR, Comment k “Unavoidably unsafe products” are discussed in the Code of Federal Regulations, Restatement of Torts (Second) 402A (k) § 402A. Special Liability of Seller of Product for Physical Harm to User or Consumer, Comment k. See e.g.,“Unavoidably Unsafe Products: Clarifying the Meaning and Policy Behind Comment K”  – https://scholarlycommons.law.wlu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2953&context=wlulr

11.  The 1986 National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act (NCVIA) (shields vaccine makers from legal liability and shifts burden of compensation for vaccine injuries and deaths onto taxpayers) – https://www.congress.gov/bill/99th-congress/house-bill/5546

12.  2011 Supreme Court (Bruesewitz): Court ruling that vaccine makers cannot be sued for design defects that harm or kill because the 1986 law acknowledged that vaccines cannot be made safe. (See NCVIA and CFR/Comment K reference)   

13.  Informed Consent Defense: Unvaccinated Control Group litigation exhibits, testimonies, evidence –

https://informedconsentdefense.org/

14. NICE Act: Bill in Congress to end vaccine mandates and encourage control group science – 

https://niceact.org

15. Video voiceover: Erik Nicolaisen – www.eriknicolaisen.com/Home.html 

Featured image is from Naturalnews.com

Universities for AUKUS: The Social License Confidence Trick

April 22nd, 2024 by Dr. Binoy Kampmark

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Cuba provides an inspiring example of a very small country whose doctors have reached some of the most difficult areas of human distress and disasters to provide their medical services to people who needed them the most. US President Barack Obama said—

“No one should deny the service that thousands of Cuban doctors have delivered for the poor suffering people.”

What is the reward that Cuba gets for this service? Often its people cannot get essential services and medical equipment. This is due to the embargo against Cuba imposed by the USA for over six decades.

In addition Cubans face problems in getting food, meeting other basic needs and trading with other countries, despite trade being integral to the development needs of this island nation. The UN Economic Commission for Latin America estimated embargo costs for Cuba at 130 billion dollars, or about 2 billion dollars per year. Other estimates mention a higher figure. 

Don’t ask for any credible reasons to explain why the USA has done this because none exists. Have you ever seen a bully tormenting a small child? The bully does not have to give any reasons, he does what he is doing because he can go on doing this.

The only hopeful time for Cuba during these long decades was when President Obama removed many restrictions and initiated cooperation activities instead, giving very encouraging results. But this period lasted only for a short while, and President Trump made things worse by introducing terror sponsor charges as well against the country, without any evidence of course. 

Such charges, which were first brought in during the tenure of Ronald Reagan, ignore the well-known fact that it is the Cubans who have been at the receiving end of several terror attacks launched by Cuban exiles from US territory and often with help from US sources, including the CIA. One of these attacks led to the death of 73 air travelers. Cuban hotels with tourists living there have also been attacked. There were several attacks on the Cuban President Fidel Castro to try to assassinate or harm him.

After the success of the Cuban revolution led by Castro which brought many equality and justice-based changes in Cuba, the USA embarked on a policy of disrupting Cuban government and economy. This is how the aims of US policy were summarized by Deputy Assistant Secretary of State, USA, Lester D. Mallory in 1960—

“Every possible means should be undertaken promptly to weaken the economic life of Cuba…denying money and supplies to Cuba, to decrease monetary and real wages, to bring about hunger, desperation and overthrow of government.”

When such a statement is made openly, is anything left to say regarding the glaring violation of all ethical considerations in US policies towards Cuba?

The utter lack of ethics in US embargo policy is also evident from the consistent opposition to this policy by an overwhelming majority of countries as reflected in UN General Assembly annual voting on Cuba’s resolution condemning US embargo. During the last year this was supported by 187 member countries, opposed by only two (who else but USA and Israel) with one absentee (Ukraine). Hence there is almost universal opposition to US embargo (which is called blockade by the Cuban government) and this embargo with all its extensive sanctions should be lifted immediately. This is a clear example of an entirely avoidable humanitarian crisis which can end very easily merely by a bit of enlightened decision making on the part of the US authorities. 

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Bharat Dogra is Honorary Convener, Campaign to Save Earth Now. His recent books include Planet in Peril, Protecting Earth for Children, A Day in 2071 and Earth without Borders. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.          

Featured image is from Silent Crow News

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Italian Premier Giorgia Meloni convened the Group of Seven (United States, Canada, Great Britain, Germany, France, Italy, and Japan), being currently under the Italian presidency, G7 has “unequivocally and in the strongest terms condemned the direct and unprecedented attack of Iran against Israel”.

They then expressed “full solidarity and support for Israel” and reaffirmed “our commitment to its safety“. The G7 is silent on the fact that the launch of drones and missiles occurred in response to the Israeli attack on the Iranian Consulate in Damascus (Syria), where over ten diplomats and officials were killed. They ignore that the Iranian Government had warned the White House much earlier of the demonstration action it would carry out. In this way, the United States and Great Britain – whose air, naval, and land forces in the Middle East were long deployed – were able to shoot down many of the Iranian drones and missiles easily. At the same time, Israel used the missile systems supplied by the United States to shoot them down.

The United States and Germany supply 99% of Israel’s arms imports: 69% of Israel’s arms imports come from US producers, while German producers supply 30%. This enormous war supply allows Israel to wage a high-intensity war in Gaza and, at the same time, carry out increasing attacks in Lebanon and Syria. All this within the framework of the plan the United States and its allies try to maintain dominion over this region through war, they are losing. Iran is in their crosshairs above all because it has become a BRICS member with Russia and China, and plays a key role as Russia’s North-South Corridor and China’s New Silk Road hub.

Germany has supplied Israel with five Dolphin-class submarines and is about to deliver a sixth. Three more Dakar class submarines, destined for Israel, will also be built by the German ThyssenKrupp under a 3 billion euro contract. All Dolphin submarines have been modified by ThyssenKrupp to launch nuclear-tipped missiles like the American Popeye Turbo. The new Dakar submarines, which Germany will supply to Israel, will have a greater nuclear attack capability. This allows Israel to permanently keep nuclear attack submarines along Iran’s coasts, while other nuclear missiles are ready for launch from air and land platforms, aimed at Iran and other countries in the region.

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This article was originally published in Italian on Grandangolo, Byoblu TV.

Manlio Dinucci, award winning author, geopolitical analyst and geographer, Pisa, Italy.

He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization.

Featured image source

Interim Prime Minister Arseny Yatsenyuk meets President Obama at White House, March 2014 (White House photo)

Author’s Introduction

We must understand the history of the U.S. sponsored February 2014 Coup d’Etat which paved the wave for the adoption of  IMF-World Bank shock treatment, namely the imposition of devastating macro-economic reforms coupled with conditionalities. This process –imposed by the Washington Consensus– was applied in developing countries since the 1980s, and in Eastern Europe and in the countries of the Soviet Union starting in the early 1990s’.

Below is an the article describing the IMF reforms which I wrote in early March 2014, in the immediate wake of the Euromaidan Coup d’Etat which was led by the two major Nazi “parties”: Right Sektor and Svoboda, with the financial support of Washington. 

What is the End Game 

The World Bank and the IMF reforms –while establishing the ground work– are no longer the main actors, representing the country’s creditors. 

The traditional IMF-World Bank reforms are in many regards obsolete. 

The Neoliberal Endgame for Ukraine –resulting from unsurmountable debts– largely attributable to military aid is the outright privatization of an entire country by Blackrock which is a giant portfolio company controlled by powerful financial interests with extensive leverage.

Black Rock  signed an agreement with President Zelensky in November 2022. 

The Privatization of Ukraine was launched in liaison  with BlackRock’s  consulting company  McKinsey, a public relations firm which has largely been responsible for co-opting corrupt politicians and officials Worldwide not to mention scientists and intellectuals on behalf of powerful financial interests.

“The Kyiv government engaged BlackRock’s consulting arm in November to determine how best to attract that kind of capital, and then added JPMorgan in February. Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelenskyy announced last month that the country was working with the two financial groups and consultants at McKinsey.

BlackRock and Ukraine’s Ministry of Economy signed a Memorandum of Understanding in November 2022. In late December 2022, president Zelensky and BlackRock’s CEO Larry Fink agreed on an investment strategy.

See

The NeoCons’ Proxy War “Against Ukraine”: Nuclear War is On the Table. The Privatization of Ukraine

By Prof Michel Chossudovsky, March 05, 2024

 

 

Michel Chossudovsky, Global Research, April 27, 2024

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The February 23, 2014 Coup d’Etat

In the days following the Ukraine coup d’Etat of February 23, 2014 leading to the ousting of a duly elected president, Wall Street and the IMF –in liaison with the US Treasury and the European Commission in Brussels– had already set the stage for the outright takeover of Ukraine’s monetary system.

The EuroMaidan protests leading up to “regime change” and the formation of an interim government were followed by purges within key ministries and government bodies.

The Governor of the National Bank of Ukraine (NBU) Ihor Sorkin was fired on February 25th and replaced by a new governor: Stepan Kubiv.

Stepan Kubiv is a member of Parliament of the Rightist Batkivshchyna “Fatherland” faction in the Rada led by the acting Prime Minister Arseny Yatsenyuk (founded by Yulia Tymoshenko in March 1999). He previously headed Kredbank, a Ukrainian financial institution largely owned by EU capital, with some 130 branches throughout Ukraine. Ukraine Central Bank Promises Liquidity To Local Banks, With One Condition, (Zero Hedge, February 27, 2014).

Kubic is no ordinary bank executive. He was one of the first field “commandants” of the EuroMaidan riots alongside Andriy Parubiy co-founder of the Neo-Nazi Social-National Party of Ukraine (subsequently renamed Svoboda) and Dimitry Yarosh, leader of the Right Sector Brown Shirts (centre in image below) , which now has the status of a political party. 

 

 

 

Kubiv was in the Maidan square addressing protesters on February 18, at the very moment when armed Right Sector thugs under the helm of Dmitry Yarosh (image above, centre) were raiding the parliament building.

The Establishment of an Interim Government

A few days later, upon the establishment of the interim government, Stepan Kubiv was put in charge of negotiations with Wall Street and the IMF.

The new Minister of Finance Aleksandr Shlapak [left] is a political crony of Viktor Yushchenko –a long-time protegé of the IMF who was spearheaded into the presidency following the 2004 “Colored Revolution”. Shlapak held key positions in the office of the presidency under Yushchenko as well as at the National Bank of Ukraine (NBU). In 2010, upon Yushchenko’s defeat, Aleksandr Shlapak joined a shadowy Bermuda based offshore financial outfit IMG International Ltd (IMG), holding the position of Vice President. Based in Hamilton, Bermuda, IMG specialises in “captive insurance management”, reinsurance and “risk transfer.”

Minister of Finance Aleksandr Shlapak  works in close liaison with Pavlo Sheremeto, the newly appointed Minister of Economic Development and Trade, who upon his appointment called for “deregulation, fully fledged and across the board”, requiring –as demanded in previous negotiations by the IMF– the outright elimination of subsidies on fuel, energy and basic food staples.

Another key appointment is that of Ihor Shvaika [right], a member of the Neo-Nazi Svoboda Party, to the position of Minister of Agrarian Policy and Food. Headed by an avowed follower of World War II Nazi collaborator Stepan Bandera [see image below], this ministry not only oversees the agricultural sector, it also decides on issues pertaining to subsidies and the prices of basic food staples.  

The new Cabinet has stated that the country is prepared for socially “painful” but necessary reforms. In December 2013, a 20 billion dollar deal with the IMF had already been contemplated alongside the controversial EU-Ukraine Association Agreement. Yanukovych decided to turn it down.

One of the requirements of  the IMF was that “household subsidies for gas be reduced once again by 50%”.

“Other onerous IMF requirements included cuts to pensions, government employment, and the privatization (read: let western corporations purchase) of government assets and property. It is therefore likely that the most recent IMF deal currently in negotiation, will include once again major reductions in gas subsidies, cuts in pensions, immediate government job cuts, as well as other reductions in social spending programs in the Ukraine.” (voice of russia.com March 21, 2014)

Economic Surrender: Unconditional Acceptance of IMF Demands by a Puppet Government

Shortly after his instatement, the interim (puppet) prime minister Arseny Yatsenyuk casually dismissed the need to negotiate with the IMF. Prior to the conduct of negotiations pertaining to a draft agreement,

 

Yatsenyuk had already called for an unconditional acceptance of the IMF package: “We have no other choice but to accept the IMF offer”.

[Neo Nazi Svoboda Party glorify World War II Nazi Collaborator Stepan Bandera]

Yatsenyk intimated that Ukraine will “accept whatever offer the IMF and the EU made” (voice of russia.com March 21, 2014)

In surrendering to the IMF, Yatsenyuk was fully aware that the proposed reforms would brutally impoverish millions of people, including those who protested in Maidan.

The actual timeframe for the implementation of the IMF’s “shock therapy” has not yet been firmly established. In all likelihood, the regime will attempt to delay the more ruthless social impacts of the macroeconomic reforms until after the May 25 presidential elections (assuming that these elections will take place).

The text of the IMF agreement is likely to be detailed and specific, particularly with regard to State assets earmarked for privatization.

Henry Kissinger and Condoleeza Rice, according to Bloomberg are among key individuals in the US who are acting (in a non-official capacity) in tandem with the IMF, the Kiev government, in consultation with the White House and  the US Congress.

The IMF Mission to Kiev

Immediately upon the instatement of the new Finance Minister and NBU governor, a request was submitted to the IMF’s Managing director. An IMF fact finding mission headed by the Director of the IMF’s European Department Rez Moghadam was rushed to Kiev:

“I am positively impressed with the authorities’ determination, sense of responsibility and commitment to an agenda of economic reform and transparency. The IMF stands ready to help the people of Ukraine and support the authorities’ economic program.” Press Release: Statement by IMF European Department Director Reza Moghadam on his Visit to Ukraine

A week later, on March 12, 2014 Christine Lagarde, met the interim Prime Minister of Ukraine Arseniy Yatsenyuk at IMF headquarters in Washington. Lagarde reaffirmed the IMF’s commitment:

“[to putting Ukraine back] on the path of sound economic governance and sustainable growth, while protecting the vulnerable in society. … We are keen to help Ukraine on its path to economic stability and prosperity.”(Press Release: Statement by IMF Managing Director Christine Lagarde on Ukraine

The above statement is wrought with hypocrisy. In practice, the IMF does not wield “sound economic governance” nor does it protect the vulnerable. It impoverishes entire populations, while providing “prosperity” to a small corrupt and subservient political and economic elite.

IMF “economic medicine” while contributing to the enrichment of a social minority, invariably triggers economic instability and mass poverty, while providing a “social safety net” to the external creditors. To sell its reform package, the IMF relies on media propaganda as well as persistent statements by “economic experts” and financial analysts which provide authority to the IMF’s macroeconomic reforms.

The unspoken objective behind IMF interventionism is to destabilize sovereign governments and literally break up entire national economies. This is achieved through the manipulation of key macroeconomic policy instruments as well as the outright rigging of financial markets, including the foreign exchange market.

To reach its unspoken goals, the IMF-World Bank –often in consultation with the US Treasury and the State Department–, will exert control over key appointments including the Minister of Finance, the Central Bank governor as well as senior officials in charge of the country’s privatization program. These key appointments will require the (unofficial) approval of the “Washington Consensus” prior to the conduct of negotiations pertaining to a multibillion IMF bailout agreement.

Beneath the rhetoric, in the real World of money and credit, the IMF has several related operational objectives:

1) to facilitate the collection of debt servicing obligations, while ensuring that the country remains indebted and under the control of its external creditors.

2) to exert on behalf of the country’s external creditors full control over the country’s monetary policy, its fiscal and budgetary structures,

3) to revamp social programs, labor laws, minimum wage legislation, in accordance with the interests of Western capital

4) to deregulate foreign trade and investment policies, including financial services and intellectual property rights,

5) to implement the privatization of key sectors of the economy through the sale of public assets to foreign corporations.

6) to facilitate the takeover by foreign capital (including mergers and acquisitions) of selected privately owned Ukrainian corporations.

7) to ensure the deregulation of the foreign exchange market.

originalWhile the privatization program ensures the transfer of State assets into the hands of foreign investors, the IMF program also includes provisions geared towards the destabilization of the country’s privately owned business conglomerates. A concurrent “break up” plan entitled “spin-off” as well as a “bankruptcy program” are often implemented with a view to triggering the liquidation, closing down or restructuring of a large number of nationally owned private and public enterprises.

The “spin off” procedure –which was imposed on South Korea under the December 1997 IMF bailout agreement– required the break up of several of Korea’s powerful chaebols (business conglomerates) into smaller corporations, many of which were then taken over by US, EU and Japanese capital.. Sizeable banking interests as well highly profitable components of Korea’s high tech industrial base were transferred or sold off at rock bottom prices to Western capital. (Michel Chossudovsky, The Globalization of Poverty and the New World Order, Global Research, Montreal, 2003, Chapter 22).

These staged bankruptcy programs ultimately seek to destroy national capitalism. In the case of Ukraine, they would selectively target the business interests of the oligarchs, opening the door for the takeover of a sizeable portion of Ukraine’s private sector by EU and US corporations. The conditionalities contained in the IMF agreement would be coordinated with those contained in the controversial EU-Ukraine Association agreement, which the Yanukovych government refused to sign.

Ukraine’s Spiraling External Debt

Ukraine’s external debt is of the order of $140 billion.

In consultations with the US Treasury and the EU, the IMF aid package is to be of the order of 15 billion dollars. Ukraine’s outstanding short-term debt is of the order of $65 billion, more than four times the amount promised by the IMF.

The Central Bank’s foreign currency reserves have literally dried up. In February, according to the NUB, Ukraine’s foreign-currency reserves were of the order of a meagre US$13.7 billion, its Special Drawing Rights with the IMF were of the order of US$16.1 million, its gold reserves US$1.81 billion. There were unconfirmed reports that Ukraine’s gold had been confiscated and airlifted to New York, for “safe-keeping” under the custody of the New York Federal Reserve Bank.

Under the bailout, the IMF –acting on behalf of Ukraine’s US and EU creditors– lends money to Ukraine which is already earmarked for debt repayment. The money is transferred to the creditors. The loan is “fictitious money”. Not one dollar of this money will enter Ukraine.

The package is not intended to support economic growth. Quite the opposite: Its main purpose is to collect the outstanding short term debt, while precipitating the destabilization of Ukraine’s economy and financial system.

The fundamental principle of usury is that the creditor comes to the rescue of the debtor: “I cannot pay my debts, No problem my son, I will lend you the money and with the money I lend you, you will pay me back”.

The rescue rope thrown to Kiev by the IMF and the European Union is in reality a ball and chain. Ukraine’s external debt, as documented by the World Bank, increased tenfold in ten years and exceeds 135 billion dollars. In interests alone, Ukraine must pay about 4.5 billion dollars a year. The new loans will only serve to increase the external debt thus obliging Kiev to “liberalize” its economy even more, by selling to corporations what remains to be privatized. Ukraine, IMF “Shock Treatment” and Economic Warfare By Manlio Dinucci, Global Research, March 21, 2014

Under the IMF loan agreement, the money will not enter the country, It will be used to trigger the repayment of outstanding debt servicing obligations to EU and US creditors. In this regard, according to the Bank for International Settlements (BIS)”European banks have more than $23 billion in outstanding loans in Ukraine.” Ukraine Facing Financial Instability But IMF May Help Soon – Spiegel Online, February 28, 2014

What are the “benefits” of an IMF package to Ukraine?

According to IMF’s managing director Christine Lagarde the bailout is intended to address the issue of poverty and social inequality. In actuality what it does is to increase the levels of indebtedness, while essentially handing over the reins of macro-economic reform and monetary policy to the Bretton Woods Institutions, acting on behalf of Wall Street.

The bailout agreement will include the imposition of drastic austerity measures which in all likelihood will trigger further social chaos and economic dislocation. It’s called “policy based lending”, namely the granting of money earmarked to reimburse the creditors, in exchange for the IMF’s “bitter economic medicine” in the form of a menu of neoliberal policy reforms. “Short-term pain for long term gain” is the motto of the Washington based Bretton Woods institutions.

Loan “conditionalities” will be imposed –including drastic austerity measures– -which will serve to impoverish the Ukrainian population beyond bounds in a country which has been under IMF ministrations for more than 20 years. While the Maidan movement was manipulated, tens of thousands of people protested they wanted a new life, because their standard of living had collapsed as a result of the neoliberal policies applied by successive governments, including that of president Yanukovych. Little did they realize that the protest movement supported by Wall Street, the US State Department and the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) was meant to usher in a new phase of  economic and social destruction.

History of IMF Ministrations in Ukraine

In 1994 under the presidency of Leonid Kuchma, an IMF package was imposed on Ukraine. Viktor Yushchenko –who later became president following the 2004 Colored Revolution– had been appointed head of the newly-formed National Bank of Ukraine (NBU). Yushchenko was praised by the Western financial media as a “daring reformer”; he was among the main architects of the IMF’s 1994 reforms which served to destabilize Ukraine’s national economy. When he ran in the 2004 elections against Yanukovych, he was supported by various foundations including the National Endowment for Democracy (NED). He was Wall Street’s preferred candidate.

Ukraines’ 1994 IMF package was finalized behind closed doors at the Madrid 50 years anniversary Summit of the Bretton Woods institutions. It required the Ukrainian government to abandon State controls over the exchange rate leading to an massive collapse of the currency. Yushchenko played a key role in negotiating and implementing the 1994 agreement as well as creating a new Ukrainian national currency, which resulted in a dramatic plunge in real wages:.

Yushchenko as Head of the Central Bank was responsible for deregulating the national currency under the October 1994 “shock treatment”:

  • The price of bread increased overnight by 300 percent,
  • electricity prices by 600 percent,
  • public transportation by 900 percent.
  • the standard of living tumbled

According to the Ukrainian State Statistics Committee, quoted by the IMF, real wages in 1998 had fallen by more than 75 percent in relation to their 1991 level.(http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft /scr/2003/cr03174.pdf )

Ironically, the IMF sponsored program was intended to alleviate inflationary pressures: it consisted in imposing “dollarised” prices on an impoverished population with earnings below ten dollars a month.

Combined with the abrupt hikes in fuel and energy prices, the lifting of subsidies and the freeze on credit contributed to destroying industry (both public and private) and undermining Ukraine’s breadbasket economy.

In November 1994, World Bank negotiators were sent in to examine the overhaul of Ukraine’s agriculture. With trade liberalization (which was part of the economic package), US grain surpluses and “food aid” were dumped on the domestic market, contributing to destabilizing one of the World’s largest and most productive wheat economies, (e.g. comparable to that of the American Mid West). Michel Chossudovsky IMF Sponsored “Democracy” in The Ukraine, Global Research, November 28, 2004, emphasis added)

The IMF-World Bank had destroyed Ukraine’s ‘bread basket”.

By 1998, the deregulation of the grain market, the hikes in the price of fuel and the liberalisation of trade resulted in a decline in the production of grain by 45 percent in relation to its 1986-90 level. The collapse in livestock production, poultry and dairy products was even more dramatic. (See http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/scr/2003/cr03174.pdf). The cumulative decline in GDP resulting from the IMF sponsored reforms was in excess of 60 percent  from 1992 to 1995.

The World Bank: Fake Poverty Alleviation

The World Bank has recently acknowledged that Ukraine is a poor country. (World Bank, Ukraine Overview, Washington DC, updated February 17, 2014):

“Evidence shows Ukraine is facing a health crisis, and the country needs to make urgent and extensive measures to its health system to reverse the progressive deterioration of citizens’ health. Crude adult death rates in Ukraine are higher than its immediate neighbors, Moldova and Belarus, and among the highest not only in Europe, but also in the world.”

What the report fails to mention is that the Bretton Woods institutions –through a process of economic engineering– played a central role in precipitating the post-Soviet collapse of the Ukrainian economy. The dramatic breakdown of Ukraine’s social programs bears the fingerprints of the IMF-World Bank austerity measures which included the deliberate underfunding and dismantling of the Soviet era health care system.

With regard to agriculture, the World Bank points to Ukraine’s “tremendous agricultural potential” while failing to acknowledge that the Ukraine bread-basket was destroyed as part of a US-IMF-World Bank package. According to the World Bank: “This potential has not been fully exploited due to depressed farm incomes and a lack of modernization within the sector.”

“Depressed farm incomes” are not “the cause” they are the “consequence” of the IMF-World Bank Structural Adjustment Program. In 1994, farm incomes had declined by the order of 80% in relation to 1991, following the October 1994 IMF program engineered by then NUB governor Viktor Yushchenko.  Immediately following the 1994 IMF reform package, the World Bank implemented (in 1995) a private sector “seed project” based on “the liberalization of seed pricing, marketing, and trade”. The prices of farm inputs increased dramatically leading to a string of agricultural bankruptcies. Projects : Agricultural Seed Development Project | The World Bank, Washington DC, 1995.

The IMF’s 2014 “Shock and Awe” Economic Bailout

While the conditions prevailing in Ukraine today are markedly different to those applied in the 1990s, it should be understood that the imposition of a new wave of macro-economic reforms (under strict IMF policy conditionalities) will serve to impoverish a population which has already been impoverished.

In other words, the IMF’s 2014 “Shock and Awe” constitutes the “final blow” in a sequence of IMF interventions spreading over a period of more than 20 years, which have contributed to destabilizing the national economy and impoverishing Ukraine’s population. We are not dealing with a Greece Model Austerity Package as some analysts have suggested. The reforms slated for Ukraine will be far more devastating.

Preliminary information suggests that IMF bailout will provide an advance of $2-billion in the form of a grant to be followed by a subsequent loan of $11 billion. The European Investment Bank (EIB) will provide another 2 billion, for a total package of around $15 billion. (See Voice of Russia, March 21, 2014)

Drastic Austerity Measures

The Kiev government has announced that the IMF requires a 20% cut in Ukraine`s national budget, implying drastic cuts in social programs, coupled with reductions in the wages of public employees, privatisation and the sale of state assets. The IMF has also called for a “phase out” of energy subsidies, and the deregulation of the foreign exchange markets. With unmanageable debts, the IMF will also impose the sell off and privatisation of major public assets as well as the takeover of the national banking sector.

The new government pressured by the IMF and World Bank have already announced that old aged pensions are to be curtailed by 50 %. In a  timely February 21 release, the World Bank had set the guidelines for old age pension reform in the countries of “Emerging Europe and Central Asia” including Ukraine. In an utterly twisted logic,  “Protecting the elderly” is carried out by slashing their pension benefits, according to the World Bank. (World Bank, Significant Pension Reforms Urged in Emerging Europe and Central Asia, Washington Dc, February 21, 2014)

Given the absence of a real government in Kiev, Ukraine’s political handlers in the Ministry of Finance and the NUB will obey the diktats of Wall Street: The IMF structural adjustment loan agreement for Ukraine will be devastating in its social and economic impacts.

Elimination of Subsidies

Pointing to “market distorted energy subsidies”, price deregulation has been a longstanding demand from both IMF-World Bank. The price of energy had been kept relatively low during the Yanukovych government largely as a result of the bilateral agreement with Russia, which provided Ukraine with low cost gas in exchange for Naval base lease in Sebastopol. That agreement is now null and void. It is also worth noting that the government of Crimea has announced that it would take over ownership of all Ukrainian state companies in Crimea, including the Black Sea natural gas fields.

The Kiev interim government has intimated that Ukraine’s retail gas prices would have to rise by 40% “as part of economic reforms needed to unlock loans from the International Monetary Fund”. This announcement fails to address the mechanics of full fledged deregulation which under present circumstances could lead to increases in energy prices in excess of 100 percent.

It is worth recalling, in this regard, that Peru in August 1991 had set the stage for “shock treatment” increases in energy prices when gasoline prices in Lima shot up overnight by 2978% (a 30 fold increase). In 1994 as part of the agreement between the IMF and Leonid Kuchma, the price of electricity flew up over night by 900 percent.

“Enhanced Exchange Rate Flexibility”

One of the central components of IMF intervention is the deregulation of the foreign exchange market. In addition to massive expenditure cuts, the IMF program requires “enhanced exchange rate flexibility” namely the removal of all foreign exchange controls. Ukraine: Staff Report for the 2012 Article IV Consultation, See also http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/scr/2012/cr12315.pdf.

Since the outset of the Maidan protest movement in December 2013, foreign exchange controls were instated with a view to supporting the hyrvnia and stemming the massive outflow of capital.

The IMF sponsored bailout  will literally ransack the foreign currency reserves held by the National Bank of Ukraine (NBU). Enhanced exchange rate flexibility under IMF guidance has been endorsed by the new NBU governor Stepan Kubic. Without virtually no forex reserves, exchange rate flexibility is financial suicide: it opens the door to speculative short-selling transactions (modelled on the 1997 Asian crisis) directed against the Ukraine’s currency, the hrynia.

Institutional speculators, which include major Wall Street and European Banks as well as hedge funds have already positioned themselves. Manipulation in the forex markets is undertaken through derivative trade. Major financial institutions will have detailed inside information with regard to Central Bank policies which will enable them to rig the forex market.

Under a flexible exchange rate system, the Central Bank does not impose restrictions on forex transactions. The Central Bank can however decide –under advice from the IMF– to counter the speculative onslaught in the forex market, with a view to maintaining the parity of the Ukrainian hryvnia. Without the use of exchange controls, this line of action requires Ukraine’s central bank (in the absence of forex reserves) to prop up an ailing currency with borrowed money, thereby contributing to exacerbating the debt crisis.

[the graph below indicates a decline of the hryvnia against the US $ of  more than 20% over a six months period] 

USD- UA Hryvnia Exchange Rate  (120 days)

Source themoneyconverter.com

It is worth recalling in this regard that Brazil in November 1998 had received a precautionary bailout loan from the IMF of the order of 40 billion dollars. One of the conditions of the loan agreement, however, was the complete deregulation of the forex market. This loan was intended to assist the Central Banking in maintaining the parity of the Brazilian real. In practice it spearheaded Brazil into a financial crash in February 1999.

The Brazilian government had accepted the conditionalities. Marred by capital flight of the order of 400 million dollars a day, the money granted under the IMF loan –which was intended to prop up Brazil’s central banks reserves– was plundered in a matter of months. The IMF loan agreement to Brasilia enabled the institutional speculators to buy time. Most of the money under the IMF loan was appropriated in the form of speculative gains accruing to major financial institutions.

With regard to Ukraine, enhanced exchange flexibility spells disaster. Contrary to Brazil, the Central Bank has no forex reserves which would enable it to defend its currency. Where would the NBU get the borrowed forex reserves? Most of the funds under the proposed IMF-EU rescue package are already earmarked and could be used to effectively defend the hrynia against “short-selling” speculative attacks in the currency markets. The most likely scenario is that the hrynia will experience a major decline leading to significant hikes in the prices of essential commodities, including food, fuel and transportation.

Were the Central Bank able to use borrowed reserves to prop up the hrynia, this borrowed money would be swiftly reappropriated, handed over to currency speculators on a silver platter. This scenario of propping up the national currency using borrowed forex reserves  (i.e. Brazil in 1998-99)  would, however, contribute in the short-term to staving off an immediate collapse of the standard.

This procedure provides “extra time” to the speculators, who are busy plundering the Central Bank’s (borrowed) currency reserves. It also enables the interim government to postpone the worst impacts of the IMF’s “enhanced exchange rate flexibility” to a later date.

When the borrowed hard currency reserves of the Central Bank run out –i.e. in the immediate aftermath of the May 25 presidential elections–  the value of hrynia will plunge on the forex market, which in turn will trigger a dramatic collapse in the standard of living. Coupled with the demise of bilateral economic relations with Russia pertaining to the supply of natural gas to Ukraine, energy prices are also slated to increase dramatically.

Neoliberalism and neo-Nazi ideology join hands: Repressing the Protest Movement against the IMF

With Svoboda and Right Sector political appointees in charge of national security and the armed forces, a real grassroots protest movement directed against the IMF’s deadly macroeconomic reforms, will in all likelihood be brutally repressed by the Right Sector’s “brown shirts” and the National Guard paramilitary led by Dmitri Yarosh [right image, center with the microphone], on behalf of Wall Street and the Washington consensus.

In recent developments, Right Sector Dmitry Yaroch has declared his candidacy in the upcoming presidential elections. (Popular support for the Yaroch is less than 2%).

“Russia put Yarosh on an international wanted list and charged him with inciting terrorism after he urged Chechen terrorist leader Doku Umarov to launch attacks on Russia over the Ukrainian conflict. The ultra-nationalist leader has also threatened to destroy Russian pipelines on Ukrainian territory.” (RT, March 22, 2014)

Meanwhile, Ukraine’s State prosecutor who also belongs to the Neo-Nazi faction, has implemented procedures which prevent the holding of public rallies and protests directed against the interim government.

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Let’s Talk About the Moon: Was Apollo 11 a Hoax?

April 21st, 2024 by Dr. Emanuel Garcia

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The night that Neil Armstrong was one small step for (a) man from the lunar surface I was taking my first airplane flight to a hockey camp near Toronto. I remember gazing out the window of the jet as a fourteen year old in July 1969 and imagining the Apollo craft on its impossible and miraculous journey to the very moon which I and countless others had marveled at and regarded as forever out of reach.

Yet reach it we did — we being the all-powerful United States of America, then simultaneously wielding its might in the jungles of a faraway country with perverse ferocity and with the sacrifice of American youngsters in the service of the hazy ideal of protection against Communism.

For many years, while cognizant of the endless warpath trodden by the country of my birth AFTER it had emerged as the glowing victor of World War II, bursting with economic and creative energy and bestriding the rest of the globe as the Colossus, I consoled myself and others with that magnificent and scarcely imaginable achievement of lunar landings.

Placing a man on the moon, that pure and nearly snow-white surface as far removed from the heat and grime of the napalmed Vietnamese jungles, somehow unified humanity in praise and deference, and established the United States as the artificer of miracles. In so doing it also lent a burnished sheen of intimidating and awe-inspiring power to an America whose tradition of can-do individualism was seen to have vanquished its socialistic rival, Russia.

The eyes of humankind for as long as it has trodden this precious Earth have looked heavenward and followed the glowing and bright and changeable Moon with a plethora of dreams and wishes and sighs. To have reached the lunar surface, to have made that impossibly giant leap, became the stuff of insurmountable accomplishment. In sum, no matter how degraded or destructive or sinister the Deep State factions of the United States had been with their never-ending wars and atrocities, the Apollo missions were an offsetting balm, a reminder of greatness and goodness and magnificence on which all could agree as the fulfillment of one of the grandest of dreams.

I had heard, throughout the years, of the cavils of small-minded conspiracy theorists who questioned the Apollo landings, but I had dismissed them or, more accurately, simply ignored them. Knowledgeable though I was about the devastating State-sponsored murders of JFK, MLK, RFK and Malcolm X, and cognizant as I was of the sickening exhibition of destructive deception that was 9/11, Apollo was a glowing ember of hope and beneficence, an emblem of the possibilities of a beneficent collective — the very stuff that dreams are made on, dreams which all of us could share and revel in and be proud about having realized, utterly without qualm.

Nonetheless, for one reason or other, nagged no doubt by an itch fostered by State duplicity, I decided to look into Apollo a bit more closely. I decided, in fact, to do my own bit of sleuthing just to make sure that the stirrings and suspicions about Apollo could be attributed to malaise and malcontents rather than to veracity.

My looking about and digging in resulted in a personal surprise, and a personal awakening. I discovered, in fact, that the case for legitimate human footsteps upon the lunar surface was ridiculously absurd. I discovered that I — and most of the world, I supposed — had accepted a grand illusion as reality when a cool examination of the evidence led to the deflating conclusion that Apollo was a hoax. A big one, a splendid one, an unparalleled one, but a hoax nonetheless.

I wrote my first article about Apollo in 2018, entitled, “How High the Moon”, which appeared on the www.aulis.com website. Others followed, including “Moon Landings: Magnificent and Deviously Contrived Propaganda,” and a review of a film by the Italian documentarian Massimo Mazzucco. I urge you to take a look at them.

Determined to lay the matter to rest for myself I even lit upon a small but telling anomaly — the Apollo 11 command module’s extra-vehicular handles. Made of aluminum, these handles should have melted under the intense heat of reentry; but they didn’t. I have published my findings comprehensively here and, in a more accessible fashion, here. These are small potatoes compared to the work of KaysingRenéSibrelPercy, BennettAllenHendersonMcGowanWisnewski and many others, whose extensive investigations have revealed and exposed innumerable discrepancies and problems with the official NASA account about virtually every aspect of the Apollo missions. Randy Walsh’s recent books are highly recommended for their overviews.

But allow me, in passing, to direct your attention to this famous video clip of what has become known as the ‘lunar grand prix’:

You be the judge as you watch the robotically immobile driver and listen to the comically insipid commentary.

The single greatest argument against the Apollo missions from 1969 to 1972 is the fact that despite the astronomically exponential growth of computational and technological power since then, somehow or other getting ‘back’ to the moon in the 21st century has not yet been achieved.

Interestingly enough, the trailer for a new film about Apollo has just been released:

From what I can tell it brazenly suggests that NASA actually undertook to film a fake lunar landing just in case the ‘real’ one didn’t fly.

I wonder why, just now, in the aftermath of a fake pandemic, this candy-coated message has been released. Is it a clever piece of propaganda designed to forestall the obvious astonishment and questioning of generations born into the internet age when they are asked to accept the clumsy and comical NASA videos of last century? Is it a sophisticated psychological way to resuscitate the halo of the Apollo achievements? What will the impact of encasing a truth within the envelope of a lie amount to, over time?

My point however is that of all the psyops, Apollo stands out supremely. Unlike the assassinations of JFK or RFK, unlike 9/11 or covid, it is not terrifyingly destructive. It is instead positive, meant to induce awe — which creates a different kind of fear among those worshipping at the altar of the miracle — and to bathe us in the aura of supreme human achievement, of conquering the unconquerable and patting ourselves on our backs, we denizens of the little species that could.

It is and has also been a way to cover over the darker and rabidly perverse and destructive machinations of State factions whose goals have been and still are endless war, power and profit — sprinkled with a dash of what I call ‘brinkmanship madness’.

For it is eminently possible that the corrupt Deep State JFK sought to confront, the one that brought us to the lip of nuclear war in the Sixties and is now bringing us all to the edge of a New Tyrannical Order, replete with hot wars and wars irregular and concealed against our very humanity, has a wild and unpredictably calamitous streak.

Those at the helm can be crazy enough to bring us all down in an orgy of annihilation even as they promise themselves visions of transhumanist immortality.

Let’s see.

I thought long and hard about discussing the Moon and the myths of America’s Apollo, because these views might cast aspersion on an already fragile alliance of people protesting against the deceptions of the covid operation. But I think the time is right — maybe Fly Me to the Moon nudged me a little?

If we are going to prevail and really create a better world — as I think we indeed are on another brink of doing — what better way to begin than by discarding all of the grand illusions in favor of humility and truth?

One final note. At the famous press conference of Apollo 11 astronauts Armstrong, Aldrin and Collins were asked by a reporter if they could see stars from the lunar surface.

The answers are instructive.

*

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Dr. Garcia is a Philadelphia-born psychoanalyst and psychiatrist who emigrated to New Zealand in 2006. He has authored articles ranging from explorations of psychoanalytic technique, the psychology of creativity in music (Mahler, Rachmaninoff, Scriabin, Delius), and politics. He is also a poet, novelist and theatrical director. He retired from psychiatric practice in 2021 after working in the public sector in New Zealand. Visit his substack at https://newzealanddoc.substack.com/.

He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from Wikimedia Commons

All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the Translate Website button below the author’s name (only available in desktop version).

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A very common occurrence observed during the 1940s and 50s was a truck slowly driving down streets throughout large and small communities, very much like a Good Humor truck. Families would bring their children out and stand along the road as they were gently sprayed in a fog of a highly toxic insecticide, DDT.

Citizens were doing their duty with absolute faith in the nation’s health authorities that this was an important public health measure.

We were told DDT would curtail infectious diseases because of its success in poorer malaria-ridden nations. 

Jump ahead to Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos in the 1960s and the US military’s indiscriminate spraying of the powerful defoliant Agent Orange.

Again, the American public was assured the chemical was necessary and safe to the hundreds of thousand American troops who were exposed to it.

Moving forward to the first Gulf War in 1991, American soldiers were told that the hundreds of metric tons of depleted uranium munitions were safe and there was no fear of any adverse effects resulting from radioactive contamination in the combat arena. Depleted uranium would again become part and parcel to America’s future wars in Yugoslavia, Afghanistan and Iraq.  

Finally, later in the 1990s there appeared another widely used toxic chemical, glyphosate or Roundup. It was heralded as an essential broadleaf herbicide that would enable American agriculture to flourish. And again, federal environmental and health authorities assured the public glyphosate was safe and posed no risks to human health nor the environment.

What do these toxic substances have in common? For each we were told they posed no risk to human health and no long-term environmental threats because it was assumed they were readily biodegradable. Whether it was the EPA, USDA, or the Department of Defense, each knew the truth. But equally important, not a single federal agency ever came forward to challenge these false assertions. All the advocates, scientists and journalists who brought forth evidence to the contrary, and exposed these chemicals’ very serious risks were either ignored, discredited or attacked. Yet historically they were proven to be correct.  

The problem was that although the public and activists had won the battle to have some of these chemicals banned, such as DDT, Agent Orange and now hopefully glyphosate in the future, politicians and citizens simply assume it is all behind us. But we rarely ever put crises and wrongdoing behind us. We assume, there will no longer be consequences and therefore the past doesn’t warrant further attention. However, the deadly legacy of thousands of toxic chemicals once released can last for decades and even centuries.  The question, therefore, is why do we ever bother to believe anything from our federal agencies and their propaganda? Why do we trust anyone when we have received nothing but a litany of lies, retaliations, legislative obstruction and cover-ups when people have access to the truth. 

DDT

DDT - Wikipedia

Dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane, commonly known as DDT, stands as one of the most notorious chemical compounds in history.

DDT was discovered in 1874 by Othmar Zeidler; decades later, Paul Muller identified DDT’s powerful insecticidal properties and this was quickly followed by DDT being manufactured widely for agricultural and pest control purposes. In 1948, Muller earned a Nobel Prize for his discovery. 

The highly toxic chemical gained prominence in the 20th century due to its effectiveness against disease vectors like mosquitoes and agricultural pests.

Its widespread application accelerated during World War II in the Pacific arena, and later became a cornerstone in global public health campaigns, particularly in eradicating malaria, typhus, body lice and other vector-borne diseases. As DDT gained widespread use, concerns about its impacts on human health surfaced. The publication of Rachel Carson’s groundbreaking book Silent Spring in 1962 further increased public awareness not only about DDT’s threats to human health but also the toxin’s environmental risks. Her book launched campaigns forcing governments to take regulatory action. Finally in 1972, the United States banned DDT for agricultural use and this was followed by several international agreements to further restrict its usage.  

DDT’s history however is particularly nefarious. After the second World War and the discovery of DDT’s extraordinary pesticide potential, the American and British militaries decided to test the chemicals safety on a refugee camp in Naples, Italy.

According to the research of Elena Conis in her book How to Sell a Poison: The Rise, Fall and Toxic Return of DDT, over a million citizens were doused with the insecticide. Because no immediate health risks were noted, the US army sprayed the chemical widely in the Pacific in order to kill disease-carrying insects that hindered the US offensive against Japan. After the war, DDT was sprayed indiscriminately in orchards, farms, and livestock facilities. It was used in walls, mattresses and clothing. Families doused pets in DDT to prevent fleas.[1]

The leading manufacturers and distributors of DDT included its largest producer Montrose Chemical Corporation in California and followed by Monsanto, Velsicol Chemical and Shell Chemical. After the EPA’s ban, numerous lawsuits were filed against the chemical companies for knowingly producing a harmful toxin without adequate safety measures or warnings. The most notable case was the US Department of Justice suit against Montrose resulting in large fines and the enforced penalties requiring the company to undertake massive cleanup efforts to remediate the environmental damage.

Despite being banned, the US remains one of the world’s leading manufacturers of DDT but for export only, especially for mosquito control in sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America and certain Asian nations. Yet this does not mean DDT is no longer used in countries that have banned it. Some organochlorine pesticides still widely used in the US are structurally similar to or direct chemical analogs of DDT. Endosulfan, for example, is structurally similar to DDT. Although in 2007 the EPA determined the pesticide posed a far greater risk to human health than previously thought, the agency has no steps to regulate it further. Endosulfan continues to be widely used in the US for pest control in fruit, vegetable and field crops. In 2022, Indian scientists observed the chemical disrupts DNA in germ cells that contribute to an increase in infertility.[2]  A Spanish study found that 100 percent of agricultural workers who sprayed endosulfan on their crops had residues of the chemical in their blood. Since then, the European Union ruled it to be too dangerous for use and banned it completely.[3]

DDT is a lipophilic chemical, which means it accumulates in the body’s fatty tissues leading to bioaccumulation and biomagnification in the food chain. Human exposure primarily occurs through ingestion of DDT-contaminated food, particularly fatty meats, poultry, dairy products, fish and to a much lesser extent plant foods such as leafy vegetables. In the mid-20th century, DDT was also sprayed in buildings for pest control. Depending upon the type of soil it is found in, DDT’s half–life is 2-15 years. In an aquatic environment, DDT can persist for up to 150 years. Once absorbed, DDT metabolizes in the liver to form DDE (dichlorodiphenyldichloroethylene), a persistent toxic metabolite with a longer half-life than DDT and heightened toxicity.[4] Chronic exposure to DDT and its metabolites has been linked to various health effects, including but not limited to:

DDT is an endocrine disruptor that potentially leads to reproductive and developmental abnormalities. Studies have discovered definitive associations between DDT exposure and certain cancers, especially breast cancer.[5]  Researchers at Tulane University’s Cancer Center discovered that human stem cells exposed to DDT underwent profound alterations in gene expression and homeostatic imbalances that may contribute to increased cancer cases.[6]

Prenatal and childhood exposure to DDT has been implicated in neurodevelopmental disorders and cognitive impairments. DDT and its metabolites have been shown to cross the placental barrier and affect the fetus. A University of California at Berkeley study concluded that prenatal exposure to DDT and DDE were associated with early childhood neurodevelopmental delays, and a Spanish study observed a relationship between prenatal exposure to respiratory illnesses in infants under 18 months.[7] DDT exposure may also suppress immune function, increasing susceptibility to infections and autoimmune diseases. 

DDT’s environmental persistence and long-range transport have profound ecological ramifications. It accumulates in soil, water, and sediments, posing risks to aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems. Most important, DDT’s tendency to accumulate and magnify through the food chain results in elevated concentrations in apex predators, such as birds of prey such as bald eagles and falcons, leading to reproductive failure and population declines. In 2021, a rather chilling Canadian study published in the Journal of Environmental Toxicological Chemistry attempted to determine the cause for rapidly declining bird flocks, such as robins, that frequently inhabit fruit orchards that were heavily sprayed with DDT between the late 1940s and into the 1970s. The researchers were following up on the presence of DDT and its metabolites after a 26-year period and found there was no noticeable biodegradation. DDT levels remained relatively the same, which would explain for DDT’s biomagnification in the birds.[8]

Although its use is now limited, the verdict for the toxin’s reemergence remains open. In 2006, the World Health Organization reversed its 30-year earlier policy against DDT indoor spraying of home dwellings and workspaces for insect control. Reporting on the WHO’s decision, the Washington Post ignores the pesticide’s risks and states the now obvious lie that “the most famous pesticide in the world, DDT has few if any adverse effects in human beings.”[9] The Post heralds its past effectiveness in reducing malarial cases, and implicitly lays out an argument to bring back its use in the US and other Western nations in the event of any future tropical infectious disease outbreaks. More recently, citing the WHO’s bogus 2016 global zika virus scare, the right-wing Cato Institute advocated for an increase in DDT spraying while also ignoring its life-threatening dangers.[10] Cato of course is simply a corporatized think tank, co-founded by Charles Koch and largely funded by the Koch Brothers, with a history of putting corporate profits above human and environmental health and flirts with climate change denialism.

Agent Orange

Image: Agent Orange Barrels at Johnston Atoll circa 1976 (Source: Public Domain)

The deadly herbicide known as Agent Orange is a scarlet letter that has been branded into America’s spine, which should have been tried as a crime against humanity in the international courts. Its widespread use as a defoliant to lessen Vietnam’s dense jungle canopy during the war has left a lasting legacy of environmental destruction and long-term health effects to exposed populations. The chemical mixture sprayed on millions of acres of forest, jungle and farmland was up to 20 times the concentration recommended for conventional killing of plants.[11] The US military also dumped millions of gallons on farms to destroy the nation’s food supply. According to government and medical institutional statistics approximately 400,000 Vietnamese citizens died from the US military spraying of Agent Orange between 1962 and 1971.[12,13] The Vietnamese government estimates that 3 million Vietnamese have suffered debilitating illnesses from exposure. An additional 300,000 US veterans are estimated to have died, largely from a variety of cancers, due to chemical exposure over the course of decades. This is over three times the number of Japanese killed in the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The Veterans Administration notes 50 diseases associated with the agent and 20 different birth defects in children birthed to Vietnam veterans.

Agent Orange was developed in the late 1940s and originally used in large-scale industrial agriculture and along railroads and power lines to control foliage overgrowth. The US government banned its domestic use in 1971 but only after it had already been used widely on American grasslands and pastures. However, it was the British military that first employed Agent Orange as a bioweapon against Malay Communist guerillas during the Malayan Emergency that ended in 1960.[14]

Agent Orange is a herbicidal mixture of two synthetic compounds: 2,4-D and dioxin or 2,4,5-T.  Its toxicological effects on human health are well-documented and multifaceted. The chemical is carcinogenic and has been linked to increased risks of various cancers. Many studies among Vietnamese populations have identified elevated rates of soft tissue sarcoma, non-Hodgkin lymphoma, Hodgkin lymphoma, and prostate cancer. Prenatal exposure to Agent Orange has been linked to adverse reproductive outcomes such as increased birth defects and developmental abnormalities in children. A study published in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health reported higher rates of birth defects among residents of Agent Orange-sprayed areas in Vietnam compared to non-sprayed areas.[15] Other adverse reproductive outcomes include very high instances of spontaneous abortions and stillbirths. There is also growing evidence suggesting that exposure to Agent Orange may have transgenerational effects impacting the health of subsequent generations. A study published in the journal Environmental Research lists epigenetic transgenerational inheritance of disease susceptibility in subsequent generations for puberty abnormalities and for testis, ovary, kidney, prostate and obesity pathologies.[16] A Korean analysis of over 111,000 Korean veterans health conditions who fought alongside US troops in Vietnam reported that those exposed to Agent Orange had higher incidences of hypothyroidism, diabetes, pituitary gland disorders, spinal muscular atrophy, Alzheimer’s disease, and other neurological diseases.[17] Some studies have drawn associations between exposure to Agent Orange and neurological disorders, including Parkinson’s disease and peripheral neuropathy.[18,19] 

Agent Orange contamination persists in the soil and water of sprayed areas in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos, posing ongoing risks to human health and ecosystems. Studies have detected elevated levels of dioxin in soil and sediment samples from sprayed areas, indicating long-term environmental persistence. In humans, the toxin can have a half-life of up to 20 years in humans; however, depending upon the type of soil and location its half-life may vary. Agent Orange deeply buried in the sediments of bodies of water can persist for over 100 years and continue to pose serious risks to human health and the environment by gradual leaching into soil and water consumption. In those countries victimized by the US military’s bioweapons operations, there has been an enormous loss of biodiversity and ecological disruption. A study published in the journal Themis documented reduced species diversity and altered community composition in forests affected by Agent Orange spraying, highlighting the herbicide’s long-lasting impacts on ecosystems.[20]

The use of Agent Orange during the Vietnam War stands as a stark reminder of the devastating consequences of unchecked corporate greed and corruption. It is not a surprise that Agent Orange’s dangers to human health have a history of being covered up by the US government. The manufacturers of Agent Orange have been implicated in a disturbing pattern of deceit and cover-up regarding the herbicide’s known health and environmental risks. From its inception, there were indications that Agent Orange posed significant risks to human health and the environment. However, rather than heed these warnings, the manufacturers of Agent Orange chose to prioritize profits over public safety. They embarked on a campaign of deception, downplaying the herbicide’s toxicity and actively suppressing scientific evidence that contradicted their interests. Key individuals within these companies played pivotal roles in perpetuating this corruption. Executives and scientists at Dow Chemical Company and Monsanto were aware of the health hazards associated with Agent Orange, yet they chose to withhold this information from the public and regulatory authorities. Instead, they engaged in tactics aimed at discrediting independent research and manipulating data to obscure the truth about Agent Orange’s harmful effects. Federal agencies tasked with regulating pesticides and protecting public health were also complicit in this corruption. The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and other government bodies failed to hold the manufacturers of Agent Orange accountable for their actions. Regulatory decisions were influenced by industry lobbying and political pressure, resulting in inadequate oversight and lax enforcement of safety standards.

In 1965, before spraying started to reach its peak between 1966 and 1968, the National Cancer Institute in collaboration with the Bionetics Research Laboratory conducted the first studies to evaluate Agent Orange’s teratogenic effects—how the herbicide disturbed the growth and development of an embryo or fetus leading to developmental malformations. The study concluded that the chemical did indeed cause malformations and stillbirths in higher doses, but due to industry pressures the study was not released to the public until four years later.[21] Even then the study was largely ignored by the government and the Defense department. In 1970, another study, but this time ordered by Congress and led by the Department of the Defense concluded four years later that they were unable to observe any indication that Agent Orange and other herbicidal bioweapons used in Vietnam directly damaged human health.[22]

One of the leading eyewitnesses on the corruption and war crimes associated with the US’s use of Agent Orange in Southeast Asia is Philip Jones Griffiths. Griffiths is a British pharmacist turned photographer and war journalist who conducted photo-reportage in Vietnam during the mid-1960s. He has extensively researched and written about the long-term human and environmental results of tens of millions of gallons of Agent Orange dumped on Southeast Asia. His book Agent Orange: Collateral Damage in Vietnam documents the destruction and suffering due to the US Air Force’s biochemical weapons project Operation Ranch Hand. Likewise, Professor Marjorie Cohn, a former international legal scholar at Thomas Jefferson School of Law and former president of the National Lawyers Guild, has outlined the legal implications of the weaponization of Agent Orange in the Vietnam War. Cohn argues that the use of Agent Orange by the US military in Vietnam constitutes both a violation of international law and a war crime. She contends that the indiscriminate spraying of Agent Orange and other herbicides in Vietnam caused widespread environmental destruction and inflicted severe harm on civilian populations, constituting acts of chemical warfare prohibited under international humanitarian law. Furthermore, she criticizes the complicity of US government officials and chemical companies in perpetuating the use of Agent Orange despite knowledge of its harmful effects. She highlights the role of corporate interests and political influence in shaping US military policy and regulatory decisions, leading to the continued use of Agent Orange despite evidence of its toxic effects.[23]

Depleted Uranium

Image: Mark 149 Mod 2 20mm depleted uranium ammunition for the Phalanx CIWS aboard USS Missouri. (Source: Public Domain)

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Depleted uranium (DU) is a byproduct of the uranium enrichment process, primarily composed of uranium-238 with a reduced concentration of uranium-235. While DU has found various industrial applications, its use in weaponry has raised significant concerns due to its potential toxicological effects on human health and the environment. The primary concern associated with depleted uranium is its radioactive properties. DU emits alpha, beta, and gamma radiation, which can penetrate the human body and pose risks of internal radiation exposure. When DU particles are inhaled or ingested, they can become lodged in tissues and organs, leading to chronic irradiation and potential DNA damage. In addition to its radioactive properties, DU also exhibits chemical toxicity due to its heavy metal characteristics. It can interfere with cellular processes, disrupt enzyme function, and induce oxidative stress, leading to cellular damage and inflammation.

Depleted uranium first saw widespread use in military applications during the 1991 Gulf War in the deserts of Kuwait and Iraq. DU was employed primarily as armor-piercing ammunition due to its high density and penetrative capabilities. It was during the first Gulf War that exposure to DU radiation generated controversy due to concerns about human health and environmental risks. During Operation Desert Storm, a Nuclear Medicine Division in Saudi Arabia estimated that 350 metric tons of DU was used, which contributed to 3-6 million grams being released into the atmosphere.[24] Yet, despite all of the warning signs during the Gulf War, the US military continued to deploy DU munitions in later conflicts including the wars in the Balkans, Afghanistan and Iraq. During the 2003 invasion of Iraq, a shocking 1,000 to 2,000 tons were dropped in the first three weeks of the war. More bothersome was the US military’s use of DU missiles in heavily populated urban areas that exposed millions of civilians to long-term radiation.[25] The amount of DU dropped in Afghanistan remains unknown; however, birth defects are increasing and elevated levels of uranium have been found in Kabul’s drinking water.[26,27,28]

The US government and the Department of Defense maintain that DU munitions are safe for military use and pose minimal risks to human health and the environment when employed in accordance with its own guidelines and regulations. The official stance on the safety of depleted uranium is largely based on biased assessments conducted by government agencies and military contractors. According to the DoD, DU munitions are subject to rigorous testing and evaluation to ensure compliance with safety standards and operational requirements; however, the actual research has been shown to be extremely weak and ignores DU’s health threats after ignition and subsequent dispersal into the atmosphere as nano-particulate matter. This increases human exposure to higher levels of radiation via inhalation, ingestion and skin contact. 

Although the majority of concerns focus upon DU’s highly toxic effects on American veterans in the Middle Eastern wars, millions of Afghani and Iraqi civilians were victims of indiscriminate bombing. Some independent studies have looked at DU’s effects on these populations. In 2021, researchers at the American University of Beirut in Lebanon analyzed observational studies from 11 electronic databases with data gathered between 1990 and 2020 reporting on cancers, birth defects, immune system dysfunction and mortality among the Iraqi population. Eight-three percent of reporting found a positive association between depleted uranium exposure and illness.[29] Likewise the independent Uranium Medical Research Center conducted field investigations and medical assessments of DU-exposed populations in Iraq. These studies documented cases of cancer, respiratory illnesses, and reproductive disorders among Iraqi civilians living in DU-contaminated areas.[30] In Basra, which was bombed by the US during the first Gulf War, research out of the Canadian University Dubai found that cases of childhood leukemia increased 60 percent by 1997, and birth defects tripled.[31] Only a highly toxic environmental contaminant could cause this level of genetically related conditions in a short period of time. 

An article in the Harvard International Review suggests that nations could turn to the Geneva Convention to prove depleted uranium is illegal once it is firmly established by consensus that it is extremely harmful to human health and the environment. The paper states, “The United States and other countries perpetuate imperialism by deploying depleted uranium without fully considering its long-term impact on local communities.” The International Coalition to Ban Uranium Weapons has already written a formal ban for international review.[32] The case against DU in warfare is more likely a war crime in the event safer and equally effective alternatives could be used such as tungsten.[33] There are other international rules, such as the Principle of Distinction and the Principle of Proportionality, that could warrant DU being banned. 

Research based upon epidemiological studies, animal research and in vitro experiments on depleted uranium exposure has identified a wide variety of diseases and health conditions. These include: higher rates of respiratory diseases, including bronchitis, asthma, and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD);[34] elevated levels of uranium in the kidneys leading to kidney damage and impaired renal function;[35] increased cancer risk, particularly leukemia, lymphoma, and lung cancers and other respiratory malignancies;[36] possible neurobehavioral disorders, such as depression, anxiety, and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD);[37] reduced fertility and increased rates of miscarriages and birth defects among individuals exposed to DU;[38] dysregulation of immune response leading to chronic inflammation and autoimmune disorders; disruption of cardiac function and vascular health due to uranium’s toxic effects on the cardiovascular system;[39] increased risk of osteoporosis, bone fractures, and skeletal deformities;[40] disruption of hormonal balance and function, potentially leading to endocrine disorders and metabolic disturbances;[41] induced DNA damage and genomic instability, increasing the risk of mutations and genetic abnormalities.[42]

Finally, depleted uranium has been linked to Gulf War Syndrome (GWS), which refers to a collection of symptoms experienced by veterans of the 1990-1991 Gulf War. GWS is characterized by a range of physical, cognitive, and psychological conditions, including fatigue, musculoskeletal pain, respiratory distress, skin disorders, cognitive and mood difficulties, and gastrointestinal problems. More severe illnesses include cancer and breakdowns in the immune system. Overall, Gulf War Syndrome is a complex and poorly understood condition characterized by a constellation of symptoms affecting multiple bodily systems. Because veterans were exposed to a wide range of environmental hazards besides depleted uranium, no single cause can be implicated. Other threats to human health during the conflict include the large oil well fires, chemical nerve agents such as sarin and cyclosarin, a battery of vaccinations including anthrax, insecticides, and finally combinations of any or all of these hazards. The stress and trauma of combat may also have exacerbated GWS symptoms thereby contributing to overall symptom severity.

Glyphosate (Roundup)

Image is from Flickr

In March 2015, the World Health Organization declared that Monsanto’s flagship product, its herbicide glyphosate or Roundup, is a probable human carcinogen. This decision placed pressure on countries’ national health ministries to begin taking a hard second look at glyphosate’s health and environmental dangers and begin raising questions whether or not to ban the chemical. As of 2019, 33 countries have enforced full or partial bans to considerably restrict its use. In the US, however, no concerted efforts have been made to even put the scientific evidence under serious independent evaluation without interference from the Big Ag industry. The US continues to stand by its 2019 EPA ruling that glyphosate is “not likely to be carcinogenic to humans.”[43] Likewise, as a single authoritative entity, the unelected European Commission continues to support private industry’s claims and denies Roundup’s more serious health risks. Although glyphosate is the single most widely used pesticide in Europe, individual EU nations are permitted to rule at their own discretion.  France, Netherlands and Belgium have approved partial bans, and other European nations are lining up to follow suit.[44] 

Glyphosate is the most widely used herbicide in the world today. The US is the largest consumer, using approximately 20% of the world’s Roundup. According to a more recent University of Maryland report, over 100 million pounds of glyphosate are applied to American farms, public spaces, parks and private yawns annually.[45] 

Over the years a large body of independent research has accumulated and now collectively provides a sound scientific rationale to confirm that glyphosate is far more toxic and poses more serious health risks to animals and humans than Monsanto and the US government admit.  Among the many diseases and health conditions non-industry studies identified are Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and autism since Roundup has been shown to instigate aluminum accumulation in the brain. The herbicide has been responsible for reproductive problems such as infertility, miscarriages, and neural tube and birth defects. It is a causal agent for a variety of cancers: brain, breast, prostate, lung and non-Hodgkin lymphoma.  Other disorders include chronic kidney and liver diseases, diabetes, heart disease, hypothyroidism, and leaky gut syndrome.[46] In addition to lung cancer, glyphosate may be responsible for today’s growing epidemics of chronic respiratory illnesses among farm workers and their families.  However, these findings derive from outside the Big Agriculture industry.  Private industries routinely defend themselves by positing their own research to refute independent reports. Consequently, for several decades it has been he-said-she-said combat. 

The EPA is fully aligned with Monsanto’s safety claims and limits glyphosate’s risks to kidney, reproductive and carcinogenic damage only from very long-term exposure to high levels of the toxin. Anything under that is considered harmless.  The EPA continues to approve small amounts of glyphosate as safe in drinking water to children. A review of existing data sponsored by Moms Across America found that out of 21 drinking water samples analyzed, 13 had glyphosate levels between 0.08 and 0.3 ug/L, well below the EPA’s limit, but significantly above the European Union’s limit of 0.1 ug/L.[47]

To this day, Monsanto continues to assert that Roundup is environmentally friendly.  We are told it biodegrades rapidly and therefore poses no long-term risks after repeated usage.  We are told that the herbicide is ideal for weed control. Throughout the US, it has been liberally sprayed on our public parks, school playgrounds, sporting fields, and throughout our lawns and gardens. We are told it doesn’t bio-accumulate in the body’s cells and tissues and is excreted rapidly.  We are also told that glyphosate toxicity is dose specific.  The EPA’s glyphosate fact sheet continues to push the myth that only exceedingly high levels of the pesticide pose any serious health risks.[48]

How factual are these claims or are they mere propaganda to obscure scientific truths far more deceptive and sinister? 

Anthony Samsel is an independent research scientist working internationally in the interest of public health and the environment. He is a member of the Union of Concerned Scientists, and a former scientist and consultant at Arthur D. Little, one of the world’s leading management consulting firms. Samsel has devoted much of his independent research on Roundup’s toxicological characteristics and bioactivity. Through FOIA filings, he received a hoard of scientific documents, over 15,000 pages worth, covering Monsanto’s complete glyphosate research. A review of the data has uncovered that the company had known for almost 4 decades that glyphosate is responsible for a large variety of cancers and organ failures. 

In addition, Monsanto’s studies confirm that low glyphosate doses were equally if not more toxic than higher doses. Samsel’s observations were confirmed in a study published in the Environmental Health Journal by scientists at Kings College London and the University of Caen in France. The two year study found that glyphosate administered at an ultra low dose of 0.1 ppb (the EU’s safety limit) in drinking water altered over 4,000 gene clusters in the livers and kidneys of rats. These alterations, the study reports, “were consistent with fibrosis, necrosis, phospholipidosis, mitochondria membrane dysfunction and ischemia.” Low doses of Roundup were found to be far more toxic than the US EPA limits.[49]

During its years investigating glyphosate’s bioactivity, Monsanto conducted hundreds of trials on mice, rats, beagle dogs, rabbits and other life. Aside from the diseases listed above, other cancers and diseases Monsanto’s own research uncovered from glyphosate exposure include:  adenoma cancer in the pituitary gland, glioma tumors in the brain, reticular cell sarcomas in the heart, malignant tumors in the lungs, metastatic sarcomas of the lymph gland, cancer of the bladder, thyroid carcinoma, basal cell squamous skin tumors, and others. In female mammals there were cancers of the lung, liver, thymus, stomach, bladder, adrenal glands, ovaries, colon, uterus, parathyroid and mammary glands.[50]

One of Monsanto’s claims is that glyphosate doesn’t bio-accumulate in tissues, rapidly biodegrades, and is excreted from the body readily.[51]  Contrary to this claim, Monsanto carried out meticulous studies to determine levels of accumulation in the organs, tissues and cells glyphosate reaches. Glyphosate was radio labeled with carbon 14 and given in 10 mg doses to seven groups of animals, male and female. After 24 hours, the toxic chemical was found in the lungs and all body fluids: lymph, blood, urine and cerebral spinal fluid.  Glyphosate also accumulated in the bone by 30 ppm and in the bone marrow by 4 ppm.  Monsanto’s studies were comprehensive. It found an accumulation of the chemical in red blood cells, thyroid, uterus, colon, testes and ovaries, shoulder muscle, nasal mucosa, heart, lung, small intestine, abdominal muscle and the eyes. Moreover, when Monsanto convinces the public that glyphosate breaks down quickly, we are not told that the compound’s metabolite byproducts are equally toxic and persist in the body and soil far longer. 

Roundup’s inventor, Monsanto is now largely a defunct corporation. After many thousands of lawsuits were filed against Monsanto due to glyphosate’s carcinogenic activity, the company was purchased by the German mega-firm Bayer in 2018. As of May 2022, Monsanto paid out $11 billion to settle over 100,000 cases. This was shortly followed by a Ninth Circuit court putting pressure on the EPA to reevaluate glyphosate’s serious dangers to humans, animals and the environment.[52] In a Philadelphia case, the court awarded a plaintiff diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma $2.25 billion. Cases involving non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma seem to be the primary ruling favoring plaintiffs although Bayer continues to deny any association. One study has shown glyphosate exposure increases a person’s risk of the disease by 41 percent.[53] According to the Lawsuit Information Center, about 54,000 Roundup cases are still pending. Many of the settled cases were ruled on Monsanto’s failure to provide known health warnings about their product.[54]

Conclusion

These examples only scratch the surface, although their human cost has been astronomical. The real corruption however should be leveled at the government and our federal agencies. Today, private corporations simply do what they do: generate profits. It is not public duty to hold private industry accountable. Government carries that mandate, and repeated failure to protect public health is unconscionable. The same holds true for not-for-profit medical organizations, such as the American Medical Association (AMA), who claim to uphold evidence-based science but repeatedly side with their corporate sponsors. The famous Tobacco Master Settlement in 1998 forced the tobacco industry to pay over $206 billion over 25 years for covering up smoking’s lethal dangers. Despite the industry’s CEOs and executives knowing for decades about tobacco’s addictive threats to public health, the government and AMA nevertheless protected the tobacco corporations’ trade secrets for decades. Other examples of federal corruption jeopardizing human health includes the Department of Energy’s full knowledge of uranium mining’s dire health risks to tribal Native American with food and water contamination, and the continual support for synthetic hormone replacement for women, which increases women’s risk of breast cancer by 30 percent.[55,56]

What is especially disgraceful is the failure of government, regulatory agencies and the medical authorities to apologize when proven wrong by public support for clear scientific evidence. Today, this cognitive disconnect from reality is just as systemic throughout federal agencies and private industry as was in 1972 when DDT was banned.

The promising news is that all of the government and industry propaganda about these toxic chemicals are increasingly being exposed as fallacious. As time passes, more and more research will inevitably emerge to damn the proponents of these products and further expose their deeper ulterior motivations to favor profit and war over health. 

Although surveys show the American public is turning its back on industrial agriculture and war, too much is heavily invested in agro-biotech and military complexes for it to disappear quickly. We have become accustomed to expect ever-increasing new volleys of propaganda and fabricated lies from the US government whenever its policy positions and globalist agendas are threatened. They always have an army of internal scientists at their disposal and compromised paid shills to concoct new bogus research to keep lawsuits and legal cases dangling within the courts. Therefore we can always expect to hear more scientific denialism and junk science coming out of the federal government and promulgated by major media pundits. 

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Richard Gale is the Executive Producer of the Progressive Radio Network and a former Senior Research Analyst in the biotechnology and genomic industries.

Dr. Gary Null is host of the nation’s longest running public radio program on alternative and nutritional health and a multi-award-winning documentary film director, including his recent Last Call to Tomorrow.

They are regular contributors to Global Research.

Notes

[1] https://newrepublic.com/article/166645/ddt-still-us-50-years-since-banned-poison-elena-conis

[2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9729358/

[3] https://ejfoundation.org/resources/downloads/end_of_the_road_for_endosulfan.pdf

[4] http://npic.orst.edu/factsheets/archive/ddttech.pdf

[5] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4524999/

[6] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4286277/

[7] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16818570/; https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9690583/

[8] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9299171/

[9] https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/2006/09/16/who-urges-use-of-ddt-in-africa-span-classbankheadcall-for-applications-of-pesticide-changes-30-year-policyspan/a0b38560-0404-41fe-b263-73d0b00edf84/

[10] https://www.cato.org/commentary/bring-back-ddt

[11] https://www.aspeninstitute.org/programs/agent-orange-in-vietnam-program/what-is-agent-orange/

[12] https://www.veterans.nd.gov/news/agent-orange-its-affecting-veterans-and-their-kids&ved=2ahUKEwjD9KH0zcCFAxWhF1kFHcaKB0kQFnoECA8QAQ&usg=AOvVaw2QzeqRTl1kwrxFoIeZ8FiG

[13] https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/symptoms/24689-agent-orange-effects%23:~:text=Complications%2520from%2520Agent%2520Orange%2520exposure,Orange%2520from%25201962%2520to%25201971.

[14] https://www.forces.net/heritage/history/malayan-emergency-britains-vietnam-except-britain-won

[15] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16543362/

[16] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8130889/

[17] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24906069/

[18] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37890520/

[19] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9920643/

[20] https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1010&context=themis

[21] https://ntrl.ntis.gov/NTRL/dashboard/searchResults/titleDetail/PB223159.xhtml

[22] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK236351/

[23] https://vn-agentorange.org/agent-orange-terrible-legacy-of-the-vietnam-war/

[24] http://umrc.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/On-Depleted-Uranium-the-Gulf-War-and-Balkan-Syndrome-CMJ-2001.pdf

[25] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1362480607085793?ref=hir.harvard.edu

[26] http://www.wise-uranium.org/dissafdf.html

[27] https://www.dawn.com/news/298923/afghans-to-probe-if-us-used-depleted-uranium

[28] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0045653516311596

[29] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7903104/

[30] http://umrc.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/Warning-of-Uranium-Contamination-Risks-to-NGO-Staff-Coalition-Forces-Foreign-Contract-Personnel-and-Civilans-in-Iraq-Tedd-Weyman-2004.pdf

[31] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/268273134_Depleted_Uranium_Radioactive_Contamination_In_Iraq_An_Overview

[32] https://hir.harvard.edu/depleted-uranium-devastated-health-military-operations-and-environmental-injustice-in-the-middle-east/

[33] https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13623699.2010.535277?ref=hir.harvard.edu

[34] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9610560/

[35] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28462701/

[36] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1119402/

[37] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12015793/

[38] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/11617139_Reproductive_and_developmental_toxicity_of_natural_and_depleted_uranium_A_review

[39] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3159113/

[40] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12015793/

[41] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27544493/

[42] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3985252/

[43] https://phys.org/news/2023-09-glyphosate-restricted.html

[44] https://www.nature.com/articles/s43247-023-00951-x

[45] https://extension.umd.edu/resource/vinegar-alternative-glyphosate/

[46] https://www.organicconsumers.org/news/monsanto%25E2%2580%2599s-roundup-enough-make-you-sick

[47] https://www.momsacrossamerica.com/glyphosate_testing_results

[48] https://www3.epa.gov/pesticides/chem_search/reg_actions/reregistration/fs_PC-417300_1-Sep-93.pdf

[49] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26302742/

[50] https://www3.nd.edu/~aseriann/Glyphosate_1.pdf

[51] http://prn.live/the-gary-null-show-09-04-15/

[52] https://cdn.ca9.uscourts.gov/datastore/opinions/2022/06/17/20-70787.pdf

[53] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1383574218300887

[54] ttps://www.lawsuit-information-center.com/roundup-lawsuit.html

[55] https://ehp.niehs.nih.gov/doi/full/10.1289/EHP7537

[56] https://www.komen.org/breast-cancer/risk-factor/postmenopausal-hormone-use/

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On April 18, the US and UK imposed a new round of sanctions on Iran.

On April 17, European Union leaders had talked aggressively about ramping up sanctions on Iran. This has happened in the wake of Iran’s April 13 attack on Israeli targets, which in turn was in response to the April 1 attack on an Iranian consulate building in Syria which killed seven Iranian commanders and which is believed very widely, by almost everyone, to be an Israeli attack.

However while increasing sanctions on Iran, the USA and the UK have not mentioned that the Iran attack itself was in response to an Israeli attack which had killed several Iranian commanders including a very senior one. In all fairness, the USA, the UK and the European Union should have been equally critical towards both attacks, in fact more towards the first one rather than the response to it. However they chose to impose sanctions only on Iran, while ignoring the attack on Iranian personnel and consulate building.

The damage suffered by Iran was clearly higher. It cannot be said that the Iran attack inflicted disproportionate damage. Was this only because of interception success by Israel and its allies? Several analysts feel that Iran had in fact deliberately avoided what could prove to be a highly fatal attack. This is the stand taken, for example, in an article published in Politico under the title ‘Iran’s Attack Seems like it was Designed to Fail, so what Comes Next?’(14 April, 2014).

In this article, author Michael Hirsh has quoted Ali Vaez of the International Crisis Group as stating about the Iranian response,

“They (Iran) could have used a much higher number of projectiles, synchronized drones and missiles in a way that could have swarmed the air defense systems, and could have fired their new hypersonic missiles.”

The fact that they did not resort to such ways of inflicting more definite and higher harm available to them indicates, this expert has argued, that “they (the Iran side) clearly wanted something spectacular but not fatal.”

In addition, Iran hastened to announce to the international community that from their side the matter concludes here.

Hence the response of Iran can hardly be called so dangerous or escalatory as to call for further sanctions, to add to the many that already exist.

In addition despite the desperate need for peace, there are several other signs of escalation.

On April 15, Israeli opposition leader and former Premier Yair Lapid said that under Netanyahu “Jewish terrorist violence” against Palestinians in the occupied West Bank was “out of control”. Should not such violence be seen as escalatory?

Meanwhile, to mention another worrying front, conditions continue to be very tense on the Israel-Lebanon border too. According to the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project (ACLED), a non-profit, between October 7, 2023 and March 15, 2024, militias like Hezbollah in Lebanon on one side and Israel on the other side exchanged at least 4,733 attacks, among them 3,952 (83%) by the Israeli side. However, other estimates mention a higher number of Hezbollah attacks. Israel has evacuated 61,000 people belonging to 43 communities in the Upper Galilee region. According to ACLED, Israeli attacks in Lebanon have killed at least 357 people since October 7, 2023, while on the Israeli side 22 lives have been lost.

On April 18 the leader of Yemen’s Iran-aligned Houthis, who had been attacking shipping in the Red Sea, said that the group had carried out operations in the Indian Ocean and towards southern Israel. Leader Abdul Malik al Houthi said that so far 98 ships had been targeted in attempts to prevent ships heading to Israel from sailing through the Red Sea. He said such attacks would continue till the Israeli offensive in Gaza is stopped. 

On April 18, Ahmad Haghtalab, Iranian Guards Commander-in-charge of nuclear security, said that Iran could review its ‘nuclear doctrine’ following increasing Israeli threats.

Hence it is clear that there are deeply worrying escalations at several levels in the Middle East.

All this, it should be remembered, is in addition to the extreme distress of the people of Gaza (where well over a hundred thousand people have been killed, are missing or seriously injured in the course of the six-month conflict) which is almost beyond words.

Those doctors and humanitarian workers who have been familiar with several conflicts have stated that they have seldom seen such extreme hunger and such terrible injuries inflicted on helpless people. There is urgent need for non-partial response and attitudes on the part of the international community which is difficult to find. On the one hand, human distress is being aggravated and on the other hand the chances of escalation and a bigger conflict are increasing.

Several western analysts have stated that the 1 April attack on the Iranian Consulate was aimed at escalation in such a way that the USA gets more directly involved, but despite this, sanctions were introduced against Iran, not Israel. Hence it is important for many more countries and forces of peace to come forward for a non-partisan approach to resolving the crisis and for peace. 

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Bharat Dogra is Honorary Convener, Campaign to Save Earth Now. His recent books include Planet in Peril, Protecting Earth for Children, Earth without Borders and A Day in 2071. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from Silent Crow News

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New Year Donation Drive: Global Research Is Committed to the “Unspoken Truth”

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Indeed, as I see, each year Russian diplomats, people here commemorate their loss, on the West’s behalf, I literally cringe with shame — again. That as far as I am aware, no UK Gov. Minister, representative, person of high office has ever joined in gratitude and respect for 26 million – or perhaps more – lost in siding with the “Allies.” Beyond all shame. Again.

Felicity Arbuthnot, Global Research, January 17, 2024

Without US support to Nazi Germany, the Third Reich would not have been able to wage war on the Soviet Union. Germany’s oil production was insufficient to wage a major military campaign. Throughout the war, the Third Reich relied on regular shipments of crude oil  from US Standard Oil owned by the Rockefeller family.

The Franklin D. Roosevelt administration could have adopted severe sanctions against Standard Oil with a firm decision to enforce a blockade against Nazi Germany. 

You cannot wage a war without fuel. America had been “sleeping with the enemy” throughout World War II. America’s objective was to destroy the Soviet Union.

Michel Chossudovsky, Global Research, January 17, 2024

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An epochal anniversary from the annals of modern history is coming up in another ten days that remains a living memory for the Russian people. The Siege of Leningrad, arguably the most gruesome episode of the Second World War, which lasted for 900 days, was finally broken by the Soviet Red Army on 27th January 1944, eighty years ago to be exact. 

The siege endured by more than three million people, of whom nearly one half died, most of them in the first six months when the temperature fell to 30° below zero. It was an apocalyptic event. Civilians died from starvation, disease and cold. Yet it was a heroic victory. Leningraders never tried to surrender even though food rations were reduced to a few slices of bread mixed with sawdust, and the inhabitants ate glue, rats — and even each other — while the city went without water, electricity, fuel or transportation and was being shelled daily. 

It was on the 22nd of June, 1941 that the German armies crossed the Russian frontiers. Within six weeks, the Army Group North of the Wehrmacht, armed forces of the Third Reich, was within fifty kms of Leningrad in a fantastic blitzkrieg and had advanced  650 kms deep into Soviet territory.

A month later, the Germans had all but completed the city’s encirclement, only a perilous route across Lake Ladoga to the east connected Leningrad with the rest of Russia. But the Germans got no further. And 900 days later their retreat began. 

The epic siege of Leningrad was the longest endured by any city since Biblical times, and, equally, citizens became heroes — artists, musicians, writers, soldiers and sailors who stubbornly resisted the iron from entering their souls. Petrified by the prospect of surrender to the Soviet Union, the Nazis preferred to lay down arms before the western allied forces, but Gen. Dwight Eisenhower, Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force in Europe, ordered that the honour of victory should go to the Red Army. 

Herein lies one of the greatest paradoxes of war and peace in modern times. Today, the anniversary of the siege of Leningrad has become,  most certainly, an occasion that the US and many of its European allies would rather not remember. Yet, its contemporary relevance is not to be glossed over, either.

The Nazi leadership aimed to exterminate Leningrad’s entire population by enforced starvation. Death by starvation was a deliberate act on the part of the German Reich. In the words of Joseph Goebbels, Adolf Hitler “intended to have cities like Moscow and St Petersburg wiped out.” This was “necessary”, he wrote in July 1941, “because if we want to divide Russia into its individual parts,” it should “no longer have a spiritual, political or economic centre.” 

Hitler himself declared in September 1941, “We have no interest in maintaining even a part of the metropolitan population in this existential war.” Any talk of the city surrendering had to be “rejected, as the problem of keeping and feeding the population cannot be solved by us.”

Simply put, the population of Leningrad was left to starve to death – much like the millions of Soviet prisoners of war held by the Wehrmacht. The historian Jörg Ganzenmüller later wrote that this form of mass murder was cost-effective for Berlin, for, it was “genocide by simply doing nothing”. 

“Genocide by doing nothing”! Those chilling words are as well applicable today to the West’s “sanctions from hell” with an ulterior agenda to “erase” Russia and carve out five new states from its vast landmass with fabulous resources that can be subjugated by the industrial world. 

The mother of all ironies is that Germany is even today at the forefront of the “genocide by doing nothing” strategy to weaken and bring down the Russian Federation on its knees. The Biden administration depended on a troika of three German politicians to do the heavy lifting in that failed effort to erase Russia — EU’s top bureaucrat in Brussels Ursula von der Layen, German Chancellor Olaf Schulz and Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock. 

George Santayana, the Spanish-American philosopher, essayist, poet, and novelist once said, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” This is how the far-right thrives.

In Germany and elsewhere, younger generations are becoming indifferent to the history of fascism. The idea of a Fourth Reich has entered an unprecedented heyday and is currently experiencing a new phase of normalisation in Europe. The tumultuous political upheaval throughout the western world provides the backdrop today.

The author of  The Fourth Reich: The Specter of Nazism from World War II to the Present, historian and professor of history and Judaic studies Gavriel Rosenfeld has written that “The only way to mute the siren call of the Fourth Reich is to know its full history. Although it is increasingly difficult in our present-day world of fake ‘facts’ and deliberate disinformation to forge a consensus about historical truth, we have no alternative but to pursue it.” 

The justification of political violence is classically fascist. This past week, we saw a breathtaking spectacle at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in Hague reminding us that we are now in fascism’s legal phase. If the Nazis used Judeo-Bolshevism as their constructed enemy, Israel is doing the same thing by raising the bogeyman of Hamas. Fascism feeds off a narrative of supposed national humiliation by internal enemies. 

Meanwhile, what gets forgotten is that there has been a growing fascist social and political movement in Israel for decades. Like other fascist movements, it is riddled with internal contradictions, but this movement now has a classically authoritarian leader in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu who has shaped and exacerbated it, and is determined that in his time in politics it will be normalised. 

The probability is high that in a matter of a few days, the ICJ will give some sort of interim order/injunction to Israel to end the violence against the hapless Palestinians in Gaza. But the fascist movement Netanyahu now leads preceded him, and will outlive him.

These are forces that feed off ideologies with deep roots in Jewish history. They may be defending a fictional glorious and virtuous national past, but it would be a grave error to think they cannot ultimately win.

The Russians are learning this home truth the hard way in Ukraine where “de-nazification” is turning out to be the weakest link in their special military operation, given its geopolitical moorings traceable to Germany’s dalliance with the Ukrainian Neo-Nazi groups in Kiev in the run-up to the 2014 coup, which the US inherited gleefully and wouldn’t let go. 

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Featured image: On the 75th anniversary of the battle that lifted the Siege of Leningrad in World War 2, people walk in snowfall to the Motherland monument to place flowers at the Piskaryovskoye Cemetery where the victims were buried, St. Petersburg, Russia, January 26, 2019 (Source: IP)

Aparentemente, as tensões entre o governo ucraniano e os EUA estão a aumentar. Num discurso recente, o presidente ucraniano, Vladimir Zelensky, criticou severamente os políticos e decisores americanos, acusando-os de não se preocuparem com a Ucrânia. O caso mostra claramente como o regime de Kiev está profundamente insatisfeito com o recente declínio da ajuda militar ocidental.

Numa  entrevista recente  a jornalistas ucranianos, Zelensky criticou o atraso dos legisladores americanos em encontrar um acordo sobre o apoio militar a Kiev. Atualmente, os parlamentares norte-americanos preparam-se para votar um controverso pacote de assistência militar ao regime neonazista, que está gerando muita polarização e discussões nos EUA.

Os legisladores evitaram votar a medida durante meses, dizendo que Washington deve ter outras prioridades estratégicas. Os republicanos acreditam que, em vez de gastar dinheiro na Ucrânia, o governo deveria aumentar as suas ações para combater a imigração ilegal e apoiar Israel no Médio Oriente. Zelensky está impaciente com estas conversações nos EUA, uma vez que o impasse político mina o apoio ao regime.

A demora dos legisladores em encontrar um acordo, segundo Zelensky, é uma prova de que o apoio dos EUA à Ucrânia na guerra não é sincero, sendo apenas parte de um jogo político – no qual a Ucrânia parece cada vez menos interessante para os americanos.

“Isto é pura política e é uma vergonha para o mundo e uma vergonha para a democracia, (…) Ninguém se importa com quantas pessoas morrem na Ucrânia todos os dias. Eles só se preocupam com seus índices de aprovação”, disse ele.

É curioso que Zelensky faça tais comentários agora, já que sempre foi um dos principais apoiantes da “amizade” entre americanos e ucranianos. Zelensky está claramente a tornar-se mais  hostil  na sua comunicação com os parceiros americanos. Esta hostilidade deve-se ao facto de a assistência militar dos EUA ter diminuído drasticamente nos últimos meses, gerando expectativas terríveis sobre o futuro das forças de Kiev.

Curiosamente, Zelensky descreve a ajuda militar americana como puramente “política”, como se isso fosse realmente surpreendente. Não existe nenhum acordo que estabeleça uma obrigação legal para os EUA apoiarem a Ucrânia, portanto a decisão de manter a assistência é obviamente política. Washington tem interesses políticos na Eurásia e quer promover uma estratégia de cerco e desgaste contra a Federação Russa. Nesta estratégia, é conveniente enviar armas para a Ucrânia e é por isso que existe a assistência actual. Não existe nenhuma relação de “verdadeira amizade” entre americanos e ucranianos, muito menos obrigações legais – apenas interesses políticos.

O problema é que os interesses políticos são frequentemente confrontados com a realidade material de um país. Nos EUA, há uma grave crise acontecendo. Economicamente e socialmente, o país atravessa um período de grandes dificuldades, tendo problemas com inflação, desindustrialização e desemprego, além de uma epidemia de dependência de drogas e crescimento da violência urbana. Paralelamente, a imigração descontrolada, com a constante entrada ilegal de milhares de estrangeiros no país, gerou uma crise de legitimidade na própria unidade nacional americana. Isto foi visto recentemente no Texas, quando as autoridades regionais se recusaram a obedecer a Washington devido à posição irresponsável do governo federal ao permitir a entrada de imigrantes ilegais na fronteira sul.

Além disso, existem outros cenários de conflitos internacionais que preocupam actualmente Washington. A escalada no Médio Oriente está a gerar um impulso do lobby sionista nos EUA para que mais ajuda militar seja enviada a Israel. A situação é tão crítica que o governo americano está claramente a pedir a Tel Aviv que diminua a escalada da guerra, reduzindo as acções em Gaza e evitando retaliações contra o Irão. Isto não está a ser feito porque os EUA realmente querem a paz, mas porque os decisores americanos sabem que o país não tem condições materiais para se envolver numa guerra total.

Perante tantas prioridades, a Ucrânia parece cada vez menos relevante para os EUA. Não há interesse estratégico em continuar a gastar milhões de dólares para prolongar uma guerra invencível. O resultado final no campo de batalha não pode ser alterado pela ajuda americana, sendo o prolongamento do conflito o único resultado real da política de assistência. Assim, logicamente, cada vez mais decisores políticos americanos tendem a ignorar Kiev, a fim de se concentrarem em questões internas – ou noutros problemas externos.

O ex-presidente Donald Trump já pediu aos seus apoiantes que vetassem qualquer novo pacote pró-Ucrânia. Alguns parlamentares republicanos, no entanto, parecem dispostos a aprovar o projeto se o governo federal também divulgar um orçamento para implementar medidas anti-imigração e apoio a Israel. Não há como prever qual será a decisão final, mas uma coisa é certa: a partir de agora haverá cada vez menos vontade de ajudar a Ucrânia entre os políticos americanos. Em vez de se queixar disto, Zelensky deveria simplesmente romper com os EUA e aceitar os termos de paz russos.

Lucas Leiroz de Ameida

 

Artigo em inglês : Zelensky criticizes US politicians as military aid declines, InfoBrics

Artigo publicado em português no site : paginaglobal.blogspot.com

Imagem : InfoBrics

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Lucas Leiroz, jornalista, pesquisador do Center for Geostrategic Studies, consultor geopolítico.

Você pode seguir Lucas Leiroz em: https://t.me/lucasleiroz e https://twitter.com/leiroz_lucas

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Global Research Referral Drive: Our Readers Are Our Lifeline

***

Read Parts I-V:

Part 1: Newton, Rosicrucianism and the Imperial Control of Science

Part 2: Tesla’s Eugenics (and other Black Magick)

Part 3: Tesla and his Nazi Friend… The Strangest Friendship

Part 4: Tesla’s Martians and H.G. Wells

Part 5: Tesla: From Extreme Empiricist to Father of A.I. Gods


“Too bad, Sir Isaac, they dimmed your renown
And turned your great science upside down.
Now a long-haired crank, Einstein by name,
Puts on your high teaching all the blame.
Says: matter and force are transmutable
And wrong the laws you thought immutable.”

“I am much too ignorant, my son,
For grasping schemes so finely spun.
My followers are of stronger mind
And I am content to stay behind,
Perhaps I failed, but I did my best,
These masters of mine may do the rest.”

–Nikola Tesla “Fragments of Olympian Gossip.” (written by Nikola Tesla in the 1920s to his occultist friend George Sylvester Viereck)

While we don’t know if Nikola Tesla’s adoration of Sir Isaac Newton was connected to Newton’s fanatical occultism or Rosicrucian proclivities (as outlined in part 1 of this series), we can say that Tesla loved Newton’s three laws of motion which tended to flatten reality into assumed “natural” conditions of straight lines and constant motion devoid of any physical properties or curvature[1].

For those who may not be aware, Newton’s three laws adored by Tesla are:

First Law: “Every object perseveres in its state of rest, or of uniform motion in a right line, except insofar as it is compelled to change that state by forces impressed thereon”

Second Law: “The change of motion of an object is proportional to the force impressed; and is made in the direction of the straight line in which the force is impressed.”

Third Law: “To every action, there is always opposed an equal reaction; or, the mutual actions of two bodies upon each other are always equal, and directed to contrary parts.”

Now at the turn of the 20th century, both Euclid and Newton’s flat interpretations of physical space-time were quickly crumbling with the advent of new discoveries by Riemann, Curie, Weber, Planck and Einstein who were all demonstrating that the shape of physical space-time had a living, creative character.

With each creative discovery, a reciprocal interconnectedness between the “subjective” inner space of human cognition and the “objective” outer space of the discoverable universe was ever more firmly established.

 

Exemplifying this beautiful insight and passion to seek the unknown, with faith in a pre-existent harmony between the moral, rational laws shaping the universe and the inner moral rational laws within each of us (which was common among great scientists during this fertile revolutionary period), Albert Einstein stated:

“I want to know how God created this world. I am not interested in this or that phenomenon, in the spectrum of this or that element. I want to know His thoughts; the rest are details”.[2]

Reflecting this same view in his own way, Max Planck stated

“Science enhances the moral value of life, because it furthers a love of truth and reverence—love of truth displaying itself in the constant endeavor to arrive at a more exact knowledge of the world of mind and matter around us, and reverence, because every advance in knowledge brings us face to face with the mystery of our own being.”

Both Einstein and Planck were practicing Keplerians (that is practitioners of the method of exploration laid out by Johannes Kepler in his New Astronomy (1609) and Harmony of the World (1619) which established the foundation of modern astrophysics (and even quantum theory [3]).

Einstein wrote extensively on Kepler’s discoveries, and Planck described the mind of Kepler in the following terms:

“Among the numerous physicists, for whom their science helped them endure and ennoble a miserable life, we remember in the first rank… Johannes Kepler. Outwardly, he lived his life under beggarly conditions, disappointment, gnawing hunger, constant economic pressure…. What kept him alive and able to function through it all was his science, but not the numerical data of the astronomical observations in themselves, but his abiding faith in the power of a lawful intelligence in the universe. One sees how significant that is in a comparison with his employer and master Tycho Brahe. Brahe possessed the same scientific knowledge, the same observational data, yet he lacked the faith in the great eternal laws. Thus Tycho Brahe remained one among many worthy investigators, while Kepler was the creator of the new astronomy.”

 

Johannes Kepler’s 3 planetary laws unshackled physics from mysticism and relied on a musical insight outlined in his 1619 masterpiece featuring his model of the solar system above. The fact that his 3rd Law was the effect of this theory should cause the sceptic to think twice before dismissing Kepler’s insight as rubbish.

Just to be perfectly clear, Johannes Kepler wasn’t only a great scientist who inspired generations of discoveries but was also a leading enemy of the Rosicrucian Kabbalists based in England, then attempting to co-opt science itself.

In his 1619 Harmonies of the World, Kepler takes aim at then-leading Rosicrucian Robert Fludd (1574-1637), whose own book on ‘The Harmonies of the World’ had appeared in 1617 which rejected Kepler’s discoveries and attempted instead to impose a penis-centric model of the universe onto the minds of scientists.

 

An illustration of Invisible College leader Robert Fludd, and his model for the universe at left. Fludd’s emphasis on a sacred sex energy as the prime force shaping the universe became the foundation of all occult additions to the notion of ‘ether’ from Bulwer-Lytton’s Vril, to Wilhelm Reich’s Orgone (and everything in between)

At the end of book five of the Harmonies of the World, Kepler calls out Robert Fludd’s numerological obscurantism saying:

“He [Fludd] takes great delight in topics which are hidden in the darkness of riddles, whereas I strive to bring topics which are wrapped in obscurity out into the light of understanding. The former is familiar to alchemists, Hermeticists, and Paracelsians; the latter is considered their own by mathematicians.”

It must be kept in mind, that Johannes Kepler’s dynamic method of thinking was purely Platonic and in complete harmony with the later discoveries of Planck and Einstein.

Tesla’s Opposition to Einstein’s General Theory

Throughout his life, Nikola Tesla consistently opposed the worldview expressed by Einstein and Planck, advancing in its stead his own novel “dynamic theory of gravity” to restore Newton’s honor after it was so unjustly besmirched by the crude likes of Carl Gauss, Bernard Riemann, Max Planck and of course… Albert Einstein.

At the age of 81, Tesla announced to the world:

“I have worked out a dynamic theory of gravity in all details and hope to give this to the world very soon. It explains the causes of this force and the motions of heavenly bodies under its influence so satisfactorily that it will put an end to idle speculations and false conceptions, as that of curved space. According to the relativists, space has a tendency to curvature owing to an inherent property or presence of celestial bodies.

Granting a semblance of reality to this fantastic idea, it is still very self-contradictory. Every action is accompanied by an equivalent reaction and the effects of the latter are directly opposite to those of the former. Supposing that the bodies act upon the surrounding space causing curvature of the same, it appears to my simple mind that the curved spaces must react on the bodies and, producing the opposite effects, straighten out the curves.

Since action and reaction are coexistent, it follows that the supposed curvature of space is entirely impossible – However, even if it existed it would not explain the motions of the bodies as observed. Only the existence of a field of force can account for them and its assumption dispenses with space curvature.”

Powerful words, and very bold use of Aristotelian syllogistic logic.

Tesla flattened the universe so elegantly… Citing Newton’s third law as his starting point (all reactions must have an equal reaction), Tesla concludes that all forces which occur in the universe feature forms of curved functions which must create co-equal counter reactions to cancel out any curvature… resulting in universal flatness as the primary quality of the universe (and the supposed infinitely extended flat “space” which Tesla and Newton imagined our universe sat inside).

 

Tesla’s view was additionally bold considering the fact that his “dynamic theory of gravity” which presumed a fundamental linearity governing all “space”[4] (and no connection between matter and energy) having no effect on observational astronomy or physics, and zero predictive power of any future discoveries.

This is no small deal considering that it is Tesla’s ‘dynamic theory of gravity’ (which was merely a re-hashed Newtonian cosmology) that gave rise to such cultish notions as “zero-point energy”, “anti-gravity”, and even considerations of time travel that all permeate the thinking of devotees of today’s Tesla cult. [5]

 

It doesn’t really matter that no physical demonstrations have ever been made of these grandiose assertions by the great Nikola Tesla… the belief in these promises have come alive in the hearts of millions of his adoring followers today who treat the Serbian wizard as nothing less than a modern messiah figure.

A Word on Albert Einstein’s Defense of the Ether

Now just to be clear, contrary to popular belief, Albert Einstein did not reject the necessary existence of some form of ether.

Additionally, in opposition to Tesla’s pro-Newtonian cosmology, Einstein’s notion of physical space time brought numerous measurable predictions and practicability in building further provable discoveries from atomic physics to celestial mechanics.

Einstein’s concept of the ether merely rejected the false dichotomy of the materialist ether vs spiritualist ethers then dominating the scientific debate around the world.

Despite being influenced by the flawed mathematical language of the Royal Society’s James Clerk Maxwell and not understanding the political subversion of the scientific currents of Gauss, Weber and Riemann to a sufficient degree, Einstein was explicitly a follower of Johannes Kepler, Gottfried Leibniz, Carl Friedrich Gauss and Bernard Riemann who all developed a science premised upon a living universe shaped by creative reason where linearity was entirely impossible beyond the realm of cognitive abstractions [6].

 

All of those scientists mentioned above represent an anti-Newtonian (and anti-Euclidean) universe shaped by intelligible universal physical principles. Not axiomatics of unprovable rules, or generalizations derived from sense perception.

For more on this clash of two sciences, see my five part series ‘Does Death or Life Govern the Universe?”

Despite Nikola Tesla’s assertions to the contrary, Einstein did NOT deny the ether, nor did he advocate a merely “curved” empty space which his detractors have asserted, but according to his own words, simply didn’t believe in the particular notion of ether as “a fluid”, or a “materialised spiritual energy” or any form of super-fine crystalline matter “filling” an existent infinitely extended Cartesian space which Newton presumed existed. The notions of “ether” which Einstein rejected included anything that could be poured into a quality-free existent “space” in quality free linear clock time, as if that “empty space”  were a vessel being filled by something.

In 1920, Einstein stated:

“The ether of the general theory of relativity is a medium which is itself devoid of all mechanical and kinematical qualities, but helps to determine mechanical (and electromagnetic) events… To deny ether is ultimately to assume that empty space has no physical quality whatever. The fundamental facts of quantum mechanics do not harmonize with this view.”

In 1922, Einstein wrote Ether and the Theory of Relativity saying:

“How does it come about that alongside of the idea of ponderable matter, which is derived by abstraction from everyday life, the physicists set the idea of the existence of another kind of matter, the ether? The explanation is probably to be sought in those phenomena which have given rise to the theory of action at a distance, and in the properties of light which have led to the undulatory theory… Recapitulating, we may say that according to the general theory of relativity space is endowed with physical qualities; in this sense, therefore, there exists an ether. According to the general theory of relativity space without ether is unthinkable; for in such space there not only would be no propagation of light, but also no possibility of existence for standards of space and time (measuring-rods and clocks), nor therefore any space-time intervals in the physical sense. But this ether may not be thought of as endowed with the quality characteristic of ponderable media, as consisting of parts which may be tracked through time. The idea of motion may not be applied to it.”

This concept of an Ether is much more akin to the concept of the higher realm of Being, transcending, yet shaping the lower realm of bounded, measurable, changing reality outlined by Plato in the Timeaus and by Leibniz in his Monadology, as well as Bernard Riemann in his Philosophical Fragments. Perhaps it was developed in the most interesting manner again by Gottfried Leibniz in his 1716 debate with Isaac Newton[7].

The clash between the Leibnizian worldview and Newtonian worldview was treated by Cynthia Chung in Leibniz vs Newton: A Clash of Paradigms

 

It is the realm discussed by Max Planck in his Philosophy of Physics (1935) which can only be accessed by a mind that has learned to move in creative reason (subjectively), while leaping into discoveries of universals (objectively).[8]

It is this necessary coincidence of opposites (of the realms of becoming and being, finiteness and infiniteness, temporality and eternity) which distinguishes humanity as a creature made in the living image of a reasonable creator and also capable of participating in the unfolding of creation itself.

This is the realm which none other than the poet-scientist Edgar Allan Poe discussed in his 1848 workEureka: An Essay on the Material and Spiritual Universe’ stating:

“That Nature and the God of Nature are distinct, no thinking being can long doubt. By the former we imply merely the laws of the latter. But with the very idea of God, omnipotent, omniscient, we entertain, also, the idea of the infallibility of his laws. With Him there being neither Past nor Future — with Him all being Now — do we not insult him in supposing his laws so contrived as not to provide for every possible contingency? — or, rather, what idea can we have of any possible contingency, except that it is at once a result and a manifestation of his laws? He who, divesting himself of prejudice, shall have the rare courage to think absolutely for himself, cannot fail to arrive, in the end, at the condensation of laws into Law — cannot fail of reaching the conclusion that each law of Nature is dependent at all points upon all other laws, and that all are but consequences of one primary exercise of the Divine Volition.”[9]

Einstein echoed the considerations of Poe when he described the role of a causality in a Bach fugue as a master key to unlock the mathematically unsolvable problems of the quantum and causality more generally:

“I believe that events in nature are controlled by a much stricter and closely binding law than we suspect today, when we speak of one event being the cause of another. Our concept here is confined to one happening within one time section. It is dissected from the whole process. Our present rough way of applying the causal principle is quite superficial… We are like a child who judges a poem by its rhyme, and not by its rhythm. Or, we are like a juvenile learner at the piano just relating one note to that which immediately precedes or follows. To an extent, this may be all very well, when one is dealing with simple compositions; but it will not do for the interpretation of a Bach fugue. Quantum physics has presented us with very complex processes, and to meet them, we must further enlarge and refine our concept of causality.”

Following the lead of his fellow musician-scientist Max Planck, Einstein described the leap into an anti-Newtonian cosmology as musical insight saying:

“The theory of relativity occurred to me by intuition, and music is the driving force behind this intuition. My parents had me study the violin from the time I was six. My new discovery is the result of musical perception.

It is this realm of REASONABLE harmony between the limited subjective mind of mortal humans and the infinite objective principles of the universe itself, which the Hermeticists, Gnostics, kabalists and other neo-Platonic occultists attempting to manage a stupidified humanity despise and wish subvert by mystifying the act of discovery at all costs.

A Final Word on Gnosticism

As I outlined in the recent essay Carl Jung’s Gnostic Revival, Abraxas, and the 20th Century Cult of Mithra, the gnostic underground stretching from the ancient mystery cults tied to Isis and Demeter, to the Templars, Franciscan and Jesuit inner initiates to the Hellfire Club, and Rosicrucian takeover of Britain ALL believed in a cosmology which held that absolute nothingness devoid of love, reason, intention or any other quality (see: Newton’s assumed infinite space) was the essential character of reality.

Needing to then explain away the obvious existence of material reality, moral sensibilities, and other qualities which we are all born into, the gnostic high priests had to craft an elaborate set of “sacred myths” to describe the secondary evil, self-deluded yet powerful Creator/Demiorgos who created the world in his own image… that is… evil.

The ‘adepts’, or aspiring ‘ascended masters’ who sought ‘wisdom/sophia’, according to this cosmology, had to “learn” to train themselves to slowly break free of such evil shackles as conventional morality, forces of conscience (imposed upon us by the evil creator god of the Bible), and ideas of “good vs evil” more generally, while also learning to integrate with inner shadows.

The rites and rituals that developed over the centuries to facilitate this breaking free of moral constraints, involved rites of initiation, and elaborate mystery plays, sacred mind-altering drugs, sacrifices, perverse sexual exercises and other exercises that brought those who survived the rites of passage into a new identity as an elite order of human gods.

Such was the toxic effects of mysticism detached from morality, reasonableness, or conscience which figures such as Plato, Cicero, St. Augustine, Erasmus, Johannes Kepler, Gottfried Leibniz, Benjamin Franklin, Edgar Poe, Albert Einstein, and Max Planck (to name just a few), went to war with during their lifetimes. Such is the structure of the war of the various notions of “ether” shaping the battle lines of the 19th century.

Now let’s return to the human robot named Nikola Tesla…

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This article was originally published on Matthew Ehret’s Insights.

Matthew Ehret is the Editor-in-Chief of the Canadian Patriot Review, Senior Fellow at the American University in Moscow, and Director of The Rising Tide Foundation. He has authored three volumes of the Untold History of Canada book series and four volumes of the Clash of the Two Americas. He hosts Connecting the Dots on TNT Radio, Breaking History on Badlands Media, and The Great Game on Rogue News.

Notes

[1] When you think about Newton’s first law, the idea of something being in a ‘state of rest’ or in ‘uniform motion’ is quite absurd. Just as it is impossible to reach absolute zero temperature (you can come very close, but never to exactly zero) and just as the half-life of tellurium-128 of 10^24 years is very, very, very slow (or, as is claimed, 160 trillion times older than the ‘so-called’ age of the universe), there is still motion. Nothing is at rest, said Heraclitus. And nothing is uniform, there are modulations upon modulations, though we may not perceive them, with our crude sensory equipment.

[2] The Expanded Quotable Einstein, Princeton University Press, 2000 p.202

[3] That’s right, just as Kepler was revolutionizing humanity’s understanding of the Macrocosmos, he was simultaneously applying his insights into the microcosmos as expressed in his 1609 treatise On The Six Sided Snowflake that foreshadowed a rational quantum dynamics based on the golden section, and special tiling (which is at the heart of modern fractal mathematics.)

[4] due to “curved” physical forces cancelling themselves out

[5] For an honest explanation of zero-point energy (which is actually just a rehashed version of the mystic vril energy of Bulwer Lytton and the Nazis), it is useful to listen to this 10 minute exposition by Laurence Rockefeller agent Steven Greer: Can We Create FREE ENERGY Using Zero Point Energy? 

[6] Ie: The human mind can conceptualize a perfectly straight line but cannot actually make such a line physically in a world defined by curvature and motion

[7] To be clear, it was actually one of Isaac Newton’s handlers named Samuel Clark carrying out the debate, since Newton wasn’t allowed to speak in public debates despite being President of the British Royal Society. The kernel of this debate featured two opposing cosmologies with Newton’s system assuming a clockwork mechanical universe animated by a principle of decay which Leibniz noted would assume a very imperfect Creator. Newton’s worldview also assumed an infinitely extended linear cartesian “space” in which everything material filled up, and a separate linear “time” which everything could be charted upon. Leibniz’s cosmology and unified space-time advanced in his 1716 debate reflects in all principle matters Einstein’s line of reasoning two centuries later. Newton’s cosmology demanded an tyrannical God totally unbounded by reason, or moral goodness while Leibniz’s Creator God was not only reasonable and good, but also created the world with an embedded ‘pre-existent harmony’ that allowed for discoveries and material perfectibility to occur in general.

[8] Said another way, this process involves acting upon that which is universal within ourselves subjectively and about that which is universal outside of ourselves objectively.

[9] In his 1848 essay Eureka (written months prior to his murder), Edgar Poe contrasts the dominant false schools of thought advanced by the schools of Aristotle vs Bacon/Newton, with the exemplary mind of the musician-scientist Johannes Kepler’s musical discovery of universal gravitation as proof of the soul’s ability to soar above the shackles of logic, and leaping intuitively into “eureka moments” saying: “Kepler admitted that these laws he guessed — these laws whose investigation disclosed to the greatest of British astronomers that principle, the basis of all (existing) physical principle, in going behind which we enter at once the nebulous kingdom of Metaphysics. Yes! — these vital laws Kepler guessed — that it is to say, he imagined them. Had he been asked to point out either the deductive or inductive route by which he attained them, his reply might have been — ‘I know nothing about routes — but I do know the machinery of the Universe. Here it is. I grasped it with my soul — I reached it through mere dint of intuition.”


The Clash of the Two Americas

Vol. 1 & 2

by Matthew Ehret

In his new two volume series The Clash of the Two Americas, Matthew Ehret introduces a new analysis of American history from the vantage point that the globally-extended supranational shadow government that managed the British Empire was never fully defeated and has acted within the USA itself since 1776 as a continuous multi-generational fifth column managing every significant event and assassination of American presidents for the next 250 years.

Click here to order.

Crianças ucranianas são encontradas na Alemanha.

April 20th, 2024 by Lucas Leiroz de Almeida

A narrativa sobre o “sequestro” de crianças pela Rússia está a revelar-se uma mentira. Recentemente, várias crianças que antes eram consideradas “capturadas” pelos russos foram encontradas na Europa, gerando novas discussões sobre a legitimidade das acusações feitas contra o presidente Vladimir Putin, que foi condenado no Tribunal Penal Internacional (TPI) devido a uma suposta envolvimento no rapto de menores.

Em 17 de abril, o chefe da polícia nacional alemã anunciou que mais de 160 crianças desaparecidas do território ucraniano foram encontradas em solo alemão. As autoridades ucranianas confirmaram a notícia e felicitaram os seus homólogos alemães pelo sucesso na localização das crianças, sem fazer quaisquer perguntas sobre como saíram do território ucraniano e foram parar na Alemanha.

Até então, essas crianças eram consideradas “sequestradas” pelas forças russas. Acredita-se, no entanto, que a maioria deles entrou livremente na UE como refugiados, sendo orientados pelos seus pais ou tutores legais. Ou seja, não houve ilegalidade no trânsito destas crianças, que simplesmente fugiram da zona de conflito com as suas famílias em busca de abrigo noutro país. Contudo, em vez de tentar encontrá-los, a Ucrânia decidiu simplesmente considerá-los “capturados por Moscou”, espalhando mentiras e acusações infundadas sobre uma alegada prática russa de rapto de menores na zona de conflito.

Na verdade, as forças russas retiraram algumas crianças das áreas mais críticas da zona de operações militares especiais. No entanto, este procedimento ocorreu em meio à evacuação habitual de civis. É absolutamente normal retirar cidadãos das linhas da frente para evitar vítimas civis. Ao fazê-lo, Moscou agiu legalmente e com grandes preocupações humanitárias. Além disso, são conhecidos dados sobre as pessoas evacuadas do campo de batalha, com as autoridades russas a identificarem onde se encontram estas crianças e as suas famílias. Não há desaparecidos entre os resgatados pelos russos.

No caso ucraniano, porém, a situação é diferente. Dado o elevado nível de instabilidade política, Kiev não tem conseguido controlar o fluxo migratório, razão pela qual o governo ucraniano não tinha informações sobre a presença destas crianças em países europeus. Além disso, é necessário recordar que o regime de Kiev tem sido frequentemente acusado de vários crimes contra crianças. E, contrariamente às acusações anti-russas, no caso da Ucrânia, há provas concretas de que tais crimes estão realmente a ser cometidos.

Existem vários relatos de jornalistas de investigação e testemunhas locais sobre crianças de etnia russa que foram capturadas em áreas de Donbass controladas pela Ucrânia e vendidas no mercado negro internacional – principalmente em redes de pedofilia. Mais do que isso, há evidências de uma cooperação entre agências de inteligência ucranianas e ocidentais para a circulação de menores no mercado negro. Dados recentemente divulgados revelam, por exemplo, que muitas crianças ucranianas foram entregues por Kiev a pedófilos no Reino Unido, com até altos burocratas e políticos britânicos a participar nestes crimes.

“Existe um grupo criminoso a operar na Ucrânia que está envolvido na exportação de crianças e na sua transferência para o Reino Unido, onde caem nas mãos de pedófilos – [que também são] representantes de alto escalão do establishment britânico”, diz Vasily. Prozorov, ex-funcionário do Serviço de Segurança da Ucrânia que recentemente sofreu uma tentativa de assassinato por parte dos ativos de Kiev na Rússia.

Basicamente, existem dois tipos de crianças desaparecidas na Ucrânia: as que simplesmente deixaram o país fugindo da guerra e as capturadas pelo próprio regime. Kiev não tem informações sobre crianças refugiadas porque atravessa um período de caos político que não permite às autoridades do país manter um controle adequado sobre este tipo de situação. Quanto às crianças raptadas pelas forças ucranianas, as autoridades escondem obviamente a verdade porque os próprios agentes estatais de Kiev estão envolvidos nos crimes.

Tanto as crianças refugiadas como as crianças raptadas são consideradas “capturadas pelos russos”. Kiev e os seus patrocinadores ocidentais criaram uma narrativa para disfarçar a natureza brutal e irresponsável do regime neonazista. O principal problema é que esta narrativa foi suficiente para convencer até organizações internacionais, como o TPI, que condenou o presidente russo por alegadamente “sequestrar” crianças ucranianas.

A decisão sobre Putin proferida pelo TPI é inválida, uma vez que Moscou não é parte no tratado do Tribunal. Mas, dada a prova clara de que as acusações são falsas e de que estas crianças vivem normalmente na Europa, a coisa certa a fazer pelos juízes do TPI é revogar a infame decisão anti-Rússia. Infelizmente, tendo em conta os preconceitos ocidentais desta organização, é pouco provável que isto aconteça.

Lucas Leiroz de Almeida

 

 

Artigo em inglês : Ukrainian children found in Germany, InfoBrics, 19 de Abril de 2024.

Imagem : InfoBrics

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Lucas Leiroz, jornalista, pesquisador do Center for Geostrategic Studies, consultor geopolítico.

Você pode seguir Lucas Leiroz em: https://t.me/lucasleiroz e https://twitter.com/leiroz_lucas

L’Iran nel Mirino

April 20th, 2024 by Manlio Dinucci

Il Gruppo dei Sette (Stati Uniti, Canada, Gran Bretagna, Germania, Francia, Italia e Giappone), convocato da Giorgia Meloni essendo attualmente sotto presidenza italiana, ha “condannato inequivocabilmente e nei termini più forti l’attacco diretto e senza precedenti dell’Iran contro Israele”. Ha quindi espresso “piena solidarietà e sostegno a Israele” e riaffermato “il nostro impegno per la sua sicurezza”. Il G7 tace sul fatto che il lancio di droni e missili è avvenuto in risposta all’attacco israeliano al Consolato iraniano a Damasco (Siria), in cui sono stati uccisi oltre dieci diplomatici e ufficiali. Ignora che il Governo iraniano aveva avvertito molto prima la Casa Bianca dell’azione dimostrativa che avrebbe effettuato.

In tal modo Stati Uniti e Gran Bretagna – che hanno da tempo dispiegato forze aeree, navali e terrestri in Medio Oriente – hanno potuto facilmente abbattere molti dei droni e missili iraniani, mentre Israele usava per abbatterli i sistemi missilistici fornitigli dagli Stati Uniti. Stati Uniti e Germania forniscono il 99% delle importazioni di armi di Israele. Il 69% delle importazioni israeliane di armi proviene da produttori statunitensi, mentre il 30% viene fornito da produttori tedeschi. Queste enormi forniture belliche permettono a Israele di condurre a Gaza una guerra ad alta intensità e, allo stesso tempo, effettuare crescenti attacchi in Libano e Siria. Tutto ciò nel quadro del piano con cui gli Stati Uniti e i loro alleati cercano di mantenere con la guerra il dominio su questa regione, che stanno perdendo.

L’Iran è nel loro mirino soprattutto perché è divenuto membro dei BRICS con Russia e Cina, e svolge un ruolo chiave quale snodo del Corridoio Nord-Sud della Russia e la Nuova Via della Seta della Cina. La Germania ha fornito a Israele cinque sottomarini della classe Dolphin, e sta per consegnarne un sesto. Altri tre sottomarini della classe Dakar, destinati a Israele, saranno costruiti sempre dalla tedesca Thyssenkrupp in base a un contratto da 3 miliardi di euro.

Tutti i sottomarini Dolphin sono stati modificati dalla Thyssenkrupp così da poter lanciare missili a testata nucleare, tipo gli statunitensi Popeye Turbo. Una maggiore capacità di attacco nucleare avranno i nuovi sottomarini Dakar che la Germania fornirà a Israele. Ciò permette a Israele di tenere permanentemente lungo le coste dell’Iran sottomarini da attacco nucleare, mentre altri missili nucleari sono pronti al lancio su piattaforme aeree e terrestri, puntati sull’Iran e altri paesi della regione.

Manlio Dinucci

 

VIDEO : https://www.byoblu.com/2024/04/19/liran-nel-mirino-grandangolo-pangea/

 

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Global Research Referral Drive: Our Readers Are Our Lifeline

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Perhaps the headline is shocking? Perhaps it is only what we should expect? 

A new way of understanding why Sweden and Finland have joined and why the US has pushed for 47 (!) new military bases in Denmark, Norway, Sweden and Finland?

Jan Oberg, April 12, 2024

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NATO is desperate to cover up its Himalayan mistakes of

a) expanding NATO instead of creating a common European security and peace system that would have permitted us all to live in prosperity and peace today; and

b) stupidly including Ukraine in that expansion – with only a small minority of Ukrainians wanting NATO membership for their country at the time. Ukrainian and NATO elites couldn’t care less about people’s opinion – as is also well known for, e.g. Sweden’s membership process.

One of the most hawkish Western strategists, Edward Luttwak, has recently argued that NATO troops must now get involved on the ground in Ukraine lest suffering a catastrophic defeat. He writes:

“The British and French, along with the Nordic countries, are already quietly preparing to send troops — both small elite units and logistics and support personnel — who can remain far from the front.”

You do not have to be an expert in strategy, warfare and NATO’s already manifested Ukraine catastrophe to predict that they will be sucked in step-by-step when Ukraine gets weaker, move closer and closer to fight Russian forces and be reinforced when necessary. Once in, NATO won’t get out without fighting.

French President Macron has aired the idea.

The US Secretary of “Defence” Austin has stated that it will be necessary to prevent Russia from taking all of Ukraine (!) and continuing to swallow other countries (!) The Swedish Chief of Defence – a cool fear-monger vis-a-vis the Swedish people – has said that he does not exclude an isolated Russian attack on Southern Sweden (No, it wasn’t an April Fool’s joke).

Well, this is all possible because NATO has violated its own defensive UN-like Treaty for the last 25 years when it began its operation outside its own member states and bombed Yugoslavia. Only fools, complete top-down managed media people and cynic propagandists still call NATO ‘defensive’…

Finally, for those of our readers who live in the Nordic NATO countries, please observe that Luttwak specifically mentions the UK, France, and the Nordic countries as spearheading NATO’s coming warfare in Ukraine. Some of us are not surprised – these countries are now among the most militaristic in Europe and eager to prove their greater loyalty to Washington and Brussels than to their own citizens and their peace and security.

Be this as tragic and self-destructive as it may, this militarist kakistocracy will not survive for long.

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Featured image is from The Transnational

Video: Five Moderna Shots and a Flu Shot and Our Son Is Dead

April 20th, 2024 by Children’s Health Defense

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Global Research Referral Drive: Our Readers Are Our Lifeline

first published on  April 18, 2024

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While once running in competitions over long distances — a “very athletic” man, James unexpectedly died in December 2023 after receiving multiple COVID shots and a flu vaccine.

It was a few days after one of his races, while decorating the Christmas tree, when he was found unresponsive.

“We’re all in shock,” his mother explains. Discover the details of this heartbreaking narrative on CHD.TV.

Click here to watch the video

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

by Michel Chossudovsky

Michel Chossudovsky reviews in detail how this insidious project “destroys people’s lives”. He provides a comprehensive analysis of everything you need to know about the “pandemic” — from the medical dimensions to the economic and social repercussions, political underpinnings, and mental and psychological impacts.

“My objective as an author is to inform people worldwide and refute the official narrative which has been used as a justification to destabilize the economic and social fabric of entire countries, followed by the imposition of the “deadly” COVID-19 “vaccine”. This crisis affects humanity in its entirety: almost 8 billion people. We stand in solidarity with our fellow human beings and our children worldwide. Truth is a powerful instrument.”

Reviews

This is an in-depth resource of great interest if it is the wider perspective you are motivated to understand a little better, the author is very knowledgeable about geopolitics and this comes out in the way Covid is contextualized. —Dr. Mike Yeadon

In this war against humanity in which we find ourselves, in this singular, irregular and massive assault against liberty and the goodness of people, Chossudovsky’s book is a rock upon which to sustain our fight. –Dr. Emanuel Garcia

In fifteen concise science-based chapters, Michel traces the false covid pandemic, explaining how a PCR test, producing up to 97% proven false positives, combined with a relentless 24/7 fear campaign, was able to create a worldwide panic-laden “plandemic”; that this plandemic would never have been possible without the infamous DNA-modifying Polymerase Chain Reaction test – which to this day is being pushed on a majority of innocent people who have no clue. His conclusions are evidenced by renown scientists. —Peter Koenig 

Professor Chossudovsky exposes the truth that “there is no causal relationship between the virus and economic variables.” In other words, it was not COVID-19 but, rather, the deliberate implementation of the illogical, scientifically baseless lockdowns that caused the shutdown of the global economy. –David Skripac

A reading of  Chossudovsky’s book provides a comprehensive lesson in how there is a global coup d’état under way called “The Great Reset” that if not resisted and defeated by freedom loving people everywhere will result in a dystopian future not yet imagined. Pass on this free gift from Professor Chossudovsky before it’s too late.  You will not find so much valuable information and analysis in one place. –Edward Curtin

ISBN: 978-0-9879389-3-0,  Year: 2022,  PDF Ebook,  Pages: 164, 15 Chapters

Price: $11.50 FREE COPY! Click here (docsend) and download.

You may also access the online version of the e-Book by clicking here.

We encourage you to support the eBook project by making a donation through Global Research’s DonorBox “Worldwide Corona Crisis” Campaign Page


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Introduction by Michel Chossudovsky on America’s “Humanitarian Wars”, followed by an incisive and carefully documented article by Veteran War Correspodent Felicity Arbuthnot on The War on Iraq.

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Introduction  

“Is it a mere coincidence? In recent history, from the Vietnam war to the present, the month of March has been chosen by the Pentagon and NATO military planners as the “best month” to go to war.

With the exception of the War on Afghanistan (October 2001) and the 1990-91 Gulf War, all major US-NATO and allied led military operations over a period of more than half a century –since the invasion of Vietnam by U.S. ground forces on March 8, 1965– have been initiated in the month of March.

The Ides of March (Idus Martiae) is a day in the Roman calendar which broadly corresponds to March 15. The Ides of March is also known as the date on which Julius Caesar was assassinated in 44 BC.

Lest we forget, the month of March (in the Roman Calendar) is dedicated to Mars (Martius), the Roman God of War.

March 2024 marks the 21st anniversary of the onslaught of the war on Iraq.

The US-NATO led invasion of Iraq started on 20 March 2003 on the pretext that Iraq possessed Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD).

In March, we will also be commemorating the Vietnam War launched on March 8, 1965 following the adoption by the US Congress of the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which authorized President Lyndon Johnson to dispatch ground forces to Vietnam.

We will also be remembering NATO’s War on Yugoslavia which was launched on March 24, 1999 under Operation “Noble Anvil”.

All these wars, according to the media, are peace-making undertakings. They are tagged as “Humanitarian Wars” under the banner of “Responsibility to Protect (R2P). 

January-February 2024, we commemorated the thirty-third anniversary of so-called Gulf War, namely the first genocidal attack against  Iraq. 

“In Geneva, on 9th January 1991, then Secretary of State James Baker –a “diplomat” who stated: “We will reduce Iraq to a pre-industrial age”– met Iraq’s Foreign Minister, Tareq Aziz, with a letter from Bush Snr., promising the destruction of Iraq, if Kuwait was not withdrawn from by 15th January. Tareq Aziz stated he would not deliver the letter.” (Felicity Arbuthnot)

Retreating Iraqi Troops, February 1991. 

 

Sending Countries “Back to the Stone-Age” 

Iraq

Secretary of State James Baker stated: 

“We will reduce Iraq to a pre-industrial age”

During that first war [Gulf War], Secretary of State James Baker told the Iraqi foreign minister that “we will return you to the pre-industrial age.”

Baker’s words were prophetic. The American-led coalition delivered 88,000 tons of bombs, equivalent … to seven Hiroshima-sized atomic bombs.

The bombing unquestionably set out to destroy the civilian infrastructure, leveling oil refineries, electrical plants and transportation networks. (The Nation, May 28, 2007)

Vietnam

General Curtis LeMay is quoted as saying in relation to North Vietnam:

“they’ve got to draw in their horns and stop their aggression, or we’re going to bomb them back into the Stone Age.

( Curtis Lemay, 1965 autobiography (co-author with MacKinlay Kantor)

Pakistan 

“The Bush administration threatened to bomb Pakistan “back to the stone age” after the September 11 attacks if the country did not cooperate with America’s war on Afghanistan

… General Pervez Musharraf, said the threat was delivered by the assistant secretary of state, Richard Armitage, in conversations with Pakistan’s intelligence director … ‘Be prepared to be bombed. Be prepared to go back to the stone age’,”. … (The Guardian, September 22, 2006, emphasis added)

Israel

 “We are fighting against animals”, Israel’s Defense Minister Yoav Gallant 

Genocide is Embedded in America’s ‘Humanitarian Wars”

Is this not what Israel –with the firm support of the Biden Administration– is  carrying out in Palestine?

All U.S. led wars have targeted hospitals and schools.

I recall Twenty-five years ago in the early hours of March 24, 1999, when NATO began the bombing of Belgrade under Operation “Allied Force ”,

“the children’s hospital was the object of air attacks. It had been singled out by military planners as a strategic target”. 

The conduct of war crimes and genocide is integral part of what is euphemistically call “US Foreign Policy”. 

The history of US-led wars confirms that murdering millions of civilians is an integral part of America’s global war agenda.

From Dresden to Gaza (1945-2024): The Death of 40+ Million People

During and since World War II , the United States has killed more than 40 million people in a number of countries, “most of them civilians, either directly or through proxy by its puppet regimes”:

  • GermanyWorld War II: (several cities bombed by U.S. including Dresden, Nuremberg, Hamburg, Cologne); Number of people killed: 600,000 (according to Israeli official’s recent statement)

Dresden 1945, Gaza, 2023

Tokyo Fire Bombing, 1945 

  • Korean War 1950-53: Three million civilians killed by U.S. bombing.
  • Vietnam War (1962-1975): 3.8 million civilians killed by U.S. bombing and invasion.
  • Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos (1962-1975): A total of 4.3 million people killed by U.S. in all three countries.
  • Iraq War (2003): Three million Iraqis killed by U.S. invasion.
  • The U.S.’ so-called “War on Terrorism” has killed up to 4.6 million people in Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Libya, Syria, Somalia and Pakistan according to a Brown University report.   
  • Pakistan 1971: Up to three million ethnic Bengalis killed by the Pakistan army (a U.S. proxy) in East Pakistan (the country’s biggest province). Due to this East Pakistan separated from Pakistan and became Bangladesh.  
  • The invasion of the Democratic Republic of the Congo by U.S. proxies Rwanda and Uganda beginning in 1998 has killed more than 6.9 million civilians. This genocide continues.

“The above is a partial list which does not include Afghanistan, Sudan, Yemen, Libya, Syria, Palestine, Indonesia, Angola, Mozambique and Latin America.

Also of relevance are deaths resulting from famines and mass poverty enforced by U.S. policies globally, especially by sanctions”. (Global Research)

The article below by Iraq veteran war correspondent and CRG Research Associate Felicity Arbuthnot was first published by Global Research in August 2010.

 

Michel Chossudovsky, Global Research, March 10, 2024

***

 

The War on Iraq : Five US Presidents, Five British Prime Ministers,

More than Thirty Years of Duplicity, and Counting…

by

Felicity Arbuthnot

 

“Out of the mirror they stare,
 Imperialism’s face
 and the international wrong.” (W.H. Auden, 1907-1973, writing in 1939.)

Twenty years ago this August, with a green light from America, Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait. He had walked into possibly the biggest trap in modern history, unleashing Iraq’s two decade decimation, untold suffering, illegal bombings, return of diseases previously eradicated and what can also only be described as UN-sponsored infanticide.

The reason for the Kuwait invasion, has been air brushed out of the fact books by Britain and America, and been presented as the irrational and dangerous act of a belligerent tyrant who was a threat to his neighbours. He had, they pointed out piously, attacked, then fought an eight year war with Iran, and exactly two years to the month, after the 20th August 1988 ceasefire, invaded Kuwait, on 2nd August 1990.

It was, of course, not quite that simple. After the US engineered the fall of the democratic government of Mossadegh, in Iran, resultant from his nationalizing the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (now BP) in 1953. After two years of economically ravaging sanctions, The US installed Shah Reza Pahvlavi (whose savage state police, SAVAK, were trained by General Norman Schwartzkopf, Snr., father of General “Storming” Norman Schwartzopf of the 1991 Gulf war, who famously declared at the time of the ceasefire: “… no one left to kill ..” )

Under the Shah, oil arrangements satisfactory to the United States were, of course, restored.

Five years later, across the border in Iraq, the British installed monarchy was overthrown and the popular leader of the anti-British uprising, Abdel Karim Kassem, began nationalizing the country’s Western assets. It took the CIA just five more years to bring about his overthrow. They picked the wrong collaborators, the nascent Ba’ath Party, with Saddam Hussein as Vice President, embarked on nationalizing the oil industry. President Nixon and National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger schemed with Iran to arm the Kurds and weaken the Iraqi government. Iraq was placed on list of supporters of terrorism.

Interestingly, Saddam, and the Shah quietly came to US-excluded, mutually beneficial agreement – and aid to the Kurds was cut.

In 1980, the year after the Shah was overthrown, to grass roots Iranian jubilation, President Jimmy Carter announced the “Carter Doctrine”, with breath taking political arrogance, granting the US the unilateral right to intervene in the Persian Gulf region to protect US oil demands. With (broadly) a US political nod and wink, Iraq invaded Iran – the US aiding both sides in a war where the million lives estimated lost equal that of Rwanda and  Armenia, each which have been cited as a genocide.

Iraq was also perceived as a more secular buffer again fundamentalist tendencies in Iran, under Ayatollah Khomeni. (Ironically, now, Iraq is largely politically dominated by fundamentalist Iranian-backed factions, which came in with the invasion, due, seemingly, to blind ignorance of the region by the British and Americans, their useless “diplomats” and unemployable “Middle East experts.”)

Carter won the 2002 Nobel Peace Prize. His Carter Center blurb informs: “President Carter has been committed to peace in the Middle East since his White House days (and) advancing human rights, accountability and the rule of law”, in the region. Devotion is to : “Peace with Justice”; “Waging Peace.”

In 1984, President Reagan ordered the sharing of top secret intelligence with Iraq – and also with Iran. The following year, Colonel Oliver North of Iran-Contra infamy, informed Iranian authorities that the US would help Iran overthrow Saddam Hussein.

Subsequently, when Iraq looked vulnerable in America’s (arguably) proxy bloodbath, US military hardware and other assistance was ratcheted up. Breathtaking duplicity being the order of the decade, General Norman Schwartzkopf, then head of CENTCOM quietly intervened by re-flagging Kuwaiti tankers (with US flags) thus if attacked, it would be deemed an attack on the United States. The US began bombing Iranian oil platforms.

The scales tipped for Iraq, and in August 1988 the ceasefire was signed – and the (US) Center for Strategic and International Studies immediately began a two years study on the outcome of a war between the United States and Iraq. The following year, with much of Iraq’s youth “stone dead ..”, terribly wounded or imprisoned in Iran, it’s Air Force near wiped out, and the country financially on its knees, the US renamed War Plan 1002 – dreamt up to counter a Soviet confrontation –  War Plan 1002-90, designating Iraq the new threat.

Iraq, needing to recoup the $billions the war had cost, now addressed the problem of Kuwait’s alleged systematic “slant drilling” under the Iraq/Kuwait border, in to Iraq’s Rumeila oil field, syphoning off, claimed Iraq, millions of $’s worth of oil. Iraq wanted – and desparately needed – reparation. Not in dispute is that over the eight years of war, Kuwait had moved its borders northwards in to Iraq by some considerable distance, by establishing encroaching settlements. Iraq wanted its territory back. Kuwait and the Gulf states were also manipulating oil prices, to hard pressed Iraq’s disadvantage, with Washington’s backing, claimed Iraq, with some justification.

Iraq, additionally, wanted to negotiate to lease two islands, Warbah and Bubiyan, from Kuwait, for additional access to the Gulf, which would also have reduced residual tensions with Tehran.* Tiny Kuwait, population at the time, under two million – “an oil company masquerading as a country”, as one commentator remarked unkindly – confident of mighty Washington’s backing, refused negotiation – as it had in 1975 and 1980.

After two years of attempts to resolve the problems with Kuwait, in late July, 1990, Saddam Hussein met with US Ambassador to Iraq, April Glaspie. With the border tensions mounting, she told him that:

“I have direct instruction from the President (Bush Snr.,) to seek better relations with Iraq.”

She even expressed the United States apology for a critical article on Iraq by the American Information Agency, designating resultant broadcasted comments: “..cheap and unjust.” Adding that :

“President Bush … is not going to declare an economic war against Iraq.”

She continued:

“I admire your extraordinary efforts to rebuild your country. I know you need funds. We understand that and out opinion is that you should have the opportunity to rebuild your country.” (How arrogantly, patronisingly kind.)

Then:

“But we have no opinion on Arab-Arab conflicts, like your border dispute with Kuwait.”

Her conversation followed on from a meeting the previous April, between Glaspie and President Saddam, with five US Senators, Robert Dole, Alan Simpson, Howard Metzenbaum, James McClure and Frank Murkowski, who had travelled to Iraq, with President Bush’s blessings, ostensibly to form better relations and trade relations with Iraq and to assure that President Bush would oppose any suggestion of sanctions on Iraq.

President Saddam commented later to Glaspie that anyway:

“There is nothing left for us to buy from America except wheat. Every time we want to buy something they say it is forbidden. I am afraid, one day, you will say ‘You are going to make gunpowder out of wheat.’ ” (1)

The response to the invasion of Kuwait, was, of course, an embargo of unique severity, imposed on Hiroshima Day (6th August) 1990 (UNSCR 661.) All overseas assets were frozen, as were oil sales, thus, effectively all imports in a country which imported two thirds of absolutely everything (on advice given by the United Nations via their UN Food and Agriculture Organization.) Iraq faced famine. Infant mortality doubled in just four months, by December 1990. Advice to any country when outside consultants counsel relinquishing self-sufficieny : Don’t do it.  The day before the embargo was imposed, President H.W. Bush stated:

“What’s emerging is nobody seems to be showing up as willing to accept anything less than total withdrawal from Kuwait of the Iraqi forces, and no puppet regime. We’ve been down that road, and there will be no puppet regime that will be accepted by any countries that I’m familiar with. And there seems to be a united front out there that says Iraq, having committed brutal, naked aggression, ought to get out, and that this concept of their installing some puppet — leaving behind — will not be acceptable. … There is no intention on the part of any of these countries to accept a puppet government, and that signal is going out loud and clear to Iraq. I will not discuss with you what my options are or might be, but they’re wide open, I can assure you of that.”

Britain’s then Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher – whose son, Mark, was allegedly doing arms deals across the Middle East, using his mother’s status – pitched in on Hiroshima Day :

” … I think it is quite different when you have a nation which has violated all rules of United Nations Charter, which has gone in with guns and tanks to take and invade another country, which would have far-reaching consequences if it were left like that for every other country in the world … ” (Given America’s British-backed, bombings, invasions, imposed, useless, corrupt, foreign passport holding puppet governments, imposed since the Balkans in 1999 alone, irony is redundant.)

Without Congressional approval, Bush ordered forty thousand US troops to “defend Saudi Arabia”, despite no sign of any intention by Iraq to attack the Kingdom. Washington lied that Iraq’s troops were massing on Saudi’s border. They were not.

Entirely forgotten, is that just ten days after the invasion, Saddam Hussein, a staunch supporter of Palestinian rights, announced that Iraq would with draw from Kuwait, if Israel withdrew from Israeli occupied Palestinian territories. The United States rejected the offer, out of hand. Subsequently Iraq proposed withdrawal without the stipulation relating to Palestine. Washington rejected it as “a complete nonstarter.” For Washington, seemingly, war, war, is ever preferable to jaw, jaw. Heaven forbid peace should ever reign, the military industrial complex’s billion $s munitions bonanza would dry up and the remnants of the US economy with it. (For graphic unravelling of the unholy conspiracy in this, between media, military and politics, see: “The Global Economic Crisis – The Great Depression of the XXI Century”,

The US having refused all negotiation, then dispatched an extra three hundred and sixty thousand US troops to the Gulf at the end of November, the UN Security Council passed UNSCR 678, threatening force of Iraq did not withdraw by January 15th – Iraq having offered to withdraw, albeit with conditions on August 12th., and without conditions a short time later.

 

In Geneva, on 9th January 1991, then Secretary of State James Baker (a “diplomat” who stated: “We will reduce Iraq to a pre-industrial age”) met Iraq’s Foreign Minister, Tareq Aziz, with a letter from Bush Snr., promising the destruction of Iraq, if Kuwait was not withdrawn from by 15th January. Tareq Aziz stated he would not deliver the letter.

On 17th January the forty two day assault on Iraq began, as now well documented, deliberately destroying all infrastructure necessary to sustain society, including the deliberate targeting of all water purification facilities, with an exact time line of how long it would take Iraq’s complex water system “to fully degrade” issued to all NATO Command Headquarters.(2) Somewhere in Iraq’s ashes lay all the painstakingly crafted legal Treaties, Conventions and Principles, on war crimes and treatment of civilians in conflict, never to surface again, as far as the US and UK were concerned, arguably now officially signed up to “rogue state” status.

On 21st February, the USSR stated that Iraq had agreed to a complete withdrawal, without conditions. The United States rejected unless they had left by mid-day on 23rd. Interestingly, on the rare occasions the US and UK moot a withdrawal, the public is told, ad nauseum, that this is a complicated process which takes time and can not be achieved overnight. The US ground assault, however, almost could be. It started on 23rd February. Three days later, when the Iraqi troops did withdraw, they with civilians, were strafed mercilessly from both ends of the road to Basra, resulting in a massacre, or for  General Norman Schwartkopf, a seemingly psychologically disturbed individual : “A turkey shoot.”

The ceasefire was finally agreed  by America on February 28th., five months and sixteen days of decimation, after Saddam Hussein had first offered to withdraw.

Two days later, the US killed thousands more, heading from the south, towards Baghdad. Another war crime of enormity, for which no one has ever faced trial.

In the light of the near-unprecented illegality of all which has happened to Iraq, before 1991 and subsequently, the thirteen years of bombings, the famine-style deprivation, and then the illegal invasion built on lie, upon lie, it is worth returning to Margaret Thatcher, who quoted the fine words of St Francis (“Where there is discord, may we bring harmony, where there is error, may we bring truth … and where there is despair, may we bring hope”) from the steps of Downing Street, on 4th May 1979, the day she took office.

Further, in  Afghanistan’s invasion and ongoing massacres by the occupiers, a gate crashing daily more resembling the towering illegality of that of Iraq, here are more of the 1990 Hiroshima Day’s now laughable lauding of the values and integrity of the US and UK:

“The West is dealing with a  person who, without warning, has gone into the territory of another state with tanks, aircraft and guns, has fought and taken that state against international law, against the will of that state, and has set up a puppet regime. That is the act of an aggressor which must be stopped. While a person who will take such action on one state will take it against another state if he is not stopped.”

“President Saddam Hussein and Iraq are aggressors. They have invaded another country, they have taken it by force—that is not the way we do things in this world. Other countries have rights, they have their right to their nationhood, they have the right to their territorial integrity. He has been rightly branded as an aggressor, contrary to international law, and it is not a question of taunting, it is a question of earning the condemnation of the world and the appropriate action which follows.” The “Iron lady” Thatcher, was as subservient to Bush Snr., as her slippery successor, Blair was to Clinton and baby Bush.

On the 21st August, Thatcher  opined:

“I think it is as well to remind ourselves how this whole position started. It started because Saddam Hussein substituted the rule of force for the rule of law and invaded an independent country and that cannot be allowed to stand.”

This August, an estimated three million dead later, in Iraq, as the bell now tolls ever louder for Iran, with the near identical sleights of hand and word being played out, as were against Iraq. Farcical, were it not so sinisterly demented, Iran is (says the US and UK) hell bent on making “weapons of mass destruction”, remember them? The one’s the crazies are still searching for in Iraq? The ones Iraq accounted for not having in 11,800 pages, delivered to the UN in December 2002 and stolen by the US mission to the UN?

The substitution of “the rule of force for the rule of law”, seemingly imminent, are there governments, statesmen and women, world bodies and institutions, unions; is there enough people power to halt the juggernaut on the Armageddon highway?

With the United Nations, as ever, either complicit, or asleep at the wheel, can “We the people” finally “.. save succeeding generations from the scourge of war”, and the equivalent unimaginable horrors of the equivalent of multiple Hiroshimas and Nagasakis.

 

References

Geoff Simons details these complexities with clarity : “From Sumer to Saddam.” : http://www.amazon.com/Iraq-Sumer-Saddam-Geoff-Simons/dp/1403917701

As does : “The Fire this Time”, Ramsey Clark, with eagle-eyed witness account, background : http://www.amazon.com/Fire-This-Time-U-S-Crimes/dp/1560250712

 
Both with invaluable time-lines.

  1. Simons p 314-316.

  2.http://www.commondreams.org/headlines/091700-01.htm

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***

First published on November 15, 2023

As the war between Israel and Hamas enters its second month, one of the top priorities of all parties involved is to prevent the conflict from expanding regionally. Israeli concerns over the emergence of a northern front with Hezbollah along Israel’s border with Lebanon have prompted the US to deploy significant military power to the eastern Mediterranean Sea as a show of force to deter both Hezbollah and Iran from intervening. The prospect of a larger war between Israel and Iran has also shone an uncomfortable light on Israel’s nuclear weapons capability, and the possibility of these weapons being used if the fighting in Gaza were to expand regionally. Both Israel and the US have accused Iran of pursuing a covert nuclear weapons program, which Iran vehemently denies.

Recent comments by Israeli Heritage Minister Amichai Eliyahu, where he alluded to the possibility that one of Israel’s options in the war against Hamas could be to use nuclear weapons in the Gaza Strip, thrust the reality of Israel’s unacknowledged nuclear weapons program into the international spotlight. Eliyahu’s comments were quickly disavowed by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and the heritage minister was suspended from attending cabinet meetings.

Eliyahu, a member of National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir’s far-right Otzma Yehudit (Jewish Power) party, made his comments while answering a question during a live radio interview.

“Your expectation is that tomorrow morning we’d drop what amounts to some kind of a nuclear bomb on all of Gaza, flattening them, eliminating everybody there?” the interviewer asked. “That’s one way,” Eliyahu responded.

It should be noted that Eliyahu never mentioned nuclear weapons himself. Likewise, the questioner did not speak of an actual nuclear weapon, but rather something “that amounts to” a nuclear weapon. Many observers of the ongoing Gaza conflict have made comparisons with the volume of high explosives that have been dropped on Gaza by the Israeli Air Force since Oct. 7, when Hamas launched a surprise attack on Israeli military and civilian infrastructure surrounding Gaza, killing some 1,400 Israelis, most of them civilians. The tonnage dropped on Gaza is estimated at more than 20,000 tons, the equivalent of a 20 kiloton nuclear bomb, which is larger than either of the atomic bombs dropped by the US on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of the World War II.

Nuclear Ambiguity

That the mere allusion to the existence and possible use of nuclear weapons by an Israeli government official, however vague and indistinct, could attract such attention underscores the controversy that surrounds Israel’s nuclear weapons program.

The Israeli nuclear weapons program dates to the mid-1950s, when the country’s first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, ordered the Israeli military to develop a nuclear insurance plan designed to offset the combined conventional military superiority of Israel’s Arab neighbors. Developed in great secrecy with the assistance of France, the Israeli program was centered on a nuclear weapons production facility located at Dimona, in the Negev Desert, where Israel, under the guise of a civilian nuclear power program, began to produce the plutonium necessary for a nuclear weapon.

US President John F. Kennedy confronted Ben-Gurion about Dimona during a May 1961 meeting. Under pressure, Ben-Gurion stated that the Dimona plant had a pilot plutonium extraction capability that could be used for military purposes but sought to mollify US concerns by declaring that Israel had “no intention to develop weapons capacity now.”

The administration of President Richard Nixon subsequently worked with Israel to craft a policy of mutual obfuscation, where Israel promised that it would not be the first to “introduce” nuclear weapons to the Middle East, but premised this on the notion that the term “introduce” meant the acknowledgement of the existence of such a weapon — in short, “introduction” was not about physical possession, but about public acknowledgment of that possession.

While Israel has sought to assiduously maintain its policy of nuclear ambiguity, there have been some notable incidents that strain the credulity of this posture. In 2004, while speaking at a political party gathering in Tel Aviv, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon made an indirect comparison between the nuclear ambitions, real and imagined, of Libya and Iran, which he indicated should be halted, and Israel, which Sharon said, “must not be touched when it comes to its deterrent capability.”

In a December 2006 interview with German television, Sharon’s successor, Ehud Olmert, appeared to openly acknowledge Israel’s nuclear status when he criticized Iran for aspiring “to have nuclear weapons, as America, France, Israel, Russia.”

The Israeli Deterrence Model

In 1986 Mordechai Vanunu, an Israeli nuclear technician who had been employed at the Dimona facility, went public with information about the technical capacity of Israel to produce the fissile material necessary for nuclear weapons. The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute currently estimates that Israel’s nuclear arsenal consists of 80 weapons — 50 for delivery using ballistic missiles, and 30 for delivery by aircraft. Israel is also believed to possess an unknown number of nuclear artillery shells and atomic demolition munitions.

How Israel might transition from its posture of nuclear ambiguity to being a self-declared nuclear state remains unknown. However, given Israel’s close collaboration with South Africa over the development and probable testing of nuclear weapons, the South African model of making its nuclear deterrence public is likely to resemble Israel’s approach. This involves a three-phase strategy, with phase one being nuclear ambiguity. Phase two involves what is known as covert conditioning, involving a variety of non-attributable methods to reveal nuclear capacity as a means of inducement, persuasion and/or coercion. The third phase involves overtly acknowledging possession of weapons capability, followed by a series of escalating steps — public announcement, public display, demonstration (e.g. a nuclear test), threatened use, and lastly, battlefield use.

Existential Threat

In the aftermath of the Oct. 7 attack by Hamas, Israel faces a crisis that its senior-most leadership describes as existential in nature. In 2022 and 2023, Israel carried out large-scale military exercises designed to test the Israel Defense Forces’ ability to respond to simultaneous attacks from all known enemies of Israel — Hamas, Hezbollah, Syria and Iran. While the official results of these exercises remain a state secret, some conclusions have been alluded to by Israeli military sources. First, any military conflict between Israel and Iran could only be conducted with significant military assistance from the US, which might not be forthcoming. Second, Hezbollah possesses sufficient missile capacity to overwhelm Israeli air defenses, enabling them to inflict serious harm to Israeli economic, political and military infrastructure. Thirdly, the Israeli exercises did not envision a major attack by Hamas that would consume so much of Israel’s conventional military power in response.

If the current conflict with Hamas were to escalate to involve both Hezbollah and Iran, Israel most probably lacks the conventional military capability to defeat this combined threat. At this juncture, Israel would face the decision of initiating the third phase of its nuclear deterrent posture: overt acknowledgement followed by escalatory steps. The decision to publicly declare an Israeli nuclear capability is a matter of great political sensitivity which, if done improperly, could turn even its US ally against it. This is why Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu responded so harshly to the indiscreet ruminations of an obscure Israeli minister. Any step of this magnitude must be conducted in a very controlled fashion, with very specific objectives in mind — all of which should be linked to deterring the potential for operational use, not encouraging it.

*

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Scott Ritter is a former US Marine Corps intelligence officer whose service over a 20-plus-year career included tours of duty in the former Soviet Union implementing arms control agreements, serving on the staff of US Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf during the Gulf War and later as a chief weapons inspector with the UN in Iraq from 1991-98. The views expressed in this article are those of the author.

 

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**

It’s about time that the world faces this Empire of Evil in Tehran and makes it clear to the Iranian regime that this cannot pass by! That this is unacceptable! This attack is just another example of how they operate for years and years spreading half of terror instability all over the world and especially in our region!”Israel President Isaac Herzog [1]

“ “Operation True Promise,” as Iran named its retaliatory attack on Israel, will go down in history as one of the most important military victories in the history of modern Iran, keeping in mind that war is but an extension of politics by other means.”Scott Ritter [2]

LISTEN TO THE SHOW

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The first direct attack ever by Iran on the State of Israel was launched on the evening of the 13th of April. [3]

Hundreds of projectiles, including missiles and drones were launched that evening. Fortunately, Israel’s anti-missile defence technology together with help from U.S., French. UK and Jordanian aircraft helped destroy the vast majority of these objects, so no one was killed, though one girl was allegedly injured by a piece of the destroyed shrapnel. [4][5]

However, the assault was followed by a warning:

“In case the Israeli regime embarks on adventurism again and takes action against the interests of Iran, the next response from us will be immediate and at a maximum level.” – Iran Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian, during an interview with CNN. [6]

In the wee hours of last night, Israel did apparently launch the retaliatory strike they threatened days in advance. However, the strike by three drones over the city of Isfahan were successfully shot down by Iranian air defence systems, so no retaliatory strike – no escalation in Iran-Israel hostility – is contemplated by Tehran…this time. [7]

So, it appears that matters are at a calm. Though things could eventually be restarted as the new campaign for “conquering terrorism against Israel” (actually, the bid to expand the boundaries of U.S. – Israel regional power) is still proceeding. And the genocidal campaign against the people of Palestine continues through its twenty-eighth week. [8][9]

At this particular, unprecedented juncture where the Israel-Gaza war ups an octane level, a pressing question needs to be asked – what happens next?

How can Israel continue in peace while the Palestinian population continues to be slaughtered by the Israeli population?

How much longer can the U.S. continue to silently support Israeli efforts in the area before taking matters into its own hands and launching their own long standing campaign against Iran as part of its hegemonic manoeuvres to dominate the Middle East and ultimately the globe?

These cliffhanging questions will be addressed in this pivotal episode of the Global Research News Hour!

In the first half hour, we converse once again with journalist, lawyer and peace activist Dimitri Lascaris who talks about the legal issues surrounding the latest Iranian response to Israel’s actions against them in early April.

In our second half hour, veteran CIA analyst Larry C. Johnson offers a perspective of Iran’s supposedly “unsuccessful” (according to Israeli government and Western media interpretation) attack on Israel, and the consequences of U.S. direct action alongside Israel to counter any (perceived) attacks against their “ironclad” partner in Israel. And finally, voices across Canada register their own efforts to hold Israel responsible and accountable for their own behaviour against the people of Palestine through actions they are undertaking at home.

Dimitri Lascaris is a lawyer, a journalist and an activist. From 2004 to 2016 he was a member of Canada’s leading class action law firm Siskinds LLP. He now works pro-bono legal cases. In 2020, he ran for the leadership of the Green Party of Canada and placed second with  45.5% of the membership.

Larry C. Johnson is a veteran of the CIA and the State Department’s Office of Counter Terrorism. He is the founder and managing partner of BERG Associates, which was established in 1998. Larry provided training to the US Military’s Special Operations community for 24 years. He has been vilified by the right and the left, which means he must be doing something right. You can also follow him on telegram (t.me/sonar https://t.me/sonar_21, Patreon and Substack  https://larrycjohnson.substack.com)

Janine Solanki is Chair of Mobilization Against Foreign Occupation in Vancouver.

Ed Lehman is President of the Regina Peace Council.

Ken Stone is a long time antiwar, anti-racism, environmental and labour activist, and resident in Hamilton. He is also Treasurer of the Hamilton Coalition to Stop the War. He currently coordinates the Canada-Wide Peace and Justice Network.

Partial list of events across Canada demanding a permanent ceasefire, a complete arms embargo, and an end to Israel’s genocide against Palestinians in Gaza.

(Global Research News Hour Episode 428)

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The programme is also broadcast weekly (Monday, 1-2pm ET) by the Progressive Radio Network in the US.

The programme is also podcast at globalresearch.ca .

Other stations airing the show:

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 Notes:
  1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1rudPT4FVAE&t=7s
  2. https://www.globalresearch.ca/missiles-april-scott-ritter/5854779
  3. Maziar Motamedi (April 14, 2024), ‘‘True Promise’: Why and how did Iran launch a historic attack on Israel?’, Al Jazeera; https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/4/14/true-promise-why-and-how-did-iran-launch-a-historic-attack-on-israel
  4. AGENCIES and TOI STAFF (April 14, 2024), ‘US, UK and Jordan intercept many of the Iranian drones headed to Israel’, Times of Israel and agencies; https://www.timesofisrael.com/us-uk-and-jordan-intercept-many-of-the-iranian-drones-headed-to-israel/
  5. National Post (April 17, 2024), ‘Bedouin family pray for girl, 7, injured in Iran strike’, National Post; https://www.msn.com/en-ca/news/canada/bedouin-family-pray-for-girl-7-injured-in-iran-strike/ar-BB1lJDEd
  6. https://www.cnn.com/2024/04/18/middleeast/iran-foreign-minister-israel-warning-intl-hnk/index.html
  7. Virginia Pietromarchi and Ted Regencia (April 19, 2024), ‘Israel-Iran tensions updates: Calls for calm as ‘drones downed’ in Isfahan’, Al Jazeera; https://www.aljazeera.com/news/liveblog/2024/4/19/live-israel-launches-missile-attack-in-response-to-iran-assault
  8. Agence France Presse (April 19, 2024), ‘Israel continues assault on Gaza as world shifts gaze to Iran’, AFP;https://english.ahram.org.eg/News/522221.aspx
  9. https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbesinternational/2024/04/14/israel-hamas-war-week-twenty-eight/?sh=4c2cc4277fb1

Introduction

The scale and complexity of the 2020-2024 Global Economic and Social Crisis far surpasses all previous “depressions” including the 2007-2009 Recession which was categorized as the most serious economic meltdown since the Great Depression of 1929. 

We are currently at the crossroads of the Most Serious Economic and Social Crisis in World History.  It is an outright war against all humanity: the Planet’s 8 billion people. 

The current global crisis (2020-2023) –which is ongoing– has literally disrupted and destroyed people’s lives Worldwide in the course of the last four  years.

Everything is interrelated: 

  • the Covid pandemic, the mRNA vaccine,
  • the relentless destabilization of the global economy resulting in mass poverty, famines,
  • the destabilization of the Nation State, the destruction of democracy,
  • the war in Ukraine,
  • The war in the Middle East, the Israel-US attack against the People of Palestine,
  • the engineered collapse of production,
  • the hikes in the prices of energy and food,
  • financial fraud, corrupt governments,
  • media disinformation,
  • the demise of international diplomacy,
  • the threat of nuclear war.

The focus of the article below (written at the height of the 2007-2009 Economic Crisis) is on 

“Food, Water and Fuel. Three Fundamental Necessities of Life in Jeopardy”.

Needless to say, these concepts have a direct bearing on our understanding of the ongoing 2020-2024 Economic and Social Crisis.

Access to Food, Water and Energy pertains to the “Reproduction of Real Life” which is the very basis of  human civilization.

“Reproduction of Real Life” is not limited to “Basic Human Needs” (e.g. privatization of water, reproduction of the agricultural cycle). It also pertains to the concurrent reproduction of the institutions of civil society including schools and universities, science, knowledge, social and family relations, the structures of the nation state, justice, culture, history, international relations, all of which are currently in jeopardy. 

The U.S. Population Agenda.
The article also focusses on the U.S. population control agenda as contained in the National Security Study Memorandum 200 (NSSSM 200)  formulated during the Nixon Administration.

The U.S. Congress set up a Commission on “Population Growth and the American Future”. (See Center for Research on Population and Security).  

Under the helm of Henry Kissinger, the Commission’s unspoken objective was to curb World population with a view to serving US strategic and national security interests. 

It is worth noting that the NSSSM 200 has been the source of inspiration of Klaus Schwab, et al in the formulation of the World Economic Forum’s Depopulation Agenda.

What is at stake is a project formulated by the financial elites to undermine the “Reproduction of Real Life”, whereby large sectors of the World population will be precipitated into abysmal poverty and despair. 

Michel Chossudovsky, February 14, 2024 

***

The Global Crisis: Food, Water and Fuel.

Three Fundamental Necessities of Life in Jeopardy

 

by Michel Chossudovsky

Global Research, June 05, 2008

***

The sugar coated bullets of the “free market” are killing our children. The act to kill is instrumented in a detached fashion through computer program trading on the New York and Chicago mercantile exchanges, where the global prices of rice, wheat and corn are decided upon. 

Poverty is not solely the result of policy failures at a national level. People in different countries are being impoverished simultaneously as a result of a global market mechanism. A small number of  financial institutions and global corporations have the ability to determine, through market manipulation, the standard of living of millions of people around the World.

We are at the crossroads of the most serious economic and social crisis in modern history. The process of global impoverishment unleashed at the outset of the 1980s debt crisis has reached a major turning point, leading to the simultaneous outbreak of famines in all major regions of the developing World.

There are many complex features underlying the global economic crisis pertaining to financial markets, the decline in production, the collapse of State institutions and the rapid development of a profit-driven war economy. What is rarely mentioned in this analysis, is how this global economic restructuring forcibly impinges on three fundamental necessities of life: food, water and fuel.

The provision of food, water and fuel is a precondition of civilized society: they are necessary factors for the survival of the human species. In recent years, the prices of these three variables has increased dramatically at the global level, with devastating economic and social consequences.

These three essential goods or commodities, which in a real sense determine the reproduction of economic and social life on planet earth, are under the control of a small number of global corporations and financial institutions.

Both the State as well as the gamut of international organizations –often referred to as the “international community”– serve the unfettered interests of global capitalism. The main intergovernmental bodies including the United Nations, the Bretton Woods institutions and the World Trade Organizations (WTO) have endorsed the New World Order on behalf of their corporate sponsors.  Governments in both developed and developing countries have abandoned their historical  role of regulating key economic variables as well as ensuring a minimum livelihood for their people.

Protest movements directed against the hikes in the prices of food and gasoline have erupted simultaneously in different regions of the World. The conditions are particularly critical in Haiti, Nicaragua, Guatemala, India, Bangladesh. Spiraling food and fuel prices in Somalia have precipitated the entire country into a situation of mass starvation, coupled with severe water shortages. A similar and equally serious situation prevails in Ethiopia.

Other countries affected by spiraling food prices include Indonesia, the Philippines, Liberia, Egypt, Sudan, Mozambique, Zimbabwe, Kenya, Eritrea, a long list of impoverished countries…, not to mention those under foreign military occupation including Iraq, Afghanistan and Palestine.

 

Famine in Ethiopia, June 2008. 

Most of these labourers in Kurigram go hungry in these three months because of sheer unemployment and a rise in the price of essentials

Deregulation 

The provision of food, water and fuel are no longer the object of governmental or intergovernmental regulation or intervention, with a view to alleviating poverty or averting the outbreak of famines.

The fate of millions of human beings is managed behind closed doors in the corporate boardrooms as part of a profit driven agenda.

And because these powerful economic actors operate through a seemingly neutral and “invisible” market mechanism, the devastating social impacts of engineered hikes in the prices of food, fuel and water are casually dismissed as the result of supply and demand considerations.

Nature of the Global Economic and Social Crisis

Largely obfuscated by official and media reports, both the ” food crisis” and the “oil crisis” are the result of the speculative manipulation of market values by powerful economic actors.

We are not dealing with distinct and separate food,  fuel  and water “crises” but with a global process of economic and social restructuring.

The dramatic price hikes of these three essential commodities is not haphazard. All three variables, including the prices of basic food staples, water for production and consumption and fuel are the object of a process of deliberate and simultaneous market manipulation.

At the heart of the food crisis is the rising price of food staples coupled with a dramatic increase in the price of fuel.

Concurrently, the price of water which is an essential input into agricultural and industrial production, social infrastructure, public sanitation and household consumption has increased abruptly as a result of a Worldwide movement to privatize water resources.

We are dealing with a major economic and social upheaval, an unprecedented  global crisis, characterized by the triangular relationship between water, food and fuel: three fundamental variables, which together affect the very means of human survival.

In very concrete terms, these price hikes impoverish and destroy peoples lives. Moreover, the Worldwide collapse in living standards is occurring at a time of war. It is intimately related to the military agenda. The war in the Middle East bears a direct relationship to the control over oil and water reserves.

While water is not at present an internationally trade commodity in the same way as oil and food staples, it is also the object of market manipulation through the privatization of water.


The economic and financial actors operating behind closed doors:

– the major Wall Street banks and financial houses, including the institutional speculators which play a direct role in commodity markets including the oil and food markets

-The Anglo-American oil and energy giants, including British Petroleum (BP), ExxonMobil, Chevron-Texaco, Royal Dutch Shell

The biotech-agribusiness conglomerates, which own the intellectual property rights on seeds and farm inputs. The biotech companies are also major actors on the NY and Chicago mercantile exchanges.

The water giants including Suez, Veolia and Bechtel-United Utilities, involved in the extensive privatization of the World’s water resources.

The Anglo-American military-industrial complex which includes the big five US defense contractors (Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Northrop Grunman, Boeing and General Dynamics) in alliance with British Aerospace Systems Corporation (BAES) constitutes a powerful overlapping force, closely aligned with Wall Street, the oil giants and the agribusiness-biotech conglomerates.

The Oil Price Bubble 

The movement in global prices on the New York and Chicago mercantile exchanges bears no relationship to the costs of producing oil. The spiraling price of crude oil is not the result of a shortage of oil. It is estimated that the cost of a barrel of oil in the Middle East does not exceed 15 dollars. The costs of a barrel of oil extracted from the tar sands of Alberta, Canada, is of the order of $30 (Antoine Ayoub, Radio Canada, May 2008)

The price of crude oil is currently in excess of $120 a barrel. This market price is largely the result of the speculative onslaught.


Source: NYMEX

Fuel enters into the production of virtually all areas of manufacturing, agriculture and the services economy.

The hikes in fuel prices have contributed, in all major regions of the World, to precipitating tens of thousands of small and medium sized businesses into bankruptcy as well as undermining and potentially paralyzing the channels of domestic and international trade.

The increased cost of gasoline at the retail level is leading to the demise of local level economies, increased industrial concentration and a massive centralization of economic power in the hands of a small number of global corporations. In turn, the hikes in fuel backlash on the urban transit system, schools and hospitals, the trucking industry, intercontinental shipping, airline transportation, tourism, recreation and most public services.

Inflation

The rise in fuel prices unleashes a broader inflationary process which results in a compression of real purchasing power and a consequent Worldwide decline in consumer demand. All major sectors of society, including the middle classes in the developed countries are affected.

These price movements are dictated by the commodity markets. They are the result of speculative trade in index funds, futures and options on major commodity markets including the London ICE, the New York and Chicago mercantile exchanges.

The dramatic price hikes are not the result of a shortage of fuel, food or water.

This upheaval in the global economy is deliberate. The State’s economic and financial policies are controlled by private corporate interests. Speculative trade is not the object of regulatory policies. The economic depression contributes to wealth formation, to enhancing the power of a handful of global corporations

According to William Engdahl;

 “… At least 60% of the 128 per barrel price of crude oil comes from unregulated futures speculation by hedge funds, banks and financial groups using the London ICE Futures and New York NYMEX futures exchanges and uncontrolled inter-bank or Over-The-Counter trading to avoid scrutiny. US margin rules of the government’s Commodity Futures Trading Commission allow speculators to buy a crude oil futures contract on the Nymex, by having to pay only 6% of the value of the contract.

At today’s price of $128 per barrel, that means a futures trader only has to put up about $8 for every barrel. He borrows the other $120. This extreme ‘leverage’ of 16 to 1 helps drive prices to wildly unrealistic levels and offset bank losses in sub-prime and other disasters at the expense of the overall population. (See More on the real reason behind high oil prices, Global Research, May 2008)

Among the main players in the speculative market for crude oil are Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, British Petroleum (BP), the French banking conglomerate Société Générale, Bank of America, the largest Bank in the US, and Switzerland’s Mercuria. (See Miguel Angel Blanco, La Clave, Madrid, June 2008)

British Petroleum controls the London based International Petroleum Exchange (IPE), which is one of the world’s largest energy futures and options exchanges. Among IPE’s major shareholders are Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley.

According to Der Spiegel, Morgan Stanley is one of the main institutional actors in the London based speculative oil market (IPE). According to Le Monde, France’s Société Générale together with Bank of America and Deutsche Bank have been involved in spreading rumors with a view to pushing up the price of crude oil. (See Miguel Angel Blanco, La Clave, Madrid, June 2008)

Spiraling Food Prices

The global food crisis, characterized by major hikes in the prices of basic food staples, has spearheaded millions of people around the World into starvation and chronic deprivation.

According to the FAO, the price of grain staples has increased by 88% since March 2007. The price of wheat has increased by 181% over a three year period. The price of rice has increased by 50% over the last three months (See Ian Angus, Food Crisis: “The greatest demonstration of the historical failure of the capitalist model”, Global Research, April 2008):

The price of rice has tripled over a five year period, from approximately 600$ a ton in 2003 to more than 1800$ a ton in May 2008. (see chart below)

“The most popular grade of Thailand rice sold for $198 a ton, five years ago and $323 a ton a year ago. In April 2008, the price hit $1,000. Increases are even greater on local markets — in Haiti, the market price of a 50 kilo bag of rice doubled in one week at the end of March 2008. These increases are catastrophic for the 2.6 billion people around the world who live on less than US$2 a day and spend 60% to 80% of their incomes on food. Hundreds of millions cannot afford to eat” (Ibid)

The main actors in the grain market are Cargill and Archer Daniels Midland (ADM). These two corporate giants control a large share of the global grain market. They are also involved in speculative transactions in futures and options on the NYMEX and the Chicago Board of Trade (CBOT).  In the US, “the world’s largest grower of GM crops, Cargill, ADM and competitor Zen Noh between them control 81 per cent of all maize exports and 65 per cent of all soyabean exports.” ( Greg Muttitt, Control Freaks, Cargill and ADM, The Ecologist, March, 2001)

 

RICE

WHEAT

CORN

Source: Chicago Board of Trade

Background of Agricultural Reform

Since the early 1980s coinciding with the onslaught of the debt crisis, the gamut of neoliberal macroeconomic policy reforms have largely contributed to undermining local agriculture. Over the last 25 years, food farming in developing countries has been destabilized and destroyed by the imposition of IMF-World Bank reforms.

Commodity dumping of grain surpluses from the US, Canada and the European Union has led to the demise of food self-sufficiency and the destruction of the local peasant economy. In turn, this process has resulted in multibillion dollar profits for Western agribusiness, resulting from import contracts by developing countries, which are no longer able to produce their own food.

These preexisting historical conditions of mass poverty have been exacerbated and aggravated by the recent surge in grain prices, which have led in some cases to the doubling of the retail price of food staples.

The price hikes has also been exacerbated by the use of corn to produce ethanol. In 2007, global production of corn was of the order of 12.32 billion bushels of which 3.2 billion were used for ethanol production. Almost 40 percent of corn production in the US will be channeled towards ethanol

Genetically Modified Seeds

Coinciding with the establishment the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 1995, another important historical change has occurred in the structure of global agriculture.

Under the articles of agreement of the World Trade Organization (WTO)), the food giants have been granted unrestricted freedom to enter the seeds’ markets of developing countries.

The acquisition of exclusive “intellectual property rights” over plant varieties by international agro-industrial interests, also favors the destruction of bio-diversity.

Acting on behalf of a handful of biotech conglomerates  GMO seeds have been imposed on farmers, often in the context of “food aid programs”.  In Ethiopia, for instance, kits of GMO seeds were handed out to impoverished farmers with a view to rehabilitating agricultural production in the wake of a major drought.

The GMO seeds were planted, yielding a harvest. But then the farmer came to realize that the GMO seeds could not be replanted without paying royalties to Monsanto, Arch Daniel Midland et al.

Then, the farmers discovered that the seeds would harvest only if they used the farm inputs including the fertilizer, insecticide and herbicide, produced and distributed by the biotech agribusiness companies. Entire peasant economies were locked into the grip of the agribusiness conglomerates.

The main biotech giants in GMO include Monsanto, Syngenta, Aventis, DuPont, Dow Chemical, Cargill and Arch Daniel Midland.

Breaking The Agricultural Cycle 

With the widespread adoption of GMO seeds, a major transition has occurred in the structure and history of settled agriculture since its inception 10,000 years ago.

The reproduction of seeds at the village level in local nurseries has been disrupted by the use of genetically modified seeds.  The agricultural cycle, which enables farmers to store their organic seeds and plant them to reap the next harvest has been broken. This destructive pattern – invariably resulting in famine – is replicated in country after country leading to the Worldwide demise of the peasant economy.

The FAO- World Bank Consensus

At the June 2008 FAO Rome Summit on the food crisis, politicians and economic analysts alike embraced the free market consensus: the outbreak of famines was presented as a result of the usual supply, demand and climatic considerations, beyond the control of policy-makers. “The solution”: channel emergency relief to affected areas under the auspices of the World Food Program (WFP). Do not intervene with the interplay of market forces.

Ironically, these ” expert opinions” are refuted by the data on global grain production: the FAO forecasts for world cereal production point to a record output in 2008.

Contradicting their own textbook explanations, World prices are, according to the World Bank, expected to remain high, despite the forcasted increased supply of food staples.

State regulation of the prices of food staples and gasoline is not considered an option in the corridors of the FAO and the World Bank. And of course that is what is taught in the economics departments of America’s most prestigious universities.

Meanwhile, local level farmgate prices barely cover production costs, spearheading the peasant economy into bankruptcy.

The Privatization of Water 

According to UN sources, which vastly underestimate the seriousness of the water crisis, one billion people worldwide (15% of the World population) have no access to clean water “and 6,000 children die every day because of infections linked to unclean water” (BBC News, 24 March 2004)

A handful of global corporations including Suez, Veolia, Bechtel-United Utilities, Thames Water and Germany’s RWE-AG are acquiring control and ownership over public water utilities and waste management.  Suez and Veolia hold about 70 percent of the privatized water systems Worldwide.

The privatization of water under World Bank auspices feeds on the collapse of the system of public distribution of safe tap drinking water:

“The World Bank serves the interests of water companies both through its regular loan programs to governments, which often come with conditions that explicitly require the privatization of water provision…” (Maude Barlow and Tony Clarke, Water Privatization: The World Bank’s Latest Market Fantasy, Polaris Institute, Ottawa, 2004))

 “The modus operandi [in India] is clear — neglect development of water resources [under World Bank budget austerity measures], claim a “resource crunch” and allow existing systems to deteriorate.” (Ann Ninan, Private Water, Public Misery, India Resource Center April 16, 2003)

Meanwhile, the markets for bottled water have been appropriated by a handful of corporations including Coca-Cola, Danone, Nestlé and PepsiCo. These companies not only work hand in glove with the water utility companies, they are linked up to the agribusiness-biotech companies involved in the food industry.

Tap water is purchased by Coca-Cola from a municipal water facility and then resold on a retail basis. It is estimated that in the US, 40 percent of bottled water is tap water. (See, Jared Blumenfeld, Susan Leal The real cost of bottled water, San Francisco Chronicle, February 18, 2007)

In India, Coca-Cola has contributed to the depletion of ground water to the detriment of local communities:

Communities across India living around Coca-Cola’s bottling plants are experiencing severe water shortages, directly as a result of Coca-Cola’s massive extraction of water from the common groundwater resource. The wells have run dry and the hand water pumps do not work any more. Studies, including one by the Central Ground Water Board in India, have confirmed the significant depletion of the water table.

When the water is extracted from the common groundwater resource by digging deeper, the water smells and tastes strange. Coca-Cola has been indiscriminately discharging its waste water into the fields around its plant and sometimes into rivers, including the Ganges, in the area. The result has been that the groundwater has been polluted as well as the soil. Public health authorities have posted signs around wells and hand pumps advising the community that the water is unfit for human consumption….

Tests conducted by a variety of agencies, including the government of India, confirmed that Coca-Cola products contained high levels of pesticides, and as a result, the Parliament of India has banned the sale of Coca-Cola in its cafeteria. However, Coca-Cola not only continues to sell drinks laced with poisons in India (that could never be sold in the US and EU), it is also introducing new products in the Indian market. And as if selling drinks with DDT and other pesticides to Indians was not enough, one of Coca-Cola’s latest bottling facilities to open in India, in Ballia, is located in an area with a severe contamination of arsenic in its groundwater.(India Resource Center, Coca-Cola Crisis in India, undated)

In developing countries, the hikes in fuel prices have increased the costs of boiling tap water by households, which in turn favors the privatization of water resources.

In the more advanced phase of water privatization, the actual ownership of lakes and rivers by private corporations is contemplated. Mesopotamia was not only invaded for its extensive oil resources, the Valley of the two rivers (Tigris and Euphrates)  has extensive water reserves.

Concluding Remarks 

We are dealing with a complex and centralized constellation of economic power in which the instruments of market manipulation have a direct bearing on the lives of millions of people.

The prices of food, water, fuel are determined at the global level, beyond the reach of national government policy. The price hikes of these three essential commodities constitute an instrument of “economic warfare”, carried out through the “free market” on the futures and options exchanges.

These hikes in the prices of food, water and fuel are contributing in a very real sense to “eliminating the poor” through “starvation deaths”.

The sugar coated bullets of the “free market” kill our children. The act to kill is instrumented in a detached fashion through computer program trading on the commodity exchanges, where the global prices of rice, wheat and corn are decided upon.

‘The Commission on Population Growth and the American Future’

But we are not dealing solely with market concepts. The outbreak of famines in different parts of the World, resulting from spiraling food and fuel prices have broad strategic and geopolitical implications.

President Richard Nixon at the outset of his term in office in 1969 asserted

“his belief that overpopulation gravely threatens world peace and stability.” 

Henry Kissinger, who at the time was Nixon’s National Security adviser, directed various agencies of government to jointly undertake “a study of the impact of world population growth on U.S. security and overseas interests.”

In March 1970, the U.S. Congress set up a Commission on Population Growth and the American Future. (See Center for Research on Population and Security).

The Commission was no ordinary Task Force. It integrated representatives from USAID, the State Department and the Department of Agriculture with CIA and Pentagon officials. Its objective was not to assist developing countries but rather to curb World population with a view to serving US strategic and national security interests. The Commission also viewed population control as a means to ensuring a stable and secure environment for US investors as well as gaining control over developing countries’ mineral and petroleum resources.

This Commission completed its work in December 1974 and circulated  a classified document entitled 

National Security Study Memorandum 200: Implications of Worldwide Population Growth for U.S. Security and Overseas Interests” 

to “designated Secretaries and Agency heads for their review and comments.”

In November 1975, the report and its recommendations were endorsed by President Gerald Ford.

The Report focusses strictly on Population Control. The issue of Depopulation is not formally addressed.

The National Security Study Memorandum 200 (NSSSM 200)  does however intimate the following: that in certain countries a recurrence of hunger mines, disease and war could constitute a de facto instrument of population control.

“Accordingly, those countries where large-scale hunger and malnutrition are already present face the bleak prospect of little, if any, improvement in the food intake in the years ahead barring a major foreign financial food aid program, more rapid expansion of domestic food production, reduced population growth or some combination of all three. Worse yet, a series of crop disasters could transform some of them into classic Malthusian cases with famines involving millions of people.

While foreign assistance probably will continue to be forthcoming to meet short-term emergency situations like the threat of mass starvation, it is more questionable whether aid donor countries will be prepared to provide the sort of massive food aid called for by the import projections on a long-term continuing basis.

Reduced population growth rates clearly could bring significant relief over the longer term…..

In the extreme cases where population pressures lead to endemic famine, food riots, and breakdown of social order, those conditions are scarcely conducive to systematic exploration for mineral deposits or the long-term investments required for their exploitation.

Short of famine, unless some minimum of popular aspirations for material improvement can be satisfied, and unless the terms of access and exploitation persuade governments and peoples that this aspect of the international economic order has “something in it for them,” concessions to foreign companies are likely to be expropriated or subjected to arbitrary intervention.

Whether through government action, labor conflicts, sabotage, or civil disturbance, the smooth flow of needed materials will be jeopardized.

Although population pressure is obviously not the only factor involved, these types of frustrations are much less likely under conditions of slow or zero population growth.”

(1974 National Security Study Memorandum 200: Implications of Worldwide Population Growth for U.S. Security and Overseas Interests”. (emphasis added)

The report concludes with a couple of key questions pertaining to the role of food as “an instrument of national power”, which could be used in the pursuit of US strategic interests.

  • On what basis should such food resources then be provided? Would food be considered an instrument of national power? Will we be forced to make choices as to whom we can reasonably assist, and if so, should population efforts be a criterion for such assistance?
  • Is the U.S. prepared to accept food rationing to help people who can’t/won’t control their population growth?” (Ibid, emphasis added)

In the words of Henry Kissinger:

“Control oil and you control nations; control food and you control the people.”


ANNEX

Corporate Actors highlighted in this article (among many other important corporate actors)

Speculative Trade in Crude Oil: Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, British Petroleum (BP), Deutsche Bank, Société Générale, Bank of America, Switzerland’s Mercuria.

Water Privatization

Water Infrastructure: Suez, Veolia, Bechtel-United Utilities, Thames Water and Germany’s RWE-AG

Retail Distribution of Drinking Water: Coca-Cola, Danone, Nestlé and PepsiCo

Food Prices and Genetically Modified Seeds

Monsanto, Syngenta, Aventis, DuPont, Dow Chemical, Cargill,  Arch Daniel Midland.

Military Industrial Complex

Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Northrop Grunman, Boeing, General Dynamics, British Aerospace Systems Corporation (BAES)


The Globalization of Poverty and the New World Order 

by Michel Chossudovsky

originalIn this new and expanded edition of Chossudovsky’s international best-seller, the author outlines the contours of a New World Order which feeds on human poverty and the destruction of the environment, generates social apartheid, encourages racism and ethnic strife and undermines the rights of women. The result as his detailed examples from all parts of the world show so convincingly, is a globalization of poverty.

This book is a skilful combination of lucid explanation and cogently argued critique of the fundamental directions in which our world is moving financially and economically.

In this new enlarged edition –which includes ten new chapters and a new introduction– the author reviews the causes and consequences of famine in Sub-Saharan Africa, the dramatic meltdown of financial markets, the demise of State social programs and the devastation resulting from corporate downsizing and trade liberalisation.

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.

Published in 11 languages. More than 100,000 copies sold Worldwide.

 TO ORDER ONLINE OR MAIL ORDER CLICK HERE

Note: at present. The print version is not available. The pdf version can be ordered online.

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Authorities in Italy have carried out 22 arrests and seized assets totaling over 600 million euros ($638 million) as part of an inquiry into fraud linked to the European Union (EU) COVID-19 pandemic recovery fund.

Items confiscated during the raids included villas, Rolex watches, Cartier jewelry, gold, cryptocurrencies, and high-end vehicles such as Lamborghinis and Porsches. With police investigations into the Qatargate scandal still ongoing, this latest embarrassment comes at a time when the European political bloc’s reputation for financial probity is already deeply damaged.

Three of the 22 arrests were made in Slovakia, two in Austria, with the remainder taking place in Italy. Simultaneous searches were also conducted in Romania. In carrying out the arrests, Italian law enforcement officials are said to have worked closely with staff from the European Public Prosecutor’s Office (EPPO). Notably, therefore, while the EPPO’s 2023 annual report revealed an overall total of 1,927 ongoing investigations involving 19.2 billion euros in suspected fraud, some believe this may simply be the tip of the iceberg.

In an additional new probe, the EPPO and authorities in Greece are also examining allegations of fraud related to the distribution of 2.5 billion euros in EU COVID-19 recovery funds to Greek companies. Here, the investigation focuses on suspicions that firms colluded to limit competition during public tender processes, potentially inflating fees. The allegations reflect growing concerns over a lack of transparency and fair competition in the EU’s distribution of recovery funds across its member states.

Ironically, it appears the alleged fraudsters may have found it easier to access the funds than most of the EU’s member states. According to reports, European governments have received less than a third of the bloc’s original 723 billion euro pandemic recovery pot and are pushing for the payouts to be speeded up. However, the European Court of Auditors, the EU’s auditing watchdog, believes that weak safeguards are increasing the scope for fraud. Even prior to the launching of the Italian and Greek investigations, the Court had openly warned of possible corruption in the spending of the funds.

In this respect it is now clear that crime syndicates have become skilled at pocketing money distributed by the EU for development and reconstruction. Given that cryptocurrencies, artificial intelligence (AI), and offshore servers were reportedly used to facilitate the Italian fraud, it seems the bloc’s stated ambition to become a world leader in the regulation of AI is already being undermined.

With its post-COVID-19 recovery fund rapidly turning into a full-scale political disaster, the EU is increasingly facing calls for transparency over what has happened to the money. Some observers worry that the bulk of it may never be recovered. Either way, the billions borrowed to create the fund will eventually have to be repaid, which means that the ultimate victims will likely be European taxpayers. Already squeezed by the ongoing cost-of-living crisis, and with elections to the European Parliament due to be held between 6-9 June, voters may well decide to vent their anger at the ballot box.

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This article was originally published on Dr. Rath Health Foundation.

Executive Director of the Dr. Rath Health Foundation and one of the coauthors of our explosive book, “The Nazi Roots of the ‘Brussels EU’”, Paul is also our expert on the Codex Alimentarius Commission and has had eye-witness experience, as an official observer delegate, at its meetings. You can find Paul on Twitter at @paulanthtaylor

He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from DHRF/Adobe Stock


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

by Michel Chossudovsky

Michel Chossudovsky reviews in detail how this insidious project “destroys people’s lives”. He provides a comprehensive analysis of everything you need to know about the “pandemic” — from the medical dimensions to the economic and social repercussions, political underpinnings, and mental and psychological impacts.

“My objective as an author is to inform people worldwide and refute the official narrative which has been used as a justification to destabilize the economic and social fabric of entire countries, followed by the imposition of the “deadly” COVID-19 “vaccine”. This crisis affects humanity in its entirety: almost 8 billion people. We stand in solidarity with our fellow human beings and our children worldwide. Truth is a powerful instrument.”

Reviews

This is an in-depth resource of great interest if it is the wider perspective you are motivated to understand a little better, the author is very knowledgeable about geopolitics and this comes out in the way Covid is contextualized. —Dr. Mike Yeadon

In this war against humanity in which we find ourselves, in this singular, irregular and massive assault against liberty and the goodness of people, Chossudovsky’s book is a rock upon which to sustain our fight. –Dr. Emanuel Garcia

In fifteen concise science-based chapters, Michel traces the false covid pandemic, explaining how a PCR test, producing up to 97% proven false positives, combined with a relentless 24/7 fear campaign, was able to create a worldwide panic-laden “plandemic”; that this plandemic would never have been possible without the infamous DNA-modifying Polymerase Chain Reaction test – which to this day is being pushed on a majority of innocent people who have no clue. His conclusions are evidenced by renown scientists. —Peter Koenig 

Professor Chossudovsky exposes the truth that “there is no causal relationship between the virus and economic variables.” In other words, it was not COVID-19 but, rather, the deliberate implementation of the illogical, scientifically baseless lockdowns that caused the shutdown of the global economy. –David Skripac

A reading of  Chossudovsky’s book provides a comprehensive lesson in how there is a global coup d’état under way called “The Great Reset” that if not resisted and defeated by freedom loving people everywhere will result in a dystopian future not yet imagined. Pass on this free gift from Professor Chossudovsky before it’s too late.  You will not find so much valuable information and analysis in one place. –Edward Curtin

ISBN: 978-0-9879389-3-0,  Year: 2022,  PDF Ebook,  Pages: 164, 15 Chapters

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For well over 30 years at this point, NATO has been conducting a crawling, yet comprehensive invasion in Europe. After spending nearly a decade waging a war of aggression on Serbia/Yugoslavia, which effectively served as the testing ground for its “Barbarossa-like” strategic siege of Russia, the world’s most bellicose military alliance moved to the active phase of this plan. After decades of futile attempts to build a mutually beneficial relationship based on peace and respect, Moscow responded with the special military operation (SMO) to push NATO back. What’s more, the first stage of the SMO looked more like an expanded police action supported by some strategic assets. And it nearly ended in mere weeks, as expected by the intelligence services and military commanders. Unfortunately, the political West had other plans, so it sabotaged the already-signed peace deal.

Ever since, the belligerent power pole kept escalating its “Barbarossa 2.0”, mostly by delivering ever more advanced and longer-range weapons. This was soon followed by a significant increase in direct military involvement, mostly in the form of so-called advisers. However, while such personnel didn’t officially belong to operational NATO units, various strategically important assets of several member states became more involved than ever. This is particularly true for the numerous ISR (intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance) platforms that keep flying around Ukraine, be it over the Black Sea, Romania or Poland. It was precisely these assets that were used in providing the Neo-Nazi junta forces with constant updates on the movement and whereabouts of Russian troops. The relayed battlefield data was then used to strike Moscow’s forces on the frontlines.

And yet, this wasn’t enough, as NATO wanted to take it up a notch and try this on Russia’s more strategic targets. It started with a combo of drone and sabotage attacks on airbases housing strategic bombers/missile carriers. Such strikes had little to no actual impact, but served the purpose of probing the Kremlin and the Russian military to see what their reaction would be. However, Moscow kept its cool and simply continued the SMO at its own pace, refusing to succumb to any emotional reactions that could have ended in higher casualties for regular Ukrainians. Still, NATO is determined to cement hatred by constantly fomenting death and destruction, so it prompted the Kiev regime to organize terrorist attacks within Russia, with one such monstrous act resulting in nearly 150 deaths and over 550 injuries. The Neo-Nazi junta and NATO still insist they had nothing to do with it.

However, evidence suggests otherwise. The political West and its favorite puppets in Kiev chose the perpetrators of Muslim background to incite religious and ethnic hatred within Russia. In turn, this was supposed to undermine the country’s unity in the face of a common threat from NATO. Although this largely failed, the endlessly malevolent nature of Moscow’s enemies shows that there’s virtually nothing they won’t try to hurt its basic national interests. Thus, it’s hardly surprising that the strategic assets of the Russian military are a target. However, while the Kremlin is perfectly aware that losses are inevitable in a confrontation with the entire US-led political West, some things simply cannot be tolerated. Namely, on the night of April 17, the Neo-Nazi junta forces launched a missile attack on the strategically important Dzhankoi airbase in northern Crimea.

According to local reports, the attack, launched at around 3:40 AM, lasted for about an hour and included the usage of up to 12 US-made MGM-140 ATACMS tactical ballistic missiles. There is (as of yet still unverified) footage showing the alleged damage to an S-400 SAM (surface-to-air missile) battery. Damage was also reported for the military airfield, although there are no reports about the alleged destruction of any aircraft. The attack was conducted with the support of US ISR assets flying over the Black Sea, while the potential participation of US personnel on the ground should certainly not be excluded. Kherson is around 170 km northwest of Dzhankoi, meaning that it’s well within the maximum range of the MGM-140B (300 km), although the older MGM-140A (165 km) shouldn’t be excluded. The attack followed right after NATO ISR assets appeared in the area.

This includes the USAF’s Northrop Grumman RQ-4B “Global Hawk” drone and the US Navy’s Boeing P-8A “Poseidon”. A few weeks ago, the former’s naval version, dubbed MQ-4C “Triton” was also deployed to Europe and has been conducting similar ISR missions. Some sources claim that, in addition to “Nebo-M” radars, the “Fundament-M” airspace surveillance asset was allegedly damaged during the same attack on the Dzhankoi airbase. The Russian side is yet to comment on these reports. This came less than a day after the Kiev regime forces supposedly attacked another “Nebo-U” radar station in the Bryansk oblast (region). The alleged strike reportedly opened up the way for long-range drones to attack the Avangard plant of the legendary Almaz-Antey Concern famous for the S-300 and S-400 series of air defense systems. However, there are no credible sources to confirm this.

Still, these aren’t the only unfounded claims by the Neo-Nazi junta. Citing its military reports, the mainstream propaganda machine insists that the Kiev regime forces allegedly damaged the 29B6 “Container”, an over-the-horizon radar located in the Russian Republic of Mordovia. The 29B6 “Container” is a new generation of such radars and it’s part of Moscow’s early-warning system, providing long-distance airspace monitoring and ballistic missile detection. Any damage to it would certainly be of global proportions, as it provides unmatched strategic ISR capabilities. The fact that there’s no evidence for the claim and that the Kremlin hasn’t commented on any of these reports suggests they’re likely to be false. After all, the Neo-Nazi junta keeps insisting on battles and strikes that never happened, as was the case with the Morozovsk airbase in the Rostov oblast.

Namely, on the night of April 5, the Kiev regime forces launched an attack on the airbase, allegedly destroying at least half a dozen aircraft parked on runways. The Russian military stated that it repelled the massive attack, but the Neo-Nazi junta kept insisting that it was successful, further adding that another two airbases were also hit, including Engels in the Saratov oblast and Yeysk in the Krasnodar oblast. The mainstream propaganda machine reported that at least 15 Russian aircraft were destroyed. However, the satellite imagery released the next day proved that the claims were false, as none of the 53 drones reached their targets. On the other hand, the Russian military provided clear evidence for the recent destruction of hostile MiG-29 fighter jets and S-300 SAM systems in Dnepropetrovsk. The Neo-Nazi junta’s assets were destroyed by an “Iskander-M”.

As for the Kiev regime’s claims, the one about the Dzhankoi airbase attack seems to be the most likely. Still, NATO involvement in the strike is the biggest issue, as it could force Russia to start shooting down US ISR platforms over the Black Sea, particularly the unmanned ones. This could serve as a warning sign that manned jets would be next if the belligerent alliance continues with the practice of providing targeting data and orders to the Neo-Nazi junta.

The political West is also spying on others in Europe, particularly Serbia, as it escalates its two-front aggression on the traditionally pro-Russian country. All this suggests that the strategic pressure on Moscow and its partners will keep growing, as NATO is unable to fight Russia directly, neither in a conventional nor thermonuclear conflict. However, it will keep escalating terrorist attacks and indirect military involvement.

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This article was originally published on InfoBrics.

Drago Bosnic is an independent geopolitical and military analyst. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

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Given the lying and fact-twisting that have routinely been part and parcel of accounts of what is occurring in the Middle East, the past several weeks have nevertheless been shocking in terms of how an abysmally low standard of truth can be reduced even farther. Looking at developments objectively, one comes up with a series of facts.

First of all, Israel was not at war with either Syria or Iran during the first weeks in April.

Iran had never attacked Israel prior to that point and Syria last fought Israel in 1973, over 50 years ago.

Israel, however, has regularly been assassinating Iranian officials and scientists and it has been frequently bombing Syria since 2017, increasing the pace to weekly and sometimes even daily attacks over the past six months paralleling the Gaza fighting.

A particularly devastating attack took place on March 29th when the Israeli military launched massive strikes against a weapons storage depot in Syria’s northern province of Aleppo which killed at least 40 people, most of them Syrian soldiers. The air strikes produced a series of explosions that also killed six Lebanese Hezbollah fighters.

But three days later on April 1st a very damaging and unprovoked attack was directed against the Iranian Embassy’s Consulate General, which was located in an upscale neighborhood in Damascus, Syria’s capital. The building was completely destroyed by missiles fired from F-35 fighter planes that had crossed over the Syrian border from Israel, killing Iranian diplomats as well as Brigadier General Mohammad Reza Zahedi and Zahedi’s deputy, General Haji Rahimi, and also Brigadier General Hossein Amirollah, the chief of general staff for the al-Quds force in Syria and Lebanon. Syria subsequently confirmed that a total of 13 people were killed in the attack, including six Syrians and a Lebanese Hezbollah militiaman. Both Iran and Hezbollah vowed revenge.

Attacking a diplomatic mission is considered a major war crime according to the Vienna Convention, but there was no condemnation of the incident coming from the US and the usual suspects in Western Europe. Instead of doing what was right by pressuring Israel to stop attacking its neighbors and thereby possibly preventing a major war in the Middle East, President Joe Biden repeated his pledge that the United States would regard as “ironclad” its commitment to guarantee Israel’s security if Iran were to strike back. This guaranteed to Israel that any action taken by it would be supported by Washington.

The Biden Administration also predictably voted against a Russian- and Chinese-drafted UN Security Council resolution to condemn the Israeli attack on the Iranian Consulate, which was a clear violation of international law and an act of war committed by Israel. The US reportedly cast its veto vote “no” after “diplomats said the US told council colleagues that many of the facts of what happened on Monday in Damascus remained unclear.” What was actually unclear was the fog that generally surrounds the Biden foreign policy and national security team since it was pretty transparent who was the aggressor in terms of means, motive and outcome.

When Iran did retaliate on April 13th, it carried out a carefully calibrated moderate strike against military targets intended to do damage but not cause a large number of casualties.

It reportedly hit several airbases from which the Israeli fighter bombers had begun their attack on Damascus as well as an Israeli Air Force intelligence center in the formerly Syrian Golan Heights.

No one was killed in spite of the 300 estimated drones and missiles that were launched, most being intercepted by Israel and its allies. But the attack nevertheless sent a message from Tehran that next time it could be much worse, both immediate in timing and “considerably more severe” than its response on Saturday night had been.

Iran also claims that it attempted to prevent an escalation by warning the US about their plans, which would be passed on to Israel, that a “controlled” retaliation was coming. The Pentagon denied that it had been told anything, which may mean that Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin was asleep at his desk once again.

Not content with the outcome, Israel inevitably struck back on Friday, hitting a major airbase near Isfahan, and, to make sure no one was missed, targets in both Iraq and Syria.

Iranian military sources advise however that the loud explosions heard by local residents were Iranian air defenses shooting at some flying objects, presumably drones. Per the New York Times and other accommodating media, the strike was a warning that Israel could penetrate Iranian airspace and not intended to do serious damage.

The Pentagon was apparently informed shortly before the Israeli action. Iran’s counter-counter retaliation is now pending, but it is clear that Netanyahu will not be deterred by electoral considerations in the United States to stay his hand in his own counter-counter response.

And how does the United States fit into the story? The White House response to the Iranian attack on Israeli territory was inevitably completely unlike the previous uncritical response to Israel’s Consulate General attack, namely condemnation of Iran and the repetition of the usual tripe about “Israel has a right to defend itself” and the sanctity of the “ironclad” defense arrangement. Biden also attempted to cover himself against political blowback due to his licking Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s shoes in the upcoming November election by making it known that he had spoken with and advised Netanyahu, recommending not carrying out a reprisal of the reprisal, which Washington would be unable to support as it could/would lead to major escalation. Netanyahu, not fearing Biden’s displeasure, blew the advice off and he and his war cabinet made clear that they were working on a response as well as setting a timetable for invading Rafah in south Gaza, which Biden had also recommended against.

The White House completed its groveling to Netanyahu by vetoing a UN Security Council resolution on April 18th that would have advocated full UN membership status for the state of Palestine, demonstrating that kicking the Palestinians is always a good way to maintain Israeli favor! The vote was 12 (including France, Japan and South Korea) in favor, two abstentions (the shameless United Kingdom and, surprisingly, Switzerland) and an American veto. The US insisted that elevation of Palestine’s diplomatic status can only be obtained after negotiations between the Palestinian Authority and Israel. US Ambassador to the UN Linda Thomas-Greenfield absurdly raised another objection:

“Right now, the Palestinians don’t have control over a significant portion of what is supposed to be their state. It’s being controlled by a terrorist organization.”

She was referring to Hamas but the comment actually more correctly is applicable to Israel. In any event, a leaked White House memo had previously revealed that Biden opposes full UN membership and statehood for the Palestinians without Israel’s approval, which, of course, will not be forthcoming.

So we have Israel as the aggressor against two countries that were not declared enemies and had not attacked the Jewish state in any way in many, many years. But when Israel attacked them, committing a major war crime Joe Biden and company preferred to sit on their hands and mumble, saving their vituperation for when Iran staged a deliberately mild counter-attack as a warning. That is called hypocrisy, to turn things on their head to provide the answer that one wants to see and it applies equally to Biden accusing the Russians of “illegal occupation” in Ukraine while Israel’s theft of Syria’s Golan Heights and ongoing seizure of the West Bank goes unchallenged by Washington. And the pushback against Iran is unlikely to diminish very soon as the Jewish controlled US Congress also has the bit between its teeth to demonstrate how much it loves Israel. Congressman Steve Scalise, GOP House Majority Leader, has announced that

“In light of Iran’s unjustified attack on Israel, the House will move from its previously announced legislative schedule next week to instead consider legislation that supports our ally Israel and holds Iran and its terrorist proxies accountable. The House of Representatives stands strongly with Israel, and there must be consequences for this unprovoked attack.”

Over at the Senate Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas is advocating punishing Iran by beating on its possible friends in the US, physically attacking folks who are demonstrating in support of the Palestinians. Cotton said that the “pro-Hamas criminals” should be confronted by angry citizens who “take matters into [their] own hands” and confront the offenders, endorsing the use of force against peaceful demonstrators.

But there is also the back story behind why Israel likely attacked the Iranians in Syria in the first place. I and a number of other observers immediately after the Israeli attack assumed that the Jewish state had staged a deliberate over-the-top provocation to draw Washington into its wars. Just as in the case of the October 7th Gaza attack by Hamas, which Israel had full knowledge of and let happen, Netanyahu sought to create a situation in which it would goad Iran into being forced to retaliate to force an “ironclad” Biden to protect its “ally” by taking on Iran directly.

Why did Israel do it beyond the obvious desire to destroy Iran just like it is destroying the Palestinians?

It was done because Israel has likely become aware that it is viewed as the world’s greatest pariah state due to its genocide in Gaza, to include the recent horrific killing of hundreds of Palestinians in the Al-Shifa hospital in Gaza as well as the targeted assassination of seven employees of a charity that was bringing in food to those starving due to Israel’s blocking the entry of relief supplies. And also because Israel is actually not winning its war against Hamas, it needed to shift the narrative to something different.

That would be using its time-honored technique of making itself once again the “victim” in confronting a powerful new enemy, Iran, which would make the problem of bad public relations with the world over Gaza be in part mitigated.

A shift in the story would also presumably bring with it the expected help from the United States and its European allies to do the hard work in killing Iranians. And the trick seems to have worked, predictably. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak of Britain has been recently facing demands to cut off arms shipments to Israel because of the devastating death toll in Gaza, but on the following Monday, he was able to salute the British warplanes that had shot down some Iranian drones sent by Iran to attack Israel. It was a telling example of how Israel has been able to scramble the equation in the Middle East. Faced with a intensively publicized barrage of Iranian missiles, Britain, the United States, France and others rushed to help the Israelis who had in fact started the conflict. The United States is also currently planning on increasing the pressure on Iran through a series of tough new sanctions being prepared by Treasury Secretary Janice Yellen, saying

“Treasury will not hesitate to work with our allies to use our sanctions authority to continue disrupting the Iranian regime’s malign and destabilizing activity.”

Yellen notably did nothing when Israel committed a major war crime in its attack on the Iranian Consulate General in Damascus, nor has she supported sanctions over the Israeli Gaza genocide. She is, of course, Jewish. More aid for the Jewish state is also still waiting for a congressional vote to approve the $14 billion currently in the pipeline, with Washington Report claiming that this year’s total US aid to Netanyahu will likely exceed $25 billion “in direct costs related to its fervent support for Israel.”

Right now, the dilemma for the US government will be that it must pull out all the stops in supporting Israel or face inter alia retaliation by the Israel Lobby working through its donors and media resources to defeat Biden in November.

And there hovers in the peripheries of one’s mind the worse grim possibility that Israel, if rebuffed by its “allies,” will use its secret nuclear arsenal to blow up the Middle East and presumably a large chunk of adjacent areas in Europe and Asia as well.

There are stories already circulating suggesting that the Israeli nuclear reactor at Dimona might have been an Iranian target and that Israel is right now preparing to take out Iranian nuclear research sites. Netanyahu is calling the shots while a befuddled White House looks on. Israel has baited a trap and Joe Biden has stepped right into it.

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This article was originally published on The Unz Review.

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

He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from TUR

Interest Rates Are Going Higher

April 19th, 2024 by Alasdair Macleod

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If a chart speaks a thousand words, this is it:

 

 

From its peak at about 15% in the early eighties, the trend for US bond yields was down for forty years. When the yield soared through 2.8% in April 2022 (yes, only 2.8%) alarm bells should have been ringing. When it turned down from 5% last October, investors heaved a sigh of relief and then expected interest rates and bond yields to decline: inflation was over.

However, between October and February the monthly inflation rate continually increased (it paused in March at the February rate). Importantly, last month Larry Summers headlined a join report between Harvard and the IMF which came out with a CPI recalculation to include financing costs, stating that in 2022 CPI inflation hit 18%. Those financing costs are still there, so the current official estimates of 3.4% understate it massively.

Of course, if the Fed cut its funds rate and the banking system followed, the inflation rate based on Summers’ calculation would fall. But that’s not what the Fed is watching. It sees commodity and energy prices rising again. Gasoline, a significant CPI component is rising particularly strongly up 14% this year. But as a mutual friend in the IMF who knows Summers well observed to me, it is amazing how he is ahead of the curve when a change in policy is about to happen. And he is saying that inflation is still a problem, contradicting markets.

So yes, the chart above of a thousand words is not to be ignored, and we are seeing that the super-tanker determining global interest rates is on the turn towards higher rates. Expectations of lower rates are being continually deferred and might not even happen. And Summers has been ramming the message home that the Fed should not reduce interest rates in a series of Bloomberg interviews.

US interest rates and bond yields will rise. The consequences for US bond prices and equity values will be extremely bearish, given that prospective valuations of the former will decline materially, and that the relationship with equities is already very stretched. This is illustrated in my next chart.

 

 

The negative correlation between the Treasury long bond and the S&P index is normally very tight, the exceptions being during the dot-com bubble, the Lehman crisis, and in the wake of the covid crisis when the Fed suppressed rates to the zero bound and bond yields with it. More recently, the long bond yield has risen significantly, without undermining equities. It is now becoming clear that interest rates are not going to fall as they are optimistically discounted, and equities will surely fall significantly.

The Impact on Japan Will be Devastating

 

 

This week has seen the yen fall through the Bank of Japan’s last-ditch line at Y152 as bond yields rose strongly. There’s little doubt that the Bank of Japan will have to raise rates and stop monetising debt.

The losses on QE have become incredible. Since the peak of prices in July 2019, the value of the Bank of Japan’s bond holdings has fallen by over Y400 trillion, which is over 400,000 times its paltry equity capital of 100 million yen. It raises the question: will the BOJ need to be recapitalised?

Doubtless, as dollar rates increase  forcing Japanese rates higher its losses will eventually catch the public’s attention. And the plight of Japan’s over 20 times highly leveraged banks will as well, because if the central bank is bust saving the commercial banking system becomes no longer credible and has the potential to collapse the currency.

The ECB Has Its Own Difficulties

Similarly to the Bank of Japan, the ECB faces a potentially lethal combination of higher interest rates, bond yields, and a falling exchange rate against the US dollar. And having made the error of imposing negative interest rates combined with quantitative easing, it has undermined the purchasing power of the euro. Furthermore, the eurozone includes some of the most indebted of the advanced nations, so further increases in bond yields from current overvalued levels will hit them hard.

Greece has a debt to GDP estimated at 150%, Italy 140%, France112%, Portugal 112%, and Spain 110%. All these eurozone nations are running budget deficits as well, ranging as high as 8% to GDP for Italy.

These budget deficit estimates assume no recession, which with higher interest rates is virtually guaranteed. They are likely to be significantly higher due to lower tax revenues, higher welfare costs, and higher financing rates. In the past, the ECB has bought off most of these problems through a combination of interest rate suppression and QE — these will no longer be possible in a rising global interest rate environment which is beyond the ECB’s control.

The ECB and the national central banks in the Eurosystem have losses on QE which in many cases wipes out their capital entirely. Without their recapitalisation, like that of the Bank of Japan they will lack the credibility to rescue their commercial banks from failure. Similarly to the Japanese banking system, eurozone banks became exceptionally leveraged due to margin compression under negative interest rates, so they are extremely vulnerable to rising interest rates and bond yields.

Recapitalising the Eurosystem is a nightmare at best. It will require unanimous approval from many member parliaments, not just to recapitalise individual national central banks, but to subscribe for their key commitments at the ECB as well. To get unanimity will be difficult enough, when TARGET2 imbalances are so significant. When the Bundesbank is owed over a trillion euros by the ECB and other members of the Eurosystem, convincing politicians in Berlin to agree to the Bundesbank’s recapitalisation will be difficult. And that’s assuming the Federal Constitutional Court doesn’t get involved as well

We should be aware that higher interest rates could destroy the Eurosystem entirely. And with its failure, the future of the Brussels project itself will be in doubt. I have mentioned this possibility many times over the last ten years, but this outcome is now shifting from possible towards being probable.

Other Nations Are Ill-prepared for Higher Rates

Other nations with their own currencies will have to raise their interest rates to keep pace with those of the US dollar, or risk seeing them decline relative to the dollar. And higher rates will impact government and private sector debt accordingly. Some nations which have managed their public affairs responsibly have highly indebted private sectors, with mortgage debt that will become unaffordable, destroying residential property values. There is no escape from the financial holocaust about to hit everyone, brought about by the US Government’s abuse of its fiscal responsibilities, particularly in recent years, and the monetary authority’s mismanagement of credit.

As well as the demise of fiat currencies, we are seeing the end of the socialising welfare model. The only escape from total economic collapse is to return to credible gold standards, which Russia, China, and Saudi Arabia can do.

The Restitution of Gold

It is becoming clear that the era of fiat currencies is drawing to a close, and that the return of gold as the international anchor for all credit will return. This outcome will not be embraced by America, the EU, Japan, and many other nations hooked on non-productive credit inflation and economic management by the state. The longer they delay accepting this reality, the worse it will be for their currencies.

We know that China and Russia have accumulated large amounts of bullion as insurance against this possibility. Before the last financial crisis, China was even exhorting its own citizens to buy gold. And in addition to her official reserves, informed opinion is that Russia has a further 10,000 tonnes or so in two other state funds. Between them, Russia and China are the golden centre for their rapidly developing sphere of influence, fully 60% of the world’s population and already over 30% of its nominal GDP.

It is increasingly fashionable for geopolitical analysts to talk about the rising power of the two Asian hegemons. So far, they haven’t debated the demise of the dollar-based fiat currency system. Its principal features are its instability, its loss of purchasing power since the end of Bretton Woods in 1971, and the necessity to raise interest rates from time to time in an attempt to stabilise currency values. And now, by China and Japan simply withholding further purchases of dollars and dollar denominated debt, the dollar is sinking relative to gold. A funding crisis looms, which will need far higher interest rates, undermining the value of the dollar measured in gold even further.

This contrasts with credible gold standards, which anchor currency values to international legal money. It leads to stable interest rates at low base levels, typically two or three per cent. The caveat is that central banks should use interest rates to manage their gold reserves, not to manage economic outcomes. And the government must always run a balanced budget.

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Alasdair Macleod runs FinanceAndEconomics.org, a website dedicated to sound money and demystifying finance and economics. Alasdair has a background as a stockbroker, banker and economist. He is a Senior Fellow at the GoldMoney Foundation.

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After having read the 72nd report of the Department Related Parliamentary Standing Committee on alleged irregularities in the conduct of studies using HPV vaccines by Path in India, it was startling to see Bill Gates bobbing his head up and down and smiling ingratiatingly on prime time television while the Prime Minister lectured him in Hindi on his plans for the country. Public memory fades quickly and politicians of all hues wait for this memory to fade so as to carry on regardless of the effect of their policies on the health of the nation.

In 2010, “the entire world was shocked by media reports about the deaths of female children in Andhra Pradesh after being administered the HPV vaccines. The project was reportedly funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.” The role of government agencies including ICMR and DCGI in approving these trials, the misuse of the government funds “for a private project of dubious nature”, the use of the logo of the NRHM to give it respectability and official endorsement, the approval of the trials by the National Ethical Committee, came under scrutiny by Parliament. Hugely perturbed “the Central Government directed an enquiry be conducted by the premier investigation agency, the state governments were advised not to carry out further vaccinations in the interim period.”  

The committee appointed to investigate

“found the entire matter very intriguing and fishy… the monopolistic nature of the product being pushed and the unlimited market potential… are all pointers to a well-planned scheme to commercially exploit a situation… and would have generated windfall profits for the manufacturers by way of automatic sale, year after year without any promotional or marketing expense. The American organization Path resorted to subterfuge. The interest, safety and well beings of subjects were completely jeopardized by Path.

Thus as early as 2006, the main objective of Path was to facilitate the introduction of the HPV vaccine Gardasil into government funded immunization programme in India.”  

The experts in the enquiry committee when asked, opined that “the design of the project itself was faulty. In the survey documents there was no column for serious adverse events even though much before the trials started, severe allergic reactions and other considerable side effects were well-known. Because ICMR was worried about bad publicity in case of side effects, Path did not provide for “urgent expert medical attention in cases of serious adverse events”, which were known or expected. There was no preparation to handle serious developments like cardiac arrest and seizures occurring at the sites of vaccine administration. There existed no insurance cover for the children.  

The Committee took a serious note of the fact that “both the Ethics Committees existed as a formality” and that there was “a clear dereliction of duty”. The credibility of the Universal Immunization Programme “was used to promote private, foreign interest” and recommended “practices of diverting public funds for advancing interest of a private agency should never be allowed in future.”  

The Committee found that the project was “reportedly funded by Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation” and that the “vaccines were donated by the manufacturers.”  

When the Committee desired to know “whether criminal enquiry was initiated against Path”, no answer was forthcoming. Commenting on the action taken report “the Committee was amazed at the audacity of DCGI to merely repeat various steps to be taken as if they were new additional measures. Except for slight amendment in the informed consent form, there was nothing new in the action taken report. No accountability had been fixed.”  

Commenting on the American organization Path, the Committee was concerned that it set up an office without getting the required mandatory approvals / permissions. The Committee found it “surprising that security and intelligence agencies did not raise an eyebrow on a way a foreign entity entered India through the backdoor.” The Committee found the actions of Path “a serious breach of trust, of medical ethics, and a clear cut violation of the human rights of these girl children.”  

The Parliamentary Standing Committee questioned the decision of ICMR to promote the drug in the Universal Immunization Programme in 2007 itself, before the vaccine was approved in India in 2008.  

The Committee also affirmed the general guidelines of CDSCO that no trial can be conducted on children until trials are conducted on adults to determine efficacy and safety. The project envisaged vaccination of about 30,000 children in the age group of 10-14 years. What made things even more worrying was the deaths of children after receiving the vaccine. These were dismissed as “unrelated to vaccination without in-depth investigation.”  

On informed consent the ICMR acknowledged that

“there were gross violations of norms in Andhra Pradesh. 9543 consent forms were signed, 1948 had thumb impressions, while hostel wardens signed 2763 forms.

In Gujarat 6217 were signed and 3944 had thumb impressions. Very large number of parents / guardians were illiterate and could not even sign in their local language. The wardens / teachers / head-masters were not given written permissions by the parents / guardians to sign on behalf of their girls. On many forms, witnesses had not signed. Neither the photographs, nor the photo ID cards of the parents / guardians / wardens is pasted in the consent form. On many forms, investigators had not signed. On some forms, signature of the parents / guardians is not matching with their names. The date of vaccination in some forms was much earlier than the date of signatures.”

The DG, ICMR admitted “that many consent forms were filled up by the principal on behalf of the students, he admitted gross violations in the recording of serious adverse effects also.” The Committee concluded that the consent forms were carelessly filled up “and were incomplete and inaccurate”, full of “grave irregularity”.  

High officials admitted that the presence of ICMR in the Project Advisory Committee indicated “conflict of interest” and therefore ICMR had moral responsibility for the numerous irregularities reportedly committed. This dereliction of duty went to the extent of ICMR “apparently acting at the behest of the manufacturers”. For example, “States were not even capable of monitoring the adverse effects.” The machinations of Path came in for “the strongest condemnation”.  

The Drugs Controller General of India (DCGI) came in for scathing criticism as well.

“DCGI played a very questionable role… remained as a silent spectator even when its own rules and regulations were being so flagrantly violated.”  

The Parliamentary Standing Committee found instances of conflict of interest in the composition of the Enquiry Committee. There was no disclosure by the members of the Enquiry Committee or by the experts. The Committee found that an individual availed the hospitality of the trial sponsors during a visit to Seoul to attend a conference, which fact was not disclosed. On enquiry, the Committee found that the conflict of interest though, “serious matter” was treated in a “casual manner”.  

The success of vaccine manufacturers and promoters in getting away with myriad illegalities in the marketing of the HPV vaccines and its endorsement by the Prime Minister of India, ultimately paved the way for the secretive clearance of the COVID vaccines in India. Serious adverse events were kept top secret. Perhaps the number people who died due to vaccine related reasons will never be known. The sudden inexplicable deaths of young persons proximate to the taking of the vaccine will probably never be investigated.

The judiciary is loath to even allow any enquiry perhaps on the assumption that a judicial review could possibly lead to vaccine hesitancy.

In the meanwhile, the large numbers of COVID vaccine related deaths remains India’s best kept secret. But, that is another story; and there are excellent studies done which are waiting in the wings to be reported but cannot find a willing publisher. Such is the nature of freedom of the press in India.  

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Colin Gonsalves is a human rights lawyers in India fighting for the rights and well-being of India’s most vulnerable populations. He is a Senior Advocate at the Supreme Court of India and the founder of the Human Rights Law Network (HRLN), an Indian national network of public interest lawyers. Over three decades, HRLN’s lawyers have engaged in public interest litigation to hold the government to account and secure a broad spectrum of human rights. Gonsalves’ work has focused on securing rights for India’s most vulnerable people, such as bonded labourers, ethnic and religious minorities, refugees, slum dwellers, women and the poor. His most significant victories in the courtroom include the 2001 “Right to Food” case, which saw India’s Supreme Court issue far-reaching orders enforcing a free midday meal for all schoolchildren. It also granted access to subsidised grain for over 400 million Indians living below the poverty line. In 2016 and 2017, Gonsalves obtained landmark judgments from the Supreme Court that ended the longstanding immunity of the Indian Armed Forces from criminal prosecution. This has had a significant impact in reducing the number of extrajudicial executions occurring in India’s Northeast.

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The West did not want to be drawn into negotiations and instead offered Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky increased military aid and strengthened pressure on Russia, Foreign Affairs magazine published on April 16. Two years on, it is evident that the West now regrets not achieving peace as Russia is preparing for a major and devastating offensive against Ukrainian forces.

In March 2022, peace negotiations were held in Istanbul. The package of agreements during the negotiations in Turkey’s largest city included Ukraine’s neutrality status – the refusal to join NATO, deploy foreign troops on its territory, and develop nuclear weapons, in addition to the obligation to only carry out military exercises with the consent of the guarantor countries. In return for these concessions, Kiev was offered international security guarantees akin to NATO’s Article 5, except in Crimea, Donetsk, and Luhansk.

According to Foreign Affairs,

“the Western response to these negotiations […] was certainly lukewarm. Washington and its allies were deeply skeptical about the prospects for the diplomatic track emerging from Istanbul; after all, the communiqué sidestepped the question of territory and borders, and the parties remained far apart on other crucial issues. It did not seem to them like a negotiation that was going to succeed.”

Foreign Affairs points out that “a final agreement proved elusive, however, for a number of reasons,” referring to the increase in military aid to Kiev and pressure on Russia, including through an increasingly strict sanctions regime.

Source: Foreign Affairs

The authors of the article believed that the West did not want to be drawn into negotiations with Russia, especially those that would create more obligations to guarantee Ukraine’s security. Another relevant factor was Zelensky’s confidence that, with sufficient support from Western countries, he would be able to defeat Russia.  

Although those points are relevant, it cannot be overlooked that the West in 2022 did not want a peaceful resolution as it was believed that Russia could be financially crippled and Ukraine’s military victorious. Two years later, the IMF recently predicted Russia’s economy would grow by 3.2%, faster than all the world’s advanced economies, including the US, and significantly more than the UK, France, and Germany, while at the same time, the Russian military is preparing for a major offensive against Ukraine’s depleted forces.

More specifically, it was the then British prime minister Boris Johnson who torpedoed the negotiations. Russian President Vladimir Putin even pointed out that discussions broke down after Johnson delivered on behalf of “the Anglo-Saxon world” the order for Kiev to “fight Russia until victory is achieved and Russia suffers a strategic defeat.”

It is recalled that as early as March 30, Johnson stated, “We should continue to intensify sanctions with a rolling program until every single one of [Putin’s] troops is out of Ukraine,” showing that he never had an interest in achieving peace. Ten days later, the then-British prime minister arrived in Kiev, making him the first foreign leader to visit after Russian forces withdrew from besieging the Ukrainian capital.

During the visit, Johnson told the Ukrainian president that “any deal with Putin was going to be pretty sordid” and that it “would be some victory for him: if you give him anything, he’ll just keep it, bank it, and then prepare for his next assault.”

Although the West vehemently denies that Johnson is responsible for negotiations breaking down, Davyd Arakhamia, the parliamentary leader of Zelensky’s political party and leader of the very first Ukrainian delegation to meet with Russian officials only days after the war began, said in a 2023 interview that the former British leader encouraged the end of negotiations and pushed for more combat.

 “When we returned from Istanbul, Boris Johnson came to Kiev and said that we won’t sign anything at all with [the Russians]—and let’s just keep fighting,” Arakhamia revealed.

Johnson was not alone, though. Most Western leaders do not want peace, as they spent a lot on supporting the Kiev regime with weapons and funds. The US and its European NATO allies, in a desperate bid to weaken Russia, have sent tens of billions of dollars worth of weapons and military equipment to Ukraine following the escalation of conflict in February 2022.

Instead of defeating Russia, Western investments have reduced US and NATO reserves and diminished Kiev’s ability to negotiate on favourable terms. But as Foreign Affairs magazine highlighted, the West was never interested in achieving peace and was full of arrogance and belief that it could make Russia submit to its demands through economic coercion and war via its Ukrainian proxy. This is now a decision the West is ruing as Russia continues to thrive and territorially expand while the West economically struggles and Ukraine contracts.

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Ahmed Adel is a Cairo-based geopolitics and political economy researcher. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

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Pascal Sleiman, head of the Christian Lebanese Forces’ Jbeil district office, was kidnapped and killed by a gang of Syrian car thieves on April 7. He died after being hit on the head and chest by the criminals, who then stuffed him into the car’s truck, and later dumped him in a border area in Syria.

According to the Lebanese army, the politician and head of management information systems at Byblos Bank, was the victim of a carjacking by a criminal gang, who have been arrested.

“Following up on the case of Pascal Sleiman, who was kidnapped, the army intelligence directorate was able to arrest most Syrian gang members involved in the kidnapping”, the Lebanese army announced in a statement on X.

The army added,

“During their investigation, it became clear that the kidnapped person was killed by them while they were trying to steal his car in the Jbeil area, and that they transported his body to Syria,” the army stated. “The Army Command coordinates with the Syrian authorities to hand over the body, and investigations are completed under the supervision of the Cassation Public Prosecution.”

A Lebanese judicial official said security forces had arrested seven Syrians on suspicion of involvement in Sleiman’s killing. The kidnappers admitted that their goal was stealing the victim’s car. A military official said Damascus had handed over three suspects.

However, in Lebanon’s fractured political landscape, there are several interpretations to the story, depending on what political party you are affiliated with, and even depending on what religious sect you have been born into.

Because Sleiman was an official within a political party in Lebanon, many first jumped to the conclusion it was a political kidnapping and murder, of which Lebanon is famous for. This baseless rumor has raised tensions in Lebanon and on Monday evening, hundreds of people blocked roads in Byblos, while videos circulated on social media of violence against Syrians.

The Lebanese Forces (LF) is a right-wing Christian political party headed by Samir Geagea, who was a militia commander during the Lebanese civil war 1975-1990. Geagea was the only war-lord to be imprisoned following the war, and was released in 2005.

Geagea dislikes the Syrian government, and Hezbollah, the resistance group and political party. Hezbollah supporters are primarily Shiite Muslims in the south of Beirut, and in the south of Lebanon.

The Free Patriotic Movement (FPM), another Christian political party now headed by Gebran Bassil, allied with Hezbollah, making it at odds with the LF, and has divided Lebanon’s Christian community.

The LF emerged as part of a wider Christian right-wing front fighting Palestinian, Muslim and secular left-wing forces during the civil war.

During the Israeli occupation of the south of Lebanon from 1982, Geagea supported Israel against his own nation, even though the south of Lebanon holds many Christian villages which suffered greatly under the brutal Israeli military occupation. It was Hezbollah which forced Israel to leave Lebanon in 2000.

Men, women and children were imprisoned in the infamous Khaim prison during the occupation, which Israel destroyed in summer of 2006 when Israel bombed all of Lebanon in an effort to destroy Hezbollah. Israel lost the 2006 war and was unable to advance inside Lebanon.

While Geagea and the Lebanese Forces were collaborating with the enemy, Hezbollah was fighting Israel, and was victorious in finally freeing Lebanon of Israeli occupation, except for the Shebaa Farms area on the border, which remains occupied by Israel.

The LF has used the tragic death of Pascal Sleiman as a chance to ignite the flames of sectarianism by blaming Hezbollah for a hand in his death. The killers were Syrians, and Hezbollah and the Syrian government are seen as allies, and part of the axis of resistance to the Israeli occupation of Palestine, the Golan Heights and Shebaa Farms.

Since October, Hezbollah has traded attacks with Israel along the border in response to the brutal genocide Israel is waging on the Palestinian people in Gaza.

In a speech made on Monday, Hezbollah secretary-general Hassan Nasrallah said Sleiman’s abduction “has nothing to do with politics or Hezbollah”, condemning the accusations.

Tensions between Hezbollah and the LF have persisted over the years, and the LF accuses Hezbollah of endangering Lebanon in a full scale war with Israel in response to the repeated attacks by Hezbollah.

Lebanon’s financial meltdown began in 2019, and the LF accused FPM and Hezbollah of being responsible for the economic crisis which saw banks closing and people on the brink of starvation.

The anti-Syrian sentiment is soaring after the death of Sleiman. Videos on social media show protests, blocked roads and sectarian tensions rising as some political groups call for Syrian refugees to face collective punishment.

Many Lebanese, including politicians, have long pushed for Syrian refugees to go home. The Syrians came flooding into Lebanon, and elsewhere, during the US-NATO attack on Syria which began in 2011 for regime change. The conflict in Syria is over, and many refugees have returned to Syria, but many Syrians living in Lebanon have put down roots after so many years and refuse to leave.

Syrians have been blamed for the economic crisis, instead of blaming the Lebanese officials who have sucked the country dry over decades of corruption.

Interior Minister Bassam Mawlawi warned that “this country cannot withstand problems and sectarian strife”.

The security forces have been instructed “to strictly enforce Lebanese laws on Syrian refugees”, he told reporters after a meeting about Sleiman’s killing.

“We will become stricter in granting residency permits and dealing with those (Syrians) residing in Lebanon illegally,” Mawlawi added, urging people to stop renting apartments informally to Syrians.

He also called for “limiting the presence of Syrians” in the country, without saying how.

Lebanese Foreign Minister Abdallah Bou Habib called the number of Syrians a “problem”.

“We have 2.2 million Syrian refugees in Lebanon, a country of five million, and half a million Palestinians,” he told reporters in Athens.

The United Nations refugee agency says more than 800,000 Syrian refugees are registered with the body in Lebanon, noting registrations have been suspended since 2015 following a government ruling.

Ramzi Kaiss from the US-based group Human Rights Watch said Beirut must ensure the investigation into the killing is thorough and transparent in light of decades of impunity in Lebanon for politically sensitive killings.

“Attempts to scapegoat the entire refugee population are deplorable” and “threaten to fuel already ongoing violence against Syrians in Lebanon,” Kaiss told AFP.

The body of Sleiman was handed over to the Lebanese Red Cross from the Syrian authorities, and then was taken on a planned procession which stopped at the LF office in Jbeil. His final journey was accompanied by Kataeb supporters, and citizens hearing in the background the national anthem being played.

Most Lebanese say they saw enough civil war and never want to see it raise its ugly head once more. They are looking for peace, economic recovery, and the future of their children. However, they are some who will use even a crime to stoke the flames of sectarian hatred.

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This article was originally published on Mideast Discourse

Steven Sahiounie is a two-time award-winning journalist. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

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We all are aware of the enormous distress caused and the thousands of human lives lost in the conflicts in Gaza and Ukraine, but there are a few who look at these wars in a very different way– in terms of high profits being made and stock prices rising!

Let us look at some of the headlines of recent times from leading newspapers and other media—

  • Defense stocks hit record high as Ukraine war deepens—The Telegraph, 2 January 2024
  • Arms maker BAE makes record profit amid Ukraine and Israel-Gaza wars—The Guardian, 21 February 2024
  • Ukraine war orders starting to boost revenue for big US defense contractors—Reuters 27 October 2023
  • Arms Companies make a killing in world bazaar—Economic Times, 10 January 2023
  • Arms manufacturers stocks surge worldwide following Hamas attack—CTECH—11 October,2023

Jacob Wolinsky, writing in Yahoo!finance ( 29 February 2024 states),

“Where there is war there is money to be made, and rising geopolitical tensions in the Middle-East, and the two year war in Ukraine are leaving investors to shield their portfolios with defense stock as governments bolster their defense budgets with plans to increase defense stockpiles and upgrade long-range military vehicles and aircraft fleets.”

This review further states,

“there is perhaps no better time for being in the business of defense contracting than right now.”

What about the ethical aspects of investing in weapons manufacturing? This question has been raised in an article in Euronews by Veronica Romano (‘Making money on defense stocks—is it ethical to cash in on this boom’) in which the writer quotes Johanna Schimdt, a researcher at Tridos Bank as saying, “Financing arms manufacturing means financing warfare.”

One aspect of this debate that needs to be emphasized is that there has been increasing consolidation in the arms industry and despite new companies and start-ups also coming up, on the whole there is increasing concentration of government military contracts and orders among a few giant arms companies. These are very powerful companies which spend millions of dollars every year on lobbying and are known to have indulged even in fraud to boost their profits further.

According to the Watson Institute/Brown University Costs of War project on post 9/11 wars, ever since the Afghan war started, Pentagon spending has amounted to 14 trillion dollars, with one-third to one-half of the total going to the military contractors, further one-third to one-quarter of this going to the just five major corporations. These weapons makers spent 2.5 billion dollars just on lobbying during the past two decades, employing about 700 lobbyists per year, more than one for every member of Congress. These weapon makers and suppliers also took advantage of wartime conditions to overcharge and even commit outright fraud. In 2011 the Commission on Wartime Contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan estimated waste, fraud and abuse to be somewhere between 31 and 60 billion dollars.

Hence because of the huge profits as well as huge budgets of lobbying, the biggest arms corporations and military contractors have also acquired the dangerous capability to influence security and foreign policy makers towards more aggressive policies and hence towards creating a higher possibility of wars and conflicts. This is highly regrettable, this is a cause of massive human distress and all those who believe in peace must work to reduce, minimize and finally eliminate this possibility and potential of weapon manufactures to influence policies in such a way that the possibilities of war and conflict increase.             

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Bharat Dogra is Honorary Convener, Campaign to Save Earth Now, His recent books include Planet in Peril, Protecting Earth for Children, Man over Machine and A Day in 2071. He is a regular contributor to Global Research. 

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***

Like all living creatures, people need to eat to live.

Some people, eaten from within by a demonic force, try to deny others this basic sustenance.

All across the world people are starving because the powerful and wealthy create economic and political conditions that allow their wealth to be built on the backs of the world’s poor. 

It is an old story, constantly updated.  It is one form of official terrorism.

From the Irish famine with its terrible aftermath created by the imperialist British government in the 19th century that caused the death of between one and two million Irish and the forced emigration of more than a million more between 1846 and 1851 alone, to today’s savage Israeli genocide and forced starvation of Palestinians in Gaza, the stories of politically motivated famine are legion.

.

.

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In their wake, as the historian Woodham-Smith wrote in 1962 of the Irish famine, it “left hatred behind.

Between Ireland and England the memory of what was done and endured has lain like a sword.”  This Irish bitterness toward the English was strong even in my own Irish-American childhood in the northern Bronx more than a century later.  Ethnic cleansing has a way of leaving a livid legacy of rage toward the perpetrators, especially in the Irish case when talk of of one’s ancestors’ perilous forced emigration on the Coffin Ships was ever broached.

Today’s Israeli government leaders must be historically ignorant or suicidal, for the Irish rage at the British led to the Easter Rebellion of 1916 and the eventual establishment of the Republic of Ireland, where today in Dublin, its capital, huge throngs march in support of the Palestinian people and their fight against Israel.

Do the Israeli leaders think that they can evade the lessons of history, lessons that oppressed people everywhere learned from the irrepressible Irish rebels? 

Like their arrogant British imperialist counterparts, they have self-anointed themselves a chosen people so they can inflict death and suffering on the unchosen ones, the animal people, those disgusting creatures not deserving of life, land, or liberty.

But starve, torture, and slaughter people enough and the flaming sword of revenge will exact a heavy price. Dark furies will descend.

Dehumanize people enough, take their land, and the day always comes when the wretched of the earth rise up against their racist colonialist settlers.

Deny the bread of life to people long enough so that they watch their emaciated children die in their arms or search for their body parts beneath the bombed rubble and you will find that the terrified have become terrifying.

Frantz Fanon wrote accurately about the link between bread and land:

“For a colonized people the most essential value, because the most concrete, is first and foremost the land: the land which will bring them bread and, above all, dignity.”

Without bread to eat, as Marx and Victor Hugo told us in their different ways, the desperate become desperadoes.

The poet Patrick Kavanaugh, in his haunting long poem, “The Great Hunger,” concluded it thus: “The hungry fiend/Screams the apocalypse of clay/In every corner of this land.”  Lines that with a slight difference pertain to every land where famine is used as a weapon of war.

But why is this so? What is this demonic force that drives some human animals to oppress others?

I think we can agree that humans have animal needs of hunger, thirst, sex, etc. that need to be satisfied, but that we also are symbolic creatures – angels with anuses as Ernest Becker has said so pungently in his classic book, The Denial of Death

We live in a world of symbols, not merely matter.

Unlike other animal species, we have made death conscious and must deal with that consciousness one way or another.  We have beliefs, ideas, symbol systems and get our sense of self-worth symbolically.  Of course, the anuses are the problem because they remind us that despite all our highfalutin fantasies of omnipotence of the symbolic sort, what goes in one hole comes out the other and like those backdoor hole deposits we too are destined for underground holes in the earth.

But this is unacceptable.  The thought of it drives many savagely crazy – individuals, groups, and nations.  So, as Becker writes,

“An animal who gets his feeling of worth symbolically has to minutely compare himself to those around him, to make sure he doesn’t come off second best.”  Herein lies the root of competition and the desire to be successful and hoist the symbolic trophies that declare us winners.  And if there are winners, there must be losers.  If I win and you lose, then I can feel superior to you and “good about myself,”

at least in the realm where we compete.  Equality is a problem for humans, whom Nietzsche termed “the disease called man.”  This sense of competition can be relatively harmless or deadly.

History is replete with the latter type, where the fear of not being immortal leads to the extermination of others, as if to say: “See, we are number one.” You die but we live. This is the case with the present Israeli policy of genocide of the Palestinians through famine, bombs, and guns. 

Famine in Gaza, 2023-2024

Famine in Afghanistan in the Wake of the US-NATO’s “Just War” (2001)

The chosen enemy is always considered dirt, pigs, reduced to animal status not worthy to exist, and in a transference of existential trepidation emanating from a deep sense of insecurity masked as triumphalism, must be eliminated because their very existence threatens the oppressors God-like sense of themselves.

There is physical hunger and there is symbolic hunger. Each needs satisfaction. In a just and equitable world, the hunger for bread would be easy to satisfy.  It is the symbolic hunger for an answer to death that poses the deeper problem and causes the former.  For in a world where people could recognize their fears and deep-seated anxieties and stop transferring them to others, the bread of truth might reign. We might stop slaughtering and starving others to purge ourselves of the self-hate and insecurity that drives us to feel the love of our fellow victimizers but the hate of our victims.  No one would be Number One.  All would be chosen and feast as equals at the table of the bread of life.

If only the Israeli and U.S. government leaders were wise enough to read, they might read Herman Melville’s Moby Dick and turn from the path of their joint obsession to obliterate the world for a trophy that they will never hoist.  Ishmael might reach them with his words: “For there is no folly of the beast of the earth which is not infinitely outdone by the madness of men.” And they might seek peace, not an expansion of war.

If only. . . . but I dream, for they have chosen war, and the dark furies lay in wait.

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This article was originally published on the author’s website, Behind the Curtain.

Edward Curtin is a prominent author, researcher and sociologist based in Western Massachusetts. He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG).  

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On April 17, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban spoke at this year’s National Conservatism (NatCon) conference, a gathering of conservative political parties in the European Union, as the name aptly suggests. Dubbed the “gathering of Europe’s far right” by the mainstream propaganda machine, NatCon is indeed opposed to the ultra-liberal ideology and policies of the unelected bureaucrats in Brussels.

Leaked New York Times Gaza Memo Tells Journalists to Avoid Words “Genocide,” “Ethnic Cleansing,” and “Occupied Territory”

By Jeremy Scahill and Ryan Grim, April 18, 2024

The New York Times instructed journalists covering Israel’s war on the Gaza Strip to restrict the use of the terms “genocide” and “ethnic cleansing” and to “avoid” using the phrase “occupied territory” when describing Palestinian land, according to a copy of an internal memo obtained by The Intercept.

Vitamin D and Cancer: A Quick Review and a Look at New Research

By Dr. William Makis, April 18, 2024

I’m often asked by COVID-19 mRNA Vaccinated individuals how to either prevent cancer from developing or once diagnosed, how to best treat a Turbo Cancer, given that Oncologists have no idea how to deal with this new vaccine phenomenon.

Israel Versus Iran – A Trigger Towards Armageddon?

By Peter Koenig, April 18, 2024

Interesting is that both sides, Israel and Iran, do not seem to want war, or better a HOT WAR, where saber-rattling could surreptitiously convert into a mushroom cloud. They know when NATO gets involved, Russia and China may get involved – and then the sky is open and Armageddon is on the table, or rather all over Mother Earth.

Earth Day 2024: Unveiling the Ecological Toll of War and Genocide

By Melissa Garriga, April 18, 2024

As Earth Day approaches, prepare for the annual spectacle of U.S. lawmakers donning their environmentalist hats, waxing poetic about their love for the planet while disregarding the devastation their actions wreak. The harsh reality is that alongside their hollow pledges lies a trail of destruction fueled by military aggression and imperial ambitions, all under the guise of national security.

The Australian Defence Formula: Spend! Spend! Spend!

April 19th, 2024 by Dr. Binoy Kampmark

82,000 Canadians Sign Historic Parliamentary e-Petition Calling for Arms Embargo on Israel

April 19th, 2024 by Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East

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Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East (CJPME) welcomes today’s introduction of official Parliamentary Petition e-4745, which calls for a two-way arms embargo on Israel and was sponsored by NDP Foreign Affairs Critic Heather McPherson. With 82,248 signatures, it is the 9th most popular e-petition in the history of Parliament. CJPME urges the Canadian government to finally listen to Canadians and immediately impose an arms embargo on all military trade with Israel using the Special Economic Measures Act.

“We are thrilled to see such a positive response to this petition for a total embargo on military trade with Israel. Canadians are sending this government a clear message that they do not want to be arming Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza, nor do they want Canada to purchase weapons from Israel’s military-industrial complex,” said Michael Bueckert, Vice President of CJPME and creator of the petition. CJPME thanks MP McPherson for supporting our petition and for her ongoing advocacy in Parliament on the Canada-Israel arms trade.

Petition e-4745 was initiated by CJPME and sponsored by Heather McPherson, MP for Edmonton Strathcona and NDP Foreign Affairs Critic. The petition calls upon the Canadian government to:

  1. Impose a two-way embargo on arms between Canada and Israel;
  2. Investigate whether Canadian weapons or weapons components have been used against Palestinian civilians in the occupied Palestinian territories, including during the current war on Gaza;
  3. Review all military and security cooperation between Canada and Israel; and
  4. Close loopholes that allow the unregulated and unreported transfer of military goods to Israel through the United States.

On March 18, Parliament voted to “cease the further authorization and transfer of arms exports to Israel to ensure compliance with Canada’s arms export regime.” CJPME has warned that Canada is stalling on implementing this policy and that Foreign Affairs Minister Mélanie Joly has introduced loopholes that unacceptable narrow the scope of the ban. Moreover, CJPME notes that we need to go further: the initial text of the motion introduced by the NDP called on Canada to “suspend all trade in military goods and technology with Israel,” and would have received the support of the Bloc Québecois, Green MPs, and reportedly up to 90 Liberal MPs.

“Evidently, there is historic popular and political interest in a comprehensive arms embargo on Israel. The Trudeau government has no excuse not to break all military ties with Israel immediately,” added Bueckert.

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O regime de Kiev é absolutamente incapaz de manter o controle sobre o que acontece no país. Numa declaração recente, o Ministério do Interior anunciou que não possui informações sobre a localização de todas as armas que foram distribuídas à população ucraniana desde o estabelecimento da lei marcial – imediatamente após o lançamento da operação militar especial da Rússia. Isto significa que milhões de armas circulam livremente pelo país – ou mesmo no estrangeiro – e podem acabar nas mãos de criminosos e terroristas. Porém, mais do que isso, a verdadeira preocupação parece ser com a possibilidade de o povo ucraniano iniciar uma revolta contra o governo.

Igor Klimenko, Ministro do Interior da Ucrânia, afirmou em 12 de Abril que muitas das armas distribuídas aos cidadãos simplesmente já não estão sob controle governamental. Não existem dados que comprovem a localização das armas, impedindo assim qualquer tipo de controle sobre a circulação destes equipamentos. Isso tem causado preocupação ao governo, que tenta criar mecanismos para recuperar as armas – ou pelo menos localizá-las e monitorá-las.

“Quantas armas nossos cidadãos têm nas mãos? Entre 1 e 5 milhões (…) Quantas granadas? Bastante também (…) Nós (…) entendemos que deveriam tê-lo porque há uma guerra em curso”, disse o Ministro.

Os legisladores ucranianos estão atualmente a trabalhar num projeto de lei que estabelece um procedimento oficial que obriga os cidadãos a entregar ou registar as suas armas. No início das hostilidades com a Rússia, o Ministério do Interior distribuiu milhões de armas aos civis. O suposto objetivo era fortalecer a população e criar milícias populares para proteger as cidades ucranianas dos “invasores” russos.

Além de armas de fogo, também foram entregues granadas a cidadãos comuns, o que demonstra o elevado nível de irresponsabilidade por parte do governo ucraniano. Para piorar a situação, muitos veteranos regressam da linha da frente com armas capturadas que guardam como “troféus”, o que torna ainda mais difícil às autoridades terem controle sobre o equipamento militar que circula no país.

Obviamente, a distribuição irresponsável de armas às pessoas comuns pode ter consequências catastróficas. O governo afirma estar particularmente preocupado com o fato de muitos soldados regressarem a casa com problemas mentais devido ao stress no campo de batalha. Pessoas nestas condições de saúde não deveriam portar armas, pois poderiam representar um risco para a sociedade. Embora válido, o argumento não parece suficiente para explicar as preocupações do regime.

O governo ucraniano nunca demonstrou qualquer preocupação real com a saúde mental das suas tropas. Pessoas com problemas mentais estão até sendo enviadas para o front, além de os soldados serem obrigados a permanecer no campo de batalha por um longo período, ignorando quaisquer protocolos de saúde. O regime neonazista é bem conhecido pelo seu desrespeito pela vida dos cidadãos comuns e pela sua indiferença pela saúde dos soldados, razão pela qual tal preocupação não parece ser a verdadeira razão pela qual a Ucrânia quer recuperar o controle sobre as armas.

Além disso, é necessário recordar que, desde 2022, as autoridades russas têm relatado a presença de armas ucranianas fornecidas pelo Ocidente com grupos terroristas em todo o mundo, mesmo em África. Kiev sempre ignorou o fato evidente de que as suas armas estavam no mercado negro, razão pela qual esta não parece ser a verdadeira explicação por trás do desespero do regime em controlar a circulação de armas a partir de agora.

Certamente, Zelensky e a sua equipe estão particularmente preocupados com a crescente insatisfação popular e a possibilidade de uma revolta em massa. Apesar de ser uma medida perigosa e irresponsável, armar civis garante inevitavelmente maior poder de rebelião aos cidadãos comuns. Com armas nas mãos, os civis ucranianos poderiam criar milícias populares de autodefesa, não contra os russos (como planejou Kiev), mas também contra o próprio regime neonazista e as suas políticas ditatoriais.

Com pessoas armadas dispostas a proteger-se e a resistir às medidas do regime, pode tornar-se impossível para Kiev continuar a manter o sistema de recrutamento forçado a longo prazo, por exemplo. Estando o povo ucraniano cada vez mais insatisfeito com a guerra, parece que Kiev teme que haja revoltas populares contra as autoridades – o que, considerando a posse de armas pelo povo, poderá levar a uma guerra civil e ao colapso imediato do regime.

Na verdade, a Ucrânia encontra-se numa situação cada vez mais complicada. Será difícil recuperar o controle sobre as armas distribuídas, pois certamente o cidadão comum não aceitará obedecer à nova lei – e poderá se defender de represálias justamente por estar armado. Sem a confiança e o apoio do seu próprio povo, o regime não parece ter boas expectativas, sendo a derrota uma mera questão de tempo.

Lucas Leiroz de Almeida

 

 

Artigo em inglês : Kiev admite que não tem controle sobre as armas que foram distribuídas aos cidadãos comuns, InfoBrics, 16 de Abril de 2024.

Imagem : InfoBrics

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Lucas Leiroz, jornalista, pesquisador do Center for Geostrategic Studies, consultor geopolítico.

Você pode seguir Lucas Leiroz em: https://t.me/lucasleiroz e https://twitter.com/leiroz_lucas

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On April 17, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban spoke at this year’s National Conservatism (NatCon) conference, a gathering of conservative political parties in the European Union, as the name aptly suggests. Dubbed the “gathering of Europe’s far right” by the mainstream propaganda machine, NatCon is indeed opposed to the ultra-liberal ideology and policies of the unelected bureaucrats in Brussels. Thus, it’s hardly surprising that Orban was quite critical of the troubled bloc’s numerous failures, as he openly urged voters to reject mainstream political parties in the upcoming EU elections. Orban even called on the political leadership in Brussels to resign, pointing out that all of their major projects and policies, such as the so-called “green transition”, sustainable development, migration, military and sanctions, etc. failed.

“The sense of this European election is: change the leadership,” he stated, adding: “If the leadership proves to be bad, it must be replaced. That’s so simple.”

For the Associated Press, this was “too much”, as the major mainstream propaganda machine outlet complained about the applause that Orban, a “right-wing populist leader” according to them, got for those words. He also criticized the EU’s suicidal climate policies and agriculture rules that make it impossible for farmers across the EU to stay in business. In addition, Orban warned that the ongoing migration crisis is getting out of hand and that the possible admission of the Kiev regime to the EU or NATO should not be allowed, primarily for economic and security reasons. He also criticized the European Commission, the bloc’s effectively unelected executive body, for using the COVID-19 pandemic as an excuse to attack his country, slamming the EC for an attempt to “suffocate Hungary financially”.

And indeed, the Brussels bureaucrats illegally denied giving Budapest access to billions of euros in funds over alleged “concerns about democratic backsliding in the country”, as well as the “possible mismanagement of EU money”. In Orban’s view, this is nothing more than an attempt to blackmail the country due to his strong stance on all of the aforementioned policies and ideologies that the political West subscribes to nowadays. He also reiterated that the failures extend to the self-defeating sanctions on Russia. The mainstream propaganda machine usually accuses Orban of being a supposed “staunch ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin” for such a stance, particularly when it comes to his opposition to the change of Ukraine’s status as a potential geopolitical buffer zone between the EU/NATO and Russia.

In addition, Orban called the Neo-Nazi junta “just a protectorate relying on Western money and weapons, not a sovereign state anymore”. Expectedly, this wasn’t met with approval in Brussels, which even tried to prevent this year’s NatCon, citing alleged “security concerns” as the excuse for it. The AP called the conference “a gathering of strident nationalists and fundamentalist Christians”, complaining about the fact that it resumed after winning a legal challenge against Brussels city authorities which tried to prevent it under the pretext that it posed “a threat to public order”. Other prominent EU conservative figures, such as Eric Zemmour from France, were to attend the NatCon. However, Zemmour was held by the police, preventing his address about the EU’s immigration rules that can only be described as suicidal.

And while the mainstream propaganda machine is shrieking at the very idea someone would dare criticize and strongly oppose any (let alone all) of the aforementioned policies, the obvious question arises – is the so-called “far right” in the EU right (no pun intended)? Can anyone really refute Orban’s claim that the political leadership in Brussels is incompetent when they say things like “Russia is losing so badly that its military is forced to take chips out of washing machines“? Such ludicrous propaganda myths clearly indicate that the so-called “EU elites” are far more like flea market salesmen, rather than leaders who could ever be taken seriously. What’s more, Orban is certainly not alone in his criticism, as Prime Minister Robert Fico of the neighboring Slovakia expressed similar concerns, particularly about Ukraine.

As for the extremely controversial EU Asylum and Migration Pact recently approved by the European Parliament, which will effectively force member states to accept their “fair share of new immigrants” or pay a fine for every migrant they reject, the conservative parties are furious, and rightfully so, it should be noted.

While the EU, a mere geopolitical pendant of NATO at this point, is allocating hundreds of billions to the deeply corrupt Neo-Nazi junta, farmers across the bloc are faced with a plethora of issues that will soon spill over to other industries and sectors of fledgling European economies. The unelected Brussels bureaucrats believe that encouraging their (neo)colonialist policies through immigration might ameliorate some of those issues by essentially importing more cheap labor force.

However, the conservatives are (rightfully) concerned about the demographic and security consequences of such policies. The extremist ultra-liberal ideology that the political West increasingly subscribes to is incompatible with the more traditional values of both the immigrants and indigenous Europeans. This is already causing a plethora of societal and safety problems across the continent, so encouraging immigration will only exacerbate the situation. The ongoing deindustrialization of the EU’s most powerful economies is certainly not making things better, as the largely unskilled labor force that most immigrants belong to will not be able to contribute economically, which opens a lot of questions about potential security risks in the foreseeable future. However, asking about it is usually deemed too “far right”.

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This article was originally published on InfoBrics.

Drago Bosnic is an independent geopolitical and military analyst. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

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