Business Insider reported that NATO had never faced an adversary of Russia’s calibre after World War II, and it would have been difficult for the alliance to establish air superiority over Russian forces. The warning comes as experts have explained the sombre reality that the F-16 fighter jets, a key aircraft in many NATO air force fleets, provided to Kiev will not be a “magic bullet” that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and his Western allies expect them to be.
“Russia could challenge NATO’s historical air dominance,” reported the media on July 13 after explaining that this is a change from the scenario that emerged after the Cold War when the West had a clear advantage. “Russia would be a very different opponent. It has the territory and industry to build and field massive and sophisticated air defenses that an opponent may struggle to destroy.”
“The US and its allies, even with fleets of fifth-generation stealth fighter jets, likely would find it difficult to establish the same level of air dominance they’ve largely had since the end of World War II,” the New York-based outlet said.
According to experts cited by the portal, Western aviation has never had the experience of combating air defence systems at a level similar to that of Russia’s. During the conflict in Ukraine, the Russian military proved that it could establish extremely difficult air defence areas for the enemy with powerful radars, electronic warfare systems and missiles.
“The Russians could attempt a surprising and impactful opening attack,” the article warned. “For example, the Russians could target vulnerabilities like satellites to try to disrupt the space-based communications and navigation NATO airpower depends upon.”
The worry that Russia could establish air superiority over NATO, particularly over the bloc’s 30 European members, became a more serious consideration after Russian forces methodically obliterated Ukraine’s air force. Russia so impressively dismantled the Ukrainian air force that the Kiev regime is desperately seeking F-16 fighter jets from Western allies to replenish its fleet, even though experts are saying that the aircraft is now obsolete and unlikely to survive the conflict.
“As soon as the Ukrainians encountered Russian-controlled air space, the F-16’s value would diminish markedly, as would its likelihood of survival,” Harrison Kass wrote for the National Interest. “In a conflict with a great power, China for example, the F-16 would remain on the backbench.”
This is a telling revelation considering the US still uses over 900 F-16s, NATO members, including Turkey, Greece, Poland, and Romania, use hundreds more, as well as US non-NATO allies Israel, Taiwan and South Korea. In effect, the F-16 would be rendered almost useless against Russia given that the Eastern European country’s military is ranked second, one above China, according to the 2024 PowerIndex.
Kass warns Kiev that the good performance of the F-16 fighter jets in Iraq and Afghanistan does not say anything about their capabilities against Russian air defences.
After stressing that “the F-16 fighting falcon era is coming to a rapid end,” Kass concludes that the US-made fighter jet “will not offer a magic bullet for Zelensky” and will merely “buy a little more time.”
Russian President Vladimir Putin has warned that the F-16s supplied to Kiev will be destroyed just like other Western military equipment. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov also warned that their appearance in Ukraine will not change anything on the front and that they will be destroyed in the same way as other types of weapons.
Nonetheless, in 2023, several NATO states agreed to supply the Ukrainian armed forces with the fighter jets and launched training programs for Ukrainian pilots. On July 10, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said that the US and its allies are “underway” in sending the promised F-16 fighter jets to Ukraine.
As Europe and the US are not interested in a viable, pragmatic, and lasting peace agreement in Ukraine which recognises Russian interests in the region and establishes a lasting solution, they are actively prolonging the fighting despite not only the humanitarian consequences but even the weakening of their own military. Whilst NATO members are distracted with training Ukrainian pilots to use fighter jets that are effectively obsolete in any combat with a great power, Russia, as Business Insider has acknowledged, has successfully challenged the air dominance NATO largely enjoyed since the start of the Cold War despite the introduction of fifth-generation fighter jets.
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July 19th, 2024 by The Palestinian Information Center
Across vast agricultural lands and along the coast in central and southern Gaza, tens of thousands of tents have become shelters for hundreds of thousands of Palestinians displaced by the ongoing, bloody Israeli war for the 10th consecutive month.
Once a symbol of the Nakba (catastrophe) and displacement for more than seven decades, the tent has now become a dream for thousands of displaced families in Gaza, despite the harsh living conditions it imposes.
What is it like to live in a tent? This question might seem devoid of emotions and disconnected from the harsh realities of Gaza amid the Israeli genocide that has taken many Palestinian lives but failed to break their will and determination to cling to their land. However, the question is crucial to understand the extent of the Palestinian tragedy and resilience.
The Palestinian Information Center (PIC) interviewed some of those that were displaced and are now living in tents to see the harsh situation they are now under.
Quest for a Tent
Whilst all those interviewed speak of the difficulty of living in a tent – suffering the harsh hot summers and cold winters – for many of the displaced the tent has become a dream come true as it is easily hoisted and dismantled quickly. This is important for those displaced who needed to move more than once because of the Israeli army gunfire, tanks, drones and warplanes.
Living in a tent with premature triplets: how fear and anxiety haunt Gaza’s new mothers https://t.co/ZyquQcrzLg
Mohammed Said said he bought a tent for 1,200 shekels ($330) after he could no longer bear living in a “khas,” a makeshift shelter made of wooden sticks covered with nylon or any other available material.
We are tired of living in a blazing tent in the summer heat without the minimum necessities of life: no water, no electricity, no sewage. The spread of flies and rodents. Stop the war on #Gaza. pic.twitter.com/aDIwhQNmvt
He explained a khas provides no privacy because of the mostly nylon material its made of and its impossible to move when forced to relocate. Thus, he went for a tent, having relocated at least twice already.
Various NGOs provide tents for free, but with demand shooting up some of the tents have started to be sold, forcing people to buy them due to the lack of alternatives. Today tents vary in shape and size, according to how much you want to pay.
Finding a place to set up the tentAfter getting a tent, the second challenge is to find a place to set it up. Such areas are currently limited to around Khan Yunis and Deir al-Balah.
Khaled Al-Masri said he had to move his tent several times to be close to water sources and/or the scarce aid.
“Today, there are camps made up of a group of tents overseen by an association or individuals’ initiatives to provide some aid, ensure water access, and establish shared bathrooms. Other tents are set up randomly on agricultural land and near destroyed homes,” he said.
Life in the Tents
Living in tents are tales of pain and suffering, varying according to the family’s resources, number size, tent location and the supervising entity.
A small family with a tent in an area receiving aid can adapt better and suffer less compared to an extended family with a small tent in an area lacking in services.
With the scorching summer heat, living in a tent among hundreds of others in Gaza feels like a living hell, said Amani Hamdan.
Hamdan told PIC she was forced to live in a tent on a land of a friend of her husband. She is joined by her mother-in-law, disabled sister-in-law and her four children.
“We relocated at least seven times from Khan Yunis since our house was bombed. Initially, we had no tent and suffered much until we managed to obtain one, and it’s only advantage is it can be unhooked easily if we need to move again.
Living in a tent is harsh and difficult, a primitive life. And with no walls, and privacy, our voices reach the people in the tent next door and theirs reach us,” she added.
Suffering in Tents
“We can hardly move around inside the tent, some sleep on mattresses, some without, part of the tent holds food supplies. The temperature is scorching, forcing us out of the canvas. In winter, we were drenched by rain; now, the heat is unbearable, but we thank God for what we have,” Hamdan added.
“We cook on fire outside the tent, bake bread in a shared oven, share a bathroom, and bathe rarely, needing prior coordination with the other tent partners. The children start their morning search for wood, while my husband travels long distances for water that is sometimes brought by volunteers. Life has become primitive with no kitchen, bathroom, or water faucets.”
What Is a Tent?
After enduring the harsh tent life for months, engineer Mohammed Munir wrote about its meaning, “To burn while sitting inside, to suffocate with no air or cooling. It’s like a greenhouse during the day.”
“A tent means living on the ground, separated only by fabric, coexisting with all the insects of the earth as if you are now their guest,” He wrote on Facebook.
“Normal activities become complicated, like taking a nap or a bath, walking comfortably, sitting peacefully, feeling safe, or sleeping without back pain from the hard ground, all of our dreams are now out of reach.
A tent means no privacy, speaking in whispers inside your tent while your neighbor hears you. With tents set up on sand and agricultural land, it means living with all types of insects and with no hygiene,” Munir concluded.
The Meaning of a Tent
“A tent means having no wall to lean on, no private life,” Sama Hassan wrote.
“Displacement means not to live in safety or stability. We first moved from Gaza City to the north in search of ‘fake’ safety until the missiles to land on us. We then fled to southern Gaza in the first Friday of the war and stayed in Khan Yunis for two months, then moved to Rafah when the city was invaded in early December 2023.
With each relocation, I lost a thread of my privacy, becoming more displaced and homeless like thousands in Gaza. A tent is harsher than a shared room in a stranger’s house as the bathroom is either within the tent, set up primitively, or shared, half a kilometer away, established by a charity. If a woman needs to use it at night, she must wake a man to escort her,” she ended by saying.
Life in a tent is hard for women, who must fully dress as they usually do when they go out of the house. She maintains dressed at all time despite the heat, lack the freedom of movement. In the tent, fires are lit, cooking is made, washing dishes, with large water containers placed in the corner.
Bathing in a tent involves women surrounding the one washing with thick blankets, like forming a small tent within the main tent, with the woman hurrying before the others tire of holding the blankets.
If living in a tent is already insufferable, doing so amid the ongoing Israeli genocide and bombings is even more so, because the strikes continue targeting as what happened to us in Rafah and Khan Yunis. This is beyond words.
In recent months, Israeli bombs have burned tents and killed dozens, leaving survivors to search for the remains of their loved ones before finding a new place to set up another tent if one is available, continuing their struggle.
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This article was translated and edited from the Palestine Information Center’s website by Dr Marwan Asmar who writes in https://crossfirearabia.com.
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The US military announced Thursday that the floating pier, aimed ostensibly at delivering aid to Gaza’s starving population, will be dismantled. The official end of this two-month farce graphically exposes the complicity of American imperialism in Israel’s genocide against the Palestinians, which has claimed an estimated 186,000 lives, and will claim many more in the coming weeks and months due to malnutrition.
Since the floating pier was installed and declared operational on May 16, just 8,500 tons of aid have been delivered via the route. This equates to about 420 truckloads of aid. Announced with great fanfare by President Joe Biden in March, the pier ended up taking two months to deliver 80 percent of the 500 truckloads of aid that arrived in Gaza each day prior to the launching of Israel’s genocidal onslaught on October 7.
The pier was only in service for 25 days during its two-month presence off the Gaza coast due to bad weather and repeated repairs. The total cost of the operation was $230 million.
Overhead image of the connection of the Gaza Pier shortly after completion by US military forces on May 16, 2024 (From the Public Domain)
With breathtaking cynicism, Deputy Commander of US Central Command Brad Cooper asserted during his announcement of the end of the pier that it was “mission accomplished.” Perhaps he revealed more than he intended. The remark underscores how Washington was never concerned about averting a famine that was already imminent in March, when Biden presented the plan for the pier. Rather, the goal was to make a token gesture to widespread anger over the imperialist powers’ involvement in the genocide.
From the outset, aid organisations denounced the ineffectual approach of maritime aid deliveries. A statement was signed by 25 non-governmental organisations in March criticising the use of air drops and maritime deliveries by states “to create the illusion that they are doing enough to support the needs in Gaza.”
If US imperialism and its European allies were genuinely concerned about the humanitarian catastrophe unfolding before the world’s eyes in Gaza, they could have demanded Israel fully open land crossings into Gaza and guarantee the unhindered access of aid workers. What’s more, they could have forced this measure by halting their uninterrupted supply of high-powered weaponry to Israel, without which the Zionist regime could not continue its genocidal onslaught. But American imperialism is incapable of such actions, because it backs the genocide to the hilt as a demonstration of the ruthless measures it is prepared to employ in the rapidly emerging world war between the major powers.
The flow of 2,000-pound bombs, one of which can destroy an entire city block, has continued unabated. The Biden administration has supplied some 14,000 of these weapons of mass murder since Israel’s bombardment began.
Since Biden announced the deployment of the pier, Israel has continued to deliberately target aid workers and hit facilities run by the United Nations Relief Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), the main agency responsible for the delivery of aid. On April 1, the Israel Defence Forces bombed two vehicles carrying aid workers from World Central Kitchen, killing seven. Despite compelling evidence showing that Israel’s strike was deliberate, no calls came from the United States or any other imperialist power for an independent investigation or unimpeded access to Gaza for aid workers.
On May 6, just under two weeks before the pier went into operation, the IDF began its long-planned onslaught on Rafah, closing the two main border crossings for aid deliveries into the enclave. The offensive drove upwards of a million people out of Gaza’s southernmost city and reduced aid deliveries to a trickle, further compounding the already horrendous food crisis.
In a July 9 briefing, UN special rapporteurs declared that famine had spread throughout the Gaza Strip.
“We declare that Israel’s intentional and targeted starvation campaign against the Palestinian people is a form of genocidal violence and has resulted in famine across all of Gaza,” they explained in their statement. “We call upon the international community to prioritise the delivery of humanitarian aid by land by any means necessary, end Israel’s siege, and establish a ceasefire. … Thirty-four Palestinians have died from malnutrition since 7 October, the majority being children. Inaction is complicity.”
On July 12, an Israeli air strike in a supposed “safe zone” west of Khan Younis killed four aid workers from the Al-Khair organisation. A day later, 92 people were killed by an IDF strike on a camp in the al-Mawasi “safe zone.” UNRWA’s Gaza headquarters was “flattened” on July 15 in another strike, according to UNRWA head Philippe Lazzarini.
It has become virtually impossible to move aid inside Gaza due to ongoing bombardments and the deliberate targeting of aid workers. Speaking to Ireland’s The Journal, Maher Haboush from Gaza City explained that he and his family have been displaced 10 times since Israel’s bombardment began.
“I lost 16 kilos before the war; this is famine, and now a new level has started. When I go to the market, I can’t find items to feed my children,” he said.
UN Emergency Relief Coordinator Martin Griffiths warned that 1 million Gazans, about half the population, would face the threat of starvation and death by the middle of July. Waiting until famine is officially declared before taking action “would be a death sentence for hundreds of thousands of people and a moral outrage,” he added.
Image: Yazan al-Kafarna is one of the latest to die of hunger and malnutrition in Gaza since the start of the war on 7 October (Screengrab/X)
The Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, created by the UN, declares a famine when 20 percent of households have an extreme lack of food, 30 percent of children have acute malnutrition, and at least two adults or four children per 10,000 people die daily.
Disease is also on the rise. A report from Gaza’s health ministry Thursday confirmed the presence of polio in waste samples from Gaza. An Oxfam report stated that Israel has reduced water supplies to Gaza by 94 percent, producing “a deadly health catastrophe.” The level of water available in Gaza is “less than a single toilet flush” per day per person, the report added. The report pointed out that Israel has destroyed or damaged five water sanitation sites every three days since October 7, reducing water production in Gaza by 84 percent. The IDF has also destroyed 70 percent of water sewage pumps and all waste water treatment plants.
US imperialism views the inhuman crimes perpetrated by the Zionist regime as a price worth paying to advance its geopolitical interests in the region against Iran. Washington views the Gaza genocide as a key component in this strategy, which is aimed at consolidating American imperialist hegemony over the energy-rich Middle East. It has sanctioned a vast intensification of Israeli strikes into southern Lebanon to kill several leading commanders of Iranian-backed Hezbollah and will back an all-out war by Israel in Lebanon to the hilt.
Israel’s Prime Minister and war criminal-in-chief Benjamin Netanyahu is due in Washington next Wednesday, when he will deliver a progress report to Congress on the implementation of the genocide. He is scheduled to meet with Biden, and sources Thursday indicated that attempts are being made to arrange a meeting with the fascist ex-President Donald Trump, the current front runner in the US election. Amid rampant starvation and the spread of disease in Gaza, Netanyahu’s visit clearly expresses the complicity of the entire American political establishment in the genocide against the Palestinians.
The World Socialist Web Site and Socialist Equality Party are organizing a demonstration in Washington on July 24, not to appeal to the war criminals but to lay the basis for the building of an international anti-war movement led by the working class. This is the only way to stop the genocide and the rapidly evolving third imperialist world war.
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Featured image: Construction of the floating pier, April 26, 2024 (From the Public Domain)
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A contronym is a word having two definitions that contradict each other. Two examples are the word bolt, which can mean to lock with a bolt and to flee, and clip, which means to attach and to detach.
There are many such words and there is also a system of thought based on them. It has no name except for the one I give it here, admittedly an awkward one: The Contronymal Circus. Like words that are their own antonyms, this system of thought confuses and traps, as it is meant to do.
Language is of course slippery and equivocal, with words often connoting multiple meanings. But language is also conditioned by history; even my phrasing it that way is an example of using words in a loose and sloppy way, for “history” doesn’t exist and can’t do anything, people make history, use and shape words for their own designs, even as language then uses them as well.
To say I am making a moot point is an example of my point: Is it arguable or irrelevant to consider? Is that clear?
The American oligarchic political system that is endlessly debated and fixates people’s attention is a contronymal system that contains positive and negative poles that cancel each other out while keeping the believer frozen and frustrated. Once you are in it, you are trapped because there are no outside references, the simulated system of thought is your cage. Biden vs. Trump is an example of this cage.
The great Irish writer James Joyce was born in 1882 in Ireland that was historically subjected to colonial domination by Great Britain. He realized early on that the English language bequeathed to him was not neutrally aesthetic but through usage was politically charged and that words meant one thing to the colonizers and another to the colonized. In The Portrait of the Artist As A Young Man, his autobiographical novel, he has Stephen Dedalus say about his conversation with his condescending Jesuit English-born dean of studies:
The language in which we are speaking is his before it is mine. How different are the words home, Christ, ale, master on his lips and on mine! I cannot speak or write these words without unrest of spirit. His language, so familiar and so foreign, will always be for me an acquired speech. I have not made or accepted his words. My voice holds them at bay. My soul frets in the shadow of his language.
For language constitutes “reality” as much as describes it. It is political. Therefore, all cultures of resistance need to reclaim language, which includes not just individual words and their meaning, but phrases, sentences, paragraphs, and narrative structures. When ruling elites can impose language usage on the ruled, they can control their thinking, their sense of “reality,” and their belief in what is possible.
This is why poets are so central to the resistance of oppressed people, and by oppressed people I include residents of the United States who may not describe themselves with that term. For when language is corrupted and thought twisted in sinister ways, all efforts to resist the colonizers of the mind are self-defeating. Double-binds are not reserved for personal relationships but pertain equally to politics and culture. There is a reason why public discourse about politics (and most everything) in the U.S.A. is so circular in nature, so self-defeating, always ending in a dead-end as the system of oligarchic rule rolls along and even strengthens. Think Bush vs. Gore, Obama vs. McCain, Hillary Clinton vs. Trump, Biden vs. Trump, Trump vs. someone. Think of what has happened to reading, writing, and speaking skills throughout the society at every level. Functional illiteracy is widespread. Ignorance may not be bliss even when it’s folly to be wise, for the inability to grasp the contradictory nature of the story you are thinking in has no happy ending.
In the words of the Palestinian writer Edward Said:
“As one critic has suggested, nations themselves are narrations. The power to narrate, or to block other narratives from forming and emerging, is very important to culture and imperialism, and constitutes one of the main connections between them.”
The French thinker, Jean Baudrillard, cast this language conundrum in terms of simulacra and simulation, simulacra between copies of copies that have no originals. He said:
Today abstraction is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror, or the concept. Simulation is no longer that of the territory, a referential being, or a substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal. The territory no longer precedes the map, nor does it survive it. It is nevertheless the map that precedes the territory – precession of simulacra – that engenders the territory….
Like a narrative structure that is a contronym – self-contradicting – there is no dialectical tension because the system has swallowed it. There is no critical negativity, no place to stand outside to rebel because the simulacrum encompasses the positive and negative in a circulatory process that makes everything equivalent but the “positivity” of the simulacrum itself. You are inside the whale: “The virtual space of the global is the space of the screen and the network, of immanence and the digital, of a dimensionless space-time.”
What I am trying to say is difficult to grasp because it is so twisted. To use language to untwist this example of what the poet William Blake called the “mind-forged manacles” that is the essence of explicit or implicit propaganda is hard, because it involves uncovering the words used and the narratives we imbibe to understand our worlds. It involves grasping the presuppositions of a counterfeit system. It is much harder by the day because language has been radically reduced to slogans and words to images of images. Artificial Intelligence is further reducing all reality to illusions. We are caged in a system of contradictions, a narrative of contronyms through which we must see.
At the end of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Joyce, the great wordsmith and experimenter with form who would go on to write Ulysses and Finnegan’s Wake, has Stephen Dedalus declare that he will leave Ireland to go and “forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.”
It is time for us to leave as well, to abandon a way of thinking that offers us the false choice of the evil of two lessers in a corrupt system. We have been sold a counterfeit bill of goods, one forged in the devious minds of deans of deception who make Stephen’s interlocuter look like an obnoxious amateur.
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This article was originally published on the author’s blog site, 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).
Recently, NATO countries began the process of transferring the seized and previously frozen $300 billion Russian assets to Ukraine. The $300 billion, it is argued, will ‘buy time’ for Ukraine to continue the war in 2025—much like the lives of the 300 Spartans in mythology supposedly bought time to mobilize a larger force.
Nowadays, internet platforms like Facebook provide great business for users. But with time, they abuse users in various ways in order to satisfy and attract more business customers. At a certain point, they claw back on benefits for the business-people as well and incur more profits for themselves, leading to the demise of the original platform.
Shortly after helping to launch the Citizens Party, a new coalition linked with Barry Commoner’s 1980 environmental campaign for US President, I circulated a memo about next steps.
During the (First) Cold War, Europe was at the center of a possible confrontation between US-led NATO and Soviet-led Warsaw Pact. By the 1980s, the two sides deployed thousands of medium and intermediate-range weapons, both ballistic and cruise missiles.
As early as January 2022, National Institutes of Health (NIH) researchers were aware of at least 850 peer-reviewed case reports and/or research articles about COVID-19 vaccine reactions, according to emails obtained by Children’s Health Defense (CHD).
Are mainstream Israeli media outlets now guilty of antisemitic Holocaust denialist blood libel conspiracy theories, or is it no longer an antisemitic Holocaust denialist blood libel conspiracy theory to say that this happened?
The US Air Force has been sending unmarked planes from Britain’s base on Cyprus to Israel since it began bombing Gaza, it can be revealed. The planes are all C-295 and CN-235 aircraft, which are believed to be used by American special forces. Declassified has found 18 of these aircraft which have gone from the sprawling British air base on Cyprus, RAF Akrotiri, to Israel’s coastal city Tel Aviv since October 7.
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Shortly after helping to launch the Citizens Party, a new coalition linked with Barry Commoner’s 1980 environmental campaign for US President, I circulated a memo about next steps. It urged leaders of the Vermont chapter to focus on Burlington. The state’s largest city “can be extremely fertile ground,” I wrote in March 1980. Fiscal crisis, cronyism between the Democratic mayor and business leaders, youth unrest, skyrocketing rents — the city’s problems made it ripe for a political upheaval.
“In a three-way race, even a mayoral candidate might be elected,” I predicted.
At the time Bernie Sanders was beginning to organize low-income residents of Burlington’s Franklin Square housing project. He wanted to persuade college students, the elderly and low-income renters to press for affordable housing and tenants’ rights. He wasn’t yet thinking about running for local office.
I was still editing the Vanguard Press, but also beginning to plan a possible run for mayor. As I explained to a Washington Post reporter decades later, I knew that in a mayoral election, “if leftists had any chance of pulling off an upset, only one of them could be on the ballot.”
Even after Bernie announced, some urged me to go for it; they saw Sanders as a veteran candidate, good at reducing his ideas to plain English, but more a voice for change in statewide or national races. On Halloween night, however, three of his friends sat him down in a laundry room for a frank talk about his future.
In a way, it was an intervention, one that had a profound effect on Vermont history.
As journalist Marc Fisher retold the story during Sanders’ second presidential race, they said that he had no political future if he kept going on as he had.
“Sanders readily conceded that, having run for Vermont governor, twice, and for US Senate, twice, never winning more than 6 percent of the vote, he risked getting stuck on the fringe, perceived as a joke.”
He also had trouble connecting with the people around him.
“Without a steady job, he drove around the state in his Volkswagen Bug trying to sell teachers the films he had cobbled together about socialist Eugene V. Debs and other radicals.”
As he entered a second decade of campaigning, Bernie wanted another shot at running for governor. His friends were adamantly opposed. Richard Sugarman, a philosopher professor who taught existentialism and Jewish thought at the University of Vermont, joined with the others in urging him to give up on fruitless statewide races and instead run in Burlington, a place where he had a chance to win…
Read more in Managing Chaos: Adventures in Alternative Media, available July 22, 2024.
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Managing Chaos: Adventures in Alternative Media
It is an eye-witness account that explores the unique, tumultuous history of Pacifica radio and alternative media in America. Filled with episodes from an eclectic career, Greg Guma’s new book discusses the evolution of radio and television, the impacts of concentrated media ownership, the rise of the alternative press, his complex relationship with Bernie Sanders, his work in Vermont before and during a progressive revolution that changed the state’s power structure, and decades later, what happened while he managed the original listener-supported radio network. Here is another excerpt:
Challenge or Folly?
We rode to Houston Media Source, the city’s public access center, on an ancient school bus chartered for the occasion. It was Sunday, October 30, 2005, and the Pacifica National Board was still considering who to choose as the network’s next CEO.
During the trip, I struck up a conversation with Ursula Ruedenberg, coordinator of Pacifica’s Affiliates Program. Ursula had been active in the “Save Pacifica” movement and afterward took on the tough job of convincing community radio stations that it was all right to rejoin the new and improved network. Curious about my Vermont connections, she fondly recalled her days with Bread and Puppet, the legendary theater group based in the Green Mountains since the 1970s. I had my own memories of those days, weekends camping in Glover, the Domestic Resurrection Circus, and later work with the Schumanns and Robin Lloyd on films and a book, Bread &. Puppet: Stories of Struggle and Faith from Central America.
Sitting nearby was Sarv Randhawa, a nuclear plant regulator who represented KPFA on the national Board. Sarv was intrigued by my relationship with peace movement icon David Dellinger, a friend who had died just the year before. I had admired Dellinger since the 1960s, and worked with him from the late 1970s onward in Vermont on peace campaigns, Toward Freedom, and prison justice. We talked about nonviolence and Dave’s ability to overcome differences with love and mutual respect. Pacifica needed that kind of energy to live up to its potential, he believed.
While the Board met in the center’s large studio, Georgia and I waited at opposite ends of the labyrinthine building. I caught a glimpse of her, but the headhunters were determined to keep us apart. Struggling to relax, I drew on my training in Buddhist meditation to drop my expectations and simply “be” in the moment. After a while a wiry man entered the waiting room and introduced himself as Steve Brown.
I knew the name from emails that were part of my research. A successful entrepreneur who reportedly made millions through direct marketing, he was — depending on whom you asked — either greatly misunderstood or completely malevolent, a defender of diversity or a racist demagogue, an untapped resource or as dangerous as Karl Rove. Whatever the truth, his ideas were certainly provocative.
That August, for example, he had proposed eliminating most of the national office, including the CFO and other staff, and turning most of its functions over to local business managers or committees. “If we dumped most of the national office tomorrow,” he wrote, “what would we give up — other than the need for us to feed it $6.3 million (he was off by a few million) a year? Getting that money back would make the budgetary woes of all our stations disappear in a flash.”
But Brown’s real fire was saved for the situation at WBAI, where he served on the local station board, and especially for its Program Director Bernard White and the Justice and Unity Coalition (JUC), a cadre-style, black-led group with a majority of local board seats and a hard-edged anti-racist agenda. As he saw it, White had “unethically used the station’s resources to consolidate his own power” and bore most of the responsibility for several years of lost listenership and economic decline. And the JUC let him do it, he charged, using underhanded means to maintain control and foist a narrow agenda on the station.
Of course, JUC and White had equally harsh words for Brown, who they described as a racially obsessed liar and purveyor of stereotypes, intent on purging Black programmers and taking WBAI back to the “good old days.” Aware of this, I wondered whether it was safe even to be seen talking with him. But he just wanted to wish me good luck, offer a business card, and volunteer some advice if I got the job. Compared to his emails, the casually dressed 68-year-old seemed mild, almost stuffy.
Ushered into the dimly-lit studio at last, I struggled to remain calm. A serious examination of the organization’s mission was in order, I suggested; after almost 60 years it was about time. I also stressed that Pacifica, one of few independent voices for change in a time of fear and Bush doublespeak, had both a responsibility and an opportunity to challenge mainstream media’s myopia and distortions. But it was letting internal battles and provincial thinking get in the way.
To make a fundamental difference, the network would have to offer the country what founder Lew Hill had imagined for KPFA — dialogue and debate, a celebration of honest differences, not a series of self-righteous monologues that preached more than they persuaded. That was the terrain of self-appointed electronic prophets, right-wing pundits and evangelists who capitalized on mass insecurity to market extreme views and create a distorted reality. Pacifica would have to do better, becoming again a relevant, popular and entertaining voice for political change and social transformation.
Dave Adelson posed the most pointed question. A KPFK delegate and L.A.- based neurophysiologist who had devoted years to Pacifica and been at the center of the “take back” fight, he remained unconvinced. “Well, you’ve essentially said you can drive a car,” he challenged, “but this place is more like a semi truck. How do we know you can drive something like that?”
Whatever their size or shape, organizations are much the same, I replied, and I had led and studied them for more than 30 years. The same can be said of people. Whatever their political differences, they want to be heard, appreciated, and inspired. The leadership challenge would be to listen, resist taking sides in factional disputes, and, at the same time, clarify what makes this a unique organization.
Two more things are worth mentioning. WBAI board member Ray LaForest, a Haitian immigrant and union organizer, asked how long I was willing to remain in the job. Three years was my limit, I announced. If I could accomplish anything useful, it would happen by then or not at all. What I left out was my belief, based on past experiences, that leading a politically-charged organization for much longer can be counter-productive.
Fear about the use of power, especially among progressives, tends to breed suspicion over time and turn support into jaded opposition. In a country where narcissism is a widespread disorder, public figures are often idealized in the early stages. But along with that comes the urge to degrade in the long run, often sparked when the “hero” inevitably disappoints. Intensified by the machinery of mass communication and social media, such a desperate urge can turn even assassination into a form of spectacle.
Not that I was in danger of being murdered. But judging from Pacifica’s recent history, character assassination wasn’t out of the question if I overstayed my welcome.
The second point was that even if the job was offered, I wasn’t ready to accept it. Before making a decision, I needed to talk personally with members of the staff and Board. What I found out might well influence my decision.
Before the ride back to Bush airport, I heard that the board had voted. But the outcome wouldn’t be made public. “Put me out of my misery,” I joked. All the headhunters would say was, “Hang in, the vote was close and they’re hoping to get closer to consensus. It’s not over yet.”
That wasn’t completely accurate. As I learned later, Eva Georgia had narrowly prevailed. But the decision wouldn’t be binding until background checks were conducted.
Back in Vermont, I refocused on Vermont Guardian, the print and online news operation we had launched less than two years before. For my partner Shay Totten, a brilliant reporter and editor who I had known since the late 90s, it was the fulfillment of a dream — a statewide news organization that would reflect “the Vermont Way.”
For me, it was a return to editing a Vermont weekly after a quarter century. Before the election of Bernie Sanders and emergence of the Vermont Progressive Party, the Vanguard Press was the Champlain Valley’s strongest alternative voice in years, hosting a crew of hungry young journalists, activists and thinkers who shook up the status quo. The Democratic mayor, Gordon Paquette, recognized the threat, and, after the newspaper published an article criticizing his decision to ban rock music in local venues, he decided to counter-attack. Paquette sued the paper and its editors for libel. The case centered on the allegation that he was drunk on the night when he attended a Supertramp concert in Memorial Auditorium and found some concertgoers too rowdy for his taste.
After we published the story, Paquette tried to force a retraction and get the names of our anonymous sources. When we refused he sued, which led to even more bad press. Convinced that the paper – and specifically its senior editor – was out to get him, the goal was to make the price so high that the Vanguard would be forced to back off. We didn’t. In early 1981, on the verge of Bernie’s first victory, discovery and depositions were still pending.
Shortly after that election the case was quietly dropped.
Throughout Sanders’ years as mayor we were sometimes coalition allies, but also opponents at times on development and peace issues. At one point he presided over my arrest (with others) outside an armaments plant.
After four terms, Sanders retired, and prepared for his next chapter, national office. He was defeated by Republican Peter Smith in a 1988 congressional bid, but came back two years later and won. That led to eight terms in Congress — before moving on to the US Senate. He didn’t lose another race until his first campaign for president in 2016. Meanwhile, I went on to edit other publications, defend immigrant rights in New Mexico, run a bookstore in Southern California, and launch another newspaper.
In our mission statement for Vermont Guardian, Shay Totten and I noted that although the state had recently “led the way toward social and political progress” — a statement that could be read as a reference to environmental leadership, Town Meeting votes, gay marriage, Howard Dean presidential run, or the rise of Vermont’s Progressive Party, Ben and Jerry’s and Sanders, to name just a few — its newspapers had largely been gobbled up by large corporations.
Vermont Guardian would “reinvigorate the credo that journalism speaks for the individual, checks abuses of power, and stands vigilant in the protection of democracy and free speech,” we pledged. It would be the state’s “editorial town commons, a place where Vermonters can share ideas and forge solutions.”
Despite our bold words and good intentions, however, the business was struggling by the end of 2005. It made me ask: Like the national administration we often criticized, were our grand ambitions really a form of folly? In a post-Thanksgiving editorial, I considered the consequences of ignoring harsh realities.
Those responsible for the Vietnam War insisted on “staying the course” due to a combination of overreaction, illusions of omnipotence, and a shortage of reflective thought. The ingredients that created the Iraq War were much the same — exaggerating “national security” imperatives, assuming that the world’s “only remaining Superpower” couldn’t possibly lose, and refusing to consider that an invasion could spark global resistance, potentially on a scale that would be impossible to contain.
But describing the Iraq debacle as mere folly was too simple. One addition was incompetence, since those eager to save face later claimed the war began due to a “massive intelligence failure,” pointing to years of so-called evidence that Saddam Hussein’s regime posed a serious threat to Iraq’s neighbors and the West. But even such semi-critics endorsed the idea that the US should pursue “regime change.” In other words, they had grandly assumed the right to transform a country, to replace its power structure and “democratize” it.
Folly, incompetence, delusions of grandeur? It was hard to choose. In the case of the Bush administration it clearly wasn’t just a mistake. It was a conscious decision that looked more like a step toward tyranny.
What was the true history of the Iraq War? The evidence was still coming in. But we already knew that it began long before Congress voted, and before the 9/11 attacks so often used to justify an open-ended “war on terror.” Were lies told? Certainly. It stood to reason, since many of the war’s architects were admirers of philosopher Leo Strauss, a great believer in the usefulness of lies.
Secrecy and deception, a veritable culture of lies, are necessary, Strauss argued, to protect “the wise” — those with a natural right to rule — from the vulgar masses, who would otherwise be ungovernable and rise up against them. He called such tactics “noble” lies. “Because mankind is intrinsically wicked, he has to be governed,” Strauss wrote. “Such governance can only be established, however, when men are united – and they can only be united against other people.”
And the lessons? Well, people often deceive themselves, overreact to perceived threats, exaggerate, or fail to distinguish between fears, hopes and reality. That is folly, and it is both human and forgivable. But when deception is willful and rationalized as somehow justified or “noble,” perhaps because an enemy must be stopped “by any means,” the line between good and evil has been crossed.
Looking at Pacifica, its warring camps seemed to be letting fear cloud their judgment, or purposely distorting the picture to achieve bitter victories. More to the point, if offered the job, could I overcome such deep-seated animosities and change its culture? Or was I just trading one form of folly for another? No easy answers leapt to mind.
Nevertheless, on December 21, 2005, those became more than academic questions. After almost two months and endless hours of teleconference debate, Pacifica’s national board had reached a decision. It seemed impossible, but the “old white guy” from Vermont was being offered the dream job from hell. The catch was that I had ten days to decide. And two weeks to get to Berkeley.
Only later did I learn how this came to pass, and how frustrating a dream job can be.
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During the (First) Cold War, Europe was at the center of a possible confrontation between US-led NATO and Soviet-led Warsaw Pact.
By the 1980s, the two sides deployed thousands of medium and intermediate-range weapons, both ballistic and cruise missiles.
The most prominent US Army unit equipped with such weapons was the 56th Artillery Command, deploying battalions armed with MGM-31 “Pershing I/Ia” and “Pershing II” nuclear-tipped ballistic missiles. The former had a range of 740 km and carried a single warhead with a yield of up to 400 kt, while the latter’s maximum range was reported to have been 1770–2400 km, with a single 80 kt warhead. The US Army also deployed the GLCM (Ground Launched Cruise Missile), officially designated as the BGM-109G “Gryphon”, a subsonic cruise missile with a range of 2780 km and a single W84 thermonuclear warhead (yield of up to 150 kt, or approximately 10 times more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb).
It should be noted that the “Gryphon” was essentially a land-based version of the infamous “Tomahawk” cruise missile that the US Navy continues to use and upgrades on a regular basis (the latest variant being the Block 5). The Soviet Union had a plethora of missiles to match the US military, but the most prominent was the unrivaled RSD-10 “Pioneer” (NATO reporting name SS-20 “Saber”) solid-fueled ballistic missile with a range of up to 5800 km and the only IRBM (intermediate-range ballistic missile) capable of using three MIRV (multiple independently targetable reentry vehicles) warheads. These had a yield of 150 kt each or roughly 10 (30 altogether) times more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb. There was also the version with a single 1 Mt warhead that was around 67 times more destructive. At least 728 such IRBMs were made and you can imagine they would’ve turned Europe into a radioactive glass desert for the next several eons.
The USSR obviously had a massive advantage, but this would’ve hardly mattered given that both sides would’ve simply destroyed each other.
Just two years later, in 2021, meaning before the SMO (special military operation), the US Army reactivated the aforementioned 56th Artillery Command in Germany. Its units are equipped with the previously banned medium and intermediate-range missiles and the 56th is also planning to induct new platforms, such as the “Dark Eagle” hypersonic missile, although this weapon is yet to be delivered, as it’s still going through a rather rocky development.
The latter can hit targets at ranges of approximately 1600 km. Their ability to carry the W80 thermonuclear warheads means that the old GLCM is effectively resurrected, while the very usage of the name “Typhon” indicates that the missile is a successor to the “Gryphon”.
After the latest NATO summit in Washington DC, the US and Germany announced the definite deployment of these weapons in Europe, a move that will bring unprecedented escalation.
“the two countries said that the ‘episodic deployments’ are in preparation for longer-term stationing of long-range capabilities that will include SM-6, ‘Tomahawk’ and developmental hypersonic weapons with longer range than the current capabilities in Europe”.
These statements indicate several important things.
First of all, the announcement of the end of “episodic deployments” means that these weapons are already in Germany and that their deployment will officially be made permanent in 2026, which is a mere formality that will simply legalize the current state of things.
Second, the announcement doesn’t mention the “Typhon” platform, but this is already implied by the reference to its primary weapons, the SM-6 and “Tomahawk”.
Third, the aforementioned “developmental hypersonic weapon” is most likely the “Dark Eagle”.
The Russian military has already taken all this into account and prepared a broad and adequate response.
Back in April, it tested an unnamed type of IRBM that will essentially inherit the RSD-10 “Pioneer”.
At the time, I argued that the missile in question was most likely the RS-26 “Rubezh”, a highly advanced maneuverable IRBM that can also carry hypersonic warheads or up to four standard MIRV ones with a yield of 300 kt each. These are approximately 20 (80 altogether) times more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb. With a range of up to 5800 km, it covers the entirety of Europe and even large parts of the US if deployed in the Russian Far East. Needless to say, the ability of NATO to shoot down such weapons is highly questionable, to put it mildly.
The US-led political West is essentially turning back the clock to a time when the world was on the edge of an abyss virtually every single day for nearly half a century. Worse yet, it can be argued that the current situation is even more dangerous, as the balance of power in Europe was destroyed by American expansionism.
The NATO-orchestrated Ukrainian conflict is the most obvious consequence of this, as Moscow was forced to intervene after Washington DC stated that it would station missiles on Ukrainian soil.
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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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An amazing window of opportunity opened up with the dawn of popular internet activity.
Suddenly, we could explore new insights far more effortlessly than before the internet when television, radio and the newspapers were the knowledge based weapons of choice. And as we have seen, markets and the rights of property owners shape and drive the actual information laying about for the masses to digest.
New platforms started to appear on the landscape of the world wide web. They managed a lot of information. They connected us to friends in far away places. Does anyone even remember using postal mail anymore?
But that window is closing. Nowadays, internet platforms like Facebook provide great business for users. But with time, they abuse users in various ways in order to satisfy and attract more business customers. At a certain point, they claw back on benefits for the business-people as well and incur more profits for themselves, leading to the demise of the original platform. [2]
The process somewhat resembles Walmart, the retail giant which based on its global size outsells local competitors with lower prices. When they close, they are the last market standing and then close up extras. Giants can essentially eliminate the competitors to the detriment of everyone else. Amazon behaves in a similar way. [3]
These giant firms are active on the internet as well, where they are no longer constratined by competition.
We don’t care. We don’t have to. We’re google.
This process is known in tech circles by the common name “Enshittification.” Applications abound in Facebook, Uber, and so on. Is there a way of reversing this condition and making internet platforms more accountable to us, the common people?
Cory Doctorow believes there is! He sees the process as resulting from encouraging digital monopoly platforms to exploit both users and business customers while leaving them locked in with trace amounts of utility to keep them locked in. He also sees a means by which it can be reversed by seizing the means of computation and building a new internet suitable for confronting a world plagued by environmental collapse, genocide and rising fascism.
The talk on this week’s Global Research News Hour was from the well attended talk he presented at Knox United Church in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada, on the second of May, 2024. His talk was sponsored by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives Manitoba Branch, and radio station CKUW.
Cory Doctorow (craphound.com) is a science fiction author, activist and journalist. He is the author of many books, most recently THE BEZZLE (a followup to RED TEAM BLUES) and THE LOST CAUSE, a solarpunk science fiction novel of hope amidst the climate emergency. His most recent nonfiction book is THE INTERNET CON: HOW TO SEIZE THE MEANS OF COMPUTATION, a Big Tech disassembly manual. Other recent books include RED TEAM BLUES, a science fiction crime thriller; CHOKEPOINT CAPITALISM, nonfiction about monopoly and creative labor markets; the LITTLE BROTHER series for young adults; IN REAL LIFE, a graphic novel; and the picture book POESY THE MONSTER SLAYER. In 2020, he was inducted into the Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame.
WZBC 90.3 FM in Newton Massachusetts is Boston College Radio and broadcasts to the greater Boston area. The Global Research News Hour airs Global Research News Hour excerpts infrequently during Truth and Justice Radio which starts Sunday at 6am.
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As the issue of Ukraine’s NATO membership has been debated so extensively recently, it is useful to recall that in 2011 NATO had noted with concern the extremely low acceptability of this membership among the people of Ukraine.
This can be seen in a NATO document titled ‘Post Orange Ukraine: Internal dynamics and foreign policy priorities’ prepared by the NATO Parliamentary Assembly, Sub-Committee on Democratic Governance in October 2011.
“The greatest challenge for Ukrainian-NATO relations lies in the perception of NATO among the Ukrainian people. NATO membership is not widely supported in the country, with some polls suggesting that popular support of it is less than 20 per cent.”
Further this document notes that NATO bombing of Belgrade was particularly unpopular in Ukraine.
Despite efforts being made to improve the perception of NATO among the people of Ukraine, this document noted, “for many Ukrainians the image of NATO still evokes a sense of fear.”
It is not just membership; most Ukrainians appeared to also oppose other kinds of close relations with NATO. As this document writes,
“A majority of Ukrainians supports neither membership of NATO nor even closer cooperation with the Alliance.”
If this was the view of the people, what was the view of the democratically-elected government led by President Yanukovych at this point of time (when the document being quoted here was prepared in October 2011)?
This document tells us –Mr. Yanukovych made it clear that Ukraine no longer needs NATO membership (membership of Ukraine was accepted as a policy decision at the 2008 NATO summit).
The document states — In June 2010, the President signed a bill which commits Ukraine to a ‘non-bloc policy which means non-participation in military-political alliances’. What is more, there was also support of important opposition leaders for this. Some opposition leaders believed that Ukraine’s foreign policy had become more balanced.
So if the people, the government and the leading opposition figures were not for NATO membership, the matter should have ended there.
However the NATO document did not express its happiness or optimism with this growing agreement in Ukraine for opposing NATO membership.
Instead the document expressed the likelihood that this neutrality would end or should end. More precisely, the document stated,
“There is no consensus in Ukraine whether maintaining a balanced approach between the West and Russia is possible in the long run. It can be argued that these two vectors are at least partly contradictory, and that Ukraine would eventually need to clearly choose its path.”
Further this document stated even more clearly that the doors of NATO remain open for Ukraine.
No reasons for taking this position are given in the document, although common sense would suggest the contrary– that a longer-term policy of neutrality would be very useful for the stability and progress of Ukraine. Serious doubts are expressed in the document regarding the continuation of the neutrality path by Ukraine despite growing agreement among the Ukrainians that they need neutrality and balance.
Others have also pointed out the lack of support for the policy of NATO membership or closer relations with NATO in Ukraine. Prof. Glenn Diesen of the University of South-Eastern Norway (USN) has written in his recent essay titled ‘Destroying Ukraine with Idealism’ (this can be read at the author’s substack or at Brave New Europe website, July 17 2024),
“The Western public is rarely informed that every opinion poll between 1991 and 2014 demonstrated that only a very small minority of Ukrainians ever wanted to join the alliance (NATO).”
In addition all the time senior western diplomats, academics and other experts who are known for their commitment to peace have been warning against the eastwards expansion of NATO in general and making Ukraine a member of NATO in particular.
John Matlock, top expert on Soviet affairs in the US Foreign Service who was later US ambassador in Moscow stated around the time of the invasion of Ukraine by Russia,
“There would have been no basis for the present crisis if there had been no expansion of the alliance (NATO) following the end of the Cold War.” He further added, “What Putin is demanding is eminently reasonable.” As is well-known the main concern of Russia at that time was that there should be no NATO membership of Ukraine.
Earlier the former British ambassador of UK to Russia, Roderic Lyne had warned in 2020 that it was a huge mistake to push the NATO membership for Ukraine. He stated even more ominously,
“If you want to start a war with Russia, that’s the best way of doing it.” (R.Lyne, the UC interview series : Sir Roderic Lyne by Nikita Gyazin, Oxford University Consortium, 18 December 2020).
Former German Chancellor Angela Merkel stated that Russia would interpret the possibility of Ukraine’s NATO membership as a declaration of war. (A. Welsh—Angela Merkel opens up on Ukraine, Putin and her legacy, Deutsche Welle, 7 June 2022).
Earlier 50 foreign policy experts of the USA including former senior military officers, diplomats and senators had signed a letter titled “NATO expansion a policy error of historical proportions.”
So we had a situation around year 2013-14 in which Ukrainian people, government and opposition leaders were against Ukraine’s membership of NATO and prominent western experts and leaders known for desiring peace had serious concerns regarding the high costs and undesirability of NATO membership of Ukraine.
In this situation the USA and close allies instigated a coup in 2014 to oust the democratically elected government of Ukraine and install a regime that would follow the dictates of the USA. As the leaked Nuland-Pyatt phone conversation revealed, the USA was planning a regime change, who would be in positions of power, who would be kept out, how some justification for coup would be found. (BBC Ukraine Crisis: Transcript of leaked Nuland-Pyatt call, 7 February 2014).
The general prosecutor of Ukraine Vikror Shokin later complained that since 2014,
“the most shocking thing is that all the (government) appointments were made in agreement with the US.” (Newsweek, Does Ukraine have kompromat on Joe Biden, 8 August, 2023).
A Entous and M.Schwirtz reported in The New York Times (The Spy War—How the CIA secretly helps Ukraine fight Putin, 25 February, 2024) that on the first day following the coup, Ukraine’s new spy chief contacted the CIA and M16 to establish a partnership for covert operations against Russia (ultimately leading to 12 CIA spying bases along the Russian border). This kind of thing could not have been started so quickly without previous planning.
Hence what is clear beyond doubt is that the NATO membership did not have roots among the people of Ukraine and support for this still pending membership was imposed from outside after creating conducive conditions for this with a coup and all the follow-up changes.
Further while it has been frequently alleged that Russia attacked in early 2022 without provocation, a top advisor to former French President Sarkozy named Henri Guaino wrote in the French newspaper Le Figaro in May 2022 that the US-Ukraine Charter on Strategic Partnership in November 2021 “convinced Russia that they must attack or be attacked.” This expert warned European countries under the strategic leadership of the USA against sleepwalking into a war with Russia. This article, which was extensively quoted in another widely read article published in the New York Times in the same month ( C.Caldwell—The war in Ukraine may be impossible to stop, and the US deserves much of the blame, May 31, 2022).
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Bharat Dogra is Honorary Convener, Campaign to Save Earth Now. His recent books include Protecting Earth for Children, Planet in Peril, A Day in 2071 and Man over Machine. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.
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[This story was first published on January 30, 2014.]
Izzy was born a healthy beautiful little girl who was always happy and very fun loving.
I remember when Izzy got sick like it was yesterday. She was 18 months old at the time. Our day care centre had flooded that week with the heavy rain and was closed for the remainder of the week, so I decided to use this opportunity to get her immunizations up-to- date.
Everything seemed fine, but 2 days later Izzy’s eyes started to look swollen and red spots started to appear, so I took her to our local doctor who diagnosed foot and mouth and conjunctivitis.
The next morning I woke up to her crying and frothing at the mouth and her face was covered in a red rash.
I raced her to the Royal Children’s Hospital’s emergency and by the end of the day she was admitted onto an empty wing in case whatever she had might be contagious.
At 11.00pm the doctor phoned our room from his home. He had been researching all day and informed us that Izzy was having a severe allergic reaction to her vaccination which was causing Stevens-Johnson Syndrome. I can remember our conversation so clearly! He just kept saying how sorry he was. I had never heard of SJS and was not sure why he was so sorry, but it was freaking me out. I got onto my iPad and looked it up. As soon as I saw the mortality rate, I turned it off.
Stevens-Johnson Syndrome is a rare, serious disorder in which one’s skin and mucous membranes react severely to a medication or infection. SJS is most often from medicine containing Ibuprofen such as Nurofen, or from sulphur-based treatments, from many antibiotics, or from anti-seizure medicine, and more rarely from vaccinations as in Izzy’s case, whose reaction was to the DTaP vaccine. What is unnerving is that one can have these medications for years without any problems and then for some unknown reason one’s body will react in this way due to having been hyper-sensitised, this irrespective of one’s age.
Stevens-Johnson Syndrome often begins with flu-like symptoms, followed by a painful red or purplish rash that spreads and blisters, eventually causing the top layer of one’s skin to die and shed. My daughter was basically burning from the inside out and her skin came off. She had to be intubated and placed in an induced coma to ensure her oesophagus didn’t close up, as with burn patients.
Izzy spent the next two weeks in the ICU at the RCH in Melbourne while they worked on saving her life.
One night they called and told me to come straight in as they didn’t think she would make it through the night. I have never felt so sick with fear. I stayed by her side, pleading to the heavens to let her live, even if that meant that I had to be willing to sacrifice her eye sight in exchange for her life.
It was like my prayers were heard and accepted. She was eventually moved to the burns ward for the next 3 months and nursed back to health. She had to learn to walk and to eat again. Thankfully, her skin grew back with minimal scarring. Her corneas were however stuck as if glued to her eyelids.
They required an intensive operation at the Eye and Ear Hospital to separate the eye from the lid without piercing the cornea. Amazingly, the corneal specialists managed to do this successfully.
Two months later she accidentally poked her glasses into her eye and perforated it. This required an emergency corneal transplant. I cried throughout the day for Izzy and also because the cornea was donated by a little child who had died that day. That a suffering family in their time of despair had the generosity to give such a gift to someone to someone was so beautiful. I think of them often and wish they knew that a part of their child was making such a great difference to my little girl.
Izzy has however sustained irreversible scarring to the corneas and as such is now blind and can only see high-contrast colour and movement. She wears protective glasses 24/7 so as not to damage her eye again.
Her right eye is still stuck down to the eyelid and she won’t have any vision from it until operated on, sometime in the near future. The operations won’t be without risk, as operating on the eye could inflame the left eye and take what little sight she does have. Essentially, we are between a rock and a hard place with this one.
Izzy is on daily immune suppression medication for her transplant. She has had so many operations I have lost count, but she continues to be a brave, smiley and happy girl. In addition to all of this she suffers from photophobia (intolerance to light) and Dry-Eye Syndrome which requires constant ointment and drops in her eyes for the rest of her life. She is in constant pain as her eyes feel gritty, as if she had sand in them all the time.
It has been a real struggle dealing with this and just getting through each day, but I stop feeling sorry for myself when I see how amazing Izzy is and how she just gets out there and tries everything, wanting to be just like her older sister.
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Our thanks to Dr. William Makis for bringing this to our attention.
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The counter-sniper who ultimately shot Crooks HAD to have seen the shooter when he took aim from the roof’s ridge. The kill shot hit Crooks when his head was positioned 3-5 feet downslope of ridge.
The FBI just released the following timeline of the Trump and Crooks shooting.
5:10 p.m. Crooks first identified as a person of interest.
As I noted in my earlier post, Puzzling Features of Crooks Crime Scene, at the instant Crooks was shot, his head was positioned a significant distance downslope of the roof’s ridge.
The position of his body marks the position at which he was shot in the head.
Using Crooks’s body length and the rifle for approximate scale, his head appears to be 3-5 feet downslope from the roof’s ridge.
This post-mortem photograph suggests that Crooks was trying to crawl backwards, back down the slope, at the instant he was shot. In order to aim his rifle down the opposite slope and towards Trump, his elbows had to have been positioned considerably closer to the ridge—especially considering the ridge is equipped with an elevated vented ridge. Note in the following diagram that Trump’s head was significantly lower than the elevation of the roof’s ridge.
A video filmed by a bystander on the ground and published by TMZ captured Crooks’s final seconds. Due the camera angle and the angle of the ridge axis relative to the photographer, it’s difficult to say from this perspective exactly how far Crooks is from the ridge. However, to reiterate, his elbows had to have been very close to the protruding vented ridge.
Altogether, it strikes me as a logical deduction that the counter-sniper who ultimately shot Crooks HAD to have seen Crooks at the instant the shooter rested his rifle on the vented ridge and took aim at Trump. It must have taken at least a few seconds for Crooks to acquire his target and take careful aim at it from this position.
The TMZ video shows Crooks fixed in this position for at least five seconds before his first shot can be heard. Because he is fixed in this prone position when the video starts, it’s likely he was already in this position for an additional few seconds before the camera rolled.
In the world of professional counter-snipers, five seconds is an eternity.
Two counter-sniper teams—with two riflemen on the north barn and two riflemen on the south barn—were scoping the ridge when Crooks opened fire.
Given that the team on the north barn may not have been able to see the entire east side of the ridge, the obvious choice was to assign each of the four riflemen to scope a particular section of the ridge. The two riflemen on the south barn could indeed see the ridge behind which Crooks popped up to take aim.
It’s very hard for me to believe that at least one of the riflemen did not see Crooks aiming his rifle in time to shoot him before he fired. According to the FBI, even after Crooks completely gave away his position by firing from it, it still took the counter-sniper 26 seconds to return the fatal shot. Something must have caused the counter-snipers to hesitate.
NOTE: My objective with this post is NOT to draw definite conclusions about motives for this security failure, but to raise questions that should be posed to the FBI
POSTSCRIPT: Some commentators have suggested that Crooks fired his first burst from a position on the roof far enough east to obscure his position from both sniper teams, and then moved laterally (to the west) across the roof in order to reposition himself for the second burst that can be heard a few seconds later. I doubt the few seconds between bursts afforded enough time for him to move laterally across the roof, assume a second prone position, and aim for the second burst. He could not easily slide across the roof seams, but would have had to do a series of crab movements to his right while holding his rifle with one hand, then reassume a prone position, then reacquire the target and aim for the second burst. As the TMZ video fades in to capture his position when he was shot, he is already in a fixed prone position and you can hear his first two shots. He does NOT change his position prior to firing the second burst about four seconds later. About ten seconds after his second burst, one can hear a distant snap and the bystander says, “Oh, he’s down.” Even if Crooks did move laterally across the roof before firing the second burst, why didn’t the counter-sniper shoot him before he was able to fire the second burst?
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2500 years ago, the myth goes, 300 Spartans faced a much larger military force from the East at Thermopylae, a small mountain pass in ancient central Greece. Thermopylae is the Latin word for ‘Hot Gates’, as the area featured hot springs. In European history the ‘hot gates’ battle ended with the 300 Spartans annihilated.
The Persians had opened a second front to the rear of the Spartan line which then collapsed, wiping them out to the man. The ‘hot gates’ was thus a defeat, although in later mythology it was spun as a strategic victory that bought time for the Greeks to mobilize to fight another day.
Having bought time at Thermopylae is debatable, however, given that the battle of the ‘hot gates’ lasted only three days! That’s not much of a delay. The Greeks then took another year to mobilize. Three days didn’t matter that much. So the loss of 300 Spartans at Thermopylae was really a waste of a valuable elite battalion of troops—and Thermopylae was by no means a ‘strategic victory’ that it is spun in western mythology to have been.
Two and a half millennia later Europe is again at the ‘hot gates’! And 300 is once more the magic number!
300 today refers to the $300 billion of Russian financial assets that were seized by NATO countries in 2022 as part of US and EU sanctions imposed on Russia in February that year. According to European Central Bank director, Christine LaGarde, no less than $260 of the $300 billion is held in Europe, most of which is in Belgium near Brussels which is NATO’s home base. Another $5 billion was frozen in the USA. The rest distributed among banks of other G7 countries and friends.
Recently, NATO countries began the process of transferring the seized and previously frozen $300 billion Russian assets to Ukraine.
The $300 billion, it is argued, will ‘buy time’ for Ukraine to continue the war in 2025—much like the lives of the 300 Spartans in mythology supposedly bought time to mobilize a larger force.
Ukraine’s $200 Billion Per Year Price Tag
In the roughly two years since the Ukraine War began in February 2022, it’s estimated the USA has provided Ukraine with $200 to $220 billion in military and economic aid. European NATO countries provided at least another $100 billion or more depending on how one estimates the market value of former Soviet Union weapons that were given to Ukraine. Then there’s the IMF’s at least $18 billion to prop up Ukraine’s currency, along with the billions more in private loans and investments from private sources.
This past spring 2024, the US Congress passed a package of another $61 billion for Ukraine and Europe scrapped up another $5 billion. That combined amount is estimated to fund Ukraine’s war through the end of 2024.
Add all the foregoing items up and that’s roughly $200 billion a year cost to NATO countries to have funded the war in Ukraine. About half is in the form of weapons and another half to keep the Ukrainian economy afloat since Zelensky himself has estimated Ukraine’s economy and institutions need about $8B/mo. to keep going.
But that still leaves the question how NATO and the West can fund Ukraine’s war costs and keep its economy afloat into 2025 and beyond, since it is clear the US and NATO countries have no intention of agreeing to end the conflict anytime soon. On the contrary, the events of the past year in particular indicate a NATO strategy of continuing incremental escalation by providing Ukraine ever more lethal NATO weaponry, more NATO technical assistance on the ground, and NATO approval of increasingly provocative tactics by Ukraine—like missile strikes deep into Russia, attacks on Russian ballistic missile defense radars, use of cluster bombs on Russian civilian populations, and soon to be announced ‘no fly’ zones along Ukraine’s western border.
As a further indicator of US and NATO plans to continue the war longer term, the major NATO governments also recently signed long-term, minimum 10 year bilateral defense agreements with Ukraine. That’s designed to lock in whatever governments replace the current pro-war elites currently running the USA, UK, France and Germany.
Sullivan with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in Kyiv, November 4, 2022 (Licensed under CC0)
According to the Wall Street Journal, the US-Ukraine bilateral security agreement would “establish a long term U.S. commitment to military aid” for Ukraine requiring “future U.S. administration to work with Congress to provide funding and military support for Kyiv.” Or as chief neocon in the Biden administration, Jake Sullivan, put it: the US-Ukraine bilateral security agreement was “not just for this month, this year, but for many years”.
In yet another indication of a likely continuing war beyond 2024, both NATO and Russia are now lining up allies in preparation for what looks like a protracted, and possibly wider, conflict. Russia’s answer to NATO signing bilateral defense agreements with Ukraine has been to conclude agreements with China, North Korea, Vietnam, Iran and various countries in Central Asia, including even Afghanistan, to provide contract troops in exchange for Russian military aid.
In this regard, recent events are eerily similar in that regard to what took place in the summer of 1914 in Europe as both sides lined up allies in anticipation of the coming conflict called World War I.
Short of a Russian complete military victory brought on by the collapse of the Ukrainian forces and a NATO decision not to directly enter the conflict despite it—the latter a very unlikely proposition in the event of an imminent Russian military victory—the Ukraine war will drag on well into 2025.
All of which again raises the question how to pay for it after current funding from NATO runs out after December 2024.
Recently, the process how to fund and continue the war was begun—a process that involves the transfer, in whole or part, of Russia’s $300 billion assets in the West that were frozen in 2022.
The $300 Billion for Ukraine
In April the US Congress passed a law that allows President Biden to seize the $5 billion of Russian assets in US banks, or in real property form, convert it to dollars and put it in a Ukraine Defense Fund also created by the law. Biden then pressed the European NATO countries to do the same with their $260 billion share.
The Biden proposal was for the US to raise $50 billion immediately (from various US investors) for Ukraine. Private bonds would be issued per the Biden plan, bought by (US?) investors, and the $50 billion put in the Ukraine defense fund created by Congress and distributed to Ukraine. The World Bank would act as distributor of the funds. Ukraine would pay the interest on the bonds every year. The catch per the Biden plan was if Ukraine defaulted in the payments, then the Europeans would be liable to reimburse the investors. What a deal! American investors would make the money and Europeans potentially get stuck with the bill. Even they choked on it. So the Europeans came up with their own plan.
While details reportedly are still to be worked out in coming weeks, the Europeans’ plan would raise $54 billion in funds “from existing EU programs for Ukraine”. It’s not clear if that’s from private investors if the EU would issue new bonds specifically for Ukraine aid and EU governments and banks then buy them. If so, the EU issuing its own bond represents a further trend toward creating a fiscal union alongside the Euro currency/European Central Bank monetary union. The EU plan also reportedly required the US to assume a share of the risk and pay lenders if Ukraine defaulted and didn’t make payments. Lenders, in the meantime, would be paid interest on the $260 billion annually. That was estimated around $4 billion a year. The Europeans also wanted language that assured European military contractors got their share of Ukraine spending of the funding, not just the US.
Both the Biden and EU plans remain highly opaque in terms of details. Europeans admitted the details will take weeks to resolve. But there remain interesting gaps in the deal, presumably to be worked out before year end. Questions like:
Is the $54 billion raised from private investors as well as governments?
Will Ukraine get all the $54 billion up front or in tranches; if latter, how many tranches for how many years?
Will Governments (EU and/or US) assume liability to lenders if payments aren’t made.
Are there subsequent $54 billion disbursements to follow? Some US media have suggested the deal includes further $54 billion distributions to Ukraine’s economy over three years. Is the $54 billion to prop up Ukraine’s economy, paying government salaries, purchases and pensions through 2027? Or does it include for weapons as well? If latter are separate, how much will that cost?
What’s the lenders’ guaranteed annual interest rate of return on the bond and loan if private funding—not just government—is part of the European deal?
If the interest profits on the $260 billion seized assets is only $4B/yr, who pays lenders the difference? Current interest on the $260B in EU banks was virtually risk free. But repayment of the interest on the loan by Ukraine carries a major element of risk. Won’t the lenders demand a much higher interest rate than before? Private lenders involved certainly won’t buy the Bond at normal market interest rates.
When the bond matures in ten years, how will Ukraine return the principal if it only covers interest payments each year. Where will Ukraine get the cash to pay off principal, whether annually or at maturity? Especially if it loses the war.
Bottom line, it appears somehow Ukraine will get at least $50 billion. To spend on what is unclear. Unclear also is whether the government will issue the bond that private investors will buy or will it be a private bond back by government if not paid. However, the $50 billion is structured, Ukraine will still have to pay back the principal ($300B presumably). Where’s it to get the money? It’s economy is a basket case and in a debt death spiral. Which means, in the end, the $260 billion in Europe will likely also have to be seized to pay the bondholders and investors at maturity of the bond.
Biden and the Americans wanted to just seize the full amount and give it to Ukraine (as Biden did with the US share of $5 billion Russian assets in US banks). Europeans balked at that and propose a financial sleight of hand solution: create the fiction that the interest on the $260 billion will cover annual interest payments to the lenders and somehow Ukraine can pay back the $260 billion principal in the end.
So why are the Europeans so reluctant to jump in with both feet and do what the Biden administration has done and wants them to do as well—grab the $260 billion outright instead of using the $260 billion as collateral with which to raise a Euro bond to provide Ukraine with funding? The explanation is the Europeans are worried about the legality of just distributing the seized funds. (As if skimming the interest and profits were somehow not illegal but seizing and distributing the principal $260 billion was!)
Blowback from Diverting the $300 Billion
What the Europeans are really worried about is if they steal the assets too quickly, Russia will no doubt respond in kind. There are still a lot of EU bank assets—cash, securities and real property—in Russia. What’s to stop Russia from seizing that in turn? America has little at risk in Russia in that sense. Europe has a great deal.
Russia reportedly is already freezing and seizing assets of Deutschebank and Commerzbank for sanctions related reasons. There are many European companies still operating in Russia. What’s to stop Russia from taking over their assets—financial and real property?
Then there’s the potential impact on the European currency, the Euro, and deposits in EU banks by many countries of the global South. Outright seizing of assets raises the question: whose assets in EU banks are next to be seized? Other countries will take their currency and other liquid assets out of EU banks. That outflow will depress the value of the Euro. The European Central Bank will then have to raise interest rates in Europe to keep the Euro from falling in value. That will slow and already sluggish and stagnant European economy. The consequences of just grabbing and distributing sovereign assets of a country thus carries significant risk of economic contagion, in other words. The Europeans know this. Hence their current plan to work around the outright seizure and distribution of the $260 billion principal, skim the profits from it, and use it all as collateral to fund a loan—i.e. their $54 billion government bond plan.
US neocons are too dumb to foresee (or perhaps even care) of such an impact on the US dollar from their outright seizure of Russian assets. As the arrogant global economic hegemon, the US and Biden administration think they are largely immune to such potential economic blowback from seizing assets of another country. They, of course, are wrong. The Europeans are perhaps more aware of the consequences. American neoliberal elites just don’t seem to care. By the time they do it will be too late. The coming BRICS expansion and alternative global financial structure will have done mortal harm to the USA global dollar and hegemony. There is even talk now of the now expanding BRICS creating an alternative political structure, a kind of BRICS global parliament. Institutional ‘dual power’ is always a sign of revolution and it’s becoming increasingly clear almost the entire global South is now in a state of revolt from the American/G7 empire!
Thermopylae 2.0: Will the $300 Billion ‘Buy Time’
Public opinion within the US and the European members of the G7 is shifting. The recent elections for the European Parliament, followed by the stunning defeat of Macron’s party in France in that country’s National Assembly elections, and the subsequent Conservative Party’s debacle in Britain soon after, are all harbingers of shifting political winds in Europe. Germany’s weak SPD-Greens coalition government is also apparently in trouble as the right wing AfD party continues to gain seats in the legislature and support in public opinion.
Then there’s the dramatic events in the USA in the wake of Biden’s disastrous presidential debate as well as the surge in public voter support for Trump following the recent failed assassination attempt. In USA national elections popular voter support is irrelevant. One person, one vote democracy in America simply does not exist. What matters is the electoral college vote cast by state electors. At least 40 of the 50 states’ electors are already virtually predetermined, locked in for either Biden or Trump. The strategic exception is the seven (maybe ten now) swing states up for grabs by either party. And Trump leads in all; in some cases by double digit numbers.
The recent outcome of elections in Europe and pending in the USA are by no means a guarantee that the NATO funding schemes for seizing the Russia’s $300 billion assets will collapse. the momentum politically is clearly shifting. Zelensky clearly thinks the NATO financing of the war is secured for at least another year as result of both the US and EU latest arrangements to tap the $300 billion. He’s recently bragged publicly that he now has $90 billion ‘in the bag’ which includes the EU’s $54 billion.
But the political momentum on the war is clearly shifting. Public support in the West for NATO elites’ war financing policies is beginning to look like liquefaction of the soil that occurs in earthquakes. What was once solid ground may quickly turn to liquid mud. No building, however tall or solid, can resist when the earth itself moves! The recent election developments in Europe and USA may be the initial seismic shock in the collapse in public and political support in the West for a continuation of the war.
Wars on the scale of Ukraine today are determined by which side can out produce the other in weapons and material; which population is larger; which has the greater number and better trained troops; whose economy is strongest; and whose populace are united behind the effort and most committed to the outcome. And Ukraine is in a disadvantage in all the above categories.
Like the 300 Spartans before them at Thermopylae, the West’s distribution to Ukraine of Russia’s $300 billion of assets will not be able to prevent eventual defeat. The Ukraine war will almost certainly be resolved within the next twelve months—on the ground, not with bank accounts. Like the Spartans at Thermopylae in 480 BCE, time may run out for Ukraine before Europe can even buy some of it with its share of the $300B.
Moreover, the price paid by Europe for its $54 billion war loan to Ukraine may result in a net loss to Europe from the investment. Europe may open itself to all the negative consequences of such a bad investment. As Mohammed bin Salman (MBS), leader of Saudi Arabia, has recently publicly warned: should Europe go ahead and distribute its share of the $300B to Ukraine, Saudi Arabia will withdraw its assets and Euros from European banks. MBS especially warned withdrawal from French banks.
With ‘Project Ukraine’, Europe stands at the ‘Hot Gates’ again. By committing another ‘300’ again, it may realize very little gain militarily at the cost of an historic loss economically.
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This article was originally published on LA Progressive.
Dr. Rasmus is author of the books, ‘Central Bankers at the End of Their Ropes’, Clarity Press, 2017 and ‘Alexander Hamilton and the Origins of the Fed’, Lexington Books, 2020. Follow his commentary on the emerging banking crisis on his blog, https://jackrasmus.com; on twitter daily @drjackrasmus; and his weekly radio show, Alternative Visions on the Progressive Radio Network every Friday at 2pm eastern and at https://alternativevisions.podbean.com.
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As early as January 2022, NIH researchers were aware of at least 850 peer-reviewed case reports and/or research articles about COVID-19 vaccine reactions, according to emails obtained by Children’s Health Defense.
As early as January 2022, National Institutes of Health (NIH) researchers were aware of at least 850 peer-reviewed case reports and/or research articles about COVID-19 vaccine reactions, according to emails obtained by Children’s Health Defense (CHD).
In one email (name and agency redacted), NIH researchers were told the federal government was “saddled” with the “mess” of dealing with those injured by the COVID-19 vaccines, due to the liability shield enjoyed by vaccine manufacturers.
The emails, part of a 309-page batch of documents released to CHD on June 21, originated from a U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) request to NIH researchers for input on a report highlighting several injuries common among people who received the vaccines.
CHD requested the documents via a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request to the NIH in November 2022. When the NIH hadn’t responded by April 2023, CHD sued the agency.
The batch of documents released in June — which include emails toPeter Marks, M.D., Ph.D., director of the FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research — revealed that by fall 2021, key NIH researchers were aware of scientific studies on serious adverse events, including persistent neurological symptoms, following COVID-19 vaccines.
As with prior releases of the NIH documents, June’s tranche also included several emails from vaccine-injured individuals to NIH researchers, seeking help for their symptoms — with one person asking, “Why aren’t you studying vaccine injuries?”
‘Tinnitus … Was a Freight Train in My Head for the First Four Months’
On Jan. 10, 2022, NIH researcher Dr. Avindra Nathwas forwarded an email from someone whose name is redacted, with the subject line: “Followup [sic] Jan 4th Meeting” (pages 281-289).
The original email, dated Jan. 9, 2022, was sent to FDA officials including Marks and Dr. Janet Woodcock, principal deputy commissioner of food and drugs, who apparently participated in a meeting on this topic on Jan. 4, 2022.
The Jan. 9, 2022 email included a list of “persistent symptoms following the Covid vaccines” and the names of researchers who were studying these conditions, which included dysautonomia, neuropathy, tinnitus, multisystem inflammatory syndrome (MIS), myocarditis, blood clots and parasthesias.
The email was accompanied by a spreadsheet listing approximately 850 “peer-reviewed case reports/research articles about Covid vaccine reactions.”
Regarding dysautonomia — a nervous system disorder that disrupts automatic bodily functions — the email stated that the condition is “grossly under diagnosed” and “is not diagnosed in ERs or ICUs” but in “autonomic specialty labs.”
The email noted that such labs are less likely than hospitals to file reports with the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) and added that there “likely are issues with identifying this syndrome if only looking through VAERS or similarly reported databases.”
As a result, the email suggested
“it would be reasonable to approach autonomic specialists / long covid specialists about their observations.”
The Jan. 9, 2022, email also noted unusual trends regarding diagnoses of neuropathy — a set of neurological symptoms that includes numbness and tingling in the hands or feet, and a burning, stabbing or shooting pain in affected areas.
According to the email,
“Historically, neuropathy presents in the predominantly male population aged 59+. However as discussed previous [sic], neuropathy in our case is predominantly female, aged 29-40.”
As with dysautonomia, the email noted that neuropathy is “likely to be inadequately reported through the VAERS and BEST [Biologics Effectiveness and Safety] systems because of the circumstances previously mentioned for dysautonomia.”
The Jan. 9, 2022 email also acknowledged that tinnitus was a common post-vaccination injury, noting, “Our findings are that this is not just J&J [the Johnson & Johnson, or Janssen, COVID-19 vaccine] … not by a long shot.”
According to the email,
“This symptom is more proportionate to the general neuro symptoms by brand as previously reported in our patient led survey of 500 participants.”
The email’s author also noted that,
“in my case yes, I have tinnitus now and it was a freight train in my head for the first four months.”
‘Is It Reasonable to Dismiss … 20 New Symptoms … in a Single Person Post Vaccine?’
According to the email, myocarditis and blood clots were already “acknowledged by the FDA and CDC” (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention).
“Every person in our groups that have one of these two conditions, also have accompanying neuro issues like those of us who are not currently acknowledged by the FDA and CDC,” the email said.
“Even the perfectly healthy very fit young males with the lasting myocarditis are struggling with the POTS and inflammation/brain fog/memory loss. Makes me suspect that somehow these all are a result of the same mechanism of action,” the email stated.
The Jan. 9, 2022, email also acknowledged parasthesia — a condition that causes a burning, prickling sensation — and MIS, a condition in which numerous organs become inflamed, as concerns.
The email openly questioned why more wasn’t being done to connect these conditions in the vaccinated, to the COVID-19 vaccines themselves, noting that vaccinated people were frequently demonstrating multiple rare symptoms:
“While we understand that correlation does not equal causation, we also find a strong correlation with the change in our blood that mirrors long-haul, and symptomology that mirrors long-haul.
“Because of this, I have to ask what is the process by which Covid PASC [post-acute sequelae of SARS-CoV-2 infection, or long COVID] symptoms have been so readily tied back to Covid, whereas the same symptoms due to the Covid vaccines have not?
“Also, while it may be coincidental to have one or maybe two strange symptoms pop up, is it reasonable to dismiss 10, 15, 20 new symptoms that occur in a single person post vaccine.”
‘Insanely Challenging for These People Suffering … to Walk This Path Alone’
In the Jan. 10, 2022, email to Nath an NIH researcher wrote,
“The FDA has asked once again for us to provide any input from those who have experience with this disease. Very prompt responses and more active engagement on their part lead me to believe they will now examine these problems with some effort.”
The author also asked Nath if he knew researchers “who could fill in the gaps” and asked him if he would “kindly be willing to discuss with Peter Marks?”
“The gov has conveniently absolved the drug companies of any liability, and the federal government is now saddled with the responsibility of figuring out this mess,” the email continued. “I am happy to orchestrate a meeting of the minds with NDR [non-disclosure] agreements if that would get the discussion started in a way that is similar to how previous new diseases have been investigated.”
The email also noted talks with public health officials in Germany and France.
“It has been insanely challenging for these people suffering to have to walk this path alone. They grow more and more desperate by the day. Knowing there is someone, somewhere looking into this makes a big difference for these people to just hang on.”
Even though public health agencies were aware of this information and were discussing vaccine injuries in early 2022, official government advice to the public continued to claim the COVID-19 vaccines were “safe and effective,” including statements by Dr. Anthony Fauci in November 2022.
And in testimony before Congress in February, Marks dismissed the COVID-19 vaccine injury reports filed with VAERS, stating that numerous false reports are submitted to the database — a claim some experts have disputed.
As of today, the CDC continues to recommend the COVID-19 vaccines “for everyone ages 6 months and older, including people who are pregnant, breastfeeding, or might become pregnant in the future.”
NIH Researchers Aware of Vaccine Injury Studies in Fall of 2021
The June 2024 tranche of NIH documents also revealed that, at least as early as fall 2021, researchers with the agency were aware of scientific studies and surveys highlighting serious adverse events following COVID-19 vaccination.
The version of the survey included in the email was accurate as of Aug. 31, 2021, and contained the results of 382 questionnaires submitted by people “suffering persistent neurological symptoms after receiving the Sars-CoV2 Vaccine in the United States.”
According to those results, 71% of respondents said they had no preexisting health conditions prior to the symptoms they developed following their COVID-19 vaccination, and 94% said they had never previously experienced a reaction to other vaccines.
The most commonly reported symptoms included paresthesia, tinnitus, heart palpitations, tachycardia, chest pain, visual disturbance or loss, muscle twitching, joint pain, muscle aches, brain fog, fatigue and anxiety attacks.
Almost all respondents said these symptoms began less than two weeks following vaccination.
In a Nov. 15, 2021, email (pages 300-305), Nath was sent a scientific paper, “Neurological side effects of SARS-CoV-2 vaccinations,” authored by Austrian researcher Josef Finsterer, M.D., Ph.D.
“Safety concerns against SARS-CoV-2 vaccines are backed by an increasing number of studies reporting neurological side effects. … Healthcare professionals, particularly neurologists involved in the management of patients having undergone SARS-CoV-2 vaccinations, should be aware of these side effects and should stay vigilant to recognize them early and treat them adequately,” the paper concluded.
“Myelitis has been reported as a complication of COVID-19 infection. However, it has rarely been reported as a complication of COVID-19 vaccination.”
The paper focused on the example of one of Fitzsimmons’ patients, a 63-year-old previously healthy male who developed myelitis after his second dose of the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine — and treatment that was effective in his case.
Other emails apparently sent by Fitzsimmons highlighted the injuries and the progression of treatment of this 63-year-old man (pages 145-150).
‘A Blood Clot as a Cause of Your Paralysis Would Make the Most Sense’
In an email chain to Nath beginning Sept. 20, 2021, (pages 228-233) with the subject “Paralyzed after J&J Covid Vaccine,” the author (whose name is redacted) said that less than 24 hours following vaccination, the patient “lost bladder control.” He later developed a blood clot and erectile dysfunction, before becoming paralyzed.
In a response that day, Nath told the patient,
“The temporal association of the symptoms with the vaccine does make is [sic] suspect, but I do not know of any way how to sort it out.”
In a follow-up email that day, Nath said,
“A blood clot as a cause of your paralysis would make the most sense, however, proving cause and effect related to the vaccine in a single patient is virtually impossible.”
In a Dec. 13, 2021, email to Nath (pages 234-236), another vaccine injury victim, who “was healthy prior to vaccination,” described injuries following both doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine, including paresthesia, tachycardia, severe tinnitus, intractable insomnia and “POTs-like symptoms.”
“I have been diligent and determined in seeking care near and far, but have continued to face skepticism, half-interest, and an inability to know how best to treat,” this person wrote.
And in a series of emails beginning Jan. 24, 2022, (pages 246-247), a “woman who was completely healthy before taking the Pfizer vaccines” told Nath about a series of neurological symptoms and inflammation she experienced following her second dose, in addition to symptoms like tinnitus, insomnia and brain fog.
“Why isn’t the NIH doing research on this?” she asked in a follow-up email on Jan. 25, 2022.
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Michael Nevradakis, Ph.D., based in Athens, Greece, is a senior reporter for The Defender and part of the rotation of hosts for CHD.TV’s “Good Morning CHD.”
Featured image is from CHD
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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Article first published by Global Research on May 23, 2023. Minor revisions on June 15, 2024
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Absolutely stunning,
An Astute Intelligence Op. A++.
The election of Zelensky in 2019 was intent upon acquiring the ethnic Russian vote in Donbass.
A Russian Jew transformed into a Nazi?
See the video below.
June 15, 2024. Zelensky arrives in Switzerland for the Ukraine Peace Conference.
On June 15-16, 2024, delegates from 90 countries will be meeting at the Bürgenstock resort near Lucerne, in the context of a Peace Conference organized by the Swiss government to which Russia was not invited.
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Zelensky is Jewish. He supports the Nazi Azov Battalion, the two Nazi parties, which have committed countless atrocities against the Jewish community in Ukraine.
He belongs to a Russian-Jewish family. He was brought up as a native Russian speaker, who prior to entering politics in 2019 was not fluent in Ukrainian.
And the Western media in chorus are endorsing the Zelensky proxy regime without bating an eyelid. The Kiev regime is upheld as a democracy.
Video
And now this Jewish-Russian proxy president wants to “ban everything Russian”, including the Russian language (his mother tongue), the Russian media, the teaching of Russian in the schools.
He has been instructed by Washington to lead Kiev’s Neo-Nazi government, which is portrayed by the U.S. mainstream media including the NYT as a democracy.
Zelensky also plans to ban Russian composers including Tchaikovsky, Prokofiev, Shostakovich, Borodin, Glinka, Rimsky-Korsakov, and many more.
Are Russian films also slated to be banned?
Ironically if this were to be carried out, it would include Zelensky’s movies (featured in Russian) (produced prior to him becoming president in 2019). These include “Servant of the People”, 2016 (in Russian on Netflix). Below is the Trailer of his Film entitled “8 First Dates”.
Trailer of Zelensky’s Film entitled “8 First Dates”
Meanwhile, the Kiev neo-Nazi regime (supported by US-NATO) has endorsed the writings of Stepan Bandera as well as Adolph Hitler’s Mein Kampf.
Military Training of Young Children to fight the Russians
From the outset in 2014 as well as under president Zelensky’s government, the Azov battalion is supported by US and Canadian military aid channelled to the Ukraine National Guard via the Ministry of Internal Affairs.
The Azov Battalion promotes Nazism. It actively coordinates the Neo-Nazi Summer School:
Zelensky Betrays His Family
Zelensky has also betrayed his family. Many of his relatives were victims of the Nazi holocaust.
In a twisted irony, days before he assumed office [May 2019], “he …laid flowers on the grave of his grandfather, Semyon Ivanovich Zelensky (image right), who fought in the Soviet Union’s Red Army during World War II”.
It was May 9 — Victory Day in Ukraine — and a day of “thanksgiving,” he wrote in a Facebook post.
“[Semyon] went through the whole war and remain[s] forever in my memory one of those heroes who defended Ukraine from the Nazis,” he wrote.
“Thanks for the fact that the inhuman ideology of Nazism is forever a thing of the past”
Thanks to those who fought against Nazism — and won.” (quoted in Washington Post, emphasis added)
High Treason.
My Grandfather: “one of those heroes who defended Ukraine from the Nazis”.
What a liar and a criminal.
Sponsored by America and Europe, Zelensky is leading a Neo-Nazi government, he is promoting Nazism in Ukraine.
And the Western media in chorus are endorsing the Zelensky proxy regime without bating an eyelid. The Kiev regime is upheld as a democracy.
Ottawa, House of Commons, September 22, 2023
And at Canada’s House of Commons (September 22, 2023), a standing ovation for the Neo-Nazi President of Ukraine.
Are Canada’s MPs totally ignorant or are they embracing an unfolding US-Canada-NATO “Neo-Nazi Consensus”?
This what happened in the aftermath of Zelensky’s Address
It is worth noting that David Pugliese of The Ottawa Citizen has carefully documented the Neo-Nazi features of the Kiev Regime. His report (which no doubt was read by several of Canada’s Members of Parliament) was published in 2021 during the Zelensky presidency (May 2019-)
Michel Chossudovsky, Global Research, September 23, 2023
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Featured image: Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky delivers an address in Kiev, Ukraine, April 15, 2022. (Credit: Ukrainian Presidency)
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The Ukraine Peace Summit in Switzerland, June 15-16, 2024 was an outright failure.
Sponsored by the Swiss Government (15-16 June, 2024) it resulted in a chaotic public relations ploy rather than a peace initiative. Russia had not been invited to attend.
The fundamental issue, which was carefully avoided is that the dominant 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.
In Part I of this article the issue of Holocaust Denial is addressed: Our governments –which claim to be firmly committed to social democracy– are actively supporting and financing a coalition government which is supportive of Ukraine’s Nazi movement which collaborated with Nazi Germany’s occupation forces during World War II. The evidence is overwhelming.
Specifically, the German penal codeprohibits “Denial of the Holocaust” as well as the “dissemination of Nazi propaganda”.
We are dealing with something far more serious than Nazi “hate speech”, namely the relationship of the German Government with the Kiev regime’s Nazi Movement.
See also the Resolution of the UN General Assembly, dated January 2022 quoted in the above document.
Unquestionably, the German Government of Chancellor Scholz’s decision to support the Kiev regime’s Nazi Movement constitutes a criminal act under German law., namely the violation of. the Penal Code.
While Western governments are actively repressing the protest movements against Israel’s act of genocide, —with mass arrests on charges of antisemitism—, these same governments are supporting Ukraine’s Nazi movement which actively participated and collaborated with Nazi Germany in the genocide directed against the Jewish population of Ukraine. (1941-1944)
Michel Chossudovsky, June 21, 2024
This article addresses the following issues
Part I: The Role of the Ukraine’s Neo Nazi Parties and their links to Nazi Germany
Part II: Adolph Hitler is “The Torchbearer of Democracy” in Ukraine
The Role of Ukraine’s Neo-Nazi Parties and their Links to Nazi Germany
by
Michel Chossudovsky
April 21, 2024
Introduction
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.
Andriy Parubiy founded in 1991 the Social-National Party of Ukraine (subsequently renamed Svoboda [Freedom], together with Oleh Tyahnybok. The name Social-National Party was chosen with a view toreplicating the name of Hitler’s Nazi (National Socialist) party.
Parubiy was subsequently appointed Chairman of Ukraine’s Parliament (Verkhovna Rada).
According to Andriy Parubiy: Adolf Hitler was “the torchbearer of democracy”. (See Part II below)
The two Neo-Nazi parties of Ukraine’s so-called coalition government are actively supported by “the international community” namely our governments.
The U.S. Congress has allocated more than 60 billion dollars in military aid, which will in large part be managed by Kiev regime’s Nazi faction which exerts its power in the realm of intelligence, internal affairs, national security and the military, in liaison with its U.S.-NATO sponsors.
Nazism and the History of World War II
These are not “Neo-Nazi” entities. The term “Neo” (“New”) is misleading. They are full-fledged Nazi parties, historically aligned (going back to World War II) with the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) of Stepan Bandera(OUN-B)
“Before World War II, the 1.5 million Jews living in the Soviet republic of Ukraine constituted the largest Jewish population within the Soviet Union, and one of the largest Jewish populations in Europe. … The number of Jews in the Ukrainian Soviet Republic (UkrSSR) rose to 2.45 million people [from 1939-1941]”
Amply documented the OUN-B and its National Insurgent Army (UPA) were actively involved in the massacres of Jews, Poles, Communists and Roma in major cities including Odessa and Kiev.
At the outset of Operation Barbarossa, (June, 22 1941) in coordination with the death squads (Einsatzgruppen) of Nazi Germany, members ofthe OUN-B were instrumental in the killings in the City of Lviv, Western region of Galicia, resulting inthe massacre and deportation of more than 100,000 Jews:
While Stepan Bandera had announced the creation of a Nazi Ukrainian State, which pledged “to work with Nazi Germany”, Adolf Hitler disapproved of the proclamation. Despite Bandera’s “house arrest”, the members of OUN-B actively collaborated with the Wehrmacht’s occupation forces (1941-1944).
In Ukraine: “..up to a million Jews were murdered by Einsatzgruppen units, Police battalions, Wehrmacht troops and local Nazi collaborators” (emphasis added)
On September, 1 1941, the Nazi-sponsored Ukrainian newspaper Volhyn wrote, in an article titled Let’s Conquer the City, namely Lviv:
“All elements that reside in our land, whether they are Jews or Poles, must be eradicated.
We are at this very moment resolving the Jewish question, and this resolution is part of the plan for the Reich’s total reorganization of Europe.
The empty space that will be created, must immediately and irrevocably be filled by the real owners and masters of this land, the Ukrainian people”.(emphasis added)
The map below is the territory under Nazi Germany occupation (1942) extending from Galicia to Kiev and Odessa.
It indicates cities with Jewish ghettoes, the locations of major massacres.
In this regard, the Janowska concentration camp was established in the outskirts of Lviv in September 1941.
Lviv had a Jewish population of 160,000. The Janowska camp combined “elements of labor, transit, and extermination”.
Our governments are aligned and supportive of Ukraine’s Nazi Movement which collaborated with Nazi Germany and was actively involved in crimes against humanity (1941-1944).
Vidéo (en français): Guerre et Paix; Made in America
Holocaust Denial?
The OUN-B was complicit in the crimes of Nazi Germany. Our governments –which claim to be firmly committed to social democracy– are actively supporting a Ukrainian Nazi movement which collaborated with Nazi Germany’s occupation forces during World War II.
That is the unspoken truth which is embedded in our history, casually ignored by both the media and Western Europe’s “Classe politique”.
By ignoring the World War II legacy of Stepan Bandera’s OUN-B and casually describing him as an anti-Soviet Nationalist, both the mainstream media as well as our governments, are complicit in what might be described as “Holocaust Denial”.
Specifically, the German penal codeprohibits “Denial of the Holocaust” as well as the “dissemination of Nazi propaganda”. We are dealing with something far more serious than hate speech, namely the relationship of the German Government with Ukraine’s Nazi Movement.
Unquestionably, the German Government of Chancellor Scholz’s decision to support Ukraine’s Nazi Movement constitutes a criminal act under German law., namely the violation of. the Penal Code.
Who is Practicing Antisemitism?
While Western governments are actively repressing the protest movements against Israel’s act of genocide, —with mass arrests on charges of antisemitism—, these same governments are supporting Ukraine’s Nazi movement which actively participated and collaborated with Nazi Germany in the genocide directed against the Jewish population of Ukraine.
Sounds contradictory?
My question is: Who are the Anti-semites? The answer is obvious. Our governments, which are financing the Neo-Nazi regime in Kiev.
From a legal standpoint, this is a criminal act on the part of Western governments.
Moreover, the funds allocated by the US Congress (April 2024) to Ukraine ($60 billion +) and Israel ($22 billion +), are in blatant violation of the Genocide Convention. (See below)
The Contracting Parties [member States of the U.N.] confirm that genocide, whether committed in time of peace or in time of war, is a crime under international law which they undertake to prevent and to punish.
Article II of the Convention defines Genocide as
“any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
(a) Killing members of the group; (b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; (c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; (d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; (e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
Article III, section (e) defines the acts which are punishable including
(e) Complicity in genocide.(which applies to Western governments which are supporting Israel)
Article IV
“Persons committing genocide or any of the other acts enumerated in article III [Article III (e)] shall be punished, whether they are constitutionally responsible rulers, public officials or private individuals.
“Complicity in Genocide” (Art. III). Our Governments “Shall be Punished” (Art. IV) ?
Articles I, III and IV
By endorsing Israel’s act of genocide against the People of Palestine, our governments which are “contracting parties”) are “complicit” according to Article III (e) of the Genocide Convention.
Under Articles III and IV, Western governments (“constitutionally responsible rulers, public officials”) which endorse Israel’s act of genocide are subject to punishment under the Genocide Convention.
Is Netanyahu Antisemitic?
Western governments are not only supporting Israel’s act of genocide, they are in collusion with Prime Minister Netanyahu who has an extensive criminal record(charges of corruption according to the NYT)
While the genocidal actions taken by his government against the People of Palestine are of a criminal nature under the Genocide Convention, they are also considered as an act of anti-semitism directed against the People of Palestine.
The Semite people of the Levant, Mesopotamia and the broader Middle East share a common history, culture and similar languages, broadly including Arabs, Jews, Assyrians, Arameans, Phoenicians.
Bear in mind that Aramea (similar to Arabic and Hebrew) was the language of communication at the outset of Christianity. It was the language of Jesus Christ.
Produced by Oliver Stone
For carefully documented details on the crimes committed by the OUN on behalf of Nazi Germany, view the movie (executive producer Oliver Stone). click below
Flash Forward: Collaborating with Today’s Nazis
There is ample evidence of collaboration between the Kiev Neo-Nazi regime and NATO member states, specifically in relation to the continuous flow of military aid as well as the training and support provided to Ukrainian forces, not to mention the Nazi Azov Battalion.
In turn, the Azov battalion –which is the object of military aid, has also been involved in the conduct of Summer Nazi training Camps for children and adolescents.
The Azov battalion’s Summer Camps are supported by US military aid channelled to the Ukraine National Guard via the Ministry of Internal Affairs. The MIA coordinates the “anti-terrorism operation” (ATO) in Donbass.
Today these children -who have been duly indoctrinated- are adolescents who are being drafted to serve in the Armed Forces and/or the Azov Battalion.
Neo-Nazi Parties are Illegal
While Neo-Nazi parties are outlawed in a number of European countries including Germany where symbols and Nazi slogans are illegal, the governments of NATO-EU member states are routinely supporting Nazism in Ukraine.
The following image is revealing, from Left to Right:
the Blue NATO flag,
the Azov Battalion’s Wolfangel SS of the Third Reich,
Hitler’s Nazi Swastika (red and white background)
are displayed which points to collaboration between NATO and Ukraine’s Nazi regime.
Our Message to Western Governments
Who are the Anti-semites? The answer is obvious. Our governments, who are financing the Neo-Nazi regime in Kiev.
Collaborating with a Nazi regime is a criminal act under international law.
Providing 60+ billion dollars of military aid to a Nazi government is illegal. It’s the criminalization of the US Congress.
Supporting Israel’s Genocide against the People of Palestine is a Crime against Humanity. Our governments are in violation of the Genocide Convention.
By endorsing Israel’s act of genocide against the People of Palestine, our governments (which are “contracting parties”) are “complicit” according to Article III (e) of the Genocide Convention.
Under Articles III and IV, Western governments (“constitutionally responsible rulers, public officials”) which have endorsed Israel’s act of genocide are subject to punishment under the Genocide Convention.
Michel Chossudovsky, Global Research, May 5, 2024
Adolph Hitler is Ukraine’s “Torchbearer of Democracy”
According to Chairman of Ukraine’s Parliament (2016-2019)
Michel Chossudovsky
September 7, 2017
(minor revisions of 2017 article)
No Outrage or Media Coverage by Ukraine’s Staunchest Allies.
Kiev Regime Speaker of the House “Is Not a Nazi”. Ukraine is “A Flowering of Democracy” according to the NYT
On September 4, 2018 the Chairman of Ukraine’s Parliament (Verkhovna Rada) Andriy Parubiy’s intimated that Adolf Hitler was “the torchbearer of democracy”.
His statement was broadcast on Ukraine’s ICTV channel. Parubiy described Adolf Hitler as a true proponent of democracy claiming that the Führer “practiced direct democracy in the 1930s.” (Tass, September 5, 2018).
“I’m a major supporter of direct democracy,… By the way, I tell you that the biggest man, who practised a direct democracy, was Adolf Aloizovich [Hitler]”. (quoted by South Front)
This controversial statement, with some exceptions was not picked up by the Western press. Lies by omission.
Why? Because the Kiev regime (including its Armed Forces and National Guard) is integrated by Nazi elements which are supported by the US and its allies.
Parubiy has been given red carpet treatment by Western governments. He is casually portrayed as a right wing politician rather than an avowed Nazi.
Embarrassment or Denial?
The US Congress, Canada’s Parliament, the British Parliament, the European Parliament, have invited and praised M. Parubiy.
Parubiy with Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland (Obama Adminstration)
Received by the Canadian Parliament
Parubiy with President of the European Commission for Democracy through Law, Gianni Buquicchio, June, 2017
Max Blumenthal on Parubiy’s meeting with members of the American Foreign Policy Council, July 2, 2018
“At a packed meeting in the Senate, the Grayzone’s Max Blumenthal asked organizers whether it was appropriate for Congress and the American Foreign Policy Society to be coddling the founder of two neo-Nazi parties. The response his questions elicited ranged from bizarre to deeply troubling.”
June 15, 2018, two of the most influential Republicans in Congress, House Speaker Paul Ryan and Senator John McCain, meet Parubiy in Washington. (Max Blumenthal report)
The Opposition Bloc faction in Ukraine’s parliament, the Verkhovna Rada, has demanded public condemnation as well as the resignation of the Chairman of the Rada Andriy Parubiy..
Who is Andriy Parubiy? Why Do Western Politicians Love Him?
Parubiy founded in 1991 the Social-National Party of Ukraine (subsequently renamed Svoboda [Freedom], together with Oleh Tyahnybok, who currently heads the Svoboda party. The name Social-National Party was chosen with a view to replicating the name of Hitler’s Nazi (National Socialist) party
DmytroYarosh (Centre) EuroMaidan Coup d’Etat
Parubiy was ‘Commandant’ of the volunteer rebel forces together with DmytroYarosh (head of the Right Sector, image above) and Oleh Tyanhnybok.
These neo-Nazi insurgent forces were involved in the ‘Euromaidan’ coup d’Etat in early 2014, which led to the overthrow of president Viktor Yanukovych. All three neo-Nazi leaders are followers of Ukraine’s Nazi Stepan Bandera (see image below), who collaborated in the mass murder of Jews and Poles during World War II.
Nazi Rally supportive of Stepan Bandera.
Confirmed by [former] Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland, key organizations in the Ukraine including the Neo-Nazi party Svoboda were generously supported by Washington: “We have invested more than 5 billion dollars to help Ukraine to achieve these and other goals. … We will continue to promote Ukraine to the future it deserves.”
The Western media has casually avoided to analyze the composition and ideological underpinnings of the government coalition. The word “Neo-Nazi” is a taboo. It has been excluded from the dictionary of mainstream media commentary. It will not appear in the pages of the New York Times, the Washington Post or The Independent. Journalists have been instructed not to use the term “Neo-Nazi” to designate Svoboda and the Right Sector. (see Michel Chossudovsky, March 7 2014)
In 2014 Andriy Parubiy was appointed (by the Kiev government) Secretary of the National Security and National Defense Committee (RNBOU). (Рада національної безпеки і оборони України), a key position which overseas the Ministry of Defense, the Armed Forces, Law Enforcement, National Security and Intelligence. While he was dismissed a few months later (August 2014),
Parubiy together with Dmytro Yarosh played a key role in shaping Ukraine’s National Guard as a Nazi Force using Nazi insignia. Despite his dismissal by Poroshenko he continues to exert influence in military and intelligence affairs. As Chairman of the Parliament (Verkhovna Rada) Parubiy is entitled (ex officio) to attend all meetings of the RNBOU.
The Azov National Guard
While the media failed to cover Parubiy’s statement concerning Adolph Hitler’s commitment to democracy, they nonetheless have expressed “concern” regarding the influx of US, Canadian military aid, which might fall in the wrong hands, according to Canada’s National Post. (2015 report)
Fake News Coverup of America’s Neo-Nazi Ally. Lies through omission.
According to a New York Times March 2014 report published in the immediate wake of the Maidan coup:
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Secret Service’s explanations for the security failures surrounding the assassination attempt against former President Donald Trump at a rally on Saturday aren’t adding up, according to security experts and former Secret Service agents.
Emerging details from official accounts and leaks to the media have raised serious questions about how a 20-year-old gunman was able to get within rifle range of Trump. Many key questions hinge on the responsibilities delegated to local police, who U.S. Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle confirmed during a Monday interview with ABC News were inside the building the shooter fired from, though nobody was stationed on the rooftop.
Cheatle explained a decision was made not to put anybody on top of the building because the “sloped” roof made it unsafe, but security experts and former Secret Service agents who spoke with the Daily Caller News Foundation emphasized not having someone on the roof was a “big failure” and didn’t believe Cheatle’s explanation was sufficient.
“Let’s just say the local law enforcement officers [and] the Secret Service agree that it’s just not safe to keep someone up there for a couple of hours,” former Secret Service agent Anthony Cangelosi told the DCNF. “Then the question is, well, how do we maintain its integrity otherwise? It’s not like you just throw your hands up and say ‘can’t do that.’”
Cangelosi said there is no “justifiable reason” for failing to cover the roof, suggesting they should have found solutions like putting another platform up or getting an officer on a lift.
Peter Yachmetz, retired FBI agent and principal security consultant at Yachmetz Consulting Group, pointed out that the shooter was moving around on the “unsafe” roof prior to the incident.
“The slope didn’t affect him,” Yachmetz told the DCNF.
Law enforcement reportedly spotted the shooter on the roof 30 minutes before shots were fired, WPXI reported Monday. After the incident, a witness described watching a man climbing onto the roof and trying to warn a police officer, claiming officials responded with confusion.
“The reality is, regardless of the spin, that particular roof should have been under constant surveillance and or posted,” former secret service agent Tim Miller told the DCNF.
“In this particular instance, we did share support for that particular site and that the Secret Service was responsible for the inner perimeter,” Cheatle told ABC News Monday during an interview. “And then we sought assistance from our local counterparts for the outer perimeter. There was local police in that building — there was local police in the area that were responsible for the outer perimeter of the building.”
However, a local law enforcement official told The New York Times Tuesday that the local forces were in an adjacent building, not the one the shooter was firing from.
The discrepancies in their accounts only add to the uncertainties surrounding who was responsible.
CBS News reported Monday that there were three snipers stationed inside the building shooter Thomas Matthew Crooks fired from, citing a local law enforcement officer. One of the snipers saw Crooks looking through a rangefinder in the minutes before he fired and radioed command post, according to CBS News.
The Butler Township Police Department declined to confirm the report to the DCNF, stating that there is an ongoing investigation by the FBI.
Butler County Sheriff Michael Slupe declined to offer additional comments Tuesday, telling the DCNF he is “backing away from media requests for comment and opinions.”
“There are too many questions being posed that I do not have first hand knowledge of and too many fingers being pointed,” he said. “I am in charge of the Deputy Sheriffs and no other law enforcement agency. My Deputies performed their duties at their assigned areas and went above and beyond after the shooting started and ended in the their actions to help people and assist police in clearing the nearby buildings.”
Slupe previously confirmed to CNN that an armed Butler Township officer encountered Crooks before he shot at Trump, but retreated down the ladder after Crooks pointed his gun at him. He told KDKA-TV there was a security failure, but noted “there is not just one entity responsible.”
“The Secret Service plays a key role in protecting, in this case, former President Trump, but they don’t act alone,” he told the outlet. “The Secret Service receives support from local police departments.”
Pennsylvania State Police, however, did confirm they had no members “inside the building or staging in it.”
“The Pennsylvania State Police provided all resources that the United States Secret Service (USSS) requested for former President Trump’s rally in Butler on Saturday, July 13th, including approximately 30 to 40 troopers to assist with securing the inside perimeter,” Pennsylvania State Police Lieutenant Adam Reed told the DCNF. “Among PSP’s duties at the rally, the Department was not responsible for securing the building or property at AGR International.”
Reed said he could not say when an officer witnessed the shooter, as it was not a state trooper who saw him.
Former secret service agent Jeffrey James explained to the DCNF that protection “works in a series of concentric circles.” Typically, there is an inner circle of secret service agents, a second circle that mixes both agents and local law enforcement, and an outer ring that is largely state and local partners.
If the agent in charge of the site told a local law enforcement officer on the outer perimeter that the building is his responsibility, then anything that happens is on the officer.
“But if that agent didn’t find one of the local law enforcement partners and give very clear, direct directions…then it’s going to be the responsibility or the fault of that agent for not delegating that,” he told the DCNF.
It’s unclear what instructions the Secret Service gave to local law enforcement.
Butler County District Attorney Richard Goldingertold The Washington Post Tuesday that “Secret Service was in charge” and that “it was their responsibility to make sure that the venue and the surrounding area was secure.”
“For them to blame local law enforcement is them passing the blame when they hold the blame, in my opinion,” Goldinger told The Washington Post.
However, the Secret Service released a statement on Tuesday pushing back against assertions that they were blaming local law enforcement for the tragedy that unfolded on Saturday. “Any news suggesting the Secret Service is blaming local law enforcement for Saturday’s incident is simply not true,” the statement posted to the Secret Service’s X page said.
“I am having difficulty reconciling the answer the Director gave in her ABC interview with the official statement made on social media,” Patrick Yoes, national president of the Fraternal Order of Police, said in a press release on Tuesday. “Our goal is to provide whatever assistance the Secret Service needs to perform their mission and to do so with mutual respect, trust, and accuracy.”
A RealClearPolitics report suggested Sunday that resources were diverted away from Trump’s rally to an event where First Lady Jill Biden was speaking. Anthony Guglielmi, chief of communications for the United States Secret Service, denied this was the case.
Questions also remain about why Crooks was not taken out sooner. Cangelosi explained to the DCNF that counter-snipers can face challenges due to their distance from the target.
“With counter snipers, you’re usually so far away, it’s not usually clear whether an individual is an imminent threat, ” Cangelosi said. “It’s harder to discern. Once they discern whether that person is a threat to life or serious bodily injury, they can take the shot.”
Yachmetz questioned why drone coverage was not utilized.
“A drone strategically placed a few thousand feet above could have oversaw the entire venue,” he said.
“In my opinion, a detailed, in-depth very specific investigation must be conducted of all procedures [and] this entire matter by a non-biased outside investigative group (possibly of retired agents),” Yachmetz told the DCNF, emphasizing the investigation must not be “politically motivated.”
House Committee on Oversight and Accountability Chairman James Comerannounced Monday that Cheatle would testify at a committee hearing on July 22. President Joe Biden said Sunday that he directed an “independent review” of the events.
The FBI told the DCNF it has “nothing additional to provide at this time beyond previously-issued statements.” The Bureau said Monday that it gained access to Crooks’ phone and “has conducted nearly 100 interviews of law enforcement personnel, event attendees, and other witnesses.”
Trump suffered a wound to his ear, and two were killed, including Crooks and 50-year-old ex-volunteer fire chief, Corey Comperatore. Two other attendees were also wounded in the attack.
The Secret Service did not respond to a request for comment.
*
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Wallace White and Owen Klinsky contributed to this report.
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Are mainstream Israeli media outlets now guilty of antisemitic Holocaust denialist blood libel conspiracy theories, or is it no longer an antisemitic Holocaust denialist blood libel conspiracy theory to say that this happened?
A new report from the Israeli outlet Haaretz titled “IDF Ordered Hannibal Directive on October 7 to Prevent Hamas Taking Soldiers Captive” confirms what independent outlets like The Grayzone and Electronic Intifada have been getting smeared as antisemitic conspiracy theorists for saying this entire time: that many of the Israeli deaths on October 7 were the result of an IDF policy of deliberately firing on their own people to prevent them from being taken hostage by Hamas.
Citing a “very senior IDF source,” Haaretz reports that Israeli troops responding to the Hamas attack were told “Not a single vehicle can return to Gaza,” and that “it was entirely clear what that message meant, and what the fate of some of the kidnapped people would be.”
This acknowledgement flies in the face of everything the imperial media and Western officials have been saying since October about these claims. Just last month State Department spokesman Matthew Milleracted as though journalist Sam Husseini was a raving lunatic for asking about the possible implementation of the Hannibal Directive on October 7. The Grayzone’s Max Blumenthal notes that he was actually smeared as a “manipulator” by Haaretz itself back in November for his reporting on the evidence of IDF fire being behind many deaths during the attack.
When I asked about Hannibal Directive last month, the State Dept remarkably claimed they didn’t know about the “supposed directive”. More revealingly, no major media took note of this denial even though it’s about The Hostages they all claim to care about. Today in Haaretz: https://t.co/xCezkj53Y1pic.twitter.com/oSzVdjKWuP
So I guess at this point we need to ask, which is it? Are mainstream Israeli media outlets now guilty of antisemitic Holocaust denialist blood libel conspiracy theories, or is it no longer an antisemitic Holocaust denialist blood libel conspiracy theory to say that this happened?
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A new report published in The Lancet medical journal titled “Counting the dead in Gaza: difficult but essential” highlights the fact that many times more people tend to be killed indirectly by things like starvation and disease as a result of recent conflicts than from direct military violence. The report says that as a “conservative” estimate of four such indirect deaths for every one direct death, a direct death count of 37,396 could wind up placing the actual total death count as a result of this onslaught at around 186,000. This would be about eight percent of the total population of Gaza.
The Lancet notes that the number of reported direct deaths is “likely an underestimate” since thousands of bodies remain uncounted beneath the rubble in Gaza, and since Israel has destroyed Gaza’s infrastructure for counting the dead. So the real number of direct deaths is almost certainly much higher than 37,396, which means the real number of indirect deaths which could be conservatively inferred from this number would sit well into the hundreds of thousands.
And that’s just if the direct killing stopped today. The real death toll is only going up.
As Dr Assal Rad noted on Twitter, these reports come just days after the US State Department’s deputy spokesman Vedant Patel told the press “We continue to believe that any major military incursion into Rafah we would be opposed to, but yet, we have yet to see any kind of incursion to take place thus far.”
StateSpox Monday on Rafah: We would be opposed to a major military incursion, we have yet to see any kind of incursion to take place thus far
If a military operation which turns a city into a flattened, unrecognizable wasteland of rubble isn’t considered a “major military incursion”, I think it’s fair to say that nothing would be.
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It’s so surreal how Americans watched undeniable evidence that the president doesn’t run America during the first presidential debate, and then went right back to arguing about who should be president as though this never happened.
I mean, they watched it happen. Right in front of their faces. They saw clear, unequivocal evidence that the person who’s supposedly calling the shots in their country has a brain which does not work, which means the shots are necessarily being called by someone else. And yet here they are, still arguing over who should be president as though they didn’t just see the very premise of this argument exposed as complete nonsense.
It’s like if a wife was talking to her husband, and then he told her “I’m not actually your husband, I’m a space alien,” and then he took off his mask and showed her his flying saucer, and then after he put his mask back on she asks him what he wants for dinner and reminds him they’re having drinks with the Millers on Friday.
Inside Joe Biden there are two wolves fighting: a deranged imperialist wolf who wants to commit genocide and start World War Three, and a demented incontinent wolf who just wants to be welcomed into the sweet embrace of death.
A liberal will tell you you’re crazy and unrealistic for saying revolution is the only path to meaningful change, and then say the only real path is to make sure their party never, ever loses an election in a system that’s arranged to ensure both parties lose half the time.
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The US Air Force has been sending unmarked planes from Britain’s base on Cyprus to Israel since it began bombing Gaza, it can be revealed.
The planes are all C-295 and CN-235 aircraft, which are believed to be used by American special forces.
Declassified has found 18 of these aircraft which have gone from the sprawling British air base on Cyprus, RAF Akrotiri, to Israel’s coastal city Tel Aviv since October 7.
Akrotiri is the key node in the international effort to arm and provide logistical support for Israel’s assault on Gaza.
Flight path of an unmarked US Air Force plane that flew from RAF Akrotiri to Tel Aviv on 26 June. (Screengrab: Radarbox)
But the UK government has always refused to divulge any information about US activities at Akrotiri, which is known to include transporting weapons to Israel.
Asked in May how many US Air Force (USAF) flights had taken off from the base since October 7, defence minister Leo Dochertysaid:
“The Ministry of Defence does not comment on the operations of our Allies.”
But Declassified discovered the unmarked planes that flew from Akrotiri to Israel from November to June have a serial number showing they are operated by the USAF. Most of these journeys had the flight number GONZO62.
Six more unmarked C-130 planes have gone from Akrotiri to Tel Aviv since the bombing of Gaza began, which are believed to be USAF, but it was not possible for Declassified to locate their operator.
The C-130 can carry 128 combat troops and almost 20 tonnes of cargo.
The new information could further implicate British ministers in war crimes in Gaza. In November 2023, a US military official revealed that American special forces were stationed in Israel and “actively helping the Israelis”.
A spokesperson for the UK Ministry of Defence would only tell Declassified:
“In response to the situation in Israel and Gaza, we are working with international partners to de-escalate the conflict, reinforce stability and support humanitarian efforts in the region. Any use of UK bases will be in line with these objectives.”
Fort Liberty
Most of the unmarked planes show that they were recently at Fayetteville, North Carolina, which is home to Fort Liberty, the largest US Army base by population with nearly 50,000 active-duty soldiers.
Formerly called Fort Bragg, it is home to the 1st Special Forces Command (Airborne) which “assigns, equips, trains, certifies, and validates [Army Special Operations Forces] Soldiers and units to conduct global operations”.
The Pentagon says this unit is “the most adaptable and capable enabling force in the United States military.”
The planes, the C-295 and CN-235, are produced by Airbus and believed to be used by 427th Special Operations Squadron which has been described as USAF’s “most secretive squadron” and is based at Fort Liberty.
After a reporter filed a Freedom of Information Act request, the Air Force told him the unit supports “training requirements…for infiltration and exfiltration” – a reference to the covert deployment and extraction of special forces behind enemy lines.
The aircraft’s primary military roles include maritime patrol, surveillance, and air transport. It can carry 70 military personnel or 48 paratroopers.
In February 2023, an unmarked CN-235 went to eastern Europe to support President Joe Biden’s trip to Ukraine and Poland.
This plane arrived at the USAF base in Britain, RAF Mildenhall in Suffolk on February 17, where it spent the night before leaving for Poland the following day.
“Sporting a single-tone slate grey livery, this rare, secretive [Air Force Special Operations Command] aircraft wore no identifiable national markings, air arm/unit insignia or serial number details.”
But the serial number of the US plane at RAF Mildenhall was eventually located and is the same as the plane that has flown from Akrotiri to Israel five times since March, including as recently as June 26.
Aerial view of Pope Airfield in Fayetteville, North Carolina, where records have placed the covert US Air Force planes. (Screengrab: Google Earth)
Transport Flights
Declassified has also found 26 marked USAF planes have arrived at RAF Akrotiri since the bombing of Gaza began. These have included 16 huge C-17 military transport aircraft from US bases in Germany, Spain and Kuwait.
The C-17 is capable of transporting 134 personnel and many types of military equipment, including Abrams tanks and three Black Hawk helicopters. The US military notes that its role is to “rapidly project and sustain an effective combat force close to a potential battle area”.
Respected Israeli newspaper Haaretzreported in October 2023 that over 40 US transport aircraft had already flown to RAF Akrotiri carrying equipment, arms and forces. It is unclear where they got this figure from.
Haaretz reported that the planes were loaded with cargo from strategic depots belonging to the US and NATO in Europe. Around half the US flights were said to be “delivering military aid”.
Declassified has found that during the six days from February 4 to 9 there was a flurry of USAF activity at RAF Akrotiri when six C-17s arrived from Ramstein air base in Germany. All soon returned to their bases.
On June 24, a US-operated C-17 was sent from RAF Akrotiri to Tel Aviv, before flying on to Ramstein. It is possible this plane was transferring weapons to Israel.
USAF planes arriving at Akrotiri since October 7 have also included five C-130 planes coming from the US base Incirlik at Adana in Turkey. The UK government has refused to disclose what they had onboard.
The US Department of Defense did not respond to a request for comment.
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Matt Kennard is Head of Investigations at Declassified UK. He was a fellow and then director at the Centre for Investigative Journalism in London. Follow him on Twitter @kennardmatt
Featured image: Flight path of an unmarked US Air Force plane that flew from RAF Akrotiri to Tel Aviv on 26 June. (Screengrab: Radarbox)
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It’s no secret that the Neo-Nazi junta and (for now) former president Donald Trump don’t exactly see eye to eye. However, as the latter’s chances for a second term are now going through the roof, it could be argued that the Kiev regime is in a quiet (or perhaps not so quiet) panic mode.
And while this hypothesis may seem too farfetched, especially so soon after the assassination attempt, the Neo-Nazi junta’s desperation shouldn’t be taken lightly. Its frontman Volodymyr Zelensky has had a very rocky relationship with several of Trump’s closest associates, including his running mate, JD Vance.
Namely, in an interview he gave to CNN on the second anniversary of the special military operation (SMO), Zelensky didn’t have anything nice to say about Vance. In fact, the former comedian insisted that Vance, who served as a combat correspondent in the US Marine Corps, is “clueless” about the ongoing NATO-orchestrated Ukrainian conflict. It seems the fatigues Zelensky has been wearing since the SMO started gave him the illusion that he’s an actual military commander.
“I’m not sure he understands what’s going on here and we don’t need any rhetoric from people who are not deeply in the war,” Zelensky told CNN’s Kaitlan Collins, adding: “To understand, he needs to come to the frontline to see what’s going on, to speak with the people … to understand.”
Zelensky certainly never dreamed that his comments on Vance could actually make the Kiev regime’s relations with Trump all the more sour, so he soon resorted to damage control after his closest henchmen panicked that tens of billions in US “aid” could soon dry out. The lavish lifestyle of the Neo-Nazi junta elite is quite expensive and includes high-level prostitutes, supercars, seaside resorts, villas and other perks of “freedom and democracy”. During a press briefing held on July 15, Zelensky insisted that he is “ready to work with Trump” if the latter is elected in November. Obviously, this was a last-ditch (albeit ill-timed) effort to make sure that the aforementioned American “aid” continues flowing into the coffers of the perpetually corrupt Kiev regime.
“If Mr. Donald Trump becomes a president, we will work. I am not afraid of this,” Zelensky stated, adding: “Most of the Democratic party supports Ukraine, [but] there are varying positions among Republicans, some of whom are more right-wing and radical. The Republican Party is different, but its majority supports Ukraine and the people of Ukraine. We have bipartisan support and we have strong relations with the US politicians representing the Republican Party.”
The obsessive panic about Trump and Vance can also be seen in the European Union, where senior officials are already preparing for doom and gloom scenarios of the Kiev regime’s total defeat at the hands of the advancing Russian military. Not to mention that many of them are convinced that they’ll also be forced to face Russia all by themselves, a daunting prospect given just how ineffective and weak the EU has become (if it’s ever been anything but). One unnamed official was quite direct and said that “this is a disaster for Ukraine”. Having to deal with Trump was “a major trouble already”, but it seems that Brussels is particularly afraid of Vance, as his appointment “raised further questions about a potential new administration’s commitment to Ukraine and the transatlantic alliance”.
Politico claims that “Vance has made his views on Ukraine clear”, because in 2022, he told Steve Bannon in an interview that “[he doesn’t] really care what happens to Ukraine one way or another”. In February 2024, Vance also refused to meet the Neo-Nazi junta’s delegation at the Munich Security Conference, telling Politico that “the US needed to reassess its support for Ukraine”. He also criticized the EU for its “dependence on the US for military spending”, particularly Germany, accusing it of “failing to meet the NATO defense spending target of 2% of GDP”. However, the Kiev regime officials believe something could be “worked out with Vance”. Maria Mezentseva, an MP from Zelensky’s party and deputy chairwoman of the EU integration committee, said Vance should be invited to Ukraine.
“I think we should bring him,” she told Semafor, adding: “That’s how we usually succeed to change someone’s mind.”
Mezentseva’s assessment may seem overoptimistic, but it’s not without reason, as it has indeed been the case that many who were previously skeptical about the Neo-Nazi junta ended up “changing their mind” after visiting the country.
Whether this was the result of some “monetary encouragement” or something else is unknown, but it obviously worked often enough to give the Kiev regime the said overconfidence. We don’t yet know much about Vance and his convictions to say with certainty whether he’d budge or not. However, we do know that Trump is unlikely to do so, particularly if the Neo-Nazi junta’s possible involvement in his assassination attempt is revealed. This perfectly explains the panic in both Kiev and Brussels, as well as the Deep State’s readiness to eliminate Trump. After all, he said he will “totally obliterate it”.
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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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‘There was crazy hysteria, and decisions started being made without verified information’: Documents and testimonies obtained by Haaretz reveal the Hannibal operational order, which directs the use of force to prevent soldiers being taken into captivity, was employed at three army facilities infiltrated by Hamas, potentially endangering civilians as well
Gaza Division operations and airstrikes in the first hours of October 7 were based on limited information. The first long moments after the Hamas attack was launched were chaotic. Reports were coming in, with their significance not always clear. When their meaning was understood, it was realized that something horrific had taken place.
Communication networks could not keep up with the flow of information, as was the case for soldiers sending these reports. However, the message conveyed at 11:22 A.M. across the Gaza Division network was understood by everyone.
“Not a single vehicle can return to Gaza” was the order.
At this point, the IDF was not aware of the extent of kidnapping along the Gaza border, but it did know that many people were involved. Thus, it was entirely clear what that message meant, and what the fate of some of the kidnapped people would be.
This was not the first order given by the division with the intent of foiling kidnapping even at the expense of the lives of the kidnapped, a procedure known in the army as the “Hannibal procedure.”
Documents obtained by Haaretz, as well as testimonies of soldiers, mid-level and senior IDF officers, reveal a host of orders and procedures laid down by the Gaza Division, Southern Command and the IDF General Staff up to the afternoon hours of that day, showing how widespread this procedure was, from the first hours following the attack and at various points along the border.
Haaretz does not know whether or how many civilians and soldiers were hit due to these procedures, but the cumulative data indicates that many of the kidnapped people were at risk, exposed to Israeli gunfire, even if they were not the target.
At 6:43 A.M., at which time rocket barrages were launched at Israel and thousands of Hamas operatives were attacking army strongholds and the division’s observation and communications capabilities, the division’s commanderBrig. Gen. Avi Rosenfeld declared that “the Philistines have invaded.”
This is the procedure when an enemy invades Israeli territory, upon which a division commander can assume extraordinary authority, including the employment of heavy fire inside Israeli territory, in order to block an enemy raid.
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This interview was recorded a July 2, 2024. It was intended to be published prior to the NATO Summit.
Due to temporary technical problems the programme was not recorded in the Lux Media Studio. Our thanks to Lux Media for their support.
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NATO is not an Alliance. It is an organisation under the command of the Pentagon, and its objective is the military control of Western and Eastern Europe.
US bases in the member countries of NATO serve to occupy these countries, by maintaining a permanent military presence which enables Washington to influence and control their policies and prevent genuine democratic choices.
NATO is a war machine which works for the interests of the United States, with the complicity of the major European power groups, staining itself with crimes against humanity.
These wars are financed by the member countries, whose military budgets are increasing continually to the detriment of social expenditure, in order to support colossal military programmes like that of the US nuclear programme which costs 1,300 trillion dollars.
To exit the war system which is exposing us to increasing dangers, we must leave NATO, affirming our rights as sovereign and neutral States.
In this way, it becomes possible to contribute to the dismantling of NATO and all other military alliances, to the reconfiguration of the structures of the whole European region, to the formation of a multipolar world where the aspirations of the People for liberty and social justice may be realised.
We propose the creation of a NATO EXIT International Front in all NATO member countries , by building an organisational network at a basic level strong enough to support the very difficult struggle we must face in order to attain this objective, which is vital for our future.
Excerpts from the Florence Declaration. Florence, April 7, 2019
The barn roofs are higher than the roof of the building from which Crooks fired. That at least one of the counter-snipers could see him is evidenced by the fact that the counter-sniper ultimately shot Crooks in the head.
What would happen if Biden were to get his targeted countries or his weapons systems mixed up. Biden’s mental acuity cannot be categorized as “fraudulent”. What is deceitful and fraudulent is the outright conduct of “political plagiarism” (1988).
It is now five years since Emmanuel Macron, in one of those blunt outbursts for which he is known, told The Economist, in a reference to the collective West, “What we are currently experiencing is the brain death of NATO.” The French president thereupon shocked officials across the Continent.
The United States, often through the CIA, has been involved in various coups and assassinations in the Global South. These actions have had profound and lasting impacts on the region.
With everything set up for a major escalation, the last thing one would expect is to see Zelensky suggest that Russia should be invited to the next “peace summit”. The news about it went under the radar because everyone’s focus was on the assassination attempt on Donald Trump, but at a press conference in Kiev, Zelensky did exactly that, leaving many confused and dumbfounded.
Needing to find some electoral distraction to improve the Liberal-National coalition’s chances of returning to office, Dutton has literally identified a nuclear option. Certainly, it is mischievous, throwing those wishing to invest in the problematic Australian energy market into a state of confusion. The business of renewables, as with any investment, is bound to also be shaken.
Since the end of the Cold War and the Clinton administration coming to power in 1992, the United States has undergone a systemic decay in its political body. Policies increasingly favor the interests of an oligarchic and powerful elite more often than not at the expense of the public.
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It is now five years since Emmanuel Macron, in one of those blunt outbursts for which he is known, told The Economist, in a reference to the collective West, “What we are currently experiencing is the brain death of NATO.” The French president thereupon shocked officials across the Continent. “That is not my point of view,” Angela Merkel responded augustly. “I don’t think that such sweeping judgments are necessary.” Heiko Maas, the German chancellor’s foreign minister, added imaginatively, “I do not believe NATO is brain dead.”
The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) celebrated its 75th anniversary last week, 32 presidents and prime ministers assembling in the same Washington auditorium where earlier leaders, 12 of them then, signed its founding treaty on April 4, 1949. Joe Biden presided over the anniversary proceedings, of course. And with this in mind, let us credit the French leader for his prescience in diagnosing the condition of NATO’s cerebral matter. As Joe Lauria put it in a Consortium News commentary at the summit’s conclusion last Thursday, this is an organization whose members are collectively losing their minds.
It is important to understand what Macron did and did not mean with this remark. He was not, as might be easily misinterpreted, declaring the North Atlantic Treaty Organization purposeless or obsolete: That was Donald Trump’s line, and Trump was then three years into his presidency. Macron, indeed, was reacting to Trump’s complaints about the alliance as a budgetary sinkhole and his, Trump’s, consequent failure to point the other members in the imperium’s desired direction, as all American presidents had since NATO’s launch as the Atlantic world’s premier Cold War military institution.
For the first time, a photo at the Washington summit captures all 32 NATO member states’ delegation groups together (9th of July 2024) (From the Public Domain)
Specific to the occasion of his interview with The Economist, Macron was unhappy about the mess then unfolding in northern Syria. Some readers may recall it: Trump had ordered American troops withdrawn—albeit an order diplomats, Army officers, and spooks soon subverted—and Turkey, a NATO member, had immediately piled in to attack Kurdish militias based in the region.
“You have no coordination whatsoever of strategic decision-making between the United States and its NATO allies. None,” Macron told The Economist. “You have an uncoordinated aggressive action by another NATO ally, Turkey, in an area where our interests are at stake. There has been no NATO planning, nor any coordination.’’
And then the French leader’s punchline:
“We should reassess the reality of what NATO is in light of the commitment of the United States.’’
Macron’s “brain dead” remark was not the thought of any kind of peacenik, then. The man who now advocates sending French troops into Ukraine is a committed militarist. What interests me about Macron’s apparently bold utterances, again and again, are the contradictions you find in them. In this case, he was angry at Donald Trump for failing to let the Europeans pretend they had a say in alliance policy while taking the occasion to assert his then-new, now-familiar call for Europe to cultivate its “strategic autonomy.”
This is the kind of thing—the self-doubt, the smoldering resentments, the fraying unity—that prompted President Biden to make revitalizing NATO a priority when he took office three and some years ago.
“Who’s going to be able to hold NATO together like me?” was prominent among his boasts in his July 5 interview with ABC News’s George Stephanopoulos. “You’re going to have now the NATO conference here in the United States next week. Come listen. See what they say.”
The anniversary summit has come and gone. And two realities are now upon us. The other alliance leaders in attendance didn’t say anything of consequence—not a single statement of note. It was boilerplate and pabulum, start to finish. Two, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization is nicely reunited—“Together Again,” as the old Buck Owens song goes—but there can be no doubting now that it is brain dead.
Here is something frightening to consider. This is Larry Johnson’s take on the question that occupied minds during the July 9–11 gathering. Johnson, who now commentates regularly, is a former CIA officer and also served previously in the State Department’s Office of Counter Terrorism. Don’t let the vulgar imagery throw you; it is indicative of the prevailing mood:
“The hot political event this year is the NATO Summit in Washington. All Western world leaders showed up, not to discuss NATO’s future, but to see if Joe Biden survives the meetings without dumping a load in his Depends or keeling over dead. Sort of the same reason people attend a car race—i.e., they are waiting for the crash. Nothing like a fiery car wreck to get the adrenaline pumping.”
We need to think about what it means when NATO members meet and what is on their minds are not the various crises into which they have led the world over the past many years but whether the man whose authority lies effectively beyond question will manage to deliver an address coherently. We can laugh at President Biden’s public displays of ineptitude, and there were some of these, per usual, as he addressed the summit and then gave a press conference afterward. But I didn’t say funny: I said frightening. And this is what NATO has become during Biden’s three and a half years as the alliance’s de facto commander-in-chief.
Image: President Joe Biden shakes hands with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy during the NATO Summit in Washington, D.C., July 11, 2024 (From the Public Domain)
Yes, Biden introduced Volodymyr Zelensky to the summit as “President Putin.” Yes, he confused his vice-president with the nonexistent “Vice-President Trump.” But it seems time now to look beyond ridicule. It is certainly time for the mainstream media to cut out the everybody-makes-mistakes nonsense. Biden has made himself a sad figure these past few weeks, a character reading a little out of Shakespeare and a little out of Sophocles. But the NATO summit faces us with the bitter reality that Joe Biden has become, above all, dangerous. Is there another way to think about a man listing into senility while directing an inordinately powerful military alliance whose members know how to defer and follow but do not know how to think?
I was struck last week by the sparsity of the coverage American media dedicated to the summit. Some stories on Biden making it to the end of his presentations—the summit address, the presser that followed—without blowing it too badly. Markedly fewer given to the substance of the gathering. It seemed to me a tacit suggestion that nothing new was said or determined during the July 9–11 sessions. It was simply more of the same, and more of the same does not make good copy in the news biz.
Let us consider what the same comes to, and then what it means that more of the same is on the way. To preview my conclusions, NATO has just committed the West’s post-democracies to an era of institutionalized war, global violence, and disorder—this with, by design, no plan to end it.
The same threat of annihilation familiar to those who recall the Cold War will prevail once again. Spending on armaments will take automatic priority over the well-being of the societies paying for this profligacy. Russia and China will be normalized as permanent enemies. The West’s estrangement from the non–West will be an established fact of life. The Deep State, an entrenched trans–Atlantic phenomenon now, will ally with liberal authoritarian elites to enforce this regime and suppress all those who question or challenge it.
There is no overstatement here. This is precisely the project America’s neoconservative cliques outlined when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991 and a decade of American triumphalism ensued. You will find all of this in the subtext of Biden’s keynote address as the 75th events opened. The remarkable thing now is the degree of denial required of NATO’s leaders as they profess adherence to this agenda in a world radically transformed in the ensuing three decades.
After praising the “remarkable progress” of European members that are spending ever more on weaponry—what a terrific thing—Biden went straight into the proxy war the alliance wages in Ukraine against the Russian Federation. Among his various assertions:
“Ukraine can and will stop Putin,” “Make no mistake, Russia is failing in this war,” “We’ve built a global coalition to stand with Ukraine.” “An overwhelming bipartisan majority of Americans understand that NATO makes us all safer.” And then one of my favorites, a recurring theme and a real Bidenism: “And Putin wants nothing less—nothing less than Ukraine’s total subjugation. And we know Putin will not stop at Ukraine.”
The high officials listening greeted all of these statements with enthusiasm. None of them bears even a remote relationship with the truth. In an interview with Andrew Napolitano taped for Judging Freedom, conducted after the summit ended July 11, John Mearsheimer, the foreign policy scholar, called Biden’s speech “poppycock, full of deluded statements.” But exactly. Reading the transcript of these remarks, all the intervals of applause noted in brackets, NATO seemed to me too Soviet for words at this point. I thought of those Cold War Life magazine photos of the Russian Duma when votes were taken, all hands raised uniformly in assent.
This is the trans-Atlantic alliance as it has become. It operates on the basis of fantastic conjurings, and no member questions them. You have read absolutely no mainstream media challenging these silly fabrications and none analyzing NATO’s purpose or policies with any seriousness. This is what I mean by frightening. This is what makes NATO as it is now dangerous. Its stated purpose makes no sense and its unstated purpose is as noted above.
And here is the diabolic truth it is important not to miss: Biden and everyone in his summit audience knows Ukraine is losing its war, knows Moscow has no designs on Europe, knows there is no “global coalition” standing with the alliance. These are simple facts beyond dispute, matters of record. But Biden’s speech was not meant for the other leaders present and the other leaders present did not applaud for Biden: Biden’s true audience was the public in the trans–Atlantic post-democracies, and the applause he received amounted to their instructions in the necessity to approve.
NATO summits as performance, as exercises in mass propaganda conducted entirely in the open: I confess I cannot fully register the implications of an organization as powerful as the Atlantic alliance operating this emptily and cynically. NATO has a purpose all right, but its political figureheads, generals, and bureaucrats must make one up for public consumption, its actual purpose—global dominance at whatever cost—being too objectionable to profess.
As to more of the same, the anniversary summit appears to mark a turn in the eastern alliance toward complete abandonment of the pretense of NATO as a defensive organization in favor of increasingly aggressive, provocative postures. Antony Blinken, speaking in the course of the proceedings, termed the thought of Ukraine’s membership in the alliance “inevitable and irreversible,” awaiting the Kiev regime across “a well-lit bridge.” I read this two ways. One, Biden and his policy cliques are doing what they can, which is limited, to reassure Ukraine in anticipation of a possible Trump victory in November.
Two and closer to the ground, as Kiev continues to lose on the battlefield, NATO now intends to signal that settlement talks are out of the question and the alliance will plunge deeper into the morass however deep the morass eventually proves. To wit: John Helmer, a long-serving and highly reliable Moscow correspondent who now publishes Dances with Bears, reported last week,
American, British, and Canadian troops in NATO’s forward bases in Poland, Latvia, and Lithuania are being told to prepare for deployment to the Ukraine next year. They are also being warned to expect to fight under heavy Russian artillery, missile, guided bomb, and drone strikes.
Note the nations from which these troops will be dispatched to the Ukrainian front. They are all former Soviet satellites nursing quite understandable but lethally unbalanced cases of anti–Russian paranoia. This is how aggression is sometimes engendered in the long-term war against Russia. Ukraine relies on the same visceral anti–Russian animus by way of the neo–Nazi units that lead its military.
“And here with us—and here with us today are countries from the Indo–Pacific region,” Biden said midway in his address. “They’re here because they have a stake in our success and we have a stake in theirs.” I do not like this remark one bit. I read it as a barely veiled confirmation of a swell of hints and innuendo last year to the effect that NATO intends to expand its purview to East Asia, so following the U.S. in its gradually escalating confrontation with China.
The NATO Summit at the Washington Convention Center in Washington, D.C., July 11, 2024 (From the Public Domain)
As if on cue, Jens Stoltenberg, NATO’s outgoing sec-gen, subsequently launched into an utterly inappropriate attack on China for “oppressing its own people,” for “crushing democratic voices,” for “more assertive behavior in the South China Sea,” for “threatening neighbors, threatening Taiwan,” and so on down the list of complaints Blinken and the Biden regime’s policy cliques favor when addressing the Chinese.
NATO in Asia is now to be taken with the utmost seriousness. It is NATO now and the NATO to come—brain dead NATO, NATO everywhere with no legitimate business anywhere. Shortly after Stoltenberg delivered himself of his preposterous tirade, Biden hung the Presidential Medal of Freedom around his neck.
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Patrick Lawrence, a correspondent abroad for many years, chiefly for the International Herald Tribune, is a media critic, essayist, author and lecturer. His new book, Journalists and Their Shadows, is out now from Clarity Press. His website is Patrick Lawrence. Support his work via his Patreon site.
Featured image: 2024 Washington summit logo (Licensed under Fair Use)
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The Moderna COVID-19 vaccine was linked to significantly higher mortality rates than the Pfizer vaccines, based on a preliminary analysis of individual health data for the Czech Republic. Scientists call for more research.
The Moderna COVID-19 vaccine was linked to significantly higher mortality rates than the Pfizer vaccines, based on a preliminary analysis of individual health data for the Czech Republic.
Kirsch obtained the data through a Freedom of Information Act request by a Czech citizen.
The data on vaccinated people included vaccine manufacturer, vaccination date, and the lot number and code for each person.
Kirsch was able to analyze people’s medical records over time, tracking which people received one, two or three doses of a vaccine by a given manufacturer, and whether they died within the following year.
He calculated and compared the overall mortality rate in the Moderna group with the Pfizer group and found that at all ages, there were more deaths in the Moderna group.
He also found that the difference in death rates was statistically significant across every age group studied. However, the percentage increase in risk increased as people got younger. His analysis covered people in their mid-40s through late 90s, according to his graphs.
Kirsch reported, for example, that people ages 46-69 who received two doses of Moderna’s vaccine had over a 50% higher risk of death within one year compared with those who received two Pfizer shots.
He also wrote that the data show the Pfizer vaccine is “also completely unsuitable for public use,” but there was not enough data to determine its link to all-cause mortality.
“Unless the drug makers can explain to the world how this new data from the Czech Republic actually proves that all their vaccines are equally safe, the Pfizer, Moderna, Jannsen, and AstraZenecavaccines should be immediately halted as too unsafe to use,” Kirsch wrote.
Critics: More Research Needed, But Preliminary Analysis ‘Valuable’
Kirsch’s analysis was not formally written up or peer-reviewed. However, he included a critique by University of Pennsylvania biostatistician Jeffrey Morris, Ph.D., whom Kirsch asked to comment.
Morris said the analysis did not account for possible confounding variables.
Kirsch countered that there was no confounding factor that could explain the difference and challenged researchers or governments to explain.
Denis Rancourt, Ph.D., all-cause mortality researcher and former physics professor at the University of Ottawa in Canada, who has done extensive country-by-country analyses of the link between vaccine rollouts and all-cause mortality also told The Defender there were systematic limitations to Kirsch’s analysis.
For example, he said, the Czech Republic had major spikes in excess mortality over time during the COVID-19 period, a lot of which were unrelated to the vaccines because they happened in complex ways before the vaccination campaigns.
There is also variability in how different manufacturer’s vaccines were rolled out. For example, one manufacturer’s vaccine may have been rolled out earlier versus later during a spike in an all-cause mortality wave related to several different factors. In Kirsch’s analysis, that death would be attributed to a vaccine, even though it may have been caused by factors unrelated to the vaccine.
According to Rancourt, there is a significant temporal element that Kirsch’s analysis doesn’t accounted for. At what point during an all-cause mortality wave people are vaccinated and when they die, and when and how rapidly vaccines from a particular manufacturer are rolled out must all be taken into account in a proper analysis.
“One must do a full temporal analysis to control for this systematic error,” Rancourt said. “This was not done.”
However, he also said Kirsch’s analysis is “very useful and important data.” Despite his methodological critiques, Rancourt said. “I think it’s highly valid what [Kirsch] is doing. He’s done a first analysis that shows a result that is worth looking into.”
Kirsch called the Czech government data “the mother lode.” “We have never had data like this before,” he said and shared comments from other researchers who also commented on the value of the data.
“The patient-level data from the Czech Republic is astonishing and very disturbing,” Dr. Paul Marik said.
“I am amazed that it took the authorities four years to release individual-level data,” data scientist Tomas Fürst, Ph.D., from the Czech Republic told Kirsch. “If we had this type of data earlier, we would have been able to avoid the biggest mistakes of the pandemic response. All governments should immediately release this data.”
Karl Jablonowski, Ph.D., research scientist for Children’s Health Defense, told The Defender, “One of the most important takeaways from this research is that we are seeing important signals in the data about a very serious safety issue and we need more data to investigate it further.”
“But we don’t have that data — governments do and they ought to release it for analysis,” he said.
Debating Potential Biases and Alternative Explanations
Kirsch did his analysis based on the assumption that Pfizer was harmless so that it could therefore act as a placebo group, Craig explained on her Substack.
“It is an excellent placebo group because confounders around health and socioeconomic variables are accounted for because the brands were distributed randomly,” she said.
Kirsch addressed several counter-arguments, or what he called “attack vectors” through which critics might attack his findings.
The most plausible counter-explanation, he said, would be that there was a vaccine distribution bias where Moderna and other vaccines were given exclusively to people with high comorbidities.
However, he said there was no evidence that Moderna was given to people at higher risk of death or that there were any criteria for vaccinating people with one vaccine or the other. Therefore, he said, it could be assumed the vaccines were assigned by convenience, “removing the majority of biases.”
Craig agreed, “Unless someone can provide compelling evidence of Moderna having been given to those more likely to die in every age group and throughout the time period then this is compelling evidence that it was more deadly,” she wrote.
However, Rancourt noted that vaccines are not rolled out randomly. “Different manufacturers get rolled out at different times and are even used for different groups of people,” he said. “So there is no reason to assume that the two manufacturers were proportionally rolled out synchronously.”
Instead, the differences in the rollouts should be accounted for in the analysis.
Kirsch also said the differences couldn’t be explained by vaccine efficacy, because the COVID-19fatality rates were quite low.
The findings also demonstrate “biological plausibility,” Kirsch wrote, because both vaccines have the same mRNA active ingredient, the doses are significantly different. Pfizer’s COVID-19 shot contains 30 micrograms per dose and Moderna’s contains 100 micrograms per dose.
Other Research Showed Similar Findings
Kirsch noted that his findings concord with other research into this issue.
The Fraiman paper, which re-analyzed the Phase 3 Pfizer and Moderna trials, found Moderna’s vaccine similarly had a 50% higher rate of serious adverse events of special interest than Pfizer
In that paper, they also found that fatal vaccine toxicity varied by manufacturer, with Janssen’s shot being the most fatal, followed by Moderna’s and then Pfizer’s. The paper included details about toxicity, dose number and manufacturer.
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Brenda Baletti, Ph.D., is a senior reporter for The Defender. She wrote and taught about capitalism and politics for 10 years in the writing program at Duke University. She holds a Ph.D. in human geography from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a master’s from the University of Texas at Austin.
Featured image is from CHD
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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The following still images from aerial video footage of the dead would-be assassin on the rooftop strike me as puzzling.
Note the large flow of blood downslope of his body in the following closeup. The position of his body marks the position at which he was shot in the head.
I initially wondered if the photo was taken after law officers checked Crooks’s body to make sure he was dead, then separated the weapon from his body, and then left the scene. Perhaps initial responders were told to leave the roof to minimize contamination of the crime scene, and to wait in the parking lot below for the coroner and crime scene investigators to arrive.
However, I still believe it is worth trying to ascertain if it was Crooks who tossed the weapon far to his left after he finished shooting. It appears that the weapon’s magazine is still seated in the weapon. Did the responders check to make sure the chamber and magazine were empty, and then reinsert the magazine?
The position of Crooks’s body—a few feet below the roof’s ridge—suggest that he was trying to crawl in reverse, back down the roof, but was unable to keep his head low enough to avoid getting shot by a counter-sniper.
I wonder if he believed—or was led to believe—that if he made a show of tossing his rifle far to the side, the counter-snipers would refrain from shooting him to preserve him as a witness.
Obviously, the time to shoot Crooks was the second he aimed his weapon from the roof’s ridge, not after he’d finished shooting and was crawling in retreat back down the roof’s slope.
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Over the last couple of days the news cycle has been overwhelmingly dominated by a sniper’s attempted assassination of Donald Trump at a large campaign rally in western Pennsylvania, with the presidential candidate fortunate enough to escape with only a minor wound to his ear.
Meanwhile, the ongoing efforts of various influential Democrats to pressure President Joseph Biden into dropping out of the race on grounds of mental incapacity completely vanished from the news, swamped by the dramatic account of Trump’s narrow escape from death. With the media no longer focusing on Biden’s problems, the chances that the DNC might be able to replace him with a stronger candidate may have been lost, further increasing Trump’s odds of regaining the White House this November.
I’ve only casually followed the story of this attempted assassination without spending much time investigating the details of the incident or the considerable number of conflicting theories floating around on the Internet. But various people have asked me for my opinion, so I might as well provide it, though my views should not be accorded any more weight than they deserve, especially since I lack any military expertise.
According to the media accounts, a young 20-year-old gunman named Thomas Matthew Crooks was somehow able to enter the vicinity of the Trump rally armed with an AR-15 rifle. He set himself up on the rooftop of a nearby building and fired several shots, one of which wounded Trump in the ear while another killed a bystander in the crowd, after which he himself was shot dead by counter-sniper fire from security personnel.
Allowing an armed gunman such an opportunity to potentially kill a leading presidential candidate obviously involved extremely serious lapses in security by the Secret Service agents guarding Trump and this has naturally provoked widespread suspicions that some sort of plot had been responsible. There have also been claims circulating on social media that bystanders noticed the gunman and alerted authorities, but instead of ordering the sniper shot or at least securing the candidate and taking him to safety, the security personnel waited until the prospective assassin had fired his potentially fatal shots before taking any action.
At the very least this is obviously a huge black-eye for our Secret Service and the other police agencies that were on the scene, supposedly protecting Trump.
Given the extremely strong emotions that Trump arouses in both his supporters and his opponents, it’s hardly surprising that this very strange and suspicious official story quickly inspired numerous conspiratorial narratives, which have widely circulated among both Trump-backers and Trump-haters.
For more than eight years, most American elites have expressed a seething hatred of Trump, doing everything they could to frustrate his presidency, ensure his defeat in 2020, and then prevent him from regaining the White House in 2024. Soon after a mob of outraged Trumpists stormed the DC Capitol on January 7, 2021, I published an article pointing to the overwhelming evidence that the American media and our Internet giants, assisted by numerous dishonest former intelligence officers, had combined to steal the 2020 election from Donald Trump: American Pravda: Our Disputed Election.
Last year I discussed the extraordinary efforts of those same biased media outlets to hide the massive corruption scandal engulfing Joseph Biden and his family, doing so both prior to the 2020 vote and now leading up to the 2024 election.
More recently as Trump’s efforts to regain the presidency moved forward, his bitter Democratic enemies launched a series of outrageous political prosecutions hoping that felony convictions and possible imprisonment would destroy Trump’s popularity with voters. But instead Trump’s polling numbers continued to rise, and his Republican renomination became assured.
So now with Trump leading in the polls and the desperate Democrats fearful that Biden would be no match for him in November, a sniper was allowed surprisingly easy access to the candidate at a rally, and if the trajectory of the bullet he fired had been an inch or two different, Trump could easily have been killed. Under these circumstances, only the most oblivious would fail to be highly suspicious of what happened.
Did Trump’s bitter enemies conspire to have him killed by an assassin’s bullet, as had happened more than half-century ago to President John F. Kennedy and his younger brother Robert? While that is certainly possible, unless much stronger evidence emerges, I will remain extremely skeptical.
Assassinating a former president who is leading in the current polls is a very serious undertaking, and Trump’s lucky survival has drastically strengthened the support he enjoys both from the voters and from the billionaire donor class while his security will also surely be massively increased. I think it quite unlikely that any future sniper will have as easy a time gaining access to him at a rally or anywhere else. As Emerson said, “When you strike at a king, you must kill him.”
So if Trump’s enemies had decided to have him killed, I doubt they would have selected an untrained 20-year-old nursing home worker as their assassin, a choice that resulted in the failure that occurred. Surely a far more professional sniper would have been employed, a sniper who never would have missed his target. Arranging for the Secret Service agents and the local police to stand down and provide an opening entailed enormous political risks, and what good would that do if the gunman selected couldn’t shoot straight? If any powerful organization or individual had been behind the assassination plot, Trump would be dead and Americans would be arguing about a successful rather than a botched assassination.
The dozens of security personnel who left Trump vulnerable are now being denounced as grossly negligent in the media, and if any of them had been given suspicious orders responsible for that debacle, they will surely soon come forward and defend themselves by explaining what had happened and implicating those responsible. If none of them do so, then the likelihood of any anti-Trump plot begins to dissipate, and the explanation of sheer incompetence becomes the most plausible theory.
One claim I’ve seen is that the gunman was wearing some sort of military-themed shirt and casually carrying his rifle in plain sight, leading most onlookers to assume that he was a member of one of the various different organizations tasked with ensuring Trump’s safety. This seems like exactly the sort of stupid bureaucratic mistake that can easily occur when multiple government agencies are involved in a common project.
Meanwhile, some anti-Trump circles have naturally promoted their own contrary conspiracy theories. They have suggested that the attack was a daring false-flag operation organized by Trump or his close allies, intended to only slightly wound the candidate and thereby greatly bolster his political campaign, just as has now happened.
However, I think this scenario is even less plausible than the other one. Once again, we must realize that the shooter selected for this dangerously lethal operation was an untrained 20-year-old firing from a distance of 400 feet, a sniper who hit Trump’s ear rather than his head. Thus, any such plan to boost Trump could very easily have ended up killing him instead, and it’s difficult to believe that any rational Trump supporter would have taken such a gigantic risk.
Perhaps some of these conspiracy advocates believe that the wound itself was somehow faked, and that all the Secret Service agents who saw the injury at close range and hustled Trump away were conspirators in the plot. But lacking any evidence, these sorts of theories grow ever more complex and unlikely.
My own reconstruction of what happened is different and much simpler.
When I first heard that Trump had survived an attempted assassination, my surprise was not that it had occurred but that there hadn’t already been a dozen or more previous attacks. I doubt that any political figure in modern American history has ever been so massively demonized by our mainstream media as Donald J. Trump during the last eight or nine years. He’s been vilified as a fascist, a Hitler, a traitor, a Russian stooge, a rapist, a racist, a swindler. Trump was endlessly portrayed as a fiend absolutely determined to destroy American freedom and democracy, someone who represented our country’s deadliest human enemy.
Our media creates our reality and for most of the last decade, hundreds of millions of Americans have been completely blanketed by these unrelenting waves of ferocious anti-Trump propaganda, so surely many thousands of them would have been unbalanced enough to consider saving our country by taking the law into their own hands and patriotically risking their own lives to eliminate that deadly human menace. The media had spent all these years painting a very bright target on Trump’s back, and I’ve been astonished that until a couple of days ago no American had yet taken aim at it.
Consider an analogous case from a few years ago. For many years, anti-immigration activists loudly proclaimed that our country was being “invaded” by hordes of hostile Mexican immigrants. Therefore, I was hardly too surprised that in 2019 a very patriotic but somewhat dim-witted 21-year-old named Patrick Wood Crusius took that heated political rhetoric a little too literally and decided to shoot as many of those foreign invaders as he could, killing a couple of dozen Hispanics at a Walmart store in El Paso, Texas. I strongly suspect that the young gunman who tried to kill Trump acted out of roughly similar motives.
Finally, I was generally pleased to see that Trump namedSen. J.D. Vance as his running mate. Although I’m not exactly thrilled with many of Vance’s positions, notably his extremely aggressive rhetoric regarding Iran and the Middle East, he seemed like the least bad choice among the several names under consideration, and we have to settle for what we can get.
Back in January 2013, Prof. Amy Chua and others had invited me to the Yale Law School to give a talk on my Meritocracy analysis of elite university admissions, and Vance, then using his previous name of Hamel, had been the young law school student who met me when I arrived and guided me around. Now, less than a dozen years later, he’s certainly come up a great deal in the world, being on the verge of becoming one of the youngest vice presidents in our national history, someone just a heartbeat away from sitting in the Oval Office. It’s very nice to know that he’s fully aware of some of the highly-controversial matters of great importance to our national future.
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Scroll down for the complete text of U.S. Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle statement
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U.S. Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle issued a statement in which she asserted the following:
Secret Service personnel on the ground moved quickly during the incident, with our counter sniper team neutralizing the shooter and our agents implementing protective measures to ensure the safety of former president Donald Trump.
The “counter sniper team” consisted of the riflemen posted on the two barns (with white roofs) behind the stage. With that in mind, consider the following photograph.
From their vantage point on the barn roofs, the counter snipers could plainly see that there were NO SENTRIES on the building to the north. They could also see the bystanders on the ground to the left of the building, frantically gesturing towards the roof for minutes prior to Crooks reaching the ridge and firing the shots.
The barn roofs are higher than the roof of the building from which Crooks fired. That at least one of the counter-snipers could see him is evidenced by the fact that the counter-sniper ultimately shot Crooks in the head.
There is simply no exculpatory explanation for this incident. Obviously, not a single sentry was posted on the building. Note the higher building just behind and slightly to the left of the building from which Crooks fired. This was a painfully obvious location to post a sentry who could have secured the rooftops and observe the event from a perfect vantage point.
Cheatle has zero credibility. The totality of circumstances indicates that security was deliberately withdrawn from the building, thereby granting a would-be assassin easy access to its rooftop with a clear line of sight to the stage on which Trump spoke.
It will be interesting to see if the local police remain silent or if media outlets like CNN continue to quote unnamed “law enforcement” sources making dubious statements that raise more questions than they answer.
I suspect that local law enforcement officials have been given the strong impression that this is a matter for federal agents, meaning there is nothing to be gained by discussing it with the media.
Statement From U.S. Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle
I would like to start by extending my deepest condolences to the family and friends of Corey Comperatore, who was killed during the assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump’s life in Butler, Pennsylvania, Saturday, as well as those who were injured during this senseless act of violence.
Secret Service personnel on the ground moved quickly during the incident, with our counter sniper team neutralizing the shooter and our agents implementing protective measures to ensure the safety of former president Donald Trump.
Since the shooting, I have been in constant contact with Secret Service personnel in Pennsylvania who worked to maintain the integrity of the crime scene until the FBI assumed its role as the lead investigating agency into the assassination attempt. I have also been coordinating with the protective detail for former President Trump and have briefed President Biden on the details of the incident.
The Secret Service is working with all involved Federal, state and local agencies to understand what happened, how it happened, and how we can prevent an incident like this from ever taking place again. We understand the importance of the independent review announced by President Biden yesterday and will participate fully. We will also work with the appropriate Congressional committees on any oversight action.
The incident in Pennsylvania has understandably led to questions about potential updates or changes to the security for the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee. The U.S. Secret Service, in conjunction with our Federal, state and local law enforcement and public safety partners, designs operational security plans for National Special Security Events (NSSE) to be dynamic in order to respond to a kinetic security environment and the most up-to-date intelligence from our partners.
I am confident in the security plan our Secret Service RNC coordinator and our partners have put in place, which we have reviewed and strengthened in the wake of Saturday’s shooting. The security plans for National Special Security Events are designed to be flexible. As the conventions progress, and in accordance with the direction of the President, the Secret Service will continuously adapt our operations as necessary in order to ensure the highest level of safety and security for convention attendees, volunteers and the City of Milwaukee. In addition to the additional security enhancements we provided former President Trump’s detail in June, we have also implemented changes to his security detail since Saturday to ensure his continued protection for the convention and the remainder of the campaign.
The Secret Service is tasked with the tremendous responsibility of protecting the current and former leaders of our democracy. It is a responsibility that I take incredibly seriously, and I am committed to fulfilling that mission.
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Zelensky Now Wants Russia because Donald Trump has formulated a Peace Plan which obliges the Kiev regime to enter into peace negotiations with Russia
Trump’s national security advisory team has prepared a balanced plan.
if the Kiev regime does not enter into peace talks with Moscow, the U.S. would (under a Trump presidency) immediately suspend the flow of US weapons to Ukraine:
“Under the plan drawn up by [General Keith] Kellogg and Fred Fleitz, who both served as chiefs of staff in Trump’s National Security Council during his 2017-2021 presidency, there would be a ceasefire based on prevailing battle lines during peace talks, Fleitz said.
This plan has been endorsed by Donald Trump. Moreover Trump has also confirmed:
“that if reelected, he would swiftly bring an end to the war in Ukraine by speaking with Putin.
“I will have that war settled between Putin and Zelensky as president-elect before I take office on January 20.
I’ll have that war settled,” Trump said on June 27 during a debate with Biden, adding
“I’ll get it settled fast, before I take office.” (Quoted by Newsweek)
Michel Chossudovsky, July 18,2024
Incisive analysis by Drago Bosnic:
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Understanding the Kiev regime’s political decisions can be quite challenging, partially because those decisions are actually made in Washington DC. However, there are moments when understanding the darkest corners of quantum mechanics is far easier than figuring out what exactly the Neo-Nazi junta wants. Just last month, the political West and its puppets in Kiev openly talked about conducting large-scale terrorist attacks all across Russia, including against public schools. These threats were soon followed by real acts of blatant terrorism, with missile strikes on crowded beaches in Sevastopol and an attempt to start religious unrest in Russia through the use of Islamic radicals who brutally murdered both civilians (including an Orthodox Christian priest) and local law enforcement in the southern republic of Dagestan.
One such large-scale strike was used to stage a false flag in Kiev, where a children’s hospital was hit by a US-made SAM (surface-to-air missile) which then suddenly “transformed” into a “Russian Kh-101 long-range cruise missile”. This was a perfectly timed PR “victory” for Zelensky as he was heading to Washington DC for a NATO summit. The Neo-Nazi junta frontman used the usual buzzwords, “condemning Russian terrorists for attacks on kids”. Interestingly, he failed to explain how it was possible for the Kremlin to accomplish this when the Kiev regime forces regularly “shoot down” 300% of all Russian missiles, including hypersonic ones. And to say nothing of the usual trope about Moscow perpetually “running out of missiles”, but also “using them against children” and “residential areas”.
This was followed by yet another pompous announcement of a new counteroffensive that’s supposed to “turn the tide” and drive out the “evil Russians”. Thus, with everything set up for a major escalation, the last thing one would expect is to see Zelensky suggest that Russia should be invited to the next “peace summit”. The news about it went under the radar because everyone’s focus was on the assassination attempt on Donald Trump, but at a press conference in Kiev, Zelensky did exactly that, leaving many confused and dumbfounded.
“I believe that Russian representatives should be at the second summit,” he stated on July 15, adding that “preparatory work for another summit is underway”.
This is the first time in well over two years that the Neo-Nazi junta hinted that it’s ready for direct “peace talks”. Previously, Zelensky was vehemently opposed to even basic contact with the Kremlin as long as President Vladimir Putin is in power. Thus, the previous “peace summits” were not much more than glorified fairs aimed at creating the narrative that “the world supports Ukraine”. Seeing through this, China refused to participate, leaving the summit nothing more than a NATO echo chamber of endless praise for the political West’s “values” and its non-existent “moral high ground”, based entirely on a fantasy world that exists only in the numerous outlets of the mainstream propaganda machine. Thus, the latest offer seems quite unusual (if not even outright strange), particularly considering the timing and other factors.
It still remains unclear what the endgame is, especially because Zelensky is yet to reveal whether the laughable “peace formula” is still his “red line”. If that’s the case, then he’s just wasting his breath, as Moscow has already flatly refused to even consider such demands, which is perfectly understandable and expected given the fact that the “plan” boils down to Russia’s capitulation. What’s more, getting even China onboard is highly unlikely if the political West continues down the path of perpetual escalation. Interestingly, at least one prominent analyst already predicted that Zelensky will sue for peace several weeks ago, albeit through third parties. However, although the idea of peace is certainly a welcome one, the motivation behind such initiatives needs to be carefully analyzed, especially when dealing with the political West.
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Drago Bosnic is an independent geopolitical and military analyst. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.
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Parking his van in Deby, the town of the Trump rally – close, but not right up to, because it was full of visitors’ cars.
Strange that he even could get one of the last parking spots – because other visitors had reported they had to park far away.
On foot, he carried a ladder (I believe 5 foot) which he had bought at Home Depot that same Saturday morning and brought with him in his van. Also on foot, he openly carried the AR-15-style rifle of his father’s with plenty of ammunition. He had just bought 50 rounds of ammunition extra. Yeah, when on a picnic, you sometimes buy some necessities in the last minute.
Perhaps whistling a joyful tune, he met a police officer on his way, and then continued. Several witnesses saw him walking, carrying his rifle. It was a nice morning.
Arriving at the scene, he put his ladder up on the wall of factory building and climbs up to the roof of the factory building, only 140m from Trump. A police officer noted the ladder, climbed it too, but just as the officer was trying to crawl up on the roof, he pointed his rifle at the police officer and told him to get lost – which the officer duly did and nothing else happened.
All the officer could report was to have been threatened with a rifle by a man moving into position from where he could get a clean shot at Trump – no need for fuzz from the police. Fuzz came, however, soon after as lots of bystanders saw him crawling on the roof with his rifling, approaching the middle point of the roof from where there was full sight to Trump. He didn’t care, and proceeded undisturbed as if he had some kind of “deal” with higher powers, either divine powers or deep state powers.
A law enforcement counter-sharpshooter positioned behind Trump followed it all. The law enforcement sharpshooter posted on social media, that the sharpshooter had him on his scope at least 3 minutes before he fired on Trump, but that orders were not to shoot before the assassin shot. Meanwhile, Trump was speaking joyfully, no need to disturb Trump either to get Trump away from the scene at least until the situation was resolved.
Why?
The 20-year old had registered early as a Republican voter – but on 20 January 2021, on the exact day of President Biden’s inauguration, he sent a highly symbolic $ 15 to a Democratic “action group” – clearly indicating that he was against Trump and (at least morally) supported others who were against Trump. This seems clearly motivated by the 6 January 2021 incident just two weeks earlier.
A loner, somewhat bullied by others, but having intelligence and empathy. Good with computers. High school degree. Worked like his parents in social care, giving meals to the elderly. Never anything to report on. Didn’t try to shoot anyone he knew, or to shoot “as many as possible”. If he had any personal thirst a kind of revenge on his local community, it looks rather like becoming a local hero who saved the USA from Trump.
Timing is notable: This event happened exactly as nothing else can stop Trump from becoming the next President, except death or injury. All Democratic efforts to defame Trump, to ruin Trump, to make Trump a felon have failed. All chances of Biden winning a victory in the last minute have also evaporated, as this happened. Even Biden himself and the Democratic party have in a sense sunk into the ground and evaporated.
Either … or…
Either this guy was extremely naïve, and just plain lucky he got so far. Wandering around in the open with a ladder and a rifle, ignoring all witnesses incl. bypassing police, climbing roof in full daylight with lots of bystanders to reach Trump. Fools are sometimes lucky – they do things nobody thought possible, and because nobody thought it possible, they might get far.
Or this guy achieved some kind of contact in the deep state and was carefully selected as a “sleeper agent”, so to be activated by the deep state when all other means to stop Trump had been exhausted. This would explain why no social contacts have been registered. The deep state doesn’t leave traces.
The Secret Service team close around Trump are loyal to the task. They have worked with Trump since 2016, and they have extremely close personal relationships together, knowing each other’s family etc. But leadership on the scene was criminally bad. Bad planning. Lack of coordination. Procedures not okay. Priority number one is to secure the protectee before any injury happens. As somebody said: “Maximum attention on securing the Protectee”. But while Trump was speaking, Secret Service people ran behind Trump with weapons unholstered – nobody caring to secure Trump’s immediate safety before Trump was already hit just millimeters from his skull. Awful and disgraceful.
Less than mediocre. Who said that the USSS – the Secret Service – were the best in the world?
The top of Secret Service is guilty. Criminal neglect as a minimum comes to mind. Or whatever your instincts believe. Info has circulated, that the Director of Secret Service had reduced Trump’s security level on request from President Biden, making Trump more vulnerable assassination. Anyway, don’t expect an “independent” FBI investigation to find anything similar to the Truth. But will a Congressional investigation get any further? So far, Congressional investigations have a history of superficiality, parody, drama, and personal profiling – but not of digging into the dark stuff.
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Karsten Riise is a Master of Science (Econ) from Copenhagen Business School and has a university degree in Spanish Culture and Languages from Copenhagen University. He is the former Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer (CFO) of Mercedes-Benz in Denmark and Sweden.
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On July 13, at a rally near Butler in Pennsylvania, former American president Donald Trump narrowly escaped death after he was grazed by a bullet fired by 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks. He fired at least eight rounds from an AR-15-style rifle from the roof of a nearby building outside the rally venue. Several people were wounded, at least one of which subsequently died. The surreal scenes left the audience dumbfounded, with panic ensuing only after the shooter was neutralized. In the last two days, there’s been a lot of speculation about what really happened, ranging from assumptions that it was staged to the Secret Service’s incompetence and even possible complicity. Albeit the latter might seem far too extreme, there’s actual footage of civilians seeing Crooks on the roof from which he took the shot and warning police and security that he’s there.
However, despite the sheer luck Trump had, this opens up numerous questions about the warmongering elites in Washington DC and their highly likely (if not guaranteed) involvement in the assassination attempt. It should be noted that Trump himself is not exactly the “Second Coming of Christ”, as many believe, simply because it’s extremely difficult (if not impossible) for a single person to change the foreign policy of the United States.
In fact, although Trump has repeatedly warned about this, he didn’t really end Washington DC’s aggression against the world. He surely hasn’t started any new wars, which is commendable, but he also didn’t end those that the US was already involved in and he never conductedthe dismantling of the unchecked power of the Military Industrial Complex, despite promises to do so.
Thus, he’s not exactly the “candidate of peace” that he’s usually portrayed as in most anti-establishment media. However, Trump is definitely the next best thing and precisely this is completely unacceptable to the war criminals and plutocrats in Washington DC. This is particularly true when it comes to prolonging the NATO-orchestrated Ukrainian conflict. Trump has always been against any major US involvement in Ukraine, thinking it was imprudent to “poke the Bear”.
However, all this only backfired, boosting his popularity and making his opponents more desperate than ever.
The list of those who oppose (although intense hatred is a far more suitable term) Trump is quite long and includes many foreign actors, particularly those with deep ties to the corrupt US federal institutions. One of those is certainly the Neo-Nazi junta.
Thus, at some point, Trump might actually say (provided he wins the election) that the Neo-Nazi junta was involved in his assassination attempt.
Agencies such as the infamous CIA-ized SBU and GUR certainly have the capacity to aid in planning and executing such operations. Not to mention they have a clear motive, as they depend entirely on the “aid” he wants to cut. There’s no proof they took part in this, but it’s a possibility that certainly shouldn’t be rejected. However, regardless of whether there has been any involvement on their part, this could give Trump a perfect excuse to cut further financial and military support by saying that “we tried to help, but they tried to kill me”. And given his rather simplified vocabulary (or lack of eloquence, some would say), that might actually be the way he says it. In doing so, Trump would essentially hit at least three birds with one stone.
First, he would get rid of a massive financial burden, while also saving billions that could be used elsewhere.
Second, Trump would kill the largest source of funding for his DNC opponents.
And last but not least, this would give him a unique opportunity for a guaranteed exit strategy that would be far better for America than something along the lines of the humiliating defeat it suffered in Afghanistan, just much worse and more consequential in the long term.
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Drago Bosnic is an independent geopolitical and military analyst. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.
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Since the end of the Cold War and the Clinton administration coming to power in 1992, the United States has undergone a systemic decay in its political body. Policies increasingly favor the interests of an oligarchic and powerful elite more often than not at the expense of the public. The rise of ultra-liberal policies to create a secular society built upon an amoral technocratic paradigm, which includes the current “woke” movement, critical race theory (CRT), and diversity, inclusion, and equity (DIE) requirements, have further intensified societal divisions and tribal factions at odds with traditional conservative and family values.
The media, which once served as a pillar of democracy, is today nothing but a tool for social and political manipulation. Since the 1990s, media conglomerates have consolidated power, aligning themselves with either of the two party political ideologies and agendas. This alignment has led to biased reporting and the amplification of divisive rhetoric. The rise of cable news networks such as Fox News and MSNBC has contributed to a polarized media landscape where the public is presented with only one-sided partisan perspectives. This polarization is then further extended to social media platforms, where algorithms prioritize sensational and divisive content, further entrenching cultural divides. As George Orwell famously remarked, “The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history.”
Deliberate government tactics to keep the population divided has destroyed social coherence, the sense of unity and shared purpose within a society. Such tactics succeed by keeping people mentally distracted. This strategy of “divide and conquer” ensures that the public remains distracted and disorganized, preventing a unified challenge to the status quo. Identity politics, for instance, has been leveraged to create and exacerbate social divisions.
“The most dangerous man to any government is the man who is able to think things out for himself,” wrote essayist H.L. Mencken in the early 20thcentury. “Almost inevitably, he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane, and intolerable.”
Mencken’s quote underscores the consequence of a corrupt political system that fosters division only to maintain control. By encouraging cultural fragmentation, those in power divert attention from their failings and prevent unified opposition.
A clear example of this tactic is seen in the handling of racial and ethnic tensions. Political leaders exploit these tensions to rally their base, diverting attention from broader systemic issues such as economic inequality, corporate corruption and federal agency capture. The government’s response to movements like Black Lives Matter is mixed, with some politicians using the movement to stoke fears, race baiting, among certain demographics while failing to address the root causes of racial injustice.
The deliberate use of social issues to create division is not new. As Niccolò Machiavelli observed,
“The wise ruler, whenever he can, will subdue the people by force or by fraud.”
By keeping the population focused on cultural and social battles, the government can operate without substantial public scrutiny or opposition. Power then resorts to manipulation and coercion to maintain control and stability.Particularly in our post-9/11 era, this Machiavellian principle is evident in the draconian policies and practices designed to maintain control over the populace. These measures, masquerading as the need for national security, reflect the use of both force and fraud to subdue and manipulate public sentiment.
The Patriot Act significantly expanded the government’s surveillance capabilities. The Act allowed for the indefinite detention of immigrants, expanded the powers of law enforcement agencies to search personal records without a court order, and increased the ability to monitor phone and email communications. It facilitated government intrusion into the private lives of every American.The National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) further threatened and undermined constitutional protections and civil liberties includingindefinite detention of American citizens without trial. The revelations by Edward Snowden in 2013 highlighted the extent of the National Security Agency’s (NSA) surveillance programs, which included the bulk collection of phone metadata and internet communications of millions of Americans. This extensive surveillance infrastructure represents a clear example of subduing the populace by fraud.
In addition, the rise of digital platforms and social media has introduced new avenues for both surveillance and censorship. Governments and private companies have increasingly collaborated to monitor and control online content, often under the guise of combating misinformation and maintaining public order. This intersection of public and private surveillance mechanisms creates an environment where dissent and alternative viewpoints can be easily suppressed, further aligning with Machiavelli’s notion of subduing the populace by fraudulent means.
The impact of government policies favoring the elite is most acutely felt by the underprivileged and poor. According to a joint investigation conducted by Princeton and Northwestern universities, economic policies since the Clinton administration have prioritized the interests of Wall street and the multinational behemoths of defense, pharmaceutical, chemical and energy industries, leading to increased income inequality and reduced social mobility. The welfare reforms of the 1990s, for instance, aimed to reduce dependency on government assistance have accomplished the opposite by increasing hardships for many vulnerable populations.
The deregulation of financial markets, which culminated in the 2008 financial crisis, tossed the citizens of Main Street into the gutter. Washington’s incompetence led to a housing market collapse, widespread unemployment, and a severe recession. While large financial institutions received substantial bailouts, many ordinary Americans faced foreclosure, unemployment, and financial ruin. As Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz noted,
“The gap between what our economic and political systems were supposed to deliver — rising living standards for most citizens — and what they actually delivered became intolerable.”
That is exactly what is happening today, and worse.
The regulatory capture by private corporate interests over government agencies has further exacerbated social and economic inequalities. Regulatory bodies that are supposed to protect public welfare are now fully co-opted by the industries they regulate. This is especially true of the pharmaceutical industrial complex’s domination of the FDA and CDC. The approval of opioid medications, heavily influenced by pharmaceutical lobbying, has led to an opioid epidemic that has devastated communities across the country. Purdue Pharma, the maker of OxyContin, aggressively marketed the drug while downplaying its addictive potential, leading to widespread addiction and overdose deaths. And for years the legislators and officials in our compromised duopoly did nothing.
Similarly, the revolving door between Wall Street and government agencies like the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) undermines regulatory oversight. Former executives from major financial institutions take key regulatory positions, ensuring that policies remain favorable to their former employers.
The suppression of fundamental democratic principles by those in power is a significant consequence of systemic decay. Voter suppression, gerrymandering, and the disproportionate influence of money in politics undermine fair representation and accountability. These actions prevent the public from exercising their democratic rights and perpetuate the control of a minority elite. The disenfranchisement of marginalized communities through restrictive voting laws is a prime example. Measures such as voter ID laws, purging voter rolls, and limiting early voting disproportionately affect low-income and minority voters. These tactics ensure that the political power remains concentrated among those who support the elite’s agenda.
The influence of money in politics further exacerbates this issue. The landmark Supreme Court decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission in 2010 allowed for unlimited corporate spending in elections, amplifying the political power of wealthy individuals and corporations. This decision has led to an influx of “dark money” in politics, where the interests of the few outweigh the needs of the many.
President Franklin D. Roosevelt warned,
“The liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic state itself.”
Seventy years later money in politics has broken the very fabric of democracy, creating an oligarchic regime that enslaves the public.
All of this has enormous psychological consequences because someone must be blamed for this decay and rot in Washington. One acknowledged way to relieve stress is to act out, and often with vitriolic aggression.The emergence of ultra-liberal policies regarding race, the “woke” movement, and the emphasis on critical race theory (CRT), and diversity, inclusion, and equity (DIE) mandates in public spaces and institutions have intensified societal divisions. These policies, while aimed at addressing historical injustices and promoting inclusivity, have accomplished the opposite and sparked equally aggressive backlashes from conservative and traditional value-based communities.
Critical race theory, which examines the intersection of race and law and its impact on racial inequality, has arisen out of nowhere as a flashpoint in American politics. Proponents argue that CRT provides a necessary framework for understanding systemic racism and advocating for social justice; however, CRT’s critics contend that it promotes a divisive view of society, pitting racial groups against one another and undermining the notion of a shared national identity.
The implementation of diversity, inclusion, and equity mandates in workplaces and educational institutions, although perhaps originally with good intentions, has shown itself to be exceedingly undemocratic, unconstitutional, and coercive and counterproductive. Such policies prioritize identity over merit and foster a culture of victimhood and entitlement. This perception is fuelling resentment and polarization, further fracturing social cohesion.
The “woke” movement, purported to represent heightened awareness of social injustices and advocacy for marginalized groups, has likewise accomplished the opposite by increasing societal antagonism. John Stuart Mill observed,
“He who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that.”
Woke’s militant and uncompromising approach alienates individuals who feel their values and beliefs are under attack. This alienation is exacerbated by the woke and radicalized LGBTQ+ movements to label dissenting opinions as inherently racist, extremist and even fascist. Consequently all openings for dialogue and constructive debate are stifled. The vilification of opposing views has created an environment where ideological entrenchment and hostility thrive. But this dynamic only benefits those in power by diverting attention from the more dire systemic issues and prevents the formation of a unified front against political corruption and the elite’s dominance over our lives.
Looking back, when did this rot and decay across America take hold? We would argue that it was during the Clinton years that Washington’s draconian policies, either intentional or naïve, had the most profound and far-reaching effects on the nation’s culture, social coherence, and welfare for the underprivileged and poor.Machiavelli’s observation that a wise ruler will subdue the people by force or by fraud remains highly relevant in the context of modern governance. The policies and practices implemented in the US, including the repeal of Glass-Steagall, the Patriot Act, the NDAA, and extensive surveillance measures, illustrate how our government has used both coercion and manipulation to maintain control. These measures have destroyed our civil liberties and democratic principles. As history and contemporary events demonstrate, the balance between security and liberty is delicate, and the government’s use of force and fraud to maintain power is now the greatest enemy to democratic ideals.
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Richard Galeis the Executive Producer of the Progressive Radio Network and a former Senior Research Analyst in the biotechnology and genomic industries.
Dr. Gary Nullis 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.
The incident on July 13 in Butler, Pennsylvania is the first time a would-be assassin has shot at a U.S. president or presidential candidate since John Hinckley shot President Ronald Reagan on March 30, 1981. As such, it is the first assassination attempt in our era in which most citizens are carrying cell phones equipped with video cameras.
NATO’s three-day summit in Washington DC achieved the objective for which it was designed, to create a public forum in which all 32 members of the Alliance could express their unanimous support for upcoming attacks on the Russian Federation.
The war in Palestine and throughout the regions mentioned did not begin less than one year ago, it has a history of more than a century which some aspects were outlined in the pamphlet “Zionism: The Myths, the Lies, the Crimes”.
A team of Italian researchers verified what they called “the real impact of the vaccination campaign” by comparing the risk of all-cause death among vaccinated and unvaccinated residents of the Italian province of Pescara.
With the Venezuelan presidential election coming up on July 28, retired diplomat Edmundo González is reported to be leading the polls, even though the former ambassador was unknown to the majority of the population up to a few months ago and never sought elected office.
In this article, I will review the different types of aggression used by Washington against Nicaragua. This is not ancient history; the interference continues to today. The methods change but the purpose remains the same: to subjugate nominally independent countries and use them in the interests of US corporations, elites and government. When nations resist domination and insist on independence, the US goal becomes to prevent them from succeeding.
The Palestinians want their land back. Then they will talk of peace. The Israelis want peace, but demand Palestinian land. And that, in three short sentences, is the intractable nature of this conflict.
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Indonesia’s traditional foreign policy is a careful balance between the United States and China, one that Washington seeks to unsettle without respecting the Southeast Asian country’s historical non-alignment stance. Indonesia aims to uphold its strategic independence while promoting regional stability and prosperity, but this is also being challenged by Washington’s growing militancy against China in the Asia-Pacific region.
Despite China and the US accusing each other of military maneuvers that fuel tensions in the Asia-Pacific region, Indonesia holds major military exercises with the US but maintains China as its main economic partner. This is in the hope of offsetting the risk of pivoting too much towards one great power, especially as both desperately vie for influence in a country with three major maritime chokepoints — the Malacca, Lombok, and Sumba Straits.
The 2023 Super Garuda Shield exercise involved 1,900 Indonesian military personnel, 2,100 from the US, and 1,000 more from Australia, Japan, and Singapore, and “strengthens the US-Indonesian bilateral relationship,” according to US Maj. General Jered P. Helwig. This was the largest such exercise involving Indonesian and US troops.
Although the US will once again participate in the 2024 Super Garuda Shield, Indonesian military spokesman Major General Nugraha Gumilar stressed that the exercise has no intention of consolidating military power against certain countries and reaffirmed that Indonesia is a non-aligned country in terms of regional security, adding that there is defence cooperation with China in military education and officer’s student exchange.
“We have Chinese military officers joining the Indonesian military’s Staff and Command School and the Indonesian Army’s Staff and Command School,” he said.
At the same time, a 2017 United States National Defense University assessment found that Indonesia was among China’s top ten military diplomatic partners from 2003 to 2016.
Decisionmakers in Jakarta have successfully maintained a balanced policy, but Washington is actively challenging this. Washington seeks to exploit differences Southeast Asian countries have with each other and China because of territorial disputes over the South China Sea and leverages this to turn countries against Beijing.
One example is Indonesian Trade Minister Zulifi Hasan’s announcement in June of the introduction of import duties on Chinese goods to mitigate the effects of the US-China trade war.
“The United States wants to impose a 200% tariff on imported ceramics or clothing. We can also do this to ensure that our small businesses and industries survive and thrive,” the minister said.
Washington’s trade war has led to an oversupply of goods in China’s domestic markets, forcing the redirection of commodity flows to other foreign markets, particularly Indonesia, which threatens Indonesian producers. Recall that in May 2024, the trade confrontation between the US and China reached a new level after US President Joe Biden introduced protective tariffs on a wide range of Chinese goods, which has clearly hurt Indonesia despite its balanced policies.
Yet, even manipulative tactics like this to unsettle Jakarta-Beijing relations cannot work. Indonesia’s president-elect Prabowo Subianto, who will take office on October 20, travelled to Beijing on April 1 at the invitation of Chinese President Xi Jinping, just some weeks after securing the presidency, signaling his intent to continue Indonesia’s cooperation with China.
Continued cooperation with Beijing will be lucrative and beneficial for Indonesia, which already has 71 China-funded projects underway, the same number of projects as Pakistan and second only to Cambodia’s 82. Indonesia–China trade reached over $149 billion in 2022, a 19.8% increase year-on-year, and China’s $8.2 billion was the second-largest source of investment in Indonesia. China pledged an additional $44.89 billion to Indonesia in July 2023 and a further $21.7 billion two months later.
In this way, although the US is seemingly a more important military partner for Indonesia than China, the country’s main trading partner is clearly China. Nonetheless, the US has caused minor damage in Indonesia-China ties through its trade war, but this is only a hiccup in the grander scheme of trade relations and investments, which are only set to increase year on year.
Given that Donald Trump is expected to enter the White House in January 2025, tensions between Washington and Beijing will heighten further than what Biden took it, and Indonesia, as a country that sees a huge portion of world trade passing through its waters, will become a key battleground for influence. However, it is likely that the status quo in Jakarta-Washington and Jakarta-Beijing ties will continue when Subianto becomes president later this year since he has given no indication of moving away from Indonesia’s traditionally non-aligned position.
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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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In the 48 hours before he opened fire on former President Donald Trump, 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks made a series of stops in and around his suburban Pittsburgh hometown.
On Friday, he went to a shooting range where he was a member, and practiced firing, a law enforcement official told CNN. The next morning, Crooks went to a Home Depot, where he bought a five-foot ladder, and a gun store, where he purchased 50 rounds of ammunition, the official said.
Then, Crooks drove his Hyundai Sonata about an hour north, joining thousands of people from around the region who flocked to Trump’s rally in Butler, Pennsylvania. He parked the car outside the rally, with an improvised explosive device hidden in the trunk that was wired to a transmitter he carried, the official said. Then, investigators believe, he used his newly-bought ladder to scale a nearby building, and opened fire on the former president.
IF this is true, it is yet another glaring indication that security was simply pulled from the building located about 130 yards north of where Trump was scheduled to speak.
Naturally the notion of Crooks toting a ladder up to the building without being observed and stopped seems beyond belief. The CNN report mentions nothing about a roof rack on his car, and even a telescoping ladder probably wouldn’t fit in a Hyundai Sonata.
An alternative theory is that the alleged “law enforcement” official quoted by CNN is misdirection—that is, that in fact it was conveyed to Crooks that the ladder would already be in place upon his arrival. Given that the building was the most logical place to post police sentries, one wonders if the ladder was originally erected for police officers who then—for some reason—left their post and left the ladder in place.
IF Crooks brought the ladder with him, he must have visited the building in advance to ascertain the roof height and a favorable place to erect the ladder (on a section of wall conveniently obscured by a cluster of ornamental cypress trees).
The following image is a still from a video taken from a helicopter after Crooks was shot in the head by a counter-sniper.
The top arrow points to his body. Just below it is his rifle lying a few feet from him. The arrow to the right points to his backpack. The far right arrow points to a ladder. Note the large flow of blood downslope of his body in the following closeup.
The aerial video appears to have been taken before any law enforcement officers made it onto the roof. I initially wondered if it was taken right after an officer checked Crooks’s body to make sure he was dead, then separated the weapon from his body, and then (for some reason) left the scene.
However, the totality of elements displayed in the photograph indicates that the most likely explanation is that—AFTER Crooks fired the shots—he tossed the weapon to his left and was trying to crawl backwards to return to the ladder when he was shot in the head.
Note there is no way he could have rested his rifle on the ridge to fire at Trump without being seen by the counter-snipers, who were standing on a higher elevation on the barn roof. In order to retreat hastily back down the slope, Crooks must have failed to keep his head sufficiently low to evade the counter-sniper’s shot.
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All images in this article are from CD unless otherwise stated
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Note: These remarks were delivered at a public forum on the history and current situation in Palestine and West Asia. The pamphlet entitled “Zionism: the Myths, the Lies, the Crimes” was recently published by fighting-words.net. This pamphlet is based on a series of classes delivered by Abayomi Azikiwe and David Sole during 2009 and 2013 in Detroit. The forum on July 15 reviewed some of the points raised in the pamphlet as well as an update on developments in Palestine and West Asia since the beginning of the Al-Aqsa Flood on October 7, 2023. Yvonne Jones, an organizer for the Moratorium NOW! Coalition, chaired the forum.
It is important to review the recent developments in the Gaza Strip, Palestine as a whole and the entire West Asia and North Africa regions in the aftermath of the events of October 7.
The war in Palestine and throughout the regions mentioned did not begin less than one year ago, it has a history of more than a century which some aspects were outlined in the pamphlet “Zionism: The Myths, the Lies, the Crimes”.
Having said this, it is essential to understanding the recent phase of the genocidal war that this settler-colonial history has only further confirmed the arguments put forward in the publication. Immediately after the beginning of the Al-Aqsa Flood, the United States government and its imperialist allies sought to provide not only a rationale for an escalation in attacks upon the Palestinian people these states transferred weapons to the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) to injure, displace and kill even more inhabitants of the Gaza Strip.
Hamas, the Resistance movement which has the largest presence in Gaza as the administrative apparatus, has controlled the enclave since 2007. During that year the Israeli regime ordered the evacuation of the settler-colonial enclaves into the other areas of historical Palestine.
However, this purported withdrawal did not bring peace and stability to Gaza and the West Bank. The Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) continued their periodic bombing operations and targeted assassinations.
Hamas, through its military wing known as the Al-Qassam Brigades, maintained their right to launch armed attacks on the settler-colonial outposts in other areas of the country. Hamas are not the only resistance organizations which have a presence in Gaza. Reports since the beginning of the Al-Aqsa Flood indicate that at least nine different brigades are involved in the military campaign against the IDF. Another important organization is the Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) and its military wing known as the Al-Quds Brigades.
the Popular Resistance Committees with its armed wing known as Al-Nasser Saled ad-Din Brigades;
Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) whose military structure is called Abu Ali Mustafa Brigades;
Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine—General Command (PFLP-GC) with the military wing known as Jihad Jibril Brigades;
Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine whose armed forces are the National Resistance Brigades or the Omar al-Qassem Brigades;
Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigade, which could be the military wing of Fatah in Gaza; and
Abd al-Qadar al-Husseini Brigade, also said to be an armed unit of Fatah; and
the Palestinian Mujahideen Movement.
With the existence of these organizations on the ground in Gaza it is not surprising that the Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) have not been able to subdue the people. The ongoing resistance is remarkable considering the large-scale assault on the Gaza Strip where nearly 39,000 people have been killed, most of whom are women, children, seniors and the infirm. In addition, nearly 90,000 have been wounded and injured. Gaza’s population of 2.3 million remain displaced and imperiled.
The lack of food, clean water, fuel, medical facilities, medicines and other essentials of life is undoubtedly contributing to the toll of those suffering from illnesses and dying daily. Gaza has been described as the largest openair prison in the world even prior to the events of October 7. Since the latest phase of the war, the conditions have worsened as the IDF blocks much needed humanitarian assistance from entering the enclave. The incessant bombing and shelling combined with the enhanced blockade has prompted billions of people around the world describing the role of the settler-colonial regime in Tel Aviv as genocidal.
International Solidarity Has Further Exposed Zionism as an Imperialist Project
Emerging from the horrors of the last nine months has been the mobilization of the largest solidarity movement internationally. Demonstrations erupted in various geo-political regions around the world. In areas close to Palestine in states such as Lebanon, Egypt, Iraq, Yemen, Iran, etc., millions took to the streets in condemnation of the Israeli Apartheid regime.
In neighboring Lebanon, the Hezbollah resistance movement has opened another front against Tel Aviv. The Israeli government has relocated hundreds of thousands of its people from the border areas with southern Lebanon.
Resistance forces in Iraq, Syria and Yemen have engaged in military strikes against the State of Israel. Yemen has gone further than any other states by imposing a blockade on vessels conducting trade with the Zionist regime utilizing the Red Sea.
“The Armed Forces of Yemen’s Sanaa government, aligned with the Ansarallah resistance movement, announced on 14 July an operation against an Israeli ship in the Gulf of Aden and an attack targeting Israel’s southern port city of Eilat, known in Arabic as Umm al-Rashrash. Sanaa’s forces said the operations were a ‘response to the Al-Mawasi massacre in Khan Yunis, which was committed by the Israeli enemy [on Saturday].’ At least 90 Palestinian civilians were killed in the massacre in southern Gaza. ‘The naval forces, the unmanned air force, and the missile force of the Yemeni armed forces carried out a joint operation targeting the Israeli ship (MSC UNIFIC) in the Gulf of Aden, with a number of ballistic missiles and drones,’ Yemeni army spokesman Yahya al-Saree said in a statement on Sunday. ‘The Air Force launched a number of drones targeting a number of military targets of the Israeli enemy in the Umm al-Rashrash area, south of occupied Palestine. The operation achieved its goals successfully,’ Saree added.”
In Europe millions more have staged mass demonstrations and other acts of solidarity. In some European states such as France and Germany, solidarity activists defied bans on Palestinian support work as they marched in the central business districts of imperialist capitals such London, Paris and Berlin. (See this)
On the African continent there is much solidarity with the plight of the Palestinians. In the Republic of South Africa, the African National Congress government and the recently established Government of National Unity (GNU), have continued their solidarity. In December, the South African government filed a lawsuit against the State of Israel charging the apartheid regime of violating the Genocide Convention.
In January, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) ruled that the charges brought by the South African government claiming genocide were plausible. A series of measures were ordered to be implemented by Tel Aviv, yet there has been no change in its military policy.
Solidarity in the U.S. Impacts Presidential Politics
The U.S. administration of President Joe Biden rejected the lawsuit filed by Pretoria saying the legal action had no merit. Biden has continued the decades-long subsidization of settler-colonial rule in Palestine. He is the only U.S. president who has traveled to Tel Aviv during a period of active combat operations.
Biden proposed to Congress and won additional funds to intensify the wars in Palestine and Ukraine. Funds were allocated also to contain China and enhance the militarization of the Southern border.
In the U.S., demonstrations erupted in cities in various regions of the country. Many of these manifestations were initiated and led by Palestinians, Arab and Muslim Americans. In addition, people from other nationalities and oppressed nations joined the Palestine solidarity struggle demanding an immediate ceasefire and the halting of all assistance from the U.S. to Tel Aviv.
African American progressives and several religious entities opposed Biden’s unconditional support for the Zionist state. In the Detroit metropolitan area where the largest concentration of Arab and Muslim Americans live several African American church leaders joined with other clergymen in a Michigan Task Force for Palestine.
The Listen to Michigan campaign led the electoral movement against the foreign policy of the Biden administration in Palestine. Organized in a matter of weeks, the coalition pointed to another form of solidarity during a national election year.
“Michigan voters sent Biden a strong message during the Democratic primary that he can count us out for genocide. More than 100,000 multiracial, multi-faith, and anti-war Democrats voted ‘uncommitted,’ in strong opposition to Biden’s funding of war and genocide in Gaza. The very next day, a co-chair for Biden’s re-election bid told NPR that our ‘message has been received.’ What began as a grassroots movement in Michigan swiftly captured the nation’s attention. Our message spread to various Super Tuesday states, inspiring communities from coast to coast to stand up and make their voices heard at the ballot box. These primaries are an early litmus test for how much Biden’s stance on Gaza could hurt his reelection bid; the threat to Biden’s reelection isn’t that anti-war Democrats will vote for Trump, it’s that they won’t vote at all.”
Later the establishment of encampments on college and university campuses opened a new chapter in the Palestine solidarity movement. These encampments demanded full disclosure and divestment of all holdings held by higher educational institutions in the State of Israel and those who conduct business with the settler-colonial regime.
These encampments often referred to as “Free Universities for Gaza” were met with state-sanctioned repression. Students, staff and professors working in the Palestine solidarity struggle were subjected to threats from university administrators to terminate them.
As the impact of the encampments spread far and wide, many campus administrators ordered police to remove the demonstrators. Over 3,000 students, professors and community activists were arrested and charged with felonies and misdemeanors. In these evictions, police and vigilantes physically attacked the solidarity activists.
In order to justify these repressive acts, the Palestine solidarity activists were slandered as posing a threat to Jewish students and faculty. They were falsely accused of creating a public health and security threat to the campuses.
President Biden along with leading Republican and Democratic politicians echoed these same sentiments labeling the movement organizers as being antisemitic. However, these encampments and building occupations contributed immensely to the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign which has existed for several years.
Despite the favored foreign policy status of Tel Aviv, events over the last nine months have illustrated the strength of independent politics. Therefore, we must move forward in our solidarity efforts until the people are liberated in a unified Palestinian state.
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Abayomi Azikiwe is the editor of the Pan-African News Wire. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.
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With the Venezuelan presidential election coming up on July 28, retired diplomat Edmundo González is reported to be leading the polls, even though the former ambassador was unknown to the majority of the population up to a few months ago and never sought elected office. By his own admission, he had “absolutely no plans to be a presidential candidate… much less to be president” until April this year when he was invited by the Venezuelan opposition to be their presidential candidate after the authorities prevented both María Corina Machado, the former candidate, and her stopgap from running.
The whole issue about María Corina Machado’s would-be candidacy is controversial. It is worth highlighting that by the end of March this year there were no less than 11 opposition candidates in Venezuela – albeit the country is often described as dictatorship. Each and every one of those was able to register as candidates without issues, Machado being the only one refused.
It would be fair to describe Machado as an extremist: for example, she took part in the Pedro Carmona’s 2002 attempted military coup, signing the infamous Carmona Decree. Carmona was a business leader (president of the Venezuelan Federation of Chambers of Commerce), who acted as de facto president of Venezuela for just one day. During his brief rule, both the Supreme Court and the National Assembly were dissolved, with the Constitution being declared void. There were various arbitrary detentions, including that of then president Hugo Chavez, Maduro’s predecessor. With the support of crowds of demonstrators and the military, Chavez was then restored to office. Carmona is also known to have defended sanctions against his own people.
Last week, the Venezuelan government arrested some people involved in Machado’s campaign (including her campaign manager), under the accusation of having taken part in a violent plot. Considering their record, such accusations should be taken seriously, albeit one is tempted to quickly denounce them as political persecution and nothing else.
Machado in fact faces a 15-year disqualification for her involvement in the whole Juan Guiado’s affair. Her alternate, Corina Yoris (a little known academic who has never held public administration positions) was similarly unable to register due to technicalities. Namely, Yoris own political party was an unregistered one (all she had to do was to find a registered political party and join it).
Then, without many alternatives, the little known academic and retired diplomat Edmundo González Urrutia was named as a kind of temporary replacement. And now he seems to be leading the polls.
In 2021, after the Juan Guaido’s imbroglio, the Venezuelan opposition itself recognized President Nicolas Maduro’s government, as I wrote at the time – although it oscillates between participating in elections and boycotting them. For years, the South American nation has been facing heavier US sanctions and falling oil prices, which contributed to an oil production collapse, export revenue being the cornerstone of the Venezuelan economy. On top of that, Washington plus several European governments blocked Maduro’s government’s access to over $7 billion of state funds held overseas. It did bring about a national catastrophe. In a bizarre situation, control of the nation’s bank accounts (frozen by the US) is given to the opposition, without accountability – unsurprisingly, corruption charges against opposition leaders abound since at least 2019.
Image: Hugo Chavez (Source: CADTM)
Some context is needed. Hugo Chavez, whether one likes him or not, was indeed a very popular president in his country and, contrary to what many believe in the West, he and his Bolivarian Revolution did bring about a number of social advances, pertaining to education, inequality, health and income. Even the 2010 OAS report which denounces Venezuela’s human rights standards acknowledges that “in terms of economic, social, and cultural rights, the IACHR recognizes the State’s achievements with regard to the progressive observance of these rights, including, most notably, the eradication of illiteracy, the reduction of poverty, and the increase in access by the most vulnerable sectors to basic services such as health care.”
According to the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC), poverty rates fell from 49.4% in 1999 to 23.9% in 2012, this being the largest success in poverty reduction among 11 countries in the region. All of this explains the long-lasting cult of Hugo Chavez to this day among sectors of the population. However, the country has been facing serial economic problems for a while, and Maduro’s popularity is clearly declining for a number of reasons.
Besides the aforementioned economic and humanitarian catastrophe, geopolitically-wise, the country faces challenges pertaining to the oil discoveries in Guyana and Suriname, amid the Washington-Beijing trade war. The geopolitical dispute between these two superpowers actually goes beyond trade, encompassing the diplomatic and military realms. The specter of a US intervention still haunts the region, with rising tensions involving Colombia. Venezuela largely counts on both Iran and, indirectly, on China, to counter American sanctions and to project its oil market share. It would not be reasonable to expect the current Venezuelan opposition to have the diplomatic wisdom to pursue a pragmatic foreign policy, given their ideological profile and lack of experience.
Venezuela faces many problems which also include bad policy choices, mismanagement and issues involving freedoms, with a PSUV (the hegemonic party) in crisis. It cannot live on Chavez’s nostalgia forever. One however would be mistaken to assume that the Venezuelan opposition today represented by the likes of María Corina Machado and Juan Guaidó are some sort of “democratic” alternative. They are not and their records speak otherwise. They are part of a violent radicalized minority heavily funded by the US without training in politics or public policy.
There are indeed cultural and social reasons beyond the phenomenon of newcomer Edmundo González leading the polls – if the group behind takes over Venezuelans could face problems similar to the ones one can see today in Argentina, with Javier Milei. And this could have serious impacts on the continent.
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This article was originally published on InfoBrics.
Uriel Araujo is a researcher with a focus on international and ethnic conflicts. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.
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A team of Italian researchers verified what they called “the real impact of the vaccination campaign” by comparing the risk of all-cause death among vaccinated and unvaccinated residents of the Italian province of Pescara.
COVID-19 vaccines were linked to an increase in all-cause mortality in a new peer-reviewed study that analyzed data from the Italian National Healthcare System.
Based on their analysis, a team of Italian researchers verified what they called “the real impact of the vaccination campaign” by comparing the risk of all-cause death among vaccinated and unvaccinated residents of the Italian province of Pescara.
In their univariate analysis, the researchers found the risk of all-cause death to be over 20% higher for those vaccinated with two or more doses of the COVID-19 vaccine compared to the unvaccinated.
In contrast, prior research done in the same region suggested those with three or four doses had a lower risk of all-cause death.
“We also found a slight but statistically significant loss of life expectancy for those vaccinated with 2 or 3/4 doses,” they said in the report, which they published June 30 in Microorganisms.
“These findings call for an immediate halt of COVID-19 vaccination across the globe and a thorough investigation of what went wrong during the COVID-19 vaccine campaign.”
McCullough wrote on Substack that the paper’s main point is that
“COVID-19 vaccination did not ‘save lives’ as so many in Washington have proclaimed without evidence.”
Alberto Donzelli, one of the Italian study’s authors, told The Defender the study is “an important advance” because it looks at all-cause mortality broken down by vaccination status, and accounts for confounding variables that may have affected earlier reports on COVID-19 vaccination and all-cause mortality.
Very few studies in the world have successfully done that, he said.
McCullough also told The Defender the study’s findings are “cohesive” with those of a recent German study — currently available as a preprint — which found COVID-19 vaccination was linked to increased all-cause death in 16 German states.
The earlier study — which followed up with people two years after the start of the COVID-19 vaccination campaign — found that those who received one or two doses had a significantly higher risk of all-cause death, while those who received three or more vaccine doses had a lower risk of death.
However, these results were likely distorted due to “immortal time bias,” Donzelli and his co-authors said.
Immortal time bias is a common study design flaw that can throw off statistical estimations between an exposure (such as a COVID-19 shot) and an outcome (such as an increased risk of death), according to the University of Oxford’s Catalogue of Bias.
Donzelli said the bias “afflicts most observational studies on mortality from COVID-19.” So he and his co-authors took the necessary steps to correct for the bias and reanalyzed the same data.
They looked at vaccination records from Jan. 1, 2021, through Dec. 31, 2022, for people ages 10 and up.
They also looked at follow-up data collected from Jan. 1, 2021, through Feb. 15, 2023, for these people, as long as they hadn’t tested positive for COVID-19 on the date of the follow-up.
They also looked at other variables, such as pathologies other than COVID-19, that may have affected people’s health.
“The results are startling,” wrote McCullough, after doing calculations using the report’s data. “COVID-19 specific deaths were not reduced with vaccination, however there was a U-shaped trend of note when COVID-19 deaths were adjusted per 1000 population: unvaccinated 1.98/1000, one dose 0.27/1000, two doses 1.08/1000, and 3/4 doses 3.5/1000.”
Additionally, Donzelli and his co-authors in their multivariate analysis found that those who received one dose of the COVID-19 vaccine had a hazard risk ratio — which is a statistical estimate of risk — of 2.4 for all-cause mortality, meaning they were much more likely to die compared to the unvaccinated.
“Those vaccinated with two doses showed an almost double hazard ratio of death: 1.98,” Donzelli pointed out.
These numbers are significantly worse than what was reported in the original study that hadn’t corrected for the immortal time bias, he said. Correcting for that bias changed the results for those who were vaccinated with three or more doses, too.
The original study authors had claimed that being vaccinated three or more times reduced the risk of mortality more than four-fold. Based on his and his co-authors corrected analysis, Donzelli called the claim “implausible.”
He said of the multivariate analysis,
“Those vaccinated with three or more doses turned out to die at the same rate as the unvaccinated.”
However, taken together with univariate analyses and life expectancy estimates, all COVID-19 vaccine dosing regimens show an overall increase in all-cause mortality.
CDC: COVID Shots ‘Save Lives’
The Defender asked the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) if it planned to modify its statement that “COVID-19 vaccines save lives” in light of the study’s findings.
A CDC spokesperson told The Defender that the CDC “does not comment on findings or claims by individuals or organizations outside of CDC.” The spokesperson declined to provide studies or data supporting the agency’s claim that the vaccines save lives.
“CDC research has continuously found that COVID-19 vaccines are safe and effective,” the spokesperson said.
UPDATE: This article was updated to state the researchers found the risk of all-cause death to be over 20% higher for those vaccinated with two or more doses of the COVID-19 vaccine compared to the unvaccinated.
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Suzanne Burdick, Ph.D., is a reporter and researcher for The Defender based in Fairfield, Iowa.
Featured image is from CHD
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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NATO’s three-day summit in Washington DC achieved the objective for which it was designed, to create a public forum in which all 32 members of the Alliance could express their unanimous support for upcoming attacks on the Russian Federation. That was the real purpose of the confab. The managers of the event, sought a dramatic display of unity to justify future hostilities with Moscow and to reduce the possibility that any one person would be held responsible for starting World War 3.
The summit was followed by the release of a formal Declaration which strongly suggests that the decision to go war has already been made. As many people know, NATO has green-lighted a policy that allows the firing of missiles at targets inside Russian territory. This policy will also apply to the numerous NATO F-16s that will be deployed to Ukraine sometime in the near future. (F-16s can carry nuclear missiles) Despite overwhelming support for these policies among the members, we must not forget that these are blatant acts of aggression that are forbidden under international law. No amount of public relations hoopla can conceal the fact that NATO is on-track to commit the “supreme crime”.
It’s worth noting, that NATO intends to take a more active role in the conduct of the war. According to National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, the Alliance plans to formally establish a NATO office inside Ukraine that will be used to oversee military operations. In short, the managers of the conflict no longer have any interest in concealing their involvement. This is now a NATO operation. Here’s an excerpt from an article at the World Socialist Web Site:
This NATO office will accompany the creation of a NATO command to oversee the war in Ukraine, transitioning the provision of weapons and logistical oversight from an ad hoc group led by the United States to the NATO alliance itself.
Sullivan’s remarks outlined the main agenda items of the three-day summit in Washington, which is expected to signal a major escalation of the conflict with Russia in Ukraine and plans to significantly increase NATO’s capabilities to fight a full-scale war throughout Europe….
He said the summit will also announce “a new NATO military command in Germany led by a three-star general that will launch a training, equipping, and force development program for Ukrainian troops….”
The creation of a NATO office in Kiev and the reorganization of weapons provision, training and military logistics under a direct NATO command marks the end of any pretense that the conflict in Ukraine is not a war between NATO and Russia. It marks a dangerous new phase in the war, raising the prospect of a major escalation. Washington summit will announce plans to set up NATO office inside Ukraine, WSWS
Add all of this to the fact that the Summit Declaration posits that Ukraine is now on an “irreversible” path to NATO membership, and it becomes clear that every effort is being made to provoke Moscow.
Not surprisingly, Russia was thoroughly demonized in the Declaration which follows the familiar pattern we have seen with other enemies of Washington including Saddam, Qaddafi and Assad. Here’s a brief summary of “evil” Russia directly from the text:
Russia remains the most significant and direct threat to Allies’ security…
Russia bears sole responsibility for its war of aggression against Ukraine, a blatant violation of international law, including the UN Charter.
There can be no impunity for Russian forces’ and officials’ abuses and violations of human rights, war crimes, and other violations of international law.
Russia is responsible for the deaths of thousands of civilians and has caused extensive damage to civilian infrastructure.
We condemn in the strongest possible terms Russia’s horrific attacks on the Ukrainian people, including on hospitals, on 8 July…
We are determined to constrain and contest Russia’s aggressive actions and to counter its ability to conduct destabilizing activities towards NATO and Allies… Washington Summit Declaration, NATO
Washington’s ferocious repudiation of Russia leaves no doubt as to where all this is heading. It’s headed for war.
The authors of this declaration were reiterating the views of the billionaire elites who are determined to roll-back Russia’s battlefield gains, topple the political leaders in Moscow, and splinter the country into smaller, more-manageable statlets. Russia represents the most formidable obstacle to Washington’s overall geopolitical strategy of projecting power into Asia, encircling China, and establishing itself as the preeminent power in the world’s most prosperous region. These strategic objectives are invariably omitted in the media’s coverage, but they are the underlying factors that shape events. Here’s Biden:
In Europe, Putin’s war of aggression against Ukraine continues. And Putin wants nothing less than Ukraine’s total subjugation; to end Ukraine’s democracy; to destroy Ukraine’s culture; and to wipe Ukraine off the map.
And we know Putin won’t stop at Ukraine. But make no mistake, Ukraine can and will stop Putin — (applause) — especially with our full, collective support. And they have our full support. “Ukraine can and will stop Putin.” The White House
It’s all nonsense, but it helps to build the case for war which is Biden’s obvious intention. (Here’s John Mearsheimer’s response to Biden’s claim that Putin wants to conquer Europe. You Tube; :30 second mark)
The truth is that the war was triggered by NATO enlargement, an inconvenient fact that NATO chairman Jens Stoltenberg has admitted on numerous occasions. Some readers might also recall that—during the peace negotiations between Kiev and Moscow in April 2022—Russia’s primary demand was that Ukraine reject NATO membership and declare permanent neutrality. Zelensky agreed to those terms which, in effect, prove that Putin’s action was linked to NATO expansion. There is virtually no proof that Putin wants to conquer Europe. None. Putin simply wants Ukraine to honor its treaty obligations regarding neutrality. Check out this excerpt by Ted Snider at Antiwar.com:
Ukraine.. promised to stay out of NATO. Its non-alignment was enshrined in the foundational documents of the independent state of Ukraine.
Article IX of the 1990 Declaration of State Sovereignty of Ukraine states that Ukraine “solemnly declares its intention of becoming a permanently neutral state that does not participate in military blocs.” That promise was repeated in Ukraine’s 1996 Constitution, which committed Ukraine to neutrality and prohibited it from joining any military alliance. But in 2019, President Petro Poroshenko amended the Ukrainian Constitution, committing Ukraine to the “strategic course” of NATO and EU membership.
Given NATO’s past behavior, this was viewed as a direct threat by Russia. When asked in 2023 if Russia still recognizes the sovereignty of Ukraine, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov answered, “We recognized the sovereignty of Ukraine back in 1991 on the basis of the Declaration of Independence, which Ukraine adopted when it withdrew from the Soviet Union… One of the main points for [Russia] in the declaration was that Ukraine would be a non-bloc non-alliance country; it would not join any military alliances… In that version, on those conditions, we support Ukraine’s territorial integrity.” NATO’s 75th Anniversary: The Broken Promises That Led to War,Antiwar.com
The issue, of course, could have been resolved long ago if Washington had acted in good faith, but Washington has not acted in good faith. In fact, Washington is still determined to inflict a “strategic defeat” on Russia in order to implement its “pivot to Asia” strategy to ensure its future as the world’s only unchallenged superpower. These goals cannot be achieved without escalation, confrontation and a full-blown war. The NATO summit is merely a prelude to a broader and more violent conflict between the nuclear superpowers.
The question we should being asking ourselves is whether NATO can actually win a war with Russia. Can it?
The answer is “No”, it cannot.
Why?
Here’s how military analyst Will Schryver answers that question:
I have done my research — for years, dating back long before 2022…. I repeatedly warned that it (Ukraine) was a war the US/NATO could never win….There is a VAST difference between the “on paper” strength of NATO (including the US) and their actual war-fighting capability. The US could not assemble, equip, field, and sustain even 250k combat effectives in eastern Europe, and any attempt to do so would necessitate the evacuation of every major US base on the planet. The US/NATO not only could not win a war against Russia, but they would be eviscerated in the attempt.
Alerted by the US/NATO destruction of Yugoslavia, Iraq, and Libya, the Russians have spent the past 25 years — and particularly the past two years — engaged in a massive and exceedingly impressive military build up and modernization in preparation for an eventual war against the US/NATO. In the past 2+ years, t hey have methodically destroyed Ukraine’s three successive proxy armies with one arm tied behind their back. Their force generation, combat training, and military industrial production far exceed the entire NATO bloc combined. I appreciate the degree to which military analytical tourists like yourself have been thoroughly propagandized by Hollywood fantasies and the western state-controlled media, but wars are not fought and won by imaginary narratives and flashy superheroes. They are won by raw firepower — a metric by which the tripartite alliance of Russia, China, and Iran now possess supremacy over their hubris-drunken enemies in the rapidly eroding American Empire. There is only one sane option at this point: relinquish empire and make peace with the resurgent civilizational powers of the earth. Otherwise much of modern human civilization itself is at risk of being destroyed, and it will take centuries to recover. Ukraine Can’t Win, Will Schryver, Twitter
There’s also the niggling issue of “magazine depth” which refers to the stockpiles of weaponry and munitions required to outlast and eventually defeat the enemy. Here’s Schryver again:
There is no doubt Israel (just like its great benefactor, the United States) is, in the context of a “big war”, capable of executing several damaging strikes against a potential peer or near-peer adversary. But, throughout the imperial domain, there are fatal weaknesses that exist right now, and which cannot be turned into strengths at any point in the near- or medium-term. The first is what military types call “magazine depth”: munitions stockpiles sufficient to offensively overwhelm, defensively defeat, and strategically outlast the enemy. Neither the United States, nor any of its largely impotent client nations, possess “magazine depth” sufficient to prosecute anything more than a relatively brief campaign against their potential peer adversaries: Russia, China, Iran — and all or any of their lesser-power partners. Magazine Depth, Will Schryver, Twitter
What Schryver is saying is as profound as it is alarming. The United States and NATO will not prevail in a war with Russia because they do not have the industrial capacity, the force generation, the combat training, the magazine depth or the overall firepower of Russia. By every metric, they are the inferior fighting force. Additionally, Russia has already killed or captured hundreds of thousands of the “the best-trained and best-equipped soldiers in the Ukrainian army”. That army has already been effectively annihilated. The troops in the trenches today are poorly trained, unskilled, low-morale rookies who are being slaughtered by the thousands. Does anyone seriously believe that NATO involvement can turn this train around and secure a victory? Here’s more from Schryver:
The Russians have demonstrated that they can routinely shoot down ANY species of strike missile the US/NATO can field against them — not all of them all of the time, but most of them most of the time. And they get better and better at it as time goes on.
Indeed, over the past few months it is increasingly becoming “all of them most of the time”…. As Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu reported earlier this week:
“We are using air defence systems in a comprehensive manner during the special military operation. This significantly improved their responsiveness and strike range. Over the last six months, we have shot down 1,062 of NATO’s HIMARS rockets, short-range and cruise missiles, and guided bombs.”
No other military on the planet has previously attested this level of capability. The US does not have it, and is at least a decade away from developing it….
The current front-line inventory of US tactical ballistic missiles and sea- and air-launched cruise missiles would present no greater technical challenge for Russian air defenses than what they have already seen and defeated in the Ukraine War. The significance of this battlefield development defies exaggeration. It alters the war-fighting calculus that has been assumed for many decades. Empty Quiver, Will Schryver, Twitter
Some readers may find it hard to believe that NATO would rush into a war without thoroughly researching its prospects for success. But that is precisely what’s happening here. Blustery Uncle Sam foolishly believes that he will win as soon as he “throws its hat in the ring. He can’t accept that the scales are tipped in Russia’s favor and that his entry into the war will be met with a thunderous response. But that is the reality he faces. Here’s Schryver one last time:
NATO would face enormous problems of coordination, doctrine and force generation, even if it could agree an objective. Its troops are not trained for this kind of war and have never operated together…..
(they) would be hard-pressed to field a force more powerful than the reported nine Brigades trained and equipped by the West for the Great Offensive of 2023, which just bounced off the Russian forces without achieving anything of note….
The US has no ground combat units in Europe remotely suited to high-intensity land warfare…. Given enough time, money, political will and organization, most things are possible. But there is no chance… of NATO assembling a force which would constitute anything more than a nuisance to the Russians, while putting many lives in danger…… NATO’s Phantom Armies, Will Schryver, Substack
I am convinced that there is a delusional element within the foreign policy establishment that have convinced themselves that NATO will defeat Russia if they face each other on a battlefield in Ukraine. Schryver’s analysis helps to show why that’s not going to happen.
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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).
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We are witnessing accusations of anti-semitism, in colleges and universities, coupled with police intervention, arrests, prison sentences, for all those who act in solidarity with the people of Palestine.
But there something very fishy going on.
While Western governments are actively repressing the protest movements against Israel’s act of genocide, —with mass arrests on charges of antisemitism—, those same governments are supporting Ukraine’s Nazi movement which actively participated and collaborated with Nazi Germany in the genocide directed against the Jewish population of Ukraine during World War II
Update. The French Elections. “The Left” Supports the Nazi Regime in Kiev?
Ironically, the only party firmly committed to suspending military aid to the Nazi Kiev regime is Marine Le Pen’s National Rally (RN) which is tagged by people on the Left as fascist and anti-semitic.
Meanwhile, according to the Kiev Post, Ukraine is rejoicing.
Several of France’s leftist parties which are part of the NFP socialist coalition are firmly supportive of Ukraine’s Nazi regime.
A message to my friends on the Left: How is it that people who are committed to social democracy and socialism are endorsing a Neo-Nazi regime in Ukraine?
The World is Upside Down.
The Left is misinformed. Supporting the Nazis in Ukraine, serves the interests of the Global Financial Establishment and the hegemonic interests of the US.
C’est Le Monde à l’Envers
M. C., July 9, 2024
The following image is revealing, from Left to Right: the Blue NATO flag, the Azov Battalion’s Wolfangel SS of the Third Reich and Hitler’s Nazi Swastika (red and white background) are displayed, which points to collaboration between NATO and the Neo-Nazi regime.
Western countries have been financing the Nazi Summer Camps
My question is: Who are the Anti-Semites? The answer is obvious.
Our Western governments (including the majority of NATO member states), which are generously financing the Neo-Nazi regime in Kiev.
From a legal standpoint, this is a criminal act on the part of our governments, which should be opposed by a vast social movement in all NATO member-states.
The dominant Nazi faction within the Kiev government regime (which is supported by our governments) exerts its power within the realm of intelligence, internal affairs, national security and the military.
Andriy Parubiy founded in 1991 the Social-National Party of Ukraine (subsequently renamed Svoboda [Freedom]), together with Oleh Tyahnybok. Parubiy was subsequently appointed Chairman of Ukraine’s Parliament (Verkhovna Rada).
According to Andriy Parubiy: Adolf Hitler was “the torchbearer of democracy”.
“I’m a major supporter of direct democracy,… By the way, I tell you that the biggest man, who practised a direct democracy, was Adolf Aloizovich [Hitler]”. (Quoted by South Front)
Remember Victoria Nuland of F**k the EU Fame
The US Congress, Canada’s Parliament, the British Parliament, the European Parliament, have invited and praised M. Parubiy.
Parubiy with Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland (Obama Adminstration)
Here is Victoria Nuland with the leader of the Svoboda Nazi Party, Tyannybok.
Tyannybok (leader of Neo-Nazi Svoboda Party (left), Yatseniuk (right)
The Holocaust in Ukraine
With the formation of a new government composed of NeoNazis, the Jewish community in Kiev is threatened. This community is described as “one of the most vibrant Jewish communities in the world, with dozens of active Jewish organizations and institutions”.
A significant part of this community is made up of family members of holocaust survivors.
“Three million Ukrainians were murdered by the Nazis during their occupation of Ukraine, including 900,000 Jews.” (indybay.org, January 29, 2014).
Ukraine’s Nazi movement collaborated with Nazi Germany in the early 1940s. The Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) participated in the killings of Ukraine’s Jewish Population.
The map below is the territory under Nazi Germany occupation (recorded in 1942) extending from Galicia to Kiev and Odessa.
It indicates cities with Jewish ghettoes, as well as the locations of major massacres.
“Before World War II, the 1.5 million Jews living in the Soviet republic of Ukraine constituted the largest Jewish population within the Soviet Union, and one of the largest Jewish populations in Europe. … The number of Jews in the Ukrainian Soviet Republic (UkrSSR) rose to 2.45 million people [from 1939-1941]”
Amply documented the OUN-B and its National Insurgent Army (UPA) were actively involved in the massacres of Jews, Poles, Communists and Roma in major cities including Odessa and Kiev.
At the outset of Operation Barbarossa, (June, 22 1941) in coordination with the death squads (Einsatzgruppen) of Nazi Germany, members ofthe OUN-B were instrumental in the killings in the City of Lviv, Western region of Galicia, resulting inthe massacre and deportation of more than 100,000 Jews:
The members of OUN-B actively collaborated with the Wehrmacht’s occupation forces (1941-1944).
In Ukraine: “..up to a million Jews were murdered by Einsatzgruppen units, Police battalions, Wehrmacht troops and local Nazi collaborators” (emphasis added)
On September, 1 1941, the Nazi-sponsored Ukrainian newspaper Volhyn wrote, in an article titled Let’s Conquer the City, namely Lviv:
“All elements that reside in our land, whether they are Jews or Poles, must be eradicated.
We are at this very moment resolving the Jewish question, and this resolution is part of the plan for the Reich’s total reorganization of Europe.
The empty space that will be created, must immediately and irrevocably be filled by the real owners and masters of this land, the Ukrainian people”. (Emphasis added)
The map below is the territory under Nazi Germany occupation (1942) extending from Galicia to Kiev and Odessa.
It indicates cities with Jewish ghettoes, the locations of major massacres.
In this regard, the Janowska concentration camp was established in the outskirts of Lviv in September 1941.
Lviv had a Jewish population of 160,000. The Janowska camp combined “elements of labor, transit, and extermination”.
What this means is that our governments —which claim to be firmly committed to social democracy– are actively supporting and financing the Neo-Nazi Kiev regime.
Specifically, the German penal codeprohibits “The Denial of the Holocaust” as well as the “dissemination of Nazi propaganda”.
We are dealing with something far more serious than Nazi “hate speech”, namely the relationship of the German Government with the Kiev regime’s Nazi Movement.
Our governments, including the totality of NATO member states have been instructed by Washington to SUPPORT and SPONSOR Ukraine’s Neo-Nazi regime, which came to power in 2014. in the wake of a US sponsored coup d’Etat.
For more analysis on the Holocaust in Ukraine, see:
WESTERN GOVERNMENTS WHICH SUPPORT THE NEO-NAZI KIEV REGIME ARE ANTI-SEMITIC
There can be no peace when elected governments are supporting Ukraine’s NAZI Movement.
There can be no peace when US-NATO are actively supporting and financing Neo-Nazism in Ukraine.
NATO = NAZISM
There can be NO PEACE when the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) Summit (scheduled for 9-11 July 2024) has already announced its unbending support for the Kiev Nazi regime.
NATO is the protagonist of fraud and crimes against humanity.
NATO’S MANDATE IS TO SUPPORT NAZISM AND ANTI-SEMITISM.
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Evee Gayle Clobes had her 6-month checkup and scheduled immunizations a day and a half before she passed and was found to be in perfect health, as she was her whole life.
She was giggling, eating solids, and telling me “no” just the night before her passing.
PRELIMINARY autopsy results have been INCONCLUSIVE, the medical examiner stated that no abnormalities were found, no visible reason to the doctor as to why she passed.
She did state that they are running tests to determine if vaccinations were the cause. I do not know what tests exactly yet, but she did agree it was of concern.
Please share Evee’s story.
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Our thanks to Dr. William Makis for bringing this to our attention.
A recente tentativa de assassinato do ex-presidente Donald Trump chocou o mundo. Os EUA, um país que se descreve como defensor da democracia, da liberdade e dos direitos humanos, estão a tornar-se uma nação instável, perigosa e caótica. As tentativas de assassinato contra candidatos presidenciais são um assunto extremamente sério e indicam um estado de fracasso institucional.
Em 14 de julho, Trump foi atingido de raspão na orelha direita durante um comício eleitoral na Pensilvânia. O atirador foi rapidamente morto pelas forças de segurança após o tiroteio, o que torna difícil investigar quem ou o que estava por trás do ataque. Segundo o FBI, o atirador agiu sozinho e não tinha ligação com inteligência ou redes terroristas. A mídia ocidental está divulgando a narrativa do FBI, tornando o discurso “oficial”. No entanto, importa sublinhar que testemunhas afirmaram ter avisado a polícia sobre a presença de um homem com uma arma apontada a Trump no telhado de um edifício. Segundo testemunhas, a polícia ignorou os avisos, o que parece suspeito. Nenhuma explicação foi dada até o momento para o caso.
Na verdade, são muitas as possibilidades a serem analisadas. Trump poderia ter sido alvo de inimigos políticos ou agentes de inteligência (ambos estrangeiros ou americanos). O ex-presidente americano tem muitos adversários dentro e fora do país, principalmente devido às suas posições “dissidentes” na política externa. Promete abertamente acabar com o apoio militar à Ucrânia, o que irrita o lobby pró-Kiev nos EUA. Além disso, apesar de ser um sionista radical, Trump tem vários desentendimentos pessoais com o primeiro-ministro israelense, Benjamin Netanyahu, e criticou repetidamente a forma como Tel Aviv está a conduzir a atual guerra em Gaza – razão pela qual é possível que o lobby pró-Israel nos EUA quer “punir Trump”.
Considerando que o atirador foi eliminado, o processo de investigação será frustrado e nunca será alcançado um consenso sobre as razões do crime. A narrativa de que o atirador era um “lobo solitário” certamente se tornará hegemônica, com a mídia considerando qualquer interpretação adversa como “notícia falsa”. Também nunca será possível saber se a intenção do atirador era matar o ex-presidente, e o ataque falhou, ou se na verdade apenas o feriu, como “gesto de alerta”. Na prática, a verdade parece quase impossível de ser descoberta.
Porém, mais importante do que descobrir a verdade sobre o caso específico do ataque a Trump, é necessário compreender o contexto político americano como um todo. O simples fato de ter sido feita uma tentativa de assassinato contra um candidato presidencial é suficiente para mostrar que o país se encontra numa grave crise institucional e social. A maior potência mundial encontra-se numa situação semelhante à de muitos países pobres de África ou da América Central, onde os políticos são assassinados por criminosos e as eleições são conduzidas de forma violenta, fraudulenta e caótica.
A violência política nos EUA não é nova. O assassinato de JFK, por exemplo, chocou a sociedade internacional durante a Guerra Fria. As infames relações entre setores do governo e do Congresso americano com redes criminosas, máfias e agências de inteligência estrangeiras são bem conhecidas, com inúmeros relatórios, livros e artigos sobre o assunto disponíveis ao público. No entanto, é inegável que esta violência aumentou nos últimos tempos, com a situação interna nos EUA a piorar progressivamente.
Vários relatórios de inteligência alertam que os EUA poderão enfrentar uma guerra civil num futuro próximo. As tensões raciais e a polarização política são alguns dos principais problemas sociais do país. Recentemente, os sentimentos separatistas do Sul foram fortalecidos pela crise migratória no Texas, e houve até uma acusação formal de violação do pacto federal por parte de Washington. A tendência é que este cenário se deteriore ainda mais daqui para frente, especialmente nos estados de maioria conservadora, onde a reação popular à tentativa de assassinato de Trump deverá ser intensa.
Trump, sem dúvida, emerge do ataque mais forte. Diversas pesquisas já indicavam que ele era o favorito na disputa presidencial – agora, seus ganhos políticos serão ainda mais significativos. Joe Biden, que já foi criticado pelos sinais claros de problemas mentais, está ainda mais fraco agora. Será difícil para os Democratas reverterem a enorme vantagem dos Republicanos.
Por outro lado, os Democratas continuam a controlar o governo, os meios de comunicação social e a maior parte dos setores estratégicos do país. Tendem a reagir agressivamente à ascensão dos republicanos. Os juízes pró-democratas poderiam, por exemplo, tomar medidas como uma possível intervenção judicial contra a elegibilidade de Trump.
Tudo isto mostra como os EUA caminham para um ciclo vicioso de caos, violência política e instabilidade. Não parece haver qualquer possibilidade de um futuro pacífico para Washington nos próximos anos.
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“Whenever any American’s life is taken by another American unnecessarily—whether it is done in the name of the law or in the defiance of law, by one man or a gang, in cold blood or in passion, in an attack of violence or in response to violence—whenever we tear at the fabric of life which another man has painfully and clumsily woven for himself and his children, the whole nation is degraded.”— Robert F. Kennedy on the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. (1968)
There’s a subtext to this assassination attempt on former President Trump that must not be ignored, and it is simply this: America is being pushed to the brink of a national nervous breakdown.
More than 50 years after John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr., and Robert F. Kennedy were assassinated, America has become a ticking time bomb of political violence in words and deeds.
Magnified by an echo chamber of nasty tweets and government-sanctioned brutality, our politically polarizing culture of callousness, cruelty, meanness, ignorance, incivility, hatred, intolerance, indecency and injustice have only served to ratchet up the tension.
Consumed with back-biting, partisan politics, sniping, toxic hate, meanness and materialism, a culture of meanness has come to characterize many aspects of the nation’s governmental and social policies. “Meanness today is a state of mind,” writes professor Nicolaus Mills in his book The Triumph of Meanness, “the product of a culture of spite and cruelty that has had an enormous impact on us.”
This casual cruelty is made possible by a growing polarization within the populace that emphasizes what divides us—race, religion, economic status, sexuality, ancestry, politics, etc.—rather than what unites us: we are all Americans, and in a larger, more global sense, we are all human.
This is what writer Anna Quindlen refers to as “the politics of exclusion, what might be thought of as the cult of otherness… It divides the country as surely as the Mason-Dixon line once did. And it makes for mean-spirited and punitive politics and social policy.”
This is more than meanness, however.
We are imploding on multiple fronts, all at once.
This is what happens when ego, greed and power are allowed to take precedence over liberty, equality and justice.
This is the psychopathic mindset adopted by the architects of the Deep State, and it applies equally whether you’re talking about Democrats or Republicans.
Beware, because this kind of psychopathology can spread like a virus among the populace.
As an academic study into pathocracy concluded, “[T]yranny does not flourish because perpetuators are helpless and ignorant of their actions. It flourishes because they actively identify with those who promote vicious acts as virtuous.”
People don’t simply line up and salute. It is through one’s own personal identification with a given leader, party or social order that they become agents of good or evil. To this end, “we the people” have become “we the police state.”
By failing to actively take a stand for good, we become agents of evil. It’s not the person in charge who is solely to blame for the carnage. It’s the populace that looks away from the injustice, that empowers the totalitarian regime, that welcomes the building blocks of tyranny.
This realization hit me full-force a few years ago. I had stopped into a bookstore and was struck by all of the books on Hitler, everywhere I turned. Yet had there been no Hitler, there still would have been a Nazi regime. There still would have been gas chambers and concentration camps and a Holocaust.
Hitler wasn’t the architect of the Holocaust. He was merely the figurehead. Same goes for the American police state: had there been no Trump or Obama or Bush, there still would have been a police state. There still would have been police shootings and private prisons and endless wars and government pathocracy.
Why? Because “we the people” have paved the way for this tyranny to prevail.
By turning Hitler into a super-villain who singlehandedly terrorized the world—not so different from how Trump is often depicted—historians have given Hitler’s accomplices (the German government, the citizens that opted for security and order over liberty, the religious institutions that failed to speak out against evil, the individuals who followed orders even when it meant a death sentence for their fellow citizens) a free pass.
This is how tyranny rises and freedom falls.
None of us who remain silent and impassive in the face of evil, racism, extreme materialism, meanness, intolerance, cruelty, injustice and ignorance get a free pass.
Those among us who follow figureheads without question, who turn a blind eye to injustice and turn their backs on need, who march in lockstep with tyrants and bigots, who allow politics to trump principle, who give in to meanness and greed, and who fail to be outraged by the many wrongs being perpetrated in our midst, it is these individuals who must shoulder the blame when the darkness wins.
“Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate, only love can do that,” Martin Luther King Jr. sermonized.
The darkness is winning.
It’s not just on the world stage we must worry about the darkness winning.
The darkness is winning in our communities. It’s winning in our homes, our neighborhoods, our churches and synagogues, and our government bodies. It’s winning in the hearts of men and women the world over who are embracing hatred over love. It’s winning in every new generation that is being raised to care only for themselves, without any sense of moral or civic duty to stand for freedom.
John F. Kennedy, killed by an assassin’s bullet five years before King would be similarly executed, spoke of a torch that had been “passed to a new generation of Americans—born in this century, tempered by war, disciplined by a hard and bitter peace, proud of our ancient heritage—and unwilling to witness or permit the slow undoing of those human rights to which this nation has always been committed, and to which we are committed today at home and around the world.”
Once again, a torch is being passed to a new generation, but this torch is setting the world on fire, burning down the foundations put in place by our ancestors, and igniting all of the ugliest sentiments in our hearts.
This fire is not liberating; it is destroying.
We are teaching our children all the wrong things: we are teaching them to hate, teaching them to worship false idols (materialism, celebrity, technology, politics), teaching them to prize vain pursuits and superficial ideals over kindness, goodness and depth.
Freedom demands that we stop thinking as Democrats and Republicans and start thinking like human beings, or at the very least, Americans.
JFK was killed in 1963 for daring to challenge the Deep State.
King was killed in 1968 for daring to challenge the military industrial complex.
Image: Robert F. Kennedy giving his speech on the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. (Licensed under Fair Use)
Robert F. Kennedy offered these remarks to a polarized nation in the wake of King’s assassination:
“In this difficult day, in this difficult time for the United States, it is perhaps well to ask what kind of a nation we are and what direction we want to move in. [Y]ou can be filled with bitterness, with hatred, and a desire for revenge. We can move in that direction as a country, in great polarization…filled with hatred toward one another. Or we can make an effort … to understand and to comprehend, and to replace that violence, that stain of bloodshed that has spread across our land, with an effort to understand with compassion and love… What we need in the United States is not division; what we need in the United States is not hatred; what we need in the United States is not violence or lawlessness; but love and wisdom, and compassion toward one another, and a feeling of justice toward those who still suffer within our country, whether they be white or they be black.”
Two months later, RFK was also killed by an assassin’s bullet.
We haven’t dared to dream that dream in such a long time.
But imagine…
Imagine what this country would be like if Americans put aside their differences and dared to stand up—united—for freedom.
Imagine what this country would be like if Americans put aside their differences and dared to speak out—with one voice—against injustice.
Imagine what this country would be like if Americans put aside their differences and dared to push back—with the full force of our collective numbers—against government corruption and despotism.
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The lodestar of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s talks with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow on July 8-9, it must be the disclosure by the Deputy Head of the Presidential Administration in the Kremlin Maxim Oreshkin that the two leaders discussed the topic of cash payments with the use of cards of national payment systems as an important element of trade support infrastructure and interaction in general.
Oreshkin added that the two countries are also putting in place an arrangement on interaction between their central banks on the issue of accepting national payment card.
At one stroke, Modi electrified the forthcoming BRICS Summit in Kazan in October. Modi also informed Putin that he will be attending the summit meeting. It is no secret that the BRICS member states are seeking to improve the international monetary and financial system and are prioritising the creation of a platform that will enable them to conduct transactions in national currencies in mutual trade.
The Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov had announced after a meeting of the economic bloc’s foreign ministers in Nizhny Novgorod, Russia, last month that “Our agenda is extensive. It includes issues that will directly affect the future world order based on fair grounds.” Indeed, more and more countries are having doubts about SWIFT, after many Russian banks were cut off from the Belgium-based financial messaging system following the start of the Ukraine conflict in 2022.
From the American perspective, the terrible beauty about Modi’s Russia trip is that behind his anti-war rhetoric, PM created an ambience of high moral standing for Delhi that he promptly exploited to bring about a paradigm shift in the India-Russia relations.
Make no mistake, SWIFT translates as US hegemony; it is about isolating Russia from the international financial system; and here we see India teaming up with Russia to create a payment system using local currencies. Notionally, this is not an anti-American move, because the bulk of trade continues to be in the US currency. Cynics may say India is running with the hounds and hunting the hares. But who cares? Americans must be going nuts. Oil, fertiliser, nuclear power plants, ABM system, joint development and production of weaponry — and now, an ecosystem that ignores SWIFT.
Coincidence or not, Modi arrived in Moscow on the same day that NATO’s 75th anniversary summit meeting began in Washington with an agenda loaded against Russia while Modi chose to spend that evening closeted with the Russian leader at his country residence in the Moscow suburbs for a private meal, a walk in the woods and several hours of intense conversation to choreograph a quantum leap in the Russian-Indian relations. And all this while the NATO summit made a renewed pledge to defeat Russia in the Ukraine war.
A Russian pundit at the Academy of Sciences and concurrently a professor at the Diplomatic Academy of the Russian foreign ministry, Andrey Volodin summed up Modi’s visit as signifying a “breakthrough” in Russian-Indian relations characterised by a “new climate of trust, which existed in relations between the Soviet Union and India during the times of Indira Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi.”
Volodin listed the increase in the bilateral trade turnover and the transition of the economic relations to national currencies as the second important outcome of the visit. He flagged that cooperation in the military-industrial sphere “received a certain boost” as indeed the development of the International North-South Corridor, which “opens up unprecedented opportunities.”
Indeed, disregarding the US state department spokesman’s repeated expressions of concern this week over the consolidation of the Indian-Russian relations, the Putin-Modi joint statement defiantly asserted that the Intergovernmental Commission on Military and Military Technical Cooperation will hold its session in Moscow in the second half of this year. The joint statement added,
“Responding to India’s quest for self-sufficiency, the partnership is reorienting presently to joint research and development, co-development and joint production of advanced defence technology and systems. The Sides confirmed commitment to maintain the momentum of joint military cooperation activities and expand military delegation exchanges.”
“India has declared itself as a developing world power that does not succumb to external pressures,” and, second, “an impetus has been given (this trend will continue in the future) to the development of the security system in Eurasia. Some countries hoped that India would avoid this dialogue, but it did not avoid this dialogue.”
This is the crux of the matter. At the grand ceremony in St Andrew’s Hall of the Grand Kremlin Palace where Putin presented the Order of St Andrew the Apostle to Modi on Tuesday, the prime minister made a highly revealing statement.Modi said:
“Our relationship is extremely important not only for our two countries, but is also of great significance for the entire world. In the current global context, India and Russia, as well as their partnership, have taken on a new importance. We are both convinced that further efforts are needed to ensure global stability and peace. In the future, we will continue to work together to achieve these goals.”
The big picture is that India has taken a leap of faith. It is one thing not to give in to US bullying but it is another thing altogether that Delhi is co-relating the Indian experience with that of Russia — and even China. Interestingly, Modi left Moscow Tuesday and headed for Austria whose neutrality is anchored in Joseph Stalin’s statesmanship.
Today, India-Russia relations “are blossomingand getting stronger as time goes by” and their cooperation “represents a guarantee for the future of our people” — to borrow Modi’s words. Make no mistake, this thought process goes way beyond strategic autonomy. No country on earth can dictate the trajectory of the India-Russia relationship.
To be sure, the walk in the woods by Putin and Modi in the presidential estate at Novo-Ogaryovo was much more than a photo-op. Putin had done his ‘homework’ alright.
Actually, we got a preview of it in Lavrov’s hugely significant remarks at the 10th Primakov Readings international forum in Moscow on June 26 pinned on the ‘media leak’ that Modi was due to travel to Russia in a fortnight’s time. That was one of the most important speeches by Lavrov in recent times.
Lavrov disclosed that Russia has plans to convene meetings with India and China again in the RIC format. Lavrov underscored that Russia, India and China will only benefit from the revival of RIC format.
“It is also obvious that the United States is trying to drag India into its anti-China project… Both China and India are much more deeply involved in the Western system of globalisation in terms of the volume of financial, investment, and trade agreements and many other things. But the fact is that just like us [Russia], China and India are fully aware of the discriminatory nature of what the West is doing,” Lavrov said.
It is a seductive thought that a long journey into the Asian Century may be beginning. If the RIC format revives on the sidelines of the BRICS Summit in Kazan, the journey will accelerate. China probably senses it.
Global Times featured two commentaries on successive days commending Modi’s foreign policies. (here and here) The second commentary cites Chinese expert opinion that “The deepening of relations between Russia and India is an important step toward global strategic balance.” (here)
While Modi was still in Moscow, China’s special representative on border talks with India, Foreign Minister Wang Yi messaged National Security Advisor Ajit Doval to express his willingness to collaborate with Delhi to “properly handle” border-related issues amid the ongoing dispute in eastern Ladakh.
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Featured image: President Vladimir Putin (R) and Prime Minister Narendra Modi (L) took a walk in the woods at the presidential estate in Novo-Ogaryovo, Moscow Region, July 8, 2024 (From Indian Punchline)
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ABC News is reporting that the building on which the gunman (identified as Thomas Matthew Crooks) perched when he shot at Trump was the “police tactical staging area” for the providing event security.
The report makes the following strange assertions (my emphasis in bold).
ABC News learned the building was the same building a local police tactical team was using as a staging area to watch over the crowd at the Butler Farm Show grounds.
It is unclear if the team was inside the building, which sources said had been swept before the rally. Investigators are still working to learn if the roof was locked down.
According to a source who spoke with ABC News, Crooks did not use a ladder to get access to the roof.
Officials said an officer was “vaulted” up to the roof after rallygoers called attention to Crooks, who then turned and aimed his gun at the officer.
AP reported the officer retreated down the ladder and Crooks turned around and began shooting.
Note that none of the above makes any sense.
1). Though the building (with a parking lot, located just north of event) was indeed a logical place for a police staging ground, its single most valuable feature for the purpose “to watch over the crowd” was its roof. Why were no police posted on its roof?
2). Obviously the roof was NOT locked down, or else Crooks could not have accessed it in broad daylight in front of multiple witnesses who noticed him on the roof while he crawled up to the roof ridge to rest his rifle and shoot at Trump.
3). The part about the officer being “vaulted” up to the roof sounds like something Inspector Clouseau would do. After being “vaulted” up to the roof, why did the officer then “retreat down the ladder”?
4). If Crooks turned his rifle on the police officer who was “vaulted” onto the roof, why didn’t the counter-sniper—who was watching Crooks through his scope—shoot Crooks then? That is, why did the counter-sniper wait for Crooks to return his aim away from the vaulting police officer and back at Trump for long enough to fire at Trump?
Note that the barn roof on which the counter-snipers were positioned was higher than the low roof on which the would-be assassin was perched. From their vantage point, they could see Crooks well enough to hit him with a fatal head shot. Why did they wait for him to fire first?
Something tells me our mainstream media is not going to pursue answers to these questions with much rigor.
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When the Monroe Doctrine was declared, in 1823,it was aimed at European colonial powers. It told them to butt out: the US “sphere of influence” included all of Latin America and the Caribbean. During the past two centuries, virtually every Latin American and Caribbean country has had to endure US intervention and interference in their internal affairs. The coups, political manipulation and aggression directed by Washington have been relentless.
One of the most victimized countries has been Nicaragua. In this article, I will review the different types of aggression used by Washington against Nicaragua. This is not ancient history; the interference continues to today. The methods change but the purpose remains the same: to subjugate nominally independent countries and use them in the interests of US corporations, elites and government. When nations resist domination and insist on independence, the US goal becomes to prevent them from succeeding.
July 19, 2024
On July 19 Nicaragua will celebrate the 45th anniversary of the Sandinista revolution. On that day, Nicaraguans overthrew the US backed Somoza dictatorship. In Managua, Nicaraguans will honor the day and re-assert their sovereignty and independence. Nicaraguan leaders will likely denounce US interference and their right to have friendly relations with any country they choose to. At the same time, we will surely see negative comments about Nicaragua from Washington and US media.
There have been eight distinct typesofUS interference and aggression against Nicaragua:
1. Conquest 1855-56
In 1855, with a small army of US and European soldiers, William Walker (image on the right; from the Public Domain) arrived in Nicaragua. The country was in the midst of a civil war and the foreign military turned the tide. When Walker’s forces seized control of the Nicaraguan city of Grenada, he declared himselfPresident of Nicaragua.Walker’s presidency was quickly recognized by US President Franklin Pierce. Supported by southern slave holding US states, one of Walker’s early actions as Nicaraguan president was to re-legalize slavery which had been outlawed in 1832. Nicaraguans did not accept this. Within a couple years, Walker’s forces were defeated, and in 1857 he was executed in neighboring Honduras.
2. Military Occupation 1909-1933
Beginning in 1909, US Marines invaded and occupied Nicaragua when US financial interests were not being considered paramount. Nicaraguans were considering borrowing money from European countries to finance a canal running across the isthmus. For the next three decades, the US Marines were ever present to insure Washington and Wall Street controlled major decisions. USMC Major General Smedly Butler later reflected on his role:
“I spent 33 years and four months in active military service and during that period I spent most of my time as a high class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism…. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. I helped purify Nicaragua for the International Banking House of Brown Brothers.”
Beginning in 1927, US foreign military dominance was increasingly challenged by a peasant army led by Augusto Cesar Sandino. Sandino’s July 1, 1927 manifesto denounces the collaborators and commits to “defend the national honor and redeem the oppressed.” By 1930, Sandino’s army was 5,000 strong and inflicting serious blows. In 1933 the last US Marines left Nicaragua following the election of Juan Batista Sacasa.
3. US-backed Dictatorship 1934-1969
Image: Anastasio Somoza García (From the Public Domain)
The US Marines departed but left behind trained surrogates. In 1934, the “National Guard” reneged on a peace agreement with Sandino and murdered him, his brother and two generals.They proceeded to destroy Sandino’s army and then overthrew the elected government.With US support, the Somoza family dominated the country for the next 45 years. Poverty and illiteracy were widespread while corruption was rampant. In 1961,armed opposition to the Somoza dictatorship was formed under the banner ofthe Sandinista Front for the Liberation of Nicaragua (FSLN).After 50,000 deaths, the Somoza dictatorship was overthrown on 19July 1979.
4. Terrorism 1969-1980
Under the FSLN, Nicaragua made huge improvements with land reform and a very successful literacy campaign.For the first time, medical help was made available in remote communities and schools were open to all children.But in Washington, the Reagan administration could not accept an independent Nicaragua. US President Reaganwas obsessed with overthrowing the Sandinista government.They tried to do this by creating a “Contra” army which attacked community clinics, bombed gas pipelines and infrastructure and killed healthcare and rural cooperative members. They even killed foreign aid workers such as young US engineer Ben Linder who was constructing a small hydroelectric dam to provide electricity to a remote village.
In the face of such obvious crimes, Nicaragua filed charges against the United States before the International Court of Justice (ICJ). They won their case and the US was ordered to pay compensation for the damages caused. Flaunting the ruling of the highest court in the world, the Reagan administration refused to pay damages to Nicaragua and continued to support the terrorist army. Under popular pressure, Congress passed the Boland amendment outlawing US assistance to the terrorist Contras. The Reagan administration ignored this as well,funding the Contras through a scheme where weapons were sent to the Contras in small private airplanes. The same planes were used to bring Colombian cocaine into the US.The profits went to the Contras while crack cocaine flooded poor and largely Black communities. A recent book from a CIA “Black Ops”agent documents the creation, training and financing of the terrorist Contras.
5.Economic Warfare 1985 to 1990
In 1985, an economic embargo was applied by the US against Nicaragua. US products could no longer be exported to Nicaragua and Nicaraguan products were barred from entering the US.The goal was clearly to hurt the Nicaraguan economy and pressure the Nicaraguan people to turn against the government.The justification stated:
“I, Ronald Reagan, President of the United States of America, find that the policies and actions of the Government of Nicaragua constitute an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States and hereby declare a national emergency to deal with that threat.”(emphasis added)
The truth was the exact opposite: the policies of aggression by the United States was an extreme threat to Nicaragua.
6. Election Interference 1984 to Today
The first democratic election in Nicaragua’s history took place in 1984. The FSLN won against a very divided opposition. Chuck Kaufman analyzed what happened then and afterward:
“Already in 1984, we saw the United States place itself as the final judge and jury as to whether or not an election was legitimate… Delegitimizing elections is one of the primary overt tools used by the United States to subvert democracy around the world…. The 1990 election is where the US game plan for election intervention was written, perfected and victorious…. Through the use of money and pressure, the US took advantage of Nicaragua’s lack of laws controlling foreign money in its elections to create a unified 14 party anti-Sandinista coalition … The US then spent more money per Nicaraguan voter than George H W Bush and Michael Dukakiscombined spent per US voter in our 1988presidential election. At the same time the US warned Nicaraguan voters that the Contra War, which had cost them 40,000 sons and daughters, would continue if Daniel Ortega won reelection.”
US intervention was “successful” in bringingthe US-supported team into power in Managua. A slim majority of Nicaraguans cried uncle in the face ofUS aggression and threats. The US and western media was surprised when Daniel Ortega and the FSLN peacefully left office and passed on the leadership.
Image: Daniel Ortega
Neoliberal policies reigned for the next 16 years. While they were good for the wealthy and elites, they were a disaster for the majority of Nicaraguans.Health care and education was again privatized. Land reform measures and the literacy campaign were ended. Illiteracy again became widespread.State controlled infrastructure including roads, water and electricity was not improved, it was in disrepair and decline.
In the elections of 2006, Daniel Ortega and the FSLN won a plurality. There were multiple reasons: first, the economy and deteriorating infrastructure was a disaster.Second, the US failed to unite the right. Third, US election interference was publicly revealed after the US ambassador unwisely told some visiting activists how many millions were allotted for interfering in the election.
7.Subversion Through NGOs and “Color Revolution”
After 16 years in opposition, the FSLN came back to power in 2007 under the leadership of Ortega.With ever increasing electoral support, they have governed since then. The reasons for their popularity are practical.Healthcare and education are provided free.Roads and highways have been greatly improved and now extend across the country to the Caribbean. Electricity and running water have been continuously expanded and are now available throughout 98% of the country. Nicaragua is in the world top 10%in gender equality and renewable energy. Nicaragua actively assists small farmers and is 90% food sovereign.
Washington has not rushed to congratulate Nicaragua on their successes. On the contrary, this success has been noted with displeasure and Nicaragua has returned to the list of countries targeted for destabilization.
Over the past decades, the US has developed a softer approach to undermining governments which are deemed to be “adversary”. A key component of this is funding “non-governmental organizations” (NGOs). These organizations may have innocuous or even progressive sounding purposes but inevitably serve US goals. The NGOs receive much of their funding from US government related organizations such as USAID and the National Endowment for Democracy. As documented by Max Blumenthal in June 2018, the NGOs proudly boasted of their role in “laying the groundwork for insurrection” and “nurturing the current uprisings”.
With salaries which are high in comparison to local standards,the NGOs attract and influence ambitious students and youth. The directors of the NGOs learn which youth are promising to their objectives and what issues motivate them.In Nicaragua there were dozens of NGOs with a mission of“democracy promotion”.In essence these were training sessions in anti-government activism.Other focal points were journalism and the use of social media. There was little or no monitoring of these foreign funded activities.
Masked protesters backed by the CIA who were part of 2018 coup plot against Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega. [Source: idcommunism.com]
In the spring of 2018, there was an attempt to overthrow the elected Sandinista government. The coup attempt was driven by youth influenced byUS-funded NGOs with muscle provided by mercenary thugs and gangs. The coup attempt, from beginning to end, is described in a series of articles by Nicaraguan resident and journalist John Perry and author Dan Kovalik. This was similar to “color revolutions” carried out in numerous other countries on US target list.The common characteristics are: youth mobilized by US-funded NGOs, heavy use of social media, false or exaggerated accusations of government violence,false claims that the protests are strictly “peaceful” when there are actually widespread provocations and violence.
Nicaragua passed through this stage from April to July 2018. The insurrection died when it became clear the violence was instigated by the protesters and the average Nicaraguan was being deeply hurt by the continued disruption and roadblocks.Dozens of police and hundreds of civilians were killed in the confrontations. Hundreds of government buildings, police stations and schools were attacked and the economy severely disrupted.
Ultimately, the insurrection and coup attempt collapsed.With police ordered to stay in their barracks, it was clear who was responsible for the violence. The public became increasingly angry at the protesters because their roadblocks and violence were ruining lives and the economy. The silver lining is that it sparked a realization in the FSLN that they needed to be more vigilant about education of youth and monitoring foreign funded organizations.
8.Information Warfare and Extreme Sanctions
Beginning with the 2018 coup attempt in Nicaragua, the US information war on Nicaragua escalated dramatically.In 2020, Nicaragua started regulating foreign-backed organizations.Given thatforeign supported organizations played a big role in the insurrection resulting in hundreds of deaths and billions in economic damage, the need to do this was clear.The new regulations require foreign-backed organizations to document where their funding comes from and how it is spent. The US has the same requirement known as the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA), but that does not stop western media from claiming that these laws are “dismantling civil society”.On the contrary, many NGOs registered and continued as before. Those who refused to register were denied a permit, just as they would be in the United States.
US government influence extends to many “human rights” groups and some branches of the United Nations. For example the UN’s Human Rights Council established a “Group of Human Rights Experts on Nicaragua” to investigate alleged Nicaraguan human rights violations and abuses since April 2018. Their mandate was extended until February 2025 but they have issued two preliminary reports that claim Nicaragua is committing crimes, violations and abuses including “persecution ofany dissenting voice”, torture and the “deprivation of Nicaraguan nationality.”
The reports by three “experts”, none of whom is Nicaraguan, are extremely biased.They have been rebutted in a detailed article co-written by international legal scholar Alfred de Zayas. It is endorsed by 85 different organizations and over 450 individuals including Nicaraguan citizens and residents. The article reveals that the “experts” failed to comply with their own mandate to gather information from all sides. The report of the Group of Human Rights Experts on Nicaragua (GHREN) is solely based on the opinions and accusations of the dissidents and is a mockery of what should be an objective report based on evidence from all sides.
Along with the drumbeat of negative accusations based on subjective or no evidence, the US keeps adding more and more sanctions on Nicaragua. Unknown to most Americans, sanctions (called ‘unilateral coercive measures’) have been repeatedly condemned by the United Nations General Assembly.They are considered to bein violation of international law and the UN Charter. Ignoring the opinions of 75%of the world, the US Treasury Department has recently issued a slew of sanctions on Nicaraguan officials, state corporations, judges, mayors and attorney general.
In late 2021,three years after the coup attempt, Nicaragua held its national election.Western criticisms of the election were refuted in this article. International observers were impressed with organization, large turnout and enthusiasm. The US administration and media falsely claimed the main opposition candidates had been imprisoned. In fact, the few imprisoned individuals represented no parties or significant base of support. They claimed to be “precandidates” not because they were viable contenders but because they sought to avoid prosecution while slandering the Nicaraguan government.
On the contrary, there were five opposition candidates representing genuine parties and movements. The voters had a real choice. With 66% of the electorate voting, 75% voted for Daniel Ortega and the FSLN over the competitors.The theme of the election was “Soberania”, beautifully sung by a young Nicaraguan patriot at the house where Cesar Augusto Sandino grew up.
Nicaragua continues to assert its sovereignty and pursue its own foreign policy. In September 2021, Nicaragua cut ties with Taiwan and established diplomatic relations with China. In October 2022, Nicaragua refused to condemn Russia for its intervention in Ukraine, blaming the US and NATO for having provoked the conflict. On Oct 24 2023, Nicaragua called for an emergency session of the UN General Assembly to consider “protection of the Palestinian civilian population.” Later, Nicaragua’s Foreign Minister Denis Moncada said the Palestinian cause is one of the most just causes of our times.In January 2024, Nicaragua filed charges at the International Court of Justice against Germany for being an accomplice to genocide in Gaza.
In June the results of an extensive poll conducted by the independent and well regarded M&R Consultants were released. They indicate high satisfaction with the direction and leadership of the country. Confidence in the “stability,security, and economic progress” of the country has risen from 36.8% in 2018 to 74.8% today.
Nicaragua has good reason to be wary of the United States. In the eight different ways described above,the US has interfered with Nicaragua’s independence for 170 years.The vast majority of Nicaraguans continue toresist, calmly insisting on their independence and sovereignty. As the song “Soberania” says, “Respect my flag or go away.”
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Rick Sterling is a journalist based in the San Francisco Bay Area. He is a regular contributor to Global Research. He can be reached at [email protected]
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It comes back in a rush, the stench of raw sewage, the groan of the diesel, sloth-like Israeli armored personnel carriers, the vans filled with broods of children, driven by chalky faced colonists, certainly not from here, probably from Brooklyn or somewhere in Russia or maybe Britain.
Little has changed. The checkpoints with their blue and white Israeli flags dot the roads and intersections. The red-tiled roofs of the colonist settlements — illegal under international law — dominate hillsides above Palestinian villages and towns. They have grown in number and expanded in size. But they remain protected by blast barriers, concertina wire and watchtowers surrounded by the obscenity of lawns and gardens. The colonists have access to bountiful sources of water in this arid landscape that the Palestinians are denied.
The winding 26-foot high concrete wall that runs the 440 mile length of occupied Palestine, with its graffiti calling for liberation, murals with the Al-Aqsa mosque, faces of martyrs and the grinning and bearded mug of Yasser Arafat — whose concessions to Israel in the Oslo agreement made him, in the words of Edward Said, “the Pétain of the Palestinians” — give the West Bank the feel of an open air prison. The wall lacerates the landscape. It twists and turns like some huge, fossilized antediluvian snake severing Palestinians from their families, slicing Palestinian villages in half, cutting communities off from their orchards, olive trees and fields, dipping and rising out of wadis, trapping Palestinians in the Jewish state’s updated version of a Bantustan.
It has been over two decades since I reported from the West Bank. Time collapses. The smells, sensations, emotions and images, the lilting cadence of Arabic and the miasma of sudden and violent death that lurks in the air, evokes the old evil. It is as if I never left.
I am in a battered black Mercedes driven by a friend in his thirties who I will not name to protect him. He worked construction in Israel but lost his job — like nearly all Palestinians employed in Israel — on Oct. 7. He has four children. He is struggling. His savings have dwindled. It is getting hard to buy food, pay for electricity, water and petrol. He feels under siege. He is under siege. He has little use for the quisling Palestinian Authority. He dislikes Hamas. He has Jewish friends. He speaks Hebrew. The siege is grinding him, and everyone around him, down.
“A few more months like this and we’re finished,” he says puffing nervously on a cigarette. “People are desperate. More and more are going hungry.”
We are driving the winding road that hugs the barren sand and scrub hillsides snaking up from Jericho, rising from the salt-rich Dead Sea, the lowest spot on the earth, to Ramallah. I will meet my friend, the novelist Atef Abu Saif, who was in Gaza on Oct. 7 with his 15-year-old son, Yasser. They were visiting family when Israel began its scorched earth campaign. He spent 85 days enduring and writing daily about the nightmare of the genocide. His collection of haunting diary entries have been published in his book “Don’t Look Left.” He escaped the carnage though the border with Egypt at Rafah, traveled to Jordan and returned home to Ramallah. But the scars of the genocide remain. Yasser rarely leaves his room. He does not engage with his friends. Fear, trauma and hatred are the primary commodities imparted by the colonizers to the colonized.
“I still live in Gaza,” Atef tells me later. “I am not out. Yasser still hears bombing. He still sees corpses. He does not eat meat. Red meat reminds him of the flesh he picked up when he joined the rescue parties during the massacre in Jabalia, and the flesh of his cousins. I sleep on a mattress on the floor as I did in Gaza when we lived in a tent. I lie awake. I think of those we left behind waiting for sudden death.”
We turn a corner on a hillside. Cars and trucks are veering spasmodically to the right and left. Several in front of us are in reverse. Ahead is an Israeli checkpoint with thick boxy blocks of dun colored concrete. Soldiers are stopping vehicles and checking papers. Palestinians can wait hours to get past. They can be hauled from their vehicles and detained. Anything is possible at an Israeli checkpoint, often erected with no advance warning. Most of it is not good.
We back up. We descend a narrow, dusty road that veers off from the main highway. We travel on bumpy, uneven tracks through impoverished villages.
It was like this for Blacks in the segregated south and Indigenous Americans. It was like this for Algerians under the French. It was like this in India, Ireland and Kenya under the British. The death mask — too often of European extraction — of colonialism does not change. Nor does the God-like authority of colonists who look at the colonized as vermin, who take a perverse delight in their humiliation and suffering and who kill them with impunity.
The Israeli customs official asked me two questions when I crossed into occupied Palestine from Jordan on the King Hussein Bridge.
The Palestinians want their land back. Then they will talk of peace. The Israelis want peace, but demand Palestinian land. And that, in three short sentences, is the intractable nature of this conflict.
I see Jerusalem in the distance. Or rather, I see the Jewish colony that lines the hills above Jerusalem. The villas, built in an arc on the hilltop, have windows intentionally narrowed into upright rectangles to double as gun slits.
Israeli checkpoint outside the Palestinian city of Ramallah. August 2004 (From the Public Domain)
We reach the outskirts of Ramallah. We are held up in the snarl of traffic in front of the sprawling Israeli military base that oversees the Qalandia checkpoint, the primary checkpoint between East Jerusalem and the West Bank. It is the scene of frequent demonstrations against the occupation that can end in gunfire.
I meet Atef. We walk to a kebab shop and sit at a small outdoor table. The scars of the latest incursion by the Israeli army are around the corner. At night, a few days ago, Israeli soldiers torched the shops that handle money transfers from abroad. They are charred ruins. Money from abroad will now be harder to get, which I suspect was the point.
Israel has dramatically tightened its stranglehold on the more than 2.7 million Palestinians in the occupied West Bank, who are surrounded by more than 700,000 Jewish colonists housed in some 150 strategically placed developments with their own shopping malls, schools and medical centers. These colonial developments along with special roads that can only be used by the colonists and the military, checkpoints, tracts of land that are off limits to Palestinians, closed military zones, Israeli-declared “nature preserves” and military outposts form concentric circles. They can instantly sever the flow of traffic to isolate Palestinians cities and towns into a series of ringed ghettos.
“Since Oct. 7 it is hard to travel anywhere in the West Bank,” Atef says. “There are checkpoints at the entrances of every city, town and village. Imagine you want to see your mother or your fiancée. You want to drive from Ramallah to Nablus. It can take seven hours because the main roads are blocked. You are forced to drive through back roads in the mountains.”
The trip should take 90 minutes.
Israeli soldiers and colonists have killed 528 Palestinian civilians, including 133 children, and injured more than 5,350 others in the West Bank, since Oct. 7, according to the UN human rights chief. Israel has also detained over 9,700 Palestinians — or should I say hostages? — including hundreds of children and pregnant women. Many have been severelytortured, including doctors tortured to death in Israeli dungeonsand aid workers killed upon their release. Israel’s National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir has called for the execution of Palestinian prisoners to free up space for more.
Ramallah, the seat of the Palestinian Authority, was in the past spared the worst of Israeli violence. Since Oct. 7, this has changed. Raids and arrests take place almost daily in and around the city, sometimes accompanied by lethal gunfire and aerial bombardments. Israel has bulldozed or confiscated more than 990 Palestinian dwellings and homes in the West Bank since Oct. 7, at times forcing owners to demolish their own buildings or pay exorbitant fines.
Heavily armed Israeli colonists have carried out murderous rampages on villages east of Ramallah, including attacks following the murder of a 14-year-old colonist on April 12 near the village of al Mughayyir. The colonists, in retaliation, burned and destroyed Palestinian homes and vehicles across 11 villages, ripped up roads, killed one Palestinian and wounded more than two dozen others.
Israel has ordered the largest West Bank land seizure in more than three decades, confiscating vast tracts of land northeast of Ramallah. The extreme rightwing Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, who lives in a Jewish colony and is in charge of colonial expansion, has promised to flood the West Bank with a million new colonists.
Smotrich has vowed to obliterate the distinct areas in the West Bank created by the Oslo accords. Area A, which comprises 18 percent of the West Bank, is under exclusive Palestinian control. Area B, nearly 22 percent of the West Bank, is under Israeli military occupation, in collusion with the Palestinian Authority. Area C, over 60 percent of the West Bank, is under total Israeli occupation.
“Israel realizes that the world is blind, that no one will force it to end the genocide in Gaza, and no one will pay attention to the war in the West Bank,” Atef says. “The word war is not even used. This is called a normal Israeli military operation, as if what is happening to us is normal. There is no distinction now between the status of the occupied territories, classified as A, B and C. The settlers are confiscating more land. They are carrying out more attacks. They do not need the army. They have become a shadow army, supported and armed by Israel’s rightwing government. We have lived in a continuous war since 1948. This is simply the newest phase.”
Jenin and its neighboring refugee camp are assaulteddaily by Israeli armed units, undercover commando teams, snipers and bulldozers, which level entire neighborhoods. Drones equipped with machine guns and missiles, as well as warplanes and Apacheattack helicopters, circle overhead and obliterate dwellings. Medics and doctors, as in Gaza, are assassinated. Usaid Kamal Jabarin, a 50-year-old surgeon, was killed on May 21 by an Israel sniper as he arrived for work at the Jenin Governmental Hospital. Hunger is endemic.
“The Israeli military carries out raids that kill Palestinians and then departs,” Atef says. “But it returns a few days later. It is not enough for the Israelis to steal our land. They seek to kill as many of the original inhabitants as possible. This is why it carries out constant operations. This is why there are constant armed clashes. But these clashes are provoked by Israel. They are the pretext used to continually attack us. We live under constant pressure. We face death daily.”
The dramatic escalation of violence in the West Bank is overshadowed by the genocide in Gaza. But it has become a second front. If Israel can empty Gaza, the West Bank will be next.
“Israel’s objective has not changed,” he says. “It seeks to shrink the Palestinian population, confiscate larger and larger tracts of Palestinian land and build more and more colonies. It seeks to Judaize Palestine and strip the Palestinians of all the means to sustain themselves. The ultimate goal is the annexation of the West Bank.”
“Even at the height of the peace process, when everyone was mesmerized by peace, Israel was turning this peace proposal into a nightmare,” he goes on. “Most Palestinians were opposed to the peace accords Arafat signed in 1993, but still they welcomed him when he returned. They did not kill him. They wanted to give peace a chance. In Israel, the prime minister who signed the Oslo accords was assassinated.”
“A few years ago, someone daubed a strange slogan on the wall of the U.N. school east of Jabaliya,” Atef wrote from the hell of Gaza. “‘We progress backwards.’ It has a ring to it. Every new war drags us back to basics. It destroys our houses, our institutions, our mosques and our churches. It razes our gardens and parks. Every war takes years to recover from, and before we’ve recovered, a new war arrives. There are no warning sirens, no messages sent to our phones. War just arrives.”
The Jewish settler colonial project is protean. It changes its shape but not its essence. Its tactics vary. Its intensity comes in waves of severe repression and less repression. Its rhetoric about peace masks its intent. It grinds forward with its deadly, perverted, racist logic. And yet, the Palestinians endure, refusing to submit, resisting despite the overwhelming odds, grasping at tiny kernels of hope from bottomless wells of despair. There is a word for this. Heroic.
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Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist who was a foreign correspondent for fifteen years for The New York Times, where he served as the Middle East Bureau Chief and Balkan Bureau Chief for the paper. He previously worked overseas for The Dallas Morning News, The Christian Science Monitor, and NPR. He is the host of show The Chris Hedges Report.
Featured image: Which Genocide Are You On? – by Mr. Fish via ScheerPost
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Just days after the attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump, theories are flying from all directions. Many who ridiculed the “conspiracy theories” of conservatives are now suggesting the whole event was a set-up to boost Trump in the polls ahead of the election. Others suggest it was the “deep state” or even foreign actors who organized it.
Former US Navy Seal and founder of Blackwater, Erik Prince, claims that
“The fact that [the Secret Service] allowed a rifle armed shooter within 150 yds to a preplanned event is either malice or massive incompetence.” He went on to observe that, “unaccountable bloated bureaucracies continue to fail us as Americans,” adding that “unserious and unworthy people in positions of authority got us to this near disaster. Merit and execution must be the only deciding factors in hiring and leadership, not the social engineering priority of the day.”
Video has emerged showing that for at least two minutes law enforcement knew someone with a gun was on a roof aiming at the former President and no one communicated the need to pull Trump from the stage. You can clearly hear the crowd warning law enforcement that someone was on the roof. Yet he was unhindered until the first shots rang out.
Considering this fact, Erik Prince has a point.
If this is like any previous governmental foul-ups, we can expect hearings, investigations, and commissions that will actually serve to hide the official errors or even malicious intent by some in the government. That’s what government does no matter who is in office: protect itself from actual scrutiny and resist being exposed as incompetent or worse.
But what if there was a genuine investigation that actually revealed the truth about what happened at the Trump rally over the weekend? Could we rely on the mainstream media to even report it? This is the same media that, after Trump was clearly shot on live television, reported “Trump escorted away after loud noises at PA rally.” (Washington Post). And “Secret Service rushes Trump offstage after he falls at rally.” (CNN).
This is the same mainstream media that has been comparing Donald Trump to Hitler for years, and now pretends to be shocked that their vile rhetoric ended up in violence. There is a good reason why the mainstream media is regarded by the American public with record levels of contempt.
The current Director of the Secret Service has been interviewed expressing her dedication to “diversity” in hiring agents. What if her dedication to DEI goals led to an agency that is more “diverse” but fails at its core mission? Can we rely on the media to inform us of this? Or will they, as usual, just blame it all on the Second Amendment?
What if the problem with the Secret Service is that it was moved into the bloated, incompetent, and menacing Department of Homeland Security, the creation of which I strongly opposed when I was in Congress?
We shouldn’t count on hearing the truth about the attempted assassination from the mainstream media. No wonder the elites remain determined to censor social media sites like Twitter/X and TikTok. We live in an empire of lies, propped up by the mainstream media. And seeking the truth in this empire of lies is the greatest challenge for us in the moral bankruptcy in which we live.
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The recent assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump has shocked the world.
The US, a country which describes itself as a defender of democracy, freedom and human rights, is becoming an unstable, dangerous and chaotic nation. Assassination attempts against presidential candidates are an extremely serious matter and indicate a status of institutional failure.
On July 14, Trump was grazed in the right ear during an election rally in Pennsylvania. The [alleged] shooter was quickly killed by security forces after the shooting, which makes it difficult to investigate who or what was behind the attack.
According to the FBI, the shooter acted alone and had no connection to intelligence or terrorist networks. The Western media is spreading the FBI narrative, making the speech “official”. However, it must be emphasized that witnesses claimed to have warned the police about the presence of a man with a rifle targeting at Trump on the roof of a building. According to witnesses, the police ignored the warnings, which seems suspicious. No explanation has been given so far for the case.
In fact, there are many possibilities to be analyzed. Trump could have been targeted by political enemies or intelligence agents (both foreign or American ones). The former American president has many opponents inside and outside the country, mainly due to his “dissident” positions in foreign policy.
He openly promises to end military support for Ukraine, which irritates the pro-Kiev lobby in the US. Furthermore, despite being a radical Zionist, Trump has several personal disagreements with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and has repeatedly criticized the way Tel Aviv is conducting the current war in Gaza – which is why it is possible that the pro-Israel lobby in the US wants to “punish Trump”.
Considering that the shooter was eliminated, the investigation process will be thwarted and a consensus on the reasons for the crime will never be reached.
The narrative that the shooter was a “lone wolf” will certainly become hegemonic, with the media considering any adverse interpretation as “fake news”.
It will also never be possible to know whether the shooter’s intention was to kill the former president, and the attack failed, or whether he actually just injured him, as a “warning gesture”. In practice, the truth seems almost impossible to be discovered.
However, more important than discovering the truth about the specific case of the attack on Trump, it is necessary to understand the American political context as a whole. The mere fact that an assassination attempt was made against a presidential candidate is enough to show that the country is in a serious institutional and social crisis.
The world’s greatest power is in a situation similar to that of many poor African or Central American countries, where politicians are assassinated by criminals and elections are conducted in a violent, fraudulent and chaotic manner.
Political violence in the US is not new. The assassination of JFK, for example, shocked international society during the Cold War. The infamous relationships between sectors of the American government and Congress with criminal networks, mafias and foreign intelligence agencies are well known, with numerous reports, books and articles on the subject available to the public. However, it is undeniable that this violence has increased in recent times, with the domestic situation in the US progressively worsening.
Several intelligence reports warn that the US could face a civil war in the near future. Racial tensions and political polarization are some of the country’s main social problems. Recently, southern separatist sentiments were strengthened by the migration crisis in Texas, and there was even a formal accusation of violation of the federal pact on the part of Washington. The tendency is for this scenario to deteriorate even further from now on, especially in the conservative majority states, where the popular reaction to the assassination attempt on Trump is likely to be intense.
Trump undoubtedly emerges from the attack stronger. Several polls already indicated that he was the favorite in the presidential race – now, his political gains will be even more significant. Joe Biden, who has already been criticized for his clear signs of mental problems, is even weaker now. It will be difficult for the Democrats to reverse the Republicans’ huge advantage.
On the other hand, the Democrats remain in control of the government, the media and most of the country’s strategic sectors. They tend to react aggressively to the rise of the Republicans. Pro-Democratic judges could, for example, take measures such as possible judicial intervention against Trump’s eligibility.
All of this shows how the US is heading towards a vicious cycle of chaos, political violence and instability. There does not seem to be any possibility of a peaceful future for Washington in the coming years.
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This article was originally published on InfoBrics.
Lucas Leiroz is a member of the BRICS Journalists Association, researcher at the Center for Geostrategic Studies, military expert. He is a regular contributor to Global Research. You can follow Lucas on X (formerly Twitter) and Telegram.
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“The fact that [the Secret Service] allowed a rifle armed shooter within 150 yds to a preplanned event is either malice or massive incompetence.” — Security expert Erik Prince, Navy Seal and founder of Blackwater
One of the most puzzling aspects of the near assassination of Donald Trump on the Secret Service’s watch is the shooter’s expectation to find the buildings within the protected area unoccupied by Secret Service and no agents guarding the sniper positions on the buildings.
It is very unusual that an intended assassin would expect to be able to appear with a rifle in a protected area and not be accosted. In other words, it reeks of the smell of a stand down.
Here is the Russian state news agency RIA-Novosti’s comment:
“The assassination attempt on Donald Trump is surprising only because it happened on July 13, and not earlier — a year, three or eight years ago. The upstart, who challenged not only most of the American establishment, but also the ‘Washington swamp’ as such, has risked his head very much all these years… It is clear that now the ‘swamp denizens’ are biting their elbows because they did not think to kill Trump before November 2016: they underestimated the threat, did not believe in the reality of his victory.”
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said that the atmosphere of hatred created around Trump by the Biden regime has led to the near assassination of Donald Trump.
“After numerous attempts to remove Trump from the political arena with the help of legal tools, courts, the prosecution, attempts to politically discredit and compromise the candidate, it was clear to all outside observers that his life was in danger.”
Trump Pledges to Fight Evil
“We will FEAR NOT, but instead remain resilient in our Faith and Defiant in the face of Wickedness.” — Donald Trump
Trump understands that the real fight is against the evil that has in its grasp the Democrat Party, the media, the liberal-left intellectuals who control the educational system, and the financial system that enslaves the population to debt service.
It is extraordinary that former Presidents Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama along with Biden and Trump himself have issued statements thanking the Secret Service for their “swift intervention.” Think about this for a minute. To get five presidents, including the nearly assassinated Trump, to issue thanks to the Secret Service, thanks not justified by the Secret Service’s failure, took organization. That this presidential support came so quickly implies prior organization which supports the hypothesis of a planned attack on Trump. It is a pity that Trump himself was roped into participating in what could be a pre-planned coverup.
Swift intervention? After an assassin in plain view of the Secret Service fires a series of shots that kill one person and dangerously injures two others standing behind Trump and misses killing Trump by a quarter of an inch? Only when the assassin finishes firing does the Secret Service intervene.
How does a Secret Service that totally fails in its responsibility to protect a presidential candidate get congratulations for preventing an assassination?
Trump’s assassination failed because Trump turned his head when the assassin shot, thus throwing the bullet off mark. The Secret Service did nothing to prevent Trump’s assassination.
Is it the case that once the Secret Service saw Trump was down, Trump was believed to be mortally injured and it was the time to eliminate, like happened to Oswald, the shooter before he could talk?
I don’t say this is the case. It is a question that needs investigation.
The question of the unsecured buildings from which the intended assassin fired has produced a dispute between the Secret Service and local police. The Secret Service claims the neglected shooting positions were the responsibility of the local police. The local police say they are merely the ordered around adjuncts of the Secret Service, who are in charge. Let’s assume the local police were responsible for the security of the nearby sites. Why did not the Secret Service check if the police performed their alleged duty?
The greatest puzzle is the near assassin’s unencumbered access to perfect spots for a successful assassination.
To those few Americans still capable of thought, the outpouring of former presidents clearing the Secret Service with praise of its non-performance suggests it was an establishment attack on Donald Trump’s life.
Trump’s response to the attack on his life is not promising. Indeed, he is already moving off-task. He says he is going to reunite the country. This assumes that America has no internal enemies intent on destroying her, her values, and her liberties, and in her place erecting a Sodom & Gomorrah Tower of Babel.
How can Trump reunite a country when the Democrat half is dedicated to the country’s destruction via open borders and the legitimization of all forms of sexual perversion? Is Trump going to compromise with his enemies and give them, in the false name of unity, part of their agenda?
What is the point of a raised fist with blood running down your face shouting “fight, fight, fight” if you are going to compromise?
Trump has to root out the evil, to extinguish the evil. He has to find and appoint and get confirmed a government that will support him in this battle. Anything less and he is a failure.
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Paul Craig Roberts is a renowned author and academic, chairman of The Institute for Political Economy where this article was originally published. Dr. Roberts was previously associate editor and columnist for The Wall Street Journal. He was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy during the Reagan Administration. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.
Normalization of diplomatic relations with the Russian Federation had first been proposed by Donald Trump in 2017. Even prior to the inauguration of president Trump, the US media in liaison with US intelligence had launched successive waves of smears directed against President-elect Donald Trump. The objective from the very outset was to discredit president Trump, presenting him as a Manchurian candidate serving the interests of the Kremlin.
In a highly controversial decision, the Supreme Court on June 28 reversed a 40-year old ruling, reclaiming the Court’s role as interpreter of statutory law as it applies to a massive body of regulations imposed by federal agencies in such areas as the environment, workplace safety, public health and more.
In our strange era in which we are contending with the Matrix, it is important to remember that there are good conspiracy theories and bad conspiracy theories. Good conspiracy theories are supported by evidence that stands up to critical scrutiny.
The Iranian people voted for him because they wanted a “reformist” who’d gradually change their country’s domestic and foreign policies, knowing that nothing radical can be expected due to the strict system of checks and balances that’s in place to prevent this.
Over the years, the number of those killed or seriously injured in gun violence continues to accumulate. In surveys, one out of five Americans have stated that a family member or someone very close has been fatally shot.
Tara Rodas is an HHS whistleblower who exposed how the US government is using taxpayer dollars to traffic illegal migrant children all throughout the United States. Yesterday Tara testified before Senator Grassley’s committee.
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The USA in the only country in the world where there are more firearms than people.
46% of all households have a firearm. This is the average. In some places this can be over 60%.
About 48,000 people die in gun-violence in a year, the majority of this being suicide cases.
When seen in the context of comparable rich countries, the US gun homicide rate is about 25 times higher while gun suicide rate is about 10 times higher.
For every victim of shooting who dies, there are more than double the number who go to emergency rooms in hospitals for the treatment of their injuries.
Over the years, the number of those killed or seriously injured in gun violence continues to accumulate. In surveys, one out of five Americans have stated that a family member or someone very close has been fatally shot.
However the harm done by excessive number of firearms goes much beyond the actual shootings. Many people in certain communities say that due to the excessive number of people having or carrying firearms, they live in perpetual fear and their life has become much more stressful than it would otherwise be without so many guns. Even within families the life of several family members is very adversely affected, particularly of women in families with a history of domestic violence. Schools have also come under the shadow of the stress caused by the wide spread of gun violence and gun culture, including most students as well as teachers.
While there is wide concern over the easy availability of guns and bullets, those people and social movements who have been campaigning against such easy and widespread availability of guns have not been successful so far in reducing the presence of guns and the supporters of easy and unhindered gun availability are known to be politically influential and powerful. They are known to often take very aggressive positions.
While there is obvious need to curb gun violence and the wide presence of guns and gun culture, supported by gun movies and other popular media, some other important questions also need to be raised. These relate to why such popular gun culture flourishes, who fuels it and why such a large number of people feel the need to have so many firearms. Unless such broader questions are also examined sincerely, it may not be possible to reduce the demand for guns and the supply of guns.
Of course the industry which feeds on the sales of such huge numbers of guns and bullets on a continuing basis is also likely to acquire a strong interest in such continuing sales and these powerful economic interests may also be fueling popular gun culture and keeping the demand and supply of civilian firearms at a very high level.
However there are also factors beyond this which also need to be considered. The aggression of the US establishment abroad has to be matched by a popular culture of aggression at home as these two trends feed off each other. It appears that maintaining and popularizing aggressive cultures, using Hollywood movies and other devices, is considered desirable by the establishment to create domestic perceptions and thinking that are supportive towards external aggression.
The military industrial establishment, which has emerged as a powerful force, is also fine with the continuation of external as well as internal aggression, both being supportive of each other.
Hence while gun control efforts and campaigns are obviously justified and deserve the support of people, these may not be able to progress much on their own, unless they become part of wider peace campaigns which seek to check internal as well as external aggressive trends of the USA. Such a broader peace movement can also be helpful in checking some other important social problems of the USA as well, while also contributing to world peace.
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Bharat Dogra is Honorary Convener, Campaign to Save Earth Now. His recent books include Protecting Earth for Children, Planet in Peril, A Day in 2071 and Man over Machine. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.
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The Iranian people voted for him because they wanted a “reformist” who’d gradually change their country’s domestic and foreign policies, knowing that nothing radical can be expected due to the strict system of checks and balances that’s in place to prevent this.
Iranian President-Elect Masoud Pezeshkian, who won the snap elections that were called after former President Ebrahim Raisi’s death in a tragic helicopter crash in mid-May, published a refreshing foreign policy vision at the Tehran Times on Friday titled “My message to the new world”. The reason why it’s described as refreshing is because it moves beyond the zero-sum thinking that the Mainstream Media (MSM) and many folks from the Alt-Media Community (AMC) nowadays espouse.
Both media camps largely believe that the world is divided into the West and the non-West, with the US leading the first and China the second, and they’re both supposedly predestined to clash. Each recoils whenever one of their own cooperates with their side’s perceived rival. The MSM was apoplectic that Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban visited Moscow as part of his peace mission earlier this month while the AMC reacted similarly when Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi visited DC last summer.
Iran has hitherto been considered by many in the MSM and the AMC alike to be one of those zero-sum countries considering its regional role in the global systemic transition to multipolarity and the opprobrium that this has provoked from the West in response. Such a perception was just shattered by Pezeshkian, however, who declared in his article that he’s prepared to improve ties with his country’s adversaries so long as they treat it with respect and allow it to preserve its dignity in all ways.
In his words, “we will welcome sincere efforts to alleviate tensions and will reciprocate good-faith with good-faith”, beginning with Iran’s home region and then spreading outwards. In connection with that, he called for expanding relations with Turkiye, Saudi Arabia, Oman, Iraq, Bahrain, Qatar, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates; doing the same with respect to Russia and China; and then trying to find a way forward with the West. His goal is to create stable international conditions for peace and development.
Pezeshkian is associated with the “reformist” school of policymakers who advocate gradual changes in Iranian policy at home and abroad, while their “friendly rivals” are the “principalists” who believe that that reforms might corrupt the country and could ultimately lead to a pro-US regime change. Regardless of whatever one’s views are about these two, the fact of the matter is that they’re each patriots in their own way, and there’s no way that the Iranian system would ever allow a “traitor” to rise to power.
This clarification is required to dispel the false perceptions among some in the AMC who assumed that Pezeshkian’s critiques of various policies were proof of him being a “Trojan Horse”. Iran’s post-1979 system is chock-full of checks and balances which prevent any such figure from ruining the country. Nothing of significance can be done without the approval of the Supreme Leader, who acts as the leading bulwark against radical policies, though they’re also backed up by the IRGC and other groups.
The point is that Pezeshkian’s interest in exploring a rapprochement with the West doesn’t make him a “sell-out” to the multipolar cause. China is in a relationship of complex economic interdependence with those countries despite being one of the world’s most powerful multipolar engines, while India proudly multi–aligns between the West and the non-West, the pragmatic approach of which Pezeshkian apparently wants to emulate. There’s nothing wrong with either and they both deserve praise.
In fact, it’s far more common for non-Western countries to balance between their side and the West than it is for them to not have any significant ties with the West, so Iran, Russia, North Korea, and a few others are the exception, not the rule. The only reason why they don’t have a similar level of ties with the West as their peers do is because the West sanctioned them for their foreign policy, thus being the ones who decided that they didn’t want cordial relations, not Iran and company.
To be sure, the West oftentimes exploits these selfsame relations by gradually making them lopsided in its support and thus creating disproportionate dependence on its markets, investments, arms, etc., but it’s possible to avoid such a trap if non-Western leaders are careful. Pezeshkian is confident that Iran can thwart the hybrid threats connected with resuming trade with the West in the scenario that some of those countries are interested, but to be honest, it’s unlikely that his outreaches will be reciprocated.
While the MSM and AMC are almost equally influenced by zero-sum thinking, it’s only the West as a whole that actually formulates policy according to this paradigm, not non-Western countries. This is evidenced by the former’s comprehensive pressure campaigns against Russia, Iran, and North Korea, while the latter proved its strategic autonomy by not cutting off ties with those three in solidarity with the West nor cutting off ties with the West out of solidarity with those three.
It’s therefore natural that the MSM is caught in zero-sum thinking, but those in the AMC who have such views are mostly ideologically driven activists who are so committed to the cause that they subconsciously behave as though they’re “more multipolar than the top multipolar countries”. No value judgement is being implied here, it’s just a reflection of reality to help readers understand why many in the AMC promote views that are at variance with most of the non-West’s who they claim to represent.
This is crucial to keep in mind when reflecting on some of the dire predictions that were made about Pezeshkian before his election and in assessing the intentions behind his newly articulated foreign policy. The Iranian people voted for him because they wanted a “reformist” who’d gradually change their country’s domestic and foreign policies, knowing that nothing radical can be expected due to the strict system of checks and balances that’s in place to prevent this.
In the event that the West rejects his outreaches as is expected, then Iran will simply continue along the foreign policy course that Raisi charted for it, in which case nothing will change. On the off chance that at least some of them positively respond to his appeal, then the most that might happen is a boost in bilateral trade and a reduction in tensions. Nothing dramatic will likely happen either way, but at least Pezeshkian is trying to promote peace despite the odds, which speaks to his personal integrity.
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Andrew Korybko is an American Moscow-based political analyst specializing in the relationship between the US strategy in Afro-Eurasia, China’s One Belt One Road global vision of New Silk Road connectivity, and Hybrid Warfare. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.
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I’ve seen a few Substack posts from authors who claim that the assassination attempt was staged in order to garner sympathy for Trump. One author asserted that there is a lack of visible blood on Trump’s right hand immediately after he touches his right ear immediately after the shots ring out, and that this lack of blood visible (in a millisecond of video) on his right hand at this instant is proof that his ear was not actually wounded.
Another Substack author boldly proclaimed that the direction of blood flow down Trump’s face indicates that the apparent blood flow was staged.
As one who has a written a book about staged suicides for which I consulted top bloodstain pattern analysts, I can confidently state that both of these authors are making the wildest of assumptions.
A high-velocity bullet that superficially grazes the outer ear will NOT necessarily produce a wound that bleeds instantly. In Trump’s case, it appears that the wound only started to bleed with sufficient volume to run down his face AFTER he was placed in a kneeling position by Secret Service. It is perfectly plausible that the wound only started to bleed in this manner after he was placed in this position. I have personally suffered multiple wounds that only began to bleed with notable volume after a few seconds.
Note that the direction of flow in this photograph is consistent with his head being held approximately in this position for several seconds.
Copyright Getty Images
In order to make a persuasive case that the assassination attempt was staged, the Substack commentators would have to explain away the following:
1) Multiple, credible witnesses stated independently that they saw the shooter on the roof, firing a rifle towards Donald Trump.
2) Video recordings of a young man on the roof in the prone position, aiming a rifle at Trump at same time that multiple shots can be heard coming from the direction of the roof.
3) The death of Cory Comperatore, whose fatal gunshot wound to the head was observed by multiple witnesses, including an ER doctor in the audience who tried to resuscitate him.
If the young man on the roof was—as some commentators have suggested—merely firing blanks—and Donald Trump crushed a theatrical blood capsule onto his ear while he was in a kneeling position—these commentators must present a persuasive explanation of what killed Cory Comperatore and—according to reports—wounded David Dutch, 57, of New Kensington, Pennsylvania, and James Copenhaver, 74, of Moon Township, Pennsylvania. Both are purportedly being treated at Allegheny General Hospital in Pittsburgh.
I wonder if those who propose the staging theory could present evidence that Cory Comperatore was not fatally shot in the head—and that David Dutch and James Copenhaver were not severely wounded—in the same fusillade.
If—as some commentators have suggested, Comperatore, Dutch, and Copenhaver were sacrificial victims to make the staging seem real, I wonder if these commentators can present evidence to support their theory?
In our strange era in which we are contending with the Matrix, it is important to remember that there are good conspiracy theories and bad conspiracy theories. Good conspiracy theories are supported by evidence that stands up to critical scrutiny.
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Featured image is by Evan Vucci / Licensed under Fair Use
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In a highly controversial decision, the Supreme Court on June 28 reversed a 40-year old ruling, reclaiming the Court’s role as interpreter of statutory law as it applies to a massive body of regulations imposed by federal agencies in such areas as the environment, workplace safety, public health and more.
The Court’s 6-3 conservative majority overturned a 1984 ruling, also issued by that Court’s conservative majority, that granted authority to a federal agency if a Congressional statute involving that agency was ambiguous or incomplete. It left the interpretation of the law to the agency rather than the courts.
This principle blocked individuals and businesses from suing agencies in court for damages incurred when the agencies exceeded their Congressional mandates.
“Chevron deference,” the name given the 1984 decision due to the litigation involving that company, has been grounds for upholding thousands of regulations by a host of federal agencies over the last four decades. Opinions by commentators on its reversal range from “an epic disaster, … one of the worst Supreme Court rulings … another huge gift to special interests and corporations,” to “a victory for the common man” and “an important win for accountability and predictability at a time when agencies are unleashing a tsunami of regulation — in many cases clearly exceeding their statutory authority ….”
On July 10, Reuters reported that House Republicans had asked all federal agencies to begin reviews of regulations that could be affected by the recent ruling, noting:
Three House committees — Agriculture, Oversight, and Education and Workforce — targeted agencies including the Environmental Protection Agency, the Securities and Exchange Commission and Department of Labor in what the chamber’s No. 2 Republican, Steve Scalise, called a “fight to free the American people from the power-hungry administrative state.”
The “administrative state” had modest beginnings during George Washington’s presidency, with the formation of the Defense, State, Treasury and Justice Departments. Today it has mushroomed into more than 400 agencies. For the 178 laws passed by Congress in 2020 alone, federal agencies issued an average of 19 rules and regulations for each law passed, for a total of 3,382 such rules. The Federal Register, a common measure of regulatory action, hit an all-time high 95,894 pages in 2016. That’s 75 times The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, which contains 1280 pages.
The issues raised by the Chevron doctrine go back to the founding of the country and make for an interesting lesson in civics. But first a look at the fishing case that reversed it.
The Fishermen Who Challenged a Bureaucracy
On Jan. 17, 2024, the U.S. Supreme Court heard oral arguments in two combined cases, Loper Bright Enterprises v Raimondo and Relentless, Inc v Department of Commerce, which would determine the fate of Chevron. On June 28, the Court ruled in favor of the fishermen plaintiffs in the Loper Bright case, rejecting the deference that courts have given federal agencies in cases where the law is unclear. The Court did not rule on the merits — the question whether the agency had exceeded its statutory authority. It just ruled on the judicial question whether Chevron blocked the case from proceeding. Chief Justice John Roberts, who wrote the Opinion of the Court, stated:
Chevron’s presumption is misguided because agencies have no special competence in resolving statutory ambiguities. Courts do. …
Chevron is overruled. Courts must exercise their independent judgment in deciding whether an agency has acted within its statutory authority, as the APA [Administrative Procedures Act] requires.
The case was therefore allowed to go forward in the lower D.C. District Court where it originated. Those proceedings are expected to begin this fall.
The plaintiffs are three New Jersey herring fishermen who challenge what they say is an unlawful requirement that forces them to surrender 20% of their earnings to pay at-sea monitors – individuals who gather information used to regulate their industry. The cost works out to as much as $700 a day, which can be more pay than the crews themselves take home.
The requirement was imposed on them by the U.S. Department of Commerce, which oversees the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which regulates the nation’s fisheries. The fishermen don’t contest that federal law allows the government to require at-sea monitors on their boats, but they argue that Congress never gave the executive branch authority to pass monitoring costs onto the fishermen. They contend that the NOAA abused its power, but they were handicapped by Chevron in fighting the rule.
“We are grateful the Court has overruled Chevron,” said Bill Bright, one of the fishermen plaintiffs. “Restoration of the separation of powers is a victory for small, family-run businesses like ours, whether they’re involved in fishing, farming or retail.”
Paul Clement, former U.S. Solicitor General and attorney for the fishermen, echoed that sentiment, stating, “We are gratified that the Court restored the constitutionally mandated separation of powers.” And that Constitutional mandate is what makes for an interesting civics lesson on the issues.
Designing a Republic with a Balanced Separation of Powers
The Founding Fathers were famously afraid of centralized power, and they designed the Constitution and Bill of Rights to avoid it. Power was balanced among separate branches of the government — watchers watching the watchdogs, with no one imperial controller.
In colonial America, judges were appointed and paid by the monarchy, receiving salaries that were raised from duties paid by the colonists. King George exercised sole authority to appoint colonial governors to represent the Crown’s interests. For legislative control, the monarchy possessed the powers of the purse and the sword, stationing soldiers in the colonies while requiring that colonists house, feed, and pay taxes for the soldiers’ imported supplies.
The judicial branch is presumably an independent branch of government, alongside the legislative and executive branches. But many regulatory agencies have their own in-house court systems, called administrative law courts (ALCs). In ALCs, agencies choose their own judges, pay their salaries, and set the rules of procedure. Agencies rarely lose in their own courts. And their abuses to established constitutional norms have garnered the attention of federal courts in recent years especially in antitrust and securities law matters.
In administrative law courts, private litigants are deprived of basic constitutional privileges, including the right to trial by jury, freedom to petition a case before a Constitutional (Art. III) court, and equal application of justice under the law. Litigants who lose may or may not be granted the right to appeal to a federal court; but even if they succeed in getting on the appellate court docket, the process is lengthy and expensive, undemocratically excluding those who cannot afford the cost or the time to wait for a decision.
The New Jersey fishermen in the two herring boat cases were not required to go through the administrative law court system, but the result was the same: the agency made the rules and enforced them; and under “Chevron deference,” the plaintiffs were powerless to contest the outcome.
Alexander Hamilton wrote in The Federalist that any irreconcilable differences between the Constitution and the laws passed by Congress were to be decided in favor of protecting the Constitution as the supreme law of the land. The power of judicial review was first asserted in the Supreme Court’s 1803 decision in Marbury v. Madison, recognizing the Constitution as the highest law in the land. Through judicial review, the Court reinforced that constitutional system by checking the power of other branches. Not just the administrative arm of the executive branch but the legislature itself could be restrained from passing legislation that violated the Constitution.
In 1946, Congress passed the Administrative Procedure Act (APA) to codify the procedure for executing administrative law. The APA provides that the “reviewing court shall decide all relevant questions of law, [and] interpret… statutory provisions.”
It is that deviation from the constitutional system as codified in the APA that the Supreme Court intended to rectify. Justice Elena Kagan, who wrote the dissenting opinion, stated that “the majority’s decision today will cause a massive shock to the legal system, ‘cast[ing] doubt on many settled constructions’ of statutes and threatening the interests of many parties who have relied on them for years.” But Justice Roberts made clear that prior decisions relying on Chevron were not automatically nullified but stood under stare decisis (to “stand by things decided”). The issues could be challenged in new cases, but the challenged rules had to be shown to exceed the mandate of Congress.
The Question of Corporate Capture
No doubt the floodgates to new cases will be opened, as other critics have stated; and it will be a major burden for the court system, which is already backlogged. But it is actually a democratic development. As Robert F. Kennedy Jr. explains on X:
The Chevron decision cuts both ways. The original ruling allowed agencies to function effectively, which they cannot if every interpretative gray area in the law requires a court decision.
If the agency is working in the public interest, we definitely want it to exercise broad…
— Robert F. Kennedy Jr (@RobertKennedyJr) July 2, 2024
The Chevron decision cuts both ways. The original ruling allowed agencies to function effectively, which they cannot if every interpretative gray area in the law requires a court decision. If the agency is working in the public interest, we definitely want it to exercise broad interpretive leeway. For instance, almost every important environmental decision in federal court over the past 40 years is based upon Chevron. Without it, the EPA (not an entirely captured agency) is virtually powerless. But when corporate interests have captured a federal agency, then the same interpretive leeway gives the agency even more power to serve their corporate masters at the expense of the public interest. Thus we have the FDA sending armed police to shut down Amish farmers and grocery stores for selling raw milk, while they allow into our food supply hundreds of harmful but profitable chemical additives that are banned in other countries. The Chevron controversy is therefore a false dilemma with no solution. The real issue is corporate capture. If federal agencies served the public interest, then no one would want to hamstring them.
Although critics say the ruling is a boon to corporations, it is the agencies themselves that are notoriously susceptible to “corporate capture.” As explained in Investopedia:
Regulatory capture is a process by which regulatory agencies may come to be dominated by the industries or interests they are charged with regulating. The result is that an agency, charged with acting in the public interest, instead acts in ways that benefit incumbent firms in the industry it is supposed to be scrutinizing.
It is that sort of corporate capture that Chevron deference protected from the reach of the courts, and that the Supreme Court’s latest ruling has opened to private challenge. The APA tells agencies they cannot act illegally, arbitrarily, or without letting the public meaningfully participate in the creation of new rules. Many agency rules are now vulnerable to judicial review for violating those standards.
Agency Overreach: Some Areas of Vulnerability
Technically, the Federal Reserve, the FDIC, the Treasury, the State Department, the IRS and even the Defense Department are agencies falling under the Administrative Procedure Act and its rules. Even those secretive, non-transparent, unaccountable intelligence agencies sometimes called the “deep state” could be subject to APA review. But as detailed in a Vanderbilt Law School article titled “The Politics of Deference,” “national security” has its own special deference under separate case law, so it probably cannot be reached.
The more likely initial targets will be agencies such as the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).
MSNBC experts expect electric vehicles to be most at risk. A Reuters article titled “Biden Tailpipe Emission Rules on Shakier Ground after Supreme Court Ruling” explains, “That’s because the rules target mobile sources of greenhouse gas rather than stationary ones like power plants, even though environmental laws are ambiguous on whether regulators have the mandate to do that.” Another expert says the controversial tailpipe regulations “will eliminate most new gas cars and traditional hybrids from the U.S. market in less than a decade.”
Steve Forbes argues that Congress would not have passed such a prohibition because of intense public opposition, so it got kicked over to the EPA, which was thought to be untouchable under Chevron. But Chevron deference is no more. On July 3, 26 states filed suit against the Administration over EV mandates. The Petition for Review states, “the final rule exceeds the agency’s statutory authority and otherwise is arbitrary, capricious, an abuse of discretion, and not in accordance with law.”
Other agency regulations expected to be the subject of lawsuits include the SEC’s imposition of civil penalties without the benefit of a jury trial, and FDA and CDC regulations involving vaccines, pharmaceuticals and dietary supplements.
The administrative law system does not follow constitutional principles, which it must if it is ruling on regulations having the force of law. Removing some of the arbitrary red tape hampering small business, local politicians, schools and families by holding administrative regulations up to Constitutional standards can not only stimulate economic productivity and lower inflation and taxes but can help restore the system of checks and balances so important to our country’s founders.
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His entire set of teeth, and gums, must be gold plated by now. Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair has decided to let the world, and more specifically Sir Keir Starmer’s freshly elected government, in on a secret: that artificial intelligence is inexorably majestic, glorious and sovereign. Embrace it and fob off the doomsdayers. Importantly for Blair, embracing it will ensure that the rivers of gold continue to flow into his private purse.
In May, the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change (TBI) released a report that unabashedly embraced the role of AI in influencing the way states govern. It is the accompanying document to Blair’s own address given at the Future of Britain Conference on July 9, which called for reimagining the state through the prism of AI. As he spoke, the sound of money going out the door was palpable.
The former PM would have the new Labour government believe, plucking various numbers out of the air, that technological reforms made to the public sector could see £12 billion of “annual fiscal space” at the conclusion of the first term, followed by £40 billion at the end of the second, with cumulative savings of £15 billion in the first term and £150 billion in the second.
As one has come to expect from Blair’s ruminations, complexity and troubling consequence is obscured by anaemic waffle. He found it hard to avoid the prospect that this enthusiastic embrace of AI by governments would see a contraction of the public sector, offering no details about chronology or severity. Little, as well, on how the revolution could offer “the best route to a society that is not only more productive but one that is more equitable… a contemporary version of the combination of economic efficiency and social justice.”
In Governing in the Age of AI: A New Model to Transform the State, the institute takes a hammer to the traditional caution expressed by the state. “Like all well-established organisations, the state has a bias towards caution. But this is an illusion – a failure to modernise, reform and deliver is a perilous course for a nation and those who govern it.” With a breezy confidence, the report estimates that £40 billion in annual savings will be made as things stand with current technology. “But of course, over time, this technology will accelerate dramatically in its capability, and so will the savings.”
The report is shameless in charting out the institute’s own marketing strategy. Here is the scenario, and we are happy to offer our services in facilitating it, swooping in for the corporate kill. “To access this opportunity [presented by AI], government will need a coordinated strategy to put in place the necessary infrastructure, sovereign capability and skills.” Appropriate data, “interoperable” across departments, will require investment. Models will need to be trained, with necessary computing power to “for AI to run at scale”. Enter the linking of hands between government and the private sector, something the institute is more than willing to facilitate.
Blair’s donor base is impossible to discount when considering his speeches on the subject of AI and the reports of his institute. Over the years, the billionaire co-founder of Oracle, Larry Ellison, has forked out vast sums to the organisation. In 2021, Ellison, through his philanthropic offices, furnished the institute with US$33.8 million, with a promise of US$49.4 million in 2022. These contributions should suggest more than a bit of string pulling by the likes of Ellison over the TBI research agenda, a case of purchasing corrupted advice that can be duly advertised to government and corporate clients the world over.
Benedict Macon-Cooney, the body’s chief policy strategy, is dismissive of the suggestion. “There is no conflict of interest, and donations are ringfenced.” He did, however, concede that the institute did partner public officials with companies to attain their respective goals. “Sometimes the state is the best way to do things, but if we are [to] look around and see private providers which would be better helping with reforms, then we will say so.”
In what seems like a mud wrestle between the mendacious and truth in slant, Goldman Sachs has begged to differ from the TBI’s dreams of technological nirvana in a dampening analysis. On this occasion, the devil is singing in different registers. In its June 2024 report, the investment banking colossus notes that the vast sums being expended – an estimate of US$1 trillion over the next few years is offered – on data centres, chips, AI infrastructure and the power grid has, and will have “little to show for it in so far beyond reports of efficiency gains among developers.”
The report features an interview with MIT’s Daron Acemoglu, who estimates that a mere quarter of tasks subject to AI “will be cost effective to automate within the next 10 years, implying that AI will impact less than 5% of all tasks.” In his interview, Acemoglu observes that numerous tasks currently being performed by humans “for example in the area of transportation, manufacturing, mining, etc., are multifaceted and require real-world interaction, which AI won’t be able to materially improve any time too soon.”
The GS Head of Global Equity Research, Jim Cavello, is even less impressed, noting that AI technology, to be viable, must be able to solve complex problems. AI technology is not the holy grail of company valuations, being simply too costly in terms of building critical products such as GPU chips and unable, so far, to “replicate humans’ most valuable capabilities.”
There you have it. On the one hand, the flowery promises of AI benefits and savings arising from a fierce embrace of technology by governments, as put forth by Blair and his institute. Then we have Goldman Sachs, similarly famed for its ruthless tailoring of advice to swell monetary returns. Neither is encouraging, but Blair’s offerings always come with a barely concealed odour of self-interest masquerading as human salvation.
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Dr. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He currently lectures at RMIT University. He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG). Email: [email protected]
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