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First published on May 17, 2022
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Introduction and Update
Why has the “Confidential Pfizer report” made public under Freedom of Information (FOI) in October 2021 not been quoted or referred to in parliamentary and public enquiries as a means to refuting the official narrative (which contends that the Covid-19 vaccine is “safe and effective”). Neither has it been the object of media coverage.
We have documented numerous public enquiries.
The evidence amply confirms that the Pfizer vaccine is a dangerous substance, resulting in deaths and adverse events. This is confirmed by the Pfizer Confidential Report released under FOI in October 2021. It come’s from the Horse’s Mouth.
Bombshell Study: Cancer Related Excess Mortality in England and Wales
Dowd’s method was to analyze the number of deaths attributed to cancer in England and Wales between 2010 and 2022 [based on data] from the U.K. Office for National Statistics
He compared excess death rates, the difference between observed deaths and the baseline for expected deaths, before and after the COVID-19 pandemic.
He established a baseline of normal cancer death rates from 2010-2020 that was remarkably consistent with few deviations, he said — until the cancer death rates rose significantly in late 2021 in the U.K. following the vaccine rollout”
The table below pertains to excess deaths related to malignant neoplasm (cancerous tumor) in England and Wales, recorded in three consecutive years: 2020, 2021, and 2022 vs. a 10 year trend (2010-2019).
The data for excess mortality in 2020 (the year prior to the vaccine) are negative with the exception of “malignant neoplasm without specification of site”.
The upward movement in excess mortality (%) commences in 2021. The increase in excess mortality related to malignant neoplasm is tabulated for the two first years of the vaccine.
Video: Michel Chossudovsky with Caroline Mailloux
The following video interview with Prof. Michel Chossudovsky pertains to the Confidential Pfizer Report released as part of a Freedom of Information (FOI) procedure.
What is contained in Pfizer’s “confidential” report is detailed evidence on the impacts of the “vaccine” on mortality and morbidity. This data which emanates from the “Horse’s Mouth” can now be used to confront as well formulate legal procedures against Big Pharma, the governments, the WHO and the media.
Video: Interview with Caroline Mailloux, Lux Media: Prof. Michel Chossudovsky on the “Secret” Pfizer Report Puts Forth a Strategy and Legal Procedure to Confront Big Pharma with a view to Withdrawing the Covid-19 Vaccine Worldwide
The Covid Vaccine and the Secret Pfizer Report
[Click upper title and right corner to enter fullscreen]
Michel Chossudovsky, Global Research, November 23, 2023, July 30, 2024
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What’s Inside Pfizer’s “Secret Report”?
The Confidential report is a bombshell. The vaccine was launched in mid-December 2020. By the end of February 2021, “Pfizer had already received more than 1,200 reports of deaths allegedly caused by the vaccine and tens of thousands of reported adverse events, including 23 cases of spontaneous abortions out of 270 pregnancies and more than 2,000 reports of cardiac disorders.”
This Confidential Pfizer Report provides data on deaths and adverse events recorded by Pfizer from the outset of the vaccine project in December 2020 to the end of February 2021, namely a very short period (at most two and a half months).
The data from mid-December 2020 to the end of February 2021 unequivocally confirms “Manslaughter”. Based on the evidence, Pfizer had the responsibility to immediately cancel and withdraw the “vaccine”.
Pfizer’s Worldwide marketing of the Covid-19 Vaccine beyond February 28th, 2021, is no longer an “Act of Manslaughter”.
Murder as opposed to Manslaughter implies “Criminal Intent”.
Pfizer’s Covid 19 Vaccine constitutes a Criminal Act. From a legal standpoint it is an “Act of Murder” applied Worldwide to a target population of 8 billion people. Sofar more than 60 percent of the World’s population have been Covid-19 vaccinated.
“This document provides an integrated analysis of the cumulative post-authorization safety data, including U.S. and foreign post-authorization adverse event reports received through 28 February 2021.
(…)
“Pfizer is responsible for the management post-authorization safety data on behalf of the MAH BioNTech according to the Pharmacovigilance Agreement in place. Data from BioNTech are included in the report when applicable.
“Reports are submitted voluntarily, and the magnitude of underreporting is unknown.
(…)
“Cumulatively, through 28 February 2021 [in less than three months], there was a total of 42,086 case reports (25,379 medically confirmed and 16,707 non-medically confirmed) containing 158,893 events. Most cases (34,762) were received from United States (13,739), United Kingdom (13,404) Italy (2,578), Germany (1913), France (1506), Portugal (866) and Spain (756); the remaining 7,324 were distributed among 56 other countries.
(…)
“As shown in Figure 1 [see below], the System Organ Classes (SOCs) that contained the greatest number (≥2%) of events, in the overall dataset, were General disorders and administration site conditions (51,335 AEs), Nervous system disorders (25,957), Musculoskeletal and connective tissue disorders (17,283), Gastrointestinal disorders (14,096), Skin and subcutaneous tissue disorders (8,476), Respiratory, thoracic and mediastinal disorders (8,848), Infections and infestations (4,610), Injury, poisoning and procedural complications (5,590), and Investigations (3,693)”
The following video interview with Prof. Michel Chossudovsky pertains to the Confidential Pfizer Report released as part of a Freedom of Information (FOI) procedure.
What is contained in Pfizer’s “confidential” report is detailed evidence on the impacts of the “vaccine” on mortality and morbidity. This data which emanates from the “Horse’s Mouth” can now be used to confront as well formulate legal procedures against Big Pharma, the governments, the WHO and the media.
Video: Interview with Caroline Mailloux, Lux Media: Prof. Michel Chossudovsky on the “Secret” Pfizer Report Puts Forth a Strategy and Legal Procedure to Confront Big Pharma with a view to Withdrawing the Covid-19 Vaccine Worldwide
VIDEO: The Covid Vaccine and the Secret Pfizer Report
[Click upper title and right corner to enter fullscreen]
Translations in several languages are envisaged. The book is available in print form in Japanese. 仕組まれたコロナ危機:「世界の初期化」を目論む者たち
As a means to reaching out to millions of people worldwide whose lives have been affected by the corona crisis, we have decided in the course of the next few weeks to distribute the eBook for FREE.
Can we trust a Big Pharma vaccine conglomerate which pleaded guilty in 2009 to criminal charges by the US Department of Justice (DoJ) including “fraudulent marketing” and“felony violation of the Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act”?
Video. US Department of Justice. 2.3 Billion Medical Fraud Settlement
“Adverse events from drugs and vaccines are common, but underreported. … less than 0.3% of all adverse drug events and 1-13% of serious events are reported to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Likewise, fewer than 1% of vaccine adverse events are reported. (emphasis added)
This Confidential Pfizer Report released as part of a Freedom of Information (FOI) procedure provides data on deaths and adverse events recorded by Pfizer from the outset of the vaccine project in December 2020 to the end of February 2021, namely a very short period (at most two and a half months).
In a twisted irony, the data revealed in this “insider report” refutes the official vaccine narrative peddled by the governments and the WHO. It also confirms the analysis of numerous medical doctors and scientists who have revealed the devastating consequences of the mRNA “vaccine”.
What is contained in Pfizer’s “confidential” report is detailed evidence on the impacts of the “vaccine” on mortality and morbidity. This data which emanates from the “Horse’s Mouth” can now be used to confront as well formulate legal procedures against Big Pharma, the governments, the WHO and the media.
In a Court of Law, the evidence contained in this Big Pharma confidential report (coupled with the data on deaths and adverse events compiled by the national authorities in the EU, UK and US) is irrefutable: because it is their data and their estimates and not ours.
Bear in mind: it’s data which is based on reported and recorded cases, which constitute a small percentage of the actual number of vaccine related deaths and adverse events.
This is a de facto Mea Culpa on the part of Pfizer. #Yes it is a Killer Vaccine
Pfizer was fully aware that the mRNA vaccine which it is marketing Worldwide would result in a wave of mortality and morbidity. This is tantamount to a crime against humanity on the part of Big Pharma.
Pfizer knew from the outset that it was a killer vaccine.
It is also a Mea Culpa and Treason on the part of corrupt national governments Worldwide which are being threatened and bribed by Big Pharma.
No attempt has been made by the governments to call for the withdrawal of the killer vaccine.
People are told that the vaccine is intended to save lives.
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Comments Off on Pfizer’s “Secret” Report on the Covid “Vaccine”. Beyond Manslaughter. The Evidence is Overwhelming. The Vaccine Should Be Immediately Withdrawn Worldwide
The entire opening ceremony was filmed while Paris was under pouring rain – including a blasphemous Last Supper, the setting of Leonardo da Vinci – but with full LGBTQ+ label and characters, with a fat, big-breasted trans-lady in the middle, in Jesus’ place, according to the famous da Vinci painting. Also appearing, a blue gnome dancing with a stiff penis (see picture).
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French singer Philippe Katerine during the Paris Olympics opening ceremony(X/@Scipionista)
And to top it off, Marie Antoinette with her cut-off head in her lap, singing the emblematic song of the French Revolution, “Ça ira” (“It’ll be fine”). Marie Antoinette was the wife of King Louis XVI, who was executed by guillotine on 21 January 1793. Her execution by guillotine followed on 16 October 1793, at the Place de la Révolution.
All accompanied by a hologram of the 4th Horseman from the apocalypse with the four biblical figures who appear in the Book of Revelation. Each of the horsemen represents a different facet of the apocalypse: conquest, war, famine, and death. The one displayed at the Olympics Opening was the Forth Horseman of Death, depicted by the devil on a horse, draped in an Olympic flag (see picture).
The International Olympic Committee (IOC) has since deleted all videos of the opening ceremony of the 2024 Summer Games in Paris from its YouTube channel. Committee officials faced massive global public backlash over an alleged LGBTQ-themed parody of ‘The Last Supper’ at the event, which was widely seen by Christians as blasphemous.
The IOC did not explain the reason for the removal. It was a reaction to numerous politicians, social media users, and influencers expressing outrage over “The Last Super” scene (see RT 28 July 2024).
At the time of this writing, this short video clip was still available (see below).
What connection to the Olympic Games does this grotesque symbolism have? These games are by themselves a farce – like most sports events to deviate people’s attention, to indoctrinate their thinking, or rather non-thinking, to look for diversion, rather than the substance of what our world has become – and the direction it is going.
Western summer time, vacation time, no-thinking time, are ideal for these international and regional sports events. Whether people are watching football (soccer), or tennis, or the Olympics, does not really matter. Their heads are turned to an irrelevant sports event. Their emotions run high, especially watching soccer, screaming, yelling, and even physically fighting each other over their teams.
While in the back – invisible to most people – the dark agenda is progressing fast and undisturbed. What is the “dark agenda”?
It is a multi-purpose program, including attacking humanity simultaneously from different angles with different weapons. Among them, all-digitization, promotion of robotization and Artificial Intelligence (AI), as well as all-digitized money towards a cashless monetary system.
Once this point has been reached, humanity is fully enslaved, controlled on every step we take. It looks irreversible, unless we find the courage to leave the system behind – and everything we have acquired, learned, and loved in our lives, to start afresh.
What is better – enslavement or leaving our past behind and having a high-spirited shot at a new civilization, moving our lives onto a higher level, where we do not need the low-vibrating diabolical cultism, we are exposed to now?
Truly, it looks like this world we are in – where most of people still do not see anything wrong, do not see the light, this world structure cannot be reformed. It has gone too far.
We, the People, must choose, rather sooner than later. But this will be a voluntary step. Those, who do not feel the need to start afresh may stay behind until their conscience tells them that something is wrong with this life – a life prepared with a long-arm – for the UN-Agenda 2030 and the WEF’s Great Reset – where at the end a robotized, transhumanized “left-over” population will own nothing but is happy.
The World Health Organization (WHO), created by and sold to the devil under eugenist control, may as well be called World Death Organization (WDO) as it allows and promotes the launching of invented plandemics that will require – mandated by the WDO – “vaccination” with deadly mRNA vaxxes – with the sole purpose and fulfilling the funding eugenists’ depopulation agenda.
An example is the newly appointed, NEVER elected, head of the European Council (EC), Ursula Von Der Leyen (often called “Von der Lying”), has concluded contracts with the pharma industry for a 1 billion “vaxxes”. This is about two jabs per EU inhabitant — for what? A yet to come Plandemic. Maybe the infamously called virus “X” at the WEF’s Davos meeting in January 2024?
Maybe it is the highly propagated “bird flu” that is now manufactured so it can jump from animals to humans and the fearmongers say it is very deadly – comparatively, “covid” was a walk in the park.
So “vaxxes” are of the order – mandate of WHO’s commanding our health and death. And mind you, like in the first run – covid – no over-the-counter very effective medication, no natural healing means are going to be permitted, because as many people as possible must get their potentially deadly shot.
Yes, deadly because the key objective of the evil agenda is massive but massive depopulation. See this recent short video from an author of the Club of Rome’s most infamous report called, “Limits to Growth” (1972):
The dark diabolical cult which pretends to run our world and which has long prepared the final stage of their full supremacy, UN-Agenda 2030, and The Great Reset, must follow strict Cult rules. Among them is a simple one: they must tell their “victims” – in this case all of humanity — what they are planning to do.
This Olympics opening ceremony does just that: it tells us that the final stage has begun. Death is on the horizon (the Forth Horseman of the Apocalypse) and that days are counted.
Most of it is spreading fear – making the populous at large even more vulnerable, fearful people are easily submissive. But this ceremony is very reminiscent of previous weird, Satanic “Openings”, such as the London Olympics of 2012 (see full 4-hour video), as well as the Luciferian opening of the Swiss Gotthard Tunnel in June 2016 – see this 6-min. video clip.
The latter was commented at the time by a Russian Ruptly reporter, “When they are coming out in the open as they do here, then the final phase is close”. He was right.
As a final Anecdote to this diabolical feast called “Paris Olympics 2024”: Russian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova said,
“Russia is ready to grant political asylum to French citizens, who suffered from watching the opening ceremony of the 2024 Olympic Games.”
The Russian Embassy in Paris has been inundated with calls since the announcement was made.
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Peter Koenig is a geopolitical analyst and a former Senior Economist at the World Bank and the World Health Organization (WHO), where he worked for over 30 years around the world. He is the author of Implosion – An Economic Thriller about War, Environmental Destruction and Corporate Greed; and co-author of Cynthia McKinney’s book “When China Sneezes: From the Coronavirus Lockdown to the Global Politico-Economic Crisis” (Clarity Press – November 1, 2020).
Peter is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG). He is also a non-resident Senior Fellow of the Chongyang Institute of Renmin University, Beijing.
All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the “Translate Website” drop down menu on the top banner of our home page (Desktop version).
79 years ago. The first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima “A Military Base” according to Harry Truman.
The collateral damage concept had yet to be defined. 100,000 civilians were killed in the first seven seconds of the explosion.
Michel Chossudovsky, Hiroshima Day, August 6, 2024
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The dangers of nuclear war are not an object of debate and analysis by the mainstream media.
Public opinion is carefully misled. ” All options on the table”. Nuclear weapons are portrayed as peace-making bombs.
Did you know that tactical nuclear weapons or so-called mininukes with an explosive capacity between one third and six times a Hiroshima bomb are considered, according to scientific opinion, on contract to the Pentagon as “harmless to the surrounding civilian population because the explosion is underground”.
It’s a lie.
The US has a vast nuclear arsenal capable of blowing up the planet several times.
The World commemorates the 79th anniversary of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (August 6, 9, 1945)
Did you know that Hiroshima was a “military base”, and that when the first atomic bomb was dropped on two of Japan’s heavily populated areas in August 1945, the objective was, according to president Truman to save the lives of innocent civilians.
“The World will note that the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima a military base. That was because we wished in this first attack to avoid, insofar as possible, the killing of civilians..”(President Harry S. Truman in a radio address to the Nation, August 9, 1945, starts at 05.15).
listen to the audio
The first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945; the Second on Nagasaki, on August 9, on the same day as Truman’s radio speech to the Nation, starts at 05.15.
Unpunished crimes against humanity, “collateral damage”.
In the words of President Harry Truman in his Diary (emphasis added):
“We have discovered the most terrible bomb in the history of the world. It may be the fire destruction prophesied in the Euphrates Valley Era, after Noah and his fabulous Ark…. This weapon is to be used against Japan … [We] will use it so that military objectives and soldiers and sailors are the target and not women and children.
Even if the Japs are savages, ruthless, merciless and fanatic, we as the leader of the world for the common welfare cannot drop that terrible bomb on the old capital or the new. … The target will be a purely military one… It seems to be the most terrible thing ever discovered, but it can be made the most useful.”
To this date, the US government has not apologized to the people of Japan, nor has the mainstream media acknowledged that Harry Truman was a liar and a criminal.
Truman’s July 25 diary entry (see above), suggests that he was not aware that Hiroshima was a city.
Had he been misled by his advisers that Hiroshima was a military base and that it was ok to bomb, or was he lying to himself?
Was he stupid and uneducated?
Everybody in the high ranks of the U.S military knew that Hiroshima was a populated urban area with approximately 350,000 inhabitants (1945).
Here is the transcript of Truman’s radio address pertaining to the atomic bomb (emphasis added):
:”The world will note that the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, a military base. That was because we wished in this first attack to avoid, insofar as possible, the killing of civilians. But that attack is only a warning of things to come. If Japan does not surrender, bombs will have to be dropped on her war industries and, unfortunately, thousands of civilian lives will be lost. I urge Japanese civilians to leave industrial cities immediately, and save themselves from destruction.
I realize the tragic significance of the atomic bomb.
Its production and its use were not lightly undertaken by this Government. But we knew that our enemies were on the search for it. We know now how close they were to finding it. And we knew the disaster which would come to this Nation, and to all peace-loving nations, to all civilization, if they had found it first.
That is why we felt compelled to undertake the long and uncertain and costly labor of discovery and production.
We won the race of discovery against the Germans. [Amply confirmed Nazi Germany never contemplated the development of nuclear bombs]
Having found the bomb we have used it. We have used it against those who attacked us without warning at Pearl Harbor, against those who have starved and beaten and executed American prisoners of war, against those who have abandoned all pretense of obeying international laws of warfare. We have used it in order to shorten the agony of war, in order to save the lives of thousands and thousands of young Americans.
We shall continue to use it until we completely destroy Japan’s power to make war. Only a Japanese surrender will stop us.
The atomic bomb is too dangerous to be loose in a lawless world. That is why Great Britain, Canada, and the United States, who have the secret of its production, do not intend to reveal that secret until means have been found to control the bomb so as to protect ourselves and the rest of the world from the danger of total destruction.
As far back as last May, Secretary of War Stimson, at my suggestion, appointed a committee upon which Secretary of State Byrnes served as my personal representative, to prepare plans for the future control of this bomb. I shall ask the Congress to cooperate to the end that its production and use be controlled, and that its power be made an overwhelming influence towards world peace.
We must constitute ourselves trustees of this new force–to prevent its misuse, and to turn it into the channels of service to mankind.
It is an awful responsibility which has come to us.
We thank God that it has come to us, instead of to our enemies; and we pray that He may guide us to use it in His ways and for His purposes.”
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The US government continues its violent persecution of all citizens who express opinions contrary to the foreign policy of the White House. Once again, the country’s authorities unjustifiably harassed military analyst Scott Ritter, raiding his house under the allegation that Ritter is a “foreign agent.” Apparently, any American citizen who disagrees with the policy of war with Russia is considered a “spy” by the government, which shows how Washington is becoming an antidemocratic police state.
The FBI and the New York State Police raided Ritter’s house in Ethlehem Township, south of Albany. The agents remained inside Scott’s house for about five hours, collecting materials they considered suspicious. More than two dozen boxes were removed from the place by the police containing various items meant for investigation, including several electronic devices.
The police presented a search and seizure warrant based on the Foreign Agents Restriction Act. In practice, this means that for the American police, Scott Ritter is officially a “Russian asset.” The investigations are certainly intended to find some kind of incriminating content that would allow a formal charge of espionage and conspiracy against the American state.
This is not the first time that Scott Ritter has been attacked by the authorities of his own country. The analyst has already lost his passport and the right to leave the US after the American police forcibly escorted him off a plane when he was about to go to the Russian Federation in June. Ritter had been invited to participate in the St. Petersburg Economic Forum, where he was expected to give a talk on a panel about multipolarity and geopolitics. However, shortly after boarding the plane, American guards confiscated his passport without providing any explanation, which is a serious violation of basic individual rights.
Now, with the FBI’s harassment, Scott’s situation is even more complicated. Without a passport, he is unable to leave the country to seek political asylum in another state. Having to remain on American soil, he is likely to be increasingly targeted by the Washington’s authorities, who have become well-known for implementing a method similar to psychological torture to coerce citizens who disobey the country’s tacit “rule” of supporting the White House’s aggressive foreign policy.
Ritter is a former officer of the US Marine Corps, having served as an intelligence agent specializing in missiles during the Gulf War. He became known for his work as a UN weapons inspector in Iraq, having been an opponent of the US invasion of the country. At the time, Ritter repeatedly stated that Iraq did not have weapons of mass destruction, and therefore the US military action was unjustified. The judicial and police harassment against him began in the early 2000s precisely in retaliation for his pro-peace stance.
In the same vein, having studied Russian affairs academically, Ritter is deeply familiar with the history of the Russian-Ukrainian crisis and has been a vocal critic of the US policy of arming Kiev since 2022. He advocates a peaceful policy between the US and Russia and the establishment of mutually favorable conditions for coexistence. In the same vein, Ritter has used his military expertise to debunk some fallacious Western narratives about the situation on the battlefield.
Since 2022, he has been pointing out how Russian troops maintain complete control over the military situation, with Ukraine having no chance of reversing this scenario. Ritter’s work is seen as a threat by the Western propaganda machine, which constantly needs to spread lies to convince public opinion to continue supporting Ukraine. Ritter’s situation has become even worse since October 2023, when he spoke out against Israel’s violent incursions into Gaza and has become a critic of US support for Netanyahu. The persecution of Ritter has escalated since then, with both the pro-Ukraine and pro-Israel lobbies now targeting him.
In fact, what is happening to Ritter is just one example of how the US is becoming a police state. Democracy and freedom of speech are no longer part of American political principles – at least not on a practical level, being just pointless rhetoric. Unfortunately, Ritter is likely to face even more police and judicial abuse, since without a passport he has no way of leaving the country to escape persecution. The same fate awaits any American citizen who dares to publicly criticize the international crimes committed by Washington.
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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.
Poland became a NATO member in the first controversial eastward expansion of NATO following the collapse of the Soviet Union. In the subsequent controversy over attempts to make Ukraine a NATO member, Poland has been an even more vociferous supporter of the USA than the traditional strong allies of the USA from Western Europe. It can be argued that in the recent Ukraine-Russia conflict, among all leading European countries Poland has taken the most hawkish stand against Russia.
A recent published paper in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists (8.8.2024) has raised concerns regarding the closer cooperation of Poland and the USA relating to nuclear power which can have military implications.
This paper titled ‘Eastern Europe’s Purchase of US Nuclear Reactors is Primarily About Military Ties, not Climate Change’ has been written by Maha Siddiqui and M.V.Ramana’ and was first published on August 2, 2024.Although this paper briefly mentions Romania, mostly it concerns Poland.
This paper argues that while outwardly promoting nuclear power as a way to meet climate goals,
“Poland and other countries in Eastern Europe seem to be using nuclear purchases for geopolitical leverage with the United States. That desire is evident in their parallel actions in the military front. Given the ongoing war in Ukraine and tensions in multiple parts of the world, the combination of geopolitics and nuclear technology may prove dangerous, even as it is ineffective at mitigating climate change.”
This important paper informs us that in recent years, Poland has entered into a number of agreements to build nuclear reactors, including the in-vogue small modular reactors (SMRs) from the United States and large reactors from South Korea. In April, Poland President Andrzej Duda publicly expressed a readiness to host NATO nuclear weapons. In an interview published in a Polish news outlet, he revealed that nuclear sharing had been discussed with the United States “for some time.” The previous Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki had also indicated an “interest in hosting nuclear weapons under NATO’s nuclear-sharing policy.”
This paper adds that Poland also tied itself militarily to the United States by becoming part of US missile defence infrastructure. The process started during the George W. Bush administration and continued through the successive US presidencies. Most recently, as part of the Biden administration’s 2024 budget for defence, the Missile Defence Agency requested funding to complete construction of a site in Poland to deploy the Aegis Ashore missile defence system and purchase missiles for this site.
Further the authors tell us that Poland has emerged as one of Europe’s largest importers of military equipment, second only to Ukraine, buying military equipment worth billions of dollars from the United States. In the 2023 fiscal year alone, Poland purchased Apache Helicopters ($12 billion), High Mobility Artillery Rocket System ($10 billion), Integrated Air and Missile Defence Battle Command System ($4 billion), and M1A1 Abrams Main Battle Tanks ($3.75 billion).
Poland’s military spending in 2023 was 75 percent higher than in 2022 and 181 percent higher than in 2014. Poland was also among the world’s 20 largest importers of weapons in the 2019-2023 period, with its share of imports jumping four-fold compared to the previous 2014-2018 period. Of these imports, nearly half came from the United States.
Inthe “Integrated Country Strategy” for Poland from June 2022, the US State Department’s top two mission goals were stated to involve military engagement and adoption of new energy technology, including nuclear power. This paper argues that “by all evidence, the focus on nuclear energy in Eastern Europe appears not to be driven mainly by climate change but by old-fashioned geopolitics in significant proportion.”
The authors issue a timely warning,
“Building up military forces using US technology and expanding US military presence in the region, even possibly basing nuclear weapons in Poland, may increase the likelihood of a catastrophic war between Russia and NATO. Such a war would be compounded by the potential for radioactive contamination from deliberate or inadvertent attacks on nuclear reactors, as illustrated by the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant in Ukraine, which Russia has occupied since March 2022 and used as a source of leverage.”
The authors conclude,
“Investments in nuclear power in Eastern Europe hide geopolitical and military motivations behind a smoke screen of fighting climate change. When these motivations result in the massive acquisition of military equipment, manufacturing and operating them will increase carbon dioxide emissions. Worse, military build-ups will also increase the risk of conflict, potentially leading to a catastrophic war that could involve nuclear weapons.”
This important paper should be seen as a very timely call, a very important call to avoid creating new risks, very high risks in a geo-politically very sensitive part of the world. In particular this paper deserves serious attention in Europe. Clearly an already deeply troubled world should endeavour actively to avoid creating any more serious risks in sensitive areas. There is need for much higher commitment to peace and it needs to be better recognized more widely that avoiding conflicts and relentless arms race, while being most essential for their own sake, can also contribute greatly to reducing climate change.
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Bharat Dogra is Honorary Convener, Campaign to Save Earth Now. His recent books include Planet in Peril, Protecting Earth for Children, Earth without Borders and A Day in 2071. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.
Ukrainian forces, numbering over a thousand, advanced 10 km. across the border into Russia’s Kursk region on the morning of Tuesday, August 6. Previous incursions from Ukraine into Russia, near the city of Belgorod, have allegedly been led by anti-Kremlin Russian groups.
But this time, the incursion was conducted by Ukrainian forces, using a combination of infantry, armor, drones, electronic warfare and air defense in the attack.
The main operational Russian gas pipeline into Europe runs near Sudzha, where a metering station – reportedly captured by Ukraine – monitors the reduced Russian supplies to countries such as Austria and Hungary.
Russia has declared a state of emergency in Kursk and local officials told the Tass news agency that 3,000 civilians had been evacuated following an attack that has clearly caught Moscow off guard.
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A visibly angry Vladimir Putin convened a televised meeting of Russia’s Security Council on Wednesday, August 7, in which the military’s chief of staff, Valery Gerasimov, told him the advance had been halted and that the Kursk operation would be concluded by “reaching the Russian state border.”
Putin was exasperated for a reason, because only a week ago on August 1, he had displayed tremendous magnanimity and extended a goodwill gesture to the Biden admin by agreeing to a prisoner swap deal, but instead of rapprochement, Washington paid him back by instructing Ukrainian proxy to mount Kursk offensive inside Russia.
The United States and Russia completed their biggest prisoner swap in post-Soviet history on August 1, with Moscow releasing journalist Evan Gershkovich and fellow American Paul Whelan, along with dissidents including Vladimir Kara-Murza, in a multinational deal that set two dozen people free. Releasing Western hostages was clearly an effort by Kremlin to appease Washington after the naval standoff in Cuba in June.
On June 12, a Russian naval fleet comprising a frigate, a nuclear-powered submarine Kazan, an oil tanker and a rescue tug crossed into Havana Bay after drills in the Atlantic Ocean. The next day, on June 13, a U.S. Navy submarine arrived in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, as a fleet of Russian warships gathered for planned military exercises in the Caribbean.
U.S. Southern Command announced the USS Helena, a nuclear-powered fast attack submarine, pulled into the waters near the U.S. base in Cuba. A Canadian Navy patrol ship also docked in Havana. Ottawa said the ship arrived on June 14 to signal the “capable and deployable” nature of the Canadian military.
The Russian naval fleet left Cuba on June 17 after a five-day stay but Putin’s hawkish maneuver precipitated a rift between the Biden admin and the Deep State. The Pentagon’s military brass favored a much forceful response to Russia’s provocation amidst Ukraine’s proxy war but Biden got cold feet because brinkmanship could have led to a nuclear standoff with Russia in the election year.
Joe Biden’s ignominious fall from grace was unanticipated and abrupt. It seems quite “a coincidence” that only a day before Russian naval fleet made a port call to Havana and six weeks before Biden decided to drop out of the presidential race on July 21, his cocaine addicted son Hunter was found guilty by a Delaware jury on June 11 for owning a gun as a user of illegal drugs and lying on paperwork about his drug use when he bought the gun.
Hunter Biden faces a maximum prison sentence of 25 years but is likely to receive a lesser sentence. In addition, Hunter also faces federal criminal charges for failing to pay more than $1.4 million in taxes on time. A trial in that case is scheduled to begin in September in Los Angeles.
What’s even more surprising is the fact that Hunter Biden nearly avoided facing trials on both the gun charges and the tax charges. Last year, prosecutor’s office and Hunter Biden’s legal team struck a tentative plea deal in which Hunter would have pleaded guilty to two misdemeanor tax charges and submitted to drug testing and other monitoring. Under the deal, prosecutors would have deferred the gun charges and eventually dropped them if Hunter had remained out of trouble.
But the deal “miraculously” fell apart in June after the deep state decided that Joe Biden had become a liability as president and needed to be replaced by a security establishment’s stooge, Kamala Harris. Thus, Joe Biden was literally blackmailed by the Deep State to quit the presidential race in exchange for saving the life of his problem child.
Had Joe Biden decided not to quit the race, the security establishment threatened to open host of other criminal cases against Hunter Biden, including the notorious Burisma Holdings case in which Hunter Biden had received millions of dollars in illicit kickbacks from a Ukrainian energy firm from 2013 to 2018 while his father Joe Biden was Obama admin’s vice president.
On Thursday, August 8, Hunter was implicated in another criminal case. Prosecutors in the U.S. criminal tax case against Hunter Biden accused him of accepting millions of dollars in payments from a Romanian businessman who sought to “influence U.S. government agencies” in connection with a criminal probe in Romania.
On the other hand, security establishment via Democratic emissaries assured Joe Biden to use its influence with security agencies, bureaucracy and judiciary to drop all criminal cases against Hunter if Joe Biden agreed to quit the race and kept quiet afterwards.
Kamala Harris, being an Indian immigrant and lacking a significant political constituency in the United States, is an ideal presidential candidate from the perspective of security establishment. During her four-year unremarkable career as vice president and the way she cheered waving Ukrainian flag during President Zelensky’s address to the US Congress, she has proved that she would play into the hands of deep state like a servile puppet.
Furthermore, the attempted assassination of Donald Trump at a Pennsylvania rally on July 13, meant as a psy-ops tactic, served a two-fold objective. Firstly, it created an atmosphere of fear and paranoia, restricted Trump’s movement during the election campaign, as he has since been advised by the Secret Service not to attend outdoor rallies and conveyed a message that red lines shouldn’t be crossed in political speeches.
Secondly, the drastic measure also managed to send a spine-chilling warning to Trump’s political opponent Joe Biden that the deep state was willing to go to any extent to achieve its objectives, even if it had to assassinate sitting US presidents, such as the brutal murders of the Kennedy brothers following the Cuban missile crisis of 1962. Unsurprisingly, panic-stricken Joe Biden decided a week after Trump’s brush with death to leave the White House for his Delaware mansion instead of ending up in the morgue.
Since World War II, the United States has been ruled by the top brass of the Pentagon while presidents have been reduced to the ceremonial role of being public relations’ representatives of the deep state, pontificating and sermonizing like priests to gullible audiences at home and abroad on the virtues of supposed American democracy, rule of law and civil liberties.
Though a clarification is required here that US presidents indeed have the power to order withdrawal of troops from inconsequential theaters of war, such as the evacuation of US forces from Iraq as directed by former President Obama in 2011 or the withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan as ordered by President Biden in 2021, as the perceptive military brass is courteous enough to bow to “sane advice” of purported chosen representatives of the people and “toddler-in-chief” of the armed forces in order to maintain the charade of democracy in the eyes of the public.
But in military oligarchy’s perpetual conflict with major world powers deemed existential threats to the US security interests, such as arch-rivals Russia and China, as in the Ukraine War, civilian presidents, whether Biden or Trump, don’t have the authority to overrule the global domination agenda of the Pentagon.
All the militaries of the 32 NATO member states operate under the integrated military command led by the Pentagon. Before being elected president, General Dwight Eisenhower was the first commander of the Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe (SHAPE).
The commander of Allied Command Operations has been given the title Supreme Allied Commander Europe (SACEUR), and is always a US four-star general officer or flag officer who also serves as the Commander US European Command, and is subordinate to the Chairman Joint Chiefs of Staff.
The incumbent Godfather of the Cosa Nostra is Gen. Charles Q. Brown since October 2023 following the retirement of Gen. Mark Milley who completed his tenure of four tumultuous years, including the Ukraine War and the Capitol riots, in September as the Chairman Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Thus, the Pentagon’s top brass, through NATO’s military command, exercises absolute control over Ukraine’s theater of proxy war. The Zelensky regime and its military commanders are merely servile stooges beholden to military strategy as devised by master strategists of the Pentagon.
The foremost objective of the US military brass in Ukraine’s proxy war is to degrade Russia’s military capabilities, for which Ukrainian troops and conscripts are being used as cannon fodder.
In February, Zelensky sacked Valery Zaluzhny as commander-in-chief of Ukrainian forces on the orders of US military commanders. As he was hesitant to commit more cannon fodder to breach Russia’s defensive lines in Donbas amid much-hyped Ukrainian counteroffensive lasting from June to December last year.
Differences between the two men had been simmering for many months but appeared to grow wider towards the end of last year, after Zaluzhny said the war had reached a stalemate in a long essay and interview in The Economist magazine in November.
New commander-in-chief Oleksandr Syrskyi has been criticized for pursuing bloody and reckless military tactics which resulted in significant Ukrainian losses during the Battle of Bakhmut, and was nicknamed “General 200,” a reference to Cargo 200, a Soviet military code denoting military fatalities.
He would likely retain his job as long he uncritically obeys the Pentagon’s dictates. But if he developed critical faculties, a cardinal sin in military command structure across the world, then he too would meet the same ignominious fate as his predecessor.
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Nauman Sadiq is an Islamabad-based geopolitical and national security analyst focused on geo-strategic affairs and hybrid warfare in the Middle East and Eurasia regions. His domains of expertise include neocolonialism, military-industrial complex and petro-imperialism. He is a regular contributor of diligently researched investigative reports to Global Research.
Sunlight’s hidden benefits — Sunlight is crucial for our health, dramatically cutting the risk of dying or getting cancer, yet we’re always told to avoid it
Beyond vitamin D — While we recognize the importance of vitamin D, many other critical functions of light in plants, animals, and humans remain largely unknown and will be explored in this article
Modern light exposure — Our constant exposure to artificial light is mistakenly seen as harmless, but forgotten research shows it’s a root cause of many modern physical and behavioral issues
Light and blood — Blood plays a key role in conducting light throughout our bodies. Disruptions in this process (e.g., from wearing glasses that block certain parts of the light spectrum) can lead to serious health problems
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I’ve gradually become convinced that sunlight is one of the most vital nutrients for our bodies. For instance, as humans migrated north from Africa and experienced less sun exposure, their skin lightened, suggesting this adaptation likely ensured enough sunlight still entered the body.
Industries with vested interests lobby to hide true causes while diverting attention to easy scapegoats. Since sunlight isn’t profitable, the narrative we hear only focuses on its dangers.
For example, dermatologists transformed themselves from an unwanted career to a coveted (and incredibly lucrative) specialty by branding themselves as cancer fighters, emphasizing the need for regular, often costly, skin cancer exams and expensive skin cancer removals. They portrayed benign cancers as deadly and blamed sunlight for skin cancer, concealing that lack of sunlight leads to fatal skin cancers.1
This fear mongering hasn’t reduced skin cancer death rates2 but has increased harmful diagnoses and treatments even as effective and affordable treatments are hidden from the public.3 Many in turn have fallen victim to the Great Dermatology Scam4 (detailed further here). Consider for instance Comedian Jimmy Dore’s recent experience:5
Sunlight is free and profoundly beneficial, yet industries profiting from illness directly oppose it. In this article, I’ll explore forgotten knowledge of light’s importance and the remarkable things it does within the body.
The Overlooked Power of Sunlight
Prior to dermatology’s disastrous war on the sun,6 the value of sunlight was widely recognized in medicine. For example, in the early 1900s, heliotherapy (sunbathing) was used with great success for treating many (otherwise incurable) conditions, such as the 1918 influenza,7 tuberculosis,8 and many other diseases.9 Sunlight offers immense benefits, yet it’s often undervalued. Consider these points:
Cancer prevention — Sunlight exposure dramatically reduces cancer risk. A large study found that high UVB exposure halved the risk of breast and prostate cancer.10
Longevity — A meticulous 20-year study11 of 29,518 women showed that avoiding the sun increased the likelihood of dying by 60%. Regular sun exposure significantly reduced heart disease deaths and other common illnesses.
Note: That study12 also found a variety of other common diseases were much less likely to affect those with adequate sun exposure.
Mental health — Sunlight is crucial for mental well-being, especially in preventing depression like seasonal affective disorder.13 Many workers, particularly night shift employees, suffer from a lack of sunlight. For instance, a study of Chinese operating room nurses revealed worse mental health correlated with low sun exposure.14
Note: During my medical internship, long night shifts under fluorescent lights led to clinical depression. After a month, I bathed in a full-spectrum light bulb15 and felt better almost instantly.
Circadian rhythm — Sunlight helps regulate circadian rhythms, which are crucial for rest and repair. Modern insomnia is often linked to artificial light exposure, and one effective treatment is starting the day with a walk in the sunlight.
What Is Light?
Light is a wave of energy (termed electromagnetic radiation or EMR) that travels through space at the speed of light. Depending on the length or frequency of that wave, its properties change significantly. For instance, when its length is between 380nm-700nm, it is visible to the naked eye and spans a wide range of colors, while outside this range other types of light emerge (e.g., infrared or ultraviolet [UV] light).
Note: Pioneering experiments have shown certain sensitive individuals can see wavelengths outside the visible light spectrum.16
As light (and other types of EMR) saturate our environment, they have many significant biological effects. Classically, those effects are seen as a product of how much energy they contain and if that energy is sufficient to ionize (break apart) the bonds that hold biological molecules apart, something seen with increasing frequency as one goes towards the gamma ray end of the spectrum.
However, this ignores that waves with much lower energy can also affect biological systems if their wavelength matches a biological structure and through resonance stores within it. For example, consider how radar microwaves affect aphids:
Note: Many individuals are hypersensitive to microwaves and thus radar, cell phones or Wi-Fi.
Likewise, the body requires many of the unique wavelengths found in natural light, which unfortunately are absent in artificial lighting. For example, different types of UV light exist (e.g., UV-A, UV-B, and UV-C), each with unique vital functions.
Biophotons and Mitogenic Radiation
Biophysics reveals that cells emit faint ultraviolet photons to control growth and communicate. Disruptions in these biophoton transmissions can lead to disease, with abnormal emissions seen in conditions like cancer. For example, carcinogens significantly disrupt these biophotons, while non-carcinogens do not.17
In 1923, Alexander Gurwitsch18 discovered that cells emit faint ultraviolet light, called mitogenic radiation (MGR), which induces neighboring cells to divide. This light is so faint that it wasn’t detectable until decades later with advanced photomultiplier devices. Key insights from Gurwitsch’s research include:
Secondary emission — Cells exposed to MGR re-emit it, precisely matching the frequencies needed for optimal biological responses.
Injury response — Injured or dying cells release a brief MGR flash.
High emission areas — Brain tissue, corneas, the optic nerve, active muscles, and blood emit more MGR.
Blood conductance — Blood vessels and energized tissues, influenced by the heart’s charge, conduct MGR efficiently.
Aging and healing — MGR emissions decrease with age, potentially affecting healing. Restoring MGR in older blood improved senility in early studies.
Despite its potential, MGR research has faded into obscurity. Interestingly, advanced meditators often report perceiving light within their bodies, which biophoton researchers have confirmed using sensitive instruments. This field hints at an unseen world of cellular communication and health diagnostics waiting to be explored. For example, I showed how MGR underlies many of the therapies now used in regenerative medicine here.
John Nash Ott
Plants grow so slowly that they can’t typically be seen. Enter time-lapse photography: by speeding up these microscopic movements, we can see plants in action. John Ott, a pioneer in this field, started experimenting with time-lapse photography back in 1927 while still in high school.
Time-lapse photography was no easy task — it demanded consistent framing and lighting over months or even years. Ott, with his remarkable skills and patience, became a sought-after expert, delivering stunning results where others often failed. His work, such as the footage he created for Disney,19 or this video20 where he coaxed potted primroses to dance (and then bow) to a classic waltz, thus gained immense popularity.
Through his experiments, Ott realized that plants reacted to the light he used for filming, including specific light filters for different colors. This sensitivity to light extended beyond plants to animals and humans as well (e.g., Ott observed significant psychological disturbances result from wearing pink glasses). One key discovery was that essential UV light doesn’t pass through glass, so Ott used special windows to let in natural light.
Ott’s work opened up a fascinating world where the subtle responses of plants to light became visible, highlighting light’s profound impact on all living things.
“No one in science has made a major breakthrough in science by conducting double-blind studies. Breakthroughs are made by careful observation.” — John Ott
Ott found himself in a unique position: his groundbreaking research faced resistance from mainstream institutions while gaining attention from the scientific community, particularly for his time-lapse photography. Despite some successes, like removing dangerous TVs from the market and promoting full-spectrum lighting, he encountered continual obstacles, often due to institutional reluctance to publish his findings. His work, however, found its way into natural medicine.
Key discoveries:
1. Plants — Cyclical natural light was essential for plant health, guiding their growth cycles, increasing their crop yields, and allowing them to recover from otherwise fatal infections.21 He also found minute cosmic rays or artificial x-rays (e.g., from cathode ray televisions or fluorescent lights) determined which directions plants grew it and also significantly affected humans (e.g., by causing nervousness or chronic fatigue).22
2. Eyes and light — Ott discovered that the eyes (the most transparent part of the body) play a crucial role in nourishing the body by allowing natural light to enter the body, affecting vital glands like the pituitary and pineal.23 This insight suggests that proper light exposure is essential for maintaining hormonal health.24
3. Glasses — Standard glasses and contacts block essential wavelengths (e.g., UV radiation). Ott found many health issues improved once he brought natural light back to the eyes.25
4. Light-induced motion — Ott observed that natural light could induce spontaneous and orderly motion with plant or animal cells, while unnatural light froze that motion and cellular reproduction, indicating that light has a dynamic effect on biological systems.26
5. Sunlight deficiency — Ott and other scientists, particularly in Russia, believed that a widespread deficiency of sunlight was causing a chronic epidemic of severe health issues.27
6. Frequency sensitivity — Ott theorized that different body parts respond to specific light frequencies, and that photosensitizing drugs and pathogens might affect the body based on the light they absorb or reflect.28 Subsequent research in color therapy confirmed many of his discoveries.29
7. Behavior — Ott regularly observed light influenced both animal and human behaviors (e.g., unnatural light made animals far more aggressive while healthy light made them more nurturing toward their offspring).30 In humans Ott saw workplaces fall apart once pink lighting was introduced to “brighten the mood” and observed workers have exceptional health and behavior after UV backlights were introduced.31
Likewise, he discovered natural lighting significantly improved children’s behavior and academic performance at school.32
8. Reproduction — Ott discovered that lighting had a significant effect on both animal fertility (e.g., unnatural light could stop fish from laying eggs)33 and the gender ratio of their offspring (e.g., under healthy light chinchillas gave birth to more females), to the point many farmers and breeders began implementing Ott’s suggestions.34 Similarly, they found healthy lighting significantly increased agricultural yields (e.g., hens grew faster and laid more eggs).
9. Cancer — Unhealthy lighting was carcinogenic (e.g., Ott traced an “inexplicable” leukemia cluster to toxic classroom lighting and highlighted research showing it caused or exacerbated cancers in animals).35 Conversely, Ott successfully treated numerous cancer patients by putting them on a healthy light program.36
10. Other illnesses — Ott found that healthy light prevented infections, and cavities, increased the general survival of animals, and helped many other human chronic illnesses like diabetes, arthritis, allergies, or other autoimmune disorders.37
In summary, Ott highlighted that artificial light, with its specific concentrated wavelengths, due to resonance could disrupt biological processes, causing over-activation or under-activation of certain functions, and showed that even trace amounts of background radiation could have significant biological effects.
Liquid Crystalline Motion
A major mystery in biology is how fluids are able to continually move throughout organisms without a pressure gradient (e.g., one created by a pump) existing to drive that flow. For example, once blood returns to the capillaries, it transitions from no blood pressure to a rapid flow within the veins. Observations like this in turn have led certain schools of medicine to believe the heart’s primary function is not to pump blood through the body.38
Gerald Pollack provided an answer to this vexing question.39 Many throughout history have observed that water often enters a state where it’s neither a liquid or a solid. Pollack discovered that when water interacts with polar surfaces and an energy source, it forms a new state with unique properties:40
Gel-like structure — It behaves like a gel or liquid crystal that continually stabilizes and protects the surface it coats (e.g., a blood vessel or the fascia).41
Charge gradient — It has a built-in charge gradient that powers essential physiologic processes.42
Spontaneous flow — When this gel like water coats a tube, the hydrogen ions it releases repel each, creating a spontaneous flow that acts as a natural fluid pump in plants, cells, and blood vessels.43
Note: This spontaneous flow and its importance is discussed further here.
Sunlight plays a crucial role the body’s circulation by:
Fueling the creation of gel-state water and thus fluid motion.44
Catalyzing Cholesterol Sulfate Synthesis, creating the polar surface gel-state water forms from.45
It’s UV light improving Zeta Potential, which disperses fluids46 (e.g., eliminating microclots), hence eliminating the obstacles to fluid circulation.
Enhancing nitric oxide production — Dilates blood vessels, improving circulation.47
This suggests that the body was designed to harness sunlight for maintaining fluid flow and cardiovascular health.
Blood Conducts Light
Much of Ott’s work revolved around getting the light we needed inside the body. Parallel to this, a variety of other innovators discovered that bringing light inside the body (e.g., with a laser)48 yields a variety of meaningful benefits. Similarly, like Ott, they often found illness results from the body’s inability to bring the light it needs into itself (e.g., consider the significant health issues Ott observed from glasses blocking essential wavelengths to the eyes).
One of the oldest approaches to bringing light inside the body was to extract blood from the body and then transfuse it back in, exposing it to light (typically ultraviolet) before it had entered the body and thereby bypassing the barriers skin created to light entering the body. Since 1928, ultraviolet blood irradiation (UVBI) has consistently produced miraculous results, and is now widely used in countries where the practice of medicine has not been monopolized.
When I started using UVBI, I began noticing that I would often see rapid improvements occur which seemed to be occurring too quickly for it to simply have been a product of the irradiated blood circulating through the body and affecting whatever it came into direct contact with.
Note: I have also observed this rapid change with a few other therapies (e.g., certain stem cell preparations), which also emit mitogenic radiation.49
When experimenting, I found that turning the external UV light source on and off during treatment (after which the blood takes roughly 30 seconds to enter the circulation) triggered immediate systemic responses, suggesting that blood might conduct light. This means that illuminating one part of the blood could quickly affect the whole system. Presently, I believe this conductivity is due to:
1. Secondary UV emissions — Blood exposed to UV light can emit secondary UV radiation. This was confirmed by experiments where UV-exposed blood caused photographic paper to develop.50
2. Porphyrins and light transfer — Porphyrins,51 like those in hemoglobin and chlorophyll, transfer light energy.52 This helps convert sunlight into usable energy in our bodies.
3. Absorption of light — Blood cells absorb specific wavelengths of light,53 which could explain how light exposure impacts health.
4. Other conductors — Nerves and the physical correlates of the acupuncture channels54 also conduct light.
Assuming blood indeed conducts light, this provides an important context to many of the ideas outlined thus far. Understanding this helps clarify why localized light treatments can have such broad effects. Conversely, if you struggle with sunlight tolerance, it might be due:
1. Microcirculation issues — Poor zeta potential55 can hinder the transference of UV-heated fluids into the body, allowing the light to concentrate in the skin, leading to sunburn from excessive light exposure.
2. Mitochondrial dysfunction — If mitochondria can’t convert light energy into usable energy, which in turn creates both reductive stress56 and potential damage from light exposure.
One of the most controversial moments in Trump’s presidency was his asking about a new COVID-19 treatment which put an ultraviolet light into the body and could disinfect the lungs within a minute.57
After Trump said this, the media and many politicians continually (to this day) repeated the false claim that Trump had advocated for injecting bleach into the body, and as a result, many of his supporters objected to how the media portrayed the incident. In my case, there were two reasons I had strong feelings about it.
First, it stigmatized using nasal disinfectants (e.g., iodine, hydrogen peroxide, or hypochlorous acid) to treat COVID-19. This was extremely unfortunate, as when used early in the illness, those disinfectants were one of the safest, most effective and most widely available treatments for COVID-19 — to the point had this approach been widely publicized, it likely would have ended the pandemic.
Second, it stigmatized the idea of putting light inside the body, which in my eyes, is one of the most useful medical therapies ever developed. In the second half of this series (which can be read here), I discuss exactly how that is done, the remarkable results UVBI provides for a wide range of challenging conditions, and just how far the medical industry went to prevent this competing therapy from ever seeing the light of day.
It is hence my sincere hope that the work of pioneers in this field such as Dr. Mercola and readers like you will make the public aware that natural light is critical for cellular health and have the remarkable properties of light no longer a Forgotten Side of Medicine.
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Author’s note: This is an abbreviated version of a full-length article that takes a deeper look into the remarkable effects of light on living organisms. For the entire read with much more specific details and sources, please click here.
A Midwestern Doctor (AMD) is a board-certified physician in the Midwest and a longtime reader of Mercola.com. I appreciate his exceptional insight on a wide range of topics and I’m grateful to share them. I also respect his desire to remain anonymous as he is still on the front lines treating patients. To find more of AMD’s work, be sure to check out The Forgotten Side of Medicine on Substack.
Gold fell on August 5 from recent record highs, joining stocks, oil, and other risk assets in retreating amid increasing unemployment in the US and growing market fears over a recession. In fact, one of the most respected economists in the US categorically said that he is “beginning to smell a recession” approaching.
At the close on August 5, benchmark US gold futures for December delivery were at $2,447.80 an ounce, down $22, or 0.9%, on the day. The metal reached an all-time high of $2,522.20 on August 1 before ending the week up 2.7%, the biggest since a 3.3% rally in the week ending May 5. The spot gold price, which reflects real-time bullion trading, held steady at just over $2,407 an ounce, down nearly $36, or 1.5%.
Gold prices plunged as stocks on Wall Street continued their free fall, and crude prices hit their lowest levels for 2024 amid concerns about a possible US recession and the impact it could have on the world’s largest economy and oil consumer.
In the early hours of August 5, the Nikkei, the Tokyo Stock Exchange’s key index, which reflects the fluctuation of the share prices of 225 leading companies in Japan, fell by nearly 4,000 basis points amid investor concerns about a possible US recession and the strengthening of the yen against the dollar.
The drop had reached 13%, representing a decrease of more than 4,000 basis points. This exceeded the worst historical fall of ‘Black Monday’ in 1987, when the collapse was 3,836.33 points.
According to Adam Button, an economist and market commentator on ForexLive, the fluctuations in global markets are due to the increase in the US unemployment rate, which rose to 4.3% in July and given this situation, investors fear that this indicates the risk of recession in the US.
He added, “Gold does well when things are bad, but not when they’re really bad.”
Fears of a US recession have grown since the Labor Department reported in July that only 114,000 non-farm jobs were created, the lowest number since economic recovery began after the COVID-19 pandemic. Nonetheless, unemployment rose to 4.3% in July, the highest rate since December 2021, and at a faster pace than analysts had expected, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that “the unemployment rate rose by 0.2 percentage point to 4.3 percent in July, and the number of unemployed people increased by 352,000 to 7.2 million. These measures are higher than a year earlier, when the jobless rate was 3.5 percent, and the number of unemployed people was 5.9 million.”
Among major worker groups, unemployment rates for adult men (4.0%) and whites (3.8%) rose in July, according to the agency’s data. Unemployment rates for adult women (3.8%), teens (12.4%), African Americans (6.3%), Asians (3.7%) and Hispanics (5.3%) all remained unchanged during the month.
Considering these conditions, it is little wonder that John Lonski, a financial markets economist, said on Fox News that conditions are set for an economic recession in the near future.
“I’m beginning to smell a recession coming into view,” said the economist. “This jump by the unemployment rate, my goodness, 4.3 percent, this is up sharply from not long ago.”
For his part, US President Joe Biden reacted to the figures released by the BLS on August 2 and acknowledged that in July, employment is growing more gradually, despite the fact that since he came to power, he said, 16 million jobs have been created and the unemployment rate has been lower than during any other administration in half a century.
“No doubt the US labor market has taken a turn for the worse. The July jobs report stunk. Is a recession coming? Was it as bad [as] it looked? Maybe not. The big mystery was a huge increase in people who said they couldn’t work due to bad weather. Odd…” said Jeffry Bartash, an analyst at specialist firm MarketWatch.
Despite Biden’s propaganda of strong economic growth and recovery, all indicators point to the US heading towards a severe recession. Instead, he will be remembered as the president who did not improve the US’s declining economic situation as he instead prioritised arming and funding Ukraine to the tune of nearly $200 billion.
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It is a matter of deep concern in the USA that the maternal mortality rate of the country has declined alarmingly in recent years. However there is very less realization of this fact or of stagnation of other development indicators of the USA outside this country, except among development academics.What is no less significant is that around the same time Russia has registered important development gains and in the context of some important indicators it has actually surged ahead of the USA.
In any comparison of two countries, generally human development indicators are likely to be higher in the richer country, and these are even more likely to be lower for any country facing constraints such as those created by sanctions and hostile policy of more powerful countries. In this context the comparison of the USA and the Russia Federation reveal some interesting aspects.
Child mortality, or under five years of age mortality, measured per 1,000 live births, is widely considered to be a good indicator of health in any country. In this context it is useful to see the UN data which tells us that for the latest year 2021 the child mortality rate was 5.1 in the Russian Federation, while it was 6.2 in the USA. Hence Russia has been able to achieve a lower child mortality rate despite being confronted with very difficult conditions compared to the USA which enjoyed the most favorable and even hegemonic conditions at the world level.
If we see this data for the period 2000-2021, then in the USA this declined from 8 in year 2000 to 6.2 in 2021, while in Russia this declined from 20 to 5.1, a very significant reduction. In comparative terms, Russia was much behind USA in this respect but surged ahead over the first two decades of this century.
In year 2000 Russia trailed behind the USA very significantly, its child mortality rate being 20 compared to 8 for the USA. Yet within two decades, a time when Russia faced several sanctions, Russia managed to acheve a child mortality rate lower than USA.
In the case of infant mortality (or mortality under 1 year of age per 1000 births), according to Macrotrends data, the infant mortality in Russia declined in a big way from 19 in 2000 to 4.8 in 2023, while during the same period infant mortality in the USA declined from 7.2 to 5.4, so that Russia which had been far behind the USA now had a lower infant mortality rate in 2023.
In the case of maternal mortality rate or MMR (reported per 100,000 births), according to UN data, from year 2000 to 2020, this declined very significantly in Russia from 52 to 14, while that of the USA actually increased from 12 to 21. Thus during this period, according to UN data, Russia was recording a very big decline of 6.66% per year while the USA was recording not a decline, but instead an increase of 2.88% per year in maternal mortality rate.
According to Macrotrends data, from 2000 to 2017, the maternal mortality rate of the Russian Federation declined from 56 to 17, while this rate increase in the context of the USA was from 12 to 19.
In both these sets of data, it is common that the Russian Federation starts at MMR much higher than that of the USA, and despite facing difficult conditions, reaches a lower MMR than the USA within two decades or even earlier.
Initially some persons tried to draw attention away from rising maternal mortality in the USA by saying, wrongly, that this is due to late pregnancy, but if this was the case then the MMR would have risen similarly in other rich countries. However as a report in the Scientific American noted (‘Why maternal mortality is getting worse across the USA’) if the MMR for USA is compared with the MMR of comparable rich countries, then it is almost double for the USA (about 24) compared to other rich countries ( about 12). What is more this is, to a considerable extent, due to the higher rates for blacks and even more particularly Native American and Native Alaska communities in the USA. In the case of these natives the MMR almost tripled during 1999-2019.
A study by Northwestern University, reported in Northwestern Now, has also debunked late pregnancy as a cause by pointing out that higher MMR is being reported in all age groups of mothers, including young age groups, in the USA. This study has reported even higher increase of maternal mortality rate between 2014 and 2021 in the USA. The study has also confirmed much higher mortality rate among blacks compared to the national average. Dr. Sadiya Khan who was involved in this study has emphasized that maternal mortality is largely preventable and to achieve lower rates it is important to improve health infrastructure and surveillance.
According to official USA figures for percentage of people in poverty in the USA, this number is 11%. According to official Russian figures for people livig in poverty in the Russian Federation, this is 9%.
According to official figures for the number of homeless people in the USA, this is 653,104. According to official figures for the number of homeless people in Russia this number is 11,300. This may be an underestimate.
Leaving aside comparisons, some other significant development achievements of Russia may be noted.
During 2000-2019 according to UN data the life-expectancy in the Russian Federation increased significantly from 65.3 years to 73.2 years. According to Macrotrends data, this increase was from 65.4 in 2000 to 72.98 in 2023.
The increase of income or GNI per capita in Russia during this period was very significant—from $1,710 in year 2000 to $4,450 in 2005 to $9,980 in 2010 to $11,610 in 2021. On the contrary when the Russian economy was acting much under western influence earlier during year 1991 to year 2000, there was a huge decline from $3,440 to $1,710.
The Human Development Index of Russia improved from 720 in 2000 to 822 in 2021.
Thus as far as the welfare and progress of the people of the Russian Federation in the first two decades is concerned, this appears to have done remarkably well, despite many hurdles being placed in its path by the most powerful countries, despite constant vilification andcriticism. In some important respects, this performance has been better than that of the richest and the most powerful country.
However the performance of Russia in some other contexts including reduction of inequalities and democratic reforms has not been encouraging.
The quality of democracy in the USA has also been in decline, causing much concern. Inequalities in the USA are incredibly high.
Some weaknesses of Russia and the USA from a development perspective are common—both have high levels of inequality and both spend a high share of their budgets on weapons and military.
However a big question remains as to what explains the ability of Russia to emerge ahead of the USA in the context of some important development indicators despite the fact that the USA has much higher GNP per capita and hegemonistc powers at world level, while Russia has suffered under sanctions and other constraints imposed on it, such as the sabotage to destroy its prominent pipelines for supplying energy to Europe.
While development economists and experts will no doubt answer this question in more capable ways, what can be stated even at this preliminary stage is that Russia, its leaders and people, appear to have shown much higher commitment regarding some key national goals.
These important development achievements of the Russian Federation during the 21st century also reveal how unfair the relentless criticism and vilification of Russia in recent years has been. It would be much better for the USA andits European allies to see Russia in a much more balanced way, appreciate its real achievements, raise objections only when there are serious problems and try to settle them in peaceful ways, instead of carrying out very dangerous proxy wars, sabotage and relentless disinformation against Russia, very unfortunate and unethical tendencies that can also spiral out of control.
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Bharat Dogra is Honorary Convener, Campaign to Save Earth Now. His recent books include Planet in Peril, A Day in 2071, Protecting Earth for Children and Earth without Borders. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.
With the obvious exception of Russia and Belarus, there’s not a single Ukraine’s neighbor that’s not in NATO or at least under its jackboot. The two most important members of the world’s most aggressive racketeering cartel that directly border Ukraine are Poland and Romania. They form the bulk of NATO’s so-called Eastern Flank which stretches from Estonia to Bulgaria. Some members such as Hungary and Slovakia are refusing to directly participate in NATO aggression in Europe and have repeatedly stated they want to avoid a confrontation with Russia. Some are loyal to the alliance, but still somewhat ambiguous, such as Bulgaria and partially Czechia. Others, like Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania are endemically Russophobic, but are largely militarily inconsequential and don’t border Ukraine.
This leaves only Poland and Romania as serious contenders for the next phase of NATO aggression. However, while Poland is as endemically Russophobic as the Baltic states, Romania is far less black-and-white in this regard. In order to cement Russophobia in the country, the political West wants to escalate a conflict in neighboring Moldova and then drag in both Romania and Russia. NATO and the Kiev regime have been trying to destabilize Transnistria for this exact reason. Kishinev has zero reasons to get involved and unfreeze the conflict that has been dormant for over 30 years. This isn’t even in Romania’s interest, as it can continue peaceful integration with Moldova. It would gain very little with the resumption of hostilities in Transnistria, while also getting Russia as a direct opponent. Thus, trying to maintain peace, even a very fragile one, is the best option for all sides that are directly involved.
However, NATO is not interested in peace. Quite the contrary, just like its geopolitical predecessor, the Nazi German-led Axis powers, it wants to use countries like Romania and Moldova as springboards for a crawling confrontation with Russia. However, the world’s most aggressive racketeering cartel cannot risk a direct war right away, as this would jeopardize its entire Eastern Flank, particularly now that Moscow is responding to NATO aggression with the deployment of medium and intermediate-range missiles such as the heavily upgraded “Iskander” systems and new IRBMs (possibly the RS-26 “Rubezh”). Thus, the immediate basing of the Neo-Nazi junta’s NATO-sourced F-16s in countries such as Poland and Romania will likely be avoided, leaving Moldova as the only option. In the last several decades, the political West invested billions to stir up Russophobia in the former Soviet republic.
Namely, various sources say the F-16 that was recently seen over Odessa flew toward Moldova, where it turned off its transponder and disappeared from flight tracking websites. This could indicate that the US-made jets are indeed housed in Moldova. Since Romania operates F-16s, its ground crews could service the jets there, thus maintaining plausible deniability of direct NATO involvement. With some minor differences, Romanian and Moldovan are effectively the same language, so the crews could pass as the locals.
If true, this would mean that Moldova is a party to the conflict. This is particularly dangerous for the small former Soviet republic, as numerous Russian officials have repeatedly stated that any third parties that might house F-16s (or get involved in any other way) will be considered legitimate targets. It can be argued that this is precisely what the political West wants. Firstly, this would drag Moldova into the NATO-orchestrated Ukrainian conflict, forcing Russia to react, thus shifting its attention and resources away from the Donbass, where the Neo-Nazi junta forces are suffering heavy losses in manpower and equipment, while also losing territory on a daily basis. Secondly, it serves as a test of what exactly Moscow would do. If it retaliates against Kishinev, the Kremlin would be forced to fight another war, although this could discourage NATO from basing the Kiev regime’s F-16s in Poland and Romania.
On the other hand, if Russia decides not to target Moldovan airbases housing the US-made jets, this could encourage the political West to use Romania and Poland for the same purpose. Either way, the potential for escalation in this area is massive, particularly if the deliveries of F-16s also include nuclear weapons. On the other hand, the F-16’s impact on conventional military operations against Russian forces is minimal. Thus, the NATO-backed government in Kishinev is essentially risking the lives of 2.5 million Moldovans who don’t want to take part in any war, particularly not against Russia. Unfortunately, the political West is determined to use the country as a staging ground to project power in the strategically important Odessa oblast (region), which is critical for the Neo-Nazi junta’s maritime access. Moldova itself and the people would not only gain nothing from this, but stand to lose quite a lot.
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A guest on Judging Freedom, Dr Gilbert Doctorow, took a contrarian stance to Scott Ritter’s journalism work on Russia, which seemingly aligns Doctorow’s stance with the official government stance.
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Doctorow accused Ritter (starting about 21:30) of stomping across redlines that any person familiar with Russia should have been aware of. Doctorow didn’t specifically state what any of these redlines might be.
He also accused Ritter of violating FARA (the Foreign Agents Registration Act), albeit he conceded that was not for him to judge.
Says Doctorow,
My concern is [that] two generations of Americans have not understood the Cold War and how you behave in circumstances when you are backing the cause or at least sympathetic to the cause or even understanding the cause of an [US] adversary. How do you avoid becoming Tokyo Rose [as English-speaking female radio propagandists for Japan were called]?
In other words, Doctorow is accusing Ritter of being a (perhaps unwitting) propagandist for Russia as well as not knowing how to behave in certain circumstances. In other words, Doctorow (who has his academic credentials highlighted as “Dr. Gilbert Doctorow, Ph.D.”) comes across as questioning the intellectual rigor of Ritter.
An additional redline, according to Doctorow,
And, you do not accept payments of any kind, or of favors, like travel. That is air travel, hotels, and the rest of it. You do not touch that. If it is being offered to you by a country, by a foreign country, particularly a foreign country that is in such hostile relations with the United States. (23:50)
… Ritter has “exposed himself to [violating FARA] charges by admitting he received money from RT and so forth.” (29:45)
Such an argument is problematic for many reasons. According to Doctorow, any journalistic work with a hostile country must be unpaid. Journalism, for many, is a paying job. It is a means to be reimbursed for one’s time, effort, training, and skill. Yet Doctorow proffers that in certain circumstances a journalist should forgo payment.
If US authorities do not explicitly decree that journalism relaying the situation or views of a certain foreign country is prohibited, then how is one to know?
Besides, do Americans not have an inalienable right to know? Or is knowledge/information/data to be solely the prerogative of the US government to determine what citizens can be exposed to? Is gaining insight to what the other side is saying to be prohibited?
Americans will just have to trust that their government knows best; for instance, that Viet Nam had fired missiles at US ships in the Gulf of Tonkin, that Iraq had weapons-of-mass-destruction, that Syrian government forces had carried out chemical weapon attacks, that there is no genocide in Palestine.
Does the First Amendment in the US not protect freedom of speech and the press? Because if one has to pay to fly to Russia, pay for hotels, transportation, and meals in Russia, then only those with the means to self-finance such an endeavor are likely to provide information — with potential for bias from the well-to-do perspective. If reporting on Russia has to be done out of the pocket of a journalist, this sounds like a good way to censor journalism. It is censorship that limits the rights of those who want to work as a journalist and also denies the rights of readers/viewers of such journalism.
If it wasn’t largely for Ritter then how many people would have known about Iraq having been “fundamentally disarmed”? More recently, if not for Ritter, how many people would have heard why the Bucha massacre of scores of civilians blamed on Russia and reported as such by the stenographers in western monopoly media was a fabrication for killings carried out by Ukrainians?
Powerful people and the interests behind them seek to control information. They want to prevent certain information from reaching an audience and they’d like a certain narrative, even disinformation, to reach that audience.
If knowledge is power (not a corrupting power, it is hoped), then it should not be controlled by the already powerful, it should be a liberatory force to empower the masses.
Don’t Be a Yes Man
There are different types of contrarians depending on whether those who we are talking to are in agreement or disagreement.
We are encouraged to be critical thinkers. We are taught to value leadership. However, there is a type of person called a Yes Man (or Yes Woman). This is a weak person who always supports whoever is in a position of power, rightly or wrongly. Yes Men are dangerous.
There are plenty of bad laws on the books. One aphorism holds that laws are meant to be broken. This is too simplistic. But some bad laws should be broken and taken off the books.
Don’t follow bad leaders or bad laws. Ritter is a contrarian to the fetid state. He has the courage to oppose censorship, bad thinking, and following bad laws.
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Events of recent days have focused world’s attention on the multi-dimensional crisis situation in Bangladesh, an important country of South Asia having most of its land border with India (a much smaller part with Myanmar) and with a population of over 170 million. Bangladesh has a long coastal stretch and an intricate network of big and small rivers, contributing to beautiful greenery but also exposing the people here to cyclones and floods, all the more so in times of climate change.
In fact the first aspect to which one would like to draw the attention of readers relates to the extremely difficult conditions that prevail here for many people and the record of any government or leaders should be examined keeping in view these difficulties, something that is often forgotten.
Bangladesh was part of colonial India and suffered from the terrible exploitation by British colonial rulers for nearly two centuries. In fact the exploitation of this part of the country was known to be extremely acute, as seen from the very large number of famine deaths, the increasing poverty of peasants and the destruction of once flourishing weaving craft.
With independence in 1947 came the partition of the country, caused by the deliberate provocation of divisions among people caused by colonial rulers who followed a divide and rule policy. This led to large-scale deaths and displacement, coming on top of a mass famine which had just ended.
As a result of partition the new country of Pakistan emerged which in turn consisted of West Pakistan and East Pakistan, separated by a long distance. West Pakistan practiced internal colonialism against East Pakistan so that the sufferings of East Pakistan continued even after the end of British colonial rule.
Image is from the Public Domain
After 24 years matters came to a head when West Pakistan leaders and army rulers refused to hand over the country’s leadership to the charismatic leader from East Pakistan Sheikh Mujibur Rehman whose party the Awami League had won a national level majority in elections. Mujibur Rehman, popularly called Banglabandhu, was instead arrested. A genocidal campaign was launched in East Pakistan by the army of West Pakistan and some local collaborators who generally consisted of the most fanatic and fundamentalist sections of society. Hindu minority families and intellectuals were targeted in particular.
Estimates of the number of people killed from this violence number between three million (the figure accepted by the Bangladesh government) so far and three hundred thousand, with a middle level figure being around 1.5 million to 2 million people. A large number of people also died from hunger and disease. Nearly two hundred thousand to four hundred thousand women were raped. Nearly 10 million people were displaced, a big majority belonging to the Hindu minority, and sought shelter in refugee camps set up across the border in India.
The USA under Nixon (and Kissinger) and China under Mao supported Pakistan all through in this genocide which continued for nearly nine months. Then the Indian army and local Mukti Bahini fighters joined hands to defeat the Pakistani army and secure the surrender of nearly 90,000 Pakistani soldiers.
Thus was born a new country named Bangladesh (former East Pakistan). Mujibur Rehman was released and on assuming leadership of the new country declared commitment to secularism and socialism which was reflected in the constitution too. However after about four years he along with most family members was killed by a group of army officers in August 1975. This was followed by army rule, dictatorships, coups and instability.
The overall result has been that the country and its people have suffered a lot. In addition we have the impacts of climate change which are reflected in more sea-storms, floods and intense heat waves. The angry sea is eating up land while the density of population is already very high, in fact the highest among the larger countries, at about 1,342 people per square km. This can be compared to 37 per square km for USA and 4 per sq. km for Canada. Among western countries the Netherlands is considered to be the most densely populated, but in the case of Bangladesh the density is about 2.5 times that of the Netherlands.
This is why I stated at the outset that the development challenges are really quite tough here. Now in addition let us look at some of the structural problems. The inequalities in the country are high and it is not easy to take actions against the well-entrenched elites without risking hold over power. Conditions of international division of work allow for exports to expand manly in low wage conditions, and the terms of trade are often against the poorer country.
Image is licensed under GODL-India
Hence the evaluation of any leader should be only against the background of all these difficulties. Sheikh Hasina, the longest serving Prime Minister of Bangladesh who has left the country recently in the middle of violent disturbances, was able to provide the country significant achievements in development and stability in the course of nearly two decades. In the context of many important human development indicators, Bangladesh soon surged ahead of Pakistan despite having suffered internal exploitation for nearly 24 years. Bangladesh emerged as a leading center of garment exports. Hence for the greater part of her rule, Sheikh Hasina can be credited with providing reasonably good achievements in difficult conditions.
However serious difficulties started emerging after the COVID 19 disruptions due to which unemployment increased. In such a situation the anger against job reservations for freedom fighter families increased. Sheikh Hasina responded to this by making due changes.
In all democratic systems there are times when people come on the streets for protests. Some of these protests relate to very genuine problems, and as we have already indicated there are many genuine problems from which people suffer here in overall very difficult conditions. A democratic system is generally capable of reaching some agreement with such protesters because the government ultimately wants to settle things and the protesters are satisfied once they get a reasonably satisfactory response.
However things start getting out of hand once there is a foreign hand behind the protests and that too of some very powerful country or countries. Now in this situation the objective of the protests is no longer to ensure the settlement of problems but instead it is to go on inciting violence and disturbances till some other and bigger objective of the foreign hand, like regime change or the ouster of some big leader, is achieved.
Sheikh Hasina faced this kind of a situation in the last days of her rule and it is to a significant extent due to this reason that the protests could not be settled in an amicable way. Of course it can be argued that she and her colleagues could still have found a way out with more skills and patience. To give an example, her government could have tried to separate the genuine protesters like some sincere students from those were following the dictates of the foreign hand and have been known for their cruelty and fanaticism. Under ideal conditions the sincere protesters wanting better democracy and improved job prospects could have been invited to reach an early settlement while a strong stick would have been used only against those undemocratic and fanatic elements which were part of a conspiracy of regime change.
However this is easier said than done. Also one has to remember that in the past not only was the family of Sheikh Hasina murdered by fanatic/cruel elements tied to the foreign hand, in addition assassination attempts had also targeted Sheikh Hasina more than once and even grenades had been thrown on her and her colleagues, leading to the death of several of her colleagues even though she survived somehow. Such past experiences increase the feeling of insecurity and in such conditions if she could not distinguish between some sincere protests and the protests of the fanatic and cruel elements who had always tried to harm her and her family then her difficult situation can be understood.
In due course more will no doubt be revealed about the foreign hand, but for the time being at least this much can be stated that that this was related to a significant extent to the refusal to hand over a base that could be used for strategic purposes, while the other big aim of the foreign pressures was related to weakening the friendly relations and cooperation prevailing between India and Bangladesh. Sheikh Hasina had been warning against the foreign pressures on her and the efforts to weaken her.
Ultimately one is left with an overwhelming impression of the extent to which imperialism is responsible for the problems of common people—whether as a result of the long colonial rule of exploitation and ‘divide and rule’ policy, or the impact of the richest industrial countries in causing climate change, or the role of imperialism in pushing the trade and financial systems which place severe constraints on economies like those of Bangladesh, or the impact of imperialism in pushing for distorted health and pandemic policies which caused avoidable disruptions for livelihoods of people, or the hidden hand of imperialism in pushing for regime change and ouster of leaders, by involving even aid agencies and making unprincipled use of even fanatic fundamentalist elements, strengthening them in the process at the cost of secular forces. While imperialism is responsible for so much distress of people and for the harm caused to democracy and secularism, at the same time imperialism works in such a shrewd way that the affected and suffering people generally do not blame the forces of imperialism and instead sections of suffering people keep blaming each other for the distress.
The recent changes in Bangladesh are much more likely to have a negative rather than a positive impact, some signs of which are already evident. As far as the path ahead is concerned, there is absolutely no doubt that conditions for most people can improve on a sustainable basis only by following a path based on justice, peace, inter-faith harmony, democracy and environment protection, these precepts being integrated well with each other on the basis of local conditions.
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Bharat Dogra is Honorary Convener, Campaign to Save Earth Now. His recent books include Protecting Earth for Children, A Day in 2071, Planet in Peril and Man over Machine (Ideas of Mahatma Gandhi for our times). He is a regular contributor to Global Research.
Featured image: Fountain inside the Museum of Independence, Dhaka, Bangladesh. It is the first and only underground museum in the country. (Licensed under CC BY 3.0)
US political and media elites tried but failed to sink the Chinese swimming team at the Paris Olympics.The Chinese swimmers performed well despite the increased stress caused by media-induced rumors of “Chinese doping”. And now, the tables are being turned as the US anti-doping regime is coming under increasing scrutiny and criticism.
The Media Manufactured Cloud of Suspicion
Just a few months ago the NY Times and German ARD media ignitedthe controversy with an “investigation” regarding an incident from December 2021. At that time, 23 Chinese swimmers tested positive for a trace amount of the heart medication Trimetazadine (TMZ) during a swim meet for top swimmers from across the country.The Chinese Anti Doping Agency investigated and learned that all the positively tested swimmers were staying at the same hotel and eating in the same dining room. The amount of TMZ detected was so low that in some cases it was detected one day, and not the next. Testing in the kitchen revealed that TMZ was on the counters and in the vent hood.
The Chinese Anti Doping Agency (CHINADA) concluded that the athletes had been contaminated through food served in the dining room. They reported the facts to the World Anti Doping Agency (WADA) and the international swimming federation (World Aquatics, formerly known as FINA). Both organizations concurred with the conclusion that the athletes were innocent and should not be charged with an anti-doping rule violation.
But the NY Times and ARD suggested something shady had occurred and the athletes may not have been innocent. They further suggested thatCHINADA and WADA may be in collusion and covering up mass doping.
This story ignited a storm of accusations with the head of the US Anti Doping Agency (USADA), Travis Tygart, leading the pack. Some prominent international swimmers have joined the fray with suggestions that the Chinese swimming accomplishments at the 2022 Tokyo Olympics were tainted, “not clean,” or based on cheating. The insinuations and suspicions continued into swimming competitions at the Paris Olympics. Many TV commentators at the Olympics referred to the insinuation one way or another. Media kept the suspicion alive by highlighting when a prominent international swimmer said anything about it. American champion swimmer Katie Ledeckysaid it was difficult to accept coming second behind a Chinese swimmer who might have doped. Legendary US swimmer Michael Phelpssaid any athlete guilty of doping should be banned forever – “one and done”.
The US Congress got involved with Congressional representativesto suspend or cancel US contributions to WADA. With the 2019 Rodchenkov Act, the US Congress has granted itself the power to arrest and penalize anyone in the world involved in “doping”.
Paris 2024 Olympics
Image: Pan Zhanle (潘展乐) celebrating at the 2024 Summer Olympics in Paris in August 2024 (Licensed under CC BY 3.0)
Swimming at the 2024 ParisOlympics is now over. The swimming powerhouses USand Australia won the most medals with 28and 18 respectively. But China did well, coming third with 12 swimming medals.China’s Pan Zhanle was one of the superstars of the event, setting a new world record in the 100 m freestyle. He also anchored the Chinese relay team to their victory in the 4 x 100 meter medley relay, an event the US has dominated for 64 years.
Chinese swimmers spoke about feeling additional stress and discomfort because of the accusations and rumors about doping. They were tested much more than any other team, with some 600 doping tests conducted leading into and during the games. There were zero violations.
The superstar Pan Zhanle was not one of the swimmers who tested positive in 2021.
So it was left to some critics to say his performance was not “humanly possible”.
Tables Are Turned
Chinese and other media are now pushing back and exposing the hypocrisy and double standards of the US anti-doping regime. Even the mainstream Newsweek magazine headlines “China turns the table on US doping accusations.”
More significantly, on August 7 the World Anti Doping Agency (WADA) publicly denounced USADA for having “allowed athletes who had doped, to competefor years, in at least one case without ever publishing or sanctioning their anti-doping rule violations, in direct contravention of the World Anti-Doping Code and USADA’s own rules. The USADA scheme threatened the integrity of sporting competition, which the Code seeks to protect.”
Other international organizations are also reacting negatively to the US efforts to be the global judge and jury. The International Olympic Committee has said that the US may lose hosting of future Olympic Games if the US undermines the global anti doping establishment.
NY Times Misleading Information
The NY Times and Germany’s ARD launched and spurred this controversy with misleading reporting. A recent NYT article titled “A Doping Scandal” claims there is “a troubling pattern of positive doping tests in the Chinese swimming program.” Twelve members of the Chinese Olympic team tested positive in recent years for powerful performance-enhancing drugs but were cleared to keep competing.”They insinuated malfeasance on the part of the Chinese swimmers, China Anti Doping Agency and World Anti Doping Agency.By implication, the world swimming federation (World Aquatics) was also guilty.
The NY Times claim that Trimetazidine is a “powerful performance-enhancing drug” is false. The medication is helpful for elderly individuals with weak hearts but does nothing for young athletes with healthy hearts.As noted at SwimSwam magazine, “Dr. Benjamin Levine, a renowned sports cardiologist at UT Southwestern Medical School, says he doesn’t think it provides any benefit.” If Western athletes doubt this or want to test it, Dr. Levine says they can imbibe RANOLAZINE which is very similar to TMZ and NOT PROHIBITED.
The insinuation that dozens of Chinese swimmers from diverse parts of the country with different coaches were collectively imbibing a prohibited medication risking their careers and reputations does not pass the sniff test. Simple logic would indicate an accidental contamination of the food they were all eating, confirmed by the presence of the chemical in the dining room kitchen. That is what CHINADA, WADA and World Aquatics all determined. The commitment of Chinese swimmers to anti-doping and clean sport is confirmed by the renowned Australian swim coach Denis Cotterell.
The Need for Thresholds
This incident points to the need for there to be appropriate thresholds for determining a doping rule violation. Currently this is inconsistent. There are minimum levels for some chemicals and none for others. Modern test instruments can detect extremely small amounts – molecules – of a chemical. As a scientist at an official doping test laboratory said, “It is very dangerous to not have a minimum threshold because all sorts of chemicals are in the environment.”
How Did the TMZ Get in the Kitchen?
A very important question remains unanswered: How did TMZ get into the hotel kitchen and the food that was being prepared for consumption by the Chinese athletes?
There is a curious coincidence. During the same month, December 2021, the Russian figure skaterKamila Valieva – widely recognized as the best in the world – tested positive for a trace amount of TMZ when she was competing in the Russian Nationals in St. Peteresburg.Howeverthis was not reported by the Swedish laboratory until February,just in time to disrupt the Beijing Winter Olympics.Unlike the Chinese swimmers, Valieva was alone and unable to identify where the contamination seven weeks earlier came from. This one positive test for a trace amount of TMZ resulted in huge turmoil in Beijing, assumption of guilt contrary to common sense, and ultimately the destruction of Valieva’s international competitive career. Her suggestion there may have been sabotage was ignored. The NY Times thinks this case is “how it’s supposed to work.”
Summary
In Paris unlike Beijing in 2022, the accusations were a distraction but not totally disruptive. The fans in the swimming arena were respectful and appreciative of the Chinese athletes. Some international swimmers also ignored the controversy and did the right thing. They congratulated the Chinese swimmers when they were victorious. Australian Kyle Chalmers congratulated Pan Zhanle.American Caleb Dressel acknowledged the Chinese swimmers were the best that day they won the 4 x 100m medley.
The attempt to torpedo the Chinese swimmers and undermine China’s international image did not succeed.
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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]
The Pentagon is in the midst of a massive $2 trillion multiyear plan to build a new generation of nuclear-armed missiles, bombers, and submarines. A large chunk of that funding will go to major nuclear weapons contractors like Bechtel, General Dynamics, Honeywell, Lockheed Martin, and Northrop Grumman. And they will do everything in their power to keep that money flowing.
This January, a review of the Sentinel intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) program under the Nunn-McCurdy Act — a congressional provision designed to rein in cost overruns of Pentagon weapons programs — found that the missile, the crown jewel of the nuclear overhaul plan involving 450 missile-holding silos spread across five states, is already 81% over its original budget. It is now estimated that it will cost a total of nearly $141 billion to develop and purchase, a figure only likely to rise in the future.
That Pentagon review had the option of canceling the Sentinel program because of such a staggering cost increase. Instead, it doubled down on the program, asserting that it would be an essential element of any future nuclear deterrent and must continue, even if the funding for other defense programs has to be cut to make way for it. In justifying the decision, Deputy Defense Secretary William LaPlantestated:
“We are fully aware of the costs, but we are also aware of the risks of not modernizing our nuclear forces and not addressing the very real threats we confront.”
Cost is indeed one significant issue, but the biggest risk to the rest of us comes from continuing to build and deploy ICBMs, rather than delaying or shelving the Sentinel program. As former Secretary of Defense William Perry has noted, ICBMs are “some of the most dangerous weapons in the world” because they “could trigger an accidental nuclear war.” As he explained, a president warned (accurately or not) of an enemy nuclear attack would have only minutes to decide whether to launch such ICBMs and conceivably devastate the planet.
Possessing such potentially world-ending systems only increases the possibility of an unintended nuclear conflict prompted by a false alarm. And as Norman Solomon and the late Daniel Ellsberg once wrote,
“If reducing the dangers of nuclear war is a goal, the top priority should be to remove the triad’s ground-based leg — not modernize it.”
This is no small matter. It is believed that a large-scale nuclear exchange could result in more than five billion of us humans dying, once the possibility of a “nuclear winter” and the potential destruction of agriculture across much of the planet is taken into account, according to an analysis by International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War.
In short, the need to reduce nuclear risks by eliminating such ICBMs could not be more urgent. The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists’ “Doomsday Clock” — an estimate of how close the world may be at any moment to a nuclear conflict — is now set at 90 seconds to midnight, the closest it’s been since that tracker was first created in 1947. And just this June, Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a mutual defense agreement with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, a potential first step toward a drive by Moscow to help Pyongyang expand its nuclear arsenal further. And of the nine countries now possessing nuclear weapons, it’s hardly the only one other than the U.S. in an expansionist phase.
Considering the rising tide of nuclear escalation globally, is it really the right time for this country to invest a fortune of taxpayer dollars in a new generation of devastating “use them or lose them” weapons? The American public has long said no, according to a 2020 poll by the University of Maryland’s Program for Public Consultation, which showed that 61% of us actually support phasing out ICBM systems like the Sentinel.
The Pentagon’s misguided plan to keep such ICBMs in the U.S arsenal for decades to come is only reinforced by the political power of members of Congress and the companies that benefit financially from the current buildup.
Who Decides? The Role of the ICBM Lobby
A prime example of the power of the nuclear weapons lobby is the Senate ICBM Coalition. That group is composed of senators from four states — Montana, North Dakota, Utah, and Wyoming — that either house major ICBM bases or host significant work on the Sentinel. Perhaps you won’t be surprised to learn that the members of that coalition have received more than $3 million in donations from firms involved in the production of the Sentinel over the past four election cycles. Nor were they alone. ICBM contractors made contributions to 92 of the 100 senators and 413 of the 435 house members in 2024. Some received hundreds of thousands of dollars.
The nuclear lobby paid special attention to members of the armed services committees in the House and Senate. For example, Mike Turner, a House Republican from Ohio, has been a relentless advocate of “modernizing” the nuclear arsenal. In a June 2024 talk at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, which itself has received well over a million dollars in funding from nuclear weapons producers, he called for systematically upgrading the nuclear arsenal for decades to come, while chiding any of his congressional colleagues not taking such an aggressive stance on the subject.
Although Turner vigorously touts the need for a costly nuclear buildup, he fails to mention that, with $305,000 in donations, he’s been the fourth-highest recipient of funding from the ICBM lobby over the four elections between 2018 and 2024. Little wonder that he pushes for new nuclear weapons and staunchly opposes extending the New START arms reduction treaty.
In another example of contractor influence, veteran Texas representative Kay Granger secured the largest total of contributions from the ICBM lobby of any House member. With $675,000 in missile contractor contributions in hand, Granger went to bat for the lobby, lending a feminist veneer to nuclear “modernization” by giving a speech on her experience as a woman in politics at Northrop Grumman’s Women’s conference. And we’re sure you won’t be surprised that Granger has anything but a strong track record when it comes to keeping the Pentagon and arms makers accountable for waste, fraud, and abuse in weapons programs. Her X account is, in fact, littered with posts heaping praise on Lockheed Martin and its overpriced, underperforming F-35 combat aircraft.
Today’s tour of @LockheedMartin’s F-35 plant with @SecAFOfficial, @SenTedCruz, and Lockheed leaders Marillyn Hewson and James Taiclet highlights Fort Worth's Texas-sized role in providing for our common defense and the contributions made by our world-class workforce. pic.twitter.com/gEXSRrXSVa
Other recipients of ICBM contractor funding, like Alabama Congressman Mike Rogers, have lamented the might of the “far-left disarmament community,” and the undue influence of “anti-nuclear zealots” on our politics. Missing from the statements his office puts together and the speeches his staffers write for him, however, is any mention of the $471,000 in funding he’s received so far from ICBM producers. You won’t be surprised, we’re sure, to discover that Rogers has pledged to seek a provision in the forthcoming National Defense Authorization Act to support the Pentagon’s plan to continue the Sentinel program.
Lobbying Dollars and the Revolving Door
The flood of campaign contributions from ICBM contractors is reinforced by their staggering investments in lobbying. In any given year, the arms industry as a whole employs between 800 and 1,000 lobbyists, well more than one for every member of Congress. Most of those lobbyists hired by ICBM contractors come through the “revolving door” from careers in the Pentagon, Congress, or the Executive Branch. That means they come with the necessary tools for success in Washington: an understanding of the appropriations cycle and close relations with decision-makers on the Hill.
During the last four election cycles, ICBM contractors spent upwards of $226 million on 275 extremely well-paid lobbyists. For example, Bud Cramer, a former Democratic congressman from Alabama who once sat on the defense subcommittee of the House Appropriations Committee, netted $640,000 in fees from Northrop Grumman over a span of six years. He was also a cofounder of the Blue Dog Democrats, an influential conservative faction within the Democratic Party. Perhaps you won’t be surprised to learn that Cramer’s former chief of staff, Jefferies Murray, also lobbies for Northrop Grumman.
While some lobbyists work for one contractor, others have shared allegiances. For example, during his tenure as a lobbyist, former Senate Appropriations Committee Chair Trent Lottreceived more than $600,000 for his efforts for Raytheon, Textron Inc., and United Technologies (before United Technologies and Raytheon merged to form RX Technologies). Former Virginia Congressman Jim Moran similarly received $640,000 from Northrop Grumman and General Dynamics.
Playing the Jobs Card
The argument of last resort for the Sentinel and similar questionable weapons programs is that they create well-paying jobs in key states and districts. Northrop Grumman has played the jobs card effectively with respect to the Sentinel, claiming it will create 10,000 jobs in its development phase alone, including about 2,250 in the state of Utah, where the hub for the program is located.
A view of the Northrup Grumman Mission Systems headquarters facility on West Nursery Road in Linthicum, Maryland. (Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0)
As a start, however, those 10,000 jobs will help a miniscule fraction of the 167-million-member American workforce. Moreover, Northrop Grumman claims facilities tied to the program will be set up in 32 states. If 2,250 of those jobs end up in Utah, that leaves 7,750 more jobs spread across 31 states — an average of about 250 jobs per state, essentially a rounding error compared to total employment in most localities.
Nor has Northrop Grumman provided any documentation for the number of jobs the Sentinel program will allegedly create. Journalist Taylor Barnes of ReThink Media was rebuffed in her efforts to get a copy of the agreement between Northrop Grumman and the state of Utah that reportedly indicates how many Sentinel-related jobs the company needs to create to get the full subsidy offered to put its primary facility in Utah.
A statement by a Utah official justifying that lack of transparency suggested Northrop Grumman was operating in “a competitive defense industry” and that revealing details of the agreement might somehow harm the company. But any modest financial harm Northrop Grumman might suffer, were those details revealed, pales in comparison with the immense risks and costs of the Sentinel program itself.
There are two major flaws in the jobs argument with respect to the future production of nuclear weapons. First, military spending should be based on security considerations, not pork-barrel politics. Second, as Heidi Peltier of the Costs of War Project has effectively demonstrated, virtually any other expenditure of funds currently devoted to Pentagon programs would create between 9% and 250% more jobs than weapons spending does. If Congress were instead to put such funds into addressing climate change, dealing with future disease epidemics, poverty, or homelessness — all serious threats to public safety — the American economy would gain hundreds of thousands of jobs. Choosing to fund those ICBMs instead is, in fact, a job killer, not a job creator.
Unwarranted Influence in the Nuclear Age
Advocates for eliminating ICBMs from the American arsenal make a strong case. (If only they were better heard!) For example, former Representative John Tierney of the Center for Arms Control and Nonproliferation offered this blunt indictment of ICBMs:
“Not only are intercontinental ballistic missiles redundant, but they are prone to a high risk of accidental use…They do not make us any safer. Their only value is to the defense contractors who line their fat pockets with large cost overruns at the expense of our taxpayers. It has got to stop.”
The late Daniel Ellsberg made a similar point in a February 2018 interview with the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists:
“You would not have these arsenals, in the U.S. or elsewhere, if it were not the case that it was highly profitable to the military-industrial complex, to the aerospace industry, to the electronics industry, and to the weapons design labs to keep modernizing these weapons, improving accuracy, improving launch time, all that. The military-industrial complex that Eisenhower talked about is a very powerful influence. We’ve talked about unwarranted influence. We’ve had that for more than half a century.”
Given how the politics of Pentagon spending normally work, that nuclear weapons policy is being so heavily influenced by individuals and organizations profiting from an ongoing arms race should be anything but surprising. Still, in the case of such weaponry, the stakes are so high that critical decisions shouldn’t be determined by parochial politics. The influence of such special interest groups and corporate weapons-makers over life-and-death issues should be considered both a moral outrage and perhaps the ultimate security risk.
Isn’t it finally time for the executive branch and Congress to start assessing the need for ICBMs on their merits, rather than on contractor lobbying, weapons company funding, and the sort of strategic thinking that was already outmoded by the end of the 1950s? For that to happen, our representatives would need to hear from their constituents loud and clear.
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ISBN Number: 978-0-9737147-5-3 Year: 2012 Pages: 102
PDF Edition: $6.50 (sent directly to your email account!)
Michel Chossudovsky is Professor of Economics at the University of Ottawa and Director of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG), which hosts the critically acclaimed website www.globalresearch.ca . He is a contributor to the Encyclopedia Britannica. His writings have been translated into more than 20 languages.
Reviews
“This book is a ‘must’ resource – a richly documented and systematic diagnosis of the supremely pathological geo-strategic planning of US wars since ‘9-11’ against non-nuclear countries to seize their oil fields and resources under cover of ‘freedom and democracy’.” –John McMurtry, Professor of Philosophy, Guelph University
“In a world where engineered, pre-emptive, or more fashionably “humanitarian” wars of aggression have become the norm, this challenging book may be our final wake-up call.” -Denis Halliday, Former Assistant Secretary General of the United Nations
Michel Chossudovsky exposes the insanity of our privatized war machine. Iran is being targeted with nuclear weapons as part of a war agenda built on distortions and lies for the purpose of private profit. The real aims are oil, financial hegemony and global control. The price could be nuclear holocaust. When weapons become the hottest export of the world’s only superpower, and diplomats work as salesmen for the defense industry, the whole world is recklessly endangered. If we must have a military, it belongs entirely in the public sector. No one should profit from mass death and destruction. –Ellen Brown, author of ‘Web of Debt’ and president of the Public Banking Institute
One thing you can say about the Administration of President Joe Biden is that nearly every week there is something new and exciting to discuss. Galloping dementia recently gifted us with Joe’s 11-minute abdication speech in which he announced that he would not be running for another term as president. He babbled about how he was taking the step in spite of his desire to continue. The president, who is 81 and recently best noted for his failing mental state causing him to fall down stairs, felt compelled to say that he believes that his record as president “merited a second term” but that “nothing can come in the way of saving our democracy.”
He also claimed that“I’m the first president in this century to report to the American people that the United States is not at war anywhere in the world,” even though it is engaged in a military occupation and combat operations in Syria, bombing Yemen and conducting counterterrorism in Iraq as well as supporting logistically and with intelligence the large and growing conflicts in Ukraine and Gaza. He has pledged to Israel that he will “defend” it if attacked, presumably no matter what Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu assassinates or bombs to provoke a war against Lebanon, Syria and Iran.
Joe ended up by celebrating the nomination of Kamala Harris as heir-designate to the Oval Office after disposing of the troublesome and assertive Donald Trump, who presumably is the one who will tear up the US Constitution and “destroy democracy” if given the chance to do so.
But that was two weeks ago. More recently the fun fair on the Potomac turned its guns on a major critic of the federal government’s policies, most notably exercising its proclivity to float a lot of lies to turn anyone who exercises his or her first amendment right to free speech into some kind of traitor who has to be silenced. Many would argue that if the Biden Administration has one major failure beyond losing control over the country’s southern border, it is failure to manage US Foreign Policy in such a fashion as to avoid initiating or expanding existing international conflicts so as to turn them into major wars.
If one considers Ukraine and Gaza, both conflicts that could have easily been stopped or de-escalated if the State Department had stopped acting as a shill for Volodymyr Zelensky and Benjamin Netanyahu and had instead created disincentives to continuing the fighting, the case for US involvement as an antagonist is non-existent. The American people benefit in no way from either war and opinion polls make clear that there is considerable popular opposition to the carnage taking place along both fronts.
On August 7th, it was reported that Scott Ritter, who I consider a friend, had his house in New York State searched by FBI and police and 25 boxes containing documents and electronic communications devices were reportedly taken away for examination in an “ongoing investigation.”
Scott, a former Marine corps intelligence officer, has anti-war credentials that go way back to before the Iraq War when he, as a United Nations Weapon inspector, declared that Saddam Hussein had no “weapons of mass destruction” (WMD). WMD fear was being promoted in Washington as the reason for attacking and disarming Iraq. Scott was pilloried both by the mainstream media and by the Pentagon’s and White House’s mostly Jewish neocons (Paul Wolfowitz, Doug Feith, Richard Perle and Scooter Libby) who were busy fabricating deliberately misleading information and disseminating it to encourage the George W. Bush administration to start the war, which it obligingly did. Scott nevertheless has continued to be an effective gadfly over war and peace issues ever since that time.
Ritter had earlier a run-in with the Biden regime in June 2024 when he was at the airport in New York City preparing to fly to Istanbul on his way to St. Petersburg to attend the prestigious international Economic Forum that that city hosts annually. A team of three FBI agents accosted him as he was about to board his plane and they confiscated his passport under orders from the State Department. They would neither give him a receipt for the document nor did they produce a warrant. No reason was given for the action, and Scott has since that time been unable to get his passport back.
The passport confiscation and now the house search appear to be connected with what is referred to as a Foreign Agent Registration Act (FARA) of 1938 investigation. FARA came into being just before the outbreak of the Second World War, when it was feared that “agents” of the Italian and German governments were all too freely spreading their propaganda in the US. In particular, FARA mandates that the finances and relationships of the foreign affiliated organization be open to Department of the Justice inspection. It states that “any person who acts as an agent, representative, employee, or servant, or otherwise acts at the order, request, or under the direction or control of a foreign principal.” Those who fail to disclose might be penalized by up to five years in prison and fines up to $250,000.
To be sure, the U.S. government has recently been aggressive in demanding FARA registration for other nations as well as for Americans working for foreign powers. There have been several prominent FARA cases in the news. Major Russian news agencies operating in the U.S. were compelled to register in 2017 because they were funded largely or in part by the Kremlin. Also, as part of their plea deals, the former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort and former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn both conceded that they had failed to comply with FARA when working as consultants with foreign governments.
Image: U.S. Rep. Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii addresses the National Guard Association of the United States 138th General Conference, Baltimore, Md., Sept. 12, 2016. (U.S. Army National Guard photo by Sgt. 1st Class Jim Greenhill)
While the Department of Justice is now going after Scott Ritter using FARA presumably because he is an effective critic of Joe Biden’s wars, there are some indications that other elements in the US government security apparatus are going after others who have dared to oppose what the White House and Congress have been up to. On August 6th, while Democratic nominee Kamala Harris pledged to defend “freedom, compassion, and the rule of law” to cheers in Philadelphia, Hawaii’s former Congresswoman and National Guard officer Tulsi Gabbard described how she was being tracked by teams of government agents in surveilling her and her husband whenever she travels by air. Whistleblowing Air Marshals leaked how Gabbard had been singled out as a “domestic terror threat” under the so-called “Quiet Skies” program. Her boarding passes bear the SSSS notation which makes her subject to additional security searches and questioning. Her probable crime is opposing the war in Ukraine or, possibly, having recently published a book entitled “For Love of Country: Leave the Democratic Party Behind.”
While Attorney General Merrick Garland is active in pursuing individual Americans for possible FARA and “domestic terrorism” violations, he is strangely but predictably reluctant to go after the most corrupt foreign government’s US-domestic lobby which dwarfs all others in terms of illicit cash flow and political impact. It is a foreign government that receives billions of dollars a year in “aid” and other benefits from the United States taxpayer. Consider beyond that, the possibility that that government might take part of the money it receives and secretly recycle it to groups of American citizens in the United States that exist to maintain and increase that money flow while also otherwise serving other interests of the recipient country. That would mean that the United States is itself subsidizing the lobbies and groups that are inevitably working against its own interests. And it also means that those lobbyists though US citizens are acting as foreign agents, covertly giving priority to their attachment to a foreign country instead of to the nation in which they live.
I am, of course, referring to Israel. It does not require a brilliant observer to note how Israel and its allies inside the U.S. have become very skilled at milking the government in the United States at all levels for every bit of financial aid, trade concessions, military hardware and political cover that is possible to obtain. The flow of dollars, goods, and protection is never actually debated in any serious way and is often, in fact, negotiated directly by Congress or state legislatures directly with the Israeli lobbyists. This corruption and manipulation of the US governmental system by people who are basically foreign agents is something like a criminal enterprise and one can only imagine the screams of outrage coming from the New York Times if there were a similar arrangement with any other country.
Recent revelations suggest that Israel’s cheating involves subsidies that are paid covertly by Israeli government agencies to groups in the United States which in turn took direction from the Jewish state, often inter alia damaging genuine American interests. The Israeli Lobby also has been long noted for its interference in American elections, including spending large sums of money to oust politicians who complain about the Jewish state and its behavior. Progressive Congresswoman Cori Bush, a critic of Israel, was recently ousted after her opponent received $8 million and earlier this year Jamaal Bowman lost after a record $15 million went to support another “friendly to Israel” candidate.
Many of the groups receiving Israeli money failed to disclose the payments, which is a felony. At the same time, even the casual observer of government in Washington would inevitably note how Israel’s various friends and proxies, uniquely, have been de facto exempt from any regulation by the US government. The last serious attempt to register a major lobbying entity was made by John F. Kennedy, who sought to have the predecessor organization to today’s American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) comply with FARA. Kennedy was killed before he could complete the process and some have linked his death to efforts to register the Israel lobby elements while also blocking Israeli attempts to illegally and secretly develop nuclear weapons.
If one is requiring all the Israeli proxies that together make up the Israel Lobby to register under FARA, you might start with AIPAC, the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD) and the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP) but there will be many, many more before the work is done. And there is Christians United for Israel (CUFI), which also has received funding and material aid directly from Israel. The fundamentalist Christian head cases that place Israel’s interests ahead of those of their own country finally need to have their bell rung.
One might well suggest that the Biden Administration stop harassing ordinary Americans who are exercising their free speech right to critique unnecessary wars and instead go after the Israel Lobby, which is a major contributing factor to why those wars are taking place at all. It would also be nice to end the hypocrisy that surrounds anything having to do with Israel in Washington. The country is no democracy, no ally, and it is a major league war criminal with possibly hundreds of thousands of dead Palestinians as evidence of its genocidal inclinations. Several hundred Congressmen cheering war criminal Benjamin Netanyahu do not change that. Apart from anything else, that the United States is involved in sustaining and providing cover for the slaughter of thousands of innocents while also pursuing its own citizens who are saying “Thou shalt not!” is an abomination.
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This article was originally published on The Unz Review.
Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation (Federal ID Number #52-1739023) that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is councilforthenationalinterest.org, address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is [email protected].
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(Originally published September 30, 2023)
“It appears that Trudeau and Zelensky had arranged to meet this guy ahead of time. Which means that’s a further level of clearance. Meaning that Trudeau and his immediate handlers knew exactly who he was and yet he met with him… When they stood up to applaud a Nazi – a literal Nazi – they claimed that was an accident. There was nothing accidental about it! They knew who they were applauding when they applauded him. They’re just not being honest about it today.”
At a time the elites in the West have a problematic figure on the world stage, and you are having difficulty mobilizing the working class to put on uniforms and “fight for their country,” it is helpful to have a second class of pawns to do the fighting instead.
Hence, the Mujahideen in Afghanistan, funded by the CIA, contributed to the destruction of Soviet Union. [1]
Today we have the perfect group of stooges to execute an operation against big bad Russia. The same breed of tyrants in Ukraine who joined alongside the Nazis to conquer the U.S.S.R. appear to be active again following the 2014 Maidan and the coup that ensued. And they apparently don’t need much motivation to carry out offensives against the people of the Donbass region. [2]
So if Russia can be persuaded to come to their assistance, the result could well be Afghanistan 2.0! Arm the Slavic men with Howitzers, rocket launchers, missile systems and numerous other military toys while not a single soldier from the U.S. or any other country dives into the breech of the epic fight.
However, it appears that things are not going quite so badly for the Russians as had been originally planned. The great “counter-offensive” waged by President Zelensky’s forces did not amount to much more than a burp. And the NATO members, including Republican opposition members, are getting tired of throwing more weapons and money into the black hole that is Ukraine. [3][4]
Meanwhile, the Canadian Parliament is reeling from the embarrassing spectacle of being seen applauding a Ukrainian-Canadian veteran taking on the Soviets during World War II – who turned out to be serving on Hitler’s side. A Nazi! [5]
With these and other dynamics in play the Global Research News Hour continues to update listeners on the fate of this war, and the reality of the foreign policy of Canada.
In our first half hour, peace activist Tamara Lorincz joins us to analyze the consequences of the Nazi in the House of Commons and the involvement of NATO in essentially taking over our foreign affairs in recent years.
In our second half hour, military analyst and commentator Scott Ritter not only gives total victory by Russia an absolute necessity to end the war, he expands on Zelensky’s background and fate, muses about the true role of Ukraine Reconstruction Bank for power brokers JPMorgan and Blackrock, and much more.
It should also be noted that both guests expand on their own recent voyages to Russia and what we could learn about the prospects for peace from these experiences.
Tamara Lorincz is a member of Canadian Voice of Women for Peace, a PhD candidate, Balsillie School of International Affairs, Wilfrid Laurier University, and a fellow with the Canadian Foreign Policy Institute .
Scott Ritter is a former US Marine Corps intelligence officer and author of ‘Disarmament in the Time of Perestroika: Arms Control and the End of the Soviet Union.’ He served in the Soviet Union as an inspector implementing the INF Treaty, in General Schwarzkopf’s staff during the Gulf War, and from 1991-1998 as a UN weapons inspector.
GR: The great counter-offensive that we were talking about by the Ukrainians amounted to minor gains and spectacular loss of life. Ukraine deaths, I believe, soar into the hundreds of thousands now. I mean, men are actually grabbed in the street to herd into this war. And Russians have suffered too, of course. And NATO countries are starting to run out of resources to send a diminishing army. I have to ask: from your vantage point, as a military expert, what is your analysis of the war as it stands right now? I mean, can you give us an update?
SR: Well, I mean, what we’re looking at it is the strategic defeat of the Ukrainian Armed Forces.
I mean, even minor gains is far too optimistic, because a gain has to indicate some sort of progression to an objective. The objective of the counter-offensive was never to capture a village that had a pre-war population of 400. I’m referring to the village of Robotino. That’s in the Zaporizhzhia, that has been at the centre of this counter-offensive since its start back in early June. Robotino was supposed to be the point of entry by Ukraine into the Russian defence network. They should have captured or cleared Robotino on Day 2 of the operation. They should have been at Tokmak, which is the intermediate objective, a town some-20 kilometres beyond the frontline.
And then they should have been at Melitopol’, the major city which was the ultimate, you know, goal of this offensive, that is capturing Melitopol’, severing the land bridge between Russia and Crimea, and putting the Russians in an untenable situation thereby hoping that Russia would come to the negotiating table. And so, unless you take Melitopol’ and sever the land bridge you can’t speak of a “gain,” because the gain has to be seen in the context of the brutality.
The Ukrainians have successfully taken Robotino, but only after they deployed the last three brigades of the 12 brigades they allocated for the task of capturing Melitopol’. And having seized Robotino, they found that they had seized nothing more than a death trap, because Robotino was in the low ground between a series of high grounds continuing to be occupied by the Russians. And when you have the high ground, you have, you know, a superior fire position.
And the Ukrainian counter-offensive is stalled. They have no more reserves, they committed their last reserves. The Russians, meanwhile, continue to hold the totality of their defensive line. They have hundreds of thousands of troops that have yet to be committed into this fighting. Their defence industry is churning out the war material at record numbers with no indication of not being able to sustain this level of production.
Meanwhile, Ukraine’s defence industry is non-existent. They’re totally dependent on military production coming from the West, from Europe, from the United States. The Western nations have already indicated they have pretty much exhausted their relevant stockpiles of equipment to send to Ukraine. They are struggling to get new production online. And this means that Ukraine will not be able to replenish the losses that they have suffered. This means as this war goes on and as the, you know, meat-grinder grinds away, gaps will be appearing in the Ukrainian defence line and defence capacity. Gaps that cannot be replenished and these gaps will be further exploited by the Russians, creating more gaps.
And this is a recipe for collapse, and I think that’s the direction that we’re heading on the Ukrainian front. Toward the ultimate collapse of the Ukrainian military’s ability to maintain some sort of cohesive front against the Russians.
GR: Well, with this collapse appearing, you mean a signalling of the end of the war in some sense, it’s got to head somewhere. You’ve got Zelensky still, you know, going around. He was in Canada last week, somewhat infamously, in terms of the Canadian Parliament. And I’m wondering, is he still going to be president a year from now or six months from now? I mean, what do you predict will be his fate with his glorious war, as you said, coming crashing down?
SR: Well, I mean, we need to understand that Zelensky is not Winston Churchill. He is a tool of Western intelligence, of Western governments who used him to manipulate Ukraine into serving as a proxy of NATO in a larger conflict against Russia. He is an actor who has been ably reading scripts handed to him by his CIA and MI6 masters. And he had a successful first season, we could say. The show was well written and the product was seen by the viewership as being worthy of continued support.
But the second season has not been so successful. The second season, I guess we could have called it the “season of the counter-offensive.” And the counter-offensive has failed egregiously, and now the West is stuck with an actor whose script no longer motivates.
When he went on his most recent trip, you know, starting off by travelling to the United Nations where he spoke before the General Assembly. As he left Europe, we saw Poland begin to turn its back on Ukraine. And this is a very problematic issue for Ukraine: Poland is one of the larger supporters of Ukraine. Poland serves as a conduit, a physical conduit, of munitions being sent to Ukraine. Polish personnel have fought by the tens of thousands in Ukraine on the side of the Ukrainian army as mercenaries. Poland has turned over significant numbers of tanks, artillery pieces, and riding vehicles. And now Poland has said it will no longer participate in that, that they will no longer send military equipment to Ukraine. That this military equipment, especially the newer equipment is being used in Poland and being purchased abroad, will be used exclusively for the Polish military.
Moreover, Poland has said that it will not participate in the Black Sea grain deal, meaning that Poland will not allow Ukraine to dump its grain on the Polish, you know, economy. Poland is more concerned about their own farmers, their own agriculture, how to bring those crops to market, how to earn money for these farmers so they can pay taxes so that Poland can do the things that Poland needs to do.
By allowing Ukrainian grain into the Polish market, they really undercut the Polish farmer in terms of pricing. Plus the quality is garbage, much of this grain has been sitting in silos for years and has rotted and is fermented. You know, so it’s sub-quality grain. But this is problematic for Ukraine, because if it can’t bring the grain to market, it can’t generate money that it desperately needs.
And so, having Poland turned its back on Zelensky and on Ukraine was basically the precursor for what turned out to be a disastrous trip. He went to the United Nations General Assembly, spoke before the global community to a largely empty conference room. The people that flocked to hear him in the past no longer care with what he says, because he’s irrelevant. He’s recognized as having zero relevance to this issue. He’s a puppet of the – if you want to negotiate with a puppet, understand that you have to negotiate with the puppet handler. And so, people were starting to say, ‘We’re going to talk with the United States and Europe, we’re not going to talk with Ukraine, because Ukraine doesn’t do anything on its own volition.’ So, a disaster when he went to Washington D.C., he got snubbed by Congress.
The last time he was in Washington D.C. he was able to speak to a joint session of United States Congress. He had Nancy Pelosi infamously hold up a Ukrainian flag signed by so-called Defenders of Bakhmut, many of whom were affiliated with right-wing political parties. He got her to say “Slava Ukraine” which is the war cry of the Banderist movement which Zelensky has been propping for. He went to the Pentagon and was told, you know, you’re going to have to basically get some victories on the battlefield before we can go back to Congress and get more money.
And then, with his tail between his legs he flew off to Canada. Here, he met with Prime Minister Trudeau in the Canadian Parliament and got some arousing ovations from the Parliament as he delivered his presentation. But near the end of his presentation the camera panned to an individual in the audience who stood up to receive the applause of Zelensky, Trudeau, and others, including the totality of the Canadian Parliament. This was a 98-year old former soldier with the 14thGalician-SS, or Waffen-SS Division, one of, you know, a Nazi formation and everybody who served in it, you know, had to be a Nazi, taken an oath to serve Nazi Germany.
The 14th Galician Division, you know, had a reputation, well-earned during the war, of killing innocent civilians, killing Jewish women, children, the elder men, killing Poles, killing Belurusians, killing Russians themselves. A very, very criminally-laced organization. In 1945, when the war ended, the Galician Division was captured intact by the British army, I believe. And instead of being turned over to the Soviets for retribution, well-deserved, instead they kept them under British custody, turned them into what they call “displaced persons” who were interned in several camps throughout Germany. And eventually, the Galician Division was dispatched from Germany to Canada en masse, in totality, where they were absorbed by the Western Ukrainian diaspora in Ukraine.
This gentleman was singled out, he stood up, and he received a standing ovation from Parliament. Parliament literally applauded a Nazi.
GR: Yes.
SR: Now, the speaker of the Parliament has quit. He apologized, he puts the blame on him. But I will tell you this: I’ve spoken before the Canadian Parliament before, it was a foreign relations committee, but I had to be thoroughly vetted by the Canadian Royal Mounted Police and by the Canadian intelligence services before I was allowed to enter and have connection with these parliamentarians.
GR: Wow.
SR: The security for Zelensky and for Trudeau is even greater. There’s not a single person in the Parliament that wasn’t known by name to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and to the Canadian Intelligence services. But they had to have their names submitted ahead of time to be vetted. So, the Canadian Security services knew exactly who this guy was and what his background was.
Moreover, it appears that Trudeau and Zelensky had arranged to meet this guy ahead of time, which means that’s a further level of clearance. Meaning that, Trudeau and his immediate handlers knew exactly who he was, and yet he’d met with him. Zelensky knew who he was, and yet they met with him.
So, to say that this was an “accident” where only the Speaker of the House is to blame, the Speaker of the Parliament, that this was his mistake, he resigned, he’s taking a bullet for the boss. But the fact of the matter is Trudeau knew about it, he had to know about it. So did Zelensky and their security, so did the entire Parliament. When they stood up to applaud a Nazi, a literal Nazi, they claim now it was an accident. There was nothing accidental about it, they knew who they were applauding when they applauded him. They’re just not being honest about it today.
This underscores the degree to which Ukrainian nationalists with, you know, very very odious backgrounds, people who fought alongside Nazi Germany as part of the Waffen-SS who committed horrific crimes while they served Nazi Germany. They are alive and they are willing – they are alive and they are living in Canada, in Ukraine. Here in the United States we just turned a blind eye to them.
GR: Wow, that’s amazing. I thank you for bringing that to our attention. You know, just to switch gears again: as you have articulated, there is really no hope of Ukraine pulling off a victory in this battle. So, something else has to happen and if they’re going to win either NATO troops can be convinced to join Ukrainians on the front lines, or God help us, a nuclear war could be triggered. Or some sort of truce could be signed. I think that sums up all the available choices. What is your guess as to which direction this US-NATO actually will go?
SR: Well, let me say right off the bat that this is just going to be unconditional Russian victory. That’s the only way this war ends unless NATO intervenes and then this war ends with a general nuclear exchange and it terminates all life on the planet as we know it. There will be no truce, there will be no ceasefire, there will be no frozen conflict. There will be no forever war. This war is going to end – you know, I can’t give you an exact date and time – but it will end, and it will end with Ukraine’s unconditional surrender to Russia, or it will end with the absolute destruction of Ukraine.
When US Senator Lindsey Graham said that this conflict will be fought to the last Ukrainian, he was serious. Because Americans don’t care about Ukraine or Ukrainians. We only care about Ukrainians sacrificing their lives in furtherance of an American goal of bringing harm, of pain, of hurt to Russia. So, we need to understand that’s the reality. This will not end any other way. Either total Russian victory or general nuclear war.
Now, to avoid a general nuclear war, the West is going to have to accept the reality that Russia is going to win, and they’re going to win on Russian terms. And so, the question is: can NATO, the United States, the collective West, accept a Russian victory, and what will they do in the face of a Russian victory? Will they, you know, abandon Ukraine but then regroup and seek to confront Russia elsewhere? Or will they abandon Ukraine and recognize that the best way to get out of this situation is to learn to peacefully co-exist with Russia and begin negotiations with Russia about a European security framework that would be acceptable both to Europe and to Russia. These are the only options. There is literally the only – you know, in order to have a ceasefire or truce or some sort of negotiating settlement, you have to have all parties talking about this and ultimately be in agreement. Russia is not in agreement. They made it clear there will be no ceasefire. So, all the options you’ve laid out appear to just be laid out for the domestic political benefit of the nations that are willing to talk about it at this stage of the game. But it will have no impact on ultimately how this war ends. This war ends when Russia decides this war ends. And —
GR: Yeah.
SR: — no other way.
GR: Yeah. I just appreciate your take on another aspect of the war, and that’s the development of the Ukraine Reconstruction Bank. It’s set up with JP Morgan and Blackrock, you know, two of the biggest financial entities in the world. And it’s propped up as the source to allow private investors to rebuild Ukraine after it has already suffered from its rejection by Russia and then now this war. But it’s probably more intended at making big money for the war contractors. I mean, I’m thinking of what Halliburton did in Iraq. What are your thoughts, I guess? I mean, is it as benevolent as its PR says it is? Or is this like the bank and the involvement of JP Morgan and Blackrock an example of the saying by Smedley Butler that “war is a racket”?
SR: Oh, war is a racket and Blackrock is a racketeer. They’re not there to help Ukraine, they’re there to make money. You know, their bet is, as this war goes on, you know, Ukrainian assets that, right now, are worth a lot of money will diminish in value. Of course, Blackrock wants to be there to buy them at the lowest possible value and then reap the rewards through predatory reconstruction.
But the good news for Ukraine is that Blackrock will never have an opportunity to do any of this. Because Ukraine is going to lose the war, and Russia will make null and void any arrangement that Blackrock has signed. The Zelensky government will no longer exist when this war is done and the Ukrainian government that will replace it will not be inclined to honour any agreement made with Blackrock. So, it’s totally irrelevant.
Nothing that Blackrock thinks or hopes will happen from this relationship with the Ukrainian government will ever reach fruition, because in order to reach fruition you need conflict termination on terms that allow not only for the Zelensky government to stay in power, but for the Zelensky government in Ukraine to be in a superior position over Russia, one where these contractual relationships will be enforceable. That just isn’t going to happen.
The Russians will never enforce this, will never agree to this, and neither will any new Ukrainian government. So, I’m surprised at Blackrock for doing this, because it’s a very poor investment and they’re not going to be getting a good return on their dollar.
GR: Okay. I would also like to – before we run out of time. I heard that you spent time in Russia a few months ago. I would appreciate if you could just describe your experiences there. Where you travelled, who you talked to, and what was your impression generally of the country this late into the war.?
SR: Well, I went to Russia in late April. I stayed there for 26 days, returned back to the United States on May 25th. I visited 12 cities during that time. The purpose of the visit was a book tour. I had just had my book “Disarmament in the Time of Perestroika” translated into Russian and published by a Russian publishing house.
And so, I was doing a book tour. But in the process of doing the book tour, I was – I had the opportunity to see Russia, to meet Russians, and get a first-hand view at what the reality of Russia was. My primary objective wasn’t to do an assessment on where Russia was vis-a-vis the war, but rather to learn more about the Russian people, their history, their culture, the Russian soul. And to capture this information and bring it back here to the United States in an effort to better educate and inform my fellow citizens about the reality of Russia to try and create a vaccine, so to speak, to the disease of Russophobia that has gripped the United States.
But you know, when you do that you get a feel for the reality. And right now, Russia is impacted by the reality of this conflict. It’s everywhere you go, you see the Russian people rallying around their government. Deeply patriotic people. Supporting defence industries, supporting the troops, supporting the Putin government.
I was there for Victory Day, May 9th is Victory Day, one of the biggest holidays in Russia, of celebrating the victory of the Alliance over Nazi Germany. And what I can say is that, you know, I’ve been involved with a lot of Fourth of July parades here in the United States. I was a volunteer firefighter for many years. And of course, on the Fourth of July we like to parade up and down our town and receive the applause of the admiring citizens and all that. But you know, basically Fourth of July comes and Fourth of July goes. Victory Day is forever, meaning that the Russians never lose sight of the sacrifices made by their ancestors who came before them.
Twenty-seven million Soviet citizens, many of them Russians, but not exclusively so, perished in that conflict. And the Russian people feel indebted to them. So, as they prepare for Victory Day, it is a – it has a deeper meaning to them, it resonates with the average Russian citizen. Victory Day itself is an extremely sombre day. Yes, there’s a parade, yes there’s fireworks. But it’s also a day that people go to the graves, that people lay flowers and monuments.
In years past, the Russians have done a parade of – sort of a spontaneous parade by it’s called the “Immortal Regimen,” it’s become a formal thing. And millions of Russians fill the streets in a parade where they hold up the photograph of a relative, you know, from World War II, somebody who served, and it’s now expanded to anybody who served. This was a hugely emotional moment, where people were actively participating in something. Showing appreciation for their relatives, telling their relatives that the current generation has not forgotten their sacrifices and will never betray the cause which is Mother Russia that people died for. And this extends beyond May 9th and the days afterwards it still resonated.
And I – if I went to Russia today, it would still be resonating. People would still be talking about the importance. Because this is part of their DNA, this patriotic desire to serve their nation. It’s a real deal, and I witnessed that. You know, it’s imperative to tell the American people that this is not propaganda, this is not Russian propaganda, this is genuine, this is genuine, this is real, this is visceral.
This is who the Russian people are. And also, to report back that Russia is not being negatively impacted by the economic sanctions. That the Russian economy was thriving, without exception, every local economy seemed to be doing well. There was new construction everywhere.
Russia is a clean nation. Russia is a well-functioning nation. Russia is a nation that appears to have compassion for its collective population. I didn’t see homeless camping out under bridges or, you know, in parks or under bushes. I didn’t see drunks and drug addicts crowding the streets, you know, invading parks. The country was full of a vibrant people who are very proud of who they are. This wasn’t a propaganda exercise, this was a Russian reality.
And I would just encourage anybody who could, travel to Russia to see it for yourself. And what you’ll do is come back with a deep appreciation of Russia, its culture, its history, its people. But also a recognition that everything the West, their governments, and Western media have told you about Russia is a lie.
I’m not going to sit here and pretend that Russia is perfect, that it doesn’t have problems, it does. It’s not perfect. I’m not going to pretend that everything that Russia does on the world stage is admiral and beyond critique. No. Some of it is as selfish as what America does. And you know, every nation should be open to be criticized by its own people. But when you do the, you know, the balance sheet between the sins of Russia and you weigh, you know, looked at the sins of America, the sins of Europe, you realize that Russia has very few sins. Whereas Europe and the United States have a tremendous amount of sins. Russia is on the right side of history. They are trying to be good global community members. They don’t want to dominate the world, they just want to be in the world as equals in a world that respects Russia as much as Russia respects them.
GR: I guess in the one minute – we’ve got one minute left in this broadcast. I mean, is there anything you could say to me? Next week is the global day of action to end the war in Ukraine, October 1st– October 8th. I was wondering if anything from your knowledge of Russia and their people, what you could say that would maybe emphasize in people’s minds that, yes, peace is on the way if we do things right. What would you say to those activists?
SR: I would tell the activists that the best path to peace is a total Russian victory. That you need to stop arming the Ukrainians. You need to stop funding the Ukrainians. This war is not going to end with some sort of negotiated settlement that – where, you know, everybody feels good about this. Ukraine has lost this war.
And the reason why Ukraine lost this war is because the West pushed it into this conflict and then continued Ukraine full of weapons and money to sustain this war. Russia is not going to end this war without achieving the objectives that it set out to achieve. And therefore, the world needs to respect this. And if you hope we could stop sending them the weapons and the money that is being used by proxy to (inaudible, 28:22). And to ensure that future generations of Ukrainians will grow up in dislocated environment , poor education, no stability, a nightmare. If you care for Ukraine, pray for a Russian victory.
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Much is talked about the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), part of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, which was adopted by all United Nations (UN) members in 2015, integrating environmental, social and governance topics. Sustainability is a core concept here – and such is increasingly becoming a controversial topic, sometimes associated with “climate colonialism”. One could even talk about a “sustainability fatigue”. Even Brazil’s president Lula da Silva has famously accused the European Union (EU) of disguising protectionist initiatives under an environmental agenda. Within the nationalist and state-developmentalist camp (especially in the Global South, formerly known as the Third World), there often is a perception that all environmental discourse and topics amount to merely a veil over neo-colonialist interests.
It has always been a great challenge to reconcile, on the one hand, national industrial and developmental needs and, on the other hand, environmental concerns. Such is a complex balancing, involving intricate technical issues. The environmental problems in any case are matters of greatest importance to the future (and present) of mankind. There is no denying that the rising levels of pollution and deforestation, among other concerns, need to be dealt with in an efficient manner. It is also true, however, that at the same time the so-called environmental agenda is weaponized by great powers. There really is a false dilemma at play here: true facts can also be used for propaganda. The burning forests and poisoned rivers (and their effects) are real and so is the weaponization of environmentalism and sustainability and the double standard about it.
The logic of it is quite similar to that behind the weaponization of human rights (or of diversity and wokeism, for that matter). For example, there may indeed be concerns about the way China deals with political-religious extremism and the related domestic security issues (an Eurasian transnational problem). Some Chinese initiatives to fight Islamic extremism are indeed controversial: the “Vocational Education and Training Centers” have been described by critics as “concentration camps”. In any case, Washington highlights the matter (often in a hyperbolic and distorted manner) while aiming to engage Muslim-majority nations and their civil societies to urge their leaders to cut down on trade with Beijing, thereby reducing the flow of oil to the Asian superpower – the goal being, among other things, to have South Asian countries block Chinese low-interest infrastructure projects. These very projects, ironically, can contribute to achieving SDGs in the region.
The American humanitarian concern can only be described as hypocrisy if one is aware of the fact that the United States, as the Human Rights Watch (HRW) reports, for more than two decades has made use of the so-called “indefinite detention”, and has been imprisoning (without due process of law) and torturing thousands of adults and minors (mostly Muslims), who are kept in places like Guantanamo Bay or in CIA “black sites” and secret prisons in more than 50 countries worldwide.
Back to the environmental issue, one can see, time and time again, the same kind of hypocrisy and double-standard. Various African energy projects, as I wrote a couple of years ago, have been repeatedly opposed by the US-led West. In September 2022, for instance, the EU Parliament passed a resolution stating that the Tanzania’s and Uganda’s East African Crude Oil Pipeline (EACOP) project poses “social and environmental risks.” The European Parliament thereby advised its member states not to support (either diplomatically or financially) Uganda’s oil and gas projects. Uganda’s Deputy Speaker of Parliament Thomas Tayebwa reacted to that by describing the European resolution as the “highest level of neocolonialism and imperialism” against Uganda’s and Tanzania’s sovereignty. Bear in mind that the whole continent of Africa in 2020 accounted for merely 3.8% of the world CO2 emissions from industry and fossil fuels.
Proposed route of 1,410km Hoima-Tanga Oil Pipeline (Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0)
The most blatant instance of the US weaponizing environmental agendas lies, as I wrote before, in the very way it seeks water hegemony through a number of initiatives framed in the language of climate concerns. Biden’s Washington exerts pressure on Brazil on the matter of the Amazon while endorsing Ford F-150, an electric truck that damages the Amazon river (the aluminum used poisons the waters).
Such game goes even beyond the scope of the “Global South”, sometimes being weaponized by the United States against transatlantic allies (who, mind you, are also the target of a subsidy war): for instance, in 2022, John Kerry, who then was the American “Climate Czar”, that is Biden’s special presidential envoy for climate, warned investors against funding a Nigeria-Morocco gas pipeline project which could benefit Africa and also Europe. The way Washington has played the European energy crisis in the last years, by the way, is key to understanding the current conflict in Ukraine. In fact, American geoeconomic and private and even shady interests about gas, energy and resources play an important role in the ongoing Ukrainian crisis – in addition to Washington-led NATO geopolitical goals pertaining to encircling Russia. But that is another topic.
Managing natural resources and water access is one of the great challenges of the 21st century, and various disputes and conflicts can be expected to emerge over such issues, both on the intra-national and international level. Unfortunately, one can also expect environmental rhetoric to be increasingly used as a tool by a superpower such as the United States.
But the SDG are not necessarily “the enemy”, even from the perspective of the East or the Global South. Hannah McNicol, a University of Melbourne doctoral researcher, argues that China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) in fact largely converges with the SDGs, with the former adopting the latter’s framework. Thus, according to McNicol, “the SDGs are materially achieved via BRI economic and infrastructure policies.”
China in Red, the members of the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank in orange. The proposed corridors and in black (Land Silk Road), and blue (Maritime Silk Road). (Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0)
Discussions about the SDGs usually emphasize the environmental angle (clean water, clean energy) or sometimes the gender angle, however the SDGs encompass industry and infrastructure as well as the fight against poverty. There is no way to achieve any of that without responsible and consistent re-industrialization – no matter how much is talked about the supposed “post-industrial” world today. No developing or emerging nation should be shy about seeking industrial power while even the West struggles to overcome deindustrialization. It is precisely because manufacturing/industrialization matters so much that it has become the target of economic warfare – which is often framed in the language of sustainability and environmental concerns. It is just part of the game.
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Canadian economist Prof. Michel Chossudovsky criticizes the U.S. government for promoting nuclear war propaganda and advocating for the ‘safe use’ of nuclear weapons in conventional war. He highlights the brainwashing of decision-makers and the dangers of their own power.
Chossudovsky discusses the 2001 Nuclear Posture Review and the recategorization of nuclear weapons.
The short video below also addresses the role of Victoria Nuland in U.S. foreign policy and the neo-Nazi agenda embedded in regime change efforts.
At no point since the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima on August 6th, 1945, has humanity been closer to the unthinkable – a nuclear holocaust which could potentially spread in terms of radioactive fallout Worldwide .
All the safeguards of the Cold War era, which categorized the nuclear bomb as “a weapon of last resort”, have been scrapped. “Offensive” military actions using nuclear warheads are now described as acts of “self-defense”.
The August 6-8 2003 “Privatization of Nuclear’ Warsecret meeting was held behind closed doors at Strategic Command Headquarters at the Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska.
It was conducive to a $1.3 trillion dollar nuclear weapons program initiated under the Obama administration, which is slated to increase to 2 trillion dollars by 2030.
Hiroshima Day, August 6, 2024
Towards a World War III Scenario:
The Privatization of Nuclear War
Michel Chossudovsky
August 7, 2011.
Introduction
At no point since the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima on August 6th, 1945, has humanity been closer to the unthinkable – a nuclear holocaust which could potentially spread in terms of radioactive fallout over a large part of the Middle East.
All the safeguards of the Cold War era, which categorized the nuclear bomb as “a weapon of last resort”, have been scrapped. “Offensive” military actions using nuclear warheads are now described as acts of “self-defense”.
The casualties from the direct effects of blast, radioactivity, and fires resulting from the massive use of nuclear weapons by the superpowers [of the Cold War era] would be so catastrophic that we avoided such a tragedy for the first four decades after the invention of nuclear weapons.1
During the Cold War, the doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) prevailed, namely that the use of nuclear weapons against the Soviet Union would result in “the destruction of both the attacker and the defender”.
In the post Cold war era, US nuclear doctrine was redefined. The dangers of nuclear weapons have been obfuscated.
Tactical nuclear weapons have been upheld as distinct, in terms of their impact, from the strategic thermonuclear bombs of the Cold War era.
Tactical nuclear weapons are identical to the strategic nuclear bombs. The only thing that differentiates these two categories of nuclear bombs are:
1) their delivery system;
2) their explosive yield (measured in mass of trinitrotoluene (TNT), in kilotons or megatons.
The tactical nuclear weapon or low yield mini-nuke is described as a small nuclear bomb, delivered in the same way as the earth penetrating bunker buster bombs.
While the technology is fundamentally different, tactical nuclear weapons, in terms of in-theater delivery systems are comparable to the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945.
The Pentagon’s 2001 Nuclear Posture Review envisaged so-called “contingency plans” for an offensive “first strike use” of nuclear weapons, not only against “axis of evil” countries (including Iran and North Korea) but also against Russia and China.2
The adoption of the NPR by the US Congress in late 2002 provided a green light for carrying out the Pentagon’s pre-emptive nuclear war doctrine, both in terms of military planning as well as defense procurement and production. Congress not only rolled back its prohibition on low yield nuclear weapons, it also provided funding “to pursue work on so-called mini-nukes”. The financing was allocated to bunker buster (earth penetrator) tactical nuclear weapons as well as to the development of new nuclear weapons.3
Hiroshima Day 2003: Secret Meeting at Strategic Command Headquarters
On August 6, 2003, on Hiroshima Day, [twenty two years ago] commemorating when the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima (August 6 1945), a secret meeting was held behind closed doors at Strategic Command Headquarters at the Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska.
Senior executives from the nuclear industry and the military industrial complex were in attendance. This mingling of defense contractors, scientists and policy-makers was not intended to commemorate Hiroshima.
The meeting was intended to set the stage for the development of a new generation of “smaller”, “safer” and “more usable” nuclear weapons, to be used in the “in-theater nuclear wars” of the 21st Century.
In a cruel irony, the participants to this secret meeting, which excluded members of Congress, arrived on the anniversary of the Hiroshima bombing and departed on the anniversary of the attack on Nagasaki.
More than 150 military contractors, scientists from the weapons labs, and other government officials gathered at the headquarters of the US Strategic Command in Omaha, Nebraska to plot and plan for the possibility of “full-scale nuclear war”, calling for the production of a new generation of nuclear weapons – more “usable” so-called “mini-nukes” and earth penetrating “bunker busters” armed with atomic warheads.4
According to a leaked draft of the agenda, the secret meeting included discussions on “mini-nukes” and “bunker-buster” bombs with nuclear war heads “for possible use against rogue states”:
We need to change our nuclear strategy from the Cold War to one that can deal with emerging threats… The meeting will give some thought to how we guarantee the efficacy of the (nuclear) stockpile.5
The Privatization of Nuclear War: US Military Contractors Set the Stage
The post 9/11 nuclear weapons doctrine was in the making, with America’s major defense contractors directly involved in the decision-making process.
The Hiroshima Day 2003 meetings had set the stage for the “privatization of nuclear war”. Corporations not only reap multibillion-dollar profits from the production of nuclear bombs, they also have a direct voice in setting the agenda regarding the use and deployment of nuclear weapons.
The nuclear weapons industry, which includes the production of nuclear devices as well as the missile delivery systems, etc., is controlled by a handful of defense contractors with Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics, Northrop Grunman, Raytheon and Boeing in the lead.
It is worth noting that barely a week prior to the historic August 6, 2003 meeting, the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) disbanded its advisory committee which provided an “independent oversight” on the US nuclear arsenal, including the testing and/or use of new nuclear devices.6
There are more than 5000 US nuclear weapons deployed. And now the US is committed to developing a generation of “more usable” low yield tactical nuclear weapons (bunker buster bombs) which are “harmless to the surrounding civilian population because the explosion is underground”.
“Blowing up the Planet” on a first strike basis as a instrument of peace and global security.
Those who decide on the use of nuclear weapons believe their own lies.
And those who dare to say that the use of nuclear weapons threatens the future of humanity are branded as “conspiracy theorists”.
The Privatization of Nuclear War
Video. James Corbett Interviews Michel Chossudovsky
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ISBN Number: 978-0-9737147-5-3 Year: 2012 Pages: 102
PDF Edition: $6.50 (sent directly to your email account!)
Michel Chossudovsky is Professor of Economics at the University of Ottawa and Director of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG), which hosts the critically acclaimed website www.globalresearch.ca . He is a contributor to the Encyclopedia Britannica. His writings have been translated into more than 20 languages.
Reviews
“This book is a ‘must’ resource – a richly documented and systematic diagnosis of the supremely pathological geo-strategic planning of US wars since ‘9-11’ against non-nuclear countries to seize their oil fields and resources under cover of ‘freedom and democracy’.” –John McMurtry, Professor of Philosophy, Guelph University
“In a world where engineered, pre-emptive, or more fashionably “humanitarian” wars of aggression have become the norm, this challenging book may be our final wake-up call.” -Denis Halliday, Former Assistant Secretary General of the United Nations
Michel Chossudovsky exposes the insanity of our privatized war machine. Iran is being targeted with nuclear weapons as part of a war agenda built on distortions and lies for the purpose of private profit. The real aims are oil, financial hegemony and global control. The price could be nuclear holocaust. When weapons become the hottest export of the world’s only superpower, and diplomats work as salesmen for the defense industry, the whole world is recklessly endangered. If we must have a military, it belongs entirely in the public sector. No one should profit from mass death and destruction. –Ellen Brown, author of ‘Web of Debt’ and president of the Public Banking Institute
All Global Research articles can be read in 51 languages by activating the “Translate Website” drop down menu on the top banner of our home page (Desktop version).
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This article was first published on March 9, 2022, revised and expanded on October 5, 2022, minor revisions on May 25, 2023.
Introduction
At no point since the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima on August 6th, 1945, has humanity been closer to the unthinkable. All the safeguards of the Cold War era, which categorized the nuclear bomb as “a weapon of last resort”, have been scrapped.
Let us also recall the unspoken history of America’s doctrine pertaining to the conduct of nuclear war.
Barely six weeks after the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki,the U.S. War Department released a Secret Plan on September 15, 1945 to bomb 66 cities of the Soviet Union with 204 atomic bombs.
The September 1945 Plan was to “Wipe the Soviet Union off the Map” at a time when the US and the USSR were allies. Confirmed by declassified documents, Hiroshima and Nagasaki served as a “Dress Rehearsal” (see historical details and analysis below).
Video: The Dangers of Nuclear War: Michel Chossudovsky with Caroline Mailloux
Vladimir Putin’s statement on February 21st, 2022 was a response to US threats to use nuclear weapons on a preemptive basis against Russia, despite Joe Biden’s “reassurance” that the US would not be resorting to “A first strike” nuclear attack against an enemy of America:
“Let me [Putin] explain that U.S. strategic planning documents contain the possibility of a so-called preemptive strike against enemy missile systems. And who is the main enemy for the U.S. and NATO? We know that too. It’s Russia. In NATO documents, our country is officially and directly declared the main threat to North Atlantic security. And Ukraine will serve as a forward springboard for the strike.” (Putin Speech, February 21, 2022, emphasis added)
In July 2021, the Biden administration launched its Nuclear Posture Review (NPR) which was formally announced in October 2022.
The 2022 NPR includes what is described as a “nuclear declaratory policy of the United States”.
The 2022 NPR largely confirms the nuclear options developed by the Obama and Bush administrations predicated on the notion of preemptive nuclear war raised in President Putin’s speech.
The underlying US nuclear doctrine consists in portraying nuclear weapons as a means of “self defense” rather than as a “weapon of mass destruction”.
The NPR does not rule out the possibility of a “first strike” nuclear attack against Russia. According to theUS Congress Research Service:
“The NPR [2022] suggests that the United States may use nuclear weapons in circumstances that do not involve potential adversaries’ potential use of nuclear weapons. …The review also asserts that an ‘effective nuclear deterrent is foundational to broader U.S. defense strategy,’ but does not elaborate. (…)”
“Should deterrence fail, ‘the United States would seek to end any conflict at the lowest level of damage possible on the best achievable terms’— language implying that the United States might use nuclear weapons for purposes other than deterrence.” (CRS Reports. US Congress 2022 NPR, emphasis added)
The Privatization of Nuclear War
It should be understood, that there are powerful financial interests behind the NPR which are tied into the $1.3 trillion nuclear weapons program initiated under President Obama.
Although the Ukraine conflict has so-far been limited to conventional weapons coupled with “economic warfare”, the use of a large array of sophisticated WMDs including nuclear weapons is on the drawing board of the Pentagon.
Dangerous narrative: The NPR proposes “increased integration of conventional and nuclear planning”, which consists in categorizing tactical nuclear weapons (e.g. B61-11 and 12) as conventional weapons, to be used on a preemptive basis in the conventional war theater (as a means of self defense)
According to the Federation of American Scientists, the total number of nuclear warheads Worldwide is of the order of 13,000. Russia and the United States “each have around 4,000 warheads in their military stockpiles”.
The Dangers of Nuclear War are Real. Profit Driven. Two Trillion Dollars
Under Joe Biden, public funds allocated to nuclear weapons are slated to increase to 2 trillion by 2030 allegedly as a means to safeguarding peace and national security at taxpayers expense. (How many schools and hospitals could you finance with 2 trillion dollars?):
The United States maintains an arsenal of about 1,700 strategic nuclear warheads deployed on intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) and submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs) and at strategic bomber bases. There are an additional estimated 100 non-strategic, or tactical, nuclear weapons at bomber bases in five European countries and about 2,000 nuclear warheads in storage. [see our analysis of B61-11 and B61-12 below]
The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimated in May 2021 that the United States will spend a total of $634 billion over the next 10 years to sustain and modernize its nuclear arsenal. (Arms Control)
In this article, I will focus on
The Post Cold War shift in US Nuclear Doctrine,
A brief review of the History of US-Russia Relations since World War I,
An Assessment of the history of nuclear weapons going back to the Manhattan Project initiated in 1939 with the participation of both Canada and the United Kingdom.
Most people in America do not know that the Manhattan Project in the immediate wake of bombing of Hiroshima, Nagasaki in August 1945, was intended to formulate a nuclear attack against the USSR, at a time when the Soviet Union and the U.S. were allies.
What I am referring to is the U.S Blueprint of September 15, 1945 according to which the US War Department planned to drop more than 200 atomic bombs on 66 cities of the Soviet Union. This is not mentioned in the history books. See:
A Note on the History of US-Russia Relations. The Forgotten War of 1918
From a historical standpoint the US and its Allies have been threatening Russia for more than 104 years starting during World War I with the deployment of US and Allied Forces against Soviet Russia on January 12, 1918, (two months following the November 7, 1917 revolution allegedly in support of Russia’s Imperial Army).
The 1918 US-UK Allied invasion of Russia is a landmark in Russian History, often mistakenly portrayed as being part of a Civil War.
It lasted for more than two years involving the deployment of more than 200,000 troops of which 11,000 were from the US, 59,000 from the UK. Japan which was an Ally of Britain and America during World War I dispatched 70,000 troops.
The US threat of nuclear war against Russia was formulated more than 76 years ago in September 1945, when the US and the Soviet Union were allies. It consisted in a “World War III Blueprint” of nuclear war against the USSR, targeting 66 cities with more than 200 atomic bombs. This diabolical project under the Manhattan Project was instrumental in triggering the Cold War and the nuclear arms race. (See analysis below).
Chronology
1918-1920: The first US and allied forces led war against Soviet Russia with more than 10 countries sending troops to fight alongside the White Imperial Russian army. This happened exactly two months after the October Revolution, on January 12, 1918, and it lasted until the early 1920s.
The Manhattan Project initiated in 1939, with the participation of the UK and Canada. Development of the Atomic Bomb.
Operation Barbarossa, June 1941. Nazi Invasion of the Soviet Union. Standard Oil of New Jersey was selling oil to Nazi Germany.
February 1945: The Yalta Conference. The meeting of Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin.
“Operation Unthinkable”: A Secret attack plan against the Soviet Union formulated by Winston Churchill in the immediate wake of the Yalta conference. It was scrapped in June 1945.
April 12, 1945:The Potsdam Conference. President Harry Truman and Prime Minister Winston Churchill approve the atomic bombing of Japan.
September 15, 1945: A World War III Scenario formulated by the US War Department: A plan to bomb 66 cities of the Soviet Union with 204 atomic bombs, when the US and USSR were allies. The Secret plan (declassified in 1975) formulated during WWII, was released less than two weeks after the official end of WWII on September 2, 1945
1949: The Soviet Union announces the testing of its nuclear bomb.
Post Cold War Doctrine: “Preemptive Nuclear War”
The Doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) of the Cold War Era no longer prevails. It was replaced at the outset of the George W. Bush Administration with the Doctrine of Preemptive Nuclear War, namely the use of nuclear weapons as a means of “self-defense” against both nuclear and non-nuclear weapons states.
In early 2002, the text of George W. Bush’s Nuclear Posture Review had already been leaked, several months prior to the release of the September 2002 National Security Strategy (NSS) which defined, “Preemption” as:
“the anticipatory use of force in the face of an imminent attack”.
Namely as an act of war on the grounds of self-defense
The MAD doctrine was scrapped. The 2001 Nuclear Posture Review not only redefined the use of nuclear weapons, so-called tactical nuclear weapons or bunker buster bombs (mini-nukes) could henceforth be used in the conventional war theater without the authorization of the Commander in Chief, namely the President of the United States.
Discussing “requirements for nuclear strike capabilities,” the report lists Iran, Iraq, Libya, North Korea, and Syria as “among the countries that could be involved in immediate, potential, or unexpected contingencies.” …
Three of these countries (Iraq, Libya and Syria) have since then been the object of US-led wars. The 2001 NPR also confirmed continued nuclear war preparations against China and Russia.
“The Bush review also indicates that the United States should be prepared to use nuclear weapons against China, citing “the combination of China’s still developing strategic objectives and its ongoing modernization of its nuclear and non-nuclear forces.”
“Finally, although the review repeats Bush administration assertions that Russia is no longer an enemy, it says the United States must be prepared for nuclear contingencies with Russia and notes that, if “U.S. relations with Russia significantly worsen in the future, the U.S. may need to revise its nuclear force levels and posture.” Ultimately, the review concludes that nuclear conflict with Russia is “plausible” but “not expected.” [that. was back in 2002] ( Arms Control) emphasis added.
The Privatization of Nuclear War
With tensions growing in major regions of the World, a new generation of nuclear weapons technology was unfolding making nuclear warfare a very real prospect. And with very little fanfare, the US had embarked on the privatization of nuclear war under a first-strike “preemptive” doctrine. This process went into full swing in the immediate wake of the 2001 Nuclear Posture Review (2001 NPR) adopted by the US Senate in 2002.
On August 6, 2003, on Hiroshima Day, commemorating when the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima (August 6 1945), a secret meeting was held behind closed doors at Strategic Command Headquarters at the Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska. Senior executives from the nuclear industry and the military industrial complex were in attendance.
This mingling of defense contractors, scientists and policy-makers was not intended to commemorate Hiroshima. The meeting was intended to set the stage for the development of a new generation of “smaller”, “safer” and “more usable” nuclear weapons, to be used in the “in-theater nuclear wars” of the 21st Century.”
Nuclear War against both China and Russia is contemplated
Russia is tagged as “Plausible” but “Not Expected”. That was back in 2002.
Today at the height of the Ukraine war, a Preemptive Nuclear attack against Russia is on the drawing of the Pentagon. That does not however mean that it will be implemented.
A Nuclear War Cannot be Won?
We recall Reagan’s historic statement: “A nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought. The only value in our two nations possessing nuclear weapons is to make sure they will never be used.”
Nonetheless, there are powerful voices and lobby groups within the US establishment and the Biden administration that are convinced that “a nuclear war is winnable”.
Flashback to Inter-War Period: Wall Street Finances Hitler’s Election Campaign
According to Yuri Robsov, Wall Street and the Rockefellers were funding Germany’s war machine as well as Adolf Hitler’s election campaign:
American cooperation with the German military-industrial complex was so intense and pervasive that by 1933 the key sectors of German industry and large banks such as Deutsche Bank, Dresdner Bank, Danat-Bank (Darmstädter und Nationalbank), etc. were under the control of American financial capital.
The political force that was intended to play a crucial role in Anglo-American plans was being simultaneously prepared. We are talking about the funding of the Nazi party and Adolf Hitler personally.
On January 4th, 1932, a meeting was held between British financier Montagu Norman (Governor of the Bank of England), Adolf Hitler andFranz Von Papen (who became Chancellor a few months later in May 1932) At this meeting, an agreement on the financing of the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei(NSDAP or Nazi Party) was reached.
This meeting was also attended by US policy-makers and the Dulles brothers, something which their biographers do not like to mention.
A year later, on January 14th, 1933, another meeting was held between Adolf Hitler, Germany’s Financier Baron Kurt von Schroeder, Chancellor Franz von Papen and Hitler’s Economic Advisor Wilhelm Keppler took place, where Hitler’s program was fully approved.
It was here that they finally resolved the issue of the transfer of power to the Nazis, and on the 30th of January 1933 Hitler became Chancellor. The implementation of the fourth stage of the strategy thus begun.
World War II: “Operation Barbarossa”
There is ample evidence that both the US and its British ally were intent upon Nazi Germany winning the war on the Eastern Front with a view to destroying the Soviet Union:
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“Stalin and his entourage’s growing suspicions, that the Anglo-American powers hoped the Nazi-Soviet War would last for years, were based on well-founded concerns. This desire had already been expressed in part by Harry S. Truman, future US president, hours after the Wehrmacht had invaded the Soviet Union.
Truman, then a US Senator, said he wanted to see the Soviets and Germans “kill as many as possible” between themselves, an attitude which the New York Times later called “a firm policy”. The Times had previously published Truman’s remarks on 24 June 1941, and as a result his views would most likely not have escaped the Soviets’ attention. (Shane Quinn, Global Research, March 2022)
Hitler’s Operation Barbarossa initiated in June 1941 would have failed from the very outset had it not been for the support of Standard Oil of New Jersey (owned by the Rockefellers) which routinely delivered ample supplies of oil to the Third Reich. While Germany was able to transform coal into fuel, this synthetic production was insufficient. Moreover, Romania’s Ploesti oil resources (under Nazi control until 1944) were minimal. Nazi Germany largely depended on oil shipments from US Standard Oil.
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Trading with the Enemy legislation (1917) officially implemented following America’s entry into World War II did not prevent Standard Oil of New Jersey from selling oil to Nazi Germany. This despite the Senate 1942 investigation of US Standard Oil.
While direct US oil shipments were curtailed, Standard Oil would sell US oil through third countries. US oil was shipped to occupied France (officially via Switzerland, and from France it was shipped to Germany: “… The shipments went through Spain, Vichy France’s colonies in the West Indies, and Switzerland.”
Without those oil shipments instrumented by Standard Oil and the Rockefellers, Nazi Germany would not have been able to implement its military agenda. Without fuel, the Third Reich’s eastern front under Operation Barbarossa would most probably not have taken place, saving millions of lives. The Western front including the military occupation of France, Belgium and The Netherlands would no doubt also have been affected.
The USSR actually won the war against Nazi Germany, with 27 million deaths, which in part resulted from the blatant violation of Trading with the Enemy by Standard Oil.
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“Operation Unthinkable”: A World War III Scenario Formulated During World War II
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A World War III scenario against the Soviet Union had already been envisaged in early 1945, under what was called Operation Unthinkable, to be launched prior to the official end of World War II on September 2, 1945.
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Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin met at Yalta in early February 1945 largely with a view to negotiating the post war occupation of Germany and Japan.
“If you thought the Cold War between East and West reached its peak in the 1950s and 1960s, then think again. 1945 was the year when Europe was the crucible for a Third World War.
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The plan called for a massive Allied assault on 1 July 1945 by British, American, Polish and German – yes German – forces against the Red Army. They aimed to push them back out of Soviet-occupied East Germany and Poland, give Stalin and bloody nose, and force him to re-consider his domination of East Europe. … Eventually in June 1945 Churchill’s military advisors cautioned him against implementing the plan, but it still remained a blueprint for a Third World War. …The Americans had just successfully tested an atomic bomb, and there was now the final temptation of obliterating Soviet centres of population”
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Churchill’s “Operation Unthinkable” against Soviet Forces in Eastern Europe (see above) was abandoned in June 1945.
During his mandate as Prime Minister (1940-45), Churchill had supported the Manhattan Project. He was a protagonist of nuclear war against the Soviet Union, which had been contemplated under the Manhattan project as early as 1942, when the US and the Soviet Union were allies against Nazi Germany.
A Blueprint for a Third World War using nuclear weapons against 66 major urban areas of the Soviet Union was officially formulated on September 15, 1945 by the US War Department (see section below).
The Potsdam Conference
Vice President Harry S. Truman was sworn in as president of the United States on April 12, 1945, after the death of Franklin D. Roosevelt, who died unexpectedly of a cerebral hemorrhage.
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At the Potsdam meetings, President Truman entered into discussions (July 1945) with Stalin and Churchill: (see image right). The discussions were of a different nature to those of Yalta, specifically with regard to both Truman and Churchill who were both in favour of nuclear warfare:
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“[British] PM [Churchill] and I ate alone. Discussed Manhattan (it is a success). Decided to tell Stalin about it. Stalin had told PM [Churchill] of telegram from Jap emperor asking for peace. Stalin also read his answer to me. It was satisfactory. Believe Japs will fold up before Russia comes in. I am sure they will when Manhattan appears over their homeland. I shall inform Stalin about it at an opportune time. (Truman Diary, July 17, 1945, emphasis added)
What this statement from Truman’s Diary confirms is that Japan would “fold up” and surrender to the US “before Russia comes in”. Ultimately this was the objective of the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
While Stalin was casually informed by Truman regarding the Manhattan Project in July 1945, sources suggest that the Soviet Union was aware of the Manhattan Project as early as 1942. Did Truman tell Stalin that the atom bomb was intended for Japan?
“We met at 11.00am. today.[ That is, Stalin, Churchill and the US president].
But I had a most important session [without Stalin?] with Lord Mountbatten and General Marshall [US joint Chiefs of Staff] before that. [This meeting was not part of the official agenda] We have discovered the most terrible bomb in the history of the world. It may be the fire destruction prophesied in the Euphrates Valley era, after Noah and his fabulous ark. Anyway, we think we have found the way to cause a disintegration of the atom. An experiment in the New Mexico desert was startling – to put it mildly. Thirteen pounds of the explosive caused a crater six hundred feet deep and twelve hundred feet in diameter, knocked over a steel tower a half mile away, and knocked men down ten thousand yards away. The explosion was visible for more than two hundred miles and audible for forty miles and more.
This weapon is to be used against Japan between now and August 10th.I have told the secretary of war, Mr Stimson, to use it so that military objectives and soldiers and sailors are the target and not women and children. Even if Japs are savages, ruthless, merciless and fanatic, we as the leader of the world for the common welfare cannot drop this terrible bomb on the old capital or the new. He and I are in accord. The target will be a purely military one and we will issue a warning statement asking the Japs to surrender and save lives. I’m sure they will not do that, but we will have given them the chance. It is certainly a good thing for the world that Hitler’s crowd or Stalin’s did not discover this atomic bomb. It seems to be the most terrible thing ever discovered, but it can be made the most useful.” (Truman’s Diary, Potsdam meeting on July 18, 1945)
The discussion on the Manhattan Project does not appear in the official minutes of the meetings.
The Infamous “WW III Blueprint” to Wage a Nuclear Attack against the Soviet Union (September 15, 1945)
Barely two weeks after the official end of World War II (September 2, 1945), the US War Department issued a directive (September 15, 1945) to “Erase the Soviet Union off the Map” (66 cities with 204 atomic bombs), when the US and USSR were allies, confirmed by declassified documents. (For further details see Chossudovsky, 2017)
All major cities of the Soviet Union were included in the list of 66 “strategic” targets. The tables below categorize each city in terms of area in square miles and the corresponding number of atomic bombs required to annihilate and kill the inhabitants of selected urban areas.
Six atomic bombs were to be used to destroy each of the larger cities including Moscow, Leningrad, Tashkent, Kiev, Kharkov, Odessa.
The Pentagon estimated that a total of 204 atomic bombs would be required to “Wipe the Soviet Union off the Map”. The targets for a nuclear attack consisted of sixty-six major cities.
One single atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima resulted in the immediate death of 100,000 people in the first seven seconds. Imagine what would have happened if 204 atomic bombs had been dropped on major cities of the Soviet Union as outlined in a secret U.S. plan formulated during the Second World War.
Hiroshima in the wake of the atomic bomb attack, 6 August 1945
The document outlining this diabolical military agenda had been released in September 1945, barely one month after the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (6 and 9 August, 1945) and two years before the onset of the Cold War (1947).
The secret plan dated September 15, 1945 (two weeks after the surrender of Japan on September 2, 1945 aboard the USS Missouri, see image below) , however, had been formulated at an earlier period, namely at the height of World War II, at a time when America and the Soviet Union were close allies.
The Manhattan project was launched in 1939, two years prior to America’s entry into World War II in December 1941. The Kremlin was fully aware of the secret Manhattan project as early as 1942.
Hiroshima and Nagasaki: Dress Rehearsal for Planned Nuclear Attack against the Soviet Union
Were the August 1945 Hiroshima and Nagasaki attacks used by the Pentagon to evaluate the viability of a much larger attack on the Soviet Union consisting of more than 204 atomic bombs? The key documents to bomb 66 cities of the Soviet Union (15 September 1945) were finalized 5-6 weeks after the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings (6, 9 August 1945):
“On September 15, 1945 — just under two weeks after the formal surrender of Japan and the end of World War II — Norstad sent a copy of the estimate to General Leslie Groves, still the head of the Manhattan Project, and the guy who, for the short term anyway, would be in charge of producing whatever bombs the USAAF might want. As you might guess, the classification on this document was high: “TOP SECRET LIMITED,” which was about as high as it went during World War II. (Alex Wellerstein, The First Atomic Stockpile Requirements (September 1945)
The Kremlin was aware of the 1945 plan to bomb sixty-six Soviet cities.
The documents confirm that the US was involved in the “planning of genocide” against the Soviet Union.
Let’s cut to the chase. How many bombs did the USAAF request of the atomic general, when there were maybe one, maybe twobombs worth of fissile material on hand? At a minimum they wanted 123. Ideally, they’d like 466. This is just a little over a month after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Of course, in true bureaucratic fashion, they provided a handy-dandy chart (Alex Wellerstein, op. cit)
Central to our understanding of the Cold War which started (officially) in 1947, Washington’s September 1945 plan to bomb 66 cities into smithereens played a key role in triggering the nuclear arms race.
The Soviet Union was threatened and developed its own atomic bomb in 1949 in response to 1942 Soviet intelligence reports on the Manhattan Project.
While the Kremlin knew about these plans to “Wipe out” the USSR, the broader public was not informed because the September 1945 documents were of course classified. They were declassified 30 years later in September 1975
Today, neither the September 1945 plan to blow up the Soviet Union nor the underlying cause of the nuclear arms race are acknowledged. The Western media has largely focussed its attention on the Cold War US-USSR confrontation. The plan to annihilate the Soviet Union dating back to World War II and the infamous Manhattan project are not mentioned.
Washington’s Cold War nuclear plans are invariably presented in response to so-called Soviet threats, when in fact it was the U.S. plan released in September 1945 (formulated at an earlier period at the height of World War II) to wipe out the Soviet which motivated Moscow to develop its nuclear weapons capabilities.
The assessment of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists mistakenly blamed and continue to blame the Soviet Union for having launched the nuclear arms race in 1949, four years after the release of the September 1945 US Secret Plan to target 66 major Soviet cities with 204 nuclear bombs:
“1949: The Soviet Union denies it, but in the fall, President Harry Truman tells the American public that the Soviets tested their first nuclear device, officially starting the arms race. “We do not advise Americans that doomsday is near and that they can expect atomic bombs to start falling on their heads a month or year from now,” the Bulletin explains. “But we think they have reason to be deeply alarmed and to be prepared for grave decisions.” (Timeline of the Doomsday Clock, Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, 2017)
IMPORTANT: Had the US decided NOT to develop nuclear weapons for use against the Soviet Union, the nuclear arms race would not have taken place.
Neither The Soviet Union nor the People’s Republic of China would have developed nuclear capabilities as a means of “Deterrence” agains the US which had already formulated plans to annihilate the Soviet Union.
The Soviet Union lost 26 million people during World War II.
The Cold War Era
The Nuclear Arms Race was the direct result of America’s September 1945 plan to “blow up the Soviet Union”, formulated by the US War Department.
The Soviet Union tested its first nuclear bomb in 1949. Without the Manhattan Project and the War Department’s September 15, 1945 “World War III Blueprint”, the Arms Race would not have occurred.
The September 15, 1945 War Department set the stage for numerous plans to wage World War III against Russia and China:
The Cold War List of 1200 Targeted Cities
This initial 1945 list of sixty-six cities was updated in the course of the Cold War (1956) to include some 1200 cities in the USSR and the Soviet block countries of Eastern Europe (see declassified documents below). The bombs slated for use were more powerful in terms of explosive capacity than those dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Excerpt from list of 1200 Soviet cities targeted for nuclear attack in alphabetical order. National Security Archive, op. cit.
“According to the 1956 Plan, H-Bombs were to be Used Against Priority “Air Power” Targets in the Soviet Union, China, and Eastern Europe. Major Cities in the Soviet Bloc, Including East Berlin, Were High Priorities in “Systematic Destruction” for Atomic Bombings. (William Burr, U.S. Cold War Nuclear Attack Target List of 1200 Soviet Bloc Cities “From East Germany to China”, National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 538, December 2015
During the Cold War, the doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) prevailed, namely that the use of nuclear weapons would result in “the destruction of both the attacker and the defender”.
In the post Cold war era, US nuclear doctrine was redefined. “Offensive” military actions using nuclear warheads are now described as acts of “self-defense”.
Humanitarian Nuclear Warfare under Joe Biden
US-NATO led military Interventions (Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Yemen) which have resulted in millions of civilian casualties are heralded as Humanitarian Wars, as a means to ensuring Peace.
This is also the discourse underlying US-NATO intervention in Ukraine.
“I just want you to know that, when we talk about war, we’re really talking about peace” said George W. Bush
“Humanitarian Nuclear Bombs”
This kind of window dressing of “humanitarian nuclear bombs” is not only embedded into Joe Biden’s foreign policy agenda, it constitutes the mainstay of US military doctrine, namely the so-called Nuclear Posture Review, not to mention the 1.2 trillion nuclear weapons program initiated during the Obama administration.
The B61 Mini-nukes Deployed in Western Europe
The latest B61-12 “mini nuke” is slated to be deployed in Western Europe, aimed at Russia and the Middle East (replacing the existing of B61 nuclear bombs).
B-61-12 is portrayed as a “more usable” “low yield” “humanitarian bomb” “‘harmless to civilians”. That’s the ideology. The reality is “Mutual Assured Destruction” (MAD).
The B61-12 has a maximum yield of 50 kilotons which is more than three times that of a Hiroshima bomb (15 kilotons) which resulted in excess of 100,000 deaths in matter of minutes.
If a preemptive attack using a so-called mini nuke were to succeed, targeted against Russia or Iran, this could potentially lead humanity into a WW III scenario. Of course these details are not highlighted in mainstream media reports.
F-15E Eagle Strike Eagle Fighter for the Delivery of the B-61-12
Low Yield Nukes: Humanitarian Warfare Goes Live
And when the characteristics of this “harmless” low yield nuclear bomb are inserted into the military manuals, “humanitarian warfare” goes live: “It’s low yield and safe for civilians, let’s use it” [paraphrase].
The US arsenal of B61 nuclear bombs directed against the Middle East are currently located in the military bases of 5 non-nuclear states (Italy, Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, Turkey). The command structure pertaining to the B61-12 is yet to be confirmed. The situation with regard to Turkey’s Incirlik base is unclear.
Upholding WMDs as Instruments of Peace is a Dangerous Gimmick
Throughout History, “Mistakes” have Played a Key Role
We are at a Dangerous Crossroads. There is no Real Anti-war Movement in Sight.
Why? Because War is Good for Business!
And the powers of Big Money which are behind US-NATO led wars control both the anti-war movement as well as the media coverage of US led wars. That’s nothing new. It goes back to the so-called Soviet-Afghan War (1979-) which was spearheaded by US National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski.
Through their “philanthropic” foundations (Ford, Rockefeller, Soros et al) the financial elites have over the years channelled millions of dollars into financing so-called “progressive movements” including the World Social Forum (WSF)
It’s Called “Manufactured Dissent”: Big Money is also behind numerous coups d’état and color revolutions.
Meanwhile, important sectors of the Left including committed anti-war activists have endorsed the Covid mandates without verifying or acknowledging the facts and the history of the so-called pandemic.
It should be understood that the lockdown policies as well as the Covid-19 “Killer Vaccine” are an integral part of the financial elite’s “broader arsenal”. They are instruments of submission and tyranny.
The World Economic Forum’s Great Reset is an integral part of the World War III scenario which consists in establishing through military and non military means an imperial system of “global governance”.
The same powerful financial interests (Rockefeller, Rothschild, BlackRock, Vanguard, et al) which are supportive of the US-NATO military agenda are firmly behind the “Covid Pandemic Op”.
***
The Historic Battle for Peace and Democracy. A Third World War Spells the End of Humanity?
Relentless War Propaganda and Media Disinformation Is the Driving Force. It Must be Confronted.
Is “Peaceful Coexistence” and Diplomacy between Russia and the U.S. an Option?
“War is Good for Business”: Corrupt Governments which Uphold the Interests of Big Money Must be Challenged
ISBN Number: 978-0-9737147-5-3 Year: 2012 Pages: 102
PDF Edition: $6.50 (sent directly to your email account!)
Michel Chossudovsky is Professor of Economics at the University of Ottawa and Director of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG), which hosts the critically acclaimed website www.globalresearch.ca . He is a contributor to the Encyclopedia Britannica. His writings have been translated into more than 20 languages.
Reviews
“This book is a ‘must’ resource – a richly documented and systematic diagnosis of the supremely pathological geo-strategic planning of US wars since ‘9-11’ against non-nuclear countries to seize their oil fields and resources under cover of ‘freedom and democracy’.” –John McMurtry, Professor of Philosophy, Guelph University
“In a world where engineered, pre-emptive, or more fashionably “humanitarian” wars of aggression have become the norm, this challenging book may be our final wake-up call.” -Denis Halliday, Former Assistant Secretary General of the United Nations
Michel Chossudovsky exposes the insanity of our privatized war machine. Iran is being targeted with nuclear weapons as part of a war agenda built on distortions and lies for the purpose of private profit. The real aims are oil, financial hegemony and global control. The price could be nuclear holocaust. When weapons become the hottest export of the world’s only superpower, and diplomats work as salesmen for the defense industry, the whole world is recklessly endangered. If we must have a military, it belongs entirely in the public sector. No one should profit from mass death and destruction. –Ellen Brown, author of ‘Web of Debt’ and president of the Public Banking Institute
O governo dos EUA continua a perseguir violentamente todos os cidadãos que expressam opiniões contrárias à política externa da Casa Branca. Mais uma vez, as autoridades do país perseguiram injustificadamente o analista militar Scott Ritter, invadindo a sua casa sob a alegação de que Ritter é um “agente estrangeiro”. Aparentemente, qualquer cidadão americano que discorde da política de guerra com a Rússia é considerado um “espião” pelo governo, o que mostra como Washington está a tornar-se um estado policial antidemocrático.
O FBI e a Polícia do Estado de Nova York invadiram a casa de Ritter em Ethlehem Township, ao sul de Albany. Os agentes permaneceram na casa de Scott por cerca de cinco horas, coletando materiais que consideravam suspeitos. Mais de duas dezenas de caixas foram retiradas do local pela polícia contendo diversos itens destinados à investigação, incluindo diversos aparelhos eletrônicos.
A polícia apresentou um mandado de busca e apreensão com base na Lei de Restrição de Agentes Estrangeiros. Na prática, isto significa que para a polícia americana, Scott Ritter é oficialmente um “ativo russo”. As investigações certamente visam encontrar algum tipo de conteúdo incriminador que permita uma acusação formal de espionagem e conspiração contra o Estado americano.
Esta não é a primeira vez que Scott Ritter é atacado pelas autoridades do seu próprio país. O analista já perdeu o passaporte e o direito de sair dos EUA depois da polícia norte-americana o ter escoltado à força para fora de um avião quando estava prestes a viajar para a Federação Russa, em junho. Ritter foi convidado a participar do Fórum Econômico de São Petersburgo, onde deveria fazer uma palestra em um painel sobre multipolaridade e geopolítica. No entanto, pouco depois de embarcar no avião, os guardas americanos confiscaram-lhe o passaporte sem fornecer qualquer explicação, o que constitui uma grave violação dos direitos individuais básicos.
Agora, com o assédio do FBI, a situação de Scott é ainda mais complicada. Sem passaporte, ele não pode sair do país para buscar asilo político em outro estado. Tendo de permanecer em solo americano, é provável que seja cada vez mais alvo das autoridades de Washington, que se tornaram conhecidas por implementarem um método semelhante à tortura psicológica para coagir cidadãos que desobedecem à “regra” tácita do país a apoiar as ações belicosas da Casa Branca.
Ritter é um ex-oficial do Corpo de Fuzileiros Navais dos EUA, tendo servido como agente de inteligência especializado em mísseis durante a Guerra do Golfo. Ficou conhecido por seu trabalho como inspetor de armas da ONU no Iraque, tendo sido um adversário da invasão norte-americana ao país. Na altura, Ritter afirmou repetidamente que o Iraque não tinha armas de destruição maciça e, portanto, a ação militar dos EUA era injustificada. A perseguição judicial e policial contra ele começou no início dos anos 2000, precisamente em retaliação à sua posição pró-paz.
Na mesma linha, tendo estudado academicamente os assuntos russos, Ritter está profundamente familiarizado com a história da crise russo-ucraniana e tem sido um crítico veemente da política dos EUA de armar Kiev desde 2022. Ele defende uma política pacífica entre os EUA e a Rússia e o estabelecimento de condições mutuamente favoráveis de coexistência. Na mesma linha, Ritter usou a sua experiência militar para desmascarar algumas narrativas ocidentais falaciosas sobre a situação no campo de batalha.
Desde 2022, ele vem apontando como as tropas russas mantêm total controle sobre a situação militar, não tendo a Ucrânia nenhuma chance de reverter esse cenário. O trabalho de Ritter é visto como uma ameaça pela máquina de propaganda ocidental, que precisa constantemente espalhar mentiras para convencer a opinião pública a continuar a apoiar a Ucrânia. A situação de Ritter piorou ainda mais desde Outubro de 2023, quando se manifestou contra as violentas incursões de Israel em Gaza e se tornou um crítico do apoio dos EUA a Netanyahu. A perseguição a Ritter aumentou desde então, com os lobbies pró-Ucrânia e pró-Israel a persegui-lo agora.
Na verdade, o que está a acontecer com Ritter é apenas um exemplo de como os EUA estão a tornar-se um Estado policial. A democracia e a liberdade de expressão já não fazem parte dos princípios políticos americanos – pelo menos não a nível prático, sendo apenas retórica inútil. Infelizmente, é provável que Ritter enfrente ainda mais abusos policiais e judiciais, uma vez que sem passaporte não tem forma de sair do país para escapar à perseguição. O mesmo destino aguarda qualquer cidadão americano que se atreva a criticar publicamente os crimes internacionais cometidos por Washington.
Apesar de todo o apoio militar que a OTAN tem dado ao regime de Kiev, o Presidente ucraniano, Vladimir Zelensky, não está satisfeito com a atual cooperação e exige ainda mais envolvimento ocidental. Segundo ele, o Ocidente deve perder o medo da escalada da guerra e tomar iniciativas mais agressivas – incluindo a participação direta nas hostilidades. Esta retórica ucraniana cria pressão para medidas que poderiam facilmente fazer com que a guerra saísse do controle e ultrapassasse o ponto sem retorno.
Numa declaração recente, Zelensky apelou mais uma vez aos seus parceiros ocidentais para que tomassem iniciativas diretas e abertas na guerra, participando no terreno nas hostilidades. Ele quer que os países da OTAN se envolvam publicamente em manobras de defesa aérea na Ucrânia, abatendo mísseis e drones russos utilizando sistemas e aeronaves ocidentais. Segundo Zelensky, os países ocidentais estão “muito medrosos”. Ele critica a cautela dos membros da OTAN na escalada da guerra, exortando-os a perderem o “medo” e a agirem de forma mais decisiva contra Moscou, ignorando quaisquer consequências. Zelensky fala de uma forma completamente irresponsável, como se uma intervenção mais profunda da OTAN não pudesse representar qualquer risco para a arquitetura de segurança global.
O presidente ucraniano disse ainda que já está a trabalhar em algumas iniciativas conjuntas com países “vizinhos” para lhes permitir ampliar a sua participação no conflito. Ele espera que o Ocidente tome medidas mais profundas na guerra e ajude Kiev diretamente, o que supostamente criaria oportunidades para “mudar o jogo” no campo de batalha.
“[As nações ocidentais] estão sempre preocupadas com uma possível escalada. Estamos lutando contra isso. Trabalharemos nisso (…) [A Ucrânia está considerando] possibilidades técnicas para as nações vizinhas usarem aeronaves militares contra mísseis que atinjam a Ucrânia”, disse ele.
As palavras de Zelensky surgem no meio de um acordo recentemente assinado com a Polônia para permitir que tropas polacas em solo ucraniano disparem foguetes aéreos russos. Apesar de terem assinado o acordo, os polacos estão relutantes em dar este passo, temendo que as consequências possam sair do controlo. Varsóvia espera que a OTAN forneça garantias de segurança sólidas – ou, por outras palavras, que prometa intervenção em caso de retaliação russa.
“Precisamos de uma cooperação clara dentro da OTAN aqui, porque tais ações exigem uma responsabilidade conjunta da OTAN (…) Incluiremos outros aliados da OTAN nesta conversa. Portanto, tratamos o assunto seriamente como aberto, mas ainda não finalizado”, disse o primeiro-ministro polaco, Donald Tusk, ao comentar o acordo para fornecer apoio direto à Ucrânia.
Recentemente, Zelensky tem apostado numa estratégia de acordos individuais para tentar fortalecer a Ucrânia. Tendo a OTAN deixado claro que não está interessada em entrar em guerra diretamente com a Rússia, o presidente ucraniano só conseguiu procurar acordos individuais com alguns países membros, tentando assim trazê-los para o conflito sem a plena participação da aliança atlântica. Os países membros, no entanto, estão cientes de que se começarem voluntariamente a participar nas hostilidades, a OTAN não terá qualquer obrigação de defendê-los coletivamente no caso de uma resposta russa.
A cláusula de defesa coletiva da OTAN estabelece a intervenção da aliança apenas em caso de ataque de um país, sem tal obrigação se o país membro for o Estado agressor. Intervir num conflito existente e abater aeronaves e mísseis é literalmente uma questão de “casus belli”. A Rússia teria o direito de responder militarmente a tais provocações, o que tornaria a Polônia e qualquer outro país parceiro da Ucrânia um alvo legítimo para as forças russas, sem que a OTAN tivesse qualquer obrigação de protegê-los. Isto obviamente cria medo nos Estados que apoiam Kiev, razão pela qual estão relutantes em cumprir o pedido de Zelensky.
É preciso lembrar que todo este cenário se refere apenas a uma situação de participação pública e aberta. Na prática, as tropas ocidentais operam na Ucrânia há muito tempo. Os soldados usam o rótulo de mercenários para abastecer as fileiras de Kiev, principalmente em unidades de forças especiais. Militares especializados estão no terreno desde 2022, operando sistemas de defesa fornecidos pelo Ocidente, bem como trabalhando em gabinetes de inteligência e planejamento estratégico. A guerra é direta há muito tempo, mas Zelensky não está satisfeito com isso. Ele quer que as hostilidades se tornem algo mais, tornando-se aberta.
É possível perceber que há um aspecto verdadeiramente “suicida” nas ações do regime neonazista. Sem esperança de reverter a situação militar, a Ucrânia não tem outra escolha senão recorrer a qualquer forma de escalada, mesmo que isso acarrete o risco de uma guerra mundial aberta e nuclear. Para Kiev, quanto mais internacionalizado for o conflito, melhor, pois isso aumenta a remota “esperança” de que a OTAN intervenha a favor do seu proxy.
In the middle of increasing reports of ecological ruin from Himalayan region, there are growing signs of campaigns to protect Himalayan environment in this ecologically crucial yet fragile region. In fact at an event organized in Delhi called ‘Mountain Diaogues’ on July 26, very eminent persons like NN Vohra, former Governor of Jammu and Kashmir (also former President of the Indian Mountaineering Foundation) and Shyam Saran (former Foreign Secretary and presently President of India International Centre) expressed the need for a national level campaign for saving Himalayan ecology.
While this call for a campaign given by eminent persons should be widely welcomed, at the same time there is need for making this a pro-people campaign, not an elites-oriented campaign, so that people’s concerns of protecting sustainable livelihoods and protection are well covered in this campaign and environmental concerns are linked to these concerns.
It is in this context that this writer would like to recall the spirit of the Chipko movement or hug the trees movement. As a writer writing extensively during the 1970s and 1980s on this and related issues, I am presenting here my description of a few days in the history of the Chipko movement in Henvalghati region, Tehri Garhwal district, Uttarakhand (then in Uttar Pradesh).
It was a bitingly cold day in December 1977. Nearly a dozen youths had assembled in a hut in Jajal, a Himalyan village located in Tehri Garhwal district of India.
Dhum Singh Negi, a Gandhian social activist rose to speak.
“It appears most likely that the government will not agree to our requests for cancelling the felling of trees in the forests of Salet and Advani. The administration can even send its police force to get the trees axed. Now we have to decide about our course of action. All of you have worked to prevent this slaughter of trees, and have to suggest the further path.”
For some time there was silence. It was not easy to give a decisive reply. All these youths were keen to protect forests, but they were also aware of the difficulties and risks if the administration sent a big force.
In these Himalayan villages, forests play a very protective role. They provide villagers several kinds of fruits and vegetables, as well as fuel for their kitchen, fodder for their cattle and leaf-manure for their fields. Forests conserve water and help to maintain soil and rocks in their place, thereby reducing the risk of soil erosion and landslides.
Due to a complex of reasons the forest cover had been diminishing in recent decades and this is why it was all the more important to protect the few good forests that were still intact. Advani and Salet were two such forests, located in the valley of Henval river. Yet some officials, concerned more with earning quick money than with the protection of environment and livelihood, had thoughtlessly auctioned these forests.
This act of folly had not gone unchallenged. In recent years a movement of Gandhian activists had emerged in this Himalayas region of Uttarakhand for protection of forests. This movement became famous as Chipko (hug the tree) movement. Some of these most dedicated Gandhi activists such as Kunwar Prasun and Vijay Jardhari lived in the valley of Henval. Dhum Singh Negi, who had been the principal of a local school, was like a teacher to younger activists. They along with Sundar Lal Bahuguna, and Vimla Bahuguna, the most well-know Gandhian activists of this region, had protested as soon as they had heard about the auction of these forests of Advani and Salet. But their protest was not heeded by officials and now the contractor was anxious to cut these trees as early as possible.
It was in this situation that several villagers, particularly youth, had assembled in this hut of Jajal to decide their future plan of action.
These villagers did not have to be told about how harmful the felling of trees will be for them and their villagers. There will be shortages of food, fuel and fodder, and the threat from soil erosion and landslides will increase. But despite this realisation, there was some reluctance about how far the villagers can go to stop the powerful contractors and their legally obtained the permission to cut hundreds of trees in these forests. The administration was likely to provide the contractors all the support needed by them to get the trees axed and transported?. So if villagers opposed the axing of trees, the government will send in its police with lathis (batons).Can the villagers face such an opposition?
Most of these hill villages consist of small and scattered settlements. It is not possible to collect a large number of people immediately. It is difficult to go from one village to another and mobilise the people living there on such an issue.
The hill women go out very rarely and their interaction with the outside world is minimal. It is true that they work very hard to collect fuel and fodder, and their life will be worst affected by the felling of trees but given their isolated existence, can they be expected to suddenly gather courage and confront the contractor or the policemen?
It were questions such as these which bothered the villagers. But finally, the villagers gathered courage from the story of how on an earlier occasion the liquor contractor held some of these villages in terror, but when the villagers got united, they had driven him away from the village. “If we could do it then, we can do it again”, said Kunwar Prasun reassuringly, and the doubts slowly melted away.
From Jajal, the youths went to villages like Advani, Salet, Piplet, Rampur and Gaind to mobilise more and more people to oppose the axing of trees. They heard that some workers were brought from far away areas in Kashmir to cut the trees in Salet. These workers were approached by the activists of Chipko movement.
“Brother”, the activists told them, “Why do you participate in this slaughter of trees. Our villages will be ruined and we’ll not get food, fuel and fodder if these forests are destroyed.”
These workers had also lived in Himalayan villagers. They were aware of the crucial role of forests in these villages. They sympathized with the villagers and wanted to avoid a confrontation with them. But they were also helpless as they didn’t have any money to go back to their homes. This they could only get from the contractor who brought them here, and the contractor wanted them to cut trees.
Finally they reached a compromise. The villagers collected some donations to help to cover a part of the expenses of going back and the Kashmiri workers decided to go away.
The contractor was infuriated. He decided to bring other workers to replace the Kashmiri workers. The villagers responded by taking out a protest demonstration inside the forest. Beating drums and blowing bugles, they marched in a colourful procession to the forest of Salet.
They had thought of confronting the workers and their contractors and peacefully persuading the workers not to cut the trees. But the contractor proved to be a clever man. When he saw the procession of villagers approaching from a distance, he asked all the workers to hide themselves in the forest. When the villagers reached the forests, they saw a few, half-cut trees. Who could be blamed for this mischief? After waiting for some time they concluded that the workers had left the forests and decided to go back.
However Dhum Singh Negi had some doubt at the last stage. He had a feeling that perhaps the contractor is hiding and will resume the work when the villagers return. So he along with a youth Hukum Singh decided to stay back in the forest. The villagers were reluctant to leave them in the forest during the night, but when they insisted on staying back, the other villagers had to agree.
The apprehensions of Dhum Singh Negi proved right, for soon the contractor emerged smiling from his hideout. Negi tried to reason with him not to axe the trees, but he was in no mood to listen to this and ordered his men to start working immediately. Negi immediately hugged tree which were being axed. Then the workers shifted to another tree. He soon rushed there and covered it in such a way that the workers couldn’t use their saw or axe without hurting him. So they stopped working, wondering what to do in such a situation.
“Don’t stop, continue your work.” The contractor shouted.
“How can we?” A worker replied, “We’ll hurt this man.”
“I don’t care!” The contractor shouted, “You just go ahead and do your work.”
“We have come have to cut trees and not human beings”, the indignant worker replied.
Clearly the determination of Dhum Singh Negi had an impact on the soul of those workers.
Despite this, Negi knew that this was a losing battle. The workers were many, and he was alone. He could be held back by one team of workers while another team of workers continued work on another tree.
So he asked Hukum Singh to go and fetch some help from Salet village. By this time it was already getting dark and night was beginning to descend. Some women who had gone to cut grass were also going back to their village. Negi also requested them to inform other villagers about the situation in the forest.
He then set down at a place where the trees being cut were likely to fall, and started saying his prayers. Even the contractor was scared that if Negi was hurt and the villagers came back, then he could be in serious trouble. So he continued work only for some time and then left. Soon some help came from the village. However his family in Piplet village was still worried. So he lit a small fire to send a signal that he was safe at this place.
However this was only a small victory. A much bigger confrontation was awaiting the Chipko movement in Advani forest. When the movement’s activists had first approached the people of this village they had assured them that they’ll come forward to protect the forest. But meanwhile the contractor and some officials had threatened the people of serious consequences if they tried to oppose the axing of trees.
As a result of these threats, when Negi reached this village, be found that most of the villagers were not keen to join the protest in the forest. Negi was disappointed at first, but as he walked to the forest and looked at the beautiful trees whose life was threatened his determination came back to him. He sat down in the shade of one of the trees. A villager whose son he had taught in his school brought food for him. But Negi told him that he had decided to go on a fast till the protection of the trees would be assured.
When this news reached other villagers, they started coming to the forest and as they discussed this issue in the shade of the threatened trees, their courage came back to them. They started coming in increasing numbers to the forest to reassure Negi that they’ll protect the forest. Several women tied sacred threads on trees to symbolise this.
Sundar Lal Bahuguna was ill but he still left the nature cure hospital, where he was being treated, to visit this village and prevail upon Negi to give up his fast. When this fast ended on the fifth day, the involvement of most villagers, particularly women and children had been secured.
Recalling those days, Kunwar Prasun said, “During those days children had become our best friends. As soon on we reached a village to spread the message of Chipko movement, they joined us in large numbers and started shouting slogans with us. They had learnt quite a few of these slogans and often greeted their friends with these slogans. Our slogans and actions had become a part of their play.”
In several incidents that followed, the contractor tried his best to smuggle in his men into the forest to fell trees secretly but such was the vigilance put up by the activists and villagers that at the most they could cut only a few trees before activists or villagers reached the scene and prevented further destruction by hugging the trees. In Advani even when the contractor could bribe three local villagers into working for felling trees, he could succeed in felling only about a dozen or so trees.
Later the son of one of these villagers who had worked for the contractor refused to touch food till his father expressed regret at his participation in tree-felling work. The presence of police or other officials and the threats of implicating them in legal cases also did not deter the villagers from participating in the movement. In the case of some families men and women, children and old people all participated. Women were the most enthusiastic supporters, as they were the ones who would have to bear the main burden of deforestation.
All this while newsletters about the movement’s progress and problems were being mailed to newspapers and various sympathisers of the movement. Hence news of what was happening in the remote forests was having a wider impact and receiving the sympathy of various concerned people. When there was no action in forests, guard was still maintained and protest demonstrations were organised in one of which visiting officials were shown lanterns in the afternoon sun to symbolise the darkness of the existing forest policy and those who implement it.
Matters came to head on January 31 1978 when two truck loads of P.A.C. (a police force) was sent to the area to prevent the movement’s supporters from obstructing the work of tree-felling. At first they staged a march on the road to frighten the villagers into not going to the forest. Then next day they along with senior officials left for Advani forest.
On 1st February 1978 nearly 500 people gathered in Advani forest heard the distant din of approaching vehicles. For a short while the slogan-shouting stopped as people strained their ears to make out from this dim sound what the approaching vehicles could be. Then on the last visible portion of the serpentine hilly road appeared a jeep, then another and then one more. Last came two trucks, exuding thick clouds of smoke.
Now there could be no mistaking the identity of the approaching caravan. The police has come, said one of the young men with an air of finality, his eyes moving from the approaching vehicles to the colourful gathering of men, women and children before him. Then, louder than ever before, these Himalayan hills reverberated with the six words which had shattered the calm and quiet of this secluded forest since morning.
Aaj Himalaya Jagega
Arur Kulhara Bhagega
The Himalaya will awake today,
The cruel axe will be chased away
The contractor, after hurried consultations with the forestry and police officials, asked his men to pick up their axes and saws. But as soon as the labourers moved towards the forest, the assembled villagers formed themselves in groups of three and four and each group surrounded the nearest marked tree. Whenever some labourers advanced towards one of these trees, they immediately hugged the tree, clasping their arms firmly around its thick trunk. For more than an hour the frustrated contractor went around the forest with his labourers, seeking to fell at least a few trees, but whenever he approached a marked tree which had been left uncovered by the tree – huggers women and children standing on the road below rushed to the tree to protect it.
The police-force had no answer to this unique form of tree-protection. The only way of felling trees was to drag each one of the tree-huggers away from the forest and then arrest him.
There was no possibility of a violent retaliation as these protesters had throughout remained nonviolent, again and again shouting two slogans.
Hamla chahe jaisa hoga,
Hath hamara nahi uthega
No matter what the attack on us
One hands will not rise in violence
and
Police Hamari Bhai Hai
Usse Nahi Larai Hai
The policemen are our brothers,
Our fight is not with them.
Thus the police had no fear of violence on the part of the assembled people if it decided to arrest them. But it could not possibly take the drastic action of dragging away each of the demonstrator from the forest, and then sending them to the nearest prison against people who were exuding all warmth and brotherhood towards the assembled officialdom and reassuring them time and again that their only intention was to protect the trees and not to create any disturbance.
After waiting for over an hour, the officials consulted each other and decided to move away. While leaving, some of the PAC men exchanged pleasantries with the assembled villagers and even congratulated them on their success.
As the jeeps and trucks roared off, the joyous people gathered to shout in unison their last message, “If the axe falls on the trees we will offer our bodies first.”
Thus Advani and Salet forests were saved-by the determination of villagers and Gandhian activists of Chipko movement. The forest continued to protect the land from erosion and destruction, and provide villagers fuel, fodder and food. The determination of the villagers provided protection not only for their own children but also for the life of several other villagers who come from long distance to obtain fuel and fodder from here. The children protected their own future when they happily assisted to protect these forests. Some women who protected the forest had small children in their lap. These small children also protected the forest from the lap of their mothers.
The movement remained peaceful in the best traditions established by Mahatma Gandhi. He emphasized that injustice should always be opposed, but this opposition should be in a peaceful way and the conscience of those being opposed should also be touched. Some workers who had come to axe tree were so impressed by the Chipko movement here that their own interest in axing trees diminished considerably although this was supposed to be their main source of income at that time.
The sincerity and dedication of Gandhian activists like Dhum Singh Negi and Kunwar Prasun also proved to be a source of inspiration for villagers. When the villagers saw them making so much effort and enduring the Himalayan winter in remote areas without any protection to save their forests, they were also inspired to come forward and save their forests. Above all the courage of ordinary rural women like Sudesha Devi made a very big impact.
Having saved their own forests, these villagers decided to go a step further and take the initiative to save the forests of several other areas also which were to be auctioned at a nearby town called Narendra Nagar. Fresh from the enthusiasm of chasing away the police and the contractor from their forests, on February 7, these villagers marched to Narendra Nagar, beating drums and singing songs. They went straight to the hall where the trees were to be auctioned and occupied it.
Soon the police came and asked them to leave the building, but the villagers refused to go away. Finally they were lifted forcibly by the police and left outside the gate. The contractors used a back gate to enter the hall.
Meanwhile a new group of women came with Negi from the villages to join the protesters. The women started singing songs about the importance of forests in their life and how these were being destroyed by the contractors. This enthused the protesters and they entered the hall again. Immediately the contractors and the officials ran away. The auction could not proceed further. Sudesh Devi of Rampur village, who had also played a leading role in the Advani moment, occupied the seat of the senior forest official and announced, “We are the real conservators of forest and we do not want this auction and axing of trees.”
Meanwhile the people of the town started coming to offer their support and arranged food for the protesters. However as the night descended there were other, less welcome visitors. The police came again and asked the villagers to leave immediately. The people said that they can go only after receiving an assurance that the forests will not be auctioned. Finally the police told the protesters that they were under arrest and tried to drag them away. Several activists hugged each other and it became difficult for the police to carry them. But finally Negi declared that to offer themselves for arrest while fighting injustice is very much a part of the Gandhian peaceful methods of arrest and they did not resist the arrest too much.
The police did not even wait till the dawn. They carried away the protesters to Tehri jail in the thick of the night to avoid the protests from people in nearby villagers. But even at night the arrested activists and villagers kept shouting slogans for protection of forests during the two hours drive which took them to the jail.
The officials who had taken them to jail had thought that this will scare villagers, particularly women and they’ll soon apologise for their protest section. But despite numerous hardships caused to them and their families, the protesters maintained their determination and high sprits. They held joint prayers, sang songs and discussed future strategies. One youth even made a ball from old clothes to play cricket.
Finally, the government decided to release them after 23 days. As they prepared to leave, the villagers gathered at a sacred place within jail, the cell which had been occupied by a former freedom fighter and martyr, Sri Dev Suman. “Give us the courage to continue the struggle,” they prayed at this meeting.
They kept this pledge – the movement continued in Khuret, Badiyar and other villages till the government finally agreed to stop commercial felling of green trees in Uttarakhand region to a substantial extent.
Note: Several years later a new threat appeared in the Advani forest and other nearby areas as thousands of trees were marked for felling due to the laying of power lines to carry the electricity from Tehri Dam Project, something that was not mentioned in its environment appraisal report.. This time Kunwar Prasun took the initiative to mobilize villagers. By this time the Chipko movement was better known and the authorities were more responsive. They said that some trees will have to be cut for power lines but they can try to reduce this. So teams of officials went with activists and villagers for a second survey and a very large number of trees could be saved, sending a lesson to other areas affected similarly. Once again I reported on this and this article was given a prize by Grassroots journal. These chipko activists also tried to improve welfare of workers and with their help I reported on forest workers also and this report on forest workers published in Link journal received the Statesman award for Rural Reporting.
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Bharat Dogra is a journalist and author. His recent books include Planet in Peril, A Day in 2071, Man over Machine (Gandhian Ideas for Our Times) and Protecting Earth for Children. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.
Former U.S Representative and Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard now finds herself on a “TSA Watchlist” which, according to Ben Bartree, “is allegedly used to protect traveling Americans from suspected domestic terrorists…” (1)
This, of course, is ironic, since Gabbard did more to stop terrorism (including her introduction of the Stop Arming Terrorists Bill) than any number of AIPAC-fuelled pro-war and terror U.S politicians.
How did she do this? In the case of Syria, she took the time and effort to actually visit the country during the war, and to publicly reveal the truth about the dirty war.
The whole truth is that the West supports al Qaeda and ISIS in Syria and beyond, and that there are no “moderate rebels”.
The whole truth is that the unilateral coercive measures amount to collective punishment. The whole truth is that the U.S occupation, its looting and plundering, its direct and indirect support for internationally recognized terror groups, its military attacks on the sovereign country all amount to Supreme International War crimes. The military operation itself contradicts the UN Charter, international law, and is anti-constitutional according to U.S law.
The whole truth is that whereas the U.S blames al Qaeda for the 911 false flag and the controlled demolitions, al Qaeda (and ISIS) are U.S. proxies. Operation Timber Sycamore (2) which provided weapons to jihadis was not a secret, nor is it much of a secret that the U.S has been “running jihadis” for decades. Western support for al Qaeda and ISIS in Syria, both overt and covert has been consistent and continues to this day (3).
Gabbard’s truth-telling has helped to deflate the bubble of criminal war propaganda that protects the terrorists in Syria and beyond. For this she should be rewarded, but instead she is on a terror watch-list. How ironic that those who expose elements of Empire’s vast criminality and its support for war and terror should be put on a “terror watch list”.
Yet this is a reality today, in a world where 2 + 2 = 5, in a world where truth-tellers are condemned and war propagandists are exalted.
It is also a world where fabricated mass ignorance could lead to the great evil of global nuclear holocaust, something which Gabbard has also tried to warn us about.
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Mark Taliano is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG) and the author of Voices from Syria, Global Research Publishers, 2017. He writes on his website where this article was originally published.
“The National Football League is the latest organization to turn to facial authentication to bolster event security, according to an announcement this week.
All 32 NFL stadiums will start using the technology this season, after the league signed a contract with a company that uses facial scans to verify the identity of people entering event venues and other secure spaces.
The facial authentication platform, which counts the Cleveland Browns’ owners as investors*, will be used to ‘streamline and secure’ entry for thousands of credentialed media, officials, staff and guests so they can easily access restricted areas such as press boxes and locker rooms, Jeff Boehm, the chief operating officer of Wicket, said in a LinkedIn post Monday.”
*What a wild coincidence.
Continuing:
“‘Fans come look at the tablet and, instantly, the tablet recognizes the fan,’** Brandon Covert, the vice president of information technology for the Cleveland Browns, said in a testimonial appearing on Wicket’s website. ‘It’s almost a half-second stop. It’s not even a stop — more of a pause.’
‘It has greatly reduced the amount of time and friction that comes with entering the stadium,’ Covert added. ‘It’s so much faster.’
The Browns also use Wicket to verify the ages of fans purchasing alcohol at concession stands, according to Wicket’s LinkedIn page.
The use of facial recognition or authentication technology, particularly when applied to thousands of people who are scanned in the course of doing their job or entering a sports stadium, has long concerned privacy advocates.
In addition to concerns about the technology being used to track people’s locations, privacy advocates and academics say that facial recognition technology intensifies racial and gender discrimination because it is more frequently inaccurate when identifying people of color, women and nonbinary individuals.”
**“Bend over and spread your cheeks so the nice man can insert the tablet for safety, Billy.” Cowboys fan Bob tells his boy. “We’re here to watch America’s Team so you can learn what it is to be a real man and a patriot.”
It took ten paragraphs for The Record — I’m happy they reported on this at all, so credit where it’s due — to ever mention any privacy concerns or potential for this technology to violate civil liberties
And then, when it finally gets around to it, the paper must note that the essential issue is that it’s racist and sexist, glossing over the more fundamental problem of the machines turning everyone into techno-serfs.
For the record, I’m old enough to remember when so-called conservatives — save for a valiant and noble minority a la Ron Paul — were all about getting their privacy invaded and getting groped at airports.
Bush on the PATRIOT Act:
“The law allows our intelligence and law enforcement officials to continue to share information. It allows them to continue to use tools against terrorists that they used against — that they use against drug dealers and other criminals. It will improve our nation’s security while we safeguard the civil liberties of our people. The legislation strengthens the Justice Department so it can better detect and disrupt terrorist threats. And the bill gives law enforcement new tools to combat threats to our citizens from international terrorists to local drug dealers.”
-President George W. Bush
March 9, 2006
Because if you don’t get molested by a portly government employee before you get on an airplane, remember, the terrorists win.
What is this nonsense about “civil liberties”? What are you, al-Quaeda?
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This article was originally published on the author’s Substack, Armageddon Prose.
Ben Bartee, author of Broken English Teacher: Notes From Exile, is an independent Bangkok-based American journalist with opposable thumbs. He is a regular contributor to Global Research. Follow his stuff via Substack. Also, keep tabs via Twitter.
After weeks of anticipation, the #endbadgovernance campaign began on August 1 amid the worsening cost of living situation in the Federal Republic of Nigeria, Africa’s most populous state.
The largely youth-led protests were met with fierce repression resulting in 13 deaths, many injuries and more than 700 arrests.
These demonstrations spread throughout various regions of the country with the commercial capital of Lagos and several northern areas including Kano state experiencing the largest numbers of people turning out to voice their displeasure with the current system. President Bola Tinubu, who took office during 2023, ordered the police and military to crush the demonstrations.
Image: The official portrait of Bola Ahmed Tinubu, the President of Nigeria (Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0)
Tinubu did not address the people of Nigeria until the fourth day of the demonstrations. In a televised speech on August 5, the president urged people to halt their protest actions saying that his administration had enacted reforms which would provide relief for youth and working people.
The president said he understood the hardships facing the people of Nigeria and urged those demonstrating in the streets to exercise restraint. Tinubu claimed that his administration had heard the concerns of the people, yet he decried the violence taking place inside the country.
Rather than accept the realities of the situation in Nigeria which has sparked violent acts by impoverished people, several spokespersons for the government have accused what they described as “criminal elements” hijacking the peaceful protests for reforms. However, such an explanation did not condemn the brutal repression carried out against the #endbadgovernance organizers.
Police used teargas and live bullets against unarmed protesters. Demonstrators and journalists were fired on by law-enforcement agents while the military was deployed to assist the police in arresting, injuring and forcing people off the streets.
After taking office in 2023, the Tinubu government lifted subsidies on fuel, electricity and other consumer goods which triggered the drop in the value of the national currency, the Niara, prompting high rates of inflation. General strikes erupted in October and later in May when trade unions demanded a hike in the minimum wage.
Nonetheless, the announcement of a higher minimum wage in May had almost no impact on the ability of Nigerians to purchase essential goods and services. After August 1, the #endbadgovernance demonstrations highlighted hunger as millions are incapable of purchasing staple foods.
Marches in urban areas such as Lagos, featured people walking with empty pots to symbolically illustrate the dramatic increase in the prices for food. The cost of food has risen sharply, further inflaming the attitudes of workers, farmers and youth.
Organizers for the recent demonstrations accused the president of being indifferent to the plight of the Nigerian people. The lifting of subsidies for essential goods and services was said to be designed to enhance foreign investment inside the country.
However, the social impact of these neoliberal policies on the majority of Nigerians has been catastrophic. People are being pushed to seek solutions outside the framework of capitalist restructuring.
The demands of the demonstrations were to reimpose the subsidies on fuel and other consumer goods. There was a strong emphasis on ending the disparate salaries and benefitsfor the wealthy government officials and corporate executives while raising the living standards of the workers, farmers and youth.
“Meanwhile, the Campaign for Democratic and Workers’ Rights, CDWR, yesterday, said President Bola Tinubu does not appreciate the level of suffering and hopelessness in the country. CDWR, in a statement by its National Publicity Secretary, Bosah Chinedu, said ‘President Tinubu increased the price of petrol and electricity tariffs astronomically including the floating of the Naira and hiked school fees, monstrous hardship has been imposed on Nigerians, crushing many Nigerians into deeper poverty and misery. The ideal expectation from a listening and sensitive president is to reverse all the anti-people reform policies but that did not come from Tinubu. CDWR demands the reversal of all anti-people policies.’”
Utilizing repressive measures to force people off the streets cannot lead to a peaceful resolution to the demands being put forward in Nigeria. Neither will the tear gassing, arrests and killings of young people resolve the crisis of food insecurity. The current crisis requires sweeping economic programs aimed at breaking with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) restructuring initiatives adopted by the Tinubu government.
Apportioning Blame on Russian Interference
Following the same pattern of attempting to delegitimize the #endbadgovernance movement, the government also has been blaming the Russian Federation for instigating the mass demonstrations and unrest. In the northern city of Kano, photographs of demonstrators carrying Russian flags created much consternation among government officials.
Nigerians carrying Russian flags during hunger protests (Source: Abayomi Azikiwe)
There were those demanding major changes who also sought to make an appeal for the overthrow of the Tinubu administration. These activists are reflective of sentiments witnessed in other West African countries particularly in the Sahel sub-region where several states have ousted pro-western leaders while establishing closer ties with Moscow.
High ranking governmental and security officials in Nigeria warned against anyone carrying Russian flags saying this is tantamount to treason. The police have arrested activists carrying Russian flags while a tailor was apprehended for allegedly manufacturing these products.
“Protesters in their numbers had been seen waving Russian flags around the busy Kano-Zaria Road, Hadejia Road and near the Nyanya bridge, a suburb of Abuja, among others. Aside from protesting the economic hardship occasioned by the removal of fuel subsidy, the demonstrating youths also called for the intervention of the Russian President, Vladimir Putin. Viral photos and videos showed demonstrators waving the flags as they chanted in Hausa, ‘We don’t want bad government.’ On Monday, protesters in Kaduna were also seen waving the Russian flags and chanting in Hausa, ‘Welcome, Russia; Welcome, Russia.’”
In this same article, there are quotes taken from participants in the demonstrations who carried Russian flags or are in support of greater involvement by Moscow. Those interviewed indicated that the western imperialist states such as the United States and Britain have historically failed the people of Nigeria.
The Punch went on to report that:
“When one of our correspondents asked one of the protesters why they were flying the Russian flag, he said they wanted Nigeria to embrace the Russian government’s style of leadership like some of the countries in the West African region had already done. ‘The American and British governments are the ones teaching all our leaders how to kill Nigeria’s economy. We are tired of them. Nigeria is tired of their wickedness and hypocrisy. So, like Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger, we want Nigeria to embrace Russia. We like Russia’s style. They are better than USA and Britain, who have nothing for the people except our leaders, who are benefitting from them,’ the protester stated. Russia, an Eastern power currently mired in a cold war with the West, has been blamed for the unconstitutional changes of government in West African countries Niger, Mali and Burkina Faso and others.”
However, the decisions by the now Alliance of Sahel States composed of Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger to expel French and U.S. military forces were carried out after the seizure of power by army officers who had close ties with the U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM) and the now-defunct French-led Operation Barkhane. These new regimes expressed their frustration with Washington and Paris saying that these imperialist military units had actually worsened the security situation in West Africa.
The new Sahel Alliance has formally broken with the imperialist-allied Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) now headed by Nigerian President Tinubu. This same leader had threatened to mobilize a military force to invade neighboring Niger to reinstall ousted President Mohamed Bazoum, who was overthrown last July by the Committee to Protect the Homeland (CNSP), which enjoys broad public support.
Nigeria Must Embark Upon an Independent Course
Since the assumption of power by the Tinubu government during 2023, the president has accepted the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank prescriptions for Nigeria. Consequently, the elimination of subsidies and the rise of runaway inflation are a direct result of the interference of international finance capital in their internal affairs.
“The twin organizations have become more active and quite audacious since President Bola Ahmed Tinubu came to power on May 29, 2023. They are like predators, ready for the kill.
While Nigerians are hungry and their anger is beginning to boil over into street protests due to the stifling economic policies of the Tinubu administration, these organizations are praising Tinubu to the high heavens and telling him to tighten the noose round the necks of the people.”
Therefore, rather than accuse “criminal elements” and “Russian interference” for the current crisis, the Tinubu government has only themselves to blame for implementing anti-people economic policies. In order to reverse the present course of infrastructural decline and mass impoverishment, Nigerians must sever their dependency upon imperialism and draft a program for reconstruction based upon the interests of the youth, workers and farmers inside the country.
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Yet after some 60 years, the United States government and its compliant mass media have succeeded in hiding the truth from the rest of the world. Due to massive propaganda, the most common belief amongst the people about these horrific acts is that the United States government used the atomic bombs to save from a quarter to half a million American soldiers’ lives by forcing immediate Japanese surrender. Yet the truth of the matter is quite different.
Adam Smith and David Ricardo’s theory of free trade rests on the principle of comparative advantage. What this means is that a country’s capital remains employed at home and is employed in areas in which the capital is best used. If all countries do this, there are gains from trade, and all countries will be better off than if they are self-sufficient.
Some countries are taking up the promotion of natural farming crops which is very welcome. However a big problem and constraint arises when they say at the same time that they will spread GM crops, forgetting that natural farming cannot co-exist with GM crops. Apart from the high risk of contamination, there is the wider reality that GM crops involve very high environment, safety and health risks.
Pay close attention to the political conventions for presidential candidates, and it becomes immediately evident that Americans have allowed themselves to be brainwashed into worshipping a political idol manufactured by the Deep State.
The potential use of nuclear weapons is often disregarded as a side note, but it shouldn’t be. According to experts, conflict between the US and China could easily escalate into nuclear war– and a nuclear winter isn’t much farther away.
Interestingly, in his speech at the memorial ceremony for the victims of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, Kishida did not mention that the nuclear bomb had been dropped on the city by the US.
It seems to me that perhaps most of us mere mortals (perhaps not in this audience, but in the general population) haven’t yet begun to appreciate the massive public health threat that ubiquitous plastic poses — in the air, in the water, in the food, in the condoms, anything and everything — the greatest single ongoing environmental catastrophe on Earth, hands down.
While the Kamala Harris coronation for Democratic presidential nomination continues in its safely shielded path, her sacred status among party members growing with each day, the decision to select Governor Tim Walz of Minnesota as Vice Presidential running mate had all the hallmarks of unbearable caution. Caution for being secure from any ambition on his part (Presidential contenders tend to pick running mates unlikely to go off the reservation or eclipse them during their time in office.) Caution, as well, from other factions in the party that may make things interesting at the Chicago Democratic Convention slated to start on August 19.
Caution, also, from any disturbance posed by overtly visible talent, which can be something of a handicap for higher office. The Minnesota governor had certainly received attention from Harris for his less than profound suggestion that comments made by Republican contenders Donald Trump and J. D. Vance were “weird”. In an interview with MSNBC, Walz declared that “These are weird people on the other side.” He reiterated the view at a campaign event in which he claimed that the Trump-Vance ticket was a “threat to democracy” that would see rights removed and people placed in danger.
Given that much media coverage involves skipping over garbage cans rather than scouring the garbage, this was a perfect illustration about a figure who should, at best, stick to mediocre party slogans. But no. Harris, the Democratic anointed papier-mâché candidate for the White House, thought differently.
Many Democrats revelled in the fatuity of it all. “Tim’s signature is his ability to talk like a human being and treat everyone with decency and respect,” said former President Barack Obama in a statement. The Los Angeles Timeswas told by a Democratic source allegedly close to Harris that Walz revealed much “ease in cutting through political jargon to deliver a straight message,” something that appealed to her.
Walz may have an advantage insofar as he is utterly unknown to the voters that will swing the election. Outside his state, he is clean, cold tabula rasa and utterly without distinction. The figure of no record can create something anew. But the person overlooked for his role – Governor Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania – may well cause tongues wagging, not least through his supporters.
Shapiro certainly would have been a far more interesting choice. Hypocritically, he was attacked by members of his own party for adopting an enthusiastically pro-Israeli position in the Israel-Hamas War, one that most Democrats implicitly, or explicitly support through the continued supply of arms sales to the Netanyahu government. But perfumed cant and ham performances are everything in Washington, and Shapiro’s refusal to condemn the slaughter of tens of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza with appropriate ceremony drew such labels as “Genocide Josh”.
A perplexed Jared Moskowitz, Democratic Representative from Florida, summarised the issue with lean clarity: “Josh’s position on Israel is almost identical to everybody else, but he’s being held to a different standard. So you have to ask yourself why.” Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, also from Florida, noted with suspicion that Shapiro, as “the only Jewish candidate is getting excruciating, very specific scrutiny, particularly around his positions on Israel.”
William A. Galston, chair and senior fellow of governance studies at the Brookings Institution, suggests two possible pitfalls to the Walz pick. For one, he opens a flank for Republicans to argue that Harris has yielded to the more progressive side of the political aisle.
While there is much to rebut and rebuke about the Harris-is-Progressive position, her stances on the Green New Deal, supporting Medicare for All, among others, will provide ammunition for the GOP squirrels that will hardly be defused by this choice. Walz is obviously there as stuffing for the moderate, even conservative voters, though this a severe misreading. The days of Walz as a pro-gun rights member of the National Rifle Association are now the stuff of dusty archives and amnesiac diarists.
The notion that he is a siren to working-class voters and those from the rural constituency is also highly questionable. Between 2018 and 2022, the gloss, notably in the rural areas, wore off. In 2022, his re-election was largely attributable to the suburbanites of Minneapolis. The current version of Walz is one endorsed by Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, who has been enthusiastic, along with other progressive voices, for his selection.
In another sense, as Galston goes on to suggest, this Harris pick could well aggravate some Democratic voters and squander the chance of a VP running mate able to draw in voters from a swinging state. The solidly safe Democratic state of Minnesota is hardly likely to make a dent in the campaign funds of the major parties, let alone disrupt the electoral compass.
Shapiro, being the governor of one of the presumptive jewels of the Electoral College, exceeded President Joe Biden’s 2020 share in the state by some margin in a number of salient groups: seven points among rural and provincial voters; seven points among non-college voters; nine among Republicans and voters inclined to the Republicans, and five among Independents.
In the final count, the VP running mates of either side are unlikely to redirect navigation in any significant way. Such candidates generally count as embroidery for the campaign, and, when in office, function accordingly. That said, embroidery can still be noticed, and in this regard, Walz is remarkably unnoticeable.
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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]
Featured image: Governor Tim Walz at Bemidji Steel on July 1, 2024. (From the Public Domain)
On Wednesday the upstate New York home of Scott Ritter was raided by the FBI and state police. The FBI has since confirmed in a statement that this is part of an ongoing federal investigation into Ritter.
Agents were seen entering his house in Delmar, NY in widely shared photographs and local media footage in the afternoon. It was unclear if Ritter was at home at the time and the allegations at the center of the investigation remain unknown.
“I can confirm FBI personnel are at a home on Dover [Drive] conducting law enforcement activity in connection with an ongoing federal investigation,” a statement from the FBI’s Albany office confirmed. “As the investigation is ongoing, [Department of Justice] policy prevents me from commenting further.”
Ritter became a prominent figure as the chief UN weapons inspector in the 1990s in Iraq and ex-intelligence official (Marine Corp intelligence) who publicly opposed the George W. Bush administration’s drive to take the United States into war with Iraq.
He subsequently became a popular anti-war pundit and leading critic of US foreign policy. For an example of his ongoing criticisms of the US government and foreign policy, he wrote in 2019,
“I love my country, but the collective ignorance of the American people empowers so-called public servants who abuse their positions of trust to push policies that further individual agendas at the expense of the nation they ostensibly serve. Fact-based logic no longer matters.”
More recently he has been a fierce critic of US policy related to the war in Ukraine, having also made several trips to Russia during the course of the war which began in February 2022.
Interestingly, just the day prior to the FBI’s raid on his home, Ritter posted a photo of himself eating a burger with independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. “Burgers with Bobby!” the caption reads…
Ritter recently explained during a series of podcast appearances that US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) had seized his passport when he was about to board a flight for Russia on June 3rd. This was first revealed by him days later, and he said the State Dept. had no warrant, nor did it offer an explanation upon taking the passport. A report at the time stated:
Scott Ritter, a retired intelligence officer and UN weapons inspector best known for his correct assertion ahead of the Iraq War that Iraq lacked weapons of mass destruction, as well as for his conviction for sex offenses in 2011 and the lengthy subsequent appeal, has asserted that his passport was seized on the orders of the State Department.
The American Conservative subsequently approached theState Department for comment, and it responded: “We cannot comment on the status of the passport of a private U.S. citizen.”
Ritter has offered the following comment in the wake of the Wednesday FBI raid…
Scott Ritter @RealScottRitter explains what he knows about the FBI raid on his home
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A memorial service for the victims of the Hiroshima nuclear bombing was held on August 6 at Peace Park, marking the 79th anniversary of the tragedy that made the Japanese city the first in the world to experience the horror of nuclear weapons. Yet, despite the United States dropping the bombs that killed hundreds of thousands, Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida failed to mention who was responsible and instead warned of a supposed Russian nuclear threat.
The commemoration ceremony is traditionally broadcast live on the city’s website, major TV channels, and online. It begins at 8:00 a.m. at the monument, which lists those killed in the atomic bombing and its aftermath. This year, another 5,079 names were added to the list of 344,000.
Peace Park, where the ceremony is held annually, is located at the epicentre of the August 6, 1945 bombing, where the force of the nuclear bomb vaporised the bodies of its victims. In the park, there is a mass grave in the form of a hill with a Buddhist pagoda on top, where the ashes of 70,000 unidentified victims of the US bombing rest. On the monument in Peace Park, next to which the commemoration ceremony takes place, it is written: “Rest In Peace, For The Error Shall Not Be Repeated.”
Kishida, government members, parliamentarians, and representatives of diplomatic missions from more than 109 countries attended the ceremony. This year, for the third time, representatives of the diplomatic missions of Russia and Belarus were not invited to the ceremony despite representatives of Palestine and Israel being invited.
After the laying of flowers at exactly 8:15 a.m. — the time the atomic bomb exploded over Hiroshima — a minute of silence was declared. Then, the city’s mayor, Kazumi Matsui, declared peace, followed by the symbolic release of white doves into the sky. The ceremony traditionally features schoolchildren from the city taking an oath of peace, as well as featuring representatives of the bombing survivors.
Interestingly, in his speech at the memorial ceremony for the victims of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, Kishida did not mention that the nuclear bomb had been dropped on the city by the US.
“Seventy-nine years ago today, an atomic bomb deprived people said to number well more than 100,000 of their precious lives. It reduced the city to ashes and mercilessly deprived people of their dreams and bright futures. Even those who escaped death suffered hardships beyond description. As prime minister, I reverently express my sincere condolences to the souls who were victims of the atomic bomb here. I also extend my heartfelt sympathy to those still suffering even now from the aftereffects of the atomic bomb. The devastation and human suffering wrought upon Hiroshima and Nagasaki 79 years ago must never be repeated,” Kishida said, without mentioning that the atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki by the US.
He went even further by referring to an alleged “nuclear threat” from Russia, which supposedly makes “the situation surrounding nuclear disarmament all the more challenging.”
As for Kishida’s claim of “Russia’s nuclear threat,” Russian President Vladimir Putin has previously stressed that there will be no winners in a nuclear war and that it should never occur, noting that Moscow consistently follows the spirit of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons.
A Russian nuclear doctrine signed by Putin in 2020 calls nuclear weapons “a means of deterrence,” emphasising that their use is an “extreme and compulsory measure.” The document states that Russia “takes all necessary efforts to reduce the nuclear threat and prevent the aggravation of interstate relations that could trigger military conflicts, including nuclear ones.”
According to the doctrine, Russia could use nuclear weapons “in response to the use of nuclear weapons and other types of weapons of mass destruction against it and/or its allies, as well as in the event of aggression against the Russian Federation with the use of conventional weapons when the very existence of the state is at risk.”
Yet, despite Russia’s nuclear arsenal obviously being a means of deterrence, Kishida used a US-perpetrated mass killing as an opportunity to warn of a Russian nuclear threat. The fact that he even failed to mention the US as the perpetrator of the senseless and unnecessary killing, when considering Japan’s defeat in World War II was imminent, of hundreds of thousands of Japanese citizens but warns of a supposed Russian nuclear threat is a demonstration of Kishida having turned his country into a vassal of Washington.
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“You shall have no other gods before me.”—The Ten Commandments
“Christians, get out and vote, just this time. You won’t have to do it anymore. Four more years, you know what, it will be fixed, it will be fine, you won’t have to vote anymore.”—Donald Trump
Politics has become our national religion.
While those on the Left have feared a religious coup by evangelical Christians on the Right, the danger has come from an altogether different direction: our constitutional republic has given way to a theocracy structured around the worship of a political savior.
For all intents and purposes, politics has become America’s God.
Pay close attention to the political conventions for presidential candidates, and it becomes immediately evident that Americans have allowed themselves to be brainwashed into worshipping a political idol manufactured by the Deep State.
In a carefully choreographed scheme to strip the American citizenry of our power and our rights, “we the people” have become victims of the Deep State’s confidence game.
Every confidence game has six essential stages:
1) the foundation to lay the groundwork for the illusion;
2) the approach whereby the victim is contacted;
3) the build-up to make the victim feel like they’ve got a vested interest in the outcome;
4) the corroboration (aided by third-party conspirators) to legitimize that the scammers are, in fact, on the up-and-up;
5) the pay-off, in which the victim gets to experience some small early “wins”; and
6) the “hurrah”— a sudden manufactured crisis or change of events that creates a sense of urgency.
In this particular con game, every candidate dangled before us as some form of political savior—including Donald Trump and Kamala Harris—is part of a long-running, elaborate scam intended to persuade us that, despite all appearances to the contrary, we live in a constitutional republic.
In this way, the voters are the dupes, the candidates are the shills, and as usual, it’s the Deep State rigging the outcome.
Terrorist attacks, pandemics, economic uncertainty, national security threats, civil unrest: these are all manipulated crises that add to the sense of urgency and help us feel invested in the outcome of the various elections, but it doesn’t change much in the long term.
No matter who wins this election, we’ll all still be prisoners of the Deep State.
Indeed, the history of the United States is a testament to the old adage that liberty decreases as government (and government bureaucracy) grows. To put it another way, as government expands, liberty contracts.
When it comes to the power players that call the shots, there is no end to their voracious appetite for more: more money, more power, more control. Thus, since 9/11, the government’s answer to every problem has been more government and less freedom.
Yet despite what some may think, the Constitution is no magical incantation against government wrongdoing. Indeed, it’s only as effective as those who abide by it.
However, without courts willing to uphold the Constitution’s provisions when government officials disregard it and a citizenry knowledgeable enough to be outraged when those provisions are undermined, the Constitution provides little to no protection against SWAT team raids, domestic surveillance, police shootings of unarmed citizens, indefinite detentions, and the like.
Unfortunately, the courts and the police have meshed in their thinking to such an extent that anything goes when it’s done in the name of national security, crime fighting and terrorism.
Consequently, America no longer operates under a system of justice characterized by due process, an assumption of innocence, probable cause and clear prohibitions on government overreach and police abuse. Instead, our courts of justice have been transformed into courts of order, advocating for the government’s interests, rather than championing the rights of the citizenry, as enshrined in the Constitution.
The rule of law, the U.S. Constitution, once the map by which we navigated sometimes hostile government terrain, has been unceremoniously booted out of the runaway car that is the U.S. government by the Deep State.
What we are dealing with is a rogue government whose policies are dictated more by greed than need. Making matters worse, “we the people” have become so gullible, so easily distracted, and so out-of-touch that we have ignored the warning signs all around us in favor of political expediency in the form of electoral saviors.
Yet it’s not just Americans who have given themselves over to political gods, however.
Evangelical Christians, seduced by electoral promises of power and religious domination, have become yet another tool in the politician’s toolbox.
For instance, repeatedly conned into believing that Republican candidates from George W. Bush to Donald Trump will save the church, evangelical Christians have turned the ballot box into a referendum on morality. Yet in doing so, they have shown themselves to be as willing to support totalitarian tactics as those on the Left.
This was exactly what theologian Francis Schaeffer warned against: “We must not confuse the Kingdom of God with our country. To say it another way, ‘We should not wrap Christianity in our national flag.’”
Equating religion and politics, and allowing the ends to justify the means, only empowers tyrants and lays the groundwork for totalitarianism.
This way lies madness and the certain loss of our freedoms.
If you must vote, vote, but don’t make the mistake of consecrating the ballot box.
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Some countries are taking up the promotion of natural farming crops which is very welcome. However a big problem and constraint arises when they say at the same time that they will spread GM crops, forgetting that natural farming cannot co-exist with GM crops. Apart from the high risk of contamination, there is the wider reality that GM crops involve very high environment, safety and health risks.
We should look carefully at what the most senior scientists known also for their commitment to the public interest have been saying. Surely the opinion of such scientists should get preference over those who have been working with multinational corporations known to be very exploitative towards farmers and known also for their attempts of trying to dominate the farm and food systems of developing countries.If according to reviews by very reputed scientists it can be shown that GM crops have been a disaster, then this view should get adequate importance.
Here we may note that GM crops and the herbicides accompanying them have been in court cases in some countries generally courts have been sympathetic to the victims of these crops and the agro-chemicals accompanying them. A case which attracted worldwide attention relates to the award of huge compensation to Johnson, a school groundskeeper, by a California jury on account of his health being damaged severely by a herbicide glyphosate which this groundskeeper had to use regularly, resulting in very painful and life-threatening blood-cell cancer. There was widespread sympathy for this victim and Edward Kennedy, nephew of former President John Kennedy, (he is now a Presidential candidate in the USA) was among the team of lawyers who argued this case.
For people involved in food safety issues this case had an additional significance. The herbicide in question is produced most prominently by a multinational company which is also in the forefront of the spread of GM crops. It has been involved in providing packages in which the company’s GM seeds are closely tied to the marketing of the disputed herbicide whose serious health hazards had been the subject of much debate earlier also. In the course of the hearings of this case, however, it became increasingly clear that the so-called scientific evidence of safety of its products by which the giant multinational company had been swearing had many holes in it and at times its own findings were being passed off as the opinion of reputed scientists.
All the time some of the most eminent scientists have been warning against GM crops. The most eminent scientist of India on this subject Dr. Pushpa M. Bhargava was in the forefront of voicing these warnings. He was the founder of the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology and in addition he was also the Vice Chairperson of the National Knowledge Commission. Many people’s science movements looked upon him as their mentor. He had been appointed by the Supreme Court of India as an observer in the Genetic Engineering Appraisal Committee as he was widely perceived to be not only a very accomplished expert on this issue and that too of the highest integrity but in addition he was also seen on the basis of his past record as a very strong and persistent defender of public interest.
Therefore it is very useful and interesting to see what this very senior scientist with a comprehensive understanding of this issue had to say about GM crops. First of all he made a strong and clear effort to break the myth which had been created by relentless manipulation by the very powerful forces trying to spread GM crops In India. According to this myth most scientific research supports GM crops. While demolishing this myth Dr. Bhargava wrote,
“ There are over 500 research publications by scientists of indisputable integrity , who have no conflict of interest, that establish harmful effects of GM crops on human, animal and plant health, and on the environment and biodiversity. For example, a recent paper by Indian scientists showed that the Bt gene in both cotton and brinjal leads to inhibition of growth and development of the plant. On the other hand, virtually every paper supporting GM crops is by scientists who have a declared conflict of interest or whose credibility and integrity can be doubted.”
In another review of recent trends titled ‘Food Without Choice’ (published in the Tribune ) Prof. Pushpa M. Bhargava, who was an internationally acclaimed authority on this subject, drew pointed attention to the “attempt by a small but powerful minority to propagate genetically modifiedcrops to serve their interests and those of multinational corporations(read the US), the bureaucracy, the political setup and a few unprincipled and unethical scientists and technologists who can be used as tools.” Further he warned,
“The ultimate goal of this attempt in India of which the leader is Monsanto, is to obtain control over Indian agriculture and thus food production. With 60 per cent of our population engaged in agriculture and living in villages, this would essentially mean not only a control over our food security but also over our farmer security, agricultural security and security of the rural sector.”
The strong stand of Dr. Bhargava against GM crops is supported by other eminent scientists in various parts of world. A group of eminent scientists organized under the Independent Science Panel have stated in very clear terms,
“GM crops have failed to deliver the promised benefits and are posing escalating problems on the farm. Transgenic contamination is now widely acknowledged to be unavoidable, and hence there can be no co-existence of GM and non-GM agriculture. Most important of all, GM crops have not been proven safe. On the contrary, sufficient evidence has emerged to raise serious safety concerns, that if ignored could result in irreversible damage to health and the environment. GM crops should be firmly rejected now.”
The Independent Science Panel (ISP) is a panel of scientists from many disciplines and countries, committed to the promotion of science for the public good. In a document titled ‘The case for a GMO-free Sustainable World’ the ISP has stated further,
“By far the most insidious dangers of genetic engineering are inherent to the process itself, which greatly enhances the scope and probability of horizontal gene transfer and recombination, the main route to creating viruses and bacteria that cause disease epidemics. This was highlighted, in 2001, by the ‘accidental’ creation of a killer mouse virus in the course of an apparently innocent genetic engineering experiment. Newer techniques, such as DNA shuffling, are allowing geneticists to create in a matter of minutes in the laboratory millions of recombinant viruses that have never existed in billions of years of evolution. Disease-causing viruses and bacteria and their genetic material are the predominant materials and tools for genetic engineering, as much as for the intentional creation of bio-weapons.”
Several scientists involved in studying the implications and impacts of genetic engineering got together at the International Conference on ‘Redefining of Life Sciences’ organized at Penang, Malaysia, by the Third World Network. They issued a statement (the Penang Statement, or PS) which questioned the scientific basis of genetic engineering. This statement said:
“The new biotechnology based upon genetic engineering makes the assumption that each specific feature of an organism is encoded in one or a few specific, stable genes, so that the transfer of these genes results in the transfer of a discrete feature. This extreme form of genetic reductionism has already been rejected by the majority of biologists and many other members of the intellectual community because it fails to take into account the complex interactions between genes and their cellular, extracellular and external environments that are involved in the development of all traits.
“It has thus been impossible to predict the consequences of transferring a gene from one type of organism to another in a significant number of cases. The limited ability to transfer identifiable molecular characteristics between organisms through genetic engineering does not constitute the demonstration of any comprehensive or reliable system for predicting all the significant effects of transposing genes.”
Hence it is clear that to promote GM crops as a means of increasing crop productivity has no basis in scientific reality and is merely a manipulation tactic of the powerful GM lobby which uses highly selective data to somehow promote its case in the wake of ever-increasing evidence against GM crops. The powerful GM lobby uses many kinds of front-men but behind the scenes it is essentially controlled by the most powerful, resourceful and biggest multinational companies in the food, farming, agro-chemical and related sectors.
One factor that has not received adequate attention is that due to the threat of contamination, it is difficult for normal crops and crops of natural farming and organic crops to remain free from the impact of GM crops once these have been released. As worldwide concern for food safety grows, it is likely that there will be increasing demand for organically grown crops and crops which are not contaminated by GM crops. Therefore we will be surrendering premium world markets if we allow our crops to be contaminated.Star Link (corn engineered to contain a Bt toxin pesticide) was planted on less than 0.5% of US corn acereage, but its recall cost hundreds of millions of dollars, and even then the recall was not entirely successful.
Several eminent scientists representing the Independent Science Panel have also warned against the serious threat of contamination by GM crops,
“Extensive transgenic contamination has occurred in maize landraces growing in remote regions in Mexico despite an official moratorium that has been in place since 1998. High levels of contamination have since been found in Canada. In a test of 33 samples of certified canola (oilseed rape) seed stocks, 32 were found contaminated. New research shows that transgenic pollen, wind-blown and deposited elsewhere, or fallen directly to the ground, is a major source of transgenic contamination. Contamination is generally acknowledged to be unavoidable, hence there can be no co-existence of transgenic and non-transgenic crops.”
“Crops engineered with ‘suicide’ genes for male sterility have been promoted as a means of ‘containing’, i.e., preventing, the spread of transgenes. In reality, the hybrid crops sold to farmers spread both male sterile suicide genes as well herbicide tolerance genes via pollen.”
It is due to the serious threat of contamination that even trials of GM crops are considered unacceptably risky.
As prominent environmentalist Sailendra Nath Ghosh has written,
“According to independent geneticists, the isolation distance needed to be both in time and space. The land on which the GM crop is to be grown should not sow a crop in the previous or the succeeding year. Cross-pollinating crops, unlike the self-pollinating ones, require isolation distance of three to four kms. The implementation of these requirements is impossible under Indian conditions. Farmers would not keep their lands fallow. Crops in adjoining fields are almost always planted up to the boundaries.”
Several of these threats were examined at an international conference of scientists involved in studying the implication and impacts of genetic engineering. This conference on ‘Redefining the Life Sciences’ was organised at Penang, Malaysia, by the Third World Network. These scientists and experts issued a statement called the Penang Statement (PS).
This statement listed a wide range of potential adverse effects of genetic engineering. Of particular concern is the difficulty or impossibility of recalling GEOs which have been released into the environment, or which have escaped from containment and later found to have adverse effects.
The potential ecological risks of applying genetic engineering to agriculture include the possibility that some transgenic crops could become noxious weeds, and others could become a conduit through which new genes may move to wild plants which themselves could then become weeds. The new weeds could adversely affect farm crops as well as wild ecosystems. Similarly, genetically engineered fish, shellfish and insects could become pests under certain conditions.
Plants are presently being engineered to contain parts of a virus in order to become virus-resistant. Some scientists have raised the possibility that widespread use of transgenic virus-resistant plants in agriculture may lead to new strains of viruses or allow a virus to infect a new host. There are concerns that the creation of new viral strains and the broadening of the virus’s host may increase the risks of new viral diseases that adversely affect crops and other plants. Mechanisms have been described whereby genetically engineered plants could plausibly give rise to new plant diseases.
In addition this statement warns that the rapid spread of transgenic crops poses a threat to traditional crop varieties and wild plants that are the major sources of crop genetic diversity.
Some traits of organisms may take decades or even longer to manifest themselves. An organism declared ‘safe’ in the short term could eventually prove to be dangerous.
Another ecological risk is the possibility that field or forestry plants engineered to express toxic substances like pesticides and pharmaceutical drugs may poison certain non-target organisms. Transgenes for insecticidal or fungicidal compounds that are introduced into crops to inhibit pests may unintentionally kill non-target and beneficial insects and fungi. Transgenic crops used to manufacture drugs or industrial oils and chemicals could potentially harm animals, insects and soil microorganisms.
The possible chemical contamination of surface-water and ground-water by microorganisms or plants with unusual or accelerated metabolic processes is a special concern because of the crucial importance of water for all life. It may be impossible to recall and difficult to control harmful GEOs, especially those that may contaminate ground-water.
This statement adds that developing countries in particular face special risks,
“Third World countries face even greater environmental risks than countries of the North because, in contrast, they have many wild relatives of many crops and thus there are more opportunities for various kinds of rogue species to be created.”
Moreover, most Third World countries currently have less scientific expertise and legal or regulatory capacity to monitor, assess and control activities involving genetically engineered organisms, and are thus even more vulnerable to adverse impacts.
Given the high hazards, risks and uncertainties associated with GM crops, these can never be sustainable. Markets and consumers of several countries simply do not accept GM crops.
In a letter written to the Prime Minister of India in 2009 as many as 17 distinguished scientists from the USA, Canada, Europe and New Zealand have pointed out that the claims relating to higher yield and protection of environment made for GM crops are absolutely false. Due to various problems of GM crops, their spread has been highly limited. This letter says,
“More than 95 percent of all GM crops are engineered to either synthesise an insecticide (Bt toxin) or to tolerate a broad spectrum herbicide (e.g. Roundup, Liberty) or both.
“To date there are only four major commercialised GM crops (soya, maize/corn, cotton, canola/oilseed rape) most of which (soya, corn, canola) are used primarily as animal feed. All were commercialised in the late 90s. Since then, no other commercially viable GM crop application has made it to market, especially due to farmers not accepting other GM crops (such as wheat, potatoes, and rice) for negative economic reasons (lack of buyers, loss of export markets).
“GM crops have not been widely accepted around the world. 95 percent of all GM food crops are grown in only five countries: the US, Canada, Australia, Argentina, and Brazil. If you include fibre crops (cotton), India and China would be included. Only one GM crop is approved for cultivation within the European Union, MON810 corn, which has been banned by several member states invoking documented health and especially environmental risks.
“…The basic problem is that GM as employed in agriculture is conceptually flawed, crude, imprecise and poorly controlled technology, that is incapable of generating plants that contain the required multiple, co-ordinately regulated genes that work in an integrated way to respond to environmental challenges.
“…GM has not increased yield potential. Yields from GM crops to date have been no better and in the case of GM soya have been consistently lower. A 2009 report reviewing more than 20 academic studies clearly shows that the cultivation of GM herbicide-tolerant soybeans has not increased yields. Insect-resistant corn, meanwhile, has at best only improved yields marginally. This report found that increase in yields for both crops over the last 13 years was due to traditional breeding or improvements in agricultural practices.
“…GM crops have led to vast increases in pesticide use, not decreases and therefore reduction of agricultural pollution cannot be claimed
“…Climate change brings sudden, extreme, and unpredictable changes in weather, which requires that a cropping system be flexible, resilient and as genetically diverse as possible. GM technology offers just the opposite.
“…Stability of productivity and production is much lower with many of the GM crops commercialised today. Herbicide tolerant GM soya is far more sensitive to heat or drought stress than conventional soya.
“…GM crops are designed to be used in conjunction with synthetic pesticides and fertilisers, which are manufactured from oil and natural gas.
“GM crops do not reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
“Recent data from the US department of agriculture has shown a vast increase in herbicide use since the introduction of GM crops tolerant to the application of these agrochemicals.
“Therefore, the introduction of GM crops has exacerbated rather than reduced agriculture’s carbon footprint and is clearly unsustainable.
“Alternative proven technologies that can reduce the amount of fossil fuel used in farming already exist. This includes methods for reducing fertiliser applications, selecting farm machinery appropriate for each task, managing soil for conservation, limiting irrigation and (using) agro-ecological farming techniques.”
All over the world the controversy over GM crops, also called genetically modified organisms (GMOs) is heating up as more and more evidence becomes available on their extremely serious hazards and threats. What needs to be emphasised is that these warnings have the support of some of the world’s most eminent and well-qualified independent scientists and experts in the field.
As eminent scientists from several countries wrote in a letter to the Prime Minister of India in 2009,
“GM transformation can produce novel biochemical processes that are unpredictable and for which there is no natural history to assume are safe.
“The GM transformation process is highly mutagenic leading to disruptions to host plant genetic structure and function, which in turn leads to disturbances in the biochemistry of the plant. This can lead to novel toxin and allergen production as well as reduced/altered nutritional quality.
“It is not a question of if there are disturbances to gene function and biochemistry but to what degree they will be present within any given GM plant. For example, the levels of more than 40 proteins are altered significantly in the commercialised GM MON810 corn compared to equivalent non-GM corn, which included production of a new allergenic protein.
“Numerous animal feeding studies demonstrate negative health impacts of GM feed on kidney, liver, gut, blood cells, blood biochemistry and the immune system.
“Of greatest concern is that studies show negative health effects with GM crops that have already been approved and which have been grown commercially for 10-13 years. This highlights the inadequacy of the original criteria and set of data on the basis of which marketing approval was and is still being granted.”
In the more specific context of Bt brinjal this letter says,
“Bt toxin is a proven potent immunogen raising justifiable concerns that it can give rise to allergic reactions.
“Animals fed diets containing Bt corn have shown signs of direct toxicity.
“Independent re-evaluation of Monsanto’s own research on their Bt corn crops shows negative health effects even in short-term (90-day) animal feeding studies.
“The Mahyco-Monsanto dossier of the raw experimental data of animal feeding studies with Bt brinjal shows highly statistically significant negative signs of toxicity on the functioning of multiple organ systems such as liver, kidney, blood and pancreas in all animals tested (especially rats, rabbits and goats). It is very important to note that these adverse effects were observed after only at most, a 90-day feeding time, which raises serious concerns about the safety of consuming this product over an entire lifetime. Long-term (at least 2-year) animal feeding studies were not done and are stated as not required by the apex regulator, contrary to the science, which requires these studies to detect chronic slow-onset toxicity and cancer.
“There is therefore, no scientific justification for the safety claim of Bt brinjal by India’s regulators, which are based on an uncritical acceptance of the interpretation of the data submitted by Mahyco-Monsanto. This has been heavily criticised by eminent scientists of international standing.”
In 2003 the Independent Science Panel, which consists of eminent scientists from many countries covering a wide range of relevant disciplines reviewed the evidence on the hazards of GMOs. This review concluded that many GM crops contain gene products known to be harmful. For example, the Bt proteins that kill pests include potent immunogens and allergens. Food crops are increasingly being engineered to produce pharmaceuticals, drugs and vaccines in the open environment, exposing people to the danger of inappropriate medication and their harmful side effects.GM varieties are unstable, with the potential to create new viruses and bacteria that cause diseases, and to disrupt gene function in animal and human cells.
This report also said that there have been very few credible studies on GM food safety. Nevertheless, the available findings already give cause for concern. In the still only systematic investigation on GM food ever carried out in the world, ‘growth factor-like’ effects were found in the stomach and small intestine of young rats that were not fully accounted for by the transgene product, and were hence attributable to the transgenic process or the transgenic construct, and may hence be general to all GM food. There have been at least two other, more limited, studies that also raised serious safety concerns.
“There is already experimental evidence that transgenic DNA from plants has been taken up by bacteria in the soil and in the gut of human volunteers. Antibiotic resistance marker genes can spread from transgenic food to pathogenic bacteria, making infections very difficult to treat.
Transgenic DNA is known to survive digestion in the gut and to jump into the genome of mammalian cells, raising the possibility for triggering cancer.The possibility cannot be excluded that feeding GM products such as maize to animals also carries risks, not just for the animals but also for human beings consuming the animal products.
Evidence suggests that transgenic constructs with the CaMV 35S promoter might be especially unstable and prone to horizontal gene transfer and recombination, with all the attendant hazards: gene mutations due to random insertion, cancer, reactivation of dormant viruses and generation of new viruses. This promoter is present in most GM crops being grown commercially today.”
A four-part series of experiments conducted over 3 years by the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds and the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology, Lancaster (United Kingdom)’ (see The Independent dated March 22, 2005 reporting the findings of this study) concluded that GM crops could be more harmful to many groups of wild life than their conventional equivalents. According to these studies, Bt proteins, incorporated into a significant part of all GM crops, have been found to be harmful to many non-target insects, worms and amphibians.
The Penang Statement (PS) on GM crops stated:
“Some GEOs (Genetically Engineered Organisms) have been made with virus or transposon vectors that have been artificially enhanced to become less species-specific. Since viruses and transposons can cause or induce mutations, there is the concern that enhanced vectors could be carcinogenic to humans, domestic animals and wild animals.
“Persons with allergies may have legitimate concerns that with genetic engineering, once-familiar foods may be made allergenic. Furthermore, they will not be able to protect themselves if the foods are not labelled to state that they have been produced from genetically engineered organisms. Allergenic effects could be carried with the transgene or be stimulated by imbalances in the chemistry of the host plant or organism.
“Another problem is that field workers or neighbours may develop allergies to insecticidal transgenic crops. For example, a spider venom expressed in sugarcane might block a metabolic pathway only in insects and not in humans, but humans can nevertheless develop serious allergies to some venoms.
“With genetic engineering, familiar foods could become dangerous or even toxic. Even if the transgene itself is not dangerous or toxic, it could upset complex biochemical network and create new bioactive compounds or change the concentrations of those normally present. In addition, the properties in proteins may change in a new chemical environment because they may fold in new ways.”
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Bharat Dogra is Honorary Convener, Campaign to Save Earth Now. His recent books include India’s Quest for Sustainable Farming and Healthy Food, Protecting Earth for Children, Man over Machine (Gandhian Ideas for Our Times) and When the Two Streams Met (Freedom movement of India). He is a regular contributor to Global Research.
It was 15 years ago: Felicity Arbuthnotrecalls the massacre of Palestinian children during the December 2008-January 2009 invasion of Gaza.
It did not start in 2023.
The killing of children by Israel has been persistent
Veteran War Correspondent Felicity Arbuthnot in solidarity with the Children of Palestine describes the underlying and evolving criminality as well as the Anglo-American complicity.
***
“Light the fire so I can see my tears, On the night of the massacre …” (Samih al-Qasim, b: 1939.)
It was that “pinpoint accuracy”, “surgical strike” stuff again, there were “unavoidable tragic errors”, “mistakes”, “scrupulous efforts made to avoid” etc., blah. And as Britain’s Colonel Richard Kemp declared of the fourteen hundred dead of the Christmas and New year onslaught on Gaza in 2008-2009: “Mistakes are not war crimes.” (i)
Colonel Kemp, with impeccable ties to British Intelligence Services, spoke to the BBC from Jerusalem in similar sanguine vein on 21st November(ii) of the then latest twenty four hour bombardment of the tiny, walled in Gaza Strip, where over half the population are children. But Colonel Kemp has seen a fair amount of carnage in his time, from Belfast to the Balkans, Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere. Seemingly after a while the dead and dismembered are just part of the day job.
The eight day blitz killed one hundred and sixty two Palestinians in what were merciless attacks on families with no where to hide. Nine hundred and ninety nine were injured. Eight hundred and sixty five houses are damaged or destroyed.
Six health centres are damaged, thirty schools, two universities, fifteen NGO offices, twenty seven mosques, fourteen media offices, eleven industrial plants, eighty one commercial stores and a UNRWA food distribution Centre.
In addition seven Ministry offices, fourteen police or security stations, five banks, and two youth clubs. The sports complex where the Palestinians athletes and paralympians trained for the 2012 London Olympics is reduced to rubble, as is the beautiful and most necessary Gaza Interior Ministry.
On Universal Children’s Day, 20th November, an air strike destroyed the Oxfam-supported Al Bajan kindergarten school and damaged the Al Housna kindergarten. (iii) Oxfam’s Sara Almer commented that more than one hundred and fifty children attended these kindergartens. “The children are safe, but the places where they learned and played are now in ruins.” This in an area: “where they already suffer a high level of trauma …”
The Oxfam project was as a result of the devastation caused by “Operation Cast Lead” between 27th December 2008-17th January 2009, when they also repaired the now re-fractured water and sanitation facilities.
There is a shortage of two hundred and thirty schools in Gaza, the Agency points out – and a ban on importing construction materials, which means the further thirty two damaged, the two universities and all else may well stay that way.
Ironically, on the day of the nurseries’ destruction, the UN Secretary General announced, that marking Universal Children’s Day, the launch of a major UN initiative: “Education First.” The day commemorates the adoption of the UN Declaration of the Rights of the Child of 1959 and the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child in 1989. The 1989 Convention entered in to force on September 2nd 1990, under a month after the UN embargo on Iraq, with even baby milk formula importation denied.
“The child … needs special safeguards and care, including appropriate legal protection before as well as after birth” is included in the preamble to a fine document. (iv)
Four year old twins, Suhaib and Muhammed Hijazi will never learn of the “protection” they are entitled to by the United Nations. They were killed when their home was bombed as the dawn of Universal Children’s Day approached. Their parents, Fouad and Amna died in hospital.
Saraya, eighteen months, won’t grow to read the fine words either, she died of a heart attack, literally frightened to death by the bombardment.
As the lights went off in Gaza’s hospitals, and their generator fuel hovered on empty, Gilad Sharon – youngest son of eighty four year old former Israeli Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon, who has benefited from Israel’s fine health services and been on life support systems since 2006 – stated: “We need to flatten entire neighbourhoods in Gaza. Flatten all of Gaza. The Americans didn’t stop with Hiroshima – the Japanese weren’t surrendering fast enough, so they hit Nagasaki too.”
Israel’s Interior Minister Eli Yishai stated that the goal of the attacks were to: “ … send Gaza back to the Middle Ages.” Palestine has no army, navy, air force, no heavy weaponry. Israel is an undeclared nuclear power, regarded as having the fourth strongest military on earth.
Gaza was, of course being bombed by American supplied F-16s and a variety of American weaponry. But as Gaza grieved, America had parades across the land, ate turkey, prayed over their festive dinners on Thanksgiving Day, 22nd November.
Reality would have had them burning, city to city, The UN Declaration and Convention on the Rights of the Child, The UN Declaration on Human Rights, The Geneva Convention, The Nuremberg Principles and making a pyre of all the fine, meaningless words which do not end or mask international lawlessness and inhumanity. A bonfire which might light the lie of the whole murderous hypocrisy of self proclaimed “democratic” nation states.
Notes
i. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Kemp ii. http://news.bbc.co.uk/today/hi/today/newsid_9771000/9771507.stm iii. http://www.uruknet.de/?p=m92857&hd=&size=1&l=e iv. http://un.by/en/hr/doc/child/
Comments Off on History of Israeli War Crimes, “The Killing of Children has been Persistent”: “Surgical Strikes” against Palestinian Children in 2008-2009. Felicity Arbuthnot
Timely historical analysis: This article was first published in June 2019. Reposted for the 79th anniversary of America’s bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
The extent of devastation inflicted upon Japan by the American military during World War II is not broadly known, even today. In reprisal for the attack over Pearl Harbor, which killed almost 2,500 Americans, US aircraft first began unloading bombs on Japan during the afternoon of 18 April 1942 – attacking the capital Tokyo, and also five other major cities, Yokohama, Osaka, Nagoya, Kobe and Yokosuka.
Participating in this opening incursion over Japanese territory, known as the “Doolittle Raid”, were a modest 16 US B-25 medium bombers which killed about 50 Japanese, while meting out minor overall damage. Yet the air strikes represented an embarrassment for Tokyo’s leaders, and they further dealt a sharp psychological blow on the Japanese mindset. To rub salt into wounds, not one of America’s B-25 aircraft was shot down. It was a sign of things to come.
As months elapsed into years, the destruction increased many times over. By 15 June 1945, 66 Japanese cities had been annihilated by the US Army Air Force, through firebombing attacks primarily unleashed by the new B-29 four-engine heavy bombers.
The number of Japanese metropolitan areas destroyed here was the exact figure that the Pentagon compiled when finalizing plans, in mid-September 1945, to eviscerate the Soviet Union. Indeed, 66 Soviet cities were earmarked to be wiped out – with 204 atomic bombs – less than two weeks after Japanese representatives signed surrender terms on 2 September 1945, finally closing out World War II.
Regarding atomic attack proposals against the Japanese Empire, General George Marshall, the US Army Chief of Staff, revealed in 1954 that,
“In the original plans for the invasion of Japan, we wanted nine atomic bombs for three attacks”.
Just prior to Hiroshima the Pentagon had less than half a dozen A-bombs, however.
Photograph of a mock-up of the Little Boy nuclear weapon dropped on Hiroshima, Japan, in August 1945. This was the first photograph of the Little Boy bomb casing to ever be released by the U.S. government (it was declassified in 1960). (Source: Public Domain)
The world’s first nuclear attack was unleashed at 8.15am local time in Hiroshima, on 6 August 1945, as a 15 kiloton bomb hurtled through the air when released from a B-29 aircraft. After falling for 44 seconds, the “Little Boy” atomic weapon detonated directly over Shima Hospital in Hiroshima’s city centre, instantly turning into ashes all of its doctors, nurses and patients. In the surrounding landscape, dozens of further hospitals, schools and historical buildings were razed to the ground.
Tens of thousands were killed immediately as ground temperatures momentarily soared from between 3,000 to 4,000 degrees Celsius. Of those people situated within two kilometres of the bomb detonation point, 112,000 would be dead within a year (10 August 1946).
Further thousands were also killed from radiation poisoning and severe burns, among those present in the hundreds of metres beyond the two kilometre radius mark. The majority of the dead and dying were civilians, men too old or sick to serve in the armed forces, along with large numbers of women and children.
Hiroshima’s vital arms and manufacturing complexes, scattered along the city’s periphery, were completely undamaged. These plants accounted for 74% of her total industrial output. Unscathed too was Hiroshima’s crucial port and military embarkation point on the Ota Delta. Almost 95% of Hiroshima’s factory workers were unhurt following the explosion.
On hearing of the atomic blast a few hours afterwards, president Harry Truman heralded it as “the greatest thing in history” and “an overwhelming success”.
Three days later, 9 August, Nagasaki was attacked at 11.02am local time with a more sophisticated 21 kiloton bomb – which was released over the city’s educational, cultural and religious heartland. As with Hiroshima, the Nagasaki bombing left unharmed most of the city’s war-making industries.
A mockup of the Fat Man nuclear device. (Source: Public Domain)
This “Fat Man” bomb killed further tens of thousands; including many hundreds of schoolchildren, along with destroying the city’s main hospitals, cathedrals, temples and schools. Medical facilities in both Hiroshima and Nagasaki were decimated, adding significantly to the death tolls.
Echoing Washington’s support for atomic assaults were the Western media, almost without exception. Of 595 newspaper editorials written regarding the nuclear explosions from early August until late December 1945, less than 2% opposed the attacks which would kill more than 200,000 people.
The press also firmly supported the firestorming of both German and Japanese cities, in actuality they had “demanded more bombing of civilian targets”, even criticizing air strikes over military and industrial zones. For example, New York’s Time magazine praised the annihilation of Tokyo, which left around 100,000 dead, as “a dream come true… properly kindled, Japanese cities will burn like autumn leaves”.
Elsewhere, although Japan’s hard-line militarists proposed fighting to the last man, their political leaders were compelled to announce surrender on 15 August 1945, when threatened with further atomic attacks. General Leslie Groves, directing America’s A-bomb project, informed General Marshall on 10 August 1945 that another Nagasaki-type plutonium weapon would be “on the target” and available for use “after 24 August 1945”.
The USSR’s declaration of war on Japan during the evening of 8 August 1945 also influenced Tokyo’s capitulation; with the Red Army, in the following days, cutting through Japan’s elite armies across Manchuria like a hot knife through butter. Another factor was the American guarantee, relayed on 11 August 1945, that Emperor Hirohito – a God-like entity in Japan – could continue in his role following the surrender, though he would have no real power.
Just after the first atomic attack Japan’s Chief Cabinet Secretary, Hisatsune Sakomizu, estimated that his country could hold out for another two months at most: to October 1945. Japan had long been beaten in the air, as too at sea, while her imports of crude oil, rubber and iron ore ceased to exist. Japanese forces were driven from Burma and throughout the Pacific territories.
In addition, according to high ranking figures like Admirals Chester Nimitz (Pacific Fleet Commander) and William Leahy (Truman’s Chief of Staff), the ongoing, crippling blockade of Japan by sea, coupled with conventional air attacks, would induce their surrender within weeks, making any US land invasion or atomic bombings unnecessary. The A-bombs were in reality dropped as a warning signal to the Soviet Union, America’s new and long-term enemy as highlighted by General Groves in March 1944.
Through non-nuclear bombing, the destruction of dozens of Japan’s metropolitan areas was overseen by Major General Curtis LeMay, who implemented increasingly murderous tactics. It should be remembered, however, that Japan’s army apparatus was particularly sadistic and brutal, committing atrocities predating World War II.
Yet it was Japanese civilians which bore the brunt of America’s military might. On 30 May 1945, LeMay openly boasted at a press conference that US air strikes had killed a million Japanese or more.
By the summer of 1945, over nine million of Japan’s citizens were left homeless, most fleeing to green areas. Just prior to the atomic explosions, 969 Japanese hospitals had also been destroyed by American airplanes.
Almost four years previously, Japan’s seemingly “unprovoked and dastardly attack” on the US naval base in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii – as president Franklin D. Roosevelt described it – was based on what were in fact well-grounded fears. For five months preceding Japan’s raid on 7 December 1941, Washington had been moving her B-17 heavy bombers in growing numbers to US bases in the Pacific, such as at Pearl Harbor, and also to Clark Air Base and Del Monte Airfield in the Philippines.
From mid-1941, half of America’s big bombers were shifted from the Atlantic domain towards eastern horizons, something that Japanese strategists were only too aware of.
The reasoning behind this military build up had been outlined in late 1940, by America’s famed pre-war planner and Air Force General, Claire Chennault, who outlined how the B-17s would “burn out the industrial heart of the Empire with fire-bomb attacks on the teeming bamboo ant heaps of Honshu and Kyushu”. President Roosevelt was “simply delighted” when hearing of this plan.
Notwithstanding Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor, America would have shortly entered the war regardless – and in opposition to Tokyo – as both states by 1941 were already major rivals with incompatible ambitions in the great Asian and Pacific regions. On 15 November 1941, three weeks before Pearl Harbor, General Marshall told reporters in an “off-the-record briefing” that American aircraft would “set the paper cities of Japan on fire. There won’t be any hesitation about bombing civilians”.
A year before, on 19 December 1940, Roosevelt approved $25 million in military aid to China, Japan’s traditional nemesis, including the gift of aircraft. Twenty-five million dollars in 1940 equates to nearly half a billion dollars today. On 11 March 1941, America’s president signed into law the Lend-Lease Act, a program providing further materiel to the Chinese – and also to other nations like Britain, the Soviet Union and France, all of which were far from benevolent towards Imperial Japan.
For many months, Roosevelt had placed sanctions and an embargo on Japan, such as in response to Tokyo’s September 1940 occupation of Northern French Indochina, which harmed US interests in the vicinity.
On 26 July 1941 Roosevelt froze the entirety of Japanese assets in America, a drastic policy which amounted to a declaration of economic war on Japan, over four months before Pearl Harbor. Roosevelt’s action stripped Japan of a staggering 90% of its oil imports, along with eradicating 75% of her foreign trade.
Within days, the Japanese were forced to dip into their scant oil reserves, which on their current course would be used up by January 1943, unless her armies embarked upon further invasions.
In equal enemy numbers, there were few who could live with the ferocity of the Japanese soldier, who gained notoriety for his cruelty. Tokyo’s war planners turned their hungry gaze to yet more tantalizing conquests, lining up the resource-rich states of Burma, the Philippines, Malaya, Singapore and the Dutch East Indies (Indonesia), each of which would be conquered during the first half of 1942.
As the war advanced and tables slowly turned, the Western allies’ terror bombing of civilian areas – not only ranking as war crimes – also stood as a dismal failure in its bid to bring the conflict to swift conclusion. These morally bereft strategies, of which nobody was made accountable, actually prolonged World War II. The long-held idea that blood-drenched air raids would smash the people’s morale, forcing them to revolt against their leaders, was pure fantasy.
In the summer of 1945, Japanese civilians were more interested in laying their hands upon foodstuffs, with the nation gradually starving due to America’s naval blockade. What’s more, any attempt at rebellion would promptly be eliminated by Japan’s military police, the dreaded Kenpeitai.
Western leaders failed to discern the lessons of Germany’s early 1940s Blitz of Britain, which served to strengthen the British public’s morale, not weaken it. This reality soon became clear to Wehrmacht hierarchy; but not so it seems to leaders like Winston Churchill, who was advocating the senseless obliteration of medieval cities like Dresden as late as February 1945.
Targeting women and children with bombs left the German and Japanese war machines largely unmolested. The Nazis’ armaments minister, Albert Speer, was at times left dumbfounded by Allied air tactics over Germany, which often avoided the Reich’s industrial areas.
Across 1944 Speer, much to Hitler’s delight and amazement, actually oversaw an increase in both German aircraft and panzer production, which made possible such attacks as the Ardennes Offensive of December 1944.
The realities behind air bombing escaped the attention of others like LeMay, and his English counterpart Arthur “Bomber” Harris. After it was all over, Harris admitted in his memoirs that the stratagem underlying assaults over urban locations “proved to be wholly unsound”; and that the Allied leaders should have earlier directed their pilots more frequently towards bombardment of factories, communication signals and transportation lines, which would have finished off Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan before 1945.
While LeMay was speaking about the mass deaths of Japanese, which also destroyed more than 3.5 million homes, he did not mention that in mid-1945 much of Japan’s infrastructure still lay untouched; such as the country’s crucially important coal ferry between Hokkaido and Honshu while, incredibly, the rail network remained intact through to August 1945; as too did several industrial zones which LeMay’s B-29s roamed obliviously past.
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Shane Quinn obtained an honors journalism degree. He is interested in writing primarily on foreign affairs, having been inspired by authors like Noam Chomsky. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.
Featured image: Charred remains of Japanese civilians after the firebombing of Tokyo on the night of 9–10 March 1945.
[We repost this article by Prof. Rodrigue Tremblay in commemoration of the 79th anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. First published by GR on August 8, 2010]
“We have discovered the most terrible bomb in the history of the world. It may be the fire destruction prophesied in the Euphrates Valley Era, after Noah and his fabulous Ark…. This weapon is to be used against Japan … [We] will use it so that military objectives and soldiers and sailors are the target and not women and children. Even if the Japs are savages, ruthless, merciless and fanatic, we as the leader of the world for the common welfare cannot drop that terrible bomb on the old capital or the new. … The target will be a purely military one… It seems to be the most terrible thing ever discovered, but it can be made the most useful.” (Harry S. Truman (1884-1972), 33rd U.S. President, (Diary, July 25, 1945)
“The World will note that the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima a military base. That was because we wished in this first attack to avoid, insofar as possible, the killing of civilians.” (Harry S. Truman (1884-1972), 33rd U.S. President, (radio speech to the Nation, August 9, 1945)
“.. In [July] 1945… Secretary of War [Henry L.] Stimson, visiting my headquarters in Germany, informed me that our government was preparing to drop an atomic bomb on Japan. I was one of those who felt that there were a number of cogent reasons to question the wisdom of such an act. …The Secretary, upon giving me the news of the successful bomb test in New Mexico, and of the plan for using it, asked for my reaction, apparently expecting a vigorous assent. …During his recitation of the relevant facts, I had been conscious of a feeling of depression and so I voiced to him my grave misgivings, first on the basis of my belief that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary, and secondly because I thought that our country should avoid shocking world opinion by the use of a weapon whose employment was, I thought, no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives.
It was my belief that Japan was, at that very moment, seeking some way to surrender with a minimum loss of ‘face’. The Secretary was deeply perturbed by my attitude.” (General Dwight Eisenhower, Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces in Europe and 34th U.S. President from 1952 to 1960, (Mandate For Change, p. 380)
“Mechanized civilization has just reached the ultimate stage of barbarism. In a near future, we will have to choose between mass suicide and intelligent use of scientific conquests […] This can no longer be simply a prayer; it must become an order which goes upward from the peoples to the governments, an order to make a definitive choice between hell and reason.” (Albert Camus (1913-1960), French philosopher and author, August 8, 1945)
“As American Christians, we are deeply penitent for the irresponsible use already made of the atomic bomb. We are agreed that, whatever be one’s judgment of the war in principle, the surprise bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are morally indefensible.”(The American Federal Council of Churches‘ Report on Atomic Warfare and the Christian Faith, 1946)
“It is my opinion that the use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. ” – “The lethal possibilities of atomic warfare in the future are frightening. My own feeling was that in being the first to use it, we had adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages.” (William Leahy, Chief of Staff to Presidents Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry S. Truman (“I Was There”, p. 441)
“Completely in charge in their marble homes and granite banks from which they rob the people of the world under the pretence of bringing them culture, Watch out, for … they’ll send you out to protect their gold in wars whose weapons, rapidly developed by servile scientists, will become more and more deadly until they can with a flick of the finger tear a million of you to pieces.”(Jean Paul Marat (1743-1793), Swiss-born scientist and physician and actor in the French Revolution)
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When U.S. President Harry S. Truman decided on his own to use the atom bomb, a barbarous weapon of mass destruction, against the Japanese civilian populations of the cities of Hiroshima and of Nagasaki on August 6 and on August 9, 1945, the United States sided officially on the wrong side of history. General Dwight Eisenhower, Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces in Europe and 34th U.S. President from 1952 to 1960, said it in so many words: “…the Japanese were ready to surrender and it wasn’t necessary to hit them with that awful thing.” (Newsweek, November 11, 1963). Between 90,000 and 120,000 people died in Hiroshima and between 60,000 and 80,000 died in Nagasaki, for a grand total of between 150,000 and 200,000 most cruel deaths.
It seems that military man Eisenhower was more ethical than Freemason small-town politician Harry S. Truman regarding the fateful decision.
In being the first country to use nuclear weapons against civilian populations, the United States was then in direct violation of internationally accepted principles of war with respect to the wholesale and indiscriminate destruction of populations. Thus, August 1945 is a most dangerous and ominous precedent that marked a new dismal beginning in the history of humanity, a big moral step backward.
In future generations, it most certainly will be considered that the use of the atom bomb against the Japanese civilian populations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was a historic crime against humanity that will stain the reputation of the United States for centuries to come. It can also be said that President Harry S. Truman, besides lying to the American people about the whole sordid affair (see official quotes above), has left behind him a terrible moral legacy of incalculable consequences to future generations of Americans.
Many self-serving reasons have been advanced for justifying Truman’s decision, such as the objective of saving the lives of American soldiers by shortening the war in the Pacific and avoiding a military invasion of Japan with a quick Japanese surrender. That surrender came on August 15, 1945 and it was made official on September 2 with the signing of the Japanese Instrument of Surrender, nearly one month after the bombing of the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Nazi Germany had capitulated on May 8, 1945 and World War II was already over in Europe. There was also the diplomatic fear that the Soviet Red Army could have invaded Japan, as they had done in Berlin, thus depriving the United States of a hard fought clear-cut victory against Japan.
But by the end of July 1945, according to military experts, the Japanese military apparatus had de facto been defeated. It is also true that the militarist Japanese Supreme Council for the Direction of the War was stalling with the aim of getting better capitulation terms hoping for a negotiated settlement, especially regarding the future role of their Emperor Hirohito as formal head of state.
In Europe, the allies had caused a recalcitrant Nazi Germany to accept an unconditional surrender and there were other military means to force the Japanese government to surrender. The convenient pretext of rushing a surrender carries no weight compared to the enormity of using the nuclear weapon on two civilian targets. And even if President Truman was anxious to demonstrate the power of the atom bomb and impress his Soviet friends—and possibly also assert himself as a political figure vis-à-vis previous President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who had died a few months earlier, on April 12, 1945—this could have been done while targeting remote Japanese military targets, not on targeting entire cities. It seems that there were no moral considerations in this most inhuman decision.
Since that fateful month of August 1945, humanity has embarked upon a disastrous nuclear arms race and is rushing toward oblivion with its eyes open and its mind closed.
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The book “The Code for Global Ethics, Ten Humanist Principles”, by Dr. Rodrigue Tremblay, prefaced by Dr. Paul Kurtz, has just been released by Prometheus Books.
August 7th, 2024 by Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East
Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East (CJPME) is outraged by reports that Canada’s Ambassador to Japan will be boycotting Friday’s memorial service for the US atomic bombing of Nagasaki over the fact that Israel was not invited. The City of Nagasaki had declined to invite the Israeli Ambassador, whose government is involved in the mass killing of civilians in Gaza. CJPME agrees that the presence of Israel, whose current Ministers have called for dropping a nuclear bomb on Gaza, would be completely inappropriate, and condemns Canada for this deeply offensive diplomatic statement.
“We condemn this grotesque political stunt by Canada. Boycotting the Nagasaki memorial service to protest the exclusion of Israel, a state which is actively committing genocide, is incredibly disrespectful to the civilian victims of mass killing in both Japan and Gaza,” said Michael Bueckert, Vice President of CJPME. “It is absurd that Canada is standing up for Israel’s right to attend a memorial ceremony for the victims of the United States’ nuclear bomb on Nagasaki, while its ministers casually call for dropping the same weapons on civilians in Gaza. Canada is demonstrating that its priority is not a ceasefire but defending the sensibilities and reputation of a genocidal regime,” Bueckert added.
The Associated Press reports that Canada will be joining other Western countries including France, Germany, Italy, the UK, the EU, and the US in sending a political statement to Nagasaki by refusing to send Ambassadors to the event and will only send “lower-ranking envoys.” The countries reportedly signed a joint letter complaining that Israel was being treated similarly to Russia and Belarus, who were also not invited, and urged Nagasaki to reverse its decision and invite Israel.
Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza has killed nearly 40,000 people since October 7, including over 15,000 children, with thousands more missing and presumed dead under the rubble. According to an article in the Lancet, the total number of Palestinians killed by the war through both direct and indirect means is conservatively estimated at 186,000 people. Israel’s Heritage Minister Amichai Eliyahu has proposed dropping a nuclear bomb on Gaza as an option, as have other members of the government, while other Ministers have made similar genocidal statements.
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Not long ago a couple of publishers asked about my memoirs. I told them I had no interest. Memoirs are an enormous undertaking, especially when your files haven’t been organized for the purpose.
Moreover, many of mine have been discarded in moves. When you have lived as long as I have and been involved in so many major issues, files are a voluminous collection. Moreover, I have always had a jaundiced eye toward memoirs, being unsure whether they are an exercise in egotism.
In past times I think memoirs, even if they were attempts to control the narrative, something done for us today by the CIA and woke media and universities, still made information available that otherwise would have died with the person. I find this a bit sobering as there is a great deal of information that is going to die with me.
Despite all the winnowing of my files, I still have 25 crates that if I did nothing else for one year I might get through. To organize the information, I would need at least two assistants. I have barely touched the crates, and already I have found important matters long forgotten.
In 2004 NY Democrat Senator Chuck Schumer and I opened a New Year with a jointly authored column in the New York Times. We raised the offshoring issue. American manufacturing jobs and the tech jobs of American professionals were being sent to Asia. We posed the question that if jobs offshoring was free trade, as economists claimed, was free trade any longer in America’s interest? My position was that jobs offshoring is a contradiction of free trade–more later–and Schumer was still in his idealistic period when he was concerned about the displacement of American labor by foreign labor in the production of goods and services that Americans consumed.
Our article caused a firestorm. The Brookings Institution in Washington called a conference and asked us to come and defend our position. C-Span broadcast the conference live and rebroadcast it a number of times. Schumer and I carried the day.
Delighted with the publicity, Schumer suggested a follow-up article. The NY Times was eager. We began a draft, and then it went cold. My explanation is that Wall Street, which was committed to jobs offshoring, got to Schumer and explained campaign contributions to him.
I continued on. Conservatives, free market economists, and libertarians, who are indoctrinated with free trade, but who do not comprehend the theory, called me a heretic. Nevertheless, both the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post were intrigued that the “most ardent” of the “Reagan policymakers” had taken a position against the policy that Wall Street was imposing on the country.
The Wall Street Journal assigned Timothy Aeppel to arrange a series of debates to be published in the Wall Street Journal between me and Columbia University Professor Jagdish Bhagwati. The question was: Is jobs offshoring really free trade?
Adam Smith and David Ricardo’s theory of free trade rests on the principle of comparative advantage. What this means is that a country’s capital remains employed at home and is employed in areas in which the capital is best used. If all countries do this, there are gains from trade, and all countries will be better off than if they are self-sufficient. I have wondered if the free trade theory was used as a stratagem to repeal the British Corn Laws and reduce the income and power of the landed aristocracy.
Both Smith and Ricardo made it completely clear that if a country’s capital left the country, it was pursuing absolute advantage, not comparative advantage, and free trade theory is vitiated. This is the point I made. Without comparative advantage, there is no case for free trade.
The Wall Street Journal wasn’t the only media institution interested in the facts. So was the Washington Post. The Washington Post assigned their economics editor Paul Blustein to interview me and my critics and to do a news report. Blustein interviewed me at least three times prior to writing his story. Keep in mind that Blustein had been a critic during my Treasury days with the Reagan administration. Nevertheless, after giving my critics their say, Blustein wrote:
“Still, mainstream economists can’t answer a key question that Roberts raises, which is how the U.S. economy can generate better employment opportunities to replace the white-collar jobs that are suddenly vanishing.
“Roberts recently got some support for his argument from a heavyweight academic economist, William J. Baumol . . . a past president of the American Economic Association and a book he published with Ralph E. Gomery, [a distinguished mathematician] that pokes some holes in economic orthodoxy by showing that free trade will not necessarily provide mutual gains to countries.”
Today this exchange of ideas in the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post and the honest appraisal of one’s opponents is not possible. I am banned from the Wall Street Journal, a newspaper I used to edit. I am banned from the Washington Post for which I was a contributor. I am banned from the NY Times which used to call me and ask me to write on current issues. I am banned from the newspapers of the Scripps Howard News Service. I am banned from the San Diego Union, the San Francisco Examiner, and the Los Angeles Times for which I was a regular contributor.
There is no debate. There are narratives, and the narratives are imposed. Journalism as an occupation no longer exists. Today the struggle is not to get at the heart of an issue, but to have one’s agenda prevail.
In 2013 I returned to the issue of offshoring production for the home market in my book The Failure of Laissez Faire Capitalism. In the decade since Schumer and I had published our article, the US had lost 54,000 factories. The number of factories employing 1,000 or more declined by 40%. Those employing 500-1,000 declined by 44%. Those employing 250-500 declined by 37%. Factories employing 100-250 declined by 30%. The losses are net of new start ups. The US manufacturing work force shrank by 5,000,000 employees.
In the first decade of the 21st century the population of Detroit, Michigan, declined by 25%. Gary, Indiana, lost 22% of its population. Flint, Michigan lost 18%. Cleveland, Ohio, lost 17%. St Louis, Missouri, lost 20%. Pittsburgh Pennsylvania, South Bend Indiana, and Rochester New York also lost population. These cities were once the home of American manufacturing and industrial might.
Wherever the alleged “gains of trade” might have occurred, it wasn’t in these cities.
The Democrats’ open borders policy might be replenishing these cities’ populations, but the jobs are not there to support them.
There is another reason jobs offshoring did not produce for Americans any gains from trade. When the goods and services produced abroad are brought back into the US to be marketed, they come in as imports. Thus the trade deficit widens, which means the US incurs more foreign debt. Is the growth in debt caused by jobs offshoring covered by gains from trade?
The US has not been governed in a thoughtful way for three decades. The folly will exact a large price.
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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.
“I’m a Barbie Girl, in Barbie World
Life in Plastic, It’s Fantastic
Now I’ve Got Melanoma
Anal blastoma
Going Into Coma
Life in Plastic
It’s Fantastic”
– Aqua, ‘Barbie Girl,’ Armageddon Prose Remix
It seems to me that perhaps most of us mere mortals (perhaps not in this audience, but in the general population) haven’t yet begun to appreciate the massive public health threat that ubiquitous plastic poses — in the air, in the water, in the food, in the condoms, anything and everything — the greatest single ongoing environmental catastrophe on Earth, hands down.
In Thailand, street vendors will drop watermelon or mango or whatever in a plastic bag and then put the plastic bag in another plastic bag for some reason that I could never understand. I asked one or two locals the haunting question why —but, in typical Thai fashion, never got a straight answer.
Something about convenience and keeping up appearances, as only the highly-regarded fruit vendors triple-bag everything.
“Plastics make it possible!” (Sponsored by the America Plastics Council)
Let’s not let a little cancer, a few million strokes, wrecked endocrine systems, thyroid destruction, and autoimmunity get in the way of Progress™.
“Melamine foam sponges used to clean households worldwide release trillions of microplastics each month, a new study has warned.
These sponges, known for their ability to remove even stubborn stains effortlessly, rely on their distinctive abrasive properties.
However, a new study published in the Environmental Science & Technology journal, estimates that fibres from these cleaning products release trillions of toxic microplastic particles globally each month, potentially impacting human health.
The sponges are made of a plastic polymer assembled into a soft, lightweight abrasive foam, making it ideal for making scrubby cleaning products.
But as they wear away with use, the foam breaks down into smaller pieces, releasing microplastic fibres (MPF) into sewer systems with each wash.
These toxic microplastics may be consumed by wildlife, making their way back to humans via the food chain.
They have been linked to several health complications in humans, including immune and endocrine system disruptions, as well as several types of cancers.”
“Doctors have warned of potentially life-threatening effects of plastic pollution after finding a substantially elevated risk of stroke, heart attack and early death in people whose blood vessels were contaminated with microplastics.
Researchers in Naples examined fatty plaques removed from the blood vessels of patients with arterial disease and found that more than half had deposits contaminated with tiny particles of polyethylene or polyvinyl chloride (PVC)…
Those whose plaques contained microplastics were nearly five times more likely to suffer a stroke, heart attack or death from any cause over the following 34 months, compared with those whose plaques were free from plastic contamination.”
“Several brands of condoms and lubricants contain alarming levels of toxic PFAS “forever chemicals”, including styles of Trojan and K-Y Jelly, new research finds.
The testing conducted by the Mamavation consumer advocacy blog comes just as researchers found human skin absorbs the chemicals at much higher levels than previously thought…
PFAS are a class of about 15,000 chemicals often used to make products resistant to water, stains and heat. They are called “forever chemicals” because they do not naturally break down, and are linked to cancer, liver problems, thyroid issues, birth defects, kidney disease, decreased immunity and other serious health problems.
PFAS are also considered to be reproductive toxicants and endocrine disruptors linked to low birth weight, reduced sperm counts, pregnancy-induced high blood pressure, infertility and shorter duration of breastfeeding.”
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This article was originally published on the author’s Substack, Armageddon Prose.
Ben Bartee, author of Broken English Teacher: Notes From Exile, is an independent Bangkok-based American journalist with opposable thumbs. He is a regular contributor to Global Research. Follow his stuff via Substack. Also, keep tabs via Twitter.
Numerous US nuclear war plans have been formulated from the outset, leading up to the 1956 Strategic Air Command SAC Atomic Weapons Requirements Study (declassified in December 2015) which consisted in targeting 1200 urban areas in the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe and China.
Former Secretary of the Security Council and incumbent Presidential Aide Nikolay Patrushev shared some updates about the US’ naval strategy in his interview for Rossiyskaya Gazeta last week. He said that it’s called “Sea Superiority”, which is self-explanatory, but he added that it also implies integrating the US Navy with its regional satellites’ in order to contain the Russian and Chinese Navies.
Jews are not a monolith. There are plenty of Jews who abhor the racism and violence of the Zionist faction of Jewry. Yet, many uninformed people consider Zionism to express the ethos of Jewishness.
When Banglabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rehman, the first President of Bangladesh, also called the Father of the Nation and revered by millions as such, was assassinated on August 15, 1975 as a part of the wider efforts to overthrow his popular government, there were several aspects of this murder most foul which hadshocked the world.
Pope Francis finally broke his silence and joined these voices on August 3, eight days after the episode. It seems this took some convincing, with reports that the bishop of Rome only did so after talks with… Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, of all people. This is impressive in itself and merits some analysis.
Several Hezbollah drones struck Israeli military sites near the city of Nahariya, north of Acre, on 6 August, just a few hours after several people were killed in an Israeli drone strike on southern Lebanon.
Following the latest orders from the International Court of Justice that Israel halt its military offensive in Rafah, some claimed that while the orders of the Court are of course binding, there’s “no enforcement mechanism.” The Court’s orders were of course the result of South Africa’s invoking the Genocide Convention against Israel and its repeated requests for additional orders from the ICJ.
Fidel Castro was both an incisive analyst as well a powerful voice against nuclear weapons.
In the light of recent developments in the Middle East and Eastern Europe, we bring to the attention of our readers Fidel’s powerful October 15, 2010 statement on the dangers of nuclear war,
Today, the dangers of military escalation in both the Middle East and Eastern Europe are beyond description.
“In a nuclear war the collateral damage would be the life of all humanity”
Israel is a nuclear power.
Let’s be under no illusions. The use of nuclear weapons by Israel in response to Iran’s attack is being discussed behind closed doors both in Tel Aviv and in Washington. That does not mean that it is going to be implemented.
Fidel Castro’s Message to the World against Nuclear War. Calling for World Peace
“The conventional war would be lost by the US and the nuclear war is no alternative for anyone. On the other hand, nuclear war would inevitably become global”
“I think nobody on Earth wishes the human species to disappear.
And that is the reason why I am of the opinion that what should disappear are not just nuclear weapons, but also conventional weapons. We must provide a guarantee for peace to all peoples without distinction
“In a nuclear war the collateral damage would be the life of all humanity. Let us have the courage to proclaim that all nuclear or conventional weapons, everything that is used to make war, must disappear!”
“It is about demanding that the world is not led into a nuclear catastrophe, it is to preserve life.”
This interview was recorded at Fidel Castro’s home in Havana by Cuba Debate and Global Research on October 15, 2010
TRANSCRIPT
The use of nuclear weapons in a new war would mean the end of humanity. This was candidly foreseen by scientist Albert Einstein who was able to measure their destructive capability to generate millions of degrees of heat, which would vaporize everything within a wide radius of action. This brilliant researcher had promoted the development of this weapon so that it would not become available to the genocidal Nazi regime.
Each and every government in the world has the obligation to respect the right to life of each and every nation and of the totality of all the peoples on the planet.
Today there is an imminent risk of war with the use of that kind of weapon and I don’t harbour the least doubt that an attack by the United States and Israel against the Islamic Republic of Iran would inevitably evolve towards a global nuclear conflict.
The World’s peoples have an obligation to demand of their political leaders their Right to Live. When the life of humankind, of your people and your most beloved human beings run such a risk, nobody can afford to be indifferent; not one minute can be lost in demanding respect for that right; tomorrow will be too late.
Albert Einstein himself stated unmistakably: “I do not know with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones”. We fully comprehend what he wanted to convey, and he was absolutely right, yet in the wake of a global nuclear war, there wouldn’t be anybody around to make use of those sticks and stones.
There would be “collateral damage”, as the American political and military leaders always affirm, to justify the deaths of innocent people.
In a nuclear war the “collateral damage” would be the life of all humanity.
Let us have the courage to proclaim that all nuclear or conventional weapons, everything that is used to make war, must disappear!
Fidel Castro Ruz, October 15, 2010
The Legacy of Fidel Castro Lives
Michel Chossudovsky, April 18, 2024
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From October 12 to 15, 2010, I had extensive and detailed discussions with Fidel Castro at his home in Havana, pertaining to the dangers of nuclear war, the global economic crisis and the nature of the New World Order. These meetings resulted in a wide-ranging and fruitful interview.
The first part of this interview published by Global Research and Cuba Debate focuses on the dangers of nuclear war.
The World is at a dangerous crossroads. We have reached a critical turning point in our history.
This interview with Fidel Castro provides an understanding of the nature of modern warfare: Were a military operation to be launched against the Islamic Republic of Iran, the US and its allies would be unable to win a conventional war, with the possibility that this war could evolve towards a nuclear war.
The details of ongoing war preparations in relation to Iran have been withheld from the public eye.
How to confront the diabolical and absurd proposition put forth by the US administration that using tactical nuclear weapons against Iran will “make the World a safer place”?
A central concept put forth by Fidel Castro in the interview is the ”Battle of Ideas”.
The leader of the Cuban Revolution believes that only a far-reaching “Battle of Ideas” could change the course of World history. The objective is to prevent the unthinkable, a nuclear war which threatens to destroy life on planet earth.
The corporate media is involved in acts of camouflage. The devastating impacts of a nuclear war are either trivialized or not mentioned. Against this backdrop, Fidel’s message to the World must be heard; people across the land, nationally and internationally, should understand the gravity of the present situation and act forcefully at all levels of society to reverse the tide of war.
The “Battle of Ideas” is part of a revolutionary process. Against a barrage of media disinformation, Fidel Castro’s resolve is to spread the word far and wide, to inform world public opinion, to “make the impossible possible”, to thwart a military adventure which in the real sense of the word threatens the future of humanity.
When a US sponsored nuclear war becomes an “instrument of peace”, condoned and accepted by the World’s institutions and the highest authority including the United Nations, there is no turning back: human society has indelibly been precipitated headlong onto the path of self-destruction.
Fidel’s “Battle of Ideas” must be translated into a worldwide movement. People must mobilize against this diabolical military agenda.
This war can be prevented if people pressure their governments and elected representatives, organize at the local level in towns, villages and municipalities, spread the word, inform their fellow citizens regarding the implications of a thermonuclear war, initiate debate and discussion within the armed forces.
What is required is a mass movement of people which forcefully challenges the legitimacy of war, a global people’s movement which criminalizes war.
In his October 15, 2010 message (see video below), Fidel Castro warned the World on the dangers of nuclear war:
“There would be “collateral damage”, as the American political and military leaders always affirm, to justify the deaths of innocent people. In a nuclear war the “collateral damage” would be the life of all humanity. Let us have the courage to proclaim that all nuclear or conventional weapons, everything that is used to make war, must disappear!”
The “Battle of Ideas” consists in confronting the war criminals in high office, in breaking the US-led consensus in favor of a global war, in changing the mindset of hundreds of millions of people, in abolishing nuclear weapons. In essence, the “Battle of Ideas” consists in restoring the truth and establishing the foundations of World peace.
The interview was conducted in Spanish. It was translated into English by Global Research and Cuba Debate.
The original Spanish version as well as translation into English were published by Cuba Debate and Global Research.
Michel Chossudovsky, Global Research, November 2010
Conversations on the Dangers of Nuclear War. 11-15 October 2011
Professor Michel Chossudovsky: I am very honored to have this opportunity to exchange views concerning several fundamental issues affecting human society as a whole. I think that the notion that you have raised in your recent texts regarding the threat against Homo sapiens is fundamental.
What is that threat, the risk of a nuclear war and the threat to human beings, to Homo sapiens?
Commander in Chief Fidel Castro Ruz: Since quite a long time –years I would say- but especially for some months now, I began to worry about the imminence of a dangerous and probable war that could very rapidly evolve towards a nuclear war.
Before that I had concentrated all my efforts on the analysis of the capitalist system in general and the methods that the imperial tyranny has imposed on humanity. The United States applies to the world the violation of the most fundamental rights.
During the Cold War, no one spoke about war or nuclear weapons; people talked about an apparent peace, that is, between the USSR and the United States, the famous MAD (Mutual Assured Destruction) was guaranteed. It seemed that the world was going to enjoy the delights of a peace that would last for an unlimited time.
Notice the Book by Bob Woodward entitled Obama’s Wars. Fidel had ordered a copy when it was launched, delivered to him in the UN diplomatic pouch. He had read it cover to cover when I met up with him on October 12, 2010
Michel Chossudovsky: … This notion of “mutual assured destruction” ended with the Cold War and after that the nuclear doctrine was redefined, because we never really thought about a nuclear war during the Cold War. Well, obviously, there was a danger –as even Robert McNamara said at some point in time.
But, after the Cold War, particularly after September 11 [2001], America’s nuclear doctrine started to be redefined.
Fidel Castro Ruz: You asked me when was it that we became aware of the imminent risk of a nuclear war, and that dates back to the period I talked to you about previously, barely six months ago. One of the things that called our attention the most regarding such a war danger was the sinking of the Cheonan during a military maneuver. That was the flagship of the South Korean Navy; an extremely sophisticated vessel. It was at the time when we found on Global Research the journalist’s report that offered a clear and truly coherent information about the sinking of the Cheonan, which could not have been the work of a submarine that had been manufactured by the USSR more than sixty years ago, using an outdated technology which did not require the sophisticated equipment that could be detected by the Cheonan, during a joint maneuver with the most modern US vessels.
The provocation against the Democratic Republic of Korea added up to our own earlier concerns about an aggression against Iran. We had been closely following the political process in that country. We knew perfectly well what happened there during the 1950s, when Iran nationalized the assets of the British Petroleum in that country- which at the time was called the Anglo Persian Oil Company.
In my opinion, the threats against Iran became imminent in June [2010], after the adoption of Resolution 1929 on the 9th of June, 2010, when the United Nations Security Council condemned Iran for the research it is carrying out and the production of small amounts of 20 per cent enriched uranium, and accused it of being a threat to the world. The position adopted by each and every member of the Security Council is known: 12 member States voted in favor –five of them had the right to veto; one of them abstained and 2 –Brazil and Turkey- voted against. Shortly after the Resolution was adopted –the most aggressive resolution of of them all– one US aircraft carrier, embedded in a combat unit, plus a nuclear submarine, went through the Suez Canal with the help of the Egyptian government. Naval units from Israel joined, heading for the Persian Gulf and the seas nearby Iran.
The sanctions imposed by the United States and its NATO allies against Iran was absolutely abusive and unjust. I cannot understand the reason why Russia and China did not veto the dangerous Resolution 1929 of the United Nations Security Council. In my opinion this has complicated the political situation terribly and has placed the world on the brink of war.
I remember previous Israeli attacks against the Arab nuclear research centers. They first attacked and destroyed the one in Iraq in June 1981. They did not ask for anyone’s permission, they did not talk to anybody; they just attacked them and the Iraqis had to endure the strikes.
In 2007 they repeated that same operation against a research center that was being built by Syria. There is something in that episode that I really don’t quite understand: what was not clear to me were the underlying tactics, or the reasons why Syria did not denounce the Israeli attack against that research center where, undoubtedly, they were doing something, they were working on something for which, as it is known, they were receiving some cooperation from North Korea. That was something legal; they did not commit any violation.
I am saying this here and I am being very honest: I don’t understand why this was not denounced, because, in my opinion, that would have been important. Those are two very important antecedents.
I believe there are many reasons to think that they will try to do the same against Iran: destroy its research centers or the power generation centers of that country. As is known, the power generation uranium residues are the raw material to produce plutonium.
Michel Chossudovsky: It is true that that Security Council Resolution has to some extent contributed to cancelling the program of military cooperation that Russia and China have with Iran, especially Russia cooperates with Iran in the context of the Air Defence System by supplying its S-300 System.
I remember that just after the Security Council’s decision, with the endorsement of China and Russia, the Russian minister of Foreign Affairs said: “Well, we have approved the Resolution but that is not going to invalidate our military cooperation with Iran”. That was in June. But a few months later, Moscow confirmed that military cooperation [with Iran] was going to be frozen, so now Iran is facing a very serious situation, because it needs Russian technology to maintain its security, namely its [S-300] air defence system.
But I think that all the threats against Russia and China are intent upon preventing the two countries from getting involved in the Iran issue. In other words, if there is a war with Iran the other powers, which are China and Russia, aren’t going to intervene in any way; they will be freezing their military cooperation with Iran and therefore this is a way [for the US and NATO] of extending their war in the Middle East without there being a confrontation with China and Russia and I think that this more or less is the scenario right now.
There are many types of threats directed against Russia and China. The fact that China’s borders are militarized –China’s South Sea, the Yellow Sea, the border with Afghanistan, and also the Straits of Taiwan- it is in some way a threat to dissuade China and Russia from playing the role of powers in world geopolitics, thus paving the way and even creating consensus in favour of a war with Iran which is happening under conditions where Iran’s air defence system is being weakened. [With the freeze of its military cooperation agreement with Russia] Iran is a “sitting duck” from the point of view of its ability to defend itself using its air defence system.
Fidel Castro Ruz: In my modest and serene opinion that resolution should have been vetoed. Because, in my opinion, everything has become more complicated in several ways.
Militarily, because of what you are explaining regarding, for example, the commitment that existed and the contract that had been signed to supply Iran with the [Russian] S-300, which are very efficient anti-aircraft weapons in the first place.
There are other things regarding fuel supplies, which are very important for China, because China is the country with the highest economic growth. Its growing economy generates greater demand for oil and gas. Even though there are agreements with Russia for oil and gas supplies, they are also developing wind energy and other forms of renewable energy. They have enormous coal reserves; nuclear energy will not increase much, only 5% for many years. In other words, the need for gas and oil in the Chinese economy is huge, and I cannot imagine, really, how they will be able to get all that energy, and at what price, if the country where they have important investments is destroyed by the US. But the worst risk is the very nature of that war in Iran. Iran is a Muslim country that has millions of trained combatants who are strongly motivated.
There are tens of millions of people who are under [military] orders, they are being politically educated and trained, men and women alike. There are millions of combatants trained and determined to die. These are people who will not be intimidated and who cannot be forced to changing [their behavior]. On the other hand, there are the Afghans –they are being murdered by US drones –there are the Pakistanis, the Iraqis, who have seen one to two million compatriots die as a result of the antiterrorist war invented by Bush. You cannot win a war against the Muslim world; that is sheer madness.
Michel Chossudovsky: But it’s true, their conventional forces are very large, Iran can mobilize in a single day several million troops and they are on the border with Afghanistan and Iraq, and even if there is a blitzkrieg war, the US cannot avoid a conventional war that is waged very close to its military bases in that region.
Fidel Castro Ruz: But the fact is that the US would lose that conventional war. The problem is that nobody can win a conventional war against millions of people; they would not concentrate their forces in large numbers in a single location for the Americans to kill them.
Well, I was a guerrilla fighter and I recall that I had to think seriously about how to use the forces we had and I would never have made the mistake of concentrating those forces in a single location, because the more concentrated the forces, the greater the casualties caused by weapons of mass destruction….
From left to right: Michel Chossudovsky, Randy Alonso Falcon, Fidel Castro Ruz
Michel Chossudovsky: As you mentioned previously, a matter of utmost importance: China and Russia’s decision in the Security Council, their support of Resolution 1929, is in fact harmful to them because, first, Russia cannot export weapons, thus its main source of income is now frozen. Iran was one of the main customers or buyers of Russian weapons, and that was an important source of hard currency earnings which supported Russia`s consumer goods economy thereby covering the needs of the population.
And, on the other hand China requires access to sources of energy as you mentioned. The fact that China and Russia have accepted the consensus in the UN Security Council, is tantamount to saying: “We accept that you kill our economy and, in some ways, our commercial agreements with a third country”. That’s very serious because it [the UNSC Resolution] not only does harm to Iran; is also harms those two countries, and I suppose –even though I am not a politician –that there must be tremendous divisions within the leadership, both in Russia and in China, for that to happen, for Russia to accept not to use its veto power in the Security Council.
I spoke with Russian journalists, who told me that there wasn’t exactly a consensus within the government per se; it was a guideline. But there are people in the [Russian] government with a different point of view regarding the interests of Russia and its stance in the UN Security Council. How do you see this?
Fidel Castro Ruz: How do I see the general situation? The alternative in Iran –let me put it this way –the conventional war would be lost by the US and the nuclear war is not an alternative for anyone.
On the other hand, nuclear war would inevitably become global. Thus the danger in my opinion exists with the current situation in Iran, bearing in mind the reasons you are presenting and many other facts; which brings me to the conclusion that the war would end up being a nuclear war.
Filming of Fidel’s message on October 15.2010. From left to right: Fidel Castro, TV crew, Michel Chossudovsky, Randy Alonso Falcon
Michel Chossudovsky: In other words, since the US and its allies are unable to win the conventional war, they are going to use nuclear weapons, but that too would be a war they couldn’t win, because we are going to lose everything.
Fidel Castro Ruz: Everyone would be losing that war; that would be a war that everyone would lose. What would Russia gain if a nuclear war were unleashed over there? What would China gain? What kind of war would that be? How would the world react? What effect would it have on the world economy? You explained it at the university when you spoke about the centralized defence system designed by the Pentagon. It sounds like science fiction; it doesn’t even remotely resemble the last world war. The other thing which is also very important is the attempt [by the Pentagon] to transform nuclear weapons into conventional tactical weapons.
Today, October 13th, I was reading about the same thing in a news dispatch stating that the citizens of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were drawing up strong protests about the fact that the US had just carried out subcritical nuclear tests. They’re called subcritical, which means the use of the nuclear weapon without deploying all the energy that might be achieved with the critical mass.
It reads: “Indignation in Hiroshima and Nagasaki because of a United States nuclear test.”…
“The Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki that suffered a nuclear attack at the end of WW II, deplored today the nuclear test carried out by the US on September last, called sub critical because it does not unleash chain nuclear reactions.
“The test, the first of this kind in that country since 2006, took place on September 15th somewhere in Nevada, United States. It was officially confirmed by the Department of Energy of that country, the Japan Times informed.”
What did that newspaper say?
“I deeply deplore it because I was hoping that President Barack Obama would take on the leadership in eliminating nuclear weapons”, the governor of Nagasaki, Hodo Nakamura, stated today at a press conference.
A series of news items related to that follows.
“The test has also caused several protests among the citizens of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, including several survivors of the atomic bombs attacks that devastated both cities in August of 1945.
“We cannot tolerate any action of the United States that betrays President Barack Obama’s promise of moving forward to a world without nuclear arms, said Yukio Yoshioka, the deputy director of the Council for the Victims of the Hiroshima Atomic Bomb.
“The government stated that it has no intention of protesting.” It relegates the protest to a social level and then said: “With this, the number of subcritical nuclear tests made by the United States reaches the figure of 26, since July 1997 when the first of them took place.”
Now it says:
“Washington considers that these tests do not violate the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) since they do not unleash any chain reactions, and therefore do not release any nuclear energy, and so they can be considered to be laboratory tests.”
The US says that it has to make these tests because they are necessary to maintain the “security of its nuclear arsenal”, which is the same as saying: since we have these great nuclear arsenals, we are doing this in order to ensure our security.
Michel Chossudovsky: Let us return to the issue of the threat against Iran, because you said that the US and its allies could not win a conventional war. That is true; but nuclear weapons could be used as an alternative to conventional warfare, and this evidently is a threat against humanity, as you have emphasized in your writings.
The reason for my concern is that after the Cold War the idea of nuclear weapons with a “humanitarian face” was developed, saying that those weapons were not really dangerous, that they do not harm civilians, and in some way the nuclear weapons label was changed. Therefore, according to their criteria, [tactical] nuclear weapons are no different from conventional weapons, and now in the military manuals they say that tactical nuclear weapons are weapons that pose no harm to civilians.
Therefore, we might have a situation in which those who decide to attack Iran with a nuclear weapon would not be aware of the consequences that this might have for the Middle East, central Asia, but also for humanity as a whole, because they are going to say: “Well, according to our criteria, these [tactical] nuclear weapons [safe for civilians] are different from those deployed during the Cold War and so, we can use them against Iran as a weapon which does not [affect civilians and] does not threaten global security.”
How do you view that? It’s extremely dangerous, because they themselves believe their own propaganda. It is internal propaganda within the armed forces, within the political apparatus.
When tactical nuclear weapons were recategorized in 2002-2003, Senator Edward Kennedy said at that time that it was a way of blurring the boundary between conventional and nuclear weapons.
But that’s where we are today; we are in an era where nuclear weapons are considered to be no different from the Kalashnikov. I’m exaggerating, but somehow nuclear weapons are now part of the tool box –that’s the word they use, “tool box” –and from there you choose the type of weapon you are going to use, so the nuclear weapon could be used in the conventional war theatre, leading us to the unthinkable, a nuclear war scenario on a regional level, but also with repercussions at the global level.
Fidel Castro Ruz: I heard what you said on the Round Table [Cuban TV] program about such weapons, presumably harmless to people living in the vicinity of the areas where they are to be targeted, the power [explosive yield] could range from one-third of the one that was used in Hiroshima up to six times the power [explosive yield] of that weapon, and today we know perfectly well the terrible damage it causes. One single bomb instantly killed 100,000 people. Just imagine a bomb having six times the power of that one [Hiroshima bomb], or two times that power, or an equivalent power, or 30 per cent that power. It is absurd.
There is also what you explained at the university about the attempt to present it as a humanitarian weapon that could also be available to the troops in the theatre of operations. So at any given moment any commander in the theatre of operations could be authorized to use that weapon as one that was more efficient than other weapons, something that would be considered his duty according to military doctrine and the training he/she received at the military academies.
Michel Chossudovsky: In that sense, I don’t think that this nuclear weapon would be used without the approval, let’s say, of the Pentagon, namely its centralised command structures [e.g. Strategic Command]; but I do think that it could be used without the approval of the President of the United States and Commander in Chief. In other words, it isn’t quite the same logic as that which prevailed during the Cold War where there was the Red Telephone and…
Fidel Castro Ruz: I understand, Professor, what you are saying regarding the use of that weapon as authorized by the senior levels of the Pentagon, and it seems right to me that you should make that clarification so that you won’t be blamed for exaggerating the dangers of that weapon.
But look, after one has learned about the antagonisms and arguments between the Pentagon and the President of the United States, there are really not too many doubts about what the Pentagon decision would be if the chief of the theatre of operations requests to use that weapon because he feels it is necessary or indispensable.
Michel Chossudovsky: There is also another element. The deployment of tactical nuclear weapons now, as far as I know, is being undertaken by several European countries which belong to NATO. This is the case of Belgium, Holland, Turkey, Italy and Germany. Thus, there are plenty of these “little nuclear bombs” very close to the theatre of war, and on the other hand we also have Israel.
Now then, I don’t think that Israel is going to start a war on its own; that would be impossible in terms of strategy and decision-making. In modern warfare, with the centralization of communications, logistics and everything else, starting a major war would be a centralized decision. However, Israel might act if the US gives Israel the green light to launch the first attack. That’s within the realm of possibilities, even though there are some analysts who now say that the war on Iran will start in Lebanon and Syria with a conventional border war, and then that would provide the pretext for an escalation in military operations.
Fidel Castro Ruz: Yesterday, October 13th, a crowd of people welcomed Ahmadinejad in Lebanon like a national hero of that country. I was reading a cable about that this morning.
Besides, we also know about Israel’s concerns regarding that, given the fact that the Lebanese are people with a great fighting spirit who have three times the number of reactive missiles they had in the former conflict with Israel and Lebanon, which was a great concern for Israel because they need –as the Israeli technicians have asserted – the air force to confront that weapon. And so, they state, they could only be attacking Iran for a number of hours, not three days, because they should be paying attention to such a danger. That’s the reason why, from these viewpoints, every day that goes by they are more concerned, because those weapons are part of the Iranian arsenal of conventional weapons. For example, among their conventional weapons, they have hundreds of rocket launchers to fight surface warships in that area of the Caspian Sea. We know that, from the time of the Falklands war, a surface warship can dodge one, two or three rockets. But imagine how a large warship can protect itself against a shower of weapons of that kind. Those are rapid vessels operated by well-trained people, because the Iranians have been training people for 30 years now and they have developed efficient conventional weapons.
You yourself know that, and you know what happened during the last World War, before the emergence of nuclear weapons. Fifty million people died as a result of the destructive power of conventional weaponry.
A war today is not like the war that was waged in the nineteenth century, before the appearance of nuclear weapons. And wars were already highly destructive. Nuclear arms appeared at the very last minute, because Truman wanted to use them. He wanted to test the Hiroshima bomb, creating the critical mass from uranium, and the other one in Nagasaki, which created a critical mass from plutonium. The two bombs killed around 100,000 persons immediately. We don’t know how many were wounded and affected by radiation, who died later on or suffered for long years from these effects. Besides, a nuclear war would create a nuclear winter.
I am talking to you about the dangers of a war, considering the immediate damage it might cause. It would be enough if we only had a limited number of them, the amount of weapons owned by one of the least mighty [nuclear] powers, India or Pakistan. Their explosion would be sufficient to create a nuclear winter from which no human being would survive. That would be impossible, since it would last for 8 to 10 years. In a matter of weeks the sunlight would no longer be visible.
Mankind is less than 200,000 years old. So far everything was normalcy. The laws of nature were being fulfilled; the laws of life developed on planet Earth for more than 3 billion years. Men, the Homo sapiens, the intelligent beings did not exist after 8 tenths of a million years had elapsed, according to all studies. Two hundred years ago, everything was virtually unknown. Today we know the laws governing the evolution of the species. Scientists, theologians, even the most devout religious people who initially echoed the campaign launched by the great ecclesiastical institutions against the Darwinian Theory, today accept the laws of evolution as real, without it preventing their sincere practice of their religious beliefs where, quite often, people find comfort for their most heartfelt hardships.
I think nobody on Earth wishes the human species to disappear. And that is the reason why I am of the opinion that what should disappear are not just nuclear weapons, but also conventional weapons. We must provide a guarantee for peace to all peoples without distinction, to the Iranians as well as the Israelis. Natural resources should be distributed. They should! I don’t mean they will, or that it would be easy to do it. But there would be no other alternative for humanity, in a world of limited dimensions and resources, even if all the scientific potential to create renewable sources of energy is developed. We are almost 7 billion inhabitants, and so we need to implement a demographic policy. We need many things, and when you put them all together and you ask yourself the following question: will human beings be capable of understanding that and overcome all those difficulties? You realize that only enthusiasm can truly lead a person to say that he or she will confront and easily resolve a problem of such proportions.
Michel Chossudovsky: What you have just said is extremely important, when you spoke of Truman. Truman said that Hiroshima was a military base and that there would be no harm to civilians.
This notion of collateral damage; reflects continuity in [America’s] nuclear doctrine ever since the year 1945 up until today. That is, not at the level of reality but at the level of [military] doctrine and propaganda. I mean, in 1945 it was said: Let’s save humanity by killing 100,000 people and deny the fact that Hiroshima was a populated city, namely that it was a military base. But nowadays the falsehoods have become much more sophisticated, more widespread, and nuclear weapons are more advanced. So, we are dealing with the future of humanity and the threat of a nuclear war at a global level. The lies and fiction underlying [US] political and military discourse would lead us to a Worldwide catastrophe in which politicians would be unable to make head or tails of their own lies.
Then, you said that intelligent human beings have existed for 200,000 years, but that same intelligence, which has now been incorporated in various institutions, namely the media, the intelligence services, the United Nations, happens to be what is now going to destroy us. Because we believe our own lies, which leads us towards nuclear war, without realizing that this would be the last war, as Einstein clearly stated. A nuclear war cannot ensure the continuation of humanity; it is a threat against the world.
Fidel Castro Ruz: Those are very good words, Professor. The collateral damage, in this case, could be humanity.
War is a crime and there is no need for any new law to describe it as such, because since Nuremberg, war has already been considered a crime, the biggest crime against humanity and peace, and the most horrible of all crimes.
Michel Chossudovsky.- The Nuremberg texts clearly state: “War is a criminal act, it is the ultimate act of war against peace.” This part of the Nuremberg texts is often quoted. After the Second World War, the Allies wanted to use it against the conquered, and I am not saying that this is not valid, but the crimes that they committed, including the crimes committed against Germany and Japan, are never mentioned. With a nuclear weapon, in the case of Japan.
Michel Chossudovsky.- It is an extremely important issue for me and if we are talking about a “counter-alliance for peace”, the criminalization of war seems to me to be a fundamental aspect. I’m talking about the abolition of war; it is a criminal act that must be eliminated.
Fidel Castro Ruz – Well, who would judge the main criminals?
Michel Chossudovsky.- The problem is that they also control the judicial system and the courts, so the judges are criminals as well. What can we do?
Fidel Castro Ruz I say that this is part of the Battle of Ideas.
It is about demanding that the world not be spearheaded into a nuclear catastrophe, it is to preserve life.
We do not know, but we presume that if man becomes aware of his own existence, that of his people, that of his loved ones, even the U.S. military leaders would be aware of the outcome; although they are taught in life to follow orders, not infrequently genocide, as in the use of tactical or strategic nuclear weapons, because that is what they were taught in the [military] academies.
As all of this is sheer madness, no politician is exempt from the duty of conveying these truths to the people. One must believe in them, otherwise there would be nothing to fight for.
Michel Chossudovsky .- I think what you are saying is that at the present time, the great debate in human history should focus on the danger of nuclear war that threatens the future of humanity, and that any discussion we have about basic needs or economics requires that we prevent the occurrence of war and instate global peace so that we can then plan living standards worldwide based on basic needs; but if we do not solve the problem of war, capitalism will not survive, right?
Fidel Castro Ruz.– No, it cannot survive, in terms of all the analysis we’ve undertaken, it cannot survive. The capitalist system and the market economy that suffocate human life, are not going to disappear overnight, but imperialism based on force, nuclear weapons and conventional weapons with modern technology, has to disappear if we want humanity to survive.
Now, there something occurring at this very moment which characterizes the Worldwide process of disinformation, and it is the following: In Chile 33 miners were trapped 700 meters underground, and the world is rejoicing at the news that 33 miners have been saved. Well, simply, what will the world do if it becomes aware that 6,877,596,300 people need to be saved, if 33 have created universal joy and all the mass media speak only of that these days, why not save the nearly 7 billion people trapped by the terrible danger of perishing in a horrible death like those of Hiroshima or Nagasaki?
Michel Chossudovsky. -This is also, clearly, the issue of media coverage that is given to different events and the propaganda emanating from the media.
I think it was an incredible humanitarian operation that the Chileans undertook, but it is true that if there is a threat to humanity, as you mentioned, it should be on the front page of every newspaper in the world because human society in its totality could be the victim of a decision that has been made, even by a three-star general who is unaware of the consequences [of nuclear weapons].
But here we are talking about how the media, particularly in the West, are hiding the most serious issue that potentially affects the world today, which is the danger of nuclear war and we must take it seriously, because both Hillary Clinton and Obama have said that they have contemplated using nuclear weapon in a so-called preventive war against Iran.
Well, how do we answer? What do you say to Hillary Clinton and Barak Obama regarding their statements pertaining to the unilateral use of nuclear weapons against Iran, a country that poses no danger to anyone?
Fidel Castro Ruz.- Yes, I know two things: What was discussed. This has been revealed recently, namely far-reaching arguments within the Security Council of the United States. That is the value of the book written by Bob Woodward, because it revealed how all these discussions occurred. We know the positions of Biden, Hillary, Obama, and indeed in those discussions, who was firmer against the extension of the war, who was able to argue with the military, it was Obama, that is a fact.
I am writing the latest reflection, actually, about that. The only one who got there, and gave him advice, who had been an opponent because of his Republican Party membership, was Colin Powell. He reminded him that he was the President of the United States, encouraging advice.
I think we should ensure that this message reaches everybody; what we have discussed. I think many read the articles you have published in Global Research. I think we need to disclose, and to the extent that we have these discussions and harbor the idea of disclosure. I am delighted every time you argue, reasonably, and put forth these issues, simply, in my opinion, there is a real deficit of information for the reasons you explained.
Now, we must invent. What are the ways to make all this known? At the time of the Twelve Apostles, there were 12 and no more, and they were given the task of disseminating the teachings a preacher transmitted to them. Sure, they had hundreds of years ahead of them. We, however, we do not have that. But I was looking at the list of personalities, and there are more than 20 prominent people who have been working with Global Research, prestigious people, asking the same questions, but they do not have hundreds of years, but, well, very little time.
Michel Chossudovsky. – The antiwar movement in the United States, Canada and Europe is divided. Some people think the threat comes from Iran, others say they [the Iranians] are terrorists, and there is a lot of disinformation in the movement itself.
Besides, at the World Social Forum the issue of nuclear war is not part of the debate between people of the Left or progressives. During the Cold War there was talk of the danger of nuclear conflict, and people had this awareness.
At the last meeting held in New York on non-proliferation, under the United Nations, the emphasis was on the nuclear threat from non-state entities, from terrorists.
President Obama said that the threat comes from Al Qaeda, which has nuclear weapons. Also, if someone reads Obama’s speeches he is suggesting that the terrorists have the ability of producing small nuclear bombs, what they call “dirty bombs”. Well, it’s a way of [distorting the issues] and shifting the emphasis.
Fidel Castro Ruz. – That is what they tell him [Obama], that is what his own people tell him and have him believe.
Look, what do I do with the reflections? They are distributed in the United Nations, they are sent to all governments, the reflections, of course, are short, to send them to all the governments, and I know there are many people who read them. The problem is whether you are telling the truth or not. Of course, when one collects all this information in relation to a particular problem because the reflections are also diluted on many issues, but I think you have to concentrate on our part, the disclosure of essentials, I cannot cover everything.
Michel Chossudovsky. – I have a question, because there is an important aspect related to the Cuban Revolution. In my opinion, the debate on the future of humanity is also part of a revolutionary discourse. If society as a whole were to be threatened by nuclear war, it is necessary in some form, to have a revolution at the levels of ideas as well as actions against this event, [namely nuclear war].
Fidel Castro Ruz .- We have to say, I repeat, that humanity is trapped 800 meters underground and that we must get it out, we need to do a rescue operation. That is the message we must convey to a large number of people. If people in large numbers believe in that message, they will do what you are doing and they will support what you are supporting. It will no longer depend on who are those who say it, but on the fact that somebody [and eventually everybody] says it.
You have to figure out how you can reach the informed masses. The solution is not the newspapers. There is the Internet, Internet is cheaper, Internet is more accessible. I approached you through the Internet looking for news, not through news agencies, not through the press, not from CNN, but news through a newsletter I receive daily articles on the Internet . Over 100 pages each day.
Yesterday you were arguing that in the United States some time ago two thirds of public opinion was against the war on Iran, and today, fifty-some percent favored military action against Iran.
Michel Chossudovsky .- What happened, even in recent months, it was said: “Yes, nuclear war is very dangerous, it is a threat, but the threat comes from Iran,” and there were signs in New York City saying: ” Say no to nuclear Iran, “and the message of these posters was to present Iran as a threat to global security, even if the threat did not exist because they do not have nuclear weapons.
Anyway, that’s the situation, and The New York Times earlier this week published a text that says, yes, political assassinations are legal.
Then, when we have a press that gives us things like that, with the distribution that they have, it is a lot of work [on our part]. We have limited capabilities to reverse this process [of media disinformation] within the limited distribution outlets of the alternative media. In addition to that, now many of these alternative media are financed by the economic establishment.
Fidel Castro Ruz.- And yet we have to fight.
Michel Chossudovsky .- Yes, we keep struggling, but the message was what you said yesterday. That in the case of a nuclear war, the collateral damage would be humanity as a whole.
Fidel Castro Ruz.- It would be humanity, the life of humanity.
Michel Chossudovsky.- It is true that the Internet should continue to function as an outreach tool to avoid the war.
Fidel Castro Ruz.- Well, it’s the only way we can prevent it. If we were to create world opinion, it’s like the example I mentioned: there are nearly 7 billion people trapped 800 meters underground, we use the phenomenon of Chile to disclose these things.
Michel Chossudovsky .- The comparison you make with the rescue of 33 miners, saying that there are 33 miners below ground there to be rescued, which received extensive media coverage, and you say that we have almost 7 billion people that are 800 meters underground and do not understand what is happening, but we have to rescue them, because humanity as a whole is threatened by the nuclear weapons of the United States and its allies, because they are the ones who say they intend to use them.
Fidel Castro Ruz.- And will use them [the nuclear weapons] if there is no opposition, if there is no resistance. They are deceived; they are drugged with military superiority and modern technology and do not know what they are doing.
They do not understand the consequences; they believe that the prevailed situation can be maintained. It is impossible.
Michel Chossudovsky. – Or they believe that this is simply some sort of conventional weapon.
Fidel Castro Ruz. – Yes, they are deluded and believe that you can still use that weapon. They believe they are in another era, they do not remember what Einstein said when he stated he did not know with what weapons World War III would be fought with, but the World War IV would be fought with sticks and stones. I added there: “… there wouldn’t be anyone to handle the sticks and stones.” That is the reality; I have it written there in the short speech you suggested I develop.
Michel Chossudovsky .- The problem I see is that the use of nuclear weapons will not necessarily lead to the end of humankind from one day to the next, because the radioactive impact is cumulative.
Fidel Castro Ruz. – Repeat that, please.
Michel Chossudovsky. – The nuclear weapon has several different consequences: one is the explosion and destruction in the theater of war, which is the phenomenon of Hiroshima, and the other are the impacts of radiation which increases over time.
Fidel Castro Ruz.- Yes, nuclear winter, as we call it. The prestigious American researcher, University of Rutgers (New Jersey) Professor Emeritus Alan Robock irrefutably showed that the outbreak of a war between two of the eight nuclear powers who possess the least amount of weapons of this kind would result in “nuclear winter”.
He disclosed that at the fore of a group of researchers who used ultra-scientific computer models.
It would be enough to have 100 strategic nuclear weapons of the 25,000 possessed by the eight powers mentioned exploding in order to create temperatures below freezing all over the planet and a long night that would last approximately eight years. Professor Robock exclaims that it is so terrible that people are falling into a “state of denial”, not wanting to think about it; it is easier to pretend that it doesn’t exist”. He told me that personally, at an international conference he was giving, where I had the honor of conversing with him.
Well, but I start from an assumption: If a war breaks out in Iran, it will inevitably become nuclear war and a global war. So that’s why yesterday we were saying it was not right to allow such an agreement in the Security Council, because it makes everything easier, do you see?
Such a war in Iran today would not remain confined to the local level, because the Iranians would not give in to use of force. If it remained conventional, it would be a war the United States and Europe could not win, and I argue that it would rapidly turn into a nuclear war. If the United States were to make the mistake of using tactical nuclear weapons, there would be consternation throughout the world and the US would eventually lose control of the situation.
Obama has had a heated discussion with the Pentagon about what to do in Afghanistan; imagine Obama’s situation with American and Israeli soldiers fighting against millions of Iranians. The Saudis are not going to fight in Iran, nor are the Pakistanis or any other Arab or Muslim soldiers. What could happen is that the Yanks have serious conflicts with the Pakistani tribes which they are attacking and killing with their drones, and they know that. When you strike a blow against those tribes, first attacking and then warning the government, not saying anything beforehand; that is one of the things that irritates the Pakistanis. There is a strong anti-American feeling there.
It’s a mistake to think that the Iranians would give up if they used tactical nuclear weapons against them, and the world really would be shocked, but then it may be too late.
Michel Chossudovsky .- They cannot win a conventional war.
Fidel Castro Ruz .- They cannot win.
Michel Chossudovsky. – And that we can see in Iraq; in Afghanistan they can destroy an entire country, but they cannot win from a military standpoint.
Fidel Castro Ruz. – But to destroy it [a country] at what price, at what cost to the world, at what economic costs, in the march towards catastrophe? The problems you mentioned are compounded, the American people would react, because the American people are often slow to react, but they react in the end. The American people react to casualties, the dead.
A lot of people supported the Nixon administration during the war in Vietnam, he even suggested the use of nuclear weapons in that country to Kissinger, but he dissuaded him from taking that criminal step. The United States was obliged by the American people to end the war; it had to negotiate and had to hand over the south. Iran would have to give up the oil in the area. In Vietnam what did they hand over? An expense. Ultimately, they are now back in Vietnam, buying oil, trading. In Iran they would lose many lives, and perhaps a large part of the oil facilities in the area would be destroyed.
In the present situation, is likely they would not understand our message. If war breaks out, my opinion is that they, and the world, would gain nothing. If it were solely a conventional war, which is very unlikely, they would lose irretrievably, and if it becomes a global nuclear war, humanity would lose.
Michel Chossudovsky.- Iran has conventional forces that are …significant.
Fidel Castro Ruz.- Millions.
Michel Chossudovsky.- Land forces, but also rockets and also Iran has the ability to defend itself.
Fidel Castro Ruz.- While there remains one single man with a gun, this is an enemy they will have to defeat.
Michel Chossudovsky.- And there are several millions with guns.
Fidel Castro Ruz.- Millions, and they will have to sacrifice many American lives, unfortunately it would be only then that Americans would react, if they don’t react now they will react later when it will be too late; we must write, we must divulge this as much as we can. Remember that the Christians were persecuted, they led them off to the catacombs, they killed them, they threw them to the lions, but they held on to their beliefs for centuries and later that was what they did to the Moslems, and the Moslems never yielded.
There is a real war against the Moslem world. Why are those lessons of history being forgotten? I have read many of the articles you wrote about the risks of that war.
Michel Chossudovsky.- Let us return to the matter of Iran. I believe that it is very important that world opinion comprehends the war scenario. You clearly state that they would lose the war, the conventional war, they are losing it in Iraq and Afghanistan, Iran has more conventional forces than those of NATO in Afghanistan.
Fidel Castro Ruz.- Much more experienced and motivated. They are now in conflict with those forces in Afghanistan and Iraq and one they don’t mention: the Pakistanis of the same ethnic group as those in the resistance in Afghanistan. In White House discussions, they consider that the war is lost, that’s what the book by Bob Woodward entitled “Obama’s Wars” tells us. Imagine the situation if in addition to that, they append a war to liquidate whatever remains after the initial blows they inflict on Iran.
So they will be thrust into a conventional war situation that they cannot win, or they will be obliged to wage a global nuclear war, under conditions of a worldwide upheaval. And I don’t know who can justify the type of war they have to wage; they have 450 targets marked out in Iran, and of these some, according to them, will have to be attacked with tactical nuclear warheads because of their location in mountainous areas and at the depth at which they are situated [underground]. Many Russian personnel and persons from other nationalities collaborating with them will die in that confrontation.
What will be the reaction of world opinion in the face of that blow which today is being irresponsibly promoted by the media with the backing of many Americans?
Michel Chossudovsky.- One issue, Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, they are all neighbouring countries in a certain way. Iran shares borders with Afghanistan and with Iraq, and the United States and NATO have military facilities in the countries they occupy. What’s going to happen? I suppose that the Iranian troops are immediately going to cross the border.
Fidel Castro Ruz.- Well, I don’t know what tactic they’re going to use, but if one were in their place, the most advisable is to not concentrate their troops, because if the troops are concentrated they will be victims of the attack with tactical nuclear weapons. In other words, in accordance with the nature of the threat as it is being described, the best thing would be for them to use a tactic similar to ours in southern Angola when we suspected that South Africa had nuclear weapons; we created tactical groups of 1000 men with land and anti-air fire power. Nuclear weapons could never within their reach target a large number of soldiers. Anti-air rocketry and other similar weapons was supporting our forces. Weapons and the conditions of the terrain change and tactics must continuously change.
Michel Chossudovsky.- Dispersed.
Fidel Castro Ruz.- Dispersed, but not isolated men, there were around 1000 men with appropriate weapons, the terrain was sandy, wherever they got to they had to dig in and protect themselves underground, always keeping the maximum distance between components. The enemy was never given an opportunity to aim a decisive blow against the 60,000 Cuban and Angolan soldiers in southern Angola.
What we did in that sister country is what, a thousand strong army, operating with traditional criteria, would have done. Fine, we were not 100 000, in southern Angola there were 60,000 men, Cubans and Angolans; due to technical requirements the tactical groups were mainly made up of Cubans because they handled tanks, rockets, anti-aircraft guns, communications, but the infantry was made up of Cuban and Angolan soldiers, with great fighting spirit, who didn’t hesitate one second in confronting the white Apartheid army supported by the United States and Israel. Who handled the numerous nuclear weapons that they had at that moment?
In the case of Iran, we are getting news that they are digging into the ground, and when they are asked about it, they say that they are making cemeteries to bury the invaders. I don’t know if this is meant to be ironic, but I think that one would really have to dig quite a lot to protect their forces from the attack which is threatening them.
Michel Chossudovsky.- Sure, but Iran has the possibility of mobilizing millions of troops.
Fidel Castro Ruz.- Not just troops, but the command posts are also decisive. In my opinion, dispersion is very important. The attackers will try to prevent the transmission of orders. Every combat unit must know beforehand what they have to do under different circumstances. The attacker will try to strike and destabilize the chain of command with its radio-electronic weapons. All those factors must be kept in mind. Mankind has never experienced a similar predicament.
Anyway, Afghanistan is “a joke” and Iraq, too, when you compare them with what they are going to bump into in Iran: the weaponry, the training, the mentality, the kind of soldier… If 31 years ago, Iranian combatants cleaned the mine fields by advancing over them, they will undoubtedly be the most fearsome adversaries that the United States has ever come across.
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The interview was conducted in Spanish.
Our thanks and appreciation to Cuba Debate for the transcription as well as the translation from Spanish.
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Fidel’s Message on the Dangers of Nuclear War
Recorded on the last day of the Conversations, October 15, 2010 the original Global Research/Cuba Debate video (our copyright) was removed on alleged copyright infringements alongside many other Youtube postings.
TRANSCRIPT
The use of nuclear weapons in a new war would mean the end of humanity. This was candidly foreseen by scientist Albert Einstein who was able to measure their destructive capability to generate millions of degrees of heat, which would vaporize everything within a wide radius of action. This brilliant researcher had promoted the development of this weapon so that it would not become available to the genocidal Nazi regime.
Each and every government in the world has the obligation to respect the right to life of each and every nation and of the totality of all the peoples on the planet.
Today there is an imminent risk of war with the use of that kind of weapon and I don’t harbour the least doubt that an attack by the United States and Israel against the Islamic Republic of Iran would inevitably evolve towards a global nuclear conflict.
The World’s peoples have an obligation to demand of their political leaders their Right to Live. When the life of humankind, of your people and your most beloved human beings run such a risk, nobody can afford to be indifferent; not one minute can be lost in demanding respect for that right; tomorrow will be too late.
Albert Einstein himself stated unmistakably: “I do not know with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones”. We fully comprehend what he wanted to convey, and he was absolutely right, yet in the wake of a global nuclear war, there wouldn’t be anybody around to make use of those sticks and stones.
There would be “collateral damage”, as the American political and military leaders always affirm, to justify the deaths of innocent people.
In a nuclear war the “collateral damage” would be the life of all humanity.
Let us have the courage to proclaim that all nuclear or conventional weapons, everything that is used to make war, must disappear!
Fidel Castro Ruz
October 15, 2010
Michel Chossudovsky Book’s published in 2011, following his October 2010 meeting with Fidel Castro
Russia’s response to these newfound threats will likely take the form of more joint and coordinated actions with China.
Former Secretary of the Security Council and incumbent Presidential Aide Nikolay Patrushev shared some updates about the US’ naval strategy in his interview for Rossiyskaya Gazeta last week. He said that it’s called “Sea Superiority”, which is self-explanatory, but he added that it also implies integrating the US Navy with its regional satellites’ in order to contain the Russian and Chinese Navies. This strategy accordingly focuses on the Black Sea and Asia-Pacific regions.
Beginning with the first, the US is trying to pressure Turkiye into loosening its enforcement of the Montreux Convention so as to allow more extra-regional NATO naval assets into the Black Sea. In parallel with this, the US is building new logistics centers in Bulgaria and Romania as well as planning to deploy long-range weapons there too. There’s also some superficial talk from Ukraine and its partners about ensuring “freedom of navigation” in the Azov Sea, Patrushev said, but that’s unrealistic of course.
As for the second region, Japan is designated as the center of NATO’s attention, and it’s already carried out a whopping 30x more drills with the bloc and other US military allies this year compared to the last one. Apart from that island nation, Australia, New Zealand, and South Korea – all of four of which are collectively called the “Indo-Pacific Four” (IP4) by NATO – round out the rest of its partners. Altogether, they’re having a very destabilizing effect on the Asia-Pacific, but the US lies that they’re stabilizing it.
In response to these threats, Patrushev said that Russia is comprehensively modernizing its fleet and building many new high-tech vessels. He also mentioned that President Putin decreed that industry employees across the board from production workers to engineers receive higher wages. He was mum about other details though but that makes sense for national security reasons. The impression is that the Kremlin is well aware of the US’ newfound naval threats and preparing to properly handle them.
Reflecting on the insight that this top official just shared, it’s clear that Russia does indeed consider itself and China to be the targets of what Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov earlier described as the US’ “dual containment” strategy, with the innuendo being that more joint responses can be expected. This can take the form of more naval and air drills as well as coordinated action like their nuclear-capable bombers both approaching Alaska at the same time last week.
Nevertheless, no matter how convincing the optics may appear, Russia and China will not enter into a mutual defense alliance since neither wants to sacrifice their troops’ lives for the others’ halfway across the world in their respective regions. These pieces here and here from 2023 clarify that while Russian-Chinese ties can be classified as an Entente, these are real limits to their “no-limits” cooperation, such as regarding India and Vietnam as explained in the two preceding hyperlinked analyses.
Any military alliance with China would instantly destroy the Asian balancing act that Russia has worked so hard to perfect over the past decade, and which it recently recalibrated earlier in the summer, so nobody should expect it to inflict such damage to its grand strategy. That said, it’ll likely work a lot closer with China in the air and naval domains in the coming future through joint and coordinated actions, though it remains to be seen whether this will deter the US and its satellites from crossing their red lines.
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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.
Much has been written on how divisive the “Woke” spectacle of the July 26 Olympics opening ceremony was. The controversial spectacle prompted condemnation from Muslim and Christian religious leaders worldwide.
Pope Francisfinally broke his silence and joined these voices on August 3, eight days after the episode. It seems this took some convincing, with reports that the bishop of Rome only did so after talks with… Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, of all people. This is impressive in itself and merits some analysis.
The Olympics opening was so offensive that, with the global backlash, in an underreported development, the videos have been removed from the official websites – they can no longer be found in the Olympic Committee’s YouTube channel. The same thing happened with the NBC Sports YouTube channel, the official broadcaster of the Games in the USA. No official explanation has been provided yet, but the reason is clear enough, with condemnations from politicians and religious leaders piling up – and with American company C Spire pulling its advertising out of the Olympics. Even Jean-Luc Melenchon, the leader of left-wing party France Unbowed (LFI), condemned it. The Paris Olympics organizers have apologized, albeit claiming they had no intention to offend anyone.
The opening ceremony, broadcast worldwide, was not family-friendly: it displayed, among other things, a threesome, a Lady Gaga’s performance, male genitalia exposure, and more infamously, a tableau vivant called “’La Cène Sur Un Scène Sur La Seine”, a word-play which of course means“The Last Supper on the stage on the [River] Seine.” It was basically a parody of Jesus Christ’s Last Supper involving artists in drag and Greek Gods. All of this would fit well in a Madonna or Marilyn Manson concert in any Western capital but this kind of provocation is unprecedented in such an event.
Traditionally, the opening ceremonies of Olympic games, which have their own “diplomacy” and etiquette, emphasize the culture and history of the host country in a manner that is inclusive to audiences worldwide. Jesus Christ is of course respected by Muslims as well, who believe he is a Prophet and God’s Messenger. It turns out the supposed parade of “diversity” was (as is often the case with Western “woke” ideology), actually non-inclusive to children, families, religious people, the Global South and most of the world. It is no wonder, then, that such an intense backlash came about.
In a brief 90-word statement, the Vatican said that “the Holy See was saddened by certain scenes during the opening ceremony of the Paris Olympic Games” and thus “cannot but join its voice with the others that have been raised in these last days to deplore the offense made to numerous Christians and believers of other religions.” It stated such events should celebrate international common values rather than “ridiculing the religious convictions of many people”, and added that freedom of expression should be “limited by respect for others” – something the “woke” ideologues themselves agree with, although they would differ on just whom should also be respected (not religious people, it seems).
So far, no big deal. The point here is that, according to America Magazine and many other sources, the Vatican had decided not to issue any statement condemning the event because the French bishops had already done so. The reasoning here is unclear: this could be part of Pope Francis’ usually conciliatory approach and his efforts to emphasize tolerance. In any case, it has been reported that, on August 1, President Erdogan of Turkey, called the Pope following the assassination of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh, in Tehran, and also took the opportunity to urge the pontiff to “raise voices together and take a common stance in this regard” (the Olympics’ episode), which “offended Muslims as much as the Christian world.” Erdogan had previously told his AK Party that he would try to persuade the Roman pontiff – and persuade him he did, it seems.
This has led John L. Allen Jr. to enquire, in his piece for the Catholic Herald, why it took “a Muslim” to persuade the Catholic leader to join the chorus (as he titled his piece). After all, for a week, several Catholic players (including some Bishops) tried to persuade the Pope to comment on the matter – to no avail. Erdogan did it. Part of the explanations lies in the fact that the Pope is also a Head of State. Allen Jr. reasoning is that the bishop of Rome could be “disinclined to pick a diplomatic fight with France” in light of an already tense situation there, involving a debate on abortion. John L. Allen Jr. is considered to be the most authoritative Anglophone writer on Vatican affairs.
The same expert also notes that Erdogan was clever in “packaging” his Olympics appeal within a discussion about the Israeli military campaign in Gaza. During the call, he suggested the Pope engaged in conversations with countries supporting Israel as part of diplomatic endeavors to prevent an escalation. Playing precisely that role is in the Holy See’s interest and this is why the Pope was happy, Allen Jr. argues, to toss Erdogan “a bone” on the Olympic topic so as to thereby further secure the Turkish leader’s backing. This would be part of reorienting the Vatican “away from its historical profile as a Western institution towards a more truly global, non-aligned role, and a key part of that agenda has been outreach to the Islamic world.”
To sum it up, the recent Pope-Erdogan episode demonstrates the decline of the US-led West’s moral authority, especially from the point of view of the Global South, the Islamic world, and Christians in general. It shows how the “woke” ideology, often described as a tool for Washington’s soft power (some prefer to talk about “woke imperialism”) is backfiring. Some analysts even point out it has become a liability to US national security itself. The episode also demonstrates how Erdogan, despite his more incendiary recent statements (about militarily intervening in Israel-Palestine), still wants Turkey to be a peace-broker in the Holy Land, while projecting it and himself as a kind of leader of the Islamic world – or of the Global South itself. Those are ambitious and challenging goals: for one thing, playing mediator in the cause of Palestine would require a certain neutrality which Ankara clearly does not possess. In any case, such goals are also part of a Turkish neo-Ottomanist agenda, which, as I wrote, faces a lot of opposition from many different players in the Middle East, Central Asia and beyond. In this particular Pope move, however, Erdogan can certainly boast a success story.
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Several Hezbollah drones struck Israeli military sites near the city of Nahariya, north of Acre, on 6 August, just a few hours after several people were killed in an Israeli drone strike on southern Lebanon.
“In response to the attack and assassination carried out by the Israeli enemy in the town of Abba, the Islamic Resistance fighters launched an air attack on Tuesday 06-08-2024 with a squadron of suicide drones that targeted the headquarters of the Golani Brigade and the headquarters of the Egoz Unit 621 in the Shraga barracks north of occupied Acre, hitting their targets accurately and achieving confirmed hits,” Hezbollah said in a statement.
A Hezbollah member was assassinated in the southern village of Abba on Monday.
Video footage circulating social media showed Hezbollah drones flying over Nahariya. Other footage shows plumes of smoke in the distance as a result of explosions.
BREAKING | Hebrew media reports that three drones targeted a base and vehicle in Nahariya north of Haifa. Footage shows a drone launched by Lebanon flying over its skies. Injuries reported. pic.twitter.com/VSVDJ1jgmt
“The medical teams of the Rescue Union provided first aid to a 30-year-old man who was fatally injured near Nahariya,” said a spokesperson for the Israeli Rescue Union.
“While I was driving, citizens signaled me to stop after a car had an accident after hearing the alarm and apparently as a result of being hit by shrapnel. I stopped to help him with a bag of medical equipment that I received from the Rescue Union and went over to help him while stopping the bleeding and first dressing – on his body and car were found with shrapnel wounds. He was then taken to Nahariya hospital in critical condition,” said one of the Rescue Union’s medics.
Nahariya Hospital announced that 19 Israelis were injured, including one critically. Hebrew reports on Telegram said two soldiers were wounded in the Shagra barracks. Israel’s ambulance service said it treated wounded in three different locations.
“For about ten minutes, two drones traveled about 20 kilometers deep inside Israel today, flying in the northern sky on a clear path on the way to the target until they exploded, without being intercepted,” Israeli army radio said about the attack.
The Hezbollah attack came hours after five people were killed in an Israeli drone strike on southern Lebanon earlier on Tuesday.
Hezbollah had targeted Israeli forces in the Avivim settlement that morning.
The attack also comes as regional tensions are at an all-time high following Israel’s assassinations of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran on 31 July and top Hezbollah war commander Fuad Shukr in Beirut the day before.
The attack on Beirut killed several civilians, including young children.
Tel Aviv is anticipating retaliation from the Islamic Republic and Hezbollah, as both have vowed harsh responses to the Israeli attacks.
Israel is also expecting a Yemeni response to its attack on Hodeidah port last month.
A Hezbollah source told The Cradle on 5 August that Iran, Lebanon, and Yemen will launch simultaneous retaliatory strikes against Israel to overwhelm its Iron Dome system.
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The back-to-back assassinations of Hezbollah commander Fuad Shukr in Beirut and Hamas political chief Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran were acts of either strategic folly or willful pyromania. While Israel has claimed responsibility for the former and remained cryptic about the latter, there is little doubt that it orchestrated both — and even some of its allies believe that, this time, the Israelis went too far.
Israeli politicians were quick to latch onto a pretext for a high-level strike on Hezbollah — a rocket attack from Lebanon that killed 12 Syrian Druze children and youth in the occupied Golan Heights, for which Hezbollah denied involvement — despite local residents vehemently protesting their calls for retribution. Shukr and Haniyeh were certainly key members of their respective groups, but Israel knows very well that both organizations have internal mechanisms and contingency plans to replace them; after all, these are hardly the first assassinations that the two resistance movements have experienced.
Crucially, as Hezbollah’s Hassan Nasrallah and Iran’s Ayatollah Ali Khameneideclared, the killing of two senior figures in foreign capitals, executed in the space of a few hours, was an unambiguous message that broke the so-called “red lines” established between the fighting parties over the past 10 months. Now, the world is holding its breath for a retaliation to an unnecessary power play, inching us closer to a conflagration unlike any we’ve seen in decades.
The volatile effects of Israel’s military hubris have been clear from the very first days of “Operation Iron Swords,” the brutal campaign launched on the Gaza Strip after Hamas’ deadly October 7 assault. But international politics has always put more stock in the killing of symbolic leaders than of civilians.
Indeed, although October 7 thrust the entire Middle East into a violent vortex, we have repeatedly been told that the threshold of a “regional war” has not yet been crossed. The battling actors, experts insist, are still playing a risky but calibrated game to re-establish mutual “deterrence,” permitting certain levels of violence that can still be read as avoiding all-out havoc.
In many ways, however, this is a discursive trick that downplays the harrowing truth on the ground: we have already been in the throes of that regional war for months. The evidence is in the bodies and debris piling up inGaza and southern Lebanon, and in the activation of the Western-led alliance and the Axis of Resistance across multiple fronts — from U.S. warships in the Mediterranean to Houthi militias in the Red Sea, from Israeli airstrikes in Lebanon to a missile barrage from Iran.
This confrontation can become infinitely worse. Yet the very reason that international actors have belatedly jolted into action this past week is the same reason the war is being pushed into its most hazardous phase yet: that certain lives, and certain interests, matter more than others.
Arrogance and Ambitions
For Western governments, the main danger posed by the assassinations of Shukr and Haniyeh is not the untold number of Arabs or Iranians who might be killed in an escalation of hostilities. If anything, the past 10 months have shown that as long as Palestinians were the primary casualties, an elongated war was a tolerable, if regrettable, state of affairs. As a result, Western capitals, chief among them Washington, declined to pull out all the stops to curb the fighting, instead buying time for Israel to try to advance its declared aims in Gaza and Lebanon — even as it was clear that the Israelis would fail.
Now, however, Western governments are panicking. They not only fear what an escalated war might do to the global order, including stoking security chaos and disrupting economic supply chains. It is also the very real prospect that such a war could incur a massive Israeli death toll — and with it, the unprecedented weakening of the Israeli state.
This withering process arguably began at the start of 2023, during the country’s internal battles over the far right’s judicial overhaul, but it has been rapidly expedited by October 7 and the Gaza operation. The full damage of Israel’s current military attrition and loss of global standing have yet to sink in, but a serious attack by Hezbollah or Iran will likely worsen that decline.
Image: Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, left, and Knesset Foreign Affairs and Security Committee Chairman Yuli Edelstein attend a briefing at Gallant’s office in Tel Aviv, January 30, 2024. (Photo credit: Ariel Hermoni/Defense Ministry)
Even if some in Israel admit that the military may have overreached, national ego could compel them to respond again; Defense Minister Yoav Gallant is already directing the army to prepare for a “quick transition to offense.” The constant desire to settle scores and claim some kind of victory may trounce any rationale for putting the guns down.
One might have expected Israel’s own leaders to recognize that worsening spiral, with the country’s economy tanking, its army growing weary, and its northern and southern populations displaced. But these leaders are too blinded by ideological ambitions, nationalist arrogance, and fear for their own political survival to consider any path other than militarism and bombast.
It is not just Benjamin Netanyahu, whose own security cabinet admits that the prime minister is directly sabotaging a hostage deal with Hamas. From Gallant to IDF Chief of Staff Herzi Halevi, much of the political and military brass has a vested interest in some form of a prolonged conflict. All of them were in charge on the day that Israel suffered its worst security failure in decades, and all of them are fighting to restore their reputations if not their careers; an endless emergency, they believe, can help to stretch their days in office.
Meanwhile, the far-right ministers in government, led by Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir, are embracing the crisis in order to pursue their messianic goals. Their constituents on the ground, chiefly settlers in the West Bank, are matching legislative advances for formal annexation with army-backed pogroms against Palestinian communities, consolidating their vision of Greater Israel while promoting plans to resettle Gaza as well.
More Foresight Than the White House
It is precisely these officials that President Joe Biden and other Western leaders have gifted with near-total impunity, despite every indication of their ulterior motives, their blatant war crimes, and even growing resentment from the Israeli public itself. For 10 months, the world’s most powerful governments have played dumb and helpless, pretending they had little leverage over a state that is hustling for more weapons, funds, and diplomatic backing for its onslaught. And Biden, even as he is reportedly realizing how much he is being “lied to” by Netanyahu, has still kept America’s taps open, ensuring that the reins of power remain in the hands of the fools and pyromaniacs.
Now, Washington — and for that matter, the Arab signatories to the Abraham Accords — are reaping the bitter fruits of one of their biggest mistakes: embracing the idea that bypassing the Palestinians would pave the way to regional peace. Hamas’ October 7 attack shattered that misguided belief, but the Biden administration has not absorbed the lesson.
In fact, the United States has preferred to launch airstrikes in Yemen and Iraq, threaten the world’s top courts, and indulge Netanyahu in Washington with standing ovations, rather than force Israel into a ceasefire in Gaza. The fact that millions of protesters worldwide took to city streets and campuses to demand a stop to the war from its very first days, and the Biden administration didn’t, shows how much more foresight regular citizens have compared to the decision-makers sitting in the White House.
But catastrophe is not inevitable. In the diplomatic void left by the United States, others have stepped up in recent months to try and stem the fallout. Qatar is still mediating negotiations between Hamas and Israel, despite the latter regularly insulting and undermining its hosts’ efforts, and now assassinating one of the other side’s chief negotiators.
China, which traditionally stayed clear of deep involvement in the conflict, facilitated the latest efforts at Palestinian reconciliation, when 14 factions, including Fatah and Hamas, signed a declaration of unity in Beijing last month. The new Labour-led British government has reversed its predecessor’s cuts to UNRWA, withdrawn its objections to the International Criminal Court’s applications for arrest warrants, and is reportedly close to halting certain arms sales to Israel.
Importantly, the International Court of Justice, which has recognized the plausibility of an unfolding genocide in Gaza, has unequivocally deemed Israel’s occupation illegal, and demanded firm actions to bring about its end. And ICC Prosecutor Karim Khan is waiting for the greenlight to order Netanyahu and Gallant to stand trial at The Hague, along with Hamas’ Gaza chief Yahya Sinwar (who, if reports of commander Mohammed Deif’s killing are true, is now the only surviving Hamas suspect).
All of these are miniscule measures compared to Washington’s massive leverage, or the more serious economic and political pressures that other governments still hold. But they are indicators of where international policy is finally heading. The United States needn’t find itself woefully catching up to these shifts, but getting ahead means accepting the truth that its most valued ally in the region — and U.S. power itself — has been a source of more devastation than peace.
Exercising Outsized Power
The Palestinians, for their part, are outnumbered, outgunned, and outmatched by regional and global forces beyond their control, suffering a genocidal campaign more destructive than the 1948 Nakba. Israel’s killing fields have ripped apart every Palestinian family in Gaza, turned much of the Strip into valleys of rubble, and condemned 2 million besieged people, half of them children, to a lifetime of physical and psychosocial trauma.
Hamas is surviving through its armed resistance and political organs, but it has taken heavy military blows, lost much international legitimacy after the October 7 massacres, and is scrambling for control and support in Gaza itself. The Fatah-led Palestinian Authority has once again demonstrated its total incapacity to aid its people, glued to its role as the occupation’s police force while rapidly slipping into political and financial bankruptcy.
Yet Palestinians have also proven that they carry outsized power in the face of these colossal barriers — and they must exercise it accordingly. While the foremost priority is to ensure the survival of Palestinians in Gaza from missiles, starvation, and disease, it is also vital to assert their political agency at a time when external actors — from the Israeli army to Arab and Western states — are drawing up plans to dictate their fate.
As such, the Beijing unity declaration is a crucial, albeit imperfect, initiative to mobilize around. Although President Mahmoud Abbas and his loyalists are likely to try and thwart reconciliation efforts, many members of Fatah and Hamas are recognizing the urgent need to cooperate in order to restore their legitimacy and preserve Palestinian ownership of their affairs. Palestinian civil society will need to exert pressure on the elites to translate their statements into tangible actions, while insisting on opening avenues for popular and democratic participation.
Efforts to establish a Gaza reconstructioncouncil, led by Palestinians and aided by financial and technical support from abroad, should be elevated to ensure the Strip does not become a playground for foreign interference, neither from the West nor the East. A plan will also need to be drawn up for a national security apparatus that integrates Fatah security forces, Hamas’ police, and other armed groups to have the capacity and credibility to restore order and safety among the population.
Questions of statehood and peace negotiations should not be the priority or precondition of this national program: survival, rehabilitation, and reorganization must take precedence. And international actors must respect that.
But all of this will mean little if Palestinians remain captive to the geopolitical dynamics that have thwarted their cause for a century, and brought the region to the verge of calamity. As much as Western powers may skirt around the problem, a ceasefire in Gaza remains the keystone to regional de-escalation, and Palestinian liberation the blueprint for regional hope.
Palestine is hardly the first epicenter of the Middle East’s regional battles, but it may be the final crack that shatters any semblance of the international order that failed to prevent such a war. What comes next will be defined by what happens in Gaza — and Palestinians must seize the tools to sculpt it.
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Amjad Iraqi is a senior editor at +972 Magazine. He is also an associate fellow with Chatham House’s MENA Programme, a policy member of the think tank Al-Shabaka, and was previously an advocacy coordinator at the legal center Adalah. In addition to +972, he has written for the London Review of Books, The New York Review of Books, The Nation, and The Guardian, among others. He is a Palestinian citizen of Israel, currently based in London.
The six consecutive years of drought in Morocco have been excruciating. The impact on the price of basic food items, such as meat and olive oil, has been striking. In recent years, the rainy season’s onset has been unpredictable, making it difficult to know when to plant, whether rain will come at all, or whether we are in a new trend to which we must adjust.
At the same time, human ingenuity and Moroccan national frameworks for sustainability can reduce the heavy burden of the drought. Morocco is poised to see this struggle through, and how it does can illuminate a pathway to help other nations endure through their own severe water scarcity.
Every essential national framework is in place to encourage people at the local level to adapt and to show their resiliency. In fact, the severity of the drought requiring adaptation could further operationalize Morocco’s already established charters, policies, and programs for people’s participation in natural resource management. Indeed, local communities applying Morocco’s pairing of sustainable development with participatory democratic procedures to address the water crisis could significantly fulfill its national goal of establishing decentralized administrations. After all, the more that sub-national (private-public) partners work together to implement community-identified initiatives, the more that decentralized management systems take practical form.
Morocco’s national investments in desalinization and other large-scale projects that increase and strategically disperse its water supply for regional balance are, by established global standards, exceptional. These investments also epitomize the rational justification of Morocco’s devolutionary path to decentralization, enabling the national level to assist its less advantaged regions. In this regard, led by His Majesty King Mohammed VI, Morocco is well on its way to achieving its goals in an incredibly challenging situation by integrating these initiatives with renewable energy and the nationally recognized urgency.
However, community management of local opportunities and new and restored water infrastructure remain elusive, and the critical widespread rural mobilization is not catalyzed to the extent necessary for greater success.
A sustainable development process that results in locally identified and implemented water systems advancing conservation yet enabling higher production—which is in fact Morocco’s approach—looks like this: in rural places where water scarcity is most seriously acute, women and men gather in different places (as is done traditionally) to examine as individuals and as a group their experienced difficulties in life related to social relationships, work and money outlooks, and health, education, and livelihood opportunities.
By first introspectively looking at their inner hurdles, strengths, and discovery processes determining their future and projects they want most of all, this experience in rural places commonly leads individuals to issues of water for drinking and irrigation combined with sustainable water delivery. A participatory planning approach resting upon the community’s own determination of their development objectives and action plans and their commitment to their projects’ maintenance and long-term durability is the primary factor of sustainability.
In Morocco, this process is not only found in the nation’s municipal charter, which requires long- and short-term plans to be developed by its local council members alongside the jurisdiction’s residents, but is also the central premise of the funding arm of the Moroccan government’s National Initiative for Human Development (NIHD). Further, the feature of decentralized administration of development has a home in the nation’s Constitution, and women being a driving force is codified in the country’s progressively evolving family code (Moudouwana).
This relentless drought, that too shall pass, requires for us in Morocco to add the maximal possible level of investment into the already established Moroccan strategies to community sustainability. This means that we need to train thousands of agricultural extensionists and guardians of the nation’s forests, thousands of university students and rural school teachers, thousands of members of municipal councils and civil society, and community and religious leaders in the methods for facilitating interactive participatory dialogue and activities for personal group empowerment and planning of local priority initiatives. This is especially true of those initiatives that involve water containment and maximization of utility including not just basins, towers, pipes, and drip systems, but also building the hundreds of thousands of terraces and planting hundreds of millions of endemic varieties of trees that will capture water, enable more gradual flow, without losing Morocco’s precious water to runoff (yes, trees conserve water!).
Finance for local community associations and cooperatives for all matters concerning local management of water and its efficient utility should be directed not just from the Ministry of Agriculture, but prioritized by budgets across ministries whenever possible and most especially from the NIHD. Since water infrastructure is by far the costliest locally-prioritized project, NIHD should reduce its 25 percent finance matching requirement from community beneficiaries and co-create project proposals with local groups (since rural illiteracy rates are of national concern), making the NIHD funding accessible to those who seek it.
Essentially, the combination of Morocco’s public frameworks to advance sustainable development, all integrating people’s participation and management, requires facilitators to catalyze and assist the design and implementation of water infrastructure and projects. The procurements necessary for their completion would be enabled by the support and reform of Morocco’s funding mechanisms.
In this way, Morocco through decentralized community-driven water projects in the face of a terrible drought, will powerfully entrench and scale its model, and in so doing inspire other countries on how people’s participation can be the determinant feature that turns a devastating situation into one that is made transformationally better for time to come.
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Dr. Yossef Ben-Meir is President of the High Atlas Foundation in Marrakech, Morocco. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.
Featured image: A new irrigation basin in the Al Haouz province of Morocco, as part of the rebuilding efforts in the aftermath of the 8 September 2023 earthquake (photo by the High Atlas Foundation, 2024).
“Social media went a little bonkers last week when an interview of Texas Children’s Hospital’s Dr. Peter Hotez began circulating with the Big Pharma insider calling for the United Nations and NATO to deploy security forces against ‘anti-vaxxers’ in the United States. Dr. Hotez’s statements first appeared on the YouTube channel of an international pediatric conference that took place in Colombia, but the interview then jumped onto X.
In clips of Hotez’s interview that continue to circulate on X, he claims ‘anti-vaxxers’ caused hundreds of thousands of deaths* in the United States.”
*This is full reality inversion. The Science™ killed untold millions, with its so-called “vaccines” that weren’t actually vaccines. Thanks to the tireless work of independent journalists and whistleblowers from within the industry, thousands and perhaps millions of lives were saved, not taken.
Hotez’s comments (emphasis added):
“What I’ve said to the Biden administration is, the health sector can’t solve this on its own. We’re going to have to bring in Homeland Security, the Commerce Department, Justice Department to help us understand how to do this.
I’ve said the same with…I met with [WHO general director] Dr. Tedros last month…to say, I don’t know that the World Health Organization can solve this on our own. We need the other United Nations agencies—NATO. This is a security problem, because it’s no longer a theoretical construct or some arcane academic exercise. Two hundred thousand Americans died because of anti-vaccine aggression, anti-science aggression.
And so, this is now a lethal force…and now I feel as a pediatric vaccine scientist…it’s important, just as important for me to make new vaccines, to save lives. The other side of saving lives is countering this anti-vaccine aggression.”
The word games these people play in the service of magically morphing from perpetrators into victims is mesmerizing. Opposition to aggressive biomedical terrorism, in defense of human life, somehow becomes “aggression.”
Even if there were such “aggression” on the scale that Hotez claims, it’s wouldn’t be “anti-science” — it would be counterterrorism against criminals who hide behind The Science™. If it must be called “aggression,” it would be “anti-Hotez aggression.”
Science is a method of analysis, not an entity. No one owns it; no one gets to use it as a shield to deflect criticism.
I have no doubt Peter Hotez will require 24/7 personal security for the rest of his miserable life. While I don’t encourage violence against him — because it’s illegal, not because it’s immoral — I can’t say I feel the least bit bad about it.
Among all of the reasons to hope there is a God, I pray there is one at the very least for the sake of damning this demonic butterball to eternal hellfire for the suffering he has unleashed on billions of people worldwide. Death would be too easy of an escape for him.
On a related, if gratuitous, note, here is the shameless fatass discussing his obscene eating habits with Joe Rogan and, coward that he is, hiding behind his autistic child to justify it because, he explains, eating trash together is how they bond — as if the poor kid didn’t have enough problems already.
In honor of Peter Hotez blocking me for sharing this clip of him on The Joe Rogan Experience blaming his autistic daughter for his poor diet, I’m sharing it again.
No matter how bad things get, remember: you could’ve drawn the short end of the birth lottery stick and been condemned to a life as Peter Hotez’s child.
How much does Hotez weigh? What is his body fat percentage? We can only eyeball it, but I’d wager 35 BMI and 40% body fat.
Armageddon Prose Rule For Life: Refuse all health advice from morbidly obese people, even ones in white coats with fancy job titles, as their state speaks either to their ignorance or else a profound lack of self-discipline — neither of which you should accept in a healthcare provider, or any kind of mentor for that matter.
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This article was originally published on the author’s Substack, Armageddon Prose.
Ben Bartee, author of Broken English Teacher: Notes From Exile, is an independent Bangkok-based American journalist with opposable thumbs. He is a regular contributor to Global Research. Follow his stuff via Substack. Also, keep tabs via Twitter.
Despite all the military support NATO has given to the Kiev regime, Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky is not satisfied with the current cooperation and demands even more Western involvement. According to him, the West must lose its fear of escalating the war and take more aggressive initiatives – including direct participation in hostilities. This Ukrainian rhetoric creates pressure for moves that could easily cause the war to go out of control and pass the point of no return.
In a recent statement, Zelensky once again called on his Western partners to take direct and open initiatives in the war, participating on the ground in hostilities.
He wants NATO countries to publicly engage in air defense maneuvers in Ukraine, shooting down Russian missiles and drones using Western systems and aircraft. According to Zelensky, Western countries are “too fearful.” He criticizes NATO members’ caution in escalating the war, urging them to lose their “fear” and act more decisively against Moscow, ignoring any consequences. Zelensky speaks in a completely irresponsible manner, as if a deeper NATO intervention could not pose any risk to the global security architecture.
The Ukrainian president also said that he is already working on some joint initiatives with “neighboring” countries to make it possible for them to expand their participation in the conflict. He hopes that the West will then take deeper steps in the war and help Kiev directly, which would supposedly create chances to “change the game” on the battlefield.
“[Western nations] are always concerned about possible escalation. We are fighting against that. We will work on it (…) [Ukraine is considering] technical possibilities for neighboring nations to use military aircraft against missiles that strike Ukraine,” he said.
Zelensky’s words come amid a recently signed agreement with Poland to allow Polish troops on Ukrainian soil to fire at Russian air rockets. Despite having signed the agreement, the Poles are reluctant to take this step, fearing that the consequences could spiral out of control. Warsaw is waiting for NATO to provide solid security guarantees – or, in other words, to promise intervention in the event of Russian retaliation.
“We need clear cooperation within NATO here, because such actions require joint NATO responsibility (…) We will include other NATO allies in this conversation. So, we treat the matter seriously as open, but not yet finalized,” Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk said when commenting on the deal to provide direct support to Ukraine.
Recently, Zelensky has been betting on a strategy of individual agreements to try to strengthen Ukraine. With NATO having made it clear that it is not interested in going to war with Russia directly, the Ukrainian president has only been able to seek individual deals with some member countries, thus trying to bring them into the conflict without the full participation of the Atlantic alliance. The member countries, however, are aware that if they voluntarily begin to participate in hostilities, NATO will have no obligation to defend them collectively in the event of a Russian response.
NATO’s collective defense clause establishes the alliance’s intervention only in the event of a country being attacked, with no such obligation if the member country is the aggressor state. Intervening in an existing conflict and shooting down aircraft and missiles is literally a matter of “casus belli”. Russia would have the right to respond militarily to such provocations, which would make Poland and any other partner country of Ukraine a legitimate target for Russian forces, without NATO having any obligation to protect them. This obviously creates fear in the states that support Kiev, which is why they are reluctant to comply with Zelensky’s request.
It must be remembered that this entire scenario refers only to a situation of public and open participation. In practice, Western troops have been operating in Ukraine for a long time. Soldiers use the label of mercenaries to supply Kiev’s ranks, mainly in special forces units. Specialized military personnel have been on the ground since 2022 operating Western-supplied defense systems, as well as working in intelligence and strategic planning offices. The war has been direct for a long time, but Zelensky is not satisfied with this. He wants the hostilities to be something more than a de facto reality, becoming something public.
It is possible to see that there is a truly “suicidal” aspect in the actions of the neo-Nazi regime. With no hope of reversing the military situation, Ukraine has no choice but to resort to any form of escalation, even if this carries the risk of an open and nuclear world war. For Kiev, the more internationalized the conflict, the better, since this increases the remote “hope” that NATO will intervene in favor of its proxy.
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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.
“I like to believe that people, in the long run, are going to do more to promote peace than our governments. Indeed, I think that people want peace so much that one of these days governments had better get out of the way and let them have it.” — Dwight Eisenhower
Following the latest orders from the International Court of Justice that Israel halt its military offensive in Rafah, some claimed that while the orders of the Court are of course binding, there’s “no enforcement mechanism.” The Court’s orders were of course the result of South Africa’s invoking the Genocide Convention against Israel and its repeated requests for additional orders from the ICJ.
In fact, there is such an enforcement mechanism — it’s the UN Security Council. The ICJ is a court that issues orders. The UNSC should act like a sheriff which implements those orders.
The problem of course is that the US government has misused its veto power to prevent the UNSC from actually ensuring security, vetoingnumerousresolutionson Palestine since October. And another UNSC draft resolution by Algeria is now in the works and it’s evident that the US government will veto and/or water it down.
But there is a mechanism to address such a situation. It’s called Uniting for Peace, whereby the UN General Assembly asserts itself in a situation threatening the peace when the Security Council won’t or can’t. Uniting for Peace (UNGA Resolution 377, from 1950, PDF) states:
“Resolves that if the Security Council, because of lack of unanimity of the permanent members, fails to exercise its primary responsibility for the maintenance of international peace and security in any case where there appears to be a threat to the peace, breach of the peace, or act of aggression, the General Assembly shall consider the matter immediately with a view to making appropriate recommendations to Members for collective measures, including in the case of a breach of the peace or act of aggression the use of armed force when necessary, to maintain or restore international peace and security. If not in session at the time, the General Assembly may meet in emergency special session within twenty-four hours of the request therefor. Such emergency special session shall be called if requested by the Security Council on the vote of any seven members, or by a majority of the Members of the United Nations”.
The UNGA actually held a vote for a ceasefire in Gaza (153 countries voting yes) last year using United for Peace but it didn’t invoke meaningful collective measures.
Uniting for Peace has been used numerous times, perhaps most successfully in the 1956 war, which actually involved Gaza. In choreographed manner, Israel and then Britain and France invaded Egypt after Gamal Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal. The French and British vetoes at the Security Council of course prevented it from taking appropriate action. Most of the rest of the world — including the US and USSR together — moved to use Uniting for Peace.
This was the first time UN peacekeepers were used. The United Nations Emergency Force was created to ensure the withdrawal of the invading armies.
“In Egypt the United Nations caused the world to turn away from war. Through a series of resolutions, the General Assembly effectively mobilized world opinion to achieve a cease-fire, and France and the United Kingdom shortly agreed to withdraw their forces. The Assembly’s moral pressure played a powerful part in securing the withdrawal of Israeli forces from Egyptian territory in March of this year.”
“Israel kept its troops in Gaza until March 19, 1957, when the United States finally compelled the Israeli Government to withdraw its troops.”
Demands
Legal experts note that similar measures could be taken now.
In fact, Francis Boyle, who represented Bosnia in its Genocide Convention case before the ICJ and who was the leading proponent for a country invoking the Genocide Convention against Israel, always argued that invoking the Convention should be followed by the GA using Uniting for Peace “for enforcement against Israel.” See piece from 2014, during Israel’s attack then which killed over 1,000 Palestinians. Boyle in the news release “New World Court Order Against Israel: Could Uniting for Peace Stop Israel’s Assault?” outlines a number of steps that can be taken and other legal scholars agree, also see a recent interview below (he also recently appeared with me on a recent CodePink talk):
“The U.S. government is continuing to veto and delay at the UN Security Council as Israel violates international law with its bombing in Gaza and other actions. There’s a whole host of things that should be happening under international law that are not being done. This is partly a result of U.S. government obstruction, but there are other factors as well. …
“The General Assembly can use Uniting for Peace to get around the U.S. veto. This is how the U.S. was able to fight the Korean War under the UN flag. The General Assembly can call on member states to impose a trade embargo on Israel, it can even call on member states to organize a military force. It could suspend Israel.”
On March 25, with only five days left in the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, the UNSC finally passed a resolution calling for a ceasefire during Ramadan. But even that meager measure was immediately undermined with the US government claiming the resolution was “non-binding.”
UN whistleblower Craig Mokhiber, who headed the New York office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, said then:
“You could have seen a resolution with teeth, with substance, resolution that included diplomatic, military, political, economic sanctions — not the enforcement of those sanctions, but the call for those sanctions — the deployment of a protection force, the establishment of a tribunal, the establishment of permanent mechanisms, as was the case within the United Nations during apartheid in South Africa. So, there are actions that could be taken here, but the nonveto has slowed action in the General Assembly, while at the same time allowing the United States to claim that, yes, the resolution passed, but somehow it’s not binding.”
Boyle notes that part of the utility of Uniting for Peace is that it has already been invoked in the case of Palestine and can be reconvened at any time; there’s no need to wait for another US government veto.
Demanding Demands
While US government machinations have done a great deal to enable Israel’s carnage, other states who say they are opposed to it have not done what they can.
Global citizens last year successfully urged South Africa to invoke the Genocide Convention against Israel and the South African government stepped up. Then they urged other states to join, which Nicaragua, Columbia, Libya and most recently Mexico have done, with others saying they will.
Now, global citizens can use some of the same resources, like this spreadsheet put together by a volunteer:
“Suspend Israel from participation in its activities as the General Assembly did to the former criminal apartheid regime in South Africa and to the genocidal Yugoslavia;
“Set up an International Criminal Tribunal for Israel in order to prosecute its highest level civilian and military officials for war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide;
“Recommend economic sanctions against Israel;
“Recommend UN members sever diplomatic relations with Israel;
“Admit Palestine as a full fledged UN member state.”
New York State of Mind: From Columbia to Colombia
Activism might take an especially poignant form at UN headquarters in New York City, as well as government buildings around the world. In NYC there have of course been vibrant protests at Columbia University and elsewhere, often attacked by police.
The activist Randy Credico has been driving a truck around NYC, and especially around the UN, showing the gruesome reality of Israel’s carnage.
An immediate task for activists — student and otherwise — in NYC may be to direct efforts at the UN. Protesters who have been targeted and imprisoned will be in an especially strong place to urge representatives from various countries at their UN missions to go beyond the solemn speeches which we have seen many of since October about the horrors being rained down upon Palestinians. What’s needed is maximal action.
“On April 15, 1967, amidst growing opposition to the U.S. war in Vietnam, large-scale anti-war protests were held in New York, San Francisco, and many other cities.
“In New York, the protest began in Central Park, where more than 150 draft cards were burned, and concluded at the United Nations with speeches by Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. and others.” Seemorephotos and video of MLK at the UN protest.
Getting Beyond UN Speeches
Many global political figures have made speeches at the UN and elsewhere denouncing the Israeli and US governments. And that’s good. But not good enough.
Brazil’s President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has scored headline after headline saying that Israel is committing genocide — strangely getting more and better attention than Nicaragua’s remarkable legal action against Germany for enabling Israel’s genocide. And Brazil did finally just recall its ambassador to Israel, but that’s no substitute to movement toward sanctions and other measures which can be furthered by using Uniting for Peace. Nor is Ireland, Norway and Spain finally recognizing Palestine, which most of the world did decades ago.
As of last year, the leaders of Colombia, Türkiye, Bolivia, Venezuela, Jordan, Pakistan, Algeria, Iran, Qatar, Oman and of course the Palestinians themselves all called Israel’s slaughter a “genocide” — yet none invoke the Genocide Convention until South Africa did so on Dec. 29. Now, they are failing to rally and push for maximal action using Uniting for Peace at the UN General Assembly.
“With the torment in Gaza, we believe that this helpless and dysfunctional structure of the United Nations will be questioned all over the world. Look, I am saying very openly: Nothing can continue as business as usual after Gaza.”
Erdoğan and others need to be made to live up to those words.
The US government will loudly proclaim that a General Assembly resolution is not binding. But standing against a unified vote of the world will further isolate the US establishment. And in any case, the US government has claimed that UN Security Council resolutions are not binding when it was convenient for it to do so.
The US and Israeli governments will only be stopped by concerted action coming from different directions. Strong action using Uniting for Peace will empower Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions and other movements.
It may also be a major step in developing a better world system.
Malaysia has put forward proposals to break the grip of a single member of the UNSC’ veto:
“The exercise of the veto by the members of the security council should be regulated to prohibit it from being used unjustifiably or abused by permanent members against the wishes of the majority of member states.”
What better step than the General Assembly coming together forcefully for peace to make that happen?
It’s past time that the various missions to the UN and the associated governments proclaiming their desire for peace get well beyond comfortable posturing and engage in serious movement.
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Amidst the ongoing turmoil in Bangladesh, it is important to remember the extremely important and at the same time extremely tragic events in Bangladesh in 1975.
When Banglabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rehman, the first President of Bangladesh, also called the Father of the Nation and revered by millions as such, was assassinated on August 15, 1975 as a part of the wider efforts to overthrow his popular government, there were several aspects of this murder most foul which hadshocked the world.
All the family members present in the house (together with servants) were killed, including Mujib’s wife, a motherly figure for many beyond the family, daughters in law, three sons, including a 10-year-child, each one shot separately. Another minister with family members was also killed. Other senior-most leaders were sent to prison and killed there. When an army officer involved in the assassination was asked why the 10 year old child was killed, he replied that the idea was to kill the entire family and spare no one.
Sheikh Hasina (daughter of Mujibur Rehman, later Prime minister of Bangladesh for a long time, ousted now) with one sister could escape because in August 1975 she was in W. Germany and from there she came to India.
No killer was punished and no action was taken against them for 21 years. Instead the killers—mostly junior army officers at that time—were given lucrative civil service jobs, several of them in the more prized foreign services. So they could spread out to other parts of the world and lived a life of luxury. Neither the national legal system did anything, nor was anything effective done internationally for ensuring the due punishment to them for so heinous a crime.
It was only after Sheikh Hasina was elected Prime Minister in 1996 that the process of justice started moving. Some of the killers could be been punished. Even then the entire truth could not be uncovered, or at least stated officially. So it is unlikely that the complete truth of the killing of Banglabandhu will ever be known for certainty. The reason is that the complete story has important international aspects which were difficult even for the government led for several years by the daughter of Sheikh Mujibur Rehman to state openly.
In his widely discussed book ‘Trial of Henry Kissinger’ Christopher Hitchens has stated clearly regarding those times of Bangladesh, “ (USA) Ambassador (in Bangladesh) Bosterbecame convinced that his CIA station was operating a back channel without his knowledge. Such an operation would have been meaningless, and pointlessly risky, if it did not extend homeward to Washington where, as is now notorious, the threads of the Forty Committee and National Security Council, were very closely held in one fist.” This fist, as this book explains, was that of Henry Kissinger.
Due to the investigative writings of Lawrence Lifschultz, Kai Bird, Christopher Hitchens and others publishedin reputed newspapers and journals of Bangladesh, India and several othercountries as well, some basic aspects of this heinous crime are now fairly well known.
1. It is fairly well-recognized that some influential persons of Bangladesh establishment, particularly in the army, had outwardly aligned themselves to liberation forces of Mujibur Rehman but had kept their links to Pakistan and religious fundamentalist forces intact, waiting for an opportunity to oust Mujibur Rehman. Ziaur Rehman, a senior army officer, was the most manipulative, shrewd and cruel among these persons and could go to any length to advance his interests.
2. Kissinger who was all powerful in the USA had seen the liberation of Bangladesh as a humiliation for his diplomacy that had to be avenged by ousting Mujib. Therefore he had instructed the CIA Station Chief in Dacca regarding a plan to oust Mujib. As per his mandate the CIA station chief in Dacca, who of course kept his actual assignment hidden under the officiallystated designation of being a political officer, had started exploring who can be useful in ousting Mujib and contacts had been established with various persons including Ziaur.
3. Around 1974-75 these attempts had started taking a more definite turn. The role of Ziaur Rehman was to be the important behind-the-scene role of managing the army at higher levels so that the actual killers could be reassured that no action will be taken against them after the killings and actually they will be rewarded with better opportunities. Talk of such planning was in the air.
4. The USA Ambassador in Dacca Davis Eugene Boster was a man of principles. Hearing these rumors he had given strict instructions that embassy staff is not to be involved in any coup or killing effort and should keep away from any such plotters and plot that may come to their notice. However he had very uneasy feeling that his instructions were not being followed and some sinister work was being done by the CIA station head bypassing him, on the basis of direct contacts at a very high level in the USA. Due to this duality there was a lot of tension in the USA embassy at that time.
5. Hence just a few days before the assassination when the CIA head in Dacca wanted to have a detailed secretive talk with Ziaur Rehman, he avoided a direct meeting and instead shrewdly arranged to meet at a dinner to be hosted by a prominent businessman who was also close to the Mujib family. As the dinner had just these two guests they could find enough time to talk separately in the garden. The businessman did not know the real identity of his American guest of course and later, after the assassination, when he could add two and two together, he deeply regretted the hosting of the dinner (at the prompting of the American guest), but by then it was too late to make any amends.
To this we may add the well-known history of post assassination days—the speedy rise of Ziaur to become the President of Bangladesh, the strong steps taken by Ziaur to move close to the USA and its western allies while distancing Bangladesh from India and the Soviet Union, the strengthening of fundamentalist forces within Bangladesh who had collaborated with Pakistan to kill so many people, the definite moving away from secularism.
The Sheikh Hasina government was fully committed to punishing those persons who were involved in the actual killing, but what is ultimately more important is to know who all were involved in planning the killings and in giving the go-ahead to the killers, for they would not have moved for such a shocking crime without some reassurance of their own safety and reward from higher levels. But as a complete exposure of this has strong international ramifications concerning very powerful forces, it was not possible even for the Bangladesh government led by the daughter of Banglabandhu to acknowledge all the known aspects officially.
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Bharat Dogra is a journalist and author. His recent books include Planet in Peril, A Day in 2071, Man over Machine (Gandhian Ideas for Our Times) and Protecting Earth for Children. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.
Featured image: Banani Graveyard in Dhaka (Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0)
After two weeks of speculation over who would join her at the top of the Democratic Party’s presidential ticket, Vice President Kamala Harris chose Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz on Aug. 6.
Harris made the announcement the morning after she was officially nominated as the Democratic Party’s presidential candidate in a virtual roll call.
“I’m all in. Vice President Harris is showing us the politics of what’s possible. It reminds me a bit of the first day of school,” Walz wrote in a post on social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter. “So, let’s get this done, folks!”
Speaking at their first joint rally in Philadelphia later that day, Harris described Waltz as “a fighter for the middle class” and “a patriot who believes … in the extraordinary promise of America,” as she said she does.
Other candidates who made the vice presidential shortlist include Sen. Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.), Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear, Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker, and Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg.
Shapiro, opening the rally for Harris, praised Walz as “an outstanding governor.”
“I’m going to be working my tail off to make sure we make Kamala Harris and Tim Walz the next leaders of the United States,” Shapiro said.
Tricia Jones, 67, of Philadelphia, told The Epoch Times that she was surprised that Harris chose Walz over her state’s governor, but said she was “extremely happy” about the selection.
“I think Tim Walz has the ability to speak to different populations, especially the youth population, and generate the youth vote,“ she said. ”And also I think he has the talent to be able to speak Midwestern, and that’s really essential in the swing states.”
President Joe Biden greets Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz at Minneapolis-Saint Paul Joint Air Reserve Station on April 3, 2023. (Official White House Photo by Cameron Smith)
From the National Guard to Congress
Walz, 60, began his career in the Army National Guard, serving for 24 years, before becoming a high school teacher in Mankato, Minnesota. He was first elected to Congress in 2006, defeating incumbent Republican Gil Gutknecht in Minnesota’s First Congressional District, and was reelected for another five terms.
He was the highest-ranking enlisted soldier to serve in Congress and was rated the seventh most bipartisan representative in the 114th Congress by the Lugar Center at Georgetown University.
Walz defeated Republican Hennepin County Commissioner Jeff Johnson in 2018 to become the 41st governor of Minnesota.
Swing State, Rural, Progressive Appeal
Political strategist Brian Darling told The Epoch Times that Walz is perceived as someone who can speak to swing state voters, although he hails from Minnesota, which hasn’t voted for a Republican presidential candidate in 52 years. A group of nearly 50 progressive leaders from states throughout the country co-signed a letter on July 30 urging Harris to pass on Shapiro and pick either Walz or Beshear.
The group suggested the Democratic Party needed a vice presidential candidate who would “represent and connect with rural communities that have felt left behind in recent elections.”
They celebrated Walz as a “democratic representative in a rural district before becoming governor” and a perfect candidate to “win back rural voters across the country.”
Walz is seen as popular with Midwestern and union voters and is sometimes highlighted for his military background. His appeal to rural voters and military veterans could help him in blue-wall states such as Michigan and Wisconsin.
In office, Walz spearheaded a plan to provide universal free school meals for students, pushed to get Minnesota on 100 percent “clean electricity” by 2040, and expanded paid leave for workers. The governor also signed a hands-free driving bill into law, which prohibits the use of cellphones while driving.
Republican Response
House Speaker Mike Johnson called Harris and Walz the “most radical left-wing ticket in American history” in a post on X.
“I look forward to highlighting the vast differences between their policies and the America First agenda that President Trump and Senator Vance are fighting for every day,” he said.
In a statement posted to a campaign fundraising website, former President Donald Trump said Walz would support “open borders” immigration policies and “rubber stamp” energy and climate strategies similar to the Green New Deal, a bill Harris co-sponsored while in the U.S. Senate.
Marc Ellinger, chairman of the Republican National Lawyers Association, criticized Walz for his handling of the protests and riots that broke out in 2020 after the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis.
“The American people do not want what Tim Walz allowed to happen in Minneapolis coming to their communities,” Ellinger said.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis echoed Ellinger’s concerns over the 2020 protests after Harris announced her running mate pick.
“We would never allow that to happen in the state of Florida. … That is not a prescription for America to work its way back,” he said in a statement.
Democrats Unite Behind Harris–Walz
President Joe Biden,posting to X, called Harris’s pick a “great decision.”
“The Harris–Walz ticket will be a powerful voice for working people and America’s great middle class,” Biden said, adding that the two will be the “strongest defenders” for personal freedoms and democracy. He called on Americans to “rally behind” the ticket.
The first major decision a party nominee makes is their choice for Vice President. And Kamala Harris has made a great decision in choosing Governor Tim Walz to be her running mate.
I've known Tim Walz for nearly two decades, first during his time in Congress and as Governor. A…
Former President Barack Obama also celebrated the selection of Walz, calling the military veteran an “outstanding governor” who believes government works to serve “not just some of us, but all of us” in a statement on X.
“By selecting Tim Walz to be her vice president from a pool of outstanding Democrats, Kamala Harris has chosen an ideal partner—and made it clear exactly what she stands for,” Obama said.
Like Vice President Harris, Governor @Tim_Walz believes that government works to serve us. Not just some of us, but all of us. That’s what makes him an outstanding governor, and that’s what will make him an even better vice president. Michelle and I couldn’t be happier for Tim… pic.twitter.com/s0RmVs7bGL
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) called Walz a “great choice” in a post on X, calling on Democrats to “get to work” ahead of the election.
“There’s no doubt the Harris/Walz ticket will lead us to victory in November and build a future Americans can be proud of,” Schumer said.
Great choice, @KamalaHarris. Let’s get to work! There’s no doubt the Harris/Walz ticket will lead us to victory in November and build a future Americans can be proud of. https://t.co/HiQCNG0YNW
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Reuters and The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Jacob Burg reports on the state of Florida for The Epoch Times. He covers a variety of topics including crime, politics, science, education, wildlife, family issues, and features. He previously wrote about sports, politics, and breaking news for the Sarasota Herald Tribune.
Lawrence Wilson covers politics for The Epoch Times.
Featured image: Tim Walz and Kamala Harris together in March 2024, prior to the start of the Harris 2024 campaign. Walz would go on to become the campaign’s vice presidential candidate. (From the Public Domain)
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First published on January 29, 2024, revised February 1 and 4, 2024
Update. A New Wave of Criminal Initiatives
The ICJ Judgment of January 26, 2024 assigns the Netanyahu government representing the State of Israel –accused by the Republic of South Africa of genocide against the People of Palestine– with a mandate to “take all measures within its power” to “prevent and punish” those responsible for having committed “Genocidal Acts”. (under Article IV of the Genocide Convention)
Sounds contradictory? What the ICJ judgment intimates –from a twisted legal standpoint– is that Netanyahu’s Cabinet “appointed” to implement the “prevent and punish” mandate cannot be accused ofhaving committed“Genocidal Acts”.
In substance, this contradictory mandate –which was intended to protect the people of Gaza–, provides the Netanyahu government with a pretext to “prevent and punish” Palestinians for allegedly having committed genocidal acts against Israelis. i.e. Netanyahu can not “Prevent and Punish himself”. (See our detailed analysis below in the section on “Fake Justice”). (See The Republic of South Africa’s 84 page document submitted to the ICJ)
Video. Palestine. Fake Justice at the International Court of Justice
The ICJ not only refused to propose a “Cease Fire”, its January 26, 2024 Judgment failed to question the role of the Likud coalition government, which was largely responsible for the planning prior to October 7 of a comprehensive genocide agenda, with the support of Washington.
We had predicted that this vote would contribute to a new wave of criminal initiatives on the part of the Netanyahu government. On January 26, Netanyahu confirmed that the genocide was ongoing and would continue despite the ICJ Judgment.
“We will not compromise on anything less than total victory. That means eliminating Hamas, …”
Israel’s Plan: Mass Starvation
While rhetorical condemnations against Israel prevail, what the peace movement fails to acknowledge is that no legal obstruction or hindrance was formulated by the World Court with a view to curbing the tide of atrocities against Palestinians including an Israeli project to engineer starvation throughout the Gaza Strip.
“Gaza is experiencing mass starvation like no other in recent history. Before the outbreak of fighting in October, food security in Gaza was precarious, but very few children – less than 1% – suffered severe acute malnutrition, the most dangerous kind. Today, almost all Gazans, of any age, anywhere in the territory, are at risk.
There is no instance since the second world war in which an entire population has been reduced to extreme hunger and destitution with such speed. And there’s no case in which the international obligation to stop it has been so clear.”
These facts underpinned South Africa’s recent case against Israel at the international court of justice. The international genocide convention, article 2c, prohibits “deliberately inflicting [on a group] conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part”. (Guardian)
Washington Supports the Genocide. The Issue of “Conflict of Interest” and “Recusal”
What is at stake is the criminalization of the international judicial process. The ICJ has granted Israel with the full endorsement of the U.S. a de facto “green light” to continue and “escalate the genocide”.
Criminal acts are now being committed in the occupied West Bank, coupled with an increase in the deployment of IDF forces.
In Gaza, IDF commanders have ordered soldiers to “Setting fire to homes belonging to non-combatant civilians, for the mere purpose of punishment”,
Barely a few days after the ICJ Judgment, plans were announced to establish a cohesive network of Jewish settlements in Gaza.
The Biden administration responding to Netanyahu has ordered to cut funding to the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), which is slated to trigger famine and the collapse of social services:
UNRWA provides food, shelter, health care, education … for the 5.7 million UNRWA-registered Palestinian refugees in East Jerusalem, the West Bank, Gaza, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria.
Michel Chossudovsky, Global Research, February 1-4, 2024, April 25, 2024
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Part I
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The Criminalization of International Law
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“Fake Justice” at The Hague
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The ICJ “Appoints” Netanyahu to “Prevent” and “Punish”
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Those Responsible for “Genocidal Acts”
by
Michel Chossudovsky
Introduction
While the ICJ has rejected Israel’s attempt to dismiss South Africa’s assertions, the Judgment –which is full of contradictions– is ultimately supportive of the Likud government.
Moreover, no ceasefire was declared by the ICJ with a view to saving lives. Since October 7, amply documented, the atrocities committed against the People of Palestine are beyond description. At least 10,000 children have been killed: “That is one Palestinian child killed every 15 minutes… Thousands more are missing under the rubble, most of them are presumed dead.”
Of significance: The Judgment intimates that the Israeli military rather than the Netanyahu government should be held responsible for committing criminal acts in violation of Article 2 of the Genocide Convention. What this “statement” suggests is that “Netanyahu’s hands are clean”. Nonsense!
There is ample evidence that the genocide was carefully planned well in advance of October 7, 2023 by Netanyahu’s Cabinet.
There is a command structure within the Israeli military. Israeli soldiers and pilots obey the “illegal orders” emanating from the Netanyahu government.
The ICJ is under Washington’s Spotlight.Let us be under no illusions, the U.S has firmly endorsed Israel’s criminal undertaking:
“The US said the ICJ ruling was consistent with Washington’s view that Israel has the right to take action, in accordance with international law, to ensure the October 7 attack cannot be repeated.
“We continue to believe that allegations of genocide are unfoundedand note the court did not make a finding about genocide or call for a ceasefire in its ruling and that it called for the unconditional, immediate release of all hostages being held by Hamas,” a State Department spokesperson said. Al Jazeera, January 26, 2024, emphasis added)
The President of the ICJ Joan E. Donoghue was a legal advisor to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton under the Obama administration. Joan Donoghue takes her instructions from Washington.
Moreover, the conduct of the genocide is a joint Israel-US endeavor with US forces involved in Israel’s combat units.
Nobody in the media nor in the peace movement has underscored the fact that the President of the ICJ is de facto in “conflict of interest”.
“The anger of the World has been pacified for a while with the false celebration of a fake “victory” at The Hague. The US chief judge at ICJ must be laughing.
Israel’s genocide will continue while the US and its chief justice at the ICJ keep the world at bay for very long with new false words and delaying actions.” (Karsten Riise, Global Research emphasis added)
Video: Palestine. “Fake Justice” and Genocide
Michel Chossudovsky with Caroline Mailloux, Lux Media
The Crimes Committed by Israel are “Genocidal In Character”
According to The Republic of South Africa —referring to Article II of the Genocide Convention–, the crimes committed by the State of Israel “are genocidal in character because they are intended to bring about the destruction of a substantial part of the Palestinian national, racial and ethnical group. …”:
“The acts in question include killing Palestinians in Gaza, causing them serious bodily and mental harm, and inflicting on them conditions of life calculated to bring about their physical destruction.
… That intent is also properly to be inferred from the nature and conduct of Israel’s military operation in Gaza, having regard inter alia to Israel’s failure to provide or ensure essential food, water, medicine, fuel, shelter and other humanitarian assistance for the besieged and blockaded Palestinian people, which has pushed them to the brink of famine.
The acts are all attributable to [The state of] Israel, which has failed to prevent genocide and is committing genocide in manifest violation of the Genocide Convention. … “ (emphasis added)
Persons committing genocide or any of the other acts enumerated in article III shall be punished, whether they are constitutionally responsible rulers [politicians], public officials or private individuals
The main actors behind the genocide against Palestine are the “Constitutionally Responsible Rulers”,namely “civilian politicians”.
In the Judgment –referring to Article IV— (see below) the ICJ calls upon the Netanyahu government acting on behalf of the State of Israel, to prevent and punish those individuals who allegedly committed crimes of genocide:
“The State of Israel shall, in accordance with its obligations under the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, in relation to Palestinians in Gaza, take all measures within its power to prevent the commission of all acts within the scope of Article II of this Convention. (ICJ, emphasis added)
The exact text of the motion is:
“The State of Israel shall take all measures within its power to prevent and punish the direct and public incitement to commit genocide in relation to members of the Palestinian group in the Gaza Strip;…”
What the ICJ judgment intimates is that the “Constitutionally Responsible Rulers (CRRs)” acting on behalf of the State of Israel (identified in Article IV), namely the members of Netanyahu’s Cabinet are “Innocent”. They cannot “prevent and punish” themselves.
And that is where “Fake Justice” comes in
“Constitutionally Responsible Rulers (CRRs)” Netanyahu, Galant, Ben-Gvir, Katz, Smotrich, et al are the architects of the Genocide. Yet they have been assigned by the ICJ with a mandate “To Prevent and Punish the Direct and Public Incitement to Commit Genocide…” (See text of Motion above).
The CRRs within Netanyahu’s Cabinet acting on behalf of the State of Israel-– who carefully planned prior to October 7, 2023 a genocidal attack against the People of Palestine have been “appointed” by the ICJ to “take all measures within its power” to “prevent” and “punish”“public officials”, “private individuals”, members of the Military who are carrying out acts of “direct and public incitement to commit genocide”.
Prevention and Punishment is not contemplated against Israel’s Netanyahu Clique of CRRs “who have blood on their hands.”
What does this imply?
De facto the main architects of the genocide are the “Constitutionally Responsible Rulers (CRRs)” —referred to in Article IV of the Genocide Convention.— (It’s as if the Category “Constitutionally Responsible Rulers” had been removed from Article IV of the Genocide Convention).
Under present circumstances, this “take all measures within its power” concept is tantamount to the criminalization of International Law: The CRRs “Criminals in High Office” (Netanayahu et al) are invited to take law enforcement in their own hands.
The option to entrust Netanyahu’s Cabinet with the “Prevent and Punish” assignment was a decision of the World Court. The 17 Judges could have demanded that the Israeli government cease all genocidal actions. They could also have recommended that the “prevent and punish” mandate be assigned to a United Nations body, including the UN Security Council.
The Netanyahu government has ordered the most hideous crimes against the People of Palestine.
And now the World Court has instructed a criminal government led by Netanyahu (who has a criminal record) to “take all measures within its power” to “prevent” and “punish” “public officials, “private individuals” (Article IV) as well as combatants within the Israeli military.
Visibly, the prevent and punish requirement is not meant to apply to the so-called “Constitutionally Responsible Rulers (CRRs)”, namely “civilian politicians” (i.e. “the good guys”) namely the “REAL CRIMINALS” in blatant contradiction of Article IV.
It’s an absurd proposition. It unfortunately disallows Netanyahu to “prevent and punish himself”.
And this is really what is required under international law.
Ceasefire Denied
While the Court acknowledges that criminal acts may have been committed by the State of Israel, it categorically refuses South Africa’s provisional demands including a “Ceasefire”, which would have served to interrupt at least temporarily the ongoing atrocities against the People of Palestine.
Does this not constitute a “criminal act” by the ICJ, which indelibly will result in countless deaths of Palestinian civilians? Or is a “mistake” in the formulation of the Motion?
What this signifies is that Netanyahu’s Genocide (from a strategic angle) is virtually unscathed, while sustaining rhetorical and meaningless condemnations against the State of Israel.
Throughout history, wars and war crimes have invariably been instigated by “civilian politicians”.
The Israeli military has been “Obeying Illegalorders” emanating from a government which is firmly committed to the conduct of genocide against the People of Palestine.
And now the IJC Judgment enables Israel’s “Constitutionally Responsible Rulers”, namelycivilian politicians to place the blame on the Israeli Military.
In a bitter irony, the ICJ’s “prevent and punish mandate” will allow the Netanyahu clique to reinforce their stranglehold on the Israeli protest movement as well as target Israelis who have taken a firm stance against the genocide.
The Road Ahead: Resistance within the Armed Forces. “Disobey Illegal Orders. Abandon the Battlefield”
There is resistance within the Armed Forces. Voices within Israel’s military have spoken out against the Netanyahu government. There is a Protest Movement in Israel.
In response to the ICJ slanted decision, what is required is to initiate a Worldwide campaign entitled:
The objective is to undermine the conduct of the genocide as well reverse the course of history.
It is a proposal which sofar has not been the object of debate by anti-war activists in solidarity with Palestine.
Principle IV of the Nuremberg Charter defines the responsibility of combatants “to refuse the orders of Government or a superior … “provided a moral choice [is] possible“.
Based on the Nuremberg Charter, what is required is a campaign encouraging:
Israeli, American and NATO Combatants to “Disobey Unlawful Orders” and “Abandon the Battlefield”.
The Campaign would focus on making that“moral choice” possible, namely to enable enlisted Israeli, American, and NATO service men and women to “Abandon the Battlefield”.
The Abandon the Battlefield campaign will in large part be waged in Israel. In regards to Israel, already there are unfolding divisions in the IDF command structures, political divisions, coupled with a mass protest movement against Netanyahu. The use of a False Flag justification to wage the Genocide is amply documented.
IDF soldiers and commanders must be informed and briefed on the significance of Nuremberg Principle IV.
Inasmuch as the U.S. and its allies are waging a hegemonic war in major regions of the World, Abandon the Battlefield should be a call for action by the anti-war movement Worldwide.
Now let me turn my attention to Nuremberg Principle VI, which defines the crimes punishable under The Nuremberg Charter.
Nuremberg Charter. Principle VI
Both Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu as well as President Joe Biden are responsible for “war crimes”, “crimes against peace” and “crimes against humanity” as defined under Principle VI of the Nuremberg Charter:
The crimes hereinafter set out are punishable as crimes under international law:
(a) Crimes against peace:
(i) Planning, preparation, initiation or waging of a war of aggression or a war in violation of international treaties, agreements or assurances; (ii) Participation in a common plan or conspiracy for the accomplishment of any of the acts mentioned under (i).
(b) War crimes:
Violations of the laws or customs of war which include, but are not limited to, murder, ill- treatment or deportation to slave-labour or for any other purpose of civilian population of or in occupied territory, murder or ill-treatment of prisoners of war, of persons on the seas, killing of hostages, plunder of public or private property, wanton destruction of cities, towns, or villages, or devastation not justified by military necessity.
(c) Crimes against humanity:
Murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation and other inhuman acts done against any civilian population, or persecutions on political, racial or religious grounds.
“The fact that a person [e.g. Israeli, U.S.soldiers, pilots] acted pursuant to order of his [her] Government or of a superior does not relieve him [her] from responsibility under international law, provided a moral choice was in fact possible to him [her].”
Let us make that “moral choice” possible, to enlisted Israeli, American, and NATO service men and women.
Let us call upon Israeli and American soldiers and pilots “to abandon the battlefield”, as an act of refusal to participate in a criminal undertaking against the People of Gaza.
While it is predicated on international law, its conduct does not require the political rubber stamp of the ICJ. It is part of a grassroots campaign in Israel and the Middle East as well as Worldwide.
Solidarity With Palestine
Let us have tears to our eyes in solidarity with the People of Palestine, in building a mass movement Worldwide, which confronts the ongoing slaughter before our very eyes.
Let us recall The Christmas Truce of 1914, more than 109 years ago:
“Something happened in the early months of the “War to End All Wars” that put a tiny little blip of hope in the historical timeline of the organized mass slaughter that is war. The event was regarded by the professional military officer class to be so profound and so important (and so disturbing) that strategies were immediately put in place that would ensure that such an event could never happen again.” (Dr. Gary G. Kohls)
The men learned in many ways that the official enemy was in fact not the real enemy, that the soldiers on the other side were human beings just like themselves.” (Dr. Jacques Pauwels)
Let It Happen Again
Today, we are “fraternizing” and acting in solidarity Worldwide with the People of Palestine against the hegemonic agenda of the U.S. and it allies which are waging an all-out war against humanity.
Principle IV of the Nuremberg Charter defines the rights of soldiers and pilots who have the responsibility to Disobey Illegal Orders and Abandon the Battlefield
Nuremberg Principle IV is not only a “Legal Text”, It is A Guiding Light in a Worldwide campaign against Acts of Genocide.
Here’s how everything unfolded from the start of this summer’s initially peaceful student-led protests against the judiciary’s reimposition of a contentious government job quota system to the spree of urban terrorism that ultimately forced the country’s long-serving leader to flee for her life to India.
Casual news consumers don’t know much about Bangladesh apart from it being a South Asian country that just experienced a regime change, but it’s also the eighth-most-populous country with one of the world’s largest textile industries and a highly geostrategic position. Bangladesh borders India’s Northeast States that are connected to the “mainland” by the “Chicken’s Neck”, which is only 12-14 miles wide at its narrowest, and some of these same states have been troubled by ethno-separatist unrest for years.
Former long-serving Bangladeshi Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina was a de facto Indian ally despite cultivating close ties with China and the US.
She shared Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s vision of regional development and thus allowed his country transit rights across hers for facilitating trade with its Northeast States. Moreover, Hasina prevented her country from being used by related militant groups that are designated by Delhi as terrorists, and she also cracked down on religious radicals too.
Although the Bangladeshi economy rapidly grew under her leadership, she resorted to a heavy hand to maintain domestic stability, which upset the increasingly large number of Islamist-inclined youth who considered her government’s legal cases against the opposition to be “anti-democratic lawfare”. Controversial tactics by the security services inadvertently worsened domestic dissent and ultimately led to targeted sanctions by the US, which was already becoming unhappy with her multipolar balancing act.
The past 14 months saw the worsening of her ties with America after she accused it of fomenting regime change against her in April 2023, followed by Russia expressing concerned in November that it might orchestrate a Color Revolution during January 2024’s elections that the opposition boycotted. Less than three months ago, Hasina strongly implied that the US was the Western country that she accused of plotting to carve out a Christian proxy state in the region after she rejected its demand for a naval base.
Shortly thereafter, the High Court reinstated the contentious government job quota system in late June that had been declared illegal in 2018, which served as the trigger event for mobilizing a large segment of the population to take to the streets against that decision. This movement was initially driven by students but was quickly co-opted by opportunistic members of the opposition, Western-cultivated elements of civil society, and religious radicals, which culminated in her resignation and flight this week:
The preceding analyses document the regime change sequence that took place, which continued after the quota system was scaled back and succeeded due to the rioters gambling that the armed forces wouldn’t resort to lethal force to prevent large numbers of them from storming the parliament and her palace. Average Bangladeshis unconnected to the opposition, religious radicals, and foreign forces also participated in them after being enraged at decontextualized footage of state-on-“protester” violence.
This tactic is characteristic of Color Revolutions and was employed by violent rioters, who many suspect to be the opposition Bangladesh Nationalist Party’s (BNP) banned Jamaat-e-Islami allies, provoking the security services into using lethal force as a last resort to restore safety to the streets. Those individuals were joined the unrest after seeing this footage became unwitting “human shields” for deterring the security services from replicating the aforementioned means out of fear of killing peaceful protesters.
Although social media was banned and a curfew imposed, many still came across that footage and an uncontrollable number of angry citizens then spilled into the streets, thus forcing the security services into the dilemma that was just described and leading to them standing down. Hasina fled once it became clear that she couldn’t count on the security services to protect her and uphold the government that she led. Retributive political violence and attacks against the Hindu minority then followed.
India is concerned about the possibility of Bangladesh reverting to the unfriendly country that it used to be under the BNP, which could see it once again host Delhi-designated terrorist groups as part of a major proxy war against this emerging Great Power. Pakistan’s hatred of India is well known, China is embroiled in a bitter border dispute with India, and the US is furious that India won’t submit to being a vassal by dumping Russia and fighting China on its behalf, so all three have reasons to punish it in this way.
Their interests could therefore converge in Bangladesh to pose serious threats to India’s domestic security and territorial integrity. In that worst-case scenario, the combined effect of their policies – whether coordinated or independently promulgated – would be to sabotage India’s rise as a Great Power, thus representing a major power play in the New Cold War. It’s too early to say whether that’ll happen, but it also can’t be ruled out by India either, which is closely monitoring this neighboring crisis.
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This article was originally published on the author’s Substack, Andrew Korybko’s Newsletter.
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.
Featured image: People cheering in front of prime minister’s office after her resignation (Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0)
Jews are not a monolith. There are plenty of Jews who abhor the racism and violence of the Zionist faction of Jewry. Yet, many uninformed people consider Zionism to express the ethos of Jewishness.
In this era of internet and instant communication, information on the monstrous crimes of Zionism is available for people who make an effort to be aware. Take that information and apply open-minded skepticism. Ask whether the evidence substantiates the information and its narrative.
Israeli Jews are carrying out genocide against Palestinians (something that has been ongoing for decades). Eliminating a grouping of people from existence is heinous enough, but there is also the horrific matter of what happens to the victims of Zionists before they are killed.
Redacted interviewed Dan Cohen of Uncaptured Mediato report a bloodlust where Israelis are torturing and raping Palestinian prisoners, and that Israeli protestors are in the streets claiming Israelis have a right to rape these prisoners.
Cohen is in Israel telling of “the shock and trauma and hate and racism pulsing through the veins of Israeli society ….” This is exemplified by the fact that the Israeli military-run prison with its Palestinian captives:
…is not about gaining intelligence, at all. It is not about finding Israeli captives in Gaza, at all. What happens there [in the prisons] is about the most cruel punishment. It is torture with electric shock, beating, severe beatings, where if you talk to someone you are beaten until your teeth break, until your bones break, if you fall asleep, these kinds of things. People are, as we know, anally raped. Prisoners are killed. There are many who are murdered. They just never come out…. These are just [Palestinian] civilians, cause all their fighters are underground. So they take civilians from the neighborhoods, and just take them there and torture them and kill them, even top doctors. I think it is 39 medical professionals from Gaza have ah, I believe, been killed in there… (5:30 to 7:15)
Non-Zionist Jews, Jews opposed to the crimes of Zionists, must speak out against the evil, otherwise their silence may be criticised as complicity. The non-Zionist Jews are faced with the challenge of how to get their humanist message widely disseminated in opposition to Zionism.
One grouping of Jews that opposes Zionism and supports Palestinian rights is Jewish Voices for Peace. Rebecca Vilkomerson and Rabbi Alissa Wise, two leaders and former staff of Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) have written Solidarity Is the Political Version of Love: Lessons from Jewish Anti-Zionist Organizing (Haymarket Books, 14 May 2024), which covers the period from 2010-2020.
Omar Barghouti, Palestinian human rights defender and cofounder of the non-violent Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement for Palestinian rights, wrote the foreword to the book. Barghouti notes the difference of JVP from other progressivist Jewish organizations:
Instead of the typical Jewish American PEP (progressive except on Palestine) culture, JVP has helped a PIP culture—progressive including on Palestine …
In the face of overwhelming Jewish American support for Zionism and Israeli apartheid, JVP has insisted on growing the anti-Zionist movement to dismantle the myth of Israel’s representation of all Jews and, along with it, the complicity of the Jewish Zionist establishment in securing mainstream support in the US for funding, arming, and enabling Israel’s regime of oppression.
As Solidarity Is the Political Version of Love relates, JVP has grown and morphed over time from the “first mass Jewish civil disobedience in the Rotunda of the US Congress” to later “large-scale protests at a level none of us can remember.” (p 2) “JVP grew larger as it shifted to the left and altered the public narrative about Palestinian liberation while creating a space for Judaism beyond Zionism.” (p 2-3) JVP did not declare itself anti-Zionist until early in 2019; however, it was noted that the proportion of anti-Zionist members and staff has grown over time. (p 13)
When Haymarket Books shared the e-galley, I was informed that the authors are available for interviews. With that in mind, seven days ago I sent some questions.
The first question was based on Vilkomerson and Wise’s definition of solidarity: “as when people outside a specific community dedicate themselves to supporting the rights and aspirations of that community, taking direction on what actions to take from the community itself.” (9) Since solidarity is the leitmotif for the book, why is it that JVP identifies as Jewish voices rather than, for example, Human Voices for Peace? The name seems to set limits on solidarizing with non-Jews within its organization?
However, there is something of a work around in the book: “What did it mean to be a member if you weren’t Jewish? … So, we relied on people self-identifying as members and didn’t spend time gatekeeping peoples’ Jewishness.” (p 55) “We believe movement building is the only way to realize the world all people deserve.” (p 80)
I also asked about the propriety of donating to JVP as opposed to donating to Palestinian movements.
The Zionist NGO Monitor complains that “JVP’s funding sources are not transparent.” NGO Monitor further criticizes JVP, saying that the JVP “regards the organized Jewish community as its ‘enemy’ and ‘opponent,’ …. The strategy, as stated by JVP’s executive director Rebecca Vilkomerson, is to create ‘a wedge’ within the American Jewish community to generate the impression of polarization over Israel.” For those who are opposed to Zionist oppression of Palestinians such criticism ought to be considered as a badge of honor by the JVP.
Moreover, JVP criticizes
Israel’s ongoing apartheid policies of administrative detention—holding Palestinians without charge or trial—left Palestinians stranded in prison indefinitely. At the same time, home demolitions are a daily occurrence, with more than nine thousand structures destroyed since 2009.1 In addition to the daily indignities faced by Palestinians at checkpoints, Jewish-only settlements proliferated in the West Bank, siphoning water, developing a network of Jewish-only roads connecting the settlements to Israel, and bringing into Palestinian communities thousands of armed settler vigilantes, who regularly harassed and violently attacked Palestinians, vandalizing their property with the blessing of the Israeli army, felling ancient olive trees, and shooting at Palestinians that need to cross Jewish-only roads to reach their farms or graze their flocks. In Gaza, the situation became even more dire for Palestinians after Jewish settlers were removed in 2005, when Israel turned Gaza into an open-air prison, maintaining an illegal siege by controlling what goes in and out by air, land, and sea. (p 6)
Sounds good, sounds progressivist.
I wondered about the JVP stance on two-state vs one-state. The authors wrote, “… as a group of people in the US it was not JVP’s place to determine the number of states at all, but instead to do what we could to support a liberatory future.” (p 14)
That’s fine. But what about whether Palestine should be recognized as a state, something Israel is vehemently opposed to? An online search reveals that JVP often refers to the “state of Palestine.” This earned JVP further scorn from the NGO Monitor.
JVP takes many progressivist positions.
JVP acknowledges overwhelming Jewish communal support for Israel but sees its role as “just one prong in a multifaceted movement, led by Palestinians in the US and Palestine.” (p 16)
JVP questions its own Jewish composition: “Ashkenazi Jews colluded with and assimilated into whiteness, Jewish voices (whether Ashkenazi or not) were routinely privileged above Palestinian voices” (p 40) and its hierarchical structure. (p 61)
JVP recognizes “the weaponization of antisemitism, specifically in connection with anti-Zionism,” (p 99) and sees solidarity as the key to overcoming the Zionism that Palestinians endure drives them into isolation from violent domination. (p 102) “JVP, from the very start, has been guided by the exact opposite principle, that writ large we live in an interdependent world, that we all deserve safety, and that the way to gain safety is through solidarity.” (p 103)
Paradoxically, solidarity in a worthy cause might require splittism. Vilkomerson and Wise write, “Decoupling Jews from Israel and Jewishness from Zionism are therefore essential to the struggle against real antisemitism, toward realizing Jewish safety, and, of course, for Palestinian liberation.” (p 108)
The authors see solidarity as an expression of love:
Whatever your version of solidarity, may you practice it as an expression of love. A love that manifests as raging at the world as it is, and at the same time developing smart, intentional plans to realize the world as it should be. (p 215)
The ways in which Israel’s assault on Palestinians in Gaza exceeds the horror of nearly all wars in recent memory are too long to list: more children killed, more journalists killed, more bombs dropped, more homes destroyed, more internally displaced people, more targeting of hospitals, schools, mosques, churches and refugee camps. That’s because it’s simply not a war – it’s a genocide. (p 218)
The genocide of 186,000 Palestinians (likeliest a depressingly higher number in the three-and-a-half weeks since the Lancet article was published), requires an utmost expression of love through solidarity with the entirety of humanity. This comes through clearly and forthrightly in Solidarity Is the Political Version of Love.
There are few (or none) sizeable groupings of people who form a monolith. JVP is one Jewish grouping that deviates from Zionist Jews by upholding morality in solidarity with a shared humanity.
Israel is not alone in its evil. It is backed by governments in the West. The US is a staunch supporter of Zionism, funding it, arming it, and providing media and diplomatic cover for Israel. It points to the sine qua non of a monolith of humans united by love for fellow humans. This guiding principle would elevate humanity to the stratosphere.
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“The opening ceremony of the Olympics felt like the closing ceremony of humanity”, posted on “X” (former Twitter) by @KimDotcom.
The Satanic symbolism of the inauguration of the French Olympics on 26 July 2024, raised many questions on interpreting them. Those who are behind these diabolical symbols of course knew what they were doing.
In brief, as the “Satanic Cult”, has on many prior occasions before, they showed us, the People, what they have already done with us, how far they have advanced in their evil endeavor, and that we are at “the final stage of the apocalypse” as depicted in the Book of Revelation. With gory details, blasphemous symbolism, a gross display of the United Nations 2030 Woke agenda, no end, they demonstrated the end phase of the Fourth Horseman of Death.
Is it “coincidence”, or excessive symbolism, that the entire opening ceremony was under alluvial rain, representing the biblical legendary and symbolic Deluge – as perhaps the only event capable of salvaging humanity?
We know, geoengineering can produce, as well as stop rain, wherever it’s needed – and of course much worse.
Each of the horsemen represents a different facet of the apocalypse: conquest, war, famine, and death. The one displayed at the Olympics Opening was the Fourth Horseman of Death, portrayed by the devil on a horse, draped in an Olympic flag (see picture).
The other three horsemen represent different facets of the apocalypse: conquest, war, famine; culminating in the last one: death.
Much has been written already about the satanic opening ceremony. Certainly, much more than Macron, one of the co-masters of the Diabolical Cult could have ever imagined. That shows how far removed from humanity, from those whom “they” say elected them, they really are.
Among recent articles trying to explain and analyze the strange Opening of the French Olympic Games is my previous article entitled:
The entire opening ceremony was filmed while Paris was under pouring rain – including a blasphemous Last Supper, the setting of Leonardo da Vinci – but with full LGBTQ+ label and characters, with a fat, big-breasted trans-lady in the middle, in Jesus’ place, according to the famous da Vinci painting. Also appearing, a blue gnome dancing with a stiff penis (see picture).
However, more analysis of the displayed dismal allegories may be of the order.
The symbolism is almost perfect. What do we expect?
Are they telling us that our last hour has wrung? The three initial phases of the Apocalypse have come and gone and some are being executed in parallel with each other – Conquest, War, Famine… while we are indeed entering the fourth – meaning Death. This, the Fourth Horseman, is meant to tell us.
Conquest – almost without humanity noticing, we have been taken over – by the Globalists, those who are pretending to be at the point of establishing a One World Government and a One World digital currency – exerting full control.
No kidding. We are not far from this moment. Wake up People!
War – there is no need even to talk about wars. They are everywhere. All of them initiated in one way or another by the “Deep State”.
First, create unrest by terrorism, infiltrated into a country by the “Satanic Cultists” which include the upper echelons of the financial establishment and the multibillionaire foundations, then invade, create an endless war, never to win – and so the industry that fuels it, will earn trillions of fake money.
We, the People, work hard for – while the Zuckerbergs et al – buy yachts worth half a billion dollars, irrespective of the CO2 emissions they tell us, the People, to reduce to zero. Zuckerberg is founder, chairman and CEO of Meta, former Facebook, one of the tech-giants.
The latest wealth report, just out, indicates that 1.5% of the world population owns 47.5% of the world’s wealth.
Why is that important?
Because Wars, the War Industry, is one of the largest generators of this fake wealth, wealth by death, exactly what the Fourth Horseman has in store for us: a 1.3 trillion dollar nuclear weapons program.
Wars are also supported directly or indirectly by the tech corporations, by “Cyber Valley”, formerly called Silicon Valley.
Famine– we are being plunged into an artificial famine, by the false climate change agendaand the overall lie that has been drilled into the human brain, it seems to be irreversible. The “smartest” people believe in it.
“The United States has joined 12 other nations in signing a World Economic Forum (WEF) agreement that seeks to engineer global famine by destroying the agriculture industry.
According to the agreement, which was drawn up by the WEF and the United Nations (UN), food production is causing “global warming” and must be eliminated.
To “save the planet” from “climate change,” the globalists insist, farms must be shut down across the world”
So, CO2 emissions and other greenhouse gases —like farting cows— are causing the manmade climate change, against any evidence, just propaganda, and we, the People, swallow it. And if We, the People, do not stop it, climate change will kill us all.
No word about geoengineering the weather, the climate – so we believe in the “climate” hoax.
We are blind, cannot see the white crisscrossing chemtrails on the sky, cannot see that these all-destructive horrendous bush and forest fires are made by Direct Energy Weapons (DEW) – another means of doing away with humanity.
Human agriculture, the very base for our lives, giving us the daily nutrition we need, is being killed by the “Satanic Cult”.
Farmland is being bought up, for example by the Bill Gates Foundation, thus, preventing it from being used to produce food.
Bill Gates is currently the largest single farmland owner of the USA.
Why is this important to know? Because it is all connected – causing famine and misery, and connected to the horrendous symbolism of the Olympic Openings.
We let it happen. It is our fault, as we are being told. Our Christian culture has brought us up with guilt. We are guilty before we are even born — so, yes, we must suffer.
Some protest, but most don’t. Instead, they prepare themselves for a diet on bugs and maybe grass—a diet towards famine leading directly to the Fourth Horseman of Death.
In a July 8 announcement, the Singapore Food Agency (SFA) approved the 16 insects, which include silkworm pupa and mealworm, “With immediate effect.”
“The United Nations Food And Agricultural Organisation (FAO) continues to promote insect consumption as an environmentally friendly way to get protein in your diet — for both humans and their livestock,”
Proponents of insects as food for humans, including the FAO, argue this will help combat climate change, as insects produce a smaller carbon footprint than traditional livestock. But critics challenge this view.”
Does the blasphemously displayed Last Supper of transvestites and gays suggest that death and extinction is on the horizon, as they do not procreate?
Is the Woke agenda just one more step to human extinction?
Death – That is what they want for most of us. A small group of “underlings” cum transhumans, commanded by 5G and soon 6G – no chips needed – will be their slaves.
These quasi-robots are happy owning nothing. In case they become unhappy, they can be extinguished remotely – when they become problems, or are no longer needed.
Video with Peter Koenig. Preceded by Interview with Klaus Schwab (RTS.ch)
That’s it, folks!
They have been very honest, their Olympics symbolism has clearly shown us where we are — they came out in the open with their verdict: See what we can do – there is no return.
Wake up People. It is never too late. There is never a moment of NO RETURN
Never forget this simple phrase: Together we can.
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Peter Koenig is a geopolitical analyst and a former Senior Economist at the World Bank and the World Health Organization (WHO), where he worked for over 30 years around the world. is the author of Implosion – An Economic Thriller about War, Environmental Destruction and Corporate Greed; and co-author of Cynthia McKinney’s book “When China Sneezes: From the Coronavirus Lockdown to the Global Politico-Economic Crisis” (Clarity Press – November 1, 2020).
Peter is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG). He is also a non-resident Senior Fellow of the Chongyang Institute of Renmin University, Beijing.
A loucura russofóbica e o neonazismo estão a tornar-se fenômenos cada vez mais preocupantes nos países alinhados com o Ocidente – especialmente nos Estados Bálticos. Além de criarem políticas de apartheid contra os russos étnicos, estes estados estão a tornar completamente pública e aberta a sua admiração por figuras históricas do nazismo, mostrando como a ideologia hitlerista está em ascensão.
Recentemente, as autoridades estônias deram um passo sério no seu revisionismo histórico pró-nazista ao inaugurarem um monumento dedicado a dois veteranos da Waffen-SS. Os homenageados, Major Georg Sooden e Tenente Raul Juriado, serviram na 20ª Divisão de Voluntários SS da Estônia durante a Segunda Guerra Mundial, participando da Frente Oriental contra a União Soviética. Ambos foram eliminados pelo Exército Vermelho durante o avanço soviético no verão de 1944, na região de Narva.
Houve uma cerimónia pública com a presença de militares estônios e ativistas fascistas. Há vídeos na internet que mostram o momento em que o monumento foi inaugurado por oficiais uniformizados da Estônia – o que mostra que foi uma iniciativa estatal e não um mero ato de indivíduos independentes. Durante a cerimónia, Vallo Reimann, presidente do conselho local, afirmou que o objetivo da iniciativa é homenagear os soldados que morreram na “Guerra da Independência da Estônia”.
Na mesma linha, Meelis Kiili, um major-general aposentado e deputado, disse: [A Estônia] irá lembrar-se de toda uma geração de homens e mulheres cujas vidas foram ceifadas pelo terror bolchevique (…) [Nós] devemos preservar a nossa liberdade ( …), falam estônio e transmitem o espírito estônio.”
É importante ressaltar que o monumento foi colocado na cidade de Johvi, condado de Ida-Viru, área de maioria étnica russa. Isto constitui claramente um insulto deliberado à população local, que revela o nível de desrespeito demonstrado pelas autoridades estônias para com os cidadãos de língua russa. Além do apartheid e da discriminação, os russos são agora forçados a coexistir com cerimónias públicas em homenagem aos assassinos que mataram os seus familiares durante a Grande Guerra Patriótica.
É interessante notar que os Estônios já adotaram o termo “Guerra da Independência” para se referirem aos crimes nazistas contra cidadãos soviéticos. Além de “suavizar” a sua própria história e “revisar” o passado, a Estônia está literalmente a dizer que os nazistas lutaram pela “independência da Estônia” durante a guerra, o que é uma mentira propagandística que pode ser facilmente refutada. É preocupante saber que a juventude estônia está a ser educada em escolas com este tipo de narrativa, aprendendo a admirar os criminosos genocidas nazistas e a odiar os russos, acreditando que a intenção dos alemães era “ajudar” os estônios e não promover uma massacre étnico contra todos os povos soviéticos.
O futuro das relações entre a Estônia e a Rússia será provavelmente catastrófico. A próxima geração de estônios será provavelmente composta por pessoas que odeiam fanaticamente a Rússia e simpatizam com os nazistas. Algo semelhante ao que está a acontecer na Ucrânia também está a desenvolver-se nos países bálticos e noutros antigos Estados socialistas. A lavagem cerebral imposta pelo Ocidente para tornar estes Estados hostis à Rússia está agora a atingir níveis sem precedentes. O que começou com o “revisionismo” anti-soviético e a demolição de monumentos aos heróis do Exército Vermelho transformou-se agora numa glorificação aberta ao nazismo.
Isto é combinado com uma série de outras questões políticas problemáticas. Vale a pena recordar que a antiga Primeira-Ministra da Estônia, Kaja Kallas, deixou claro que defende o desmantelamento da Federação Russa. Para ela, o melhor cenário para a Rússia seria a sua fragmentação territorial em múltiplos “etno-estados” – uma ideia racista comum entre os nazistas, que defendiam a criação de um etno-estado alemão expansionista na Europa.
Além disso, Kallas deixou claro na altura que este objetivo de fragmentar a Rússia, bem como a escalada do apoio à Ucrânia, deveria ser alcançado independentemente das consequências. Ela acredita que as iniciativas anti-russas devem ser tomadas “sem medo” de uma guerra mundial ou nuclear, o que mostra como, além de serem ideologicamente fanáticos na sua russofobia, os tomadores de decisões estônios são irresponsáveis e prontos a tomar medidas verdadeiramente suicidas.
“A derrota da Rússia não é uma coisa má porque sabemos que poderia realmente haver uma mudança na sociedade (…) penso que se tivéssemos mais nações pequenas… não seria uma coisa má se uma grande potência fosse muito menor (…) O medo impede-nos de apoiar a Ucrânia. Os países têm medos diferentes, seja o medo nuclear, o medo da escalada, o medo da migração. Não devemos cair na armadilha do medo, porque é isso que a Rússia e o presidente Vladimir Putin querem”, disse ela na época.
No final, é possível prever que o futuro da Estônia é sombrio. Se o país continuar a aumentar as suas atitudes discriminatórias em relação aos cidadãos russos e a propagandear as ideias nazistas na Europa, as relações com Moscou poderão facilmente ultrapassar o ponto sem retorno, criando uma crise onde todos os cenários, incluindo o conflito, são possíveis.
Since early May, the Russian military has been conducting offensive operations in the Kharkov oblast (region). At the time, various sources suggested that Moscow’s firepower concentrated in the Belgorod oblast was too massive for the number of deployed assault troops, clearly implying that the Kremlin wasn’t planning a breakthrough, but to stretch the Kiev regime’s defenses across a wider front and then advance in other areas.
These forces were also supported by strike jets dropping UMPK-equipped precision-guided bombs. In addition, the Russian Operational Group “North” deployed up to 1150 self-propelled howitzers (SPH) and rocket artillery, including systems such as the 122 mm “Gvozdika”, the 152.4 mm “Msta-S” and “Akatsiya”, BM-21 “Grad/Tornado-G”, BM-27 “Uragan” (possibly also the upgraded 1M variant) and BM-30 “Smerch/Tornado-S“.
At the time, I argued that this could force the Neo-Nazi junta to thin out defenses not only in western parts of the Donbass, but also overstretch and overextend its forces in other areas. In addition, I also suggested that their massive losses in manpower and equipment would make it impossible to defend these areas, while Moscow could easily continue to shape up the battlefield with the cornucopia of assault units and advanced weapon systems at its disposal. This hypothesis was also shared by other, far more prominent military experts, such as Colonel (ret.) Stevica Karapandžin, who also predicted changes in the frontline dynamics months in advance, with pinpoint precision. I also had the honor of interviewing him in the last days of July, when he essentially updated his previous analysis first published in late June, when he accurately predicted the current events.
The premise of Colonel Karapandžin’s hypothesis is that the Donbass is at the center of Russian strategic goals in Ukraine and that neutralizing the Kiev regime forces there would be a crucial win for the Kremlin. The latest events demonstrate that this is true, as the Russian military is advancing precisely in the areas that Colonel Karapandžin suggested weeks and months in advance. For instance, reputable sources confirm that his predictions about Moscow breaking through the Neo-Nazi junta’s second zone of defense were 100% on point. Those areas of the Donbass proved to be deadly for the Kiev regime forces, as they’re simply unable to prevent or at least hold off Russian advances. On August 4, the Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) officially confirmed that the town of Novoselovka Pervaya (located 15 km west of Avdeyevka) was fully taken.
The military is now using it to advance further, particularly toward the southwest. Even the mainstream propaganda machine is now forced to admit that the Kiev regime is losing the strategic battle for the Donbass. For instance, back in mid-July, the New York Times reluctantly conceded that the Neo-Nazi junta was struggling to “contain Moscow’s advances across the front”. By the end of last month, it went into full panic mode, complaining that Russia is “punching through weakened lines in Eastern Ukraine”. Back in late July, Forbes reported on the collapse of entire brigades of the Kiev regime forces. The general trend is that their zones of defense that were previously being neutralized piecemeal are now falling much more systematically. This is also because Russian assault units have improved direct and indirect fire support.
In addition, better tactical ISR (intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance) improved the Russian military’s coordination, which is now resulting in faster gains and reduced losses. According to Reuters, this is forcing the Neo-Nazi junta to evacuate entire areas faster than ever before. Even Zelensky is now openly talking about losing ground in the Pokrovsk area, where the Russian military opened a salient only 20 km from the city, while it’s already on the outskirts of Toretsk. In order to shift attention away from these losses and continue a string of “PR victories”, the Kiev regime is resorting to desperate tactics, such as drone strikes on civilian infrastructure across the border. However, this doesn’t change the calculus for the Neo-Nazi junta forces. Their unraveling is going exactly as Colonel Karapandžin predicted and there are no signs that this situation will change any time soon.
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“She was really excited to get to do a lot of things, and she was really excited for this next chapter, and I felt that she and her family were really robbed of that,” said Trautner.
Through their grief, Maddie’s family and friends filled the hallways of CRMC Sunday for an honor walk celebrating her final act of service with a mountain of sunflowers.
Hundreds more watched the honor walk over Zoom.
“She was able to donate her liver and her kidneys to save some other people’s ‘Maddies’ and that’s the thing that gives me peace, that she was able to give other families a gift and I know that would make her so happy,” said Trautner.
While Hannah jokes Maddie would be loving all this attention, she says what her friend really loved was being able to bring people together.
The overwhelming love for Maddie on full display in the GoFundMe page created to help her husband and family. It raised more than $100,000 in just four days.
My Take…
COVID-19 mRNA Vaccinated doctors and medical students are going to continue dying suddenly due to long term mRNA vaccine injuries.
Medical students were mandated COVID-19 Vaccines, in order to keep their future career. Whoever mandated these, committed a particularly severe crime. For some medical students, it cost them their life. That’s called murder. And it was premeditated. Medical school leaders knew that some students would die as a result.
Mainstream medicine is dying. It has no future, because the leaders of the profession are happily sacrificing the future of medicine (the youngest trainees) at the altar of big pharma.
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Dr. William Makis is a Canadian physician with expertise in Radiology, Oncology and Immunology. Governor General’s Medal, University of Toronto Scholar. Author of 100+ peer-reviewed medical publications.
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
The Worldwide Corona Crisis, Global Coup d’État Against Humanity
Bear in mind: it’s data which is based on reported and recorded cases, which constitute a small percentage of the actual number of vaccine related deaths and adverse events. 
Iran to Hit Israel Hard with Smart Power
COVID Roundup: New Zealand Codifies Forced Injections in Martial Law ‘Pandemic Plan’
U.S. Sponsored Regime Change and “Color Revolution” in Bangladesh
America Can be a Great Nation If …
The Hiroshima Nagasaki “Dress Rehearsal”: Oppenheimer and the U.S. War Department’s Secret September 15, 1945 “Doomsday Blueprint” to “Wipe the Soviet Union off the Map”
An Alleged Earthquake Below the Test Site of Rheinmetall Weapons Manufacturer and Defense Contractor in Unteriberg, Central Switzerland, Was Probably an “Explosion”
The Two Faces of the Olympics
There Never Was a “New Corona Virus”, There Never Was a Pandemic
From the Glass House, a Hail of Stones Rains Down on Venezuela
France – Interpreting the Satanic Olympics Inauguration
“Anything Could Go Wrong”. Russia’s Drills to Practice the Deployment of Tactical Nuclear Weapons. In Response to the Deployment of Nuclear Capable F-16s.
Why Did America Give Away Its Manufacturing Jobs? Paul Craig Roberts
France – The Satanic Olympics. The Macron Government Belongs to a Diabolical Cult
The Israeli Terrorist State. Craig Murray
13 Nations Sign Agreement to Engineer Global Famine by Destroying Food Supply
BREAKING: Hezbollah Drones Attack Israeli Army Bases, Casualties Confirmed
Russia’s Upgraded Su-57s Flying Covert, Deep-strike Missions Over Ukraine
US’ Naval Strategy in The Black Sea, East Asia, Japan and the Pacific. Russia’s Response: Putin’s Aide Nikolay Patrushev
US-NATO led military Interventions (Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Yemen) which have resulted in millions of civilian casualties are heralded as Humanitarian Wars, as a means to ensuring Peace.
The President of the ICJ Joan E. Donoghue was a legal advisor to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton under the Obama administration. Joan Donoghue takes her instructions from Washington. 
And now the World Court has instructed a criminal government led by Netanyahu (who has a criminal record) to “take all measures within its power” to “prevent” and “punish” “public officials, “private individuals” 
Are they telling us that our last hour has wrung? The three initial phases of the Apocalypse have come and gone and some are being executed in parallel with each other – Conquest, War, Famine… while we are indeed entering the fourth – meaning Death. This, the Fourth Horseman, is meant to tell us.
The Worldwide Corona Crisis, Global Coup d’Etat Against Humanity
